Mr. Commitment (8 page)

I met her gaze briefly and looked away.

“There’s my answer,” she said, sniffing back her tears. “I’d guessed there was something wrong but I wasn’t sure until now.”

I wanted desperately to be able to lie. To say, “Yes, I do want to get married,” but I couldn’t. My newly installed conscience wouldn’t let me. I loved her. I wanted to be with her. But I did not want to be married. At least not now. Not yet.

“We’ll be all right, Mel,” I said, still holding her hand. “We’re going to be okay.” She didn’t speak. We sat in silence while her unspoken reply made its way to my brain. It didn’t quite get there. “We’re going to be all right, Mel. We can get over this.”

Silence.

“We don’t need to split up,” I said desperately. “We don’t. I can learn.” I was grasping at straws now. “I’ll buy you the wardrobe.”

Still crying, she gently rotated her engagement ring off her finger and pressed it into the palm of my hand and closed my fingers over it. “It was a nice try, Duffy”—she leaned across the table and kissed me softly—“but it wasn’t enough.”

“I want to do the right thing,” I said, fighting back the tears. She didn’t hear me, though—she’d already stood up and walked away. I tried to follow her but she was too far ahead for me to catch up with her, so I watched as she maneuvered her way through Bathrooms, Rugs and Flooring toward the checkout where finally she was swallowed up into the crowds of happy couples.

I can change

I
t was early Sunday morning, the day after the Ikea episode and I was on my way round to Mel’s, determined to sort out this whole sorry mess. As far as I was concerned, all that had happened was that we’d had a stupid row which had blown up out of all proportion. All we needed to do was sit down and sort everything out and we’d be back to normal. The ten-minute walk from the Clapham Common tube to Mel’s flat flew by as I imagined us realizing that our row was nothing more than a silly quarrel brought on by pre-wedding jitters. The important thing was that we loved each other. That was all that mattered.

I pressed the buzzer for Mel’s flat. After the fourth or fifth ring I heard footsteps on the stairs and seconds later a blurry Mel-shaped figure appeared through the frosted stained glass and opened the door.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not even giving her the chance to open her mouth to say hello. “Yesterday was all my fault. I was being stupid. I’m sorry.”

Mel said nothing.

While I hadn’t exactly expected a round of applause and a standing ovation, neither had I anticipated the short uncomfortable smile she gave me or the silence that accompanied it. I followed her up the stairs to her flat wondering what was going on.

Her living room was abnormally tidy. As a rule Mel was tidy but not obsessive—today, however, the entire room looked as if it had been cleaned from top to bottom by my mum, a woman for whom a thrice-weekly removal of dust had taken on an almost religious significance. The flat’s pristine condition didn’t surprise me too much. It was Mel’s way when she was unhappy to clean—to make sense of her environment by completing tasks that were completable. The room seemed to echo her thoughts: “If only life were cleanable. If only it was a question of time and effort before life took on some semblance of peace and order.”

“I’m just going to make a cup of tea,” called out Mel from the kitchen. “Do you want an orange juice?”

“Yeah,” I said, watching her movements through the open kitchen door. “That would be great.”

I sat down in the armchair that Mel’s gran had given her when she’d moved into a nursing home. Under normal circumstances it was my favorite seat in the flat but as soon as I sat there I knew I should’ve sat on the sofa so that Mel could sit next to me. Now there was this huge physical distance between us as well as the emotional gap we were trying to bridge. Just as I was about to swap seats, however, she entered the room with the drinks and sat on the sofa opposite. The coffee table lay between us like a latter-day Berlin Wall. We sat sipping and not speaking, listening carefully to the sort of sounds we normally never heard: the ticking of the clock on the wall; the sound of Cliff Richard on Radio 2 emanating from the house across the road; the sound of two people sipping in silence.

I knew I had to say something but I didn’t want to mention anything more about our row. I felt that if we didn’t talk about the problem directly then it didn’t exist. It was ridiculously optimistic of me, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that if I could just drum up enough normal conversation with her, through some miracle of amnesia she’d completely forget that less than twenty-four hours earlier she’d broken off our engagement. But what do you talk about when there really is only one thing to talk about? I looked out of the window for inspiration.

“Looks like it might rain later,” I lied. The sky was perfectly blue and cloudless. Clutching at straws? I was grasping at fresh air.

“Does it?” said Mel, gazing out of the window to join me in my meteorological studies.

Silence.

I looked inside the room for inspiration. “The flat’s really tidy.”

Mel took a sip of her tea. “Thanks.”

Silence.

“This afternoon’s
EastEnders
omnibus looks good.”

More silence.

So much for the weather.

So much for tidy flat observations.

So much for soap operas.

So much for sticking my head in the sand hoping it would all go away.

If I don’t say something soon we’ll still be here on the sofa having monosyllabic I-spy-with-my-little-eye conversations this time tomorrow,
I thought nervously. Taking a deep breath to steel my nerves I decided to come out into the open. “Are you okay?” I asked tentatively. “I was worried about you.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said lifelessly.

“I’m sorry. About yesterday. I’m really sorry. I was stupid and selfish and I’m sorry. But that stuff you said about us being . . .” I didn’t want to spell it out, but the impassive look on Mel’s face was scaring me into it. “It wasn’t true, was it? It was just you getting angry with me, wasn’t it?” I smiled. I didn’t want it to be an accusation—I wanted it to be light and airy.

Mel shook her head. “We are over—you must know that, Duff, after yesterday.”

I opened my mouth to say something in my defense but she held her hand up to stop me.

“I know that you’re going to tell me that you do love me and that you do want to get married after all, and that’s really sweet but it’s only half true. You don’t want to get married, do you, Duff?” The saucer in her left hand was shaking ever so slightly. “When I asked you yesterday if you really, truly wanted to get married, you didn’t answer me. You confirmed what I knew already but was too scared to admit to myself: you love me but you don’t want to get married.”

She put the cup and saucer down on the table and looked out of the window. “I think I knew you felt that way even on the day that you finally said yes. But I was so happy . . . so relieved, that I put it to the back of my mind. I threw myself into making wedding plans, trying to sort things out, celebrating us being together. Looking back at it now, I can see that all I was doing was trying to block out the thought that you might not feel the same way about us being together as I do. I was hoping that somehow you’d catch me up, that this would excite you as much as it did me.” She hesitated slightly and looked right into my eyes. “Then yesterday as we argued it struck me, just as if someone had slapped me across the face, that your heart wasn’t in it—that you were marrying me because it was what I wanted, not because it was what you wanted. All you wanted to do was the right thing. The thing is, Duffy, I don’t want you to think of us spending the rest of our lives together as some sort of sacrifice you’ve got to make. I don’t want you to turn round to me one day and tell me I forced you into it. I’d hate it. Absolutely hate it.”

“That’s not true,” I said quietly.

“It is, and you know it. If you want proof I’ll give you proof.”

I raised my eyebrows sharply, as if she was about to spring a surprise expert witness on me. Who would it be? My mum? My sister? My conscience?

“It’s just the small things really,” she continued. “Like the last time we went to Mark and Julie’s—all night you were miserable and I could see it was because they were talking about the wedding. Or when we chose the engagement ring. The look on your face when the jeweler handed it to you—it was only fleeting but I saw it all the same—it was a look of doubt, a look that said: ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ But the real evidence is us. Four years together and the longest we’ve spent living under the same roof was three weeks in Goa last summer.”

She paused. “It isn’t right that you’ve made me wait this long. It’s not fair that I’ve not held back anything from you, and this one thing . . . this one thing you can’t give me. Well, I can’t wait any longer. I have a life too and I can’t afford to waste any more of it on you.”

She was right of course. Right about everything. That was the thing about Mel. She had this uncanny sense of seeing things the way they were instead of the way you’d want them to be, of knowing me better than I knew myself. She could sniff out the truth even if it hurt.

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would stop what was happening, so instead we sat in silence digesting the magnitude of our conversation. Mel was crushing her thumb into her fist agitatedly, something she only ever did when nervous or angry.

I stared out of the window hoping that one of us would say something that would make this all go away, and while I waited for this miracle to occur I tried to list all the couples we knew in my head.
Beth and Mikey, Chris and Jane, Rekah and Veejay, Richard and Liz, Lara and Irvine, Kathy and Alex, Bella and Ian, Jess and Stuart, Mark and Nga, Fran and Eric . . . Mark and Julie.

It wasn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but it did the job. These couples were exhibit A: the evidence that had slowly but surely condemned Mel and me to a permanent parting. Because compared to them, with their perfect his-’n’-hers lifestyles and complete togetherness Mel and I looked, well, sort of crap really. Within ten minutes of meeting up with them for lunch or a drink we’d experience the irrational feeling of envy and ineptitude that comes over insecure couples like me and Mel when they feel as if they’re being left behind by their contemporaries. The solution to this problem was of course to try and befriend couples more dysfunctional and less secure than ourselves. But then again maybe that was why we were so popular on the dinner-party circuit.

The thought leaked out into the real world.

“It’s because we’re not Mark and Julie, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s because we’re not perfect like them. You know,
perfect.
” I made the word sound hard and unpleasant. “You know, stripping floorboards, installing Victorian fireplaces and all that. I thought we were above all that. You and me against the world type of thing. We were a cool uncouply sort of couple. We could do our own things separately as well as doing our thing together. We had our own space. I don’t want us to be Mark and Julie.”

“Mark and Julie love each other, which is why they live together and why they’re getting married,” replied Mel. “It isn’t unnatural. People fall in love and move in together all the time.”

“But it never stops there, does it? People move in together and just end up on the couple treadmill. Trying to keep up with the Joneses—or in this case the Mark and Julies.”

Mel shook her head in disagreement. “You know we wouldn’t have done that.”

“Yes we would,” I countered. “Because everybody else does. Name me a single couple you know who own their own flat or house who haven’t got a Victorian fireplace.”

Mel thought hard. “Rachel and Paul.”

“Not good enough,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re right, Rachel and Paul haven’t got a Victorian fireplace. That’s because, if you remember, their interior decorator friend told them that Italian marble fireplaces were going to be all the rage.”

Mel shrugged her shoulders as if to say “So what?”

“Can’t you see what I’m saying? All these couples are going round trying desperately to improve everything in their lives because they want to be perfect. They want to have a perfect house, go to perfect restaurants and have the perfect relationship. But nothing’s perfect, so they’ll never be happy because they’re not focusing on what they’ve got, only on what comes next. I love you, Mel. We’ll be all right. We will. I know we’re not perfect but we’re so much better together than the alternative.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one,” said Mel coolly. “But nothing you’ve said changes the fact that
you
don’t want to live with
me.
I could wait around forever hoping that you’ll change your mind but I’m not going to. Four years is more than enough. So I need you to go, Duffy. I need you to go right now. It’s for the best. Please, please don’t try and call me. At least not for a while.”

On the doorstep we kissed briefly. “It’s the saddest thing in the world, Duff,” she said, as tears welled up in her eyes. “The saddest thing ever, because I know without question that you love me. And that we’d be so good together. But you’re terrified of commitment, and whatever it is holding you back, this is something you’ve got to sort out on your own.”

Anyone see that Lassie
film last night?

O
utside W.H. Smith, half an hour after I’d left Mel’s, I walked all the way to Clapham Junction in the rain and caught the train to Waterloo station. I had a copy of
What Hi-Fi?
in one hand (the pages of which I was trying desperately to escape into) and in the other a maxi-pack of Revels (from which I’d already frantically located and eaten all of the orange ones). Refusing to think about, confront or admit to myself what had just happened, I made my way to the tube and jumped on the Northern Line. I sat flicking through the pages of my magazine, poring over any picture or technical specifications that caught my eye. My plan was simple. I was going to go to one of the many hi-fi shops on Tottenham Court Road, hand over my credit card, point at a picture in
What Hi-Fi?
and say, “Give me that.” For approximately twenty-six minutes—roughly how long it took me to get to my destination—I was happy again.

Even though it was a rain-sodden Sunday afternoon, Tottenham Court Road was busy with shoppers and tourists. I made my way through the crowds and the drizzle to the doors of the first hi-fi shop I saw, called Now Electronics. Walking into the shop, leaving the rain behind, I immediately felt at home. Dotted around the shop floor were young men like me, exhilarated to be in a secure environment like this where we could stand and admire the latest and the best, and spend money we knew we couldn’t afford because we’d managed to provide ourselves with perfectly structured arguments as to why this purchase was, more so than food, light or shelter, not only necessary but essential to our quality of life.

I stood in front of a pair of speakers that had received a five-star rating in
What Hi-Fi?
and gazed at them longingly. A sales assistant, roughly my age, approached me, wearing a crumpled gray suit, ill-fitting shirt and really bad shoes. It was as if he didn’t care about how he looked because there were so many other more important things in life than clothes. Like hi-fi equipment.

“Nice speakers,” he said reverentially. “Really nice speakers.”

The people who run these kinds of shops were no fools. They employed people who thought like me to sell to people like me. This sales assistant knew exactly what to say, which buttons to press. It was like being seduced by the most beautiful woman in the world—with the worst dress sense in history. I was powerless to resist his charms.

“Yeah,” I said, acknowledging his point. “They are.”

“They came in late yesterday afternoon. We’ve been so busy I haven’t even had a chance to listen to them myself.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “What system have you got at home?”

I hadn’t got a “system.” What I had was a massive, matte black all-in-one thing that I’d bought off Charlie years ago; I wasn’t going to tell him that, though. Instead I lied and said I couldn’t remember, and then added casually, as if possessed by the spirit of a high-rolling playboy, “I might as well get a new CD player and amplifier while I’m here.”

“How much are you looking to spend?” he asked.

I shrugged and gave him a figure off the top of my head that in no way bore any resemblance to anything I could afford.

“Right,” he said, barely able to contain his excitement. “Hang on a sec, and I’ll make sure the listening room is vacant and then I’ll wire up the speakers to the perfect CD player and amplifier. You’ll love it.” He returned moments later carrying a bundle of wires and beckoned me to the glass-walled room at the back of the shop. It had a large worn brown leather sofa in the middle of it, perfectly positioned to optimize the acoustics of the room (apparently). While he matched up the wires with the sockets he gave me a rundown on the entire system. It was beautiful. There are few things in life more enticing than the sound of men talking hi-fi specifications. It put my world into perspective. The real world was a bad place where crappy things happened to me all the time, but this sales assistant was offering a way out, to a world of perfection, a place where every woofer, tweeter and bass note made sense. We both listened and spoke with awe when talking about the equipment. I didn’t know as much as he did, but he wasn’t condescending—he just wanted to share. The assumed knowledge. The attention to detail. It all brought us closer.

Once the speakers were wired up he asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to listen to so that we could really put the speakers through their paces. It was then that I disappointed him. Refusing all manner of dance tracks, classic rock, soul, hip-hop, jazz, guitar rock or pop, I handed him a compilation CD from the box on the floor, entitled
For Lovers Only.
It had a black-and-white picture of a preposterously attractive couple kissing in the rain.

“Track seven,” I said desperately. “Play track seven.”

He looked at me incredulously. “Are you sure, mate? I’ve got some banging techno that will sound brilliant through these.”

“Yes.” I nodded, no longer caring about what he thought of me. “I know it’s cheesy but it was my . . . it was my . . . a friend of mine wasn’t going to have it played at her wedding.”

“You’re the boss,” he said, raising his eyebrows. He placed the shiny silver disc carefully in the drawer, pushed it shut and pressed
PLAY.
Out of the speakers, crystal clear, as if the legendary ensemble were playing live right in front of me, came the rich vocal tones of the Commodores singing “Three Times a Lady.”

T
rudging through the pouring rain, weighed down by my brand-new speakers, amplifier and CD player, I was already losing any sense of well-being my purchases had given me. I needed help. I needed my friends. I called Charlie on his mobile. He and Dan were holed up in the Shakespeare in Covent Garden watching the football because the TV in the Haversham had broken down. As I put down the phone, my spirits picked up from their downward spiral. Charlie and Dan were just what I needed. Why? Because they were my people.

People who talked about anything as long as it wasn’t serious.

People who weren’t constantly asking what I was thinking.

People who followed the rules of logic.

People who didn’t talk when the TV was on unless it was to shout imaginative abuse at it.

People who thought red satin underwear looked great on the opposite sex.

A
nyone see that Lassie film last night?” said Charlie, absentmindedly dismantling a beer mat. “I think it was
Lassie Come Home.
”

The match had long since finished, a 0–0 draw and a typically dull performance from both teams, epitomizing just about everything that was wrong with modern football. It had been such a tedious game that instead of discussing the highlights we were reduced to talking about what we’d got up to the night before. Well, as I’d spent Saturday night in my darkened bedroom ruminating on the Ikea episode, I lied and told everyone I’d gone to bed early because I was knackered. Dan announced that he’d spent his evening in the company of Lana, a rather attractive heckler who’d harangued him for most of his set at the Happy House in New Cross; and Charlie, rather bizarrely, had apparently spent his evening watching
Lassie Come Home.

“They’re all the same,” said Dan, dismissing the entire Lassie genre glibly. “Small kid finds dog. Oh, Dad, can we keep dog? No. Please. No. Please. All right, go on, then. Small kid finds himself in danger. Lassie to the rescue. Happy ending.” He clapped his hands and shrugged like a cross between an East End barrow boy and a New York Jewish intellectual. “All variations on a theme, mate.”

I didn’t join in the banter because something about Charlie’s evening activities didn’t add up. “Weren’t you supposed to be out with Vernie last night? She said she’d booked you a table at some hideously expensive restaurant in Hampstead.”

“Yeah, she did,” said Charlie dejectedly. From the way he spoke it was obvious that their posh night out had been something of a disaster. “We had a great time,” he added flatly.

“So how come you got to watch Lassie?” I asked.

“I taped it,” he said defensively, the tone of his voice defying us to mock him, which we of course did anyway.

“Do you know how sad that is, Charlie?” I said, laughing. “I can’t believe you taped a Lassie film. What kind of a depraved pervert does something like that in the privacy of his own home?”

Relaxing visibly, now that the topic of his night out with Vernie had been left behind, he bowed his head in mock shame. “They were classics of their time,” he protested. “One day they’ll be up there with
The Godfather Part II, Les Enfants du Paradis
and
Digby—The Biggest Dog in the World
as the greatest films ever made.” He paused, chuckling into his beer. “Now, what was I going to say before I was so rudely interrupted? Oh yeah, in all the Lassie films, he always has to save a child from being mauled to death by some sort of vicious cougar-type animal . . .”

“Don’t you mean she?” I prompted. “Lassie was a bird.”

Charlie threw a puzzled glance at me, unsure if I was making this up. “Lassie was a bloke, wasn’t he?”

“Of course Lassie was a she,” chipped in Dan. “Otherwise they’d be called Laddie films.”

“Good point,” said Charlie, nodding. “All right, then. Well, in Lassie films
she
always has to save a child from being mauled to death by a cougar or something.” Dan and I nodded, wondering where this was going. “Well how did they do that? Surely they didn’t use real dogs to fight cougars?”

“Yeah,” said Dan. “I once read in a magazine that they went through about eight stunt Lassies per film trying to get those cougar fights right.”

My mind was obviously somewhere else because I was just about to say how outrageous this was and shouldn’t the anti-animal-cruelty societies have done something, when Dan nearly choked himself to death with laughter. “They took the cougar’s teeth out,” he said, semi-convulsed. “I found out all about it on a documentary on the Discovery Channel.”

I loved it—what I was experiencing at that very second. To me it was what life was all about; having a laugh and hanging out with my mates. It was the easy life incarnate. It was the way things were meant to be.

As late afternoon turned into early evening our inanity knew no bounds. Between us there was a degree in drama and English (Dan’s), an MA in town planning (Charlie’s) and an inordinate amount of “A” levels (some of which were mine) and yet this was the furthest you could get from intelligent dialogue. But the subjects we spoke about felt important. More important than anything else in our lives. Inspired by Lassie, topics of conversation covered the following, which despite long and often heated arguments boiled down to the following basic questions and answers:

Q: Could Batman beat Spiderman in a straight fight?

A: Not really. Spiderman has superhuman strength whereas Batman is just a bloke in a romper suit with some gadgets.

For the record:
 Charlie wanted it noted that he thought Batman would win because the likelihood of someone actually being bitten by a radioactive spider in real life was extremely small, whereas the odds of a bloke dressing up as a bat armed with a variety of crime-busting gadgets were slightly more realistic.

Q: Who weighs the most?

A: Me: 13 stone 5, Charlie: 14 stone 2, Dan: 12 stone 4.

For the record:
 Charlie insisted that it wasn’t about weight per se, as about “muscle-to-fat ratio.”

Q: Woody Allen’s best film is . . . ?

A:
Manhattan
(two votes: Charlie and me),
Shadows and Fog
(one vote: Dan).

For the record:
 Dan refused to accept the judgment and insisted we institute a points system (i.e., three points for our favorite, two for the next one, etc.) and demanded we all voted again.

Overall winner under new system: Annie Hall.

I disappeared to the gent’s at the back of the pub and as I took a leak, checked my watch. It was eight o’clock. Thanks to our concentrated drinking efforts and the eight million packets of crisps I’d consumed as a replacement for Sunday lunch I was inebriated enough not to try and work out how long it had been since I’d last seen Mel but sober enough not to fall into the urinal.

Returning from the toilet I recalled a good anecdote that would embarrass Dan. It was the story of how he’d once confessed to having a bizarre crush on Elizabeth from
The Waltons.
Walking back to the table, desperately troubled by TV trivia (“Just what was the name of the actress who played Elizabeth?”) I noticed that an extra person was sitting at our table talking to Dan and Charlie. It was only when he turned and waved to me that I realized it was Greg Bennet, a mate of mine and Dan’s who was also a stand-up comic.

Greg wasn’t really part of our inner circle—he was actually more of an associate, someone to drink with when there wasn’t anyone else, and an alternative source of comedy-circuit gossip. The thing was, none of us really liked him. He was the sort of person who would make inflammatory comments in the name of humor—usually about women, but animals, asylum seekers and religious groups were often thrown into the bargain—in the hope that his “on the edge” wit would impress us. What he failed to realize was that in his case, opposing “the overbearing arm of political correctness” and just being a git were one and the same thing. He was, however, harmless in an odd sort of way and we tolerated him for this reason and this reason only.

“Guess what?” said Greg to all of us as I reached the table and sat down.

For a laugh we all had a guess at Greg’s expense. Mine was, “You’ve decided to admit that ‘high foreheadedness’ and ‘balding’ are one and the same thing.”

Charlie’s was, “You’ve discovered that you’re not funny.”

Dan, however, got it right first time: “You’re getting married.”

“Yeah,” said Greg with a perplexed look on his face. “How did you guess?”

I looked at Dan and could see that the news quite saddened him, as it had me. Dan had been on the same drama course at college with Greg’s girlfriend—“the lovely Anne” as we called her—and had nearly got it together with her, but for one reason or another it never worked out and she’d ended up with Greg. Dan always said she was the kind of woman he could’ve fallen in love with because she was an incredibly genuine person whose only flaw, it seemed, was that she couldn’t see how much of a tosser Greg really was.