No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (2 page)

‘To go with the gold chains around your neck …’

‘I don’t wear gold chains around my neck …’

But of course she means ideologically. Ideologically he is
gross. A used-car salesman. An
arriviste.
A crap-watcher. His taste in towels proves it.

As does his taste in bathrooms. He would have liked a sunken bath. A spa system. A star’s dressing-room mirror, lit by a thousand winking bulbs. A Moorish tiled floor. Black silk blinds. And yes, yes, gold taps. What he gets is a Shaker chapel: plain white bath with its legs showing, hinges on the outside of the cupboards, tongue-and-groove walls, and communion cloths for towels.

But then he would have liked a penthouse or an apartment in a huddled mansion block to sink his Babylonian whirlpool in. Something with a Malibu terrace giving out on to the odours of the city, the fried food, the petrol fumes, the screams. Life. Life with a whiff of death in it. And what does he get instead? A whitewashed cottage on a village green in Dulwich. Dulwich! A garden. A wooden fence. Space. Death with a whiff of life in it.

So why doesn’t he assert
himself?

‘Ha!’ Ask her. She knows. ‘You may not think it,’ she tells him, ‘but you are living, in every particular, the life you want. That’s why you stay. It’s what you understand. This is the domestic universe you were brought up in – you and the rest of your sex. A mad woman with an eating disorder hidden away in the bowels of the house, getting madder every minute, while you complain, bang your forehead, and get on with your work. You couldn’t live any other way.’

Couldn’t he?

Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe his know-all painstaking feminist pornographer of a companion, Wittgenstein-the-Fucking-Wise, is right: this
is
the only life he understands. There’s a deranged woman concealed in the attic, the bedroom, the kitchen, the scullery, the hen-house; there’s a lunatic loose – wasn’t that the terrible unspoken truth that the men in his family had passed down to him through the
generations? He remembers his grandfather smiting his forehead whenever his grandmother opened her mouth. And didn’t his father do the same? Woman – mouth – speak; man – forehead – bang.

His father’s father’s brother, great-uncle Noam, used to rise from his rocking-chair, button up his waistcoat and leave the house the moment the mother of his children so much as gestured at him. As a young man he had enlisted to fight the Kaiser, took a wound in his knee and was photographed in gaiters. That gave him the right never to work again and never to be spoken to by a woman in his own home. Greataunt Isadora was permitted to clean for him, screw the heads off the chickens for him, raise sons for him, but not otherwise make a sound. Only let her look as though she might be thinking of saying something and Noam would put up his hand to indicate the desirability of silence, touch his head to denote the presence of craziness, and be gone limping through the door. Where did he go to every night? No one knew. Some said he had another woman. But who? A mute? Others claimed they saw him going into the local pub, and that he was known to sit over a single half pint of ginger beer and water, talking to no one, until closing time. Wherever he went, he went there every night of his married life for close to fifty years. And when Isadora died – with her lips sealed – it broke his heart. A month later he was dead himself. He couldn’t bear the loneliness.

Has he, Frank the crap-watcher, ever lived in a house, visited a house, heard of a house that doesn’t have a mad woman – a Mrs Rochester from whom you have to keep the matches, a Lady Macbeth from whom you have to hide the knives – sequestered away in it somewhere? These days it’s the keys to the drinks cabinet or the freezer you have to hide from them. The restaurant critic for his newspaper doesn’t leave for work until he’s marked the level of every bottle in
the house with a hair plucked from his wrist, and even then he has to ring home from whichever eatery he’s scoffing in at fifteen-minute intervals, just to boost morale. ‘Hang on, sweetheart. Back soon. I don’t know, soon. Soon! All right, but only halfway up. Good girl. Love you.’ The books editor is herself a woman, never at home except at weekends. But she can do as much damage to herself on a Saturday morning in the kitchen before sun-up as any conventionally crazed Hausfrau can do in a week. Frank knows the hubby. Come Friday evening he has to remember to take the light bulb out of the fridge. ‘It doesn’t stop her,’ he explains to Frank, ‘but it slows her down.’

Woman – mouth – drink; man – forehead – bang. Alcohol, cigarettes, pills, penises, ice cream – if it fits into their mouth they’re in trouble. What does Mel weigh right now? Six, seven stones? Fresh out of Belsen. Her friends all look the same. Big staring eyes. Sunken cheeks. Rickety, uncertain limbs. Down in Mel’s kitchen, where they huddle, heroin-haggard, with their backs to the fridge, complaining about noise and shaking with hunger, it’s like Battersea Dogs’ Home. And last week they were all the size of Oliver Hardy.

He knows she is putting her finger down her throat again. The usual tell-tale signs. Blotches on her neck. Sinks clogging up. The liver-coloured nail polish on the finger in question corroding. But he doesn’t crack on he’s noticed. Live and let live is his philosophy. Which only underlines what she’s been saying: a house with a woman going mad in it is a perfectly acceptable phenomenon to him. He couldn’t live any other way.

And she’s right about his work, too. The further back into his room he is pushed, the quieter he is required to be, the better his column gets. Coincident with the finger going in and out of Mel’s throat, comes the award – Broadcasting Critic of the Year. Except that it’s no coincidence.

But even a man who is living in every particular the life he wants can be pushed too far.

‘Funny how engrossing a domestic brawl is,’ he says to her, since they happen to have collided in the kitchen.

‘You’d call this a domestic brawl, would you?’

He realises he has blundered. ‘I use the phrase loosely.’

‘What phrase would you use instead?’

‘Forget it, Mel. I’m sorry I spoke.’

‘No you’re not. You’ve just said you’re engrossed. You’ve just said it’s funny how engrossed you are. What’s funny about it, Frank? Show me the joke.’

‘I didn’t mean funny in that sense.’

‘No. You never do mean funny in that sense. It’s a long time since there’s been any funny in that sense. I tell you, Frank, I don’t mind that we don’t fuck every morning. I don’t mind that we can’t talk to each other any more …’

‘You like it that we don’t talk.’

She breathes in. He’s interrupting her again. ‘I’ve just said,
I don’t mind that we’re not talking.
I don’t mind that we’re not fucking every morning. I don’t mind that we don’t have a friend or an interest left in common. What I do mind …

‘Is that I’m alive.’

‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘Stay calm, Mel.’

‘It’s perfectly calm around here as long as you keep your trap shut. You’re offensive. You’re an offensive individual.’

‘Whom do I offend, Mel?’

‘You offend me. Now will you shut the fuck up and be quiet. Will you shut your fucking trap when you’re in my company.’

She waits for a response. Apparently she has asked him a question.

‘Well?’

What can he say?
Yes, I will shut my fucking trap when I’m in your company.
For two pins he’d bang his fucking forehead and retire to the quiet of the local pub for the night. Supposing there to be such a thing left as a quiet local pub, one that’s not a discotheque full of kids sucking Mexican beer through a lime wedge. For two pins, if there were somewhere to go, he’d be gone.

‘What
do
you mind, Mel?’

‘I mind that you’re engrossed, as you call it. What are you doing being engrossed, Frank? Who do you think you are, a member of the fucking audience? Waiting to see what the mad woman is going to do next. What about you, Frank? What are you going to do next? What do
you
want?’

‘I want to know what else you mind, Mel.’

‘I mind that you don’t know what you want. I mind that you’re engrossed. I mind that you think it’s funny. I mind that funny doesn’t mean funny any more. When did funny last mean funny between us, Frank? That’s what I mind most, that we don’t play together any more, that there are no more jokes, that you’ve stopped making me laugh.’

Without any warning his eyes spring tears. His first instinct is to defend himself. Not make her laugh? Him? Broadcasting Critic of the Year for the very reason that he makes threequarters of a million readers laugh – aloud,
aloud,
Mel – every Sunday. But he knows what she will say. ‘That’s work, Frank. That’s what you do for a living. I’m talking about me. It’s
me
you don’t make laugh any more.’ And he knows he will have no answer to that.

He wonders if his tears might melt her heart. Might affect the way she feels. But what can they change? The fact that he doesn’t make her laugh any more? Can he cry her into finding him funny again?

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she says. ‘Upset that you’re not appreciated?’

‘I’m upset for you,’ he says. And he is. How can he not be? She has attacked her hair with kitchen scissors this morning. Cropped herself like a penitent; jagged into that dense dangerous jungle of dark-plum ripe-fig purple mane, where once, given half a chance, he would go burrowing for days at a time, led by his love for the aroma of strange fruits. Not enough hair now to provide cover for an ant. Moreover, she appears to have shed another fourteen pounds. Her short slut-schoolgirl’s skirt – into the likes of which, moons ago, it had also been his wont to vanish for long periods – soughs like an empty coal sack in the wind. You can irrigate a colon one too many times. She’s leaving bits of herself, scrapings, coils of intestine, in clinics all over London. And helixes of body hair all over the house. Nothing sprouts under her arms any more. Nor between her legs. Although she’s not a beach girl, never was a beach girl, she’s taken to shaving her pubes down to a minimal vertical strip, like a furry elastoplast or an exclamation mark. Uncover Mel’s once proliferous cunt today, and you find yourself staring into Hitler’s moustache.

She can’t stop plucking at her pores and clawing at her innards and hacking at her flesh. All because his jokes (he has nothing to say about her sentences – it’s not safe talking about her sentences) have dried up. How can he not be upset for her?

Easy. Mel knows how. By being more upset for himself. ‘You always were a sentimentalist when it comes to your sense of humour,’ she says. ‘All I have to do is tell you that you don’t have one any more and I can have you blubbering like a baby.’

And that’s what does it. After so many shut-the-fuck-ups and get-the-fuck-outs, this is all it takes to get him pulling out clothes from his wardrobe and stuffing them into a travelling-bag – her insinuation that he is incapable of feeling
for another person, her accusation that the waning of his comic gifts matters to him more than anything else, her considered opinion that his comic gifts
have
waned. He’s not a boy any more; he’s looking down both barrels of fifty. What does he have left except the capacity to enter imaginatively into another’s distress, and a sense of the ridiculous? If neither is in operation here, then he may as well be off.

Since the subject has come up, he also minds that she doesn’t mind that they are not fucking every morning. But only since the subject has come up.

And his machines?

To hell with his machines. She’s the silencer – let her keep them quiet.

H
E’S OUT. FREE
. Feeling fifteen, not fifty. Call me Kerouac. The greatest ride in his life is about to come up.

He’s over the river and on the Shepherd’s Bush flyover, following the signs to Oxford, before he remembers that he can make all the noise he likes, that he can have the soft roof of his Saab down
and
his radio on loud. Where has he been for the last half century? What has he been doing? His car’s ten years old and it’s got four thousand miles on the milometer. How many trips to Sainsbury’s is that? Where’s he been? He’s been at home, turning down the volume of his life.

Somebody honks him for hogging the fast lane. He puts up two fingers and goes slower. He’ll hog the whole fucking flyover if he feels like it.

A cargo of pimps and pushers in a beaten-up Mercedes overtakes him on the inside, yelling and pointing at their foreheads, just like his uncle Noam. ‘Shoot me then,’ he shouts. ‘Go on. A life for a lane. Go on – ram me!’

He’s in heaven. With Mel in the car he has to turn a blind eye to every automotive malfeasance, capitulate to every taunting horn. She doesn’t want to be taken out by some
drug-crazed road rager, thank you, just because his skin’s worn thin. Today he’s on his own and if there’s any raging to be done he’ll be the one to do it. He accelerates and pulls level with the Mercedes. Blows it a kiss. The driver takes one hand off his wheel and whacks off in the air. Miserable stumpy little spasmic strokes. A bleak working-class jerk off Frank hits his automatic aerial button, telescopes his aerial down, zooms it up; it whines like a dentist’s drill going into enamel, in out in out. Wanker? He’ll show them that where he comes from even a wank can be lordly. Then, in a single convulsion of speed, he Saabs past them, punching the air with his fist. The lone rager.