Al's Well Read online

  First published by Roundfire Books, 2011

  Roundfire Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

  Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

  [email protected]

  www.o-books.com

  For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

  Text copyright: Gregory Dark 2010

  ISBN: 978 1 84694 831 2

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Gregory Dark as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  Printed in the UK by CPI Antony Rowe

  Printed in the USA by Offset Paperback Mfrs, Inc

  We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

  To Bruce Crowther and to Maureen McAthey, the quality of whose friendship so greatly enhances the quality of my life.

  Acknowledgements

  The task of writing a book may be a solitary one – but that of publishing a book certainly is not. Even that lonely act of writing requires a far greater infrastructure than is generally recognised: I find it difficult, for instance, to write without food or with toothache. Below is therefore an incomplete list of those who are due acknowledgement. It is a compilation merely of those whose contributions to the welfare of Al’s Well are so evident that even an ingrate like me cannot ignore them.

  That you are reading this is due to the diligence and resourcefulness of Anne Piper. Today there is infinitely more work involved in publicising a book than there is in writing it. I deeply appreciate both the quantity of that work, and its quality.

  Annie Duflot and Monique Goddard guided me through the, sometimes esoteric, catacombs of French law and its practise. Their help too I greatly appreciate.

  Stuart Davies prepared the manuscript – several times!; and Sally Reading proof-read it – also, several times!; Nick Welch designed the cover. The work of all three was indispensable.

  Without ‘O’-Books’ chief, John Hunt, the book would never have been published. Thereafter it’s difficult within the company to know whom to thank for what. ‘O’-Books operates a system of anonymity the CIA would kill to emulate. I can therefore do no more therefore than issue a general acknowledgement to Tom Davies, Sarah Dedman, Nicola Dimond, Mary Flatt, Trevor Greenfield, Catherine Harris, Kate Rowlandson, and Maria Watson.

  If you can discover the names of those who actually printed the book, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga-Din. That’s a shame. The printers too deserve their share of any of the (admittedly, uncertain) credit which may attach.

  As does that small army of others without whose involvement you would never have been reading any of this: the buyers and the assistants of physical shops, the despatchers of e-shops … the world’s postmen and -women. Anonymity does not diminish their importance to both the book and its author! Thank you, all of you.

  My daughter, Lyubov, I also thank. As I do her husband, Keith, and Clara Izurieta. Their on-going support is as helpful as it is undeserved.

  I also thank you. Without a reader, a book is meaningless. It is the tree in an empty forest whose fall absolutely does not get heard.

  Even Mr Gates I thank and Microsoft. The misery both inflict on my life helps me to understand more fully the misery of others. For which reason too I thank Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Canon, Computerworld/Curry, Orange phones, French Telecom, British Telecom, Telefonica … and all the others making quite obscene amounts of money from the manufacture and/or sales of much-hyped but inefficient equipment, and offering ‘services’ which champion inefficiency and grotesque discourtesy. Sometimes anger is a powerful goad to keep going.

  Gregory Dark, 2011

  Chapter 1

  “I’m not leaving Al for you.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “You heard.”

  “I’m not sure what to say.”

  “I’m not, Mike, leaving Al for you.”

  “Right.”

  “Right?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Anything but that might be good.”

  “It sounded bland, Trove, that’s all.”

  “Facts are bland, Mike.”

  “Even embellished with an American accent, it sounded bland.”

  “They’re known for it, in fact, facts. For being bland.”

  “Right.”

  “Famous for it. It’s what, Mike, they’re good at.”

  “As you say.”

  “That’s what it is, Michael: a statement of fact.”

  “Right.”

  “Whatever the accent.”

  “Understood, Trove.”

  “Even with an uptight, stick-up-the butt British accent, Mike.”

  “I do, Trove, get that. How is Al, by the way?”

  “Al’s well.”

  “Good.”

  “He’s fine, just great.”

  “Great.”

  “I love him to bits. I’m not leaving him, Mike, for you.”

  “Yes, Trove, yes. You said.”

  “See, what I’m not saying, I’m not saying I’m not going to bed with you.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Of course not. I just kissed you, didn’t I?”

  “You did. That much is certainly true.”

  “And that means – I mean, that has to mean, right? – I fancy the pants off of you.”

  “Okay.”

  “That literally, I mean, I fancy the pants off of you.”

  “Well, I’m very flattered, Trove.”

  “You any idea how condescending that sounds?”

  “Oh God, did it?”

  “’S okay.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Mike.”

  “Really, so sorry. I assure you, I had not the slightest intention ...”

  “Jeez, Mike, lighten up.”

  “I’m a lightened-up sorry, then.”

  “I’m meant to be the ‘sorrier’.”

  “Yes.”

  “Al, he’s always going on at me, how I ‘sorry’ too much.”

  “Right.”

  “It sounded condescending, Mike, is all I’m saying.”

  “Right.”

  “Sounded it. I didn’t think you meant to be.”

  “Perish even the thought.

  “You’re not?”

  “See, I just love that about your English, Mike.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s just so … goddamn English, your English.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s the second condition I have for going to bed with you.”

  “That I’m English?”

  “Yeah, very funny.”

  “There are two conditions?”

  “Obviously, no? If that’s the second?”

  “Obviously, as you say.”

  “Right.”

  “The second condition is you’re not leaving Al for me?”

  “It’s just … I’ve been married to him for a lot of years. It’d break his heart. It’d break my heart too. I do love him, is what I’m saying. Don’t think, because I’m going to bed with you, I don’t love him.”

  “I know you love him.”

  “Good.”

  “The first condition, then?”

  “The first condition is that we don’t hurt each other.”

  “Right.”r />
  “Kiss me.”

  “Here?”

  “Well, gee thanks for that overwhelming burst of passion.”

  “It’s … well … you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. What is it, Mike?”

  “Public.”

  “Oh, silly me. And I never realised. I must have been dazzled by the flashlights from the thousand paparazzi all around us.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Hey, News Flash, Mike: You’re not Robert de Niro. Know what I’m telling you? You’re not that famous, is what I’m trying to say, they’re going to recognise you in a Toulouse parking lot ...”

  “And what I’m telling you —-”

  “… Public or not.”

  “—- I’m telling you, we’re not fifteen, Trove.”

  “Sure we are.”

  +++

  We kissed. It was a clumsy kiss. The kiss of fifteen-year-olds. Tongues uncertain what was expected of them, teeth bashing teeth. We were walking arm-in-arm down the side-street which leads to the parking-lot by Toulouse’s Hotel de Ville. A warm breeze rustled an evening that would otherwise have been searing. She’s small with chestnut hair, Trove, and the right side of the fifty I’m (as you know) the wrong side of. You’d like her, Drew. She’s one of us: unpretentious, unfussy … and a lot less brash and self-assured than she gives the impression of being.

  It was an unpropitious baptism. Bells did not ring, sparks did not fly. That was great! Secretly I was relieved. I think Trove was too. It meant the kiss was the prelude to a dalliance, a fling, and not to anything heavyweight or life-changing.

  The parking-lot was close to the centre. As far as parking-lots go, it’s a pretty one. But the prettiness is imbued with that primness which seems to be the defining property of the French middle-class … thinking about it, of the French middle-everything. As a town, Toulouse is sort of Frenchly middle-everything. It’s a sort of Puritan prick-tease of a town: chastely promiscuous, strait-laced but with satin lingerie – the virgin courtesan.

  +++

  “I’ve got to go, Mike.”

  “You’ve got to go.”

  “You could protest.”

  “I could, but you’ve got to go.”

  “Your place isn’t too far away.”

  “It isn’t, Trove. But …”

  “I have to go.”

  “Was that just an awkward pause we shared there together?”

  “You know why, Michael, I have to go?”

  “You just said ...”

  “Forget what I just said. You know why now I have to go?”

  “No.”

  “Because your apartment, it really isn’t far away. That’s why I have to go.”

  “Right.”

  “Right? Jesus Christ, none of this is right.”

  “No.”

  “No, Michael.”

  “It’s all wrong, right?”

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “As if …”

  “I don’t care to be mocked, Michael.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve gotten my head in a noose here.”

  “Such a lovely head.”

  “Not, Michael, a lovely noose.”

  “No.”

  “Sunday.”

  “Sunday?”

  “I need to meet with you on Sunday.”

  “Right.”

  “Not to sleep with you.”

  “Never on a Sunday, right?”

  “The following weekend, Al’s away.”

  “Right.”

  “Saturday, Mike, and Sunday.”

  “And this Sunday?”

  “I need to see you without sleeping with you.”

  “Right.”

  “To organise sleeping with you, Mike, without doing the deed.”

  “Planning the heist, sort of thing?”

  “I need to see you, Mike. You complaining?”

  “I’ll do all my moaning the following weekend.”

  “I like you as well as lusting after you.”

  “I like you too, Trove. You know I do.”

  “I think that was just another of those awkward pauses.”

  “We seem to be getting rather good at them.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Right.”

  “You could kiss me again.”

  “No, Trove, I don’t think so.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My place is too close.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I’m finding it already hard to control myself …”

  “You sure you’re not mocking me, Michael?”

  “Could I phone you?”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Ah!”

  “That was half sigh, that ‘ah’, and half question.”

  “You read far more into my ‘ah’s’, Trove, than they’re capable of holding.”

  “And just what did it mean, then, that ‘ah’?”

  “I was wondering, that’s all, will you phone.”

  “I said I’d go to bed with you, goddamm it.”

  “Oh, and you’ve always phoned the people you’ve been to bed with?”

  “That wasn’t a pause, okay?”

  “A pausette, then?”

  “A pausette’s not a pause. It was a fair point you made. A point not without fairness, is what I’m saying. I haven’t yet been to bed with you, but it’s still fair.”

  “Right.”

  “As a point.”

  “Right, Trove.”

  “I will phone, alright? Trust me. Do you trust me, Mike?”

  “Drive safely.”

  “And, like, I’m supposed not to have noticed you didn’t answer the question?”

  “I did answer the question.”

  “Answer it again.”

  “I trust you, Trove. Myself? …”

  +++

  She drove a blue Renault. I gazed after it, knowing it was not after it that I was gazing. I gazed until the reflectors’ lights glowed into a soft-focus and kaleidoscopic haze, a moving abstract scurrying through a brightly-coloured trifle.

  I wasn’t sure what had just happened. I’d known Trove for years. For years. Between us, for years, there’d been … what had it been? … a goofiness, a love of laughter and of laughing, a lascivious banter … a flirtatious, not-to-be-taken-seriously badinage. A whatever-it-was of such innocence, of such non-seduction and … unthreateningness that, on those occasions when our ‘other halves’ had also been with us, our flirting together had, if anything, only been more flagrant.

  When Eva was dying Trove was supportive. Supportive? That would be like describing Michelangelo as a bit of a chiseller. Trove was central to my coping with Eva’s illness. A keystone. After she died, if anything Trove was even more supportive. You cannot believe (nor can I adequately describe) the comfort that she was – the more so (the so much more so) for being uncondescending with it. A ‘just a friend’ friend, but a dear and close ‘just a friend’. A real friend. A woman I was proud to call a ‘just a friend’. And a woman too who enabled me to be proud of myself, to be proud of what I thought of as my grown-upness, in that I could recognise in Trove a truly sexy woman, but sex between us was not an issue. To the extent, in fact, that I remember a rather tipsy dinner party when – I suppose I was even bragging – I used her as an example of my ability to separate friendship from lust.

  Except that, gazing after her car, now sex had become an issue. And now I did lust after her. Deeply. Wildly. And with scant regard for the consequences.

  Through the welter of exhaust fumes staggered in an exhausted waft of jasmine. I wanted it to rest a while; I wanted to take off its shoes for it, offer it a drink. Before even I could motion for it to sit, though, it had gone. And I was left only with the memory. The memory only of a hint.

  Which was life, I thought. That’s the way life was.

  When Eva had died I’d been left only with the memory. As with the jasmine, it had seemed to me to be th
e memory of a wisp. Eva had been a breath of sanity within an asthma of lunacy – the asthma which was both suffocating the world and possessing it.

  You cannot hold onto a wisp. And whilst it may be the received wisdom that it’s somehow better ‘to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’, the pain of having done so tends to intimidate the lover-and-loser from shoving his hand – as he is wont to see it – a second time onto the flame.

  +++

  “See, there’s this song. Do you know?, I can’t even remember what it’s called. Shirley Bassey sang it. Yeah, whatever happened to her? To Shirley Bassey? You never seem to hear of her these …

  “I tend to do that, sorry: Stray from the point. Which means, I guess, I did it again. Sorry. Again. I feel awkward, is the thing. I mean, maybe you’re not exactly a stranger, but, still and all, you’re not either (and I mean no disrespect when I say this) a bosom buddy, as it were. Yet here I am, talking to you about my most intimate bits … thoughts, actions, all that. My sex life, for God’s sake. I guess it’s a bit like the way your gynaecologist knows you better in certain aspects than your husband.

  “Sure, it’s funny for you. You’re the gynaecologist, right? The sort of gynaecologist in this situation. Me, on the other hand, whilst you’re gazing into my innermost recesses, I’ve got my legs in stirrups. Needs be, I guess.

  “Anyhow, there’s a line in the song, whatever the hell the song was: ‘It was all so simple then’. And that’s how it was then: simple. Simple then. At the beginning.

  “He’d been living round the corner from me in France. When I say, ‘round the corner’, about thirty k’s away. – That still sounds awkward to me, isn’t that odd? Even after all my time here. Using ‘k’s, I mean, as an abbreviation for kilometres. Us Americans, we still use miles. And we’re going to go right on using ’em, goddammit. None of these European metres for us. Globalisation means the rest of the world assuming our habits, goddammit. Heaven forfend – ‘forfend’, that’s such a great word, isn’t it? It’s a word I learnt from Mike. – Heaven forfend, is what I’m saying, any of those nasty foreign habits or standards should encroach on a US brain.

  “We’d known each other for years. Known each other from when his wife had been alive ... From way before that, in fact. We’d been in the Toulouse Troupers together. That’s a theatre group hereabouts. Now, though, he had to go back to England. He needed, he said, to spend some time with his son, with his about-to-be-born grandchild. He needed, he said, to establish some kind of relationship with them both. And then he’d be back.