A Friend of the Family (28 page)

Yeah,’ Sean said, nodding and feeling strangely compelled to keep talking even though he was balanced precariously on his bike and really wanted to get home and do some more work.

It was silent for a moment, Sean wobbling back and forth on his bike, Gervase bouncing up and down slightly on his heels.

‘Read your book the other day,’ said Gervase suddenly.

‘Oh yeah?’ said Sean, feeling slightly surprised – Gervase didn’t look the reading type.

Yeah. I’m not much of a reader myself, but I thought, you know, living in your house and everything, seemed to give it more purpose.’ He left a silence, that silence that Sean always hated – he thought people did it on purpose, to wind him up.

‘Well,’ said Sean, eventually, ‘what did you think?’

‘Fantastic,’ said Gervase, rubbing his hands together. ‘Read it in one day – a real page-turner.’

‘Thanks,’ said Sean, feeling strangely moved by this declaration.

‘Don’t know how you do it, you writers. Where you get all that inspiration from. And all that discipline.’

‘Yeah,’ admitted Sean, unconsciously dismounting his bike and leaning it against the garden wall. ‘It’s tough sometimes. I had a nightmare with this second one.’

‘Oh yeah – bit of the old writer’s block?’

‘Yeah. Just couldn’t write a word. I don’t know if it was my circumstances or my brain chemistry, but it just didn’t happen – for ages.’

Gervase sucked his breath between his teeth. ‘Shit, that must be really scary.’

‘It is. You just feel so impotent. Like your book’s this beautiful, beautiful woman and she’s lying there in bed, naked, legs open, waiting for you, and you just can’t get it up. Sometimes you try to get it up for hours, other times you just give up and put your pants back on immediately.’

Gervase laughed at Sean’s analogy. ‘Shame you can’t get some kind of Viagra for writers, isn’t it?’

Sean nodded and laughed. ‘Yeah.’

‘So what unblocked you, then? What was your “Viagra”?’

Sean hesitated. He opened his mouth, about to say something, and then checked himself and shrugged. ‘Not sure really,’ he said. ‘Just a bit of a change of lifestyle.’

And then something really weird happened. Gervase suddenly grabbed Sean’s arms and started looking really deep into his eyes. As he did so, Sean felt himself go all soft and pliable and got this strange swirling sensation in his stomach, like someone had just given him a really nice compliment.

‘What?’ he said, looking at Gervase in alarm.

‘You’re in denial,’ he said, sliding his hands down Sean’s arms and grabbing his hands.

‘About what?’

‘I don’t know. But you’re just kidding yourself. Putting on an act. Building walls around yourself.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I told you – I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I see. And what I see is a very scared man who’s trying to pretend not to care about someone. And whoever it is – you care. You know you care. And if you don’t let the other person know that you care…’

Sean stopped breathing and stared into Gervase’s eyes.

‘… you may as well give up living. You’re teetering on the precipice of hell, mate – you’re going to ruin your whole life. Look into yourself. Look at your family.
This isn’t you. Drop the act. Demolish the walls. Be a man.’

And then he suddenly dropped Sean’s hands, took a step back and cleared his sinuses. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’d better let you get on. Nice talking to you, Sean. And, er… hopefully see you around here a bit more often now, eh? Maybe you’ll come and see your mum singing at the Tavern some night?’

‘Er… yeah,’ said Sean, scratching his head and feeling slightly dizzy.

‘Cool,’ said Gervase. ‘Maybe tomorrow?’

‘Yeah,’ said Sean, ‘maybe.’

And then Gervase dropped his cigarette to the floor, ground it down with the heel of his shoe and crunched across the gravel towards the front door of number 114.

Sean stood for a while, letting the experience sink in, trying to make some sense of what had just happened.

Mad, he thought, staring into the bright circle of the moon and shaking his head, obviously as mad as a hare. But as he turned his bike around, pointing it in the direction of Catford, he couldn’t shake this feeling that Gervase had something on him. That had been such an intense experience, like he and Gervase had
conjugated
somehow. It hadn’t just been a mad person ranting at a sane person – it had been some kind of
fusion.

Drop the act, he thought as he slowly remounted his bike, be a man.

What act? he thought. He wasn’t acting. He was being, existing, getting on with his life the best way he knew how. Be a man. That’s what Tony had said to him.
And Millie, too. But he
was
a man – this was what it was all about, wasn’t it? Being successful, keeping some sort of control over your own destiny, being your own person. He’d been Millie’s lapdog since they met, followed her round everywhere, done things her way, let his work slide, made all the effort. He’d even bought her a fucking engagement ring.

It was only now that he was starting to feel like a man again.

He cycled fast over Westwood Hill towards Forest Hill, purging Gervase’s comments from his consciousness with every revolution of the pedals.

Rileys’ Response

There was a letter waiting for Ned when he got back from folding cardboard on Wednesday night. The handwriting was unfamiliar but the letter had an English postmark, so Ned knew it wasn’t from Monica. He sat down on the stairs and petted Goldie’s head absentmindedly while he read it:

Tuesday 1 May

Dear Ned,

Your parcel and letter arrived this morning. As you can imagine, we were both horrified by the contents, but we wanted to thank you so much for thinking to send it to us. You’re right. Monica isn’t your responsibility any more. We both know how hard you tried to make her happy and we also know how hard she made it for you. We phoned her today and she’s very down. She says she can’t see the point of anything. She couldn’t explain why she’s been plaguing you in such an odd manner. But we think you’re probably right. She just wanted some attention. So we’ve booked our flights and are going to spend some time with her in Sydney, see if we can persuade her to come home for a while. It’s an overdue visit. You’re such a strong boy with such a big heart and I think we always depended on the fact that you were with her and that you would look after her. I feel we’ve neglected her horribly.

So thank you, Ned, for all your care and support over the years. We know you’d never have hurt Monica deliberately. And we can assure you that you won’t be receiving any more macabre parcels or obscene text messages.

We wish you all the luck in the world in whatever you end up doing.

Yours gratefully,

Ann and Geoffrey Riley

Ned read the letter twice, a small smile spreading across his face, before folding it up, slipping it back into its envelope and heading towards the kitchen and a nice cold beer.

Dinner at Tony’s

‘God, I love Nigella Lawson,’ said Ness, pulling some kind of greenery apart with her hands and throwing it into a pot before twisting around, grabbing an enormous glass of white wine and taking a huge slurp from it. She broke a large hunk of cooking chocolate off a slab and slipped it into her mouth. ‘Chocolate?’ she said, looking inquiringly at Tony.

He shook his head. ‘No thanks.’It was bad enough that Ness was in his kitchen making excruciatingly fattening food that he wasn’t going to be able to avoid eating, let alone her tempting him with huge and entirely unnecessary lumps of chocolate, too.

He looked at the clock over the cooker. Six-twenty. They were due in forty minutes, ‘they’ being Sean and Millie. Yes, Sean and Millie were coming for dinner. It was all Ness’s fault. Well – it was his bowel’s fault, actually. He’d been on the toilet last night and the phone had rung at the precise moment that it was least possible to answer it, so he’d called out to Ness to pick it up. And it had been Millie, of course.
Typical
. Hours and hours he spent not sitting on the toilet, able to answer the phone. Hours and hours when answering the phone
would be the easiest thing in the whole world. How long did he actually spend on the toilet anyway – five minutes a day? Half an hour max. And Millie had somehow managed to choose that small window of inopportunity to make the call he’d been waiting for patiently for five long days.

‘That was Millie on the phone,’ Ness had said when he emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later. ‘Said she’d been talking to you about a makeover for your flat – I didn’t know you were thinking about making over your flat; what a brilliant idea! Anyway, she said you’d invited her over to have a look and I thought, well, seems a shame for her to come all the way over here just to wander around a bit. So I invited her for dinner. And Sean, too, obviously. She sounded really pleased!’

He’d phoned Millie at work this morning to check that she really was ‘really pleased’– Ness was the sort of person who assumed that everyone was pleased about everything all the time – and apparently she was. She’d been hoping to engineer a visit to her recalcitrant boyfriend into the long trip down south and this made it seem less like she was door-stepping him and more like a nice social thing.

He walked out of the kitchen and looked around his flat. Shit – it looked awful. He should have bought some flowers, something to make it look a little less
sterile
in here. He bounced around for a while, rearranging cushions, moving chairs and tables around, opening curtains, shutting curtains, hiding objects that suddenly,
with the prospect of being looked at by Millie, seemed vulgar and ugly, before glancing at his watch and realizing that it was quarter to seven and he was still in his work clothes.

He sprinted upstairs to the bathroom, showered in three minutes flat and then had a hideous ten minutes of trying and failing to find something nice to wear. Having lost a few pounds, he’d foolishly thought he might be able to rediscover some old favourites in the back of his cupboard and wasted precious minutes pulling too-small trousers on and off and poncing around in front of the mirror before admitting defeat and putting on his trusty chinos and a blue fleece. His hair appeared to have very little interest in looking nice but he didn’t have time to worry about that any more. It was seven o’clock. And then the intercom buzzed.

He took the stairs two at a time. ‘I’ve got it,’ he called to Ness in the kitchen. And then he stopped for just a moment and stared at the little video screen. There she was. There was Millie. She was standing just behind Sean, adjusting her hair and looking stony-faced. The street lighting and the fuzzy black-and-white monitor made her look like a tragic, beautiful 1920s movie star. Tony took a deep breath, touched his hair, hit the intercom button and let them in.

Tony had had no intention of getting drunk that night, but by eight o’clock he’d had the best part of a bottle of wine. He was actually drinking faster than Ness, which was something of an achievement, and he was most
certainly the drunkest person at the table. Sean was sipping slowly at a beer, claiming that he had to take it easy because he couldn’t write with a hangover. Millie, of course, was going to make one glass of wine last all night, and Ness was packing it away as usual, but had such a high resistance to alcohol that she never appeared that drunk, no matter how much she drank. Tony, on the other hand, hadn’t really had a proper drink for the best part of a fortnight, had had absolutely nothing to eat all day, and was rushing headlong towards pathetic drunkenness on a grand scale. He glanced across at Millie, who was fresh-faced and sober, and wished that he could reverse the process somehow, but it was too late. He was pissed.

Ness stood up to clear away the starter plates and Millie immediately leapt to her feet to help her. Tony got up and changed the music. He pulled out the Macy Gray CD they’d been listening to and replaced it with
White Ladder
by David Gray.

‘See your musical tastes are as cutting edge as ever, Tone,’ said Sean in a really snide way that made Tony’s hackles rise. Tony bought about three new CDs a year and they were always the same three CDs that the rest of the British population had bought. Tony didn’t keep up with music, never really had, not since he was a teenager. He had a tenuous knowledge of the likes of Steps, Eminem, Kylie and the people who won
Pop Stars,
but that was only because they were always in the papers. He wasn’t really a ‘music’ person and it was unnecessary, he felt, for Sean to point that out and take the piss. His
immediate response was to point out something that Sean might not want to talk about.

‘So,’ he said, sitting down, ‘how’s everything going with you and Millie and the…’ He cupped his hand over his belly to indicate Sean’s unborn child.

Sean’s eyes swivelled awkwardly towards the kitchen. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘not bad.’

‘Sort it all out, then?’

‘Well. Sort of. You know.’

‘No – what d’you mean?’

‘Well, I’m
dealing with
it.’

Tony thought of Millie’s tragically unhappy demeanour and shrugged. ‘That’s not what Millie says.’

‘What Millie says? You mean, Millie’s been talking to you about it?’

Tony picked a piece of lettuce off the table-top and fiddled with it. ‘Not really – but she said she hadn’t seen you for a while.’

‘What is this?’ said Sean, starting to look a little edgy. ‘And why are you phoning Millie all of a sudden, anyway?’

Tony let the piece of lettuce leaf drop on to his table-mat and wiped his hands slowly on his napkin. ‘I’m not phoning Millie “all of a sudden”,’ he began calmly. ‘I just decided the flat needed a bit of oomph, remembered that Millie was an interior designer, gave her a ring and she happened to mention that she hadn’t seen you for a while. And given the circumstances –’ he cupped his stomach again – ‘I just thought it was a bit strange. That’s all. There’s no need to be so defensive.’