“I’m right, aren’t I?” Charlie asks. “She’s just your type.”
I shrug. “She’s everybody’s type.” I help myself to some more coffee. I’m drunk, and it seems like a good idea just to launch in. “Charlie, why did you pack me in for Marco?”
She looks at me hard. “I knew it.”
“What?”
“You are going through one of those what-does-it-all-mean things.” She says “what-does-it-all-mean” in an American accent and furrows her brow.
I cannot tell a lie. “I am, actually, yes. Yes, indeed. Very much so.”
She laughs—at me, I think, not with me—and then plays with one of her rings.
“You can say what you like,” I tell her, generously.
“It’s all kind of a bit lost in the…in the dense mists of time now.” She says “dense mists of time” in an Irish accent, for no apparent reason, and waves her hand around in front of her face, presumably to indicate the density of the mist. “It wasn’t that I fancied Marco more, because I used to find you every bit as attractive as him.” (Pause.) “It’s just that he knew he was nice-looking, and you didn’t, and that made a difference, somehow. You used to act as though I was a bit peculiar for wanting to spend time with you, and that got kind of tiring, if you know what I mean. Your self-image started to rub off on me, and I ended up thinking I was peculiar. And I knew you were kind, and thoughtful, and you made me laugh, and I loved the way you got consumed by the things you loved, but…Marco seemed a bit more, I don’t know, glamorous? More sure of himself, more in with the in-crowd?” (Pause.) “Less hard work, ’cause I felt I was dragging you round a bit.” (Pause.) “A bit sunnier, and a bit sparkier.” (Pause.) “I don’t know. You know what people are like at that age. They make very superficial judgments.”
Where’s the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn’t seem like superficial to me. These aren’t flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.
“Do you find that hurtful? He was a wimp, if that’s any consolation.”
It’s not, really, but I didn’t want consolation. I wanted the works, and I got it, too. None of Alison Ashworth’s fate here; none of Sarah’s rewriting of history, and no reminder that I’d got all the rejection stuff the wrong way round, like I did about Penny. Just a perfectly clear explanation of why some people have it and some people don’t. Later on, in the back of a minicab, I realize that all Charlie has done is rephrase my own feelings about my genius for being normal; maybe that particular talent—my only one, as it happens—was overrated anyway.
TWENTY-TWO
BARRY’S band is going to play a gig, and he wants to put a poster up in the shop.
“No. Fuck off.”
“Thanks for your support, Rob. I really appreciate it.”
“I thought we had a rule about posters for crap bands.”
“Yeah, for people who come in off the street begging us. All the losers.”
“Like…let’s see. Suede, you turned down. The Auteurs. St. Etienne. Losers like that, you mean?”
“What’s all this ‘I turned them down’? It was your rule.”
“Yeah, but you loved it, didn’t you? It gave you great pleasure to tell all those poor kids to take a running jump.”
“Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? Oh, come on, Rob. We need the regulars from here, otherwise there’ll be nobody.”
“OK, what’s the name of the band? If it’s any good, you can put a poster up.”
He thrusts a poster at me—just the name of the band, with some squiggly design.
“‘Barrytown.’ ‘Barrytown’? Fucking hell. Is there no end to your arrogance?”
“It’s not because of me. It’s the Steely Dan song. And it was in The Commitments.”
“Yeah, but come on, Barry. You can’t be called Barry and sing in a group called Barrytown. It just sounds…”
“They were fucking called that before I came along, OK? It wasn’t my idea.”
“That’s why you got the gig, isn’t it?”
Barry of Barrytown says nothing.
“Isn’t it?”
“That was one of the reasons why they asked me originally, yes. But…”
“Brilliant! Fucking brilliant! They only asked you to sing because of your name! Of course you can have a poster up, Barry. I want as many people to know as possible. Not in the window, OK? You can stick it above the browser racks over there.”
“How many tickets can I put you down for?”
I hold my sides and laugh mirthlessly. “Ha, ha ha. Ho, ho ho. Stop, Barry, you’re killing me.”
“You’re not even coming?”
“Of course I’m not coming. Do I look like a man who’d want to listen to some terrible experimental racket played in some horrible north London pub? Where is it?” I look at the poster. “The fucking Harry Lauder! Ha!”
“So much for mates, then. You’re a bitter bastard, Rob, you know that?”
Sour. Bitter. Everyone seems to agree that I don’t taste very nice.
“Bitter? Because I’m not in Barrytown? I hoped it wasn’t that obvious. And you’ve been great to Dick about Anna, haven’t you? Really made her feel a part of the Championship Vinyl family.”
I’d forgotten that I have been wishing nothing but everlasting happiness to Dick and Anna. How does that fit in with my sourness, eh? What’s bitter about that?
“That Anna stuff was just a bit of fun. She’s all right. It’s just…it’s not my fault that you’re fucking up left, right, and center.”
“Oh, and you’d be first in the queue to see me play, wouldn’t you?”
“Not first, maybe. But I’d be there.”
“Is Dick going?”
“’Course. And Anna. And Marie and T-Bone.”
Is the world really that generous-spirited? I had no idea.
I guess you could see it as bitterness, if you wanted to. I don’t think of myself as bitter, but I have disappointed myself; I thought I was going to turn out to be worth a bit more than this, and maybe that disappointment comes out all wrong. It’s not just the work; it’s not just the thirty-five-and-single thing, although none of this helps. It’s…oh, I don’t know. Have you ever looked at a picture of yourself when you were a kid? Or pictures of famous people when they were kids? It seems to me that they can either make you happy or sad. There’s a lovely picture of Paul McCartney as a little boy, and the first time I saw it, it made me feel good: all that talent, all that money, all those years of blissed-out domesticity, a rock-solid marriage and lovely kids, and he doesn’t even know it yet. But then there are others—JFK and all the rock deaths and fuckups, people who went mad, people who came off the rails, people who murdered, who made themselves or other people miserable in ways too numerous to mention—and you think, stop right there! This is as good as it gets!
Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid, the ones that I never wanted old girlfriends to see…well, they’ve started to give me a little pang of something—not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret. There’s one of me in a cowboy hat, pointing a gun at the camera, trying to look like a cowboy but failing, and I can hardly bring myself to look at it now. Laura thought it was sweet (she used that word! Sweet, the opposite of sour!) and pinned it up in the kitchen, but I’ve put it back in a drawer. I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: “I’m sorry, I’ve let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.”
See, he would have wanted to see Barry’s band; he wouldn’t have worried too much about Ian’s dungarees or Penny’s flashlight-pen (he would have loved Penny’s flashlight-pen) or Charlie’s trips to the States. He wouldn’t have understood, in fact, why I was so down on all of them. If he could be here now, if he could jump out of that photo and into this shop, he’d run straight out of the door and back
to 1967 as fast as his little legs would carry him.
TWENTY-THREE
FINALLY, finally, a month or so after she’s left, Laura comes to move her stuff out. There’s no real argument about what belongs to whom; the good records are mine, the good furniture, most of the cooking stuff, and the hardback books are hers. The only thing I’ve done is to sort out a whole pile of records and a few CDs I gave her as presents, stuff that I wanted but thought she’d like, and which have somehow ended up being filed away in my collection. I’ve been really scrupulous about it: she wouldn’t have remembered half of these, and I could have got away with it, but I’ve pulled out every single one.
I was scared she was going to bring Ian round, but she doesn’t. In fact, she’s obviously uncomfortable about the fact that he rang.
“Forget it.”
“He had no right to do that, and I told him so.”
“Are you still together?”
She looks at me to see if I’m joking, and then gives a little hard-luck grimace that actually isn’t too attractive, if you think about it.
“Going all right?”
“I don’t really want to talk about it, to be honest.”
“That bad, eh?”
“You know what I mean.”
She’s borrowed her dad’s Volvo Estate for the weekend, and we fill every inch of it; she comes back inside for a cup of tea when we’re done.
“It’s a dump, isn’t it?” I say. I can see her looking round the flat, staring at the dusty, discolored spaces her things have left on the wall, so I feel I have to preempt criticism.
“Please do it up, Rob. It wouldn’t cost you much, and it would make you feel better.”
“I’ll bet you can’t remember what you were doing here now, can you?”
“Yes, I can. I was here because I wanted to be with you.”
“No, I meant, you know…how much are you on now? Forty-five? Fifty? And you lived in this poky little hole in Crouch End.”
“You know I didn’t mind. And it’s not as if Ray’s place is any better.”
“I’m sorry, but can we get this straight? What is his name, Ian or Ray? What do you call him?”
“Ray. I hate Ian.”
“Right. Just so’s I know. Anyway, what’s Ian’s place like?” Childish, but it makes me happy. Laura puts on her pained, stoical face. I’ve seen that one a few times, I can tell you.
“Small. Smaller than here. But neater, and less cluttered.”
“That’s ’cause he’s only got about ten records. CDs.”
“And that makes him an awful person, does it?”
“In my book, yes. Barry, Dick, and I decided that you can’t be a serious person if you have—”
“Less than five hundred. Yes, I know. You’ve told me many, many times before. I disagree. I think it’s possible to be a serious person even if you have no records whatsoever.”
“Like Kate Adie.”
She looks at me, frowns, and opens her mouth, her way of indicating that I’m potty. “Do you know for a fact that Kate Adie’s got no records whatsoever?”
“Well, not none. She’s probably got a couple. Pavarotti and stuff. Maybe some Tracy Chapman, and a copy of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, and two or three Beatles albums.”
She starts to laugh. I wasn’t joking, to be honest, but if she thinks I’m funny then I prepared to act like I was.
“And I’ll bet she was one of the people at parties who used to go ‘Woooh!’ to the fade-out of ‘Brown Sugar.’”
“There is no greater crime than that, as far as you’re concerned, is there?”
“The only thing that runs it close is singing along to the chorus of ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining,’ at the top of your voice.”
“I used to do that.”
“You didn’t.”
The joking has stopped now, and I look at her appalled. She roars.
“You believed me! You believed me! You must think I’m capable of anything.” She laughs again, catches herself having a good time, and stops.
I give her the cue. “This is where you’re supposed to say that you haven’t laughed this much in ages, and then you see the error of your ways.”
She makes a so-what face. “You make me laugh much more than Ray does, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
I give a mock-smug smile, but I’m not feeling mock-smug. I’m feeling the real thing.
“But it doesn’t make any difference to anything, Rob. Really. We could laugh until I had to be taken away in an ambulance, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to unload the car and move all my stuff back in. I already knew you could make me laugh. It’s everything else I don’t know about.”
“Why don’t you just admit that Ian’s an arsehole and have done with it? It would make you feel better.”
“Have you been talking to Liz?”
“Why? Does she think he’s an arsehole too? That’s interesting.”
“Don’t spoil it, Rob. We’ve got on well today. Let’s leave it at that.”
I pull out the stack of records and CDs that I’ve sorted out for her. There’s The Nightfly by Donald Fagen, because she’d never heard it, and some blues compilation samplers I decided she ought to have, and a couple of jazz-dance things I bought for her when she started going to a jazz-dance class, although it turned out to be a different and frankly much crappier form of jazz-dance, and a couple of country things, in my vain attempt to change her mind about country, and…
She doesn’t want any of it.
“But they’re yours.”
“They’re not really, though, are they? I know you bought them for me, and that was really sweet of you, but that was when you were trying to turn me into you. I can’t take them. I know they’d just sit around staring at me, and I’d feel embarrassed by them, and…they don’t fit in with the rest of what’s mine, do you understand? That Sting record you bought me…that was a present for me. I like Sting and you hate him. But the rest of this stuff…” She picks up the blues sampler. “Who the hell’s Little Walter? Or Junior Wells? I don’t know these people. I…”
“OK, OK. I get the picture.”
“I’m sorry to go on about it. But, I don’t know, there’s a lesson in here somewhere, and I want to make sure you get it.”
“I get it. You like Sting but you don’t like Junior Wells, because you’ve never heard of him.”
“You’re being deliberately obtuse.”
“I am, actually, yes.”
She gets up to go.
“Well, think about it.”
And later on, I think, what for? What’s the point of thinking about it? If I ever have another relationship, I’ll buy her, whoever she is, stuff that she ought to like but doesn’t know about; that’s what new boyfriends are for. And hopefully I won’t borrow money off her, or have an affair, and she won’t need to have an abortion, or run away with the neighbors, and then there won’t be anything to think about. Laura didn’t run off with Ray because I bought her CDs she wasn’t that keen on, and to pretend otherwise is just…just … psychowank. If she thinks that, then she’s missing the Brazilian rain forest for the twigs. If I can’t buy specially priced compilation albums for new girlfriends, then I might as well give up, because I’m not sure that I know how to do anything else.
TWENTY-FOUR
I USUALLY enjoy my birthday, but today I don’t feel so good about it. Birthdays should be suspended in years like this one: there should be a law, of man if not of nature, that you are only allowed to age when things are ticking along nicely. What do I want to be thirty-six for now? I don’t. It’s not convenient. Rob Fleming’s life is frozen at the moment, and he refuses to get any older. Please retain all cards, cakes, and presents for use on another occasion.
Actually, that seems to be what people have done. Sod’s law decrees that my birthday should fall on a Sunday this year, so cards and presents are not forthcoming; I didn’t get anything Saturday, either. I wasn’t expecting anything from Dick or Barry, a
lthough I told them in the pub after work, and they looked guilty, and bought me a drink, and promised me all sorts of things (well, compilation tapes, anyway); but I never remember their birthdays—you don’t, do you, unless you are of the female persuasion—so a tantrum would not be particularly appropriate in this case. But Laura? Relatives? Friends? (Nobody you know, but I do have some, and I do see them sometimes, and one or two of them do know when my birthday is.) Godparents? Anyone else at all? I did get a card from my mum and a P.S. from my dad, but parents don’t count; if you don’t even get a card from your folks, then you’re really in trouble.
On the morning of the day itself I spend much too much time fantasizing about some enormous surprise party organized by Laura, maybe, with the help of my mum and dad, who could have provided her with the addresses and phone numbers of some of the people she wouldn’t know about; I even find myself irritated by their not having told me about it. Suppose I just took myself off to the pictures for a solitary birthday treat without letting them know? Then where would they be, eh? They’d all be hiding in some cupboard somewhere while I was watching a Godfather triple-bill at the Scala. That’d serve them right. I decide not to tell them where I’m going; I’ll leave them squashed up in the dark, cramped and ill-tempered. (“I thought you were going to ring him?” “I told you I didn’t have time,” etc.) After a couple of cups of coffee, however, I realize that this sort of thinking is not profitable, that it is, in fact, likely to drive me potty, and I decide to arrange something positive instead.
Like what?
Go to the video shop for a start, and rent loads of things I’ve been saving up for just such a dismal occasion as this: Naked Gun 2 ½, Terminator 2, Robocop 2. And then ring up a couple of people to see if they want a drink tonight. Not Dick and Barry. Marie maybe, or people I haven’t seen for a long time. And then watch one or two of the videos, drink some beer, and eat some crisps, maybe even some Kettle Chips. Sounds good. Sounds like the sort of birthday a brand-new thirty-six-year-old should have. (Actually, it is the only sort of birthday a brand-new thirty-six-year-old could have—the sort of thirty-six-year-old with no wife, family, girlfriend, or money, anyway. Kettle Chips! Fuck off!)