Fifteen
I’m introduced to Anna. Dick brings her to the pub on a night when Barry isn’t around. She’s small, quiet, polite, anxiously friendly, and Dick obviously adores her. He wants my approval and I can give it easily, loads of it. Why would I want Dick to be unhappy? I wouldn’t. I want him to be as happy as anybody has ever been. I want him to show the rest of us that it is possible to maintain a relationship and a large record collection simultaneously.
“Has she got a friend for me?” I ask Dick.
Normally, of course, I wouldn’t refer to Anna in the third person while she’s sitting with us, but I have an excuse: my question is both endorsement and allusion, and Dick smiles happily in recognition.
“Richard Thompson,” he explains to Anna. “It’s a song off a Richard Thompson album. ‘I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight,’ isn’t it, Rob?”
“Richard Thompson,” Anna repeats, in a voice which suggests that over the last few days she has had to absorb a lot of information very quickly. “Now, which one was he? Dick’s been trying to educate me.”
“I don’t think we’ve got up to him yet,” says Dick. “Anyway, he’s a folk/rock singer and England’s finest electric guitarist. Would you say that’s right, Rob?” He asks the question nervously; if Barry were here, he’d take great pleasure in shooting Dick down at this point.
“That’s right, Dick,” I reassure him. Dick nods with relief and satisfaction.
“Anna’s a Simple Minds fan,” Dick confides, emboldened by his Richard Thompson success.
“Oh, right.” I don’t know what to say. This, in our universe, is a staggering piece of information. We hate Simple Minds. They were number one in our Top Five Bands or Musicians Who Will Have to Be Shot Come the Musical Revolution. (Michael Bolton, U2, Bryan Adams, and, surprise surprise, Genesis were tucked in behind them. Barry wanted to shoot the Beatles, but I pointed out that someone had already done it.) It is as hard for me to understand how he has ended up with a Simple Minds fan as it would be to fathom how he had paired off with one of the royal family, or a member of the shadow cabinet: it’s not the attraction that baffles so much as how on earth they got together in the first place.
“But I think she’s beginning to understand why she shouldn’t be. Aren’t you?”
“Maybe. A bit.” They smile at each other. It’s kind of creepy, if you think about it.
It’s Liz who stops me phoning Laura all the time. She takes me to the Ship and gives me a good talking-to.
“You’re really upsetting her,” she says. “And him.”
“Oh, like I really care about him.”
“Well, you should.”
“Why?”
“Because … because all you’re doing is forming a little unit, them against you. Before you started all this, there was no unit. There were just three people in a mess. And now they’ve got something in common, and you don’t want to make it any worse.”
“And why are you so bothered? I thought I was an arse-hole.”
“Yeah, well, so is he. He’s an even bigger arsehole, and he hasn’t done anything wrong yet.”
“Why is he an arsehole?”
“You know why he’s an arsehole.”
“How do you know I know why he’s an arsehole?”
“Because Laura told me.”
“You had a conversation about what I thought was wrong with her new boyfriend? How did you get onto that?”
“We went the long way round.”
“Take me there the quick way.”
“You won’t like it.”
“Come on, Liz.”
“OK. She told me that when you used to take the piss out of Ian, when you were living in the flat … that was when she decided she was going off you.”
“You have to take the piss out of someone like that, don’t you? That Leo Sayer haircut and those dungarees, and the stupid laugh and the wanky right-on politics and the … ”
Liz laughs. “Laura wasn’t exaggerating, then. You’re not keen, are you?”
“I can’t fucking stand the guy.”
“No, neither can I. For exactly the same reasons.”
“So what’s she on about, then?”
“She said that your little Ian outbursts showed her how … sour was the word she used … how sour you’ve become. She said that she loved you for your enthusiasm and your warmth, and it was all draining away. You stopped making her laugh and you started depressing the hell out of her. And now you’re scaring her as well. She could call the police, you know, if she wanted.”
The police. Jesus. One moment you’re dancing round the kitchen to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys (Hey! I made her laugh then, and that was only a few months ago!), and the next she wants to get you locked up. I don’t say anything for ages. I can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t sound sour. “What have I got to feel warm about?” I want to ask her. “Where’s the enthusiasm going to come from? How can you make someone laugh when they want to set the police on you?”
“But why do you keep calling her all the time? Why do you want her back so badly?”
“Why do you think?”
“I don’t know. Laura doesn’t know either.”
“Well, if she doesn’t know, what’s the point?
“There’s always a point. Even if the point is to avoid this sort of mess next time, that’s still a point.”
“Next time. You think there’ll be a next time?”
“Come on, Rob. Don’t be so pathetic. And you’ve just asked three questions to avoid answering my one.”
“Which was the one?”
“Ha, ha. I’ve seen men like you in Doris Day films, but I never thought they existed in real life.” She puts on a dumb, deep, American voice. “The men who can’t commit, who can’t say ‘I love you’ even when they want to, who start to cough and splutter and change the subject. But here you are. A living, breathing specimen. Incredible.”
I know the films she’s talking about, and they’re stupid. Those men don’t exist. Saying “I love you” is easy, a piece of piss, and more or less every man I know does it all the time. I’ve acted as though I haven’t been able to say it a couple of times, although I’m not sure why. Maybe because I wanted to lend the moment that sort of corny Doris Day romance, make it more memorable than it otherwise would have been. You know, you’re with someone, and you start to say something, and then you stop, and she goes “What?” and you go “Nothing,” and she goes, “Please say it,” and you go, “No, it’ll sound stupid,” and then she makes you spit it out, even though you’d been intending to say it all along, and she thinks it’s all the more valuable for being hard-won. Maybe she knew all the time that you were messing about, but she doesn’t mind, anyway. It’s like a quote: it’s the nearest any of us gets to being in the movies, those few days when you decide that you like somebody enough to tell her that you love her, and you don’t want to muck it up with a glob of dour, straightforward, no-nonsense sincerity.
But I’m not going to put Liz straight. I’m not going to tell her that all this is a way of regaining control, that I don’t know if I love Laura or not but I’m never going to find out while she’s living with someone else; I’d rather Liz thought I was one of those anal, tongue-tied, and devoted cliches who eventually sees the light. I guess it won’t do me any harm, in the long run.
Sixteen
I start at the beginning, with Alison. I ask my mum to look up her parents in the local phone book, and I take it from there.
“Is that Mrs. Ashworth?”
“It is.” Mrs. Ashworth and I were never introduced. We never really got to the meet-the-parents stage during our six-hour relationship.