The Paperchase (6 page)

I remember the whole thing with an awful clarity. In two separate three-hour exams I watched my dad’s head bowed over his desk and listened to his expensive fountain pen scratching away on the paper. In the final exam, he called the invigilator over to complain about an apparent misprint in the unseen translation, and the papers were taken away from us, and we had to wait forty-five minutes while it was established over the telephone that a misprint had indeed occurred and the erratum in question was chalked up on the blackboard.

The thing that etched it forever on my memory as a terrible
moment was the reaction of my fellow students, who treated me with a tender, kindly pity that hurt much more than any name I had been called in the preceding years.

Dad got an A in the exam and came second overall in the entire country. The boy who beat him was a nine-year-old prodigy from Scotland. I got an E.

The results were posted to us in America during the summer. Dad shot the cork from a magnum of champagne across the garden on the evening he heard the news. He commiserated with me, but to my eyes the arc of the cork seemed to inscribe the word ‘parricide’ in the night air. Or would have, had I learned enough Latin to know what it meant.

I did better in my other subjects, and tried to draw some comfort from the fact that the letter from the examination board which Mr Sandford forwarded to my dad, and which he exhibited casually on the dining table without seeming to draw attention to it, began: ‘This remarkable young man …’; as though he were an inky-fingered schoolboy, instead of a middle-aged widower, with most of his life behind him.

‘Dad’s such a fucking horse’s arse’ was Vivian’s reaction.

I toyed briefly with the idea of withdrawing from the economy of success and failure altogether, growing dreadlocks and going to live in a caravan. But instead, I changed schools, opting out of the private system and going to the local sixth-form college, where I discovered I wasn’t as stupid as I’d thought. I went to university in Swansea, eventually, to do Soviet and East European Studies, which might have been some kind of Oedipal attack on my American heritage. I saw less and less of my father, who eventually gave up on London and moved to Italy, where he wrote law textbooks and was finally accepted as a bona fide Englishman. I spent two years after Swansea working in America, and came home to a job at the BBC, which seemed like the answer to all my prayers at the time, but over a number of years, it grew to remind me of my family, in the way that it seemed to be full of bright people competing for too little love and attention.

THERE IS A ROCK
with a ledge worn into it at the end of the jetty that marks the boundary of the beach nearest to my uncle’s house. When the sea is high, or rough, it’s too dangerous to approach – a single wave could knock you senseless. But on a windless day, with the ocean as flat as the icing on a sponge cake, it is a perfect place to dive from. When my family was still on speaking terms with one another, we used to play here, in the summers when we visited Ionia.

The game we played was this: each of us had to jump off the rock and turn to catch a soccer ball before we crashed into the water. There were many variations: you could work in a spin or a somersault, or do it with two jumpers who had to pass the ball between them and then back to the thrower. It was the best game we had, and it was – not coincidentally – the
only family game we played that lacked any sense of competition. We called it Bolder than Mandingo, because that was what you had to shout before you hit the water.

It was Patrick’s idea to say it, and because of his Boston accent, and the obscurity of the phrase, and perhaps because of Patrick’s obsession with hair loss (this was before the wig), Vivian and I thought we were saying ‘Balder than Mandingo’ as we leaped off the rock. But
Mandingo
was the title of a sixties novel about an interracial love affair, and ‘bolder than
Mandingo
’
a plaudit invented by some reviewer for another book.

Bolder than Mandingo became family shorthand for a leap into the unknown so I decided to write it on the invitations for the party I had before I left London for Ionia. Most of the guests thought it was a reference to a forgotten spaghetti Western, and my friend Stevo turned up in a bootlace tie.

My four-week notice period at the BBC had concluded the same day. It somehow reminded me of my last day at prep school, when I hung my tie on a lamppost on the way home in a moment of uncharacteristic spontaneity. Afterwards I dreamed about my dead mother telling me off and was racked by guilt and went back to retrieve it, the nylon stripes damp with rain. I probably still have the tie somewhere.

I was surprised how quickly the decision to leave my job had overtaken me. For a while, it had looked as though I was going to take a sabbatical, and leave a door open back into my old life at the BBC. But then I decided that after six months in Ionia, I would rather come back to London and start afresh than go back to a job I had grown to hate.

The possibility of change changed everything. The thought that I had no alternative was all that had kept me in my old life, and now that things could be different, they couldn’t stay the same. I couldn’t become a tribesman on Irian Jaya, or a Tatar horseman. But I could live as Patrick had lived. His will offered me that possibility. And his life seemed sufficiently different from mine to be the change I craved. By now, I felt too
close to the idea of being free to contemplate anything else. It was that moment suspended between the rock and the ocean when you bunch your knees up and anticipate the cold shock of the water. It was too late to get back on the rock now. Bolder than Mandingo.

The rather complicated provisions of the inheritance had been simplified by the rumour network in the office. I had come into a fortune, the gossip went, so I was jetting off to start spending it. On my last day, one of the producers, a man called Derek Braddock, came up to me with a mock-quizzical expression on his face as I was clearing out my desk.

‘Damien,’ he said. ‘Got a message for you, mate. Couldn’t quite understand it.’ He passed me one of the flimsy pieces of paper that we used for telephone messages. ‘Bloke called Riley. Says he wants his life back.’

I looked at him for a moment. ‘Life of Riley. Very good, Derek. You’re wasted here.’

Derek chuckled like a moron. He had a pale and mumpy face – like a photograph of a Great War soldier. I thought: There’s nothing more coercive than a bad joke.

Wendy had come up alongside him, with her hands behind her back. The dozen or so people in the office crowded around her while she made a short speech about what a pleasure it had been working with me and that I would always be welcomed back if the life of the idle rich ever got too much for me. It seemed churlish to contradict her, so I smiled and made a speech of my own about how much I’d enjoyed working there and how I’d be glad to see any of them on Ionia, if they didn’t mind sleeping on the beach; just joking, they’d always be welcome.

One of the production assistants had gone out to buy sparkling wine in the lunch break and this was produced, along with a present and a card, amid much teasing about licence-payers’ money and Producer Choice. The present was a book, a thoughtfully chosen anthology of writing about castaways which I made everyone sign. I felt a surge of affection
for all of them, even Derek Braddock, whom I’d always found a pain. I thought to myself that even if work had replicated all the faults of my family, at least it had replicated some of its virtues too: the humour, the intelligence, the companionship. For the first time, I felt a sense of loss. For good or bad, the life I had made in London was something of my own, and I was leaving it behind. I was exchanging something real for something unreal. It suddenly seemed like a dangerous swap.

We went to the pub at five o’clock, a big, shabby crowd of us, looking conspicuously pale and also more awkward together outside the office. Derek Braddock bought an enormous round of drinks and clapped me on the back.

‘You’re a mystery man,’ he said. ‘Ten years I’ve known you and this is the first time we’ve had a drink together.’

‘That’s not true,’ I told him. ‘We had a drink after the US elections.’ Secretly, I was rather flattered that Derek had spared my private life any thought at all.

‘One drink in ten years! Oi, Wendy – he’s a mystery man, isn’t he?’

‘I’m sure it was more than one drink,’ I said.

‘Damien is very … self-contained.’ Wendy laughed. She looked much prettier outside work; her eyes were bright from drinking.

‘You’re making me self-conscious,’ I said. ‘Can’t you wait until I’ve left to have this conversation?’

Derek paused before his pint of lager reached his lips. ‘I’ve always wondered about your secret life,’ he said.

‘Secret life? I don’t have one, Derek. I don’t have a life. I go home to an empty flat.’

‘What about that girlfriend of yours?’

I shook my head. ‘Didn’t work out.’

‘Pity. She was a looker.’ Derek took a sip of his drink and stared down at the floor, jingling the coins in his pocket with his spare hand. ‘Well, then.’

I had never been able to dislike Derek properly since I had taken his notebook home one day instead of mine and found a
brochure for a holiday home in Spain taped inside the front cover as though it was a talisman of another, better life. ‘Wend your way along the road from Puerto Pollença, while the lights of the porch glimmer in the gloaming.’
Glimmer
in
the
gloam
ing
:
you knew that the copywriter who came up with that thought he was Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I gave the book back to him the next day without mentioning it, but I still felt he had shared a confidence with me, and I experienced a pang of guilt whenever I found myself thinking that he was an arsehole. I said, ‘I’ll miss you, Derek,’ as a kind of penitence. Then he winked back at me as he swallowed his drink and squeezed my arm, and I felt marginally worse. I had an overpowering sense of all the small disappointments that wear you away over the years. I thought of work as a rhythm that marched Derek out of the house in the morning and back into his bed at night. And I remembered how quickly the employees in our department – men, particularly – died after retirement. Because that rhythm had gone, and it was too late for them to find another. Derek was about fifty-five; if he retired now, he would probably have two, three years at most, in which to wend his way back from Puerto Pollença in the gloaming. That was as much of the good life as his body would be able to take.

‘Best of luck,’ said Derek. ‘It was nice knowing you – almost.’

I had to leave early because I had people arriving at nine. I felt miserable slipping away from my colleagues for the last time. Outside the pub it was raining, and I waited under its awning for a couple of minutes. I suppose the alcohol generated a false bonhomie, but looking back at them, flushed and laughing inside the pub, I felt strangely cut off from them. Derek was right; in the time I’d worked there, I hadn’t got close to any of them. I think I just wasn’t that good at making friends.

I had rented my flat through an agency on a six-month lease to a stockbroker called Platon Bakatin who strode around the
place in his Gucci loafers, chatting in Russian on his mobile phone. He liked it, he said, but wanted me to redecorate and was sniffy about the furniture. I guessed that he wanted something more impressive than my worn-out sofa-bed and kilims. I thought of putting my stuff into storage, but it hardly seemed worth it, so I let a furniture dealer come round and take it all away for about seventy pounds. When he named his price I was initially reluctant. I remembered that Laura and I had bought one of the kilims on holiday in Turkey and I didn’t want to part with it. Then I thought, Fuck it; and helped carry the furniture out to the van.

Repainted, the empty flat seemed like a stranger’s when I got home to it. It was Platon’s home now, I thought. His new sofa stood in the living room, still wrapped in plastic. There was an unfamiliar echo to my footsteps as I walked around the flat. All that was left of me were my clothes, a few crates of books, lamps, an old computer, my records, and me. And soon, all that would be gone. I felt like I was erasing my presence in the world.

It was odd how many people I ended up inviting to the party. The list of guests was a long one. There’s a big discrepancy between the number of people you feel obliged to invite to a party, and the number of people you feel able to confide in when the sky falls on your head. At least there is in my case. Perhaps other people have a more healthy ratio between the two. I had invited a big crowd of craps who might or might not turn up. And I had invited my friends. More precisely, I had invited Stevo and Lloyd.

Stevo came early, full of effusiveness, and with half a bottle of vodka tucked into the pocket of his long smelly coat. He sat himself down on the crackling plastic sofa cover and started rolling a joint. He was crumbling bits of hash on to the tobacco when Lloyd arrived, straight from work, looking rumpled and tired, and collapsed on the seat next to him. ‘Heather sends her apologies,’ said Lloyd.

‘What happened? Her broomstick break down again?’ Stevo
spoke out of the corner of his mouth. He had his lips clamped around the joint while he frisked his pockets for the lighter that lay on the floor in front of him. ‘By the way, Damien, mate, where are the honeys?’

‘Did you say “honeys”?’ Lloyd asked him, in a voice that managed to be both weary and incredulous.

‘I most definitely did. Damien, where are they? You promised me pretty girls.’

I opened a bottle of sparkling wine. I had bought thirty-five, so there were just over ten for each of us. The evening had begun to take on the atmosphere of a doomed stag party. ‘Get your laughing gear round that,’ I said halfheartedly, handing them each a glass.

Stevo was not to be distracted from his theme. ‘Seriously, Damien. Where are they?’

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Stevo? Crisp, anyone?’

Lloyd took a bite of a crisp and said in a thoughtful and deliberate voice: ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that you actually hate women.’

‘Who, me?’ I said.

‘You probably do as well, but I was talking about Stevo.’

‘Only the ones that won’t shag me,’ said Stevo, and he took an enormous inhalation of his joint. He let it out in little gasps and then offered Lloyd a puff.

Lloyd took the spliff but didn’t put it to his lips. Instead, he passed it on to me. ‘Here you go. Take some of Stevo’s cold sores to your home in the New World.’

I turned up the music to drown out the two of them bickering and make it seem like there were more of us. I told myself that after two or three drinks, things wouldn’t look so bad.

Lloyd lit a cigarette. ‘What are you actually going to do when you get out there?’

I could tell Lloyd was doubtful about the wisdom of going. As we had all got older, caution had overwhelmed all his other characteristics. It was surprising if you had known him as long as
I had that this had emerged as his dominant trait, like the most unlikely candidate in a thriller turning out to be the murderer. But then two years ago, who would have thought Stevo would become this raddled parody of a skirt-chasing hedonist?

‘I don’t know really. Read, paint …’

‘I didn’t know you could …’

‘Paint? Not particularly well. That’s not the point. It’s just a chance for a change. Things are going nowhere for me here.’

‘I thought you enjoyed your job.’

‘I don’t know what gave you that idea.’

‘Damien, is it okay if I use the phone?’ said Stevo.

‘Of course,’ I said.

Lloyd sprawled back on the sofa and let out a defeated sigh. He seemed to use his work as a narcotic. It drugged him with exhaustion. He always looked tired, like a prisoner who had been kept short of sleep and food to render him submissive. It was as though Lloyd was afraid that if it were contented and well rested, his body might make plans to escape from him.

‘Heather mentioned some kind of annuity,’ said Lloyd.

‘That’s right. It’s not much. It’s tied to the upkeep of the house.’

‘Do you know what kind of trust it’s held in?’

‘No, I don’t really. That’s one of the reasons for going over: I’ll be able to find if there’s any way I can rearrange the provisions of the will.’

‘Yeah, you ought to look into that.’

‘Do you hear anything from Laura?’ I asked.

‘Heather talks to her now and again. I gather she’s doing well.’

There was a knock on the door which turned out to be Tina from downstairs. She had lived there for over a year, but I had avoided getting to know her on the very English principle that it’s better to have cool but cordial relations with your neighbours than try to make friends and discover you actually hate each other. Since I was going away, I decided it was safe to
invite her to my party, but I hadn’t really expected her to come. She was in her thirties and did something involving the Kurds which she had explained to me once when I was out trimming the hedge, but I’d forgotten.