‘Yes,’ says James. ‘We started again, left our old life behind. My brother lives in Florida now, moved there ten years ago. I stayed in Kent until I moved to London in 2001. I’ve always kept my northern accent, though.’ He grins, shyly, and I wonder if he was determined to keep that accent, as one thing from his old life, his boyhood.
This is the most he has ever said to me. The car has become a confession box, as they often do. My own was a great place for some of my most awkward conversations with Julian – frank discussions about some of the more hairy aspects of puberty, the importance of contraception at music festivals, the absence or not of heaven and Father Christmas … A person can say what they want without having to look someone in the eye, talk freely against the buffering mobile scenery of traffic and trees; use low-level school-run radio as a shock absorber for revealed secrets and fears.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I say. ‘Is your father still alive?’
‘No,’ James says. ‘In an ironic twist of fate and karma a tree fell on him, during the storm of ’eighty-seven – remember that one – Michael Fish saying it was a storm in a teacup?’
I do remember it. Marilyn had been furious that a fence had blown down and a pair of her knickers had flown into next door’s garden. ‘Oh God.’
‘A happy day,’ says James. ‘Oh, happy day!’ he sings, and gives a little smile as he taps two skittering fingers on the steering wheel. It reminds me that my car was also where I told Julian we were finally leaving Christian and his excited ‘Really?’ both broke my heart and put it back together. Perhaps James will sing along to Adele, after all, I muse, although I’ve brought Johnny Cash. ‘Is your dad still alive?’ he asks. ‘I haven’t asked.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘He died several years ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’ It wasn’t, though, not at all. Every day I missed Dad or remembered some little thing about him. How he licked along the edge of the crackly thin paper to seal his roll-ups. How he chuckled often, at something he heard on the radio. How he must have felt so utterly, utterly hopeless and beyond miserable, that day, to want to end his own life.
‘Did you also have a difficult relationship with him?’
‘No. Well, he wasn’t perfect – far from it – but I loved my dad.’ I had loved him, despite all that he was and all he could never be.
‘That’s good. It would be awful to have two parents you couldn’t stand – it would require an awful lot of counselling.’ Wry smile. Indicate left. ‘I was fourteen when my dad was killed. It meant he could no longer try and come after us. It meant we were free. But sometimes I’m not sure I really am. Free, I mean. Not quite.’
‘Why?’ I ask. I know I’m not free, I’m heading for my ball and chain (or is it apron strings? No, Marilyn wouldn’t be seen dead in an apron these days) right now. Counselling has never appealed to me. Why would I want to sit and talk to a stranger about Marilyn for an hour at a time? Or about Christian? And if I had to talk about my dad for that long I would just cry and cry, and I can do that at home.
‘Do you want to talk more about your mum?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m good.’
James nods. ‘OK. I’ll just carry on talking about myself.’ He smiles at the corner of his mouth, checks the rear-view mirror. ‘Confession time – there’s something about being in a car, don’t you think? I became an estate agent for a reason,’ he says. ‘I’m not good in groups, not good in social environments, lots of people, meeting people. I hated that bar the other night.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. I wonder why he came, and I wonder if it was because of me, then tell myself off for being stupid.
‘I know a lot of us can be wankers but I chose that career carefully. It’s a job that suits me. I like to be a one-man band. Come and go. In and out. I can’t be in a job where I have to be a team leader, go to the pub all the time, attend meetings. I get nervous in social situations.’ I understand it now, why, like me, he is happy to sit in the hospital night after night with Mac. There’s comfort and safety in the routine of it. ‘My little brother is the complete opposite. Funny, eh?’
‘He wasn’t beaten up,’ I offer.
‘No,’ he adds, and we laugh and I’m not sure why. ‘When I was a young kid I was always dragged to this terrible working men’s club,’ James continues. ‘You know the places – cheap beer, awful karaoke nights and enforced discos.’ He’s talking fast; he’s really on a roll. But I let him roll – if it’s good for him, I will watch him roll all the way down the hill, wrapped tight around himself, then when he reaches the bottom he can laugh and unfurl and stretch out, maybe. ‘My old man was a nightmare – all the time. He’d kick off, make a show of me and Mum. There would always be some sort of scene. We were judged all the time. Stared at. Usually we limped out of there like we’d just been in a shoot-out at the OK Corral.’
‘Why didn’t they just ban him?’ I ask. ‘He sounds horrible.’ Marilyn was banned once, from the local village hall. She’d got up on stage, drunk, during a quiz night and had tried to pull the compere’s trousers down.
‘I’m not sure. I think he spent a lot of money in there, or they liked the drama?’
‘Who knows?’ I say.
‘Anyway,’ and James turns to look at me at last, just briefly, ‘it’s one of the reasons I’m socially awkward. And that’s pretty much my story. You already know the whole “my girlfriend left me” strand. We’re done here, I’d say, unless you want to add anything?’
That sideways smile again. I’m sure he’s probably not done, but I don’t say so. There’s always more.
‘Will you be OK at the expo?’ I ask, thinking about what he’s just told me.
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to see when I get there.’
James has told me a lot about his life in a very short space of time, and I do feel pressure to reciprocate. Should I tell him more about Marilyn? The rest of the journey wouldn’t be long enough. Or how my dad took his life, one sunny June afternoon, in the shed at the bottom of the garden, taking part of mine with him? I really don’t want to start something I can’t finish. There’s no neat endings to either of these stories; they just go on and on.
‘And no,’ I say again. ‘To adding anything. Thank you.’ James glances over at me and I look away. I could always talk about Christian, but I can’t bear to. Perhaps, instead, I should start talking about Mac. The search for his son. My silly need to find him so I can generate a moment for Mac, worthy of the movies … That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it? I think, as I stare out of the window at an incongruous Vanmaster caravan shunting past in the dense traffic. I’m trying to engineer a wonderful movie moment for Mac. I will manipulate scenery, flood light on to a dark corner, stage-manage the best of scenes … The scene where his long-lost son shows up … I peer into a brown-curtained motorhome window, my stories untold. James is now silent. He is a careful driver, courteous. He always indicates before he switches lanes, always checks his mirror. I lean back into my seat. After a while the swish-swish of the wipers, fighting an endless battle against the rain, make it hard to resist closing my eyes.
‘Shall we stop?’
‘Hmm?’ I open my eyes. We’re on the motorway and rapidly approaching a large services sign. I must have been asleep for ages. I don’t want to stop; it’s warm in the car and cold outside. I just want to get there and get home again. ‘OK, yes, I don’t mind.’
We find a space in a rammed car park. The rain has sulkily decided to become drizzle and a fine spray of it coats me as I squeeze out of the car, trying not to scrape the door against the car next to us.
‘It’s rammed,’ says James, pulling his umbrella from the footwell of the back seat. ‘Where is everyone going?’
Inside it’s worse. Women are snaking in a long, stoically disgruntled queue for the Ladies’; truckers and lone drivers and families queue for Wok U Like and KFC and Burger King and Subway, their damp hair and downcast, grumpy faces above dark, padded coats a
nd grim-grey scarves. This is not the pleasure dome. No male or female fantasy here, nobody’s fantasy at all. This is hell on earth.
‘What’s your poison?’ James asks. ‘Early lunch, brunch, whatever.’
‘Oh God, I don’t care.’ I would rather eat soggy shepherd’s pie and questionable jam roly-poly at The Cedars, to be honest, than anything here. ‘KFC?’
We eat popcorn chicken and fries. I’m not very hungry. Perched at a too-high round table with a sticky unwiped surface, I look at James and consider whether he looks a changed man to me, after all he has told me. A beaten boy. An escapee. A survivor. A man sometimes frightened of going out. I can see it all in his eyes if I look hard enough – everything flickering behind the screen of them. At the same time, he looks just the same as he did before.
‘How is it?’ he asks.
‘How’s what?’ I reply and I look down, feeling caught out at staring at him. Does he regret telling me what he has? It is hard to know.
‘Your food.’
‘Oh, great thanks. You?’
‘Great.’
There is a kerfuffle, a sea change, over by the queue for Burger King. A rustle of excitement, a whoop. Someone is down on one knee in front of a startled-looking girl in a beige faux-fur coat. She looks like a teddy bear. The person on one knee looks like an orange chrysalis folded uncomfortably in half, a flapping corner of his padded jacket sweeping the grubby floor.
‘Who on earth would propose in a queue at a service station Burger King?’ says James. He looks tickled, quite delighted.
‘He’s insane!’ I say. ‘But at least it’s something different. And look how happy they are!’
I probably looked that happy when Christian proposed. It was a more conventional setting – an Italian restaurant. A ring in a tiramisu. A polite round of applause from fellow diners. This crowd is going wild. Orange Chrysalis has scooped up Teddy Bear and is running round the perimeter of the food court with her, to people clapping and cheering. It’s probably the happiest moment this place has ever seen. Customers’ faces light up over their junk food; they grin at each other as a pair of brown knee-high boots go rushing past them, the toes pointed upwards in ecstasy.
‘Good for you, Paula!’ a rotund man bursting from a red duffel coat in front of Marks & Spencer drolly calls out. Most of the audience turn and look thoroughly bemused at this misquote, but I smile in recognition, and so does James.
THEN
Chapter 17: An Officer and a Gentleman
Mac and I stopped off at a tiny minimart on Frith Street and picked up the cheapest bottle of wine we could find. We smuggled it into the Wiltshire Hotel, Soho Square, under his coat and into our room on the first floor. We had twin beds – an error – so we pushed them together and I jumped, laughing, on the newly formed double bed, too close to its seam, and they wheeled apart again. As I slipped down the ravine in the middle with my hand waving not drowning in the air I had never felt so happy.
Mac pushed the beds back together. We poured the wine into the smeared water glasses we found upside down on the vanity unit in the bathroom.
‘To us,’ said Mac.
‘To us!’
I pulled back the covers of one of the beds and got in, fully clothed. Mac squeezed in next to me so we were a couple of hot sardines, packed close. We were high on life and each other. We breathed each other in. We drank wine, made love, drank some more wine, made some more love. We were all that existed.
‘What time shall we go out?’ I asked later, naked and stretched out on the other side of the seam, where the sheets were still smooth and unromped on.
‘Ten-ish?’ said Mac. ‘Everything’s open until late.’ I felt all decadent. I’d been to London before, of course. I’d been dragged to see Starlight Express with Marilyn (although she missed most of the second half because she was chatting up a Rob Lowe lookalike in the bar); I’d been up on the train to go shopping in Topshop at Oxford Circus – there was a photo at home somewhere of me wearing round turquoise plastic earrings and standing outside the shop with a random group of girls; I’d been to the Tower of London when I was ten, followed by Madame Tussauds, where I was frightened to death by Christie and Crippen. But this was real London – this was night-life, hot-in-the-city London.
Mac switched on the telly.
‘Oh look,’ he said, ‘An Officer and a Gentleman. It’s not next on my list but it is on my list. You seen it?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘well, bits of it.’ Someone had put it on at someone’s house one drunken night, after getting back from an Essex house party. My memory of it was sketchy. Becky had told me it was one of her all-time favourites – she said Richard Gere was hot in it and she totally had a thing for men in white uniform.
‘Do you want to watch it? It’s only just started.’
‘All right. Have you brought your notepad?’
‘Of course,’ said Mac, leaning over to the side of the bed and pulling it from his leather bag, along with his trusted Parker pen.
‘Always prepared,’ I laughed.
‘Always prepared.’
We pulled off the sheets and rearranged them so it was like we were in a proper double bed and we propped ourselves up against as many pillows as we could find – some stashed high in the wardrobe, hoping not to be used – and watched the film. I’d always had mixed feelings about Richard Gere. I’d seen him in American Gigolo and Yanks, and I’d thought he was just OK, although obviously very good-looking, but all that changed now: I loved him as Mayo in An Officer and a Gentleman. All that DOR business, the shouting, the drills, the crying as he did press-ups; and my, Debra Winger was so sexy. I was crying a bit at the end. I couldn’t help it.
‘Well done, Paula,’ Mac said, as the credits rolled.
I sniffed away my tears with a bit of toilet roll and said, ‘Right, Mac, down to business. Portrayal of women in the movie … What do you have in your notes?’
Mac turned to lie on his front and read from his pad. ‘Men and women both flawed, can behave better. Two gits, one male, one female. Two nice people – one male, one female. Working-class women as the enemy.’
I climbed on to Mac’s back, like a porpoise. I lay flat and still and rested my chin on his right shoulder blade. ‘The character of Seeger,’ I said. ‘A female character wanting to be a man and accepted as one at the end.’
‘Entrapment via pregnancy,’ read Mac. ‘Economically motivated. Paula is saved by Mayo without having to do any of that; she gets economic elevation just for being nice.’
‘Seems all very straightforward,’ I say. ‘And lots of good discussion points here, Mac.’
‘Yep. It’s a goody. What do you think, about Paula’s rescue by Mayo at the end?’
‘It’s a great movie moment.’ I sighed, tickling Mac’s upper arm with the tip of my index finger. ‘It makes me a little angry, though. That she needs a man to save her, and all that, but at the same time I was suckered right in.’
‘Is it a fantasy of yours, to be rescued?’ He turned his head to the side and grinned at me.
‘I already have been,’ I said. ‘But not by you.’ I poked him, in the armpit.
‘Ouch!’
‘I rescued myself when I got into university. You were the cherry on the cake.’
‘I thought cherries were the devil’s spawn.’
‘Ha. I’m back on them. I like cherries.’
‘And I like being your cherry.’
‘Good. And I like your choices,’ I said. ‘Of movies. Well, so far. You’ve got a bit of everything.’
‘Thank you, student.’
‘How many more do we have?’
‘Oh, you’re bored!’
‘I’m not! I don’t want them to come to an end, if anything.’
‘Two more,’ said Mac.
‘And then what?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Then what?’ I flattened myself to him, flanked my arms down his sides. ‘What happens after we’ve seen them all?
’
‘I start the course, in October. We carry on. I don’t know, Ardie. There are always more movies to watch.’ He shifted his arm free of me and checked the time. ‘Come on, let’s go out. Soho awaits, my darling.’
I’d packed a dress for the evening, a red dress with a halter neck and a full skirt: fifties style. I’d never worn it and God knows why I’d brought it up to Warwick in the first place – I could hardly rock up in it to the Cholo Bar on a Wednesday night, and it was even a bit too flash for the occasional student balls that were held at nearby Chesford Grange.
Mac gave a wolf whistle when I emerged from the bathroom in it.
‘Wow,’ he said and I lit up like a Regent Street Christmas tree. I had never felt so attractive, so desired. I was a Hollywood starlet standing on a grand staircase ready for my close-up; I was the glamorous star of my own show. I was Paula, and I wanted this feeling to last for ever.
We went for dinner in a tiny Lebanese restaurant. There were only about six tables; the whole place was the size of our bathroom at the Wiltshire. We had meze and wine and goat curry and baklava and it was amazing. Our waiter was hilariously gossipy and over-attentive; at one point he sat down at the table with us and started telling us about the time Al Pacino came into the restaurant. At least, he thought it was him – somebody else thought it was Bobby Ball. Mac laughed his head off. He loosened up, unbuttoned his shirt. I could tell he was having a really good time. We were the last to leave but Mac still wasn’t done with the night.
‘Come on! Let’s go dancing!’ he said and he took me by the hand and pulled me through the streets of Soho where we dodged slow-moving sports cars with dazzling headlights, and people crowding the pavements and spilling out on to the streets holding pint glasses. There were clouds of cigarette smoke, jostling, shouting, people calling to each other. A girl, swivelling on her heel and tumbling into the street, caught by a couple of men in dungarees and Caterpillar boots. I got whistled at and I loved it. I felt like Rita Hayworth.
You, Me and The Movies Page 21