The Right Man (22 page)

‘Listen,
Guy, you have to be able to show that you are capable of caring for the child.
That she’s got somewhere she can stay with you. Moving out was a very bad move.
I’m sorry, but it’s true. Come and look upstairs.’

He
trotted up the narrow staircase, stabbing each step with his wide feet.
Upstairs were two small rooms. His bedroom looking out on to the street with a
couple of sociology books on the bedside table, and to the side, a tiny child’s
bedroom, looking out on to the back yards of the adjoining terraces. Nerily’s
room was unrealistically neat as well.

‘You
have to have something to show the welfare officer, even though they lie all
the time anyway. And remember to write everything down.’

There
was a laptop computer on the child’s dressing table. He flicked it on and
clicked into a file.

‘See?’
He scanned through a list of dates. ‘Every time I see Nerily, I log it here.
And here, every time Geraldine messes up a contact arrangement for whatever
reason. Which reminds me…’ And, ignoring me, he put in a new entry, punching
the keys with a delicate fury.

‘I had
the welfare officer round five times and they’re really tricky. Doesn’t matter
what you say, though, they’ll write a completely different report.’

‘How
often does she stay here?’

‘Meant
to be four evenings a month, and as of this year she can stay over weekends,
but Geraldine’s done her best to poison Nerily’s mind against me. You know,
last month she asked, “Daddy, why do you hate me so much that you won’t let me
go to America with Mummy?” Look…’ And he flicked to another file on the
computer. This one was headed ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’.

Down
the various columns were subheadings: ‘Domestic Proceedings and Magistrates
Courts Act 1978’; ‘Matrimonial Homes Act 1978’; ‘Matrimonial Proceedings Act 1976’.

‘You
know, I spent eleven thousand pounds in solicitors’ fees in the first year,’ he
continued, gathering momentum now.

 ‘Nowadays
I represent myself every time, which is better, because the judges have to bend
over backwards to help you. I mean, they even try to speak in plain English. Unless
you get someone like Coulworthy-Browne. He’s a bastard. Hates fathers.’

‘How
many times have you been in court, then?’ I asked. ‘Oh, about nine,’ he said,
over his shoulder. ‘Here, look at this, I’ve compiled a hit list of all the
custody judges. You know, which ones are sympathetic, which ones are bastards.
Judge Grantham!’ He pointed out one name. ‘God help you if you get Judge
Grantham. Best to be ill that day and go for a postponement.

I
started to feel a bit sick. The coloured balloon pattern of the wallpaper was
beginning to fall downwards. [closed my eyes and everything started rushing
upwards and over my head. I opened them again and things seemed to plummet once
more. I leaned on the door frame. I was having an attack of the whirlies. I’m
not all that good with spirits. I gulped for air.

‘There.
Look at that,’ said Malcolm. ‘Children’s Act 1989. “No reason to discourage
shared residence.” No reason to discourage it! You should have seen Coulworthy-Browne’s
face when I read that out to him in court.’ He laughed to himself.

‘Did it
do any good?’ I managed.

‘What? No,
of course not. You can’t win with those bastards. But someone’s got to have a
go.’

‘Malc,
I don’t think I’m feeling…’ I was holding on to the door now as well.

‘Fuck!
You silly cunt! You’ve gone white
as
a sheet! Why don’t you sit down, I’ll
get you some water.’ And he banged past me and rattled down the stairs, still
talking.

‘…
Did you know that England and Wales now have the highest divorce rate in the
world… Apart from California, that is …

I
flopped on to the child’s bed and sat there with my bottom lip quivering,
taking deep breaths.

Some
hours later, after the whirlies had gone, which took a lot of concentration and
deep breathing, and after Malcolm had made me some alphabet soup, I accepted
his invitation to stay over, and was put in Nerily’s room with the curtains
drawn, although it was still light outside.

My feet
and ankles hung over the end of the tiny bed. I could hear Malcolm snoring and
chortling in the next room. He had to be up in the morning for his secretarial
job, so he’d promised to get me up in time to be in Soho for 9.00. 1 wanted a
cigarette but the roll-ups were downstairs and anyway I couldn’t, for Nerily’s
sake. Even if she did only come here every other week. I lay half propped up on
the little pillows and stared at the shape of the laptop computer in the
semi-darkness. It emanated a dark-grey gloom at me. It seemed to grow in size
and significance. I tried to roll over on to my side but this rammed my face up
too close to the balloon wallpaper. I lolloped on to my other side and
succumbed to the evil presence of the laptop.

Grace
had started without me. She was calling me urgently. She was already falling. Far
down — away from me — screaming. 1 was late for our usual ritual dreamtime
sacrifice. I’d been too drunk. She was falling fast and away. A vast swimming
pool. A piranha tank. A concrete crocodile pit. Maybe I had pushed her. I threw
myself after her and woke with a start on Nerily’s floor. I had fallen off the
bed. No protective cot bars for me. It was now very bright outside. Birds sang.
I got back under the duvet and tried to warm up.

My
shirt was not on the chair where I had tossed it the previous night. After a
few minutes, Malcolm knocked on the door twice and came in.

‘Cup of
tea?’ And then he produced my shirt on a hanger and put it on the door handle.

‘And I
ironed this for you. Leave in eleven minutes. The orange one is the spare
toothbrush. And don’t put your tampon down the toilet, old boy.’

FIVE

OK, I WANT you all to think
for a minute of your most treasured possession. I don’t mean in the world. I
mean something that you have with you today. Something that you value more than
anything else. It might be your watch, or your shoes, or it might be your
credit card!’

Various
sheepish low chuckles from all of us. That was meant to be a joke.

‘Now, I
want you to take it out and look at it and think for a minute about what this
possession means to you and why it is so important to you?’ Unnecessary upward
inflections abounded.

I
thought of my Psion, my mobile, which obviously was switched off, my mini-Filofax,
my watch. Nothing seemed important, not really important, to me, that is. The
fat bearded man opposite me had put his expensive camera on his lap and was
looking at it tearfully, as if it were a dead kitten. I felt naked, my clothes
meant nothing to me, the contents of my pockets meant nothing to me. There was
nothing from my button-down shirt to my Church’s brogues which wasn’t there for
business reasons, nothing that was me. Except the picture of Grace in her
bucket, I suppose. That was the only non-business thing, although even that has
been used on occasions when networking with family-orientated Yank producers. I
took it out and looked at it. I must have had as dumb an expression on my face
as the fat bearded bloke.

‘Now. I
want you to stand up and pick someone in the room and give him your most
treasured possession and tell him why it means so much to you. Tell him its
story.’

I
flicked a glance across at Neil, hoping we wouldn’t choose each other. I was
pulled gently around by a dangerously thin ginger-haired man in a voluminous
army T-shirt and rope waistcoat He had a beard too. Come to think of it, eighty
per cent of the men in the room had beards. Luckily, I hadn’t shaved. At least
I could blend in a bit.

‘These
were my father’s socks’ he said to me reverently, in a nasal drone.

I
looked down to see his bony white toes twitching on the parquet flooring. ‘My
father was a very bad man. He walked all over my mother, so now I wear his
socks to achieve balance and wholeness.’

I
wondered whether washing the socks was also part of the karmic equation.

‘This
is my daughter,’ I said, and we swapped treasures. Christ! What the Andy Pandy
was I doing here? Over the other side of the room, Neil was giving someone a
stack of badly typed, unbound pages of manuscript and talking at length to him.
Shit, that was probably the next draft of his so-called novel. Neil seemed to
have a death-wish these days.

‘And
now I want you all to take what you have just been given and pass it on to
someone else and explain to them why it was so important to the other guy.’

I
looked around in desperation for someone to give the socks to and picked the
only guy who was wearing a suit.

‘His
dad’s socks,’ I said. ‘Some kind of Oedipal revenge totem. And was given a
little black notebook by the suited man, who spoke to me in a slow Canadian
drawl.

‘This
is a very special book.’ He had a large and beneficent smile on his face. At
least someone knew how to enjoy this.

‘It
contains the phone numbers of over two hundred women. Many of whom have had
sexual encounters with its owner.’ I searched around the room, trying to guess
which man was the stud, but noticed instead the thin redhead handing my picture
of Grace to a large, earringed, shaven-headed guy, who could have been a
paedophile for all I knew, definitely looked like a paedophile. I did not know
how to enjoy this.

Apart
from anything else, Neil’s scant manuscript was probably now in the hands of an
unscrupulous bootleg publisher with a photographic memory. We all had to sit
back down and close our eyes and think about how we felt about letting go of
our possessions. I sneaked a look at Julian, the group facilitator, who was
standing on tiptoes waving his arms around, with his thumbs and forefingers
pinched together. The conductor of a very strange and bearded orchestra.

‘Now,
staying with those feelings perhaps feelings of anger? Of greed? Of insecurity?
— and keeping our eyes closed, I want us to say what comes into our heads,
however bad it might seem, however unacceptable?’ The upward inflections were
too studied to be natural. ‘Remember this is experiential? There are no value
judgements meant to be put on this, and… I’ll start?’

I
peered round through half-closed eyelids at the rest of the group. All eyes
seemed closed. Was 1 really the only one cheating?

There
was one professorial-looking bloke who was breathing deeply into his nostrils
and exhaling very noisily. He’d been wearing glasses earlier. I was glad I had
the book of phone numbers and not this guy’s specs. Too much responsibility. I
continued my surreptitious glance around the circle and saw the glasses sitting
precariously on the lap of a shaggy man with filthy fingernails.

‘OK?’
said Julian in reassuring tones. ‘I am angry that, since she’s a successful
journalist, my partner has always earned more than what I get as a workshop
co-ordinator, and sometimes it makes me unable to offer her the support she
needs and I end up shouting at her. Yeah?’

He had
an annoyingly chirpy voice, which made everything he said sound as if it was a
refrain from a jolly English folk song. There was a pause, a few seconds of
quiet — apart from the inhaling professor — while we all tried to think of a
contribution.

‘How
Men Need to Change’ was the name of the weekend. What had Neil got me into? I
know I said I’m the sort of agent who gets involved with his clients, and I had
indeed chanted with Barbara Stenner in Primrose Hill, but this was taking
representation too far.

A whole
weekend workshop and Neil was missing two days’ writing. I should have just
cracked the whip and told him to get on with it. But then weekends were
becoming occasions to dread now from the ivory tower of Mullin and Ketts in
Soho, and I’d long ago given up my social life — friends, I mean — in order to
keep financially afloat for Grace and bloody Liz.

In the
silence, I thought about weekends and what they used to be. If I’m honest, all
of my friends, the only ones in whom I’ve confided, at any rate, have been
women, like Susan Planter. I am, I suppose, somewhat suspect in this respect. I
learned at school, and of course from my brother earlier on, that
competitiveness is so ingrained that to confess a weakness to another man would
be to lay oneself open to attack or theft.

‘I
realize that I have been abusive, I have been selfish and I closed myself off
from intimacy with my wife. I just wasn’t strong enough to be gentle.’ Must be
the man from Kleenex. Who was that goody-goody? Full marks for him. I couldn’t
see who had spoken but he had obviously been to one of these before.

‘I’d
like to be able to afford to have a holiday every now and then and to spend
more time with my girlfriend.’ A squeaky mousy-voiced man to my left.

‘It’s
only when I listen to my woman and learn to feel with her, to really feel what
she’s feeling, that I can please her, and I want to please her.’ A
Spanish-sounding guy. Well done that man. Ay thank yoh.

I
decided that I was definitely not going to say anything during this bit. Maybe
I’m just not a workshop animal.