Tolerating tedium is not something I’d ever had to do before. If I wasn’t enjoying a holiday I would come home. If I was bored by a video I would fast forward it a bit. I wished I could just point the remote control at the kids and fast forward them a couple of years; I knew they would be more interesting by the time they got to four or five. Catherine was more patient than me; she didn’t mind waiting a few years to see a return on all that time and love she was investing.
I wandered into the toilet and drowsily went to lift the seat, until I remembered that, in this household, it was always already up. I tried not to think about Catherine. This was supposed to be my time off. My urine had the sulphurous musty smell that reminded me I had eaten asparagus the night before. Catherine had cooked my dinner and she knew I loved asparagus. Even my wee reminded me of her.
I guessed that today, like most days, she would be seeing one of the mothers she had met through Millie’s playgroup. Catherine had described all the various species of mums to me. There was the guilty career mother, who was so over-enthusiastic on the one day she was able to come along to playgroup that she completely drowned out everyone else singing, ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round.’ There was the born-again stay-at-home mother who had previously been a very successful businesswoman, but had then thrown herself into motherhood with exactly the same competitive ambition. Instead of being promoted on a regular basis she just had another baby every year, which she felt allowed her to feel superior to all the women around her. There was the mother of Satan, who was totally unaware that she had given birth to the most evil being in the universe and blithely chatted away to you while her two-year-old kept smacking your child in the face and then casually remarked, ‘Aaaah. They seem to be getting on well together.’ Then there was the eco-mum, who talked quietly and gently to her child about why he shouldn’t talk with his mouth full as the four-year-old sucked away at her breast.
Catherine had befriended all of them. I was constantly impressed by how women made friends with each other so easily. When I was in the playground I found myself engaging in an elaborate paternal dance in which I subtly tried to steer my kids away from the other children being supervised by their dads, lest the two of us should be forced into the embarrassment of actually attempting small talk. Even if communication became unavoidable, we would still not speak to each other directly, but would employ our children as a third party. So if Millie was deliberately blocking the slide, my way of apologizing to the other father would be to say loudly, ‘Come down the slide, Millie, and let this little girl have a go.’
The other father would let me know that it was all right by replying, ‘Don’t push the little girl, Ellie. Let her go down when she’s ready.’ And no eye contact between the two adult males would ever have to be made. While somewhere over on the other side of the playground, his wife and mine were already discussing how soon they’d had sexual intercourse after giving birth.
Now I found myself socializing with all the new couples we had met through our children. Catherine and the mothers chatted and chatted, our children were the same age and played happily together and the other fathers and I would have nothing in common whatsoever. The previous Sunday I had found myself forced to talk to a man called Piers who relaxed at the weekend by wearing a blazer.
‘So, Michael, how do you find the handling on the Astra?’
He’d noticed that Catherine and I had driven to their house in a Vauxhall Astra and evidently thought this would be a good opening subject for a conversation.
‘The handling? Well, er, do you know, I’ve never really understood what that means. What is the handling, exactly? Because for years I thought it was something to do with what sort of handles you had on the doors, but it’s not, is it?’
Piers looked at me as if I was mentally retarded and took another glug from his personalized beer tankard before he took the trouble to illuminate me. ‘How does it hold the road?’
So that was what it meant. What a completely bizarre concept. Piers was asking me how our family car ‘held the road’. Gravity; that’s how it held the road. That can’t be the right answer, I thought to myself. So what was it that I had failed to notice about my car? It did everything I asked it to. When I turned the wheel to the left the car went to the left, when I turned the wheel to the right the car went to the right.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Pretty good actually. Yeah, the handling on the old Astra’s pretty good.’
‘What have you got, the SXi or the 1.4 LS or what?’
‘Hmm?’
‘The Astra. What model is it?’
I wanted to say, Look, I don’t know or care what fucking model it is, all right? It’s a car. It’s got two baby seats in the back and lots of stains from spilt Ribena cartons on the upholstery, and there’s a tape of Disney singalong songs permanently stuck in the cassette player.
‘Er, well, I don’t know that much about the technical side of cars really,’ I said pathetically, and Piers regarded me as if I’d just been introduced into Western society from a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea.
‘Well, it’s pretty straightforward – is it fuel injected or not? That’s what the “i” stands for: “injection”.’
There was a pause. Every day I had opened the boot of the car, but I couldn’t remember which letters I’d seen there. SXi sounded quite possible, but then so did LS. Which one was it? I had to say something.
‘Millie, don’t snatch!’ I blurted out and ran to take a doll from Millie that Piers’s daughter had just willingly handed her.
‘But she gave it me,’ said Millie, looking confused.
‘Really, Millie. Try and play nicely. Come on, let’s ask little Hermione to show us all the toys in her bedroom.’ And I went upstairs with a couple of two-year-old girls, glancing back at the other dad with a mock long-suffering ‘kids, eh?’ expression and then I hid in the child’s bedroom for forty minutes rather than attempt to continue any conversations with the grown-ups downstairs.
‘She’s really nice, isn’t she?’ said Catherine as we drove away three hours later. ‘I invited them to lunch at our place next weekend.’
She heard my world-weary sigh and said, ‘That’s what I like about you, Michael. For you there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t taken a dislike to yet.’
It was all right for her. The women were always nice; it was just their husbands who were made out of cardboard. She weaved the car in and out of the demonic traffic on Camden Road.
‘How do you find the handling on the Astra?’ I asked her.
‘What?’
‘This car, the Astra. How do you find the handling on it?’
‘What are you talking about, you boring bastard?’
I felt reassured that I had definitely married the right woman.
I could never see any friendships developing out of the families Catherine met at Millie’s playgroup, although I was slightly put out when I learned that Piers and several of the other dads had gone for a drink together one Sunday evening and I hadn’t even been offered the chance not to be friends. I chose my mates in the same way as I chose what clothes to wear. In the morning, my jeans and sweatshirt were there on the chair by the bed, so I made do with those. And then, sitting in the chairs in the next room of my flat were Simon, Paul and Jim, and so I spent the rest of my day with them. It wasn’t a question of what I liked or what suited me, it was just whatever was most convenient. Male friends seemed to just drift into my life, and then drift out again when the reason for seeing them had passed. I’d often worked with blokes I’d really liked and we had gone to the pub together or whatever. We had probably meant to keep in touch, but you can’t just phone someone up two months later and say, ‘So, do you fancy just going for a drink?’ They might say they couldn’t make it that night and then you’d look stupid.
So at the moment my best friends were the other three men in this flat.
‘All right?’ I muttered as I wandered into the living room.
/> ‘All right,’ they all mumbled back.
It was great to catch up on all their news. I read an out-of-date tabloid for a while. There was a story about a married couple in France who were both over a hundred years old but were now getting a divorce. They were asked why they were separating after so long. Apparently they’d wanted to wait until all their kids had died.
Since it was the Easter holidays, neither Paul nor Simon had to go into work and so all four of us were left hanging around the flat with nothing to do. It was fascinating to watch the other three wasting time as if they would have the luxury for ever. They were so much better at doing nothing than I was; they didn’t work so hard at being lazy. Jim was stretched out on the sofa and had apparently spent the last three hours trying to work out how his palm top could save him time. Paul was pointedly reading a grown-up newspaper, while Simon was sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing at all. He often did this. It was as if he was waiting for something. Waiting to lose his virginity, Jim said.
Simon had learned the secret of eternal adolescence. There were times when he was so awkward and self-conscious that he was unable to talk in normal phrases and sentences. He had developed a whole parallel mode of communication which was expressed purely in trivia questions. Today, instead of saying, ‘Hello there, Michael, I haven’t seen you around for a few days,’ he gave a little excited smile and chirped up with, ‘Capital of New York state?’
‘Albany,’ I dutifully replied, and he gave out a little satisfied grunt to suggest that all was well with the world.
‘B-side “Bohemian Rhapsody”?’ he continued.
‘“I’m in Love With My Car”. You won’t get me on a piece of music trivia. It happens to be my specialist subject.’
‘OK, so which line from “Bohemian Rhapsody” was the title of a song that reached number one in the same year?’
I was thrown into a mild internal panic at hearing a music question I didn’t know. ‘Get lost. You just made that up.’
‘No, it’s a well-known fact,’ chipped in Jim.
I tried affecting indifference. ‘Oh, I don’t know, er, “Scaramouche, Scaramouche” by Will Doo and the Fandangos.’
‘No.’
‘That only got to number two,’ said Jim.
Inside, my mind was racing through the lyrics of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, trying to find the title of another 1975 number one. There wasn’t one, I was sure of it.
‘Do you give up?’
‘No, of course I don’t give up.’ But I decided that instead of wasting any more time I would go into my room and do a bit of work. An hour later I came out and said, ‘I give up.’
‘The answer is, “Mamma Mia!”’ Simon informed me triumphantly.
I was stunned. It wasn’t fair. I would have got it if I’d given myself a bit longer. ‘You said a line. That’s not a line, that’s just a phrase. It doesn’t count.’
‘All hail, the trivia king,’ said Simon with his arms held aloft.
An outsider might be impressed by just how much Simon knew. He knew that the Battle of Malplaquet was in 1709 and that the Dodo had lived on the island of Mauritius. However, on the debit side, he did not know the answer to questions like, What are you going to do for a living? He did not know that his parents were rather worried about him or how on earth he was ever going to get a girlfriend. He did not even know that he was a bit smelly. Fortunately, the question, Is Simon a bit smelly? had never come up in the science and nature category in Trivial Pursuit, although, if it had, he would have been far more distressed about getting a trivia question wrong than he would have been to learn that everyone thought he stank like a soggy PE kit that had been left in its bag all through the summer holidays.
Paul had remained aloof from the quiz, but when the final answer was revealed he just said, ‘That’s right, yes,’ and nodded wisely. Perhaps he was unable to take part himself because all his energy was required to pull off the near impossible task of reading a newspaper in an annoying way. When he held up the paper it was not in order to read the articles, it was to declare, ‘Look at me, I’m reading a broad-sheet.’ The silence would be punctuated with affirmative grunts when he wanted us to know that he agreed with the editorial, or slightly too audible tuts when he read some distressing news from the Third World. The cryptic crossword was completed with an almost constant running commentary of satisfied verbal ticks and world-weary sighs.
‘Are you doing the crossword, Paul?’
‘What? Oh, yeah. Nearly finished it actually,’ he replied gratefully, unaware that Jim was gently mocking him.
‘Is that the easy or the hard one you’re doing?’
‘The cryptic crossword. I don’t bother with the other one.’
‘Wow!’ said Jim.
*
The late afternoon eventually turned into early evening and Paul started to become edgy and restless, as he usually did around this time.
‘Has anyone given any thought to dinner?’ said the person who always ended up cooking dinner. There was mild surprise that anyone should be thinking about food before it was actually time to eat. Jim looked at his watch.
‘I’m not really hungry yet. ..’
‘Well, no, but you have to buy the food and cook it before you are hungry so that it’s ready at about the same time as you are.’
Indifferent silence filled the room.
‘Well?’ said Paul finally, standing by an empty fridge.
‘Well, what?’ said Jim.
‘What shall we have for dinner?’
‘Erm, well, it’s a bit early for me, thanks.’
‘I’m not offering to cook again. I am asking if anyone else has thought about cooking for once?’
The silence was too much for me and I was the first to crack. ‘All right, Paul, don’t worry, I’ll do the dinner. I’ll go and get some fish and chips or something.’
‘That’s not cooking the dinner, that’s getting fish and chips. I don’t want fish and chips.’
‘Indian?’ I offered magnanimously, considering that the curry house was another fifty yards’ walk.
‘Why can’t we have proper fresh food cooked freshly here in our kitchen?’
There was another silence while no-one volunteered for such an enormous undertaking. Jim contemplated standing over a cooker for twenty minutes and then said exhaustedly, ‘I don’t mind fish and chips, Michael.’
‘Me neither,’ echoed Simon.
‘OK, fish and chips for three then,’ I confirmed.
‘Well, if you’re all going to have a takeaway, I’ll just have to cook myself some pasta or something on my own.’
There was a moment’s pause in which I could sense Jim’s mouth watering at the mention of one of Paul’s amazing pasta dishes.
‘Oh well, if you’re cooking some pasta for yourself, Paul, could you do enough for me, too?’
Paul was trying to find the words to express why that didn’t feel fair, but he wasn’t given time.
‘Yeah, I’ll have some of that,’ said Simon.
‘Oh cheers, Paul,’ I said.
Somehow, four men living in a flat together had evolved into a traditional nuclear family. I don’t know how it happened, or whether this metamorphosis occurs in every group of people that live together for a while, but we had inadvertently turned ourselves into mum, dad and two kids.
I suppose I was the eldest son, vague, secretive and quiet, who couldn’t get up in the mornings on the days when I hadn’t stayed out all night. Simon was the youngest child, gauche and unconfident, constantly asking questions to seek attention. Paul was the martyred, long-suffering mum, fussing and worrying for everyone else. And Jim was dad, self-possessed, lazy, mysterious and funny. The confidence that had been purchased at public school gave him a benevolent paternal air which we all looked up to, although sometimes I felt a little uncomfortable having a father figure six years younger than myself.
When I was a child I didn’t understand where my dad’s money came from,
it was just something he always seemed to have, and the same was true of Jim. The only money problem Jim had was spending it all. He bought mini-discs to replace all the CDs that had replaced all his vinyl records. He bought electrical gadgets and designer penknives and new mobile-phone covers. We presumed the money must come from his family, but we were all too polite and English to probe any further when he mumbled evasive answers to comments about his conspicuous wealth.
He had a first-class degree in Italian and Geography, although the only thing he appeared to remember was that Italy was shaped like a boot. He then decided that a Ph.D might be useful, and he was quite right; it saved him any embarrassment when people asked him what he did. Jim was doing a Ph.D, and would be doing it until the day he died. Procrastination would have been his middle name if he could ever have been bothered to get that far. And he would constantly drive Paul mad with his failure to commit to any sort of plan or pre-arrangement. On a Saturday morning Paul might suggest, ‘Do you fancy going to the National Film Theatre or something today?’
And in his posh, laid-back way, Jim would shrug indifferently and say, ‘Well, let’s just see what happens.’
Paul would then go quiet for a while, anxious not to blow his jittery up-tight cover, but when he tried to pitch the idea again, he couldn’t help but show the annoyance in his voice.
The Best a Man Can Get Page 8