Before She Met Me

by Julian Barnes

  ‘So—do you think there’s any truth in it?’

  ‘Ah. Well. I don’t know. Shouldn’t think so. I mean, I just thought it was an interesting theory. Thought it might make you feel better. Make you think of your skull in a different way: one layer of Four-Eyes, two layers of Sawn-Offs. Now why don’t they get together, you ask; why don’t they sit down at the conference table with some cerebral U Thant and just thrash out their difficulties? Why do the Sawn-Offs keep fucking up the achievements of the Four-Eyes? Eh? I mean, you’d think the Sawn-Offs would see it was in their interests to keep their tiny heads down, not rock the boat …’

  ‘What do you think?’ Graham genuinely wanted to know.

  ‘Ah.’ Jack, while elaborating his United Nations line, had kept a small part of his brain working on that one. What would be the best answer? What would Graham want to hear? ‘Well. My considered is, probably no; that’s my considered.’

  He got up, walked around pretending to be looking for a cigarette, returned, did a peg-leg swivel, farted, and murmured, as he ‘found’ his cigarettes on the arm of his chair,

  ‘The Wind and Wisdom of Jack Lupton.’

  He grinned; he’d extracted that from another, even smaller compartment of his mind; probably one occupied by Sawn-Offs, but then you never needed full power for puns. ‘My considered says, might be true for a few—I mean, don’t they think criminals have a defective gene; something gives a little pop in their skull and suddenly they’re under the stairs again digging out the striped sweater and the sack marked SWAG. Maybe for crims. But most people? Most people don’t kill other people. Most people have got the Sawn-Offs well under their thumb, I’d say. Most people control their emotions, don’t they? It may not be easy, but they do. I mean, they control them enough, don’t they, and that’s what it’s all about, that’s what we’re talking about. And without embarking on the neurology of it, I’d say that either the second eleven know which side their bread’s buttered, or perhaps the prefects really know how to handle them.’

  ‘But you fuck, as you put it, other people’s wives.’

  ‘Eh? What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Well, you said that’s one of the things the underdeveloped part of your brain made you do. So it must have got the better of you.’

  ‘And I hope it goes on doing so in that instance. Figure of speech, boyo, figure of speech.’

  ‘How can fucking someone else’s wife be a figure of speech?’

  ‘You mean it feels more like a slip of the tongue? I’m with you there.’

  That Friday, when Jack went home to Hampshire, he was more than civilly pleased to see both the country and his wife. The bantams scattered in colourful panic as he turned the car into the drive; the smell of tobacco plants in the limp evening air delighted him; the front door which let in a draught all winter now pleased him with its picturesque inefficiency. Jack didn’t fool himself about rural idylls; he just fooled himself about two-day rural idylls.

  ‘There’s my sparky,’ he said, as Sue came through from the kitchen to greet him. When he hadn’t seen her for five days he liked to play up to her vital, dynamic, Irish side; and he congratulated himself on having the guts to marry a woman of character. He ran his eye easily, proprietorially, over her sleek outline, sharp features, dark colouring, and was pleased with what he saw. Part of the ease came from not having anything in particular to feel guilty about; part of the pleasure came from its being Friday. He loved his wife best on Fridays.

  Sue, for her part, seemed happy at the start of the weekend. As they sat over steak and kidney pudding at the refectory table, while wood smoke drifted in from the other room, she told him the pump gossip and he responded with news from London.

  ‘And another thing. You know I told you about Graham coming round a few weeks ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I had him back. In fact, both the Hendricks came, separately, Graham and Ann.’ Jack had promised not to talk about their visits, but didn’t hesitate. After all, he was so notoriously unreliable that no one in his proper mind would expect him to keep a promise; he wouldn’t get any credit for secrecy, would he? Besides, wives didn’t count anyway, that was the law, wasn’t it?

  Sue had looked across at him sharply when he mentioned Ann’s name; so he hurried along with his explanation.

  ‘Seems Graham still can’t handle her past and old Jack’s cast as father confessor.’

  ‘You must enjoy that.’

  ‘I do a bit. Though I don’t envy those priests doing it all the time.’

  ‘Well, they’ve got that book with all the answers, haven’t they? Just look it up in the old black book and whatever it is stop doing it.’

  Jack chuckled, leaned across and kissed his wife wetly on the temple. He thought she was smart. She thought he was sentimental.

  ‘So what advice did you give?’

  ‘Well, I think I told Ann to take him off on holiday; and I told Graham assorted stuff, but the only thing he seems to have followed is taking up wanking again.’

  Sue laughed. She’d never much cared for Ann, always found her a bit flash, a bit too self-contained; didn’t make enough mistakes to be human. Flash trash she’d once called her to Jack; but then at the time there were extenuating circumstances. As for Graham, he was nice enough, but a bit … wet, really. Fancy getting upset about the past. There was enough in most people’s presents to give you sleepless nights if that’s what you were keen on having.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve earned your Solomon badge yet.’

  Jack laughed, and dabbed some gravy off his beard.

  ‘And the funny thing was that first I had one of them round consulting me and insisting I didn’t tell the other, and then the next day the other came brandishing exactly the same precondition.’

  ‘Sounds like a Whitehall farce. Stop brandishing that precondition at me.’

  ‘And I remember thinking, as I shut the door on Graham the second time,’ (what came next was a lie, but Jack was churning with Friday-night sentiment) ‘I remember thinking, well, Sue and I have our little rows, and we may have our bad days, but we’d never do anything like that.’ He leaned across and kissed the frontier of her hair again. She immediately straightened up and began collecting the dishes.

  ‘No, I shouldn’t think we would. We’d find a less complicated way to deceive one another, wouldn’t we?’

  There’s my sparky, Jack thought, as he smiled at her departing back. He followed her out to the kitchen and insisted on washing up, just for a change. They went to bed early, and Jack, also for a change, combed his beard in the bathroom beforehand.

  After they had made love, he lay on his back quite alert, with Sue tucked sleepily into his shoulder. He found himself thinking about Graham, about how, with a casual remark, a joke even, he’d started him off wanking again after twenty years. Twenty years! Jack envied him that. Well, envied knowing what breaking such a fast felt like.

  The next week, one afternoon when Ann was at work, Graham sat in his study addressing the Jiffy bags. The plastic linings crackled as he stuck down the labels he’d typed on the departmental typewriter. He checked the actors’ addresses again with his copy of Spotlight (most of them were c/o agents, but he thought they’d get through), picked up his stapler and went down to the kitchen.

  The butcher had been surprised by his order. Either that Mr Hendrick had fallen on hard times, or else he’d bought himself an expensive dog. The butcher hadn’t asked. It sickened him the way he often sold the same cuts both to fretting pensioners and rich dog-owners.

  Graham got out the biggest chopping board they had. First he skinned the black pudding and squeezed it out. Then he piled the soft, damp brains on top and began kneading them into the black pudding. As the creamy-pink tissues squelched between his fingers, he found himself remembering what Jack had said. But did that apply to animals as well? Were bits of this stuff prehistoric and other bits more finely developed? He stared at it for a while, but it
all seemed to have the same consistency and structure. Maybe the lighter bits were the Four-Eyes, the darker bits the Sawn-Offs. Still, no matter. Then he chopped up the bloated, goose-pimpled ox tongue and mixed that in. It looked disgusting, like a god’s vomit; it didn’t smell too good either. Graham washed his hands, then smiled to himself as he scooped a quarter of the mixture into each of the Jiffy bags. He washed his hands again, then stapled up the bags. He checked his watch: plenty of time to get to the post office.

  SIX

  Mister Carwash

  And that was when the sneering dreams began. The dreams which were so strong, and so contemptuous, that they strode carelessly across the barrier of consciousness.

  The first one came the night after he’d dropped in at the N.F.T. to check up on his wife’s adultery with Buck Skelton. The pudgy, stetsoned, middle-rank American star had once been shipped to London, on a tame producer’s whim, to play the part of special marshal from Arizona unexpectedly seconded to Scotland Yard. The Rattler and the Rubies, a comedy-thriller now being revived in a season called ‘The Clash of Genres’, included a brief scene where Ann, playing a cloakroom girl at a fashionable gaming club, indulged in some good-natured banter with a Buck who seemed to move through the sophisticated yet decadent gathering with a marvellous natural dignity.

  ‘Jest here for to put the rec’d straight,’ Buck began in confidential tones. ‘Always believe in man to man on these occasions.’ He was lying on a beach lounger at the edge of his swimming pool; Graham, ridiculously white-skinned, was squatting uncomfortably beside him on a shoe-shiner’s stool. A Pina Colada frothed at Buck’s elbow; behind him, a girl’s naked bottom suddenly broke the surface of the pool like a dolphin, waggled, and disappeared again. The sun was bouncing off the water into Graham’s eyes. Buck wore tinted shades whose density adjusted itself according to the brightness of the day; Graham could only just see his eyes.

  ‘Reason ah told you to drop bah,’ came the cowboy voice, ‘is jest fer to put you in the picture, as the movie producer said as he grabbed the starlet’s jugs, her her. Jest wanted to let you know what went on between your lil old lady and this here Buck. Know why they call me Buck? I figger you can guess.

  ‘Now, Rat tier was a real bitch movie.’ He sucked up an inch of Pina Colada through an oval, candy-striped straw. ‘A re-al bitch. We had a cokehead director, a couple of fag writers, a screw-up a day with that actors’ union of yours. I didn’t let it get to me, of course. I’m a pro. That’s why I’m still in work. That’s why I’ll always be in work. The rules are easy, Gray-ham. Number one, always take what your agent offers. Number two, never piss on the script; just say your lines as best you can, even if they are written by a couple of sky-high ass-inspectors. Number three, never get hooched on set. And number fower, don’t start balling the leading lady until you know exactly when shooting’s gonna stop.’ He took off his shades and stared at Graham for a few seconds; then replaced them.

  ‘Now, it was Rule Number Fower that took me by way of your wife. There were these union screw-ups, and to tell the truth I didn’t really give shit about that beanbag they’d cast to play my girl pardner, and we jest didn’t know how long we’d be sitting around on our butts waiting for the Queen to go by, no disrespect. I’m a pretty manly sort of fellow at the best of times, and when it’s the worst of times, well, I guess that jest makes me a sight manlier. Couldn’t wait to get the old Rattler into somebody’s Rubies, seemed like more than a good idea.’

  Graham stared moodily at Buck, taking in the slightly ridged nose, the ox-blood tan, the spurt of hair at the fork of his open shirt. One or two of the hairs seemed to be turning grey, but this only made him more threatening to Graham: he was boastfully adding maturity and wisdom to his obviously colossal virility.

  ‘Now, first time I set eyes on that little Annie of yours, I knew she was gonna prove a real firecracker. “Annie,” I says to her, “you play your cards right, and maybe you’ll get my gun.” Haw haw. Always a little joke like that at the start, something to get them thinking what might come their way. Let them turn it over for a couple of days, then they drop into the palm of your hand like a rahp pay-yaych. That’s old Buck’s philosophy, any road.

  ‘So, stranger.’ The actor suddenly became more businesslike, more distant. ‘So, I were jest giving her the old couple-of-days’ routine, waiting for the sherry wine to matoor in the caysk, so to speak, when she comes right up to me and says, “How’s about finding a holster for your gun, cowboy?” So that’s what the chicks are like over here, Buck, I says to myself.

  ‘Now, I’ve known some spirited gals in my time, stranger, but that little Annie … Back at the hotel she was hustling me outa my duds in the elevator. And then she really took off. Fightin’, bitin’, scratchin’—I even had to re-strain her a bit. The studio might have wanted a tub shot or something, and I jest had to haul her nails outa my back. I hauled them out and slapped her down, but that only seemed to make her wilder, which I s’pose I should have anticipated, so I jest reached across to my pants and slid out my lizard-skin belt and tied her wrists out of harm’s way.

  ‘And after that, every time we balled she made me tie her wrists up. Jest seemed to excite her some more. Not that there was much room for more. She was right off that scale, stranger; hurricane force nine was a gentle breeze where she came from.

  ‘But what she really liked me to do—after I’d tied her up, natch—was to chew her ass. You do that to her, stranger? She let you do that to her, stranger? I’d get me down there and start eating her out; I mean, it was a carry-out lunch counter as far as I was concerned. Then I’d sorta slide down a bit further, and I’d feel her squirm, and that current went raht through her body. Then I’d eat some more, then slide back to her ass. I’d chew it some and diddle my tongue around, and then, when she was all wound up, I’d jest plunge my tongue right in, and when I did that she’d ex-plode. Never missed. Bang, like a mousetrap. She used to say, now she understood what a cowpoke was.

  ‘She ever let you do that?’ The tone became more taunting. ‘Mean to say, I bet you kiss a lot of ass one way and another; but you ever do it for real, stranger? Or does little Annie only let the other fellers do that to her? You wouldn’t know, would you? That’s jest the trouble with you fag fellers. You get all uppity about unnerstandin’ chicks. Never met a chick yet who wanted to be unnerstood—least, not when getting balled flat was the alternative. Still, you carry on unnerstandin’ the chicks, and I’ll carry on ballin’ them.’

  In the pool behind Buck another shimmering bottom broke the surface. This time it stayed suspended there for a few seconds, and as Graham gawped the buttocks slid wetly apart. Graham, from his shoe-shine stool, looked across at Buck, who stuck out the tip of his tongue and ran it round his lips. Graham hurled himself at Buck, but the cowboy, with a swivel of the hips, made him miss his aim. As Graham lurched past, a Frye boot caught him in the thigh and twisted him into the pool. Though he normally swam strongly, the water proved so viscous that he progressed in slow motion. Eventually, after several minutes, he got both hands on the pool’s rim. As he prepared to haul himself out, a shadow fell across his face and a boot was placed firmly on the fingertips of his right hand.

  ‘Say, stranger,’ Buck spat down at him, ‘you still hanging around my prahpurty? Thought you’d been run out days ago. When I say kiss off, I’m gonna mean kiss off.’ And with that he took his glass of Pina Colada and threw the milky froth into Graham’s face.

  Graham woke up in the dark. The fingertips of his right hand were jammed between the mattress and the base of the bed. He had dribbled on the pillow and his face was wet with his own spit. His pyjamas were twisted tightly round his legs and to his surprise he found he had an erection.

  He didn’t think she possibly could have. Surely not a tubby, bogus cowboy like that. But how could you know whom your wife might have fancied before she fancied you? For a start, women often succumbed for such odd reasons: like pity, and politeness, and loneliness
, and rage at a third party, and, sod it, sheer sexual pleasure. Graham sometimes wished he’d had a go at succumbing for different reasons.

  The next day, while his brain officially dealt with Bonar Law, Carson and the Ulster Volunteers, he turned over the question of Buck. Dreams couldn’t be true, could they: that was why they were dreams. There were supposed to be premonitory dreams—the wise man sees a vision of floods, and moves his tribe to higher ground; and in his own civilization, didn’t you have dreams before job interviews, warning you against making mistakes? So why couldn’t you have post-monitory dreams? It was, if anything, a more plausible concept. He could easily have picked up something from Ann at a subliminal level, and then his brain might decide to break the news to him tactfully in his sleep. Why not?

  Of course, the Buck of his dream was very different from the Buck of The Rattler and the Rubies. In the dream, he’d been a threatening, coarse fellow; in the film, one of nature’s prairie gentlemen. Neither image, Graham assumed hopefully, would be particularly alluring to Ann; but then both of them were false images—one on a screen, one in his head. What was the real Buck Skelton like (what was his real name, for a start)? And maybe that Buck was the one to find favour with Ann.

  Baulked, Graham’s brain turned, with scarcely any encouragement, to dreams of revenge. First, he drowned the cowboy in a swimming pool of Pina Colada: the final bubbles from Buck’s failing lungs went unnoticed among all the froth on the pool’s surface. Then he bribed someone to put a rattlesnake in the path of Buck’s horse just as he was passing a giant cactus: the stallion reared, Buck was thrown, and as he clutched automatically at the cactus, two giant spines, as strong as steel, drove through his leather chaps and transfixed his balls as if they were cocktail sausages.

  The final revenge was the best, though. If there’d been one thing Graham hated, it was the way Buck had used his sunglasses. He disliked people who wore them as proof of character; but he also felt rather primly aggressive towards the glasses themselves. He disapproved of inanimate things taking on a life of their own, trying to organize a fourth estate in the world, after people, animals and plants; it upset him, threatened him even.