Boys and Girls (5 page)

At other times I will remember that I never have forgotten that hot and sunlit August afternoon when Susan had slung from a distance and into my face the splat of information that she had got herself a job – a good job, did I hear her, a better job than I had ever dreamed of or had even the merest hope of achieving. Painful, yes, but I was pleased for her – more, though, I think, I was pleased for me. Can't explain. But the sex then, well – it just sort of expired. We had never remotely been party to any form of fantasia, this is true (of course it is, of course this is true), but nevertheless I just had to confess to a wince of regret at its summary and final extinction. It was all of it so very much easier in the days when little Zizi was mine, just across the landing. Not to say Pearl. Even through the rosiness of retrospection, of course, one cannot pretend to glamour (there was always, it could hardly be ignored, the underlying and lardy haze of overfried onions, fortified by a staleness in the sheeting and a dead dog dampness that none of their enthusiastic squirtings of Shalimar, Opium or Coco ever did manage to thoroughly dispel). But leaving aside one's finer sensibilities – by God, could they do the business. Professionals, you see: knew what they were up to (like everything in life, isn't it really? You get what you pay for). Although with me, of course, more often than not all they would require (and they asked me so sweetly) was a little bit of bookkeeping – a reassuring endorsement with regard to just how little they could get away with declaring
to the Revenue in the form of a feasible income from ‘casual cleaning', sufficient to stay the trigger of investigation, to lull the suspicions of a judicious inspector. Or maybe it could be that their suntan bed had overloaded the circuit, and would you mind, Alan, taking a little look at it (ooh ta – we'll be ever so grateful). Young, you see – so terribly young they both were: had not the slightest knowledge of DIY. Fifteen years on now, the two of them: hard to think of it. I doubt they're still, you know – doing it all … or at least no longer, one hopes, in the same old rathole in the iffiest part of Kentish Town. Zizi, she really was possessed of the most perfectly lovely face – oval and wide-eyed, so very pale and trusting: truly the face of an angel. Pearl though, it has to be said (oh God yes: Pearl) – she had by far the better body. It went in, and then it went out in the best way imaginable, and so utterly resilient she was. Her trick, her party piece, was to take you in her mouth and then keep on saying Gina Lollobrigida, repeatedly. Happy days. Zizi, she was always convinced – bit of a dreamer, Zizi – that she would one day run into a rich and handsome man (young and tall and preferably a film star) who would be smitten by love, whisk her away and set her up royally as a lady, and a wife. They were thin on the ground though, that type, over a kebab shop in the iffiest part of Kentish Town. The men who did trudge up those rickety steps with her, they weren't like that at all. Pearl, she was much more of a realist: saw things square on. She just wanted to earn enough to buy herself a chain of florists by the time she was thirty, seal away the past in a lead-lined trunk and begin to behave in the way she imagined a normal girl would. The trouble was, a great deal of her sometimes really quite startling income ended up in the hands of Toe upstairs, who would unsmilingly dispense to
her powders and pills, pungent and unctuous phials with thin and dangerous needles. She could even still be living there, Pearl – she could well still be doing it all, if the body's held up, if her mind's not gone: no flowers yet, not for Pearl, I daresay. The women I use these days, they're not nearly so good as she was, though. They tend to be very clean, which of course can be good and bad – and Christ, do they cost me. Just as well that Susan's earning a fairly decent salary, on the whole, else I'd find it harder to keep up than I already do.

But now, apparently – and it does seem strange, however often I come to mull it over (I sometimes feel I've dreamed it all) … but it surely does appear as if there is soon to be a brand-new breadwinner in the family, in the unlikely and really quite laughable form of yet another husband for Susan. Not just some fancy man with a bit of money whom she may screw at will – literally, yes, and metaphorically too, and all on the q.t., somewhere cosy, oh no no no no
no
. But a husband. New one. Not instead of, but as well as. I, she just assumed would go along with the thing, no matter how bizarre or distasteful, not to say quite utterly castrating I might have found it (I go weak, and I pine …) – but how does she imagine the candidate might be feeling about the whole idea? The new boy. If he is to get selected. Well more than likely, he'll think her mad (and I could back him up on that one, if he felt he could do with some support) and then he'll just tell her to get lost, I shouldn't wonder. As any sane man would, let's for God's sake face it. Taking on a fourteen-year-old daughter, well that's one thing – but to include in the package a husband not much shy of fifty? Not the same, is it? Not the usual run of the thing. And Susan, has she I wonder troubled herself to go into all of the detail? Or do we have here merely the
bones? You never really know with Susan, you see – she can happily go either way. Sometimes she'll work out a scheme to so very fine a degree – foreseeing and countering every conceivable hitch or setback – that your head will be spinning with it all; other times, all you get is the broad and slapping brushstroke of the latest big idea, left there boldly to drip and then congeal, the assumption being that all will come together quite beautifully for the blissfully simple reason that she
wants
it to, you see. So what, I wonder, has she got in store for me this time? Are we all to pay a visit, a happy little trio, to Furniture Village and spurn with disdain the must-end-soon-once-in-a-lifetime offer on the king-size divan for being altogether far too puny in girth, on account of, do you see – and Susan will smilingly and patiently explain all of this to the goggle-eyed sales assistant – there are to be
three
in our bed (though I would hold no hope whatever of anything in the way of a
romp
, of course – or not, at least, where I'm concerned). Or will he, the new man, simply be expected to subsume my own, if erstwhile, position, while I shall be relegated to my private shoreline, and the life of a permanent beachcomber? There are worse places, I admit (I do, after all, get year-round summers).

She reads a lot of books, Susan – and proper things too. Well, working in publishing, I suppose she has to really – but to give her her due, she always was, Susan, a bit of a reader. Novels mainly, largely the better sort. I wonder if it's these that give her all her strange ideas …? Work away on her subconscious. You know – some crackpot writer in his bloody garret, stunned by booze and crazed by debt, censoring no mad wheeze as at all too wild: just bung it down and for God's sake give me the money. And then some innocent, some ingénue, some open-eyed and naïve young girl (or even an
unchained loony the likes of Susan) – they will happen upon all of this tosh in passing and then they might go thinking, hm – damn good idea, that: take a second husband (think I'll try it). They've a hell of a lot to answer for, writers, were they not all too smashed and up their own backsides to know it. God. I can't, you know … really bear to think of it: Susan, with another man. Just the thought, the mere idea, is just so indescribably painful; the reality – when she comes to do it – well it could come near to closing me down. Even if, as once she told me (and how can I ever forget it?) I am no longer in her eyes even a man at all. And it's odd, though … little bit of a tangent, this, but how can it really matter? In context. Let's face it: I've got nothing but time. So yes – I was just thinking that it's odd in a way that I hardly ever read, because writing, if I'm being really and for once deep and downright honest with myself – writing, you know, is the only thing I've ever really wanted to do. I've started a novel, matter of fact. Which doesn't mean a thing. Well it's the easiest thing in the world, starting a novel, course it is. And I should know: I've started dozens of the fucking things. It's going on with them, that's the bugger. It's going on that's hard: that's when the problems arise. In my more self-castigating, if still marshmallowy moods, I decide that all in fact that I want is to see my name in print, plain and simple – a sort of stark and incontrovertible evidence that I do in fact exist. And there is undeniably more than a grain of truth in this – I have, more than once, looked myself up in the phonebook, you know, just in order to see it. But of course it's the wrong way round in there: Peacock, Alan. Alan Peacock, that's the way round I want to see it (fair bit bigger, of course). There was a famous author once, you know (dead now) name of Peacock. Thomas Love. It always
made me giggle – I really am so very incurably shallow and juvenile, I can't help admitting it – wondering whether his mates used to maybe slap him across the shoulders and say to him: ‘How are you feeling this morning, Thomas Love?' or: ‘You really are a sensitive and delicate artist, aren't you Thomas Love? I love roast chicken – but Thomas Love Peacock.' I do, I get ambushed – waylaid and bushwhacked – by all these stupidities, and then I'm gone, I'm utterly lost in them. But I do really believe that it's more than that – got to be, hasn't it? More than just the glory of seeing my name up there, and in bold. But God knows if I'll ever achieve it, more than just a beginning. I never really know, after a certain point, what the devil more I can possibly
say
 – where I should go from there. You're always hearing, aren't you, that you should write about what you know, draw from your own experiences of life. Well in my case, very obviously, no use whatsoever: no one's going to believe in a single word of it, are they? My life. Jesus – look at me, will you? I can hardly believe it myself. Oh God. Enough – enough of all this. Because whichever way you look at it – in life as in art – it's going on that's hard: that's when the problems arise. I think now … I've got to get back to the beach. Listen to the gulls and the lapping of the waves – have myself a paddle and a nice big cornet (restore a bit of sanity, God alone knows).

I so like worry about them loads of times, my mum and dad. I think this is a sign of growing up, because all I used to ever worry about was me, but now it's not like that any more. It's them I have to worry about, and if you had a mum and dad like mine, then I think you would as well: you'd worry too. When I was little, I didn't notice they were weird. I've talked
to Jennifer and Tara about it all, parents, and they say to me oh but you're just so like really really lucky, Amanda – at least your parents are still together: at least they don't always throw things. Because Jennifer's mum and dad are divorced and they really like hate one another now, apparently – which yeh, that must be bad, although Jennifer's dad, he gives her piles of stuff whenever she sees him. Tara's dad is a children's entertainer, which is so totally worse than anything I can think of. He does clowns and magicians and balloons and stuff for all the ickle kiddies – we all used to think he was just so fucking cool when we were younger, but now it's lame and just so embarrassing. And Tara's mum, she throws things at him, Tara says. The minute he walks through the door – whap, he gets it in the head. Teacups mainly – Tara says her mum, she gets them wholesale like by the gross so she's always got loads just for chucking at his head. I used to think she was just like … joking? But she always looks dead serious whenever she says it. Well OK, yeh – my two are still together, which I suppose is fine, and nobody throws stuff, yeh that's true, but still though, they really are, the two of them, you know: just so like weird? Like my mum – she goes to work, yeh? Publisher, I've never read any of the books or anything, never even opened one: they all look so totally boring. Anyway, my mum, she makes this really big deal of getting back from work as early as she can so she can like talk to me about my
day
? ‘How I got on at school', oh yuck. I just always used to say fine, yeh fine Mum, but it was never enough. So now she kicks in with all her questions: So did you have English today, she'll go. And I'm like yeh Mum, we have English every day, don't we? And are you still doing well at it? Yeh. And Miss Brunson – that is the name of your teacher, isn't it? Yeh. Are you still
getting along well with her, are you? Yeh. Because I recall that at the beginning of term you had a little misunderstanding with her, didn't you? Yeh. But that's all right now, is it? All cleared up? Yeh. Well look, Amanda – I daresay you've got homework to get on with, have you? Yeh. Well off you go then – and don't spend the whole evening playing those awful computer games, will you Amanda? Promise me you won't: do you promise me, Amanda? Yeh. I like these little talks of ours – I think they're important; so many mothers and daughters just seem to lose touch, simply drift apart – and I like to think that you get something out of them as well: you do, don't you Amanda? Yeh.

So you see what I mean – I worry she's losing it, really. My dad is nuts, that's obvious, but at least he doesn't go around annoying me all the time. Not nuts, I don't mean, in a wacky off-the-wall and like good old lovable Dad sort of a way – just like mental, basically. He doesn't work or anything. He used to, but my mum says he kept on getting the sack, so maybe he just went off it all, I don't know. He had like this little shop once – I used to go there sometimes when I was small. Apart from him, though, it was always like – empty? Everything in it was either sharp or dirty. There was a bell above the door which never jangled because nobody ever came in. But I'd stop, if I could – I'd stop going to school. It's just such a fucking like great waste of time: bloody
Henry IV
and adverbial clauses or whatever? Yeh, like I so care. They should teach you cool stuff like make-up and driving a car and how to run like credit cards and things you're really going to need. Estuaries? The Continental Shelf?
The Canterbury Tales
? Oh
please
.