by Adam Thorpe
‘I think we should celebrate,’ Brian had said, dumping his napkin on the remains of his strawberry sundae.
‘Could be a bit premature, as it were.’
‘Look, Alan, they’re going to be fine. You’ll be tucking them in this time tomorrow. Get on the hotel blower now, upstairs, in the privacy of your room, and then come down and relax with Uncle Brian. Press nine for the outside line. The rate per minute’s the equivalent of Chad’s GNP but never mind, just do it. You know they’ve got Merryweather on draught?’
Hospital reception took ages to find Jill’s new ward. At first the woman, who sounded to Alan as though English was her third language, let alone second, claimed Jill wasn’t even in the hospital – neither she nor the baby. There was no Jill Hurst in this hospital. Alan had difficulty understanding what she was saying, and wondered whether the cleaner had picked up the phone. Then he had stupid thoughts: if someone kicked the bucket, did their name get erased immediately from the reception’s computer? Another voice came on sounding like Ali G and put him through to the maternity desk.
He sat on the end of the bed, getting ready for the bedside manner.
The phone rang for ages but he hung in there, chewing his lip and swearing and checking his watch. He hadn’t heard anything for five hours. He should have phoned every hour, but he didn’t want to keep disturbing Jill and the hours slipped by very fast. At last a nursing assistant – Polish, Alan reckoned – put him through to the right ward after a long and earnest discussion with someone else. It was as if Jill had temporarily left this life. The nursing assistant sounded breathless, as if she’d been running. They were searching for an extension number, which should have been pinned up on the board. What British hospitals need, thought Alan, is for people to stop falling ill, not health co-ordinators and governmental targets.
He finally got there and the nurse – male, a friendly bloke, quite posh – said they were both doing fine. Jill was asleep. Alan felt very grateful. ‘Thanks so much, mate.’ The nurse had his new mobile number, yes, and his hotel number. The nurse’s name was Helen and she’d be there until four in the morning. Alan had been sure it was a bloke and realised he’d dropped a clanger but the nurse was nice enough not to care. Maybe it was a bloke, who’d played Doctors and Nurses one time too many with his brother.
He took the lift down feeling ready to relax, double-checking the mobile and punching the new extension number into the PDA three times, just in case. The lift announced the floors in French and as he went out the most beautiful bird he’d ever seen in his life went in, probably on her way to some Russian mafioso in the top suite.
Roger Unwin always made a point of joining someone for a symbolic hour after the first full day and there the bastard was – in the cool bar with Geoff Soames, Tony Malpas and Jon S. Volkman. Hairy Mary and her two colleagues were by themselves under a model of a gondola. They were all laughing with their hands to their mouths, as if spitting out stones.
Amazingly, the less-cool, cosier bar was, if not seething, at least lively. People came from all around, the barman told them. Reproductions of old scenes of Rome, complete with cracks in the paint, were hung beneath gallery-type brass spots. The seats were black leather.
‘This is very swanky,’ said Brian.
‘Why Rome?’ Simon Milner asked.
‘The Harcourt’s part of the Premiere chain,’ said Phil.
‘So?’
‘Bought up last year by Mediaset, Berlusconi’s outfit. Makes the Emperor of Europe feel at home on his royal visits to Stirling.’
‘Is it really? Premiere? Part of Mediaset?’
‘Yes, Brian.’
‘I think I’ll stick to halves. I’ll be his one-man loss-making division. Isn’t the gyp trying to take control of Kirch, now?’
They settled next to a seven-foot rubber plant with phallic red flowers that turned out to be plastic, but very well done.
Alan shook its leaves. ‘The Day of the Triffids, look.’
‘Warn me if it starts to move,’ Phil said.
‘That’s what you said when you first saw Pat Ryan,’ Brian joked.
He went on cracking jokes about the chief executive and the chairman and the managing director and then about George W. Bush, stuff mostly pulled off the Internet that the others had read too, but forgotten. Otherwise they talked shop and old TV programmes and the latest dashboard navigation gizmos. There was a motor museum in Stirling, apparently. Brian told them at great length about the Bealieu Autojumble a few years back when he’d bumped into Roger Unwin beating some poor old bugger down for a couple of Riley camshafts: they’d all heard it before and many times.
Alan let it roll; no one talked incubators. The mobile stayed silent. He was getting slowly and pleasantly plastered on Laphroaig, its burn gripping his testicles, it felt like. Everything would be fine.
He made them chuckle with his account of the ice-cream museum and then felt he shouldn’t have told them, that he’d broken the deal with God.
Phil said, out of the blue, ‘I think we should raise a glass to Alan and Jill and the new baby. Eh, wet the baby’s head, as they say.’
They raised their glasses and looked at Alan. He raised his malt and smiled and said, ‘Snap.’ They drank and then he said, ‘Jill’s a great girl.’
It was his shout; he went to the bar and had to squeeze his way through to find a point of vantage. The barman, who hailed from Slovenia, had two rings in his nose and a pale, artsy-crafty face that made Alan feel stupid, middle-aged and fat.
Alan returned with the drinks and told them about the trendy barman from Slovenia.
‘You’re not fat, you’re thickset,’ said Phil.
‘Tell that to Jill.’
The conversation slid onto wives, then sex. Timid Simon Milner said nothing but was very interested. The sex talk was not dirty, it was vague and humorous. Alan told them about the smasher he’d seen going into the lift, but petered out when he realised that it wasn’t very interesting. Phil mentioned the retail manager who’d died of a heart attack while screwing his secretary. Ah, said Brian, that was in the days when their company was still a family enterprise. Heart-stopping views, Alan joked, but no one got it. Brian tended to hog the humour. He said he would stop screwing Sandra, his secretary, immediately. Sandra was forty-nine with hairs on her chin, nicknamed ‘Jaws’. Brian tapped his ticker, which was a genuine worry for him, in fact. Alan told them he had a high cholesterol count, but didn’t make a funny of it because it did, in fact, worry him. Brian said the answer, as they all knew, was straight Scotch and Viagra. Alan felt left out when the others nodded sagely. Brian went on to crack a few new Viagra jokes; the last one, about a bloke with a dick so large he had to use a golf-bag and then hire a caddie-car when he got excited, had them all weeping. They knew they were being looked at by colleagues on other tables, were scoring points and provoking envy.
After their recovery, Phil told them in his deep and steady voice about his teenage daughter’s low-life boyfriends and how he was regarded as a grouchy puritan for keeping tabs on their movements.
‘You’re no grouchy puritan, Phil,’ Brian said, in a Billy Connolly voice. ‘I mean, you’re from Dumfries, mon!’
They discussed the voracious sexual appetite of modern teenagers, quoting statistics from radio and newspaper features and a recent BBC Two documentary which, amazingly, three of them had watched – only Simon could recall it in any useful detail, talking as usual like a PowerPoint. The subject was deflected for a moment by Phil, who wondered if they’d seen a documentary in the same series about the Big Bang.
‘I never watch pornography, Phil,’ Brian joked.
After a serious quarter of an hour discussing the origins of the universe and the size of galaxies and the mystery of their creation, they paused as if for a breather. Simon Milner had said it was all mathematics.
‘No smoke without fire,’ said Brian, with a sigh, and drained his pint.
After a moment Phil said, very st
eadily, ‘Well, it makes me feel that what I have done in my life is very small potatoes.’
‘You on about your bollocks again, Phil? I dunno. What shall we do with him, lads?’
They laughed, Brian clapping Phil on the shoulder. They all felt good.
Then Alan (who’d been very quiet) said: ‘In my opinion, that’s all marketing hype, that teenage sex stuff. Sex improves with age.’
‘He’s taking the Michael again,’ said Brian, who was fifty-three with a close-cropped, grey beard.
‘I think we’re all too well behaved,’ Alan went on. He leant forward, so they could hear him even when he spoke quietly. His words felt liquid and warm and honest to him. ‘That’s why marriages go wrong. The older you get, the more interesting and varied you have to be.’
‘You’re hardly old,’ said Phil.
‘For example, Jill and I had a very good time the other night, after a long time off.’
‘It’s the single malt that talks,’ Brian said, lifting his finger on high.
‘It was the best time ever,’ said Alan, staring at a Carlsberg beer mat on the table. ‘And not just because she was very pregnant, I might add. Three, four nights ago. It was a bit rough.’ He swallowed. He used to collect beer mats as a kid, stick them up on the Grand Prix wallpaper by his bed. ‘I threw her about a bit, in fact. She liked it, obviously. We were a bit rough. But she wanted it like that, obviously.’
There was a silence between them. The music beat away through the general jabber of the others in the bar.
Brian frowned. ‘You what? You threw her about, Alan?’
‘Never done that before. Never been so rough. It was safe, though. We had a really cracking time.’
‘Would you like to give us more details?’ Brian said, winking, but half to himself as if he was unsure.
‘Nothing to be ashamed of, obviously,’ Alan said. ‘A natural phenomenon.’
‘That’s what they said about Krakatoa,’ Brian quipped.
There was a silence which accumulated embarrassment like an inane giggle getting louder and louder.
‘Was that, er, was that really such a good idea?’ Phil asked, slowly and carefully.
‘What?’
Phil moved his head about like a wobbly toy, unable to formulate the words.
‘In the – circumstances,’ he said, at last, tripping a bit over the word.
‘It wasn’t an idea, good or otherwise,’ Alan replied, his face serious. ‘It was poetry in motion.’
The others cracked up at that and had a good honest laff, but then didn’t say anything more for a few minutes. Brian went off to the toilet. Simon Milner stared at his glass. Phil pretended to look around him at the other drinkers. Alan felt much better now that he’d told them about his personal life, though his decks were fairly awash: he wasn’t used to malt, these days. It was very clean and relaxing. It covered everything – the noise, faces, everything – in a soft velvety fur.
There was nothing to be ashamed of.
And then he said, when they were all settled again over a fresh round: ‘If only she hadn’t carried that heavy shopping.’
But no one responded.
Phil’s mobile – bagpipes, for God’s sake – sounded and he was on it for ages, very loud and dull: ‘Good stuff . . . good stuff . . . good stuff . . . fantastic . . . what’s his response on the back of it . . . it’ll all go down on his HR file . . .’
‘Those sex-calls are a guinea a minute, Phil,’ joked Brian.
‘Good stuff,’ Phil went on, oblivious. ‘Absolutely right, John . . . fantastic . . . good stuff . . . excellent . . .’
When he came off, all he said was: ‘John Harvey. He’s fluffed it. Again.’
Just before midnight, two floozies in very short skirts and what looked like fishnet tops, their black bras visible, appeared at their table and spent half an hour talking dirty. They weren’t Scottish. They were exceedingly pissed and came from Southampton. They turned out not to be whores but salesgirls at the Kingfisher conference, which they seemed not to be appreciating. The title of their conference was People First. They worked for a subsidiary of Kingfisher’s called Sparrowcom. It was in the DIY public relations field. One of them was as black as the other was pasty-white.
‘We came here for some fun,’ the white girl said, wriggling in her chair. ‘Ain’t that what you’re here for, gents? Ooh, my skirt’s getting caught in my arsehole. I don’t bother with panties. I stopped seeing my doctor when he started taking my temperature the French way, y’know? Only he was using his finger instead of a barometer.’
‘Thermometer,’ said the black girl, who was on her seventh Bacardi. ‘Vanessa here is a thick slag.’
‘I don’t mind a big dick, though,’ said Vanessa, ‘because that’s not got a fingernail on the end, has it?’
She roared with laughter, as did the black girl. They were almost shouting, but then the other people were yelling and guffawing and the music filled in the gaps. The men were too polite, or maybe excited, to tell them to go away. Alan wasn’t excited. He watched everything from a distance, like a sociologist, wondering if these two girls had ever been helpless little newborns. Well, they’d had to have been. They weren’t born in fishnet tops. The heavy, repetitive music was like an evil slow handclap. He hadn’t meant to get plastered, which is why he’d kept off the beer. Also, he was trying to reduce his belly to proportions that Jill would look at without wincing. Phil was right – he wasn’t fat, but he did have this belly. At one point, in about the fourth month, he and Jill had exactly the same shape. XXL. It was surprising, it had crept up on him via beer and Mars bars. He’d eat at least three Mars bars a day, to keep himself going. With a couple of non-light Pepsis at lunchtime. Then a few beers to round the day off. He was by no means over the average office weight, though. Nor was he the heaviest drinker, far from it – in fact, he hardly ever got completely and absolutely scrambled on Friday and Saturday nights, like a lot of the others, and he’d kicked the coke habit when he was still with Jonson & Jonson. But he was getting too old for it, at thirty-nine. The drinking lark. Now he was a father, he’d start to behave. He would love Jill and – Samantha – to bits, he would. He’d be a very good boy. At least Samantha didn’t sound like an Anglepoise from IKEA. More like a – a sex-call bit, with digits instead of a surname. No. Shut it. Samantha Hurst. Middle name could be his mother’s: Doreen. What’s in a name?
Sweat was trickling down the edge of his jaw, straight out of his shaved sideburns. The white one, Vanessa, was on about fox-hunting, now, for some unknown reason. She was screwing her face up and saying how sorry she felt for the poor little fox. It’s so crooel, she was saying. Torn to bits like that.
‘Keep Britain Friday,’ said her friend, adjusting her enormous ear-bangle and leaning drunkenly against Simon Milner, who was smirking twerpishly.
‘They eat its googlies raw,’ said Vanessa, wrinkling her nose.
‘That’s A-rabs, stupid.’
‘I feel like eating blokes’ googlies raw, when they get on my wick.’
‘I just nibble ’em,’ said her friend, showing large white teeth through her crimson lips. ‘I like to take ’em whole in my gob and suck.’
‘Both at once?’ asked Brian, with his eyebrows up.
‘Flipping it with my tongue, you know what I mean?’ she said, too squiffy to notice. ‘It’s called good team-work and flexible working practice, guys!’
It was a relief when they’d gone. Even Brian’s jokes had been feeble. They’d had this great power, those females, talking dirty like that. Alan wondered whether they’d be any good in bed, or whether it was all mouth. Jill, who never talked dirty, was probably a lot better than them in bed. Subtlety was important. Anyway, those girls were probably extremely well-behaved, back in the sales office, legs crossed under the desk and looking up with a Can I help you, sir? Certainly, sir. He’ll be available in about a year.
Simon Milner went up for the next shout and claimed he’d got his b
um pinched by a teeny-bopper. They expressed their disbelief; he was the most unlikely candidate. His chief thrill was flying model gliders with his son and handing out Lib Dem leaflets in front of Waitrose.
They looked around them.
The bar was now getting filled up with thickset young blokes with tight T-shirts and shaven heads, accompanied by their giggling underage birds dressed in what would have passed as mail-order lacy underwear a few years ago, leaving their midriffs bare. It made the lads feel old, in their corner. Studs winked in navels like gold sweat-drops.
‘Oh look,’ said Brian, ‘it’s the Security Guard Social’s night out. Let’s rob a sweetshop.’
Alan wanted to tell them what Jill had said about the duty doctor’s midriff, but Simon got in first: he said he never thought he’d sit in a bar full of skinheads.
‘They’re not skinheads,’ Brian said, as if forgetting what he’d just said. ‘They’re just normal young twenty-first century blokes. And their girlfriends are not prossies, they’re normal too. It’s the same every Friday and Saturday night, round us.’ Brian lived in the country, about an hour’s commute from Hull. He had thirty sheep. ‘As a result, there are bouncers manning every pub and restaurant in the nicest market towns in England. Beverley, for instance. Big bruisers with folded arms. It’s Clockwork Orange crossed with bloody Trumpington.’
‘How normal is normal?’ Phil asked.
‘Normal is letting anti-social elements terrorise society,’ said Brian, getting political. When Brian got political, you could see the jackboots growing up his legs. ‘Fear. We’re all in fear. You recall, coming up the motorway, we kept seeing people chucking litter out of their windows? Cigarette packets and sweet papers and so on?’
‘We did and all, Brian,’ said Phil, who enjoyed goading Brian Wallis when he went like this after a few drinks.
‘Well, I’d dismember them, publicly dismember them. No, seriously. Dead serious, lads. Because after years and years of Keep Britain Tidy, there are still selfish bastards who spread their shit for someone else to clear up.’