Best Man

by Matt Dunn

  Nursing a slight hangover, I steer the Impresser down the M2 towards Margate. I don’t want to be anywhere near West London at the moment, for obvious reasons, and, anyway, today’s my mum’s birthday. As recent developments have meant I’ve not been organized enough to send her a card, I’m hoping that a surprise personal appearance, backed up by a box of her favourite Black Magic chocolates and the largest bunch of flowers I could find in the motorway services, will make up for this.

  I’ve driven down Nick’s street already this morning, but the Ferrari’s not there any more, and I still can’t seem to get an answer from his mobile. When I call the flat, Sandra tells me she doesn’t have a clue where he’s gone, but leaves me in no doubt as to where I can go.

  It’s raining hard, and I’m driving much too fast for the conditions, impatiently flashing those cars in front of me who refuse to pull over and are quite unreasonably sticking to the speed limit. As I negotiate the Saturday morning traffic, I hold a packet of frozen peas against my face with one hand to try and reduce the swelling on my lip a little, as I don’t want to turn up at my parents’ house looking like I’ve been in a fight.

  The stereo is pumping out some opera CD that I bought along with the flowers – one of those compilation albums, Twelve Songs for a Tenor, I think it’s called, and it’s pretty good, although I skip that bloody Pavarotti number that seems to be on most of these collections, and that no one can listen to any more without thinking of the World Cup football coverage. I’m not in the mood for anything upbeat given last night’s developments, and so fat men singing about love, death and depression in a language I can’t understand seems perfectly appropriate.

  I can’t stop thinking about Charlie as I drive, trying to work out a plausible explanation for the presence of another man in her flat. I suppose it could have been a friend, but the bedroom light/dressing gown scenario only suggests one kind of friend to me. And why was she so keen for me to walk away if I decided I didn’t want to be involved with the baby? Perhaps Mark had a point, and maybe it isn’t mine? It’s getting hard to see the cars in front, and I switch the Impresser’s heater on full to clear my windscreen before I realize that it’s actually my eyes that have misted over.

  I don’t feel much better even by the time I park outside my parents’ house, and, despite composing myself in the car for a few minutes before I go inside, I still have to brandish the flowers in front of me to distract their attention from my sullen expression. My mum greets me with a big sloppy kiss and a hug, then bustles off to find a vase big enough for the huge bouquet, and I’m secretly pleased when she fails and has to get two and separate the bunch. I’ve phoned ahead to tell them I’m taking them out to lunch, so in a change from her usual velour ‘leisure’ suit, she’s sporting a new matching knitted skirt, jumper and jacket, which I guess is my dad’s birthday present to her (which probably means that he stood by in BHS while she shopped with the joint cheque book).

  I move through into the front room, where my father is sitting, also dressed up, which for him means wearing trousers with a belt rather than an elasticated waistband. My parents’ dog, Patch, has had an operation on his ear, so he’s wearing one of those plastic cones round his neck that’s designed to stop him scratching at the scar, and he can’t get used to the thing. My father is teasing him by throwing chocolate dog treats for him to catch, which, because of the collar disorienting him, he keeps missing. They land in the cone where he can’t see them but can smell them, and as a result he’s currently driving himself mad trying to get them out. My dad thinks this game is the most hilarious thing he’s ever seen, and he’s giggling so hard I worry he’ll have a heart attack. He looks towards me to share his fun, but even this spectacle doesn’t provoke more than half a smile from me.

  ‘No Julie?’ asks my mother, walking into the room with a vase in each hand.

  ‘Mum, it’s Charlie. And no. She . . . had to work today. She sends her regards.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame. Such a lovely girl,’ says my dad. I don’t comment.

  ‘You could do a lot worse, you know,’ says my mum. ‘Why don’t you follow Nick’s example?’

  ‘Because I don’t think he’s setting a very good one, for one thing. Besides, I’m not interested in getting married.’ The last thing I want now is one of my mum’s when-are-we-going-to-get-a-grandchild speeches.

  ‘Oh, of course you are, dear,’ she says. ‘Don’t be such a Palestine.’

  ‘Mum, it’s “Philistine”. And anyway, I wouldn’t be so sure that Nick’s feeling so pro-matrimony at the moment.’ Fortunately, my mother is too busy arranging her flowers to pursue this.

  Not having lunch at home is quite a treat for my mum as, apart from their odd trips to London, my dad’s idea of eating out is a sandwich in the garden. Gourmet restaurants being somewhat thin on the ground in Margate, unless you count the all-you-can-eat-for-five-pounds-ninety-nine carvery on the main road, we’re heading out into the countryside (i.e. where the town stops and grass starts) to one of the better pubs in the area, the Badger’s Arms.

  I usher them out to and into the car, my dad hobbling as fast as his walking stick will let him. He loves the Impresser, and always sits proudly in the front passenger seat, relegating my mother to the back on account, he insists, of his bad knee. My mum, on the other hand, gave up driving some time in the nineteen sixties, coincidentally around the same time she met my dad, and has had her nerves frayed too many times by his recent driving performance. She’s not so keen on the way I drive either, but at least restricts her comments to a nervous ‘It’s a very fast car isn’t it, Adam’, whenever I overtake anything more rapid than a milk float.

  My parents always eat with metronomic precision – lunch at midday and dinner at six o’clock on the dot – so we’re knocking anxiously on the pub door at one minute past twelve. I point them towards a corner table, and then go to the bar and buy a round of drinks for us all for less than the price of a pint of beer in London – the usual port and lemon for my mother, which again I have to explain how to make to the girl behind the bar, and a pint of the local bitter for my dad.

  My normal rule of thumb, particularly in London, is never to eat at a restaurant that displays pictures of the food. Here we go past that, because when I pick up the menu, it actually seems to have samples of the various dishes adhering to its plastic laminated front. Fortunately, the listing is reproduced on chalkboards round the bar, so I don’t have to risk food poisoning by handling the encrusted ones. My dad can’t read what’s on the menu because he hasn’t brought his glasses with him, so I have to dictate the various choices to him, but as ever he opts for the ploughman’s lunch, and, again as ever, makes the same joke about hoping the ploughman doesn’t mind.

  My mother, whenever she goes out to eat, chooses each meal as if she’s on death row and it will be her last, and spends hours making her choice, so I’ve bought a packet of peanuts to keep my dad’s stomach rumblings at bay. We munch through them while she debates with herself about whether to have the prawn cocktail or the soup to start.

  Eventually, with the same sort of effort as if she’s answering a question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, she opts for the prawn cocktail. Resisting the temptation to ask if that’s her final answer, I rush to the bar to order before she catches sight of the specials board.

  We proceed through our lunch with the usual family small talk – how’s work, how’s the flat, what do you think about the political situation in Nicaragua – and I wince when I re-open the cut on my lip trying to eat a larger-than-usual potato.

  ‘Hurt your mouth, son?’ asks my dad.

  ‘I cut myself shaving,’ I reply.

  He looks a little confused. ‘With your electric razor?’

  ‘How’s things with you?’ I ask him, trying to divert the conversation away from my life, as my mother disappears to survey the choice of puddings.

  ‘Not good,’ he whispers, leaning across to me. ‘Your mother is taking a computing
course.’ My dad tells me this in the same tone I imagine he’ll use if he ever has to tell me that she’s about to go in for major surgery. Fortunately, my mother’s premature arrival back at the table prevents him from going into detail.

  ‘I thought about the spotted dick,’ she tells us, ‘but I’ve had it the last two times we’ve been here.’ As I get up to pay the bill, she adds, as an afterthought, ‘You can have too much dick.’ My father and I don’t dare make eye contact.

  Back at home, my mother opens the box of After Eights she’s been saving since Christmas, obviously having decided to keep the Black Magic for when I’m gone, and we play that game where you have to model words with bits of plasticine. My first card says ‘snake’ and in seconds I’ve rolled my plasticine into a long thin strip. My mum can’t get it.

  After some severe reverse cheating, where I try and ensure my mother wins (well, it is her birthday), we retire to the sofa with a glass of my dad’s home-made to partake in that staple of modern family life – the television. I sit there and watch my parents drop off into a nap, barely an hour after dinner and despite the strong coffee.

  As this is my parents’ house, there’s precious little entertainment. I flick quickly through the choice of programmes, but they only have the normal terrestrial channels, which on a Saturday afternoon provide little in the way of anything I’d be interested in. I get up and look through their video collection, but this, too, takes all of ten seconds. My father still writes the name and date of what he’s taped on the side of every cassette, which means that by now there are about seven labels stuck one on top of the other, through which you can read the previous contents on the label below. When he got to the last of his labels he started writing in pencil and rubbing out the previous entry, which after about thirty uses has left the title almost indecipherable. All I can make out is ‘atch of da’, which I guess is last week’s football, along with several gardening programmes. They do have one pre-recorded tape, Pride and Prejudice, but I’ve already had to sit through this several times, watching my mother swoon at Mr Darcy (do people still swoon nowadays, I wonder?), and as attractive as the prospect is of fast-forwarding to all the bodice-ripping moments, quite frankly I just can’t be bothered.

  Instead, I pick up the local paper and flick through, stopping as always at the property pages, which I always like to keep one eye on so I have a good idea of what to expect in the will. When I get to the ‘announcements’ section, I recognize various people from my schooldays, their grinning faces topped by thinning hair as they pose for their wedding snaps, caught for posterity by the paper’s official photographer. Worse still, I read notices reporting their delight at the birth of their babies, and I look at them disdainfully. Or is it with a tinge of jealousy, I wonder?

  I turn the page and have to stop myself from laughing out loud. It’s obviously that time again, as there’s a two-page spread featuring this year’s Bonny Baby competition entries. For a moment I entertain a mad impulse to telephone them all and tell them to destroy all copies of the paper, or be haunted by their toothless mugshots for ever more, but then I realize that they are, of course, still only babies, so probably wouldn’t understand.

  Hearing a loud snort next to me, I look round to see my father looking startled; he’s snored himself awake again. He does this a lot, but it still seems to surprise him as much as the first time. He looks at me, realizes what he’s done, smiles, and is back asleep again before I even have a chance to think of anything to say.

  I sit there miserably for an hour or so, and then check my watch. There’s still time for me to drive back into London and meet Charlie, but I’m not in anything like the right frame of mind for that particular conversation, so instead I get up quietly and sneak into the kitchen, where I liberate another bottle of wine from the fridge and pour myself a large glass. I don’t often drink on my own, but it’s this or kill myself whilst watching Little House on the Prairie.

  As I walk back into the lounge and sit down, my father snorts again and looks up. He notices my sullen expression and the large glass of wine in my hand, then glances across to check that my mother is asleep. She’s sitting in her chair, her head nodding as she tries, unsuccessfully, to fight off the combined assault of two port and lemons, a large lunch and the warm room.

  My dad stands up slowly, puts a finger to his lips and, picking up the bottle of wine and his glass, beckons me into his den. He pushes the door shut quietly, leaving my mother dozing out of earshot, and, unusually perceptively, puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Women trouble, son?’ he asks, and it all pours out of me. Well, an edited version really, as I decide that telling my mum and dad that they might be grandparents but perhaps never see their grandchild probably wouldn’t do a lot for their opinion of their favourite, albeit only, son. Particularly on my mum’s birthday.

  He sits patiently as I tell him about my fears for my future, how I have no paternal instinct and how my friends are concerned that I’ll end up alone. He nods wisely as I explain how I still feel like a child inside, that I’m just not ready for the responsibilities of adulthood, and certainly not prepared for the demands of parenthood. And, lastly, he listens carefully while I tell him that I’m worried I might lose Charlie because I don’t know how to tell her what I feel about her.

  I finish, and gaze at him expectantly as he considers all that I’ve said. The last lecture I had from my dad was almost eighteen years ago, when he found some pornographic magazines under my bed – they weren’t mine, of course, I was looking after them for Nick, you understand – so I’m intrigued as to what he’s going to say.

  ‘Son . . .’ he begins, and I think, oh dear, it’s going to be serious if he starts like that, so I prepare myself for a long tirade, lots of ‘your mother and me’ type advice and examples. Instead, mercifully, he keeps it short and sweet.

  ‘Son, do you love Charlie?’

  ‘Er . . .’ I’m so embarrassed about this sort of questioning from my dad that I go all red and feel like I did when he discovered my, I mean, Nick’s copies of Razzie. ‘Er, yeah, I think so,’ I stammer.

  He refills both our glasses. ‘Then don’t forget, the word love is a verb as well. And a verb is?’

  ‘A doing word,’ I answer, automatically.

  ‘That’s right,’ he says, proudly. ‘It’s not just something you feel, it’s something you have to do.’

  Always the teacher, my dad, and although English was never my best subject at school, I understand exactly what he means.

  I’ve drunk too much of my dad’s home-made wine, and so, rather than drive back to London and risk my licence, I decide to stay over, reasoning that I’d better have a clear head anyway when I finally talk to Charlie. And, besides, I still don’t have a clue what I’m going to say, so I keep my mobile switched off just in case. I’m in my old bedroom, but it’s very different to how it used to be. Some people like to keep their kids’ rooms the same as the day they left, so even if you go home to visit when you’re thirty you still find yourself sleeping in the bed you had when you were fifteen, struggling to get the too-short duvet to cover your toes and your chest at the same time, whilst the model aeroplanes you made as a child still hang from the ceiling.

  Not my parents. The minute I bought the flat in London they must have felt pretty sure I wasn’t coming back to live with them, as they gave all my furniture and stuff away and converted my room into a repository for my dad’s books, wine-making equipment, and somewhere for my mother’s knitting machine, which she bought during an economy drive back in the seventies, used to make one jumper for my father that would have been more appropriate for an orang-utan as the sleeves were so long, and then left to gather dust, never quite managing to throw the thing away. Thus I’m lying in a sleeping bag on the world’s most uncomfortable sofa-bed, nursing the beginnings of my second hangover in as many days, my mind spinning with the events of the past few days, and beginning to wish that I had chanced the trip back to London
after all.

  I’ve just about managed to get to sleep, serenaded by the constant bubbling of Chateau Bailey from what looks like one of those Victorian laboratories that you see on cheap horror films, when I’m woken by a knock on the door. I open my eyes, struggling to clear my head, and see two shadowy figures appear, and when I switch the light on and sit up, blinking in the sudden brightness, I see that it’s my mother, accompanied by Nick’s mum from next door. They’re both wearing their dressing gowns, and when my vision clears I notice that Nick’s mum is crying. I check my watch and see that it’s only half past three in the morning, but I’m suddenly wide awake with the clarity that it’s going to be bad news.

  ‘It’s Nick,’ she sobs.

  It’s a good minute before I can make any sense of her tearful ramblings, but the words car, accident and Beachy Head start to form an awful sentence in my head long before she can put them in the right order. My hand goes unconsciously to my cut mouth as I recall with horror the events of Friday night, and in particular the look on Nick’s face as he’d stormed out of his flat. Surely not. Not Nick . . .

  Fighting to swallow my rising sense of panic, I usher them both from the room, telling my mum to make some tea while I get dressed. I’m downstairs before the kettle’s boiled, and carry the tray through into the front room, where I manage to get the story from Nick’s mum as she sips her tea, my mother’s arm round her shoulders.

  They’d been woken by the police, she tells us, phoning to say they’d found a burnt-out Ferrari at the bottom of the cliffs at Beachy Head. When they’d punched the registration number into their computer it had given them Nick’s name at the family address, as in one of his rare cost-cutting exercises he’d registered it back at the family home in Margate. Cheaper insurance, you see, he’d told me.