Turning Forty Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Birmingham

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  London

  52

  53

  Epilogue

  Also by Mike Gayle

  My Legendary Girlfriend

  Mr Commitment

  Turning Thirty

  Dinner for Two

  His ’n’ Hers

  Brand New Friend

  Wish You Were Here

  Life and Soul of the Party

  The Importance of being a Bachelor

  Men at Work (Quick Read)

  The Stag and Hen Weekend

  Non-fiction

  The To-Do List

  Turning Forty

  Mike Gayle

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Mike Gayle 2013

  The right of Mike Gayle to be identified as the Author of the Work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 72098 3

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  ‘I found a really long grey hair and it kind of flipped me out. It’s not my first, but it’s the fact that it was so long. I was like, “Oh that’s been there. How many others are there, and what does that mean?” It actually brought me to tears slightly.’

  Jennifer Aniston

  ‘I liked turning forty. Maybe I had a crisis earlier or something. Maybe I had it in my thirties. One thing that sucks though is that your face kind of goes, and your body’s not quite working the same. But you’ve earned it. You’ve earned that, things falling apart.’

  Brad Pitt

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to use extract from the following copyrighted work:

  From The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

  First published in Great Britain in 1922. Published by Egmont UK Ltd London and used with permission.

  In the middle of the journey of our life

  I found myself in a dark wood,

  for the straight way was lost.

  Dante

  For everyone who’s turning forty –

  the only way is up.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Sue Fletcher, Swati Gamble, and all at Hodder; Ariella Feiner, Simon Trewin and all at United Agents; Phil Gayle, the Sunday Night Pub Club, Blake Woodham, The Board, and above all to C, for everything.

  Birmingham

  1

  Wiping my hand against the steamed-up window of the taxi I press my nose against the cold glass to get a better look at the worn but sturdy façade of my destination: 88 Hampton Street, the three-bed Victorian terrace that my parents have called home for over forty years.

  It looks exactly the way I left it following my last visit at Easter: same windows, curtains, and front door and even though I haven’t lived here in decades, it still feels like coming home.

  The cabbie waves the receipt I’ve requested (more out of habit than a desire to keep my expense records up to date) under my nose and I hand him a twenty-pound note and unload my bags on to the pavement. A smart young couple I don’t recognise carefully navigate their neon coloured state-of-the art pram around me and up the path to the house to the left of my parents’ that will for ever be known to me as the O’Reillys’. I watch surreptitiously as they open their front door and manoeuvre the pram inside. I feel envious. A happy couple, a young baby, and a family home: all the boxes of adult life ticked off one after the other. Compared to them I’m a walking cautionary tale.

  The cabbie is holding out my change. There was a time when I wouldn’t have given the handful of shrapnel he was proffering a second glance. Not any more. I have to make every penny count. I scoop up the change and funnel it deep into the pocket of my jeans. As I head up the icy front path I spot my mum’s Capodimonte figurines collection on the windowsill. Despite my current gloomy state of mind the tramp on a bench, the cobbler mending a boot and the Edwardian lady posing with an umbrella actually manage to bring a smile to my face. I’ve lost count of how many times my siblings and I accidentally broke off the odd limb only to have my dad Evo-stick them back together. Ugly and damaged as they are, it’s reassuring to see them again. In a city that feels increasingly alien it’s an apt reminder that there are still a few things in my home town that thankfully will never change.

  I take a deep breath to bolster my spirits as a sharp gust of October wind sends a shudder through me. Everything’s going to change once I open this door. Nothing will ever be the same again. Maybe I should’ve called to let them know I was coming up after all. I tried a couple of times but didn’t get much further than staring at their number on the screen of my phone. For a moment I seriously consider running after the taxi and getting him to drop me back at the station but then the front door opens to reveal my dad, disconcertingly dressed in a thick brown cardigan, jeans and market-stall trainers.

  ‘All right, Dad?’

  His face lights up. ‘Matthew! What are you doing here? I was hoping you were the postman. Your sister ordered me a new pair of slippers off the internet. I could really do with them coming today. You haven’t seen him, have you?’

  ‘No, Dad.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ he shrugs, ‘maybe later. To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Just passing through, Pop. Thought I’d swing by and say hello.’

  Dad makes a great show of leaning to one side to get a better view of my bags. ‘For someone who’s just swinging by, you’ve got a heck of a lot of stuff with you.’

  ‘You know me, Pop. I’m like the Boy Scouts. I like to be prepared.’

  He looks back up the path. ‘Where’s Lauren?’

  ‘Back in London.’

  ‘You didn’t bring her with you?’

  ‘She had to work.’

  Dad looks disappointed. Despite Lauren’s innate poshness they really hit it off on our first visit to the UK. It wasn’t just tha
t she was easy on the eye (though Dad never could resist a pretty face) it was that she made such an effort to make Dad feel comfortable. He couldn’t stand being too formal and the fact that Lauren mucked in getting dinner ready with the rest of the family increased her standing with him more than a million perfectly selected Christmas and birthday gifts could ever have done.

  ‘You should bring her with you next time,’ says Dad forlornly. ‘Your mother would love to see more of her.’

  I hope this might be an end to his questioning but as I open my mouth to suggest that he might actually let his first-born son inside the house rather than interrogating me on the doorstep like a rogue double-glazing salesman, he sparks up with another.

  ‘Where’s the motor?’

  ‘It’s gone. I gave it up, Dad.’ I mentally picture the pristine basalt black Porsche 911 Turbo that was my pride and joy. It almost brings a tear to my eye. ‘I came up by train.’

  Dad’s disappointment once again becomes apparent. ‘That’s a shame. It was a lovely little number you had there! So what’s that company of yours giving you next then? I bet it’s a cracker! I can’t believe some of the flash cars they’ve let you have!’

  ‘They gave me an allowance and I topped it up out of my wages. Thought a nice car would compensate for the fact that I’d part-traded my soul. As for the new motor, there won’t be one.’

  ‘How come? Won’t you need one? I suppose not given how often you’re gallivanting around the world these days. You’re barely ever in this country.’

  ‘It’s a long story, Pop, I’ll fill you in another time. Are you going to let me in or do I have to tell Mum you made me stand out here so all the neighbours can see our business?’

  ‘Your mum’s not here,’ says Dad, putting his huge hand in mine, ‘but come in if you must.’ We shake hands awkwardly but it doesn’t feel like near enough contact. I give him a one-armed hug and he tolerates it with the grace of someone who, while loathing the awkwardness of physical exchanges, has at least learned to appreciate the sentiment behind them.

  Dad insists on carrying my bags inside and then ushers me into the kitchen. He runs the tap and fills the kettle.

  ‘Still not much of a tea drinker?’ he asks, setting down the kettle on its stand and flicking the switch.

  ‘I have one now and again,’ I reply, ‘but I’m more of a coffee man these days. Can’t make it through the day without at least half a dozen.’

  ‘Don’t touch the stuff myself,’ says Dad. ‘But I’m pretty sure your mother’s got some in for guests.’ He begins searching in the nearest cupboard, which even I know is where Mum keeps her baking stuff, canned goods and pasta. Mum still clearly does everything domestic.

  ‘Try the next one along,’ I suggest.

  Dad snorts that he knows his own ‘bloody kitchen’ better than I ever will. Once it becomes clear that he’s looking in the wrong place he simply mutters, ‘Well of course I chose the wrong cupboard, you were distracting me!’

  ‘There you go,’ he says, setting down a jar on the counter. ‘Will that satisfy you and your fancy London ways?’

  The sight of the jar of supermarket own-brand instant coffee causes me to reminisce fondly about the seven-hundred-quid titanium silver Gaggia bean-to-cup coffee machine sitting on the granite counter in my kitchen back in London. ‘That’ll do nicely, Pop.’

  I sit down at the kitchen table and flick through a local free newspaper next to the fruit bowl. ‘So how have you been, Pop?’

  ‘Oh, you know me,’ he says. ‘I’m fine in myself.’

  I raise a sceptical eyebrow which is about as much as I’ll ever raise to my dad. Four years ago Dad had a heart attack. Things had been dodgy for a while and every time my phone rang I was convinced it would be one of my family calling to let me know the worst, but he pulled through in the end. The drugs seemed to sort out the problem for the interim and eventually he was lined up for a bypass operation, which seemed to have done the trick. To look at him now you’d never guess he’d been through all that but to this day I can’t take an unexpected late-night call from a member of my family without a split-second replay of that whole nightmare.

  ‘Anyway,’ continues Dad, ‘it’s your mother who’s the one to worry about. I’m always telling her to slow down but she won’t listen. Now that your sister’s moved closer she’s always volunteering us for babysitting duties even though it’s a good forty minutes in the car.’

  My kid sister, Yvonne, and her family moved to Worcester from Plymouth the previous summer for her paediatrician husband Oliver’s job. Since then nearly every conversation with Mum begins with an update on how big my newest niece, Evie, is getting and how, despite being only seven months old, Mum’s convinced that she’ll be walking soon because ‘all Beckfords walk before their first birthday’, or an update on Evie’s brothers, two-year-old Peter and three-and-a half-year-old Jake.

  Dad pulls out an envelope of photos from behind the radio on the kitchen counter and gives me a running commentary as he shuffles through them. As befits my father’s skills with a digital camera at least half of them appear to have been taken within a split second of each other, with only the slightest variation between them, but there are a few, like the one in my hands of a just-woken-up Evie smiling at Yvonne, which even I can’t help getting lost in. In the end Dad and I become so engrossed in the photos that we don’t hear Mum’s keys in the front door. So when I look up and see her laden down with shopping bags and she says, ‘Matthew! What are you doing home?’ I’m taken so much by surprise that without getting my brain into gear I say the first words that spring to my lips, which happen to be the unexpurgated truth. ‘It’s me and Lauren, Mum, we’re getting a divorce.’

  2

  It was a sunny Saturday morning in April when Lauren and I split up.

  I’d been watching workmen from Gregson’s Shed and Fencing unloading shed panels from the back of their flatbed van and I remember thinking it significant that although I was watching history in the making I was also watching history in the making alone as once again my wife had chosen to make herself absent by going into work. However, not even this could take the shine off my day as I was finally going to get the one thing I had longed for most of my adult life: a garden shed. Not just any garden shed mind you, but an eight-foot by six-foot overlap softwood apex shed with a single door, three windows, a roof topped with premium quality sand roofing felt and planks treated with a red cedar basecoat, just like the one my dad has in the back garden of the house where I grew up.

  Some might think that getting your own shed isn’t much of an ambition for a man staring down the wrong end of the barrel at his fortieth birthday and maybe they’ve got a point. It’s not like competing in a marathon, trekking around Mongolia, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or any of the other goals that automatically pop into the heads of thirtysomethings the moment they realise that forty is just around the corner. But when I turned thirty-nine I had no desire to push my body to its limit, watch the sun rise over Haleakala volcano, or even have a go at skydiving. All I wanted was a shed I could call my own.

  Of course it wasn’t like I needed to be thirty-nine to own a shed. In fact I knew plenty of people of my generation who have had their shed for years. My best mate Gershwin, for instance, got his nine-foot by eight-foot apex in spruce green with double doors when he was thirty-five (but then again at the time he’d been married with kids since his early twenties). But me, I just didn’t feel ready for a shed because the ultimate truth of shed-buying is this: a real man only buys a shed when he has to take stock of his life, has surveyed all that he has achieved and is one hundred (not sixty, seventy-five or even ninety-nine point nine) per cent satisfied with the results.

  And it was exactly that shed-worthiness survey I’d undertaken some seven days earlier as I sat in the business lounge at Frankfurt airport waiting for a flight back to Heathrow. Over a complimentary gin and tonic I reviewed the last decade of my life, and boy, was I happy with the res
ults! I had a great job as head of development for a financial software company; owned a huge four-bedroom house in Blackheath that cost me a small fortune in mortgage repayments every month; and in Lauren, my wife of six years, I had not only the longest-standing relationship of my adult life but easily the best-looking partner of anyone I knew. Not bad for your average thirty-nine year old and pretty damn amazing for a comprehensive school kid from inner-city Birmingham. Can I have my shed now? I think I bloody well can!

  Now, there are some people out there who think that turning forty is no big deal and that the age-related running of marathons, climbing of mountains and buying of sheds is a mug’s game. I make no bones about it: these people are idiots. They have to be, because no one but a certifiable idiot would ever spin such hackneyed untruths as: ‘Forty is just another birthday’ or worse still: ‘You’re only as young as you feel.’ Idiots of the world listen up: forty is the end of the race, the deadline of deadlines and the point at which excuses are no longer permitted.

  Because, let’s face it, if at twenty you find yourself messing about in dead-end jobs, backpacking around Asia or still trying to find your ‘true self’, no one is going to bat an eyelid. Even if you do that kind of thing at thirty, the worst you might get would be an ‘Each to his own,’ and a quick raise of the eyebrow from your nan because there’s still a very tangible feeling that there’s time to turn the ship round. Cut to a decade later however, and it’s a completely different story. If you haven’t got your life sorted at forty, no one, not even your own mum, is going to hand you a medal and say well done. Because the universal truth of getting older is obvious: IF YOU ARE A LOSER AT FORTY YOU WILL BE A LOSER FOR LIFE.