two

      When I could no longer stand the sight of the rusty white van dawdling along in front of me, I swung the MGF into the oncoming traffic and smacked my foot down.

      My new car squirted past the old van with a confident, throaty roar. As I cut back in front of it I caught a glimpse of the driver – a blur of bad teeth, tattoos and loathing – before he disappeared in my rear-view mirror. I felt good. The MGF meant that I no longer had to look at rusty white vans or their drivers. All that was behind me now. I could look forward to a future full of open-top motoring and admiring glances. Then the van pulled up alongside me at the very next red light.

      Jesus, I thought. Road rage.

      ‘You stupid little git,’ he told me, winding down his window to reveal a face like a Big Mac in a bucket of beer. ‘Get out and push it.’

      After he had driven off at the green light, I sat shaking for a while, thinking about what I should have said to him.

      If I get out, pal, it will be to push your crappy van up your tattooed back passage! If I pushed this thing, pal – it would have been really good to call him pal – I’d still be going faster than you. You lager-bellied moron! You fat fuck!

      I saw myself delivering some perfect put-down and then pulling away in a squeal of rubber, an infuriating little smile on my face. But what actually happened was that I just sat there trembling and dreaming until all the cars behind me started sounding their horns and shouting stuff about the lights having changed.

      So I drove off, thinking about what my dad would have done.

      He certainly wouldn’t have sat there and said nothing. And he wouldn’t have wasted time cooking up some devastating response worthy of Oscar Wilde at his pithy best.

      My father would simply have got out of the MGF and punched that van driver’s lights out. He really would.

      Not that my dad would ever be seen dead in a fancy sports car, to tell you the truth. He thought they were for wankers.

      My dad would have felt much more at home in one of those white vans.

      Gina had been incredibly understanding about the MGF. She had encouraged me to go back and talk to the salesman when even I was starting to find the idea of buying a sports car a bit stupid.

      And there were plenty of reasons why buying it was crazy. Its boot was smaller than a supermarket trolley. We really didn’t need two cars. A soft top in London is a hate object for any spotty fourteen-year-old cretin with a chip on his shoulder and a blade in his sock. But Gina just wasn’t interested.

      She told me to buy the thing and to stop thinking that my life was over just because I was turning thirty. She told me I was being pathetic, but she laughed when she said it and put her arm around me, giving me a little shake. Trying to force some sense into me. Fat chance.

      At any other time during the seven years we had been together, we wouldn’t have been able to afford a good second car. In fact, at any other time we wouldn’t have been able to afford an incredibly crappy second car. We hadn’t even owned our crappy first car for very long.

      But we no longer practically had to have a heart attack every time we received a red-topped bill. At last my job was going well.

      I was the producer of The Marty Mann Show, a late-night talk show that went out every Saturday on terrestrial television. For the six years before that I had been the producer of The Marty Mann Show back when it was on local radio and most of the country had not even heard the first rumours about its mad bastard presenter. It seemed a long time ago now.

      Over the last twelve months Marty and I had turned a no-budget radio show into a low-budget TV show. The line between the two was surprisingly thin. But crossing that thin line was enough to make Marty Mann some sort of star.

      If you walked into a restaurant with him, everybody stopped eating and talking just so they could look at him. Girls, who a few years earlier wouldn’t have touched him wearing surgical gloves, now thought he was a love god. He got photographed even when he wasn’t doing anything special. Marty had arrived big time and he had been decent enough to bring me along with him.

      The critics, or at least the ones who liked him, called Marty child-like – meaning he was open, frank and intuitive. They thought he asked the kind of questions other interviewers decided it was best not to even think about. And it was true – the editing process that exists in most of us seemed to be completely missing from Marty’s brain. And he got answers, even when what he really deserved was a punch in the mouth.

      The critics who didn’t like Marty also called him child-like – meaning he was selfish, immature and cruel. But Marty wasn’t really child-like at all. Sometimes I watched our Pat peacefully play for hours with his little plastic Star Wars toys. That was child-like. Marty’s attention span was nowhere near that long. Marty wasn’t child-like. He was just undeveloped.

      We had met at a local radio station where the staff were either on their way up or on their way out. It was a grotty little building full of curdled ambition and stale cigarette smoke, and most of our regular callers were either hopelessly lonely or borderline barking. But I always sort of missed the place. Because that was where I met Gina.

      The station was always desperate to get guests – for some reason there was never a mad rush for our cheques, which were so small they were invisible to the naked eye – and so there was often an improvisational element to our bookings.

      For instance, when the first Japanese banks started to go bust, the person we booked to talk about what it all meant was not an economist or a financial journalist, but the professor who taught Japanese at the college across the street.

      Okay, so he was a language teacher, but like any language teacher he was in love with the country whose lingo he taught. Who better to discuss why the Asian tigers were turning into neutered pussycats? Well, lots of people, probably. But he was the best we could get. Except he didn’t show up.

      As if in sympathy with the exploding Japanese bubble, the professor’s appendix burst on the morning he was due to come in, and coming off the bench as his substitute we got his star pupil – Gina.

      Tall, radiant Gina. She was fluent in Japanese, apparently an expert on the culture, and she had legs that went on for weeks. I took her into the studio and couldn’t even find the courage to talk to her, couldn’t even look in her eyes. She was beautiful, charming, intelligent. But most important of all, she was also way, way out of my league.

      And then when the red light came on in the studio, something happened. Or rather, nothing happened at all. Gina became paralysed with nerves. She couldn’t speak.

      When I had first seen her I had thought she was unapproachable. But as I watched her stuttering and sweating her way through her incoherent tale of economic decline, she was suddenly human. And I knew I had a chance. A slim chance, maybe. A snowball’s chance in hell, perhaps. But a chance all the same.

      I also knew exactly how she felt. The red light always did that to me too. I was never comfortable in front of a microphone or a camera, and the very thought of it can still make me break out in a cold sweat.

      So when it was over and Marty had put her out of her misery, it was not difficult for me to commiserate with her. She was very good about it, laughing at her nerves and vowing that her career in broadcasting was over.

      My heart sank.

      I thought – then when will I see you again?

      The thing that got me about Gina is that she didn’t make a big deal about the way she looked. She knew she was good-looking, but she didn’t care. Or rather, she thought it was the least interesting thing about her. But you wouldn’t look twice at me if you saw me in the street. And someone as ordinary-looking as me can never be