Starting Over (7 page)

Rufus ploughed on, not pausing to be abused.

‘And I can’t tell you how many times I called the suicide hotline and said, “I’m really upset, you forgot my chicken combo.”’

Then there was a tsunami of beer descending on the stage
and on our son and Rufus was suddenly talking into a microphone that had been turned off. Seeing him standing there, still wearing his please-like-me-cruel-world smile, made my throat clench. The bloke next to me was laughing wildly, an empty beer bottle in his hand, and I turned on him, only to feel Lara pulling at my hand.

‘Come on,’ she said as Rufus slunk off. We pushed our way through the mob and went backstage, although that’s too grand a term for what was beyond the tatty curtain at the side of the stage. There was a narrow corridor lined with battered silver barrels of draught beer, and it was crowded with nervous young men and a few nervous young women who were all talking to themselves, nervously rehearsing their doomed routines.

Rufus was in a room the size of a large coffin. Graffiti on the walls, no windows, no air. The smell of sweat and fear almost made me gag. He looked up as we walked in, his hair wet and matted from the beer they had thrown. Lara smoothed it down and said, ‘Oh, just look at you.’

When I embraced him, he did not pull away.

‘I’m so proud of you,’ I whispered.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said.

I wanted us to go home. I wanted us to go for a drink – he could have had a mineral water. I just wanted us to be together. It did not matter where. But there was a skinny girl in spray-on jeans lurking in the doorway, looking at Rufus, and I realised that perhaps he had other plans. He did not introduce us to the girl. But he thanked us for coming, and I knew that our being there meant something, so I hugged him so hard that he groaned, and we both laughed, and he shyly patted my back.

Then we left him, and Lara and I did not talk about it
until we were back in the car, and she had checked that the central locking was on.

‘I’m not sure you should be encouraging him,’ she said.

And I sighed – an unfair sigh, a sigh that said she was always spoiling my fun. ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘At his age you were dressing up as a cat and prancing around to the tunes of Andrew Lloyd Webber.’

‘But I was good,’ she said quietly. ‘By the time I was wearing that cat costume I had been dancing for years. Practising, learning, stretching. Being taken to classes and auditions by my mother and my grandmother. Ballet, tap, jazz. Years of it. Two decades of doing full splits.’ Now it was her turn to sigh. ‘I didn’t just decide that dance was going to…I don’t know. Get me out.’

I stared glumly at the dark East End streets. The towers of Canary Wharf were ahead, dazzling in the night sky. I wanted her to understand. I needed her to understand.

‘He’s at the age where you feel like a world beater. When you’ve still got dreams. What a great way to feel, Lara.’ I looked at her, and smiled, wanting her to be with me. ‘What a wonderful way to look at the world. To believe – to
know
– that you can own it.’

She laughed at me. ‘But it’s not real,’ she said. ‘You can’t own it, can you? The world’s not like that, is it?’

‘No, the world’s not like that,’ I said bitterly. ‘He’ll get over it soon enough, right? You don’t feel that way for very long. By your twenties you still think you can do anything, but you know you might have to wait for a while. Then by the time you’re in your thirties it’s dawning on you that the world can keep turning quite happily without you. And by then you’re probably trapped with a marriage and a mortgage and a couple of kids.’

‘Yes, sorry about that, George. Sorry about trapping you.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not talking about me.’

‘Doesn’t sound like it.’

‘I just mean there comes a point when you know you are never going to be what you want to be…then you have your first health scare, and it’s not serious. Then you have your second health scare, and it
is
serious. And a bit later – one, ten, twenty years – you die. What just happened? That? Oh, that was your life, mate. That was my life? Can I get a refund? Can I complain to someone? Can I go round one more time? Sorry, mate – no refunds, no letter of complaint, no second go at life.’ I lightly banged my fist against the steering wheel. ‘And that’s why I am never going to be the one to take his dreams away from him. Because the world will do it soon enough.’ I could smell the beer on us. ‘He has to follow his dreams,’ I said, looking at my wife and then back out the window. ‘What else can he do?’

‘Even if his dreams take him off a cliff?’ Lara said, and I didn’t bother to reply, I just kept my eyes on the congealed traffic on the Mile End Road, and my cakehole shut.

We were in sight of the Kentish Town lights of home when the scar began to throb like a madman. I welcomed the pain like an old friend. It distracted me from all the other stuff – our reluctance to see our children laughing at the top of the climbing frame, the anxieties about diminishing money and dying flesh, the boiler that was on the blink – the day-to-day confluence of ordinary life, and how in the end it bleeds you dry.

I stirred around dawn, creamy light seeping through the curtains, and before I was truly awake I was aware of that feeling, that glorious feeling of hardness unbidden.

Moaning, I rolled on to my side, smelling Lara’s hair, freshly shampooed before bedtime, trying to wash that pub right out of her, and I pressed myself against her thigh – more moaning – my skin against her brushed cotton pyjamas, my hands on her curves, gasping with that feeling, that feeling of knowing more pleasure than is bearable.

What a woman. What a fabulous woman.

She pulled away from me with an exasperated sound that came from somewhere deep inside, a sound that was somewhere between a cluck and a tut, sent on its way with an exhalation of disapproval.

‘Can’t you think of anything else?’ she said, and before she turned away she gave me this look.

As if she no longer recognised me.

I stood in the Never Too Latte coffee shop, waiting for my order, and I knew that Lara was right.

I found it difficult to think of anything else. It was true. When you get right down to it, what else is there? Really?

The girl in Never Too Latte had her back to me, and she was doing this thing with the silver spout that produced the foamy milk. Every time it had shot its load of milk, she gripped the silver spout in her right hand, and shook it. Her hand, wrapped in a white cloth, running up and down the full length of the shaft – giving it a good old rub. A single bead of foaming milk emerged from the spout.

I mean – really. What was I meant to think? What was it meant to remind me of? It didn’t look much like someone making a cup of coffee.

And now she was doing it slowly – the little minx. Her hand in the white cloth, oh-so-slowly running up the length of the silver spout, finishing it off. Fantastic wrist action.

I gawped, then I snickered, and turned to stare at the customers behind me. Their faces were blank and miserable. Maybe it was just me.

The girl turned to look at me. She was saying something. Concentrate, George, must concentrate. She was this tired, pretty girl – the city seemed to be full of them – from the Balkans, or the Baltic, or Billericay. Her hands were on her hips. She was waiting for me.

‘What?’ I stuttered.

She just about stopped herself from sighing. Her perfect little rib cage rising and falling inside her dark blue Never Too Latte T-shirt.

‘I said – how do you want it?’

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Her lips were moving – those sweet lips from the Balkans, or the Baltic, or Billericay. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

‘Do you want it sweet and hot? I bet you like it sweet and hot, don’t you, you dirty boy? And strong. Very, very strong. Is that how you like it? Is it, you gorgeous slag? And lots of foam – I bet you like it when the foam is all over our skin and running down…’

Wait a second. Did she really say that? Or did I just imagine it?

The man behind me rattled his
Evening Standard
with impatience.

A pair of weary blue eyes were looking at me. ‘I said – do you want chocolate on top?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, please.’

And then I staggered from Never Too Latte, my cheeks burning, consumed by lust and shame, the chocolate-smeared foam on my fingers.

A dozen of us sat in a circle in a rented room above a florist’s shop. We had the room for two hours, between Belly Dancing for Beginners and Narcotics Anonymous. It cost us a tenner each. Very reasonable. We were all men, and we were of all ages and races. But under our shirts we all carried the same scar.

‘Let’s start by expressing our gratitude for this new life,’ said Larry, our leader, and we all joined hands and closed our eyes.

I wasn’t crazy about the hand-holding, to tell you the truth, or the thought of having to stand up and talk to a bunch of strangers. But my cardiologist, Mr Carver, thought that it would be good for me to meet people who had been through the same experience, it would help me cope with what he called the psychological stress associated with a transplant. And I liked Larry. He was a large, gentle man, his big, bald head as smooth as a baby’s bottom, and there was a warmth and certainty about him. I could use a second helping of that, I thought.

‘We are grateful to our families for their support,’ said Larry, that big head bowed, making it feel like a kind of prayer. ‘We are grateful for the gift of life. We are grateful for the skill of the doctors. And we are grateful to the donors who made it possible.’

Larry opened his eyes and suggested we share some of our stories. They were happy stories. How could they not be? These were men who had stared death in the face. Men who should be buried by now, not sitting above a florist’s shop on Hampstead High Street.

It was a dumbfounded kind of happiness these men shared, a happiness that was full of wonder and the awe of people who could not quite believe their impossible luck. The men in that circle spoke of miracles.

‘I abused my body for years,’ said the small man in glasses to my right, getting to his feet. ‘I smoked, I drank, I filled my body with junk. My body wasn’t a temple, it was a waste-disposal unit.’ A nervous ripple of laughter around the circle. ‘And now I am about to run my third marathon.’

He let the words hang there for a bit and then he sat down.

‘Thank you, Geoff,’ said Larry. He nodded at the man to my left. Tall and thin. The youngest guy in the room. He slowly stood up.

‘My wife was six months pregnant when I had a heart attack,’ he said, his voice shaking. He looked across me at Geoff. ‘I never smoked. Was never a big drinker.’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. There was silence. We didn’t look at him.

‘It’s okay, Paul,’ said Larry, taking control. ‘If it’s too difficult…’

Paul sniffed, nodded furiously and took out his wallet.
He flipped it open and displayed it to the room. There was a photo of a grinning toddler on a sunny beach. ‘That’s Yasmin,’ he said. ‘She will be three next week.’ He shook his head, closed the wallet. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

He sat down. Larry got up and went over and hugged him. When he returned to his seat, he looked at me and smiled, giving me a nod of encouragement. So I took a deep breath and stood up.

‘Sometimes I stay up all night on the Internet,’ I said, stuffing my hands deep into the pockets of my new Diesel jeans. ‘And I learn things. I learn about people like us. People who have had transplants. And I learned about a man in Georgia who received the heart of a suicide victim – and twelve years later he killed himself in exactly the same way.’

I raised a hand to my forehead as the little guy to my right – Geoff? – snorted with disbelief. But I ignored him. I ploughed on.

‘And I learned about a woman who received a man’s heart and suddenly she started walking like a football player, and she wanted to drink beer and eat Kentucky Fried –’

Geoff laughed out loud. He touched his hand to his mouth and pulled a face. ‘Sorry,’ he tittered.

And I still ignored him.

‘She suddenly had all the cravings and quirks of her donor,’ I said. ‘And it’s not just hearts. There was a fifteen-year-old Australian girl whose blood type changed after a liver transplant. It
changed
.’ I shook my head. ‘Dozens, maybe hundreds, thousands of people all over the world, transplant recipients like us, say that they changed after the operation. They
changed
. A little girl of seven started having nightmares after she was given the heart of a murdered child. An American
woman who was terrified of heights became a mountain climber…’

Geoff raised a hand.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘Her donor was a mountain goat.’

‘But I don’t need to stay up all night reading about this stuff,’ I said. ‘Because I
know
it. I
feel
it. It’s
real
. And it’s not just change. It’s as if they – we – have become someone else.’ I pushed the fringe out of my eyes. I was growing my hair. ‘A new man,’ I said, and sat down.

Geoff stifled a fake yawn.

‘You’re talking about cellular memory phenomenon,’ he said. ‘And it’s a fallacy. In fact, there’s a medical term for it – bullshit.’

Laughter. I felt my face reddening.

Larry raised his hands.

‘Well, I think it’s important to remember that the heart is no more than a pump,’ he said gently, addressing the room but looking directly at me. I liked him but he was parroting the standard line – exactly what my heart man always told me. But if you changed the blade of a sword, and then you changed the handle – is it still the same sword? Answer me that, Geoff.

‘Organs are only removed for transplantation after a person is dead,’ Larry said, smiling at me with infinite kindness. ‘A transplant does not change your personality or behaviour.’

‘You get your mood swings because of the high doses of steroids,’ Geoff said abruptly, and I swung on him, showing my teeth.

‘I don’t get mood swings!’
I screamed in his face, my fists clenched in sudden fury, and he reared back in alarm.

Larry raised his hands to calm things down. ‘George,’ he
said, as if he knew me. And I suppose that in a lot of the ways that matter, he did. Never met me before that night, but you would never guess it. ‘It
is
George, isn’t it?’

I hung my head and my fringe toppled over my eyes. I did not brush it back. My face was burning with shame. I wanted to have a happy story, too.

‘First of all,’ Larry said quietly, ‘why don’t you say sorry to Geoff here for shouting at him, George?’ He waited, like a kindly teacher pleading for common sense to prevail in the playground. ‘There’s no need for raised voices in this room, is there?’

I shook my head, bit my lip, and shuffled my trainers. I couldn’t get it out. I squirmed in my seat. I wanted Larry to like me.

‘Sorry, Geoff,’ I eventually mumbled.

‘Apology accepted,’ sneered Geoff, the little creep.

‘Organs don’t have a genetic memory,’ said Larry, and I looked up and saw his scar peeping at me from the open neck of his green Lacoste.

But that’s just it, I thought. They do. How could I explain it? There were other people in that rented room above the florist’s shop. There were ghosts. The ones who had saved us. The ones who had made the miracles happen.

It was as if I could actually feel their presence, urging us to live the lives that had been stolen from them. I could hear the beating of their hearts, hear their low voices, sense them rattling at the door. But it was just the reformed cokeheads from Narcotics Anonymous waiting to come in. I thought I recognised one of them. He had those black Irish good looks, almost Spanish looking, and his face was definitely familiar. An old collar? It was quite possible that I had once nicked him, if he had been a hardcore druggie.

When our hour was up, and we were leaving and the next lot were coming in, our eyes met for a long moment and then he quickly looked away. I had to laugh. Sometimes naughty people know what I do just by looking at me. My wife always said that it’s the size of my feet. I reckon there’s something in the way I look at their kind. But it is real.

They have a nose for a copper.

I sat with Larry in the pub next door and I watched him sip his Guinness.

‘Mmmm,’ he said, ‘I bet my donor’s enjoying this.’

I shot him a look and he laughed.

‘Sorry. Bad joke.’ Then his big soft face got serious. ‘Of course there are side effects. Chemical, psychological, emotional. People who have been sick for years, and completely reliant on their partners, suddenly find they are independent.’

I saw Lara’s face. ‘I don’t want things to change,’ I said. ‘I want things to be the way they were.’

‘Exactly,’ he said, not getting it. ‘That new-found freedom can cause incredible problems.’ He took a long pull on his beer. ‘Look at it this way – your new life is a gift. And doesn’t it beat the alternative?’

A woman and two kids were coming towards us. She was a small, pretty redhead and the children were twins, a boy and a girl, about eleven, and Larry wrapped them all up in his big arms. When he went to get their drinks, his wife looked at me and smiled.

‘Larry tells me you’re a policeman,’ she said. ‘That must be very exciting.’

Then he came into the pub. The one with the black Irish good looks and the nose for a copper. He moved
quickly, as if he knew exactly where he was going. There was a man at the bar. I watched them go off to the toilets together.

‘I’m not really that kind of policeman,’ I said.

I kicked down the door to the toilet stall. It’s really not that hard. What you have to do is kick directly behind the lock. It just comes flying off. They were in the process of cutting up some white lines on top of the cistern. Now what were the odds of that? The Irishman was bending over to have a good hoover, one finger placed against his hooter, and the other guy had a razor blade and a rolled-up note in his hand. He looked at my face and quickly dropped the blade. I smiled at the Irishman.

‘I know you,’ I said.

‘Rufus about?’ I said, kissing my wife on the cheek. ‘Up in his room,’ Lara said, kissing me back as she exchanged polite smiles with our guest.

My wife recognised him immediately, I thought. Or at least she registered that modern sort of recognition – where you know the person, but you have absolutely no idea where from. Ten years ago the Irishman had enjoyed the perfect comedy career: a little bit of radio, a little bit of TV, a little bit of rehab. But it had been a while since Eamon Fish had been properly famous. Somewhere along the line, somewhere between the Edinburgh Festival and the Priory, he had been replaced by the younger, the edgier, the more sober. But I was honoured and excited that he was in our house. He followed me upstairs like a dutiful pageboy going down the aisle.

You need luck in this world, I thought. The other guy’s knife stays in his pocket. The drugs are cut with artificial
sweetener rather than rat poison. The oncoming car swerves at the last moment and misses you. Just that little bit of luck. And that was what I was bringing home to my son.

‘Rufus,’ I called, knocking once as we crowded into my son’s bedroom. He was sitting on the bed reading a paperback called
Love All the People
by Bill Hicks. He looked up at Eamon Fish and his mouth sagged open.

‘Okay,’ Eamon sighed, shaking hands and nodding curt acknowledgement at my introductions. ‘Show me what you’ve got.’

He sat down on Rufus’ bed as the boy stood up. I also sat on the bed, but at the other end, almost on the pillow, very careful that we did not touch, as if I was leaving space for a companion who was about to join us. Rufus looked at me and grinned miserably. I can’t pretend that it wasn’t embarrassing for all of us. But there are worse things than being embarrassed.

My son took a breath.

‘I really want to meet the right girl but the problem is there’s no romance in the world these days,’ Rufus said. ‘The other night – the other night I was holding a girl in my arms. Her body was trembling all over, her lips were on fire.’ He paused and we waited. ‘Turns out she had malaria.’

There was a knock on the door. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Lara called.

‘No, thanks!’ I shouted, too loudly, as if she was a Jehovah’s Witness who would not go away. I looked at Eamon. His face was immobile. There were no tears of helpless mirth coursing down his cheeks, he was not slapping his thighs with delight. I thought it was very funny myself. But then I was my son’s greatest fan.

‘Sometimes I think, sometimes I think that love is what happens to a man and woman who don’t know each other,’ Rufus said, pacing in front of us for a few steps, and then turning back. It wasn’t a large bedroom. ‘Guy my age – at my sexual peak, right?’

I chuckled and nodded.

‘People think a guy like me is doing it all the time,’ Rufus continued. ‘But all I get is social security sex…’

‘A little every week but not enough to live on,’ Eamon said. ‘I’ve always liked that one.’ He raised his thick black eyebrows. ‘Don’t stop now,’ he said.

Rufus rubbed his hands together. He licked his lips. There was a thin film of sweat on his forehead.

‘My sex life is really lousy,’ my son said. ‘If it wasn’t for the pickpockets, I would have no sex life at all.’ He was rushing on now, speaking too fast, wanting it to be over. I could feel a touch of rigor mortis setting in with my smile. ‘I bloody hate being single,’ my boy said. ‘Sometimes I wash up my dish and make my bed and think – oh God, I am going to have to do this again next month.’

‘Rubbish,’ Eamon snarled, and Rufus stopped pacing, his face reddening. ‘You’re crap. Total drivel. Get off the stage.’

Rufus looked at me, and back at Eamon. He held up his hands, and shook them, like a fisherman measuring the one that got away. But he was silent. He looked as though speech was impossible from this moment on.

‘Off!’ Eamon shouted. ‘Off! Off! Off! Next, please! You suck, mate! Boring!’

‘Steady on,’ I said, placing a restraining hand on Eamon’s leather jacket. He angrily brushed it off.

‘Is that what you do?’ he asked Rufus, standing up. ‘When you get a heckler, is that what you do? You just stand there
with your mouth open, looking like you’re going to burst into tears? Is that the way you handle the haters? Is it?’

‘Well,’ Rufus said. ‘Usually.’

‘Look, you control two things,’ Eamon told him. ‘Your material and the audience. It’s your show, right? This is your world. You have to crush the hecklers. Destroy them like ants. And it’s easy. They’re all drunk. They’re all idiots. They’re all losers. They wouldn’t go to the ballet and try to trip up the dancers, would they? They wouldn’t go to the golf and try to stop Tiger Woods from getting his ball in the hole – would they?’