7

Sal calls me to suggest takeaway tonight. We thought we might pick it up and bring it over to your place, she says. And before I can say, When’s the latest I can let you know, she says, And don’t give me any of that when’s the latest I can let you know crap.

My tail gets munched, and a particularly glamorous Sammy the Snake performance goes the way of all before it. The game dissolves in front of me and a groan comes out before I can stop it.

What was that?

Existential angst. Just the usual.

So we’re coming round then?

Tonight?

Yeah, about seven-thirty. We might even bring Tim and Chris. Have you got any particular food preference? It seems they’re coming round.

I’m not sure.

So does that mean no, you have no particular preference? Or are you actually unsure as to whether or not you have a particular preference?

I suspect that at present I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not I have a particular preference, and I may not be able to do so for some time.

Does this mean I should pick?

I’m not sure.

I’m sorry, did I call you on a bad day for your brain?

As opposed to other days?

Okay, we’ll make this easy. Just make sure you have five clean plates, five glasses, five forks and a couple of spoons for serving and we’ll handle everything else.

Five, five, five and two. Got it.

Some days my concentration is quite poor. People catch me when my mind is swimming among ideas and not able to grapple easily with conversation. Today I am endeavouring to make headway with the power station thing, and I am endeavouring not to clutter every moment with thoughts of Anna Hiller. But anything that reminds me of anything in the last three years reminds me of her. I am managing to construct an entire universe in which she is central, but absent.

And I’m well aware that this is a particularly stupid thing to do.

At home, I prepare the seventeen items expected of me and I place them on the red Laminex kitchen table. Sal and Jeff bring wine, so I drink quite a bit of it for them and feel more relaxed than I have for a couple of days. And the conversation moves briskly from one topic to another and I wade slowly after it, lurching in from time to time to offer some remark that is only just no longer relevant.

I have trouble moving on, I tell them. Trouble committing to a new topic.

And I’m watching these four people, these two couples, at least as much as I’m listening to them. And being the only presently trashed person among my friends, I seem to spend a lot of my time in odd-numbered groups. Nights with five plates.

While Jeff and Tim debate first the value of the adversarial talk show as a social document and then whether or not there’s a cricket career to be made out of the backspinner, I’m privately focussing on the coupling issue and not saying much.

Jeff said to me once, when I asked him (when I said to him, Tell me exactly why and give me detail), She’s smart and she’s strong and I like that. Sure, it’s not always straightforward, but straightforward never really worked for me. So it has its challenges but that’s okay. We’ve decided she’s forthright. We have a deal where I can refer to her as forthright but not uncompromising. She’s generous, more generous than me. She does things for people who matter to her. And then he shrugged his shoulders and said, And all that’s great, but so what? It sounds like a reference. Really, it just happened. One of those things I guess. The L thing, you know. And for the L thing he offers no theory, and that’s rare.

Naturally I haven’t let it rest there. In my own time, in my own head, right now in my own mad, troubled swimming among ideas, I’ve tested all kinds of hypotheses, trying to work out what goes right, what goes wrong. Comparing Sal to Anna, comparing Jeff to me. Comparing Anna to Jeff and Sal to me and Sal to Jeff. I’ve learned very little of course, but the processes of comparison are sometimes inexorable. And still the most appropriate comparison is usually me to a pair of Steelo underpants and a hair shirt.

Should I try to pursue a relationship with someone like Sal, or with someone quieter, less powerful? Should I call Anna, just one more time and …

And what about Tim and Chris? What about the other relationship in front of me right now? Tim and his PhD (Cantab) in history and his Radical Responses to the Queen Caroline Agitations (J Brit Stud, 1995) and his policy job with the state government. Tim and his fondness for recreational theorising and pulling his socks up when he plays tennis. Tim and the thing Sal refers to as his one big moment of ‘wanker fame’, his credit in the Oxford English Dictionary for discovering the first reference to the term ‘rumpy-pumpy’:

Dr Timothy Dylan Carstairs Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary

Rumpy-pumpy: from ‘rumpy’, a popular rum-based aphrodisiac in Elizabethan times (the recipe no longer extant); the deliriously protracted intercourse said to follow its use, first noted in the correspondence of Robert Greene (also Green), author of ‘Greene’s Groat’s Worth of Wit’ (1592), in a letter to the playwright Thomas Kyd concerning the behaviour of a mutual acquaintance, at that time in the Dutch seaport of Vlissingen (Flushing): ‘ … and then they partook of the rumpy and made proceed to the performance of the famous rumpy-pumpy, surely until the dawn hour was near upon them, stopping only when they had rattled every sword in the garrison and laid shameful cracks upon the town walls, and all, ‘tis said, for the price of a Dutch shilling’. TDCM

Chris and her quietness, placid non-meaningful quietness. Chris and her complete ignorance of the part of English history we refer to, somewhat strangely, as ‘Tim’s period’. Chris and her job at a Flight Centre, where they met when she booked a trip for him once, a trip with his previous girlfriend, though it’s now referred to as My trip to America.

How do they couple? How do they fit together? How did it even cross their minds, and how is it still going now?

One weekend, when they hadn’t been going out long, a group of us went to Jeff’s family’s house at the coast and Tim and Chris woke us several times each night with the sounds of short bursts of vigorous mattress bouncing and one of them (we still don’t know which) braying like a mule. Delirious maybe, intriguing certainly, but, in terms of duration at least, way short of rumpy-pumpy. Each morning they would get up late and look smug, knowing that we had heard it all but would say nothing.

There were six of us that weekend. Six plates, six of everything. Except couples, there were three couples.

Some days I’d really be better with Sammy the Snake. It’s not quite the same, but no-one gets hurt and the disappointments are bearable.

After they go I lie on my bed. I have had too much wine. Some nights this conversation goes on all around me. What am I going to do?