The Right Man (35 page)

‘Well,
how many of those dollars yer got left, me darling? You bin shedding them like
they were autumn leaves.

I took
out the wad and gave her half without counting it properly.

‘That’ll
do for starters,’ she said, and got up. ‘I’ll see you around, Big Jim.’

I
thanked her profusely, but this seemed to make her cross.

‘And
don’t start going all gooey on me, mate. None of this tart-with-a-heart shit,
OK? Because I definitely have not got one of them when it comes to fellers,
right?’

‘Whatever
you say,’ I said. She walked off stuffing dollars into her handbag.

There
were still fallen trees in the park from July’s storm. They’d been moved out of
the road and some had been chopped into neat piles, but one or two were still
awaiting the tidy-up, their mangled roots dry now in the summer sunlight. I
sat, dazed and deflated, thinking back over the events since my father’s death.
Wondering whether I had ever actually seen a drowning man in Bishop’s Park, or
whether I was psychic and what I’d seen was in fact a premonition of Neil James
drowning in his own vomit. If so, maybe I could start doing tarot readings from
Meard Street as well. That should bring in a few bob.

What
had Neil been trying to tell me? Like me, he had been out of his depth, lost.
We had both been drowning long before these events. Frustrating that he was
unreachable now, unknowable. And why was I alive and he was not? Just because
I’d fallen asleep on my stomach and not my back? I found myself resenting him
for not having finished his bloody novel. Not just because of possible
posthumous royalties — which thought did occur to me, I admit, however
shamefully — but more because he no longer needed me in any way. We were
separate now. I was alive and he was dead, the creep. I breathed in deeply. My
sinuses were beginning to clear. I would get in touch with his Karen, of
course, and do all the right things. Poor Neil. I had another, minor flurry of
tears for him before leaving the bench.

When I
got back to Meard Street, Kemble had tidied up the office and put fresh flowers
everywhere, making it all homey, the angel. There was a note: ‘Bye, gorgeous.
See you at BAFTA.’ I wrote her a funny card and put it in my out-tray.

And
that’s it really. Sorry to carry on for so long, but sometimes just being able
to talk things through, or even write them down is meant to help, isn’t it? Just
the act of admitting them. I think I know that now. You can never prepare for
every eventuality, you can’t spend your life trying to avoid Peter Pain; it
hurts too much.

Knowing,
as opposed to feeling or believing, is a reflective thing. There is no
combustion in it. The moment something is known it loses its motility. As if
the process of gaining knowledge were a dampener. In that instant when instinct
becomes describable, accountable, it is frozen as knowledge forever. Nobody
really knows what they’re doing, or why.

We busy
ourselves in everyday talk and tasks, tinkering with our histories to assign
motives — base or exalted — to our or others’ actions. But these are no more
than so many household gods, mini-deities on the shelves of our security.
Beneath even our collective unconscious, if such a thing exists, is where our
real motors charge. We are all just sperm, the forces working on our survival
or destruction outside even our subliminal cognizance.

I’d
like to be able to say how Liz is enjoying her new life, how she has adapted,
but I can’t because I don’t know. We dared not speak to each other apart from
at the counsellor’s, which went on for a couple more sessions before petering
out with no conclusions other than that Grace should be with me every other
weekend, the accepted norm. I was grateful for that at least.

Liz
carried on denying that she was seeing Bob Henderson in any kind of serious
way, even swore affidavits to that effect. Must have been on the advice of
Ralph Tropier-Potts, because Henderson Giggs could sting me for more cash if
she was not cohabiting with anyone, particularly one of the partners in their
firm. That wouldn’t have looked so good in court, would it? If it had ever come
to that, which thankfully so far it hasn’t. No. In fact the only person I know
who’s been anywhere near a court this autumn is my brother, Tony, who got a
small fine for hacking down the main overhanging branch of the elm tree in my
front drive in Fulham at 6.00 a.m. on the morning of 18 September. The
eleven-foot branch fell, rather satisfyingly for me, on to Bob’s cherished BH 123
Porsche below, denting the roof, smashing the windscreen and — deep joy —
cutting a large gash in the plush white-leather driver’s seat. Our Bob paid for
all the damage himself rather than press charges, which would have meant owning
up to staying the night there. And Tony was only done for borrowing council
equipment: chainsaw, belaying pins and parrot-beak pruner. He used his own
rope. I paid his fine. In cash, of course. Everything seems to be cash nowadays
and I like it like that. There’s nothing like having a wedge in your pocket at
all times.

I smoke
little Café Crème cigars now, instead of roll-ups, which I light with a chunky
lighter with my initials on it in gold plate. And I have leathery tassels on my
slip-on shoes. I don’t wear ties at all any more, leaving my shirts undone a
few buttons to show off the silver-inlaid shark’s tooth dangling there. I
suppose I look like a ponce now, but there’s nothing like a little shark’s
tooth to stop people saying to you, ‘Cheer up, mate, might never happen.’ I had
to buy an entirely new wardrobe in any case, because of the weight gain.

I
sometimes get a beer and a bag of chips and sit in the Soho churchyard with the
Green Man gargoyles. Sometimes I stay there all afternoon just for the hell of
it and get drunk. It’s nice to do the wrong thing.

I’ll be
out of Meard Street soon enough. I’ve found a two-bedroom residential over in
Berwick Street above the fruit market, and Darius, the landlord from the
betting shop, says I should be able to move in there in the new year. It’s all
favours. I bought the tickets for Tenerife today. Yeah, tacky I know, but I
feel like a bit of the old slip-slop—slap tanning, and it’ll make Stella happy.
Liz has said she doesn’t mind me taking Grace for a whole week at half-term.
Malcolm Viner advised me to get that un writing. He’s right, I know, but I don’t
want to inflame the situation, it’s nearly almost just about OK. Grace will be
grown up anyway by the time the lawyers have finished dipping their fingers
into our arrangements.

‘Daddy? My noise has
stopped.’

‘What
noise?’

‘My big
noise. My shouting noise. Hey, I just realized, it’s gone.’ Grace and I were
sitting in what used to be Tania’s spot on the old Muffin and Ketts sofa,
having finished a supper of Batman spaghetti and fish fingers.

‘When
did it go?’ I asked.

‘I don’t
know. It was very angry.

‘A very
angry shouting noise?’

‘Yes,
like monsters. And drums.’

‘Oh,
yes. I know what you mean.

‘Did
your shouting stop, Daddy?’

‘Yes,
it did, I think.’

‘Where
did you put it?’

‘I don’t
know. I think it must have just got bored and went away.

‘Is it
coming back?’

‘I don’t
think so. I hope not.’

‘Why?’

She was
tugging my ear lobe hard now with one hand, and sucking her thumb with the
other.

‘I’m
not going to start all that “why” stuff, Grace. It’s way past your bedtime; you
should’ve been asleep ages ago.

‘If it
comes back, I’m going to bite it hard on its bum so it cries.’

‘Good
idea.’

‘I’m
going to kill it.’

‘You do
that.’

We sat
for a moment in silence. The strip-joint tape loop started up again below.

‘Daddy?’
She was a little bit sleepy now and ready for bed. But what the hell, we could
crash on the sofa.

‘Yes?’

‘Why
are we all alive?’

I
suspected Grace’s new teacher at big school was a born-again. Grace had been
coming back with a lot of ‘Baby Jesus’ stuff since the end of the summer.

‘Erm.
How do you mean? Do you mean like Baby Jesus, and because God loves us and that
sort of thing?’

‘Naaoooo,’
she said, as if I was being really stupid — well, I was being really stupid. ‘I
don’t mean songs. I mean why is Mummy alive and you, and Granny Joy, and
Jasmine and Jasmine s mummy and Freddie and … robbers, and everybody in the
whole world.’

‘Well,
nobody really knows why. Lots of people think up things which might be true,
but nobody actually knows.’

‘You
know lots of things.’

‘Yes,
but I don’t know everything. Even though you’re only five, there’s still some
things you know that I don’t know.’

‘You
mean like
Teletubbies?’

‘Exactly.
I’ve no idea what they are. I don’t know everything, you see.’

She
paused to consider this deeply, and then suddenly jumped like Archimedes.

‘Hey! I
just thought! Maybe we all just
fell
alive. And then we couldn’t get
back.’

‘Yes,
that could be it. We fell alive, and now we’re stuck here.’

Solving
the central problem of the universe seemed to satisfy her totally, and we
lapsed into thoughtful silence again. In the street below some Hooray Henrys
were pranking around slamming car doors, and girls were laughing loudly, but
that sound was separate from our peace. Grace trusted me that this was home.

‘Daddy?’
she said again.

‘Mmmm?’
I said nonchalantly, so as to induce torpor.

‘Do you
know what sex is?’ But I declined to answer.