The Marriage Diaries

by Rebecca Campbell

  So, yeah, that's how we are, sucking the marrow out of our pasts to moisten the dry bones of our present. But I'd never dragged Malcolm Mumford back from the place I'd put him. Nor Chris Rushby, my friend.

  Chris first.

  The school I went to, The Body of Christ, was a rough school. It was a place of violence and cruelty, and that was just the teachers. Fusco, Benning, Callaghan: the names were names of fear. They were men who hit you because they didn't like how your face was made, who humiliated you in front of your classmates if you looked weak or odd. They kicked you and they punched you, and they twisted the short hairs on the nape of your neck until you cried. They never seemed to do that to the psycho kids or the huge meat-headed bullies, fists blocks of malachite, their bodies bursting Hulklike out of their school uniforms.

  Christ, I remember Gaz Kilmartin with his baby face and knuckle-dusters. He was “cock,” meaning the biggest bully, the hardest boy, in the school until Terry Coleman, fresh out of reform school, rubbed his face into our gravelly, “all-weather” sports pitch. (That was a laugh: it was all-weather only in the sense that it was equally unsuitable for games in all weathers.) Terry, who had a huge head, with the classic school bully's massive jaw, jutting brow ridges, and sloping forehead, then unzipped his knob, the like of which I've never seen before or since, as long and wide as a baby's arm, and pissed on the fallen hero. The encircling kids didn't know whether to rejoice or tremble. We all feared Gaz, but at least he was a known force. And fat: there weren't many kids who couldn't outrun him. Terry was a different proposition. His bulk was all muscle, tough and knotty. And then, Gaz, despicable though he was, was at least our bully, not an interloper like Coleman. (As it turned out, most of us had an easier life under the new regime. We were beneath Terry's contempt—we didn't even register on his radar. He was after bigger prey: sixth graders, the cocks of other schools, local hardmen, zebras. It even seemed to work out well for Gaz. Denied the old outlets for his creativity, he discovered in art class an unexpected talent for pottery.)

  From the outside, The Body looked like a Bulgarian nuclear reprocessing plant. The bits that weren't stained concrete were asbestos. Yeah, it was a dump: we all knew that—kids, parents, teachers, the rats in the creek that ran along the side of the school, the pigeons that shat on the roof. There may have been worse schools in the north of England, but there certainly weren't any worse Catholic schools. St. Michael's and Cardinal Henan were terrified of playing us at football. We were the place their kids got expelled to, and godhelpthem when they got to us.

  The creek—really just a filthy stream, lifeless but for the rats and a kind of living scum that could dissolve broken strollers and dead dogs—was, weirdly, a place of adventure, excitement, and romance for us. The “us” was the group of middling nerds with whom I ran. Most of us were bully fodder, picked on for having big lips or curly hair or satchels instead of Adidas sports bags. I don't know why Chris Rushby chose to hang out with us. He was several notches up from us in coolness, toughness, in-ness. He was short, but both times I saw him fight, he pulverized bigger kids, sliding straight from normal, cheery Chris into berserker mode, the hot fire in his eyes, his slight frame throbbing with the feel-no-pain mania of the true fighter.

  But I do know why Chris hung with us. It wasn't us; it was me. He liked me. We did that clicking thing. We got each other's jokes, felt easy together. He spent nights in my house, in my brother's bed. We shoplifted together and then gave what we stole—pens, records, comics—to tramps or girls we fancied. Sometimes we just threw our loot into the creek.

  I think maybe the key thing about Chris, the truly unusual thing about Chris, was that he was good. Good in the sense that he wanted other people to be happy; in the sense that if they weren't, then nor was he. He was the only kid I ever saw genuinely take a chance and stick up for another in a way that could have landed him a thorough beating.

  His goodness was why he brought in Mumford. Mumford was as far below us in the natural order as Chris Rushby was above. He was a colorless, pasty kid, with gray teeth and skinny legs. He had no jokes, no talk, no panache, and no real brains. He was a nothing, a void in the shape of a kid. But Mumford's biggest fault, his fatal flaw, was having a mother who loved him. One day, early on—he was eleven or twelve—his mum, big-haired, fake-furred, dropped him at the school gates and there, in full view, kissed him, leaving a set of vivid red lips on his white cheek. He was doomed. From then on, it was open season. He'd be punched and kicked by anyone who felt like it, which turned out to be almost everybody. The tiny minority who didn't bother hitting him ignored him. He never even merited proper piss-taking, because that would have involved him in the joke, and we didn't want that.

  Two—or was it three?—years of that and Mumford was more ghostly than ever, slipping silently from classroom to classroom, entirely alone, his anguish, if anguish he felt, kept tightly coiled within himself, leaving no mark on his countenance. Some of us should have seen him, helped him. But that would have contaminated us with his deathly, ghostly vapor, dragged us further into the pit, nearer the hellish tormentors, the cruel boys who punched you and kicked you for their sport.

  It began when Chris let Mumford eat his sandwiches near us during the lunch break. There were five of us: Jordon, the O'connells, Chris, and me, and we always ate our sandwiches in a niche in the school wall, sheltering from the cold wind. Mumford came and sat outside the alcove, but close enough to seem as if he were one of us, close enough for the world to make a connection. Normally we would have stoned Mumford like a pariah dog and driven him away, but Chris started talking to him. Nothing much, just chat. Music maybe, as if Mumford would know anything; TV, as if his views could possibly matter; girls, like he had a chance. Before the rest of us knew what was happening, he was in our alcove, sharing our warmth, stealing our cool.

  I can't remember now if I spoke to him at all then or in the next couple of weeks as he followed us around. I can't bring back any words, only the groans and tuts as he surfaced into consciousness, dropping out of hyperspace into our midst, desperate to please, longing simply to be here. It was always Chris who included him in our talk, made room for him in the circle.

  It was Chris who told him he could come after school to mess about by the creek.

  For most of its length, the creek was too wide to jump, and its muddy banks were slippery and treacherous. Only a fool would risk falling into those rank waters, scummed and oily. Two or three times, I'd missed my footing and gone home to a hard cuff from Mum, her nose wrinkling at the stench from the four fingers of brown damp at the bottom of my trousers. But there were a couple of spots where the creek narrowed and the bank gave purchase, and you could leap with a good chance of safe landing. And so jumping the creek was one of the things that you did, in your little gangs, once every few weeks after school. More frequently, and this slight pleasure would have palled; yet, as it stood, it was a good thing to do. Your mates might chuck stones at the water as you jumped, trying to catch your crotch in the backsplash, but, on the whole, a spirit of unity and common purpose would prevail.

  Of course, Mumford had never joined the community of leapers. One evening, I thought I saw him from the top of the bus standing alone by the creek, gazing into and over its waters, dreaming, perhaps of flight, of soaring, of the claps on the back and ironic cheers for a wobbly landing.

  But now he was with us, laughing at our jokes. What do you call a man who digs up dead bodies to fuck? A bugger. What do you call one who forgets his pick? A silly bugger! Would you let a fag bum you for an orange? No! What would you let a fag bum you for, then? Nothing! Ha, you'd let a fag bum you for nothing.

  We jumped over the easy bits. Mumford had a go, and Chris caught his hand at the far side and pulled him home as he looked like sinking back into the mud. I didn't like it. Chris was my friend, and he was spending more time talking to Mumford than me, even though Mumford didn't swear, had no chat, looked like a cunt. And then I remembered the fridge. At on
e of the creek's widest, deepest pools, a fridge had been dumped. It looked like a sunken aircraft carrier, with only a small diamond of angled deck showing above the water. There had been speculation for a while that a daring boy could jump from the right-hand bank, land with one foot on the fridge, and then take off again, landing safely on the left bank. The distance was doable, but you'd need neat footwork, clever eyes, even assuming that the platform were stable. And that wasn't the case. I knew it wasn't the case because I'd poked it with a stick. The fridge wasn't nestled properly in the mud at the bottom of the creek but was finely balanced on some kind of pivot in the sludge: a brick or some other thrown-away thing, bike, iron, fetus. It took only a little pressure for the great mass to shift. Anyone landing on the fridge would fall, and that meant lying waist-deep in stench.

  I sidled up to Mumford. Now I can remember the words—my first words to him.

  “There's a cool place to jump. You have to step-stone on the fridge. It's not hard—I've done it. Chris'll think it's cool.”

  I showed him. The others had found a condom and had sent it down the stream, like poo-sticks for perverts. Mumford didn't look happy.

  “Is it safe?”

  His voice hadn't broken, and he spoke like a girl. I laughed, mocking his timidity.

  “Course it is, pussy.”

  He was torn between fear of falling and the need to become one of us. This leap seemed to him the key. Turn that key and the years of loneliness and pain would vanish. He would have friends, people to be with. People to sympathize when he got punched. People he could talk about when his mum asked him how school was today. What had he said to her over the past two years? Had he invented friends, told made-up stories about the games and the sport and the laughs they had? Or had he just looked down at his plate, dreading exactly this as yet another humiliation?

  “Okay.” He smiled nervously.

  “Mumford is jumping the fridge,”. Jordon and the O'connells whooped for joy and came running. Chris looked concerned and came more slowly.

  “What for?” he said. “Have you made him? Did you dare him?”

  “It was his idea,” I said.

  Mumford stared at me. Was I trying to make him look good? he wondered.

  He said, “Doesn't look too bad.”

  Chris said, “I wouldn't.”

  Jordon and the O'connells shouted at him to go on.

  He took off his blazer and gave it to me. He had six or seven pens in the pocket and a clean folded hankie and some money.

  Chris was telling him what to do. Don't take a long run, he was saying. Just a couple of steps, because it was important to get the aim right, to land on the bit of fridge. But he had to keep his momentum going, to swing his other leg straight through, or he'd be stranded there, and fucked. They were standing close together, Mumford leaning, nodding. He looked happy for the first time since his mother had kissed him two years before.

  Chris went along the bank to an easy crossing and then tracked back to help Mumford when he reached the far bank. The rest of us stayed on this side. Mumford prepared himself, forward to the edge of the water, then back two steps, forward again, and back for the last time. He jumped. It was a good jump, height and distance perfect, enough speed to carry him through with a quick step on the fridge. But the fridge, as it was meant to do, betrayed him. It rocked, and he fell, splashing helplessly into the water, his face contorted with surprise and fear, and the other thing, the thing I had done to him.

  Jordon and the O'connells fell laughing to their knees. This was the funniest thing they had ever seen. Straight in, headfirst. Did you see his face? Classic. Was that you, Mog? (They called me Mog.) Fucking genius. You knew, didn't you? We didn't even look as Mumford dragged himself out of the creek. But I noticed an odd thing. Chris didn't help him. He just stood there and watched, his face blank. Then he walked away, back across the rough gypsy field to the council estate where he lived. We went around and met up with Mumford. He tried to laugh with the others—“Me mum'll kill me”—but didn't look at me as he took the blazer from my hands. I'd taken fifty pence from his pocket.

  I don't think that the incident did Mumford too much harm. I pray that it is so. He drops out of my memory again from this point, goes to a place I can't reach, but I have an idea that he found some others like himself. The bullying must have diminished, because it always does, if you wait long enough. But none of that takes away my shame. Mumford was just like us—just like us except that his mother had once kissed him on the cheek, and crucified him with that kiss, and I had betrayed him from jealousy.

  And I knew it at the time. The next day, I took the fifty-pence piece and threw it high onto the flat roof over the gym, propitiating the cruel roof gods. And then I made myself forget Mumford, because I couldn't live with the knowledge of my cruelty, of my betrayal.

  But it wasn't to be the last betrayal. After the creek, Chris melted away. In my memory, it takes place immediately, but there must have been a transition. It was near the end of the year. I didn't see him in the holidays, and the next term, our school merged with another, almost as rough, called St. Kevin's. The classes were all jumbled, and Chris and I were separated. He made new friends— tough kids, punks, skins. He never became one of the bastards, the tormentors of the weak, but he was of their party. And then he got expelled for sniffing glue in the basement, caught in a stupor, his cock in his hand. For a term, he hung around at the school gates, looking weirder every day. For a time, I stayed to talk with him, took a drag on his cigarette. But then I heard stories about him that scared me. He had been my best friend, had slept close beside me, and we had shared our sweets and smokes, and now he was letting men stick their cocks up his ass, in his mouth, because they gave him money.

  So I stopped talking. To begin with, I waved and laughed. And then I smiled. And then I didn't even smile anymore. And then he stopped coming to the school gates, and I never saw him again.

  It was only after the memory of the betrayals of Chris and Malcolm Mumford came back to me that I looked them up on the friendsreunited.com website. They weren't there, but Neil Jordon was. I e-mailed him. He was working as a chief in a hospital, still in Leeds. He had no idea what had happened to Mumford, had, in fact, like me, completely forgotten his existence. But he'd heard that Chris Rushby was dead.

  But, as I said, it wasn't finding out about them that brought back the memories of those two betrayals. I think what brought them back from deep storage was the knowledge, the fear, that I was going to commit a third betrayal. A betrayal without the excuses (however thin) of youth, of stupidity, of ignorance. A betrayal fired purely by desire.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 13

  Still no sign of Sean's journal, but now I've too many other things on

  my mind to be bothered by it. The biggest deal—bigger even, for now, than Ludo—is that finally, after at least six postponements, three changes of interior designer, and no end of heartbreak, the new Bond Street shop has opened. The mechanics of it all were hardly my department, but it was going to be one of my shops, so I had an interest. And not just an interest but also, in a very small way a responsibility. When the team couldn't get the lighting quite right, I suggested they try Galatea Gisbourne. Her reputation had been restored by the excellent job she did putting right the mess she made of Milo's apartment. Her original mistake was not in slavishly following fashion but in following fashion too slowly. She saw the trend, latched onto it, but then took a year realizing her borrowed vision. By the time Milo revealed his pony-skin-everything apartment, pony skin had bolted. He tried to tough it out for a few weeks but then got Galatea back in with a refined you'll-never-snort-coke-in-this-town-again threat. This time, she worked fast, and two months later, the hair and raw leather had gone, to be replaced by floral fabrics and frilly lace. They'd got the style mags in quickly to shoot, and everyone was happy. The pic that appeared everywhere was of Milo and Galatea writhing naked under a mound of poppies, with the tag line “Beauty Is Back.�
�� Happy that is, for a month at least, and by the time pretty was out again, and the poppies had wilted, nobody was looking.

  Galatea's big concept for the lighting was to bathe the actual garments in “pools of darkness.”

  “The idea,” she'd said, to the group of journos and scavengers around her last night at the launch party, “is to draw the eye in to that which is concealed, playing on the natural curiosity of the browser. Closer and closer they'll come, until, suddenly, they are, in a real sense, part of the clothes. And then they'll, er, buy them.”

  The shop certainly looked very different, and it worked well with seventy-odd people here, spread over the two big floors, drinking champagne and eating canapés. The in-house PR department had organized the party, so it wasn't exactly the A-list, but the right magazines were there, and Kylie Minogue, which is always nice. But the soap star had pulled out (after finding out about Kylie), and where, exactly, was Jude Law? Milo was boycotting out of pique and was dining instead with his odd little new boyfriend, Clarence. The Big Idea that the PR people had come up with was swans. They were everywhere. Stuffed ones. And ballerina types (except, perhaps, a touch wide in the waist and broad in the bust) dressed as swans, fluttering around, mutely, in lines. No one was quite sure whether this was tacky, and people kept looking from face to face to see if anyone was laughing yet. Milo would have known, but Milo wasn't there.