A Friend of the Family (3 page)

He heard a scuffling, scrabbling noise coming from the other end of the hallway.

‘Goldie!’

An ancient, threadbare golden retriever put his nose to the air, turned and made his way slowly but enthusiastically towards Ned, who dropped to his knees to greet him. Goldie was fifteen years old and looked like he too might have been found on a skip. He was wearing a scuffed Elizabethan collar; and just above his left eye
was a shaved patch, zipped together with black plastic stitches, indicating yet another mishap. His eyes were thick and half-blind with cataracts. And he was opening and closing his mouth in an approximation of the bark he would never again be able to emit since a laryngectomy had left him mute four years ago. To compensate for his lack of vocal communication, he was wagging his tail so hard that he was almost back to front and his lips were stretched back into something that Ned had always sworn was a smile.

‘Ooh yes, ooooh yes. Goldie boy, I’m home – I’m home!’Ned grabbed the ruff of fur that poked out from under the collar and scratched him good and hard, trying politely to ignore the fact that dear old Goldie hummed to high heaven.

He took off his boots and tiptoed quietly up the stairs, his socked feet instinctively missing the creaky bits and the ever-dangerous ‘seventh step’, which had remained unfixed since Gerry fell through it years ago when chasing Tony upstairs to give him a hiding.

He stopped at the top of the stairs to look at all the old framed photographs on the landing walls, yellowed and pinkish with age and sun. Ned, Tony and Sean on the beach at Margate, Bernie in a straw hat, Sean on a carousel at the local fair, Tony and Ned sitting on a step in nylon shorts with sunburnt noses, the three of them in their first Holy Communion outfits – snugly fitting white shorts, starchy white shirts and bow-ties. The family likeness was uncanny. All three of them with the same bog-standard brown hair, triangular noses,
determined chins, blue eyes and sticky-outy ears. Ned, skinny like his dad; Tony and Sean, slightly sturdier like their mum. Ned smiled at the images, so much a part of him, and made his way to the end of the landing, to his parents’ bedroom.

His parents’ bedroom was, in some ways, the hub of the house. The bed was where they all used to congregate on weekend mornings, watching children’s television and eating their cereal while Mum and Dad went through the papers and drank leaf tea that brewed in a pot on the bedside table.

The door was open – there was no such thing as a closed door in the Londons’ house – and the sound of Bernie’s snoring was now almost deafening. He pushed the door slowly and peaked around it to have a look at them. Their bed was a huge lace-festooned extravaganza of a thing that Bernie had bought from Biba in the seventies. It was four-poster and canopied with bits of twirly wrought iron all over the place. Bernie had attached things to the lace over the years – silk flowers, feathers, rosettes, tiny wire birds. Underneath this ornate marquee of a bed lay his parents. Ned felt a lump in his throat when he looked at them. His father was curled up on his side with his hands tucked under his cheek, like a small child. His head was the same shape as a rugby ball, covered from chin to crown in snowy-white, close-cropped hair with a couple of ruddy bare patches where his cheekbones were. His glasses and a Patrick O’Brian novel sat on his bedside table.

Ned’s mother lay flat on her back, her ropey, honey
coloured hair spread out around her, her green polyester nightie rising and falling with each voluminous snore, a Virgin Atlantic eye-mask attached to her head with black elastic and her unlined cheeks gleaming with night-cream. Her glasses and a Maya Angelou book sat on her bedside table.

‘Mum, Dad,’ he whispered, loudly.

Dad twitched but remained firmly asleep.

‘Mum, Dad, it’s me. Wake up,’ he whispered a bit louder, and approached the bed on tiptoe.

Mum grunted and turned on to her side and Dad twitched again.

Ned prodded his father, who woke up, dramatically and suddenly, opened his eyes, stared straight at Ned, muttered something incomprehensible and then turned over on to his other side and farted.

Ned sighed and decided to try again later. He headed towards his bedroom.

His was the only one of the boys’ rooms that hadn’t been overrun by general junk overflow. Because he’d never moved out. Even when he’d left three years ago, he hadn’t actually been
leaving home.
He’d had every intention of being back within six months. He was aware that some might find it strange that at his age he would willingly choose to live in his parental home. But why shouldn’t he? It was a great house, in a great location just twenty minutes on the 68 Express to the centre of town, his parents were the coolest parents in existence and he loved it here. Why fork out rent for some shitty flatshare or be lumbered with a ball-breaking mortgage?
No – he was giving himself until he was thirty before he even began to think about moving out.

He pushed open his bedroom door, his heart full of anticipation and warmth. He turned slightly to locate the light switch, flicked it downwards and then yelled out at the top of his voice when a man suddenly sat bolt upright in his bed. A very pale man with dyed black hair cut into an improbably geometric flat-top, wearing a selection of earrings and with a tattoo of a cobweb across his neck.

‘Jesus Fucking
Christ?
said Ned, clasping his heart with his hand.

‘Urgh?’ said the man in the bed.

‘Jesus Fucking
Christ –
who the fuck are you?’

The man squinted at Ned for a moment, one hand reaching across to an ashtray on the bedside table for a half-smoked fag butt. He put it to his lips, lit it with a Zippo, inhaled and then clicked his fingers and smiled. ‘Ned?’ he said. His voice was deep and gravelly.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Ned, still stretched back against the bedroom door, his eyebrows somewhere near his hairline.

The man in the bed exhaled and then broke into a painful, hacking smoker’s cough. He rested the fag back in the ashtray and pulled himself from the bed, still coughing. He was wearing black underpants and was very pale and unbelievably lean – solid muscle with just a hint of flesh stretched over the top, comparable, Ned thought, to the physique of a greyhound. There were more tattoos. A Confederate flag on his forearm, a line
drawing of Marilyn on his upper arm and the words ‘Live Fast Die Young’ across his hairless chest.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ He took Ned’s limp hand and shook it. ‘I’m Gervase,’ he said and then wandered back to the bed and his smouldering cigarette. He started hacking even harder, then, producing all sorts of vivid sound-effects through his nostrils and throat.

‘Yeah, but – who
are
you?’

‘Didn’t Bernie tell you?’

Ned didn’t like the way he said ‘Bernie’ with so much familiarity. He shook his head numbly.

‘I’m the lodger.’

‘Lodger?’

‘Yeah – you know – me pay money, me get room.’

‘Yeah, but – this is
my
room.’

‘That, Ned,’ said Gervase, stubbing out his cigarette and pulling a fresh one from a packet of Chesterfields, ‘is debatable.’And then he wandered towards the washbasin in the corner of the bedroom, leant down over it and in one practised action hawked up the contents of his lungs.

Lose Weight Now – Ask Me How

It was the usual scenario: Millie, strong thighs clamped around a white stallion, thick chestnut hair flowing, never-ending beach, foamy waves crashing against the shore. Tony, slim, in white linen, lying in a hammock, watching her. There might have been a bird of some kind, a blue bird. He wasn’t sure.

She dismounted her horse and approached, a half-smile playing on her lips, one eyebrow slightly cocked. There was sand dusted across her cheek. It glittered like ground diamonds. He reached out to brush it away and as he reached, she grabbed his wrist and slapped him, hard, across the face. And then, with the same hand she’d used to hit him, she delved into his trousers and held him. And it felt like he was being held by her throat, her warm, red throat. He couldn’t explain it any other way. Her breath was on his cheek, her eyes were roaming his face, her hot hand throat-like on him, up and down. She leant in to his ear and as she moved him up and down she whispered, ‘You are a god, Anthony. You are
a god
.’

And then he woke up. Just as he was about to come. Every night. Every fucking night. He wasn’t sure
whether it was frustrating or pleasurable, hell or bliss, but at least he didn’t make a mess on his sheets.

He pulled himself heavily from his bed and gave his body the customary mirror appraisal. A couple of years ago he’d look in the mirror and see a slightly stocky man with a burgeoning belly and ever so slightly budding breasts, a thirtysomething man who looked like he’d had a few curries in his time, the odd pint of lager, balanced out by sessions at the gym and the occasional game of football. What looked back at him now was a spherical, snowy-white blob with a belly large enough to house a five-year-old child and sad, slightly pendulous breasts that were bigger than Ness’s (yes – she’d measured them).

He’d given up smoking a year ago and all he’d done since was eat. Going out with Ness didn’t help. Ness was a
bon viveur,
a gourmand, a complete fucking pig. He’d never met a woman who ate as much as she managed to pack away. The bugger of it was that she had a fast metabolism and managed to stay rake thin, while Tony had the metabolism of a chronically depressed slug and now he was fat. Tony sighed, turned his back on the awful truth that was his thirty-four-year-old body and started getting ready for work.

He thought of Millie again as he showered. He thought of Millie pretty much all the time at the moment. But stranger than just thinking about her was that he imagined her
watching
him. Everything he did, everything he said, he envisaged Millie floating in a corner of the room, judging him, evaluating him,
rating him.
At home,
in the office, in the car, she was there. If he did something clumsy, he’d blush. If he did something cool, he would puff up with pride. He held his stomach in when he was naked, he only sang songs he knew the words to in the shower, he didn’t pick his nose, he didn’t even fart when he was on his own these days. Well, certainly not loudly, anyway.

He’d only met her once, a week ago, in a bar on Charlotte Street. She’d arrived just as he and Ness were leaving. They’d met for less than five minutes. She was with her boyfriend. A nice bloke, but not good enough for her – she was way out of his league. He was a boy. She was a
woman.

Tony had never really been a detail person when it came to women. He could never remember things like eye colour (Millie’s were olive green, with gold bits in), or noticed wedding rings (Millie wore silver rings on three fingers of her right hand, none on her left). And he could never find words to describe things like hair (Millie had brown hair that was made up of about a hundred different shades of honey, mahogany, chestnut and red. It was thick and blunt and she grabbed it in her fist while she talked, as if she was showing it who was boss), or clothing (Millie wore a tight red sleeveless vest with low-slung jeans, half a centimetre of tanned belly showing). Her voice was throaty and coarse, she had laughter lines, her fingernails were cut short and square. Her skin was the sort of colour that suggested some kind of watered-down exotic ancestry; Latin American, perhaps, or Middle Eastern.
She held a Marlboro Light in the same hand as a bottle of Stella and she laughed like he’d never seen a woman laugh before. Big white teeth, three fillings, the back of her throat visible, pink and glossy in the overhead light.

Camilla, that was her actual name. ‘Nobody calls me
Camilla,’
she’d said when her boyfriend introduced her. ‘Makes me sound like I own a poncey handbag shop in Chelsea, or something. Call me Millie.’

Millie. Millie Millie Millie.
Millie.

Tony’s hand had subconsciously found its way to his crotch. He snatched it away impatiently. He didn’t have time for a wank. He was going to be late. He got out of the shower, dried off and headed for his wardrobe, leafing sadly through all the clothes he was now unable to wear. Shirts that Tony had bought for their capaciousness years earlier, shirts he used to wear untucked and casual, now strained across his belly. And as his expanding girth forced his clothes to expand horizontally, so they diminished vertically so now all his trousers exposed at least a centimetre of sock.

Call me Millie. Millie Millie Millie.

She’d smiled at him as they left. It wasn’t like a ‘Thank God they’re leaving now we can get back to our cosy evening’ smile. It was a ‘See you again soon, I hope’ smile. It was a ‘You interest me’ smile. It was a smile that promised something, something substantial.

He’d had the foresight to make a plan. At the last minute, just as they were backing out of the door, he invited Millie and her boyfriend to his birthday dinner
the following weekend. They said yes. It wasn’t ideal. The boyfriend was a problem. So was that fact that Tony was fat and past his prime. But both these things were surmountable. The boyfriend could be dumped. Tony could lose weight. This was a long-term thing. As long as he had an opportunity to see her again, everything else would fall into place eventually. He knew it.

Tony hadn’t really given much thought to where Ness fitted into his ‘Millie’ plans. In the short term it was probably quite good to have a girlfriend; it gave him the Women’s Secret Seal of Approval. Having a girlfriend, especially a fairly cool one like Ness, said: ‘I am not a sad, fat divorcee on my way to TV-dinner hell and an early heart attack. I am a guy who can function in a normal healthy relationship, who has regular sex and who women like to be with. I am Anthony London, successful businessman with healthy erectile function and fantastic interpersonal skills. I am good husband material on a stick.’

He dressed, breakfasted and did something to his hair with something called ‘thickening serum’, which appeared to do nothing of the sort, and then grabbed his briefcase and his laptop and left the flat. What a miserable day – so damp and overcast it felt like someone had thrown a tarpaulin over the world while he was asleep. He crossed the road towards his car, a bright-red MX5. A girl’s car. He’d wanted an old Mercedes or Porsche – you could get something quite sexy with the six grand he’d had to spend – but for some reason he’d
let Ness talk him into buying this thing. Power steering, she’d said. Good heating. Easy to convert.
Reliable.
And she was right. There was nothing wrong with it as such; it just wasn’t very
him.
And to be quite honest, it was a bit of a squeeze – it was a Japanese car, designed for
small
Japanese people who ate seaweed, not hefty great English blokes who drank Guinness.