by Edward Docx
Though perceptibly swaying, he succeeded at last in judging the appropriate distance and the feedback subsided. He began to speak – his voice thick and clogged with too much alcohol taken in and too many emotions trying to get out.
‘Sorry … Ladies and Gentlemen … sorry; sorry to interrupt.’ He stood to one side, imitating a stance he must have seen on television. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I won’t keep you long: I hope you are enjoying the … er … the piss-up!’ He held up his thumb. ‘Er … my name, as many of you know, is Steven Brooks and, as many of you also know, my company, Brooks Bailey and Forshaw are proud to be one of tonight’s big backers. Long live lawn tennis!’
An uneasy chunter passed through the room.
‘Anyway, the reason I am standing up here is that I have er … a little announcement to make.’ His grin tightened to a grimace. ‘The first thing – the first announcement – is to say thank you all for coming and may I add my own personal note of congratulations to Chad and Tanya who are deserving winners of the men’s and the women’s.’ He broke off. ‘Singles. In that order!’
Uncertain whether they were witnessing stand-up comedy or prostrate confession, three hundred and fifty people found themselves snagged between two reactions. Some half clapped. Others half didn’t. That this unscheduled interruption from a peripheral sponsor was profoundly unwelcome was evidenced by the officials pushing their way towards the stage.
But Brooks carried on undeterred: ‘Er … the second thing is that I have just found out tonight – after ten – no eleven years of marriage to my beautiful wife, Selina, that … SHE IS A FUCKING BITCH AND A CHEATING SLAG.’
Now, verily, the Devil rode in on a crescendo of appalled murmurs, suppressed gasps and dismayed profanity; he swirled his cloak about him and, with a derisory laugh, filled the hall with chaos and malediction.
Oh, I used to think that I had lived through some bad nights, I used to think that I had toughed it out through one or two personal lows – the self-loathing, the disorientation, the gagging at your own words, the swatting at your own head – but no. Oh no. Those other, seemingly embarrassing moments in my life, those other awkward, squirm-filled evenings, they were (it turns out) only polite dress rehearsals, warm-ups, jaunty misunderstandings, merely rueful, silly, funny by comparison … the Real Thing, now that was a whole different order of experience. The Real Thing was just getting started.
I realized more or less straightaway the significance of what I had just heard, but there was little time to think clearly. And I could not immediately see how the developing situation would affect me. Steven Brooks stepped down, assisted by two or three of the officials. The band resumed. Someone else retrieved the singer from the back of the stage where she had been cowering in mortification since giving up the microphone. Dancers reformed, obscuring my view. People passed by, swearing or drunk or both. Two minutes must have elapsed – no more – and the emotional cordite was still hanging pungent in the air when I heard her voice at my shoulder.
‘So, JJ, what an unexpected pleasure. Do you mind if I sit down? Well, anyway I already have. Hello, so sorry to interrupt.’ Taking Madeleine’s seat, she leant over, placing one hand forcibly – violently – into my lap for balance while offering the other first to Neil and then to William. ‘Hi, I am Selina Brooks – one of Jasper’s discarded lovers – isn’t that right, Jasper? I am the famous bitch slag.’
Selina was slaughtered.
‘Hello,’ said Neil, blushing.
William, his face a picture of understanding, shook her hand wordlessly.
Selina sat back and looked fixedly at me. The would-be superior smile of a woman who does not think she is drunk wedged itself tightly into the corners of her mouth. Her head rocked slightly as she spoke and to counter the wine-slur she sometimes over-enunciated. ‘And so, yes, anyway, Jasper, I just wanted to know – I mean I just wanted to ask – why did you have to tell my fucking husband?’
Even my DNA was wincing.
‘I mean, use me for sex – that’s fine – I was using you too – that’s pretty much what it was all about, wasn’t it?’ Silence hurried to the tables around us. ‘But I so totally fail to see, Jasper, why you have to tell my fucking husband and wreck my fucking marriage.’
More heads turned. A couple stalled as they blustered ungainly past. Selina fumbled in front of her to open Madeleine’s foreign packet of cigarettes. She looked round. ‘Does anybody at this table have a fucking light?’
William leant forward and offered his.
‘Thank you.’ She took the deep, stagy drag of a non-smoker, then addressed her gathering audience more widely. ‘And does anybody understand why this man …’ – she pointed with the cigarette – ‘… should want to wreck my marriage and ruin my children’s lives? No? Oh, come on, Jasper. We do all so want to know. Why did you tell him? I know he’s a wanker but I didn’t realize that you were such a cheap fucking bastard too.’
I sensed Madeleine hovering behind me. How long had she been back? I didn’t dare look around in case Selina guessed that she was the woman I was with and then turned on her. Everyone and everything within twenty feet was now staring at us. The situation was appalling. I had to take Selina elsewhere. I started to get up just as Madeleine slipped quietly into Nathalie’s chair, next to William.
‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’ Selina raised a white knuckle rapidly to her eyes, though there was no suggestion of tears. ‘Oh, it’s all very easy for you. Fuck me for a while and then when you get bored fuck off and who cares about the woman with a sad marriage and a stupid fucking wanker for a husband – I SAID SIT DOWN, I’M TALKING TO YOU.’
‘Selina, I’m not –’
‘Oh, fuck off then.’ Selina jammed the barely smoked cigarette into the ashtray, rose swiftly but unsteadily to her feet and picked up the nearest glass. I was still only half standing. We faced each other for a sad, stuck moment – two stunt planes stalled at the top of their climbing arc. Then she let me have the wine full in the face.
As she removed my jacket and I took off my shirt, Madeleine said, ‘Well well, that was all a bit smart-girls-carry-Cosmo – you’re lucky it was only white. She works in advertising, you said.’
Wine in the face is seldom what you want. But all the same, while not exactly going brilliantly, the evening wasn’t yet beyond all hope. Much to my surprise, Madeleine was still with me – and being uncommonly pleasant; plus we were in the Ladies – always more recuperative than the Gents’.
‘Obviously, I didn’t tell her husband,’ I said, feeling – a little madly perhaps – that this was the most single important thing to get across. ‘Selina’s husband, I mean, I didn’t –’
‘I know you didn’t. You’re way too good for that. I think they just had a falling-out tonight is all. She probably told him herself.’ Madeleine picked up a towel before running the tap and beginning carefully to dab at my lapels. Not once did she glance at herself in the mirror. ‘And – you know – she must have fucked you back, right? Nobody forced anybody to do anything.’
‘No.’
‘And you know what else? Now that you have been very publicly revealed as the sort of man that no woman could ever really trust, like or live with, you have become significantly more desirable. You’re the sexiest man at the ball. Such is the fucked-up nature of femininity. Enjoy.’
She handed me back my jacket and ran the collar of my shirt under the tap. Two women came in and eyed me with a mixture of disapproval and amusement. Madeleine shot them an explanatory glance. Simultaneously, they raised their eyes to heaven. Women need no words.
‘You think we should stay then?’ I asked.
‘I think you should stay very close to me and I’ll look after you.’ She banged on the hand dryer and held the collar in the hot air. ‘This place is far too dangerous for you to be wandering about on your own.’
I stood bare-chested in my dinner jacket, feeling like a male stripper in a television documentary about the highs
and lows of the job, and assessed my situation. Indubitably, my main self still felt pure and intense embarrassment. And my next self still felt residually wet. But – encouragingly – selves three and four – the devious twins – who had been busy running calculations, evaluating the effect developments might have had on Madeleine, were now reporting back with some unexpectedly favourable results. Self five – oddly narcissistic even in a crisis – felt obscurely flattered. Self six, the quiet but tenacious intellectual obsessive, who was forever wrestling with life’s myriad Gordian knots, was wondering how Selina had come to be betrayed and how, in turn, she had come to the conclusion that I was responsible. Self seven marvelled at the capacity for so fractured a self. Meanwhile, self eight, who couldn’t stand any of the above, wanted to have a large fucking drink.
So, to kick things off, much to Madeleine’s amusement and every other cocktail bar-queuing person’s annoyance, I chased a Talisker with a Moscow Mule. Such a thing is very wrong and insulting and disrespectful for many reasons – I doubt even a mulish Muscovite holidaying on the Isle of Skye would be so base – but when it comes to drinking, I am a commitment kind of a guy. Cocaine, Ecstasy, weed, even cigarettes – I can take them or leave them – a few one-night stands here or there, a fling, an affair, a dalliance … nothing serious. But with drinking it is love: it’s for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part. And a guy who starts out with a Talisker followed by a Moscow Mule may have been around the block a few times, but at least he knows the first kiss still matters.
And I swear, I felt 100 per cent finer than fine afterwards. Delicious. (Anyway Madeleine was rather gleefully paying.) So next I went for a hot-me-up Kir Royal (not my style but Madeleine’s suggestion since she was having one too) followed by a cool-me-down Tom Collins. Which, with a random vodka and lime to go, finally unlocked the doors of perception.
‘You wanna dance?’ Madeleine asked.
‘Let’s dance.’
She offered me her hand and led me out of the bar. I followed her back into the main hall – the immortal god of rhythm, moving through the multicoloured women and the black and white men. The oak walls scorned me and the chandeliers leered but they didn’t have a chance: I was all groove. We swung low by our table sweet chariot big grins all round and maybe hung a friendly arm around Will, who seemed to be sitting silently alone. And a cutchy-coo. Except – miraculously – it wasn’t Will, for Will had gone. As had Neil. And there was no sign of Nathalie either. The man sitting in what I thought was Will’s chair, the chair of Will, turned out to be someone who didn’t really look like Will at all. A total non-Will. An anti-Will.
‘Hello, hello,’ I said, very friendly all the same. ‘Are you lonely? Cheer up. Why not go dancing. That’s what we’re going to do. It’s very good for you.’ ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I am waiting for my wife. We’re getting a divorce.’ Well, OK then, I thought, and ‘I’m sorry,’ said Madeleine, taking me by the arm. ‘I’m afraid my boyfriend is trying to kill himself. Please don’t pay any attention. Come on, Jasper, you promised to dance. Come on.’
That’s right, I thought, I promised to dance. And dance I fucking well will.
But it should be recorded that Steven Brooks, though irrefutably short and indifferent to the question of the divided dramatic self in the poetry of John Donne, didn’t waste time when it came to dealing with the guy who liked to sleep with his wife: the first punch connected somewhere in the solar plexus and the next crunched awkwardly into the side of my nose.
I fell, delirious, into my sweetheart’s arms.
After that, things took a serious turn for the worse. When I came round, there was less immediate intoxication but much, much more pain – oh yes – much more pain … In fact, pain, I discovered, really enjoyed hanging out with me, slaloming back and forth across my ribs, doing fancy stunts on the bridge of my nose, skidding to a halt in my eyeballs. When I came round, there was also plenty of blood on my shirt; there was the distant noise of the ball still going on; there was the leather chair in which I was slumped; there was the strong impression that I was alone in a stranger’s study; there was being drunk; there was wanting another drink of course; there was the taste of iron running thick through the valleys between my teeth; there was shame; there was no Madeleine, no William, no Nathalie, no friends and no family.
But there was Lucy.
She was sitting in the opposite chair in a purple ball gown, regarding me with the patient eyes of the ill-treated.
Some long moments seemed to doggy-paddle past, during which I remember I wanted to get up but feared that doing so might make me seem strong enough to withstand an attack. So I sat tight while the minute hand on the grandmother clock above the empty fireplace hauled itself upright to mark the hour.
Two o’clock. Seconds away. Were we two now going to fight? How, I thought, did a man defend himself against a woman who was trying to kill him? What were the rules? What was the protocol? Restraint obviously, but what if she was really death-threateningly violent? Nauseously, I realized that when it came right down to the bare-knuckle stuff a real man could never find it in himself to hit back. Perhaps then, if the moment arrived, I would just surrender.
Lucy blinked the blink of the steadily deranged, slow and deliberate as though counting blinks. Her stillness, I feared, contained a dozen maelstroms fighting with twenty angry hurricanes. The few remaining selves of mine who were not dead or wounded or too embarrassed to stand up huddled together in a bare corner of my wind-whipped soul. There was a poker and a brush and some coal tongs lying neatly in the grate by her feet. We were all very worried.
Lucy had also lost weight. She looked more austere, pale, spare – the lines of her cheekbones seemed sharper. And her hair had been scissored dramatically around the neck so that it arrived in two asymmetrical points below the jaw line. Her voice, too, seemed thinner than I remembered.
‘I wanted you to know,’ she said, at last, her mouth moving as if there was some kind of satellite delay, ‘that I was here. I shouldn’t be. But I am. I am here.’
I gathered my selves.
She smiled. ‘Don’t worry; I am not going to hit you or anything. I feel much better now than I thought I would. It’s OK. I’m glad I came to see you.’
It was impossible to think anything clearly. I raised my hand to my face to assess the agony of what was once my nose. Some questions declared themselves out of the fog: ‘How long have I been here? How long have you …’ My voice sounded strange to me, clogged and nasal as if in the grip of some deathbed cold.
She ignored me. ‘I knew you were here and I just wanted to come and see that I was OK – you know – face to face. I think I am – now. You look awful, by the way, Jasper. Your nose has been bleeding. And you’ll have a black eye too.’
Woozily, I sat up. The contents of the room swilled like the dregs in a bum’s bottle.
‘I saw what happened before with Selina’s – that’s her name isn’t it?– with Selina’s husband, I mean. You were lucky – you were lucky that … that someone caught you or you might have cracked your head on the table behind. You could probably sue.’ She smiled. ‘But best not get me to represent you.’
I shook my head.
She bit her lip and seemed suddenly to make up her mind. ‘You’re OK. I’d better go.’ She stood. ‘I’m sorry about phoning you. I won’t do that – any more. I’m feeling a lot better.’ She hesitated. ‘But if …’ – she drew a heavy breath – ‘… if – after – whenever – you ever want to call me, that’s OK.’
I got to my feet. Guilt was squatting on my heart like a bloated toad.
‘Lucy, listen, I am so sorry about what has happened, what is happening.’
But she was already at the door. ‘So am I.’
I remained as still as possible for a while. I was finding it much harder than usual to stand. The room was spinning – or rather sliding – away to the left of me. I tried imagining sliding it back to the right, but it would
not correct itself. Staggeringly, I got the impression that what I actually wanted most was a drink. The pain in my face and my stomach was extraordinary. I wondered how I was going to find the others and what to say. I ran my tongue across my upper lip. Dried blood. I wondered how I was going to find the others and what …
Madeleine came through the door in a hurry and seemed almost to rush towards me. She was frowning, her lips tight and set. She was carrying cotton wool and a wet flannel.
‘Sit.’
She led me forcefully back to the chair and set me down. Firmly, but with care, she began wiping at my face – a Sister of Mercy with her most persistent sinner, her administrations busy, concentrated, effective.
‘Head back,’ she said.
The ink was running in my mind and I am not sure whether or not the words formed as I tried to speak: ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘To get these.’ She indicated the cotton wool and the flannel.
‘How long have I been here?’
She wasn’t terse but neither was there any slack in her tone. ‘Not long. Twenty minutes maximum. Shut your eyes. They were going to call an ambulance but there was a doctor who helped us carry you up and he said you would be OK. You’re lucky. Your nose isn’t bust and your teeth are fine and I stopped you smashing your head open.’
‘Thank you for catching me.’
‘It was a complete waste of time cleaning up your shirt earlier.’
I felt I had to tell her. ‘Guess what?’
‘Undo your collar. What?’
Honesty had me by the throat. ‘One of my old girlfriends is here.’
Madeleine did not pause in her swabbing. ‘I noticed,’ she said.