Where the Rain Gets In (22 page)

“But then you realised I was a hopeless
case – am a hopeless case?”

“Yes, basically,” said Mike, “but I
never thought of you exactly in those terms. I could see that you couldn’t be
with me and that nothing I could do or say, or no amount of money I could throw
at the problem, was ever going to make any difference; so I had to just walk
away.”

“That’s what I told you at the time,”
said Katie, “only, unlike Margaret, I meant what I said.”

“But you’re a hard act to follow,” said
Mike, “and again, I know I’m being unfair to Margaret, because I really did love
her all this time and I fancied her like mad and I still do, to tell you the
truth, it was just – ”

“That you’d met me and I’d messed with
your head?”

“Yes,” said Mike, “yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well don’t be, because I’m not. To this
day, I’m glad I got to know you then and that you were a part of my life, even
if you couldn’t stay a part of it forever.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” said Katie, “for
what it’s worth.”

Katie felt good to be able to sit here
and say this to Mike.

 “Tell me about Margaret,” she said.

“Yes . . . Margaret,” said Mike.

“And I don’t want any ‘my wife doesn’t
understand me’ bullshit, either.”

“No, that’s not why I came,” said Mike.
“I know I’m a weird fuck, so I can’t complain when people don’t understand me.”

Katie laughed.

“What’s so funny?” asked Mike. “Don’t
you believe me?”

“No, it’s nothing,” said Katie.
“Somebody called me just that – a weird fuck – only this morning.”

“Well, you are – or were at any rate –
and twice as bad as I ever was.”

“Go on,” said Katie.

Mike took a drink and finished off his
pint. He poured out some of the iced water that came with the sandwiches.

“As I said, I fancy Margaret like mad.
That might seem self-evident to you, but I keep on going back to it because I
see so many men my age living with women who they just don’t want. Whatever
they once had, if they ever had it, they don’t have it any more. And I’m not
claiming there haven’t been times – phases, if you like – when I lost sight of
that with Margaret, but I’m proud of the fact that I fancy my wife.”

“You really are a weird fuck,” said
Katie.

“Yeah, well, you can imagine what she
was like as a teenager – very, very sexy; dirty, even.”

“Spare me, please.”

“Anyway, when it came right down to it,
once I’d got over my moody return from college, and my not knowing what I was
going to do, Margaret understood that eventually I’d work my way back to her.
She didn’t know about you, though she might have guessed there was someone, and
she didn’t know what my problem was with getting a job or earning a living or
deciding where to live; but she knew that once I’d come to my senses, I’d see
that I was meant to be with her. Does that sound conceited?”

“Not necessarily,” said Katie.

“It’s meant to be a compliment – to
Margaret – that she knew all along what she wanted and she was just waiting for
me to come to the same conclusion. I think men are a bit slow sometimes, when
it comes to things like that?”

“There’s no one arguing with you here,”
said Katie.

“We knew each other so well by then that
when I finally realised what I wanted – as in, to share my life and have a
family with Margaret – it was simply a matter of where we would choose to
live.”

“And so you moved back to Manchester?”

“Yes,” said Mike. “Neither family were
ecstatic about us getting married – even if they didn’t actively try to
dissuade us – but we knew we had to set up on our own elsewhere, and Manchester
was where I knew best. And learnt to love, it has to be said. I had enough
money for us to move over and buy a small place to live – ”

“You see,” interrupted Katie, “there you
go again. Young college graduates of twenty one don’t have enough money to buy
their own place, just because they decide that’s what they want to do.”

“But it was all my own money; what I’d
earned from the stock market, mainly, and that was it – all gone, there was no
more. I’d made my big decision about Margaret, but for the life of me I still
couldn’t think about how I was going to work for a living. And the more
Margaret went on about it, the less inclined I was to do anything. I knew I had
to do something, but I just couldn’t come up with any bright ideas.”

“You could have got a job, like the rest
of the world.”

“I know,” said Mike, “but for some
reason I think I wanted to live through a little poverty for a while.”

“Like a tourist,” said Katie.

“Yes, like a tourist, but also because
I’d seen where money had got me in the past – absolutely nowhere – and now I
felt like it was all that was expected of me.”

“So you were a contrary little bastard?”
said Katie. “I can imagine that went down well with Margaret?”

“She was concerned all right – more than
concerned, actually. I think she wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself
into, especially because she was pregnant at the time.”

“That would focus her mind all right,
I’d have thought.”

“Yes, and it focussed mine too,” said
Mike, “but I still didn’t know what to do. I’m only talking about a few months
or so, but Margaret found it tough being away from home, in a foreign city – ”

“And being married to a waster who’d never
had to work in his life?”

“I guess so.”

“And it was Eugene who came to your
rescue?”

“Yes, Eugene.”

“Is he well?” asked Katie. “And happy?”

“You wouldn’t recognise him Katie – he’s
so sure and confident of himself. He’s just . . . I don’t know, he’s a good
friend.”

“That’s good.”

“Of course,” said Mike, “straight after
college, he was still just Eugene and I only saw him socially a couple of times
to let him know I was back in Manchester. He was doing research at the university
– in maths – but he’d become a computer freak and that’s all he’d talk about
when we met. But he had absolutely no idea of the practical applications of
what he was talking about.”

“Whereas the great Mike Maguire, of
course . . . ”

“Well I didn’t just dive in and tell him
what he should be doing, but at one point he was responsible for the
interviewing of applicants to study maths, and he showed me the spreadsheet he
had set up. So I asked about how sophisticated all the college systems were for
things like registration and timetables and budgets, and it seemed everything
was fairly haphazard – the odd enthusiast such as Eugene working on their own,
but there was not one whole integrated system.”

“And you persuaded them you were the man
for the job?”

“No, I persuaded them it needed doing
and that my company was capable of doing it.”

“And your company was?”

“Myself and Eugene.”

“You’re a fucking chancer, Mike.”

“Not really – I knew Eugene could do it,
and I was right.”

“So you were on your way, back in
business?” asked Katie.

“More or less,” said Mike. “Eugene
didn’t give up his day job for a while, but eventually we became so busy and
were making so much money that I persuaded him it was for the best.”

“And was he happy to give up on his maths?”

“I think so; he liked the challenge of
each new project we took on and did all the programming himself for the first
few years. He just switched his energies from one thing to the other.”

“And found a practical way of using his
brain in the world?”

“Yes,” said Mike, “I think so. If Eugene
helped me back then – which he did, enormously – I think I helped him too. Of
course, he could have stayed doing research forever, but I think he liked what
we did. It changed again when we switched more to managing and maintaining the
systems we’d installed, or other systems that businesses had bought with
absolutely no support. At first I dealt with the clients and relayed the
problems back to Eugene, but he gradually became involved on site and more
socially adept at dealing with people. As I said – you wouldn’t recognise him
now.”

“And meanwhile you were becoming a
daddy?” asked Katie.

“Yes, and I have to say, as soon as I
did then everything fell into place for me. Again, I guess Margaret knew how it
would be all along, but I had to be shown. I hadn’t realised that this was the
point of everything.”

“It’s what they say,” said Katie.

“And it’s true, it’s true,” said Mike.
“You know the Bob Dylan song – ‘Sara’? Well, it’s a bit soppy, I know, but
there’s a line in it about being on the beach with his wife while the kids play
in the sand and it just seems to be so what it’s all about. You’re there with
your partner and you love her and want her and the kids are happy, but there’s
always one of them demanding your attention, so you don’t actually have much
time to yourselves, but you know that when you do it’s going to be nice and so
you spend a lot of your time anticipating being alone together rather than
being together, but it’s still good.”

“How many children do you have?”

“Three – two boys and a girl. Jack, Mike
and Katherine; they’re not kids any more, though. Jack will be twenty two this
year.”

“Fucking hell, Mike!”

“Fucking hell is right – you look around
and another decade’s gone by. You just remember snapshots of each one at
different ages, but you’re so damn busy all the time, you end up wondering just
where all the years have gone. It might be a cliché, but it’s an accurate one.”

“So you became a responsible parent?”
said Katie.

“Yes,” said Mike, but he didn’t
continue. He shook the almost melted ice around the bottom of his empty glass
of water.

“What?” asked Katie.

Mike took his time to reply.

“Yeah,” he said, “I became a responsible
parent. For years I was the sole wage earner and that, as you said, focuses your
mind all right. You forget any fancy notions or crazy ideas, and you certainly
forget about doing anything that might be bordering on illegal. You make sure
the next contracts are signed and that the work doesn’t dry up, and that was
tough enough in the Eighties, I can tell you. A lot of people still didn’t
really trust computers, or what they could do for your business. We had to wait
quite a while before we were proven right – before it became obvious that, just
to survive, every business was going to have to install some form of a system.
And of course, by then, everybody was at it so we had to re-invent ourselves
all over again.”

“But you managed, from the sound of it?”

“Yes,” said Mike, “but it was no fun,
and I didn’t like what it was doing to me. I was losing something – I was
losing the bit of me that I liked.”

“But you’d become someone Margaret could
trust and depend upon?”
“Yes but this is the thing – I don’t think she liked what I’d become either,
only in a way I was her creation. I’d done what she wanted, made our life
secure and yes, I had become someone she could depend upon.”

“But she missed her Mike?”

“I missed her Mike! I told you I
wouldn’t go on about Margaret, and I’ll try not to, and I can’t speak for how
she felt or when she felt it, but I do know what I was thinking at the time.”

“Which was what?” asked Katie.

“Well, the thing that made sense of
everything for me, as I said, was being a parent. And, as I keep on saying, I
was still relatively young. You grow up yourself as a kid and then all of a
sudden you’re this conscious being, wondering what the fuck it’s all about? And
I think that’s what happened to me after college because I knew it wasn’t just
about the money; I knew it wasn’t just about getting high and having a good
time; and I knew that some things just can’t be put right, no matter what you
throw at them. I knew all these incredible people – ”

“Remarkable people,” said Katie.

“Exactly,” said Mike, “remarkable
people, but I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing on the planet. And then one
day this tiny thing that you’ve watched being born, this eating, shitting and
sleeping machine – sleeping if you’re lucky, that is – looks up at you and
recognises you and smiles. And it might be just wind making him smile but it
doesn’t matter, because he follows you with his eyes and you might be just a
shape but that doesn’t matter either because you’re his shape and he likes you
– loves you, actually, unconditionally and without question.”

“You liked being a dad, then?” asked
Katie.

“I did, yes,” said Mike, “and I do, but
what I’m saying is this: if I’d wanted an answer to what the hell I was doing
on the planet, I was given one fairly immediately.”

“And you were still only twenty one?”

“Yes,” said Mike. “I didn’t mind at
first where my new responsibilities were taking me, because I was learning to
be a dad.”