by Mike Gayle
To:
[email protected]
From:
[email protected]
Re:
your last e-mail
Dear Elaine
I’m having trouble following your line of thought. Now you want me to go out with her?
Just checking,
love
Matt
To:
[email protected]
From:
[email protected]
Re:
Just checking.
Dear Matt
First off (I am soooooo going to get fired when they realise that I do nothing here all day except write e-mails to England). Second off, since we broke up (and let’s not forget it’s been a long time) I’ve only ‘got together’ with one guy in a bar! All you’ve done is move in with an old girlfriend who already has a boyfriend! If you’re not going to date her then I think you should date somebody. It’s only natural.
love,
Elaine
sixty-one
The only problem I really had was loneliness. On the evenings when Ginny seeing Ian coincided with Gershwin staying in or going out with his other mates, I’d find myself at a loose end. I’m not the kind of person who enjoys their own company very much. I need people to bounce off. I am very much a people-bouncing-off type of person.
sixty-two
To:
[email protected]
From:
[email protected]
Subject:
The dating game
Dear Elaine
Okay, I promise you I will go on a date. I am only doing this because I know that you won’t give up until you get your way. It must feel good to know that your power to annoy extends right across the Atlantic. Seriously, though, I think you’ve got a point. However, I think things may be more difficult for me than you might think. I was looking in the personal ads in the paper on Saturday and women in their thirties (i.e. my new catchment area) always specify that they’re looking for a man who:
1) Is financially solvent.
2) Supportive.
3) Has no emotional baggage.
While I’m okay on (1) and (2) I suspect that you may well constitute ‘emotional baggage’. Regardless, I shall find a date so we can get on with our lives.
love
Matt ‘luggage handler of the lonely’ Beckford xxx
sixty-three
‘Good night?’ asked Ginny.
It was just past half-eleven on Friday night a week after I’d moved into Ginny’s. My now slightly merry landlady had just come back from another night out with Ian while my evening had been a simpler affair along the lines of Weekend Watchdog followed by Top of the Pops, followed by feelings of hunger and self-pity, followed by a call to Domino’s Pizza, followed by more self-pity and an intense half-hour of channel surfing, followed by the arrival of my thin-crust Meat Feast pizza, followed by Friends, followed by half a tub of ice-cream followed by Frasier, followed by half of an unconvincing vampire film followed by the arrival of Ginny.
Terrible,’ I replied to Ginny’s question, without lifting my head from the arm of the sofa. ‘How about yours?’
‘Nowhere near as bad as yours, I suspect.’ She took off her coat, moved my legs out of the way and slumped on the sofa next to me. ‘We went for a drink at a new bar in town and to the Persian restaurant above it.’
‘How was it?’
‘Fine.’ She smiled. ‘They make all-right food, you know the Persians.’ She gave a little yawn then stretched. ‘So come on, Mr Misery, why was tonight so awful for you?’
‘No special reason.’
‘Hard day with Charlotte?’
‘Not in the least. She was brilliant. We went to the art museum this afternoon. I think she quite enjoyed it. Well, she must have done because on the bus on the way home she told me she was going to be an artist when she grew up. Well, either that or an accountant.’ Ginny giggled. ‘I’m not making it up either. I don’t know where she gets these things from, I really don’t. Kids’ minds are a total enigma to me.’
‘So what’s wrong, then?’
‘I’m bored, I suppose.’
‘Oh, poor baby,’ said Ginny, and rubbed her eyes. ‘Ian was on about going to the cinema tomorrow night. You can come if you want.’
‘That’s the second time you’ve invited me to play gooseberry. I have my dignity. I don’t need your charity . . . yet.’
‘You’ll be fine.’ Ginny kicked off her shoes and looked at the clock on the far wall. ‘What are you doing now? Off to bed?’
‘Not this early,’ I replied. ‘I was toying with watching this week’s ER. I taped it on Wednesday and I’ve been waiting for a really low moment in my life to watch it. The way I see it, other people’s misery, even fictional other people’s misery, is bound to make me feel better about my own life.’
‘I’ve never watched ER before,’ said Ginny, settling back in the sofa. ‘I never really like the idea of all that blood and guts and shouting.’
‘You’re joking!’ I said. ‘The shouting’s the best bit. I used to be like you, ignorant about such things. In fact, I used to leave the room whenever Elaine started watching it, saying I was going to leave her to her “girls’ programmes” but she converted me. It only took about three episodes and I was addicted. You make some coffee, I’ll set up the video, and I’ll give you a crash course on all of the characters’ histories like Elaine did with me – all the who’s sleeping with who, the who’s slept with who, the who hates who and the who’s pregnant by who. It’s just like real life, only it happens in a hospital.’
It was just coming up to a quarter to one in the morning when Ginny and I got our second wind of energy after watching sixty minutes’ worth of top-quality hospital drama. In fact, we were so hyperactive that we decided to play ER live!, a stupid in-joke of a game invented by Elaine and me that nobody else understood or found remotely funny but that we found hilarious. To play ER live! all you had to do was find a willing patient (Elaine and I used one of her mother’s embroidered cushions), assign roles (Elaine was always Dr Shula Hobgoblin, a one-armed hot-headed maverick surgeon new to the trauma department, and I was always Staff Nurse Zimmerman, a hard but fair male nurse born on the wrong side of the Austrian Alps). The rest of the game involved trying to deliver as many ER clichés as possible in a minute.
Ginny loved the idea because it was so bizarre. She decided she was going to be Dr Elizabeth Hatstand, a brilliant but eccentric second-year surgical resident from London, England. In an attempt not to reawaken too many old memories I decided to be Dr Lance Buttie, a brilliant but acutely miserable trainee surgeon with a chip on his shoulder the size of a brick.
‘Dr Buttie!’ said Ginny, barely able to control her laughter. ‘To the trauma room quickly! We’ve got a gangbanger with a GSW to the head, suffering from anaphylactic shock and – er – other stuff.’
‘Here’s the patient, Dr Hatstand.’ I picked up Ginny’s cat Larry (Sanders, smart animal, had made a crafty exit) and settled her in front of the TV with the two of us kneeling on the floor beside him. ‘It doesn’t look good,’ I said. ‘It looks like he’s lost a lot of blood. He may never bring another dead mouse into the house again.’ I thumped the ground in mock anguish. ‘Damn these youngsters and their gang warfare. Can’t they see this is such a waste of young life?’
Ginny pretended to smack me across the face. ‘Dammit, Buttie, you’re getting hysterical. Do you know that I’ve never lost a patient yet? Not even one with whiskers!’ She slapped me again. Larry watched the two of us passively, flicked his whiskers and rolled on to his back.
‘You’re right, Dr Hatstand. I’m sorry. I’m being hysterical. It’s just that I’ve never told you this but I lost my own cat in exactly the same way. It’s such a tragedy! I should never have—’
Ginny interrupted with loud beeping noises.
‘What is it, Hatstand?’
‘Th
e patient’s going into anaphylactic shock! Get me two teaspoons full of O-neg, an ECG, a DTP, a CBC, a Chem 7, a BBC1, a BBC2 and maybe even an ITV – oh, and get me the big thing that gives electric shocks too, otherwise this cat is on a one-way trip through that great cat-flap in the sky!’
‘But, Dr Hatstand, shouldn’t we just intubate? Or perform a cricothyroidoctomy? Or a cordotomy? Or even a lobotomy?’
‘Dammit, Dr Buttie!’ yelled Ginny, really getting into her role. ‘Who’s the senior surgeon round here? Me or you, dammit?’
Larry was tired of two humans shouting nonsense over his head: she rolled on to her feet, stretched and wandered off to the kitchen.
‘Come back, Larry!’ said Ginny, rolling about on the floor with mirth. ‘We promise we’ll cure you!’
‘Ungrateful patient,’ I called after him. I crawled back on to the sofa. ‘I’m shattered,’ I said. ‘Who’d want to work in a real ER ? Computers are far easier to handle.’
Ginny laughed. ‘Never mind computers. Let’s open a bottle of wine or three, relax and have a good old talk.’
sixty-four
‘You miss her, don’t you?’ said Ginny, handing me what would be the first of several glasses of wine.
‘Who?’ I said, feigning ignorance.
‘Elaine.’
I attempted to work backwards through our conversation to see how she’d gone from computing to Elaine.
‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about her for a while. When we finished playing ER live ! you looked so sad – as though you were thinking about her,’ Ginny said. ‘Maybe you weren’t. Maybe you were thinking about next week’s ER.’
Ginny was right. I had been thinking about Elaine, but only fleetingly. I was thinking about how when we played ER live! she’d always go on about a character who neither of us played called Dr Salami. It was the kind of rude, throwaway gag that in the normal world isn’t that funny. But it was our joke and nobody else’s, and that made it hilarious.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I do miss her . . . a lot. It’s just the stupid stuff, really. As well as playing ER we used to play a game called “Name That Vegetable”. We’d take it in turns to hide a vegetable underneath a towel and try to guess what it was.’
‘Mmm-hmm,’ said Ginny, raising her eyebrows. ‘That sounds like very odd behaviour indeed.’
‘I know,’ I said, laughing. ‘But that’s not the really stupid thing. The really stupid thing was that it was always a potato.’
‘So, are you going to tell me what went wrong with you two? I’ve been dying to ask you about her for ages and it’s only now that I’m trying to get you drunk that I feel able to. All you’ve said about your relationship with her so far is that it didn’t work out.’ Ginny pulled a face. ‘I mean, you haven’t even told me where you two met – and we’re supposed to be friends!’
‘Are you sure you want to talk about all this?’ I asked. ‘I mean, it’s a bit gloomy, isn’t it?’
‘No, no, no,’ said Ginny keenly. ‘Talking about relationships isn’t gloomy – it’s therapy.’
‘Okay.’ I took a sip of my wine. ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Once upon a time there was a handsome financial software designer called Matt. He’d been living in London for five years, was doing well in his job and was going out with a rather smashing girl called Monica Aspel who worked in management consultancy. Now, Matt was proud of his relationship with Monica because at the age of twenty-seven it was the first he’d ever had in which both parties referred to each other as my boy/girlfriend without the use of two-fingered ironical quotation marks. He even thought it would break the twelve-month relationship barrier that he had yet to experience. Unfortunately a month before their one-year anniversary he made the mistake of coming home to their top floor Muswell Hill flat early to discover that his darling management-consultant girlfriend had brought some work home with her and was consulting rather too closely with a manager on their bed . . .’
‘Oh, no!’ exclaimed Ginny.
‘Don’t worry,’ I replied. ‘Matt was okay – in the end. He moved out straight away and made a new home on a workmate’s sofa. Anyway, that was when – he – oh, sod it, I can’t keep this up. This was when I heard about an internal job opportunity for a software team leader, a step up the ladder and, best of all, the job was in New York. I had a massive interview, got the job and went over for the first time to meet my new bosses. Before I knew it I was in possession of a green card and on a Virgin Atlantic flight to JFK.’
‘All this sounds really exciting,’ said Ginny, encouragingly.
‘It was, although I was a bit overwhelmed by it all at first. I had all these plans. I was going to buy a Ford Gran Torino, like the one Starsky and Hutch had, I was going to go on long road trips during my vacations and I was going to join a gym and get myself some biceps – I was going to do everything. Instead, during my first week in New York, two days after I’d found my new apartment I went to a party in Greenwich Village and that was where I met Elaine. We got on well. We dated for all of two weeks before she fell out with her room-mates and moved into my apartment on a temporary basis while she looked for somewhere else and, well, she never moved out.’
‘Move in together in haste, sleep on the sofa at leisure,’ said Ginny sagely.
‘That’s pretty much it,’ I continued. ‘It worked for quite a long time, given my relationship track record, and then it suddenly stopped working. We didn’t row. In fact we always got on really, really well. We were – in fact, we still are – good friends. I’ve got my lap-top with me and I e-mail her almost every other day. I could talk to Elaine about anything, but I suppose when I got to asking myself the big question, Can I see myself with this woman in five years from now?, the answer always came back no, and if you’d asked Elaine she’d have said the same thing.’ I looked over at Ginny, unsure if I should confess. ‘When we split, everything was fine. Neither of us made a big deal out of it. It was over and we were both happy and then . . .’
‘What?’
‘I changed my mind at the last minute.’
‘But that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘It was bad. Everything was only all right when it was the two of us wanting the split. When one wants in and the other wants out it’s just, well, desperate.’
‘What made you change your mind?’
I looked at Ginny again, checking to see if I could trust the face sitting opposite me. ‘Turning thirty,’ I replied. ‘I know it’s sad. I know it’s just another birthday. But in that one moment I just thought, I’m tired of this move-in move-out thing. I’m tired of meeting new people, persuading them to like me, spending time with them then realising I’m just wasting my time again. I don’t know, I just felt like she was my last chance. Nota terribly dynamic way of seeing the world, but then again I’m not that dynamic.’
Ginny nodded, as if musing on something. ‘You were missing that thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘You and Elaine were missing that thing. The thing you’re supposed to have with the person you’re in love with – the flash of lightning, the clap of thunder, whatever it is that makes you think you can’t carry on another second with out this person by your side.’
‘I think you’re right. We probably even had it once but didn’t know it was there. And now, well, I think we’ve kind of missed it.’ I paused for a moment. ‘How about you and Ian?’
‘What?’ said Ginny, pointing to herself in mock innocence. ‘Have I got That Thing with Ian? I don’t know. Sometimes I think we’ve got it and then other times I think I couldn’t be further from him if he was half a world away. All I know is that I’m a bit like you, I think half the disappointment in my life comes from the fact that when I imagined myself at thirty, this just wasn’t what I had in mind.’
I knew exactly what she meant.
‘What did you have in mind?’ I asked.
Ginny thought. ‘When I was about fourteen, I alwa
ys thought I’d be a lawyer because I used to watch LA Law every Thursday night. I even decided I was going to practise criminal law and defend women who had no one else to turn to. I was also going to drive a black BMW convertible, wear sunglasses in my hair, irrespective of the weather, and have a smart, square-jawed boyfriend with strong muscular thighs. He and I would get married and have two children – a boy and a girl – and I’d look after them half the week and spend the other half convicting nasty men. Now look at the reality. I’m a thirty-year-old art teacher, in a reasonably okay school, with a boyfriend who’s sometimes wonderful and who’s sometimes an arse, but neither of us has any plans to make the relationship more permanent. I own my own house but I can’t put up wallpaper. I have two cats, who, without a doubt, are surrogate children and an ex boyfriend/not ex-boyfriend in my spare room. On top of all of that, I’m an orphan.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Now, how’s that for things turning out just the way you planned them?’
We sat in silence for a few minutes.
‘What about you, Matt? How did you think things would be for you when you turned thirty?’
‘Careerwise, I think things have turned out pretty much the way I always thought they would. As for that partner-for-life thing, who knows? I used to have a thing for Madonna when I was a kid. I suspect she’s taken.’
‘Who else did you have in mind?’
I thought very hard about the answer to this question and then said, ‘You.’
sixty-five
‘Is this a good idea, Matt?’
‘You’re not sure?’
‘No,’ said Ginny. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘What aren’t you sure about?’
‘About you. Me. Here on this sofa. Your . . . left hand up my cardigan.’ I withdrew it. ‘Do I need to spell it out?’