Forty minutes later I was still at the top of the stairs, lying on my back with my legs dangling over the first few steps. Cat the cat had wandered away long before, but the patterns on the landing ceiling were fascinating enough to keep me there for another half an hour. Eventually the clatter of the letter box jolted me out of my trance and I hauled myself to my feet. It was a noise that brightened my day; it made me feel there was hope I hadn’t been completely forgotten by the outside world. Obviously I wouldn’t read anything from the bank, but it might be a minicab card or a pizza leaflet, and it was always nice to read things from people who’d taken the trouble to keep in touch. On the mat was an estate agents’ brochure, full of houses that cost over a million pounds. As I flicked through the glossy pictures of beautiful expensive family homes I became convinced it had been put through the letter box by the cat, who had now gone off to bask in the glory of her sarcastic triumph.
But the punctuation in the long and lonely day was enough to drive me back to work and I sat back on my stool. There were various vital jobs that had to be done before I could really get down to work. I tried to see how much dandruff I could shake out of my hair onto the desktop. I felt a spot halfway down my back and spent ten minutes trying various bizarre yoga-like contortions in order to reach it with both hands to squeeze it. I scraped off some of the greasy greyness that had built up on the keys of the synthesizer. I smelled it, then dabbed it on my tongue. That’s when I was reminded of new Butterness. ‘Come on, Michael!’ I said out loud. ‘Butterness! Butterness! It tastes like butter but the fat is less!’ I considered ringing the agency to ask them if they were absolutely dead set on this butter tack. Most of the day had somehow disappeared; I had forgotten to have lunch and now I was suddenly so hungry that I had to eat immediately, but there was nothing in the house except some two-day-old bread and the free sample tub of bloody buggering Butterness that I’d been given.
As I threw away the uneaten crust, I faced up to the reality that I was going to let them down, that for the first time in my professional career I was going to miss a deadline, so I tried to ring the producer woman to ask if they could hang on another day. I was held in a queue for ages and then, when I finally got through, it was to an answerphone.
‘Hello, this is Sue Paxton on 7946 0003. I’m not at my desk at the moment, though you may be able to reach me on 7946 0007. If you need to speak to me urgently, try my mobile 07700 900004 or my pager, 08081 570980 number 894. You can fax me on 7946 0005 or reach me by e-mail at s dot paxton at Junction5 dot co dot uk. If you want to try me at home my home numbers are 01632 756545 or 01632 758864, or fax me at home on 01632 756533 or e-mail s dot paxton at Compuserve dot com. Otherwise just leave a message.’
By the end of all that I’d forgotten what I was ringing about, so I hung up. A few minutes later I armed myself with pen and paper and rang the number again. Then I attempted to reach her by all of the listed means, but each of them just informed me of all the other routes to a reply. By the time I’d tried them all I had wasted another hour. And so I really knuckled down and finally, finally, I managed to get the original tune out of my head and reverse the chords, and suddenly it was going round in my brain; quick get it down, record it before it’s gone again, and then the phone went and it was Catherine cancelling the next day’s meeting in Hyde Park, and I was furious and powerless and rude and pathetic and I hung up and walked round the house, kicking items of furniture.
Then the phone went again but it wasn’t Catherine changing her mind, it was the bank again and I just shouted, ‘Fuck off!’ at the officious bastard and hung up, and then he rang back half an hour later, with the satisfied air of a Nazi Kommandant who has discovered a tunnel, and said that they had sent a letter to inform me that they had authorized their solicitors to execute a warrant of possession, and I know what this means: that I am close to losing the house, but I reasoned and explained, I tell him that keeping the house is the only chance I have of getting my family back, that I have two small children and a third one on the way and that their mother has left me to live with her parents, but she can’t stay there for ever, not with her mother going on about the grandchildren not being christened, and eventually she’ll have to come back home, and that’s when she’ll see that we can work it out, that’s when she’ll see that I’ve changed, and then we’ll all be together again because that’s all that matters, that’s the only hope I’ve got: that they’ll all come back home, but that can only happen if I’ve still got the house, if there’s still a home to come back to, so you see, I have to stay here; they can’t take the house away from me now. And he listens silently and patiently. And then he tells me they are repossessing the house.
chapter ten
it could be you
‘Spare some change, please? Excuse me, could you spare any change, please?’
I had got into the habit of striding past the homeless who did the backing vocals for the music of London’s streets. But today it struck me that I had just coldly walked straight past another human being, and so I turned back and put five pounds in his makeshift cardboard money box. Five quid! And he didn’t even have a bit of string with a sad-looking dog on the end.
I was briefly irritated that the recipient wasn’t ecstatically grateful for my excessive generosity, that five pounds didn’t buy me a happier beggar. For a fiver you expect the executive thank-you plus, with a personalized letter to be sent on to you the following week explaining how your money was spent, with a P.S. asking you to convert your gifts into a deed of covenant. But he thought I was just like all the other rich clean people walking past. He thought I had a nice home and a happy wife and everything else he envied.
I had just dropped the keys to my family home off at the bank. I had walked into our local branch, queued up at the window and given them to the young girl behind the counter.
‘Hang on, I’d better get the manager,’ she’d said.
‘No, it’s all right, he’s had the paperwork. Can’t stay. I’ve got to find somewhere to sleep tonight.’
‘Oh. Is there anything else I need to know?’
‘Er, yeah. The downstairs toilet. You have to give it one slow flush and then flush it again very quickly straight away.’
She looked at me blankly, but as I went to leave she remembered the script.
‘Thank you for your custom this morning, Mr Adams,’ she said. ‘Have a nice day.’
‘Thank you. You’re too kind,’ I called behind me as I went out onto the streets of London, unsure as to where I should go now. And then I just walked around for a while; it was quite surreal really. Normally the pavement is for the irrelevant time in between the various parts of your life, now it was all there was. It made me feel that I didn’t have a point. The litter bin had a point; it was for putting paper in. The railings had a point; they were for stopping people from stepping out on the road. But what was the point of me? I wasn’t doing anything, I wasn’t going anywhere, so what was I for?
I stood there for a while and watched a tangle of old cassette tape which was wrapped around the railings – a thin, brown, shiny streamer, discarded and blowing in the wind. There was probably music recorded on that tape, music that had been composed and structured and arranged, and now it was all unravelled and useless. Somewhere along the way the tape had just snapped. Now I had all the leisure time in the world, but the currency had been chronically devalued. Time to myself was no longer stolen away in little treat-size chunks, it was forced upon me like a life sentence. I had with me a holdall that contained a few clothes, a toiletry bag and the Time Out guide to London. All my other possessions and all the contents of the family home were crammed into my next-door neighbour’s garage.
‘Oooh, you are lucky having a fridge with such a big freezer compartment,’ said the elderly Mrs Conroy, trying to be positive as I wheeled it up her driveway. Plastic bin liners were packed tight with soft toys, the telly was wrapped in a Pocahontas duvet and placed inside Alfie’s cot. Moving ever
ything out had taken me two days, and by the time I’d finished the garage looked like a squashed, post-earthquake version of our family home. Mrs Conroy kindly said I could leave everything there for as long as I wanted. Klaus and Hans were no longer lodging with her and had gone back to Germany, so no-one used the garage any more. She had given me boxes to put things in and sandwiches and cups of tea when I was exhausted from dragging sofas and mattresses up her driveway and my own key to the garage for when I needed to pop over and get anything. She didn’t ask how I had got so behind with the mortgage; the only allusion she made to everything that had happened was as I locked up the garage and thanked her again before I left. She looked at me sadly, gave me a brave smile and said, ‘You weren’t around much, were you?’
Now I walked slowly along Camden High Street, clutching the few belongings that weren’t locked up in Mrs Conroy’s garage. I found myself taking more interest than I normally would have done in the plastic bric-a-brac in charity shop windows. I passed an arcade of slot machines called Loads o’ Fun but judging by the emotionless grey faces inside it looked as if the sign above the entrance was slightly overstating it. Estate agents advertised attractive family homes, building societies offered easy loans. Catherine had learned about the unpaid mortgage from the letter to my father, but this didn’t prevent me from bringing the subject up again during the long hours spent shivering by the swings. If I attempted to talk about trivia she would always give me monosyllabic replies, so I tried to use the impending loss of our home as a means of forcing her to talk to me.
‘I think the bank are about to repossess our house,’ I had announced.
Obviously I didn’t expect her to throw her arms around me, but it was the nearest thing I had to a chat-up line. She looked at me and then looked away again.
‘Well, we would have had to sell it when we got divorced anyway,’ she remarked, as if this were something we had already agreed. It was the first time she had ever mentioned divorce, but hey, at least we were talking now, so I tried to see the positive side.
‘Anyway, I could never go back there now,’ she continued. ‘I was miserable in that house all on my own.’
This was a calculated extra turn of the knife. Though she didn’t want to be with me now, I had made her miserable by not being with her then. But I was consoled that she didn’t appear mortified by the news about the house. I didn’t come away feeling that my achievement in losing the family home had lessened our chances of getting back together. However, this was probably because those chances were currently standing at approximately zero.
As I wandered aimlessly down the main drag, it occurred to me that the fact that I had nowhere to sleep now gave me the perfect excuse to present myself to Catherine as someone she might take pity on. I imagined how she would react. If she’d said, ‘Well, if you’re ever made homeless you could always come and stay with me,’ I’m sure I would have remembered it. ‘I’ve only got a single bed, sweetheart, but hey, that’ll make it all the cosier when you cuddle up next to me.’ No, it didn’t ring any bells.
My father was not an option, either. Apart from the fact that he lived in Bournemouth, a surfeit of masculine pride on both sides meant that we hadn’t spoken to each other since he’d walked out of my kitchen. Anyway, if I had turned up at his door to tell him I’d handed my keys in at the bank, his anxiety would never had progressed beyond worrying that I’d made sure the keyring was clearly labelled. Then there was the option of the Balham flat. But all sorts of things had happened there since I’d moved out.
Monica had finished with Jim, who had then waited a decent interval of hours before asking out her best friend, Kate. Within a few weeks he had decamped to her flat in Holland Park, which had all the facilities that Jim required to continue his Ph.D, although Sky Sports 2 was a little fuzzy. Paul had finally come out of the closet and had moved to Brighton to live with his boyfriend, a nightclub bouncer who also worked in the army recruiting office. Simon had then organized three young women to take our places in the house, but when he showed them all his favourite sites on the Internet they had changed all the locks and put all his belongings on the front doorstep.
In the space of a couple of months, all four of us had left the flat. It had been Simon who had told me about all of this when he’d called my mobile phone a few weeks earlier. He was still smarting from his forced eviction and suggested to me that there must have been another reason why the girls didn’t like him. He confessed that he had once helped himself to their peanut butter and he thought that this was probably the real explanation.
So my old bachelor pad was not an option, either. In fact, I was struggling to think of anywhere I could go. I thought about all the friends I’d had in my twenties, but I hadn’t kept in contact with any of them. On the day your first child is born you might as well go through your address book and whenever you come across any friends who don’t already have babies, then just tear out their names there and then. It will save a lot of embarrassment and pointless Christmas cards later on. Of course, Catherine and I had had a wide social circle, but in reality these had just been her friends with husbands attached. Since I’d got married I had lost contact with all my old comrades from college. I certainly didn’t blame Catherine for this, she had never discouraged me from seeing the mates I’d had before we moved in together, it was just that I had sat back and lazily allowed her to organize our social diary, and quite reasonably it never occurred to her to make the effort to keep up with my old friends. There was not one couple that I would feel comfortable calling on now. They had made me feel inadequate enough before, with their great big wine glasses and their Italian bread and their wide selection of olive oils lined up on the dresser.
And so, late in a day spent walking aimlessly around, I found myself phoning Hugo Harrison to ask him if I could possibly stay with him for a night or two until I got myself sorted. I didn’t really relish having to explain to a work colleague – my main employer really – that I had got myself into dire financial straits, but as it turned out, Hugo was far too insensitive to be the slightest bit interested in any subject of conversation that did not involve the exploits of Hugo Harrison, so he never bothered to ask. He was delighted to be able to invite me up to his flat so that he could have someone to talk at.
His London address was a magnificent penthouse apartment in a high-rise complex near Albert Bridge, with views over the whole of London so that Hugo could look down on everybody. It had once been a block of council flats, but the council had contrived to successfully evict all the local people on the grounds that they had persistently voted Labour. Now the place was highly fortified, with electric gates and security cameras that would immediately spot anyone doing anything suspicious like staying in London for the weekend. Hugo’s wife lived in the country with her horses, his children were at boarding school and Hugo spent his weekday evenings in this opulent apartment. As a lifestyle, it wasn’t so different to what I’d attempted, except that for some reason this version seemed to have some sort of social legitimacy. But then, Hugo was posh. He might have stood too close to everyone when he was talking to them, but when it came to his own family, he generally liked them as far away as possible.
Although I was receiving charity I was going to have to pay for it by listening to Hugo all evening. And the more he told me, the more I realized why he had this flat. Hugo’s hobby was sexual intercourse. I had met golf bores and bridge bores, but this was the first time I had been forced to listen to a sexual-intercourse bore. He told me about his sexual exploits with a presumption that I’d share his attitude that it was all just healthy male behaviour. The fact that my wife had walked out on me made me a martyr to the cause, a heroic victim of the war of the sexes. He plied me with drink and, as dusk fell over the twinkling city below, he tried to cheer me up by telling me what a bastard he had consistently been to his other half. I was interested to know what he actually thought of his wife, and so I probed him a little bit on his marriage.
&nb
sp; ‘Oh, she’s a good mum and all that,’ he conceded. ‘She’s always sending things to the kids at boarding school. But she’s fat, you see. Big mistake.’
‘What? Being fat?’
‘No, no, she can’t help it,’ he generously acknowledged. ‘Big mistake on my part. You see, I initially fancied her because she had these enormous knockers,’ and in case his choice of words wasn’t clear enough, he mimed what enormous knockers were and on what part of the human body one might expect to find them.
‘But you should never marry a girl with enormous knockers, Michael. When my eldest son started dating girls I only gave him one piece of advice. I said, “Always remember, son. Big tits at twenty, fat wife at forty.”’
‘How charming,’ I quipped hopelessly. ‘I’m sure he’ll thank you for that later in life.’
He refilled my glass and talked about his wife’s chubbiness as if it were some tragic disability that made it impossible to have any sort of sexual relations with her, thereby justifying him playing the field whenever the fancy took him. And judging by his anecdotes this seemed to be quite often. For example, he was genuinely proud of himself for successfully seducing an actress who was very keen to be in a high-profile and lucrative commercial he was casting. What an incredible achievement, Hugo. Clever old you! He recounted how his wife had been up in London and that he’d been supposed to meet her with tickets for the opera. Instead he’d left her standing outside the Coliseum while he’d taken the young hopeful to a hotel room to have sex. It got worse . . .
‘I knew the missus would try and ring me, so I set my mobile phone to vibrate, and I was in the middle of fucking this horny little actress, right – I can’t remember her name – when suddenly my mobile started jiggling on the bedside table. I looked at the number on the screen and, sure enough, it was Miranda’s mobile.’
The Best a Man Can Get Page 21