A Friend of the Family

by Lisa Jewell

He fell into the back of the taxi and watched through the back window as Millie’s enchanted kingdom receded into the background.

  A wonderful man.

  Millie thought that he was A Wonderful Man.

  And currently thought that his little brother was a complete waste of space. How the hell had his lazy, self-centred, slacker of a brother ever managed to get his hands on such a classy woman? What was it about him that had appealed to a woman like Millie in the first place? OK, so he’d written a book, but that didn’t change him fundamentally as a person and Millie was patently not some shallow little celeb-chasing girl who got a kick out of going out with a published author. There was obviously something else to her attraction to Sean. His looks? Possibly – he was a nice-looking bloke, but there were better-looking guys out there if that’s all she was interested in.

  Maybe it was a maternal thing – maybe his boyish incompetence brought out her mothering instincts. Or maybe it was just one of those completely inexplicable attractions that you encountered every now and then in life – a bizarre chemical collision between two people who had nothing in common except some pheromone that happened to correspond with the other person’s pheromone at some fleeting moment in time. That seemed more likely, and would explain Sean’s sudden cooling off at the prospect of making such a lasting commitment to Millie. Marriage was one thing; a marriage could be arranged at the height of the chemical collision and unarranged when said pheromones had departed the scene. Divorce was a friend of the whirlwind wedding. The prospect of something as irreversible as a baby, on the other hand, could cause pheromones to flee immediately, screaming and waving their hands around in horror. There obviously wasn’t enough substance to Sean’s feelings for Millie to sustain a real life together. So he was doing what Sean always did: he was backing off. Backing off and waiting for the girl to get so upset and so angry and so hurt that they told him to fuck off. But he couldn’t get away with that approach this time. This time there were babies and engagement rings involved. This time he was going to have to grow up and deal with it.

  Tony ran a hand over his belly and looked down at his high-street shoes. He really was going to have to sort himself out if he wanted to stand a chance in hell of attracting Millie. Not seeing so much of Ness lately had helped – he wasn’t drinking so much and his clothes all felt a little bit looser. But if he wanted Millie to look at him as anything other than Sean’s much nicer older brother he had a hell of a lot more work to do.

  He rummaged through the pockets of his coat and found what he was looking for – the Natural Weightloss programme leaflet he’d picked up weeks ago.

  He pulled out his mobile, phoned the number on the leaflet and made an appointment for a consultation the following week.

  Big Quiffs and Little Cars

  It had been a long week for Ned. As well as his disastrous night out with Carly, he’d had the pleasure of receiving eighteen delightful text messages from Monica, an envelope full of her toenail clippings, a package containing wax strips with her pubes attached and then the pièce de résistance this morning. A small vial of her blood. It was only tiny – she’d siphoned it off into one of those miniature plastic bottles of soy sauce you get in sushi boxes. But the fact was that the more parcels and text messages she sent him the less concerned he felt. He found them quite comforting now – they meant she wasn’t dead, that she wasn’t in a plane on her way to London and that she wasn’t getting any worse. The scale of the gruesomeness of the ‘body parts’ had diminished rather than gathered momentum; there’d been no severed digits or bits of flesh. And when the toenail clippings had arrived on Tuesday, Ned had actually breathed a sigh of relief. Toenails weren’t disturbing – they were just grim. Now she was just being annoying instead of scary.

  The blood was a bit more of a hark back to the days of hair and eyelashes, but it wasn’t hard to extract that much blood from yourself – it might not even be blood; she might have got it from a joke shop or something.

  No – unless Mon suddenly upped the ante and started sending him thumbs and eyeballs, he wasn’t going to let it get to him. He had enough to worry about without worrying about Monica and her stupid little games.

  Like tonight, for example.

  He was sitting in the living room at the moment, watching The Simpsons on Sky One, eating Jaffa Cakes out of some kind of new-fangled metal-tin affair and waiting for Gervase to get back from work. He was waiting for Gervase because tonight he, Ned London, was going out with him. Bizarre. He’d scoured his mind, searching for the perfect excuse to get out of it, but had been unable to come up with anything. The fact that they lived in the same house meant that in order to concoct a believable excuse he’d actually have to have somewhere else to go; and, sad to say, he didn’t. The ritual Friday night out with friends seemed to have fallen off almost as quickly as Mac’s hair after Ned left the country.

  ‘No one really goes out any more,’ Simon had said, sadly. ‘Everyone’s just sort of coupled off. It’s all Friends and Frasier and home-delivery Thai on a Friday night now. Unless it’s someone’s birthday – we still go out on people’s birthdays.’

  But he’d made a few phone calls last night, anyway, hoping for a last-minute reprieve in the form of an alternative social engagement, and found that everyone else was doing things like staying in because they were knackered (pathetic), working late at the office (tragic) and having dinner with their parents (verging on the sick). Even Simon, the only other single guy left in their circle, had other plans for the night: competing in a ten-pin bowling tournament in Streatham. He’d said that Ned was welcome to come along and give him some moral support, but when Ned had sat down and weighed up the options, going to see some greasy old rock and roller in Wood Green with Gervase just about had the edge over spending the night watching his mate chucking big shiny balls down a runway.

  When Gervase got home he went straight upstairs to get ready. When he came back down half an hour later he was wearing far too much aftershave and a battered leather jacket with fringing and studs all over it. He was also wearing a violently purple shirt, open pretty much to the navel, and very pointy-toed boots with a slight heel. Ned had never seen Gervase ‘dressed up’ before and was caught momentarily somewhere between laughing out loud and a quiet sense of awe. He looked utterly ridiculous and kind of cool, all at the same time.

  At the same moment that Gervase entered the room, a horn went in the street and Gervase clapped his hands together. ‘OK. That’s Bud. Let’s rock.’

  Ned ran to the kitchen, pulled a four pack of Kronen-burg from the fridge, grabbed his jacket and followed Gervase outside. Parked on the street was a bright-yellow, souped-up Robin Reliant, with red flames painted down the side. At the wheel was a man wearing a red leather jacket who had a gigantic peroxide quiff that nearly filled the whole car.

  Ned gulped.

  ‘All right,’ said Gervase, as the quiff guy got out of the Reliant and shook his hand. Standing, the quiff guy turned out to be about five foot two and so thin that Calista Flockhart would probably have refused to stand next to him in case he made her look fat. He had intensely blue eyes and a sharp, rodenty face with two pointy little yellow rat-teeth.

  ‘Bud, this is Ned – he’s my landlady’s son.’

  ‘All right, Ned,’ said Bud, giving his hand a squeeze.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Nice motor you’ve got there.’ He indicated his parents’ driveway with a jerk of his head. Ned looked round at his father’s ancient Transit van and his mother’s even more ancient Vauxhall Cavalier, and looked back at Bud. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The little Isetta.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The bubble car. Lovely. What is it –’68? ’69?’

  Ned turned and looked at the sad little car that was now so much a part of the furniture outside their house that he barely noticed it any more. ‘I’ve got no idea,’ he said, ‘Tony got it for his seventeenth birthday.’

  ‘Lovely. Really
lovely little car.’Bud stared at the mouldy old car longingly and nodded his head appreciatively.

  ‘Bud likes little cars,’ said Gervase.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ned, ‘right.’And then he turned to get into Bud’s little Reliant. There was a small bench in the back that looked better suited to a lunch box than a six-foot man, and he realized that simply stepping into the car and sitting down was not going to be feasible. Some kind of strategy was called for. He tried getting in with his right foot first and then employed a kind of 180-degree twist to the rest of his body, but that didn’t work. He tried lowering himself in arse-first, which at least meant that eighty per cent of him was now in the car, but he couldn’t find anywhere to put his left leg or his head. He slid his bum along the little bench and managed to accommodate his left leg, but his head was still folded flat against his chest. Gervase and Bud chatted on the pavement while Ned performed his tribute to Houdini and Ned was tempted to say, ‘Tell you what, Gervase, you’re at least four inches shorter than me – why don’t you get in the back’, but realized that this contravened lift-giving etiquette, which of course stated that the driver’s best mate/girlfriend/wife got the passenger seat and strangers got the back – regardless of shape or size.

  With a few more adjustments, Ned managed to lift his head an inch or two off his chest, but then Gervase flattened the passenger seat, which effectively cut off a whole side of the back of the car, so Ned was left with no choice but to curl himself up into a sub-foetal ball, with his arms wrapped around his knees and his bottom bones digging into the poorly upholstered bench.

  ‘You all right in the back there?’ asked the more suitably proportioned Bud.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ned, ‘fine.’

  The car made a milk-float-type noise as Bud turned the key and then they were off.

  It was the longest drive of Ned’s life. The car never really felt like it got going – it was like spending the entire journey in first gear – and every pit and pebble on the road sent painful jolts up his spine through his bum bones. Halfway through the journey he started feeling like he was going to faint, so he twisted around and hooked his legs over the back of the seat so that they hung in the cargo area of the boot.

  Bud and Gervase talked about music in the front, chain-smoking, drinking Ned’s lagers and breaking into tune every now and then. Gervase did most of the talking, accompanied by Bud saying ‘Damn right’, ‘That rocks’ and ‘Fuck, man’ every now and then, and laughing as if someone was tickling his feet with a feather. Ned had very little idea what most of their conversation was about and didn’t really care. All he was concerned with was the impending end of the journey and getting out of this sardine can on three wheels.

  By the time they finally pitched up in Wood Green, it was dark and Ned thought he might actually be dead. Bud and Gervase swung casually from the car looking fresh as daisies and Ned slowly unfurled himself from the torture device, every bone and muscle in his body complaining loudly as he did so. The first thing he did when he got out of the car was to check his wallet to see how much cash he had. He didn’t care how much it cost, he was getting a cab home.

  Bud and Gervase started to get more and more animated the nearer they got to the doors of the Old White Horse. They started singing again and Bud started doing Buddy Holly-style air guitar, his big meringue of a quiff bouncing up and down like an overexcited poodle. Ned followed them dismally into the pub and waited at the back while Gervase and Bud queued up for drinks at the packed bar. He looked round him while he waited. To his right was an enormous whale of a man wearing a bomber jacket designed for someone half his size. His head was shaved completely bald save for a solitary ginger tuft at the front, which he’d teased into a tiny quiff that looked like a bunny’s tail. To his left stood a rock-like man in head-to-toe black leather, with bumpy skin and jet-black hair. His fringe had been coiled into a grease-slicked ringlet that sat on his forehead and tickled the end of his nose.

  The girls of this new and undiscovered world seemed to come in two main varieties. There was the peroxideponytailed and leather-jacketed type with, on the whole, a slightly hatched-faced appearance, not complemented by enormous black beetles for eyebrows. The alternative was the more feminine, pin-curled and vintage-clothed variety with dirndl skirts and stiletto heels.

  Ned fingered his bum-fluff beard and looked down at his Nikes and felt hugely, enormously out of place.

  Where did all these people come from? Ned never saw people like this walking down Beulah Hill, on the Tube, in airports, on the television. Where did they all live? What did they do when they weren’t going to Robert Gordon gigs in Wood Green? What did they all do for a living? Did they have families? Children? Did they flatten their quiffs and mothball their leather jackets when they got home?

  Ned remembered Tony going through a brief phase of being a rockabilly when he was a teenager. He’d Brylcreemed his hair into a quiff and worn faded checked shirts from Flip and brothel creepers from Robot. But it had just been a phase – it had passed, and by the time Tony was nineteen he was a fledgling yuppie, buying himself suits from Cecil Gee. But these people, they weren’t teenagers going through a phase – they were living it, breathing it, doing it, believing it.

  ‘There you go, mate.’ Gervase emerged from the throng at the bar clutching two plastic pints of beer. Bud followed behind with an orange juice and lemonade with a straw in it, looking like a slightly over-coiffed schoolboy. Ned downed his plastic lager in about ten gulps while he stood and chatted with Bud and Gervase.

  ‘So. Bud,’ he said, hoping to gain a little insight into the ageing-rockers scene, ‘what do you do?’

  ‘Civil servant.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m chief executive in charge of paperclips. And vice president of retractable pencils.’

  ‘He works for the Town Planning Office in Croydon,’ said Gervase, helpfully. ‘Office-supplies manager.’

  Bud nodded enthusiastically. ‘Been there twelve years,’ he said proudly. As they chatted it transpired that Bud lived in a three-bedroom house in Shirley with his wife and their three kids (one of whom was a teenager). Any money he had left over after paying the mortgage and bills went on his car and his clothes and he was, Ned realized as they talked, truly, unapologetically happy with his lot.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘if I was to win the Lottery, I’d keep, say, fifty, sixty grand. Just enough to pay off the mortgage, pay for a couple of decent holidays. Then I’d give the rest away. Wouldn’t want it. It might ruin everything. You know?’

  Ned nodded, not knowing, but wishing more than anything that he did. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the sort of happiness that could potentially be ‘ruined’ by three million quid.

  His parents had it, though, he thought. They’d attained Bud-like levels of contentment. Both of them loved everything about their lives. They loved their big messy house, their jobs, their kids, each other. And his brothers were on their way to existential nirvana, too. They both had job-satisfaction, self-confidence, great girlfriends. Even Gervase seemed content with his lot, in his own strange way. And now that all Ned’s friends were coupling off and climbing the career ladder – where did that leave him? Twenty-seven, no career, no flat, no girlfriend.

  What was wrong with him? If runty little Bud with his rat-teeth and strange taste in cars could find true happiness, then why couldn’t he? Ned was better-looking than Bud, he was taller, younger, better educated, less weird, yet Bud had everything and Ned had nothing – except his ex-girlfriend’s toenail clippings.

  Ned sighed and looked down into the bottom of his empty plastic pint. And then he thought about Monday night and his meeting with Carly. Oh yes – what a truly depressing experience that had been. Jesus. He really was all alone now. He couldn’t turn to anyone else to make him feel better about things. There was no soft cushion of Carly, no ever-available circle of friends – even his family didn’t seem to get together as frequently as they used to. How
do you start again at twenty-seven, he wondered to himself? How do you make a fresh start? Maybe you couldn’t. Jesus, what a horrible thought. He’d blown it. He was never going to have what Bud and Sean and Tony had. He’d turn into a reclusive weirdo. He’d end up looking forward to watching Simon playing in his ten-pin bowling tournaments in Streatham on a Friday night. Jesus – he’d probably end up being best friends with Gervase. He might even get his hair cut into a quiff and… Oh God. Why the hell had he ever gone to Australia? Why hadn’t he just stayed here like a normal human being and got on with his life?

  Ned marched to the bar and ordered another round of drinks. He was starting to feel quite panicky and maudlin. He needed to get drunk. Very drunk. Ugly drunk. He necked his pint while he was still at the bar and ordered another one and by the time they finally moved through to the stable block at the back, where the gig was being held, Ned was feeling decidedly unsteady.

  Bud disappeared after a few minutes to talk to some mates and Ned and Gervase stood in amiable silence at the back of the hall watching the support band. There was something strangely soothing about the atmosphere in here, about standing with Gervase among all these odd people, watching a band, feeling pissed. Ned turned to look at Gervase in profile, at his flashy purple shirt, razor-sharp hair and pointy boots, and felt a sudden overwhelming urge to hug him. Gervase turned to look at him.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’Ned turned away abruptly and looked at the band.

  He really wanted to talk to Gervase. He was getting that chocolaty feeling in his stomach again and he had so much on his mind. He hesitated for a moment before turning back to Gervase. ‘Am I…’ he began, ‘am I wearing a cape tonight?’

  Gervase smiled and looked him up and down. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, how come you didn’t say anything?’

  ‘Thought I’d give you a break. I could tell I was getting on your nerves.’

  ‘What does it look like?’