‘Be great if she could jump in. I have a car service, but I hardly trust the shmucks to find this place by tomorrow morning.’
‘Not a problem,’ I said. ‘I’d be glad to.’
When he shook my hand I could smell her perfume on him.
‘I owe you one.’ He reached into his blazer and pulled out a silver case filled with business cards. ‘Here. You get across the pond much?’
I told him I did. ‘New York’s a happening city.’
‘Can’t compare. Next time you’re in town be sure to look me up. You like football?’
‘Not soccer?’
‘No, no. American football.’
‘Great game,’ I said. ‘But not as good as rugby.’
He laughed, and, as bigger men often do, affirmed some higher status by manfully slapping my shoulders with his bear paw hands.
‘We tackle without pads and helmets,’ I added, contesting the hierarchy.
‘Hell, call me if you hit New York and I’ll take you to a Giants game.’ He shook his head. ‘Not as good as rugby, my ass.’
We arranged that I’d drop by their room in the morning. ‘I owe you one,’ he repeated. ‘I mean it.’ He then opened his leather wallet and pulled out a thick roll of notes. ‘At least let me get your gas and lunch.’
Of course I refused the money.
‘Don’t say I didn’t offer.’
Perhaps a little perturbed because I hadn’t accepted the cash, he slipped the notes back into his wallet and again patted me on the shoulder. ‘Maybe I can throw some business your way.’ Then he shook my hand and wished me goodnight. As he walked off I imagined nailing him with a rugby tackle, clattering him across the dance floor.
I also wondered if he’d touch his wife’s naked body with the same palm that had just shaken my hand.
By the time Jenni came back I’d drunk both our rum and Cokes.
‘YOUR ALARM,’ MUMBLED JENNI. ‘Switch off your alarm.’ I swore. Sunrise hit the hotel curtains. It seemed that only minutes ago I was standing with a drink in the bustle of the reception.
‘Do you have time for a shower?’ Jenni addressed me from beneath the sheets. ‘You smell like a brewery.’
I sleepwalked into the cubicle, scrubbed and scoured. Once I’d towelled myself dry I looked at my puffy face in the mirror. ‘Fuck.’
‘You’re still pissed, aren’t you?’
‘Tell me about it.’ Whisky and rum seeped from my pores. ‘If I wasn’t on taxi duty I wouldn’t have even got up.’ And that wasn’t a lie, either. If I wasn’t due outside Kay’s room I’d have cancelled the London meeting.
Jenni was sitting up against the headboard, watching me dress. ‘For God’s sake don’t get pulled over. You’ll lose your licence.’
‘That would be handy,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Imagine me handing accounts a receipt for a year-long taxi service.’
‘Exactly.’
I leant forward and kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll drive carefully.’
‘You do that.’
I brushed the hair from her face and kissed her again, on the cheek. ‘I’ll call you later.’
Before I closed the door she said, ‘Tell Kay it was nice to meet her.’
I walked the empty corridors of the hotel. Floated might be a better word as I felt drunker than I’d been when falling into bed, floating past the room numbers until I found theirs. Just before I rapped on the door I heard Segur’s voice, sharp and curt. Then Kay, muffled, playing something down before Segur snapped, ‘How the fuck do you lose an airplane ticket? Get yourself together.’
And I felt a relic of hate when I heard his anger, a boy again, hearing the threats of a drunken stepfather towards my mother.
I quickly knocked again.
‘See,’ said Kay. ‘I knew you had them.’
Then Segur opened the door. ‘Good man.’ He checked his watch. ‘Six forty-five on the nose.’ He was dressed in his shirt and trousers, as if he hadn’t even gone to bed. Or just sworn at his wife. He didn’t invite me into the room, but I could see Kay zipping up her suitcase.
‘You got everything, hon?’
‘Ready for the off?’ I added, awkwardly English in my own country.
‘Ready for the off,’ repeated Segur, mimicking my accent, smiling.
‘Whatever you want to call it,’ said Kay, ‘I’m ready.’ She bumped her cases against the wall as she walked out. She still looked good, great even, considering the time of the morning. She wore a skirt and boots with a maroon jacket over a black top. Stylish, feminine, strong. Yet, and perhaps it was the dulling effects of the hangover, or simply the presence of Segur, the woman who’d entranced me beneath the umbrella had faded. And she vanished when he kissed her.
‘Call me in a while,’ were his parting words.
Segur had kissed his wife goodbye on the lips, whilst I’d kissed Jenni goodbye on the cheek and forehead. And how significant this daily act that particular morning. Now I’m like the engineer sifting through the wreckage of a plane crash, reconsidering the hairline cracks in the wings that he once ignored.
After their kiss we walked through the bland, quiet corridors of the hotel into bright morning sunshine. I put her luggage in the boot and we opened and closed the doors.
II
TWO MONTHS AFTER THAT wedding in the Cotswolds, riding the taxi from JFK into Manhattan, my jet-lagged ghost floating somewhere above the leather seats, I watched downtown rise in a bug-smeared screen. The highway was a fibre optic of blipped light streamed into the city, sun bouncing off glinting mirrors and nuclear glass. But instead of thinking about the work ahead, the task of telling two banks how they were going to become one, the deals brokered on the strength of a handshake, the stats and graphs to justify job losses and pay cuts, I was consumed by different thoughts.
My first kiss.
Her name was Debbie Western. She ferried notes to the one I thought I loved, Hannah Stillman. Because, aged ten, I was too afraid to speak to a girl I fancied. Instead I passed on letters and whispered sweet nothings to her best friend, Debbie.
I even sent Hannah a Valentine’s card, posting it on my morning paper round before school. When I got to class they were both walking the tables asking the boys to spell ‘guess’. And once I wrote down my attempt, my anonymity was stripped. I was the only boy who’d signed his Valentine Geuss who? My spelling was honestly better than that. It was just the pressure of writing in a card from the newsagents which had cost me a week’s pay.
And anyway, all my romance was in vain. That night on the way home from school we went to the park and played on vandalized slides and swings with their chains wrapped around the frames. Although Hannah let me hold her hand, she wouldn’t let me put my arm round her shoulder. We fooled around on the see-saw for a while before she went home for tea.
That left me and Debbie with the graffiti and broken bottles, the rusting roundabout. So we explored the brook, taking the path along the water’s edge to the cow fields and the building site. To cross over to the fallen tree, a huge oak felled by lightning, you had to take the stepping stones. It had rained the night before, and the high water flooded over the bricks. I skipped across before Debbie followed. I remember she wore one of those long skirts that were fashionable at the time, and she had to lift the hem to stop it getting wet. It was this concern that put her off where she was stepping.
She tripped. She didn’t fall in, but she dipped her foot enough to lose her shoe, a white PVC slip-on that bobbed along the current like a toy canoe.
‘My shoe,’ she screamed. ‘My mum’ll kill me.’
I ran along the bank, watched the current whisk that little boat towards the weir, saw the grates it would sink between. Where a branch leant over the water I swung out low enough to reach down and pluck her shoe from drowning.
I ran back along the path holding it aloft, triumphant. I was her knight in shining armour, her hero. I was Prince Charming himself when I knelt to slip it back on to her outstretched
foot.
‘Stand up,’ she ordered. We were face to face on the riverbank, late summer sun skimming the hedgerows. ‘Here,’ she said, pointing to her cheek.
I leant forward and kissed her. My soul melted like ice cream.
Then she kissed me.
And whatever shape I thought the world was when I was ten, I was wrong. Because by the time I got home it had changed for good. I walked across the park, the sweet taste of her still in my mouth. I was dizzy with a baffling joy, for I had no reference point against which to compare what a boy and girl could become when they touched lips.
That was my thought on arriving in New York, a very real then, and a dreamlike ride along the Van Wyck Expressway in a yellow cab.
I COULD HAVE ASKED the consultancy for a larger apartment, more luxurious, with wooden floors and a view, the golden Trump or the silver Chrysler. Not a tired block wedged between the Port Authority bus station and a homeless hostel where tramps dressed for the post-apocalypse in ripped jackets and trousers tied with strips of plastic bags. Whatever I thought about the state of my own life was ridiculed by these men, building shelters from cardboard boxes and begging for change to buy dollar pizza slices. That first morning I watched two drunks in torn ski jackets hugging and bawling. It should have been pitiful and saddening. Yet there I was in my suit and polished shoes, the jet-setting business analyst, envious, and somehow exhilarated, that they had each other to hold against the world.
As I was there on a mission to streamline systems and cut costs, asking the US management for plusher accommodation might not have gone down too well. And from past New York projects I also knew that time spent in my room would be minimal. Whether seated behind a desk, at a restaurant table courting clients or knocking back beers with drunken co-workers, I had to give the company their pound of flesh. So a bed and a TV were all that I required. With a month to go till the election, Obama versus McCain, the news channels buzzed with mud slinging and polls, blue bars higher than red. Unless of course it was a financial bulletin where the red graphics dominated, accompanied by words from commentators like meltdown, record fall, and the Great Depression.
Once in my apartment, the opened, unpacked suitcase on the bed, the windows wide to the blaring traffic massed at the crossroads after rising up out of the Lincoln Tunnel, I tried to read the paper in an effort to switch off from what I’d done.
Or perhaps not what I’d done, but what I was capable of doing.
Beyond the articles ‘Campaigns Shift to Attack Mode on Eve of Debate’ and ‘Transgender Candidate Who Ran as Woman Did Not Mislead Voters’, the columns of the New York Times didn’t grab my attention. I never read further than the headlines: QUAKE KILLS AT LEAST 72 IN KYRGYZSTAN, ISLAMIC GROUP GAINS POWER IN INDONESIA, and 1 IN 4 MAMMALS THREATENED WITH EXTINCTION.
I could have looked at some stats from work. Scheduled meetings with stakeholders and devised workshops to get IT guys talking the same language as their managers. A business analyst riding the landslide of a financial crash hardly had time to sit and read the paper, ponder a personal life that needed restructuring as much as the banking industry. Yet I found my focus for spreadsheets and diagrams wanting.
But this was nothing new.
Long before the field and the rain, the wedding, her yellow dress and bare feet, my life had become a simulation I’d constructed, what I believed I wanted. A job earning silly money, a flat that I owned and a loving fiancée. From the outside I had a good thing that was only getting better.
Two years ago I’d graduated from the London Business School, armed with an MBA and ambition, though the real achievement wasn’t a curled scroll or a mortarboard and gown, the job offers from Shanghai to Boston. No, it was meeting Jenni. From the day we first kissed, on a sunlit bend of the Thames I’d planned to make my move on for weeks, I’d made a promise to myself. To be better. To be worthy of this woman with her lean and courtly grace. She was as beautiful first thing in the morning as she was in that fine summer dress, her body glowing in diaphanous gold.
Within a month I was deemed suitor enough to meet her mother and father, Freya and Philip, a doting couple in semi-retirement who had a full life behind them and time to dedicate to their daughter and a future son in-law.
If we stayed the weekend at Marlow I’d play cricket with Philip, impressing with brisk outswingers and flashing cover drives. One evening, after I’d clipped a fifty to claw back a match he thought we’d lost, we were driving back to their quiet house, both fuzzed with a couple of pints of cider, when he cried, ‘You’ve done bloody well, considering.’
He could have been considering any number of afflictions inherited from my dysfunctional family. While the steady-going Philip certainly qualified as a good man, I doubt my own father did. But now, well, now my father has retrial. Because if he’s guilty then I certainly am. Though if my mother was appointed judge I doubt the verdict would change. The fact remains he left her when she was eight months pregnant with my younger sister. In his defence my father might argue that it wasn’t some tawdry affair as he married and stayed with the woman he left my mother for. And that was nearly thirty years ago. But does this redeem him? Not in my mother’s eyes, I’m sure. She’d say she was the one who lived with the remains of the divorce, the ruins, a two-bedroomed house on an estate where half the kids, including my sister and me, were on free school dinners. Well, until we moved into my stepfather’s when I was ten.
He was a man who wanted no more to do with me and my sister than he did with our cat, who soon decided there were better homes to frequent for saucers of milk.
I can still see the plastic sheet covering the discarded furniture we left at my mother’s house. We only moved one town over, but I vividly recall a wet day when I preferred to shelter in our garden, riding my bike to the old house and crawling under the kitchen table next to the tatty sofa, listening to raindrops strike the tarpaulin.
At first my stepfather, Les, tried to buy our loyalty with what money he got from his welding job, believing an army of Stars Wars figures would win me over, a mansion-size doll’s house for my sister. For a while they did. I was a boy benefiting from a man about the house, sport and discipline, a helping hand fixing a puncture. Then he realized two kids were an unwanted part of the deal of having my mother, a woman I now understand needed him as much as if not more than she needed us, her children.
But as much as she loved him, I hated him. Soon the feeling was quietly mutual. He became the model of everything I didn’t want to be. A second-hand dealer of racist jokes, the caveman football fan who bragged about beating up policemen in his hooligan youth.
For the next six years I’d rather be outside than in his home, whatever the weather. And a housing estate bordered by farmland, coal pits and derelict factories was an adventure playground. Train tracks and a landfill, building sites and canal locks. Watching the Inter-City flash past on sunlit rails, then vanish in the heat wobble of distance, spawned my first dreams of travel, escape.
Nothing at all like Jenni’s upbringing, her loving parents.
‘I’d be proud to have you in the family.’
That’s what Philip said when I asked him for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Perhaps I was hoping to be part of a family I’d never had, to inherit Jenni’s wholesome upbringing in a house with a pond and a manicured lawn, the riding club round the corner where one day she dreamed of taking her own daughters. Our daughters.
Her mother used to hug me goodbye on Sunday evenings, before the drive back to London, and I’d feel the charity and empathy for my bereft past pressed against my chest. The hearty welcome into their huge house felt like coming in from the cold after ten years of rented flats and friends’ floors, a decade of drifting after the night I was kicked out of home by my stepfather.
I was sixteen. My mum was taking my sister to a dance contest in London. The older and closer I got to her, the more estranged and jealous Les became. He’d down bottles of Pils, get drunk, and boss my mother about
as if she were a mangy dog. And hit me. Though we both knew the day was coming when he’d get one back.
‘Who the hell does that?’ Philip had asked angrily, driving back from the cricket match. ‘Throw a boy on to the streets.’
What he said next, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, was one of the few times I ever heard him swear.
Philip had brought up the subject because it was the night after a cricket game that I last walked through my front door. I’d been playing at a picturesque oval in the next village, its trickling brook and stone cottages in direct contrast to the scruffy factories and estates of my own town. After matches I’d have beers at the local, already drinking with the ‘men’, an eclectic mix of farmers’ sons, factory workers, businessmen and millionaires. Fellow cricketers about to become my surrogate fathers. I had a curfew of eleven o’clock, a choice of either the mickey-taking of my team-mates for leaving the pub early, or the ire of Les, usually sitting up surrounded by full ashtrays and empty bottles.
It was just gone eleven when I put my key in the front door. He was in the bedroom watching TV. Before I even had my foot on the bottom step he called out, ‘Start looking for somewhere else to live.’
I hesitated, then began climbing the creaky stairs.
‘Start looking now.’
A clinical order shouted through a closed door. I turned and walked back into the night.
After years dreaming about running away, the Oedipal fantasies of his murder, pushing him down the stairs, the flashing knives, I had finally come to the moment of leaving. Not fighting. Now I was old enough he hardly seemed worth the effort. With my cricket bag slung over my shoulder I headed back to the park and sat under the slide. I planned to sleep there, but when headlights swung across the grass I slipped beneath the hedgerow at the back of school. I dossed down in a spot I’d played in as a boy, beneath the very bush where I’d once built a den. That I actually slept there, wearing my cricket whites over the top of my clothes to keep warm, was a boyhood dream of a night in the wilderness come true. Though I’d never pictured the stray dog that came sniffing me in the dark, my fist on its hollow flank when I woke up terrified, lashing out.
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 2