Starter For Ten (18 page)

'Ever since I started buying my own underwear . . .'

'Y-fronts out of fashion are they?'

'I have absolutely no idea, Mum . . .'

'I thought you preferred those cotton brief things . . .'

'I mix. It depends . . .'

'Depends on what?'

'Mum ...I'

'So how long are you staying with your girlfriend for?'

'Don't know. Three days, maybe four. And she's not my girlfriend.'

'So are you coming back?'

'No, I think I'm going straight back to college, Mum.' I don't know why, but I've taken to calling it 'college', maybe because 'university' still sounds snooty to me.

'So you're not here for New Year?'

'I doubt it.'

'You're with her?'

'I think so.' I hope so.

'Oh. That's a shame . . .' She's using her martyr voice. The trick here is not to catch her eye. I concentrate on my packing. 'And are you back here afterwards?'

'I can't really. I've got work to do.'

'You could work here . . .'

'I can't really . . .'

'I won't disturb you . . .'

'I need special books, Mum . . .'

'So you definitely won't be here for New Year?'

'Don't think so Mum, no.' From behind me comes an exhalation so mournful that I fully expect to turn around and find her lying dead on the bedroom floor. Irritated now, I say, 'You'll be out getting smashed with Uncle Des anyway, it's not like we'll see each other . . .'

'I know, it's just it's the first time you won't be here, that's all. I just don't like rattling round in the house all by myself . . .'

'Well it was bound to happen one day, Mum.' But we're both thinking the same thing. It shouldn't have happened, not like this, not just yet. There's a silence, and then I say, 'I'm going to get dressed now, Mum, so if you wouldn't mind ...?'

She sighs, gets up off the bed.

'It's nothing I haven't seen before.'

Recently too. New Year's Eve 1984/85, I came home so drunk that I managed to vomit in my own bed. I have a mercifully vague memory of my mother helping me into the bath at dawn, and rinsing off the Pernod and lager and half-digested chicken-and-chips with the shower attachment. That was just twelve months ago. She has never mentioned it since and I like to believe that maybe it didn't really happen, but I'm pretty sure it did.

Sometimes I think there aren't enough psychiatrists in the world ...

Mum's cheered up a bit by the time I kiss her goodbye on the doorstep, though she's still trying to thrust groceries on me. I reject a loaf of Mighty White, a litre of Dry Blackthorn, a pack of mince pies, a 250ml pot of UHT single cream, a 5lb bag of spuds, a packet of Jaffa Cakes, a bottle of peppermint flavour Iced Magic, and a two-litre bottle of sunflower oil, and every no-thank-you is a knife between my mother's shoulder blades. Damage done, I head off, dragging my suitcase along the road, and not looking back in case she's started crying. On the way to the train station I stop to get a fiver out of the cashpoint, then stop off at the newsagents to buy some wine for the Harbinsons. I want to get something nice, so in the end blow three quid on the one that comes in its own carafe.

QUESTION: What socio-economic term originally described the artisan occupants of walled towns in eleventh century France, occupying a position between the peasants and the landlords?

ANSWER: The Bourgeoisie.

On the train from Southend I look out the window at the wet, empty streets, the handful of shops open in a halfhearted take-it-or-leave-it way. The four days in between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve are surely the longest and nastiest in the year - a sort of bloated, bastard Sunday. August Bank Holiday's the worst though. I fully expect to die at about two-thirty in the afternoon on an August Bank Holiday. Dead of terminal ennui.

I change at Shenfield, where lunch is a can of Lucozade, a packet of Hula Hoops and a Twix bought from the windswept newsagents, and then there's just time to check how my face is healing in the station toilets' mirror before I'm back on the train.

Leaving the suburbs and heading into Suffolk the rain turns to snow. Snow like this rarely seems to reach Southend. The combination of street lights and estuary air and massed central heating tends to turn it into a sort of cold, damp dandruff, but here, through fields as the sun sets, it looks fantastically thick and clean. I read the first page of Ezra Pound's Cantos five times without understanding a word, then give up and look at the landscape. Soulfully. Ten minutes from the station pull on my overcoat and scarf and check the reflection in the train window. Collar up or collar down? I'm aiming for a sort of Graham-Greene, Third-Man look, but getting an Ultravox video.

Five minutes away, and I'm practising what I'm going to say when I see Alice again. I haven't been this nervous since Jesus in Godspell when I had to take my top off to be crucified. I can't even seem to smile properly; a lop-sided grin with my mouth closed makes me look like a stroke victim, but when I open my mouth my teeth are a jumbled cream-and-black, like a bag of Scrabble tiles. A lifetime of fresh fruit and vegetables means that Alice Harbinson has perfect teeth. I imagine her dentist looking into her mouth and just weeping at the sheer, pure, snowy splendour of it all.

As the train pulls into the station, Alice is waiting at the far end of the platform, huddled up against the snow in an expensive-looking long black overcoat that almost touches the ground, her head wrapped in a grey woollen scarf, and I wonder where she's put her balalaika. If she doesn't quite break into a run when she sees me, she at least walks a little faster, and as her face comes into focus I can see she's grinning, and then laughing, her skin whiter, her lips redder and there's something softer and warmer about her away from college, as if she's off duty, and she throws her arms around me, and says she's missed me, and she's so excited I'm there, and we're going to have so much fun, and for a moment this feels like perfect happiness, here on a country train station in the snow with Alice. Until I see, over her shoulder, this dark, handsome, moody man who I assume must be Alice's dad. Heathcliff in a wax-jacket.

If I'd had a forelock I'd have tugged it, but instead I offer him my hand. Recently I've been experimenting with shaking hands, because it's what I imagine grown men are meant to do, but Mr Harbinson just looks at me as if I've done something incredibly un-cool and eighteenth century, like curtseying or something. Eventually he takes the hand, squeezes it just hard enough to show that he could fracture my skull if he chose to, then turns and walks away.

As I drag my bags to the green Land-Rover in the station car park, Alice walks on ahead with her arms looped around her dad's neck, like he's her boyfriend or something. If I put my arm around my mum's neck like that she'd call social services, but Mr Harbinson seems to take it in his stride, puts his arm round Alice's waist and pulls her towards him. I trot up alongside."

'Brian's our secret weapon on the team. He's the boy-genius I've been telling you about,' says Alice.

'Well, I'm not sure if genius is the right word,' I say.

'No, I'm certain it's not,' says Mr Harbinson.

Driving through the country lanes. I sit in the back amidst the muddy Wellingtons and walking boots and sodden Ordnance Survey maps, as Alice keeps up a monologue about all the parties she's been to and the old friends she's seen, and I scrutinise every word, just to check for the presence of Romantic Interlopers, a hot young actor maybe, or some lightly muscled sculptor called Max or Jack or Serge. But the coast seems clear, so far anyway. Maybe she's censoring herself in front of her father. I doubt it though. I think Alice is one of those strange people who behaves exactly the same way in front of her parents as she does in front of her friends. ?'

Mr Harbinson listens and drives in silence, quietly emanating a subtle buzz of hostility. He's absolutely massive, and | I try to imagine why someone who makes art documentaries *J for BBC2 should have the physique of a brickie. And hairy, the kind of man who shaves his cheeks twice a day, but obviously terrifyingly intelligent. It's almost as if he was raised by wolves, but wolves who knew the value of a decent college education. He also seems impossibly young, good-looking and cool to be a dad, as if having a family is something he slipped in between Hendrix concerts and LSD trips.

Eventually we anive at Blackbird Cottage. Except 'collage' isn't really the word. It's huge and beautiful, the kind of house that 'rambles', a series of converted barns and farmhouses, almost a whole village, knocked together to accommodate the country residence of the Harbinson family; all the luxury of a stately home, without any of the politically inconvenient aristocratic connotations. In the snow, it's like an animated Christmas card. There's even smoke coming out of the chimney, and it's all very rural and nineteenth century, except for the sports car, Alice's 2CV, and a tarpaulin-covered swimming-pool where the cowshed used to be. In fact any notion of practical, agricultural labour has long since been swept away, and even the dogs seem middle class; two Labradors who come bounding up as if to say 'so pleased to meet you, tell us all about yourself. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they have Grade Four Piano.

'Meet Mingus and Coltrane!' says Alice.

'Hello Mingus and Coltrane.' There's a slight lapse in dog etiquette when they start snuffling at the cold meats in my suitcase as we cross the farmyard. I hoist the bag up into my arms.

'What d'you think?'

'It's lovely. Bigger than I expected.'

'Mum and Dad bought it for about five guineas or something, back in the sixties. Come in and meet Rose,' and it takes me a second to realise Rose is her mum.

There's that old chauvinistic cliche about women turning into their mothers when you marry them, but in the case of Alice's mother, I wouldn't mind. Not that I'm going to marry Alice or anything, but Mrs Harbinson is beautiful. When we come into the kitchen, a vaulted barn of copper and oak, she's stood at the sink listening to The Archers, and for a second I think Julie Christie's scrubbing the carrots; she's small, with soft wrinkles round blue eyes, and a soft blonde perm. I inarch forward across the bare flagstones, arm extended like a tin soldier, determined to persevere with the handshake thing.

'So this is the Brian I've heard so much about,' she says, and smiles, and waggles the tip of my finger with her muddy hands, and smiles at me, and I have a momentary flashback to a teacher I had a crush on when I was nine years old.

'Very pleased to meet you, Mrs Harbinson.' I sound like a nine-year-old.

'Oh, please don't call me Mrs Harbinson, it makes me feel so old. Call me Rose.'

As she bends forward to kiss me on the cheek I have a reflex action to lick my lips, so the peck on her cheek is a bit too moist, and there's this exaggerated smacking noise that seems to bounce off the flagstones. I can actually see my saliva glistening just below her eye. She discreetly wipes it away with the back of her hand before it can evaporate, and pretends to be adjusting her perm. Then Mr Harbinson looms between us, and kisses the other cheek, the dry one, proprietorially.

'And what shall I call you, Mr Harbinson?' I ask, cheerily.

'Call me Mr Harbinson.'

'Michael! Don't be mean,' says Rose.

'...or Sir. You can call me Sir . . .'

'Just ignore him,' says Alice.

'I bought you some wine,' I say, tugging the bottle out of my bag and handing it to him. Mr Harbinson looks at it as if I've just handed him a carafe of my own piss.

'Oh, thank you so much, Brian! You can come again!' says Rose. Mr Harbinson doesn't look so sure.

'Come on, I'll show you your room,' says Alice, taking me by the arm, and I follow her up the stairs, leaving Mr and Mrs Harbinson whispering behind me.

In the maisonette on Archer Road there's a point about halfway up the stairs where, if you crane your neck ever so slightly, you can actually see into every room in the house.

Blackbird Cottage is not like this at all. It's massive. My room, Alice's old room, is at the very top of the house, under ancient oak beams, in the East Wing or something. One wall is taken up completely with enlarged childhood photos of Alice; in a flowery pinafore-dress baking scones; picking blackberries in a pair of dungarees; playing Olivia in a school production of Twelfth Night, and, I guess, The Good Woman ofSchezuan with a drawn-on moustache, and dressed in a black bin-liner as a rather unconvincing 'punk-rocker' for a fancy-dress party, V's flicked demurely at the camera. There's a polaroid of her parents in their twenties, proud owners of one of the very first bean-bags, looking like members of Fleetwood Mac, in matching embroidered waistcoats and smoking what may or may not be cigarettes. Shelves of children's books indicate that Alice was obviously something pretty big in the Puffin Club; Tove Jansson, Ingrid Lindgren, Eric Kastner, Herge, Goscinny, Uderzo, Saint-Exupery - world literature for tots - and, somewhat incongruously, a broken-backed paperback edition of Lace. An A-level art montage of Madonnas from the Uffizi and a cut-out Snoopy comic-strip. Framed certificates proclaim that Alice Harbinson can swim 1,000 metres, play the oboe up to grade 6 and the piano up to grade 8, simultaneously for all I know. My bedroom is The National Museum of Alice Harbinson. I don't know how she expects me to get any sleep.

'D'you think you'll be alright here?' she says.

'Oh, I think I can manage.' She watches me scanning over the photographs, with no pretence of embarrassment or false modesty. Here is a record of my life - good, isn't it? At four, she was all you could wish for in a four-year-old, at fourteen she was just fine, thank you very much.

'No use looking for my diary, I've hidden it. And if you get cold, which you will do, there's a blanket in the wardrobe. Here, let me help you unpack. So what d'you want to do tonight?'

'Oh, I don't know, just hang out. Sonic Like It Hot's on telly.'

'Sorry, no telly here.'

'Really?'

'Dad doesn't approve of TV.'

'But he's a TV producer!'