STRETCH, 29

Damian Lanigan

COPYRIGHT

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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Copyright © Damian Lanigan 2000

Damian Lanigan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006514282

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780008245924

Version: 2017-02-16

DEDICATION

For Matthew Batstone

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Downshift

Two hundred quid

£14,273

Three hundred grand

Seventy-three thou

£240 pm

Twelve hundred quid

£2.91

Loose change

Hundreds of pounds

Crisp notes

Five quid

£200,000 a year

Thirty a bottle

Sixer in coin

The nine hundred mark

Spending limit

£15,525

Forty-eight pounds sterling and nought new pence

£45

£875,000

Over eighty pounds

Nearly seventy

Money

Seven hundred left

Four twenty-pound notes

Forty-four pounds eighteen pence

Forty p

Zero

0171 299 4563

Levelling

Averagely off

About the Author

Also By

About the Publisher

DOWNSHIFT

Two hundred quid

I was walking towards Knightsbridge with two grand in my pocket, wondering how far it would get me.

Scenario 1: I get the tube to Heathrow, buy myself a one-way ticket to LAX, hole up in a motel on Sunset, spend three sleepless days and nights hunched over the complimentary stationery, chewing down triple espressos. I emerge blinking and amazed with a movie idea so high concept that Fox kidnap me, stick me in a suite at the Beverly and forbid me to speak to anyone while they put the elements together. Tarantino wants to direct, Kidman wants to star, DiCaprio’s falling over himself to play a cameo. I demand and get back-end points and a three-thousand-square-foot office on the lot. I’m a producer now.

I liked it but I had some nagging concerns about the visa situation, so as I negotiated the painted ladies skittering between Gucci and Armani on the slick December pavements, I swung my attentions eastwards:

Scenario 2: I get the tube to Heathrow and buy a one-way ticket to anywhere in the European Union, let’s say … Brussels. No, no, let’s say Bologna. Never been there, but it’s probably quite nice. I teach English for most of the year and spend the autumn picking grapes for food and lodging. I screw forty per cent of my female students, and fifty per cent of my grape buddies. My life is simple, but fulfilling. I am known as Crazy Inglese. I marry the daughter of the guy who owns the winery. I end up running for mayor. I win and get the public transport system sorted out in record time.

Scenario 2 was getting a bit depressing. I was now right on top of the tube station, being offered a sprig of heather by some hairy gypsy child. I told her to piss off and in desperation flung my imaginings yet further east:

Scenario 3: I get the tube to Heathrow and buy a one-way ticket to Goa. I sleep on the beach, do a stack of acid and become very wise. By the summer I’m wearing a long white dress and Tolstoyesque beard and live off freebies from gullible backpackers for the rest of my life. I sleep with many freckled Australian girls, one of whom is actually called Noeleen.

Jesus, I couldn’t even get a decent fantasy going.

This may have been because the two grand wasn’t mine. It belonged to Bart, who owned the restaurant in which I slaved. In a fashion that was becoming habitual, he had summoned me from the restaurant in Battersea to the roulette table at the Sheraton Park Tower. A crackle on his mobile, in the background a whirring followed by the paradiddle as the ball bounced on to the wheel:

‘Get me two grand. I’m blown down here.’

The calls were now coming about twice a week. I’d asked Tony Ling, the restaurant’s Anglo-Chinese accountant, if it was OK, and he’d just laughed at me, showing his tiny unbrushed teeth: ‘It’s his train set.’

Tony wasn’t on my side either.

And so, despite the dull feeling that there was something going on I didn’t quite understand, and from which I could never benefit, here I was, in rich, clogged Knightsbridge, wondering what the hell I was doing here, having a curse put on me in Romany.

Scenario 4: Take the two grand to my boss, and be quick about it.

As I started to cross the road to the casino, a rich young mum in a towering 4 x 4 almost took me out. The gypsy curse nearly fulfilled instantly, but by a Range Rover rather than a horse-drawn wagon. I watched her as she swung through the red light, mouthing in the rear-view at the wriggling baby seat. The money, the bull bars and twelve airbags made her further away than Goa. Up there, in all that air-conditioned, insulated headroom, she was safe and sound with the object of her unconditional love: a smooth, fat midget who couldn’t keep things down. I wanted to be her husband, and look after her.

Scenario 5: Comfortable bourgeois tedium in old London town with a wife and a child and at least two cars.

That’s the one, and two grand gets you nowhere near it.

When I arrived at the casino, the door staff nodded me through with a combination of courtesy and disgust. I didn’t hold it against them: the winter drizzle had coaxed an old-dog aroma from my Crombie and glued most of my hair to most of my face. I went through to the tables. The place was pretty empty: a couple of absorbed Chinese at the baccarat table, a group of cigar-ing pinstripes around one of the roulette wheels obviously in a post-lunch tailspin.

Bart was sitting at the marble bar on a black leatherette stool manically swirling a vodka tonic.

‘Jesus, Stretch, you bin in a fuckin’ road accident?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, get on with it – where’s the money?’

I retrieved the money from my inside coat pocket. He took it, put it between his teeth and hitched his jeans up round his roasting-dish belly.

‘Go on then, what are you waiting for – get in a cab and fuck off back to work.’

‘It’s my evening off actually. I’m going home.’

‘In which case don’t get a cab. Well, you’re welcome to get one, but I’m not paying for it.’

‘Thanks, Bart, you’ve really made my day.’

‘Don’t mention it, Frank.’

Bart: he doesn’t make it easier.

I went into the marble-and-mood-music toilet and let the codger spritz my wrists with Czech and Speake, to take away the Airedale twang rising from my coat.

It was nearly four and already getting dark by the time I was back out on Knightsbridge. There was now no point in me going home, because I’d been invited to a pre-Christmas drinks potty in Holland Park, and was expected there at six-thirty, an hour earlier than everyone else, to ‘catch up we haven’t seen you in ages’. I wonder why that was. I decided to spend some time with a paper, in a pub, smoking. I’m the world champion at killing hours. All I have to do is look at them and they die. By the way, ‘party in Holland Park’ sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

It lost a bit in the enactment, I can tell you. I will tell you.

I bought a Standard and inserted myself in The Duchess of Kent with a pint of Pride and inspected the catering jobs. I read every single one. The best I could do was a two-hundred-quid-a-year pay rise if I went to be a trainee manager at Kentucky Fried Chicken in Streatham. Nice opportunity. I turned it down on the basis of the cardboard hat.

I left the pub at five, big empty bags of time banging at my knees, going nowhere in particular. As I crossed Knightsbridge Green a figure leapt up off one of the benches: ‘Frank! Frank Stretch!’

I looked into the man’s face. Gaunt and swarthy, eyes slightly narrowed, he looked at me eagerly. It took me a few moments to lock on properly.

‘Bill. Christ, how’s it going?’

Bill Turnage, an old schoolfriend. I suddenly had a strong desire to escape. I couldn’t bear the thought of having to talk him through the last ten years.

‘It’s fine. I’m just down for a couple of days, from Suffolk. On … business.’

‘Christ.’

We were both now pretty awkward. I looked at my watch and tried to look pushed for time.

‘Listen, I’m in a real hurry, actually. Got to go to some drinks party, sorry to sound like such a yuppie.’

‘No, no, that’s fine. Let me take your number.’

Shit.

‘Actually, I’m between apartments currently, but why not jot down an address. They can forward everything to me.’

‘Sure, sure.’

He took out a notebook and scribbled down my address. Then he looked at me with a curious intensity.

‘Take my card, get in touch, I mean it. I’d love to see you.’

I slipped his card into my coat and started rubbernecking for a taxi.

‘God, yeah, of course. But really I’m in a tearing hurry, Bill. Ten minutes late already; look there’s a cab.’

‘Call me, Frank.’

‘’Course.’

I lobbed myself into the cab and asked for Notting Hill, thus blowing my evening’s budget.

I decided that I’d walk from the Gate down Holland Park Avenue; I was still way too early. As we pulled away I looked back for Bill and saw him still looking after me. It started to give me the willies. When I was out of sight I took his card out of my pocket:

BILL TURNAGE

FURNITURE DESIGN & BUILD

Maybe having a business card would make things simpler. Everyone I know has a business card. It’s the first thing people seem to do now, trade business cards: ‘this is who I am’, ‘and this is who I am’, as if what the card says about them clears everything up.

I turned over in my mind what my card would say on it: Waiter? That would be the most honest, and thus the most undesirable. Maître d’? Says either queer or sad. Besides, maître d’ in a bar and grill in Battersea? Come off it. Manager? Oh, God, anything but that. Mimicking white collar language when you’re just a fetcher, carrier and ferrier is so shaming. Forget the positive spin: if I had a business card there’s only one thing it could say on it:

FRANK STRETCH

LESS SUCCESSFUL THAN HIS FRIENDS

£14,273

Yes, it was pretty straightforward really. Frank Stretch, underachiever, flop, relegation contender – outclassed by his friends. Now, you may think that you’re less successful than your friends, and you may well be right. The difference between us, however, is that I have a system that proves it.

If you feel as if you’re under-achieving, perhaps you’d be tempted to read a self-help book. Don’t, because I’ve tried them, and the thing about self-help books is that they are all wrong. They make it easy on the reader and tell him from the outset that he’s really a wonderful, successful human being. They refuse to acknowledge the hard and heavy truth, which is this: people who read self-help books are less successful than their friends, that’s why they read self-help books. My approach to the whole issue is a lot more rigorous and a lot more honest. It goes like this: ‘Admit it, you loser, you’re less successful than your friends, and not only that, you can prove it.’

According to this inclusive and elegant system of classification of success in life, my best friend Tom scores 73, and my (ex) flatmate Henry 59. Lottie, his knitwear fanatic girlfriend, scores a moderate 46. Bart, my dear boss, weighs in with 68. I score a lot less than any of these people. In fact thanks to the system I am now able to make a broader statement about my standing in the world: ‘Stretch, you’re less successful than everyone you know.’

I’m aware that I am open to the accusation of being self-pitying, but I’d like to point out that it is closely scrutinised, finely calibrated, judiciously-arrived-at self-pity. If you were me, and thank Allah you’re not, you’d be self-pitying too.

I call the system The Maths, as in, ‘Ooh he looks as if he might put in some really good maths’, when applied to a new acquaintance, or ‘Pretty abysmal maths there’, when applied to myself.

The principle is quite simple, really; scores for the ten important areas of life, out of ten. Let me talk you through it.

ONE: MONEY A more complex dimension than you might think. When you’re doing someone’s money score, make sure you ask all the difficult questions. The first golden rule is that people under the age of fifty always claim to be poorer than they are. (Whereas, men over fifty like to pretend they’re richer than they are, particularly to their friends, but I don’t meet them very often.)

The second golden rule is, don’t forget family. A friend of yours, let’s call him Henry, might complain that he’s underpaid and over-mortgaged, and can’t afford to go on holiday this year. You may feel entitled to a momentary moment of superiority. But hold on a second. You then find out that his dad’s a sales director of a small slipper-making company in Preston. Still feeling chipper? Well, Henry Senior has share options worth £150,000 and pension rights running to two-thirds of his annual £48,000 salary. On his demise, that dough is only going in one direction, and that’s to Henry Jun. This is by no means the worst example I could cite. I once shared a flat with a bloke who ate Safeway cornflakes with tap water for Sunday lunch and smoked Berkeleys. He was trying to get into the movies, like every other fucker. He chose as his mode of entry to this rarefied world working the late shift at the Brixton Blockbuster video store. It transpired that he had an obscure great-uncle who spent his days strapped into a leather wing-backed armchair in the Carlton Club, pissing himself with rhino force inside his tweed britches. When he finally had his coronary over the fashion pages of the Telegraph, my flatmate inherited half a million, as well as a sizeable tranche of Herefordshire and moved into a loft apartment in Clerkenwell. What looked like a dead-cert dowdy 1 turned out to be a big, airy, sky-lit 9.

Guess what? He’s now in the movies.

In 1994, the year before all this started, I earned £14,273.00 and had no expectation of ever inheriting anything. My mother died fifteen years ago, and my dad had gone AWOL in the Mid-West or the West Midlands, where his last known employment was self-unemployment. Another half-arsed Thatcherite dream gone tits-up. I could go on, about postmen uncles and dinner-lady aunties, but any way you look at it, I’m skint and likely to remain so pretty much forever.

I’ll just give you a ready reckoner:

Rupert Murdoch down to the Queen Mother | 10
Michael Heseltine down to Jeffrey Archer | 9
Alan Shearer down to Cherie Booth | 8
Some of my friends down to Preston slipper company director | 7
Ken Livingstone down to your local GP | 6
Most of my friends down to most of the rest of my friends | 5
Car salesmen down to articled clerks | 4
PAs to the MD down to binmen | 3
Me | 2
Over two-thirds of the UK population | 1

TWO: LOVE Compared to money, this one’s a cinch. From where I’m standing a half-hearted Christmas card from an ex-girlfriend scores you at least a 3. Look around and you’ll see that most people beat this score, just don’t look at me. I scored another 2.

THREE: SEX Pretty easy to mark yourself, but often very tricky to mark others. Some couples spend their entire lives pawing one another in public, trying to create the impression that when they’re alone it’s an unstoppable gymnasm from dusk till the early afternoon. Very often such behaviour is a straightforward deception. Spend a night at their place and press your ear to the bedroom wall while maintaining a total unbreathing silence. What will you hear? The sounds of a hardback closing, a peck on an already dozing partner’s cheek and the light clicking off. A milky, cuddly, dreary 2.

No, those to watch for high scores here are the ones who barely seem to look at each other at table apart from to exchange black, jaded insults. After dinner they nurse their hostilities at opposite ends of the room, while everybody else inwardly speculates on their imminent break-up. In the sack they’re like a herd of satyrs home on leave to make a porn movie. Look for the flu symptoms: bleary-eyed and all sore and achy in the morning. And then watch them closely. They are already considering their next options: which orifice, which lubricant, which forearm, which piece of machinery. A 9, no question.

You may have noticed that the sex symbol is phallic rather than yonic, if you will. Now, the act of sex for me is a yoni thing rather than a phallus thing, simple as that. That is, in an ideal world it’s a yoni thing. At that time, however, it was very much a phallus thing, and no prizes for guessing whose phallus. I regularly scored a fine upstanding 1, especially in the mornings.

FOUR: WORK Quite easy to score, as long as you remember the key question: Are you happy in your work? The ruddy-faced pinstripes larging it up in the City with their partnerships and directorships tend to score low marks in this system, despite the serial-number incomes. All the ones I know consistently wang on about early retirement or writing their novel or opening a surf shop in Maui. They hate their work, but also define themselves in terms of their work, and it’s all writ large on their business cards. Oh dear. 2s and 3s all round.

Another example. You may think that Bill Clinton has a pretty good job, and most people would agree with you. I don’t. I mean it’s just one thing after another if you’re the Leader of the Free World, isn’t it? West Bank settlers one minute, a Republican majority in Congress the next, some woman broadcasting to the nation about distinguishing marks on your penis the next. Bill’s welcome to it if you ask me. My (ex) flatmate Henry’s girlfriend is called Lottie and she knits sweaters for a living, except that she doesn’t get paid for it. I don’t really want to do that either, but at least I’d sleep at night.

When I left university I had a question to answer. What becomes of a dissolute, immature ex-Maoist (the girls are prettier in the Communist Society), now patrician-Tory, broadly-not-deeply-read pseudo-intellectual when he has to get a job?

I initially took the conventional Oxbridge approach. I applied for jobs in American, Swiss and Japanese investment banks. I considered law, but in banks the girls are prettier. In fact, they’re the Maoist girls, but now in £80 undies and mock-Chanel body armour. Needless to say I failed. I then applied to go on a journalism course in Harlow and succeeded.

A year later, the girls in the pricey underwear were just graduating into their first 3 Series when I took up an eight-and-a-half-grand glamour job on the Streatham Post. While they dealt in issues of world importance, like the exchange-rate fluctuations between the schilling and the escudo, I was scrabbling around with the trivia: births, marriages, deaths – that sort of thing.

I operated in a different world order from my peers. My world ended at Balham, Wandsworth, Chelsea Bridge. Nothing in which I was interested ramified outside this area: Chamber of Commerce Outrage at Red Route Plan, Lady Mayoress Opens New Texas Homecare, Woman Found By Son ‘Had Been Dead Three Weeks’.

On the other hand, the people I knew were obsessing about the fate of the dollar from their striplit hangars at Salomon or Stanley. They were part of that process whereby some bureaucrat in DC says the word ‘nervous’ at a dinner party and six hours later little children are crying in the streets of Nairobi.

Anyway, I didn’t last long. Journalism’s all about getting your face around, cold calling, beer drinking, loud laughing, cock sucking. I just didn’t have the necessary. Most of all it’s about wanting it badly, and I’ve never wanted anything badly, nothing that wasn’t human and female at any rate. So I sacked it. In fact, if truth be known, they sacked me. I’d captioned a picture of the local MP at a garden fête as follows: ‘ANGELA HOWEY, MP, HOLDS ALOFT A LARGE PARSNIP BEFORE INSERTING IT INTO HER ANUS’.

Everyone at the paper missed it, and they got scores of furious letters, not least from Ms Howey herself, but I was long gone. It was, I can see, a puerile gesture, but momentarily enjoyable, and mentally I was way out of there anyway. I wasn’t happy in my work, you see. At least I got out alive, if somewhat disillusioned with journalism for the time being. And now I wait tables.

So I would ask myself the question: Frank, are you happy in your work in a bad restaurant in Battersea? The answer? No, not really. Score? 3.

FIVE: HOUSE One of the easiest of the lot, particularly if you’re an owner-occupier. The property market has a strange and mysterious beauty to it, in as much as you always get exactly what you pay for. It’s practically impossible for people to artificially inflate or deflate their scores here. Let the market decide, it has great wisdom in these matters. Again, a ready reckoner may help to elucidate:

* of London, obviously.

** Likely to be a barn (unconverted).

In all cases subtract I point if you’re renting.

For owners of second homes, combine scores up to a maximum of 10.

For Islington, read Fulham, for Neasden read Tooting and so on. Zone 1 tends to beat Zone 2 which tends to beat Zone 3.

You may think that I have marked Notting Hill a tad unfairly, especially if you’ve just bought a plasterboard cubbyhole there for two hundred grand. I just say that if you live in Notting Hill you deserve all the unfairness you get.

If anybody else feels hard done by, and thinks this table undervalues their own property, I am afraid to say I don’t yet operate an ombudsman system to mediate disputes.

I rented a room in Henry’s cosy three-bed flat in Clapham, which was above a CTN and overlooked the public khazi. A roof-terraced, stripped-floored, ficus-benjamina-by-the-tellyed 4.

SIX: WHEELS Cars, basically. With motorcycles, HGVs, tractors etc each case is treated strictly on merit, but basically I’m talking cars. Cars are complex in a way that houses aren’t. Whilst in the case of new cars the market principle is broadly operable – a £13,000 Vectra always scoring more points than a £9,000 Punto – the second-hand market wreaks havoc. For instance, Marie, my ex-girlfriend, scores a solid 4 with her nearly-new Nissan Micra, whereas Henry, with his ancient Triumph Stag, scores a 5, despite the fact he paid about two grand less for it. More high marks might be scored by: a gubernatorial stretch Zil; a gold Roller droptop on white-walls; a cigarillo of crimson fibreglass with head-high tyre tread and 400 horses slavering at the nape of your neck; any Aston; anything American.

The acid test is whether or not your car evokes the comment ‘Nice motor’ (or ‘’smoter’) from a black eighteen-year-old male. If so then you’re 5 or above, if not, you’re 4 or below. I drive a 1977 Vauxhall Cavalier. Oh! My Chevalier! ‘’Smoter’? No. Laughing stock? Yes. Score? 2. Better than a Daewoo, purely for the kitsch value.

SEVEN: PHYSICAL You could never accuse me of being superficial here, as I always take care to look beneath the skin, as well as upon it. There are two dimensions on which to score; 5 for aesthetic beauty and 5 for physical health. Kind of, ‘Yeah, not bad, but how long’s it going to last?’ Some examples: a Premier League footballer with a horse’s face (getting rarer – most of them look like Zulu chiefs or boy band members nowadays): a 6. A supermodel with an aerobics video out is brushing 10. A supermodel with a syringe of smack lolling out of her eyelid as she goes hypoglycaemic in a nightclub toilet (i.e. most of them), more like a 6 again.

Despite the peascod gilet of Trex that I sport, I get two beauty points for tapering, sensitive fingers and a winning, lop-sided grin, and one fitness point for being able to go to the shops without the aid of a motorised wheelchair. I smoke Luckies, because hardly anyone else does, and binge drink whenever I get the chance, which I’m sure doesn’t do me any favours, but I never go to the doctor’s (on the same basis that I never open mail from the bank) so maybe I’m just fine. Thus, being in paranoid ignorance of my real state of health, I gave myself a rather unprepossessing score of 3.

EIGHT: POPULAR Do people spend their time at parties scanning the space over your left shoulder looking for someone they’d rather be talking to? How many invitations do you have on the mantelpiece? How many times this week did you spend your break time circling the programmes you’re going to watch on telly tonight? How often do you sit there in the early evenings desperately flipping through your mental address book, wondering why no-one ever calls? My answers to these questions go like this: yes, 0,5, very often. It’s a painful area, and you may well be reluctant to be truthful to yourself. I could even forgive you for overstating your score a little bit. I did. My score? 3. Work friends score half.

NINE: INTERESTING Another difficult category, and one with several booby traps lying in wait for the inexperienced. Let’s take an example. I have an acquaintance called Christophe who would give himself an 8 or 9 here. He would adduce as evidence the following: he plays the guitar to a high standard, goes to the theatre a lot, has one Californian parent, one Swiss, both of whom have had complicated and drawn-out nervous breakdowns. He rides a Harley and lives for half the year in a villa in Fiesole giving English lessons to the children of rich Tuscans. Crucial to his impression of himself as a ravishingly interesting fellow is the fact that he has travelled widely ‘amongst the peoples’ of the Himalayas, China and the Arctic Circle, often, as he never ceases to remind one, in difficult and dangerous circumstances. He has eaten yak’s bollocks. He is something of an authority on Taoism. There is no ‘r’ on the end of his name. A 9, Christophe? You must be joking. A 2? That’s it.

On the other hand, my flatmate Henry is a computer scientist from Leeds. His dad is that slipper magnate I was telling you about. His mum’s a housewife. For some reason he’s a Crystal Palace fan, and rarely misses a home game. His interests include supermarket shopping and TV. He holidays in the Peak District. He likes Pink Floyd and Michael Bolton. Score? 8. A man should be judged by the content of his character, not by the colour of the stamps in his passport.

I scored myself a 7 here. Oh, all right then, a 6.

TEN: CACHET Not the same as popularity at all. A hundred years ago this section would have been called ‘class’ and everyone would have slotted into their given echelon with a kind of Buddhist acceptance: Lord Salisbury: a haughty 10; fresh-off-the-boat-at-Liverpool-docks-Irish-immigrant: a potatoey 1.

The prevailing convoluted, ironic system of social classification makes everything a lot more complicated. Whilst it remains very easy to score in the lower reaches (rapists and child abusers regularly put in low scores, as does Henry), there is always a lot of debate about the high marks. Low life is just as likely as high life to push scores northwards. Even winos (or ‘dossers’ or whatever we’re supposed to call them nowadays) can score well, as long as they get a bit of media attention. Some other central figures in the new social order are surprising. Footballers can put in some immense scores. In the fifties they had the status of miners; it was good to know they were there, keeping things ticking along, BUT I’M NOT HAVING THEM FUCKING MY DAUGHTER. Now, they are like the young viscounts of the eighteenth century, taking their pleasure as it pleases them with the flower of European girlhood. The Grand Tour is somewhat dumbed down, however; Marbella and Mauritius replacing Florence and Venice, but they’re generally the boys to beat for .

Provenance is a key factor, e.g. Blenheim Palace is excellent, but so is a Glasgow tenement. A semi in Purley has retained its ability to put in a fair-to-middling if slightly shame-faced 3. Semis in South Manchester, Wigan, Poulton-le-Fylde, Stoke, St Helens and Salford are much the same as a semi in Purley, with the necessary London weighting discounted. Consequently, I also get a 3.

So let’s tot me up.

Grand Total 29.

Various ways of interpreting this, but the one I was going for at the time was as follows: ‘I am 29% as successful in life as I could be, which is much less successful than my friends.’ Putting a more positive gloss on it, I was a huge 71% as unsuccessful as I could have been. Much better than my friends. Fuck it.

Coincidentally, when this all started, I was 29 years old. So there it was. 29. The beginning and the end of Frank Stretch.

Three hundred grand

Half an hour after fleeing Bill Turnage I was still crammed into the corner of the cab (non-smoker, inevitably) somewhere between High St Ken and Holland Park. The meter was clicking up remorselessly, like a digital stopwatch. I was speculating on Bill’s maths. FURNITURE DESIGN & BUILD had a convincing ring to it, but there was something almost desperate-looking about Bill that made me baulk at anything above the high 40s. I tried to put him out of my mind. There was no chance of me ever getting in contact with him, no way he’d bother to write to me. We’re at the end of the twentieth century, for God’s sake, nobody has to do anything they don’t want to do. And anyway, I had more pressing concerns, namely the guests at Tom Mannion’s party and how they would bring home to me with force my irredeemable 29-ness. All of them would be my age, have, on paper at least, my background and education and all of them would have more money, nicer flats, more sex, better bodies, better jobs, faster cars, fuller diaries and fewer neuroses than me. What was worse was that they’d all know it and they’d know that I knew it. What was worse than that was that Tom and Lucy had invited some girl along they thought I might be interested in. I wasn’t at my best.

Tom, though, is a good guy, he means well, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. The only thing is, he’s different from other people. He’s sort of better than other people. He is my age. He is a public law barrister in what people describe to me as ‘a sexy set’. (What can this possibly mean?) His father is very high up in the newspaper and magazine business, and a baronet. Tom is happily married to Lucy, a beautiful woman (Varsity sweetheart) who trades bonds. He drives an Alfa Spider. He got a rowing Half-Blue at Oxford. He wrote a novel about art theft when he was 26. As I was being reminded now, as the cab came to a growling halt outside his house, he lives in a mews house in Holland Park. He’s funny, clever, charming and handsome. He speaks three languages. He’s my ‘best friend’. He scores 73. The maths in detail:

Nowadays, I have to mark him down on . The athleticism is atrophied, the belly is swelled by foie gras, Veuve Clicquot and summer pudding. He gets away with it, though, he’s so damned handsome, and the podginess makes him look rich. Mine is strictly chip fat and sour beer.

He is my best friend as I say, but it is a friendship increasingly sustained by distant historical links, rather than current behaviour. I have somewhere a chart which illustrates our drifting apart. The salient points are as follows: in the first couple of years after university we saw each other on average 2.1 times a week. He moved in with Lucy, at this point, and the average over the next year went down suddenly to 1.3, but didn’t further decline over the next year, in fact it held firm at 1.4. Then things started to go wrong; a sudden dive to 0.6, and a constant decline, until here we were at the end of 1995 and I’d seen him four times all year, and not since the summer.

The reason was simple: he was changing, I was staying the same. The best example of this was in our attitude to children.

My view was concise and uncontroversial: the process of acquiring children, as it takes place in the British middle classes, is an exercise in eugenics. Both parties in the enterprise spend their early sexual career sifting and sorting prospective mates on the basis of their appearance, bloodstock, prosperity, psychology, intelligence, hair colour, etc. It is not until it is felt by both parties that a satisfactory balance is struck on these criteria that any firm agreement on procreation is made, and this agreement is usually consecrated in a formal, social context. This gathering, setting the couple off in their best light, effectively invites the others in attendance to speculate on how beautiful, intelligent and socially useful the putative offspring will be. The male attempts to inseminate the female shortly after. If at any stage of the incubation period it is determined that the child is likely to be sub-standard in any of the crucial respects, it is ‘terminated’, and you start all over again. Preferences are for obedient, outgoing, straight-backed, easy-tanning, blue-eyed blonds who are capable of propagating the genetic inheritance into the distant future. A thousand years, perhaps. You can see where this is heading.

Tom, although perhaps not quite as visionary, was, in his early twenties, sceptical. He could see that children often represent dilution rather than increase, and place intolerable restrictions on freedom, and unforeseeable destructive pressures on existing relationships. Indeed, this view seemed to be increasingly widely held. Here was a generation on the cusp of their thirties, the women with their best gestating days behind them, and the slither, thud and squeal of childbirth was as yet utterly unheard. The difference was, amongst our disparate circle, that the book was now closed on who would be first to drop. Tom and Lucy had, it was rumoured, ‘been trying’ for six months, which was interesting as I had found them trying for somewhat longer. Tom was already an authority on school fees and IQ-enhancing dietary supplements. Interleaved with The Economist and EuroMoney in their magazine rack were copies of Spawn, Your Foetus and Perineal Suture Today, or whatever those baby-zines are called. Anyway, I stood there outside their Downing Street-style door, and as soon as Lucy opened the door, the beam on her face told me everything. The master race was goosestepping into town.

I managed a hurried, ‘Oh, you clever girl!’ and an awkward hug and air kiss before unconvincingly bolting up the stairs for their toilet to avoid unnecessary kerfuffle. When I reappeared I hailed Tom, who was unloading wine from a case.

‘Well done, you grubby little fucker. I knew you’d muster a chubby eventually.’

Tom and Lucy were moving between the sitting room and the doll’s house kitchen, laying out bottles and decanting snack foods, mainly those gnarled and weighty crisps that are about four quid a bag, and some sweaty-looking black olives.

Lucy walked over and gave me another hug. ‘Aren’t you happy for us?’

Happy, no. Nauseated, yes. I avoided eye contact as she withdrew.

‘Cnava drink?’

‘Oh, Frank, you’re such a charmer.’ She tried to make it sound jovial, but there was an undercurrent of exasperation. Or hurt.

‘Leave him alone, Luce. What do you want, Frank?’

‘Champagne. Can I throw my coat somewhere?’

‘Yeah, chuck it in our room but come down quickly, we want to ask you something.’

I went upstairs, feeling a little scared. They were obviously going to give me some duty to perform, and to be honest I just don’t do duties, as a rule, they’re a bit too close to responsibilities.

I had always found their house unsettling. It was, effectively, a miniature replica of both their family homes, perhaps an acknowledgement that their parents had been right about most things after all. Every wall that wasn’t cream was magnolia and the doorframes and skirting boards were an unrealistic icing-sugar white. In fact the entire house was a cake, a three-hundred-grand cake: from the outside, it was pastel-pink with three big sash windows again painted pure white, all of which suggested Battenburg. Their tiny bedroom where I was now dumping my coat was baby-blue, with a snowdrift of duvet swathing the wrought-iron bed. The curtains were pale blue and white gingham. There was a Renoir print. The whole thing whispered ‘fondant fancy’. I understood the frisson that burglars must feel when they crap in the houses they burgle as I draped my disgraceful brackish overcoat on the bed.

Back downstairs Tom and Lucy were standing parentally by their glacier-white christening-cake mantelpiece, swirling their champagne in their glasses. The huge brass-framed mirror behind them held me in its placid stare. Tom looked conspiratorially at his wife, who nodded at him.

‘Well, Frank, we got you here early because we’d really like you to be godfather to our baby.’

He was beaming like a maniac. She was grinning at me with her eyebrows raised. I panicked.

‘Oh, my God. I don’t have to do anything, do I?’

They both thought about it for a moment and then looked at each other quizzically.

‘I think you have to renounce Satan, but not much else.’

‘No, I mean, if anything happens to you two, do I have to do anything?’

‘Well, that’s a bit of a negative thought, Frank. We hadn’t really got that far.’

‘No, of course not, I’m sorry, I just don’t want to let anyone down.’

Tom’s brow creased. ‘For Christ’s sake, Frank. Come on! We’re trying to tell you that we like you and we want you to be our child’s godfather. Ey? Ey?’

He was prodding me in the stomach now.

‘Yeah, I know, I’m sorry. Yes, yes, OK – “I’d love to be your child’s godfather”, or whatever you’re supposed to say.’

This was as gracious as could be expected in the circumstances, and I dived for a snout to see me straight. Lucy looked at me a little ruefully and then at Tom. ‘Er, Frank, sorry to be a pain, but would you mind if you didn’t? It’s not for us, of course, but you know what they say, “We’ve got someone else to think about now”, and …’ Lucy couldn’t bring herself to look at me. There was a tiny, important pause as I fought myself like a lion, lighter in one hand, fag cocked in the other. To my amazement, and to that of Tom and Lucy, I got all reasonable out of nowhere.

‘Sure, no problem, mate. Do you mind if I slip into the garden and have one?’ Or are there some particularly sensitive fucking lupins you’re worried about? I saw myself out thank you and sat in their stony high-walled courtyard really getting stuck in to my Lucky. I had undoubtedly scored valuable points with this charmingly executed act of selflessness, but wondered whether they would compensate me adequately for the damage I was doing myself by holding it all in. Already that comma of protein in Lucy’s guts was exerting so much power, and not even sensate yet.

As I blasted away, I fixated on it marinading away with its proxy ASH membership, and plotted future godfatherly daytrips to Longleat, the two of us locked inside my car, me chaining my way to emphysema: ‘No, I’m sorry, Jemima/Hugo/Candia/Alexia/Moon Unit, you can’t open the doors in a safari park, or you’ll get your face ripped off by a mandrill. We’ll stretch our legs in an hour or two. Would you like one while we wait?’

This thought gave me sufficient succour to re-enter the house without a scowl on my face, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be particularly perky that evening.

By seven-thirty there were about sixteen to twenty people gathered there, almost all of whom I’d met before. Six or seven were in fact veterans of the university parties. I no longer saw any of them apart from at Tom’s. They certainly didn’t stop by at O’Hare’s that often. The remainder were Tom and Lucy’s workmates, but indistinguishable in outer appearance from the old guard; tall, with a money sheen rising quietly from their hair and skin and clothes, like vapour from an oil puddle.

I wandered over to Lucy and asked her which girl was the one they’d set aside for me. ‘Sadie, over there by the stereo.’

There was a glamorous girl in black with Italianate hair and make-up. I was fearful but excited.

‘What, with the black dress?’

‘Nononono. The girl next but one to her – in the jeans. Sadie, she’s my cousin, down from Gloucestershire to do teacher training. My uncle’s a farmer and she was bored with the rural grind. She’s fun, I think you’ll really like her.’

She was wrong on three counts. Firstly as she was ginger, there was absolutely no way I could fancy her. Not a chance. I can’t stress to you strongly enough how far off my radar gingers are. Secondly, she was a public sector worker. This is a big problem for me. I don’t gel with the vocational mentality. Mainly it’s because they’re all left-wing and skint, which just won’t do at all. Thirdly, I didn’t deserve her. One look was enough to establish that.

I turned to Lucy. ‘I’m not sure she’s quite right.’

‘Don’t be so negative, Frank. Also, she wants a Christmas job, and I said you might be able to get her in at the restaurant. What do you think?’

‘Fuck. I probably could actually.’

‘Brilliant! Let’s go and let her know.’

‘OK then.’

My heart wasn’t really in it, but we went over. Sadie was in a group of five or so by the stereo. She looked bored and restless. She was about eighty per cent scruffier than everyone else, which made her about twenty per cent sprucer than me.

‘Sadie, this is Frank I was telling you about.’

‘Hi.’

Uninterested, now she’d actually seen me.

‘Yes, he thinks he can get you a couple of weeks at his restaurant.’

‘Oh really! Great!’

I shuffled around uneasily and stared at the carpet. It was the colour of marzipan.

‘Yerr, we get pretty busy over the holidays. Have you got any experience?’

‘A bit.’

‘More than enough.’

‘When shall I turn up?’

‘Dunno. Can you do tomorrow?’

‘Yes!’

‘You won’t get paid much.’

‘As long as I get something, I’m not that arsed.’

‘You’ll get something.’

‘Sorted, then.’

We were on the fringes of the stereo group. I was too sober as yet to join the conversation. Whitney Houston was doing her airbrushed Brünnhilde act from the speakers. I scanned the CD rack. Opera highlights, U2, Motown’s Greatest Hits, the odd jazz sampler. Music for people who don’t like music. I felt a soft jab in the ribs. God, ginger, a public employee and sexually voracious, what a nightmare.

‘Hello, Frank.’ Friendly and open, but maybe with a whiff of patronising irony.

It wasn’t Sadie.

‘Oh, hi, Sophie.’

A power Sloane from Oxford days. She moved to mwah me, but I evaded. A tanned man I didn’t know in a sharp cornflower blue shirt was holding court. Sadie and the other two were maintaining shit-eating smiles. If he was boring this lot, he obviously had some special talent for awfulness.

Sophie put a bony arm gently round my back.

‘I don’t think you know anyone.’

Don’t remind me.

‘This is Nick and Flora …’ The shit-eaters mouthed silent hellos.

‘This is Sadie …’ I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, but kept my head high to prevent my double chin pouching too badly.

‘And this is my husband Colin,’ indicating the cornflower ponce.

‘Oh, Colin. Like Colin Bell, the footballer,’ I said mock-brightly as we shook on it.

He scowled a little. ‘Yes, I suppose so. It’s a family name, actually – Scottish.’

‘You don’t have much of an accent. What part of Scotland are you from? Govan?’

Nick and Flora snickered. I still hadn’t looked at Sadie, so couldn’t judge her reaction.

‘No, not Govan, but quite near Glasgow.’

‘Celtic or Rangers?’

‘Chelsea, actually. I went to school near London.’

‘Near Slough, no doubt.’

‘Hmm. Quite near.’

Sophie tried to move us on.

‘How’s your job going, Frank? Are you still in stockbroking?’

I wish she hadn’t said that. Three years ago, in the interregnum between the Post and O’Hare’s, I had spent six months working as a postboy on the trading floor of a big stockbrokers. If my memory served me, I had somewhat overstated my role to her. To what extent, I couldn’t recall. German equities analyst? Chairman?

‘No, I’m in the, er, restaurant trade now.’

In the same way that an usherette’s in the film business.

‘Oh, interesting. You were a media industry analyst, weren’t you?’

Was I? I had no idea how my mind had come up with this lie, but I cursed it filthily.

‘Well, yes, sort of.’

The ponce moved in, sensing my discomfort. ‘Sort of? What do you mean?’

‘I was training to be a media analyst, but I left before I did any actual, you know, analysing.’

‘So, what kind of work were you doing?’

‘Oh, précis-ing reports, general dogsbodying.’

‘Which firm?’

‘Gellner DeWitt.’

The ponce was warming up.

‘Interesting. I know people there. Did you know Tim Locke?’

Why, certainly. Fat loudmouth, third seat up on the Japanese warrants desk, the ‘character’ of the trading floor. Always had a pint of Guinness on his desk in the afternoons. Never said a word to me in six months, though I doled mail out to him four times a day, hoping to get noticed.

‘No, I don’t remember a Tim Locke.’

A mistake. You would have to be the veteran of the nursing home not to remember Tim Locke.

‘How strange. Most people remember Tim. How long were you there for?’

‘Only a few months.’ Give it a rest, Colin.

Lucy joined the group. The ponce continued.

‘Lucy, you know Tim Locke, don’t you? He was the year above Tom at school.’

‘Oh, yes. Big noisy chap. Stockbroker.’

‘Well, Frank here worked with him for six months, but doesn’t remember him.’

Lucy looked puzzled. ‘Where did you work with him, Frank?’

‘Gellner DeWitt, apparently.’ Come on, leave off, Lucy.

‘Oh, was he in the postroom, too?’

‘I don’t know. As I say, I don’t remember him.’

The ponce was down on me like the Assyrians.

‘The postroom. So you were a postboy, I see. No, you probably wouldn’t remember Tim, then. Not a very memorable name. I don’t suppose our postman would remember our name, would he, Sophie?’

Sophie nodded judiciously, but looked embarrassed. To the credit of their sex, all three girls looked embarrassed. I hazarded a look at Sadie. She looked mortified, the blessed little creature. The ponce left me pinned and wriggling, and turned the conversation back to himself. Floored, I took a bottle of champagne back out into the courtyard for another ferocious assault on a Lucky. I perched on a twee little garden bench and sparked up.

Lucy put her head round the door from the kitchen.

‘Have I said something wrong?’

‘No, Luce. Don’t worry, I’m fine.’

‘You can’t stay out here. It’s freezing.’

‘No, I’ll be fine. Really. I need to smoke.’

She looked at me with eyebrows raised for a moment with what could have been either indulgence or displeasure.

‘Have you met Tom’s dad yet?’

Tom had arranged for me to be interviewed for a menial job on a men’s mag his father was setting up.

‘Not a squeak.’

‘I’m sure he’ll get in touch. He’s probably pretty busy.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Come on, Frank, get inside, we’re leaving for the restaurant in a minute.’

‘Look, Mum, I’m only halfway through this cigarette. You know I always like to see things through.’

I’d called Lucy Mum sometimes, even before she was pregnant.

She moved to sit down next to me on the bench. I could sense her looking at me.

‘You know, we’re really pleased you’re going to be godfather, Frank. And we think it’s great about this interview. Tom’s positive it’ll come off.’

‘Yeah, and I’m really pleased myself, honestly. I’m just not very good at … being polite.’

Lucy giggled. I turned to look at her. She had the kind of face that women call beautiful and men call ‘all right, I suppose’. She was pale and faintly freckled with a kind mouth that always seemed to be slightly moving; pursing, grinning, pulling itself awry.

‘Come on in. You’ve nearly finished your fag. And you haven’t really got going with Sadie yet.’

‘I think that relationship’s over. It just never quite worked out. I tried my hardest, but it was never meant to be. Anyway I need another ciggie. If I don’t average two an hour, I go into a coma.’

She laughed and as she stood up kissed me on the top of the head.

‘OK, if you insist. The taxis will be here in about quarter of an hour.’

‘Thanks, Mum.’

I then spent an enjoyable ten minutes cannonballing half a bottle of champagne, then lashing Colin to a tree before shooting him in both knees with an eight-bore.

Seventy-three thou

Tom and Lucy had decided that we were all going out for dinner to celebrate their immaculate conception, but crucially hadn’t yet revealed whether they were paying or not. They were already well past the stage when they were earning so much money they didn’t know quite what to do with it. They now knew exactly what to do with it. There is a myth abroad that the heinously overpaid yuppie died with the eighties. Not so. It’s just that now they’ve learned to keep a little quieter and spend their money in places where you or I can’t see it. This lot of bankers and barristers, if they were doing averagely well for their age and experience, would all be clearing six figures. Sums of money that would turn ordinary hard-working decent folk into a purple fever were to them no more than they deserved.

An example: a year previously, almost to the day, at the end of a drunken evening at his place, Tom had told me that they had just paid off their mortgage with Lucy’s Christmas bonus. This was very Tom. Any truth you got from him about the important stuff – how much, how many, how often – only emerged when he was pissed.

‘Oh really, that must have been a good one.’

Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Please, Sweet Jesus, no more than fifty.

‘Yes, a little over seventy thousand. Seventy-three thou, actually.’

I felt my body trying to cut off the oxygen to my brain. That was five years at O’Hare’s in one little Christmassy bundle. And paying off the mortgage rather than slapping it down on an Aston I held to be unforgivable. This is what I mean about the nineties yuppie: so discreet, so understated, so fucking loaded.

Now I was in a lather about whether or not I could stretch to payment. The cortege of taxis were taking us to a new restaurant on Westbourne Grove that was certain to be laughably expensive. I had already developed an unseemly habit of being overprecise when the bill came. I did it partly out of a desire to live up to my Man on the Clapham Omnibus self-parody, but mainly because I am skint. Tom would sit there with the bill and a deck of gilded plastic in his hand, talking the waiter through the details:

‘So that’s fifty-five each on the gold card, the Amex and the Switch, and what about you, Frank?’

‘Fifteen thirty-two, I make it. I only had the main course and a drop of wine. You do take cheques, don’t you?’ Tom hadn’t used cheques for years, the instant hit of cash, plastic and the occasional banker’s draft or Eurodollar sufficing for his needs. The cheque to me, though, is the only way to pay. Put the number on the back and it won’t, can’t bounce, and the clearing lag accommodates nasty month-end shortfalls and overshoots. Also if you scrunch it up sufficiently you can buy yourself an extra few days of grace, as the banks are no longer geared up for the front jeans pocket approach to chequebook storage. The fuckers will get to me and my sort eventually, but in the meantime I praise the cheque and its inky, dog-eared, slow-moving ways. I quickly recced my pockets as I got into the taxi and was dismayed to discover that I had left my chequebook at home. I had about eighteen sheets in cash, enough for a minicab back to Clapham and a pack of Luckies tomorrow morning. Even if I had my chequebook it would have been a short-term solution, though. Never mind what I’m going to do about the fact that I haven’t got enough money, what am I going to do about the fact that I haven’t got enough money? I was jemmied into the taxi with four hyenas from Lucy’s office, or desk or floor or whatever she called it, and kept schtum. I knew how I was glossed to her glossy mates:

‘Really amusing bloke. Great laugh. Total pisshead,’ etc. Thanks, Lucy. I should have brought a plastic ball to balance on my nose. To counter the impression they had of me as court jester, I had a Hard Bitten Surly Real Guy persona in play, so that they wouldn’t talk to me. It was working a treat. I was being so scary they didn’t ask me for any cab money as we pulled up outside the restaurant. Relieved, I determined to lighten up, for old acquaintance’s sake, and put my snout firmly and deeply into the booze trough.

That it should have come to this. Tom and I met at university. He was in my history set and had the room next to mine on our corridor. For most of my first term all I remember is thinking that he was from a different planet, like most other people in the university. Planet Popular. Planet Confidence. Planet Born-to-it. As I mouldered in my room with macadamised lungs and cold feet, he held a constant, roaring party next door. Occasionally on my way down the corridor to the college bar to play pool with assorted geographers and college catering staff, I would have to ease my way past the gorgeous attendees at the rolling Mardi Gras. The boys were all six-footers, some Aberdeen Angus, some whippoorwill, in £150 loafers and cashmere cardigans. They emanated health and wealth, their eyes with that good-diet glitter. They were always irresistibly polite to me, and Tom made frequent attempts to get me to join the carnival. I always refused out of the side of my mouth and, without looking him in the eye, would scratch my nose, before scuttling off for another gallon of Belgian lager and a session on the trivia machine with Marje the buttery girl.

It wasn’t the boys that put me off, but the girls. Limby, slender, always shaking their glossy hair about and walking with high knees and straight backs. They were quite simply fucking fabulous. In the mornings I would occasionally catch a glimpse of Tom and his current Oaks winner slipping into the shower and would yelp with envy. There was one in particular I remember, whom he told me he was trying to avoid. This was before we became friendly, but he asked me to feign total ignorance of his whereabouts if this girl were to ask me where he was. He gave me a physical description and thanked me heartily. I went off one morning to a tutorial, underprepared and overtired, the pillow creases still red on my cheek, and saw her writing a message on his door, tongue resting in the corner of her mouth. Seeing me flop out of my bunker she asked me the eternal question:

‘Have you seen Tom?’

What a fucking specimen she was. No, I mean really fantastic. I mumbled shiftily, trying not to gaze too intently at her high, amazing breasts.

‘No, sorry,’ and hurried off, terrified by loveliness.

The girls I knew, at home and now here, were at best sweetly pretty. How did the bastard get that kind of action? And this was one he was avoiding! What did he have that I didn’t?

Silly question really. I enumerated what he had and I didn’t, on the way to my tutor’s room: money, charm, the handsome gene, money, a gold-plated accent, money, confidence, money, money, money.

The other thing about Tom was that he seemed to do stuff all the time. Drinking six pints would put me to bed for a day with a crepuscular hangover. If I partied with Tom’s verve and consistency I would be dead. But he was up at dawn rowing, running, meeting friends for breakfast, driving down to his parents’ house and mostly, and most often, fornicating. His bed was approximately two inches from mine, with only a film of papery wall to divide us. I was subjected to a constant chorus of bedspring, flesh-slap, banshee-wail and monkey-grunt. It was like Stockhausen at full volume, all the hours God sent. What kind of drugs did he use? Didn’t he ever get chafed? I would lie there smoking hard as he conducted his boisterous sexual trampolining acts, trying not to listen. Sometimes, unavoidably, I would become aroused by all the noise, and nick a dingy onanistic biscuit from his erotic banqueting table. More often I would just lie there in jealous amazement.

We eventually became friendly in our second term, on account of his failure to pass his first set of exams. When the results were posted in our first week back, I looked down the list and expected his name to be picked out in gold leaf. Maybe the examiners would have augmented the initial T into an illuminated depiction of the Ascension into Heaven. In fact, he fucked them up with a vengeance. A straight fail. Oh yes! During term two his social and sexual bonanza abated considerably and he was around the corridor a lot more. He started knocking on my door in the afternoons and coming in for a chat and a biscuit (McVitie’s, not masturbatory), to take a break from revision. This ritual was entirely at his instigation, but I came to long for it to come round. New friendships have the effect upon me that new love affairs have on others. I would quite happily have spent whole days talking with him. Rather like Henry does now, he would come and sit on my bed and make me tea, and retrieve my fags from the far side of the room and fix me a bowl of Shreddies. He made out, rather unconvincingly, that he had always been as in awe of me as I had been of him. He also had a tendency to understate how privileged he was. But that was OK, because I would do the same thing, talking up the generic Northern accent, talking down the fee-paying education and the ‘ontreprenerr’ dad.

For the first time in my life, I even started to develop a crush on another man. As he worked his latest contestant through some rococo moves on the other side of the wall, my eavesdropping self-abuse began to be charged with ambivalence. Whose rapturing face and body was in my mind’s eye more? This was a powerful new feeling, and disturbed me greatly. I was from the North, for goodness’ sake. The phase took a long time to pass fully, even as long as two years, perhaps. I later decided that it was merely symptomatic of a delayed adolescence. Most boys go through a homosexual period at some time, normally when they’re about thirteen. Like many things in my life, mine came later and lasted longer. I still believe now that I’m a late developer. I don’t know what gives me that idea.

I became fiercely protective of Tom when my lager and triv mates cast him as just another yah-yah bubblehead. I liked to think that they were only so savage because they were jealous, because they wanted what he had too. Now I realise that this wasn’t the case at all. Not everyone is as seduced by Tom’s kind of glamour as me (but many more than admit it). In fact, I never did really become part of his social circle, and certainly never got near to entering into his culture. Even when we moved into a house share together in the second year, and I had more direct exposure to his social MO, I was tentative. Take the parties. I just couldn’t do his sort of party. My sort of party had grave gender imbalances and not enough booze and tended to sift down to four pasty lads arguing bitterly about D.H. Lawrence. His were straightforward sensual bacchanals where everybody took a little toot, smoked a little draw and had a great time. When they were at our house I would spend the next morning tidying up, wondering why I was the only person who hadn’t enjoyed myself. I put it down to the fact that I was a drinker rather than a drugger, and a prole not a party member. My version of a great time was measured by how closely it resembled senility: memory loss, gibbering and impotence. Here were people who liked to laugh and dance around and have sex with one another. What did they know?

Of course, this was just before the great late-eighties drug liberalisation. In the suburbs of Northern towns in the mid-eighties, there was a defence mechanism employed, born of fear of change, that drugs were like tears: strictly for Southern nonces. It was, of course, narcotic Luddism, and the world was moving on regardless. Nowadays, none of the young folk, North or South, drink much any more; they do E and go out and have a lot of straight-up-and-down fatuous fun. An entire generation who no longer associate a good time with vomiting, collapsing and blacking out. Poor lost souls.

My friendship with Tom stayed weekday and one-on-one, but it was none the weaker for that. All my friendships have been based on idolisation, and with Tom this was compounded by my faint, remaining desire to give him one. However, I didn’t just adore him because of his confidence, looks and charm. A more crucial element in it was his family. Firstly he had siblings: two rangy blonde sisters. To an only child like me, they inevitably seemed to be great things to have. The real source of my admiration, however, was his relationship with his mother and father. He described to me one January when we arrived back at college what Christmas morning in the Mannion household was like. The children would assemble on his parents’ huge bed and the family would spend the morning exchanging gifts and talking. Now, to you this may seem commonplace. If so, then I apologise for being banal. But for years whenever I wanted to fuel a really good dark mood, I would permit myself to recreate a picture of the Mannions on Christmas Day.

The biggest favour I ever did him was to bring him together with Lucy. She was my study partner on a Seventeenth Century European History option in my second year, and would come to our house before tutorials to pick me up. When I first met her I thought she was a real dim bulb. She had this twee way of talking that to me seemed affected. Did anyone ever say ‘fab!’ and ‘lush!’ without irony? In tutorial she turned out to be extremely clever. It was the kind of intelligence that I could never have; common-sensical and measured, rather than flashy and over-heated like my own. I also didn’t realise for some time that she was probably beautiful, in a womanly, unattainable way, but even then I had no real desire for her. Maybe pit ponies only really fancy other pit ponies. Tom was on to it like a shot. Around the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia he was ardently negotiating terms on dinner dates. By the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession he was garrisoned in her undergarments on a permanent basis.

One freezing, foggy February morning, trudging to another tutorial I remember breaking a silence by asking Lucy a facetious question, about the character of Mazarin or what Wallenstein did of a weekend or something. She stopped on the pavement and looked at me as if I’d been talking Old Norse.

‘Hm? Oh yes.’ Very impatient, very far away.

And we continued in silence. I speculated that maybe I was seeing love at close quarters for the first time, and felt all of a sudden bewildered and out of my depth, and truly, horribly envious.

Tom even managed to stay faithful. In his position, this was an heroic feat. He had a kind of perfect magnetism for women; they wanted to fuck him, mother him and be his best friend all at the same time. I mean, even I wanted to do him, for Christ’s sake, imagine how just-turned-on-to-sex nineteen-year-old women felt. I hung around on the edge of the penalty area, hoping to pick up some of the stray crosses he’d manfully headed out, but didn’t even get in a strike on goal. Whilst he spent the better part of two terms lounging in his bower with Lucy, I regressed to my real best mates, Stella, Marje and Triv.

At this point, I moved into my Early-Period Marie O’Sullivan affair. She was in the year below me and had not yet realised that there were better places to start the Big University Relationship than the college bar on a Thursday night. But much more of Marie later. She merits several digressions all of her own.

Tom and I have weathered all the trials of the best-friend relationship. Lucy even underwent a ‘Have I ever told you, Frank, that I really want to sleep with you’ aberration just after we left university. I believe this is a common occurrence, but it seemed special to me. I remember all the strange and disorienting details. Firstly spending an evening in a dark Tandoori in Shepherd’s Bush with her stockinged foot pressed against my groin. While Tom was grinding on at noisome length about pupil masters, tenancy and cheeky-chappy Cockney clerks to my then girlfriend (post-Early-Period, pre-Middle-Period Marie), his fiancee was agitating my balls with her big toe and eyeing me disgracefully. My groin had acquired the density of wet sand. It was fortunate that Tom was still in that phase of his career when he found it intolerable not to be talking about it with a kind of breathless hysteria, because I was incapable of speech. The following morning Lucy rang me in a state of anxious desire from work and said that she had to see me. We met at her flat in Hammersmith and I confected some passion before realising as we writhed noisily on her sofa that I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t even fancy her. My motives for having come this far were confused, but certainly not good. In an act of superhuman honourableness (and OK I admit it, to some extent to conceal imminent flaccidity), I withdrew, made a fine, stumbling speech about loyalty as I was re-buttoning and left in a double hurry. Had I actually had sex with her? She would have said yes, some form of docking having been achieved, but I don’t know. It was sex removed from its primary motivation and incomplete, so I just don’t know.

If we had left it at that, the whole episode would have become a forgotten secret. But she persisted, and the next time we were alone together at her place, we went through with it. The fucking was awkward, eyes-closed and joyless, but it cast a shadow of intense excitement. We both felt filthy and low, but also strangely adult, like we had left the hermetic world of Oxford and hit the real world, where real events had real consequences.

Anyway, she saw sense pretty quickly (Did this coincide with Tom’s first big cheque? No, no, don’t be like that, Frank.) and we had to go through a tedious rite of atonement. We arranged to meet in a pub ‘where no-one will know us’ and she took me through a slow, grisly tour of her guilt and dismay at ever having dreamed of being unfaithful to Tom. She ascribed her motivation to feeling threatened by his commitment to his career, and the absorbing intensity of its atmosphere, which was by necessity tending to exclude her. She said she just wanted to feel some sense of security, and that I provided it. So, in fact the episode had been some kind of cry for help, like a deliberately botched suicide bid. That didn’t particularly raise my self-esteem. She cried a lot, and I looked around the pub self-consciously a lot. She put her head on my shoulder a lot. I thought about trying it on, with her so hot, wet and vulnerable all of a sudden, but held back. I mean where could we go? And besides, I didn’t fancy her. And besides there was Tom to consider. And besides.

She must have got what she wanted, because a matter of months later they moved in together and she never mentioned her moment of doubt or panic, or whatever it was, to me again. Now here they were, be-mewsed and lathered in confidence and dough, expecting and solid as a rock.

In a way that appals me now, at times when all the full weight of Tom’s effortless ability started to get to me, I would summon this bizarre interlude to mind. A grubby strike for the little guy. When he was at his most sparkly and contented, and especially when he was eulogising Lucy in that way he still does, I would look at him steadily and think, Ah, but, Tom … and then move on, reluctantly.

£240 pm

The day after Lucy’s gestation knees-up, it was me that needed babying. Thankfully, I had Henry at hand, flatmate, landlord and full-time dispenser of tough, cool love. Henry Stanger has consistently good scores. (There’s absolutely no doubt that he is more successful than me.) He breaks down like this:

59. Not bad at all.

He was being good to me that morning, but then again he was good to me every morning.

‘Are you going to tell me your version?’ He was sitting on the end of my bed with a large mug of tea in one fist and a tuberous reefer in the other. He thumbed his crinkled overlong hair back behind his ears in his very Henry Stanger way.

‘Oh, Christ, Henry, I think I’ve done something very, very bad.’

‘That much is evident. Tom just called to see if you got home all right and whether you’d seen a doctor yet.’

‘A doctor?’

‘There’s a large swelling above your right eye, and a trickle of dry blood on your chin. Apparently you punched a banker called Colin in a smart restaurant, vomited in the Philippe Starck sink, headbutted the toilet, and then attempted to curl up with it for the night. He thought the cabbie might have dropped you off at casualty you were in such a state.’

‘Oh, Christ. This is very bad. Are you telling me everything?’

‘Certainly not. You’re not ready for the whole story yet. Here’s some tea.’

While flat on my back, I was still occupying that golden place between sleep and waking where it is possible to believe that you’re not going to have a bad hangover. When I propped myself up on one elbow to take the mug of tea, how I longed to return.

‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear, oh, dear. Oh, Lord.’

‘Hangover? How about a bit of this?’ He waggled the spliff in his bitten-down fingers. ‘Henry’s special wake-up recipe – two parts scoopably soft hash to one part fresh grass in a Marlboro Light nid.’

I wavered but declined. My mouth tasted like I’d spent the night eating a bonfire.

‘No thanks, Henry. Toast would be real.’

‘No problem, captain. Real toast on its way.’

He slipped out, and I started trying to piece my evening together. I certainly remembered arriving at the restaurant, and finding myself sitting opposite Sophie and Colin. I also remembered Sophie graciously attempting to rehabilitate me after the postroom revelation. Then I groaned softly as I remembered frotting her during the fish course. Again, undesirable but perhaps not irreparable.

But, oh no, didn’t I also make Lucy untuck her blouse so I could get down on my knees and listen to her tummy? Yes, I think I did. And am I right in recalling that I (Oh, please say it isn’t true) whispered to her that I’d always loved her? And then … I involuntarily cut across this awful train of thought with a loud agonised moan. If I get hit with a flash of embarrassment, invariably the morning after the night before, I tend to launch into a jerky, clenched-teeth rendition of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ until the horror passes. This was way beyond Kylie’s redemption. Henry re-appeared with a round of toast.

‘Yes, Stretch, it’s pretty bad, I’m afraid. You’ll need to think of a way to make it up to Lucy but I think Tom’s forgiven you. Eat, don’t think.’

I looked at the alarm clock on my bedside table. ‘My God, it’s eleven-thirty!’ I started to get out of bed in a panic. Gentle Henry bade me stay.

‘Don’t worry, I phoned O’Hare’s. I told them you’d fallen in the shower and were mildly concussed and you’d be there this evening. They were sympathetic.’

‘Henry, you’re amazing.’

‘Toast.’

‘To Henry.’

‘To Frank. Now, eat up, get up and ablute. We’re going for some supermarket therapy.’

I had moved into a ninth of Henry’s flat a year previously, by answering an ad in the Standard. I had spent two years living in Brixton in a house the personnel of which was in a state of constant flux. Like the philosopher’s rowing boat where every plank is replaced over a period of time so that it is and it isn’t the same rowing boat, 53 Geffen Road both mutated and stayed the same. Each year one or two new occupants arrived, each week the cycle of food theft and dirty laundry repeated itself. My stay there finally saw me through the start of Late-Period Marie, but apart from that, it was a frozen, footling time. Bits and pieces of work, too much dope, too much TV, too little underwear to cope with the fact that the nearest launderette was six minutes’ walk away. A patina of stubborn grime covering everything.

I was never unhappy there. In fact, I told myself that I was having a pretty good time. By the end of my stay, because of the length of my tenure, the place had become my personal fiefdom. I could monopolise the chair that was most precisely squared up to the TV, and keep myself one step ahead on the tea rota. I also had a leading hand in selecting new tenants, a responsibility devolved to me by our benign Spanish landlord. At one stage, I got two French girls to move in, in expectation of a soupçon of l’autre at le weekend. They moved out within a month, appalled at the frowsy sarcastic Englishness of it all. I replaced them with a Yorkshire spliff king who sold advertising space and a guy who was trying to make his fortune renovating Fiat 500s, and normal service was resumed. This latter individual was actually the catalyst to my leaving. An invisible sediment of dry filth I could cope with, but an oil-clogged engine block in the bath and a length of rusty exhaust lying in the hallway for two months were too much for me to take. As no-one else seemed to mind, or even notice that their house was being turned into a scrapyard/art gallery, I considered that maybe I was too grown up for all this and started looking for an out.

Enter Henry. The ad read: ‘Sngl room for heavy smoker in Clapham flat £240 pm.’ Samuel Johnson thought that the art of advertising had peaked by 1745. He’d never seen this little doozy. I breezed the interview, although the high tar content of my Luckies caused him consternation. He served me Marks and Spencer buffet selection followed by pawpaw and mango crush, and rolled me an elegant joint, which had a beautifully fluid, smooth draw. He introduced me to Lottie who had been instructed to eavesdrop from Henry’s bedroom, and who gave me the OK. She showed me the scarf she was knitting (which was luridly vile) and asked me if I liked it. I said yes and she told me I could have it when it was finished, because Henry thought it was effeminate, and I moved into their box room two weeks later.

Thinking about it, Henry would have made someone a beautiful wife. In fact, he made Lottie a beautiful wife already, and both of them made beautiful parents for me. He worked from home, dreaming up code for a computer games company, and she did her wool-oriented charity work at the kitchen table. I thought of their life together with unenvious wonder. Him doing his fabulous intricate brainwork, her making things and both of them just quietly hanging out together all day. I’d get home and they’d be lolling on the sofa reading, maybe smoking one, the fridge filled with high class junk food: tzatziki, chicken tikka thighs, fruit fools, parma ham, halva, blueberries, red pesto.

Today Lottie was elsewhere, so Henry and I went shopping together, and he mercifully insisted on protecting me from more detail on the previous night. I was on trolley duty as he mooned around harvesting good things from the fruit and vegetable section.

‘Henry, you’re pretty hot on probability, aren’t you?’

‘Well, I’m not bad. What’s the question?’

‘How many women do I have to meet before I’ve got a robust statistical chance that the next one is the right one?’

‘Augment and clarify.’ He was gazing at the star fruit he was holding in the tips of his fingers.

‘Well, my current thinking is to treat the process like a series of coin tosses. By this reckoning, about one in every two women I meet should turn out roughly OK, and our relationship should go somewhere. I don’t mean all the way to the altar, but maybe all the way to a trip to the pictures or something.’

‘Frank, I think the system you’re using is a little flawed. And this is Stanger the Man talking rather than Stanger the Statistician. A coin is a very tightly controlled system, there are only two possible outcomes per toss. People are more …’ he was now reading the label on some purple spinach ‘… difficult. If I were you, I’d base my paranoia on something different. Like a weather system or the football results or something. You know, introduce more factors. Purple spinach. What a gimmick. Let’s try it anyway.’

‘OK, let me put it this way. I’ve thrown the woman coin to one degree or another something like thirty-two times, always wanting, let’s say, heads. But each time so far it’s come up tails. It must get more likely that, the next time I toss, I get a head.’

Henry stopped and shook his head sagely. ‘Not much comfort there, Frank. Each toss is a separate event within the system. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve come up tails, it’s just as likely to come up tails the next time. It’s plain unreasonable to be more expectant of a head just because you’ve just thrown a tail. I think there’s a play about this. These two characters keep tossing a coin and keep throwing heads. When they finally throw a tail, they both die.’

‘Oh, good.’

I watched Henry as he trawled the deli counter for some new exotica to sample.

‘Explain this then. England have played 365 test matches. They’ve won the toss 183 times and lost it 182 times. As equal as it could be. I’m not sure how, but I’m sure that refutes your argument.’

‘Maybe, but it doesn’t prove yours. They’re on tour at the moment, aren’t they?’

‘New Zealand.’

‘Well, then, if they win the toss at the next test match, I would say that you’re certain to enter a satisfying relationship by the time they lose.’

‘You’re being facetious.’

‘Do you like carciofini?’

‘His early work was all right. When are you going to tell me what really happened last night?’

‘Mmm. I think they put a bit too much vinegar in. Let’s lob it in anyway. When are we going to tell you? Lucy and I agreed that we’d wait a while. Tragedy plus time equals comedy. We want you to be able to laugh about it.’

‘God. Why, fuck, why, fuck, why? Why do I do it to myself?’

‘And indeed to others. Don’t get too worked up. It’s not as bad as your worst imaginings.’

‘Did she tell you about that girl they tried to fix me up with?’

‘Oh, yeah, she got off with a waiter or something. After you tried to get off with her by the fag machine.’

I leant on the trolley and let the heat and noise of my hangover fill the silence. The lump on my forehead was emitting a strong low hum of pain. Henry was now deep in thought at the bread section.

‘I think I’ll withdraw from social life, Henry. It’s just not worth it any more.’

‘I thought you already had.’

‘Cheers.’

‘Just drink a little less.’

‘I drink because I get nervous. I just want these fuckers to take me a bit more seriously.’

Henry turned to me with a stern and lucid look on his stem and lucid face. OK, Dad, lay it on me.

‘I’ll tell you what you can do if you want to be taken seriously. Why don’t you go to Lucy’s pregnancy party, get appallingly drunk, molest two married women, start a fight with a merchant banker, burst into tears, claim to the assembled party that you are a great poet of the human soul, vomit in the sink, collapse in a toilet cubicle and tell your best friend that he’s a squandered talent as he helps you into a taxi. I’m sure that would give you an air of gravitas.’

‘Oh, Henry. Tell me you’re joking.’

‘Nope.’

‘Is that everything?’

‘Nearly everything. But as I say, you’re not ready for the whole truth yet. Anyway, you’re broadly forgiven. Stop dwelling on it. In fact that’s good advice for you all round: stop dwelling on it, start doing something about it.’

The ‘great poet of the human soul’ was the real killer. I wasn’t fond of the tears either. Or any of it to be honest. The egg-sized contusion over my eye began to wail its reproach. I believed that there was, in fact, very little comedy to be salvaged from this incident. From my humble state the evening now looked like a symbol of Tom and Lucy’s increasing weight and stature as human beings. There they were, married, successful, generous, willingly taking on the responsibility of parenthood, spreading their benign and thoughtful influence back out into their society like proper adult people. Wankers – oh, stop it, Frank. But regardless of that, there I was, raging at being cast as some kind of low comedian, acting to type in the most egregious way possible. Subversive behaviour had at one time seemed funny, necessary even, in the face of my friends’ inexorable progress towards sensibleness. Now it just seemed like plain rudeness, and rudeness with its source in envy of people who for some reason valued me. Tom’s offer to put in a word for me with his dad about the job at Emporium made it all worse. I’ll call you a wanker, and I do, but I’ll still accept your patronage.

There was real annoyance as well, but it was not directed at my peer group any more, just at myself. I used to believe that Tom and Lucy’s approach to their lives was a kind of giving in, and that their pursuit of solidity was doomed to failure and disappointment. It certainly didn’t appear like that now. And what was more difficult to see was an alternative. My alternative was a restaurant in Battersea and fifty hours of TV a week. My alternative was nowhere, it was nugatory, it was nada, nowt, niente, null, nix, nil, nought, nothing. My time was up.

For a long time I had nursed a secret belief that, if I wanted, I could be better than anyone at anything, if I put my mind to it. I reckon most people feel the same, most men at least. So Tom looked as if he was making it as a barrister? If I’d chosen to be a barrister I’d be a lot better at it than him. So Lucy’s a bond trader? That could have been an option for me. So Henry writes elegant, beautiful computer programmes? Mine would be far more elegant, far more beautiful, if I’d ever chosen to give it a proper shot. Now the issue of choice had left the issue. What was I going to do? Take up an adult education course in law, computers and bonds? Furthermore, the evidence for such ludicrous contentions was weak at the best of times. Some strong performances at the junior school debating club, a bit of verbal facility, a knack with quadratic equations; it was never really enough. Now it would be laughable, if I hadn’t lost my sense of humour about the whole thing. The reason I gave for not having followed them all was that what they were doing just wasn’t worth bothering with. The question of what was worth bothering with just wasn’t worth bothering with either.

‘One day. You’ll see.’

Henry paid up and we ambled back to the flat. I resolved to go and revise my maths downward on all dimensions.

That and do an obituary. When I’m feeling in need of cheering up, I do an obituary. It gives you something to work towards. This is the one I worked on when we got back from the supermarket:

SIR FRANCIS STRETCH QC

PATENT LAWYER

Sir Francis Stretch, the eminent barrister, has died at his Nash house in London’s Regent’s Park, aged 71.

Sir Francis was instrumental in the radical reforms of patent law as it related to the emerging information technology industry in the late years of this century. The achievement was all the more remarkable as he came very late to both fields, not being called to the bar until his fortieth year, having completed a computer science degree at the LSE in his early thirties.

Nicknamed ‘Golden Bollocks’ because of his combination of tenacity and extreme wealth, he was respected rather than liked by his contemporaries.

A wife, Lucy, survives him. They had two step-children from her first marriage, Fortinbras and Clytemnestra, as well as a natural son, Stan.

Twelve hundred quid

Two things stopped from me from downgrading myself frantically all afternoon. The first was that, as I worked on my death notice, I got a call from Tom’s dad’s office, proposing some interview dates.

‘Hello, is that Mr Stretch?’

‘Yep.’

‘Cordelia here from Charles Mannion’s office at Emporium. I’m sorry about the delay in getting back to you.’

‘No problem.’ I’m used to it, love.

‘Well, the reason I’m calling is that Charles would very much like to see you in the next couple of weeks, and I’ve got some convenient dates which I’d like to try you with. He’d like to do a breakfast if that suits you.’

‘Great, perfect.’

‘OK, how about the twenty-ninth?’

‘That’s good for me.’

‘The third?’

‘That’s good for me.’

‘The fifth?’

‘Fine.’

‘The eighth?’

‘No worries.’

‘The tenth?’

‘Couldn’t be better.’

‘Err, the twelfth?’

‘Listen, Cordelia, I’ll tell you what, any day at all is fine by me. I’m sort of a … a free agent. Any day will be just perfect.’

‘OK, I’ll get back to you to confirm in the next day or two.’

‘Thanks very much.’

I was pretty ambivalent about this whole deal to tell the truth. I had mentioned to Tom months ago that I was considering getting back into journalism, as if it was just one of a whole range of options I was toying with, and he mentioned Emporium and said it would be no problem for him to get me in. It was supposed to be ‘a men’s magazine with a difference’ (which men’s magazine wasn’t? Manhood – the Men’s Magazine that’s Exactly the Same as the Rest?), but Tom reckoned I’d get something out of them, no trouble. They were trying to make it look as overstuffed and glossy as possible, but the backers wanted it done dirt cheap. The only place they could really wield the axe was the writing staff, which left opportunities for has-beens and never-weres like me. But still, the dreadfulness of it all. I’d read these magazines – Guy Thing, Twatted, Him and all those other shinies with their flatter-to-deceive cover shots. In fact, I read them every month. But why do they pretend to be something more interesting and important than the sixth-former wank fodder they really are? In my view, there are only two differences between Twatted and Skinny and Wriggly. Firstly, the real porn is bound with staples. Secondly, in the faux-fuck mags, tanga briefs coyly husband the muffs. In Skinny and Wriggly gussets only make an appearance strung between scissoring legs like warm mozzarella. So ‘the men’s magazine with a difference’ presumably meant either more crotch shots or fewer crotch shots. In either case, I reckoned Emporium’s business proposition was terminally disabled before it started.

The only thing that made me say yes to an interview was the thought of Tom’s efforts on my behalf, and the sense of duty that these efforts inspired. Well, that and the prospect of the freebies.

Anyway, the second thing that happened that afternoon was that I opened some mail I got in the second post. As I think I’ve said, I never open mail from the bank. It always ends in tears. I never really open any mail, as everything I get is in some way connected to money that I don’t or can’t have. But Henry had left a letter for me on the kitchen table that had a hand-written address on it. I opened it and was astonished to discover that it was from Bill Turnage. He must have written the note and posted it as soon as I’d left him in Knightsbridge. It was written on some personalised stationery, waxy paper with a quirky little logo of a table in the top right-hand corner. He’d apparently designed it himself. I remembered how brilliant he was in practical lessons. He would be polishing the marquetry on his reproduction Early Georgian escritoire, while I was still trying to make a mug tree with branches that slanted upwards.

Bill had been a middle-ranking first-division friend then, sort of an Aston Villa or a Coventry City, and like them he hung around my life without ever really making a huge impression from when I was fourteen until I left school for university. Gaunt and clever-ish, brooding and outdoors-y, he was a lot of people’s middle-ranking mate, I guess. He was a lone cyclist and hiker, too independent-seeming, too cagoule-and-walking-boots for anyone really to prize him. I couldn’t remember ever having a bad thought about him. Well, maybe he was a bit too bland. Also, he was one of those people who reach puberty when they’re about nine, and he turned up at secondary school already able to tuck his cock and balls between his legs and make like a lady. As a consequence, he inspired many sleepless nights of shame and fear amongst his contemporaries, me included. Why was my groin like Action Man’s and his like a ferret shop window?

I got over all this soon enough, and we ended up going to the same parties, removing the bras from the same girls, occasionally at the same time, and wondering what we should do then for three or four years. He then failed to get into Oxford, and ended up at UEA. I visited him once in my first year and that was that. Five years of easy affection receded into the past as if it had been no more than a handshake. No regrets, though, that’s just friendship for you.

His letter went as follows:

Dear Frank,

Don’t fall off your chair! Great to see you yesterday. You seemed a bit in a hurry. I hope you enjoyed your party.

Any road up, let me fill you in a bit, like I couldn’t do yesterday in all the rush. Been married now for nine years (gulp!) to Sue who was at UEA (you met her, but she says she won’t be surprised if you’ve forgotten) and we’ve got three kids, Debbie (9 – she’s the reason!), Ben (6) and Murray (5). Thought about having the snip, but Ben’s a pretty good contraceptive anyway!

Just to say hello again really and to say you are welcome to come and stay with us in Suffolk any time, we’ve got an attic (My study – still writing!) you can stay in with a sofa bed. The pubs are good, and have lock-ins, and the sea is wet and refreshing. Drop me a line. Alternatively, just give me a call, but I always hated the phone, didn’t I, and still do.

Yours ‘back from the grave’-ly!

Bill Turnage

The tone of the letter was difficult to judge. There were far too many exclamation marks for one thing. It could, I suppose, have been reproaching me for not getting in touch, but I didn’t think so. It cheered me up for some reason, and pathetically I was rather proud of mentioning to Henry that I’d ‘just got a letter from a really old friend, inviting me to his house in Suffolk’. He seemed surprised but unimpressed, which was characteristic, as he sat on the sofa watching Blue Peter and rolling one up. Lottie was dozing against his thigh. Another tough day in the Stanger household.

‘Very good. Are you going to go and see him?’

‘Nah. Three kids and a screech-owl of a wife. Sounds hideous.’

‘You sentimental old fool.’

‘I know, it’ll be the death of me. Anyway, I’m off to work.’

‘Be the best that you can be.’

I went out to the Cavalier feeling in a relatively good mood considering the previous night’s exertions. I had a feeling that I got increasingly less often, which could be summed up as ‘things are on the up a bit, things are happening a little’. Admittedly, it usually came to nothing, but was better than its opposite, which consisted of screaming fits and clubbing myself to death with self-hate, so I tried to make the best of it. Anyway, the thought of an evening waiting tables at O’Hare’s didn’t fill me with a feeling of yowling frustration, as it often did.

O’Hare’s is a brilliant idea if, as so many of my friends seem to think, ‘brilliant ideas’ make large amounts of money for those who have them. It is hard to determine whether the success of the idea was down to luck or judgement. Bart, whose full name was Graham Barton, was the owner and prime mover. He used to work in advertising where, he had told me, he was one of the old guard, up from secondary modem in Poplar and into the postroom rather than skimmed off from the milk round. This background had made him tougher and more devious than his college-boy competitors, and he made it pay. Leonard’s, the agency he ran for five years, was old-fashioned, overstaffed and financially imprecise, but had a powerful heritage, still just about marketable, from the early years of commercial television. With this provenance, and a heavily played English Gentleman card, he and the other crooks in charge flogged it to a Japanese agency for a hugely inflated sum in the year of Lawson, 1988. The front page of that week’s Campaign is framed in the bog at the Battersea O’Hare’s: MIEKKO NETS LEONARD’S – AT A PRICE. He once told me that he personally walked out with three times what the place was worth, and he only had fifteen per cent.

With the money he went on holiday for two years, came back and started O’Hare’s. The brilliant idea was this: Rip off FUCCERS. What is a FUCCER? Fresh from University, Credit Card, Extremely Rich. Developing this acronym, I believe, had cost Graham at least one sleepless night. ‘Fuck’ was the unstressed spine of his lexicon. It was as if he couldn’t bear to be parted from it, whatever the circumstances. ‘Would you like a fucking Jaffa Cake?’ was Graham on his elevenses best behaviour. Graham’s insight was that to try and open a fashionable restaurant was too fraught with risk – expensive staff and premises, fashionableness giving way to unfashionableness in the blinking of an eye, the need for London-competitive food, which could be anything from Andean peasant to Tex/Belge. So, in classic adman style, he chose his target audience and gave them exactly what they wanted: dark wood, consistency, old film posters, stodgy food, a place to make a noise, a late bar. Bingo. A brilliant idea. After four years he had five restaurants strategically cited in all areas of Part-Qualified Accountant and Articled Clerk Land: Battersea, Wandsworth, Clapham, Fulham and Shepherd’s Bush, with another two on the way in Highgate and Hammersmith. He had made himself well versed in the desires of the young and dull in then Gardenia-painted maisonettes, with their Monet prints and complete works of Phil Collins on DAT. After a dusty, we’ve-just-moved-in-together shag on the Habitat kilim they would crave charred protein and find themselves in one of Bart’s joints, revealing their detailed knowledge of the IKEA spring catalogue over buffalo wings and a bottle of Australian Cab Sauv: ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely to have a friendly little neighbourhood restaurant at the end of the road? No, I think we should definitely have curtains in the bathroom.’

Bart had probably made at least another couple of million out of these dreary Fuccers over the years. Eventually they would grow out of his stodgy, expensive baby food and start eating in places that didn’t play The Eurythmics’ greatest hits on a loop. Bart didn’t give a toss, though, because just as one batch moved on, in would come the next, the boys in their M&S crewnecks and chinos, the girls in jeans and blue button downs, positively gagging to be fleeced by their friendly neighbourhood fat bastard. All he did was change the tape: Enya, Mariah Carey, Riverdance, gloop music and gloop food for gloop lives.

For a boorish mudhopper from the wetlands of Essex he was doing all right, was Graham. He drove a gunmetal V12 Mercedes S Class with blacked-out windows and the word GRAZER on the numberplate. He sat high up and well back on the creamy hide with his fat baguette forefinger hooked round the base of the steering wheel with no regard whatsoever for speed cameras or pedestrians, constantly growling threats and insults at his managers over the digital carphone. When he wasn’t in the Benz, he was in the casino, toying with a couple of grand from the till at O’Hare’s.

He carried his twenty stone quite well and wore Ralph Lauren polo shirts, tight old Levi’s and whiter-than-white ‘Boks in the manner of a Hollywood film director. He liked Rod Stewart. He was so cash, so chrome-and-smoked-glass, so soft-porn, so seventies.

Fat, vulgar, and rich, he felt he could do no wrong, and by his own simplistic standards, he never did. He had a flat in Cadogan Square, a place in Berkshire which he called Hefner House after his hero, and paraded his ethnically diverse sexual conquests with Sultanic arrogance. He apparently had no friends, apart from his oddjob, Brian the Bat, and spent most of the day staring at a roulette wheel when he wasn’t paying unannounced visits to his obscenely profitable restaurants with his latest Sumatran, Geordie or Jap. Having spent his forty-five years on the planet in a constant state of angry pleasure, he was in no mood to stop now. His scores were humblingy good:

68. Good darts, big fella. His score may come as a surprise to some, but not to those who know the extent to which he adores himself. Christ, he thinks he’s marvellous. Every little piece of him, from desiccated collar-length hairdo to clean chubby toes, from bloated Merc to tigerskin bedspread, is a constant source of delight to him. With a love like that, you know you should be glad.

After being fired from The Post, I had given up on journalism. I temped around for a while, doing nothing in particular, and then pitched up in the Battersea branch of O’Hare’s. Bart interviewed me in his car as he lumbered between the Wandsworth branch and the casino. He asked me to start that evening and chucked me out on the Fulham Road, told me to make my own way back over the river, and that was that. I started as a waiter, and had endured many uncomfortable evenings serving people I knew from college.

‘Frank, what are you doing here?’ i.e., where did your wheels come off, you sad fucker. Illiterate dullards they may have been, but they knew how to load straight questions with subtext. Especially the men. Thankfully, my contemporaries had largely passed through their O’Hare’s phase by the time I got there, and I no longer needed to tell whoppers about how well the screenplay was coming on. I had been promoted to manager about six months previously. Hurroo. All this meant was that I did the count and was in charge of throwing people out when they got too raucous. On a Saturday night, particularly after a rugby international, the choruses of ‘Sweet Chariot’ and ‘Jerusalem’ would commence. I’d leave them to it and try to look harassed but amused. But at the point when the boys started slapping their dicks in the dessert, as the manager I had to intervene and chuck the imbeciles out. I’ll say two things for Fuccers, though: they never get violent, and they always pay their bill. The English middle-class upbringing can apparently countenance public immersion of undercarriage in the chocolate mousse, but scrapping with the staff and doing a runner? It’s just not done.

I stayed because I had no option. Firstly, because to move on it would be necessary to ponder the Great Big Question that bored me so much. ‘When are you going to do something with your life?’ and all that other girlfriend/mother stuff. I didn’t feel ready for that type of question. When I did start to tiptoe round such thorny subjects, a voice within me would object like a teenage virgin: not yet, not now, not here, let’s wait till later. The Lottery would set me right, or love would come crashing in from stage left in a white Ferrari. Ah, then Frank Stretch would be free and would do something with his life.

Secondly, I had accustomed myself to the ritual of working there. It was what I did. As I got older, it became increasingly less tenable to make out that I was biding my time until my ambitions had come to fruition. When I had started there it had been simple to say that it was merely a stop-gap. After three years, the thought of being interviewed by Tom’s dad for a job on Emporium in some ways filled me with dread. I couldn’t bear the notion of giving up my routine.

In fact, when I pitched up that night, in spite of the hangover and head trauma, I snapped into action with some crispness. I was feeling backslappy and chatty, but mostly I was feeling safe. I knew how to do this, for God’s sake. Within a minute of me arriving, tables were being reset more to my liking, the blackboard menu was being rechalked for aesthetic effect and clarity and I decided to run a mini-promotion on some noxious Chilean Merlot we’d overstocked. God, I was good, why should I want to leave?

Oh, and anyway, I couldn’t leave, because I owed Bart some money.

The whole process had been quite moving in a way, if you’re moved by bank manager stories. He had always been a decent, generous man, Mr Frost, and the initial letter he wrote me was suffused with a tone of genuine regret. My account was still held at the Oxford branch, as I’d never been in a position to move it closer to home. He ‘suggested’ in the letter, in a manner that brooked no refusal, that I go to meet him for A Consultation. When I turned up, I noticed that the place had been transformed into a McDonald’s. All the old attempts at gravitas and intimidation had gone. The staff were no longer divided from the punters (sorry, Clients) with bullet-proof glass, but sat in the middle of the floor behind teak-effect desks wearing nylon neckerchiefs and stewardess smiles.

Across the dustless grey chamber strode Frost. He greeted me with a real pumper of a handshake and ‘suggested’ that we have a chat in the consultation room. I asked him what had happened to his office.

‘Everything’s open plan now. We’re all moving towards flatter structures.’

‘What, relocating to a bungalow?’ Weak humour is a classic Stretch-is-Nervous stratagem.

‘No, no. Flatter management structures. Shorter chains of command.’

So, if a teller wanted to order some new paper clips they no longer had to chew up a valuable two seconds of management time by knocking on his door. I didn’t say this. The flatter structures seemed to be getting him down.

The consultation room was the size of a toilet cubicle. We both sat down at the tiny desk, our knees rubbing together awkwardly.

Frost was a mid-30s type of guy. His breakdown looks like this:

Summary: £30K and a good pension; ‘happily married’; decreasingly satisfied in his job; arid, bookless Beazer home; Mondeo/Vectra/downscale Rover 6; whippy little body (kept in trim by lunchtime squash?); Social life revolving around the bank (work friends score half points); a nice if dullish fish; and a score in deep decline. Bank managers ceased being GP-ranking ‘pillars of the community’ decades ago along with teachers and policemen – service-sector slaves who you only notice when they bring you bad news: ‘You’ve been burgled, little Jonny’s retarded, you’re skint.’

The only real area for debate was the score. Chances were he was just another lights-off missionary plugger, furrowing away with metronomic dutifulness thirteen times per fiscal year. There was a remote possibility, however, that he was a swinging suburban sex terrorist, swapping, strapping, rolling on the latex and stapling bits of plywood to his scrotum every night. The stifling mix of low-finance, 26-inch HDTV and swagged kitchen curtains can do this to a man. Despite this area of doubt he was undeniably doing better than me, and that’s the most important thing to remember.

He wasn’t his usual self that day. The familiar tone of ironic indulgence had been replaced by tortuous over-formal politeness. He started to address me as if I was a waxwork.

‘Thank you for coming to see us, Mr Stretch. I hope our consultation proves fruitful to both parties and that all outstanding issues can be resolved to our mutual benefit.’

I peered at him in disbelief. ‘Is this conversation scripted?’

He looked sheepish.

‘Er, well sort of. All Terms of Account Renegotiation Consultations now start with an open and honest statement of objectives. It’s part of the bank’s Strategic Refocus on Meeting Client Needs.’

I must have looked amazed.

‘Oh, Needs and wants. Needs and wants. I always forget that last “wants”.’

I masked incredulity with insouciance. You should try it some time. ‘OK. I see. Now what was this about “Account Renegotiation”?’

For someone who was in the soup I was acting with some aplomb. He shuffled through a thick wad of papers he had brought in with him. Had he lost his script? Did he want a prompt? ‘You haven’t read the letters we’ve been sending?’

‘Err, yes, but I can’t remember all the details.’

He looked resigned.

‘Right then, I note that at close of business on Wednesday, your current account stood at a debit balance of …’ (dramatic pause) ‘one thousand two hundred and twenty-two pounds seventeen pence.’

‘That much. Ooh hell.’

‘I also note that the account has not passed into credit for seven months. And over your nine-year relationship with us, you have not been in credit for longer than three consecutive weeks.’

That seemed about right, but I was woefully underprepared, and hence had no means of counter-attack. Information is power in these situations. The word ‘relationship’ threw me a little as well. I fell back on vagueness.

‘But I never go over my overdraft limit. Usually.’

He could just about bring himself to look me in the eye. ‘Hm, usually. Anyway, there are some new directives that have been introduced by the bank that attempt to harmonise account servicing standards and charging structures across the client base.’

I was nodding with approval, trying to give the appearance of a man who was quite interested in hearing some details about these New Directives.

‘The new directives state that clients who do not achieve reasonable credit maintenance objectives may become subject to account review and renegotiation of terms, and in certain circumstances, amicable closure following settlement of outstanding debts. Client incapacity to comply with renegotiated terms in extreme circumstances can result in recourse to legal sanction.’

Whoever wrote this stuff could really pile on the agony.

‘I’m afraid you fall into this latter category, Mr Stretch.’

‘Last, not latter. There are more than two categories.’

‘Oh, are there?’ He looked in puzzlement at the piece of A4 that presumably contained this deathless prose. It occurred to me that if this grammatical solecism was corrected because I had pointed it out, I would have cost them thousands in re-printing charges. It was some comfort, but not much.

His gaze met mine again. I noticed that he looked very tired. Beneath the strangulating coils of management speak I could detect a decent bloke trying to communicate. He really didn’t want to say what was coming, but he forced it out somehow.

‘Simply put, Mr Stretch, unless you repay your overdraft within the month, we’re going to foreclose and take you to court. I’m really sorry.’ He looked about to break down. ‘Thirty days maximum.’

‘Oh God. It’s that bad, is it? Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world. I’ll sort it out.’

‘There’s not much I can do. It’s all gone upstairs.’

So there was an upstairs in this Flatter Structure, was there? I thought there might be.

He showed me out, right into the street, and instead of shaking my hand gave me a little pat on the shoulder.

‘Good luck. I can’t say how sorry I am about this.’ He raised his brows and looked at me with sorrowful eyes. I felt like giving him a big hug. How had the bastard managed to do this? Threatened to bankrupt me and then made me feel sorry for him? But I reasoned that it wasn’t him who was doing the threatening. Mr Big was elsewhere, in some airconned money mountain in EC2, stroking his jacquard silk tie and flexing his burgundy gut. Frost was just the unwilling kneecapper. He had been emasculated. All his old powers of discretion, the things that had made it possible for him to derive some satisfaction from his work, had been usurped by New Directives until he had become little more than a talking leaflet. On the coach home I imagined him sitting drunk in a hotel bar near Swindon on some infernal Client Service course, hopelessly railing against the new ways, or flopping himself down on his Dralon settee and whingeing at the wife all night about lost self-esteem. ‘What I don’t bloody understand is …’ How much time before the laptopped whizzkids at HQ switched from a Strategic Refocus on Customer Needs and Wants to a Strategic Refocus on Firing Half the Staff? Not long, I’ll be bound.

None of this indulgence was making me any richer, so I surveyed my options. Theft, prostitution, beggary, abscondment, prison, Bart. By the time I’d alighted at Victoria it was clear to me that Bart was the only way forward. I would rather be in thrall to a fat gangster than become a cat burglar, panhandler or rent boy. I phoned him on his mobile when I got back to O’Hare’s for the evening shift and acted in a manner so craven I yelp to remember it. I could hear the dull jabbering of croupiers and Hong Kong Chinese, so guessed he was at the roulette again. After two minutes of my timid greasing I realised that he had already agreed to my request. His only conditions were that it was a personal loan from him to me, and that I had to repay it in full, not in dribs and drabs. He didn’t even want any interest. His payment was that he had effectively put me in manacles to O’Hare’s for as long as I was unable to save twelve hundred quid. On the money he paid me that was likely to be a very long time.

That night, though, despite the sloughing hangover, the egg of pain on my forehead and a sense of regret, I couldn’t make myself care. I bossed everyone about and was dangerously charming to the customers. It was warm in there, nobody knew who I was, and I could do it falling off a log. Work was a kind of deeply provisional happiness. This is the effect a hand-addressed envelope and the prospect of a job interview could have on me. For a brief period of time, obviously.

£2.91

I remembered my job offer to Sadie. The thought brought me down a little. I genuinely couldn’t remember trying to get off with her, but I had no doubt that I had done. If she combined that example of my behaviour with my humiliation at the hands of Colin, she probably wasn’t currently holding her new boss in particularly high esteem. I think I’d told her to turn up at six-thirty-ish, which turned out to be lucky, because Paolo the chef told me that the witless girl I’d hired a week before had phoned in to say that she was quitting. She had been typical of the general standard. She was Irish, from Kerry, but she was so off the pace she could have been either from the Frozen North or the fourteenth century. She had spent all her time smoking crazily out by the bins and weeping softly into her apron. O’Hare’s had had them all in my time there: thieves, mutes, illiterates, screamers and truants. The rates Bart paid attracted people with such ineptitude with the English language and such scrofulous skin that McDonald’s would reject them out of hand. There was little chance of Sadie not being up to the job.

She turned up about ten minutes late in a dirty mac and tiny once-black mini skirt. I was standing by the bar putting white plastic flowers into vases.

‘Shite. Sorry I’m late, got lost in Clapham.’

She seemed breezily unconcerned that nineteen hours previously I had attempted to tongue her face.

‘That’s OK, get your coat off and I’ll tell you the deal.’

Her hair really was very red indeed. It wasn’t sandy or hint-of-mouse-y, it was bright orangey red. She had it pinned back to her scalp and gathered into a complicated curled bun, but you couldn’t tone down hair that colour so easily.

When she was ready, I took her over to an empty table and told her the deal: ‘Lunchtime shift eleven-thirty till five, evening shift five till eleven-thirty, read the specials off the blackboard, £2.91 an hour.’

Finis.

‘That’s outrageous.’

‘Plus tips, you could be clearing well over twenty quid a day.’

‘What does it say in my contract about my rights when the boss tries sexually assaulting me?’

‘Oh, come on, give me a break. I didn’t have to give you this job, you know.’ I was aware that this had hit the wrong note.

‘I don’t have to accept.’

‘OK, OK, OK. But try not to mention the … incident … again. I’m really sorry about it.’

‘Don’t be sorry, I was flattered.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, particularly the bit when you said you don’t normally go for gingers or people in the vocations, but I was worth making an exception for.’

‘I didn’t say that, did I?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘That’s bad.’

‘Yeah, but I’ll get over it. How’s your concussion?’

‘Better. It was more of a blackout, I think.’

‘And how’s the poetry coming along?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. You were saying last night how you’re a great poet of the human soul, I was just wondering if you’d cranked out any stanzas today.’

By this stage my head was collapsed on to my forearm in grief. Sadie laughed. It was a filthy, masculine, merciless kind of laugh. ‘Right. There’s a customer. I’m off.’

Part of me had thought that Henry had been making it all up. I contemplated sticking my head in the pizza oven, but instead went out to the bins for a bifter. I didn’t speak much to Sadie for the next hour or so, but every time she went past me she said: ‘Ah, the Great Poet fixes a drink,’ or, ‘See how the bard polishes the side plate.’ I was beginning to warm to her, to be honest.

At eight, Bart dropped in with Brian. This was unusual. He would occasionally drop in early evening to put the wind up everyone but he wouldn’t dream of eating in one of his own restaurants. He sat at a table near the window looking agitated and summoned me over.

‘Stretch, how are we doing this week?’

‘Good. Ten grand easy already.’

‘How many shifts you done?’

‘Four so far. The normal.’

‘Fucking hell, Frank, why can’t you do me a few more? We take bigger when you’re on, guaranteed.’

‘Oh, you old softie. I can’t do any more. I’d go fucking mad. And you won’t pay me any extra. I’d have to be a nonce.’

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