by Mike Gayle
‘Matthew Beckford!
‘Gershwin Palmer!’
‘You porky git!’
‘You balding loser!’
We always greeted each other like that and it made us laugh. He could call me fat because, in the big scheme of things, I knew that although I was a little bit out of shape I was far from being lardy, and in turn although he was receding slightly at the temples he was still a long way from the Land of Wispy Strands.
I’d called Gershwin up at work to let him know I was back, and he’d insisted that I come into town and meet him for lunch. On seeing each other we engaged in a not-quite-but-nearly hug and laughed a lot to compensate for being pleased to see each other. The last time I’d seen him was about a year ago when I’d had to fly to London on business and I’d made a brief trip up to Birmingham to see my parents. I was in and out in under thirty-six hours but I made time to see him. Since then we’d exchanged e-mails and the occasional postcard but we weren’t regular correspondents. Not that it mattered – some friendships remain strong no matter how much you neglect them and mine and Gershwin’s was one of those.
Now we stood back and looked at each other. Gershwin was wearing a dark grey suit, white shirt and dark blue tie. He looked every inch the middle manager he was supposed to be and yet, underneath the suit, I knew he was still the same party-trick Gershwin who could drink beer through his nose, knew all the words to Boston’s cheesy soft rock anthem ‘More Than A Feeling’, and made the best bacon and egg sandwiches the world has ever known. I felt immediate relief: if those I’ve grown up with are still okay, ran my thought processes, then I’ll be okay too. And as I looked at Gershwin, checking that he still had two arms, two legs and his sanity, I knew I was okay too.
It was cold and drizzling as we stepped outside. At Gershwin’s suggestion we headed for one of the many coffee-bar retail chains that had erupted out of nowhere in the last few years. As we walked along Corporation Street towards New Street we talked about football and music, knowing that we’d do the So-how’s-life-with-you? thing later. When ‘later’ arrived, I launched into my enquiries about his life before he could launch into his. I wasn’t eager to talk about Elaine just yet.
‘How’s Zoë?’
‘She’s fine,’ said Gershwin. ‘She’s still nursing. Still at the QE.’
‘Enjoying it?’
He shrugged. ‘Not really. I think she misses Charlotte. My mum looks after her during the day but . . . you know how it is, she’s knackered when she comes in from work and then she feels like she’s not giving Charlotte her best and that makes her feel more guilty. But anyway—’
‘And how’s my lovely goddaughter?’ I asked, interrupting before he could get on to me, which was exactly what he had been about to do.
‘She’s great,’ said Gershwin. ‘She’s nearly four now. She’ll be going to school in September.’ He laughed. ‘She’ll be over the moon when she hears you’re back. She calls you “Daddy’s friend Matt who brings nice presents”. She’s got her priorities sorted, that girl—’
‘And how’s work?’ I interjected.
‘Crap. I’m bored, tired, bored, fed up and bored. Did I say I was bored? But you know how it is, everyone hates their job, don’t they, so why bother moaning?’
Following on from that I found out more about his life: yes, his mum and dad were okay; yes, his sister, Andrea, was okay too and, no, the Palmer family cat, Tweety, was not okay – she’d been run over. Just as I suspected it was dawning on him that I was employing the classic my-life’s-so-crap-I-don’t-want-to-moan-about-it-quite-yet diversionary questioning strategy, we reached our destination.
Even though it was only just after twelve the café was fairly packed, mainly with gaunt-looking studenty kids whose migratory path from Aston University’s campus to the city encompassed it. They all looked a bit ill as if they’d been surviving on nothing more substantial than cigarettes, coffee and exam pressure for some time. While we waited for the coffee to arrive, Gershwin and I exchanged a brief lift of the eyebrows in salute to a random act of senseless beauty clearing the table behind us. She had a mass of hair tied away from her face that threatened to spring into action at any moment, and a detached smile that almost, but not quite, made me want to weep with gratitude that such women still existed. Cups in hand we made our way to the high stools at the front of the café, considerately positioned by the windows to make it easier for people like us – those on the wrong side of twenty-nine – to watch the girls on the right side of twenty-five go by without causing undue stress to our knees.
‘So . . .’ said Gershwin, getting out a packet of Silk Cut.
‘I thought you’d given up?’
‘I did. I have. And tomorrow I give up again. But I’ve got to have something to live for.’ He laughed. ‘Anyway, never mind my filthy habit. The game’s up, Matt. What is it you don’t want to talk about?’
I sighed. ‘Elaine.’
‘I take it she’s what’s brought you home?’
I nodded.
‘For a while?’
I nodded again, and told him the bulk of the details about splitting up with Elaine, and my new job.
‘So, you’ve been in the wars a bit, have you?’ he said, sympathetically. ‘I can relate to that for sure.’ He smiled. ‘Congratulations on the job though. It sounds great. But it’s a shame about you and Elaine. A real shame.’
I gazed out of the window, my attention wandering as an attractive girl in office-type clothing walked by briskly as if she was late for something important. ‘It was a weird situation,’ I said. ‘It just wasn’t working out.’ Gershwin joined me in gazing out of the window. ‘There were no tears when we split up. No big hoo-hah. Nothing.’
‘That doesn’t sound right,’ said Gershwin. ‘Hoo-hah is par for the course at the end of any relationship – even if you hated each other. Without hoo-hah when you’re splitting up, well . . . it’s not splitting up, is it?’
‘Exactly,’ I replied. ‘My point entirely.’
‘So what happened next?’
‘I changed my mind.’
‘When?’
‘At the airport.’
Gershwin shook his head. ‘At the airport? Couldn’t you have left it until a bit later?’
‘So, there I am with my bags,’ I said, ignoring his comment, ‘a minute and a half from saying goodbye, and I changed my mind.’
‘What about your new job?’
‘I would’ve quit it.’
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘Well, that’s the thing. She didn’t change hers.’
‘Her what?’
‘Keep up, will you?’ I said, feigning exasperation. ‘Her mind. She did not want to continue the relationship.’
‘She actually said this?’
‘No, I could just see it in her face. She loved me and all that but she didn’t feel the same.’ I paused and shrugged. ‘I can’t blame her. I think it was an age thing, too, you know. Elaine’s twenty-two to my twenty-nine. I know it’s only seven years’ difference and not a huge deal but in a lot of ways those seven years are like dog years.’ Gershwin nodded. ‘I know they say women mature faster than men but I’m not entirely sure about that. I mean, doesn’t everyone need that period to, well, not just hang out and be . . .’ I lost the thread of what I was saying as I watched a tall, dark-haired girl on the cusp of her twenties slink by in a T-shirt so tight a six-year-old would’ve struggled to breathe in it. She was accompanied by her young, lithe, fully follicled boyfriend. ‘Basically, I think that sometimes she liked being in a proper grown-up relationship and other times quite naturally she just wanted to be twenty-two, single and stupid.’
‘Maybe she wanted to sow her proverbial wild oats,’ suggested Gershwin, as his eyes followed a group of Spanish girls across the road. ‘Like you say, she is only twenty-two.’
‘No, it’s more than that,’ I said. ‘It’s me. When I was standing there at the airport my whole life flashed before m
y eyes. I could see myself finding an apartment somewhere in Australia. I could see me filling it with a few men’s style-magazine bachelor-pad staples – the wide-screen TV, the chrome CD racks and the black leather couch. I could see me playing squash on Monday nights, five-a-side football on Wednesday nights, going for the occasional drink and a meal out with whoever would come with me on the nights that remain, and I could see that would be the sum total of the rest of my life.’
‘No women?’
‘Maybe the odd one or two . . . but they wouldn’t last.’
Gershwin laughed. He always found my gloomy side amusing. ‘Why not?’
‘Because ever since I first started going out with girls, way back when, I’ve been convinced that my life isn’t complete without one. The minute I work out life’s actually okay without a full-time one around the house, it’s all over! I’d give up. I’d fill my life with any old crap rather than compromise. And you know as well as I do that relationships are all about compromise. I think Elaine was my last chance.’
‘As mad as it seems you might have a point there,’ said Gershwin. ‘Sometimes I feel really good that me and Zoë got serious when we were still so young. We’ve grown up with each other. We’ve learned from each other. But . . . well, I dunno. Sometimes I think—’
‘What?’
‘That we might’ve missed out on something. I don’t regret having Charlotte. Not at all. But sometimes I think, well, I’ve thought . . . what if?’
‘I shouldn’t do that,’ I replied. ‘Don’t even think about going down that road. See me?’ I pointed to myself with my plastic coffee stirrer. ‘I’m your “what if?”. You’d be me, sitting here having exactly the same sort of conversation about women that we had twelve years ago. It’s getting tedious now we’re turning thirty.’ Gershwin looked thoughtful but didn’t say anything. ‘Turning thirty is one of those things that will never happen,’ I continued. ‘You know, like when you’re a kid and you try to work out which year in the future will be the one that you’ll turn thirty in, and then you work it out and you think it might as well be a billion years away because it’s so far in the future. And now suddenly, the future’s right here.’
‘The world’s full of thirty-year-olds,’ said Gershwin. The dark cloud of deep thought that had enveloped him had disappeared. ‘It’s not like in Logan’s Run, where they’re banished to some netherworld the moment they hit the three-oh.’
‘I suppose,’ I admitted. ‘I’m sure we’ve both got mates that have already been there and they’ve all lived to tell the tale. So it can’t be that bad, can it?’
‘I dunno,’ said Gershwin, clearly trying to wind me up. ‘I think it all depends on where you are in life. Some people I’ve known who turned thirty took it well and had a laugh. Some pretended to take it well then went a bit strange weeks later. Some panicked right up until their birthdays then realised nothing had changed, and then there’s the small but not insignificant number who went on that whole where-is-my-life-going? trip and never came back again. Which sort are you, then, Matt?’
‘Me?’ I said innocently, ‘I dunno. What about yourself?’
‘I dunno,’ said Gershwin, ‘but I suppose we’ll both find out soon enough.’
sixteen
To:
[email protected]
From:
[email protected]
Subject:
Home
Hi Elaine
Sorry I’ve taken so long to e-mail you. Everything is fine here. Flight was fine. Mum and Dad have been asking about you a lot. I’ve told them we’ve split up and though they were disappointed they seem to be fine about it. Also – it’s okay about the T-shirt. I have a confession too – I stole some of your underwear. It’s draped over the radiator in my bedroom as I speak. (I lie.) What I actually did take was a tape of music I made you – the one you entitled Music For Losers, vol. II. I don’t know why I took it. I suppose I just wanted a souvenir of us.
I’ll talk more soon.
love Matt.
PS For the record, you loon, all of the following world-famous people are from Birmingham:
1) John Taylor from Duran Duran (the only one from the band anyone can remember who wasn’t Simon Le Bon).
2) Joan Armatrading (female singer/songwriter. Had a hit in 1976 with ‘Love and Affection’).
3) Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin (technically he’s from Stourbridge, just outside Birmingham, but that’s near enough).
4) Kenny Baker – the guy who played R2D2 in Star Wars.
5) Ozzy Osbourne from Black Sabbath.
6) At a push I’d include ‘cod reggae’ band UB40 but I prefer to keep that kind of regional shame to myself.
seventeen
Finding myself at a loose end the day after meeting up with Gershwin, I decided to do something about my clothing situation. The majority of my belongings had been shipped back to England and wouldn’t arrive for several weeks. Also the clothes I’d brought with me were dirty because I’d suffered a mental block about using the laundry room in the basement of our apartment in New York, and the idea of bringing a load of washing home for my mum to do seemed strangely comforting.
As I was sorting out the few clean items of clothing I had that morning, it had occurred to me that perhaps my wardrobe was in need of modernisation. Currently my division-one attire (as opposed to division-two attire: Frankie Says No to War T-shirts, jeans that no longer fitted me and things to wear while decorating) consisted of the usual shirts, trousers, T-shirts and jumpers, and the one thing they had in common was that they were all dark blue or black. This was part of the problem I had been trying to explain to Gershwin about my increasing inflexibility. My liking for such clothing had developed in my twenties as a genuine affection for the darker end of the colour spectrum but had gradually metamorphosed into a pathological habit I couldn’t break. Just before Christmas, Elaine and I were shopping on the Upper West Side when she tried to persuade me to buy a pair of light grey trousers she had seen in a Banana Republic window. They weren’t hideous. They weren’t too trendy for a guy like me. There was nothing wrong with them at all. But I couldn’t even bring myself to go into the shop, let alone try on the trousers. It wasn’t my fault. I was built this way.
It was as if from the day I turned nineteen I’d been filling in a mammoth opinion survey on life and sometime after my twenty-seventh birthday the results came in. Suddenly everything fell into place and life wasn’t so complicated any more. Finally I understood what I liked and didn’t like and I stuck by it rigidly. Favourite Indian meal: Chicken Tikka Masala. Favourite TV programmes: news, sci-fi stuff, sitcoms and reruns of anything I used to watch in the seventies and eighties. Favourite music: female singer-songwriter stuff, seventies and eighties stuff and anything I listened to when I was a student. I’d had exactly the same haircut for the last six years (short all over) and I had three pairs of exactly the same jeans because I was scared that at some point in the future Levi’s might stop making them. I knew myself, I knew exactly what I wanted from life and I was happy.
This didn’t mean that I didn’t like anything new. I did. What it did mean was that the new things I let into my life were mostly variations on the old things that were already in my life – variations on a very strict theme. Elaine used to think it was insane how happy the status quo made me, but as I explained to her, the point of life is to learn from your mistakes and not to go out and see if you can make some new ones. So, after a disastrous flirtation with pastels, beige and even yellow, I finally decided that dark blue/black clothing was my clothing for life. Soon I discovered that it didn’t show up food stains and I could put pretty much everything I owned in the same wash without fear of the colours running.
Wandering through the city centre, in search of new clothes that might bolster my confidence for this bold new stage of my life, I saw an alarming number of attractive young women and tried to imagine myself with them. There we are, walking down the street, hand
in hand, laughing gaily, her in one of those breezy slip dresses, even though there is a distinct chill in the air, and me in my dark blue/black outfit. Then, in my imaginary scenario, I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window and the spell is broken. It has nothing to do with the clothes: it is more a look on my face that seems to ask, ‘Is this journey really necessary?’ The reason for this, of course, is the same as the reason for the colour of my clothes: at twenty-nine I knew exactly what kind of woman I wanted.
I wanted one like I’d already had in the past but without the annoying bits.
I wanted someone I already knew – but who didn’t know me so well that my imperfections would put her off.
I wanted someone with whom I could just be me.
But, like the elusive item of clothing you create in your mind’s eye – the one that’s the right colour, the right shade, the right style – the girlfriend in my head wasn’t available and that alone made me feel like giving up on shopping for ever.
On a rather reckless impulse – no doubt spurred on by an impending fit of melancholy – I walked into a clothes shop just off New Street that from the outside seemed suitably hip and happening – if ‘hip’ and ‘happening’ are still considered hip and happening words by those in the know. Maybe I’ve got this all wrong, I told myself. Maybe the new isn’t so terrifying, after all. Emanating from the shop’s speakers was a rumbling bass track from the loudest song I’d ever heard – it was only a notch or two down from making my ears bleed. In the far corner of the shop by the rear door I saw that they actually had a DJ with his decks. This both amused and saddened me: amused, because this guy in his early twenties, with his goatee beard, beanie hat and trainers like the ones I wore for PE when I was eleven, undoubtedly thought he was the epitome of cool even though his core audience was shopping for trousers, shirts and underpants; and saddened, because just a few years ago I, too, would have thought DJing in a clothes shop was a cool way to spend an afternoon.