All the Rage (11 page)

Mark had appropriated the idea and used it in arguments whenever he could.

More girls meant I had to find more ways to impress them. Until I could attempt the obvious.

Probably why the playwright was pimping himself onstage.

Both of us aiming to sound insightful and socially engaged.

Which I also aspired to for real.

I was going to be that kind of journalist.

I can't dismiss all my ambitions as just screwing and manoeuvres.

I do like to please people, though. And I'm good at screwing and manoeuvres and that pleases lots of people. Readers don't like insight, engagement, cleverness or any other brands of superiority. They want to feel better and wiser than what they're reading, but they're thick and have low self-esteem, so the bottom of the barrel is where I have to scrape to meet their needs. I worked that out early.

I got a job and made the readers happy.

Making readers happy is not a bad thing.

Readers like screwing and manoeuvres.

Pauline's friends in the ghastly Welsh pub, they were readers. They wanted Westminster gossip – no politics, only the hissy fits and sex. And they were delighted to hear that a minor TV star got guilty with a hooker, racked by the thought of his wife and kids, and please could he limit his one-night stand to a cuddle
and then a kip? Innocent. Except the hooker wakes up in the small hours and the star is ejaculating across her back.

I can't tell you his name.

Well, okay then. But don't pass it on.

They adored that. It brought the house down. Pauline something close to proud of me.

She has zero interest in politics. Another reason to marry her. No use washing it out of your work when you get it in your face at home.

I have opinions, of course. I'm not a vacuum. And to find what the readers want, I do have to keep informed. I'm not unable to see that citizens have been recast as customers in every sense and must be content with the act of spending and the blessed receipt of nothing.

Pretty nothing.

Passing trains.

The wider life in which it was at one time sexy to take an interest is not going well.

But I can't be expected to care. And I shouldn't attempt to make other people care, it just screws them up. It's too late for whining and discontent.

And noticing the ruin of others is the quickest way to ruin yourself.

‘Please could you?'

It surprised him that Emily didn't also embrace neutrality.

It was weird that the matter could even arise.

‘Please. You could go with me.'

Because he didn't talk politics with Emily, either.

I didn't want to fake things with her, impersonate a guy who's concerned about refugees, famines. She was smart, had a mind, and I never thought otherwise, but we didn't bother with everyday conversations. We were special. We were busy and beautiful and it would have been an ugly waste of time to disturb each other with crap from the front pages.

We gave each other peace.

So that evening with her was a shock. ‘You want me to go on a demo?' A small, nice shock.

‘You could. Mark. With me. You could.'

Demonstrations were fashionable amongst her contemporaries – they had been when he was her age, because they looked good and passed the time – but she had a passion here, too. She'd given matters thought.

Passions and thought in my absence.

Unreasonable to be jealous.

But I was.

But I was in glory as well, bathed in the joys of her having revealed herself in this regard, of her having asked for something, stated opinions.

‘It's wrong – things are all wrong. Once somebody's got more than they need, they don't need more.' Sincerity thrumming on her skin so noticeably that he wanted to lick her.

In fact, he did lick her. ‘That's a slogan, though, Sweets. And things are complicated.'

‘People say things are complicated when they don't want them to change. No one says heart surgery is complicated, so they won't try it – people want to be alive, so they do it.'

‘I think they do say heart surgery's complicated.' Her expression hardened against him when he mentioned this – even though he was smiling. ‘Or maybe not now. Maybe it's easy now. No, I know what you mean and that's good. It's a good metaphor. I'll use it.' He leaned himself towards the edge of offending her, bruising her principles, so that he could really feel how wonderful it was that she had them and how wonderful it was that she hadn't completely thrown away her degree. She'd told him that much.

Five or six weeks after we'd started and she'd wanted to be more to me maybe, to have a little past.

‘In sociology?'

After a deep kind of night.

‘Yeah.'

Her eyes had been very open and very concerned with his own.

‘Wow! Darling.'

‘Like you're surprised I got one.'

‘Like I'm – no – not surprised . . .' At which point he found himself losing any explanation that possibly her scuffle and drop between service jobs and periods of unemployment had struck him as unsatisfactory, in the sense of being not good enough for her. And it seemed even more a form of self-harm in the light of her having an, albeit laughable, degree. Her mum was a cleaner, her dad was shady and elsewhere, but she had a degree, the usual debt – more than the usual and something else to do with a grandparent's savings – and a degree . . . and a much older boyfriend who didn't want to sound at all paternal. Mark didn't want to suggest that her being with him was another indication of a reckless and damaging life.

‘You want me to be different.'

‘No, darling. No. My best girl's my best girl. Truly. You have to do what you want.' And he'd kissed her to break the conversation, kept on until they were silence and motion and nothing.

And I held her once we were done for so long that it appalled me.

Her later fixation about the demo had allowed Mark to hear himself repeat, ‘You have to do what you want.' Which was true for everyone. ‘And I have to do what you want and that's what I want. If you ask – and I like when you ask and you never have asked before, really – then I have to do what you want.'

She gave me a date and a time – an inconvenient date and time – when she would need me.

A breakthrough.

She was breaking through.

It was mainly gorgeous.

And she'd placed a minute kiss against his ear. ‘I would like it.' Sober and giggly and energetic. ‘I would.' This was Emily showing herself as a credible companion away from the bedrooms. She'd made a promise of ways they might be and he'd accepted it.

I think we both knew that.

‘But a demo, baby . . . Not a concert, or an opera, or the movies, or the zoo.' It occurred to him that he could only guess at the majority of her pastimes. She remained largely closed to him. ‘Or a club with naked ladies dancing that I would enjoy, but not as much as I enjoy you . . .' Kissing her in return across her stomach. ‘I haven't been on a demo since I was a student and that, as we're allowed to mention, is a long, long time ago.'

Emily had shaken her head like a woman who loved him and only couldn't say so because it was too much. ‘Not that long. And if you've done it once, then you'll know how.'

It made sense – drunks run their lives backwards: from unintimate intimacy to revealing commonplaces.

He'd had no intention of denying her, but he knew she would like if he teased her. ‘Say “Go with me, darling Mark, and make love to me first for at least an hour.” Go on.'

‘Then you'd have to stay the night.' She offered this as if it were an ordinary sentence and didn't scald his breath and then remove it. ‘Because we'd have to set out early. Please, darling Mark.'

Staying the Friday night with her and waking and getting the Saturday morning, too.

If I allowed it, then I'd want it again.

She would start to show on me and I'd like that and let it happen.

Sweet Emily.

I belong to sweet Emily. She's the girl who has broken me. Wide open. You could park your car inside my chest.

Watching her light while she rolls out this story about being kettled and the cops pressing in and it's turning a bit lairy before these kids – she called them kids – start up singing some daft protest song – I can't recall any protest song that wasn't a dirge – and the crowd laughs and the cordon pauses and it's clearly this golden moment for her, proof of something. Hope.

And I wanted her to hope.

My generation is at fault – not active like the one before it, not active like the one behind – and she tasks me with this slightly.

I don't believe that direct action makes any difference, but she did and it was lovely that she did.

Her expectations of happy change were as sexy as fuck.

Emily had kept on, more enthused than he'd known her, while he bled joy and horror invisibly into the sheets. ‘Please, darling Mark, and make love to me first. Yeah? Have I asked like you'd like?' She was becoming a woman he'd want in her entirety.

He could have taken out a full-page ad. A Sunday feature. ‘Yes, well, okay. Okay.' Her lips parted for him, still sticky with the
darling
that was him translated. His tongue tried to taste the word and failed, because it was given and gone. ‘You're a funny girl, bad girl. I'll have to plot like anything, so we can get away with that. Maybe Kempson will let me do colour on the anarchists, or the school kids, or something –
the reality of modern unrest.
He'll tell me what reality he wants: brave and sexy sixth-formers with compassion for the urban poor, or home-grown barbarians who want to piss on war graves and buy anthrax . . . Both . . .'

And this rushing, magnificent lurch in his thinking when he saw her frown, fully display her disapproval. At last.

Because opposition is a proper part of love.

Or maybe I was a pervert: finding a new source of desire because there was finally something I'd done that offended her. And, in recompense, I could utterly apologise, abase myself.

He'd made a point of kneeling, pressing his mouth to her ankles, her feet. Kissing for forgiveness, all bared skin and making himself plain. ‘I don't write what I believe, Emily. I should. Probably. But I'm not sure about that.' His words and good intentions at the soles of her feet, plump, grubby. He was being devoted. ‘Newspapers aren't something that people take seriously, not now. They're dying.' And hauling this, mining it from his bones, ‘I think you could teach me to branch out, though.' Nothing but sincere. ‘Maybe I could write a book.'

Nothing, but sincere.

A tingle racing the length of me when she accepted this and grinned.

Funny girl, bad girl, best girl.

‘And I'll have to be briefed by the Met – midnight updates, I'd imagine – midnight updates, I'll tell Pauline – so I wouldn't want to head home and trouble her when I'd only clatter off again at dawn . . . That would do me in, so I'd want to avoid it. I would have to stay in town. On site. What if something happened in advance of the main event and I wasn't there?'

‘You're good at lying.'

‘Ssssh. Not with you. Not ever with you.' This overtaking him for a while, driving him back into bed. Into Emily. Into his love.

Then he let her be and managed, ‘I'll get us a nice hotel for it. In Mayfair. Would you like that?'

She had changed and so could I.

‘I don't mind.'

‘A big bath. We've never been in a bath together.'

‘I don't mind.' But her eyes on him and apparently glad about it.

‘And, baby . . . If neither of us . . . We could meet early and have a room-service dinner and we could be just us and we'd make lots of love and I'd be as nice as nice to you and you'd be as nice as nice to me and, if you could, would you be able to not drink? Baby? Could you? For me? I'd like if you could be there for me. If I was very nice? I don't insist and it's not a problem . . . Emily? Could you be my sober girl? And we'll talk about what you could wear and . . . Could you not drink?'

As he finished, her eyes were cooler. ‘I could do that.'

She did sometimes lie to me.

Not that it wasn't his failure as much as hers.

We had to have wine with our dinner, we are grown-ups, that's what grown-ups do.

And we were grown-ups being as nice as nice, if not nicer.

While he took calls and checked his email she'd hold him. Occasionally she'd sip her wine.

One bottle between us and that was it. Extremely moderate.

Our perfect night.

We didn't sleep.

Any rush about joining the protesters evaporated in a long breakfast with crumbs on the pillows and their skin. They didn't get outside until noon and Mark's concentration was shredded with his body's protest, its missing her, yowling because he wasn't naked and clasping her wants.

‘Shit, I'm not . . . Do you mind if we back out a bit and get a long bead on it? We will join the parade in a while, but I've got to get my head straight. Okay, Sweet?'

Piccadilly was thick with marchers when Mark gazed beyond the hotel doors. He was slightly puzzled and slightly moved by the old-school brass bands passing, the embroidered union banners that kicked things back into the 1930s, or the 1970s – those little brackets between which self-respect had probably become a more widespread delusion. It was all making the hotel doormen nervous.