I should have hated him. He represented so much of what I can’t stand: reckless irresponsibility, self-obsession, un-reined confidence. To top it off, Bobby Charles was, for all intents and purposes, a polygamist. He as much told me so the first time I ever met him. It was at a business lunch in the City. I was the only woman at the table of four. The three men had known each other for years. I had met the first one 3 months prior, the next just a month prior, and Bobby, within the hour. They were my new team. It all seemed very heady that first day, my new team in their city suits and fine taste in restaurants and bottles of wine at lunchtime that turned into afternoon shots of whisky before moving onto the Soho house where champagne flowed and filled fluted glasses.
“Clarissa, you see, I am a very unusual man. I’ve never divorced my wife. She lives down the street from me with three of my children. I live with the mother of my other four children.”
He anticipated my question – it’s probably always the next question whenever, whomever he tells about the “special circumstances” of his life.
“Oh, no, they don’t get along – the wife and the other one – the kids get along splendidly. But not the mothers. You can imagine the second one was none too pleased when she found out I was having another child with the first. Then the first was annoyed when the second was going to have another after the last. All hell broke out when it turns out they’re both pregnant at the same time!” He chuckles at the thought of his own roguishness or at the idea that he escaped a dire time without scars or possibly at the distress of the mothers of his children.
I should hate him.
What kind of man delights in the suffering of others?
“Have I shocked you? Will you still be nice to me, my little Clarissa?” He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close, like a mate would.
I shuddered. I hadn’t seen it before. He had been just another overweight (almost fat!), balding, middle-aged, City-suit-wearer. But with his arm draped over my shoulder, he was something else. A big burly man with chunky, strong hands that could probably suffocate me without too much trouble, gently enveloped me in the circle of a chummish embrace. The familiar way he had addressed me (“my little Clarissa”) should have rankled; it was obviously far too intimate for someone I had just met. I’m noone’s little Clarissa …. if anyone’s then the Mista’s. The objections in my head were not matched by my gutt, where a little flutter warned me that this man was trouble.
“But a Uni bird like you would be shocked by a man like me, I reckon.” He had confided in me, and now he dared me to defy my instincts; he was asking me to suspend my judgment.
I should have hated him, but his frank and guileless approach as he discussed what he knew others would consider to be his foibles (for his part, he admitted no weakness) charmed me into doing exactly what he asked: I suspended my judgement.
I kept the questions that I would normally slice and dice and turn upsidedown boxed up and ignored. Questions like:
What kind of man “successfully” juggles two family units within the same mile? What kind of woman remains the loyal wife while her husband continues to propagate? What kind of other woman waits 1 year then 5 years then 11 years for the legitimisation of her relationship (a legistimisation that only a nonforthecoming divorce will grant her) during which time the man has had 2 more children with the woman he is meant to divorce?
The incredible sadness of it escaped me while my judgement sat in suspense.
Filed under: 2005, cultural conundrums, mista, problems, stream of consciousness
Before I had met Bobby Charles I would not have thought George Hounslow could have existed. I would have chalked him up to the over-active imagination of a fiction writer. Over 35 years of exposure to the rougher gender hadn’t prepared me for the unabashed misogynistic, sensualist that lived in Bobby Charles.
I like to think I know men – that I knew a thing or two about men even before I met Bobby Charles. I think I did. Bobby Charles was an outlier.
The Mista says I’m a guys’ girl. I like being a guys’ girl. I like drinking pints and not worrying (so much) about plucking my eyebrows and painting my nails. I attribute this way of my being to having grown up under the influence of two older brothers. I trailed after them, watching all the naughty things they did*. Although their boyish misconduct wrought me with ambivalence – I was equally indignant and envious of their misbehaviour – it was conduct that grew familiar. As we grew up, and the nature of my brothers’ naughtiness changed, I learned to be wary of every man’s ‘inner dirty dog’.
They all want to get into your pants.
The topic here is not feminism. I’m not going to get into whether it’s a bad thing for men to want to get into your (women’s) pants. Or investigate the whys and why nots women should or shouldn’t want to get into men’s trousers. I have no interest in exploring the societal double-standard, a subject, which frankly, I find hackneyed.
The topic here is an extraordinary man, a man who is described in the book that I’m reading, a man who I wouldn’t have believed existed except that I met him and had to work with him in the square mile protected by Griffins.
The topic here is trouble; the topic is Bobby Charles, a man, I suspect, who is trouble for any woman with whom he ‘gets involved’.
*Like sending lizards ‘into space’ by taping them to bottle rockets or setting booby traps for speeding cars (in the form of fishing line strung across the road) or TPing** the house of the neighbours who were chosen to be ‘the enemy’ for some reason or another.
**Toilet Papering: an act of ‘soft vandalism’ in that no permanent damage is caused, but there is often a hell of a mess to clean up.
Filed under: 2005, cultural conundrums, observations London, Odd, stream of consciousness
I’m reading a book.
It happens to be the very same book that the woman who stood next to me on the tube in the rush-to-get-home-hour was reading. She had the look of a cliche: mousey, librarian, prim, proper, bookish. I imagined she lived alone. Or with a cat. Or maybe with a same-sex flatmate. Certainly a flatmate would wear on her nerves. She (our mouse) would pine for the peace and quiet in which she could pamper her brain with books, books and more books! Even the most considerate of flatmates would cramp her style, I imagine. Unless, her flatmate is a sister spirit! Birds of a feather who twitter over Ideas and who rarely drink, but when they do they get drunk on a glass of wine.
I was imagining a sad life for the not-quite-dour, but certainly-serious-faced young woman next to me on the tube. I noticed she was reading a thickish book. Then, I noticed it was the same one I was reading. She had probably bought it on the same 3 for 2 sale at Waterstone’s that I had, though the orange, circular sale sticker had been removed.
I had just finished reading the following passage when I noticed the girl was reading my book:
George’s approach to women was clumsy, over-humble, and he might even stammer. (But his stammer always sounded as if he were doing it on purpose.) Meanwhile his deep-set brown eyes would be fixed on the women with an almost bullying intentness. And yet his manner would remain humble, apologetic. Women got flustered or angry, or laughed nervously. He was a sensualist of course. I mean, a real sensualist, not a man who played the role of one, as so many do, for one reason or another. He was a man who really, very much, needed women. {…} When George looked at a woman he was imagining her as she would be when he had fucked her into insensibility. And he was afraid it would show in his eyes. I did not understand this then, I did not understand why I got confused when he looked at me. But I’ve met a few men like him since, all with the same clumsy impatient humility, and with the same hidden arrogant power.1
The girl was much further along in the book than I. She had already read this passage.
What did she think of George?
I wondered if he (or the prospect of him) excited her? Or scared her? Or did she doubt his very existence? I wondered, because I thought she must doubt George.
A girl like her wouldn’t accept that a man like George is true.
I wondered because it struck me that there was a time that I would have doubted George too. Now I know better.
1 Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. p.126.
