It’s not impossible that this character had observed something in me that I’d never perceived in myself. When he said ‘you take care of her’, I wonder if he had sensed that I had to be warned. I thought of myself as a decent man, yet it could not have been more than a year later when I became involved with Sarah. But it had never occurred to me that he was doing anything other than complimenting Aileen. It was nice to hear her being praised, even though the praise was coming from an oaf who was reelingly drunk.
He was right about Aileen, it goes without saying. Aileen said what she thought, and this has always been, for me, one of her most appealing qualities. ‘I’ll come to your place on Thursday and I’ll stay’ – that’s how we came to spend the night together for the first time. (That must have been exciting, to have it stated so plainly that we were about to become lovers; it must have been.) She foresees consequences and ramifications with great clarity; she can quickly assess and summarise the positives and negatives of any given situation. She is remarkably efficient and remarkably competent, and is reluctant to attempt anything for which she doesn’t possess what she takes to be the requisite knowledge and abilities. Trial and error is not her way. Aileen has always made life run as smoothly as possible. And perhaps that’s part of the explanation for what I did: I was excited by the possibility of an interval of disorder, a diversion from the responsibilities of my life, with a young woman who patently did not live to a plan, was not transparent, was not – by definition – someone whose principles were of the same order as Aileen’s. But why, I asked myself, had I betrayed Aileen at that particular time, with that particular woman? Had a frustration of which I now retained no memory reached a critical pitch in the weeks before I met Sarah? Or was it because the foothills of middle age were then beginning to come into view that I’d succumbed to the flattering interest of a good-looking twenty-four-year-old?
Sarah had been good-looking – much more so, I knew, than appeared from this image of her. Again I studied the face in the photo. Looking at the mouth, I recalled that her lips, when she wasn’t speaking, seemed often to tremble slightly, and that this had been enticing. Her eyes sometimes would widen momentarily, by a fraction of a millimetre, as if at an amusing, or alarming, thought. There was something, too, about the movement of her waist when she walked, the suppleness of her body, that was alluring. I closed my eyes, and I saw her momentarily, in motion, as if she’d stepped up to a pane of frosted glass and then withdrawn. I saw that movement of her waist, and the curves of her back. Her skin was remarkable, I remembered: running a finger across her back was like stroking the surface of a liquid. And at the thought of her skin – even though I was merely recalling the fact of its texture, rather than reviving the sensation of it – I felt a weak stirring of desire, which was not something I’d experienced much in recent years. Then it struck me that the body of Sarah might have been the single most important element of the explanation for what had happened. Was that all it had been: the attraction of one body to another, reciprocated, albeit less strongly? And the rest of it – all the emotional tumult of the affair – had been mere smoke, the mind’s self-justification for what the body had done. Was that the truth of the matter? It was a banal idea, but credible.
Then again, credible is all that it was. I spent more than an hour with that photograph. At the end of the hour I had recovered a few pieces of memory but I knew nothing more than I had known an hour earlier. I gazed at my hands: they had touched the body of the woman in this photograph. That much was incontrovertible, I told myself. And in the next moment even this fact lost its truth: wasn’t it the case that every single cell in these hands had been replaced many times over the years? Sarah’s body was now bones in the ground; mine was no longer the one she had known. Was the man who took this picture, I argued, as dead as its subject? ‘Yes, he is,’ I answered. ‘No,’ I countered, but largely from a sense of obligation.
I went downstairs, as furtive as an adulterer coming home from a rendezvous, and searched – as some sort of antidote – for pictures of myself and Aileen from the year of the photograph of Sarah. Our lives are somewhat under-documented in comparison with the lives of Eleanor and Gerry. They have hundreds of photos, miles of videotapes, scores of DVDs. It comes of having kids, they tell us – you don’t want to lose a minute of their growing up. Aileen and I, by contrast, have a couple of photo albums and a miscellany of plastic wallets, which were crammed in a drawer in the bedroom. Most of the pictures are from our first two or three years together; after that, it’s mostly holiday pictures. I found some shots of us on holiday in Brittany, which perhaps belonged to the year in question. There was Aileen at Carnac, standing by a dolmen; she was frowning slightly (she’s never liked having a camera pointed at her), but the frown seemed to be a superficial detail – a sense of wellbeing was what the picture most strongly conveyed. In the same batch there was a snap of me, sitting on my workbench, wearing a vile mustard-coloured
top, holding a plane as though it were an object of immense value – every inch the pious young artisan. If this character were to walk into the room, I said to myself, I’d head for the door.
7
On a Saturday morning Aileen went up to London for the day and I told her a lie: I said I’d arranged to visit the studio of a pair of designers whose work I’d admired at one of last year’s degree shows. In fact, I’d arranged to meet Sam in the car park of the Bluewater shopping centre.
The Toyota had been hosed down and its interior improved since my last ride. The floor had been cleared of cups and fag-ends, the dashboard had been given a wipe, and the passenger seat was covered with a freshly laundered white towel, which had the name of a hospital stitched in blue along its borders. Sam waited until I was buckled in before starting the engine, then pulled smoothly away. For the first few minutes he barely spoke. His driving, while we were in traffic, was positively sedate: I could have had a cup of coffee in my hand and would not have spilled a drop. As soon as we were out in the country, however, he became a man in a hurry: leaning back, with one hand on the wheel and the other dangling out of the window, he took us beyond the speed limit within a minute of turning into the first clear road. At a warning sign for a dangerous junction he didn’t slow down at all. ‘Didn’t you see that?’ I asked him.
‘See what?’
‘The sign,’ I said, as we sped across the junction.
There was no chance of getting killed when he was driving, he told me. ‘King of the Road, I was. That’s what they called me. I could slot a Land Rover down an alley at sixty, with an inch to spare left and right, and there wouldn’t be a scratch on the bugger. I’ve been in ambushes and fire-fights. Had bullets pinging off the doors. RPGs zinging in. Never lost a man. You’re with me – nothing’s going to happen to you. I’m good, and God takes care of me,’ he proclaimed, smacking a fist into his chest with force.
At one point, having become distracted by the sight of an ascending hot-air balloon, it suddenly struck me that the fence-posts were reeling past very rapidly indeed. I checked the speedometer and saw that we were doing more than seventy. Not only that: Sam wasn’t even looking at the road – he too was watching the balloon. ‘If a tractor comes out of one of these fields, we’re dead,’ I said.
‘I’ll see him,’ he answered, but he eased off the throttle. After that, he more or less kept our speed within the bounds of legality. For a few more minutes there was no conversation, and then we were held up behind a lorry. ‘You wouldn’t want me to overtake, would you?’ he asked, having craned his neck out the window three or four times. I confirmed that I wouldn’t. He told me again that nothing could happen to me while I was being driven by him.
‘There’s always a first time,’ I said.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as we crawled in the wake of the lorry. ‘Here’s a story for you,’ he announced after a minute, then he told me about an incident from his time in Iraq. They had left the base to take some equipment across town and b
ring an officer back, and had been told that the chances of contact were high. They reached the building where the equipment was to be dropped off; the journey had been uneventful so far. At one point along the road back they had to pass a cluster of market stalls. It was a very hot afternoon, and Sam was feeling a bit groggy, which is perhaps why he was too slow to notice that there were no kids around. This was a sign that something was about to kick off, but it was only after it had kicked off that Sam realised that the kids were missing. ‘It was like a millisecond later,’ he said. ‘I saw the fucker in a hole in the wall, and I saw the RPG coming in, and then – before it had arrived – it struck me: there weren’t any kids.’ The grenade skimmed the bonnet of the Land Rover: with one hand Sam showed me the angle of the bonnet, and with the other he mimed the flight of the grenade; the lorry had turned off and he was now accelerating, steering with his knees. ‘Thing was,’ he continued, ‘there were gunmen in the neighbourhood as well, and they started up at the same time, so we had rounds coming in right and left. One of them went straight through us. In one window, out the other. If I hadn’t had my head back it would’ve taken my face off. That was lucky enough, right? But even better, the RPG guy was a real heavy-duty idiot. The silly bastard decides to have another pop. Steps out into the open, ready to fire. Fuck knows what he was thinking, but it was last thing he ever thought. He suffered a very rapid downturn in his quality of life, I can tell you.’ Sam giggled, shaking his head at the recollection, but his smile swiftly faded into a sombre stare that seemed, worryingly, to be fixed for a moment not on the road ahead but on a mirage of the ambush. With another shake of the head he was back in the present.
‘Something like that, it gives you a buzz like nothing else,’ he resumed. ‘When you know you were just one twitch away from being extinct, it’s better than sex, better than drink, better than drugs. You feel like fucking Superman. That’s what I felt like. It was great. Mr Invincible. But second time it happens, it makes you think. Made me think, anyway. The second time really got to me. You want to hear about it?’ I said I was happy to hear it if he would just pay closer attention to where we were going and slow down a bit. ‘Sure thing,’ he said, giving the brakes a token dab, then he told me about an evening when he’d been up on the roof with a couple of mates and a new lad, a huge Fijian called Pita. (He spelled it out for me: ‘P-I-T-A. Not Peter.’) They were sitting against the parapet, playing cards, under netting. He’d had a beer, it was late, it had been a long hot day, so again he wasn’t at his sharpest. There was a sound he recognised but didn’t process instantly, then the netting came down and a lump of metal was skittering around on the roof. His mates were diving for the steps; Pita, however, strode over to the angle of the wall in which the mortar had nestled, picked the thing up, and hurled it out into the darkness. There was no explosion. ‘Now that got me thinking,’ said Sam. ‘Three strikes and out. You’ve had two – the next one’s going to do you. It’s crap, I know, but that’s how I thought. And the other thing I thought was: when I get out of here, I’m not going to waste a fucking minute. That’s what I thought: I’m going to live life to the max,’ he said, grinning salaciously, eyes wide, at the wonderful prospect. The grin faded quickly; the eyes stared vacantly. ‘I was going to be Jack the fucking lad,’ he sighed, shaking his head.
‘That’s not how it worked out,’ he went on. He’d had plenty of opportunities to run amok, because his first job, after coming out of the army, was working the door at a club run by a ‘Turkish sleazebag’ called Mehmet. ‘I say he was sleazebag, because that’s what he was,’ Sam explained. ‘But the guy I worked with, Col, he wasn’t any better. He was into anything that had a skirt and pulse. The things some women will do to get to the VIP bar – it’s incredible. He had women in the back office, women in the bog, women in the alley out the back. One of them gave him a blow-job behind the bins, while the boyfriend was looking for a place to park. Amazing, eh?’
‘Heartwarming,’ I said.
‘But I couldn’t do it,’ he went on. ‘I couldn’t be like Col.’
My wordless response could have been taken to signify that I was glad to hear that this was the case.
‘I just couldn’t click, most of the time. I had a few women, don’t get me wrong. But it kept going wrong. I’d be talking to some girl, and suddenly it was like I didn’t have a clue what I’d just said to her. Or she’d be talking and my brain couldn’t comprehend what she was saying. It was noises, not words. The brain wasn’t processing it. Which wasn’t much of a mystery.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning I was off my face, nine days out of ten. That’s how I got the maximum. A bottle of Scotch a day, easy. Plus a few beers. I did a lot of coke, plus dope. Then I saw the error of my ways,’ he said, almost primly, with no apparent irony. ‘It just hit me one day: this isn’t right. It was the proverbial bulb going off. I’m lying in bed in the morning, with some girl whose name I don’t even know. There’s a bottle under the bed. I’m taking a swig, then: ping! This isn’t right, this voice says in my head. You haven’t been straight for a month. There’s a girl in your bed but you don’t know anything about her. You don’t know her name. You don’t even know how she got to be here. He did a sort of squirming movement in his seat and ran a finger around the neck of his sweatshirt, as though the thought of what he’d done was making him uncomfortable. ‘That’s what it was like,’ he went on. ‘Like a conversion, except God wasn’t anything to do with it. I had this voice saying to me: this is totally wrong. This isn’t you. But the thing is, I didn’t know what was me any more. Does this sound like a load of wank to you?’ he asked, in the tone of a keen student asking his teacher if he was on the right track.
I told him that what he was saying seemed absolutely reasonable, a remark that he took with the smile of someone receiving an unexpected and valued compliment.
‘OK. OK,’ he went on. ‘Good. Right. Good. So I knew this wasn’t me, yes? And I’m wondering what that means I am. A year ago, I knew what I was. It was obvious: I was a squaddie. Being a squaddie suited me. It was a good fit, till it all started to go a bit messy, and then I knew it wasn’t like a one hundred per cent fit. The fighting, the buzz and all that: some of the blokes can’t get enough of it. By the end, I’d had my fill. Don’t misunderstand me: I’d learned a lot and I’d seen a lot. I was better for having done it. But I didn’t want to see any more, thanks all the same. Enough was enough. And now, what was I? I was a bouncer and a piss-artist and a coke-head, and that really wasn’t a good fit. So I stopped being a piss-artist and a coke-head, and I stopped being a bouncer, and I did some stupid non-jobs that weren’t me at all. Then I got into building, and that was good. I liked it. I could do it. But still something wasn’t right, you know what I mean? Is this making sense?’
This time the encouragement did not seem necessary; he wasn’t going to stop talking.
‘It was like: this is the right thing to do, this is what I should be doing, it fits me, but there’s something not right with the me that it’s fitting. Are you following? It was a good fit, but it was like something fitting a dummy. I mean, not really a dummy. Of course not, not literally. I wasn’t brain-dead. But there was something missing. Like this hollow feeling, you know?’
He pressed a hand to his heart at this point, and gave me a searching look, the look of a man tormented; everything – the gesture, the look, the phrase ‘hollow feeling’ – struck me as having a rehearsed quality to it, and I knew what was coming next.
‘And then I thought – maybe it’s not knowing my real parents. My real parents, I mean,’ he went on. ‘Obvious now, I know. But honest, it hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been well looked after, when I was a kid. Mr and Mrs Hendy, they’d done a good job with me. They gave me everything I needed. They were nice people, lovely people, but we were never really mum and dad and son. They were the people who looked after me. And I was fine with that. I didn’t need to belong to a family, you know what I’m saying? I was OK as I w
as. Home was good, but I was my own man, and I proved it in the army. I didn’t need anyone, not me. The women, they came and went. Could have done better with some of them. Would have been nice to have had a steady one, but it was no big deal. I didn’t need to be with someone. And then I realised: maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I do need something. Not that I needed to be loved by my mum, OK? It wasn’t like: “Please won’t somebody love me?” It wasn’t about self-esteem. That’s your standard excuse nowadays, isn’t it? “Not my fault – I have low self-esteem. I blame my parents.” That wasn’t it. My self-esteem is fine, thank you. What I mean is just that I didn’t know my parents, and maybe that was having an effect, like some sort of weakness in your bones that you don’t know about for years and then one day you find you’re walking weird. Something like that. So I thought I’d have a go at finding my mother. Boys need their mums above all, eh? I thought: what’s the worst that could happen? She could tell me to fuck off. I could think she was horrible. I was ready for that. So I went looking for her, and I tracked her down, in her little woody hideaway. Took a while to find her, but I got there. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes, just determined. I’m not the sharpest tool in the box, I know that, but I don’t give up. I never give up. I’m like a fucking terrier, me.’ He pulled a face, as though checking his terrier-like qualities in a mirror. For a few moments he appeared to forget that I was with him.
Contact Page 7
