Working It Out. Alex George

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge door, squinting against the anaemic glow of the electric fridge light, which felt as if it was burning holes in his retinas. There was no bottled water left. Of course there wasn’t: he had drunk it all when he had arrived home last night, hoping to stave off the mother of all hangovers. The empty bottle lay on its side near the bin. Johnathan dispiritedly took a glass and filled it with warm, slightly opaque liquid from the tap.

      Chloe was addicted to self-help manuals. She could speak meaningless psycho-babble fluently, in several different dialects. She could analyse your dreams, tell you how to give up smoking or lose weight by meditation, determine what was the right job for you, and offer potted highlights of all of the world’s leading religions. Johnathan had had enough of her hectoring, if well-meaning, didacticism. All he wanted was to be left alone. It was extremely trying to have one’s numerous weaknesses pointed out and dissected at every available opportunity.

      One of these weaknesses, it transpired, was spinelessness. Johnathan had decided some months ago that he could not take any more of Chloe’s banalities, but since then had done nothing until his contretemps with Troilus the previous evening. With anyone other than Chloe the best way to end matters would have been to explain gently that it was time to move on, sorry, and there are plenty more fish in the sea, and it’s not you, it’s me, and I just don’t deserve you, and so on. Johnathan realized that this approach would not work with Chloe: she would somehow manage to twist his words back on themselves and he would in all probability find himself engaged. Instead he had attempted a more oblique approach. In the lowest, slyest way possible, he did everything he could to make life for Chloe so unbearable that she would feel obliged to dump him.

      One of the difficulties with this, however, was that he would find himself blinking in disbelief at Chloe’s equanimity as she calmly accepted his most outrageous and offensive behaviour with a brief shrug. Chloe clung on to the relationship with the tenacity of a pit-bull terrier. An entire section of her library was dedicated to Resolving Your Differences, Making that Love Work for You!, Talking it Through, and so on. Johnathan realized that there was a long, long way to go before she had exhausted the remedies available on her bookshelf.

      Chloe’s refusal to accept the obvious was the principal reason for Troilus’s fate the previous evening. It had been in many respects a political execution, Troilus no more than a hapless pawn in an altogether more complex game. Johnathan had finally had enough. He had never knowingly killed anything before, apart from the odd mosquito or bath-trapped spider, but couldn’t find it in him to feel much remorse. Troilus was only a cat, after all.

      Johnathan went back to the bedroom and retreated under the duvet. Eventually he drifted off into a restless sleep, merciful respite from his aching head. He had not been asleep for long, though, when the telephone erupted once more. Cursing, he walked out into the hall.

      Johnathan regarded the telephone suspiciously. He looked at his watch. It was now eight-thirty. It had to be Chloe. The ringing seemed to be getting louder. It felt as if someone was jabbing a needle into his ear. Finally he picked up the receiver, bracing himself.

      ‘OK you crazy bitch,’ he said. ‘I’m ready.’

      There was a discreet cough. ‘Hello darling.’

      His mother.

      ‘Oh. Hi,’ he mumbled. ‘Thought you were someone else.’

      ‘We’re just off out of the door for this festival in Cardiff, so I thought I’d give you a ring.’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘So how are you?’ asked his mother breezily.

      ‘Fine.’

      There was a slight pause. ‘You sound a bit put out, darling. Are you sure you’re all right?’

      ‘I’m fine.’

      ‘I didn’t wake you up, did I?’

      ‘Well, yes, actually, you did,’ said Johnathan as equably as he could.

      ‘But it’s such a beautiful day,’ said his mother. ‘How can you bear to spend it all in bed?’

      ‘I wasn’t going to spend it all in bed. I was just having a well-deserved lie in,’ replied Johnathan, aware of the disapproval emanating silently down the line but too hungover to care.

      ‘And what,’ continued his mother, ‘are you up to this weekend?’

      ‘All the usual chores,’ said Johnathan. ‘Washing, ironing, that sort of thing. You know me. Glamour glamour glamour.’

      ‘Oh. If you didn’t have anything special planned you could have come with us. Too late now, though.’

      ‘Oh well,’ said Johnathan, brightening slightly.

      ‘It should be absolutely fascinating,’ continued his mother. ‘They’re putting on a lesbian Macbeth, in Welsh.’

      ‘I see,’ said Johnathan. There was a long pause.

      ‘Anyway, darling, we must dash if we’re going to miss the traffic. I’ll give you a call early next week. Bye.’

      ‘Bye.’

      Johnathan thought about his parents on their way to their latest jaunt in Wales. To them, culture was a commodity which could be acquired and traded. His parents patronized (in both senses of the word) a stable of unknown artists, whose works hung throughout their cluttered North London home. They invested speculatively but without aesthetic discrimination in the hope that one day the painters would become hugely important and their paintings hugely valuable. Some of the paintings were all right, others were capable of inducing powerful migraines. One looked like an ink-blot test given to deranged children from dysfunctional families. Others looked as if they’d been painted by the children who did the ink-blot tests.

      Johnathan’s parents firmly believed that there was a direct correlation between culture and society: the higher the culture, the higher the society. Put another way, the more impenetrable the culture, the more impenetrable the posh accents. They liked to surround themselves with creative people. They knew artists, musicians and writers of varying pedigree, members of the Hampstead authordoxy. They knew a lot of women called Hermione. They were so highbrow their foreheads were permanently stuck to the ceiling.

      Johnathan, however, was a solicitor, and was therefore a considerable disappointment to his parents. It was not something they could drop into conversation with any hope of carving further notches on the bedpost of artistic pretension. ‘My son the solicitor,’ didn’t have quite the same ring about it as ‘My son the bleak playwright’, or ‘My son the post-modern poet’.

      Johnathan, though, suspected that he had an even greater failing in his parents’ eyes. He was straight. He liked girls. He was incontrovertibly heterosexual.

      There wasn’t anything specific he could put his finger on to justify his suspicion, but the cumulative circumstantial evidence seemed compelling. He had been encouraged with his dried flower collection from an early age. For his fourteenth birthday he had received a copy of Joe Orton’s diaries, and was earnestly told that it represented a viable lifestyle choice. His parents always looked rather crestfallen when he introduced them to new girlfriends. Worst of all, though, they had added an ‘h’ to his name.

      Johnathan’s СКАЧАТЬ