Goodnight Steve McQueen (24 page)

“All boys.”

“He sold over ten million records, you know.”

“So I’ve heard. Apparently his mother was very proud.”

Arse. Not much chance of dying of Christopher Walken disease. Much more chance of dying from chronic video-induced boredom.

“Hey, does anyone fancy watching my hen-night video after we’ve finished with this?”

“Yeah, why not, it’s been ages since we last watched it.”

“You don’t mind, do you, Danny?”

“No, fantastic,” I say, wondering if it’s possible to commit suicide with the edge of a broken Pringle. “What a treat.”

Still, it might not be that bad. I know what girls are like when they go out on the piss. They’re worse than men. They’re probably going to get drunk, put on sexy outfits and run around making fools of themselves.

Well, this isn’t much good, it’s just a tape of them going

out for dinner at some rubbish pizza restaurant. I wonder if the whole tape is going to be this boring. I wonder if any of them are going to dress up in French maid outfits any time soon. I wonder if Shelley and her bridesmaids are going to get naked at some point. I wonder who that weird bloke with the wire-rimmed spectacles is.

“Hi. Danny, isn’t it… I’m Ruth’s partner, Bob. Thought you might want saving from the girls. Would you like to come next door and take a look at my brand-new Mac? It’s got a thirty-eight-gig hard drive.”

Bob? Where the fuck did he come from? I didn’t even know he was here. Good idea, though. Loath as I am to tear myself away from Shelley’s drunken attempts to chat up a fat Italian wine-waiter, something tells me I might be able to have some top-quality amusement with Ruth’s partner Bob and his brand-new Mac.

“So it’s free then, is it?”

“Well, no, not exactly free, but one dollar I mean, come on, Bob, that sounds like a bargain to me.”

“OK then, why not.”

“That’s the spirit, Bob. If they’re going to spend all night sipping white wine and watching home-made chick flicks I think it’s only fair that you and I get to drink beer, talk about gadgets and watch some peculiarly poor-quality porn.”

“Right, then, I’ll just go and fetch my credit card. And how about a quick snifter of Scotch while we’re at it? I think I’ve got a bottle of Glenmorangie somewhere.”

“Good thinking, Bob. That sounds like just the ticket.”

“I’m quite drunk.” “You don’t say.” “Sorry, Alison.”

“That’s all right. I shouldn’t have made you come.” “You didn’t make me. I wanted to come.”

“No you didn’t.”

“No, you’re right. I didn’t. But I had a great time, though.”

“What did you make of Bob?”

“Great bloke. I’m thinking of making him my new best friend. Instead of Vince.”

“You weren’t corrupting him, were you?”

The?”

“Yeah, you.”

“Nonsense. We were having a very nice time. We were chatting about Palm Pilots and having a nice, civilised drink.”

“So, you weren’t getting him pissed and making him download filth from the Internet?”

“No. Not at all.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“OK then, because Ruth already thinks you’re a bad influence and I don’t want her phoning up tomorrow and telling me that you’ve turned her boyfriend into a sad, lonely pervert like you.”

“Excuse me, Alison, but I’ll thank you not to slag off my new best friend.”

“He told you about his stockbroking firm getting free tickets to Formula One didn’t he?”

“No. He absolutely did not.”

“Yeah he did.”

“Yeah … all right then … he did.”

“Thought so.”

Damn it. How does she do that? How come she can always tell what I’ve been up to? I love that about her, actually. I love that she knows me so well. It’s one of the twenty thousand things I miss about her when she’s away.

“Alison?”

“Yeah?”

“I really missed you last week.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah, I did, I missed you a lot. I know I didn’t say so on

the phone or anything but that’s the weird thing about you being in Bruges.”

“What is?”

“Well … I don’t know. It’s a bit of a paradox, actually.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. Because… it’s very strange … the thing is … I mean, it’s very peculiar … I only seem to realise how much I’ve missed you when you come back.”

“Thanks very much.”

“No problem. Alison?”

“Yeah?”

“I think I might have to go to sleep now.”

“OK then.”

“Goodnight then.”

“Goodnight.”

When I wake up Alison is nowhere to be found. She’s probably just gone shopping or popped out for breakfast but I wish she’d left me a note to say where she was going. I was planning on taking her out to lunch. I thought we could walk up to the fun fair at Alexandra Palace and have a quick go on the dod gems or maybe drive up to Hampstead Heath and lie about in the sun for the afternoon. It’s my own fault. I shouldn’t have got drunk again last night. I shouldn’t have kept her up all night with my snoring. I shouldn’t have taken the piss out of Shelley’s holiday video and spent the last half of the evening squinting at out-of-focus lesbians with Ruth’s partner Bob.

Still, one good thing has come out of it: the whole Bob encounter has left me feeling much brighter about my career prospects. So what if the band doesn’t get signed by the end of the year? So what if we decide to give it all up? Getting a proper job doesn’t have to be that bad, does it? Maybe I could get a Mac with a zillion-gi gabob hard drive. Maybe I could get a Palm Pilot and join a private members’ club in the City. I wouldn’t have to get pissed in Green Lanes with Vince any more. I wouldn’t have to put up with Kostas lecturing me on the reasons why Telly Savalas never won an Oscar he was cheated, obviously and I wouldn’t have to suffer the crunch of Sheila’s garden snails under my feet or eat my way through twenty packets of fondant fancies every week.

I wonder how long it takes to become a stockbroker anyway. Or a lawyer maybe. I wonder if you’re more likely to get on the course if you’ve paid close attention to Ally McBeal over the years. Good idea. Maybe I should ask Alison for a summary of the last four hundred episodes. Maybe I could devote my

life to saving people from the electric chair and speciali se in a bit of sexual harassment law on the side.

The shower and I are mid-wrestle it’s just spat a stream of freezing-cold water straight at my head when I hear the front door slam shut. Alison must be back.

“Hi,” I say, wrapping a towel round my waist and wandering into the kitchen. “I was just wondering where you’d got to.”

“I went over to Camden to catch up with Rufus,” she says, throwing her handbag on the table and flicking the kettle on for some tea.

“Really?” I say, slightly hurt that she didn’t ask me to come with her. “How was he?”

“Good,” she says. “He’s looking really well. He still needs badgering to go to his hospital appointments on time, but he seems better than he has in ages.”

“So,” I say, wondering if she fancies coming out for lunch, ‘have you eaten? Did the two of you go out for breakfast or something?”

“Yeah,” she says, ‘we went to one of the cafes on Parkway… and then we went shopping… round the lock.”

“You didn’t see anything you liked, then?” I say, wondering why she isn’t carrying any bags.

“No,” she says, ‘there wasn’t much about.”

“Well,” I say, wondering why she looks so edgy, “I thought you might fancy doing something this afternoon. If you’re still hungry we could go to Banners for lunch. We could go up to Hampstead Heath afterwards, if you like. We could get a kite or something.”

“It’s not very windy out.”

“I know, but it’ll still be fun. We can crash our kite into some kids’ kites and make them cry.”

“OK,” she says. “Just give me a couple of minutes to get changed.”

Alison heads off to the bedroom and (if I lean over sideways

and stand on one leg) I can just see her getting changed from the kitchen doorway. I can see her taking off her leather jacket and changing into the Snoopy T-shirt I bought her when we first started going out. I can see her fixing her lipstick and searching around for her trainers, and I’m just about to enjoy a quality moment watching her squeeze into her short denim skirt when I notice her fish something out of her handbag. It’s a piece of paper. A small piece of paper folded into a tight, neat square. I watch her as she opens it out and sits down on the bed. I watch as her lips move slowly as she starts reading from it. I watch as she folds it back up and packs it carefully into her suitcase between her clothes. I wonder what it is. I wonder if I should ask her. I wonder if it’s Didier’s phone number or something. What if that’s it? What if she went out on her own this morning so that she could phone Didier while I wasn’t around? Maybe I should ask Rufus. Maybe I should call Vince up and ask him what he thinks. Shit, I can’t. I’m still not talking to him.

“So, how long is this feud between you and Vince going to last?”

“Not very long,” I say, pulling the kite we’ve just bought out of its polythene wrapper and struggling to put it together. “We’ve got a rehearsal on Monday so we’ll have to have made up by then.”

“Maybe you should give him a ring.”

“No way. Look what he did to my eye.”

“Come off it, Danny, you love that bruise. You went to the bathroom to wash the concealer off as soon as we got over to Ruth’s.”

“That’s because it looked ridiculous. I looked like Quentin Crisp.”

“You looked fine. You just wanted everyone to see you’d been in a fight, that’s all.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“Yeah, you’re right, I did.”

“So what was it all about, then?” says Alison, finishing off the kite and handing it back to me.

“All what?”

“Your fight with Vince?”

“I don’t know. We were both pretty hammered and I said something disparaging about Kevin Rowland and he just sort of lost it and clocked me one.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with me, was it?”

“You? No. Why would it have had anything to do with you?”

“I don’t know. I just thought this whole ultimatum thing might have been causing trouble between the two of you.”

“No, not really,” I say, throwing the kite into the air and watching it crash unceremoniously into the ground. “He sort of agrees with you, actually.”

“Does he?”

“Yeah. I suppose he thinks we should put a time limit on things as well.”

“Look,” she says, leaning over and giving me a kiss on the shoulder, ‘let’s just get to the end of the year and see where we’re at. OK?”

“OK,” I say. “Good idea. Alison?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you any good at getting kites down from fifty-foot sycamore trees?”

“This is never going to work.”

“What isn’t?”

“This.”

“The bandy

“No, the kite. It’s not windy enough. You’ll never make it fly.”

“I bet I will.”

“You can’t, Danny. What are you going to do? Blow on it?”

“Come on,” I say, picking the kite off the floor and grabbing Alison’s hand.

“Where are we going?”

“See that hill?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re going right to the very top of it.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’re going to run down as fast as we can with the kite trailing behind us.”

“That won’t work.”

“Yes it will,” I say. “It’ll definitely work. I’ll make this bastard fly if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

We hang out on Hampstead Heath for the rest of the afternoon. We sip bottles of ice-cold beer by the lake, snog like sweaty teenagers in the rough grass, and wander back to the car feeling sunburnt and tired and warm. I don’t know what I was worrying about Alison wouldn’t cheat on me in a million years. Vince is right, it’s just not her. If she’d met someone else she’d tell me. If she was pissed off at me for going on tour she’d let me know. I’m just being crap. The fact that she’s away all the’ time is making me paranoid. I bet if I asked her what that bit of paper was she’d tell me straight away. I bet it was something really innocent, like a Eurostar timetable or something.

“Alison?”

“Yeah?”

“You know when you were getting ready to come out this afternoon?”

“Yeah.”

“Weller what was that bit of paper you put in your suitcase?”

“What bit of paper?”

“You know, you had it in your handbag. You were reading it while you were getting changed.”

“Oh … I don’t know. It was nothing … a Eurostar timetable, I think… why?”

“No reason. I was just wondering.”

“It wasn’t a Eurostar timetable, then?”

“No. It was a list of dates.”

“Dates?”

“Yeah. A list of dates stretching from Christmas all the way to the middle of next summer.”

“Weekly or monthly?”

“Bimonthly.”

“Well, it was probably hair appointments or something.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe it’s her periods or something like that.”

“Vince, since when did women start having bimonthly periods?”

“Well, I don’t know, do I? I still think you’re a sad fucker for looking in her suitcase, though.”

“What would you have done?”

“I would have asked her about it. I wouldn’t have gone sneaking around behind her back.”

“Yeah, well … I couldn’t help myself.”

“No, mate, I don’t suppose you could.”

Vince and I have officially made up. I apologised for being a moaning, self-absorbed git and he apologised for hitting me on the side of the head with his hummus fork. Apparently his girl friendless status has been getting him down more that I’d appreciated. Apparently I go on about Didier and the Belgians in general more than I’d realised. As it turned out Matty was the most upset out of all three of us. He couldn’t believe he’d missed out on such a top quality ruck.

“So, how did the rest of the weekend go?” says Vince, ordering himself some more tea and tucking into his baked beans on toast.

“All right, I suppose. I didn’t fuck up any more restaurant bookings or anything.”

“You just hung out at the flat and went up to Hampstead Heath?” “Yeah. Alison said we should stop trying to make the weekends feel special and just try to behave like we usually do when we’re at home together.”