Finally the deed was clumsily done and Suzanne and I were ready for proper intercourse to commence. Suzanne lay back below me and I was ready to make love to her. Actually ‘love’ was far too strong a word. I barely knew her, I quite liked her; I would be ‘making quite like’ to her. The pile of exercise mats had a musty rubber smell, and there was a piece of blackened chewing gum on the top one. And so, with a shift of my body and a clumsy grope to find my way, I became a man again. ‘That Rudyard Kipling poem really should have included something about this bit,’ I thought, as I focused on the achievement, the milestone that this was it!
‘Whoa! Whoa! Slow down a bit, Vaughan – it’s not a race to the finish!’
‘Sorry … Is that better?’
‘Nice and gentle – that’s right.’
I felt a huge gratitude to this older woman for showing me the ropes, even if she was about a decade younger than me. But I couldn’t help thinking that this whole business really was remarkably intimate; I barely knew Suzanne, and yet our two naked bodies were now interlocked in a secret room.
I did my best to go slowly, to be considerate and attentive, with occasional tender stimulation of various parts of her body, even if Suzanne had never particularly thought of her elbow as an erogenous zone. I had got into a rhythm now, and felt pretty much in control. Unfortunately my foot seemed to have got tangled in the netting of a folded-up five-a-side goal that was propped against the wall, but I wouldn’t let that stop me. I was actually having sex; this was what it felt like! That foot was not shaking free, however much I tried to wiggle it about. I looked around to see that it was completely wrapped up in the netting and I wondered whether I might be able to just leave it there until this was over. While still ostensibly focusing on Suzanne, I gave one final tug and suddenly the whole metal goal frame was pulled from where it was leaning and came crashing to the floor with a deafening clatter.
‘Jesus Christ, what was that?!’ She had leapt up in fear of being crushed by falling metal bars, and I was horrified that she had pulled herself away from me.
‘Sorry! Sorry! The goal net was tangled in my foot. Sorry, did I make you jump?’
‘Do you think the guys will have heard that from the reception desk?’
‘I doubt it. Don’t they normally have the radio on? Shall we just carry on?’
‘Did they have a radio on? I don’t remember them having a radio on.’
‘It didn’t make that much noise,’ I claimed, despite the ringing in my head and the fear that my eardrums might now be bleeding. ‘Shall we just go back to where we left off?’
But the moment had gone. Whereas before her drunkenness had made her adventurous and provocative, now she was excessively paranoid and I was appalled to see her getting dressed.
‘We could get in big trouble,’ she suddenly decided. ‘I have a professional duty to look after this equipment,’ she continued, which seemed a bit rich from someone who had minutes earlier demonstrated her professional duty to the exercise mats by having sex on them.
It was over before it was finished. I had seen an 18 certificate but had left before the end; I had smoked pot but hadn’t inhaled; I had learned to put on a condom, but it hadn’t really been required. Probably best not to save it for another time, I thought, as I shoved it in a tissue inside my jacket pocket. ‘Did this count?’ I wondered. I had had sex with a woman, but there had been no climax. Was that enough to admit me into adulthood? Yes, that still definitely counted, I concluded. I had broken my duck, I had lost my second virginity. Now I could look Mick Jagger in the eye.
The two of us got dressed and there was no pretence that we ought to spend the rest of the night together or anything soppy like that. She suggested I should leave first and she would tidy up in her store room and leave ten minutes later, so that the blokes on the door didn’t suspect anything. I gave her a peck on the cheek and thanked her probably too much, and then headed out into the main part of the gym, still feeling like a super-hero. There in the middle of the wooden floor was an abandoned football. I saw the goal at the far end of the room, and I took a short run-up and kicked the ball with all my might, watching it curl with perfection into the corner of the goal. And I raised both arms in the air in triumph. ‘He shoots! Goooooaaaallll!’
I was feeling extremely pleased with myself. I was the cock of the walk, I was the king of the world, I was the Six Million Dollar Man. I was still feeling mightily proud when I said goodnight to Kofi and John, who seemed a little strange towards me, and red around the eyes as if they had been crying or something. Or laughing, perhaps. And I looked up to the small security monitor above the desk, to see a black-and-white image of Suzanne just putting her coat on in the gym store, and then I heard them burst out laughing again as I slunk out of the main door.
Chapter 18
WHEN MADDY WAS particularly fed up with the inner city, she would occasionally buy a property-porn magazine called Coastal Living. It featured sun-bleached seaside cottages where the only item on the kitchen table was some freshly gathered samphire or an artistically positioned shell. Freckly children in stripy T-shirts with sand on their knees ate crusty brown bread grabbed from pale-blue kitchen sideboards.
I wondered if there should be a special lifestyle magazine for where I found myself now? Vaughan divides his time between his cosy bedroom in Streatham’s Hi Klass Hotel and the en-suite bathroom, where he is cultivating a range of black and green moulds on the non-slip bathmat. ‘I love living in a cheap South London hostel used mainly by prostitutes,’ says Vaughan, 39. ‘From my grubby fourth-floor window I have a perfect view of the huge extractor ducts of the kebab shop opposite.’ Vaughan says that having no cooking or washing facilities helps keep life simple, and he likes to remember the various takeaway meals he has enjoyed by keeping the congealing cartons piled up all around the room.
In my imagination, the Easter holidays had loomed in the distance as a vast tract of unlimited free time during which I would get completely on top of all my marking, lesson plans and personal admin, while also grabbing some quality time with my children and visiting my still hospitalized father. It was not until I emerged from under the cheap hotel bedsheets to glance at my bedside clock on Wednesday afternoon that I accepted I might be letting the opportunity slip by. All my good intentions had presumed a degree of energy and enthusiasm for life that seemed to have been mysteriously drained from me. Both my laptop and mobile phone had run out of battery power long ago. It would have been no effort to plug in their chargers, had my own batteries not been so low as well.
I was no more unshaven on Wednesday than I had been on Tuesday – it seemed as if even my stubble couldn’t be bothered any more. I looked so unhealthy that I decided I ought to eat some vegetables, so I rooted around among the old curry cartons and found the three-day-old polythene bag of shredded lettuce that had come with the chicken tikka masala.
I turned on the television again. I flicked to the 24-hour News Channel, but extra news was still stubbornly refusing to occur to fill the additional allotted time. I watched part of an American daytime show that featured a couple who were divorcing because they’d found out they were brother and sister. At least that was one problem Maddy and I had never had. Well, as far as I knew anyway, though if Jean turned out to be my mother that might just be enough to finish me off.
I occupied just one side of the double bed, as I always did. I’d only just realized that I instinctively preferred to take the left half of the mattress, subconsciously leaving the other side free. But now I was staring at a piece of paper that would do away with the need for such considerations.
I had verbally agreed to all the terms in this legal document some time ago; now all I had to do was sign the embossed papers where indicated, in front of a witness, and return it in the expensive-looking stamped addressed envelope and my marriage would be history. It was just a five-second task of signing my name, yet during four whole days of doing nothing I had still not found the time to do it. I h
ad placed the document on the rickety bedside table, but now clambered off the crumpled blankets and hid it out of sight amid the clutter on the other side of the room. It wasn’t just the final act of formally ending the marriage that crippled me, but that extra little humiliation of having to ask a witness to watch me sign the form.
I had wondered if could ask the fat man from the former Soviet republic of Something-astan who ran the Hi Klass Hotel. Except that I sensed he rather resented the way that I paid the nightly tariff for my room and then proceeded to sleep in it for the entire night. Every time I saw him, I felt guilty that I wasn’t sheepishly vacating my room fifteen minutes after arrival. I could always ask one of the ladies who regularly entertained clients here, I thought. Witness Occupation: Prostitute. That would look impressive.
Overhearing people having sex did not particularly lighten my depressed state. Occasionally I thought about that moment in the gym store, but it had clearly left me feeling empty. More significant than the physical experience of the night with Suzanne was the recovery of my memories of sex with Madeleine. These weren’t summoned up to be titillating or erotic, but prior to recovering them it was almost as if I’d been ending a marriage that had never been consummated.
I remembered that Maddy talked during sex. Not in the way that women are scripted in male fantasies – she didn’t groan an ecstatic ‘Oh, that is amazing! Oh yes, yes!’ That wasn’t really Madeleine’s style. No, on the particular night of passion that came to mind we were in the final throes of sexual intercourse and, as I grunted and grimaced with Maddy lying beneath me, she suddenly said, ‘Oh, I must remember to give in the form for Dillie’s school trip …’
I recalled that she had often done this. When I’d imagined that she was totally consumed in the ardour and intimacy of the moment, she would volunteer the information that she had booked the car in for a service, or would wonder out loud whether she could move that chiropodist’s appointment from Monday to Wednesday. I doubt that these were lines you’d ever hear in a pornographic movie: a beefy, oiled-up gym instructor having athletic sex with a silicon-breasted peroxide blonde, who in the moment of climax mumbles, ‘Oh no – I forgot to post Mum’s birthday card!’
But I suppose what Maddy had really been saying was that she was very comfortable with me; that she knew me really, really well. That’s how used to one another we had been – completely familiar with our partner’s quirks and idiosyncrasies. Like the two trees in our garden that had grown side by side, their trunks intertwining over the decades to accommodate and support one another.
And then I recovered another memory. It was an argument that had begun with Maddy wanting to throw out a plastic shower curtain and me insisting that it just needed cleaning.
‘Just needs cleaning by me, is what you mean,’ she says. ‘Because it would never occur to you to clean a shower curtain.’
‘But a shower curtain doesn’t need cleaning; it has a shower every day.’
‘Yeah, you take a shower every day and I have a bath, and you said you would clean the shower, so why didn’t you clean the curtain as well?’
‘Because I forgot, okay? I forgot to clean the curtain when I cleaned the shower. I forgot, just like everything else that you endlessly point out that Vaughan forgets …’
But the argument wasn’t about that at all: it was actually about sex as well. The previous evening I had suggested that we had intercourse and she had said no, and we had not so much as touched one another for weeks, and I felt angry and frustrated.
‘You notice a bit of grime on the curtain, but you don’t even notice your own husband,’ I say, escalating the conflict.
‘What?’
‘You care more about a bit of black mould in the shower than you care about me.’
‘Why are you being so horrible?’
‘Oh, look, the lid is off the toothpaste because Vaughan forgot to put it back on!’ and I run to the toothpaste and make a big show of replacing the lid. ‘Ooh, look, the toilet seat is up because Vaughan forgot to put it down.’ And I slam down the toilet lid. ‘Well, it’s better than forgetting you’re supposed to be married to someone!’
I was able to place this incident to about a year before we had separated. The drama churned over in my head and I felt ashamed that my sexual frustration had translated into anger in such an extreme manner. But, with hindsight, I now understood that sex is so important in keeping a marriage together that it really shouldn’t be left to husband and wife alone. There are people who come round to check your burglar alarm and window locks; we have health checks and visits to the dentist, and an engineer who makes sure the gas boiler is safe. There really ought to be someone from the council who pops round regularly to make sure that married couples are having sex every weekend. ‘Hmm … I see there’s a two-week gap at the beginning of the month. I’m going to have to log that in the system, and it means you will receive an official letter warning you of the dangers of neglecting physical intimacy.’
The document from my ex-wife’s solicitors had to be signed. I owed it to Maddy. I pulled on my shoes and threw on a jacket and quickly checked myself in the mirror before I presented myself to the outside world. Then I took my jacket off again, removed my shoes and went to shower and shave. I gave the bottom of the shower curtain a wipe down before I was finished.
My reintegration into civilization seemed to go unnoticed by the rest of society: evening shoppers passed me by, busy commuters were more focused on their own journeys home than noticing the lonely man forcing himself to keep walking down the high street despite having no particular place to go. It reminded me of my time before I found my true identity, the sense of separateness from the rest of the world, as if everyone else knew the part they were playing but I’d never been given a script. Inside my jacket pocket, however, was the death certificate for my marriage that I had set myself the task of posting. In my head I was scrolling through all the people who could witness my signature, but somehow I didn’t want to admit my final failure to any of my friends.
I walked two miles and found myself at the front door of the only person I felt I could ask. I had never been here before, but I had memorized the address from when I had worked in the school office. Suzanne, the dance teacher, seemed very surprised and a little alarmed to see me.
‘Vaughan! What the bloody hell are you doing here?’
‘Sorry not to call – my mobile’s flat. I came to ask a favour.’
‘Er – it’s not very convenient …’ She glanced back down the hallway.
‘Who is it?’ said a gruff man from inside the flat.
‘Just someone from school.’
Despite Suzanne’s acute embarrassment, I persuaded her that this wouldn’t take more than a minute, and I was whisked into the kitchen where I produced the divorce agreement for her to witness and sign. The nature of the favour threw her yet further.
‘Vaughan,’ she whispered, ‘I don’t want you to divorce your wife just because of what happened the other night …’
‘No, I was going to divorce her anyway.’
‘I mean, Brian and I are very happy. I can’t leave him for you, Vaughan, just like that – just because of one naughty little fling.’
‘No, really. I just needed someone to witness my signature, and I was just passing, so …’
‘You won’t tell anyone what happened, will you?’ She glanced nervously in the direction of the lounge where Brian was watching a home improvement programme. ‘I mean, I was drunk and you were drunk and it didn’t mean anything, did it?’
Her name was hastily scribbled and signed. It was barely legible, but the deed was done.
I stood before the pillar box, nervously double-checking that the envelope was properly sealed and that the stamps would not fall off. Then, in a short private ceremony, The Future formally surrendered to The Past and I put the letter in the box. Rather than return to my dismal hotel room, I picked up a free news paper and went into a high-street ‘tavern’. The pub
had got a signwriter to advertise its many attractions in old-fashioned Shakespearean script. This worked quite well for ‘Ye Real Ales’ and ‘Ye Fine Foods’ but looked less convincing for ‘Sky Sports in High Definition’. Even with the sound turned down, the large TV screen was impossible to ignore, as the silent presenters on Sky News searched for the least appropriate footage to match the song playing on the pub jukebox. Images of floods in Bangladesh served as an edgy rock video for Lady Gaga. The remains of a roadside bomb in Afghanistan added an extra poignancy to a new power ballad from the latest winner of The X Factor. The info-bar scrolled the changes in the stock markets or Europa League football scores as I finished a third packet of pork scratchings and tied the foil packets into tiny knots. A couple came into the pub hand in hand, and I was disgusted by such an ostentatious public display of sexual passion.
In the toilets I paused for a while to stare at the craggy face of the man whose life I had inherited. ‘You stupid idiot!’ I shouted at my reflection. ‘You only get one life, and you completely screwed your one up, didn’t you, eh?’
Perhaps the drink had made me slightly aggressive, but right now the only person I wanted to fight was myself. ‘You don’t know your own kids! Your wife hates you. You can’t even remember people’s names, you senile bastard—’
Then a slurred voice spoke up from behind a locked cubicle door. ‘Who is this? How do you know so much about me?’
I set off to walk the length of Streatham High Road, the night lit briefly by the blue strobe of a passing police car. Alcohol used to make me excited and up for a laugh, but these days it just made me really drowsy. Throw a party for people in their forties and too much alcohol just makes everyone want to go home and go to bed. ‘Oh wow, look at all this vodka! I’m going to drink a whole bottle and get completely … tired.’ ‘Yeah, and then let’s have a load of tequila slammers so we get like, really, really sleepy.’
The Man Who Forgot His Wife Page 21