Before Your Very Eyes
New Man: Remember him? Didn’t think so.Simon Teller is the last of a dying breed. He’s such a New Man he’s sparkling. Struggling magician, gourmet cook, and jazz freak, he’s been doing Conversation and Quiche for as long as he can remember, but he’s so sensitive that all he’s managed to conjure up is a number of awkward crushes and infatuations. And now the women are staying away in droves.Enter stage left Joe, the Houdini of the casual sex scene and the man who, in the cause of true friendship, is determined to show Simon how to pull women as easily as he pulls rabbits out of hats. Under Joe’s expert tutelage, and armed with an array of cynical – and secondhand – seduction techniques, Simon embarks on a radically different approach to dating. The results are disastrous. A number of close encounters of a very peculiar kind with desperate divorcées, nymphomaniac Canadians, and alcoholic doctors leave Simon wondering if the beautiful American magician Alex might be different…A comedy about love, friendship and magic, and about how, sometimes, the trick is to see what’s before your very eyes.
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Before Your Very Eyes
Alex George
Extract from ‘For Sidney Bechet’ from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Extract from ‘Doubt’. Writers: Smith, Gallup, Tolhurst © Fiction Songs Ltd Reproduced with permission.
For my mother and father,
Alison and Julian George, with love and apologies for the language
On me your voice falls as they love should, like an enormous yes.
For Sidney Bechet
Philip Larkin
Table of Contents
Simon Teller kissed the card.
It was a hesitant, surreptitious, don’t mind me kiss. A small, I’m not really doing this kiss. His lips barely puckered as they brushed against the white cardboard. It felt good. He read the card once more, and then kissed it again. As he did so, he made a ‘mwah’ noise. Then, feeling rather silly, he put it down on the kitchen table.
‘OK,’ he said out loud. ‘Good.’
He picked the card up again, and walked into the sitting room.
There he cursed silently. That was the problem with these converted flats. The builders had got rid of all the fireplaces. Without fireplaces you had no mantelpieces, and without mantelpieces – well. Where was one supposed to put invitations?
For that was what Simon Teller had been performing his solitary act of osculation upon. An invitation, yes, but the word failed to convey the full import of the rectangle of reinforced card that Simon held. This was no ordinary invitation. This invitation was the key to God knows what, the ticket to God knows where, the introduction to God knows who.
Simon went over to the record player and lifted the stylus on to the waiting vinyl. Sonny Rollins broke into an effervescent ‘St Thomas’, his joyful, bristling, honking saxophone reflecting Simon’s own mood. Simon propped the card up against the stereo and stepped back to admire it. There was no doubt about it: it looked good. All right, the handwriting was messy, and the green ink had smudged badly. But that didn’t matter. What mattered were the names scrawled along the top of the card.
Angus and Fergus.
Yes yes yes.
Angus and Fergus were Simon’s neighbours. They lived in the flat immediately above his. They had moved in about two years ago. Since then, Simon had only actually seen them a few times – chance encounters on the stairs, mostly – but he felt that he knew them intimately. For the other draw-back about the building in which Simon, Angus and Fergus all lived, lack of mantelpieces aside, was extremely thin ceilings.
As a result, Simon had witnessed, albeit indirectly, most of the important recent events in the lives of Angus and Fergus. He listened to their rows, and to their drunken reconciliations. But, most of all, he listened to them having sex. It wasn’t that Simon was a voyeur, or whatever the aural equivalent of that was, it was simply that he didn’t have any choice. Wherever he sat in his flat, the unmistakable sound of heavy-duty bonking would permeate through the ceiling, causing his light fittings to wobble alarmingly. Angus and Fergus enjoyed having sex, and consequently they did it a lot, with as many different girls as they could.
Simon grew to recognize the sounds of the various females who visited the upstairs flat. There seemed, at any given time, to be at least five or six who could be identified. Simon would sit in bed and, recognizing a particular trill or coo, settle back into his pillows, knowing that it was this one or that one who was being entertained that evening. He never got to see any of these women, of course. They would all leave early in the morning, while their performances were analysed in forensic detail by the two flat-mates over breakfast. Simon preferred not to listen to these post-coital discussions. The two men pored over techniques and replayed certain copulatory highlights with the relish of football pundits analysing a questionable penalty decision.
Angus and Fergus led torrid social lives. Most weekends were punctuated by the regular ringing of their doorbell. Simon sat in his flat listening to the parties swell and throb above him with a despairing heart. How he wanted to join in! How he wanted to float and glitter with the Beautiful People! He would listen to the festivities as long as he could, and then would retire to bed with an old pair of socks wrapped around his head as sound insulation.
Simon stared at the invitation again. This was it. His time had finally come. He wrote the date in his diary, and put a big red ring around it.
It was soon after this that the worries began. Simon was out of practice at parties, and hopeless at social small talk. He met people every day at the shop, of course, and could talk to them. But this was quite different. At the party he would meet sophisticated people with beauty and charisma. He would have to sparkle.
