II
Jack got on with Judy. Sometimes I didn’t like how well they got on together. I was jealous in two directions. I didn’t want to be jealous at all. I wanted happiness and joy. I wanted enough money to pay back the building society all of their correspondence-producing costs before they went bankrupt. I wanted more money than that, really. I wanted enough money to buy an island, hollow it out, and live under an imitation volcano with a swivel chair and a cat and a stack of underlings in boiler suits. I had to keep things in perspective, however. On my wages I wouldn’t be able to buy an island for several hundred years, and that wasn’t allowing for island inflation.
I could always lower my sights and sponsor a traffic island. That can’t cost much. Companies do it, at least in the West Midlands. You’re in the traffic, beside the latest traffic island, and there next to the discarded shoe and the McWrapper is a sign saying:
This traffic island is sponsored by Keegan’s Home for the Bewildered.
That can’t cost much. The only time people see the things is when they’re stuck in traffic, wondering whether there’s a reason for the traffic jam and hoping it’s a juicy accident. So the name of the company becomes subconsciously linked with stress and waiting and death and no one uses the company ever again, and the managing director in his Portakabin somewhere outside Tipton waits by the dormant telephone until the receivers come and shut him down. Still, at least it’s something to look at while you wait for an accident you can get to before the emergency services arrive and hide all the body parts.
This could just be me.
I told Judy about my days at the office and she told me about her days at the travel centre. I had always known it was a bad queue to be in. Many strange people stood in it. Dandruff was rife, coughing was likely, gaudy skin diseases drew the attention and there was the smell of people who misunderstood the use of soap. There would be strange men in combat gear and huge women with foul tattoos and hairstyles copied from ’70s footballers. There would be someone in a faded Queen concert T-shirt. There would be a young woman with the sort of eyes you normally saw on a dead fish.
I thought the queue was bad and I only saw it from the back for one hour each month. Imagine, Judy said, seeing them face-on for eight hours a day, six days a week, shuffling towards you to ask you for tickets on the space shuttle. She’d spotted me months ago, among the living dead. I was always going to the other window, and she thought I fancied Lynn, her partner. I did fancy Lynn but I didn’t mention it. You can only push your luck so far before it falls to the floor and shatters. I asked what happened in the office at the back.
Maureen happened there. Maureen was a supervisor and was in an age range starting at sixty. There was no upper limit. She spent the day in the back office. She had a chair and a desk and a packet of Rich Tea biscuits. She had a calendar with pictures of pigs on it. She had a few framed photographs of children. Judy thought they were her grandchildren. Lynn thought they were her victims. No one thought they were pretty. Maureen had a kettle and a sink and she could check bank cards. She liked checking them. She enjoyed it more if they turned out to be invalid. She had twenty/twenty vision and all her own teeth. She had a medical complaint which was never specified but which meant that she was unable to take incoming calls. Lynn had to take them.
Lynn was a blonde midget, full of energy from the tips of her toes all the short way up to her uncontrollable frizzy hair. She fidgeted in her chair all day. I was careful not to call her perky while Judy was in earshot. Since I didn’t know how far Judy’s hearing range extended, I never called her perky at all. Not out loud. She was, though. She had a perky bosom. I had often tried not to notice it. Of course, I had once stared blatantly at it, so as to divert attention away from the amount of attention I had been paying to Judy. Lynn remembered me looking at her chest. She thought I was a pervert, but gradually mellowed. One night, Judy and Lynn came out with me and Jack. The idea was that Jack and Lynn would hit it off, so that we could go out as two couples instead of one couple and a straggler.
Jack refused to hit it off.
‘She’s a midget,’ he said. ‘What am I, Billy fucking Smart?’
‘Billy fucking Stupid,’ I told him. We were in the men’s toilet in the Curdled Milk, a Dudley theme pub. The theme seemed to be bad taste and watery beer, but I might have been missing something. Jack was missing something. He was missing the urinal, completely. I wasn’t looking at his dick – well, you don’t, do you? – but there was a glint of metal from its vicinity. Perhaps that accounted for the spray he was producing. I moved to stand some distance behind him but I still didn’t feel safe.
‘She’s not a midget,’ I said. ‘She’s compact.’
‘Compact? She needs to sit on a cushion to reach the table. That’s a fucking dwarf, chief. If I showed her this she’d run a mile.’
‘If you showed anyone that they’d run a mile.’
‘Shows how much you know. I showed it to your girlfriend and now I can’t get her off the phone. On all day and night she is. Out-fucking-rageous. Can’t get enough of it.’
‘I didn’t know she was into scrap metal.’
‘Ha ha. At least she isn’t a fucking midget.’
‘She might be. Film stars are all midgets. It’s well known.’
‘What about Robert De Niro?’
‘Midget. All done with camera angles. He can’t reach the top shelf in the newsagent.’
‘Robert De Niro doesn’t go to newsagents, he has people to do it for him. He’s seven feet tall in his socks. He’s a wiseguy.’
‘He’s an actor. And he only ever plays the same role, so it’s hardly difficult.’
‘Oh?’ Jack looked round, doing up his zip. ‘And what role’s that?’
‘He always plays Robert De Niro. Every film he’s in, he’s himself.’
Jack was affronted. He was a fan of Robert De Niro. I had been, but it was something I was trying to grow out of. You can’t be impressed with New York gangsters when you leave puberty. It has to go the way of Clark’s Commandos and Action Man.
‘You talking to me?’ asked Jack. ‘There’s nobody else here.’
‘Too true,’ I said, leaving him to it.
I
Eddie Finch met Judy at a party thrown by a friend of someone Jack knew. The party looked as though it had been thrown with some force, if not much accuracy. It was held in all of the open areas of a three-storey town house on the more expensive side of Stourbridge. There was a spiky record playing somewhere, and someone said that someone who’d once been one of Pop Will Eat Itself was being the DJ for the night. Judy talked to me but I couldn’t hear her. I could only hear the record. I was trying to identify it.
I do that with music. I can’t help it. Instead of listening to whoever I’m with, I try to work out what the song is. It isn’t deliberate. It’s my ears. They prioritize. Music over conversation. That may be something to do with the conversations I usually get caught in at parties.
Judy sidestepped a slug of red wine that fell to the carpet with a thud. She looked at me and said something. I laughed, hopefully appropriately. A thin white man with thick dreadlocks gave me a stare that might have cleared the student union bar. It didn’t work in Stourbridge, even on the more expensive side. I gave him a look of my own.
Judy tugged me between people who felt as though they were made of elbows and broomsticks, my can of Supa Brew Ice Special brimming over with high-alcohol, low-taste