Squirrel Sings Favorite Nursery Rhymes
—no director’s commentary but with six cut scenes and sing-along captions—which he kept hidden at the back of his wardrobe, still in its cellophane, under a pile of sweaters. He did not feel like watching any of these. Instead he contemplated
Manhattan, Midnight Cowboy
and
À Bout de Souffle,
before deciding that, yes, he was in a
North by Northwest
state of mind. Cary Grant
and
James Mason, together.
He poured some more wine, watched the first few scenes, the bachelor and ladies’ man out and about in fifties Manhattan, and decided that Cary Grant was definitely the way to go for Josh’s party. Projected on his own mental cinema screen, he imagined himself at Josh’s penthouse apartment, dressed in an immaculately tailored lounge suit, brimming martini glass held at the rim in a way that was elegant without being effeminate, at the center of a circle of other party guests, the women, heads cocked, lips slightly parted, the men standing respectfully, deferentially, a little farther away, all of them listening intently to his every word. Rather frustratingly, he had no idea what he might be saying, but he knew that when he reached the end of his monologue, the group would rear backward in a great gale of admiring laughter.
And he imagined his good friend and mentor Josh Harper watching from the other side of the room, smiling approvingly, raising his martini glass in tribute, welcoming him into his world, and Stephen returned the smile, and toasted him back.
Cary Grant
L ike most people living in any great city, Stephen had the constant, nagging suspicion that everyone was having a much, much better time than he was.
Heading home each night on the bus, he’d see people with bottles in their hands, and convince himself that they were off somewhere extraordinary: a party on a boat on the Thames or in a swimming pool or a railway arch somewhere—places where toilet cubicles were only ever used for having sex, or taking drugs, or having sex while taking drugs. He would pass restaurants and observe couples holding hands, or gangs of pals bellowing happy birthday and unwrapping presents or chinking their glasses or laughing at a private joke. Newspapers and magazines taunted him daily, with all the things he could fail to do, all the gifted, interesting, attractive people he would fail to meet at parties in places he could never hope to live. What, he wondered, was the point of being told that Shoreditch was the New Primrose Hill, Bermondsey the New Ladbroke Grove, when you lived in a strange, nameless region between Wandsworth and Battersea, the New Nowhere? On each and every day of the week there were exhibitions and first nights and salsa workshops and poetry readings and political meetings and power yoga classes and firework displays and concerts of experimental music and exciting New Wave dim sum restaurants and big-room trance for a shirts-off, up-for-it crowd, all of which you could fail to experience. For Stephen, London was less a city that never slept, more a city that got a good nine hours.
But that wasn’t the case tonight. Tonight he was going to take his chances and actually leave the flat, and face the world again, and take his rightful place in the fashionable, fast-beating heart of things. It was the beginning of a new age, a new Stephen C. McQueen. There’d be no more standing on the outside, face pressed up against the glass. Josh was beckoning him in and never again would his evenings be accompanied by the pop of a fork piercing the film seal of a ready-meal. Riding up in the elevator at Chalk Farm tube station, he checked his reflection, undid his tie another half-inch, ruffled his hair and, by way of a little social warm-up, assumed the facial expression he intended to use when bantering with beautiful women. Forced to acknowledge that, all things considered, he looked comparatively good, he winked raffishly, popped an antibiotic just for the sheer