The Right Man (27 page)

‘You’re
such a good man,’ she said as she watched me stack the burnt floorboards neatly
behind the door in the bathroom. ‘I wish I’d chosen someone sensible like you.
Liz is lucky. But I always went for the dodgy ones, always made the foolish
choices.’

It’s
not that much fun being someone sensible like me. Susan was pissed again — Vera
Vodka this time — not ugly pissed, but enough to feel like expressing her
feelings rather than experiencing them.

‘But
that’s what you get, isn’t it, if you go for the dangerous, exciting, sexy
ones. God, I’m such an idiot.’ She was getting maudlin. Whoever she got in to
rewire would have to chase the cables right back to the consumer unit, and
re-earth everything under the sinks in the kitchen and bathrooms.

‘I
could have seen this coming really. What a stupid girl I’ve been. I knew what
he was like, why couldn’t I see it? I must have been closing my eyes to the
obvious. I must have known all along, somewhere, I just didn’t want to admit it
to myself.’ She was sniffing now. I wrote her a list of points to make to the
electrician — better separation between lighting and telephone circuit, plastic
deadeners at all junction boxes, that sort of thing —and put my jacket back on.

‘I
should have just had a few weeks of amazing sex with the toe-rag and then moved
on. I always go and fall for the wrong man.’ I was working fast now to leave. I
felt invaded by her, and in a strange way it was as if what she was saying was
an attack against my father. Not that I’m macho-proud of him or anything like
that, far from it — he was, as I have said, on the greyer side of dull — but
her words seemed to gnaw at my memory of him. 1 washed my hands of the underfloor
dirt in the kitchen sink.

‘That’s
all Jeremy was good for: sex,’ she said, pouring herself another vodka and
offering me one this time. I declined — I wanted to go.

‘That and
earning lots of money, I suppose. He was always good at that, the little slit.
I’ll fucking sting him there, if he ever wants to see his children again.’ She
was standing between me and the front door now. ‘You can stay the night if you
like, Guy,’ she said, and stroked my elbow. There was a pleading in her voice
and in her eyes. She wanted me to stay with her and make her feel attractive. I’m
sure six months previously I would have been flattered, but now I wasn’t. Now
that the interesting high-earner had flown, she deigned to sex the sensible
one, the also-ran. I was hurt. No doubt she’d insist on withdrawal, she wouldn’t
want my less-than-alpha genes swilling around inside her, and I’m not the kind
of guy to have a condom on him at all times. I was glad to reach the insecurity
of Solo once again, and ponder on the inadequacy of my own potency.

Whichever
way I looked at it, the figures didn’t add up. They couldn’t. There was the
lease on Meard Street. That had another three years to run and cost a serious wodge
every quarter. There was the service lease on the photocopier, for crying out
loud. Yes, I know those are a rip-off, but we weren’t to know at the time.

It
looked as if the clients Naomi had left me were going to turn out to be a
paltry lot, and there would be weeks of finessing them with meals and drinks to
persuade even them, scraggy as they were, not to abandon a sinking ship.

Strictly
speaking, the property at Meard Street was not residential, but I probably had
a good few months before I got rumbled, so long as I didn’t move in a piano and
a four-poster bed.

There
was the mortgage for Liz, her so-called salary for ‘secretarial work’. There
were nursery fees and, oh God, big-school fees in September.

I wish
I had got Grace into the local state school, but I had been put off by the
cheery notices on their announcement board about how to recognize the symptoms
of glue-sniffing in the under-tens.

There
would be Henderson Giggs bills, plenty of them — God knows how much they would
be — and the injustice of paying for the privilege of having some pinstriped
villain sue me made my stomach twist with pain. There would be medical bills
soon, no doubt: mine.

My
mental arithmetic is actually not that brilliant, but the figure £80,000 and
the words ‘by this November’ wafted cheekily into view in my mind’s eye,
sending shivers of stress through the old nervous system. My heart rate was up
and pounding between my ears.

I could
go bankrupt. That sounded nice. That sounded like tweety little birds
chirruping away in the cherry blossom. Bankruptcy, tra la la la la. No
responsibility. I could give up everything — except Grace, of course. I could
look after her and Liz’d have to get a job as a check-out girl to support me. I
shouldn’t have moved out. Why did I move out? I thought it was the right thing
to do. The male thing to do. The woman has the baby, after all. She needs a
nest for that. By all that’s daft, I’m sounding like the inside of a greetings
card now.

I sat
back from the computer, where I had all the figures laid out on a spreadsheet,
and reached for another cigarette, none left. Yes, I was searching the ashtray
for a reasonable butt now. That was sensible, darling. When disaster strikes,
smoke yourself to death.

Suicide.
That was an option. No, not really, not since Grace. Great male role model that
would be. When the going gets tough, the tough top themselves. I could run away
to Australia —land of Sheilas and soaps — I could go Antipodean, meet some
gymnastic surfie girl, work in television and have lots of blond children with
perms and pectoral muscles and great teeth. Naaaaaa. Don’t fancy that, m’dear.

I had a
short session finishing the five or six butts which had any kind of draw on
them, and decided that I’d probably have to go downstairs to the all-night cab
station where there was a tobacconist’s. By that I mean they usually had a few
packets of Rothmans for sale. I shut down the computer. There was no point in
looking at it all anyway.

Problems
come and then they go away again. Doesn’t mean they’re not coming back. It’s
like the tide. Who said that? I put my wallet in my jacket pocket and slipped
it on, checking my keys. I’ll tell you who said that, my bloody dad. My bloody
pedantic old boring old git of a father. Sitting in his stupid Pelican 700 series
river boat at Windsor, trying to persuade me and Tony to reharness the mooring
ropes and learn about buoyancy gradients, instead of running up and down the
deck playing Sink the Plastic Bin Bag. ‘In comes the tide,’ he said, and the
water can get quite choppy and you can get apprehensive, and then out it goes
again and everything’s peaceful and you forget about it and think everything’s
going to be all right for ever, but it won’t be. That’s why, when things are
going well, you have to make your preparations for the storm.’ What did he
know? The Thames isn’t even tidal up at Windsor.

Down in
the street, Soho was throbbing. As usual on the pavement outside the Nine
Bells, strange-haired people with studs in their leather clothes and studs in
their noses were loud-mouthing in the street. We don’t go in there. Oh no,
honey-child. The Coach and Horses maybe, that’s got musoes and chorus folk. Or
even the French House, that’s poets and trainee intellectuals. But the Nine
Bells? 1 don’t think so.

I
crossed to the other side of Dean Street and turned into Old Compton. A couple
of pale-faced rent boys in nylon zip-tops with greasy hair matted down their acne’d
necks passed me, and one of them casually raised his eyebrows at me — a
streetwalking sex—shop assistant, ‘Do you need any help, sir?’ implicit in his
subtle acknowledgement. I pressed on. I only came out for a pack of ciggies, dearie.

I
bought some matches too so I could have a smoke on the way home. That word is
beginning to haunt me. Home. Where the heart is. Or where you left it, at any
rate. Suddenly a fight broke out among the crowd in front of the Turnbull. With
a real fight, a nasty one, it’s always sudden. Not some trade of insults and
macho posturing with the protagonists being held back by their mates and a few
wild punches. That’s a scuffle. With a bit of real upsy-daisy, the nastiness
seems to come from nowhere, inflict horrible and permanent damage and fly away
again with the unsettling speed of a bat. Then, minutes later, the sirens and
the taking of witnesses’ stories, if they haven’t also flown.

A man
was pushed on the ground and two aroused and seriously aggressive soldier types
in yellow T-shirts and nightmare boots were kicking him. Not in the stomach.
Not in the balls even, but in the head. They got five or six goal-scoring
whacks in, whilst his bonce ricocheted on the pavement, and then they ran. This
is where the movie-makers have it wrong. The whole thing must have lasted under
five seconds. Sam Peckinpah eat your heart out. I was in the Frith Street phone
booth dialling 999 for the ambulance, but a dozen others must have been making
the same call.

I
crossed the road to where the victim was lying in a pool of brain-damage-type
blood. He was surrounded now, of course, the danger having subsided.

A
couple of women had come out from the pub, Alberto from Leonardo’s also. Some
others. There was a mild commotion. I hung around, wondering if I could be
useful. Passers-by passed by and stared at us. From the shouted remarks, it was
apparent that the aggressors were known to several of the folk now involved in
the incident. Someone had put their jacket over the white and limp body. Yellow
T-shirts, that was all I could remember, not much use in an identity parade.
The sirens came. I left.

 It’s a
horrible world. I gave £2 to a homeless and faceless person in a sleeping bag
crouched in the doorway of the De Lane Lee dubbing studio — trendy by day,
sordid at night — and chucked my ciggie butt in the gutter.

‘Looking
for trade?’ said a sorry-looking old thing as I turned into Meard Street.

‘No
thank you, madam,’ I said. You have to be polite.

Look, I’m
not stupid. I know that what my dad told me was probably very good advice, it
just wasn’t appropriate at the time. If I’d heeded his words, no doubt I could
have seen all this coming, I could have known. When we were coasting, I would
have checked all the knots that fastened my security. I would have swabbed the
decks and peeled potatoes in the galley, but I didn’t, OK? And now 1 was
hideously in debt and probably going to have to convince some welfare officer
that the office in seedy old Meard Street was a reasonable place to have
fortnightly contact with my child.

SIX

THE COUNSELLOR WAS a woman
of about fifty-five who lived in Ealing. Her flat where we sat was small and
rather carelessly furnished. I remember the smallest details of the hour we
spent there, although since then, Liz has disagreed with me on many of them.

‘How
did it make you feel when your husband left home?’ The tone was gentle and
coaxing. Liz whisked her head sideways, looked into the middle distance and
paused. How did it all make her feel? Well, from the study in anguish on her
face, she did not feel relaxed, happy, fulfilled, any of those things. The
counsellor waited for Liz’s reply with a practised calm which said, ‘Take your
time to answer this one. We’ve got forty-five minutes left of this session, but
that’s OK. And if you only manage to answer this one question, that’s also OK.
This is the way we do it here.’ Funny how in those flaccid pauses where verbal
exchange loses its elasticity, the domestic objects in a room take on an
inflated significance. There was a clock ticking, obviously. This was a therapy
session. It was pale blue and fifties in design. There were photographs of the
counsellor’s grown-up children in their garden. No doubt not dysfunctional like
the rest of us, no doubt each with a clutch of passed exams in their pockets.
The chairs and the rug were ragged and old. There was a hole in one arm of the
sofa which someone had tried to mend with incorrectly coloured thread. There
was a table lamp without a plug, just a wire dangling down past ancient
TV
and
Radio Times
magazines stacked under the side table, one with a photo of
Jeremy Planter on the front. All things which you would recognize if you lived
here. Things with histories that you would understand. Things which might
define ‘home’ to you. I thought of the objects in Liz and my former home. The unrepaired
chair back, the dishevelled sofa, my record collection, now redundant because
of CDs, my thermos with the vintage cars on that my mum gave me when I was ten.
I can still remember the serial number and date of each car. What makes home?
These objects, do they make home? If, as might be happening soon, they were all
put in cardboard crates in a storage safe somewhere, would that depot
temporarily be my home? Or the shell of the house, the walls, the floor and
roof? Does the spirit of the thing reside in the actual location? It was a nice
enough house, particularly the back room, and I’d done a lot of work on it
myself. Was that investment of time what made it home? Where was home? Wherever
I lay my hat, wherever I lay my wife. Wherever she lays whoever.

Liz
sniffled a bit. The counsellor leaned forward and gently pushed the box of
Kleenex across the low table towards her. ‘New, Man-Size Kleenex!’ read the
label on the top. ‘Like a man, just as much strength, but now with added
sensitivity!’ Not insisting, merely suggesting that it might be OK to cry, that
tissues were available, appropriate. Homely reassurance was on hand. A shiver
went through me. To reach Liz, the box of tissues and what they symbolized had
been pushed further away from me across the table. She was being offered home.
In the aching silence, I wanted to ask, ‘Where is this home which I have left?
Is it something exclusively Liz’s? Does she carry it with her wherever she goes
like a tortoise and its shell?’ And when she’s rolled over and helpless with
her Bob, is she at home?