Habitats

                                1

   He worked in the oil industry, and at the time of his death, he had recently broken up with a beautiful Russian girlfriend not many years his junior, and died in what my friend believed initially was an accident but later accepted as perhaps more mysterious than that. Jay lived a few miles from Oxford, in a detached house with a garden that some might have called grounds. It had an indoor swimming pool and my friend, who was a pool engineer, met him through work but returned out of friendship, even if on these visits Jay found him minor jobs to do as if the conviviality could be couched as modest profit for Alan. 

   This was how Alan offered it to me the first time he talked about Jay, several months after his initial visit, and after he had been to the house on a couple of further occasions. He described Jay’s place with a mixture of envy and wonderment, even though his job took him to many houses that were vast and expensive. Maybe he could feel this convivial envy towards Jay since they were about the same age, about thirty, and from a similar background (though Alan’s father was from Glasgow), both were brought up on housing estates near Cowley, and both went to comprehensives, though for some reason different ones. Most of the other houses Alan worked in were owned by people much older than he was or people whose background was clearly more moneyed, and many of whom were privately educated. He had nothing in common with such people and he admitted to me he had always resented them but never quite envied them, as though for him envy could only be manifest in possibility. Jay was someone he could look towards without looking up to, without feeling that the world he was entering was one in which he would be excluded the moment the pool work had been done. 

    On that first occasion discussing Jay, I asked him to describe the house, to give me the sense of this person’s wealth that somehow Alan believed he could match. My own work as a screenwriter sometimes took me to producers' houses here in London, and maybe, I thought, I wouldn’t have been impressed by the dwelling that had so impacted upon Alan. But the way Alan described it I was fascinated; here was a man from a far from wealthy background who had created a place of taste and refinement. I expected him to describe a property both grand and impersonal, if not quite vulgar, and instead, he talked of a sitting room with Persian rugs on varnished floors, a vast mahogany dining table, and Turkish lamps. The kitchen had an Arga and also a cooker and hob, and another, smaller table that could still seat up to six. On those initial visits, he had seen mainly downstairs, and the outhouse where the fifteen-metre swimming pool was housed. But on the third visit, after consuming too much tea, he asked to use the bathroom and, since work was being done to the one downstairs, he went up the first floor of this three-floor house and could see, after using the toilet, a door ajar that he didn’t feel he ought not to look into. It was a study, with a desk he suspected was at least a hundred years old, and above it shelves up to the ceiling. On the shelves were books of esoteric literature, works mainly about spiritual matters alongside a few works of fiction, including Kafka and Dostoevsky, and some philosophy — Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and some of the Ancients. He shouldn’t have been surprised; Jay had expressed an interest in philosophy and when Alan said it was the subject he might have wished to study had he gone to university, Jay said that it was the subject he almost did study. His parents reckoned he would be better with chemical engineering, and he supposed they may have been right. He said it as he looked around at what chemical engineering had given him, but there upstairs were the books that allowed him to retain his interest in a subject he might have studied but that surely wouldn’t have allowed for an indoor swimming pool. 

     After coming back down the stairs, Alan saw now in Jay a vulnerability he hadn’t noticed before, seeing in his material success a spiritual yearning and a pedagogical aspiration. Those books in the study suggested a person who may have made money but hadn’t yet on his own terms made much of himself. Was this Alan’s way of tempering the envy I asked, knowing that our friendship could entertain hypotheses out loud that many a friendship would suppress? He didn’t know, he said, but it may have been that in seeing those books he felt much closer to Jay than initially — that he didn’t think he had been invited back three times to Jay’s place because they were from the same housing estates but that they both had a yearning to escape the material, however much wealth Jay had; no matter how modest Alan’s living conditions. 

                               2

   I’d known Alan for about five years when he first told me about his developing friendship with Jay. We met at an evening class, at Oxford University, an introduction to storytelling course. My parents lived near the town centre, were both academics at the university, and I was home for a year after finishing an undergraduate degree at Edinburgh. It was the only short course I’d attended but Alan had been to a few already and would go on to do quite a few more. One evening after the class a few of us were in the pub and I asked why he chose the course and he said he was a regular; usually doing two or three a year. The conversation may have ended there and no friendship would have developed, but then he added that he chose this particular course since he wanted to know how storytelling makes sense of the world we live in. He didn’t care much for fiction except as a way of understanding himself and others. He wondered if anything had bettered the bible and I thought for a moment that he must be a Christian. He smiled as he saw the expression on my face and said he wanted to believe in stories, not in God. He then asked why I was doing the course and, again, I offered the fact first and then the intention. I told him my parents lived in Oxford, I was home for a year, then added I wanted to be a scriptwriter, and wished to find what made for a good story, one that couldn’t be reduced to formulas and expectations. He said it looked like I wanted to turn a dishonourable profession into an honourable one, and out of this teasing willingness to say what was on his mind, I in turn found myself able to say what was on mine. 

   We continued to go for drinks throughout the rest of that term but it was usually Alan and I who were the last to leave the pub, and we kept in contact after I moved down to London, always seeing him whenever I was up visiting my parents. But what was interesting was that I had never been to his flat; that after knowing him for five years, and asking him about Jay’s place, I had no idea what his place looked like. All I knew was that he lived a few miles outside Oxford, in Grove, and that I assumed it was a council flat. It always made sense that we met in town, and I never felt for all the freedom of thought we expressed, to ask him about his dwelling. 

                                                3

       Over the following years he talked a lot about Jay, and each time he visited there were always new stories, about Jay’s travels, his girlfriends, about the people he would meet, as he became ever-closer to people with money and not a little influence, and I sometimes wondered if the friendship between Alan and I continued during these years partly through the anecdotes he would tell about Jay as I often realised as we parted that Alan had said hardly anything about himself. But then that was always so; and partly why we became friends as it was based less on what we said about ourselves than how we talked about things beyond ourselves. That first occasion after the philosophy course, we talked of philosophers, of story-telling techniques, of which books we thought worked and why, and I suppose Jay was a story he liked to tell and that he had increasingly mastered in the telling. I didn’t doubt what he told me was true, or at least was true to what Jay had told him, but I knew that he could see that for me Jay was a character, someone who was colourful and narrational, someone who could be seen as a good character in anybody’s novel. 

      And so it was that I followed this person’s life at two removes, with Alan regularly informing me of Jay’s initially exuberant and eventually reckless behaviour, but I suppose I should convey them with the chronological curiosity in which they were divulged to me. That second time Alan talked about Jay, Alan said he had gone out there to fix the jacuzzi. It was clear when he arrived that there had been a party the previous night, and there were still a couple of cars in the driveway apart from the two Jay owned. They were, like Jay’s Land Rover Defender 90, and his vintage British racing Green Triumph Spitfire, cars that didn’t come cheap: a Mercedes 3 series convertible, in Sapphire Blue, and another Land Rover of some description, but less swanky than Jay’s. I wasn’t so interested in cars and had a push bike in London, but cars mattered to Alan, and I knew he had two vehicles of his own; the van he used for work and an old Saab Turbo.

  Alan carried on up the house and it seemed Jay was still in bed. It was around 1030 and a woman in her fifties was cleaning up. He hadn’t seen her in the house before and didn’t think that Jay had a cleaner though it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he did, and he noticed another woman tidying up who he assumed was the older woman’s daughter, as indeed she was. He asked the mother if Jay was there and she said yes, but he was indisposed, offering a smile and a shake of the head as she mopped the kitchen floor. Her daughter was picking up beer cans and empty bottles of wine and spirits from all over the sitting room, and Alan said he was here to take a look at the Jacuzzi. As he looked around he saw evidence of a party much larger than a gathering of people from four vehicles, and knew that though the house was big, he couldn’t imagine there were thirty of forty people upstairs. He carried on out to look at the jacuzzi, which was in the same outhouse as the swimming pool. There were glasses everywhere, a few empty bottles and a couple of unopened bottles of wine. He noticed too, several plastic cups floating in the pool, signs that alcohol and food had been spilled in it, and thought it best if he were to drain it. He would talk to Jay when he awoke. Meanwhile, he looked at the jacuzzi, discovering only the filter needed changing. Jay had been in the house for around two years and that was about the length of time a filter would last; a shame, he supposed, that it gave out during the party. He guessed people had then jumped out of the jacuzzi and went for a dip in the pool. 

      Alan fixed the new filter and was done within an hour, by which time he could see, from the outhouse window, Jay at the window of the kitchen, apparently naked — at least from the waist up. Alan was relieved when he entered the house that Jay was wearing a pair of pyjama bottoms but there was still an uncomfortable moment as Alan saw for the first time the condition Jay was in — he assumed he kept himself lean and fit but what he saw was a body sculpted; not quite like the exaggerated, cartoonish specificity of a superhero film but one of tight, firm muscle with almost no evident fat. Maybe what struck Alan, who himself had always worked out, was how casual Jay seemed about it. Alan well knew that in the gym he couldn’t stop looking at himself in the mirror, found himself unavoidably comparing himself to others even if he knew that he despised people who would do the same, and thus was caught in a combination of self-love and self-loathing as he looked. He wished he could see his body as nothing more than an object in space, and he recalled a conversation we had after one of the philosophy classes. We were talking about narcissism and identity, and he said wouldn’t it be great if we could see our body as others see ours or that we couldn’t see our bodies; that there would be no mirrors in the world. 

   He reckoned many of our problems rest on this inability to see ourselves completely and our ability to see ourselves at all. I was reminded of this earlier conversation when Alan talked of Jay’s apparent unselfconsciousness and also wondered if Jay was far more self-conscious than Alan proposed. When he told me about Jay’s study, he presented it as showing a vulnerable side to Jay but when I associated that study with this now muscled body I saw someone who was trying to create the impregnable. The house, the study, the swimming pool, and the physique, all part of an image he wished to create and sustain. While Alan saw a young man who seemed to have it all, I was inclined to muse over what was missing. 

     Alan added that after a few minutes, with Alan explaining to Jay that the jacuzzi was fixed but there was a problem with the pool, a woman came down the stairs, showered, dressed and made up, and seemed familiar enough with the house to make herself some coffee, offer Alan some, and chastise Jay gently for failing to offer him any. He apologised and said of course; his head was a bit cloudy and Alan knew that Jay would in other circumstances have offered him a coffee and yet saw in the mild reprimand a partner who wasn’t afraid to tease him in front of strangers. I asked Alan what she looked like, aware that I didn’t know what Jay looked like even if I now had an image of his half-naked body. He said his first impression was that he expected someone more beautiful but that his second was that beauty didn’t interest her more than that she didn’t possess it. She wore a little make-up around the eyes and had on red lipstick, and she was wearing leggings and an off-white woolly jumper. Her hair was tied back and her features were regular with no feature striking. She was very pretty, he would have supposed and was only initially disappointed because he could see Jay with an unequivocal beauty. I then asked how handsome Jay was, and he admitted that he was not so striking despite his physique. He had light-brown hair, a regular enough face and good teeth, but it was more, Alan added, that given the house, the youthful wealth, and the vivid social life, he expected a girlfriend to match the ambition. Interestingly, what Alan saw as a weakness; I saw as a strength, seeing in the way he described Jay’s girlfriend a solidity that Jay’s ambition might need — that were he with a beauty, someone who shared Jay’s ambitions and what I perceived was his need for attention, his life would become a constant mirror. He might have needed this young woman to offer him another perspective. 

   I asked Alan if he found out more about the party, how many and who had been in attendance. He said that Jay had told him they were friends from London; that they travelled up for the weekend and were all staying in a hotel a few miles away. They got taxis to the party and taxis back, and Jay said he was thinking of building another dwelling that could house about thirty or forty people. He wanted to have far more parties like the one the previous evening, and wanted the guests to stay all weekend if they wished. He said if he built low he should be able to get planning permission. 

                              4

Over the following couple of years I don’t recall Jay coming up in the conversation, though I assumed Alan was still doing work for him, and perhaps seeing him for a sociable cup of tea when he was working in the area — and when Jay was back in the country. We talked about other things, including my recent marriage and his affair with a married woman. I perhaps judged what he was doing more harshly than I should, because the idea that my wife might be sleeping with another man and coming home to the warmth of our bed, returning to the home we had decorated, to sit on the furniture we had spent many hours in antique and second-hand shops to find, frightened me.

      He insisted that he supposed his situation was very different from mine, even if he hadn’t met Madeline. The woman he was seeing had been married for eight years and her husband would sometimes sleep with others, usually when drunk and usually, supposedly, only once. She didn’t know if this was true but what she did know was that for her self-preservation an affair was necessary. Was this her formulation or Alan’s, I wondered, but when I asked if surely the best way to preserve her well-being was to leave, not cheat, he said that her husband was wealthy, she signed a pre-nuptial, and he was also capable of violence. There were better reasons to stay than to go. I asked if he would wish to marry her if she divorced and he said whenever he thought about it, practically, it didn’t seem possible. She was used to a standard of living far beyond his own, and he didn’t like the idea of the husband or his heavies coming after him. I looked alarmed and asked if her husband was a gangster. He looked at me almost with amusement, said that he thought not, but sometimes when there is a lot of money around things become blurry. 

   I’ve probably never felt so middle-class, sheltered and naive as when we talked that afternoon, and I didn’t dare tell Alan that I was working on a rewrite for someone else; that a producer asked me to try and tidy up the plot points in a script that was going to be made into a low-budget, crime feature film. I knew of very good British gangster movies but I didn’t think this was going to be one of them. The characters were broad and predictable; the story hinged on a robbery that suggested it should have been set in the sixties and not the present, and it had no sense of place. The settings were bars and casinos, and there wasn’t a single scene set in someone’s house. I would have wished to change almost everything about it, but it wasn’t part of my remit and what did I know anyway about the gangster life? Speaking to Alan I knew that while I might have been able to improve on the script the writer had written, this said little about my own ability to comprehend the underworld which, if Alan’s remark was true, meant that the criminal and the official weren’t too far apart. I told him about the script I was modifying and that maybe he should be the one working on it rather than me. He said he knew no more about the intricacies of this world than I did, and he didn’t doubt I was better at structuring a plot. 

   I asked him a few questions about the woman he was seeing but he was as reluctant to talk about her as I had found him initially keen to talk about Jay. He did admit that she was in her early thirties, had no children, that her husband, fifteen years older, was often away, and explained how he met her when he went to look at her swimming pool. His reluctance for a few minutes evaporated as he started telling me how he arrived at this house that was twice the size of Jay’s, with a gated entrance and a long driveway. On one side was a thick hedge of Leyland cypress, on the other, field elms, Rowan trees, and others on an immaculate lawn. Inside, the hallway was tiled and the bannisters leading up the stairs of a faded oak, and in the kitchen there was a pine table, that seated six, on top of a tiled floor. The dining area had a bigger table and the floors were pine. These were the first impressions he had and others became more permanent as in time he would get to see the rest of the house when he became increasingly familiar with the woman who occupied it. On that first occasion, he came to see what the problem was but knew that it couldn’t be fixed at once. She seemed happy rather than irritated by this, and he could see that this woman, who said she was from Uzbekistan, had little contact with others. She said she was hoping to have the pool fixed by the time family visited but that wasn’t for another six weeks. Alan said he was sure that wouldn’t be a problem, explaining why he would need to do the job in three visits. 

   By the end of that third trip, Alan knew various aspects of her life as they sat and drank coffee after he finished working. She asked if he would come back; she enjoyed talking to him and he said he liked her coffee — it was Turkish, and when it kept him awake that night he wasn’t sure if it was the coffee or the future invite. He could see this was a rich woman who was lonely even more than she was bored, and knew enough from their conversations that her husband was ambitious and perhaps ruthless, and that he had been married before and already had two children back in Volograd, not too far from the Kazakh border. His father worked at the oil refinery there and it gave her husband the smell of oil, she said, which in turn gave him the smell of money. She offered the former part of her statement with wistfulness and the latter with disdain, though his wealth had clearly allowed her to dwell in so beautiful a house. Alan said this to her as if trying to dissuade her from the affair that after this third shared coffee, he believed they were moving towards. When he left, he knew, were he to return, he would be embarking on an affair of some description and, when he did, it quickly became a sexual one. 

     He stopped abruptly, and looked at me with what I thought may have been fear but could just have been my take on his situation; an affair with the wife of a wealthy Russian oil man would have made me fearful, and perhaps it made Alan so too but I felt he wouldn’t say so. Instead, he asked about me, said I should tell him more about the script.  

                                 5     

     Months passed and I had no contact with Alan but this wasn’t unusual. Our friendship was based on my parental visits, and yet when I tried to contact him around six months after we last talked, when I was visiting my parents, he sent a text back saying he had so much work on that he might have to skip seeing me this time. This hadn’t happened before and while I didn’t doubt that Alan was very busy, and that he wasn’t inclined to lie, I sensed too that he was looking for an excuse to avoid me. It confirmed perhaps my feeling that he wished he hadn’t spoken to me last time about the affair he had embarked upon. Then, again, I wondered if he wasn’t only busy with work but with his lover too, and it occurred to me for the first time that Alan may have been lonelier over the years than I realised. He had always appeared self-contained, solitary rather than lonely, yet of course I hadn’t even once visited his home, knew of no other close friends and, until he talked about this lover, I knew nothing about any girlfriend he may have had. 

      While I didn’t know where Alan lived, I did know where he had been brought up, and yet I’d never visited the housing estate where Alan and Jay lived as children. Why would I? It was on the outskirts of Oxford, and nobody would be inclined to go there unless they had family or friends they were visiting. Yet during that visit to my parents, and unable to see Alan, I walked along Iffley Road and Henley Avenue, turned off at Newman Rd, into an underpass under the motorway and kept walking. Most of the way there was none of the calm of Oxford as trucks trundled by and there was a smell of diesel and petrol, and few people were walking on foot. Yet this was Oxford I reminded myself, though remind may not have been the word; this experience of the city was new to me. An hour after setting off I reached Blackbird Leys and recalled Alan saying that the block of flats he lived in was 15 storeys high and saw not far up ahead of me two big towers. As I came close and craned my neck, I wondered in which tower and on which floor Alan had lived, and thought of Jay too. As I remembered Alan describing to me Jay’s place, and also the house of his lover, I began to comprehend his admiration, one that might have come about through a gap I could never have quite comprehended. 

  My parents lived in Old Marston, on Mill Lane, in a house that was more than big enough for mum, dad, my sister and me, and was now probably worth a large sum of money without possessing any of the luxury Alan witnessed at Jay’s and his own lover’s houses. We had no swimming pool, no tennis court, no personal gym, but we had a garden with a treehouse and a swing, and even a small pond. But I had no sense my parents aspired to what they had and, were I to ask them, they would probably say they fell into their jobs, looked for a house, found one they could afford, decided to have children and stopped at two. They were academics, of course, and my father was an economist; my mother a political scientist, and I know that over the years people far more ambitious than themselves were their students, including quite a few ministers and a couple of prime ministers. Occasionally my parents would tell me of brilliant students but they had never talked of any who had become famous, as though the qualities required for success were not quite the same as those required for profundity. I thought again of Alan describing Jay’s study, and how anomalous it seemed that this man so keen to make an impact on the world also wished to develop his mind. But weren’t there brilliant people who also became successful, as I thought of actors, politicians, scientists and others, before realising that almost everybody who came to mind was not, or close to, my contemporaries. They were from earlier generations.

     I didn’t know what to make of this thought as I stood below these two imposing blocks, the light fading as it was now almost 7 at night in Mid-October, but looking around me I could see what Jay ran away from and that I suppose Alan had retreated from. I believed there was a different pace to their escape and standing below these towers I thought that whatever was around me was of less importance than what imposed itself upon me. There were a few cars but one of them had two wheels missing and was raised on bricks, there was a white van with a large dent on one of the back doors, and a bike chained to a pole with its chain rusted and the front wheel missing. There was rubbish on the ground, crisp packs and cans crushed in the middle but not flattened. There was washing on balconies, and a smashed window on the first floor. These were images filmmakers would offer for a short-hand look at poverty. As I walked away from the block and along what I assumed passed for the high street, I passed a row of fast food shops, bookies, a chemist, a bakery. The shops were on the ground floor and above them were flats. I wondered if they were ever part of a municipal dream or just a pragmatic solution to pressing housing problems, to finding homes for amongst others the numerous workers who at the time would have been employed in the car industry at nearby Cowley. 

     When I returned to my parents’ place, I read up on the estate and asked my parents questions as well. They said they had never been to the area; no reason to do so really, they said. Yet there they were, an economist and political scientist saying that the poverty along the road from them had no place in their consciousness and that they couldn’t see why it should. Their world was one of political thoughts and numerical data, and while many may have thought they were there to improve the lives of the poor, they did so in the abstract, and I could understand why Jay might have wished to do so more concretely and improve himself. If Blackbird Leys was the utopian new housing scheme where his parents lived, by the time Jay must have been eighteen there wouldn’t have been much hope to be found there for him. If I were to move into a house in Old Marston it would hardly be a step down; indeed, it would be a few steps up from the two-bedroom flat in Southgate my partner and I managed to buy with a government mortgage scheme that was in place for teachers in London - Bree’s job. It was as though my material comfort allowed for a downward mobility that needn’t alarm me but I assumed Jay’s was an accelerated upward mobility that couldn’t accept life would sort itself out when it was good and ready. No, Jay had to sort it out for himself I supposed, and was determined next time I met Alan to ask more about Jay, and also to ask Alan a few questions about his own life and his present love. 

                              6

That wasn’t easy. The next occasion I was in Oxford six months later I texted him and received no reply, and texted again a couple of days later and received a short text saying things were difficult at the moment and that he would love to meet up but it just wasn’t possible this time. I was in Oxford again a few months after that and tried twice and on neither occasion did Alan reply to my texts. It was a couple of years since I had last seen him by then, and I assumed the friendship was now in the past. I would think occasionally about him, sometimes would even think about Jay, but I suspected one reason Alan chose to cease contact was because of subtle slights and oblivious remarks I may have made about a life I didn’t really understand. I felt I knew it a bit better after having visited Blackbird Leys but even such a claim could show how ignorant I happened to be. I make it sound as though I found myself in the slums of a city in a distant country, when it was only a poor district several miles from my parents’ home. 

  I’d like to think my visit to the outskirts of Oxford, my attempt at understanding an aspect of Jay and Alan’s lives, may have improved the script I finished the last time I tried to contact Alan. While before I would have been happy to accept anybody working on the project, now I insisted to my agent it needed to be a director who wanted to shoot on location, to absorb an aspect of the environment. She looked at me sceptically when I said this, probably thinking that I was naive to believe I could have that sort of control; that when someone chose to buy it I would happily sell it without thinking too much about how they were going to film it. But in the three years since she had been my agent, I’d managed to get other work, contributing scripts to various TV crime shows, and tidied up the work of others. I seemed to have a skill for sorting out messy scripts, clearing up clumsy throughlines, inserting a couple of lines of dialogue that clarified a character’s motivations. It was enjoyable and often well-paid work, but I also believed I was adding to the artificiality of the TV medium, making things work but not making anything fundamentally better. During those three years my script had become more nuanced, I had thought a lot about the backgrounds of the characters, their reasons for the things they would do that might not make it on the screen but could be conveyed in the body language of the actors the director would cast. This meant I needed someone who would be more inclined to draw on the milieu, and felt that if a director from TV drama rather than with a hard documentary background took on the project, the film would be flattened into dramatic predictability. I found myself thinking I would direct it myself, though I knew little about the craft of directing and always thought my visual imagination was limited. I wanted someone who could imagine the worlds I was writing about in visual terms; who would find a location and know how to make it work in the context of the script I had written. I sometimes idly dreamed about directors I had long admired making it, but knew that if it were to made at all, on the terms I increasingly insisted upon, it would have to be made by me: a work that would be true to my vision even if it didn’t have too much imagination in the form.

     And so it was that I returned to night classes, attending over three terms a film-making course that I hoped would give me enough skills to direct. From there I would have to try and find funding, cast actors and choose locations, but that didn’t bother me much, perhaps because it was part of a dream rather than the taxing reality it might one day become. It was during the third term that I came across a small item in the Oxford newspaper I would usually read online. It said that Jay Grimsby, 37, was found dead at his home, from a heart attack. It said Grimsby was in good health and yet was given to extreme exercise, while his cleaner said that he had been on a very long cycle ride earlier that morning. I texted Alan, saying that I’d read his friend had died, that I was sorry to hear it and perhaps we could meet the next time I was in Oxford. He replied almost immediately, saying he would like that — but he would be happy to come and see me in Southgate. He could drive through the following afternoon if that would work. I took a while to reply, asking Bree if we could forego our usual Sunday afternoon walk. Over the years, I’d talked about Alan quite often but she’d never met him. The condition, she said, was that this time she would get the chance to say hello, perhaps after Alan and I had finished chatting. I told Alan that meeting the next day would be fine, and I slept lightly that evening, with an odd excitement suggesting I wasn’t only seeing a friend I hadn’t seen for several years but someone who may also have an important story to tell.  

    I suggested we meet at a cafe not far from the flat, a place easy to park. As I waited on a dry, temperate, occasionally overcast mid-afternoon, I saw Alan getting out of the very jeep or one remarkably like it, that I recalled him describing as owned by Jay. He was also wearing an Armani suit (I asked him about it) and a watch that he admitted didn’t come cheap. The moment might have been awkward enough since we hadn’t seen each other for so long, but seemed all the more so when I saw his attire. Yet instead when he started to apologise for the length of time since we had last met, and said, while looking at his clothes and pointing to the jeep, saying he’d been busy, he added that he had been expanding his business. Around the last time we saw each other, he was just getting more and more offers of work, and knowing one or two rich people led to knowing quite a few more. He started employing others and now he had a staff of fifteen, including a secretary. He smiled at this, as though the watch, the suit, and the jeep were all necessary accoutrements of career progress but that somehow the secretary was an indulgence. However, though he looked successful, with his hair expensively cut, and a tan suggesting a recent holiday abroad, he also appeared agitated and keen to talk. 

     I asked him first to tell me more about his business and also asked him as tactfully as I could whether he was still seeing the wife of the exorbitantly wealthy businessman. He said he wasn’t but couldn’t pretend she didn’t help him develop the business. They were together for a year, and during it, while they managed to keep their affair secret, she helped make Alan known to friends who were looking to build pools, have them repaired or maintained, and there was no doubt an energy there as he would be developing the business all the while he was taking risks with Madeline. He noted that his adrenaline levels weren’t so different when he went into the bank and secured a loan, and when he would go to Madeline’s house for an assignation. On those first few occasions he visited, he came in the van he had, but how often can a pool need repaired she said, and so she bought him a motorbike, and he wore the uniform of a well-known delivery food company, with the accompanying thermal bag. The bike was also easier to hide and less conspicuous to use, and it wasn’t as though there were any immediate neighbours: the house was so big that its grounds took up several acres. Yet it was a frisson, and made all the more so perhaps by the bike that he rode not just as a ruse but as a vehicle of speed. Riding to her place he felt doubly outside himself, and yet, after about nine months, the excitement remained when it came to his business but was fading when it came to Madeline. 

   He started to sense risk without compensating pleasures, and they agreed to end the affair when one afternoon while he was over at the house, she received a phone call from her husband: he was back in the country, at Heathrow airport, and would be home in an hour. Usually, she knew well in advance and though he said over the phone that a business deal failed to go ahead when two of the six involved in the investment didn’t appear, she couldn’t believe this had never happened before. It was then she told Alan that he had suspected an affair once in the past, and reminded Alan of a scar on the back of her hand that she had previously claimed was when she spilt some boiling water on herself. She said that wasn’t true: she wasn’t culprit and victim — only the victim. 

     For a while afterwards, he wondered if this were so; that she offered it as a reason to end the affair that had become sexually mundane while ever increasingly risky, and wondered too if her husband was coming back that day. He was never to find out, but it was as though Jay’s recent death made him think that Madeline’s husband, and the businessmen he knew and that Jay had also befriended, would have thought a burn on the back of the hand the mildest of reprimands. If before he wasn’t sure if he was lucky to have hands that were unblemished, now he wondered, if the affair had continued, whether he would have been sitting at this cafe talking to me. And so he turned to talking about Jay, and what he believed had happened to him.

                              7

    Jay’s house was far from the biggest in the area but he became known for parties that were real, an odd word perhaps in the context of partying but Madeline told Alan of others that were not really parties at all. They consisted mainly of middle-aged businessmen and younger women hired for the occasion, parties where men knew they were going to sleep with a woman but didn’t always know which one, with the men competing with each other for affection that had been bought and paid for. Madeline suspected her husband sometimes went, claiming he was returning from abroad a day earlier than he said, but she had no proof and didn’t go looking for any. She had heard about these parties from her husband, as he claimed it was shocking, and from other wives as well who said that their husbands knew about them too but never went. Which husbands did go, they laughed in unison. Jay’s parties were different and though he knew famous people, he came to know many who were young artists, musicians, writers, photographers, and filmmakers. They were people who were on their way to being famous or wanted to retain their independence to the detriment of celebrity. What they all possessed was energy, and so these businessmen and their wives would seek an invite as though to absorb the enthusiasm, vigour and youth of this force, and of course some of the wives were themselves young even if many of the husbands were older. Alan never went to any himself; by the time he received an invite to one he was already seeing Madeline, and, with her husband, a regular attendee, as well as herself, she thought it too risky for Alan to go as well. She admitted they were about the only social events she enjoyed and wished she could have gone with Alan instead of her husband. There were usually musicians casually playing together, artists whose work was hanging on the halls' usually otherwise bare walls, and she suspected one or two filmmakers managed to get funding from businessmen who liked the idea of being seen as a producer on a film. 

     I asked Alan how Jay had quite suddenly become so influential. He said he supposed it was partly through a girlfriend. Jay met Natasha through her father, who was involved in the oil industry in Kazakhstan, and Jay had dealings there with the company he was working for. His daughter worked with the father but was more interested in using the money to fund the arts and, living in London, she opened an independent gallery, a one-screen cinema and cafe in the city. Jay asked her out and perhaps she was intrigued by a man not that much older than herself who was making a fortune in oil but still had an interest in culture. And so this woman, who was beautiful, very rich, very cultured and very well-connected, started going out with Jay Grimsby from Blackbird of Leys. Alan had never mentioned the place before; I guessed by the way he had once described where he and Jay were from, and how close it was to Cowley, that it could only have been this estate. But as he said it I noticed he looked at me with mild contempt, as though he was looking at me through a class divide he and I knew was there but refused to recognise. It made me again suspect that the stalled friendship rested on this assumption and made me think too he might have been right: that he could see he had more affinities with a woman from Uzbekistan with a multi-millionaire husband than someone from the other side of Oxford. 

      However, as Jay became more popular he also became more envied, and while Jay was at the centre of this circle he had helped create, financially would sometimes support, and whose energy he would benefit from, others saw a young man who didn’t quite know his place. Alan knew when he first met Jay that he was working for BP, that he moved to Petrobras and the last he knew he was working for a company called Lukoil. Yet he wasn’t sure who he was with at the time of his death; that he might have created his own company, or was trying to do so. What he did know through comments Madeline made and half-jokes Jay would make, was that he was causing resentment amongst some rich and powerful internationals living in the area. Whether this was because of his business dealings or his personal life Alan wasn’t sure, but Madeline had told him about one of the parties where a businessman known for his temper, his wealth and his interest in women, always much more beautiful than himself, was trying to cajole Natasha into kissing him. She pushed him away initially with good humour but was met with increasing fury, and eventually, she slapped him across the face. People looked down and the room would no doubt have gone quiet were it not for the music that continued playing on the speakers throughout the house, and Madeline knew the man was known to be violent and possibly murderous. Jay hadn’t seen the slap but became quickly aware of the reaction to something, and as he looked in Natasha’s direction, he saw the businessman spit in Natasha’s face and clenched his fist, as if saying she was lucky to receive no more than his spittle. 

   People were clearly wondering how Jay would react. This was chiefly, after all, a bohemian environment, Madeline said. While the businessmen Jay was interacting with, employed by and doing deals with, would have expected Jay to save face, the artists and musicians might have been more inclined to see both condescension and escalation: that he would have been coming to a woman’s rescue and that violence solved nothing. It was a moment where Jay was caught between two worlds, and neither of them his own, Alan said - neither having anything apparently to do with how he grew up in Blackbird Leys. What he did was go over to Natasha asking if she was OK, and said to the businessman he had to leave. In a fight, the businessman must have known who would have won, and perhaps felt relieved that he was given this opportunity to exit without landing on the floor first. He left, but it would be only a person on his payroll who would be inclined to say he left with his dignity intact. What happened though was that shortly after several other businessmen left as well, including Madeline’s husband. He said they would be going and she said that she was staying, and while in another environment her husband might have more forcefully insisted, on this occasion he said nothing. She heard that later that evening the businessman who was asked to leave, her husband, and the three other businessmen who left voluntarily, had gone to a strip bar in Oxford. 

                              8

    Did Alan believe Jay was murdered by this person who pestered his girlfriend? Alan didn’t know, and it was shortly after the party that Alan and Madeline decided to end their affair. Alan wondered if Madeline’s husband’s early return to the country was because she stayed on at the party: that he suspected she was seeing someone who had been there. Her husband would have been wrong but if this happened to be his suspicion it wouldn’t have made the affair any easier, and so, he reckoned, that slap and the subsequent spit, had repercussions for him at least. Did they have repercussions for Jay, he couldn’t say for sure. What he could say was that the last time he saw Jay was around five weeks before his death. He was more despondent than Alan had ever seen him and said that he and Natasha were no longer together. Alan had gone over to fix a minor problem with the pool but Jay seemed to have no interest in him fixing it and asked instead if Alan wanted a cup of coffee. When he phoned, Alan initially said he would send out one of his employees but he insisted that he wanted only the best, and while Alan was momentarily flattered, usually such a remark by Jay would have been accompanied by humour. There was no laughter in his voice. 

     Jay told him that a week earlier he had argued with Natasha over her father. Her father knew the businessman who walked out of the party, knew the others who left shortly thereafter, and said that if Natasha wanted a bohemian life then she shouldn’t be involving herself in her father’s circle as well. She might have met Jay through him, her father said, but that didn’t mean she should have embarked on a relationship. Her father said he was losing contacts and soon enough could be losing money. She disagreed with her father but when she spoke to Jay about it, Jay admitted her father was right, and while he offered this pragmatically, saying this is how business works when contacts are so vital and fortunes made or lost, Natasha took it to mean Jay believed his father was right they should break-up. He didn’t mean it like that, he insisted, but Natasha saw there was little difference between her father and Jay, and that they were both concerned more with money than feeling; that for all Jay’s apparent interest in art, money clearly came first — and before her as well. 

     It could have seemed like a minor argument easily resolved but it was as though, Jay believed, this was a domestic quarrel played out against a backdrop that was nothing if not international, and Jay knew that the ending of the relationship could be worth many millions to her father. That evening at the party, at the party Jay related without knowing Alan had already heard about it months earlier from Madeline, even if it was the businessman who instigated it and Natasha who understandably reacted, it was Jay who had become the scapegoat. Instead of trying to make up, he gave up, thinking perhaps that a boy from a lousy housing estate might be able to make his fortune but couldn’t also expect the love of a woman whose familial wealth had given her a taste and refinement that he knew he could only replicate clumsily. He said he knew at that moment at the party, when he was trying to second guess the appropriate behaviour demanded from simultaneously a ruthless business environment, and a relaxed liberal arts world, he reacted too slowly for his own well-being. Nobody there may have known that he instinctively didn’t know how to react, and instead, albeit very quickly, managed to combine the supposed dignity with authority, but this was based on understanding as promptly as he could, what was the best option. It didn’t feel like a decision he made for himself, and he had since wondered whether Natasha could see his ambivalence and, in that moment, lost a respect that her father would never have risked losing. 

  Her father was a businessman through and through, as the saying goes, and what was Jay? A boy from a high-rise, with a head for business and a heart for a woman who seemed to believe only fathers and not lovers should be concerned with making money; that lovers should be making love and making art. Alan offered the remark as though his formulation rather than Jay’s, and it contained within it a disdain that might not have been aimed at me but was at the very least offered to me. Wasn’t I the middle-class lad trying to make it as a screenwriter while they were getting ahead in business? 

   When Alan and Jay talked that morning, Alan could see he was very unhappy, could recognise that for the moment the house, the business he was trying to set up and the parties he often had, meant little. But Alan wouldn’t have thought the despair suggested the suicidal. He accepted his death was natural, even as I asked him if it could have been murder. He supposed my work as a scriptwriter would find a natural death too dull, and I said what narrative tells us is that viewers have expectations. If certain conditions are offered, then the least of dramatic conclusions can seem a disappointment. I promptly apologised for my facetiousness, saying of course we were dealing now with a real person and Alan’s friend. But Alan admitted given all the information he had provided, it could seem as if he had taken his life or been killed. But Alan said even if it had been natural causes, and nothing suggested it could be otherwise, his death didn’t entirely surprise him. 

  Ever since leaving university fifteen years earlier, Jay wanted to be a success, and a success at everything he did rather than that at one or two things he was good at. He wanted to make a fortune; he wanted to be taken seriously by artists and thinkers, he wished to have a beautiful and influential partner, wanted to host the best parties of anyone he knew, and also wished to keep improving his running time. The morning they last talked, Jay said he ran a sub-six minute mile on the treadmill and wanted to get to under five. Jay was always putting pressure on himself. It wasn’t unlikely his heart would give out. Yet as he said this Alan looked like he didn’t quite believe it and at the same time couldn’t countenance that perhaps Jay had been poisoned and there was no way of proving this had been so. Neither of us knew much about the intricacies of medicine and the body, but as far as we knew it was almost impossible to induce a heart attack without raising suspicion.

                                9

     I didn’t expect to hear any more news about Jay, and also suspected that this would be my last contact with Alan; that he came to tell me about Jay as though he needed to talk to someone who knew him, however removed, and to speak more broadly about his place in this milieu. When I introduced him to Bree as she joined us briefly at the cafe, I saw it as a needless introduction. I no longer tried to contact him and didn’t expect him to text me. But several months after our meeting in London, he sent me a message asking when I would next be in Oxford. I said I planned to be there in a couple of weeks; it was my mother’s 70th birthday. He said he would really like to see me; it was great chatting last time, and wanted very much to stay in touch. I appreciated the message and was glad the friendship with Alan wasn’t over, but I knew too that I wouldn’t have much time. Bree was going to be with me, and most of the long weekend would be given over to the birthday. I proposed a pub in Old Marston and said we could meet up on Sunday evening. 

     The party was on Saturday night and was both a subdued and loud affair. There was little dancing, much talking and a lot of drinking. My parents of course invited numerous colleagues and any notion that this was not an occasion to talk shop was ignored as numerous mainly good-natured arguments were offered. Though it was a house party it quickly became, too, a garden one. The weather was cool but not cold, the skies overcast but with no hint of rain, and my sister, Bree and I were joined by a couple of my mother’s younger colleagues as we sat on the main table outside. Though almost everybody including my sister and my wife was involved in education, I knew this was my natural habitat as well, and found it odd thinking of this word in this context. But it came to me I suspect as it wouldn’t have several years earlier; that having seen where Alan and Jay lived as children, having heard so much about Jay’s lifestyle and of those he had befriended, and of Alan’s affair with Madeline, I supposed they found themselves in alien habitats; better ones no doubt but better for believing in themselves and in their world? 

   I found myself thinking too of believing in oneself, as though the person could really believe in themselves in isolation, without any environment confirming or countering that self-belief. I had the feeling that many people don’t move through different worlds enough to be forced to believe in themselves and I supposed Jay was someone who tried, someone who wanted to be perfect in as many areas of his life as he could, as though all too aware that his state of mind was precarious. This wasn’t because he had a mental health problem, as we now commonly call it, but because he didn’t find a world that was as solid as the one he came from, however deprived it may have been. At the party, there were economists, literary professors, anthropology lecturers, a film professor I had a long chat with, and various others, and they came from Britain, France, the US, Italy, Russia and Germany, amongst other places. Yet they all seemed part of the same milieu, which I suppose would be called academia. Yet while I wasn’t part of that world, I didn’t feel excluded from it either. Would Jay, tell people he worked in oil exploration; would Alan, say he was employed as a pools engineer? I think they might, and it was then that I reminded myself to listen carefully the next day to Alan’s accent, and ask him about Jay’s.  

      I had never paid much attention to Alan’s voice, and wasn’t sure if this was because I believed it to be neutral or natural, an accent where nobody could quite tell where you were from, or one that illustrated quite naturally where he was from. It was a strange oversight perhaps, but if someone has a very strong regional accent and they are head of a major gallery I think I would notice it far more than if the same accent belonged to a person cleaning a halls of residence. I wouldn’t assume either accent was neutral but I might have said the latter seemed natural. Natural to what, though, except my own prejudice that meant I needn’t think too much about it? Everyone at the party sounded natural to my ear, even if the German lecturer in Political Science had an accent I sometimes struggled to understand. It was nevertheless natural to my expectations, while if he had possessed a strong Geordie or Liverpudlian one I might have found it more anomalous. And what of my accent? It was that of someone who had been brought up in Old Marston with two academic parents, and I wondered if Alan thought it both neutral and natural: one that could pass itself off in many environments as not really an accent at all, and natural to my determination to become a successful screenwriter. And yet there I was, someone writing scripts, who had failed to register a friend’s accent. 

                                10

   When we met the next evening and offered our hellos and I asked him where he parked and so on, I listened carefully and was relieved (professionally), that his accent wasn’t easily discernible. Yet over the course of the conversation, I noticed the use of occasional Oxford slang words that as a child I’d been asked not to use, my parents calling them vulgar, and sometimes the trace of a broader accent than he generally deployed. Yet wasn’t the term ‘deployed’ quite active; that I probably wouldn’t assume I deployed a standard English accent but felt that Alan did, as though it was a constant effort to sound ‘neutral’ and ‘natural’, and that maybe he tried harder with me than with others. I promised myself to ask him about his accent and whether he modified it but for the moment I was more interested in what he had to say as he started speaking again about Jay’s death. He received a couple of weeks earlier a call from Madeline asking if he would mind coming out to look at the pool. She reckoned the chlorine levels were off and couldn’t find anyone else at short notice. She thought that perhaps he might make a special case for her even though she suspected he was no doubt busy. 

     When he arrived she admitted that there was nothing wrong with the pool but that she wanted to speak to him. Madeline, having made some tea and in the process of pouring it into the cups, said that she was leaving her husband. Had he been abusive again? Not to her but more severely to someone else: a Kazak oil man had been found dead on a pavement outside his city flat in the centre of Astana. He fell from the 15th floor. Alan understandably wondered what this had to do with her leaving her husband, even if it hadn’t been an accident, and she said that she heard that this businessman was involved in helping Jay make further contacts in the country and that her husband and his friends weren’t happy about this. They had interests in Astana too, and it was as if Jay’s reaction at the party, and his attempt to become an oil man of significance in Kazakhstan, was intolerable to them. 

    She knew not long after the party that her husband expressed almost blind anger towards Jay, saying that he could have him removed without much more than a nod or a glance. But Madeline didn’t take this too seriously; he would often talk about people he would like to dispatch. It was for her husband the equivalent of someone else offering an expletive when frustrated. No, it was more a couple of phone calls she overheard in the weeks following, calls that suggested the hiring of a hitman. He didn’t quite make it that clear on the phone, and Jay was never mentioned by name, but the purpose was it seemed either to scare someone from continuing their oil interests in Kazakhstan, or to take them out if they resisted. Alan looked at her confused; it was accepted Jay’s death was a heart attack. She didn’t doubt it, and this was convenient. But she was sure the oil man in Astana was murdered and that Jay would have been too; that her husband and his colleagues’ purpose was to retain their full interests in Kazakhstan, no matter if they were all living respectable lives in the UK. 

  Why was she so sure? The businessman’s wife was a former friend of hers, and for weeks before her husband’s death, he would speak of his fears. The friend contacted her for the first time in several years a week earlier and spoke to Madeline about it. With Jay’s accidental death, and the Kazak oil man’s demise looking accidental too, her husband and his colleagues could continue making money without these two hindrances. That was what Madeline's husband said to her the previous night, without at all suggesting he was implicated in any wrongdoing but happy to boast about the benefits to be accrued from two deaths. 

     As Alan listened, he was of course frightened too, afraid that at any moment the husband could arrive and find a way to get rid of him as well. Alan then said to me he couldn’t help but see the irony: he had escaped Blackbird Leys with a crime rate twice the Oxfordshire average and found himself in far more danger sitting in a house with a large driveway, trees in the garden and birds chirping in those trees. He looked out of the kitchen window and saw a bullfinch on the windowsill, its chest full and orange, its beak small and pursed. It reminded him of a film he once saw that gave him the same disquiet he was presently feeling, and I thought it irrelevant to name the film that I also recalled. Instead, I asked him about his accent, and also Jay’s. I said it sounded neutral to my ear, but would he have been brought up with a stronger one? Alan looked at me as he very occasionally did, with a shrewdness I couldn’t quite comprehend but one that proposed we were strangers rather than friends. He said the best elocution lesson is solitude. He didn’t have many friends at school, and supposed he interacted more with books and films than with people. When he did start interacting it was in the courses he took and the people he would meet as a pool engineer. People with swimming pools tended to have moneyed accents he said, deadpan, and, he added, no doubt speaking to me helped iron out those stray vowels. Again, there was no smile on his face, though his comment was surely meant facetiously. 

     I asked him about Madeline, a name that didn’t seem Uzbek but he said it depends whether you contract it and how you spell it. Her name was Madina, but she called herself Madeline. He said it was her husband’s decision; he called himself Peter when his name was spelt Piotr. People try to fit in any way they can, he added. He continued saying that this is what someone like myself perhaps couldn’t understand. That I had no reason to fit; I was already well-fitted. I couldn’t deny the claim and he said millions weren’t, and what he knew now was that whether someone had a five or ten-million-pound house in Oxfordshire didn’t mean they weren’t coming from a place like Blackbird of Leys too, Drozd iz Ley, he said, saying he didn’t know much Russian but Madeline had taught him that. This was more or less where her husband was from Madeline had said, and he had no plan to go back. She supposed that was why he was so ruthless; insecurity meeting the need for security. 

  As Alan talked with Madeline he wondered whether he shouldn’t be going, as he asked where her husband was now. She said he was in London, which left him far less assured than if she had said he was in New York, or Moscow, but Alan also didn’t want to leave her alone when he returned. Neither was he daft enough to think he could escape with her and that they could start a new life. There was little money of her own and both their lives would be endangered. No, he supposed as long as he left long before her husband returned, she would be safe and so would he. Yet as they were talking desire, came back, and as he initially held her hand in a moment of mutual fear as she wondered who else her husband may have murdered, so she also started to feel desire, and so they started kissing and ended up in the bedroom aware that while her husband wasn’t due till that evening, he could easily have arrived early.

     He didn’t, and Alan left, with no plans to return. He was also selling his business he said, and reckoned Jay might have been alive too if he pursued those interests to be found in the study that morning when Alan peeked in after using the bathroom. He didn’t think he was killed but he may have killed himself in that common phrase that people use when saying someone is working themselves to death. It wasn’t just that Jay overworked, he wanted, of course, to be a rich businessman with aesthetic and philosophical interests, and a body worthy of a Greek ideal. He was so keen to live up to himself that he probably killed himself, and beat Madeline’s husband and his colleagues to it. Alan said the two things about Jay that he envied amongst the enviable world he had created, was that study and the girlfriend he met a couple of times when he initially visited. Jay never said how or why they broke up, but she seemed to have the measure of the world as Jay constantly felt the need to measure it; to weigh it up so that he knew what his worth in it happened to be. Alan already had that study — he recently bought a place in Glasgow. I showed surprise and then remembered his father was from Scotland; that the family moved down to Cowley to work in the car industry. Was this to escape Madeline’s husband, I laughed, and he said that might be one of the reasons but the ex-council house he was living in near Cowley, and that he had bought ten years earlier, was worth around £300,00. He managed to buy a one bedroom with a study for under £200,00 next to a park on the Southside of the city. 

  What would he do? He trained as an electrician; he supposed he would go back to doing that, at least for the moment. There were a lot of evening classes available at the university too, he said. He would be busy, and he was good in his own company. He probably wouldn’t pick up a Glaswegian accent he said as he allowed himself to shift into one, presumably his father’s. I did wonder if his plan was to run away with Madeline, but I suspected such a remark would show once again my gaucheness, that somehow Scotland was so isolated that a rich and violent oil man’s wife could remain anonymous up there. I’d never been to Scotland and when I said this Alan showed no surprise but insisted I visit him. It would do you good, he said. You might see how other halves live, in an odd refraction of the idiom. 

© Tony McKibbin