But she seemed pleased that I had got in touch. We agreed to meet up one evening later that week at a new-ish gastro-pub in town. It was all moody lighting with various “sculptures” made out of twisted bits of iron mongery stuck to the walls. We installed ourselves at a table below what appeared to be the remains of an old-fashioned pram. It had been bent out of shape and threw strange, distorted shadows over the table. Still, it seemed safer than the assemblage of cast iron radiators suspended at a precarious-looking angle above the couple sitting opposite us.
It was a bit awkward at first. I was anxious to avoid talking about Pete, E-Gnosis or anything like that, so I steered the conversation onto more typical “getting to know you” territory. Susan talked a bit about her family. Her father had been a diplomat and they’d lived abroad until she was a teenager, which made her feel slightly ambivalent towards the UK – as if she didn’t really belong, somehow.
“Didn’t it make you want to become a foreign correspondent or something like that?” I asked.
“Not really. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like travelling and seeing new places. But actually living there is different from ‘just visiting’, if you know what I mean. I just feel that I’ve done that whole ‘living abroad’ thing. And not having grown up here, I’d like to think that I see things a bit differently from your average freelance.” She grinned, then added: “And that’s not just because we were deprived of Marmite when we were little.”
“It’s good to know that there’s more to being a successful freelance than that,” I said. “I haven’t eaten Marmite for years, but it doesn’t seem to be helping my career much.”
“Looks like you haven’t eaten fish for a while either,” she commented, gesturing at the carnage on my plate.
For some reason, I had ordered fish (Susan having announced on her arrival that she was ravenously hungry and wanted something to eat straight away). I’m not very good at eating fish at the best of times – and the fish I had ordered that evening was particularly bony. Not wanting to spend the entire time picking fish bones out of my mouth in front of Susan, I had ended up eating very little of it. The fish’s backbone and the skin were on one side of my plate, whilst on the other I had deposited most of the actual flesh, which had numerous tiny bones sticking out of it at odd angles. It looked as if I had been carrying out a hopelessly inept post-mortem on the poor creature.
“I’ve never really managed to get rid of that childhood fear of getting a fish bone stuck in my throat,” I explained. “It’s all the fault of the Queen mother.”
As a child, news reports of the late Queen mother being hospitalised for getting a fish bone stuck in her throat had, for some strange reason, made a big impression on me. Since this had happened on several occasions, I had convinced myself that she must really like fish. I pictured her consuming vast quantities of the creatures at royal banquets, ordering servants to toss them up in the air so that she could catch them in her mouth like a seal – only for one tiny sardine to get stuck on the way down, necessitating the speedy intervention of the nation’s top ear, nose and throat specialists. Not being royalty, I convinced myself that, should the same thing happen to me, medical help would probably arrive rather less swiftly – and I would be left choking to death on the fish bone. It seemed such an undignified way to go.
Susan told me how she and her sister had refused to eat fish when they were little. Her father used to keep exotic fish as pets and they had become rather attached to them. Their favourite had been a type of fish called a Pleco, which was an algae-sucker – very handy for cleaning up the tank, apparently. They called him “Lips” because he would often attach himself to the glass of the tank with his mouth.
“Me and my sister would practice smooching with him against the side of the tank, like this.” She pressed her lips up against the side of her glass, leaving a faint imprint of lip gloss.
“He was fun because you could chuck things like frozen bits of broccoli in the tank and watch them sink to the bottom. Lips would pounce on them and spend ages sucking them like an ice lolly. The trouble was, whenever my Dad got moved to a new posting, we always had to get rid of the fish. We were quite upset about losing Lips and we decided that if we couldn’t take him with us, we would set him free. So we released him into a pond in one of the parks in Mexico City, where we were living. Dad was really cross with us when he found out, because Plecos can cause lots of problems if they manage to find other fish to breed with. I think he was scared that it would somehow blow up into some major diplomatic incident. So we ended up spending our last couple of days in Mexico down at this pond trying to catch Lips by dragging a net through the water.”
“Did you get him?”
“No – we just got through a lot of frozen broccoli trying to make him come to the edge of the pond. But we think we know what happened to him because a couple of years later my Dad came home from work with this cutting from a Mexican newspaper. It was all about how the City authorities had been clearing up this pond in one of the parks – and guess what? It was full of Plecos. They’d eaten up all the other sources of food, so they’d started to eat each other. Which is probably how Lips met his end - but not before he’d gone forth and multiplied, big time.”
After this, I think both of us started to relax a bit more. Maybe it was the alcohol taking effect. I found myself opening up to her in a way that I hadn’t intended. I even told her about Kay – although not wanting to steer the conversation back onto the subject of Pete, I didn’t give any names and withheld a lot of the detail. I just told her that the object of my affections had been the wife of a friend. At the end of the story, I felt embarrassed and said:
“I’m sorry to bore you with this – you didn’t come here to listen to me moaning about my romantic failures. I mean, having an affair with a married woman – it’s hardly original, is it?”
“Well, I’m in no position to criticise. When I was twenty four, I got engaged to this guy from Venezuela who turned out to be married already. He also turned out to have at least two other mistresses besides me. My Dad tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t have any of it – I just pressed ahead with all the wedding preparations, head in the sand. I felt a complete idiot afterwards.”
By this time, it was getting late and we decided to get the bill. Then Susan said:
“Look, there’s a party tonight not far from here. It’s at a friend of mine’s house. Do you want to come?”
I hesitated because I’m never very good in situations where I hardly know anyone. But she was evidently keen for me to come with her and it seemed churlish to refuse. So off we went.
The party was in a large Victorian house about fifteen minutes’ walk from the pub. Susan explained that it belonged to Derek, a friend of hers who had inherited it from his parents. She wasn’t entirely sure what he did for a living; something in the City, she thought, but he never talked about it. When we arrived, the party was already in full swing; you could hear it half way down the road.
Derek turned out to be a large, balding man with a booming voice.
“Susan, my dear! Come in, come in!” he said, kissing her on both cheeks and gesturing expansively into his hallway. “And who, pray, is this man of mystery? Another one of your waifs and strays?”
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say to this. “Woof”, perhaps, on the grounds that I ought really to be sent back to Battersea Dogs’ Home, where I belonged.
“Derek, this is Miles. And no, I didn’t pick him up while he was begging outside the cashpoint, if that’s what you mean. We met through work, actually.”
“Susan, you know I do but jest,” said Derek, boomingly. “I’m sure he’s a fine, upstanding chap, unlike that dreadful rogue you were consorting with before. Now follow me, there are some people over here I want you to meet.”
Susan just rolled her eyes at this and we followed him inside. We were introduced to a rather uptight-looking couple who were sipping orange juice and looked as if they would much prefer to be somewhere else. No sooner had we exchanged pleasantries than Susan was pounced on by a couple of rather excitable friends of hers who – to judge from the amount of shrieking and “Oh my Gods!” involved – didn’t appear to have seen her for years. They were wearing identical outfits and but for the fact that one of them had a pair of bright orange fluffy bunny ears on her head, I would not have been able to tell them apart.
“You don’t mind us dragging her away, do you?” one of them asked, in a manner which suggested she was not going to take no for an answer. “It’s ages since we’ve seen her! We’ve got so much to catch up on. You can have her back in, ooh, let’s see, a couple of hours’ time!”
“See ya!” shouted the other one, her bunny ears now wobbling at a jaunty angle.
I smiled weakly as they hauled Susan away, leaving me with the uptight couple. After about ten minutes of excruciatingly stilted small-talk, I managed to extricate myself and went to find Susan – but she was nowhere to be seen. I ended up in the kitchen with a motley collection of single males, most of whom were rather the worse for wear. Several of them regaled me at length with their views on politics, women and the deplorable lack of real ale at Derek’s house, on account of the host being “a champagne-drinking tosser.”
I was finally cornered by a rather earnest-looking man with close-cropped hair who had been lounging in the corner, looking increasingly fed up. He hadn’t contributed much to the general discussion, but one-to-one, he turned out to have plenty to say for himself. He launched into a lengthy rant about how the country was going to the dogs. According to him, it was entirely the fault of uncontrolled immigration. The trouble with being in the kitchen at parties is that you can’t make that excuse of “I’m just going to get a drink” because all the drinks are right there in front of you. Fortunately, just as I was wondering how to extricate myself, Susan reappeared – so I made my excuses and joined her.
“I’m sorry about abandoning you like that,” she said. “But I hadn’t seen those two for a while,” nodding in the direction of the identical twin sisters. The one with bunny ears was now in animated conversation with Derek, who was laughing heartily. “And I’m sorry Derek was so rude to you.”
“That’s OK, no offence taken. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about, to be honest.”
“Well, it was pretty rude of him to compare you to Frankie, my last boyfriend – the one he called a ‘dreadful rogue’. He was unemployed, which in Derek’s view made him a wastrel – so the two of them never really hit it off. I got annoyed with Derek, which just made me more determined to go out with Frankie – and less inclined to see that he really was a bit of a waste of space. It was nearly a year ago now, but Derek always likes to remind me how he was right and I was wrong.
“Why is that man staring at us like that?” she whispered, nodding towards the kitchen, where the man I had been talking to was glowering at us. Even in the subdued lighting, I thought I could see one of the veins above his temple throbbing.
“Ah, well, that could be my fault,” I said. “He has some pretty hardline views on immigration, so I was looking for a means of escape. Anyway, when you reappeared, I told him I would have to go. I said it was because I’m an illegal immigrant myself and I’m supporting myself here by working as a gigolo. Then I came and stood next to you.”
She giggled. “I see. So he’s really staring at me, isn’t he? He probably thinks I should be sent to Saudi Arabia or somewhere like that to learn the error of my ways. But tell me,” she said, turning to face me, “what do you say if people suggest that you don’t quite look the part of a globe-trotting, international gigolo?”
“I tell them that eighty per cent of the job is all about technique. That usually shuts them up.”
“Really? I’d have thought they’d want to know more.”
“Well, if they do, I tell them it’s a trade secret. The trick is to get away before they can ask too many questions, leaving them with the thought that you might actually have been telling the truth.”
“You are a dark horse. I didn’t think you had it in you to tell a completely brazen lie like that.”
“I’m probably just a bit drunk.”
“I reckon I’ve had enough too,” she said. “Come on, let’s go before your friend over there calls the Home Office and has you deported.”
Once we were outside in the street, she stopped and said:
“Now, gigolo boy, about that world famous technique of yours. I think I’d like to try it out before they deport you.”
I turned towards her and kissed her.
“How was that?” I asked.
“Not bad. But I may need to do it again before I can give you a proper assessment.”
“Isn’t this the bit where you just run away laughing, like your niece?” I asked, half expecting her to do just that.
“Yes, it is,” she murmured, but she didn’t pull away.
Make a free website with Yola