Boys and Girls (15 page)

She had been amazed – and how much later? – when she knew by her soft and then so very lowering awakening that
she must have been asleep, the aroma of unease and severe displacement wafting around and then into her, gripping amid the darkness, making her sad and filled with something she had no word for. And he hadn't even used a … no. Huh. Be Prepared, he'd said, but he wasn't, was he? No, and nor was she, in any way at all. She saw in the lamplight a folded piece of paper that said Amanda in red capitals, with a heart underneath. She awkwardly reached across for it – the main pain now was a crick in the side of her neck – and flapped it open, incuriously.

Amanda languorously cast it aside, and wondered what to do. I think just stay where I am, until it gets light. And then go. I don't know if I can sleep again – I would quite like to. (I hate this room – I hate it here.) And dream I am at home and warm in bed and my mum comes in and asks me what I did today, yeh, and what I learned at school, but I can't at the moment think of anything nice, not even to make up. I don't think this is a very good poem. And why is he, the creep, so like fucking nuts about plums?

‘So you do see, don't you Doctor Atherby? I'm sure you do, you must do – man possessed of all your insight and such capability. What with one thing and another it has been what we in the trade call a rather hellish week. And while making oneself out to be no sort of a soothsayer, all the portents are, it can only get hellisher.'

‘The turn of events is, I confess Alan, something of a surprise to me.'

‘Well quite. Bit of a bolt between the eyes for me as well, I assure you of that. I mean to say – not every day, is it, that your wife of how many years just ups and tells you she wants to be married in tandem, as it were. As the senior party, do you suppose I'll be promoted to Husband Major? Or will the new chap be parachuted in over my head, so to speak, condemning me for ever to the I admit rather comfortingly familiar role of Minor? Quite apart from the mental turmoil and any of the more telling ramifications, it's going to be one hell of a scrum in the bathroom, of a morning.'

‘And all this came … without warning?'

‘Not Susan's way, you see. Warning. She just hits you with
it, fair and square. The only warning tends to come afterwards when she outlines what will befall you should you contemplate argument. In the realm of the fait accompli, she is the doer, and I am the thing unto which it is done. It's as well to know one's place, how things stand.'

‘You seem … less than, um – fraught, shall we say, Alan.'

‘Ah but am I, Doctor Atherby? Could this be but the brave face? The plucky Tommy joshing in the trenches. Or could I still be in a state of shock? Is the full and murky horror yet to filter through? Or maybe this is a classic and textbook case of outright denial? Amanda, she called me an ostrich, you know. She has, in truth, called me many things just lately, but this one sticks in the mind. She also said I should strive to become an Alpha Male, but me, I've always been more at the Omega end of things, really.'

‘And tell me, Alan – what do you
feel
 …?'

‘Feel. Well. What do I
feel
 …? Hm. Sad. Amazed. Frightened. Oddly excited, some ways – can't really even begin to explain that one. Useless, of course – goes without saying. And a little bit hungry – overslept, didn't want to be late for our appointment, so I just sucked on a teabag, glanced into the bread bin and ended up just crunching a handful of Golden Grahams on the Tube.'

‘Alan … do try to
address
the situation. Your time is nearly up, and we haven't really progressed – would you say we have?'

‘Mm. No. Take your point. The nub seems as slippery a fellow as usual.'

‘Now you mentioned Amanda. How is she taking all this?'

‘Hm. Well she's sad. Amazed. Frightened. Maybe even oddly excited, in some ways, though I couldn't even begin to
explain that one. Do you know, I had no idea we had quite so much in common …'

‘When you meet this man, what do you imagine your reaction will be?'

‘Well now yes – that's a good one. I have asked myself this. I would like to say that I would attack him with a club, beat my breast and yodel like a wild man, one jaunty foot atop his broken and vanquished body … but you know if I'm honest, I think it unlikely. I expect I'll treat him much as I treat everyone else. Polite, I hope – make a bloody fool of myself without even realising it. Probably attempt a joke or two, before Susan instructs me to fetch something and stop trying to be funny. We'll know soon enough, though – because oh yes, I forgot to tell you this, Doctor Atherby, but Susan, this morning, just before I dashed off here, she said to me Oh Alan, she said to me, we're having a dinner party tonight. And I said Really? Dinner party? Did I know this? And she said No Alan my sweet, you did not know this: this is why I am telling you: had you known, I should hardly have bothered. And then she says Actually, it's not a dinner party. Oh, I say –
not
a dinner party. I see. Did I know this? And Susan, she tells me not to be tedious. Anyway, Doctor Atherby, it turns out that it's going to be just the three of us. Me, Susan and the new boy. Tonight. Can you believe it? I can't. Well. There you are.'

‘Alan – I regret: your time is up.'

‘Do you know what, Doctor Atherby? I think you could be right.'

Yes. So I left him to his next appointment – man I've seen before, quaking in the waiting room. Always wears the same just-held-together and so exhausted suit and never quite manages to get
the whole of his face shaved – always at least just a lozenge of stubble, or else quite bristly thickets. Christ knows how much more of Doctor Atherby's infuriating cocktail of indifference and disdain the poor man will be able to tolerate or afford. I do get angry. Why do we do it? Pay these people to ask us how we feel and what we're going to do? I mean to say, we, the desperate, we're always the last to know (and no of course it doesn't stand to reason). I have, in truth, an urgent hangover – it is, believe me, rather pressing. Got really into it, the Scotch, last night. Was tormented this morning by the spinily tortured memory of having spoken to Amanda on the telephone, some point, and then it oozed further into me (and my throat was stopped and clutched by fear – for myself, for myself: of course for myself) that I had nodded soddenly through a vague and airy go-ahead to her staying the night at Tara's – whereas Susan, sober and parentally responsible, would surely have subjected the child to a pumped-up inquisition of the customary intensity. And I hadn't heard her come in – Susan, I mean, though I had fully intended to be so distracted as to be laughably incapable of sleeping or even repose (on the qui vive as well as, yes, the usual tenterhooks). But Scotch in quantity, it tends to not just drive a roaring and runaway train through the flimsiness of every good intention, but to rot away and then just devastate even a basic sentience. Susan, in the squint of seemingly dawn, as I smiled dementedly – it blazed away, my smiling, to gorgeously display to her how utterly grand I was feeling – she had coyly accused me of feigning sleep when just before midnight she had slipped into the bedroom and told me she was home. No no, I protested – no honestly, truly, it was real, the sleep was real, I do assure you it was real. What – when I accidentally knocked all the books off the bedside
table? When I slammed shut the window? When I ran the shower and the boiler started banging? You are telling me you slept throughout? Well she had me there, you see – because of course I
did
, I had slept throughout, but if I'd persisted with the point then she would have known that I'd been drunk (and look at me! I'm beaming! Are you not a living witness to just how grand I'm feeling?) so I barely whimpered when she put it to me that I had in fact just been a teeny bit hurt and sulkily jealous, if only a smidgen – this tacit acquiescence of mine perversely (oh God will I ever come close to understanding?) appearing to please her, and then send her teetering on the verge of outright delight.

Anyway, I was up and roughly dressed and had no wish at all to hang around because of this Amanda thing, which is why I decided to pass up on breakfast – even the coffee, which Jesus was needed – and of all things in the world staggered off to keep my appointment with the blight that is Atherby, the condescending prat. And just when I thought I was gone (she does this, Susan – she's silent and amenable until your hand is on the doorknob) she had called to me casually, the lightness in her tone, even a lilt of music, a melodic rise and fall – the closest I can remember to, Jesus, practically pleasant.

‘Alan, my sweet – I am really very happy.'

‘Oh? How perfectly extraordinary. But I mean that's
good
, of course. Of course it is.'

‘And do you know why?'

‘No, but I have an inkling that I shall before long.'

‘Because … shall I tell you why?'

‘It would be a beginning.'

‘Well I will, then. It's because I just know – I just know, really deep down, that the two of you are going to get on.'

‘Uh-huh. The two of us. So we're talking now about, um …?'

‘Yes. Which wasn't necessarily the point, of course. I mean you do see, don't you Alan, that this is for me? This is about me, yes my sweet? What I need. But this – it's by way of being something of a little
bonus
. That you'll get on, the two of you. And it makes me very happy. Oh and Alan – we're having a little dinner party. Tonight, as a matter of fact. So do look to the wine and so on, will you? Actually it
isn't
a dinner party, no it isn't, it's really just a dinner. The three of us. Yes? And then we can begin.'

I hadn't interjected at all. The way I told it to bloody Doctor Atherby, that was just to fill in the time. My head was clanging, though, and I felt a bit sick – not just, I think, on account of this and that, but because of, well, just everything really. But still and beneath it there was this very faint tremor of I think excitement, the merest thrum; maybe just the coming of the new.

‘Bit, um – quick, isn't it?'

Susan smiled with indulgent glee at my blind and disarming stupidity.

‘'Twere well 'twere done quickly. Yes no?'

I momentarily wished that I could have been Amanda, so that then I could have slung a withering and weighty contempt across the slump of my eyelids and just drawled out to her Oh yeh right:
whaddever
 … Failing that, I turned to go … but you know there was one thing I just had to ask her.

‘What does
he
, er … think of it? Hm? All this. This masterplan of yours. And what's his name, actually? Bloody hell, I can't really believe that I'm saying all this …'

‘He is not aware of the ins and outs. Detail. The brushstrokes
are broad at this stage. Just the one bold coat of vivid colour. His name is Black.'

‘His name is what?'

‘Well it isn't really his name. His actual name is … well, doesn't really matter, because what people call him is Black.'

‘Do they. Yes I see. But he isn't though, is he?'

‘Isn't what?'

‘Black.'

‘Oh what – you mean black as in
black
, do you? Oh no. He's not. Well of course he's not – don't be absolutely ridiculous, Alan.'

‘I'm sorry. I shall try to remember not to be ridiculous. I really have to go now, Susan. Mustn't be late, you know.'

‘I've never seen you so eager before to get to Doctor Atherby.'

‘No well you know – 'twere well 'twere done quickly. Yes no?'

Susan was sour again, which was strangely reassuring.

‘Never stop, do you? Just won't let things lie.'

‘Can't think what you mean. Dinner, then. I'll look to the wine. You said, did you, the three of us? What – Amanda not invited then?'

‘A step at a time, I think. Don't you?'

‘Oh absolutely. Oh quite. It's not the sort of thing, is it, you want to rush into.'

‘Always the same. You just won't let things lie …'

‘But you're wrong Susan, aren't you? That, if anything, is my ultimate forte. I look at any given thing, and let it lie is just what I do. It is you, unless I am mistaken, who are driving a digger through our manicured lawn.'

‘You'd better go. You'll be late. I hate that phrase. I always
have. Manicured
lawn
 … you never hear talk of fingernails being
mown
 – well do you?'

‘We've strayed now, have we? From the point?'

And then I just left, because it could've gone on till doomsday, all this. Christ knows it has in the past. And still no coffee, and still no toast – what a waste of bloody time. And I didn't suck a teabag – didn't go munching cereal on the Tube. Didn't even
take
the Tube. It's all for Doctor Atherby, all of that junk that drips and drops out of me: I make it up as I go along, the way I do everything else. It's all just lights and mirrors, serving well to dazzle and obliterate. There is no plan, there is no detail: just the one bold coat of vivid colour.

I was so bloody freezing when I got back home. I was still just in my top and netball skirt and these really pretty lacy tights I had on in what Mum says is taupe and she got for me from Selfridge's and now they're torn all down one side because of bloody Harry, the so-called poet. I didn't bother changing into all my other stuff which I still had rammed into my shoulder bag because I just so wanted to be out of that like creepy and so smelly house as soon as it got light and I thought well look it's not much of a walk so it's not really worth it. I only really knew I was as cold as I was though when I got into the hall and the heating was on and it was really good to just like be there – Dad's lump of keys in the horrible blue bowl, and everything. Because it had been good, actually, just walking through the streets when it was all just grey and empty. I'd never been awake this early before – you feel like the whole of the city, that it's kind of just yours, when you're all on your own and you can hear your shoes on the pavement and there aren't any cars, or anything.