‘Where’ve you been?’ Bob asked.
‘With you, don’t you remember?’
‘No.’ Bob was eating the remains of a two-day-old biryani from the Lahore on the Perth Road. The chicken in the biryani bore a worrying anatomical resemblance to cat. Bob’s idea of a balanced diet left something to be desired. When I first met him he lived off fish suppers from The Deep Sea, the occasional tin of dog food (‘Why not?’) and jars of cold baby food, the latter a particularly sensible way of eating in Bob’s opinion – no cooking, no washing-up, no thought at all beyond whether to have ‘Lamb and Vegetables’ or ‘Pears and Custard’. Or both. It was wasted on babies, Bob said, and his only complaint was that Heinz didn’t do fish and chips in toddler-sized jars.
I spent some time weaning him onto more regular student meals – sausage and chips, egg and beans, mince and anything and fish pie – the latter a concept that Bob found particularly bizarre for some reason and he kept repeating, ‘Wow, fish pie,’ until I had to ask him to stop. I took him shopping in Betty White’s on the High Street once and he couldn’t get over the idea that a shop could sell both fish and vegetables – ‘That’s not . . . natural,’ he said. Although not as unnatural, in Bob’s opinion, as fish farms.
What if I didn’t leave Bob? What if our slouch towards commitment ended at the altar? What would it be like if I occupied the wife-shaped space next to Bob? My life as a wife. In a Barratt’s starter-home, with an avocado bathroom and a three-piece suite in leather. If we ever had a child (a curious idea) I thought we should call it Inertia. Although our occasional dull missionary encounters didn’t seem passionate enough to produce anything as real and lasting as a child, even one called Inertia, and Bob (more likely to consult Mr Spock than Dr Spock) wasn’t fit to be in charge of a push-and-pull lawnmower let alone a baby in a pram.
I did so hope that Bob was a dress rehearsal, a kind of mock-relationship, like a mock-exam, to prepare me for the real thing, because if I tried to imagine Bob in a grown-up life I could only visualize him slumped on the leather sofa, watching Jackanory with a huge joint in his hand.
‘Somebody just phoned for you,’ he said, spilling grains of cold yellow rice onto the carpet.
‘Who?’
‘Dunno. Some woman.’
‘My mother?’
‘Don’t think so.’
Of course not, what was I thinking, Nora didn’t have a phone. Nora didn’t even have electricity.
‘She sounded . . . weird,’ Bob said.
‘Weird? You mean weird accent?’
‘Quite correct, Captain.’
No-one ever phoned me. The only reason we had a phone was because it was paid for by Bob’s father and mother – Bob Senior and Sylvia – so that Sylvia could remind Bob to have a wash occasionally and not eat Angel Delight at breakfast.
Although you would never think it to look at him, Bob had a more than adequate family back in Essex, a fact that he usually denied because they were such models of suburban decorum. I found Bob’s family – Bob Senior, his mother Sylvia and his sister Cherry and a buxom black Labrador called Sadie – strangely charismatic; they lived the kind of banal, tediously quotidian lives that I’d always longed for – eating roast chicken, changing sheets, going for boring Sunday outings in the family car, treading on fitted wool carpets, taking holidays in Spain, entertaining from a full drinks cabinet. For me, they were the most attractive thing about Bob.
We spent nearly every vacation with them in the pleasantly anodyne atmosphere of their house in Ilford, so much more normal than Nora’s wrack and insular home. Bob, on these visits, was his usual self, sleeping most of the day and then hanging around all evening, waiting for his parents to go to bed so that he could skin up a joint and watch Come Dancing .
Bob slept in his boyhood room, which, despite Sylvia’s best cleaning efforts, had never been purged of the smell of the teenage Bob – a heady perfume of sweaty socks and unwashed foreskins, of night emissions and illicit lager. It was decorated with football-themed wallpaper and still contained his old Dinky cars and the grotesquely misshapen soft toys that Sylvia had lovingly knitted for him.
I was always sequestered in the guest room, to prevent any ‘shenanigans’ – as Bob Senior put it – taking place. (‘As if,’ Bob Junior said.) The guest room provided an antiseptic yet pleasant environment, with its decor of overblown wallpaper roses, the rag rug on the floor, the clean magnolia paintwork and the flimsy flowered curtain that let in the orange glow of sodium street lights. I spent long hours in there, reading my way through the miscellany of guest-room reading matter (old National Geographic s, dog-eared Agatha Christies, Reader’s Digest s) and listening to the sounds of a well-ordered house. I couldn’t help thinking how much better off I would have been as a child with Sylvia as my mother – in fact, I would have been a different person altogether. Instead, I had been subjected in my formative years to Nora’s sloppy habits and laissez-faire philosophies (‘Well, don’t go to school if you don’t want to.’)