How to Be Bad (3 page)

“No, wait,” she said. She took a ballpoint pen out of her bag, grabbed my hand, and coolly scrawled a number on it. “If you feel like going out sometime, give me a call.”

*   *   *

A
T THE
pub that night, Wallace asked why I had a grapefruit on my head. I told him about the book-burning maniac and the incomprehensible tattooed maniac, and he quickly lost interest. But when I told Wallace I'd bumped into Caro, he got all excited. “She asked you to call her? Really?”

“Yeah.”

“You didn't say yes?” said Wallace.

“I didn't say anything.”

“Thank Christ for that.” He set his beer glass down on the bar and looked at me. “Because I hope you haven't forgotten what happened last time.”

“Er, no.”

Wallace proceeded to tell me anyway. “You went out together for two months.”

“Five and a half,” I said.

“Then on your eighteenth birthday, she goes and dumps you for Danny Curran.”

I nodded grimly.

Wallace laughed. “I hope for her sake he was better as a lover than he was a teacher. God, your face when you caught her sucking his cock at your own birthday party!”

“Get stuffed,” I said, blushing at the memory.

“What are you so sensitive about? It was years ago.” He smiled and shook his head. “Poor old Danny, eh? I wonder what became of the dirty one-legged bastard?”

“He had two legs,” I said. “One was shorter than the other.”

“Oh, that's right. I forgot. You saw him with his trousers down, didn't you?” Wallace took a mouthful of his drink and tried not to laugh. He tried so hard that beer came out of his nostrils.

“I'm glad you find it amusing.”

When Wallace had stopped laughing, he leaned back on his stool and shrugged. “She didn't do him much good, anyway. Lost his job for fucking a pupil. He and his wife split up, and Caro dumped him. Serves him fucking right.”

“If it hadn't been Danny,” I said, “it would have been someone else.”

“Exactly,” said Wallace, spinning on his stool until he was facing me. “That's exactly my point. What do you want her phone number for? You know what you're like. You'll see her once, then you'll start following her about on all fours with your little tail wagging and your tongue hanging out.”

“I'm nothing like that.”

“Yes, you are. You're doing it now. Why you ever wasted your time on a lying tart like that, I will never know.”

This was the trouble with Wallace. He dreamed of being hip, but he used words like “tart,” words that even your parents would consider old-fashioned.

“She was a teenager,” I reminded him. “Of course she was going to be flattered when her favorite teacher took a shine to her. She's twenty-three now. People do grow up, Andy—present company fucking well excepted.”

He sulked for a while, then tried to get his own back. “I'll tell you something about Caro, shall I? Something you didn't know. She used to take the piss out of you behind your back.”

“No, she didn't. Other kids might have done. Bastards like you. Not Caro.”

“Madden, I'm telling you. Even when you were seeing her, she found you rather amusing. And I don't mean in a nice way. She used to call you Madeline.”

“Bullshit.”

For a few seconds, Wallace looked at me the way comrades-in-arms look at each other in old war movies, just before they go over the top and get shot to fuck. “Mark?” he said.

“What?”

“Promise me you won't call her.”

“Why? What's it to you?”

“Just promise.”

“All right, all right. I promise.”

As soon as I got home, I called her.

CHAPTER 2

ABOUT A GIRL

T
HE VERY
next night, just before eight, I drove to Caro's address on Kew Road. She lived in a first-floor flat overlooking Kew Gardens. A black BMW Sportster was parked in the drive, next to which my Fiat Uno looked like a car for cautious old ladies. Feeling scared and excited, I rang the bell. Caro, now minus her plaster cast, came down to open the door. She placed her hands lightly on my shoulders and greeted me with those fake kisses so beloved of middle-class women.

We walked to the restaurant on foot, close but not touching. It was a mild but windy night in early February. Litter and dead leaves spun around our feet as we walked. I complimented her on the BMW. “You must be doing all right for yourself, to drive a car like that.”

Caro laughed rudely.

The restaurant was that French one at the shitty end of Kew Road. Our table was in the window, giving passersby an excellent view of my appalling table manners. The people around us were all rich and well groomed. In my slightly idiotic best clothes, I blended in rather well. “Have you been here before?” I asked her.

“No. Have you?”

“A few times. It's the second-best restaurant in Richmond. The first is an Indian place called the New Manzil. You know it?”

“Is that the place where they give you free wine?”

“Yeah. And those cute little matchboxes with elephants on them.”

I suddenly became aware of the Muzak softly playing in the background. “Listen,” I said. “They're playing our song.”

To our amusement and distaste, it was a Mantovani arrangement of “Fuck Me but Don't Fuck With Me” by Sol Horror. The song that had been playing at that first party when Caro had puked all over me. The song that brought us together.

“It's an omen,” I joked.

“I doubt it,” said Caro.

The neighboring table was occupied by a leering white-haired man and a woman who was young enough to be his daughter but nowhere near ugly enough.

“Look at that,” said Caro in a loud voice. “Beauty and the beast. She's got her whole life ahead of her, but so what? She's broke. He's promised to leave his wife for her, and with her body, it might just be worth it. At the moment, his money is the only aphrodisiac she needs. But I wonder how sexy he'll seem when she's forty and he's seventy-five and peeing his pajamas.”

Caro may have looked like a more beautiful version of her former self, but the feeling she gave off was very different. At seventeen, despite her pretensions to cool, she had been as appalled and bewildered by the world as me. Now, unless it was an act, she gave the impression of being frighteningly self-possessed.

“Wow,” I said. “Are you always this cynical?”

“I'm no cynic,” she said. “A cynic doesn't believe in the basic goodness of people.”

“And how many good people do you know?”

“Donny Osmond.”

“Is that it? Donny Osmond?”

“Isn't that enough? I have faith in Donny. If Donny was found to be a junkie, a wife beater, or a pedophile, I wouldn't believe in anything anymore.”

We'd ordered a bottle of chardonnay. The waiter who opened the bottle, a puny French guy in his thirties, fawned over Caro as if she were royalty. He wasn't exactly subtle about it, letting her sample the wine instead of me, despite the fact that I was paying. When Caro said the wine was lovely, the waiter said, “A beautiful wine for a beautiful lady.”

“Well, thank you,” I said, fluttering my eyelids at him.

Even when he was serving other people, the waiter couldn't help staring at her. Humbert Humbert at the next table was also mesmerized by her. I don't know why I'm acting so superior about it. I couldn't take my eyes off her, either.

I drank the first glass too quickly because I was so nervous. When I was on the second, she patted my hand. “Take it easy, I'm not going anywhere.”

“So what do you do?” I said.

She smirked. “Are we making polite conversation?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I do fuck-all,” she said. “And what do
you
do? Oh yeah, I remember. You sell rare books. Like Hugh Grant in
Notting Hill.
”

“No. He didn't sell novels. He sold travel books.”

“How on earth would you remember that?”

“I've got a very retentive memory.”

“Retentive anus, you mean.”

I decided to let this go. “If you've got any Nick Hornby first editions you want to sell, I'd definitely be interested. That's my specialist area. Books by and about men.”

“Ugh, no.” She shook her head vehemently. “All that men-with-feelings shit makes me throw up.”

I smiled tolerantly to demonstrate that her contempt for my vocation would not affect my desire to sleep with her.

“What's the point?” she said. “Are Nick Hornby books worth anything?”

“
Fever Pitch
would go for about twenty pounds. A signed one could fetch as much as forty.”

“As much as that?”

Now I was starting to feel uncomfortable. “Yeah, but you wait. In a few years, the value of those books will skyrocket.”

“What if it doesn't?” said Caro. “What if dear old Nick becomes one of those writers nobody bothers with anymore? Like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

“Well, I'll have been wasting my time.”

She nodded in satisfaction. I felt we weren't getting on well at all.

“You used to like Sylvia Plath, didn't you?” I said. “I've got a copy of
The Colossus
you might be interested in.”

“I've already got it.”

“Yeah, you've got an old paperback. I'm offering you a hardback first edition. The first UK edition, published by Heinemann in 1960. You can have it for nothing.”

“Why?”

“To say thank you. For coming here tonight.”

She frowned. “But has it got the same poems in it as the paperback?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks. But no thanks.”

“Why not?”

“I'm not interested in first editions. I'm not a collector. I think that collecting things is sick. It's like hamsters filling their pouches with nuts. It's just another way of trying to ward off death. Plus you could offer me as many books as you liked, it wouldn't turn back the clock. I'm not going to suddenly fall back in love with you. I'm not going to want to sleep with you.”

This crushed me so comprehensively that for a while I could think of nothing to say.

It was Caro who broke the silence. “To answer the question you asked ten centuries ago, I tried working. Two and a half years on a magazine in Fleet Street.”

“You were a journalist?”

“Yeah. I was a staff writer on a women's glossy. I used to make up all those exclusive stories about how to keep your man from straying.”

“And what's the answer?”

“The real answer or the one I wrote for the readers?”

“The real answer.”

“You mutate into a completely different person every two years. Only way to keep your man. Relationships only last two years. After that, the sex has lost its edge, and all the flowers in the world can't make up for the arguments, the resentments, and the secret loathing.”

“You don't really believe that,” I said. “Anyway, we were only together for six months.”

“That's right.” She smiled brightly, and my heart fluttered. “That's why I never got tired of you.”

“Oh. So how come you walked out on me?”

“I was seventeen. My lovely teacher made a pass at me. I was a little kid, I was flattered. What was I supposed to do?”

“Report him to the authorities?”

“If I'd thought you'd have been able to handle me seeing someone else, I would never have ended it. Well, not for about another eighteen months, anyway.”

The first course arrived. It looked like a giant maggot sitting on a lettuce leaf. Caro ate hers without hesitation, then started on mine. She was welcome to it.

“So in theory,” I said, “you and I have got another year and a half?”

“Stop it.”

“Then why did you ask me to call you?”

“I thought it'd be nice just to meet as friends and catch up.”

“You don't fancy me anymore?”

I saw her hesitate. “It isn't that. You're very nice. That's part of the problem. You're a little
too
nice.”

“I'm not that nice.”

“You are, Mark. I bet you even wash the dishes.”

“I prefer to wipe.”

The main course was some kind of fish. I thought I'd ordered a salad, which just went to show how bad my French was.

“How's your love life?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“I haven't been out with anyone for eight months.”

“How many relationships have you had since I knew you?”

“Lost count,” she said. “You?”

“Four,” I said. “An actress, a kindergarten teacher, a flight attendant, and a girl I met at college.”

“Which one lasted the longest?”

“Four and a half years. The girl I met at college. She was my second-favorite girlfriend. You're the first. The kindergarten teacher comes third. The flight attendant and the actress share equal fourth place.”

Caro laughed. “Is there something wrong with you?”

“No.” I felt myself blushing. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you keep making lists.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah. First you did it about the restaurant. Now you're doing it about your girlfriends.”

“Ah.”

She wasn't just being hostile. The subject interested her. “Listmaking. Making endless lists about stupid fucking things. It's an epidemic, and it's wiping out the modern Western male.”

“I haven't really given it much thought.”

“I can tell,” she said. “Does your dad make lists?”

“No.”

“Nor does mine. But he's a complete nutter, so he doesn't really count. My mum's dad got shot in the war—can't remember if I ever told you that. A Japanese bullet went right through him, took out his spleen. Do you think he made lists? His ten best comrades to die in action, in order of likability?”