Turning Forty (6 page)

‘I know you will,’ she says but the abject sorrow in her eyes says otherwise.

8

I’m woken the following morning by a sharp knock on my bedroom door. I open my eyes to see Mum standing over me wearing her outdoor coat.

‘I’m checking to see if you’re awake yet.’

I look at my watch. It’s just after ten. Given the bombshells I dropped yesterday plus the fact that she gets up at six in the morning every day it’s hardly pushing the boat out to suggest that she’s been lurking at the door waiting for me to emerge for some time.

I sit up in bed. ‘What’s on your mind, Mum?’

‘I’m nipping to the shops and I wondered what you’d like for your tea tonight.’

‘Tea?’

She nods. ‘Yes, it’s either lamb chops or pork chops because I’ve just heard on the radio they’re on special at the supermarket. Which is it to be?

It would be futile to point out that I haven’t got a clue what I want for breakfast let alone tea, so I hope to bring the conversation to a close by saying, ‘Pork,’ very firmly.

Mum pulls a face. That is clearly the wrong answer.

‘Are you sure? I’ve never heard you say they’re your favourite. Did Lauren cook them a lot?’

‘No,’ I sigh. ‘Not really. I tell you what, though, get the lamb chops. They sound nice now you mention it.’

‘I’ll get both,’ she says, clearly pleased with this decision. ‘I can always put one lot in the freezer can’t I? What are your plans for the day?’

‘I might take a walk,’ I say, ‘you know, clear my head a bit. It’s a shame we haven’t got a dog. That’s the kind of walk I could really do with right now.’

Mum nods as though she understands the whole walking-a-dog-that-we-don’t-own thing, which she clearly doesn’t. I can see the cogs whirring. Why’s he talking about dogs? We haven’t got a dog. Is he saying he wants a dog? We haven’t got room for a dog!

‘Do you need some money? There’s a twenty-pound note on the mantelpiece behind the clock. You must be getting a bit short with you not working.’

My heart melts. This is typical of my mum. Just when you’re at your most exasperated, having been woken up early and interrogated about evening meals, she’ll make a gesture so full of love and compassion that you feel terrible for all the horrible things you’ve been thinking. My little old mum giving me – who used to think nothing of spending a hundred pounds on a bottle of wine in a nice restaurant – money from her pension: it’s heartbreaking.

‘I’m all right for cash at the minute, Mum, but thanks anyway.’

As she leaves the room I head for the shower and set the controls to a few degrees below scalding in the hope that the intensity will clear the fog currently clogging up my head. Grabbing a bottle of suitably masculine-sounding shampoo that has been my brand of choice for years I give it a big squeeze and am disappointed to see that nothing is coming out. I exchange it for a bottle on the lower shelf that I know to be my mum’s (Dad has never used shampoo in his life, preferring a bar of soap ‘It’s exactly the same stuff but three times cheaper!’) and feel depressed. My mum’s shampoo is a generic supermarket brand a million miles from the fancy-monikered, floral-smelling gunk that Lauren uses and I’m struck by the thought that I may never live with a woman who buys fancy shampoos again.

Ready for the day ahead, I’m about to head downstairs when I think about Ginny. She’s the reason I’m here, the reason I’m enduring the indignities of living with my parents, and yet aside from getting on the train at Euston I haven’t actually done anything to further my plan. Should I simply call her out of the blue? Or perhaps I should drop in on her at home or engineer an ‘accidental’ meeting in the street? In the end I decide that the only thing I can do is the one thing everyone in the world has already done bar me: join Facebook.

As someone who worked in the IT industry and regularly spent huge swathes of my life staring at one screen or another I’d always found the idea of Facebook entirely unappealing. With barely enough time in the real world why would I want to waste time I didn’t have in a virtual one social networking with people who under normal circumstances I would have lost contact with? Did I really need to keep in touch with sixty-odd people I had only ever met once and would never meet again? And even if I did why would I need to see their holiday photos or receive notifications whenever they visited the pub? But as I open up my laptop, join my parents’ next-door neighbour’s unsecured Wi-Fi network and set about searching for signs of Ginny, it occurs to me that as a tool for hunting down old on/off girlfriends it is unparalleled.

I spend a couple of minutes trawling through a dozen or so Ginny Pascoes from Bristol to North Carolina but when I find the right one I know it’s her straight away. She looks just the way I remember and just as beautiful. Gazing at her photo I can’t help but wonder how I will look to her after all this time. I always imagine myself looking cool and debonair but in reality I fear it may be more off-duty geography teacher.

I try to find out more information about her life (where she’s living, what she’s doing and most importantly whether she’s single) but her privacy settings are set pretty high so that the only thing I learn is that she’s still living in Birmingham.

Frustrated, I consider sending her a friend request but somehow it doesn’t feel right and so instead since I’m here I look up a number of former school mates whose privacy settings are low to non-existent just to see how their lives are treating them in comparison to my own. I discover the following: Emma Francis (then the girl most likely to be a vet) is living in Bromsgrove, has two kids with a third on the way; Joseph Maloney (then the boy most likely to die at the hands of the police during a shoot-out) is back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, living in Bristol, and likes Metallica and playing Xbox; Neema Patel (then the girl most likely to become a GP) is a part-time optician in Glasgow with two teenage daughters, and describes her relationship status as ‘complicated’; and Gary Turrell (then the boy most likely to turn his obsession with Dungeons and Dragons into a career) is now living in Indonesia, teaching scuba-diving and (if his profile picture was to be believed) sporting the kind of six-pack only ever seen on the cover of
Men’s Health
. So this is what turning forty is all about, I conclude as I close my laptop: kids, war, scuba-diving, complicated relationships, excessive body building and a whole lot of shattered dreams.

Desperate to keep my spirits up I follow through with my idea about taking a dogless walk up to Kings Heath park but even after several laps I’ve still got energy to spend so I carry on towards the environs of Moseley, a better-off cousin to Kings Heath popular with university lecturers, medics, renting graduates and (judging by the flash cars) the occasional highly paid executive. Maybe if I’d opted to live in Birmingham while earning the kind of money that I’d been earning in London I would’ve lived here too – a nice five-bed residence tucked away from the high street but not so far that I couldn’t stagger home from a night out at the King’s Arms.

Reaching the high street I take a walk along St Mary’s Row and reminisce about some of the shops and cafes that were here when I was seventeen: the hippy place that sold tie-dyed T-shirts and silver jewellery that Ginny loved; the tiny café that would turn a blind eye to us bringing in sausage rolls from the bakery next door; the chain pub that served the cheapest beer for miles but played the world’s worst music.

Crossing over the road I pass Boots, a curry house I don’t recognise and a couple of cafés before I come to a halt outside an upmarket charity shop which appears to fancy itself as a cut above the rest. Not for this emporium dog-eared copies of Catherine Cookson novels, semi-naked Barbie dolls and dead men’s clothing. Instead, judging from its tasteful window display it’s all literary novels with unbroken spines, pre-owned must-have classic albums in vinyl and arthouse DVDs. It’s like a cooler version of the Exchange shops in Notting Hill run for the purpose of aiding humanitarian works. Intrigued, I dodge past the pristine vintage pistachio Lambretta parked outside and enter the shop.

The first thing I notice is that they’re playing The House of Love’s debut album. The moment I hear ‘Christine’, I’m transported back to a scene of my youth: me, Gershwin and the rest of the gang hanging out at Ginny’s listening to music and pontificating about life. I haven’t heard this album in years, and it immediately puts a smile on my face, a fact that doesn’t go unnoticed by the guy behind the till. He looks familiar but I just can’t place him.

Despite grey hair and lived-in craggy features, there’s something eternally youthful about him. He’s easily ten years my senior, but he looks effortlessly cool. Not for him the male fashion menopause that has afflicted most of my generation. He is exactly the kind of man I want to be ten years from now, a pinnacle of maturity and style rather than some combat-trousered off-duty dad lookalike in sagging T-shirt and comfortable footwear.

‘Cracking band weren’t they?’ he says in a soft Brummie accent.

‘The absolute best,’ I reply. ‘I saw them a few times. They were a great band live.’

‘We were probably at the same gigs. Dunno what they’re up to now. I had a guy in this morning trying to talk down the price we were charging. I told him to sod right off and then put it straight on!’

I laugh politely and try desperately to think of something else to say because I don’t want this conversation to end. I’ve just realised who he is. He’s Gerry Hammond, lead singer of The Pinfolds, and this is easily the best thing that has happened to me for ages.

The Pinfolds were Birmingham’s answer to The Smiths. Ginny got me into them after we became friends and as teenagers we saw them countless times before they got famous and moved to London, and even after that at least half a dozen times between the release of their debut album,
Newhall Lovers
, and their final tour some three years later.

On behalf of my seventeen-year-old self I want to say something to Gerry but my mind has gone blank. We do the awkward smile thing to signal the end of the conversation and then I start browsing the paperbacks behind me while conjuring up reasons why one of my all-time heroes is working in a charity shop.

After much deliberation I pick up a copy of
The Return of The Native
for £1.99 and Leonard Cohen’s
Songs of Love and Hate
on CD for £2.49 by which time I have concluded that Gerry is one of those pop stars who like to give something back. This, I decide, is very much in keeping with The Pinfolds’ left-wing ethos as I remembered them and only serves to make him even cooler.

‘Hardy and Cohen at the same time,’ he says, chuckling as he puts my purchases through the till. ‘You’ll be a barrel of laughs tonight in the pub!’

Retorts (cool or otherwise) elude me so I just laugh and nod. He hands me the bag with my purchases in adding: ‘Come back soon. We’ve always got tons of new stock coming in.’

That night I spend half the evening watching old Pinfolds videos that fans have uploaded to YouTube. It’s great hearing songs like ‘Charmed and Delighted’ and ‘Union Street Nightmares’ again but disappointing to see how few times they’ve been viewed (in the low thousands as opposed to the millions that Smiths videos have) and it makes me wonder whether I might have exaggerated their success. Obviously to me at the age of seventeen they had been this huge band, local heroes living the dream. Was it possible that their place in the pantheon of pop wasn’t quite as secure as it was in my head? Closing the lid of my laptop I find myself thinking about Ginny again as though my unconscious is trying to make a connection between her and The Pinfolds. Have I exaggerated what we used to be to each other? When I see her will she take one look at me and wonder who I am? If I really am going to make contact with her then I’ll need to get a bit more background information on her and who better to get it from than Gershwin Palmer, my oldest mate, and my eyes and ears on the streets of Birmingham. If anyone will know what Ginny’s up to he will and so I reach for my phone and type out the following text:
Split up with the missus and back in Brum. Fancy a pint?

9

It’s just after nine and Gershwin and I are nursing our pints in the crowded rear bar of an Irish pub in Moseley. I’ve told him my news and rather than asking me why it’s taken six months to tell him about me and Lauren, which would be fair enough, he says: ‘Mate, I’m really gutted for you. No one knows better than me how tough divorce can be.’

It was hard to believe it had been five years since Gershwin and his wife Zoe had split up, especially as they’d been together since their late teens. Of course they’d had their ups and downs and had once even separated for a short while, but after fifteen years together I’d been convinced they were in it for life. No one was more surprised than me when Gershwin called and told me it was over. They’d been rowing all the time and eventually Zoe asked him to move out; a few months later she met someone else. The thing that really broke my heart about it was that even after the divorce was finalised it was obvious he still loved her.

‘So what’s your plan?’ asks Gershwin. ‘Sell the house and move on?’

‘Pretty much, although it doesn’t help that I quit my job too.’

‘I thought you loved it.’

‘So did I. Turns out I was wrong. Truth is I just couldn’t do it any more. I’ve been in this business nearly twenty years and I’m burned out.’