by Nick Laird
So upon waking into a brand-new year, curled in his usual prawn, he was already physically adjusted for the immediate feeling of shame. That sensation sharpened over the next few minutes as the night before came back in shards. He suddenly remembered saying to Jess as he waited for his taxi that she was the nicest person he’d met. She’d patted his cheek as though he were five years old and called him a total sweetheart. He remembered that Glover and Ruth had announced their engagement. He still couldn’t quite process that and stored it for later, for when he was less…dying.
The light in his bedroom struck in round the curtains’ edges and turned them a tinned-tuna pink. Gingerly he propped himself up on pillows, like some precious displayed artefact, switched on the laptop and checked his mail, taking great care to move only his fingers. The pop-up blocker was disabled and three windows appeared suddenly telling him that he was the millionth visitor to the website, and that BIG CASH PRIZES awaited him. He shut them down and checked the stats for his blog. Two visitors since yesterday morning. David looked up the IP addresses and checked where they lived. Singleton had been but had left no New Year wishes. He eased himself, inch by inch, back down into the bed. His head felt hollowed out and filled with sandpaper, allergies, hurt, whatever little boys are made of.
His stomach, that dictator, eventually drove him to his dressing gown and kitchen, where he made toast and tea and boiled four identical beige eggs. As they sat in a row before him, in matching yellow china egg cups, he thought of ovals. Recognizing the shapes of things was about all he could manage. The plate was a circle, the knife a tangent. His hangover had begun in earnest, with accidie, nausea and a distinct pain in the frontal lobes each playing competing discordant parts. In the living room the telephone rang plaintively and he decided to ignore it, and that felt good and a little risky.
As soon as he heard Glover’s key in the door he jumped up from the table, and spilt the remains of his mug of cold tea. He left it and made for his bedroom. He had assumed he’d see no one all day and had been planning an afternoon of updating The Damp Review, surfing for porn, smoking a spliff and reading Berryman’s Dream Songs. He was halfway down the hallway when the front door opened, trapping him behind it, and he stood there helplessly. Ruth came through the door first, in a maroon cloche hat and a black pashmina doubled up and wrapped around her neck. Glover’s black beanie bobbed behind her. They’d been walking and glowed with vigour and purpose. Glover cradled a bag of croissants and a stack of newspapers.
When she saw David, Ruth started but recovered and cried, ‘Darling, Happy New Year!’
David pushed the front door shut to get past them, and kept on for the bedroom, shouting over his shoulder that he’d be out in a minute.
He dressed and sloped into the living room, where Ruth, still standing, handed him the arts section of a newspaper. It was a round-up-of-the-year piece.
‘Under the picture of Lucian Freud,’ she said, and sat down as he scanned the column:
2005 also saw the arrival of American artist Ruth Marks to these shores. Her gender-led, highly sexualised work attempts to rewrite male orthodoxy and though she sometimes seems hackneyed in content, her formal variety is always of interest. Her Barbican residency brings a welcome addition to the London arts scene. A retrospective runs from 20 January to 18 March.
A pack of his Marlboro Lights was on the coffee table and she slipped one from its box, pinched it in half.
‘Ouch,’ David offered.
She grimaced and lit the demi-fag. Immediately the smoke tripled his nausea.
‘Just bullshit—not worth reading,’ he said and smacked the paper with the back of his hand.
‘Gender-led? What does that even mean?’ David crossed the room to open the window as she sucked hard on the cigarette. He hoisted the sash and a blast of arctic weather entered. Nausea or hypothermia, he thought, your choice.
‘Ruth, this person’s written to these shores. They’ve written a welcome addition. It’s barely literate. It’s padding.’
She nodded, and picked at one of her nails. Her cloche hat fell off the sofa to the carpet and she looked at it, making no effort to lift it. She should be over the moon today. A whole new life ahead of her, but she was still a neurotic. Thank God for neurotics. Without them, David thought, there’d be no art at all. He remembered the time he’d reassured her in the echoey hall at Goldsmiths, how tender she’d been, how exposed.
‘But to be dismissed in one line by someone you don’t know, who doesn’t make any attempt to meet your work halfway…’
‘In fact,’ David said, enjoying fording her stream of self-pity, ‘let’s burn it. Right now.’
‘Really?’
‘We have to,’ David said firmly. ‘Otherwise it’ll just sit here on the table annoying you for the rest of the day.’
Glover entered, carrying a tray with coffee and the Christmas tin of shortbread David’s mother had sent back with them.
‘We’re going to burn that nasty little paragraph…’
Glover set the tray down, so precisely that it made no sound. ‘We should burn the idiot who wrote it…’
David folded the page and tore the paragraph out, leaving a kidney-shaped hole beneath Freud’s glare. Ruth murmured, ‘I commit thee to the flames. Oh, be careful with it.’
The crumpled bud burned slowly before blooming, suddenly, and then in an instant wilted. David poked at it with his lighter, breaking up the glossy endoskeleton.
Glover dropped another section of the newspaper on the coffee table—loosing a couple of burnt frills of ash into the air—and depressed the plunger of the cafetière with stately deliberation, detonating some historic building. David decided to face the inevitable head-on.
‘God, I almost forgot. Congratulations! Have you told everyone? How did Bridget take the news?’
Ruth laughed with a quick defensiveness. ‘David! You make it sound like I’ve some terminal illness!’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘We just spoke to her, actually. She was delighted—’
‘Well, not quite delighted maybe…’ Glover added.
‘She’s delighted about coming to London for the wedding, and she’s bringing Rolf.’
Rolf was her boyfriend. He was ‘inappropriate’, being five years older, but was becoming ‘a reality with which we’ll just have to deal’. David intended to point out the irony soon. Glover switched on the television. Football.
‘We’ve missed ten minutes. You know, you were pretty pissed last night.’
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’
Glover told him how he had tried, jokily but persistently, to punch him in the stomach. After that he’d put his head down with an audible bang on the dining-room table. He knew Glover must be exaggerating, but as he kept on talking, David had the faintest sensation of memory surfacing, as if he were hearing the plot of a book he’d loved as a child. Eventually they’d put him in a cab. He didn’t remember getting home. He didn’t remember getting inside the flat or undressing or making and eating a ham sandwich, the evidence for which, a plate of stiffened crusts, was on the bedside table when he woke.
Ruth had gone to lie down for a while and as David passed Glover’s door, carrying the empty plate and cup from his room to the kitchen, she called, ‘James.’ He pushed gently at the bedroom door.
‘Me, actually.’
‘Oh hey, you okay? You and Jess really hit it off.’
She lay on her side on the bed, reading. Her baggy brown corduroys and grey wool V-neck made David think of the women, the incidentally liberated, who took the factory jobs after the men went to war. One of her legs was drawn up and the material gathered at the knee in soft corrugations. David set the cup and plate on top of a wine box against the wall, and sat on the director’s folding chair, where Glover’s clothes were usually draped. He thought suddenly, irrelevantly, that he’d never sat here before.
‘She’s great. Ruth, maybe it’s not my place to ask, but have you told J
ames about her? It’s just she mentioned to me that you’d been in a relationship together and maybe James has a right to know…’
She sighed. ‘Oh, it came up last night. I think you might have brought it up, in fact.’
‘Really? God, I don’t even remember—’
‘No, it’s fine, honestly. It’s just a shame that everyone was drunk. He said I should have told him.’
‘About Jess?’
‘That I’d been with women.’ She widened her dark mobile eyes as if this was just hilarious. ‘Anyway, it’s fine. He likes Jess. So can you believe it? That we’re getting married?’
That was evidently the end of the topic. David shifted in his seat. The room looked odd from this new angle, the ceiling seemed lower.
‘Not really, to be honest. What happened?’
‘We’ve been getting on so well, and talking about him coming back with me to New York, and it just seemed to make sense. I didn’t expect it, but last night we were in the bedroom and he suddenly got down on one knee. I thought he was joking.’ She was grinning at the memory; David could tell the story was already crystallizing into myth. No doubt he would hear it again and again. The thought made him very tired. ‘He didn’t have a ring, so he took this off and put it round my neck.’
She pulled a silver chain from under her white T-shirt, fingered it.
‘Huh. It’s quite a decision.’
Ruth gave a tiny non-committal shrug.
‘Oh, let’s not be too sensible about it now. I’m at the stage where all I want is somebody who’s nice to me, who’s kind to me. I’ve had enough of tortured artists. I want somebody good.’ She patted something on the bed. ‘Have you ever actually read this thing?’
It was Glover’s Bible, open at some highlighted passage.
‘Well, parts of it, of course. At school, and I used to go to church with my parents…’
She slapped it shut. David said, ‘We could burn it next.’
‘Don’t let James hear you.’
They were being conspiratorial again. She flexed her leg, dissolving the corrugations, and held it a few inches in the air, as if she might start exercising, then let it drop onto the bed.
‘I think he might be growing out of it.’
‘Really? How come?’
‘You’ll laugh.’
‘I won’t.’ David raised his right hand, taking an oath.
‘Well, he’s stopped saying his prayers at night. The first few times we shared a bed, I’d say something and he’d reply, “Can you give me a minute, I’m praying?”’
David pretended to hold a phone to his ear, then turned his head away from it and mimicked Glover’s slower, deeper voice: ‘Any chance you could give me a minute? God’s just on the other line.’
She giggled, rising notes. ‘No, we shouldn’t make fun. But all that does seem to have gone to the wall. I’m almost sad about it. I find myself admiring those who can pray. I go into churches around the Barbican sometimes, in the afternoons, and there’s always one or two women on their knees…’
‘Cringing?’
Ruth placed her hand over the Bible, protecting it from David, and said, ‘You know I was brought up Lutheran, and I do think faith can be a wonderful thing if you can sustain it.’ It was typical of Ruth to be so needlessly ambivalent, he thought.
‘Oh come on, there’s no excuse now for believing in the supernatural.’
‘You’re making belief sound ridiculous.’
‘Because it is.’
She had had enough then, and sat up, swinging her legs down from the bed. She stretched her arms in the air and breathed out loudly, pitching backwards. He could see the shape of her breasts very clearly. He looked away but a little too late: abruptly she dropped her arms, crossing them over her chest. Quickly he said, ‘And I’m sorry about last night. When I was a bit drunk. I wasn’t trying—’
She held a hand in the air. ‘Stop apologizing. Everyone loves you.’ Then she locked her eyes on David’s. ‘I know people might blink at it, at first, and they might say the age gap’s problematic and, God, how am I going to meet his parents? But I really think that James and I…I love this man. I was as surprised as anyone when he asked me yesterday. I hadn’t even been thinking…’
She smoothed a hand over the pillow. David stood up and the movement incited some further disclosure from her. ‘I mean, maybe it’s premature but why not? I kept thinking to myself, why not?’
David resisted the impulse to itemize reasons. He looked around the room as if it might hold clues to Glover’s interior life. It was a small white box, tidy and impersonal. You could tell he rented. It was as if he was camped in it. Nothing nailed to the walls. Everything portable, foldable, packable. The wine crates held his books and a few DVDs. An old leather suitcase in the far corner stored his CDs. He didn’t have much. Ruth talked on.
‘I just worry that at his age he doesn’t know his own mind…but he seems so certain about things, so together. So much more together than I was at twenty-three. God, our generation weren’t like that, were they?’
Our generation? Jesus Christ. He was closer to Glover’s age than hers. Did she think she was fooling him? She’d taught him. David simply nodded and pulled the door a few inches ajar.
‘And there’s something else James wants to talk to you about today.’
So Glover was moving out, moving to America with Ruth. David would have another month or year or decade of living here alone and then, when he’d grown bored enough to suffer it, he’d organize a round of interviews from Loot. The goths, the Aussies, the newly divorced. A knot of toads. A cast of hawks. A bloat of hippopotami.
In the living room, hunched on the edge of the sofa, elbows on his knees, Glover was absorbed in the football. David looked at him expectantly but he ignored him, and lightly drummed the remote control on the tin of shortbread Hilda had sent back with them at Christmas. The crowd’s white noise subsided. A whistle blew. When Ruth settled in beside Glover and stroked his neck he dipped his head away, as if even that minute distraction was too much. She drew back her hand, rearranged her black pashmina around herself in two loose loops. David was sifting the newspapers for the property section and noticed.
‘Should I turn the thermostat up? Are you a bit cold?’
‘Are you cold?’ Glover repeated, in a tone that suggested she’d refused to answer.
‘No, no, I’m fine. This is so soft I was just wrapping myself up in it.’ Glover reached out and fingered the material. From where David sat it looked as if the back of his hand must be rubbing against her chest.
‘It’s really soft. Is it new?’ he said, grinning, eyebrows arched.
‘It’s not mine. Jess left it behind last night.’ Glover dropped his hand. ‘It’s almost unbearably plush.’ She elongated the sibilant and seemed to gift the word some hidden sexual context. David looked at the toy men chasing each other on-screen.
‘You really shouldn’t be wearing her shawl. You might get it dirty or something,’ Glover said.
‘It’s a pashmina and it’s only Jess’s. She won’t mind. The wardrobes of clothes she’s stolen from—’
‘You should take it off.’ The crowd noise from the TV began building again but Glover didn’t even turn to see the screen. There was a little stand-off occurring. David looked down at the newspaper on his lap and pretended to be engrossed by an article on interest rates.
‘Oh, don’t be silly. If I want to wear—’
‘I’m not being silly. It’s not yours. Would you like it if you left a coat at someone’s house and they wore it round the town?’
‘It’s not a coat, darling. It’s a pash—’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, whatever it is. Would you like it?’
Ruth said nothing. Glover’s curse had flavoured the atmosphere, suddenly turning everything a different colour. David read how some experts predicted a rise of another quarter point, while others thought the rates would stay put. The TV commentator spoke into the silence
about a superb long ball. The pashmina’s inky black made Ruth’s body into silhouette. David could see the thinness of her shoulders, the tilt of her breasts, then the angle of the lifted arm that brought a glass of water to her tightened, silent, lovely mouth.
By the time the football match ended, Glover lay like a sick child across the sofa, his head on Ruth’s lap. She was playing with his hair, teasing it into separate strands with her fingers. The shawl lay over the back of the armchair. Glover had one hand slid down the front of his jeans, up to the knuckles, and the other was on Ruth’s knee.
‘He wanted to wait until the soccer finished.’
Glover bumped his head on her thigh in reproof, and sat up.
‘The thing is, it’s going to be a small wedding, and since we wouldn’t even know each other if it wasn’t for you, we wondered if you fancied being best man.’
He employed several hand gestures throughout this little declaration and finished, bizarrely, by pointing at David. If you fancied being—it sounded as if Glover thought he was the one doing him a favour. Still, he supposed he was quite pleased.
‘Of course, I’d be delighted. It’d be an absolute honour.’
A red jewel sparkled in her navel
At PMP the A-level students sat their mocks straight after Christmas, at the start of the January term, and it had become traditional that they organize a party to celebrate the exams’ conclusion, which—since PMP paid for it—the teachers were meant to attend. The students brought girlfriends or boyfriends, the teachers presented their spouses for inspection and everyone was entreated, like so many Rapunzels, to let their hair down. The fact that a few of the Year Sevens were always technically under the legal drinking age was never discussed. Each year the Mocks Party came and each year David, slightly stoned, with a righteous sense of grievance, went.
The Year Sevens’ social committee was headed by Kimberley, an Australian student with a nose ring and a raft of blonde ringlets that provided her with endless satisfaction. If David asked her a question, she’d give them a quick, equine toss before responding. And she talked as she wrote, babbling nervily around a topic. Sometimes her essays actually ended with an exclamation mark—which all goes to show why Shakespeare is undoubtedly the world’s greatest writer! She had managed to compound the general horror of the evening by staging the party on a boat. They were to be transported, pointlessly, up and down the Thames, which David realized would preclude any early departures.