by Matt Dunn
‘Okay. I’m watching.’
‘Right. Think of it like one of those wildlife programmes you’ve seen about the Serengeti. These are the prey, and we, or rather I, am the hunter. We watch the prey for a while, selecting the one we want, and then, when the time is right…’
‘We pounce?’
‘Nope. We let them come to us. Well, to me. And then you step in and grab a piece of the action.’
‘And how do we, sorry, you, lure them, exactly?’
Dan taps the side of his nose conspiratorially. ‘Watch and learn, Eddy-boy. Watch and learn.’
We take our drinks and stand by the edge of the dance floor, where we can get a good view, or more likely, where Dan can make certain he gets spotted. Sure enough, within minutes, a couple of girls have stopped dancing and are heading over in our direction. They’re both dressed in the standard uniform of Brighton clubbers—as little as possible—and clutching bottles of brightly coloured mixers. By the looks of them, they’re about sixteen.
The taller of the two pokes Dan unsteadily on the shoulder. ‘You’re that Dan Davis, aren’t you?’ she shouts, ignoring me completely. ‘From the telly.’
Dan beams back at her. ‘That’s right.’
‘My mum loves you.’
Dan blanches slightly at this remark, but doesn’t miss a beat. ‘And I love your mum. What are your names?’
‘I’m Donna,’ she replies. ‘And this is Tracy.’
Dan shakes them both by the hand. ‘Hi Donna. Hi Tracy. And this…’ he says, nodding in my direction, ‘is Edward.’
I sense that this is my ‘in’. My big moment. An opportunity to learn from these girls, to refine my chatting-up skills, so that when Jane comes back, I can wow her, just like I’m about to wow these two with my sparkling wit, while coolly sipping my sparkling water. Hey—maybe I can use that line…
As I open my mouth to speak, Donna and Tracy look round, size me up, decide that I’m not worth talking to, and turn their attention back to Dan. What’s worse is that all this takes approximately one tenth of a second, and as the night progresses, this is about as much ‘action’ as I get. For example:
11.49 p.m.
I’m stood there as Dan talks to Tiffany and Sharon. I get a shouted ‘hello’ out of Sharon, but that’s it.
12.08 a.m.
I’m stood there as Dan talks to Claire, Debbie, and Angela, who are out on a hen night. Only Angela is getting married, but all three of them seem to think I’m invisible.
12.24 a.m.
I’m stood there as Dan talks to Philippa and Annabel. I have a brief conversation with Philippa, although the word ‘conversation’ is stretching it, as she almost instantaneously decides she’ll break off from our ‘chat’ to ask Dan to dance. Annabel doesn’t ask me, and I’m certainly not going to ask her.
12.26 a.m.
I’m stood there as Dan dances with Philippa. Annabel has gone to the toilet.
12.33 a.m.
I’m stood there as Dan dances with Philippa and Annabel.
It’s about now that I realize the fundamental flaw in this nightclub approach. I may be a good listener, good at conversation even, but not when I can’t hear a word the person I’m talking to is saying. Equally, having to shout back to them at the top of my voice doesn’t help, and especially not when the person I’m trying to talk to has all her attention focused on Dan.
After several more repeats of this, I give up. When a sweaty Dan finally arrives back from the dance floor, I tap him on the shoulder.
‘I’m going home,’ I shout in his ear.
‘What for?’ He glances at his watch. ‘The night is still young.’
‘Yes,’ I shout back. ‘But I’m not. Will you be okay here on your own?’
Dan looks at me like I’m stupid, flicking his eyes across to a group of women dressed as schoolgirls, who are giggling and pointing at him.
‘I think I’ll get through it.’
I push my way back through the swing doors, past the bouncers, and out into the Brighton night air. The queue, like me, doesn’t seem to have moved the slightest bit forward.
Sunday 23rd January
11.45 a.m.
I’m not quite so sore this morning, but I’m still glad that I don’t have to do any exercise again until tomorrow, as the thought of doing anything more energetic than my usual lazy Sunday certainly doesn’t appeal.
I think about trying to reach Dan on his mobile, but given the situation I left him in last night, that’s probably not such a good idea. I’m also feeling a little guilty that he might feel obliged to spend time with me now that Jane’s gone, and besides, Sunday was always Jane’s and my day.
By mid afternoon, I’ve finished the papers, and I’m bored. It’s too cold to go out for a walk, but I don’t really want to spend the rest of the day in an empty flat on my own, so instead, I decide to try and do what people apparently do in these situations: find out who my friends are.
I don’t really have many other ‘mates’, so to speak. What with Jane, and work, and going to the Admiral Jim with Dan, I’ve never really had much spare time. Of course, Jane and I have, sorry, had, a couple of friends who we’d meet up with occasionally, usually at their places—Jane didn’t like to cook, she said, or was it because she was embarrassed about the flat, I now wonder—where we’d take along a bottle of cheap Australian plonk and sit and talk about boring stuff into the small hours, me joining in where required, but really just wondering when I was going to be able to have another cigarette.
But when I think about them now, the idea of going to see them without Jane in tow seems, well, redundant, really. I’d feel like a spare part, a gooseberry, and of course I’d have to tell them all that Jane has left me—and how would I even begin to try and explain that away?
So instead, I hit upon a solution. I’ll just call up the male halves of these couples we know. Do I consider them friends? I suppose so. Do I consider them my friends? Tricky one, given that usually our relationships have consisted of just sitting there, nodding sagely and exchanging the odd knowing glance while our better halves moaned about us over a glass of Chablis.
Now I come to think about it, I can’t remember a single conversation of substance I’ve had with any of them. Rebecca and Richard—she’s Jane’s friend from work, and Richard? What does Richard do? Something in the city, I think. Or there’s Julia and Mark, from Ealing. Mark’s an accountant, I think, and even fatter than me, but they’ve got kids now anyway. And then there’s, oh God, the most boring couple on earth, Dawn and Alan. Surely they’ll be a safe bet. They live fairly nearby. And I have their number.
Alan picks up the phone after the eighth ring, as if he’s finally worked out where the strange noise is coming from.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Alan. It’s Edward.’
‘Edward?’
The pause as he tries to place me grows longer and longer, and eventually gets so embarrassingly long that I have to step in and put him out of his misery.
‘You know, of Jane and Edward?’
‘Ah, yes. Edward,’ he says, grateful for the lifeline I’ve thrown him. ‘How are you?’
‘Great. You?’
‘Good thanks. And Jane?’
That stops me a bit in my tracks. I decide to go for honesty. ‘She’s…in Tibet, actually.’
‘Tibet?’ says Alan. ‘What on earth is she…Hold on a second. Dawn’s trying to tell me something.’
I hear the unmistakable sound of a hand being placed over the mouthpiece, followed by a few seconds of muffled conversation, which I’m guessing is Dawn explaining to Alan what’s happened between Jane and me.
‘Women, eh?’ I say, once I hear the hand being removed, before realizing that it’s actually Dawn I’m now talking to.
‘Hello, Edward. How are you?’ she asks.
It’s an innocent enough question, but something about the matter of fact way she poses it makes me realize that she’s not really interested in my
answer.
‘I’m fine, actually.’
‘We were so sorry to hear about you and Jane,’ she continues. ‘Still, it’s probably for the best.’
We? Alan didn’t seem to know about it until approximately thirty seconds ago. And probably for the best? For whose best? I’m so indignant at this that I can’t even answer, which is a silence that Dawn feels she needs to fill with other platitudes.
I want to ask her to put Alan back on, and why she felt the need to take over the conversation. I’m uncomfortable talking to her—that ‘probably for the best’ has left me in no doubt as to where her loyalties lie. I endure a minute’s worth of ‘people grow apart’ and ‘want different things’, which I’m tempted to counter with ‘no one asked me what I wanted’, when Dawn finally pauses for breath.
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘what can we do for you?’
We? It’s quite patently obvious that you can do nothing for me. It’s Alan I want. Alan that I’m reaching out to in my hour of need. Alan who’s deserted me already, the rat. But then that would imply that I’m a sinking ship, and I’m definitely not sinking.
‘I wanted to…Is Alan there again please?’
There’s the briefest of pauses this time, and then, ‘He’s busy right now. Can I take a message?’
Busy? What on earth can he suddenly have started that he wasn’t doing two minutes ago when he was free enough to answer the phone? Brain surgery? Servicing the car? Constructing a model of the Eiffel Tower from matchsticks?
And then, with a frightening clarity, it occurs to me what Dawn is doing. She’s keeping me away from him. She’s decided that it would be wrong for me to have anything to do with her husband, so she’s shielding him, screening him, protecting him, in case some of my aura, my bad luck, my undesirability rubs off. Dawn plainly doesn’t think our friendship exists outside coupledom, so if one of her friends has decided that I’m chuckable, then there’s obviously no place for me in their cosy little world. She can’t imagine there might possibly be something I want to share or discuss with Alan that I couldn’t possibly want to say to her. And what’s more, I know she can’t believe that I would have the nerve to think they might want to be friends with me, now that Jane’s out of the picture.
‘Er…Well, can he call me back?’
This takes her by surprise. So much so that she blurts out what she’s probably been trying not to say for the last couple of minutes.
‘I don’t think that would be such a good idea.’
Don’t you? I want to ask. Why? Why couldn’t you just have done the decent thing, and just have said ‘yes’? That way you’d know he wasn’t going to call, I’d know he wasn’t going to call, and then when he didn’t call it would be over. Done with.
Finally, and about time too, dignity gets the better of me, and it is dignity, because although I’m tempted to say something rude, or smart (although partly because I can’t think of anything smart to say), I just hang up. It’s the mercy-killing approach. Fuck them, and their cosy little suburban lifestyle, and their taking bloody sides. They deserve each other, Alan and Dawn.
But while their small-minded pettiness makes me sick, I envy their solidarity. Their coupleness. The fact that they’re a unit. Did Jane and I ever used to be like this? Together against the world, shielding each other from life’s unpleasantness, from what it can throw at you, protecting each other from, well, from the likes of me.
Within thirty seconds of putting the phone down, I make a decision. I’m done with the Alan and Dawns of this world. Dawn the Yawn and Anal Alan. They always were Jane’s friends, not mine, and now, they’ve proved it. We never had anything in common anyway, he and I, and as for her…
No, when Jane and I are back together, I’ll make sure we get a new bunch of friends. It’ll be a whole new Dawn for us, if you like.
But perhaps not a new Alan.
Wednesday 26th January
7.21 a.m.
Monday’s and Tuesday’s workouts follow the same cycle of stretching and retching, but today’s session is, to use a technical exercise term, a bugger. Sam starts me off with a light jog along the promenade, past the ruined West Pier, and then along towards the Palace Pier, picking our way through the cans, bottles, chip wrappers, and occasional piles of sick from the night before. It’s a cold, blustery morning, the overnight rain has frozen in puddles on the pavement, and there’s half the usual morning crowd of joggers around.
As we pass the donut stand at the end of the Palace Pier, I start to make the loop that takes us back up onto the promenade and towards the gym, but Sam keeps on going, and I have to turn round and sprint to catch her up.
‘What?’ I pant. ‘Where?’ Whole sentences still being beyond me this early in my training programme.
Sam grins across at me, still hardly breathing compared to my fish out of water impression.
‘Something a little different today,’ she replies, enigmatically. ‘No gym.’
I have to stop myself from punching the air in delight. No gym! No muscles screaming at me to stop. No agony tomorrow morning. And more importantly, no Sy sneering at me from behind his over-developed pecs.
My delight is short-lived as we jog a further two hundred yards along the promenade, beneath where the road slopes up towards the marina, and stop at the bottom of the longest, not to mention steepest, flight of stairs I’ve ever seen.
‘OK,’ instructs Sam, ‘follow me.’
With that, she bounds up the stairs, taking them in pairs. I follow like a dutiful dog, managing the first twenty or so steps two at a time, and I’m even able enjoy the sight of Sam’s pert, red-tracksuited posterior pumping away at my eye level as I do my best to keep up. But all too soon I feel the muscles in my legs start to burn, my lungs tighten, and even the lure of Sam’s bouncing buttocks can’t keep me going. As they fade into the distance, I cut my stride from two steps to one step, and even have to start tugging on the handrail to get me up the final few.
When I reach the top, gasping for air and looking desperately for a place to sit down, Sam grins at me.
‘Good,’ she says. ‘But let’s keep moving. It’ll help get the lactic acid out of your legs faster.’
Mercifully she heads back in the direction of the pier, and as I shuffle after her, the pain in my legs and lungs starts to lessen slightly, and I even begin to feel chuffed that I’ve managed the stairs without stopping or, more impressively, throwing up. We follow the pavement back down the hill, and then to my horror, Sam turns back towards the bottom of the steps.
‘You can’t…You’re joking?’
Sam shakes her head. ‘Nope. Three times. Great exercise for the heart, legs, and stomach. All top athletes do this kind of thing.’
She runs off back towards the start of my torture circuit, and I jog reluctantly after her, reasoning that as I’ve managed it once, if I take the first few stairs more easily rather than chasing off behind Sam’s behind, then the rest shouldn’t be so difficult.
How wrong I am. While Sam leaps up them without pausing for breath, the minute I hit the first one I know I’m in trouble. I just about manage to get halfway up before collapsing against the rusty handrail.
Sam reaches the top, turns round to see me, and then, annoyingly, runs back down to where I’m heaving for breath.
‘You know,’ I say, in between gasps for air, ‘if there’s ever a vacancy for a guard at Guantanamo Bay, I’ll be sure to put you forward.’
She shrugs. ‘Get used to this. We’ll be doing it once a week. Only I won’t tell you which day.’
After a moment or two’s rest, I set off again, and manage to make it up the rest of the way, but only by pushing down on my knees with my hands in the way that those mountaineers you see making a final assault on the summit of Everest do, although even at 28,000 feet they can probably still climb faster than me this morning. By the time I eventually get to the top, my legs feel like jelly, and I’m not sure I’ll make it home, let alone manage another go.
/> Sam yawns theatrically, and looks at her watch.
‘Are you ready? One more time?’
My look obviously conveys my answer, but she just turns round and starts to jog back down the slope again. I stare at her retreating back, wondering whether she’d mind if I just waited for her here, and then reluctantly begin a weary shuffle after her.
When I get to where she’s waiting at the corner, she stops her jogging on the spot.
‘Okay,’ she says, ‘on second thoughts, that’s enough of those for today. We don’t want to overdo it. You did well.’
‘Well?’ I’m sure my face must be the same colour as her tracksuit. ‘What was “well” about that?’
‘You didn’t throw up. Or fall down the stairs. Or do both at the same time. Come on, home.’
It takes another five minutes of slow jogging before I can get back to anything like a regular breathing rate. My heart is hammering in my ears, and when we eventually reach the bench on the promenade that’s become our stretching point, I collapse onto it, a relieved expression on my face.
‘So what was that all about?’ I ask, once I can eventually talk again.
‘Variety.’ Sam grins, as she leads me through our warm-down. ‘Keep the body guessing by pushing it with different things.’
‘I thought the whole point of this training was to do the same routine every day, and after a while it’d get easier?’
Sam shakes her head. ‘I find that my clients don’t respond if we just keep on doing the same things, day in, day out. Eventually people get bored, and leave…’ Sam’s voice tails off as she realizes what she’s said.
And later, as I limp back to my empty flat, I appreciate that she may have a point.
7.02 p.m.
I get back from work just in time to catch Mrs Barraclough in the street outside the flat. Literally, as she slips over on a patch of ice by the steps. Fortunately she’s not that tall, which means she doesn’t have particularly far to fall.