The Two of Us (18 page)

For El’s part, I haven’t seen him happier or more excited in a long long time. El has a wheelchair now; he can still walk, but he tires quickly and stairs are practically impossible.
Ivy is slower moving, too, and she takes some of the weight off her feet by leaning on the handles of El’s chair as she pushes him into the central hall of the museum.

Much of El’s excitement has been the prospect of a day at the museum, but he is also beside himself at having finally met Ivy, and hasn’t stopped talking at her since we loaded him
into the taxi. He’s even managed to get her name right. But as we cross the threshold of the museum, even El falls silent. The word that springs to mind is cavernous, but no cavern was ever
this expansive or flooded with light. The wide tiled floor is enclosed on either side by two tiers of stacked, terracotta arches, each one maybe twenty feet high and leading the eye upward to a
vaulted ceiling, composed of decorative panels and broad glass panes. At the far end of the hall a row of tall stained-glass windows boom with rose-tinted sunshine. Majestic, ethereal, magnificent,
opulent – they all come close. You could almost miss the museum’s most famous exhibit, but of course nobody does. It’s early in the day and the schools are still in term time, so
there are fewer visitors than there might be; even so, there are a couple of hundred people in the main hall. And, of course, they are entirely preoccupied with the twenty-six-metre dinosaur
skeleton that has pride of place.

‘J. . . Jesus!’ El points at the giant pile of mahogany-coloured bones. ‘L. . . look the s. . . size o’ that f. . . fuckig diosonour!’ he says, his voice echoing
around the glorious space. ‘R. . . right, l. . . less go ex. . . explorin’.’

Without El we might be tempted to flow with the crowd, but both his wheelchair and his unselfconscious awe force us to amble at a slower, more considered pace. After graduating from Bristol
University with a degree in Biology, El came to London to do a Ph.D. in something involving bugs and DNA. Maybe this is why he is so uncharacteristically quiet – reverential, even – as
we stand mute before the fossils, models and stuffed specimens of beasts prehistoric, extinct and – you could be convinced – simply imagined. We examine glass cases displaying shells
and minerals and teeth and petrified dung (‘Dino poo!’). We linger over glass cases of butterflies, skulls and preserved footprints from one hundred million years ago. An archaeopteryx
fossil in a square slab of rock looks like some prehistoric fairy-tale book, and a decorated dolphin skull makes the hairs stand up at the nape of my neck. We stare open-mouthed at a woolly
mammoth, a sabre-toothed tiger, a duck-billed platypus and a gorilla that bears an uncanny resemblance to Ivy’s brother Frank.

‘Want me to push?’ I ask Ivy, and she accepts the offer.

‘Practice for you,’ says El. ‘For when b. . . baba c. . . comes along.’

We stop to look at a Neanderthal skull. The yellowed bone is broken and incomplete, as if it’s been dropped and shattered at some point in the last couple of hundred thousand years. After
pondering the exhibit for a minute, El turns to Ivy and stares at her face. He holds a shaking hand to his cheek as if checking to see if his own face is scarred like Ivy’s.

‘F. . . Fisher din’t tell me,’ he says. ‘W. . . w. . .’

‘What happened?’ Ivy asks.

El nods.

Ivy smiles, squats down beside the chair so that her face is level with El’s. ‘When I was eight, I decided to try and tap dance on top of a glass coffee table.’

El’s head wobbles on top of his shoulders; he pulls a face that suggests he doesn’t believe this.

‘’s true,’ she says. ‘The table was toughened glass, so I thought it’d be okay. Although it’s so long ago now, I’m not really sure if I was thinking
anything at all.’

‘B. . . blimey,’ says El, ‘b. . . bet you w. . . won’ do th. . . that again.’

Ivy laughs and shakes her head. I’ve been worried about El meeting Ivy – worried that he’d say something to offend her, or incriminate me. But seeing them together now, I feel
myself relax and I regret not introducing them to each other sooner.

Before we leave, we stop at a glass case containing a first edition of Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
. And (with the exception of the dino poo) this captures El’s
attention more than anything else we have seen today.

‘Old Ch. . . Charlie,’ El says. ‘He’s my h. . . h. . .’

‘Hero?’

El dismisses the word with a frustrated flick of his hand, as if it irritates him, but he nods to himself nevertheless. The ancient copy of Darwin’s book is displayed alongside an imposing
marble statue of the great man himself sitting in a hefty chair, beard rolling down his chest, coat draped across his knees. The symmetry between my friend in his wheelchair and Charles Darwin on
his white marble throne is impossible to miss.

‘F. . . fuckig g. . . g’netics.’

And seeing El sitting before his idol, twitching and jerking and diminished . . . with the right soundtrack it could move me to tears.

‘R. . . right,’ says El, ‘I need a p. . . pee, and one of y. . . you two is going to h. . . hold my imp. . . impressive exhibit.’ He grins up at us, enjoying the effects
of his hard-earned words.

Charles Darwin may well have developed the theory of natural selection, but I’ll bet everything I have he wasn’t as funny as my friend El.

We eat a late lunch at a posh restaurant in South Kensington. El struggles to grip cutlery now, so we have brought his own – a knife and fork with bicycle handgrips fitted over the handles
to make it easier for him to hold. Every time the waiter brings something to our table, El raises his knife and dings an imaginary bicycle bell. Far from being offended by this behaviour in a
Michelin-starred restaurant, our waiter appears to be highly entertained by it. A lot of rich and famous people live around here, so maybe he’s used to eccentrics. Either way, I tip him
heavily, but this, too, seems to be nothing extraordinary – at least not to the waiter.

‘You sh. . . should be s. . . savin’.’ El points a shaking finger at Ivy’s bump.

‘He’s right,’ says Ivy, smiling. ‘You’re a family man now.’

‘C. . . can I touch it?’ El asks, and he has the expression of a child asking to stroke a puppy.

Ivy moves her chair so that it’s alongside El’s, takes his hand and places it inside her shirt on the bare skin of her bump. I’m expecting some lewd comment or innuendo from
El, but he simply closes his eyes and sits very still (as still as he can) with his hand against Ivy’s tummy.

‘Did you feel them move?’ asks Ivy, once El has removed his hand.

El nods, and when he opens his eyes they are shiny with tears. He turns to me: ‘So y. . . you goin’ p. . . pr. . . propose or w. . . what?’

Ivy laughs awkwardly and I excuse myself to the loo.

In the taxi back to Earl’s Court, El sits on the back seat next to Ivy, holding her hand and, after only a few minutes, falling asleep with his head resting against her arm. Ivy strokes
his head absent-mindedly.

It’s close to five o’clock when we drop El at home, and I help him up the steps to his front door as the driver removes El’s wheelchair from the boot. Phil invites us in for
wine, but Ivy and I are both exhausted and the taxi is waiting to take us on to Wimbledon. With El safely installed in front of the TV, Phil comes to the taxi to say goodbye.

‘Same time next week?’ he says, and then, seeing our expressions, he laughs. ‘Your faces!’ he says, and his laughter catches until he is wiping tears from his eyes.
It’s the most relaxed I’ve seen Phil in months, and I feel pretty good about myself for it. Not good enough to take the bait, though.

‘You know there are places,’ Ivy says, ‘where you can put El into daycare?’

Phil looks up at the clouds, puts his hands in his pockets then immediately removes them.

‘It might be good for you,’ Ivy says. ‘Both of you.’

Phil sighs and it feels like a gesture of acquiescence, or the step towards it. He leans in to the cab, kisses Ivy on the cheek, then turns to me.

‘If I were you, William, I’d put a ring on this girl’s finger and quick.’ And then, of course, he bursts into tears.

Ivy sleeps in the taxi back to Wimbledon, and if there’s a happier man stuck in slow-moving rush-hour traffic this evening, then I’d like to shake his hand.

When Frank gets back from work a little before eight, I’m dozing in front of a property show and Ivy is reading her book club assignment. Frank is carrying four bags full of groceries, and
after a cursory hello, he changes out of his work clothes and starts cooking a spaghetti bolognese for the three of us. It’s a nice gesture, of course, but to me it feels a little too much
like he’s moving in.

This is only his fourth night staying with us so it’s too soon to have formed a concrete impression of the guy, but he seems unusually quiet as we eat our supper. Maybe he’s tired
– it’s the first day of his working week, after all. Frank divides his professional time between St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington and a private practice in North London. Where he
was today, I don’t know, but both are an awkward commute from Wimbledon, and he is surely earning enough to rent a flat of his own somewhere more convenient. As a prelude to sewing this seed,
I ask how long it took him to travel to work this morning, but he merely shrugs and grunts. I comment on how unreliable the District Line is, and Frank collects the dirty supper dishes, takes them
to the sink and washes up.

I flick on the TV and we watch a smug couple convert an abandoned brewery into a million-pound, eco-friendly, context-sympathetic mansion with a swimming pool. Ivy is asleep within five minutes,
but tired as I am, one-minute to nine is too early for me to turn in. I begin flicking through the channels and Frank drops onto the sofa at the exact moment I land on the opening sequence of an
Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

‘Beer,’ he says, handing me an open bottle of Asahi.

I make idle chit-chat throughout the movie, not because I want to know how Frank’s day was, or how many bedrooms his house in Bushey has, or whether he plays for the local rugby team . . .
I ask these things because I’m hoping to make the bugger homesick. I ask about Christmas, because Christmas is a time for children and I want to establish whether or not Frank is interested
in salvaging his marriage so he can remain a part of his son’s life. Frank doesn’t answer any of my questions with more than the minimum number of syllables, but he answers my
overarching line of enquiry very eloquently just after Mr Schwarzenegger shoots Sharon Stone, his duplicitous wife, in the head.

‘Consider dat a divowce,’ says Arnie.

‘You fucking tell her, mate,’ says Frank.

And that, it seems, is that for Frank and Lois.

According to the bedside clock, it’s 2.58 a.m. when Frank gets up to piss out four bottles of Asahi, then turns on the Xbox and starts shooting shit. And however sorry I
feel for myself, at least I’m not the unfortunate patient scheduled to have his fillings drilled out by a tired, depressed and hungover gorilla in approximately six hours’ time.

Friday night is a bad night for a stag do. But needs must when you have twelve men to marshal; all but one are married or living with someone and the majority have children,
which effectively means I have to accommodate the plans and demands of more than thirty individuals. It’s December and there are presents to buy, decorations to dust off, parties to attend,
family to visit, displaced children to take to the panto . . . and this is the single day this month on which all of Joe’s buddies are available. Ivy and I have our twenty-week scan tomorrow
morning – the unambiguously named ‘anomaly scan’ – and it’s caused no small amount of friction that I’ll be attending with a honking great hangover. But the best
man’s priorities (and those of his girlfriend and unborn twins) are last on the list, apparently. Joe isn’t getting married until the middle of February, so January would make more
sense. However, the average age of the stags is closer to forty than thirty, and for a depressing number of them January is a month of voluntary or enforced abstinence. February is too close to the
big day for approval by Jen, Joe’s fiancée, so here we are in a central London strip bar on the penultimate Friday before Christmas.

The reason most stag dos happen on a Saturday is that it gives you the option to distract yourself during the day with go-karts, clay-pigeon shooting, basket weaving or whatever. You get a
chance to ease into the day and pace the drinking. On Friday nights, though, it’s straight out of the office and into the pub. You’ve been thinking about it all day, watching the clock,
hating your job and already tasting that first drink. By six thirty we were three pints in, by seven thirty we hit the tequila, and by eight we were a seething, braying, back-slapping mob. By nine
we were fading with terminal velocity and Joe – eyes simultaneously drooping with drink and flashing with maniacal zeal – insisted we ‘hit the tits’.

We are surrounded – literally
surrounded
– by aggressively beautiful, filthily athletic, over cosmeticized, underdressed women. It’s all your teenage dreams come true,
but to look at the faces (disdain, despair, fear, shame, regret) of the dozen drunken men in attendance, you’d think we were watching breaking news of some brutal, unfathomable atrocity.

‘I mean, look at that. Just . . . Look. At.
That!
’ says Malcolm, indicating the balloon-tight buttocks of the stripper rotating her hips just inches in front of his face. He
sighs as he places his head in his hands.

‘Tell me about it,’ says Tom, laying a comforting hand on Malcolm’s shoulder.

‘Before she had kids, my missus had an arse like a Chinese swimmer,’ says Finn, slicing a shallow curve through the air with the blade of his hand. ‘Now . . .’ He stares
at his cupped hands, weighing their imagined contents and frowning as if trying to ascertain just what the hell he is holding. ‘Tits, I understand,’ he says. ‘Breastfeeding, and
all that. But how does having a baby make your arse fall off the back of your legs? Explain that to me, someone.’