by Tony Parsons
‘Nothing.’
‘Come on.’
‘You just seem a bit too friendly with that guy.’
‘Luke?’
‘Is that his name?’
‘Jesus Christ, Harry. I’m not interested in Luke. Not that way.’
‘You said he wants—’
‘I don’t care what he wants. Wanting is not the same as getting. He’s smart enough to see what I’m doing with the company. He knows I can help his business. I think he can help mine. I admire him, okay?’
‘You admire a sandwich merchant?’
‘He’s a brilliant businessman. He’s worked hard for everything he’s got. I know he’s a bit flash. I know you didn’t like what he said about Eamon. I didn’t like it either, okay? But this is strictly business. Do you honestly believe I would think about him in that way? I don’t go around shagging anything that moves, Harry. I’m not a man. I’m not you.’
‘So how does it work? You and old Luke? I’m just curious about your relationship.’
‘His company has more work than it can handle. If something comes up and they’re fully stretched, he calls me.’
‘No – I mean how does it work with you and him? On that other level. Does he know you’re not interested in him that way? Is he cool about that? Or is still hoping to get his hands on your canapés? Don’t tell me, because I know the answer.’
I knew I should have shut up by now but I couldn’t stop myself. I was afraid that I was losing her. Which was kind of ironic, as I was the one who went knocking on Gina’s door when I knew she wasn’t home.
‘Shall I tell you what makes me sad, Harry? You think he’s only interested in me for one thing. Maybe – just maybe – he’s interested in me for two or three reasons. Did that ever cross your mind? Why do you find it so hard to believe that someone could like me for what I can do? Not for what I look like? Why is that so hard?’
Because I am still crazy about you, I thought. Because I can’t imagine any man looking at you and not feeling exactly what I feel. But I said nothing.
‘I don’t even want to talk to you.’ She turned on her side, angrily killing the light. I turned on my side, reached for the light.
We lay in the darkness for a while and when she spoke there were no tears in her voice, no anger. Just a kind of bewilderment.
‘Harry?’
‘What?’
‘Why do you find it so hard to believe that you’re loved?’
She had me there.
Kazumi had told me she took a photography class in Soho every morning. After a couple of practice runs, I found that if I timed it just right, I could catch her on the short walk from Gina’s home to the tube station. I couldn’t believe that I was doing this thing. But I did it just the same.
I pulled up to the kerb beside her, sounding my horn, the stalled rush-hour traffic howling with protest behind me. I tried to look surprised.
‘Kazumi. I thought it was you. Listen, do you want a lift into town? It’s not out of my way or anything.’
She got in, a little reluctantly, not as pleased to see me as I’d hoped she would be. She was struggling with a large cardboard box with ‘Ilford photographic paper’ written on the front. She had a couple of cameras with her. But she didn’t look anything like a tourist.
I asked her how she liked London, what techniques she was studying right now, if she missed Japan. I talked too much, babbling mindlessly, my cheeks burning, too excited to see her. Eventually she managed to get a word in.
‘Harry,’ she said.
Not Harry-san? Not honourable, respected Harry? I admit I was a little disappointed.
‘You’re married, Harry. With a beautiful wife. A wife you love very much.’ It was all true. She stared out at the paralysed, angry traffic, shaking her head. ‘Or am I missing something?’
No, I thought. It’s me. It’s me who’s missing something. And suddenly I knew exactly what it was.
The smell of Cajun cooking.
Cyd was in the kitchen experimenting with red beans, rice and what was probably a catfish when I dumped the pile of glossy brochures on her chopping board.
‘What’s that?’
I picked one up at random, showed her the palm trees, blue seas and white sand, like a street trader showing off his wares. ‘Barbados, darling.’ I began flicking through the brochures. ‘Antigua. St Lucia. The Cayman Islands.’
‘Are you crazy? We can’t go to the Caribbean. Not now.’
‘Then what about the Maldives? The Red Sea? Koh Samui?’
‘I’m not going to Thailand, Harry. I have to work.’
I took her hands in mine. ‘Run away with me.’
‘Don’t touch me. I smell all fishy.’
‘I don’t care. You’re the love of my life. I want to take you to some tropical paradise.’
‘What about Peggy?’
‘Peg comes too. The Indian Ocean. Florida. Anywhere in the world. For a couple of weeks. For a week. She can snorkel. Get a tan. Ride the banana boats. She’ll love it.’
‘I can’t take her out of school.’
‘Gina took Pat out of school.’
‘I’m not Gina. And we can’t go away for two weeks.’
There were other brochures. Skinny ones, with glittering urban landscapes on the cover instead of sun-drenched beaches.
‘Then what about a mini-break? Just for a few days? Prague. Venice. Or Paris – Pat loved Paris.’
‘I’m too busy at the moment, Harry. Work’s really taking off. Sally and I can hardly handle it. We’re thinking of taking someone else on.’
‘Barcelona? Madrid? Stockholm?’
‘Sorry.’
I sighed. ‘Do you want to see a movie? Maybe we could get something to eat in Chinatown. Sally can babysit.’
‘When did you have in mind? Sundays are good for me.’
So my wife and I took out our diaries and, surrounded by her experimental Cajun cooking, we tried to find a window for romance.
part two: your heart is a small miracle
thirteen
My wife.
I could always spot her across a crowded room. Something about the curve of her face, the tilt of her head, the way she pushed her hair out of her eyes. Just a glimpse was all it took. I couldn’t mistake my wife for anyone else. Even when I wasn’t expecting to see her.
It was a party at the station to launch the new season of programmes. Wine and canapés, gossip and flattery, a speech from Barry Twist about forthcoming attractions. An evening of compulsory fun. There was a lot of that in my game. And even though Eamon was officially resting and there was no Fish on Friday in the spring schedule, I thought I should be there. Marty Mann’s advice had been nagging at me more than I cared to admit. Maybe I should be searching around for new talent, looking to diversify. Maybe only a fool pinned all of their hopes on just one person. But right now I couldn’t think about any of that because my wife was here. I pushed my way through the crowd. Cyd was not surprised to see me.
‘Harry. What are you up to?’
‘Working.’ If you could call it working, these few hours of small talk and Chardonnay. My old man would have considered it a big night out. For me it was another day toiling at the coalface. ‘How about you?’ Although of course I had guessed by now.
‘Working, too.’ For the first time I noticed she was holding a silver tray by her side, empty apart from a few crumbs of fish cakes or satay. ‘Sally’s babysitting for me. I mean – us. I got a call this afternoon. Luke and his people usually cater for this do, but they’re snowed under right now. It’s a good job for me to get.’
Luke. Wanker.
We smiled at each other. I was so glad to see her. I was feeling party-lonesome until her face was suddenly there. Cyd had been to quite a few of these evenings with me, although not recently. And although she never ducked these dos, this wasn’t really her thing at all – too much smoke, too much alcohol, and too much meaningless chitchat with people she would never see aga
in, people who were always looking over your shoulder for someone more famous. Too much like hard work. But she had been with me in this room before, so it didn’t seem that strange to see her here. Even with a silver tray in her hands.
I touched her arm. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
She laughed. ‘Got to work, babe. I’ll see you later, okay? We can go home together, if you can stick around until I’ve cleared up.’
She gave me a peck on the cheek and went back to the kitchen to load up with more satay and fish cakes, while I wandered around the party trying to avoid people who would want to talk about Eamon and his nervous exhaustion. There was a bank of TV sets in the middle of the room, repeating a loop of trailers for the new season’s shows. A lot of Marty Mann shows. Six Pissed Students in a Flat was coming back, so was the CCTV programme, You’ve Been Robbed! I stood there nursing my beer, watching the tasters for irreverent game shows, irreverent talk shows and irreverent dramas.
Tired old irreverence, I thought. It’s killing television.
A couple of suited and booted business types appeared by my side, tossing peanuts into their mouths and gawping at the screens as though they had never seen a television before. They couldn’t be from the TV station or any of the production companies that made the shows, because they were far too formally dressed. We had a strict dress code at the station – you had to be fashionably scruffy at all times. Maybe they were advertisers, invited to give them a taste of cut-price glamour.
Cyd brushed past me carrying two silver trays piled high with sashimi. She gave me a wink, and bent to place one of the trays on a table. The men turned away from the bank of screens, their jaws working furiously on their peanuts.
‘Look at the legs on that,’ one of them said.
‘They go all the way up to her neck,’ said the other.
‘No arse, though.’
‘Flat as a pancake.’
‘And no tits.’
‘You don’t get tits with legs like that.’
‘You need a nice arse though.’
‘I’ll give you that.’
‘You need either tits or arse, right, even with legs like that. Because you need something to hold on to when you start your ascent.’
‘Great legs, though.’
‘Get those wrapped around your neck, mate, you’ll never want to come up for air.’
They chortled in perfect harmony, watching my wife walk away.
I stared at the pair of them, my face burning. I kept staring, wanting them to notice me.
They didn’t notice me.
Then all the peanuts were gone and, after rifling in the salty bowls for a bit, they sloped off, looking for more tasty snacks. I went looking for my wife. When I caught up with her she was handing out her sashimi to a bunch of women I vaguely recognised. They were helping themselves to raw fish while simultaneously managing to ignore Cyd completely. These bloody people. Who did they think she was? Nobody?
Cyd smiled at me. She had a lovely face. She was always going to have a lovely face, no matter how many years went by. But I couldn’t smile back at her.
‘Get your coat. We’re leaving.’
‘Leaving? I can’t leave. Not yet, babe. What’s wrong? You look all—’
‘I want to go.’
‘But I’ve got to work. You know that.’
The women were starting to stare at us. They were holding slivers of salmon and tuna in their podgy fingers. I took Cyd’s arm and pulled her aside. Her silver tray banged into someone’s back. The sashimi wobbled precariously.
‘I mean it, Cyd. I’m going home. Right now. And I want you to come with me. Please?’
She wasn’t smiling any more.
‘You might be going home, Harry, but I’m working. What happened? Come on. Tell me. Did someone say something about Eamon? Is that why you’re upset? Forget about Eamon. Marty’s right – get something new going for yourself.’
I wanted to tell her – don’t waste your time here. I know exactly what these men are like, because I’m one of the bastards myself. But she wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. She was all innocence, she thought it was all about raw fish and chicken on a stick and people appreciating you for doing a good job.
‘Please, Cyd. Come with me.’
‘No, Harry.’
‘Then do what you want.’
‘I will.’
So I left her at the party, left her feeding all those hard, empty faces, and went out to look for a cab. I left her there, all by herself, even though I knew she was too good for that place, and too good for those people.
When I got home Peggy had been in bed for hours. Sally was on the sofa, idly channel-surfing with one hand and soothing her baby in her carrycot with the other. Soothing Precious. That was the baby’s name. Precious. Sally asked me how the evening had gone – she meant for Food Glorious Food, not the station – and I told her that everything was fine. Then I got her a minicab.
Luke Moore drove my wife home. By then I was pretending to be asleep, lying on my side, breathing easily, trying to fake the soft rhythms of sleep. I listened to my wife quietly undressing in the dark, heard her clothes slipping from her long, slim body, and inside my Marks & Spencer pyjamas, my heart ached for her. Then we lay in the darkness for a long time, trying hard not to disturb each other.
Back to back in the marital bed, and never quite touching.
‘Your heart is a small miracle, Mr Silver,’ said Dr Baggio. ‘A small miracle.’
My wife is having an affair, I thought. She’s fucking this guy. I just know it.
‘The heart is a pump about the size of a fist,’ said my doctor, inflating the strap she had wrapped around my arm. I could feel it tightening against my skin. ‘We all have blood pressure. It’s simply the pressure created by the constant pumping of blood around the body. In a healthy adult a normal blood pressure is 120 over 80. Yours is…goodness.’
It happens. You promise to love each other forever. You really mean it. You plan to sleep with no one else for the rest of your life. Then time wears away at your love, as the tide wears away a rock. And in the end your feelings – her feelings – are not what they were once upon a time. Other people are let in, like light in a darkened room. You can’t get them out again. Not once you have let them in. What can you do once you have let them in?
‘You can put your shirt back on,’ my doctor said.
She didn’t want sex any more. Not with me. Not even with one of my magic condoms. Oh, we still had our Saturday night shag, which was sometimes postponed to Sunday or Monday if the catering business was booming. But I felt as if she was just doing it to keep me quiet. That it was easier to lie back and think of nothing than argue about it. Too tired, she always said. Yeah, right. Tired of me. It wasn’t even the sex I missed most.
It was all the other stuff. It was the being loved.
‘There are lots of things you can do to control your blood pressure,’ my doctor said. ‘You can reduce your intake of alcohol. Lose weight. Increase physical activity. Most important of all, you can change your wife.’
Change my wife?
Things weren’t that bad. I wanted my marriage to last. I wanted to get it right this time. Get it right once and forever. ‘But I love my wife.’
‘Not your wife. Your life. Don’t let things get to you. Find time for yourself. Control your anxieties. You need to change your life, Mr Silver. You only get one of them.’
Life. Not wife.
You obviously get more than one of those.
The heart is a small miracle.
‘I liked the way it made me feel,’ Eamon said. ‘Once upon a time. And I wanted to have that feeling again.’
We were walking in the grounds of a private hospital an hour’s drive south of London. Eamon talked about cocaine as we kicked our way through the leaves. He was only halfway through a 28-day detox programme, but he was already looking fitter than I had seen him since he was fresh from the Edinburgh Festival. He was meant
to be playing football this afternoon – substance abusers versus the manic depressives – but the match had been cancelled. The manic depressives were too depressed.
‘We have these group sessions. Such stories, Harry. You’d love it. All these alcoholics and cokeheads and junkies telling you where it all went wrong. Every kind of addict under the sun. Some of them are very articulate. And do you know what I heard someone say this morning? Alcohol gave me wings to fly—and then it took away the sky. Isn’t that great? That’s exactly how I feel about coke.’
‘But that still doesn’t explain it. You’ve got this great life—money, fame, weather girls. And you screw it all up for a feeling. Not even a feeling – the memory of a feeling.’
‘Come on, Harry. I know you’re not a drinking man. And I know that drugs are not your thing. But it’s the same for you.’
‘How’s that?’
‘It’s the same for you with women.’
And I saw that he was right. That’s why I wanted Cyd to be the woman I first met, that’s why I had gone to Kazumi’s door. I was hooked on a feeling too.
The remembrance of the greatest feeling in the world.
It wasn’t the rush of cocaine or the fog of alcohol, it was the feeling I got when I was starting with a woman. Passion, sex, romance, feeling alive, feeling wanted – it was all of those things, wrapped up in a fleeting moment of time.
I liked the way it made me feel.
And I couldn’t help it. I wanted that feeling again.
Even if it meant trouble galore.
fourteen
Jim Mason resembled a male model just starting to go to seed.
The chiselled features were beginning to show signs of a double chin, and under the leather jacket the beer paunch was developing like a promising marrow. But he still looked capable of causing trouble. Cyd’s ex-husband arrived to pick up his daughter.
‘Hello, Harry. How you doing, mate? Peggy ready to rock and roll?’
It was one of those scenes that I had never imagined playing, an event where I would love to have known the correct etiquette. This man had broken the heart of the woman I loved. But if he hadn’t broken her heart, my wife and I wouldn’t be together. Should I thank him or thump him? Or both?