Wake Up Happy Every Day (30 page)

And then I wonder if maybe I need an eyelash architect. I don’t want to be undone by a detail like that. Tripped up at JFK because my eyes don’t look sad and soulful enough. That would be shit.

A latte-coloured supermodel spikes the volleyball over the net and directly into the face of one of her opponents, who falls to the sand. The crowd roar approval.

‘What are you thinking?’

Ah, Sarah’s employing the four most loaded words you can have in a long-term relationship.

I counter them with the three most important.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No, really. What are you thinking.’

‘No, it really doesn’t matter.’

And on we go like that for quite an irritating while before I cobble something together that I can share.

‘You really want to know? I’m thinking that we’ve all this money but we don’t seem to be having much fun yet.’

On the screen the supermodel scores another devastating point and high fives various other beauties. This is Brazil versus Switzerland and the Swiss look dejected. Not much of the spirit of William Tell about them. But then they don’t even have beaches. They’re very much the underdogs here. They shouldn’t feel bad. And the Brazilians own this sport. Brazil is on the way up generally. If you want to see what the new world order will look like don’t watch baseball, watch beach volleyball. The girls are in, the men are out. The northern hemisphere is done: the south is rising.

There is a pause, and then Sarah says, ‘No, we’re not exactly having fun. We’re not exactly happy, but at least we’re miserable in comfort.’

I smile at this but tell her that I’m not all that comfortable actually. Not really. I hurt and I’m hungry.

‘Well, maybe we should start the big trip,’ she says. ‘Maybe you’ve done enough. But I was thinking we might start in England, if you didn’t mind.’

England? That grey and sodden place? That cantankerous old git that keeps moaning on about the good old days? Yes. Yes please. Let’s go there.

Sarah says, ‘I miss it. I miss my family. I miss our friends. Just a couple of days and then we’ll go anywhere else you like. It’s just that Mum worries about me. I’d like to reassure her.’

‘All mums worry, don’t they? If they’re doing their job properly, I mean.’

‘I guess. But she wants to see her granddaughter too.’

Yeah of course she does. And who are we to stop her?

It occurs to me that I should feel quintessentially Californian now, in a way. I’ve reinvented myself. Hell, I’ve even had work done. I push my hand through my hair. Feels good. More than this, it really does feel real. Even better than the real thing. I should love it here now, but I don’t. I feel like I’m in a prison. A sunshiny prison and there’s the Russell problem, the way he’s in the walls somehow. In the very air con. But then maybe he’ll always be with us now. Wherever we go.

The big problem is Scarlett. I know we’re both worried about moving her.

I’m the one to actually say it. ‘What about Scarlett?’

And Sarah says, ‘I know. All this – it was for Scarlett. But . . .’ She leaves the sentence hanging, she chews her lip.

‘And it’s sort of working, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘I mean, look how happy she is. And she’s speaking, Sarah. She’s flipping well talking.’

‘She’s said the word badass.’

‘And awesome. And oh my actual god. You can get a long way on that. Especially here. If she learns to say dude and what the fuck she’ll have the entire vocabulary of a typical American teenager. She’ll be a straight-A.’

Sarah doesn’t laugh. Why should she? Because it’s not really true, is it? In truth I find American youth incredibly articulate when they want to be, though I only have Mary to go on. Oh, and reruns of golden-age comedies like
Happy Days
and
Saved By The Bell
, both of which are secret pleasures when I come back knackered after a workout and there’s no decent sport on TV.

Now Sarah says, ‘You don’t worry that she’s liking it a bit too much? That she’s getting too attached to Mary and she won’t be able to cope without her? You know when we move on, or when Mary does.’

And I have thought about this. Scarlett is growing obsessed with Mary. She wants to be her. Sarah has been buying her tons of new stuff, just as she said she would, and yet we find Scarlett shuffling around in Mary’s cast-off pumps, carrying her old purse, cramming paperclips in her mouth to try and replicate her babysitter’s dental scaffolding. Walking around with her ukulele the way she used to go around with Spot the Dog. Mary is Scarlett’s role model. Her mentor.

‘It’s hard to know the best thing, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘But you’re sure leaving here is the best thing?’

‘Of course I’m not sure,’ Sarah says. ‘Only idiots are sure and certain about things. Look at Russell.’

And it’s true. Russell was always more or less doubt-free. It’s one of the things people liked about him. And not just girls. It was how he got people to do stuff for him. He always seemed certain of the direction of travel. People crave certainty and love those who seem to have it. Surprising when you think how those people have screwed it up for the rest of us over the centuries. The history of certainty is the history of genocide. Doubt has, on the whole, been involved in far less mass murder. Far fewer pogroms. Doubt may not get you very far, but sometimes here is the best place to be anyway. I don’t understand why more people don’t embrace doubt, when it generally works so much better than the alternative.

And so many good things turn out to be the result of accidents or mistakes. Penicillin and Cadbury flakes. Kelloggs cornflakes and Post-it notes. America itself is an accident. The result of an idiot thinking he’d discovered a short cut to Samarkand. While nuclear weapons are the product of brainboxy doubt-free kids conducting successful science experiments.

Yes, fucking up often turns out to be the best thing long term. We should all of us be more relaxed about mistakes I think. Mistakes often save us from something worse. Often much, much worse.

The power of doubt and the virtue of fucking up. I can’t believe no great religions have been founded on these precepts. If I wasn’t minted already, maybe that’s what I could have done. Started the Church of Self-Doubt and the Immaculate Mistake. Maybe I’d have got a little business start-up loan from the government.

So I have my doubts about going, and I have my doubts about staying, but I do know I want to get away from this house. This place that refuses to become a home, this building which I am convinced despises me.

My phone chirrups. These days I have the best phone money can buy. Sarah and Jesus took a long time choosing it. I’m told it does a lot of things. You could, if you wanted, make a blockbuster movie with it. Really. On this phone you could write it, shoot it, edit it, compose and record the score and finally project it in shinier than life widescreen gorgeousness at the nearest wall. You could dub it into any major language and several of the minor ones. You could work out the budgets on it. Draw up all the contracts on it, find the private cellphone numbers of your chosen Hollywood stars on it. People have.

And you could, if you wanted, snooze on your flight to the premiere at Cannes, knowing that the phone could land the plane should the pilot have a heart attack.

Everything is on your phone now. No need even for the ancient clutter of desktop or laptop. And this despite the fact that we all of us know that our hard drives aren’t safe. That at some point in the nearish future a hard, driven soldier in a crack Chinese Special Cyber-Ops Squad is going to stab a finger at his own Smartphone screen and wipe all our information about everything in less than a nanosecond.

Or the Taliban will shoot down a satellite with a well-directed beam from a laser-pen, causing a lot more havoc than 9/11. Planes into buildings? No, no my friend – so crass, so old, so vulgar, so noughties. Not like a nice clean utterly contemporary blue screen of death.

Or maybe it’ll be an anti-climactic ending. Maybe it’ll just be the bathos of Microsoft and Google finally overreaching themselves and everything from birth registration to death certificate via school reports, medical records, bank statements, payslips, driving licences, and criminal convictions will simply vanish. Not to mention books, plays, films, parish council minutes – the whole history of human record-keeping and communication will be deleted into nothingness. Upgraded into a black hole from where no amount of system restore will bring it back.

We all know this, which is why Parliament even now keeps a copy of all its laws on vellum. When it comes to the laws of the land not even paper is trusted to last long enough, but for everything else there is chip and there is pin. The handy little plastic smart thingamajigs with screens to touch and buttons to press. As a species we like pressing buttons. We like touching things. We’re good at it.

But as a species we’re also careless, sloppy.

So it might, in the end, be a pushed button that brings about the end of the world. Just as we knew it would be. But it turns out it won’t be the big red one of cold-war nightmares – nothing as dramatic as that – instead it might be a chirpy wee graphic of a button that gets accidentally sat on in a works canteen in a light industrial unit somewhere on the edge of Shenzhen. It won’t be Dr Strangelove that finishes us off, it’ll be a sleepy, overworked geek trying to archive the history of porn on his new tablet during the long, lonely nightshift. We’ll be undone by a pocket call.

My phone is so futureproof, so resolutely advanced that it seems almost quaint that you can also make calls and send texts should you be into that retro kind of caper.

This cheerful cheep-cheep turns out to be a text from Polly, the girl at Sunny Bank. It says:
Just thought I should say your friend’s dad is now my lodger! How weird is that?

‘Very fucking weird,’ I say to the phone.

‘What?’ says Sarah.

‘It’s my dad’s care home,’ I say, ‘Sunny Bank. The old bugger’s done it again. Got some bird to wipe his arse for him.’ And I type ‘
????’

‘No kiss?’ says Sarah. She’s moved so she’s looking over my shoulder.

‘I don’t put kisses. Not on texts to strangers.’

‘If you don’t put a kiss these days it looks rude. There’s been rampant endearment inflation in the last few years you know. You should probably put two. Or three.’

Really? Sometimes I can’t tell if Sarah is messing with me. She just laughs and then Mary is in, telling us that our gorgeous daughter is ready for her story.

Sarah and I take it in turns to read to Scarlett. It is the favourite time of day for both of us. Scarlett smelling deliciously of baby shampoo and talc, murmuring nonsense, her thumb snugly slotted into her mouth as though thumbs and mouths were designed to go together. Which maybe they were. Maybe thumb-sucking is a normal feature of human development which we, in our cruel and unnatural way, frown at and discourage. By ‘we’ I mean this cold, utilitarian world we live in, not we as in me and Sarah – because here in Nicky-and-Sarah World it is frowning that is frowned upon and discouragement that is discouraged.

And even though she’s only three, even though she’s more or less mute, she has taste. Our Scarlett is proper old school when it comes to literature. Scarlett likes verse. It is rhyme and it is iambic, or it is nothing. So she’ll accept
The Gruffalo
naturally. She will sigh with appreciation at
The Snail and The Whale
too. But her favourites are darker hued than this. As long as there are pictures then she loves literary derring-do. Sabres gleaming. Cannons roaring. She loves flashes and bangs. Tennyson’s gallant 600 charging the Russian guns. The Highwayman with his dash and his finery. The section where the highwayman comes across the moor using the road that’s a ribbon of moonlit, tlot-tlot-tlotting on his horse. That, my friends, is our Scarlett’s very favouritest line out of the whole history of literature. Sometimes I have to repeat all the tlot-tlots several times.

I like to think she doesn’t quite get all the sexual heat of the girl with her finger on the trigger – the landlord’s black-eyed daughter whose violent suicide warns her lover of the ambush of redcoats at the inn – but who knows? They grow up so fast these days.

And I’m here to tell you there is an advantage to reading to children who can’t talk. There are no annoying questions to answer.

In ‘The Highwayman’ our tragic heroine is undone because she has spurned the love of the ugly old ostler, but I’ve never had to explain what an ostler is or how exactly you ostle, never mind why the landlord’s black-eyed daughter is prepared to top herself for love of a car jacker – because that’s what the highwayman is, no matter how fancy the clothes.

It’s usually me that does the old-school stuff. Tonight I think Sarah’s doing
The Hungry Hen
, a tragic morality piece where a fox watches and waits until the hen he’s had his eye on is fat enough for him to eat. Only he waits too long, and by the time he makes his move the hen is not only strong enough to fight him off, she’s big enough and ravenous enough to eat him up. In one gulp. A lesson in carping the bloody diem if ever there was one. Don’t wait while your enemies prepare, strike while they’re weak. Kick them when they’re down. Kicking your enemies when they’re down would seem to be the absolute optimum time to do it.