Wake Up Happy Every Day (29 page)

‘Oh, come on, Daniel,’ but then she thinks she’s been too snappy, so she says, ‘I’m all intrigued now.’ And she puts her hand on his arm. He seems to start, as if he’d been thinking of something else entirely and she’s tugged him back into the present.

‘Er, yes, right, well,’ and he goes into the little kitchenette and she can see him take down a piece of paper fastened to the fridge behind a little yellow sun. A magnet, Polly guesses.

He comes back out. It is a leaflet, one that is all words and no pictures.
THE HOMECARE OPTION
. That’s the headline. Polly looks at him closely as she takes it.

‘Probably not practical . . .’ he starts.

‘Shush, Daniel, let me read it properly . . .’ and she sits down on the arm of the chair.

‘Gosh, you are being forceful today.’

‘Sorry,’ she says but she doesn’t lift her eyes from the paper.

‘Oh, don’t apologise. I like it,’ he says.

The leaflet is all about how families can earn extra money taking an elderly person into their home. It’s like fostering, adoption even, but for pensioners rather than for kids. She reads it carefully and then goes over it again.

‘I just thought . . .’ He breaks off.

Polly looks up at him, then down at the leaflet again. She doesn’t know what to say.

‘Like I say, probably out of the question, but I just thought that . . .’ He stops again. He smiles. ‘Gosh this is hard, like asking for a date.’

Bit more than a date, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s thinking
Come on, Daniel, spit it out
. But she says nothing.

‘You’re not making this easy.’

‘I’m sick of making things easy, Daniel.’ And, as she says it, she knows it’s true. She’s always made things easy. Easy for teachers, easy for friends, easy for boyfriends, easy for her mum. Easy for her managers. She even made it easy for her dad to sell most of the horses and then fuck off with Lavinia fucking Macleod. And Lavinia had been her babysitter when she was small. And she’d always made things easy for her then too. Didn’t play up. Put on her jimjams, cleaned her teeth, took the wooden hill to Bedfordshire as soon as she was told to. Put the light out and everything. Lay there in the dark listening to Lavinia downstairs fix herself snacks and drinks and then snort at
Roseanne
on the telly. Maybe if she’d been a bit more of a brat then Lavinia would have thought twice about stealing her dad. It’s a possibility anyway. Polly has always made things easy for other people, hard for herself. Well, it’s going to stop now.

‘Yes, well . . .’ Daniel takes a breath, wanders back into the kitchenette. Mumbles something.

‘I can’t hear you, Daniel.’

‘I just said that this place costs a fortune and I’d rather give my money to people I like, that’s all. And I get on well with your mum.’

‘I don’t know, Daniel, I’ll have to ask her. I think she’ll be freaked out.’

‘Well she sort of suggested it actually. She gave me the leaflet anyway.’

Polly stares at the carpet. It could do with a hoover, but so could everywhere at Sunny Bank. Not really the cleaners’ fault, they’re just a grubby lot, the old. Always shedding bits of food, hair, teeth.

She is certain that she has to say no. She even opens her mouth to say this when Irina bangs into the room without a by your leave.

She ignores Daniel, just stands there, hands on hips, lips curling, sneering, spitting nasty words in Polly’s direction.

‘You still here? Leave now please. Right this minute. Or I really will call the police.’

Polly sighs. But at least that’s a decision made for her. ‘Come on then, Daniel,’ she says. ‘Your stuff won’t pack itself, will it?’

And so that’s Irina nicely stubbed out.

Thirty-one

NICKY

We are lounging separately on our absurdly super-sized sofas, the pink one for Sarah, the electric-blue one for me, and we are watching sport. For those with time on their hands televised sport is a total boon. I never much liked sport as a kid. My dad did, so that might be why it never appealed to me. Rugby, that was his big thing.

I did get into Test cricket as a student. But that’s not really sport as such. Five days of not very much ending in a draw. It’s like contemporary experimental theatre more than anything. I’ve always been drawn to an absence of drama I think. Even in drama. Consider my favourite playwright after Shakespeare – Beckett. The man with the most inventive ways of saying and doing nothing. Only trouble with Beckett is that the plays aren’t long enough. Test cricket at its best is five days of Endgame and what could be better than that? Russell liked sport. He liked it all. Motor racing that was his favourite. F1 on the muted telly. Punk rock on the stereo. Cider in his hand. Bilkofest still to come in the evening. Russell’s perfect Sunday back in the day.

But now when I myself am running, jumping, skipping, jabbing, bobbing, weaving, squatting, pulling, pushing, pressing, lifting and stretching a lot of the time – and then resting – I find I’m becoming increasingly tolerant of sport. Especially American sport. Everything about sport here is such a big production. The plays, the uniforms, the commentary, the ad breaks. To watch American sport is to see the way the whole empire thinks and moves. Want to know about American morality? American politics? American business? Watch baseball.

Right now I’m not watching baseball. I’m half-watching the group stages of the Beach Volleyball World Cup but not thinking about sport, morality, politics or business. I’m thinking about love and I’m thinking about railways. They go together, don’t they? Specifically, I’m thinking about InterRail and I’m thinking about my first big love. Unrequited naturally. I’m thinking about Caroline Dawson. Lorna’s mum.

In 1985 a hundred quid would buy you a rail ticket that gave you a month’s unlimited travel on Europe’s rail network. It was the summer after our first year at the college, I had some money saved from the job at the card place, Russell had his student overdraft facility, and we both had a burning desire to be somewhere that wasn’t Bedford. In particular I had a burning desire to be somewhere where my dad wasn’t.

It would be fair to say that me and my father have never got on. I worshipped him as a kid, but he wasn’t very good at hiding his disappointment in me. I was a shy and nervous child and my dad didn’t really do shy or nervous. Didn’t get it. My dad could get by in any of half a dozen different languages. See him in an Indian restaurant and he’d be doing banter with the waiters in confident Bengali. We were always getting extra side dishes.

He’d give it a go in Santanello’s pizzeria too, serenading the harassed waitresses in booming sing-song cod-Italian. Like he was in an opera called Mr Fisher Orders A Margherita. Prepared to embarrass us all for extra garlic bread. The language of Shy, however, the dialect of Nervous, these were tongues he didn’t speak and wasn’t about to attempt.

So, yep, when I was a little boy he was away a lot and I used to miss him and then he’d come back and I used to get nostalgic for the ache of missing him. Of course I couldn’t articulate it like this then. Then, I was just confused. And, later, when I was an adolescent, he wasn’t away so much and he and his opinions took up every corner of the house. I kept bumping into his views on the EEC, or the miners. Tripping over his thoughts about Northern Ireland or lenient judges in the hallway. Squeezing past his position on the miners’ strike or modern pop music on the stairs.

A very tidy man in most ways, he scattered his attitudes, positions and sentiments like a careless picnicker scatters crisp packets. And in the end all this litter spoilt the view.

So when Russell suggests going to Greece by way of Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna, Belgrade, and more or less every other major rail terminus in Europe, I jump at it. Of course, it isn’t just about my dad, there is the hope of adventures too. I’m twenty after all. God knows I’m ready for some.

They don’t even have to be big adventures. Athletic Swedish adventures. Severe German adventures. Moody French adventures. Breezy Australian adventures. Generous Dutch adventures. The pale fire of a Scottish adventure. Even a nerdy English adventure maybe. An adventure whose drama is hidden behind librarian specs and a liking for Virginia Woolf. That’ll be OK. That’ll be a big enough adventure for me. A sound return on my investment. And I’m hoping my own complete fluency in Shy will eventually count for something, somewhere. Get me into a tight spot or two. Perhaps abroad, talking books with serious girls, Shy could translate as Enigmatic.

And it is true that there are a lot of girl-shaped adventures. They just don’t happen to me.

We could call that InterRail tour ‘Confessions of a Wingman’. And I’m not even a wingman to a real, live flesh-and-blood human being. I’m wingman to a haircut. I get to watch as Russell’s Duran Duran hair woos and wins backpacking girls in sad cafes right across Europe. My role turns out to be to make Russell and his hair seem less threatening, more normal. To sit and radiate comforting ordinariness, making small talk with the companions of the girls Russell’s hair is doing its number on.

And it absolutely must be the hair that does the wooing because the 1985 vintage Russell Knox has a very limited supply of chat. Some very ropey material. In the shopping mall of banter Russell’s is very definitely a Soviet-era store. Not much in the way of choice and all of it packaged in a stark, brutalistic style. All he stocks is heavy-handed piss-taking, mainly of me, but also of the accent and perceived national characteristics of whichever country the adventures come from. So the Scottish girls are miserly, the Australian girls are uncouth, the German girls are efficiently authoritarian, the Swedish girls are efficiently promiscuous and so on.

And yes, he gets told to fuck right off. Maybe twice this happens. He even gets laid out rather than laid by one Aussie girl rebutting her own resemblence to national stereotype in somewhat ambiguous style. But mostly it gets him where he wants to go.

And yes, I know it wasn’t just the hair really. It was also the insanely unjustified self-confidence, though one of the girls did tell me it was also the dreamy curl of the eyelashes. But no one fucks someone just because they have nice eyelashes do they? Maybe they do. Or maybe they did then.

Lorna Dawson might not be the only child Russell has. There could be other kids from other girls seduced by peacocky hair, bad jokes, and those goddamn eyelashes. And if there are other progeny, there’s a good chance they’ll all be beautiful and all filled with the restless light of the driven and dissatisfied.

And I think about Lorna’s mum. The quiet and lovely Caroline. The girl Russell’s Casanova hair left behind on the platform at Bedford Midland.

I met her first. A course on the romantics. Blake, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Shelleys – all of them recollecting experience in tranquillity, defecating into pure transparency. Generally laying down the blueprint for every scene that came after. All the white ones anyway.

The alliances, the betrayals, the grand statements and gestures. The adventurous, incestuous sex. You Young British Artists, you neo-folk kids, you Brit-poppers, you grungers, you punks, you angry young men, you Beatniks, you Bloomsburys, you pre-Raphaelites, all you brotherhoods, all you movements – you owe all your attitudes and ways of carrying on to the guys with the daffodils and the sick roses.

That was the sort of thing Caroline would say as we sat on plastic orange seats in the refectory after class. And then Russell would join us and she would shut up, stop being interesting and entertaining and knowledgeable and instead look at him – at his eyelashes and hair – while he spoke. And I would sit and say not very much and concentrate on watching her watching him. I would watch the truth behind the word ‘crush’. A person bewitched in this kind of a way becomes so much less than they are, so much less than they could be. Flattened. Squashed. Crushed.

Caroline. She liked her beer in pints. She could play a mean game of pool. She could play piano. She could roll a fag with one hand. And her major was in modern languages – just think how huffy the Shelleys would have been if they’d known they were only a minor – and she would have been hugely helpful with the many
bitte, wo ist das bahnhof
-type situations we found ourselves in that summer.

Taking Caroline along might have negated the mesmerising effects of the hair I suppose. There was a chance those beguiling eyelashes would have had their style cramped. Even the Swedish girls don’t usually like getting off with someone while their regular girlfriend is watching.

And when we come back for our final year Caroline has left. Dropped out to do some paralegal thing in London. She doesn’t leave me her address.

I often wonder about her over the years, but Russell just shrugs when I mention her. Easy come, easy go he says, but he really liked her. I know he did. Everyone did. She was a bit like Sarah in that way actually. They looked a bit the same too. Pale, freckled, clear-eyed. Sometimes caught smiling at secret jokes that they won’t ever tell.

Yes, Caroline Dawson, she would be the kind of girl to keep a pregnancy quiet. A good sport.

I’m trying to think if there was any time after that InterRail trip when I actually liked Russell. I’m thinking maybe there wasn’t, not really.