David Nicholls - One Day

Road. His head is resting against the window as he hears Pete and Jack chickening out, offering up the usual excuses: it‘s late, they have work in the morning. ‗I‘ve got a wife and kids you know!‘ says Pete jokily; they‘re like hostages pleading for release. Dexter feels the party disintegrating around him but doesn‘t have the energy to fight it, so he stops the cab in King‘s Cross and sets them free.

‗Come back with us, Dex mate? Yeah?‘ says Jack, peering in at the window with that stupid concerned look on his face.

‗Nah, I‘m alright.‘

‗You can always stay at mine?‘ says Pete. ‗Sleep on the sofa?‘ but Dexter knows he doesn‘t real y mean it. As Pete has pointed out, he‘s got a wife and kids, so why would he want this monster in his house? Sprawled stinking and unconscious on the sofa, weeping while Pete‘s kids try to get ready for school.

Grief has made an idiot of Dexter Mayhew once again, and why should he impose this on his friends? Best just stick with strangers tonight. And so he waves goodbye and orders the taxi onto a bleak, shuttered side street off

Farringdon Road, and Nero‘s night-club.

The outside is marked by black marble pil ars, like a funeral directors. Fal ing from the cab, he worries that the bouncers won‘t let him in, but in fact he is their perfect customer: wel dressed and stupid-drunk. Dexter grins ingratiatingly at the big man with the shaved head and the goatee, hands over his cash and is waved through the door and into the main room. He steps into the gloom.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a visit to a strip club would have seemed raffishly post-modern; ironic and titil ating at the same time. But not tonight. Tonight Nero‘s night-club resembles a business-class departure lounge in the early Eighties. Al silver chrome, low black leather sofas and plastic pot plants, it is a particularly suburban notion of decadence. An amateurish mural, copied from a children‘s textbook, of slave-girls bearing trays of grapes, covers the back wal . Polystyrene Roman pil ars sprout here and there, and standing around the room in unflattering cones of orange light on what look like low coffee tables are the strippers, the dancers, the artistes, al performing in various styles to the blaring R & B; here a languid jig, there a sort of narcoleptic mime act, another girl performing startling aerobic high-kicks, al of them naked or nearly so. Beneath them sit the men, suited mainly, ties undone, slumped on the slippery booths with heads lol ing backwards as if their necks had been crisply snapped: his people. Dexter takes the room in, his eyes slipping in and out of focus, grinning stupidly as he feels lust and shame combine in a narcotic rush. He stumbles on the stairs, steadies himself on the greasy chrome rail, then stands and shoots his cuffs and weaves between the podiums towards the bar where a

hard-faced woman tel s him single drinks can‘t be bought, just bottles, vodka or champagne, a hundred quid each. He laughs at the audacious banditry and hands over his credit card with a flourish, as if chal enging them to do their worst.

He takes his bottle of champagne – a Polish brand that comes in a pail of tepid water – and two plastic glasses, carrying them to a black velvet booth where he lights a cigarette and starts to drink in earnest. The ‗champagne‘ is as sugary as a boiled sweet, apple-flavoured and barely sparkling, but it doesn‘t matter. His friends have gone now and there is no-one to take the glass from his hand or distract him with conversation, and after the third glass the time itself begins to take on that strange elastic quality, speeding up and slowing down, moments disappearing altogether as his vision fades to black and back up again.

He is about to slip into sleep, or unconsciousness, when he feels a hand on his arm and finds himself facing a skinny girl in a very short, sheer red dress with long blonde hair, shading into black an inch from her scalp. ‗Mind if I have a glass of champagne?‘ she says, sliding into the booth. She has very bad skin beneath the thick foundation and speaks with a South African accent, which he compliments her on.

‗You‘ve got a lovely voice!‘ he shouts against the music. She sniffs and wrinkles her nose and introduces herself as Barbara in a way that suggests that

‗Barbara‘ was the first name that came to hand. She is slight with bony arms and smal breasts which he stares at baldly, though she doesn‘t seem to mind. A bal et dancer‘s physique. ‗Are you a bal et dancer?‘ he says, and she sniffs and shrugs. He has decided that he real y, real y likes Barbara.

‗What brings you here then?‘ she asks mechanical y.

‗It‘s my anniversary!‘ he says.

‗Congratulations,‘ she says, absently, pouring herself some champagne and raising her plastic glass in the air.

‗Aren‘t you going to ask me what it‘s the anniversary of?‘

he says, though he must be slurring his speech pretty badly because she asks him to repeat it three times. Best try something more straightforward. ‗My wife had an accident exactly one year ago today,‘ he says. Barbara gives a nervous smile and starts to look around as if regretting sitting down. Dealing with drunks is part of the job but this one is plainly weird, out celebrating some accident, then whining on incoherently and at great length about some driver not looking where he was going, a court case that she can‘t understand and can‘t be bothered to understand.

‗Do you want me to dance for you?‘ she says, if only to change the subject.

‗What?‘ He fal s towards her. ‗What did you say?‘ His breath is rank and his spit flecks her skin.

‗I said do you want me to dance for you, cheer you up a bit? You look like you might need cheering up.‘

‗Not now. Later maybe,‘ he says, slapping his hand on her knee now, which is as hard and unyielding as a banister.

He is speaking again, not normal speech but a tangle of unconnected mawkish, sour remarks that he has made before – only thirty-eight years old we were trying for a baby the driver walked away scot-free wonder what that bastard‘s doing right this minute taking away my best friend hope he suffers only thirtyeight where‘s the justice what about me what am I meant to do now Barbara tel me what am I supposed to do now? He comes to a sudden halt.

Barbara‘s head is lowered and she‘s staring at her hands, which she holds devoutly in her lap as if in prayer and for a moment he thinks he has moved her with his story, this beautiful stranger, touched her deeply in some way.

Perhaps she‘s praying for him, perhaps she‘s even crying –

he has made this poor girl cry and he feels a deep affection for this Barbara. He puts his hand over hers in gratitude, and realises that she is texting. While he has been talking about Emma, she has had her mobile phone in her lap and is writing a text. He feels a sudden flush of rage and revulsion.

‗What are you doing?‘ he asks, voice trembling.

‗ What? ‘

He is shouting now. ‗I said what the fuck are you doing?‘

He swipes wildly at her hands, sending the phone skittering across the floor. ‗I was talking to you!‘ he shouts, but she is shouting back now, cal ing him a nutter, a loony, then beckoning to the bouncer. It‘s the same immense goateed man who had been so friendly at the door, but now he just puts his massive arm around Dexter‘s shoulders, the other round his waist, scooping him up like a child and carrying him across the room. Heads turn, amused, as Dexter bawls over his shoulder, you stupid, stupid cow, you don’t understand, and he catches one last glance of Barbara, both middle fingers raised and jabbing upwards, laughing at him. The fire exit is kicked open and he is out once again on the street.

‗My credit card! You‘ve got my fucking credit card!‘ he shouts, but like everyone else the bouncer just laughs at him, and pul s the fire exit closed.

Enraged now, Dexter steps straight off the pavement and waves his arms at the many black cabs that head westward, but none of them wil stop for him, not while he‘s staggering in the road like this. He takes a deep breath, steps back onto the pavement, leans against a wal and checks his pockets. His wal et has gone, and so have his keys, to his flat and his car. Whoever‘s got the keys and wal et wil have his address too, it‘s on his driving licence, he‘l have to have the locks changed, and Sylvie‘s meant to be coming round at lunch time. She‘s bringing Jasmine. He kicks at the wal , rests his head against the bricks, checks his pockets again, finds a bal ed-up twenty-pound note in his trouser pocket, damp from his own urine. Twenty quid is enough to get him safely home. He can wake up the neighbours, get the spare key, sleep it off.

But twenty quid is also enough to get him into town, with change for another drink or two. Home or oblivion? Forcing himself to stand straight, he hails a cab and sends it into Soho.

Through a plain red door in an al ey off Berwick Street he finds an il icit underground dive that he used to go to ten, fifteen years ago as a very last resort. It‘s a grubby windowless room, dark and dense with smoke and people drinking from cans of Red Stripe. He crosses to the formica table that doubles as a bar, using the crowd for support, but then discovers that he has no cash, has given the last of it to the taxi-driver, lost the change. He‘l have to do what he always used to do when he had lost al his money, pick up the nearest drink and neck it. He walks back into the room, ignoring the abuse of the people he stumbles into, grabs what looks like a forgotten can and drains what‘s left, then boldly takes another and jams himself in a corner, sweating, his head against a loudspeaker, his eyes closed, the drink running down his chin and onto his shirt and suddenly there‘s a hand against his chest pushing him back into the corner and someone wants to know what the fuck he thinks he‘s playing at, nicking people‘s drinks.

He opens his eyes: the man before him is old, red-eyed, squat like a toad.

‗Actual y, I think you‘l find it‘s mine,‘ says Dexter, then sniggers at how unconvincing the lie is. The man snarls, bares his yel ow teeth and shows his fist, and Dexter realises what he wants: he wants the man to hit him. ‗Get your hands off me, you ugly old cunt,‘ he slurs, and then there‘s a blur and a noise like static, and he is lying on the floor with his hands to his face as the man kicks at his stomach and stamps on his back with his heel. Dexter tastes the foul carpet as the kicks come down, and then suddenly he is floating, face down, six men lifting him by the legs and arms, like at school when it was his birthday and al his mates threw him in the pool and he is whooping and laughing as they carry him along the corridor through a restaurant kitchen and out into the al ey

where he is bowled into a huddle of plastic bins. Stil laughing he rol s off onto the hard, filthy ground and feels the blood in his mouth, the hot iron taste of it, and he thinks, wel , it‘s what she would have wanted. This is what she would have wanted.

15th July 2005

Hello there, Dexter!

I hope you don‘t mind me writing. It‘s a weird thing to do, isn‘t it, writing a letter in these days of t‘internet! but it felt more appropriate. I wanted to sit down and do something to mark the day, and this seemed like the best thing.

So how are you? And how are you keeping? We spoke briefly at the memorial service, but I did not want to intrude as it was clear how tough that day was for you. Brutal, wasn‘t it? Like you, I‘m sure, I have been thinking of Emma all day. I‘m always finding myself thinking of her, but today is especially tough and I know you must find it tough too, but I wanted to drop you a line with my thoughts for what they are worth (i.e. not very much!!!!). Here goes then.

When Emma left me all those years ago, I thought my life would go to bits, and it did too for a couple of years. To be honest, I think I went a bit nuts. But then I met this girl in a shop where I was working and for our first date I took her to see me do some stand-up comedy. Afterwards she said please not to take this the wrong way but that I was a very, very bad comedian and that the best thing I could do was give it up and be myself instead. That moment was the moment that I fell in love with her and now we have been married for four years and have three amazing kids (one of each! Ha ha). We live in the teeming metropolis that is Taunton to be near my parents (i.e. free baby-sitting!!!). I work in a big insurance office now, working in the customer enquiries department. No doubt this will sound a bit dullsville to you, but I am good at it and we have a really good laugh. All things considered I am really happy. Our kids are a boy and two girls. I know you have a kid too.

Knackering, isn‘t it?!!!

But why am I telling you all this? We were never particularly good pals and you probably don‘t care very much what I am doing. I suppose if there is a reason for writing it is this.

After Emma left me I thought I was finished, but I wasn‘t, because I met Jacqui my wife. Now you‘ve lost Emma too, because I met Jacqui my wife. Now you‘ve lost Emma too, only you can never get her back, none of us can, but I just wanted to urge you not to give up. Emma always loved you, very, very much. For many years this caused me a great deal of pain and jealousy. I used to

overhear your phone-calls and watch you together at parties, and she always lit up and sparkled with you in a way she never did with me. I‘m ashamed to say I used to read her notebooks when she was out, and they were full of you and your friendship and I couldn‘t bear it. To be honest, mate, I didn‘t think you deserved her, but then I don‘t think any of us deserved her really. She was always going to be the smartest, kindest, funniest, loyalest person we would ever meet, and the fact of her not being here well it just isn‘t right.

So like I said, I didn‘t think you deserved her but I know from my brief contact with Emma that all that changed eventually. You were a shit and then you weren‘t a shit, and I know that in the years you finally got together that you made her very, very happy. She glowed, didn‘t she?

She just glowed with it all shiny and I would like to thank you for this and say no hard feelings mate and wish you best of luck for the rest of your life.

I am sorry if this letter is getting a bit weepy.

Anniversaries like this are hard for all of us, for her family and you especially, but I hate this date, and will always hate this day every year from now on whenever it comes round. My thoughts are with you today. I know you have a beautiful daughter and I hope you get some comfort and pleasure from her.

Well must close now! Be happy and be good and get on with life! Seize the day all that bollocks. I think that is what Emma would have wanted.

Best wishes (or at a push, love I suppose) Ian Whitehead

‗Dexter, can you hear me? Oh, God, what have you done?

Can you hear me Dex? Open your eyes, wil you?‘

When he wakes, Sylvie is there. Somehow he is lying on the floor of his flat, jammed between the sofa and the table, and she is standing awkwardly above him, trying to pul him out of the narrow space and get him into a sitting position.

His clothes are wet and sticky and he realises that he has been sick in his sleep. He is appal ed and ashamed but powerless to move as Sylvie grunts and gasps, her hands beneath his armpits.

‗Oh, Sylvie,‘ he says, struggling to help her. ‗I‘m sorry. I fucked up again.‘

‗Just sit up for me wil you, honey?‘

‗I‘m fucked up, Sylvie. I am so fucked up . . .‘

‗You‘l be fine, you need to sleep it off that‘s al . Oh, don‘t cry, Dexter. Listen to me, wil you?‘ She‘s kneeling with her hands on his face now, looking at him with a tenderness he rarely saw when they were married. ‗We‘l get you cleaned up and into bed, and you can sleep it off. Okay?‘

Glancing past her he sees a figure loitering anxiously in the doorway: his daughter. He groans and thinks he might be sick again, so powerful is the sudden spasm of shame.

Sylvie fol ows his gaze. ‗Jasmine sweetheart, please wait in the other room, wil you?‘ she says, as level y as possible. ‗Daddy‘s not feeling very wel .‘ Jasmine doesn‘t move. ‗I told you, go next door!‘ says Sylvie, panic rising in her voice.

He wants very much to say something to reassure Jasmine, but his mouth is swol en and bruised and he can‘t seem to form the words, and instead he lies back down, defeated. ‗Don‘t move,‘ says Sylvie, ‗Just stay exactly where you are,‘ and she leaves the room, taking their daughter with her. He closes his eyes, waiting, praying for al of this to pass. There are voices in the hal . Phone-cal s are made.

The next thing that he knows for sure is that he is in the back of a car, curled uncomfortably on the back seat beneath a tartan blanket. He pul s it tight around him – despite the warm day he can‘t seem to stop shivering – and realises that it‘s the old picnic blanket which, along with the smel of the car‘s scuffed burgundy upholstery, reminds him of family days out. With some difficulty he lifts his head to look out of the passenger window. They are on the motorway. Mozart plays on the radio. He sees the back of his father‘s head, fine silver-grey hair neatly trimmed apart from the tufts in his ears.

‗Where are we going?‘

‗I‘m taking you home. Go back to sleep.‘

His father has abducted him. For a moment he considers arguing: Take me back to London, I‘m fine, I‘m not a child. But the leather is warm against his face, he doesn‘t have the energy to move, let alone argue. He shivers once more, pul s the blanket up to his chin and fal s asleep.

He is woken by the sound of the wheels on the gravel of the large, sturdy family home. ‗In you come then,‘ says his father, opening the car door like a chauffeur. ‗Soup for tea!‘

and he walks towards the house, tossing the car keys jauntily into the air as he goes. Clearly he has decided to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary has

happened, and Dexter is grateful for this. Hunched and unsteady, he clambers from the car, shrugs off the picnic blanket and fol ows him inside.

In the smal downstairs bathroom he inspects his face in the mirror. His bottom lip is cut and swol en, and there‘s a large, yel ow-brown bruise down one side of his face. He tries to rol his shoulders, but his back aches, the muscles stretched and torn. He winces, then examines his tongue, ulcerous, bitten at the sides and coated with a grey mould.

He runs the tip of it over his teeth. They never feel clean these days, and he can smel his own breath reflecting back off the mirror. It has a faecal quality, as if something is decaying inside him. There are broken veins on his nose and cheek. He is drinking with a renewed sense of purpose, nightly and frequently during the day, and has gained a great deal of weight; his face is podgy and slack, his eyes permanently red and rheumy.

He rests his head against the mirror and exhales. In the years he was with Emma he sometimes wondered idly what life would be like if she weren‘t around; not in a morbid way, just pragmatical y, speculatively, because don‘t al lovers do this? Wonder what he would be without her? Now the answer is in the mirror. Loss has not endowed him with any kind of tragic grandeur, it has just made him stupid and banal. Without her he is without merit or virtue or purpose, a shabby, lonely, middle-aged drunk, poisoned with regret and shame. An unwanted memory rises up of that morning, of his own father and his ex-wife undressing him and helping him into the bath. In two weeks time he wil be forty-one, and his father is helping him into the bath. Why couldn‘t they just have taken him to hospital to have his stomach pumped?

There would have been more dignity in that.

In the hal way he can hear his father talking to his sister, shouting into the telephone. He sits on the edge of the bath.

It requires no effort to eavesdrop. In fact it‘s impossible not to hear.

‗He woke the neighbours, trying to kick his own door down. They let him in . . .

Sylvie found him on the floor . . . It seems he had a bit too much to drink that‘s al . . . just cuts and bruises . . . Absolutely no idea. Anyway, we‘ve cleaned him up. He‘l be fine in the morning. Do you want to come and say hel o?‘ In the bathroom, Dexter prays for a ‗no‘, but his sister clearly can see no pleasure in it either. ‗Fair enough, Cassie. Maybe give him a cal in the morning wil you?‘

When he is sure his father has gone, Dexter steps out into the hal and pads towards the kitchen. He drinks warm tap water from a dusty pint glass and looks out at the garden in the evening sun. The swimming pool is drained and covered

with a sagging blue tarpaulin, the tennis court scrappy and overgrown. The kitchen, too, has a musty smel .

The large family house has gradual y closed down room by room, so that now his father occupies just the kitchen, living room and his bedroom, but even so it is stil too large for him. His sister says that sometimes he sleeps on the sofa.

Concerned, they have talked to him about moving out, buying somewhere more manageable, a little flat in Oxford or London, but his father won‘t hear of it. ‗I intend to die in my own house if you don‘t mind,‘ he says, a line of argument that‘s too emotive to counter.

‗Feeling better then?‘ His father stands behind him.

‗A little.‘

‗What‘s that?‘ He nods towards Dexter‘s pint glass. ‗Gin, is it?‘

‗Just water.‘

‗Glad to hear it. I thought we‘d have soup tonight, seeing as how it‘s a special occasion. Could you manage a tin of soup?‘

‗I think so.‘

He holds two tins in the air. ‗Mul igatawny or Cream of Chicken?‘

So the two men shuffle around the large musty kitchen, a pair of widowers making more mess than is real y necessary in warming two cans of soup. Since living alone, his father‘s diet has reverted to that of an ambitious boy-scout: baked beans, sausages, fish-fingers; he has even been known to make himself a saucepan of jel y.

The phone rings in the hal . ‗Get that wil you?‘ says his father, mashing butter onto sliced white bread. Dexter hesitates. ‗It won‘t bite you, Dexter.‘

He goes into the hal and picks up. It‘s Sylvie. Dexter settles on the stairs. His ex-wife lives alone now, the relationship with Cal um having final y combusted just before Christmas time. Their mutual unhappiness, and a desire to protect Jasmine from this, has made them strangely close and for the first time since they got married they are almost friends.

‗How are you feeling?‘

‗Oh, you know. Bit embarrassed. Sorry about that.‘

‗That‘s alright.‘

‗I seem to remember you and Dad putting me in the bath.‘

Sylvie laughs. ‗He was very unfazed by it al . ―He‘s got nothing I‘ve not seen before!‖‘

Dexter smiles and winces at the same time. ‗Is Jasmine okay?‘

‗I think so. She‘s fine. She wil be fine. I told her you had food poisoning.‘

‗I‘l make it up to her. Like I said, I‘m sorry.‘

‗These things happen. Just don‘t ever, ever do it again, wil you?‘

Dexter makes a noise that sounds like ‗No, wel , we‘l see . . .‘ There is a silence. ‗I should go, Sylvie. Soup‘s burning.‘

‗See you Saturday night, yes?‘

‗See you then. Love to Jasmine. And I‘m sorry.‘

He hears her adjust the receiver. ‗We do al love you, Dexter.‘

‗No reason why you should,‘ he mumbles, embarrassed.

‗No, maybe not. But we do.‘

After a moment, he replaces the phone then joins his father in front of the television, drinking lemon barley water that has been diluted in homeopathic proportions. The soup is eaten off trays with special y padded undersides for comfortable laptop eating – a recent innovation that Dexter finds vaguely depressing, perhaps because it‘s the kind of thing his mother would have never let in the house. The soup itself is as hot as lava, stinging his cut lip as he sips it, and the sliced white bread his father buys is imperfectly buttered, torn and mashed into a puttycoloured pulp. But it is, bizarrely, delicious, the thick butter melting into the sticky soup, and they eat it while watching EastEnders, another recent compulsion of his father‘s. As the credits rol , he places the padded tray on the floor, presses the mute button on the remote control and turns to look at Dexter.

‗So is this to become an annual festival, do you think?‘

‗I don‘t know yet.‘ Some time passes, and his father turns back to the muted TV. ‗I‘m sorry,‘ says Dexter.

‗What for?‘

‗Wel , you had to put me in the bath, so . . .‘