‘I don’t care.’
And I could tell that he didn’t. And that it wasn’t one of those, I don’t cares that ordinary mortals use in moments of heat, said for effect and retracted afterwards.
Lennie’s don’t care was ice cold and truthful.
* * *
Ah yes, everyone knew Lennie.
Lennie, in and out of the White Swan, the Queen’s Arms, the Jolly Pilgrim.
‘Hey, Lennie.’
‘Hey, Riley.’
Lennie here today and gone tomorrow. Lennie’s postcards behind the bar from exotic locations. Lennie part of the scenery.
When I got around to admitting Lennie and I were an item, I saw the truth of the thing reflected in other people’s eyes: Connie, Sophie, my sister Cassie.
‘Lennie …’ they all said, of one accord. ‘You don’t mean Lennie O’Halloran?’
Living in a small town is not like living in a city. You can’t leave your sexual blunders behind you. They follow you up the High Street, accost you in the post office, in the shape of Fleur, for instance, still married to Martin then, and with a smooth smile that pretended commiseration but was lit with an unmistakable touch of pleasure.
‘Of course we knew what he was from the start.’
‘Did we? How’s that?’
‘Well … you know.’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Oh, come on. You know. Even when he was working with Daddy.’
‘Well now, that’s strange because as I recall your daddy told me once Lennie was the best salesman he ever had.’
It was only a week or so after Lennie had left so I was in what you might call an excitable condition that day in the post office. A couple of heads turned in the queue as my voice rose above the hubbub.
I said, ‘In fact, your daddy said if Lennie had stayed, he’d have ended up sales manager.’
Fleur said, ‘Shhh,’ casting a nervous look over her shoulder. She reached a hand out to my arm like some nurse trying to lead out a patient.
I shook it off angrily. ‘Don’t shush me.’
That was where the point of an umbrella suddenly appeared in our midst.
‘Stirring the shit as usual, Fleur?’ my mother said briskly.
I tell you, that woman was like some latter-day Mrs Bennet in the post office that morning. She rested her two hands on the crook of her umbrella for all the world like it was a parasol. She might have been staring at Fleur from beneath a fur-trimmed bonnet.
‘Whatever has happened between my daughter and her fiancé –’ (Oh God, I love that. What Lennie would have said if he’d heard it) – ‘is exactly that: her business and his business, and we’ll all thank you to keep that poky little nose of yours out of it.’
I know. It’s hard. I’ve just utterly transformed your view of my mother.
One thing’s for sure, Uncle Hugh was right about Lennie being a great salesman. Over the years Lennie sold just about everything. Office equipment, agricultural implements, kitchens, cars, carpets, clothes, jewellery, furniture, insurance policies, holiday homes, and plots of building land in Florida, which may or may not have been under water.
I asked him once. ‘Is there anything you haven’t sold?’
‘Probably not,’ he said.
‘What about your soul?’ I was joking but he answered it quite seriously.
‘Oh, that went early,’ said Lennie O’Halloran.
Lennie said it didn’t matter what you sold. Big or little, cheap or scarily expensive, it was all the same process. And let’s face it, he was the man to know. Watching Lennie sell was to watch an artist at work, a maestro. Any number of disparate pieces of imagery spring to mind to describe his modus operandi. An animal carefully circling its prey, a dancer blocking out his moves, an actor. When selling he appeared to make no effort at all. He’d approach any customer as if by default, with an air of apology for disturbing them. The next minute he’d be sliding away, begging them not to be embarrassed or impeded by his presence. On the other hand if he could help them in any way … And twenty minutes later they’d be signing on the dotted line and for something twice the price they came in for.
Lennie’s job at Frasers was his first in our town. He was there four years, leaving to work for a Triumph dealership in Bristol. He’d come down weekends in a good suit and a TR6.* The next thing he’s in London, selling office equipment, then seriously upmarket kitchens. After that it’s Seattle, where the firm sends him, so that behind the bar at the White Swan or the Jolly Pilgrim, the postcards and the pictures are stacking up. An apartment with a pool, a shop with his name on the fascia and a Porsche parked outside it. But then just when you think nothing can go wrong he’s back home with nothing but one bag, and a shrug and a careless, ‘It didn’t work out.’ And all this because he doesn’t care, he truly doesn’t care. He’s not like ordinary folk. He’s older than that. A million years older. He’s careless, absolutely careless – careless of himself, of life, of everything, the good times as well as the bad, and there’s a reason for this and it turns out it’s not a good one.
I don’t know if there’s a descending order of wickedness in this world, if there’s a tariff, a list of crimes and their charges you might be taxed with up there when you get to those pearly gates. Still, I think adopting a child, an innocent, and then abusing him has to rank pretty high up on the list.
I love to think of Lennie’s parents reading this. I’d like to think of them playing the part of cuddly old innocents somewhere in some care home, and being confronted with their crime, having it read out to them, and all the half-decent people turning away, and this because I never could see simply growing old as an excuse or mitigation, and certainly not as some form of final redemption.
I don’t know who Lennie’s real parents were; neither did he. If he’d wanted to trace them, or at least his mother, because it’s unlikely any father’s name would have appeared on the birth certificate, it would have been possible. These things were just beginning to happen. I showed him an article one day in the newspaper, exactly about that. Showed you how to do it. But he didn’t want to know.
‘Forget it, Riley. I’m not interested.’
And I guess he wasn’t interested because he’d written the story himself. Because he already knew, because he’d put the pieces together and therefore didn’t need to make the enquiries.
Lennie was born in Liverpool, a place of ships and, like all such places, with a lot of dockside activity. A local Catholic orphanage dealt with the result.
You could figure by Lennie’s looks that this was his likely lineage. In old novels, they’ll talk about lascars, who were sailors from the East Indies, or possibly old Persia. One of those might have been Lennie’s father. And there’s no point from here on in fooling around with phrases like ‘dark good looks’ because they come nowhere near it. Lennie’s face was extraordinary. It could have looked down at you from a mizzen mast any time over the past centuries. Something about it seemed not quite human. You looked at it and you thought that it must have been the face Emily caught sight of and created Heathcliff from, the one Robert Louis Stevenson saw halfway between Jekyll turning into Hyde or back again. I don’t do descriptions much (you’ll have noticed that, a succession of editors have pointed it out as my weakness), but I could go on all day trying to capture for you the enigma that was Lennie. First, the hair that he wore thick and long to his collar, whatever the fashion, that tucked behind his ears, and lay around his face and around the smooth delicately lined forehead in black and silver-grey curves. Didn’t some poet say he could write a sonnet to some woman’s eyebrow? If I wrote sonnets I could do it to Lennie’s, the thickness of them, the blackness, the way they winged out instead of arched, but were always drawn in together, causing that small furrow over the bridge of his nose and giving him that air of slight menace. Add to this the skin that a dark designer stubble would grow on in hours, and the eyes, the darkest brown I’ve ever seen in my life, a liquid iris-less brown; and fi
nally the lips, dark lips, smooth and wide and always a little open. Utterly incapable of looking innocent or unsensuous.
A dull swirling anger can still settle on me when I think of what happened to Lennie, one he’d always be intent on diffusing.
‘So what?’ he’d say. ‘How many other kids do you think it happens to?’
A Manchester couple adopted Lennie. Catholics. Good living (and doesn’t that cover a multitude of sins). His mother was Polish, his father Irish, a believer in discipline. Pretty much anything, by the time he passed the age of ten, could earn Lennie a thrashing. Which wasn’t as bad as what came afterwards, when his beauty began to show and his sex-deprived mother began to take an interest in him best described as unholy.
‘I don’t know why you keep it,’ I said to him, full of fury, one day reaching up to tear at the framed photo, the only picture on his walls. He grabbed my hand. Said, ‘Leave it, Riley.’
They must have handed the camera to a passer-by.
Take a picture of us. Would you mind? Yes, us and our son …
And so there they were, gargoyles in their long, dark fifties macs, clutching his hand on that trip to London. Six or seven he was then, and still with that sweet trusting smile on his face and – a nice irony this – the mother of parliaments behind him.
‘It’s awful,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand why the hell you keep it.’
He said, ‘It’s the last time I can remember being really happy.’
Several times I said, ‘You should do something about this, Lennie.’
He said, ‘What? Talk to someone?’ and his face and his voice were scornful.
Once he almost did … something. We were in Manchester, checking out mobile phones at an exhibition, this for the shop he was thinking of opening. On the edge of the city, on our way home, he suddenly turned off the main road, took a detour round a backstreet, parked in a street of grey run-down houses looking that much worse with the grey November mist curling all around them.
I didn’t have to ask why we were there. I guessed immediately, not least because of the way he was sitting there not saying anything, but just staring at the house with its sagging, dripping eaves and a weak grey light escaping through the curtains.
‘Come on.’ I grabbed his hand. ‘Let’s do it. Let’s face them,’ but he pulled his hand away sharply. Instead he just went on sitting there in silence, not moving.
Lennie wasn’t a tall man, around five-five. He had a small frame too, small hips and shoulders. Sitting there that day, he seemed to get lower and lower in his seat and that much smaller as if, I guess, he was turning into a little boy again.
In the end he’d flicked the ignition key and put in the clutch and we began to pull away.
He didn’t look back as we drove down the street. Still in darkness, still in silence.
There’s a lot of different things you need to feed into the equation to make sense of what happened with Lennie, and one of them would have to be – and this the one with at least a shred of credit – that I wanted to make him happy. I wanted to do what plenty of woman had wanted to do before me – and there had been plenty. I wanted to make up for all the bad stuff that had happened to him. He was not a large man. There was something delicate about those lascar good looks, and sometimes in my arms he would feel remarkably frail. I’d get the feeling, holding him, that I was touching a different Lennie, as if I was getting to some decent heart of him. But then all the women of the world who go out with the Lennies of this world will say that. Check the agony columns if you don’t believe me. And who could tell if any of this was real, with that cloud of Afghan black hanging over us?
We were together about eighteen months, Lennie and I. I guess the thing that sticks out, looking back, is how little we had to show for it in terms of a relationship. What I mean is there was just so little damn enjoyment in the thing. Instead, in the way of such affairs, it was a paltry, diminished existence. The mail bags of agony aunts as I say are full of such affairs. People, women, accepting so very little. I’m ashamed that it happened to me.
We had nothing in common the pair of us, that was the thing, and I was proud of that, perversely, foolishly proud. I’ll be honest now, I never was the sort to search for brain over brawn, this being partly the result of my calling. I wasn’t looking for a long-term-partner, for a father to my children, and this affected my choice. I could afford to be cavalier about it.
Because we had nothing in common, we did so damn little together – rented videos, mostly, got takeaway meals, went to the odd rock concert, Springsteen, Ry Cooder, but never to the cinema, seldom even out to dinner.
We did take the odd weekend away to expensive hotels, where we’d take cursory walks around the grounds, then retire to our room to watch films on the TV, order up room service. And mostly, because he didn’t have his credit cards, or for some other convoluted reason I couldn’t figure, I’d end up paying.
‘Remind me, Riley. I’ll pay you back next month.’ But somehow he never did and I never got around, from sheer shame, to forcing the issue.
We did go to the theatre once, I remember that. It was by way of an experiment on my part, an attempt as always to give the affair some legitimacy. I took him see Death of a Salesman, and he came out stunned, almost entranced, you might say, exhilarated too and thoughtful the way I’d never seen him.
He said, ‘He got it, Riley. That guy … Miller … he got it right.’
But we never went again. There never was anything he wanted to see. That was the end of it.
There was the sex, of course. And this is important. Ah, yes. The sex.
The first time I went to bed with Lennie it struck me in a blinding flash that this is what I’d wanted to do for years, all through those Hi Lennie in and out of the White Swan years, when I could have sworn I had no interest in Lennie O’Halloran whatsoever.
Sex with Lennie was good, very, very good, there’s no question about that. Lennie had been around and knew his way around. A good combination. He knew the moves and how to make them, besides which – and this against all the odds – he was a generous lover. Most surprising about him was the way he kissed, which was warm and full-blooded, as if from this at least in life he gained enjoyment. In sex he always gave an impression of tenderness, and I put it that way because with Lennie you could never be sure what was real and felt, and what was just an impression that he was able to give for whatever reason. Still, it was as if any warmth and responsiveness that he was unable to demonstrate in everyday life he could at least show in bed.
Besides all this there’s something else that has to be factored in, that potion like the one in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, only in this case that I poured into my eyes, and that Lennie poured into his own too, and that, at the very least, helped to generate the warmth and ease of the lovemaking, to knock off – the way it will – all the rough edges.
In short, the very best Afghan black was never far from Lennie’s person, never far from mine either during that time we went out together. I don’t intend to do one of those Just Say No lectures here; frankly it’s not my thing. Instead I’ll just say I had a taste for it that had developed on my travels, and which had stayed with me, which, in the main, had always a) wasted my time and b) wildly skewed my judgement. And there’s no question, it did both of these things with Lennie.
‘I’ll take care of this customer, Barry,’ he said that day I went into Currys, looking for a new sound system, pushing a pimply youth aside. He’d only been back from one of those mysterious foreign forays a matter of months; still he’d managed to jump up from common or garden salesman to sales manager.
‘Hey, Riley.’
‘Hey, Lennie.’
‘Saw you in the paper. Written a book or something. Is that right, Riley?’
Ten years or so on, opinions are still divided as to whether the change in my financial circumstances was a factor in Lennie’s new and previously unrevealed interest in me. Basically they divide up like this:
All of my friends and loved ones: Yes, no question.
Me: No, but only because as far as I’m concerned the only way to come out of this whole thing with a shred of dignity is not to shift the blame but to take it at least where it largely belongs, fair and square on my own shoulders.
Because if there is one thing I despise more than all else it’s those dumb letters you get on the agony pages. You know the sort of thing:
Dear Abbey,
The last three dozen men I’ve been out with have all been bastards. Why am I so unlucky?
Like they really do believe it. That it’s all a matter of luck. That they just had the misfortune to hit an arsehole cluster.
Just about the only thing I’ve got going for me as far as the whole episode is concerned, is that at least I learnt from my mistake, that it only took one Lennie for me to learn my lesson. Besides this, in the main, I’m a cock-up rather than conspiracy theorist. Like I said, Lennie’s one defining feature was that overwhelming carelessness, so that if I fell into his lap, I figure he thought that was just fine. But do I think he planned it all ahead of time? Frankly, no. He was just too lazy.
Because that was the thing about Lennie and me. In some ways we were alike, frighteningly so. That’s what he’d say that last day, in the doorway, smoothing his hair back like nothing had happened, staring down at me where I still lay on the floor.
‘We’re alike, you and me, Riley,’ this with a touch of regret in his voice. ‘We could probably have made a go of it if you’d have only accepted that.’
And I know now what he meant. But it wasn’t the truth, or at least – as always – not the whole truth.
Because while confronting Lennie was like confronting my own image in the mirror, his was that image magnified, blown up out of all proportion – my doppelgänger walking the earth, yes, but imbued with everything I was, my inclinations, leanings multiplied a thousand times over, a sort of Über-Single dedicated to himself, to his own ambitions and desires, the centre and span of his universe. In the world of the self-absorbed, the self-sufficient, the self-interested, all those other selfs (and for which I make no apology), he was a professional among amateurs, a giant among the pygmies.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 19
