Mr Waldman’s father-of-the-bride speech had contained only one joke — good to get Viv off my hands! — but Moose in his groom speech had the audience roaring, joke after joke about things Viv did and didn’t do, and when he sat down Viv put her hand on his wrist. He thought, She’s proud of me, that was a good speech, I worked so hard on that speech to make her proud. In the corridor five minutes later she slapped his face. ‘Performance!’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Performance!’
He didn’t understand the accusation. She refused to elaborate. If he was performing he was performing for her, for her friends, for a family from whom he’d always wanted more love than he got. It was the first of many times he’d see her pretty neck go blotchy with rage. Not the best of starts. She cried when they drunkenly fucked that night, a bed covered with itchy red petals. He lay awake thinking of words that rhymed with wedding. He thought of shredding. Maybe dreading. Spreading. At times he lamented the fact he’d been born with a somewhat unsubtle mind.
Where was the paramedic with the big blurry nose? Where was Potato the Dog? People so easily swam in and out of your life.
The theatre. Mr Marshall pulling his mask to one side. Mr Marshall saying, ‘You’re about to feel much better.’
His tongue feeling clean. A huge weight lifted from his chest. But weak, still weak, the white lights of the theatre. Bluish smocks and masks. The dreamy creamy space emptying out. Performance. Two students who’d observed the whole thing standing in the corner, solemn, waiting to be told what to do. A distant nurse saying, ‘The boy said he fell on it in the bathroom!’ Distant people laughing. Water. A plastic cup. Performance. Most delicious water he’d ever tasted. Light dimming and his daughter, sleep.
Growing up in Brighton, not yet known as Moose, he’d been told on many hundreds of occasions that he was destined for great things. This seemed like good news. He chose to believe it. He was good-looking, bright, popular, sporty. The idea that his heart would one day falter? That he would keel over before achieving what he wanted to achieve? Ridiculous. Absurd. As crazy as thinking life itself would one day stop shaping itself, however crudely, around his needs and wants. As unimaginable as the idea that he’d one day have such a precocious ear for failure that he’d mishear almost everything else. His heart was healthy, its welfare was secure, its beat was steady and vital and it was — like him — carefully contained, unbothered by the world, a private preciously effective thing that functioned without thought or doubt. Picturing his knowledgeless boyhood self now, he couldn’t help but laugh. The laughing hurt him even more than sighing did. The pain brought him briefly out of a thick half-sleep and made him ask, ‘Is my daughter still here?’ A nurse wheeling him along a corridor told him to try closing his eyes.
His supposed destiny as one of life’s trailblazers took strength from all the occasions when kids his own age, and a healthy few dozen from the years above, chanted his name from the sidelines at football games. It took strength from the huddle of parents who often invited him round for tea after he’d hit a hundred runs or taken five quick wickets. It took strength from the local newspapermen — doughy, tired, deprived of light — who vied to steal from him some quick remark or meaningful reflection on the nature of Talent every time he won (aged 14, 15, 16 and 17) the 200 metres and 400 and 800 metres in the South-East of England Regional Schools’ Junior Athletics Championships. And it took strength (how could it not?) from seeing his own face in the Argus under the unforgettable headline ‘BEST YOUNG SPORTSMAN BRIGHTON’S EVER SEEN’.
There was a song certain girls sang while watching him take his shabby grammar school to the National Championships Finals in three different sports. It was a simple song, not much imagination to it, and it followed the tune of Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t That a Shame’. ‘Ain’t That The Finch’ they’d cry after the ball had left his boot and crashed past the keeper; ‘Ain’t That The Finch’. Sometimes he’d hear a depthless, muzak version of the same anthem in the playground, walking between buildings, crossing the concrete, pausing to pull up his socks. He’d look up and see girls from the school opposite, fingers clawed into the fence. They were singing to him, serenading him, fighting off impending fits of giggles. Once they recovered from these giggles one of them would generally ask if he was going to be at the Electric House come Friday. Demonstrating the unflustered ease that only the most adored of boys could afford, untouched by the super-abundance of love which met his every move, he looked at them and unleashed one of his trademark Shrugging Smiles. A good-natured smile. An excellent shrug. ‘Maybe,’ he’d say.
They nodded slowly, like he’d told them the future.
The Electric House was a local landmark around which the teen population of Brighton carried out the deadly serious business of hanging around. They hung around chatting. They hung around drinking. They hung around practising their kissing. They spent a lot of time pretending to inhale, or coughing. If you had a blind date with a girl they’d arrange to meet you at the Electric and it was a tradition of the time that they’d tell you the exact section of pavement on which you should stand at the designated hour, often referencing chalk marks set down specifically for that purpose: an ‘X’ or an intimidating tadpole squiggle. Seldom did they keep him waiting long. It was a beautiful thing: his luck, his ability; the way the world moved to his tune.
On Christmas Eve, behind the changing rooms of the big drained Black Rock swimming pool, Angela Hebbethwaite opens her coat, a coat with shoulders covered in snow, and lifts up her several jumpers, permitting him to touch her breast. The left one, the soft floury texture of it. With wordless joy he fondles. The best Christmas present he’s ever had.
‘I’m going to be the next Don Revie,’ he tells Angela.
‘I believe in you,’ she says. ‘You’re quite tall.’
She tucks her boob back into her bra. A drunk Santa staggers past. They listen to Santa having a wee against the wall.
At this time there were definitely one or two friends and family members who predicted his downfall. It was said that by pursuing so many different sports to County level, then England Under 16 level, he would sacrifice his studies. It was also said by his soon-to-die Auntie Janet (appendix, Wandsworth) that it was ‘an inevitability’ that once The Finch hit sixteen the extraordinary upward curve of athletic achievement that had marked his life to date would begin to level off. Even his mother appeared ready to accept elements of this hypothesis. With her constant curbing of expectations and reminders that ‘life follows complex patterns’, she seemed to agree that a boy as bafflingly popular and successful as her son would, at some point on the perilous path to adulthood, blink and lose his way. If his father pushed her to give reasons for this lack of faith she sometimes cited, with the stiff air of someone called to give evidence, Philip’s occasional tendency to speak of himself in the third person.
The Finch was just a persona, a character other people had made up. It saddened him that his mother didn’t seem to understand.
In response to what he couldn’t help but see as doom-mongering by the senior females in his family, he did reasonably well in most of his exams. It was essays that were his undoing, but he got extra help from Miss House and Mr Phillips in English and History. He worked hard — hard-ish — and was in the unusual position of being considered a role model by both pupils and teachers, so it was perhaps no surprise when he was appointed, following an internal school process which he liked to think of as democratic, as Head Prefect. People told him he fulfilled the role with composure, style and a stringent sense of fairness, and he shrugged off their praise, neither emboldened nor embarrassed, his only concession to immodesty being his readiness to make a detailed mental note of their words, remembering certain shapely turns of phrase or terms of praise in case they came in handy at a later date. A job application. A self-awareness test. Stuff like that.