‘He’s very nice,’ his mother said reprovingly. ‘He really is. Your father just wanted to sit down and gossip with Barbara about people no one else had ever heard of and, of course, Ted would keep on interrupting, as he had a perfect right to, in his own house, when his wife and a guest are being a little tedious. He’s really very nice. On the Sunday morning, before lunch, he saw that the whole thing was really hopeless, we might as well leave your father and Barbara alone to get it out of their system, so he said, “Come on, Cathy” —he called me that, but you can’t take offence, you really can’t— “let’s go for a drive and leave these two to get on with lunch.” And we drove to the seaside and threw bread to the gulls, and when we got back, they’d finished with every single person either of them had ever worked with, and had made really quite a delicious cottage pie for lunch. He really is nice, don’t listen to your father.’
Two weeks later, David went to London to buy some new shoes. It was one of his small pieces of self-respect that he would not buy shoes in St Albans; in the St Albans Marks & Sparks he would go as far as routine white cotton shirts and socks and plain V-necks, but no more than that. He took the Friday afternoon off, and met Richard at six in a bar in Rupert Street. The stools were lined up along the glass perimeter of the bar, and on each a man on his own sat and read the free gay magazine handed out in bars, or played with the texting facility on his mobile phone. One poor sap actually had his laptop open and was searching the Internet. Even David could see that they would be better off extinguishing their battery-charged devices, turning to each other and starting to speak. But Richard was not there yet, so David, after buying a drink he did not much care for, Campari-soda, to make himself look interesting, sat down on an empty bar stool facing outwards into the street, got out his mobile phone and started writing a long text, almost a diary entry, to Richard, to pass the time.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ Richard said, bustling in, flushed and quiffed. ‘Can’t believe it. Friday fucking afternoon and the fucking client calls, says it’s no good, we need a rethink ASAP, Belinda says fine, hey, guys, Monday morning at eleven they’re coming in to see the results, the new results. And I say let’s go home and do fuck all and present them with exactly the same material and see if they notice. But apparently, according to Belinda, that won’t do. How are you, darling? Bought some lovely shoes?’
When the drinks had been fetched, and Richard had greeted a couple of acquaintances, exes, casual shags, or whatever they were, they sat down in their small corner. Richard’s gaze was unwaveringly on David’s face, not wandering about the room. David knew this was a compliment consciously paid to him, that for the next hour Richard was all his, whatever the delights just out of eyeshot, whatever the opportunities within the range of a good spit. David found this ostentatious compliment slightly insulting, as if there could be no debate that there was something more interesting happening elsewhere in the bar. He began to talk about his parents.
‘And,’ he finished, ‘I had a phone call from my mother this morning, saying that they’re going down to Devon again, next weekend. They never go anywhere.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Richard said. ‘I remember when they went to Normandy a couple of years ago. And you went to Florence with your mother, didn’t you?’
‘Venice,’ David said. ‘All the same.’
‘You know what I think?’ Richard said. ‘I think they’re having a little break-out. It needn’t necessarily be a wife-swapping, swingers sort of thing.’
‘What?’
‘I said, it needn’t be a wife-swapping, swingers sort of thing. Going down to Cockering, was it? Lovely name. Catching up with old friends, your dad and his secretary’s old husband doing a late-night high-five on the landing as they pass each other going from one bedroom to the next—’
‘You really are too much,’ David said.
‘What? Isn’t that what you meant? I thought that was the whole point of what you were saying. It seems a long way to go to find a suitable couple, but—’
‘Richard, please.’
6.
Every week, David went over to his parents. He would always make a point of ironing his shirt and making sure his jeans and jumper were clean and hole-less—there had been an outbreak of moths recently in his wardrobe. He would make a point of going slightly out of his way to fetch a good bottle of wine from Oddbins, rather than stop at the all-hours shop, which was directly on the route. He would often pause to pick up a book that he’d read and enjoyed recently, to lend to his mum. He was a good son, and his regular habits proved it to them, and to him.
‘We’re only looking at properties at the moment,’ his mother was saying. ‘Nothing’s been settled as yet.’
‘Nothing’s been settled?’ David said. He felt like bursting into tears. When people said that nothing had been settled, it meant that they’d abandoned their present life. ‘I don’t know—it seems like an awful risk.’
‘A risk?’ David’s father said. ‘I don’t know about that.’
‘We’re not moving all that far away,’ his mother said. ‘It’s not as adventurous as all that.’
‘The thing is…’ David marshalled his thoughts. They were grim. ‘The thing is that you’re both not as young as you used to be. What happens if something happens to one of you? In a new town, you wouldn’t have anyone. Here, you’re surrounded by people you know. In an emergency, who would help out in—in—’
‘Hanmouth,’ his mother said. ‘Well, I see what you mean, but it does seem a shame not to move while we still have our faculties.’
‘David’s right,’ his father said. ‘There is that to be thought of.’
‘In ten years’ time, it’ll be too late,’ his mother said, patiently explaining. ‘The thing is that we’re perfectly capable of making new friends, you know. It’s a very lively little town. There are reading groups, the WI, Neighbourhood Watch. They’re in and out of each other’s houses all day long, you can see.’
‘You hate the WI,’ David said, almost in tears. For a terrible moment, he thought about the possibility of himself moving down to Devon—perhaps not in the same town as his parents, but in another one, a small town just up the coast, from where he could pop in every Saturday. He stopped himself.
‘I don’t know why you’re being like this about it,’ his mother said. ‘It’s not like you to be such a stick. Anyone would think we were talking about moving to Patagonia. It’s only three hours in the car. We could practically pop back for lunch if we felt like it.’
In the months following, it seemed as if the whole process had stalled. Nothing further was said about it, though on three occasions, their regular routine was interrupted because the pair of them had gone down to Hanmouth. He felt that an awkwardness was rising between them; after that first conversation, they were tight as clams about their proposition. He cursed himself: if he had been a little bit clever, a little bit more encouraging, they would have kept him up to date; they might even have asked him to come down and take a look at the place.
Hanmouth filled his thoughts, like a neglected wife dwelling on a discovered mistress. After a week or two, he yielded to the temptation, and looked the town up on its own website. The website was maintained by a local amateur fisherman, whose ideas of what might be interesting to the outside world were curious and filled with personal anecdotes of sea-borne weather from decades back. ‘The great Storm of 1954 was remembered Long in Hanmouth, it carried the Benches at the present day standing along Wolf Walk right out to Sea in the course of a Single night.’ The erratic style of the amateur fisherman covered the whole town in embarrassment; his parents could not be serious about moving to a place where the capital letters were so erratic, the standards of education so low. But the photographs were beautiful: an absurdly picturesque town, white-painted cottages, a church on a headland with a green churchyard and a yew, high above the glistening estuary. There were portraits, too, of many local figures—three white-coated butchers, a bravely
smiling girl in the cheesemonger’s, proffering Stilton at the end of a knife, a smiling plump lady with glasses on her bosom and a shelf of brownish books behind her, representing the second-hand bookshop, a whole classful of volunteers standing before the Devon Sea Rescue charity shop, and then half a dozen of the retired fisherman, his children and five blond grandchildren. The children looked appallingly prosperous, and the grandchildren hardly less so. ‘The following photographs were Taken in July 2004 from a Jaunt in a friends’ Light Aircraft and show Hanmouth from the Air.’ His parents, David was sure, had no friends who owned Light Aircraft—the illiteracy somehow added to the uncomfortable prospect—and he certainly did not. Following a thought, he made a search, and found some Hanmouth estate agents. ‘Have you got those Chinese blurbs nearly ready?’ his boss called, from the far end of the segmented room. ‘I was hoping to have a look at them today.’
‘Yes, almost done,’ David said, investigating Devon house prices. After five minutes he sighed, and sat back with happiness. It was not going to happen. He did not know exactly what the house prices in St Albans were like, but he was pretty sure that they were not going to match the seven-figure sums in this small Devon town. He wondered that his parents had not yet discovered that: a glance in an estate agent’s window would surely have revealed how unsuitable this place was. He did hope they weren’t going to move to anywhere horrid, just for the sake of it.
‘You seem cheerful today,’ his mother said, as he arrived at their house on a Saturday lunchtime, new jersey on, an ironed shirt and even a tie underneath. ‘I’ve made a cottage pie. And we saw a flat this week we really like. We’ve got the description out to show you.’
7.
The week after David met Mauro for the first time, he picked up the telephone and gave him a ring. It was practically impossible not to. He required reality to catch up with the general impression he had given out. Richard and, he supposed, Rodrigo believed that he had not just met a man at the club, but had gone to bed with him in a generally satisfactory way. David had given this impression not so much to save his own face as to save Richard’s feelings; he had, after all, gone to so much trouble on David’s behalf. David knew from bitter experience that a boyfriend invented from scratch, based on absolutely nothing, was never convincing—he recalled a sour little episode with Dymphna at work, whom he’d thought was his friend, first failing to ask the right questions, then asking too many, then doing it all over again in front of an audience, suppressing a tremor of laughter. But Mauro was a real person; it was none of their business what degree their intimacy had reached (he remembered the sight of Mauro in the kitchen doorway in his underpants, reaching up with his left arm, yawning and smiling sleepily). He found himself telling not just Richard, not just his neighbour downstairs as they were taking out the rubbish at the same time, but even his mother that he had met someone, that it seemed to be going quite well.
Afterwards he cursed himself for telling the neighbour; after all, Vanessa could know perfectly well, if she wanted to look into it, how many nights he spent at home, how many nights David’s heavy tread up the stairs was accompanied by another, defter, more eager walk. But it was a very good idea to tell his mother about Mauro. If he was honest, his parents’ departure for Hanmouth, three months before, was intimately connected to his venturing out into Vauxhall, the dance floor, the following of a handsome Italian stranger home. Without the sense of being abandoned by the most dully reliable element of his life, out of all the dully reliable elements of his life, David would probably not have thought of venturing out at all. His parents’ removal had had the effect of making him see his life, and to go out in search of improvement. In part, his search, more seriously undertaken, for a companion who could be taken out in public was his sense that his relationship with his parents could be improved greatly if only he had a boyfriend to present to them, to talk about with them, all of that. The details of sexual fulfilment, of having a lover, the whole erotic caboodle of the face on the pillow and the body pressed against your own was important and fascinating to David; however, he saw the social possibilities of turning to an acquaintance at a party and saying, ‘Have you met XXX, my boyfriend?’ (A wave of white noise in the head at the mere prospect of a name.) That seemed most important, after persuading his parents that he was, after all, all right, that, yes, I have met someone, yes, it does seem to be going well, yes, indeed, we’ll come and stay, whenever you like, it’s time—a joshing, manly, even parental tone entering here—it’s time you met my young man.
‘Hello?’ the voice said.
David introduced himself, not leaving a pause, but gabbling out the place, the time, the occasion, the consequences, and five circumstantial details about his appearance and what Mauro had been wearing the night they met, and finally referring to himself as ‘Mr Poppers’, fixedly staring at a blank space on the wall as he did so.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mauro said. ‘How are you? Nice to hear from you.’ In the background, there was a blitzing wave as Mauro evidently walked past a pneumatic drill, and David paused to get his next line right, and get it heard. ‘Hello? Hello?’ Mauro said, mistaking the silence.
‘I wondered what you were up to this Saturday,’ David said. It wasn’t so hard, and in a moment they had arranged to meet for a drink in Vauxhall, and then maybe on to a club—they weren’t going to that place again: Massimo got beaten up and thrown out by the security, and for what? David listened to the little story with pleasure. It wound on without ever getting to a conclusion. He had wondered what, actually, Mauro and he would talk about if they ever met sober in daylight, and here was the answer. He would do very well.
8.
The possibilities for improvement in David’s life were not all that could be hoped for. He worked for a firm which, among other things, did something that had, always, to be explained three or four times, and then people were not quite sure about it. They provided copy, in English, for foreign businesses. ‘Translations, you mean?’ people would say. No, not quite: David’s boss had discovered, or believed, that all across the world companies were dying for some English copy to add a touch of class, English being the language of aspiration, whether in Saudi Arabia, China or Paraguay. On T-shirts, in company brochures, on the backs of paperbacks, on tourist pamphlets, English was required not so much to convey meaning but to add an aroma of social mobility, of class, of get-up-and-go and pizzazz and vim and the rest of it. The paragraphs that David composed and sold on, licensing all manner of linguistic and physical product to remote and non-Anglophone corners of the world, were not supposed to make sense: they were supposed to sell. ‘But doesn’t everyone speak English?’ people would say, but apparently everyone did not. Subtler enquirers would say, ‘But why can’t they write their own bad English?’ to which David’s answer was that his bad English and his reliable English company had, evidently, a solid badness all its own. ‘Kiss My World of Dreams’ a David paragraph would begin, and go on in similar vein. The company ventured into import-export, and David’s day was taken up with other tasks, too. But three or four times a week, he was taken away from the world of invoices and dockets and online ordering protocols in favour of kissing the World of Dreams, and wrote rubbish for an hour or two.
The company had begun relations with companies in Japan, where Dymphna had spent three years teaching English as a foreign language before giving up the unequal struggle; she had acquired an unexpected range of Japanese boys to spin into a business. They used to write slogans for T-shirts—I Am Butterfly Connect, Let Each Man Do His Best Agile Sports Life, Invitation for the Proud Life, Crocodile Profusion. There was one David was particularly proud of; it was, in his view, a perfect fulfilment of the thing that Japanese T-shirt manufacturers wanted and would like to produce themselves. It read: ‘Spanking! Size Case Nomadic: You can find It up completely. At any Time at Any purpose, In your life, Style. That’s something Like’. He never heard back from any of the companies who formed their clients, then or when the b
usiness started to expand into other, bigger markets. He saw his job, in part, as amusing English tourists in Tokyo and Shanghai, and liked to think of the innocent Japanese who both bought and sold his wearable slogans as in on the joke, and rather enjoying it.
In the past two years, a new development had occurred. Dymphna returned from a trip to China, and had discovered that Chinese teenagers in Beijing liked to carry around books in English. As a fashion statement, not for reading: they could rarely read any English. Dymphna wondered whether they really cared what the contents of the books were, and, indeed, a teenager with bronze chrysanthemum-like hair, an English cricket sweater and tartan bondage trousers had got into trouble for carrying round a copy of Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, probably left in a hotel room by some politically motivated tourist. If the youth could be assured that the books they were holding had absolutely no political content, and looked, moreover, rather more like the Chinese idea of an English book than an English book itself did, Dymphna observed there was money to be made.
Of course, it could be gibberish, but then the suspicion of the authorities would be raised, and their time wasted in cracking codes—and who knew what they might disinter from the ruin of a random text? Of course, they could be real books, but then the point of copyright would probably arise. An old book would be set in a typeface the Chinese would find too ugly to show their friends, and the cost and expense of resetting a book in a modern typeface could never be recouped. All in all, the cheapest option proved to be to ask members of a creative writing group, then their friends, children, acquaintances, parents, to write the books themselves, pay them a hundred pounds each and get them to sign away their rights in perpetuity.
King of the Badgers Page 18
