Wake Up Happy Every Day (2 page)

I’ve seen a dead body before, of course – by the time you get to the age of forty-nine who hasn’t? – but that was my mum safe home after a year thrashing on the end of the hook and line that is stomach cancer. Laid out in the scented parlour of a proper funeral home with her face smoothed as bland as the moon. As annihilating as icing on a store-bought cake. She had been moved from the raw, upsetting twitch and flex of death to the still ranks of the dear departed. She’d been properly processed.

Russell hasn’t been processed and he doesn’t look like anyone’s dear departed. And he doesn’t look at peace. He looks enraged. Cheated.

There is, I’m certain, a medical explanation for the mottled framboise of his face – something boringly scientific – but at this moment he just looks bloody furious, engorged with murderous intent. The seething victim of a juvenile practical joke who is going to properly fuck someone up when he catches up with them. A paranoid homeowner who has glimpsed an intruder he intends to shoot.

Russell doesn’t respond to my voice, or to my hand when I shake his shoulder. He doesn’t tell me to sod off. He doesn’t ask that if a man can’t pass out in his own bathroom, where the fuck can he pass out? He’s chill and stiff through his Oakland Raiders sweatshirt. I know it then.

Russell Albert Knox, my friend since 1968 when we were both four years old and both living in Plover Way, Brickhill, Bedford, Bedfordshire, England, the United Kingdom, Europe, The World, The Universe – is dead. Russell is dead and I feel . . .

What do I feel?

I feel tired.

I’ve never been a hard man. Never even pretended to be. I’m a softy. Everyone says so. Sarah says it’s one of the main things she liked about me. I’ve even ended up with a reasonably girlie version of my own name. It’s always been Nicky, never the curt manliness of a simple Nick, or the formal bow of a Nicholas. So I don’t want anyone thinking I take Russell’s death in my stride. I’m properly shocked, just as you’re meant to be. And shock must account for at least some of the stuff I do later on.

I don’t puke or anything – in real life people don’t. It’s only in films that people routinely throw up on encountering a dead body. No, I’m not sick – but I do need to sit down for a while.

I sit and I finish my drink and listen to the blood thrum in my ears and my heart two-stepping away in my chest and God knows how long that takes, but eventually I recover enough to get up and do something practical. Something useful.

I change the record.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Callous. But it’s not. Not really.

See, I remember the house seeming to get smaller, the walls encroaching on me and I get the notion to honour my dead friend by finishing the bottle and playing something with heft. Something with weight. Which means something with cellos. John Taverner,
The Protecting Veil.
It’s one of the few classical pieces I know, and it was Russell who introduced me to it. So it is entirely apt. I absolutely need to hear it. I need that, and, suddenly, weirdly, I need a cheese sandwich. And crisps.

Shock, see. Grief. Makes us mad. Makes us hungry. Makes us do strange and wonderful things.

Pretty soon this place, this luxury faux-castle with unrivalled views over the world’s coolest city, is certain to become a venue for difficult phone calls, tricksy questions and form filling. All the dispirting stuff of clerking. The wee wee hours aren’t suitable for all that. Far better, I think, to use the time till morning proper in reflection on Russell’s life and work. To ponder in sombre fashion what a fragile, ill-made piece of crap is Man. To acknowledge that we’re born astride a grave etc. Russell deserves some modest period of grace before the various civil services of two sick and criminal nations put him through their rendering machinery. He’s owed that.

I’m drunk remember. Shocked remember. And in Hyde Street, Russian Hill. Hyde Street. In a house once owned by the widow of Robert Louis Stevenson, where there is a stained-glass window that shows the
Hispaniola
in full sail, through which, on a good day, you can see Treasure Island. And Alcatraz.

I am lost. I’m adrift. I’m drunk. I’m grieving. Maybe I’ve even gone a little crazy. Let’s not forget any of that.

Two

LORNA

And in those same early hours way across town in the Tenderloin, Lorna Dawson holds Jez’s cock gently but securely between her thumb and forefinger. She strokes him. She bends and puts the bruised hibiscus of him between her lips, then she unrolls the condom down him while he inhales deeply and raises his hips. It’s a smooth, practised movement and she wonders if you can get too expert at something like this. Does it say something about her that isn’t so great actually? And then she wonders if Jez’s erections are less strong these days, whether there is just a little more give in them. A little more plasticity. She won’t mention it, but maybe it means age is catching up with him. Just a bit. He is nearly thirty-five after all.

As she clambers above him, ready for what Jez likes to call docking procedure, she makes the mistake of catching his eye. He winks, and something inside her shrivels and dies.

She closes her eyes and sinks down onto him, settles her weight onto her calves and the backs of her thighs. This is the last time. Please make this the last time. She rocks her hips a few times. Experimental. Tentative. Now that he’s inside her, he feels as hard as ever. Maybe she’s mistaken about the ageing thing.

She opens her eyes. He’s staring right at her. Concentrating, unblinking now, frowning like he’s invigilating an exam. He holds her around the hips, moves her gently. ‘Baby, that’s beautiful,’ he says. ‘You look so fucking beautiful.’ She rocks slowly, forwards and back, up and down. He is such a plonker sometimes.

But afterwards, she lies with her head on his skinny hairless chest, listening to the distant gurglings going on somewhere deep inside him. Like a faulty heating system. Like there are bits of him coming loose, and it makes her feel fond of him in a way she never does when they’re fucking.

‘Here we are again,’ she says. Then she says, ‘This isn’t love.’ And is surprised to find she’s said it out loud.

‘Hush,’ he says. ‘We said we’d never use that word.’

She’s genuinely shocked. Did they agree that? And he must have noticed her quiver because he says, ‘You’re right. This isn’t love. This is something better than that.’

‘What’s better than love?’

‘Almost anything,’ he says. ‘Almost everything.’

She wants to smack him right in the mouth. It’s so like him. Sums him up. Glib and lazy. Clever and meaningless. And, actually, thinking about it, not even all that clever.

She sits up, flicks her hair back out of her eyes. He loves it long and wild and dirty-blonde like this. Idiot man, he thinks dirty-blonde hair means a dirty-blonde soul. Which in her case it maybe does, a bit. But only a bit. Whatever, she’s definitely getting it cut.
Maybe dyed too. She could be a gamine brunette. She could be that.

She rubs her arms, they’re goose-pimply and the friction feels good. Jez looks up at her, smiling. He’s like some kind of pale snake. Not a lightning-quick venomous one, not a cobra or anything like that. More like an albino anaconda that’s recently swallowed a guinea pig. Smug, sated, sleek, and ready to sleep. Is he even a good shag? She can’t tell any more.

Jez’s eyes are closing, he’s drifting off. She pulls his nose. ‘Come on, Jezza, you can do better than that.’

His eyes snap open. He’s annoyed. Good. Lorna feels her heart begin to race a little. Good good good. He’s pissed off. Excellent.

Jez frowns. ‘Desire is better than love. Friendship is better than love. Understanding, tolerance, warmth, self-knowledge. They’re all better than love.’

‘They
are
love, you idiot. All those things – they are love.’ She keeps a smile in her voice. Even so, Jez tightens his lips. He doesn’t like conflict. He especially doesn’t like post-coital conflict.

‘No they’re not. They all
last
. Love doesn’t. Love is like an infection. It’s a fever, a nasty little rash. It’s a few days of heat and sweat and panic. A few weeks maybe.’

She wonders if he believes this. Maybe he does. ‘No,’ she says at last, still careful to keep her tone light. ‘You’re describing something else. Flu maybe. Or syphilis.’ Or the early stages of pregnancy. But she isn’t going to say that. Jez still doesn’t need to know about that. He won’t ever need to know about that.

Jez shrugs his shoulders.

And he’s not even handsome. Not really. His skin is getting rough, his teeth are going sort of yellowy. Off-white anyway. There are tiny flecks of crud on his eyelids. And he’s too bony to be a proper man. He’s thirty-five for chrissakes, or nearly, and still a hairless streak of piss. It’s not natural.

‘I can’t come here again.’

‘You always say that.’

‘This time I mean it.’

‘You always say that too.’

She sits up. ‘Jez, I do mean it. Next time you call, I’m going to be out, my cell will be off and I’ll be out of state. I’ll be skiing, or diving or . . .’ She stops, unable to think of anything else she wants to do that might sound suitably exotic or playful or adventurous.

‘Or what?’ says Jez.

‘Or dead.’ She holds her breath.

‘OK,’ he says. OK? OK? What does he mean by that?

He pulls her back down on top of him. ‘I’m not going to be allowed to sleep am I?’ He smiles and his face looms into hers, too close for her to see it properly. There is just a sense of teeth and lips and nose and hot breath and a sweaty lump of hair. But he sounds happy now, and she knows he can look beautiful when he’s happy. Her heart cracks.

It’s Friday. She knows already that he won’t call her again until Wednesday at the earliest. She’ll be out. She’ll be away.

Jez moves his hands over shoulders, her back, her arse, her thighs. She kisses his neck. She feels him twitch beneath her, stir against the fuzz between her legs. The fuzz he’s been trying to get her to get rid of actually.

She kisses him again. ‘I don’t come here for warmth, or friendship, or any of that. I come here because I’m a bit bored and a bit lonely.’ And as soon as she says it, she knows that it is true and she knows she has to leave California as soon as. It just isn’t her friend any more.

‘Hush now,’ Jez says.

Three

NICKY

Some time later – who knows how long? – I have the big idea. An idea that could be good for us but one that, miraculously, hurts no one else. Because ideas often do, don’t they? Hurt people, I mean.

And it’s just taking vague shape when Sarah appears, red hair excitingly disordered, the constellations of freckles standing out against the Celtic pale of her skin. Skin made still more ghostly by her being abruptly shaken from sleep. She is Celtic-eyed too, and right now her sharp blue stare flashes dangerous flames as she stumbles in wondering what – exactly – I think I’m doing. We have a child trying to sleep upstairs. And what is this dreadful, churchy music anyway?

And I’m too dazed to say anything so I put my finger to my lips and take her by the hand and show her Russell on the floor of the bathroom. And when she runs for her phone to call 911, I follow and spill out my idea to her hunched and hurrying dressing-gowned back.

It’s important that you know this about Sarah. She’s not just loyal and kind-hearted, she’s also almost pathologically law-abiding. Even getting a parking ticket or a library fine panics her. Uniquely among the people I know, she never had a shoplifting phase as a kid. She’s never even nicked pens or stationery from work. Never jumped a red light, never dropped a sweetie wrapper in the park. She claims she never even tried to buy booze or fags under age. She’s a phenomenon. So when I explain my idea I guess I’m almost certain that she’ll reject it out of hand. In fact, if I’d genuinely thought she’d go for it, I probably would never have said it. Does that make sense? I think at this stage it is just a theoretical plan. An abstract thing. A phantasm conjured by grief and whisky. And cellos. Don’t forget those cellos.

She stops. She turns around, those eyes as blue and as wide as the bay itself. I think I’m really in the shit.

‘What? What did you just say?’

‘Nothing. Just an idea. Forget it.’

But she makes me say it all again, slowly, and I do and this time it doesn’t sound like a big idea. It sounds a bit rubbish.

Deep breath.

It doesn’t have to be Russell there, dead in the bathroom. It could be me. This story doesn’t have to be rich bloke collapses in his toilet. Instead it could so easily be the story of an old friend flown over – with his family – by his generous buddy. An old friend who then – tragically – collapses and dies in a foreign land. A simple story and a beautifully sad one. And it has a kind of truth too. It’s
more
truthful in a way. It should have been me, not him. It makes more sense that way.

She says nothing. Looks at me agog, scared-looking. I’m in too deep to stop now. I’m aware that what I’m saying is outrageous. Wrong on so many levels, but still on I go.

We have all the passwords. And we have the passports, the utility bills and all the other necessary chip and pin fabric of a life. Two lives. And wasn’t Russell planning to vanish anyway? And he’s dead. That’s nature. It’s not like we killed him. And our life? Due for taking to the recycling centre. It’s a basement life, full of damp plans and mottled schemes. It’s a rusty, grimy, grubby life that needs disinfecting, spring-cleaning, converting into something useful and you, Sarah, you’ve been saying that for years. And we have our girl to think of now too, don’t we? And we won’t have been the first to do this. If you can imagine it, then someone has done it. That’s something my dad always used to say. One of his many wise observations, along with never a borrower or a lender be and early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.