‘That’s no excuse though.’
‘Well, no, but it was bound to give you a knock.’
‘I’ve still got that letter you wrote. It’s a very beautiful letter, I appreciated it.’
‘But still, I should have tried harder to get in touch. You’re meant to stick by your friends aren’t you? Take the blow.’
‘I don’t blame you—’
‘But even so.’ To her embarrassment, she found that there were tears in her eyes.
‘Hey, hey, what’s up, Em?’
‘I’m sorry, drunk too much is all …’
‘Come here.’ He put his arms around her, his face against the bare skin of her neck, smelling shampoo and damp silk, and she breathed into his neck, his aftershave and sweat and alcohol, the smell of his suit, and they stood like this for a while until she caught her breath and spoke.
‘I tell you what it is. It’s … when I didn’t see you, I thought about you every day, I mean
every day
in some way or another—’
‘Same here—’
‘—even if it was just “I wish Dexter could see this” or “where’s Dexter now?” or “Christ, that Dexter, what an idiot”, you know what I mean, and seeing you today, well, I thought I’d got you back – my
best
friend. And now all this, the wedding, the baby – I’m so, so happy for you, Dex. But it feels like I’ve lost you again.’
‘Lost – how?’
‘You know what happens, you have a family, your responsibilities change, you lose touch with people—’
‘Not necessarily—’
‘No really, it happens all the time, I know it. You’ll have different priorities, and all these new friends, nice young couples that you met at ante-natal classes who’ll have babies too and understand, or you’ll be too tired because you’ve been up all night—’
‘Actually, we’re going to have one of those babies that aren’t too much trouble. Just leave them in a room apparently. With a tin opener, a little gas stove.’ He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh. ‘It won’t be like that, I promise.’
‘Do you?’
‘Absolutely.’
She pulled away to look at him. ‘You swear? No more disappearing?’
‘I won’t if you won’t.’
Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of glorious confusion.
‘What’s the time?’ said Emma, twisting her face away in panic.
Dexter tugged his sleeve and looked at his watch. ‘Just coming up to midnight.’
‘Well! We should go.’
They walked on in silence, unsure about what had happened and what would happen next. Two more turnings brought them once again to the exit of the maze, and back to the party. Emma was about to open the heavy oak door when he took her hand.
‘Em?’
‘Dex?’
He wanted to take hold of her hand and walk back into the maze. He would turn his phone off, and they would just stay
in there until the party was over, get lost and talk about all that had happened.
‘Friends again?’ he said eventually.
‘Friends again.’ She let go of his hand. ‘Now, let’s go and find your fiancée. I want to
congratulate
her.’
Richmond, Surrey
Jasmine Alison Viola Mayhew.
She was born in the late evening of the third day of the new Millennium, and so would always be as old as the century. A neat but healthy 6lbs 6ozs, and to Dexter’s mind, inexpressibly beautiful, he knew that he would sacrifice his life for her, while at the same time feeling fairly confident that the situation was unlikely to arise.
That night, sitting in the low-slung vinyl hospital chair, clutching the tiny, crimson-faced bundle, Dexter Mayhew made a solemn resolution. He resolved to do the right thing from now on. A few biological and sexual imperatives aside, all his words and actions would now be fit for his daughter’s ears and eyes. Life would be lived as if under Jasmine’s constant scrutiny. He would never do anything that might cause her pain or anxiety or embarrassment and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing in his life to be ashamed of anymore.
This solemn resolution held for approximately ninety-five minutes. As he sat in a toilet cubicle, attempting to exhale cigarette smoke into an empty Evian bottle, a little must have escaped and set off the detector, waking his exhausted wife and daughter from their much-needed sleep and as he was escorted from the cubicle, still clutching the screw-top bottle of yellow grey smoke, the look in his wife’s tired, narrowed eyes said it all: Dexter Mayhew was simply not up to it.
The growing antagonism between them was exacerbated by the fact that, as the new century began, he found himself without a job, or even the prospect of a job. The broadcast slot for
Sport Xtreme
had crept inexorably towards dawn, until it became clear that no-one, not even BMX riders, could stay up that late on a weeknight, no matter how rad, sweet or old skool the moves. The series limped to an end and Paternity Leave shaded into the less fashionable state of unemployment.
A temporary distraction was provided by moving house. After much resistance the bachelor flat in Belsize Park was rented out for a huge monthly sum, and exchanged for a neat terraced house in Richmond with, they told him, bags of potential. Dexter protested that he was too young to move to Surrey, by about thirty-five years, but there was no arguing with the quality of life, the good schools, the transport links, the deer roaming in the Park. It was close to her parents, the Twins lived nearby, so Surrey won out and in May they had begun the endless, bottomlessly expensive task of sanding every available wooden surface and knocking through every non-supporting wall. The Mazda sports car went too, sacrificed for a secondhand people carrier that smelt indelibly of the previous family’s communal vomit.
It was a momentous year for the Mayhew family, yet Dexter found himself enjoying nest-building far less than he had thought. He had imagined family life as a sort of extended Building Society commercial: an attractive young couple in blue overalls, paint-rollers in hand, pulling crockery from an old tea chest and flopping down onto a big old sofa. He imagined walking shaggy dogs in the park and exhausted but good-humoured night-feeds. At some point in the near future, there would be rock pools, fires on the beach, mackerel cooked over driftwood. He would invent ingenious games and put up shelves. Sylvie would wear his old shirts over bare legs. Knitwear. He would wear a lot of knitwear and provide for his dependents.
Instead there was bickering, meanness and sullen looks through a fine haze of plaster dust. Sylvie began to spend more and more time at her parents’ house, ostensibly to avoid the builders but more often to stay clear of her listless, ineffectual husband. Occasionally she would phone up to suggest that he go and see their friend Callum, the crayfish baron, and take him up on his offer of work, but Dexter resisted. Perhaps his presenting career might pick up again, he might find work as a producer or re-train as a cameraman or an editor. In the meantime he could help the builders, cutting down on labour costs and to this end he made tea and went for biscuits, picked up a little basic Polish, played PlayStation against the sonic boom of the floor-sander.
Once upon a time he had wondered what happened to all the old people in the TV industry, and now he had his answer. Trainee editors and cameramen were twenty-four, twenty-five, and he had no experience as a producer. Mayhem TV plc, his very own independent company, had become less a business, more an alibi for his inactivity. At the end of the tax year it was formally wound down to avoid accounting costs, and twenty reams of optimistically headed paper were shamefully consigned to the attic. The only bright spot came from spending time with Emma again, sneaking off to the movies when he should have been learning to grout with Jerzy and Lech. But that melancholy feeling, stepping out of a cinema into sunlight on a Tuesday afternoon, had become unbearable. What about his vow of perfect fatherhood? He had responsibilities now. In early June he finally cracked, went to see Callum O’Neill and was initiated into the Natural Stuff family.
And so this St Swithin’s Day finds Dexter Mayhew in an oatmeal-coloured short-sleeve shirt and mushroom-coloured tie, supervising delivery of the vast daily supply of rocket to the new Victoria Station branch. He counts the boxes of the green
stuff while the driver stands by with a clipboard, staring openly, and instinctively Dexter knows what’s coming next.
‘Didn’t you used to be on telly?’
And there it is…
‘Back in the mists of time,’ he replies, light-heartedly.
‘What was it called?
largin’ it
or something.’
Don’t look up
.
‘That was one of them. So do I sign this receipt or what?’
‘And you used to go out with Suki Meadows.’
Smile, smile, smile
.
‘Like I said it was a long, long time ago. One box, two, three—’
‘She’s everywhere these days, isn’t she?’
‘Six, seven, eight—’
‘She’s gorgeous.’
‘She’s very nice. Nine, ten.’
‘What was that like then, going out with her?’
‘Loud.’
‘So – whatever happened to you?’
‘Life. Life happened.’ He takes the clipboard from him. ‘I sign here, yes?’
‘That’s right. You sign there.’
Dexter autographs the invoice and places his hand into the top box, taking a handful of rocket and tasting it for freshness. ‘Rocket – the iceberg lettuce
de nos jours’
Callum is fond of saying, but Dexter finds it bitter.
The real head-offices of Natural Stuff are in a warehouse in Clerkenwell, fresh and clean and modern, with juicers and bean-bags, unisex toilets, high-speed internet and pinball machines; immense, Warholesque canvases of cows, chickens and crayfish hang on the walls. Part workplace, part teenager’s bedroom, the architects had labelled it not an office, but a ‘dreamspace’ in Helvetica, lower case. But before Dexter is allowed into the dreamspace, he has to learn the ropes. Cal is very keen that all his executives get their hands dirty, so Dexter
is on a month-long trainee placement, working as the shadow manager of the latest outpost of the empire. In the last three weeks he has cleaned out the juicers, worn a hairnet to make the sandwiches, ground the coffee, served the customers and, to his surprise, it has been okay. This, after all, is what it’s all about; business is people, as Callum likes to say.
The worst thing about it is the recognition, that flickering look of pity that passes over the customer’s face when they see an ex-TV presenter serving up soup. The ones in their mid-thirties, his contemporaries, they’re the worst. To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death, and they stare at Dexter behind the cash register as one might stare at a prisoner on a chain-gang. ‘You seem smaller in real life,’ they sometimes say, and it’s true, he does feel smaller now. ‘But it’s okay,’ he wants to say, ladling out the Goan-style lentil soup. ‘It’s fine. I’m at peace. I like it here, and it’s only temporary. I’m learning a new business, I’m providing for my family. Would you like some bread to go with that? Wholemeal or multigrain?’
The morning shift at Natural Stuff lasts from 6.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., and after cashing up, he joins the Saturday shoppers on the train to Richmond. Then there’s a boring twenty-minute walk back to the terrace of Victorian houses that are all much, much bigger on the inside than they appear on the outside, until he is home at The House of Colic. As he walks up the garden path (he has a garden path – how did that happen?), he sees Jerzy and Lech closing the front door, and he assumes the matey tone and mild cockney accent that is mandatory when talking to builders, even Polish ones.
‘Cześć! Jak siȩ
masz?’
‘Good evening, Dexter,’ says Lech, indulgently.
‘Mrs Mayhew, she is home?’ You have to change the words round like this; it’s the law.
‘Yes, she’s home.’
He lowers his voice. ‘Today, how are they?’
‘A little … tired, I think.’
Dexter frowns and sucks in his breath jokily. ‘So – should I worry?’
‘A little, perhaps.’
‘Here.’ Dexter reaches into his inside pocket, and hands them two contraband Natural Stuff Honey-Date-Oat Bars. ‘Stolen property. Do not tell anyone, yes?’
‘Okay, Dexter.’
‘Do widzenia.’
He steps up to the front door and takes out his key, knowing there’s a good chance that somewhere in the house someone will be crying. Sometimes it seems as if they have a rota.
Jasmine Alison Viola Mayhew is waiting in the hallway, sitting up unsteadily on the plastic dust-sheets that protect the newly stripped floorboards. Small neat, perfect features set in the centre of an oval face, she is her mother in miniature, and once more he has that feeling of intense love tempered with abject terror.
‘Hello, Jas. Sorry I’m late,’ he says, scooping her up, his hands circling her belly, holding her above his head. ‘What kind of day have you had, Jas?’
A voice from the living room. ‘I wish you wouldn’t call her that. She’s Jasmine, not
Jazz.’
Sylvie lies on the dust-sheet-covered sofa, reading a magazine. ‘Jazz Mayhew is
awful
. Makes her sound like a saxophonist in some lesbian
funk
band.
Jazz.’
He drapes his daughter over his shoulder and stands in the doorway. ‘Well if you’re going to name her Jasmine, she’s going to get called Jas.’
‘
I
didn’t name her,
we
named her. And I know it’s going to happen, I’m just saying I don’t like it.’
‘Fine, I’ll completely change the way I talk to my daughter.’
‘Good, I’d like that.’
He stands at the end of the sofa, glances at his watch showily,
and thinks
A new world record! I’ve been home, what, forty-five seconds, and already I’ve done something wrong!
The remark has just the right mix of self-pity and hostility; he likes it, and is about to say it out loud, when Sylvie sits and frowns, her eyes wet, hugging her knees.