Starting Over (21 page)

They danced. The woman kept barking at them. She didn’t stop. They followed her drill. Fluid movement to mechanical orders. Everybody looked incredible to me. They seemed to obey the choreographer without having to think about it. And then they all stood there, soaked in sweat, shoulders heaving with diaphragm-filling breaths, as the woman went down into the stalls to talk to the man who sat all alone in that red velvet auditorium. I saw the fingers of Lara’s right hand flutter to the pain in her right hip, and then fall to her side. When the woman came back on stage she moved through the lines, touching shoulders and saying, ‘Thank you.’

Those she touched left the stage quickly and without a word.

But Lara was still standing there.

Larry had lost weight.

A face-changing, shape-shifting amount of weight. His clothes hung on him like a collapsed circus tent, his favourite green Lacoste shirt sagging to reveal a pencil-length of scar on his chest. His wife was going to have to make him get a new wardrobe.

But he looked good – better than I had ever seen him. He was going to die one day, but that was something that he shared with everyone else on the planet, so I couldn’t let that get me down.

I looked at him and smiled. Sometimes you look at an old friend and just the fact that they are still here can stab you with happiness. That was how I felt about Larry.

We were in the hall above the florist’s shop. My eyes
drifted to the rain pitter-pattering on the window. One floor below there was nobody at the tables and chairs of the cafés on Hampstead High Street, and I realised that somehow the season had changed when I wasn’t looking.

A new guy was on his feet, his hands rolling around each other, as if he was washing them. He wasn’t that old – somewhere in his thirties, I guessed – but he looked dangerously overweight.

‘I put on all this weight after the operation,’ he said, hands wringing. Larry – the changed Larry – was smiling encouragement. ‘They told me that the steroids would pile on the pounds, but I don’t understand why all the exercise I’m doing isn’t having any effect. My wife is worried that I am…’

His voice trailed away. We knew what his wife was worried about.

‘That’s normal,’ said Geoff, his arms folded across his chest. ‘Your new heart is without a nerve supply for the first year, so it responds much more slowly than you would expect to exercise.’

The new guy looked at Geoff. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.

Geoff smiled encouragement. ‘Don’t worry too much about it,’ he said. ‘It gets better.’

Larry crossed the room and embraced the new guy, and thanked him for sharing.

Then it was time for our prayer. I stood and reached out my hands, and they were taken by Paul on one side and Geoff on the other. We closed our eyes and bowed our heads. It was a real prayer, you see.

‘We are grateful to our families for their support,’ said Larry. ‘We are grateful for the gift of life. We are grateful
for the skill of our doctors. And we are grateful to the donors who made it possible.’

God knows I was grateful for all those things. But, still, I thought that maybe I would skip next week’s meeting. It was different now that I was back at home.

I wouldn’t feel guilty about not turning up. Our meetings were well attended now, with as many regulars as Narcotics Anonymous and Belly Dancing for Beginners put together. And I had never really taken to the whole hug-a-stranger thing.

It had taken me long enough to learn how to put my arms around my own family.

I thought it was going to be the two of us. My son and I. But it was never going to be just the two of us ever again.

The black cab pulled up outside the main entrance to Selfridge’s and I saw that Nancy and Alfie were with him in the back. And I thought, Couldn’t they get the bus? Does my son work so hard just so she can ride in cabs?

Alfie got out first, and I said, ‘Hello, Alfie,’ and he stared at me blankly. Then his mother emerged, an emphatically pregnant thing easing herself on to the pavement, giving me a brittle little smile even as she gave instructions to Rufus. He was still in the back seat, slipping some notes through the glass to the driver, and I instinctively reached for the money in my back pocket. But he’d already taken care of it.

I stood with Nancy and Alfie as she chastised her son for his latest infraction. And as the great mass of humanity on Oxford Street flowed around us, I thought to myself, Who are these people? Rufus joined us. We didn’t hug – Nancy was between us. We went inside.

‘Don’t start,’ Nancy told Alfie, but unfortunately he did
start, and he didn’t stop. He clearly did not wish to be in Selfridge’s. There was a toy hammer sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans and a plastic spanner sellotaped behind his ear.

‘I’ve got lots of jobs for you to do in my house,’ I said cheerfully, and he frowned at me with suspicion.

Nancy had a list. The thing that Rufus and I had planned to buy was not on her list, and I was hoping that she might give my son an hour off for good behaviour. But no. We tagged meekly along as Nancy unsmilingly made her way through the clothes for expectant mothers, the children’s department and ladies’ shoes. Nancy was attempting to squeeze one of her feet into a Jimmy Choo sandal – like an ugly sister taking her shot at the glass slipper – when we realised that Alfie was missing.

I felt it in the pit of my stomach. That sick panic when a child is missing. There is no fear quite like it in this world. And I had every sympathy for Nancy as she began to call her son’s name, again and again and again, louder and louder, ever more desperate. She stared around, frantic with fear, one foot in a Jimmy Choo sandal and the other one bare.

I gently touched her arm. ‘You really have to keep a close eye on them in a place like this,’ I said, and I didn’t mean
you
, I meant
all of us
, but still she turned on me with such fury in her eyes that I realised she hated me.

And then Rufus was suddenly coming towards us with Alfie in his arms, the boy twisting his head to look back, waving his rubber hammer, and I could see the workmen on the far side of the store who had attracted the boy’s attention. They were tearing down something old and erecting something new.

Nancy grabbed her son and shook him. He dropped the
toy hammer in his fist and began to whimper. And Rufus had such a sweet, open-hearted grin on his face that I put my arm around him and patted his bony shoulder twice, and I didn’t care if it was allowed or not.

Then we went off to do what we had planned to do all along, and we chose the suit that my son would be married in.

I sat with my fingernails digging into the worn leatherette of the Ford Capri’s passenger seat, my right foot involuntarily slamming down on brakes that were not there, slick with sweat despite the winter chill.

My mum leaned forward from the back seat and I could hear her sharp intake of breath as my dad paused at a deserted roundabout, waited for a while, looked around uncertainly, waited a bit more, muttered a few words to himself that may or may not have had anything to do with driving, and then slowly lurched off just as a lorry with the right of way came hurtling towards us. We caught a glimpse of the driver’s face, contorted with shock and rage as he swerved past us, leaning on what sounded like a ship’s horn.

‘Keep your hair on, mate,’ commented my dad, ‘nobody wants to find it.’

He veered off the roundabout without indicating, crossing two lines of traffic and narrowly missing a silver-haired old lady in a Nissan, who stuck two fingers up at him and mouthed, ‘Wanker.’

My dad had been a fast, competent driver for as long as I could remember. He had an old-fashioned attitude to driving – to him, a man wearing a seat belt was only slightly better than a man wearing a dress – and when admonished by my mum for regarding the speed limit as purely optional, he always cited his clean licence. When I thought of him in my childhood, I pictured him behind the wheel of a car. At home, at work. He was one of those men who derive real joy from driving, and he did it very well, or at least with a kind of belligerent proficiency. I could not imagine a time when he would not drive. And now that time was here.

We were moving the last of my stuff back home. There wasn’t much – a few cardboard boxes in the boot of the Capri, crammed with clothes and CDs and books that had seemed important once. But the ten-mile run from suburb to city confirmed what my mum had been telling me for a while. My dad’s driving days were done.

‘He’s all right when he’s going straight,’ she told me as my dad unloaded the boot. ‘It’s the bendy bits that throw him.’ She looked back at my dad hefting a box of paperbacks. ‘You talk to him.’

So I asked him to help me make the tea, and watched him slowly shuffle about the kitchen, not forgetting anything, but making the organisation of boiling water and fetching milk and dunking tea bags and spooning sugar and collecting cups seem as complicated as conducting a symphony orchestra.

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘thanks for the lift.’

He nodded curtly. My dad had never got used to the glib Americanism of, ‘You’re welcome,’ and I don’t suppose he ever would now.

‘You know, that Capri’s getting really old.’

His face brightened. ‘Like me!’ He measured out the sugar, as careful as a nuclear physicist dishing out the plutonium.

‘It’s been a great car, but I really think it’s getting past its best.’

I had steeled myself for furious denial, or some resentful argument at the very least. But he just reached for the milk, and looked thoughtful.

‘Not really roadworthy any more,’ he agreed. He looked up at my mum as she came into the kitchen, expecting to have to pull us apart. She looked at us warily and started opening cupboards, seeking biscuits.

‘I was just talking to Dad about the car,’ I said.

He grimaced at her. ‘Just about got through its MOT last time, didn’t it?’ he said.

Mum nodded. She shook some Jaffa Cakes on to a plate. ‘But it’s been a lovely little car,’ she said.

My dad picked up a Jaffa Cake and looked at it as if he had never seen one before. ‘Too much rust, see?’ he said. ‘Even if the engine is still running, the rust gets them in the end. Take care of the engine and it will run forever. But you can’t do much about the rust.’

My mum took his hand. ‘Never mind, eh?’

She really loved him. And whatever happened, she was not going to stop loving him.

‘It’s had its day,’ said my dad, with a total lack of sentiment or self-pity. There was no talk of a new car.

‘Yes,’ said my mum. ‘And what a lovely day it was.’

The following weekend we took the car to a dealer, but he told us the list price wouldn’t be worth the storage
space. It took me a moment to realise that he was telling us the Capri was worthless. The dealer tried to be kind – he suggested advertising for a collector. Perhaps someone in the specialist market would be interested, he said, although to be honest he doubted it. These collectors wanted something in pristine condition. The Capri had too much rust. He gave us an address on the other side of the river.

So my parents sat in the back seat holding hands and I drove the Ford Capri to what was called a salvage yard, although it seemed to be exactly the opposite. It was a killing field and a graveyard, and across those Kent flatlands you could see it from miles away. From a distance it looked like a mountain range of finished cars. Up close, as I drove through the gates, guard dogs showing their teeth, cars rose above our heads, they stretched into the distance, they seemed to go on forever. Ridges and hills of mangled metal, destroyed by accident or time.

I didn’t have to rush the paperwork, because there was a queue for disposal. Lined up and ready for systematic wrecking were corroded buckets with foreign plates, accident write-offs that still had blood smeared on their broken windscreens, the untaxed and the uninsured and the unloved. And some that had just had their time.

We were allowed to watch from a safe distance. A removal lorry gently lifted the Capri off the ground and moved it to where a giant forklift truck was waiting. The forklift carefully transported the Capri to a wrecking crane. As the forklift retreated, the crane swung round and dangled five massive steel claws above the roof of the car. The claws opened. They came down with a prehistoric scream of metal. They sunk into the Capri, picked it up off the ground and
slammed it back down. The wheels all came off. There was an element of cruel theatre about it all. It reminded me of the kind of wrestling where men wear masks and Lycra. Meticulously choreographed violence that was no less real for being premeditated.

The metal claws kept their grip on the Capri. They lifted it higher, and swung it around to where a machine like a giant’s sandwich maker sat below a steep hill of mangled steel. The crane manoeuvred the Capri into the giant’s sandwich maker. When it slammed closed, the windows dramatically exploded in a storm of broken glass.

The giant’s sandwich maker kept opening and closing until the Capri was no longer a car. The crane came back, lifted it out of the sandwich maker and started tearing it to pieces, like a vulture devouring roadkill. My mum looked away. Then it was lifted and dumped at the top of the hill of mangled steel.

My mother slipped her arm in my father’s arm, a gesture that had started when they were teenagers and had never ended. She laid her head on his shoulder. There were tears in her eyes, but my dad was almost jaunty.

When the noise subsided, he gave me a wink and nudged me in the ribs. He nodded at the mountain of dead cars and grinned as if he thought he was getting away with something.

‘I’m not complaining,’ he said. ‘I reckon I had my money’s worth.’

He was looking up at what had once been his car, but he was thinking about something else.

I lurked at the rear of the red velvet auditorium, leaning on the back of the last row of the stalls, and nobody bothered me.

There were not many people about at that time of day. One of the director’s assistants gave me a strange look when she went off to get coffee, but she didn’t say anything when she came back. I think it’s because I dress almost exactly like a caretaker.

I watched the thin, bossy woman – the choreographer, Lara had told me – move across the stage, among a dozen of the men – the boys, they called them, and although most of them were in their twenties, there were a few on the far side of thirty who were not boys by even the most generous definition of the word.

And as the choreographer selected and discarded, she identified the chosen ones with a name or a colour or an item of clothing. She knew some of the names. A lot of the names. But she couldn’t know everyone. There were new people coming through all the time. And old boys and girls dropping out. But even if she only identified someone by the colour of their kit, somehow they all knew who she was talking about. What they didn’t know at the moment they were singled out, was if they were being chosen or rejected, if they were wanted or not.

If they were
right.

‘Diego – the boy in the sweatband – combat trousers – Johnny – Penguin T-shirt and the red top.’

I watched their faces as they went from the awful moment when they didn’t know if they were being asked to stay or told to go, to the next moment, when they knew that they had been accepted or rejected.

‘Stage left,’ said the choreographer. ‘The rest – thank you very much.’ She clapped her hands twice, instantly subduing the murmurs of joy and despair. ‘Next group.’

I saw Lara waiting in the wings.

At this stage the boys and girls danced apart, as separate as kids at a high school prom, and those who were not dancing stood on the edge of the stage, learning the steps, moving to the music, evaluating the competition, massaging away the aches and pains and wear and tear.

Lara was kneading the back of her right leg. I knew from her sleeping that the pain was almost constant now. In both her hamstrings. In her right hip. And most of all in her tendons, where the muscle holds the bone, and a dancer feels the miles on the clock. She filed on stage with her group of girls.

‘Pick it up from,
‘Who’s the private dick?’
the choreographer commanded, and the tape started up, and it sounded like music hall grafted on to the last days of disco. It was Watson’s big number at the top of
Sherlock!
They would be dancing behind him, a motley collection of Edwardian gentlefolk, flower girls and Peelers in top hats.

Who’s the private dick with the gruff sidekick? It’s elementary, it’s elementary.

‘Give it to me stronger,’ she said, and they moved like a flock of birds, a school of fish. By now they knew the moves and were reaching for that moment when they could do them without thinking. I watched Lara. I was aware of the other girls, but I watched only her.

A single hair or a bloody stain, And he’s straight in there with his giant brain. Yes, he does some coke but they don’t complain, Because it’s elementary.

‘Step, push, step, step, touch, kick – strong arms!’ the choreographer barked. She was circling them like a teacher in an exam room, clapping her hands, squinting at them, keeping them on the beat. ‘Seven, eight – the hounds of HELL – step, pivot, step, touch…that’s it, that’s it.’

From Baker Street to the hounds of hell, Who’s the master sleuth? The brutal truth Is that it’s elementary.

When it ended, Lara stood there with her hands on her aching hips, filling her lungs, holding the breath for a count of four, then letting it go as slowly as she could. She blinked, the salt of the sweat stinging her eyes, as the whippet-thin choreographer moved among them, her eyes on the director like an auctioneer whose gaze was fixed on the richest man in the room. Making the cut.

‘Okay, okay. The girl in red – Megan – the girl in white – pink shorts – Debbie – Coco…stage left. The rest of you – thank you very much.’

Lara was the girl in white. And the girl in white was still there.

I don’t think she could see me lurking at the back of the stalls, but as she left the stage she smiled and gave a quick thumbs up to all those empty seats, all that worn red velvet, and the darkness beyond.

‘Maybe it will be all right,’ Lara said, holding the wide brim of her wedding hat so that the autumn wind couldn’t take it. ‘Maybe it will.’

She was trying to cheer me up. We were on the steps of the registry office, and we were waiting for a wedding to
exit before we could go inside. A laughing middle-aged man and woman were coming out, and their friends and relatives were pelting them with confetti. Lara and Ruby and Nan and I took a step back, but the wind blew stray confetti in our faces, and we entered the registry office covered in small scraps of pastel-coloured paper. Lara gave my arm an encouraging squeeze and I nodded, showing her I appreciated the effort. But how was I meant to feel? We were covered in confetti before our son’s wedding had even begun. That didn’t seem right. Nothing seemed right.

‘Registry of birth, marriage and death,’
Ruby said, reading the gilded sign above the door. ‘Which one do we want?’

All three, I thought.

‘Be nice,’ Lara said.

A few familiar faces were already inside. My parents – my dad in an old suit, my mum in a hat so new that it broke my heart. She had had her hair done – one of those frozen Margaret Thatcher hair-dos that resemble a medieval helmet.

Keith was there – Uncle Keith, Ruby still called him, but Rufus had dropped the uncle bit, which somehow made him seem even younger. Faces from Rufus’ work. The security guys. The little Muslim girl. But the friends from school had drifted away, and the friends from stand-up had not been made. Rufus had invested his life in this one unremarkable woman. And it was like watching someone you love flush their life down the toilet.

Nancy’s side was better represented. Lots of earrings. Especially on the men. They looked as though they were on their way to Ascot. For a bit of light mugging. Tough guys in tight suits with short hair or no hair. Tarty-looking women
with boob jobs and gold ankle chains. And that was just her grandmothers.

Lara dragged me over into the heart of the mob and attempted to make some introductions. But Nancy’s mother – a fierce blonde of fifty with great legs and a West Ham United tattoo – and Nancy’s father – who you wouldn’t want to meet even up a very well-lit alley – were both with new partners now, so just meeting the parents was four people right there. I smiled weakly. But it was all too complicated for me. It was all too much.

And then they were there. The groom and the bride and the bride’s souvenir from a previous relationship, dressed in a suit and bow tie that somehow made him resemble a performing monkey. If his mother hadn’t been gripping him tightly by the wrist, I swear he might have done a bit of juggling. We filed into the office where the deed would be done.