My Favourite Wife. Tony Parsons

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СКАЧАТЬ have done it for nothing. Hilarious, they always said. Like the woman from Shanghai Chic. Everything was hilarious. It was all so fucking hilarious that it made you puke.

      One night some idiot was practising his fast bowling with the Scotch eggs and splattering yolk and breadcrumbs all over the customers in the snug. Howzat? Hilarious, darling. The Scotch-egg bowler was a strapping lad in a pink cashmere sweater and carefully distressed Levi’s. They could be big lads, these Hoorays. They weren’t selling off the playing fields at the kind of school his mummy and daddy sent him to.

      There was a girl with him – one of those girls, Bill thought, one of those Fulham Broadway blondes – who was trying to get him to stop. She seemed halfway to being a human being. Bill gave her credit for looking upset. For not finding it absolutely hilarious. That was the first time he saw Becca.

      Bill politely asked the Scotch-egg bowler to leave. He told Bill to fuck off and get him a pint of Fosters. So Bill asked him less politely. Same response. Fuck off and a pint of Fosters. So Bill got him in an arm lock before his brain had registered what was happening and marched him to the door. It toughed you up on those building sites. It didn’t matter how much sport they played at their private schools, it just wasn’t the same as manual labour.

      A meaty lad but soft inside, Bill thought. He gave him a push at the door – slightly harder than was strictly necessary – in fact a lot harder than was strictly necessary – and the fast Scotch-egg bowler skidded and fell into the gutter.

      At the outside tables, people laughed.

      ‘One day you’ll bring drinks to my children,’ he told Bill, getting up, his face red for all sorts of reasons.

      ‘Can’t wait,’ Bill said. They must have been about the same age, he thought. Bill bet his mum wasn’t gone.

      ‘And you’ll be a toothless old git with snot on his chin and your rotten life will be gone and you will still be waiting on the likes of me.’

      Bill laughed and looked at the blonde girl. ‘I hope your kids look like their mother,’ he said, turning away, and never expecting to see her again.

      But Becca came back inside to apologise on behalf of her boyfriend and offer to pay for the Scotch eggs and all the mess, and she was just in time to see the landlord fire Bill, who didn’t like it that Bill had used more force than necessary to throw out the fast Scotch-egg bowler; he wasn’t here to rough up the paying customers, he was here to stop trouble, not to start it, and Bill was saying that he couldn’t possibly be fired, because he was fucking well quitting, okay?

      Becca followed him outside and said, ‘Don’t go.’

      And Bill said, ‘Three quid an hour to be insulted by dickheads? Why not?’

      But that wasn’t what she meant.

      She apologised again and said that he was a nice guy really, Guy was, and Bill got a bit confused there, because the boyfriend’s name was Guy, and they had a little laugh about that, and that was good, because she had such a beautiful face when she laughed, and then she said that Bill shouldn’t think they were all idiots and Bill said ah, don’t worry about it, he had no objection to spoilt rich kids with no manners, they had to drink somewhere, and she said that was not her, and he didn’t know her at all, getting angry now, and he said, Well, prove it – let me have your phone number and I might give you a call sometime, because he really didn’t give a fuck any more and he was sick of not having a girlfriend who looked like her and sick of being lonely and sick of feeling that he had never had the chance to suck all the juice out of being young.

      So she wrote her number on the palm of his hand and by the time he got back to his rented room on the other side of town his heart fell to his boots because the eight digits had almost worn off.

      But he still had the number. Just.

      And that was how he met Becca. She was the first one in that place, the very first, who didn’t look straight through him, or look at him as if he was dirt, and he would always love her for that.

      And he got scared sometimes. Because his life was unthinkable without her. Because he wondered what would have happened to him if he had not met Becca. He thought – what then?

      Who would have loved me?

      The three of them walked hand in hand through a warehouse full of old masters.

      There was Picasso’s Weeping Woman, Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. There were Degas dancers, Monet waterlilies and haystacks, Cézanne apples and mountains. There were Lichtenstein’s comic-book lovers, Jasper Johns’ flags and Warhol’s Marilyn and Elvis and soup cans. There were canvases stacked everywhere, and on many of them the paint was still wet.

      ‘Do one-two-three,’ Holly commanded, happy to have a parent on each hand, so Bill and Becca went, ‘One-two-three!’ and swung their daughter up between them, her thin legs flying as they walked past Gauguin native girls, a pile of Last Suppers and Mona Lisas by the score.

      ‘One-two-three!’ they chanted, and Holly laughed wildly as they walked past Hockney swimming pools, Jackson Pollock splatter paintings and sailboats by Matisse.

      They stopped at the end of an aisle where a girl in her late teens was painting half a dozen Sunflowers all at once. She worked quickly, occasionally glancing at a dog-eared History of Modern Art.

      ‘It looks absolutely like the picture in the book,’ Holly said.

      ‘It looks exactly like the picture in the book,’ Becca said.

      ‘Is it really real, Daddy?’ Holly said.

      The girl artist smiled. ‘Everything is fake except your mother,’ she said. ‘Old Shanghai saying.’

      Becca ordered four Sunflowers to go with the Starry Night and The Sower that she had already bought. She laughed happily, in a way that she hadn’t laughed for a long time. Vincent Van Gogh was going to fill the walls of their new home.

      They caught a cab to the Bund, which by now Bill had learned to called the Waitan, ‘above the sea’, and finally they saw the jazz band in the bar of the Peace Hotel.

      The six musicians were in their eighties now, the very same bunch of swing-obsessed Chinese boys who had been playing when the Japanese army marched into Shanghai a lifetime ago, and as the waitress fussed over Holly’s hair and Bill and Becca sipped their Tsingtaos while the band swaggered through Glenn Miller’s ‘String of Pearls’, for a few sweet dreaming minutes Becca thought it truly seemed as though the old world had never been pulled apart.

      The next day Bill came back from work early and joined his daughter at the window. Devlin had packed him off home. He wanted Bill’s family to be happy. He wanted them to stay.

      ‘That’s my favourite one,’ Holly said, indicating a half-starved ginger kitten that was patrolling the perimeter of the fountain. ‘That’s the best one.’

      There were no pets allowed in Paradise Mansions but from their window Holly would watch the stray cats who haunted the courtyard – emaciated creatures that preened themselves in the shade of the straggly flower beds, or lapped delicately from the pools of water created by the mother-and-child fountain, or gnawed at bones they had foraged from the rows of huge black rubbish bins in an alleyway СКАЧАТЬ