The Rotters' Club (48 page)

Now I’ve found out that it’s generosity that turns me on
), and, watch out, Benjamin, you are rushing on, rushing on towards the end now and you can hold back for a little bit longer, I think, don’t lose this moment, don’t, don’t lose it, it may never come back, quick, think of something else, like that line, for instance, that line you just quoted, where did it come from?, it’s both familiar and unfamiliar, it feels like something that’s always been around in my head but I hadn’t thought of it for a long time, and now I’ve got it, yes, of course, it’s a song by Hatfield and the North, ‘Share It’, how appropriate, everything is appropriate today, everything is coming together, but it’s odd that I haven’t listened to that record for so long, it used to be my absolute favourite, I’ve had a soft spot for them ever since I went to see them at Barbarella’s, more than four years ago now, I have no trouble remembering the date, it was just two days before Malcolm died, and that reminds me of something that happened on Monday, three days ago, when I was walking through the cathedral square, with Cicely, as it happens, it was my lunch hour and until she goes back to school, in a week or two, she always comes to meet me in my lunch hour, and on this occasion we were walking through the square, hand in hand, which is how we always walk these days, and we passed this guy sitting on a bench, drinking from a can of something or other, Ansell’s I think it was, he had a red face and a big beard and to be honest he smelled a bit, I just thought he was a wino at first, but then I stopped walking and something clicked into place and I looked back at him and then I turned, drawing Cicely with me, and I went up to him and I looked him in the eye and said, You don’t recognize me, do you?, and he stared back at me, he had this slightly glazed look to him, I think he’d been drinking for an hour or two, and he said, No I don’t – who are you, you cunt? and I said, You’re Roll-Up Reg, and he said, I know who
I
am – who are you?, and I told him that he’d come with me to Barbarella’s all that time ago with Malcolm, and when I mentioned that name it was as if some kind of light-bulb went out behind his eyes, they went dark, and he drooped forward on his bench, almost slumped, and when he looked at me again he said, I remember you, you’re the Tory cunt, but there was no laughter in his voice when he said it this time, and he didn’t speak for quite a while after that but eventually he raised his head and sort of looked me up and down, took the measure of me, and said, You’ve grown up a bit since then, haven’t you?, and I didn’t know what to say to that, so I introduced him to Cicely and he shook her very nicely by the hand and said, politely but very deliberately, enunciating every word carefully, the way that some alcoholics do, It’s an honour to meet you, you must excuse me if I say anything out of order, the fact is, I’m an uncouth and ill-mannered cunt, and Cicely just laughed and assured him that whatever he said was fine, and he turned to me and said, Are you giving it to her?, and in fact the answer to that was still technically no, but I don’t think he expected me to tell him, anyway, because he asked me next what I was doing these days, and when I told him that I’d got a temporary job working for a bank and then I was going up to Oxford he just laughed and said, So you never did read
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,
then, and I knew what he was getting at so I became a bit defensive and said, T. S. Eliot worked for a bank, you know, and Roll-Up Reg said, Yes, and he was a cunt, as well, but I could tell he was only joking, and then we both went quiet and I was about to say goodbye and move on when he asked me, How’s that sister of yours?, so I told him about Lois, as briefly as I could, saying as little as possible about the bad times and telling him that now, just in the last few months, she really seemed to have got her act together, and she even had this new boyfriend, a lawyer called Christopher, her first boyfriend since Malcolm, and completely different from him, too, the polar opposite in every respect, and Roll-Up Reg nodded and said that was nice, he was glad for her, but I could tell that I had depressed him by reminding him about all of this, and sure enough suddenly his eyes were full of tears and he sort of fell forward and Cicely grabbed hold of him and sat next to him on the bench, she had to support him, practically, he was leaning on her shoulder as he looked at me and said, It was my fault, you know, it was my fault they went to that pub, if it wasn’t for me Male would be alive today and he would have married your sister and none of this would have happened, they were going to go to The Grapevine and then I told them not to, I can remember the conversation now, I told him it would be full of cunts in suits, it was all my fault, I killed him, I killed him, and I had to kneel down beside him and say, No, Reg, No, I didn’t know whether to call him Reg or Roll-Up actually, neither of them seemed to come very naturally, but I said, No, you’re not to blame, no one’s to blame for something like that, it’s fate or destiny or God or something, and he pulled himself together and squeezed my shoulder and said, Yes, you’re right, and Cicely gave him a Kleenex and wiped his face down a bit and he said again, You’re right, son, you’re right, it’s God, and I said, Yes, it is, and he said, He’s a cunt, isn’t he?, and I thought about what He’d done to Malcolm and what He’d done to Lois and what He’d done to the rest of us as a consequence and I said, Yes, He is, Reg, He’s a complete and utter cunt, and I laughed and Reg laughed and Cicely laughed, too, she didn’t know what it meant, for me, to say that, she doesn’t know the truth about me and God, I’ve never told her the story of the miracle, maybe I will one day but not yet, and besides, there are other miracles in my life now, like the miracle of Cicely herself and how she made me feel this morning, so then we said goodbye to Roll-Up Reg, he sat up on his bench and he took us both by the hands, and he said God bless, he said God bless both of you, you cunts, and then we walked on, and it would be good, wouldn’t it, if that was the last time I’d seen him in my life, there would have been a nice sense of closure about it, but as it happens he seems to sit and drink his Ansell’s in the cathedral square most days, and I see him almost every lunch hour, not to speak to, though, we just wave hello or we make a bit of eye contact, but no, there will be no tidy rounding-off of that particular story, I’m sorry to say, whereas it was different with Steve, when Cicely and I went to visit him last Saturday, early in the afternoon, there was a definite sense of finality about that meeting, which did not start well in any case because Steve was out when we arrived, he was still at work and so we had to sit there for a while with his parents, Mr and Mrs Richards, and of course they hate Cicely because they think that she made their son unhappy, all that time ago, when they were in
Othello
together – it all started then, oh yes, everything started then! – because it was after that that Steve split up with his girlfriend, Valerie, who by all accounts was very nice, so you can imagine that the situation was pretty tense, as we all sat there waiting for him to come home, and I didn’t make things any better because I was nervous, too, it’s shameful to admit it but yes, I was nervous, we were in Handsworth and for years my family had brought me up to believe that Handsworth was a sort of no-go area, some dark outpost of colonial Africa which had somehow got transplanted to Birmingham, and they had managed to convince me that my car was bound to get broken into if I left it parked in the street, or we would come back to it after half an hour and find that it was sitting on bricks or something, but I have to say that I saw very little evidence for these theories, not that Handsworth is at all similar to Longbridge, no, you can feel the difference, not just in the number of black people on the streets or all the different languages you can see in the shop windows or the different kinds of food for sale, it goes somehow deeper than these things, yes, I admit it, it was like a foreign country to me but I liked it for that very reason, and found myself thinking how strange it was, what an indictment, that I could share the same city with these people and yet I had had no contact with them in all my eighteen years, apart from Steve, of course, and how difficult it must have been for him, how very surreal and disorientating, to have arrived at King William’s and found that he was the only black boy there and that we all made fun of him and called him Rastus, God, we’re a fucked-up country, I’m beginning to see that, now, perhaps I really should have been listening to Doug all these years, anyway, that’s why I had been feeling nervous, absurdly, but it didn’t last for long because Mr and Mrs Richards were very welcoming, whatever they may have thought of Cicely, they made us tea and they asked her questions about America, and they told us about Steve’s job, which does not sound like much of a job, I’m afraid, he is only working in the local chip shop, but as they said he has to get whatever work he can and save up towards next year’s fees because if he is going to retake his A-levels he will have to go to sixth-form college, and they will have to pay for that themselves, and they told us that he might get a pay-rise soon because the shop is hoping to expand, they want to put in a few tables and chairs at the back and turn it into a proper little restaurant, and when I heard that I asked them what the name of the chip shop was and they told me, and when they told me I felt my heart sink but I didn’t say anything and just then Steve came in anyway, the shop had closed at two-thirty, and he was so pleased to see us, he broke into this enormous grin, he hadn’t seen me since that terrible day last year, the last day of term, and he hadn’t seen Cicely for even longer than that, he seemed especially pleased to see Cicely, and she stood up when he came in and hugged him with real affection, real fondness, he seemed quite overwhelmed by it, Cicely has that effect on people, they forget what she is like, and we didn’t stay long in his parents’ house, I’m pleased to say, because I’m afraid I found it oppressive, it was a friendly place, warm and tidy and full of lovely strange cooking smells, but I’m afraid the smallness and the poverty of it depressed me, yes, it’s shocking, isn’t it, but I realized then that Steve’s family were by far and away the poorest of all my friends’, it embarrassed me, and it embarrassed me that I had my own car parked outside, a Mini which was only two years old, which my parents had basically given me, although I was paying them a token amount towards it every week out of my wages, and as the three of us walked towards Handsworth Park I felt ashamed for having everything given to me so easily, my job at the bank and my place at university and everything else, when Steve seemed to have almost nothing, at the moment, and only a year ago it had seemed that we were all in the same position but perhaps that was just an illusion, perhaps the playing field was never really level and life would always in fact be easier for someone like me, I suspect that is the case, nothing changes, nothing has changed, and I’ll tell you something else that hasn’t changed, as well, he is still in love with her, yes, Steve is still in love with Cicely, I saw it that afternoon in Handsworth Park, it was obvious, obvious to me anyway, though I didn’t say anything to her about it afterwards and I think it’s possible that she didn’t even notice, she often doesn’t notice these things, it’s not that she takes it for granted that people will always adore her, it’s just that she lives her life at this pitch all the time, always conducts her friendships at a level of intimacy which is completely normal for her but not for most people, so she doesn’t realize how special she has made them feel, it was the same with Helen in America, Helen obviously worshipped her, had never met anyone like her, her father was in the same play as Cicely’s mother so naturally they were thrown together a good deal, and it was fascinating for me, those few days in January, to spend time with them both, God it was cold, that’s the main thing I remember about it, I have never felt cold like the cold you get in New York in January, and there was one night in particular I remember when the three of us were supposed to be walking from Cicely’s mother’s apartment to some cinema or other, and we literally couldn’t make it, even with all our coats and scarves and gloves and hats it was too cold and the snow was too heavy so we stopped off at this hotel instead, it was called the Gramercy Park, we went into the bar and ordered whiskies and we never made it to the cinema at all, we just sat drinking at the bar all evening, it was an amazing evening, and an amazing place, full of these old actors, there was this man there, I could swear it was Vincent Price, sitting at the bar by himself most of the night and even he couldn’t take his eyes off Cicely half of the time, she draws people towards her, somehow, is always getting into conversation with strangers, and I was, yes, fascinated that evening to see the quality of the friendship between Cicely and Helen, who was from the West Coast, and so not like a New Yorker at all, I was told, I don’t know anything about America but apparently there is this big divide between the East Coast and the West Coast, and Cicely and Helen had known each other two or three months now, so thinking about it they had spent far more time together than she and I ever had, which might have explained the intimacy between them, the sense of a private language from which I felt excluded, private jokes, private phrases, and not just in words, either, there were private looks and private smiles, and I’m not saying it was the same with Cicely and Steve that afternoon in Handsworth Park, I’m just saying, well, what am I trying to say, exactly, that I felt jealous, I suppose, on both occasions, I felt that I was being denied the whole of her, I did not like sharing her with someone else, even when I knew that there was nothing but friendship involved, and when I knew that it was greedy of me to want to keep Cicely all to myself, she is so special, so precious, everybody should be allowed some time with her, everybody in the world, but it’s true, I can’t deny it, ‘a hatred for you spat like a welding flame’, that was how I felt both times, towards Helen in the Gramercy Park Hotel on that snowy New York evening and towards Steve in Handsworth Park that bright Saturday afternoon, the last Saturday of April, just five days ago, but it seems a long time, already, as I said, there was this sense of finality about it, this overtone of hail and farewell, I feel that we have lost Steve, lost him to something, what can you call it?, history, politics, circumstance, it’s a horrible feeling, actually, a feeling that our time together at school was a sort of brilliant mistake, it was against the normal order of things, and now everything is back to how it is meant to be, Steve has been put back in his proper place and it is monstrous, not just to think that this has happened, but to think