The Right Man

by Nigel Planer

  I sensed a stridency in his voice which matched the effort that had so obviously gone into the hoovering and dusting.

  ‘Technically, you’d be abandoning. Mind you, you’re legally the absent parent, even if you live next door and take the child to school every day. That’s what makes me really angry.’

  The cane stool seemed to be creaking of its own accord now.

  ‘Did you know that until 1823 it was legal for a woman to kill her child if it was illegitimate? The Stuart Bastardy Act 1623.’

  ‘Funny name, Stuart Bastardy,’ I said. I was losing it. But Malcolm seemed to be charged with some zeal. This was obviously his favourite subject. As soon as my beans were finished, he zipped my plate away and rushed it to the kitchen to be cleaned. I stood limply in the doorway. He carried on talking while washing up.

  ‘Do you know what is the demographic group most at risk from homicide? Mmm?’ Malcolm was the kind of person who could use words like ‘homicide’ without sounding American. ‘Children under the age of one, that’s who. And fifty per cent of them are killed by their mothers.’

  He dried the dishes too, and put them away. I almost wished I had had a more complicated meal. It would have given him more to do. His energy was draining.

  ‘Listen, Guy, you have to be able to show that you are capable of caring for the child. That she’s got somewhere she can stay with you. Moving out was a very bad move. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Come and look upstairs.’

  He trotted up the narrow staircase, stabbing each step with his wide feet. Upstairs were two small rooms. His bedroom looking out on to the street with a couple of sociology books on the bedside table, and to the side, a tiny child’s bedroom, looking out on to the back yards of the adjoining terraces. Nerily’s room was unrealistically neat as well.

  ‘You have to have something to show the welfare officer, even though they lie all the time anyway. And remember to write everything down.’

  There was a laptop computer on the child’s dressing table. He flicked it on and clicked into a file.

  ‘See?’ He scanned through a list of dates. ‘Every time I see Nerily, I log it here. And here, every time Geraldine messes up a contact arrangement for whatever reason. Which reminds me…’ And, ignoring me, he put in a new entry, punching the keys with a delicate fury.

  ‘I had the welfare officer round five times and they’re really tricky. Doesn’t matter what you say, though, they’ll write a completely different report.’

  ‘How often does she stay here?’

  ‘Meant to be four evenings a month, and as of this year she can stay over weekends, but Geraldine’s done her best to poison Nerily’s mind against me. You know, last month she asked, “Daddy, why do you hate me so much that you won’t let me go to America with Mummy?” Look…’ And he flicked to another file on the computer. This one was headed ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’.

  Down the various columns were subheadings: ‘Domestic Proceedings and Magistrates Courts Act 1978’; ‘Matrimonial Homes Act 1978’; ‘Matrimonial Proceedings Act 1976’.

  ‘You know, I spent eleven thousand pounds in solicitors’ fees in the first year,’ he continued, gathering momentum now.

  ‘Nowadays I represent myself every time, which is better, because the judges have to bend over backwards to help you. I mean, they even try to speak in plain English. Unless you get someone like Coulworthy-Browne. He’s a bastard. Hates fathers.’

  ‘How many times have you been in court, then?’ I asked. ‘Oh, about nine,’ he said, over his shoulder. ‘Here, look at this, I’ve compiled a hit list of all the custody judges. You know, which ones are sympathetic, which ones are bastards. Judge Grantham!’ He pointed out one name. ‘God help you if you get Judge Grantham. Best to be ill that day and go for a postponement.

  I started to feel a bit sick. The coloured balloon pattern of the wallpaper was beginning to fall downwards. [closed my eyes and everything started rushing upwards and over my head. I opened them again and things seemed to plummet once more. I leaned on the door frame. I was having an attack of the whirlies. I’m not all that good with spirits. I gulped for air.

  ‘There. Look at that,’ said Malcolm. ‘Children’s Act 1989. “No reason to discourage shared residence.” No reason to discourage it! You should have seen Coulworthy-Browne’s face when I read that out to him in court.’ He laughed to himself.

  ‘Did it do any good?’ I managed.

  ‘What? No, of course not. You can’t win with those bastards. But someone’s got to have a go.’

  ‘Malc, I don’t think I’m feeling…’ I was holding on to the door now as well.

  ‘Fuck! You silly cunt! You’ve gone white as a sheet! Why don’t you sit down, I’ll get you some water.’ And he banged past me and rattled down the stairs, still talking.

  ‘… Did you know that England and Wales now have the highest divorce rate in the world… Apart from California, that is …

  I flopped on to the child’s bed and sat there with my bottom lip quivering, taking deep breaths.

  Some hours later, after the whirlies had gone, which took a lot of concentration and deep breathing, and after Malcolm had made me some alphabet soup, I accepted his invitation to stay over, and was put in Nerily’s room with the curtains drawn, although it was still light outside.

  My feet and ankles hung over the end of the tiny bed. I could hear Malcolm snoring and chortling in the next room. He had to be up in the morning for his secretarial job, so he’d promised to get me up in time to be in Soho for 9.00. 1 wanted a cigarette but the roll-ups were downstairs and anyway I couldn’t, for Nerily’s sake. Even if she did only come here every other week. I lay half propped up on the little pillows and stared at the shape of the laptop computer in the semi-darkness. It emanated a dark-grey gloom at me. It seemed to grow in size and significance. I tried to roll over on to my side but this rammed my face up too close to the balloon wallpaper. I lolloped on to my other side and succumbed to the evil presence of the laptop.

  Grace had started without me. She was calling me urgently. She was already falling. Far down — away from me — screaming. 1 was late for our usual ritual dreamtime sacrifice. I’d been too drunk. She was falling fast and away. A vast swimming pool. A piranha tank. A concrete crocodile pit. Maybe I had pushed her. I threw myself after her and woke with a start on Nerily’s floor. I had fallen off the bed. No protective cot bars for me. It was now very bright outside. Birds sang. I got back under the duvet and tried to warm up.

  My shirt was not on the chair where I had tossed it the previous night. After a few minutes, Malcolm knocked on the door twice and came in.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ And then he produced my shirt on a hanger and put it on the door handle.

  ‘And I ironed this for you. Leave in eleven minutes. The orange one is the spare toothbrush. And don’t put your tampon down the toilet, old boy.’

  FIVE

  OK, I WANT you all to think for a minute of your most treasured possession. I don’t mean in the world. I mean something that you have with you today. Something that you value more than anything else. It might be your watch, or your shoes, or it might be your credit card!’

  Various sheepish low chuckles from all of us. That was meant to be a joke.

  ‘Now, I want you to take it out and look at it and think for a minute about what this possession means to you and why it is so important to you?’ Unnecessary upward inflections abounded.

  I thought of my Psion, my mobile, which obviously was switched off, my mini-Filofax, my watch. Nothing seemed important, not really important, to me, that is. The fat bearded man opposite me had put his expensive camera on his lap and was looking at it tearfully, as if it were a dead kitten. I felt naked, my clothes meant nothing to me, the contents of my pockets meant nothing to me. There was nothing from my button-down shirt to my Church’s brogues which wasn’t there for business reasons, nothing that was me. Except the picture of Grace in her bucket, I suppose. That was the only non-busine
ss thing, although even that has been used on occasions when networking with family-orientated Yank producers. I took it out and looked at it. I must have had as dumb an expression on my face as the fat bearded bloke.

  ‘Now. I want you to stand up and pick someone in the room and give him your most treasured possession and tell him why it means so much to you. Tell him its story.’

  I flicked a glance across at Neil, hoping we wouldn’t choose each other. I was pulled gently around by a dangerously thin ginger-haired man in a voluminous army T-shirt and rope waistcoat He had a beard too. Come to think of it, eighty per cent of the men in the room had beards. Luckily, I hadn’t shaved. At least I could blend in a bit.

  ‘These were my father’s socks’ he said to me reverently, in a nasal drone.

  I looked down to see his bony white toes twitching on the parquet flooring. ‘My father was a very bad man. He walked all over my mother, so now I wear his socks to achieve balance and wholeness.’

  I wondered whether washing the socks was also part of the karmic equation.

  ‘This is my daughter,’ I said, and we swapped treasures. Christ! What the Andy Pandy was I doing here? Over the other side of the room, Neil was giving someone a stack of badly typed, unbound pages of manuscript and talking at length to him. Shit, that was probably the next draft of his so-called novel. Neil seemed to have a death-wish these days.

  ‘And now I want you all to take what you have just been given and pass it on to someone else and explain to them why it was so important to the other guy.’

  I looked around in desperation for someone to give the socks to and picked the only guy who was wearing a suit.

  ‘His dad’s socks,’ I said. ‘Some kind of Oedipal revenge totem. And was given a little black notebook by the suited man, who spoke to me in a slow Canadian drawl.

  ‘This is a very special book.’ He had a large and beneficent smile on his face. At least someone knew how to enjoy this.

  ‘It contains the phone numbers of over two hundred women. Many of whom have had sexual encounters with its owner.’ I searched around the room, trying to guess which man was the stud, but noticed instead the thin redhead handing my picture of Grace to a large, earringed, shaven-headed guy, who could have been a paedophile for all I knew, definitely looked like a paedophile. I did not know how to enjoy this.

  Apart from anything else, Neil’s scant manuscript was probably now in the hands of an unscrupulous bootleg publisher with a photographic memory. We all had to sit back down and close our eyes and think about how we felt about letting go of our possessions. I sneaked a look at Julian, the group facilitator, who was standing on tiptoes waving his arms around, with his thumbs and forefingers pinched together. The conductor of a very strange and bearded orchestra.

  ‘Now, staying with those feelings perhaps feelings of anger? Of greed? Of insecurity? — and keeping our eyes closed, I want us to say what comes into our heads, however bad it might seem, however unacceptable?’ The upward inflections were too studied to be natural. ‘Remember this is experiential? There are no value judgements meant to be put on this, and… I’ll start?’

  I peered round through half-closed eyelids at the rest of the group. All eyes seemed closed. Was 1 really the only one cheating?

  There was one professorial-looking bloke who was breathing deeply into his nostrils and exhaling very noisily. He’d been wearing glasses earlier. I was glad I had the book of phone numbers and not this guy’s specs. Too much responsibility. I continued my surreptitious glance around the circle and saw the glasses sitting precariously on the lap of a shaggy man with filthy fingernails.

  ‘OK?’ said Julian in reassuring tones. ‘I am angry that, since she’s a successful journalist, my partner has always earned more than what I get as a workshop co-ordinator, and sometimes it makes me unable to offer her the support she needs and I end up shouting at her. Yeah?’

  He had an annoyingly chirpy voice, which made everything he said sound as if it was a refrain from a jolly English folk song. There was a pause, a few seconds of quiet — apart from the inhaling professor — while we all tried to think of a contribution.

  ‘How Men Need to Change’ was the name of the weekend. What had Neil got me into? I know I said I’m the sort of agent who gets involved with his clients, and I had indeed chanted with Barbara Stenner in Primrose Hill, but this was taking representation too far.

  A whole weekend workshop and Neil was missing two days’ writing. I should have just cracked the whip and told him to get on with it. But then weekends were becoming occasions to dread now from the ivory tower of Mullin and Ketts in Soho, and I’d long ago given up my social life — friends, I mean — in order to keep financially afloat for Grace and bloody Liz.

  In the silence, I thought about weekends and what they used to be. If I’m honest, all of my friends, the only ones in whom I’ve confided, at any rate, have been women, like Susan Planter. I am, I suppose, somewhat suspect in this respect. I learned at school, and of course from my brother earlier on, that competitiveness is so ingrained that to confess a weakness to another man would be to lay oneself open to attack or theft.

  ‘I realize that I have been abusive, I have been selfish and I closed myself off from intimacy with my wife. I just wasn’t strong enough to be gentle.’ Must be the man from Kleenex. Who was that goody-goody? Full marks for him. I couldn’t see who had spoken but he had obviously been to one of these before.

  ‘I’d like to be able to afford to have a holiday every now and then and to spend more time with my girlfriend.’ A squeaky mousy-voiced man to my left.

  ‘It’s only when I listen to my woman and learn to feel with her, to really feel what she’s feeling, that I can please her, and I want to please her.’ A Spanish-sounding guy. Well done that man. Ay thank yoh.

  I decided that I was definitely not going to say anything during this bit. Maybe I’m just not a workshop animal.

  ‘Sometimes I just want to kill someone. Push them under the water and drown them.’ This was Neil’s throaty voice. I hoped he didn’t mean his agent.

  ‘I’d like a harem,’ said a down-to-earth voice nearby suddenly. ‘I’d like to have enough money to hire a different expensive hooker every day, or maybe two, and have them do whatever I told them and never have to work again.’

  There was a nasty moment’s silence. Someone laughed in it. Julian, our facilitating leader, coughed a little cough.

  ‘That’s OK?’ he said sagely. ‘Remember, we’re meant to be saying whatever we feel, whatever comes into our heads? However awful it might seem?’

  The earthy voice continued: ‘I’d like to whip them with belt straps and make one of them talk dirty in my ear, while another one sucks my knob.’

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t crane my neck round to see who was speaking without it being obvious. Then came the Canadian guy’s voice.

  ‘After my divorce, I had to get away. I took an old camper waggon and lived down by the ocean for a few months, with the waves and the sky. It was good.’

  I felt certain that, like me, the general democratic majority of the group were waiting to hear more from the harem belt-buckle bloke and were not really that interested in the Canadian guy s commune with nature.

  There was another little silence. The professor had stopped wheezing.

  ‘Anything else?’ said Julian the facilitator in a nursery-school tone. He was referring to the group as a whole, but his remark seemed to refer in our minds only to the pervy guy on my right. We all waited to hear if this lone voice would have any further exciting revelations for us. He didn’t let us down.

  ‘I’d like to invite all my friends round to fuck my ex-wife, one after the other,’ he continued. ‘I’d watch. Two or three of them at a time. The queue of men would go round the block. She’d be wearing a blindfold.’ I wondered if it was his black book that I was holding.

  ‘The whole thing would go on for hours. After the mess she’s made of my life, after what she’s put me t
hrough, it would be a pleasure to see her suffer. They could flick her up the arse. Some of the men would be allowed to kick her. I’d laugh. Then I’d drag her out across my front drive, scraping her face on the gravel ..

  He paused because a lump of saliva had come up in his throat. While he swallowed and took breath, Julian facilitated.

  ‘OK, right. And now we can open our eyes?’ He stood there still on tiptoe, in his lemon-yellow Marks and Spencer cardigan, smiling.

  ‘So we can see, there’s a lot of this aggression in us.’ He mimed quote marks around the word aggression, as if he were making some deep intellectual point.

  ‘And it can be even, well, frightening? Yuh?’

  I don’t think I was the only man there secretly thinking it can also be a bit of a turn-on. Lovey.

  Immediately on opening our eyes, we all looked to my right to see if we could identify the monster man, but there were only two very gentle hippy-looking guys and the Canadian in the suit. The large bald paedophile was right over the other side of the room, so it wasn’t him.

  As you can imagine, lunch was a tawdry affair. Organic everything and small portions of rice. There was a thick chocolate brownie cake but that had run out by the time I had got to the head of the droopy queue. There was plenty of carrot cake, of course. There’s always plenty of carrot cake.

  I drifted with my paper plate through the alternative bookstall. A thousand pamphlets about men and yet nothing which mentioned football, birds or lager. Tell a lie, there was a small flyer leaflet called ‘Men, Violence and Alcohol, a Weekend Intensive’, with a photo of the big bald paedophile on the cover, Simon Dukowski, Group Co-ordinator.