“Listen,” I said to Ed. “I come here a lot. You wanna kick my ass, then let’s go outside.”
“Thanks,” said the White Stripes guy. “I mean, you know. You’d be welcome if there wasn’t anyone else here, because you’re a regular, and we like to look after our regulars. But…” He gestured at the line behind us.
“No, no, I understand, man,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Shall I leave your coffees on the counter here?”
“Sure. It won’t take long. He usually calms down after he’s landed a good one.”
“Fuck you.”
So we all went out on to the street. It was cold and dark and wet, but Ed’s ears were like two little torches in the gloom.
Martin
I hadn’t seen or spoken to Penny since the morning our brush with the angel had been in the papers. I had thought fondly of her, but I hadn’t really missed her, either sexually or socially. My libido was on leave of absence (and one had to be prepared for the possibility that it might opt for early retirement and never return to its place of work); my social life consisted of JJ, Maureen and Jess, which might suggest that it was as sickly as my sex drive, not least because they seemed to suffice for the time being. And yet when I saw Penny flirt with one of Matty’s nurses, I felt uncontrollably angry.
This isn’t a paradox, if you know anything about the perversity of human nature. (I believe I have used that line before, and as a consequence it is probably beginning to seem a little less authoritative and psychologically astute. Next time, I shall just own up to the perversity and the inconsistency, and leave human nature out of it.) Jealousy is likely to seize a man at any time, and in any case the blond nurse was tall, and young, and tanned, and blond. There is every chance that he would have made me uncontrollably angry if he had been standing on his own in the basement of Starbucks, or indeed anywhere in London.
I was, in retrospect, almost certainly looking for an excuse to leave the bosom of my family. As suspected, I had learned very little about myself in the previous few minutes. Neither my ex-wife’s scorn nor my daughters’ crayons had been as instructive as Jess might have wished.
“Thanks,” I said to Penny.
“Oh, that’s OK. I wasn’t doing anything, and Jess seemed to think it might help.”
“No,” I said, immediately at something of a moral disadvantage. “Not thanks for that. Thanks for standing here flirting in front of me. Thanks for nothing, in other words.”
“This is Stephen,” Penny said. “He’s looking after Matty, and he didn’t have anyone to talk to, so I came over to say hello.”
“Hi,” said Stephen. I glared at him.
“I suppose you think you’re pretty great,” I said.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“Martin!” said Penny.
“You heard me,” I said. “Smug git.”
I had the feeling that over in the corner, where the girls were colouring their picture, there was another Martin—a kinder, gentler Martin—watching in appalled fascination, and I wondered briefly whether it was possible to rejoin him.
“Go away, before you make an idiot of yourself,” said Penny. It says a lot for Penny’s generosity of spirit that she still saw idiocy coming towards me from off in the distance, and that I still had a chance of getting out of the way; less partial observers would have argued that idiocy had already squashed me flat. It didn’t matter, though, because I wasn’t moving.
“It’s easy, being a male nurse, isn’t it?”
“Not very,” said Stephen. He had made the elementary mistake of answering my question as if it had been delivered straight, without bile. “I mean, it’s rewarding, sure, but… Long hours, poor pay, night shifts. Some of the patients are difficult.” He shrugged.
“Some of the patients are difficult,” I said, in a stupid whiny voice. “Poor pay. Night shifts. Diddums.”
“Sean,” Stephen said to his partner. “I’m going to wait upstairs. This guy’s throwing the rattle out of the pram.”
“You just wait and listen to what I have to say. I did you the courtesy of listening to you banging on about what a national hero you are. Now you listen to me.”
I don’t think he minded staying where he was for a couple of minutes. This kind of sensationally bad behaviour elicited a great deal of fascination, I could see that, and I hope I don’t seem immodest when I say that my celebrity, or what remained of it, was crucial to the success of the spectacle: usually, television personalities only behave badly in nightclubs, when surrounded by other television personalities, so my decision to cut loose when sober to a male nurse, in a Starbucks basement, was bold—possibly even groundbreaking. And it wasn’t as if Stephen could really take it personally, just as he couldn’t have taken it personally if I’d decided to crap on his shoes. The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.
“I hate people like you,” I said. “You wheel a disabled kid around for a bit and you want a medal. And how hard is it, really?”
At this point, I regret to say, I took the handles of Matty’s wheelchair and pushed him up and down. And it suddenly seemed like an excellent idea to put my hand on my hip while I was doing it, in order to suggest that pushing disabled people around in their wheelchairs was an effeminate activity.
“Look at Daddy, Mummy,” one of my daughters (and I’m sorry to say that I don’t know which one) yelled with delight. “He’s funny, isn’t he?”
“There,” I said to Penny. “How’s that? Do I look more attractive to you again now?”
Penny was staring at me as if I were indeed crapping on Stephen’s shoe, a look that answered the question.
“Hey, everybody,” I yelled, although I had already attracted all the attention I could possibly wish for. “Aren’t I great? Aren’t I great? You think this is hard, Blondie? I’ll tell you what’s hard, Sunny Jim. Hard is…”
But here I dried up. As it turned out, there were no examples of difficulty in my professional life readily to hand. And the difficulties I had experienced recently all stemmed from sleeping with an underage girl, which meant that they weren’t much good for eliciting sympathy.
“Hard is when…” I just needed something with which to finish the sentence. Anything would do, even something I hadn’t experienced directly. Childbirth? Tournament-level chess? But nothing came.
“Have you finished, mate?” Stephen asked.
I nodded, trying somehow to convey in the gesture that I was too angry and disgusted to continue. And then I took the only option apparently available to me, and followed Jess and JJ out of the door.
Maureen
Jess was always walking out of everywhere, so I didn’t mind her going too much. But when JJ walked out, and then Martin… Well, I started to feel a bit annoyed, to tell you the honest truth. It seemed rude, when everyone had gone to all that trouble to turn up. And Martin was so peculiar, pushing Matty up and down and asking everyone if he looked attractive. Why would anyone think he looked attractive? He didn’t look attractive at all. He looked mad. To be fair to JJ, he’d taken his guests with him when he went—he hadn’t left them behind in the coffee bar, the way Jess and Martin had done. But later on I found out that he’d taken them all outside to have a fight with them, so it was difficult to decide whether he was being rude or not. On the one hand, he was with them, but on the other hand, he was with them because he wanted to beat them up. I think that’s probably still rude, but not as rude as the others.
The people left behind stood around for a little while, the nurses and Jess’s parents and Martin’s friends and family, and then when we all began to realize that no one was coming back, not even JJ and his friends, no one was quite sure what to do.