Starter for Ten

  “… Hmmm …”

  “… I mean, what is it, a measly twenty-three quid a week or something? No one can live on that. And what do they expect people to do anyway, if there's no proper work around … ?”

  “Uh-huh …”

  “… I'd like to see some of those bastard Tories survive on that money. Anyway, I'm worried that he's going to ask if he can borrow money from me, because I can't afford to lend him money, not with grants at this level.…”

  … And here I stop talking because I realize that Rebecca's written the words “Heeeelp meeee!” backwards in the steam on the window.

  “Sorry. I'm being a bit boring, aren't I?”

  “Well, Jackson, you know me, usually I'd love nothing better than to discuss Tory social policy of a morning, it's just, well, it's not really the important issue here. Is it?”

  “No, I suppose not.” I take a deep breath. “Sorry about the other night.”

  “And do you know exactly what you're apologizing for?”

  Do I? “Not exactly, no.”

  “Not really an apology then, is it?”

  “No. No, I suppose not.” Looking back on that evening, I suppose it was a little like getting caught up in a drunken scuffle outside a pub on a Friday night; exciting and vivid and scary at the time, but afterward you're not sure exactly who did what to whom, or even who started it. I contemplate communicating this analogy to Rebecca, but no one likes being told that kissing them is like being beaten up outside a pub, so instead I just say,

  “I presumed it was just, you know, the usual.”

  “What's the usual?”

  “You know, just me being useless.”

  “Och, well, you're no worse than me.…”

  “I'm much worse than you.”

  “You're not.…”

  “I am.…”

  “No, you're not.…”

  “I am, I'm appalling.…”

  “All right, Jackson, let's not get into a dialectic about it, yeah?” and she sips her tea, and seems to chew it, then says, “Look, I got a bit drunk and made a mistake, ‘misread the signals' or whatever the phrase is, and I'm not particularly angry with you, I'm just embarrassed, really. It's not very often that I make myself …”—and she gives a little, bitter laugh—“… vulnerable, is that the right word?” Then she licks the tip of her finger, and uses it to swab the crumbs of my bacon roll from my plate. “Still, I'm sure I'll learn to love again.”

  The conversation is clearly taking on a new and intriguing personal dimension here, so I lean forward on the table and rest my head at an angle against the wet window in a style that I believe denotes a kind of wistful sensitivity, and in a low voice say, “So, have you had, you know, bad emotional experiences, in the past then, emotionally speaking?”

  Rebecca pauses, mug halfway to her mouth, then looks over both shoulders. “Sorry, but are you talking to me?”

  “It's a fair question, isn't it?”

  “It's also none of your fucking business. What d'you want me to say? It's because Daddy never let me have a pony? I got drunk, and I fancied a bit of, human, whatever, contact, and I made a pass, and I got rejected. It's not that big a deal. Just because everyone else at this fucking place is emotionally fucking incontinent, doesn't mean I have to be.…”

  “I think you swear too much.”

  “Bollocks I do …”

  “I think if you swear all the time, then you're going to devalue the effectiveness of the swear words.”

  “And who are you, Mary-fucking-Poppins?” she says, but smiling ever so slightly, which is as much as I can hope for, I suppose. Then she sips her tea, looks out the window, and says casually, “Anyway, if you must know, the last relationship I had ended up in an abortion clinic, so … well … anyway, I'm not quite as free and easy about these things as some people are. That's all.”

  I don't know how to react to this. Or, rather, I know how to react from a political point of view, but I'm just not sure how I'm meant to react as a human being. I don't know what to do with my face. Perhaps the thing is not to get too somber, not to make too big a deal about it.

  “Who was he?”

  “Just some guy from home, some guy I made the mistake of shagging. No one you know,” she says, picking holes in my balled-up serviette.

  “And he packed you in because you … ?”

  “No, of course not. Well, not immediately. Not at all. It was complicated.” Then she sighs, glances at me, then back down to the serviette. “Guy called Gordon, who I was at sixth form with. First-true-love, all that crap. We'd been going out about six months, and we were going to go inter-railing together that summer, after our exams, then take a year out and go and live somewhere abroad, see how things worked out, see if we wanted to, you know, whatever. So we set off round Europe, seeing the sights, sleeping on beaches, all very love's-young-dream, then, halfway round Spain, turned out I was pregnant. So we talked it through, decided what to do, came straight back, sorted things out. And he said that we'd get through it together and he'd stick by me, which he did. But only for a week and a half. So. There you go.”

  “And did you, you know, love him?” She frowns, purses her lips, but doesn't reply, just looks out the window, then back to the balled-up serviette. I don't know what to say, but feel like I ought to say something. “Well, I'm sure you did the right thing at the time.”

  Rebecca's eyes flash back at me. “Brian, I know I did the right thing. I wasn't asking for your approval …”

  “No, I know …”

  “… and there's no need to start talking in that dopey voice either.”

  “What voice?”

  “You know what voice. It does happen, you know, abortion, a lot, more than you know …”

  “I do know …”

  “… and we don't all curl up into a little ball about it either, we don't all crawl away into a corner with a copy of The Bell Jar, you know. Most women just get on with things …”

  “I'm sure …”

  “… so let's just change the subject then, shall we?”

  “Okay.”

  “Is that your Mars bar?” she says, and I have a tiny little moment of anxiety, because I can't remember whether or not we're meant to be boy cotting Mars bars. “Uh-huh.”

  “Give it here, then.” I dutifully hand it over to her, and she takes a bite, chews it for a moment or two. “Why's everything you eat and drink brown? I've never seen so much brown food. It wouldn't hurt you to eat the odd piece of fruit and veg every now and then, you know.…”

  “You sound like my mum,” I say.

  “Well, she's a wise lady. You should listen to her. And me.” She takes another bite. “So, have you seen her, then?” she says with her mouth full. “Who? My mum?”

  “No, not your mum …”

  “Who, then?”

  “You know who: Farrah-Fucking-Fawcett.”

  “Oh, just a couple of times.” She takes another bite, then tosses the Mars bar back across the table at me, where it lands sticky-end down. “And do you still … like her, then?”

  I recognize that there's a very real danger that I could end up with a teaspoon in my eye, so I choose my words very carefully, and just say, “I think so.”

  “And what do you think she thinks about you?”

  “I think she finds me … interesting.”

  She looks at me, and goes to say something, then looks out of the win- dow, and starts to draw in the condensation again, a smiley face. “Interesting, eh? Well, it's very touching of you to hang in there, I suppose. Persistence in the face of indifference. Very … plucky,” she says, with a curl of the lip.

  “Yeah, well. I don't really seem to have much choice in the matter, to be honest.”

  “Oh, no, there's always a choice, Brian. You've always got a choice whether or not to be a complete and utter sap.”

  When I arrive home in the middle of the day, I see Marcus coming out of the house and locking the front door. I duck behind a wall and
even contemplate running away, but don't have full control of my legs yet, and besides he's seen me, and waits at the top of the steps, tapping the palm of his hand with an invisible rolling-pin.

  “Hiya, Marcus!”

  “Hello, Brian.”

  I try to get past him to the front door out of the drizzle, but he's not budging.

  “Sorry about last night, Marcus,” I say, you little squirt.

  “You do know overnight guests aren't allowed on university premises, don't you?”

  “Yes, I know …” I say, taking his aviator spectacles off his face.

  “I mean, Josh and I might want to have people to stay, but we don't, because we respect the university rules.…”

  “I know, Marcus …” I say, snapping the spectacles neatly in two across the bridge.

  “So how long's he staying then?”

  “Don't know. The next couple of days? Just till he's sort of sorted himself out.…” And I toss the broken spectacles on the ground, grind the glass underfoot.

  “Seemed to me that might take more than a couple of days …”

  I look up to my bedroom window, worried that Spencer's still lying in bed, listening, then offer, in a low voice, “Tomorrow? He'll be gone by tomorrow.”

  Marcus weighs this up, and finally finds it acceptable. “Okay, tomorrow. But no later,” he says, brushing past me, and I plant my foot at the base of his spine and shove him down the flight of stone steps to his death.

  “Have a good day, yeah?” I say.

  In the gray midmorning light, my bedroom is a mess of bed frames and album covers, coats and mattresses, duvets and moist towels. There's a sort of tangy, effervescent ammonia and alcohol smell, a feeling that if I'd walked in smoking a cigarette, my bedroom would have actually exploded in my face, so I open the window wide in spite of the rain and turn on the overhead light to see if Spencer is still lolling under a duvet somewhere. He isn't. Instead, there's a note on the desk, scrawled on a piece of lined paper.

  “Gone to the pub. See you later.”

  The travel alarm clock on my mantelpiece says 11:55. Next to the clock is the pile of change that I emptied out of my pockets last night. There should be approximately four pounds fifty-five there, but I count it anyway, just in case.

  Four pounds fifty.

  And I don't know what makes me feel sadder, the idea of Spencer in a pub before noon, or the fact that I checked to see if he'd stolen my money.

  28

  QUESTION: Which secret Greco-Roman festivals began as events exclusively for women, later admitting men, before finally being banned by the Roman Senate in 186 B.C. on the grounds of their supposedly orgiastic nature?

  ANSWER: Bacchanalia.

  As a general rule of thumb, you know a party's in trouble when they start playing show tunes.

  When Spencer and I arrive on the doorstep of 12 Dorchester Street we can clearly hear “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story blaring out loudly from the living room hi-fi, accompanied by several ostentatiously word-perfect male voices, and whilst I love Broadway musicals as much as the next man, there's a time and a place for these things. Also, the next man in this case is Spencer, who's not really a musical theater fan, and eyes me warily.

  “You sure about this?”

  “If they put Starlight Express on, we'll leave. All right?” and then the door's opened by Erin the Cat.

  “Hiya, Erin!” I chirp.

  “Hello, Brian,” she sighs.

  No one moves. I see her eyes flick up to Spencer's shaved head.

  “This is my friend, Spencer!”

  “All right?” says Spencer.

  “Hm,” says Erin, clearly not sure if this is all right, so I hold up the bottle of wine and four cans of lager as an incentive, and finally she opens the door.

  “The kitchen's through there,” says Erin, before heading back into New York's tough West Side, where the macho, street-smart Jets are being portrayed by three larky, skinny, overexcited boys from the Drama Department. To her credit, Erin takes West Side Story off the stereo, and puts on Sly and the Family Stone instead. “Oh! But it's ‘I Feel Pretty' next!” wails one of the Jets petulantly, and I see Spencer the Shark shaking his head and running his hand over where his hair used to be, and I have the definite sensation of having arrived at a party with a cocked and loaded shotgun.

  When I get back from breakfast with Rebecca, I check to see if Spencer's stolen any money, then decide to write some notes in my poetry notebook. On a new page, opposite my “breasts of alabaster” poem, I write:

  steam and grease condense on a café's plate glass windows. breakfast specials

  … Then I get tired, and decide that that's probably enough for today. I don't really have the energy, so instead I lie on the futon, start to read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and get as far as “It was an Ancient …” before the warmth and fumes from the gas heater make me fall into an appropriately narcotic slumber.

  I wake up in the afternoon gloom, fully dressed and sweaty and glue-mouthed, to find Spencer sitting with his feet up on my desk, reading Coleridge.

  “All right, Sleeping Beauty?”

  “What time is it?”

  “About four o'clock?” and there it is again, that all too common pang of regret at having entirely wasted another perfectly good day. Great chunks of my life have slipped by in this manner, the long school holidays especially; my salad days apparently, the supposedly idyllic long, hot summers, all evaporated away in a hazy torpor of hangovers and pointless ambles round Woolworth's, and headache-inducing afternoon naps, and video nasties watched for the fifteenth time with the curtains drawn, and drunken bickering and name-calling, and take-away food and fitful sleep and hangovers again and then back to Woolworth's. Hadn't I made some kind of resolution about all this? Wasn't this meant to have stopped by now? I'm already nineteen; I can't afford to let life slip through my fingers like this. So why have I done it again? I decide it's Spencer's fault, and sit up grumpily.

  “Who let you in?”

  “Some long-haired prick in a velvet waistcoat.”

  “Josh?”

  “‘Josh.' Not very friendly.”

  “Were you very friendly?”

  “Probably not. Why, should I have been?”

  “Well I do have to live with him, so …” Spencer doesn't say anything, just tosses the Coleridge back onto my desk. I get a waft of lager, cigarettes and perspiration. “Where have you been, then?”

  “Went to the pub. Read the paper. Walked round the shops.”

  “Buy anything?”

  “What with?” The same thing you bought the lager and cigarettes with maybe? I think, but instead say: “Nice city, though, isn't it?”

  “Yeah, 's all right,” and he rubs his hands over his face. “So—what now?”

  “Well, there's this party tonight, which should be quite cool, but I have to do some work first, really.…”

  “Nah, you don't.”

  “Spence, I do.…”

  “All right, I'll just sit and read or something.”

  But I have to get out of this room, as soon as possible, so instead I say, “Or we could just go to the pictures?”

  So we go to the pictures and watch the 5:15 p.m. screening of Amadeus, which seems to me a beautiful and profound exploration of the nature of genius, and which Spencer sleeps through.

  Things perk up, as they tend to, when we go to the pub. We argue over what to put on the jukebox, blow fifty pence on the slot machine, then sit in a little booth and have a laugh again. Spencer tells me that Tone has joined the Territorial Army.

  “You're joking.…”

  “I'm not.…”

  “But he's a nutter.…”

  “Doesn't matter. They prefer nutters.…”

  “So they're going to arm him?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Too-oooo w-risky,” we say, in unison, and I realize I haven't said “too- oooo w-risky” for years. Then Spencer says, “Initially
, of course, they're just training him to sit on the enemy's chest and fart in his face …”

  “… Or just sneak up behind him and rub his knuckles really hard on the top of their head.”

  “… Then nick their stereo equipment …”

  “… Fucking hell—Sergeant Tone …”

  “… The ultimate deterrent …”

  “The free world sleeps safe in its bed,” and Spence gulps his pint, then adds, “I tell you what's really funny—he's trying to get me to join, too.

  Thinks I need some order and discipline in my life, apparently.”

  “Tempted?”

  “Absolutely. Weekends spent in a fart-filled tent on Salisbury Plain with a bunch of Tory gun nuts. It's just the short-sharp-shock I need.” And I see my opportunity to slip it in undetected, so I keep smiling and say, “So have you thought about going back to college, maybe … ?”

  But Spencer spots it and says, “Fuck off, Bri.…” Not in an unkind way, but not kindly either, just wearily. “Anyway, university's just National Service for the middle classes.”

  “So what about me then? I'm not middle class.”

  “You are middle class.…”

  “No, I'm not.…”

  “Yes, you are.…”

  “My mum earns loads less than your parents.…”

  “It's not about money, though, is it? It's about attitude.”

  “Actually, technically, it's about who owns the means of production.…”

  “Bollocks, it's about attitude. Your mum could have sent you down a coal mine, and you'd still come up middle class. It's the things you say, the books you read, that film you just made me sit through, it's the way you go on school trips and spend your money on educational books and postcards instead of fags and arcade games, it's the way you ask for black pepper for your fish and chips …”

  “I've never done that.…”

  “You have, Bri! I was with you.”

  Actually, in my defense, my memory of the incident is that I didn't ask for black pepper, I chose black pepper, because they had black pepper there, but I don't want to labor the point. “So you think just because someone likes reading, or wants to learn something, or prefers black pepper, or wine to beer or whatever, that makes them middle class?”