find himself blinking in disbelief at Chloe’s equanimity as she calmly accepted his most outrageous and offensive behaviour with a brief shrug. Chloe clung on to the relationship with the tenacity of a pit-bull terrier. An entire section of her library was dedicated to Resolving Your Differences, Making that Love Work for You!, Talking it Through, and so on. Johnathan realized that there was a long, long way to go before she had exhausted the remedies available on her bookshelf.
Chloe’s refusal to accept the obvious was the principal reason for Troilus’s fate the previous evening. It had been in many respects a political execution, Troilus no more than a hapless pawn in an altogether more complex game. Johnathan had finally had enough. He had never knowingly killed anything before, apart from the odd mosquito or bath-trapped spider, but couldn’t find it in him to feel much remorse. Troilus was only a cat, after all.
Johnathan went back to the bedroom and retreated under the duvet. Eventually he drifted off into a restless sleep, merciful respite from his aching head. He had not been asleep for long, though, when the telephone erupted once more. Cursing, he walked out into the hall.
Johnathan regarded the telephone suspiciously. He looked at his watch. It was now eight-thirty. It had to be Chloe. The ringing seemed to be getting louder. It felt as if someone was jabbing a needle into his ear. Finally he picked up the receiver, bracing himself.
‘OK you crazy bitch,’ he said. ‘I’m ready.’
There was a discreet cough. ‘Hello darling.’
His mother.
‘Oh. Hi,’ he mumbled. ‘Thought you were someone else.’
‘We’re just off out of the door for this festival in Cardiff, so I thought I’d give you a ring.’
‘Right.’
‘So how are you?’ asked his mother breezily.
‘Fine.’
There was a slight pause. ‘You sound a bit put out, darling. Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I didn’t wake you up, did I?’
‘Well, yes, actually, you did,’ said Johnathan as equably as he could.
‘But it’s such a beautiful day,’ said his mother. ‘How can you bear to spend it all in bed?’
‘I wasn’t going to spend it all in bed. I was just having a well-deserved lie in,’ replied Johnathan, aware of the disapproval emanating silently down the line but too hungover to care.
‘And what,’ continued his mother, ‘are you up to this weekend?’
‘All the usual chores,’ said Johnathan. ‘Washing, ironing, that sort of thing. You know me. Glamour glamour glamour.’
‘Oh. If you didn’t have anything special planned you could have come with us. Too late now, though.’
‘Oh well,’ said Johnathan, brightening slightly.
‘It should be absolutely fascinating,’ continued his mother. ‘They’re putting on a lesbian Macbeth, in Welsh.’
‘I see,’ said Johnathan. There was a long pause.
‘Anyway, darling, we must dash if we’re going to miss the traffic. I’ll give you a call early next week. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
Johnathan thought about his parents on their way to their latest jaunt in Wales. To them, culture was a commodity which could be acquired and traded. His parents patronized (in both senses of the word) a stable of unknown artists, whose works hung throughout their cluttered North London home. They invested speculatively but without aesthetic discrimination in the hope that one day the painters would become hugely important and their paintings hugely valuable. Some of the paintings were all right, others were capable of inducing powerful migraines. One looked like an ink-blot test given to deranged children from dysfunctional families. Others looked as if they’d been painted by the children who did the ink-blot tests.
Johnathan’s parents firmly believed that there was a direct correlation between culture and society: the higher the culture, the higher the society. Put another way, the more impenetrable the culture, the more impenetrable the posh accents. They liked to surround themselves with creative people. They knew artists, musicians and writers of varying pedigree, members of the Hampstead authordoxy. They knew a lot of women called Hermione. They were so highbrow their foreheads were permanently stuck to the ceiling.
Johnathan, however, was a solicitor, and was therefore a considerable disappointment to his parents. It was not something they could drop into conversation with any hope of carving further notches on the bedpost of artistic pretension. ‘My son the solicitor,’ didn’t have quite the same ring about it as ‘My son the bleak playwright’, or ‘My son the post-modern poet’.
Johnathan, though, suspected that he had an even greater failing in his parents’ eyes. He was straight. He liked girls. He was incontrovertibly heterosexual.
There wasn’t anything specific he could put his finger on to justify his suspicion, but the cumulative circumstantial evidence seemed compelling. He had been encouraged with his dried flower collection from an early age. For his fourteenth birthday he had received a copy of Joe Orton’s diaries, and was earnestly told that it represented a viable lifestyle choice. His parents always looked rather crestfallen when he introduced them to new girlfriends. Worst of all, though, they had added an ‘h’ to his name.
Johnathan’s extra ‘h’ had been a source of irritation and inconvenience for as long as he could remember. Nobody except for his parents knew quite why it was there, squatting like an uninvited guest in the middle of his first name. Every credit card, chequebook, and bill missed out his ‘h’. The only people who ever spelled his name correctly were the promotions department at Readers’ Digest who regularly tried to entice him into entering the Biggest Prize Draw Ever. He had grown accustomed to watching people frown slightly as they looked at his business card, while they tried to work out what was wrong with it. Johnathan had become convinced that his parents had burdened him with the redundant consonant to show that their son was somehow different. Well, maybe he was, but not that different.
Sexually Johnathan had grown up in a drearily unspectacular way. He finally managed to lose the millstone of virginity during his first, parent-free, week at university in the traditionally messy and awkward way. He was leerily propositioned by an unattractive and very drunk biochemistry postgraduate in the college bar, and woke in her bed the next morning experiencing elation, disgust, and a splitting headache. After that Johnathan had failed to have proper sex with anyone else until he had left university.
Johnathan remembered that there was a bottle of aspirin in the bathroom. His hangover was clearly too sophisticated to be dealt with simply by way of sleep. Something chemical was required. He sloped off to the bathroom, took three pills, and went into the kitchen.
Johnathan switched on his espresso machine, which soon began to chugger and whoosh and gurgle in a way more soothing than any mother’s heartbeat. He had never really stopped to consider his relationship with his coffee machine from a Freudian perspective. It was certainly closer than the one he enjoyed with his mother.
When the little yellow light on the machine clicked itself off, Johnathan flicked the switch and watched as the twin nozzles which hung beneath the matt black belly of the machine began to trickle thick, black liquid into the waiting cup. A few seconds later, the cup was full. Johnathan lifted it to his nose and breathed in deeply, relishing the espresso’s aroma. He sighed a small sigh, and then tipped the contents of the cup down his throat in two quick movements, rather as if he was taking medicine. Johnathan shut his eyes for a few moments, and allowed his mind to go blank. Then he opened them again, and switched the coffee machine back on. Round two.
Some hours later, fully caffeined-up and a few chores to the good, Johnathan sat on his sofa watching a children’s Saturday