The Best a Man Can Get

by John O'Farrell

  My feigned indifference failed to persuade him that this was not a big deal. That night’s performance was sold out, the theatre manager explained and Mr Stannard turned to me and completely lost control. They say that the fear of a moment is often worse than the moment itself. Not in this case; my fear was completely justified. I think even the other teachers were embarrassed at the way his face went bright red and his body shook and he spat as he shouted at me. I just stood there, unable to think of anything to say in my defence, shrugging my shoulders silently in response to every question he screamed at me. The veins were standing out on his forehead, and as he yelled two inches from my face, I could smell stale cigarettes. He was so angry with me that he got his words mixed up. As his fury reached a crescendo he shouted, ‘And now, now the, the, the entire fifth form aren’t going to miss Hamlet.’

  ‘Yes they are, sir.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said they aren’t going to miss it.’

  ‘No, I said they aren’t going to see it.’

  ‘No, you said they aren’t going to miss it, sir.’

  I may have ruined the evening for sixty-four people, but I was definitely right on this point.

  ‘Don’t tell me what I did and didn’t bloody say. I said see it’. His quivering purple face was still just a couple of inches from mine and a bit of his spit landed on my nose, but I thought it better just to leave it there.

  One of the other teachers tried to calm him down. ‘Actually, you did say miss it, Dave.’

  And then Mr Stannard turned to Mr Morgan and started shouting at him instead, which all the other kids thought was quite exciting because we’d never seen teachers shouting at each other before.

  The stupid thing was that the only reason I hadn’t told him was because I hadn’t wanted to upset him. As a long-term strategy this had never been very likely to succeed. Eventually we all went out and sat around under the statue of Eros for hours, waiting for the time when the coaches were due to pick us up again, and I sensed that Mr Stannard didn’t like me any more and it started to rain.

  ‘Well, if we all die of pneumonia we can thank Michael Adams,’ he’d said bitterly, which I thought was a bit unfair because it wasn’t my fault it was raining.

  ‘You stupid dingbat, Adams,’ said my classmates.

  ‘“Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,”’ said Hamlet. I knew how he felt.

  *

  ‘Michael, you have a tendency to put off problems until they are no longer problems but have developed into full-scale disasters,’ my headteacher announced the following morning as I stood before his desk. And this was pretty much the gist of what my bank manager said to me sixteen years later when we spoke on the phone about my outstanding mortgage payments. He made a date for me to come and see him and sort it all out, and to prove that his analysis of my character was entirely correct, I failed to turn up for the appointment.

  I sat down in my bachelor pad and worked out how much I needed to pay to get up to date with the mortgage on my family home. I wrote out how much I owed on all my credit cards and various hire-purchase agreements. In a column next to these I wrote out how much money I had coming in over the next couple of months. I tried bumping the second figure up a little bit by including some unspent record vouchers I’d had since Christmas, but it didn’t look any less depressing. I stared long and hard at the two amounts, trying to think of the most sensible and realistic course of action open to me. And then I went out and bought a lottery ticket.

  The day when I was going to have to start working like a slave was fast approaching. In the meantime, I resolved to make some economies. I’d try to put less toothpaste on my brush and I’d start buying peanuts instead of cashew nuts. There had been another household expense in my South London flat that had been niggling me for some time, but I hadn’t been quite sure of the most tactful way to raise it. The cost of our telephone was split four ways, but closer examination of the bill revealed that well over half the calls were made by Sordid Simon calling up his favourite obscene sites on the Internet. I was subsidizing his ritual self-abuse. It’s awkward enough when you feel someone should pay a little bit more towards the bill in a restaurant, but telling a flatmate they owe you a lot of money because they spend half their spare time having sex with their right hand, well it’s not the sort of thing that’s covered by the Debretf’s book of social etiquette. But the evidence was there in black and white, the itemized bill showed the same number over and over again, and for how long Simon had been connected to it. On 9 February, for example, he had called it at 10.52 a.m. and it would appear that he had masturbated for seven minutes and twenty-four seconds. That had cost us all thirty-five pence, not including VAT. Later on that day he had called it for twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds, but then I suppose you’d expect it to take a little longer second time around. There were pages and pages of calls, listing the dates, times and duration of his time spent surfing the net. Actually, surfing is too glamorous a word for what Simon did on the Internet. He lurked on it, he prowled it, he hung around in the bushes of the Internet.

  I raised this problem with the others and we agreed we would have to confront him about it. We were keen to get the conversation over with as quickly as possible, hoping we could discuss the financial principle without getting into the nitty-gritty of what he was actually watching. We should have known better. Despite what we might have imagined to be embarrassing circumstances, Simon seemed to be delighted to be the centre of attention and positively welcomed the chance to hold forth on the one subject in which he was a real expert.

  ‘It’s really very good value,’ he explained brightly. ‘For the price of a local telephone call you can see people having sex with gorillas.’

  ‘Ah, the wonders of modern technology,’ said Jim.

  ‘Or any of the primates for that matter, except orangutans. But they’re quite rare, aren’t they?’

  Simon was completely oblivious to our discomfort and enthusiastically chatted on and on about the fascinating world of hard-core pornography.

  ‘You’re a seedy little runt, Simon,’ I told him and he seemed quite pleased, as if he had presumed that my opinion of him was far lower. I wasn’t so much annoyed by the fact that Simon was obsessed with pornography as I was by the fact that he didn’t feel the need to be the slightest bit secretive or embarrassed about it. All men are preoccupied with sex, but at least the rest of us make some attempt to hide it. He chatted about his fixation as if it were a charming little hobby, like amateur dramatics or painting watercolours. ‘It’s good to talk’, said the advert for British Telecom, Or whatever else you did to run up a phone bill.

  In the hope that we might share his enthusiasm if only we saw what we had been missing, he showed us some of the pornographic sites he visited. They featured three or four awkwardly contorted people who looked like they were playing Twister in the nude. ‘Left hand on red dot; right foot on yellow dot; left breast on black penis.’ Except that I remember playing Twister had always been great fun, whereas these people’s faces suggested they were in a great deal of pain. I found these photos simultaneously revolting and compelling. Like car crashes and anchovies, you knew they were horrible but you couldn’t help double-checking just to make sure they were as sickening as they’d seemed the first time. But my first impressions were generally correct. Most of the images were about as erotic as colour photos of open heart surgery. There was a sequence of photos that told the story of a dinner party turning into an orgy. The transition seemed quite effortless.

  ‘There it is again, you see,’ said Simon.

  ‘What?’

  ‘One thing leading to another. Look, picture one, they’re being introduced. Picture two, they’re chatting a bit. Picture three, she’s got his cock in her mouth. I mean, what happened between pictures two and three – that’s what I need to know. How does one thing lead to another? If that was me, it would be picture one, “Hello, hell
o.” Picture two, “Chat, chat.” Picture three, she’d be slapping me round the face and leaving.’

  He called up another Internet site that was stored under ‘Favourites’ and giggled slightly as the next photo slowly downloaded. The computer gradually revealed the picture from the top downwards, as if it were playing with us, toying with the idea of showing it all, but then holding back and teasing us by disclosing a little more. The woman revealed was undeniably attractive. She had a pretty face, perfectly formed breasts, well-rounded hips and long, smooth legs. The only thing that spoilt it for me – and maybe this is just me being fussy – was that she had a large erect penis. I know that, as a man, we often unreasonably expect women’s bodies to fit into some preconceived stereotype, but I think the absence of a penis and testicles is one prerequisite I would probably have to insist upon.

  Amid the exaggerated groans, I told Simon that his relationship with this computer wasn’t healthy, that it was all one-way sex, with no love or foreplay, and we all agreed that in future he should at least take the computer out to dinner or something before they got down to it.

  Eventually a new house rule was proposed: Simon should only be allowed to masturbate in front of his computer during off-peak hours and at weekends. He protested, pointing out that the calls were discounted. Apparently, when he registered with BT Friends and Family, it turned out that his best friend was his Internet server, which seemed tragically appropriate. It wasn’t as if this best friend ever called him. But the rule was passed and now we could leave Simon alone again.

  ‘All agreed,’ said Jim, ‘but could I just see that picture of those blonde twins mud wrestling again . . .’

  *

  The reason we held Simon in such low esteem is that he naively presented us with so much to find distasteful about him. He didn’t keep his dark side to himself. He told people things. It was both a failing and a virtue; he may have been a worm, but he was an honest and unpretentious worm. I felt confident that he wasn’t a secret cannibalistic serial killer, because if he had been, he would cheerfully have informed us all about the practical details of cooking human flesh. He was that rare thing, a person with no secrets.

  I had lived my life with an instinctive secrecy that had even made me pause before saying, ‘Here’, when the teacher called the register. Jim, Paul and Simon had no idea that when I wasn’t with them I was a husband and father. That was just the way I preferred things to be. Soon after I’d started renting my room, the other tenants had moved on, and there didn’t seem any need to illuminate my new flatmates about my unconventional domestic arrangements. I didn’t generally lie. I just deceived by omission. Catherine once joked that the reason I never talked about what I’d been doing was to avoid lying about it. How I’d laughed. Obviously, I was compelled to launch an extended defence of my masculine silences. I mumbled, ‘Is not.’

  My reticence was in her interest as well as mine. I learned early on that if the mother of your children has had a boring day, it isn’t particularly tactful to tell them every detail of what a fun and interesting time you’ve been having. They much prefer it if you’ve been bored, too. So on the days that I came home to a scene of exhausted ennui, I would do my best to at least play down any enjoyment I’d had while I was out. That Friday I returned to find Millie watching a video while Catherine was on her knees cleaning out the oven, trying to rock Alfie in the baby seat with her foot at the same time.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, pretty boring.’

  ‘Did you have lunch?’

  ‘Well, I grabbed something.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where? Erm, well I popped into this sort of awards lunch thing.’

  ‘An awards lunch?! Oh, that sounds fun.’

  ‘Well, it was no big deal. You know advertising; there’s an awards lunch somewhere most days. Really tiresome, actually.’

  ‘So did you go back to your studio to do some work?’

  ‘Erm, no. I wouldn’t have got much work done: I’d had too much champagne. Well, I don’t know if it was real champagne; it tasted a bit cheap actually, so I kind of stayed there all afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice for you.’

  ‘Well, I was obliged really. You know, contacts, networking, all that boring stuff.’

  She put her head in the oven again and I double-checked that she was cleaning it, not committing suicide.

  ‘You weren’t up for an award were you?’ said the echoey voice from inside.

  ‘Er, sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘Erm, well, yes, I was. Best original backing music – for that bank ad I did last autumn?’

  ‘Blimey. You kept that quiet.’

  ‘Well you’ve got enough on your plate without me boring you about my work,’ I said unconvincingly. She paused while she scraped off the last of the crusty grease and I hoped the cross-examination would end there.

  ‘So you didn’t win, then?’

  ‘Erm. Well, yes, I did win, actually. Yeah.’

  I heard her head bump against the inside of the oven. And then she came out and looked at me in disbelief. ‘You went to an awards lunch and won an award?’

  ‘Yeah. A big silver statue thing. I went up on stage to collect it and everyone applauded and it was presented to me by John Peel and he shook my hand and afterwards we chatted for ages.’

  ‘John Peel? I hope you didn’t ask him if he remembered your flexi-disc?’

  ‘Catherine, John Peel used to get thousands and thousands of tapes and records every year, I’m not going to expect him to remember one flexi-disc that he didn’t play in the late Eighties, am I?’

  ‘So he didn’t remember it, then?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. No. But he’s even nicer than he sounds on the radio and everyone kept coming up and saying congratulations and looking at my award and taking photos.’

  And then I realized I’d rather blown my martyred cover, and so I belatedly attempted to claw it back.

  ‘But you know, apart from that it was really tiresome. It’s all so phoney. And the award weighed a ton. It was awful walking the length of Park Lane carrying this three-ton award and trying to get a cab.’

  ‘Sounds like hell,’ she said, looking up from where she was crouching on the floor. Her face was marked with burned fat from the inside of the oven, which had covered her clothes and clogged up her hair. Alfie started to cry gently in the background because Catherine’s foot had stopped rocking the seat.

  ‘Erm, I was maybe thinking I might have a bath,’ I ventured. ‘But, er, I suppose I could look after the kids for a bit if you wanted to use the bathroom before me.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to put you out. Since you’ve had such an awful day,’ she said pointedly.

  As far as I was concerned, telling people things only ever caused problems. It is always presumed that complete and total honesty is the only way to have a happy relationship, but nothing is further from the truth. When a couple have just made love, the last thing they should do is be open and honest with each other. The woman says, ‘Mmm, that was lovely.’ Not, ‘Oh, that was quicker than I would have liked.’ And he says, ‘Hmmm, it was really nice.’ Not, ‘Interestingly, I have discovered that I can heighten my climax by pretending I’m making love to your best friend.’

  All couples deceive each other to some degree, so what I was doing wasn’t particularly unusual. Every father has heard the cry of the baby in the night and then pretended to be asleep as his wife gets out of bed to deal with it. I was more secretive than some men, but far more loyal to my wife than many others. Anyway, I thought to myself, Catherine tells lies. When the Conservatives came looking to canvass me at the general election, she told them that she was Michael Adams. She put on this croaky deep voice and asked if you were still allowed to join the Tory Party if you’d had a sex change. The joke rather backfired when the candidate suddenly became very interested in her and we had to hide upstairs every time he came
back and rang on the doorbell.

  And, of course, she deceived everyone about her pregnancy. She didn’t want to tell people for the first three months, so she coerced me into maintaining a front of un-fertilized normality. What was so disconcerting about this was that, although I was the practised liar, when the time came for us to jointly hoodwink everyone else, I realized that she was much better at it than I was. We spent a rare evening out at Catherine’s new-age sister’s house, listening to Judith’s theory that the world was going to end because everyone was leaving on their solar-powered calculators and using up the sun. Judith was a textbook modern hippie. The only time we had been offered meat at her house was years earlier, when we had gone round for a ceremonial meal to celebrate the birth of her child and she had uttered the unforgettable words, ‘Red or white wine with placenta?’

  ‘Erm, just a little couscous for me, thank you,’ Catherine had replied. ‘I had placenta for lunch.’

  Now that she was pregnant Catherine wasn’t drinking wine, and on this occasion I expected her to refuse, but she was way ahead of me. To say no would have been to draw attention to herself and raise suspicion, so she accepted wine along with everyone else and nobody noticed that she never actually drank any. Once I’d recognized her plan, I thought I would do my bit to help and gallantly stepped in to surreptitiously drink her wine for her. All four glasses. It’s the sort of self-sacrifice all fathers-to-be should be prepared to make. Our host kept topping up our glasses and I kept emptying both of them. I gave Catherine a sly wink and a conspiratorial smile to acknowledge that I knew what she was up to and that I was discreetly helping her keep up appearances. And then I fell off my chair.