You thought there was going to be nothing left in the video shop, didn’t you? You thought I cut such a tragic figure that I’d be reduced to watching some Whoopi Goldberg comedy-thriller which never got a cinematic release in this country. But no! They’re all there, and I walk out with all the rubbish I want tucked under my arm. It’s just turned twelve, so I can buy some beer; I go home, pop a can, draw the curtains to keep out the March sunshine, and watch Naked Gun 2 ½, which turns out to be pretty funny.
My mum calls just as I’m putting Robocop 2 into the machine, and again, I’m disappointed that it isn’t someone else. If you can’t get a phone call from your mum on your birthday, then you’re really in trouble.
She’s nice to me, though. She’s sympathetic about me spending the day on my own, even though she must be hurt that I’d rather spend the day on my own than spend it with her and Dad. (“D’you want to come to the pictures this evening with your father and Yvonne and Brian?” she asks me. “No,” I tell her. That’s all. Just “No.” Restrained or what?) She can’t really think of anything to say after that. It must be hard for parents, I guess, when they see that things aren’t working out for their children, but that their children can no longer be reached by the old parental routes, because those roads are now much too long. She starts to talk about other birthdays, birthdays where I was ill because I ate too many nutella sandwiches or drank too many rainbow cocktails, but these were at least pukes conceived in happiness, and her talking about them doesn’t cheer me up much, and I stop her. And then she starts on a whiny, how-come-you’ve-got-yourself-into-this-mess speech, which I know is a result of her powerlessness and panic, but it’s my day today, such as it is, and I’m not prepared to listen to that either. She’s OK about me shutting her up, though: because she still treats me like a child, birthdays are times when I am allowed to behave like one.
Laura rings in the middle of Robocop 2, from a callbox. This is very interesting, but maybe now is not the time to talk about why—not with Laura, anyway. Maybe later, with Liz or someone, but not now. This is obvious to anyone but a complete idiot.
“Why are you ringing from a callbox?”
“Am I?” she says. Not the smoothest answer.
“Did you have to put money or a card into a slot to speak to me? Is there a horrible smell of urine? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, it’s a callbox. Why are you ringing from a callbox?”
“To wish you a happy birthday. I’m sorry I forgot to send you a card.”
“I didn’t mean…”
“I was just on my way home, and I…”
“Why didn’t you wait till you got back?”
“What’s the point of me saying anything? You think you know the answer anyway.”
“I’d just like it confirmed.”
“Are you having a good day?”
“Not bad. Naked Gun 2 ½: very funny. Robocop 2: not as good as the first one. So far, anyway.”
“You’re watching videos?”
“I am.”
“On your own?”
“Yep. Want to come round? I’ve still got Terminator 2 to see.”
“I can’t. I’ve got to get back.”
“Right.”
“Anyway.”
“How’s your dad?”
“He’s not too bad, at the moment, thanks for asking.”
“Good.”
“Have a nice day, OK? Do something good with it. Don’t waste all day in front of the TV.”
“Right.”
“Come on, Rob. It’s not my fault you’re in on your own. I’m not the only person you know. And I am thinking of you, it’s not like I’ve just jumped ship.”
“Tell Ian I said hi, OK?”
“Very funny.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do. Very funny.”
Got her. He doesn’t want her to phone, and she’s not going to tell him she has. Cool.
I’m at a bit of a loss after Terminator 2. It’s not four o’clock yet, and even though I’ve plowed my way through three great crap videos and the best part of a six-pack, I still cannot shake the feeling that I’m not having much of a birthday. There are papers to read, and compilation tapes to make, but, you know. I pick up the phone instead, and start to organize my own surprise party in the pub. I shall gather a few people together, try to forget I called them, take myself off to the Crown or the Queen’s Head around eight for a quiet pint, and get my back slapped raw by well-wishers I never expected to see there in a million years.
It’s harder than I thought, though. London, eh? You might as well ask people if they’d like to take a year off and travel around the world with you as ask them if they’d like to nip out for a quick drink later on: later on means later on in the month, or the year, or the nineties, but never later on the same day. “Tonight?” they all go, all these people I haven’t spoken to for months, ex-colleagues or old college friends, or people I’ve met through ex-colleagues or old college friends. “Later on tonight?” They’re aghast, they’re baffled, they’re kind of amused, but most of all they just can’t believe it. Someone’s phoning up and suggesting a drink tonight, out of the blue, no Filofax to hand, no lists of alternative dates, no lengthy consultation with a partner? Preposterous.
But a couple of them show signs of weakness, and I exploit that weakness mercilessly. It’s not an ooh-I-shouldn’t-really-but-I-quite-fancy-a-pint sort of weakness; it’s an inability-to-say-no sort of weakness. They don’t want to go out tonight, but they can hear the desperation, and they cannot find it in themselves to respond with the necessary firmness.
Dan Maskell (real first name Adrian, but it had to be done) is the first to crack. He’s married, with a kid, and he lives in Hounslow, and it’s a Sunday night, but I’m not going to let him off the hook.
“Hello, Dan? It’s Rob.”
“Hello, mate.” (Genuine pleasure at this point, which is something, I suppose.)
“How are you?”
So I tell him how I am, and then I explain the sad situation—sorry it’s too last-minute, bit of a cock-up on the arrangement front (I manage to resist telling him there’s been a bit of a cock-up on the life front generally), be nice to see him anyway, and so on and so forth, and I can hear the hesitation in his voice. And then—Adrian’s a big music fan, which is how I met him at college, and why we kept in touch afterwards—I steal a trump card and play it.
“Have you heard of Marie LaSalle? She’s a very good folky country kind of singer.”
He hasn’t, not surprisingly, but I can tell that he’s interested.
“Well, anyway, she’s a…well, a friend, and she’ll be coming along, so…she’s great, and she’s worth meeting, and…I don’t know if…”
It’s just about enough. To speak frankly with you, Adrian’s a bit of an idiot, which is why I thought Marie might be an enticement. Why do I want to spend my birthday drinking with an idiot? That’s a long story, most of which you already know.
Steven Butler lives in north London, doesn’t have a wife, and doesn’t have that many friends either. So why can’t he come out tonight? He’s already rented his video, that’s why.
“Fucking hell, Steve.”
“Well, you should have called me earlier. I’ve only just come back from the shop.”
“Why don’t you watch it now?”
“No. I’m a bit funny about watching videos before my tea. It’s like you’re just watching for the sake of it, do you know what I mean? And every one you watch in the daytime, that’s one less you can watch at night.”
“How d’you work that out?”
“’Cause you’re wasting them, aren’t you?”
“Watch it another time, then.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve got so much money I can give two pounds to the bloke in the video shop every night.”
“I’m not asking you to do it every night. I’m…Look, I’ll give you the two quid, all right?”
“I dunno. Are you sure?”
br />
I’m sure, and there we have it. Dan Maskell and Steve Butler. They don’t know each other, they won’t like each other, and they have nothing in common apart from a slight overlap in their record collections (Dan’s not very interested in black music, Steve’s not very interested in white music, they both have a few jazz albums). And Dan’s expecting to see Marie, but Marie’s not expecting to see Dan, nor does she even know of his existence. Should be a cracking night out.
Marie’s got a phone now, and Barry has her number, and she’s happy that I called, and more than happy to come out for a drink, and if she knew it was my birthday she’d probably explode with joy, but for some reason I decide not to tell her. I don’t have to sell the evening to her, which is just as well, because I don’t think I’d be able to give it away. She’s got to do something else first, however, so there’s an agonizing hour or so alone with Steve and Dan. I talk to Dan about rock music, while Steve stares at somebody getting lucky on the fruit machine, and I talk to Steve about soul music, while Dan does that trick with a beer mat which only the truly irritating person knows. And then we all talk about jazz, and then there’s some pretty desultory what-do-you-do kind of stuff, and then we run out of petrol altogether, and we all watch the guy who’s getting lucky on the fruit machine.
Marie and T-Bone and a very blond, very glamorous, and very young woman, also American, finally turn up around quarter to ten, so there’s only forty-five minutes of drinking time left. I ask them what they want to drink, but Marie doesn’t know, and comes up to the bar with me to have a look at what they’ve got.
“I see what you mean about T-Bone’s sex life,” I say as we’re waiting.
She raises her eyes to the ceiling. “Isn’t she something else? And you know what? That’s the ugliest woman he’s ever dated.”
“I’m glad you could come.”
“The pleasure is ours. Who are those guys?”
“Dan and Steve. I’ve known them for years. They’re a bit dull, I’m afraid, but I have to see them sometimes.”
“Duck noires, right?”
“Sorry?”
“I call ’em duck noires. Sort of a mixture of lame duck and bête noire. People you don’t want to see but kinda feel you should.”
Duck noires. Bang on. And I had to fucking beg mine, pay mine, to come out for a drink on my birthday.
I never think these things through, ever. “Happy birthday, Rob,” says Steve when I put his drink down in front of him. Marie attempts to give me a look—of surprise, I would guess, but also of deepest sympathy and bottomless understanding, but I won’t return it.
It’s a pretty bad evening. When I was a kid, my granny used to spend Boxing Day afternoon with a friend’s granny; my mum and dad would drink with Adrian’s mum and dad, and I’d play with Adrian, and the two old codgers would sit in front of the TV exchanging pleasantries. The catch was that they were both deaf, but it didn’t really matter: they were happy enough with their version of a conversation, which had the same gaps and nods and smiles as everyone else’s conversation, but none of the connections. I haven’t thought about that for years, but I remember it tonight.
Steve annoys me throughout: he has this trick of waiting until the conversation is in full flow, and then muttering something in my ear when I’m attempting either to talk or to listen to somebody else. So I can either ignore him and appear rude, or answer him, involve everyone else in what I’m saying, and change their direction entirely. And once he’s got everyone talking about soul, or Star Trek (he goes to conventions and things), or great bitters of the north of England (he goes to conventions and things), subjects nobody else knows anything about, we go through the whole process all over again. Dan yawns a lot, Marie is patient, T-Bone is tetchy, and his date, Suzie, is positively appalled. What is she doing in a grotty pub with these guys? She has no idea. Neither have I. Maybe Suzie and I should disappear off somewhere more intimate, and leave these losers to get on with it. I could take you through the whole evening, but you wouldn’t enjoy it much, so I’ll let you off with a dull but entirely representative sample:
MARIE:
…just unbelievable, I mean, real animals. I was singing “Love Hurts” and this guy shouted out, “Not the way I do it, baby,” and then he was sick all the way down his T-shirt, and he didn’t move a muscle. Just stood there shouting at the stage and laughing with his buddies. [Laughs.] You were there, weren’t you, T-Bone?
T-BONE:
I guess.
MARIE:
T-Bone dreams of fans as suave as that, don’t you? The places he plays, you have to…[Inaudible due to interruption from…]
STEVE:
[Whispering in my ear] They’ve brought The Baron out on video now, you know. Six episodes. D’you remember the theme music?
ME:
No. I don’t. [Laughter from Marie, T-Bone, Dan] Sorry, Marie, I missed that. You have to do what?
MARIE:
I was saying, this place that T-Bone and me…
STEVE:
It was brilliant. Der-der-DER! Der-der-der DER!
DAN:
I recognize that. Man in a Suitcase?
STEVE:
No. The Baron. ’S’ out on video.
MARIE:
The Baron? Who was in that?
DAN:
Steve Forrest.
MARIE:
I think we used to get that. Was that the one where the guy [Inaudible due to interruption from…]
STEVE:
[Whispering in my ear] D’you ever read Voices from the Shadows? Soul magazine? Brilliant. Steve Davis owns it, you know. The snooker player. [Suzie makes a face at T-Bone. T-Bone looks at his watch.]
Etc.
Never again will this combination of people be seated around a table; it just couldn’t possibly happen, and it shows. I thought the numbers would provide a feeling of security and comfort, but they haven’t. I don’t really know any of these people, not even the one I’ve slept with, and for the first time since I split up with Laura, I really feel like slumping onto the floor and bawling my eyes out. I’m homesick.
It’s supposed to be women who allow themselves to become isolated by relationships: they end up seeing more of the guy’s friends, and doing more of the guy’s things (poor Anna, trying to remember who Richard Thompson is, and being shown the error of her Simple Minded ways), and when they’re ditched, or when they ditch, they find they’ve floated too far away from friends they last saw properly three or four years before. And before Laura, that was what life was like for me and my partners too, most of them.
But Laura…I don’t know what happened. I liked her crowd, Liz and the others who used to come down to the Groucho. And for some reason—comparative career success, I guess, and the corresponding postponements that brings—her crowd were more single and more flexible than mine. So for the first time ever I played the woman’s role, and threw my lot in with the person I was seeing. It wasn’t that she didn’t like my friends (not friends like Dick and Barry and Steve and Dan, but proper friends, the sort of people I have allowed myself to lose). It was just that she liked hers more, and wanted me to like them, and I did. I liked them more than I liked my own and, before I knew it (I never knew it, really, until it was too late), my relationship was what gave me my sense of location. And if you lose your sense of location, you get homesick. Stands to reason.
So now what? It feels as though I’ve come to the end of the line. I don’t mean that in the American rock’n’roll suicide sense; I mean it in the English Thomas the Tank Engine sense. I’ve run out of puff, and come to a gentle halt in the middle of nowhere.
“These people are your friends?” Marie asks me the next day when she takes me for a post-birthday crispy bacon and avocado sandwich.
“It’s not that bad. There were only two of them.”
She looks at me to see if I’m joking. When she laughs, it’s clear that I am.
“But it was your birthday.”
“W
ell. You know.”
“Your birthday. And that’s the best you can do?”
“Say it was your birthday today, and you wanted to go out for a drink tonight. Who would you invite? Dick and Barry? T-Bone? Me? We’re not your bestest friends in the whole world, are we?”
“Come on, Rob. I’m not even in my own country. I’m thousands of miles from home.”
“My point exactly.”
I watch the couples that come into the shop, and the couples I see in pubs, and on buses, and through windows. Some of them, the ones that talk and touch and laugh and inquire a lot, are obviously new, and they don’t count: like most people, I’m OK at being half of a new couple. It’s the more established, quieter couples, the ones who have started to go through life back-to-back or side-to-side, rather than face-to-face, that interest me.
There’s not much you can decipher in their faces, really. There’s not much that sets them apart from single people; try dividing people you walk past into one of life’s four categories—happily coupled, unhappily coupled, single, and desperate—and you’ll find you won’t be able to do it. Or rather, you could do it, but you would have no confidence in your choices. This seems incredible to me. The most important thing in life, and you can’t tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times, no matter how much money they have or how uncomfortable their shoes are or how little their child is sleeping; and people who are doing OK but have still not found their soul mate should look, I don’t know, well but anxious, like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally; and people who are desperate should wear something, a yellow ribbon maybe, which would allow them to be identified by similarly desperate people. When I am no longer desperate, when I have got all this sorted out, I promise you here and now that I will never ever complain again about how the shop is doing, or about the soullessness of modern pop music, or the stingy fillings you get in the sandwich bar up the road (£1.60 for egg mayonnaise and crispy bacon, and none of us have ever had more than four pieces of crispy bacon in a whole round yet) or anything at all. I will beam beatifically at all times, just from sheer relief.