Come Together Read online

  I get back to the gallery round four, still drowsy from the sun, still woozy with what’s gone down. There’s an envelope wedged in the letterbox and I open it and read the letter inside. It states: Call me on my mobile now. Paulie. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I can’t believe my luck. The one day I do a bunk, he has to turn up. I go inside, brace myself and dial his number. He’s not in a good mood. Wrong, he’s homicidal. He explains, through a staggering variety of expletives, that he’s been made to look a fool in front of his new girlfriend by not being able to get into his own gallery because the locks have been changed. But this, I discover, is merely the build-up to the seriously bad news.

  Me: ‘Listen, Paulie. I messed up, okay? And I’m sorry. And it won’t happen again.’

  Paulie: ‘You’re damn right it won’t, and d’you want to know why?’

  Me: ‘Why?’

  Paulie: ‘Because you’re fucking well fired, that’s why. I want you to shut the gallery now and take the keys round to Tim Lee in the pottery next door and then I never want to see or hear from you again. That simple enough for you?’

  Me: ‘And that’s it?’

  Paulie: ‘That’s it.’

  Me: ‘Well, actually, there is one thing I don’t understand.’

  Paulie: ‘What?’

  Me: ‘Just how come the reception on your mobile’s so bad?’

  Paulie: ‘Because I’m in a helicopter. Though what the fuck’s that got to do with—’

  Me: ‘So where exactly are you?’

  Paulie: ‘Halfway to Paris.’

  Me: ‘Oh.’

  Paulie: ‘What d’you mean, Oh?’

  Me: ‘I mean, Oh, well you’d better turn round, because I’m leaving your stupid keys in your stupid door, and I’m leaving your stupid door wide open.’

  I don’t, of course, carry through my threat. Partly on the grounds that Paulie can afford a better lawyer than me, and partly because I’m feeling more down-and-out than up-and-at-’em. Instead, I dutifully lock up the gallery for the last time and drop the keys off with Tim.

  As disasters go, this makes the Hundred Years War look like a harmless squabble. The effect it’s going to have on my life is barely quantifiable. No income = No way of sustaining my current lifestyle = No option other than to take a one-way ticket back to Crapjobsville = The end of ambition and the beginning of a life of meaningless drudgery.

  Whatever control I had over my life has just vanished and, as I get on my bike and set off for the home I can no longer afford to live in, I’m overwhelmed with a feeling of impotence. I’ve never felt this way before. Well, almost never.

  * * *

  Confessions: No.4 Impotence

  Place: my room, student digs, Edinburgh.

  Time: 11.30 p.m. 2 October 1991.

  Ella Trent was a babe. Understatement. Ella Trent was the best babe. The legs of Julia Roberts’s body double in Pretty Woman. The face of Uma Thurman when she’s dancing with John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Jamie Lee Curtis’s tits in Trading Places. And the cool charisma of Lauren Bacall. If there was a school whose entrance policy was based on beauty rather than IQ, then Ella Trent would be the girl they’d put on the cover of the prospectus. This woman didn’t just turn guys’ heads when she entered a room, she broke their necks.

  And I’d just pulled her.

  It should never have happened, of course. There was her, and there was me. North & South. Sweet & Sour. Beauty & Beast. Never should the twain have met. Ella Trent wasn’t destined for the likes of me. A film or rock star? Yes. A date in some exclusive Hollywood bistro? Yes, again. But Jack Rossiter outside The Last Drop in the pouring rain? No. No to the power of infinity.

  Not that I was complaining at this unlikely twist of fate. I was nineteen years old, in the second year of my Art degree at Edinburgh. The sole reason I’d passed my first year had been down to the fact that Ella Trent worked on the same floor in the library as me. In between staring at my books, I’d stared at her. I’d stared and I’d planned and I’d plotted. And, finally, I’d plucked up the courage to speak to her. After much subtle work (biro borrowing and the likes), I’d successfully engineered a nodding-of-heads-in-mutual-recognition relationship.

  But it wasn’t the contents of her pencil case I was interested in. My top five sexual fantasies at the time – always run in reverse order, for titillation purposes – were:

  5. Three-in-a-bed sex romp with Hayley and Becky, twins on my course

  4. Being held captive by a tribe of beautiful Amazons for breeding purposes

  3. A spanking with a wet halibut, administered by Mademoiselle Chaptal, my school French teacher

  2. Being the only male survivor of a plane crash on an uninhabited tropical island, where the female survivors happened to be the contestants for Miss World

  1. Achieving a simultaneous orgasm with Ella Trent after a lengthy bout of stroke-inducing sex

  Excepting the fish fetish thing at number three (attributable, I now suspect, to cod and chips being the staple of my student diet), I think it was a fairly standard list for a young man. But the order says it all. Ella Trent above an unlimited supply of Amazons? I mean, really. But there she was: numero uno. There was nothing I could do about it.

  And there I was, back in my bedroom, after snogging her outside The Last Drop and all the way back in the cab. I stared at her as we undressed, savouring every moment. For me, this was the opportunity to fulfil the fantasy of a lifetime. And if, for her, it was the result of being stoned, having lost her glasses, and having mistaken me for Brad, an Australian exchange student who she fancied, so what? At that moment, as far as I was concerned, her presence in my bedroom was the direct result of a splendidly fought campaign. I’d done my groundwork in the library. I’d spotted her in The Last Drop. I’d accidentally bumped into her at the bar. And I’d chatted and charmed and schmoozed her as if my life had depended on it.

  And my plan had worked.

  Here she was in my bedroom, and soon there she lay, naked on my bed. I had conquered. I had seen. And soon I would come. Or, rather, just as my fantasy dictated, we would come together. The shag was in the bag and nothing was going to go wrong. And not just any shag, either. The Shag of the Century. It was going to be sexellent, screwpendous and screwperb, all rolled into one. I would be her Clint Eastwood, her Sean Connery and her Richard Gere. She’d remember me. My ego demanded it.

  And, to begin with, that’s exactly how it was. We groped and rolled and grunted our way across the sheets. We stroked, we poked and we pried. Forget foreplay. This was fiveplay. Sixplay. This was the most horny I’d ever felt in my life.

  ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Now. Get a condom. Do it now. Please, do it now.’

  But if my plan to live out my number one fantasy was working, something else, I became excruciatingly aware as I pulled the condom on, wasn’t. It could have been the eight pints of lager it had taken me to pluck up the nerve to make a move on Ella that was responsible. Or it could have been insecurity, just looking down at her incredible body and knowing that I could never live up to its standards and expectations. Or it could have been plain shock, achieving something I hadn’t ever really thought possible.

  But whatever the cause, the results were the same: a sinking sensation in my gut, accompanied by a shrinking sensation in my groin. I watched my condom-covered cock shrivel like a burst balloon. No. This can’t be. No way. Not now. Not her. I won’t allow it. I began to panic, desperately running through fantasies two to five. But my dick had other ideas. For the first time since birth, it didn’t have a life of its own. Instead, it had a death. And a rapid one at that. Ella and I watched as it stooped and drooped, wilted and died.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she replied, getting up and snatching her knickers from the floor, ‘it’s never happened before.’

  I covered my face with my hands, mumbling, ‘I blame it on my mother.’

  ‘What?’

  My Australian accent w
as thicker this time. ‘For calling me Brad. I’ve never felt comfortable with the name.’

  * * *

  Talking Pictures

  Most times, I reckon, change is a slow process. It’s so slow you don’t even register it happening. Like puberty. One minute, you’re eleven years old without a single pube to your name, and then it’s ten years later, and not only have you got enough hair down there to stuff a cushion, but it’s sprouting out of your knuckles and nostrils as well. And you ask yourself, How did I get like this? Just when, precisely, did I change from soft-skinned boy into hairy-bellied man? And you’ve got no reply to these questions, because it didn’t happen overnight, it happened over years.

  Sometimes, though, it’s different. Sometimes change is an express train, picking you up at one stop and dropping you off further down the line only seconds later. And it leaves you staggered. It leaves you staggered and stunned, because you can see the distance you’ve travelled and you know you can never go back.

  Take now. Take being here in my bedroom at 8 a.m. Take lying here with my arm around this beautiful girl, with her sleeping head rested on my chest and the sound of her breathing synchronising with mine. A couple of weeks back, my reaction to this would have probably been:

  a) There’s a girl asleep in my bed; excellent, I’ve pulled

  b) There’s a girl asleep in my bed; shit, that means I can’t do a runner

  c) There’s a girl asleep in my bed; better wake her up – but what the hell’s her name?

  But I do know this girl’s name. This girl’s name is Amy. Today is Sunday. It’s a week and a half since I got fired from Paulie’s Gallery. It’s a week and a half since I had that conversation with Amy in Hyde Park and we moved from a Me and a Her to an Us. And my reaction now to her being here is:

  a) Amy’s asleep in my bed; excellent, I’ve pulled

  b) Amy’s asleep in my bed; good, I don’t want her to be in anyone else’s

  c) Amy’s asleep in my bed; great, because waking up without her on the nights we spend apart sucks

  In spite of my initial resistance, I’ve come to the conclusion that change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is just as well, really, because the change doesn’t stop with my attitude to waking up with Amy beside me. Change, as the hippies sensibly pointed out, is all around. All around my bedroom, at least. The old faithfuls – my favourite FHM pin-ups, my Die Fly, Die! collection of squished insects on the window pane, and my rogue socks and boxer shorts – have been respectively torn down, wiped off and vanquished to the washing machine. And if change is not a bad thing, then it’s definitely a bed thing. My sheets and duvet and pillow cases are freshly laundered. My bedside ashtray contains four, rather than forty, cigarette butts. And my March ’71 edition of Playboy, a twenty-fifth birthday present from Matt, has been removed from beneath the mattress and stashed in a box on top of the wardrobe.

  But change can suck. And when that change is do to with my job, it does.

  My first thought after getting back to Matt’s house after being fired was to construct an effigy of Paulie out of jackal dung, mark out a chalk pentagram on the paving stones in the back garden, and stab knitting needles through his vital organs whilst chanting the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Dismissing this on the grounds of impracticality (jackal dung is a total nightmare to come by at this time of year), I then got practical. I boosted my ego, telling myself that I was good at the job I used to do and shouldn’t find it a problem sorting out some freelance work. There are times, though, when the world takes it upon itself to prove its superiority by crushing your ego like an ant. Ten phone calls to old contacts and ten noes later, I concluded that this was, indeed, one of those times. So I bit the bullet. There was only one honourable course of action left to me: begging.

  I drew up a list of potential benefactors:

  a) My father. Dad said goodbye to me, Kate, Billy and Mum about a week after my eighth birthday. Two kids and a wife he no longer loved, coupled with the pressures of commuting from Bristol to London, left him susceptible to the dubious charms of Michelle Dove, his then secretary. Despite my mother’s predictions to the contrary, Dad and Michelle are still happily married. They live in a mansion house in Holland Park and divide their time between spending the ludicrous amounts of cash Dad’s property development company made in the eighties boom, and raising their two children, Davie (14) and Martha (13). Dad and I meet twice a year (birthday and Christmas). Probability of him giving me cash: zero. Probability of him lending me cash: slim. Probability of him repeating his offer of getting me a start in the City: high.

  b) My brother. Billy Boy, in keeping with his fascination with all things technological, does marketing for a software development firm in the Docklands. Billy has a mortgage and a family. He does OK and he’s happy. But he’s got a future. He’s got his kids to think of. I shouldn’t be pressuring him back into the role of Acting Dad he pulled off so well when me and Kate were kids.

  c) My mother. Asking Mum for money would put me in the same league as Nero on the decency front. She works as a typist in a bank in Bristol and, after the mortgage payments and bills, there’s not much left. Sure, she’d find the money, same as she did when I was a student, but I’d end up feeling shit about it.

  d) My sister. Student. Like asking a corpse for health tips. Forget about it.

  e) Matt. Tricky one this. Because Matt’s stacked cash-wise. And he’s my best mate. And I’d do the same for him, but he’s so generous anyway, I’d feel pretty shoddy about borrowing cold currency off him. It comes down to self-respect, I suppose.

  Not exactly what you’d call a dream selection. But desperate times call for desperate deeds. Working on the theory that a slim chance was better than no chance at all, it was Dad who got the call. His receptionist was hostile, but Dad, bizarrely enough, was receptive to my suggestion of a meet. We duly arranged to hook up for lunch on Tuesday afternoon.

  It went well. Relatively well. It went well for a meeting with the one relative of mine who can’t help sighing at the very sight of me. We talked the talk for a while, caught up on each other’s lives. Then I cut to the chase and asked him if he could lend me some money and he told me I should be standing on my own two feet. Then I told him about losing my job and he told me he could get me an introduction to a perfectly good stockbroking firm. Then I told him that I wanted to make a go of the art and he sighed and returned his attention to his lobster salad. And then he did something I didn’t remember him ever doing before: he came up with a solution that wouldn’t involve compromise by either of us. He told me he’d commission me to do a piece for the reception of their new Knightsbridge office. And I did something I’d never done in return: I thanked him and told him I wouldn’t let him down.

  Friday morning, and Willy Ferguson, Dad’s marketing director, rocked – or, rather, rolled – up at Matt’s house. I’d cancelled Sally’s modelling session for the second week running, telling her I had to go to Bristol for a funeral. Last week, wallowing in a post-firing depression, I hadn’t been able to face seeing her at all. And, of course, there was what had happened with Amy: our pact. I needed time to straighten this out in my head before I saw Sally and risked going on to autopilot and forgetting I was no longer available. She was OK about it and this was a relief, because despite my decision not to go for closure with her any more, I did want to finish her portrait.

  Willy was mid-fifties, balding, and had a gut that only a lifetime of serious lunching could have produced. What looked suspiciously like a baked bean lay embedded in his thick moustache, just above the corner of his mouth. I showed him through to the studio, where I’d hung eight pieces of my work up for his critical assessment. He glanced over the paintings like he was reading a McDonald’s menu.

  ‘Three thousand pounds,’ he finally said. ‘One thousand up front and the rest on receipt of the goods. Make it big, because we’re a big company. Big is what we’re about. Same sort of size as that one,’ he continued, waving at my boys’
toys piece. ‘But not so weird.’

  ‘Have you got any ideas about what sort of thing you’re looking for?’ I asked helpfully.

  ‘Something bright. Something to cheer people up.’

  ‘Something bright …’

  ‘Yellow.’

  ‘Yellow?’

  ‘Or orange. Orange will probably do just as well.’

  ‘How about lime?’ I asked, barely able to believe my luck at being privy to this, the inaugural exposition of the Citrus Theory of Art by Professor Willy Ferguson.

  He considered this for a moment, before deciding, ‘No, lime’s no good. Looks like mildew. Don’t want clients coming in and thinking our walls are riddled with damp. Stick to yellow or orange. Can’t go far wrong with that.’

  I made a mental note to call ArtStart as soon as he’d left and order a pot of their brightest yellow paint.

  ‘Who’s the bird?’ Willy asked, clocking Sally’s portrait and leaning forward to get a better look.

  ‘Just a model.’

  He tilted his head to one side and stood in wrapped contemplation for a moment. ‘Amazing,’ he finally concluded.

  I felt myself swell with pride. ‘You like it?’

  ‘Bloody right. I haven’t seen a pert pair of tits and a nice tight arse like that for years.’

  So there it is. With the good (Amy), comes the bad (having to go to Dad for help), comes the ugly (whatever yellow monstrosity I whip up to adorn the reception of Dad’s firm). But I mustn’t complain. There’s money in the bank. I can afford to live again. I wanted a change, and that’s exactly what I’ve got.