by Nick Laird
He flopped down by the stereo and scanned his eyes up and down the stacked CDs. They were so taken with their conversation they hadn’t even turned the music on.
‘But when you were growing up, did you think the town was dying?’
Glover noticed David looking at the CDs and said, ‘My Blood on the Tracks is there somewhere.’
‘Oh yes, play that,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s his best.’ A male thing to say, so definitive and presumptuous. David saw she was taking charge with Glover. Whatever would happen would happen tonight. As she plucked at the stitching of the red cushion on her lap, she was scrutinizing Glover’s profile from beneath her calculated lashes. David found the CD and set it in the stereo’s extruded tray, intruded it, pressed play. The opening chords of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ came through the speakers.
The evening went slowly. David found himself irritated when Glover cracked some joke that made her laugh, and laugh excessively, or when she asked him yet another question. He was too familiar with the sense of being overlooked not to feel it keenly. When he went to check on dinner, he unzipped his hooded top and took it off, and wished emotions were like clothes, that he could remove them, fold them, set them somewhere. He laid the table and stood at the sink, then pressed his hand on the steam of the windowpane, where it left a perfect print. He went back in and downed a lot of wine and smiled.
It was true enough: Glover was handsome. His physique was nothing but tendon and muscle, and he fitted it entirely. He couldn’t imagine the ugly-duckling version, fat and acned, though there was no doubt he was a swan now. David had been an ugly duckling too, and had then grown into a penguin. Or a dodo. A booby. He had never seen Glover drop or fumble or break anything, and that capability could be seen in his hands: they were large, graceful, lightly veined. His movements had an easiness, and because he was not physically false, he also seemed not personally so. His body was honest; it showed its workings and let him interact ‘naturally’ with others, David felt. His own mechanisms lacked transparency. His body was growing into Buddha’s, and beginning to conceal its mysteries, and he must make do with Buddha’s sexlessness, with Buddha’s bogus smile.
He’d made a chicken and broccoli pie, and before the others had even finished their portions he’d eaten two-thirds of the entire thing. He needed to slow down, so he spooned a few new potatoes, slippy with butter, onto his plate. These he ate deliberately, cutting each in half to expose the soapy moon flesh before spearing it, sending it home. Afterwards, he wouldn’t let them help him clean up, and though he recognized the gesture as passive-aggressive, part of him wanted solitude. Who wants to be entangled in the nets of other people’s sexual tension? And this was everywhere; it was tinnitus; he couldn’t block it out.
After washing up and wiping down the work surfaces, listening to them whispering and laughing, he came back to the living room and Glover thanked him for cooking. Ruth said it was just right for a wintry evening, then added, ‘You know, David, I thought we could talk about the project. I had some ideas about the conception of it…’
Despite himself, David smiled. In Larry’s club they’d talked for ages, drunk, about doing a joint project. And best of all, Glover was not involved, although she looked at him as she explained, ‘I’ve always wanted to do something words-based, something very clean and plain, like signs that don’t read like you’d expect them to. Though not that.’
The problem with the project, nascent as it was, already lay with her phrase, ‘Though not that.’ The few times they’d discussed what they might do, her words had seemed to drift towards what she meant, and David would think they were on the right track, but then she’d finish with that bewildering and unequivocal disqualification: Though not that.
Glover nodded gravely—the usual prelude to a one-liner—and said, ‘Yeah, with his looks and your brains you could really come up with something amazing.’
Ruth giggled and play-slapped him on the arm—so this was her in fifth gear. David felt a little tremor of disgust and took a sip of wine to cover it. At any moment she might draw a fan from her sleeve and start fluttering it under her eyes. Oh sir, I beg you…To tamp the conversation down, he said, ‘I could come in this week and see you, actually. I’ve been writing bits and pieces. Thinking about the temperature of the thing.’
Glover cut his eyes at him to say The temperature of the thing? Ruth was bobbing her chin intently, and staring at a point above the coffee table. When she talked about art she tended to peer, David had noticed, into the middle distance, as if to keep her mind unsullied by the grubby objects of this world.
‘I think it should be about replicating surfaces that are usually graffitied, but with the actual writing being arresting, counterintuitive,’ Ruth said, sitting back on the sofa so it rocked slightly.
Glover, warming to the game, clicked his fingers and pointed at nothing. ‘You could make an instruction manual, and then have it cover something completely different.’
‘Insert the digital cable into your anger,’ David said quickly; he would not be outdone by Glover.
‘Exactly,’ Ruth murmured. ‘But not quite that.’
‘Or a street sign that says “Despair 8 miles, Contentment 26”.’
‘I once saw a guy begging with a sign that said “Blah blah blah…” What about toilet graffiti that instead of being something sexual said, um, “I really like what you’ve done with your hair”?’
David snorted with laughter. Glover could always make him laugh. They were specialists at this kind of baton-passing and bar-raising. Ruth was not; she adjudicated.
‘Yes, that’s funny, though maybe not that exactly.’
David drifted on a sea of wine from tragedy to comedy; he was starting to find it compelling. Here was a 45-year-old woman hitting on a 23-year-old man, and he couldn’t tell which way it would go. When the third bottle, the last, was almost empty (a little moat of red surrounded the glass fort in the middle) Glover left the living room and came back ready to hike up Scafell Pike, tugging a black beanie down over his ears.
‘I’ll nip down and get another bottle.’
‘Maybe two,’ David said, pushing his hand into the pocket of his jeans.
Glover shook his head. ‘No, you’re all right, I’ve got money.’
When the door closed on Glover’s exit David attempted to marshal some salient facts. Everyone was a bit drunk, and had spent the last hour in different postures of swoon. He himself was almost horizontal on the floor by the armchair; Glover and Ruth had been sharing the sofa.
‘Ruth, should I go to bed? Leave the pair of you to it?’
He hated himself for talking like this, for giving in. No one else might have noticed, but it was still his flat.
‘No, don’t be ridiculous. But what do you think?’
‘About James? I didn’t ask him. Should I have said something?’
It was like having toothache, David thought, and not being able to stop one’s tongue making its testing, hurtful probes against the problem. He should go to bed.
‘No, God no. That would be embarrassing…’
She pulled a small silver mirror out of a side pocket of her bag and flipped it open, then drew back her top lip in a distressing way, like a horse. Her teeth were long and high-gummed. He said nothing as she started to reapply her lipstick, then he looked away from her, over at the play of shadows on the window. Witnessing the prep and effort was too intimate. Something soft, like pity, rose within him, and the experience made him uncomfortable. He tried to stabilize the mood.
‘It’s going to be great to be working on this project together. I thought some of the ideas about the graffiti were really interesting.’
Ruth tipped her head a few inches back from the mirror and smiled unconvincingly, her mouth staying closed. He realized she was buying him off. She pitied him enough to gift him this preoccupation, this little enterprise, in order that she might stay in his flat and, without guilt, have sex with Glover. He kept silent and a calm descended
on them as she put away her make-up. David remembered some graffiti he’d seen on the wall of a beer garden in Kennington. It said Fuck you if you’re reading this.
Glover returned and David slid into a blue funk of drinking and observing. Both Ruth and Glover tried to deflect some things to him but he was too tired to play. Then it became one of those evenings where he drank and was fine and drank and was fine and drank and smoked a cigarette and suddenly was not fine at all. He was suddenly very, very far from fine. He struggled to his feet and whispered, ‘I have to go to bed.’
On top of his duvet, in the dark, fully clothed, on his back. If he didn’t keep absolutely still, the room was sucked into a whirlpool, at the centre of which was his head. Ruth was squealing about something and then someone put his Carole King CD on the stereo. He heard the start of ‘It’s Too Late’, then fumbled for his earplugs on the bedside table, squashed them in and passed out.
When David’s radio alarm went the next morning he groped for it, turned it off, dropped it and then opened his eyes very slowly, testing the vigour of his hangover. It was strong, say three stars, maybe four. At some point in the night he had climbed under the duvet and removed his socks, but was otherwise still dressed. Getting vertical was a lengthy process, akin to dry-docking a ship. Carefully he stripped and manoeuvred himself into the shower of his tiny en-suite, working mostly by touch. He sat down in the scald, propping his back against the cold tiles, and let the water relentlessly batter his downcast head. This must be what exhumation is like. He was a revenant come back, reluctantly, to light. His hangovers came in different brands of mental anguish, and this one, he could already tell, was a specialist in self-loathing. He hugged himself in despair. The blank metal mouth of the drain was segmented, as if it wore braces. It imbibed and ingested; it guzzled and swilled. As he watched water pool in his indentations and run off his blossoming gut, his pubertal breasts, he wondered about Ruth and Glover. For twenty minutes he sat there, his naked head bowed, fingers and toes crinkling and crinkling, wanting the water to wash him away, to dissolve him and send him in strands down into the city’s sewers, where he belonged. Were they ten feet away? In one another’s arms? Asleep or making love? He was a negligible thing, an invisible man.
Sixties fittings
He didn’t see Glover again until Sunday, when he arrived back whistling from church. They were heading up to David’s parents’ in Hendon, and James was cradling some white lilies he’d bought on the High Street. Their scent, filtered through David’s hangover, was sickly. He told him they’d have to go in the boot. Glover laughed and began whistling again. David recognized the hymn. Something about a rock. If this was what it did, he needed some of that old-time religion. They trooped downstairs to the street, where two young Arabs were pushing a knackered Volvo estate past the flat. Another sat in the driver’s seat. One pusher gave a theatrical grunt and the other mimicked it, louder. They laughed.
‘Shall we give them a hand?’
‘We’re late as it is, and you know my mum’s roast is all about the timing. The window of edibility’s small on a good day—’
Glover thrust the lilies at David and jogged across. ‘Can I help?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. The Volvo picked up momentum and the driver gunned the ignition; a couple of coughs and it woke into life. He revved the engine hard and waved out of the window, beckoning the men to get in. One of them—moustache, baseball cap—clapped Glover on the shoulder, and the car gave a long toot on the horn as it took off.
‘We’re going to be late now.’
‘Don’t be such a miserable bastard.’
The heater of David’s Volkswagen Polo was broken and there was no parcel shelf, and the smell of the lilies in the boot was strong, almost bodily. David was cold and nauseous but—the toothache again, that wish to feel some new sensation, even if it happened to be pain—he couldn’t help but ask about Ruth. He’d tried to speak to them on Friday and Saturday but both their mobiles had been turned off. Glover recounted their day very factually: after the Tate Modern they’d bought tickets for Haneke’s Caché, but in the end they passed on the screening and instead sat in a pub round the corner. David had reviewed it on his blog, and told him he’d missed a rather fine movie.
‘So you’re definitely seeing each other?’
‘Not really sure, to be honest. Though I went to hers last night after work.’
David had a shocking single image of Ruth lying naked on the bed, her body spread-eagled, sated, then Glover strolling out of her flat, whistling that fucking hymn again, work done. He was going on about how great her place was, how the view was amazing, how the kitchen had ‘all its original sixties fittings’.
‘That works.’
‘Huh?’
‘Child of the sixties.’
‘Barely. Forty?’
‘Closer to fifty.’
Glover snorted. David idled the car in first, waiting to filter into the right lane.
‘She’s thirteen years older than me. She’s forty-seven, maybe even forty-eight.’
‘No way.’
Glover was silent. David could have tooted his horn in triumph. He chuckled and glanced over at James, who said, ‘Huh.’
‘More than twice your age. Well preserved, of course. What age is your mother?’
‘Fuck off…She’s fifty-two.’
‘Well, that’s something. Did Ruth tell you she was forty?’
‘No, I just…She said she was like all women, that she wanted to stay forty for ever or something. I thought that meant she was forty…’ Glover gave a laugh then too, though it wasn’t quite real. ‘Well, whatever.’
He was subdued for a couple of miles and then, as the Polo whinnied round Staples Corner, David turned the radio down.
‘So how was it?’
‘I’m not discussing that,’ Glover said immediately, humourlessly. It appeared that Glover, that fine appraiser of the female form, would only talk about women in the abstract.
‘It’s not my fault she’s old.’
‘I don’t care what age she is. It’s just numbers. It’s totally irrelevant.’
‘Oh come on. It’s not totally irrelevant. And I need details, man. You’re among friends.’
Glover’s face twisted in distaste and then becalmed itself; he made the decision to be honest.
‘We didn’t do it, if that’s what you’re asking.’
David kept his eyes on the cavernous nostrils of the Benetton model on the back window of the bus ahead: her head was thrown back and she was cackling at the endless hilarity of life. He felt, strangely, a little ashamed. Glover’s attitude struck him as puritan and silly, but also exposed him—unfairly—as somehow voyeuristic. Still, he was used to shame. Since Ruth had told him that she fancied Glover, a wave of it kept breaking over him, out of nowhere, like some menopausal flush, leaving him dizzy and uncomfortably hot.
Another image of them surfaced in his mind. She was sitting astride him, naked from the waist up and Glover’s open mouth advanced on a low round breast, on a nipple dark and crinkled as a raisin. He felt a prickle of sweat between his shoulder blades and pressed hard into the car seat to stop it trickling down his back. It wasn’t just shame. There was room for anger too. They’d made a fool of him. Screw Glover’s new-found propriety; he pressed on. ‘Really? How come?’
‘This feels a bit weird, to be honest. You’re a friend to both of us. I don’t know that I should talk about this stuff with you.’
David sighed, then wrenched the steering wheel round and slammed the car into an oncoming juggernaut. No, he didn’t. But he was pissed off. Glover dictated the terms of their friendship. Everything was done to suit him. Ruth would be more forthcoming. David let the silence build. London heaved and wallowed. He was not often directly insulted, but he could recognize it when it occurred. Glover should apologize. He wouldn’t be treated like this.
When Glover spoke again, though, a few minutes later, he’d drifted far from their conversation. ‘S
he’s different, isn’t she? Ruth.’
It was one of those unanswerable statements you can do nothing with—that you must just try to outlive. David noticed that someone had knocked against the wing mirror. He could only see the reflection of his car door, its stagnant avocado green.
‘She’ll be going back to New York, of course…’
‘Oh no, I know that. I’m not thinking about it as some big romance. And it doesn’t matter, but I didn’t know she was quite so…That there was such a big age gap. I’m just saying she’s very different to most people I’ve met. When we went round the Tate she knew about everything, and was excited about everything…She’s had this whole other life.’
David was silent as Glover chased his own thought down its rabbit hole.
‘About a month ago this guy started coming into the Bell almost every evening. Never talked to anyone. About your age but smartly dressed, suit, tie, wedding ring. He comes in at six on the dot and stands at the bar, orders a large white wine, downs it in one and goes. And that’s it. Takes a minute, ninety seconds.’
There was a Border collie pup in the boot of the estate car in front. Each time the traffic stopped it appeared, pressing two outsized paws against the back window and staring mournfully out.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Just…this guy’s obviously steeling himself to go home to someone he doesn’t want to go home to. I don’t think there can be anything worse than that.’
‘Ri-ight…’ The traffic moved: the pup’s paws slid off the glass.
‘I suppose I was just thinking that I can’t imagine ever again meeting anyone like Ruth. She wouldn’t ever feel oppressive. She’s got too much going on in her own life. She’s too cool…’