White City Blue Read online

  I paused, as if listening to myself. I was beginning to enjoy the effect.

  There’s a chance, actually, that it may not be subsidence. Because the bloke next door has a sound system that takes up most of a double bedroom. Tends to vibrate the walls a bit. He’s on holiday for a month. He’s quite a nice bloke, but a little stubborn, a little bit, how should I say? What’s the word? Psychopathic. Oh, and there’s dry rot starting in one corner of the roof. Dirty Bob’s leaving it to ripen for a while then you’re liable to quite a significant service charge. So, on the whole then, I think it’s probably not the best you could do, given your resources, lifestyle parameters and other such requirements.

  There was another long pause. Veronica tried to tug at a few strands of her hair, but it was really too short to get hold of. She was extraordinarily thin, but not unattractively so somehow. I liked thin women. Nothing against fatties, mind you. Tony loves ’em. Fair play for the chubby chasers. But I felt slightness, smallness made them more different from me. When you held them. I loved that difference.

  I tried to work out whether her hair was dyed or not. There were no roots showing, but that wasn’t proof of anything. Then, without the glimmer of a smile, but with a tiny drop in those heavy, sexy eyelids and a small series of understanding nods, she said, The feng shui is good, though?

  I shook my head.

  No. That’s fucked too.

  At this point she immediately let out a laugh, a high chuckle, or peal, quite different from the guttural, slightly saucy job she’d performed before. The stretched face stretched further, the fat little nose jiggled, the skin tone began to approach the chilli-pepper red of her hair. That nose just crucified me. I found myself laughing too, at first politely, then in gusts. We duetted; then it died down into a stillness. I could hear the Central Line train from the Shepherd’s Bush underground rumbling. That was another thing, but still…

  Would you like to have dinner with me? she said, just like that.

  Where? I said, quite taken aback by the question.

  Where? 1 don’t know. Maybe the new sushi bar.

  I shook my head again.

  There’s no sushi bar?

  She laughed again, caught me up in it once more. Still laughing, I drove her back to her work. We went out for the first time that Friday night.

  That was six months and two weeks ago. Of course, at that time I didn’t have the faintest idea of what was going to happen. I often manage to blag women while showing them flats – it’s something of the reflected glamour of the surroundings, something of the power it gives me, as if I actually owned all the places myself. But I did feel that she was special in some way. Not only in herself, but in her timing. Everything, and everyone, has a time; a person has to fit yours. So she was the right-enough woman, at the right-enough time. I vaguely sensed though never quite acknowledged then that I was getting weary of Colin, and Nodge, and Tony, and football, and the next kind of ethnic restaurant, and five-a-side, and pints and E and chop and drinking games and pulling and carrying on pretending that it was the best thing there was or could ever be, and that anything else was a lame compromise. I was weary of myself.

  Not that it hadn’t been great sometimes, and sometimes even now was. But more and more it felt like history that hadn’t yet found its way into the past. Stuck right there in the present, gumming everything up. You could tell, because history is what our meetings – Colin, Tony, Nodge and me – are getting to be about. Not that great spontaneous rap, that impro, of irony and sub-irony and sub-sub-irony, and dry wind-up and piss-take, that you can do when you’ve tapped the vein that runs between you, that can have you doubling up with laughter and the joy of having mates – the illicitness of it, the crudeness of it, the wonderful little-boy playfulness of it. No, not that, but, like I say, history, the immediate and distant past. What have you done? Where have you been? What have you seen? How was X when you saw her? How was that match you went to? Do you remember when? Too much of that now. Too much.

  After all, I was thirty years old – and there was a sense of this life fraying at the edges, smelling just slightly of decay, on the turn. She seemed ideal to… renew my world, so to speak, or to help me remake it into something not necessarily better, but different. Something with its own special tortures and irritations and boredoms and ringing, mocking laughters.

  I decided what I was going to do – to resolve the situation as it were – also, funnily enough, as a direct consequence of the showing of a property. A house in this case on the Shepherd’s Bush/Hammersmith border. It was probably a month after meeting Veronica, three weeks since we started ‘going out’, i.e. shagging each other. Perhaps – as Vronky would doubtless have it – there was synchronicity going on. I have to admit it was weird. But coincidence can be like that sometimes.

  The house was an end terrace on one of the streets near Brook Green. It was a nice little place actually, and no more ridiculously overpriced than any other property in that street. This time, the potential buyers had come to the office. They were ancient – in their sixties at least. One man, one woman, both of them well wrinkled up like a brace of Shar Pei. They drove behind me in the Beemer in some kind of joke crate – a Morris Minor, I think it was. I glanced up at the mirror and saw that one of them had their head back and was laughing fit to bust, while the other smiled and twinkled all over the place. That alone was unusual. Most of the ancients in my experience spent their time moaning and bitching at each other or sitting in dazed, indifferent silence.

  When we got there, the Morris pulled up slowly behind me. Then the man got out, walked round the car and opened the door for the woman, standing politely to one side as she got out. That was sweet, I thought. You don’t often see that nowadays. Oldies can be cute like that.

  I took them inside and gave them the basic spiel – lots of light, blah, nice and convenient for shops, blah, plenty of space, blah, good decorative order, blah blah blah. They didn’t seem to be listening, just very quietly walking around the house side by side, talking quietly to each other, one or the other chuckling gently from time to time. Their faces were unremarkable, though they both looked pretty fit I suppose, and lacked that faint accusatory air of pathos that so many nearlydeads had. The other odd thing was that they touched each other a lot – brushed against each other’s clothes, touched each other’s hands. It was sort of weird. I’d seen the same kind of thing at school in teenagers, but never among geris.

  I looked at my notes. Harry Butson and Maud Louise Coldstream. Anything around 300K. So what was with the Morris? Were they flakes, mincers? Were they even married? No. I was sure, somehow, that they were serious punters. Although their clothes were old and worn, they seemed somehow dignified and self-contained. And some of the jewellery that old Maud was wearing, although not at all flashy, somehow smelt of green. I can’t really explain it. When you’re an agent, you just learn to tell these things.

  Anyway, at one point I had to retreat upstairs for a pony in what I still often forgot to call a loo rather than a toilet, so I was gone for quite a long time, what with the Dhansak I’d had the previous night. When I came out something very weird was going on. I had to rub my eyes in order to get it straight.

  They were in the master bedroom – good proportions, 18 x 14, new carpet, fitted wardrobes – and, get this, they were stretched out on the bed kissing each other, which in itself is disturbing, but in this case it was with tongues. It sounds repulsive, I know, but in actual fact it was strangely touching. These ugly, old withered things behaving like… ordinary people, like the unafflicted.

  The man, who was lean and well spoken without seeming at all hoity-toity, noticed me come into the room. He smiled calmly in acknowledgement but didn’t seem remotely embarrassed. The woman – I swear, when I think of it, she was pushing seventy – then got up and started bouncing up and down on the bed.

  This should be able to take it, eh, Harry? she said, and winked at me.

  Maud is insatiable, said Harry, and the woman gave a big throaty giggle, then let herself fall backwards on to the mattress again.

  I actually felt myself blush, and Maud noticed and said kindly, Don’t worry about him, young man. He’s always pulling someone’s leg. Anyway, even if it were true, he’s not up to it any more, poor old dog. I sometimes think 1 shall have to start looking elsewhere for my entertainment.

  With this she shot me a look of such naked sauciness that I blushed still deeper. This time it was Harry who was laughing.

  They tottered up from the bed and Maud nearly seemed to fall. Harry immediately reached out for her and held her firmly by the arm until she’d straightened up again. The look of concern that suddenly replaced the look of merriment was… I don’t know. Touching, I suppose.

  They fidgeted around the house a bit more and then put an offer in, adding, however, that they wouldn’t be able to take possession for three months because they were going on a camping tour in the Far East. I assumed this was a joke, but it emerged that they were perfectly serious. Harry had just cashed in some big pension scheme on turning sixty-five and they were going to blow it all on ‘the pleasures of the Orient’, as Maud put it, with a wink.

  Somehow watching them put me in an altogether happier frame of mind than I had been in. When I thought of old people, I thought of my parents, or Diamond Tony’s or Colin’s, or Nodge’s – all of them indifferent to, or even contemptuous of each other. Then it suddenly occurred to me, perhaps it was one of those Autumn Romances you read about in Women’s Journal or whatever crap it was that my mum bought. Perhaps they’d got off with each other at the Darby and Joan club last week or something, and had had a bunk-up for the first time in thirty years.

  So as they were heading back to the Morris, I just had to ask. I wa
s shaking Harry’s hand, firm and confident just like Uncle Billy taught me, and I said, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but have you two been together long?

  Harry smiled.

  No, not really.

  I nodded, thinking, I knew it.

  Maud gave him a pinch on the shoulder.

  Not unless you consider thirty-five years a long time. We don’t, do we, Harry?

  Seems like a bloody long time. But he laughed as he said it.

  Then he did something extraordinary. He turned to me and put his arm round my shoulder. Not like he was a poof, but as if he had known me all my life or something. And oddly, it didn’t feel bad, or embarrassing. It felt like… like I’d always wished my dad would have felt like when he was alive. Had he ever put his hand on my shoulder, that is. Which he hadn’t.

  Then Harry said, quite clearly, but under his breath, A man should sign up, son, with the right woman. It’s the best life has to give. Don’t wait about like these silly sods nowadays. Get down to it.

  He squeezed my shoulder with his hand. It felt surprisingly strong.

  Is there anyone special for you, son?

  Well, maybe. There’s someone I’m thinking of.

  Is it serious?

  It’s a possibility, I suppose.

  I was surprised to hear myself say this.

  Well, don’t muck about. That’s the beginning and end of it.

  And then he was off in that silly, frog-faced Morris. Yet for some reason, his words floated around my head, came back to me in my dreams. Thinking how nice it would be, to be like old Harry and Maud, about a hundred and fifty years hence.

  Chapter Two: The Friends of Frank the Fib

  So now it’s just another Tuesday night on the Goldhawk Road. I’m on my fifth bottle of Staropramen, trying to get well and truly binnered, but my mind feels absolutely unfogged. It’s not a matter of wanting. I need to be drunk. Tonight I’ve got to tell them that I’m leaving them, that it’s over, that it hasn’t worked out, that I’m selling them down the river.

  Diamond Tony, Nodge and Colin are all with me, inside the Bush Ranger, watching the Rangers game on the satellite screen. A hundred other faces are upturned also, mostly male. They have scorched faces from Spanish tans, greased French crops, white lager-foam moustaches, MA1 nylon jackets. Stone-washed jeans, white Reeboks, gold earrings, fake Ralphs from the Bush Market. It’s all sports casual, surf-wear and over-designed running shoes, Nike Air Maxes up against the Reebok DMX 2000 series. The whole place has an odour of Fosters Ice and Lynx Aftershave. I like it. It smells like home.

  Of the four of us – I like to think – only Colin looks typical, a genuine pitch potato. It isn’t just the clothes – the baggies, the Rangers/ Wasps official sweatshirt, the little rash of old adolescent spots around the mouth, the beer-stained windcheater – but the expression on his face. Rapt, astonished, praying. Caring far too much, for someone thirty years old.

  Colin, more than any of us, lives for this, for these moments, in a crowd in front of a green rectangle, destinies being juggled. I see his face shining with tension. Yet, for a moment, he looks five years old as Kevin Gallen strikes at an open goal and manages to send it elegantly dundering fifteen feet past the left-hand post. Colin’s small face crumples in bitterness and betrayal, as if some personal unkindess has been deliberately done to him.

  He still has QPR posters covering the walls of his bedroom from floor to ceiling, and goes to every match that he can, just as he has since he was fifteen years old. Although normally the quiet and affable one, when he’s worked up his emotions get entirely out of control. Sometimes he cries, although he will always hide himself first. Colin has never quite managed to master the public indifference that the rest of us present as our emotional lives.

  Right now he is nodding his head back and forth in a kind of fit of disappointment. On one level, Colin, I sometimes think, is a little backward – still living with his mother, never having any girlfriends. But what emotions he does have he invests in the world he limits himself to – his horror videos, his computer, his friends, his football. I think for a moment he’s going to cry right now, but to my relief he turns instead and rummages glumly in his packet of crisps. Walkers Double Crunch Chilli.

  I can’t get lost in the game. I can’t care. I’ve been thinking about Veronica all day. No, I’ve been thinking about myself all day and wondering about the effect of what I am going to have to say to them. I feel I’m in a pocket of air, watching the whole heaving scene from within a bubble. I catch Tony’s face in close-up, as it distorts in profile, rising to meet the screen.

  Tony – Anthony Diamonte, otherwise known as Diamond Tony or DT – is laughing loudly. Tony always laughs loudest of the four of us, but this time his determination to compete with the rest of the heaving room has upped the volume. Tony always wants to win everything, even when there’s no game being played. He’s half out of his chair, giving the wanker sign to Gallen, who has fallen on his knees and is covering his eyes with his hands. The floodlights give Gallen four shadows. Tony’s laughter, at this moment, is contemptuous, without humour.

  In the reflected light of the screen, his cream-coloured Jil Sander rollneck looks the colour of a pistachio nut. He must be steaming hot in that thing, but he looks absolutely cool and undisturbed by the raging heat. The fact that he is money is apparent even in the smoky half-light. The Mulberry Black Cavalry Twill coat draped over his quarterback shoulders, the bespoke suit, the Patrick Cox shoes, the Oris Big Crown Commander watch. Even his face is money, that Eurotrash look, all olive skin and floppy black hair, big gleaming teeth in a perfect smile. You wouldn’t think he was just a barber – sorry, hairstylist – from Shepherd’s Bush; you would think he was a matador, or a glamorous extra in an Italian arthouse movie.

  Women love Tony. They don’t care it’s all a fake – the tan, the style, the smile. He’s handsome, I suppose. I have to admit that. However much I lie to others – and I do, I do – I try to be honest with myself. It’s hard, though I don’t know why.

  Tony looks very sophisticated, even though he’s just a yob, same as the rest of us. More of a yob, actually, because I’m not a yob at all, come to think of it, and neither is Nodge or Colin. Most soccer fans around here stopped being yobs years ago. They read Irvine Welsh and listen to Classic FM, then clock in for work at the print shop or the carpet warehouse. Nothing fits the world any more. Me with my degree, Tony with his thousand pound suits, Nodge and his unreadable books. A cab driver with his nose in Rohinton Mistry, for fuck’s sake. It’s all hybrid, atomized.

  But Tony, for all his cash, is – and don’t get me wrong, he’s a mate, I love him – Tony is…

  The word that springs to mind is cruel.

  No, cruel isn’t right. That implies someone who gets a pleasure out of hurting other people, and Tony isn’t like that. He just doesn’t mind hurting people, if they’re in his way. It’s nothing personal. He just thinks there are more important things than never hurting anyone’s feelings. It’s very un-English, I suppose. But then Tony isn’t English. He’s Sicilian, or at least his parents are. He hates to be reminded of this. Around his neck, the hand and the horns to ward of evil spirits. Solid gold.

  Anyway, when you get to know him you realize that it’s all an act and that in fact, underneath, he’s all right. I suppose he must be, because otherwise he wouldn’t be my mate.

  And he is my mate, my best mate. He’s a laugh. He makes things happen. He’s a cyclone. And he’s always been there. Not nearly as long as Colin, but as long as Nodge. Fifteen years now, it must be.

  I turn to Nodge. The Staropramen is beginning to work now, pulling me apart from the crowd instead of drawing me in. Nodge has stuck out his lips in a sort of sour, lemony way, but otherwise has not moved an inch. He has this economy of movement. Never shifts if he doesn’t have to. Like he was planted. Like he had a perpetual right to the exact space he has occupied and no one was going to say otherwise.

  His face gives the same impression. Running to fat, doughy, all gathered together in the centre, slightly convex, like someone punched him in the face once and it collapsed inwards, leaving a big soft rim at the edges. It looks like it is protected by its perimeter, a buffer zone of pinkness and hair and chin. It’s a face that is immovable, that will stand its ground. A stubborn face, not easily roused. Running low, half-way across it, like a large, sleeping caterpillar, is a Liam Gallagher unibrow, an unbroken line of thick hair above his eyes.