David didn’t write the books: his time was too valuable, and as an employee, he had to be paid at least the minimum wage. He wrote, however, the blurbs which were to go on the back cover, and the titles. That was the most important part: these Chinese would, perhaps, never open the books, but the titles and the blurb were there for any admiring person to observe, passing in the Chinese street. David envisaged sleek-haired girls in cheongsams, passing each other glossily in a high-lit shopping centre of marble and smoked glass, a Chanel rip-off handbag under one arm, one of his books in another. Sometimes a member of the local creative writing group would protest that their manuscript already had a title, and its title was Mother Called Me Cunt. David would explain that the Chinese market in English books responded best to particular titles, and the particular title that they would respond to was Nightingale Lovely World Dreaming, Yes, For Ever, Yes. Sometimes he opened up and read a paragraph of one of these books, and a paragraph was all that was necessary: a waterfall of self-pity and self-reflection and self-consciousness.
But who am I writing for, thought Moron Pranxfucker to himself, striding the ruins of the post-apocalyptic ruins of New York. He sighed as he fired his machine gun at the crawling zombies which at the same time screamed and howled threateningly. The skyscrapers of New York stood blackened like giant dominoes in a game of dominoes which would end by destroying the whole world as they toppled on top of each other, one after the other. Am I writing for myself or for some audience which will never understand my words? Are these thoughts intended for anyone at all or is someone writing it all down somewhere? he thought to himself. Yes, Moron Pranxfucker was right, for maybe the first time in his life, apart from when he thought, three days before, before all of this started happening, that his girlfriend Marlena Friendly was probably the least attractive woman whose tits he had ever spunked off over. He was right, because someone was writing it all down somewhere, and someone, too, was reading it, and you and I know who was writing and who was reading it, even if Moron Pranxfucker did not and never would. Suddenly a bigger than usual zombie reeled out of a nearby doorway which Pranxfucker suddenly recognized as the ruined doorway of Macy’s. He headed towards Pranxfucker like a giant rearing rat with his eyes blazing, reminding everyone of the zombies in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, and Moron Pranxfucker shot once, twice, three times in the head. The zombie kept on coming but Moron Pranxfucker shot him a fourth time in the head. Then the bastard stopped coming.
David retitled works like this Moon Antelope, I Love You, and Rainbow Kiss the Lucky Bird, and sent the authors in Northern Ireland a hundred quid to keep their literary blogs going. They were happy to be in print on paper, if only for the benefit of people who could not understand three consecutive words in English. Some of them had MAs in creative writing. If you thought about it, you could cry.
9.
‘Got any plans for the weekend?’ Dymphna said from her desk, her eyes fixed on a spreadsheet.
‘Going up to town,’ David said. ‘Seeing Mauro.’
‘Right,’ Dymphna said. She paused for a moment or two, moved her cursor around the screen. It was not her way to enquire into David’s life with interest. The job interview had been conducted, like a small girl playing at shops, with Dymphna in her bright red stockings and button-strapped Mary Jane shoes behind her big desk. David was sitting on a chair on the other side. The first time they had met subsequently Dymphna, released from legal restraints, had asked in a general sort of way whether he had children or not. He had told her that he didn’t because he was gay. Subsequently, he heard that she had thought that gays were all right, but she wished they didn’t thrust the fact of it down your throat all the time.
‘I thought I’d stay in with Michael,’ she said. ‘Now that Toby’s nearly three, we think he’s mature enough for a little brother or sister. We’re trying for another baby, you know.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘And it’s the right time of the month. We worked it all out. The peak time for conception is on Saturday afternoon, so my sister’s going to come round and take Toby to the swings between two and four. It’s all worked out. I don’t suppose it’s as exact as all that, but you can certainly pin down the peak time for ovulation to within an hour or two.’
‘Oh, I see,’ David said. ‘No, we’re just going out for dinner, Mauro and me. Maybe a film.’
‘Well,’ Dymphna said. She moved a figure from one virtual letterbox to another; amended it, then moved it back and amended it again. She hummed a little tune; in her way, she often hummed when trying to give the impression that she was deep in concentration. David had worked opposite her for seven years now, and had never managed to identify a single tune she hummed. It was his opinion that she made her tunes up as she went along, not at all being the sort of person to listen to music, or trouble to remember it afterwards. She would have said that, with a husband and a boy of three, she never seemed to have the time to listen to music, as she never had the time to read a book or see a film, or develop an interest in other human beings not related to her by blood or marriage. ‘Well,’ she said again. ‘Are you going to be finishing those Chinese blurbs off today? If I send them off today, they’ll be waiting for them when the printers come in first thing Monday morning.’
‘How many are there?’ David said. ‘How many still to do?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Dymphna said. ‘I’ve promised them ten.’
David turned back to his computer screen and started to write. ‘Happiness is the gift to everybody,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes you sit in your home, and you wait for a special present. Love is a beautiful thing. Does it happen to you? You must tell all your friends that it matters if nobody loves you. Then perhaps love will come to you, when all hope and trust has gone. It will burst through your door, when you feel so alone, and take you in its arms in a huge warm embrace. It may be a dark thin man who loves you, or it may be a blonde beautiful woman. But love is everywhere, waiting to fill your life with happiness. It is like a special warm fire, burning in the hearth of your innermost soul. If you open the doors of your soul to love and happiness, then you will find that love and happiness enter in, laughing with joy. Always remember,’ David wrote, remembering an Italian man in his brilliant white underpants, lifting one arm over his head and yawning as if in ecstasy as he said good night, ‘the world is lovely, and loves you, too.’
‘Why do we say “the cockles of your heart”?’ David said. ‘Nothing to do with whelks, I suppose.’
‘No idea,’ Dymphna said. Both of them were inspecting their computer screens, David what he had just written, Dymphna the same thing, sent across by David. ‘Something to do with cochlears?’
‘What’s a cochlear?’
Dymphna turned from her screen, and inspected David, top to bottom. ‘Someone’s in a good mood,’ she said, referring, he supposed, to his surging copy.
Mauro had suggested meeting in a bar David didn’t know; after a bit of online research, it looked like the sort of place they had met in, but one designed for earlier in the evening. David walked through the door ebulliently; he had put on the sort of clothes he had last week rejected, and he felt as if he had been accepted by this world now. It all seemed to have gone absolutely fine.
And as if to confirm the idea, Mauro was sitting there already, on a stool, talking to the barman. David had wondered, in the previous few days, whether he would recognize him, so dense a layer of recollection and wishfulness had built up over his real features, and the only thing that came to mind was that single image of a yawning faun, his arm upwards and bent over his head. But of course he recognized him, and when Mauro turned round, his features somehow wobbling about, he recognized David, too.
‘I’ve been terrible,’ Mauro said. ‘I took the afternoon off work—I wanted to go to the shops, I wanted to buy some T-shirt—but then I thought, no, I can’t face it, so I just came down to Soho, and I went to a bar, then another bar, with a friend, you know, and then he stayed in
Soho and I came down here.’
‘Are you drunk?’ David said.
‘I’m so drunk,’ Mauro said. ‘And it’s only six thirty. I’ve been here for ever and ever, drinking and drinking. I’m so sorry.’
‘That’s quite all right,’ David said, smiling. Mauro dipped his head and, with both hands, ruffled and smoothed his hair, raised his face, shook his head and took another drink of beer. ‘Do you want another one of those? Or do you feel you need to get something to eat?’
‘Yeah, take him off,’ the barman said. ‘He’ll benefit from a sandwich, I should say.’
‘Yes, food,’ Mauro said. So they went to a Portuguese restaurant in the vicinity, where David had some lamb chops, and Mauro a chicken stew with beans, of some sort. In a while, Mauro started to make more sense, to tell stories, to clarify his mind in the early evening light. After an hour or two, ordering one Coca-Cola after another, he was making quite a lot of sense; he started to listen to what David had to say, and not just to nod while David spoke. His niceness made itself evident, like a suppressed buoy resurfacing above the waves. So they went back to the bar—David paid for the Portuguese dinner, it seemed only fair—and drank some more, and by now it seemed to David that they had reached, more or less, the same starting point. Some friends of Mauro joined them, one after the other, and others, as they passed, called out in acclamation—one man, a startling caber of muscle draped with thin scraps of a vest, actually shouted hurrah, or hallelujah, or yippedy-doo, or some other ancient barely worded celebration at the mere sight of Mauro and a remembered tumble in the sack. They were the sort of men whom David, normally, would barely dare to look at in a bar; they were, he saw, the heroes of this particular bar, this particular evening. And they were civil to him. They asked about him, they laughed when he joked and they joked back at him; they made reference to past outings with confidential, sharing amusement and to future outings with the implication that David would be with them then. Mauro’s imprimatur, however he had earned it, had embedded him in this lovely group, and standing there, so long as he took care not to glimpse himself in the mirror behind the bar, he could believe himself one confident good-looker among seven others. Mauro shone with a sort of pride; if it were rational, it might seem to David as if Mauro were pleased to have met him. What does he want? David asked involuntarily, before remembering that not everyone was like him. Some people were lazy, good-natured and pleased to have new people in their life. He could accept that.
Another bar, a third; a club, and at four thirty or five, they started to talk about going on to an ‘after hours’, including him, David saw, in the invitation. ‘Oh, come,’ Mauro said. But David was now as drunk as Mauro had ever been, and the trains to St Albans were running. His instinct told him that he would lay the foundations for proper popularity if he went home at what the rest of the group obviously thought was quite an early time. He said goodbye, casually, to Mauro, smiled, and went; but the whole group, one after the other, blew him kisses across the crowd and the huge beats of the dance floor on his way to the door. It was one of the nicest things that had ever happened to David.
10.
‘Over a lovely landscape in the countryside, where flowers bloom and small animals live in peace and harmony with each other, a rainbow of every colour stretches. After rain, the colours come out into the air, and everything seems fresh and cheerful. People are beautiful in a country like this, and full of their own happiness. Let them sleep together, and kiss, and share their beautiful love in the spring and the summer, in all the seasons of the year. Freshly peeled oranges lie on a dark blue wooden table in the sunshine, and bright green parrots and parakeets hop down, trying the delicious fruit. On a morning like this, anything could happen. Your life could be changed, and admit something beautiful which will never leave it,’ David wrote, on his own, in the office.
11.
In the weeks that followed, David and Mauro fell into a regular pattern. They would meet in town, have dinner, go to a bar or a sequence of bars, and then to a nightclub. From what Mauro’s friends said, these evenings of Mauro’s usually ended with a ‘chill-out’, where Mauro and whoever else seemed to be around had sex in twos and threes and fours on a stranger’s sofa, bed or floor. Sometimes, David gathered, Mauro took a stranger back to his own flat when the night had gone a long way into morning. He could not help envisaging it: Mauro, naked, taking a figure into his arms in an ample smiling embrace, a figure who was not obscure or without detail, but who was just another Mauro, embracing his identical self as if in a mirror. By the time Mauro was in another’s arms, David was always on the train back to St Albans. It was usually empty; once, he delayed it until eight, but could not sustain his energy any longer, and on the train back, he found himself sitting behind an old married couple, parcelling out their breakfast. The train began to move, and his eyes closed. Abruptly, he woke himself with the tail-end of a rasping snore.
‘There’s a bloody snorer behind me,’ the old woman said.
‘A snorer? You get all sorts. Got up too early, didn’t he?’ her husband replied listlessly. They said nothing for a moment or two. ‘Has that got meat in it?’
‘Yes, that’s got yeast in it.’
‘No, meat.’
‘No, it’s not got meat in it.’
‘I only ask, because last time you had a bacon sandwich, you were ill the next day.’
‘That’s not a bacon sandwich, that’s a sweet thing, look. I’ll split it in half, you can have half of it.’
‘I don’t want half of it.’
‘Well, suit yourself. Have you got sweetener?’
David looked out of the window, feeling already the sleepwards tug of the train’s chugga-chugga. It had been heavily cloudy first thing, but over the roofs of Finsbury Park, there was already enough blue in the sky to make a sailor’s suit, as his mother used to say; the slick of water on a long roof flashed gold in the direct sun.
What the relationship between David and Mauro was remained to be clarified. It was with a complicated series of motives that David spoke to his mother, now settled with his father in Hanmouth, about a new ‘relationship’: wanting to put himself in a better light than he had previously occupied, wanting to reassure her that his life would be all right, and, perhaps partly, the obscure motive of thinking that if he said something, it would make it so. Surely if someone in the depths of Devon believed as a fact that David had a boyfriend called Mauro, the universe would bring it about in due course. And there was a special bond between David and Mauro; this was confirmed for David when, two months after they had met, Mauro moved flat to a couple of streets away in Clapham. The old flat had been a knocked-together job with plywood doors and an old sofa smelling of dog; the new one was brassier, on the ground floor of a thirties block with broad low-ceilinged rooms and a lobby like an ocean liner. Mauro shared it with two other boys, off the gay rental website. The old landlord kept Mauro’s deposit, and he found himself short for the two months’ deposit the new landlord asked for. David was really happy that he was the one Mauro turned to, and he wrote a cheque with lightness in his heart.
There was geographical dispersion enough between the three points of this claim—David, Mauro, parents—to make it unlikely any clash would occur when the nature of the relationship would have to be clarified. But on one of their Friday nights, David had suggested a change from Vauxhall, and they had met in a bar in Soho. David had walked through the door, and there was Richard, sitting waiting for someone.
‘Hello, stranger,’ Richard said. ‘I heard you were in London all the time these days. Never call, never write. The children cry whenever I mention your name.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t put it like that,’ David said, with a terrible rush of confusion, his mind constructing the scene now rapidly approaching. But before he could put anything right, Mauro was bouncing through the door with an accordion-fold of shopping bags and an absurd, cheerful trilby on his head that David had never seen before. ‘Hello, hello,
hello, darling,’ he said, and gave David the same kiss he gave everyone. ‘I’ve had such a—oh, well, let me tell you—’
‘This is Richard,’ David said glumly.
‘I’ve heard about you,’ Richard said. ‘We’re so happy that David’s met someone. And you look very suitable, very suitable indeed.’
David could only watch. But, in fact, Mauro just accepted the compliment. There was no confusion that David could see, and as the conversation went on, Mauro could hardly remain in ambiguity about what Richard thought. He clearly was under the impression that the deal was done, signed, delivered, and the curtain-rails being bickered over. The moment came when David could have said, ‘No, no—he’s not my boyfriend or anything.’ Came and went. He stood there miserably as Richard went on about married bliss and his hope that Mauro could wrench David away from St Albans. But Mauro was perfectly cheerful, responding to Richard’s questioning without a glance at David or a contradiction.
Finally Rodrigo arrived with three Brazilian friends—one of whom, David was glad to see, was enormously fat and spotty, five foot two and introduced, implausibly, as Edison. ‘Well, you can light up my life any time,’ David said, enjoying the chance to flirt patronizingly for once. It was good to see that even Rodrigo had his share of David-like obligations, too. Rodrigo and the pustular Edison took Richard off. David thought he would take the initiative.
‘I didn’t tell him,’ he said. ‘I didn’t say you were my boyfriend, or anything. I don’t know why he thought that. I would have put him right, but I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, and then afterwards, it just seemed…’
‘I don’t care,’ Mauro said, and he smiled. ‘I don’t care what he thought. It doesn’t matter at all.’
King of the Badgers Page 19
