Manners

by Robert Newman

  How weird that me and Kieran were having that discussion about quitting then, as if we somehow knew what was going to happen, as if what's just happened was somehow in the air even then.

  Something smells dead and bad in that fridge.

  'I felt you were headed for spontaneous combustion or something,' he told me that day. And, weirdly, the very next weekend became a crucible of what he'd said. Was this because I wanted to have it out with myself? Or was I just locked into a flightpath? Looking at it now, the weekend after was a warning, especially the strange way it all ended when I was invited to the country house.

  Country House

  'Why did you invite me along?' I asked as Amy did eighty-five round the North Circular on our way to the country house.

  'I like you,' she said. 'You're a real person.'

  'What's that mean?' I grimaced, hearing my own remoteness in the compliment.

  'I don't know,' she chirruped. I stared out the window. The blurry lamp-posts flicking by knew what she meant. It meant she saw me as a 2D figure representing lost virtues like theme-park actors living in a medieval hamlet. I was not of her world, her interest was only a day-tripper's curiosity. It meant, in fact, that she saw me as unreal. The strummed lamp-posts wanted to vibrate into each other and not be single posts.

  Amy was an actress I met when her house was burgled. She had the clear, Teflon skin of the young and privileged. Her cropped, hacked-about hair made it look as if the burglars had stolen her long, blonde tresses. In the ransacked flat we fell to chatting. She asked a few questions to which my answers were, in effect, 'No, I am not a moron,' and now that Beverley and me were apart I gave her my 'direct line' (home number). But there on the North Circular I began to wish I hadn't. Like all middle-class people she had no idea how routinely rude she was under all that 'niceness'. I put a cassette in the car stezzy.

  'What's this?' she asked.

  'A Northern Soul compilation.'

  'Oh, Northern Soul,' she said, the way posh people do, knowing the name of everything but the meaning of nothing.

  The words floated off her lips. Whenever middle-class people talk about working-class culture, they say it without the emphasis of meaning in the way a Gerry spy would say Baker Street, whereas a Tommy would say Baker Street. Oh, Northern Soul, she said. No, Northern Soul. It's the same when they meaninglessly say Oh, yeah the Sex Pistols, punk. They say it not knowing the significance. It's pronounced Sex Pistols or the Pistols, it's pronounced punk. When I told her about shocking things I'd seen or heard about on the job, they just registered vaguely on her peripheries. Oh that stuff.

  'Just then, all out of the blue it seemed then, she queried, 'Have you ever hit a woman?'

  'No. No way.'

  'Why not?'

  'What do you mean, "Why not?"'

  'Ha!' she laughed to herself.

  'What?'

  'Men always make out that it's such a terrible thing if a man hits a woman but that's sort of sexist, like we're totally victims.'

  'It is a terrible thing.'

  'You've never hit a girl?'

  'No! Of course not.'

  'Donovan used to hit me,' she tested.

  'I feel physically ill now.'

  'Why?'

  'What do you mean, "Why?"'

  'It's not such a big thing.'

  'Yes it is. When did he hit you?'

  'It was only twice, I think.'

  'Why?'

  'Well, I dunno. But the rules are all changed when you're really close with someone. It's all — you're into a strange area … '

  'No. They're not. They can't be.'

  'All right, then, how many prostitutes have you been to?' she asked me.

  'None!'

  'Really?'

  'Yes, of course!'

  'Tod sees them all the time,' she said with a triumphant smile, triumphant in her equanimity, triumphant because this didn't bother her a jot.

  'That's a truly wicked thing to do,' I said slowly.

  'Why?'

  'I think it's a class thing. You just don't have any moral sense at all.'

  'Any guilt you mean.'

  'No. No morals.'

  'What's the difference?'

  Amy wanted me to confirm her belief in male corruption. If all men were corrupt then that made everything simpler for her emotionally. I knew my own corruption too well to stick around and have it confirmed.

  We left the road signs and were on to the biro directions: by a bridge by a phone-box by a green gate by a tree.

  *

  At the house, they were playing a late-night game of football in the headlight beam of car parked on the lawn and an outside light lost behind thick, fluorescent ivy. Four boys and five girls, laughing and shouting. Rees, whose house it was — well, parents', but they were away — came over and shook my hand — 'Hello, nice to meet you!' — and then as the ball came near, ran and lifted the woman on the ball off the ground, placed her to one side, and then ran on with the ball. By her retaliatory tackle from behind I guessed it was his girlfriend. We joined the losing side straight away. Five minutes later, after I'd missed a preposterous overhead kick, I lay there with the damp grass under my winded back and felt like I'd been there a week.

  Amy had, alas, told them I was a cop and so I arrived bristly with imminent conflict in plus-fours I'd bought from this second-hand shop as a kind of a defensive class joke. (Police officers inhabit a class void: no one ever says 'an officer and a gentleman' about even a senior cop.) But as soon as all of us were sitting at the battered, old wooden table in the candle-lit kitchen, I found I liked this lot. They were interesting people and not really what you'd call posh at all. They were just people who go to art-house films and talk about film directors like old friends who've gone wrong, who keep making mistakes they could've saved them from. All a little older than me they were just graduates — and after all, so was I. And maybe it was time for me to get some new friends now I'd sensed me and Kieran were just colleagues, really. We waited for the kitchen fire to heat us up.

  Rees the host was handsomely receding at the temples of a black quiff, and wore an Aran roll-neck and battered black leather coat. And that's Tom in the roll-neck and Graham in the duffle-coat. All the men looked as though Jack Hawkins was waiting for them up on the poop-deck.

  Tubby Graham had a lovely Tyneside voice that seemed to come from his chest, and a twinkly intelligent look behind his specs. A beautiful half-Indian woman with oriental eyes and delicate features called Harriet. Angela appeared, at first, not so much a person, more the personification of glandular overactivity. High gums, rabbit eyes, oily skin, Angela Hyper-Thyroid had a posh speech impediment, too. Her saliva-shiny lips said v instead of th. I liked her. She was open and she couldn't say 'fairer than that'.

  There were two people there, however, I didn't like. Polly had let-it-breathe grey strands in her black hair. There was a dragging heaviness about her, a stone in a stream. Pear-shaped herself, she wanted everything around her in her own image and would know no rest until she had made it so. I heard her humming, but she was so ineluctably sour that it sounded like sardonic humming, a parody of facile joy. (Everything she said had a sneer riding on it. She didn't even know she was sneering. She thought she was merely being pointed or droll. There was just a range of sneers to choose from. Tom, New Age Tom, wanted to drag me down to his stillness. He kept looking at me with a patronizing: 'Hey, why are you flying around?' look; a smug 'There's nothing to be afraid of' look. In the cold living-room side-by-side on flowery armchairs, he was chatting to Harriet. Dumping a red plastic clothes-basket full of logs by the fireplace I overheard him say in tones of universal sympathy, 'Of course he's getting all these bad things like the migraines. I mean that's because he's staying in this space where he doesn't have to be positive, and what happens when you're in a small, cramped space with no windows? You get a headache.'

  It was that simple. Tom, for all his talk of the spirit, was actually a materialist with his belief i
n instant earthly reward, in good fortune to the good, bad fortune to the bad. For all his talk of the spirit he had a bad spirit, selfish and subtly bullying as he kept staring at me in that pious way. This house was such a buzz, however, that even my unease with him still had the colour of happiness like the small ache of going out to get the logs in for the fire.

  I left them to it and went into the warm kitchen where I sat in on a conversation between Graham, Rees, Nick and Amy about Steptoe & Son.

  'That's why it's called Steptoe & Son, even though they are both Steptoe, because it's about the two sides of us, the child and the parent,' said Graham.

  'No, it's just the name of the company. Steptoe & Son!' said Nick.

  'But it could've been Steptoe & Steptoe, but it isn't because it's about how we've got this harsh parental voice in our heads which is about fear and telling us we're no good, and we've got this weak, aspirant voice — and it's about that conflict … ' I wasn't sure if he was serious, so I just said, 'I find it too painful to watch sometimes. I'm like "No! Don't take your dad on your honeymoon with you!"'

  Graham looked at me. His look seemed to suggest that my strict professional self was tyrant to child Harold, so I laughed when Rees said, 'So, what about Cannon and Ball?'

  'No, actually I think you might have a point,' said Amy, 'but would you say that the reason it's called "step — toe" is because they're always stepping on each other's toes, or the father is always stepping on the son's toes?'

  'I'm not saying that they thought of all this consciously but, yeah,' he grinned, 'there might be summat of that.'

  'Bullshit!' cried Nick, triumphantly, and Graham started laughing so maybe he wasn't serious after all.

  Rees got out a tin Woodbine box, and turned to me: 'I was gonna build a spliff, but if it'll embarrass you … '

  'No, no that's very civil of you, but I was about to crash now anyway.'

  Amy led me up and along a tiny corridor to my room. 'Here we are!' My room was a thing of wood. Dark, wooden floor, wooden wall-panels, ceiling and headboard. 'This is the haunted room, I'm afraid,' she said. 'Good-night!'

  'Good-night!'

  'Sleep well! See you tomorrow.'

  Sorry, ghost, I thought, unlacing my boots, but you're stacked up in a holding circle in the sky. You'll just have to join the queue. I'm sure you're a scary ghost and everything, I said to the room, but I've seen a woman melt, like. Sorry. I threw the boots across the room. Kenneth told me he'd come back and haunt me, too.

  Woke early among mahogany bedposts after mahogany sleep, and went for a walk around the gardens (wearing ordinary black Levi's now that I was part of this). A lawn bit. A small, walled vegetable garden. A covered swimming-pool seen through the mossy windows of a brick conservatory with proud, 1872, iron plumbing. A mazy walkway and sleeping flower-beds. Ploughed and frosty fields stretching beyond the thin, rusty, knee-high fence.

  Hands in pockets, I touched my knees on the rusty wire. Ever since getting here I'd been able to hear myself think as if the frost-flat fields were a sounding-board. But over a noisy, japey breakfast, I felt the same, could still hear myself think. The sounding-board was also to do with being mob-handed and not detonated into the ones and twos of north London. The fact that I had gone straight up to bed last night, I reflected, looking out over the silent fields, rather than hanging around and trying to get off with Amy, had to do with the sounding-board, with being able to hear other voices apart from greed and desire, fear and fuck-it. I hadn't even tried. Why not? Because it felt wrong, that's why. Wow! That's a new one. I'd always wanted to think that and mean it. And here and now I did. It felt wrong because I was part of something bigger than just me, or because I was living collectively.

  Maybe the reason a break or a holiday is stimulating might just be as simple as smelling new smells, or being in a different shaped room. Maybe that was why it felt magic here, I thought, washing up to Al Green on a cassette player in the kitchen … Echoey water-polo in the steamy glasshouse pool, the women topless or in T-shirt and knickers. The pepperminty smell of their spliff; the tap-tap of table-tennis and stone-tiles. A pyrex baking dish put in to soak, and walking mob-handed down to the sea for a swim in sheet-lightning. Harriet-on-Sea, her green T-shirt clinging to her goose-pimpled dark skin as the sea crashed. The water drying in patches on her thighs, not wanting to leave.

  On the last evening we went into town to buy some chips.

  I'd only been at the manor two days but Highway Code Town felt a world away. As we drove back in the dusk, I looked down from the high lane at a passing pub. The Beer Garden seemed like a prison association area. A young, married couple sat in flummoxed silence obediently eating their hot meal. No one said monogamy would stand alone. Once it was part of something else, but now it wandered around killing time. The husband in freshly laundered denim sat at a slatted table and stared at the ice-cubes dissolving in his last bit of orange juice. His special treat! His evening! How small our pleasures are, for that is my life too. And one day I'll have forgotten — or have had to forget — that it could ever be bigger, vivider, like it was here at this country house. I began to feel a bitter envy of my warm and lovely host. If it wasn't for a burglary and a show-off nod to the books on Amy's shelf I'd never have got my foot in the door, never known about all this. The others could have this 100-mile soul-service whenever they wanted. I would have to accept a bribe from the Russian mafia before I could ever make this a regular part of my season.

  When we got back to the swell house, I realized why I hadn't tried to get off with Amy the night before. Here there were other shapes in the world apart from her breasts. It was like a feeling I had had at weddings and christenings, a feeling that I was somehow a bit further from crime and pervy thoughts. A better self due to the setting.

  I left the others to go and watch the Prince Naz fight in the 'lounge'.

  'That's your idea of fun, is it?' asked Tom as I wandered off. 'Watching two half-naked black men hitting each other, all sweaty and bloody?'

  I sat in the cold front-room with a bowl of rhubarb pie and custard on my lap. The Prince had dispatched his challenger while I still had the tough edges of pie-crust to try and rive with my spoon.

  'How was it?' asked Harriet, as I walked in with my begging bowl.

  'Excellent, thanks.' I felt a vacuum in the room and knew they'd been talking about me, but they picked up on an earlier conversation: pitying poor lost film-directors again. I wondered whether most modern conversations sound like fake, cover-up conversations. They have the same earnestness about nothing as when you pretend you were engrossed in something before the man you were slagging off walks in.

  'He's just repeating himself,' said Nick, lamenting the plight of some billionaire director.

  'I haven't seen the film,' I said, 'but I saw an interview where he said about the old-style gangsters: "Morality doesn't enter into it." I couldn't believe he said that.'

  'Why not?'

  'You can't say that conventional rules of right and wrong don't apply just 'cos that was the Bronx and it's survival.' They went quiet: the cop was talking as a cop. At last. 'And all that bollocks about the old gangsters having a code of conduct, he was saying, and the new ones don't … If you're a working-class shopkeeper in the 1930s getting your face slashed 'cos you won't pay protection, it still hurts even if it's done by a man in a trilby. Scorcese just means gangsters were once white and now they're black. It's a foreign code to him and so he thinks there's no — '

  'If you're saying all modern gangsters are black … ' snorted Polly, with a headshaking jangle of her earrings. She had these long, dangly, deliberately unsexy earrings — I fucking hate them. Hate them. I hate them. The long, spindly, metal, ethnicky ones. I fucking hate them. Earrings inlaid with, of course, turquoise. What else? Turquoise will always find its way on to a person of bad spirit, like dots on stale Mother's Pride.

  'Do you believe in censorship?' asked Amy.

  The conversation now felt like the US
visa waiver with its Yes/No tick-box: Are you entering the USA to engage in acts of terrorism? Yes/No. I hated the fact that my acceptance at the dinner table depended on a Yes/No tick-box. Are you homophobic? The correct answer is no. Peasy. Peasy and dismaying. As a cop you see all these people with their attitudes all present and correct doing terrible things. But with a sigh, and a sense that everyone else was somehow sitting on the other side of the table, I said, 'I thought that film Wild At Heart should've been banned or cut, and Cape Fear, too.'

  'Why?'

  ''Cos they had women being raped and enjoying it.'

  There was a pause now. I stared at the sunken plunger of the cafetière, its solid metal core inside the coiled spring. I knew by the thickening blood in my neck veins choking my voice while I said this that it wasn't the voice of love, but the solid voice of hate coiled in self-righteousness, plunging you down and blinding you to detail with blind grains at the back of the eyes.

  'Mind if I roll a joint?' said Tom to big laughs.

  'Go ahead,' I said, 'but you were giving it the high-horse about boxing and yet there's plenty more black people killed as a result of drugs than ever killed in boxing.'

  Polly tried to drag me into a black hole of her own making: 'Again you're saying most drug dealers are black … ' I wanted to say the next bit and so raised my voice over hers, knowing that was a pc black mark against this PC.

  'But the way, er, liberals talk about the police is twenty years out of date; you've got Chief Constables talking about legalizing drugs — '

  'Are you in favour of legalization?' asked Harriet.

  'No, actually,' I said, laughing at my contradiction.

  'You've just contradicted yourself,' contradicted Heavy Polly dismissively. Ah, Polly. I thought I'd find you here, waving your little linesman's flag. Of course you're pointing out the regulation lines because stale shapes are all you know.