The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ Leo said.

  Mr Ghosh brushed that aside. ‘You just have to do the usual tour you give dignitaries, but a little less pomp. No one else needs to be warned – if it’s good enough for our patients, it’s certainly good enough for Lady Sharifullah to cast her noble eye over. Actually, I’m being unfair. She’s supposed to be perfectly nice. She was chief executive of an NGO about women’s education in Asia.’

  ‘She’s from Sheffield,’ Leo said. ‘Like me.’

  ‘Well, there you are, then,’ Mr Ghosh said. It seemed that Leo had agreed to host Lady Sharifullah. Did they say ‘Lady Sharifullah’, which was absurd, tea-party-on-the-lawn, or did they say ‘Baroness Sharifullah’, which suggested a serious place in the legislative programme? Neither of them could quite decide. And now Mr Ghosh turned back to his computer. ‘I’ll let you know some more details tomorrow.’

  2.

  Leo had bought his house in 1995. The housing market had sunk over the previous years; selling his first flat, he had escaped negative equity, but only just. (A strange way of putting it – he had sold his flat for five thousand more than he’d bought it for.) The house he lived in now, between Clapham and the Battersea bit of the river, had cost him £90,000, which was three times the salary he had reached at the hospice plus a little bit. Now, his salary was about a fifth higher than it had been, twenty years ago, and his house was worth a million pounds or more. ‘I want to be a millionaire,’ he imagined himself saying in the 1980s, what he would have thought of that. No one he worked with at the hospice could possibly have afforded a house within walking distance, not even Mr Ghosh. He wished that the careful respect with which people treated him was down to his work, his length of service, his reliability. He was afraid that it was down to the fact that he had been able to buy a house near the park in 1990.

  ‘So much for my vow of poverty, obedience and obscurity,’ he imagined himself saying to an imaginary friend, one who would smile and shake his head ruefully. ‘If I sold the house in Kandahar Road, I could buy my dad’s mansion in Sheffield and have enough left over for a top-of-the-range caravan.’ The imaginary friend shook his head ruefully at Leo, the SW11 millionaire. It was so ordinary a dilemma.

  Rubilynn was in the kitchen, cleaning, when he let himself in. The sound from the sitting room meant that she had collected Sandy from the infants’ school and set him down on the sofa, which was wrapped in protective clear plastic, in front of the television. The tinkle and the calm voice proceeding from there were the programmes he had gone on liking. Leo liked them too: they soothed him, if Sandy let his dad take him on his knee and they watched them together. Rubilynn hardly looked up: she was scrubbing the sink with bleach.

  ‘You had a good deep clean yesterday,’ Leo observed by way of greeting. ‘It’s not necessary to do it every day.’

  ‘It’s good to do it every day,’ Rubilynn said. ‘We do it at work twice a day, very clean. Sandy likes it.’

  ‘The house is lovely and clean,’ Leo said. He didn’t think that Sandy cared either way.

  ‘Thank you,’ Rubilynn said, but without turning round and without any pleasure or gratitude in her voice. Leo knew why.

  ‘Are you going out tonight?’ he said.

  ‘Your friend – he’s coming here? Thursday night, he don’t come last week, so this week, he’s coming? Tonight I am going to spend time with my sister. Sister in Vauxhall.’

  ‘She’s not really your sister, is she, Rubilynn?’

  ‘She’s my sister, she was very kind to me,’ Rubilynn insisted.

  ‘That’s not what we mean here when we say “sister”, is it?’ Leo said. He despised himself for his meanness towards his wife, and yet he went on saying these things.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ Rubilynn said. South London was full of sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, at a pinch cousins; it had taken Leo some years to realize that, for the most part, Rubilynn meant only that she harboured adequately warm feelings towards a person who came from the same place she did. ‘Your friend is coming tonight, what time?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Leo said. ‘Probably after work.’ That was Leo’s polite fiction in turn, the suggestion that Tom Dick had a job that he did during the day. It was probably the English equivalent of Leo calling him his brother.

  ‘I’m going soon,’ Rubilynn said. ‘Sandy comes with me and when I go to work I leave him with my sister, sleeps there. I collect him tomorrow morning when I am finished, take him school.’

  ‘And I’m working tomorrow from six,’ Leo said. ‘And all weekend. So perhaps Monday we can sit down together as a family? I’ll get something nice to eat.’

  And now Rubilynn turned round, peeling her rubber gloves off: she gave him the look of concern and gratitude that was never far from her eyes. ‘As family,’ she said, and a sweet and lopsided smile appeared as if from nowhere. She was not cross with him; she was cross with the sense of duty and humiliation that insisted on having Tom Dick round to visit for an evening twice a month, every other Thursday night. The duty and humiliation preceded Rubilynn and took, somehow, precedence over her. Rubilynn did not understand, she said nevertheless, why they had to have anyone else. There were the three of them and they were happy in the little house. Nobody else was needed. Leo actually had a sister – a real one – who lived fifteen minutes’ walk away, only five minutes’ walk from the hospice, in a grand white stucco house by the Common. He had seen her in the street and she had looked at him, disbelieving, as if he were a ghost. He had walked on with his wife and his baby son. For Rubilynn, the aunts and the uncles and the brothers and the sisters and the cousins were needed, it appeared. But Rubilynn did not have it in her to say, ‘I hate your friend Tom Dick. I do not believe that you like him. Let us close the door to him for ever.’ She must have felt that that was bringing Leo to the point of making a choice. Her view of herself in his life was always provisional, Leo knew, despite Sandy, despite everything.

  As a family: Leo thought he would have time after work on Monday to go to Gerrard Street and buy some stinky tofu. It would make Rubilynn clap her hands to see something she liked so much, that made Sandy’s eyes widen with horror and that Leo could only ever force down. Stinky tofu was his first clue to what Rubilynn guarded carefully, her story. It was still almost his only one. He had hardly seen the small round nurse when she arrived, ten years ago. It had taken him ages to get her name right, and he had actually appealed in the end to Mrs Roy, Mr Ghosh’s predecessor-but-two, to make sure that he was in the right area. She was silent and smiling, efficient and tidy; if Leo had been asked, he would have thought she was Filipina, but without much concentration. It was with astonishment that he now remembered a time when he could hardly have distinguished Chinese from Japanese, Burmese from Thai, Filipino from Malay at a glance. She listened and smiled at what others said; she did not proffer any information. Only once, when somebody was making a cheese toastie in the kitchen, did she pull a face.

  ‘Don’t you like cheese?’ Leo said – he was there with his mid-morning cup of tea. ‘Is it too smelly for you?’

  He blushed to think, now, that that used to be the way he spoke to foreigners. The first normal thing he had said to the woman who he was going to marry was ‘Don’t you like cheese?’ as if explaining what that smell was. Of course anyone would know what cheese was. And in a moment Rubilynn was explaining, haltingly, but in little bursts of enthusiasm, that where she came from there was something called stinky tofu, so good, but no one liked it at first. She would never bring stinky tofu into work! But you could not buy it in London. Leo was tactful then, or was conscious of drawing the limits of enquiry tight, and he did not ask where she came from. But he believed that you could buy anything in London. He went to an internet café on Clapham high street and did a search. He learnt that stinky tofu was something that was popular in Taiwan. He went, therefore, to Chinatown, and in the first supermarket he went into he found that they were prepared to sell him so
me. He had no idea how much to buy: he settled for half a pound.

  The next day he had presented it to Rubilynn. She gazed at him, astonished. She did not have a beautiful face: she had the reassuring face of somebody’s mummy, photographed when young. He explained that he had been tickled by the name she had mentioned, and had wanted to seek it out.

  ‘Did you try it? Did you like it?’ Rubilynn wanted to know, but Leo had not. She had offered some to him, but he said he had just eaten – there was a Gorgonzola-like smell from the plastic bag that he shrank from, in fact. Rubilynn would take it home, that evening. Her sister – she did not eat stinky tofu: she did not like it. Rubilynn was going to be so happy, eating stinky tofu here!

  In his mind afterwards he had a story of a poor Filipina girl who had to grow up in Taiwan, who escaped from there as soon as she could. It touched his heart, as made-up stories so often turn back on their creator and touch the heart. They had married four months later. It seemed to Leo to be the right thing to do. There were only the two of them, and five friends – nurses, mostly – from the hospice. He decided not to invite Tom Dick, although by then Tom was already visiting him twice a month, every other Thursday. It was very nice. Rubilynn produced a big white dress with a veil; she looked swamped and nervous in it, and relieved when it was all over. When she wrote with a pen on the form that her place of birth was Taipei, Taiwan, Leo was overcome with the magic of it, the beauty and certainty of his knowledge of her. Afterwards she moved into Leo’s house. It was full of Leo – he had been there for ten years – and there was so little of her to make room for. Every time something needed replacing, he promised himself, a kettle, the curtains, the carpet, she would be given permission to choose it, and make his world hers. He would not say any of this to her. It would just happen. His marriage became another of those things that he deserved and would live within; his job, his solitude, his single friendship with a man he did not like. There was no week of the year that he did not think about what he had done to Aisha Sharifullah in the summer of 1990. His cruelty.

  Tom Dick came round at half past seven, almost on the dot – some wildlife programme was just starting, and Leo was almost glad of the excuse to turn it off. There was something atavistic in Tom’s sticking to conventional mealtimes as times to turn up, as a decadent society preserves the performance of ritual obeisance long after it has stopped possessing any meaning. The cargo cult was evident in what Tom was holding: two square pizza boxes from Domino’s round the corner. He must have rung the doorbell with his elbow. He would not eat more than a slice, if that; almost one whole pizza would be left behind with the unfailing observation that there was nothing like cold pizza for breakfast. It had never been eaten; Rubilynn would never have allowed either of them to eat anything that had been brought to the house by Tom Dick. But the polite fiction was preserved by Leo eating one of the pizzas, hot, and throwing the other away, cold.

  Tom Dick looked terrible; grey and exhausted, his eyes brilliant and his gums showing in the pulled-back smile. His hair was wild and upright, his crumpled shirt open over an old black T-shirt; the slept-in appearance was forgivable in a man of twenty-two, but Tom Dick was Leo’s age. He was fifty-seven, or perhaps fifty-eight.

  ‘Come in,’ Leo said. ‘Is that pizza I see?’

  I am doing something good, Leo said to himself. I am doing something good.

  ‘It was tonight, wasn’t it?’ Tom Dick said, stumbling over the words in his haste. ‘I’m sure it was tonight we agreed. I got a text from you, was it, I don’t know, yesterday, saying are we on for tomorrow night, and I’d forgotten but I’m quite pleased, I was pleased to get it because you know I had a date, I had a date planned for tonight but it fell through. I won’t bore you with the details. So that was nice, to get your text and think, OK, yes, that’s a nice idea, great, good old Leo.’

  Tom Dick appeared to be reaching for his pocket while still holding the pizza boxes. Leo reached forward smartly and took them from him in the nick of time. Tom Dick extracted his phone as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Yes, here we are. You sent me a text and it was yesterday. I got a Four Seasons and a Quattro Formaggi, is it, I hope that’s OK. I thought I’d leave you to get something to drink.’

  ‘I can get you a beer,’ Leo said. ‘But you’re going to have to make it last, Tom.’

  ‘Oh, that’s fine, that’s fine, perfect, I don’t ask for anything,’ Tom Dick said, now humbly shedding his shoes and kicking them to one side of the hallway. He had learnt that this was a shoeless house and now did not need to be asked to remove them. As always, Leo could not help seeing Tom’s trainers, worn and dirty and, most of all, size thirteen, next to the neat, shining and tiny array of the shoes of three tiny Spinsters. ‘Just one beer and then I’m happy with water from the tap. What’s our movie tonight? Do we have a movie? I really fancy a movie and a pizza and maybe a beer, one beer. I can’t help thinking, I was thinking only tonight or this morning or maybe yesterday,’ Tom Dick said, coming into the living room and looking about him wildly, ‘I was thinking – Listen, this is important, I want to say this, but first I’d better just, well, as it were, go to the loo.’

  ‘You know where it is,’ Leo said. He set down the pizza boxes on the table; he went into the kitchen and fetched two plates and two sets of knives and forks; he extracted two beers from the fridge, opened them and poured them into two glasses. He sat down to wait.

  Presently Tom Dick returned. ‘That’s fine that’s better,’ he said, sitting down. ‘Oh a glass of beer. Well, just the one, perhaps.’

  ‘Tom, I’ve told you before,’ Leo said. ‘I can’t have you doing drugs in my house.’

  Tom reached out. He was on the verge of touching Leo’s knee with his great hand, in reassurance or sympathy; it hovered; it withdrew. ‘I wouldn’t do that to you,’ Tom Dick said, his eyes rolling.

  ‘You’ve just done it,’ Leo said. ‘I’m not an idiot. I have a child, you know. A child lives in this house, you understand?’

  ‘I was thinking,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I was thinking about – this was yesterday – I was thinking about the first time we met. Not the first time we met obviously, that was when we were maybe like twelve, or whatever, but the first time – do you know – the first time we met when I had made up my mind to do the right thing. Do you know what I’m referring to?’

  ‘Yes, Tom,’ Leo said resignedly. He had heard this before. Tom often brought it up: it was the moment he drew many morals from; he remembered it quite wrong.

  ‘It was just one day and everything had gone wrong. I was sitting in this place and around me there were people who I didn’t know and would never see again. I just saw them. They were naked, some of them, but it wasn’t until this moment that I really saw them, I saw them! I just understood that I shouldn’t be with people who I’d met twelve hours before in Soho, I should be with people who, you know, I knew, I’d been with for years. And then I just saw you in my mind and I thought about all the things I’d done to you, all the bad things I’d offloaded onto you, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I think I do,’ Leo said.

  ‘That’s it, you understand when I talk,’ Tom Dick said. ‘And I realized that I was afraid of stuff happening to me, you know, stuff happening, and so I created it, I made it happen, and I made it happen to other people, I made it happen to you. So I left that place, I went to St Pancras, I bought a ticket, I got on a train. I thought I would drive but then I thought I was high, I would kill myself, I would fall asleep on the M1. I knew exactly what I had to do. I got the train, I went to your house. Your parents’ house. I don’t know what I wanted to say. But then you were there and you were getting into a taxi and you were driving away and I was just standing there, I was too late. I thought I was too late. I just stood there trying to make up my mind. I waited until those others came back and I got them to give me your address in London. I followed you home! I must have done. And then at first you didn’t want to talk to me.’

>   ‘No, Tom, I didn’t,’ Leo said.

  ‘My life was so terrible, it was terrible,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I looked you in the face and I saw a man who was looking at me with death in his soul, who wanted to shut me out. Do you remember? You were there in the door of the place you lived, where it was … I don’t know where it was. I was living with my mum I think … It was that place you lived in before. Do you remember? And then I looked at you and you saw me. You sort of gave way, you saw what you had to do, and there it was, you forgiving me already. And you said, “Come in.” Do you remember? I’ll never stop thanking you for that. After that I was OK, I was really OK. After everything I’d done to you. At Oxford and everything.’

  ‘Yes, Tom,’ Leo said. ‘I remember. It’s fine. You don’t have to say thank you all the time. We’re friends now. What do you fancy? An old movie? Something foreign? A blockbuster? Something arty?’ Wordlessly, Leo reached out and took a wodge of tissues from the box on the table. He had placed it there before Tom Dick arrived. He passed them to Tom Dick, who wiped the tears from his eyes and from his sweaty face, and blew his nose. They watched Singin’ in the Rain. Half an hour before the end, Tom Dick excused himself and went to the lavatory, where he probably took some more drugs. His puzzlement at the complexity of the film, his invulnerability to anything that might be meant to make him laugh, was almost tangible. The film came to an end; Leo stood up and said goodnight; Tom Dick stumbled to the door and left.

  Leo returned to the sitting room. Before tidying up, he watched his favourite part of the film again. It was everybody’s favourite part of the film, the part where Gene Kelly danced in the rain. Earlier, Leo had not been fully concentrating on it. As it had started, Tom Dick had recognized and understood the famous music, and his brow had unfurrowed: he had given a sweet, boyish smile of recognition. It unfurled across his face. The smile on Tom Dick’s face: it was the smile of beatific joy, before he had ever felt the need to pretend in the face of the world. Then, Leo had enjoyed looking at Tom Dick’s absorbed, sweet smile; but now his concentration was on the film. He enjoyed it a lot. Sometimes things were really good and everybody agreed. You did not have to seek out things that were unheard of. Often the best things were like a bank-holiday Monday with your wife and your delighted child on the front at Bournemouth. That had been a very good day, a day of kindness to others. It was what men lived by. He remembered that he must organize Rubilynn’s birthday treat, now only three months away.