I guess you could see it as bitterness, if you wanted to. I don't think of myself as bitter, but I have disappointed myself; I thought I was going to turn out to be worth a bit more than this, and maybe that disappointment comes out all wrong. It's not just the work; it's not just the thirty-five-and-single thing, although none of this helps. It's . . . oh, I don't know. Have you ever looked at a picture of yourself when you were a kid? Or pictures of famous people when they were kids? It seems to me that they can either make you happy or sad. There's a lovely picture of Paul McCartney as a little boy, and the first time I saw it, it made me feel good: all that talent, all that money, all those years of blissed-out domesticity, a rock-solid marriage and lovely kids, and he doesn't even know it yet. (...)
Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid, the ones that I never wanted old girlfriends to see . . . well, they've started to give me a little pang of something, not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret. There's one of me in a cowboy hat, pointing a gun at the camera, trying to look like a cowboy but failing, and I can hardly bring myself to look at it now. Laura thought it was sweet (she used that word! Sweet, the opposite of sour!) and pinned it up in the kitchen, but I've put it back in a drawer. I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: 'I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.'See, he would have wanted to see Barry's band; he wouldn't have worried too much about Ian’s dungarees or Penny's flashlight-pen (he would have loved Penny's flashlight-pen) or Charlie's trips to the States. He wouldn't have understood, in fact, why I was so down on all of them. If he could be here now, if he could jump out of that photo and into this shop, he'd run straight out of the door and back to 1967 as fast as his little legs would carry him.
We were twelve or thirteen, and had recently discovered irony —or at least, what I later understood to be irony: we only allowed ourselves to play on the swings and the roundabout and the other kids' stuff rusting away in there if we could do it with a sort of self-conscious ironic detachment. This involved either an imitation of absentmindedness (whistling, or chatting, or fiddling with a cigarette stub or a box of matches usually did the trick) or a flirtation with danger, so we jumped off the swings when they could go no higher, jumped on to the roundabout when it would go no faster, hung on to the end of the swingboat until it reached an almost vertical position. If you could somehow prove that these childish entertainments had the potential to dash your brains out, then playing on them became OK somehow
Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breasts that I would try to touch her between her legs, a gesture that had a sort of self-parodying wit about it: it was like trying to borrow a fiver, getting turned down, and asking to borrow fifty quid instead.
Read any women's magazine and you'll see the same complaint over and over again: men —those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on — are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in 'foreplay'; they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you can't help feeling, are kind of ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren't interested. They didn't want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried. It's not really very surprising, then, that we're not much good at all that.
They were our golden couple, our Paul and Linda, our Newman and Woodward, living proof that in a faithless, fickle world, it was possible to grow old, or at least older, without chopping and changing every few weeks.
And we no longer admired people who had gone out together for a long time; we were sarcastic about them, and they were even sarcastic about themselves. In a few short weeks, mock-marital status had ceased to be something to aspire to, and had become a cause for scorn. At seventeen, we were becoming as embittered and as unromantic as our parents.
And, anyway, by moving to London I had made it easier to be liked by girls. At home, most people had known me, or my mum and dad —or had known somebody who knew me, or my
mum and dad — when I was little, and consequently I'd always had the uncomfortable feeling that my boyhood was about to be exposed to the world. How could you take a girl out for an underage drink in a pub when you knew you had a scout uniform still hanging in your closet? Why would a girl want to kiss you if she knew (or knew somebody who knew) that just a few years before, you had insisted on sewing souvenir patches from the Norfolk Broads and Exmoor on your anorak? There were pictures all over my parents' house of me with big ears and disastrous clothes, sitting on tractors, clapping with glee as miniature trains drew into miniature stations; and though later on, distressingly, girlfriends found these pictures cute, it all seemed too close for comfort then.
But I still felt a fraud. I was like all those people who suddenly shaved their heads and said they'd always been punks, they'd been punks before punk was even thought of: I felt as though I was going to be found out at any moment, that somebody was going to burst into the college bar brandishing one of the anorak photos and yelling, 'Rob used to be a boy! A little lad!,' and Charlie would see it and pack me in. It never occurred to me that she probably had a whole pile of books about ponies and some ridiculous party dresses hidden away at her parents' place in St. Albans. As far as I was concerned, she had been born with enormous earrings, drainpipe jeans, and an incredibly sophisticated enthusiasm for the works of some guy who used to splodge orange paint around.
I made sure, however, that I was never in anything, work or relationships, too deep: I convinced myself that I might get the call from Charlie at any moment, and would therefore have to leap into action. I was even unsure about opening my own shop, just in case Charlie wanted me to go abroad with her and I wasn't able to move quickly enough; marriage, mortgages, and fatherhood were out of the question. I was realistic too: every now and again I updated Charlie's life, imagining a whole series of disastrous events (She's living with Marco! They've bought a place together! She's married him! She's pregnant! She's had a little girl!), just to keep myself on my toes, events which required a whole series of readjustments and conversions to keep my fantasies alive. (She'll have nowhere to go when they split! She'll really have nowhere to go when they split, and I'll have to support her financially! Marriage'll wake her up! Taking on another man's kid will show her what a great guy I am!) There was no news I couldn't handle; there was nothing she and Marco could do that would convince me that it wasn't all just a stage we were going through.
We were having a state-of-the-nation conversation and she said, quite matter-of-factly, that we were in a pretty unhappy phase at the moment, and I agreed; she asked whether I ever thought about meeting somebody else, and I denied it, and she laughed, and said that people in our position were always thinking about meeting somebody else. So I asked if she was always thinking about meeting somebody else, and she said of course, so I admitted that I did daydream about it sometimes. At the time I thought it was a let's-be-grown-up-about-life's-imperfectability sort of conversation, an abstract, adult analysis; now I see that we were really talking about her and Ian, and that she suckered me into absolving her. It was a sneaky lawyer's trick, and I fell for it, because she's much smarter than me.
When I begin to get the feeling that we're having a good time, I give her chances to get away: when there's a silence I start to listen to T-Bone telling Barry what Guy Clark is really like in real life as a human being, but Marie sets us back down a private road each time. And when we move from the pub to the curry house, I slow down to the back of the group, so that she can leave me behind if she wants, but she slows down with me. And in the curry house I sit down first, so she can choose where she wants to be, and she chooses the place next to me.
She tells me that she thought I was cute, a word that no one has ever previously used in connection with me, and soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off. I tell her that I think she's beautiful, which I sort of do, and talented, which I definitely do. And we talk like this for a while, congratulating ourselves on our good fortune and each other for our good taste, which is the way these post-kiss pre-sex conversations always go, in my experience; and I'm grateful for every stupid word of it, because it buys me time.
I have a terrible, chilling, bone-shaking experience: the most pathetic man in the world gives me a smile of recognition. The Most Pathetic Man In The World has huge horn-rimmed spectacles and buckteeth; he's wearing a dirty fawn anorak and brown cord trousers which have been rubbed smooth at the knee; he, too, is being taken to see Howard's End by his parents, despite the fact that he's in his late twenties. And he gives me this terrible little smile because he has spotted a kindred spirit. It disturbs me so much that I can't concentrate on Emma Thompson and Vanessa and the rest.
he's thirty-five, and she's telling herself that life isn't going to offer her any more than what she has here this evening, a pizza and an old boyfriend she didn't like that much in the first place. That's a pretty grim conclusion, but it's not difficult to see how she got there. Oh, we know, both of us, that it shouldn't matter, that there's more to life than pairing off, that the media is to blame, blah blah blah. But it's hard to see that, sometimes, on a Sunday morning, when you're maybe ten hours from going down to the pub for a drink and the first conversation
of the day.
When I begin to get the feeling that we're having a good time, I give her chances to get away: when there's a silence I start to listen to T-Bone telling Barry what Guy Clark is really like in real life as a human being, but Marie sets us back down a private road each time. And when we move from the pub to the curry house, I slow down to the back of the group, so that she can leave me behind if she wants, but she slows down with me. And in the curry house I sit down first, so she can choose where she wants to be, and she chooses the place next to me.
She tells me that she thought I was cute, a word that no one has ever previously used in connection with me, and soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off. I tell her that I think she's beautiful, which I sort of do, and talented, which I definitely do. And we talk like this for a while, congratulating ourselves on our good fortune and each other for our good taste, which is the way these post-kiss pre-sex conversations always go, in my experience; and I'm grateful for every stupid word of it, because it buys me time.
I have a terrible, chilling, bone-shaking experience: the most pathetic man in the world gives me a smile of recognition. The Most Pathetic Man In The World has huge horn-rimmed spectacles and buckteeth; he's wearing a dirty fawn anorak and brown cord trousers which have been rubbed smooth at the knee; he, too, is being taken to see Howard's End by his parents, despite the fact that he's in his late twenties. And he gives me this terrible little smile because he has spotted a kindred spirit. It disturbs me so much that I can't concentrate on Emma Thompson and Vanessa and the rest.
he's thirty-five, and she's telling herself that life isn't going to offer her any more than what she has here this evening, a pizza and an old boyfriend she didn't like that much in the first place. That's a pretty grim conclusion, but it's not difficult to see how she got there. Oh, we know, both of us, that it shouldn't matter, that there's more to life than pairing off, that the media is to blame, blah blah blah. But it's hard to see that, sometimes, on a Sunday morning, when you're maybe ten hours from going down to the pub for a drink and the first conversation
of the day.
'We were just talking about what we'd call a dog if we had one,' says Charlie. 'Emma's got a Labrador called Dizzy, after Dizzy Gillespie.'
'Oh, right,' I say. 'I'm not very keen on dogs.'
None of them says anything for a while; there's not much they can say, really, about my lack of enthusiasm for dogs.
'Is that size of flat, or childhood fear, or the smell, or . . . ?' asks Clara, very sweetly.
'I dunno. I'm just . . . ' I shrug hopelessly, 'you know, not very keen.'
They smile politely. As it turns out, this is my major contribution to the evening's conversation, and later on I find myself recalling the line wistfully as belonging to a Golden Age of Wit. I'd even use it again if I could, but the rest of the topics for discussion don't give me the chance
I don't feel good, not now that it's all over. For an afternoon I was working in a place that other
people wanted to come to, and that made a difference to me — I felt, I felt, I felt, go on say it,
more of a man, a feeling both shocking and comforting.
Men don't work in quiet, deserted side streets in Holloway: they work in the City or the West
End, or in factories, or down mines, or in stations or airports or offices. They work in places
where other people work, and they have to fight to get there, and perhaps as a consequence they
do not get the feeling that real life is going on elsewhere. I don't even feel as if I'm the center of
my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's? When the
last person has been ushered out of this place, and I lock the door behind him, I suddenly feel
panicky. I know I'm going to have to do something about the shop — let it go, burn it down,
whatever — and find myself a career
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