No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (27 page)

‘Is she well?’ Meaning, he detects, has she forgiven me.

Something else Frank has forgotten. There was no fond leave-taking between the women. They went from clawing each other to death to icy detachment in a single movement. That’s if you can call three days and three nights a single movement.

‘Mel? Well? No, not well.’

Clarice scrutinises his face to be sure what sort of not well he is reporting. Then, having cleared it for serious ailments of the body, she says, ‘She always took things hard.’

Which is a bit soon for Frank.

He leaps to correct a false impression, to restore Mel to vigorous good health in the eyes of Clarice. ‘Mel takes things the way Mel takes things,’ he says. ‘When I say she’s not well I should add that she’s well enough to have booted me out of the house.’

But there’s no shaking Clarice’s complicity. ‘I bet you deserved to be booted out,’ she laughs. ‘Knowing you.’

Meaning, you bugger! Not meaning, poor Mel.

But what does he want? He’s turned up out of the blue on Clarice’s shop floor, Mel-less, you could say flaunting his Mel-lessness, with a face full of bad intentions – has he any right to expect Clarice, for whom this is a busy emmetwatching day, to launch immediately into an itemisation of Mel’s virtues? And what impossible standard of probity is he demanding of himself? Is he Mel’s little soldier suddenly, sent out into the world, fully-armed, to fight for her good name?

Funnily enough, as his nostrils progressively fill with Clarice, that’s exactly how he does see himself. Mel’s little warrior.

Clarice has to leave him for a minute. Elkin is beckoning. An emmet family needs help deciding between a medium seal on a rock and a large field mouse in a field. They prefer the medium seal
qua
seal, but aesthetically favour the colour of the cord from which the large field mouse hangs. Easy. Clarice changes the cord for them while they watch in a stupefied hush. Unties the knots, re-threads the cord. Look, ma, a woman re-threading a cord! Frank sees how showing customers her cunt was the logical next step for Clarice.

He, too, watches in a stupefied hush. She is, after all, now he can see more of her, showing signs of wear. She flaunts a shorter skirt than she used to – the regulation callisthenics tunic of the new woman – but her flesh is not as confidently in charge of itself as it was. The wrong sort of dimpling is at work. There is vein activity afoot. She is being undermined,
from the inside. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Soon she’ll be asking for just five more years. Maybe she’s already started the negotiations.

Smelling her death on her, Frank is aroused. It isn’t morbidity that does it, it’s pathos.

Frank has always possessed the gift of seeing all women in the one woman. In Clarice, bent over the counter wrapping slate, her skirt tight across her flesh, but her flesh no longer tight across the bone, he re-acquaints himself with all the mortally sad girls of his life. His grandmother, who was scarcely older than he is now when she died, though she seemed an aged and worn-out woman; his mother, whose fate it is to be nudged forever gravewards by him – here I come, mother, treading on your heels, faster, come on, faster; all the fat nebbishy keife he lifted off the streets of Droylesden in the days of the great white ynaf hunt; all those hysterical foreign students with their St Vitus cunts; poor poor self-depilating Mel. Can any of them look to him for recompense? Is there any way he can make amends? Yes. Tonight he will give himself to Clarice as a way of saying sorry to the lot of them. All for one and one for all. If one cunt is every cunt, then he has it in his power to kiss that long continuum of sad girls better, doesn’t he? – down on your knees, Frank, tongue out, for one last all-embracing act of lingual expiation.

‘Look, I can see you’re busy,’ he whispers to Clarice. ‘Is there any chance I can see you tonight?’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘The Poldark.’

She whistles through her teeth. The Poldark’s always difficult because Elkin’s always there. Stupid of Frank. He should have remembered. And besides, everyone knows her at The Poldark. She can’t just slip upstairs and slip back down
again, fatter by however much Frank pumps into her, not in The Poldark.

Obstacles. But only
obstacles.
It comes back to Frank, on a warm tide of fond and forgotten pleasure, how wonderful it is to be in the company of a woman for whom there are only obstacles, never compunctions.

Compunctions lead invariably to a power struggle. Argument. Persuasion. Rhetoric. Whereas an obstacle is a partnership thing. A mere hindrance you can overcome together. Which they do. She will slip out of the flat. Late. After twelve. Elkin won’t hear a thing. He’ll be out cold, snoring through his beard. Height of the season fatigue compounded by extreme emmet exasperation. But she won’t risk The Poldark. She’ll meet him up on Deadman’s Point. Say, twelve-thirty. By the bench. Just watch your step. There’ll be a moon, but watch your step anyway.

Frank knows better than to ring Mel on his mobile and say, ‘Guess where I’m off to tonight.’

But it crosses his mind.

Now he understands what Mel means when she complains about the noise he makes. If there were anyone he could complain to,
he’
d be complaining about the noise he makes. He can’t hear himself scheme or regret, he can’t hear his own counsel, he can’t even hear himself think twice, above the boom of his agitation.

How to get through to midnight plus thirty? See the sea? No, the sea must not be pre-empted; the sea is for tonight. Lunch? Crap on a paper plate. Crap with chips. No again. If he eats he will drink, and what if drink affects his enthusiasm for Clarice? Fortunately he has some crap-watching obligations to attend to. They’ll take care of the afternoon at least. Where would a man be without his work?

He returns to his room, stretches out on the Iron Maiden,
which is what The Poldark means by a single bed, and surfs the daytime telly. On every channel a twenty-two-stone woman is being reunited with the child she abandoned at birth. The child too is now a twenty-two stoner. So it’s true what they say: it’s in the genes.

The cameras go gloating over the ruined features of the studio audience. Not a mouth that’s still. Not a chap that hasn’t fallen. Faces like messed-up jigsaw puzzles, every one of them. Frank’s too. He’d like to dry his tears but he is afraid that if he puts his hand to his face he’ll find his oesophagus where his eyes should be.

He can’t go on watching. He is overcome with grief and guilt, and therefore self-disgust. He is supposed to be a critic not a person. But he knows that if he switches off he’ll only be swapping one sort of agitation for another. And at least what’s on the box is impersonal. Species-shlock. The mess we’re all in together. As opposed to the mess he’s individually cooking up for himself In about … how many hours … ?

Why
is
he so tense? What is he doing indulging such agonies of anticipation. It’s only Clarice, for God’s sake. An old family friend.

Treachery, is that it? Going behind Mel’s back?

No. He’s done treachery. Besides which, he’s a free agent. You can’t go behind the back of someone who’s denied you her front.
(And
might be granting it to someone else, newer, younger, nicer, quieter.)

Going solo then, is
that
it? Going solo where previously he’d gone à
deux?

No. He’s done solo, too. Slipped in while Mel had her face averted. Only the once, but he’s done it.

That only leaves the dick. Following the dictates of the dick, one last time?

Forget it. The dick no longer dictates to him. In so far as the dick is in the picture, he dictates to it.

So why the breathlessness?

Why?

He falls asleep with the crap still churning. Out like a baby; one minute taking no shit, the next taking whatever his unconscious throws at him. He’ll be lucky, the state he’s in, not to be sucking off Kurt again. When he awakes it is evening. He can hear the bar going. The laughter of locals. Virna expostulating. A Ceilidh band.

He carries his soap and towel down the passage, showers, shaves, sighs, and goes downstairs. Elkin is nodding in his corner, snapping the hinged lid of his pewter tankard in time to the music. He enjoys a Ceilidh band. Virna less so. A band – any band – takes from the attention she is here to receive. She is wearing a purple satin shimmer suit to go with her complexion and raises one leg behind whenever a man kisses her. Strictly according to the Miss Manners Book for Wayward Bodmin Matrons. Mel would be proud to see her still going strong. It’s all about when you time your run. Mel and her friends tore the field apart in their early days. Now they sit dried out in the knacker’s yard, extruding their colons, preparing to become dog meat. While Virna, who kept her ankles together until she was fifty, is moist and full of running.

She espies Frank and calls him over. Frank’s here. ‘Lo Frank. All right? A drink for Frank. He hesitates. Does drink improve him or deplete him? He can’t remember. That’s how long it’s been since he had a midnight cliff date to keep.

He asks for water but doesn’t drink it. He doesn’t want to be peeing into the sea all night.

The Ceilidh band is the usual baffling mix of pixie men in frayed cardigans and woolly hats, and beautiful strong-jawed women with perfect teeth. The men thump timbrels with
knobbly sticks. The women raise faerie pipes to their lips. And blow. Back in their caravans the beautiful strong-jawed women submit to the unwashed knobbly men and have their babies. Why?

One of the tympanists reminds Frank of Hamish. Cheltenham Hamish. His maybe son. He has a similar way of hugging his chest, between tunes. And is studded and padlocked in all the same places. Funny how quickly that adventure in paternity came and went. D’s fault, strictly speaking. It was she who put the case, from the available information, for everything being domestically
comme il faut
with the Brylls. Kurt, Liz, Hamish – and they all lived happily ever after. Very well, then. Who is Frank to worry, one way or another? Obviously, he is not the fathering kind. If he was the fathering kind he’d have fathered above board ages ago. He sees it now. There’s an Einsteinian dimension to it. It is all about the way you regard your dick in time. Fatherers choose to have the dick over and done with. Been and gone. Dick – seed – child. Job finished. Non-fatherers, amongst whom Frank must from this day hence number himself, are more forward looking. They are not ready yet for consequences. Time is curved, so they may yet fuck themselves back into their own boyhood, never mind Hamish’s. Now’s then and then’s now. The game is still afoot.

See what the promise of a night on a bare mountain can do.

Which reminds him. Time to go. It may only be ten-thirty, but what if Clarice decides to make an early run for it herself? He has learnt from Mel that women have a far lower patience threshhold than men. How many street corners has he lingered on until three, four in the morning, until the dawn breaks, on the off-chance that his date for seven o’clock the night before had missed a bus or got the time
confused? You gave a woman every chance. You gave your dick every chance. But in the days when he was meeting Mel at corners she’d be gone if he wasn’t at least thirty minutes early. She wouldn’t even look up and down the street. No Frank? Get fucked, then. I’ve got better things to do. And she was off. What if Clarice is the same?

A cold, ironical bitch of a moon surveys him as he clambers up to Deadman’s Point. Fireflies flash in the gorse. Adders slither out of his way. The sea holds its breath. No Clarice. Good. She can’t have come and gone already. He stretches himself out on the bench and stares back at the moon. They know each other well, Frank and Selene. She’s seen him through many a humiliation. Fifty years’ worth. Though she might be said to be carrying her years better than he is carrying his. She stares him out. He blinks first. Then blinks again. Then nods off Old guys need a lot of rest.

He half-wakes to a pain in his chest. Oh no. Not that. Not now. Not here.

But it isn’t that sort of pain. It’s more exquisite. More precisely located. A pectoral pain. A mammary torment. A burning of the nipple. And what’s this ‘a’? It’s two burnings – a fire in each nipple. Excruciating. As though he’s giving suck to twins.

But twin what? Twin adders?

Fanged, whatever they are.

When he opens his eyes he sees that Clarice is on her knees before him, an expression of intense comic concentration on her face, her fingers in his shirt, squeezing. A vein twitches in her neck. Moonlight elongates and Egyptifies her nose.

‘Hurt?’

(What does she know?)

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

(What
does she know?)

‘Why good?’

‘Your punishment for taking so long to come back and see me.’

(She is at play. She doesn’t know anything.)

He tries to sit up, to kiss her, but she uses her weight to keep him down.

‘Uh, uh,’ she says. ‘Mel wouldn’t like.’

Fancy her remembering that. Coming out of the cottage bathroom, half way through day two of their indecorous spree, Mel had found them on the floor playing conventional missionaries and savages, conventionally blowing down each other’s throats. Given the unconventional journey they had been on together, the three of them – losing souls, not saving them – this spectacle had struck Mel as a betrayal. ‘If you’re going to start that,’ she’d complained, ‘I’m out of here.’

Frank had immediately snatched his mouth from Clarice’s mouth and returned it to her cunt, where it gave no offence.

At a level below the pleasure of the pain, Frank is irked by Clarice. Twice now, in the course of the few sentences they’ve been able to exchange, she’s invited him to join her in scorn for Mel’s queer rectitude. As though there’s a freemasonry of insouciance that Clarice believes they share, as though she’s addressing a fellow free spirit. As though she can assume that when it comes to a shoot out, Frank is on Clarice’s side against Melissa.

But by God it’s something to have a sharp-nailed woman tear your nipples off beneath a sneery moon.