Читать книгу: «Before Your Very Eyes», страница 2

TWO

Simon woke up, and immediately tried to fall asleep again. His head was filled with a searing, shrill whining sound, not unlike that of twenty or so chain saws going at full throttle. He cautiously opened one eye. The noise got louder. He shut his eye again. It occurred to Simon that he was not, in all probability, surrounded by a posse of lumberjacks. Blinding white light flashed across his beleaguered brain. Simon groaned. While he had been asleep his tongue had been removed and replaced with a large slab of medium-grain sandpaper. The chain saws had by now been joined by a chorus of crashing anvils.

Simon lay back and, against his better instincts, thought. Trying not to move, he mentally did a rapid check of his body. There was a painful throbbing in his right hand, and an even worse one in his left foot, but apart from that, and his monstrous headache, everything seemed to be all right. Tentatively he moved his left hand over to feel his right, and found that it was trussed up in bandages. Frowning, Simon opened his eyes again, and waited for the mist to clear.

He was in a hospital ward. On either side of him motionless figures were humped beneath sheets and blankets. Simon struggled up on to his left elbow, trying to ignore the demonic pounding in his head.

What was he doing here? he wondered. He cast his mind back to the previous evening. The last thing he could remember was being inelegantly spread-eagled on the Twister sheet, waiting for Heather to spin the needle. Suddenly the unpleasant memory of Joe’s appalling fart popped into Simon’s brain, and he recalled collapsing on to his hand. Simon looked down at his body. He was wearing a pair of pyjamas that he did not recognize, and which bore the unmistakable smell of an industrial cleaning process. Someone had undressed him. Slowly he began to assimilate the possibility that, as humiliations went, he had quite possibly just eclipsed all his previous efforts.

Simon’s hangover began to reassert itself as waves of nausea flooded over him. He slumped back on to his pillows and sighed. His left foot throbbed. He stared at the ceiling. This was all very peculiar, and very unpleasant. With Wagnerian hangovers such as this one, there was only one place to be: at home, in bed, within running distance of the nearest toilet. He glanced up and down the ward again. There were no nurses to be seen. He would have to wait to be rescued.

Eventually Simon drifted off into an uneasy sleep. When he woke again, a nurse in a dark blue uniform was standing next to the bed.

‘Good morning, Mr Teller,’ she said as soon as he opened his eyes.

Simon’s brain was still eddying around the fringes of unconsciousness. ‘Er, hello,’ he replied.

‘How are we today?’ asked the nurse briskly.

‘Not too great, actually,’ admitted Simon. ‘My hand and foot hurt, and I’ve got a bit of a headache.’

‘Yes, well, I can’t say I’m surprised,’ said the nurse, ‘after all of last night’s excitements.’

Simon said nothing, hoping for more information.

‘What did you think you were doing?’ continued the nurse.

Simon stared back at her blankly. ‘I really have no idea,’ he answered truthfully. ‘I was quite drunk, I think.’

The nurse snorted. ‘I think that much was obvious,’ she said, extracting a thermometer from her pocket and inserting it in Simon’s mouth without further pleasantries. She glanced at her watch. ‘I gather the board of the hospital have asked for a report to be prepared,’ she continued.

‘Wur yur moorr terrin mir wur harwen?’ asked Simon politely.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Teller,’ said the nurse. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’ She reached over and extracted the thermometer from Simon’s mouth and scrutinized it. She pulled a face. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘your temperature seems fine. May I see your hand, please?’

Gingerly Simon pulled his right hand from beneath the covers and presented it for inspection. The nurse examined the binding. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You sprained it quite badly. You’ll need to keep the pressure off the wrist for a while. Does it itch?’

‘No,’ said Simon. ‘It just hurts a lot.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ said the nurse. ‘That’ll wear off soon enough. How is your foot?’

‘Painful. Especially when I move.’

The nurse nodded. She walked to the end of the bed and picked up the chart which hung there. ‘I’ll arrange for you to have an X-ray so we can find out what sort of damage you did to yourself. In the meantime, I suggest you try and keep as still as possible so you don’t aggravate things.’ She smiled, without humour. ‘Here are two aspirins for your headache.’

Simon took the pills. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘Please make sure you stay in bed and don’t get into any more trouble,’ said the nurse.

‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Simon, who was ransacking what was left of his brain for some small snippet of information, some undeleted detail, about what had happened the previous evening. He could remember nothing after the game of Twister in Angus and Fergus’s flat. After that there was a great, depressing, black hole of nothingness. What had the nurse meant about preparing a report?

Unable to ponder more recent events, Simon’s mind turned back to the dinner party itself. The brain being the playful organ that it is, he could remember in agonisingly clear detail Joe’s story about the magic coin, and shuddered at the embarrassment of it all. He remembered his anguish when he saw Delphine laughing at him along with everyone else. Cruelly, Simon’s brain was able to reconstruct Delphine’s exquisite face in photographic detail. His spirits spiralled still lower.

What was it with women? Simon wondered. They were a confusing breed. He really couldn’t understand why he had been single so long. He had read all the right books and magazines. He knew what women wanted. He could tick every box on the Ideal Man wish-lists that cropped up regularly in Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. He had read Crime and Punishment, twice. He had Grade 6 piano (with Merit). He was an excellent cook. He liked Jean-Jacques Beineix films, and owned several on video.

Years of gazing critically at himself in the mirror had persuaded him that physically he wasn’t too bad, either. He had dark, curly hair, and green eyes that he suspected might be his best feature. (He had been told this one evening, by his first girlfriend, in between tongue-heavy snogs, and had clung on to the belief ever since. After all, it was quite something even to have a best feature.) Overall his face had a pleasing look to it: decent skin, middling cheek-bones, good teeth. His chin had in the past been described as ‘strong’; Simon wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but had concluded that it had to be better than having a weak one.

There was no doubt: in the eligibility stakes, Simon was up there with the best of them. He had the lot.

What was more, Simon didn’t just regard females as members of another, alien race. He was not an Angus or a Fergus, for whom women were either cooks or sex objects. Women, he knew, wanted to be respected as people, to be liked and admired for their minds and not just their bodies or domestic skills. Simon understood this, and behaved accordingly.

And yet they stayed away in droves. It was all very perplexing.

Simon had never had any trouble making friends with women. It stood as testimony to his sensitivity and emotional candour. Women felt able to talk to him openly. They loved him for it. It was just that they loved him like a brother. It would have been nice to find one who would love him like a randy hot-blooded sex machine.

Despite the number of female friends that Simon had had, they never stayed friends for very long. There were two principal reasons for this.

The first problem was his respect for women generally. This meant that he wasn’t interested in trying to sleep with a girl before he got to know her properly. The difficulty with this approach was that, by the time Simon felt that they knew each other well enough to progress to the next, more interesting, stage, the girl had either got bored and had given up hope, or they had become such good friends that neither of them wanted to risk the friendship by sleeping together.

Eventually of course the girl would meet someone else and start sleeping with him immediately. She would then gradually see less and less of Simon, until disappearing completely in a frenzy of loved-up happiness.

Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, Simon had an embarrassing habit of falling hopelessly in love with his platonic girlfriends at wholly inappropriate moments. This usually happened just as they had begun to go out with someone else. It was only then, seeing them breathless and giddy with the excitement of new-found romance, that it would occur to Simon that, actually, it should be him that they should be getting so breathless and giddy about. There then followed excruciating confrontations, bewildered accusations, sheepish (but hopeful) admissions, scornful rejections, and (if he was lucky) cautious reconciliations coupled with stern warnings that nothing like this must ever happen again, ever. It was all rather humiliating.

The few fully functioning romantic relationships that Simon had managed also followed a predictable pattern. Simon was hopelessly, cripplingly, romantic. At the beginning of every relationship he would bombard his new paramour with letters, poems and flowers. He would spend hours composing his wedding speech in his head, and would moon about, unable to concentrate on anything. This clumsy, romantic streak, this desire to fall in love the way they say you should, was beguiling to the girl in question, usually for about a week. After that, the constant attention would begin to unnerve her somewhat, and before long Simon would be treated to the usual, hand-holding chat about slowing down, taking things easy, and giving each other a bit more space, which Simon now recognized as the inevitable precursor to the girl disappearing off the face of the planet. There would then follow a period of intense and histrionic mourning, after which came the hyper-critical self-analysis phase. This would leave him none the wiser, and primed to make all the same mistakes again next time around.

After contemplating this situation for some time and trying not to think about Delphine, Simon sighed, and closed his eyes. He tried to sleep, without success. Sometime later he heard a nearby cough. Simon opened his eyes. Standing at the end of the bed, clutching a brown paper bag, was Joe.

Simon struggled to sit up. ‘Hello,’ he said.

Joe proffered the bag. ‘Grapes,’ he explained.

‘Oh. Thanks very much.’

There was a pause as the two men looked at each other uncertainly.

‘I wanted to see how you were,’ said Joe.

Simon shrugged, slightly nonplussed. ‘Well, that’s thoughtful of you. Thanks.’

‘How’s your hand?’

‘Don’t know, to be honest,’ said Simon. ‘It’s all bandaged up so tightly that I can’t feel much.’

Joe pulled a face. ‘You haven’t broken it?’

Simon shook his head. ‘Just a sprain, apparently. I suppose that’s good news, but it still hurts like buggery. And something else obviously happened last night. My foot is agony.’

Joe sat down on the end of the bed and frowned. ‘Your foot? There was nothing wrong with your foot at the party.’

‘Exactly. I’ve no idea what’s wrong with it. I’m due to have an X-ray later today.’ He paused. ‘Actually, Joe, there is something I’d like to ask you.’

‘What?’

‘Well, this is slightly embarrassing, but can you remind me how I got to the hospital? It’s a bit of a blur.’

‘We called you a taxi. Don’t you remember?’

‘Oh yes. I remember now.’ Simon felt his cheeks go hot.

‘And you didn’t want to go.’

‘I didn’t?’

‘Well. First things first. You fell on your hand during that game of Twister, and fainted. When you came round you insisted on staying at the party. You wanted to talk to Delphine.’

Simon groaned. ‘Go on.’

‘Anyway, your wrist was swelling, and so Fergus called a cab and packed you in it, gave the driver a tenner and told him to get you to the nearest hospital. And here you are.’

Joe opened the bag of grapes and stuck one in his mouth, looking around the ward as he did so.

‘So,’ said Simon eventually. ‘How is Delphine?’

‘Delphine? She’s fine, I think.’

‘Oh good.’

Simon reached across and took a grape himself. ‘Nice girl,’ he said as he inspected the skin of the grape closely.

‘Very nice,’ agreed Joe. ‘Pretty. Funny too. Apparently, she goes like a –’

‘– shit house door in a hurricane, yes, I know,’ said Simon miserably.

The bag of grapes was now shuttling up and down the bed between the two men. Well, this is an unusual situation, thought Simon. Here am I, trying to make small talk with this man, when the only two times we have interacted socially were firstly when he humiliated me completely in front of a room full of strangers and secondly when he farted so badly that I ended up in hospital. What does one say?

‘I thought Delphine was very nice,’ said Simon.

‘Mmm.’ Joe’s mouth was full.

Did she, Simon wanted to ask, mention me after I’d gone? Ask for my telephone number, that sort of thing?

He tried a different tack. ‘It’s hard to meet people properly at those sorts of parties, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘I suppose so,’ said Joe.

The grape bag scooted up the bed again.

‘Anyway,’ said Joe, ‘I never pull at parties.’

‘Pull? As in pull women?’

Joe nodded. ‘Never do it.’

Simon thought about this. ‘Neither do I, I suppose. It’s terribly difficult, isn’t it? It’s such an artificial situation. Go up to a girl at a party and start talking to her and you may as well be wearing a sign around your neck saying “Sad Bastard”. And women treat you accordingly, which is generally with enormous contempt.’

‘Actually, that’s not what I meant at all,’ said Joe. ‘It’s amazingly easy to pull at parties.’

‘Oh,’ said Simon.

‘You’re right, of course,’ continued Joe, ‘you may as well be wearing a sign around your neck, but that’s the beauty of it.’

Simon looked blank. ‘It is?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Joe. ‘Look. You’re at a party. You see this woman you want to talk to. And, because you’re at a party, you can. You can just wander up to her and start chatting about any fucking thing in the world, and it doesn’t matter – because you’re at a party. Normal rules don’t apply. If a woman goes to a party, she’s more or less signed up for the social chit-chat bit. She’ll be expecting it. It’s all part of the experience. She’s not going to tell you to bog off the moment you start speaking to her.’

Simon said nothing.

‘Now, if this woman gets bored with you a bit later on, then she can quite legitimately turn around and ask to be left alone. And that’s OK, too. That’s all part of the deal. At that point, you’ve had your chance, and you’ve blown it. But at least you got your chance. The party is a great social leveller. It’s a very democratic institution. Everyone has the chance for a go. It’s yours for the taking.’

Simon considered this. ‘If it’s so easy to pull at parties, then why don’t you?’

‘Because the problem with parties,’ replied Joe patiently, ‘is that, by definition, in order to be invited, you need to know someone else there. Or know someone who knows someone. Ultimately, unless either you or the woman is a gatecrasher, there will be some sort of connection, however indirect, between the two of you. Mutual friends, that sort of thing.’

Simon frowned. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Well,’ explained Joe. ‘Exactly that. If this woman is part of your circle, or part of your circle’s circle, then there’s always a risk that you’ll bump into her again afterwards.’

‘Afterwards?’

‘Yeah.’ Joe winked. ‘Afterwards.’

‘Oh. I see,’ said Simon after a few moments. ‘So tell me,’ he said. ‘If you don’t pull women at parties, where do you meet them?

‘The National Gallery,’ said Joe.

There was a pause.

‘What?’ said Simon eventually.

‘The National Gallery,’ said Joe. ‘It’s in Trafalgar Square.’

‘I know where it is,’ snapped Simon.

Joe reached into the bag and took another grape. ‘It’s the best place in London to meet women. Although you do need to do research.’

‘Research on what, exactly?’ Simon asked, distaste and curiosity growing at equal rates.

‘The paintings. I’ve established what sort of women stand in front of what sort of paintings. And then I wow them with some poetry. I’ve got different poems for each painting.’

‘I don’t believe this,’ said Simon.

‘It’s true,’ said Joe, missing Simon’s point. ‘If I want to meet a gentle, nicely brought up girl who wears Laura Ashley skirts and reads Jane Austen novels, I go to Boating on the Seine by Renoir. Then I hang around until a suitable specimen turns up – I never have to wait more than a few minutes. Bit like buses. Anyway. So I’ll wait until this girl has been gazing at the painting for a while. And then I’ll step up behind her, and say,

My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.

‘And then she’ll turn around, surprised. I look at her shyly. We discuss the formless spontaneity of the picture for a few minutes, then maybe do a quick tour of the rest of the gallery, and then I ask, casually as you like, whether she has time for a coffee. And bingo, you’re off.’

Simon sat back on his pillows. Finally he said, ‘What was that poem?’

‘It’s from Prometheus Unbound, by Shelley. Gets them every time.’ Joe made his hand into the shape of a pistol and shot an imaginary target. ‘So, that was Laura Ashley Girl. Clean-living, generally. Usually very good cooks. They always fall for the whole poetry thing. It’s just so romantic, being approached by a stranger in an art gallery.’

‘God,’ mused Simon. ‘You really have this all worked out, haven’t you?’

‘Oh yeah. For example,’ continued Joe, ‘absolutely the best sex, without question, you get in front of the Canalettos.’

‘Really?’ said Simon in a defeated way.

Joe nodded. ‘Don’t know why. Maybe there’s something in the paintings that appeals to nymphomaniacs. Anyway, with Canalettos, as there are quite a few of them, I tend to stand in front of the painting next to the one that the girl is in front of, and then murmur quietly,

Beneath is spread like a green sea

The waveless plain of Lombardy,

Bounded by the vaporous air,

Islanded by cities fair;

Underneath Day’s azure eyes

Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies,

A peopled labyrinth of walls,

Amphitrite’s destined halls.’

Joe looked at Simon. ‘Shelley again. Top man.’

‘What’s Amphitrite?’ asked Simon.

‘No idea,’ said Joe. ‘Nobody’s ever asked. A woman wouldn’t, you see. As long as a poem rhymes, it doesn’t matter what it actually says. Here’s another example,’ he continued, warming to his theme. ‘There’s a painting by Munch called Melancholy. It’s of this man sitting with his head in his hands on this beach, and in the background there are two other people hugging each other. Dark squirly skies. Pretty depressing stuff. Now, the sort of people who tend to hang around that painting are either angry students, or women who have just been dumped. Each needs a different approach.’

‘Which is?’

‘Well, for the students, I’ve just got this new thing. I’ll walk up next to them and stare at the picture as intensely as they are, and say,

A hidden rage consumes my heart

As fuelled by years of wasted time

I close my eyes

And tense myself

And screaming

Throw myself in fury over the edge

And into your blood.’

Simon thought about this. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Heavy stuff. Shelley again?’

Joe shook his head. ‘The Cure. Works wonders. They just melt. At last, they think – a kindred spirit. Somebody else who understands. After that, it’s easy.’

‘So what,’ asked Simon, unsure if he really wanted to hear the answer, ‘do you do for the recently dumped?’

‘Oh well, quite different, of course. There you need compassion, understanding, sympathy. So I usually try a bit of Emily Dickinson:

My life closed twice before its close;

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we know of hell.

‘That tends to get them going a bit, and then I go for the usual drink-round-the-corner routine. Recent dumpees are great, though, because they’re either on the rebound and desperate for some love and attention, or they’re on the look-out for a revenge fuck.’

‘Revenge fuck?’ said Simon, blinking.

‘Sure. You know. Just to show whoever-he-was. And revenge fucks are usually brilliant, from a sex perspective. It’s as if they’re performing in front of an audience.’

Simon was silent as he contemplated this.

‘So anyway, there you are,’ said Joe. ‘Why bother with the effort of chatting up people you might meet again when there is an endless source of available women wandering around London’s art galleries? I’ve had a bit of success in front of Tintoretto, too, although they’re exclusively history of art students. Nobody else bothers with Tintoretto nowadays.’

Simon stared at his visitor with appalled fascination.

There was a pause.

‘I shouldn’t have farted,’ said Joe after a while. ‘Sorry.’

Simon was caught off guard by the abrupt change of subject. ‘Amazing the lengths some people will go to, to win a game of Twister,’ he said.

Joe grinned. ‘Well, I’m sorry, anyway,’ he said.

‘Apology accepted,’ said Simon.

There was another pause. ‘I’d better go,’ said Joe. He stood up.

‘Right. Thanks for coming. It was kind of you.’

Joe shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. ‘Least I could do, in the circs. And sorry again.’

‘That’s OK.’

There was a pause.

‘Yeah, while we’re at it, I guess I should apologize too for that story I told,’ said Joe. ‘About the, er, bath.’

‘Forget it,’ said Simon, not really meaning it.

The two men looked at each other for a few moments.

‘Tell me,’ said Joe. ‘Where’s the magic shop you work in?’

Simon named an address near Victoria Station.

‘I know the area,’ said Joe. ‘Maybe I’ll pop by.’

‘That would be cool,’ said Simon, slightly bemused.

‘Right,’ said Joe. ‘Hope you feel better soon.’

‘Thanks.’

‘See you, then,’ said Joe. He began to extend his hand towards Simon, but then thought better of the gesture and instead thrust it deep into his pocket, before turning and walking quickly out of the ward.

Simon settled back into his pillows. Well, he thought, that was a bit weird. He wondered whether Joe would ever bother to contact him again. He thought it was unlikely. Joe had come to see how Simon was and to apologize, and even that was probably more than Simon had a right to expect. He had seemed nice enough. A cynic when it came to women, of course, but otherwise all right. Despite his behaviour at the party, concluded Simon, Joe couldn’t be all bad. Simon checked the grape bag to see if there were any loose grapes rolling around the bottom of the bag. There weren’t. His wrist throbbed. He lay back and waited for something to happen.

Nothing did.

Later on that afternoon, Simon had his X-ray.

Soon afterwards, an attractive young doctor appeared by the side of the bed. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My name’s Dr Gilbert. We’ve had a look at the X-ray, and the good news is that it’s just a bad sprain.’

‘Oh good,’ said Simon. He was itching to ask exactly what had happened to his foot, but was too ashamed to ask.

‘There’s also some severe bruising around the big toe, and that’s swollen quite badly as a result. But that should go down in a couple of days.’

‘Right,’ said Simon, who thought Dr Gilbert was rather pretty.

The doctor put her pen into the breast pocket of her white coat. ‘The nurse will come along in a minute and bandage your foot up to keep it nice and firm. After that you’ll be able to go.’ She paused. ‘You’re going to need crutches,’ she said. ‘And I suggest you take things gently at first. They’re not as easy to use as you’d imagine. If there’s something to hit, you’ll hit it.’

‘Right,’ said Simon again. He flashed Dr Gilbert his best smile. ‘Thanks ever so much.’

‘Not at all,’ said Dr Gilbert. ‘Come back in a week and we’ll have a look and see how you’re doing. And I suggest you keep away from coffee machines for a while.’ She winked at him.

Simon stared back at her blankly. ‘Er, thanks,’ he said. ‘I will.’