Staying Alive

‘Does it?’ I reply, deflating, probably visibly. ‘I haven’t cleaned in ages.’

She raises a sceptical eyebrow, then says, ‘How have you been?’

Well, since you decided to move in with a QC who probably earns thirty times my salary and is old enough to be, if not your father, then your considerably older brother, and since you chose to announce the joyous news on the very day that I’d been out and blown six and a half grand on a ring with which I was going to get down on my knees and ask you to be mine forever and ever and ever, and since you’re now twizzling your hair around your finger in a manner that is guaranteed to make me melt like a Mars Bar in a Glasgow deep fat fryer, I feel like rubbish…If you must know.

‘I’m getting over the flu,’ I say, going directly for the sympathy vote, before adding, ‘but I’m fine, thanks…You?’

‘You know—busy. How’s work?’

‘Oh, the usual juggling act of exotic shoots and five-hour lunches.’

‘Still taking your orders from Mammon, then?’

‘Well, from Mammon’s little helper…You know…Niall. Can I get you a coffee or something?’

‘No, I’d better not stay. I’m in court first thing—my client fled Nigeria after she’d been raped by an entire army platoon and now the Home Office wants to send her back there. Unbelievable.’

This brief snatch of conversation pretty much sums it up. Why Megan left me. I lack commitment. Not the emotional kind—splurging six and a half grand on a ring more or less settled that one. What I lack is her passion for justice. While she is using her degree to make the world safe for the poor and disenfranchised, I’m using mine to feed them choc-ices. It doesn’t take Naomi Klein to argue that, while it undoubtedly delivers a sensuously silky adventure in taste, ChocoChillout won’t even begin to address the iniquities in the continent of Africa.

It’s not that I don’t believe in the same things as Megan. I do.

Mostly.

Up to a point.

I always encouraged her crusades on behalf of victims of police harassment and the fascist asylum laws, but that wasn’t enough. My trouble was that I could never bring myself to make the leap to actually doing something. It was never quite the right time to give up my comfortable salary and the job that—even if I don’t love it—is a pretty cushy number. Besides, how was I going to make a difference? Social work? Sorry, but I’m too easily scared—show me a pug-faced dad accused of beating up his kids and I’d be hiding behind the six-year-old. Voluntary Service Overseas? What skills can I offer? Do they need an expert store checker in Eritrea? I do have fantasies about joining a crack earthquake rescue team (see How I’d Like to Die, Item Four), but—come on—I also quite fancy the idea of having dew-drenched sex in a spring meadow with Uma Thurman. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

(Number one: it’s far from certain that Uma would be agreeable. Number two: where can you find a spring meadow that isn’t saturated with pesticides these days? And—much more pertinent, this one—number three: faced with the reality of alfresco sex, I’d flee. Said meadow could be miles from the nearest homestead and I still wouldn’t be able to get it up—well, a skylark might be watching.)

I did once make a personal sacrifice and take a stand. I gave up a Saturday—valuable housework time—to accompany Megan on the last big protest before Gulf War Two. I wasn’t comfortable though and she could tell. Issues simply aren’t that black and white for me—my politics are coloured not red, orange, blue or green, but a vivaciously vague shade of grey. (In the opinion polls, I’m one of the fourteen per cent that always votes Don’t Know, the true third party in British politics). While Megan and thousands of others were yelling ‘Blair out!’ and ‘No war!’ I was looking vainly for a small group chanting (quietly, so as not to bother anyone), ‘We’re not sure, we’re not sure.’

In the end she couldn’t live with an armchair liberal and dumped me for the real thing: Sandy Morrison QC, defender of the wrongly convicted, champion of the underdog and regular star of Question Time. He was on it last week. He was brilliant. And his hair looked fabulous—like a lion’s mane. He was maddeningly articulate too. Bastard. Call me bitter, but it struck me then that taking a stand for society’s losers must be a doddle when it gives you a seven-figure income.

I look at Megan and I wonder if Sandy Morrison QC is waiting outside in his Bentley Arnage T with its six-point-eight-litre engine which delivers four hundred and fifty brake horse-power, making it the fastest production Bentley ever. How do I—an automotive illiterate—know all about Sandy Morrison’s one-hundred-and-seventy-grand car? I read about it in the Mail. They were doing one of their so-called-lefty lives in lap of luxury stories, and had got wind of the fact that he’d recently traded up from a Jag. But he hadn’t completely sold out. He’d bought one in lush socialist red.

Megan looks at the box on the coffee table and asks, ‘Are those my things?’

‘Uh-huh.’

There isn’t much. Some soppy compilation CDs, half a dozen books, a pair of jeans, a bra that ended up in one of my drawers for reasons that have nothing to do with anything unsavoury, and some photos from our last holiday—they were taken with my camera so strictly speaking I should keep them, but I’m making a point.

I didn’t put in her garlic crusher. I want to keep something of hers. Besides, it might give her a reason to call me.

I did slip the ring into the box. She doesn’t know about that.

The evening had gone like this:

‘Megan, I’ve got something I want to say.’

‘Me too. You go first.’

‘No, you.’

‘OK…Look, there isn’t an easy way to tell you this so I’d better just do it…I’ve…I’ve met someone…’

After that, ‘Will you do me the honour of marrying me?’ seemed a tad superfluous.

She picks up the box and clasps it to her chest.

I will her to spot the VSO booklet that I carefully placed beside it on the coffee table (at a cocksure fifty-eight degree angle), but—damn it—she doesn’t. She doesn’t notice the application form for a job with Waltham Forest Social Services either. Instead she looks at me searchingly.

‘Murray…Are you really…all right?’

No, I am not all right. The moment you’ve left I’m going to surround myself with snapshots, holiday souvenirs, the set of aluminium espresso cups that we bought together in Camden Market (the ones we never used again after the third-degree burn to my bottom lip), my copy of the Complete Seinfeld Scripts which you said would always remind you of me—and will thus always remind me of you—your garlic crusher, the other bra that I didn’t put in the box and several other mementos of our five years, eight months, one week and three days together. Then I will swallow an entire bottle of paracetamol and wash it down with the ouzo we bought in Kos, before dying weeping, broken and about fifty years before my due date.

All of which I manage to condense into a shrug.

She looks at me sorrowfully and says, ‘You need to—’

‘What, get a life?’

‘I wasn’t going to say that. But you do need to do something with yourself.’

I’ve heard this before, though never delivered with such pity. You need to do something with yourself was Megan’s cry throughout the five years, eight months, et cetera of our relationship. Towards the end it was uttered with increasingly desperate shrillness. She had a point. All she wanted was for me to have a dream, a direction, to stop drifting. She wasn’t the only one. I wanted me to stop drifting—still do. But I’ve never been one to take destiny by the scruff of its neck and give it a jolly good shake—or even to tap it on the shoulder and utter a polite ahem. A few years ago I thought my job was The Thing, but it wasn’t long before I realised my heart wasn’t in it. I turn up and go through the motions, but I lack the desire to make anything of it. But what do I possess the desire to do? I’ve asked myself that one enough times. I’ve come up with answers too. Lists of them. In the fond belief that committing something to paper will make it seem more tangible and therefore achievable. I remember my last one, written shortly before Meg left:

1. Pony trek up Andean spine of S America

I should point out that the only horse I’ve ever ridden was pink and had a slot for the fifty-pence piece…But, you know, think Big and all that.

2. Write Bill Bryson-ish book of pony trek (drawing attention to plight of indigenous peoples, threatened tree frogs, etc.)

3. Return Elgin Marbles (NB: check first)

The NB was a reminder to check whether it was Elgin that had stolen them or Elgin that wanted them back. I was pretty sure that Elgin had nicked them, but you know how these things can go pear-shaped for lack of basic groundwork.

4. Buy old bus. Refurb as mobile drug rehab unit (double-decker/make it residential?)

5. Mobile soup kitchen?

6. Mobile potage kitchen? (Sell lobster bisque/vichyssoise to City workers at £7 per portion)

Because it was clearly getting pretty stupid at this point, I took a coffee break. That was when I noticed my kitchen hygiene was slipping below its usual operating theatre standard and wrote:

7. Clean kitchen cupboards

8. Ditto hob

9. Mr Muscle Kitchen Spray

10. Cif Cream (lemon)

11. Flash Wipes

12. Plain digestives

13. Gold Blend (decaf)

I probably needn’t add that items seven to thirteen were made reality within hours, whereas numbers one to six have yet to progress from back-of-an-envelope status.

‘I’m fine, Megan,’ I say now. ‘I’ve got all sorts of things in the pipeline.’

‘I hope so. Just don’t leave them in there too long.’

She turns to go and I ask, ‘Do you want a lift?’

Now, why did you say that, because it’s only going to lead to her asking you…

‘You’ve finally had the car fixed?’

See what I mean?

‘Um…No…But I could call a minicab.’

‘It’s OK. I’ll get the tube.’

I follow her to the front door. She opens it and says, ‘Bye, then. I’ll give you a call if there’s anything else.’ She dips forward clumsily and kisses me on the cheek.

Then she’s gone.

I return to the living room and open a chink in the curtain. I watch her cross the road and walk in the direction of the tube station. But she stops fifty yards away beside a gleaming red Bentley and climbs in.

The woman I was meant to be with.

Megan and Murray.

Mamp;M.

Two little peanuts nestling in their chocolate and candy shells.

Gone forever.

(Unless she comes back for the garlic crusher.)

Now it’s Megan and Sandy.

Mamp;S.

Two items of sensible cotton underwear nestling in a…

It really doesn’t bear thinking about.

And she doesn’t even know that I wanted—want—to marry her.

And that there is a statistically slight (according to Stump, who hardly seems the reliable type) yet distinct possibility that I have a disease that begins with C and has been known to kill people.

I listen to the sound of fireworks fizzing and popping all over South Woodford. It’s as if they’re celebrating the fairy-tale union of Meg ’n’ Sand.

God, this self-pity. Megan was right. I have got to do something with myself.

Well, I can take care of that right now. I start with the magazines, adjusting them so they are once again in perfect alignment with the table’s edge.

9:17 p.m.

I switch off the vacuum cleaner and turn on the stereo. Solace in song. A disc is already in the slot so I press play. It’s Caesars. ‘Sort It Out’. A nice, bouncy tune. And, now I listen to it, lyrically apt.

I’m gonna smoke crack

’Cause you’re never coming back

I’m gonna shoot speedballs

Bang my head against the walls

I wanna sniff glue

’Cause I can’t get over you.

Yes, that is sooooo…not me. If, on the other hand, it went, I’m gonna spring clean, Wanna spray some Mister Sheen…

six: it’s kind of personal

monday 10 november / 8.57 a.m.

I wake up and the first thing I think—apart, obviously, from Damn, forgot to set the alarm—is that it has been five days since Megan came for her stuff. I wonder why she hasn’t been in touch about the ring. Or the garlic crusher. I tip myself out of bed and make a coffee. Then, still in my pyjama bottoms, I head downstairs to the hall and grab my post. No Jiffy Bag containing a jewellery-box-shaped lump. Just the usual crap.

Back in my flat I sit on my sofa and open…taran-tara!…a Barclaycard statement:

BALANCE FROM PREVIOUS STATEMENT £977.74 PAYMENT RECEIVED—THANK YOU 30.00 JP STEIN OF HATTON GARDEN 6,499.00 MONTHLY INTEREST AT 1.385% 13.12 NEW BALANCE £7,459.86

Bugger.

I’ve spent the last few weeks filing this under D for Denial. I have no idea how I’m going to pay it. The truth is that I had no idea when I walked into JP Stein and picked out the chunky diamond in an eighteen-carat setting. I figured that the moment Megan said yes, the world would transform into a magical place where it chucked down in Ethiopia like an August bank holiday, George W embraced Osama B on the White House lawn and credit-card bills were quietly forgotten.

Which I’m sure would have happened if she had said yes.

So, if you’re upset about the sad state of the world, you know who to blame.

No, that’s not fair. The fact is that she never got the chance to reply because I was too wet to ask the question.

I crumple the statement and toss it across the room. Then, unable to fight the Cleaning Impulse, I retrieve it from the floor and put it in the bin. I return to my post and open an exclusive invitation to become the proud owner of a Capital One Platinum Card…an exclusive invitation from Renault to test-drive a Mégane…and an exclusive invitation to an appointment at Saint Matthew’s Hospital in Leytonstone.

Something else I’d filed under D.

Actually, I’m not in denial. Over the last few days I’ve persuaded myself to take up Doctor Stump—a wise and experienced general practitioner—on his reasonable and statistically based suggestion that I almost certainly DO NOT have cancer. It’s probably a straightforward case of seminal granuloma and, honestly, how bad can that be? It sounds like a nourishing high-fibre supplement, available at Boots, Holland and Barrett and all good health-food shops. Whatever, I bet it’s something that clears up with the help of a non-astringent ointment. No, I’ll surely be putting unnecessary pressure on an already stretched health service by showing up for the appointment.

I bin the letter and switch on the TV.

Hyam.

Richard Hyam-Glass. Ex-junior minister for something or other, convicted of taking bribes after having unsuccessfully sued Channel Four, which had made the original accusation. The sleaziest aspect wasn’t the lying or even the backhanders—he was a politician and they’re part of the job spec. No, his one truly despicable act was to shove his thirteen-year-old daughter into the witness box to lie on his behalf. She provided the false alibi that very nearly won his libel trial.

I remember feeling sorry for her, being scarred in public by her own father, branded a perjurer when she’d barely grown out of Barbies. I wonder what she’s up to now. Languishing in a rehab clinic for teenage junkies? I doubt it. Probably lounging around the grounds of a Swiss finishing school.

Finally rumbled, Hyam-Glass did his time in a five-star Hampshire jail, where he wrote an ‘ achingly confessional’ (the Mail) and ‘ poignantly repentant’ ( The Times) memoir. Now he has found redemption. A canny producer read his book, studied the jacket photo—which showed a handsome face etched deeply with the lines of suffering—and decided to re-launch him as daytime telly’s Mr Empathy.

You might wonder why I remember some relatively minor politician’s fall from grace so vividly. Well, I lived and breathed it vicariously through Megan. She was a junior in Channel Four’s legal department at the time. For her it was the clearest case of good against evil since Superman versus Lex Luthor. The TV channel’s cause looked hopelessly lost, but at the eleventh hour their barrister put in a barnstorming performance. He stood up, cleared his throat and reduced the plaintiff’s key witness to tears as he showed her to be nothing more than a brazen liar. Of course, that she was only thirteen might have helped him. At the time a saying about candy and babies sprang to mind, but I didn’t mention it to Megan.

I wish now that I had. The barrister was a bloke called Sandy Morrison.

I watch Richard Hyam-Glass bounding up and down the steps on his set, allowing his audience one or—if they behave—two words in edgeways. The show, like all these things, has nothing to do with giving ordinary people a voice and everything to do with providing a TV studio large enough to contain its presenter’s bloated ego. He’s tossing out empathetic phrases: emotional credit account and the long and winding road to closure. He could be talking about anything that entails trauma—which these days does mean anything—and I have to look at the caption to see what the topic is. Living with cancer.

I switch off the TV—not because I’m in denial, but because I’m late for work—and head for the bathroom. I run the shower and climb in. I squeeze a dollop of gel into my hand and soap my body. Same order as always: face, shoulders, arms, torso, groin…I can feel the lump and I don’t know if it’s an effect created by the blast of water bouncing off my scrotum, but it feels as if it’s alive, like it’s setting off on an impromptu growth spurt for the benefit of my soapy fingertips.

Stupid. Of course it isn’t growing. But I’m panicking now. I rinse off, towel myself dry and dress. Then I head for the office. But not before I’ve retrieved the letter from the bin.

10.54 a.m.

‘You’re late. Again,’ Haye snaps. ‘And you’ve got soap in your ear.’

‘Sorry—I seemed to run out of time this morning.’

‘Well, don’t let it happen again. This isn’t the image Blower Mann likes to project to its clients.’

Haye is big on four things: store checks, punctuality, contact reports and the image Blower Mann likes to project to its clients. To give him his due, soap in ear surely breaches the spirit, if not the letter of the Blower Mann dress code.

‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘it’s assessment time. I’ve got you down for a thirty-minute slot on Thursday morning. Make sure your diary’s clear.’

After I’d left uni I got a letter from Blower Mann informing me I had an interview with one of their group account directors—Niall Haye. Wow, I thought, Niall Haye. Of course, I’d never heard of him, but what a sexy-cool name—a twinkle-toed Irish footballer’s name, an edgy author’s name, a rock star’s name.

Never be seduced by a name.

Got that?

Never.

Niall Haye is a drone. Of all the drones in the hive, he is the droniest. A hundred-grand showbiz Porsche sits in his designated parking space, but it can’t conceal the man’s total lack of colour.

And if any one thing has killed my ambition it’s the fact that twice a year he sits me down for my assessment and dangles the promise that if I work really hard then one day I could turn into him.

‘Thursday, Thursday,’ I burble as I feel the bump of the hospital letter in my jacket. ‘Er…I can’t, Niall. I’ve got a hospital appointment…Sorry.’

‘Nothing I should worry about, Murray?’

His uncharacteristic display of tenderness surprises me and the words, Er, it’s almost certainly nothing, but I’m having a very minor lump checked out, almost spill out…but not quite. What I say instead is, ‘It’s nothing really…It’s kind of personal.’

Which is a mistake because, now I think about it, Haye is big on five things: store checks, punctuality, contact reports, appear-ance, and the prevention of personal affairs impacting (his favourite verb—though, of course it isn’t actually a verb; just a word that he and his kind have press-ganged into performing against type) on work. Worse still, the linking of a hospital appointment to the phrase it’s kind of personal surely has him picturing a visit to an STD clinic.

‘You of all people,’ he says, ‘should not be taking your biannual appraisal lightly. If I may use my favourite analogy—’

Let me guess. Space, the final frontier?

‘—a career is rather like interplanetary travel—’

Bingo!

‘—The slightest misfire on your rocket’s trim controls—’

Trim controls, trim controls…Must have left them in my workstation. In my desk-tidy perhaps? Oh, I was forgetting; this is an analogy.

‘—and you’ll miss your destination by light years. Your ship, my friend—’

Pur-lease, Haye—I am not your friend.

‘—has yet to leave the launch pad. If you’ve any interest at all in achieving lift-off, you’ll reschedule the hospital.’

Oh yes, how I’d love to cancel an urgent investigation into a potentially life-threatening disease so I can listen to you marking me out of ten on my performance across fifteen key criteria.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I say.

He turns and walks briskly away, all things-to-do-people-to-see. I can’t believe how jaded I feel. A thirty-one-year-old burn out. Yet there’s one thing that gives me hope. I do, after all, have a dream, though not one of which Megan would approve. I’m not sure I entirely approve of it myself. This is how it goes:

Haye: Murray, something huge has come up, a gold-plated revenue opportunity and a chance to make the world a better place.

Colin: What is it, Niall?

Haye: Before I tell you, I need to know I can count on you one hundred and ten per cent. You’ll be playing on the A team, pissing with the big boys, and I need to know you’re up for it.

Colin: You know I relish a challenge, Niall. Show me your biggest executive urinal and let me hose down that porcelain.

Haye: We’ve been appointed to handle Mr Muscle.

Colin: Fantastic! Stupendous. This is the one we’ve been waiting for.

Haye: Isn’t it? We’ve got the whole lot. The kitchen spray, the bathroom cleaner, the entire kit and caboodle.

Colin: Even the oven spray, the drain cleaner and the handy orange-scented kitchen wipes?

Haye: Their entire product portfolio is ours and I believe there’s only one man who can handle it…(Unnecessarily over played dramatic pause)…Murray, this is your baby.

SFX: Manly backslaps and high fives.

It isn’t always Mr Muscle. Sometimes it’s Cif, sometimes Dettox. Other times, as a sop to my ex, it’s an as yet un-launched range of eco-friendly products that really do make the world a better as well as a cleaner and more fragrant place.