Altar Ego (20 page)

Zack surveyed her with the enthusiasm one gives an approaching traffic warden.

‘One of your
brothers
works in our law firm, you know,’ Vivian prattled.

‘Ah … I’m an only child …’

‘I’ll introduce you. He’s from Nigeria,’ she clarified.

Zack shrugged his massive shoulders. There was a cumbersome silence.

‘I love that film starring Denzel Washington,’ Anouska giddily volunteered.

Once we were seated according to placement (honestly, Vivian would have a placement at a picnic) I realized that everyone was wearing some hint of African Urban Chic. Fierce loyalty to Julian was wrestling with an overzealous desire to prove how relaxed they were around black people, which meant that within minutes all the guests were boasting about what wonderful affirmative action policies they’d personally implemented in their workplaces, somehow managing to touch on an unbridled admiration for Tiger Woods’s golfing technique or Linford Christie’s track speed en conversational route.

‘I hate sports,’ Zack replied. He caught my eye across the black-eyed beans – yes, even the food was ethnic – and I suddenly knew, with a sickening turn of the stomach, that this dinner party was going to become like one of those meetings between Hutus and Tutsis, with the UN vainly
trying
to turn the conversation to the weather.

‘I believe we met briefly. At my wedding,’ trilled Darius who’d deigned to join us for the first time since his marriage.

Zack shrugged. ‘All you white guys look alike to me.’

‘What about that old weather …’ I hazarded. ‘So cold for September …’

Couples consulted each other with their eyes, then, deciding Zack was joking, laughed immoderately.

‘Black is such a reductive term,’ Simon pontificated, passing me what looked like pâté, but in this household could easily have been Vivian’s placenta. ‘Any label, any category that reduces people to one thing, what they look like – Jew, black, woman, gay – is so patronizing.’

‘Yeah? I lerve bein’ niggah black …’ The guests leant towards Zachary in a condescending choreography of sympathy. ‘… Great for gettin’ laid. Guilt trips white chicks
so
fast.’

Eyebrows were semaphoring all around the table. We’re talking Oscar-Winning Eyebrow Performances. I quailed inwardly. My partner’s tongue was now practically protruding through his cheek.

‘S’pecially if yer pretend to be from the Third World.’

A frisson of shock rippled through the room. Surely he meant to say ‘developing countries’?

Vivian realigned her cutlery on the Designers Guild tablecloth. Silence collected between the dinner guests
like
drifts of snow. I couldn’t believe Vivian had bothered with the wretched placement. Nobody was going to stay long enough for Zack to learn their names.

When Zack used the fish knife to butter his roll and flossed his teeth with a matchstick, you could sense the contempt being kept in check. But when he poured the Armagnac he chose to drink with his main meal into a parfait glass and played table quoits with the onion rings, restrained disapproval bulged like an abscess in the room. I tried to escape, I truly did. But every time I made a move, out would come another course. This was turning into the longest dinner party in the history of the world. It was the Hundred Years War of dinner parties.

‘We can’t stay too long, I’m afraid. Zack thinks that a dinner party is a perfectly good way of wrecking a perfectly good evening.’ My words were strung together on a taut wire of nervous gaiety.

‘Naw, I don’t. I see dinner parties as, like foreplay …’ he said, hell-bent on mischief. ‘Somewhere’s I can be thinkin’ about those crotchless panties that I gave yer earlier.’

It was Eyebrow Oscars again. Personally I felt a loo trip coming on to search for some serious substances to abuse. But when I got back, with only half an expired cold capsule in my system, things had got worse. Zack was toying with my friends, the way a cat toys with a mouse.

‘Drug dealers ain’t so bad. Ain’t it a relief for your parents to know that the guys hangin’ around the school gates ain’t all child molesters?’

I guzzled my wine in one gulp.

‘… Hey.
Animals
wear fur an’ nobody complains. As for testin’? All that shampoo keeps their fur real shiny, yer know …’

At that point I commandeered the whole bottle, crawled inside and just tried to remember what my name was. When I reemerged it was to hear Vivian exclaim to her designer lettuce with great indignation, ‘Oh no, Zachary. You must never strike a child in anger.’

‘Yeah?’ Zack asked. ‘Well,
when
then?’

Needless to say, a gap in the conversation opened up. During dessert, I exhausted myself acting as a conversation gap filler. Just when I thought we could exit without insulting anyone more than we had already, Vivian announced that Zack just had to lead us in a little dancing.

‘I’ve got rap, funk, jazz. I’ve got Ladysmith Black Mambazo!’ Determined to show just how hip and cool a hostess she really was, Vivian hijacked Zachary into the living room. As they ground pelvises, Simon looked on, his repugnance masked by a thin blade of a smile – a smile that sliced the air as Zack danced more erotically and Vivian swooned more besottedly with every funky jungle beat.

Later, over the hiss of the espresso machine, Vivian
cornered
me in the kitchen. Her mouth was swollen with the need to talk, to probe, to know all. ‘I didn’t understand you leaving Julian, but I do now. When you’ve got a trophy bonk, who cares about the brain? No wonder he charmed the pants off you …’

‘The elastic wasn’t too strong to begin with, though, was it?’ Simon said, appearing behind us, armed to the teeth with cold, glinting words. ‘Have you read my publication on the importance of intellectual bonding,’ he turned to Zack, who’d just sauntered into the kitchen in the search for ice, ‘over purely ephemeral physical attraction?’

‘I’m sorry, man,’ Zack replied, raiding the freezer. ‘But, like the Voyager Spacecraft – that’s way the fuck over my head.’

Simon rankled. ‘We don’t use that uncouth word in this house.’

‘Fuck? You’re right, man. Fuck is such a cunt of a word.’ As Zack rubbed an ice cube across the base of his throat, a look reminiscent of a dieter faced with a plate of chocolate éclairs flashed across Vivian’s flushed countenance.

‘Well, Rebecca,’ Simon said curtly. ‘It’s been a real experience meeting the man for whom you dumped my best friend. And when you take your leave, we’ll be more than grateful.’

Zachary turned to me. ‘Would it be a real breach of that precious dinner-party tradition of yours if I kneed the host in the nuts?’

I placed myself bodily between them.

‘You do teach harmony and reconciliation, remember, Simon …’

‘I do
not
refer to myself as a teacher, thank you very much. I am a learning coordinator. An educational enhancer.’

‘Yeah?’ said Zack. ‘Well, I refer to yer as a grade-A mother-fuckin’ dipshit.’

The odour of violence was dissipated by the sound of a Janet Jackson hit single being warbled through the letter box in male falsetto. As Vivian dragged Zack off for more dancing, Simon flung open the front door to reveal Julian crouching on the threshold. The fact that he was wearing boxer shorts, a dinner jacket and a pair of antlers on his head was probably
not
a good sign.

‘Where the hell is that melanin-over-endowed, intellectually challenged, phallocentric, bastard of African-American extraction you left me for?’ he demanded. ‘It’s time I showed him a thing or two …’ He swerved into the hall.

His breath, up close, was strong enough to melt your nostril lining. ‘Jules,’ I placed a restraining hand on his arm, ‘you’re drunk.’

‘Drunk? I’m not as think as you drunk I am …’ He shook me off and lurched in the direction of the music. ‘Madonna, U2, The Bearded Clams … you see? I know the Top Forty off by heart. I forsook Classic FM for Capital Radio, all the way over here … Greater love hath no man, believe me.’

‘You
drove
?’

‘Good God yes. I have to keep my car with me at all times. I’m frightened it’ll leave me for a younger owner.’

‘You could have got yourself killed!’

‘Oh well. Save me suiciding. Single men are twice as likely to commit suicide, you know,’ he hiccoughed.

‘Jules …’ I tried to hold him back, but he veered into the living room, barging through Darius, Anouska, Vivian and Kate who were all dancing self-consciously to some bongo beat, climbed on to the coffee table and started doing the lambada.

Sober, Julian is a terrible dancer. But drunk he resembled Isadora Duncan with stomach cramps. Zack watched, bemused, from the sidelines, while Julian incorporated vigorous knee and elbow jerks with a lot of Bacchanalian flinging to the floor.

‘You see? I’m not always excessively biased in favour of rational and tasteful behaviour,’ he cried out, snogging every inanimate object in sight. ‘I’m not an anathema to everything you find proposable to after all, eh Beck?’

Watching Julian pinballing about the room, I was well aware that I was the one who’d jilted his game. It was then I knew that Catholics and Jews do not have a patent on guilt.

Julian wheeled drunkenly to the left, colliding smack bang into the muscular arms of Zachary. Julian looked up woozily.

‘Oh … it’s the Thinking Woman’s Crumpet. Nice to see you. Though I nearly didn’t recognize you without my wife attached to your genitalia.’

The dancers stood, motionless. Zack took a step back.

‘How many wives can you blokes actually have? It’s odd, but we more civilized types believe that matrimony is a library where the members are obliged to return one spouse,’ he swayed, ‘before taking another.’

‘Yeah?’ said Zack, the steam of anger rising off him. ‘Maybe I can learn from that … I’m nearly over the cannibalism too, yer know.’

‘Zack,’ I steered him towards the door. ‘You know, us being here is making it really, really hard for them to talk about us behind our backs …’

‘Name me one of the Beatles’ wives,’ Julian prodded him in the chest. ‘Go on. Just one …’

We had to get out of there. ‘Come on,’ I plucked at Zachary’s sleeve.

Julian let out a bestial cry. ‘Rebecca, I forbid you to go.’ I turned and looked into his aching eyes. ‘Okay … I beg,’ he amended, a funereal droop to his shoulders. ‘I don’t wanna walk down life’s lonely highway, holding hands with myself.’

Jeepers, he
had
been listening to the Top Forty. ‘Oh, Jules …’ It was me who’d done this to him. I was the Princess of Darkness. Not even Johnny Cochrane could defend me on this one. ‘Don’t let Julian drive home,’ I ordered Kate as I heaved open the front door.

Julian, tortured by loss and misery, seized my arm. ‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ He was gesticulating wildly, as though presenting News For The Deaf. ‘A man who can show his feelings?’ Sentiments sloshed over his face.

Yes, I thought woefully. But this was an arterial wound to the emotions. ‘Jules, get some sleep.’

‘Typical,’ pontificated Simon. ‘Women like you spend years telling men to undo our buttoned-up macho silence, advocating the catharsis and closeness to be had when sharing deepest, darkest fears … then you leave us for a man who’s perfecting the art of being a vegetable.’ He pointed at Zack.

‘You people shit me, j’know that?’ Zack slewed around to face the gawking throng. ‘Yer fuckin’ noses are so fuckin’ high in the air you’d think you was sniffin’ God’s socks.’

‘
Were
sniffing,’ Simon corrected automatically.

A bone-brattling punch sent Simon hurtling backwards into a hall wall smothered in framed photographs of the famous couples whose marriages he claimed to have saved. They toppled en masse on to the trendily bare floorboards, shattering on impact.

‘There was no need to do that,’ I screamed at Zack. Julian staggered to where Simon lay, curled up like a broiled prawn, porcupined in glass shards amongst a Cubist assortment of facial fragments of Britain’s Fashionista. As Julian drunkenly administered the kiss of life, Vivian, howling, hit Zack over the head with a
Conran
vase. In the ensuing chaos – believe me, even the talked-to plants were trying to strangle each other – the Infant Prodigies rushed down the stairs and bit Kate on the leg.

‘Oh grow up,’ Kate snapped illogically, slapping their bums. This prompted a decibel-melting duet of wails, soon tried by Vivian, then counterpointed with Simon’s threats of lawsuits and a solo falsetto from Darius – ‘You’re behaving like Savages!’ – a howler that would require a Witness Protection Scheme to have saved him from Zachary’s flying fists.

‘This has gone far enough!’ Kate exploded at me. ‘For once I agree with Simon. How could you leave Julian for this bit of fluff? Everything about him is odious. What he says. How he says it …’

‘Where he lives,’ Anouska shuddered. ‘Nipping out for a carton of milk in Brixton is an act of heroism!’

‘I couldn’t care where he lives as long as it’s with me.’ And I meant it. ‘You’re just jealous, Kate, because since “Married with Children” dumped you, your diaphragm’s been growing lichen!’

So much for Zack losing his social virginity, I thought as we escaped in the minicab. This had been more of a gangbang at Caligula’s orgy.

I vowed there and then to never, ever mind when Zack used a preposition to end a sentence with …

But little did I know the amount of crap up with which I would have to put …

21
How Gauche It With You?

IT WOULD BE
fair to say that at first glance, South London lacks charm. At second and third glance as well, actually. The streets sprawl about like an old drunk. The exhausted tenements whose rickety verandas bloom with grey washing exhale a stale, insipid odour. Pedestrians tread carefully through the rubbish, like novice rollerbladers. The local charity shop has bars on its windows. This is Hell’s kitchenette.

Until Kate’s outburst, a miasma of lust had blinded me to my surroundings. But on the way home that night, I suddenly saw it all through my friend’s eyes.

Zachary lived in Brixton, which is twinned with Eritrea. The minicab shuddered to a halt in front of a hairdressing salon whose sign read ‘Bobbitts – For The Best Cut In Town’. As Zack and I crossed the potholed
street
, I was aware of eyes, hostile predatory eyes, following me. It felt like insects running up and down bare legs.