Staying Alive

And now I stand in my living room and survey the germ-free perfection that is a tribute to my hermetically sealed single-hood…And when Megan turns up in half an hour, a reminder of the tedious dust buster she left behind.

I know what has to be done.

Deep breath—You can do this, Murray.

I start by taking the back of my hand to the magazines, flipping them to a wanton seventy-three degrees to the edge of the coffee table.

7.45 p.m.

She should be here by now.

As I wait I look at the mess that I’ve painstakingly created and it’s taking every ounce of willpower to resist tidying up.

I need a distraction. My hand goes in search of one, snaking into my trouser pocket and feeling for the—

I have got to stop this. Stop worrying unduly. Pull myself together.

I go to the bedroom, fetch the cardboard box containing Megan’s belongings, and put it on the coffee table. One more thing. I root around the kitchen until I find the scented candles. I unwrap one and light it. I immediately blow it out. It’s lavender. She hates lavender.

7.53 p.m.

‘What’s that horrible smell?’ she says as I let her in.

Though I dumped the candle in the bin, the bouquet has lingered.

My ex has an implausibly sensitive nose. The one and only time that I lit up a joint while home alone she busted me, picking up the scent as she walked out of South Woodford tube. ‘I’m a solicitor,’ she declared. ‘I work with the police, the CP-bloody-S. Do you have any idea how much you could be compromising me?’ It was like going out with the drug squad’s star sniffer dog—the one that can smell the heroin in the baggage hold as the plane takes off in Islamabad. I couldn’t get away with a thing. One night she climbed into bed about an hour after me and as I stirred she said, ‘You’ve been wanking, haven’t you?’

‘Have not,’ I mumbled sleepily while simultaneously shifting my hip onto the small sticky patch on the sheet.

‘Don’t lie, Murray,’ she snapped. ‘I can smell it.’

I follow her as she walks through the hall and into the living room for the first time in three weeks, three days and nearly six hours. She must have been in court today because she’s wearing a sober-ish grey suit, white blouse, glossy opaque tights and shoes that tread the fine line between sensible and sexy. I feel something stir. In my gut and down there. You cannot imagine how gratifying this is. I’ve got a lump, yet I’m getting aroused. Any sign of a normal sexual impulse (even if it’s lusting after my depressingly unavailable ex) is surely also a sign that I don’t have cancer. I mean, cancer and sex drive, they’re mutually exclusive, aren’t they? But I have to stifle it because this is neither the time nor the place. No, it is the place—at least two of my happiest memories consist of spontaneously doing it with Megan in this very living room (having first spontaneously draped a towel over the sofa to avoid troublesome stains)—but it is clearly not the time.

‘You can tell I’ve moved out,’ she says jauntily. ‘It looks really…tidy.’

‘Does it?’ I reply, deflating, probably visibly. ‘I haven’t cleaned in ages.’

She raises a sceptical eyebrow, then says, ‘How have you been?’

Well, since you decided to move in with a QC who probably earns thirty times my salary and is old enough to be, if not your father, then your considerably older brother, and since you chose to announce the joyous news on the very day that I’d been out and blown six and a half grand on a ring with which I was going to get down on my knees and ask you to be mine forever and ever and ever, and since you’re now twizzling your hair around your finger in a manner that is guaranteed to make me melt like a Mars Bar in a Glasgow deep fat fryer, I feel like rubbish…If you must know.

‘I’m getting over the flu,’ I say, going directly for the sympathy vote, before adding, ‘but I’m fine, thanks…You?’

‘You know—busy. How’s work?’

‘Oh, the usual juggling act of exotic shoots and five-hour lunches.’

‘Still taking your orders from Mammon, then?’

‘Well, from Mammon’s little helper…You know…Niall. Can I get you a coffee or something?’

‘No, I’d better not stay. I’m in court first thing—my client fled Nigeria after she’d been raped by an entire army platoon and now the Home Office wants to send her back there. Unbelievable.’

This brief snatch of conversation pretty much sums it up. Why Megan left me. I lack commitment. Not the emotional kind—splurging six and a half grand on a ring more or less settled that one. What I lack is her passion for justice. While she is using her degree to make the world safe for the poor and disenfranchised, I’m using mine to feed them choc-ices. It doesn’t take Naomi Klein to argue that, while it undoubtedly delivers a sensuously silky adventure in taste, ChocoChillout won’t even begin to address the iniquities in the continent of Africa.

It’s not that I don’t believe in the same things as Megan. I do.

Mostly.

Up to a point.

I always encouraged her crusades on behalf of victims of police harassment and the fascist asylum laws, but that wasn’t enough. My trouble was that I could never bring myself to make the leap to actually doing something. It was never quite the right time to give up my comfortable salary and the job that—even if I don’t love it—is a pretty cushy number. Besides, how was I going to make a difference? Social work? Sorry, but I’m too easily scared—show me a pug-faced dad accused of beating up his kids and I’d be hiding behind the six-year-old. Voluntary Service Overseas? What skills can I offer? Do they need an expert store checker in Eritrea? I do have fantasies about joining a crack earthquake rescue team (see How I’d Like to Die, Item Four), but—come on—I also quite fancy the idea of having dew-drenched sex in a spring meadow with Uma Thurman. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

(Number one: it’s far from certain that Uma would be agreeable. Number two: where can you find a spring meadow that isn’t saturated with pesticides these days? And—much more pertinent, this one—number three: faced with the reality of alfresco sex, I’d flee. Said meadow could be miles from the nearest homestead and I still wouldn’t be able to get it up—well, a skylark might be watching.)

I did once make a personal sacrifice and take a stand. I gave up a Saturday—valuable housework time—to accompany Megan on the last big protest before Gulf War Two. I wasn’t comfortable though and she could tell. Issues simply aren’t that black and white for me—my politics are coloured not red, orange, blue or green, but a vivaciously vague shade of grey. (In the opinion polls, I’m one of the fourteen per cent that always votes Don’t Know, the true third party in British politics). While Megan and thousands of others were yelling ‘Blair out!’ and ‘No war!’ I was looking vainly for a small group chanting (quietly, so as not to bother anyone), ‘We’re not sure, we’re not sure.’

In the end she couldn’t live with an armchair liberal and dumped me for the real thing: Sandy Morrison QC, defender of the wrongly convicted, champion of the underdog and regular star of Question Time. He was on it last week. He was brilliant. And his hair looked fabulous—like a lion’s mane. He was maddeningly articulate too. Bastard. Call me bitter, but it struck me then that taking a stand for society’s losers must be a doddle when it gives you a seven-figure income.

I look at Megan and I wonder if Sandy Morrison QC is waiting outside in his Bentley Arnage T with its six-point-eight-litre engine which delivers four hundred and fifty brake horse-power, making it the fastest production Bentley ever. How do I—an automotive illiterate—know all about Sandy Morrison’s one-hundred-and-seventy-grand car? I read about it in the Mail. They were doing one of their so-called-lefty lives in lap of luxury stories, and had got wind of the fact that he’d recently traded up from a Jag. But he hadn’t completely sold out. He’d bought one in lush socialist red.

Megan looks at the box on the coffee table and asks, ‘Are those my things?’

‘Uh-huh.’

There isn’t much. Some soppy compilation CDs, half a dozen books, a pair of jeans, a bra that ended up in one of my drawers for reasons that have nothing to do with anything unsavoury, and some photos from our last holiday—they were taken with my camera so strictly speaking I should keep them, but I’m making a point.

I didn’t put in her garlic crusher. I want to keep something of hers. Besides, it might give her a reason to call me.

I did slip the ring into the box. She doesn’t know about that.

The evening had gone like this:

‘Megan, I’ve got something I want to say.’

‘Me too. You go first.’

‘No, you.’

‘OK…Look, there isn’t an easy way to tell you this so I’d better just do it…I’ve…I’ve met someone…’

After that, ‘Will you do me the honour of marrying me?’ seemed a tad superfluous.

She picks up the box and clasps it to her chest.

I will her to spot the VSO booklet that I carefully placed beside it on the coffee table (at a cocksure fifty-eight degree angle), but—damn it—she doesn’t. She doesn’t notice the application form for a job with Waltham Forest Social Services either. Instead she looks at me searchingly.

‘Murray…Are you really…all right?’