Zigzag Street (8 page)

If you stare at the Can of Worms screen saver long enough, you don't see the worms at all. You see the screen opening up black spaces in front of you, shapes arising with the appearance of order and then metamorphosing into other shapes. Such is the way of the worms.

If I was paying any less attention to my work I would probably be drooling. I expect that by this time next week the ever-considerate Hillary will have fixed a bib to my chin.

I know I'm not doing as well as I used to. I know I'm not kicking out of this just yet. I know that for every little thing I can interpret as an encouraging sign, there are probably several that suggest the exact opposite. And some of the examples of this are obvious and undeniable.

I want things to be better, but they aren't yet. Some days have an inertia about them. And those that move at any speed seem to move also without any control. I have always liked control, and any lack of it does cause me some discomfort.

I have always liked control. It makes me sound like some control freak.

I hope, in my life, for a reasonable level of control. That most days will be manageable, and that most random events that arise should offer me opportunities rather than harm. And I think all that's okay, within the bounds of acceptability in a person, or a partner. That's what I hope.

I am not Jeff Ross, who correctly understands himself to be a creature of routine. A creature for whom change is an enemy. This man's development, as he well knows, was thrown out at the anal stage. He lets nothing go. If sphincters could arm wrestle he'd be a world champion.

I have suggested to him I should change. That maybe I should make myself a nicer person, maybe that would work. But he says nice is dead in the nineties, that this is an age of irony and maybe even cruelty, particularly
the cruelties of ambivalence and indifference, and I should run with it. He says that perhaps the only change I should make should be to ease up on the enormous amount of cruelty directed inward. He tells me I dwell too much on the idea that I have been cruel to others, and I now seem to be championing their cause and being very cruel to myself.

He says that the best you can do in the nineties is to be ironic and harmless (that is, to choose to discard the cruelty on offer), to find a small number of people you like and trust, to expect wine of quality and regular tennis and to hold out little hope for the world. I think he is the sort of person who, in the time of fortified cities, would have been quite comfortable during a long siege.

I told him he should write a self-help book, and tour internationally as a guru to the lonely and crapulous. That regardless of his own stated choice to look inward, he had a gift and a duty. He had a special thing to share. And I told him I could see him drawing crappy people from their modest lives into stadiums where they would sing and hug and chant his truisms and learn to love their disease.

A few days after I suggested this, he scared me a little by proving that he'd given it some thought. He said we could do it. He said we should start with bumper stickers. Bumper stickers that said, in very large letters ‘CRAP', and then, below, in smaller letters, ‘and I'm proud'. He seemed to see this as a very liberating notion.

I am one of his friends. We share tennis and wine and the siege mentality of the age, but that's not to say he doesn't worry me.

He turns thirty tomorrow. I go out at lunchtime to buy him a gift.

I browse, and by the time I absolutely have to go back to work I have nothing. I am standing in front of a shelf of popcorn makers. I tell myself not to dismiss the popcorn makers lightly, and I take myself so seriously
I buy two. My theory is that one will make an excellent gift for Jeff, and the other will facilitate diversity in my diet. Over the last few weeks I have noticed my culinary repertoire constricting, and I don't think this is a good sign. Reading the pack, the popcorn maker looks straightforward. Add corn. Turn on. And the corn spins in hot air until it pops and pours out into your catcher, then you have all the options in the world.

I leave the store with one under each arm and I go back to work.

Corn will be good. Popcorn will help me. Popcorn and its many possibilities. Maybe I'm better than last Christmas, at least in some ways.

At four-thirty I'm back at the medical centre, where I'm told,
Doctor's running a little behind, so please take a seat
.

I sit near the TV and kids with runny noses and palpable fevers clamber across the furniture and tip over a pot plant. At least in the medical centre everyone around me thinks it's fine to have bandages, and probably only the relatively small number of people over the age of ten think I'm wearing them because of some failed suicide attempt.

At five-fifteen my turn comes. Greg's door opens and he calls me in and inspects my wounds in a very business-like way and says he's pleased with the progress. He says we could probably leave them open, but it might be an idea to cover them just so they don't get bumped. Then we sit down for our chat.

So how's it going
? he says, in a way that makes it seem very like a standard opening remark.

Fine.

How's the cat? Did it turn up
?

Yeah. The cat's fine.

He looks down at my file, as though trying to work out where to take it from here. He clicks his pen a few times, but writes nothing.
Your address
, he says.
I used to look after the woman who lived there
.

Yeah, my grandmother.

This wasn't … This may sound a little strange. The cat. It's not an orange cat, is it
?

An orange cat called Greg, yes. The cat my grandmother named after you. That's the one. He's very nice normally. Just not a fan of the flea bath.

Who would be
?

So you're saying that cutting me to ribbons would be the reasonable response of any orange Greg in the circumstances?

He laughs, though in a slightly unsettled way, as though I might be offering to flea-bathe him.
We miss your grandmother round here. She was certainly a character
.

Yeah.

She always used to bring biscuits. She made them herself. I always looked at her and thought that's what I'd like to be like at ninety
.

Yeah, me too. I thought that. There she was, ninetyone and still putting shit on me. You've got to respect that.

So, how do you get to be living in her house
?

It's a complicated set of circumstances. Well it's not really. It's actually pretty simple. I was in a relationship. It ended. I had to live somewhere. I stayed with my parents but, you know.

Yeah, I do. I do know. I worked in England for a while and when I came back I stayed with mine for a few months. I hadn't lived with them for maybe ten years. It was very strange. Too strange. They ate dinner really early, and took an intense interest in my day
.

Yeah. That's it. That's it, exactly. They're great but they'll drive you crazy. And you want to shake them and say, These things are just habits. They don't matter. You can get over this. People can eat dinner after dark. But you know they wouldn't understand. They think there's something really Bohemian about you because you don't want to eat till seven-thirty.

In the end you have to leave, don't you? You've got to get back to some place that's your own
.

Yeah. Or in my case my grandmother's. But it's fine now. I'm settling in.

And the relationship
?

It's over. That's been made clear to me. So now I've got to make it clear to me too, and then work out what happens next.

He says these things can be rough. Sometimes they're all you can think about and you can feel them weighing you down, but in the end you pull through, even if there are times when you don't expect to. We talk a bit more, probably until he decides I'm safe, until he believes his feline namesake caused the harm that brought me here two nights ago. And he says that we could talk again, if I wanted. That I can come back if I notice I'm not coming to terms with any of this and I want to talk to someone who's not part of the situation.

And right at this moment I realise that sometimes I still work on the assumption that I'll be fine. That something will happen, or nothing will happen, and this will all lift from me and I'll be fine.

I walk home up the hill. Right now I don't feel bad.

On Friday Deb asks me what plans I've got for the weekend and I tell her I'm going to a thirtieth.

And she says,
Fuck, thirty
, slowly and breathily as though it's almost inconceivable.
You're not thirty are you Ricky
?

No. I've got nearly two years left to do all the ‘before I'm thirty' things.

Thirty. I can't even imagine thirty
.

You don't have to. It happens anyway. It's like that.

So what are you doing
?

Going out to dinner.

No, you've got to do more than that
.

I'll give you the guy's number if you want. You can call him and tell him he's fucking up his only shot at a decent thirtieth.

I start working, start looking through this contract again and wading my way with some discomfort to a few things that might become ideas. My phone rings. It's Deb.

You know what I'd do for my thirtieth, Ricky
?

What?

I'd get one of those bouncy castles, one of those blow up ones you see at church fetes, and I'd have the party in there
.

Good plan, Deb.

Yeah. Thanks babe. You'll be there won't you
?

Sure.

You'll have to take your shoes off. That okay by you
?

Fine. I bounce way better with my shoes off.

Cool
.

We all plan to meet at my place for drinks before dinner. Sal decided this a couple of weeks ago because it's near the restaurant and, besides, it would give everyone a chance to see how my renovations are going. Back then there was nothing ironic about it, I fully expected we'd be standing round admiring my handiwork. I wonder if I can keep everyone down at the end of the verandah with the two and a half painted railings long enough to get away with it. I doubt it.

So instead I hide the two and a half painted railings with a table and I try to distract my guests with champagne and the presentation of the gift. And the house is so profoundly unrenovated that the inspection aspect of the visit is entirely forgotten. I extol the many virtues of popcorn. I tell them it's easy, it's healthy and the choices of seasoning are limited only by the imagination. Jeff asks me what seasoning I'm going to try first with mine and I realise I haven't thought this through.

Good imagination
, he says.

We go into the kitchen and he loads up both our machines with corn. Within minutes the popcorn is pouring into a large mixing bowl with butter and curry powder and Jeff gets quite excited about the result, but the general consensus is that it might not be quite right with the champagne.

And we do seem to drink quite a lot of champagne before we head off down the hill to Le Chalet.

They seat us at a table for six, with Jeff and Sal on one side, Tim and Chris on the other and me at the end, sitting opposite a distant empty chair that I try to tell myself is not symbolic. Jeff calls one of the staff over and says,
I wonder if you could take that chair away. It's making my friend uncomfortable
.

And tonight
, Sal says emphatically, as though she has planned to,
no intellectual wanking. No excluding reasonable people with that boy's crap
.

But it's my birthday
, Jeff says,
and that's my favourite thing
.

Well that puts me in my place. Your favourite thing is it? Okay, for the birthday boy, for the boy who clearly has an interest in beginning his thirty-first year with a vow of celibacy, wank away. Go on. See if I care
.

Excellent
.

But nothing about longitude. We've all had enough of fucking longitude
.

I drink quickly and the entrees are a while arriving. The others say I'm talking loudly and sounding tense and I tell them, for no known reason, Well of course I'm tense, wouldn't you be?

This only focuses the attention more clearly on me. Everyone seems to be talking at once and I can hear Jeff making remarks about my tension and its probable sexual nature, my hundred and eighty days of celibacy, the likelihood that I am an expert snake-handler by now, which he gleefully workshops into the concept of ‘going the Ram Chandra'. I deny this, and he calls me Onan the Barbarian. He appears to be speaking from a list of Famous Masturbatorial Identities.

I take him up on this and we become quite competitive until we reach a point where I seem to decide that my best weapon is to turn the argument on me, and I find myself declaring quite loudly that I am impotent and that my penis is a plumb bob capable of pointing only to the centre of the earth.

And Sal, slightly more controlling than usual when she's drunk, is saying to Jeff,
Little sips, little sips
, and he's giving me a look that suggests I might now be called Bob for the rest of my days. I can see him saying it,
Bob
, and smiling as he's trying to drink, trying to negotiate his mouth to his wine glass as both her hands hold it down.

But things don't go too badly until I declare that I want to make a speech and I headbutt the woman arriving with our mains as I stand. She pirouettes and
loses nothing, and the others at the table applaud. I hear my voice shouting quite loudly that Jeffrey is the most handsome of my friends and then I hear myself saying that I need to do a wee now.

The others all start going,
Ssshh
, louder than I think they need to so I say, What do you mean Ssshh? It's only a wee.

They
Ssshh
even louder, I Ssshh back and soon everyone in the restaurant is going
Ssshh
and I'm shouting, You all do wees, don't ya?

Shortly after that things deteriorate.

I know I make several trips to the toilet in the next hour, because making trips to the toilet isn't easy. The number of chairs in the way is quite incredible, and crowds of people I don't know cheer every time I stand. Some of them I think, or perhaps I just fear, whisper,
You all do wees, don't ya
? as I go past.

On one of the trips, perhaps the last, the toilet door is shut. I can hear someone on the other side singing ‘That's Amore'. The door opens and Tim lurches out, makes a very rough kind of eye contact, seems surprised that it's someone he knows, says,
Oh, hi. You know that thing? That thing when you've had a few drinks and you look in the mirror and you see Dean Martin? Yeah
. And he gives me a friendly pat on the shoulder, then he does the same to the wall and he makes his way back to the restaurant. I go into the toilet, and of course he's pissed on the floor.

When we leave, someone at the last remaining table shouts,
Make sure you look after Richard
to the others, and they undertake to do so.

I wait till their cab arrives, and then I set off on the climb up to Zigzag Street. This is a much more confusing task than I remember and I can't help thinking of
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
, not a film I can say I ever understood, but I have never felt more empathy with the wordless Kaspar than I do at this moment. Almost
to the point of being sure I can hear Pachelbel's ‘Canon' as my mountain sways in front of me.

I fall several times, mostly onto the pavement and only once into the gutter, but that begins as a fall onto the pavement and ends with a gentle roll to the right dictated by the contours, which in places require vigilance.

But I come to no harm, and in the morning I wake in my own bed.