Us (3 page)

And why should she? Jake the trapeze artist was a man who stared death in the face, while most nights I stared television in the face. And this wasn't just any circus, it was
punk
circus, part of the new wave of circus, where chainsaws were juggled and oil drums were set on fire then beaten incessantly. Circus was now sexy; dancing elephants had been replaced by nude contortionists, ultra-violence and, explained Jake, ‘a kind of anarchic, post-apocalyptic
Mad Max
aesthetic'.

‘You mean the clowns don't drive those cars where the wheels fall off?' asked Connie, her face a stone.

‘No! Fuck that, man! These cars
explode
! We're on Clapham Common next week – I'll get you both tickets, you can come along.'

‘Oh, we're not together,' she said, a little too quickly. ‘We've just met.'

‘Ah!' nodded Jake, as if to say ‘that makes sense'. There was a momentary pause and to fill the gap, I asked:

‘Tell me, do you find, as a trapeze artist, that it's hard to get decent car insurance?'

The percentage varies, but some of the things I say make no sense to me at all. Perhaps I'd meant it as a joke. Perhaps I'd hoped to emulate Connie's laconic tone through raised eyebrow and wry smile. If so, that hadn't come across, because Connie was not laughing but pouring more wine.

‘No, because I don't tell 'em,' said Jake with a rebellious swagger, which was all very anarchic but good luck with any future claims, big guy. Having steered the conversation to insurance premiums, I now dolloped out the tuna pasta bake, scalding the back of Connie's hands with fatty strands of molten Cheddar, hot as lava, and as she peeled them off Jake returned to his monologue, stretching across me for more booze. To the extent that I'd ever thought about trapeze artists, I'd always pictured slick, broad Burt Lancaster types, smooth and brilliantined and leotarded. Jake was a wild man, covered in luxuriant body hair the colour of a basketball but still undeniably handsome, strong-featured, a Celtic tattoo encircling his bicep, a tangle of wild red hair gathered into a bun with a greasy scrunchie. When he spoke – and he spoke a great deal – his eyes blazed at Connie, passing straight through me, and I was forced to accept that I was watching a blatant seduction. At a loss, I reached for the rudimentary salad. Doused liberally with malt vinegar and cooking oil, it was my sister's rare culinary gift to make lettuce taste like a bag of chips.

‘That moment when you're in mid-air,' said Jake, stretching for the ceiling, ‘when you're falling but almost flying, there's nothing like that. You try to hold onto it, but it's … transient. It's like trying to hold on to an orgasm. Do you know that feeling?'

‘Know it?' deadpanned Connie. ‘I'm doing it right now.'

This made me bark with laughter, which in turn attracted a scowl from Jake, and quickly I offered the acrid salad bowl. ‘Iceberg lettuce, anyone? Iceberg lettuce?'

The tuna pasta bake was forced down like so much hot clay and Jake's monologue continued well into ‘afters', an ironic sherry trifle topped with enough canned cream, Smarties and Jelly Tots to bring about the onset of type 2 diabetes. Connie and Jake were leaning across me now, pheromones misting the air between them, the erotic force field pushing my chair further and further away from the trestle table until I was practically in the hallway with the bicycles and the piles of
Yellow Pages
. At some point, Connie must have noticed this, because she turned to me and asked:

‘So, Daniel, what do you do?'

Daniel
seemed close enough. ‘Well, I'm a scientist.'

‘Yes, your sister told me. She says you have a PhD. What field?'

‘Biochemistry, but at the moment I'm studying Drosophila, the fruit fly.'

‘Go on.'

‘Go on?'

‘Tell me more,' she said. ‘Unless it's top secret.'

‘No, it's just people don't usually ask for more. Well, how can I … okay, we're using chemical agents to induce genetic mutation …'

Jake groaned audibly and I felt something brush my cheek as he reached for the wine. For some people, the word ‘scientist' suggests either a wild-eyed lunatic or the white-coated lackey of some fanatical organisation, an extra in a Bond film. Clearly this was the way Jake felt.

‘
Mutation
?' said Jake, indignantly. ‘Why would you mutate a fruit fly? Poor bastard, why not leave it be?'

‘Well, there's nothing inherently unnatural about mutation. It's just another word for evolu—'

‘I think it's wrong to tamper with nature.' He addressed the table now. ‘Pesticides, fungicides, I think they're evil.'

As a hypothesis, this seemed unlikely. ‘I'm not sure a chemical compound can be evil in itself. It can be used irresponsibly or foolishly, and sadly that has sometimes been the—'

‘My mate, she's got an allotment in Stoke Newington; it's totally organic and her food is beautiful, absolutely beautiful …'

‘I'm sure. But I don't think they have plagues of locusts in Stoke Newington, or annual drought, or a lack of soil nutrients—'

‘Carrots should taste of carrots,' he shouted, a mystifying non sequitur.

‘I'm sorry, I don't quite—'

‘Chemicals. It's all these chemicals!'

Another non sequitur. ‘But … everything's a chemical. The carrot itself is made of chemicals, this salad is chemical. This one in particular. You, Jake, you're made up of chemicals.'

Jake looked affronted. ‘No I'm not!' he said, and Connie laughed.

‘I'm sorry,' I said, ‘but you are. You're six major elements, 65 per cent oxygen, 18 per cent carbon, 10 per cent—'

‘It's because people try to grow strawberries in the desert. If we all ate local produce, naturally grown without all these chemicals—'

‘That sounds wonderful, but if your soil lacks essential nutrients, if your family's starving because of aphids or fungus, then you might be grateful for some of those evil chemicals.' I'm not sure what else I said. I was passionate about my work, felt that it was beneficial and worthwhile, and as well as idealism, jealousy might also have played a part. I'd drunk a little too much and after a long evening of being alternately patronised and ignored, I had not warmed to my rival, who was of the school that thought the solution to disease and hunger lay in longer and better rock concerts.

‘There's easily enough food to feed the world, it's just all in the wrong hands.'

‘Yes, but that's not the fault of science! That's politics, economics! Science isn't responsible for drought or famine or disease, but those things are happening and that's where scientific research comes in. It's our responsibility to—'

‘To give us more DDT? More Thalidomide?' This last blow seemed to please Jake hugely, and he broadcast a handsome grin to his audience, delighted that the misfortunes of others had provided him with a valuable debating point. Those were terrible tragedies, but I didn't remember them being specifically my fault, or my colleagues' – all of them responsible, humane, decent people, all ethically and socially aware. Besides, those instances were anomalies compared to all the extraordinary developments science had given us, and I had a very clear mental image of myself high, high in the shadows of the big top, sawing madly at a rope with a penknife.

‘What would happen,' I wondered aloud, ‘if you fell from your trapeze, God forbid, and broke your legs and a massive infection set in? Because what I'd love to do, in those circumstances, Jake, what I'd love to do is stand by your bedside with the antibiotics and analgesics just out of reach and say, I know you're in agony but I can't give you these, I'm afraid, because, you know, these are chemicals, created by scientists and I'm very sorry, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to amputate both your legs. Without anaesthetic!'

I wondered if perhaps I had overplayed my hand. In hoping to sound impassioned I had come across as unhinged. There had been malice in what I'd said, and no one likes malice at a dinner party, not open malice, and certainly not my sister, who was glaring at me with custard dripping from her serving spoon.

‘Well, Douglas, let's hope it doesn't come to that,' she said weakly. ‘More trifle?'

More distressingly, I was not acquitting myself well in front of Connie. Even though we'd spoken only briefly, I liked this woman very much and wanted to create a good impression. With some trepidation, I glanced to my right, where she remained with her chin in the palm of her hand, her face entirely impassive and unreadable and, to my mind, even lovelier than before as she took her hand from her face, placed it on my arm and smiled.

‘I'm so sorry, Douglas, I think I called you Daniel earlier.'

And that – well,
that
was like a light coming on.

I think our marriage has run its course
, she said.
I think I want to leave you.

But I'm aware of having gone off on a tangent and wallowing in happier times. Perhaps I'm casting too rosy a glow. I'm aware that couples tend to embellish ‘how we met' folklore with all kinds of detail and significance. We shape and sentimentalise these first encounters into creation myths to reassure ourselves and our offspring that it was somehow ‘meant to be', and with that in mind perhaps it's best to pause there for the moment, and return to where we came in – specifically the night, a quarter-century later, when the same intelligent, amusing, attractive woman woke me to say that she thought she might be happier, that her future might be fuller, richer, that all things considered she might feel more ‘alive' if she were no longer near me.

‘I try to imagine it, us alone here every evening without Albie. Because he's maddening, I know, but he's the reason why we're here, still together …'

Was he the reason? The only reason?

‘… and I'm terrified by the idea of him leaving home, Douglas. I'm terrified by the thought of that …
hole
.'

What was the hole? Was I the hole?

‘Why should there be a hole? There won't be a hole.'

‘Just the two of us, rattling around in this house …'

‘We won't rattle around! We'll do things. We'll be busy, we'll work, we'll do things together – we'll, we'll fill the hole.'

‘I need a new start, some kind of change of scene.'

‘You want to move house? We'll move house.'

‘It's not about the house. It's the idea of you and me in each other's pockets forever more. It's like … a Beckett play.'

I'd not seen a Beckett play, but presumed this was a bad thing. ‘Is it really so … horrific to you, Connie, the thought of you and I being alone together? Because I thought we had a good marriage …'

‘We did, we do. I've been very happy with you, Douglas, very, but the future—'

‘Then why would you want to throw that away?'

‘I just feel that as a unit, as husband and wife, we did it. We did our best, we can move on, our work is done.'

‘It was never work for me.'

‘Well, sometimes it was for me. Sometimes it felt like work. Now that Albie's leaving, I want to feel this is the beginning of something new, not the beginning of the end.'

The beginning of the end
. Was she still talking about me? She made me sound like some kind of apocalypse.

The conversation went on for some time, Connie elated at all this truth-telling, me reeling from it, incoherent, struggling to take it in. How long had she felt like this? Was she really so unhappy, so jaded? I understood her need to ‘rediscover herself', but why couldn't she rediscover herself with me around? Because, she said, she felt our work was done.

Our work was done. We had raised a son and he was … well, he was healthy. He seemed happy occasionally, when he thought no one was looking. He was popular at school and he had a certain charm, apparently. He was infuriating, of course, and always seemed to be more Connie's son than mine; they'd always been closer, he'd always been on ‘her team'. Despite owing his existence to me, I suspected my son felt that his mother could have done better. Even so, was he really the sole purpose and product, the sole work, of twenty years of marriage?

‘I thought … it had never crossed my mind … I'd always imagined …' Exhausted, I was having some trouble expressing myself. ‘I'd always been under the impression that we were together because we wanted to be together, and because we were happy most of the time. I'd thought that we loved each other. I'd thought … clearly I was mistaken, but I was looking forward to us growing old together. Me and you, growing old and dying together.'

Connie turned to me, her head on the pillow, and said, ‘Douglas, why would anyone in their right mind look forward to
that
?'

It was light outside now, a bright Tuesday in June. Soon we would rise wearily and shower and brush our teeth standing at the sink together, the cataclysm put on hold while we faced the banalities of the day. We'd eat breakfast, shout farewell to Albie, listen to the shuffle and groan that passed for his goodbye. We would hug briefly on the gravel drive—

‘I'm not packing any suitcases yet, Douglas. We'll talk more.'

‘Okay. We'll talk more.'

—then I would drive off to the office and Connie would head off to the train station and the 0822 to London where she worked three days a week. I would say hello to colleagues and laugh at their jokes, respond to emails, eat a light lunch of salmon and watercress with visiting professors, listen to reports of their progress, nod and nod and all the time:

I think our marriage has run its course. I think I want to leave you.