A Friend of the Family Read online

  Love to Monica. And love to you.

  Your dad X

  Dear Mon

  Sunday 8 April 2001

  Dear Mon,

  By the time you get this letter I will be on a plane and on my way back to England. I’m really sorry to bugger off like this without saying goodbye properly, but, as you know, the past few weeks have been quite stressful for me and the more stressful things got the more we seemed to be arguing. Losing my job was just the last straw and I can’t see any reason to be here any more. I haven’t made the life for myself over here I was hoping for. I’ve just got stuck in a rut doing crap jobs and hanging out with the same people and as time goes by I miss my life back at home more and more. I miss my mum and dad. I miss my brothers. I miss just sitting on the sofa with Sean watching The Simpsons and I miss all my old friends. So much has happened since I’ve been here with you – Sean’s had a book published, Tony’s got divorced, and now Mum and Dad are having a big anniversary party back home. I don’t want to miss it and I don’t want to be away from my family any more. I miss England, too. I miss the weather and the TV and the people. I know I should have waited till you got home, talked to you face to face, but I’ve tried that before and you know how things always turn out – you go into mental meltdown, I try to make you feel better, we end up staying together.

  Things started off so great for you and me, Mon. Meeting you was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me and coming to Oz with you was the greatest adventure of my life, but it’s over now. Finished. I’ve never really managed to make you happy, Monica – you know that and I know that. I think you’ll agree with me when I say that our relationship really ended ages ago. I don’t know what’s kept us together for so long. I think it might be a combination of fear and habit. You were such a strong person when I first met you, Monica, but you’ve let me make you weak. I can’t hold you up any more. You’ve got so much going for you – you’re so funny and cool and clever. It’s only your own insecurities that are holding you back – and me. You can make a go of things in Oz, I know you can. You’ve just got to get out of your shell and into the world, become the person I met in Leicester Square all those years ago.

  I love you, Mon, I really do. You’re one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known, but it’s time for me to go home and it’s time for you to get on with your life without me. I wish you happiness and success. I’ll think of you for ever, Mon. Good luck.

  Ned XX

  PS: Enc: $250 for the next month’s rent. I’ve also left you my football and my PlayStation, and the Fatboy Slim tickets are in my top left-hand drawer. There’s some hash in the coffee jar next to the phone. I’ve sold my car to Spencer. And if you find my Titleist golfballs you can have them.

  Unbridled Parental Joy at Prodigal Homecoming

  It was a perfectly miserable April morning when Ned finally came home. The city cowered glumly under a thick grey blanket of cloud and the air smelt of damp brickwork and diesel.

  London, thought Ned, staring at the back end of a used-car depot through the misted-up window of a black cab. Look at it. Just look at it.

  It’s so beautiful…

  The cab sped seamlessly through the empty streets of south London, stopping pointlessly at deserted traffic lights, gliding across roundabouts. Ned smiled as the Crystal Palace mast hove into view – a symbol of homecoming since the day he was born.

  A few eerie, solitary figures moved through the mist that hung over Brockwell Park; early-morning dog-walkers and out-patients from the Marsden. A man in a red waterproof jacket practised t’ai chi under a just-budding horse-chestnut tree. Down Norwood Road, past West Norwood Cemetery and up on to Beulah Hill. And there it was: number 114. A two-storey Georgian villa, a bit like a child’s drawing of a house. Steps up to a greying stone portico, large, stripped-oak front door, sash windows on either side. It was looking tattier than ever. Flaps of cream stucco peeled from the walls, last year’s autumnal fall was still heaped in mulchy piles up against the front wall and rivulets of green mould streaked the paintwork.

  The old bubble car that Tony had bought with his first pay-cheque when he was seventeen sat half-shrouded under a sun-bleached tarpaulin on the front lawn. In front of the bubble car sat Sean’s Vespa, once the apple of his eye and the centre of his universe, now a mildewed and pitiful-looking creature, slouched defeatedly against an old set of Formica-topped drawers. Edwardian, Victorian and Georgian chimney stacks sat in a kind of Stonehenge arrangement on the other side, and between the detritus all manner of robust-looking weeds had taken root.

  Ned had once brought a friend home from university who lived in the area too. He’d looked rather uncertain as Ned ascended the front steps, jangling his door keys. ‘You live here?’ he’d said. ‘Uh-huh,’Ned had said. ‘Shit – I always thought this place was a squat.’ Which was, Ned could see with his newfound objectivity, exactly what it looked like.

  He slung his rucksack over his shoulder and crept quietly up the path, kicking a sheet of old newspaper out of the way as he walked. His key in the lock sounded familiar, like it had been just hours since he’d last heard the sound. Even after all this time he still had the knack, turning the key at just the right angle and with just enough of a flick of the wrist, and then the front door swung slowly open.

  Mayhem. Total and utter mayhem. He smiled wryly to himself and sidestepped a large stuffed rabbit, approximately the size of a Rottweiler, which for some strange reason was wearing Tony’s Jim’ll Fix It badge and had a packet of rolling tobacco on its lap. Walking into the Londons’ house from the grey street outside was like leaping from monochrome to vivid Technicolor. The bleak exterior of the house masked an interior that made the word ‘eclectic’ seem a little puny in its powers of description.

  Bernie and Gerry had a very laissez-faire attitude to interiors and made no effort whatsoever to exert any kind of control over their possessions. It wasn’t that they had no taste. There were flashes of class, style and downright Elle Decoration in places. Gerry was an antique-silver dealer with a long-established stand at Grays in South Molton Street, and Bernie was a jewellery buyer for Alders in Clapham Junction. They knew nice stuff when they saw it. The problem was that they also managed to turn a blind eye to some truly grim stuff. Like the cut-crystal vase with a small ceramic cat sitting on the rim, a Christmas gift from Tony’s ex-parents-in-law. It had pride of place on the mantelpiece, even though Bernie had hated it on sight and even though there was zero possibility of said ex-parents-in-law ever setting foot in their home again. Bernie had simply forgotten that she hated it. Ditto the carpet, which had been in the house when they’d bought it, thirty years ago, and was of the classic British ‘swirl and square’ design in violent hues of mustard and baby poo. The fireplace was still surrounded by the ‘Brick-alike’ false brickwork they’d put in when it was ‘modern’, in the seventies, and above it hung a rather nice late-Edwardian mirror that had fallen from its hook years earlier causing the glass to snap clean in two. Other people would have wailed about seven years’ bad luck and rushed it to the mirror emergency ward to be fixed. Bernie and Gerry had simply tutted, sighed and re-hung it, and the fractured reflection it gave of the living room became yet another aspect of their home that you just got used to.

  But what really set Ned’s parents’ house apart from other ill-furnished residences was the junk. Not just family detritus that had been hanging around waiting for a trip to Oxfam. Real, actual junk. Old chests of drawers, broken chairs, shop mannequins, boxes of rusting kitchen utensils, old Christmas cards, disembodied doll-parts, unidentifiable bits of oily machinery, mildewed curtains. And there were things that were just in the wrong place. A plastic swing-bin in the hallway. A pushchair in the living room. A shower curtain separating the downstairs toilet from the kitchen. A proper front door, replete with letterbox, knob and the number 15, hanging between the front and back rooms. A manky old hobbyhorse with matted hair and a drawn-on moustache stood sentinel at the
foot of the stairs.

  Gerry was a skip-hound. He could not pass a skip without having a little rummage and coming away with at least one small trophy, be that an old telephone or a piece of skirting board. And Bernie was just as bad, bringing home whimsical odds and ends from the display storeroom at Alders, things that were going to get thrown away otherwise. She felt sad, she said, thinking that for a few weeks these bits of sculpted polystyrene and plywood had been spotlit and dazzling, enticing customers into the store, and were then discarded like pubescent child stars.

  Ned walked from room to room for a while, absorbing the smells – French polish, tired carpeting, dog hair – and taking in the scenery – the junk, the cardboard boxes, the piles of magazines and abandoned embroidery – and thought to himself, This is me, all this clashing and clutter, this hoarding and piling. This is what made me and this is where I belong. And this was why he hadn’t phoned ahead, why he hadn’t told anyone he was coming home. Because he’d wanted to find home exactly as he’d left it three years ago and not as some fussed-over, tidied-up, bunting-festooned facsimile stuffed with aunts and uncles and neighbours and chicken-paste sandwiches and pork pies cut into quarters. Because he’d wanted to smell bed on his dad and see last night’s dinner plates piled up in the kitchen.

  He heard a scuffling, scrabbling noise coming from the other end of the hallway.

  ‘Goldie!’

  An ancient, threadbare golden retriever put his nose to the air, turned and made his way slowly but enthusiastically towards Ned, who dropped to his knees to greet him. Goldie was fifteen years old and looked like he too might have been found on a skip. He was wearing a scuffed Elizabethan collar; and just above his left eye was a shaved patch, zipped together with black plastic stitches, indicating yet another mishap. His eyes were thick and half-blind with cataracts. And he was opening and closing his mouth in an approximation of the bark he would never again be able to emit since a laryngectomy had left him mute four years ago. To compensate for his lack of vocal communication, he was wagging his tail so hard that he was almost back to front and his lips were stretched back into something that Ned had always sworn was a smile.

  ‘Ooh yes, ooooh yes. Goldie boy, I’m home – I’m home!’Ned grabbed the ruff of fur that poked out from under the collar and scratched him good and hard, trying politely to ignore the fact that dear old Goldie hummed to high heaven.

  He took off his boots and tiptoed quietly up the stairs, his socked feet instinctively missing the creaky bits and the ever-dangerous ‘seventh step’, which had remained unfixed since Gerry fell through it years ago when chasing Tony upstairs to give him a hiding.

  He stopped at the top of the stairs to look at all the old framed photographs on the landing walls, yellowed and pinkish with age and sun. Ned, Tony and Sean on the beach at Margate, Bernie in a straw hat, Sean on a carousel at the local fair, Tony and Ned sitting on a step in nylon shorts with sunburnt noses, the three of them in their first Holy Communion outfits – snugly fitting white shorts, starchy white shirts and bow-ties. The family likeness was uncanny. All three of them with the same bog-standard brown hair, triangular noses, determined chins, blue eyes and sticky-outy ears. Ned, skinny like his dad; Tony and Sean, slightly sturdier like their mum. Ned smiled at the images, so much a part of him, and made his way to the end of the landing, to his parents’ bedroom.

  His parents’ bedroom was, in some ways, the hub of the house. The bed was where they all used to congregate on weekend mornings, watching children’s television and eating their cereal while Mum and Dad went through the papers and drank leaf tea that brewed in a pot on the bedside table.

  The door was open – there was no such thing as a closed door in the Londons’ house – and the sound of Bernie’s snoring was now almost deafening. He pushed the door slowly and peaked around it to have a look at them. Their bed was a huge lace-festooned extravaganza of a thing that Bernie had bought from Biba in the seventies. It was four-poster and canopied with bits of twirly wrought iron all over the place. Bernie had attached things to the lace over the years – silk flowers, feathers, rosettes, tiny wire birds. Underneath this ornate marquee of a bed lay his parents. Ned felt a lump in his throat when he looked at them. His father was curled up on his side with his hands tucked under his cheek, like a small child. His head was the same shape as a rugby ball, covered from chin to crown in snowy-white, close-cropped hair with a couple of ruddy bare patches where his cheekbones were. His glasses and a Patrick O’Brian novel sat on his bedside table.

  Ned’s mother lay flat on her back, her ropey, honey coloured hair spread out around her, her green polyester nightie rising and falling with each voluminous snore, a Virgin Atlantic eye-mask attached to her head with black elastic and her unlined cheeks gleaming with night-cream. Her glasses and a Maya Angelou book sat on her bedside table.

  ‘Mum, Dad,’ he whispered, loudly.

  Dad twitched but remained firmly asleep.

  ‘Mum, Dad, it’s me. Wake up,’ he whispered a bit louder, and approached the bed on tiptoe.

  Mum grunted and turned on to her side and Dad twitched again.

  Ned prodded his father, who woke up, dramatically and suddenly, opened his eyes, stared straight at Ned, muttered something incomprehensible and then turned over on to his other side and farted.

  Ned sighed and decided to try again later. He headed towards his bedroom.

  His was the only one of the boys’ rooms that hadn’t been overrun by general junk overflow. Because he’d never moved out. Even when he’d left three years ago, he hadn’t actually been leaving home. He’d had every intention of being back within six months. He was aware that some might find it strange that at his age he would willingly choose to live in his parental home. But why shouldn’t he? It was a great house, in a great location just twenty minutes on the 68 Express to the centre of town, his parents were the coolest parents in existence and he loved it here. Why fork out rent for some shitty flatshare or be lumbered with a ball-breaking mortgage? No – he was giving himself until he was thirty before he even began to think about moving out.

  He pushed open his bedroom door, his heart full of anticipation and warmth. He turned slightly to locate the light switch, flicked it downwards and then yelled out at the top of his voice when a man suddenly sat bolt upright in his bed. A very pale man with dyed black hair cut into an improbably geometric flat-top, wearing a selection of earrings and with a tattoo of a cobweb across his neck.

  ‘Jesus Fucking Christ? said Ned, clasping his heart with his hand.

  ‘Urgh?’ said the man in the bed.

  ‘Jesus Fucking Christ – who the fuck are you?’

  The man squinted at Ned for a moment, one hand reaching across to an ashtray on the bedside table for a half-smoked fag butt. He put it to his lips, lit it with a Zippo, inhaled and then clicked his fingers and smiled. ‘Ned?’ he said. His voice was deep and gravelly.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Ned, still stretched back against the bedroom door, his eyebrows somewhere near his hairline.

  The man in the bed exhaled and then broke into a painful, hacking smoker’s cough. He rested the fag back in the ashtray and pulled himself from the bed, still coughing. He was wearing black underpants and was very pale and unbelievably lean – solid muscle with just a hint of flesh stretched over the top, comparable, Ned thought, to the physique of a greyhound. There were more tattoos. A Confederate flag on his forearm, a line drawing of Marilyn on his upper arm and the words ‘Live Fast Die Young’ across his hairless chest.

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ He took Ned’s limp hand and shook it. ‘I’m Gervase,’ he said and then wandered back to the bed and his smouldering cigarette. He started hacking even harder, then, producing all sorts of vivid sound-effects through his nostrils and throat.

  ‘Yeah, but – who are you?’

  ‘Didn’t Bernie tell you?’

  Ned didn’t like the way he said ‘Bernie’ with so much familiarity. He shook his head numbly.
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  ‘I’m the lodger.’

  ‘Lodger?’

  ‘Yeah – you know – me pay money, me get room.’

  ‘Yeah, but – this is my room.’

  ‘That, Ned,’ said Gervase, stubbing out his cigarette and pulling a fresh one from a packet of Chesterfields, ‘is debatable.’And then he wandered towards the washbasin in the corner of the bedroom, leant down over it and in one practised action hawked up the contents of his lungs.

  Lose Weight Now – Ask Me How

  It was the usual scenario: Millie, strong thighs clamped around a white stallion, thick chestnut hair flowing, never-ending beach, foamy waves crashing against the shore. Tony, slim, in white linen, lying in a hammock, watching her. There might have been a bird of some kind, a blue bird. He wasn’t sure.

  She dismounted her horse and approached, a half-smile playing on her lips, one eyebrow slightly cocked. There was sand dusted across her cheek. It glittered like ground diamonds. He reached out to brush it away and as he reached, she grabbed his wrist and slapped him, hard, across the face. And then, with the same hand she’d used to hit him, she delved into his trousers and held him. And it felt like he was being held by her throat, her warm, red throat. He couldn’t explain it any other way. Her breath was on his cheek, her eyes were roaming his face, her hot hand throat-like on him, up and down. She leant in to his ear and as she moved him up and down she whispered, ‘You are a god, Anthony. You are a god.’