No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (17 page)

In the second, it was not just the end of the garden, it was the end of the world. Planes were coming at the house on revolving cylindrical clouds of black smoke, and in the distance the sky was broken and falling apart. The sun was hideously disfigured. The entire universe was shredding itself. Frank himself was hiding under the piano. Under the piano was the one safe place anywhere. But he couldn’t persuade Mel to join him. He realised it was too late now. She was going to die along with everything else. ‘I love you,’ Frank called. He wanted her to know that their life together had had meaning. He loved her. It was his last and only chance to tell her. Ever ever ever. He shouted it out – ‘I love you, Mel. I have always loved you.’ But she couldn’t hear him over the roar of the planes which were now alight and plunging into the roof of their house.

He woke with tears on his face.

That’s when he knows he isn’t well: when he starts the day blubbering.

He stays in bed in the Queens Hotel for twenty-four hours while all his clothes are being laundered. Then he stays in bed for a second twenty-four hours in order to catch the new Robert Hughes series on American art. Then he stays in bed for a third twenty-four hours in order to write his review. The box is never more gripping, he argues, than when you see someone thinking on it. He loathes the phrase ‘good television’, but he uses it. Good television is no different from good life: it’s the sight of somebody thinking. No thought, no life, no life no television. All television should be arts television, that’s the conclusion he comes to in his review. Except that ‘the arts’ is another phrase he loathes. He stays in bed for a fourth twenty-four hours trying to sort out his argument.

Counting phone calls and room-service and laundry, and throwing in the cost of the Gloucester whores, his bill for five days in Cheltenham is a small token of appreciation short of a thousand pounds. That’s the better part of two thousand since he left home less than a fortnight ago. Call that four and a half thousand a month. Which comes to in excess of fifty grand a year. And he still hasn’t had what a reasonable person would call a tolerably pleasurable evening.

There are reasons for going back to London. He has mail to collect. He has people to see. He has changes to make to his wardrobe. He has his monthly appointment with his hairdresser. Eventually he knows he will have to return and find himself a room; but he can’t go back yet, not light two thousand quid and absolutely nothing achieved. Unless you call a stain of jism the size of a flattened mosquito on the inside of his windscreen, an achievement.

In a queer sort of way he feels he has let Mel down, being booted out of the house and not managing to find anything
better to do with himself than he has found so far. He has to stay away if only to have one or two more interesting stories to tell Mel, should she ever ask him to come back, which of course she won’t, now she has another man, which she hasn’t, has she?

He takes the M5 going south. This has several advantages, none of which he gives a name to. He won’t be making that mistake again. But loosely clinking about at the back of his brain are such place names as Watchet, Porlock, Lynton, Exeter, Little Cleverley. Watchet because he likes the drive to Porlock. Porlock because he likes the drive from Watchet. Lynton, he just likes. Unless it’s Lynmouth he just likes. Whichever is the one that flooded. And then there’s a dim memory he has of Billy Yuill telling him that he’d inherited a place, a holiday cottage, in one or other of them. He’s only remembered that because he’s thought about it every time he’s driven through. Hm, Billy Yuill’s holiday residence. Let’s hope the fucking place floods again while he’s in it. Not that he’s going to Lynton or Lynmouth for any Yuill-related reason. If Liz is now happily Mrs Billy, summering in Somerset, she won’t be wanting Frank Ritz of Kilburn and Paris rapping on her little cottage door, as somebody’s son Hamish, whatever his real name is, so smartly pointed out. No. He’s drunk the dregs of that one. Nor does Exeter being on his list of possibles have a ghost of a connection to Exeter being on D the comedian’s list of engagements. That too is a non-starter. He’s had his dick out, that’ll do. As for Little Cleverley, well, well, time will tell, and if he does make it that far down the coast, he will be doing it, in a manner of speaking, for Mel. Given that Mel got into Clarice’s pants before he did. Not by much, it’s true, but a whisker is a whisker in Little Cleverley.

All the service facilities on the motorway are full. The cars spill back out on to the slip road. Frank is bemused by this
until he remembers that it’s still August. He is surprised that the summer hasn’t frittered itself away while he’s been in Cheltenham getting pale. No such luck. The proletarian crap-watchers are as hell bent on getting into their holiday togs as they were when he last paid attention to them back in Little Venice-on-the-Runnel. They queue, belly to buttock, smelling of burning car upholstery, at the all-day breakfast counter, counting the beans on one another’s plates. They’re suffering from Frank’s disease. A pity Mel isn’t here to put them right. They’re attacking themselves with food. Abusing their spouses with fried bread. Knocking their kids out with chips. We’re banning handguns, Frank thinks, but we’re keeping motorway food. He has tomato soup himself, which he spoons from a giant witch’s cauldron. Hot soup and croutons, just the ticket when it’s eighty-five degrees in the shade. Hot soup and croutons and tea, for which he hands over a ten pound note and from which he gets no change to speak of. Frank can never get over how expensive it is to be poor. How the poor can afford to be poor beats him. But there they are again, paying for their petrol and crisps and make that a roll of scratch-cards while you’re at it, duck. When Frank was a boy he used to play abstract noun I-spy in the back of his parents’ car. That was before he borrowed it to ferry whores in. I spy with my little eye something beginning with C … Conundrum – I win! Now, in-car entertainment for kids is a roll of scratch-cards and a coin. They’are our Damien, just shut ya trap and see if you can win us a hundred grand. Frank sees them rubbing and scratching in toddler-seats, their baby fingers smeared with silver, all the way down the motorway. No wonder, he thinks, that the whores of today are so mercenary.

He comes off the motorway at Bridgwater and pootles reflectively into Nether Stowey. Welcome to Coleridge country. How long before
Biographia Literaria
makes it on to
the box? In his own way he is as sentimental a journeyer as any pilgrim to Coronation Street. He too likes to plug into the presiding genius of the place. For many years he has meant to come and stay in the Quantocks, put on red socks and walking boots and follow the paths that Coleridge and the Wordsworths took, tracking the course of streams, listening to rivers, recording starlight, reciting poetry in echoing groves. He communicated this desire to Mel in their early days. ‘Think of it,’ he said, ‘no car, just you and me and the ghosts of Wordsworth and Coleridge, lost among the deep romantic chasms. We could walk all day among the waterfalls, not see a single soul, fall into a pub for dinner, drink honey-dew, then stumble into bed under a waning moon, listening to the big sea.’

‘So let’s do it,’ Mel said.

She was so prompt then. So spirited and agreeable. Up for anything.

They bought each other woolly walking pullovers and marbled notebooks, sharpened a dozen pencils, took a room in a guest house a hundred yards from Coleridge’s cottage and never got out of bed. It was too soon in their connection. The only deep romantic chasms that Frank had time for in those days belonged to Mel.

When they finally did get to walk in the west country it was at Mel’s instigation, and it was Daphne du Maurier’s west country, not Coleridge’s. Impatience had entered into it by then. Mel didn’t buy the cottage in Little Cleverley to celebrate their passion but to find an alternative to it. Frank was already making too much noise for her to take. ‘If you’re going to come down to Little Cleverley with me,’ she warned him, ‘you’d better be prepared to have quiet thoughts. No running around looking for curries. No yelling at the telly. No London stuff.’ Among the hippy bits and pieces left behind by the previous sitting tenants was a
parchment scroll on which was transcribed that once inescapable consolation ode of the culturally damaged –
GO PLACIDLY AMID THE DIN
etcetera. Mel ripped off the etcetera and posted the words
GO PLACIDLY
above Frank’s side of the bed.

Now would be a good time for him to dump the car and walk the Quantocks, but he is too restless. He accepts that he will never do it. He blames the heat, the tourists, his commitments, but the truth is that he cannot face being alone in nature. How many bound notebooks has he bought in his life, for the purpose of recording his fortnight’s solitary expedition to Bronte country, Hardy country, Lawrence country? There they all sit, in a neat pile on the top of one of his bookcases, labelled, dated, paginated – addressed even, with the promise of a small reward should anyone find them forgotten under an ash tree by a fairy stream – but otherwise quite empty. Get wisdom? No, thank you. Frank’s got it and all that means is that he’s wise to himself. No more notebooks. No point. He’ll never fill them. He’ll never stay in a Quantock valley and walk the hills until his legs give out. He’d rather sit on the edge of a bed and watch crap on the box all day. Mel made him feel well but she never cured him. He still does what he hates, and hates what he does. Of course, if there were some girl who’d like to go hiking through the Quantocks with him, walk all day among the waterfalls, drink honey-dew, then stumble into bed under a waning moon … But this fantasy too can no longer survive the penetrating gaze of wisdom. He’s wise to himself. He don’t want no girl. He thinks he wants a girl because he’s been wanting one since he was six. It’s a long-time tic. What you’ve been wanting for as long as you’ve been conscious you can’t suddenly unwant. But when Frank puts his ear to the growling of his appetites he hears no clamour for a girl. Girls he’s had. So now what? What does wisdom have to say
today on the question of what a man who has been booted out of his house is supposed to do with himself if he has no appetite for a girl? A long-time tic has lots going for it. It points you in the direction of what to do next. Frank’s longtime tic used to tell him that it was once again time to go and fuck a girl. If he no longer wants a girl, then what is he to fuck? He knows the answer to that, too. He isn’t to fuck anything. But he’s a man; the only truly passionate pursuit of his life has been fucking. There’s a mathematical necessity involved in this. M.A.N. = F.U.C.K. If he’s now to believe that a man of his age isn’t for fucking, then what the fuck is a man of his age for?

Do the sums. Show him the equation. M.A.N. = what?

He knows the danger. There’s no end to what you know once you become wise. He knows that he might end up following his long-time tic for the simple reason that he can’t come up with anything else to follow.

This is not something philosophers of society have adequately addressed or foretold. They’ve been too preoccupied with the economic and psychological consequences of redundancy and geriatric longevity. No one has come along and said we have a massive sociopathic crisis in the making here: a generation of men is about to enter middle age with no passion left for fucking who have not been schooled in any other purposeful activity. Frank can only speak as he finds; it would have been better for him, as a man suddenly booted out of a stable surrogate-for-fucking home situation, had he known of some re-training programme he could have entered.

Back up on the high road the country he has just left gets up to its old beguiling tricks. If you could only descend into those deep-bosomed hills, slip silently into that arboreous cleft, all would be well. The wispy woods would take care of your body, and the smoky churches would take care of your
soul. To his right the big sea slopes away from him, too blue to bear. It is always a shock to him to look at the map and be reminded that this is still only the Bristol Channel and that that is only Wales on the other side of the water. That should be Peru over there. Or Troy. Or Xanadu.

He drops down into Porlock for afternoon tea and finds a film crew painting the town into period picturesqueness. The all-singing, all-dancing late eighteenth century. Maybe they
are
doing
Biographia Literaria
for telly.

‘It is not every man that is likely to be improved by a country life,’ declaims Colin Firth Coleridge in a white knotted muffler, while the children whip their hoops along the cobbles and the costermongers bawl their wares. ‘Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. And where these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of stimulants: and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard-hearted –

Cut to opium den.

The BAFTA, Frank warrants, is already in the bag.

Meanwhile, although there is nothing to look at except a few men in overalls painting the doors of houses, the ill-educated and the insensible cluster in their gross contracted summer shorts and wait for the stars to arrive. Who will be Dorothy? Who will be Hazlitt?

‘I think I’ll wait to see it on the box,’ Frank tells an insufficiently stimulated family from Wolverhampton who think that the whole thing is going to start and finish the minute the paint dries.

‘Isn’t eet loive?’ the head of the family asks.

Out of instinctual politeness, Frank offers to think about it. ‘Unlikely,’ he says. ‘But you could ask one of the cameramen when he arrives.’

‘When will that boi?’

‘In about a fortnight,’ Frank guesses.

He gets back into his Saab and climbs and then drops into the twin towns on the Lyn. Welcome to Yuill country.

This time he doesn’t go looking for the best hotel. Anything will do. Anything will have to do given that he’s running out of readies and the Lyns are running out of rooms. He takes an attic with a gable window that gives him the sea. Then goes in search of the tea he didn’t get in Porlock.