No more mr nice guy a no.., p.13
No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel, page 13
She drove him out into the country, blindfolded like O, a mystery tour, down a lane, up a lane, off the beaten, on to corrugations, along a logger’s track (was it?) deep into a forest (was it?) the light dappling and dying through his blindfold, the trees at one another’s throats, his heart swinging like the shafts of sun – was she bringing him here to kill him? ‘Out,’ she said, when the track finally came to an end. She led him along warm gravel, foliage nudging at him, lime the only smell, the only sound leaves breathing. She took off his blindfold. ‘Strip,’ she said. She produced a camera. His camera. The old Brownie box camera with which he’d won the school junior photography prize, for a series of studies of the Manchester Ship Canal in winter. The same Brownie box camera he thought she’d confiscated after he’d tried to snap her climbing out of the bath. ‘But don’t take everything off,’ she told him. ‘Nudity is always heightened, wouldn’t you agree, if something is left to the imagination. Keep your socks on.’ She draped him around a tree. She sat him on a stump and got him to put a finger in his mouth. ‘Not your thumb, your forefinger.’ She arranged him on the forest floor like a stricken nymph, with everything akimbo. ‘Lovely,’ she said, ‘now moisten your lips.’ He knew he had to take it like a man. He didn’t have a leg to stand on. She’d found his photograph collection. She’d seen what he could do, compositionally, with a camera. She got him to crouch on all fours and then pout at her, upside down between his knees. ‘One for the mantelpiece, that,’ she said. He heard the clop of a tennis ball, saw through the trees a pair of lovers on a tandem. Suddenly he knew where he was. ‘Jesus Christ, Mel, this is Dulwich Park! We live here!’
‘So don’t draw attention to yourself,’ she said. ‘Now reach for your member. Make as if you’re picking a flower. You’re a creature of the woods, don’t forget. Wild and untameable, yet curiously innocent.’
He couldn’t.
‘Enough?’
‘Enough.’
But it wasn’t enough for her. ‘Just a couple with your legs up around your ears then, and we’ll call it a day. And try to look as if you’re at home in nature more.’
She made him well. She showed him that he was suffering from a common compulsive order known as man – M.A.N. – and that contrary to popular belief there was a cure.
‘And how will I know when I’m better?’ he asked her.
‘You’ll know that you’re getting better when you wake up in the morning and your first thought isn’t a fuck or a photo.’
Now he knows that there’s another cure. They could have just waited till he was fifty.
But of course his hard-on was only the tip of the polluted iceberg that was his nature. ‘I wouldn’t mind if your appetites were cheerful,’ she told him. ‘But you don’t fuck to feel good, you fuck to feel bad. You drink to feel bad, too. You watch crap all day on the television to feel bad. You even eat to feel bad. That’s why you want a curry every night, so that you can punish your stomach and feel like shit in the morning.’
He took this hard. When all else was said and done, he considered himself to be a Rabelaisian man. He drank, he fornicated, he pigged out, he belched, he farted, he slept, he rose on the arched dolphin back of his dick, ready to breast the wild waves of existence all over again. He was a force of nature, wasn’t he. He was the functions disporting themselves. ‘According to the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin,’ he told her, ‘no meal can be sad.’
‘Well it can in your case,’ she said. ‘In your case no meal is ever anything but sad.’
He couldn’t deny it. If he feasted at midnight he woke with a broken heart. Whatever he did upset him, and whatever upset him, he did.
She came home earlier than expected from a meeting with her publishers one afternoon and found him bending over the ironing-board, spitting on his shirt.
‘How can you do that?’ she cried.
He explained that his shirt was badly creased but that he couldn’t be bothered with the palaver of setting the iron to steam.
‘Why can’t you treat your things with some respect,’ she asked. ‘Why can’t you take time over yourself? Why do you have to spit on your own life?’
She made him well. She taught him self-regard. She showed him how everything didn’t have to be a hurry or a hurt, how he could make a ceremony out of eating, ironing, sex. She even showed him how to take some small pleasures in the crap he watched all day on telly. OK, Oprah might not have been to his taste, but she addressed the feelings, didn’t she? And she was warm – that was called warmth, Frank. And sure, the conversation of those Cockneys who made all their important life-decisions in the pub wasn’t of the sort that Frank and Mel may have recognised as penetrating, but it gave pleasure to others, and where would the world be if it only contained the sort of people whose conversation Mel and Frank found penetrating? Besides, she explained, disliking everything he saw and did was making him ill. Bad heartedness was not just a figure of speech. Thinking and feeling badly actually made the heart bad. Weakened it. Predisposed it to disease. He would have a heart attack from attacking. When they cut him open they would see the scars made by all the intemperate attacks he’d launched on others and on himself. She calmed him; she soothed him; she talked to him as though he were an imbecile, she made him see that the universe was a plenteous place, roomy enough for diversity, and unlikely to run out of food and drink and girls, so Frank didn’t have to gobble it all up at once and make himself feel poorly afterwards. She couldn’t have succoured him better had she left him to guzzle on her tit.
It cost her in the end. Making someone else well always does. She expended so much energy on the reparation of his self-esteem that she had none left for the maintenance of her own. He was meant to do the same for her now. Massage her heart; talk to her as though she were an imbecile. But he couldn’t ever make the sentences sound right. ‘Get your finger out of your fucking throat!’ he yelled at her. ‘Is that meant to help me?’ she asked. ‘Is that your way of being calming?’ But what was he supposed to do? He was a man; he suffered from M.A.N.; and men don’t have tits.
Even when she’d given up on him and closed her ears against the noise he made, she kept him well by virtue of her brute presence. The mere fact of her being there – even if he didn’t touch her, even if he didn’t see her – was enough to stop him going whoring whenever the fancy took him. Whoever invented the idea of the stable relationship understood the necessity for anchorage. A cold line extended from Frank’s keel to the icy ocean bed of habituation. Friend or foe, Mel was there, a mooring, a tether, an ever-present weight that prevented him floating out into the uncertain immensity of the night.
Then he became fifty and no longer felt the want of an anchor.
Was that why he consented to be booted out of his house? Did he know that he didn’t need Mel any more? Did he understand that he was finally old enough to be trusted with the captaincy of his own bark?
Well he got that wrong, didn’t he.
He isn’t well. Even allowing for bad hotel lights and unflattering hotel mirrors, he can see he doesn’t look well. There’s no life in his skin. He’s eating crap again. Watching it and swallowing it. His teeth feel loose. His heart’s bad. Mel was right. You get a bad heart from having bad feelings. And he’s been having bad feelings for a lifetime. And now he’s having bad dreams.
Disaster dreams. Two on the run, both involving Mel. In the first, he was standing on a verandah looking out into a garden where Mel was sitting reading under a tented umbrella. Her legs were crossed and her hair was blowing. It was their garden in Dulwich, but the light was Italian. In the dream, Frank felt Italian himself. He was back in a mobster shirt, having Italian thoughts, sucking in the light as though he were an Italian vegetable, a melanzana or a zucchino, absorbing what was rightfully his. Suddenly the ground began to open in front of Mel, then behind her, great fiery cracking fissures in the lawn, as though the great boulders on which the earth was founded had finally split. Mel took no notice. Her book was far more interesting to her. Frank screamed and screamed to get her attention but she couldn’t be bothered listening. Merely Frank making noise again. He wanted to run to her but he couldn’t move. He was growing in a terracotta pot on the verandah. A melanzana can’t just leap out of the soil and scale a verandah wall when the fancy takes it. He woke as Mel was disappearing obliviously into the ground.
In the second, it was not just the end of the garden, it was the end of the world. Planes were coming at the house on revolving cylindrical clouds of black smoke, and in the distance the sky was broken and falling apart. The sun was hideously disfigured. The entire universe was shredding itself. Frank himself was hiding under the piano. Under the piano was the one safe place anywhere. But he couldn’t persuade Mel to join him. He realised it was too late now. She was going to die along with everything else. ‘I love you,’ Frank called. He wanted her to know that their life together had had meaning. He loved her. It was his last and only chance to tell her. Ever ever ever. He shouted it out – ‘I love you, Mel. I have always loved you.’ But she couldn’t hear him over the roar of the planes which were now alight and plunging into the roof of their house.
He woke with tears on his face.
That’s when he knows he isn’t well: when he starts the day blubbering.
He stays in bed in the Queens Hotel for twenty-four hours while all his clothes are being laundered. Then he stays in bed for a second twenty-four hours in order to catch the new Robert Hughes series on American art. Then he stays in bed for a third twenty-four hours in order to write his review. The box is never more gripping, he argues, than when you see someone thinking on it. He loathes the phrase ‘good television’, but he uses it. Good television is no different from good life: it’s the sight of somebody thinking. No thought, no life, no life no television. All television should be arts television, that’s the conclusion he comes to in his review. Except that ‘the arts’ is another phrase he loathes. He stays in bed for a fourth twenty-four hours trying to sort out his argument.
Counting phone calls and room-service and laundry, and throwing in the cost of the Gloucester whores, his bill for five days in Cheltenham is a small token of appreciation short of a thousand pounds. That’s the better part of two thousand since he left home less than a fortnight ago. Call that four and a half thousand a month. Which comes to in excess of fifty grand a year. And he still hasn’t had what a reasonable person would call a tolerably pleasurable evening.
There are reasons for going back to London. He has mail to collect. He has people to see. He has changes to make to his wardrobe. He has his monthly appointment with his hairdresser. Eventually he knows he will have to return and find himself a room; but he can’t go back yet, not light two thousand quid and absolutely nothing achieved. Unless you call a stain of jism the size of a flattened mosquito on the inside of his windscreen, an achievement.
In a queer sort of way he feels he has let Mel down, being booted out of the house and not managing to find anything better to do with himself than he has found so far. He has to stay away if only to have one or two more interesting stories to tell Mel, should she ever ask him to come back, which of course she won’t, now she has another man, which she hasn’t, has she?
He takes the M5 going south. This has several advantages, none of which he gives a name to. He won’t be making that mistake again. But loosely clinking about at the back of his brain are such place names as Watchet, Porlock, Lynton, Exeter, Little Cleverley. Watchet because he likes the drive to Porlock. Porlock because he likes the drive from Watchet. Lynton, he just likes. Unless it’s Lynmouth he just likes. Whichever is the one that flooded. And then there’s a dim memory he has of Billy Yuill telling him that he’d inherited a place, a holiday cottage, in one or other of them. He’s only remembered that because he’s thought about it every time he’s driven through. Hm, Billy Yuill’s holiday residence. Let’s hope the fucking place floods again while he’s in it. Not that he’s going to Lynton or Lynmouth for any Yuill-related reason. If Liz is now happily Mrs Billy, summering in Somerset, she won’t be wanting Frank Ritz of Kilburn and Paris rapping on her little cottage door, as somebody’s son Hamish, whatever his real name is, so smartly pointed out. No. He’s drunk the dregs of that one. Nor does Exeter being on his list of possibles have a ghost of a connection to Exeter being on D the comedian’s list of engagements. That too is a non-starter. He’s had his dick out, that’ll do. As for Little Cleverley, well, well, time will tell, and if he does make it that far down the coast, he will be doing it, in a manner of speaking, for Mel. Given that Mel got into Clarice’s pants before he did. Not by much, it’s true, but a whisker is a whisker in Little Cleverley.
All the service facilities on the motorway are full. The cars spill back out on to the slip road. Frank is bemused by this until he remembers that it’s still August. He is surprised that the summer hasn’t frittered itself away while he’s been in Cheltenham getting pale. No such luck. The proletarian crap-watchers are as hell bent on getting into their holiday togs as they were when he last paid attention to them back in Little Venice-on-the-Runnel. They queue, belly to buttock, smelling of burning car upholstery, at the all-day breakfast counter, counting the beans on one another’s plates. They’re suffering from Frank’s disease. A pity Mel isn’t here to put them right. They’re attacking themselves with food. Abusing their spouses with fried bread. Knocking their kids out with chips. We’re banning handguns, Frank thinks, but we’re keeping motorway food. He has tomato soup himself, which he spoons from a giant witch’s cauldron. Hot soup and croutons, just the ticket when it’s eighty-five degrees in the shade. Hot soup and croutons and tea, for which he hands over a ten pound note and from which he gets no change to speak of. Frank can never get over how expensive it is to be poor. How the poor can afford to be poor beats him. But there they are again, paying for their petrol and crisps and make that a roll of scratch-cards while you’re at it, duck. When Frank was a boy he used to play abstract noun I-spy in the back of his parents’ car. That was before he borrowed it to ferry whores in. I spy with my little eye something beginning with C … Conundrum – I win! Now, in-car entertainment for kids is a roll of scratch-cards and a coin. They’are our Damien, just shut ya trap and see if you can win us a hundred grand. Frank sees them rubbing and scratching in toddler-seats, their baby fingers smeared with silver, all the way down the motorway. No wonder, he thinks, that the whores of today are so mercenary.
He comes off the motorway at Bridgwater and pootles reflectively into Nether Stowey. Welcome to Coleridge country. How long before Biographia Literaria makes it on to the box? In his own way he is as sentimental a journeyer as any pilgrim to Coronation Street. He too likes to plug into the presiding genius of the place. For many years he has meant to come and stay in the Quantocks, put on red socks and walking boots and follow the paths that Coleridge and the Wordsworths took, tracking the course of streams, listening to rivers, recording starlight, reciting poetry in echoing groves. He communicated this desire to Mel in their early days. ‘Think of it,’ he said, ‘no car, just you and me and the ghosts of Wordsworth and Coleridge, lost among the deep romantic chasms. We could walk all day among the waterfalls, not see a single soul, fall into a pub for dinner, drink honey-dew, then stumble into bed under a waning moon, listening to the big sea.’
‘So let’s do it,’ Mel said.
She was so prompt then. So spirited and agreeable. Up for anything.
They bought each other woolly walking pullovers and marbled notebooks, sharpened a dozen pencils, took a room in a guest house a hundred yards from Coleridge’s cottage and never got out of bed. It was too soon in their connection. The only deep romantic chasms that Frank had time for in those days belonged to Mel.
When they finally did get to walk in the west country it was at Mel’s instigation, and it was Daphne du Maurier’s west country, not Coleridge’s. Impatience had entered into it by then. Mel didn’t buy the cottage in Little Cleverley to celebrate their passion but to find an alternative to it. Frank was already making too much noise for her to take. ‘If you’re going to come down to Little Cleverley with me,’ she warned him, ‘you’d better be prepared to have quiet thoughts. No running around looking for curries. No yelling at the telly. No London stuff.’ Among the hippy bits and pieces left behind by the previous sitting tenants was a parchment scroll on which was transcribed that once inescapable consolation ode of the culturally damaged – GO PLACIDLY AMID THE DIN etcetera. Mel ripped off the etcetera and posted the words GO PLACIDLY above Frank’s side of the bed.
Now would be a good time for him to dump the car and walk the Quantocks, but he is too restless. He accepts that he will never do it. He blames the heat, the tourists, his commitments, but the truth is that he cannot face being alone in nature. How many bound notebooks has he bought in his life, for the purpose of recording his fortnight’s solitary expedition to Bronte country, Hardy country, Lawrence country? There they all sit, in a neat pile on the top of one of his bookcases, labelled, dated, paginated – addressed even, with the promise of a small reward should anyone find them forgotten under an ash tree by a fairy stream – but otherwise quite empty. Get wisdom? No, thank you. Frank’s got it and all that means is that he’s wise to himself. No more notebooks. No point. He’ll never fill them. He’ll never stay in a Quantock valley and walk the hills until his legs give out. He’d rather sit on the edge of a bed and watch crap on the box all day. Mel made him feel well but she never cured him. He still does what he hates, and hates what he does. Of course, if there were some girl who’d like to go hiking through the Quantocks with him, walk all day among the waterfalls, drink honey-dew, then stumble into bed under a waning moon … But this fantasy too can no longer survive the penetrating gaze of wisdom. He’s wise to himself. He don’t want no girl. He thinks he wants a girl because he’s been wanting one since he was six. It’s a long-time tic. What you’ve been wanting for as long as you’ve been conscious you can’t suddenly unwant. But when Frank puts his ear to the growling of his appetites he hears no clamour for a girl. Girls he’s had. So now what? What does wisdom have to say today on the question of what a man who has been booted out of his house is supposed to do with himself if he has no appetite for a girl? A long-time tic has lots going for it. It points you in the direction of what to do next. Frank’s longtime tic used to tell him that it was once again time to go and fuck a girl. If he no longer wants a girl, then what is he to fuck? He knows the answer to that, too. He isn’t to fuck anything. But he’s a man; the only truly passionate pursuit of his life has been fucking. There’s a mathematical necessity involved in this. M.A.N. = F.U.C.K. If he’s now to believe that a man of his age isn’t for fucking, then what the fuck is a man of his age for?
