Ménage (20 page)

Owen found the drinks table and got a Beck’s. Stared round, looking for Dot. He located her, finally, amid a group of young trendies. The way she laughed then suddenly withdrew and they reached to touch her. The way she shook her head and told them, no doubt, that she hadn’t had a creative thought in years, and they laughed out loud, thinking it a very witty reply from a Turner Prize-nominee.

Fifty feet away but he did not want to interrupt. He tried to distract himself with the art on show but it was all that new politically correct form of racism, the ‘real voice’ of ethnic others. Photographs from Afghanistan of families covered in some kind of authentic ethnic mud/blood-like goo. He glanced up but she was gone again. He heard her laughter and glimpsed her hair in the midst of an increasing circle.

He texted her. ‘Talk to me. I’m by bar.’

And waited. Some woman in heels had come up to him and told him that she followed his reviews, but didn’t he think he was maybe just a bit too cynical?

Dot texted back. ‘Bored out of my fucking tits. Am in back.’

The woman told him she’d studied postmodernism and thought him rather reactionary, almost existentialist in his diagnosis of what was fake and real in modern culture. He apologised for having to text.

‘Am being accosted by freak. Save me. XXX’

The woman said she found many of the things he said unduly negative, in fact the only reason she read his reviews was cos she found him a truly sad nihilistic individual, and he represented everything she despised. He shrugged his shoulders, apologised. She threw her drink in his face.

People moved away. Embarrassed. Thankfully no one that had a name.

He moved to the back, mopped himself down. No text from Dot. The PR person came and apologised, asked if there was anything she could do. He told her this was not the first time. Another Beck’s would be fine.

He waited ten minutes and there was no sign of the beer or of Dot.

He texted her. ‘See you back home then.’

It wasn’t going to work. Art and Dot and him. The whole thing – nostalgia, nothing more. The daily reality eating away at the memory and the reality was that over the years Dot had become a player; no matter how much she resisted her success, it had branded itself on her. This woman tonight was not the Dot he knew.

‘They’re so square – and you’re so smart and funny, we won’t do it again.’

She was sorry – it’d been wrong for them to see all of her old artist friends so quickly after getting together. She’d sensed he found it hard to fit in, she was sorry she hadn’t had time to introduce him to anyone. She was drunk and gigglish. ‘People,’ she laughed, ‘I don’t hate ’em, I’m just happier when they’re not around,’ quoting Saul. She was really drunk. Two fucking hours it had taken her to come back.

‘C’mere, grumpy,’ she said. But when they had made love he had been too overbearing, too needy, and she had been unresponsive to his needs, too drunk to fuck. He had finished selfishly with no care for her. Saying, ‘I’m fucking you, I’m fucking you.’ Afterwards there had been the silence. He asked what was wrong.

‘Nothing, I was just thinking . . . I heard Molly moving round. No, it was nothing. She’s so restless here. Forget it.’

‘You sure that’s all?’

‘It’s nothing, forget it.’

She rolled away and turned off the bedside light, leaving a space between them.

‘HOME HOME HOME!’ Molly screamed. It was well past nursery time and she was sitting in a mess of clothes she’d
pulled
from the boxes; three of her pictures were lying torn on the floor.

‘NOW NOW NOW!’

Owen didn’t want to tell Dot how to manage her child but she was doing it all wrong.

‘Oh baby, I know, but we can’t go back now, they’re showing people round and you hate it when strangers come marching through your house, don’t you?’

‘HOME NOW NOW!’

Dot was trying to placate her with her Hello Kitty dolly, which was immediately thrown to the floor.

‘Just a few more weeks, baby, and we’ll have a lovely new place.’

That was it. The little brat stared at her mother, took a deep breath and held it.

‘Now stop that,’ Dot said, throwing Owen a worried glance. ‘C’mon, don’t be bossy-breath, you know Mummy cries when you do that.’

Molly closed her eyes and crossed her arms, puffing her cheeks out.

‘Please, baby, stop that, it’ll make you sick.’

The kid’s face started turning red.

‘Ohmigod, this isn’t fair, I know you miss the old house, but we can’t stay there forever.’

Owen had grown increasingly aware of how Dot’s patience was being strained. Truth was he didn’t want her to get a new place, and would come up with any number of subtle criticisms of her planned homes just to postpone the possibility of her moving on. It would only be so long till she worked out his little strategies.

Molly knew. Her face started turning purple. Dot was in a panic. Grabbing her arms, shaking her. What the hell can I do? thought Owen.

‘Molly, stop that, you’re going to faint, stop that!’

Slap her, that’s what Owen would have done, or walk away.

The kid’s head dropped forward and Dot screamed, catching her.

‘My God! Molly! Molly!’

Owen leaned forward to help take the kid’s weight.

‘Don’t touch her, she’s done this before, I know what to do. God, how did this start again?’

Dot laid her dead-looking child down on the floor, started whispering and kissing her.

‘OK, OK, we’ll go and spend the night there, OK? In the old place.’

Miraculously the kid breathed again. The whole thing had been a ruse.

Owen stood there like a fool, useless and resentful that the child had not only got her own way but expressed her irritation with him, his flat and plans. Molly was on to his postponement tactics and suffering because of them.

‘Could you just leave us alone for a minute?’ Dot said on her knees in the midst of the mess of teddies. He stepped away down the hall and looked back at them both framed in the doorway. They looked like refugees, desperately hugging each other. Don’t shut me out, Owen thought. Whatever it takes to stay together, I’ll do it.

*

It had been a particularly cold February and Saul spent most of it in a drunken coma, rereading his
Beyond Good and Evil
, dressed in three layers with the bar fire on all day and night beside his bed. I sensed that his drunkenness was due to his suspicion over my affair with Dot. Certainly he’d become more averse to her presence, failing to even attempt to make a start on the text she’d asked him to do for the
Bug
show.

— Don’t bug me with your bugs. I’ve enough in my bed as it is! Go back from whence you came! Back to your
parents
! First-class airmail, to the bloody turret, to the menstrual hut you must go!

For days he had been seeding references to her parents into his every sentence, leading her to think that the plan for a visit was her own idea.

— Fuck you, she shouted back. — If you ever met my father you’d be shitting yourself.

— Try me, he replied.

I could do nothing to stop it – the gauntlet had been thrown down and the showdown arranged. Dot paid for the taxi to St John’s Wood and said there would be lots of free booze because her mother was an alcoholic. She intended to blag or pinch another eight hundred from Dearest Daddy she said (Saul having pissed away all of the last amount Dot loaned him), but she seemed completely oblivious to Saul’s plan to dump her there and escape debt-free. Images of what would result if I refused to go flooded me: Saul would be alone with the father, whispering profanities like ‘Don’t you agree, we could do with another Falklands to keep the number of plebs down?’ He’d vomit on their chaise longue as they sat down to tea and cakes and accomplish his plan, with Dot being placed in care that very night. I was caught in the middle again, fearful of exposing his deception to her, but equally anxious of her finding out that Saul had been scheming in my ear behind her back. Why I had not stuck up for her and ceased doing his dirty work, I did not know. I decided to accompany them to defuse the situation.

I’d done my best to dress smartly for the occasion wearing my pinched Oxfam suit and best pair of Docs. There was no polish so I shined my shoes with margarine. Saul had been playing Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
in preparation and emerged wearing his SMOKE CRACK WORSHIP SATAN T-shirt. Dot on seeing this decided to outdo him and put on his COCKS SUCK T-shirt. A petty game of radical one-upmanship ensued, with Saul, quite unexpectedly, taking
the
opposite tack and selecting his stolen Armani, while Dot went for red torn fishnets and that thing she’d recently shoplifted that she called a skirt that I would have described more as a belt, Saul’s army boots and another layer of the mascara added to the accumulated remnants of the last week’s. Also in competition seemed to be the amount of alcohol they could consume before even setting foot outside. I sensed that seeing her well-heeled parents might be unsettling for her.

The taxi turned the corner onto a row of huge St John’s Wood mansion houses. While Dot paid and tipped the man we decanted and stood in the drive before the vast edifice. There were at least twelve windows with almost medieval-looking frames, and trees and flowers of every imaginable variety as if the place was a botanic gardens; the lawn was a long-abandoned tennis court and there were his and hers BMWs in the drive. An irrational fear of the wealthy overcame me. I registered something similar on Saul’s face.

— Home sweet home, Dot said as she staggered to the doorbell. The woman who answered was not at all what I expected her mother to look like. Short and olive-skinned, Portuguese or South American.

—
Hola
, Pilita, Dot chimed. I’m just popping in for a bit. Daddy’s not here, is he?

— No, Miss Dorothy. Away till Tuesday.

— And dearest Mamma?

— In Italia to Friday, you not get message?

— Of course, good, good, off you go then, you’re excused.

It was a surprise and somewhat scary to witness Dot as an affluent young brat, bossing around the Third World slave. So she had known all along that her parents were away. I started to sense that Dot had another kind of surprise prepared for us. She led us along a corridor lined with images and certificates of her father’s glory. Trophies and awards,
framed
certificates and memberships of this prestigious club and the next, photographs of groups of men in suits.

— As soon as she’s gone, we’ll steal the booze, Dot whispered.

She gave us the guided tour with an exaggerated posh voice. There was an almost feudal castle-like stairway straight out of
Brideshead Revisited
; teak bookshelves lined with every imaginable psychology text and mini-busts and sculptures of Greek philosophers.

— Of course, Daddy is from a long line of respected psychiatrists, specialising in the neuropathology of women. I was one of his most difficult cases!

She seemed to relish how uncomfortable she was making us feel. She led us along a corridor lined with framed photos. Mostly of herself, always in the centre of the picture, looking like a boy, serious and androgynous, in an all-girls’ school, at a sports club, always with awards and certificates. Photos of her with her father’s proud hand on her shoulder, the mother nowhere in sight. She seemed top of every class. The hall was like a hall of fame, like they’d built her up to succeed at everything she ever tried.

She caught me staring and pushed me on.

— Over there’s the west wing. When I had my episode, I had my deathbed there. They really thought I was going to die.

I hoped to hell none of this was true and that she was just playing a game with us. She winked at me. I could not tell if she was just making this stuff up.

— Charming, Saul muttered. His plan had completely backfired and he seemed almost scared. She led us into Daddy’s study and sat in his leather chair at his big desk, flashing her torn fishnet crotch. The entire place looked like a facsimile of Freud’s original.

— I think it all started because he’d stopped sleeping with my mum, and then I got boobs and he started freaking
out
. I tried to make them go away by not eating but it only made it worse. He’d have preferred a son, I think. The three of us drove each perfectly insane. Poor Daddy.

Saul tried to ignore her, his eyes were fixated on what looked to be a stuffed badger. Saul pulled his finger back swiftly from the animal, as if bitten.

Dot laughed at him.

Pilita called goodbye from the front door and within seconds Dot declared that the mayhem should commence. She spun round in her daddy’s chair, went into his desk drawer, leafed through his many credit cards, and pocketed one.

— What shall we spend it on, boys, a pizza or a prostitute? Purge or binge?

Many questions were troubling me about her past and her present incarnation. Saul loved stories of the aristocracy and their debauchery, but I could tell he had never come this close before. Dot ran out of the room and we were alone.

— We should go, I said.

— Don’t be a chicken, he replied, — this is all quite perversely fascinating.

Dot returned with a bottle of vodka, some glasses and a huge pack of duty-free menthols and threw Saul a packet, then another, teasing him, I could tell, making him reach for them and pick them up from the floor. She poured us both huge shots of vodka.

— But . . . what are we actually doing here? I asked. Saul was staring at the huge vodka bottle.

— You’re not afraid of a little bit of transgression, are you? she laughed. — Come on, boys, I have a surprise for you.

The scene that was unfolding was a little too like one Saul had told us about the Duchess for my comfort. 1920s New York – an orgy in a rich man’s Upper West Side mansion. Artists and aristocrats naked and crawling in blood, semen
and
broken glass. Saul was too busy lighting a fag to notice my appeals for his intervention. Dot left the room and I caught her at the corner, and whispered, — What’s going on?

— Oh come on, I told you I’d have my revenge, let’s just see how much he can take. Shh, he’s coming.