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Addictions
I knew something was wrong when I woke up that afternoon. It wasn't the fact that it was so late in the day, or that I had a crushing hangover and parts of last night were missing, because I'm used to that by now. It was that the phone was ringing, and had been for I had no idea how long.
Nobody calls me at home. The reason for this is that nobody has my home phone number, except my next of kin, and even he had to beg to get it out of me. Business contacts and girlfriends get the number of my mobile, which is always switched off to render me tantalisingly unavailable. It works: I don't think I've ever been so popular. But the home phone – never. The odd wrong number perhaps, but that's it. Simon very rarely calls because he's a bright, self–sufficient lad and can usually look after himself. Who can blame him for not wanting to look after me into the bargain?
I made an executive decision, albeit a bad one, and stood up. I crossed the room to where the phone should have been, on my desk, and picked the whole instrument from behind the sofa, blowing fluff and crumbs off it as I did.
"Hello?" It was Simon; it had to be Simon, unless, God forbid, he'd given the number to his mother.
"Dad! Thank God, I thought you were out. You haven't forgotten about today, have you?"
It was Simon. I clearly had forgotten about today. What the hell was it? His birthday? Shit. I scrabbled in my back pocket for my chequebook, pulled out a crushed packet of Benson and Hedges – not even my brand, what had I been doing last night? – and gave up.
"Remind me?"
"I'm coming up to visit with my new girlfriend –" ("Not that new!" a female voice in the background reminded him) " – yeah, cheers Caro – and we're staying the weekend and I was just about to leave so I thought I'd phone and warn you. I told you about it two weeks ago."
His voice wasn't strained, just frayed round the edges with weariness at the old routine. Good boy ... I was frantically trying to think, my soupy hangover still sloshing in my skull. What would I need for a visit of more than one person for more than twelve hours?
"Oh, yes, of course I remember. Actually I was just going to the supermarket to buy … stuff ..." I finished lamely. "What do you want to eat? Or shall we eat out?" Simon knows I can't cook. He could probably hear the hope in my voice, but he's been a little wary of me in restaurants ever since last time.
"No, it's fine Dad, we won't need much, just get in some bread and milk and tea, the essentials." He knows me too well. From memory the fridge contained cold pizza, champagne, vodka and half a chocolate trifle.
"All right, bacon and eggs and things too, yes? We'll have a fry up!"
Now that my hangover was receding I was getting quite hungry, having eaten very little but peanuts and olives in the last twenty-four hours. If there's one thing I know how to do in the kitchen it's fry things, and I had visions of impressing Simon's girlfriend with my debonair competence at the cooker.
"Er, well, better not Dad, because Caroline's vegan. I did say." He sounded exactly like his bloody mother: did you get the laundry, Greg? did you pay the gas bill, Greg? I did say … A blast of fury rose in my gut.
"You can tell her to bring her own fucking dinner then, because I'm not cooking for the bitch!" I slammed the receiver down, missed, and threw the whole thing into the bin. I fell onto the sofa and watched my hands shake for a bit, feeling the first fainting rush of sickness – hello old friend – then crawled to the waste paper basket and picked the receiver out.
"Simon, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to shout, of course I'll find something for her. I'm just feeling a bit rough –"
But the phone was keening softly like a lost ambulance, and he wasn't there.
The boy's done well for himself, I'll give him that. Caroline, despite being a rabbit food devotee and a nosy little bitch, is what I used to call a stunner, when I still saw them around. The kind of places I go to these days don't tend to feature attractive women unless they're part of the stage show. Lots of has-beens, yes, a lot of ladies with once-were-pretty faces collapsed under the weight of too much makeup, but nobody beautiful, nobody young, nobody who isn't choking down the rest of their life, having already had too much of it. C'est la vie. C'est le mort. Listen to me. I never speak French unless I'm already half-gone, being too aware of my appalling accent: Schoolboy South London.
We're in the middle of dinner, some sort of bean-based stirfry she and Simon collaborated on, and she's talking about university and helping herself to some more champagne – I thought I might as well use it – and I'm watching the lyrical way her little breasts move as she leans over me to grab the bottle. She's dressed up to impress good old Dad, clearly not knowing what to expect, and having taken one look at me didn't have time to change. Tight glittery gauzy top thing, knee-length black skirt, and, endearingly, what look like ballet shoes. Well, she's tall enough already I suppose – nearly my height in her no doubt stockinged feet. Dark brown hair, light brown eyes, slender all ways. An interesting little scar on the side of her nose. If I didn't know better I'd say she was in training to be a femme fatale, but with Simon in tow it's unlikely. Pity. Such a waste of good material. She's asking me a question.
"What do you do, Mr. Robinson?"
Well, generally, sweetheart, I do a dishonest day's work, pausing only for a liquid power-lunch, and then I go out and get fantastically drunk in some horrible non-vegan bar. Or sometimes I come home and sink a bottle of vodka or two on my own, just me and the four distressed walls. It varies.
"I'm a financial strategy consultant." It sounds meaningless. It is.
"Top of his field, don't be modest now." That's Simon sticking up for me, the loyal little sod.
"It does seem to be the only job on offer these days. I'm so sick of the milkround, all these grey-suited graduates telling us how great we'd be at merchant banking or strategy creation or something. I don't even know what it involves, to be honest. Oh – no offence, sorry."
She's bored, poor girl. She doesn't really want me to go into the details, she wants me to be witty, interesting, masterful, my son's father.
"None taken. It's difficult but dull, and it pays well. That's all I know about my job, and all ye need to know."
She pricks up her ears at the mangled quote. Perhaps I'll tease her, pull her tail a bit. As far as I'm concerned, any fan of Keats is fair game.
"Of course," I say, lying through my 80 proof teeth, "I write poetry in the evenings."
"Really?" Her expression of mingled interest and disbelief tells me I've gone too far. Perhaps she writes poetry? Perhaps he does? To her? Oh God …
"Oh yes, New Statesman competitions, sonnets, villanelles, haiku, you name it. It's just a mechanical exercise really, a stretching of the brain after all those numbers."
"Ah."
She sips her champagne. I'd expected her to look disappointed, to move on to something else, but she just stares at me through the candle flame with an expression that says I'll figure you out eventually, so don't bother playing games. Simon's on full embarrassment alert, having gone through this before with, as they say, hilarious consequences – I can see the casual change of subject teetering on the tip of his tongue – but we're fine, Caro and I, just staring each other down with this-kitchen-ain't-big-enough-for-the-both-of-us looks.
"I'd love to see some of it," Caroline says, calling my bluff, "if I may."
"I'll dig it out later, see what I can find fit for young eyes." I throw a leering wink at Simon, who cringes; I can be very cruel sometimes. "More champagne?"
"No. Thanks."
"Simon?"
"Yes, thanks Dad, I will." He holds out his glass like Oliver Twist. Either he's turning into a piss-artist like his old man or he's hoping that the more he drinks, the less I will. Poor innocent: this isn't water by my elbow you know, son. I've never seen him drink two Babychams in a row before without falling over, but he seems to be holding it well.
"So. Caroline. What are you doing, English, French? Do you write?"
It's as though I've asked after a recently dead relative. Her shoulders twitch, her eyes disconnect from mine, like a TV screen suddenly full of snow.
"No."
Simon knows this is the wrong answer, and tries to correct her, with the best intentions but alas, no subtlety.
"Yes you do, you did anyway. She was published – weren't you, Caro – in the university magazine."
"Wow." Caroline looks blackly at me. Simon is the only one oblivious to the sarcasm. She rallies and tries to excuse herself: to some people admitting they write is like coming out of the closet, with all the fear and loathing that involves, but none of the freedom. Caro's clearly unsure of her textuality.
"I gave up writing poetry," she says clearly, eyeing the cigarette I have just lit, the better to enjoy her discomfiture, "because it was rubbish."
"The process or the poetry itself?" I enquire smoothly, blowing smoke towards her.
"Both." She starts fiddling with her napkin, tearing it into strips as if to bandage a wound. Simon, focusing on her with a little difficulty, is not about to allow his girlfriend to be anything less than beautiful, intelligent and multi-talented.
"Oh, nonsense, you're just selling yourself short. I'm sure it was great."
"How would you know?" she inquires coldly. "It was before you met me."
He falls quiet, cowed. I have to say, I think she's bringing out the big guns of Before You Met Me a little early in this embryo domestic. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to wind her up. If it carries on at this rate they'll be having kiss-and-make-up sex on the table just as I serve dessert, and that would be distasteful. I sense a charged silence descending, and have just enough sensitivity left not to try to break it. Simon, too, is quiet and drains his champagne, looking bewildered. Why did I have to push his girlfriend to see if she would break? Every time he comes home and proudly shows me his new girl, I always play with her for a bit and then take her apart without putting her back together again. Why hasn't he learnt yet not to share his toys? I expect he's just too soft not to give me one more chance to behave myself, time after time. Who taught him forgiveness? Not me, that's for sure.
Unexpectedly, Caroline says
"Can I have a cigarette, please?"
Now this is surprising. A smoking vegan? Not terribly health-conscious, to say the least. Perhaps her abstemious, virtuous exterior hides the heart of a carnivore. Just as long as it's not my son she's mauling. I toss a cigarette across to her and she lights it at the candle. I continue to smoke, but the relish has gone out of it now that I know it doesn't annoy her. Simon watches her too, with puzzlement.
"Didn't you give up ages ago?"
"Yes." She inhales deeply and visibly enjoys the effect. "That's why I'm getting such a rush off it." Her pupils dilate and her eyes darken. "But once a smoker, always a smoker, don't you think?" This was addressed to me.
"Yes, I think you're right. You never forget how. Like riding a bike."
"Well, it's an addiction, isn't it?" says my son crassly, brightly. I wonder, I wonder if she's figured it out yet. It would be a bloody miracle if she hasn't: she's very sharp, or thinks she is. It's at this point, just as I'm relaxing into the evening and thinking of making some coffee (Irish of course), that she reaches across the table and picks up my glass of water
"Sorry, can I have some? It's just that smoking dries my throat."
I leap out of my chair towards the sink, cracking my shin on the table leg.
"I'll get you a glass of your own –"
Too late. She takes a sip and I watch her with detached interest. At least I won't have to keep acting sober. And she doesn't cough, doesn't splutter, just sips it as though it were Evian fresh from the volcanic stream. My admiration for her shoots up, and Simon looks at me with champagne hope in his eyes. If I've stopped drinking spirits during meals it's just before and after he has to worry about.
Caro returns my glass to its mat.
"Thanks. I only wanted a sip." She must have known. She either knew beforehand or – life's little ironies are coming thick and fast – she's one of us, a pint-sized addict, legless before she was legal, no sooner off the breast than onto the bottle. Welcome aboard, sweetheart. I drink to you.
No. She's too young for that. Surely.
I realise I'm still standing by the sink and immediately start clearing the plates and getting cups for the coffee.
"Coffee, boys and girls? It's real Java." I don't wait for an answer but start spooning the mahogany powder into the paper filter, sucking in the heady smell. Halfway through it occurs to me that Caro would probably prefer lettuce leaf tea or something, but after the performance with the cigarette I'm sure she won't balk at caffeine. At least I hope not. I get some single cream out of the fridge and pour it in a jug, to make my point.
The CD, a bland compilation of late-night jazz, has stopped, but I can still hear music and I'm pretty sure it's not a choir of seraphim come to bear me to my reward in heaven. Those whom the Gods love...I think I'm well past dying young by now. I turn round and realise that the sound is Caro, humming under her breath. I have unwittingly interrupted a touching scene. She and Simon are holding hands across the table, her left in his right, as her other hand gently strokes his cheek and lips. As I watch, his head dips and he kisses her palm. Christ. I turn back to the coffee just as I recognise the tune she's serenading him with. Cole Porter's "I get a kick out of you". First line: I get no kick from champagne … The cheeky witch is mocking me, clear–eyed and clear headed in a candlelit kitchen with two drunk men, one a dipso and one a lightweight. What did she ever do to deserve this? I recognise the signs of impending unconsciousness in Simon and am not surprised when his head lolls and Caro gently lays it on the table, cushioning it with her jumper.
"Out for the count, is he?" I hand her a cup of incredibly strong coffee, boiling and black, and she sips it immediately without changing expression. This girl should really take up poker.
"I think so." She has a faraway look in her eyes; she's probably working out how to manhandle him into bed on her own after I collapse in solidarity.
"Well, that makes one of us. Although I think I'll need a little more than that to send me on my way." I blow on my coffee, which is still too hot to drink. Oh fuck it. Why pretend? I pour it down the sink and rescue my glass of vodka from the table, taking a healthy gulp. She drinks her coffee thoughtfully. Simon sighs in his sleep.
Eventually she turns to me and asks me to help her carry him to the bedroom. She'll take his feet if I –
"Don't worry, he's not very heavy. You get his bag and I'll get him."
I drain the rest of the glass and wash it up conscientiously, with deliberate concentration, before hoisting the floppy Simon over my shoulders in a fireman's lift. He's lighter than I thought he'd be: it's as though his size and solidity was an act that collapsed the second his head hit the table . Bizarrely, I feel ashamed, as though I'm putting on some macho display for my son's girlfriend, even though she's not in the room. With the sudden exercise of carrying him I can feel the slow sway of alcohol in my blood, and I have to be careful going through the dark living room (too macho to find the light, and too drunk) so that I don't trip over or hit him on anything. Halfway across he slithers from my shoulders and sprawls bonelessly on the rug, still fast asleep. I sigh, crouch, and pick him up again, one arm under his neck and another in the crook of his knees, Mills & Boon hero style. It reminds me of when he used to fall asleep before bedtime as a child: he'd go quiet for a bit, although perfectly coherent, and then just pass out in whatever position he was in. He made some wonderful tableaux for us: draped over the arm of a chair, resting his chin on his hands at the dinner table, curled up behind the sofa. Sometimes I didn't want to move him: just take a photo of him as he was, unconsciously flamboyant in his dreams. But I always put him to bed, trying not to wake him, just like this.
She's standing at the door to the bedroom wearing his dressing gown, and smirks as I sweep past her with Simon in my arms. I feel like Rhett Butler. I feel ridiculous. I lay him on the bed as carefully as possible, panting a bit, and start unbuttoning his shirt. She kneels down beside the bed to take his trousers off. It's a peculiarly erotic moment: for me, anyway. I imagine she's packing a rape alarm in those capacious pockets. Of course she needn't worry: tired and pissed as I am I could barely raise a smile. That's the one thing the drink has done to my body: no broken veins, no comedy red nose, no beer gut – everything else has been miraculously preserved – pickled I should say. I look exactly the same now as I did when I was thirty. I look exactly like Simon. It's almost obscene, how fit I am, considering my lifestyle. I half-expect there to be a Dorian Gray photograph in an attic album somewhere, wrinkling and bloating. But I just can't get it up. Oh, I want sex all the time: I am a man, after all. And I chase women with increasing desperation and fervour; it seems that the instinct to try and mate with things persists even when the ability is long gone. One of Nature's crueller tricks, but, I must admit, poetically just.
I'm struggling with Simon's shirt. If there's one thing more difficult than trying to undress yourself when drunk, it's trying to undress somebody else. So far one arm is out and the sleeves are round his neck. It looks like I'm trying, very ineptly, to strangle him.
"It's all right. Thanks for carrying him. I'll do the rest." Hands off my boyfriend, inebriate.
I stand up and start to undo my own shirt before realising that this is not polite in mixed company.
"Goodnight then." I turn and head towards the door, shouldering the bookcase out of the way.
"Goodnight." She has stopped undressing him and is cradling his head in her arms; a pieta scene. She traces his cheekbone with her thumb and hums Cole Porter very, very softly. I know why she does it. I say:
"He's beautiful." More beautiful than his mother. More beautiful than Caroline, even. The light from the hallway strokes his forehead, tousles his hair, touches the skin of his outflung arm with silver. I'm standing six feet from him. From here I could kiss him or kill him, and he'd never know.
"He looks like you." Oh Caroline, cara Caro, I know he does.
"I know." That's why I'm so afraid for him.
On cue, tears well up; I can feel them hiding, hurting, behind my eyes and I curse this cheap old trick of my body's. I never was a sloppy drunk but just recently I have begun to cry at anything: films, books, miniseries, commercials. I cry when I finish a bottle and I cry when I open a new one. I've even started to cry at those bleeding-heart pictures they show on the news, of starving refugees and casualties of war. I just can't stop.
I suppose, the amount I drink, all that liquid's got to come out somewhere. Maybe it means something. And what I'm most scared of is that it means nothing, that it's just tears.
Caro's looking at me strangely, but I'm not crying, I'm being a brave little soldier until I'm out of the room and I won't embarrass her or sleeping Simon. What is she thinking, in that vegan bloodsports mind of hers, my more-than-a-match player of games? Her brown eyes are black in the shadows of the room. She's waiting for me to leave. I'm waiting for her to ask me to.
"Go to bed, Greg." Ah …
"You'll make sure he's OK?" My voice is steady as a rock, tears burning my eyelids.
"Yes. He'll be fine. Go to bed."
I won't do this again, Simon, I promise, I swear: I'll be presentable from now on. I'll be reliable, punctual, paternal. I'll be under control, love, just as long as you promise not to go out of control. I smelt whisky through the champagne on your sweet breath as I carried you, a lot of whisky, and I didn't see you drink it. That's an old alkie's trick, and you're not an old alkie. Sleep tight, Simon, sleep it away.
"Go to bed."
I go. |
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