S.O.S. (2 page)

‘Been over all that, haven't we, Trish?' And by Christ hadn't we: over and over, up and down, in and out – Jesus it's wearing, tell you. ‘
Don't
want to go – wouldn't have crossed my mind. But it's … well, don't bite my head off – the
family
, isn't it?'

Bloody stupid. Worst thing to say. Took a good bit of finger-pawing, doe-eyes and chin-chucking (not to say another bleeding bottle of Lanson) to hoick my way out of that one. And all the time I was feeling resentful. I mean – why
me
? If Nicole hadn't entered the fucking competition, she never would've won the fucking prize, would she? And my whole life wouldn't now be in lumber. I don't want to go to New bloody York on the
Transylvania
, do I? (And what sort of bloody name is that for a ship?) Never would've dreamed of it in the whole of my lifetime. But something like this comes along – whole family, twelve days all in, Trip of a Lifetime – costing them a bloody fortune (cash alternative? You think I didn't check?) what actually can you do? And at the time, when the news came through –
should've seen Nicole's face, she had looked so young again: skipping about with Marianne and Rollo, all like kids at playschool – it had seemed so very far into the future as to cry out for shoving into the bulging box of admittedly dreadful things – but God, no time to dread them
yet
. And then suddenly, well – it's all over you.

Got Trish in a creème bruleée with maraschino and funny little biscuits.

‘
Any way
…' I'm oiling, ‘it's only for a
bit
.'

‘Not just a bit, though, is it?'

‘Week. Nine days …'

‘Twelve.'

‘Twelve … Fine. Not that long, is it? Drop in the – '

And already the ocean was vast between us. So I'm thinking – this is the joke of it, really – I'm thinking
Yes
: yes it bloody is a long time and I don't want to
go
. Why is nobody hearing me? Hey? Don't want to
go
. Nicole started in weeks back: You don't want to
go
, do you David?
Course
I do, I hugely protest (stock reaction). You
don't
 – I
know
you don't. And then I'm thinking Well if you know I don't (and you're right, you're right – you always are: I don't) why did you bloody insist that I come? In the first place? Hey? Right early on I went, Look Nicole – why don't just you and Marianne and Rollo go, hey? And maybe take your friend Annie to make up the numbers; got so much
work
on at the moment, haven't I, love? You won't
work
, she shoots back at me (razor-tipped, all this now, and steeped in something nasty) – you just want to
drink
and see your
woman
. Oh God. Walked right into it, didn't I? Like I always do. So on with the wide eyes – the hurt, white shocked-awake face:
Woman
? What
woman
? What are you going on about a
woman
now for, Godsake? I've
told
you, Nicole, there is no – Oh fuck off David! (and now she's screaming) I've just about had it with you up to
here
: you're bloody coming and that's the end of it, OK? Even this – even this big free thing, you're determined, aren't you, to fuck it up for everyone?!

Well no: determination doesn't enter. It's just a byproduct – a gratis spin-off of what I do, and who I am. I didn't want to go simply because I just didn't want to go. Sometimes things
are
that simple – but you just try telling it to a female. I mean, sure – if I'd been allowed to (oh joy) stay in my own house and live my own life, one or two trips down Trish's way could well have been part and parcel of the general scheme of things, but it wasn't as if this was the
point
. And Annie – Nicole's friend, Annie – Christ, she would've jumped at it, Annie would: never seemed to go anywhere, poor old sod. But I well understand that if Annie had tagged along, then Nicole would have annihilated at a stroke the huge back debt of slavering envy that would soon become her eternal due, and which she no doubt intended to exact quite teasingly while levying upon each transatlantic anecdote a stiff and mandatory surtax (while holding interest down).

She doesn't understand me, my wife. They say that, don't they? In jokes. Half-drunk old nutters are supposed to, aren't they, say that to some thicko doxy who'll nod to just anything if there's three bloody courses in it, and then a taxi home (her home, mind, and generally alone: got to be fresh for tomorrow when she's due to spend quality time with some dough-faced, puny and penniless young loser whom she'll stroke and subsidize, coax and encourage, and then beg the bastard to fuck her blind). But me, I use this as no line: Nicole, she
thinks
she understands me – thinks she knows me inside out like all wives do, but she doesn't, she doesn't – and nor will she ever, at this rate of progress (nineteen years, and counting). Example: one night I come home, decent hour – eleven, thereabouts – and OK, I'd had a fair time with Trish, cards on the table, but on the way home I got to thinking You know what, old lad, it's not right, this: it's with
Nicole
I should be up to all this malarkey – Nicole, my wife – as well as (and here is maybe the point, why I ever started to stray) mother of my children. So anyway, I'm looking at her just sitting there, Nicole, watching some or other film on Channel could it be 4 (
sh
! she'd hissed at me, it's just coming up to the finish) and I blurted out –
Nicole
! Listen! Make me the happiest man alive! And she turned and she looked at me – and for just one crazy instant something within me leapt up from somewhere deep and I thought: Result! And then she said: I'm not divorcing you, if that's what you mean. And then she said: I've missed the bloody ending now – well, you certainly managed to fuck
that
up, didn't you David?

Or words to that effect. So I'm getting it in the neck from Nicole because, you see, I'm going on the
Transylvania
to New York when I don't
want
to (she hates me for not wanting to – so why can't I stay? No, not an option, I'm afraid) and I'm getting it too from Trish for precisely the same bloody reason – except, of course, that she's convinced that I can't bloody
wait
(all this interlarded with the usual corollary that I never, do I, take her
anywhere
). Not true! I once tried that – attempted to be, oh God,
amusing:
slumped back in her pillows and roared up to the ceiling ‘I take you, Trish, all the way to heaven and back!' Did she laugh? Did she? Well what do
you
think? Yeh – you're right. She just wagged her head a bit and went, she said, to run a bath. I sometimes think: what am I doing all this for? Why do I, you know – go
on
with it? Because I sometimes think I'd be all right, me, all on my own.

*

Heaven and back: yes sure, David – very funny. Ho ho. God – lately, it's got to be that even the sex with you (and that's all there's really been between us for too long, now) is hardly more than just barely
achieved
. Trish, you go: I'm just so
tired
, you know …? Well no, David, I
don't
know, frankly. You
may
be tired – you may well be, I'm not saying you're not. But
primarily
, David, what you are is pissed on a pretty
much permanent basis. You seem to leave the office later and later – and always, no matter what you've promised, you always have to go to some bloody
pub
with one of your ghastly so-called friends and by the time you get here the candles I lit for you are guttered and the bubbles and oils in the big, hot bath I drew for us both have dissipated, and long ago I sat there and cried as I watched the whole chilled mess of it drain away. The food I've cooked you don't want – I've
eaten
is what you always say to me, but you haven't, David, you haven't: what you've done is
drink
. And so just about all you are up to and good for is tugging like an ape – no
grace
, David: there's no
art
in what you do – at whatever quite delicious silk and lacy thing I'm in for you, and then when I've shown you how it ought to be done, you focus first and feast your eyes and then just fall across me, David – thunder down on me like a newly slit open sack of tumbling potatoes, and I am no more than the floor beneath you. And even then, if I left you to, oh God –
please
get on with it, all you'd do is fall asleep. How many times, David? How many times has that happened? How many times have I whispered to you, shouted at you, cursed you to hell and then squirmed my bloody way out from under the sheer and reeking rat-arsed weight of you? Only if I bite you repeatedly and make like a milkmaid with all of my fingers – only then are you likely to make it. And me? I experience little more than a jerked-out shudder and an immediate subsidence, followed by damp. So why do I want you? Why do I want you so terribly much? Why is it that I want you to leave your bloody
wife
and come and stay with me? And
talking
of your bloody wife – just
don't
: OK? Let's just not. And don't please talk to me about, Christ – family
holidays
 – don't even mention one single thing about your life together, all right? Because I simply can't bear it. I'm thirty-six years old now, David: next stop forty. I want, I need – a man of my
own
; but more than that – someone to take care
of me: you, David, you. Don't ask me why you – maybe simply because it's you who's here, and there's no one else.

And then you leave. As soon as you wake up, you drink some of the wine I chose and uncorked and left there to breathe: it must be exhausted by now. Sometimes you don't even pour it into a glass. Would you, could you think of doing that anywhere else but here? Could you? At a party? In one of your horrible pubs? God – at
home
, would you? When you're with your family and your bloody
wife
? Just pick up a bottle of burgundy and upend it to your lips and down your throat? No. I don't think so. But you do with me. And maybe because here, with me, is the only time you can really let go: be yourself? Because I couldn't really say – can't, no, in all honesty recall, how on earth you behave when you're out. Because never – and I don't care
what
you say, David – never, ever do you take me anywhere: nowhere at all. Oh yes: you're going to mention, aren't you, those three days away – aren't you, David? Those precious and distant three days away, when your bloody kids and your bloody wife were staying with, who was it? Her mother? Not her mother? Anyway – staying somewhere with someone, doesn't matter. And you took me away to that little hotel just outside of Oxford – and
yes
, David, it was bliss. Yes it was – it was divine, totally – but it was, oh God oh God, so very long
ago
, David: so very long ago. And even then you stole from me the final afternoon because you had to get back – go back home, you said, so that you could prepare.
Prepare
, I remember going (and already, although you hadn't even left me, I was missing you terribly).
Prepare
, I said – prepare for
what
, in God's name? And at first you would not say – and then, in time and eventually, you slowly told me. You had to rumple up and thump down upon the marital bed (because she, your bloody
wife
, would never expect you to have made it) and also you had to pour away four, maybe five big bottles of Evian (because she, your bloody
wife
, knew that you would have drunk that much at least to slake your permanent alcoholic dehydration – and of course you would never have thought of buying more). Pans had to be greased, plates and cups and glasses sullied and smeared and stacked up in piles by the sink. And then later you told me you had twice choked up the lavatory, feeding it sheet after sheet of virgin Andrex (the empty roll destined to garnish the bags of household rubbish that somehow had to be cobbled together, and of course just left there to rot); on the second occasion the plunger, you said, just wasn't up to coping and so you had to call out an emergency plumber and that, you told me – to my face and deadpan – was forty-five quid down the drain.

So why do I want you? Why do I want you so terribly much? Why is it that I want you to leave your bloody
wife
and come and stay with me? I don't know. I don't know. I just know I want, need –
someone
to take care of me: a man of my own. And do I think this can ever happen? I don't know. I don't know. I just don't know.

*

‘David!'

Jesus Jesus.

‘David! Now this, now, is the absolute
limit
 – !'

‘I'm getting up I'm getting up I'm getting up – look, I'm getting – see? I'm up I'm up I'm up.'

Nicole's fists were thumped into her hips: nice hips, oh yes – still quite trim, Nicole, as David saw with such mixed feelings.

‘You disgust me,' she said – and quietly, which was rather scary, actually.

David nodded, when she'd gone. Disgust her, yes: he knew he did, he knew it, and he more or less understood why.

Felt a bit better once he'd splashed his face and fooled around with a toothbrush; gave up flossing – made him gag
(and that blue-green Listerine he couldn't help but swallow). This linen shirt feels nice, he was thinking now – and
then
he thought Oh by Christ yes: the
other
reason (how could I have forgotten?) I don't want to go: what the doctor said. The other day.

‘Think on balance we ought to take a closer little look, Mister Arm. Could be nothing at all to worry about, but …'