Wake Up Happy Every Day
Read Wake Up Happy Every Day Online
Authors: Stephen May
For Charles Ockelford
and in memory of
Edward May
27 May 1935 – 8 May 1998
A few honest men are better than numbers
Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping
Bo Derek
Contents
NICKY
Fifty is not the new forty. No. Fifty is the new nineteen. A time when the world is full of limitless possibility. That’s what Russell says.
I am in San Francisco. In Russian Hill. In a house that once belonged to Fanny Osborn-Stevenson, widow of Robert Louis. I am drinking 1963 vintage malt and sitting in a fine leather armchair. There is the smoky crackle of vintage blues in the background. On vinyl. Bessie Smith. Good booze, good blues and nothing to do tomorrow. This is actually all anyone needs to be happy. Only I can’t concentrate because Russell is still talking in his horrible mid-Atlantic drawl. The voice I’ll never get used to.
Some people would say it was better than the mockney whine he used to have. Not me.
‘I’m giving it all up, Nicky-boy. Getting out while I can.’
Russell is turning his back on everything. Not the money, obviously. Just the work. Just the life. Just the people. He’s fifty tomorrow and he’s worked long enough – now is the time for adventure, travel. He’s going to see everything. He’s going to Marrakesh, Ulan Bator, Spitzbergen. He’s going to Easter Island, Dahomey, Kaliningrad. The Antarctic. He’s going to Everywhere. And then he’s going to Anywhere.
And he’s not just going to see these places, oh no – he’s going to develop relationships with them. He’s going to get under their skin. He’s going to pull them apart to see how they work. Maybe he’ll write about them. Proper books too. Not just bloody blogs.
And then he’s going where they don’t even have Starbucks. Where he can’t be emailed or poked or skyped or dream-tabbed or sat-phoned. Places where the long needy arms of Facebook friends can’t tap him on the shoulder to suggest he like something they’ve done, made, seen. Or, worse, like things their kids have done, made, seen. He’s going where he’s beyond the reach of what’s trending.
I wonder if there even are such places any more, but Russell’s too intoxicated by his plan to listen.
Maybe he’ll help set up schools, hospitals. Maybe he’ll adopt a few kids. Bright kids. Kids who can talk. Kids who can walk properly. I let it go, don’t say anything.
Maybe he’ll build his own city. The perfect city. A place where you’ll find everything you need. I believe him. He always liked to do elaborate things in Lego when we were kids.
On and on he goes, while Bessie struggles to make herself heard. He says that, then again, maybe he won’t help the street kids of South Sudan or wherever. Maybe he won’t create Knoxville. Maybe he’ll – at last – just have fun. See what happens. He’s going to be open to whatever comes along. He’s going to have the gap year he denied himself all those years ago. The gratification he deferred then he’s going to have now with compound interest. From now on he is going to have a gap life.
His eyes are blazing bright in his lean and sculpted face. This is his renaissance. He is leaving behind the crocodile swamps of commerce. He’s terminated all his relationships with anyone connected with his old life.
‘Except you and Sarah, Nicky-boy. I hope you feel flattered.’
I take a sip. Bessie has got the Empty Bed Blues. I take another sip.
Russell’s liquidated all his interests and he names the figure he’s got for them. The numbers make my skin itch.
It’s a staggering sum.
Turns out Russell is richer than the Queen, richer than Madonna. Vatican rich. Biblically rich. Richer.
What a waste.
I close my eyes. Listen to the music reaching its fingers out from all the ghosts of the great depression: from the soup kitchens, from all the brothers sparing dimes. And, hey, listen up fellas, Bessie Smith wants a little more sugar in her bowl. The minx.
And then Russell feels the need to tell me why he can afford to do this gap-life thing and I can’t. And so the very last words he says to me, like so many other words over the years, are about success, failure and the line between them.
People say it’s a fine line, like the one between love and hate. Russell, bless him, has never seen it like this. For Russell it’s always been more of an unnavigable ocean. His continent of hard-won achievement on one side – all fifteen million dollar houses once owned by the widows of famous wordsmiths – and the scrubby, barely inhabitable landscape of my failure on the other. It’s a subject he finds endlessly fascinating. One he can return to again and again, always finding something new to say.
And now, on this last night, he says, ‘Thing is, Nicky-boy, I know that it is partly genetic. And it might be a little bit environment but mainly – mainly’ – here he wags a stiff finger for emphasis – ‘it simply has to be character. I have it. Sarah has it. You don’t.’
He says that, or something very like it, and then he goes to one of the six luxury bathrooms recently restored by Joe Farrell, architect to the stars.
Russell’s view is that he’s done better because he
is
better. I’ve done crap because I
am
crap. And, truthfully, I don’t mind this talk. Not really. I can’t be arsed to even pretend to mind. I’m used to it. It’s an old, old routine, easily bearable. It’s not like I even really listen any more. Sarah gets annoyed about it, but I don’t. And Sarah, my beautiful, loyal, kind-hearted life partner, is upstairs, lying next to Scarlett, my funny-faced newish daughter. Where is Russell’s loyal, kind-hearted life partner? Where is Russell’s funny-faced newish daughter?
Where is the love?
Exactomundo, my friend. It is nowhere.
I stand looking out into the diamond-studded purple of the San Francisco night until Bessie Smith finishes asking all mankind to do our duty – she’s insatiable that girl – and it’s the sudden silence that coaxes me out of my fugue state. Where is Russell anyway? Unlike him to nod out. That’s one of the things about Russell: he’s always awake – thinking, planning, scheming, making calculations on wee slips of paper long after everyone else has finally slid into unconsciousness. Always closing in on something.
Most likely he’s taking a sudden conference call with Brazzaville or São Paulo. Because I don’t actually buy the giving-up thing. Even if it’s for real, it’s still going to be a fad, a fling. Russell can’t give up whatever it is he actually does. It’s who he is. Russell is addicted to getting people to dance for him. Always has been ever since he was buying mint imperials on the way to school at 10p a bag, and selling them individually in lessons at 1p each. He must have been eight when he started doing that.
And now I need to pay a visit too. I know every bedroom – sorry, every
guest suite –
in this place comes with its own wet room but I don’t want to risk stumbling into Russell’s lair. If he really has crashed then let him stay that way. I don’t need a resumption of the never-ending lecture on my own inadequacies. And if he’s awake, I don’t want to interrupt the soft murmuring of insane strings of numbers into the ears of some minion on the other side of the world. The issuing of orders that might mean the end of a rain forest, the slow death of a language. And I don’t want to find our room. I don’t really want to wake Sarah, she’s a girl who needs her sleep. And I don’t want to wake Scarlett either, because she’s a girl who doesn’t need her sleep. She’ll want the telly on and there’ll be a scene.
She’s got stamina our daughter. When she wants something she doesn’t give up until she gets it, so we mostly cut out the middleman and give her what she wants straight away. Just saves a whole lot of time. And, yes, I know: a rod for our own backs. Possibly. But we’ll cross that bridge etc. Consistency – I think that’s what kids need. And we’re consistently pushovers, so everyone knows where they stand, don’t they?
I creep into the cloakroom off the cavernous, parqueted, tackily chandeliered hallway. Go into the little slice of England with the vintage Giles cartoons on the wall and the copies of
Private Eye
stacked up. And that’s where I find him, kneeling on the floor in a parody of prayer, and already cold to the bone and rigid.