Separation for beginners, p.4
Separation for Beginners, page 4
Rather than call her from the bath, I put my music back on but decide on a change of mood. Red Snapper. Great band. Perfect music for letting you all in on a shocking secret – this is not a fantastic time to be a high-street travel agent. None of Susie or Erland’s friends have ever set foot inside a travel agency. As teens, I’d see their faces wrinkle with confusion at the concept of what I do. They’d want to be polite to you, because you’re old and they’re in your house and they like you on account of generally decent feedback on your parental performance from your child. But despite the good manners, I could almost hear them whimper, ‘I don’t understand,’ and see them tighten the grip on their phones as if to say, ‘My travel arrangements are in my hand – what are you talking about?’
At some point during my mum’s funeral I should have noticed that half the people who had been at my dad’s funeral five years earlier weren’t there. I should have done the maths on the fact that my core customers were making the same one-way trip to the ultimate unknown destination, and that this was not good for business. But I was too busy cremating Mum and stuff. No, that’s an excuse. I was averting my eyes from business reality long before my parents departed.
It started well enough. I learned the trade from them and found that much of it was already in my brain by a process of osmosis. They loved their work almost as much as they loved each other. (I’m not even going to start on my parents’ marriage. They were dynamic, happy and very much in love. None of which helps.)
I added a new side to the business, scuba-diving holidays in Europe; I set up partnerships and got to dive Sharm, Gozo, Lofoten. I grew it and took in Bonaire and Cuba. My parents placed their faith in face-to-face contact remaining the heart of a successful travel business and I failed to modernise their thinking because we ticked along, and I only ever wanted to tick along so I could leave early enough to do the school run and be with Claire and the kids as much as possible. I have been to forty countries on this planet and, once I was married, nothing ever beat the feeling of walking through my own front door.
When you’re a father of young children you get the chance to do the right thing every day of your life: protect them, feed them, make them feel safe and good, choose to laugh with them instead of getting annoyed. You have a partner who makes you feel stronger every day, helping you correct your mistakes, appreciating the things you get right. Every single facet of it is nurturing to one’s soul and self-worth. Now, there’s no one to get things right for. No one needs me. I am in an undiluted, non-stop partnership with myself, my fiercest critic.
There’s a knock on the bathroom door. At least, I think there is, but the music is so loud I can’t be sure. I ignore it anyway. Then there’s a banging on the door. I ignore that too and Susie calls out, asking me if I’ve had a heart attack.
I reach for my phone to turn the music off.
‘Er, no, don’t think so. Not a big one.’
I switch back to some classical music. I installed a Sonos system when my flat was complete, spent a week transferring my CDs to it instead of going into work, and am already informed by Susie that it’s out of date. ‘The classic purchase by a man of a certain age,’ Niall called it, shortly before I clubbed him to death in my dreams.
Susie marches in and stops dead when she sees me.
‘Do you mind! I’m in the bath,’ I say.
She tilts her head sympathetically, switches the music off and kneels down by the bath, the empty bath in which I sit fully clothed reading The Romford Pelé by Ray Parlour.
‘Why are you reading in here?’
‘It’s nice. I like it.’
‘What’s wrong with your bedroom?’
‘I don’t like my bedroom.’
It’s true. It was the playroom and then became a small snug where Claire and I used to sit and read. I don’t like it being my bedroom.
‘Living room?’ Susie asks.
‘Gandalf is in there.’
She sighs, like a mum with a teenage boy she doesn’t know what to do with. ‘Dad . . .’
‘I’m reading.’
‘It can wait. Did you put that potted tree in front of the For Sale sign?’
‘Not exactly in front.’
‘Totally obscuring it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Houses are sold online anyway, not from passing traffic.’
‘Then it doesn’t matter.’
‘Dad . . . I need to talk to you.’
I return to my book, which is a ridiculous thing to do when someone is talking to you, but I don’t realise this until I am holding the thing up to my face. When we played hide-and-seek, Erland would stand in the middle of the room covering his face and consider himself invisible. Erland was two. That’s the level I’m at right now.
‘Must be a great book,’ Susie says.
‘Yeah. I mean, it’s not Joyce.’
‘Dad . . .’
I put the book down and turn to her, to listen to what I don’t want to hear.
‘I’m taking the job in Stockholm. I can’t keep working as an intern. I graduated nearly three years ago and it’s getting me down. I have to take this job, Dad.’
My daughter wipes away the tear that has already escaped onto my cheek.
‘I’m going to tell Niall now.’
‘About moving to the tundra or the fact that your new boss is a handsome ex-lover who still has a thing for you?’
‘We were nineteen, it lasted four months, we never . . . did anything.’
‘Oh dear, unfinished business.’
‘No.’
‘That’s how Niall will see it.’
‘Which is why I’m not going to tell him about Mark, just about the job.’
‘What if I tell him, for my own amusement?’
‘What if I tell Mum you’ve taken to lying fully clothed in the bath listening to Mozart, for my own amusement?’
She has a point. This isn’t my finest hour. ‘It’s Puccini,’ I say.
Susie gets to her feet.
‘Good luck, love.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
Left alone, not allowing myself to sob without a lock on the door, I see myself for what I am: an ageing man with his business and family disappearing in front of him, lying fully clothed in a bath, and I hate myself. I’ve even got my shoes on. My daughter heading to Sweden, my son on the other side of the world, Claire on a journey of her own. Well done, Pete. You’re the man.
Claire and I were still together when Erland went to New Zealand but I think he knew that Claire would leave me before I did. I don’t mean that she told him, but that he could see it coming and that he wanted to get as far away as possible. It can’t be fun to watch your mum grow bored of your dad.
When Susie was born, I got Erland from nursery and brought him to meet his sister. For one brief moment, all four of us were sitting quietly on the hospital bed. Claire, exhausted, elated, looked at us and said, ‘Two is perfect. Let’s quit while we’re ahead, let’s not change a thing.’ She was right, it was perfect. But when it came to not changing a thing, I took that a bit literally for the next twenty years. The trick would have been to – well, if I’d known what the trick was, things might be different.
For a change of scene, I get out of the bath and go and stand at the kitchen window, so as to look pathetic in a different part of the flat.
Niall comes in, looking off-the-scale distraught. ‘She’s going at the weekend!’
‘I know.’
We immediately have a problem here in that I am so full of self-pity I’m all out of sympathy and in any way giving-a-shit about Niall. I try to break this to him gently by not looking at him. The garden has my full attention, along with the depressing prospect of being left alone in this flat. I had no idea she was going so quickly.
‘Don’t you think that’s kinda short notice?’ Niall says.
‘She’s got to work, Niall.’
Typical me, putting my daughter’s needs first. But yes, I do think it’s fast, until it strikes me that she probably made up her mind days ago, if not weeks, and what has taken longer is knowing how to tell the two of us. The one thing – and I insist the only thing – Niall and I have in common is that we spend our days looking forward to Susie coming home. This is both pathetic and back-to-front, given that we, allegedly, have jobs and she doesn’t. Didn’t.
I hear a weird sound from behind me and when I turn, I see that it is the onset of a wave of snotty, whelping sobs. Niall is inconsolable. Tears are streaming down his unshaven face. His shoulders are heaving. He looks like a toddler who has dropped his ice cream. I’m so shocked I approach him as if to offer comfort but find myself hovering uneasily just beyond reach, as if he smells of wee, until I am saved by the doorbell.
‘I’d better get that.’ I move fast.
Niall grabs my arm. ‘I can sort accommodation with a friend, so you needn’t worry about me.’
I look at him, incredulous. ‘I don’t.’
I open the door to Matthew and a couple in their thirties.
‘Just doing a viewing, Peter.’
I step out and shake hands with the couple. ‘Pete Smith. I own the flat.’
‘I thought a Mrs Smith owned the flat?’ the woman says.
I don’t like her. I turn to Matthew and ask why he hasn’t told me about the viewing, as agreed.
‘I did text you,’ Matthew says.
I reach for my phone but can’t find it. I am still patting my pockets when Niall appears, snivelling, his purple face strewn with tears, and looking like he’s just taken a beating. The couple are horrified by the sight of him.
‘Must have put my phone down,’ I say. ‘Sorry. Fair enough, go ahead.’
Matthew rolls his eyes, which I think is unnecessary.
Niall takes my phone from his pocket. ‘Here it is. Got you a present, was doing it just now when Susie broke the news. It’s a thank-you for everything.’ He hands it to me, wiping his tears and snot away with his sleeve.
‘That’s my phone. You got me my phone?’
‘No, I signed you up on Tinder.’
I splutter in front of the couple.
‘I’ve created you an account and everything,’ Niall says proudly. ‘As a thank-you.’
‘What! How did you get into my phone?’
‘Guessed your passcode. Susie’s year of birth . . . original.’
‘How dare you!’
Niall looks aghast at me. ‘That’s insanely ungrateful.’ He is genuinely hurt.
‘But I’m not gay!’ I splutter. ‘I love gay people and people of every possible description and, you know, absolutely everyone, but I’m not gay.’
‘I don’t think Tinder’s the same-sex one,’ the woman says.
‘That’s Grindr,’ her husband says, too enthusiastically for his wife’s liking.
‘This is a gift from me to you,’ Niall protests. ‘I put a lot of thought into this. I thought and thought and thought about it, a lot.’
The couple are backing away from the door now and Matthew is trying to usher them round to the flat entrance.
Niall steps towards them but his bulk, and his grief at Susie’s news, and his outrage at my ingratitude make it seem like the lunge of a desperate man. ‘I could have just given him wine, but I really thought about it ever such a lot – what do you get for a man who needs to get back on the bike, you know?’
I blush at this description of me because, whilst I don’t want this couple (or anyone) to buy the flat, I do want the general public to think I am rarely off the bike.
‘Is this sex site on my phone now, for everyone to see?’ I ask. ‘People will think I’m a pervert.’
‘No,’ Niall says. ‘People will think you’re a perv if you don’t have it . . . “Look at me, I’m sixty years old and perfectly happy to go without sex and love for the rest of my life . . .” equals sexual deviant.’
‘I’m fifty-three, you horse’s arse!’
Niall turns to Matthew and the couple again. ‘Am I right?’
‘I’d be on it if I wasn’t fortunate enough to be married,’ the man says.
His wife grits her teeth. I can’t tell if they’re a double act who will be laughing about this after the viewing and rushing home for a quickie before going back to work, or if they’re on the edge of an abyss and each hoping the other one will step over first.
Matthew looks uneasily at the couple. ‘We should get upstairs,’ he says.
‘Well!’ Niall huffs. ‘You’re welcome. Bloody hell! You try to do something nice!’ He marches back inside to the kitchen. The couple look dubious and I see an opportunity to kill off this viewing.
‘That sweet grizzly bear of a man,’ I say, raising a brave laugh. ‘Or should I say, child in a man’s body, because that’s all he is. He just loves people and gets over-excited, but you’ll get to know him properly and learn he’s no real danger, despite what the authorities say.’
I bid them good day and listen to the footsteps above as they view the flat. They are gone in less than five minutes.
It is shortly after four in the morning. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in the last year I have slept later than four o’clock. And I’m talking about a severed hand with two fingers left on it. My waking terrors are fed by the terrible twins of debt and divorce.
Rather exotic is the fact that I wake up the same way people wake from nightmares in movies: sitting bolt upright, gasping for breath. In my case, this four a.m. ritual comes not because of a bad dream or a dodgy screenplay but because I think I am having a heart attack. I know that I’m not, that my mouth is dry and I can’t swallow and this seems, in half-sleep, like being unable to breathe. But the part of my brain that knows that one day, given the extreme nature of my financial plight and mental distress, I might have a heart attack always believes that today is the day.
That would be very me; dying of a heart attack, brought on by the stress of mistakenly thinking I was having a heart attack.
When I wake like this, it is always to a very definite thought or fact sitting at the front of my brain, and usually it is one of the following:
One – why the people I have known in the travel world for decades have totally ignored my emails to them about merging or buying me out.
Two – my belief that the stress I feel over my work means I’ll die soon and become a distant memory to my son and daughter who, by middle age, will have lived as much of their life without me as with me.
Three – not dying but my children being ashamed of me and preferring to hang out at the lovely big house Claire buys with her next husband, who is nice, successful, good-looking, solvent and hung like a tapir.
Four – the fact that I feel unable to share my money problems, work worries and general self-loathing and feeling of failure with anyone, thus calling into question all my close friendships.
Despite all this, there is something about my kitchen at four-thirty in the morning that I enjoy. The silence. The growing light. Coffee. Telling myself today will be different. But enjoying that time is only a relative value, it feels good compared to what has preceded it: the fake coronary, staring at the ceiling scared, despairing and lonely, feeling unconnected to lifelong friends. Compared to my four-to-four-thirty-a.m. slot, coffee in the kitchen is the Maldives. Compared to being asleep in bed with my ex-wife, it’s a damp day on the Isle of Sheppey.
I know that there are millions of people who would be thrilled if they had to start again from fresh with what I have. And they’d be a lot more grateful than I am feeling. But I’m not and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that.
I switch my phone on and see a text Claire sent me last night.
Thinking of surprising Susie at the airport to see her off. You going? X
Can’t go. She’s all yours. Lovely surprise for her x
When morning comes, Susie packs for Stockholm while I pack for the trade fair in Berlin. We both leave tomorrow. I chivvy Niall to get his things packed up, but he reminds me that, given his approach to material possessions, leaving here will take him approximately three minutes. He is, anyway, too busy lying on Susie’s bed taking items out of her suitcase and throwing them across the floor and begging her not to go. It’s pathetic but I don’t say anything as he’s kind of doing my job for me.
Chapter 5
Niall is in the kitchen, making breakfast. His tablet is propped up against an industrial-sized tin of olive oil and on the screen is what looks, I have to concede, like a work-type thing. He has three hobs in use. The oven is on and the grill door open. Niall glances up at me and winks but says nothing. He takes the coffee pot and pours me a cup, stirs in a half-spoon of sugar just the way I like it, then takes a milk jug from the hob and plunges it until the milk is a creamy, frothy texture and pours that into my coffee. He stirs it and winks again as he hands it to me.
Why he doesn’t look overwhelmed by cooking a breakfast with more than two constituent parts to it is beyond me.
‘That’s nice,’ he says. His voice is a purr.
‘What’s nice?’ I ask, but Niall doesn’t seem to hear me. Which is fine.
I go to the sofa with my coffee. I hear the shower turn off and Susie singing. This is the last time I will hear that sound. The next time I have breakfast in here, I’ll be alone. I had been living in the flat for two weeks before she asked to move in and for most of that time Dennis was still here finishing things off. I’ve not really been truly alone here, and I wish I didn’t have to go to a trade fair but could close the door when Susie and Niall leave today and face up to the solitude. After Claire left, there was a period when I felt excited about the future, the openness of it, the limitless possibilities; it lasted for twenty minutes and then I wanted her and the children back and that’s pretty well where I’ll be again with Susie gone.
‘Can you repeat that?’ Niall says. ‘I didn’t get you.’
‘I didn’t say anything.’ I say.
