With Laura, I changed my mind about that whole process for a while. There weren’t any sleepless nights or losses of appetite or agonizing waits for the phone to ring for either of us. But we just carried on regardless, anyway, and, because there was no steam to lose, we never had to have that look around to see what we’d got, because what we’d got was the same as what we’d always had. She didn’t make me miserable, or anxious, or ill at ease, and when we went to bed I didn’t panic and let myself down, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
We went out a lot, and she came to the club every week, and when she lost the lease on her flat in Archway she moved in, and everything was good, and stayed that way for years and years. If I was being obtuse, I’d say that money changed everything: when she switched jobs, she suddenly had loads, and when I lost the club work, and the recession seemed to make the shop suddenly invisible to passers-by, I had none. Of course things like that complicate life, and there are all kinds of readjustments to think about, battles to fight and lines to draw. But really, it wasn’t the money. It was me. Like Liz said, I’m an arsehole.
The night before Liz and I were supposed to have a drink in Camden, Liz and Laura met up somewhere for something to eat, and Liz had a go at Laura about Ian, and Laura wasn’t planning on saying anything in her own defense, because that would have meant assaulting me, and she has a powerful and sometimes ill-advised sense of loyalty. (I, for example, would not have been able to restrain myself.) But Liz pushed it too far, and Laura snapped, and all these things about me poured out in a torrent, and then they both cried, and Liz apologized between fifty and one hundred times for speaking out of turn. So the following day Liz snapped, tried to phone me and then marched into the pub and called me names. I don’t know any of this for sure, of course. I have had no contact at all with Laura and only a brief and unhappy meeting with Liz. But, even so, one does not need a sophisticated understanding of the characters in question to guess this much.
I do not know what, precisely, Laura said, but she would have revealed at least two, maybe even all four, of the following pieces of information:
That I slept with somebody else while she was pregnant.
That my affair contributed directly to her terminating the pregnancy.
That, after her abortion, I borrowed a large sum of money from her and have not yet repaid any of it.
That, shortly before she left, I told her I was unhappy in the relationship, and I was kind of sort of maybe looking around for someone else.
Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances (in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the worst four things that you have done to your partner, even if—especially if—your partner doesn’t know about them. Don’t dress these things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? OK, so who’s the arsehole now?
EIGHT
WHERE the fuck have you been?” I ask Barry when he turns up for work on Saturday morning. I haven’t seen him since we went to Marie’s gig at the White Lion—no phone calls, no apologies, nothing.
“Where the fuck have I been? Where the fuck have I been? God, you’re an arsehole,” Barry says by way of an explanation. “I’m sorry, Rob. I know things aren’t going so well for you and you have problems and stuff, but, you know. We spent fucking hours looking for you the other night.”
“Hours? More than one hour? At least two? I left at half-ten, so you abandoned the search at half-twelve, right? You must have walked from Putney to Wapping.”
“Don’t be a smartarse.”
One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, somebody will be able to refer to me without using the word arse somewhere in the sentence.
“OK, sorry. But I’ll bet you looked for ten minutes, and then had a drink with Marie and thingy. T-Bone.”
I hate calling him T-Bone. It sets my teeth on edge, like when you have to ask for a Big Heap Buffalo Billburger, when all you want is a quarter-pounder, or a Just Like Mom Used to Make, when all you want is a piece of apple pie.
“That’s not the point.”
“Did you have a good time?”
“It was great. T-Bone’s played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore album.”
“Far out.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
I’m glad it’s Saturday because we’re reasonably busy, and Barry and I don’t have to find much to say to each other. When Dick’s making a cup of coffee and I’m looking for an old Shirley Brown single in the stockroom, he tells me that T-Bone’s played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore album.
“And do you know what? He’s a really nice guy,” he adds, astonished that someone who has reached these dizzying heights is capable of exchanging a few civil words in a pub. But that’s about it as far as staff interaction goes. There are too many other people to talk to.
Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there’s nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (“If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do”), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they don’t really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.
The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when they’re driving home from work. Sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they haven’t heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, title, and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, “Happy Go Lucky Girl” by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental.
You can really see what Dick and Barry are for on Saturdays. Dick is as patient and as enthusiastic and as gentle as a primary-school teacher: he sells people records they didn’t know they wanted because he knows intuitively what they should buy. He chats, then puts something on the record deck, and soon they’re handing over fivers almost distractedly as if that’s what they’d come in for in the first place. Barry, meanwhile, simply bulldozes customers into submission. He rubbishes them because they don’t own the first Jesus and Mary Chain album, and they buy it, and he laughs at them because they don’t own Blonde on Blonde, so they buy that, and he explodes in disbelief when they tell him that they have never heard of Ann Peebles, and then they buy so
mething of hers, too. At around four o’clock most Saturday afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and it’s going OK, maybe because I’m proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage.
So when I come to close the shop, and we’re getting ready to go out for a drink as we do every Saturday, we are all happy together again; we have a fund of goodwill which we will spend over the next few empty days, and which will have completely run out by Friday lunchtime. We are so happy, in fact, that between throwing the customers out and leaving for the day, we list our top five Elvis Costello songs (I go for “Alison,” “Little Triggers,” “Man Out of Time,” “King Horse,” and a bootleg Merseybeat-style version of “Everyday I Write the Book” I’ve got on a bootleg tape somewhere, the obscurity of the last cleverly counteracting the obviousness of the first, I thought, and thus preempting scorn from Barry) and, after the sulks and rows of the last week, it feels good to think about things like this again.
But when we walk out of the shop, Laura’s waiting there for me, leaning against the strip of wall that separates us from the shoe shop next door, and I remember that it’s not supposed to be a feel-good period of my life.
NINE
THE money is easy to explain: she had it, I didn’t, and she wanted to give it to me. This was when she’d been in the new job a few months and her salary was starting to pile up in the bank a bit. She lent me five grand; if she hadn’t, I would have gone under. I have never paid her back because I’ve never been able to, and the fact that she’s moved out and is seeing somebody else doesn’t make me five grand richer. The other day on the phone, when I gave her a hard time and told her she’d fucked my life up, she said something about the money, something about whether I’d start paying her back in installments, and I said I’d pay her back at a pound a week for the next hundred years. That’s when she hung up.
So that’s the money. The stuff I told her about being unhappy in the relationship, about half looking around for someone else: she pushed me into saying it. She tricked me into saying it. That sounds feeble, but she did. We were having a state-of-the-nation conversation and she said, quite matter-of-factly, that we were in a pretty unhappy phase at the moment, and I agreed; she asked whether I ever thought about meeting somebody else, and I denied it, and she laughed, and said that people in our position were always thinking about meeting somebody else. So I asked if she was always thinking about meeting somebody else, and she said of course, so I admitted that I did daydream about it sometimes. At the time I thought it was a let’s-be-grown-up-about-life’s-imperfectibility sort of conversation, an abstract, adult analysis; now I see that we were really talking about her and Ian, and that she suckered me into absolving her. It was a sneaky lawyer’s trick, and I fell for it, because she’s much smarter than me.
I didn’t know she was pregnant, of course I didn’t. She hadn’t told me because she knew I was seeing somebody else. (She knew I was seeing somebody else because I’d told her. We thought we were being grown-up, but we were being preposterously naive, childish even, to think that one or the other of us could get up to no good, and own up to the misdemeanor, while we were living together.) I didn’t find out until ages afterward: we were going through a good period and I made some joke about having kids and she burst into tears. So I made her tell me what it was all about, and she did, after which I had a brief and ill-advised bout of noisy self-righteousness (the usual stuff—my child, too, what right did she have, blah blah) before her disbelief and contempt shut me up.
“You didn’t look a very good long-term bet at the time,” she said. “I didn’t like you very much, either. I didn’t want to have a baby by you. I didn’t want to think about some awful visiting-rights relationship that stretched way on into the future. And I didn’t want to be a single mother. It wasn’t a very hard decision to make. There wasn’t any point in consulting you about it.”
These were all fair points. In fact, if I’d got pregnant by me at the time, I would have had an abortion for exactly the same reasons. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Later on the same evening, after I’d rethought the whole pregnancy thing using the new information I had at my disposal, I asked her why she had stuck with it.
She thought for a long time.
“Because I’d never stuck at anything before, and I’d made a promise to myself when we started seeing each other that I’d make it through at least one bad patch, just to see what happened. So I did. And you were so pathetically sorry about that idiotic Rosie woman…”—Rosie, the four-bonk, simultaneous orgasm, pain-in-the-arse girl, the girl I was seeing when Laura was pregnant—”…that you were very nice to me for quite a long time, and that was just what I needed. We go quite deep, Rob, if only because we’ve been together a reasonable length of time. And I didn’t want to knock it all over and start again unless I really had to. So.”
And why had I stuck with it? Not for reasons as noble and as adult as that. (Is there anything more adult than sticking with a relationship that’s falling apart in the hope that you can put it right? I’ve never done that in my life.) I stuck with it because, suddenly, right at the end of the Rosie thing, I found myself really attracted to Laura again; it was like I needed Rosie to spice Laura up a bit. And I thought I’d blown it (I didn’t know then that she was experimenting with stoicism). I could see her losing interest in me, so I worked like mad to get that interest back, and when I got it back, I lost interest in her all over again. That sort of thing happens to me a lot, I find. I don’t know how to sort it out. And that more or less brings us up to date. When the whole sorry tale comes out in a great big lump like that, even the most shortsighted jerk, even the most self-deluding and self-pitying of jilted, wounded lovers can see that there is some cause and effect going on here, that abortions and Rosie and Ian and money all belong to, deserve each other.
Dick and Barry ask us if we want to go with them to the pub for a quick one, but it’s hard to imagine us all sitting round a table laughing about the customer who confused Albert King with Albert Collins (“He didn’t even flinch when he was looking at the record for scratches and he saw the Stax label,” Barry told us, shaking his head at the previously unsuspected depths of human ignorance), and I politely decline. I presume that we’re going back to the flat, so I walk toward the bus stop, but Laura tugs me on the arm and wheels around to look for a cab.
“I’ll pay. It wouldn’t be much fun on the twenty-nine, would it?”
Fair point. The conversation we need to have is best conducted without a conductor—and without dogs, kids, and fat people with huge Marks and Spencer bags.
We’re pretty quiet in the cab. It’s only a ten-minute ride from the Seven Sisters’ Road to Crouch End, but the journey is so uncomfortable and intense and unhappy that I feel I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. It’s raining, and the fluorescent lights make patterns on our faces; the taxi driver asks us if we’ve had a good day, and we grunt, and he slams the partition shut behind him. Laura stares out of the window, and I sneak the odd look at her, trying to see if the last week has made any difference in her face. She’s had her hair cut, same as usual, very short, sixties short, like Mia Farrow, except—and I’m not just being creepy—she’s better suited to this sort of cut than Mia. It’s because her hair is so dark, nearly black, that when it’s short her eyes seem to take up most of her face. She’s not wearing any makeup, and I reckon this is for my benefit. It’s an easy way of showing me that she’s careworn, distracted, too miserable for fripperies. There’s a nice symmetry here: when I gave her that tape with the Solomon Burke song on it, all those years ago, she was wearing loads of makeup, much more than she was used to wearing, and much more than she had worn the previous week, and I knew, or hoped, that this was for my benefit, too. So you get loads at the beginning, to show that things are good, positive, exciting, and none at the end, to show tha
t things are desperate. Neat, eh?
(But later, just as we’re turning the corner into my road, and I’m beginning to panic about the pain and difficulty of the impending conversation, I see a woman on her own, Saturday-night-smart, off to meet somebody somewhere, friends, or a lover. And when I was living with Laura, I missed…what? Maybe I missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, going out of her way, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, maybe wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when I was younger, the knowledge that I was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me feel pathetically grateful. When you’re with someone permanently, you don’t get that: if Laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. And when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn’t, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me. Anyway, all this is by way of saying that the woman I saw out of the cab window inspired me and consoled me, momentarily: maybe I am not too old to provoke a trip from one part of London to another, and if I ever do have another date, and I arrange to meet that date in, say, Islington, and she has to come all the way from Stoke Newington, a journey of some three to four miles, I will thank her from the bottom of my wretched thirty-five-year-old heart.)