by Nigel Planer
‘Hello, Mr Mullin. Grace isn’t here.’ It was Rosie, Grace’s aptly named nursery teacher. ‘She hasn’t been in all week. You can take her art folder if you like.’
I followed Rosie into the playroom, feeling too large. Apart from all the furniture in there being kiddy-sized, the staff and mums all seemed ‘to be smaller even than me. I hung about testily at the doorway to the room. ‘Her collages are in the art tray.
I didn’t know where the art tray was, damn it, and hesitated a moment. The nobby mum with the honking voice clocked my lost look, and as she bundled past me with her brood, she stopped and looked up at me with a bitter look in her Anglo-Saxon eyes. ‘You’re learning,’ she said at me with a triumphant and hateful lump in her throat. The ‘you’ in question presumably being all men in general, and I suspect more specifically her nobby husband, wherever he was right now. Probably shagging his secretary. God knows, I would too if I was married to her.
I couldn’t ask Rosie for more information without compromising my position. It was bad enough that I obviously didn’t know Grace had been off school. What kind of a parent must she think I am? I took Grace’s raffia pictures and got out as quickly as I could. When a whole kindergarten do their glueing and sticking and painting and then their efforts are hung on the wall, the results all look pretty much the same, don’t they, except for the one that has your own kid’s name at the bottom which somehow has a hidden signal in it, a message which only you can read which tells you that actually your kid is a remarkable individual, a genius maybe. Grace had drawn a large acorn growing into a big oak which had stick-on tissue-paper leaves. And beside it was a squirrel. Rosie had helped her write her name underneath.
In the street I left another message on Liz’s machine, more querulous this time. Could she please let me know what was going on? My battery was going flat, so I had to leave it at that. Probably just as well. I went round to the house, our house, and stupidly tried my key in the door, even though I knew she’d changed the locks. I tried the bell. I felt less like Clint Eastwood than like Woody Allen now, standing on my own doorstep ringing the bell with a stack of coloured cards under my arm. I wished I was Jim Carrey, then I could have pulled a stunt and abseiled up to Grace’s bedroom window. I left a note, a brief one, and sloped away before the neighbours saw.
It was hot as hell and the dog turds on the street were smouldering. I didn’t know what to do and I hate that. I felt like an ice-cream, probably just for comfort, but it was hot, so having an ice-cream would be normal. I was allowed an ice-cream. Yes, I could have an ice-cream without looking like too much of a failure sad-act, for Christ’s sake. I would have an ice—cream. I set off for Bishop’s Park thinking of Mivvis. I needed a space to work out what to do. I should do something. I couldn’t go back to Soho, or to Malcolm’s, I had to get some result from my afternoon. Maybe I should just go to the park, have my ice-cream and then shoot a lot of people at random. With my battery flat, I couldn’t make a barrage of calls, which would have been my normal reaction to crisis or uncertainty. I did, however, nip into the Langthorne Street phone box and call Liz’s mum with the last twenty pence on my phone card.
‘Hello, Joy, how are you? … Good good good. Look, I’m sorry to trouble you but I’m trying to find out where Grace is. She hasn’t been into nursery for three days and Liz isn’t returning my calls. I don’t know how much you know of what’s been going on between me and her, but it’s not been, well… good for the last few months. I don’t know what she’s told you, but I would like to know where my daughter is.
‘What did you expect, Guy?’
I didn’t know how to react, so I gave a recalcitrant snigger. ‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘I’m sure Liz knows what she’s doing, Guy. She’s perfectly capable of looking after Grace.’
‘I’m sure she is, Joy. I’d just like to know where she is, that’s all.’
‘You should go away for a while, Guy, calm down, take a holiday, take a month off You should leave Liz alone, for all of your sakes. Stop putting so much pressure on her. Let her sort things out in her own time.’
‘I can’t afford to go away, Joy, you know that.’ The tone of my voice was making me sound more desperate than I was. No, that’s a lie. I was trembling in the kiosk.
‘There’s no point in losing your temper with me, Guy. Something I hear you do rather a lot of these days. I’m very sad for you both at the moment, as a matter of fact. I really thought she’d found the right man for her this time. But …’
Oh yes, Joy. You’d really know about finding the right man, having married three wrong ones and road-tested several others for adequacy on the way. I didn’t say that. I wish I had. I said, ‘I’m touched that you’re concerned for us, Joy, but I do want to know where my daughter is, and if you know I think you should tell me.’
‘Get real, Guy,’ she said, trying to sound modern I suppose. Obviously in her opinion the way to bring up girls correctly is to secrete them from their fathers. I hung up on her. Maybe she was right, I don’t know, maybe I should just go walkabout, or on a world cruise, and become in Grace’s eyes a distant figment. An enigmatic role model for her to cling to when in a few years time she was considering whether to sniff that glue, or kick that old lady off the pavement.
The tea shop by the allotments was closed, so no Mivvi. I gulped from the water fountain by the bowling green. The parakeets and rollers in the mini-aviary squeaked and trilled, but their noise did not trouble me. My mind was singular. I had something specific to worry about. The waste-paper bins had not been emptied and sweet wrappers and lolly sticks were spattered on the paving stones. A toddler was being hand-held along the top of the low wall by her bored au pair. Other children on rollerblades had ordinary ice-creams, so the van must be outside the gate on Stevenage Road, the street where BBC producers live before being promoted to heads of department. I couldn’t think whether to sit or stand, to move or be still. The lawns and benches were full of reclining men with their shirts off and women lolling over them with their skirts hitched up.
‘Aha! it’s the wood-man!’ Tony was ambling up towards me, dressed only in his oily shorts and brown work-boots. ‘I’m just off to the bushes to partake of this,’ he said, and flashing his eyes at me he produced a large conical joint from behind his ear. ‘And I was wondering if you would care to join me for a blow, compañero?’
‘Well, I’ve got things I’m meant to be doing, so I shouldn’t really.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, I’m supposed to be meeting a friend of mine for a drink, and …’
Under the sweeping branches of an enormous cedar tree by the back of the duck pond, Tony lit up. The smoke billowed upwards from the wider end of the joint and then two thick jets of it came streaming out of his nostrils. Like the foam and twigs and mud on the drowning man’s face.
‘Seen the Green Man again lately?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Too busy pandering and pimping to see what’s going on in the real world, eh?’
‘You could put it like that. To be honest, at the moment I think I’m what could be called well and truly fucked.’ I could tell him. He wasn’t in the biz.
He passed me the whopper and I took a couple of puffs before handing it back to him.
‘Help yourself,’ he said, but I declined any more.
‘I’m looking for my daughter.’ It sounded rather dramaqueeny now said.
‘I never told Mum and Dad this, but I’ve got a kid, I think. In Sweden somewhere. I was seeing this girl when I was in Europe, I mean, it was real love, you know, we both felt it and everything. Amazing sex. She took me back to see her folks and that was it. They were some big fucking rich Swedish family, like nearly royalty, and they told me where to get off. Made me sign papers and everything saying that when she had the kid I would never come back or make a claim on it or anything.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said.
‘As far as they were concerned I just wa
sn’t the right kind of man for her, and I wasn’t going to make her life difficult, you know, I loved her. So I just fucked off like a puppy.’ He inhaled another huge gulp of the smoke. ‘But she was the only one really, you know… the one. I often wonder what happened to her. The kid’d be, oooh, seventeen now I should think. She wrote to me once, just after she’d had him, Matthias, that’s what they called the poor little fucker. What sort of a name’s that? Probably a right little banker by now.’
He flicked the glowing end off, and folding over the loose top, put the joint back over his ear.
‘Right, that’s enough of that for now. Don’t want to get completely blotto. Not yet.’
I was feeling a little woozy myself.
‘The Bricklayer’s Arms opens at six. You coming or what? You can buy me a pint if you behave yourself Ask your friend to come along. Or is it by any chance a friend of the female persuasion?’
The river was sluggish brown, as if it too was taking the afternoon off to sunbathe. After Tony had popped into his shed to get his top — a T-shirt with a Tibetan mandala on it over the words ‘Despair-Proof Vest’ — we passed by the spot where the drowning man had disappeared. I stopped for a minute. Tony stood respectfully in silence, looking out in the same direction as I was. I found that my left thumbnail was scratching at my wedding ring. Maybe it had been doing that for some weeks, but only now had I become aware of it. I took the ring off slowly and chucked it hard into the steady plate of water. It was so small that we didn’t see its plop. We walked on.
‘Yeah,’ said Tony presently, ‘life becomes much easier to bear once you make the decision that women are crap.
That thought was not quite the intention of my action. I told him so.
‘No, I don’t mean crap as in stupid or wicked or inferior,’ he said. ‘I mean crap as in the answer to it all. They’re not very good as drugs. Things go better once you stop looking to a woman to make it all OK in your life. She can’t do that for you’, Guido. You gotta do that for yourself’ I wished I could wear a T-shirt like his.
Malcolm Viner didn’t like the Bricklayer’s Arms, I could tell. He looked almost as out of place there as I did, in his sleeveless shirt and slacks with his clean bald head shining. He ordered himself a half of lager and bought me and Tony a second pint each. It’s one of those small, dingy back-street jobs which exist in a permanent dark-brown nicotine-sticky state of December. The bar staff and clientele seem to go back a long way, having grown their impressive bellies together over the years in there. As a concession to the free-market thinking of the eighties and the yuppification of pubs across the land, they bunged four half-broken plastic chairs on the pavement outside during the summer months. Tony, Malcolm and I went out and sat on three of them, using the fourth as a table.
‘OK,’ said Malcolm, ‘there are three claims a wife can have over you financially speaking: one, the capital sum, i.e. a big wodge of cash if you’ve got it; two, the right to accommodation provided by you; and three, maintenance. Then money for child support comes over and above that.’
‘So that’s four really, ain’t it?’ said Tony.
‘Well, yes, but they try to separate child maintenance from the rest, even though in practice it all ends up going to the mother.’
‘Can’t I just give her half of everything and leave it at that?’ I said.
‘Well, no, Guy, you can’t. In this country it’s worked out according to what’s known as the wife’s needs and requirements. You’ll have to submit a full and frank declaration of how much you’re worth and then what you pay her is worked out according to that, set against her needs and requirements.’
‘What about Grace?’
‘Well, the judge won’t award you custody unless you can prove Liz is unfit to be a mother, which is unlikely, and undesirable in any case. It is assumed that you are unfit to be the principal carer of the child because you are a man. But anyway that’s academic because she doesn’t really work and you do, so the law assumes you can’t look after a child.’
‘What if I don’t want to work any more?’
He laughed. ‘What you want is not going to come into any of this.’ Tony laughed too. Malcolm went on. He was unstoppable:
‘I wouldn’t advise you to apply for joint custody either; I tried that. Although the 1989 Child Act specifically stipulates that joint custody should be considered except in unusual circumstances, in practice the judiciary ignore the wishes of Parliament and award residency to the mother in ninety-five per cent of cases. All you get is contact, which is completely unenforceable if she decides she doesn’t want to let you see the little blighter, or if she doesn’t like you any more, or if, like me, you run out of money.
As before, Malcolm’s zealous fire was consuming all it encountered, and exhausting me in the process.
‘It all comes down to money in the end,’ said Tony, and offered me his baccy.
‘I don’t think she ever did like me, now I come to look at it.’
‘I hate to sound all negative about this, Guy, but there’s no point in being unrealistic, is there? You’re in a very bad position not having a home for the Princess Grace to go to when she’s with you. There are contact centres nowadays. Awful, depressing places. Heart-rending. I went along at the specified time, but Geraldine just didn’t bother to show up and there was nothing I could do about it.’
‘I wish I’d never married her.’
‘Oh, no, that’s your main leverage. It’d be much worse if you’d never married, believe me. You’d have no rights over young Gracie at all, only responsibilities to pay for both of them.’
He started to write down some notes for me.
‘So if I’m going to be in court with you as your lay adviser, you’ve got to get me your tax returns for the last five years, all your property details, shareholdings, assets, income and out-goings, gifts received, oh, and a schedule of your own needs and requirements — might as well bung that in although it’s not officially relevant — and a full statement of the time you spend with Grace. And of course any insurance details or other policies you might have …’
‘I feel like I’m just a chequebook,’ I said.
‘You are, you are. That’s all you are, mate, just a way for the Government to avoid paying single-parent allowance. Let’s face it, people like us who don’t have total financial security shouldn’t really go around having children. A couple of rock stars could keep the human race going, sperm-wise. We’re just spare pricks, old son.’
Tony concurred. ‘Sounds a bit like the Egyptian system really. The pharaoh had a few hundred wives and thousands of children, while everyone else had to settle for a shag once every couple of decades and then back to hauling the stone slabs around to make his pyramid for’ him.’
I imagined big Hendo, Bob Rameses Henderson III, and the photo of his three young, expensive sons in tartan ties that had been shown to me by his wife Saara. It was true, a man like that can afford to have as many children as he likes. High priest of the temple, investment and contractual litigation, two hundred and fifty pounds an hour. The wallet-photos of his potential offspring unfolded into infinity like a credit-card concertina.
At last I got through to Liz. I was standing in the bar at the Bricklayer’s Arms, shovelling coins into their tabletop payphone. A large, sweaty man who was called Bill was nuzzled with his back up against me. They didn’t really want customers having private conversations in here and so the phone was annoyingly placed.
‘Where are you?’ said Liz, hearing the beery laughter behind me.
‘In the pub,’ I said.
‘I see,’ she replied in a told-you-so tone of voice. ‘What do you want?’ It was difficult to crack her hostility.
‘Well, to see how you are. Didn’t you get my messages? Is Grace OK?’
‘Checking up on your property?’ she said.
‘They told me she hasn’t been in Fledglings for three days. What’s going on?’
‘Don’t start shoutin
g at me, Guy. And I don’t like you ringing my mother and shouting at her either.’
‘I didn’t shout,’ I shouted.
‘There’s no point in us talking, Guy. I’ll see you at the counsellor’s next time. If you can still be bothered to come, that is. But apart from that I don’t really think this is very helpful, do you?’ She hung up on me.
I looked around the bar. No one was looking at me, but they all wanted me to leave, I could sense it. I rang her back anyway.
‘What?’ she said, as if I was the stupidest imbecile on earth.
‘Where’s Grace, Liz? Where is Grace?’
‘She’s having her bath, and I have to go and supervise actually because she’s had another ear infection and mustn’t get any water in it.’
‘Have you taken her to the doctor?’
‘What do you care, Guy? All you care about is Muffin and bloody Ketts and being the shittest-hottest agent in town. Go and sign a few deals, why don’t you? Leave me alone.’ She hung up again. God, it was hot, I had to get outside again. Tony and Malcolm broke off their conversation and looked up at me together.
‘How did it go?’ they said jointly.
‘Erm. Pretty good,’ I said, fidgeting. ‘They’re alive. But not well. Grace’s got another ear infection, and Liz’s …
‘Has she been to the doctor?’ asked Malcolm helpfully.
‘Don’t know that yet.’
‘So that’s a bit of a result this afternoon, I think it must be your round, sir.’ Tony offered up his empty glass.
‘Just a tomato juice for me,’ said Malcolm apologetically.
On returning with the drinks, I found Tony smoking the second half of his big joint, with his scarred brown legs outstretched over the kerb, while Malcolm spouted forth on his favourite subject.
‘You see, the actual cause of the breakdown bears absolutely no relation to the terms of the settlement and custody arrangements. It doesn’t matter who did what to whom; all that does is decide whether a marriage has irretrievably broken down, and once they’ve decided that, they completely ignore it, and proceed along no-fault divorce lines, which is actually not what’s written down in the 1979 Care and Proceedings Order Bill. But they ignore that completely.’
