“I have to travel around in my job a lot,” I protested.“Sometimes I have to eat on the road. That’s the nature of the work.”
“Allow me to introduce you to something that you may finduseful in the future,” remarked Barry sarcastically, reaching under his deskand picking up the waste paper basket. “This is called a bin. You put rubbishinto it. Clearly no one’s ever taught you this, so now seems as good a time asany.”
Eventually he let me have the keys to the new car, afterhe’d made me swear on my mother’s life which was a bit harsh considering shewas going to die in about a week’s time. Perhaps he’d feel guilty about sayingit when he found out.
With the BMW gone, I got acquainted with my “new” car, aVolvo, which, whilst not in the same league as what I had been used to, wasstill an extremely nice drive. I had to concede, looking around at the mess, hedid have a point.
As for the chicken bones, I eventually traced their origin backto Keele Services on the M6, when I got peckish on the way home from a meetingin Manchester four months earlier.
July 2006
A heatwave was spreading across the country, Lily Allen wastop of the charts with a catchy little number entitled Smile, and I wasout for a drink with Nick.
The Turf Tavern was my favourite place to spend a summerevening in Oxford. As the night wore on, we worked our way down the list ofguest ales on the blackboard behind the bar.
My father had died two weeks previously, and Nick had takenme out for the evening to try and cheer me up. It quickly transpired that hewas the one that needed cheering up. He had just gone through a rather messydivorce and was feeling rather depressed about the fact that at 35 years old healready had two failed marriages behind him.
“At least we didn’t have any kids,” mused Nick.
“You were hardly with her long enough, really, were you?” Ireplied.
“No. I shouldn’t have married her in the first place. Idon’t know what I was thinking of. Talk about love being blind. You must havesuspected something.”
Making a mental note that I would try and mention it whenthe time came, all I could offer, lamely, was “Sorry, mate”. If I had saidsomething, would it have made any difference, though?
The world was full of people who thought their latestpartner was the best thing since sliced bread, whilst all around them could seethat they were in fact an arsehole. There was never any point saying anything,Nick was right: love was blind.
Fishing for details, I discovered that he’d picked her up ina nightclub in Oxford three years ago. Like myself, Nick had done very wellwithin the company and after he took this girl home to his upmarket flat inJericho, she took a real shine to him, or, as it later transpired, his money.
Blinded to her selfish ways by her stunning figure, longlegs, fake tan and plastic boobs, he had proposed within six months, desperateto keep hold of her.
They’d married in 2004 but had split up after about a year.She’d taken him for a mug and now possessed half of everything he’d had. Thathad included the flat, which had to be sold, and now he was renting a rathermore modest pad somewhere off the Botley Road.
The conversation continued, with Nick’s ranting increasingin line with the amount of beer he’d consumed.
“A hundred grand at least this has cost me. And she hardlyever wanted to have sex after we got married. Well, not with me, anyway.”
That was a sore point. It seemed that they had split upafter he’d found her in bed with a plumber who’d come to fix a burst pipe threemonths earlier. It turned out he’d been giving her pipes a good plumbing on aregular basis ever since.
I had to feel a bit sorry for Nick. He seemed to beperennially unlucky in love.
He was still going on. “I was lucky if I got it once amonth, mate. That’s grand total of twelve shags from my second marriage. What’sthat, eight grand a shag or thereabouts? I’m a fucking idiot, I really am.”
I thought it best not to mention to Nick that I’d once spentmore than that on an all-nighter with two high-class escorts in a hotel inMayfair. Instead I said, “She was hot, though. She must have been good in bed.”
“Just because someone looks hot, doesn’t mean they can cutit in the sack,” he said. “She couldn’t give head properly for a start. You useyour lips and tongue, not your teeth. What’s that all about? Didn’t anyone evertell her?”
“Perhaps they didn’t like to complain, you know, looking agift horse in the mouth and all that.” I decided to change the subject before Nickstarted coming out with any more revelations about his unhappy sex life. “So,now that you’ve got the money from the flat, what are you going to do with it?Are you going to get another place?”
“No, I’m going to rent for a bit and see what happens to houseprices. They’ve shot up the past few years. I reckon there’s another crash onthe way,” said Nick, confidently.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Nick,” I replied. Apartfor a brief blip at the end of the decade, I knew that house prices wouldcontinue to rise at ridiculous rates for another fifteen years at least. “Whatare you going to do, then, put it into savings?”
“Well, I was going to,” he said, “but then I went to seethis bloke at the bank to talk about ISAs. He said that was a waste of time andthat I’d be much better investing it all in the stock market. He showed me allsorts of graphs showing how much money the markets have made in the last fewyears, and I think it’s worth a punt.”
I had noticed when Nick had arrived that evening that
