“Good,” said Becky, closing the door behind him.
“So, is he in?”
They walked up the stairs to the flat.
“He’s in Crete,” said Becky. “I’m house-sitting. I’m working at the Battersea Arts Centre.”
“Phew,” said Jamie.
“Meaning?” asked Becky.
“Meaning I’ve been trying to ring him. I thought he was avoiding me.”
“He is.”
“Oh.”
Jamie sat himself down at the kitchen table, then realized it was Becky’s flat, temporarily at least, and Tony and he weren’t going out anymore and he shouldn’t make himself at home quite so automatically. He stood up again, Becky gave him an odd look and he sat down for a second time.
“Glass of wine?” Becky waggled a bottle at him.
“OK,” said Jamie, not wanting to seem rude.
She filled a glass. “I don’t answer the phone. Makes life a lot simpler.”
“Right.” Jamie’s head was still full of all the things he was planning to say to Tony, and none of them were very appropriate now. “The Battersea Arts Centre. Is that, like paintings, exhibitions…”
Becky gave Jamie a withering look and poured herself another glass. “It’s a theater. I work in the theater.” She said the word theater very slowly, as if talking to a small child. “I’m a house manager.”
“Right,” said Jamie. His own experience of theater was limited to one forced visit to Miss Saigon which he had not enjoyed. It seemed best not to share this with Becky.
“You really weren’t paying very much attention when Tony talked about his family, were you?”
Jamie was having trouble remembering a conversation in which Tony told him what his sister did. It was possible that Tony had never actually told him. This too seemed like something best to keep to himself. “So…when’s Tony getting back?”
“Not entirely sure. Another couple of weeks I think. It was all rather spur of the moment.”
Jamie did a quick calculation in his head. Two weeks. “Shit.”
“Shit because?”
Jamie wasn’t sure if Becky was prickly in general, or whether she was being specifically prickly with him. He trod carefully. “I wanted him to come to something. A wedding, actually. My sister’s wedding. She’s getting married.”
“That is what people generally do at their weddings.”
Jamie was beginning to understand why Tony hadn’t made a bigger effort to introduce his sister. This woman could give Katie a run for her money. “We had an argument.”
“I know.”
“And it was my fault.”
“So I gathered,” said Becky.
“Anyway, I was thinking if I could get him to come to the wedding…”
“I think it was the wedding he was avoiding. By going to Crete.”
“Ah.”
Becky stubbed out her cigarette in the little glass ashtray in the center of the table and Jamie concentrated on the way the smoke floated up and broke into little spirals to take his mind off the uncomfortable silence.
“He loved you,” said Becky. “You do know that, don’t you.”
“Did he?” It was a stupid thing to say. But he was too shocked to care what he sounded like.
Tony loved him. Why the fuck had Tony never said so? Jamie had always assumed Tony felt exactly the same as him, not wanting to leap in and make commitments.
Tony loved him. He loved Tony. How in God’s name had he managed to screw things up quite so spectacularly?
“You didn’t realize, did you,” said Becky.
There was absolutely nothing Jamie could say.
“Jesus,” said Becky. “Men are morons sometimes.”
Jamie was about to say that if Tony had only told him, then none of this would have happened. But it didn’t sound like a very grown-up response. Besides, he knew precisely why Tony had never told him. Because he’d never allowed Tony to tell him, because he didn’t want Tony to tell him, because he was terrified of Tony telling him. “How can I get in touch with him?”
“God knows,” said Becky. “He’s staying with some friend who’s got a time-share thing out there.”
“Gordon.”
“Sounds right. He thought the mobile would work.”
“It doesn’t. I tried.”
“Snap,” said Becky.
“I need a cigarette,” said Jamie.
Becky smiled for the first time. She gave him a cigarette and lit it for him. “You are in a state, aren’t you.”
“Look,” said Jamie. “If he rings—”
“He hasn’t.”
“But if he does—”
“You’re serious, aren’t you,” said Becky.
Jamie steeled himself. “I love him. I just didn’t realize until…Well, God, Tony chucked me. Then my sister canceled the wedding. Then my dad had some kind of nervous breakdown and ended up in hospital. And we all drove to Peterborough and everyone basically scratched each other’s eyes out. And it was horrible. Really horrible. Then the wedding was back on again.”
“This is going to be a really fun event, isn’t it.”
“And I realized Tony was the only person who—”
“Oh Jesus. Just don’t cry. Please. Men crying does my head in. Have another drink.” She poured the remains of the wine into his glass.
“Sorry.” Jamie wiped his slightly moist eyes and swallowed the lump.
“Drop an invite round,” said Becky. “Write something soppy on it. I’ll stick it on top of his post pile. Or on his pillow. Whatever. If he gets back in time I’ll kick his arse and make him come.”
“Really?”
“Really.” She lit another cigarette. “I met his previous boyfriends. Nobheads. In my humble opinion. Obviously you and I haven’t known each other long but, trust me, you seem like a major improvement.”
“Ryan seemed nice.” In his mind, Jamie was introducing Becky to Katie and wondering whether the two of them would become friends for life or spontaneously combust.
“Ryan. God. What an arsehole. Hated women. You know, you can’t work with them because they’re not tough enough and they bugger off to have children. Probably not even gay. Not properly. You know the type. Just can’t stomach the idea of sex with women. Hated children, too. Which always winds me up. I mean, where do you think adults come from, for God’s sake? You want bus drivers and doctors? You need children. I’m glad I’m not the poor bloody woman who spent a chunk of her life wiping his arse. Didn’t like dogs, either. Or cats. Never trust a man who doesn’t like animals. That’s my rule. You don’t fancy sharing a Tesco curry, do you?”
88
Jean rang David. The boiler was fixed and he had the house to himself again, so she dropped in on her way back from the bookshop.
She told him about the wedding and he laughed. In a kind way. “Oy oy oy. Let’s hope the day itself is less eventful than the buildup.”
“Are you still coming?”
“Would you like me to?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes I would.” She wouldn’t be able to hold him. But if Jamie and Ray had a row, or Katie changed her mind halfway through the ceremony, she wanted to be able to glance across the room and see the face of someone who understood what she was going through.
He gave her a hug and made her a cup of tea and sat her down in the conservatory and told her about the eccentric plumber who’d been working on the boiler (“Polish, apparently. Degree in economics. Says he walked to Britain. German monastery. Fruit picking in France. Bit of a roguish air, though. Not sure whether I entirely believed him”).
And good as it was to be talking, she realized that she wanted to be taken to the one remaining place where she forgot, however briefly, who she was and what was happening in the rest of her life. And it was a little scary, wanting something that much. But it didn’t stop the wanting.
She took hold of his hand and held his eye and waited for him to realize what she was thinking withou
t her having to say it out loud.
He smiled back and raised one eyebrow and said, “Let’s go upstairs.”
89
George missed his second therapy session on account of being in hospital. As a result he was rather dreading his next meeting with Ms. Endicott, much as he had once dreaded being sent to Mr. Love to explain why he had thrown Jeffrey Brown’s satchel onto a roof.
But she listened respectfully to the story and asked some very specific questions about what he had hoped to achieve and what he felt at various points during the whole process, and George got the distinct impression that he could have announced that he had eaten his wife in a pie and Ms. Endicott would have asked about the kind of gravy he had served with it, and he was not sure whether this was a good thing or not.
It was beginning to annoy him. He explained that he felt a good deal better now and she asked in what precise way he felt better. He described his feelings about Katie’s wedding and Ms. Endicott asked for a definition of “Buddhist detachment.”
When, at the end of the session, Ms. Endicott said that she was looking forward to seeing him the following week, George made an ambiguous “Uh-huh” noise because he was not sure whether he would be coming the following week. He half expected Ms. Endicott to pounce on his deliberate ambiguity, but their forty-five minutes were up and they were now clearly allowed to behave like normal human beings again.
90
Jamie got back late from Tony’s flat. Too late to ring people with children at any rate. So he decided to drive over to Katie and Ray’s the following day, pick up an invitation and offer his congratulations in person.
He liked Becky. She had softened over the microwave curry, even if her opinions of estate agents hadn’t. He liked most stroppy women. Growing up with Katie, no doubt. What he really couldn’t stand were winsome head tilts and hair flicking and pink mohair (why they appealed to rugby players and scaffolders was a mystery he was never going to solve). He wondered briefly whether she was a lesbian. Then he remembered a story of Tony’s about her and some boy breaking their parents’ toilet seat during a party. Though people changed, of course.
He talked about Katie and Ray’s roller-coaster relationship and managed to convince Becky that Ray was a suitable candidate for castration, then had to steer her carefully round to thinking he was an honorable kind of guy, which was considerably harder because, when he thought about it, it was very hard to put his finger on precisely what had changed.
She talked about growing up in Norwich. The five dogs. Their mum’s allergy to housework. Their father’s pathological devotion to steam railways. The car crash in Scotland (“We crawled out and walked away without a scratch and we turned round and the back of the car was torn off and there was, literally, half a dog on the road. Had a few nightmares about that. Still do”). The boy they fostered who had an obsession with knives. The time Tony and a friend set light to a powered model plane, launched it from the bedroom window and watched it bank slowly at the end of the garden, flaming dramatically, then turn and fly into the half-built house next door…
Jamie had heard most of the stories before, in one form or another. But he was listening properly this time.
“Sounds grim.”
“It wasn’t actually,” said Becky. “It’s just the way Tony tells it.”
“I thought your parents chucked him out. After that thing with him and…”
“Carl. Carl Waller. Yeh. But Tony wanted to get chucked out.”
“Really?”
“Being gay was a godsend.” Becky lit a cigarette. “Meant he could be an outlaw without having to mainline heroin or steal cars.”
Jamie digested this slowly. A thousand miles between them and he felt closer to Tony than he’d ever done. “But you and Tony. You were sort of estranged, too, weren’t you. And now you’re flat-sitting.”
“We met up when I moved down to London. A few weeks back. Suddenly realized we liked each other.”
Jamie found himself laughing. Out of relief, really. That Tony could make the same kind of mistakes he’d made himself.
“What’s so funny?” asked Becky.
“Nothing,” said Jamie. “It’s just…It’s good. It’s really good.”
Everyone’s luck really did seem to be turning. Maybe there was something in the air.
When he reached Katie’s place the following evening the door was opened by her and Ray together, which seemed symbolic, and he found himself saying, “Congratulations” with the sincerity he wasn’t able to muster the first time round.
He was ushered into the kitchen, getting the tiniest grunt of greeting from Jacob who was deeply involved in a Fireman Sam video in the living room.
Katie seemed a little giddy. Like those people you saw interviewed on the news who’d been winched out of something ghastly by a helicopter.
Ray seemed different, too, though it was hard to tell whether this was just because Jamie felt differently about him now. Certainly he and Katie were getting on better. They were touching each other, for starters, which Jamie hadn’t seen before. In fact when Fireman Sam finished and Jacob pottered through in search of a carton of apple juice, there was definite Oedipal tension (“Stop hugging Mummy,” “I want to hug Mummy”). And the thought occurred to Jamie that Katie and Ray had fallen in love only after going through all the crap that most people saved for the end of their relationship. Which was one way of doing things.
Jamie asked about an invitation for Tony, and Ray seemed unnaturally excited by the possibility that he might be coming.
“It’s a bit of a long shot,” said Jamie. “He’s incommunicado in Greece. I’m just hoping he gets back in time.”
“We could track him down,” said Ray with a can-do gleefulness that felt not quite appropriate.
“I think we have to leave it in the lap of the gods,” said Jamie.
“Your call,” said Ray.
At which point Katie yelled, “Jacob,” and they all turned round to see him deliberately emptying his apple juice carton onto the kitchen floor.
Ray made him apologize, then dragged him out to play in the garden, to show him that stepfathers had other uses besides monopolizing mothers.
Jamie and Katie had been chatting about the wedding for ten minutes when Katie got a phone call from home. She reappeared a few moments later looking slightly troubled.
“That was Dad.”
“How is he?”
“He seemed fine. But he wanted to talk to Ray. Wouldn’t tell me what it was about.”
“Maybe he wants to be manly and pay for everything.”
“You’re probably right. Well, we’ll find out when Ray rings him back.”
“Not that I rate Dad’s chances,” said Jamie.
“So, now,” said Katie, “what are you going to write to Tony?”
91
George’s mistake was to stand naked in front of the mirror.
He had paid his last visit to the surgery. The wound had granulated and no longer needed daily packing. Now he simply removed the previous day’s dressing after breakfast, slipped into a warm salt bath for ten minutes, got out, dried himself gently and applied a fresh dressing.
He was taking the tablets and rather looking forward to the wedding. With Katie and Ray running the show there was very little for him to do. Making a brief speech seemed a very simple contribution to the proceedings.
The mirror was foolish bravado in part, a celebration of the fact that he had put his problems behind him and was not going to let them restrict his behavior any longer.
Not that the reason mattered much now.
He got out of the bath, toweled himself dry, sucked his stomach in, pulled his shoulders back and stood to attention in front of the sink.
It was the cloud of red dots on his bicep which caught his attention first, the ones he had seen in the hotel room and managed to forget about. They seemed larger and more numerous than he remembered.
He felt sick.
The obv
ious thing to do was to back swiftly away from the mirror, get dressed, take a couple of codeine and open a bottle of wine. But he was unable to stop himself.
He began examining his skin in detail. On his arms. On his chest. On his stomach. Turning round and looking over his shoulder so that he could see his back.
It was not a good thing to do. It was like looking at a petri dish in a laboratory. Every square inch held some new terror. Dark brown moles, wrinkled like sultanas; freckles clumped into archipelagos of chocolate-colored islands; bland flesh-colored bumps, some slack, some full of fluid.
His skin had become a zoo of alien life forms. If he looked closely enough he would be able to see them moving and growing. He tried not to look closely.
He should have gone back to Dr. Barghoutian. Or to another, better doctor.
He had arrogantly thought he could solve his problems with long walks and crosswords. And all the time, the disease had laughed and spread and tightened its hold and given birth to other diseases.
He stopped looking into the mirror only when his vision blurred and his knees buckled, pitching him onto the bathroom floor.
At which point the picture of his own naked skin, still vivid in his mind’s eye, mutated into the skin of that man’s buttocks going up and down between Jean’s legs in the bedroom.
He could hear them again. The animal noises. The wrinkled flesh being wobbled and swung. The things he had not seen but could imagine only too clearly. That man’s organ going in and out of Jean. The sucking and the sliding. The pink folds.
In this house. In his own bed.
He could actually smell it. The toilet scent. Intimate and unwashed.
He was dying. And no one knew.
His wife was having sex with another man.
And he had to give a speech at his daughter’s wedding.
He was clinging to the bottom rung of the heated towel rail, like a man trying not to be swept away by a flood.
It was like before. But worse. There was no floor beneath him. The bathroom, the house, the village, Peterborough…it had all peeled back and shredded and blown away, leaving nothing but infinite space, just him and a towel rail. As if he had stepped outside the spaceship and found the earth gone.