EIGHT
Dean Close was not afraid of opening his birthday post that morning. He was not afraid of getting old because he had a safety net. If all else failed, he would join Exit and bump himself off. He and his mates all agreed. When it stopped being good, you went. The Sanctity of Life brigade gave him the pip. Who wanted to end up in an old folk’s home?
Anyway, that was years ahead. Today he was twenty-eight. He rolled over to see the time. Presumably Keith and Julian had already left – he couldn’t hear the usual noises of them getting up and out at speed and there was no Capital FM pounding its lullaby through the walls. He scratched, yawned, stretched, rolled and opened one eye. Nearly ten. He had probably been woken by them banging the front door. Sods might have bought him a cup of tea before going. After all, it was his birthday.
He stumbled out, wrapping the duvet around his naked shoulders – first chill of the end of summer – and wandered into the bathroom. Damp smells of toothpaste and shaving soap clung to the walls and the shower curtain hung its dripping tatters on the wrong side of the bath. His feet flinched at the cold puddles on the floor. He peed quickly and plodded, like some snowbound monk, into the kitchen. The place was not too bad today – Julian’s girlfriend had stayed the night and made a few inroads. The table surface had been wiped and only bore the slightest traces of spilt tea, scattered sugar and toast. The beer cans had gone. He picked up a buttery knife, dipped it into the Marmite jar, and licked it, while waiting for the kettle to boil.
He put his feet up on the chair opposite, wrapped the duvet even more firmly around him, and thought that Julian’s girl, Alice, had her uses. She was also intelligent and decorative. Twenty-five, worked in an art gallery, cropped black hair and a stud in her nose. Cheerful, chatty, she was the perfect example of the kind of girlfriend he was supposed to want. But it did not work out like that. Girls like Alice were no challenge and he always got bored with them. Pamela was different. She lived for the moment, she knew about things – took him to films he would not normally see, to places like Petworth and Blenheim and Sissinghurst, which she knew everything about, cooked stuff for him that was strange and different – so that he felt he was always learning, was fascinated, excited. And she made no demands. He used to wish, sometimes, that she would.
It was funny. The less she asked for, the more he wanted to give. Wanted to spend more time with her, even move in with her, and she was the one who laughed it off and said it would spoil things. That was usually his line. He had to accept it. He was not used to being refused, but he had to accept that this was the way she wanted it to be. Even that felt good. No arguments, no debates, no ‘Which pub? Which film? Which pizza?’ until you were blue in the face and fed up with the whole thing. He loved that, her decisiveness. She always said she was old enough to be his mother, but she was nothing like her. His mother never put him second in her life. Pamela did. She teased, cajoled, played around sometimes, but, basically, she made the decisions. This far only, was her message, and he enjoyed pushing to see if he could go a little bit more.
He yawned and sat down to think. He liked to remember her. When she said that they must think of it as fun and not for ever, he felt a sudden determination to change her mind. He loved her, he told her that, and she just put her finger to his lips and shook her head. He had never told anyone before or since that he loved them. He tried with girls like Alice, and he failed. No one in the flat understood about Pam. At first they just whistled the Mrs Robinson song at him whenever he came back from seeing her, and then, later, when they realized it was more than that, they got serious and tried to get him to back off. When he told them Pamela had ended it, he saw relief on their faces. ‘Fuck you all,’ he said.
He was miserable and drunk, and miserable and drunker, for weeks, and he remained unattached. He tried to see Pam a few times but she refused. Only once, afterwards, did they meet, and that was for a furtive drink by the river at Kew, when she reminded him, sad but firm, that it was never for ever. He would have gone on ringing her, but he got fed up with Daniel always answering. He also knew that what she said, she meant.
Alice brought her girlfriends round occasionally so that they could all get pissed together. Over the last year or so one or two of them had ended up in his bed. And that was all. He did not want anyone else. He found them boring. If he said a name like Wim Wenders or Lutyens, they hadn’t a clue, and if he fooled around in bed instead of getting on with it. . . He licked at the Marmite again. They had no idea. None. So – if he could not have her – he would have no one. His mother kept hinting: the last of her boys and would he settle down now? Well, no. He could not tell her why.
Alice was really nice. Alice was really concerned about him. Alice would love to fix him up with someone just like her. Julian would like it, too – gave the whole thing a comfortable symmetry. But after the wild nights and frenzied beddings, he always kept his cool, kept his distance. They might ring (he was polite), they might call (he would be Just Going Out), and they got the message. Alice was nice but too young. He had nothing to learn from them. At that pub in Kew, when he complained, Pam said that maybe he should try to teach them about the things that interested him. He could not be bothered to try – they’d laugh. Silly girls. Not for him.
Not for him, either, were Keith’s preferences. Dean had tried it once. Got picked up by a guy a few years older than him – thought it might work. It didn’t and he would be forever grateful to the pick-up for recognizing that it was a bad idea. ‘You’ll freak,’ he said. Which was probably true. And he told him to go home and find a nice girl to settle down with. Patronizing bastard.
He never told Keith. Keith, who would not bring anyone back to the house and discreetly kept his affairs elsewhere. Less, he said, to protect his flat-mates from the mortal sin of being party to the consenting act than to protect himself from losing the occasional lover he found. Keith had carroty hair, freckles and wore glasses. It would have been no contest with Dean. Julian was to be trusted by the presence in his life of an Alice; Dean was up for grabs, no matter how he laughed and denied it. ‘Never had the horn for another bloke in my life,’ he told Keith firmly when he was still seeing Pam. ‘Always a first time,’ said Keith good-naturedly. After all, he pointed out, he had been a virgin once.
Dean winced, remembering the pick-up. It was stupid. What she would call immature. He threw the knife across the table and it fell to the floor with a clatter. He did not bother to pick it up. Her rebuff still hurt. He was not used to being denied things. Anyway, it was wrong to give something that good up when any moment you could go under a bus or get cancer or anything. She held him for the last time on the pub steps, a quick hug, and was gone.
Live while you have life to live, love while you have love to give. He found that on a postcard and sent it to her. Picasso. One old bloke who got it right. Well, the words anyway – he wasn’t too sure about the pictures – she liked them and he just pretended and tried to. When she walked off down the path at Kew Bridge, he wanted to run after her, scream in her face: What has your careful, planning older generation achieved?
A dying world. And now you are killing love in it too. He could still hear her saying, ‘I’m really sorry, Dean,’ as she said goodbye, and he could still remember how little affected she seemed to be. Her son was home. Bring on the fatted calf. Bye-bye, Dean; no hard feelings. Youth and beauty, she said to him, you have them both and they are great gifts.
He reckoned he knew the worthlessness of youth and beauty by now. He had been their star and their victim. If he sold trainers in pubs, the girls just melted. If he did clipboard market research, they queued up for him. Even getting the third room in this flat was to do with his looks. Keith just said yes. And that was that. He had even been picked off the street to do modelling, and now it was acting. But they did not look at him, they looked at his looks. When the poster campaign to stop people seeing only the disability rather than the whole person began, he wanted to scrawl across them, ‘It’s the same for me – no one ever looks at me.’
It was his looks that had brought them together. He was waitering at the time. She said, ‘I think my son’s got a poster of you up in his room.’ Just for a laugh he said it probably was him. The next time she came in he was just going off duty. She screwed up her eyes at him and said, ‘I’m sure it is you. . .’ And he demanded to see it. He thought she was just a lonely woman, like his mother, but she turned out to be funny and interesting; he was sorry when she said she had work to do and he left. The next day he called at her shop, a bit tongue-tied, and then he waited to walk home with her in the evening.
Easy. One minute it was seven-thirty, the next it was two in the morning – and no tubes or buses. She put him in Daniel’s room, he came into hers pretending he had had a nightmare – they fell about laughing – and afterwards, when he had been too nervous to manage it – she just smiled and said, ‘Let’s sleep.’ And in the morning it was all right. No trouble. Easy.
At that time, Daniel the Beloved Son was only an empty room. An absence who had introduced them. He never seriously believed in his existence. When he came home for weekends sometimes, Dean stayed away. Naturally enough, she wanted to be with her son. He understood. And in the long summer vacation Daniel travelled in America. Which made the shock all the more devastating when he suddenly realized what Finals meant, and Daniel came home for good.
One day you will want children, was one of her get-out lines. How the fuck could anyone make up another person’s mind on that? Just because she had one. Just because she was half-way across London being a mother to her bloody son, and had almost certainly forgotten about him completely, it didn’t mean that he was going to be grateful for the freedom granted to get someone up the spout.
He put a tea-bag in an unusually clean mug, poured in water, and stirred angrily. Birthdays were supposed to be days for reflection, he decided, and having the flat to himself this morning was the best present he’d received so far. He slewed the tea-bag around, pressed it with a spoon once more, and flung it into Alice’s sparkling sink. All right, it just so happened that she was a bit older than he was – well, all right, much older than he was – but it didn’t stop him (on the way to her house, on the rare occasions she let him visit) singing at trees, buying chocolates and African violets, anything to show her that he really cared about her. A fact about which she seemed not at all convinced. He pointed out to her that her theory was badly flawed. The world, and that included his mother, would have to put up with it. You are not my mother, you are the woman I love, he said. My mother is sitting in Ireland baking and cleaning, he said. You are not like her. ‘It’s a question of degree,’ she said, stroking his face.
The letter-box rattled. He hopped out to the hall, still clutching the duvet, and picked up a pile of cards. His parents, his sisters, a few from friends – he went through the lot hurriedly, his heart sinking, and shuffled back into the kitchen. He opened the envelopes listlessly, sipping his tea between whiles. Nothing from her. Though why he should imagine that after fifteen months, and with no word so far, she would suddenly send a birthday card, he could not think. Yes, he could. It was called hope. It happened on birthdays.
He picked up his parents’ card. Yet again there was the delicate, lacy handwriting that always filled him with dread and, yet again, amid the blessings for his birthday there was the offer of his air fare any time he felt like coming back to Dublin. His mother wanted to see her beautiful boy. He loathed the phrase now. Beautiful Boy. Pam called him that when he gave her a bunch of flowers, or made her laugh, or lay quiet in her arms. She had even used it on that last afternoon. Before ‘Hi, Mum, I’m home . . .’ broke their world apart.
He touched the carton on the table. She had turned as pale as this milk. He saw it, remembering the draining colour. Then she leapt from the bed, wagged a warning finger at him with an expression of anger and fear that he found frightening, shoved him – bollock naked – under her bed – clothes, African violet, and all.
‘Stay,’ she had hissed, throwing on her Happy Jacket. ‘Stay. . .’
Just as if he were a disobedient dog.
‘Danny,’ she called down the stairs. ‘Danny. You’re a day early. I’m just coming down.’
If he learned one thing that day, it was that women are consummate actors. She sounded delighted that he was home. Delighted. Then, as she closed the bedroom door, she turned, looked at Dean as if he were her worst nightmare, and almost spat out that he should not move until she called him, on pain of death.
Lying under the bed, it felt as if he were the mature one rather than her. So her son had come home? So she was having a fuck. So what? He should be glad for her, shouldn’t he? Anger and frustration made him say that to her later. After which she ended it. Very quietly, in a few sentences. Then she got up and left and, like the cliché, she never looked back. She was still wrong about one thing: whatever her age, it made no difference to how he felt.
He looked at his parents’ card and re-read the message. Dublin, Donegal, Dubai. It was all the same to him. But maybe he would go home on a visit. Maybe later in the year, when the acting course was finished. He had wanted to take Pam to Dublin one day, despite her telling him it was the place where she and her husband first fell in love. No chance now. Remembering the conversation about Exit, he brightened. There was always that. Then he opened a beer. Why not, it was his birthday.