The Rules of Play (8 page)

A human metal detector.

A gap in the market.

He can do anything, anything in the world, this boy. He could stop wars. He could be the second-youngest pope.

And then the loss-adjuster has returned, and is walking across the room towards me. He kisses me on my forehead and sits down on the sofa, next to Selwyn.

Why, whenever there are three people, does it always have to be two against one?

I stub out my cigarette on the saucer. It was horrible. I say, ‘I should go home.’

Strange word: ‘home’ is where Selwyn is, and Alan, but if Selwyn is here . . . The other place seems very far away, and much longer ago than this morning.

I’m not expecting to be contradicted, and no one does.

‘Are you coming with me?’ I ask Selwyn.

‘If you’re going home, yes.’ He doesn’t get up.

‘Where else would we be going?’

‘I mean, if you’re going home.’

Oh. He means, of course, a woman’s, a mother’s, place: home, and not ever to come to this flat again. But right now, which is exactly the time I should be having this argument, I’m suddenly too tired. I know there’s something I should be fighting for but the focus is blurred.

I get my bag. Now Selwyn stands up and seems to be waiting but there’s nothing to wait for. I put my arm around his stiff, sharp shoulders, as sharp and as hard as that thing I fell against in the cupboard beneath the stairs, and we head for the door.

The loss-adjuster offers to drive us and I say no, no, we’re fine, without even turning to look at him, and already we’re standing by the lift, waiting for it to arrive. But now there’s a heaviness, a sluggishness, encasing us, the lift torpid and pompous, its light yellow and old, time slowing down, and to shake this off I start walking, as soon as we come out of the door to the street, faster than usual. Selwyn strides to keep up.

And then, suddenly, I’m aware he’s no longer beside me, and I turn.

He’s standing at the edge of the pavement. A party of teenage foreign backpackers threads between us, their voices loud and carefree—Spanish, my other language. He’s forgotten something, I think. We’ll have to do this all over again.

‘Actually,’ Selwyn says, ‘I think I’ll hang around for a bit.’

Okay. He’ll follow, in his own time.

‘I mean,’ he says, ‘I’m going back to the flat.’

That sheepish smile. And then he’s walking away, walking back. He has a key. He puts things in cupboards.

I HAVE A pounding headache, not nagging but bullying, despotic. I have been force-fed with deep-fried sugar for lunch, I have been messed around by Selwyn whom I love, I think, and I have smoked my first cigarette in ten years.
Of course
I have a headache. As soon as I get home I walk upstairs to the bathroom, ignoring Agnieszka’s attempt to detain me, and take down a box of painkillers from the shelf in the cabinet. I sit on the edge of the bath and read the small print on the back of the box.
More
common side effects may include: abnormal dreams, abnormal
ejaculation, abnormal vision, anxiety, diminished sex drive,
dizziness, dry mouth, flu-like symptoms, flushing, gas, headache,
impotence, insomnia, itching, loss of appetite, nausea,
nervousness, occasional forgetfulness, rash, sinusitis, sleepiness,
sore throat, sweating, tremors, upset stomach, vomiting. Less
common side effects may include: bleeding problems, chills,
confusion, ear pain, emotional instability, fever, frequent urination,
high blood pressure, loss of memory, palpitations, sleep
disorders, weight gain, vertigo. In children and adolescents,
less common side effects may also include: excessive menstrual
bleeding, hyperactivity, mania or hypomania, nosebleeds, personality
changes.

I chuck the box in the bin. I decide I am feeling better.

ALAN IS IN the kitchen, in darkness. He must know I’m here, but he doesn’t turn round. What he’s doing, I gradually realize, is rearranging the recipe books on the shelf beside the cooker in alphabetical order. By author, or title? He reaches up—he has short arms, whenever he buys a new jacket he has to get the sleeves shortened— and brings down a book, and examines its cover, and reaches up again to place it back on the shelf in a different place. Again and again. It’s like an improvised performance in a small room above a pub, one the actor doesn’t know how to bring to an end. But that’s okay. Although I’d like to know what happens next I’m also happy just watching, leaning against the doorframe. I’ve paid for my ticket.

Then he sits down, still without turning on the light. It’s possible that he too is training his eyes, to see in the dark. I want him to tell me what he sees.

Before that, Agnieszka must update me. She is ironing in the bathroom at the top of the stairs. ‘
Fffshhhh
,’ she has said, while I was watching Alan, imitating the noise of the iron. And now she is singing. Calling me.

The trip to the hospital with Harvey was an anticlimax: they put him on a nebulizer, gave him a prescription and sent him home. And last night Harvey took Agnieszka to a musical in the West End. She laughs and waves her arms around as she tells me about the dance routines and the special effects, and I suggest she switches off the iron before she knocks it over. Then she laughs even more when she tells how Harvey got annoyed and told her that what they were watching was moving and tragic. I am not enjoying hearing this. It’s clear that Harvey’s all-round blockheadedness is exactly what’s making Agnieszka very fond of him.

After the musical he took her to a hotel, a Hilton hotel.

‘So he’s rich, Agnieszka? That helps.’

Agnieszka is not sure. ‘He pays with tickets, like at the theatre.’

‘And then?’

‘We go to room, drink champagne.’ She screws up her nose.

‘Not good?’ I have sat down at the top of the stairs. I am tired. Agnieszka is standing behind the ironing board with hands far apart, like Manet’s woman behind the bar at the Folies-Bergère. Agnieszka is no less formidable.

‘Not fizzy. Not cold.’ She clearly expected more from a hotel calling itself the Hilton.

‘There are two beds, thin ones,’ she goes on, ‘but bouncy. You know?’

I can guess. She tried them out. She sat, or maybe even lay, on the mattress, and bounced up and down. She’s a practical girl.

‘He kisses me, then he tries to move these beds to make one big bed. I am wanting to help but he says no, so only I am watching. His face gets red. I am worried, I am trying again to help, he pushes me away. He makes this noise, like in the park?’

I wheeze, putting a lot of exaggeration into it. It comes surprisingly easily, as if a small animal inside me is trying to come out. ‘Wheeze,’ I say, drawing breath.

‘Yes, wheeze. He wheezes, but worse than in the park. He starts to make like the bird again—’

‘You mean his arms?’

‘Waving, like the seagull on the ground, when it starts to fly.’ She demonstrates.

‘I tell him to lie down, breathe like this.’ More demonstration, and this time I join in. Slow, deep breaths: in, out, in, out.

‘He has some pills in his jacket, I find them.’

‘Oh, Agnieszka.’

‘We lie down, very quiet. The pills make him better. After some time he tells me he must take these pills every day but he doesn’t, they make his skin very bad.’ She scratches her forearm.

‘Yes, scratchy. A rash.’

‘One time, he says, he went to psychology—psychology something.’

‘Therapist. It’s easier.’

‘This woman, she ask him why he thinks everything so dangerous, why he must be punished, what he done wrong? But really, Harvey has done nothing wrong, ever.’

She shakes her head. ‘So one time is it, he doesn’t go to see this woman again.’

‘No,’ I say, after a pause. I stand and hug Agnieszka awkwardly, over the ironing board. But she stiffens, resists, the Communist poster-girl again, determined. She doesn’t cry. She’s not going to let me off so easily.

Because it’s true I’ve been remiss, and more. I haven’t spoken to her about married men. (
Is
Harvey married? I will believe, now, everything Agnieszka tells me, and most of what he tells her.) I haven’t warned her about single or separated English men whose smiles are not easy, not relaxed. Let alone the ones whose smiles are too easy, too relaxed. I haven’t warned her about cheap champagne in Hilton hotels, nor men playing three-card tricks, nor love. Unforgivably, my lack of sympathy for Harvey—my active dislike—has been conspicuous. Why couldn’t I simply be happy for her, that she was happy?

I haven’t taken care.

Agnieszka has gone to her room. One of Alan’s office shirts lies on the ironing board, a creased arm dangling limply down.

SOMETIMES THE BATTER ’ S job is to score lots of runs as fast as he can, and sometimes it’s to stay in and not get out and the runs are secondary. The bowler’s priority is almost always to get the batter out but there are times when stopping the batter getting runs is the main thing.

God, this is a stupid game.

Agnieszka is proud, intelligent, ambitious, and she offers herself to an overweight buffoon who slouches over crosswords in the stale air of coffee bars. Selwyn— Selwyn is
gorgeous
, and if I were a fifteen-year-old girl I’d make sure he understands what that means—and he spends all day grumping about the injustice of the world. Me, I am married to a caring, conscientious man who rearranges cookery books by the light of the moon, and I rush away into the arms of man who wears yellow Wellington boots and whose job—and possibly whose life too, if I cared to investigate further—reeks of doom, disaster, things gone awry.

Stupid, stupid game. To decide who bats first, the umpires
toss a coin
. You can play the most brilliant game of your life and still end up on the losing side. You can be totally out of form and score zero and zero again and still prance with your team-mates in triumph at the end. And that’s another thing: the spraying of champagne by the winners, the conspicuous waste. Fools. Champagne is for drinking, whether you win or lose. Just pass me the bottle.

I COME DOWN to the kitchen. The night of the long knives. The long, long night of the knives. The short knives, which so often get lost. And Selwyn will find them. Alan is sitting as before, in the one comfortable chair in the kitchen, with the cat on its arm. But in deeper darkness. Really, I cannot speak to an invisible man.

I switch on the small light over the cooker. ‘Is that okay?’

It appears to be so. Indeed, Selwyn is safe, Agnieszka has not been raped, no rash crime of passion has been committed, no one has thrown him- or herself under a train. But it is not okay.

Alan knows. He knows where Selwyn is—Selwyn phoned him. He knows the loss-adjuster is my lover, and maybe has known ever since he first saw him that time in Edinburgh. He knows that Agnieszka is going through a difficult time, and probably even the details too, though I’m sure he doesn’t want to. He knows pretty well everything. He may even have been to school with the three-card-trick man. If I ever did forget the loss-adjuster’s phone number, all I’d have to do is ask him. He should be the umpire, not me.

I blink, and see Alan wearing that wide-brimmed white hat. He is tossing a coin. No, I want to tell him, there must be a better way, we need more time. But you only get so much time before the show moves on.

Unless I am pregnant. In which case there’s a new member of the cast, a tiny loss-adjuster who’s one quarter Spanish. Or a whole different show.

I have a sudden feeling of vertigo, as if I am high up on one of those cranes from which they take the aerial shots that show the players as just tiny white dots on the green field. I reach for a chair and sit down. Alan looks at me without expression. I breathe deeply, as I did with Agnieszka only minutes ago, and then I pull the chair closer to my book-rearranger, my knower of the alphabet and all the rules, this man without whom Selwyn would not have been. ‘Alan, what are we going to do?’

He does that thing with his hands, linking and reversing them and pushing them out in front of him.

Then he says some obvious things, arranged in paragraphs and sub-sections, as if he’s a committee, but they probably do need saying and he’s by far the best person to say them. He says that this is surely not, vis-à-vis me and him and the loss-adjuster, an uncommon situation. In general. He actually does use that word, ‘vis-à-vis.’ He mentions Alex and Lyn, and Jamal and Sarah, and Kirsten and Robin, he doesn’t need to go on. So people have been through this before, are doing it all the time, and there are models, but that doesn’t mean any one of those models is best for us. Assuming that the loss-adjuster and I love each other—

A tiny pause here, two commas instead of one, in case I want to interrupt. And I do want to interrupt: how dare he
assume
we love each other? Why can’t I just have, what do they call it, a ‘fling,’ like everyone else? But instead, I go to the fridge to get some apple juice. There isn’t any.

—we should probably separate. And Selwyn—

‘Selwyn,’ I say, coming back to the table. ‘It’s such an absurd name. It’s for someone who’s much older than sixteen. You should be called Selwyn and Selwyn should be Alan. No wonder he’s confused and doesn’t know what he wants. You know companies—big companies— spend millions of pounds on branding consultants and market research before they name a new product and we laugh at them but at least they’re making an effort, putting a bit of thought into it. If you’d bought a pint for a deaf man down the pub and asked his advice you’d have done better than
Selwyn
.’

The fridge makes its fatuous grumbling noise, re-cooling.

Alan says that it wasn’t like that at all and that I know it. Selwyn was the name of Annie’s father and was the only name possible and was the right one, the name she needed her child to have—Annie, that is, Alan’s first wife, whose own name has not been spoken in this kitchen for a very long time, who died of some awful illness when Selwyn was barely a year old and who was already ill at the time of his birth and knowing she was going to die. It’s almost certainly true that I did know this before but any information I’ve ever had about Annie has been accidentally-on-purpose mislaid in some ancient and leaky storage device that can never be upgraded. A little bit because Annie was Alan’s first and possibly only true love but mainly because illness is something I back away from, don’t want to know about. It doesn’t disgust me—I can clean up vomit, blood, shit, any other discharge the human body is capable of, as efficiently as the most seasoned and crusty nurse—but it does remind me: that I have only one inning, two if I’m lucky. Even colds, even glue ear.