Staying Alive. Matt Beaumont
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this is neither the time nor the place. No, it is the place—at least two of my happiest memories consist of spontaneously doing it with Megan in this very living room (having first spontaneously draped a towel over the sofa to avoid troublesome stains)—but it is clearly not the time.
‘You can tell I’ve moved out,’ she says jauntily. ‘It looks really…tidy.’
‘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