People are beginning to make their way home: singles clutching early editions of the Sunday papers, couples stopping to window-shop in estate agents’ for flats they can’t afford, gangs of pissed-up girlies tottering home in their high heels
and flimsy skirts and gangs of hairy men in their best white shirts chasing hopelessly after them.
There’s a full moon. It’s warm and muggy and close and some of the nearby restaurants have spread their tables out on to the street: a few stragglers are drinking liqueurs and pretending to be continental while the waiters pace about in circles wondering if they’re ever going to leave.
“I’ve been sick,” she says matter-of factly
“Thought you might have,” I say, sitting down next to her.
“I think I’d like to go home now.”
“No problem,” I say. Till nip back inside and tell everyone that you’re not feeling well.”
“You ruined my night,” she says, stubbing her cigarette out on the kerb.
“I know. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
“So where were you, then?” she says, trying to meet my gaze. “Coz, you know, even you couldn’t make mowing a lawn take that long.”
“I went into town,” I say. “I wanted to buy you a leaving present but it all took much longer than it should have on account of the Ant and Dec question, and then Sheila turned out to live in the Amazonian rain forest and then she wanted to show me her photos of Antwerp and then ..
.”
“You’re a very weird person,” she says, softening slightly. “You’re a very weird person, Danny McQueen.”
And then she throws up again, spilling her multicoloured guts all over the parched summer pavement and clearing the last stragglers away from their tables. The waiters are grateful. And I lift her up, hail us a taxi and carry her back home to bed.
Alison has gone without me. The reason I know she’s gone without me is because she’s left me a note.
Dear Danny, it says, I’ve gone without you. You looked so peaceful I didn’t want to wake you up. I’ll call as soon as I get in. Love you lots Al x.
Well, that’s a lie for a start. I never look peaceful when I’m asleep. I honk and fidget and dribble and snore and I quite often get woken up in the middle of the night by Alison digging me in the ribs and telling me to shut the hell up. I wanted to go with her. It was going to be great. I was going to wave at her from the platform like Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter. I was going to kiss her on the forehead and wish her luck and she was going to cry her eyes out and tell me how much she was going to miss me. I was going to buy myself a stale chicken tikka baguette and wait around with her bags while she went to look at lacy pants in Knicker Box.
Alison loves shopping at departure points. Airports are her all-time favourite, but I know she’ll be indulging in some quality retail activity at the Eurostar terminal. I can see her now: nipping into Smith’s for a copy of Hello! (she only reads Hello! when she thinks no one will see her), ordering a cappuccino from Costa Coffee, popping into Body Shop for kumquat-flavoured toiletries and wandering into Knicker Box to eye up the rails of skimpy underwear.
Under normal circumstances I might spend some quality time imagining Alison in skimpy underwear at this point, but I’m not really in the mood. Why didn’t she bother to wake
me up? We agreed last night that I’d drive her to Waterloo. It’s not like I can’t get up early when I have to, it’s not like I have to stay in bed all morning, it’s just that I tend to go to bed late. It’s just that daytime telly doesn’t really kick in until after the Jerry Springer show comes on. Not unless you count the Columbo reruns on BBC Choice. I love Columbo reruns, I love how everyone thinks Columbo is a complete numbskull when actually he’s a super-cunning detective genius.
I look at Alison’s note again. There’s a clear subtext hidden between the lines. She may still love me but she’s definitely beginning to lose respect for me.
The living room is a mess; pieces of crumpled wrapping paper all over the floor and yesterday’s food spread out across the dinner table in a deep greasy pile: the MS ready meal that we were too hung over to eat, the bottle of Sancerre that we were too hung over to drink, and the decimated Thomas the Tank Engine cake that was all either of us could face. Alison liked her cake. She liked her cake and her guidebook and her silver bracelet and when I explained that her flowers were currently languishing on the windowsill in Sheila’s front room she didn’t seem to mind.
She put the bracelet on her wrist and kissed me gently on the cheek. I kissed her back. I kissed her mouth and her neck and her fabulous tits and then the hangover horn kicked in with a vengeance and we ended up screwing right there on the sofa.
She looked incredible. Even with her hair all messed up and smelling ever so faintly of puke, even with mascara clotted in filthy black rings round her eyes, even with cake icing smeared across the edges of her beautiful mouth. I love Alison’s mouth. I love her mouth and her legs and the taste of her cunt and the way her whole body tenses up like a bullet when she comes.
We stayed on the sofa for a long while after that: curled up in a duvet, sipping hot tea and polishing off the rest of Thomas’s bright green funnel with our hands. She said she forgave me.
She said it would have been a crap party anyway because she didn’t like most of the people who were there. She made me sit in the damp patch on the duvet by way of a punishment. She made me realise just how much I’m going to miss her.
I spent the rest of the afternoon watching her pack, avoiding the washing up and drip-feeding her Coke and cupfuls of soluble aspirin. At one point I came up with a unique hangover treatment consisting of aspirin, fresh orange juice, Pepto-Bismol and a whole raw egg but, oddly enough, she didn’t seem overly impressed. I told her what Ruth had said to me the night before. She told me it was all bullshit.
“I didn’t tell her anything,” she said, rolling her Tshirts between tissue paper so they wouldn’t get creased on the journey, “Ruth just presumed. I only said you were thinking of doing something else, not that you were definitely going to.”
“So you didn’t ask her to find me a job in tele sales then?”
“Jesus, no. Are you kidding? I’d rather you spent the rest of your life in a bar mitzvah band than got a job in tele sales
Thank God for that.
“So, how about I take you to Waterloo in the morning?” I said when we’d finished forcing her suitcase shut.
“Bit early for you, isn’t it?” she said carefully. “I’ve got to be there by half nine.”
“No problem. I’ll get up and drive you. You don’t want to lay out fifteen quid for a taxi when you’ve got me to take you. I mean, there’s no point, is there?”
“But I’ve already ordered one, for eight thirty, it’s all arranged.”
“So cancel it,” I said. “They won’t care.”
“OK,” she said. “I’ll go and do it now.”
I’m ninety-nine and a half per cent sure she never cancelled that cab.
My second mug of coffee is going down nicely and I’m beginning to feel a bit more positive. If Alison is losing respect for me then it’s up to me to win it back. It’s up to me to prove that I can do it: that all those years in damp rehearsal rooms and piss-stained dressing rooms haven’t been a complete and utter waste of time.
We’ve got to pull ourselves together. We’ve got to start taking this thing more seriously. We’ve got to give the band one more Atlantic City-style spin of the dice.
It’s about time I called Vince and told him about my plan.
Vince is in a mood with me. I can tell he’s in a mood with me because he won’t give me any of his chips.
“Come on.”
“No.”
“Come on, give us a chip.”
“No, and they’re not chips anyway, they’re curly fries.”
“I don’t care what they’re called, just give us one.”
“No, get your own.”
“Can I have some?”
“Course you can, mate… D’you want ketchup on ‘em?”
“Yeah, nice one.”
“How come he gets to have some?”
“Because he’s not a wanker.”
“And I am?”
“You said it.”
The emergency band meeting isn’t going quite as well as I’d hoped. Not only has Vince refused to give me any of his chips, he’s also made it quite clear that he doesn’t think very much of my plan.
“It’s a rubbish plan.”
“Why is it rubbish?”
“Because it’s exactly the same plan we’ve been having for the last ten years, that’s why.”
“It’s not,” I say, pulling a neatly folded sheet of A4 out of my pocket. “Look, I’ve made a list of things to do. Just wait until you see this.”
I have to say that I’m particularly pleased with the way my ‘to do’ list has turned out. I’ve used a different colour felt-tip pen for each new suggestion, and I’ve also underlined
what I consider to be the key points in lime-green Magic Marker. It took me the entire length of This Morning to get it just right.
“Blimey,” says Vince, biting into his cheeseburger and splattering my ‘to do’ list with globs of chilli sauce, ‘it gets worse. Oi, Matty, listen to this.”
Matty spears another forkful of chips on to his plate and Vince clears his throat and begins to read aloud.
“Ehem… point number one,” he says, tapping the paper on the table like a pretend news reader ‘get decent… what does that word say? Right, manager, yeah… get decent manager with office in Camden town or similar.
“Point number two: get some decent live dates instead of just playing for beer at friends’ parties.
“Point number three: record new demo and send it to various A’n’R departments instead of relying on Sheila at the video shop to tell us if the new songs are any good or not.
“Point number four: get matching poodle haircuts in the manner of early Bon Jovi videos so that the three of us start to look more like a proper band.
“Point number five…”
“Fuck off,” I say, snatching the list off Vince and folding it back into my pocket. “You’re just taking the piss now. It doesn’t say that at all. I was only saying that we should make an effort to look more like a cohesive unit. What? What are you both laughing at? What the fuck is so funny all of a sudden?”
“You are,” says Vince, wiping his eyes with his serviette. “You with your felt-tip pens and your Magic Markers and your emergency ten-point plans. I mean, when was you actually going to get around to telling us?”
“Telling you what?”
Matty makes a violent whipping motion with his arm.
“About Alison.”
“What about Alison?”
“About what she said. About the ultimatum. About the whole six-month thing.”
TO
“Whoopah!” says Matty, cracking his arm in the air and slapping his middle finger into his palm with a sharp, neat crack: “Whooopahhh!!” he says again.
“What are you doing? What is he doing? Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”
“Pussy-whipped,” says Matty. “It’s the sign for pussy-whipped, whoop—’
“Matty, do that again and you’re a fucking dead man…”
“All right, cairn down,” says Vince, pulling me back into my seat and offering me his plate. “I think you’d better have one of my curly fries.”
“I suppose Ruth told you, then?” I say, chewing sulkily on my chip.
“Yeah, at The Medicine Bar. We came back just after you’d taken Alison home and she told us the whole thing. It was pretty obvious, Danny, all that guff about finding you a job in tele sales and Ruth saying that we were shit and you not even bothering to stick up for us.”
“I know, you’re right, I should have told her where to go.”
“So it’s not true, then? You haven’t told Alison that you’re giving up?”
“Of course not.”
“But you have agreed to it, though, the six-month limit?”
“Yeah,” I say solemnly, “I suppose I have.”
“Right then.”
“What do you mean, “right then”, what does “right then” mean?”
“It means at least we know where we stand.”
Vince stares at his coffee, I stare at my emergency ten-point plan, and Matty looks from Vince to me and back again. No one says anything.
“Guys, guys,” says Matty finally, “I mean, come on, we can sort this out, right?”
“Ask him,” says Vince, looking over at me.
“Danny?”
“Ask him,” I say, looking back across the table at Vince.
“Right, I’m off to the news agent to see if the new NME’s in yet. You’ve got exactly five minutes. If you’ve not sorted things out by the time I get back I’m calling up the first wanted ad that I see. Got it?”
“Yeah, suppose so.”
“Good. I mean it, guys, five minutes, or I’m off.”
We watch Matty get up and march purposefully towards the door. Neither of us is quite sure what to say.
“Blimey,” says Vince after a while, ‘old Nappy Rash can be quite firm when he wants to be, can’t he?”
“Yeah,” I say, breaking into a smile. “Who knew he had it in him?”
By the time Matty gets back with his paper Vince has almost decided to forgive me.
“I didn’t appreciate having to hear it from someone else, that’s all,” he says, reaching over for my packet of cigarettes and helping himself.
“I know,” I say, ‘it was out of order. I suppose I thought it would be easier once Alison had left.”
“Well, I don’t see why,” he says, taking Matty’s Zippo out of his pocket and flicking it alight. “And I’ll tell you something else for nothing. Your missus has got rotten taste in mates.”
“I know … I don’t think Alison’s friends like me very much.”
“No, mate, they don’t, especially that Ruth one. She’s a nightmare.”
“Yeah, well, she’s infertile or something,” I say by way of an explanation.
“Thank Christ for that,” says Vince.
“Well, that’s more like it,” says Matty, slapping us both on the back. “That’s what I like to see, the two of you taking the piss out of each other again-Hey, isn’t that my Zippo?
I’ve been looking for that Zippo for ages. How long have you had it?”
“Sorry, Matt, I borrowed it off you the other day. I was just about to give it back to you, as it goes.”
“Well, I suppose that’s OK, then. But don’t borrow it without telling me next time, OK?”
“No problem,” says Vince, putting the Zippo back in his pocket and taking a wheezy suck on his fag. “Who fancies some more coffee, then?”