Jonathan Lee - High Dive

‘Is repetition,’ he said, and waited. If she was alive to this one cheap joke, maybe their relationship could be saved after all. But no, her eyes were cold, and he saw that the chilly sophistication of her sense of humour was one of nine or ten things that had doomed him from day one.

Bob had a place in Midtown Manhattan. Bob had three daughters. One was at Oxford. He’d beaten cancer, had Bob. Bob was a fighter. Bob owned an early Joan Miró sketch. Money if he sold it. Bully for Bob!

‘You don’t even like New York!’ he said.

‘Bob does. He likes New York.’

‘Bob sounds like a cunt.’

‘It’s too late,’ she said, ‘for you to develop some spine.’ Comebacks were always something she was good at.

He thought, I love you, don’t leave me, I love you. Who was she to take his daughter away?

‘You can visit, Moose.’

‘With what money?’

‘With all the money you keep saying you’ll soon be earning.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘You haven’t, not for a long time.’

‘Bob has,’ he said.

She looked at the carpet. ‘Yes.’

‘Ask her who she wants to live with,’ he said, and felt detached from the new chill in his voice. ‘Just ask her.’

Viv looked at him with a flicker of something fresh in her eyes. He saw with disgust that he’d impressed her.

This conversation would come back to him over the years, slightly different each time. It was like one of those crazy tonsillitis dreams he’d had as a child, clutching a cool damp flannel to his face, his mother’s diamond-shaped ice cubes shrinking in a bowl by the bed.

Vivienne asked Freya who she wanted to live with, and asked in the wrong way, just as he’d known and hoped she would. Vivienne told Freya what would happen. She said, ‘We’re splitting up, darling, I’m so sorry. You’ll live here with me.’ Viv was cleverer than him, undoubtedly. But despite or because of her intelligence, she had no feel for others’ freedom, their need to believe they were in control, and he understood something of this — it was the biggest thing that life had taught him. As a toddler Freya had always complained when her mother carried her upstairs for a bath. On the nights when Moose was in charge, he took a different approach. He posed a question for his daughter: ‘Bath before or after dinner?’ She made a choice and didn’t protest when asked to stick to it.

In later years he’d waste a lot of time thinking about why Viv had so easily given up on their daughter. How Viv had seemed willing month by month to let a distance open up between them. Friends treated the situation with suspicion. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that middle-class mothers don’t abandon their kids. They looked at him like he must have threatened her, or beaten her, or slept with the babysitter. To one mutual friend all he could say, over and over, was: ‘I’m surprised too.’ All he could add was: ‘Maybe some women are different to others?’ And also, magnanimously: ‘It wasn’t that she was a bad mother.’ Which she wasn’t. That was the sad thing about it. Wasn’t even a bad wife — they were simply a stupid match. The sight of her sewing labels onto skirts and shirts and jackets, all her daughter needed for a new school term, looking over the bridge of those huge glasses. The constant vegetable casseroles. He came to think she was so very depressed at that time that she didn’t want to go on living. Rather than killing herself, she wiped her life clean, started again, daughterless. But then again, this was only his version. They didn’t talk much those last few years, not about anything meaningful. In the gloom of their marriage it was possible he had blind spots.

He closed his eyes and dozed, observing in his dreams a dozen dark mysterious trees. The way some branches stayed heavy in the breeze. The way others were subtle and reactive. He was hang-gliding over a forest, naked, the proud owner of a friendly erection. His balls were unrealistically big. Down below, Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet waved and went about their business. He passed through several commas of cloud and swooped into a red lipless tear in the sky. In haste and natural expectancy of compliance he nodded at God and God nodded back. Then someone vomited once, twice, and God sipped a beer and burped.

SHE’D THOUGHT FRENCH. She’d thought Italian. She’d thought coq au vin with scalloped potato gratin, or tortellini with spicy sausage in a bouncy-sounding sauce. Bon appétit, mademoiselle! Buono appetito, bella! But no: her fancy dinner with Surfer John turned out to be a takeaway curry, two bottles of cava, a polystyrene cup sticky with watered-down mango chutney, and a bag of fractured poppadoms. She made sure to claim the least broken one as her own.

He said, ‘Can I come in and use your loo, before we go?’

‘Sure.’

‘Can you hold these?’

‘You brought booze?’

‘It’s BYO.’

‘What is?’

‘The restaurant.’

‘Which one?’

‘Not sure yet,’ Surfer John admitted.

‘I thought you were supposed to be recommending somewhere? Booking somewhere? I thought you were picking me up in your car and we were —’

‘It’s at the garage,’ John said. ‘Suspension. Think I put too much stuff on the roof.’

She waited.

‘Maybe we’ll have a drink here first, Freya Finch? My mum gave me these two bottles from her party.’

This was how it went. This was how, tipsy on cava, she found herself having to retrieve, at 9 p.m., the Coastal Raj menu from the back of the cutlery drawer in her own cold kitchen at home.

They sat on the sofa and ate their food. Newspaper-covered cushions were on their knees and the plates were balanced on these. Her dad had bought the sofa last year second-hand from a woman in Littlehampton. As the woman had pointed out other items for sale in her house, and explained her decision to let her husband run off with an acquaintance — ‘My mother said be kind to less fortunate girls’ — a gold bangle had crashed up and down her arm.

‘Are you happy, Freya Finch?’

She held her fork in mid-air. ‘Are you getting deep, John?’

‘Just wondering,’ he said.

‘Maybe. It depends. You?’

He shrugged like it was a stupid question. ‘Cool,’ he said. She saw that a scattering of dead hairs sat on the shoulders of John’s T-shirt. This provoked in her a jolt of empathy: he too had had a recent haircut, maybe even at the mercy of Wendy Hoyt, though probably somewhere better. His ears looked pink and vulnerable tonight, borrowed from a less confident boy. She liked those ears and liked the feeling of liking them.

The cava bottle stood on the coffee table. A ripped bag of lettuce relaxed beside it. She was wearing her best knee-length dress, a little yellow number with polka dots and ruching at the shoulders. She should change into jeans, probably, but she was concerned about what that would say to him. She didn’t want to get too casual, because that would mean giving up on the idea of leaving the house. A cocktail bar after food — that was the revised itinerary.

On the carpet was a leaflet that had fallen out of the Argus : a plea for support from the Society of Redundant Electrical Oven Salesmen.

‘It’s their own fault,’ Surfer John said between mouthfuls. ‘They need to adapt to gas.’

He retrieved the second bottle of cava from the kitchen. The window took the force of the cork. Fifty per cent of the booze frothed out on the carpet.

‘Sorry,’ he said. It was his word for ‘I am failing badly at feats of manly endeavour’.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. It was her phrase for ‘Yes, you are’.

They laid tea towels down on the dark part of the carpet. They drank beers they found in the garage. It occurred to her that if mice had peed on the cans then she and John might both die of a mouse-pee disease. They stared at each other, waiting for the next move. They talked about John’s art. He’d done a foundation course. She thought it was an interesting combination within him, art and sport, but the mention of painting seemed to send him into a low-level trance. He rubbed his eyes. The skin around them took on the pinkish blush of a faded ketchup stain. He said he was really bored with working at the hotel, that his parents were asking him when he was going to move out, what he was going to do with his life, when he was going to start getting serious. He glanced up and glanced away. She realised he was nervous tonight, that he’d been nervous since he arrived. This gave her an unexpected feeling of power. It put her at the centre of things.