by Edward Docx
She let me live with myself all the way back to the barge before she put me out of my misery.
‘Shall we have our sandwiches now?’ she asked.
‘How did you know that I’d brought sandwiches?’
‘I looked in your picnic bag when you went to get the bottles of water,’ she smiled, apologetically and not sorry at all.
‘OK. Definitely. Let’s get stuck in. And I’ll open my bottle too. Although I am a bit worried that it might not be cool enough …’
Unnervingly, she put her finger and thumb lightly to my jaw and turned my head to look at her. ‘Hey, I’m not Australian by the way. That was a joke. You don’t have to feel bad.’
‘A joke?’
‘Yes.’ Now she was really laughing.
I must have looked startled or something. But it was her touch, more than her amusement or what she had said, that had caught me off guard.
Her eyes softened. ‘You really mustn’t take everything so seriously.’
I had absolutely no idea what to say so I opened the wine with unnecessary professionalism and poured it into the two glasses, which I had taken care to have rinsed in the pub.
Soon enough we were chugging homeward. Little Sydney dropping away astern, the welcoming old world salve of Little Venice ahead. The evening was falling, soft and balmy over the city, and we sat in contented silence, enjoying our sandwiches. I was left alone for a few minutes to recover my equilibrium and gather my thoughts. At some point, Madeleine lit a meditative cigarette and shifted in her seat so that – very slightly – she could lean against me.
Meanwhile, in my head – which I freely own is not the most reasonable of places – the problem to which I was still seeking an elegant solution persisted. Somehow or other – and soon – I had to know. And yet … if a woman refuses to volunteer the information, the boyfriend question is virtually impossible to ask without being crass. The signals? There were no signals. Or maybe there were too many. She was flirting. But all women flirt. Especially the unavailable ones. Intellectually, I admit I was lost. I was zugzwanged. But we were passing the aviary and I made the decision to find out one way or another before the Maida Hill tunnel.
‘I’ll have one of those cigarettes now – if that’s OK,’ I said.
‘Sure.’ She sat up slightly. ‘I feel very lazy. I had no idea that London could be so … pleasant.’
‘Regent’s Park is underrated,’ I said, taking both cigarette and the offered lighter as she settled back down. ‘Although I can’t understand who would want to go and visit the zoo any more – I was under the impression that zoos were pretty much calling it a day. And you would have thought that keeping birds in giant nets wasn’t exactly all the rage anymore. But it seems there are still a few thousand diehards who need their fix of lethargic penguin and mangy giraffe. Are these really from Tajikistan?’
‘No, they’re from Damascus.’
‘Oh.’ I inhaled. ‘Well, they’re fucking strong.’
‘Not really – these are actually made with special, selected tobacco.’ She held her cigarette at arm’s length and examined it. ‘The best quality you can get in Syria. And not available in the shops either. I have a Turkish friend, an interpreter, who gets them for me when I am out there – Mario. Although that’s not really his name. Or at least, it’s not what the Syrian women call him.’
The alcohol was working its impish magic. Gently, I sat up to reach down for the rest of the wine. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Let’s finish it.’ She released her almost empty flute from where she had trapped it between her legs, dropped her feet down from the side of the boat and sat up again.
Our heads were almost touching. ‘And what do most people call you?’ I asked, carefully draining the last of the bottle into first one glass then the other.
She looked up at me sharply, a surprising tautness in her face, her eyes making themselves directly intimate with mine.
I drowned the urge to kiss her. ‘I mean, does everyone call you Madeleine or Maddy or Mad or something else?’
‘Oh … I get you.’ She paused. ‘Most people call me Maddy, I suppose. But I like my full name too. What do most people call you?’
‘At school I was called Jacques.’ I explained: ‘I went to school abroad and my surname is Jackson. But these days it’s pretty much Jasper – even with girlfriends.’
‘Have you got a girlfriend at the moment?’
I put down the empty bottle. ‘No. Not at the moment. I was going out with somebody but we … she sort of left me. That was a few months ago. And you?’
‘Oh,’ she frowned. ‘My boyfriends call me John or Frank or sometimes Bradley.’
I laughed. ‘Which is it at the moment?’
‘I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment.’
A young guy cycling down the towpath ahead of his family pulled up his front wheel and held the stunt all the way into the darkness of the tunnel.
12. The Dream (‘Image of her …’)
So, if I dream I have you, I have you,
For, all our joys are but fantastical.
A fanfare of heavenly trumpets. Oh yes, sometimes things just fall into a man’s lap, and all he can do is wish he believed in a God unto whom he might give thanks. The coast, it seemed, was unguarded. The boats must not only now be beached, they must also be burnt.
Taking a serious girl out to dinner for the first time is not easy. Men throughout the world will throng the witness stand to attest to the manifold horrors and catastrophes their efforts have unintentionally occasioned. And no doubt there are millions of women who could outdo these testimonies with gruesome tales of agonies suffered and atrocities endured.
As far as one can tell, there are some four or five basic approaches adopted by our mutual friend, the regular guy. Although these depend upon the health of his wallet and the impression that he wants to make, they can nonetheless be outlined according to the type of regular guy he believes himself to be.
The first is what I call the Clapham method: our hero (an arts graduate in his late twenties, who likes to keep in the Zeitgeist) flicks through his Time Out for some newly hailed East End gastro-pub before making the call from his office during a handy gap between status meetings. On the appointed day at the appointed hour, he turns up to await his willing counterpart, who duly arrives ten minutes late, whereupon, after some initial awkwardness, they get stuck into amicable conversation and seared tuna loins (never reflecting for a moment whether or not the great fish can – strictly speaking – be said to have any such body part). The second approach is that adopted by the Money Boys – the groomed-up, buttoned-down, switched-on jerkers-off, who have been stupid enough to make themselves a lot of money (the City, drugs, information technology, consultancy et cetera). The Money prefers to sweep the night off its feet with a round of badly made cocktails and a hot-shit visit to a fiendishly over-priced, chrome-décor arse-pit of a hotel restaurant bar, where, after much consideration, they wash down their medium rare steak et frites with lashings of Château Baron Rothschild (because it’s a wine that somehow sounds like wealth). The third method is that of the poor, honest, open-palmed actor or television researcher or struggling section-2-journalist-would-be-film-noir-director. In this case our man may even get a bus to the rendezvous in order to feed a misplaced sense of metropolitan guile that he derives from knowing the timetable and routes. He and his date chow down over a rustic faux-Lebanese, after which they splash out, she giggling, he wriggling, on homemade ice-cream (which isn’t homemade) before agreeing to catch the latest Danish reality-flick the next Sunday afternoon. Last, and by all means least, we have the hateful West London trustafarian crowd – the sallow-faced and unwanted progeny of the last generation’s arrivistes. Sensationally unintelligent, dressed down to the nines, and with their boredom worn like a badge of courage, these would-be men drag their tarted-down little vixens out to Ladbroke Grove for apathetically ordered whatever-the-fuck with the veneer of ethnic authenticity on
the street outside and similarly pointless friends within easy beckoning distance and the unspoken promise of a line of bad cocaine in a toilet somewhere if things go well.
All. of which leaves us – you and me both – crying quietly into our hands with shame and despair. But by such roads does the regular guy – in his many guises – like to travel. The world is full of fuckers and there’s nothing we can do. Idealism, as you will have noticed, has died a short but tragic death. Don Quixote rode in vain and Karl Marx is long forgotten, muttering the truth into his beard like a mad tramp lying on a broken box on the pavement outside King’s Cross station. We live in the age of the Lowest Common Denominator. And boy oh boy is it low.
I do it like this.
At eleven-thirty, I put down my quill and I call Carla at Danilo’s.
‘Hello, Carla,’ I say. ‘It’s me, Jasper. Did you have a nice holiday?’
‘Yes. Very nice, thank you. I see my sister’s children and we go to see Roma play for the first time – I think we shall win this year. It’s amazing in the big stadium. And the sun is always out. I hate to come back to London now. I say to Danny, we must open a new restaurant back there and finish here. But he says that everybody in Italy knows how to cook so what would be our difference?’ She sighs. ‘And the money is much less. Anyway, how have you been?’
‘Good.’
‘I haven’t been here to see about the girl but –’ a smile tinkles through her voice ‘but Roberto tells me you don’t need me to say if she was here any more. You have been with her having coffee – everybody knows. Are you coming here for lunch together today?’
‘No, not today,’ I tell her. ‘But I was wondering whether you could call Bruno for me? I need a special favour for next Tuesday?’
‘Yes, sure. For your friends … or for two people?’
‘For two.’
The sound of another smile. ‘OK. No problem. Do I see you tomorrow?’
‘Yes, you do. Thanks, Carla.’
Carla then calls Bruno. (And let us note in passing how Carla’s instinctive Italian grasp of life’s subtleties leads her naturally to separate the category ‘friends’ from ‘girlfriends’, be they potential or otherwise.) I go back to work and complete another couple of lines.
At four-thirty, I break and call La Casetta – by some distance the best Italian restaurant in London. The telephone is answered by Bruno.
‘Hello, Bruno, it’s Jasper here, how are you doing?’
‘Very well.’
‘And business?’
‘Is very good now again. But the bastards upstairs are still complaining about the noise so I have to still have my problem with them. Oh, why me I say …’
The conversation continues in this direction for about three minutes while Bruno reprises the difficulties he has been having with his neighbours and their noise complaints until, at the right moment, I move us on.
‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I need a special favour next Tuesday.’
‘Oh yes, Carla said you were coming to see us.’
‘Is it OK to have the table?’
‘Sure it is OK. Sure. I will change things around if there is a problem. Don’t worry.’
‘And Bruno, you will take care of the fat men?’
‘And Jasper, I will take care of the fat men.’
Why all this? Because I am not family to Bruno and Carla – they are cousins and Bruno will never ever say ‘no’ to Carla however busy he might be. And because it indicates to Bruno how seriously I am taking the evening and thus ensures that he will guarantee me not only my favourite table but also – crucially – who sits at the other tables near me. Which is to say: no fat men.
Making sure that you have a certain table at the best Italian restaurant in London is only half the job. In order to be certain of everybody’s comfort – mine, the other men dining and most of all Madeleine’s – the best thing is to segregate: business women, elderly friends, lesbians and so on near me; staring, lechery-prone fat men far away. And make no mistake, the fatter they are, the more they stare.
How come I get such special treatment at La Casetta? The menus … the menus, of course. All forty-four of them, hand written in exquisite Littera Gothica Textualis Rotunda Italiana – much to the delectation of both Augusto, the generous proprietor, and that great uninformed tribe of the palate-dead, otherwise known as restaurant reviewers. An enjoyable job, sent my way through Carla and completed entirely gratis along with a promise of twice-yearly revisions in return for free dining every so often. Not such a dumb game this calligraphy business, after all.
Next, at quarter to five I call the Roys. Roy Junior answers.
‘All right, Roy?’
‘Total.’
‘Listen, how much for Tuesday eleven-thirty until one?’
A sharp intake of breath, then: ‘We-e-ell … I’m supposed to be in Keele Tuesday. Got things going on. You know what I’m saying?’
‘Again? On a Tuesday?’
‘Busy man.’
‘Couldn’t you drive up afterwards. I mean – I reckon I’ll probably be back before midnight.’
‘Not really. Jazz mate. They need me – you know – to sort things early.’
‘Shit. I really needed you. It’s very serious.’
‘Forty. That’s my final offer. Jazz mate.’
‘Can’t do it for twenty?’
‘Split?’
‘Done. Thirty it is.’
There is a pause while he reconsiders what he has let himself in for, then he says: ‘But twenty more for every extra hour after one – yeah?’
‘Right. It won’t be that late.’
‘Sorted.’
I am about to hang up but then I add, ‘Roy?’
‘That’s my name – don’t wear it out.’
‘This is an important job so I need 100 per cent from you. Just like we did last time.’
‘With that Lucy girl with the perky tits?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Jazz, mate, don’t you worry about a thing.’
As you may have guessed, following the barge trip, I simply came right out with it and asked her if she would like to have dinner later in the week. No strings. No presumptions. Just – would she like to have dinner? Casual as a cat’s stretch. Routine. An almost nothing question as we stepped back on to the quay at Warwick Avenue.
And she said ‘no’.
And my heart stopped beating.
And she watched with a smile as time and space shrivelled, blushing, into the dusty earth.
And I promised to fashion a new god in her image and put lambs to the sword by the million if only she would speak some little kindness to me before I turned the bloody blade upon myself.
And finally she broke the silence and explained that she had agreed to do a special job for The Times in Philadelphia and that she would be away in America all week – sorry. But how about the Tuesday following?
And I managed to pull my disintegrating self together and said that I would call her next Monday to confirm and arrange a place to meet and a restaurant – if that was OK with her?
And she said ‘sure’ and ‘thanks for such an unexpectedly nice day’.
And I went home and spent the night in a deep parody of sleep.
I take the Tube whenever I am going out to meet someone with whom I expect to have a decent conversation. I find that the speculations set off by the presence of so many strangers, none of whom I actually have to talk to, somehow stimulate my mind and serve to make me slightly more receptive, slightly more implicated. Indeed, I always think travelling on the London Underground is something akin to the experience I imagine some of the Victorian anthropologists used to have when they visited their lunatic asylums – similarly beset by institutional shades of green and black, prey to strange winds and distant groaning, beloved of scurrying mice and shuffling men, a place where time itself is routinely stretched or shrunk or lost, a place of too much light or too much dark, of grime-choked air and inexplicable
hum, of hot breath and break-neck rattle, of private tremors and mad convulsing … That Tuesday evening, my fellow loons and I scorched and banged along the Bakerloo together, trying not to stare or collapse or chew off our own gums. At Piccadilly Circus, fighting our way through the throngs of asylum-seekers coming the other way, those of us still strong enough to walk managed to get off. We broke ground to find ourselves freshly amazed at the weather – gusts of wind, darker skies, the promise of a storm and nothing like the hazy, late afternoon we had so recently left behind above the more northerly reaches of the line. Obviously the West End had signed up to an entirely different weather system provider – more channels presumably.
Once alone, I knifed my way up Shaftesbury Avenue, splitting the bloats of American tourists, rolling like hot-dogs on the sidewalk between restaurants, slicing through the mobs of Asian teenage tough-guys, idling between arcades with their fake-black accents and low-slung jeans, past the cash-dispenser camps of the homeless, all chattering into their mobile phones, around the football fans down from Sunderland for the weekend to teach London a lesson in how to have a night out and already off-their-faces-and-falling-down-drunk, through the Marks and Spencer masses, milling around the musicals, swinging left up Wardour Street where the thirty-something media crowd sport soft-leather satchels the better to advertise their creative credentials, and finally into Soho proper and Old Compton Street, where the gay battalions troop their colours and aimless men pedal birthday girls around in big yellow rickshaws.
I saw her the moment I walked into the bar. She was wearing a white suit – long, loose mannish trousers and fitted jacket with a single button. She looked like a creature from Yves Saint Laurent’s dreams. And she was sitting in my favourite chair on the far side, a spot which gave her a complete view of the room and, in particular, the door through which I had just entered. She had seen me too and now she stood up. Heads turned. Conversations stalled. There was nothing else to do but go straight on over.