10
Katie sometimes wondered
whether Mum chose her opinions just to wind her up.
Clearly she’d rather the wedding didn’t go ahead. But if it did she wanted it to be a grand and public celebration. Katie pointed out that it was a second wedding. Mum said they didn’t want to seem cheap. Katie said that some restaurants were very expensive indeed. Her mother suggested a church blessing. Katie asked why. Her mother said it would be nice. Katie pointed out that nice was not the point of religion. Her mother said she should arrange to have a dress made. Katie said she didn’t do frocks. Her mother told her not to be ridiculous. And Katie began to realize they should have tied the knot in Las Vegas and told everyone afterward.
The following day Katie was watching
Brookside
on telly while Ray and Jacob made some kind of rudimentary shelter out of two dining chairs and the picnic blanket. She asked what they were doing and Jacob said they were making a tent. “For the wedding.” And Katie thought, “Sod it.” She was getting married to Ray. Her parents were going to have a party. They were simply going to do these things simultaneously.
She rang her mother and suggested a compromise. Her mother got the marquee and the flowers and the cake. Katie got the civil ceremony, no blessing and a dress off-the-peg.
The following Saturday Ray and Jacob went to get a new exhaust fitted while Katie met Mona in town to buy an outfit before Mum changed her mind.
She bought herself a long silk strapless dress in sky blue from Whistles. You couldn’t run in it (Katie made a point of never buying anything you couldn’t run in) but if the register office caught fire she reckoned Ray could sling her over his shoulder. She bought a pair of suede shoes in a slightly darker blue with a bit of heel from a place on Oxford Street, and it was quite fun being girly for a few hours with Mona, who could do girly till the cows came home.
When she got home she did a twirl for the boys and Jacob said, “You look like a lady,” which was weird, but sweet.
She bent down and kissed him (bending down wasn’t particularly easy either). “We should get you a sailor suit to match.”
“Don’t be hard on the little chap,” said Ray.
Jacob gave her a serious look. “I want to wear my Bob the Builder T-shirt.”
“I’m not sure what Granny is going to think about that,” said Katie.
“But I want to wear my Bob the Builder T-shirt,” said Jacob.
They’d cross that bridge when they came to it.
11
George sat in the
car outside the surgery, gripping the steering wheel like a man driving down a mountainside.
The lesion felt like a manhole cover of rotted meat under his shirt.
He could see the doctor, or he could drive away. He felt a little calmer just putting it like that. Option A or Option B.
If he saw the doctor he would be told the truth. He did not want to be told the truth, but the truth might not be as bad as he feared. The lesion might be benign or of a treatable size. Dr. Barghoutian, however, was only a GP. George might be referred to a specialist and have to live with the prospect of that meeting for a week, two weeks, a month (it was entirely possible that after seven days without eating or sleeping one went completely insane, in which case matters would be taken out of his hands).
If he drove away, Jean would ask him where he had been. The surgery would ring home to ask why he had missed the appointment. He might not get to the phone first. He would die of cancer. Jean would find out that he had not been to the doctor and be livid that he was dying of cancer and had done nothing about it.
Alternatively, if the lesion was benign or of a treatable size and he drove away, it might subsequently mutate into a malignant and untreatably large cancer and he might be told this and have to live, for however brief a time, with the knowledge that he was dying as a direct result of his own cowardice.
When he finally got out of the car it was because he could no longer bear his own company in such a confined space.
The presence of other people in the surgery calmed him a little. He checked in and found himself a seat.
What could he say about Ray in his speech at the wedding reception? Now there was a puzzle he could get his teeth into.
Ray was good with children. Well, good with Jacob at any rate. He could fix things. Or thought he could. The mower had died a week after he tinkered with it. Either way it was not a sufficient recommendation for marriage. He had money. A sufficient recommendation, certainly, but one which you could add only as an amusing aside once you’d established that you liked the chap.
This was filling his head.
Ray was in love with Katie, and Katie was in love with him.
Was she? His daughter’s mind had always been a mystery to him. Not that she had any qualms about sharing her opinions. About the wallpaper in her bedroom. About men with hairy backs. But her opinions were so violent (could wallpaper matter that much?), so changeable and so clearly not part of a coherent worldview that he wondered, sometimes, during her teens especially, if there were something medically wrong.
No. He had got everything back to front. It was not the job of the bride’s father to like his prospective son-in-law (he could feel sanity returning even as he formed the thought). That was the job of the best man. In which respect, if Ray’s best man improved on the buffoon at her last wedding George’s relief might outweigh his misgiving about the marriage itself (“So I rang all Graham’s previous girlfriends to find out what Katie was in for. And this is what they said…”).
He looked up and saw a poster on the far wall. It consisted of two large photographs. The photograph on the left showed a patch of tanned skin and bore the words
HOW DO YOU LIKE MY TAN
? The picture on the right bore the words
HOW DO YOU LIKE MY SKIN CANCER
? and showed what looked like a large boil packed with cigarette ash.
He came very close to being sick and realized that he had steadied himself by gripping the shoulder of a tiny Indian woman to his right.
“Sorry.” He got to his feet.
What in the name of God were they doing putting up a poster like that, in here of all places? He aimed himself at the exit.
“Mr. Hall?”
He was halfway to the door when he heard the receptionist saying it again, more sternly this time. He turned round.
“Dr. Barghoutian can see you now.”
He was too weak to disobey and found himself walking down the corridor to where Dr. Barghoutian stood beside his open door, beaming.
“George,” said Dr. Barghoutian.
They shook hands.
Dr. Barghoutian ushered George inside, closed the door behind him, sat down and reclined with the stub of a pencil jammed like a cigar between the first and second fingers of his right hand.
“So, what can I do for you today?”
There was a cheap plastic model of the Eiffel Tower on a shelf behind Dr. Barghoutian’s head and a framed photograph of his daughter on a swing.
This was it.
“I had a turn,” said George.
“And what kind of turn are we talking about?”
“At lunch. I was finding it very difficult to breathe. I knocked some things over. Rushing to get outside.”
A turn. That was all it was. Why had he got himself so worked up?
“Chest pain?” asked Dr. Barghoutian.
“No.”
“Fall over?”
“No.”
Dr. Barghoutian stared at him and nodded sagely. George did not feel good. It was like that scene near the end of the film, after the Russian assassin and the unexplained office fire and the member of Parliament with the penchant for prostitutes. And it all came down to this, some old Etonian in the library of a London club, who knew everything and could have people wiped out with a single phone call.
“What was it that you were trying to get away from?” asked Dr. Barghoutian.
George could think of no conceivable answer to this.
“Were you frightened of something?”
George nodded. He felt like a five-year-old boy.
“And what were you frightened of?” asked Dr. Barghoutian.
It was all right. It was good to be a five-year-old boy. Five-year-old boys were looked after. Dr. Barghoutian would look after him. All he had to do was hold back the tears.
George lifted his shirt and unzipped his trousers.
With infinite slowness Dr. Barghoutian retrieved his spectacles from the desk, put them on and leaned close to the lesion. “Very interesting.”
Interesting? Jesus. He was going to die of cancer surrounded by medical students and visiting professors of dermatology.
A year seemed to pass.
Dr. Barghoutian removed his spectacles and leant back in his chair. “Discoid eczema, unless I’m very much mistaken. A week of steroid cream should sort that out.” He paused and tapped some imaginary ash from his pencil onto the carpet. “You can tuck yourself back in now.”
George tucked his shirt back in and did up his trousers.
“I’ll print you out a prescription.”
Crossing the reception area he passed through a column of sunlight falling from a high window onto the flecked green carpet. A mother was breast-feeding a small baby. Beside her an elderly man with ruddy cheeks and Wellington boots leant on a walking stick and seemed to gaze, past the baby buggies and the dog-eared magazines, to the rolling fields where he had doubtless spent the greater part of his working life. A phone rang like church bells.
He pushed open the glass double doors and reentered the day.
There was birdsong. Actually, there was no birdsong but it seemed like a morning which deserved birdsong. Above his head, a jet was opening a white zip down the middle of a blue sky, ferrying men and women to Chicago and Sydney, to conferences and colleges, to family reunions and hotel rooms with plump towels and a view of the ocean.
He paused on the step and breathed in the good smells of bonfire smoke and recent rain.
Fifteen yards away, on the far side of a neatly trimmed, waist-high privet hedge, the Volkswagen Polo was waiting for him like a faithful dog.
He was going home.
12
Jamie ate a seventh
Pringle, put the tube back in the cupboard, went into the living room, slumped onto the sofa and pressed the button on the answerphone.
“Jamie. Hello. It’s Mum. I thought I might catch you in. Oh well, never mind. I’m sure you’ve heard the news already, but Katie and Ray were round on Sunday and they’re getting married. Which was a bit of a surprise, as you can imagine. Your father’s still recovering. Anyway. Third weekend in September. We’re having the reception here. In the garden. Katie said you should bring someone. But we’ll be sending out proper invitations nearer the time. Anyway, it would be lovely to talk to you when you get the chance. Lots of love.”
Married? Jamie felt a little wobbly. He replayed the message in case he’d heard it wrong. He hadn’t.
God, his sister had done some stupid things in her time but this took the biscuit. Ray was meant to be a stage. Katie spoke French. Ray read biographies of sports personalities. Buy him a few pints and he’d probably start sounding off about “
our colored brethren
.”
They’d been living together for what…? six months?
He listened to the message for a third time, then went into the kitchen and got a choc-ice from the freezer.
It shouldn’t have pissed him off. He hardly saw Katie these days. And when he did she had Ray in tow. What difference did it make if they were married? A bit of paper, that was all.
So why did he feel churned up about it?
There was a bloody cat in the garden. He picked up a piece of gravel from the step, took aim and missed.
Fuck. There was ice cream on his shirt from the recoil.
He dabbed it off with a wet sponge.
Hearing the news secondhand. That’s what pissed him off. Katie hadn’t dared tell him. She knew what he’d say. Or what he’d think. So she’d given the job to Mum.
It was the other-people thing in a nutshell. Coming along and fucking things up. You were driving through Streatham minding your own business and they plowed into your passenger door while talking on their mobile. You went away to Edinburgh for a long weekend and they nicked your laptop and shat on the sofa.
He looked outside. The bloody cat was back. He put the choc-ice down and threw another piece of gravel, harder this time. It glanced off one of the sleepers, flew over the end wall into the adjoining garden and hit some invisible object with a loud
crack.
He shut the French windows, picked up the choc-ice and stepped out of sight.
Two years ago Katie wouldn’t have given Ray the time of day.
She was exhausted. That was the problem. She wasn’t thinking straight. Looking after Jacob on six hours sleep a night in that craphole of a flat for two years. Then Ray pitches up with the money and the big house and the flash car.
He had to call her. He put the choc-ice on the windowsill.
Perhaps it was Ray who’d told their parents. That was a definite possibility. And very Ray. Marching in with his size fourteen boots. Then getting shit from Katie on the way home for stealing her thunder.
He dialed. The phone rang at the far end.
The phone was picked up, Jamie realized it might be Ray and very nearly dropped the receiver. “Shit.”
“Hullo?” It was Katie.
“Thank God,” said Jamie. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. I mean, it’s Jamie.”
“Jamie, hi.”
“Mum just told me the news.” He tried to sound breezy and unconcerned, but he was still jumpy on account of the Ray panic.
“Yeh, we only decided to announce it on the way to Peterborough. Then we got back and Jacob was being rather high maintenance. I was going to ring you tonight.”
“So…congratulations.”
“Thanks,” said Katie.
Then there was an uncomfortable pause. He wanted Katie to say
Help me, Jamie, I’m making a terrible mistake,
which she obviously wasn’t going to do. And he wanted to say
What the fuck are you doing?
But if he did that she’d never speak to him again.
He asked how Jacob was doing and Katie talked about him drawing a rhinoceros at nursery and doing a poo in the bath, so he changed the subject and said, “Tony’s getting an invite, then?”
“Of course.”
And it suddenly sank in. The joint invitation. No bloody way was he taking Tony to Peterborough.
After putting the phone down he picked up the choc-ice, wiped the brown dribble off the windowsill and walked back into the kitchen to make some tea.
Tony in Peterborough. Jesus. He wasn’t sure which was worse. Mum and Dad pretending Tony was one of Jamie’s colleagues in case the neighbors found out. Or their being painfully groovy about it.
The most likely combination, of course, was Mum being painfully groovy and Dad pretending Tony was one of Jamie’s colleagues. And Mum being angry with Dad for pretending Tony was one of Jamie’s colleagues. And Dad being angry with Mum for being painfully groovy.
He didn’t even want to think about Ray’s friends. He’d known enough Rays in college. Eight pints and they were that close to lynching the nearest homosexual for sport. Apart from the closet case. There was always a closet case. And sooner or later they got paralytic and sidled up to you in the bar and told you everything, then got shirty when you wouldn’t take them up to your room and give them a hand job.
He wondered what Jeff Weller was doing these days. A sexless marriage in Saffron Walden, probably, with some back copies of
Zipper
hidden behind the hot water tank.
Jamie had spent a great deal of time and energy arranging his life precisely as he wanted. Work. Home. Family. Friends. Tony. Exercise. Relaxation. Some compartments you could mix. Katie and Tony. Friends and exercise. But the compartments were there for a reason. It was like a zoo. You could mix chimpanzees and parrots. But take the cages away altogether and you had a bloodbath on your hands.
He wouldn’t tell Tony about the invitation. That was the answer. It was simple.
He looked down at the stub of choc-ice. What was he doing? He’d bought them to console himself after the binoculars argument. He should have chucked them the next day.
He pushed the choc-ice into the bin, retrieved the other four from the freezer and shoved them in afterward.
He stuck
Born to Run
on the CD player and made a pot of tea. He washed up and cleaned the draining board. He poured a mug of tea, added some semi-skimmed milk and wrote a check for the gas bill.
Bruce Springsteen was sounding particularly smug this evening. Jamie ejected him and read the
Telegraph.
Just after eight, Tony turned up in a jovial mood, loped into the hall, bit the back of Jamie’s neck, threw himself lengthways on the sofa and began rolling a cigarette.
Jamie wondered, sometimes, if Tony had been a dog in a previous life and not quite made the transition properly. The appetite. The energy. The lack of social graces. The obsession with smells (Tony would put his nose into Jamie’s hair and inhale and say, “Ooh, where have you been?”).
Jamie slid an ashtray down to Tony’s end of the coffee table and sat down. He lifted Tony’s legs into his lap and began unlacing his boots.
He wanted to strangle Tony sometimes. The poor house-training mostly. Then he’d catch sight of him across a room and see those long legs and that brawny, farm-boy amble and feel exactly what he felt that first time. Something in the pit of his stomach, almost painful, the need to be held by this man. And no one else made him feel like that.
“Nice day at the office?” asked Tony.
“It was, actually.”
“So why the Mr. Glum vibes?”
“What Mr. Glum vibes?” asked Jamie.
“The fish mouth, the crinkly forehead.”
Jamie slumped backward into the sofa and closed his eyes. “You remember Ray…”
“Ray…?”
“Katie’s boyfriend, Ray.”
“Yu-huh.”
“She’s marrying him.”
“OK.” Tony lit his cigarette. A little strand of burning tobacco fell onto his jeans and went out. “We bundle her into a car and take her to a safe house somewhere in Gloucestershire—”
“Tony…” said Jamie.
“What?”
“Let’s try it again, all right?”
Tony held his hands up in mock-surrender. “Sorry.”
“Katie is marrying Ray,” said Jamie.
“Which is not good.”
“No.”
“So you’re going to try and stop her,” said Tony.
“She’s not in love with him,” said Jamie. “She just wants someone with a steady job and a big house who can help look after Jacob.”
“There are worse reasons for marrying someone.”
“You’d hate him,” said Jamie.
“So?” asked Tony.
“She’s my sister.”
“And you’re going to…what?” asked Tony.
“God knows.”
“This is her life, Jamie. You can’t fight off Anne Bancroft with a crucifix and drag her onto the nearest bus.”
“I’m not trying to stop her.” Jamie was starting to regret this topic of conversation. Tony didn’t know Katie. He’d never met Ray. In truth, Jamie just wanted him to say,
You’re absolutely right.
But Tony had never said that, to anyone, about anything. Not even when drunk. Especially not when drunk. “It’s her business. Obviously. It’s just—”
“She’s an adult,” said Tony. “She has the right to screw things up.”
Neither of them said anything for a few moments.
“So, am I invited?” Tony blew a little plume of smoke toward the ceiling.
Jamie paused a fraction of a second too long before answering, and Tony did that suspicious thing with his eyebrows. So Jamie had to change tactics on the hoof. “I’m sincerely hoping it’s not going to happen.”
“But if it does?”
There was no point fighting over this. Not now. When Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on the door Tony invited them in for tea. Jamie took a deep breath. “Mum did mention bringing someone.”
“Someone?” said Tony. “Charming.”
“You don’t actually want to come, do you?”
“Why not?” asked Tony.
“Ray’s engineering colleagues, my mother fussing over you—”
“You’re not listening to what I’m saying, are you.” Tony took hold of Jamie’s chin and squished it, the way aunts did when you were a kid. “I would like. To come. To your sister’s wedding. With you.”
A police car tore past the end of the cul-de-sac with its siren going. Tony was still holding Jamie’s chin. Jamie said, “Let’s talk about it later, OK?”
Tony tightened his grip, pulled Jamie toward him and sniffed. “What have you been eating?”
“Choc-ice.”
“God. This thing really has depressed you, hasn’t it.”
“I threw the rest away,” said Jamie.
Tony stubbed out his cigarette. “Go and get me one. I haven’t had a choc-ice since…God, Brighton in about 1987.”
Jamie went into the kitchen, retrieved one of the choc-ices from the bin, rinsed the ketchup from the wrapper and took it back through to the living room.
If his luck was in, Katie would throw a toaster at Ray before September and there wouldn’t be a wedding.