Chapter Eleven: Nodge, or, Strictly Speaking, Noj
I’m at the park with Nodge, or strictly speaking, Noj. It’s Jon spelt backwards, of course. He’s taking his sister’s girls, Florence and Dilly, to the swings for a couple of hours at Ravenscourt Park. Dilly has her friend Ben with her. Nodge likes children, and anyway one of his many highly developed senses of duty is familial. We’re sitting on a park bench, watching the two sisters, one four and one three, rock back and forward on a seesaw. We’re not saying much, then right out of the blue Nodge says in that low, neutral, classless, slightly sinussy voice, Why are you getting married then?
Nodge always likes to come straight to the point. It’s one of the ways he sells himself to the world – as straightforward, down to earth, no nonsense.
He is smoking a cigarette, a Craven A. That’s typical of Nodge. I don’t believe he likes Craven A cigarettes at all – he often chokes on their strength, and when I tried to puff it once, it rasped in my throat like I was swallowing a tiny burnt fir cone. But the point is that Craven A cigarettes are honest. Tobacco rolled up into a bit of paper, for the smoking of. No knives cutting silk, no cowboys in hats on prairies. It was how Nodge saw himself precisely.
Today he’s wearing black trousers, black boots, a grey sweater and a moss-coloured waterproof jacket. I don’t think I have ever seen Nodge wearing a bright colour – not a single bright colour. Not since schooldays anyway. Even, at the fancy-dress party I had recently – the theme of which was, naturally enough, cartoons – he turned up, predictably, as Eeyore, entirely in well-pressed grey felt complete with a forlorn tail. (I went, originally I thought, as Cornfed the Pig from Duckman. No one recognized me. Tony was a convincing Joker from Batman, Colin equally believable as Butthead. Or was it Beavis?)
Everything today, as ever, is pressed and clean, as if it was laundered and ironed an hour earlier. His movements are precise; his cigarette smoking is elegant – one could almost say beautiful, were it not a ridiculous thing to say. His hands are delicate, with long thin fingers quite in contrast to his imploded steamed-pudding face.
I am holding a can of Lucozade. I take a swig, wipe my mouth with the back of my sleeve, leaving a small white slick about four inches long. I cough and consider whether or not I should answer, and if so, how truthfully. I wasn’t sure how truthfully I was capable of answering.
Why? Don’t you like Veronica?
Nodge sniffs and reaches for another fag. His fingers are yellow.
As a matter of fact, I do. She was all right. Head screwed on, I thought. That’s not what I was asking. What I was asking was –
I wave a small cumulus of cigarette smoke away from my face.
I know what you were asking. And it’s a stupid question. After all, why does anyone get married?
I’m not asking why anyone gets married. I’m asking why you’re getting married.
I might as well ask why you aren’t getting married.
It’s not the same. Anyway, it’s me who’s asking the question.
I become irritated, although I’m not sure why. After you’ve known someone as long as I’ve known Nodge, no conversation takes place in a vacuum. Each phrase uttered, each sentence delivered, is part of a continuum, a larger, three dimensional pattern that occupies the present, but stretches back deep into the past and contains an array of threatening implications for the future. With Nodge, for instance, I know if I concede some principle now, it will be filed away, used against me at some unspecified, as yet unarrived moment.
Meanwhile, history – the past – has taught me that Nodge is a kind of echo chamber. He sits quite still, smoking those honest Craven As which I don’t believe he likes, and either listens or asks nosy questions. But you ask him something about his life, what he thinks, feels, and he’ll just shrug and duck the question, then sit quite still until the weight of silence builds up so much you find yourself gabbling, telling him everything while he puffs honest smoke like Thomas the Tank Engine.
UNCLE JON!
Dilly, Nodge’s niece, is running towards us, crying with the full force of her lungs. Nodge casually but precisely stubs out his cigarette and leans towards her. His face opens with a kind of tenderness. This surprises me. I didn’t know Nodge had those kind of feelings. Soft ones.
What’s the matter, sweetheart?
She jumps up and throws her arms around his neck, weeping bitterly. In the background, Ben is chasing another little girl who was at the playground when they arrived, someone neither of them has met before.
Uncle Jon, Ben says… Ben says… Ben says… She can’t get the words out, she’s choking so much with fury and upset. Ben says he won’t be my friend. Ben’s got a new friend. They won’t let me play with them.
She begins to cry again, and Nodge gives her another hug.
Well, then, Ben’s just silly. Because you’re the most beautiful girl in the playground and if Ben doesn’t want to play with you –
I don’t care. I don’t want to play with him.
Come on, darling. That isn’t true.
It is true. It is. I’m not going to be anyone’s friend ever again, not never. Not ever.
She screws her face up in a rubbery grimace. Nodge shrugs, looks at me. Ben is enjoying himself, completely ignoring – possibly enjoying – Dilly’s abject tears. He’s hugging the new girl; it is a deliberate attempt to taunt Dilly. She glances, then looks away.
Dilly, look. The swing is empty now. Why don’t you go and play on it?
Dilly brightens up. In an instant, she’s turned on her heel and is heading for the swing, face still wet, nose still stained with snot. Ben ignores her still. Meanwhile, Florence is playing with another little boy. They are laughing together and holding hands. Nodge turns to me again, raises his Gallagher unibrow and gives me a kids, who’d have ’em smile.
You’ve got it all to come, Frankie.
I don’t know about that. Just because I’m getting married doesn’t mean I have to start breeding.
Hmmmh.
I recognize this hmmmh. Nodge has several different and distinct hmmmhs. This particular one means that he doesn’t believe what I’m saying, that I’m just pretending to stand aloof from the idea of children because it preserves my idea of myself. It’s a very irritating noise.
Kids aren’t for everyone.
Hmmmh. So… Long pause, deep honest drag on honest cigarette. Why are you getting married then?
I shift uneasily in my seat. Nodge has a way of getting you to talk in the end.
I don’t know, Jon. To be honest, I haven’t stopped asking myself that since I popped the question to Veronica. I just know that it feels like the right thing to do.
Silence.
More silence.
Puffety puff. I can’t take the pressure of the silence any more. Nodge is used to it, sitting in a cab all day with only his own company.
Obviously, I’m not getting any younger. There’s like… it’s like there’s a weight pressing down on me, a pressure. I don’t know where it comes from. I’m thirty years old after all. I looked in the mirror the other day and there was fucking hair coming out of my ears. Like an old man. And everyone else seems to be doing it. Not that I’m just going along with the crowd. Veronica’s terrific, she really is. I mean, I know she seems a bit off with people sometimes, but that just comes from being with dead people all day. We’re easy together, it works. And I’m tired of being out there in the meat market. You get to a point when you want things to be, I don’t know, settled. A line drawn somewhere.
He nods. I look around the playground. Now Dilly is playing with Ben again, and the new kid as well. Dilly actually has her arms around the new kid and is giving her a kiss. Florence is playing chase with the other kid, laughing at the top of her lungs. All around the playground, singles and pairs of parents stand silently, never acknowledging each other at all. The thought comes to me. We close up like clams as we get old. Distance is one of the ways we stop being children.
&n
bsp; Then I say, I guess I’ve been thinking that I’ve never committed myself to anything in my life and that maybe, just maybe, that’s where I’ve been going wrong. Always hedging my bets, waiting for the better offer. It’s no way to live. You have to plant your feet, make your stand. Life changes, and you have to change too. She’s lovely, Veronica, she’ll make a great doris. She’s kind, loves me. She’s intelligent and warm.
I try to resist saying the next thing, but I can’t. It’s too deeply ingrained. Reflexive.
And she’s a terrific shag.
You have to do that from time to time. Drop in a joke, something that establishes that you’re blokes together, that you each possess cocks, that you’re not getting too serious, not for too long. There are limits. Balloons have to be punctured beyond a certain level of inflation.
Nodge, a puritan who has, and has always had, the trick of making me feel ashamed of myself, gives a thin smile, acknowledging that the I’m when all said and done a bloke strategy has been, as is conventional, deployed. Then it’s back to the nod, smoke, nod. He wants more. I try to just let the silence pile up, but it’s too uncomfortable, too intimate.
No, I’m kidding. Anyway that’s not the reason I’m marrying her. I’m… it’s… because…
What I want to say is, why are you asking me this? Why don’t you just be happy for me, and slap me on the back and wish me luck? Honesty, concern – it’s overrated. It’s a form of hostility.
It’s an excuse for a party, isn’t it?
I see, even before I deliver these words, how pitiful this is. Where do I get this stuff from? Then, out of the blue, the real answer comes to me, like a blazing sign in Piccadilly Circus. As I stare across at Nodge in his grey and brown togs, and his faint disapproval, and barely concealed judgement, I think, but don’t say, It’s because of you. You and people like you. My friends, so called. I’ve had it with you, the lot of you. You’re a game that’s been played out, an emotion that’s been used up, a drink that’s been finished, a Craven A cigarette that should have been stubbed out years ago. You’re a habit I’ve got to break, an existence I’ve got to leave behind. And Veronica, she’s a ladder that was left lying out in the yard. And I’m going up. I’m going up, up and away.
I want to be normal, and I’m getting less normal as each year passes, as dorishood, coupledom, becomes the norm. I want to be respectable. I don’t want to be the misfit again. Never again.
But are they, my friends, really what I’m getting away from, and is Veronica really where I’m getting to? What are the other forces at work? There are always other forces at work. I’d ask Nodge, but Nodge finds it hard to talk. He finds it easy to speak, but hard to talk. Anything that goes beyond a certain point, the shutters come down.
It wasn’t always that way, I sometimes remember. I say sometimes, because there are things between us that I’d sooner forget myself. Not because they were unpleasant. That’s the point. It’s because they’re unsettling.
For years I haven’t thought about this, been determined not to think about it in fact. But getting married is a light shone into dark places. The light sometimes makes me squirm, so I endeavour to switch it off again. But sometimes it gets stuck. You click and click and it just stays on. Then Nodge speaks, looks at his watch. I pay attention, hoping that it will stop the memory-dominoes that have just started tumbling.
Decided what we’re going to do on 14 August?
Colin suggested playing golf.
Not a bad idea. What do you think?
Sure. Why not?
OK then. Look, I’ve got to get the kids back.
Fine. Catch you later then.
Later.
The dominoes are still toppling. Walking away from the playground, I look back at Nodge, catch him in profile. He doesn’t know he is being seen, and I stare at his face and wonder what it is I like about him any more. I can see at this moment there is tenderness there, but it is so… buried. Unexcavatable, a deep seamed mine. Perhaps I don’t like him at all any more. Perhaps he scares me. But why should he scare me?
That’s what the light’s been showing up, that’s what the dominoes are heading towards, naked and weird. It comes to me at night, when the noise of a boom box wakes me up from a passing car, or the roar of a giant motorcycle. My eyes pop open and I’m suddenly not here, still in my bedroom, but at a different time, in a different world, in my mother’s house, fifteen years ago.
Chapter Twelve: Morning Glory
I suppose I’d only known Nodge a year or so at the time. We didn’t talk much, even after what happened with Colin. He was moved to a different stream from me, Colin and Tony shortly after the debagging. But we were both good runners, and he and I at the age of fifteen paired up on the 100-metres relay team. Stocky and broad but without the overcoat of fat he carries with him now, his powerful legs gave him the perfect build for the sprint. We both ran for the school; I was often clumsy with the baton and I noticed him because, when I dropped it, he was the only one in the team who would commiserate rather than bellow at me. Like I say, he was different then. Softer. He’s kind, Nodge. I often forget that, for some reason. You wouldn’t guess it. He hides it, like everything else nowadays.
He was almost flamboyant then. I remember he had a big alpaca red sweater, some corn-coloured trousers and an early crude version of training shoes. There was something exotic in him that has since become concentrated all in the gestures and rituals of his cigarette smoking, leaving his remaindered self washed of tone.
His walk home would take him in the same direction as me and Colin, so we began to fall in line together, kicking cans home, smoking illicit cigarettes by this time in the greasy spoon which lay half-way between the school and our homes. Even then his smoking style was admirable. I tried to emulate him, but always looked gauche in comparison.
Nodge had a mordant sense of humour; he was dry then, although nowadays he seems to have decayed into cynical. In his quiet way, he was daring, vengeful. When a teacher bullied some innocent kid, he would put sugar in his petrol tank. He never stood back from a fight either – when someone was picked on, he would stand like a taut hippo in between victim and aggressor, daring them to strike. Nodge was always for the underdog. That was why I started out liking him, I think. And I suppose it’s why he took to Colin also, although they were never that close. But he understood what it meant to be weak: the price, the shame.
Nodge, though, was tough. There was something leathery about him, something indestructible, and the indestructibility became more pronounced as he got older. Again, it seemed to become sort of debased into insensitivity later. I sometimes think some secret disappointment soured him at some time in the last decade, transforming all his virtues into their darker opposites. But I could never guess what it might be. Or perhaps I never wanted to guess.
Anyway, after a few months of walking home together and running in the school team, we began to hang around in the evenings. Fifteen years old is a nether world – too old for childhood, too young for the pub. So on summer evenings, we would just go out and walk together, purposelessly, indulging sometimes in acts of petty vandalism – stealing road signs, firing air pistols at scurrying birds, always missing, deliberately.
Sometimes we would bring Colin with us. Not much would happen, but there was something about Colin – something he did on one of these evenings – that has remained with me since, still vivid. I have talked about it with Nodge and Tony since, and it has made us wonder about what lies underneath Colin’s apparently bottomless mildness.
On this occasion, Nodge, Colin and me were walking home and I had the air pistol, and I drew double-quick and just let loose at a pigeon – for a laugh. I meant to miss, as usual, but I hit it on the wing. The bird made a strange gagging noise, recoiled, then began to bleed. It staggered. It was crippled. Clearly it would not fly again.
I felt vividly shocked and disgusted, horrified and helpless. The bird started to squawk now, in a cry of what sounded like pain. Nodge lo
oked at me and I looked back.
What we going to do?
I don’t know. It’s…
We’ll have to…
Colin very quietly looked up at us and said, We should kill it.
Nodge and I shook our heads, appalled.
We can call the vet.
We could put it in a splint.
Your mum’ll know what to do.
But Colin hadn’t moved. Then he said again, in exactly the same flat tone, No. We should kill it.
Then, quite calmly, he walked over to where the bird was, picked up a rock that made up part of a loose garden perimeter backing on to the pavement and with one motion smashed the rock down on the bird’s head.
That’s done.
The bird’s body kept moving. Colin brought it down again, and again, until its head was just a red mess on the concrete. Then he looked up at mine and Nodge’s frozen faces.
It’s dead now.
Then he began to walk on. Me and Nodge didn’t say anything, but began to follow him. And for the first time in my life, I was scared of Colin, scared of what was dark inside him.
But such drama was unusual and extraordinary. Mostly, though, we just dragged around the streets in different, harmless permutations, dreaming of when we wouldn’t be there any more. Nodge would always talk about how he wanted to travel, though I suppose at that time it meant more to him than just being a taxi driver. He would go into travel agents and ask for all their free brochures and sit on park benches with me, poring over the pictures of sunlit perfection.
Look at this. Sri Lanka. The whiteness of that beach. Can you believe that sea? China – a traditional village. Probably full of tourists now. But just look at it. Isn’t that something? Jamaica – ‘A Jewel in the Caribbean Sea’. Mad. Easter Island. Look at those weird faces. That one looks like Colin.