18

On Friday Deb asks me what plans I’ve got for the weekend and I tell her I’m going to a thirtieth.

And she says, Fuck, thirty, slowly and breathily as though it’s almost inconceivable. You’re not thirty are you Ricky?

No. I’ve got nearly two years left to do all the ‘before I’m thirty’ things.

Thirty. I can’t even imagine thirty.

You don’t have to. It happens anyway. It’s like that.

So what are you doing?

Going out to dinner.

No, you’ve got to do more than that.

I’ll give you the guy’s number if you want. You can call him and tell him he’s fucking up his only shot at a decent thirtieth.

I start working, start looking through this contract again and wading my way with some discomfort to a few things that might become ideas. My phone rings. It’s Deb.

You know what I’d do for my thirtieth, Ricky?

What?

I’d get one of those bouncy castles, one of those blow up ones you see at church fetes, and I’d have the party in there.

Good plan, Deb.

Yeah. Thanks babe. You’ll be there won’t you?

Sure.

You’ll have to take your shoes off. That okay by you?

Fine. I bounce way better with my shoes off.

Cool.

We all plan to meet at my place for drinks before dinner. Sal decided this a couple of weeks ago because it’s near the restaurant and, besides, it would give everyone a chance to see how my renovations are going. Back then there was nothing ironic about it, I fully expected we’d be standing round admiring my handiwork. I wonder if I can keep everyone down at the end of the verandah with the two and a half painted railings long enough to get away with it. I doubt it.

So instead I hide the two and a half painted railings with a table and I try to distract my guests with champagne and the presentation of the gift. And the house is so profoundly unrenovated that the inspection aspect of the visit is entirely forgotten. I extol the many virtues of popcorn. I tell them it’s easy, it’s healthy and the choices of seasoning are limited only by the imagination. Jeff asks me what seasoning I’m going to try first with mine and I realise I haven’t thought this through.

Good imagination, he says.

We go into the kitchen and he loads up both our machines with corn. Within minutes the popcorn is pouring into a large mixing bowl with butter and curry powder and Jeff gets quite excited about the result, but the general consensus is that it might not be quite right with the champagne.

And we do seem to drink quite a lot of champagne before we head off down the hill to Le Chalet.

They seat us at a table for six, with Jeff and Sal on one side, Tim and Chris on the other and me at the end, sitting opposite a distant empty chair that I try to tell myself is not symbolic. Jeff calls one of the staff over and says, I wonder if you could take that chair away. It’s making my friend uncomfortable.

And tonight, Sal says emphatically, as though she has planned to, no intellectual wanking. No excluding reasonable people with that boy’s crap.

But it’s my birthday, Jeff says, and that’s my favourite thing.

Well that puts me in my place. Your favourite thing is it? Okay, for the birthday boy, for the boy who clearly has an interest in beginning his thirty-first year with a vow of celibacy, wank away. Go on. See if I care.

Excellent.

But nothing about longitude. We’ve all had enough of fucking longitude.

Debating the Discovery of the Longitude

The on-going debate concerning the Discovery of the Longitude has come to symbolise the pointlessness of all our many on-going pointless point-scoring games. The unspoken ground rules appear to include a necessary lack of any ultimate worth in the topic, and certain minimum and maximum levels of knowledge, so that we each have sufficient material for the game to begin, but none of us ever has enough to bring it to a conclusive end. And this has taken us through all kinds of subjects from sport (obviously), to worm reproduction, to forgotten pop classics of the late seventies, to possible interpretations of the line ‘Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni’ in its historical context, to the likely effects of Eratosthenes’ Error on early cartography and ultimately to the Discovery of the Longitude. This is one of the best because we all know nearly nothing about it, but we each claim to come at it from a valid perspective, Jeff with a Masters in Maritime law, Tim with his history PhD, and me, courageously, with no more weaponry than a single quote from the Notes to Gulliver’s Travels mentioning substantial sums offered by the British Government from 1714 for a means of measuring longitude at sea. And the rest of my position is determined by nothing more than fragments and lies and a loud unreasonable confidence. Despite this, my argument has evolved into something of quite extraordinary detail, and has the respect of all. Of course, when fully sober, none of us is totally sure of his position, and after a few drinks the course of events is dictated solely by a process of flagrant contradiction and one-upmanship. This is usually only brought to a close by Sal shouting, ‘You’re making it up. You’re lying now. That’s the lying face. If you don’t stop now I’ll have to hit Jeff in the balls’.

I drink quickly and the entrees are a while arriving. The others say I’m talking loudly and sounding tense and I tell them, for no known reason, Well of course I’m tense, wouldn’t you be?

This only focuses the attention more clearly on me. Everyone seems to be talking at once and I can hear Jeff making remarks about my tension and its probable sexual nature, my hundred and eighty days of celibacy, the likelihood that I am an expert snake-handler by now, which he gleefully workshops into the concept of ‘going the Ram Chandra’. I deny this, and he calls me Onan the Barbarian. He appears to be speaking from a list of Famous Masturbatorial Identities.

I take him up on this and we become quite competitive until we reach a point where I seem to decide that my best weapon is to turn the argument on me, and I find myself declaring quite loudly that I am impotent and that my penis is a plumb bob capable of pointing only to the centre of the earth.

And Sal, slightly more controlling than usual when she’s drunk, is saying to Jeff, Little sips, little sips, and he’s giving me a look that suggests I might now be called Bob for the rest of my days. I can see him saying it, Bob, and smiling as he’s trying to drink, trying to negotiate his mouth to his wine glass as both her hands hold it down.

But things don’t go too badly until I declare that I want to make a speech and I headbutt the woman arriving with our mains as I stand. She pirouettes and loses nothing, and the others at the table applaud. I hear my voice shouting quite loudly that Jeffrey is the most handsome of my friends and then I hear myself saying that I need to do a wee now.

The others all start going, Ssshh, louder than I think they need to so I say, What do you mean Ssshh? It’s only a wee.

They Ssshh even louder, I Ssshh back and soon everyone in the restaurant is going Ssshh and I’m shouting, You all do wees, don’t ya?

Shortly after that things deteriorate.

I know I make several trips to the toilet in the next hour, because making trips to the toilet isn’t easy. The number of chairs in the way is quite incredible, and crowds of people I don’t know cheer every time I stand. Some of them I think, or perhaps I just fear, whisper, You all do wees, don’t ya? as I go past.

On one of the trips, perhaps the last, the toilet door is shut. I can hear someone on the other side singing ‘That’s Amore’. The door opens and Tim lurches out, makes a very rough kind of eye contact, seems surprised that it’s someone he knows, says, Oh, hi. You know that thing? That thing when you’ve had a few drinks and you look in the mirror and you see Dean Martin? Yeah. And he gives me a friendly pat on the shoulder, then he does the same to the wall and he makes his way back to the restaurant. I go into the toilet, and of course he’s pissed on the floor.

When we leave, someone at the last remaining table shouts, Make sure you look after Richard to the others, and they undertake to do so.

I wait till their cab arrives, and then I set off on the climb up to Zigzag Street. This is a much more confusing task than I remember and I can’t help thinking of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, not a film I can say I ever understood, but I have never felt more empathy with the wordless Kaspar than I do at this moment. Almost to the point of being sure I can hear Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’ as my mountain sways in front of me.

I fall several times, mostly onto the pavement and only once into the gutter, but that begins as a fall onto the pavement and ends with a gentle roll to the right dictated by the contours, which in places require vigilance.

But I come to no harm, and in the morning I wake in my own bed.