by Mike Gayle
I zip up my jeans and am about to flush when I hear Clive’s unmistakable Glaswegian brogue and Alexi’s south-London-geezer tones. Clear as day Alexi says to Clive: ‘If I’m living in a dump like one-two-eight and think that working in a charity shop, flirting with girls half my age and trying to play the cool dude with a bunch of twentysomethings is a good idea for a grown man the night before I turn forty, promise you’ll kill me, yeah, because honestly mate, if I actually think that’s a life then I will need putting out of my misery.’
They erupt into raucous laughter and I’m not sure what to do but then I take a deep breath and step out just as they’re both zipping up their trousers. The look of horror on their faces says it all.
‘I thought you were at the bar,’ says Clive fearfully as Alexi looks on. ‘We were just shooting our mouths off. We didn’t mean anything by it.’
I don’t say a word. I leave the pub and take the money that I was going to spend on a round to the off-licence down the road and buy a small bottle of bourbon. After tearing off the wrapper with my teeth I take a sip and then another sip, then finish off the entire bottle and once I’m well and truly on my way to not knowing which way is up, I switch on my internal autopilot and head in the direction of Ginny’s house.
As my finger hovers over Ginny’s front doorbell, I have no idea why I’m here. I have no idea what to say to Ginny, how I’m going to respond if Gershwin answers the door or even what to do if they’re both out. All I know is that I have officially had enough. I haven’t just reached my breaking point, I have gone way beyond it and snapped in two. I’m not just in danger of losing it, I have lost it completely and have no idea how to get it back.
I ring the doorbell and my head starts spinning so much that I have to lean against the door. This is a really bad idea, I know it, and yet there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I stare at the bell. Why haven’t they answered yet? Did they not hear? Maybe I’m so drunk I didn’t ring it properly. I reach out to press the bell again then I see Ginny’s face at the window. Moments later she opens the door.
‘Matt, what are you doing here?’
‘Why haven’t you been in touch?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean why haven’t you been in touch? I was there for you! I was there for you when you needed me so why weren’t you there for me?’
‘Have you been drinking?’
I’m bewildered by the stupidity of her question. ‘Of course I’ve been drinking! Do you think I’ve turned up on your doorstep the night before my birthday by accident? My life has turned to arse, Ginny, pure arse. It’s falling apart around my ears, and you’re the only one who can save me.’
‘Matt,’ says Ginny desperately, ‘you can’t be here! Gershwin’s upstairs, he’ll be down any minute. Please go and I promise I’ll see you tomorrow and we can sort this whole thing out! But you can’t be here right now!’ She snatches a look over her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Matt, I’m really sorry.’ Then she slams the door shut in my face.
I don’t move a muscle, not quite able to believe that Ginny, my Ginny, the woman who I’d walk a mile over broken glass to see has slammed her front door in my face. It doesn’t compute. It refuses to penetrate my skull. And then the message reaches home: Ginny’s just slammed the door in my face; she’s turned away from me in my time of need. A response is called for: I determine to ring her doorbell until it falls off the wall. Focusing every last drop of energy I have into the index finger of my right hand I jab it right into the centre of that doorbell like an Olympic archer hitting a bull’s-eye and keep it there with a determination that would have made the little Dutch boy proud. I’m not moving it for anyone, not until I get someone to come and answer this door.
I have no idea how long it takes for the door to open again (time in my current state of mind has lost all meaning) but when I see Gershwin it’s as if I can no longer contain the rage that I have been desperately holding back since the day Lauren told me she no longer loved me. With my finger still fixed to the doorbell I yell at the top of my voice: ‘I shagged Ginny a week after I came home to Birmingham and the week before last we met up and I took her to a funeral!’
The confusion on Gershwin’s face as he looks from me to Ginny’s horrified expression would have been amusing had his fist not been drawing back at the same time. He launches it, fully primed, in the direction of my face with such speed that I watch in awe as it closes in on me. Reaching maximum velocity it completely fills my vision and then makes contact with my nose sending me spinning like a rag doll into the air.
For a moment, I feel nothing, and wonder whether I am dead, but then a small pinprick at the centre of my face gradually mushrooms into a nuclear explosion’s worth of pain. I am alive, as the taste of blood oozing from my nose down into my mouth attests, but only just. As I lie on the floor, I open my eyes and see my watch right next to me. It is a quarter to one in the morning and almost down to the exact minute forty years ago today in a hospital a few miles from here I came kicking and screaming into the world.
Ginny kneels down next to me; she’s crying and shouting at Gershwin to go and get some towels.
‘Are you all right? Is anything broken?’
‘I’m forty.’ My voice barely registers above a whisper.
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m forty,’ I tell her and then I pass out.
Days left until I turn forty: 0
49
It’s an odd feeling to open your eyes and not be in the place you hope you might be (lying in bed next to Rosa) or in the place you ought to be (my hideously uncomfortable bed in the hideous room in the hideous house that I share with the hideous housemates who despise me) but are somewhere you don’t recognise at all. I’m in fact in a double bed in a tastefully neutral bedroom. I turn my head slightly and my throbbing nose hurts so much I feel my head is about to fall off. Out of the corner of my eye I see my former best mate’s ex-wife sitting next to the bed watching me closely.
‘So you’re awake now are you?’ says Zoe.
‘Now I’m really confused. Why am I at your house?’
‘You’re not, you’re at Ginny’s.’
I look around the room. Yes, I am indeed in Ginny’s guest bedroom.
‘What are you doing here then?’
‘Gershwin woke me in the middle of the night worried that he’d killed you. He called me over to take a look even though I haven’t worked on an emergency unit in a decade.’
‘So am I OK?’
‘You might be mildly concussed. If I was you I’d go to hospital. It wasn’t like we didn’t try to take you last night but you made such a commotion I thought it would be better to keep you here.’
‘So, you’ve been watching me all night?’
Zoe laughs. ‘You know I love you, Matt, but not that much. I took it in turns with Ginny. In fact you’ve just missed her. I can go and get her if you like.’
I try to sit up and my head does the throbbing thing again.
‘I can’t believe this is what forty feels like.’
‘Gershwin got you good and proper,’ she says, handing me a couple of painkillers and a glass of water. ‘The way I hear it you’re lucky a bloody nose is all you got.’
‘Oh, so it’s all my fault is it?’ I lift my head to swallow the pills and drink all the water in an effort to speed them through my system more quickly.
‘Of course it’s not just your fault. It takes two to tango and with Gershwin in the mix this was always going to be a mess. But when it comes to you getting a slap on the night before your birthday of all nights, you know as well as I do that you only have yourself to blame. What were you thinking, telling him about you and Ginny? How did you think he’d react? He knows that you and Ginny have always had a bond and all you’ve done is confirm his worst fears.’
With an enormous effort I sit up and look her in the eye.
‘What’s happened?’
‘He’s gone. Sent Ginn
y a text this morning to say he slept in his car and that he’s going to stay with friends while he sorts his head out.’
‘Why doesn’t he just go back to his house?’
‘Because it’s rented out. Has been since they moved in together.’
‘So how was Ginny about him leaving like that?’
‘How do you expect? For all her faults she does really love Gershwin and I haven’t seen him nearly as happy as he has been with her since we split up.’
‘So you’re taking his side now?’
Zoe sighs. ‘What’s going on here? Do you think you’re still seventeen and can get away with all the larks you and Gershwin were always reminiscing about whenever you got together? No one needs to takes sides, Matt, like you’re having a spat in the sixth-form common room! Yes, it’s tough when a marriage fails, and no, it’s not exactly great when you wake up and decide that you hate your job but you’re a grown man and the sooner you start acting that way instead of like a hormonal overgrown schoolboy the better.’
Zoe may have a point but I’ve long since stopped listening to her as something twice as pressing and three times as scary dawns on me. I look at my watch.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m about to be late for my own birthday party.’ I grit my teeth through the pain and launch myself trouserless out of bed. ‘My mum is literally going to kill me.’
‘Where have you got to get to?’ Zoe makes a show of averting her eyes.
‘Worcester.’
‘When should you be there?’
‘Ten minutes ago.’
Zoe picks up her handbag and takes out her car keys. ‘Take these.’ She dangles them in the air. ‘It’s the silver Toyota parked out front. I know this is seventeen types of madness but, well, consider it a birthday present. If you damage it, you pay for it, job or no job, right?’
I take Zoe in my arms and give her a huge peck on the cheek and a good old-fashioned bear hug. ‘You’re a lifesaver, you know? Any time you need anything at all, you come to me and I’ll sort you out. I owe you big time.’
‘All I need right now is for you to put your trousers on!’
This isn’t an unreasonable request and so as she turns away I pull on my jeans and take a five-second glance in the mirror above the chest of drawers. My face is bruised and battered and my shirt splattered with blood, and though there isn’t a great deal I can do about the former a quick rummage through the chest of drawers where I find a black T-shirt belonging to Gershwin sorts out the latter. I tell myself that I’ll have plenty of time to clean up my face on the journey to Worcester but in the meantime I need to get going and I’m halfway out of the door when Zoe stops me in my tracks.
‘What about Ginny?’
‘What about her?’
‘What do you want me to tell her when she wakes up?’
It’s a good question, given that last night I turned up on her doorstep wrecked out of my head and detonated six tons of plastic explosive underneath her relationship.
‘Tell her I’m sorry.’
‘And that’s it?’ asks Zoe.
‘I’ve got to go.’ I feel her disappointment radiating in my direction.
‘I’ll talk to you later.’
Picking up the huge bunch of flowers that I’d bought on the way over from Birmingham, I climb out of the car and go over in my head the likely progress of the day: Mum will be in a mood until we’ve eaten; Dad will be in a mood because Mum being in a mood always makes his day worse; my sister will start telling me how worried Mum has been all morning and then have to stop mid-sentence to attend to the kids; my brother-in-law, sensing tension, won’t say much; and my nephews will pile on top of me the moment I cross the threshold and beg me to play anything with them so long as it’s dangerous.
The first sign that things might not go as anticipated comes as the door opens to reveal my brother Ed, who I had no idea was coming up from Reading; the second is when a small child appears whom I recognise as my brother Tony’s eldest and the final sign comes when Ed makes way for my mum and she has the biggest grin on her face. She holds out her arms and calls: ‘Where’s that baby of mine?’ I look around, thinking that one of Yvonne’s kids must have escaped, only to realise as she puts her arms round me that she’s actually talking about me.
‘What happened to your face?’
‘I got into a fight with Gershwin. It’s a long and miserable story that can probably wait for another time if that’s OK? I just want to enjoy today, Mum, with you and Dad and whoever else you’ve got stashed away in there. What’s going on?’
‘What do you think’s going on, bro?’ says Ed, shaking my hand. ‘It’s a gathering of the clan just for you, you big idiot.’ He steps back to reveal Yvonne and all her family, Tony and all his, and Ed’s wife Sheena with their two kids. As they gather round the weirdest thing happens: I feel myself on the verge of tears. I want to ask forgiveness for the state I’m in. But there’s no need: this is family.
‘I don’t know what to say. This . . . well, this really . . . means . . . you know what I’m saying.’
‘No worries, bro,’ says Tony. ‘We’d heard you’d been through the mill a bit and so we thought we’d all make the effort to be here. That said, if we’d known it would’ve reduced you to tears like a big girl we would have done it a lot sooner!’
I try to twist Tony’s hand behind his back but then Ed jumps on me and in a few moments we’re roughhousing like the old days and laughing like idiots because we’re out of shape and scared of doing any permanent damage to ourselves in the pursuit of fun.
‘Will you boys ever grow up?’ yells Mum.
‘No,’ says Tony, trying to get me in a headlock. ‘I can pretty much guarantee that’s never going to happen.’
At Dad’s request we break up the play fighting and head straight to my parents’ little dining room that looks out across open fields. After a lifetime in the urban sprawl they really have fallen on their feet finding a place like this and I’m happy for them. They deserve it.
Three generations of Beckfords sitting round the table united in the effort to make a dent in the feast that Mum has spent days preparing is a magnificent sight to see. We eat, drink and are indeed merry and as birthdays go it’s looking like this one might not be anywhere near as awful as I’d imagined.
50
The dying embers of the sun are filling the sky with a last blast of colour as Mum, Dad and I stand in front of the bungalow and wave off Ed, the last of the family to leave.
‘That’s the most fun I’ve had in years,’ says Dad. ‘What do you think to doing it again at Christmas?’
‘Count me in.’ I look over at Mum and see that she’s a bit tearful. ‘It’s always tough saying goodbye,’ I put my arm round her, ‘but they’ll be back soon.’
‘I just miss you all,’ says Mum. ‘I know you’ve got to live your lives but what I wouldn’t give to see you all every day.’
Dad and I exchange wary glances. While we both understand the sentiment, I don’t think either of us would be all that keen on being surrounded by family twenty-four seven.
‘It’s getting a bit chilly,’ says Dad, changing the subject. ‘Who fancies a brew?’
We head back inside and as Dad makes the tea I allow Mum to give me the guided tour of the bungalow she’s been threatening me with all afternoon. It’s nice that they’ve put their mark on what was essentially a collection of magnolia boxes and I can tell from the way they move around the rooms that to them this is already home.
‘So what are your plans now your birthday’s behind you?’ asks Mum as we stand in the kitchen sipping tea. ‘Carry on as you are until you get some good news about the house?’
‘I haven’t got a clue.’ I look out of the window at a blue tit pecking at the bird feeder. ‘Carrying on like I have been doesn’t exactly make me feel great but then again the idea of going back to the IT world . . . well, you know how I feel about my old job.’
‘But you’
ve got to do something, haven’t you?’
‘Which is why I might just have to suck it up and go back to contracting in London. The bills aren’t going to pay themselves.’
‘You know there’s always a place for you here,’ says Mum. ‘I know we don’t always see eye to eye but this is, and will always be, your home, and don’t you dare forget that.’
I thank Mum and go and search out my dad, finding him sitting on the sofa in front of the TV.
‘I’ve just come to say goodbye, Pop.’
He stands up. ‘You don’t have to go, you know. Why don’t you stay the night?’
‘I’d love to but without going into a lot of stuff that you won’t want to hear I made a pretty big mess last night and I need to clear it up.’
‘It wouldn’t be related to those bruises on your face?’
‘Just a bit. I’ve got a lot of apologising to do but it’s nothing I can’t handle. Or at least I hope so.’
My dad holds out his hand and I shake it firmly. ‘It’s been good having you around, son. Don’t be a stranger will you?’
Gathering together my birthday presents (a jumper from my parents; a digital camera from Yvonne; a remote-controlled Dalek from Ed; and a George Foreman grill from Tony) and what little remains of my birthday cake, I say one last goodbye to my folks and head out to the car.
The image of my parents waving from their porch reminds me of something Ginny said after I told her about my parents’ plans: ‘Maybe they want to make some new memories.’ She was right; that’s exactly what they’d done here today. And not just new memories for me or my siblings but for my nieces and nephews and for themselves. They’d got it right, my parents, now all I need to do is follow suit and we’ll all be happy.