by Stephen May
Jesus finds the spas with their nail architects, their renovators of finger and toe. It is Jesus who discovers Austen, a fragrance made up of essences of ancient love potions that retails at nearly $600 per art deco bottle. It is Jesus who leads Sarah to hidden lingerie booths whose names resemble those of old established London solicitors. The more staid the name, the more the products promise tasteful, top-end, bespoke raunch. Grieves and Sanders, Daunt and Co, Malik, Styles and Mills – these are the places to get your basques, your camisoles, your stockings, your garter belts and all the buttons and hooks of a lost age of sexual glamour. Sarah says she likes it in these places, with their smells of lace, leather and the woody essence of desire.
One shopping session lasts from ten in the morning till ten at night and Sarah comes home drunk. She collapses into bed, and an unusually bashful Jesus makes an attempt at a slurred explanation involving the Hyatt and cocktails infused with real whale skin. Mary leads him away, scolding him affectionately and smiling prettily.
And as I undress Sarah she tells me the price of every piece of clothing. For the cost of what she’s wearing, you could buy a decent family saloon. The knickers alone are the price of a premier-league season ticket.
And when, finally, she’s lying there naked, she giggles. ‘And this,’ she says, running her hands down across her breasts and over her stomach, ‘this is priceless.’
And then she turns over and I stroke her back, kiss the archipelagos of freckles on her shoulders.
‘Sleepy,’ she says.
And I sit there, every part of me aching, thinking what a privilege it is to be able to watch my naked Sarah sleeping. It is a much bigger piece of outrageous good fortune than the fact I’m now one of the richest people on the planet.
I go back into the living room. Mary is there watching Millionaire. It is the $500,000 question.
‘What, last year, was the gross domestic product of the European Union?’
‘What kind of question is that?’ Mary is aghast. She loves Millionaire, though she rarely makes it past $64,000.
‘Is it a) 16,500 billion US dollars; b) 16,700 US Dollars; c) 17,200 billion US Dollars, or d) 17,600 billion US dollars?’
The lights swirl, the music bleeps, sounds like an ancient ventilator in a provincial operating theatre. The contestant, a pudgy former steel-worker from Detroit called Norm, licks his lips and sweats. He has no lifelines left.
‘It’s d,’ I say firmly, though it’s a guess. I’ve chosen the highest figure and even then I’m surprised how low it is. Only 17,600 billion US dollars for the GDP of the entire European Union? Things are clearly worse than any of us thought.
Norm’s eyes flick towards the camera; for a second it’s like he’s looking right at me. And he looks desperate. He tugs at my heart. The presenter says he’ll have to hurry him. Norm’s in agony.
‘Come on,’ snaps the presenter.
Norm goes for a. The presenter relaxes.
‘Final answer?’ he asks, genial now.
Norm relaxes too. He even smiles. He’s taking comfort from the presenter’s easy warmth.
‘Final answer,’ he says. The house lights are up, the music collapses, the presenter slaps his forehead with theatrical relish.
‘Norm, Norm, Norm,’ the presenter says cheerfully. ‘It’s d. The answer is d.’
‘I nearly said that,’ says Norm. He sounds broken.
‘Oh, Norm. Oh, you,’ says the presenter. It doesn’t sound like he believes him.
Mary looks at me with shiny-eyed respect. ‘Good work, Mr Knox,’ she says. ‘You are definitely going to be my phone-a-friend.’
‘Where’s Jesus?’ I say.
‘In the blue room, getting himself sober I hope.’
The blue room is where Mary sleeps when she stays over, which she’s done a few times now.
Mary’s been over a lot in the last couple of weeks, because with me running, skipping, spinning, Zumba-ing and all that, and with Sarah shopping and – it turns out – drinking whale-skin cocktails, we need help with Scarlett.
They seem to get on, though it’s always hard to tell with Scarlett. If I had to guess I would say she’s generally pleased to see her and Mary keeps up a stream of chatter around her which we are told is a good thing to do. And I find it oddly comforting anyway. It’s been helping me, even if Scarlett can take it or leave it.
And now, sitting companionably with Mary, I wonder out loud about these all-day shopping explorations. It does cross my mind that while I am being stripped down, while I am hurting and hungry, maybe it isn’t just drinks Sarah’s been having in the Hyatt. Maybe the aphrodisiac qualities of all her new buying power, of all her gear, all her stuff, means that in some fancy suite with free Wi-Fi and discreet room service, she’s having her $25,000 finery ripped off her by a slightly overweight business studies grad student who is almost certainly in denial about his own sexuality. And come to think of it, it’s weird how Jesus stays ten pounds above his best weight when you consider he’s often running alongside me. Maybe it’s a glandular thing.
Mary thinks hard for a long moment. Then she says, ‘Mr Knox, you know what the most important three words in a long-term relationship are?’
‘No,’ I say, wondering that she can be so confident about this sort of thing at twenty-whatever, while still being the possessor of braces and pigtails. Of course it is actually only the young that are confident about this stuff really.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No, tell me. I’d like to know.’
‘No, silly. Those are the three most important words. It. Doesn’t. Matter.’
‘Ah. I get it. Wise words indeed.’
And she’s right, isn’t she? Out of the mouths of babes and all that. It doesn’t matter. When your partner pisses you off, take a deep breath and say to yourself that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Most things don’t. In the end.
Then she says, ‘Anyways, Jesus wouldn’t cheat on me. And Sarah wouldn’t cheat on you.’
‘You sound very certain.’
‘I am certain. They love us.’
I laugh. ‘Of course. How could they not?’
‘Exactly. Me and you, Mr Knox, we’re catches. I’m hot and you’re a total high-baller.’
‘You know, Mary, I think you might be my phone-a-friend too.’
And then we hear Scarlett whimpering. I tell Mary to relax, to stay where she is and I go to see my little girl. Though it turns out she’s actually asleep again before I get there.
I sit by her bed and watch her dreaming. I wonder if she speaks in her dreams. I wonder if she runs, and skips and climbs trees in her dreams. Maybe she spanks the ukulele like a rock star.
When I go back to the living room Mary has gone to the blue room and the lights are off. And I sit in the warm dark, listening to the house whisper stories to itself. I’m beginning to hate this house. It’s like an ill-fitting suit. A second-hand Oxfam suit like the kinds Russell and I used to search for in the eighties. The kind you could pretend looked modish and didn’t smell of dead people. This house is loose and flappy, and it smells of dead people. Really. Every now and then I swear I catch a vaguely spermy whiff of Russell. Doesn’t matter how many plug-in odor-munchers we use, Russell is still lurking in the air con and in the underfloor heating. And I think this house is beginning to hate me. Sees me as an interloper. Which I am of course, but I don’t like the idea that the stories it tells are all spiteful anecdotes about my lack of suitability as a tenant. I fear this house is a snob.
Sarah sits up as I come into the room.
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘Hi,’ she says back. And that’s when I find out about her lack of stamina because she tells me that she’s sick of shopping, sick of clothes, sick of shoes. Sick, even, of Prosecco and chocolate. ‘I’ve had a fun couple of weeks. I’ve had a holiday. But now I want to use my time properly.’
‘You’re such a puritan,’ I say.
She looks sad. ‘I know. I
can’t help myself.’ She pauses. ‘I’m going to spend time with Scarlett. If I do buy stuff it’ll be for her. And I’m going to learn a language. Really learn it. I’m going to stop shopping with Jesus and start paying him to teach me Spanish. It’ll help when we go travelling.’
She tells me that she doesn’t want to become one of those wealthy, purposeless women with expressionless faces that you see everywhere.
She says, ‘I don’t want to become a lady who lunches. Especially since I’ve no one to lunch with.’
I start to get undressed. It doesn’t take long. I’m wearing jogging bottoms, T-shirt and sweatshirt. Total value, maybe thirty dollars. I flex the new muscles on my arm.
‘Do you think Jesus is the best Spanish teacher out there? He certainly won’t be the cheapest.’
‘I know, but he needs the money. And he’ll be good enough.’ She pauses. ‘I think successful learning is more about the learner than the teacher in any case. Don’t you?’
I think about Sarah having Jesus as her teacher, having to repeat what he says. Having him correct her. Having him give her new words, new ways of thinking. It’s a pretty intimate thing to be doing. I almost say something.
‘What?’ says Sarah. ‘What were you going to say?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say.
Twenty-two
LORNA
The thing about the dinner party is that it’s all nightmarishly grown-up.
Lorna has met Megan’s boss and her husband a couple of times before. They’d been in the bar when they’d all gone out for Megan’s last birthday but there had been loads of people out that night and Megan had – hilariously – been very drunk and very sick. Lorna had spent a lot of time in the bogs of some bar holding her mate’s head and stroking her hair while she had upchucked pasta, tiramisu and Sierra Nevada ale. It had been her twenty-ninth after all, and if you can’t get wasted on your last birthday of your twenties, when can you? Lorna had been quite pleased to see it actually. She had been beginning to think Megan’s self-discipline was a bit unnatural.
Amelia and John had also been part of the group that went to the theatre a few months back, but Lorna hadn’t really spoken to them then either. She’d sat next to Amelia but she’d felt oddly shy.
Lorna knows that Megan admires Amelia. She often talks about her calm good sense, how organised she is, how well read, how funny. She tells her about her support for progressive causes – financial and practical. Lorna had always thought that she sounded a bit irritating to be honest. A bit too good to be true. Amelia was still a boss after all. Still a leech. But Megan, well, she always sticks up for her.
‘She’s a good boss. A good person actually. She listens. She values what I’ve got to say. She doesn’t belittle anyone, or steal their ideas.’ Lorna had to let it lie. Maybe there are decent people in the world of senior management somewhere. It just isn’t her experience is all.
Lorna and Megan are in a contented phase. Things are good. They have a much nicer, much bigger flat right on Telegraph. They even have a cleaner – Leslie – who comes on Mondays and Fridays for a couple of hours. They’d argued about this for days. But eventually Megs had caved.
They are both uncomfortable with it, a discomfort they resolve by overpaying her. And by frantically tidying and cleaning before she arrives. They have cable, they have new bikes. And now, apparently, they have dinner parties.
Lorna is also enjoying her course. Her days with minor Victorian women novelists are actually quite congenial. Like spending her time with a gang of eccentric, waspishly gossipy aunts. Mostly they take the genteel piss out of vicars while fantasising about getting off with the landed gentry. They’re quite modern really. On balance this course is probably better than taxidermy, though she will definitely do that one day.
They never did talk about the fight, even though Megan’s eye had swollen so much and become such a vivid supernova of angry reds and yellows and purples that she hadn’t gone out of the house for a week. And even after that she’d felt compelled to tell perfect strangers about this terrible bike accident she’d had after she had been cut up by some city-trader wanker in an SUV downtown.
There has, Lorna feels, been a subtle shift in the balance of power in the home. Megan maybe not quite so parental, not quite so bossy. Perversely this means Lorna working harder at being mischievous, playful. They can’t talk about this either. But they are more or less happy.
Happy.
Amazing how much happiness a bit of financial security can bring. Lorna read somewhere that the optimum amount of extra cash a person needs to improve their mental health is £30,000 – enough to have no debts. To have something in the bank. Enough to know that you can quit your job if the boss stops being a good listener, starts stealing ideas or just generally begins to get a bit belittling on yo ass.
It’s enough for a long holiday, for new books, for shoes, for funky wooden salad bowls and all the vital little treats that make life worth living. In a proper, decent-ordered Green Socialist society everyone would be able to live like they had at least £30k in the bank all the time.
Yes. Everyone should have enough for a cleaner. Everyone should have enough to host dinner parties to which your room-mate can invite her boss.
And inviting Amelia and John means gin and tonics, olives, spinach with nutmeg soup, lamb-stuffed green peppers with couscous and a spicy tomato sauce, different kinds of salads. And good old apple and blackberry crumble with custard and cream for dessert. Proper home-made custard. Proper thick organic double cream.
This had been Lorna’s contribution. Everyone likes a crumble. And custard is England’s signature food. Crème anglaise they call it in France, don’t they?
And there are fine wines. Yeah, since The Money life has become a great deal more like a TV-advert life. A magazine life. Life like it should be.
Lorna’s not sure how it happens but instead of books and politics and holidays and funky salad bowls they find they are talking about John’s work. He is in insurance. And – luckily – he is surprisingly entertaining about it. It helps that John is handsome in a TV way. In a state senator sort of way. He fills his suit well. Broad shoulders, straight back, laughing brown eyes in a tanned face. He looks well cared for but not fussily overgroomed. And he has a deep, reassuring voice. Lorna likes him. She notices his hands. Strong hands.
And she has to admit that Amelia and he seem to be a decent match. They laugh when they talk over each other. They bicker good-naturedly about the detail of anecdotes that involve them both and she is good-looking too in a pointy way. A tanned lustre to her skin that speaks of some exclusive tennis club. A hungry face that says ambition and no carbs after twelve on weekdays. Big lips. The Victorian lady novelists would have had her down as dangerous straight from the off.
She has interesting eyes, almost lilac in this light, and a runner’s body. Only with breasts, which most serious runners don’t have. And if it’s a puppy job it’s a good one. Subtle. And her hands are as delicate as John’s are tough. Lorna can picture them both in a deli – her pointing at jars of expensive pickles, him opening them with those big hands when they get back home. They definitely match. Complementary.
Once they’ve done John’s work they talk about films and about HBO box sets. They even talk about minor Victorian lady novelists for a while. And on the whole Lorna likes it all.
She’s always been sniffy about middle-class dinner parties but, really, what’s not to like? Good food, good conversation with handsome people with nice hands who smell of sandalwood and purposeful days. And if, yes, it does feel like she and Megan are just playing at being adult somehow – that sooner or later a real responsible member of the community will come along and tell them to tidy up and put all their toys away – maybe that’s how everyone feels, all the time. Maybe everyone is waiting for Daddy to get home and tell them off. Maybe Amelia and John feel like that too. Maybe she should ask them.
John looks thoughtful as she puts the questi
on. ‘I think you might have a point,’ he says.
‘It would explain the appeal of the Republicans,’ Amelia says. ‘Daddy knows best so leave all the decision-making to him.’
‘Daddy being the military-industrial complex? The elite?’
‘Exactly.’
And though Lorna has started this conversation – and though she agrees with this analysis – she’s a bit buzzy and doesn’t think she has the legs for politics tonight. Especially when they are all sitting stuffed with lamb and fancy salads and crumble, and with Megan heading off to the kitchen to make Irish coffees using single malt Jamesons.
So she goes to the loo and when she comes back she tells some stories about blokes. She gives them some of her finest. The guy who, after a year of not-all-that-casual-actually dating asked her to move in with him. And his wife. The randy old poet she met at a barbeque her mum had, who asked her straight out if she’d like to fuck. And who, when she declined asked plaintively, ‘Is it because I’m old?’ To which she had to reply that yes, it probably was. At least a bit.
And there were other stories too, some about blokes weirder than this. The boy she accidentally slept with during Freshers’ week, who then sent her a poem more or less every day for three years. The freak. What was his name? Peter something? Paul?
She tells the table about deluded boys, mummy’s boys, dull boys. The boy who kept carnivorous spiders. The man who offered to sponsor her through college. He’d said he’d pay her £10,000 a year if she’d spend a weekend with him once a term and give him the full girlfriend experience.
‘That one was quite tempting actually. Ten grand and all I’d have to do would be to spend a few weekends moaning that he spent too much time on the Xbox. Though I suppose it’s just possible he might have had other ideas about what the full girlfriend experience meant.’
And they are funny stories and they all laugh lots, even Megan who has heard them all before and had even been there for some of the choicer incidents. Because, yes, there are stories that involve The Fuckweasel which Lorna tells because, yes, she was so over him. She tells the story of how she’d met him. About how it was her first week in California and she’d been in Vesuvio – the famous beatnik bar, just down from the City Lights bookstore where only tourists go now. Jez had been in there drinking draught Sierra Nevada and looking so crassly like an artist with his Jim Morrison hair. Early sexy Jim Morrison mind, not fat, bearded Jim Morrison. Jez had even been wearing leather strides for fuck’s sake.
