Dan Taylor Is Giving Up on Women (21 page)

‘Rob called. I’ve not said anything. I’m going around now. I… You… Um. Hope you’re OK. Speak to you soon. Take care now.’

Take care now? Swearing to myself about another stupid answering-machine message, I grabbed a coat and headed out of the door.

The morning was another cold and fresh one, and despite the bright sun the cars were still frosted over — although I definitely detected one that looked as if the side windows had been rubbed clear of any icy condensation by the pressure of someone’s winter coat writhing against it in the middle of the night. I walked briskly towards the Harrisons’, or as briskly I could on the icy pavement. My hangover now was a distant memory as the nerves and adrenalin took hold again.

I had twenty minutes or so to work out what I was going to say, and to work out just how it was that I’d got myself in this situation.

Barely a month ago, in the wake of finding I could only get someone to get naked in my vicinity by accidentally leading them to believe I was a tragic widower, I’d despaired of ever meeting someone. Fed up with seeing the arseholes and the liars and selfish pricks get the girls, I’d figured that for my own dignity and self-respect the only thing I could do was become an eccentric recluse. That plan hadn’t quite worked out though, thanks to the Harrisons, and subsequent events suggested being a selfish, lying arsehole wasn’t going to be enough for me to get the girl either.

There were some awful things people could do to other people, both friends and strangers, when they were looking for someone to love. People tried too hard with the wrong people, and didn’t try hard enough with the right ones. Friendship could be forgotten, or taken for granted and under-appreciated. Friendship could also turn into something else.

But at what cost?

People could excuse anything they did, regardless of how hateful, if they could convince themselves they were doing it out of love. But when in life did you stop doing things for other people? Putting what someone else wanted ahead of what you did?

And was doing the decent thing the wrong thing if it was based on dishonesty, and you were lying to yourself? In the end didn’t the cracks always show?

And hang on, what if someone else involved wasn’t doing the decent thing either? Did that mean all bets were off?

And how many more rhetorical questions could I ask myself, drawing bigger and bigger platitudes from more and more specific circumstances to try and justify my situation?

Would there still be time to quit while I was ahead?

Coming into South Wimbledon, I passed the off-licence and convenience store, and thought about popping in to see if the guy who ran it would be up for selling me a couple of miniature bottles of Dutch courage. But then I figured I’d wait for that kind of drinking until all this was sorted and my life had entirely fallen apart. I would need the booze to warm me ahead of another night sleeping under a bridge yelling random accusations about the disintegration of my life at strangers coming back from the cinema.

Two minutes later I arrived at the door to Rob and Hannah’s place. Standing there, I considered ringing the doorbell for the nice old lady with the cats who lived in the downstairs flat. She’d always seemed very friendly and non-confrontational. We could maybe have a cuppa and share some stories about worming instead.

But after straightening up my coat, and faffing with my hair to cover the fading but still present bruise on my face, I took a big deep breath and pressed the buzzer marked ‘The Harrisons’.

And I knew what it was that I had to do.

‘Dan,’ said Rob as he bear-hugged me at the top of the stairs.

I was off balance, having been grabbed before my back foot could gain traction on the landing, and I had to wave my arms wildly to make sure the two of us weren’t found with broken necks and in a very intimate embrace at the bottom of the stairwell. Having regained my balance, I responded with a standard manly back pat. This resulted in Rob pulling me in closer and sinking his head into my shoulder. All the tension that had been creeping in between us lately, about the way he’d treated Hannah, the way he’d treated me, and the way I’d treated him, all of that was forgotten in that moment, as one man turned to another in a physical embrace seeking honest comradely comfort.

I was completely overcome with total awkwardness and panic and I really,
really
just wanted it to stop.

Still, I knew shoving him away with an, ‘Oi! Gerroff!’ would be wrong, and so was torn between gently prising him away to administer a cheery upper-arm punch and a ‘chin up’, or pulling him closer so I didn’t have to see that the convulsions shaking his shoulders were the result of his sobbing on me. One thing I did know was that I really wasn’t ready for dealing with this kind of naked emotion.

‘There, um, there…’ I said with a back rub as I shuffled us away from the edge of the stairs, knocking a plant off its table as I went. Despite having already been to the gym once this year, to be honest I was beginning to struggle a little under the weight of a fully grown, limply weeping man.

‘I’ve done this! She’s gone!’ he cried into my ear, before letting out a remorseful wail that started low and turned into a howl that shrivelled my spinal cord and was frankly a little over-dramatic.

I wriggled my shoulders out of his grasp to try and get a bit of distance between us, deciding I’d definitely now done my bit for open, modern male bonding.

‘Hold me!’ he cried.

Apparently, it hadn’t been enough. I gave him another consoling pat on the back, which caused him to pat me on the back too. It was quite firm, and a little painful really, so I patted him back harder. And he patted me back harder. So I patted him back harder. With two big open hands he patted me back even harder, and by that point we were both just whacking each other as hard as we could on the back with these sympathetic pats. The last couple though, I’d have to admit to using my knuckles to really get a couple of shots in the kidneys. I couldn’t help it — it was a defence mechanism against having my ribs shattered by a tearful man on the brink of emotional breakdown.

Finally he took a step back to look at me, and I remembered Mark Stephens, the toughest nine-year-old in my primary school. He was a boy nobody had ever seen cry, until one day when an innocuous fall from a climbing frame onto playground concrete caused his face to go purple and contort into this rictus of outrage and pain. Of course later we learnt that he’d fractured his ankle in the landing, and would be in a cast for months, but at the time the sudden unexpected display of jarring and fake-looking emotion had everyone pointing and laughing. It was a lot like the face Rob was pulling now. Rob stood there with big mournful eyes and his bottom lip stuck out like a brave little soldier.

‘Come on, old man,’ I said, ‘sit yourself down. I’ll get you a cuppa.’

Robotically Rob shuffled to the sofa and crashed down, staring into the middle distance, and I scuttled to the kitchen.

‘Actually I’ll have a coffee, please,’ he sniffed as I got together cups and waited for the water to boil. ‘And there’s proper stuff in the fridge, the Colombian, not the instant.’

‘Just because you’re heartbroken doesn’t mean you should have to tolerate inferior beverages, I suppose,’ I muttered to myself as I dug out the cafetière and a measuring spoon.

‘Sorry for the outburst, sport. All got a bit much for me.’

I looked around the small cramped kitchen, and thought of all the times the three of us had squeezed in here getting pasta and drinks ready, taking the piss out of each other, or railing against a world that in one way or another hadn’t treated one of us with the respect and wonder we deserved. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle as I could almost feel the times Hannah would have slid past me with a hand on the small of my back, or a casual stroke of my arm. Or when I’d give her shoulders a rub while Rob mixed cocktails and she complained about the halfwits at her office. Just the stuff of being friends, but now it seemed different.

Of course, the other thing that seemed a bit different was that I didn’t know then that Rob and Hannah’s marriage was on a knife edge, and I hadn’t betrayed my best pal by luring his wife into a drunken shag.

But it wasn’t like that! I insisted to myself, banging the teaspoon on the Formica counter. I…I…I love her, I finally confessed, banging the spoon again. And that bastard in the next room — I banged the spoon — has cheated on her — bang — diminished her — bang — disrespected her choices — bang — and I wasn’t going to stand for that any more. Bang. Bang. Bang.

‘What’s the racket? Everything all right in there?’

I stormed out into the living room, still brandishing my teaspoon, fired up for a confrontation with the scoundrel lounging on the sofa. He was slouching there, gently rubbing the frame of a photo of their wedding day with a faraway look in his eyes.

‘D’you want sugar?’ I demanded.

‘I’d promised her I’d cut down,’ he said mournfully. ‘Just three, please.’

Back in the kitchen I spooned in some sugar, and berated myself for chickening out of saying what it was I wanted to say. But I still didn’t know how I was going to say it. It was the guilt getting in the way, I realised. It was the only thing I could think of when I saw him mooning about looking glum. His jittery, nervy tension from earlier had collapsed amid his tears, leaving him looking frail and vulnerable. I guessed I just wasn’t angry enough, and I needed to focus more on what he’d done, not on what I had, and not on how it was affecting him.

I tried to fire myself up. He’d spent God knew how long — years, probably — manipulating her feelings to get what he wanted, regardless of what she thought. But what was it I was doing last night when I invited her, already half drunk and emotionally vulnerable, to a party?

OK, but he’s been cheating, I reminded myself. He’d taken any excuse to go off humping somebody he really shouldn’t be. But then how exactly would you describe what I’d been doing when Hannah had said, ‘Ow, you’re on my hair!’ just a few short hours ago?

I was in turmoil, my mind in a whirl. I was trying to think straight, but tying myself in knots trying to find the way to express the truth about how I felt. I was unable to overcome the white noise that came with considering the consequences of saying what I really wanted.

‘Any biscuits in there, sport?’

That did it.

‘Look, it’s no bloody wonder she left you if this is the way you treated her all the time!’

I stormed out of the kitchen into the living room, pointedly slamming the mug of coffee on the side table next to him, without even looking for one of the Wonder Woman coasters. ‘She’s not some sort of slave, y’know, and neither am I.’

‘Hey! Calm down, Spartacus. I’m knackered. I just need an energy burst.’

‘Oh, really? Well, if you hadn’t spent so much time last night bonking some strumpet maybe you wouldn’t be so tired.’

He looked at me, startled, and on the edge of furious.

‘What the fuck are you talking about? And why do you sound like
The Sun
from the 1980s? Bonking?’

‘Whatever the kids are calling it these days — adultery. Where were you last night?’

‘I was at work. There was a crisis.’

I stared at him incredulously. He looked back, then stared at the floor, then the ceiling, then back at me, then settled his gaze on a large yucca plant to my right.

‘Nothing’s happened with her. Nothing really, we’re just hanging out. She’s fun, reminds me a lot of Hannah, funnily enough.’

‘Nothing’s happened?’

‘Bit of a snog at the Christmas party, but that’s it. We were working on some big accounts together towards the end of the year and spent a lot of time together. We kept spending time together when we didn’t really have the excuse any more. You’d like her. I was going to introduce the two of you actually.’

‘You wanted to introduce me to your mistress?’

‘On this fuckwitted dating thing of yours, sport. I thought you might hit it off.’

‘Jesus, as some kind of beard? You figured you could cheat on me the same time you cheat on your wife?’

Thin ice, I realised…

‘I told you nothing’s happened with her. Much. Nothing much has happened. The occasional…y’know… Nothing really.’

For the seventeenth time that day, I began to feel like I was going to be sick.

‘Well, what have you been doing?’ I asked.

‘Dinner. Afternoon movies. Walks around town. I haven’t even been back to her place yet.’

‘But you’re working up to it.’

‘I dunno.’

‘You want to?’

He looked at me as if that was the stupidest question anyone had ever asked him.

‘I don’t know how you could do that to Hannah.’

That set him off. He sprang to his feet and began agitatedly pacing the room, slapping bookshelves and kicking the base of the sofa as he went back and forth.

‘Christ, the two of you are pissing me off with your pain-in-the-arse pompous moralising these days. Her looking down on me every time I mention kids because I actually want to move this relationship forward and telling me she’s always been honest and not changed since uni. Well, I can tell you she’s fucking delusional if she thinks she’s the girl I married.’

‘You want to bring a child into this?’ I said, pompously gesturing around the room, as if a flat with a complete collection of Paul Newman DVDs and an Elvis bust would be an inhumane environment in which to bring a child.

‘And you with all your
whining
about doing the right thing, because you haven’t got the balls to carry things through. Acting like a marriage-counselling vicar about things you know nothing about. And since the two of you have been hanging out together? Insufferable! And with Laura, the odd night out and occasional blow job isn’t something I’d give up a marriage for. I mean, I’m not stupid. I want Hannah to come back.’

No balls? Whining? This would be the time to let him have it. Give him the truth — tell him that if he wanted to know if I had balls he should ask his wife, and if anyone had been doing any whining it was her last night. But I figured no, firstly that would be too mean, and secondly, as an attempt at macho dialogue it didn’t really make any sense, particularly the whining bit.

‘Do you think she’s found out about the girl from the gym too?’ Rob asked suddenly. The anger had faded again
and the vulnerable abandoned husband was back.

‘What girl?’

‘From the gym. But that was just mucking about, and just the once.’

‘The gym?’

‘We’d been flirting for months. You’d have noticed it if you ever showed up. It was one time, one of those broom-cupboard moments and totally unexpected.’

A hint of winking pride slipped into his tone, slightly edging out the guilty penitence.

‘We’d barely ever spoken but every time there was just this chemistry. Like you get with someone in a club, y’know? Well…you can probably imagine anyway. But everything we said was just loaded with innuendo. Then one day I kinda dared her to, y’know, and twenty minutes later I’m back home in the shower saying the hot water at the gym had gone off again.’

‘I can’t believe you’re showing off about this.’

‘I’d have expected Hannah to do the same in the situation,’ he said defensively, the anger coming back into his voice. ‘I even bet she has. It was just one of those moments you never think happens but when it does you don’t turn it down, for Christ’s sake. It’s got nothing to do with my marriage.’

‘But of course it doesn’t! I can’t even imagine why we’re talking about the two things at the same time.’

This bickering was getting nowhere, but it had confirmed to me what I’d wanted to hear: that Rob was a philandering and controlling swine. Now I should tell him what had happened last night. I just needed to come out and say it.

‘Urgh, Christ, that’s disgusting. What did you do? Is that salt in there?’

Pausing from his prowling around the room, Rob had taken a huge swig of the coffee I’d made him, swallowing half and spitting the other half back in the vicinity of his mug.

‘Ah. It may be, yes.’

Three large spoonfuls. By accident. They really shouldn’t keep the salt in a jar next to the tea bags.

‘You did that on purpose, didn’t you, you bastard? Trying to poison me, like you do anyone who gets in your way.’

‘One time, that happened!’

‘It’d be bloody typical of your way of doing things. Snide remarks and lecturing and judging when I’ve turned to you for help.’

We stood there in silence staring at each other, then my phone loudly chirruped that a text message had come in. I desperately wanted to check it in case it was Hannah, but didn’t want to back down from this face off. Then Rob’s phone vibrated and slid slightly across the table as he received a message too. The stand-off ended quickly as we both moved to check messages at the same time.

‘It’s Hannah,’ we said simultaneously.

‘What does yours say?’ Rob asked edgily.

I tried to focus on reading the message, while my mind was giddy that she’d text me first. But the message was far from good news.

Last night was a mistake. Sorry. I’m all right, but going away for a few days. Hx

‘Just that, um, just that she’s going away for a while,’ I said distractedly. A mistake? Did she really think it was a mistake? Then why had she texted me first? That had to mean something, didn’t it?

‘Yeah, mine says that too,’ said Rob, more talking to himself than me. ‘She needs a break is what it means, the
stuff about it being over…just how she feels now.’

He looked at me, a puzzled expression on his face. As his eyes flicked from me, to my phone, and then back to his, I found it a little tricky to swallow.