The Right Man

by Nigel Planer

  I could go bankrupt. That sounded nice. That sounded like tweety little birds chirruping away in the cherry blossom. Bankruptcy, tra la la la la. No responsibility. I could give up everything — except Grace, of course. I could look after her and Liz’d have to get a job as a check-out girl to support me. I shouldn’t have moved out. Why did I move out? I thought it was the right thing to do. The male thing to do. The woman has the baby, after all. She needs a nest for that. By all that’s daft, I’m sounding like the inside of a greetings card now.

  I sat back from the computer, where I had all the figures laid out on a spreadsheet, and reached for another cigarette, none left. Yes, I was searching the ashtray for a reasonable butt now. That was sensible, darling. When disaster strikes, smoke yourself to death.

  Suicide. That was an option. No, not really, not since Grace. Great male role model that would be. When the going gets tough, the tough top themselves. I could run away to Australia —land of Sheilas and soaps — I could go Antipodean, meet some gymnastic surfie girl, work in television and have lots of blond children with perms and pectoral muscles and great teeth. Naaaaaa. Don’t fancy that, m’dear.

  I had a short session finishing the five or six butts which had any kind of draw on them, and decided that I’d probably have to go downstairs to the all-night cab station where there was a tobacconist’s. By that I mean they usually had a few packets of Rothmans for sale. I shut down the computer. There was no point in looking at it all anyway.

  Problems come and then they go away again. Doesn’t mean they’re not coming back. It’s like the tide. Who said that? I put my wallet in my jacket pocket and slipped it on, checking my keys. I’ll tell you who said that, my bloody dad. My bloody pedantic old boring old git of a father. Sitting in his stupid Pelican 700 series river boat at Windsor, trying to persuade me and Tony to reharness the mooring ropes and learn about buoyancy gradients, instead of running up and down the deck playing Sink the Plastic Bin Bag. ‘In comes the tide,’ he said, and the water can get quite choppy and you can get apprehensive, and then out it goes again and everything’s peaceful and you forget about it and think everything’s going to be all right for ever, but it won’t be. That’s why, when things are going well, you have to make your preparations for the storm.’ What did he know? The Thames isn’t even tidal up at Windsor.

  Down in the street, Soho was throbbing. As usual on the pavement outside the Nine Bells, strange-haired people with studs in their leather clothes and studs in their noses were loud-mouthing in the street. We don’t go in there. Oh no, honey-child. The Coach and Horses maybe, that’s got musoes and chorus folk. Or even the French House, that’s poets and trainee intellectuals. But the Nine Bells? 1 don’t think so.

  I crossed to the other side of Dean Street and turned into Old Compton. A couple of pale-faced rent boys in nylon zip-tops with greasy hair matted down their acne’d necks passed me, and one of them casually raised his eyebrows at me — a streetwalking sex—shop assistant, ‘Do you need any help, sir?’ implicit in his subtle acknowledgement. I pressed on. I only came out for a pack of ciggies, dearie.

  I bought some matches too so I could have a smoke on the way home. That word is beginning to haunt me. Home. Where the heart is. Or where you left it, at any rate. Suddenly a fight broke out among the crowd in front of the Turnbull. With a real fight, a nasty one, it’s always sudden. Not some trade of insults and macho posturing with the protagonists being held back by their mates and a few wild punches. That’s a scuffle. With a bit of real upsy-daisy, the nastiness seems to come from nowhere, inflict horrible and permanent damage and fly away again with the unsettling speed of a bat. Then, minutes later, the sirens and the taking of witnesses’ stories, if they haven’t also flown.

  A man was pushed on the ground and two aroused and seriously aggressive soldier types in yellow T-shirts and nightmare boots were kicking him. Not in the stomach. Not in the balls even, but in the head. They got five or six goal-scoring whacks in, whilst his bonce ricocheted on the pavement, and then they ran. This is where the movie-makers have it wrong. The whole thing must have lasted under five seconds. Sam Peckinpah eat your heart out. I was in the Frith Street phone booth dialling 999 for the ambulance, but a dozen others must have been making the same call.

  I crossed the road to where the victim was lying in a pool of brain-damage-type blood. He was surrounded now, of course, the danger having subsided.

  A couple of women had come out from the pub, Alberto from Leonardo’s also. Some others. There was a mild commotion. I hung around, wondering if I could be useful. Passers-by passed by and stared at us. From the shouted remarks, it was apparent that the aggressors were known to several of the folk now involved in the incident. Someone had put their jacket over the white and limp body. Yellow T-shirts, that was all I could remember, not much use in an identity parade. The sirens came. I left.

  It’s a horrible world. I gave £2 to a homeless and faceless person in a sleeping bag crouched in the doorway of the De Lane Lee dubbing studio — trendy by day, sordid at night — and chucked my ciggie butt in the gutter.

  ‘Looking for trade?’ said a sorry-looking old thing as I turned into Meard Street.

  ‘No thank you, madam,’ I said. You have to be polite.

  Look, I’m not stupid. I know that what my dad told me was probably very good advice, it just wasn’t appropriate at the time. If I’d heeded his words, no doubt I could have seen all this coming, I could have known. When we were coasting, I would have checked all the knots that fastened my security. I would have swabbed the decks and peeled potatoes in the galley, but I didn’t, OK? And now 1 was hideously in debt and probably going to have to convince some welfare officer that the office in seedy old Meard Street was a reasonable place to have fortnightly contact with my child.

  SIX

  THE COUNSELLOR WAS a woman of about fifty-five who lived in Ealing. Her flat where we sat was small and rather carelessly furnished. I remember the smallest details of the hour we spent there, although since then, Liz has disagreed with me on many of them.

  ‘How did it make you feel when your husband left home?’ The tone was gentle and coaxing. Liz whisked her head sideways, looked into the middle distance and paused. How did it all make her feel? Well, from the study in anguish on her face, she did not feel relaxed, happy, fulfilled, any of those things. The counsellor waited for Liz’s reply with a practised calm which said, ‘Take your time to answer this one. We’ve got forty-five minutes left of this session, but that’s OK. And if you only manage to answer this one question, that’s also OK. This is the way we do it here.’ Funny how in those flaccid pauses where verbal exchange loses its elasticity, the domestic objects in a room take on an inflated significance. There was a clock ticking, obviously. This was a therapy session. It was pale blue and fifties in design. There were photographs of the counsellor’s grown-up children in their garden. No doubt not dysfunctional like the rest of us, no doubt each with a clutch of passed exams in their pockets. The chairs and the rug were ragged and old. There was a hole in one arm of the sofa which someone had tried to mend with incorrectly coloured thread. There was a table lamp without a plug, just a wire dangling down past ancient TV and Radio Times magazines stacked under the side table, one with a photo of Jeremy Planter on the front. All things which you would recognize if you lived here. Things with histories that you would understand. Things which might define ‘home’ to you. I thought of the objects in Liz and my former home. The unrepaired chair back, the dishevelled sofa, my record collection, now redundant because of CDs, my thermos with the vintage cars on that my mum gave me when I was ten. I can still remember the serial number and date of each car. What makes home? These objects, do they make home? If, as might be happening soon, they were all put in cardboard crates in a storage safe somewhere, would that depot temporarily be my home? Or the shell of the house, the walls, the floor and roof? Does the spirit of the thing reside in the actual location? It was a nice enough house, particularly
the back room, and I’d done a lot of work on it myself. Was that investment of time what made it home? Where was home? Wherever I lay my hat, wherever I lay my wife. Wherever she lays whoever.

  Liz sniffled a bit. The counsellor leaned forward and gently pushed the box of Kleenex across the low table towards her. ‘New, Man-Size Kleenex!’ read the label on the top. ‘Like a man, just as much strength, but now with added sensitivity!’ Not insisting, merely suggesting that it might be OK to cry, that tissues were available, appropriate. Homely reassurance was on hand. A shiver went through me. To reach Liz, the box of tissues and what they symbolized had been pushed further away from me across the table. She was being offered home. In the aching silence, I wanted to ask, ‘Where is this home which I have left? Is it something exclusively Liz’s? Does she carry it with her wherever she goes like a tortoise and its shell?’ And when she’s rolled over and helpless with her Bob, is she at home?

  I coughed, clearing my throat as if to speak. The counsellor’s eyes darted across to mine. ‘Don’t blow it now’, they said to me, ‘it’s not your turn.’ Liz looked deeper into the pattern on the ragged carpet and exhaled in a big sigh. She took a Man-Size Kleenex from the box, and poked at her nose with it. She too was screaming at me in the silence: ‘It’s not your turn. You agreed to come here, now you must wait.’

  I tried not to speak, but rather to extract myself from the moment. I did not leave home. I coughed again. I said it. ‘I did not leave home.’ Both women looked at me exasperated, as if to say, ‘How could you?’

  ‘Please’, said the counsellor. ‘I was asking Liz. You can speak later.’

  ‘You asked her how it made her feel when I left home,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t leave home, I went to sleep in the office because we were getting on so badly, arguing in front of Grace, you know, and now she’s changed the locks.’

  ‘I think you both know what I meant,’ said the counsellor. Liz was nodding now, looking at me and biting her trembling lip.

  ‘Hurt… lonely… abandoned… frightened,’ she said, as if she’d been practising. You’re not on Oprah Winfrey now, love, I wanted to say.

  ‘I’m just trying to help you two to decide what direction you’re going in,’ said the counsellor. ‘J don’t want to carry this on until Christmas. I’ll give you three, maybe four sessions maximum, but beyond that, there’s truthfully not all that much I can do for you.’

  Maybe the counsellor wasn’t so bad after all. I piped down in order to let her do her stuff. We’d already covered the subject of Bobbie Henderson, and now it seemed to be closed. Liz had said she’d rather not talk about it, that it had nothing to do with her and me and Grace, that it was a separate issue. When I mentioned his Porsche, parked under our elm tree, Liz accused me of spying on her, and the counsellor seemed to consent to this interpretation by her silence.

  ‘And how about Grace?’ she said to Liz, emphasizing the word ‘about’. ‘How are you coping with her? How is she taking all this?’

  ‘She’s driving me mad,’ said Liz. ‘She won’t do anything I tell her and I just lie there at night worrying about her. On my own.’ The counsellor was buying all this ‘on my own’ stuff.’

  ‘It is frightening, just you and a child on your own, isn’t it?’

  ‘She’s had glue ear again and she’s been on antibiotics, and last time they didn’t work and the doctor seemed worried that she might end up going deaf.’

  ‘How is she now?’

  ‘Well, she’s been better this week but she just seems to want to make noise all the time just to annoy me. She’ll turn up the telly full volume and laugh at me or bang on her drum, blow on her mouth organ, anything. She knows it gets on my nerves. It’s like she’s trying to push me over the edge, to punish me. Yesterday she worked out how to turn on the radio alarm clock, and she thought it was funny.’ It did sound quite funny to me.

  Liz sniffed and looked up tentatively with the faintest curl of a genuine smile. Almost as if she was asking my permission to smile at me. I smiled back, and for a moment we caught each other’s eyes like it was the first time. I was looking deep down into her and she could see right into me, into my fear. The pleading quality was there in her eyes. She snorted a laugh, full of saliva, and I started to wet my cheeks. For a second I could remember what had been there between us originally. It was too much. I turned away. I didn’t reach for the Man-Size Kleenex. Man-Size they might be, but not Man-Style. I blinked it all away. Bob Henderson wouldn’t blub. The counsellor let us share this moment. She wasn’t bad at all, come to think of it, and only £30.

  ‘And how do you feel about leaving Grace with her father? Does that feel safe?’ she asked Liz. My pulse quickened and my skin prickled, but I held myself back. Once again, I thought, I was being sentenced without trial. Once again judged by the behaviour of others, the Jeremy Planters and the Doug Handoms. It must be like this for women when they try to get promotion to the board.

  ‘Oh, he’s very good with her. She’s always loved her daddy.’ Well, thank you, Liz. Decent of you to admit it.

  ‘And if it was possible, would it be all right for her to stay with her daddy every now and again to give you a rest?’

  Malcolm Viner was right. I had no say here. Only that which was granted me by the authority of the unwritten law of motherhood. No wonder Grace was playing up. Wouldn’t you? You are born into an incomprehensible confusion of foreign objects and there are two of them who seem to be in charge, who seem to be more important than the others in terms of whether you get fed, whether you can stick your fingers in plug sockets, whether bedtime means you go to sleep or can get away with another game of pyjama-tigers.

  Then, it seems, the second, slightly less useful one has to go away to be shot at in a war, or just pops out for a paper and a pack of ciggies, never to return, or goes and dies of any one of the major six diseases as men tend to, or just runs out of cash or gets bored or… What’s going on here? you must think. What are the rules? Am I in charge now? Have I killed him? Have I got Mum all to myself now? Aren’t I a little young for that? I think I’ll get a rash, that’ll teach them, or have a nasty ear infection.

  ‘It’s not very savoury, where I’m living at the moment,’ I said. ‘But there is plenty of room. My partners have all buggered off down to Regent Street.’

  ‘How about a trial weekend, and if that works, then every other weekend for the meantime, until you can see more clearly how things will turn out between the two of you?’ said the counsellor. In the pause, whilst Liz thought about this, the pale-blue clock ticked lethargically onwards.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ Liz agreed, looking down into her lap. ‘Maybe an afternoon, but I couldn’t let her stay the night.’ I still don’t understand why, even with an arbiter present, it was still Liz’s call. Nevertheless, with two lots of rent, an £80,000 overhang and a business down the toilet, an afternoon with my kid was about all I could afford. I bought into it. The date for an afternoon contact was set.

  The large brown woman didn’t recognize me, or wasn’t going to show it anyway, why should she? I had just been a half-hour punter to her, a trick. She was differently turned out today, the fake lashes and nails were gone. But I recognized her of course, and having a child with us each removed any threat that there might have been in my striking up a conversation with her. Kids are handy like that.

  ‘Thank God it’s cooled off a bit, eh?’ I said. ‘It can get a bit unbearable, can’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I prefer the winter. I like it when it’s cold.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but it can get so exhausting in the heat with all the pollution, can’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Is this your girl?’

  ‘This is Grace.’ Grace was hanging on to me shyly. The large woman’s daughter was playing among the tangled weeds over by the fallen gravestones.

  ‘How old are you then, Grace?’ she asked her. Grace didn’t reply. She looked up at me.

  ‘She’s four.’

  ‘Fou
r and three-quarters,’ Grace murmured under her breath.

  ‘That’s my Jasmine.’ The woman indicated the chubby girl with a nod of her chin. ‘She’s nearly nine.’

  ‘I met you before. You probably won’t remember. You gave me your number. I’ve still got it.’ I didn’t tell her that actually I could recall the number easily even now. She would have got the wrong idea.

  ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘There was a storm.’

  ‘I’m Guy Muffin, I work round here. Well, live round here, I suppose.

  ‘Oho — shouldn’t tell me your real name, you know, you bad man.

  ‘No, it’s all right, you don’t have to tell me yours.

  ‘I’m Stella, 38—26—38.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. It’s a lovely church, isn’t it? Have you been inside?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Jasmine goes to school here.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good. They’re good, aren’t they, the church schools?’

  ‘They’re the only proper education in the state system. I was lucky to get her in,’ said Stella.

  ‘Only trouble is, you have to go to church regularly to qualify for it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind that. I’ve always gone to church.’ She was probably unaware of her eyes returning every few seconds to where her child was playing.

  ‘I went along to get Grace in down in Fulham where I used to live, and the church is full of all these middle-class families who never normally go there at all, pushing their under-five-year-olds to join in with the hymns so they won’t have to fork out for school fees. No children over five in there at all.’ I dawdled a bit. Stella was still sitting quietly on the bench. I stood awkwardly. I put our lunch rubbish in the litter bin. It had been nicer to sit in the churchyard than under the fluorescence of the Shaftesbury Avenue McDonald’s.