by Emlyn Rees
‘You want to tell me what the hell all that crap in the church was about?’ he asked.
I didn’t reply. In the light of what he’d just said, there seemed little point in discussing the nature of blasphemy with him. Besides, I’d already given up justifying my actions to Miles. His suddenly showing an interest in me, even being here at all, made me wary enough as it was.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘What do you care?’ I muttered without looking up from the table.
I’d expected a rebuke, but instead he simply said, ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ He rubbed at his nose with the back of his hand. ‘That speccy kid next to you was giving you grief about something, wasn’t he?’
I nodded my head.
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ he asked after a moment’s silence.
‘No.’
‘Want me to have a word with him?’
‘I can deal with it myself. Look,’ I continued, ‘let’s just drop it, all right? It’s not important.’
‘If that’s the way you want it …’
Again, I said nothing.
‘How are your lessons going?’ he asked.
I picked up the pint of bitter that Miles had bought me and took a sip, noticing that he was already halfway through his own drink, even though he’d only just sat down. Mine tasted acrid and yo-yoed in my stomach, but I managed to hold it down. I cleared my throat and tried to look like I could handle it all right. ‘OK,’ I replied.
‘You working hard?’
‘Yes.’ I screwed up my face, searching my mind for small talk. ‘Sometimes. History is hard, you know. And the Latin … I get confused … Some of the other boys in my year, they’ve been studying it since they were seven …’
Miles nodded his head in what I took to be understanding. ‘You’ve got O levels coming up, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah. In a month.’
‘Don’t worry about them too much.’
‘I’m not.’
His mouth cracked into a half-grin. ‘But don’t worry about them too little either,’ he said. ‘I pay good money to send you here.’
‘I know.’
‘Seriously, though, son, if you fail them, you fail them. I never got any qualifications and it’s not held me back.’
I stared at him impassively. This was nothing I hadn’t heard before.
‘You can always come and work for me,’ he added.
I took another swig of my beer.
‘What about the rest of it?’ he asked.
‘The rest of what?’
‘School. You know, what you get up to when you’re not working … How’s all that?’
What do you want to know? I thought. That I’m sick to death of this place and the end of term seems a century away? That I’m planning (whether you like it or not) on refusing to attend sixth form anywhere other than at home with Mickey? Or that I’m terrified about messing my exams up before then? No, I thought. You don’t want to know any of that stuff, any more than I want to tell you. You’d rather ignore it, in exactly the same way you’ve ignored everything to do with Mum and me that hasn’t suited you.
And even if I did tell you the truth, you wouldn’t be able to handle it, would you? You wouldn’t understand about the exams, about how important they are to me, about me wanting to make something decent of myself. You wouldn’t understand because you think exams are for jerks and your idea of decent is hanging out with cheap crooks and fucking cheap whores behind your wife’s back.
He lit another cigarette and smiled at me uncertainly, waiting for me to speak.
I shrugged. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Are you still seeing Mickey?’
I shifted awkwardly on my seat. ‘We write,’ I told him, and then, ‘We’re going to go on holiday together in the summer.’
This last sentence had slipped out, because going away with Mickey, just the two of us, had been occupying my mind all term. I hadn’t wanted Miles to know it, in case he objected and said we were too young. I’d wanted to spring it on him and Mum as Mickey and I were walking out of the house with our bags already packed. My heart stepped up a beat, as I waited for his objection, but it never came.
‘She’s a beautiful girl,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘Are you in love with her?’
I didn’t answer. My emotions were my own. I didn’t want Miles – this man who I considered had got selfishness down to a fine art – sneering at them, undermining me with his own scepticism.
‘You’d know if you were …’ he told me, his eyes glinting.
‘Oh, right,’ I snapped, ‘and you’re the expert on love now, are you?’
‘I never said that.’
‘What do you care what I think about her?’
I watched him scratch at the stubble under his chin, lost in deliberation. He said nothing and looked away from me, across the pub garden to the open fields beyond.
‘You don’t like me much, do you, Fred?’ he eventually asked, turning and levelling his stare at me.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’
‘I’m sorry for that.’
His eyes flickered, searching my face for a reaction. He didn’t get one. I swallowed down the hurt I felt. I loved Miles, but no, I didn’t like him. To tell him that I did would be a betrayal of myself and I didn’t want to give him my forgiveness; he’d done nothing to deserve it. Everything in his life was so easy for him and so difficult for the people around him. I wanted him to suffer now, as I’d suffered because of him. I wasn’t going to lie to him about who he was, or what I thought about him.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘well, maybe you should’ve thought of that before.’
‘Maybe I should,’ he conceded, but with a roughness in his voice. ‘But maybe that’s what I’m doing right now.’
He lifted his glass and drank, lowering it from his lips when only a centimetre of liquid remained. Contemplatively, he swilled it round the glass. ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ he finally said. I studied his face. The insecurity I’d noticed outside the chapel was back. Go on, I thought. Say it. Say you’re going to leave Mum. ‘There’s been some trouble at the club,’ he went on.
Miles never talked business with me. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘It’s Tony. He’s walked out and I don’t think he’s going to be coming back.’
This made no sense to me. ‘But –’
Miles lifted his hand to silence me. ‘He made some threats before he left. I’m not going to burden you with the details, because it might not come to anything.’
‘But if it does?’ I asked.
‘If it does, then … I don’t know. I don’t know yet, Fred … but everything,’ – he stressed the word again, almost, it seemed, for his own benefit – ‘everything might change.’ His face twitched in awkward sincerity.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘What I told you before,’ he continued, ‘about being sorry … I want you to know that I meant it. I never planned things to be this way between us. I always thought that when you were a little older, I’d … we’d …’ He pulled a Zippo lighter from his pocket. ‘Listen to me,’ he growled at himself. ‘I can’t even make myself heard.’
As he leant forward to light a cigarette, I stared at the hair on the top of his head and noticed for the first time that it had started to thin. I wanted to know what thoughts were rushing through his brain beneath. Tony had threatened him. Was Miles frightened, or angry, or both? Was he in danger? Was he going to lose the club? What was he going to do about it and why was he speaking to me in riddles? Any other son, I think, would have asked his father these questions, but I couldn’t bring myself to. All I saw was an opportunity to reject him, to take strength from his weakness and to throw his love back in his face. I wouldn’t feel pity for him. I wouldn’t have him turning my view of him round on a whim like this. He was going to have to work a lot harder than that. ‘I should be getting back,’ I said. ‘I’ve got work to d
o.’
He looked up at me and I ignored the sadness in his eyes, my face already set like stone.
Three years ago I became addicted to an intricate and violent computer game called Quake. It was a shoot ’em up, and Eddie and I would spend hours battling it out with each other in the flat, or pooling our resources against other combatants on-line. Whenever I paused or actually quit the game, I’d find myself suffering immediate pangs of withdrawal over the beautifully designed virtual world I’d just abandoned. My real environment would appear lacklustre and monochrome in comparison, and all I’d want to do was to slip straight back on-line again.
It’s the same with Mickey now: one fix leaves me craving another. The low-level angst, melancholy and depression that invariably accompanied my first few slices of Quake cold turkey are all present and correct here today. (Hence my leaning up against the empty and unused filing cabinet in my office, staring out of the window, like some lovesick Fifties teenager slumped up against a Wurlitzer.) So, too, are the retinal flashes I used to suffer – only this time they feature snapshots and memories of a childhood spent in Rushton during the last century, rather than (thankfully) virtual machine-guns carving virtual enemies in half.
I feel so relaxed with Mickey, so … accepted for who I really am. It’s like having all the pressure of the last fifteen years since Miles’s death lifted from me. It’s like dropping my mask and smiling with my own mouth for the first time. Mickey was there. She knows how it was. She sees me warts and all and she doesn’t judge me for it. And if she can do that – if I can be that way with her – where does that leave Rebecca and Eddie and everyone else? Do we really know each other at all?
Behind me, my laptop belches – one of Susan’s little innovations which signals that my lunch hour is over and it’s time to hit the grindstone once more. With a deep sigh, I peel myself off the filing cabinet and walk back to my desk and sit down. I wipe my hand across my forehead and, staring at the glaze of sweat on my palm, curse the air-conditioning company and global warming in general for what must be the fiftieth time today. Then my laptop barks at me and starts to pant (another of Susan’s gimmicks), and I click on to check my mail:
Hey, there, Mr Romantic-Faraway-Look-In-His-Eyes. Dreaming about your wedding day?
Twisting in my chair, I peer through the gap on the glass front of my office, between the flashy silver and red graphics of a couple of newsasitbreaks.com posters left over from last year’s Tech Spin trade fair.
Sure enough, across the open-plan desks of the perpetually animated sales team, Susan is staring back at me from her own glass pen, smiling while fanning her face with a fluorescent orange flip-flop. I shake my head at her in reply and she holds eye contact with me as she touch-types a further communication. My screen barks once more and I read:
Rebecca?
Again, I look round at Susan and again I shake my head. Another text message pops into my inbox:
Well, I certainly hope it’s no one else …
Without thinking – about Rebecca, about the wedding, about the sheer bloody consequences of this kind of banter – I rattle back:
It is …
It takes roughly the length of a blink between the moment I hit SEND and my reply reaching Susan’s screen. And it takes me roughly the same amount of time to realise quite how public I’ve just allowed the confusion within me to become.
My attempt to ascertain Susan’s reaction is frustrated by one of the sales team, Jim, who’s now up on his feet and pitching between us, phone clamped between his shoulder and jaw, waving his arms around like he’s guiding a chopper on to an oil rig during a tempest.
My frustration, though, is temporary; Susan’s back to me within seconds:
For real?
The forefinger of my right hand gets as far as the Y of my intended YES, when my fingers freeze above the keyboard.
I can’t tell Susan – even though the urge to set free the mess of emotions inside me and confide in someone is so strong. Actually speaking about my feelings, I know will start some terrible ball rolling down a steep, steep slope, gathering up all before it and changing the appearance of my world for ever. I mean, that’s how it happens, isn’t it? It’s like when you’re a kid. You confide in someone about something and they tell someone else, and the next thing you realise everybody knows what you’ve said and you have to stand by it. It’s no longer a possibility you’re simply mulling over in your mind but an intent upon which you’re suddenly expected to act.
And I can’t act, can I? I can’t see Mickey again, not without telling Rebecca about her first. Mickey was insistent about it. No flakiness, she said. But how can I introduce Mickey to Rebecca as a friend when there’s still a risk that Mickey might let something slip about Miles, and when ... when the truth of it is that yesterday, sitting up there on the roof terrace with her, I was thinking about her as much more than that?
Reaching out for the keyboard once more, I delete the Y I’ve already typed and settle, instead, for:
Forget about it.
Susan’s back at me in a flash:
OK, but if you ever want to talk, you know where to find me.
I type her OK and glance over at the bacon and avocado sandwich I picked up at lunchtime, still in its plastic triangle on the windowsill. I know I should probably eat something, but my appetite’s shot to bits and, instead, I grab my can of Diet Coke and take a swig.
I gaze around my office, at the squared-off polystyrene ceiling, the Velcro dartboard on the wall, the bright white target chart with its magnetic red and black flags (fallout from some strictly analogue management guru drafted in by Personnel last year). Then, so distracted and simultaneously buzzed am I by what I nearly let slip to Susan that I do what I’ve been avoiding doing all morning: I survey my desk.
I like to think of myself as a ‘paperless office’ kind of a person, but the evidence before me is way off. Normally, my work is as portable as my laptop and phone, but today, today I have something the size of the Sunday Times print run on my desk. To the right of my laptop is a stack of sponsorship initiatives and their correlating content suggestions that Susan’s been working on with Graham and that now need wheat-chaffing by me. There are also some queried invoices from the Brick Lane launch that Accounts want clarifyed. None of this, though, is what’s bothering me.
No, it’s the significantly larger pile of paperwork to the left of my laptop that’s responsible for my uncharacteristic recalcitrance in relation to my desk. Rising up from the Wonder Woman mouse mat that forms its foundations (part of Michael’s Thanksgiving jollity towards his British team), it teeters perilously out across the edge of the desk like a condemned factory chimney. I try to look away, but it’s no use: the same as with a particularly nasty horror film at a particularly nasty juncture, it has me hooked.
There it stands: the Wedding: To Do pile.
The worrying thing is that I can’t bring myself to connect to what any of this means, let alone do anything about it. And it frightens me. I’m getting married in just over two weeks’ time. I should be excited and nervous, but I’m not. I’m detached and distant from the whole event. My certainty has vanished and there doesn’t seem to be a thing I can do about it.
Instead, all I can do is picture myself at the altar of Shotbury church before Rebecca arrives on our wedding day, turning round and surveying the people in the pews behind me, searching, ever searching for the one face I want to see, but the one face that I know isn’t and can’t be there.
Love. What’s that? What I have with Rebecca? What I thought I had with Rebecca? What I think I can have with Mickey once more? I haven’t been head-over-heels in love with anyone since I was a teenager. Perhaps head-over-heels in love is an option only available to teenagers, and other people who are fortunate enough never to have had their hearts broken and hardened. Perhaps I’m crazy wanting more than I already have.
*
‘Honestly, these people don’t half get on my tits,’ Rebecca obser
ves. ‘Three bed with garden. That’s what I told them. Not one bed with conservatory, or three bed with balcony. It can’t be that difficult, can it? And the rot they come out with. The market’s this, the market’s that. What do they know about markets and marketing? I’ve done more marketing diplomas than they’ve had hot dinners, or kebabs – or whatever it is that that they shovel into their sweaty bellies. And do you know what else, Fred? Fred?’
‘Wuh?’ The road ahead comes sharply into focus and I turn to Rebecca, who’s in the driving seat next to me.
‘Fred, are you listening?’
The last thing I remember is getting into the car after a disappointing viewing of a cramped basement flat over on Carlton Vale. ‘What?’
‘Are you –’
‘Sure,’ I say, fumbling around in my memory for Rebecca’s last words and hazarding a wild guess: ‘Shovelling stuff into Betty’s wellies, right?’
Rebecca rolls her eyes at me, muttering, ‘Estate agents, darling. I was talking about estate agents,’ before turning her attention back to the road.
The blood-red cherry of her lips suddenly shrinks as she sticks her foot down on the accelerator, slams her palm on to the horn and swerves to the left. The car horn blares long and loud, and I drop my shades and stare up out of Rebecca’s convertible at the wide blue sky.
‘Up yours, Grandpa,’ Rebecca shouts through the open window at an angry-looking man in a rusty old Mini Metro that she’s just cut up. ‘Now, then,’ she continues, winking at me and pushing back a rogue auburn curl from her forehead, ‘who’s next?’
‘Next?’
‘On the list.’
I look down at the folder marked SATURDAY on my lap. SUNDAY, along with folders equating to several other blocked-out days before our wedding, are back at Rebecca’s flat, which we left at just gone eight this morning, ‘To give us a jump on everyone else and a good ten hours in which to get stuff done’.
‘Which list?’ I ask, because the SATURDAY folder contains several of them, each neatly typed up and colour-coded by Rebecca’s assistant, Paul.
