Starter for Ten

by David Nicholls

  “Oh, just a place in town. Luigi's?”

  “KFC all booked up was it?”

  “You think Luigi's is a bad idea?”

  “Not at all. You're clearly a gentleman of taste and sophistication! And I hear the half-pounder with cheese, chili and onion rings is to die for. Maybe you can take me there one day too, Jackson.”

  And she walks on ahead, leaving me trying to think of something clever to say. “Rebecca,” I call after her. She turns, grinning. “Why do you always call me Jackson?”

  “D'you mind?”

  “Not really. It's just a bit juvenile, that's all.”

  “Och, I'm sorry. It's meant with affection. Would you prefer ‘Brian’? Or the more perky and informal ‘Bri’? Or ‘Herr Himmler,’ perhaps … ?”

  “Brian, I think.”

  “Okay, then, Brian it is. Have fun, Brian. Keep your wits about you, Brian. Play it cool, Brian”—and she disappears down the corridor—“see you around, Brian.”

  I hurry to Alice's room, half expecting to see this great long queue of boys, but when I get there the door's closed. I can hear voices from inside— I don't exactly press my ear to the wood, because that wouldn't be right, but I do stand close enough to hear.

  “Where's he taking you for dinner?” says a voice, female, thank God.

  “Bradley's, I think,” says Alice.

  “Bradley's—very posh.”

  “Is he rich then?”

  “Don't know. Wouldn't have thought so,” says Alice.

  “Well, just make sure you're back by eleven, young lady, or we'll send the police out looking for you.…” I knock, because I don't want to hear any more, and there's some whispering and giggling, and then she opens the door.

  She's wearing a low-cut charcoal-gray satin evening dress with a puffball skirt, and her hair's piled high on her head, so that along with the high heels, she seems about two feet taller than usual. She's wearing more makeup than usual too, lipstick for the first time, the line of that tiny raised scar still visible on her lower lip. Most remarkable of all, though, is the low-cut ball gown. She must have some kind of strapless bra arrangement under there, because her shoulders are bare, as if the top half of her body were being squeezed gently out of the dress, and there's a fantastic curve of bare skin, of bare Alice, rolling, overflowing the top of the satin bodice. In a nineteenth-century novel, you'd say that she had a “magnificent bosom.” In fact, you'd say it now too. She has a magnificent bosom. You're staring. Don't stare, Brian.

  “Hello, Alice.”

  “Hello, Brian.”

  Behind her, Erin the Cat, and another one of her gang, are smirking at me. Close your mouth, Brian.

  “You look very nice, Bri,” says Erin, without meaning it.

  “Thank you! So, shall we go then?”

  “Absolutely.”

  And she takes my arm and we go.

  14

  QUESTION: Consisting of a straight chain of carbon atoms, with hydrogen atoms along its length, and a carboxyl growth at one end, oleic acid is the most widely distributed example of which lipid component?

  ANSWER: Fatty acids.

  Politically, of course, I don't really approve of the concept of physical beauty. The idea that someone, man or woman, should receive any kind of extra attention or affection or popularity or respect or adulation simply because of a quirk of genetics and some arbitrary, male-media-defined subjective notion of “beauty” seems to me inherently wrong and unacceptable.

  Having said that, Alice is clearly just … beautiful. In the candlelight she looks like a de la Tour. Or do I mean Vermeer? Or Watteau? She knows she's being looked at as she opens the menu, and she must know that she looks lovely, but what must that be like? To be looked at, rather than just glanced at, and to give pleasure, entirely passively, just by being looked at. Though looking at her now, it occurs to me that it's not even pleasure as such, just more of an ache, a low, dull, heavy throb in your belly, that you wish you could get rid of but can't, because it's too much temptation, to sit and look, to sit and gaze, and take her in.

  Ever since I met her, I've noticed people gazing at Alice in this way. I've watched Patrick do it, smoothing back his hair, with his fat, stupid astronaut's tongue lolling out, and I watch Luigi the waiter do it as he peels her burgundy shawl off her bare shoulders and shows us to the table, then heads through the swing doors to spread the word, so that both the chef and the washer-upper come out of the kitchen on some feeble pretext, just to look at her. What must that be like? To be admired before you've even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you're like?

  When Mum's watching telly, she'll often appraise a woman, a film star or something, and say “She's beautiful …,” then, damningly, in her best Old Testament voice, “… and she knows it.” Whether or not “beautiful and knows it” is better or worse than “ugly and knows it” I'm not sure, and I suppose great physical beauty must be some kind of burden, but as burdens go, it surely has to be one of the lighter ones.

  Over the top of the menu, I steal a glance at the rectangle of peachy, candlelit cleavage that I'm trying not to look at because I don't want her to feel she's being objectified.

  “Nice, isn't it?” she says.

  I assume that she means the restaurant and say, “Is it? I hope so.” I'm having to whisper, because we're the only people here, and I don't want to offend Luigi, who's busy over by the plastic-ivy-covered bar, smearing the wine glasses with grease, and leering. It seems that reserving a table might not have been as essential as I thought. “I tried to get us into Bradley's but they were fully booked,” I lie.

  “Not to worry. This is great!”

  “There's pizza and pasta, and over the page there's burgers …”

  “Oh, so there is …” she says, unpeeling the plastic-sealed pages which come in a ring binder.

  “Or spareribs if you prefer … ?”

  “Ooooo-kay.”

  “And you have to have a starter too, the works, all on me!”

  “Well, we'll see about that …”

  And we go back to the menu.

  Oh, God.

  Silence.

  Better say something.

  “Hmmmm. Breadsticks!”

  I take a breadstick, peel the paper off, unwrap a pat of butter and wipe it along the breadstick. “You know what I always wonder about spareribs? Who decides they're spare? Not the pig, surely! It's not like the pig's saying, ‘Well, I'm going to need these ribs, but those are spare, take them! Take my ribs! Eat! Eat my ribs!’” She gives me a Children-in-Need kind of smile, glances at my hand, and I look down and realize that for some reason I'm waving a knife around.

  Stay calm.

  Stop jabbering.

  Put … the knife … down.

  But the truth is I'm starting to lose faith in Luigi's as a venue for a romantic seduction. The floors, I realize, are linoleum, curling up at the skirting boards, and not particularly clean, and the checkered tablecloths are actually vinyl, for ease of wipeability. Also, even though Luigi's seated us in a romantic corner at the back, we're pretty near the toilets, which is convenient, I suppose, but means there's a slightly tangy back note of lemon disinfectant to the evening. I'm anxious that Alice might feel uncomfortable here. She's certainly starting to look uncomfortable; her puffball evening dress has ballooned up around her, as if she's being consumed by her gown.

  “Shall we order?” I ask.

  “It all looks delicious, I have to say,” she says, but I'm not so sure. We concentrate on the menu, which is sticky to the touch, imperfectly typed, phonetically spelled—Chilly Concarny, is that right?—and divided up into “For Openers!,” “The Main Event!!” and “Oh Go On Then … !!!” To be honest, it actually does all look delicious to me—with an emphasis on deep-frying and charred meats, and hardly any vegetables. Even the cheese comes deep-fried, and the portions here are obviously big, because they tell you on the menu how much all
the meat weighs. But I can't help worrying that Alice is used to lighter fare, tofu and salads and things that have been steamed, and I think she may well be one of those quality-over-quantity types. I'm starting to perspire. And itch too, from the detergent in the bath. I look down and notice that the cuffs of my white shirt have a denim-blue tidemark.

  The theme from The Godfather plays on a loop in the background, and after some silent deliberation, we're ready. I look around for Luigi, but can tell he's approaching behind me by the sucking noise his footsteps make on the linoleum. Alice goes for the stuffed mushrooms and a margarita pizza with a side salad, while I opt for the whitebait and the barbecued half-chicken with chips and complimentary relish tray. “Hope it's not the back half !” I say, and Alice smiles, ever so subtly, and insists I choose the wine. There's stuff by the carafe, but even I know that wine shouldn't be that cheap, so I decide to go for something bottled and sparkling. The champagne's way too expensive so I settle on the Lambrusco. Didn't Rebecca say something about her liking it? I don't know much about wine, but I know white goes with chicken and fish, so I order the white Lambrusco Bianco.

  After the waiter's gone I say, “Oh, God, Faux-Pas City!”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I asked for white Lambrusco Bianco and of course bianco actually means white! Tautology or what!” As amusing anecdotes go, I realize that this wouldn't really hold its own on a chat show, but it serves to break the ice, and she smiles and we start to talk. Or rather she does, and I nod and listen, pick sticks of red wax off the candle, melt the ends, stick them back on at odd angles, and watch her. She's talking, as she often does, about school days at Linden Lodge, one of those massively expensive socialist private schools out in the country, and I have to say it sounds like a pretty cushy number to me, and not like boarding school at all, more like a sort of seven-year slumber party. As far as I can tell from the way Alice describes it, a typical academic day at Linden Lodge goes like this:

  8:30–9:30 Smoke joint. Bake bread.

  9:30–10:30 Have sex with son/daughter of Famous Person.

  10:30–11:30 Build barn.

  11:30–12:30 Read T. S. Eliot aloud, listen to Crosby, Stills and Nash, play cello.

  12:30–1:30 Experiment with drugs, have sex.

  1:30–3:30 Double skinny-dipping. Swim with dolphins.

  3:30–4:30 Dry-stone-walling. Sex (optional).

  4:30–5:30 Acoustic guitar lesson.

  5:30–6:30 Have sex, then sketch sleeping naked partner in charcoal

  6:30–4:00 Compulsory Bob Dylan.

  4:00 Lights out, but only if you want to.

  Obviously, from a political point of view I don't approve of a school like this, even if it sounds frankly fantastic. What with all the dope-smoking and sex and endless singing of Simon and Garfunkel songs, you'd think they'd never actually get any studying done, but they must be doing something right, because Alice is here, after all, and though I haven't asked about her A-level grades yet, not on a first date, she is doing a degree, even if it's only in drama. Maybe if you listen to enough Radio 4 from an early age, you just get educated subliminally.

  My whitebait arrive, about thirty of the little silver things washed up on a leaf of iceberg lettuce, looking up at me and saying “We died for you, you bastard, at least do something amusing!” So I put one in my mouth with the tail sticking out and pretend to be a cat. This goes down only moderately well. She returns to her garlic mushrooms.

  “How are they?”

  “Nice! Very garlicky. No snogging for me tonight!”

  And there it is, the subtle warning, like a Klaxon in the ear, in case I was getting any fancy ideas. I'm not surprised, really, it's pretty much what I expected, and I take comfort from the fact that it's an ambiguous warning, albeit only very, very slightly ambiguous—it's not you, Brian, it's the mushrooms—the implication being that if she'd ordered a different appetizer, the deep-fried Camembert, for instance, then we'd have already made love by now.

  “So did you have many boyfriends there?” I ask casually, nibbling on a fish.

  “Oh, just one or two,” and she proceeds to tell me all about them.

  From the point of view of sexual politics, I think it's really important not to have double standards about men's and women's sexual history. Of course, there's absolutely no reason why Alice Harbinson shouldn't have had an active romantic and sexual past, but, still, I think it's fair to say that “just one or two” is a little misleading. By the time the main courses arrive, the names have started to blur, but there's definitely someone called Rufus, whose dad's a famous film director, and who had to move to L.A. because their love for each other was just too dark and intense, whatever that means. And Alexis, the Greek fisherman who she met on holiday, and who kept turning up at their London house asking for her hand in marriage, until they had to phone the police and get him deported. And Joseph, a really beautiful jazz musician who she had to finish with because he kept trying to get her to take heroin with him. And Tony, a potter friend of her father's who made stunning ceramics in this beautiful crofter's cottage in the Highlands of Scotland, and was great in bed for a sixty-two-year-old, but then wouldn't stop phoning in the middle of the night and eventually tried to commit suicide in his own kiln, but is okay now.

  And Saul, a really gorgeous and wealthy American model who was amazing-looking with a (whisper it) “really massive penis,” but you can't have a relationship based on sex, even if it's mind-blowing sex. And then, saddest of all, there was Mr. Shillabeer, her English teacher, who turned her on to T. S. Eliot and apparently once made a girl orgasm just by reading The Four Quartets aloud, and who fell in love with Alice while they were doing The Crucible, but became a bit obsessive. “In the end he had a nervous breakdown and had to leave. He's gone back to live with his parents now. In Wolverhampton. It's quite sad, really, because he was a cool English teacher.”

  By the time she's finished, I've stripped half-a-chicken in barbecue sauce down to its carcass, and the remains lie on my plate looking like, well, one of Alice's ex-lovers. Nearly all of her relationships have ended in madness, obsession and devastation, and suddenly my wheely-bin adventure with Karen Armstrong round the back of Littlewoods seems to have lost some of its tragic grandeur.

  “It's strange isn't it—how many of them end badly?” I say.

  “I know! Weird isn't it? Tony, Dad's ceramic friend, the guy in the kiln, once told me that when it came to love I was like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!”

  “But do you ever end up getting, you know … hurt?”

  “Of course I do, Brian. That's why I'm not going to have any relationships at all at university. I'm going to concentrate on my work,” and then she adds, unaccountably, in an American accent, “I'm going to get me to a nunnery!”

  And there it is again, the Klaxon. Casually, she goes back to peeling the melted Cheddar off the top of her margarita, and wrapping it round her index finger. “Anyway, sorry—me, me, me. What do your mum and dad do, again? I've forgotten …” she says, sucking on her finger.

  “Mum works in Woolworth's, and Dad's dead.”

  She puts her napkin to her mouth, swallows.

  “You didn't tell me that …”

  “Didn't I?”

  “No, I'm sure you didn't.” She reaches across, puts her hand on my arm. “Brian, I am so sorry.”

  “Oh, it's all right, it was six, no, seven years ago now, when I was twelve.”

  “What happened?”

  “Heart attack.”

  “Oh, God, how old was he?”

  “Forty-one.”

  “That must have been awful.”

  “Oh, well, you know.”

  And she's leaning forward now, eyes wide, and she's holding my hand and squeezing it, and with the other hand she takes the wax-encrusted bottle, and puts it to one side so that she can see me properly.

  “Do you mind talking about it?”

  “No, not at all,” I say, and I start talking.


  15

  QUESTION: Lee J. Cobb, Fredric March and Dustin Hoffman have all played the unfortunate Willy Loman in which Arthur Miller play of 1949?

  ANSWER: Death of a Salesman.

  “Dad was a double-glazing salesman, which is a funny job really, because it's one of those jobs that people think it's okay to laugh at, like traffic warden or tax inspector or sewage worker. I suppose it's because, at the end of the day, no one loves double-glazing. Dad certainly didn't, not after ten years of it, anyway. He was in the army before that, where he'd met Mum and had me. He'd done his National Service, one of the last people to do it, and sort of liked it, and hadn't known what else to do, so he stayed on. I do remember worrying, whenever there was a war somewhere on the news, tension with Russia, or when Northern Ireland was flaring up or something, worrying that he'd be called up, stuck into uniform, given a gun. But I don't think he was that kind of soldier, really, I think he was more on the clerical side. Anyway, when they had me, Mum put her foot down and said he had to leave the army because she was fed up with moving round all the time, and she hated West Germany, where I was born, so he came back to Southend, and he got the double-glazing thing and that was it really.”

  “Did he enjoy it?”

  “God, no. I mean, he must have at first, I suppose, but I think he really grew to despise it. It's long hours, you see, because you have to catch people when they're in, which means early mornings, evenings and nighttime, so it was usually dark when he got home, even in summer. And I think there was a bit of door-to-door involved: ‘Excuse me, madam, but are you aware of the huge difference double-glazing could make to your heating bill,’ that kind of thing. And I know it was paid mainly on commission, which meant that there was this constant worry about money. Whatever job I end up doing, I never, ever want to be paid on commission. I know it's meant to be an incentive, but it's just an incentive to fuck up your life, it's working with a gun to your head. It's really evil, I think. Anyway. Sorry. Boring.