Abergavenny

When I describe Paul to my new friends, I say he is vertiginously handsome. He is so handsome that you might shatter with the force of it, I say. Your eyes can not grip on to a face that good, I tell them.

I first saw Paul across a strip-lit bar and, despite his striking looks, I foresaw that he and I would become friends. I went across, in-between the pool tables, and introduced myself formally, like a guy to a girl in the fifties.

Today, Paul is laying the decking and starting to make a window-frame from old railway sleepers. It’s his parents’ new house. They’ve got solar panels on the roof. During the summer months they expect to sell electricity back to the national grid.

Paul’s father teaches environmental law. He has written books.

I’m on a two-carriage train from Newport. I always bring Paul a game pie from Gwyn T. Davies butchers. Pigeon, venison, rabbit and duck.

I tell my female friends that they should marry Paul. He occasionally gets depressed, particularly as the days get shorter, but that just means he’s thoughtful.

Back when we were at college, we used to say – when Paul got really wrecked and his eyelids lowered – that he had an alter ego, Bruno Sandbank, who was highly charismatic but treated women badly.

I haven’t seen Bruno for years.

In November, Paul is going to Eritrea to help build affordable, low-tech housing. And he’s not doing it to so he can say that he’s doing it. He’s just really interested. He says simple stuff like, It’s a good idea. I like his straight-forwardness.

I would not marry Paul, before you say it. He would not marry me.

Asha, my new girlfriend, has texted me to say she is still in bed. It’s midday.

Paul said that, tomorrow morning, we’ll go to visit Cwm Yoy – a small parish church that, because it was built on subsiding land, has become warped and misshapen.

Some friends are more important than girls. In America, they say: Bros before hos.

You can make anything sound true with a rhyme.

I alight at Abergavenny station.

I look down from the railway bridge as the train slides north out of the station, headed to Manchester. The ground is shiny from recent rainfall. I sit on a bench with the pie in my lap.

Paul will pick me up in Bruno, his Mazda. He named his car after his alter ego.

There’s a double rainbow forming above the townhall. I think about taking a photo on my phone but, I know that the result will be instantly disappointing.

“Ayyyy!”

I recognise Paul’s The Fonz impression immediately. I hadn’t noticed him approach.

He’s standing by the canned drinks machine; he thumps it with his fist, as if it is a jukebox.

“Look,” I say and I point at the rainbow.

He stops being the Fonz and walks over.

“I arranged that,” he says. “It’s my way of saying hello.”

We’re staying at his parents’ new house. Paul says he has to finish up laying the joists for his parent’s decking, so I just sit on the garden bench while he gets on with it. The smell of mastic, a black vinyl-based glue, niggles the back of my throat.

I watch Paul work for a while. He has a whole torture-parlour of power tools: an electric planer, a staple gun and a Japanese-made electric drill called The Lion.

After a while, I start to feel a bit useless. Usually, when I see Paul, we behave like a team. If we go to the supermarket, then we delegate: you’re on flesh, I’m on fluid. Meet back at till six in six minutes.

But I can’t really help with his carpentry.

“Honey, shall I make us dinner?” I call out.

Paul comes in with black hands and a slash of vinyl along his neck. He carries his tools through to the garage while I drain the potatoes.

“Pie,” he says.
“Pie,” I concur.

I mash some English mustard in with the potatoes. I drain the cabbage. It’s a traditional British meal: meat, potatoes, vegetable. Paul is a skilled labourer. I am the hard-working wife. It is the nineteen fifties.

The smell of Swarfega wafts through from the garage as Paul washes his hands.

The pie is wonderful, as usual. The pastry crumbling in geological patterns.

Only once the plates have been pushed in to the centre of the table and we’re slouching in our chairs, do we begin to talk. Every friendship has its own speech pattern. We’ve always talked laterally: conversation sliding sideways through distractions, puns, ribbings, innuendo. This can sometimes give a sense that nothing is fully explored.

“So I’ve got a new girlfriend,” I say.
“Have you?”
“I have.”
“How is she?”
“She’s normal. She’s nice.”

Paul gives me a huge over-the-top grin, slapping his hands on to the table.

“Mate,” he says.
“Everyday and in every way I am getting better and better,” I say.
“You are,” he says.
“She’s called Asha; she’s Polish.”
“How old is she?”
“I’m not sure. Twenty-two maybe?”
“You’re not sure.”
“Twenty-three maybe?”
“You’re not sure.”
“We’re not getting married.”

I take a moment to consider this idea. Paul sees that I am actually thinking about it. He frowns a little.

“I would marry her though. She’s great.”
“My God. Buying a house, getting married. Who are you?”
“I am my Dad.”
“You are.”

There’s a few seconds silence. We both sip our apple juices.

“Have your parents met her?” he asks.
“Not yet. My sister has. My sister said I was punching above my weight.”
“Are you?”
“Big time.”
“You usually go for Aryans,” he says.
“The Aryans were Scandinavian, not Polish. Asha’s Polish. She looks Polish.”
“Actually,” Paul says, “there’s no such thing as an Aryan. It’s just a concept.”
“You’re a concept,” I tell him. He has blonde hair, blue eyes, is tall and good looking, also with muscles.
“Hitler loves me,” Paul says.

It has taken us many years of practice to be able to speak like this.

When we were at university, Paul and I used to call each other my nigga and we used to say that, for race inequality to be tackled effectively, it is important that two white middle class boys should be able to have rap battles and call each other my nigga, even in a black American accent. We had a friend in our halls of residence, Varghese, an Indian American; his parents were Indian but he was brought up in America. We used to call him my nigga and he thought it was funny. He used to call us my nigga and it was exhilarating.

I used to say that, if the black American community say that only they can use the word nigga then they are just creating another barrier – they are just giving the word back its bite, its prejudice.

I had a feminism tutor at university who used to talk to us about her cunt. One day, she said: I have a beautiful cunt. She wanted to reclaim the word.

It never worked. If anything, it just made her seem a bit lonely.

I don’t call my friends my nigga, anymore. I think political correctness has not gone mad. I think it is smarter than ever.

There’s this whole older generation who remember a time when it was cool to call someone a Paki or a wog. Or not exactly cool, but acceptable. And now they’re told not to use the language they’ve been using all their lives. They used these words when they were innocent children. And they all have friends who are Pakistani. And besides, Bangladeshis can be Pakis, Indians can be Pakis. Someone with a tan can be a Paki. It’s just a word.

But, the reality is, if the word disappears from society then, eventually, the meaning disappears and, some time after that, so does the prejudice. At first, people stop saying racist things but they keep thinking racist things. Soap to clean the mouth but not the mind. (That’s a lyric from a NoFX song.) But, once that generation dies, the prejudicial ideas have got no way to be further transmitted, so they die out. Language dictates the limits of expression.

For that older generation who are told that a common, seemingly innocuous word is now offensive, it must seem strange. It may feel like their language is being taken away from them. Suddenly, they don’t know how to refer to their brown friends. This is a necessary side-effect.

Counter-wise, we have to keep language honest. Human rights abuses, for example, can be disguised by new language. I don’t know the exact details. Ethnic cleansing or genocide. Stripping a prisoner naked and calling it Nature Time or some such. I don’t know, I’m making this up.

But there’s nothing wrong with altering language for the right reasons.

I think all this in a few moments.

Paul is putting the dishes away.

“What’s going on in your love life Bruno?”
“Bruno’s dead,” Paul says.
“Bruno’s never dead. He’s just dormant.”
“Honestly, he came out a few weeks ago. He just makes me depressed. I’ve killed him. Bruno Sandbank is dead.”

We can talk about Paul’s alter ego in the third person. It is easier for both of us.

“What did he do?”
“He had sex with someone.”
“Was it a girl?”
“Yes.”

Paul closes the dishwasher and turns to face me.

“Did he remember her name?”
“Yes he did.”
“Bruno the gentlemen.”
“Not exactly.”
“So what then?”
“Apparently…” Paul tails off, and looks at the floor.
“Apparently?”
“So I’m told,” he says, hesitantly.
“Yeees.”
“After having sex with her, in her own bed, he told the girl that she was not good looking enough. He told her she was ugly.”
“He said that?”
“Apparently.”
“How do you know?”
“She is one of my best friends.”
“She told you?”
“No. She told Chris. Chris told me. She’s not speaking to me. I denied it.”
“Mate.”
“I know.”
“Mate. That’s rough.”

When we want to signify serious emotional engagement, we use the word mate.

“I fucking hate it,” Paul says. “He’s not fun.”

We go out for a pint and a game of pool in a very quiet pub down the road. By ten thirty we are the last ones in the bar. I beat Paul three nil.

Walking home, the street lights become less frequent as we make our way back to his parent’s house, which is at the end of a private road, on a hill overlooking Abergavenny.

“There’s a girl who I like,” Paul says.
“She’s really great. She’s got this cute little broken nose.”
“Nice, mate,” I say. “I love a broken nose.”

I have a broken nose. Some days, I think it is charming. Paul didn’t mean to pay me a compliment but, inadvertently, he did, which is the best kind of compliment.

“What’s her name?”
“Alice.”
“Lovely.”
“She is sporty,” he says. “She does power kiting.”
“Extreme,” I say and I make an X with my arms.
“And she snowboards.”
“You do realise the life expectancy of a girl like her is substantially lower than that of most third-world countries?”

An automatic security light clicks on as we walk past someone’s garden. We are in a room of light.

“Don’t shoot!” I say.
“They’ve finally tracked us down, Bro.”
“I’m not your Bro. I am an undercover agent. You’ve walked straight in to my trap.”
“I never should have invited you to stay in my parent’s home.”
“That was your fatal error.”
“And the game pie.”
“Yes, the game pie contained a homing beacon.”
“Homing pigeon beacon.”
“Precisely.”

Sometimes Paul and I say certain things, and I think that, if I was listening to the conversation, I would not like the people who are speaking. Even if they are joking, I would not like them. But there’s something about being one of the people involved – a kind of brinkmanship thrill at being in that awful conversation – the sort of conversation I would never have in front of Asha, for example. In fact, if I overheard this sort of conversation on the bus, I’d probably tell Asha about it, but with my own superior commentary interjecting. Pair of twats, I would say.

It’s like when you are the one table laughing loudly and having a great time in the restaurant. And, just for fun, you light up cigars at your table – you don’t even like cigars.

“Where is this girl?” I ask him.
“She’s in Japan, teaching English. We send each other emails.”
“Aww.”
“When is she back?”
“Christmas.”

When we get back home, Paul makes us both peppermint tea. We discuss what time we’ll need to get up in the morning if we’re to see this wobbly church before I catch my train. We decide to get up at eight – time for a fry-up, my speciality – and then out by nine.

There’s something about making plans, about arranging things, that feels like getting old. Just deciding to leave a sensible amount of time to get to a train station – for example – feels like my life is draining away from me.

As I lie in bed, I think about the new things that I want from my life. I want to sleep well. I want to get up and see a church. I want to go for a walk. I want to get home in time to do some writing. I would like to get some food for the house. Asha loves avocados and, at the moment, they’re going cheap on Kingsland High Street market. I want to plan my dinner. I want to have my dinner before eight o ‘clock. These are new things, for me. I am changing and I am happy to change.

Paul is changing too. I like the person he is becoming. I’m not sad to see our student personas fade. Maybe it’ll be our conversation habits that change last. Or maybe, we’ll still be speaking the way we do now when we’re eighty.

I don’t ever want to be embarrassed of the way Paul and I speak to each other.

In the morning, on the way to the church, we listen to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, specifically When I’m Sixty Four. I think about the fact that when Paul wrote the song he must have been about my age, twenty-five. I think about the possibility of being Sixty-four and Asha being sixty-one, or sixty-two. I think about the texture of her skin.

I think that Paul McCartney says:

Every summer we can rent a cottage,
In the Isle of Wright, if it's not too dear.
We shall scrimp and save…

Which is pretty incongruous, for one of the best-selling albums of all time. I remember that McCartney turned sixty-four a few years ago because there were lots of tie-in articles in the press.

We’re in the Church. It does have a lean and the angles of the window sills do not match up to the roof beams. Paul is primarily interested in the difficult carpentry that was required when the church needed refurbishment. Each new beam had to be individually measured to fit, because no distance or angle was the same.

There’s no one else around. Parish news letters are piled on a table next to the contributions box. I read that, recently, boxes of candles were stolen.

In the wonky church, I think about the fact that you can love someone despite their physical appearances. I think that Paul likes a girl with a broken nose. And he is spectacularly handsome. He doesn’t need a broken-nosed girl.

I am standing under the arches of a subsiding church. This feels like the place for an epiphany.

I have always been young. I was born young.

Paul’s lifting up the dust-guard on the organ’s keyboard. He tries to play chopsticks but it doesn’t make any sound. He knows how to play some Beatles songs: Yesterday and Hey Jude.

The epiphany passes.

We’re driving back through the narrow lanes. Paul is driving carefully and slowing at the corners. He pays particular attention to the black and white arrows that precede sharp turnings.

I am looking forward to going back home. I get the feeling that we make each other sad, maybe. That Paul finds me depressing, even though he’s grinning now and singing along to Lovely Rita.

Old friends are depressing, I think. I only want new ones.

He drops me at the station.

On the train, I chat to a girl who’s going to Oxford to study PPE. She’s quite pretty. I ask her about her interviews. She gets animated as she talks about the philosophy lecturer who swung on the arms of his chair like an ape.

She keeps involuntarily touching her nose. I think maybe it’s because she has seen that my nose is broken.

I listen to her. I feel completely detached from her. All I want is to be in my new girlfriend’s bed. I want to marry Asha. I want to trap her. I want us to be old. I’m tired of waiting.