Sweet Sorrow(114)
There were a few more encounters after that, late at night on the phone or in city-centre pubs, then out onto the street. The couple that you sometimes see in tears at closing time, alternately clinging to each other then pushing each other away: that was us.
But though I fought for her, I knew these were the final skirmishes in a battle that was already lost. Fran Fisher walked away to get a mini-cab home. I wouldn’t see her again for more than twenty years, but I would see her again.
2x 4x 8x 16x
In the era of Dad’s VHS machine, one of my smaller talents was an ability to fast-forward with great accuracy, watching the action spool past and pressing stop at precisely the right time to allow for the momentum of the whizzing spools. In the digital era, things are easier and instead of seeing every single moment speeding by, transformed into silent comedy, we skip and hop directly to the things we want to see. It’s more efficient that way. So: As soon as I could drive I got a job at the airport, clearing the tables and trays of first-class passengers in the twenty-four-hour executive lounge. It was a job that might have been invented with the specific intention of filling me with loathing: loathing for the way the customers filled their glasses with free champagne they’d never finish, the rare roast beef scraped into the bin; loathing for the squalor of behind the scenes, the grey-faced staff sucking on cigarettes in doorways, the stinking lockers and vacuum-sealed packs of smoked salmon like great blocks of pink alien flesh. The gulf between customers and staff, us and them, was like something from the Soviet-era propaganda machine, and the only way to get through each shift was to engage in petty acts of spite and sabotage that led in turn to that other, most poisonous, form of loathing. A Sussex University Philosophy student, slumming it for the summer, told me about Sartre’s waiter, fixing his smile and taking his orders and living his life of bad faith, and I thought two things: Yep, that sounds about right. Also: Fucking students.
Like the Gold Card members of the Executive Club, I made the most of all that bounty, but while they were only passing though, I was on a fifty-six-hour week, living on pretzels and Brie. I became the overtime king, working all the hours I could, and with my first pay packet I bought a bed to replace the bunks in my room, then methodically paid off our household debts. In December, Social Security sent Dad to work at the Royal Mail sorting office and something about the early mornings, the routine and some old-English quality of the job struck a chord and he became a full-time postman. ‘Finished by two and the day’s all your own!’ he said as if he couldn’t quite believe it. He stopped smoking, cut down on his drinking and his highs and lows became less extreme, so that for the most part we were calmer, more peaceable, more sedentary.
On the evenings when I didn’t have to work we watched the same films and TV shows, ate the same meals, read the same books one after another, washed and dried at the sink. ‘You and your father,’ my mother said, on one of her final visits before she moved away, ‘are like an old married couple,’ a weird and depressing vision of domestic life that underlined just why she’d left. She didn’t say it warmly. It was a warning.
Though we’d sometimes bump into each other on the streets, I didn’t see much of old friends who’d gone on to college, and all too soon that September came round when they all flew away to Manchester, to Birmingham and Hull and Leicester, to Glasgow and Exeter and Dublin. I’d heard that Fran Fisher was at Oxford (‘at’ not ‘in’), reading (not ‘studying’) English and French, and I thought, well that sounds about right. That makes sense.
Harper, who’d worked steadily when no one was looking, went to study Civil Engineering in Newcastle, where he was rarely seen outside without a traffic cone on his head. Fox, who’d relentlessly jeered anyone caught holding a pen, went off to train as a games teacher and at Christmas they’d meet me in the pub and tell me stories of legendary piss-ups. Soon Harper had a serious girlfriend, a woman of impossible glamour, studying tourism. They were going to go travelling together, perhaps drop in and see Lloyd, who now did something shady in Thailand. ‘Unless he’s in jail,’ said Fox, and we all agreed that a Thai jail was probably an environment where Lloyd could really thrive. We’d all softened a little, in our manner and around our waists, and laughed in a different way. I felt fond of them and we’d even try to revive the old nicknames and scuffles. But if we were a band, then we were past our best, re-formed, a nostalgia act, still playing but a member down and with only the old hits to perform. Harper skipped one Christmas, Fox another, and after that we no longer met up.
In my first summer after school, I’d noticed posters start to appear for Full Fathom Five’s new production. His hair was slicked back and without glasses his eyes seemed puffy and small, but I recognised George as a beetle-ish, hunch-backed King Richard III, in some ways a promotion, in others not. The following summer it was As You Like It, then, because enough time had passed, time for A Midsummer Night’s Dream again. I was no more likely to buy a ticket than I was to gate-crash the school-leavers’ disco, but I still felt a childish resentment that they were carrying on without me. Shakespeare, performing, books, music, poetry, art; the promise had been that these things changed young lives, gave a sense of self-worth, of community, altered the way in which we moved through the world. With missionary zeal, this was what Ivor and Alina had strived for and it had worked. But the process was reversible, and now nostalgia turned to bitterness whenever I recalled that summer. In 2001 it was Macbeth, and this, appropriately, was the production that killed them off. I imagined Ivor and Alina selling off the Transit van, dumping the beanbags and the yoga mats, and felt an unpleasant relief when they didn’t return.