by Paul Thomas
‘Celia? She’s okay — pretty eager to please but who wouldn’t be in her position? Why do you ask?’
I shrug. ‘I feel like a change.’
‘I thought you liked Shelley.’
‘Yeah, but I’ve been with her for nineteen years. It’s the longest continuous relationship of my adult life.’
‘You need to make some changes, that’s for sure, but I’d suggest you start a little closer to home. Anyway, Celia’s not looking to grow her client list; she’d actually like to get rid of the lightweights and just have, you know, the crème de la crème.’
‘Well, that’s that, then.’
‘I guess I could mention your name.’
‘Up to you — if you can be bothered …’ I shrug again, but my diffidence doesn’t throw her off the scent.
‘Oh, I can be bothered,’ she says with leaden emphasis. ‘The question is, can you? What exactly would I tell her? I mean, when can she expect to see something?’
‘When I’m ready.’
She shakes her head. ‘No, Max, it doesn’t work that way any more. You’re going to have to sell yourself.’
‘I’ll leave that to those who’ve got nothing else to sell.’ I stand up. ‘And on that uplifting note … You want me to call a cab?’
Tania’s indifferent shrug closes a tiresome chapter. She orders a cab on her mobile. ‘It’ll be a few minutes,’ she says, ‘so what are we going to talk about?’
‘Who said we have to talk?’
‘I’m really curious, Max: why do you find it so difficult to talk to me about your work?’
‘Why bring my work into it?’ I snap. ‘For that matter, why bring yourself into it? It’s almost two in the morning and I’ve had a long, trying day. I’d just as soon not talk to anyone about anything.’
‘Suit yourself.’ She goes over to the window to look out for the taxi through the chink in the curtains. I wait, certain that this disengagement won’t go the distance. After a couple of minutes she turns to me. ‘You know what I’d do if I was you? A serial killer book.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, because people have this craving to be scared. We know there’s no creature from the Black Lagoon, right? We don’t believe in ghosts or vampires any more and we’ve pretty much wiped out every species that could threaten us. Okay, space is the last frontier and all that but we’ve been sending out probes and radio signals for fifty years and it kind of looks like there’s nothing out there. Which just leaves other people. Well, despite what the politicians say come election time, we know the vast majority of other people, even the scumbags, won’t actually go out of their way to do us harm. We’ve got to be in their orbit, you know, fucking them or buying drugs from them or working in a bank or whatever. But serial killers kill when the opportunity presents itself and because it gets them off, so we’re all potentially at risk. They’re the last monsters — and the scariest because they’re real and they live among us but we can’t see them.’
‘You’ve obviously given it a lot of thought — why don’t you do it?’
She gives me a get-with-it look. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I already have a rather large subject of which I’ve barely scraped the surface. I’ve also got a publisher and a fan base who want me to go way deeper.’
‘A dirty job but you’re happy to do it, eh?’ She’s back-lit by a headlight beam. ‘Your taxi’s here.’
‘Think about it, Max. See you around, I guess.’
‘See you on the cover of the Literary Review.’
She glows and I could kick myself. I could tell her she makes Shakespeare look like Mickey Spillane and she wouldn’t suspect irony.
‘Before that, I hope.’ And with a coy smile and a little wave, Tania walks out of my life.
There’s nothing like your lover walking out at two in the morning after one for old times’ sake to make a chap nostalgic. And when the severance follows hard on the heels of a doom-laden professional setback and many hours of steady, at times high-tempo, drinking, the urge to look over one’s shoulder is irresistible.
These photographs have accompanied me on my twenty-five-year gypsy progress, going from one bottom drawer to another, concealing cigarettes or drugs or, in weak moments, pornography, only let loose from their envelopes on nights like this. Some were taken on all-but-forgotten holidays and barely ruffle the pool of emotional recall. There are snaps of me nursing an espresso or a beer or a late-night drink at writers’ hangouts like Deux Magots, Elaine’s and Harry’s Bar. There are beach scenes from Portugal, Morocco and Barbados in which some women draw attention to their breasts via full and defiant disclosure, while others favour the traditional method of approximate concealment. There are familiar landmark shots from New York and Rome and touristy vistas from the Greek Islands and New England in the fall.
Some date from my spells in London and Paris, where I stayed long enough to pick up their relentless metropolitan rhythm. And though I contemplated calling these colossal and demanding city-states home, the images now seem suffused with a haze of impermanence. They record hasty arrangements in short-term accommodation, base camps, places to replenish and rest up, even hibernate. The glazed smiles on those soft young faces, the matey arms around the shoulders, the goofy expressions and slapstick poses, the inevitable raised glasses convey a sense of fun being had at all costs, of purposeful gaiety. These are scenes from a protracted wake. We got together to mark the passing of our youth and ended up having a hell of a party because our youth would have wanted it that way. And what kept us at it night after night was the knowledge that when we stopped, that would be the end of it. The party would be over; we wouldn’t reconvene at someone else’s place next week. When the hangovers lifted, it would be goodbye to all that — the pubbing, the clubbing, the all-night parties, the romantic merry-go-round — and time to make some hard, permanent choices: where to live, what to do, who to marry.
Even as these free spirits cleaned up afterwards, letting in a glacial wind off the river to disperse the fallout from a thousand cigarettes and blocking the footpath with an unholy stack of empties, their thoughts were turning to home. Home: the best place on earth to bring up children, the only place on earth where you could be downtown at five and have a perfect beach to yourself at six. Home: Mum and Dad and the friends for life who knew you inside out and loved you anyway. Home: where you belonged. Not me, of course. Bohemians don’t settle down with a wife and kids and a dog and a company car and start building up security. Bohemians believe that if you travel light and live for today, you’ll never grow old.
There’s a photo of five Kiwi lads on the footpath outside a London pub. We’re in T-shirts — mine has the Solidarity logo — so it was probably one of those long, beguiling, velvet twilights when anything could happen and sometimes did. There’s me, heart-wrenchingly young, before the thickening and the greying and the moulting and the coarsening set in and the optimism started to drain away. The cheerful yeoman on my right went back to the family clothing business in Christchurch and the wide-open spaces and, I suspect, never looked back. I have an idea the spiv on my left is a solicitor in Hamilton. He may look back but selectively, skipping over his arrest for shoplifting and the time his drunken striptease on a flight to Majorca earned him a night in a Spanish prison and a lifetime ban from British Airways.
He hovers anonymously on the edge of the frame, uncertain of where he stands. I forget his name — he was that kind of guy — but he worked in the money markets, which weren’t yet the Aladdin’s Cave they later became. He still had more money than the rest of us, and spread it around. I don’t remember anyone turning down his largesse but behind his back he was disparaged as a square peg trying to buy himself a round hole. Apparently he went to New York and made a fortune. These days, I imagine, people make a point of remembering his name.
Johnny’s also on the outer, but he’s just taking a break from being the centre of attention. Johnny was adamant that he was never going home. Home was too s
mall, too slow, too far away. It had nothing he wanted. His father was dead, his mother had entered a dubious remarriage and his siblings were small-minded dullards. Of all the people I met on my travels, Johnny was the one I was determined not to lose touch with. He was a wheeler-dealer who fizzed with energy and had a brainwave every day and I was sure he was going to make a fortune.
Johnny would have given rich people a good name. He was stylish, unconventional, generous to a fault. He would have had a fabulous pad in Chelsea and a villa on the Med where I’d always be welcome. But Johnny went down to Nairobi to check out the safari holiday business. He liked exotic women and there are plenty in Nairobi as a result of the influx of Indian labour early last century. Johnny got Aids and shrivelled up and died in a London hospice. The guy whose name I can’t remember paid for his body to be flown back to New Zealand. Everyone comes home eventually.
There’s a photo taken by my first wife, towards the end. I’d recognised a semi-famous writer sitting by himself in the corner of a Soho pub. He’d been an angry young man in the fifties; now he was an angry old man. What made him angry now was the encompassing liberal orthodoxy that was starting to flex its politically correct muscles. His targets responded by calling him a reactionary and deeming his work irrelevant.
I hesitated before approaching him because the Guardian had dubbed him ‘the rudest man in Britain’ and he professed to find everyone under fifty appalling, but my wife egged me on, perhaps in the hope that I’d be hurtfully snubbed.
He looked up from his Telegraph when I halted on the perimeter of his personal space. ‘Friend or foe?’
‘Friend.’
‘Jolly good. Mine’s a large Laphroaig.’
I bought him a drink to prove that I came in peace and was invited to take a seat. He was genial, forthcoming and knew how to take a compliment — with a raise of the eyebrows and ‘Do you really think so? Well, that’s most gratifying.’ But when I let slip that my first novel was about to come out he frowned into his glass. If he was in my shoes, he said, he wouldn’t waste his time writing fiction, he’d do something in the city. A young man could do very well for himself in this high-finance racket.
‘There’s more to life than money, isn’t there?’ I said.
‘Well, there certainly used to be,’ he said mildly. ‘I’m not sure that’s still the case and I very much doubt it’ll be the case in twenty years’ time.’
The semi-famous writer smiled benignly when my wife took the photo and held his smile while I took one of them, both rosy-cheeked and bespectacled. My wife, however, isn’t smiling. The writer was charming but held unspeakable opinions and while she was prepared to humour me, she was damned if she was going to look happy about it. That wouldn’t have been true to herself.
He insisted that I send him a copy of my novel, care of his publishers, which he promised to read, provide feedback on (my idea) and wittily endorse when it came out in paperback. I duly sent it off but never heard back, which didn’t surprise me. He probably never received it or, if he did, probably never got around to reading it or, if he read it, probably didn’t think much of it. The old-school approach to such a dilemma is that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.
He’s dead now and twenty years have gone by.
Last I heard, my first wife was married to a property developer and living in Taupo. It just goes to show: when I first met Jill, she’d no more have given the time of day to a property developer than drunk South African wine. Her parents were prominent members of Auckland’s left-wing intelligentsia; in fact, their house on Takapuna beach seemed to be its unofficial summer headquarters. Father was a professor of French and something of an authority on Camus, Sartre and the existentialist scene; mother was a lawyer always on the lookout for a good cause. They were active in the Labour Party but drew the line at standing for Parliament, no doubt put off by the indignities — some self-inflicted — suffered by their MP friends during the long years of Opposition. At first I took Jill to be a compulsive name-dropper and it wasn’t until summer arrived that I realised the writers and intellectuals and political figures whose familiar names rolled so easily off her tongue were in fact family friends.
Jill’s parents kept an open house, so on any given weekend there’d be up to two dozen visitors, most of them engaged in the life of the mind or attached to someone who was. For a would-be writer and self-styled bohemian it was as close to the ideal environment as I could find without emigrating. Everyone I met seemed to be some sort of writer or someone who slept with writers. The combination of boozy parties — which often began as boozy lunches — and tangled, overlapping love lives guaranteed regular eruptions of drama and bad behaviour. It quickly became apparent that infidelity, jealousy and declarations of suicidal or violent intent were part and parcel of the literary life. On some sweaty-palmed nights the atmosphere was more saloon than salon and the air crackled with impending violence.
I was to witness a number of physical confrontations, not all of them all-male affairs. Once I had to make a tackle to prevent one of our leading poets stabbing one of our leading historians. When a semblance of order was restored and the poet had been banished — I think a woman might have got away with using a knife but men were expected to settle things with their bare hands, in the New Zealand way — I accompanied the shaken historian on a walk along the beach. Seeing I’d saved him from a flesh wound — the poet was far too drunk to have nailed a vital organ — I felt entitled to ask what the story was.
The historian produced cigarettes and matches and asked me to help out because his trembling hands were incapable of the fast and accurate work needed in the whippy on-shore breeze. After he’d filled his lungs he said, ‘I screwed his wife.’
I knew the poet and his wife were living apart because the poet’s mistress had told me so only minutes before I was called upon to halt his popeyed charge across the living room.
‘Why should he care? He walked out on her, didn’t he?’
‘Ah, but you see he loves her.’
This was said with such solemn authority that it was obviously meant to answer all possible questions and thus put the matter to rest. My inability to grasp what was straightforward, even self-explanatory, reminded me of my bewildered response to higher maths and basic science.
‘So why did he leave her?’
The historian’s wheezy exhalation may have concealed a sigh. ‘I suppose he was cunt-struck. That’s usually why men leave their wives, isn’t it?’
‘Then why the hell doesn’t he just go back to her?’
‘Too late — she’s decided she doesn’t want him.’ He smiled grimly. ‘There’s a lesson there somewhere.’
These were people in their forties and fifties with grown-up or teenage children and not blessed with evident or even subtle sex appeal. For all my bohemian pretensions I found it absurd that these wrinklies couldn’t keep their hands off one anothers’ wives and husbands. I see it differently now, of course. The clock was ticking. They were running out of time.
Jill’s view was that the fashionable open-mindedness that encouraged all this illicit humping was a male con-trick. Men claimed to want only an inch, a little leeway, but they took a mile on the basis that they’d been given a licence to stray. (Personal experience was at work here, as I later realised when she revealed hair-raising information about her father.) She warned me at the outset that I’d get zero tolerance and was true to her word. After several years of occasional adultery I felt obliged to own up to an affair that was threatening to get serious. Jill packed her bags and went home.
I wasn’t sad to see her go because I didn’t love her and was finding it increasingly hard to like her. She’d always been politically strident but we were living in Britain in the Thatcher years and people like Jill managed to convince themselves that they were an endangered species. Now she woke up strident and got more vociferous as the day wore on. I found Thatcher a bizarre human being but what was one to make of
her great adversaries, Comrade Scargill and General Galtieri? Try as I might, I couldn’t see that Thatcher posed a serious threat to me or anyone else who stuck to the rules and minded their own business. Scargill, though, was Willie Smaile with a Bonaparte complex, while Galtieri and his colonels had waged war on their own people with the toll running into many thousands of disappeared ones. I couldn’t see any reason not to welcome their downfall. Jill, however, was belligerently for the miners and against the Falklands campaign, even though previously she’d passed up sleep-ins on sleet-lashed Sunday mornings to demonstrate against the junta.
So Jill went home to Mum and Dad and, so I heard (for there are always people keen to update you on your ex, whether the news is sensational, unremarkable or the last thing you wanted to hear), to an experiment or two before settling down with her property developer. He, no doubt, cast a professional eye over that beachfront property and did the maths. I can honestly say the thought had never occurred to me. It was only years later, when I eventually came home, that I realised I’d effectively shown the door to an only child who was sitting on a goldmine.
And me and my girl went to Paris. Patricia was an aspiring writer and I had indeed got the ball rolling by praising an article of hers that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. I probably wouldn’t have made the move to France if I hadn’t teamed up with her. She spoke fluent French — her family had a restored farmhouse near Toulouse — and received a tidy allowance from her parents that survived her doing a flit to Paris with a near-penniless writer she’d known for little more than a month.
I dwell on two photos from my time with Patricia. The first is a blurred shot of an unknown man of unknown nationality, although if I had to guess I’d go for Belgian. His toupee is askew and his face is a riot of emotion led by scalding embarrassment. The photo was taken on the Rock of Gibraltar shortly after one of the Rock’s celebrated apes dropped out of a tree onto the man’s shoulder and whipped off his toupee. The snatch was witnessed by perhaps thirty people, including half a dozen off-duty British soldiers whose lager-boosted mirth was a thing to behold. On the trip back to our Moroccan resort Patricia and I debated whether the ape had known instinctively that there was something not quite right about the man’s hair or whether it had got as much of a surprise as the rest of us.