Half Plus Seven (19 page)

‘It's… it's… it's… my new cologne!' I shouted with nervous pride. I kicked Jill under the table. She looked at me with the usual vitriol, but kept it zipped. The pitch was her lead and she wasn't about to give up a shot at the new biz bonus – 15 per cent of the fee in the first three months – that easily.

Miles broke the silence.

‘Well, Bill, I think you need a new brand.' And with that, a smile broke out in the corners of the dour Scot's mouth.

On the way out I made my excuses and used the facilities. I stuffed my heavy Jockeys in the bathroom bin. Needless to say, we didn't win the beauty parade. This was a kick in the balls. I could have done with the free detergent.

Back to the now, I sped the shackles of my time-killing tidy regime and hit the pan. When I went it was akin to opening the doors of a Wetherspoons to the town drunks at 10 a.m. and seeing them burst through before laying around the edges, lifeless and stinking.

It's fair to say the relentless urge to empty your bowels was one of the more awkward withdrawal symptoms from the sauce. Thanks in no small part to the hole through to the ground floor, it was easy to hear upstairs, downstairs. A key was slipped into the lock, found its grooves and turned the door open. The draught excluder made a brushing sound as it swept over the accumulated freesheet newspapers and take-away menus.

Craig.

‘Helloooooo…? Craig, Craig darling, are you in…?' And then, as an afterthought, ‘Bill…?'

‘Yeah… I'm upstairs.'

‘Oh, hello stranger!' Connie shouted up.

But how could Connie shout up? How could she have just come in? She'd made me a cuppa less than an hour ago. Hadn't she? We'd had a conversation. Or had we? Had it really happened? Or had it all been a dream? This wasn't what drug hallucinations were like. They were full of pink elephants, two-headed leprechauns and cats with nine tails and no lives – not hot-drink-wielding housemates. Whatever was going on in this tiny little brain of mine with its blown-out, slowed down synapses, I didn't fucking like it. I strained to shit the last of the goodness out of me when a sudden wave of nausea swam from the pit of my stomach through my body and out of my mouth in the form of a vegetable soup (extra carrot). My aim was directly over the hole in the floor. The mush hurtled through the air, between the floorboards, down into the kitchen. Oh dear.

‘EUUUUGH…!! BILL…!!! BILL?!'

Oh dear.

Connie appeared at the hole holding a wok equally proportioned with yet-to-be-cooked and regurgitated vegetables.

I looked down.

Oh dear.

Chapter 19

‘Here you go, my little man. Milk no sugar, just how you like it.'

My mum was fussing.

‘We've got some biscuits in too if you fancy a dunk, Bill?'

‘No thank you, Barry.'

‘All the more for me then…' Barry leapt off the breakfast bar stool towards my mother, resplendent in a pair of tight black leather pants, ‘…give us the tin, ya sexpot, you.'

If I hadn't recently spewed my guts up everywhere, the behaviour of the wrinkly rocker my mum was married to would have released a vom-nado. The sight of the leather tightening around his crotch when he engaged in horseplay would have turned Cool Hand Luke's stomach. I just had nothing left to give. No goodness left inside me. Hence, the scene of post-modern domesticity you've happened upon. After sickgate I'd decided that it was best for me to lay low from number 35 for a while. Give Craig and Connie some quality time. Let the spew settle. As embarrassing as it was for a 29-year-old man to ask his mother if he could spend a few days of R & R in the guest bedroom, it was what the current situation called for. The cap in hand actions were entirely necessary for the current state of affairs. And anyway, my dead dad practically owned half of this aspirational, class-climbing, bricks and mortified toy house. Barry, frankly, could get fucked. Which, thanks to the paper-thin walls favoured by the building trade post-millennium, was something I had to pipe loud post-rock music into my ears to avoid hearing, and subsequently being sick, and then being stuck in a vicious circle worthy of a suicide attempt. But the plus sides included three hot meals a day, a 52 inch LCD screen television and quilted toilet paper. I'd told my mum I'd been feeling rundown after working myself too hard on a project to change public opinion about an incinerator planned for construction on a popular playing field. She got confused every time I spoke about work. The perfect smokescreen.

‘That's nice, dear,' she'd say with a baffled look on her face. ‘Now what can I fix you to eat?'

I'd googled the hell out of ‘rehab diet' and decided upon a regime high in essential restorative vitamins and minerals. Heavy on the vegetables, big on oily fish and easy on the red meat. My mum had said:

‘Oh, love, okay. I'll get a special shop in. We did it on the computer the other day, you know?'

‘Did what, Mum?'

‘Got the shop in.'

‘Oh.'

‘On the computer.'

‘Right…'

‘Shall we get it in on the computer? You can choose what you want then?'

‘Okay, thanks, Mum, but I don't want you to go to any trouble.'

The thought of Barry's internet browsing history popping up on screen did nothing for my constitution.

‘It's no trouble, son.'

‘Problem with that bloody internet shopping though, love is the, pardon my French, the bloody Polish packers.' Head of International Relations, Barry, was at it again. ‘You ask for roasting potatoes, you get a ton weight of bloody roasted peanuts. Waste of time and money, love. Don't give them the bloody jobs.' If he threw in some Princess Di and Madeleine McCann material he could have been the
Daily Express
incarnate.

‘Look, Mum, I don't want any trouble. I'll just eat whatever's going.'

‘Okay, love.' She wore the accustomed look of disappointment particular to mothers.

‘Well, you'll have to fend for yourself tonight, young man. Your mother and I have been invited over to our friends' on the other side of the Close, Jason and Francesca's. He's a big wheel on the town council is Jason.'

The word WIFESWAPPING flashed through my mind in big red neon letters.

‘They're ever such a nice couple, love,' Mum said. ‘The last time we went around Francesca cooked us a Thai green curry, didn't she, Barry? I'd said to Francesca, “I don't like spicy, but I don't mind spicy”, if you get my meaning. And you know what? It wasn't spicy at all. Barry even had seconds.'

On Jason's wife probably.

Barry bore all the hallmarks of a sexual miscreant. I'd imagined he was a big name on the local swinging circuit – his poncey hair, his rock ‘n' roll hips, his too-tight pants. I had every faith that he sang his solitary chart hit at the top of his voice while a 62-year-old grandmother of three gave him fellatio – the first time she'd had meat in her mouth since her husband died after a short illness – in the spare bedroom of an identikit Wimpey townhouse, my mother looking on encouragingly, not wanting to speak up against their new alternative lifestyle lest she rocked the boat.

‘We can do the car boot on Sunday, as long as we're in for The Grapes on Friday night. Should be crackerjack!'

Humiliating carnal group encounters as recompense for a weekend selling bits and bobs from the back of a Seat.

This was the first time I hadn't been at least half drunk in Barry's company. It was trying.

‘I wonder what she'll cook up tonight? Probably something fancy do you think, Barry?'

‘I should imagine so, my beautiful wife. Righty ho, I'm off upstairs for the three sh's…'

Barry shot me a conspiratorial wink as he left the kitchen. Oh my dear fucking God. I was part of his gang. I needed to get well and get the fuck out of here.

With Mother and It off doing unthinkable things, I had the run of the house. The last time I'd had access to satellite television and a fully stocked fridge had been the summer after university when I'd lounged around on my parents' sofa for three lazy months. It had been like
The Graduate
, just with the Simon and Garfunkel, sunshine and sex with a mature lady swapped for MTV2, unseasonal rain and the 10-minute freeview. I was younger then, more stoner than day-long drinker. Lose a vice, gain a vice. Change a crutch, choose a crutch. What would my new one be? I knew what it could be. Christy. And what were my chances? Zero. I had been presented with the perfect opportunity to tell her how I feel and what did I do? Throw up on her shoes. And a little bit in her handbag. Smooth, smooth moves. Christ, I needed a drink.

Barry had quite a liquor cabinet in the garage. I should know, I'd raided it enough times. I went into the garage and looked at the bottles. Whiskies, brandies, gins, vermouths, aperitifs. I stayed and stared, rapt like a caveman looking at fire. In awe of its beauty, intoxicated by its power, aware of its danger. I went back into the house. I considered lying naked on the shag pile rug in front of the hearth in the living room but thought better of it when reckonings of who'd done the same before me added themselves up in my mind. I wandered upstairs. The last time I'd rummaged around their cupboards I'd pocketed a fistful of Citalopram. Best to avoid the bathroom cabinets this time. I turned on the cold tap and doused my face with water. Standing so close to the fire had brought me out in a sweat. I dried off, methodically evaporating the beads of water that would soon be replaced by beads of sweat, and went into the spare room. Under the bed was an ottoman full of the accumulated junk that had been hidden away since Barry had been living with my mum. I pulled it out, blew the dust off the top and opened it wide. It was a treasure trove of spoilt memories, trinkets and paper deemed significant or special enough to become personal baggage. The sum of my personal effects at my mother's house wouldn't have made for much of an estate to squabble over. Old family photographs from a 1980s beach holiday, Mum's eyes smiling worriedly, Dad's eyes giving away his sangria intake, and me, staring straight ahead at the lens. There was a singular sadness about looking at photos from your past. If only the matt-finish mouth could speak to you now and see the disappointment you'd inevitably become. This wasn't the plan, it'd say; twenty-nine, not an astronaut or spy, wears a tie to work, stopped riding skateboards. No love, no real life, it'd say, before going back to the beach or birthday party, or fun fair or family gathering. The time-worn greetings cards wouldn't have many posthumous takers either. I picked an A4-sized one up. It carried an ‘18' bubble, written in gold font, an exclamation mark to hammer the point home and a clearly tipsy mouse next to a magnum of champagne. I opened it up to find scribbled greetings in half a dozen different hands.

‘Happy birthday bro!

Legal at last.

Looking forward to a wicked disco.

Safe!

Jinko'

I hadn't seen Jinko since I'd moved away for college a few months after receiving his kind congratulations. He'd got the first girl he stuck it in pregnant – Janine Davies: pretty face, big appetite – and fallen off the radar. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook, I now was not only up to date with his life in the preceding pre-digital revolution years – two kids now, one of each, and an assistant manager's job at a hardware store on an out-of-town development – but could be updated on his burgeoning philosophic bent (‘If a tree falls in da woods and there's no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound? I thought it was bears wot shit in da woods LOL') or his appreciation for a cooked dinner (‘Luv the mrs Sunday roast <3'). He poked me. I never poked him back.

‘Oy oy!

Happy fucking birfday Billy boy!

Let's get mash up!

Tom'

Tom was a cab driver now. He'd picked me up from a private address at 5.30 a.m. one Saturday morning a couple of years back. I'd been snorting lines of coke the size of a midget's hard-on and had been trying to level myself out with skunk and straight up gin. I, or the large amounts of drugs I had on my person, had convinced two young girls with long legs and short dresses to leave the club, swing by another dealer's house and head back to mine to really get the party started. One of them was a perfect specimen apart from one lazy eye. I fully intended to snort drugs off their naked bodies and fuck the pair of them. I think this was evident in my demeanour. I hadn't recognised Tom for a few minutes and when I did was sure that he had clocked me but had tried to concentrate on the road and hope I'd not latch on. He had put weight on and wore a shit goatee beard. His disguise could have worked but didn't. We exchanged surprised salutations, over-egged on my part thanks to the dangerous levels of narcs in my system. He said it looked like I was doing well. I said we should lunch. He said he didn't get a lunch-break. I gave him my card. He never called.

I closed the card.

The greetings might as well have been epitaphs.

Chapter 20

‘Where the hell have you been, Bill?'

‘I've been, you know… around…'