The Perfect 10 (10 page)

Adrian rolls off me onto the bed. This time I made the necessary pleasurable noises without going to the effort of actually faking an orgasm in its entirety. I don’t have the energy or the inclination. He doesn’t seem bothered.

Adrian mumbles something into the pillow.

‘Sorry?’ I ask.

He raises himself up on to his elbows and looks at me seriously. ‘Who would have thought it, eh?’

‘Thought what?’ I stroke the hair out of his eyes.

‘You and me.’ He smiles at me, and kisses my forehead.

‘It’s not the strangest thing that’s ever happened.’

‘No, I know. Not now. It just shows …’

‘Shows what?’ I ask.

‘You know,’ he closes his eyes and hugs me, drifting into sleep, ‘what a difference a year can make.’

‘Well, people’s feelings change all the time,’ I say, nervously trying to stop him before he goes too far.

‘Hmmm?’ His eyes are still closed, and he presses his face into my neck. ‘You’ve done so well …’ And he falls asleep.

Three hours later I am still awake, while Adrian snores loudly on the other side of the bed. Yep, I’ve done so well.

Cagney B. James cracks a nut in his right hand. His father, Tudor B. James, is the only other person alive who knows what the ‘B’ stands for. His mother knew as well, but she died twenty years ago, so Cagney isn’t as worried about her letting it slip. The sign on his door neglects the ‘B’, and merely reads,

The Agency
C. James Proprietor

Tarnished silver lettering on heavy oak, and a window. It could be the door to a funeral parlour, or a gambling den, or any number of things, and that’s the point. The shell crumbles in his palm. Like a hooker giving a hand job, it’s a well-practised technique, just without the constant AIDS testing. Maybe the odd splinter, but hell, that won’t shut down his immune system. He kicks the pieces towards the bin.

Leaning back in his chair, Cagney places both feet up on the desk in front of him, and listens to the noises outside his window, with eyes closed. The bottle bank swallows ten
green Merlots, fed by a ruddy old major in wellingtons and a tweed jacket with elbow patches as red as the veins in his cheeks. You can’t sleep in Kew for the sound of recycling. ‘Luxury’ family saloons purr up, and uniform beige court shoes and black city loafers dive out of passenger seats and hit the ground running, as a tube lazes graciously into the station.

The butchers fire up the rotisserie chicken at 9 o’clock every morning, and the smell drifts through Cagney’s window with the warm air, mixed with the plastic croissant and coffee smells seeping out of Starbucks. Just the thought of hot food before midday makes him retch. He forces himself to stomach it for five seconds, before spinning round and slamming the window shut with a force that makes the flower seller across the road drop his bucket of tulips and exclaim, ‘Prick!’

Cagney hears it.

The flower seller used to be big-boned, voluptuous, heavy on the eye: a fat, fat man. He was reassuringly huge, pleasantly swollen, with a stomach that children could bounce on, and flesh concertinas where his neck should have been. Cagney hasn’t spoken to him in the ten years he’s sold his flowers opposite the office. The flower seller had obviously stopped eating sometime last year, and Cagney noted the slow but steady loosening of his shirt buttons, and his neck suddenly appeared one day, unexpectedly, like a highland fling from an old set of bagpipes that you thought were broken. It was then that he lost Cagney’s respect, and just when Cagney had been working up to saying ‘good morning’. If he liked his food – and he obviously had liked Ethiopia’s share of food and never mind about the famine – why deny it? He had been sturdy before, big and fat and happy – and that made him worth something, in the Cagney James pamphlet on life. A kindred spirit that almost got a
hello. The fat flower seller of Kew, as much a part of the village as the gardens themselves, and the ever-increasing quota of camera jockeys from April to October. American tourists felt they knew him on sight, from the slide shows back home entitled ‘Our Trip to Europe’. Now the man’s friends have trouble recognising him from three feet. Cagney is pretty sure it has hurt his pocket as well. Japs don’t feel the need to stop and chat to him, his new slimmer frame and loose skin so much less charming, or snapshot friendly. He is threatening now; he looks so average that you have to wonder what nastiness is on his mind instead of sausage and chips. It suggests to Cagney that although the body may now be ‘healthy’, he has lost another friend to the new century. Yes, he
was
a friend. If Cagney had ever actually needed to buy flowers, that’s where he would have got them, but not now. And all for what? For a woman, probably.

‘Poor bastard.’ He swears loudly, alone in his office.

Cagney indulges his demons. He gives them their head, and lets them breathe. He smokes Marlboro Reds, but without passion. They are a habit, not a crutch. He drinks whiskey, mostly Jack Daniel’s, but he doesn’t mind which brand if it’s on sale. Straight, no ice. There is no desire he feels the need to suppress. He doesn’t feel lust any more, trickling its fingers down his spine.

He’s not hurting anybody but himself. And that used to be allowed.

He read in the paper that you shouldn’t skip breakfast, and loath as he is to ignore the sound advice of a ‘celebrity doctor’, he now takes a shot of whiskey each morning, sharp and decent, harsh but so honest it borders on the poetic. What great advice it had been.

Of course, he’d absolutely love a muesli bar instead, or a carrot juice, or a live yoghurt, or a vitamin garlic essential fucking fatty acid pill, or better still a month in a glorified
country prison with nothing but rice cakes and fizzy water on the menu, or another lecture from another expert who knows better.

He just hasn’t found the time.

As much as he really wants to pay some overpriced, long-haired, four-eyed Freudian Jungian Cantian freak to tell him he really wanted to screw his mother and kill his father at the age of two but if he looked away they wouldn’t actually exist, his income just won’t stretch to that and the whiskey, and what a goddamn tragedy it is. Everybody’s life had become everybody’s business, and what a loss to society that Cagney refuses to play along.

Want Nothing – that is the title of Cagney’s Pamphlet on Life. Subtitle: Live with your lot.

There are so many headlines, every day so many new headlines that litter what used to be ‘news’ papers, saying exactly what they said yesterday: some new way of preaching ‘open up’. Somebody has redefined ‘emotionally healthy’ for the nation, but Cagney’s in-built dictionary doesn’t agree.

A man, a MAN, should have basic needs that can be paid for with a twenty. Only then will they always be met. A MAN should never let his weaknesses wear him, or expose himself to the ridiculous banality of ‘self-improvement’. A MAN is a MAN at birth, and that should be good enough. Most importantly, a MAN should know when to shut up.

Cagney’s only weakness is monkey nuts. He likes the routine, the crack between his fingers, the bits that fall away. Everywhere he goes he leaves a trail of shells. It drives people crazy, and although he thinks about giving them up, that’s as good a reason not to as any.

He searches the internet occasionally for the nutritional value of the monkey nut, hasn’t found it yet thank God, but is afraid he might stop ageing at forty, live to one hundred, and become the Monkey Nut Miracle Marvel Man.

The sound of footsteps on the solitary flight of stairs that lead to his office signal the arrival of somebody with size twelve feet. Hopefully his secretary will stop them coming into his office. He’ll have to hire a secretary first, of course.

‘For fuck’s sake …’ he swears, under his breath this time. He just can’t find a man to take on the job, and a woman would end up crying if he didn’t bring her muffins on a Friday, or throw a party every time she had her roots done.

The door swings open and a human Labrador bursts in.

‘Boss!’

Cagney stares blankly at the smile that greets him, and says nothing. The new arrival continues to smile. He is wearing communist khakis and a polo shirt, a jumper is tied around his shoulders in a Fabulous Five idiotic let’s-grab-a-dog-and-a-picnic-and-find-ourselves-a-dead-body way, and he stands, arms outstretched in greeting, as if years have passed since last they met. His name is Howard. They spend far too much time together for Cagney’s liking.

‘You call, I come running!’

‘You’d think I’d learn not to call.’

‘I got your nuts!’ Howard winks, and slings a bag on the desk.

‘Does that explain your erection?’ Cagney brushes the bag straight into his desk drawer, as Howard looks down at his crotch to double-check Cagney is joking. Satisfied that he is not actually sporting wood, he grins and props himself, full of beans and life and marrow, on the edge of Cagney’s desk.

‘Did I ask for a lap dance?’

‘Invading your space, boss, duly noted.’ But Howard doesn’t move.

‘I won’t pay you for it, even if you strip. Especially if you strip.’

‘If you’d get another buggering chair in here, Cag, I
wouldn’t have to sit on the desk! Nope, that came out wrong – I don’t want a buggering chair, just a chair would be great – preferably one without straps to hold me down or a hole in the back for anal penetration.’

Howard slaps the desk and laughs loudly, but stands up as Cagney winces at the air of stupidity that fills the room like cheap heavy aftershave so much it gives him a headache. He almost manages to ignore his name’s abbreviation.

‘So, what’s up, Mo’ Fo’?’ Howard crosses his arms, hugging himself, and leans back slightly, chin in the air.

‘Howard, you’re from Fulham. It’s not the hood.’

‘I’m still trying it out, seeing how it hangs on me … my nizza.’

‘Will you be singing “Mammy” later?’ Cagney mumbles, but Howard doesn’t hear, as he raps quietly to himself. Cagney catches the odd ‘fuck’, the odd ‘whore’, and something about being ‘straight out of Compton’. Cagney thinks hard to remember how old Howard is, and when he realises it is twenty-four, he closes his eyes. Was he this foolish fifteen years ago, this blind, stupid, idiotic and pointless? This impressionable, dull, random, inane? This vulnerable? Cagney can’t remember a time when he felt differently from the way he feels now, and although he is the last person to claim his life has any kind of point, he has surely never been as disposable as Howard. He remembers the days of polite conversation, of small talk, of respect and integrity. He has never tried to ‘rap’. Making swear words rhyme has apparently become an art form. He racks his brain, searching for something, anything pure. He finds the Indian Ocean lapping at a secluded beach, and he clutches on … the swell of rage subsides. Cagney opens his eyes half a minute later: a grinning Howard stares back at him.

‘Finding your happy place again, boss?’ Howard winks for the second time in five minutes.

‘Fetching as it is, Howard, I think you might like to know that you have a brush sticking out of the back of your head.’

‘I couldn’t get a comb to stay.’

Cagney stares at him, incredulous. He actually pays this boy, pays him to live, to eat, to house himself. He employs him when what he should really do is have him put down. But work is work, and Cagney can’t do the younger ones himself; he is old enough to be their father. He glances at his calendar, a subconscious habit that has crept up on him over the last year. September 28 – three months to go. To death or freedom, he doesn’t care which. To forty. Countdown officially commenced nine months ago, but he’s had one eye on that calendar for ten years.

Cagney visualises the half-empty bottle of Jack in his drawer, and the beaker he stole from a hotel in Brighton ten years ago that has never known water. He controls the urge to lunge for it.

What he knows is this: in the thirties, in the forties, a guy like him was permitted his idiosyncrasies, with no pressure to air dirty laundry or bandage over neurosis, or cure it somehow. The world deserved – no, it needed – its share of alcoholics and depressives, not that Cagney sees himself as either. But if he were a member of one of these underground clubs, he wouldn’t feel ashamed. He lives in a dirty world, full of vicious tricks, and at some point you accept it. He doesn’t greet the mornings with a smile any more. And so what? He’s no daddy to a doting toddler, no strong husband to a soft sweet-smelling feminine bundle. He’s nobody’s hero.

Howard fidgets, and Cagney looks up to see him adjusting the brush that sticks out precariously from his short bushy blond hair, admiring himself and using Cagney’s frame as a mirror. It is one of the only things that sits permanently on his desk, propped against an old coffee cup
that has stuck itself spitefully to the wood. A roughly framed quote from a newspaper he’d read on a train nearly ten years ago, as the clock struck midnight, and he had turned thirty: ‘Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.’

‘Put that down, and lose the brush, Basil.’

‘It’s Howard. Oh, Basil, Basil Brush! Boom boom! You’re unusually sunny today, boss, and I think I know why! Stop me if I’m wrong, but could it have something to do with a new hero in town? Eh?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, how have you heard about that already?’

‘The waitress I shagged in Starbucks told me.’

‘Is she a waitress in Starbucks, or did you shag her in Starbucks?’

‘Both. Anyway, boss! I knew you had it in you! I wish I’d been with you, we could have caught him quicker. Now tell me everything that happened. Julie … Jenny said you went running off after this guy, and –’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Modesty, Cagney, that’s what makes you the man that you are. But fuck that, tell me what happened.’

‘Nothing happened. I heard some woman screaming, and that’s that.’

‘Fine. Don’t tell me. Iuan will tell it better anyway.’

‘Iuan knows?’

‘Everybody knows! It’s the talk of the village!’

‘But how? It only happened twenty-four hours ago! And on a Sunday, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Come on, boss, don’t be shy. Did you hit him?’

Cagney sighs. This is just what he knew would happen. He shouldn’t have done anything, should have just sat at his desk and ignored it all. Now he’s in for at least a week of people trying to talk to him, perfect strangers accosting
him in the street to discuss it, the entire nosy-busy-body-caring-sharing-smile-on-its-face-village falling over itself to ask him how he feels and offer a thousand shoulders to cry on when he needs them. Then they’ll congratulate each other for Cagney’s heroics, believing they’ve finally turned him with their sweet sensitive carnival of Champagne liberalism. They got him in the end, that sour old hack always dressed in black, their village Grinch, not painting or singing or living the life glorious with the rest of them. They got him with their cheerful persistence, and forced him to care by trailing their lives for him to see and share, like multicoloured ribbons flying from the backs of their push bikes. They got him, while shaking sad heads at their knowledge of life’s problems, courtesy of that morning’s
Guardian
newspaper. Yes, they’ll think they got their man in the end, as Cagney got his, but theirs were rugby tackles of love. Cagney winces at the thought, and looks down at his desk, at the piece of paper with a hastily scrawled address and Friday’s date written in big black letters. It will be awful. It will be the kind of dreadful appreciative small-talk-filled evening that could actually kill him. But how can he not go?