The Right Man (28 page)

I
coughed, clearing my throat as if to speak. The counsellor’s eyes darted across
to mine. ‘Don’t blow it now’, they said to me, ‘it’s not your turn.’ Liz looked
deeper into the pattern on the ragged carpet and exhaled in a big sigh. She
took a Man-Size Kleenex from the box, and poked at her nose with it. She too
was screaming at me in the silence: ‘It’s not your turn. You agreed to come
here, now you must wait.’

I tried
not to speak, but rather to extract myself from the moment. I did not leave
home. I coughed again. I said it. ‘I did not leave home.’ Both women looked at
me exasperated, as if to say, ‘How could you?’

‘Please’,
said the counsellor. ‘I was asking Liz. You can speak later.’

‘You
asked her how it made her feel when I left home,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t leave
home, I went to sleep in the office because we were getting on so badly,
arguing in front of Grace, you know, and now she’s changed the locks.’

‘I
think you both know what I meant,’ said the counsellor. Liz was nodding now,
looking at me and biting her trembling lip.

‘Hurt…
lonely… abandoned… frightened,’ she said, as if she’d been practising. You’re
not on Oprah Winfrey now, love, I wanted to say.

‘I’m
just trying to help you two to decide what direction you’re going in,’ said the
counsellor. ‘J don’t want to carry this on until Christmas. I’ll give you
three, maybe four sessions maximum, but beyond that, there’s truthfully not all
that much I can do for you.’

Maybe
the counsellor wasn’t so bad after all. I piped down in order to let her do her
stuff. We’d already covered the subject of Bobbie Henderson, and now it seemed
to be closed. Liz had said she’d rather not talk about it, that it had nothing
to do with her and me and Grace, that it was a separate issue. When I mentioned
his Porsche, parked under our elm tree, Liz accused me of spying on her, and
the counsellor seemed to consent to this interpretation by her silence.

‘And
how about Grace?’ she said to Liz, emphasizing the word ‘about’. ‘How are you
coping with her? How is she taking all this?’

‘She’s driving
me mad,’ said Liz. ‘She won’t do anything I tell her and I just lie there at
night worrying about her. On my own.’ The counsellor was buying all this ‘on my
own’ stuff.’

‘It
is
frightening, just you and a child on your own, isn’t it?’

‘She’s
had glue ear again and she’s been on antibiotics, and last time they didn’t
work and the doctor seemed worried that she might end up going deaf.’

‘How is
she now?’

‘Well,
she’s been better this week but she just seems to want to make noise all the
time just to annoy me. She’ll turn up the telly full volume and laugh at me or
bang on her drum, blow on her mouth organ, anything. She knows it gets on my
nerves. It’s like she’s trying to push me over the edge, to punish me.
Yesterday she worked out how to turn on the radio alarm clock, and she thought
it was funny.’ It did sound quite funny to me.

Liz
sniffed and looked up tentatively with the faintest curl of a genuine smile.
Almost as if she was asking my permission to smile at me. I smiled back, and
for a moment we caught each other’s eyes like it was the first time.
I
was
looking deep down into her and she could see right into me, into my fear. The
pleading quality was there in her eyes. She snorted a laugh, full of saliva,
and I started to wet my cheeks. For a second I could remember what had been
there between us originally. It was too much. I turned away. I didn’t reach for
the Man-Size Kleenex. Man-Size they might be, but not Man-Style. I blinked it
all away. Bob Henderson wouldn’t blub. The counsellor let us share this moment.
She wasn’t bad at all, come to think of it, and only £30.

‘And
how do you feel about leaving Grace with her father? Does that feel safe?’ she
asked Liz. My pulse quickened and my skin prickled, but I held myself back.
Once again, I thought,
I
was being sentenced without trial. Once again
judged by the behaviour of others, the Jeremy Planters and the Doug Handoms. It
must be like this for women when they try to get promotion to the board.

‘Oh, he’s
very good with her. She’s always loved her daddy.’ Well, thank you, Liz. Decent
of you to admit it.

‘And if
it was possible, would it be all right for her to stay with her daddy every now
and again to give you a rest?’

Malcolm
Viner was right. I had no say here. Only that which was granted me by the
authority of the unwritten law of motherhood. No wonder Grace was playing up.
Wouldn’t you? You are born into an incomprehensible confusion of foreign
objects and there are two of them who seem to be in charge, who seem to be more
important than the others in terms of whether you get fed, whether you can
stick your fingers in plug sockets, whether bedtime means you go to sleep or
can get away with another game of pyjama-tigers.

Then,
it seems, the second, slightly less useful one has to go away to be shot at in
a war, or just pops out for a paper and a pack of ciggies, never to return, or
goes and dies of any one of the major six diseases as men tend to, or just runs
out of cash or gets bored or… What’s going on here? you must think. What are
the rules? Am I in charge now? Have I killed him? Have I got Mum all to myself
now? Aren’t I a little young for that? I think I’ll get a rash, that’ll teach
them, or have a nasty ear infection.

‘It’s
not very savoury, where I’m living at the moment,’ I said. ‘But there is plenty
of room. My partners have all buggered off down to Regent Street.’

‘How
about a trial weekend, and if that works, then every other weekend for the
meantime, until you can see more clearly how things will turn out between the
two of you?’ said the counsellor. In the pause, whilst Liz thought about this,
the pale-blue clock ticked lethargically onwards.

‘Mmmmm,’
Liz agreed, looking down into her lap. ‘Maybe an afternoon, but I couldn’t let
her stay the night.’ I still don’t understand why, even with an arbiter
present, it was still Liz’s call. Nevertheless, with two lots of rent, an
£80,000 overhang and a business down the toilet, an afternoon with my kid was
about all I could afford. I bought into it. The date for an afternoon contact
was set.

The large brown woman didn’t
recognize me, or wasn’t going to show it anyway, why should she? I had just
been a half-hour punter to her, a trick. She was differently turned out today,
the fake lashes and nails were gone. But I recognized her of course, and having
a child with us each removed any threat that there might have been in my
striking up a conversation with her. Kids are handy like that.

‘Thank
God it’s cooled off a bit, eh?’ I said. ‘It can get a bit unbearable, can’t it?’

‘Oh,
yes, I prefer the winter. I like it when it’s cold.’

‘Well,
I wouldn’t go that far, but it can get so exhausting in the heat with all the
pollution, can’t it?’

‘Yes.
Is this your girl?’

‘This
is Grace.’ Grace was hanging on to me shyly. The large woman’s daughter was
playing among the tangled weeds over by the fallen gravestones.

‘How
old are you then, Grace?’ she asked her. Grace didn’t reply. She looked up at
me.

‘She’s
four.’

‘Four
and three-quarters,’ Grace murmured under her breath.

‘That’s
my Jasmine.’ The woman indicated the chubby girl with a nod of her chin. ‘She’s
nearly nine.’

‘I met
you before. You probably won’t remember. You gave me your number. I’ve still
got it.’ I didn’t tell her that actually I could recall the number easily even
now. She would have got the wrong idea.

‘I
remember,’ she said. ‘There was a storm.’

‘I’m
Guy Muffin, I work round here. Well, live round here, I suppose.

‘Oho —
shouldn’t tell me your real name, you know, you bad man.

‘No, it’s
all right, you don’t have to tell me yours.

‘I’m
Stella, 38—26—38.’

‘Yes, I
remember. It’s a lovely church, isn’t it? Have you been inside?’

‘Oh,
yes. Jasmine goes to school here.’

‘Oh,
that’s good. They’re good, aren’t they, the church schools?’

‘They’re
the only proper education in the state system. I was lucky to get her in,’ said
Stella.

‘Only
trouble is, you have to go to church regularly to qualify for it.’

‘Oh, I
don’t mind that. I’ve always gone to church.’ She was probably unaware of her
eyes returning every few seconds to where her child was playing.

‘I went
along to get Grace in down in Fulham where I used to live, and the church is
full of all these middle-class families who never normally go there at all,
pushing their under-five-year-olds to join in with the hymns so they won’t
have to fork out for school fees. No children over five in there at all.’ I
dawdled a bit. Stella was still sitting quietly on the bench. I stood
awkwardly. I put our lunch rubbish in the litter bin. It had been nicer to sit
in the churchyard than under the fluorescence of the Shaftesbury Avenue
McDonald’s.

‘Do you
want a biscuit, Grace?’ said Stella.

‘What
kind?’

‘Funny
Face.

Grace
put out her hand.

‘Say
thank you,’ I said automatically, before she had had the chance to say it. She
joined Stella on the bench and ate her Funny Face.

I
scanned the trees and looked up at the church spire, not sure whether to sit on
the bench myself. Under the gable of the roof were knotty gargoyle faces. One
of them was disgorging the leafy branches of an oak tree carved out of the
stone. Like the locations of the ancient yew trees across England, around which
so many of the first churches were built, originally this must have been a
pagan site. Christianity merely grafted on over the top like geological rock
strata. Tony would like it here. The Green Man, symbol of growth out of death
and destruction. The anarchic and spoiling nature of man epitomized. The cheeky
jokester. The one who knows that creativity sometimes comes out of breakage. The
one who combats apathy but who doesn’t put his toys back in the right boxes. The
one who stirs the water with a stick to see what’s lying on the bottom, just
for the hell of it. Curiosity. Devilment. Surprise. An idea occurred to me. A
wicked one. Grace bit the eyes off the top of her Funny Face. and held it upside
down.

‘Look.
It’s a face the other way round too,’ she said to the large woman.

‘Oh
yes, so it is,’ Stella replied. I sat down on the bench beside her. Rooters
were blaring in Wardour Street beyond the gates of the church, and some kind of
argument was raging.

‘I don’t
want to be rude,’ I said, somehow spurred on by the grinning gargoyles, ‘but I
run a sort of agency myself, and, well … entertainment business agency, you
know, TV, films, all sorts really …’

‘Huh!
And you think I might be just right for a part in a film that might happen if I
just pop along to a photographic session and whip my top off. Listen, Buster
…

‘No, I
don’t mean that. To tell you the truth, the TV business is not what it was and,
well, to tell you the absolute truth, my business is very much not what it was.
OK, I’ll be straight with you, it’s on its last legs, but… I do have all the
contacts still and…’ I kept on going. I was grinning now like the Green Man.
It was infectious; Stella smiled back at me. A wicked smile. ‘Well, some of my
clients are very attractive, but unfortunately out of work, actresses and…’
She wasn’t helping me out, she just kept smiling. ‘Then there are the visiting
film producers, some of them very well known, if you see what I mean?’ Looking
over the top of Grace’s head, I said with exasperation, ‘Can’t you help me out
here?’

‘You
have a business proposition to make to me, Mr Guy Muffin? I think I know what
you’re suggesting and I think, well, I
know,
that I might be able to
help you here and that we could come to some agreement. Jasmine!’ she called
across to her daughter. ‘You come here a minute, babe!’

Jasmine
shuffled halfway across towards us. ‘What?’ she shouted.

‘Jasmine,
this is Grace. You play with her for a bit. Your ma’s got to have a talk with
her dad.’

‘Oh,
all right,’ said Jasmine with unashamed reluctance, her eyes hitting the sky.
And then, very politely, she came up and took Grace’s hand and led her to where
she’d been playing.

‘OK,
first off, why do you want to do this thing, big boy? And don’t you lie to me.
I can always tell.’

I
thought for a moment. ‘Because they can all fuck off as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Alrrrrright!’
She laughed wheezily.

‘Of
course, there are practical reasons, necessities. Money, or lack of it … her.’
I indicated Grace.

‘I
understand.’ She gave a big sigh. ‘I do.’

‘And I’ve
got the contacts but it would have to be, well…’

‘Discreet,’
she said. ‘High—class … expensive.’ She smiled big now, and her teeth dazzled
in the half-sunlight.

‘My
thoughts entirely.’ I was relaxing into it. ‘Like escorts or something.’ I
would wear the shiny suit, I would drive the Mazda. My shades would look £150
but cost £20 from a Carnaby Street booth. Stella put her hand on mine briefly.