With her coat off, Julia’s figure is available for Alexander’s admiration. She is dressed in a long denim skirt and an ivory-coloured scoop-neck pullover, clothes he has never seen before, which seem to belong to a more refined wardrobe than the one he knew when they were together.
His mind knows that the probability of sex with Julia is zero right now and depressingly low in the future, but his body innocently displays a Pavlovian reaction to her presence. It associates her with sex, and wants immediately to slip its arms around her waist, to invade her mouth, to rip off her fine new clothes, to suck her breasts, to lick her skin – to penetrate her. His penis is poising itself for action, and the organ which is his skin has perked up, the individual cells eagerly anticipating her touch, greedy for it.
‘Oh the baby is beautiful,’ Julia squeals, which brings Alexander’s ardour down a couple of points.
He raises an eyebrow at Danny, who responds with an echoing facial manoeuvre, though his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. Danny is ever more strained, which is not surprising given that he is tired and hung over, and embarking afresh on a project of parenthood with a woman he would rather have much less to do with.
‘What are you going to call him?’ Julia asks.
‘Merlin,’ Alexander says.
‘You can’t call him Merlin,’ Julia shrieks. ‘Are you joking?’
Aoife gives her throaty laugh, which breaks into a cough.
‘We’re trying to think outside the box here,’ Danny says, somewhat defensively.
‘Well think again, folks,’ Julia replies, but then appears to feel that she is being overassertive and changes direction. ‘Of course, it’s none of my business. I don’t want to intrude. If it’s Merlin, then. . . .’
‘Then Merlin’s a lovely name,’ Alexander offers.
‘I saw you on TV, Danny,’ Julia gushes, changing the subject.
Alexander also witnessed this event. He finds that there is little more depressing in life than seeing your best friend from college appear on television while you wallow in filth and loneliness. The show in question was a particularly disgusting specimen: an Irish imitation of the dimly lit, intellectual, late-night talk show, where a panel of overly articulate, self-regarding beauties attempted to outdo each other with ever-increasing levels of honesty, insight, subtlety.
‘They did a great overhead shot of your bald spot,’ Alexander recalls.
‘Ouch,’ says Danny, his hand rising reflexively to the crown of his head to survey the extent of the damage.
‘Don’t mind him,’ Julia counters quickly. ‘He’s just bitter and twisted because you’re on television and he isn’t.’
‘You know me so well,’ Alexander confesses.
Danny shrugs in feigned nonchalance, placing himself above all the bickering.
‘I loved the way your title came up when you were speaking,’ Julia continues. ‘Danny Carter, Journalist and Broadcaster.’
‘They forgot Renowned Pisshead,’ says Aoife.
‘I thought you were very good,’ Julia continues.
‘Does your man really have a stammer, or does he just put it on in the make-up room to be endearingly brave?’ Alexander asks.
There is a knock on the door and a group of medical professionals enters briskly: an old guy with a moustache in a white coat; a young guy in green scrubs; a midwife in blue. The visitors are invited to wait in the corridor for a few minutes. Danny makes to leave with them, but Aoife instructs him to stay.
Outside, the two stand opposite each other. Julia looks up and down the busy corridor, which flows between them, avoiding eye contact with Alexander.
A weary woman in a nightgown shuffles through with a nod to Julia. At the same time, a young man, who gives the appearance of being an elated new father, rushes by in the opposite direction.
‘You’re looking great,’ Alexander ventures.
Julia gazes at him crossly without response.
‘Why the hostility?’
‘You tell me.’
Alexander feels himself going off on a tangent. He knows it’s not a good idea, but he can’t resist the impulse.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about housework,’ he says. ‘You always said that I didn’t pull my weight, that you did so much more. I agree that people living together should share the housework, all other things being equal. But the question is: who decides how much housework there is? Who decides the precise level of cleanliness and tidiness that is required? That should also be a democratic decision, a compromise. Now that I have come out from under the yoke, I realise that you were a fascist about how clean things had to be.’
Julia ruefully shakes her head.
‘You need to get yourself a life,’ she says.
‘I know.’
He also senses, though he cannot be sure about this, that if you want a woman to marry you, you shouldn’t tell her she is a fascist the first time you see her in several months, particularly if you don’t know when you are going to see her again.
‘When I said fascist, I didn’t mean it in a bad way.’
Danny and Alexander meet Paul in The Ginger Man for pints.
‘I have no cash resources, gentlemen,’ Danny announces. ‘You’ll have to carry me. I do have an American Express card, which is almost certainly maxed out, but you can be lucky with these things. I’ll try it later on when my courage is up. Give me a twenty, Paulie. I’ll get the first shout in.’
‘That is typical,’ Paul says, when Danny has gone to the bar. ‘His missus is inside in a private room and he can’t afford a round. I bet they don’t pay the bill.’
‘What bill?’
‘Any bill, but I meant the hospital bill. It’s a couple of grand for a private room. . . . He’s gone around the bend with the booze. My sister saw him in Renards nightclub during the week, two o’clock in the morning and he was literally banging his head off the wall, with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. She said he was incoherent, didn’t even recognise her. . . . When he rings me now to go out, I’m searching for excuses: have to clean the windows; have to mow the lawn; have to cut my toenails; whatever I can come up with. Because it’s not going to be three or four or five pints, it’ll be ten, and we’ll end up licking alcohol off the streets. I’m just not interested any more.’
First pint:
‘I was just saying you’re a scabby bastard,’ says Paul.
‘Fuck you too,’ says Danny.
Second pint:
‘Did you hear that Philip O’Brien is living on the streets in Liverpool with a big homeless-guy beard on him?’
‘Why doesn’t he just move into a squat?’
‘Can’t keep it together. It’s not as easy as it used to be.’
Philip was a dealer in college. He and Vladimir Foster were partners in crime. Alexander always thought that Philip was the brains behind the operation, with Vlad doing the donkey work of bringing the dope back from London on the Holyhead ferry. But now Vlad is obese and prosperous, a software engineer living in Islington, while Philip will probably die of intestinal bleeding in a public toilet.
‘We see the whole spectrum,’ Danny says. ‘Philip O’Brien at one end, Hugo Strongboy at the other. By the way, I want to tell you lads: we’re going to christen the baby next weekend, and I’m going to ask Hugo to be godfather. You guys are my flesh and blood, but—’
‘Hugo is a multimillionaire,’ Alexander says.
‘Don’t flatter yourself that we’re bothered whom you ask to be godparents,’ Paul says. ‘Anyhow, we know you’re a closet homosexual and Hugo’s giving it to you up the ass.’
‘Or you want him to give it to you up the ass.’
‘Yeah, yeah. What I want is to give my son a godfather who might be able to do something for him in the future.’
‘With a name like Merlin,’ Paul observes, ‘his fu
ture is already irretrievable.’
‘You’ve no imagination,’ Danny responds angrily, rising for the first time in reaction to Paul’s persistent provocation.
‘But why would you have a christening a week after the baby’s birth?’ Alexander asks. ‘That’s not the usual way, is it?’
‘It’s my stepson’s plan . . . Jasper. He was never christened, and now he wants to be, the two of them together. He wants to do it in a hurry for some reason.’
‘What religion are you going for?’
‘Catholic or Protestant,’ Danny says, enjoying himself again. ‘It’ll depend on who can book us in for next Sunday.’
Fourth pint:
‘Are you going to tell Alex about your bit on the side?’ Danny asks Paul with a wink.
‘It was supposed to be a secret affair,’ Paul says to Danny, frowning.
Alexander knows they have an inner-circle conversation that excludes him. This has ceased to be a source of pain in itself, but he finds it humiliating that they parade it.
‘Karina had some gals over a few months ago,’ Paul begins with an expression of discomfort on his face. ‘I think they were going to start a book club, but instead they just got plastered.’
‘Women love to bitch and talk about periods,’ Danny says, speaking as though he were a world expert in an obscure field.
‘I was out at a jazz gig,’ Paul continues. ‘I got home after twelve, and the thing was breaking up. I sat down for a glass of wine. Most of them were leaving. Karina was hammered and went off to bed: she always falls asleep when she drinks. At the end, I was left alone on the sofa with one of them, and she just starts laying into me.’
‘Do I know her?’ Alexander asks.
‘No,’ Paul says, without a flicker of hesitation. ‘She’s a friend of Karina’s.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Let’s not get into it. . . . Next thing I know she’s leading me up the stairs to the spare bedroom. I know that Karina is out for the count, but still I’m fairly shitting myself. At the same time though, you know, it’s hard not to go with the flow.’
‘Look at him, all bashful and it’s-nothing-to-do-with-me,’ exclaims Danny with delight. ‘He had the best sex life of anybody in college. He’s been fighting them off probably since he was twelve.’
‘We had this amazing high-risk bonk in the spare room; then she says she’s going to sleep over, to tell Karina that she was too drunk to go home. The next morning the three of us are having breakfast, blah de blah, talking about property prices, and she is playing footsie with me under the table.’
‘Sounds exciting,’ says Alexander, but what he feels is weariness.
‘It is exciting – the best sex I’ve had in a long time – but my nerves are shot to bits.’
As the information lands fully, the moment turns ugly for Alexander. He has no moral objection to the sex, or the deceit, but the telling of the tale, the opening of that which should remain private, smashes something in his mood, like a piece of crockery.
He likes Karina.
‘You’re watching stuff the whole time,’ Paul is explaining to Danny, ‘looking for clues that might give you away, sniffing your clothes, deleting texts. I should quit while I’m ahead.’
Alexander drinks from his Guinness, drifts away from the conversation. He wonders about marriage, about the possibility of a marriage in which you really mean it.
He remembers – without immediately spotting the association – a night in a club on the quays, years previously, in the immediate post-college period, when Danny, Paul and he ended up drinking at a big table with a group of people they had known only obliquely in Trinity. He got talking to a few arty types, students of literature and drama, one of them the grandson of a famous painter.
‘I don’t give a shit about Christian mythology,’ the grandson argued passionately in an intense passage of conversation, which Alexander recalls clearly: ‘A guy crucified to the floor of Abrakebabra on Westmoreland Street – that is the kind of mythology that interests me, that moves me.’
Alexander thinks: Why couldn’t I have spent more time with people like that?
‘Don’t you guys find that life is really difficult?’ he says suddenly in a moment of reckless honesty, of madness. ‘I sometimes feel like I’m drowning, you know? I’m up to my throat in water, turning my face to the sky so that it won’t flood into my mouth.’
He feels his eyes scrunching up, not that he is getting teary, but he is filled with a rush of emotion that concentrates itself in this part of his face.
Paul looks at him blankly, glances at Danny, drinks from his pint.
Danny is stern. ‘In fairness, we don’t talk about that kind of thing,’ he says.
Alexander nods, accepts the admonition. His emotion flees, and, in fleeing, becomes as strange to him as it is to the others. He drinks, reaches for his cigarettes.
He recalls often the year they spent in London together, dwells in it.
They lived for free in a house in the East End. It wasn’t exactly a squat, although that was how they liked to think of it. The house was owned or managed by a mild-mannered Pakistani estate agent called Roger Singh. Their occupancy in some way suited his dodgy business, or he liked them, or he wasn’t very good at insisting on the rent, or all these things. In any case, after the first month, they never paid him.
Sometimes Roger would arrive over in the evening with a bottle of whiskey and they would all get drunk. He had the eyes of a saint, but would moan about his wife in his sing-song English and smoke all the dope he could get if the lads had any.
They all had different jobs. Alexander worked as an insurance clerk in the City. Danny was a barman in a students’ pub near Regent’s Park. Paul got a gig in the advertising department of a trade magazine.
Alexander was the first up on weekdays. He would stagger out of bed into the shower. There was a plumbing problem. Every shower or bath led to a minor flood, which then conveniently disappeared between the bare floorboards: problem solved; but, out of sight, things were rotting.
For breakfast he would buy two jammy doughnuts and a bottle of Lucozade in the local corner shop. He would also buy a Daily Mirror to read on the tube. He was a Daily Mirror reader that year, and it was nice. He rarely thought about anything. In the evenings, they’d go out on the tear or else get mellow with a few spliffs and a couple of beers in front of the TV. His brain clouded over, and he didn’t miss it.
But it was all too much for the bathroom floor. One day the ceiling in the corner of the kitchen, the part directly under the bathroom, cracked wide open, in three distinct moves, with a lot of creaking and groaning. And the bath slid through, like a divine revelation, travelling with a wave of dirty sudsy water; it flew through the air and landed smack on the television set.
That was the beginning of the end of the year in London.
Sally Barnes works in the Personnel Division of the Department of Finance and has responsibility for matters relating to the National Economic Advisory Council. She is a big cheerful girl who suffers from clogged sinuses and lapses in concentration.
The recruitment of Imelda was a case in point. Imelda was interviewed by Alexander, Sally, and Fat Barry from Special Projects. Barry was more interested in his own performance than in that of the candidate. ‘How did I do?’ he asked Sally at the end. Alexander himself isn’t much better in these things. He blushes when he is asking the questions, finds it impossible to pay attention to the answers, and dreads the part at the end where candidates get to ask their own questions. This is a crap job, he wants to blurt out. There is no proper work, the pay isn’t very good, and the prospects for advancement are practically nil. The only advantage is that you don’t have to work hard. In fact, with a little talent and determination, you could get away with doing nothing at all. For the love of God, do something else with your life.
But however poor the standard of the interview board, Imelda was worse. She failed by a wide margin, even though there were no other candidates (labour market shortages – too many jobs, not enough people). The board scored it up, signed it off, and that afternoon Sally sent Imelda a pro forma letter offering her the job.
‘Tell her it was a mistake,’ Alexander suggested.
‘I did, but she has already handed in her notice where she’s working.’
‘What are you talking about? She told us she is working part-time in a coffee shop until she finds a proper job.’
‘Yeah, but she’s given in her notice. Plus she’s told her parents. They’re very pleased.’
‘I bet they are.’
In the recruitment of Evil Neville, Sally’s error was less grievous, but has created a difficulty that Alexander now faces this Monday morning.
During the interview, Sally got carried away (labour market shortages – trying to attract the candidate) telling Neville about the possibilities for further education, including that the Council could fund him to do a master’s degree. Unfortunately, it turns out that was not true. As a graduate trainee on a fixed-term contract, Neville – so Sally told Alexander on Friday – is not entitled to have any fees paid.
‘But you told him in the interview that we would pay his fees.’
‘No I didn’t! And I’ve checked with Barry and he agrees with me.’
Fat Barry from Special Projects had again been the third man on the panel.
‘I remember it well, Sally,’ Alexander corrects her. ‘And so does Neville.’
‘You’re mistaken. How could I have said it if it isn’t the policy?’
‘Neville,’ Alexander exclaims generously as the man in question enters his office. ‘Come in. Take a seat. Tell me about your plans for Christmas.’
‘I don’t really have any plans,’ Neville responds contemptuously as he sits down at the meeting table rather than in the chair in front of Alexander’s desk, which Alexander indicated.
Being Alexander Page 13
