I’m OK-looking; in fact, if you put, say, Mel Gibson on one end of the looks spectrum and, say, Berky Edmonds from school, whose grotesque ugliness was legendary, on the other, then I reckon I’d be on Mel’s side, just. A girlfriend once told me that I looked a bit like Peter Gabriel, and he’s not too bad, is he? I’m average height, not slim, not fat, no unsightly facial hair. I keep myself clean, wear jeans and T-shirts and a leather jacket more or less all the time apart from in the summer, when I leave the leather jacket at home. I vote Labour. I have a pile of classic comedy videos—Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Cheers, and so on. I can see what feminists are on about, most of the time, but not the radical ones.
My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame. I’d say that there were millions like me, but there aren’t, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don’t read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen. Lots of blokes drink too much, lots of blokes behave stupidly when they drive cars, lots of blokes get into fights, or show off about money, or take drugs. I don’t do any of these things, really; if I do OK with women, it’s not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don’t have.
Even so, you’ve got to know when you’re out of your depth. I was out of my depth with Charlie; after her, I was determined never to get out of my depth again, and so for five years, until I met Sarah, I just paddled around in the shallow end. Charlie and I didn’t match. Marco and Charlie matched; Sarah and I matched. Sarah was average-attractive (smallish, slim, nice big brown eyes, crooked teeth, shoulder-length dark hair that always seemed to need a cut no matter how often she went to the hairdresser’s), and she wore clothes that were the same as mine, more or less. All-time top five favorite recording artists: Madness, Eurythmics, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley. All-time top five favorite films: National Velvet, Diva (hey!), Gandhi, Missing, Wuthering Heights.
And she was sad, in the original sense of the word. She had been dumped a couple of years before by a sort of male equivalent to Charlie, a guy called Michael who wanted to be something at the BBC. (He never made it, the wanker, and each day we never saw him on TV or heard him on the radio, something inside us rejoiced.) He was her moment, just as Charlie was mine, and when they split, Sarah had sworn off men for a while, just as I had sworn off women. It made sense to swear off together, to pool our loathing of the opposite sex and get to share a bed with someone at the same time. Our friends were all paired off, our careers seemed to have hardened into permanence, we were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition. Everything seemed much later than it was, and after a few months she moved in with me.
We couldn’t fill a room. I don’t mean that we didn’t have enough stuff: she had loads of books (she was an English teacher), and I had thousands of records, and the flat is pretty poky anyway—I’ve lived here for over ten years, and most days I feel like a cartoon dog in a kennel. I mean that neither of us seemed loud enough, or powerful enough, so that when we were together, I was conscious of how the only space we occupied was that taken up by our bodies. We couldn’t project the way some couples can.
Sometimes we tried, when we were out with people even quieter than we; we never talked about why we suddenly became shriller and louder, but I’m sure we both knew that it happened. We did it to compensate for the fact that life was going on elsewhere, that somewhere Michael and Charlie were together, having a better time than we with people more glamorous than us, and making a noise was a sort of defiant gesture, a futile but necessary last stand. (You can see this everywhere you go: young, middle-class people whose lives are beginning to disappoint them making too much noise in restaurants and clubs and wine bars. “Look at me! I’m not as boring as you think I am! I know how to have fun!” Tragic. I’m glad I learned to stay home and sulk.) Ours was a marriage of convenience as cynical and as mutually advantageous as any, and I really thought that I might spend my life with her. I wouldn’t have minded. She was OK.
There’s a joke I saw in a sitcom once—Man About the House, maybe?—a terribly unsound joke, wherein a guy takes a really fat girl with specs out for the evening, gets her drunk, and makes a move on her when he takes her home. “I’m not that kind of girl!” she shrieks. He looks at her aghast. “But … but you must be,” the bloke says. It made me laugh when I was sixteen, but I didn’t think about it again until Sarah told me she had met someone else. “But … but you can’t have,” I wanted to splutter. I don’t mean that Sarah was unfanciable—she wasn’t, by any means, and anyway, this other guy must have fancied her. I just mean that her meeting someone else was contrary to the whole spirit of our arrangement. All we really had in common (our shared admiration of Diva did not, if truth be told, last us much beyond the first few months) was that we had been dumped by people, and that on the whole we were against dumping—we were fervent antidumpers. So how come I got dumped?
I was being unrealistic, of course. You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who could not possibly appeal to anybody else at all. If you’re going to go in for this stuff at all, you have to live with the possibility that it won’t work out, that somebody called Marco, say, or in this case, Tom, is going to come along and upset you. But I didn’t see it like that at the time. All I saw then was that I’d moved down a division and that it still hadn’t worked out, and this seemed a cause for a great deal of misery and self-pity.
And then I met you, Laura, and we lived together, and now you’ve moved out. But, you know, you’re not offering me anything new here; if you want to force your way onto the list, you’ll have to do better than this. I’m not as vulnerable as I was when Alison or Charlie dumped me, you haven’t changed the whole structure of my daily life like Jackie did, you haven’t made me feel bad about myself like Penny did (and there’s no way you can humiliate me, like Chris Thomson did), and I’m more robust than I was when Sarah went—I know, despite all the gloom and self-doubt that bubbles up from the deep when you get dumped, that you did not represent my last and best chance of a relationship. So, you know. Nice try. Close, but no cigar. See you around.
now …
One
She leaves first thing Monday morning with a hold-all and a carrier bag. It’s sobering, really, to see how little she is taking with her, this woman who loves her things, her teapots and her books and her prints and the little sculpture she bought in India: I look at the bag and think, Jesus, this is how much she doesn’t want to live with me.
We hug at the front door, and she’s crying a little.
“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she says.
“I can see that,” I say, which is sort of a joke and sort of not. “You don’t have to go now. You can stay until whenever.”