Anyway, I worked and worked at this one, and I’ve still got a couple of early demons knocking around the flat, prototype tapes I changed my mind about when I was checking them through. And on Friday night, club night, I produced it from my jacket pocket when she came over to me, and we went on from there. It was a good beginning.
Laura was, is, a lawyer, although when I met her she was a different kind of lawyer from the one she is now: then, she worked for a legal aid firm (hence, I guess, the clubbing and the black leather motorcycle jacket). Now, she works for a City law firm (hence, I guess, the restaurants and the expensive suits and the disappearance of the spiky haircut and a previously unrevealed taste for weary sarcasm) not because she underwent any kind of political conversion, but because she was made redundant and couldn’t find any legal aid work. She had to take a job that paid about forty-five grand a year because she couldn’t find one that paid under twenty; she said that this was all you need to know about Thatcherism, and I suppose she had a point. She changed when she got the new job. She was always intense, but, before, the intensity had somewhere to go: she could worry about tenants’ rights, and slum landlords, and kids living in places without running water. Now she’s just intense about work—how much she has, the pressure she’s under, how she’s doing, what the partners think of her, that kind of stuff. And when she’s not being intense about work, she’s being intense about why she shouldn’t be intense about work, or this kind of work, anyway.
Sometimes—not so often recently—I could do something or say something that allowed her to escape from herself, and that’s when we worked best; she complains frequently about my ’relentless triviality,” but it has its uses.
I never had any wild crush on her, and that used to worry me about the long-term future: I used to think—and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do—that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have a look around and see what you’ve got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.
With Laura, I changed my mind about that whole process for a while. There weren’t any sleepless nights or losses of appetite or agonizing waits for the phone to ring for either of us. But we just carried on regardless, anyway, and, because there was no steam to lose, we never had to have that look around to see what we’d got, because what we’d got was the same as what we’d always had. She didn’t make me miserable, or anxious, or ill at ease, and when we went to bed I didn’t panic and let myself down, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
We went out a lot, and she came to the club every week, and when she lost the lease on her flat in Archway she moved in, and everything was good, and stayed that way for years and years. If I was being obtuse, I’d say that money changed everything: when she switched jobs, she suddenly had loads, and when I lost the club work, and the recession seemed to make the shop suddenly invisible to passers-by, I had none. Of course things like that complicate life, and there are all kinds of readjustments to think about, battles to fight and lines to draw. But really, it wasn’t the money. It was me. Like Liz said, I’m an arsehole.
The night before Liz and I were supposed to have a drink in Camden, Liz and Laura met up somewhere for something to eat, and Liz had a go at Laura about Ian, and Laura wasn’t planning on saying anything in her own defense, because that would have meant assaulting me, and she has a powerful and sometimes ill-advised sense of loyalty. (I, for example, would not have been able to restrain myself.) But Liz pushed it too far, and Laura snapped, and all these things about me poured out in a torrent, and then they both cried, and Liz apologized between fifty and one hundred times for speaking out of turn. So the following day Liz snapped, tried to phone me and then marched into the pub and called me names. I don’t know any of this for sure, of course. I have had no contact at all with Laura and only a brief and unhappy meeting with Liz. But, even so, one does not need a sophisticated understanding of the characters in question to guess this much.
I do not know what, precisely, Laura said, but she would have revealed at least two, maybe even all four, of the following pieces of information:
1) That I slept with somebody else while she was pregnant.
2) That my affair contributed directly to her terminating the pregnancy.
3) That, after her abortion, I borrowed a large sum of money from her and have not yet repaid any of it.
4) That, shortly before she left, I told her I was unhappy in the relationship, and I was kind of sort of maybe looking around for someone else.
Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances (in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the worst four things that you have done to your partner, even if—especially if—your partner doesn’t know about them. Don’t dress these things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? OK, so who’s the arsehole now?
Eight
“Where the fuck have you been?” I ask Barry when he turns up for work on Saturday morning. I haven’t seen him since we went to Marie’s gig at the White Lion—no phone calls, no apologies, nothing.
“Where the fuck have I been? Where the fuck have I been? God, you’re an arsehole,” Barry says by way of an explanation. “I’m sorry, Rob. I know things aren’t going so well for you and you have problems and stuff, but, you know. We spent fucking hours looking for you the other night.”
“Hours? More than one hour? At least two? I left at half-ten, so you abandoned the search at half-twelve, right? You must have walked from Putney to Wapping.”
“Don’t be a smartarse.”
One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, somebody will be able to refer to me without using the word arse somewhere in the sentence.
“OK, sorry. But I’ll bet you looked for ten minutes, and then had a drink with Marie and thingy. T-Bone.”
I hate calling him T-Bone. It sets my teeth on edge, like when you have to ask for a Big Heap Buffalo Billburger, when all you want is a quarter-pounder, or a Just Like Mom Used to Make, when all you want is a piece of apple pie.
“That’s not the point.”
“Did you have a good time?”
“It was great. T-Bone’s played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore album.”
“Far out.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
I’m glad it’s Saturday because we’re reasonably busy, and Barry and I don’t have to find much to say to each other. When Dick’s making a cup of coffee and I’m looking for an old Shirley Brown single in the stockroom, he tells me that T-Bone’s played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore album.
“And do you know what? He’s a really nice guy,” he adds, astonished that someone who has reached these dizzying heights is capable of exchanging a few civil words in a pub. But that’s about it as far as staff interaction goes. There are too many other people to talk to.
Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there’s nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable.
You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (“If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do”), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they don’t really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.