“This place is amazing! Is that shark real?” she says. A waiter approaches dressed in navy trousers and a white roll neck jumper. Without a word, he opens a bottle of Meursault and pours a small amount into Grace’s glass, who gently moves the glass in small circles on the table then lifts it to her nose, inhales, sips a little, rinses the wine over her tongue and finally nods to the waiter, who then pours for them both.
“So how have you been, Emma?” says Grace.
“OK, I suppose. Sounds like things are as hectic and complicated as ever in the world of Miss Grace Evans,” she replies.
“Ah, well yes, but without complications I don’t suppose many of us would have anything to do.”
“Well, as long as you’re happy. You know I still don’t really know what you do…” she says enquiringly.
“Oh, it’s really boring to be honest. So, I hope you’re in the mood for some seafood…?”
The food is sensational and they manage two bottles of the Meursault with the attentive but unobtrusive waiter regularly filling their glasses, though Em isn’t too sure that Grace’s glass gets filled as much as hers.
“So what about Mark?” says Grace.
“Oh nothing, I still see him once in a while. In fact, I saw him last night, but it’s the same old thing; he’s the nicest, funniest, most amenable guy you could wish to meet, right up until the sex, and then he doesn’t want to know. It’s ridiculous! Ejaculation, then mute! At least he’s got his post-coital weeping under control. Sometimes I think it would be better if he just pissed off back to his wife and kids in New Zealand. What about you – anything serious on the cards?”
“Of course not; men are only good for one thing, though I hear some of them are learning how to cook and clean, which is promising. You have to assume that all men are rats and treat them accordingly.”
“Oh, speaking of which, get this – I was on the Guardian dating website yesterday and chatting away with this guy who actually sounded quite nice. It was all very civilised, you know, ‘Perhaps we might take the opportunity to enjoy a beverage this weekend’, and so on, when all of a sudden he launches into ‘Who’s your daddy – I’m gonna shove my shaky stick up your butterfly’!”
“What?!”
“Honestly! He was clearly having several conversations at once, some of which were considerably different in tone to the one we were having. Either that, or he was a complete schizophrenic and there was a change of driver at the wheel!”
“You should’ve gone with it.”
“I thought that after, but he dropped our conversation as soon as he realised.”
“Shame, that sounds like it could’ve been interesting,” says Grace.
“You know, I think I might’ve thought of a way to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to men.”
“Oh, I’d like to hear this.” Grace leans in and makes a pinnacle of her index fingers under her nose.
“Well, you know my sister has moved into this hippy commune in New Cross?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I was out at Purgatory last night watching this gypsy punk band –”
“That sounds like a cross between hip and sad.”
“Favour the latter. Anyway, one of Elsa’s housemates was there and she’s actually really nice. She studied anthropology and one of her areas of expertise was primatology – she reckoned that when it came to apes, you could tell a society’s sexuality by the size of the male’s testicles.”
“I’m listening,” says Grace.
“Apparently, gorillas have extremely small testicles in relation to their body size and this is because they live in polygynous societies, where one silverback rules the roost and expects to mate with all the females. Because he is the only sexually active male around, he doesn’t need to produce masses of sperm; he is merely topping up his ladies every time. Therefore, tiny nads. Compare this with chimpanzees that live in polygynandrous societies –”
“Polygy-what?”
“Polygynandrous – where everybody is screwing everybody. Male chimpanzees have very large testicles in relation to their body size because when they copulate with a female, they know that Uncle Bob has probably only just finished there himself, so they need to be making gallons of baby gravy for their sperm to stand a chance of pushing to the front of the queue. Hence, whopping nuts.”
“OK, what about humans?” says Grace, intrigued.
“According to Tanya, the situation with humans – and bonobos, whatever they might be…”
“Oh they’re pygmy chimps – very cute.”
“… Is medium-sized testicles…”
“Oh.” Grace looks disappointed.
“Which means that humans are somewhere in between; it could swing either way, so to speak.”
“Right, so what’s your new strategy for men then?”
“Well, Tanya pointed out that there’s a great deal of size range hidden away out there when it comes to human testicles.”
“Granted,” says Grace, nodding.
“So bag yourself a man with tiny spuds and you’re in business,” she says.
“Hang on a minute,” says Grace, “you said small testicles were to be found in societies where one male gets to have sex with lots of females who only have sex with him. That doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me.”
“Ah no, but the point is, all men are going to be unfaithful regardless of their testicle size…”
“All men are rats,” agrees Grace, nodding.
“Exactly – they believe it to be their divine apish right – but if you find yourself a man with small testicles, he will always assume that you are faithful to him,” she concludes triumphantly.
“Oh, I see, yes, very clever.”
“And then, after Tanya had finished her little lecture, she patted her boyfriend on the shoulder and said what lovely small balls he’d got. He did not look pleased. Really liked her…”
They both lean back in their chairs in satisfaction and look around at the other diners in the submarine restaurant. Emma is feeling a bit drunk and suddenly a wave of melancholy and nostalgia sweeps over her.
“I’ve been thinking about the past a lot; sometimes I wonder if our best days are behind us. Remember when we were in India? I don’t know if it’s rose-tinted glasses, but I feel like I was so much happier then. D’you remember us sitting on that mountain near Pushkar with our heads full of bhang and watching the sunrise over the desert? Those beautiful green and turquoise bee-eaters flying all around us, and the only sounds were the peacocks crying in the village down below. I remember thinking that everything just seemed so simple and perfect and defined. I feel like I’m becoming more blurred as I get older.”
“Em, darling, we wanted to see the world as a black and white place because the mind wants to simplify what it sees. We didn’t have the experience of real living that brings with it the realisation that the world is a grey place.”
“Maybe,” she says.
“Shall we get dessert?” suggests Grace.
“I might just have a brandy.”
“Being careful, are we?”
“What d’you mean?”
“Oh nothing, I was just saying –”
“That I’m fat.”
“Em, you do tend to eat a lot when you’re a bit low.”
“Oh great, so I’m fat AND depressed now!”
“Oh Em, I didn’t mean that.” Grace looks around and a waiter appears almost instantaneously, “We’d like an Armagnac –”
“A large one,” Emma says.
“Yes, a large one and I’ll have the pomegranate sorbet with white chocolate and chili ice cream.”
“Yes madam,” says the waiter.
“Jesus, he spoke,” she says to nobody in particular. Grace looks at her with a neutral face.
“So come on,” she says, as if it’s costing her a huge effort, “I want to know about this company you work for.”
“There’s not much to say…”
; “Oh come on, I want to hear about all the wonderful things your company does.”
“Well, it’s just a property development company; they build places for people to live.”
“No, really?” Her sarcasm is gaining strength. Their orders arrive. She downs her Armagnac in one and says, “Come on Grace, I figure you’re working at a higher level than ‘they build places for people to live’ considering the amount of money you are obviously earning. I’m sure I’m not that stupid that I can’t handle a slightly more technical description of what your company does. With all the massive profits that you’re making, it must give you such a good opportunity to put something back into the community.”
“Seagull has been buying considerable tracts of land in Africa and planting forests to offset their carbon emissions.”
“Oh this is too good to be true. Where?”
“Uganda.”
“What an amazing coincidence. So Tanya’s boyfriend, whose name was Tem, is an aid worker and he just happens to be going out to Uganda on Tuesday to try and help raise the profile of displaced people out there who have had their homes and their land sold by the government to companies who are buying it for carbon offsetting. Apparently subsistence farmers who have lived and worked the land for generations are being violently removed in order to make way for these wonderful western environmentalists.”
“It’s not as black and white as that, Em.”
“People are being shot and killed, women are being raped.”
“I’m just saying that our company is buying land out there in good faith; it’s not our fault if the Ugandan government doesn’t accept these people’s claims to the land.”
“Never your fault, is it Grace? As long as the world is grey, you don’t have to take responsibility for anything. You can just keep grabbing money.”
“There’s nothing wrong with making money.”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with making money; it’s an unnatural desire that can never be satisfied. You can never be full with money, so you just keep taking and taking until there isn’t enough for anybody else.”
“Fine, if money’s so unimportant to you, you can go halves on the bill, can’t you?” says Grace.
There is a long pause.
“OK, fine,” says Em.
Grace offers her a lift, but she doesn’t take it. It takes her three hours to walk home in the steadily falling rain. When she gets to her flat, Mr Buttons is waiting for her by the door. He immediately begins purring around her legs. She has not brought a doggy bag.
“Fuck off Muttons,” she says, kicking the cat up the arse.
The lights in the flat do not work. Using her mobile phone for light, she checks the fuse box. There is nothing amiss.
She gets into her slanket and sits on the couch in front of the empty TV screen. She pulls her slanket around her and sits in the darkness of her cut-off flat.
Strip
“Your strip is like your battle dress, man.” Pedro takes a long drag on the joint and continues, “It’s like the highlander’s kilt, the red Indian’s war paint, or the SAS with the black jumper. When I put this Millwall shirt on, I’m ready to face the enemy. I have made my mental preparations and I accept the possibility of death, man I welcome death with open arms, because this is the only noble death left open to a warrior man like myself in the modern world. The modern world, ‘e want to take away my purpose, my fighting spirit, ‘e want to cut my cojones.” He grabs his crotch and squints as if he is staring into the sun. “’E want to take my power and domesticate me, like, how you say, the neutral dog.”
“A neutered dog,” enunciates Hendo very carefully in his Glaswegian twang. He is sitting in his usual chair at the end of the kitchen table, wearing Pedro’s sombrero and drinking Special Brew.
“Exactly. The newder dog, that’s what the modern world wants us to be: we placid, we smile, we nice to be left with the babies, we shit in the box. No more howl at the moon, no more running with the pack. ‘E want us to suppress our very nature, ‘e want to take away the specific ingredients that make us a man. But not Pedro, huh. I know the score and it ain’t no conspiracy, man; they ain’t no-one hiding in the shadows pulling the strings like a puppet; all the planes flying over don’t got no chemical sprays to deposit on the population and make us docile. This is evolution, man. But we got too good, we take the natural out of the natural selection. We so good at making the order from the chaos that there ain’t no chaos left. But we need ‘im; too much equilibrium don’t make an equilibrium. So I put on my shirt and I stand up to put the balance back in the balance. I put a little chaos back in the mix. ‘E benefit everybody when Pedro go loco, huh.”
He sings to the melody of ‘We Are Sailing’:
“No-one likes us, no-one likes us,
No-one likes us, we don’t care,
We are Millwall, super Millwall,
We are Millwall, from the Den.”
Elsa comes out of her room.
“Guys, can you keep it down just a little bit, please – I’ve got to work tonight and I could do with just a couple of hours’ more sleep.”
“Eh, beautiful, I so sorry – these cun’s got no respect for they housemates, huh. Pedro keep them quiet for you, OK?”
“Sorry Elsa,” says Ben, as he pours water from the kettle onto his dried noodle breakfast, “we’ll put a muffler on him.”
“Thanks guys, later,” says Elsa as she shuffles back to bed.
“You can get these things now for dogs,” says Billy, putting aside his newspaper for a moment, “that fit to a dog’s collar, and if the dog barks or makes a loud noise, it squirts it with a jet of water. That Japanese girl I was seeing, Kira, she had this nasty little dog, a Spitz, that would bark all day. Her neighbour was a taxi driver who worked nights, so he needed to sleep in the day. Well this dog made this guy so crazy, he’d come round and complain and I’d tell him, y’know, sorry, but what are you gonna do? Anyway, he could see he wasn’t gonna be able to do anything by shouting at me so he came up with a better solution – brought Kira one of these electro-squirty-collars one day and that was it. I put the thing on it, took him about 20 minutes to get used to it, running round barking and yelping, and after that I never heard a squeak from the little fucker again.”
“You ain’t putting no electric squirty collar on Pedro, man – you don’t even wanna try. I’ll be kicking your ass so hard, you be buying groceries with your mother for a month.”
“OK Peds, easy buddy, easy.” Ben puts aside his bowl of noodles and holds his hands up with eyes wide in mock fear. “That sounds real nasty and look, you’re scaring Billy – he’s gone pale and everything. For Billy’s sake, keep it down a notch will you?”
“OK Ben, since you ask so nicely and because Billy scared,” Billy is still nonchalantly reading the sports pages, “I make myself Senor Tranquilo till we leave the house, but listen guys, today is an important day, this is the big one. I cannot stress the importance of your first trip to the Den. This is the once-in-the-blue-moon opportunity for the forces of chaos to rise up and shake the foundations of our society. Not too much, but just enough for the people to remember why they are alive. Tonight we will run with the pack boys; we will howl at the blue moon and shake our cojones,” he grabs his crotch and squints as if he’s looking at the sun, “at the world, the hijo de putas…” He tails off into a stream of Spanish curses.
“Is Sammy coming to the match?” says Billy to Ben.
“Nah, he hates football,” says Billy, folding the paper and tossing it into the recycling.
“Shame, we almost had all the boys out on a school trip together.”
“Well there’s Pete, too.”
“True, but y’know, I don’t count Pete. It’s funny, I sort of expected to get to know Pete a bit more since he offered to help me with my training, but he clams up whenever we talk about anything but boxing. I mean, he comes alive when he’s on the job and he knows everything about the sport, and I mean everything: w
ho won what when, how they trained, the tactics, what they ate! It’s unbelievable. He’s a great trainer.”
“You might not notice the difference,” says Ben, “but I think this thing you two have got has made a real difference to him; he’s way more sociable than he was when I first moved in. He never used to come out of his room at all, apart from to eat and to shit. He sat down here the other night with me and Anna and Hendo and smoked his pipe for a good few hours. Granted he didn’t say much, but he seemed happy enough to just sit there with us and enjoy the company.”
“Maybe you’re right. It’s amazing to think that he’s been living here for almost thirty years.”
“One of the founding fathers.”
“Yeah, and he just seems to have become a part of the furniture.”
“I guess it must be weird for him. He must’ve seen hundreds of housemates come and go over the years. You must get tired of making friends with people and then they move on and you have to start all over again. It must be wearing. You can understand him being aloof.”
“But what does he do? I mean, where does he get his money from? He doesn’t claim dole, he doesn’t work – well certainly not in any conventional sense that I can see – and he doesn’t seem to have any friends, I mean apart from us. He just lives in that dark room – what does he do all day? Smoke his pipe? Watch films? Play online poker? Spank his monkey? The monkey gets tired.”
“Depends on the monkey, Billy. Anyway, I know what you’re saying, but I really think Pete’s good. Life kicks everyone up the arse once in a while: we all get our hearts broken, we all get let down by the people we love, we all make mistakes, but some people take it hard, they aren’t so thick-skinned and they take it to heart and they find it’s hard to pick themselves up again and they don’t like to feel like that. Maybe some people decide that the best course of action is to limit the risk of further damage and close off the exposure to the outside world as much as possible. It’s like the difference between a cavefish and a fish in the sea – they’re no better or worse off than each other, they’re just suited to different environments. It’s no wonder Pete’s been here so long – this house allows him to be a recluse without completely isolating himself from the rest of the world. It’s perfect for him, really.”
The Laundry Basket Page 6
