We dont die of love, p.5
We Don't Die of Love, page 5
Mrs Hobbs showed me around a large and well-proportioned, skilfully renovated seventeenth-century farmhouse. She was a well-groomed lady of indeterminate age. Elderly but still athletic-looking. Tennis or golf or horse riding or all three. Dancing too maybe. Samba in the village hall on Thursdays. There was probably Pilates in the mix somewhere. Personally supervised and bespoke stretching of some kind anyway.
She was sceptical about me. Without saying a critical word she managed to hint pretty strongly that getting Team Ernies in to do dawn fry-ups for the last of the revellers wasn’t her idea. When she first opened the door she had looked me up and down – not in a sexual way, don’t get me wrong – more in a buying a dog sort of a way. Could I fetch a shot partridge? Could I catch a rabbit? Bait a badger? Was my coat glossy? Were my teeth capable of crunching a bone?
Her expression was both sharp and resigned. She expected the world to try and get one over on her and it got her down sometimes. Still, she made a decent brew in a kitchen that was considerably larger than the one we had in Ernies and we got chatting a bit.
‘Important do, this party?’ I said.
‘It would seem so,’ she said.
Turned out that her own fiftieth wedding anniversary, her youngest daughter’s fortieth birthday and her husband’s eightieth all fell on the same weekend. She said that if it was up to her she’d just go to The Ducking Stool for a dinner with the husband and pay for the daughter to host her own do in town, but it wasn’t how Mr Hobbs liked to do things. He liked the big gesture, the grand statement. Speeches and toasts. Free breakfasts for his guests as the sun rises. Couldn’t do anything by halves.
Having confided her feelings about the party and given me this small insight into her home life, she thawed out a little more while giving me the tour of the house. Asked me to call her Margaret for a start.
‘“Mrs Hobbs” makes me feel so old,’ she said.
You’re arranging a fortieth birthday party for your youngest daughter, I thought. It’s your own fiftieth wedding anniversary. No getting away from it, Mrs Hobbs – Margaret – you are quite old.
It was an attractive house. Tastefully decorated in an uncluttered style. Clean lines, lots of apple-white. Lots of light. I liked it. Made me want to have a thorough clear-out when I got back home. I made sure I praised it.
‘Very Nordic,’ I said. ‘Very now.’
It was the right thing to say and she talked me through her thinking, how she removed a dividing wall between the kitchen and dining room to create a large open-plan living space with views over the moors. How they had turned the old workshops into the kitchen, filling in the gap with a dining and sitting area with an apex roof that linked to a new extension. The extension itself was a multi-purpose space big enough to host parties, even extravagant ones.
She told me that she would have liked to do interior design professionally as a career maybe. I said she still could and she made a face. No, really, I said. I told her that I had it on good authority that older women were taking over. That they were the future, actually. There was a revolution happening, I said. She could be part of it.
She seemed unconvinced. I felt I’d made a misstep somehow.
‘Have you had lunch?’ I said.
There and then I made her a simple mushroom omelette. The secret is a little fresh finely chopped green chilli in with the mushrooms, a dash of soy sauce and a blob of good double cream in with the egg mixture. I served it with sautéed potatoes. Wes might do the day-to-day work in the kitchen at Ernies but I can still do the showboat stuff if I have to.
It worked anyway. Did what it should. Hard to resist the perfect omelette. Margaret Hobbs ended up offering me an insane amount of money for the gig. We would get the same for doing this party as we would for a month just slogging away in the caff. For some reason I felt I had to protest.
‘It’s too much.’
Margaret begged to differ. We bickered good-naturedly and pointlessly for a few minutes, both of us aware of the absurdity of the customer trying to raise the price, the supplier trying to lower it. It was a game, one she finally put a stop to.
‘Look, Luke, my husband has done very well for himself. Very well indeed when you consider what he came from: two rooms in Stonebeck. Mother left when he was seven. His father was always out of work and generally drunk. Violent too.’
It was a classic boy-made-good story. Dickensian stuff. Hobbs basically brought himself up. Grafted hard, ducked and dived, bobbed and weaved and now he lived here in this fine old house, with his wife whose own father had been Mayor of Leeds back in the day.
They had other houses too, of course. A place in Portugal and a place in Jersey. Tony drove a vintage Jensen Interceptor. Margaret had a nippy little baby Merc. They had horses. Kids both went to private schools and, despite managing to leave those incredibly expensive establishments with barely a GCSE between them, they also had nice houses, big cars, lovely holidays, all paid for by Tony’s grafting.
She told me she could have whatever she wanted. ‘Tony’s always asking me to buy more things. Clothes, shoes, stuff for the house, trips abroad. Art. He gets annoyed when he gets the credit card statements and finds out I haven’t used them. It winds him up.’ She laughed as she told me that whenever she was pissed off with him she simply refused to spend money. ‘If I’m in a real sulk I can go months without buying anything. Drives him crazy.’
She said that Tony also liked to think he was still down to earth. ‘That’s another reason why he wants you,’ she said. ‘He loves the idea of a business based in the same slums he escaped from, serving food to the local nobs.’
I bristled at the casual use of the word slums. I was allowed to call them that. This Margaret was emphatically not. Not with that gymkhana accent.
Sharp-eyed as she was, she noticed. ‘Tony’s words, not mine.’
Her point was that she wanted her husband to feel this party would go with a proper swing, that it would be like some Yorkshire rewrite of The Great Gatsby, so she had to make sure she’d paid over the odds for everything. Tony Hobbs was one of those people who only feel they’ve got the best if they’ve spent eye-watering sums of cash. If it doesn’t cost big-league, then how do you know it even matters?
‘Anyway,’ she said at last. ‘You should see what the band are getting and they’re shit.’
She smiled as I recoiled from the unexpected oath. It was the reaction she’d hoped for.
There was a soft cough and we looked up and discovered we were being watched. A tough-looking man in early middle age, a bloke just beginning to show the effects of time’s steady vandalism. Reddening skin, thickening waist, thinning hair shaved close to the skull, mean eyes in a pudgy face. He looked like he might still enjoy a ruck on the terraces. A scrap on a Saturday.
We nodded at each other. He looked familiar, but one thing I’ve noticed about getting older is that everyone starts to look a bit familiar, though placing where you met them gets harder. That bloke running the newsagents? You might have sat next to him in double history for five years. That woman drinking with her friends in the pub? Could be an old work colleague. Could be a friend of your wife’s. Could be the ex-wife of your best mate. Or she could be a stranger who just happens to resemble a sitcom actress from the 1980s. Someone who once had a cameo in Only Fools and Horses.
Routine face-blindness is like varicose veins, another small humiliation inflicted by advancing age. It was actually Zoe who taught me the proper name for it: prosopagnosia. She says the whole country is afflicted with it because English people don’t like to look very closely at anything – including faces – in case they see something that frightens them.
‘This is my son-in-law, Micky,’ said Margaret. ‘Works with Tony. Married to Joanie, our youngest.’
There was no warmth in her voice. I got the impression that she had never considered this Micky much of an addition to the family, that she had always thought of her Joanie’s marriage to him as not so much gaining a son but very much losing a daughter.
‘How do,’ he said. His voice was toneless and thin.
‘All right,’ I said.
It’s fair to say that we didn’t take to each other. If I’d met Micky before, it wasn’t anywhere good.
Halfway back to the city and I was overwhelmed by dread. I had to pull off the motorway onto the hard shoulder. I had to take a few deep breaths. Try and calm down. This happened sometimes. It had happened before Selena left too, though not as often. The sudden realisation that one day – quite soon in the scheme of things – I’ll be dead. We all will. Selena, Charlie, Grace, Zoe, Wes, the fucker Jacob, all our friends, everyone we’ve ever loved. All ashes and dust. Carbonised dandruff.
It’s senseless because it shouldn’t matter. The world managed quite well without me for several hundred millennia, and I don’t miss all those years. Time travel would be fun and everything, but I’m not poleaxed with grief because I missed the birth of rock and roll, or the Battle of Trafalgar or the Black Death. Why should I worry any more about being absent for all the possible futures than I do about missing all the past that’s been and gone?
It’s not that I fear the process of dying either. The National Health Service is good at death. It’s a thing it does well. As a rule we’re helped to slip out of this vale of tears helpfully – even beautifully – medicated, a softly smiling nurse (and in my imagination, very beautiful, probably from one of the Mediterranean countries, sun-ripened skin made glowing by great salads, by olives, by decent wine) promising to make us more comfortable as she proffers the needle, as she slides in the spike. And if it’s not like this – if our end is shocking, brutal and painful, if we go hard, coughing out our last seconds on the damp concrete of some drab street somewhere – well, then at least it’ll probably be quick.
No, it’s not really the fact of death that gets me; it’s just horror at how fast life has gone. A minute ago I was a kid. Seconds ago, I was buying a flat, seconds after that Selena was moving in, then there was a house, then the kids were busy being born. Took no time at all. In a few seconds more it’ll be my funeral. A few old men at the wake, good bacon sarnies served because it’s what I would have wanted. Something noisy but melodic on the stereo as my coffin slides behind that grubby municipal curtain and into the grubby municipal oven.
What I really want is to live forever. For my children to live forever. If there has to be change, any change at all, then it should be slow and should always be for the better. Not too much to ask, is it?
I guess you could call it a panic attack, though that seems a banal phrase for the absolute swamping sickness of it. A kind of epilepsy of the heart is what it is. A haemorrhage in the soul. For a few minutes I just have to stop whatever I’m doing and sit and weep. Sob like a child lost in dark woods without his parents.
I didn’t snap out of it, either. No, I had to haul myself out of the funk inch by desperate inch. Fight for a kind of sanity, like thrashing my way to the surface of a deep and freezing sea. Breath coming in wracking gulps when I finally broke through into light and air. Lungs raw.
What helped with this one was the knowledge that pretty soon the traffic police would turn up and want to ask their questions, and I had the suspicion that my reply – ‘it just struck me, Officer, one day I’ll be dead. And so will you, and isn’t that fucking obscene?’ – might not cut the mustard. Might get me banged up, if not in the nick then in a psychiatric ward somewhere.
When I did get it together to drive on to Ernies I found the troops unimpressed by news that we’d landed a lucrative outside catering gig. Zoe told me that she’d have to consult her social calendar.
‘I might find that one of The Three is taking me out to try and get in my knickers.’
Wes snorted at this, and then grunted that he’d make a pie or summat, but don’t expect him to go all the way to North Yorkshire to serve it at daybreak.
‘Brilliant. Thanks a million. Appreciate all the enthusiasm,’ I said.
‘You know what they say about sarcasm,’ said Zoe. ‘It’s the stupid man’s idea of cleverness.’
Anyway, the troops had news of their own. While I was gone there had been a party of guys in suits, at least five of them, taking pictures of the place. Photos of both the inside and the outside. Wes had to chase a guy out of the kitchen.
‘All very weird,’ said Zoe.
I was thinking it wasn’t weird at all. I was thinking Ken, the old bastard, he did it. He actually got it together to complain to the city council and they had sent their crack food hygiene squad in. Well, good luck to them. Whatever the one-star reviewers said – and there had been more of them recently – Wes always had the place immaculate, the kitchen of Ernies was always as sterile as a mortuary. We had nothing to fear from that department.
Zoe had other news too. ‘Oh, and your missus came in.’
‘Selena?’
‘Unless you have another wife I don’t know about.’
‘What did she want?’
‘To see you, I guess.’
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
Zoe just looked at me, rolled her eyes.
‘Yeah, sorry.’ I said.
Over the last couple of weeks I’d been mislaying my phone and when I did have it on me it seemed to be more or less permanently out of charge. I swear it wasn’t deliberate but I can see how it could look like it was. When my phone rang or pinged it was either someone asking how I was, or it was Selena wanting to deal with those bloody practicalities – solicitors and estate agents and all that. She’d got very fierce and focused since I failed to convince the kids to be kinder to her. I did try, phoned them both the day Selena came round to get her stuff but they were both too angry to entertain the idea of speaking to her. I didn’t really push it, to be honest.
It wasn’t just my phone I’d been neglecting. I’d also avoided Facebook and Twitter and any WhatsApp groups I’d accidentally found myself a part of. When I wasn’t at work I wanted to be alone with my real friends – my movies, my music, my books. Booze. Food.
I was ghosting everyone. Ghosting the whole goddam world. Not that the whole goddam world had really noticed.
I asked if I could borrow Zoe’s phone. As she handed it over she tried to reassure me.
‘She looked all right, you know. She was friendly actually. Cheerful. I think she probably just wants to check in, to keep things nice. She might even be worried about you.’
‘She’ll be wanting her money from the house,’ said Wes. ‘Half your pension too, probably.’
‘Oh, Wes,’ Zoe said and laughed. Her eyes sparkled. She flicked a tea towel at him. ‘What are you like?’
After we shut, after Zoe and Wes had gone, I sat in Paperwork Corner in the dark. Going home just seemed like too much of an effort. I got as far as loading the dishwasher and turning off the lights and it kind of wore me out. To get any further with the whole going home thing I’d have to get up, get my coat, pull the shutters down, lock the place, set the alarms – all too exhausting to even think about. Maybe I’d do it in a minute but for now I’d just drink a mug of builders amid all this defiantly eclectic furniture, most of it exquisitely uncomfortable, nearly all of it sourced by Selena. The product of hours spent going through the classifieds, and haunting auction rooms, car boots, thrift shops and eBay.
Life is all about choices and right then I chose to sit in the dark and brood. Sulk, Selena would say. Outside there was the growl of the low-geared cars nosing through the streets, voices raised in anger or distress. Shrieking of all kinds. Stonebeck is a Managed Prostitution Zone, which means managed misery and I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the unmanaged kind. Hard to say. Anyway, there was the usual bolero of slow-witted laughter. That modernist symphony of glass smashing. The inevitable sirens. The night just getting started.
Where do these people find the energy?
8
TINTIN AND THE LAST GOLDEN AGE
‘We should tell everyone who has two houses or more that they need to choose the one they want to live in because we, the people, will take the spare ones and use them to house the homeless.’ She was ladling soup into the polystyrene cups held out by a line of rough sleepers and explaining to me why we should ban holiday cottages and buy-to-lets. Telling me why being a landlord should be as unacceptable as being a thief. It was 20 December 1988 and we were working together at the soup kitchen she ran in the High Road. There was a fierce frost in the air and fairy lights in the windows of the kebab shops, fully tinselled-up plastic Christmas trees behind the barred windows of the houses. If I hadn’t been with Selena it would have been deeply depressing.
She was twenty-one, her hair was a short boyish crop and her face was full of sharp points and flinty edges. Chin, nose, forehead, lips, teeth, cheekbones: her face looked like it was made of specialised cutting tools. Something you’d use for shaping diamonds. There was good-humoured energy in every movement of a compact body made lithe by childhood gymnastics and kept that way by five-a-side soccer and sessions at the university climbing wall.
Selena had a lot of radical opinions at that time and what was funny was how even this most disenfranchised of communities thought her views were too extreme. The homeless would say thank you for the soup and then accuse her of being a communist troublemaker.
Selena would just laugh and go on to lay some of her other beliefs on them. Her idea that inheritance tax should be increased to 100 per cent. Or that when she was General Secretary of the UK she’d introduce conscription – not to increase the supply of soldiers – she’d actually abolish the army – but to make sure we got enough teachers, nurses and social workers.
‘Anyone capable of that kind of work should be made to do it for a couple of years. People would be more respectful of the public sector then,’ she said.
Or she would talk about extending the principle of the jury system to Parliament. Her idea was that if we trust juries to get at the truth in criminal trials then why not have a jury of six hundred ordinary men and women sitting in Westminster to choose the laws?
