Us

by David Nicholls

There was always the ‘panic button’ by the side of our bed, but I could never imagine pressing it in case the alarm disturbed someone – say, a burglar for instance.

I eat carefully to avoid the fate of my father, who died of a heart attack earlier than seemed right. His heart ‘basically exploded’ said the doctor – with inappropriate relish,

For most people, their twenties represent some kind of high-water mark of gregariousness, as they embark on adventures in the real world, find a career, lead active and exciting social lives, fall in love, splash around in sex and drugs. I was aware of this going on around me. I knew about the nightclubs and the gallery openings, the gigs and the demonstrations; I noted the hangovers, the same clothes worn to work on consecutive days, the kisses on the tube and the tears in the canteen, but I observed it all as if through reinforced glass.

sister. In her mid-twenties Karen was promiscuous in her friendships and ran with what my parents referred to as ‘an arty crowd’: would-be actors, playwrights and poets, musicians, dancers, glamorous young people pursuing impractical careers, staying up late then meeting for long and emotional cups of tea during all hours of the working day.

Doused liberally with malt vinegar and cooking oil, it was my sister’s rare culinary gift to make lettuce taste like a bag of chips.

I’d drunk a little too much and after a long evening of being alternately patronised and ignored, I had not warmed to my rival, who was of the school that thought the solution to disease and hunger lay in longer and better rock concerts.

‘It’s not about the house. It’s the idea of you and me in each other’s pockets forever more. It’s like … a Beckett play.’ I’d not seen a Beckett play, but presumed this was a bad thing.

The beginning of the end. Was she still talking about me? She made me sound like some kind of apocalypse.

Europe represented first love and sunsets, cheap red wine and breathless fumbling.

Anything that suggested ‘abroad’ made him suspicious: olive oil, the metric system, eating outdoors, yoghurt, mime, duvets, pleasure.

To my father, ‘abroad’ was a strange, unknowable place where the milk tasted odd and lasted an unnaturally long time.

It was like waiting in a queue for a rollercoaster that I had no intention of riding.

There’s a particular grubbiness that comes with travel. You start showered and fresh in clean and comfortable clothes, upbeat and hopeful that this will be like travel in the movies; sunlight flaring on the windows, heads resting on shoulders, laughter and smiles with a lightly jazzy soundtrack. But in reality the grubbiness has set in before you’ve even cleared security; grime on your collar and cuffs, coffee breath, perspiration running down your back, the luggage too heavy, the distances too far, muddled currency in your pocket, the conversation self-conscious and abrupt, no stillness, no peace.

Oh, and as well as the emphysema, cancer and heart disease that he is presumably nurturing in that narrow chest, he suffers from a malaise that requires at least twelve hours of sleep, and yet is singularly incapable of commencing these twelve hours before two a.m.

In short, my son makes me feel like his step-father.

Of course, after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions about our distant pasts have all been posed and we’re left with ‘how was your day?’ and ‘when will you be home?’ and ‘have you put the bins out?’ Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we’re both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

Other people’s sex lives are a little like other people’s holidays: you’re glad that they had fun but you weren’t there and don’t necessarily want to see the photos.

Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was very good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvases of battles and shipwrecks. Then it was back to women lying on sofas or getting out of the bath, murkier this time, less detailed, then a great many wine bottles and apples, then ballet dancers. Paintings developed a certain splodginess – critical term – so that they barely resembled what they were meant to be. Someone signed a urinal, and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colour were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete, and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything-goes free for all.

Once again I was struck by the power of great art to make me feel excluded.

I had, for instance, been a long-time advocate of the music of Billy Joel, particularly his early- to middle-period albums, and this had been the cause of some mockery from the hipper, edgier biochemists.

And yes, I had ‘dated’ too, a series of unsuccessful job interviews for a post I didn’t really want, the meetings largely taking place in cinemas because there would be less obligation to speak.

Embarrassment and self-consciousness were the key emotions, discomfort increasing exponentially at each encounter until one or other of us cracked and blurted out a standard-form ‘let’s be friends’, after which we’d part, sometimes at a brisk run.

What was I hoping to achieve? It was hardly a ‘cry for help’; I would have been embarrassed to make that much noise. ‘A cough for help’, perhaps that was what it was. A clearing of the throat.

In our digital age we now have the electronic means to summon up a face more or less at will. Back then faces were like phone numbers; you tried to memorise the important ones. But my mental snapshots of the previous weekend had begun to fade. Chaste and sober on a squally, gun-metal weekday, would I be disappointed?

The accordion, like the bagpipes, is part of the select group of instruments that people are paid to stop playing, but for the next forty-five minutes my son’s mysterious guest pushed at the musical limits of the squeezebox, regaling much of the fifth, sixth and seventh floors of the Good Times Hotel with, amongst others, a boisterous ‘Satisfaction’, a sprightly ‘Losing My Religion’ and a version of ‘Purple Rain’ so long and repetitive that it seemed to stretch the very fabric of time.

I don’t think my face fell, I tried not to let it, but it’s true that I was wary of any activity prefixed with the word ‘street’. Street art, street food, street theatre, in all cases ‘street’ preceding something better carried on indoors.

I considered not answering but I’ve never been able to ignore Connie’s call.

Watching him enjoy music was like seeing him wear a paper hat at Christmas; it looked uncomfortable.

My wife educated me; a common phenomenon, I think, and one that is rarely or only begrudgingly acknowledged by the husbands that I know.

It’s a terrible habit but a silence in a contained space makes me anxious, and so I tug and tug at the conversation as if struggling to start a lawnmower.

And I do read a great deal of non-fiction, which has always seemed to me a better use of words than the made-up conversations of people who have never existed.

Amsterdam was the trendy dad of European cities; an architect, perhaps, barefoot and unshaven. Hey, guys, I told you, call me Tony! says Amsterdam to his kids, and pours everyone a beer.

Most people entering a relationship carry with them a dossier sub-divided into infatuations, flirtations, grand amours, first loves and sexual affairs.

I think I can honestly say that I’ve never met a biochemist that I didn’t like.

The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts – first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you’re left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such.

‘You think I’d spoil the fun.’ ‘I think you wouldn’t have fun, which means I wouldn’t have fun.’ ‘I think there’s another reason.’ ‘Go on then.’ ‘I think you’re embarrassed by me sometimes.’ ‘Douglas, that’s ridiculous. I love you, why would I be embarrassed by you? Don’t I come home to you every night?’ ‘When there’s no one else around.’ ‘And isn’t that better? Just the two of us? Don’t you love that? Because I do! I fucking treasure it, and I thought you did too.’ ‘I do! I do.’

For a feeling of true righteousness and invulnerability, there’s nothing quite like riding a bicycle in Amsterdam. The traditional power relationship with the car is reversed and you’re part of a tribe of overwhelming numbers, sitting high in the peloton, looking down on the bonnets of those foolish or weak enough to drive. Here people cycled with a reckless swagger, talking on the phone, eating breakfast, and on a bright, beautiful August day, our bicycles purring and rattling down Herengracht to the Golden Corner, there seemed no better place to be.

‘It’s three fifteen. If we’re going to get to the Anne Frank House we need to go now.’ ‘Douglas, can we leave it be? Even the Gestapo didn’t want to get there this much.’

Because it was all very jolly, wasn’t it, all very cool, sitting around and getting stoned all afternoon with your mum? What a lark, what memories to share! But I wanted my son to have ambition, I wanted him to have drive and energy and a fine, fierce mind. I wanted him to look out into the world with curiosity and intelligence, not with the awful solipsism and silliness of the stoned. Irrespective of the medical risks, the memory loss and apathy and psychosis, the possibility of addiction or exposure to hard drugs, what was this idiotic obsession with chilling out? I wasn’t aware of having been relaxed at any time in my entire life; that was just the way things were, and was it really so bad? To be taut as a wire, on the ball, conscious of the dangers around you – wasn’t that to be admired?

I found myself falling out of love with Amsterdam. For a start, there were far too many bicycles. The whole thing had got completely out of hand, the bridges and streets and lampposts choked with them like they were some alien weed.

‘Ah, I see that you have Downton Abbey here too!’ Regina shrugged. ‘You want to watch something else?’ she said, and indicated a small pile of pornographic DVDs.

‘I love you’ is an interesting phrase, in that apparently small alterations – taking away the ‘I’, adding a word like ‘lots’ or ‘loads’ – render it meaningless.

She liked to ‘leave dishes to soak’, an act of self-deception that I’ve always abhorred.

I’d always been led to believe that one talked to parents in the same polite, over-enunciated tone used for customs officials and police officers, conversation kept within tight parameters.

Separate rooms would have been too draconian, but despite there being a perfectly good double bed, we were shown into the spare room with two singles, my mother holding open the door as if to say, ‘Here it is, your den of filth and shame.’

‘It is a win-win situation,’ said the Dutchman, who seemed to have a business idiom for every circumstance.

grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost.

because what had I given Connie, after all? The benefits for me were clear, but throughout our time together I had seen the question flicker across the faces of friends and waiters, family and taxi-drivers: what’s in it for her? What does she see that so many others have missed?

While there was breath in my body, she would never lack sufficient AA batteries.

A great deal of stress is placed on the importance of humour in the modern relationship. Everything will be all right, we are led to believe, as long as you can make each other laugh, rendering a successful marriage as, in effect, fifty years of improv.