Us Read online

  ‘Hasn’t stopped you in the past.’

  ‘Or shall I just knock on the—?’

  ‘Douglas, I don’t care what you do as long as you stop talking!’

  ‘Hey! I’m not the one with the accordion!’

  ‘Sometimes I think an accordion would be preferable.’

  ‘What does that mean?!’

  ‘It doesn’t mean— It’s two thirty, just …’

  And then the noise stopped.

  ‘Thank you, God!’ said Connie. ‘Now, let’s go to sleep.’

  But the irritation lingered and we lay beneath its cloud, contemplating other nights we had spent like this, dwelling on a moment’s unkindness, impatience or thoughtlessness. I think our marriage has run its course. I think I want to leave you.

  And then a jolt, like a bass drum behind our heads, followed by the particular, insistent thump-thump-thump of a headboard banging against a wall.

  ‘They’re jamming,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Albie.’ Connie laughed, her forearm across her eyes. ‘That’s just perfect.’

  51. the rock accordionist

  We met the beguiling musician the next morning in the hotel’s gloomy basement breakfast room. Uncharacteristically for Albie, they were up before us, though it was hard to see the girl’s face at first, clamped as it was to Albie with the tenacity of a lamprey eel. I cleared my throat, and they peeled apart.

  ‘Hello! You must be Douglas and Connie! Christ, look at you, Connie, you’re gorgeous! No wonder your son is so hot, you’re a be-auty.’ Her voice was gravelly, Antipodean. She took my hand. ‘And you’re a very beautiful man too, Dougie! Ha! We were just having some breakfast, the breakfast here is a-mazing. And it’s all free!’

  ‘Well, not exactly free …’

  ‘Here – let me move Steve out of the way.’ Steve, it seemed, was the name of her accordion. Steve had his very own chair, where he sat toothily grinning. ‘Come on, Steve, let poor Mr Petersen sit down, he looks wasted.’

  ‘We enjoyed your concert last night.’

  ‘Aw, thank you!’ She smiled, then used her fingers to arrange her features into a clown’s sad face. ‘Or did you not really mean that?’

  ‘You play very well,’ said Connie. ‘We’d have enjoyed it more before midnight.’

  ‘Oh no! I’m so sorry. No wonder you look fucked, Mr Petersen. You’ll have to come and see me play at a reasonable hour.’

  ‘You’re actually playing a concert?’ said Connie, with a hint of incredulity.

  ‘Well, concert’s a big word. Only outside the Pompidou.’

  ‘You’re a busker?’

  ‘I prefer “street performer”, but yes!’

  I don’t think my face fell, I tried not to let it, but it’s true that I was wary of any activity prefixed with the word ‘street’. Street art, street food, street theatre, in all cases ‘street’ preceding something better carried on indoors.

  ‘She does an amazing “Purple Rain”,’ mumbled Albie, who was slumped diagonally across the banquette like the victim of a vampire.

  ‘Oh we know, Albie, we know,’ said Connie, regarding the accordionist through narrowed eyes. The girl, meanwhile, was scooping the contents of many tiny jars of jam into a croissant. ‘I hate these little jars, don’t you? So shitty for the environment. And so frustrating!’ she said before cramming her entire tongue into one.

  ‘I’m sorry, we didn’t quite get your—’

  ‘Cat. As in the hat!’ She patted the black velour bowler that she wore at the back of her head.

  ‘And are you Australian, Cat?’

  Albie tutted. ‘She’s from New Zealand!’

  ‘Same thing!’ She gave a loud bark of a laugh. ‘You guys better get some breakfast in you, before I eat it all. Race you!’

  52. on practical ethics in the breakfast buffet system

  Over the years, at conferences and seminars, I’ve had some experience of the breakfast buffet system and have noticed that when confronted with a table of ostensibly ‘free’ food, some people behave with moderation and some as if they’ve never tasted bacon before. Cat was of the group that believes that ‘eat as much as you like’ is a gauntlet thrown down. She stood at the juice dispenser, pouring a glass then downing it, pouring a glass then downing it; juice-hanging, I call it and I wondered, why not just open the tap and lie beneath it? I smiled at the waiter who shook his head slowly in return, and it occurred to me that if management made the connection between last night’s accordion workout and the woman now piling a great mound of strawberries and grapefruit segments into her bowl, then we might be in very real trouble.

  We shuffled along the counter. ‘So what brings you to the Eternal City, Cat?’

  ‘Paris isn’t the Eternal City,’ said Connie. ‘The Eternal City is Rome.’

  ‘And it’s not eternal,’ said Albie, ‘it just feels like it.’

  Cat laughed and wiped juice from her mouth. ‘I don’t live here, I’m just passing through. I’ve been bumming round Europe ever since college, living here, living there. Today it’s Paris, tomorrow Prague, Palermo, Amsterdam – who knows!’

  ‘Yes, we’re the same,’ I said.

  ‘Except we have a laminated itinerary,’ said Connie, examining the empty grapefruit container.

  ‘It’s not laminated. What I mean is, we’re going to Amsterdam tomorrow.’

  ‘Lucky you! I love the ’Dam, though I always end up doing something I regret, if you know what I mean. Party town!’ She was filling a second plate now, balancing it on her forearm like a pro and focusing on proteins and carbohydrates. Lifting the visor on the bacon tray, she inhaled the meaty vapour with eyes closed. ‘I’m a strict vegetarian with the exception of cured meats,’ she said, loading dripping coils of the stuff onto a plate already overflowing with cheese, smoked salmon, brioche, croissants …

  ‘That’s certainly quite a breakfast you’ve got there!’ I said, smile fixed.

  ‘I know! Albie and me’ve worked up quite an appetite,’ and she gave a low, dirty laugh and snapped at his buttock with the bacon tongs while Albie grinned sheepishly at his plate. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘most of this is for later on.’

  That, to my mind, was crossing a line. The buffet was not a picnic-making facility nor a come-one-come-all larder. I had resolved to be nice to Albie’s new friends and their eccentricities, but this was theft, plain and simple, and when a banana followed a jar of honey into the capacious pockets of her velvet shorts I felt that I could restrain myself no more.

  ‘Don’t you think maybe you should put some of that back, Cat?’ I said, light-heartedly.

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘The fruit, the jars of honey. You only need one, two at the most.’

  ‘Dad!’ said Albie. ‘I can’t believe you’d say that!’

  ‘Well, I just think it’s a bit excessive …’

  ‘Awk-ward!’ trilled Cat in an operatic falsetto.

  ‘She’s not eating it all now.’

  ‘Which is exactly my point, Albie.’

  ‘No, fair enough, fair point – here, here …’ And Cat began tossing jars and fruit and croissants back on to the table willy-nilly.

  ‘No, no, take what you’ve got, I just think maybe don’t put stuff in your pockets—’

  ‘See what I mean, Cat?’ said Albie, gesturing towards me with an open hand.

  ‘Albie …’

  ‘I told you, this is what he’s like!’

  ‘Albie! Enough. Sit.’ This was Connie, with her sternest face. Albie knew well enough not to argue, and we returned to the table, took our seats and listened to Cat …

  53. the cat in the hat

  … how she loved New Zealand, how beautiful it was but how she’d grown up in a boring suburb of Auckland, so dull and middle-class, mile upon mile of identical houses. Nothing ever happened there – or rather, things did happen there, terrible things, but no one ever talked about them, they just closed their eyes and carried on with their dull, conventional,
boring lives and waited for death.

  ‘Sounds like where we live,’ said Albie.

  Connie sighed. ‘I challenge you, Albie, to name one terrible thing that’s happened to you in your whole life. Just one. Cat, poor Albie here is scarred because we didn’t let him have Coco Pops back in 2004.’

  ‘You don’t know everything about me, Mum!’

  ‘Well, I do as a matter of fact.’

  ‘No, you don’t!’ Albie protested, looking betrayed. ‘And since when were you this great defender of home, Mum? You said you hated it too.’

  Had she? Connie, moving on, said, ‘Cat, my son is posturing for your benefit. Carry on. You were saying.’

  Cat was ramming salami inside a baguette with a dirty thumb. ‘Anyway, my dad, who’s a complete and utter bastard, insisted that I study engineering at the uni, which was a complete waste of time …’

  Albie was grinning at me but I declined to meet his eye and poured more coffee. ‘Well, not a complete waste of time,’ I said.

  ‘It is if you hate it. I wanted to experience things, see things.’

  ‘So what did you study instead?’

  ‘Ventriloquism.’ She held a marmalade jar to her ear and a small voice said, help me! help me! ‘That got me into puppetry and improv and I joined this street theatre group, operating these giant marionettes, and we just hit the road, travelled all over Europe, had a wild time until they all wimped out and went home to their little jobs and little houses and dull, predictable little lives. So I carried on, travelling solo. Love it! Haven’t seen my parents now for four years.’

  ‘Oh Cat, that’s terrible,’ said Connie.

  ‘It’s not terrible! It’s been amazing for me. No roots, no rent, meeting the most incredible people. I can live wherever I want now. Except Portugal. I’m not allowed into Portugal, for reasons which I am not at liberty to divulge …’

  ‘But what about your parents?’

  ‘I send my mum postcards. I phone her twice a year, Christmas and birthday. She knows I’m fine.’

  ‘Hers or yours?’ said Connie.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You said you phone her Christmas and birthday. D’you phone her on her birthday or your birthday?’

  The question seemed to puzzle Cat. ‘My birthday, of course,’ she said, and Connie nodded.

  ‘And your father?’ I asked.

  ‘My father can go screw himself,’ she said proudly, popping the bread into her mouth, and I noted how Albie could barely contain his admiration.

  ‘That seems a little harsh.’

  ‘Not if you met him. If you met him, it’s a grrr-eat review!’ She laughed her laugh again, the kind you see in films to denote madness and the waiter’s stare got a little harder. Despite my best efforts, I was finding it difficult to warm to Cat. She was somewhat older than Albie, which made me feel absurdly defensive of him, and her skin had a chafed look, as if it had been scoured with some sort of abrasive – my son’s face, presumably. There were panda smudges around her eyes and a red smear around her mouth, again attributable to my son, and high arched eyebrows that seemed drawn on. What did she remind me of? When I first arrived at university I attended a fancy-dress screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with the aforementioned Liza Godwin, which remains one of the most wearying evenings of enforced wackiness that I have ever writhed through in my life. The things I did for love! I am not a religious man but I vividly remember sitting in my seat wearing a pair of Liza Godwin’s torn tights, with a lipsticked rictus grin on my face, praying, please, God, if you do exist, let me not do ‘The Time Warp’ again.

  And yes, there was something of that Rocky Horror quality to Cat, and perhaps this appealed to our son, his hand on the small of her back, her fingers exploring the torn knees of his jeans. It was all rather disturbing, and I must confess a certain relief when she said:

  ‘Okay, you good people, it was a pleasure to encounter you. You’ve got a fine young man here!’ She slapped his thigh for emphasis.

  ‘Yes, we’re aware of that,’ said Connie.

  ‘Enjoy the sights! Young man, escort me to the door – I don’t want the buffet police to wrestle me to the floor and strip-search me!’ There was a guffaw and the scrape of a chair as she hoisted the accordion called Steve from his seat and squashed her bowler hat down on to her curls. A high trill from Steve, and they were gone.

  We sat in the kind of silence that follows a collision, until Connie said, ‘Never trust a woman in a bowler hat.’

  We laughed, enjoying the sweet marital pleasure of shared dislike. ‘“Mum, Dad, I’d like you to meet the woman I intend to marry.”’

  ‘Douglas, don’t even joke about it.’

  ‘Well I liked her.’

  ‘Is that why you told her to put her breakfast back?’ giggled Connie.

  ‘Was that too much, d’you think?’

  ‘For once, Douglas, I say no.’

  ‘So what do you think he sees in her? I think it’s the laugh.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s just the laugh. I think sex might have something to do with it too. Oh, Albie,’ she sighed, and a look of awful sadness came across her face. ‘Douglas,’ she said, her head on my shoulder, ‘our boy’s all grown-up now.’

  54. oversharing, undersharing

  I had hoped the three of us would spend our last day in Paris together, but Connie felt tired and insisted, rather snappily, that she’d like just one minute to herself if that was all right, just one single minute if that wasn’t against the law. With just each other for company, my son and I had a tendency to panic, but we steeled ourselves and set out for the Musée d’Orsay.

  The weather had turned, the city humid beneath low, dense cloud. ‘Storm later,’ I said.

  Nothing from Albie.

  ‘We liked Cat,’ I said.

  ‘Dad, you don’t have to pretend, because I don’t care.’

  ‘We did, we did! We thought she was very interesting. Challenging.’ A short distance, silence, then:

  ‘D’you think you’ll stay in touch?’

  Albie wrinkled his nose. We had not spent a great deal of time discussing affairs of the heart, my son and I. There were friends – Connie’s friends, mainly – who had conversations of startling frankness with their children, constantly hunkering down on baggy sofas to confer on relationships, sex, drugs, emotional and mental health, taking every available opportunity to parade around naked, because isn’t that what teenage kids really want? Evidence of time’s decay brandished at eye-level? While I found this approach smug and contrived, I also accepted that there was room for improvement on my part, a certain reticence that I should do my best to overcome. The nearest my own father came to ‘opening up’ about relationships was a selection of National Health leaflets on sexually transmitted diseases that he left fanned out on my pillow, a parting gift before I left for university and all the information I would ever need on the workings of the human heart. My mother changed the television channel every time two people kissed. Both had passed through the permissive 1960s untouched. It might as well have been the 1860s. How my sister and I ever came to be, I’ve frankly no idea.

  But wasn’t emotional openness something I’d intended to work on? Perhaps this was an opportunity to chat about the turmoil of these teenage years, and in turn I could confide some of the ups and downs of married life. With this in mind, I took a short detour to rue Jacob, the hotel where Connie and I had stayed eighteen years ago, and I paused and held Albie’s arm.

  ‘You see this hotel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That window, up there? Corner of the second floor, the one with the yellow curtains?’

  ‘What about it?’

  I placed my hand on his shoulder. ‘That, Albert Samuel Petersen, is the bedroom where you were conceived!’

  Perhaps it was too much too soon. I’d hoped that there might be something rather poetic about it, seeing the exact place where sperm and egg had fused and he had blinked into existence.
Part of me thought that he might find it amusing, imagining his parents as their younger selves, so different from our current, less carefree incarnations. I’d hoped that he might even be touched by my nostalgia for his creation in an act of love that, in my memory at least, had been freighted with emotion and care.

  Perhaps I hadn’t thought it through.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Right there. In that room. That is where you came to be.’

  His face shrivelled into a mask of disgust. ‘Now there’s an image I will never get out of my head.’

  ‘Well, how else do you think it happened, Albie?’

  ‘I know it happened, I just don’t want to be forced to think about it!’

  ‘I thought you’d like to know. I thought that you’d be …’

  He began to walk on. ‘Why are you being like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Saying all this stuff. It’s very weird, Dad.’

  ‘It’s not weird, it’s a friendly conversation.’

  ‘We’re not friends. You’re my father.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean … adults, then. We’re both adults now, I thought we could talk like adults too.’

  ‘Yeah, well thanks for oversharing, Dad.’

  We walked on and I considered the concept of ‘oversharing’, and what undersharing might be, and whether it was ever possible to settle on something in between.

  55. épater le bourgeois

  Soon we were at the Musée d’Orsay, standing in the extraordinary concourse of the old converted train station. ‘Look at that incredible clock!’ I said, in my awed voice. Albie, too cool for awe, walked on and began to take in the paintings. I like the Impressionists, which I know is not a particularly fashionable line to take, but Albie was making a great show of his indifference, as if it were me who’d painted the poplar trees, the young girls seated at the piano.

  Then suddenly we found something more to his taste: L’Origine du Monde by Gustave Courbet. The style and techniques were the same that you might see applied to ballet dancers or a bowl of fruit, but here the subject was the splayed legs of a woman, her face beyond the frame. It was a disconcerting picture, explicit and unflinching, and I did not love it. Generally speaking I dislike being shocked. Not because I’m a prude, but because it all seems so juvenile and easily achieved. ‘Where do they get their ideas?’ I said, glancing at it and moving on.