by Adrian White
“But you’re a hard act to follow,” said Mike, “and again, I know I’m being unfair to Margaret, because I really did love her all this time and I fancied her like mad and I still do, to tell you the truth, it was just – ”
“That you’d met me and I’d messed with your head?”
“Yes,” said Mike, “yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well don’t be, because I’m not. To this day, I’m glad I got to know you then and that you were a part of my life, even if you couldn’t stay a part of it forever.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” said Katie, “for what it’s worth.”
Katie felt good to be able to sit here and say this to Mike.
“Tell me about Margaret,” she said.
“Yes . . . Margaret,” said Mike.
“And I don’t want any ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ bullshit, either.”
“No, that’s not why I came,” said Mike. “I know I’m a weird fuck, so I can’t complain when people don’t understand me.”
Katie laughed.
“What’s so funny?” asked Mike. “Don’t you believe me?”
“No, it’s nothing,” said Katie. “Somebody called me just that – a weird fuck – only this morning.”
“Well, you are – or were at any rate – and twice as bad as I ever was.”
“Go on,” said Katie.
Mike took a drink and finished off his pint. He poured out some of the iced water that came with the sandwiches.
“As I said, I fancy Margaret like mad. That might seem self-evident to you, but I keep on going back to it because I see so many men my age living with women who they just don’t want. Whatever they once had, if they ever had it, they don’t have it any more. And I’m not claiming there haven’t been times – phases, if you like – when I lost sight of that with Margaret, but I’m proud of the fact that I fancy my wife.”
“You really are a weird fuck,” said Katie.
“Yeah, well, you can imagine what she was like as a teenager – very, very sexy; dirty, even.”
“Spare me, please.”
“Anyway, when it came right down to it, once I’d got over my moody return from college, and my not knowing what I was going to do, Margaret understood that eventually I’d work my way back to her. She didn’t know about you, though she might have guessed there was someone, and she didn’t know what my problem was with getting a job or earning a living or deciding where to live; but she knew that once I’d come to my senses, I’d see that I was meant to be with her. Does that sound conceited?”
“Not necessarily,” said Katie.
“It’s meant to be a compliment – to Margaret – that she knew all along what she wanted and she was just waiting for me to come to the same conclusion. I think men are a bit slow sometimes, when it comes to things like that?”
“There’s no one arguing with you here,” said Katie.
“We knew each other so well by then that when I finally realised what I wanted – as in, to share my life and have a family with Margaret – it was simply a matter of where we would choose to live.”
“And so you moved back to Manchester?”
“Yes,” said Mike. “Neither family were ecstatic about us getting married – even if they didn’t actively try to dissuade us – but we knew we had to set up on our own elsewhere, and Manchester was where I knew best. And learnt to love, it has to be said. I had enough money for us to move over and buy a small place to live – ”
“You see,” interrupted Katie, “there you go again. Young college graduates of twenty one don’t have enough money to buy their own place, just because they decide that’s what they want to do.”
“But it was all my own money; what I’d earned from the stock market, mainly, and that was it – all gone, there was no more. I’d made my big decision about Margaret, but for the life of me I still couldn’t think about how I was going to work for a living. And the more Margaret went on about it, the less inclined I was to do anything. I knew I had to do something, but I just couldn’t come up with any bright ideas.”
“You could have got a job, like the rest of the world.”
“I know,” said Mike, “but for some reason I think I wanted to live through a little poverty for a while.”
“Like a tourist,” said Katie.
“Yes, like a tourist, but also because I’d seen where money had got me in the past – absolutely nowhere – and now I felt like it was all that was expected of me.”
“So you were a contrary little bastard?” said Katie. “I can imagine that went down well with Margaret?”
“She was concerned all right – more than concerned, actually. I think she wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into, especially because she was pregnant at the time.”
“That would focus her mind all right, I’d have thought.”
“Yes, and it focussed mine too,” said Mike, “but I still didn’t know what to do. I’m only talking about a few months or so, but Margaret found it tough being away from home, in a foreign city – ”
“And being married to a waster who’d never had to work in his life?”
“I guess so.”
“And it was Eugene who came to your rescue?”
“Yes, Eugene.”
“Is he well?” asked Katie. “And happy?”
“You wouldn’t recognise him Katie – he’s so sure and confident of himself. He’s just . . . I don’t know, he’s a good friend.”
“That’s good.”
“Of course,” said Mike, “straight after college, he was still just Eugene and I only saw him socially a couple of times to let him know I was back in Manchester. He was doing research at the university – in maths – but he’d become a computer freak and that’s all he’d talk about when we met. But he had absolutely no idea of the practical applications of what he was talking about.”
“Whereas the great Mike Maguire, of course . . . ”
“Well I didn’t just dive in and tell him what he should be doing, but at one point he was responsible for the interviewing of applicants to study maths, and he showed me the spreadsheet he had set up. So I asked about how sophisticated all the college systems were for things like registration and timetables and budgets, and it seemed everything was fairly haphazard – the odd enthusiast such as Eugene working on their own, but there was not one whole integrated system.”
“And you persuaded them you were the man for the job?”
“No, I persuaded them it needed doing and that my company was capable of doing it.”
“And your company was?”
“Myself and Eugene.”
“You’re a fucking chancer, Mike.”
“Not really – I knew Eugene could do it, and I was right.”
“So you were on your way, back in business?” asked Katie.
“More or less,” said Mike. “Eugene didn’t give up his day job for a while, but eventually we became so busy and were making so much money that I persuaded him it was for the best.”
“And was he happy to give up on his maths?”
“I think so; he liked the challenge of each new project we took on and did all the programming himself for the first few years. He just switched his energies from one thing to the other.”
“And found a practical way of using his brain in the world?”
“Yes,” said Mike, “I think so. If Eugene helped me back then – which he did, enormously – I think I helped him too. Of course, he could have stayed doing research forever, but I think he liked what we did. It changed again when we switched more to managing and maintaining the systems we’d installed, or other systems that businesses had bought with absolutely no support. At first I dealt with the clients and relayed the problems back to Eugene, but he gradually became involved on site and more socially adept at dealing with people. As I said – you wouldn’t recognise him now.”
“And meanwhile you were becoming a daddy?” asked Katie.
“Yes
, and I have to say, as soon as I did then everything fell into place for me. Again, I guess Margaret knew how it would be all along, but I had to be shown. I hadn’t realised that this was the point of everything.”
“It’s what they say,” said Katie.
“And it’s true, it’s true,” said Mike. “You know the Bob Dylan song – ‘Sara’? Well, it’s a bit soppy, I know, but there’s a line in it about being on the beach with his wife while the kids play in the sand and it just seems to be so what it’s all about. You’re there with your partner and you love her and want her and the kids are happy, but there’s always one of them demanding your attention, so you don’t actually have much time to yourselves, but you know that when you do it’s going to be nice and so you spend a lot of your time anticipating being alone together rather than being together, but it’s still good.”
“How many children do you have?”
“Three – two boys and a girl. Jack, Mike and Katherine; they’re not kids any more, though. Jack will be twenty two this year.”
“Fucking hell, Mike!”
“Fucking hell is right – you look around and another decade’s gone by. You just remember snapshots of each one at different ages, but you’re so damn busy all the time, you end up wondering just where all the years have gone. It might be a cliché, but it’s an accurate one.”
“So you became a responsible parent?” said Katie.
“Yes,” said Mike, but he didn’t continue. He shook the almost melted ice around the bottom of his empty glass of water.
“What?” asked Katie.
Mike took his time to reply.
“Yeah,” he said, “I became a responsible parent. For years I was the sole wage earner and that, as you said, focuses your mind all right. You forget any fancy notions or crazy ideas, and you certainly forget about doing anything that might be bordering on illegal. You make sure the next contracts are signed and that the work doesn’t dry up, and that was tough enough in the Eighties, I can tell you. A lot of people still didn’t really trust computers, or what they could do for your business. We had to wait quite a while before we were proven right – before it became obvious that, just to survive, every business was going to have to install some form of a system. And of course, by then, everybody was at it so we had to re-invent ourselves all over again.”
“But you managed, from the sound of it?”
“Yes,” said Mike, “but it was no fun, and I didn’t like what it was doing to me. I was losing something – I was losing the bit of me that I liked.”
“But you’d become someone Margaret could trust and depend upon?”
“Yes but this is the thing – I don’t think she liked what I’d become either, only in a way I was her creation. I’d done what she wanted, made our life secure and yes, I had become someone she could depend upon.”
“But she missed her Mike?”
“I missed her Mike! I told you I wouldn’t go on about Margaret, and I’ll try not to, and I can’t speak for how she felt or when she felt it, but I do know what I was thinking at the time.”
“Which was what?” asked Katie.
“Well, the thing that made sense of everything for me, as I said, was being a parent. And, as I keep on saying, I was still relatively young. You grow up yourself as a kid and then all of a sudden you’re this conscious being, wondering what the fuck it’s all about? And I think that’s what happened to me after college because I knew it wasn’t just about the money; I knew it wasn’t just about getting high and having a good time; and I knew that some things just can’t be put right, no matter what you throw at them. I knew all these incredible people – ”
“Remarkable people,” said Katie.
“Exactly,” said Mike, “remarkable people, but I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing on the planet. And then one day this tiny thing that you’ve watched being born, this eating, shitting and sleeping machine – sleeping if you’re lucky, that is – looks up at you and recognises you and smiles. And it might be just wind making him smile but it doesn’t matter, because he follows you with his eyes and you might be just a shape but that doesn’t matter either because you’re his shape and he likes you – loves you, actually, unconditionally and without question.”
“You liked being a dad, then?” asked Katie.
“I did, yes,” said Mike, “and I do, but what I’m saying is this: if I’d wanted an answer to what the hell I was doing on the planet, I was given one fairly immediately.”
“And you were still only twenty one?”
“Yes,” said Mike. “I didn’t mind at first where my new responsibilities were taking me, because I was learning to be a dad.”
“And then?”
“And then pretty much the same for quite a few years, well into the Nineties. We were fairly well off by this stage – ”
“Legitimately!”
“Yes, legitimately, and also because Margaret had returned to work, so we had two wages coming in.”
“So you started having fancy notions again?” asked Katie.
“No, amazingly,” said Mike. “I just carried on the same old same old, which I think now was a mistake but at the time I thought was the right thing to do. Having the kids was not so easy for Margaret – it’s not that glamorous being stuck at home all the time and I didn’t always have that much to contribute on the rare times I might be around. I guess it was Margaret’s time for wondering just what the fuck it’s all about. So when she started back at work I thought we were getting through the rough patch, that once she was back in the workplace she’d get back some of her self worth.”
“And she didn’t?”
“Only up to a point,” said Mike. “I thought if I just encouraged her it would be enough; I guess she needed more from me than that. And there was something else going on at the time too.”
Mike poured himself the remaining water from the jug on the table.
“Are you okay for a drink?” he asked Katie.
“I’m fine,” she said, “thanks – go on.”
“The kids were growing up – which you’ll probably say is obvious, but it’s not so obvious when you’re right in the middle of it. When they’re really young, you struggle on from one phase to the next – especially with your first kid – and just when you come to terms with where they’re at, they’ve moved on to the next phase. The second time around you recognise things a lot quicker, and by the third you’re an old pro. We now had two teenage sons, which was hard enough but nothing too tragic – the odd scare was all. But then Jack was about to leave school – ”
“And Margaret was desperate for him to go to college, and you didn’t care one way or the other?”
“Yes,” agreed Mike. “We went through all that and it was as you describe, but we got over it. The point was – Jack was going, he was leaving home. He tried college at first but really, what he was doing was leaving home. And I don’t think Margaret had thought that through.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s kind of accepted isn’t it, that mothers love their children more than they love their partners?”
“Is it?” asked Katie.
“Put it this way – every bloke knows that it’s true. It’s never said out loud but when it gets right down to it, given the choice, mothers would go with their kids every time. And that’s fair enough because most partners are a waste of space anyway, I know, but what happens when the kids leave home? The mothers are left with the horse they didn’t back.”
“So Jack was gone – ”
“And it was pretty obvious Mike junior wouldn’t be far behind – he couldn’t wait to be either travelling, or earning, or both.”
“And Margaret was left with you and Katherine, and the feeling that her life was passing her by.”
“Yes,” said Mike.
“And now you’re thinking the same? That once Katherine leaves, the two of you are going to be strangers to one another?”
“It’s possible,” said
Mike. “I hope it doesn’t work out that way, but the thought has occurred to me.”
“And so now you’re thinking – did I make the right choice all those years ago? What if I’d stayed with Katie? Would my life have been so very different? Fucking hell, Mike – this is just mid-life crisis nonsense and you know it. Please tell me you didn’t bring me here for that – you know we could never have been together. We wouldn’t have lasted twenty minutes and here you are, married to Margaret for over twenty years.”
Mike put down his glass and smiled.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t bring you here for that. I loved you Katie, you know that, and I think I was right to love you, but I don’t think that’s the answer to my problems. I’m here for a very different reason altogether.”
“A few years ago,” said Mike, “Margaret had sex with another man. She says it was just a one-off thing and I believe her. It hurt me a lot at the time and it still hurts me now, but I can see why it happened and that’s why I just told you all that shit. I can’t say I handled it well – I don’t know how to measure these things – and I was in a bad way there for a long time. But the way I feel now is, I love Margaret and I want us to be together. I don’t think it will be easy, but I think that’s the only hope I have of making sense of my life again.
“The way Margaret feels is different. I think she hates herself and can’t get over what she’s done. I don’t think I helped by going off at the deep end like I did, but I couldn’t stop that at the time. Maybe some couples can brush this off, but I couldn’t and now Margaret can’t.”
Mike paused for a moment.
“C’est la vie, you might think,” he said. “Tough shit, get over it! There’s no reason why everything should be okay just because I want it to be. I wouldn’t argue with you about that.
“Margaret’s reaction has been different to mine: it’s been to shut down her feelings and to not let me in. She’s put all her energy elsewhere – into her work and her studies – because, after all, that’s the direction her life was heading anyway. But I don’t want to live my life in that way.”
Mike was quiet again for a moment, and Katie didn’t speak.