About once every six months I drive to a house to pick up a box of six sealed tubs of aloe vera juice. These tubs are not, I hasten to add, for your do or die low life correspondent. No doubt I have lost enough credibility already with last week’s cake forks. If I confessed to trying to prolong my low life by taking top spec aloe vera juice, it would probably and rightly be the end.
For this is what the advertising pamphlets of this pyramid selling company brand hints at. Without actually coming out and wildly promising it, the subtle impression created by the PR firm responsible for these pamphlets is that drinking the stuff will energise and lengthen your life. It will also grant you serenity of mind. The cost of a single tub would, I’d guess, keep a small rural African village in manioc root for about a year. But let’s not even begin to think about the implications of this in case it disturbs our serenity before we’ve even got the lid off.
Last year I saw a pamphlet showing photographs of a few hundred of these pyramid sellers at a get-together. Every one of them looked well dressed and well groomed, and their smooth and happy faces suggested that thanks to aloe vera they had not only achieved health, wealth and happiness but they had also found the key to eternal life.
Every so often I am delegated to go and pick up a box of six on behalf of aged relatives who club together to buy one, but are too physically feeble to be able to lift it and carry it out to the car. (They are strangely silent as they distribute the tubs among themselves, as though it were a bit of a guilty secret.) And you should see this house where I make the collection. It’s a stunning, brand-new, million pound, open-plan, air-tight, oak-and-glass show home. Whenever I’ve been, there hasn’t been anything visible that isn’t neat or tidy or immaculate. It is as though the place has to be ready at short notice for photographers. I have never seen a newspaper lying about, for example. Nor a used teabag on the draining board. Either would be a kind of catastrophe. Even the sawn ends of the few logs stacked beside the cold and pristine log burner have been carefully chosen for their matching shade of yellow and their perfect circularity.
And then there’s the distributing agent herself. This strangely unassuming woman is always in, always alone in that sunlit, oak-vaulted space, and she always stands quietly, like a curator or a photographer’s model, there if necessary to lend a touch of human perspective. The emotional temperature is always exactly the same — room temperature. She seems to have all the time in the world, the whole of eternity before her perhaps, in which to exchange serene pleasantries.
She’ll ask how I am, and say in return that she’s extraordinarily well, thank you, as always, and would I like a cup of tea? And I look across at the kitchen area and the work top that looks as though it’s just come out of the bubble wrap, and it seems a shame to abuse it with a bout of vulgar tea-making, so I say, thank you, no, I’d better not.
Then I present her with a cheque for the goods. I don’t sully her hand or even her vision with such a ludicrous object by placing it in her palm. I am now in a universe where money doesn’t exist or is at least an invisible or behind-the-scenes type of thing, like sewers, or abattoirs. Instead I fold it exactly in half and place it on one of the worktops, off to one side, where we can ignore it, or pretend it never happened. And then she’ll indicate the pale cardboard box on the pale oak floor beside the pale oak door, all ready to go.
And the next time I go, maybe six months later, she’ll be there on those sunlit oak floorboards, serene, prosperous, well and alone, and she’ll welcome me as warmly as if she hasn’t moved, or been anywhere, or done anything since the last time I came, and another box, as pristine as the one before, will be waiting for me on the floor.
What a turn-up for the books my last visit was, though. She came to the door and led me into the sunlit vaulted space as usual. But when she turned to face me, she looked abject and diminished. She pulled out a well-used handkerchief, covered her reddish nose, and bugled a trumpet voluntary. Between breaths she held my eyes pleadingly in hers. Clearly a disaster of the first magnitude had befallen her. I dropped my head in sympathy. She had a cold.
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