by Nigel Planer
Ralph Tropier-Potts had obviously had several conversations with Liz, unless he had been briefed by lover-boy Bob. The letter advised me that Liz was now represented by Henderson Giggs and that I should appoint a solicitor at my earliest possible convenience. The rest of the package contained a Standard Costs agreement for me to sign — that I would pay Henderson Giggs’ fees since Liz had no income — and a petition for divorce on the grounds of my unreasonable behaviour.
In the furniture-smashing rows there had been a few slaps and kicks. Difficult now to say who had inflicted more on the other, quantity-wise. Impossible to say, of course, who started it. No blood ever, no bruises other than the emotional kind. I did concuss myself mildly once banging my head against the bedroom wall, and walked around for a few days feeling sorry for myself She had been frightened by that, I know, but on the whole, the unreasonableness of our behaviour had been mutual, I would say. In fact, unfathomable would be a more accurate description. Reason for separation m’lud: totally incomprehensible behaviour all round.
The bulkiest document was a Child Proceedings Order which had been filled out already and was supposed to relate to Grace, although the details, from what I could ascertain while conducting a phone call, seemed to bear very little relation to reality.
I looked through the partition at the vacant state where once had been many busy women. Nothing seemed to have much to do with reality today. I wanted to ask Susan’s advice about solicitors, since she was one, albeit of the local conveyancing kind, but now was obviously not the time. For instance, was it normal for a contract and investment lawyer to be dealing with a matrimonial issue. Was that allowed?
‘Thank you, Guy. Thanks so much for all this.’ Susan started to wind up our conversation.
‘Give my love to Liz and little Grace. I’m sorry to lose it just then. I’m sure I’ll be all right in a while and I’ll see you at about six or seven then. I’d offer to make you dinner but we don’t want Liz thinking I’m taking you away from her.’
The phone would start ringing for real in a while. I wondered how many lines they’d left me. I threw open the window and took some deep breaths. It felt strangely exciting to be alive. The ringing in my ears had stopped. I didn’t have the time for it.
Mid-morning the buzzer went.
I checked who it was through the window. I didn’t want anyone important seeing the depletion of my kingdom. I’d had a moderately successful couple of hours trying to find out, by subtle means or foul, who I might still represent, and it looked as if they were going to be a pretty sad and small bunch. Most of my earners had already been approached and sloped across to Naomi and Arabella’s side of Soho.
Kemble Stenner was standing in the street carrying a modelling portfolio. She buzzed again, I let her up.
‘God! I hate men.’ She came in and threw herself on to the mini-sofa, lighting a Marlboro. She was wearing a minuscule wraparound skirt and a tight midriff-revealing top. It was as if, petite as she was, her clothes had all shrunk in the wash. Nothing joined anything else. At the top of her skinny thighs, hold-me-up stockings stopped an inch and a half short of her skirt hem. Her hair was backcomb-frazzled and the amount of make-up she had on made her look like a piece of jailbait.
‘You going for a casting?’ I asked, putting the kettle on.
‘Just been,’ she spat. ‘For some incredibly interesting new Japanese beer promotion video.’
‘Did you get it?’
‘Yeeeeeeees. Of course.’ She sighed. ‘Easy. Bit of lippie, bit of …’ She acted out a pouting, dumb sex kitten, wiggling her shoulders and fluttering her eyelashes. She did it very well. I put it immediately on my mental shelf of erotic images to be enjoyed later, and made her a coffee without asking if she wanted one.
‘Thanks, doll,’ she said and slumped back on the mini-sofa. The aggression she had entered with was subsiding now. I took one of her cigarettes without asking.
‘Help yourself,’ she said, as I lit it, and then, ‘Ooo hoo hoo. What’s happened here, then? They all done a runner on you?’ She looked around the empty room. Our voices had echoes.
‘Yup,’ I said.
‘Fuuuuuuck,’ she said, smiling. I was smiling too. I don’t know why.
‘You got anybody left? 1 mean, is there any point in my being here or are you an ex-agent now?’
‘Oh, I’ve got a few.’
‘What about Doug Random? He gone with them?’
‘Actually, no. I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘He’s coming over from LA this week.’ Doug’s message had been one of the eighteen on my machine.
‘You’ve got to introduce me to him. I want to shag him so much. I think he’s gorgeous. I want to have his babies.’
‘Yes, he is, isn’t he,’ I said.
‘So do all my friends.’
‘Yes, most women feel like that about Doug,’ I said.
‘Did you know this was going to happen? I mean, was it planned?’
‘Nope. Well, they must have planned it but they somehow forgot to tell me. That must have been part of the plan.’
‘God. The bitches!’ she said, laughing at the sheer exhilaration of the disaster.
‘Yup,’ I said. ‘They’re all down at Regent Street now.’ For a moment she looked like a little old lady, heaped there on my sofa, her bony knees sticking up, her shoulders caved in, waving a cigarette in the air. Child actor, you see, always a mixture of the immature and the ancient. Cynical in the voice and eyes, pre-pubescent in the heart. She must have had several years in her early teens of being the sexy one. The one the boys hit on while her non-professional sisters and friends looked on in envy and self-crushing admiration. Learning too early how to control the overactive hormones and hence behaviour of every acne’d male who came within a ten-yard radius of her. This would have been her first taste of power. Her best grade at GCSE. How unfair that she had been too young to do anything with it, other than practise on older and more predatory men now she was in her twenties. Learning enough of grown-up behaviour and dress sense to get herself accepted way out of her depth in the business world, where sexuality is currency.
‘So. Do you want a fuck?’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette on the coffee table. ‘I’m meeting a girlfriend at twelve, so we’ve got time.’
‘Well, I …’ I began.
‘Yeah, I know you’ve got a lot of work to do, but you must be shattered, you look really rough. It’d do you good, get rid of some of that pent-up anger.
She got up and came over to where I was sitting, and straddled my lap, making her skirt rise even further up her thighs, if that were possible. I had to clear my coffee cup out of the way and put it on the floor behind me. As my arm became free, she took hold of my wrist and put my hand down between her legs.
‘Just because it’s a mercy fuck doesn’t mean I’m not wet.’ She was wet. I didn’t know how I felt about being given a mercy fuck at eleven o’clock in the morning by a twenty-two-year old with the scratchy voice of a pensioner. The phone rang. I let the answer-phone take it. It was Tania.
‘Guy. I’ve just heard and I wanted to let you know that I didn’t know anything about it. I promise.’ She sounded distressed. Cleopatra barked in the background. ‘If you’re there, Guy, pick up the phone, please. They’ve asked me to go and work there now. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I’ll have time to do both. Are you there, Guy?’
She waited a few more seconds and then, asking me to call her back, she rang off.
Kemble was rubbing herself against my hand now, so I left it there. She lifted up her top and started to squeeze her little girl’s nipples. ‘You don’t have to kiss me if you don’t want,’ she said. ‘You can close your eyes and imagine I’m Michelle Pfeiffer if you like.’ I didn’t feel like closing my eyes and I’m not that mad on Michelle Pfeiffer anyway, as it happens. I tried to think for a moment if there was anyone else, the vision of whom would drive me wild with passion. But, like the woman on my lap, in the end they’re all j
ust actresses in one shape or form. In any case, if it came to erotic fantasy, you couldn’t do much better than Kemble Stenner sitting on your lap. But somehow the reality of it was not doing the trick. All right, I had a mild erection, yes, but it didn’t pulse with any particular need for fulfilment. It was merely reacting to stimuli. Merely obliging, doing the right thing.
I thought of all the times with Liz, when I had wanted sex and she hadn’t. I thought about Hendo and whether he was any good at it. Well, he must be, he must know the right things to do. She’d probably never had to bark instructions at him. With shame, I pictured him fucking her hard, doggie-style, up against the filing cabinets I could see over Kemble’s shoulder.
‘Oh, now, that’s more like it,’ said Kemble, smiling wickedly at me. ‘Yes.’ She moved her hands to my trousers and squeezed my cock through the corduroy.
It felt bad, but the idea of Robert Henderson, Copyright and Investment Litigator, roughing up my wife across the filing cabinet was stimulating the manufacture of semen in my scrotum more than the gyrations or the sight of the very real girl on my lap.
We did use a condom. I kept my shirt and jacket on. Afterwards, there was no hug.
‘You all right, gorgeous?’ she said. ‘You look like you’re miles away.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was.’
From her bag, she took a pair of jeans and some clean knickers. I sat, unmoving, where I was and smoked her last Marlboro Light while she changed.
‘Still want to represent me, then? Or have you given up that idea? Are you giving up the business?’
‘I’ll represent you,’ I said. ‘I said I would.’
‘And introduce me to Doug Handom, remember?’
‘Yes, I can do that if you like.’
She gave me a small kiss on the cheek and took the lit cigarette off me.
‘I like you,’ she said. And left.
Only parents of children under eighteen know what the Danger Zone is, because it only started in 1991 and children over twelve aren’t allowed in. It’s pretty good value and it has its own burger and chips bar on site. And if you can stand the fluorescent light, bright-green plastic furniture and constant shrieking of children and blowing of whistles, you can sit and read the paper for three-quarters of an hour while your charges disappear into a chaotic maze of rope bridges and climbing tunnels and sporty youths in matching yellow sweatshirts supervise the letting-off of steam. Despite the aggressive titles of the games there — Killer Fox, Ultimate Challenge, Total Destruction — there are virtually no accidents, no broken teeth, bloodied noses or twisted necks, and tears there are also surprisingly rare. Zombified mums and dads sit around holding discarded sweaty zip-tops, unable to converse with each other over the noise. Like sitting in the middle of a congregating throng of soon-to-migrate birds.
I looked at my watch for what must have been the sixth time. We could go as soon as I could get Dave and Polly in the same place for long enough to do up their shoes. Dave, his cheeks red and his hair hot from running around, was in a surly and disobedient mood.
‘I think it’s really stupid in Killer Fox, because I’ll never be able to run faster than a grown-up, right? So if it was real I’d always get caught.’
‘Silly,’ said Polly. ‘You don’t have to run faster than a grownup if it was real. You just have to run faster than me. The fox would just stop and gobble up whichever one he catched first.’
There we have it, the entire theory of natural selection from the mouth of an eight-year-old. Survival of the most competitive within the species so that we can all play our part in the dog-eat-dog world. Like show-biz. Like marriage. Dave refused to put on his jacket.
‘You’re not my dad,’ he said, just to make sure I didn’t feel in any way comfortable.
The hordes of tabloid midges which Susan had described to me over the phone were no longer outside the Planter residence in Chiswick. There was, however, one lonely little hack, pacing up and down in a cheap suit. He must have kicked himself, when I arrived with the children, that his photographer wasn’t with him. Mind you, I don’t exactly look like hunky new toyboy material. As we approached the front gate he scampered along beside us, asking if I would like to comment, or find out if Susan would like to comment, on the crumpled snapshot in his paw which showed Jeremy with a woman — not Arabella —which could have been snatched on a telescopic at any time in the past five years. I steered the children to the front door and rang the bell. I could have given the little junior journo a story by using the key which I still had in my pocket, but I don’t think I could have thought of a suitable explanation for Dave of my having the key to his front door.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ whined the novice gutter rat, ‘but I’m only doing my job, and she is blonde.’ Poor little kitten. Sent by his big bad editor to cover a non-event in Chiswick because it might afford the opportunity of printing a picture of a woman who happened to have fair hair. I felt sorry for him, all on his lonesome, no back-up. His colleagues had all obviously been called away to bigger coups abounding with boobs and bubbly.
Susan opened the door to us a few inches and we slid indoors. She was in a charred state, quite literally. My assessment of the quality of the wiring at the Planters’ had been correct, and a shoddy connection under the upstairs floorboards outside her bedroom had evidently heated up enough to smoulder on to one of the joists, causing a small fire. She’d put it out with some dead flower water about an hour ago, but the place and Susan smelt smoky. She was wearing dark glasses and was over-cranked, slightly shaky.
Upstairs there were a couple of floorboards blackened, still glistening wet, and that was all. What would have come in handy now would have been my inheritance. That ml cable my father left me in his work cupboard. I did what I could to make the place safe for the night, isolating the downstairs so that Susan could stick Dave and Polly in front of a video until a candlelit bedtime. She’d need to have the house looked over properly as soon as possible.
‘You’re such a good man,’ she said as she watched me stack the burnt floorboards neatly behind the door in the bathroom. ‘I wish I’d chosen someone sensible like you. Liz is lucky. But I always went for the dodgy ones, always made the foolish choices.’
It’s not that much fun being someone sensible like me. Susan was pissed again — Vera Vodka this time — not ugly pissed, but enough to feel like expressing her feelings rather than experiencing them.
‘But that’s what you get, isn’t it, if you go for the dangerous, exciting, sexy ones. God, I’m such an idiot.’ She was getting maudlin. Whoever she got in to rewire would have to chase the cables right back to the consumer unit, and re-earth everything under the sinks in the kitchen and bathrooms.
‘I could have seen this coming really. What a stupid girl I’ve been. I knew what he was like, why couldn’t I see it? I must have been closing my eyes to the obvious. I must have known all along, somewhere, I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.’ She was sniffing now. I wrote her a list of points to make to the electrician — better separation between lighting and telephone circuit, plastic deadeners at all junction boxes, that sort of thing —and put my jacket back on.
‘I should have just had a few weeks of amazing sex with the toe-rag and then moved on. I always go and fall for the wrong man.’ I was working fast now to leave. I felt invaded by her, and in a strange way it was as if what she was saying was an attack against my father. Not that I’m macho-proud of him or anything like that, far from it — he was, as I have said, on the greyer side of dull — but her words seemed to gnaw at my memory of him. 1 washed my hands of the underfloor dirt in the kitchen sink.
‘That’s all Jeremy was good for: sex,’ she said, pouring herself another vodka and offering me one this time. I declined — I wanted to go.
‘That and earning lots of money, I suppose. He was always good at that, the little slit. I’ll fucking sting him there, if he ever wants to see his children again.’ She was standing between me and the fro
nt door now. ‘You can stay the night if you like, Guy,’ she said, and stroked my elbow. There was a pleading in her voice and in her eyes. She wanted me to stay with her and make her feel attractive. I’m sure six months previously I would have been flattered, but now I wasn’t. Now that the interesting high-earner had flown, she deigned to sex the sensible one, the also-ran. I was hurt. No doubt she’d insist on withdrawal, she wouldn’t want my less-than-alpha genes swilling around inside her, and I’m not the kind of guy to have a condom on him at all times. I was glad to reach the insecurity of Solo once again, and ponder on the inadequacy of my own potency.
Whichever way I looked at it, the figures didn’t add up. They couldn’t. There was the lease on Meard Street. That had another three years to run and cost a serious wodge every quarter. There was the service lease on the photocopier, for crying out loud. Yes, I know those are a rip-off, but we weren’t to know at the time.
It looked as if the clients Naomi had left me were going to turn out to be a paltry lot, and there would be weeks of finessing them with meals and drinks to persuade even them, scraggy as they were, not to abandon a sinking ship.
Strictly speaking, the property at Meard Street was not residential, but I probably had a good few months before I got rumbled, so long as I didn’t move in a piano and a four-poster bed.
There was the mortgage for Liz, her so-called salary for ‘secretarial work’. There were nursery fees and, oh God, big-school fees in September.
I wish I had got Grace into the local state school, but I had been put off by the cheery notices on their announcement board about how to recognize the symptoms of glue-sniffing in the under-tens.
There would be Henderson Giggs bills, plenty of them — God knows how much they would be — and the injustice of paying for the privilege of having some pinstriped villain sue me made my stomach twist with pain. There would be medical bills soon, no doubt: mine.
My mental arithmetic is actually not that brilliant, but the figure £80,000 and the words ‘by this November’ wafted cheekily into view in my mind’s eye, sending shivers of stress through the old nervous system. My heart rate was up and pounding between my ears.
