‘I know, and I’ve been trying to get out for ages, it’s just, well you know – it’s like a maze in here!’ He giggled, but there was silence from the phone. ‘Hello? Are you still there? Can you hear me?’
‘Are you with anyone, Dexter?’ said Sylvie, her voice low.
He glanced at Emma, still pretending to be captivated by the ultrasound scan. He thought for a moment, then turned his back to her and lied. ‘Actually there’s a whole gang of us in here. We’re going to give it another fifteen minutes, then we’re going to dig a tunnel, and if that doesn’t work we’re going to eat someone.’
‘Thank God, here’s Callum. I’m going to talk to Callum. Hurry up, will you?’
‘Okay. I’m on my way. Bye, darling, bye!’ He hung up. ‘Did I sound drunk then?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘We’ve got to get out of here right now.’
‘Fine by me.’ She looked in both directions, hopeless. ‘We should have left a trail of breadcrumbs.’ As if in answer, there was a hum, a click, and each of the lights that illuminated the maze clicked off one by one, plunging them into darkness.
‘That’s handy,’ said Dexter. They stood still for a moment as their eyes adjusted to the gloom. The band were playing ‘It’s Raining Men’, and they listened hard to the muffled sound as if it held a clue to their whereabouts.
‘We should get back,’ said Emma. ‘Before it starts raining men.’
‘Good idea.’
‘There’s a trick, isn’t there?’ said Emma. ‘As I remember it, you put your left hand on the wall, and as long as you don’t let go, you get out eventually.’
‘Then let’s do it!’ He poured the last two glasses from the champagne bottle and placed the empty bottle on the grass. Emma removed her heels, placed her fingertips on the hedge and, a little gingerly at first, they began to walk along the dim corridor of leaves.
‘So you’ll come? To my wedding.’
‘Of course I will. I can’t promise not to disrupt the service, mind.’
‘It should have been me!’ They both smiled in the darkness and walked a little further.
‘As a matter of fact, I was going to ask you a favour.’
‘Please, please, don’t ask me to be the Best Man, Dex.’
‘It’s not that, it’s just I’ve been trying to write a speech for ages now, and I was wondering if you might give me a hand?’
‘No!’ laughed Emma.
‘Why not?’
‘I just think it’ll carry less emotional weight if it’s written by me. Just write what you honestly feel.’
‘Well I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. “I’d like to thank the caterers, and by the way I’m scared shitless.”’ He squinted into the darkness. ‘Are you sure this is working? It feels like we’re going further in.’
‘Trust me.’
‘Anyway, I don’t want you to write the whole thing, just give it a polish?.?.?.’
‘Sorry, you’re on your own there.’ They came to a halt at a three-way junction.
‘We’ve definitely been here before.’
‘Just trust me. We keep going.’
They walked on in silence. Nearby the band had segued into Prince’s ‘1999’, to cheers from the guests. ‘When I first heard this song,’ said Emma, ‘I thought it was science-fiction. 1999. Hover cars and food in pill form and holidays on the moon. Now it’s here and I’m still driving a Fiat bloody Panda. Nothing’s changed.’
‘’Cept I’m a family man now.’
‘A family man. Good God, aren’t you scared?’
‘Sometimes. But then you look at some of the idiots who manage to raise kids. I keep telling myself, if Miffy Buchanan can do it, how hard can it be?’
‘You can’t take babies to cocktail bars, you know. They get funny about that kind of thing.’
‘S’okay. I’m going to learn to love staying in.’
‘But you’re happy?’
‘Yeah? I think I am. Are you?’
‘Happier. Happyish.’
‘Happyish. Well, happyish isn’t so bad.’
‘It’s the most we can hope for.’ The fingertips of her left hand passed across the surface of a statute that seemed familiar, and now Emma knew exactly where they were. Turning right, and then left would bring them out into the rose garden again, back into the party, back to his fiancée and their friends, and there would be no more time to talk. She suddenly felt a startling sadness, so stopped for a moment, turned and took both of Dexter’s hands in her own.
‘Can I say something? Before we go back to the party?’
‘Go on.’
‘I’m a little drunk.’
‘Me too. That’s okay.’
‘Just?.?.?. I missed you, you know.’
‘I missed you too.’
‘But so, so much, Dexter. There were so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and you weren’t there—’
‘Same here.’
‘And I feel a little guilty, sort of running away like that.’
‘Did you? I didn’t blame you. There were times when I was being a little?.?.?. obnoxious.’
‘More than a little, you were bloody awful—’
‘I know—’
‘Selfish, and stuck-up and boring actually—’
‘Yes, you’ve made that point—’
‘But even so. I should have stuck it out a bit, what with your mum and everything—’
‘That’s no excuse though.’
‘Well, no, but it was bound to give you a knock.’
‘I’ve still got that letter you wrote. It’s a very beautiful letter, I appreciated it.’
‘But still, I should have tried harder to get in touch. You’re meant to stick by your friends aren’t you? Take the blow.’
‘I don’t blame you—’
‘But even so.’ To her embarrassment, she found that there were tears in her eyes.
‘Hey, hey, what’s up, Em?’
‘I’m sorry, drunk too much is all?.?.?.’
‘Come here.’ He put his arms around her, his face against the bare skin of her neck, smelling shampoo and damp silk, and she breathed into his neck, his aftershave and sweat and alcohol, the smell of his suit, and they stood like this for a while until she caught her breath and spoke.
‘I tell you what it is. It’s?.?.?. when I didn’t see you, I thought about you every day, I mean every day in some way or another—’
‘Same here—’
‘—even if it was just “I wish Dexter could see this” or “where’s Dexter now?” or “Christ, that Dexter, what an idiot”, you know what I mean, and seeing you today, well, I thought I’d got you back – my best friend. And now all this, the wedding, the baby – I’m so, so happy for you, Dex. But it feels like I’ve lost you again.’
‘Lost – how?’
‘You know what happens, you have a family, your responsibilities change, you lose touch with people—’
‘Not necessarily—’
‘No really, it happens all the time, I know it. You’ll have different priorities, and all these new friends, nice young couples that you met at ante-natal classes who’ll have babies too and understand, or you’ll be too tired because you’ve been up all night—’
‘Actually, we’re going to have one of those babies that aren’t too much trouble. Just leave them in a room apparently. With a tin opener, a little gas stove.’ He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh. ‘It won’t be like that, I promise.’
‘Do you?’
‘Absolutely.’
She pulled away to look at him. ‘You swear? No more disappearing?’
‘I won’t if you won’t.’
Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of glorious confusion.
‘What’s the time?’ said Emma, twisting her face away in panic.
Dexter tugged his sleeve and looked at his watch. ‘Just coming up to midnight.’
‘Well! We should go.’
They walked on in silence, unsure about what had happened and what would happen next. Two more turnings brought them once again to the exit of the maze, and back to the party. Emma was about to open the heavy oak door when he took her hand.
‘Em?’
‘Dex?’
He wanted to take hold of her hand and walk back into the maze. He would turn his phone off, and they would just stay in there until the party was over, get lost and talk about all that had happened.
‘Friends again?’ he said eventually.
‘Friends again.’ She let go of his hand. ‘Now, let’s go and find your fiancée. I want to congratulate her.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fathering
SATURDAY 15 JULY 2000
Richmond, Surrey
Jasmine Alison Viola Mayhew.
She was born in the late evening of the third day of the new Millennium, and so would always be as old as the century. A neat but healthy 6lbs 6ozs, and to Dexter’s mind, inexpressibly beautiful, he knew that he would sacrifice his life for her, while at the same time feeling fairly confident that the situation was unlikely to arise.
That night, sitting in the low-slung vinyl hospital chair, clutching the tiny, crimson-faced bundle, Dexter Mayhew made a solemn resolution. He resolved to do the right thing from now on. A few biological and sexual imperatives aside, all his words and actions would now be fit for his daughter’s ears and eyes. Life would be lived as if under Jasmine’s constant scrutiny. He would never do anything that might cause her pain or anxiety or embarrassment and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing in his life to be ashamed of anymore.
This solemn resolution held for approximately ninety-five minutes. As he sat in a toilet cubicle, attempting to exhale cigarette smoke into an empty Evian bottle, a little must have escaped and set off the detector, waking his exhausted wife and daughter from their much-needed sleep and as he was escorted from the cubicle, still clutching the screw-top bottle of yellow grey smoke, the look in his wife’s tired, narrowed eyes said it all: Dexter Mayhew was simply not up to it.
The growing antagonism between them was exacerbated by the fact that, as the new century began, he found himself without a job, or even the prospect of a job. The broadcast slot for Sport Xtreme had crept inexorably towards dawn, until it became clear that no-one, not even BMX riders, could stay up that late on a weeknight, no matter how rad, sweet or old skool the moves. The series limped to an end and Paternity Leave shaded into the less fashionable state of unemployment.
A temporary distraction was provided by moving house. After much resistance the bachelor flat in Belsize Park was rented out for a huge monthly sum, and exchanged for a neat terraced house in Richmond with, they told him, bags of potential. Dexter protested that he was too young to move to Surrey, by about thirty-five years, but there was no arguing with the quality of life, the good schools, the transport links, the deer roaming in the Park. It was close to her parents, the Twins lived nearby, so Surrey won out and in May they had begun the endless, bottomlessly expensive task of sanding every available wooden surface and knocking through every non-supporting wall. The Mazda sports car went too, sacrificed for a secondhand people carrier that smelt indelibly of the previous family’s communal vomit.
It was a momentous year for the Mayhew family, yet Dexter found himself enjoying nest-building far less than he had thought. He had imagined family life as a sort of extended Building Society commercial: an attractive young couple in blue overalls, paint-rollers in hand, pulling crockery from an old tea chest and flopping down onto a big old sofa. He imagined walking shaggy dogs in the park and exhausted but good-humoured night-feeds. At some point in the near future, there would be rock pools, fires on the beach, mackerel cooked over driftwood. He would invent ingenious games and put up shelves. Sylvie would wear his old shirts over bare legs. Knitwear. He would wear a lot of knitwear and provide for his dependents.
Instead there was bickering, meanness and sullen looks through a fine haze of plaster dust. Sylvie began to spend more and more time at her parents’ house, ostensibly to avoid the builders but more often to stay clear of her listless, ineffectual husband. Occasionally she would phone up to suggest that he go and see their friend Callum, the crayfish baron, and take him up on his offer of work, but Dexter resisted. Perhaps his presenting career might pick up again, he might find work as a producer or re-train as a cameraman or an editor. In the meantime he could help the builders, cutting down on labour costs and to this end he made tea and went for biscuits, picked up a little basic Polish, played PlayStation against the sonic boom of the floor-sander.
Once upon a time he had wondered what happened to all the old people in the TV industry, and now he had his answer. Trainee editors and cameramen were twenty-four, twenty-five, and he had no experience as a producer. Mayhem TV plc, his very own independent company, had become less a business, more an alibi for his inactivity. At the end of the tax year it was formally wound down to avoid accounting costs, and twenty reams of optimistically headed paper were shamefully consigned to the attic. The only bright spot came from spending time with Emma again, sneaking off to the movies when he should have been learning to grout with Jerzy and Lech. But that melancholy feeling, stepping out of a cinema into sunlight on a Tuesday afternoon, had become unbearable. What about his vow of perfect fatherhood? He had responsibilities now. In early June he finally cracked, went to see Callum O’Neill and was initiated into the Natural Stuff family.
And so this St Swithin’s Day finds Dexter Mayhew in an oatmeal-coloured short-sleeve shirt and mushroom-coloured tie, supervising delivery of the vast daily supply of rocket to the new Victoria Station branch. He counts the boxes of the green stuff while the driver stands by with a clipboard, staring openly, and instinctively Dexter knows what’s coming next.
‘Didn’t you used to be on telly?’
And there it is?.?.?.
‘Back in the mists of time,’ he replies, light-heartedly.
‘What was it called? largin’ it or something.’
Don’t look up.
‘That was one of them. So do I sign this receipt or what?’
‘And you used to go out with Suki Meadows.’
Smile, smile, smile.
‘Like I said it was a long, long time ago. One box, two, three—’
‘She’s everywhere these days, isn’t she?’
‘Six, seven, eight—’
‘She’s gorgeous.’
‘She’s very nice. Nine, ten.’
‘What was that like then, going out with her?’
‘Loud.’
‘So – whatever happened to you?’
‘Life. Life happened.’ He takes the clipboard from him. ‘I sign here, yes?’
‘That’s right. You sign there.’
Dexter autographs the invoice and places his hand into the top box, taking a handful of rocket and tasting it for freshness. ‘Rocket – the iceberg lettuce de nos jours’ Callum is fond of saying, but Dexter finds it bitter.
The real head-offices of Natural Stuff are in a warehouse in Clerkenwell, fresh and clean and modern, with juicers and bean-bags, unisex toilets, high-speed internet and pinball machines; immense, Warholesque canvases of cows, chickens and crayfish hang on the walls. Part workplace, part teenager’s bedroom, the architects had labelled it not an office, but a ‘dreamspace’ in Helvetica, lower case. But before Dexter is allowed into the dreamspace, he has to learn the ropes. Cal is very keen that all his executives get their hands dirty, so Dexter is on a month-long trainee placement, working as the shadow manager of the latest outpost of the empire. In the last three weeks he has cleaned out the juicers, worn a hairnet to make the sandwiches, ground the coffee, served the customers and, to his surprise, it has been okay. This, after all, is what it’s all about; business is people, as Callum likes to say.
