This Is the Life

by Alex Shearer

  “I just couldn’t. I mean, if he’d dressed a little smarter maybe, or had had a shave more often. But you can’t expect to live without hot water for ten years and still—”

  “No, of course.”

  “—maintain normal standards,” Terri said.

  “So how did Louis take that?” I asked. “He was okay, I guess. Because you obviously remained friends.”

  “Oh yes,” Terri said. “I really liked Louis. And so did Frank—until he got the drinking problem.”

  I looked at my watch.

  “I’d better go,” I said. “It’s late and I’m not so sure of the route in the dark.”

  Terri gave me detailed directions for a shortcut, but they were so complicated I couldn’t follow them, and I went back the way I had come. I was driving Louis’s ute, which was a noisy rattletrap with a falling-down window and a heater/cooler fan permanently stuck on high. It also had a quarter of a million miles on the odometer. And that was Louis too, always buying old and high-maintenance. Even when he could afford better.

  I said good-bye to Terri and thanked her for everything and we said we’d keep in touch, though I doubted that we would and I believe she doubted that too.

  The last I saw of her was in the rearview mirror, her and her little dog watching me drive away.

  I hadn’t said a word to her about Louis’s version of events; I’d felt it would have been impolite to mention this contradictory story. But I did wonder which version was true. And I also wondered why she had even mentioned the incident. Did she know that I knew something and she wanted to put me right? Or had she really slept with Louis, but was embarrassed about it, because of his paint-splattered clothes and his torn shorts and his creased T-shirt and his untrimmed beard and his not having been under a hot shower in ten years?

  And if her version was the true version, then why had Louis told me a different one? Had it been a tale of wish fulfillment? But he hadn’t needed to tell me a single thing about it. If she’d turned him down, he could have kept quiet about that. Only the two of them need ever have known.

  So where does the truth lie, and does it really matter?

  But I liked Terri. She seemed like a good person to me. Good and kind and generous—someone who’d had a hard life but had come through without cynicism and with her values intact. And she said some nice things at the funeral service, and she didn’t have to.

  So what the hell. What are you supposed to do, anyway, with all the fathomless stories that you’ll never get to the bottom of, and all the contradictions? People’s lives seem like entangled balls of string, with a thousand knots in them. You’ll never unpick them all. The best you can do is just carry on and forget about it. You could drive yourself nuts if you brooded over it. And what good would that do anyone? Least of all yourself.

  5

  Babies

  Back in my juvenile delinquent days I had been apprehended for tearing the leaves off a rhododendron bush, but had given a false name and address, so the cops had come looking for me and stopped the school bus on the way home into town. I guess I must have been the only person on board who looked guilty, so they said it was me, which it was, but I denied it, and they escorted me off the bus to the police station across the road.

  I used to try to sit on the long backseat of the bus with the troublemakers and no-hopers and those who had aspirations to play the electric guitar but who would probably end up working behind a counter.

  Seeing me being taken away, Louis—who was a respectable pillar of society back then, with a prefect’s badge and high status as deputy head boy—got off the bus too and accompanied me to the station.

  When news reached the school the next day, they said they would expel me for what I had done to the bush, as it was plain I was a bad lot and a corrupting influence and heading for the crapper.

  Louis went to the headmaster’s door and knocked on it and requested an interview, during the course of which he relayed the fact that if I got kicked out, he would leave too, and they didn’t want to lose him, so we both stayed.

  I should have been grateful, I suppose, but I wasn’t particularly, as I hated the place and left anyway after a couple of months. But I appreciated his loyalty, since we hadn’t been getting along back then and fought constantly. Once he tried to break a beer glass over my head and told me I treated home like a hotel. I told him it was a pretty poor hotel and not what I was used to—which was a lie, as I’d known nothing else. After that I tried to hit him over his head with a cricket bat, but he was too quick for me. But apart from small skirmishes like that, we got on fairly well.

  At one time, though, Louis had a religious period and our mother started panicking when he let it be known that he felt he maybe had a vocation and would one day become a priest. Our mother went straight to church and prayed that such a thing would never happen, and God, being bountiful, let that particular cup of woe pass to someone else.

  All the same, Louis took possession of the high moral ground and defended it staunchly for several months. When he came across the James Bond paperback I was reading, he tore it up and tossed it in the trash and said reading it was ­a sin.

  I had to tell him that it wasn’t even my book, I’d been loaned it, and it was none of his damned business what I read as I would read whatever I liked and he could go and screw himself and he’d better get me another copy soon because I was due to return the book to the boy I’d borrowed it from.

  Give him his due, he bought a replacement, but he said I wasn’t to look inside it, I was to hand it back and no peeking.

  When he was out of the way I finished the novel. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, unless it was the heavy smoking.

  But that was Louis for you back in those days, always ready with the judgments and the moral tone; but then he mellowed a little in later life and said the school was a nest of hypocrites after it came to light that half of the reverend fathers were now standing accused in their retirement of fiddling with little boys.

  All the same we had a big row once that set the tone for the remainder of our relationship when Louis told me that as soon as he got the chance he was going to move abroad and head for another country so as to get away from me. And that was just what he did—though whether I was the prime mover in this or just another incidental annoyance he wanted to get away from I’m unsure. I suspect the latter and bear no hard feelings, because if he was pleased to go, I was also relieved he was gone, as it meant I could read my books in peace without the censor looking over my shoulder.

  The first place Louis went was Canada. He got his chemistry degree and then went to Alberta to study for a master of science and teach undergraduates. He met a girl there called Chancelle who had a brain the size of his or maybe even bigger, and they both studied chemistry and had a lot of sex, according to Louis, and no doubt some intellectual conversations afterward. They soon moved in together.

  Chancelle was French Canadian and her family supported a free and separate Quebec. They wouldn’t speak English to you and made out that they didn’t know any, though they did and spoke it like natives when people weren’t looking. Louis had to learn some French or they’d have left him out of all the conversations. He got quite fluent as far as I know, though he spoke it with a Canadian accent.

  But things went to pot after a few years. Louis got his degree and went to work for a mining company out in the sticks. Chancelle got more deeply involved in French Canadian politics, and she and Louis only saw each other at weekends. She began an affair with another French Canadian who was also active on the political front (and, no doubt, the sexual one) and spoke better French than Louis did.

  Louis got disillusioned and disgusted and came back home. Like most academically inclined people who don’t know what to do with themselves, he decided to return to university. So he studied for an engineering diploma this time, and when he got it, he moved up nort
h and worked in a straight and proper job for a while, but he got disillusioned and disgusted, as they didn’t know how to run a business and there was too much politics and the senior management were wankers.

  So he took his savings and bought a narrow boat and sailed it down the canal to Bristol. He moored up in the harbor half a mile from the flat I lived in with a woman I had fallen in love with, on account of—amongst other things—her Scottish accent. The trouble was, she was an artist, and her friends were artists, and Louis lived on a boat now, and he got into crafts and furniture-making and rented a small workshop by the docks. So everyone was a bohemian apart from me, and I had to get up on Monday mornings and go to work, as I was the one paying the rent.

  This narrow boat was the first of Louis’s wrecks. It needed so much work done to it, it would have been easier to start from scratch and build a new one. It had once been a fireboat on the Birmingham Canal. Its engine was situated in the middle of the boat, instead of at one end, which is more usual, and it had two driveshafts, so that the boat could go in either direction without the need to turn it around—which can be difficult in a narrow canal when you’re in a hurry to put out a fire.

  There was no comfort in that boat at all, just a couple of hard bunks and a stove to cook beans on.

  “It’s a doer-upper,” Louis told me. “What do you think?”

  “I think,” I told him, “that the trouble with you and your doer-uppers, Louis, is that you never do do them up. You never get around to it, do you? You lose interest and start on something else, and you don’t finish that either. Because you lose interest again and—”

  “I’m thinking of doing it out in mahogany,” Louis said. “I’ll put some partition walls up and get it divided into rooms. Bathroom here, galley there, living quarters here, guest bedroom there.”

  “Where are you putting the game room, spa, and indoor swimming area, Louis?” I asked. But he ignored me as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “It’s going to be something special once it’s done.”

  “It’ll be something special if it ever does get done. This is the story of your life to date, Louis,” I said. “Things taken on and not seen through. Great projects started and never completed. Remember that astronomical telescope you were going to make when we were kids?”

  “I made a start on it but was trammeled by lack of proper equipment,” he said.

  “Louis,” I reminded him, “you were going to grind your own lenses. And the pieces of glass were a yard across and six inches thick.”

  “If I was doing it today, I’d do it differently,” Louis said.

  “Okay, Louis. If you really want my opinion—and I know you don’t—the first thing I’d do to this boat if I were you—apart from sell it—is to put a proper heating system in. Get a wood-burning stove or something. That little burner is not going to warm this boat. Not once winter comes. It’s going to be so cold in here come January that brass will crack.”

  “We don’t need any stoves,” Louis told me. “We’re tough.”

  “You may be tough,” I said. “But when winter comes I’m going to buy myself a portable gas heater for the flat.”

  I seem to recollect that Louis spent a lot of time that winter at our apartment, sleeping on the sofa. He and my girlfriend, Iona, got on okay. But then they were both bohemians and weren’t paying any rent.

  The fact was that when it came to being tough, I only really helped the tough guys out when they were busy. My parents had wanted a girl as their second child, only they hadn’t got one, they had got me. According to my mother, I was born so scrawny I wasn’t expected to live, but live I did. Even now there are people who bear grudges about that. But I can’t do anything about it.

  Spring came and the air got warmer and Louis went back to his boat. Sometimes the harbormaster would move the boat on a whim and Louis would go home after a night in the pub to find his boat gone from its moorings, and he would have to tramp around the harbor looking for it, which could take him an hour or more. He fell in the water a few times, but it was only to be expected and was probably ­character-building, and it never seemed to do him any harm, apart from the difficulty he had in drying his clothes.

  Looking back now, I see that was the start of his sartorial problems and when he first began aiming for the vagrant look, which he seemed to so effortlessly accomplish. He ripped his trousers once and walked around for a week with the leg flapping until Iona sewed it up for him, even though she was a strong feminist and it was old-style women’s work.

  “You should be able to sew up your own trousers, Louis,” she told him.

  “I’m working on it,” he said.

  “I thought you were working on your boat,” I told him.

  “I’m working on them both.”

  He was actually working on neither. He had a new interest, making occasional tables.

  “Does that mean the tables are for particular occasions, Louis? Or does it mean you just make them occasionally?”

  He just looked at me as if I weren’t there and didn’t answer.

  I still have one of his occasional tables, sitting right there in the dining room. Tile-inlaid surface and pine legs. It’s warped and buckled a little with the passing of the years, but it’s lasted the course. It’s outlived its maker, in any event. It wasn’t that Louis couldn’t do things; it was that he couldn’t make money out of them. Nor was he a natural craftsman; he was more one by ambition and willpower. He lost his temper with inanimate objects quite a lot. I could be wrong, but I believe that natural craftsmen don’t do that—they know how to bend the inanimate to their will, and how to persuade it into shape with cajoling and subtlety and cunning. And that’s the craft of it.

  Louis’s savings slowly dwindled and he couldn’t be a bohemian anymore. He went and got a manual job assembling generators. It was just a stopgap thing, like so many of those jobs were. He stopgapped for almost the rest of his life. And maybe I’m wrong about his stopping being a bohemian. Maybe he was just a bohemian in a nine-to-five job; the bohemianism was in his soul.

  He never did do the boat up, nor did he ever install a stove. He ended up hauling the boat out of the water and chopping it up for firewood.

  But before that, we had a crisis.

  The phone rang in the flat and it was a woman with a French-sounding accent.

  “Hello,” she said. “I was given this number and I want to speak to Louis.”

  “Who’s calling?” I said.

  “Chancelle,” she said. “I’m at the airport and have flown over to get back together with Louis and I want to have his babies.”

  “Who gave you my number?”

  “Your mother.”

  “I see. Well, Louis doesn’t live here, Chancelle—” She stifled a sob. “That is, he lives near, but this is my place.”

  “But I have come all this way—”

  “Wouldn’t it have been better to take soundings first?”

  “What is this—take soundings?”

  “Chancelle, have you communicated with Louis about this? You haven’t seen each other in, what, three, four years? Have you written to him? Is he expecting you?”

  “I love Louis so much and want to have his babies.”

  “Well, you’ll need to speak to Louis about that. I don’t know where he stands on babies. That’s something you’ll need to discuss.”

  “I am coming to see him.”

  “Chancelle—”

  “I am getting on the bus.”

  “Chancelle, you don’t even know—”

  “Your mother gave me your address. I’ll be there tonight. Tell Louis I love him.”

  The phone went dead.

  “Who was that?” Iona said.

  “Chancelle,” I explained. “Louis’s ex from Canada. She’s landed at Heathrow.”

  “What does she want?”
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  “She wants to have his babies.”

  Iona gave me a strange and narrow-eyed look. I didn’t know then that she wanted to have my babies. But I didn’t want any babies at that time in my life. Eventually despairing of never having any babies, Iona went off to have them with somebody else.

  “Well, is he expecting her?”

  “I don’t think he’s heard from her in years.”

  I found Louis down at the docks, chewing the fat with his neighbors. Wherever you go in the world you will find men with boats chewing the fat. They rarely venture anywhere. Their boats are usually out of the water and need something done to them. There’s some rubbing down going on, or some filling in, or they’re painting the hull in defouling liquid. The maintenance is long and the voyages are few. But that’s not the point. The point is the old boats and the tea and the bacon sandwiches and a place to go come the bank holidays and the empty vacation times and the long, hot, eternal summer days, when you can take your shirt off and let your belly hang out and show the passersby your tattoos.

  “Louis,” I said, “I just got a phone call. It’s Chancelle, and she’s landed at Heathrow and she’s coming down here to have your babies.”

  Louis looked panic-stricken.

  “She’s coming here?”

  “Right now. Even as we speak she’s on the bus and throwing her birth-control devices out of the window.”

  “Jesus,” Louis said.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I’m going to have to go,” Louis said. And he went aboard his boat and started packing a bag. He had bought an old rusty car by now. He got it cheap since it had three hundred thousand miles on it.

  “Louis,” I said, following him, “you can’t just disappear and leave me to deal with her. What am I going to say? She wants to have your babies.”

  “Well, I don’t want to have her babies.”

  “You what?”

  He threw a gray towel into a bag.

  “That is, I don’t want her to have mine. I haven’t heard from her in years. She’s crazy.”