Wake Up Happy Every Day

by Stephen May

  For Charles Ockelford

  and in memory of

  Edward May

  27 May 1935 – 8 May 1998

  A few honest men are better than numbers

  Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping

  Bo Derek

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  One

  NICKY

  Fifty is not the new forty. No. Fifty is the new nineteen. A time when the world is full of limitless possibility. That’s what Russell says.

  I am in San Francisco. In Russian Hill. In a house that once belonged to Fanny Osborn-Stevenson, widow of Robert Louis. I am drinking 1963 vintage malt and sitting in a fine leather armchair. There is the smoky crackle of vintage blues in the background. On vinyl. Bessie Smith. Good booze, good blues and nothing to do tomorrow. This is actually all anyone needs to be happy. Only I can’t concentrate because Russell is still talking in his horrible mid-Atlantic drawl. The voice I’ll never get used to.

  Some people would say it was better than the mockney whine he used to have. Not me.

  ‘I’m giving it all up, Nicky-boy. Getting out while I can.’

  Russell is turning his back on everything. Not the money, obviously. Just the work. Just the life. Just the people. He’s fifty tomorrow and he’s worked long enough – now is the time for adventure, travel. He’s going to see everything. He’s going to Marrakesh, Ulan Bator, Spitzbergen. He’s going to Easter Island, Dahomey, Kaliningrad. The Antarctic. He’s going to Everywhere. And then he’s going to Anywhere.

  And he’s not just going to see these places, oh no – he’s going to develop relationships with them. He’s going to get under their skin. He’s going to pull them apart to see how they work. Maybe he’ll write about them. Proper books too. Not just bloody blogs.

  And then he’s going where they don’t even have Starbucks. Where he can’t be emailed or poked or skyped or dream-tabbed or sat-phoned. Places where the long needy arms of Facebook friends can’t tap him on the shoulder to suggest he like something they’ve done, made, seen. Or, worse, like things their kids have done, made, seen. He’s going where he’s beyond the reach of what’s trending.

  I wonder if there even are such places any more, but Russell’s too intoxicated by his plan to listen.

  Maybe he’ll help set up schools, hospitals. Maybe he’ll adopt a few kids. Bright kids. Kids who can talk. Kids who can walk properly. I let it go, don’t say anything.

  Maybe he’ll build his own city. The perfect city. A place where you’ll find everything you need. I believe him. He always liked to do elaborate things in Lego when we were kids.

  On and on he goes, while Bessie struggles to make herself heard. He says that, then again, maybe he won’t help the street kids of South Sudan or wherever. Maybe he won’t create Knoxville. Maybe he’ll – at last – just have fun. See what happens. He’s going to be open to whatever comes along. He’s going to have the gap year he denied himself all those years ago. The gratification he deferred then he’s going to have now with compound interest. From now on he is going to have a gap life.

  His eyes are blazing bright in his lean and sculpted face. This is his renaissance. He is leaving behind the crocodile swamps of commerce. He’s terminated all his relationships with anyone connected with his old life.

  ‘Except you and Sarah, Nicky-boy. I hope you feel flattered.’

  I take a sip. Bessie has got the Empty Bed Blues. I take another sip.

  Russell’s liquidated all his interests and he names the figure he’s got for them. The numbers make my skin itch.

  It’s a staggering sum.

  Turns out Russell is richer than the Queen, richer than Madonna. Vatican rich. Biblically rich. Richer.

  What a waste.

  I close my eyes. Listen to the music reaching its fingers out from all the ghosts of the great depression: from the soup kitchens, from all the brothers sparing dimes. And, hey, listen up fellas, Bessie Smith wants a little more sugar in her bowl. The minx.

  And then Russell feels the need to tell me why he can afford to do this gap-life thing and I can’t. And so the very last words he says to me, like so many other words over the years, are about success, failure and the line between them.

  People say it’s a fine line, like the one between love and hate. Russell, bless him, has never seen it like this. For Russell it’s always been more of an unnavigable ocean. His continent of hard-won achievement on one side – all fifteen million dollar houses once owned by the widows of famous wordsmiths – and the scrubby, barely inhabitable landscape of my failure on the other. It’s a subject he finds endlessly fascinating. One he can return to again and again, always finding something new to say.

  And now, on this last night, he says, ‘Thing is, Nicky-boy, I know that it is partly genetic. And it might be a little bit environment but mainly – mainly’ – here he wags a stiff finger for emphasis – ‘it simply has to be character. I have it. Sarah has it. You don’t.’

  He says that, or something very like it, and then he goes to one of the six luxury bathrooms recently restored by Joe Farrell, architect to the stars.

  Russell’s view is that he’s done better because he is better. I’ve done crap because I am crap. And, truthfully, I don’t mind this talk. Not really. I can’t be arsed to even pretend to mind. I’m used to it. It’s an old, old routine, easily bearable. It’s not like I even really listen any more. Sarah gets annoyed about it, but I don’t. And Sarah, my beautiful, loyal, kind-hearted life partner, is upstairs, lying next to Scarlett, my funny-faced newish daughter. Where is Russell’s loyal, kind-hearted life partner? Where is Russell’s funny-faced newish daughter?

  Where is the love?

  Exactomundo, my friend. It is nowhere.

  I stand looking out into the diamond-studded purple of the San Francisco night until Bessie Smith finishes asking all mankind to do our duty – she’s insatiable that girl – and it’s the sudden silence that coaxes me out of my fugue state. Where is Russell anyway? Unlike him to nod out. That’s one of the things about Russell: he’s always awake – thinking, planning, scheming, making calculations on wee slips of paper long after everyone else has finally slid into unconsciousne
ss. Always closing in on something.

  Most likely he’s taking a sudden conference call with Brazzaville or São Paulo. Because I don’t actually buy the giving-up thing. Even if it’s for real, it’s still going to be a fad, a fling. Russell can’t give up whatever it is he actually does. It’s who he is. Russell is addicted to getting people to dance for him. Always has been ever since he was buying mint imperials on the way to school at 10p a bag, and selling them individually in lessons at 1p each. He must have been eight when he started doing that.

  And now I need to pay a visit too. I know every bedroom – sorry, every guest suite – in this place comes with its own wet room but I don’t want to risk stumbling into Russell’s lair. If he really has crashed then let him stay that way. I don’t need a resumption of the never-ending lecture on my own inadequacies. And if he’s awake, I don’t want to interrupt the soft murmuring of insane strings of numbers into the ears of some minion on the other side of the world. The issuing of orders that might mean the end of a rain forest, the slow death of a language. And I don’t want to find our room. I don’t really want to wake Sarah, she’s a girl who needs her sleep. And I don’t want to wake Scarlett either, because she’s a girl who doesn’t need her sleep. She’ll want the telly on and there’ll be a scene.

  She’s got stamina our daughter. When she wants something she doesn’t give up until she gets it, so we mostly cut out the middleman and give her what she wants straight away. Just saves a whole lot of time. And, yes, I know: a rod for our own backs. Possibly. But we’ll cross that bridge etc. Consistency – I think that’s what kids need. And we’re consistently pushovers, so everyone knows where they stand, don’t they?

  I creep into the cloakroom off the cavernous, parqueted, tackily chandeliered hallway. Go into the little slice of England with the vintage Giles cartoons on the wall and the copies of Private Eye stacked up. And that’s where I find him, kneeling on the floor in a parody of prayer, and already cold to the bone and rigid.

  I’ve seen a dead body before, of course – by the time you get to the age of forty-nine who hasn’t? – but that was my mum safe home after a year thrashing on the end of the hook and line that is stomach cancer. Laid out in the scented parlour of a proper funeral home with her face smoothed as bland as the moon. As annihilating as icing on a store-bought cake. She had been moved from the raw, upsetting twitch and flex of death to the still ranks of the dear departed. She’d been properly processed.

  Russell hasn’t been processed and he doesn’t look like anyone’s dear departed. And he doesn’t look at peace. He looks enraged. Cheated.

  There is, I’m certain, a medical explanation for the mottled framboise of his face – something boringly scientific – but at this moment he just looks bloody furious, engorged with murderous intent. The seething victim of a juvenile practical joke who is going to properly fuck someone up when he catches up with them. A paranoid homeowner who has glimpsed an intruder he intends to shoot.

  Russell doesn’t respond to my voice, or to my hand when I shake his shoulder. He doesn’t tell me to sod off. He doesn’t ask that if a man can’t pass out in his own bathroom, where the fuck can he pass out? He’s chill and stiff through his Oakland Raiders sweatshirt. I know it then.

  Russell Albert Knox, my friend since 1968 when we were both four years old and both living in Plover Way, Brickhill, Bedford, Bedfordshire, England, the United Kingdom, Europe, The World, The Universe – is dead. Russell is dead and I feel . . .

  What do I feel?

  I feel tired.

  I’ve never been a hard man. Never even pretended to be. I’m a softy. Everyone says so. Sarah says it’s one of the main things she liked about me. I’ve even ended up with a reasonably girlie version of my own name. It’s always been Nicky, never the curt manliness of a simple Nick, or the formal bow of a Nicholas. So I don’t want anyone thinking I take Russell’s death in my stride. I’m properly shocked, just as you’re meant to be. And shock must account for at least some of the stuff I do later on.

  I don’t puke or anything – in real life people don’t. It’s only in films that people routinely throw up on encountering a dead body. No, I’m not sick – but I do need to sit down for a while.

  I sit and I finish my drink and listen to the blood thrum in my ears and my heart two-stepping away in my chest and God knows how long that takes, but eventually I recover enough to get up and do something practical. Something useful.

  I change the record.

  Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Callous. But it’s not. Not really.

  See, I remember the house seeming to get smaller, the walls encroaching on me and I get the notion to honour my dead friend by finishing the bottle and playing something with heft. Something with weight. Which means something with cellos. John Taverner, The Protecting Veil. It’s one of the few classical pieces I know, and it was Russell who introduced me to it. So it is entirely apt. I absolutely need to hear it. I need that, and, suddenly, weirdly, I need a cheese sandwich. And crisps.

  Shock, see. Grief. Makes us mad. Makes us hungry. Makes us do strange and wonderful things.

  Pretty soon this place, this luxury faux-castle with unrivalled views over the world’s coolest city, is certain to become a venue for difficult phone calls, tricksy questions and form filling. All the dispirting stuff of clerking. The wee wee hours aren’t suitable for all that. Far better, I think, to use the time till morning proper in reflection on Russell’s life and work. To ponder in sombre fashion what a fragile, ill-made piece of crap is Man. To acknowledge that we’re born astride a grave etc. Russell deserves some modest period of grace before the various civil services of two sick and criminal nations put him through their rendering machinery. He’s owed that.

  I’m drunk remember. Shocked remember. And in Hyde Street, Russian Hill. Hyde Street. In a house once owned by the widow of Robert Louis Stevenson, where there is a stained-glass window that shows the Hispaniola in full sail, through which, on a good day, you can see Treasure Island. And Alcatraz.

  I am lost. I’m adrift. I’m drunk. I’m grieving. Maybe I’ve even gone a little crazy. Let’s not forget any of that.

  Two

  LORNA

  And in those same early hours way across town in the Tenderloin, Lorna Dawson holds Jez’s cock gently but securely between her thumb and forefinger. She strokes him. She bends and puts the bruised hibiscus of him between her lips, then she unrolls the condom down him while he inhales deeply and raises his hips. It’s a smooth, practised movement and she wonders if you can get too expert at something like this. Does it say something about her that isn’t so great actually? And then she wonders if Jez’s erections are less strong these days, whether there is just a little more give in them. A little more plasticity. She won’t mention it, but maybe it means age is catching up with him. Just a bit. He is nearly thirty-five after all.

  As she clambers above him, ready for what Jez likes to call docking procedure, she makes the mistake of catching his eye. He winks, and something inside her shrivels and dies.

  She closes her eyes and sinks down onto him, settles her weight onto her calves and the backs of her thighs. This is the last time. Please make this the last time. She rocks her hips a few times. Experimental. Tentative. Now that he’s inside her, he feels as hard as ever. Maybe she’s mistaken about the ageing thing.

  She opens her eyes. He’s staring right at her. Concentrating, unblinking now, frowning like he’s invigilating an exam. He holds her around the hips, moves her gently. ‘Baby, that’s beautiful,’ he says. ‘You look so fucking beautiful.’ She rocks slowly, forwards and back, up and down. He is such a plonker sometimes.

  But afterwards, she lies with her head on his skinny hairless chest, listening to the distant gurglings going on somewhere deep inside him. Like a faulty heating system. Like there are bits of him coming loose, and it makes her feel fond of him in a way she never does when they’re fucking.

  ‘Here we are again,’ she says. Then she says, �
�This isn’t love.’ And is surprised to find she’s said it out loud.

  ‘Hush,’ he says. ‘We said we’d never use that word.’

  She’s genuinely shocked. Did they agree that? And he must have noticed her quiver because he says, ‘You’re right. This isn’t love. This is something better than that.’

  ‘What’s better than love?’

  ‘Almost anything,’ he says. ‘Almost everything.’

  She wants to smack him right in the mouth. It’s so like him. Sums him up. Glib and lazy. Clever and meaningless. And, actually, thinking about it, not even all that clever.

  She sits up, flicks her hair back out of her eyes. He loves it long and wild and dirty-blonde like this. Idiot man, he thinks dirty-blonde hair means a dirty-blonde soul. Which in her case it maybe does, a bit. But only a bit. Whatever, she’s definitely getting it cut. Maybe dyed too. She could be a gamine brunette. She could be that.

  She rubs her arms, they’re goose-pimply and the friction feels good. Jez looks up at her, smiling. He’s like some kind of pale snake. Not a lightning-quick venomous one, not a cobra or anything like that. More like an albino anaconda that’s recently swallowed a guinea pig. Smug, sated, sleek, and ready to sleep. Is he even a good shag? She can’t tell any more.

  Jez’s eyes are closing, he’s drifting off. She pulls his nose. ‘Come on, Jezza, you can do better than that.’

  His eyes snap open. He’s annoyed. Good. Lorna feels her heart begin to race a little. Good good good. He’s pissed off. Excellent.

  Jez frowns. ‘Desire is better than love. Friendship is better than love. Understanding, tolerance, warmth, self-knowledge. They’re all better than love.’

  ‘They are love, you idiot. All those things – they are love.’ She keeps a smile in her voice. Even so, Jez tightens his lips. He doesn’t like conflict. He especially doesn’t like post-coital conflict.

  ‘No they’re not. They all last. Love doesn’t. Love is like an infection. It’s a fever, a nasty little rash. It’s a few days of heat and sweat and panic. A few weeks maybe.’