Separation for beginners, p.9
Separation for Beginners, page 9
She laughs, but it’s kind and polite the way she talks to me and I suddenly realise that, despite my regular absences from work, Josie talks highly of me. It sparks a certain joy in me for approximately one billionth of a second until I realise that I would rather drive off a cliff than tell her she’s out of a job. I buy a round, hand Josie and Chrissie their drinks, and take the others to our table gripped by an urgent resolve to use all and any contacts I have left to find this young woman a better job. The conversation between Mrs H, Simon and me is stunted but perfectly pleasant. I do feel a certain lightness at simply being out and at having spent some hours in the office. The fact that I have used those hours to confirm the oblivion of the business is a mere detail.
The landlord steps onto a raised stage the size of a table. He switches on a mic and we discover that there’s a comedy night starting in fifteen minutes. A few whistles from Josie’s mates tell us that’s why they are here.
‘We’d better cram in all our chit-chat before that starts, then,’ Simon says.
Every small firm needs one chronically sardonic single male in the team, just so that no one else ever need fear being the biggest git in the company.
Mrs H, who seems to have morphed into the Queen Mother now that she’s out in public, grips her handbag to her stomach and says that she won’t stay for ‘that sort of thing’ but that ‘it’s nice to be out’.
We have nothing much to talk about, the three of us, and I turn to cast an eye out across the rest of the pub and nearly jump out of my skin when I find a young man standing over me, offering his hand. He is wearing cut-off tracksuit bottoms as shorts and a vest that reveals tanned and very muscular arms and shoulders, a couple of tattoos and a scar. He has cropped hair, a second scar above his lip, and possibly the most handsome smiling face I’ve ever seen. His eyes sparkle with warmth to the same degree that his voice is rough and ready.
‘Mr Smith, I’m Grant, Josie’s boyfriend.’
I know a little about Grant from Josie. That he’s lovely and that he’s a scaffolder.
I stand up. ‘Hello, Grant, good to meet you.’
As we shake hands, he lays his left hand on top of my right. His smile is strangely disarming.
‘It is such a pleasure to meet you,’ he says. ‘Josie thinks you’re the business.’
I am speechless. Really? I want to say. I think I’m a useless, washed-up piece of crap.
Grant flashes his smile at Simon and at Mrs H, who looks like she wants to adopt him. Unless she wants to . . . No, gross.
‘Nice to meet you all,’ he says. ‘Don’t want to interrupt, just wanted to say hello.’
‘Good to meet you, Grant,’ I say.
He returns to Josie and their friends, and I see Josie glance across to us.
Mrs H offers the kiss of life to our conversation by making the ridiculous claim that when she first knew me, I looked like Grant, and describes my scuba-diving adventures back in the day as swashbuckling. I can sense Simon flinch to fill up his sarcasm water-gun, so I change the subject.
‘I suppose,’ I say, in a sweeping admission of defeat, ‘that the bigger companies were always going to barge us off Bonaire and Sal and certainly obliterate us from the Red Sea but I wish I’d bought a property or two in one of those places back then.’
Regretting not buying property somewhere cheap that then became expensive: the conversational refuge of the living dead.
And Simon is happy to join this death march of a chat. Whitstable. Cape Verde. Harlem. Costa Rica. Ramsgate. That’s his list of places he wished he’d seen coming.
Mrs H has her own list and doubles up on Whitstable. Without stopping for breath, she grabs the Kent link by the throat and tells us that her grandparents used to come out of London to work the hop fields and that was their summer holiday. All I can hear is Tim Brooke-Taylor doing the cardboard-box sketch. I almost miss Niall. He’s annoying but at least his references are contemporary.
And then the worry about what to talk about, and the wretchedness of what we are talking about, and the perversion of thinking I could prefer Niall’s company to someone else’s – all these things go out the window and the evening turns on its head because I see something and then I hear something, and, for a moment, my head cannot compute what the two things mean.
What I see is Josie, standing at the far end of the bar clutching her notebook. She is looking at her feet and she is shaking. And her back is turned away from the bar. For a split second, there’s no possible reason for her to be where she is.
But then the landlord’s voice blares out of the speaker system. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, from time to time, we have our open-mic night here at the Grasshopper, and tonight six people have five minutes each to show us what they can do. First up, we are very proud to welcome a local girl doing only her second-ever stand-up, so a warm welcome please to . . . MISS . . . JOSIE . . . CHAMBERS!’
My mouth drops open. I instinctively want to run and stop her, the slow-motion rugby tackle, but that tells you everything about me and nothing about brave Josie Chambers, who steps on stage to a riot of cheers from Grant and their friends.
When I say Josie is clutching her notebook, I mean gripping. With trembling hands. She looks terrified, but she barely hesitates before starting.
‘Good evening, I’m Josie Chambers and I live in Merriment. You all know Merriment, you’ve all driven past it, the housing estate built in 1968 by DEFRA to house cattle and named by the famous London advertising agency Piss, Take and Fuckyou.’
The open mouths of Mrs H and Silent Simon are all I need to know that they, like me, were ignorant of what quiet, demure, shy Josie Chambers has been writing in her Moleskine notebook all this time.
‘All my family live on the estate – me and my sisters, my mum and dad, my grandmum. There’s one member of my family doesn’t live on Merriment and that’s Dodi. You know what’s cool about Dodi?’
‘No!’ someone from her group calls out.
‘What’s cool about Dodi, Josie?’ someone else shouts, on cue.
‘I’ll tell you. She’s my great-grandmother. How cool is it to have a great-grandmother!’
There’s a round of applause. Josie holds up an imaginary glass. ‘Cheers, Dodi.’
She takes the mic off the stand. ‘Dodi lives in Martyr’s Green . . .’
There are a couple of stray shouts of support for the village, which is a few miles away.
‘. . . and I would say I get a call from Dodi a couple of times every week, and I go over to see her every week too. She claims not to be a fan of the phone but she’s rarely off the thing. And I have to tell you people, if my great-grandmother calls, she usually starts the call by saying the words, “Do you remember . . .?” and I have to warn you, if my great-grandmother calls and starts with the words, “Do you remember . . .?”’
She nods and waits.
‘You do not want your name to be the next thing that comes out of that woman’s mouth . . .’
There’s sniggering from the audience.
‘Because if it is . . .’
She looks out at us, narrows her eyes.
‘. . . you’re fucked. It means you’ve either got cancer or died. ’Cause those are the two things my great-grandmother likes to talk about.’
Josie holds her hand to her ear like a phone.
‘“Josie, you remember old Mrs Coot?”
‘“Hi, Dodi.”
‘“Remember the woman Coot?”
‘“I think so.”
‘“You must do – she lived on Ripley Lane when I lived on Ripley Lane.”
‘“Thirty years before I was born.”
‘“You must know her, she used to come in with marrows from that wretched man’s allotment.”
‘People, if Dodi has called to tell me Mrs Coot has cancer, Mrs Coot has probably died of it by the time I pretend to know who she is. Oh! And don’t think it makes any difference coming out with an outright “no”.
‘“Darling, you remember Percy Bachelor from Windmill Lane?”
‘“No, Dodi, I never knew him – I categorically don’t know who that is at all.”
‘“Well, he just passed. Very rare form of leukaemia. Betty Wright called and told me.”
Josie takes a deep breath and smiles at us. ‘So, a man I don’t know at all, who lives in a village I have never lived in, has died. What am I meant to say to her? “Does leukaemia count, Dodi? Not proper cancer, is it?” But I don’t say that, I just respectfully mutter, “That’s sad.”
‘“It is. I thought you’d want to know.”
‘WHAT?!! WHY, WOMAN?!! I was having a nice morning!
‘“Anyway, how are you?” she’ll then ask.
‘“Okay, I guess,” I’ll say weakly, ’cause I’m distracted by the image of Percy Bachelor – who I have to make up from scratch in my head because I don’t know him – lying dead in a bed, hooked up to some dreadful life-support machine that has just been switched off. And I wonder if Dodi and this Betty Wright character are competitive.’
Josie puts her hand back to her ear as a phone again.
‘“Hello, Betty love, how are you?”
‘“Hi, Dodi. Percy Bachelor has leukaemia.”
‘“I know, Betty, I’ve known that for some time.”
Josie fist-pumps furiously.
‘Take that, Betty, I already knew. Haha.
‘“Well, he’s dead, passed yesterday. Thought you’d want to know, Dodi.”
Josie slumps and her face turns angry.
‘“That fucking bitch! How the hell did she find that out before me? Fuck that!”
‘Meanwhile, Betty Wright is dancing around her wardened accommodation. Do they have a scoring system, five points if you know someone’s diagnosis before the other one does, ten points for a death? Bonus points if the terminally ill person has told you personally and you can prove it? You gotta be able to prove it.
‘“Thanks so much for letting me know about your diagnosis, Percy. If there’s anything at all I can do – and, um, look, I know time is of the essence – but could you possibly just put it in writing to me?”
‘Last Christmas, over a glass of stout, my great-grandmother actually said to me, “You know, I’m really hoping you have a nice year ahead, have some fun, be happy. I worry about you – sometimes you sound a bit down.”’
Josie pauses, then yells, ‘“WELL, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT, WOMAN? WHENEVER WE SPEAK I’VE JUST BEEN TOLD SOMEONE IS DEAD OR DYING!! OF COURSE I DON’T SOUND HAPPY. MY OWN GREAT-GRANDMOTHER IS GOD’S OWN MESSENGER OF DOOM!!!”’
Mrs H is laughing but her lips are pursed together as if wanting to register her shock at the language. Si’s pint glass is glued to his lower lip as he watches with a weird, snarling smile of disbelief lighting up his face. The pub is buzzing. I look over at Grant who is watching Josie adoringly, nervously, willing her on.
Josie takes a sip of water from a bottle. She wipes her brow. She moves loosely now and I suspect she knows she has the whole place behind her, and that pale voice and apologetic faltering start she returns to now, is deliberate.
‘Now, this isn’t really connected to anything but I only have a few minutes so I thought it might be a good use of our time to have a little chat about our arseholes.’
Mrs H spits her drink into her glass. Si, through some strange amphibious trick, smirks whilst downing his pint. The pub hushes. Josie allows her voice to grow stronger again, and make the whole thing seem accidental, off the cuff.
‘And, specifically, about the fact that . . . Isn’t it amazing that our arseholes don’t wear out? I mean, what manufactured part, even titanium, lasts for that long with that sort of use?’
She does the maths for us, counting on her fingers. ‘Two craps a day – yes, I’m just talking about women for the moment, that’s six hun . . . seven hundred and thirty a year, live for seventy years, that’s seven thousand three hundred times by . . . that’s about fifty thousand usages . . . so between fifty and a hundred thousand usages depending on diet and gender. And it never wears out! No one dies of a worn-out arsehole, no one has an arsehole replacement at fifty. We should be building bridges out of this stuff. Let’s amend the organ donor forms now and rebuild Britain with Percy Bachelor’s arsehole! Let’s take it to Parliament. No one, but no one, takes their arsehole with them to the grave!’
When her five minutes are up, the place erupts, the whole place this time, not just her corner, and she suddenly looks made of paper – as if the noise could crumple her. She makes it off the stage and collapses into Grant’s ridiculously large arms. He engulfs her and kisses her, and she laughs and cries. She comes across to us, drenched in sweat, still shaking. Her cheeks are red and her eyes are searching for clues as to how she did as if her ears can’t fathom the applause which the landlord is waiting to die down before he introduces the next act. All barriers are down now, cast aside by sheer joy, so I hug her and I can do nothing but stare at her, shaking my head, unable to put into words my admiration. Mrs H smiles bravely when Josie looks to her; she seems happy that Josie’s act went down so well but bemused by the content.
Ironically, the only one of us who can find anything to say is silent Si, who does not do hugging, but raises his glass and mutters, ‘That was funny, that. Really good.’ Praise indeed. At one point it looks like he might even get out of his seat.
A work day that I had dedicated to hard-nosed cost-cutting decisions is rounded off by me using my least buggered credit card to buy a few rounds for the Josie Chambers fan club and my own staff. I resolve to keep them on the payroll for eternity. I walk home in a state of euphoria at Josie’s talent and guts, bobbing my head around as I sing, ‘Stick, stick, stick, stick, sticky sticky stick stick,’ to myself. It’s the best evening I’ve had in some time. It’s the only evening I’ve had.
Chapter 8
I am sitting on the toilet reading more fabulous prose by the bard Ray Parlour and listening to Zoe Ball (massive crush 1990s to the present day, Claire fully aware and not entirely supportive) when Niall bursts in.
‘I’m bloody in here, Niall! Radio’s on!’
But Niall is excited. He seems to be panting like a dog. He’s clutching his phone and holding it out towards me.
‘Susie’s coming back for the weekend! She’s boarding any minute!’
I nearly leap off my seat, which would be bad. Instead, still somewhat forgetful of where I am, I call out, ‘Hello.’ Niall hands me his phone and it is then that I discover Susie is on FaceTime.
‘Are you where I think you are, Dad?’
I look at Niall in disgust. ‘Niall! Chrissake! Yes. Yes, I am. What’s wrong with you, man?’
‘Why are you both in the bathroom when Dad’s . . .’
My daughter’s voice recedes as Niall takes the phone back and heads for the kitchen.
‘Well, I’m excited to see you even if old misery guts isn’t,’ I hear him say.
‘SHUT THE BLOODY DOOR!’
I’m too happy about Susie’s surprise visit to bother explaining to Niall how many all sorts of wrong it is to hand me my daughter on FaceTime when I’m seeing a man about a dog. What’s the point? It’s not my job to change him. It’s my job to evict him.
I find him in the kitchen, on the sofa with a stack of recipe books. He’s buzzing with excitement. ‘She can’t live without us, dude. She just can’t live without us.’
I remind him that today is the day he moves out.
‘Peter Smith!’ he says, as if he’s my mother, or Frankie Howerd. ‘That would be crazy. Seriously. Massive mistake. Either Susie would come and spend the weekend with me at my mate’s flat or she’d say, “No way am I kipping on the sofa-bed in a shithole,” and we’d both end up here anyway.’
‘Tell me more about your mate’s flat. That is the only thing in what you just said that interested me.’
‘Seriously, it’s a non-starter. Awful option.’
‘Again, all I’m hearing is the word “option”.’
‘Seriously, no way, she’d never forgive you for making me live there.’
‘I get it – if you start a sentence with the word “seriously”, it means you are about to talk bollocks.’
‘I guess Sooz and me could stay at her mum’s for the weekend.’
Bastard. That’s below the belt. That’s chemical warfare.
‘You can stay the weekend, as our guest not lodger, and you’re leaving Monday morning at the same time I go to work. And if you make any reference to being intimate with my daughter in front of me, I’ll beat you to a pulp.’
Niall smiles patronisingly, the facial-expression equivalent of a pat on the head. ‘There’s no way you could, old chap, but point taken, I’ll be really respectful about what I say. And it’s good to know you’re going to give work a try on Monday.’
I make a cup of tea. I don’t make Niall one and when he gets up to make himself one, I spread out on the sofa. Not allowing him room on my kitchen sofa has become a ritual these past few days. Intellectually, I am regressing, and my starting point wasn’t exactly Brian Cox.
‘Did she say why she’s coming back?’ I say, switching on the evening news.
‘No. Very tight-lipped, she was. She’s seeing her friend Rebecca who lives near Heathrow tonight and coming to us super early tomorrow morning.’
Niall is stirring his tea when he suddenly lets out a loud, melodramatic ‘OH!’ that makes me spill mine.
‘What the . . . ?’ I gasp, jumping up into a power stance fashioned by the boiling fluid on my crotch.
He stares at me demonically. ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ he says.
‘This’d better be good.’
‘I just died!’
‘That is good.’
‘No, I mean, I just diiiiied. Oh, my God!’
He freezes and a beatific smile contorts his face. ‘She’s pregnant!’ he whispers.
He starts fanning his own face, like he’s auditioning to be the gardener on Queer Eye.
‘I’m having a hot flush. I’m gonna be a dad! I’m so ready for this. No, I’m too young. No, I’m so ready for this!’
