by Nick Laird
‘It was all about frustration. That was kind of the point,’ she said, smiling sadly.
‘You should get that,’ Glover chipped in.
Ruth threw him a sharp look.
Over the last month David had felt them both pulling away from him. His texts and messages seldom elicited replies. Glover stayed at Ruth’s almost all the time. David would leave notes on the kitchen table and they’d still be there when he got home from work. It was obvious: he was otiose. And Glover’s manner was very brusque if he appeared to be asking anything of him. Added to that, David heard a hint of superiority in everything Glover said, and if he smiled or laughed it was code for Oh my friend, you didn’t really…you didn’t really think you had a chance?
Admittedly, he had invited himself along to the recital. He’d emailed them about going to see a movie which it turned out they’d already seen, without him, and then he asked Ruth if he could come out with them. He felt entitled. It was normal that they’d want to spend time together alone: they were at the start of their relationship, infatuated, in love, lust, whatever, but they could have handled it better. He had his own things going on, of course, teaching and reading and blogging. The Damp Review was getting several dozen hits a day, and he’d begun chatting to another blogger who’d left comments. ‘Singleton’ lived in SW9. She lol-ed a lot and had recently posted a review on her own site of the same Wong Kar-Wai movie that David had written about. Like David, she displayed no photographs of herself, though she had a slinky cartoon avatar, who wore a silver miniskirt and had masses of black curly hair and huge violet eyes.
The Damp Review was anonymous, though David signed his posts ‘The Dampener’. His alter ego was unafraid, hard-boiled, outrageous. David’s blog was his counter-plot, and everything was up for judgement and redressal. If he watched TV or read a book, was delayed by roadworks or bought a sandwich, he’d blog about it. Then the comments from others might appear. It was peculiar what brought people to his site. Anything and everything. And when they arrived they’d look around, then join in. People take so much shit that they’ll jump at a chance to give some back. And David’s rancour was applauded. He was permitted. He felt fine. He didn’t need to justify, but on occasion, late at night, adrenalized with vitriol, some cobwebby corner of him almost understood the problem: he was searching not for things to love but a place to put his rage.
Glover led them from the embassy through the alien streets of Victoria. Christmas had arrived as advertised. The streets were full of work outings, of drunks and shoppers. They came to a Thai place, Luxuriance, which Tom had apparently recommended. David was not really speaking to his flatmate. Glover took any opportunity now to differentiate himself from David, and his reaction to the piano recital was a case in point. David stared at the menu. For weeks all he had done was eat, laying down reserves for some coming hibernation, and now he found it almost impossible to pick a main course. Each choice was too freighted with corollary loss.
When Ruth slipped off to the bathroom, the men were left facing each other across a gold elephant-shaped candleholder. Glover’s hair had been cut slightly differently, shorter at the sides, and he’d shaved, so his face looked very soft. He could have been seventeen, about to be sent off to war. He tipped forward and propped both elbows on the table; two light indentations appeared on his brow above the neat nose.
‘How exactly have I annoyed you? What have I actually done?’
‘No, it’s nothing. It’s fine.’ David looked down at the tablecloth.
‘What’s fine? What are you forgiving me for?’
‘I don’t see why you had to be so pissy about the concert. It’s like every time I say something you have to disagree, and it’s not like we even see each other any more…’
Glover gave a patient sigh, tried to smile.
‘I genuinely enjoyed it. I don’t know why that should upset you…I’m sorry if you feel a bit neglected.’
David poured himself another large dose of Sauvignon Blanc and set the bottle back down without refilling Glover’s glass.
‘Well, that’s one of the unpleasant side effects of neglect.’
‘You want every relationship in life to be all-consuming. I sometimes think you have problems understanding that you’re my flatmate and not my boyfriend.’
‘Oh, go fuck yourself.’
‘All right, all right,’ Glover said tightly. ‘Sorry, let’s take it down a notch.’ He had exhausted his verbal scope, and now he playpunched David on the shoulder.
‘It’s fine, really.’
‘Come on. I’ve got Christmas Day off. I’m still coming to your folks’ for lunch. We’ll have a few pints this week and go to the pitch-and-putt.’
‘It’s winter. The course will be closed.’
‘We’ll climb the fence.’
‘In tam-o’-shanters.’
‘And plus fours.’ Glover gave his baggy smile, and shrugged. ‘I didn’t mean to be a prick. This is all pretty fucking strange for me.’
‘And for me too.’
Glover stood up then to go to the toilet, and pretended to essay a putt into Ruth’s handbag.
David hated sitting in public by himself and took out his phone to check for messages. When Ruth returned, he was in the middle of giving a tentative bite to the flower carrot that decorated his satay plate. It seemed to have been somehow vulcanized.
Ruth watched him set it back down. ‘I’m sorry it’s been awkward tonight.’
‘Oh, it’s not your fault. I think James has been really busy at work. He’s just tired.’
The fact that David was defending Glover seemed to irritate her, and he wasn’t sure why he’d even bothered. She pushed her tongue up over her top teeth, as if checking for one of the two butterfly prawns he’d seen her eat that evening, then added with a certain triumphant brutality, ‘Hmmm, I know it’s not my fault. He’s pissed because you’re here.’
She was daring him in some way and met his astonished stare, for a moment, with defiance. David felt humiliation single him out like a spotlight.
‘I didn’t realize…I shouldn’t have come.’
She blinked and smiled sympathetically, though the dark pools of her eyes were still backlit with mischief. ‘Oh no, he’s not really angry. It’s my fault. I should’ve asked him before I said you could come this evening. I think he wanted it to be just the two of us. He says he’s going to miss me this week’—she flashed her eyebrows at such a sweet absurdity—‘and he wanted to say goodbye properly.’
Glover managed to say goodbye properly for about an hour later that night. He was certainly not a virgin any more, and David couldn’t help but think that he was doing it on purpose. After the dinner, he had made a show of insisting they spend the night in Borough and David felt it was for his benefit, to demonstrate the power he now wielded over Ruth. To be accommodating, David had gone straight to bed, pleading a headache and general exhaustion, not that they pushed him for reasons. He left them on the sofa, her bare feet across his lap, the toenails still electric blue, Joni Mitchell on the stereo. When he heard them enter Glover’s bedroom he was listening to the shipping forecast, feeling as utterly remote as a trawler rounding Cromarty or Malin Head or FitzRoy. He turned off the radio and listened. After a few minutes the faintest creaking of the bed could be discerned. When it speeded up, someone seemed to slow it again. A couple of times the headboard gently knocked against the wall.
David lay very still, with his eyes closed, and saw the machine with no face, white and entire, rocking and working itself to the edge, and over the edge, to the weightless fall. His head could only be the distance of an outstretched arm from theirs. When he woke she had left for New York.
Reconciling everything
Two days later, Glover was still in bed when David sloped out into the living room at 8 a.m. It was Christmas morning. David’s body clock was on school time. Glover had left the heat on overnight and the whole flat had the stifled atmosphere of an airing cupboard. He swooshed the curtains open
in the living room and let the grey light fall in on a classic Yuletide scene: crumpled Stella cans on the coffee table, an ashtray cluttered with butts, and the Radio Times draped like an antimacassar over the back of the armchair. Outside, the street was just as dead. Windscreens and bonnets glinted with frost. All the houses were sealed up with curtains or shutters or blinds. David watched the neighbours’ baleful white cat trot into view on the opposite pavement and then out of shot again. Welcome to the bleak midwinter.
Glover’s parents had gone away for the holidays, to stay with his father’s brother Geoff, who’d retired to Malaga to lay-preach to tourists, play golf and occasionally return to Suffolk with a tan the colour, Glover said, of peanut butter. His sister was a social worker in Durham, married with two children, and had asked him up to stay for the holidays. David had listened to him on the phone, pleading prior commitments, of which the main one, he could now see, was drinking Belgian lager.
By the time David emerged from the shower Glover had cleared the coffee table and sat slouched in the armchair in his dressing gown, drinking tea and watching a cartoon. Two bow-tied bears on-screen were driving a car constructed from tree trunks and boulders.
‘Merry Christmas, then,’ he said flatly, raising his mug in salutation but not looking up.
‘And to you.’ David sat down heavily on the sofa. ‘Sooooo. Are you ready for the Pinner Christmas?’
‘I’ll tell you what I am looking forward to, is a proper spread. I had cheese on toast for lunch yesterday.’
‘Was that it?’ David’s stomach, his most compassionate organ, contracted involuntarily with sympathy.
‘With a dash of Worcestershire sauce.’
‘You poor, malnourished fool. Did you speak to Ruth? How’s New York?’
‘Under three feet of snow but she’s good. Missing me apparently.’ He looked up and raised his eyebrows, meaning Women! What can you do? ‘She’s going to her friend Jess’s for dinner, and seeing Bridget and her boyfriend in the morning.’
‘Lovely. Shall we leave about twelve?’
‘I’ve church at ten and I need a bath.’
‘Don’t make it an epic.’
The Polo had frozen up. David sprayed his initials on the patinated windows with the anti-freeze and they climbed in and waited, watching in silence as the liquid ploughed transparent rills down through the ice and revealed the street in strips.
In Hendon, David’s father was sitting on a wicker stool in the porch, wearing a yellow scarf and a new navy duffel coat very similar to David’s. The porch was now the only place where Hilda allowed him to smoke, and he sat there at all hours, diligently filling the glass box with wispy clouds and silky filaments. As they crunched across the verge towards him David was reminded of a physics experiment at school which sought to demonstrate atomic theory by Brownian motion: one observed smoke particles, then deduced that their random movement was due to being pinged hither and thither by the air’s invisible molecules. Ken got to his feet slowly, and David had to dismiss the thought that someday his father would die.
‘David, James, welcome. Merry Christmas.’
‘Merry Christmas, Ken.’
‘Merry Christmas, Dad.’
Glover handed over two bottles of mulled wine from the corner shop.
‘Merry Christmas indeed,’ Ken declared with an off-putting chuckle. David looked down at the little wicker plant table to see a half-empty bottle of Sandemans port, a used glass and several cigar butts. He was in hiding and, at one o’clock, already a bit drunk.
‘I like the Paddington Bear get-up,’ Glover said, giving a little tug on the hood of the duffel coat.
‘Christmas present from Hilda—so I can stay out here longer.’
Lunch was a buffet. Ken didn’t like turkey and Hilda wrongly assumed that choice equated to quality. She had put on perfume, a purple pleated skirt and a cream silk blouse, along with an expression of radiant mania. She loved Christmas. So much could go wrong! Normally when someone entered their household the three of them behaved as if it were a gala performance, but today David couldn’t rouse himself. When he stood with his back to the white marble fireplace, where a pyramid of smokeless fuel produced a flameless, heatless fire, he wanted to lie down on the rug and sleep.
Across the living room, in front of the closed venetian blind, his mother had set the small plastic tree on the magnified snowflake of a lace doily, atop the tallest of the three nesting tables. Since some of the branches had been slotted in wrongly to the metal trunk and were now stuck, it was bush-shaped rather than conical, and bare of decoration but for a single strand of silver tinsel that snaked around it, and an angel David had made at school from yellowed card and pipe cleaners, with a polystyrene ball for a head. The angel had had a cardboard wand once, and over the years Hilda had replaced it with a toothpick, a paperclip and now, rather ominously, a red-headed match. Ken, Glover and David sat obediently at the tablecloth embroidered with cartoon reindeer. On the sideboard knives and forks poked from a tumbler, and David thought how it looked like a modernist posy. Art was addictive, he realized, because analogy was a technique of integration, and thus gave endless, untrue hope for reconciling everything.
The day passed, however, without argument. David mined a tin of Roses for the hard centres. Relatives rang and the phone was passed round with dumbshows of refusal followed by enthusiastic words of greeting. Glover laughed at each mime in turn, conferring upon the Pinners membership of their own family.
Ken washed up; Glover dried; David made the tea. Hilda had been exiled to the living room and they could hear her pummelling the cushions to reshape them, then aligning the slate coasters with the edge of the coffee table. Ken asked Glover what he thought of QPR’s new manager. Outside an antic blue tit alighted and clung and pecked at the feeder that hung on a nail in the fence post. Ken stood very still, watching the bird, letting only his hands move beneath the waterline of suds.
‘Where do these go?’
Glover held four plates in a stack. David nodded at the wooden cupboard by Glover’s head. ‘Can you get me mugs when you’re in there?’
As David poured milk from the carton into the Royal Doulton jug and set it on the floral tray, Glover clattered the mugs down beside it. David saw his dad glance at them and waited for him to speak. When he didn’t, David said, ‘No, not that red one.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
Ken was looking straight ahead, out of the window. The bird had flitted off. All at once David could feel the heat of his father’s tiredness. David said, ‘That’s the workman’s mug.’
‘Which workman?’ Glover was grinning with disbelief, one eyebrow raised.
‘Any of them. Mum has a thing about it not being used by family.’
‘Should I take it? I work.’
David lifted the red mug and set it back in the cupboard. Ken, choosing deafness, continued staring into the garden, his hand moving a sponge inside a saucepan with a circular, meditative motion.
Glover and Ken sat at either ends of the new huge Land-of-Leather sofa, working industriously through a box of orange Matchmakers and a case of Guinness, amiably taking turns to retrieve cold cans from the garage. The sofa had arrived two weeks before and was an all-white, deep-backed, six-hide thing, which slumped against one wall like a snowdrift. Glover called it very bling-bling, and then had to explain what that meant. Hilda smiled but gave a tiny wounded sniff, so he began stroking the leather and saying, ‘You know, this really is soft.’ As for David, he was too old to sneer at anything in his parents’ house. Taste, after all, was just taste. Refinement in such matters meant nothing but the smallest aspirational adjustment. Everyone needs something to lie on.
He sat at the dining table and flicked through one of his mother’s magazines. He wasn’t reading it exactly, but he found that looking at the airbrushed and the collagened, the perma-tanned and siliconed, made him strangely angry, and he lifted a biro from the sideboard and began doodling the obscenities
of real life on them: double chins and buck teeth, spectacles and birthmarks, facial hair and frowns. Hilda announced herself with a sigh and settled in on the other side. Between mother and son the embroidered reindeer raced among the crumbs and spills. Her hair had been redone for Christmas and she lifted a hand to it now, patting to check that everything was in place.
‘Are you having a nice Christmas, darling?’
‘Of course. It’s been great.’
She shifted in her seat a little, and raised her wine glass. Her lipstick had imprinted a cerise half-moon on the rim and she picked a white serviette from the pile on the table and wiped it off. He was reminded of taking Communion, kneeling between his parents at the rail, and watching the insipid verger wipe the silver cup before it came, disgustingly, to his own lips.
‘I’m sorry the ham was tough. You never know until it’s cooked. Even your dad can’t choose one that—’
‘It was fine. It was lovely.’
‘So, are you going to tell me about your new friend, about this Ruth?’
He’d been stupid enough to mention her name on the phone to his mother once, though it had been so long ago that he thought she had forgotten. In general his mother was not a great listener, appearing to be counting seconds until she could speak again.
‘Oh, she’s well, as far as I know. She’s off to New York for Christmas, actually.’
Hilda gave a cautious little smile, and pulled sharply at a loose brown thread attached to Rudolph’s antler.
‘Because your father and I wouldn’t be…we wouldn’t object to meeting her at some point, you know.’
‘Well, she’s just a friend.’
Hilda nodded solemnly, entrusted with some vast and confidential responsibility. David was aware that Glover could probably hear, though Ken had found some goal-of-the-year programme on Sky Sports and was loudly disputing the findings. He lowered his voice.