it was effeminate, and I moved into their box room two weeks later.
Thinking about it, Henry would have made someone a beautiful wife. In fact, he made Lottie a beautiful wife already, and both of them made beautiful parents for me. He worked from home, dreaming up code for a computer games company, and she did her wool-oriented charity work at the kitchen table. I thought of their life together with unenvious wonder. Him doing his fabulous intricate brainwork, her making things and both of them just quietly hanging out together all day. I’d get home and they’d be lolling on the sofa reading, maybe smoking one, the fridge filled with high class junk food: tzatziki, chicken tikka thighs, fruit fools, parma ham, halva, blueberries, red pesto.
Today Lottie was elsewhere, so Henry and I went shopping together, and he mercifully insisted on protecting me from more detail on the previous night. I was on trolley duty as he mooned around harvesting good things from the fruit and vegetable section.
‘Henry, you’re pretty hot on probability, aren’t you?’
‘Well, I’m not bad. What’s the question?’
‘How many women do I have to meet before I’ve got a robust statistical chance that the next one is the right one?’
‘Augment and clarify.’ He was gazing at the star fruit he was holding in the tips of his fingers.
‘Well, my current thinking is to treat the process like a series of coin tosses. By this reckoning, about one in every two women I meet should turn out roughly OK, and our relationship should go somewhere. I don’t mean all the way to the altar, but maybe all the way to a trip to the pictures or something.’
‘Frank, I think the system you’re using is a little flawed. And this is Stanger the Man talking rather than Stanger the Statistician. A coin is a very tightly controlled system, there are only two possible outcomes per toss. People are more …’ he was now reading the label on some purple spinach ‘… difficult. If I were you, I’d base my paranoia on something different. Like a weather system or the football results or something. You know, introduce more factors. Purple spinach. What a gimmick. Let’s try it anyway.’
‘OK, let me put it this way. I’ve thrown the woman coin to one degree or another something like thirty-two times, always wanting, let’s say, heads. But each time so far it’s come up tails. It must get more likely that, the next time I toss, I get a head.’
Henry stopped and shook his head sagely. ‘Not much comfort there, Frank. Each toss is a separate event within the system. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve come up tails, it’s just as likely to come up tails the next time. It’s plain unreasonable to be more expectant of a head just because you’ve just thrown a tail. I think there’s a play about this. These two characters keep tossing a coin and keep throwing heads. When they finally throw a tail, they both die.’
‘Oh, good.’
I watched Henry as he trawled the deli counter for some new exotica to sample.
‘Explain this then. England have played 365 test matches. They’ve won the toss 183 times and lost it 182 times. As equal as it could be. I’m not sure how, but I’m sure that refutes your argument.’
‘Maybe, but it doesn’t prove yours. They’re on tour at the moment, aren’t they?’
‘New Zealand.’
‘Well, then, if they win the toss at the next test match, I would say that you’re certain to enter a satisfying relationship by the time they lose.’
‘You’re being facetious.’
‘Do you like carciofini?’
‘His early work was all right. When are you going to tell me what really happened last night?’
‘Mmm. I think they put a bit too much vinegar in. Let’s lob it in anyway. When are we going to tell you? Lucy and I agreed that we’d wait a while. Tragedy plus time equals comedy. We want you to be able to laugh about it.’
‘God. Why, fuck, why, fuck, why? Why do I do it to myself?’
‘And indeed to others. Don’t get too worked up. It’s not as bad as your worst imaginings.’
‘Did she tell you about that girl they tried to fix me up with?’
‘Oh, yeah, she got off with a waiter or something. After you tried to get off with her by the fag machine.’
I leant on the trolley and let the heat and noise of my hangover fill the silence. The lump on my forehead was emitting a strong low hum of pain. Henry was now deep in thought at the bread section.
‘I think I’ll withdraw from social life, Henry. It’s just not worth it any more.’
‘I thought you already had.’
‘Cheers.’
‘Just drink a little less.’
‘I drink because I get nervous. I just want these fuckers to take me a bit more seriously.’
Henry turned to me with a stern and lucid look on his stem and lucid face. OK, Dad, lay it on me.
‘I’ll tell you what you can do if you want to be taken seriously. Why don’t you go to Lucy’s pregnancy party, get appallingly drunk, molest two married women, start a fight with a merchant banker, burst into tears, claim to the assembled party that you are a great poet of the human soul, vomit in the sink, collapse in a toilet cubicle and tell your best friend that he’s a squandered talent as he helps you into a taxi. I’m sure that would give you an air of gravitas.’
‘Oh, Henry. Tell me you’re joking.’
‘Nope.’
‘Is that everything?’
‘Nearly everything. But as I say, you’re not ready for the whole truth yet. Anyway, you’re broadly forgiven. Stop dwelling on it. In fact that’s good advice for you all round: stop dwelling on it, start doing something about it.’
The ‘great poet of the human soul’ was the real killer. I wasn’t fond of the tears either. Or any of it to be honest. The egg-sized contusion over my eye began to wail its reproach. I believed that there was, in fact, very little comedy to be salvaged from this incident. From my humble state the evening now looked like a symbol of Tom and Lucy’s increasing weight and stature as human beings. There they were, married, successful, generous, willingly taking on the responsibility of parenthood, spreading their benign and thoughtful influence back out into their society like proper adult people. Wankers – oh, stop it, Frank. But regardless of that, there I was, raging at being cast as some kind of low comedian, acting to type in the most egregious way possible. Subversive behaviour had at one time seemed funny, necessary even, in the face of my friends’ inexorable progress towards sensibleness. Now it just seemed like plain rudeness, and rudeness with its source in envy of people who for some reason valued me. Tom’s offer to put in a word for me with his dad about the job at Emporium made it all worse. I’ll call you a wanker, and I do, but I’ll still accept your patronage.
There was real annoyance as well, but it was not directed at my peer group any more, just at myself. I used to believe that Tom and Lucy’s approach to their lives was a kind of giving in, and that their pursuit of
