Empty

1

I arrive home to find a man standing on the driveway of my house.

His tie is pulled halfway down his chest, his body is swaying and he refuses to let me park. I stop the car with the wheels on the kerb, the headlights illuminating the trousers of his nasty, unhappy suit.

He raises his hands to stop me driving and falls forward with the effort. His clothes shine under the lights. His hair is smeared across his forehead like he’s melting, but I can’t quite make out what he looks like because he keeps swaying and lolling.

It takes a while for Jessica, who is sitting next to me, to react. Oh my God, she says as he sinks to his knees on the tarmac and puts his hands to his face. Jessica reaches for the door and I catch her arm.

Don’t get out, I say. He might be … but I fail to finish. Frankly, I don’t know what he might be. Certainly not dangerous; he’s nothing more than a moist mess on the driveway, burbling incoherently under the engine noise.

Jessica removes my hand. Don’t be so pathetic, she says. And as she gets out of the car and approaches him, and bends her knees to get closer to his face, I realise she knows him.

Do I know him? Hard to tell what the fucker looks like. But I feel I should get out in a show of moral support.

Pull it onto the kerb or something, says Jess, shielding her eyes from the headlights. You can’t leave it there.

I don’t answer.

There’s tenderness between them. She is not recoiling in horror at the mess he’s making or the potential scene that could develop in full view of the neighbourhood. She’s talking softly, little knees peeping out under her hem, her shadow wrapping him like a blanket. She puts her hands on his shoulders.

I am suddenly aware that this bloke, whose dribbling and tears and what looks like chunder are dripping onto a driveway where he doesn’t belong, is not the outsider; I am.

So, what am I witnessing? Something profound? It’s not entirely clear. This guy is a watery embarrassment, but even so, I can sense a significant plot twist in my life is happening around me. I’m not sure what the appropriate response is to all this.

So, I move the car.

*

The signs that my nine-year relationship with Jess is beginning to fall apart have been there for some time, I suppose. If you asked Jessica, I’m sure she would say I have chosen to miss them, seeing only what I want to see and justifying the odd crack or fault line as something that happens to all relationships over time. I’m pretty sure even if she didn’t put it quite like that, I would be the one to blame.

You seem incapable of seeing what would be perfectly obvious to anyone else, even if they were lying in a brain-dead coma being kept alive by breathing apparatus, she said to me once when I hadn’t noticed a flirty glance being exchanged between two separately married friends at a dinner party.

And I guess that would be her point. That kind of comment isn’t unusual; her contempt for me, her belief that I am unforgivably thick in the head, is not disguised, so I should have seen all this coming.

When she sees Graham letting himself down on our driveway (Graham being the moist pile of puke who is publicly deconstructing by the light of my company car), Jessica’s response is typical of our current repartee.

Come on, Ben, get him inside. What are you waiting for? she says, as though it should be obvious we should be getting him inside, even though he clearly represents some kind of health hazard. I am the idiot. Not the drunk who is currently wiping what looks like a chunk of strawberry pop-tart off his chin.

I say nothing while we get him inside and rest him on my beautiful Armeggio suede sofa. Jess keeps stroking his face, avoiding the pools of spittle, sweat, half-chewed food and other unnamed matter that have collected around his mouth. She knots her brow in what I take to be pity, though it is not an expression I am familiar with.

Get the spare bed made up, she says into Graham’s face. He’s in no fit state to get home; he’ll have to sleep here.

I know I should be paying attention – this is probably very important – but it is all making me feel a bit awkward. From a dark place at the back of my skull I’m reminded I have a gram and a half of very good-quality cocaine in my pocket, which would take my mind off things right now.

I try to remember how long it is since I stuffed a line or two of top-quality cocaine up my nose, and reach the muddled conclusion it must be a good ninety minutes. It was in the restaurant, coffee had only just come out, and then the walk to the car park was over ten minutes, as well as the drive home …

For God’s sake, Ben. This dreamy wondering is, it seems, wholly inappropriate. What are you doing just standing there like a dummy? Am I talking to myself? Make up the spare bed!

Graham alarmingly takes this as his cue to turn up the volume. No, no, no, no, no, he says, blowing enormous saliva-bubbles with every ‘no’. I’m not sleeping in any spare bed. I’m not staying in any bed unless you’re in it, Jessssssica. He is shaking his head now, spraying globules of gooey spit and specks of yellow matter onto the coffee table and the soft suede of the gorgeous sofa. It cost over five thousand pounds, you know. I could have bought a decent motorbike with that. I think some of it also hits Jess in the face … and since this is my story, let’s say it does.

I don’t laugh. Jess, I say instead, who is this guy?

She stops wiping her lapels and rolls her eyes at me but before she can answer, the beast from the sweaty lagoon arises.

I am the one who really loves Jesssss. His lips are quivering slightly and his chin is about to drip. I am the one who would … die … yes, die for her. He fixes my eyes with his to deliver his coup de grace. I am the one she should be with, not you! And he flops back into full repose, his energy spent by his rather camp declaration of affection.

Have we met? I say. He does seem vaguely familiar now I can get a good look at him. He has begun to sob into Jessica’s Oswald Boateng jacket.

She pushes Graham away. The way he’s conducting himself is clearly irritating her. Jesus, Ben, she says softly, What is it you want?

I don’t know. Tell me how you know him. I can feel the itch starting in my shoes, which is very fucking annoying since I feel I should be in total control.

Jessica sighs and stands up straight. Christ, Ben, what a fucking mess. I thought even you would have worked it out by now. I mean, do I have to have sex with him right here on this couch to explain it to you? Graham looks up at this, with strained optimism across his brow. My first thought is for the suede. His name is Graham, Jess goes on, and that is probably … well, you can draw your own conclusions, the details aren’t important.

And is it true about you two being in love? I ask, a bit pathetically.

Yesssss, spumes Graham, debris flying across the rug and into his own hair. He is about to launch into some more drivel when Jessica cuts across him. Graham and I have been seeing each other for a while, Ben. About a year, I guess. Which I have been trying to tell you, I have. But you won’t listen. You’re incapable of it, just like you’re incapable of … of … of thinking anything changes. People change, things change – and it’s like you’re incapable of, I don’t know, of finishing a sentence, or of growing up, growing out of your childish behaviour. Life isn’t just one long jolly … you’re a grown man.

And with that she stops, seeing that I am down for the count.

What’s floored me is that she’s right. Well, not right – I wouldn’t give her that satisfaction – but she’s certainly right-ish. She has been trying to tell me, dropping hints. She’s stayed out after work more often, increasingly with no warning. I mean, how many meetings do magazine people need to tell them it’s all over and they should start taking plumbing classes?

But that’s not the only clue. She’s been staying out longer, all night on occasion. When things have reached a point where your home life consists of her arriving home in the morning, slamming the front door, running to the shower, discarding clothes as she goes, slurping coffee from my cup, chasing around after some papers, and then leaving, you should twig there’s a problem. I admit I may not have picked up on all these things, I get it, but just because my partner doesn’t make herself a full English every morning, am I meant to expect a drunken yuppie to appear on my driveway and wipe his dinner all over my suede sofa?

Oh, don’t nod your head or suck your teeth; it’s easy to be wise in hindsight. Nine years together. A long time. And we still talk to each other; words still pass between us. Perhaps it’s not the giggling banter of our first few weeks together, but there’s still communication. For example, Jessica will have little affectionate digs at my habit of tidying and shuffling, especially when I’m completely toasted.

You’re so beautifully organised; I love that about you, she would say. But if you just left my stuff alone, I would be able to get on with my life so much better. And, I don’t ask you to do very much, so it would be really nice if you didn’t totally fuck up everything I do ask you to do.

Okay, okay, I’m slightly bitter about her now that Jessica is officially walking out, and I suppose my recollection of the things she said is a little tainted. But she can be bloody sarcastic.

Graham’s bitten his tongue and it is now bleeding. He keeps pressing the back of his hand into his face and staring at it, deeply worried, it seems, that his tongue is about to come away.

I am lugging bedding from the laundry to the spare room, preoccupied with how quickly I can get into another room without being missed so I can stick some drugs up my nose.

What must you be thinking of me? Desperate to get away from the dose of real life that is confronting me on my Armeggio sofa, and escape into a chemically altered state of euphoria. Perhaps you have some sympathy for Jessica’s view of my sad, pathetic state.

Judge me if you like, but I dare you to keep it together when everything around you seems to be a lie and life is kicking you right in the danglers. Perhaps I should have been expecting this, but I simply wasn’t. Jessica’s signals were not unambiguous.

I mean, it isn’t just me that she holds in utter contempt; it is also the rest of the species. She never tips because service staff have given up; she gives taxi drivers directions continuously and sighs and tuts all the way; she sneers at her colleagues and she criticises our friends. She can’t bear anyone. Except perhaps Graham, who on this showing probably deserves her derision more than most.

I can’t believe you’re going to sleep with him, I say to her as she attempts to remove Graham’s trousers while avoiding an unidentified stain on the crotch. Graham is trying to rub her breasts with sticky hands. You’d prefer to spend the night with … that? I say, asking for trouble.

Is the penny finally dropping? She is drilling into me with the same eyes that used to weep with laughter at the things I said, drilling those eyes into the back of my skull.

I never considered Jess to be any more than super­ficially nasty. Sarcastic, bitter, but not malicious. But maybe she has manufactured this whole scene. Maybe she wanted to inflict as much misery on me as she can, and organised Graham to be at the house when we got home, so as to bask in my humiliation.

Looking at him mauling her with his unhygienic limbs, I have to confess he’s not much of a trophy to flaunt in front of me. Well, whatever, it doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t say a great deal for me. This is a pretty undignified way to have the curtain drawn back on your life. I think I would have preferred it if Graham hadn’t been attempting to disrobe Jessica, hoisting up her skirt while she tried to tell me our relationship is over, but it looks like I don’t get to choose.

So here we are. A nasty looking boil has grown on the arse-cheek of my life and, like Graham is doing to Jessica, it’s trying its best to bite me. If boils can bite, which they can’t. Anyway, the point is my arse is being bitten by something and it isn’t very pleasant. Better than having it fondled by Graham, perhaps, but still … I am straying from the point.

This is a wake-up call. Over the nine years Jessica and I have been together we have developed something of a symbiosis. Can I function without her? I have no idea. We have become, I believed until now, one organism. When she feels pain, I can sense it without asking. What I stick up my nose gives her a rush.

I haven’t had to think or act as an individual for almost a decade. But all our futures are changing and maybe it’s time to ditch the comfort of the status quo; maybe this is exactly what we all need, not just me. At the same time as Jessica is choosing Graham over me, the country is being asked to choose who it wants to get into bed with. An election is coming. And after twelve years of the same government we are all, as the politicians say, being offered the chance to make a new future.

Well, I can’t speak for the country but that’s certainly what I intend to do. My life is about to change forever, and I’m going to climb out of the passenger seat to get my hands well and truly on the wheel. Oh, yeah.

And what I will never be able to forgive Jessica for is that she is ultimately responsible for everything that will result. The bloody cow.

2

I stare longingly at Vernon’s cigarette.

We’re sitting in the canteen at the offices of England’s fifth-bestselling newspaper, hunched in orange moulded plastic chairs that are bolted to the floor, drinking coffee from polystyrene cups that fizz as if dissolving every time you take a sip.

Do you want one? asks Vern, reaching for his packet. I wondered if you’d regressed ten years overnight?

I say nothing. Some print workers laugh from a table in the corner of the room. Vernon starts stroking his cigarette box and sings my name. Then he says, You know you’re not supposed to humiliate them anymore, don’t you? That poor bastard won’t sleep for a month after what you did to him, you realise that? I mean, it’s fair enough but I think we’re supposed to give them a hug these days, not give them a belting like that.

Vernon is gently yellowing as he ages. His hair is losing its colour but turning a translucent brown, the same shade as the nicotine-stained walls. He’s taken to wearing beige suits, shirts in a variety of yellows, and wide ties from the seventies. The cloud of smoke around his head seems to follow him whether he’s got a fag on the go or not.

He’s talking about the colossal shit I dropped on a bloke called Julian Williams a little earlier on. When not drinking coffee in the airless canteen, Vernon and I sell advertising space for this newspaper.

The advertising department at The Bell is an open-plan affair. Grey desks made of plastic-coated MDF form jagged hexagons on a dull purple carpet. Each desk is bordered by eight-inch screen walls, covered in a carpet-like fuzz, the colour of what children bring up after too much orange squash at a birthday party.

One of these hexagons belongs to my set of idiots. Paul, the junior, is straight out of university on our graduate recruitment programme, which means he isn’t bright enough for the big accountancy or management consultancy firms and he isn’t imaginative enough to go travelling. He’s given a patch that is virtually devoid of revenue, and he is shouted at by everyone.

Marina has been with us a year, after an apprenticeship doing what Jessica used to do: sell magazines. She’s eaten lunch at the next table to George Michael, and seen Nicolas Cage getting drunk and leery at a West End wine bar, so she’s now hooked on the industry. But she’s not in love with The Bell.

Then there’s fat-faced, stripey Julian. He rarely goes out, preferring instead to bellow on the phone all day, aiming the handset like a loaded weapon, and tells unsuspecting media buyers ‘jokes’ from his private collection, membership of which is strictly limited. Once he’s regurgitated something from the tired mush that forms his conversational diet, he waits quietly, smiling, for his audience to realise they are meant to laugh. And once they do, he achieves comic orgasm, spurting unhappy-coloured laughter all over the desks, and waving his smirk around the office for other members of the group to admire.

This morning I stood over Julian and dangled a page of The Daily Bulletin at him, on which was printed an advertisement for a reasonably-priced Japanese hatchback called the Karguri Scuttle. What do you know about this, Julian? I said and sighed.

It’s a Karguri Scuttle ad, he said.

Yes, I know that. I want to know what you know about it.

We’ve got that, said Julian, glancing at Marina and colouring slightly. He was clearly lying. I have no idea why. He knew it was a lie. I knew it was a lie. Simplest thing at this point was to reverse out and stop humiliating both of us. But he didn’t stop. He kept going, making up more and more rubbish.

As I asked him repeatedly whether he was sure about this information and stayed as calm as I could, he refused to get himself out of it. He even started blushing, unable to believe what he was getting into.

So, we did the whole dance. I asked him absurd questions and he made up ever more far-fetched answers off the top of his head, hoping I would go away. Trouble is, Julian is possibly the biggest idiot of all our idiots and he does have a habit of saying the most ridiculous things. And on this one, for whatever reason, he’s decided to have a shot at kicking the wheels off the entire fucking apple cart.

How many? I asked.

Hmm? How many what?

For Christ’s sake, Julian, how many fucking Karguri pages have we got?

Oh, err, not sure, I’ll have to check. A few, though.

To Julian’s left, Marina, who had been doing a good job of pretending to flick through the papers, snorted a laugh. Conversation around the department dropped a little. The atmosphere tightened. Hackett wandered out of his office. And still Julian squeezed out the horseshit.

I let the air-conditioning suck away his words and then spoke to him more slowly and quietly. You’re not sure? I said. I gave him a look designed to say ‘Why are you putting us through this?’ but which he took to mean ‘I am completely convinced by your fuckwittery’.

I said, You don’t know how many full-colour-page advertisements for Karguri you booked? It just doesn’t stand out. In all the hundreds of full-page campaigns you book every single day. Is that it? Is that what you are trying to tell me?

Not sure of the exact number, no.

Really? Just can’t recollect? I looked at him like you look at the airline rep who tells you that your flight has been cancelled. "Okay, well, can you tell