Laura’s changed even since I last saw her. Partly it’s the makeup: she’s wearing it for work, and it makes her look less stressed-out, less tired, in control. But it’s more than that, too. Something else has happened, maybe something real, or maybe something in her head. Whatever it is, you can see that she thinks she’s started out on some new stage in her life. She hasn’t. I’m not going to let her.
We go to a bar near her work—not a pub, a bar, with pictures of baseball players on the wall, and a food menu chalked up on a noticeboard, and a conspicuous lack of hand-pumps, and people in suits drinking American beer from the bottle. It’s not crowded, and we sit in a booth near the back on our own.
And then she’s straight in with the “So, how are you?” as if I’m nobody very much. I mumble something, and I know that I’m not going to be able to control it, I’m going to come too quickly, then it’s, bang, “Have you slept with him yet?” and it’s all over.
“Is that why you wanted to see me?”
“I guess.”
“Oh, Rob.”
I just want to ask the question again, straightaway; I want an answer, I don’t want “Oh, Rob,” and a pitying stare.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say that you haven’t, and for your answer to be the truth.”
“I can’t do that.” She can’t look at me when she’s saying it, either.
She starts to say something else, but I don’t hear it; I’m out in the street, pushing through all those suits and raincoats, angry and sick and on my way home to some more loud, angry records that will make me feel better.
The next morning the guy who bought the Sid James Experience album comes in to exchange it. He says it’s not what he thought it was.
“What did you think it was?” I ask him.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Something else.” He shrugs, and looks at the three of us in turn. We are all staring at him, crushed, aghast; he looks embarrassed.
“Have you listened to all of it?” Barry asks.
“I took it off halfway through the second side. Didn’t like it.”
“Go home and try it again,” Barry says desperately. “It’ll grow on you. It’s a grower.”
The guy shakes his head helplessly. He’s made up his mind. He chooses a secondhand Madness CD, and I put the Sid James Experience back in the rack.
Laura calls in the afternoon.
“You must have known it would happen,” she says. “You couldn’t have been entirely unprepared. Like you said, I’ve been living with the guy. We were bound to get around to it sometime.” She gives a nervous and, to my way of thinking, highly inappropriate laugh.
“And, anyway, I keep trying to tell you, that’s not really the point, is it? The point is, we got ourselves into an awful mess.”
I want to hang up, but people only hang up to get called back again, and why should Laura call me back? No reason at all.
“Are you still there? What are you thinking?”
I’m thinking: I’ve had a bath with this person (just one, years ago, but, you know, a bath’s a bath), and I’m already beginning to find it hard to remember what she looks like. I’m thinking: I wish this stage were over, and we could go on to the next stage, the stage where you look in the paper and see that Scent of a Woman is on TV, and you say to yourself, Oh, I saw that with Laura. I’m thinking: am I supposed to fight, and what do I fight with, and whom am I fighting?
“Nothing.”
“We can meet for another drink if you like. So I can explain better. I owe you that much.”
That much.
“How much would be too much?”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. Look, I’vegot to go. I work too, you know.”
“Will you call me?”
“I haven’t got your number.”
“You know you can call me at work. And we’ll arrange to meet and talk properly.”
“OK.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Because I don’t want this to be the last conversation we have. I know what you’re like.”
But she doesn’t know what I’m like at alclass="underline" I call her all the time. I call her later that afternoon, when Barry has gone out to get something to eat and Dick is busy sorting out some mail-order stuff out the back. I call her after six, when Barry and Dick have gone. When I get home, I call Directory Enquiries and get Ian’s new number, and I call about seven times, and hang up every time he answers; eventually, Laura guesses what’s going on and picks up the phone herself. I call her the following morning, and twice that afternoon, and I call her from the pub that evening. And after the pub I go around to Ian’s place, just to see what it looks like from the outside. (It’s just another north London three-story house, although I’ve no idea which story is his, and there are no lights on in any of them, anyway.) I’ve got nothing else to do. In short, I’ve lost it again, just like I lost it with Charlie, all those years ago.
There are men who call, and men who don’t call, and I’d much, much rather be one of the latter. They are proper men, the sort of men that women have in mind when they moan about us. It’s a safe, solid, meaningless stereotype: the man who appears not to give a shit, who gets ditched and maybe sits in the pub on his own for a couple of evenings, and then gets on with things; and though next time around he trusts even less than he did, he hasn’t made a fool of himself, or frightened anybody, and this week I’ve done both of those things. One day Laura’s sorry and guilty, and the next she’s scared and angry, and I am entirely responsible for the transformation, and it hasn’t done me any good at all. I’d stop if I could, but I don’t seem to have any choice in the matter: it’s all I think about, all the time. “I know what you’re like,” Laura said, and she does, kind of: she knows that I’m someone who doesn’t really bother, who has friends he hasn’t seen for years, who no longer speaks to anybody that he has ever slept with. But she doesn’t know how you have to work at that.
I want to see them now: Alison Ashworth, who ditched me after three miserable evenings in the park. Penny, who wouldn’t let me touch her and who then went straight out and had sex with that bastard Chris Thomson. Jackie, attractive only while she was going out with one of my best friends. Sarah, with whom I formed an alliance against all the dumpers in the world and who then went and dumped me anyway. And Charlie. Especially Charlie, because I have her to thank for everything: my great job, my sexual self-confidence, the works. I want to be a well-rounded human being with none of these knotty lumps of rage and guilt and self-disgust. What do I want to do when I see them? I don’t know. Just talk. Ask them how they are and whether they have forgiven me for messing them around, when I have messed them around, and tell them that I have forgiven them for messing me around, when they have messed me around. Wouldn’t that be great? If I saw all of them in turn and there were no hard feelings left, just soft, squidgy feelings, Brie rather than old hard Parmesan, I’d feel clean, and calm, and ready to start again.
Bruce Springsteen’s always doing it in his songs. Maybe not always, but he’s done it. You know that one ‘Bobby Jean,’ off Born in the USA? Anyway, he phones this girl up but she’s left town years before and he’s pissed off that he didn’t know about it, because he wanted to say good-bye, and tell her that he missed her, and to wish her good luck. And then one of those sax solos comes in, and you get goose pimples, if you like sax solos. And Bruce Springsteen. Well, I’d like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song. Just once. I know I’m not born to run, I know that the Seven Sisters Road is nothing like Thunder Road, but feelings can’t be so different, can they? I’d like to phone all those people up and say good luck, and good-bye, and then they’d feel good and I’d feel good. We’d all feel good. That would be good. Great even.