Turning Thirty (7 page)

‘Yes, thanks, Matthew,' he said pithily. ‘Your mother wanted to send out a search party to see if you were still alive. I told her not to bother as you were probably hibernating.'

‘Good one,' I replied, I sniffed, coughed and rubbed my head in an attempt to wake myself up a bit. I picked up my dad's copy of the
Sun
from the coffee table, sat down and had a quick glance through the first couple of pages. A quirky story on page three – next to the assets of Gina, 18, from Essex – caught my eye. A man from Cheltenham had been kicked out of the house he shared with his girlfriend because she was fed up with his collection of twelve thousand milk bottles. The last line of the story really made me laugh: ‘It goes to show she wasn't the right girl for me. If she loved me she'd love my milk bottles.'

‘What are you laughing at?' asked my dad. ‘Is it the milk-bottle bloke?' I nodded. ‘You've got to admire a man like that. Those milk bottles must make him really happy.'

‘Really, really happy,' I replied. It was a crap joke, really, but it amused me and my dad, and we sat there for a good few minutes passing asides about Milk-bottle Man until we'd exhausted every available pun. I was about to continue reading the paper, assuming that my dad was merely sitting down in his chair for a moment's rest from household maintenance – he was always fixing something – when he coughed and moved his shoulders about as if wanting to get down to business.

‘So?' he said, in a manner that once again managed to be both a question and a statement of fact.

‘So?' I replied, raising my eyebrows.

It suddenly dawned on me that my mum had sent him in on a mission to find out more about me and Elaine splitting up. I think the idea was supposed to be that because my dad was a man and I was now a man he was supposedly the perfect person for me to talk to about problems to do with life. I could tell just from looking at him that he wasn't in total accord with this idea but it was clear, too, that my mum had promised to make his life hell if he didn't comply with her wishes.

‘So?' he repeated.

I scratched my head, closed the newspaper and looked at him expectantly. My mum had got it completely wrong if she thought sending him to talk to me was the way to find out how I was feeling. This was a genuine case of the blind leading the blind. My dad never talked about himself if he could help it and neither did I (well, not to them anyhow), and what she'd failed to see was that we liked it that way. I suppose when I was five or six we talked. I remember I'd tell him how I felt about school and my friends, speculating on what I might like to do when I grew up. And I remember he'd talk to me about how he felt about things too and we both seemed to get a lot of satisfaction from such a meeting of minds. But only a few years later, those sort of conversations dried up as my dad gave me the greatest gift known to mankind – silence. I like to think that he taught me you could communicate as much without words as with – that there were more ways to crack an egg than by talking to it. He taught me that sometimes the only thing you can do is just hold it all in until you reach a point where you can deal with it. I'm not saying it was a perfect philosophy – far from it – but it was a useful one to have when your only other option was to dive off the deep end. So this was why, for the majority of our lives, my dad and I had worked on a strictly need-to-know basis. In fact, over the past few years especially, we'd gone out of our way to give the impression that we weren't even vaguely interested in the need-to-know stuff either. This, of course, was all lies and macho posturing because in phone calls home I'd ask my mum without fail how my dad was, and he always asked Elaine how I was when he spoke to her, which was more frequently than he spoke to me. It was a great system. We were both using the women in our lives to translate our silence and surliness into conversation. Of course, now that my translator and I had gone our separate ways my dad and I could both see the truth: he needed to know about me and I needed to know about him.

It was about time for another ‘So?' from me, and I obliged as I still had no idea how we were going to get this talking thing going. His response was to pause and take a long, slow sip of his tea. That was another thing about my dad that I liked. All his movements were slow and considered. He'd always been this way. I don't think I had ever seen him run. He wasn't one of life's runners: he was more of a sturdy walker. I, on the other hand, was one of life's wobblers. I'd wobbled, tripped and slouched my way through life in an ungainly fashion, and my lack of cool worried me. I always got the feeling that when it came to the point at which my dad got to look back over his life for one last time he'd be able to say to himself, ‘No matter what I did, no matter whether I was right or wrong, I was always cool.' When the time came for my big goodbye, however, I'd get to cower with embarrassment.

‘So,' he began carefully, ‘how are you, Matt?'

‘I'm . . .' I searched around for the right word. I didn't want to lie to him now that he'd had the courage to get things going. ‘I'm . . . doing okay.'

He sighed and looked at the TV, which wasn't even on. ‘It's not easy, you know, life,' he began.

‘Oh,' I said, quietly.

‘But it's worth it,' he said, echoing himself.

I nodded. ‘Good.'

Then he joined the two sentences together and said, ‘It's not easy but it's worth it.' He took another long, slow sip of his tea and waited – my cue, I presumed, to contribute to the conversation but I honestly couldn't think of a single thing to say in response to his words of wisdom. I could see that he had a point, but that was about all.

‘Cheers, Dad,' I said.

He looked up from his tea-cup. I suspect the laws of masculine exchange would say that I was supposed to look away when our eyes met but I didn't, so we looked at each other uncomfortably for far too long, though it was probably only a few seconds. He wanted to talk. Strangely even I wanted to talk. I suppose if this had been a couple of million years ago and we'd been cavemen we could have hunted a brontosaurus or two to release the tension of this awkward situation, but as it wasn't, the best alternative was TV.

‘I think there'll be some news headlines on soon, Dad,' I said. ‘Shall I turn the TV on so that we can catch them?'

He smiled, shrugged and said, ‘If you want.' So I turned on the TV, handed him the remote and settled back in the armchair while we both pretended to watch the news.

Dear Matt

Where are yooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuu?????

love

Elaine

Friends.

I had some in New York.

I had a few living in Spain and a few more in France.

Closer to home I even had them in London, Cardiff and Glasgow.

Here in Birmingham, however, I had one friend, Gershwin Palmer, my oldest friend. There used to be a lot more old friends here, a whole group of us, in fact, who had gone to King's Heath Comprehensive and had stayed friends through sixth-form and beyond. There was Ginny Pascoe, my ex-girlfriend/not girlfriend, tall, very attractive and the queen of bad decisions; Elliot Sykes, built like a rugby player, laughed like a drain, born with a curious ability always to land on his feet; Pete Sweeney, a man whose obsessions were science fiction, music and girls, in that order; Katrina Turner, the most attractive girl in our gang and also the one destined to be the most successful; and finally Bev Moore, the oddball, a Goth who never admitted to being a Goth, a sarky cow with a wicked sense of humour. With Gershwin and me, we formed the magnificent seven, a group of friends who drank together, got thrown out of nightclubs together and who, so rumour had it, got an education together.

We were friends for life. Or so we thought.

But, like friends for life eventually do, when we reached the eighteen–nineteen mark, we left Birmingham one by one and went our separate ways. Ginny went to Brighton to do an art course, because she wanted to be an artist; Elliot moved to London to live with his sister, because he wanted to get into advertising; Pete went to university in Loughborough to do sports science, because he didn't know what else to do; Katrina went to university in Leeds to read media studies, because she wanted to be the next editor of
Vogue
; and Bev got a job in Miss Selfridge, because she wanted to get enough money together to go travelling for a few years. Quite soon the only time we all met up was on Christmas Eve, at the Kings Arms in Moseley, the pub that acted as the unofficial clubhouse for ex-King's Heath Comprehensive pupils. However, as we graduated our way through to our mid-twenties, even Christmas in the Kings Arms fell by the wayside and before we knew it we'd all moved on so far with our lives that we literally didn't know each other any more. All except Gershwin, that is. He didn't move anywhere.

I'd known Gershwin – named after the great composer because his mum liked ‘Rhapsody in Blue' – since my first day at secondary school, some eighteen years ago, and in all that time we'd never lost contact. When the majority of us went to university, Gershwin decided he'd had enough of education and got a job working for a local hospital trust. At the time we all thought he was making a huge mistake and told him so. After all, we thought, he's missing out on being a mad student, getting up to all sorts of mad-student antics, and having mad-student fun. That was one way of looking at it. The other way was this: by the time we'd left university, Gershwin was a high-flying junior manager responsible for a budget of hundreds of thousands of pounds, while my highest-flying achievements included assistant deputy editorship of the university magazine's arts page and an ability to watch the same episode of
Neighbours
twice a day and still find it fascinating. Because of this, Gershwin was the first of all of us to tick off all the big ones on the I'm-a-fully-formed-adult checklist. He was the first to have real money, spend real money and own a car that wasn't held together by Sellotape and goodwill. He was the first to get a mortgage, break the elusive two-and-a-half-year barrier in a relationship – with Zoë, the love of his life whom he met in a nightclub – and, at twenty-four, was the first to get married.

The wedding – at which I was best man – was an event I'll never forget. Not least because it was the last time all seven of us dragged ourselves from the various corners of the world to which we'd been flung and got together to party. While at the back of my mind there was the small worry that Gershwin was too young to be getting hitched, I also felt immense pride about it because this was
my
best mate getting married. When everyone I knew (myself included) was doing everything in their power to hang on to the vestiges of their former student lifestyles it felt like Gershwin, venturing into the world of marriages, mortgages, careers and – a year later – kids, was a pioneer – boldly going where none of my peer group had gone before. Even with this turning-thirty thing he was going to get there before me although our birthdays were only separated by a few weeks.

‘Matthew Beckford!

‘Gershwin Palmer!'

‘You porky git!'

‘You balding loser!'

We always greeted each other like that and it made us laugh. He could call me fat because, in the big scheme of things, I knew that although I was a little bit out of shape I was far from being lardy, and in turn although he was receding slightly at the temples he was still a long way from the Land of Wispy Strands.

I'd called Gershwin up at work to let him know I was back, and he'd insisted that I come into town and meet him for lunch. On seeing each other we engaged in a not-quite-but-nearly hug and laughed a lot to compensate for being pleased to see each other. The last time I'd seen him was about a year ago when I'd had to fly to London on business and I'd made a brief trip up to Birmingham to see my parents. I was in and out in under thirty-six hours but I made time to see him. Since then we'd exchanged e-mails and the occasional postcard but we weren't regular correspondents. Not that it mattered – some friendships remain strong no matter how much you neglect them and mine and Gershwin's was one of those.

Now we stood back and looked at each other. Gershwin was wearing a dark grey suit, white shirt and dark blue tie. He looked every inch the middle manager he was supposed to be and yet, underneath the suit, I knew he was still the same party-trick Gershwin who could drink beer through his nose, knew all the words to Boston's cheesy soft rock anthem ‘More Than A Feeling', and made the best bacon and egg sandwiches the world has ever known. I felt immediate relief: if those I've grown up with are still okay, ran my thought processes, then I'll be okay too. And as I looked at Gershwin, checking that he still had two arms, two legs and his sanity, I knew I was okay too.

It was cold and drizzling as we stepped outside. At Gershwin's suggestion we headed for one of the many coffee-bar retail chains that had erupted out of nowhere in the last few years. As we walked along Corporation Street towards New Street we talked about football and music, knowing that we'd do the So-how's-life-with-you? thing later. When ‘later' arrived, I launched into my enquiries about his life before he could launch into his. I wasn't eager to talk about Elaine just yet.

‘How's Zoë?'