Exile on Nickel Street

This is how it goes down.

Gormless, propped against a pillar, doing my New York finest to manifest insouciance. Eight hours stuffed into a plastic Norse Atlantic Basic bucket, titrating a parade of tiny Merlots down my gizzard, trying to script the opening scene of the recently green-lighted movie I seem to have cropped up in. The Movie of Me. The Gotham Ultimatum. Music. Titles. Fade up on gangly yet oddly alluring protagonist emerging through arrivals gate, waved at by eager blonde, ecstatic behind security barrier, small breasts bouncing beneath flimsy t-shirt, casually sporting a pair of his old Levi’s.

Or propped against a pillar, gormless.

I muddle with my phone. Has it been long enough that I can pass as diligent-but-weary meeter? As opposed to discarded meetee? I feel pity radiating off the slumped chorus of taxi drivers, their cocked faces gazing over like cherubims. They know what’s what. They’ve seen this shit before. They’re just pretending to be tired and disinterested, lost in their phones and the quiet desperation of long-buried lives. Doing their compassionate best to affect indifference to the tragedy unfolding before them. The Tragedy of Me. I glance at their plaintive signs. Storb. Shwanzman. Rudely torn from Amazon boxes, misspelled in immigrant Sharpie, waiting like rescue kittens to bring smiles to the faces of people with names like Muppets. I could weep. Poor Tom. Birthed onto the tarmac at Kennedy, no doctor, no midwife, nary a slap on the bottom nor moistly proffered teat.

How oddly empty the terminal is. Unsettling. Wherefore the hordes of monochrome Irishmen doffing newsboys’ caps, dufflebags over their shoulders, frozen in cheeky midwhistle as they descend the gangplank onto Ellis Island? The Hills of Donegal. Wild Mountain Thyme. I’ve got a brace of Egyptians and a fat lady on a mobility scooter. Oh, and a woman with a trolley selling gum and phone chargers. I could use a charger. I only have my English one with its massive three-pronged hood like a Minecraft cobra. I’ll have to borrow Marcy’s. Jesus, what a start. And after I’ve sworn that this time I won’t devolve immediately into a needy spaniel. “Eh, Marce? Can I use your charger?” What a dildo. “Oh, and I don’t s’pose you have a toothbrush?” I wander over to check them out. Twenty-four dollars. Is that good or bad? It sounds like a fortune. Doesn’t matter really, as I don’t have twenty-four dollars. I don’t have any dollars. Sure, there’s an ATM over there, but it looks murky, squatting beside a skulk of discarded baggage carts. Like maybe there’s a tiny dude inside, an ATM dwarf, who’ll up and run after I’ve stuck my card in, and I’ll have to run after him and spend my first hour in New York chasing a fleet-footed, dwarf-infested cash dispenser round the arrivals hall of JFK. And later that night everybody south of Houston Street will say “oh, you fell for the old airport ATM dwarf thing?” I buy gum.

Fuck’s sake, where is she? I mean, for sure she’s texted, but JFK WiFi is down, or my phone is, or it doesn’t want to sniff the arse of something called Free Boingo. And I’ll be fucked if I’m going to turn on international roaming. I’ve been warned. Swarms of data Valkyries on tiny broomsticks, cackling starlings with dollar bills for tails, all murmurating around your phone, waiting for a sucker move. Swipe right and gasp as they zoom up your anus, tug out your intestines like a badly deployed parachute. 8 hours of Instagram stories about quiche, illuminated manuscripts from old Oswestry chums asking what day I’m flying to New York and do I want to go down the Fox & Hounds for a couple of pints with them and Val? A four minute video from my dad on Bitcoin. Zettabytes, yottabytes of data digested in a nanosecond, sculpted into a steaming fiscal turd-alp. By the time I catch my breath I’ll be splayed and cuffed and frogmarched off to debtor’s prison. I’m a worrier, see? I worry about stuff. I get it from my mum. I worry about nonsense when I ought to be worrying about Marcy having decided this English Tom thing was a crap move, but that febrile sex with a fairly well-known author twice her age is a much better one. But right now that’s not a worry I can worry about.

I’m in America to do a year at Yale. How the fuck did that happen? Let’s get this straight; I’m not that clever. I mean, I’m not stupid, I’m clever enough. I can tie my own shoelaces, wipe my own bottom, and given the right miasma of social blather (freshman seminar, Shrewsbury gallery opening) pull off an impersonation of somebody who knows a-thing-or-two about something-or-other. But Yale clever? That’s proper clever, right? Like longer than a weekend at a friend’s parents’ place in the Cotswolds clever? Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe Yale clever is no cleverer than any other clever, only I’m not clever enough to know? Again, fuck. More time wasted thinking people know stuff about shit they don’t. In London I was in love with a philosophy student who was truly, empirically clever. Skip. She was Australian, and me and Angus called her Skippy, after the bush kangaroo. We thought that was really clever. Lots of jokes about eucalyptus treats, piano playing paws and deep, fuzzy pouches. She endured this, even acquiesced to some charitable sex, before cheerfully buggering off without saying goodbye. She’d been looking for Young Chomsky. She got the postgraduate arse-end of Beavis & Butthead. 

Clever or not, I’ve noticed (whilst nibbling the eraser off my pencil pondering the Yale-Clever Duality) that the word Yale makes things happen. There’s a momentary pause, the air goes wobbly, the ear of the cosmos twitches like you’ve dangled a mouse in front of snoozing Shrödinger’s Cat; then pouff! you enter on one floor, come out on another. I like it. Marcy (despite being pathologically shit at airport pickups) moves in interesting circles. Or at least one. A tiny – but oddly pertinent – encampment at the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, just a knuckle of restaurants and bars really, but home to a burgeoning scene of would-be writers, model-poets and pretty girls, all busily protracting the latest drawl of New York counter-culture. It’s shallow (shallow as any self-referential scene ever is), and it might even be a bit vapid. But it exists. It’s written about. So to a person who has never been written about and isn’t sure he exists, it’s pretty cool. I’ve been at the periphery of some things over the years, but downtown New York cool isn’t one of them. I’m hungry. And you’d think my magic Yale incantation would fall on deaf ears in the hubbub of this lilting salon of neo-adolescent literary lovelies, right? I mean, who gives a fuck about the Dreaming Spires of Connecticut when you’re sat opposite Martin Amis’s daughter, guzzling a goblet of Fernet on Ludlow Street? Except people do. Give a fuck. Even as rats scuttle between Canal and Hester, the genie still pops out of the lamp. Just dumb luck, you think? Or is there perhaps a role in this louche soap opera that has languished uncast – floppy, glottal Englishmen, goes to Yale, has girlfriend in the scene – waiting for me to turn up? I don’t know. And honestly, I don’t care. It feels cool, cooler than any day ever in the history of suburban mid-Wales, and I really want an audition.

No but really, where the fuck is she? It’s peculiar. Not one person has entered America since I did. At least not here. And nobody appears to be coming any time soon. The taxi drivers are scattered about on benches like broken crows; they’d be perking up if customers were in the pipeline. So weird. Big old New York in big old America, your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. Yet nobody. Listen, I’m not begging forgiveness. I’m twenty-eight and rudderless. Yeah, there’s been London, and now Yale and clever professors and my thesis on W.H. Auden, but fuck, I’ve been whittling that bastard to a reed for half a lifetime. What did Yeats say? ‘The collar-bone of a hare / Worn thin by the lapping of water.’  That’s it. ‘The white thin bone of a hare.’ Arid and arcane, distilled by an inkless pen to academic dust. Every time I open the book, clouds of halitotic pterodactyls fly out. I want to weep and bellow “Who the fuck cares!?” Well, now somebody does. Not about gerontic Wystan, padding about the East Village in carpet slippers, his face a topographical map of Iceland. Not about his classical oeuvre or the misappropriation of myth in The Age of Anxiety.  But just about sweet, anxious Tom and the fact he goes to Yale. And yeah, that feels good. The girls are all skin, the boys all swagger, there are drugs and booze and cigarettes and I’m allowed in. Nobody is pointing and laughing or ushering me to the door. Look at the picture in the 2038 book Nickel 22 from Powerhouse! That’s me on the sofa next to Fernanda Amis, smoking a Marlboro, sipping Fernet-Branca! The Movie of Me is no longer some eight-hour Cinema Verité dirge about wind-farming in Lincolnshire. It’s a crap mini-series about an anthill of irritating narcissists, but hey, people are tuning in. So y’know, questions like, “why are you so keen to be part of a scene you know is trivial, reactionary and dumb?” are palpably not germane to the matter at hand. Yeah, I want to be part of something stupid that other people think is cool. Yeah I go to bed thinking every word that splooged from my mouth was a cartwheeling turd of toe-curling pretentiousness, and yeah I get up every morning and start texting so I can go back and splooge all over again. I mean, fuck dude. Duh.

I pull a book from my backpack. I probably won’t be able to read. The fog of anxiety at having been rendered a piece of left luggage in this crumpled, anonymous corner of JFK has reduced the likelihood of becoming engrossed in somebody else’s poignant story (when mine is obviously the most poignant ever) to pretty much zero. Still, it’s a cute Penguin, one of those 50’s orange ones people buy in bulk to embroider their living rooms with perceived erudition. Better to be sat on a suitcase reading an attractive paperback than gazing blankly into thin air like a poorly-stuffed mongoose. I mean, what if somebody mistakes me for an Australian? Jesus. The horror. Some gawky tosspot from Melbourne, here on a J-1 to run the radio station at a summer camp in Connecticut. “D’yer know where yer git the Greyhound to New Milford, mate?”

The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Volume 5
The Lost Decade and Other Stories
Six Brilliant Stories Written at the Heroic Pitch of Desperation in the Last Twilight Decade of Fitzgerald’s Life

A friend from home gave me it as a going-away present. A provincial primer on New York, viewed through a beer glass outside the King’s Head, Bangor-on-Dee. The Campbell Apartment, boulevardiers at the Knickerbocker and Jazz. Two pints of Green Hop and a packet of Cheese and Onion. He inscribed it in biro. All the best for America. Gary.

Sweet. Touching even. Quite a subtitle, though. Already brilliant and heroic, and I haven’t even cracked the spine. And isn’t last twilight tautological? How’d that make it past a Penguin editor? Jesus, Marcy. I know it’s only been forty minutes, but for an amoeba forty minutes is a lifetime. The stories are largely about Yale and Yalies. A horrible term. Is that what I’m about to become? A Yalie? Some giggling horse-toothed pansy doing the Charleston in a punt? I traipse to the bottom of page one, a lifer slopping out his first night of feculence. Four paragraphs in and everybody’s getting the fuck out of New Haven to spend their glittering youth in New York. Great. I’ve just coughed up a month’s rent and security deposit on a room in a second floor flat by the bus station. In fucking New Haven. With a post-graduate anthropology student who spearheads a Multiplayer Online Battle Alliance and practices Moldovian throat-singing. His back-hairs are like the legs of dock spiders. They come rearing out of the plughole looking for prey.

And now the hangover is beginning to set in. An evening hangover, the aftermath of countless mini-bottles of Sutter Home Red tossed to me by my cake-faced trolley-dolly, like squandongs to Skippy. Is an evening hangover still a hangover? I mean, what is it hanging over? Not the night; that’s still to come. Should it be called a hangunder? Because it is actually sort of hanging under something, right? The night again, like a hornet’s nest. One of those grey, papery ones that lurk in the eaves, humming with malice. Don’t hit the fucker with your ladder, you’ll be tweezering stingers from the pumpkin of your face for weeks. Ugh. Always a bad idea, flagging down wiggy Mephistopheles for another bottle, actually make that two. It caused the flight to slither by untroubled, gazing glassily at back-to-back-to-back Jason Bourne dirges through a purple fug of Merlot. But now she’s back, Margot from Pontefract, eyes burning behind clotted curtains of mascara. She wants my soul. I knew it. I have soul cancer.

None of the Fitzgerald stories are sticking. I mean, my eyes see grey armies of words, but they’re all kind of listless, shuffling about the page like they don’t know why they’re there. The battle is happening somewhere else. Bully-beef in mess tins, gin rummy on ammo boxes in the sap trench with Lance Corporal Braithwaite. ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ Jesus, I need a drink. Like an actual pint of Iron Horse in the Red Lion with Gary. Wait, don’t be stupid Tom, pull yourself together. England is behind you. Gary and Val,  ‘Poesy’s unfailing River, which through Albion winds forever,’ Marks & Sparks Coronation Chicken by blue remembered hills on the 10.45 off-peak to Euston; everything you’ve come to loathe, everything you’re running screaming from. You are New York Tom now, all pink and shiny, ‘a naked new born babe, striding the blast’. Ugh, here comes heaven’s cherubim again, fat bastard. There’s literally nothing open in JFK, not a single spigot of booze beyond Immigration. I could lick the sanitizer dispenser in the men’s bathroom, but it doesn’t seem a terribly Bright Young Thing thing to do.

Listen, I realise it might sound like I’m kind of crushed out on this whole dippy downtown scene (let’s give it a title – Nickel Street – not my invention, but we’ll get to that); I mean, my descriptions are all a bit twinkly-gushy, I’m dropping names of modish Italian booze brands, daughters of famous writers, and now all of a sudden I’m snarfing down Fitzgerald? Sure, I’ve been inoculating my fanboy giddiness with a frisson of ‘hey, I know it’s all nonsense’, but then why do I have Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus in my mum’s suitcase? Wait, how did you know it was my mum’s? Clearly I am enamored with the syntax, the referential map that tornadoes down to Clandestino and yes, another beaker of fucking Fernet. Maybe I ought to calm down a bit, yeah, pick up Muma’s Samsonite and get on the bus to New Haven? Because Yale is an actual thing. An achievement. There are decent, clever people there, amazing libraries full of learning, parties, fun to be had. I should probably establish my brand a bit before pinballing onto Division Street like a spastic cranefly, right? Yeah, yeah. So let me tell you about my friend Greg.

Nickel Street. That’s the name of his play. He’s written a few, but this is the one people have heard of. And the irritating thing is, Marcy was in it. Yeah, same Now It’s Been A Fucking Hour Marcy. Not the original production – the celebrated one staged in a Greenpoint loft, reviewed in The New York Times, which anointed our Greg The Chinatown Chekhov. No, Marcy’s was a few months later, a revival in the West Village. She played the role vacated by Fern Amis. Name-dropping again. Except I called her Fern this time, did you notice? Took her Nanda and tossed it over my shoulder like a dirty sock. Atrocious. But I can’t help it. See I really like her dad. Like really really. I mean, it borders on adulation, parroting his pouting, cocksure swagger in stories I try to write for nobody in particular. Don’t roll your eyes. I’m not going to apologize. The guy’s good. Yeah, there’s been some abortions, and with Martin (I’m gonna use his first name since we’re becoming chums) you’re always dodging the banana-skin of smarmy. And sure, the whole Hitch/Little Keith fags-and-booze-and-cunnilingus routine can get a bit cringeworthy. But come on, The Rachel Papers? And the recent one, Inside Story? I mean, taut, elegant, even (I wince to say it) moving. And for God’s sake, Money? For a freshly-minted Englishman in New York, it’s a bible. Fucking Brobdingnagian, dude. And here we get to my point (I hear the bass timpani of foreheads hitting the table). Naming of Parts. The title of a 1942 Henry Reed poem in which a Sergeant-Major painstakingly elucidates the actions of a rifle by naming its parts. Dylan Thomas does a lovely reading on the 1957 Caedmon recording A Visit to America. Lower sling swivel. Upper sling swivel. Cocking piece. Martin (it curls the nose a little more each time I try it) does something similar in Money. He names everything. A restaurant is never just a restaurant. It’s The Breadline, Assisi’s or The Mahatma. Simpleton movie idol Spunk Davis broods next to hammy has-been Lorne Guyland who has superannuated sex with ripely maternal Caduta Massi. And his Falstaffian anti-hero? John Self. Martin’s old now. Like Tireseus, he shuffles towards us swinging sock-ball breasts and pendulous balls. It’s all Cobble Hill Brownstone and Gazpachuelo at La Vara now. But in his day he was a greedy, swaggery little bastard, gobbling down New York – people, places, the whole menu – like a ravenous pug, making it all his own.

Greg does it too. Nickel Street, my pal, remember? Except I can’t give examples since, in the throes of bromantic ardour, I’ve given too many already. So what’s the point? I’m not sure any more; but I do kind of need a poo. Honestly, I don’t really like pooing in public toilets. Especially in airports. You go in with all your clothes, your coat, suitcase, backpack, and have to arrange it around yourself like an Bedouin trader, before pulling down your trousers and hoping the unholy mélange of economy-class contortionism, airline tikka masala and bucket-Merlot hasn’t made a Hecate’s cauldron of your colon. Because emerging from behind the half-door having performed the climax of Beethoven’s 9th to an unwitting audience of Middle-Eastern Uber drivers is the kind of ignominy that follows you around for a lifetime. ISIS finds out. Especially as I’ve held off during the flight (what kind of barbarian shits on a plane?) in the confident expectation I’ll be able to do it at Marcy’s with a tap running, fan blowing, candle burning, singing Violetta’s death aria from La Traviata. Fucking Marcy. The girl has a lot to answer for.

There’s something I haven’t told you about Marcy. Something I feel bad about. She’s stolen goods. See, when we were first hanging out she was with my friend Tertius. I mean, we weren’t best friends, not bosom buddies, me and Tersh. It wasn’t a Greg thing. More university pals. I wasn’t angling to review his self-published book on Amazon or anything. But yeah, when Marcy came to New York, Tersh came with her. It was only later that hanging about turned into messing about. And like I said, I feel bad. If Tersh wasn’t heartbroken, he was definitely a bit miffed. I consoled myself by having sex with Marcy. But hey, it’s a rite of passage, right? I mean listen, I’m an academic studying Classics at Yale, I know a thing or two about Myth. And let me tell you, running off with your friends’ girlfriends is a thing. No, but really, think about it. Paris and Menelaus weren’t best mates exactly, but when Paris scampered off with Helen over his shoulder, sure, there were tears, but it wasn’t like it caused a decade-long war or a whole city to be burned to the ground. I mean, shit like that happened all the time. Look at Hephaestus limping home in his flip-flops to find Ares knobbing Aphrodite on the marital paliasse. He got over it. Oh, and Zeus. A beast! Turned himself into a swan, swanned up on Leda, wife of Tyndareus of Lacedaemon while she was taking a bath (she’s just sort of thinking, ‘what a nice swan’) and BAM! – jumps her soapy bones and rapes her two clowns short of a circus. I didn’t do that! Dionysus? Dionysus got Aura blotto on cheap wine, had his way with her, then married her while she was still unconscious. Me and Marcy were never married.

What about Hannah, though? Hannah’s cute. She got a double-starred first in Classics from Trinity and her inaugural volume of poems won the T.S. Eliot Prize. At least I suspect she’s cute. It’s hard to be sure. In her PR photo she’s pulling an austere skinny-poet-girl face, gazing luminously into the camera, blown-out background, Martha Stewart lighting. Valedictorian Gioconda. Notes of Kristen Scott-Thomas, but less haughty. But then in candid pictures something more angular, sparkly and toothy starts to happen. I wonder if she’s slept with Nick Laird? Oh wait, I just read she’s forty-three. Blimey. Okay, forget it, move along Grandma. I don’t mean that, of course. I’m just trying out being reactionary and anti-woke, like Greg and Martin and Marcy and Fernie, y’know, bouncing it off the walls, seeing if it comes back sounding like a twat, which it does. Still, two kids. It definitely loosens the mental elastic on her description of getting a Brazilian.

On a table in Chelsea holding yourself open, “stretch it” she says,
Irritably sometimes, and “stretch” as lavender wax wells
Voluptuously in hidden places, and “turn” as you kneel on all fours
So she can clean you up behind and, still parting you open, her fingers
Spend one moment too long …

Phew, eh? Bit steamy. Funny things, Brazilians. You’d assume brainy girls didn’t get ’em. Like it’d be beneath them to be caught red-anused, harbouring the vulva of a child. And yet off with the breeches, down with the tighty-whities and whaddayaknow? Philip Larkin without the glasses. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo? Bald as a billiard ball. Rubbery as a bag of erasers. A recent study at the University of California found 62% of women between the ages of 18 and 65 sport a Jeff Bezos. 62%! Between 18 and 65! Which means on any given spelunking expedition, you have a much better chance of not finding a pube than of finding one. And if you really, really want one? Better ask your Granny. How do I know this? I dunno, you pick shit up right? I’m trying so hard to be a polymath. Hannah is one of those. After Cambridge she went to Harvard, taught at Stanford, then Harvard again, then Oxford. Ask her about bald bajingo and she’ll start declaiming The Trojan Women in Aeolian. Had I gone to Oxford (instead of London) she’d have been my supervisor. I’d have been summoned to her rooms every couple of weeks to be maternally scolded for dragging my feet over the fleabag corpse (and hirsute pudenda) of wrinkly Wystan.

‘But c’mon, Hannah, you know how boring he is.’
‘Not the point, Thomas. You know the deal. Somebody has decided that what you have to say deserves to be said. And they’ve backed it up with money. You can’t flim-flam your way out of it.’

Flim-flam? Who says flim-flam? What next? Calling my sagacious unearthing of Euripides in The Dyers Hand ‘utter codswallop’? I forgive her though. Turns out, on close inspection, she really is adorable, with that one fangy eye-tooth and all. So clever and clean but with the faint burr of the dominatrix. What did Eliot say? ‘The corner of her eye / Twists like a crooked pin.’

‘But even he knew it was crap at the end. Like smelly bagpipes, all windy and honking. Rhyming Shield of Achilles with dirty old willies …’
‘That was Betjeman.’
‘Oh come on Han. Hey, here’s an idea. Why don’t you write it for me? I’m so
bored. And you fucking love Auden.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Oh come on. You’re so clever. You could knock the fucker out in a fortnight.’
‘Thomas, this is your Doctorate. I’ve already done mine.’
‘Can I have it?’
‘Next week same time?’
‘Ugh. Next week same time.’
‘Good. I’ll expect some progress.’
‘Hey Han?’
‘Nah. Han-Nah.’
‘Right. Hey, Han-Nah. Can I put my head on your chest? Just for a minute?’
(pause)
‘Thirty seconds.’
‘Oh, brilliant. Amazing. You’re a doll.’
‘Chop-chop. I’ve got a 2.30 at Keble.
‘Lovely. And can you just kind of … stroke my hair?’
‘Poor Tom.’ (she strokes)

Hannah does the naming thing too. In her (intriguingly lewd) poem You, Very Young In New York. The thing Martin and Greg do. They’re all at it.

… like the sky
Square at the end of Fifth whitening at dawn
Unseen, as you watch the unlit cabs go by.

And then:

Last week New York Magazine said Queens was getting hip;
At Club 19, “Manhattan transplants chill and sip
Cold hoppy Krušovice, whisky sours, and Staropramen.”
On Fridays, a pop-up serves tonkotsu miso ramen.
You wonder what it means to define Astoria’s “epicenter,”
Or press panini with “finesse,” what the median two-bedroom rent is.
Once a year you go in a cab to the Bohemian Beer Garden
And eat pink, flayed kielbasa, penile and artery-hardening,
While elderly men dance to a band in blue embroidered hose,
Holding their elbows rigidly, like waxed Pinocchios.

New York. I mean of course New York. Anybody who knows how it feels to be lying in bed in a tiny one-bedroom on Hester Street the morning after arriving at JFK, having staggered through a jetlagged night in the fleshpots of Ludlow and Eldredge, wearing yesterday’s underpants, watching your girlfriend sleepily pull on her winter clothes, kiss you goodbye, slip off to work: who has got up and sat at the tiny kitchen table by themselves, beside the window, sipped the half cup of coffee she left in the bialetti, turned their head and squinted through the still-screened murk at the Chinese women bundled up against the tickertape snow, pushing through DON’T WALK signs as they churn along Orchard like subway trains; and said to themselves, ‘My God. I’m in fucking New York.’ Anybody who has done this has done this. And knows how astonishing it is; an epipany, rebirth, absolution, for ourselves and countless millions before us. From Dutchmen with tricorn hats to Ukrainians with nothing at all. Marcy. She gave me that. And because she did we are inextricably bound, a single peanut-shaped molecule gently cartwheeling through the cosmos to some far-off place that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. 

I didn’t give it back though. She’d already got it before I turned up. Not from Tersh, but somebody else, I don’t know who. Doesn’t matter. But I think maybe the thrill she felt, that cooing smirk I’d catch her wearing when I glanced over, or when we went arm-in-arm up Broadway to get cheap seats for Tosca, or in Nom Wah, or the back of Scarr’s snarfing Sicilian and sidecars when the Nickel scene was at its pretentious, portentous best; was the thrill you feel when you’re seeing somebody you love see what you have seen, feel what you have felt, for the very first time. Knowing you’d made it happen. Like a parent with an awestruck child. And all you want to say is, “pretty fucking great, right?” But the relationship isn’t reciprocal. Like water, unconditional love runs downhill. The job isn’t to give it back, but to pass it on. Larkin enchaîné. ‘Man hands on ecstasy to man …’

She isn’t coming, is she? You saw it coming long ago. Why am I always the last to know? I like that couplet in Hannah’s poem, the one where she rhymes embroidered hose with Pinocchios. It has a touch of the prestidigitator’s ta-da!  Like the tail end of a well-turned limerick. People underrate the limerick. They scoff, like it’s just some playground doggerel about men with different-sized balls. But what’s wrong with different-sized balls? If you can make ‘em swing with aplomb, why’s it worth less than a sonnet? Because John Donne didn’t write it? Have you heard John Donne’s sonnets? Like the Archbishop of Canterbury gargling the Elgin Marbles. A good limerick is as pert as a Russian gymnast pulling a double-back-salto, farting loudly and landing on a sixpence. Naked. Me and Skippy would spend long Camberwell mornings drinking PG Tips in bed, smoking, composing limericks about philosophers to springboard us into Socratic scrambled eggs.

English polemicist Hobbes,
Took to bigamy in between jobs,
“It’d be much less tiring
And far more inspiring
If I had me four balls and two knobs.”

She was bonkers for eggs was Skippy. Mad for them. When she was born she was full of eggs. They all are, ladies. A million eggs each. By the time they reach puberty, two-thirds are gone. Then they start shooting out the rest, twelve a year, like one of those guns that fires ping-pong balls, four hundred in a lifetime. By the time I met her (she was honking the horn of 30) it must have looked like the fridge in Sainsbury’s after a bank holiday. That’s why she was gobbling down eggs. She was eggless. She needed more eggs.

Whilst bathing, Immanuel Kant
Got bit on the knob by an ant.
He said, “I must cease
From a’scratching my piece,
And I would if I could but I can’t.”

Spooky. A million eggs. Like a seahorse or a sturgeon. All teeming with roe. And only one of them had Skippy’s face on it. Or Marcy’s, or Greg’s. Or Tom’s, even. An egg to the left and there’d have been be no Hannah. It’d be Hans, and he’d be running a Volkswagen dealership on the outskirts of Dortmund. We are all truly one-in-a-million. And each new encounter, an existential miracle. There was more chance of me winning the New Jersey Powerball than of ever bumping into Marcy. Which has become blindingly obvious in the arrivals hall at JFK.

It’s the mother thing. It’s always the mother thing. It isn’t as if I turn up at the tournament floppy and vulnerable. Initially I am quite swashbuckling, clippity-clopping in on my charger, lance all pointy and whetted. You’d be proud. And I do all the extra-curricular stuff it says in the book: never recoil before mine enemy: make war against the infidel without cessation: perform scrupulously mine feudal duties insofar as they betray not the laws of God. I also buy cigarettes, throw cloaks on puddles and do airport pickups, albeit on the Tube since I can’t drive. I know. But I never learned. Being in control of a car would make me anxious. Is that girly? Only later, when the doubt sets in, do I begin to shrink back into my armour, breastplate sagging, visor clanking shut mid-soliloquy. When I was first trying to seduce Hannah into being my supervisor, I went to see her reading at a bookshop in West London. It was busy, she was popular, I think she’d just won the Eliot thing. I had a question all picked out, something I’d noodled to filigree in my bedroom, all plummy and curlicued, referencing The Odyssey. So anyhow, question time comes, Hannah shades her eyes, peers into the crowd and I’m instantly on my feet like Inflatable Tube Man, upstretched arm tumescent with poetic ardour. Boiiiiiing! Startled, she really has no choice but to pick me. I mean, every head in the room has turned, fearing I’ve been electrocuted. It’s either pick me or call an ambulance. So she kind of nods encouragingly, like do you need to go to the toilet? and … and … I totally blank. No, worse than blank. Black out. Time and space stand still. Except they don’t. I stand still. Time and space keep going. And there I stand, erect, frozen in a Sieg Heil rictus, grinning like Wensleydale Wallace. When I come round, everyone is staring at me, my hand is still up, and I have uttered not a word. And pretty, motherly Hannah is kind of craning her head, looking puzzled. I have no idea how long my hand was up. In some parallel universe, I think it still is. Then I sort of lurch and belch and regurgitate my question as a single, under-masticated bolus. Like Alien. Onto the floor, where it lies writhing, looking for a new host. Her answer?

“Mmm no, not really.”

Which, in the end, is kind of everyone’s answer, right? Tom? ‘Mmm no, not really.’ Does that sound like self-pity? Like I’m angling for sympathy, for a surrogate mother to take my hand, cradle me to their bosom, stroke my hair and murmur “Poor Tom”? Like I’d done with Marcy and Skippy? Like I’d dreamed of doing with Hannah and probably Fernster, and maybe even Greg, given half a chance, if he wasn’t a dude and already at it with somebody else. And now I’m trying to do it … with you? And you don’t even exist. You’re just a dream, a dagger of the mind, a nebulous chorus of a thousand faces, all beaming and guffawing in the half-light, then weeping a little, then leaping to their feet and applauding, bellowing “Bravo! Bravo!” when the curtain falls.

‘Hey, asshole!’

I turn. Which sacred edicule in what JFK cleaning-lady’s Holy Sepulchre have I besmirched with my tears?

‘Marcy?!’
‘Um, yeah. Who were you expecting? Bernadette of Lourdes?’
‘Fuck! … Marcy!’
‘Are you having a stroke?’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Jesus, Babe, why is your face all wet?’
‘I just … I just splashed it in the bathroom. Jesus. Marcy!’
‘That’s my name.’
‘Where have you been?’
‘All your life?’
‘No, no. I mean … I got here at 6.’
‘Dude, you said 8.’
‘I said 6.’
‘Sweetie, d’ya wanna see your text?’
‘I said 8?’
‘Babe, can we go? The driver’s waiting. Oh, and everybody’s at Clandestino; there’s a party at Fernanda’s tonight and her dad’s going to be there …’
‘Martin!?’
‘Yeah. He asked if you wanted to rest your head on his chest while he strokes your hair. Then, afterwards, you can climb up his vagina and maybe snuggle a bit in his womb …?’

••••