Somebody else's novel

I don't think I had seen anything quite like him.

I was walking home, along the street which runs parallel to the garish multistorey car park. The traffic went past me in blips, every passenger a different ethnicity, like a BBC mock-up of what it wants to believe society is really like. The couple in the brand new Mini looked nowhere near well off enough to afford a brand new Mini, but easily wayward enough to have chosen one in such an unsuitable shade of brown. And then, as I approached the traffic lights, I caught up with him.

He was a tall thin guy, surely no older than twenty-five, in long white cotton robes that came down to the ground. They practically shone in the sun so you almost had to look away. That intensity was matched by the glare coming off the fine white skullcap he was wearing, like a lace teacosy. A straggly beard stayed close to his jawline with seemingly no ambition to progress beyond it. On his feet were trainers - white again, the lurid white of trainers that have never touched a pavement. The whole ensemble fitted in perfectly with the pale complexion of his face, and I was struck because I would never have expected him to be white. If that wasn't odd enough, his right hand played idly with his Blackberry, a squat grey brick that might have been cutting edge six years ago.

The slobby middle-aged man walking in the other direction past us - striped t-shirt stretched by a belly that hadn't been there when it was first bought, beer can gripped like a thing far more precious than it was - stared at him as if he'd fallen to earth from another planet. Personally, I wasn't sure which of them had fallen from another planet. Maybe it was both of them. Maybe it was me.

Watching him fidget and wait for the lights to change I got that feeling I sometimes get, of being a minor character in somebody else's novel. Because somebody really ought to be writing a novel about the man in white - even just seeing him for a minute I felt like there was a story there and I suspected it was better than mine. I wanted to know what the attire was in aid of and where he was going, whether he was married, what his house was like. And nobody would ever have wanted to know that about the man in the striped t-shirt, the couple in the brown Mini or even me, boiling in my suit that's slightly too big these days, wearing my huge, absurd headphones.

Some people are like that. You meet them for minutes and you feel like you're in the presence of - not quite greatness, but noteworthiness. It made me think of the one time I met Paul, because that was the way with him too.

Last year Kelly and I went to visit my aunt in Bristol during her convalescence, near the beginning of that agonising period which started with the operation and only really ended with the all clear a couple of weeks ago. We strolled up Whiteladies Road, a long grand street I only recalled from childhood memories, most of them planted by stories my parents told and not things I genuinely remembered. So for instance I had been reliably informed that it was there that I saw and cried at ET as a platinum blonde eight year old, and if you asked me I would repeat it as gospel, but I only really have somebody else's word for that. So many things in our lives that we think are fact are only flimsy transcripts in somebody else’s handwriting, but we believe them anyway because otherwise we’d have to accept that we don’t know almost anything.

At the top of Whiteladies Road, the old department store had been converted into an indoor bazaar full of independent stallholders, and the three of us had a wander round. The wares on offer were much as you would expect: some retro porcelain here, the second-hand books even Oxfam wouldn’t take there, PVC handbags and tie-dye, clothes from labels no one had heard of. A Caribbean café offered jerk chicken and I was almost tempted to try it. And there, on the other side, was the oddest stall selling perfume. Under the counter a sign said “Spritz Fragrances… makes perfect scents”. I winced; the pun was bad enough, but the tacky font was even worse.

All the display stands were at forty-five degrees to everything else in the bazaar, which was presumably meant to make it look different but instead was only jarring. We wandered through, finding a selection of apothecary jars on the shelves in the corner, all labelled. “Calvin Klein – Obsession” said one, “Dolce & Gabbana” another. They all seemed to be knock-offs or replicas, in a bazaar which itself was like a low rent parody of the kind of fashionable markets you find in Spitalfields. That was the point when we hesitated too long, and the would-be perfumer descended on us.

He was a tall, striking-looking man with coffee-coloured skin and a close-cropped beard. The thing I noticed about him first was his suit. Some people only own one suit and virtually never wear it – it is bought out of necessity, as cheaply as possible, and often doesn’t fit. This man clearly owned such a suit and from the looks of things wore it every day. The trousers were shiny with wear, though they might have been like that even when they were first taken off the hanger several years ago. I don’t know what the opposite of luxury is, but that suit was it.

“Hi, I’m Paul. Can I interest you in anything?” he said, gravitating straight towards my aunt. He had a clipped accent which could have been American or could have been Caribbean, I couldn’t really place it.

“Oh no, we’re just browsing.” she said.

“Well, what sort of smells do you like?”

This seemed like an open invitation to have the sort of long conversation I had already ruled out. My aunt told Paul the sort of scent she liked, and he launched into a long complicated explanation of fragrances which appeared, as far as I could tell, to have very little to do with anything I had read on the subject. I allowed myself to drift to the edge of our tiny crowd, but there was something about the man that wouldn’t let me break away. He should have been a charlatan. The superficial judgments I’m so partial to told me he was a charlatan. But somehow my instincts were saying something else.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a healer.” he said, “But I can tell what you need. You might not know what you want, but I think I can see what you need. You need some healing, don’t you?”

I don’t know how he could tell, but he was so nice to my aunt, who was trying so hard to hide her nervousness in crowds and her baggage, figurative and literal.

“Yes, I suppose I do.” she said.

For the next fifteen minutes or so Paul was a blur; I don’t know which worked faster, his hands or his mouth. He dabbed her wrist with stopper after stopper, mixing and blending, and he kept talking to her. Did she want something a bit lighter? No problem. Or a grassy note in there perhaps? He knew just the thing. You can go into the centre of my hometown any given Saturday lunchtime and get harassed by a crazy, preached at by an evangelist or rendered guilty by an aggressively marketed good cause, but this was something altogether more rare; we felt kind of special.

I have a feeling, looking back on it, that Paul knew that my aunt wasn’t in the market for perfume and I’m not sure that’s what he was trying to sell her. I think what he was giving her instead, without charge, was kindness and attention. And for those fifteen minutes – though there was still an element of hustle about Paul, the suit and the accent, probably – my poor recuperating aunt felt like she was receiving an individual consultation in Liberty rather than standing in a tatty arcade in Bristol with fake fragrance building up on her skinny arm. He gave her something back that I hadn’t even figured out was missing, and it was quite something to watch.

When we left, we bought a soap dish from Paul which we didn’t really need, because I would gladly have paid him for what he did for her. For Kelly, too – he told her that her aura was so warm he could barely stand next to her, and that he had a sense that great things were going to happen to her over the next few years. And I was trying to look unconvinced, but I couldn’t carry it off.

Afterwards we drifted upstairs, where the more gentrified stalls were: a photographer, some painters, a lady making jewellery. And when we went back down my aunt tried on some clothes, eventually picking up a tasteful black and grey top which didn’t quite look like anything else she owned. “I can wear it for special occasions.” she said, and I found myself hoping there would be many of them. I didn’t know back then that she would move to Reading and be given the all clear, I didn’t know she would end up in a huge flat with more space than she knew how to fill, her own bathroom, an enormous fridge freezer. I didn’t know she would get her own washing machine, something she never had in all the three decades she was stuck in that bedsit. None of us knew any of those things, we just knew that special occasions weren’t something my aunt’s life had been full of, and whenever we talked about bucking that trend there was a feeling of putting a brave face on things.

Everything about Paul should have been wrong: the patter; the suit; the font; the professed ability to sense auras; everything. The other ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I would have thought he was a fraud. Even to this day, I don’t know why I didn’t. When my aunt was buying the top, Kelly was over there talking to him again - about their black roots, about where their ancestors came from (America in both cases, as it happens), about all the things we just don’t know. You got the impression you could have talked to him all day. That’s the thing about people with charisma; they’re dangerous, they make you forget yourself. This is how wars start I tried to tell myself. This is how vulnerable people get parted from their life savings. But it wasn’t working.

I still have Paul’s business card in my wallet. Kelly and I talked about how, when my aunt was better, we’d go back and pay for her to have a personalised fragrance made up. But then she moved to Reading and it never happened. When I type Paul’s website into my browser, nothing comes up. The domain expired and it hasn’t been renewed. I searched on his full name too. It drew a blank, and his was a far from common name. Even the website for the arcade has a different shop now in the location where his used to be. It’s almost as if he never existed, to the extent where I do have to stop and remind myself that he did. I can’t help wondering where he went, whether he’s plying the same trade somewhere else, trying something new or whether he’s given up. And I find I’m slightly sad that I’ll never know; I would definitely have read the novel he was in.

Exhausting a place

In this room, there are six men and one woman. There are a number of voices coming out of the phone on the middle of the table, all of them indistinct.

There are three striped shirts – a blue and white one which screams deckchair, a black and white chalk-striped corporate gangster and a glorified pyjama top. There is one hairstyle from 1984, there are two men with no hairstyle to speak of and three men with no hair to speak of. There are two short-sleeved shirts, one bright yellow linen, one tired poly-cotton, like a school shirt which has never been thrown away.

There is a bright pink cardigan, and no, it isn’t mine.

There are two lip-chewers, two pen-fidgeters and a Coke-sipper. There are two cheap disposable biros bearing promotional logos, one posh silver rollerball (a leaving gift from a previous job, probably, or maybe a present from a spouse who had run out of ideas), one fountain pen – mine – and a clutch pencil. I admire anybody who wields a clutch pencil at work. There are two chunky watches with giant rubberised straps, saying I do sport, fraudulently sitting on the wrists of two men who do not do sport.

In this room, there are a total of twelve attempted jokes. Eleven of them are not remotely funny, the twelfth would only be funny if you knew the subject matter of the meeting back to front. It does not make me laugh.

There is one ulcer that I know of, though there may be more.

There are two people giving proceedings their undivided attention, three people giving them their divided attention and two people giving them very little attention. There are plenty of alternatives to paying attention; nose-twitching, scratching in pads, tapping on Blackberries. There is one doodler, and she draws her name on her pad in large, likeable capitals. She thinks better of colouring the letters in.

There is a man who sounds as if he’s talking over the phone down a really bad line, a disconcerting effect because he is in this room.

There are four pairs of glasses, mostly conventional enough. Only one looks as if it forms a joke shop combo with the wearer’s eyebrows and nose. There is one comedy accent, like a heavy in a Bond film. It goes beautifully with the Eighties hair and the clutch pencil.

In this room, there are two ears sprouting wiry white hairs, on a head with very little hair of its own; so often the way. There are two big noses, three small noses and one hook nose, but only two enormous nostrils. It seems, from the other end of the table, that you could fall into them and wait years for rescue.

There are three wedding rings, but they are not on the hands you’d expect.

There is one moustache, one goatee and there are four faces sporting the kind of light stubble which says that ten minutes longer in bed on a Monday morning is far more important than shaving. One of those faces belongs to me. There is one pair of surprisingly small hands, stubby fingers like baby new potatoes.

There is one mobile phone with Sweet Child O’ Mine as a ring tone, something we all loudly discover halfway through. Finding that out is my favourite thing. Apart from that there is no fun in this room, there are no dreams coming true and there are definitely no surprises.

There are twenty-four different three letter abbreviations. No single person understands all of them.

Nerve

Gemma’s is the first desk I notice every morning as I head across to mine, so I always know from the outset whether she is in on any given day or working from home - or doing whatever it is she does at home which means she isn’t on instant messenger and takes several hours to reply to emails. We all have our theories, by which I mean that I have my theory and that by repeating it often enough I have convinced everybody to believe me.

Something was different about Gemma when I walked through the door of the office this morning and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. She was sat bolt upright, looking straight ahead and her hair looked fuller, with more body, glam somehow. I didn’t give it any more thought and went to log on at my computer and begin the complex operation of figuring out which pieces of work I couldn’t put off any longer. Pretty soon, my IM pinged with an offer from Gemma to go for the first cuppa of the day and naturally I agreed, which had plenty to do with how much I still wanted to put off those pieces of work.

We ambled down the corridor and I noticed again that Gemma looked plain weird. She was still very upright, looking straight ahead and walking towards the kitchen as if she was on castors and being pushed by an invisible man. I’m not used to anybody I know having a bearing like that; you could almost believe that she’d spent the previous night doing a crash course at a military academy. We reached the kitchen, me shuffling along and her sedately sweeping through the double doors like a modern-day Queen Victoria, and then she came clean.

“I’m in agony.” she said. “I’ve trapped a nerve in my neck.”

“I thought there was something different about you.”

“It’s awful. I can’t move my head at all. You don’t realise how much you use your neck until you can’t.”

Phil was already in the kitchen, taking his regulation twenty minutes to make a cup of tea. None of us know how he manages to make tea making look so leisurely, it’s one of life’s insoluble mysteries. All we do know is that when we all descend on the kitchen en masse he always starts before us and finishes after us. All that time spent, and yet he’s never made a hot beverage I liked the look of. He peered over in Gemma’s direction.

”What’s up mate? You look like a robot.”

He had a point: I hadn’t thought of it that way, but since Phil mentioned it the way Gemma’s whole body swivelled when she turned round to fire him a withering stare was somehow reminiscent of an android. If laser beams had shot out of her eyes and he had crumpled smoking to the floor I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised. Phil didn’t even notice though because he doesn’t, not that kind of thing anyway.

“It’s not funny! I was in so much pain this morning. David had to drive me to work because I can’t turn my head.”

“Your hair looks different, have you done something different with it?” said Clare, stirring her peppermint tea in the corner next to the microwave. Clare always has peppermint tea and always in her own mug, which she bought at Sainsburys and scrubs obsessively every day. (“How can you drink from one of the mugs in the cupboard?” she once asked me. “They’re black. You can’t see anything on the inside. How would you know if they’re dirty?”)

“I couldn’t use my straighteners this morning, too painful, so I’ve just blow-dried it.”

“It looks nice!” said Clare, always one to focus on the positives. Meanwhile, I was deriving great amusement from walking round Gemma in circles while she had no choice but to keep staring at the notice board on the far wall.

”Stop being a bastard.” she said.

“I’m sorry, but it is quite funny.”

“No it’s not.”

We made eye contact. She looked mainly cross, but not completely. It seemed appropriate as I was mainly amused, but not completely.

“It is sort of funny I’m afraid. But if it’s any consolation, you look like your posture is incredible. You don’t look like you’ve got a trapped nerve in your neck at all.”

“Really?” said Gemma, brightening considerably.

”No. If anything, you look like your hair weighs a ton.”

Later on, no better, Gemma went to see the onsite beauty therapist who had offered to try and sort her out with a massage. I joined her, because the kitchen was en route and my tea was cold. Earlier in the week I had told Clare that my tea was colder than a necrophiliac’s girlfriend, a simile which would have been remarkably effective if I hadn’t had to explain what a necrophiliac was. “How do you know these things?” Clare had asked me incredulously, which was even more effective as I couldn’t begin to explain that.

”Stop staring at me.” said Gemma. She has a tone of voice she uses at times like this which I like to call her evil voice. It’s the tone which suggests that she expects complete obedience, tempered with a smidgeon of disbelief that she has to give the order at all.

“I can’t help it, it’s just that I’ve never seen anybody walking quite like this before.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to walk behind me, it’s just creepy.”

“Sorry Gemma.” We got to the door and I pushed it open for her. She had the sort of bearing that made you want to hold doors open, or possibly throw a cape on a puddle. Gemma and Clare had gone to the pub for lunch without me, and I imagined the lunchtime drinkers of Bracknell had probably never seen anything quite like it. They probably thought she was a visiting duchess or something. There was a moment of eye contact again, and I realised that I didn’t know Gemma quite well enough to figure out whether she had lost patience with me, and I probably never would.

“Have you ever had a trapped nerve in your neck?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, I can’t wait until you do. And when you do, I want to be there, and I’m going to rip the piss out of you about it.”

“That’s not very nice, Gemma. But do you know what really hurts? You’re insulting me like that and you can’t even bear to look at me while you’re doing it. That’s cold.”

”Get lost.” said the back of Gemma’s head, floating off into the distance, perfectly level. I didn’t need to see her face to judge her expression, but I was still relieved that I couldn’t.

Meetings and holidays

In my meeting today, we get to talking about holidays. I find this is a common conversation topic in meetings I am running. I think it’s because the people round the table desperately need to remind themselves why they are enduring the meeting in the first place. But on a day like today I don’t mind; the sun is still shining outside and we are making good progress, working in co-operation, not competition, and my mind too is turning to the next chance I will get to jump on a plane and be somewhere else. The sights and sounds of Istanbul, only three months ago, feel far too distant.

Besides, it’s inevitable, an occupational hazard when the nearest station to the office is at Gatwick Airport. Everyone else on my train was grinning, showing off in shorts, pulling huge suitcases onto seats or wrestling them onto the overhead racks while I sat there, buttoned up and buttoned down, peering at bad news on my Blackberry and rejigging my to do list for the hundredth time.

The only exception was the glacial blonde sitting opposite, who kept staring over at me in between pages of the Metro. It’s the new glasses and the haircut I told myself with a certain smugness. I’ve still got that old magic. My left hand crept beneath my newspaper and suddenly with horror I realised that my flies were wide open. Shortly after that we stopped at Guildford and she got off, as all the attractive people did, but not before shooting me a look of mild contempt.

Thinking about holidays is the only way to stay sane on a journey like that, otherwise you would go mad and start shouting at strangers. I consoled myself by deciding that they were going to places I had no desire to see, and would have an awful time. Disappointingly, they showed no understanding of this.

I get off the train and walk through the station, trying to ignore the palpable excitement of practically everyone in the departures lounge. Only the other workers in the airport, my fellow sufferers, lift my spirits. Loitering in the Marks & Spencer Simply Food I see two hairy workman in reflective jackets grabbing houmous and choosing between tubs of olives and find myself oddly cheered by the incongruity. And then it is time to stand at the side of the lay-by and wait for Paul to pick me up, in his standard issue Vauxhall.

“I went to Palma a couple of weeks ago mate.” says Paul as we sit in the windowless room, poring over systems and screens. “It was brilliant, great weather, cheap, everyone was really friendly.”

“I bet the food was nice too.” I say, because in my world holidays are just trips to giant living restaurants and if you’re lucky there are some monuments or shops to look round between meals.

“Yes, just amazing - lots of tapas. Have you ever had those things, they’re called devils on horseback?”

“Yes, they’re prunes wrapped in bacon, right?”

“That’s the ones.”

The me outside work would quibble at this stage and point out that, technically, those are Christmas party food rather than authentic Spanish tapas. But I am at work and I’ve learned at least a few social conventions in the last ten years, so I nod and don't pick him up on it.

“My wife’s going to Egypt this year with my mother-in-law.” I say. “They’re going on a cruise down the Nile.”

“You not going with them?” says Eddie, looking up from his screen. He works for Paul, and he’s a lot quieter when Paul is around. I give a wan smile.

“No, I think I’ll sit that one out. It will be nice for them to have that bonding experience. And besides, if I don’t go with them hopefully I’ll get to go away on holiday with my friend Dave. We go away most years, usually to Prague.”

Paul makes a face.

“I’m not sure I fancy Prague, all those stag weekends.”

“I know a funny story about that, remind me to tell you later when we’re on our way to the station.”

We tap away and read more reams of notes on the flickering projector, back in work mode. Through the open door I notice a man in a wheelchair trundling past. Paul spots him and tuts.

“I tell you what, for a man on disability benefit he doesn’t half take a lot of fag breaks. I ought to disable the lifts, see how he likes that.”

I’m not sure what facial expression to adopt at this stage, so I settle for a mixture of contemplation and a lack of confidence in my own hearing. I’m not one hundred per cent sure he really said it. How to respond? I decide to surprise him, and myself, with compassion. I don’t remember until many hours later that Paul’s child is also in a wheelchair.

“I don’t know, if I was stuck in a wheelchair I’d probably take up smoking too. It must be pretty miserable.”

“He’s got ME, hasn’t he Eddie?”

“No, it’s MS.” says Eddie helpfully, acting as Paul’s built in spell-checker. Nobody is up to the job of correcting Paul’s grammar at times.

“What happened to that woman in your team with ME, by the way?” I ask Paul.

“Oh, she left in the end.”

“She was a bit wet, wasn’t she?” I say. I remember her well, drippy and pale, strangely without substance even before the diagnosis. I’d always thought she was awful at her job, and then felt awful when I found out what she was ill with, because nobody deserves that.

“What, wet between the legs?” chuckles Paul.

“No, behind the ears.” I say, unable to prevent myself from sounding curt. Sometimes I forget just how inappropriate he can be - even by my standards, and my standards are more forgiving than almost anybody’s.

At the end of the meeting we have finished our work and established that things are a little better than they were and a little worse, in a way that would be impossible to sum up in a single slide. It’s the worst possible outcome, because it means that explaining what we have learned will place too much of a demand on anybody’s attention span. But never mind: we have had a pleasant day and we know we’ve achieved something, even if only the three of us know what that is. I get my stuff together and head out with Paul to his car.

“You were going to tell me a story about Prague.” he says.

“Oh yes, that’s right. This is a good one. Have you ever met Posh James in our team?”

Paul pulls away, into the quiet industrial park. It is hours before these roads will clog up with people desperate to get home.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, he went on a stag week to Prague with some friends. Not a stag night, not a stag weekend, but a whole week. And on their first night they walked down one of the streets in the Old Town which is lined with… there’s no nice way to put this, titty bars.”

“Titty bars.” said Paul in shock. I think he never quite expects me, with my posh voice, to say anything disgusting. It’s nice to think there are still some people who believe I am above that sort of thing.

“And there’s someone outside each of the bars trying to lure the punters in, hassling them, telling them how hot their girls are. So James and his friends walk down this street getting more and more tired of all the banter. So at the very end of the row of bars, this guy says ‘Come in, come in! We have beautiful girls.’ and one of James’ mates - fed up of all the attention by now and feeling a bit bloody-minded - says ‘Do you have any midgets?’”

“Jesus, mate.” chuckles Paul.

“And of course they don’t. So James’ friend says ‘Sorry, but if you don’t have any midgets we’re not interested.’ and on they go. The next night, they walk the same route and they get hassled in exactly the same way. And at the end of the row it’s the same guy and the same question. ‘Do you have any midgets?’ ‘No, my friend.’ ‘Sorry, if you’ve got no midgets, we’re not coming in.’ and so on.”

“Is this a joke?”

“No, true story, I swear. Anyway, this goes on all week; every night they go past the bars and every night they say the same thing to the man outside the last one. No midgets, no show. Anyway, they get to their final night in Prague and they stroll past, and their favourite front of house practically flags them down. ‘Come in, come in! Very hot girls tonight.’ And so they say ‘Do you have any midgets?’ for the very last time.”

“And?”

“And the man looks beside himself. ‘Yes! Yes! For you specially, we have found a topless midget.’”

“You are fucking joking.”

“I’m not! And so James and his friends look at each other, and they think, Well, it’s rude not to, so they went in and watched the topless midget on their last night in Prague.”

“That is quality.”

“I know.”

There is a slight pause, and I know Paul can’t hear my cogs turning. Because the thing I’ve always wondered about that story is whether a topless midget’s breasts are in proportion to the rest of her body or not. I can’t remember whether it’s midgets or dwarves whose extremities are built to scale. But, because I’m at least partly still in work mode, I decide not to share that eternal mystery with Paul. The car pulls up in the lay-by, and I check my watch; just enough time to make the hourly train.

“Good meeting today.”

“Yes, it was - and a pleasure as always. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Have a safe trip home.”

As the car speeds off, taking the second exit at the roundabout as smoothly as Scalextric, and becomes a navy dot in the distance I find myself thinking again what a funny man he is, and how surprised I am that I like him. But it only crosses my mind for a second - that and the realisation that the best of the sun has gone for the day, and maybe the week too. And then I have to make a move myself and catch my train so I scuttle in the direction of the terminal building past the yellow-jacketed workmen, houmous-powered, drilling through the tarmac.

The brace position

We were driving back from the dentist and Kelly was telling me all about her plans to finally fix her wayward bottom teeth, provided it wasn’t too expensive and didn’t involve having a brace on her top teeth.

“Didn’t I hear the dentist say it would cost two grand?” I said. I had been sitting on the red leather chesterfield vaguely eavesdropping on them talking in the next room. I was only partly concentrating on them and partly concentrating on my phone. I was also concentrating on the red leather chesterfield and thinking This is where your money goes when you have a private dentist. And it was today’s paper - The Mail, but today’s paper none the less - and all the magazines were recent, too, no exposés from last summer dressed up as this spring’s news. But I was at least slightly listening to the sounds through the door, because something about hearing my wife’s voice in the next room always feels like the most reassuring radio station in the world.

My dentist is a tired looking man who’s been looking after my teeth since I was sixteen; I hope to goodness those two facts are unconnected. I used to go to see him with my mum, and when I got a clean bill of health – which I always did – my mother would take me to the delicatessen opposite and I would pick out a huge slice of chocolate fudge cake, topped with a substantial crust of icing, to reward myself for my good fortune. Back in those days I was always nervous even though I knew that deep down I had nothing to fear. The deli may have closed and my mother might be distant, but that feeling has stayed with me all my life; countless presentations, performance reviews and conversations I’ve been dreading are testimony to that.

When I took up smoking I was so ashamed of my teeth that I didn’t go and see him for years, but now those days are over I am much more relaxed about it. Anyway, he’s less intimidating than the dental hygienists - they are the ones who can make you feel as if you are a matter of weeks away from your gums turning to purple mulch and all your teeth coming out if you nod your head too vigorously. I wonder if they get special training for that. In any case, on this visit he prodded, scrutinised, and told me I had nothing to worry about, at least not this time. (“You don’t have bad teeth at all.” he said. “Not for a grinder, anyway.”) I said I should get round to making an appointment with the hygienist in a way which suggested it was a long way down my priority list, possibly tucked underneath taking up yoga or a wheat free diet. “Good luck with that.” was the response. “Our hygienist is harder to see than the Pope.”

“He said that two grand was the worst case scenario.” said Kelly as we pulled out of the car park, away from the grotty pub where my family had gone for a drink after badminton games when I was fifteen, during my parents’ desperate last attempt to hold their threadbare marriage together. My mum had been going through the motions and I don’t know which would have been sadder: if my dad knew that, or if he didn’t.

“Well, obviously we wouldn’t go for it if it cost that much.”

If I hadn’t said that Kelly might have done, but because I did I got that contrary look.

”We might do.”

“If you think I’m spending two grand on ‘improving you’ in that way…”

“Oh, because of course we never spend any money on improving you, do we?” The tone was light and playful but there was something unyielding beneath the surface, or would be if I pushed matters.

“All right, all right.” I said. I knew she was right, as usual. “You’ll have to let me take a picture of your wonky bottom teeth, so that if anyone at work asks me why we’re remortgaging the flat I can show it to them. Look at my wife, the uruk-hai I can say to them.”

That got a smile, to my relief. The roof was down, neither of us had a coat on and it was far too glorious a day to fall out about anything. I’ve been lucky for the last seven years because it’s nearly always like that, and the weather rarely has anything to do with it.

“Anyway, didn’t you hear everything we were saying?”

“No, not really. I made out bits and pieces, that’s all. I love your voice. You always sound so posh.”

That got a different kind of smile, a not-this-old-chestnut-again smile.

“I am not posh.” she said. It may not surprise you to hear that this riposte was delivered in a manner best described as posh.

“Do I need to remind you of the Christmas Eve incident again?”

I watched with a certain satisfaction as her brows knitted ever so slightly into a smooth but recognisable frown.

It happened one Christmas Eve and we had been out in town with my friend Laura. The topic of Kelly’s poshness – one of those popular discussion topics that comes up every now and again – had been a major theme of the evening and Kelly had spent much of the night denying it as usual. You could have printed bingo cards with the stock phrases Kelly always came up with by way of rebuttal. “I grew up in a two bedroom house, with my mum in one room and my three sisters and me in the other.” she would always say, along with “I’m working class!”, “My mum was on the social and used to work in the chip shop.” and her personal favourite, “She didn’t have central heating until after I moved out.” If Kelly was really pulling out the stops she might mention the way her mother used to liberate unwanted vegetables from the pallet outside the greengrocer, but she saved that for special occasions.

Although I knew all of this was technically all true, Laura and I made eye contact and I raised a quizzical eyebrow. Laura, as it happens, was living in her parents’ palatial abode in one of the most desirable parts of the suburb I grew up in, a house with a long drive and pillars outside the front door. We made constant jokes that her postal address began with “The West Wing”, which she always denied. And yet, if you didn’t know anything about their backgrounds and you just heard their beautiful, accentless voices you could think they met at the same finishing school.

At the end of the night, we found ourselves rushing to get Laura on the last bus home because taxis on Christmas Eve out to the greenest edges of town cost enough to buy presents for several relatives, even by Laura’s lavish standards. It was a race against time as we sped up from a walk to a speedier walk and – for the closing stages – into a bizarre kind of jog, a six foot tall man and two women taller still racing through the streets towards the station. We got to the stop just as the bus pulled up and, within earshot of all the festive revellers waiting to get on board (most of them far more full of seasonal cheer than anybody ought to be) Kelly came out with an exclamation which has since passed into legend.

“Hurrah! Hurrah!”

“Sorry, and you say you’re not posh?” I said. Laura tried not to laugh out loud, and failed. It may have been the best present I got that year.

Not long after, as penance, Kelly got a t-shirt printed. On the front, in purple letters, it said “I’M NOT POSH”. Only when you saw the back print did you spot the letters “HURRAH! HURRAH!” arcing along her shoulders. She used to wear it at badminton matches, and I enjoyed standing behind her, looking at a constant reminder that she could laugh at herself. After that it got relegated to nightwear, and eventually it was thrown out. But her ability to laugh at herself has stayed, and her lips broadened into a smile.

“No, you don’t need to remind me of the Christmas Eve incident.”

There was no weariness, not even faux weariness, just a comfortable call and response. The car zipped along the suburban roads, tree-lined, with wide pavements, an area both of us liked driving through but agreed we could never live in.

“Shall we go to the pub when we get home, sit outside, have a pint of cider and maybe play some cribbage?”

“Yes, that sounds like a cracking idea.”

When she smiled, I got a good look at her bottom teeth in the rear view mirror. They looked pretty near perfect to me.

Women, mothers

My acupuncturist April’s latest wheeze is that I should consider a wheat free diet. She tells me this as I lie on my back on the couch, feeling the needles go in one by one - or rather not feeling them, but knowing they are going in all the same, it‘s a very hard sensation to describe - staring off in the general direction of the high ceiling above. I have to ask her to repeat herself a couple of times. Sometimes this happens because I can’t make out her accent, but this time it’s because I can’t quite believe it. I avoid laughing, partly because I know it would be bad manners but mainly because I think it’s unwise to mock somebody when they’re in the middle of sticking sharp objects in you. Not unless that’s what you’re into, anyway.

“I think it would involve too many changes.” I say, beginning mentally to tot up all the things I’ve eaten which would be off limits. I stop at the beginning of the previous day, because by then it’s crystal clear that a life without wheat would be no fun at all.

“Oh no, it’s very good. I have a lot of clients who have given up wheat and they all tell me what a difference it’s made. For someone like you, whose stomach is very weak, it could really help.”

I note that April hasn’t told me she has given up wheat herself. Although she may be loosening up a little; earlier in the same session she told me, with a glee I found charming, that she had discovered strawberry flavoured Swedish cider. “It’s very good.” she said, “But one bottle gets me really drunk.” From what I imagine about April’s regime, sniffing the neck of an open bottle would probably be enough to tip her over the edge.

I try to imagine the life of someone who gives up wheat, but it’s just not happening. If wheat was such a bad thing, would they really refer to people who can’t eat it as “intolerant”? After all, nobody gets described as “poison intolerant”, do they? I think about all those labels you could give people: mugging intolerant, earthquake intolerant. No, it doesn’t work. A wheat-free life is something I associate with going without, with the special sections of the supermarket full of alternatives to things, the sections nobody shops in unless they have to. It seems rude to say no outright, so I say what I always say to April when she suggests a drastic and unpalatable change to my lifestyle.

”I’ll think about it.”

“You should go home and ask your wife.” she says, which makes me wonder whether I’ve done a very good job of portraying my wife in the pleasant chats April and I have during acupuncture sessions. It seems rude to point this out too, so instead I bite my tongue and let the moment pass. That’s easily done, because we’re reaching the point in proceedings when the smalltalk stops. April swings the heat lamps over and they gently radiate comfort in the direction of my belly, like a concentrated burst of summer, and she moves further up, peppering my arms with tiny spikes. But my eyes aren’t even open by then, the sunlight streaming in from the big sash window just bounces off my eyelids. All I can feel is the warmth, all I can hear is the sound of the sea playing on her tiny stereo, and it’s as if I melt into the couch.

* * *

I always sit upright for my conversations with Ann Marie, and I’ve usually been to the pub first. It started because the bus drops me off at twenty to six, and I visit her at six, and it wasn’t quite enough time to pop home and change. And the Lyndhurst was so welcoming, so tastefully lit, and it was summer and there was just enough time to nurse a half at one of the outside tables and decide what to say, so I stopped there one day straight off the bus which conveniently stops right outside. It hardened into a habit, the way these things often do.

It’s been two years, and I don’t really know Ann Marie any better than I did on day one. I know that isn’t the nature of the conversations that we have, but it’s still strange to rattle on about your life to somebody and for it all to be so one-way. Occasionally, when the time is up, there is something like smalltalk but never for long. One time, I discovered that she was from Baltimore – I would never have placed her accent in a million years, so this was a useful piece of information to place in a very small file which was unlikely ever to get much bigger. “It’s not all like The Wire” she told me, with a small and uncharacteristic smile.

Some of our conversations career headlong towards the end and I feel like I could be there all night, feeling cheated when they finish. Some by contrast are painfully slow, trying to work out where to go next. Some days I don’t make any sense to me, so I’m not sure how it could make sense to anybody else. Some days I am bored, or boring, or both, or I catch myself talking about things I’m sure I’ve said before in exactly the same way and I get echoes of echoes of déjà vu, like being in a hall of mirrors. Some days I am so frustrated that what is supposed to be progress can feel so little like it. But she often finds a different angle or a killer question, and when she does she lights up a corner of my life I’ve been struggling to see into.

One time, we were talking about the situation with my mother, the one I don’t talk about much with everyone else. This was last year, when things were much less closed off than they are now, when everything was going to go wrong but none of us completely knew it yet. My mother had sent me another of those mails she specialises in, the short spiky message in which it was all my fault and I was invited, again, to apologise. They were all variations on that theme, at the time. It was like a weather forecast; sometimes they was angry, sometimes they were sad, then they went through another angry phase and finally there was nothing at all.

“What are you going to do?”

I knew the answer to this one. This was an easy question; I’d been thinking about it in the pub, had it all worked out.

“I‘m not sure. I suppose I could reply going into all the detail of why that’s wrong, putting my side of it again, line by line. There’s so much in there though that I think I might never stop, and it will make me angry, and it’s all been said before. Or I could say that it’s not something I want to discuss again, I could reply saying there’s no point in raking it over. Or I could sit on it for a few weeks, see how I feel.”

There was a long pause, and I could almost see her digesting what I’d said, chewing on ideas. She’s good at that, and the pauses are just long enough that you don’t know whether to volunteer more. I wonder what admissions she wrings from people in those extra split seconds of silence. Then she spoke.

“What’s your gut reaction?”

The ball had come back across the net at blinding speed and all I had time to do was stick my racquet in front of my face and watch it bounce off.

“My gut reaction is to tell her to piss off.”

One thing I’ve learned from these conversations is that I am not good at gut reactions, not in touch with them at all. I like to weigh things up, don’t like being on the spot. Sometimes she asks me how I feel about something, and I’ll tell her, and there’s a pause and a different kind of smile.

“Is that how you feel, or what you think?”

I think I can’t tell the difference. Or is that how it feels?

And when we talk about the relationship between my body and my mind, I wonder if there is a relationship at all. It’s civil rather than cordial if there is one. I’ve always been cerebral, and when my body goes wrong I don’t feel like it’s on the same side as my mind at all. Often my body feels like just another car I haven’t learned to drive. Anybody who watches me try to dance, or break into a run to get across a busy street before the lights change, would be tempted to agree.

Our latest conversation is drawing to an end and I say something about being lazy.

“Would you say you’re lazy then?” she asks me.

”Yes.” I say, without any hesitation. I can’t even be bothered to dress it up.

* * *

There have been adverts everywhere about Mother’s Day. I note them ruefully, and hear people at work talking about weekend plans. Mother’s Day’s one of those universal celebrations – either you’ve got one, you are one, or you’re married to one, and they’ve pretty much got you every way. It seems odd to tell my friends I’m not doing anything special. At the end of the working week I take a walk through town and stop at the card shop, buy something suitable - not too mushy, not in poor taste, and write it sitting on a bench outside the department store. I check the last collection on the postbox and calculate that it has a fair chance of getting there on time, and in it goes. Then I go off to the pub, something I’m pretty sure that most of the women in my life would not approve of.

On Sunday, the phone rings. It’s my mother-in-law.

“Thank you for my card!”

“That’s all right, it made it then?”

“Yes, it arrived yesterday but I didn’t open it. I knew it would probably be for today. And thanks for my presents too, the book and the CD.”

Obviously they were Kelly’s idea, and I will hand her over to Kelly in due course and she’ll hopefully say the same things to her, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m enjoying the conversation. We chat away about my ailments, and her day yesterday with her granddaughters, and I tell her about our Saturday in London, arranged on the spur of the moment because we can.

“You’ll have to email me a photo of your new sofa.”

“I will Rose, don’t worry.”

I’ll need to, if she’s going to see it, because she doesn’t come to Reading if she can possibly avoid it. She’s not a confident driver, and she regards our one-way system as the outermost circle of hell. It was easier when we lived at the old place, next to the river. The directions would go like this: drive from Oxford to Reading and turn left just before the first big roundabout that sends you into a cold sweat. We’re on the right. And Rose could do that, but when we moved closer to the centre of town, many confusing roundabouts away from there, it started to get more difficult.

The first time Rose tried to find our new flat unaided we tidied everything, put the kettle on and got some nice food in. She was late, but that’s fine, because she’s always late. Usually late setting off, too - my in-laws make plans at the last minute if they make them at all, something which drives me to distraction. When the phone rang half an hour after she was due to arrive, Kelly picked it up and all I could hear was her impatiently asking question after question, trying to work out where Rose had wound up in her ancient Rover. She was round the back of the big shopping mall in town, right next to the depot where they delivered all the goods. Piecing things together, it soon became apparent that my mother-in-law had driven the wrong way round most of the one way system. As if Reading wasn't a hair-raising enough place for motorists already.

The second time, she brought my sister-in-law and a satnav to ensure that history didn’t repeat itself. All it meant was that history repeated itself as farce. Just as before, the phone rang half an hour late, and I was treated to the spectacle of Kelly trying to navigate her mother through the one way system, like ground control talking someone through landing a plane when the pilot has died in mid-air. Even from my spot, puzzled on the sofa, I could hear the noise of my mother-in-law having a stand-up row with her own satnav. We gave up on getting her to the flat unaided after that - instead, we would drive over to my old flat and wait there for her to arrive. She would pull up outside an address I haven’t lived in for years, and I would get out of the car, jump into her passenger seat and direct her through the roundabouts and lanes. With my navigational skills, the road awareness of a natural born pedestrian, it was always a case of the blind leading the blind.

All my in-laws are country types. For Rose’s sixtieth birthday, her daughters took her to London for a minibreak. It was a surprise, they planned it without her knowing and just told her to pack a bag and take a couple of days off work. They stayed in a hotel together, had dinner off Leicester Square, they went to a concert. It was Billy Ocean, because my in-laws all love Billy Ocean; they had t-shirts printed and everything. I remember that Kelly’s said “BILLY OCEAN FLOATS MY BOAT”, another one said “GET OUT OF MY DREAMS, GET INTO MY CAR”. I like to think he would have done it, too, even if it had involved taking a red Rover the wrong way round Reading’s one way system. They went on the London Eye the next day, and took tea at the Ritz and Rose even let the girls take photos, which was a great compliment because she detests having her photo taken. I told people at my office, and they all said things like “what a lovely surprise”, and then I hit them with the sucker punch: it was the first time Rose had ever been to London.

We chunter away quite merrily and Kelly, painting her nails on the sofa, looks up, happy but in no hurry to take the receiver off me. It’s Mother’s Day, after all, and we all need one.

“Do you want to talk to Kelly?”

“I suppose I better had, or she’ll only get jealous won’t she.”

“Yes, I bet she would, she’s a bit like that. Okay then Rose. Love you, bye!”

“Love you, bye!”

Marks out of ten

The dynamic at work is constantly changing. Manga Dave is gone, off travelling before he returns to the country in the autumn. When he gets back the best of the weather we haven’t had yet will be gone. He will be living in London and working for a management consultancy, picking up his security pass and handing in his soul on his first day in the office. In the meantime, we get the occasional email from an internet café in LA or Australia, drenched with sunshine, reeking of good times and making us all feel drab and envious. I’m sure he is regularly tagged in Facebook photos, grinning in a vest on a beach somewhere and holding a beer bottle up to the blazing sun, young enough to think he has all the time in the world.

In his place, Clare has started joining us around the table at lunchtimes. She took a while to find her feet in our group dynamic, but she’s settling in nicely. She’s warm, funny, and human - not ashamed, like the rest of us, to admit that she’s having a shit day or would rather be at home reading a trashy novel or loafing in front of the telly. None of us like people who are on message all the time, they get found out and blackballed for lunch club very quickly. Clare only has a few foibles that we’ve worked out so far – the main one being a slight compulsion about obsessive cleaning. She has her own set of wipes, her desk always gleams and at the end of every day you could look at it and think nobody has sat there at all. If she took a close look at my keyboard I think she’d have palpitations.

She’s also a single girl about town. I’ve always thought single people are a lot more interesting than people in couples; they’re still trying, still making an effort and they always have interesting stories for those of us who like living vicariously – which is most of us. You get just enough excitement or embarrassment that you can remember what being single is like, but never so much that you feel wistful for the fact that those days are gone. If you ever want to feel happy about being attached, whatever your partner is like, just go on your own to a town centre pub at nine o’clock on a Saturday night. Even on the rare days when your other half is really getting on your nerves, it always works.

Anyway, it all started at lunch earlier this week when Clare made the mistake of telling us she’d got lucky at the weekend. After she broke the news, Iain and I shared a conspiratorial wink and Gemma beamed, clearly smug because she’d already been given all the gory details in one of those girly chats the rest of us aren’t privy to.

“So, what base did you get to? Second base, third base, home run?”

I was going easy on Clare because she’s still relatively new. Six months further down the line, I would be asking for a running commentary, or diagrams.

“Oh, we went all the way.” said Clare. This was so much more candour than I was used to; by contrast, Gemma was always extremely cagy about everything. It quite threw me off my stride for a moment, but I soon recovered.

“So who’s the lucky man?” I said. “Was this a nightclub conquest?”

“No. I’ve known him since I was sixteen, he’s an old friend of mine.”

“Oh, he’s definitely always fancied you then.”

“He has not! We’ve hung out together for ages and nothing like this has ever happened.”

“That’s not how men work, take it from me. I bet you he’s had a thing for you for years.”

Gemma looked on in disdain.

”You always say this, this is your theory that all men fancy all women yet again.” Those last two words were said with a worrying combination of boredom and exhaustion. How long had Gemma felt this way about my lunchtime repertoire?

“I’m just saying that men don’t make friends with women if they think they’re minging. It doesn’t happen. I don’t have any unattractive women friends, for example.”

“None at all?” said Iain, with evident scepticism. I decided to give it a bit more consideration - after all, this wasn’t a time for rash and unsupported arguments. There were important matters of sexual politics to discuss, and it deserved a measured and temperate response.

“All right, I suppose I’ve got a few rough friends. There’s one, for example, who I wouldn’t sleep with if my cock was on fire and her fanny was an ice bucket. But in those cases, they must fancy me instead: my theory still holds.”

“This theory of yours is total bollocks.” said Gemma.

“All right, you might not fancy them per se, but there’s always some kind of spark of attraction. Back me up here, Iain.”

Even my conversational use of Latin hadn’t worked; Iain was showing no interest whatsoever in getting dragged into the conversation, which I thought was rather disappointing of him. He certainly behaved very differently during the laddish chats which Clare and Gemma weren’t privy to. So much for male solidarity.

”No, I really don’t think so.”

“Oh come off it Iain, look at your friend Catriona. You definitely fancy her. Come to think of it, do you have any unattractive lady friends?”

Catriona and Iain went to university together and she swings by his desk about twice a day. Whenever she does Iain perks up considerably - but every time we point this out he then says “but she’s just a friend” in that hollow way which seems mainly designed to convince himself rather than us. It doesn’t even achieve that, if appearances are anything to go by.

“Well, I suppose I have one. But I definitely don’t fancy her.”

“And has she ever fancied you?”

Iain stopped, thought for a moment, looked peeved.

”Well, technically yes. But both times I slept with her were a mistake.”

“See!” I said, triumphant, “It completely proves my theory. Besides, all men do this. When we meet a woman for the first time we instinctively give them a mark out of ten, and if it’s good we also think about what they’d be like in the sack. Don’t we, Iain?”

Iain took in exactly what I was saying and decided he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

“Sorry, you’re on your own with this one.”

“So does that mean you’ve given Clare a mark out of ten? And me?” said Gemma, with all the trepidation of someone asking a question with no desire at all to hear the answer.

“Definitely. In fact Gemma, do you remember the day you came in for your interview?”

I remember it like it was yesterday. Gemma had been several years younger, very smartly dressed and keen to impress. My then boss walked her through the office and took her into the small glass room next to our desks and Phil and I desperately craned our necks, trying to work out if she was attractive. We were thwarted, because she was sitting with her back to us, but it didn’t stop us trying. Eventually we got a half decent look when she was on her way out, so we had to settle for that.

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Well there you go, we all gave you a mark out of ten that day. Iain would have too, if he hadn’t been out of the office that afternoon, he’s just too chicken to admit it.”

“You’ve gone wrong.” said Iain. “Men just don’t do this. Think about what you’re saying! I dread to think how your mind works. Does that mean you’ve given my wife a mark out of ten?”

I suddenly had an image of this conversation going horribly wrong, so it was time to make another convenient revision to my theory.

”Okay, obviously there are some exceptions. Your in-laws, for example, or family. But apart from that they’re all fair game.”

“Why do you always bring this up?” said Gemma.

“You just don’t like it because loads of your male friends fancy you and you’re in denial about it. Take Colin, for example.”

Colin was a friend of Gemma’s who I always thought had a bit of a thing for her. They hadn’t got together, mainly because of Gemma’s excellent boyfriend Dave, but knowing how men worked I still wouldn’t rule out Gemma having a prominent position in Colin’s wank bank.

“What about Colin?”

“Well come on, if you were single – let’s say Dave had some kind of tragic accident.”

“You can’t say that!” said Clare. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

“True, I’m sorry, I apologise. Say Dave was mysteriously in a coma – from which he would eventually recover, absolutely no harm done - and unable to attend to your sexual needs, are you really telling me Colin wouldn’t come round and offer you a shoulder to cry on?”

I knew this was just getting worse and worse, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I was on a kamikaze mission, determined to keep talking until my friends had run out of patience, and I had run out of friends.

“That’s disgusting.” said Gemma. “Colin’s got a girlfriend and I’m very happy with Dave.”

“Yeah, but if you were both single you’d be rutting like stags and we both know it.”

Silence filled the space between the four of us, and even I realised how much preferable it was to the sounds I had been making. It was time to head for our desks and face the afternoon. I had a feeling I had achieved the almost impossible; making my friends glad to be going back to work.

One thing was rankling with me though: I was convinced that Iain had let me down. Even though men aren’t supposed to give away the inner workings of the masculine mind – you might as well just show women the secret handshake and be done with it – I still thought he might have backed me up a little. I couldn’t resist an opportunity to put my theory to the test.

“Phil, can you settle an argument between me and Iain?”

“Yeah. What is it?”

“I say that men always give women a mark out of ten when we meet them for the first time, Iain says they don’t. What do you reckon?”

Phil paused, mulling it over, then he chuckled.

“It’s not that complicated mate, it’s a mark out of one. You decide whether you’d do them or not, that’s all there is to it. I mean, sometimes it takes longer than others – if you look at a pensioner you can work it out in a split second, in some cases you need to give it a bit more thought, but it never takes long. Iain definitely does it too.”

“I do not!”

”Yeah right, mate.” said Phil. “I’ve got one word to say to you: Catriona.”

“Oh fuck off.”

Revenge was sweet, and as we all headed down the corridor to make the first coffee of the afternoon I took great delight in telling Clare that Phil had proved my theory right.

“Oh, and Iain? I’ve had a call from the National Union of Men. They’ll be coming round to your house at half-six tonight in a pick-up truck to collect your testicles. Trust me, you won’t be giving anything a mark out of ten after that.”