‘Oh dear. That must have made you feel awful?’
‘What? No, I had this really wicked idea, right? This actress was half pissed, a bit giggly, you know, so I picked up the vibrating phone and pressed it against her . . . you know, her little sex button.’
‘You did what?’
‘Yah. I mean, she thought it was a scream, but she really got off on it, as well. Can you imagine that? So my wife is trying to ring me to find out where the fuck I am, but all she can hear is the ringing tone. Totally unaware that the longer she held on, the closer she got to bringing my mistress to a sexual climax!’
‘That’s obscene, Hugo.’
‘Isn’t it! My wife gave my lover an orgasm!’ And he gave this loud braying laugh, knocked back his drink and slapped me on the back saying, ‘Another glass of wine, Michael?’ When he came back from the kitchen, I asked him if the girl was good in the commercial, and he looked at me as if I was mad and said, ‘Good God, no. I didn’t cast her!’
He continued telling me far too many details about the sex he’d had with dozens of nameless women, but the more lovers that he listed, the lonelier he sounded. For all I knew every single story could have been made up; he was just using me as a sounding board for all his private fantasies. The only definite evidence I’d ever had of his incredible powers of seduction was his visit to a seedy prostitute in Soho. Strangely, that particular conquest was never recounted. I felt increasingly uncomfortable sitting there listening to him. He was drawing me in, trying to make me approve. Like him, I had deceived my wife, and Hugo made me feel that entitled me to life membership of his women haters’ club. I was resolute that I was not the same as him. I wasn’t a prude, I didn’t disapprove of sex, but Hugo talked with such contempt about the women he had seduced that it left almost as bad a taste in my mouth as it must have done for them.
‘You only live once, Michael,’ he said. ‘And I can’t think of anything more boring than just fucking Miranda once a week for the rest of my life.’
Finally he poured me a glass of wine and asked me if I’d had any more thoughts about Classic Commercials, and suddenly I realized something with complete clarity.
‘Er, I’ve decided ‘I’d rather not do it after all.’
‘Why on earth not?’
I tried to explain to him. He had said that he wanted a classical album without all the boring bits, so I told him that you have to have boring bits, because what he called the boring bits are what make the memorable bits memorable. ‘Life has boring bits,’ I declared slightly too loudly. I tried to make him understand that the vocal finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is moving and powerful and wonderful because of what you have listened to during the previous hour, because of the commitment you have put in. The cellos and basses take you through the previous movements, reject each in turn and then tentatively develop the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme that had been expressed by the woodwind section earlier on. That is why, when it finally bursts forth, the choral climax is one of the greatest moments in the history of music.
Hugo’s reaction was, ‘OK, we can lose Beethoven’s Ninth; we’ll stick in that bit of Mozart from the yoghurt ad instead.’ So I tried to explain to him all over again that you can’t just have the special bits on their own. Art isn’t like that, and life isn’t like that. I understood that now.
He was bemused by my bizarre principles and soon steered the conversation back to the various ways in which he had betrayed his wife. At this point I got to my feet and announced, ‘Actually, Hugo, I’m going to head off now. There’s a couple of other people I want to look up, so I’ll probably stay with them tonight.’ And before I knew it I was looking at myself in the lift mirror, wondering how I had exchanged a warm bed in a luxury penthouse flat for I knew not what.
‘Goodnight, sir,’ said the uniformed porter who opened the front door for me. It was a very grand entrance for a homeless person to make onto the dark streets of London.
I saw a mock Irish pub and headed for that. Then I sat in the corner and slowly but methodically got myself drunker. There was a self-consciousness to this reckless behaviour; I even bought a small bottle of whisky from the off-licence afterwards, and I’ve never liked whisky. Catherine had often accused me of having a self-destructive streak, but sitting in that pub with no home to go to, excommunicated from my family and with no friends to turn to, I think I was entitled to feel a little bit sorry for myself. Then, just to compound my private humiliation, a song came on the jukebox which I recognized from years ago.
‘What’s this music that’s playing?’ I slurred at the barmaid as she stacked up my collection of empty glasses.
‘The Truth Test,’ she said in a high-pitched twangy Australian accent that didn’t quite chime with the plastic shamrocks on the wall.
‘The Truth Test! Oh, not the bloody Truth Test! Are they famous, then?’
‘Are you joking? This song’s number one.’
‘The Truth Test! But they were rubbish! They used to support us in Godalming. I had to lend them my fucking fuzzbox for Christ’s sake.’
She attempted a half smile, thought about asking me what a fuzzbox was and then decided better of it. Somebody put the same track on again and I decided that was my cue to leave. Though my wallet was by now empty of banknotes I had found the scrap of paper on which I’d scribbled Simon’s new address in Clapham, and so I stuffed it in my pocket and started to walk southwards. It was only a couple of miles as the crow flies, but at least four miles as the drunk weaves, and by the time I got there I had lost my piece of paper. I stood in the darkness of Clapham Common, going through the same pockets a dozen times. Twice I checked that it hadn’t fallen into my turn-ups and both times found that I wasn’t wearing turn-ups. What was I supposed to do now? Distant headlights circled round the common, the biggest traffic island in London. I sat on a bench. I was drunk, I was tired. Then I finally conceded what had happened to me and shifted my body round so I was lying on the bench. An alarm went off in the distance. I put my holdall under my head, wrapped my coat around myself as tightly as I could and attempted to sleep. In my drunken state I actually allowed myself a flippant little smile at my situation. The last piece of post that I had opened at home was a magazine from my old university, and as always I’d turned straight to the ‘Where are They Now?’ section. Maybe I could have filled it out, ‘Here I am, pissed out of my head, sleeping on a bench on Clapham Common.’
Despite the wind and the occasional mocking laugh from the mallard ducks on the boating pond, I fell asleep quite quickly. I’ve always dozed off easily when I’ve had a lot to drink; that’s why I was sacked from that summer job driving pensioners to the seaside. But in the middle of the night the drink and the drizzle started to make themselves felt and I came round feeling damp and dehydrated at the same time. As always when you wake up in a strange place, there is a split second while you try to remember where you are. It didn’t feel like my bed at home. It didn’t feel like the luxury four-poster I had spurned at Hugo’s apartment. When I realized that the shivering and aches I felt were due to the fact that I’d been sleeping on a park bench I became so overwhelmingly depressed that I almost felt like throwing myself under the first vehicle that came past, but this turned out to be a milk float, which would only have bruised my leg a bit, and I didn’t want another failure to add to the list.
Then in the depressed introspection of the small hours, my mind wallowed into that dangerous quicksand of self-pity. All that I wanted, in fact, all that I had wanted all along, was the love and respect of Catherine. Just to be really sure that the woman I loved, loved me back. In my self-centred universe I had only ever seen her as a planet revolving around me. That misconception was sustainable until the children came along, but then the physics were suddenly exploded. I couldn’t accept it; I still tried to force myself back into the centre of her life. If I wasn’t the reason she had been pissed off at breakfast, I would make sure I was the reason she was pissed off by lunchtime. I would hijack h
er irritation, make it relate to me. Maybe this was the way all men thought. Maybe the day after Mrs Thatcher lost her job as prime minister, Denis Thatcher got all prickly and defensive and said, ‘I don’t know why you’re in such a bad mood with me.’
I lay there, cold and hollow, watching the cars speed by. They became more frequent as London began to wake up; now their drivers seemed in an increasing hurry. Under the feeble glow of the street lights I noticed a shape attached to the railings on the other side of the road. A few yards along from the stripped skeleton of a bicycle frame I could just make out a withered bunch of carnations, a small bunch of cheap garage flowers, now brown and lifeless. There is only one reason why people tie flowers to railings: to mark the spot where someone was killed. Another car tore past, oblivious to the significance of the spot, speeding down the road just as the fatal car that precipitated the pathetic, withered memorial must have done. In the summer, ice-cream vans park along here. I wondered if a child had run across to get an ice cream and hadn’t stopped to look, like that time Millie had seen a feather in the middle of the road and run across, and I’d shouted at her so much I had made her cry. She’d never seen me be so angry with her, but really I’d been furious with myself for letting go of her hand and imagining what might have happened.
Then my unbridled mind started to gallop down a path too terrible to explore. What if Millie was run over? What if there were some railing where I had to go and tie cheap carnations. Don’t think about it, Michael. Put it out of your head. But I couldn’t help myself, I started deliberately fantasizing about Millie’s death, imagining the scene step by step, watching it unfold, constructing a chillingly plausible fatal scenario in my head.
I’m in the front garden watering the window boxes, and I have left the front door slightly ajar because I don’t have my door keys in my pocket. I’m half aware of the cat slipping through the gap in the door. I don’t see Millie following the cat. The cat is on the pavement now and Millie’s holding her tail. The cat doesn’t like this game, so it runs off across the road and Millie chases after her, running out between the parked cars. There is a big white builder’s van with a copy of the Sun on the dashboard; the driver’s listening to Capital Gold and they’re playing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and it’s the guitar solo, which always makes him drive faster, and suddenly there’s a thud and a screech and a loud pop as his tyre goes over Millie, and then the next set of tyres go over her as well, and it all happens so fast, but it’s in slow motion, too, and there she is on the road behind the van; she’s completely still, just a body, a little broken, useless body; and I put on those shoes that morning and we chose that dress together, and now the driver is standing at the side of the road using every swear word he knows to say that it wasn’t his fault, and he’s pale and he’s shaking, and a BMW coming the other way is tooting his horn because the bloody van is blocking the road, and then the builder throws up on the roadside and his radio’s still playing and there’s a line about nothing really mattering, and then there’s a gong and it’s over and that’s it – Millie’s life only lasted three years.
Another pair of headlights shine on the dried-out brown flowers and I come to. My anti-fantasy is so vivid that I want to see Millie now, I want to pick her up and squeeze her tight and not let her go, but I can’t. Not because I lost her to a white van, but because I lost her to another more subtle accident: a marriage break-up. Of course it’s not the same, and she’ll be all right, and Catherine will bring her up well; but she won’t love me like I love her; she won’t be bothered about me. And though it’s a million times preferable to her being killed by a grubby builder’s van, I have lost her; we won’t live together; she won’t really know me. There has been a terrible accident and I have lost her.
How did this happen? How did this sequence of events unfold? The day that I first deceived Catherine, when I turned off my mobile when I saw my home number on the little screen – that was the cat slipping out of the front door. Then there was the time that Catherine asked me if I’d been working all through the night, and instead of just saying that I’d worked till ten and had been too tired to travel home and then be woken up by the kids all night, I just stared at the ground and nodded, and by failing to put her straight I lied by default – that was like not looking to see where Millie was, not thinking that she might be in danger. Then I lied with increasing nonchalance and lied to myself that Catherine was happy, and I started to deliberately escape from her and the baby – like the cat pulling away as Millie tried to hold on to its tail. And then the cat was over the road and Millie couldn’t catch it, and then suddenly, bang, my two lives collide, and Catherine cries and cries and cries and it’s all over, it can’t be mended. I’ve lost them, just like Dad lost me. That was another sort of accident, I thought. The affair. My dad had taught me how to cross the road, because he didn’t want to lose me; he had told me not to run off the pavement after a football, because he didn’t want to lose me; but he didn’t see the danger he was putting me in when he went for a drink with that girl he met through work. He just didn’t think; like the child running after a cat or a ball, he was excited and he’d run after the pretty girl and then, bang, he had lost his son, his marriage was over and it was all a terrible accident.
The darkest hour before the dawn was lit by the flashing blue light of a speeding police car, though there was no siren to pierce the silence of the winter night. Why didn’t they come rushing to marriage break-ups? Why hadn’t the police car sped after my dad when he had driven away from our family home and said, ‘That’s very dangerous, sir, that child could get hurt.’ Was it now set to happen all over again?
In my last meeting at the swings with Catherine, I had pleaded with her yet again that I had already given up the flat when she left me, and I think I saw a brief flicker of hesitation, when she was almost tempted to believe me. I had told her how furious I was with my dad for showing his girlfriend the letter.
‘Why would he do that?’ I had said to her. ‘Why would he show Jocelyn a deeply personal private letter that I had written him?’
‘Because he was proud,’ she said calmly.
In an instant so much suddenly became clear. It was so obvious once Catherine had said it. Dad had shown my extended confession to his girlfriend because he was so proud to have had a letter from me. I’d never sent him so much as a postcard before; I’d hardly ever called him or been to see him in Bournemouth. It didn’t matter what I’d put in the letter; if I’d written to tell him I was robbing pensioners to pay for my crack habit he would have waved the letter around to say, ‘Look, look, a letter from my son!’
It was my fault that Dad had shown my letter to his girl-friend. It was my fault that Catherine had received it. I’d not been there for the generation above any more than I had been for the one below. So my letter ended up being important not for what it told Dad, or Catherine, but for what it told me. How incredibly betrayed Catherine felt when she learnt the truth about my way of life and how desperate my father was for the slightest attention.
Dawn was breaking over the common and I suddenly felt like I had got it. I understood how all this worked; the riddle was solved in my head. You just have to spend time with the people you love. You don’t try to change them, you don’t get annoyed because they don’t behave how you want them to behave, you put up with boredom or tantrums or repetition and you just spend time with them. On their terms, listening to them telling you about cars their friends bought in Belgium, or what they drew at playgroup or whatever. You have to have patience and just be there. Elderly parent or small child; it’s all the same. Just pass time with them and then everyone is happy, even you, in the end.
I wanted to see Catherine to share this revelation with her, to tell her that now I knew what I was supposed to do then everything could be all right again. I wanted to join her, be bored with her. In the half light I struggled to sit up, but I felt nauseous and dizzy. Hangovers usually made me clamour for fresh air, but that wasn’t
a problem on this occasion. I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers against my temples, attempting a gentle circular rubbing movement as if this had the remotest chance of countering the effects of a bottle of wine, several pints of strong lager and a small bottle of blended whisky.
‘You look a bit rough there, mate.’
If I looked as rough as I felt I was surprised that anyone would come within a hundred yards of me. Sitting beside me on the park bench was a tramp. A traditional smelly tramp, with a big can of Special Brew in his hand and a huge scab on his chin. The only thing that wasn’t traditional about him was that he was Welsh. Scottish drunks, yes, I had seen plenty of those. Irish drunks, yes, they had made Camden tube station their own. But a Welsh homeless alcoholic, that was a new one on me. It was strange how the Scots and Irish seemed to be everywhere – in films, in music, in Celtic dance extravaganzas, even slumped outside tube stations. Here, at last, was a Welshman who was doing his bit to redress the balance.
‘Er, yeah, I do feel a bit rough, yeah. I just needed to sit down for a bit.’
‘And then you just lay down and spent the night here, ha ha ha ha. This is my bench, see, but you were fast asleep so I let you have it for a night. Drink?’ and he offered me a swig from his can of Special Brew which still had a globule of his spittle hanging from the rim.
‘No thanks, I never drink warm lager and tramp’s gob before breakfast.’
I only thought that; I didn’t have the courage to actually say it. It was nice of him to offer to share what little he had with me, even if it was the singularly most unattractive offer I had ever had in my whole life. It concerned me that this tramp was so friendly, that he was talking to me like an equal.
‘I’ve not seen you sleeping around here before,’ he said.
The Best a Man Can Get Page 22