Gabriel said nothing. Everyone except Gabriel finished their soup in silence. He poured himself another glass of wine. Finally, Yvonne spoke, a little louder than normal: ‘As this isn’t actually really my body, can I ask, do you have any cigarettes?’
The main course was a walnut-and-squash bake for Gabriel and Julie, and grilled king salmon for Yvonne and Kevin. The accompanying vegetables were steamed and dressed with a little butter. It smelt delicious and was prepared perfectly, yet it was wasted. The quiet introspective misery from the table in the far corner seemed to have infected Christopher’s group. Yvonne was chatty, talking about Spain and her son, but then she was drunk. Kevin was trying to please by nodding and handing out bits of bread roll, but Julie was continuing to be reserved and Gabriel was completely silent.
‘So, what do you two do for a living?’ Kevin asked Gabriel and Julie.
‘I teach art,’ she answered.
‘Oh, in school?’
‘No, in a day centre. I used to teach in a prison and I do some evening classes. It’s not exactly a career, I just found myself doing it. I like the people,’ she said dreamily. She was thinking about the old people in her art group, how genuinely sad they would be about her accident. And Brenda. Would someone think to call Brenda?
‘What about you?’ Kevin said, looking at Gabriel.
‘Actually, I’d just lost my job. All in all it wasn’t a very good day.’
‘Oh, sorry to hear that,’ said Kevin.
‘Doesn’t much matter now, does it?’ and Gabriel smiled for the first time since he’d all but died.
‘I used to lay people off,’ volunteered Yvonne. ‘Horrible business, hated it.’ She was slurring. ‘I’d do it to their faces, but every time I did it I felt worse than the last time. Strange, you’d expect it to get easier; people I worked with said it did, but not for me. I think because every time I had to lay someone off it felt like I had failed in the business and it was more my fault than before. After all, I was experienced, I should see the odd recession coming, know what I mean?’
Nobody did, but they weren’t going to say.
‘I was just a sportswriter on a website,’ shrugged Gabriel.
‘Oh well, you know, the dot-com industry, a disaster waiting to happen,’ said Yvonne dismissively.
‘Yeah, except it was on pretty solid ground we thought, good advertising revenue, part of a big company committed to developing properties on the Web. Still, it’s all bollocks isn’t it really? I mean I loved writing about football and cricket for a living, but it wasn’t exactly a job for a grownup.’
‘Well, what is?’ said Yvonne.
‘Ellie and I were in the middle of IVF, I hadn’t even told her I’d lost my job; I didn’t want to worry her.’ His voice grew quieter. His eyes were reddening.
‘You’ll find something,’ said Yvonne. Everyone stared at her. ‘I mean you would have found something, you know … oh fuck it, what do I know, I’m just a fucking drunk. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Gabriel quickly. ‘You haven’t said anything wrong.’
Julie looked as though she were going to cry. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry for running you over. I’m so very sorry.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, Julie,’ Christopher said.
‘Nothing is ever anyone’s fault,’ said Julie. ‘I fucking hate that.’
‘Well,’ said Yvonne. ‘Anyone else fancy a cigarette?’
‘She won’t give up, you know,’ Christopher said without thinking. As soon as he said it, he realised he shouldn’t have. Yet he felt no regret.
‘Who?’ asked Yvonne, lighting up and tossing the pack of cigarettes along the table toward Julie and Gabriel.
‘Ellie,’ Christopher said, looking directly at Gabriel. ‘Ellie won’t give up on you that easily.’
‘What do you mean?’ Gabriel sat up straighter ‘What can she do about it?’
‘She is going ahead with the IVF.’
‘How? Who with? For fuck’s sake …’
‘With you Gabriel, she plans to finish the treatment with you. This I know. It’s my job to know. She is planning to steal your sperm …’
‘What do you mean, “steal” it?’
‘The doctors looking after you won’t let her have it without going to court, something to do with informed consent, so she has hatched a plan with her friend Izzy.’
‘Izzy won’t help.’
‘She says she will.’
‘She won’t; she hates me.’
‘What do you mean, she hates you?’ asked Julie.
‘Well she doesn’t like me; she won’t help.’
‘Well Moira’s around, maybe she will. And Sam’s definitely involved.’
‘What kind of plan?’
Christopher breathed in and looked at the trees outside again. He thought of Estelle. He missed her already. He said ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to go into details right now, especially as the crème brûlée is just coming, but suffice to say she hasn’t given up on you.’
‘Quite a woman,’ said Julie, picking up the cigarettes and taking one before offering them to Gabriel, who started to pluck one out then stopped.
‘No, it’s OK, thanks. They’re bad for your health.’
16
The next morning everyone was on time, and nobody was hung over. The silence at the beginning of the group was short. Yvonne looked around, raised her eyebrows, shrugged, and said, ‘If it is talking we are here for, then I can talk—if nobody else has anything they want to say?’
Everyone shook their heads. Yvonne began, ‘Between 1983 and 1988 I probably made over four million pounds from property deals and I lost most of it in two months in 1989. Of course I wasn’t the only one, and to be honest I don’t think it hit me as hard as it hit others; I mean, it didn’t ever cross my mind to shoot myself or anything. It never really felt like my money, not deep down, which is perhaps the feeling that guided my later actions.’
‘I heard you had your hand in the till,’ said Kevin.
‘Yes well, if that made your job easier I imagine you relished that kind of information. It wasn’t true of course.’ She paused before adding, almost gleefully, ‘Although from their point of view I can see that it was.’
‘It wasn’t supposed to help me kill you,’ Kevin explained. ‘It was just something someone said.’
‘Whatever.’ Yvonne thought of, and treated, Kevin as if he were something sticky on her shoe. ‘Anyway I started again. During the ‘90s I—quite cleverly, I thought later—ignored the dot-com revolution. If I couldn’t clearly see the revenue stream I didn’t want to hear about it. Instead I went into business publishing and it was, if I say so myself, a very good decision, financially at least.’
‘And what happened?’ asked Clemitius, who was relishing some proper talking going on at last.
‘I set up business magazines that serviced the public sector. I started with a teaching magazine, then a nursing magazine, then another nursing magazine for nurses who thought they were too clever to read the first one, then a social work magazine and so on. At my peak I owned 11 magazines. You probably wouldn’t have heard of any of them. Not all big sellers, but all profit makers.’
‘What’s so clever about that?’ asked Julie.
‘Recruitment advertising,’ said Yvonne. ‘I mean, none of the public sector groups are exactly A-list consumers for the mainstream advertisers, but all of them are massive recruitment areas. And ultimately the recruitment drive was a publicly funded, unlimited resource—particularly through the 90’s when all those public-sector professions had staff shortages. I made more money in 1996 for example then I had in the whole of the 1980s.’
‘You must have been very happy,’ said Julie uncertainly. She had never really thought about money very much. Nor why people built their lives around it.
‘You’d think, wouldn’t you?’ sighed Yvonne.
‘Did I tell you my girlfriend’s a nurse?’ said Gabriel, for no reaso
n other than that he was thinking about Ellie, as he had been since he got there.
‘Maybe she read my magazines,’ said Yvonne.
‘Maybe.’ Gabriel sounded unconvinced.
Yvonne waited to see if Gabriel would elaborate. He didn’t. ‘What is interesting to me is that nobody ever, not once, asked if we were doing anything morally questionable.’
‘What do you mean?’ Clemitius asked.
‘We were stripping millions from public services.’
‘You were selling a service,’ said Kevin. ‘Nobody made them pay you.’
‘Yes well, you would say that, wouldn’t you. Of course we were selling a service that had to be provided, but the money we brought in was taxpayers’ money, it existed to provide people with social workers or teachers and yet was being filtered off to me, my partners, and ultimately—when we went public—to our shareholders. Our share price was bolstered by taxpayers’ money, which made it a pretty good share to have, so it became more and more popular and, as a consequence, shareholders got greedy and put more pressure on us to provide more profit, providing the bare minimum in terms of content, reducing staffing, selling even more ads. Nobody ever asked if what we were doing was morally wrong.’
‘What did you do when you started to wonder?’ asked Clemitius.
‘I started drinking too much for one thing,’ said Yvonne. ‘That was a mistake, because apart from the fact it made for some pretty undignified moments in my life, it also made it easy for my company to get rid of me. I got kicked upstairs, became an executive director, which is business-speak for pointless suit. They should have had the guts to fire me but didn’t. I decided to set myself up as a project director. At first I tried, quite legitimately, to persuade the company to fund educational projects, awards, career development funds, stuff like that. Things that would pump just a little money back into public services and also give us a more positive profile, but the idiots couldn’t see the point, or the profits, and refused me.
‘So I went into competition with my own company, I essentially went into business with the government to set up a series of free websites and newsletters for recruitment advertising. I had every contact I needed in the business, all the people had long resented paying money to the likes of us just to staff the public services. I undercut my own company by 45%, I negotiated agreements with all of the appropriate unions, and I didn’t say a word to anyone. It took me seven months of bloody hard work and nobody once asked me what I was doing. I wasn’t answerable to anyone.
‘Somehow they got wind of it, about three weeks before the network was due to launch. I knew they would, of course. The head of marketing escorted me from the building. I’d hired the chinless prat. They got even dirtier than I anticipated in employing you, Kevin. It’s a shame, I would have loved to have been there for the first six weeks of the sites and the papers. But unfortunately I missed out on that.’
‘So,’ said Clemitius, trying to be charming. ‘You are something of a Robin Hood figure, stealing from the rich and giving back to the poor?’
‘No,’ said Yvonne. ‘I just got tired of freeloading off of the state and getting praised for doing it. Christ, if I’d been a single mum living on benefits, I’d have been considered the lowest of the low, but as it was I was a candidate for Businesswoman of the Year simply for taking millions from the government to advertise jobs.’
‘I have a question,’ said Gabriel.
Yvonne looked at him and pursed her lips.
‘Why are you here? It sounds to me as though you were pretty much in control of your life, and you tried to do the right thing, something I don’t remember doing lately, not that I am any kind of right-thing role model here, but … well I just don’t get it?’
‘Yes, why do you think you are here?’ Clemitius asked Yvonne. ‘Think about yourself, try to take an overview of your life and the things about you that have perhaps stopped you from fulfilling your human potential.’
Christopher shuffled in his seat a little, he felt a mild anxiety, as though he should be saying something, but he couldn’t think of anything. He had rather enjoyed Yvonne’s story. He found himself liking her.
‘I’m a drunk?’ suggested Yvonne dispassionately.
‘Yes,’ said Clemitius, ‘but that in itself isn’t what has prevented your personal fulfilment. Everyone looked confused. ‘Why do you think you drink?’ he went on, helpfully.
‘I get thirsty?’
‘I’m thinking beyond that.’
‘I like the feeling it gives me.’
‘I’m sure there is more to it than that. What feeling? More confidence perhaps?’
Christopher wanted to say something, anything. He shuffled in his seat again and even opened his mouth but nothing came out. He realised he was uncomfortable. Not for himself, but for Yvonne. Because when Clemitius spoke it felt to Christopher as though he were assaulting someone.
‘No, I’m pretty confident most of the time,’ said Yvonne. She felt no anxiety at the questions, no embarrassment at the answers. ‘If anything, I like the fact that when I’m a little drunk I may be a little more vulnerable, you know, to the unknown. Maybe I’m a bit of a control freak.’
Everyone sat in silence.
‘Is that it?’ said Yvonne. ‘I’m a bit of control freak?’
Clemitius nodded sagely, a man who had today at least done his job.
‘So,’ said Yvonne. ‘You’re suggesting that my tendency toward wanting to retain a certain control in most circumstances has in effect prevented me from living a more fulfilling life?’
‘No,’ said Clemitius, a little smugly. ‘You are saying that.’
Julie screwed up her eyes. Is that it? Self-knowledge as delivered by angels? Because it felt to her just a little like a daytime television show.
‘Well maybe,’ said Yvonne. ‘Or alternatively, it’s given me the drive, confidence and ability to move beyond the career in telesales I had at twenty-three, to break into business?’
‘But you’ll never know what might have been.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that if you had found it within yourself to challenge yourself in a different way, perhaps you might have found a path to a greater personal fulfilment?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I don’t, but …’
‘You don’t.’
‘Seems to me that you’re guessing,’ interjected Gabriel. ‘She’s done all right, she is who she is, she hasn’t done any harm to anyone …’
‘Harming others is a slightly outdated way of measuring good,’ said Clemitius.
‘Oh, sorry for being old-fashioned,’ said Gabriel.
‘Is it?’ Julie asked.
They looked at Yvonne, who was shaking her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No sorry, you’re wrong. I know I have a drink problem, I will buy that I am a control freak, hell if you like I’ll even get into the fact that I cannot sustain a decent relationship—although as I sustained one long enough to give me my son, on reflection I’d say I did OK there. On the whole I don’t have any big regrets. I can even cope with being dead, because I feel as though I have lived. Being killed by that insidious little creep annoys me, but dead is dead. Beyond that? It was a pretty good life I think. Sorry, does that mean I’ve failed?’
‘You can’t really fail in therapy,’ Clemitius said with a shrug. ‘It is for you to do what you want to do with whatever emerges from the process.’
Yvonne was quiet and so was everyone else. It may have been a thoughtful silence, it may have been a comfortable silence, but Julie looked at her as she stared at the floor in front of her and if she had to guess, she would have guessed it was a confused silence. She had felt like she was stoned ever since she got here, but now she was waking slightly. And as she looked around the group she found herself thinking two things: firstly that Clemitius was, well, a bit of a prat. Secondly, she found herself wondering about Michael and it made her ache, really ache, and those t
wo things combined to make her feel as though she were going to be sick.
17
James Buchan’s meeting with Bernie, his former manager and currently an antiques dealer, hadn’t gone as badly as it might have, but neither had it gone as well as he might have hoped. Mind you, James had hoped for quite a lot. As he had driven to Margate, his dream scenario involved Bernie sobbing at the sight of James, whom he had always thought of as the son he had never had. Furthermore, and this bit came to James when he got to the Medway towns, Bernie had by coincidence received one or two calls lately from journalists anxious to know what had happened to the ‘years ahead of their time’ Dog in a Tuba, and in particular to their ‘enigmatic, distinctive, some would say misunderstood genius’ front-man James Buchan. What’s more, Bernie would reveal that Dog in a Tuba had been invited on the ‘80s Revisited tour with Adam Ant, Paul Young, and Go West. And Sting himself had called to see if Bernie knew where James was, in the hope that he would co-write some of the songs for his forthcoming album.
Consequently, it wasn’t going to take much for James to be disappointed.
Bernie, meanwhile, had always anticipated punching James if he ever saw him again. James being the man who, in Bernie’s head at least, had not only driven him to drink, but had also driven his innocent young god-daughter Alice to drugs and then, even worse, into a modelling career. However, the years had mellowed him, and it is quite possible that sitting in the pub with James had made him forget the bad times and remember—if not the good times they shared, because frankly there weren’t any—the fact that when they were all together, they were young and thin.
‘Have you spoken to any of the others about this reunion idea?’ They were huddled round a small table in the corner of the near-empty pub. An old man in a cap was playing a fruit machine; three others were listening to a horse race on the radio. In the pub it was the 1970s. James felt quite at home.
‘No, not really. Gary Guitar hung up on me.’
‘Well Gary Guitar hates you.’
‘Yeah, yeah, he does,’ said James, genuinely bemused.
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