“He goes on long enough,” I said one night, when we were both lying awake, staring at the ceiling. “I should be so lucky,” said Laura. This was a joke. We laughed. Ha, ha, we went. Ha, ha, ha. I’m not laughing now. Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and dread and doubt.
When a woman leaves a man, and the man is unhappy (and yes, finally, after all the numbness and the silly optimism and the who-cares shrug of the shoulders, I am unhappy—although I would still like to be included somewhere in the cover shot of Marie’s next album) … is this what it’s all about? Sometimes I think so, and sometimes I don’t. I went through this period, after the Charlie and Marco thing, of imagining them together, at it,and Charlie’s face contorted with a passion that I was never able to provoke.
I should say, even though I do not feel like saying it (I want to run myself down, feel sorry for myself, celebrate my inadequacies—that’s what you do at times like these), that I think things were OK in That Department. I think. But in my fearful imaginings Charlie was as abandoned and as noisy as any character in a porn film. She was Marco’s plaything, she responded to his every touch with shrieks of orgasmic delight. No woman in the history of the world had better sex than the sex Charlie had with Marco in my head.
But that was nothing. That had no basis in reality at all. For all I know, Marco and Charlie never even consummated their relationship and Charlie has spent the intervening decade trying—but failing miserably—to recapture the quiet, undemonstrative ecstasy of the nights that we spent together. I know, however, that Ian was something of a demon lover; so does Laura. I could hear it all; so could Laura. In truth, it pissed me off; I thought it pissed her off, too. Now I’m not so sure. Is this why she went? Because she wanted a bit of what was happening upstairs?
I don’t really know why it matters so much. Ian could be better at talking than me, or cooking, or working, or housework, or saving money, or earning money, or spending money, or understanding books or films; he could be nicer than me, better-looking, more intelligent, cleaner, more generous-spirited, more helpful, a better human being in any way you care to mention … and I wouldn’t mind. Really. I accept and understand that you can’t be good at everything, and I am tragically unskilled in some very important areas. But sex is different; knowing that a successor is better in bed is impossible to take, and I don’t know why.
I know enough to know that this is daft. I know, for example, that the best sex I have ever had was not important; the best sex I have ever had was with a girl called Rosie, whom I slept with just four times. It wasn’t enough (the good sex, I mean, not the four times, which were more than enough). She drove me mad, and I drove her mad, and the fact that we had the knack of being able to come at the same time (and this, it seems to me, is what people mean when they talk about good sex, no matter what Dr. Ruth tells you about sharing and consideration and pillow talk and variety and positions and handcuffs) counted for nothing.
So what is it that sickens me so much about ‘Ian’ and Laura? Why do I care so much about how long he can go on for and how long I could go on for and what noises she made with me and what noises she makes with him? Just, I guess, this in the end: that I still hear Chris Thomson, the Neanderthal, testosterone-crazed, fourth-year adulterer, calling me a spastic and telling me he has knobbed my girlfriend. And that voice still makes me feel bad.
During the night, I have one of those dreams that aren’t really dreams at all, just stuff about Laura fucking Ray, and Marco fucking Charlie, and I’m pleased to wake up in the middle of the night, because it means stopping the dream. But the pleasure only lasts a few seconds and then everything sinks in: that somewhere Laura really is fucking Ray (maybe not exactly now, because it’s 3:56 a.m., although with his stamina—his inability to climax, ha ha—you never know), and I’m here, in this stupid little flat, on my own, and I’m thirty-five years old, and I own a tiny failing business, and my friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost. And if I went back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in an old people’s home, I wouldn’t worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e., the rest of it, would be over. And I wouldn’t even have had to kill myself.
It’s only just beginning to occur to me that it’s important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you’re just clinging on. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does. You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then? I’ve got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I’m in danger of falling off the edge.
“Have you got any soul?” a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I’ve got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can’t seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn’t be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.
Six
Exactly one week after Laura has gone, I get a call from a woman in Wood Green who has some singles she thinks I might be interested in. I normally don’t bother with house clearance, but this woman seems to know what she’s talking about: she mutters about white labels and picture sleeves and all sorts of other things that suggest we’re not just talking about half a dozen scratched Electric Light Orchestra records that her son left behind when he moved out.
Her house is enormous, the sort of place that seems to have meandered to Wood Green from another part of London, and she’s not very nice. She’s mid-to-late forties, with a dodgy tan and a suspiciously taut-looking face; and though she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, the jeans have the name of an Italian where the name of Mr. Wrangler or Mr. Levi should be, and the T-shirt has a lot of jewelry stuck to the front of it, arranged in the shape of a CND sign.
She doesn’t smile, or offer me a cup of coffee, or ask me whether I found the place OK despite the freezing, driving rain that prevented me from seeing my A-Z in front of my face. She just shows me into a study off the hall, turns the light on, and points out the singles—there are hundreds of them, all in custom-made wooden boxes—on the top shelf, and leaves me to get on with it.
There are no books on the shelves that line the walls, just albums, CDs, cassettes, and hi-fi equipment; the cassettes have little numbered stickers on them, always a sign of a serious person. There are a couple of guitars leaning against the walls, and some sort of computer that looks as though it might be able to do something musical if you were that way inclined.
I climb up on a chair and start pulling the singles boxes down. There are seven or eight in all, and, though I try not to look at what’s in them as I put them on the floor, I catch a glimpse of the first one in the last box: it’s a James Brown single on King, thirty years old, and I begin to prickle with anticipation.
When I start going through them properly, I can see straightaway that it’s the haul I’ve always dreamed of finding, ever since I began collecting records. There are fan-club-only Beatles singles, and the first half-dozen Who singles, and Elvis originals from the early sixties, and loads of rare blues and soul singles, and … there’s a copy of ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols on A&M! Ihave never even seen one of these! I have never even seen anyone who’s seen one! And oh no oh no oh God—‘You Left the Water Running’ by Otis Redding, released seven years after his death, withdrawn immediately by his widow because she didn’t …