Twenty-four

Will fell in love on New Year’s Eve, and the experience took him completely by surprise. She was called Rachel, she illustrated children’s books, and she looked a little bit like Laura Nyro on the cover of Gonna Take A Miracle —nervy, glamorous, Bohemian, clever, lots of long, unruly dark hair.

Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was unreciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out. These were people who could not control themselves, or protect themselves, people who, if only temporarily, were no longer content to occupy their own space, people who could no longer rely on a new jacket, a bag of grass and an afternoon rerun of The Rockford Files to make them complete.

Lots of people, of course, would be thrilled to take their seats next to their computer-generated ideal life-partner, but Will was a realist, and he could see immediately that there was only cause for panic. He was almost sure that Rachel was about to make him very miserable indeed, mostly because he couldn’t see anything he might have which could possibly interest her.

If there was a disadvantage to the life he had chosen for himself, a life without work and care and difficulty and detail, a life without context and texture, then he had finally found it: when he met an intelligent, cultured, ambitious, beautiful, witty and single woman at a New Year’s Eve party, he felt like a blank twit, a cypher, someone who had done nothing with his whole life apart from watch Countdown and drive around listening to Nirvana records. That had to be a bad thing, he reckoned. If you were falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and all the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.

One of his problems, he reflected as he was trying to dredge his memory for a single tiny scrap of experience that this woman might regard as worth her momentary contemplation, was that he was reasonably good-looking and reasonably articulate. It gave people the wrong impression. It gave him admission to a party from which he should be barred by ferocious bouncers with thick necks and tattoos. He may have been good-looking and articulate, but that was just a quirk of genetics, environment and education; at his core he was ugly and monosyllabic. Maybe he should undergo some sort of reverse plastic surgery—something that would rearrange his features so that they were less even, and push his eyes closer together or further apart. Or maybe he should put on an enormous amount of weight, sprout a few extra chins, grow so fat that he sweated profusely all the time. And, of course, he should start grunting like an ape.

Because the thing was that when this Rachel woman sat down next to him at dinner she was interested, for the first five minutes, before she’d worked him out, and in that five minutes he got a glimpse of what life could be like if he were in any way interesting. On balance, he thought, he’d prefer not to have that glimpse. What good did it do him, after all? He wasn’t going to get to sleep with Rachel. He wasn’t going to go to a restaurant with her, or see what her sitting room looked like, or get to understand how her father’s affair with her mother’s best friend had affected her views on having children. He hated the five-minute window of opportunity. In the end, he thought, he would be far happier if she turned round to look at him, just about managed not to vomit, and turned her back on him for the rest of the evening.

He missed Ned. Ned had given him an extra something, a little il ne sait quoi, that would have come in handy on an evening like this. He wasn’t going to bring him back to life, though, poor little sod. Let him rest in peace.

‘How do you know Robert? ’ Rachel was asking him.

‘Oh, just…’ Robert produced television programmes. He hung out with actors and writers and directors. People who knew Robert were arty movers and shakers, and were almost obliged to be glamorous. Will wanted to say that he had written the music for Robert’s last film, or given him his big break, or that they met for lunch to talk about the godawful mess that was this government’s arts policy. He wanted to say that, but he couldn’t.

‘Just… I used to buy my dope off him years ago. ’ That, unhappily, was the truth. Before Robert became a television producer, he was a dope dealer. Not a dope dealer with a baseball bat and a pit-bull, just someone who bought a bit extra to sell on to his mates, who at the time included Will, because Will was going out with a friend of Robert’s… Anyway, it didn’t matter why he was knocking around with Robert in the mid-eighties. The point was that he was the only person in the room who neither moved nor shook, and now Rachel knew it.

‘Oh, right, ’ she said. ‘But you’ve kept in touch. ’

Maybe he could make up some story about why he still saw Robert, a story that might cast him in a more flattering light, make him seem a little more complicated.

‘Yeah. Dunno why, really. ’ No story, then, obviously. Oh well. The truth was that he didn’t know why they’d kept in touch. They got on reasonably well, but Robert had got on reasonably well with most of that crowd, and Will had never been entirely sure why he had been the one who survived the inevitable career-change cull. Maybe—and this sounded paranoid, but he was sure there was a grain of truth in here somewhere—he was enough of a deadbeat to demonstrate to the people here that Robert had pre-media roots, while at the same time he was presentable enough not to scare them all away.

He’d lost Rachel, for now at least. She was talking to the person sitting on her other side. What could he reel her back with? He must have had some talent or other which he could exaggerate and dramatize somehow. Cooking? He could cook a bit, but who couldn’t? Maybe he was writing a novel and had forgotten about it. What had he been good at when he was at school? Spelling. ‘Hey, Rachel, how many c’s in necessary? ’ She probably knew anyway. It was hopeless. The most interesting thing about his life, he realized, was Marcus. That was something which set him apart. ‘Sorry to butt in, Rachel, but I have this weird relationship with a twelve-year-old boy. Is that any good to you? ’ OK, the material needed some work, but it was there, definitely. It just needed shaping. He vowed to bring up Marcus at the first available opportunity.

Rachel had noticed he wasn’t talking to anyone, and wheeled round so that he could be included in a conversation about whether there was anything new under the sun, with particular reference to contemporary popular music. Rachel said that to her Nirvana sounded just like Led Zeppelin.

‘I know a twelve-year-old who’d kill you for saying that, ’ said Will. It wasn’t true, of course. A couple of weeks ago, Marcus had thought that the lead singer of Nirvana played for Manchester United, so he was probably not yet at the stage where he wanted to annihilate people who accused the band of being derivative.

‘So do I, come to that, ’ said Rachel. ‘Maybe they should meet. What’s yours called? ’

He’s not mine, exactly, he thought. ‘Marcus, ’ he said.

‘Mine’s Ali. Alistair. ’

‘Right. ’

‘And is Marcus into skateboards and rap and The Simpsons and so on? ’

Will raised his eyes skywards and chuckled fondly, and the misapprehension was cast in concrete. It wasn’t his fault, this conversation. He hadn’t lied once in the entire minute and a half. OK, he had been speaking more figuratively than the expression usually implied when he had said that Marcus would kill her. And OK, the rolling eyes and the fond chuckle did suggest a certain amount of parental indulgence. But he hadn’t actually said that Marcus was his son. That was one hundred per cent her interpretation. Certainly over fifty per cent, anyway. But it definitely wasn’t the SPAT thing, when he’d lied through his teeth for the entire duration of the evening.

‘And is Marcus’s mother here tonight? ’

‘Ummm…’ Will looked up and down the dinner table as if to remind himself one way or the other. ‘No. ’ Not a lie! Not a lie! Marcus’s mother was not there!

‘You’re not spending New Year’s Eve with her? ’ Rachel was narrowing her eyes and looking down her nose to indicate that she knew this was a leading question.

‘No. We, er, we don’t live together. ’ He’d really got the hang of this truth-telling business now, he felt. If anything, he’d moved right away from lying and towards understatement, because not only was he not living with Fiona at the moment, but he had never lived with her, and never intended to live with her in the future.

‘I’m sorry. ’

‘It’s OK. How about Ali’s dad? ’

‘Not at this table. Not in this city. Not in this country. He gives me his phone number when he moves. ’

‘Right. ’

Will had at least managed to introduce some friction into the conversation. Until he’d played the Marcus card he’d kept slipping off before he’d even started. Now he felt as though he were climbing a mountain, rather than a glacier. He imagined himself right at the bottom of the cliff-face, looking up and around for footholds.

‘Which country is he in, then? ’

‘The States. California. I’d prefer Australia, but there you are. At least it’s the west coast. ’

Will reckoned he’d now heard fifty-seven varieties of this conversation, but this gave him an advantage: he knew how it went, and go it did. He might not have done anything in the last decade and a half, but he could cluck sympathetically when a woman told him how badly her ex-husband had behaved. Clucking was something he had got really good at. But it worked, as clucking often did—no one, he decided, ever did themselves any harm by listening attentively to other people’s woes. Rachel’s story was, by SPAT standards, run-of-the-mill, and it turned out that she hated her ex because of who he was, rather than what he had done to her.

‘So why the fuck did you have a child with him? ’ He was drunk. It was New Year’s Eve. He was feeling cheeky.

She laughed. ‘Good question. No answer. You change your mind about people. What’s Marcus’s mother’s name? ’

‘Fiona. ’ Which, of course, it was.

‘Did you change your mind about her? ’

‘Not really. ’

‘So what happened? ’

‘I dunno. ’ He shrugged, and somehow managed to give a rather convincing impression of a man who was still baffled, shell-shocked even. The words and the gesture were born of desperation; it was ironic, then, that they somehow managed to make a connection.

Rachel smiled, and picked up the knife she hadn’t used, and examined it. ‘In the end, " I dunno" is the only honest answer anyone can give, isn’t it? Because I dunno either, and I’d be kidding myself, and you, if I pretended any different. ’

At midnight they sought each other out and kissed, a kiss that was somewhere between cheek and lip, the embarrassed ambiguity hopefully significant. And at half-past midnight, just before Rachel left, they arranged to get their lads together to compare skateboards and baseball caps and the Christmas edition of The Simpsons.