Buch lesen: «Working It Out»

TWO

The telephone was ringing.

Slowly, very, very slowly, its insistent shrilling filtered through the syrupy mire of Johnathan Burlip’s sleeping brain. As consciousness arrived, he became aware not only of the telephone but also of a brutish throbbing just behind his eyes. He groaned, rolled inelegantly out of his bed, and tottered out of the bedroom. Barely awake, he picked up the phone and said,

‘Ugh.’

There was a pause. Then:

‘Bastard.’

Johnathan blinked. He swayed slightly. The throbbing was spreading from his eyes backwards into his brain and upwards to his temples, where it sat, deeply malignant, radiating pain. The clock in the hall seemed to suggest that it was six o’clock in the morning. He waited.

‘Bastardbastardbastard.’

Johnathan closed his eyes. It was Chloe.

‘Hello Chloe,’ he said.

‘Oh no you don’t. Oh no you bloody don’t. Don’t think for one minute that you’re going to sweet-talk your way out of this one. No way. Not this time. End of story. You’re history.’

‘OK,’ said Johnathan.

‘Look,’ said Chloe, ‘don’t even bother trying. It’s a waste of time. It won’t work. It’s pitiful, actually. You’re pathetic. You’re just a drivelly, snivelling pathetic man. God. I can’t believe this. At least have a bit of dignity.’

‘OK,’ said Johnathan.

‘I mean, Jesus. You killed my cat. You’re a murderer. I should report you to the police. The RSPCA. You are in serious trouble. Serious. You can just forget everything. How you can even ask me to contemplate having you back at this stage is beyond me.’

Johnathan woke up. He had asked no such thing, and nor was he going to. Best to make that clear right away. ‘You’re right,’ he said quickly. ‘I killed your cat. I killed Troilus. I am a murderer. I am vermin. You wouldn’t want to see me again even if I was the last person on the planet.’

Chloe’s tone softened. ‘This self-hate is not good for you,’ she said. ‘You’ve always had low self-esteem. It’s not going to get you anywhere. You need to look at yourself in a more positive light. You do have some good qualities.’

Johnathan started to hop up and down in agitation. This was not going according to plan. ‘I killed Troilus,’ he reminded her.

Chloe sighed. ‘I know. I don’t pretend to understand why. You were looking for a form of externalizing your emotions, you wanted to project your frustrations. You were caught up in the sub-luminous ego strata.’

Johnathan frowned. ‘What?’ he said.

‘But you have a problem. You’re angry about something. You should try and talk about it. You need professional help. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I go all the time. It’s been enormously uplifting, just to be able to share my problems with a sympathetic ear. Voicing my hopes and fears out loud helps them to crystallize within me. I come out more fulfilled, more rounded. More me.’

More fucking nutty, thought Johnathan blackly.

‘Chloe,’ he said after a few moments. ‘It’s over, isn’t it?’

‘God, don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. It’s never over. Things are never that bad. Christ. Things are worse than I thought. You must snap out of it, Johnathan. Come back from the edge. Take a step back and see the better you.’ Chloe’s reedy voice rose a few pitches with excitement.

Johnathan sighed. ‘No, not that. Us. You and me. We’re over. Finished. Aren’t we?’

‘Oh,’ said Chloe, the disappointment audible. ‘I see.’

‘I mean,’ said Johnathan reasonably, ‘I did kill your cat.’

Chloe thought about this. ‘We all have our moments of madness. The insuperable super-ego plays its trump card.’

‘But surely you must hate me now,’ said Johnathan hopefully.

‘Hate? What is hate, at the end of the day?’

‘Listen,’ said Johnathan quickly, keen not to get side-tracked. ‘You’re obviously still very upset. I understand that. You need some time alone. I’m sorry to have caused you so much grief. I understand if you’ll never want to see me again,’ he said.

‘Sweetie,’ cooed Chloe. ‘You’re being terribly hard on yourself–’

‘But I must, I must,’ cried Johnathan, and slammed the receiver down. He stood still for a few moments, dazed, wobbling slightly with queasiness and sleep. His mouth felt as if a herd of camels had surreptitiously crapped in it during the night.

He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge door, squinting against the anaemic glow of the electric fridge light, which felt as if it was burning holes in his retinas. There was no bottled water left. Of course there wasn’t: he had drunk it all when he had arrived home last night, hoping to stave off the mother of all hangovers. The empty bottle lay on its side near the bin. Johnathan dispiritedly took a glass and filled it with warm, slightly opaque liquid from the tap.

Chloe was addicted to self-help manuals. She could speak meaningless psycho-babble fluently, in several different dialects. She could analyse your dreams, tell you how to give up smoking or lose weight by meditation, determine what was the right job for you, and offer potted highlights of all of the world’s leading religions. Johnathan had had enough of her hectoring, if well-meaning, didacticism. All he wanted was to be left alone. It was extremely trying to have one’s numerous weaknesses pointed out and dissected at every available opportunity.

One of these weaknesses, it transpired, was spinelessness. Johnathan had decided some months ago that he could not take any more of Chloe’s banalities, but since then had done nothing until his contretemps with Troilus the previous evening. With anyone other than Chloe the best way to end matters would have been to explain gently that it was time to move on, sorry, and there are plenty more fish in the sea, and it’s not you, it’s me, and I just don’t deserve you, and so on. Johnathan realized that this approach would not work with Chloe: she would somehow manage to twist his words back on themselves and he would in all probability find himself engaged. Instead he had attempted a more oblique approach. In the lowest, slyest way possible, he did everything he could to make life for Chloe so unbearable that she would feel obliged to dump him.

One of the difficulties with this, however, was that he would find himself blinking in disbelief at Chloe’s equanimity as she calmly accepted his most outrageous and offensive behaviour with a brief shrug. Chloe clung on to the relationship with the tenacity of a pit-bull terrier. An entire section of her library was dedicated to Resolving Your Differences, Making that Love Work for You!, Talking it Through, and so on. Johnathan realized that there was a long, long way to go before she had exhausted the remedies available on her bookshelf.

Chloe’s refusal to accept the obvious was the principal reason for Troilus’s fate the previous evening. It had been in many respects a political execution, Troilus no more than a hapless pawn in an altogether more complex game. Johnathan had finally had enough. He had never knowingly killed anything before, apart from the odd mosquito or bath-trapped spider, but couldn’t find it in him to feel much remorse. Troilus was only a cat, after all.

Johnathan went back to the bedroom and retreated under the duvet. Eventually he drifted off into a restless sleep, merciful respite from his aching head. He had not been asleep for long, though, when the telephone erupted once more. Cursing, he walked out into the hall.

Johnathan regarded the telephone suspiciously. He looked at his watch. It was now eight-thirty. It had to be Chloe. The ringing seemed to be getting louder. It felt as if someone was jabbing a needle into his ear. Finally he picked up the receiver, bracing himself.

‘OK you crazy bitch,’ he said. ‘I’m ready.’

There was a discreet cough. ‘Hello darling.’

His mother.

‘Oh. Hi,’ he mumbled. ‘Thought you were someone else.’

‘We’re just off out of the door for this festival in Cardiff, so I thought I’d give you a ring.’

‘Right.’

‘So how are you?’ asked his mother breezily.

‘Fine.’

There was a slight pause. ‘You sound a bit put out, darling. Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I didn’t wake you up, did I?’

‘Well, yes, actually, you did,’ said Johnathan as equably as he could.

‘But it’s such a beautiful day,’ said his mother. ‘How can you bear to spend it all in bed?’

‘I wasn’t going to spend it all in bed. I was just having a well-deserved lie in,’ replied Johnathan, aware of the disapproval emanating silently down the line but too hungover to care.

‘And what,’ continued his mother, ‘are you up to this weekend?’

‘All the usual chores,’ said Johnathan. ‘Washing, ironing, that sort of thing. You know me. Glamour glamour glamour.’

‘Oh. If you didn’t have anything special planned you could have come with us. Too late now, though.’

‘Oh well,’ said Johnathan, brightening slightly.

‘It should be absolutely fascinating,’ continued his mother. ‘They’re putting on a lesbian Macbeth, in Welsh.’

‘I see,’ said Johnathan. There was a long pause.

‘Anyway, darling, we must dash if we’re going to miss the traffic. I’ll give you a call early next week. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

Johnathan thought about his parents on their way to their latest jaunt in Wales. To them, culture was a commodity which could be acquired and traded. His parents patronized (in both senses of the word) a stable of unknown artists, whose works hung throughout their cluttered North London home. They invested speculatively but without aesthetic discrimination in the hope that one day the painters would become hugely important and their paintings hugely valuable. Some of the paintings were all right, others were capable of inducing powerful migraines. One looked like an ink-blot test given to deranged children from dysfunctional families. Others looked as if they’d been painted by the children who did the ink-blot tests.

Johnathan’s parents firmly believed that there was a direct correlation between culture and society: the higher the culture, the higher the society. Put another way, the more impenetrable the culture, the more impenetrable the posh accents. They liked to surround themselves with creative people. They knew artists, musicians and writers of varying pedigree, members of the Hampstead authordoxy. They knew a lot of women called Hermione. They were so highbrow their foreheads were permanently stuck to the ceiling.

Johnathan, however, was a solicitor, and was therefore a considerable disappointment to his parents. It was not something they could drop into conversation with any hope of carving further notches on the bedpost of artistic pretension. ‘My son the solicitor,’ didn’t have quite the same ring about it as ‘My son the bleak playwright’, or ‘My son the post-modern poet’.

Johnathan, though, suspected that he had an even greater failing in his parents’ eyes. He was straight. He liked girls. He was incontrovertibly heterosexual.

There wasn’t anything specific he could put his finger on to justify his suspicion, but the cumulative circumstantial evidence seemed compelling. He had been encouraged with his dried flower collection from an early age. For his fourteenth birthday he had received a copy of Joe Orton’s diaries, and was earnestly told that it represented a viable lifestyle choice. His parents always looked rather crestfallen when he introduced them to new girlfriends. Worst of all, though, they had added an ‘h’ to his name.

Johnathan’s extra ‘h’ had been a source of irritation and inconvenience for as long as he could remember. Nobody except for his parents knew quite why it was there, squatting like an uninvited guest in the middle of his first name. Every credit card, chequebook, and bill missed out his ‘h’. The only people who ever spelled his name correctly were the promotions department at Readers’ Digest who regularly tried to entice him into entering the Biggest Prize Draw Ever. He had grown accustomed to watching people frown slightly as they looked at his business card, while they tried to work out what was wrong with it. Johnathan had become convinced that his parents had burdened him with the redundant consonant to show that their son was somehow different. Well, maybe he was, but not that different.

Sexually Johnathan had grown up in a drearily unspectacular way. He finally managed to lose the millstone of virginity during his first, parent-free, week at university in the traditionally messy and awkward way. He was leerily propositioned by an unattractive and very drunk biochemistry postgraduate in the college bar, and woke in her bed the next morning experiencing elation, disgust, and a splitting headache. After that Johnathan had failed to have proper sex with anyone else until he had left university.

Johnathan remembered that there was a bottle of aspirin in the bathroom. His hangover was clearly too sophisticated to be dealt with simply by way of sleep. Something chemical was required. He sloped off to the bathroom, took three pills, and went into the kitchen.

Johnathan switched on his espresso machine, which soon began to chugger and whoosh and gurgle in a way more soothing than any mother’s heartbeat. He had never really stopped to consider his relationship with his coffee machine from a Freudian perspective. It was certainly closer than the one he enjoyed with his mother.

When the little yellow light on the machine clicked itself off, Johnathan flicked the switch and watched as the twin nozzles which hung beneath the matt black belly of the machine began to trickle thick, black liquid into the waiting cup. A few seconds later, the cup was full. Johnathan lifted it to his nose and breathed in deeply, relishing the espresso’s aroma. He sighed a small sigh, and then tipped the contents of the cup down his throat in two quick movements, rather as if he was taking medicine. Johnathan shut his eyes for a few moments, and allowed his mind to go blank. Then he opened them again, and switched the coffee machine back on. Round two.

Some hours later, fully caffeined-up and a few chores to the good, Johnathan sat on his sofa watching a children’s Saturday morning television show. His hangover had slowly cranked itself up to full throttle at around ten o’clock but since then had been winding down so that now it only hurt when he moved or thought. Watching children’s television required him to do neither.

Johnathan’s dog, Schroedinger, was asleep next to him on the sofa, his head resting peacefully in Johnathan’s lap. Nobody knew exactly what unlikely communion had produced him. He looked like the result of a bizarre experiment where a Scottie had mated with a porcupine.

When first-time visitors to the flat met Schroedinger, the conversation always followed the same course with an inevitability which Johnathan had begun to resent.

Visitor: Ah, what’s his name.

Johnathan (gloomily, for he knows what is to come): Schroedinger.

Visitor (frowning): You can’t call a dog Schroedinger.

Johnathan: Why not?

Visitor: Well, you know, Schroedinger’s Cat.

Johnathan (peevishly): Yes?

Visitor: So. It would be all right for a cat, but not for a dog.

Johnathan (testily): But the cat wasn’t called Schroedinger. The cat belonged to Schroedinger. Sort of.

Visitor: Yes?

Johnathan: So, logically, a cat is the last creature you would call Schroedinger.

Visitor (uncertainly): Because.

Johnathan: Because cats don’t own cats.

Visitor: Are you telling me that your dog owns a cat?

Johnathan: No of course not–

Visitor: Well then.

Johnathan:–all I’m saying is that, logically, it makes more sense to call a dog Schroedinger than a cat.

Visitor (unconvinced): But Schroedinger’s Cat.

Johnathan: OK, take another example. Take a Rubik’s cube.

Visitor (unsure where this is leading): OK.

Johnathan: Well, you obviously wouldn’t call a Rubik’s cube ‘Rubik’, would you, because we all know that’s the name of the chap who invented it.

Visitor: ?

Johnathan: Look, if you’re going to be picky, Schroedinger’s Cat was dead anyway.

Visitor (cleverly): Ah, but that’s the point. We don’t know that.

It was on days like this that Johnathan was relieved that Schroedinger was, if anything, lazier than he was. He was not the sort of dog which insists on dragging its owner for a brisk tour around all the interesting piles of dog shit in the area within five minutes of its owner’s first bleary-eyed appearance in the morning, and Johnathan loved him dearly for it. Schroedinger preferred to remain in the relative tranquillity of Johnathan’s small garden, where he could relax and defecate at leisure.

Johnathan sat back and sighed. He stared up at the ceiling and considered the weekend that lay ahead. His fridge was presently home to a half-empty jar of mayonnaise and an onion. His entire week’s washing lay crumpled at the foot of his bed.

He decided to slip out to do his weekend shop at the local store. Gently he pushed Schroedinger’s head off his lap and stood up. Schroedinger wagged the stump where his tail should have been, and yawned at Johnathan’s disappearing back.

When Johnathan returned home, having bought some fantastically expensive baked beans and a pre-sealed pack of bacon, his answer-phone was winking at him. Chloe, he thought. He put down his shopping and debated whether or not he was feeling sufficiently robust of spirit to listen to the message. Finally he pressed the little red button. The tape whizzed back and crackled into action. There was a beep.

‘Hi, it’s Topaz. Could you give me a ring as soon as you get in, if you’re back today? You could just be a life saver. OK. Hope to hear from you later. Ciao.’

Johnathan’s heart leaped, and then sank again. He knew at once what Topaz wanted. Someone must have turned down her dinner party invitation, and she was one short for the night. Few things were as important to Johnathan’s friends as getting the boy-girl-boy-girl seating arrangements just so at their dinner parties. Absences were not tolerated kindly. Johnathan had, by accident rather than design, carved a niche amongst his circle of acquaintances as a last-minute social substitute extraordinaire. He rarely had any social engagements of his own and so was always available to turn up on short notice and make up numbers. Unfortunately he had proved himself so reliable in this capacity that people had stopped inviting him to dinner parties at all, just in case anybody dropped out. His social life therefore depended upon other people falling ill, breaking promises, or suffering unforeseen mishaps. When things went according to plan, Johnathan was redundant. When things went wrong, he was a hero. Johnathan knew how members of the medical profession felt.

Still, he told himself, it was Topaz. At least she was thinking of him, if only as a last resort.

Topaz was the sort of girl Johnathan had dreamed about meeting for years. Now that he had, he found himself awake in the middle of a nightmare. They had met some years previously at the birthday party of a mutual friend whom Johnathan had known at university. It had been a fancy dress party. The theme had been ‘The Empire’. Johnathan had, rather wittily he thought, gone as a mint imperial. He first met Topaz, who was dressed as Princess Leia from Star Wars, as he was coming out of the downstairs toilet. When she came out a few minutes later, Johnathan was still standing there, trying to reach a zip at the back of his costume. Topaz took pity on him, and helped. Fuelled by embarrassment and alcohol, Johnathan had misinterpreted this act of kindness as a clear indication that Topaz wished to go to bed with him, and later on the same evening he had clumsily propositioned her. Topaz, crushingly amused, had politely declined his offer. Instead she had kissed him lightly on the cheek and told him he was sweet. Despite the ‘sweet’ comment, they had remained friends.

She worked as a subeditor for a home furnishings and interior decorating magazine. She was independently wealthy, intelligent, and impossibly gorgeous. She was also not the slightest bit interested in Johnathan in a sexual context. Johnathan, on the other hand, was extremely interested in Topaz in a sexual context. She appeared to him in his dreams, usually either sitting naked in his kitchen slicing up cucumbers or emerging from the sea in a low-cut rubber wetsuit holding a large harpoon that had already shot its bolt. This unhealthy obsession had continued unabated throughout Johnathan’s other recent relationships. If anything, it had become worse. Topaz was a useful means of distracting Johnathan from Chloe’s relentless barrage of inanities, and he would frequently drift off into a lustful reverie while she jabbered on, which had on one occasion been awkward as he had been unable to explain why Chloe’s discourse on parachutes, and their colours, had produced a rather obvious erection. Chloe had begun to suspect that he was actually turned on by that stuff.

Johnathan had by now resigned himself to the fact that he would never summon up enough courage to ask Topaz whether she might consider taking their relationship beyond the merely platonic. He thought that perhaps initially there had been a flicker of interest from her, but now, nothing. Things were strictly platonic. Indeed, things were so platonic that Topaz felt able to regale Johnathan with stories of her sexual adventures with such attention to detail that it made him weep; not with sympathy or jealousy, but from the pain of his erection straining against his trousers.

It was a difficult position. He didn’t love her, or anything complicated like that. He was just desperate to go to bed with her. As he became more and more obsessed, her company became less and less bearable. Now, of course, with Chloe out of the way, there was no reason why he shouldn’t just ask her, but he knew that he was too much of a coward. He decided that he would rather suffer the priapic indignities of being her principal sexual confessor than run the risk of scaring her off completely. This sort of agonising pain was better than that sort of agonising pain.

Why? Johnathan asked himself as he picked up the phone. Why do I do this?