Boys and Girls (4 page)

‘Rage. Resentment. Take many forms …'

‘Yes, I'm sure that's so. But not
Scrabble
, surely? Monopoly I could understand …'

‘You did say, however Alan, that he was away a good deal? Your father.'

‘Well – he went to work, if that's what you mean.'

‘Come, Alan – you really must help me if I am to help you. That is why we are here, after all. I have said this before.'

‘You have – you have, Doctor Atherby. You've said everything before. And God – I must have said everything about a thousand times over, but still we go round and round, don't we?'

‘Maybe here is the nub. Maybe here, Alan, is the nub. Round and round – but never penetrate.'

‘Am I to understand that we are now on to sex again? Or
would that be a word association too far? Could I, Doctor Atherby, have altogether failed to grasp the
nub
?'

I silently laughed myself silly while he did his half-blind impersonation and set to nodding his head off like a very superior toy in the back of a limousine – and none the less irritating for that. Then he battered blue murder out of his bristly bloody upper lip with that very ostentatious fucking pen he's got.

‘You don't, do you Alan …? Take drugs at all? I do ask from time to time.'

‘Drugs? No, Doctor Atherby. Not drugs, no. Alcohol – yes. Great deal of that. Nicotine, naturally: fine cigars. Caffeine – well of course. Oh – and the little blue ones that you give me, the pink of course. Susan, she gives me white ones, whenever she thinks of it. And didn't you just briefly prescribe those rather jolly red ones? Might have been Christmas time. I well remember telling you that you really shouldn't have. But apart from that, no. No drugs. Why do you ask, Doctor Atherby?'

‘You never feel the need to … escape? You never maybe felt it as a child?'

‘Oh God
yes
! Why didn't you say? Escape – oh Jesus yes. I've wanted to
escape
since the day I was born. Well actually – that's not quite true. On the day I was born, and I'll never forget it – not a day you would forget, is it really? It was a Wednesday, half-closing round our way, glorious sunshine, unseasonal for the time of year, everyone said so – on that day I terribly wanted to
de
-escape. Took one swift look around me and thought to myself oh dear me no – don't at all like the look of this lot, not one little bit: think I'll go back where I came from. Had a quick chat about it with my Mummy – the first of many of our little tête-à-têtes – and I could see it at
once – perceptive child – that she wasn't all that red hot on the idea, which was wholly understandable in the circumstances. Wouldn't you say? She'd had a hell of a day, after all. Because childbirth, well – never easy, is it? No sort of picnic. But apart from that one instance, from that day forward – oh God yes: escape, became my middle name. So there, Doctor Atherby: an early – post-natal, indeed – and deep desire to regress to the womb. We've that, at least. Something to go on, surely? Meat on the bone there, I should have said.'

‘Let's wind it up for today, Alan, shall we?'

‘Oh really? Oh blow. And just when the nub was looming.'

I could write a book about my parents, as a matter of simple fact, but I'm damned if he'll get to know even any little part of it. Not his business, is it? I don't honestly know why I still go on seeing him, bloody Doctor Atherby, except for the fact that it can be quite diverting. But all this digging around about one's
parents
 – totally absurd. I mean to say, my father – just a fairly all-round average sort of chap, I'd say. In insurance. And no he didn't really, well – talk to me, so to say. Take me to the park, kick a ball around; read to me at bedtime. Men didn't, not in those days, not really. Unless they were pretending to be enlightened – cravenly desperate to divert at least the worst of the animosity from a wild-eyed woman who was frightening them. And my mother? Normal, completely everyday. Never quite sure how she did fill in all the hours, to be perfectly honest with you. And Dad, he's dead now of course, though I couldn't even begin to tell you, really, what it was that he got up to while he was still alive. Didn't play golf, do the garden, collect things. No interest in travel, apart from hearing about it on the television. Never went in for sport of any kind – and nor was he a one for the pub or the ladies, only inasmuch as
he wasn't really a one for just anything at all – nothing I can put a finger on, anyway. Mystery, in truth – though hardly a beguiling one. So I couldn't, now I think of it, write a book about them at all – not unless publishers are suddenly in the market for very short and dull ones. No no – never mind them: it's Susan we ought to be talking about, if we're forced into discussing anyone at all. I mean – how did the two of us ever get together in the first place? Astonishing, really. I never paid her a lot of heed – thought she was out of my class, and of course she was: she is. On the plus side, I remember thinking (and all of this, it's just on fifteen years ago now – fifteen years, dear oh dear) … yes, what I did observe about her was that she hated, absolutely abhorred, chocolate, cats, soft toys and lip balm (didn't even have a thing about shoes) – and that, as far as women went, made her quite utterly unique, in my admittedly very limited experience. And that's a lie. My experience, I mean: wasn't very limited – hardly more than non-existent, it has to be faced. When we first met … and how on earth did we?
Where
did we? I expect she knows, Susan; I'm sure she remembers every single detail. Blank to me, though. Suddenly she was just sort of
there
, that's all, and she didn't go away. Anyway, I had this tiny little boxed-off room in the iffiest part of Kentish Town, over a kebab shop and a grimy old pub next door. There were a couple of tarts just along the landing, Zizi and Pearl, and up in the attic was Toe, a one-eyed Taiwanese drug dealer who spoke not one word of English and had a lucrative sideline in deviant porn … and so I just can't tell you how blissfully convenient it all was, having these long-standing and easily elastic arrangements with everyone concerned. But Susan, she dragged me away from all of that – had me installed in her cute little lavender
doll's house just off the very best stretch of the King's bloody Road. I was doing rather well in journalism at the time, which I've often thought I maybe ought to have persevered with, who's to say? Might by now be editing
The Times
. (And I do this, time to time – go thinking or saying something perfectly ridiculous like that: because I wouldn't, would I? Be editing
The Times
. Lucky to be cleaning their lavatories. Oh God – I really have to keep it in check, you know, all that sort of thing; get a tight grip.) But anyway – at the time, I wasn't doing badly.
North London Gazette & Mercury
 – they gave me every sort of column and feature and story to work on. My finest hour, in retrospect, was probably the agony page – I eschewed the customarily dogmatic and absolute responses of my peers in favour of a more liberal and open-minded approach, one where all the given angles and perspectives could be viewed simultaneously, the better to see that no cut-and-dried solution easily presented itself. The current feeling upon high, though, was that dogma should very much be the order of the day: they had to be sure they could foretell that predictability would soon and definitely be coming. But there were many more strings to my particular bow: I gave the readers advice and tips on any number of things – including (Susan laughed, but Susan would) interior design. And not just that, but gardens too – even what to look for when investing in a property. Many pointers were a given, of course – obviously one avoided anything described as ‘architect-designed' (and as opposed to designed by what, exactly? Greengrocer? Cocker fucking spaniel?) – unless of course one wished to inhabit a glasswalled refrigerator the size of a football field with nothing even approaching a curtain, with a ‘poured concrete floor' (I am not kidding), the damned Eames chair, the Corbusier
long bloody thing, a weirdo Noguchi table and a giant glass and spherical vase with an orange in it. Oh yes – and thick white candles where any normal human being might be more inclined to either a decent log fire or even an electric light. They weren't always five shades of white and glass though, these arrogant nightmares flung in your face by self-serving maniacs who all lived happily ever after in their eighteenth-century rectories. Once I remember I received a press release from some po-faced and deluded ‘wall-covering consultancy' (I tell you, I tell you: I am not horsing around here – this is gospel) which confided breathlessly that this season the new and must-have shades were to be ‘Noir and Cohiba'. In short, if you were fed up being blinded by the white and thinking of dickying up the old homestead, why not obliterate it under a bucketful of soot and crap? Well I took it upon myself to steer my readers away from all this nonsense: gave them the facts about three-piece suites, wall sconces, nests of tables, fireside rugs – things you want to live with. I got no sort of backing from the editor, though – I think I was too avant-garde for the times: he just wouldn't take the risk. (Yes: I know. Again, of course, I'm fooling myself. No – not fooling, just trying for my own sorry sake to cushion the blow. I know I didn't understand the first thing about it – I just thought, write about the obvious comforts, the unassuming reality, and you will sweep all before you. Well not, apparently. I wasn't, in truth, doing at all well in journalism. Was I?)

Ah well. Maybe a bit of all that has rubbed off on me, though, because I do quite like it – decorating, a little bit of home improvement, whatever they like to call it these days. DIY. Oh yes – here's a memory, here's a little something for Doctor bleeding Atherby: it's about my father. One time – I must still
have been a schoolboy – he came home from work on a Friday evening with a saw in his hand. What's that, my mother said. This? It's a saw, my father replied, perfectly reasonably (and certainly I was with him so far). And that, my mother said – what's that thing there? That, my father assured her, that, my dear, is in fact a hammer. Moreover, in the car there is timber: I have decided to fashion for us all a three-legged stool. My mother blinked: a three-legged stool? Had she heard him correctly? My father was nodding quite vigorously (he could have given Doctor Atherby a very good run for his money in the nodding department, my father could – always nodding away with the best of them, he was). Indeed, he averred: a three-legged stool. Why, my mother wanted to know now, must its legs number three, exactly? For the simple reason, she was told – and I remember his solemnity, whether genuine or feigned – that were there but two, it would surely topple over. Ye-e-es … came my mother's quite measured agreement – but I was thinking, you see, rather more on the lines of, well – four, you know (not to put too fine a point on it). I see, said my father quite coldly: well in the light of this barrage of quite ceaseless criticism I consider it the better part of valour to withdraw wholeheartedly from the entire proceedings; the subject is closed forthwith. And neither saw nor hammer was ever seen again. Strange though, isn't it? These small and silly things that you remember.

Anyway – I've done up the spare room.
Not
the spare room, though – not any more: it is now my oasis of peace. I humoured Susan – I do it a lot, much more than I care for, because I have to, I have to – and I just let her get on with it, extracting huge amusement from the singular inaptness of my referring to it ever as my ‘study' (because of course you
don't
, do you Alan my
sweet? Study? You never ever really have. Studied. Have you? Alan? My sugar). It is of no matter – she can call the damn room whatever she pleases. But for me it is now my very Valhalla: a place of bliss. And when, very annoyingly, she barged right in, and just at the very moment I had decided that of course all this dreadful and peachy paint simply wouldn't do at all, I had the brainwave of covering the thought by worrying her more than slightly – making her wonder if I am now truly on the verge of becoming quite unhinged. I do it from time to time – it amuses me to witness the quick light of fright leap up into her eyes – I am maybe a little more interesting, then – and anyway, it keeps her on her toes, as well as making for a degree of distance. I later on bought a couple of cans of deep French blue, very thick and luscious: this went all across the walls and ceiling and doors and skirting – all is now a Mediterranean blue. I have in there a powerful patio heater and a huge umbrella with a raffia fringe. When Susan was at work and Amanda still at school, I sneaked into the room a structural surveyor who assured me that the floor could support with ease the fourteen sacks of fine and golden sand that were due to be delivered the following morning, along with the smooth round pebbles (he gave me a look, of course, but I'm used to looks: I get them all the time). The deckchair is the traditional stripey kind – canvas, though, not a clammy vinyl – and I have a little fridge, for alcohol and ice cream (you can still buy the cones, I was gratified to discover). I was pleased too to be able to download from some strange website or other the most spectacular and evocative sounds – the wheeling and mewling of gulls overhead, the gentle rush of the incoming sea. A fan is there to supply a gentle breeze. And I am in there too, whenever I can be: my secret life – at last, it's a beach!

And when I'm in there, what do I think of? Slumped into the sling of the deckchair, I squint behind my shades, the soft warm sand oozing so very nicely between the toes of one foot, the other quite happy to be plashing idly in a shallowish paddling pool of cool, fresh water (and I am most assiduous in changing it daily). Well now there's a question. I simply am able to luxuriate in the moment: black-out thought, or try to – it's hard, of course, it's tricky to achieve, but I have to suspect that I am so much better at it than many more sentient beings. Susan, say – or practically anyone, really. And then I come to remember all of the things I have striven to forget … the time I was on a real beach, in Eastbourne, I couldn't have been more than ten years old (I think I might even have been seven or eight) and the donkey I was geeing up and so gleeful to be on top of, simply died beneath me. Sighed so curiously through his two great nostrils, and folded heavily on to the sand: briefly he sounded disgruntled, and then he made no sound at all. My mother was screaming at my father for letting me go on such a thing, and now look! Now look! Now look what's happened! I was quivering behind her skirts, afraid that the owner would have me up for murder. I then sat down and cried. Children were swarming and they prodded the dead donkey, the furious owner swatting and flicking them back with the flail of a bamboo goad. My father roared at the man quite briefly, and then he turned and stamped away. I sensed that my mother, she wanted to move us away from the scene of the disaster, but was worried that then my father would fail to find us. And so we waited, my Mummy and I, until it was dusk, but he did not come back. They tied all these ropes around him, and then they hauled him away (the donkey, I mean). That night in the boarding house, I shared my
Mummy's bed and he came in late, my father, and we heard him stumbling and banging about in the room next door that used to be mine. Something tinkled and then it tumbled, and then there was quiet. My Mummy told me that everything was all right – she hugged me closely, and I loved it.