Glover’s Mistake

An old western was on the television in the living room. Glover had changed his clothes and now lay on the floor with one arm tucked up into his red T-shirt. The shape of his fist bounced gently off his chest, like a beating cartoon heart.

‘I think this is bust.’

Glover looked up as David wagged the black stapler, pulled the arm out from under his T-shirt and motioned for David to throw it. He caught it neatly, sat up and turned it over in his hands, as if looking for its price. Then he snapped it open and nodded.

‘It’s jammed. I can see it. The magazine can’t push up to the top.’

‘The magazine of staples?’

‘Yep.’

‘That’s very nice.’

‘One of the best.’

Last year David had photocopied the list of collective nouns for animals from his old dictionary at school and stuck it to the fridge. Glover and he had got into the habit of repeating them, and occasionally testing each other. (‘A sloth?’ ‘Bears…A fluther?’ ‘Jellyfish.’) David didn’t know exactly why he’d grown so fond of them. They seemed to hint at all the differing ways to proceed. A labour of moles. A zeal of zebras. A shrewdness of apes. With Glover, from the very start, David felt they fitted; that they lived in the same collective noun. He wanted good things to happen to him. He wanted good things to happen to them both. Glover worked the offending staple out with the point of a biro.

‘Ah, cheers.’

‘Interesting yesterday, with Ruth.’

‘Was the Bell not pretty empty for a Saturday?’ David clacked the stapler lightly a couple of times.

‘I know it sounds stupid, but I never considered a painting as representing, instead of just straight depicting.’

David thought it did sound stupid and it made him feel fond of his friend—it was these little reminders of Glover’s very average mind that made his good looks so much easier to stand.

‘If I’d had a teacher like that I might have done my homework.’ Glover lay back down on the carpet, where two cushions angled his head to the screen. They watched four men on horseback ford a river, then arrive in an empty one-street town. A man dived through the window of the saloon and began shooting at them.

David said, to no response, ‘Sugar glass.’

Glover had slipped his hand back up into his T-shirt and was gently tapping on his chest again. The cartoon heart. He was always in such a good mood after church. David didn’t think it was righteousness particularly, or smugness; more that he’d done his duty and could now relax. Still, it was intensely irritating. David felt excluded from his happiness, his secret. Over another burst of gunfire he said, ‘How was God today?’

‘Fine. Thanks.’

‘What did you learn? What was the sermon?’

Glover sighed and blinked hard at the screen.

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Of course.’

‘Ermm, something like, without a shepherd sheep are not a flock.’

‘Correct. They’re not. They’re autonomous.’

‘They’re sheep.’

‘Autonomous sheep.’

An outlaw was hiding in a barrel with a shotgun, staring out through a knothole in the wood. David prodded again. ‘You don’t have to sneak off, you know.’

‘I don’t sneak off. You’re not up when I leave.’

What’s the opposite of coincidence? What’s the word for nothing happening that might suggest a hidden plan? Glover found significance in the darkest corners of his life. Whatever found him could not have missed him, whatever missed him could not have found him. Once, when David had been turned down for the job of Deputy Head of the English Department, Glover had assured him that everything happened for a reason. David hadn’t protested, but at that moment some deep tectonic movement had occurred. They might share the same flat but they lived in different universes. Folk-tale determinism! David was not surprised by much in the routine progress of his days, but that surprised him. If life turned on any principle it was haphazard interaction and erratic spin. He thought it much too obvious for argument: you make your own luck.

They were silent as the adverts came on. Glover and David considered themselves expert judges of the female form. There was an unspoken question when a woman was sighted which required a binary answer. It seemed as if they were simply being honest, and it made David feel masculine—not macho, not manly—to talk that way. Often, if they were in a bar or on a street, it would be a nudge or a directed glance to alert the other’s attention—although Glover was picky. A beautiful Indian girl in full sari was selling teabags to them now and, without prompting, Glover said no, her shoulders were too wide.

The drogue

They had met in the Bell two years ago. David was trying to mark essays when the barman put some folk music, extravagantly loudly, on the stereo. Miming how to twist a dial, David said, ‘Sorry, mate, could you turn it down a bit? Too much accordion for me.’

‘My dad used to play the accordion.’

David smiled weakly, showing no teeth, trying for polite dissuasion.

‘He met my mum at a church concert. Without the accordion I wouldn’t be here.’ The barman grinned—a kind of slackening that made his face charming.

‘Does he still play?’

‘On state occasions.’

Wearing a grey T-shirt and dark blue canvas trousers of the sort David associated with plumbers, the barman was athleticlooking with very square shoulders; and these he hunched forward as he rested against the glass-doored fridge, so his T-shirt hung concavely, as if blown on a washing line. The hair on his head was short, black, artfully mussed with wax. David’s mother would have said he had the forehead of a thief, meaning it was very low, but his eyes would have won her over. They were widely spaced and a light, innocent blue. The way his heavy eyebrows sloped towards a neat, feminine nose seemed to grant his face sincerity. David liked him—James Moore Glover—at once. A friendship, too, is a kind of romance.

Glover did all the newspaper crosswords when it wasn’t too busy, and since David always sat at the bar, marking at lunchtimes, or for an hour after work, he was often on hand to help. And talking in the sardonic, ruminative, unhurried way of two men who happen to be in the same place, they discovered that they made each other laugh.

A few months after Glover had started in the Bell, he looked up and scratched unthinkingly at his cheek, where light acne scars were still visible, and David noticed he wasn’t working on a crossword. He was circling flat-shares in Loot. He’d been staying with his boss Tom and Tom’s girlfriend, but the couple were splitting up and selling their flat; he had to move out.

After a pint and a half of German lager David said, ‘Mate, you know, I’ve a spare room. You could stay there if you’re stuck.’

Glover arrived with Tom, his worldly goods in the boot of the bar manager’s BMW. It turned out the bar manager was also Glover’s cousin. David and he disliked each other instantly. Tom remembered him from the pub, he said, as if that was somehow damning and odd, and he walked round the flat with a cursory, dismissive air; he’d seen it all before, or if not exactly this, then something close enough. He said, ‘Going to make tea for us then or what?’ and as David carried the tray through to the living room, he heard him whisper to Glover, ‘You’d best make sure you’ve a lock on your door.’ After he’d left, David had made it plain that this certainly wasn’t that kind of set-up, and Glover appreciated, he thought, his candour. James had six wine boxes of books, several bin bags of clothes and a five-foot bay tree in an earthenware pot. The tree had a slim trunk and a perfect afro of thick, waxy leaves. The pot got cracked on the door jamb and they replanted it into the plastic red bucket David used for the mop. It was still there now, in David’s living room, in its temporary home.

Glover’s stopgap fix also settled into permanence. Initially circumspect, tidying up, knocking on doors, apologizing for polishing off the milk, they quickly developed the shorthand of flatmates. Glover came from Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast and his low-pitched voice had the slightest suggestion of an East Anglian accent: he lengthened vowels and weakened the second syllable in thinking, drinking, something. He didn’t take sugar in his tea. His sudden violent sneezes seemed to come in threes.

He was muscular, and stayed fit by running every day along the river and the wind-picked streets of south-east London, his iPod strapped to his waist, his footfalls keeping time with his soundtrack of deep house. Glover claimed that he used to be a lot bigger, meaning fatter, and then at the end of his first year in college at Norwich he’d taken up jogging, and now greeted each day with the devotions of a hundred press-ups and sit-ups. David disliked and admired and envied that disciplined part of his flatmate. Glover’s orderly mind was dominated by its left hemisphere. His toiletries stood grouped at one end of the windowsill, all their labels facing forwards; David’s were scattered throughout the bathroom, or propped upside down in various corners, distilling the last of their contents into their caps. While Glover wired plugs, changed fuses, replumbed the leaky washing machine, David made cups of tea and hovered. He could ask Glover about cold fusion, about the white phosphorus the Americans were using, about a car’s suspension, about enriching uranium, and Glover would explain it with a nerdish enthusiasm. The television occasioned some of his greatest triumphs. A programme about land speed record challengers led to an explanation of how those parachutes that shot out behind the vehicles worked. He fetched an A4 pad and a pen from his room, drew some diagrams to illustrate the dynamics of a drogue (his word). His measured speech, with its tiny lilt, sped up with excitement, and David felt he was one of those swollen, empty parachutes, dragging behind, slowing him down.

David liked the fact that Glover knew, that someone knew, how everything functioned. It was reassuring. These exchanges of information were interspersed with the usual male distractions: anecdotes, comparisons and lists, the one-upmanship of clambering humour; someone would say something funny, and the other would take the conceit one step further. And when Glover cracked up, the husky rev of his laugh never failed to ignite David’s. Watching him put up the shelves that had been leaning in the hallway for three years, David asked if he ever thought he might go back and finish his degree: he’d dropped out of a mechanical engineering course. Glover had a screw in his mouth, and it fell on the laminate floor, hitting his foot and skittering across to the doormat.

‘Yeah, thing is, I came back after the first summer looking a bit different. It was weird. I’d lost all the weight and was taking these antibiotics for my skin—and I couldn’t get over the fact that people suddenly changed. People who wouldn’t give me the time of day in the first year were now all over me like a rash. I didn’t feel like anyone was real. I hated it.’

The recycling box

Monday morning began with a double period of David’s A-level group, where he distributed his printouts and they discussed the symbolism of ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’. Lunchtime brought no respite.

Aside from occasionally letting a student borrow his cigarette lighter at the steps by the side entrance, PMP’s debating society was David’s only extra-curricular activity, and since the teacher who ran it had gone on maternity leave, he was now required to attend every weekly meeting. This House Believes that America No Longer Leads the Free World.

The in-house genius in the debating society was little Faizul, the Egyptian. He proposed the motion, voice fluttering between outrage and plea, hands frantic as shadow puppets. The rebuttal was provided by myopic, ungrammatical Clare, Queen of the Home Counties, and David watched the fifty golden minutes of his lunchtime tick away.

Before afternoon class he checked his email in the computer lab and found Ruth had replied to his message thanking her for the trip to the gallery. He’d also asked her if she fancied catching the latest ridiculous Hollywood remake—she’d mentioned her inexplicable weakness for blockbusters—and she suggested Wednesday night. And did he want to ask Glover, since he’d said he wanted to see it as well?

The movie was exceptionally poor, David thought, though Ruth claimed to agree with Glover’s verdict of ‘silly but fun’. As David walked out onto the pavement ahead of them he was already writing The Damp Review’s post in his head: Never remake monster movies. It’s always a mistake. One can upgrade certain things—special effects, sets, costumes, even the actors—but one cannot get the better of nostalgia. One can’t improve on memory: that subtle, slanted light.

Ruth and David lunched the next week, and he met her for a drink after she’d been to a gallery opening. And so it continued. He would sit opposite and watch the internal weather of her emotions play on her beautiful face. She lived at the surface of her life. Nothing yet had happened between them but David felt the sheer intensity of their interactions precluded his role from being the usual one of confidant. Sometimes she held his look for a second or two longer than necessary, and sometimes she smiled in an impudent, daring way that David would think about later. In the meantime she was laden with a great deal of emotional baggage—this dancer called Paolo, still calling from America.

One chill November night the three of them saw Othello at the Globe and, after hailing a cab on Blackfriars Bridge for Ruth, the flatmates began the footslog back to Borough. The streets were almost deserted, plucked clean by the cold, and the icy pavements glinted like quartz. The play had not been good and David was extemporizing. After a pause, occasioned by his comparing the director to a back-alley abortionist, Glover said, ‘How do you really feel about Ruth? I mean honestly.’

‘I really like her,’ David said, mimicking his emphasis. ‘Why, don’t you?’

‘Of course, but I was wondering if you were going to do anything about it.’

David knew what he meant immediately, but something in his tone—some hint of irritation—offended him. Glover was always trying to push him into the world, offering to try internet dating with him, suggesting they reply to the newspaper personals, telling David to walk up to girls in pubs. He thought Glover considered him inert, as if he just needed a shove in the back to start rolling forward, but David was acquainted with rejection. He could only proceed at his own pace.

‘We’re old friends, you know? Really old friends.’

A crisp packet scraped along the pavement, worried by the wind, and Glover kicked at it. It flipped up over his track shoe and settled back, face down.

‘I suppose the question is whether you’re attracted to her.’

David bristled again and sighed with impatience. ‘Anyone can see she’s attractive.’

‘Yeah, I think so.’

He didn’t reply. What was it to Glover? They’d reached the front steps of their flat and the conversation was parked there, by the wheelie bins and the recycling box in which someone had dropped a half-eaten kebab.

Like road maps, abandoned

On a wet, dark, interminable Wednesday, one of those winter days that lacks an afternoon, Ruth emailed to invite David to dinner. He’d never been asked to her flat before, to the Barbican, and Glover’s email address didn’t feature in the recipients’ section. Her note was casual and he matched the tone, replying with one line: Sure, that’d be nice. Probably nothing would happen, but the night before he was due for dinner, he ironed his skyblue shirt. This action carried a certain evidential weight: he loathed ironing, its peculiar blend of fussiness and tedium, and got away with wearing round-neck jumpers at school. However, that particular shirt, according to his mother, brought out his eyes. He was childishly excited to see Ruth’s natural habitat. He’d never known her to cook before and was envisaging something plain, unfussy. Italian perhaps. Zucchini. Basil. Pecorino. Fruit to finish.

The day itself was a write-off. The only thing achieved was managed after hours when David, on the rota to supervise study group from 4 to 6 p.m., helped Susan Chang, who smelt of vanilla ice cream, remove a paper jam from the photocopier. He felt delighted by his small victory, and to celebrate, and in preparation for the evening, he decided to smoke some of the emergency weed he kept hidden in the locked drawer of his desk. He visited the staff toilet, perched on the edge on the flippeddown lid and skinned up. The joint was small, heavy on green, pointy as a golf tee, and would take the edge off the nervousness he was feeling. It was not beyond reason that it might be tonight. Ruth was unaccustomed to being alone.

He slipped the joint inside the pocket of his jacket and, at six o’clock exactly, headed up the ribbed linoleum stairs, wedging the fire-door ajar with an empty Coke can. Out on the roof of the school the evening sky was enormous. Tidal night was rolling in across the rooftops and the horizon was stacked with sinking bands of oranges and reds and pinks.

Sometimes David saw things and wanted to tell someone about them, face to face, eye to eye. He had had a girlfriend once, Sarah, years ago. They’d met in the students’ union in their last term at Goldsmiths: she’d spilt his beer and then insisted that he buy them both another. Over the next four months it happened that nothing became real to him until he’d told her about it. If they weren’t together, they rang each other in the afternoon to describe what they’d done in the morning, then spent the evening recounting their afternoons.

Back then David still had hair, and one stoned lunchtime Sarah had used her flatmate’s clippers to shave it off. David saw what he would look like bald: insane and shiny, a spoon with eyes. In her bedsit, above a fried-chicken takeaway in Turnpike Lane, they watched a lot of New German Cinema, lit joss sticks and had clumsy, vehement sex. In the moment he’d once accidentally caught her fish-shaped earring and her ear had bled on the sheet. She hadn’t cried but had squirmed below him faster, panting, and then slapped him on the shoulder hard, saying, ‘Now hold me down. Now put your hand across my mouth. Now hurt me, hurt me.’ When she went to India for six months, she wrote to tell him it was over. It did not escape his notice that the letter had been posted, presumably from Heathrow, on the same day that she left. He had only been in love once, and it wasn’t her.

Queuing in the student cafeteria, in his first week at Goldsmiths, he had reached the checkout before discovering, in a hot flush of shame, that he’d forgotten his wallet. The girl in the line behind him had tapped him on the back, and when he turned had pressed a five-pound note into his hand, saying, ‘Take it, really, it’s fine.’ He had never seen anyone be so kind. She didn’t know him at all. He ate his lunch directly behind her and couldn’t take his eyes off her hair. Thick and dark and shiny as an Eskimo’s. Natalie was a third-year, he found out, and when he met her the next day to pay her back, they’d ended up eating lunch together and he’d made her clear green eyes close repeatedly with laughter.

David leaned against the red-brick chimney stack and lit his spliff. He thought how he was growing old and odd, how he was falling prey to calcified and strange routines. The thick unfiltered smoke began to spread its anaesthetic chill throughout his head. Two pigeons sat on the bitumen lid of a water tank, cooing and soothing the traffic below. He moved towards them and they fluttered off, settling on a lower ledge. In the distance the British Telecom minaret rose above the hum, and the satellite dishes on the roofs stood out like white carnations fixed in buttonholes. He stubbed what was left on the lid of the tank and was halted for a second by the presence of the moon. It was cinematic, scaly and yellow, and had crept up silently behind him as if it meant to do him harm.

On the pavement, foggy but relaxed, he put on Elgar’s Sea Pictures and caught a 38 on Oxford Street up into the City. The Christmas lights had been erected, but were not yet switched on. He was going to be early, so he got off by Turnmill Street to walk. This was the hour before the evening started, the hour when anything might happen. It was the hour when the newspapers were skimmed and ineptly refolded like road maps, abandoned on the vacant seats of tubes and trains and buses. It was the hour when the smell of cumin and curry would waft across his parents’ garden in Hendon. It was heaven. It was the dog-walking hour. It was the hour of a million heating systems clicking on and thrumming into life, the hour of a blue plastic bag whipping above the building site on Clerkenwell Road in spasms of desire. Would Ruth be wondering, right now, about tonight? Would she be looking down at London in transition, and thinking anything could happen? This hour must once have been the kingdom of the lamplighters, and subject to their piecemeal, point-by-point illumination, but now the street lights all came on in a single instant pulse, a blink, as David stopped by Smithfield meat market to spark his Marlboro Light, where the floors had been hosed down and water ran in rivulets out into the street, creating tiny eddies round his sensible brown loafers.

Natalie had graduated a few weeks after the incident in the cafeteria. She’d found work in a graphic designers in Ascot, though she came back to London at weekends to stay with her boyfriend in Clapham. Every so often she spoke to David on the phone but was always too busy to meet. So on Friday evenings and Monday mornings David took to hanging around in Waterloo station—along the route where she’d have to walk from the overground train from Sunningdale down into the Underground to catch the Northern Line, and back. He did that for two months and never saw her, not once. He had wanted her so much he could barely think straight. He wrote her hundreds of poems and letters that he never sent, and a few that he did. He wanted her in his arms, in his eyes, in his kidney and spleen and heart. He wanted to unbutton her white shirt and slide the snakeskin belt out of the loops of her Levi 503s. Jittery with excitement in the station, he would take up his position by the ticket machines and scrutinize for an hour or so the unknown faces passing through the barriers until, eventually, he would give up, and move off with a grimace and a heavy gait, as if some part of him ached when he took a step.

As the lift ascended the twenty-three floors to Ruth’s flat David stared at himself in the mirror. Here was the elliptic face. The joint had left his eyes watery and the walk had taken it out of him. His sweaty head shone like a conker, and his cheeks were watermelon-pink. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and blotted himself. At the second knock, he heard Ruth shout from inside, ‘It’s open.’ He tried the door and here she was, walking towards him in dark skinny jeans and a black kimono jacket. Her hair was still damp, swept neatly into a side parting, and such unfussiness lent her face a new authority.

‘Hey hey hey,’ David said, for no good reason he could think of, lifting his arms like some favourite uncle.

‘Wonderful to see you.’ She offered her cheekbones to kiss in turn and then presented a cordless telephone, the mouthpiece covered by one of her palms. ‘I’m just in the middle of something.’ He mouthed Sure and she said, ‘The living room’s through there,’ nodding up the corridor, before pushing the door shut with a naked foot. David noticed that her toes were not beautiful—misshapen as pebbles—but the nails were painted electric blue.

He propped himself on the arm of a massive maroon sofa. It ran the entire length of one glass wall—the exterior walls of the living room were ceiling-to-floor windows, and an outside walkway ran along them, enclosed by a chest-high barrier of hammered concrete. In the corner of the living room there was a huge battered travelling trunk—the kind of thing a seven-yearold in a peaked cap and uniform, going back for Michaelmas term, might sit on in a railway station in the 1950s. There was an armchair that matched the sofa and was functioning as a filing cabinet of sorts—papers were divided by being stuck behind, or to one of the sides of, the seat cushion. Ruth was at the other end of the hallway—in the bedroom he assumed—talking loudly.