Stretch, 29. Damian Lanigan
Why was my groin like Action Man’s and his like a ferret shop window?
I got over all this soon enough, and we ended up going to the same parties, removing the bras from the same girls, occasionally at the same time, and wondering what we should do then for three or four years. He then failed to get into Oxford, and ended up at UEA. I visited him once in my first year and that was that. Five years of easy affection receded into the past as if it had been no more than a handshake. No regrets, though, that’s just friendship for you.
His letter went as follows:
Dear Frank,
Don’t fall off your chair! Great to see you yesterday. You seemed a bit in a hurry. I hope you enjoyed your party.
Any road up, let me fill you in a bit, like I couldn’t do yesterday in all the rush. Been married now for nine years (gulp!) to Sue who was at UEA (you met her, but she says she won’t be surprised if you’ve forgotten) and we’ve got three kids, Debbie (9 – she’s the reason!), Ben (6) and Murray (5). Thought about having the snip, but Ben’s a pretty good contraceptive anyway!
Just to say hello again really and to say you are welcome to come and stay with us in Suffolk any time, we’ve got an attic (My study – still writing!) you can stay in with a sofa bed. The pubs are good, and have lock-ins, and the sea is wet and refreshing. Drop me a line. Alternatively, just give me a call, but I always hated the phone, didn’t I, and still do.
Yours ‘back from the grave’-ly!
Bill Turnage
The tone of the letter was difficult to judge. There were far too many exclamation marks for one thing. It could, I suppose, have been reproaching me for not getting in touch, but I didn’t think so. It cheered me up for some reason, and pathetically I was rather proud of mentioning to Henry that I’d ‘just got a letter from a really old friend, inviting me to his house in Suffolk’. He seemed surprised but unimpressed, which was characteristic, as he sat on the sofa watching Blue Peter and rolling one up. Lottie was dozing against his thigh. Another tough day in the Stanger household.
‘Very good. Are you going to go and see him?’
‘Nah. Three kids and a screech-owl of a wife. Sounds hideous.’
‘You sentimental old fool.’
‘I know, it’ll be the death of me. Anyway, I’m off to work.’
‘Be the best that you can be.’
I went out to the Cavalier feeling in a relatively good mood considering the previous night’s exertions. I had a feeling that I got increasingly less often, which could be summed up as ‘things are on the up a bit, things are happening a little’. Admittedly, it usually came to nothing, but was better than its opposite, which consisted of screaming fits and clubbing myself to death with self-hate, so I tried to make the best of it. Anyway, the thought of an evening waiting tables at O’Hare’s didn’t fill me with a feeling of yowling frustration, as it often did.
O’Hare’s is a brilliant idea if, as so many of my friends seem to think, ‘brilliant ideas’ make large amounts of money for those who have them. It is hard to determine whether the success of the idea was down to luck or judgement. Bart, whose full name was Graham Barton, was the owner and prime mover. He used to work in advertising where, he had told me, he was one of the old guard, up from secondary modem in Poplar and into the postroom rather than skimmed off from the milk round. This background had made him tougher and more devious than his college-boy competitors, and he made it pay. Leonard’s, the agency he ran for five years, was old-fashioned, overstaffed and financially imprecise, but had a powerful heritage, still just about marketable, from the early years of commercial television. With this provenance, and a heavily played English Gentleman card, he and the other crooks in charge flogged it to a Japanese agency for a hugely inflated sum in the year of Lawson, 1988. The front page of that week’s Campaign is framed in the bog at the Battersea O’Hare’s: MIEKKO NETS LEONARD’S – AT A PRICE. He once told me that he personally walked out with three times what the place was worth, and he only had fifteen per cent.
With the money he went on holiday for two years, came back and started O’Hare’s. The brilliant idea was this: Rip off FUCCERS. What is a FUCCER? Fresh from University, Credit Card, Extremely Rich. Developing this acronym, I believe, had cost Graham at least one sleepless night. ‘Fuck’ was the unstressed spine of his lexicon. It was as if he couldn’t bear to be parted from it, whatever the circumstances. ‘Would you like a fucking Jaffa Cake?’ was Graham on his elevenses best behaviour. Graham’s insight was that to try and open a fashionable restaurant was too fraught with risk – expensive staff and premises, fashionableness giving way to unfashionableness in the blinking of an eye, the need for London-competitive food, which could be anything from Andean peasant to Tex/Belge. So, in classic adman style, he chose his target audience and gave them exactly what they wanted: dark wood, consistency, old film posters, stodgy food, a place to make a noise, a late bar. Bingo. A brilliant idea. After four years he had five restaurants strategically cited in all areas of Part-Qualified Accountant and Articled Clerk Land: Battersea, Wandsworth, Clapham, Fulham and Shepherd’s Bush, with another two on the way in Highgate and Hammersmith. He had made himself well versed in the desires of the young and dull in then Gardenia-painted maisonettes, with their Monet prints and complete works of Phil Collins on DAT. After a dusty, we’ve-just-moved-in-together shag on the Habitat kilim they would crave charred protein and find themselves in one of Bart’s joints, revealing their detailed knowledge of the IKEA spring catalogue over buffalo wings and a bottle of Australian Cab Sauv: ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely to have a friendly little neighbourhood restaurant at the end of the road? No, I think we should definitely have curtains in the bathroom.’
Bart had probably made at least another couple of million out of these dreary Fuccers over the years. Eventually they would grow out of his stodgy, expensive baby food and start eating in places that didn’t play The Eurythmics’ greatest hits on a loop. Bart didn’t give a toss, though, because just as one batch moved on, in would come the next, the boys in their M&S crewnecks and chinos, the girls in jeans and blue button downs, positively gagging to be fleeced by their friendly neighbourhood fat bastard. All he did was change the tape: Enya, Mariah Carey, Riverdance, gloop music and gloop food for gloop lives.
For a boorish mudhopper from the wetlands of Essex he was doing all right, was Graham. He drove a gunmetal V12 Mercedes S Class with blacked-out windows and the word GRAZER on the numberplate. He sat high up and well back on the creamy hide with his fat baguette forefinger hooked round the base of the steering wheel with no regard whatsoever for speed cameras or pedestrians, constantly growling threats and insults at his managers over the digital carphone. When he wasn’t in the Benz, he was in the casino, toying with a couple of grand from the till at O’Hare’s.
He carried his twenty stone quite well and wore Ralph Lauren polo shirts, tight old Levi’s and whiter-than-white ‘Boks in the manner of a Hollywood film director. He liked Rod Stewart. He was so cash, so chrome-and-smoked-glass, so soft-porn, so seventies.
Fat, vulgar, and rich, he felt he could do no wrong, and by his own simplistic standards, he never did. He had a flat in Cadogan Square, a place in Berkshire which he called Hefner House after his hero, and paraded his ethnically diverse sexual conquests with Sultanic arrogance. He apparently had no friends, apart from his oddjob, Brian the Bat, and spent most of the day staring at a roulette wheel when he wasn’t paying unannounced visits to his obscenely profitable restaurants with his latest Sumatran, Geordie or Jap. Having spent his forty-five years on the planet in a constant state of angry pleasure, he was in no mood to stop now. His scores were humblingy good:
68. Good darts, big fella. His score may come as a surprise to some, but not to those who know the extent to which he adores himself. Christ, he thinks he’s marvellous. Every little piece of him, from desiccated collar-length hairdo to clean chubby toes, from bloated Merc to tigerskin bedspread, is a constant source of delight