Stretch, 29

£240 pm

The day after Lucy’s gestation knees-up, it was me that needed babying. Thankfully, I had Henry at hand, flatmate, landlord and full-time dispenser of tough, cool love. Henry Stanger has consistently good scores. (There’s absolutely no doubt that he is more successful than me.) He breaks down like this:

59. Not bad at all.

He was being good to me that morning, but then again he was good to me every morning.

‘Are you going to tell me your version?’ He was sitting on the end of my bed with a large mug of tea in one fist and a tuberous reefer in the other. He thumbed his crinkled overlong hair back behind his ears in his very Henry Stanger way.

‘Oh, Christ, Henry, I think I’ve done something very, very bad.’

‘That much is evident. Tom just called to see if you got home all right and whether you’d seen a doctor yet.’

‘A doctor?’

‘There’s a large swelling above your right eye, and a trickle of dry blood on your chin. Apparently you punched a banker called Colin in a smart restaurant, vomited in the Philippe Starck sink, headbutted the toilet, and then attempted to curl up with it for the night. He thought the cabbie might have dropped you off at casualty you were in such a state.’

‘Oh, Christ. This is very bad. Are you telling me everything?’

‘Certainly not. You’re not ready for the whole story yet. Here’s some tea.’

While flat on my back, I was still occupying that golden place between sleep and waking where it is possible to believe that you’re not going to have a bad hangover. When I propped myself up on one elbow to take the mug of tea, how I longed to return.

‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear, oh, dear. Oh, Lord.’

‘Hangover? How about a bit of this?’ He waggled the spliff in his bitten-down fingers. ‘Henry’s special wake-up recipe – two parts scoopably soft hash to one part fresh grass in a Marlboro Light nid.’

I wavered but declined. My mouth tasted like I’d spent the night eating a bonfire.

‘No thanks, Henry. Toast would be real.’

‘No problem, captain. Real toast on its way.’

He slipped out, and I started trying to piece my evening together. I certainly remembered arriving at the restaurant, and finding myself sitting opposite Sophie and Colin. I also remembered Sophie graciously attempting to rehabilitate me after the postroom revelation. Then I groaned softly as I remembered frotting her during the fish course. Again, undesirable but perhaps not irreparable.

But, oh no, didn’t I also make Lucy untuck her blouse so I could get down on my knees and listen to her tummy? Yes, I think I did. And am I right in recalling that I (Oh, please say it isn’t true) whispered to her that I’d always loved her? And then … I involuntarily cut across this awful train of thought with a loud agonised moan. If I get hit with a flash of embarrassment, invariably the morning after the night before, I tend to launch into a jerky, clenched-teeth rendition of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ until the horror passes. This was way beyond Kylie’s redemption. Henry re-appeared with a round of toast.

‘Yes, Stretch, it’s pretty bad, I’m afraid. You’ll need to think of a way to make it up to Lucy but I think Tom’s forgiven you. Eat, don’t think.’

I looked at the alarm clock on my bedside table. ‘My God, it’s eleven-thirty!’ I started to get out of bed in a panic. Gentle Henry bade me stay.

‘Don’t worry, I phoned O’Hare’s. I told them you’d fallen in the shower and were mildly concussed and you’d be there this evening. They were sympathetic.’

‘Henry, you’re amazing.’

‘Toast.’

‘To Henry.’

‘To Frank. Now, eat up, get up and ablute. We’re going for some supermarket therapy.’

I had moved into a ninth of Henry’s flat a year previously, by answering an ad in the Standard. I had spent two years living in Brixton in a house the personnel of which was in a state of constant flux. Like the philosopher’s rowing boat where every plank is replaced over a period of time so that it is and it isn’t the same rowing boat, 53 Geffen Road both mutated and stayed the same. Each year one or two new occupants arrived, each week the cycle of food theft and dirty laundry repeated itself. My stay there finally saw me through the start of Late-Period Marie, but apart from that, it was a frozen, footling time. Bits and pieces of work, too much dope, too much TV, too little underwear to cope with the fact that the nearest launderette was six minutes’ walk away. A patina of stubborn grime covering everything.

I was never unhappy there. In fact, I told myself that I was having a pretty good time. By the end of my stay, because of the length of my tenure, the place had become my personal fiefdom. I could monopolise the chair that was most precisely squared up to the TV, and keep myself one step ahead on the tea rota. I also had a leading hand in selecting new tenants, a responsibility devolved to me by our benign Spanish landlord. At one stage, I got two French girls to move in, in expectation of a soupçon of l’autre at le weekend. They moved out within a month, appalled at the frowsy sarcastic Englishness of it all. I replaced them with a Yorkshire spliff king who sold advertising space and a guy who was trying to make his fortune renovating Fiat 500s, and normal service was resumed. This latter individual was actually the catalyst to my leaving. An invisible sediment of dry filth I could cope with, but an oil-clogged engine block in the bath and a length of rusty exhaust lying in the hallway for two months were too much for me to take. As no-one else seemed to mind, or even notice that their house was being turned into a scrapyard/art gallery, I considered that maybe I was too grown up for all this and started looking for an out.

Enter Henry. The ad read: ‘Sngl room for heavy smoker in Clapham flat £240 pm.’ Samuel Johnson thought that the art of advertising had peaked by 1745. He’d never seen this little doozy. I breezed the interview, although the high tar content of my Luckies caused him consternation. He served me Marks and Spencer buffet selection followed by pawpaw and mango crush, and rolled me an elegant joint, which had a beautifully fluid, smooth draw. He introduced me to Lottie who had been instructed to eavesdrop from Henry’s bedroom, and who gave me the OK. She showed me the scarf she was knitting (which was luridly vile) and asked me if I liked it. I said yes and she told me I could have it when it was finished, because Henry thought it was effeminate, and I moved into their box room two weeks later.

Thinking about it, Henry would have made someone a beautiful wife. In fact, he made Lottie a beautiful wife already, and both of them made beautiful parents for me. He worked from home, dreaming up code for a computer games company, and she did her wool-oriented charity work at the kitchen table. I thought of their life together with unenvious wonder. Him doing his fabulous intricate brainwork, her making things and both of them just quietly hanging out together all day. I’d get home and they’d be lolling on the sofa reading, maybe smoking one, the fridge filled with high class junk food: tzatziki, chicken tikka thighs, fruit fools, parma ham, halva, blueberries, red pesto.

Today Lottie was elsewhere, so Henry and I went shopping together, and he mercifully insisted on protecting me from more detail on the previous night. I was on trolley duty as he mooned around harvesting good things from the fruit and vegetable section.

‘Henry, you’re pretty hot on probability, aren’t you?’

‘Well, I’m not bad. What’s the question?’

‘How many women do I have to meet before I’ve got a robust statistical chance that the next one is the right one?’

‘Augment and clarify.’ He was gazing at the star fruit he was holding in the tips of his fingers.

‘Well, my current thinking is to treat the process like a series of coin tosses. By this reckoning, about one in every two women I meet should turn out roughly OK, and our relationship should go somewhere. I don’t mean all the way to the altar, but maybe all the way to a trip to the pictures or something.’

‘Frank, I think the system you’re using is a little flawed. And this is Stanger the Man talking rather than Stanger the Statistician. A coin is a very tightly controlled system, there are only two possible outcomes per toss. People are more …’ he was now reading the label on some purple spinach ‘… difficult. If I were you, I’d base my paranoia on something different. Like a weather system or the football results or something. You know, introduce more factors. Purple spinach. What a gimmick. Let’s try it anyway.’

‘OK, let me put it this way. I’ve thrown the woman coin to one degree or another something like thirty-two times, always wanting, let’s say, heads. But each time so far it’s come up tails. It must get more likely that, the next time I toss, I get a head.’

Henry stopped and shook his head sagely. ‘Not much comfort there, Frank. Each toss is a separate event within the system. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve come up tails, it’s just as likely to come up tails the next time. It’s plain unreasonable to be more expectant of a head just because you’ve just thrown a tail. I think there’s a play about this. These two characters keep tossing a coin and keep throwing heads. When they finally throw a tail, they both die.’

‘Oh, good.’

I watched Henry as he trawled the deli counter for some new exotica to sample.

‘Explain this then. England have played 365 test matches. They’ve won the toss 183 times and lost it 182 times. As equal as it could be. I’m not sure how, but I’m sure that refutes your argument.’

‘Maybe, but it doesn’t prove yours. They’re on tour at the moment, aren’t they?’

‘New Zealand.’

‘Well, then, if they win the toss at the next test match, I would say that you’re certain to enter a satisfying relationship by the time they lose.’

‘You’re being facetious.’

‘Do you like carciofini?’

‘His early work was all right. When are you going to tell me what really happened last night?’

‘Mmm. I think they put a bit too much vinegar in. Let’s lob it in anyway. When are we going to tell you? Lucy and I agreed that we’d wait a while. Tragedy plus time equals comedy. We want you to be able to laugh about it.’

‘God. Why, fuck, why, fuck, why? Why do I do it to myself?’

‘And indeed to others. Don’t get too worked up. It’s not as bad as your worst imaginings.’

‘Did she tell you about that girl they tried to fix me up with?’

‘Oh, yeah, she got off with a waiter or something. After you tried to get off with her by the fag machine.’

I leant on the trolley and let the heat and noise of my hangover fill the silence. The lump on my forehead was emitting a strong low hum of pain. Henry was now deep in thought at the bread section.

‘I think I’ll withdraw from social life, Henry. It’s just not worth it any more.’

‘I thought you already had.’

‘Cheers.’

‘Just drink a little less.’

‘I drink because I get nervous. I just want these fuckers to take me a bit more seriously.’

Henry turned to me with a stern and lucid look on his stem and lucid face. OK, Dad, lay it on me.

‘I’ll tell you what you can do if you want to be taken seriously. Why don’t you go to Lucy’s pregnancy party, get appallingly drunk, molest two married women, start a fight with a merchant banker, burst into tears, claim to the assembled party that you are a great poet of the human soul, vomit in the sink, collapse in a toilet cubicle and tell your best friend that he’s a squandered talent as he helps you into a taxi. I’m sure that would give you an air of gravitas.’

‘Oh, Henry. Tell me you’re joking.’

‘Nope.’

‘Is that everything?’

‘Nearly everything. But as I say, you’re not ready for the whole truth yet. Anyway, you’re broadly forgiven. Stop dwelling on it. In fact that’s good advice for you all round: stop dwelling on it, start doing something about it.’

The ‘great poet of the human soul’ was the real killer. I wasn’t fond of the tears either. Or any of it to be honest. The egg-sized contusion over my eye began to wail its reproach. I believed that there was, in fact, very little comedy to be salvaged from this incident. From my humble state the evening now looked like a symbol of Tom and Lucy’s increasing weight and stature as human beings. There they were, married, successful, generous, willingly taking on the responsibility of parenthood, spreading their benign and thoughtful influence back out into their society like proper adult people. Wankers – oh, stop it, Frank. But regardless of that, there I was, raging at being cast as some kind of low comedian, acting to type in the most egregious way possible. Subversive behaviour had at one time seemed funny, necessary even, in the face of my friends’ inexorable progress towards sensibleness. Now it just seemed like plain rudeness, and rudeness with its source in envy of people who for some reason valued me. Tom’s offer to put in a word for me with his dad about the job at Emporium made it all worse. I’ll call you a wanker, and I do, but I’ll still accept your patronage.

There was real annoyance as well, but it was not directed at my peer group any more, just at myself. I used to believe that Tom and Lucy’s approach to their lives was a kind of giving in, and that their pursuit of solidity was doomed to failure and disappointment. It certainly didn’t appear like that now. And what was more difficult to see was an alternative. My alternative was a restaurant in Battersea and fifty hours of TV a week. My alternative was nowhere, it was nugatory, it was nada, nowt, niente, null, nix, nil, nought, nothing. My time was up.

For a long time I had nursed a secret belief that, if I wanted, I could be better than anyone at anything, if I put my mind to it. I reckon most people feel the same, most men at least. So Tom looked as if he was making it as a barrister? If I’d chosen to be a barrister I’d be a lot better at it than him. So Lucy’s a bond trader? That could have been an option for me. So Henry writes elegant, beautiful computer programmes? Mine would be far more elegant, far more beautiful, if I’d ever chosen to give it a proper shot. Now the issue of choice had left the issue. What was I going to do? Take up an adult education course in law, computers and bonds? Furthermore, the evidence for such ludicrous contentions was weak at the best of times. Some strong performances at the junior school debating club, a bit of verbal facility, a knack with quadratic equations; it was never really enough. Now it would be laughable, if I hadn’t lost my sense of humour about the whole thing. The reason I gave for not having followed them all was that what they were doing just wasn’t worth bothering with. The question of what was worth bothering with just wasn’t worth bothering with either.

‘One day. You’ll see.’

Henry paid up and we ambled back to the flat. I resolved to go and revise my maths downward on all dimensions.

That and do an obituary. When I’m feeling in need of cheering up, I do an obituary. It gives you something to work towards. This is the one I worked on when we got back from the supermarket:

SIR FRANCIS STRETCH QC

PATENT LAWYER

Sir Francis Stretch, the eminent barrister, has died at his Nash house in London’s Regent’s Park, aged 71.

Sir Francis was instrumental in the radical reforms of patent law as it related to the emerging information technology industry in the late years of this century. The achievement was all the more remarkable as he came very late to both fields, not being called to the bar until his fortieth year, having completed a computer science degree at the LSE in his early thirties.

Nicknamed ‘Golden Bollocks’ because of his combination of tenacity and extreme wealth, he was respected rather than liked by his contemporaries.

A wife, Lucy, survives him. They had two step-children from her first marriage, Fortinbras and Clytemnestra, as well as a natural son, Stan.

Twelve hundred quid

Two things stopped from me from downgrading myself frantically all afternoon. The first was that, as I worked on my death notice, I got a call from Tom’s dad’s office, proposing some interview dates.

‘Hello, is that Mr Stretch?’

‘Yep.’

‘Cordelia here from Charles Mannion’s office at Emporium. I’m sorry about the delay in getting back to you.’

‘No problem.’ I’m used to it, love.

‘Well, the reason I’m calling is that Charles would very much like to see you in the next couple of weeks, and I’ve got some convenient dates which I’d like to try you with. He’d like to do a breakfast if that suits you.’

‘Great, perfect.’

‘OK, how about the twenty-ninth?’

‘That’s good for me.’

‘The third?’

‘That’s good for me.’

‘The fifth?’

‘Fine.’

‘The eighth?’

‘No worries.’

‘The tenth?’

‘Couldn’t be better.’

‘Err, the twelfth?’

‘Listen, Cordelia, I’ll tell you what, any day at all is fine by me. I’m sort of a … a free agent. Any day will be just perfect.’

‘OK, I’ll get back to you to confirm in the next day or two.’

‘Thanks very much.’

I was pretty ambivalent about this whole deal to tell the truth. I had mentioned to Tom months ago that I was considering getting back into journalism, as if it was just one of a whole range of options I was toying with, and he mentioned Emporium and said it would be no problem for him to get me in. It was supposed to be ‘a men’s magazine with a difference’ (which men’s magazine wasn’t? Manhood – the Men’s Magazine that’s Exactly the Same as the Rest?), but Tom reckoned I’d get something out of them, no trouble. They were trying to make it look as overstuffed and glossy as possible, but the backers wanted it done dirt cheap. The only place they could really wield the axe was the writing staff, which left opportunities for has-beens and never-weres like me. But still, the dreadfulness of it all. I’d read these magazines – Guy Thing, Twatted, Him and all those other shinies with their flatter-to-deceive cover shots. In fact, I read them every month. But why do they pretend to be something more interesting and important than the sixth-former wank fodder they really are? In my view, there are only two differences between Twatted and Skinny and Wriggly. Firstly, the real porn is bound with staples. Secondly, in the faux-fuck mags, tanga briefs coyly husband the muffs. In Skinny and Wriggly gussets only make an appearance strung between scissoring legs like warm mozzarella. So ‘the men’s magazine with a difference’ presumably meant either more crotch shots or fewer crotch shots. In either case, I reckoned Emporium’s business proposition was terminally disabled before it started.

The only thing that made me say yes to an interview was the thought of Tom’s efforts on my behalf, and the sense of duty that these efforts inspired. Well, that and the prospect of the freebies.

Anyway, the second thing that happened that afternoon was that I opened some mail I got in the second post. As I think I’ve said, I never open mail from the bank. It always ends in tears. I never really open any mail, as everything I get is in some way connected to money that I don’t or can’t have. But Henry had left a letter for me on the kitchen table that had a hand-written address on it. I opened it and was astonished to discover that it was from Bill Turnage. He must have written the note and posted it as soon as I’d left him in Knightsbridge. It was written on some personalised stationery, waxy paper with a quirky little logo of a table in the top right-hand corner. He’d apparently designed it himself. I remembered how brilliant he was in practical lessons. He would be polishing the marquetry on his reproduction Early Georgian escritoire, while I was still trying to make a mug tree with branches that slanted upwards.

Bill had been a middle-ranking first-division friend then, sort of an Aston Villa or a Coventry City, and like them he hung around my life without ever really making a huge impression from when I was fourteen until I left school for university. Gaunt and clever-ish, brooding and outdoors-y, he was a lot of people’s middle-ranking mate, I guess. He was a lone cyclist and hiker, too independent-seeming, too cagoule-and-walking-boots for anyone really to prize him. I couldn’t remember ever having a bad thought about him. Well, maybe he was a bit too bland. Also, he was one of those people who reach puberty when they’re about nine, and he turned up at secondary school already able to tuck his cock and balls between his legs and make like a lady. As a consequence, he inspired many sleepless nights of shame and fear amongst his contemporaries, me included. Why was my groin like Action Man’s and his like a ferret shop window?

I got over all this soon enough, and we ended up going to the same parties, removing the bras from the same girls, occasionally at the same time, and wondering what we should do then for three or four years. He then failed to get into Oxford, and ended up at UEA. I visited him once in my first year and that was that. Five years of easy affection receded into the past as if it had been no more than a handshake. No regrets, though, that’s just friendship for you.

His letter went as follows:

Dear Frank,

Don’t fall off your chair! Great to see you yesterday. You seemed a bit in a hurry. I hope you enjoyed your party.

Any road up, let me fill you in a bit, like I couldn’t do yesterday in all the rush. Been married now for nine years (gulp!) to Sue who was at UEA (you met her, but she says she won’t be surprised if you’ve forgotten) and we’ve got three kids, Debbie (9 – she’s the reason!), Ben (6) and Murray (5). Thought about having the snip, but Ben’s a pretty good contraceptive anyway!

Just to say hello again really and to say you are welcome to come and stay with us in Suffolk any time, we’ve got an attic (My study – still writing!) you can stay in with a sofa bed. The pubs are good, and have lock-ins, and the sea is wet and refreshing. Drop me a line. Alternatively, just give me a call, but I always hated the phone, didn’t I, and still do.

Yours ‘back from the grave’-ly!

Bill Turnage

The tone of the letter was difficult to judge. There were far too many exclamation marks for one thing. It could, I suppose, have been reproaching me for not getting in touch, but I didn’t think so. It cheered me up for some reason, and pathetically I was rather proud of mentioning to Henry that I’d ‘just got a letter from a really old friend, inviting me to his house in Suffolk’. He seemed surprised but unimpressed, which was characteristic, as he sat on the sofa watching Blue Peter and rolling one up. Lottie was dozing against his thigh. Another tough day in the Stanger household.

‘Very good. Are you going to go and see him?’

‘Nah. Three kids and a screech-owl of a wife. Sounds hideous.’

‘You sentimental old fool.’

‘I know, it’ll be the death of me. Anyway, I’m off to work.’

‘Be the best that you can be.’

I went out to the Cavalier feeling in a relatively good mood considering the previous night’s exertions. I had a feeling that I got increasingly less often, which could be summed up as ‘things are on the up a bit, things are happening a little’. Admittedly, it usually came to nothing, but was better than its opposite, which consisted of screaming fits and clubbing myself to death with self-hate, so I tried to make the best of it. Anyway, the thought of an evening waiting tables at O’Hare’s didn’t fill me with a feeling of yowling frustration, as it often did.