by Rob Palk
‘We had a report that Nazis were hitting people,’ said the policewoman. She looked rather jealous of the Nazis.
‘I’m really not a Nazi,’ said the Nazi. ‘I go on climate marches. My girlfriend is one-eighth Caribbean. I’m a great one for Curb Your Enthusiasm. Listen, there was this one guy, we met him on the bus. He might have been a Nazi. We let him come with us cos he had the gear.’
‘There you go,’ said Keris.
‘More I think of it, the more he seems a Nazi. Like he was out on his own on a Friday night, in full Nazi uniform. That has to be a giveaway. And he kept talking about Nietzsche and whatsisname, Gobineau. Now I personally quite like Nietzsche but you got to admit that’s suspect. And when we got here he was—’ he scratched his head ‘—measuring people’s skulls. With some special kind of skull-measuring equipment he had in his bag. And he kept asking to go to the living room. Living room, we must have living room, he said. It was him who did all of the hitting.’
‘Plausible,’ said Alistair. ‘You should be after him.’
The police went over to their car and held a whispered discussion. I didn’t think they could go much longer without arresting someone. The Nazi was asking Keris for a fag while the line-up of ghouls was starting to loosen. I couldn’t see my witch anywhere.
‘Alistair,’ I said. ‘I kissed a witch.’
He smiled at me in a fatherly way and patted me on the head. ‘That’s good. You’re moving on.’
‘I’m not moving on,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to move on. I wish I hadn’t done it.’
There was my witch coming back to us, wobbling on her architectural heels, bag swinging as though she were about to start demolishing property. On arriving, she kissed me wetly on the mouth. She did the same with Alistair, which cheered me up a bit. Probably everyone kissed each other now, and were Nazis, and did horrible things in Berlin.
I told them I would be a few minutes and started off back home.
First there was happiness. From being in bed on a Sunday, with work a day away. Next up came memory, at a cell level, of alcohol, the check to see that I was still alive, the guilt of having drunk when I really shouldn’t. Then other memories, tumbling downhill and into my consciousness. Marie had gone. Marie had gone because she saw an anger that wasn’t in me. Marie had gone because the badger cull had taken over her thoughts. I had been drunk. I had kissed a witch and might have done even more, if it wasn’t for the Nazis. Three cheers for the Nazis, I thought.
I had called Marie. No, that was okay, she hadn’t answered. Except then I had texted her dad. I had texted Frank Lansdowne on my way back home. And I had no idea what I’d said.
The texts started off okay: I told him I was looking for Marie. I told him I was worried about her. This was fine, this was true. I told him, I told him . . .
I had told Frank that I thought Marie had a drink problem. I didn’t actually think this and I wasn’t at all sure why I’d said it. ‘We have to help her,’ I’d said. ‘I’m going to need both of you to help me get through to her.’ Which must have been why I’d said it. ‘She really has a lot of problems I need to sort out.’ Frank hadn’t pshawed this. There was nothing that could be construed as a pshaw. He had asked me to come round the next day. Which meant, I realised, today.
Five
‘Stuart?’ Frank Lansdowne stood at the door wearing the plush white type of dressing gown they give you at a health spa. It was late in the day to be sleeping but it was possible he’d had a bad night. I stood at the door and feigned wellness. ‘Bit early for trick or treating, isn’t it? Or late I suppose now. Come in, Stuart, come in.’ He stepped back, rummaging in his dressing gown pocket for Marlborough Lights. He didn’t usually smoke in the house, the fags being reserved for when people could see him. Marie, he said, had gone out.
So, I was back at the Lansdownes’s. I’d only been there a fortnight before but it felt a good deal longer. The old familiar house again, the posters of art deco cats, the photographs of Judy from a 1986 Observer magazine, and most of all the pictures of Marie. Marie as an impish toddler clutching a cat, Marie blowing out birthday candles at age eighteen, Marie in a beret and a stripy top, smiling so hard that her cheekbones bracketed her eyes. Marie’s features on endless repetition around the walls and she looked different in every shot.
‘I don’t mind admitting this business has taken its toll,’ Frank was saying. ‘Judy is scared to leave the house in case she’s asked about it. Thank heavens for Ocado, I say.’ He did his usual grin, that of a schoolboy caught skiving, willing you into complicity. ‘How are you Stuart? You look . . .’ My appearance seemed to exhaust even his gift for simile. I followed him through to the front room to find Judy on the sofa, lost under a heap of rugs and cushions. She looked, I thought, diminished.
Now, I liked the Lansdownes. I’d known about the two of them before I knew their daughter. She’d mentioned them on the first date, used to the men she’d been with vaguely recognising their names but not actually being excited about it. Whereas I was not a fan, exactly, but I owned a few of his novels and two collections of essays (while steering clear, as most people did, of the poems). His last, bulky volume, Memory, My Mother, was one of the books I read on the toilet when slightly drunk: erudite, clever and weightless musings on literature, history and life. His avian face on the cover. And I had read enough autobiographies of the heroic old Granta generation to know about his youth in Manchester, the grammar-school-aided clamber up to Oxford, the early promise of greatness he never quite fulfilled. The friendships with Salman, Tom and Milan, the stories of having bedded two Booker winners and an editor of Spare Rib. The masterpiece that never seemed to appear.
Marie had been slightly embarrassed to tell me about her folks. ‘It’s overwhelming. All through my life you’d have to watch what you say around him in case it turned up in one of his books. And they’ve both become grand old things now but when I was younger they were, well, they were sort of cool. I’d see them mentioned in the papers, say. Having to connect the person telling me to finish my dinner with, you know, the enfant terrible. Or comments about mum’s legs on The Late Show.’ I remembered her mother’s legs. She was American, and somehow, as part of a generation’s easy ascent, wound up on British television and in the broadsheets, wryly expounding on books. I’d seen her in the nineties on BBC2, her blonde prettiness unsuccessfully obscured behind outsize glasses as a concession towards seriousness, explaining Proust to insomniacs.
I knew about these people. These people were it. They were where the art was. They were garden parties and memories of the sixties, they were films and they were prizes and stories about the Prague Spring. I’d even borrowed her father’s tone in my work from time to time, fallen by accident into his seen-it-all-before style, his hand-sweeping cadences. All those grand garden parties at their house near Regent’s Park, all those luminaries guzzling Prosecco. I’d arrived right there, smack bang in the literary world and I hadn’t even started my book yet. I’d got there by falling in love. And I liked falling in love. Only now she had gone.
‘Stuart, Stuart,’ cried Judy Lansdowne, from somewhere among the chintz. ‘Marie is out at some meeting. With that man.’
‘That man?’ There was a man, then. There was always going to be a man. I put my hand on the back of the nearest chair.
‘She’s brought him here. This badger man.’ She looked around in case anyone was listening, although clearly no one could be. ‘We don’t really know what to do. We can’t turf her out. But he’s enormous. And he smells.’ I held onto the back of the chair. My face did a good impression of a dinghy having its air let out. Marie had gone for Henry then.
Judy went on, ‘And as for the other one!’
‘The other one?’ My wife seemed to have formed a badger seraglio.
‘I still say we turf him out,’ said Frank. ‘Although as to how we do that. We could always get some bailiffs.’ He lapsed into one of the ’ard man voices he liked to use in his fiction. �
��’Ire some muscle.’
‘Love, you know that’s impossible. If he goes she goes. It’s not as though we like him. He’s so big, isn’t he? You can’t take a man like that seriously. So what are you going to do Stuart? Are we talking divorce? Do you have any idea how much we spent on that fucking wedding? That’s half her inheritance, you know, gone on a bunch of napkins.’
‘I don’t actually want a divorce,’ I said. ‘I want Marie to come back.’
‘The problem is she seems to want one, you see. And what’s all this about her drinking?’
Frank put his hand on my arm. ‘Come with me, Stuart,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
We went through to the kitchen. I had spent so many days in this place, pulling Pinot from the fridge, breakfasting in the conservatory. This house was a haven for me. It was the civilisation I yearned for. It was books and peace and my marvellous bloody wife. I wasn’t giving her up in a hurry. I wasn’t giving any of it up.
‘Frank,’ I said. ‘About the texts.’ Even in here, of course, the photographs of Marie. Holidays and outings and, oh spare me this, our wedding. Did she know even then that she was going to leave? She didn’t look unhappy. How do unhappy people look? I don’t picture them looking so pretty.
‘Stuart. Stuart. Stuart.’ Frank looked different, sitting at the kitchen table. Shrunk, somehow, and unprotected, as if an unkind word could smite him.
‘I might have maybe given, not the wrong impression, but not entirely the . . .’ He looked rueful. He looked frail and very tired and ready for bed. ‘Frank,’ I said, deciding to risk it. ‘I might have—’
A feathery cloud of fag-smoke. ‘We’ve tried, you know, Stuart,’ he said. ‘Our one and only child and she came late. I know I haven’t always been perfect.’ His eyes glazed as he thought of his many imperfections. ‘But I never wanted her to get so lost. A home like this,’ he waved his hand through the smoke. ‘It’s a centre isn’t? And she doesn’t seem to have a centre. It’s here, it’s supposed to be here.’
‘I mean, she does drink, a bit, who doesn’t, but I might have given—’
Except now the old man was sobbing. That head from which had come all those novels, those essays, those hundreds of ignored poems, was rocking with every sob. ‘What did we do?’ he said. ‘It’s been awful since this happened. I just keep asking myself, what did we do?’ He was actually whimpering now. Hopefully the real-life situation was making him cry. Hopefully my texts hadn’t done this.
‘We can get her back Frank,’ I said. ‘I love her so much, you know. But you have to help me. You, and Judy too. Do whatever it is you can.’
He nodded, but kept on crying. It was starting to make me uncomfortable. Was I supposed to hug him? Supposed to somehow comfort him? He was a regular guest on Front Row. He should fucking well hug himself.
I should tell him, firmly, that the drinking wasn’t real. That would be a start.
The door opened and a young man in pyjamas stood before us. He had a look halfway between a cherub and a rat, thick deposits of sleep in the corner of each eye and duckling-coloured hair sprouting at angles. I knew him from somewhere. It was . . . it was George, the mumbling boy from the badger camp, the one who followed Henry around.
‘Guys,’ he said, talking as though he had his fist in his mouth. ‘Could you keep the noise down? Trying to get some sleep.’ He yawned and his whole body stretched a few more feet before concertina-ing into a slump. Having exerted himself that far, he set off back upstairs.
I muttered goodbye to my still teary father-in-law and darted after the boy. He must have seen me coming and hoofed it four at a time up there, but I was quick enough to nab him before he got to Marie’s room. I had stayed in this room countless times and now it seemed it was his turn. ‘George,’ I said, ‘George.’ He looked at me in a confused sort of way, as though he had stubbed his toe on something and it had turned out to know his name. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Stuart,’ he said with what passed for a smile. I agreed that this was definitely who I was. We sat on the bed, the bed I’d first seen on my second night with Marie. The room was the same, the same pictures on the wall, the same dusty crowd of old books. It was different though now, because now I had no stake in it. It was a room I no longer belonged in, that was all. George sat cross-legged on the bed, his shins showing, pink and hairless. He tugged at a string of beads around his skinny wrist. There was a sleeping bag on the floor and I realised I was now sitting on Marie and Henry’s bed, that the two of them had been sleeping here with George at their feet, like a dog. I was glad he was there to stop them having sex.
I assumed that his being there stopped them.
‘She said I could,’ he said. He pronounced the word ‘she’ like he was pronouncing a sentence. He did not have much love for my wife, it seemed. ‘They’ve gone out. To a meeting. I stayed in cos I wanted to sleep but you were making a row.’ He stuck his forefinger between each toe consecutively and rubbed hard for grease. ‘Not seen you at camp for a bit.’
‘I’ve been busy.’
‘You should come and get her back. We’re all going back there tomorrow. Get her back and then she won’t be around all the time. Henry,’ he said, ‘he’s not right when she’s around. Not practical. That’s what’s great about him, he’s practical. When she’s around he’s just looking after her. Waste of everyone’s time.’
I had the feeling I’d found an ally. Not the sort of ally I’d like, but you take your luck how you find it. I lay down on the bed, where I had lain so many times, and put my hands behind my neck. George, having finished cleaning his toes, started on his ears, digging for gold.
‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s got a purpose. Everyone has a function. And his was the camp. Yours is, probably, complaining. Hers is listening to you complaining and telling you you’ll be all right. And now she’s joined him it’s making everyone else go off too. It’s got me here and you talking to me when you’d rather be with her and I’d rather be with the badgers, and him not paying attention to the badgers cos he’s looking after her. She’s messed everything up.’ This speech seemed to exhaust him. He started ruffling his hair at startling speed, as if trying to perm it by hand.
‘For an anarchist you don’t seem to like change very much.’
He looked at me for the first time. His eyes were a pale grey, as if they had run out of colour halfway through making them. ‘I said. It’s about everyone finding out where they’re supposed to be and then staying there. Not messing things up. If you mess things up, you just end up building things and bulldozing things and jetting around the world. Will you try?’ he said. ‘I think she’d listen. I think she would come back. I’ll tell you something.’
‘I’m not taking relationship advice from a kid,’ I said. We sat in silence a while. ‘Go on though, you might as well.’
‘They aren’t, you know, doing it.’ He screwed up his face at the thought. ‘She says that it’s too soon. That she needs to be sure or something. Henry’s really cross at that. He says he isn’t but I can tell.’
‘Well,’ I said. This news had some restorative effect. ‘We’ll just have to try and get things back to normal then.’
When I got downstairs, Frank and Judy were in the front room, deep in a whispered conference. I looked at them from the doorway, not the public duo but a couple locked in privacy, knowing all there was of one another. I set off for the door.
You know what? I felt sort of satisfied. I felt sort of all right. There were things that could be done. At least, I thought, as I headed for the station, I was making a bit of effort.
Six
My dad pressed down the car boot, sealing the last of my possessions inside. It had been hard for my parents, this year. They had only just got used to my nearly dying when I’d gone and got married on them. Now I was separated and moving house. It must have been like watching one of those speeded up films of plants growing and dying, except with the narrative spliced. My m
um had cried in the flat as we piled up my books into boxes. My dad kept up an act of sympathetic stoicism that just about made things worse.
‘You know you can always come home,’ they said. I considered this. It wasn’t unambiguously awful, was the worst thing. Imperial Leather and clean carpets. The heating a little too high. All my meals made for me, nights in front of the telly. Catch up with old school friends. The ones who’d stayed and had kids as soon as they could, the ones who’d been cool in their day. The kids would be almost twenty now. I could feasibly marry one of my old friend’s kids.
Still, it would mean defeat. Back with his folks in his thirties. Shambling round the shops behind his mum. My Stuart back from London. Slowly accepting them buying all my clothes. Dinner for the three of us. Masturbating in bed while keeping my whole body still for fear of the mattress and thin walls.
‘I’ll pass,’ I said. ‘But thanks.’
‘I still don’t understand why she’s done this,’ said my mum. I told her it was temporary, it wouldn’t last, that I was moving out to save rent but we’d soon be together again.
My parents looked at me and around the flat and neither of them spoke.
The days leading up to the move hadn’t been so bad. I imagine if I hadn’t known I was going to get Marie back then they might have been pretty awful. But I was confident I was doing all I could. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t moments, of course. I heard from Frank that she was back in Gloucester at the camp. Packing our things wasn’t fun, the letters and the photographs and the goods bought for the future.
Then, one cold morning, I broke. I’d spent most of the evening looking at Facebook, her profile and the badger guy, Henry Ralph his full name was, my head full of unwanted pictures. I called, not caring where she was.