Ralph's Party Read online

  Karl and Siobhan – a strictly small-time couple. That’s how Siobhan had always seen them, and she knew plenty of people who were jealous of their way of life, and their relationship. She couldn’t have wanted for any more really – they had a lovely flat which they’d been lucky enough to buy for next to nothing before Battersea had up and come, a beautiful dog, friends they’d known since university, a relationship full of laughter and ease that was, their friends informed them, the strongest they knew, an example to everyone else, a yardstick. Neither of them was going to suffer from executive burn-out. The idea that all this might change, would change, filled Siobhan with dread.

  Suddenly it would matter that she was getting fat, Karl would notice that her life was going nowhere. He would get back from his Drive Time slot, hyped and driven, full of fame and crappy Top Ten pop songs and find Siobhan’s bulk sprawled all over the sofa, glued to Coronation Street, her belly swollen from the enormous meal she’d eaten while he was out because she didn’t like to eat in front of Karl any more, and what would he think?

  Would he still drive the little black 1966 Embassy he’d shipped back from India the year after university? Would he still wear his old American Classics chinos with the split on the knee and the scuffed old Bass Weejun loafers he’d had since before she even knew him? Would he still put on his funny Tibetan socks with the leather soles when he got in and make them both a cup of tea and watch documentaries on the sofa with Rosanne on his lap?

  Would he still love her?

  It was cold now – winter had stopped knocking tentatively at the door, had forced its way in and made itself at home. Siobhan looked up in time to see a wispy violet cloud pass over the moon and then disappear back into the blackness.

  ‘Come on, baby, let’s go back.’

  They moved briskly up Almanac Road towards the light and warmth of number thirty-one. As Siobhan felt in her coat pocket for her front-door keys she heard voices and looked down to see a pretty dark-haired girl leaving the basement flat below theirs. There’d been visitors in and out of that flat all night. She wondered what was going on.

  She unclipped Rosanne’s lead in the hall and the dog dashed into the living room and straight on to Karl’s lap. Karl hugged her and let her lick his face and Siobhan watched the scene from the hall while she tugged at her too-tight coat sleeves. She smiled deeply and warmly to herself and allowed the scene to etch itself firmly on the slate of her mind, allowed the joy of her current life to overcome her, because, she knew for sure, it was all about to change.

  Chapter Three

  Ralph and Smith had been best friends for fifteen years. They had been enemies for four years before that, since day one at grammar school, Smith offended by Ralph’s creative aura and vaguely effeminate manner and Ralph threatened by Smith’s easily gained popularity and effortless academic success. They kept different circles of friends and, on the rare occasion that their paths crossed, they sniffed and snarled at each other like unfriendly dogs passing in the park, their friends keeping them at bay like impatient owners tugging on leads.

  It took a girl to bring them together. She was a foreign-exchange student from Baltimore called Shirelle and she was staying with Smith and his family for two months. She arrived in London in May wearing flared jeans with turn-ups and a hairy turquoise woollen jumper with a cowl neck. Her hair was long and plain, like her face.

  She spotted Ralph getting off the bus on her first morning at Croydon Grammar. His trousers were tighter than school rules allowed, his dark-blue blazer was held together at the back with a safety-pin and his hair was dirtily tousled, sticking up in meringue-like peaks sculpted with soap. He had a smudge of something black and sooty under each eye. Smith thought he looked like a right tosser. Shirelle fell in love.

  Over the course of that term Shirelle became Skunk. She shaved her hair and dyed it black with a peroxide streak running through the middle. She spent her allowance in Carnaby Street on fishnets and studded belts and leather skirts. She smoked and drank snakebites and followed Ralph around like a lovesick Rottweiler. She asked him over to the Smith residence with the invitation ‘Fuck me,’ an offer that, although it scared him half witless, Ralph as a hormonal young man of sixteen felt he could not refuse.

  Smith as a hormonal young man of sixteen was both fascinated and repulsed by these sessions and the fact that they were happening, audibly, under his own suburban roof. Any previously held notion of Ralph’s dubious sexuality was well and truly rubbished by the noises that emanated from the Smiths’ spare room. As time went by, his curiosity got the better of him and one afternoon, feigning interest in the phone book in the hall, he watched Ralph saunter down the stairs, tucking his T-shirt into his combat trousers in an awe-inspiringly macho way, smelling of something unfamiliar and exciting.

  ‘So, what’s going down, then, Ralphie-boy?’ Smith enquired, in what he hoped sounded like a casually offhand, sneeringly condescending manner. ‘How’s it going with the skunk-woman?’

  Ralph glanced ceilingwards. ‘Fancy a walk?’ he’d said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets.

  And that was that. Shirelle went home at the end of term, despite her threats to stay and bear Ralph’s children, bring them up in the squat they would share with the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie Sioux, take heroin and die of an overdose, and Ralph and Smith became friends.

  Theirs had developed into a friendship based around the ability to comfortably spend hours in each other’s company without the need to speak or move. Now, as it had been at school, they each maintained different circles of friends and took part in different activities outside the flat, but their time together there was a precious opportunity mutually to make no effort whatsoever, a form of behaviour that they found unacceptable to themselves and their friends in any other circumstance.

  Obviously they weren’t always silent. Sometimes they would discuss which channel to watch, occasionally they even bickered about it and conducted small tussles over the remote control when one felt the other lacked the judgement required for captaincy of such an important tool. And sometimes they would talk about women.

  Women were a pain in the arse, they were balls and chains, never pleased, always aggrieved. Smith and Ralph thought of themselves as nice blokes. They weren’t bastards, they didn’t have affairs or lie to women, or stand them up, or hit them, or expect them to perform menial tasks. They didn’t ignore their women when they were with their mates or go out with the lads and refuse to see them; they didn’t stick pictures of Melinda Messenger over their beds. They were nice blokes. Phoned when they said they’d phone, gave their girlfriends lifts, paid for things, didn’t demand sex, even handed out the odd compliment. Ralph and Smith tried to treat women as equals, they really did, but women just kept proving to them that they weren’t worthy of it – they were a strange, alien breed with a list of unreasonable expectations as long as the M1 and a feast of paranoias and insecurities that Smith and Ralph were expected to deal with, daily. And then of course there were the women who weren’t like that. They were the ones you fell in love with almost immediately, told all your mates about, made fantastical plans for the future with and then felt surprised when three weeks later they dumped you in a pool of your own foolishness and went off with someone who would have affairs, lie to them, stand them up, hit them and expect them to perform menial tasks.

  Ralph, blessed with an insatiable libido, couldn’t do without the sex and still threw himself regularly into the fray, emerging every now and then broken and crippled, hobbling and limping, his over-enthusiastic genitalia still pointing proudly like a bayonet towards the next battle. But Smith had given up fighting this frightening nineties version of the battle of the sexes years ago and retired, bruised but intact, to his corner.

  Smith was saving himself anyway, so he said. Saving himself for a woman about whom he knew nearly nothing, a woman with whom he’d never progressed beyond the occasional awkward exchange of smiles, waves and nods, a woman who, in his opinion,
encapsulated in one blissful arrangement of cells, organs, pigment and genes, the absolute epitome of female loveliness. For five years he’d imagined a day when their paths would cross. He’d bestow upon her a charming smile of teeth and self-confidence, engage her briefly in witty conversation, extend an invitation to dinner at the wonderful restaurant that had just opened up in St James, smile again at her acceptance, drape his overcoat over his shoulder and walk away with a well-paced swagger.

  Instead, he’d spent five years grimacing gruesomely at her like a socially and intellectually inept toad, sometimes raising a limp, sweaty hand to wave at her if he chanced upon her from a distance and occasionally adding yet more to his plight by tripping over obstacles, dropping fragile objects, missing steps and failing to find his door keys whenever he was within her sights. He was in love with a vision of blonde, honeyed gorgeousness, a tall, slender, toned slip of perfection that no other girl he’d encountered before or since had come close to matching in any way. He was in love with a girl called Cheri, a girl who lived two floors above in the flat at the top of the house, a girl who shared his address. Until he made her his, no other girl would do.

  Smith’s love for Cheri remained undiminished by her haughty arrogance, her sneering indifference to his attempts at friendliness. It remained unsullied by the frequency of middle-aged men visiting her flat, their Porsches and BMW s double-parked on Almanac Road, by the thought of wives left at home while their husbands wooed his beloved with gifts of jewellery and perfume and dinner at all the best restaurants in London. Smith failed to see beyond her beauty; all he knew was her cool exterior, the layers of self-protective skin she wore to hide the nothingness inside.

  While Smith waited on a fantasy that he was emotionally incapable of engineering into reality, Ralph filled his life with a succession of vacuous blondes with accommodating beds, and the two of them killed time … until what? Until they were too old to do anything about it? Until all the opportunities in life had gone, like unclaimed raffle prizes, to other people?

  Smith knew that they needed a change. Things had been the same for too long. They were grinding each other down. He’d put an ad in Loot, one in the Standard and a card in the newsagent’s window. And along had come Jem.

  As far as Ralph was concerned, things hadn’t changed too much in the week since Jem had moved in. She was out most nights, and when she was around she was barely noticeable. There were a few strange things in the bathroom, like cotton-wool balls and jumbo boxes of Tampax, and the fridge had suddenly become home to fresh vegetables, chicken breasts and skimmed milk. But apart from surface changes, it was still, to all intents and purposes, the same flat.

  Except it felt different. The dynamics had changed. Ralph no longer felt comfortable walking around in nothing but his boxers; he became self-conscious about his toilet habits, which had always been protracted and unpleasant-smelling but which Smith had learned to live with a long time ago. And, more unexpectedly, Ralph was curious, very curious. Here was a stranger, in his home, a stranger about whom he knew no more than a first name, a strange woman at that, with all the exotic and delightful paraphernalia that surrounded women – knickers, bras, make-up, heels, roll-on deodorants in pink bottles, hairbrushes entangled with long, clean-smelling hairs, Pearl Drops, lacy things, silky things, fluffy things. He’d spent many hours extracting varying degrees of enjoyment from the women in his life, but he’d never, in all his thirty-odd years, lived with one before.

  And now there was one in his flat. His curiosity was aflame and, really, he had only peeped into Jem’s bedroom. He hadn’t searched through her things or opened drawers or anything, just walked around a bit and looked at stuff. He was sure there wasn’t anything wrong with that. If there’d been anything she hadn’t wanted anyone to see she’d have put it away somewhere, out of sight. And besides, she’d left the door open. Ralph didn’t like to think of himself as a snoop and was feeling slightly guilty now about his little investigation, especially in the light of what he’d seen.

  Ralph had intended to spend this week at the studio. He hadn’t been for over three months now. He’d made that brochure-design job for the travel company last more than a fortnight when he could have finished it in a week and had spent the last ten days or so cocooned in his room working his way through all thirty-three levels of some computer game or other. He’d reached the end this morning and, after the rapturous programme of congratulations and flattery from the computer had died down, he’d sat back in his chair and realized with some sadness that he now, officially, had nothing to do.

  He’d persuaded himself that at eleven-forty it was way too late to make it to the studio but that he would definitely go tomorrow. He’d thought about the possibility of calling Claudia at work and decided against it – he always called her at the wrong time: ‘Not now, Ralph, I’m in the middle of something’; ‘Not now, Ralph – I’m on my way out’; ‘Not now, Ralph – I’ve only just got in.’ He imagined Claudia, in one of her silly shiny suits, busily walking in and out of the office all day, endlessly, like a film on a loop. It made him smile to himself.

  The usual cloud of boredom descended upon him, and he decided to go for a short walk. As he strolled down Northcote Road, past market stalls of jewel-coloured autumn flowers and cheap plastic toys and joss sticks and African beads he began to think about Jem. He really hadn’t wanted another flatmate – he liked his lifestyle with Smith, an easy life, watching telly, getting stoned – but it was Smith’s flat and so he’d gone along with it, and anyway, Jem seemed quite nice and he trusted Smith’s judgement.

  The first week had been a bit awkward. Smith and he weren’t very good at making an effort with strangers, and he’d felt guilty ordering that home-delivery Indian without asking Jem if she wanted any and then embarrassed when he’d heard her slipping into the bathroom moments after he’d made that festering rodent-corpse smell in there. She’d offered to cook for them tonight, and although he appreciated the gesture he found himself rather selfishly resenting this disruption of his normal routine. Monday night was his staying-in night and he liked it to be as socially undemanding as possible; when Smith was out he quite often switched on the answerphone and ruthlessly screened his calls. But it was nice of Jem to offer and he would try to rise to the occasion.

  To give his walk a purpose he went into his local overpriced ‘corner shop’, one of those ubiquitous upmarket chains which sell bags of imported tortilla chips for extortionate amounts of money but never stock anything you really want to eat, which sell only one kind of washing powder but at least twenty-two brands of Mexican chilli sauce. Ralph didn’t know why he frequented these places – they were so obviously designed to line the pockets of some youthful laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank ex-City-boy types (‘Ere, Paul, let’s buy some retail space and flog the yuppies a load of wine and tortilla chips for three times the recommended retail price’) and they annoyed him intensely. He bought himself a packet of Marlboro, although he had two packs at the flat, and walked back to Almanac Road.

  Lunchtime television consisted of a selection of cookery programmes and Australian soaps, and Ralph found himself mindlessly absorbed in some frenetic shopping-channel programme, watching a camp guy with a tape measure around his neck feverishly extolling the myriad virtues of a horrible acrylic tunic with beading around the neck: ‘Not just one, not two, but three, three different types of beading. You’ve got the bugle beading here, the button beading around the appliqué and, look – this beautiful tear-drop beading on both sides!’

  Ralph wondered what planet these presenters came from and what drugs the channel fed them to make them sound so sincerely and genuinely excited about the naff and uninspiring products they were being asked to pay homage to.

  He switched off the television and felt silence engulf the room. He felt empty and useless. He had nothing to do. He picked up a mug of lukewarm tea he’d made earlier and a packet of Tuc biscuits and walked aimlessly into the hall. It was then that he found h
imself, almost subconsciously, pushing open the door to Jem’s little room.

  It was strange to see the spare room full of someone’s things. He’d only ever seen it empty before. It already had an unfamiliar smell. Jem’s belongings lay semi-unpacked in boxes around the edges of the room – empty boxes had been flattened and folded and left near the door. The bed was unmade and there was a blue cotton dressing-gown draped across it with a white Chinese dragon embroidered on the back.

  Ralph stepped further into the room to examine a pile of CD s balanced on the table next to Jem’s bed. He was impressed with her taste in music, like his, still stuck somewhere in 1979: the Jam, Madness, the Cure, Generation X, the Ramones – he might ask if he could borrow them. Next to the CDs was a framed photograph of Jem in a thick winter coat, her nose reddened by the cold, crouching to hug a handsome golden retriever. Ralph looked closely at the photograph, realizing that he couldn’t really remember what Jem looked like – he hadn’t paid her much attention – and that she was extremely pretty. Not particularly his type, though. He always went for blondes, blondes with long legs and designer clothes and attitude problems, blondes with names like Georgia, Natasha and, of course, Claudia, blondes who worked in PR or for art galleries or fashion houses, blondes who wished he was wealthier, trendier, tidier, smarter, earlier, later, cooler – someone else.