Boys and Girls (32 page)

‘Alan. Thank God. When you didn't come, I thought—'

‘No no. No need. All is well. False alarm. Amanda and Father Flynn – just flicking through a catechism. Moving sight. He's on top form, I must say. Oh – and she wished you every happiness in the world, by the way, Amanda. Just a bit too shy to tell you herself, you know what she's like. And Blackie, well … what can I say? Jigging up and down with excitement, he is – like a kid on Christmas Eve. Says he's the luckiest man alive. I told him he's right. And I know whereof I speak.'

Rather to his surprise, Susan stood up to face him. She was dressed and coiffed and radiant, he only now just realised: her beauty astonished him – again, again. The side of her face was now against his, in a crush and flurry of silk and scent. Alan felt the kick and lurch, a memento of his love. He was sad when she moved away, was no longer against and a part of him.

‘Now then, Susan. The other thing. Safe now, do you think? To let him out?'

Susan bit her lip and looked reflective. ‘Ah,' she said softly. ‘Daddy …'

‘Nurse said he'd had enough Christ-knows-what to fell a buffalo, but still I think you know – timing is all.'

Mm. Indeed. It was that, if Susan were to be honest with herself – which was always, surely, now the intention (from this day forward)? – that had, among a thousand other and lesser anxieties, been very much a factor to consider: the wisdom of Daddy being here at all. When first she had insisted upon it, she had possibly quite wilfully and childishly refused
to have truck with the depth of his condition. It was just that for her first wedding, her marriage to Alan, she had been so terribly eager to see it done – and the eagerness, in retrospect it hardly surprised her because that, well – that was her nature, that was how things had to be … but this is
Alan
we are talking about, good God in heaven. Why and how the headlong dash? What sort of urgency could he possibly have inspired in her? Well there. That is the trouble with facts, remembered occurrences – the rigid structures still standing in defiance after the dust and sparkle of all nuance has long since blown away. You cannot, as people say, argue with them (they must be faced) … and yet their underlying impetus is lost for ever: they are stripped of reason. Like, I don't know – Stonehenge, say: one can but marvel at this vast and static undeniable presence, while never understanding how it should be there. And Daddy, poor Daddy, I'd given him so little notice he of course just couldn't manage it. He said he would cancel his meeting in Barcelona, reconfigure the AGM (for this is the life he used to lead) and of course I said no – because there would after all be a lifetime full of Daddy, so where was the damage? He was so very handsome in those days – so virile and dynamic. Often browned by the glinting sun from when he fished for barracuda on his sleek and chartered yacht. So very capable and suave as his beautiful hand reached over for the bill in a wonderful restaurant where he was so well known at the close of yet another so very perfect dinner (the slim gold Patek-Philippe just subtly gleaming amid the equally golden hairs on his wrist). I saw him like this so few times afterwards – and then there came the first in a series of disturbing reports: his Bentley was found abandoned in Portsmouth – he was found sitting on a bench in a park not a mile away, determined
to see in the millennium from just the spot he had selected at the axis of a floral clock (and this three years before its dawning). He telephoned me so very very late one night to say that he had exchanged the Patek-Philippe with a mounted cavalier upon the moors for a bag of some sort of a savoury snack, though he thought not Twiglets.

And so, in the face of Alan's now wholly comprehensible incredulity, I flatly insisted that upon this next occasion, this brand-new wedding so many years later, that my Daddy should be there – and yes, to give me away. In the glow of the vision I had conjured, I saw myself – younger, even lovelier – and my tall and silver-haired magnificent father, whose tailoring and stature and profile would render all other men there akin to a scattered band of stunted bruisers, clumsy in hand-me-downs – he would offer me his arm and smile his love for me and send me with a kiss sweetly on course for a new and spectacular chapter. Yes well. The home he's in, they thought I was joking, much to Alan's fat satisfaction. And of course, even in the face of, oh dear – sanity, this made me more determined (it is hard, you know, being me all the time). They forced me to endorse every manner of release, the acceptance of all responsibility, the agreement to the considerable costs relating to transportation and accompaniment. And even as I heard the burr of the nib of the pen on the first of the documents – my Daddy's old Montblanc, as a matter of fact, roundly describing the loops of my name and ending with a flourish in the mark of Zorro – I tumbled to the stir and then clamour of warning. And then I signed the others.

‘Shall I, Alan … talk to him first? I wanted to go to him the minute he arrived, but … well. I didn't. Should I? What do you think? See him first? Before the actual, you know – thing?'

‘Well … there's very little time now. Of course – bride's prerogative to be late … but I have a feeling you know, Susan, that if ever your mantra applied … well then it surely does now.'

‘My …? What do you mean, Alan?'

He stooped and kissed her forehead.

‘'Twere well 'twere done quickly …'

Susan smiled in fondness and maybe resignation. She briefly touched his hand, and Alan was shocked to discover that this had so very stupidly thrilled him.

‘I'll get the nurse to decant him downstairs, Susan, and then I'll haul down old Blackie. Give Amanda a knock. See to the clergy side of things. One good side to us all just being here, though – we don't have to drive round and round in circles in Rolls-Royces and things, waiting for someone to turn up. Yes. Right, then? OK. Ready? Good. Oh yes and I forgot to mention – the flowers, they arrived, look marvellous. Bit late, but they're all here now. And, um … this, Susan …' and Alan was reaching into the wardrobe as he stuttered out this oddly difficult little bit – ‘this … this is for you.'

Susan gazed at the ball of palest pink old roses, flecked with gypsophila and trailing a ribbon of, oh – just exactly the identical shade. Her eyes dipped down and her shoulders were relaxed into maybe ease or a voluntary defeat.

‘Oh. Alan. I hate you …'

‘Right. No change there, then. Um – why, particularly …?'

‘Because my maquillage is perfect and if it all just runs and smears I shall look like a … well. I'll just look a mess. Thank you, Alan. Thank you.'

She kissed him soft and full on the lips, a sensation he barely remembered. He gripped her shoulders and tried not
to sob and so much wanted now just to rape her, here and at this very moment, to rip, tear into and spoil, ravish and repair this once holy union of husband and wife.

Stood there like a bloody statue until I thought I'd bloody become one. Alan, he'd popped his head in at some point earlier and suggested I might like a sit-down – bloody laugh that was. Done a really thorough job I had, with all the straps and buttons, but Jesus, when it came to the cummerbund – always an ally when a paunch is on the menu – I could barely get it to do up. And the jacket itself – could hardly believe it: not just the body of it, not just the fastening, but the sleeves, even the bloody sleeves! Thought they were going to burst as I was boiling like a pig and trying to stuff my big porker arms into and down the fucking things. Can't have been that long, can it? Since I wore a bloody dinner suit? I mean, am I expanding then conceivably daily? It's extraordinary, really. I mean to say, I look in the mirror, a fat man doesn't gaze back at me. Granted, the reflection is anything but gratifying – the real hair, the natural stuff, what there is of it – that's growing in like it had been paid to (white, but of course) and the punched-in darker little wiry knobs of it just sit there with resentment, not so much ever getting longer as fizzing out sideways like spat-out furballs. No – more the air of a pubic bush, really, randomly dispersed by a salvo of buckshot, then quickly flash-fried as crispy seaweed in the merest smidgen of corn oil. Hands are horrible – hanks of albino bananas, foxed like the pages of my second edition of Sam Johnson's
Dictionary
, and no doubt altogether as musty. Face, well – handsome once, it pains and amazes me to recall, now more akin to a gourd that a spade's just clanged into. So a relative
mess, it's fair to say – but not, strangely enough, a fat man. So is some malevolent goblin (and can there be another kind …? Doubt it, doubt it) sneaking into my wardrobe under cover of darkness and substituting all of my clothes for sets that have been similarly well-tailored, though with comparative dwarfs in mind? People, that is to say, even smaller than I? Or maybe they have been just deftly inserting the odd tuck here, taking in a dart or an inseam there – just sufficient to render me foolish and so damned uncomfortable that all I can do is just stand in the middle of the room like a bloody statue until I thought I'd bloody become one? And my arches, they were now strained in pain, my head just clinging on in fear to the guardrail of borderline giddiness. My bootmaker, idle sod – he says if I get easily used to these little beauties, then the next pair he might even be able to jack up that all-important extra inch, bloody deluded fool that he is. Can't he see that if he goes on at this rate I'm in danger of becoming not so much a pillar of a man but some sort of a Barnum's fairground attraction with my head rammed up into any passing chandelier and half my stature made up wholly of
shoe
. I tell you, if I can lift it without the aid of two strong men, next time I see him, this clown of a bootmaker, I'm going to get one of these patent numbers and clout the cunt round the skull with it: dead before he hit the floor. I'd send no flowers.

Couldn't tell you how relieved I was when Alan finally came to get me. I'd made sure I'd taken my puffers, scratched my neck into a lurid and pustulating smorgasbord (slathered all over it a cortisone cream) and swallowed all relevant pills along with a small handful more just to be on the safe side. I was as ready as ever I can be, and God I was grateful to him, Alan, for getting me down the stairs. I am, you know,
going to get those bloody architects of mine – one of them's a homosexualist, you only have to look at him, the other's barely more than a simpleton who still seems to worship Le Corbusier. Wanted to build me a conservatory along the lines of a cigar box, and jacked up on concrete stilts. Jesus, the only thing that should be that is me. You might wonder why I engaged them: I know I do. No, I said – I want one with a pitched roof and trefoil crenellations and bloody great finials, not to say glazing bars and pilasters. Close to tears he was, stupid bloody bastard. Just as well his nancy partner was there at his elbow with a lacy hanky. Anyway I am – don't think it's too late: going to get them to put in a lift. Escalator, maybe: there's an idea. And in the mornings, for coming down to breakfast, possibly a fireman's pole.

Jesus, though. When finally we were down on the ground floor and out the back and into the atrium, I barely could believe the sight that met me. An undulating battlefield – well yes, that was expected, but it was all loosely draped with thick and green sort of tarpaulins, stained and holed, can't describe them. Sort of thing you might in desperation sling over a house in a storm when the roof was blown to kingdom come. But Alan, I whispered to him with urgency (whispered, yes, because Amanda, she was there, swaying and goggling at me quite glassily, seemingly holding up or maybe leaning on a parboiled party with a pink-and-sepia clerical collar. Another man in white had a drooling old man in an unrelenting clinch, encouraging him to suck upon what appeared to be a dildo; all these people, do you see? So I had to be discreet). Alan – where are the rugs? What rugs, he said: don't know what you're talking about. The rugs, the rugs – I've got this collection of Persian rugs, some Turkoman, three Chinese, a
couple of dhurries, one or two runners: I
told
you about them. You never told me, he said – maybe it was Susan that you told. No no, I said – I wouldn't have troubled Susie with it, no no, I wouldn't have told Susie. And so I was left with the creeping and not unfamiliar suspicion that I had in fact told nobody at all about my collection of rugs, not a living soul, except of course for myself – out loud, yes, and no doubt repeatedly. Oh dear Lord. And it's not as if it's going to get any better, you see: that's the worry.

And that's when I felt it go. A sort of greasy slippage from deep within the ear, and then just the kiss of a draught. The plop it made as it then leapt away from me was the last thing I was destined to hear for quite some considerable time. Even though I caught the slightest glimpse of it from the corner of my eye as it hit the nearest hillock, bounced, rolled and recoiled like a stir-crazed Mexican fucking jumping bean, maddened with delight at its gutsy bid for freedom. I'm frantically signalling to Alan, but damn and blast him, he just won't look over – staring at the doorway – and me, well I couldn't move, well how could I? Jammed in the spot he'd dumped me. Things were grim enough already, but if my clothes were now suddenly to explode and I were to break a limb falling off my shoes in shock, then I think we might have on our hands a debacle too far. There are a couple of violinists over there, look – astounding, really, I hadn't seen them before … three actually, now I come to focus, seem nice women, and another one, a man, with one of those – what are they? Big violins. Those big buggers they pluck and carve away at with a thing. And going by the arm movement – Jesus, these women … seem intent on sawing the fiddles in half, and he, the bloke, he's no slouch either when it comes down to the old
in and out … yes, so there's probably music then, filling the air. And Susie's father – got to be him, I presume: there was no plan I was aware of to have more than just the one gaga and slavering derelict to attend this communion … he seems to be enjoying the tune: waving his arms about and singing along, conceivably, although it could be no more than a protracted yawn. His dinner suit seems huge on him, and there's yellow all down the front of it. Cello, is it …? Think so. Bass, could be. Priest person. He's come over to me now – patting my hand and beaming like a child (and the fumes, I can't tell you – something on a par with an industrial patio cleaner, strong and surgical, with a top note of maybe ammonia: Christ, he'd go up like a torch). So I have another half-hearted attempt to wave over to Alan – I can almost sense the stitching in the seams straining at their utmost to keep this impossibility together and intact – but he's rapt, you know, thoroughly entranced is how he's seeming … and I crank round my neck a bit, and then I see why.