The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  They had kissed already – against the side of a lorry, inside the porch, on the stairs – kisses between perfect strangers, conveying only hunger and curiosity. Now, as he spurted his juice into the man’s insides, desire sated, he felt an old familiar yearning to kiss in tenderness, to be held, to be made to feel, however fraudulently, safe. He fought the feeling, roughly pressing a hand across the man’s face, forcing his thumb between his teeth and on to the hot vulnerability of his tongue. The man sucked obediently, expressing Jamie’s need on his behalf. Jamie watched him for a moment, until the beating in his chest subsided, then he pulled back his hand and let his dick slide out with a wet, suggestive plop. In the half light from the lamps along the riverside, he could see that the condom had slipped off. With a practised gesture, disguised as a further caress, he slipped two fingers inside and tweaked the thing out.

  He began to stand but the man, eyes still closed, took him by the wrists. Jamie waited, making no reciprocation, until he was released again, then walked slowly to pull on some tracksuit bottoms. Taking a small, black towel from the neatly folded stash kept in the bathroom for just this purpose, he came back to clean his visitor. Wiping sweat and sperm from limbs that were lent a deathly pallor by the thin light, an effect heightened by the man’s heavily corpseish stillness. He wiped the body longer than was strictly necessary, enjoying the slow ritual courtesy and the almost paternal feeling it invariably stirred in him.

  At last he roused himself with a little, comical snort.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Jamie said. ‘But it’s Tony.’

  ‘Well, thanks. Tony.’

  He rose, lit a cigarette and began to wander around the eerily lit room, peering closely at things in the gloom. Walking near the windows his body was lit by the diffused glow of lights from outside, revealing a suggestion of belly.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, picking up the idol that perched on Jamie’s only bookcase.

  ‘I inherited her from my grandmother. She’s from an East Anglian burial barrow. A fertility goddess.’ In three short sentences, Jamie realised, he had destroyed his carefully assembled image of tight-lipped machismo. The man chuckled.

  ‘Whatever she is, I wouldn’t want to meet her up a dark alley,’ he said.

  Jamie watched him replace the treasure and said, ‘I … er … I’m afraid I’ve got to get to work early.’

  With mumbled apologies, the man dressed and left. He behaved perfectly. He made no awkward overtures about leaving addresses or telephone numbers and he gave no name. He only spoiled the encounter’s smooth completion by having to ring on the doorbell when he realised he had left his watch and wedding ring in an ashtray by the sofa.

  Ever since he had started attending a gym after a summer with a leg in plaster caused him to put on weight, Jamie had checked himself religiously on the bathroom scales at night, charting his progress from slack-thighed wimp to urban olympian. This evening, stepping off the scales, he sensed it was a habit he would have to break if he was to retain his sanity. These things became obsessive, tedious even. For the fourth night in a row, instead of luxuriating in the pleasures of an unshared, unrumpled bed, he found himself fretting wakefully over complex mental indices of indulgence and retribution, teasing, circular lists of profit and loss, the nightmarish equations whereby risk might be calculated.

  The twenty-five years of Jamie’s life had been shaped by an impulse towards transgression in one form or another. Miriam, as his mother had always insisted her children call her, had brought him and his sister into the world in a haphazard commune, made up of fellow art school graduates she gathered about herself. Uncertain as to which of the group’s floating male population was their father, she had proudly given them her surname. She had fed them on home-made bread and home-made cheese and encouraged them to run naked as savages and decorate their bodies with natural pigments. Seven-year-old Jamie had transgressed against this self-conscious paganism by winning a place at a Rexbridge college choir school, where he sang like an angel, wore a collar and tie and learned slabs of the Bible by rote. When Miriam finally put communal life behind her and married her accountant, she tried hard to become the kind of mother who liked having a privately educated choirboy for a son. Like her father, she became keen for Jamie to pursue his musical training and shed a little culture on her by association. Reliably disobedient, he changed direction again, taking Economics, Politics and Maths A-levels, giving up singing and skipping university to take a job with a Lloyd’s syndicate. Now his contemporaries seemed to be falling over themselves in the rush to settle down and have babies and/or cats, so he remained petless and resolutely – even callously – single. His regular encounters with men he picked up in the street or the gym were lent an added spice by the knowledge that his settled colleagues, and even his stepfather, enviously pictured him playing the field with a fragrant address book of single women.

  Appalled by Miriam’s transformation following her marriage, equally wilful, though not, he suspected, quite as committed to the single state as he was, his older sister Alison was his only confidante. They lived on opposite sides of London but spoke every day and made a point of meeting once a week, if only for a sandwich and coffee. The morning after this latest adventure, they had time for complicated salads and a bottle of Chablis.

  ‘But that’s such a waste of perfectly good man!’ Alison protested after the detailed account she claimed as her due.

  ‘I’ve told you before. Twice is a mess, three times, a commitment.’

  ‘But a married man is already committed elsewhere.’

  ‘Allow me some principles,’ Jamie insisted. ‘I’m many nasty things, perhaps, but I’m not a homewrecker.’

  ‘Not intentionally. But he probably went home and couldn’t look his wife in the eye.’

  ‘And that’s my fault? It takes two.’

  Alison reached across with her fork to help him finish his salad which he was starting to neglect. When he caught her eye she said, ‘It’s only rabbit food. And you know I hate waste. You should eat more yourself. You’re looking skinny.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he insisted. ‘I work out three times a week at least.’

  ‘You’re still looking skinny.’

  Jamie laughed at the concerned enquiry in her gaze. He swopped their salad bowls so she could eat without stretching, then he topped up their glasses.

  ‘I want to be a gay man,’ she said.

  ‘Ssh!’ he chuckled. ‘People are staring.’

  ‘But I do!’

  ‘Oh please. Not still? I thought working on the helpline might have cured that.’

  ‘If you pick up some sexy married stranger in a late-night supermarket, it’s all in an evening’s entertainment. If a woman does that, she gets called a scrubber.’

  ‘So does a man. Depends on his friends.’

  ‘But you know what I mean. Sex is so easy for you.’

  ‘What about that bloke in your office?’

  She dropped her fork with a clatter and pushed the bowl to one side. Last time they had spoken, she had hotly denied anything had gone on between her and a younger colleague but now her reaction to Jamie’s sudden question had betrayed her. She looked up, caught, smiled ruefully then looked down again and fell to pleating her napkin.

  ‘That. Well that won’t happen again. I’m sure of it. Anyway it’s madness to sleep with colleagues.’

  ‘Didn’t stop you.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Scrubber.’

  ‘Stop it,’ she squeaked. ‘Get us some coffee. I’ve an editorial meeting at three.’

  He paid the bill while he was fetching the coffee – even following her recent managerial promotion, she earned almost half his salary – then halved what she owed him when she insisted on paying her way. He suspected Alison knew he did this and he was touched that she let him. She paid him back from time to time with small but satisfyingly dense parcels of the books she published
. He usually kept these for a while, enjoying their crisp promise before giving them away, unread, to his secretary. His secretary was indefatigable but entirely undiscriminating in what she read, and it fascinated Alison to hear how fiercely the woman judged the latest Aldo MacInnes conundrum, say, against some piece of mass-market escapism.

  ‘Guess who phoned me this morning,’ Jamie said, munching the chocolate mint from her saucer before she could be tempted to change her mind about not wanting it. ‘Regular as clockwork.’

  ‘Miriam,’ she said, then imitated their mother’s voice with deadly precision. ‘Angel, Frank and I were wondering if you could find time for us this weekend.’

  ‘She asked you too?’

  Alison nodded.

  ‘Are you going?’ Jamie asked her.

  ‘I said I’d let her know.’

  ‘Oh dear. Me too.’

  Brother and sister exchanged a guilty look. Miriam had staggered them several years before by marrying colourless, conscienceless, enthusiastic Francis, moving into his large Essex house and taking up sports to please him. Both children had been in the throes of leaving home in any case, and Miriam’s eagerness that they should continue to have ‘their’ rooms in her well-appointed prison only speeded up the process. Francis had left his first wife for Miriam and the defection had still not been forgiven by his own children. The new pair rattled around in a house far too large for them – filling their spare time with tennis, swimming, golf and ‘going for drives’ – beleaguered by two sets of angry offspring who refused to play family unless spectacularly bribed.

  Alison had a small box of her mother’s old photographs which she and Jamie occasionally pored over, fascinated at the drunken images of boozy, druggy afternoons at The Roundel, everyone dressed in flares and the men indistinguishable with their beards and long hair. It was hard to understand the impulse behind Miriam’s dogged attempt to transform herself from bread-baking, peace-marching, free-loving earth mother to an only slightly eccentric surburban matron with big hair and redundant four-wheel-drive. Or would have been, had not so many of her contemporaries abandoned hippy principles with equally gay abandon at about the same time.

  ‘I’ll go if you will.’

  ‘Done,’ Jamie agreed. ‘I’ll drive us. But I’m not playing tennis.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘And we leave after Sunday lunch. Promptly.’

  ‘I was telling Grandpa the other day, I suppose I could forgive it – I mean, we all want security, and there’s nothing sadder than a hippy in middle age – if only she wouldn’t try to involve us so. And that awful, hopeful way she has of saying “and do bring a friend, if you like”.’

  ‘She never says that to me,’ said Jamie. He felt perplexingly stung by this.

  ‘You never have a “friend” long enough for them to get invited.’

  ‘She knows though, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Of course.’ Alison glanced at her watch then held out her empty coffee cup to a passing waiter with a beseeching smile. ‘But she doesn’t like to think about it in case her reaction turns out to be at odds with what’s left of her liberal sensibility. And he’d die of embarrassment. Sometimes I think he’s like an Action Man. You know? Nothing down there but a fold of hygienic plastic’

  A thick-set, Danish-looking man with short, ash-blond hair, his suit jacket slung over one shoulder, strode by their table. The conversation stopped momentarily as both cast an appraising gaze at his rear. Jamie sighed minutely as they turned back to face each other. Alison’s understanding was immediate.

  ‘Hetero bottom,’ she said. ‘My gaydar’s improving.’

  ‘Your friends on that helpline are teaching you about more than the medical crisis,’ Jamie clucked and they laughed. He reverted to the previous, perennial topic between them. ‘But how can she stand him? He’s such an Easy Listening sort of man.’

  ‘At least he’s rich. How did she stand Joey or Phil or Reefer or any of the rest of the Beards? Miriam’s always had lousy taste in men.’

  ‘Unlike us.’

  She smiled at him sunnily across her cup. He loved her like this; strong, bony, alert. He liked to think people would look at them and know at once they were brother and sister. His grandfather had a framed photograph of his late wife looking up from her work in a flower bed at The Roundel, no-nonsense hair pulled off her face by a spotted scarf. Although Alison affected not to notice it, the resemblance between the two women was uncanny. She set her cup down, made leaving motions with her bag, and moaned, ‘But I never have any men!’

  ‘Only because you make no time for them.’ Jamie left the wine bar with her. ‘You fill your evenings with manuscripts, lame ducks and that fucking helpline.’

  Alison peered dubiously at herself in a car window and worried some frizz back into her hair.

  ‘Half the reason I took that on,’ she explained, ‘was in the forlorn hope of meeting somebody.’

  ‘A lesbian-run, gay-manned sex problems helpline is hardly a likely hunting ground for you, sister.’

  ‘What would you know, with your selfish life? Kiss.’ He pulled her to him and kissed her on the lips. ‘Now,’ she added, ‘change your gym and eat some steak or something. Sleep more, party less.’

  ‘You’re late for that meeting.’

  ‘I’m serious, Jamie. I wish you would.’

  ‘Yeah yeah.’

  She gave him a brief, earnest look from under her fringe, kissed her fingers to him then turned the gesture into a frantic wave at a passing taxi which honked and pulled over. He watched her drive away, then turned back towards the office and his deskload of data about a recent petrochemicals disaster in Germany. For a few moments a chill hung about him, despite his walking on the street’s sunny side. Then the Dane in the rumpled suit walked by with some colleagues, caught his eye and, falling behind his companions, smiled lazily at Jamie with the corner of his mouth.

  35

  ‘I’m sorry. This chair’s taken.’

  ‘Well could I borrow it till they get here?’

  Alison placed a hand protectively on the chairback and faced the woman out.

  ‘He’ll be here any minute,’ she said, unconsciously using the male pronoun as a weapon. ‘He’s just a bit late.’

  The woman sighed crossly and turned her back to try elsewhere. Alison topped up her wine. She had almost finished the bottle already. She glanced at her watch, then carried on with her attempt to read a manuscript. The yacking, hooting voices around her were oppressive. Her eyes stung with smoke and, after a day with nothing to eat beyond some fashionably austere fish, the wine was turning rancid on her tongue. A knot formed in her stomach: her habitual quiet seething against the rudeness of Londoners, their casual discourtesies, slovenly insults.

  Damn him! Where was he? At the meeting that afternoon she had stuck her neck out for him, defending him, against two outstanding interviewees, as the best in-house candidate for a vacant editorial post. Cynthia, the editorial director, whose loudly touted belief in feminist solidarity had a way of deserting her when dealing with female colleagues, had grilled her.

  ‘Well why, exactly? Come on, Alison! You can’t just say “Oh but he’s good” without giving us chapter and verse! Why is he good? I mean, we all know he’s pretty …’ And she had used her just-one-of-the-girls manner to make everyone laugh and forget Alison’s argument. Alison persevered. He had an eye, she said. He had spotted Petra Levy. ‘Oh, and there was I thinking you had spotted Petra.’ Cynthia fixed her with a mocking stare and Alison suddenly knew that Cynthia knew that the young man in question had already flattered Alison into bed. Wondering whether the decorative bastard had not perhaps already done the same with Cynthia, Alison had fought back, dropping hints to remind the board that at least two of their number were ex-Adonises of Cynthia’s, whose worth, beyond a certain public-school prettiness, had taken considerably longer to prove itself. Embarrassed – they had long since settled for younger, more malleable women than Cynthia
– the ex-Adonises began to agree with Alison. Cynthia pretended she had only been playing devil’s advocate and Alison’s candidate won the day. She broke the good news to him herself. He hugged her in full view of the office and they agreed to meet for a celebratory drink at six-thirty. It was now seven-fifteen.

  ‘Hi?’

  As he answered the telephone, she heard laughter in the background. He was already celebrating. At home. With friends. Having expected only his answering machine, she wanted to hang up without speaking but instead said, ‘It’s me. I’m at the wine bar. Remember?’

  There was a second of quick thinking then he blurted, ‘God I’m so sorry, Alison. Listen, I –’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said, thinking it wasn’t. ‘I’ve run into some old friends here. We were just wondering where you had got to, because they’re treating me to dinner and you could have come along.’

  He opted for what he gauged as disarming frankness.

  ‘Do you know, I was so excited and, what with everyone ringing to congratulate me, I completely forgot!’ She could picture him running a hand through his boyishly tousled hair, one shirt tail carefully untucked. ‘Alison I’m a bastard. You must let me buy you an extra special lunch.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘You can. Bye.’

  ‘Bye. See you tomorrow. And listen. I’m truly sorry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cynthia would have taken revenge, scuppered his first big deal then pretended to rescue him from the mess, while spreading rumours that he could only get it up with women over fifty, but Alison feared this was yet another area in which she was not like Cynthia. She would probably end up paying for the proposed lunch, because he had managed to forget his wallet. She paid for the Beaujolais, carried out the rest of the bottle to give to a girl she had noticed camped outside, toyed with the idea of a taxi, then let prudence draw her inexorably on to the deep escalators at Holborn station.