‘Do you want my pass?’ asked Roger. Clinton shook his head.
‘It won’t work any more,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’
And Roger walked out of the door of Pinker Lloyd for the last time.
85
Arabella had her good points. She was, in her way, resilient. She had the toughness of her obliviousness. So if he had had to guess, Roger would have guessed that she would be brave and strong about what had happened. Her stronger, stuff-the-world side would kick in and she would be realistic and practical. She would be a rock.
That turned out not to be the case. Wrong, hugely wrong, mega-wrong. Arabella went to pieces, and did so in the most direct way possible: by bursting into tears, falling onto the sofa, and saying, over and over and over again, ‘But what are we going to do?’
The right move for Roger would obviously have been to sit down on the sofa beside her, put his arms around her, and tell her that everything was going to be all right. But Roger found that he didn’t have it in himself to do that. Wasn’t the first stage supposed to be denial? Roger felt a distinct lack of denial. What had happened wasn’t nearly deniable enough.
‘I don’t know,’ said Roger. ‘I have no idea.’
He had been feeling pretty shitty when he walked in, and Arabella’s reaction was making him feel even worse. The trip home had been hell. Not as hell as it would have been if he’d had to take the Tube; that, carrying his box of personal effects, would have killed him. So no, not that bad. But still pretty bad. The cab ride had been nauseating; the driver was one of those cabbies addicted to side roads and back-doubles, and he seemed to pride himself on never travelling in a straight line for more than fifty metres, with a special penchant for targeting streets featuring sleeping policemen, so the cab’s swaying, bouncing motion left Roger feeling physically sick. He also found himself, for the first time ever, thinking about the cost of the cab. All those other times he’d taken taxis, and never given it a thought… the time sweeping through the dark with Matya in the seat beside him, watching her reflection in the glass, looking at her smile, imagining giving her one right there on the wide back seat… and now here he was, his cardboard box and his rising nausea, one eye on the meter. Jesus it was expensive. When had the prices gone up so much? It was going to hit thirty quid, for God’s sake!
And now here was Arabella, making him feel worse. Maybe that was what she always did; maybe she always made him feel worse, and he’d never really noticed before. Maybe what seemed like the ordinary rough-and-tumble of marriage, combined with hard work and London, was something simpler: the fact that added to any equation, Arabella made it worse. What don’t you need, when you’ve just, completely out of the blue, lost your job? What’s literally the very last thing you need? A spouse convulsed with disbelieving grief. That’ll do it.
Arabella was now rocking backwards and forwards.
‘What are we going to do, what are we going to do, what are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know. Where are the children?’
‘What are we going to do? I don’t know. How should I know? Out somewhere. With Matya. What are we going to do?’
‘Well, for a start, we’re going to have to cut back on expenditure everywhere. Everywhere,’ said Roger. ‘No child-support money to spend on frocks, not any more’ – because that was where that £1,500 a year went, a fact he knew she didn’t know he knew. Ha! Take that! Screw you very much! Arabella blinked. He’d got her! Yeah! Take that!
‘Gym membership… lunches out… all that stuff will have to go.’
Arabella kept rocking.
Sod this for a game of soldiers. Roger needed to get some air. He turned and went out the door thinking, I know what I’ll do: I’ll go for a walk. In the five years he’d been living in Pepys Road, this was something he had never done, not once, in the midweek. He had never not been at work and in the holidays they’d always been expensively elsewhere.
Roger strode out the door and down the road. He dodged an Ocado van backing into a parking spot, and then had to pause to allow a dog-walker to sort out a crisis with tangled leads and a large poodle which, from the way it was sitting immobile on the pavement, seemed to be on strike. It didn’t help that the dog-walking man was trying to use one of his hands to send a text. Down the road, Roger could see Bogdan the builder, the Pole Arabella used sometimes, throwing a piece of plaster into a skip. He saw Roger and the two men nodded at each other. Maybe I could be a builder, thought Roger. Do something a bit more physical. It would suit me. Always liked to do DIY, back in the day when I had the time for it. Still got the energy, the physique, the va-va-voom. Life in the old dog yet…
He turned the corner and headed out on the Common. This again was something he’d only ever done on the way to or from work, or wheeling the boys out at the weekend, a time quite a few other bankers could be seen, all in their various tribal uniforms, their pushchairs so big and unwieldy they were like infant SUVs. Weekends were all about the Euro bankers with their sweaters over their shoulders, the yummy mummies on their mobiles, the British military fitness crowd shouting at their idiotic punters, unable to believe that they were being paid for yelling at people to do sit-ups. On sunny days, huge numbers of young people would remove as much of their clothing as was legally possible and sprawl on the grass drinking alcohol. Simple pleasures are the best. There had been far less of that this summer than usual, a fact you could tell just by seeing how green the grass was. The sprawlers looked like yobs and proles, but Roger knew that appearances were deceptive; just because they had their kit off and were getting drunk didn’t mean that they weren’t web designers, secretaries, nurses, software engineers, chefs. It was a rule of London life that anybody could be anybody.
The Common demographic was different in the middle of the day, middle of the week. It was more underclassy. Four homeless men were sitting on a park bench drinking Tennent’s Super, while a woman, looking just as rough as they did, harangued them about some injustice. They were nodding, agreeing, feeling her pain and at the same time feeling no pain whatsoever.
Three truanting teenagers were practising skateboarding on the pavement and into the road. It was as if by the energy they put into not caring about the traffic they could make the traffic go away. Roger thought about saying, hope you’ve filled out your donor cards, lads – then thought better of it. There were three of them, after all. A few yards away, a scowling skinhead, in his late thirties so old enough to know better, was letting his pit bull shit on the path, and visibly daring anyone to say something to him about it. A couple more truanting teenagers were playing basketball on the netless court, and beyond them, the skateboarders who could actually be bothered to use the skateboard park were practising their stunts and moves. Roger had done a little skateboarding in his youth, but in those days the emphasis had been on what you could do with the board when its wheels were in contact with the ground, whereas now the emphasis seemed much more on lifting the board in the air, or shooting the bottom of the board on the edge of the ramp, or grabbing it with your hand while airborne. A man in a red bandanna rode up to the top of the ramp, flipped up into the air, grabbed the bottom of his board, and came back down with the board on the top edge of the structure, which had the effect of making him fall over backwards onto the wooden floor. Some of the other skateboarders applauded – ironically, Roger assumed.
Actually, Arabella’s question had been a good one. What are we going to do? What am I going to do?