Alex George - Before Your Very Eyes

Extract from ‘For Sidney Bechet’ from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Extract from ‘Doubt’. Writers: Smith, Gallup, Tolhurst © Fiction Songs Ltd Reproduced with permission.

For my mother and father,

Alison and Julian George,

with love and apologies for the language

On me your voice falls as they love should, like an enormous yes.

For Sidney Bechet

Philip Larkin

Cover Page

Title Page Before Your Very Eyes Alex George

Excerpt Extract from ‘For Sidney Bechet’ from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Extract from ‘Doubt’. Writers: Smith, Gallup, Tolhurst © Fiction Songs Ltd Reproduced with permission.

Dedication For my mother and father, Alison and Julian George, with love and apologies for the language

Epigraph On me your voice falls as they love should, like an enormous yes. For Sidney Bechet Philip Larkin

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

DISCOGRAPHY

About the Author

Also By Alex George

Copyright

About the Publisher

Simon Teller kissed the card.

It was a hesitant, surreptitious, don’t mind me kiss. A small, I’m not really doing this kiss. His lips barely puckered as they brushed against the white cardboard. It felt good. He read the card once more, and then kissed it again. As he did so, he made a ‘mwah’ noise. Then, feeling rather silly, he put it down on the kitchen table.

‘OK,’ he said out loud. ‘Good.’

He picked the card up again, and walked into the sitting room.

There he cursed silently. That was the problem with these converted flats. The builders had got rid of all the fireplaces. Without fireplaces you had no mantelpieces, and without mantelpieces – well. Where was one supposed to put invitations?

For that was what Simon Teller had been performing his solitary act of osculation upon. An invitation, yes, but the word failed to convey the full import of the rectangle of reinforced card that Simon held. This was no ordinary invitation. This invitation was the key to God knows what, the ticket to God knows where, the introduction to God knows who.

Simon went over to the record player and lifted the stylus on to the waiting vinyl. Sonny Rollins broke into an effervescent ‘St Thomas’, his joyful, bristling, honking saxophone reflecting Simon’s own mood. Simon propped the card up against the stereo and stepped back to admire it. There was no doubt about it: it looked good. All right, the handwriting was messy, and the green ink had smudged badly. But that didn’t matter. What mattered were the names scrawled along the top of the card.

Angus and Fergus.

Yes yes yes.

Angus and Fergus were Simon’s neighbours. They lived in the flat immediately above his. They had moved in about two years ago. Since then, Simon had only actually seen them a few times – chance encounters on the stairs, mostly – but he felt that he knew them intimately. For the other draw-back about the building in which Simon, Angus and Fergus all lived, lack of mantelpieces aside, was extremely thin ceilings.

As a result, Simon had witnessed, albeit indirectly, most of the important recent events in the lives of Angus and Fergus. He listened to their rows, and to their drunken reconciliations. But, most of all, he listened to them having sex. It wasn’t that Simon was a voyeur, or whatever the aural equivalent of that was, it was simply that he didn’t have any choice. Wherever he sat in his flat, the unmistakable sound of heavy-duty bonking would permeate through the ceiling, causing his light fittings to wobble alarmingly. Angus and Fergus enjoyed having sex, and consequently they did it a lot, with as many different girls as they could.

Simon grew to recognize the sounds of the various females who visited the upstairs flat. There seemed, at any given time, to be at least five or six who could be identified. Simon would sit in bed and, recognizing a particular trill or coo, settle back into his pillows, knowing that it was this one or that one who was being entertained that evening. He never got to see any of these women, of course. They would all leave early in the morning, while their performances were analysed in forensic detail by the two flat-mates over breakfast. Simon preferred not to listen to these post-coital discussions. The two men pored over techniques and replayed certain copulatory highlights with the relish of football pundits analysing a questionable penalty decision.

Angus and Fergus led torrid social lives. Most weekends were punctuated by the regular ringing of their doorbell. Simon sat in his flat listening to the parties swell and throb above him with a despairing heart. How he wanted to join in! How he wanted to float and glitter with the Beautiful People! He would listen to the festivities as long as he could, and then would retire to bed with an old pair of socks wrapped around his head as sound insulation.

Simon stared at the invitation again. This was it. His time had finally come. He wrote the date in his diary, and put a big red ring around it.

It was soon after this that the worries began. Simon was out of practice at parties, and hopeless at social small talk. He met people every day at the shop, of course, and could talk to them. But this was quite different. At the party he would meet sophisticated people with beauty and charisma. He would have to sparkle.

It had been a long time since Simon had sparkled.

Keen to make a good impression, Simon instigated emergency measures to hone his social skills. He spent two evenings watching Wim Wenders videos, hoping that these would see him through any sticky conversational moments. He spent hours smiling at himself in the bathroom mirror, tilting his head this way and that as he listened to imaginary chit-chat.

‘Really?’ he murmured in his best Sean Connery, as the extractor fan whirred noisily above him. ‘How fascinating.’ He flashed his eyes dangerously. ‘Tell me more .’

As the appointed day approached, Simon began cramming information as if he were taking an exam. The problem was that he was preparing himself for the unknown. He had witnessed countless parties through the vibrating medium of his ceiling, but it had been impossible to distinguish specific conversations. All he was sure of was that the conversation must be awfully sophisticated. In the absence of any specific intelligence, he employed the cultural scatter-gun approach, and was ready to discuss – albeit at rather superficial levels – everything from football to Fellini.

On the evening of the party, Simon waited for several people to arrive before venturing up himself. As he climbed the stairs, he could feel his brain bulging with useless information. He clutched an excessively expensive bottle of Montrachet, hoping that it would impress his hosts.

Taking a deep breath, Simon knocked.

The door opened. In front of Simon stood a huge man in jeans and a striped shirt. Angus or Fergus. Simon could not remember which. Suddenly he realized that he had never actually known which of Angus or Fergus was which. The man looked at him enquiringly.