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‘Captive,’ I said. ‘She’s being held captive.’
‘Being held captured,’ he said. ‘We have to rescue her, Daddy.’
‘Okay.’
I sat playing with my son for a while, something I knew I didn’t do nearly enough. Then after about five or ten minutes I decided I had better get in to work. It was going to be a long day.
Pat was disappointed that I was cutting our game short, but he cheered up when I switched his video of Princess Leia as a beautiful slave girl back on. He really liked that bit.
We were all over the papers.
The broadsheets saw the Cliff incident as symptomatic of a medium in terminal decline, desperate for cheap sensation in a world of visual overload and limited attention spans. The tabloids were going barmy about the blood and bad language.
All of them were calling for the head of Marty Mann. I was going to call him from the car, but I remembered that I had lent Gina my mobile phone.
Marty’s company – Mad Mann Productions – had a floor in a building on Notting Hill Gate, a large open-plan office where self-consciously casual young people in their twenties worked on The Marty Mann Show or spent months planning future Mad Mann projects. The office was currently working on a game show for clever people, an alternative travel programme, a scuba diving series that would allow Marty to spend six months in the Maldives, and lots of other ideas which would almost certainly never actually happen.
We called it development. The outside world would call it farting around.
Only Marty and I had offices at Mad Mann. Actually they were more like little private cubbyholes, full of tapes and shooting scripts and a few VCRs. Siobhan was waiting for me in mine.
She had never been in my room before. We sort of blushed at each other. Why is it so easy to talk to someone before you go to bed with them for the first time and then suddenly so difficult?
‘You should have woken me up before you left,’ she said.
‘I was going to,’ I said, ‘but you looked so…’
‘Peaceful?’
‘Knackered.’
She laughed. ‘Well, it was a bad night. The only good thing about it was you.’
‘Listen, Siobhan –’
‘It’s okay, Harry. I know. I’m not going to see you again, am I? Not like last night, I mean. You don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to say anything that isn’t true. I know you’re married.’
‘You’re a great girl, Siobhan. You really are.’
And I meant it.
‘But you love your wife. I know, I know. Don’t worry. I would prefer to hear it now than six months down the line. I would rather get it over with before I start to really like you. At least you’re not like some of them. You didn’t tell me that your wife doesn’t understand you. You didn’t tell me that you’re probably going to break up. You didn’t spend months sneaking out of the house to phone me. You’re not a stinking hypocrite.’
Not a hypocrite? I spent last night with you and I’ll spend tonight with my wife. Surely a hypocrite is exactly what I am?
‘You’re no good at all this, Harry. That’s what I like about you. Believe me, there are not many around like you. I know. The last one – Jesus! I really thought he was going to leave his wife and that we were actually going to get married. That’s how stupid I am.’
‘You’re not stupid,’ I said, putting my arms around her.
We held each other tight, with real feeling. Now we were splitting up, we were getting on brilliantly.
Then she started to get choked up about how difficult it is to find a good man, while I thought to myself – well, that’s a relief. We aren’t going to star in a remake of Fatal Attraction after all.
I knew I was getting off lightly. Siobhan was going to let me go without pouring acid on my MGF or putting our pet rabbit in a pot. Not that we had a rabbit. But after the relief had subsided I was surprised to find that I felt a little hurt. Was it so easy to say goodbye to me?
‘This always happens to me,’ Siobhan laughed, although her eyes were all wet and shining. ‘I always pick the ones who have already been picked. Your wife is a lucky woman. As I believe I said on that message I left you.’
‘What message?’
‘The message on your mobile.’
‘My mobile?’
‘I left a message on your mobile phone,’ Siobhan said, drying her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Didn’t you get it?’
seven (#ulink_d244d48c-8bb3-558e-98bb-4662a1417153)
Gina was packing her bags when I got home. Stuffing a suitcase and a weekend bag up in our bedroom, pale-faced and dry-eyed, doing it as quickly as she could, taking only the bare essentials. As if she couldn’t stand to be there any more.
‘Gina?’
She turned and looked at me, and it was as if she were seeing me for the very first time. She seemed almost giddy with contempt and sadness and anger. Especially anger. It scared the shit out of me. She had never looked at me like that before.
She turned again, picking something up from the little table by her side of the bed. An ashtray. No, not an ashtray. We didn’t have any ashtrays. She threw my mobile phone at me.
She had always been a lousy shot – and we had had one or two arguments where things had been thrown – but there wasn’t the room to miss, and it smacked hard against my chest. I picked it up off the floor and a bone just above my heart began to throb.
‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she said. ‘Never.’ She nodded at the phone. ‘Why don’t you listen to your messages?’
I pressed the icon on the phone which showed a little envelope. Siobhan’s voice came crackling through, wry and sleepy and completely out of place in our bedroom.
‘It’s always a bad sign if they go before you wake up…but please don’t feel bad about last night…because I don’t…your wife is a lucky woman…and I’m looking forward to working with you…Bye, Harry.’
‘Did you sleep with this girl, Harry?’ Gina asked, then shook her head. ‘What’s wrong with me? Why am I even bothering to ask? Because I want you to tell me that it isn’t true. But of course it’s true.’
I tried to put my arms around her. Not hugging her. Just trying to hold on to her. Trying to calm her down. To stop her getting away. To stop her from leaving me. She shook me off, almost snarling.
‘Some little slut at the office, is she?’ Gina said, still throwing clothes into her suitcase. She wasn’t even looking at the clothes she was packing. She didn’t look as though she thought she was a lucky woman. ‘Some little slut who thinks you can do her a few favours.’
‘She’s actually a really nice girl. You’d like her.’
It was a truly stupid thing to say. I knew it the second the words left my big mouth, but by then it was already too late. Gina came across the bedroom and slapped me hard across the face. I saw her wince with pain, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. She didn’t really know how to hit someone. Gina wasn’t like that.
‘You think it was romantic or passionate or some such bullshit,’ Gina said. ‘But it’s none of those things. It’s just grubby and sordid and pathetic. Really pathetic. Do you love her?’
‘What?’
‘Are you in love with this girl?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘If she wants my life, she can have it. All of it. Including you. Especially you, Harry. Because it’s all a lie.’
‘Please, Gina. It was a mistake. A terrible mistake, okay?’ I scrambled for words. ‘It didn’t mean a thing,’ I told her.
She started laughing and crying at the same time. ‘Don’t you understand that makes it worse?’ she said. ‘Don’t you understand anything at all?’
Then she really started to sob, her shoulders all hunched up and shaking, not even trying to wipe away tears that seemed to start somewhere deep inside her chest. I wanted to put my arms around her. But I didn’t dare touch her.
‘You’re just like my father,’ she said, and I knew it was the worst thing in the world she could ever say. ‘Just like him.’
‘Please, Gina,’ I said. ‘Please.’
She shook her head, as if she could no longer understand me, as if I had stopped making any kind of sense.
‘What, Harry? Please? What? You’re like a fucking parrot. Please what?’
‘Please,’ I said, parrot-like. ‘Please don’t stop loving me.’
‘But you must have known,’ she said, slamming shut the suitcase, most of her clothes still unpacked and scattered all over our bed. The other bag was already full. She was almost ready to leave. She was nearly there now. ‘You must have known that this is the one thing I could never forgive,’ she said. ‘You must have known that I can’t love a man who doesn’t love me – and only me. And if you didn’t know that, Harry, then you don’t know me at all.’
I once read somewhere that, in any relationship, the one who cares the least is the one with all the power.
Gina had all the power now. Because she didn’t care at all any more.
I followed her as she dragged her suitcase and bag out into the hall and across to Pat’s bedroom. He was carefully placing Star Wars figures into a little Postman Pat backpack. He smiled up at us.
‘Look what I’m doing,’ he said.
‘Are you ready, Pat?’ Gina asked.
‘Nearly,’ he said.
‘Then let’s go,’ she said, wiping away the tears with her sleeve.
‘Okay,’ Pat said. ‘Guess what?’ He was looking at me now, his beautiful face illuminated by a smile. ‘We’re going on a holiday.’
I let them get as far as the door and then I realised that I couldn’t stand losing them. I just couldn’t stand it. I grabbed the handle of Gina’s bag.
‘Where are you going? Just tell me where you’re going.’
She tugged at the bag, but I refused to let go. So she just left me holding it as she opened the front door and stepped across the threshold.
I followed them out into the street, still holding Gina’s bag, and watched her strap Pat into his child seat. He had sensed that something was very wrong. He wasn’t smiling any more. Suddenly I realised that he was my last chance.
‘What about Pat?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to think about him?’
‘Did you?’ she said. ‘Did you think about him, Harry?’
She heaved her suitcase into the back of the estate, not bothering to get the other bag back from me. She let me keep it.
‘Where will you stay?’
‘Goodbye, Harry.’
And then she left me. Pat’s face was small and anxious in the back seat. Gina stared straight ahead, her eyes hard and shining. She already looked like someone else. Someone I didn’t know. She turned on the ignition.
I watched the car until it had turned the bend in the street where we lived, and only then was I aware of the curtains that were twitching with curiosity. The neighbours were watching us. With a sinking feeling, I realised that’s the kind of couple we had become.
I carried Gina’s bag back into the house, where the phone was ringing. It was Marty.
‘Can you believe what these fuckers are saying about me in the papers?’ he said. ‘Look at this one – ban mad mann from our telly. And this one – A MANN OF FEW WORDS – ALL OF THEM ****ING OBSCENE. What the fuck are they implying? These people want my job, Harry. My mum is really upset. What are we going to do?’
‘Marty,’ I said. ‘Gina’s left me.’
‘She’s left you? You mean she’s walked out?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What about the kid?’
‘She’s taken Pat with her.’
‘Has she got someone else?’
‘Nothing like that. It was me. I did something stupid.’
Marty chuckled in my ear. ‘Harry, you dirty dog. Anyone I know?’
‘I’m frightened, Marty. I think she might be gone for good.’
‘Don’t worry, Harry. The most she can get is half of everything you own.’
He was wrong there. Gina had already walked out with everything I had ever wanted. She had got the lot.
eight (#ulink_157c1496-7cd1-5019-bad7-70cef07379d8)
Barry Twist worked for the station. Over the past year, I had been to dinner at his home, and he had come to dinner at mine. But, the way our world worked, we weren’t exactly friends. I couldn’t tell him about Gina. It felt like I knew a lot of people like that.
Barry had been the first of the television people to take Marty and me out to lunch when we were doing the radio show. He had thought the show would work on television and, more than anyone, he had been responsible for putting us there. Barry had smiled all the way through that first lunch, smiled as though it was an honour to be on the same planet as Marty and me. But he wasn’t smiling now.
‘You’re not a couple of kids dicking about on the radio any more,’ he said. ‘These are big boys’ rules.’ His conversation was full of stuff like ‘big boys’ rules’, as though working in television was a lot like running an undercover SAS unit in South Armagh. ‘We had nine hundred phone calls complaining about the fucking language.’
I wasn’t going to roll over and die just because he was our commissioning editor.
‘Spontaneous TV, Barry, that’s what you pay him for. On this kind of show it’s not what the guests say that makes news. It’s what they do.’
‘We don’t pay him to assault the guests.’ Barry indicated the papers on his desk with a thin little smile. I picked up a fistful of them.
