Fuck. I hate all this stuff. How old do you have to get before it stops?
When I get home there are two answering machine messages, one from Laura’s friend Liz and one from Laura. They go like this:
1) Rob, it’s Liz. Just phoning up to see, well, to see if you’re OK. Give us a ring sometime. Um … I’m not taking sides. Yet. Lots of love, bye.
2) Hi, it’s me. There are a couple of things I need. Can you call me at work in the morning? Thanks.
Mad people could read all sorts of things into either of these calls; sane people would come to the conclusion that the first caller is warm and affectionate, and that the second doesn’t give a shit. I’m not mad.
Five
I call Laura first thing. I feel sick, dialing the number, and even sicker when the receptionist puts me through. She used to know who I am, but now there’s nothing in her voice at all. Laura wants to come around on Saturday afternoon, when I’m at work, to pick up some more underwear, and that’s fine by me; we should have stopped there, but I try to have a different sort of conversation, and she doesn’t like it because she’s at work, but I persist, and she hangs up on me in tears. And I feel like a jerk, but I couldn’t stop myself. I never can.
I wonder what she’d say, if she knew that I was simultaneously uptight about Marie coming into the shop? Laura and I have just had a phone call in which I suggested that she’d fucked up my life and, for the duration of the call, I believed it. But now—and I can do this with no trace of bemusement or self-dissatisfaction—I’m worrying about what to wear, and whether I look better stubbly or clean-shaven, and about what music I should play in the shop today.
Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women, or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners. It’s easy enough to be nice to your mates. You can buy them a drink, make them a tape, ring them up to see if they’re OK … there are any number of quick and painless methods of turning yourself into a Good Bloke. When it comes to girlfriends, though, it’s much trickier to be consistently honorable. One moment you’re ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl, and expressing your feelings and doing all the other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you’re manipulating and sulking and double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them. I can’t work it out.
I phone Liz early afternoon. She’s nice to me. She says how sorry she is, what a good couple she thought we made, that I have done Laura good, given her a center, brought her out of herself, allowed her to have fun, turned her into a nicer, calmer, more relaxed person, given her an interest in something other than work. Liz doesn’t use these words, as such, I’m interpreting. But this is what she means, I think, when she says we made a good couple. She asks how I am, and whether I’m looking after myself; she tells me that she doesn’t think much of this Ian guy. We arrange to meet for a drink sometime next week. I hang up.
Which fucking Ian guy?
Marie comes into the shop shortly afterward. All three of us are there. I’m playing her tape, and when I see her walk in I try to turn it off before she notices, but I’m not quick enough, so I end up turning it off just as she begins to say something about it, and then turning it back on again, then blushing. She laughs. I go to the stockroom and don’t come out. Barry and Dick sell her seventy quid’s worth of cassettes.
Which fucking Ian guy?
Barry explodes into the stockroom. “We’re only on the guest list for Marie’s gig at the White Lion, that’s all. All three of us.”
In the last half-hour, I have humiliated myself in front of somebody I’m interested in, and found out, I think, that my ex was having an affair. I don’t want to know about the guest list at the White Lion.
“That’s really, really great, Barry. The guest list at the White Lion! All we’ve got to do is get to Putney and back and we’ve saved ourselves a fiver each. What it is to have influential friends, eh?”
“We can go in your car.”
“It’s not my car, is it? It’s Laura’s. Laura’s got it. So we’re two hours on the tube, or we get a minicab, which’ll cost us, ooh, a fiver each. Fucking great.”
Barry gives a what-can-you-do-with-this-guy shrug and walks out. I feel bad, but I don’t say anything to him.
I don’t know anybody called Ian. Laura doesn’t know anybody called Ian. We’ve been together three years and I’ve never heard her mention an Ian. There’s no Ian at her office. She hasn’t got any friends called Ian, and she hasn’t got any girlfriends with boyfriends called Ian. I won’t say that she has never met anyone called Ian in the whole of her life—there must have been one at college, although she went to an all-girls school—but I am almost certain that since 1989 she has been living in an Ianless universe.
And this certitude, this Ian-atheism, lasts until I get home. On the windowsill where we put the post, just inside the communal front door, there are three letters amidst the takeout menus and the minicab cards: a bill for me, a bank statement for Laura … and a TV license reminder for Mr. I. Raymond (Ray to his friends and, more pertinently, to his neighbors), the guy who until about six weeks ago lived upstairs.
I’m shaking when I get into the flat, and I feel sick. I know it’s him; I knew it was him the moment I saw the letter. I remember Laura going up to see him a couple of times; I remember Laura … not flirting, exactly, but certainly flicking her hair more often, and grinning more inanely, than seemed to be strictly necessary when he came down for a drink last Christmas. He would be just her type—little-boy-lost, right-on, caring, just enough melancholy in his soul to make him appear interesting. I never liked him much then, and I fucking hate him now.
How long? How often? The last time I spoke to Ray—Ian—the night before he moved … was something going on then? Did she sneak upstairs on nights when I was out? Do John and Melanie, the couple in the ground-floor flat, know anything about this? I spend a long time looking for the change-of-address card he gave us, but it’s gone, ominously and significantly—unless I chucked it, in which case strike the ominous significance. (What would I do if I found it? Give him a ring? Drop round, and see if he’s got company?)
I’m starting to remember things now: his dungarees; his music (African, Latin, Bulgarian, whatever fucking world music fad was trendy that week); his hysterical, nervous, nerve-jangling laugh; the terrible cooking smells that used to pollute the stairway; the visitors that used to stay too late and drink too much and leave too noisily. I can’t remember anything good about him at all.
I manage to block out the worst, most painful, most disturbing memory until I go to bed, when I hear the woman who lives up there now stomping around and banging wardrobe doors. This is the very worst thing, the thing that would bring anybody (any man?) in my position out in the coldest and clammiest of sweats: we used to listen to him having sex. We could hear the noises he made; we could hear the noises she made (and there were two or three different partners in the time the three of us—the four of us, if you count whoever was in Ray’s bed—were separated by a few square meters of creaking floorboard and flaking plaster).