by Nick Laird
She gave her hurt little laugh: it bounced along-ha ha ha- like something hard had dropped and skittered on the tiled floor. The thick-waisted redhead behind the sandwich counter stared at them, even though she’d managed not to make eye contact once when they’d ordered. He stared back and she looked away eventually, wiping two stubby hands on her apron.
Bridget squashed her empty water bottle into a third of its size, and screwed the lid back on. It held its form. Seeing him watching, she added, ‘For the landfill sites.’
He tapped it gently on the lid and it spun round to point at her. ‘You could probably get that shown in one of your mother’s exhibitions.’
Bridget gave a reluctant half-smile. ‘Don’t tell her I said that…As far as I can see, you know, your mum’s proud of you whatever you choose to do.’
Even as he was saying it David knew it was a lie. His own parents were not so much proud of him as sporadically tolerant, and he guessed that Bridget felt something similar from Ruth. He lifted his empty Coke can and buckled it in his two hands. Liquid dribbled out of the split, and Bridget looked pityingly at his sticky fingers.
‘Listen, David, you seem like a nice man and you’re, you know, clearly a fully paid-up member of her court, but what’s between Ruth and me is not really up for discussion.’
The small speech had left her tremulous. For an awful second he thought she might cry. He hunched forward and bandaged serviettes around his fingers.
‘No, of course not. I didn’t mean to intrude into…’
‘It’s guilt with Ruth. It works in mysterious ways, and just because she pays for stuff does not mean she has the right to have a say in my life.’
‘What does she have to feel guilty about? As far as I can see—’
Somewhat dramatically, Bridget interrupted him by slapping both of her small hands face down on the table. Her nails were bitten raw.
‘When I was eight, she walked out. She’s “Ruth” to me, you know? “Mom” is kind of overstating the case.’
A strand of hair was swept behind her ear and immediately fell back again.
‘Well, that’s a terrible thing to have happened.’
‘Things like that don’t just happen.’
They sat in silence, David rubbing at his fingers. He’d stepped in a puddle to find it was three feet deep. He felt ashamed of himself. The only thing to do was unpeel the lid of his yoghurt and begin eating it.
‘It wasn’t that I didn’t like Gloria. But you know Ruth brought her into my life and now I still have to see her. She’s living in Chicago and we keep in contact but she and Ruth don’t even speak. When she was in the clinic I was the one who visited her…’
The anti-laugh again.
They wandered in the cold sunshine around the block, passing students of David’s who assumed, he assumed, that Bridget was a prospective attendee at PMP. The girls looked at her closely, which confirmed to David that she was pretty. At a travel agent’s window, bricked up with white cards showing last-minute flights, she stopped.
‘God, eighty-nine pounds to Prague. It’s so cheap for you guys to get to Europe.’
‘Yeah, though I don’t really take advantage of it.’
‘I love Europe. My dad met Dylan in Prague. They jammed for like two hours or something,’ Bridget said, in a low, serious tone. He could tell Dylan was the godhead for her, though she had not yet perfected Ruth’s ability to drop a name into the conversation and then wait for the ripples to settle round it. She couldn’t help continuing, ‘Dylan. Can you imagine?’
Parting on the PMP steps, they agreed that as far as Ruth was concerned they’d fully discussed Bridget’s teaching career, and that David had been very helpful. After David had kissed her goodbye, Bridget asked him as an afterthought whether he knew where she could buy James and Ruth a wedding present, something antiquey maybe. David had no classes tomorrow afternoon and said he was intending to go to Alfie’s market on the Edgware Road. They’d be welcome to join him.
When he got home David saw that he’d had a visit from Singleton’s IP address. But there was still no email. He responded to some of the arguments he was involved in, and then updated his blog. Glover got in from a run when David was going through his best man’s speech. He still had his iPod in, and was half-singing along, making tentative little demi-notes and yelps and murmurs. The speech, David thought, wasn’t bad at all. It had a few witty one-liners, but was, primarily, a masterwork in evasion.
Over a Chinese takeaway, eaten on their laps, Glover mentioned that Jess and Ginny were arriving that evening. Ginny was being collected at Heathrow by her niece and going down to West Sussex to stay with family. On the pretence that she had business in London, and with Ginny’s blessing, Jess was avoiding her in-laws.
She was staying at Ruth’s for the week, Glover said, and changed the subject then, telling David how Eugene had had his bicycle stolen from the lamppost outside the Bell and Crown. Glover had a nebulous fear of Jess. He had no handle on her. Later, as he washed the dishes and David dried them, David asked him outright if he minded that Jess was staying in the Barbican. He batted the question away with ‘Why should I mind? They’re old friends. She’s got a right to see her old friends.’
A few seconds later he added, ‘It throws me-I don’t know. Her own daughter can’t stay there but her ex-girlfriend can?’
‘It was a strong thing between them. She’s a loyal person, Ruth-that’s what’s great about her.’
‘A strong thing? Spoken about it with you, has she?’
It was a question pushed towards him scornfully, like a counterfeit coin, and David saw the fear on its flip side.
‘Yeah, sometimes she says stuff.’ David moved beside him, pleased with his use of the present tense, and fished the dishcloth from the murky water.
‘Like?’
‘Oh, you know, this and that. You should really be having this conversation with Ruth, James, not me.’
‘You think I’m stupid. It’s stupid, I know.’
‘I don’t think it’s stupid. Maybe it’s not sophisticated…’ David trailed off.
‘I don’t know, man. How d’you get sophisticated feelings? I can’t manage it. You feel what you feel…There’s always going to be aspects of the relationships she’s had with women that I just can’t replicate.’
‘Yeah, I can see what you mean.’
Glover looked tragically thankful for this. Rice and sweet-and-sour sauce had been spilt in transferring their takeaways onto the plates, and David wiped the kitchen table in broad sweeps, leaving shiny channels on the dark wood. ‘But, you know, you’re only twenty-three. You should maybe also think about whether or not you want to be getting so serious.’
Glover turned around to face the room, wiping his hands on a checked tea towel.
‘David, understand. I’m absolutely serious about this. I can’t imagine being anywhere she isn’t.’
A toast to Mrs Glover
‘I think that maybe this is too large?’
Rolf was addressing them both, gesturing towards a wrought-iron birdcage that came up to his chest and looked as though it belonged in a fetish club. David laughed but Bridget just nodded and continued flipping through the rack of prints. They’d been here for almost two hours and had not found anything suitable, although David had purchased, rather recklessly, a first-edition Graham Greene and Bridget had tried on several vintage dresses, buying a pretty gingham pinafore that was very, as she said, Little House on the Prairie. It had been a pleasant afternoon. Rolf was always checking to make sure they didn’t lose each other and he carried Bridget’s shopping for her. David intended to report such attentiveness back to Ruth.
As some of the dealers were starting to shut up shop, fetching in furniture from the passageways and using long poles to take down hanging bags and clothes, they had to find something quickly. David was beginning to panic. Glover and Ruth had insisted they didn’t want presents (actually, specifically, Glover had said, ‘We don’t ne
ed anything,’ which David felt was off-message), but as best man he couldn’t turn up empty-handed. Bridget had just decided that she wanted to get them two prints of street scenes from sepia London-ideally one of the Barbican area and one of where David and Glover lived, but even this was proving tricky.
On the wall behind the rack of prints that Bridget was perusing was a framed picture of an English country cottage. Pink briar roses twisted round the door and a stream ran through the foreground. Off to the side was a proper forest, dark and deep, the kind that represents the subconscious in fairy tales. The thing was stiff and twee and awkwardly done. David glanced at it quickly and away, and then spotted a little brass plate on the bottom of the frame. It read Puzzle Picture in a gothic font and he looked again at the image, then realized the stallholder, a stooped, diminished man in an overwashed white shirt and a navy tank top, had appeared at his shoulder. He was smoothing his spivvy pencil moustache and smiling with nervous fieldmouse eyes. Around his neck his glasses hung on ordinary white string. As they came in David had noticed on his desk, beside the Daily Mail’s half-completed puzzle page, a pack of Benson & Hedges, and as he stood beside him now the proprietor’s breath was stale and laboured.
‘Lovely, isn’t it? An original Currier and Ives.’
From the back of his throat, David surprised himself by producing a mooing sound of interest.
‘American printmakers. Nineteenth century. The puzzle pictures being particularly sought after. I was very lucky to find this one.’ He unfolded his spectacles and slid them on. Little nodules of Sellotape bulked the arms where the string was attached.
‘Have you spotted all the animals? I think there’s five of them. Or six maybe.’
As the dealer spoke, the English country scene seemed to refocus itself. David suddenly discerned a leopard crouched in some branches; a crocodile half-submerged in the foam of the river; the face of a horse in the cottage thatch. He saw that the fissure in the path was not a fissure but a snake, or no, not a snake but the tail of a rat, its body formed from a rock and a tussock of grass. A wolf, his jaw ajar, looked down from the clouds.
‘I picked it up in Devon. Or was it Somerset? They’re really highly collectible,’ the dealer said, a little faintly. An aura of despair had settled on him like a pungent eau de cologne. David was finding it difficult to breathe. He took a step forward, away from the man, and examined the picture again. The odd thing was that once he had spotted the hidden creatures everything became different; he saw a face in the line of a branch, a wispy figure in the twisting roses, a dagger hidden in the ferns. This was paranoia. The dealer wanted one hundred and thirty, though he took, unhappily, a hundred in cash.
Under David’s direction Bridget purchased a 1927 print of the dome of St Paul’s, with a few black boxy cars on the untarred road, and one for Glover of The Cut in Waterloo. It was from 1910 and featured a shopkeeper standing in front of a grocery store, arms folded, ready to sell. A striped awning extended behind him and in its shade two long tables of fruit and vegetables stood piled as high as any harvest festival.
Wednesday brought the kind of wet that only these little islands can manage. It started in the small hours of Tuesday night and stirred David awake. As he lay curled beneath his 20 tog duvet and listened to its hiss and thrum, then to the gathered contrapuntal drips landing on his windowsill, he felt a deep primeval gladness to be dry and warm and horizontal.
By the morning the rain was fanaticized. The roads and pavements had turned to waterways, and black cabs swished past like hovercraft. At lunchtime David braved Oxford Street to buy a new ensemble for the wedding, settling, finally, on a fawncoloured double-breasted suit with two splits at the back of the jacket, which, as the Italian shop assistant slickly suggested, ‘the bigger man normally prefers’. David realized, again, that he was in danger of joining the fat men’s club. The next step would be a suggestion that he might want to try these, which have an elastic waistband. Or maybe this muumuu. He bought an umbrella and walked back to school slowly, not really caring, and had to spend the afternoon sitting at his desk in bare feet, with his desert boots and socks drying on the radiator behind the bookcase.
By the time he walked from Borough station home, it had eased to a light simmer. As he closed the door of the flat, Glover’s voice greeted him from the living room.
‘David, know where Ruth is? I’ve been trying to catch her all day.’
David watched the new brolly he’d just propped in the corner fall slowly over, drawing a wet arc on the wall. His flatmate appeared in the hallway then, in a thick grey polo neck David didn’t recognize.
‘Nope, neither seen nor spoken.’
He had to step round him to hang up his duffel. Glover’s voice dropped a register. ‘Every time I ring they’re at lunch, or in a bar, or drinking wine on the sofa-I don’t know what kind of organizing they’re doing.’
He was smiling and pushing absently against the door frame with one hand, wanting reassurance. David wasn’t in the mood.
‘Unbelievable outside. You’d think the Thames had burst its banks.’
In the bedroom he tried his new suit on again and thought, this time, that he looked like a free-range egg. When he turned in front of the mirror he saw how his posterior caused the jacket flap to stick out slightly, like tail feathers. Chicken or egg. Front or side. How do you want me? He should have gone for black. Just then an email from Gayle arrived, a copy of her post about seeing some pop singer in a Brixton pub. Apparently he’d been rude to a barmaid and had then been chucked out for smoking weed in the toilets. David began to reply that listening to puerile descriptions of the detritus of society was like being back at school-but then he looked at the picture of her he’d printed out and Blu-tacked to the monitor. She appeared to have a dimple, though it may have been a fleck of something on the camera lens. In the picture she was laughing, rubbing a balloon on her jumper-on her not-insubstantial chest, in fact-and holding a bottle of Becks. He deleted his unsent message and drafted another, beginning It’s always struck me how our culture, such as it is, gets the celebrities it deserves. Then he elaborated on how ‘slebs’ had taken on the roles previously occupied by the pantheon of gods. Then he discussed the tendency of even the global village to need its stereotypes and scapegoats, and a pretty girl to sacrifice. Marilyn Monroe. Princess Diana. Heather Mills McCartney. The last was a joke and he showed this by writing (Joke!) after it. Then, at the end, casually, he invited her to Glover and Ruth’s party. She was online and messaged back, immediately, that she wasn’t sure but she thought she’d be able to come, and that she’d definitely try, and that she was glad that he’d asked her, and that she agreed about celebrities-though she couldn’t pass up the chance to skim through Heat when she was in the hairdressers. Despite the wayward punctuation, David found he was smiling.
On the Friday-their last Friday as flatmates-David came home from school and tidied up in case anyone came back that night after the Tavern. He hoovered the living-room rug, emptied the fridge of some rancid yoghurt and a block of colonized parmesan, and pushed the kitchen table against the wall to make a decent space for socializing.
Glover was in his bedroom, finishing his packing, and he said Jess and Ruth were having cocktails in the Savoy. The Tavern was booked from eight but he doubted if anyone would be arriving before nine. His black holdall was open on his bed, clothes folded inside it. The boxes were going to be collected next Saturday: David would have to wait in for the removals company, as if he’d nothing better to do. He’d get used to the empty flat, he told himself. That was the lesson of the last six months. One could get used to anything.
There had been no word from Gayle. David had sent her a reminder email with the details, and his mobile number, and checked MSN to see if she was online, but her account had been set to private for some reason. He searched for her on Skype, just in case, but she wasn’t listed. He had her home number now but didn’t like to just ring it, at least not yet. There was a chance s
he might turn up at the pub, no doubt late and flustered, the Rossetti hair everywhere, the flapping leopardskin coat.
‘Do you think you could listen to me run through my speech tonight? Just to check I’ve covered all the bases?’
David was about to tuck in to his pasta, but he nodded, and Glover rested against the kitchen counter, holding a sheet of A4, flexed, psalter-like, in front of him. Awkwardly, he clutched his left elbow with his right hand. David twirled spaghetti carbonara on his fork as quietly as possible.
‘“On behalf of my wife and I…”’ he nodded to an imaginary Ruth beside the toaster, ‘“I’d like to thank everyone for coming, particularly those who’ve travelled far and wide to be here…from Felixstowe and even the USA, and particularly Bridget and Rolf, who should right now be studying—”’
‘Too many particularlys. And I don’t think people travel far and wide.’
Glover let the sheet drop and gave a wolfish smile. He had a little sliver of theatricality in him.
‘Can we keep the comments to the end, please? I just need to practise running through it first. So…“the first meeting between my wife and myself was very strange indeed. She thought that I was following her from the tube station, and it’s fair to say that our first conversation was less than friendly. In fact she screamed at me in the street.”’
Glover paused for audience reaction. David smiled as he might at a small child who was blocking a doorway he needed to get through. His flatmate was sufficiently encouraged.
‘“Immediately, I knew that Ruth was going to play a big part in my life. She swept into it like a hurricane.”’
Another look towards the toaster.
‘“I’ve never met anyone like her. And she’s introduced me to a new world of ideas and experiences. Some good, some bad and some downright ugly.”’
