Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Harper. ‘It’s just plasterboard. You all right?’ His hand was on my shoulder, consoling and sincere, and I loved The Prince at that moment, and wondered if I should say so.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Just lost it for a moment.’

  ‘Too right you lost it,’ said Lloyd. ‘Good job you’re such a shitty shot.’

  ‘Lloyd …’

  ‘If you could actually throw I’d be fucking dead.’

  ‘LLOYD!’

  ‘I’ll pay for the wall,’ I said, ‘obviously.’

  ‘Forget about it.’

  ‘You can’t pay for a wall, you stupid prick.’

  ‘Lloyd, leave it.’

  ‘You lunatic, Lewis!’

  ‘I’m going to go home,’ said Fox.

  ‘Yeah, I should go home too,’ I said, as if none of this had anything to do with me, but when I got to my feet I found that I needed to sit, then lie down on the sofa, head back, and it was then I noticed that the den had started to twist and pitch, the walls elastic. Closing my eyes transported me to one of those machines they use to test G-force on astronauts and when I opened them to say goodbye to Fox, time had also taken on an abstract quality because Fox had vanished, and so I closed my eyes again. I could hear voices but the blood roared in my ears so loudly that I couldn’t make out words, and when I opened my eyes once more and tried to stand, the sofa cushions seemed like quicksand, sucking me down so that Harper had to pull me out.

  ‘God, Lewis, you’re really pissed.’

  ‘Going to go home.’

  ‘Yeah, you should.’

  I raised one hand to Lloyd. ‘Bye, mate.’

  But Lloyd did not look at me. ‘Yeah, bye.’

  The house was quiet, the lights dimmed as Harper led me back along the corridor.

  ‘Hey. Hey! Now it’s just us, I want to tell you—’

  ‘Shhhh!’

  ‘I meant to tell you, I met this girl …’

  ‘What? Not now, eh?’

  ‘Okay. I’ll phone you. Goodnight, Mr and Mrs Har—’ I shouted up into the darkness, then stumbled over a stepladder, dragging it some way down the hall, entangled with my foot.

  ‘Sh! They’re asleep!’ hissed Harper.

  ‘I want to say goodbye to your mum …’

  ‘Shhhh.’

  And then in another of those tricks of time, I had been teleported to the doorstep, Harper’s hand on my shoulder once again, propping me up.

  ‘Are you all right, Charlie?’

  ‘What? What? Yeah.’

  ‘You’re sure you can get home?’

  I told him I’d be fine, was just a bit pissed.

  ‘Bit what?’

  ‘Bit pissed.’

  ‘You said “lost”. “Bit lost”.’

  ‘What? No, bit pissed.’

  ‘All right. All right. Here’s your bag.’

  ‘Love you, mate,’ I said, mumbling the offending word so that he might hear it and not hear it at the same time, and then I was alone.

  My bike lay on the drive but someone had adjusted the seat so that I could no longer lift my leg high enough and I cursed and fell, and swore again, then found that if I stood astride the bike then hoisted it up to meet me, I could start to pedal. Home was ten minutes away and I longed for bed, for an antidote to the poison in my veins, or a transfusion, to be sucked dry, emptied out and refilled with something better, something pure. If I went home now, even if I managed to line up the key in the lock, I would not sleep, I’d close my eyes and find myself back on that centrifuge and what if Dad was awake or slumbering on the sofa, what if I had to speak? I dreaded the thought and swore to myself, never again, I would no longer live like this, I would start afresh tomorrow and I would be clean and honest and kind and new and better, better, better, like Alina said, I would find a way to move through this world, present and alive, find a way to be.

  But for the moment it seemed there was nothing I could do to stop the road ahead buckling and twisting like a rope bridge. Cycling with my eyes closed wasn’t as helpful as I thought it might be and instead I fixed my gaze on the yellow lines, using them like rails, but found that I no longer had faith in the laws of physics or believed that continuing to pedal would be enough to keep me upright and so, passing the recreation ground, I slowed until the bike pitched to the side and I allowed myself to fall and crawl from beneath it so that I could rest.

  The grass was cool on my back, the stars circling the sky and leaving trails of light like a leap into hyperspace, and I spread my arms and attempted to dig my fingers into the baked earth to prevent myself flying off into the void. Closing my eyes, I searched for something else to cling on to and found Fran Fisher, the way we’d said goodbye, the smile that seemed to play in the corner of her mouth when I tried and failed to speak, as if she really understood me. In a way that was not yet clear, she seemed to be the solution to a problem that was also unclear. But then nothing was clear to me. Best just to rest. I loosened my grip, rolled onto my side and lost consciousness.

  At some time in the night, I had the strange sensation that Dad was there, his coat pulled over his pyjamas, talking to me softly. That the car was behind him, door open, engine running, headlights illuminating the park. That he lifted me up like a fireman and staggered to the backseat and drove me home, with Chet Baker singing on the stereo. There was a snapshot, too, of me vomiting into the toilet, and another of me sitting in that tiny bath, knees up against my chest, warm water from the shower on my back. It all had the quality of a dream but I do know that when I woke the next morning, badly bruised and with the poison still running through my veins, I was somehow in my own bed, in clean sheets, wearing pyjamas I’d not worn since I was a kid.

  Dad

  For the first eleven years of my life my father raised me, though this makes the process sound a little too considered and wholesome.

  He was a musician in those days, a saxophonist, at least in theory. With Mum’s encouragement, and to my grandparents’ fury, he had dropped his accountancy course and instead he’d play for three or four nights a week in a number of groups, sometimes jazz, sometimes covers bands, leaving the days free to ‘work on his music’. The three of us lived in a rented flat above a butcher’s in a Portsmouth shopping arcade. Mum worked shifts at the general hospital and so my earliest memories are of endless, baggy hours, trying to get plastic soldiers to stand up on the carpet while Dad noodled along to records on his saxophone and a small electric piano that he sat behind like a child’s tiny school desk. It was a sort of elevated karaoke, my father lifting the needle on the run he couldn’t play or the chord he couldn’t find and so lifting it often, listening again, nodding along with the sax across his chest, then trying again. Babies exposed to Bach and Mozart are said to develop more quickly, with sharp analytical minds, but no one knows what five or six hours of bebop can do. It certainly didn’t make me prematurely cool or laid-back – quite the opposite – but there are still albums that are as familiar to me as nursery rhymes. Blue Train, The Sidewinder, Go!, Straight, No Chaser provided the soundtrack to the time we spent, content in each other’s company, in those three small rooms. My father was not the outdoor type. As a concession to parenting norms, we’d sometimes walk to the local recreation ground, as bleak and desolate as a military airfield. But the paddling pool was always empty, the slide was not slippery and scary boys monopolised the swings, and with my encouragement we’d soon head back to the flat, the soporific glow of the paraffin heater, the TV on but muted, Button Moon soundtracked by Cannonball Adderley, The Flumps by Dexter Gordon.

  And sometimes I’d just watch Dad play; a tall but not handsome, slightly stooped man, with a craning neck and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed elastically when he laughed or played, like a gannet swallowing a fish. Young only in theory, he seemed out of time, a product of the post-war years, of coffee bars and National Service rather than the sixties and seventies in which he’d grown up. Even in his twenties his face was crumpled lik
e something long-forgotten in a pocket, and his skin had an unnerving elastic quality – grab him by his cheeks and pull and his face would stretch alarmingly like a frilled lizard; the price, I imagined, of all that practice. But he had wonderful eyes, soft and brown, that would fix on us during his frequent bouts of sentimentality, and he was well liked and popular and kind – a talker to strangers, a helper of old ladies, and I loved him very much, and loved our life together in that flat.

  Just before Mum returned from her shift, he’d join me on the gritty carpet to perform a little display of diligence in front of the fort, asking questions in the self-consciously earnest voice of a social worker or hurrying through an ABC, losing interest long before ‘M’. My father liked to call himself an auto-didact, frequent use of the term ‘auto-didact’ being the hallmark of an auto-didact, though if he was self-taught, my mum would say, it was by a substitute teacher. Still, he retained a great belief in the educational value of natural curiosity, and so I learnt about electricity by poking the toaster with a fork, about the digestive system by eating Lego, about water displacement by running my own bath. He wasn’t the kind of father to build a kite but if he had then I’d have trotted off to play beneath the pylons. Occasionally there’d be bouts of plagiarised clowning: chopped-off thumbs, objects pulled from behind my ear, noses snapped off then reattached – I was easily satisfied – and then he’d drift back to his music. He was not neglectful but he was … relaxed, easily distracted.

  Later, at school, I would discover that most dads were terrifying drill sergeants, remote and frightening, storming in to inspect kit and quarters at the end of each day, their presence unnerving. As far as I can remember, my dad was always there and for the most part we got on with our own small projects side by side, fuelled by tea and juice, cheap biscuits and sweet desserts in chemical pink made with water from the kettle, and early childhood was scrappy and grubby and disorganised and also a kind of bliss.

  They married in 1984. I’m in their wedding photo, three years old, dressed in a comical corduroy three-piece suit, Dad in a skinny tie standing unnaturally straight. My mother, in ironic white, stands in profile to emphasise the immense bump that contains my sister, and waves her fist at Dad in jokey rage. At least we took it as a joke. My friends now are careful to set the stage before starting a family, establishing career, the mortgage, spare bedrooms. Still in their early twenties, my parents chose to improvise. I remember wild parties, the flat crammed with musicians and nurses, nitro meeting glycerine. I remember lighting strangers’ cigarettes.

  Billie – after Holiday – arrived and for a while there would be four of us, stepping on the toys, waking each other at all hours. A comfortable sort of chaos became fraught and fractious, so that it was almost a relief to start school. Almost; my father cried at the gates as if I were an evacuee. ‘What I’d like to do,’ he said, holding my head in his long fingers as if it were a prize, ‘what I’d like to do, if you don’t mind, is take your head right off and carry it around with me. Is that all right?’

  These were the memories my mother had called on when she’d claimed that Dad and I were close, that we’d be fine living together, and, in fairness, there were flashes of that bond on days like this particular Saturday. On a tray by my bed, there was warm tea, a cold can of Coke, aspirin displayed on a paper doily. The window had been opened and a panel of blue sky suggested a lovely day, but I was unable to face the challenge of a staircase until the afternoon. Dad was crouched by the stereo, head close to the speakers just as he used to do, his fingers tapping the air where his saxophone used to be, as Ornette Coleman played a jazz rendition of the violent disorder in my own head.

  ‘Could you turn it down a little please?’

  He twisted round, with an indulgent half-smile. ‘Have fun, did you?’

  ‘Yes, thanks Dad.’

  ‘I don’t know, Charlie, you stay up all night then come home, reeking of cinnamon …’

  The mystery of my return was not discussed and never would be, for which I was grateful. At some point I would need to phone Harper. Violence was fine as long as it looked like fun, but to lose control like that … I’d need to apologise. Through the haze, the image of the dent in the plasterboard returned and I could recall, too, the snap of pleasure I’d felt as the pool ball had left my hand. I’d have to phone Lloyd too, to reassure him, and myself, that I’d meant to miss. For the moment, I could only curl into the corner of the sofa and try not to move my head. Weren’t young people meant to be impervious to hangovers? Contact with the sofa cushions, even the air, bruised me. ‘It’s possible to drink in moderation, you know. You don’t have to do yourself harm.’

  ‘I know!’

  I would never drink again, or only in the urbane, sophisticated manner of people who drank wine, people like Fran; wine without a screw top, out of proper glasses. Another pang of guilt; I’d meant to spend the day reading Romeo and Juliet. I’d no hope of impressing her but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, and the idea of opening that script …

  Blissfully, brilliantly, the day had clouded over, which meant that it was possible for Dad to ask, ‘Want to watch films with me?’

  We were at our ease in front of movies. With my friends, it was rare to watch a film that was not set in space, the jungle, the future or some combination of these. But on days like this I craved what I thought of as Dad films, long, grand and familiar. We’d been watching the same rota since my childhood, British films with Julie Christie and Alec Guinness, John Mills and Richard Burton, spaghetti Westerns and film noir, Spartacus and The Vikings and The Third Man. We couldn’t afford to buy them but the library stocked a few and working through the shelves was one of Dad’s informal projects. ‘I’ve got Once Upon a Time in the West, Where Eagles Dare and The Godfather Part II.’

  That was nine hours at least, enough to get through the half-life of alcohol and take us into night-time with tea on our laps. He joined me on the sofa, the remote within easy reach.

  ‘We’re going in,’ he said and we sat in companionable silence, lulled by the familiar confrontations, the gunfire and explosions, as the alcohol sputtered out and dissipated, and this was a good day with my dad.

  Sampson

  On Monday, the fine weather broke and I lay in bed, listening to the clamour of a whole summer’s rain falling. The first rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet was at nine thirty, and at eight forty-five it was still roaring down, the light as dim as a December afternoon. Perhaps it was a sign. When I was sixteen, the sole purpose of weather was to send me personal messages and the rain pelting the window was a hand on my chest saying, nothing good can come of this. You’ll look like a fool. Forget her. Stay in bed.

  I’d spent the previous afternoon trying to understand the play, revising for a test, the test of Fran’s approval. In the rectangle of cement that counted as our garden, I sat as straight and scholarly as the deckchair allowed, took the script from my bag and began to read the Prologue.

  Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene …

  I’d resolved that I would take it slowly, understand each line before I moved on to the next, and to begin with, this was fine, easy, practically normal English, the words following one another like handholds until I felt my grip loosen.

  … where civil blood makes civil hands unclean …

  Because how could blood be ‘civil’ and what were civil hands anyway? Whose hands? Civil as in ‘civilian’, or as in ‘polite’ or as in ‘civil war’? There were two ‘civils’ in the line, and perhaps both ‘civils’ had all three meanings; perhaps that was the point, perhaps it was a ‘play on words’. I remembered Miss Rice, our old English teacher, telling us not to think of Shakespeare, of any poetry, as something that needs translating: ‘It’s not a foreign language, it’s this language, your language.’ But something would have to be done to make this comprehensible; not translation exactly, more like the solving of a riddle. Taking it one word at a time, I came up with: ‘t
he blood of civilians dirties hands that should be friendly in the course of this civil war.’

  There, that sounded right.

  But this was the fourth line of the play, and now I remembered the long, sleepy afternoon spent staring at Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, the instinctive pleasure at the sound of the word turning to frustration as every phrase demanded to be explained, paraphrased, referred to in footnotes, those maddening Yoda-like inversions repaired. ‘Don’t worry if your head hurts sometimes,’ she’d said. ‘That’s normal. It’s like when you exercise and your muscles ache.’ Perhaps I was trying too hard. Perhaps Shakespeare was like one of those ‘magic eye’ paintings that were popular at the time: find the right balance between focus and relaxation and the picture will emerge. ‘Oh, I get it!’ someone would shout from the front of the class, but I didn’t get it and sat, feeling increasingly stupid and frustrated. Did Fran Fisher struggle like this? Did any of those kids?

  … misadventured piteous overthrows

  Three random words that might as well have been ‘pig umbrella satellite’. I checked the number of pages – one hundred and twenty-four. A lifetime wasn’t long enough to unpick all of this stuff, and like generations of actors before me, I decided that I’d concentrate on my own part. Perhaps there’d be something there to make Fran smile.

  Sampson: Gregory on my word, we’ll not carry coals.

  Gregory: No, for then we should be colliers.

  Sampson: I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw.

  I slapped the script down onto cement. I mean an we be in choler we’ll draw; even in Elizabethan England, I imagined black-toothed serfs turning to each other and asking ‘What did he just say? Something about choler?’ I’d been told that there were jokes. Choler, collar, collier. These were the jokes. And why was there no ‘d’ on the ‘and’? Why?

  I closed my eyes and reminded myself that, after the read-through, I would not actually be playing this part. It would just be a means to an end. ‘Ay, ’tis but a means to an end,’ I said out loud, picked the play up from the patio and read on. There was some stuff I recognised as ‘bawdy’, about maidenheads and maids and the line ‘My naked weapon is out,’ which made me wince, because I knew that I’d have to point to my groin. ‘Tis well thou art not fish. If thou hadst, thou hadst been Poor John.’ I had to say this. In front of Fran, in front of Lucy Tran and Colin Smart and Helen Beavis.