No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (7 page)

‘Do you see a future with this woman?’ Frank asks, once it is clear he must ask something.

‘An erotic future?’

‘I just meant a future. But I suppose eroticism enters into it.’

‘I want five more years of erotic life. With Sara. I’d settle for that.’

Five years, Frank thinks, of Sara sitting on his face and crying. He could have got that with the Swede ages ago. Or with Mel, come to that, speaking figuratively.

Five years. We’re into that phase. Just give us five more years. That was what his father reckoned he would have settled for at the end – just five more years. And he was seventy.

Frank wants to know something. Will there ever be a time when you are happy for it to be over? Not five more years or
five more weeks or even five more minutes. Stop now! Case closed.

Silly question.

They walk to a Chinese restaurant, where Josh has a regular table. His own wine. His own won ton bowl. His own chopsticks. Frank imagines them being locked away in his absence like private snooker cues on a rack in a snooker club. They used to play together in Oxford when they weren’t fucking. Now he has an image of Josh at full stretch over the table, trying to pot the pink with a ten-inch stick of ivory. ‘Can you get extensions for those?’ he asks.

Josh takes this to be an allusion to their earlier conversation. His chin recedes. ‘You think an extension might be the answer?’

Their eyes meet in a sort of silent toast to old mirth. Unspoken between them is the realisation that if they let the same amount of time elapse before they meet again they will be seriously old men when they do. Older than Frank’s father was when he died, wanting just five more years.

Josh orders them crispy Woodstock duck, over which he remembers to ask Frank what he’s up to. But he starts to go sleepy, slide down in his seat, drown, as soon as Frank starts to tell him. Frank’s own fault. He won’t return the compliment. Won’t open his heart. Won’t say how much he earns. Won’t say who he loves. Won’t make a little floating picture of Mel’s bum with his hands. Though Christ knows there’s a good enough reason for that – Mel no longer has a bum.

They go back to the gallery for decanted port. Raise glasses. Exchange cards. Before Frank realises that there’s not much point handing over a card with your address on when you don’t have an address. ‘Let me give you my mobile number instead,’ he says. ‘More reliable.’

He needs a new card, with only his mobile and his car registration numbers on it. Frank Ritz, gipsy.

Oh, and of course his e-mail. But for the bad dreams, Hamlet could have boarded happily in a nutshell. Why shouldn’t Frank be bounded in a laptop and count himself a king of infinite space?

Before he goes he asks to have a last look at the Matthew Smiths. Take a bit of fleshly hope away with him. While he’s looking and wishing, it occurs to him that the only paintings on the walls of Josh’s gallery that don’t show a nude on a bed show nudes in a bath.

‘Josh,’ he says, ‘where are the landscapes?’

Josh smiles. A long melancholy smile that seems to go all the way back to the intense seriousness of boyhood. ‘These
are
the landscapes, matey,’ he says.

S
O WHO’S IT
to be next?

If this is what reunions with old friends are always like, he’s ready for more. Wheel them on.

He’s stayed away from old friends as a matter of principle since he became old enough to have old friends. As a matter of Mel’s principle, that is. Other than when it comes to crap-watching, Frank has no principles. Principles are Mel’s territory. Don’t look backwards, she is always telling him.
Was
always telling him. It unsettles you. And you do it out of the worst of motives. There are only two reasons why you ever want to see an old friend: you either want to suffer or you want to crow.

Living with Mel has been like living with an Old Testament prophet. She denies him every pleasure.

And foresees only disasters.

Well, Mel too is now the past, an old friend as of five days ago. He has got through a working week. Had his laundry attended to in a farmhouse bed and breakfast on a stubbly field just outside Shipton-under-Wychwood, and faxed in his weekly column via laptop and modem from a country house hotel in Burford. So far, touch wood, he has eaten
well, not got too drunk, and kept his dick in his pants. Not that, touch wood, anyone has invited him to take it out.

Touch wood.

He left Oxford after two nights in Summertown. Sleeping badly. The retrospection gang keeping him awake. Since then he has been trying to get into the Cotswolds proper but has been restricted to the margins by holiday crowds. On a rough calculation, he hasn’t ventured more than five miles from the A40 since he was booted out of his home. Not his fault. Twice he has tried to find a hotel room in Bourton-on-the-Water, but everything is taken. August, the girls at the desk tell him, shaking their heads. He knows it’s August, but what he doesn’t know is why August should affect Bourton-on-the-Water. The Venice of the Cotswolds they call it, on the strength of a couple of man-made streams and a bridge. A sign points to a bird-park in Bourton-on-the-Water and another sign points to a place where you pay to see a model of the village you’re already in, otherwise it’s heritage and has-been shops. Has there been a sitcom set in Bourton-on-the-Water? Unable to park his Saab, unable to find anywhere to sit for lunch, unable to get a room, Frank stands in the middle of Bourton-on-the-Water and scratches his head. He is the only person not wearing shorts. Is there something wrong with him? Wherever there is a blade of grass someone wearing shorts is lying on it. The village is so crowded there are people wearing shorts lying on the road. What happened to the idea – prevalent when Frank was young – that you went to a beach if you wanted to lie down in the sun? What happened to driving to the coast, parking by the sea, eating sandwiches in your car and staring at your death in long trousers, as a way of spending August?

Such questions are driven by serious professional considerations. Already, and there are another three weeks of August
still to be negotiated, he has come within a single advertisement break of missing an early-evening programme it was imperative he watched. Bourton-on-the-Water – no room at the inn. Lower Slaughter – no room at the inn. Stow-on-the-Wold, Moreton-in-Marsh, Bourton-on-the-Hill – forget it. ‘I’ll pay you,’ he offered at last, ‘just to let me sit on the edge of someone’s bed and watch their telly for half an hour.’ No go. He went so far as to count out money from his wallet, notes, the stuff itself, rubbing them together to release their irresistible odour the way you do when you’re asking a bellhop to turn a blind eye in downtown Panama City. Money talks, sister. Not in Stourton-in-the-Mire it doesn’t. ‘What about the telly in the lounge?’ Fine, so long as the programme he wants to watch is an Australian soap. They’re in there as well, lying about in their shorts, watching Australians in
their
shorts. Is this where they get the idea from? Do they think they’re in fucking Melbourne? In the end it was a lay-by on the A429 that saved him. Roof up on the Saab, Hitachi running on its batteries and his laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter. Not good reception, but at least a moving picture. And a fond old sensation of misbehaving in a motor.

So who
is
it to be next?

He tells himself he’s taking time around the peripheries of the Cotswolds because they suit his temper. The yellow of the stone – the yellow of his dying sun. The misty distances of the slumbering hills – the story of his fitfully rumbling life. Their calm reserve – his extinguished fervor. But in truth he is slowly, inexorably, nudging towards Cheltenham.

Where there are ashes to stir. Who knows, maybe even coals to poke.

His heart is leaping in his chest. The bones of his cheeks ache like ice. His eyes sting. He can’t speak. He can barely
breathe. He opens his arms. Arms are opened to him. In he goes. All the way in, all the way back. Everything blackens and fades – his trespass, his sorrow, the years.

Kurt!

Frank!

He holds on. Is held.

Is she there?

The question that spoils it every time. Is
she
there?

Liz!

Frank!

He can’t keep it just between the two of them. Never could. Neither of them could.

Try again.

Kurt!

Frank!

Hold still. Hold very still. The time before her. Boys. Boys on backs. Boys on backs in summer parks looking up at sky. Aeroplanes, one a day, maybe fewer, pure white in the clear heartbreak blue, like the future. Where will you be? Where will I be? Boys boating. Boys rowing, knee to knee, on creaking seats. Fingers skimming the water, gloves of seaweed, mermaid’s oily tresses. Who’s down there? Boys on lakes, boys in gardens, grounds of stately homes, ruined monasteries, abbeys, priories, castles, smelling time. What will you do? What will I do? Boys waiting.

Is it only about girls? Even when it’s about chemistry sets and telescopes and chest-expanders and boxing-gloves and bikes and skates and buses to sites of ruination is the waiting only ever really about girls, birds, keife, nekaiveh, polones, call them what you like?

‘I’ve been waiting to be in love all my life,’ Kurt admits, on a train they have taken to Harrogate, to find love in the rose gardens.

They are fourteen and haven’t found it yet.

Frank can’t call it love. What he’s been waiting for all his life is an affair. ‘It’s a shtup I’ve been after, Kurt.’

‘But that’s what love is, you berk,’ Kurt corrects him. ‘Love is a shtup.’

‘Who’s the berk? I’m talking about shtupping
outside
love. Cruelty and possession; the sacred terror – all that stuff. I’m talking a walk on the wild side, Kurt.’

‘A walk on the wild side? Do me a favour. Where’d you get this shit?’

‘Morecambe.’

‘Morecambe! When were you in Morecambe?’

‘When I was six. I was there on holidays with the deelos. We were stuck in a boarding house. It parneyed the whole time. There was nothing else to do, so we just sat around in the breakfast room all day, doing jigsaws. Four o’clock in the afternoon we were still scoffing corn flakes and sorting straight bits. There was this geezer staying there at the same time. A Spaniard or a Turk or something. He had a sort of semi-shvartzer keife with him. Thick lips, huge Hottentot aristotle, but totally shtumm. They’d come down for breakfast, then they’d go back to their room. Then they’d come down for more breakfast, then they’d go back to their room. All day, up and down. But whenever you saw them he’d have his hand on her Gregory Peck. Not on her shoulder but actually
round
her neck, pinching it between his thumb and his fingers. The only time he took his hand away was when he needed it to butter more toast, and then you could see the marks on her.’

‘And she didn’t object to this?’

‘Of course she didn’t object to it. That’s how they do it over there.’

‘In Morecambe?’

‘In Africa, shmuck.’

‘So what are you telling me? That you’re looking for some
dumb shvartzer with a huge aris who’ll let you pinch her black and blue?’

‘I’m telling you that every time they came down into that breakfast room I felt my kishkes go klop…’

‘Listen, boychick – stop moodying me. You were probably just hungry.’

‘Hungry? I was eating six breakfasts a day. Lonely was what I was. Lonely and longing. I saw what the Turk had – I saw the look of devotion in the keife’s mince pies – and I longed to be looked at like that.’

‘And that’s what you call the sacred terror?’

‘Yep.’

‘You’re a sadist, Frank.’

Better to be a sadist, Frank thinks, than a shmuck. But he doesn’t acknowledge this to Kurt. To Kurt he denies the charge. ‘I was six. How can you be a sadist when you’re six? I just knew I wouldn’t be happy until I had a keife of my own to hold by the neck.’

‘Only you couldn’t find one.’

‘’Course I couldn’t find one. I was fucking
six,
Kurt. If I’d found one I wouldn’t have been able to reach the neck.’

‘Because
you
wanted a big girl.’

‘Like you don’t, all of the sudden?’

In sight of Harrogate station, Kurt caves in. Sure, that’s what he wants. That’s what they’ve come to Harrogate for – to find a couple of big girls. Zwei shtarker keife. Big in the sense of grown-up. Grown-up in the sense of knowing that you go to a rose garden when you are looking for love.

And the miracle is – they find them!

It’s Kurt who does the pulling. This has never been discussed between them but the assumption is that as Kurt has the looks of the hour – a sallow Elvis complexion, easily-hurt Elvis eyes, something Red Indian somewhere in the genes – he should be the one to bait the hook. Once the
catch is landed, Frank gets his chance. Jokes, risks, nobbels, fannies, moodies, lunges – whatever it takes. Since they haven’t done this many times before, they don’t know what it takes.

One of the girls is exceedingly tall, one isn’t – that’s the first thing Frank notices. The second thing he notices is that Kurt has angled for himself the one that isn’t.

‘Thanks,’ Frank whispers. ‘So I still don’t get to reach the neck.’

‘Forget the neck,’ Kurt whispers back. ‘Just concentrate on the tits.’

But it’s a moot point, as even Kurt concedes, whether Frank will be able to reach the tits either.

They sit on the grass and lie about their age. Kurt says he is in the army. Frank is reading psychology at Basle University. Soon he will explain their dreams to them. The girls are nurses. Soon they will make Kurt and Frank better.

Frank wonders whether the tall one might not even be a matron. She has an otherwise-engaged look about her. One eye on an imaginary drip. Whereas the short one is bleary, and looks dumbfounded. Lucky old Kurt. Dumbfounded equals performance – isn’t that the received wisdom? You can be finished with the dumbfounded before they’ve realised that you’ve started.

Kurt hands around the snouts. Army supplies. ‘An army marches on its lungs,’ Frank says. First joke.