Jackie and Phil are the most boring people in the southeast of England, possibly because they’ve been married too long, and therefore have nothing to talk about, apart from how long they’ve been married. In the end, I am reduced to asking them, in a joky sort of way, for the secret of their success; I was only saving time, because I think they would have told me anyway.
“If you’ve found the right person, you’ve found the right person, it doesn’t matter how old you are.” (Phil)
“You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.” (Jackie)
“That’s right. It would have been easy to pack it in and start all over again with someone else who’s swept you off your feet, but then you’re still going to get to the stage when you’re going to have to work at the new one.” (Phil)
“There aren’t too many candlelit dinners and second honeymoons, I can tell you. We’re beyond all that. We’re good friends more than anything.” (Jackie)
“You can’t just jump into bed with the first person you fancy and hope that you don’t damage your marriage, no matter what people think.” (Phil)
“The trouble with young people today is … ” No. Just kidding. But they’re … evangelical about what they have, as if I’ve come up from north London to arrest them for being monogamous. I haven’t, but they’re right in thinking that it’s a crime where I come from: it’s against the law because we’re all cynics and romantics, sometimes simultaneously, and marriage, with its cliches and its steady low-watt glow, is as unwelcome to us as garlic is to a vampire.
I’m at home, making a tape of some old singles, when the phone goes.
“Hi. Is that Rob?”
I recognize the voice as belonging to someone I don’t like, but I don’t get any further than that.
“This is Ian. Ray.”
I don’t say anything.
“I thought maybe we should have a chat? Sort a couple of things out?”
This is … something … gone mad. Blank gone mad. You know when people use that expression to communicate the fact that something OK has got right out of control? “This is democracy gone mad.” Well, I want to use that expression, but I’m not sure what the something is. North London? Life? The nineties? I don’t know. All I do know is that in a decent, sane society, Ian wouldn’t be ringing me up to sort a couple of things out. Nor would I be ringing him up to sort a couple of things out. I’d be sorting him out, and if he wants to be eating dungarees for a week, he’s going the right way about it.
“What needs sorting out?” I’m so angry my voice is shaky, like it used to be when I was on the verge of a fight at school, and consequently I don’t sound angry at alclass="underline" I sound scared.
“Come on, Rob. My relationship with Laura has obviously disturbed you a great deal.”
“Funnily enough I haven’t been too thrilled about it.” Sharp and clear.
“We’re not talking joky understatement here, Rob. We’re talking harassment. Ten phone calls a night, hanging around outside my house … ”
Fucking hell. How did he see that?
“Yeah, well, I’ve stopped all that now.” Sharp and clear has gone; now I’m sort of mumbling, like a mad guilty person.
“We’ve noticed, and we’re glad. But, you know … how are we going to make the peace here? We want to make things easier for you. What can we do? Obviously I know how special Laura is, and I know things can’t be good for you at the moment. I’d hate it if I lost her. But I’d like to think that if she decided she didn’t want to see me anymore, I’d respect that decision. D’you see what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. So how shall we leave it then?”
“Dunno.” And then I put the phone down, not on a smart, crushing one-liner, or after a raging torrent of abuse, but on a ‘dunno.’ That’s taught him a lesson he won’t forget.
HIM:Good. So how shall we leave it then?
ME:I’ve already left it, you pathetic little twerp. Liz is quite right about you. [1]
HIM:Good. So how shall we leave it then?
ME:We won’t leave it, Ian. Or at least, I won’t. I’d change your phone number, if I were you. I’d change your address. One day soon you’ll look back on one visit to the house and ten phone calls a night as a golden age. Watch your step, boy. [2]
HIM:But I’d like to think that if she decided she didn’t want to see me anymore, I’d respect that decision.
ME:If she decided she didn’t want to see you anymore, I’d respect that decision. I’d respect her. Her friends would respect her. Everybody would cheer. The world would be a better place.
HIM: This is Ian. Ray.
ME: Fuck off. [3]
Oh, well.
Oh well, nothing. I should have said any of those things. I should have used at least one obscenity. I should certainly have threatened him with violence. I shouldn’t have hung up on a ‘dunno.’ These things are going to eat away at me and eat away at me and I’m going to drop dead of cancer or heart disease or something. And I shake and shake, and I rewrite the script in my head until it’s 100 per cent proof poison, and none of it helps at all.
Nineteen
Sarah still sends me Christmas cards with her address and phone number on them. (She doesn’t write it out: she uses those crappy little stickers.) They never say anything else, apart from ‘Happy Xmas! Love, Sarah,’ in her big round schoolteacher’s handwriting. I send her equally blank ones back. I noticed a couple of years ago that the address had changed; I also noticed that it had changed from a Whole Number, Something Street to a number with a letter after it, and not even a ‘b,’ which can still denote a house, but a ‘c’ or a ‘d,’ which can only denote a flat. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but now it seems faintly ominous. To me it suggests that the Whole Number, Something Street belonged to Tom, and that Tom isn’t around anymore. Smug? Me?
She looks the same—a bit thinner, maybe (Penny was a lot fatter, but then she’s doubled her age since I last saw her; Sarah had only gone from thirty to thirty-five, and that’s not life’s most fattening journey), but she’s still peering out from under her bangs. We go out for a pizza, and it’s depressing how big a deal this is for her: not the act of eating pizza itself, but the dateness of the evening. Tom has gone, and gone in a fairly spectacular fashion. Get this: he told her, not that he was unhappy in the relationship, not that he had met someone else he wanted to see, not that he was seeing someone else, but that he was getting married to someone else. Classic, eh? You’ve got to laugh, really, but I manage not to. It’s one of those hard-luck stories that seem to reflect badly on the victims, somehow, so I shake my head at the cruel mysteries of the universe instead.
She looks at her wine. “I can’t believe I left you for him,” she says. “Mad.”
I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want her rejecting the rejection; I want her to explain it so that I can absolve her. I shrug. “Probably seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Probably. I can’t remember why, though.”
I could end up having sex here, and the prospect doesn’t appall me. What better way to exorcise rejection demons than to screw the person who rejected you? But you wouldn’t just be sleeping with a person: you’d be sleeping with a whole sad single-person culture. If we went to her place there’d be a cat, and the cat would jump on the bed at a crucial point, and we’d have to break off while she shooed it out and shut it in the kitchen. And we’d probably have to listen to her Eurythmics records, and there’d be nothing to drink. And there’d be none of those Marie LaSalle hey-women-can-get-horny-too shrugs; there’d be phone calls and embarrassment and regret. So I’m not going to sleep with Sarah unless at some point during the evening I see quite clearly that it’s her or nothing for the rest of my life, and I can’t see that sort of vision descending on me tonight: that’s how we ended up going out in the first place. That’s why she left me for Tom. She made a calculation, worked out the odds, made a solid each-way bet and went. That she wants another go says more about me, and about her, than cash ever can: she’s thirty-five, and she’s telling herself that life isn’t going to offer her any more than what she has here this evening, a pizza and an old boyfriend she didn’t like that much in the first place. That’s a pretty grim conclusion, but it’s not difficult to see how she got there.