Man and Wife

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Those that can, do,’ I said. ‘Those that can’t, become irreverent critics.’

  ‘How is the lad? Doing well? Chilling out?’

  ‘He’s anxious to get back to work. To get back to his show.’

  ‘The show.’ Barry’s eyes roamed the Merry Leper. He waved half-heartedly at someone he knew. ‘Of course, of course.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No problem. Just a slight change of plan.’ He let the words hang between us. ‘You’re dropping Fish on Friday?’

  Barry laughed at the very idea. ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ he said. Then he looked sheepish. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Christ, Barry. That show is Eamon’s life.’

  I also thought – and my livelihood. I thought of the money I sent to Gina, the money for Pat, the bills at home, and wondered what I would do if our show went down the pan. Perhaps Marty Mann had been right. I was stupid to trust so much in just one person. When it all goes wrong, what have you got left? Monogamy breaks your fucking heart.

  ‘We remain committed to Eamon. But after recent events, all to do with his ravenous little nose, we no longer see Eamon as talk-show material. We see him as something a bit more…street. Slightly more…youth. Bringing the drama, as it were. Busting a cap and so on. We want him to host Wicked World.’

  ‘What’s Wicked World when it’s at home?’

  ‘Well, co-host, actually. With Hermione Gates.’

  ‘That airhead with the tattoos who’s always at some launch party showing her drawers?’

  Barry nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s Hermione. Isn’t she great? Very hip. Spunky. With a post-girl power sort of vibe.’ He stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘She does show her drawers a lot, doesn’t she?’

  ‘And Wicked World? What is it? Some harebrained mix of inane chat and bad music for pissed students who are just back from the uni bar and want to gorge themselves on borderline obscenity for an hour before they collapse in a stupor?’

  ‘That’s the general idea,’ said Barry. ‘It’s made by Mad Mann Productions. Your old pal, Marty Mann. Their star is in the ascendant, Harry. Marty’s got a whole raft of programmes on air this season. The reality TV thing, Six Pissed Students in a Flat, is back with a bang. And he’s got that new dating game, Dude, Where’s My Trousers? And that quiz show, Sorry, I’m a Complete Git. Marty’s also doing our new late-night cultural review – Art? My Arse!’

  ‘Up my arse? What kind of a title is that?’

  ‘Not up my arse. Art? My Arse! Harry. Art? My Arse! It’s irreverent, topical, cutting edge.’

  He saw the look on my face.

  ‘Just run it past him, will you? The Wicked World thing. Time moves on. I know young men like Eamon – and you, Harry – imagine that TV is always going to be there for them. But it doesn’t work like that. The world keeps turning. New faces are coming up all the time. Television is a good mistress but a bad wife.’

  I was about to launch into my defence of Eamon – he had cleaned up his act, he was far too good to present late-night rubbish designed to ingratiate itself to drunken thickos – when over Barry’s shoulder I saw Cyd come into the Merry Leper. She was not alone.

  Luke Moore had a proprietorial arm around my wife’s waist as he steered her through the bar and into the restaurant at the back. There was something different about her, I thought. And then I realised.

  She looked happy.

  I felt a stab of pain when I remembered she used to look like that when she was by my side. The mixture of pride and happiness you feel when you have found the one you have been looking for. And suddenly I knew that I didn’t marry her just for the sake of my son. I married Cyd because I was crazy about her. Because I loved her.

  The man from the TV station stifled a yawn.

  ‘That’s the thing about the modern world,’ he told me. ‘Sooner or later, we all get dropped.’

  When I got home Sally was sleeping on the sofa.

  A mop of dyed blonde hair, baggy jeans, and a discreet navel ring just visible under her cropped T-shirt. The girl next door. What made Sally slightly different from the average babysitter was that her own baby was sleeping on the rug in front of the fire.

  Precious was on her back, wearing Gap Kid pyjamas, her arms raised level with her ears, like a pint-sized weightlifter. She looked a lot bigger than I remembered, but then she must have been two years old already. And I realised that soon I would be exactly like one of those old wrinklies who got on my nerves all the time when I was growing up, saying aren’t you getting big? And the kid will think – stupid old git, that Uncle Harry.

  Sally woke up, rubbing her eyes and smiling.

  ‘Peggy went down well,’ she said. ‘It’s very quiet without Pat.’

  ‘How do you do it, Sally?’

  She scooped up her sleeping daughter, started fussing with her wispy hair. ‘How do I do what?’

  ‘Precious. Bringing her up on your own. How do you manage it?’

  ‘Well, my parents are great. Like your mum with Pat. And you know what it’s like. You looked after Pat by yourself for a bit, didn’t you? It’s not so bad.’

  ‘I did it for a while. You’re doing it for life. It must be hard without – what’s his name? Steve? – pulling his weight.’

  ‘I’d rather be on my own than with some useless bastard of a man,’ said Sally, rocking Precious in her arms. ‘Like her fat-arsed father. No arguments. No bitching about who does what. Just me and my girl. The single parent answers to no one. Tell you what I like about it, Harry.’ She kissed the fluff on Precious’s head. ‘It’s uncomplicated.’

  I remembered the time Pat and I had been on our own, after Gina had gone to Japan to find herself, to get her life back, but before Cyd and I had begun. For all the support I had received from my parents, I had often felt like the last line of defence between my son and all the dark stuff in the world. Sometimes I felt lonely and afraid. And yet I remembered it as a happy time in my life. Pat and me together, just the two of us – I sort of missed those days.

  Because Sally was right. It was uncomplicated.

  I was taking a shower when Cyd came home.

  She stuck her head around the shower curtain and gave me her goofy grin.

  ‘Room for one more inside?’

  She looked as though she’d had a drink or two. I thought of my wife with Luke Moore at the back of the Merry Leper. Why hadn’t she told me that she was meeting that creep? What was she trying to hide?

  I could hear her humming to herself as she slipped out of her clothes. She seemed happy and playful, a slightly drunk woman coming home to her husband with a clear conscience. I turned my face to the shower head and let the hot water beat against my face.

  Cyd stepped into the shower with me, her long, slim body pressing against me. I felt myself respond immediately. I couldn’t deny it to myself. I still fancied her like mad.

  ‘Ho ho ho,’ she said. Boy, she was really tipsy. ‘Are you just pleased to see me or is that a large erection? Come on, give me that soap.’

  She worked up some suds and started lathering her limbs. Then she turned her attention to me, soaping my back. It was diligent rather than sexy – the work of a woman used to cleaning a child – but I was soon bone hard. I turned to face her, her wide-set eyes squinting in the spray, black hair plastered to her shoulders.

  ‘In the shower,’ she laughed. ‘We haven’t done this for ages, have we?’

  ‘How was your evening?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Sorry, who did you say you were seeing?’

  ‘Oh, just these two women who do the catering for some of the blue-chip corporations in the City. We had a couple of drinks and grabbed some supper in the Merry Leper. Pat get off okay?’

  ‘A couple of women, you say?’

  She closed her eyes and moaned, gripping me like a handbrake about to be released.

  I broke away from her, pushing the shower curtain aside and grabbing the nearest towel.

  �
�What’s wrong? Harry?’

  I furiously dried myself, soap all over my back, my wife’s face all wet and confused. I wished I didn’t want her so badly. I wanted it to be over, so that all this feeling would stop.

  ‘There’s not enough room in there for me,’ I told her, tossing the towel at the laundry basket and leaving her to shower alone.

  And I saw that our marriage was a lot like the London Eye, that giant Ferris wheel on the south bank of the Thames.

  Even when everything appeared to be perfectly still, even when nothing at all seemed to be happening, it was up there in the darkness, turning, turning, in motion all the time.

  twenty

  ‘Keep it simple,’ Eamon said. ‘That’s the first thing they tell you in AA. All the lying and the running around will never do you any good. If you’re ever going to get well, you have to keep it simple, Harry.’

  Before us the land stretched out like a postcard of County Kerry. A still silver lake was the only break in miles of moorland that ran all the way to where the rocks of the mountains finally met the sea. That sea looked enormous, as though it went on not to America, but to the end of the world.

  Eamon had warned me that the tourists were trampling all over his homeland, seeking the craic in every pub, a bit of Celtic mysticism around every corner, and girls who looked like the Corrs at every bed and breakfast. But the only sign of life I saw in all of this wild, rugged landscape was a comedian who had put on a few pounds since the last time I saw him.

  ‘They want to drop the show, Eamon. I know this isn’t the best time to tell you, but I can’t help it. The drugs scared them. If you had just been pissed out of your skull it would be another matter. They could have passed that off as jack-the-lad antics. They think that alcohol abuse is cute. It would have gone down well with all the booze advertisers. But drugs are something else.’

  ‘I’m out? Just like that?’

  ‘They’re not going to recommission Fish on Friday. They want you to co-present some late-night zoo. Wicked World, it’s called. You and Hermione Gates.’

  ‘Her who’s always showing her drawers?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  He thought about it for a while. The sweet-smelling grass scrunched under my brand-new Timberland boots.

  ‘And what about you, Harry? Are you coming with me? I’m not doing it if they don’t want you.’

  I was touched that Eamon would think of me. But it hadn’t crossed my mind that the makers of a funky, spunky show like Wicked World would want an unfunky, unspunky producer like me. I assumed that they would want some young hotshot with jeans so low that you could see his pierced scrotum.

  ‘Don’t worry about me.’ I thought of the money that I sent to Gina for Pat, the money that Cyd and I relied on for our mortgage. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  We walked down into a shadowy dip in the land and came up into sunlight on a small rise. In the distance, just before the bracken gave way to the rocks by the sea, there was a small farmhouse. It hadn’t been anyone’s home since the potato famine, but it had been an authentically rustic holiday home ever since Ireland had become a place that people came to rather than left. This had been Eamon’s home the last month. And now a taxi was approaching it on the winding peninsula road.

  ‘That’ll be him,’ Eamon said. ‘Evelyn Blunt.’

  We watched the taxi.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this, Eamon? You don’t have to talk to this guy.’

  ‘I trust Blunt about as far as I can ejaculate.’

  ‘That far?’

  ‘But he’s already called me every dirty name under the sun. What else can he do to me?’

  The interview had been Barry Twist’s brainwave.

  Twist believed that the public loved the idea of a sinner eventually seeing the error of his ways. The folks out there would forgive you anything, Barry reckoned, as long as you didn’t look as though you had actually enjoyed any of it in the first place. It was no longer enough for someone to dry out, they had to be seen to have dried out. The world had a taste for public repentance.

  Evelyn Blunt, the poison pen in Eamon’s side for so long, had been invited to do the interview because his paper was thought to have an influential circulation – that is, people in the media read it, the opinion formers who would decide if this comeback was a success – while Blunt himself was writing longer, more thoughtful features these days, as he attempted to make the transition from his spiteful little hatchet jobs to something more like real writing. Blunt had failed as a TV presenter, novelist and talk-radio jock. It was inevitable that sooner or later he would have a go at being a journalist.

  We came down the hill to the farmhouse as the taxi deposited its passengers next to my hire car. Blunt got out and looked at all that wild grandeur with his sour, crumpled face. There was something sweaty about him, as though he was still recovering from the dipso he had been in his debauched youth. He wasn’t alone. There was a young woman with him. The photographer.

  I couldn’t see her face as the taxi driver helped her haul out black nylon bags full of lights, film and tripod from the boot of his cab. Then she straightened up, looking at the land as she pushed a veil of black hair out of her face. And I saw her.

  Kazumi.

  We were at the farmhouse now. Blunt took Eamon’s hand and pumped it as though he hadn’t really been using my friend as a punch bag for the last two years. Kazumi and I stared at each other. Then she nodded at the Atlantic.

  ‘Look.’

  Many miles out to sea, a storm was coming in. Huge black rolling clouds were sweeping towards the coast, but they seemed so far away that it felt like weather seen in a dream.

  ‘Ah, that’s a long ways out,’ said Eamon. His Kerry accent was always a lot thicker once you got him out of Soho. ‘We don’t run for cover round here. We have a nap and then we run for cover.’

  But Kazumi had already gone, clambering over the jagged rocks with a camera swinging around her neck. We watched her crouch on the rocks and start taking pictures of the coming storm.

  ‘Sweet little Kazumi,’ said Evelyn Blunt. ‘I’m in there tonight.’

  It wasn’t until Eamon had been cornered in the toilets by a gang of English tourists in Manchester United shirts and Evelyn Blunt had climbed on the table to show us his Riverdance routine that Kazumi and I had a chance to be alone.

  ‘So did London work out for you?’ I shouted over the pub band’s spirited version of Van Morrison’s ‘Real Real Gone’.

  She tapped her ears. I liked the way they stuck out a bit. I liked it quite a lot.

  ‘Can’t hear,’ she said, sipping her Guinness.

  ‘Are you getting much freelance work? Have you worked for the Trumpet before?’

  She smiled, shook her head, and touched those sticky-out ears. It was true. The noise in here was deafening. I realised I could say what I liked to her.

  ‘I said – I’m so happy to see you. You look gorgeous. I think you’re lovely. I am so glad you walked into my life. I think I’m losing my mind.’

  She smiled politely.

  A laughing German tourist in a Glasgow Celtic shirt smashed into our table. He was clapping his hands and stamping his feet as Blunt jigged around with his arms so stiff by his side that they could have been tied there.

  ‘These crazy Irish,’ said the German. ‘They have such a good time, no?’

  ‘He lives in Hampstead,’ I said. ‘Hampstead in London.’

  ‘Crazy, crazy Irish.’

  A cheer went up as the band, a bunch of crusty-looking hippies who resembled extras from Braveheart, tore into Van Morrison’s ‘One Irish Rover’.

  Blunt went up a gear.

  A coach party of Italians arrived, swelling the pub to overload. They placed their orders for Guinness with the red-haired student behind the bar. Blunt stubbed his toe on a large glass ashtray and began hopping around on one leg, grimacing in agony. The tourists applauded excitedly, mistaking his injury for part of the official fl
oorshow.

  The German tourist nodded knowledgably. ‘Music is very important to the Irish. Boomtown Rats. Thin Lizzy. U2. It’s in their soul.’

  He climbed on to the table with Blunt.

  Eamon came back. He looked up at Blunt and the German, shaking his head. ‘Will you look what happens when they watch Titanic one time too many?’

  A tray of pints was placed on the table and, trying to upstage the German, who was doing a basic acid house dance – arms waving, feet planted, the antithesis of the common or garden Riverdance – Blunt attempted to execute an advanced Lord of the Dance leap across the stout. That’s when he fell off the table and landed face first in an Australian tourist’s cheese and tomato toastie.

  Eamon sipped his mineral water and smiled at Kazumi. My spirits dipped. Eamon wasn’t going to try to sleep with her, was he? The drugs had replaced the girls in his life. But now the drugs were gone.

  Then the band got stuck into ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ and the whole place was up on its feet. A handsome young Italian approached Kazumi and asked her if she wanted to dance. Suddenly Evelyn Blunt was between them, his red face scowling, and a slice of tomato hanging from one sweaty eyebrow.

  ‘She’s taken, mate.’

  They eventually threw us out.

  The visitors were willing to go right through till dawn, but the young red-haired bartender had to get up for his IT course at college in the morning.

  So the four of us walked back along a rutted country road where the only light was the twinkling canopy of stars and the only sound was the roaring boom of the sea.

  That and the tourists throwing up in the coach car park.

  It was hard to sleep in that farmhouse by the bay.

  The night winds whipped off the Atlantic and made the ancient timbers of the farmhouse creak and groan like a ship tossed on a stormy sea. And it was freezing – my M&S pyjamas were supplemented with an old Fish on Friday T-shirt and thermal socks, and I still shivered under the wafer-thin duvet that was there for the summer trade.

  But tonight it wasn’t the cold or the noise that kept me awake. It was the thought of Kazumi huddled beneath the sheets of the room at the top of the house. That’s what truly kept me from sleeping. And that’s why I was awake when she knocked on my door at three in the morning.