The Marriage Diaries Page 10

  “Okay,” I said casually, as if I were used to this sort of request. “If I can work around my, er …” What? Tea drinking? The urgent need to arrange my shoes in alphabetical order? “… other commitments. But I don't quite follow. I mean, I just, you know, complained about stuff. I didn't even think you'd broadcast what I said.”

  “No, that's the funny thing. The reporter wasn't sure about you, but there was a problem with the trains from Taunton, so our lesbian jam feature couldn't go ahead.”

  “Pity. I'd have liked to have caught that.”

  “But it turned out to be a lucky break. You were exactly what we were looking for. You see, without wanting to be antiman (no, we're not antiman at all), we like to show how men should take on more of the work usually dumped on women—children and ironing and so on—but how they still aren't any good at it.”

  “Damned if you don't and damned if you do.”

  “What? No, I wouldn't say it was a religious thing. But we thought you summed that up very well. I mean, you're looking after … Horace?”

  “Harry.”

  “Sorry, Harry, and Celeste is out working, and that's as it should be, but, well, it obviously isn't your forte, is it?”

  I wasn't going to argue myself out of a job. And perhaps she was right. Maybe I was a shitty parent.

  “Well, it's a pretty tough job. And I suppose there are often things I'd rather be doing than—”

  “Precisely. So our vision is that you produce these weekly talks about how things have gone wrong, your failures, and general mess-ups. We like those.”

  So that was how I came to be spending my Wednesday afternoons in a cramped recording studio in one of the really out of the way bits of the BBC, a tea-stained script before me and a crazed technician with bloodshot eyes and the tang of cheap ganja clinging to his lank, yellowing hair staring at me through a glass panel.

  The first week, I came on after a feature trailed as “Anal fistulas—curse or secret blessing?” Tough act to follow. I didn't understand how anyone could bear to listen to my whiny voice, replete with its half-lisp and the ever-present threat of a stammer breaking through. I was relieved when the postponed lesbian jam makers burst forth, and I certainly never listened to myself again.

  But it seemed that Susan was right. My failures were exactly what the listeners to Woman's Hour wanted to hear, and I had me a job and, within a couple of weeks, a cultish following of madwomen. And now, at parties, I said I was a radio journalist, which, I thought, had a good old-fashioned ring to it, sounding interesting enough to be interesting but not interesting enough for anyone to want to know more about it. Perfect.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 10

  Sean's always been embarrassed about what he does. He was embar- rassed about being a student for so long, he was embarrassed about being a civil servant, he was embarrassed about being a sad sackofshit (his phrase, naturally) stay-at-home dad. For a long time, when people asked him what he did, he'd say that he worked for the Laboratoire Garnier. If they ever asked him what he did there, then his answer would vary depending on whom he was talking to. If it was a respectable aunt of mine, for example, then he would tell her that he donated his unusual pH-neutral bodily fluids at £5 a shot, which were then used in face creams and hair conditioners. If it was anyone young or leftish-looking, he would claim to be developing animal-friendly forms of vivisection, by breeding rabbits with less sensitive eyes or monkeys that enjoyed having the tops of their skulls sawed off. So I can quite see why he snatched at the chance of pretending to be a journalist, whether of the Internet or radio variety.

  The first I heard about the Woman's Hour thing was when Edwina called me.

  “You should listen. It's quite funny,” she said.

  “Does he moan about everything and make a big deal about small problems like always being in the wrong supermarket queue and dropping pile ointment in front of pretty girls?”

  “Yes. That's it exactly.”

  “I've heard it all before.”

  And so I had. It was only a matter of time before he told the story about staying the first night at some new girlfriend's flat and nipping out in the night stark naked and finding the floor of the loo flooded with some disgusting liquid and standing on top of the seat to keep his feet dry while peeing down between his legs, and then the door opens behind him, and he thinks it's his girlfriend, and he shouts over his shoulder “Look, look, I'm a gymnast,” and then he sees that it's not his girlfriend at all but some poor frightened flatmate of his girlfriend, who'll never be the same again. Well, I didn't really want to be there for that, not even listening to the radio.

  After two days, it became perfectly clear that Ludo wasn't going to call me, which was a slap in the face.

  So I called him.

  Katie answered.

  “Hi, Katie,” I said, a little panicky. “Sorry you couldn't be there the other night. You work too hard. But then I suppose you have to, don't you?”

  “God, Celeste, now that Penny's bowed out, I've begun to appreciate more what she did. All that being crappy to people to make them do things. And sacking people. And telling them they can't have any more money. Do you do all that yourself?”

  “Course not, darling. I don't get involved in the mechanics; I just buy. I suppose it's one of the advantages of being … well, working for a different sort of company.”

  “I'm sorry I missed the play. Ludo said it was fun.”

  “Fun? Well, not quite the word I'd have used about the play. But Ludo was very gallant.”

  “Yes, he said you went for a drink afterward.”

  “That's what I'm calling about, actually. You see, I left my … thingy behind in the bar.”

  “Thingy?”

  “Scarf. Yes, scarf. And I wondered if he picked it up.”

  “I don't think so—he would have said.”

  “Can I ask him about it? Perhaps he saw where I left it.”

  “Sure. Hang on.”

  “Celeste? Hello.”

  “Hi, Ludo. Thanks for calling.”

  “What do you … ? I don't follow. Did I say I would phone?”

  “You didn't specifically say, no. But I thought you would. Is Katie right there?”

  “No, she's in the other room.”

  “I thought that we had such a nice time, you might want to do it again.”

  “There's not much else on at the moment. Unless you fancy Tis Pity She's a Whore at the Barbican.”

  “ 'tis what?” I laughed nervously. Ludo wasn't known for taking the piss, but you never knew. Perhaps Katie had rubbed off on him over the years. I suppose she owed him something: after all, she got his flat, his money, his business (well, if you assumed Penny Moss would go to him one day), and his rich-boy status.

  “The John Ford play. It's a masterpiece. About incest. And revenge.”

  “Actually, the part I enjoyed was the drink.”

  That was as far as I was going to go. Too far, you might say. He was silent for three very painful seconds.

  “Okay.”

  SEANJOURNALTEN.DOC

  COMPLETELY NO PANTIES

  “The chairs are really low, you know, kids'chairs, but that's all there are, and so when you sit in them, your knees are up around your ears. It's not a comfortable place. Harry was being a little fucker.”

  We were in the Black Lion—Leo Kurtz, Andrew Heathley, Ludo Moss, and me. I was telling them about the Monday group. Harry had been a beast all morning. He kept snatching stuff: bits of the train set, a naked black dolly, a crane, and the ear of the beautiful Somali boy, whose mother probably wasn't called Myfanwy. Stacey, who by now had decided that Harry was not a happy boy, kept following us around, waiting for the next episode. When Harry made his lunge, she'd dive in and take the thing away from him and give it back to the original owner, shouting out in her strident American voice “It's hard; I know it's hard,” which was supposed to be a way of acknowledging, while resisting, Harry's covetousness, but which sounded for al
l the world like the moaning of a porn star, midshoot. Brenda was trailing me as well, determined to talk about being called Brenda, but I left all that out because the boys didn't want to hear about it. But I did do my impersonation of Stacey saying “It's hard, it's hard,” like a porn star, because I knew they'd like that.

  “And I looked up, and there it was, staring me in the face. Her fanny.”

  “The fanny of Myfanwy?” said Andrew, being funny.

  “The fanny of Uma Thursday.”

  Uma had come into the group late, as always. She was wearing a short skirt, but I hadn't particularly noticed because legs don't do much for me. They're just the things that keep the rest of you off the ground. Pudgy or long, I don't care, honestly don't care. But then she'd laughed at nothing, and I'd looked, and there it was.

  “And you're sure,” said Andrew. “Completely no panties?”

  Leo cuffed him. “What the fuck do you think he means? With panties, the law of the undivided middle applies: you can't be partly no panties, can you? Either you're panties, or you're no panties.”

  “I meant that … well, it could have been small panties. You know, the ones with the string, like bum floss, and the little tiny thing at the front, like a slingshot.”

  “Thong,” said Ludo glumly.

  “No, it was completely no panties,” I said. “And from then on, it was like the eyes of a religious picture that follow you around the room. Wherever I looked, there she was, aiming it at me.”

  “What does it all mean?” asked Leo seriously. “Is she making a play for you?”

  “Maybe she's got a condition,” said Andrew. “Some kind of rash or fungal infection that needs air. I once had a thing like that, when I was fifteen. I played cricket without any underpants, because of the chafing, and then my trousers split when I was coming in to bowl, and my knob was suddenly just there, like a baby shrew. Fucking umpire no-balled me, you know, for comic effect, but it still went down in the score book.”

  He shook his head, upset by the memory.

  “Definitely wasn't a rash. All looked very healthy to me. You know me, I never think that women fancy me …”—there was some general scoffing, but that's what you'd expect—“but I … I don't know. Maybe she is. After me. But it's a strange way of making a first move. She hasn't even really flirted with me up to now, unless you count talking as flirting.”

  “Which you do,” cut in Andrew, although whether the you was accusatively singular or embracingly plural I don't know.

  “Which I'm trying not to,” said I. “And, I suppose, an e-mail in which she described trying to have sex with a doorknob and another where she asked me if I'd ever been rimmed.”

  “And have you?” asked Andrew. I gave a shuddering negative.

  “What's she like?” asked Ludo, looking up from his Guinness. We were all drinking Guinness. It's what you do in Kilburn. “Apart from being the kind of girl who sends that sort of e-mail.”

  “You mean what does she look like? Gorgeous. No, that overstates it. Pretty, very pretty. You know, hair”—I did a head-tossing movement—“and all that.”

  “No,” said Ludo, “but what is she like? Is she … nice?”

  “Nice? Uma? She's the opposite of nice. That's part of her appeal. Talking to her is like taking a plunge in a cold mountain stream. Not that I've ever actually plunged into a cold mountain stream. Or any other kind of stream, come to think of it. Quite happy with a nice, warm bath, on the whole. But, well, you know what I mean about the stream. Very refreshing. In theory.”

  “You're not going to screw her, are you, Sean?” That was Andrew.

  “No. Nooooo. No. Well, maybe. I mean, no.”

  It had to come down, publicly, to a “no.” For a bunch of guys, they were a curiously puritan lot. Leo was blissfully married to a woman called Odette, to whom he had a slavish devotion. It may have had something to do with the fact that he was a funny-looking little fellow and she was rather pretty, albeit it in a gangly way that didn't do anything for me. But the point is, there's nothing like thinking you've pulled above your natural level for setting your mind in that slavish-devotion mode. Andrew's girlfriend was in Mauritius studying snails. Yes, I know. He went out to visit her whenever he could scrape the fare together, but distance is another of those things that can keep you slavishly devoted. Whatever it was she was doing there (studying snails, stupid!) was due to come to an end quite soon, and her return would, I guessed, be a bigger challenge to their love than her departure. So Leo and Andrew were both raised by love into a zone of moral purity that wasn't, perhaps, their natural homeland. Ludo was different. He had a kind of moral solidity about him, a conscious doing-the-right-thing weighti-ness, that would have been unbearable had he not … um, been our friend.

  I'd known Leo and Andrew for a couple of years, Ludo for a bit longer. The common link was a guy called Tom, who was part of Celeste's fashion set. He knew Ludo and had been at school with Andrew in a hellhole town in the Midlands. For some reason, Tom dropped out of the gang, leaving the four of us as contented, grumbling drinkers. As I've said, Leo was a bit odd-looking, small and dark and long-faced. But he always wore pretty cool clothes in a black-polo-necky kind of way. Andrew was taller but often walked hunched over to be on the same level as Leo. He was a failed dandy in dress, never quite getting it right. Ludo always looked like he was about to go off on a grouse shoot, with his leather patches and country cords. All of them had the advantage over me of not being splattered in baby drool.

  “Have you noticed,” said Andrew, “that we always end up talking about sex in the Black Lion? It's like that book Songlines, you know, where the aborigines always recognize where they are by which bit of the song they've reached, so the song's a kind of map. We always talk about football in the Mitre, music in Power's Bar, and sex in the Black Lion. If I was blind, I'd know exactly where we were.”

  “If you were blind, you'd have an excuse for wearing that shirt,” said Leo.

  “What does Celeste think about this?” Ludo asked, filling the smiling silence that followed as Andrew tried and failed to think of a smart reply to the shirt jibe.

  “Do I look like a shit-fer-brains? Why in the name of fuck would I tell Celeste about this? It doesn't matter that I haven't done anything; it doesn't matter that I'm not going to do anything; just the very fact that I've seen someone's fanny means that I'm dead.”

  “I think you should tell her,” Ludo persisted. “Things like this can … fester.” He was still looking down into his pint.

  “There's an argument that too much openness is selfish,” said Leo. “You talk about that kind of thing, which gets it off your chest, but then you deposit it right onto someone else's. Sometimes it's best just to carry the burden yourself. Especially if nothing's going to come of it.”

  “Of course, nothing's going to come of it. Why would anything come of it? I couldn't be happier with Celeste. She's astonishing.”

  “She's certainly a beauty,” said Andrew. Leo agreed loudly. Ludo drank some of his beer, but in such a way as to indicate concurrence.

  “It's amazing what you'll put up with for the sake of beauty,” said Leo. “And it's hard, in a way, to work out why. I mean, in a relationship, you can see how kindness or generosity or being good at ironing might well be useful things, things that you'd really want to find in your partner, but why beauty? It doesn't do anything, does it? It's just there.”

  “Isn't beauty nothing but the promise of pleasure?” said Andrew, quoting Stendhal and so ostentatiously putting on his quoting-Stendhal face.

  “I don't really get that,” replied Leo. “It begs the question. Why should bedding a beautiful woman be any more pleasurable, from a sensation point of view, than an ugly one?”

  “From my experience,” I said, “sleeping with beautiful women can be highly unsatisfactory, sensationwise. And vice versa. There is a promise-of-pleasure kind of woman, but they're not the beautiful sort. More the ones who have that naughty look, the I'm-up-for-any
thing look.”

  I was at least half thinking about Ludo's girlfriend, Katie. She certainly had that naughty look. Was that why Ludo had never gotten round to marrying her?

  “Yeah,” said Andrew, smiling, “and they always seem to be the ones who smoke and have their roots showing. I like that. I've found the ones you need to steer clear of are the crazy ones.”

  “But haven't you ended up with one of the crazy ones?” I said. I'd heard some very strange stories about Alice, his snail-loving girlfriend.

  “She stopped being crazy,” he said seriously. Leo gave me a look that suggested I drop it, so I did.

  Ludo looked me in the face and said quietly, “So what are you going to do?”

  “I've told you, nothing. But she's, um, coming round tomorrow afternoon. For a playdate.” They all, Ludo excepted, whooped and hollered. “Fuck off,” I said, grinning. “It's a kiddie thing. She's bringing her weirdo child along. And we'll hardly be at it in the bedroom with the kids running riot next door. She does give spectacular blow jobs, though.”

  “What,” all three shouted in unison, getting us a stare from the blunt-faced barman.

  “Not what you think. We were walking along the street last week after the group, and she asked me what I was best at—I'd been telling her about all the stuff I'd failed at lately. And I said, “Nothing,” you know, what I always say about flattering to deceive, starting off well, and then wilting under pressure, and she said that everyone was the best at something and that she gave porn-star blow jobs, whatever they are—I mean, however they're different from the normal kind.”

  “I think it's how far they, ah, draw it in,” suggested Andrew helpfully. “You know, all the way, not just mucking about with the terminal fifth.”

  “Isn't there supposed to be a funny bit in between your arse and your balls?” said Leo, a little too graphically for anyone's taste. “Maybe it's something to do with that. Licking it or biting it or something.”

  “Deep throat,” cut in Ludo, surprising and silencing us. “You have to train yourself not to gag. There was a boy,” he explained, when we all looked at him in astonishment, “who used to do it for Mallomars in our dorm at school. Tomkin, his name was. I never partook. I wanted my own Mallomar. I offered him a penguin once, but it was Mallomars or nothing.”