by Nick Laird
The week Jess was in London Glover spent all the time he wasn’t working in the flat in Borough. David thought he’d be spending his off-hours at the Barbican, metaphorically pissing in the corners to mark out his territory, but no. He said Ruth’s place would feel too crowded with three of them in it, and what did he want to hang around with two women for a week for? There was a touch of falsity in his tone and David decided that he was repeating Ruth.
In the last few months Glover had begun to show a certain reluctance to demonstrate enthusiasm about anything David said or did. Particularly in front of Ruth. He felt that Glover’s comments were usually aimed at chipping a little bit off him, at reducing him. But that week they had fun. They consumed indiscriminately: sitcoms, video games, takeaways. David thought Glover seemed relieved to be hanging out and talking shit like in the pre-Ruth days. During Top Gear he made David laugh for ages when he said it was like Christmas not to have to listen to Radio Fucking Four.
Stalwart
The press screening was at four in the afternoon and David managed to leave school in time to arrive at the Leicester Square multiplex ten minutes early. Singleton arrived five minutes late, pushing a boneshaker and wearing a leopardskin coat, both of which she had warned him about. He watched her from the lobby as she chained the bike to a lamppost using a large padlock and a thick chain that she pulled from her rucksack. She had abundant pre-Raphaelite hair, and as she entered the lobby and looked around, he saw she had large brown timid eyes set deep in an apple face; and she was a little apple-red and flustered. She was so sorry she was late, she’d forgotten her glasses and then had to go back. Sorry, sorry, she was Gayle, with a Y. No problem, they had plenty of time. Don’t worry. Breathe. He was David, with an I. She laughed politely and, after they’d shaken hands, disappeared into the lobby toilets. Another five minutes passed, and when she still hadn’t come back, he found himself seriously considering the possibility that she might have done a runner, that she might have taken just one look and scarpered, but then she came out, banging the toilet door on the wall and pulling an endearingly silly face at the noise. She had re-made up and, in gratitude for her reappearance, David decided that she was cute. Particularly if he focused on her big brown eyes and tried to ignore the babyish rotundity of her face, and her depleted mouth.
In the screening room they sat in the row behind two newspaper critics that David recognized from their byline photos. They, the critics, were going to Cannes and seemed to want everyone else to know it. David raised his eyebrows at Gayle and she rolled her eyes back at him; it was a bit of British bonding. He took his notebook out and wrote down the gist of what the loudest critic said, to post online and satirize.
Seeing what he was doing, Gayle whispered, excitedly, ‘Oh, you’re terrible.’
He decided she definitely was cute, and pretty even, though a little plump. Botticelli would have loved her. David Pinner, so far, liked. The conversation didn’t flow quite as it did on IM, though they both smiled a lot, and agreed how weird it felt to meet face to face, to hear the other’s voice. When she pulled a freezer bag from her rucksack and offered David a peeled carrot he took one-more from solidarity than desire. She hadn’t seen much of the director Kent Gray’s previous work and had come straight from her office in Stockwell, where she worked parttime on a medical journal, a job which she wanted to quit in order to travel in India, or maybe China, though she’d been to Hong Kong once before, when she was very young, with her whole family, to see an uncle who worked in the army and was stationed out there. She chattered on nervously, nibbling at her carrot, and watching her made David feel very stalwart and substantial and rational.
Even so, the darkness came as a relief; any silence now could no longer be described as awkward, only anticipative. In their baggy jeans, her knees were much further away from the seat in front than David’s, and he found that this too pleased him. Contentedly he sat and listened to the tiny bumps and ticks of ice cubes blunting in his carbonated drink. Then the movie started.
Afterwards they stood and talked for a while when she unlocked her bike. She had quite enjoyed the film, found the cinematography innovative. David thought it total rubbish, with a ludicrous plot, an unconvincing denouement and twodimensional characters. She had to get home now. She blogged mostly on books but was, she said, going to start doing movies. The evening was pleasant, David thought, not world-shaking, perhaps, but certainly pleasant. He rode all the way home on the tube standing up, strap-hanging, hurtling through the earth, watching the blasted rock speed past, since that was without doubt what a man would do.
Flicking between channels
‘You wouldn’t believe the number of forms they make you fill out.’
London was petty, repetitive, tiring. The tube had gorged itself on commuters and when it seemed to David that his carriage could not possibly take another soul, some chancer had flung himself against the bodies and forced another shuffle and commingling. He’d been squashed against the connecting door, where a pallid, abruptly nosed woman in a business suit, forehead dappled evenly with sweat as though she’d used a pastry brush, had spent ten minutes coughing her illness into his face. The city felt expended. Nothing was clean. David had a hankering for something mint and shiny. He ignored Glover and went into the bathroom, where he washed his face viciously to separate the evening from his shitty day.
A thick folder of official-looking documents lay on a cushion on Glover’s stomach as he lounged on the sofa and leafed through them.
‘I said you wouldn’t believe the amount of forms they make you complete.’
He was pretending to be exasperated, but his tone was excited, proud even: he saw himself responding supremely well to a devilish challenge.
‘Who does?’ David slumped in the chair. No hello. No how-was-your-day.
‘The Americans. At the embassy. They make you fill out a ton of forms when you’re applying for a visa.’
‘Since when have you said fill out?. The English fill in forms. We’ve already lost you to the Yanks.’
Glover wiggled a little on the sofa, adjusting the cushion under the forms, and said, ‘Well, whatever, there’s a billion of them.’
David fired the TV on with the remote and immediately turned it off again. He was not in the mood to be distracted, patronized, misinformed or sold something.
‘Now, do you mean an American billion or a British billion? Do you even know the difference between them? Shouldn’t you check that out before you move there?’
Quickly, Glover shifted the cushion and got up. He didn’t look at David as he stepped lightly over his extended legs.
‘Okay. You win. Your crap mood trumps my good one. I give in.’
‘Don’t you mean you give out?’ David shouted after him. He heard Glover’s door pull closed. After a few minutes he got up and drank a glass of London’s worn-out water, then rolled a three-skin spliff while sitting on the toilet. The rest of the evening he kept his door closed and worked on his best man’s speech. He’d been writing it for days but that night it really came together. He tweaked and fine-tuned it, rehearsed it softly, then out loud, varying the emphases. No reply to his thank-you-for-a-nice-afternoon email to Gayle. She was obviously uninterested, or busy, or both.
Glover claimed that he didn’t want a stag night, and David didn’t try to persuade him otherwise. The idea of organizing a weekend’s, or even an evening’s, activities for a drunken all-male troop of baboons didn’t appeal. But on the Friday evening two weeks before the wedding, Glover texted to say he was ‘involved in a session’. He’d stayed on in the Bell after the day shift, and by the time David arrived he was already flushed and far gone. The current pressing concern seemed to be not the rise of fundamentalism or global warming or the decline of the NHS, but how many beer mats you could balance in a stack on your elbow and then catch when you jerked your arm down.
Glover was chewing a matchstick, and the way it pinned his mouth up made it look as though he had a clef
t lip. He plucked it out, then pointed it at David and said, ‘Compadre, welcome. Tom you’ve met. Eugene, another member of the Bell and Crown family. We’re having a drink. Tom in fact might be a bit drunk.’
He winked and nodded towards his cousin, whose response was to give him a zingy punch, hard, on the shoulder. The manager of the Bell was as bullying and charmless as a barrow boy shouting in a market. He was muscular but small-framed and had given himself a curved back from working out so much. His mousey hair hung to his shoulders, parted in the middle, and though around David’s age, he dressed more like a Brooklyn teenager: a loop of chain hanging down from oversizedjeans, an enormous New York Knicks T-shirt. His face was permanently changing, grinning, frowning, smirking, as if someone sat inside him flicking between channels.
It is quite something to be sober when everyone is drunk. You’re a genius crash-landed in the valley of the imbeciles. Eugene, a kind of ghost-man, pale as flour, was probably the drunkest. His freckles made his face harmless and as endearing as a child actor’s, though when he opened his mouth each sentence was garnished with a swear word. David unfastened the toggles of his duffel coat and draped it over the back of the chair, which promptly tipped to the ground with a muffled bump. When he retrieved it and straightened up Tom was smirking conspiratorially at Glover. David knew they didn’t really want him here-he was outside the circle, a bore, a drogue-but he tried hard to win them round. He jollied along, laughed tremendously, and kept a firm grip on his dislike of Tom.
They wandered then, the four of them, through guilty neon Soho, sticking to the patch bordered by Shaftesbury Avenue in the south, Charing Cross Road in the east and Oxford Street to the north. They must have been to six or seven pubs-the Rising Sun, the Three Brigadiers, the Coach and Horses, Fluid, the Moon and Sixpence-standing shoulder to shoulder in a ring, necking pints and shorts and reminding Glover that he was soon to be at the altar, haltered, retrained, restrained, worried, harried, sorry, married. They returned triumphant to the Bell and Crown for last orders.
Della, Tom’s new girlfriend and-not coincidentally-the Bell’s new barmaid, triple-bolted the doors as soon as the last customers were cajoled outside. Tom directed her to some lights behind the bar and the atmosphere dimmed.
Pints tended to make David inward and morose, and when a Smiths track he liked came on-‘Death of a Disco Dancer’-he found that he had been unconsciously ripping apart an empty box of Camel Lights. Like an undone jigsaw of the sky, the pieces lay scattered before him. Tom was talking.
‘That I understand, but I only met her once and she was wearing some yellow coat that covered everything up, and so the question is, is she stacked?’
Glover’s only response was to laugh. Normally his features looked closed and forbidding, like a soldier on parade, but when he laughed something winning and vulnerable entered the equation. His mouth was slightly overpopulated with teeth and his eyes narrowed. There was nothing intimidating about him when he laughed. It made David want to dive in and join him. And now he did.
Glover lowered his pint and said, still smiling, ‘She’s curvy, and she’s extremely sexy, Tom. She should carry a health warning.’
He was amusing himself. What David envied most was Glover’s valency, that talent he possessed for combining with whatever element he moved in.
‘David knows her. Ask him.’
As to Ruth, one of the foremost feminist artists of our time, Tom still required a certain specific confirmation.
‘So has she got a rack?’
David grinned at Tom and then turned to Eugene’s farm-boy face, the porous freckles.
‘Ruth beggars all description. She has an exquisitely straight nose. And her eyes are a deep intelligent brown.’
‘An exquisitely straight nose?’ Glover laughed.
‘Like Cleopatra’s,’ David said. Glover grinned at him with bemused approval; he couldn’t quite gauge his seriousness.
With deliberate crudity and iambic stress, Tom said, ‘But whát abóut the títs?’
‘Yes, she has those,’ David replied, nodding wisely to the general laughter.
Glover stood up slowly and unsteadily, as if being inflated, then plucked the unlit cigarette from between his lips. He announced, ‘My friends, the tits are magnificent.’
‘Well, there you go,’ David added, but Glover wasn’t finished.
‘And she gives great head.’
A cheer went up from Tom; Eugene nervously raised his glass in a toast; David looked at the table.
They went home some hours later in a taxi. As David tried to get the key into the door, Glover took his arm and told him that he was a great guy, and that he’d helped him out, and that he really loved him. David wasn’t particularly touched. He manoeuvred him into his room and helped him climb onto the bed, setting a glass of water on his bedside table and leaving his plastic bin and a towel beside him. Glover lay there fully clothed, groaning every so often, but as David was leaving he spoke, in a soft anxious voice.
‘I have to say my prayers.’
David remained standing at the door but didn’t respond. He thought Glover was about to pray aloud, but a few seconds later he turned over onto his side, to face the wall, and murmured, ‘Sleep well, Swell.’
He wondered if Ruth said that to him when they lay in bed together. Maybe that was all his prayers comprised now. He stood and watched the tiny rhythmic crumpling movement of the duvet and listened to the waveform of Glover’s breathing, then left to write a long post for The Damp Review about the death of love. He wrapped himself in his brown fleece blanket, propped himself up on his pillows and booted up the laptop.
Gayle had finally emailed. She said she had been in Swindon on a course for work and was now in Bristol with her sister. She’d be in touch when she got back. David didn’t buy it for a second. He was a little drunk himself and anonymously left some comments on her blog poking gentle fun at a couple of her entries. To be honest, he wasn’t interested in seeing someone who found Kent Gray’s heavy-handed style of direction acceptable.
He started on his post. Glover had transferred his faith in God to faith in Love. People used to believe in nature too, as a way to teach them how to live, at least until evolution came along, and people looked at gardens and saw not the symbols of grace and harmony that Marvell did, but fresh patterns of competition, auctions of light, acres and acres of selfishness. Where do we find ourselves? Where is the analogy for good? Glover believed he could become himself through love, that love would move him to the centre of his life, to his true place in the sun. It was the first time he had fallen for such a lie, and only a first-timer, an amateur, could fail to notice that love had died in the culture. It wasn’t serious. Only a child credited love now. Only a virgin. A millionth visitor. A religious nut. It all required the same kind of faith, the same vanity and weakness. But, David thought, God is dead-as is Nature, as is the Author-and Love has followed them into the grave.
Information killed it. People know all about infidelity and opportunity and pheromones, about natural spans of lust, about the genetic imperative. We know that the man who leaves his wife for his secretary will be the same man in three years, and will feel the same way that he feels now. A new partner is at best a temporary salve; believe it, they will not save you. But poor Glover never had a chance. First love is sentimental. It is romantic and we’ve moved beyond that. The meaning of love, in fact, follows the meaning of that word. Romantic used to refer to an expression of deep feeling (see Wordsworth) and now it’s become nothing less than an insult, meaning one is unrealistic and possesses an idealized notion of the way things should be. David typed quickly, checked it, then headed the post Wanking Ourselves Senseless: The Death of Love in Modern Culture. That should bring in a few hits.
He turned off the computer and the bedside lamp. The curtains were still open and out to the south, over zone three and zone four and zone five and onwards, a silver bank of cumuli had aggregated. It was shining eerily, lanterned fr
om within by an invisible moon.
A series of short rises and swinging stops
Even though Glover and Ruth had eschewed the usual trappings (no photographer, no morning suits, no limousine or string quartet), David didn’t think Ruth had done any of her real work-any art-for days. When he managed to get hold of her, she was trying on shoes in South Molton Street or having a facial in a spa in a basement in Chelsea. Bridget and Rolf arrived on the Thursday night, a week before the wedding. On the Friday she was taking them shopping, then to the Tate Modern, and then—at Glover’s suggestion-up on the London Eye.
They were to meet Ruth and co at six o’clock on the Friday night outside County Hall. It was bright and clear but a chill wind loitered on the river walk, rising and fading and rising again. David was sensible in his black woollen gloves and duffel, but in the walk from Waterloo had broken out in a sweat. If the Thames is London’s artery, the South Bank is its cholesterol: book stalls, tourists, street theatre (meaning buskers and painted immigrants standing still on upturned buckets). David had the impression there were a lot of first dates occurring. Optimistic couples walked past, glowing with mendacity, and far enough apart not to bump hands. A businessman loosened his tie as he strode towards them and then violently yanked it out from his collar, as though it had turned into a cobra. This was the end of work and the end of the week. Night was arriving and the darkness was welcome. It licensed an adjustment of mood.