Thirty-two

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the idea—it wasn’t even particularly risky. On the contrary, it was just a mundane social arrangement, the sort that people make all the time, all over the place. If these people were ever to realize the possible consequences, Will reflected later, all the tears and embarrassment and panic that could ensue in the event of these arrangements going just slightly wrong, they would never arrange to meet for a drink again.

The plan was for Rachel, Will and Fiona to go to a pub in Islington while Marcus was up in Cambridge visiting his father. They would have a drink and a chat, then Will would absent himself and Rachel and Fiona would have a drink and a chat, as a result of which Fiona would cheer up, feel better about things and lose the urge to top herself. What could possibly go wrong?

Will arrived at the pub first, got himself a drink, sat down, lit a cigarette. Fiona arrived shortly afterwards; she was distracted and slightly manic. She asked for a large gin and ice, no mixer, and sipped at it nervously and quickly. Will started to feel a little uncomfortable.

‘Have you heard from the boy? ’

‘Which boy? ’

‘Marcus? ’

‘Oh, him! ’ She laughed. ‘I’d forgotten all about him. No. He’ll leave a message while I’m out, I should think. Who’s your friend? ’

Will looked round, just to check that the seat beside him was as empty as he remembered it to be, and then back at Fiona. Maybe she was imagining people; maybe that’s why she got down and cried a lot. Maybe the people she imagined were horrible, or as depressed as she was.

‘Which friend? ’

‘Rachel? ’

‘Who’s my friend Rachel? ’ Now he didn’t understand the question. If she knew his friend Rachel was Rachel, what exactly was the information she required?

‘Who is she? Where does she come from? How does she fit in? Why do you want me to meet her? ’

‘Oh. I see. I just thought, you know. ’

‘No. ’

‘I just thought you might find her interesting. ’

‘Will this happen every time you meet somebody? I have to see them for a drink, even though I don’t really know you, let alone them? ’

‘Oh, no. Not every time, anyway. I’ll weed out the rubbish. ’

‘Thank you. ’

And still no Rachel. She was now fifteen minutes late. After a peculiar and pointless conversation about John Major’s shirts (Fiona’s choice of conversational topic, not his), and several lengthy silences, Rachel was thirty minutes late.

‘She does exist? ’

‘Oh, she definitely exists. ’

‘Right. ’

‘I’ll go and phone her. ’ He went to the payphone, got the answerphone, waited for a human interruption that never came, and went back to his seat without leaving a message. The only excuse he would accept, he decided, would involve Ali and a large articulated vehicle… Unless she had never intended to come. He suddenly realized with terrible clarity that he’d been set up, that when Rachel had said that he would get the hang of it if she showed him how, this is what she had meant. He wanted to hate her, but he couldn’t: instead he felt a rising panic.

Another silence, and then Fiona started crying. Her eyes filled up and started to leak down her face and on to her pullover, and she just sat there quietly, like a kid oblivious to a runny nose. For a while Will thought he could just ignore it, and it would go away, but he knew deep down that ignoring her was simply not an option, not if he were worth anything at all.

‘What’s the matter? ’ He tried to say it as if he knew it were a big question, but it came out all wrong: the gravity sounded, to him at least, like tetchiness, as if there were a ‘now’ missing from the end.

‘Nothing. ’

‘That’s not true, is it? ’ It still wouldn’t be too late. If Rachel arrived breathless and apologetic at this second, he could stand up, make the introductions, tell Rachel that Fiona was just about to explain the root cause of her misery, and then shove off. He looked towards the door hopefully and, as if by magic, it opened: two guys in Man United away shirts walked in.

‘It is true. Nothing’s the matter. No thing. I’m just like this. ’

‘Existential despair, right? ’

‘Yeah. Right. ’

Again, he hadn’t got the tone of it. He’d used the phrase to prove that he knew it (he wondered whether Fiona thought he was dim), but quickly realized that if you knew it, these were precisely the circumstances in which you would give it an enormous body-swerve; it sounded flip and pseud and shallow. He wasn’t cut out for chats about existential despair. It just wasn’t him. And what was wrong with that? There was no shame in it, surely? Leather trousers weren’t him. (He’d tried some on once, just for a laugh, in a shop called LeatherTime in Covent Garden, and he’d looked like a… Anyway). The colour green wasn’t him. Antique furniture wasn’t him. And depressive hippy-liberal women weren’t him. Big deal. It didn’t make him a bad person.

‘I don’t know if there’s a lot of point in talking about this with you, ’ she said.

‘No, ’ he said, more cheerfully than was appropriate. ‘I know what you mean. Shall we finish this and go, then? I don’t think Rachel’s going to show up. ’

Fiona smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘You could try persuading me that I’m wrong. ’

‘Could I? ’

‘I think I probably need to talk to somebody, and you’re the only one here. ’

‘I’m the only one here that you know. But I’d be useless. You could throw that slice of lemon across the pub and hit somebody who was better than me. As long as you aimed away from that guy who’s singing on his own over there. ’

She laughed. Maybe his lemon joke had done the trick. Maybe she’d look back on those few seconds as a turning point in her life. But then she shook her head, and said, ‘Oh, shit, ’ and began to cry again, and he could see that he had overrated the power of the throwaway one-liner.

‘Do you want to go and get something to eat? ’ he said wearily. He was going to have to look a long way down now.

They went to Pizza Express on Upper Street. He hadn’t been there since the last time he had had lunch with Jessica, the ex-girlfriend who was determined to make him as unhappy and sleepless and out of touch and burdened by parenthood as she had become. That was a long, long time ago, before SPAT and Marcus and Suzie and Fiona and Rachel and everything. He’d been an idiot then, but at least he’d been an idiot with an idea, some kind of belief system; now he was hundreds of years older, one or two IQ points wiser, and absolutely all over the place. He’d rather be an idiot again. He’d had his whole life set up so that nobody’s problem was his problem, and now everybody’s problem was his problem, and he had no solutions for any of them. So how, precisely, was he, or anybody else he was involved with, better off?

They looked at the menu in silence.

‘I’m not really hungry, ’ said Fiona.

‘Please eat, ’ said Will, too quickly and too desperately, and Fiona smiled.

‘You think a pizza will help? ’ she said.

‘Yes. Veneziana. ‘Cos then you’ll stop Venice sinking into the sea and you’ll feel better. ’

‘OK. If I can have extra mushrooms on it. ’

‘Good call. ’

The waitress came to take their order; Will asked for a beer, a bottle of house red, and a Four Seasons with extra everything he could think of, including pine nuts. If he was lucky, he would be able to induce a heart attack, or find that he was suddenly fatally allergic to something.

‘I’m sorry, ’ said Fiona.

‘What for? ’

‘Being like this. And being like this with you. ’

‘I’m used to women being like this with me. This is how I spend most evenings. ’ Fiona smiled politely, but suddenly Will felt sick of himself. He wanted to find a way in to the conversation that they had to have, but there didn’t seem to be one, and there never would be while he was stuck with his brain and his vocabulary and his personality. He kept feeling as though he were on the verge of saying something proper and serious and useful; but then he ended up thinking, Oh, fuck it, say something stupid instead.

‘I’m the one who should apologize, ’ he said. ‘I want to help, but I know I won’t be able to. I haven’t got the answers to anything. ’

‘That’s what men think, isn’t it? ’

‘What? ’

‘That unless you’ve got some answer, unless you can say, " Oh, I know this bloke in Essex Road who can fix that for you", then it’s not worth bothering. ’

Will shifted in his seat and didn’t say anything. That was precisely what he thought; in fact, he had spent half the evening trying to think of the name of the bloke in Essex Road, metaphorically speaking.

‘That’s not what I want. I know there’s nothing you can do. I’m depressed. It’s an illness. It just started. Well, that’s not true, there were things happening that helped it along, but…’

And they were away. It was easier than he could possibly have anticipated: all he had to do was listen and nod and ask pertinent questions. He had done it before, loads of times, with Angie and Suzie and Rachel, but that was for a reason. There was no ulterior motive here. He didn’t want to sleep with Fiona, but he did want her to feel better, and he hadn’t realized that in order to make her feel better he had to act in exactly the same way as if he did want to sleep with her. He didn’t want to think about what that meant.

He learnt a lot of things about Fiona. He learnt that she hadn’t really wanted to be a mother, and that sometimes she hated Marcus with a passion that worried her; he learnt that she worried about her inability to hold down a relationship (Will restrained a desire to leap in at this point and tell her that an inability to hold down a relationship was indicative of an undervalued kind of moral courage, that only cool people screwed up); he learnt that her last birthday had scared her to bits, because she hadn’t been anywhere, done anything, all the usual malarkey. None of it amounted to anything enormous, but the sum of her depression was much greater than its parts, and now she had to live with something that tired her and made her see everything through a greeny-brown gauze. And he learnt that if someone were to ask her where this thing lived (Will found it hard to imagine a more unlikely question, but that was just one of the many differences between them), she would say that it was in her throat, because it stopped her from eating, and made her feel as though she were constantly on the verge of tears—when she wasn’t actually crying.

And that was it, more or less. What Will had been most frightened of—apart from Fiona asking him about the point (a subject that never even came close to showing its face, probably because it was clear in his face and even in his life that he didn’t have a clue)—was that there was going to be a cause of all this misery, some dark secret, or some terrible lack, and he was one of the only people in the world who could deal with it, and he wouldn’t want to, even though he would have to anyway. But it wasn’t like that at all; there was nothing—if life, with its attendant disappointments and compromises and bitter little defeats, counted as nothing. Which it probably didn’t.

They got a taxi back to Fiona’s place. The cabbie was listening to GLR, and the disc jockey was talking about Kurt Cobain; it took Will a while to understand the strange, muted tone in the DJ’s voice.

‘What’s happened to him? ’ Will asked the cabbie.

‘Who? ’

‘Kurt Cobain. ’

‘Is he the Nirvana geezer? He shot himself in the head. Boom. ’

‘Dead? ’

‘No. Just a headache. Yeah, course he’s dead. ’

Will wasn’t surprised, particularly, and he was too old to be shocked. He hadn’t been shocked by the death of a pop star since Marvin Gaye died. He had been… how old? He thought back. The first of April 1984… Jesus, ten years ago, nearly to the day. So he had been twenty-six, and still of an age when things like that meant something: he probably sang Marvin Gaye songs with his eyes closed when he was twenty-six. Now he knew that pop stars committing suicide were all grist to the mill, and the only consequence of Kurt Cobain’s death as far as he was concerned was that Nevermind would sound a lot cooler. Ellie and Marcus weren’t old enough to understand that, though. They would think it all meant something, and that worried him.

‘Isn’t he the singer Marcus liked? ’ Fiona asked him.

‘Yeah. ’

‘Oh, dear. ’

Suddenly Will was fearful. He had never had any kind of intuition or empathy or connection in his life before, but he had it now. Typical, he thought, that it should be Marcus, rather than Rachel or someone who looked like Uma Thurman, who brought it on. ‘I’m not being funny, but can I come in with you to listen to Marcus’s answerphone message? I just want to hear that he’s OK. ’

But he wasn’t, really. He was calling from a police station in a place called Royston, and he sounded little and frightened and lonely.