The Beard (5 page)

She stepped from the shower and, grabbing a towel loosely around her torso, opened the door to see Ah-Lam looking moderately startled. Amy stood there, a puddle of water gathering at her feet, lather slowly trickling down her head and shoulders, her eyes not entirely devoid of rage. “Ah-Lam,” she said with a degree of hesitation. Her new housemate hadn’t seen her quite like this before and probably wasn’t relishing the terse treatment she was receiving. “What’s wrong?”

Ah-Lam looked embarrassed. “Your phone,” she said, pointing towards Amy’s bedroom. “It keeps ringing and ringing. I thought it might be important.”

At that moment, Amy tuned in to her bedroom, only to hear her phone ringing again and again. “Thank you, Ah-Lam,” she offered with as much retrospective grace as she could muster. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”

She knew exactly who it was. It was her mother – a woman who refused to call the house phone, “As you never know who you’ll end up speaking to.”

Amy’s mother assumed that anyone who lived in a protracted house share beyond university was on an inevitable path to singledom or lesbianism. She also believed, quite earnestly, that any unanswered call must indicate that her daughter’s undiscovered body lay half-naked, surrounded by blood. Historically, she’d even received a reprimand from the local police for calling them when Amy hadn’t answered her phone within the set amount of rings. In response, she never stopped calling, safe in the knowledge that if her daughter was, indeed, alive, she’d answer or someone would alert her to the increasingly frantic calls – as had happened with a slightly distressed Chinese exchange student.

Amy was perfectly happy to ignore the phone but, given the imploring eyes of her new housemate,
she became conscious that she should answer it. She stomped off to her room, leaving soapy footprints up the hallway.

“Mother, what do you want?” said Amy as soon as she answered. She stood in the middle of her room, wet, shivering and trying hard to keep shampoo from bleaching her eyeballs.

“So, you’re alive,” came the well-to-do voice from the other end of the line.

“Yes, I am. I was in the shower. You interrupted me having a shower. So I’m going to call you back when I’ve rinsed my hair, OK?” Amy had learned from bitter experience that a short, sharp approach with her mother garnered more efficient results, however brutal it may appear.

“No, you’re not,” her mother said, matter of fact. “I’m just calling to tell you about Claire’s wedding. It’s in two months and they say you haven’t RSVP’d. So I said that you were coming and that you’d be plus one.”

“Mother!” Amy shouted in breathless exasperation. Mentally, she ran through all the ways she could get out of attending her cousin’s big day. The silence was a sufficient giveaway to a mother well versed in these techniques.

“Time’s up. No excuses, so you’re coming. Oh, and when I said plus one, I meant one that was born with an actual penis, not one that’s had one grafted on.”

“Mother, I’m not a lesbian and, as far as I know, lesbians don’t graft penises onto themselves in order to have sex.”

The reply was immediate and said with a hint of concern: “And how do you know what lesbians do?”

Amy stood in her bedroom, shaking with cold and wondering why she was having such a conversation. She glanced up and saw another of her flatmates enter the bathroom, lock the door and turn the bath taps on. Knowing that she wouldn’t be able to rinse her hair for a considerable amount of time didn’t enhance her mood.

“How do you know they attach penises to one another? Did someone give a talk about it at the WI?” came Amy’s waspish reply.

There was a considered clearing of the throat down the phone line. “That’s quite a vulgar prospect. I sometimes think that living in the city has made you coarse, young lady. Your father told me, if you must know. Apparently, there’s a Polish barmaid working in the pub. She told him.”

“Right…” Amy uttered by means of resignation. The prospect of her father having such conversations was of no consequence compared to a soapy head of hair.

“Why not bring this Tom you’ve been talking about
? Are you still seeing him?” Amy’s mother enquired gently.

Amy sighed. It would come as no surprise to discover that her mother had concocted this entire wedding just to meet Tom. She’d mentioned him a few times, but had wisely kept the details limited. As such, her mother was hell-bent on finding out more. The most successful method she’d discovered so far was to assume that Amy was still single and gay, and hope that her protests would reveal yet more information.

“If he isn’t busy then, yes, I’ll ask him,” Amy said joylessly.

Silence at the other end of the phone indicated total focus from her mother. This was a promising revelation. Not since Amy’s school days had she met a
boy that her daughter was dating. This was big news. “That would be nice,” she replied, trying as hard as possible to sound indifferent.

Amy knew that her mother would be biting her lip, ready to scream with anticipation and excitement. “Well, like I say, if he’s free, I’ll ask. But he goes away a lot to see family, so he may have plans.” She was well versed in laying the foundations for forthcoming disappointment. It was one of her fortes.

A silence separated mother and daughter, both still fixed to a phone. Suddenly, Amy’s mother, Judith, drew breath. “Well, I’ll go now and leave you to your shower, but don’t forget September 20th. You need a decent outfit that doesn’t make you look frumpy, as well as your man, a smile and a gift. A hat would also be nice, but I know how strident you are about looking pretty. Enjoy your shower. Kisses.”

Whereupon the line went dead. Amy threw her phone onto the floor and stamped her foot in irritation. “Piss off!” she said, spinning around.

“Sorry,” said Ah-Lam, with a look on her face that said, “I’m going to start flat hunting as soon as I leave this room.”

“Oh no, not you, Ah-Lam,” said Amy, reaching out to apologise. “My mother! My mother!” Whereupon Amy, some 5ft 7in, stood towering above Ah-Lam and mimed taking a gun from an imaginary holster and blowing her head off, adding, “Mother!” by means of clarification.

Ah-Lam looked back, somewhat terrified, and attempted a smile. “Your post,” she said as she returned to her room, slamming the door with some gusto.

“Brilliant,” said Amy as she looked down, only to see that the standard bearer for her day’s post was a credit-card bill. “Just brilliant!” She slumped onto her bed and shivered.

Tom sidled into Derek’s office and lingered by the doorframe, half in, half out. He stared at Derek, who was behind his desk, transfixed on his computer screen. His boss looked fairly calm and collected, so Tom ruled out that he was looking at porn. He was sure he was safe from being “invited” to view yet more depravity.

“What do you want?” Derek asked without looking up.

Tom was momentarily caught off-guard. He’d stood in the doorway contemplating whether to go in and speak to Derek. As he hadn’t made his mind up, he’d assumed that he was undetectable. He’d stood in position, running through what he was going to say, so he hadn’t expected to be spotted. “Hmm?” he managed, as if woken from a sleep.

Derek didn’t look up from his screen. Instead, he repetitively tapped keys on the keyboard, as if he were entering the same letter or number over an
d over again. “You’ve been hovering around for ten minutes and it’s beginning to piss me off. What do you want?”

Tom wandered in as casually as he could manage, unaware that it had been ten minutes. With no windows open, the stench of “man musk” in the room was fairly overwhelming, if not distressingly familiar. If Derek was right and this masculine aroma was an elixir to attract others, Tom was sure that he’d be feeling some stirrings at the very least. Instead, he felt queasy and suffocated.

“Oh, nothing,” he said nonchalantly. “Just mulling over some features and articles – you know, the usual.”

Derek
continued his monotonous activity without once glancing up. “OK,” he mumbled. “Close the door on your way out, there’s a good lad.”

Tom duly obliged and backed out, closing the door behind him. He stood against it and sighed. There’d surely be many other opportunities, but each one spurned gained a momentous significance. Tom spun around to face his desk and stared at his screen. Pictures of enlarged chemical compounds greeted his return. The company designers had tried to make an article on chemical compositions interesting but, put simply, they’d failed. Tom’s job was to write about the compound in a way that would make the man in the street understand. It wasn’t a job he relished.

“You alright, mate?” Carl had spun his chair around and was staring at Tom over his screen. “You seem a bit distracted.”

Tom looked up without any conviction. “Sorry, mate,” he replied wistfully. “Just can’t be arsed today, you know? I keep thinking about this leaving do.”

They both sat in unhappy contemplation. “Well, that would depress anyone,” Carl offered.

“You bringing your wife?” asked Tom. Carl’s wife had only been seen once. She’d shocked everyone by being Carl’s polar opposite. Whereas he was flash and always into the latest fashions, she was a stay-at-home, down-to-earth character. Fugly, everyone had agreed.

“Probably,” Carl replied without irony. He liked to perpetuate the myth that he had a bevy of women at his disposal. The guys were never sure just how much of this was guff and what was truth. He’d been a “playa” before he got married, so it was entirely possible that it’d continued. It was widely felt that he’d married just to keep his family happy – an arranged marriage of sorts. He was coming to an age when his family saw his philandering as inconsistent with the morally upright Asian community to which they all belonged. As such, and out of the blue, he’d got married. But less than six months later, talk of other women had started up again.

Their first baby, Carl Jnr. (a family tradition, he said, rather than a narcissist’s cry for help), had arrived only a few months ago. His extra-marital activity seemed to have dwindled, although this wasn’t due to increased child-rearing duties – they were undertaken exclusively by his wife, Fadila. It seemed that Carl’s sole job, as a father, was to visit people to collect credit for inseminating his wife. Much of the glory he duly accepted was for the very child-rearing that his exhausted wife was doing. As such, and as much as everyone liked Carl, there had always been an element of disquiet about the way he was treating
her. Carl wasn’t so vain that he didn’t pick up on this. He’d often cite the situation as a “cultural interpretation”, giving a compelling case against anyone who believed that he was having it easy. He’d once argued that he never got to spend time with his child and was merrily seen as the cash machine of the family. His impassioned defence of the situation had quelled any sense of disharmony. He would proceed to ruin it, however, by detailing his exploits outside of marriage. This didn’t sit well with his persona as a victim, and took the sheen from the image of an injured-innocent.

That said, as a co-worker, he was relatively hard working and decent. Someone you could happily spend time with.

“You bringing Amy, then?” he enquired, picking at the loose skin around his nails.

“Probably,” Tom shot back deliberately.

“You can always bring a friend if you don’t want to bring her,” Carl replied delicately.

Tom had spent his life surveying the horizon for warning signs. Every walk home after a night at a club was done so in the expectation that some homophobic attacker lay in a bush or around a corner. Every hint, suggestion or intimation that could be interpreted as a reference to his sexuality was picked up on instantly and addressed with calm but sure handling. As a result, he was known to be over-sensitive and touchy, to the point of neurotic. Finding the balance was always difficult.

As such, he seized on the “friend” comment. Was it loaded? Was Carl alluding to something or merely stating the obvious? Tom wasn’t sure and didn’t want to give anything away, so he took a deep breath and sighed slowly. “I could, I suppose.” He glanced up quickly at Carl, who was taking an unhealthy interest in his fingernails, causing some to bleed. “If I bring a female, I’ll have questions to answer, and if I bring a mate, Derek will be on at me all the time, saying I’m gay.”

Carl nodded judiciously. “And if he did?” he asked innocuously.

Tom knew that he was now in uncharted and potentially dangerous water. This was a small office. Whatever society says about women as gossips, it overlooks a well-hidden but universal truth – men gossip far more. Any chink in his cast-iron armour now would open the gossip floodgates. He knew that his next words had to be chosen without panic and delivered with conviction. Evidently, words had been exchanged.

It was readily accepted that Carl was always the last in the chain to find things out. Tom knew straightaway that this had been flowing for some time and that the source of this gossip bubbled up elsewhere. As such, he needed to ensure that whatever he said – which would flow back to the point of origin – was sufficiently commanding.

“You’re right. I don’t give a shit what he thinks about me, but can you imagine all the jokes? It’s bad enough now. Besides…” he said, fiddling with some papers on his desk and looking disinterested, “I’m always being dragged to Amy’s work parties, so it’s her bloody turn to return the favour!”