No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (21 page)

‘Oh, yeah? Well I’ve seen blokes on ynaf hunt, and none of them ever struck me as having a particularly sophisticated sense of the ridiculous. Speaking as a steward of the ynaf, I have to tell you that I don’t remember any masterful jokes made in pursuit of mine – unless you call “Show us your cunt” a masterful joke.’

‘It could be, depending on the context. Bluntness is its own fun, as you know perfectly well. You’re on stage five
nights a week shoving bits of bloke into every orifice – you don’t need me to tell you about the mirthfulness of brutality.’

‘Parody, Frank. I’m up there taking the piss out of you lot. It’s called redressing the balance.’

‘The fuck it is. That’s not why those fat birds are sitting there in their thousands with their tits shaking, because you’re redressing the balance. They’re into the violence of it, D. They’re into the ancient fucking needling antagonism of sex.’

‘Wrong, Frank. Those fat birds, as you so nicely call them, are laughing with the relief of being able to get their own back at last. They’ve been the objects of your antagonism for however many thousands of years, now they’re enjoying being able to express their own.’

‘So we’re not arguing. It’s great to slag off the other sex. There’s nothing in the world like it, I agree with you. I don’t give a shit about the history of it. If you’ve allowed yourselves to forget where the pleasure lies, that’s your fault. I’m glad for you if you’ve got it back. But don’t tell me you’re just redressing a balance. Because what’s going to happen once you’ve redressed it? Are you suddenly going to stop finding cock –
the
cock – funny?’

‘I don’t think we need to worry about that quite yet. I think we’ve plenty to do.’

‘Sure you have. And it’s not called therapy, either. I’m surprised at you. If there’s one person who oughtn’t to believe in therapy it’s a comedian. You
are
the therapy.’

‘A comedian can’t do everything, Frank.’

‘Yes, you can. Not for yourself, I grant you. But you’re not doing it for yourself We’re already agreed on that. You’re the captain of a sinking ship. It’s us, the passengers in the lifeboats, you’re meant to be thinking about. And we don’t want you pretending we’re not in trouble. Sing to us of
death and drowning. Tell us the one about the cannibal and the shark. That’s the shit that keeps us going.’

‘That keeps
you
going.’

‘OK. But I’m the audience, remember.’

‘You’re not my audience. If I ever catch you in my audience I’ll make you wish you’d never been born.’

‘What’ll you do? Joke me to death?’

‘I’ll tell the story of your life, Frank. I’ll tell them what’s become of you after half a century following the great white ynaf that bit your appendage off. My girls like a good adventure yarn. Especially when it’s got a happy ending, like the hero bleeding to death on Exmoor. I’ll tell them what you’ve told me. That you no longer know whether to cry or to come. I’ll drag you up on stage. You can weep through your weenie for us – ‘

‘You need therapy, D.’

She throws a chocolate at him.

So everything’s all right then. Back to happy families.

‘I think that’s the only therapy I can allow,’ he goes on, ‘therapy for comedians. Help for the physicians who cannot help themselves. And I suggest we start by lifting that little apron of fat you’ve got down there and seeing if we can get a look at the knish.’

‘I prefer ynaf.’

‘I prefer show us your cunt.’

He makes a lunge in the direction of her deformity. She snorts with fright and laughter, bunching the bed clothes around her, piling on the fortifications. He doesn’t, of course, actually touch her. A deal’s a deal. And it’s its own kind of fun exactly as it is, galumphing with a corrugated dirigible, whose tits hummock about under their protective wrapping like badgers chasing their tails under parkland, and who lets you expatiate, lets you explain her job to her, lets you choke on your own too much, without feeling the need
to kick you out of the house. Or in this case, the Five Star hotel.

Could it be that Frank’s found the secret of relational contentment? Agreeing from the outset to stay away from the cunt, except in horseplay? Are there to be satisfactions in being fifty after all?

He often thinks he’d like to have been a comedian himself. He would have enjoyed being on stage, making them laugh with that one.

They stay in bed, looking at the sea and the telly and not touching, for three more days. Each night, when there’s no more tolerable telly left, Frank goes back to his bed in the room next door, and each morning he returns for bacon, egg and coffee, followed by brown ale and black chocolate, in hers.

It’s a life. It’s a convalescence, anyway.

When he does put a foot outside the hotel he is surprised to see how bright it is. He rubs his eyes. That golden ball sitting in the sky … Could that be the sun? And those long thin things, the colour of salmon, moving about in the glare of the water, not eating … Could those be people? He catches sight of his reflection in a shop window. He has to look twice before he’s sure it’s him. He has put on weight on D’s diet. But he looks different in some other way as well. Good and not good; fraughtly placid.

He has banking to do. D has asked him to draw cash out for her on one of her cards, though what she needs cash for, unless it’s to tip room service, he can’t imagine. And he has to transfer funds from his savings to his cheque account. He’s gone through a further couple of thousand since he broke his resolution to stay away from five star hotels. If it goes on like this he’s going to have to get another column. It’s a thing he’s always promised himself – that he will never,
never
allow
himself to be reduced to writing about family values or having the builders in, but he has been made a vagrant by his long-term partner and needs must when the devil drives.

She –
she –
has responded promptly but coldly to his faxed request for her to stick his mail in a jiffy bag and forward it to him poste restante, Torquay. She’s sent him everything, leaflets, handbills, minicab cards, menus from take-away restaurants, shopping lists from home deliverers, circulars from real estate agents, quotations for double glazing and loft conversions, notices of church fetes, invitations to car-boot sales, plastic sacks for the blind, electioneering material (including a signed letter from Tony Blair), the local council newsletter, an appeal for information about a missing cat, a free shampoo sample, and of course the domestic bills. All the shit that comes through the letter box she’s bunged him. So that he should feel he’s still at home? So that he should miss the palpable evidentiality – the dailiness, as sentimentalists of the hearth call it – of their domestic life? Some hope. There is no letter from her. No personal mark, other than a few impatiently scrawled arrows directing his attention to overdue amounts. It could have been worse, he accepts that. She could have thrown up in the bag before she sent it.

The violence of women. The vindictive uses to which they put the postal service. A girlfriend of Frank’s once sent what was left of an intimate chicken dinner, registered mail, to another girlfriend of Frank’s. Bones, carcass, gristle, giblets, parson’s nose, the lot. And that wasn’t all the big brown envelope contained. Used toothpicks fell out of it as well, the contents of an ashtray, a couple of lipsticked tissues, a wine cork, a tea bag – all the evidence Frank had stupidly forgotten to clear away (the waste bin isn’t
away)
of girlfriend number two’s infraction of the rights to exclusivity of girlfriend number one.

Perhaps exclusivity wasn’t the only issue. The chicken
dinner in question had taken place while girlfriend number one was out of town. And had been cooked in her kitchen. And consumed on her dining table. And the ashtray had been found on her bedside table. And girlfriend number two had been her best friend.

But the violence of the response, none the less …

She rang him up in tears, the recipient of the bones, to solicit his understanding. ‘I had to
sign
for them, Frank.’

‘It must have been terrible,’ he said. But without conviction. He was a sucker for the meticulous ferocity of girlfriend number one. Fancy gathering it all out of the bin, fancy wrapping it all up, fancy quantifying your grievance to the last bone, and fancy, after all that, going down to the post office and filling out a form. It was awesome.

Mel had not put herself to that kind of trouble. Her rage never stooped to precision revenge. She was a blanket bomber. Whatever dropped on the mat and wasn’t addressed to her she simply swept into the bag and sent him. He wasn’t worth making distinctions over. She hadn’t even bothered to stick a stamp on the envelope.

Such ferocity. Such a fury they’re all in. D too is a volcano ready to blow. Not because she isn’t fucking. Frank wouldn’t be so gross as to suppose that a woman who isn’t fucking is bound to explode. Who was ever kept calm by fucking, anyway? No, not fucking isn’t what’s making them all sore, it’s a sense of individual injustice. It’s as if they’ve arrived at an idea of self late – later than Frank’s sex, certainly, and probably later than the amoebas and the bivalves, come to that – and don’t know what to do with it now they’ve reached it. Take D’s objections to being thought of as cunt. Why so sensitive? Frank would love to be thought of as cock. ‘I wouldn’t mind a piece of that,’ he once overhead one woman saying to another in a theatre queue. If he wasn’t mistaken he was the that she wouldn’t have minded a piece
of. He’d never been more complimented in his life. He never has since. If someone were to think of him as a
that
today, and were happy to take any piece of him that was going –
a
piece, she said she would have settled for, any piece – who knows, his garden might bloom again. He’s easy about being objectified, that’s his point. He’s not self-sensitive. Everything in the world is wrong, but its wrong-ness isn’t a personal affront to him. As it is to them. As it is to D who won’t look under the apron of fat God gave her; as it was to the one who posted off the giblets; as it was to the Ethiopian whore who would rather suck his car upholstery than his balls; as it is to Mel who has made herself a successful pornographer on the strength of it. She gets a shiver up, the way ladies like it, because every act of sex appals her and shocks her. And why does it do that? Because it some how takes from her. A fuck committed on her in person takes from the her that doesn’t fuck; a fuck committed on another takes from the her that does. Hence she finds it an act of infidelity, a betrayal and a vilification, either way. Hence she writes it filthy. Hence she excites her readers. Frank has seen the instructions which the new publishers of women’s filth put out to would-be exponents of the smutchy art – under no circumstances, they all warn, make a joke, for a joke interrupts the erotic trance. Well no joke ever interrupted Frank’s erotic trance. But then it was never a trance of the vilified self, was it? When they went on ynaf hunt, he and his china plates, they went in the expectation that they would come first and laugh later. But any other order would have done as well. A man can come when he’s laughing or laugh when he’s coming, it doesn’t matter. The cosmos is a joke to him, not an act of spite directed at his person.

He saunters about in the festive brightness of Torquay like a truant. ‘Don’t go looking for a knocking shop while you’re out,’ D had told him. ‘Come straight back after banking and
we can have an oyster lunch in bed.’ He thinks he’ll skip the oysters. And maybe bed as well. Not in the mood. It’s the maleficent bag of bills from Mel that’s done it. And standing waiting at a poste restante counter once again. Too cruel the contrast. No beating heart this time. No has she, hasn’t she. When it’s Mel you’re expecting to hear from, you know the answer to that – she hasn’t.

He sits on a bench, the last in a row of old men, and gazes at the masts of sailing ships. The masts clink lightly in time with one another, as do the sagging scrotums of the old men. Chink, chink, chink. Soon he’ll be ready to join a bowls club.

It’s too sad in the sun. The cosmos is not an act of spite directed at his person, but if it were this would be the means of its perpetration – sunshine. The full mocking glare of sunlight. Frank’s lost track of time. He thinks it might not be August any more, but it’s still a long way to winter. Roll on the dark days.

Walking away from the sea, he finds himself in a municipal park. Men with remote-controlled power boats are gathered around a pond. They have the look of husbands who have left the house early, like anglers, to escape the violence and pornography of their womenfolks’ conversation. Every two or three minutes they haul their craft out of the water, because they’ve capsized or crashed or gone aground on an island of floating litter. Frank has never seen creatures more engrossed. Or more united in a common purpose. The bottom of one man’s boat is the bottom of all their boats. They aren’t men as he knows them. They aren’t conversationalists or ironists or fuckers. They are an earlier species; perhaps what men would have been like in the garden had heaven not come up with the concept of a helpmeet. Yes, that’s what defines them – they aren’t helpmet. Which for some reason touches Frank to his heart.

He takes a cab back to the hotel and unthinkingly lets himself into D’s room. He’s been coming and going from it in the normal way, popping out to clean his teeth, popping back to grab a chocolate. But in the normal way she’s expecting him. This time he’s been out, and been out longer than he said he was going to be. So this time he should consider himself a formal visitor. He should knock. He should wait to be let in. But he’s lost in a world of toy boatmen. He forgets. He puts the key in the lock and turns it. And as a consequence disturbs D, lying on her side with her fingers busy beneath her custodial apron of fat, exciting herself, as though she is both pianist and grand piano, into little ricocheting arpeggios of exquisite pain.

By the time he has identified the cheeping it is too late for him to withdraw.

She is furious with him for bursting in on her like this. She is flushed and shamed and thwarted and angry. ‘You were supposed to come back for oysters,’ she cries. She rights herself in the bed. ‘What was I to do? Sit here twiddling my thumbs until fucking
Newsnight?’