ordinary hard-working decent folk into a purple fever were to them no more than they deserved.
An example: a year previously, almost to the day, at the end of a drunken evening at his place, Tom had told me that they had just paid off their mortgage with Lucy’s Christmas bonus. This was very Tom. Any truth you got from him about the important stuff – how much, how many, how often – only emerged when he was pissed.
‘Oh really, that must have been a good one.’
Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Please, Sweet Jesus, no more than fifty.
‘Yes, a little over seventy thousand. Seventy-three thou, actually.’
I felt my body trying to cut off the oxygen to my brain. That was five years at O’Hare’s in one little Christmassy bundle. And paying off the mortgage rather than slapping it down on an Aston I held to be unforgivable. This is what I mean about the nineties yuppie: so discreet, so understated, so fucking loaded.
Now I was in a lather about whether or not I could stretch to payment. The cortege of taxis were taking us to a new restaurant on Westbourne Grove that was certain to be laughably expensive. I had already developed an unseemly habit of being overprecise when the bill came. I did it partly out of a desire to live up to my Man on the Clapham Omnibus self-parody, but mainly because I am skint. Tom would sit there with the bill and a deck of gilded plastic in his hand, talking the waiter through the details:
‘So that’s fifty-five each on the gold card, the Amex and the Switch, and what about you, Frank?’
‘Fifteen thirty-two, I make it. I only had the main course and a drop of wine. You do take cheques, don’t you?’ Tom hadn’t used cheques for years, the instant hit of cash, plastic and the occasional banker’s draft or Eurodollar sufficing for his needs. The cheque to me, though, is the only way to pay. Put the number on the back and it won’t, can’t bounce, and the clearing lag accommodates nasty month-end shortfalls and overshoots. Also if you scrunch it up sufficiently you can buy yourself an extra few days of grace, as the banks are no longer geared up for the front jeans pocket approach to chequebook storage. The fuckers will get to me and my sort eventually, but in the meantime I praise the cheque and its inky, dog-eared, slow-moving ways. I quickly recced my pockets as I got into the taxi and was dismayed to discover that I had left my chequebook at home. I had about eighteen sheets in cash, enough for a minicab back to Clapham and a pack of Luckies tomorrow morning. Even if I had my chequebook it would have been a short-term solution, though. Never mind what I’m going to do about the fact that I haven’t got enough money, what am I going to do about the fact that I haven’t got enough money? I was jemmied into the taxi with four hyenas from Lucy’s office, or desk or floor or whatever she called it, and kept schtum. I knew how I was glossed to her glossy mates:
‘Really amusing bloke. Great laugh. Total pisshead,’ etc. Thanks, Lucy. I should have brought a plastic ball to balance on my nose. To counter the impression they had of me as court jester, I had a Hard Bitten Surly Real Guy persona in play, so that they wouldn’t talk to me. It was working a treat. I was being so scary they didn’t ask me for any cab money as we pulled up outside the restaurant. Relieved, I determined to lighten up, for old acquaintance’s sake, and put my snout firmly and deeply into the booze trough.
That it should have come to this. Tom and I met at university. He was in my history set and had the room next to mine on our corridor. For most of my first term all I remember is thinking that he was from a different planet, like most other people in the university. Planet Popular. Planet Confidence. Planet Born-to-it. As I mouldered in my room with macadamised lungs and cold feet, he held a constant, roaring party next door. Occasionally on my way down the corridor to the college bar to play pool with assorted geographers and college catering staff, I would have to ease my way past the gorgeous attendees at the rolling Mardi Gras. The boys were all six-footers, some Aberdeen Angus, some whippoorwill, in £150 loafers and cashmere cardigans. They emanated health and wealth, their eyes with that good-diet glitter. They were always irresistibly polite to me, and Tom made frequent attempts to get me to join the carnival. I always refused out of the side of my mouth and, without looking him in the eye, would scratch my nose, before scuttling off for another gallon of Belgian lager and a session on the trivia machine with Marje the buttery girl.
It wasn’t the boys that put me off, but the girls. Limby, slender, always shaking their glossy hair about and walking with high knees and straight backs. They were quite simply fucking fabulous. In the mornings I would occasionally catch a glimpse of Tom and his current Oaks winner slipping into the shower and would yelp with envy. There was one in particular I remember, whom he told me he was trying to avoid. This was before we became friendly, but he asked me to feign total ignorance of his whereabouts if this girl were to ask me where he was. He gave me a physical description and thanked me heartily. I went off one morning to a tutorial, underprepared and overtired, the pillow creases still red on my cheek, and saw her writing a message on his door, tongue resting in the corner of her mouth. Seeing me flop out of my bunker she asked me the eternal question:
‘Have you seen Tom?’
What a fucking specimen she was. No, I mean really fantastic. I mumbled shiftily, trying not to gaze too intently at her high, amazing breasts.
‘No, sorry,’ and hurried off, terrified by loveliness.
The girls I knew, at home and now here, were at best sweetly pretty. How did the bastard get that kind of action? And this was one he was avoiding! What did he have that I didn’t?
Silly question really. I enumerated what he had and I didn’t, on the way to my tutor’s room: money, charm, the handsome gene, money, a gold-plated accent, money, confidence, money, money, money.
The other thing about Tom was that he seemed to do stuff all the time. Drinking six pints would put me to bed for a day with a crepuscular hangover. If I partied with Tom’s verve and consistency I would be dead. But he was up at dawn rowing, running, meeting friends for breakfast, driving down to his parents’ house and mostly, and most often, fornicating. His bed was approximately two inches from mine, with only a film of papery wall to divide us. I was subjected to a constant chorus of bedspring, flesh-slap, banshee-wail and monkey-grunt. It was like Stockhausen at full volume, all the hours God sent. What kind of drugs did he use? Didn’t he ever get chafed? I would lie there smoking hard as he conducted his boisterous sexual trampolining acts, trying not to listen. Sometimes, unavoidably, I would become aroused by all the noise, and nick a dingy onanistic biscuit from his erotic banqueting table. More often I would just lie there in jealous amazement.
We eventually became friendly in our second term, on account of his failure to pass his first set of exams. When the results were posted in our first week back, I looked down the list and expected his name to be picked out in gold leaf. Maybe the examiners would have augmented the initial T into an illuminated depiction of the Ascension into Heaven. In fact, he fucked them up with a vengeance. A straight fail. Oh yes! During term two his social and sexual bonanza abated considerably and he was around the corridor a lot more. He started knocking on my door in the afternoons and coming in for a chat and a biscuit (McVitie’s, not masturbatory), to take a break from revision. This ritual was entirely at his instigation, but I came to long for it to come round. New friendships have the effect upon me that new love affairs have on others. I would quite happily have spent whole days talking with him. Rather like Henry does now, he would come and sit on my bed and make me tea, and retrieve my fags from the far side of the room and fix me a bowl of Shreddies. He made out, rather unconvincingly, that he had always been as in awe of me as I had been of him. He also had a tendency to understate how privileged he was. But that was OK, because I would do the same thing, talking up the generic Northern accent, talking down the fee-paying education and the ‘ontreprenerr’ dad.
For the first time in my life, I even started to develop
