Wake Up Happy Every Day

by Stephen May

  Ten

  NICKY

  One dirty night, one night rolling in the sewer of all the bad-good, good-bad things money can get you. We’ve promised ourselves one wild night of decadence. One night of fun.

  Thing is, nothing is harder than the quest for fun. On a Tuesday at any rate.

  Even in the world’s coolest city. Even with unlimited gelt. Even with Jesus as your guide and Mary as your babysitter – it still takes work.

  We get Mary from an agency that says they are ‘Proud to give the second-best kind of love’. The very best presumably coming from mom and pop themselves. And Mary herself seems up for fun. She’s all about the pigtails, the lilac knitwear, the glittery nail polish, the unnaturally clean white sneakers, the white jeans, the socks with tiny red love hearts on them and a truly grisly bouncy, day-glo vivacity.

  And she arrives with two ukuleles – one for her, one for our little princess. I wish her good luck with that. Scarlett is only three after all and – lovely though she is – even I must admit she’s shown few signs of prodigious musical talent. She certainly doesn’t do much singing. And she might find the fingering more than usually difficult with not really being able to use her left arm and everything.

  ‘Oh, everyone loves learning to play music, Mr . . . sorry, I’ve forgotten . . .’

  ‘Knox. Russell Knox.’

  ‘We’re going to have the best time, Scarlett and I. The Best Time.’

  ‘Not second best?’ I want to say, but I don’t.

  ‘She’s adorable. I can tell we’re going to be friends already.’

  I wonder if Mary is on some kind of medication. Prozac maybe, or one of its stronger successors. You hear these stories about how the whole of American youth is junked to the eyeballs. Probably right now, somewhere out in a mid-west kindergarten, the next president but three is getting his daily Ritalin jab. Quite frightening really when you think about it.

  Our last babysitter back in the UK was a student of Sarah’s called Noel who was fired when we came home at ten one night to find him asleep in our bed and Scarlett roaming free around the top of our house covered in her own faeces. All the bedroom windows were open and there was the gory finale of a zombie flick on the TV screen. Noel was apologetic – hard few days working on an essay, plus he was a bit hung over from celebrating finishing said essay and sorry it won’t happen again. Etcetera, etcetera.

  I was all for punching his lights out. And it takes a lot to turn me violent. Sarah was cooler. Calmer. Kinder. Understanding. More rational. Like she always is. She held me back. Calmed me down.

  She simply shook her head sorrowfully. She even paid him. All of which Noel was grateful for at the time. Though a few weeks later he somehow failed all his exams quite spectacularly. He couldn’t understand it, he’d put lots of revision in. He’d thought he’d done well. But he lost his appeal to the dean, and now he works in a kebab shop and can never go home again. Not with both his parents being doctors who prize academic success above all else.

  That’s what Sarah heard on the uni grapevine.

  She looks kind. She is kind. But you really don’t want to cross Sarah. I wouldn’t risk it anyway.

  I don’t think we’ll have a Noel kind of problem with Mary. She has completed numerous courses in childcare and her whole gleaming, glowing, creamy-faced perkiness does not suggest that she’s a zombie film fan. So what if she’s on the happy pills?

  Mary leaps straight in with the songs and the dancing and Scarlett hides her face in Sarah’s shoulder, grunting wetly until I tell Mary that we don’t mind if she lets our baby stay up and watch as much telly as she wants. And she can even eat her own weight in ice cream. Mary doesn’t have to live up to the agency’s mission statement. This second-best kind of love absolutely doesn’t have to combine the best traditional and contemporary childcare thinking in a way that means your most precious possession is being nurtured and helped to grow into the person she deserves to be with every minute she’s in our care . This Best Time she mentioned can be just slobbing out in front of the multiplex-sized screen watching Spongebob and eating stuff that’s spun out of sugar, emulsifiers and air. That’s just how we roll in this family, Mary. Mary’s perky popsicle face loses just a little of its iridescent pep.

  ‘Er, I think I’ll just stick to agency guidelines, if that’s all right with you, Mr Knox.’

  We show her round the house and she nods and murmurs and doesn’t look overawed or anything, and we show her the room where she can crash if she wants because we’re planning to be home very late. It’s the deal we’ve agreed with the agency, anything after 1 a.m. and we have to provide bed and breakfast for the sitter of a quality equivalent to at least that of a four-star hotel.

  ‘OK for you, Mary?’ I say as I show her one of Russell’s ridiculously well-appointed guest suites.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says.

  Well, don’t sound so impressed. What can she have been expecting? I think about telling her something of the history of the house.

  ‘Do you know Treasure Island?’ I say.

  She nods enthusiastically.

  ‘I basically adore all the Muppet movies,’ she says. ‘I even have a favourite Muppet – Animal. He’s so cute, so big and hairy and all.’ And she does the Muppet’s voice. ‘Mah na mah na.’

  What can you say to that?

  Our first child-free evening in months starts with a stretch limo. Not just any limo either – no, it’s a classic Cadillac from the days when limos were the sole preserve of the ruling class rather than something Joe Drone hired to take his daughter to the high school prom. This is a vehicle from back when cars said something. And that something was ‘Fuck you, peasant.’ This is a car a president would be proud to have his brains blown out in.

  We’re talking a limo whose innards resemble the smoking room of some nineteenth-century London gentleman’s club. We’re talking a limo with leather armchairs that might have been transplanted from the Athenaeum in the same way that the original London Bridge somehow ended up in Nevada. And these are chairs that may well have gone from having their seats buffed by Gladstone or Disraeli, to having those same seats glossed by the arses of William Randolph Hearst and all his rosebuds.

  We’re talking Jazz Age champagne flutes whose elegant super-model thin lines might have been twirled in the gas-effect lamplight by a young Zelda Fitzgerald. We’re talking a limo with its own gun cabinet containing antebellum Winchesters used to scare marauding Cheyenne in the distant past, but still kept oiled and ready for action today.

  We’re talking a car kitted out with a vintage Dansette and classic 45s. A car with soul where modern cars just have the tinny functionality of an iPod dock.

  And fuck ashtrays. This car has handcrafted spittoons. It also does fewer mpg than your average airliner. A modern limo is an eco-friendly dickless geek using swanky design to cover embarrassment at its very existence. Modern cars – all modern cars, not just limos – have shame as standard. This car, on the other hand, is a living embodiment of an older, better, more sensual, less craven time. Yup. The only thing green and good and wholesome about this car is the driver’s livery.

  Ah yes. The driver.

  Jesus Rodriguez. A twenty-three-year-old Guatemalan business studies grad student earning some extra Yankee dollars driving for the masters of the universe. Jesus is a chauffeur; he wears a chauffeur’s cap but he somehow makes his uniform look like a creation from the fashion avant-garde – he has a catwalk strut. Really we should close the partition between driver and the car’s stateroom and not even glance at him. He’s no one. A random civilian in our new world order. But we are new to wealth. Don’t know the rules. Haven’t begun to speak the elevated body language of the billionaire tribe. We don’t know about the shields and force fields that money can give you.

  We are babes lost in the dark woods of money and looking to kindly strangers for help. And of course, there are no kindly strangers anywhere ever. And certainly not in the woods, as a
ny fairy tale will tell you.

  We should just tell Jesus to shut up and drive, to give us a thousand bucks’ worth of Bay Area trunk road. We should draw the drapes, dim the lights and make out in the back like teenagers. We should rub and fumble, tug and stroke, lick, nibble and suck. I’m being buried in a week or so after all.

  We should set the tone for our new wealth in that way. By properly enjoying the fun anyone can have – rich or poor.

  Instead we leave the itinerary to Jesus. We put ourselves in his hands and let his power move us.

  ‘You English?’ Jesus says.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sarah says.

  ‘My cousin is in England. London. Place called Plumstead. Do you know it? Martina’s her name.’

  ‘Martina from Plumstead, right. I’ll look out for her.’

  ‘She’s hot. I mean I know she’s my cousin and all, but I’m telling you, I wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Hot Martina from Plumstead,’ I say. ‘Got it. I’m sure our paths will cross one day. Bound to in a tiny place like London, England.’

  And he probably starts hating us right then. And where did it come from that weary sarcasm? The proper rich would never stoop to it. But then, as I say, they wouldn’t ever be suckered into actual small talk with the help.

  We try to row back from it of course. But rowing back from it is actually the worst thing to do. Once you’ve chosen assholery as your route of choice you have to stick with it all the way. You have to stay committed. Retreat looks like weakness. Looks like weakness, because it is weakness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sarah says. ‘We’re a bit stressed. An old friend has just died. Very suddenly. No offence.’

  ‘No problem, ma’am.’

  But there is a problem. We just don’t know it yet. And maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference if we had been super-nice to him from the start.

  ‘Just take us to the places the rich, the beautiful and the damned hang out,’ I say.

  He doesn’t even have to think.

  ‘You got it.’

  So it’s Krug in the car, dirty Martinis at Romans in Castro, back through Nob Hill for a 1945 Mouton-Rothschild with dinner at Fleur de Lys. Brazilian chicken for Sarah. Fillet of sea bass for me. Roasted quail with Swiss chard and pine nuts with a red wine and thyme reduction for our driver.

  Then back in the limo for Aberlour scotch while gawking at the trannies on Lower Polk and then, suddenly, somehow, we are in Oakland blinking in the strobes of somewhere called the Starlight disco, watching dead-eyed waifs gyrate to the European piano-house music of twenty-odd years ago. We don’t dance. Not even to ‘Ride on Time’ by Black Box, though I think Sarah would like to. We sit in the VIP chill-out zone and listen to Jesus talk business.

  ‘My philosophy is this,’ Jesus says. ‘In business you can either be the cheapest or the best. Everyone else fails in the end, but the cheapest and the best survive. And it’s helluva lot easier to be the best, my friend. See, the big guys can always be cheaper than you are, they can cut their margins to the bone to fuck you over. But if you’re the best – hey, you can put whatever premium you like on your product and people will pay it. There are always people who will pay top dollar for the best.’ He licks his lips, sniffs. There’s a better than even chance he’s on drugs too. And not Prozac or Ritalin either. I wonder if he’s bought the cheapest or the best.

  ‘The trouble is,’ Sarah says, ‘lots of people can’t tell the difference between the cheapest and the best.’

  ‘Those folks don’t deserve to have dough. Fuck them,’ Jesus says.

  ‘But also,’ she says, ‘sometimes the cheapest is the best.’

  But Jesus isn’t listening to her. Most men don’t listen to women about business, like they don’t listen to women about films, or music or drugs, or sex or money. They sometimes listen to women about food or furniture. But even then not all that often, and not for long. Their loss frankly, as they sometimes come to realise. When it’s too late usually. Not me of course. I’m not like that. But then I’m not most men. I do listen to women. I listen to Sarah anyway.

  We watch the rising dawn from Marin Headlands. Sun coming up like a fiery baseball, and that bridge. That bridge. Pretty stunning. Pretty gold. We shiver and shake and say nothing much. There is nothing much to say. Then back into our oak-panelled mobile clubroom for the trip back to the house. We thank Jesus for showing us a real wild time. We pay him for the dints and scratches and bumps in the Cadillac – by the time we get home it looks like it has been in a Mogadishu firefight – promising to hook up with him real soon. We watch him attempt a 27-point turn, before giving up and reversing at speed. Him, his hidden hate and the dozen cellphone numbers of blonde wraiths that he’d somehow managed to harvest during the evening between business lectures. Oh, and Mary, because he promises to drop her off on his way home. She gets in without much of a backward glance. She seems way more excited by riding in Jesus’s limo than she is by the house. And I do kind of get it. A house – however nice – is just a house, but a good car, well that’s something else.

  ‘You have a lovely kid,’ Mary says as she clambers in the back. ‘Very sweet. Good ear too.’ She almost certainly says that to all the parents – it’s probably strict company policy – and we know this, Sarah and I, but still it gives us a small glow. There’s no flattery so seductive as flattery about your kids, I find, and we look at each other and smile. How the hell would she know if Scarlett has a good ear or not?

  Inside the house we go and look at our lovely kid twitching amid whatever crazy dreams three-year-olds have. We hold hands. I wonder for the ten thousandth time just what will become of her.

  ‘Do you think Jesus enjoyed himself?’ Sarah says. It’s like he’s a lovely kid himself and we’re grandparents who have taken him out to the museum for the day. I don’t reply. I don’t give a shit about Jesus.

  Back downstairs we undress slowly in the living room. We do it in silence, looking carefully at each other the whole time. We haven’t done that in years. I see Sarah taking in my incipient breasts, my swelling second-trimester belly, my greying chest hair, the shy snail of my penis. The weary sag of my shoulders. I’m not in good shape, I know it. I see it reflected in Sarah’s eyes, in her sad smile, as she takes in all the vandalism time has done to me since the last time she really looked. I see her thinking that something radical needs to be done. You know, when I was younger people used to mistake me for Bono from U2. Well, it happened once or twice. And Bono – he still looks like Bono, doesn’t he? I, on the other hand, I look like Baldrick from the Blackadder TV series. Or at least that’s who I’m mistaken for these days. Sarah says she doesn’t mind. She says, ‘I like Baldrick, he’s my favourite.’

  Sarah looks OK, of course. More than OK. If you were being picky you might say legs are a bit varicosed, breasts slightly less pillowy than they once were – we both blame Scarlett for that – but generally she’s looking good. Forty-two and she could be, oh, thirty-eight, easy.

  ‘Russell kept himself in trim,’ she says finally.

  ‘Look what happened to him,’ I say, and I smile at the accidental rhyme which is like something from Hilaire Belloc.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t really know.’

  And we pull all the blinds but this house is fifteen million dollars’ worth of too damn airy, too damn spacious, too damn everything, and we can’t keep the light out. Not really. That goddamn light gets everywhere. We lie awkwardly under a duvet on the sofa and hold each other and listen to the freeform music of the city. And Sarah talks about how the search for real fun is going to need imagination, planning, and organised thinking. What we need is proper project management.

  ‘Targets, goals, objectives,’ I say.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she says.

  ‘Milestones,’ I say. She nods.

  She goes on about how we are going to need smart objectives to make the best of our new situation, our new lives. We are going to need goals that are
specific and stretching, measurable and motivating, achievable and agreed, relevant and reinforced, timed and trackable. SMART in other words. Or SSMMAARRTT I suppose, strictly speaking. She gets quite excited. Quite passionate. There’s heat in her voice. A flush across her neck. My shy snail stirs a little. Not too much, but a little. She talks about storming, forming, norming – which are, apparently, the three necessary stages of change for any organisation, even a small one like our little family.

  I tell her not to bring her filthy performance-management talk into the bedroom, not unless she’s prepared to take the consequences, and she giggles and we cuddle for a while. I don’t know about Sarah but I certainly feel unusual. Sleepy and buzzy at the same time. I guess I feel all moneyed up.

  I’m in this foggy twilight world for a while – a short time? A long time? I have no idea – and then Scarlett wanders in and squirms her way between us.

  ‘Hello, lovely,’ I say.

  And Sarah gets up, makes tea and comes back and explains to Scarlett about the game. The game that means I’m going to be called Russell from now on, rather than Daddy. If we keep it up we get to win a massive prize. Scarlett nods and gurgles. She has an extensive repertoire of nods and gurgles as you might imagine, and I’m pretty fluent in them. This, I reckon, is a yes, I get it kind of nod. It’s a Daddy’s called Russell, now can we get on with breakfast and Nickelodeon please? kind of gurgle. It’s a nod and a gurgle that says that Scarlett is impatient for some of the best kind of love.