Stretch, 29

Seventy-three thou

Tom and Lucy had decided that we were all going out for dinner to celebrate their immaculate conception, but crucially hadn’t yet revealed whether they were paying or not. They were already well past the stage when they were earning so much money they didn’t know quite what to do with it. They now knew exactly what to do with it. There is a myth abroad that the heinously overpaid yuppie died with the eighties. Not so. It’s just that now they’ve learned to keep a little quieter and spend their money in places where you or I can’t see it. This lot of bankers and barristers, if they were doing averagely well for their age and experience, would all be clearing six figures. Sums of money that would turn ordinary hard-working decent folk into a purple fever were to them no more than they deserved.

An example: a year previously, almost to the day, at the end of a drunken evening at his place, Tom had told me that they had just paid off their mortgage with Lucy’s Christmas bonus. This was very Tom. Any truth you got from him about the important stuff – how much, how many, how often – only emerged when he was pissed.

‘Oh really, that must have been a good one.’

Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Please, Sweet Jesus, no more than fifty.

‘Yes, a little over seventy thousand. Seventy-three thou, actually.’

I felt my body trying to cut off the oxygen to my brain. That was five years at O’Hare’s in one little Christmassy bundle. And paying off the mortgage rather than slapping it down on an Aston I held to be unforgivable. This is what I mean about the nineties yuppie: so discreet, so understated, so fucking loaded.

Now I was in a lather about whether or not I could stretch to payment. The cortege of taxis were taking us to a new restaurant on Westbourne Grove that was certain to be laughably expensive. I had already developed an unseemly habit of being overprecise when the bill came. I did it partly out of a desire to live up to my Man on the Clapham Omnibus self-parody, but mainly because I am skint. Tom would sit there with the bill and a deck of gilded plastic in his hand, talking the waiter through the details:

‘So that’s fifty-five each on the gold card, the Amex and the Switch, and what about you, Frank?’

‘Fifteen thirty-two, I make it. I only had the main course and a drop of wine. You do take cheques, don’t you?’ Tom hadn’t used cheques for years, the instant hit of cash, plastic and the occasional banker’s draft or Eurodollar sufficing for his needs. The cheque to me, though, is the only way to pay. Put the number on the back and it won’t, can’t bounce, and the clearing lag accommodates nasty month-end shortfalls and overshoots. Also if you scrunch it up sufficiently you can buy yourself an extra few days of grace, as the banks are no longer geared up for the front jeans pocket approach to chequebook storage. The fuckers will get to me and my sort eventually, but in the meantime I praise the cheque and its inky, dog-eared, slow-moving ways. I quickly recced my pockets as I got into the taxi and was dismayed to discover that I had left my chequebook at home. I had about eighteen sheets in cash, enough for a minicab back to Clapham and a pack of Luckies tomorrow morning. Even if I had my chequebook it would have been a short-term solution, though. Never mind what I’m going to do about the fact that I haven’t got enough money, what am I going to do about the fact that I haven’t got enough money? I was jemmied into the taxi with four hyenas from Lucy’s office, or desk or floor or whatever she called it, and kept schtum. I knew how I was glossed to her glossy mates:

‘Really amusing bloke. Great laugh. Total pisshead,’ etc. Thanks, Lucy. I should have brought a plastic ball to balance on my nose. To counter the impression they had of me as court jester, I had a Hard Bitten Surly Real Guy persona in play, so that they wouldn’t talk to me. It was working a treat. I was being so scary they didn’t ask me for any cab money as we pulled up outside the restaurant. Relieved, I determined to lighten up, for old acquaintance’s sake, and put my snout firmly and deeply into the booze trough.

That it should have come to this. Tom and I met at university. He was in my history set and had the room next to mine on our corridor. For most of my first term all I remember is thinking that he was from a different planet, like most other people in the university. Planet Popular. Planet Confidence. Planet Born-to-it. As I mouldered in my room with macadamised lungs and cold feet, he held a constant, roaring party next door. Occasionally on my way down the corridor to the college bar to play pool with assorted geographers and college catering staff, I would have to ease my way past the gorgeous attendees at the rolling Mardi Gras. The boys were all six-footers, some Aberdeen Angus, some whippoorwill, in £150 loafers and cashmere cardigans. They emanated health and wealth, their eyes with that good-diet glitter. They were always irresistibly polite to me, and Tom made frequent attempts to get me to join the carnival. I always refused out of the side of my mouth and, without looking him in the eye, would scratch my nose, before scuttling off for another gallon of Belgian lager and a session on the trivia machine with Marje the buttery girl.

It wasn’t the boys that put me off, but the girls. Limby, slender, always shaking their glossy hair about and walking with high knees and straight backs. They were quite simply fucking fabulous. In the mornings I would occasionally catch a glimpse of Tom and his current Oaks winner slipping into the shower and would yelp with envy. There was one in particular I remember, whom he told me he was trying to avoid. This was before we became friendly, but he asked me to feign total ignorance of his whereabouts if this girl were to ask me where he was. He gave me a physical description and thanked me heartily. I went off one morning to a tutorial, underprepared and overtired, the pillow creases still red on my cheek, and saw her writing a message on his door, tongue resting in the corner of her mouth. Seeing me flop out of my bunker she asked me the eternal question:

‘Have you seen Tom?’

What a fucking specimen she was. No, I mean really fantastic. I mumbled shiftily, trying not to gaze too intently at her high, amazing breasts.

‘No, sorry,’ and hurried off, terrified by loveliness.

The girls I knew, at home and now here, were at best sweetly pretty. How did the bastard get that kind of action? And this was one he was avoiding! What did he have that I didn’t?

Silly question really. I enumerated what he had and I didn’t, on the way to my tutor’s room: money, charm, the handsome gene, money, a gold-plated accent, money, confidence, money, money, money.

The other thing about Tom was that he seemed to do stuff all the time. Drinking six pints would put me to bed for a day with a crepuscular hangover. If I partied with Tom’s verve and consistency I would be dead. But he was up at dawn rowing, running, meeting friends for breakfast, driving down to his parents’ house and mostly, and most often, fornicating. His bed was approximately two inches from mine, with only a film of papery wall to divide us. I was subjected to a constant chorus of bedspring, flesh-slap, banshee-wail and monkey-grunt. It was like Stockhausen at full volume, all the hours God sent. What kind of drugs did he use? Didn’t he ever get chafed? I would lie there smoking hard as he conducted his boisterous sexual trampolining acts, trying not to listen. Sometimes, unavoidably, I would become aroused by all the noise, and nick a dingy onanistic biscuit from his erotic banqueting table. More often I would just lie there in jealous amazement.

We eventually became friendly in our second term, on account of his failure to pass his first set of exams. When the results were posted in our first week back, I looked down the list and expected his name to be picked out in gold leaf. Maybe the examiners would have augmented the initial T into an illuminated depiction of the Ascension into Heaven. In fact, he fucked them up with a vengeance. A straight fail. Oh yes! During term two his social and sexual bonanza abated considerably and he was around the corridor a lot more. He started knocking on my door in the afternoons and coming in for a chat and a biscuit (McVitie’s, not masturbatory), to take a break from revision. This ritual was entirely at his instigation, but I came to long for it to come round. New friendships have the effect upon me that new love affairs have on others. I would quite happily have spent whole days talking with him. Rather like Henry does now, he would come and sit on my bed and make me tea, and retrieve my fags from the far side of the room and fix me a bowl of Shreddies. He made out, rather unconvincingly, that he had always been as in awe of me as I had been of him. He also had a tendency to understate how privileged he was. But that was OK, because I would do the same thing, talking up the generic Northern accent, talking down the fee-paying education and the ‘ontreprenerr’ dad.

For the first time in my life, I even started to develop a crush on another man. As he worked his latest contestant through some rococo moves on the other side of the wall, my eavesdropping self-abuse began to be charged with ambivalence. Whose rapturing face and body was in my mind’s eye more? This was a powerful new feeling, and disturbed me greatly. I was from the North, for goodness’ sake. The phase took a long time to pass fully, even as long as two years, perhaps. I later decided that it was merely symptomatic of a delayed adolescence. Most boys go through a homosexual period at some time, normally when they’re about thirteen. Like many things in my life, mine came later and lasted longer. I still believe now that I’m a late developer. I don’t know what gives me that idea.

I became fiercely protective of Tom when my lager and triv mates cast him as just another yah-yah bubblehead. I liked to think that they were only so savage because they were jealous, because they wanted what he had too. Now I realise that this wasn’t the case at all. Not everyone is as seduced by Tom’s kind of glamour as me (but many more than admit it). In fact, I never did really become part of his social circle, and certainly never got near to entering into his culture. Even when we moved into a house share together in the second year, and I had more direct exposure to his social MO, I was tentative. Take the parties. I just couldn’t do his sort of party. My sort of party had grave gender imbalances and not enough booze and tended to sift down to four pasty lads arguing bitterly about D.H. Lawrence. His were straightforward sensual bacchanals where everybody took a little toot, smoked a little draw and had a great time. When they were at our house I would spend the next morning tidying up, wondering why I was the only person who hadn’t enjoyed myself. I put it down to the fact that I was a drinker rather than a drugger, and a prole not a party member. My version of a great time was measured by how closely it resembled senility: memory loss, gibbering and impotence. Here were people who liked to laugh and dance around and have sex with one another. What did they know?

Of course, this was just before the great late-eighties drug liberalisation. In the suburbs of Northern towns in the mid-eighties, there was a defence mechanism employed, born of fear of change, that drugs were like tears: strictly for Southern nonces. It was, of course, narcotic Luddism, and the world was moving on regardless. Nowadays, none of the young folk, North or South, drink much any more; they do E and go out and have a lot of straight-up-and-down fatuous fun. An entire generation who no longer associate a good time with vomiting, collapsing and blacking out. Poor lost souls.

My friendship with Tom stayed weekday and one-on-one, but it was none the weaker for that. All my friendships have been based on idolisation, and with Tom this was compounded by my faint, remaining desire to give him one. However, I didn’t just adore him because of his confidence, looks and charm. A more crucial element in it was his family. Firstly he had siblings: two rangy blonde sisters. To an only child like me, they inevitably seemed to be great things to have. The real source of my admiration, however, was his relationship with his mother and father. He described to me one January when we arrived back at college what Christmas morning in the Mannion household was like. The children would assemble on his parents’ huge bed and the family would spend the morning exchanging gifts and talking. Now, to you this may seem commonplace. If so, then I apologise for being banal. But for years whenever I wanted to fuel a really good dark mood, I would permit myself to recreate a picture of the Mannions on Christmas Day.

The biggest favour I ever did him was to bring him together with Lucy. She was my study partner on a Seventeenth Century European History option in my second year, and would come to our house before tutorials to pick me up. When I first met her I thought she was a real dim bulb. She had this twee way of talking that to me seemed affected. Did anyone ever say ‘fab!’ and ‘lush!’ without irony? In tutorial she turned out to be extremely clever. It was the kind of intelligence that I could never have; common-sensical and measured, rather than flashy and over-heated like my own. I also didn’t realise for some time that she was probably beautiful, in a womanly, unattainable way, but even then I had no real desire for her. Maybe pit ponies only really fancy other pit ponies. Tom was on to it like a shot. Around the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia he was ardently negotiating terms on dinner dates. By the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession he was garrisoned in her undergarments on a permanent basis.

One freezing, foggy February morning, trudging to another tutorial I remember breaking a silence by asking Lucy a facetious question, about the character of Mazarin or what Wallenstein did of a weekend or something. She stopped on the pavement and looked at me as if I’d been talking Old Norse.

‘Hm? Oh yes.’ Very impatient, very far away.

And we continued in silence. I speculated that maybe I was seeing love at close quarters for the first time, and felt all of a sudden bewildered and out of my depth, and truly, horribly envious.

Tom even managed to stay faithful. In his position, this was an heroic feat. He had a kind of perfect magnetism for women; they wanted to fuck him, mother him and be his best friend all at the same time. I mean, even I wanted to do him, for Christ’s sake, imagine how just-turned-on-to-sex nineteen-year-old women felt. I hung around on the edge of the penalty area, hoping to pick up some of the stray crosses he’d manfully headed out, but didn’t even get in a strike on goal. Whilst he spent the better part of two terms lounging in his bower with Lucy, I regressed to my real best mates, Stella, Marje and Triv.

At this point, I moved into my Early-Period Marie O’Sullivan affair. She was in the year below me and had not yet realised that there were better places to start the Big University Relationship than the college bar on a Thursday night. But much more of Marie later. She merits several digressions all of her own.

Tom and I have weathered all the trials of the best-friend relationship. Lucy even underwent a ‘Have I ever told you, Frank, that I really want to sleep with you’ aberration just after we left university. I believe this is a common occurrence, but it seemed special to me. I remember all the strange and disorienting details. Firstly spending an evening in a dark Tandoori in Shepherd’s Bush with her stockinged foot pressed against my groin. While Tom was grinding on at noisome length about pupil masters, tenancy and cheeky-chappy Cockney clerks to my then girlfriend (post-Early-Period, pre-Middle-Period Marie), his fiancee was agitating my balls with her big toe and eyeing me disgracefully. My groin had acquired the density of wet sand. It was fortunate that Tom was still in that phase of his career when he found it intolerable not to be talking about it with a kind of breathless hysteria, because I was incapable of speech. The following morning Lucy rang me in a state of anxious desire from work and said that she had to see me. We met at her flat in Hammersmith and I confected some passion before realising as we writhed noisily on her sofa that I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t even fancy her. My motives for having come this far were confused, but certainly not good. In an act of superhuman honourableness (and OK I admit it, to some extent to conceal imminent flaccidity), I withdrew, made a fine, stumbling speech about loyalty as I was re-buttoning and left in a double hurry. Had I actually had sex with her? She would have said yes, some form of docking having been achieved, but I don’t know. It was sex removed from its primary motivation and incomplete, so I just don’t know.

If we had left it at that, the whole episode would have become a forgotten secret. But she persisted, and the next time we were alone together at her place, we went through with it. The fucking was awkward, eyes-closed and joyless, but it cast a shadow of intense excitement. We both felt filthy and low, but also strangely adult, like we had left the hermetic world of Oxford and hit the real world, where real events had real consequences.

Anyway, she saw sense pretty quickly (Did this coincide with Tom’s first big cheque? No, no, don’t be like that, Frank.) and we had to go through a tedious rite of atonement. We arranged to meet in a pub ‘where no-one will know us’ and she took me through a slow, grisly tour of her guilt and dismay at ever having dreamed of being unfaithful to Tom. She ascribed her motivation to feeling threatened by his commitment to his career, and the absorbing intensity of its atmosphere, which was by necessity tending to exclude her. She said she just wanted to feel some sense of security, and that I provided it. So, in fact the episode had been some kind of cry for help, like a deliberately botched suicide bid. That didn’t particularly raise my self-esteem. She cried a lot, and I looked around the pub self-consciously a lot. She put her head on my shoulder a lot. I thought about trying it on, with her so hot, wet and vulnerable all of a sudden, but held back. I mean where could we go? And besides, I didn’t fancy her. And besides there was Tom to consider. And besides.

She must have got what she wanted, because a matter of months later they moved in together and she never mentioned her moment of doubt or panic, or whatever it was, to me again. Now here they were, be-mewsed and lathered in confidence and dough, expecting and solid as a rock.

In a way that appals me now, at times when all the full weight of Tom’s effortless ability started to get to me, I would summon this bizarre interlude to mind. A grubby strike for the little guy. When he was at his most sparkly and contented, and especially when he was eulogising Lucy in that way he still does, I would look at him steadily and think, Ah, but, Tom … and then move on, reluctantly.