by Nigel Planer
It was as if she was testing me, auditioning me for some role which I had no idea how to play. I kept smiling and quietly sat through all she threw at me. When the bill came and I put my card on the table, she said, ‘Thanks, Dad, that was great. I won’t tell Mum I’ve been seeing you.’ Maybe she was auditioning herself She was certainly being very funny. I kept laughing and smiling and we shared a cigarette. She took all the mints from the saucer and blatantly shoved them in her bag.
‘Aren’t you going to spank me then?’ she said as we were leaving.
‘I would never hit a woman, my angel,’ I said, playing along.
‘I bet I could make you.
Did she want me to get angry with her, shake her by the shoulders, tell her to behave herself? I wasn’t going to. For some reason, in my present state of mind, I found her antics entirely engaging and I followed her back to my own front door.
‘Can I stay the night with you?’ she asked, in a pouty, little-girlish way.
‘Well, there isn’t much room, as you saw,’ I said.’
Upstairs, we finished the wine and smoked more.
‘Do you want me to be your agent?’ I asked. ‘Because I’m very happy to take you on. I mean, you don’t have to do all this, you know. I think I could get you work.’
‘Oh, I’m giving up the business tomorrow anyway,’ she said casually. And then, ‘Do you want to see my tattoo?’
‘Well. That depends …’ I started, but she’d already pulled down her leggings to reveal a rose on her left buttock. She wasn’t wearing any knickers.
There is a certain breed of actress, known in the business as a ‘no-knickers actress’. Their performances are usually strident and assertive, with a lot of saliva-spraying. Sometimes, when in a Greek tragedy, for instance, they will actually wear no knickers, but generally the term refers to their brassy and worthy approach to their work. Kemble was not of this type. She was simply not wearing any knickers.
‘It’s very nice,’ I said. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘Yeah. It was agony, but I’m used to pain. My dad used to beat me up on a regular basis. Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick,’ she said, and raced to the toilet. I followed her to the door and listened while she retched rather unconvincingly. When she came out I rubbed her puny shoulders and made her a cup of tea, which she never drank.
Despite my best intentions I found it hard to lie on the camp bed squashed up against a naked twenty-two-year-old and not get an erection. She folded herself around me and pulled the unzipped sleeping bag up tight around our shoulders. I lay there, stiffly, wondering what to do. I kissed her ear.
‘Can’t we just cuddle and go sleep?’ she said. I’d love to do that, I thought, but erections and sleep don’t go together. The blood is confused. I lay there for a bit longer, listening. to her breathing. She had fallen asleep, spread over my chest. I tried to sleep, but inside my scrotum the two sperm factories had received the message to manufacture and they weren’t going to stop now. I wondered how many millions had been created since Kemble had whipped down her leggings to show me her tattoo. Counting sperm is not a recommended soporific, they somehow lack the placidity of sheep. Especially since, as has now been discovered, not all sperm are the same. There are sprinter sperm, the ones who race straight up the tube for the egg, ready or not. There are slow-burn sperm, who hang around the darker fallopian corners for a few hours, waiting for a later opportunity. And there are rear-guard killer sperm, who don’t go for the egg at all, but lurk at the entrance in case another man’s sperm should happen by, in which case they explode themselves, kamikaze-style, killing their rivals. Sperm are, in fact, rather like an army, or a football formation. Thoroughly chap-like. I wondered what kind I would be, were I a sperm. Not the right kind, I had no doubt. Not the one who scores the goal. I wondered whether sperm are aware of what kind of sperm they are anyway. At least my erection was gone by now. With great delicacy, I extricated myself from the camp bed and from Kemble’s embrace, and tiptoed into the office. I rang for a 7.00 a.m. alarm call. She’d have to be out by the time the women arrived. I tidied up the office and curled up on the sofa.
‘I just didn’t think it was going anywhere. I woke up one morning and thought — I’m not in love with him any more, so what’s the point?’ Maureen Beauley slammed the door of her bright-red VW golf, and started it up with the keys which she’d casually left in the ignition. ‘He never really loved me properly, I mean, he was a great guy and everything, sweet, but he didn’t know how to really cherish a woman.
Why do women always tell me their stuff? What is it about me? Or do they tell anyone and everyone, and I’m one of the few who actually listens to it? As she changed gear aggressively, the tight skirt of her green business suit slid up the lining slip a couple of inches to reveal the top of a stocking and a quarter-inch triangle of white thigh. 1 clocked it in a blink of my eye without letting my neck muscles move an iota. She noticed that I’d noticed nevertheless.
‘Yes, I see,’ I said. ‘I understand. Do you think he even knew what loving you properly would be, or did he just not care?’ I could have said, ‘Wwwooooaaa! Stockings! Nice!’ or words to that effect, but I’m not made like that, and anyway we were supposed to be looking for a flat for my mother. It seemed inappropriate.
‘I just want to be loved by a man above all else. To know that I come first. I think most women do. And I was earning more than him anyway, so …’ She jumped a light and hung a left without indicating. Someone hooted at us. I gripped the seat-belt holder; she was driving much too fast. ‘What did you think of that last one?’ she asked.
‘Too many stairs.’
‘Yes, and it needed a lot of work. I think they’d come down, though, if you wanted to make an offer.’
I sifted through the estate agent’s details. All with small glossy photos pasted on the front. All virtually identical, rather like a casting directory.
‘And what about your son? You said you had a son,’ I asked.
‘Oh, he comes first. Always. I love him more than anything. Here we are.
We pulled up outside a terrace of houses with double front doors. Cottages built originally for the river-dock workers at Hammersmith. Most have kitchen extensions now and a small yard out the back. After fumbling with her huge assortment of keys, she opened the door and we entered the ground-floor flat, which had piles of junk mail in its narrow front corridor. This one was unoccupied, a recent conversion. The builders had tried to stretch a two-bedroomed self-contained granny flat out of what must once have been a living room and pantry, so the rooms were tiny and wedge-shaped and smelled of emulsion paint still. Most of the doors, when swung open, missed the opposite walls by only an inch or so, making one have to step back and round before entering, like a lovers’ gate.
Maureen Beauley and I were squeezed close together in the corridor momentarily and entered the tiny front room with its authentic mini-fireplace still intact, although unusable in this now smokeless zone. She watched me looking round the place in silence, occasionally putting in remarks such as: ‘I don’t know what the service charge is on this one.’ I wondered whether she was expecting me to make a pass at her. Her beige silk blouse was certainly unbuttoned to reveal a slice of bra. [wondered if it was one of the things about her job that she got to have dubious sex in other people’s houses whenever she wanted. Or whether men making erotic suggestions to her was actually the bane of her life. What did she want? She seemed to be signalling something, but not in a language I understood. Women dress, I am assured by Liz and by others, to please themselves. It is nothing to do with catching male attention, that is merely an inconvenient by-product. Jeremy Planter would most likely have done it already with the breezy estate agent in every room. He would have known the right thing to say.
I’ve never been very good at reading signals. Sexual signals, I mean. Through my early twenties, when I suppose I should have been out rutting with the best of them, there were countless occasions when I only realize
d afterwards that I had been come on to, and was expected, as the man, to make a pass, or at least a suggestion of a pass, if only for tradition’s sake. An incident — or rather, a non-incident — with a girl in a towel from the room opposite when I was a student springs to mind too often to haunt me as an example of a lost opportunity. The hint was there and obvious, she couldn’t fix her lights or something, and knocked on my door half naked. What did I do? I fixed up whatever it was that was broken, and said good night. Presented with the possibility of passion, I spluttered like a rabbit frozen in the headlights to regret at leisure over the ensuing years. Why on earth this girl of my memory couldn’t have done the asking, if that was what she wanted, I don’t know, but as a man one is meant to be constantly up for it, a randy, thoughtless pumping machine, and therefore girls wouldn’t have quite the same fear of rejection as boys. At least when it comes to casual sex. I’ve often had this argument with Liz. Me claiming that it’s easier for a woman to go out and get immediate sex if that’s all she’s after than it is for a man. This is why men always make out that they’re more interested in sex than affection, because sex is harder for them to come by. Whereas it’s the other way round for women. That’s the idea anyway. Someone should write a book about it. Oh, they already have done, haven’t they? And done, and done to death. Another saturated market area for Neil to fail in. The point is that I don’t see myself so much as sex on legs as a soft git with a permanent bewildered expression on his face like the sidekick to a TV glove puppet. Easy prey.
Of course, when I became an agent things changed quite a bit, and I got used to younger actresses ruffling their hair a lot in my presence, or laughing too much at my remarks, or just plain pushing their bodies up against me. In the first couple of years I did take advantage of this once or twice, with disastrous consequences. It’s not good to mix sex and business. Maybe it’s different in real estate.
I couldn’t see Mum in this place. Mind you, it was difficult to picture her anywhere but in her own kitchen, reading out-of-date colour supplements or watching her TV with the sound turned up too loud.
‘I just wanted to be touched — held, you know?’ said Maureen Beauley.
‘Well, quite. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’ I agreed vehemently as we pulled back out, too fast, on to the Fulham Palace Road.
‘My little boy misses his father all the time now, of course. But he’ll get used to not seeing him. He’ll have to. His dad loves him to bits. Sometimes I think he loved his son more than me.
‘And you wanted to be loved above all else,’ I said sympathetically.
‘Still, children are very resilient, you know,’ she said, as people always do when they mistreat them. If children are so resilient, I thought, how come the world is peopled with fucked-up adults?
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m sure you’re doing the right thing.’ As we stood outside the estate agent’s office she gave me a professionally warm smile and said, ‘Well, we’ve got your details, so we’ll send you anything new that comes in, and as I say, that first one we looked at are in a hurry to sell, so I think they’d be open to an offer.’
Of course, I had no right to be depressed. Others have far worse problems than me. Neil, for a start. Half my clients, come to think of it. Everything about the day confirmed that I could make no claim on sadness. It was June and deliciously warm. The plane trees of Fulham were brightening like bells in the new light. You could feel their pleasure, hear their freshness in the breeze, almost smell the sexuality of their photosynthesis.
I could go and see my brother Tony. Apart from the funeral, we hadn’t seen each other since my father died. I might find him in Bishop’s Park where he sometimes worked. Trouble was, it was dangerously close to where Grace’s first childminder had been, and I didn’t want big whooshes of sad. I checked my mobile for messages. Simon Eggleston called to thank, and Barbara Stenner wanted to speak ‘urgently’. For some reason I punched off the power button and put my mobile back in my pocket. I wandered down Queensmill Road without a sense of purpose. I became anxious at the thought of being off schedule, of being unaccountable. What was I thinking of, what was I doing? As I reached the river walkway by Fulham football ground it occurred to me. I was taking a walk, that was what I was doing. That’s what people do, isn’t it? They go for walks. Sometimes even just because they feel like it. Sometimes even during working hours. What a little ‘aholic’ I seemed to have become.
Leisure. Funny word. Leh-czha. Lejah. I rolled it around my mind for a while. When was the last time it had been there? Leisure. When? I thought about this. 1984. Yes, 1984, before Mullin and Ketts, before bloody Liz even. I was working for Anthony Sampson, the famous old-school agent. The type with a pocket handkerchief. I had a three-week holiday in Greece with my brother Tony and his girlfriend of the time. What was her name — Stacey, Tracy, Spacey? I had leisure and a job to go back to, as a commissioned trainee. Eleven thousand I made that year, and it seemed enough. Cor! Listen to me: ‘In them days you could go clubbing, shag a few birds, pay off your mortgage, smart clothes, smart car, and still have change for the school fees and the wife’s cocaine habit.’
I wandered along the towpath in the Putney direction. In the warm, girls were wearing cotton again and the river looked luxuriant: glinting silver diagonals emanating from the wake of a rowing eight. Spring had been grown out of, and the air was optimistic. It all made me feel, well, guilty. I could not come up to the mood of the day. I was aimless. There was no need to walk to the park, but like a headless chicken, I tottered down well-trodden paths. With Grace gone, the park would undoubtedly make me feel worse. The climbing frame train where she cut her knee, the now dried-out boating lake which we never did get to have a go on. The sandpit where some older kids had teased her and stolen her shoe. And of course, down towards Fulham, the spot where the bearded man had sunk so gracefully last month. I must have been mad coming here. A bicycle went past with an empty plastic baby-seat on the back. School pickup. It was twenty past three.
Liz was right, I am an indulgent and self-pitying wanker. Stupid to come down here and look at all these things, sit on this bench. I bring things on myself. I set myself up to fail. How did I think Bishop’s Park would make me feel, even on a day like this? What did I expect?
Some lads broke into a fight over a disputed goal in the football field beyond the playground. A dog barked and the irritating whine of a chainsaw suddenly stopped. Strange how, in its absence, one notices a noise which before had been there but blocked out by the mind. It started again. Damn, once you’ve noticed it, it really gets under your skin and makes it hard to think. I got up and walked towards the exit gate.
In the miracle of this day, which I spoiled with my presence, a flirtatious breeze invited the sawdust from the chainsaw to dance. Some of it stuck in my throat. The noise stopped again momentarily and then resumed. I was wading through brash now, large branches and sawdust strewn across the path which an old boy in a dark-blue donkey jacket was shunting into a heap.
Up in the branches, a pair of brown male legs in oily denim shorts braced themselves against the Y—shaped break of the tree, whilst among the leaves above, their owner wielded the whining saw like a TV magician showing you each side of a silk handkerchief And that’s TV as in television, by the way. The legs, though muscular and tanned, were scarred and lived-in. Not the legs of one of those model boys in the new jeans ads, or on the Z-cards. Older legs, a man’s legs, tough, sinewy, bloody British legs. Not pumped up with steroids, vitamins or gym machinery. Men’s legs must have been like this at Agincourt.
The old boy down below, clearing the brash, shouted, ‘Cheer up!’ at me. ‘It might never happen!’
The saw noise stopped and the air thumped into a silence in my head. Broken only by the man above shouting, ‘Timbaaaaaah!’ like a corny Tarzan. Well, at least someone was enjoying himself. It was my brother Tony. They’d let him loose with a chainsaw, the mad fools. After the remedial home in Kent, we were al
l pleased he’d managed to hold down a job sweeping leaves and picking up litter. Now he was limbering down towards me like a monkey on speed.
He flashed a pirate’s grin at me, his earring glinting in the sunlight. Grace was not there to have this stuff explained to her. No one was asking me, ‘Why, Daddy? Why is Uncle Tony cutting the tree off? What does timbaa mean? What did the other man say would never happen?’
He climbed down out of the tree with ease. Apart from his height, he was the nearest thing to a pirate you could ever see. He’s concuss-yourself-on-a-door-lintel tall. Bang-your-knees-on-steering-wheels tall. Stoop-around-in-boats tall. Answer-lonely-hearts-advertisements tall. He could never have been a real pirate, not even a captain pirate, with the privileges and higher ceiling of the captain’s cabin. Lofty was his nickname at school.
‘Have the Tories reformed themselves into an electable party, number two?’ said in an accent out of a 1950s submarine movie.
‘What?’ I said, gormlessly.
‘Well, smile then,’ he chirped at me.
‘Oh,’ I said lamely, getting his joke.
It was a fall from a tree that first put Tony into hospital. I must have been nine or so. I remember waiting with my mum in casualty for the doctor’s results, and feeling that although it had been his decision to climb so high, it was my fault that he fell. As if my envy of him had been tangible enough to eject him from the branch. I still live with that ampoule of guilt. Mind you, the amount of LSD he took in the late seventies probably had more to do with his current mental state, and that had nothing to do with me.
The old geezer in the donkey jacket hustled me out of the way. I was standing on his brash. I apologized.
‘You’ll get over it, mate,’ he said.