Ralph's Party (2 page)

Siobhan knew she should feel happy. I mean - ALR, Al London Radio. That was something else, it realy was.

When Karl had first told her, earlier on that evening, she had felt ecstatic — al his dreams come true. He was on the phone to his Irish mother and Russian father in Sligo now, teling them the news.

She looked at him over the top of her book; his soft, handsome face was alive with an energy she hadn't seen for years as he explained to his no doubt bursting-at-the-seams-with-pfide mother that her one and only son, her precious, sweet Karl, had just been handed a peaktime slot on London's biggest radio station.

She couldn't quite imagine it: 'Good evening, London, and welcome to the Karl Kasparov Show.' Her Karl, not some faceless, naff D J, but her Karl, having thousands of listeners, his own jingles, doing interviews. His name would be there in the radio listings: '3.30-6.30

p.m. -Karl Kasparov.'
Drive Time,
that's what they caled it, Karl's slot. Karl was going to have a
Drive Time
radio show.

Siobhan imagined a classic 'Hot in the City' scenario, a traffic jam on a steaming summer's day, bumper-to-bumper gridlocked traffic and the sound of Karl's voice purring from car radios, 'It's hot out there — so keep cool by staying tuned to
Drive Time
ALR' before seguing into 'Up on the Roof.

A barely perceptible whimper jolted Siobhan from her train of thought. It was a quarter to eleven - they'd forgotten about Rosanne in al the excitement. She was now sitting stoicaly by the living-room door, aware that tonight was not a normal night and trying, without irritating, to convey the message that she stil had a bladder and it was getting late.

'Oh, baby, did we forget about you?' The sympathetic tone of Siobhan's voice elicited a tentative wag from Rosanne's tail, which increased with velocity and force as Siobhan headed towards the hook in the hal that bore her lead.

'Karl, I'm taking Rosanne out for a pee. Come on, baby! Come on, we're going out!'

Siobhan struggled into her winter coat, so much tighter around her upper arms and chest than it had been last year, and Rosanne panted delightedly at the door waiting for her mistress to join her.

Siobhan was glad to be out in the cold night air. The central heating, the excitement and the champagne had fuzzed up her mind. It was a beautiful October night and the tal, elderly houses of Almanac Road looked elegant beneath a jet-black sky brightly iluminated by a huge ful moon.

Rosanne seemed to sense the fulness of the moon above, uncertainly sniffing the air around her, her black coat looking extra glossy beneath the bright white light. They walked to the end of the road, Siobhan thinking hard about her feelings. She'd got so used to she and Karl bumbling along in their unimpressive lifestyle. It had never mattered to her before that she hadn't realy worked since losing her job as a technician at a fashion colege in Surrey - she'd made ends meet with the odd

wedding-dress commission and handmade cushions for an interior-design shop on Wandsworth Bridge Road. And Karl's weekend deejaying at local pubs and functions, plus what he earned at the Sol y Sombra teaching Ceroc had been plenty to meet their paltry mortgage repayments and modest-lifestyle expenses.

Karl and Siobhan-a strictly smal-time couple. That's how Siobhan had always seen them, and she knew plenty of people who were jealous of their way of life, and their relationship. She couldn't have wanted for any more realy - they had a lovely flat which, they'd been lucky enough to buy for next to nothing before Battersea had up and come, a beautiful dog, friends they'd known since university, a relationship ful of laughter and ease that was, their friends informed them, the strongest they knew, an example to everyone else, a yardstick. Neither of them was going to suffer from executive burn-out. The idea that al this might change, would change, filed Siobhan with dread.

Suddenly it would matter that she was getting fat, Karl would notice that her life was going nowhere. He would get back from his
Drive
Time
slot, hyped and driven, ful of fame and crappy Top Ten pop songs and find Siobhan's bulk sprawled al over the sofa, glued to
Coronation Street,
her bely swolen from the enormous meal she'd eaten while he was out because she didn't like to eat in front of Karl any more, and what would he think?

Would he stil drive the little black 1966 Embassy he'd shipped back from India the year after university? Would he stil wear his old American Classics chinos with the split on the knee and the scuffed old Bass Weejun loafers he'd had since before she even knew

him? Would he stil put on his funny Tibetan socks with the leather soles when he got in and make them both a cup of tea and watch documentaries on the sofa with Rosanne on his lap?

Would he stil love her?

It was cold now — winter had stopped knocking tentatively at the door, had forced its way in and made itself at home. Siobhan looked up in time to see a wispy violet cloud pass over the moon and then disappear back into the blackness.

'Come on, baby, let's go back.'

They moved briskly up Almanac Road towards the light and warmth of number thirty-one. As Siobhan felt in her coat pocket for her front-door keys she heard voices and looked down to see a pretty dark-haired girl leaving the basement flat below theirs.

There'd been visitors in and out of that flat al night. She wondered what was going on.

She undipped Rosanne's lead in the hal and the dog dashed into the living room and straight on to Karl's .lap. Karl hugged her and let her lick his face and Siobhan watched the scene from the hal while she tugged at her too-tight coat sleeves. She smiled deeply and warmly to herself and alowed the scene to etch itself firmly on the slate of her mind, alowed the joy of her current life to overcome her, because, she knew for sure, it was al about to change.

Ralph and Smith had been best friends for fifteen years. They had been enemies for four years before that, since day one at grammar school, Smith offended by Ralph's creative aura and vaguely effeminate manner and Ralph threatened by Smith's easily gained popularity and effortless academic success. They kept different circles of friends and, on the rare occasion that their paths crossed, they sniffed and snarled at each other like unfriendly dogs passing in the park, their friends keeping them at bay like impatient owners tugging on leads.

It took a girl to bring them together. She was a foreign-exchange student from Baltimore caled Shirele and she was staying with Smith and his family for two months. She arrived in London in May wearing flared jeans with turn-ups and a hairy turquoise woolen jumper with a cowl neck. Her hair was long and plain, like her face.

She spotted Ralph getting off the bus on her first morning at Croydon Grammar. His trousers were tighter than school rules alowed, his dark-blue blazer was held together at the back with a safety-pin and his hair was dirtily tousled, sticking up in meringue-like peaks sculpted with soap. He had a smudge of something black and sooty under each eye. Smith thought he looked like a right tosser. Shirele fel in love.

Over the course of that term Shirele became Skunk.

She shaved her hair and dyed it black with a peroxide streak running through the middle. She spent her alowance in Carnaby Street on fishnets and studded belts and leather skirts. She smoked and drank snakebites and folowed Ralph around like a lovesick Rottweiler. She asked him over to the Smith residence with the invitation Tuck me,' an offer that, although it scared him half witless, Ralph as a hormonal young man of sixteen felt he could not refuse.

Smith as a hormonal young man of sixteen was both fascinated and repulsed by these sessions and the fact that they were happening, audibly, under his own suburban roof. Any previously held notion of Ralph's dubious sexuality was wel and truly rubbished by the noises that emanated from the Smiths' spare room. As time went by, his curiosity got the better of him and one afternoon, feigning interest in the phone book in the hal, he watched Ralph saunter down the stairs, tucking his T-shirt into his combat trousers in an awe-inspiringly macho way, smeling of something unfamiliar and exciting.

'So, what's going down, then, Ralphie-boy?' Smith enquired, in what he hoped sounded like a casualy offhand, sneeringly condescending manner. 'How's it going with the skunk-woman?'

Ralph glanced ceilingwards. 'Fancy a walk?' he'd said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets.

And that was that. Shirele went home at the end of term, despite her threats to stay and bear Ralph's children, bring them up in the squat they would share with the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie Sioux, take heroin and die of an overdose, and Ralph and Smith became friends.

Theirs had developed into a friendship based around the ability to comfortably spend hours in each other's company without the need to speak or move. Now, as it had been at school, they each maintained different circles of friends and took part in different activities outside the flat, but their time together there was a precious opportunity mutualy to make no effort whatsoever, a form of behaviour that they found unacceptable to themselves and their friends in any other circumstance.

Obviously they weren't always silent. Sometimes they would discuss which channel to watch, occasionaly they even bickered about it and conducted smal tussles over the remote control when one felt the other lacked the judgement required for captaincy of such an important tool. And sometimes they would talk about women.

Women were a pain in the arse, they were bals and chains, never pleased, always aggrieved. Smith and Ralph thought of themselves as nice blokes. They weren't bastards, they didn't have affairs or lie to women, or stand them up, or hit them, or expect them to perform menial tasks. They didn't ignore their women when they were with their mates or go out with the lads and refuse to see them; they didn't stick pictures of Melinda Messenger over their beds. They were
nice blokes.
Phoned when they said they'd phone, gave their girlfriends lifts, paid for things, didn't demand sex, even handed out the odd compliment. Ralph and Smith tried to treat women as equals, they realy did, but women just kept proving to them that they weren't worthy of it — they were a strange, alien breed with a list of unreasonable expectations as long as the Ml and a feast of paranoias and insecurities that Smith and Ralph were expected to deal with, daily. And then of course there were the women who weren't like that. They were the ones you fel in love with almost immediately, told al your mates about, made fantastical plans for the future with and then felt surprised when three weeks later they dumped you in a pool of your own foolishness and went off with someone who
would
have affairs, lie to them, stand them up, hit them and expect them to perform menial tasks,

Ralph, blessed with an insatiable libido, couldn't do without the sex and stil threw himself regularly into the fray, emerging every now and then broken and crippled, hobbling and limping, his over-enthusiastic genitalia stil pointing proudly like a bayonet towards the next battle. But Smith had given up fighting this frightening nineties version of the battle of the sexes years ago and retired, bruised but intact, to his corner.

Smith was saving himself anyway, so he said. Saving himself for a woman about whom he knew nearly nothing, a woman with whom he'd never progressed beyond the occasional awkward exchange of smiles, waves and nods, a woman who, in his opinion, encapsulated in one blissful arrangement of cels, organs, pigment and genes, the absolute epitome of female loveliness. For five years he'd imagined a day when their paths would cross. He'd bestow upon her a charming smile of teeth and self-confidence, engage her briefly in witty conversation, extend an invitation to dinner at the wonderful restaurant that had just opened up in St James, smile again at her acceptance, drape his overcoat over his shoulder and walk away with a wel-paced swagger.

Instead, he'd spent five years grimacing gruesomely at her like a socialy and intelectualy inept toad,

sometimes raising a limp, sweaty hand to wave at her if he chanced upon her from a distance and occasionaly adding yet more to his plight by tripping over obstacles, dropping fragile objects, missing steps and failing to find his door keys whenever he was within her sights. He was in love with a vision of blonde, honeyed gorgeous-ness, a tal, slender, toned slip of perfection that no other girl he'd encountered before or since had come close to matching in any way. He was in love with a girl caled Cheri, a girl who lived two floors above in the flat at the top of the house, a girl who shared his address. Until he made her his, no other girl would do.

Smith's love for Cheri remained undiminished by her haughty arrogance, her sneering indifference to his attempts at friendliness. It remained unsulied by the frequency of middle-aged men visiting her flat, their Porsches and BM Ws double-parked on Almanac Road, by the thought of wives left at home while their husbands wooed his beloved with gifts of jewelery and perfume and dinner at al the best restaurants in London. Smith failed to see beyond her beauty; al he knew was her cool exterior, the layers of self-protective skin she wore to hide the nothingness inside.

While Smith waited on a fantasy that he was emotionaly incapable of engineering into reality, Ralph filed his life with a succession of vacuous blondes with accommodating beds, and the two of them kiled time... until what? Until they were too old to do anything about it? Until al the opportunities in life had gone, like unclaimed raffle prizes, to other people?

Smith knew that they needed a change. Things had been the same for too long. They were grinding each other down. He'd put an ad in
Loot,
one in the
Standard
and a card in the newsagent's window. And along had come Jem.

As far as Ralph was concerned, things hadn't changed too much in the week since Jem had moved in. She was out most nights, and when she was around she was barely noticeable. There were a few strange things in the bathroom, like cotton-wool bals and jumbo boxes of Tampax, and the fridge had suddenly become home to fresh vegetables, chicken breasts and skimmed milk. But apart from surface changes, it was stil, to al intents and purposes, the same flat.