Tom proudly showed me a video clip on his mobile phone of his latest girlfriend doing a striptease. Confident girl. The tattoos must have cost a fortune. ‘So who’s this one?’ I said.
‘The first time I woke up beside her, I thought, “Oh no! What’s this?” But I’ve got to hold both my hands up,’ he said, holding both his hands up, ‘she’s grown on me and now I want to spend the next 45 years with her. Jerry, you must meet her.’
Tom is a self-employed painter and decorator. The last time I met him he’d moved in with a customer, a Swedish businesswoman who lives in the sort of Devon cottage one sees depicted on the lids of shortbread biscuit tins. She contracted Tom to touch up her woodwork, one thing led to another, and from Tom’s point of view the essential human requirements of sex, food and a thatched roof were met overnight.
‘What happened to the Swede?’ I said. Tom winced at the memory. ‘She was posh,’ he said. He wouldn’t go into detail — it must have been too horrible for words. He would say only that the final straw was the evening they’d argued about the quality of a bottle of wine. Did he realise, she’d said, that her family came from ‘restaurant stock’ and therefore she knew a bad wine when she tasted it. ‘Restaurant stock!’ said Tom incredulously.
But he was dying to tell me about his new girlfriend. She’s called Twirly. She owns and runs a guest-house on the seafront. She’d rung and asked him to come round and give her a quote for some interior decorating. One thing led to another and soon the basic human requirements of food, sex and shelter were being met for Tom here as well, with free use of an Audi A4 thrown in for good measure.
He wrecked the Audi within days. Rolled it. Not sideways, but end over end. He was going too fast and missed a corner. The car catapaulted over a hedge and into a field. ‘Valerie’ by Amy Winehouse was playing on the radio. His only injury was a sprained knee. Tom got out and hobbled smartly away from the scene before the police arrived and made him blow in the bag. And was he drunk? Of course he was, he said. But not that drunk. He was on mushrooms mainly.
What scared him the most was having to tell Twirly he’d written off her car and didn’t own a driving licence. Expecting her to do star jumps, he was amazed when, on the contrary, she was calm, sympathetic and forgave him immediately. It was the moment, said Tom, when he decided that here at last was the woman he wanted to be with for the rest of his life. I really must meet her and see for myself what a lovely person she was. How about if we went over to see her right now?
Of course I was delighted for him and touched that he should fall in love with the first person to refuse to press charges, and I agreed to go with him. We set off towards the guest-house, but regrettably we became separated in the busy pub we called at on the way. Here I met another friend who took me first to a party in the staff quarters of a big hotel then to a more crowded, convivial party in a private house that went on until dawn. I was too wired to go home and sleep, so stayed on drinking till about ten, then I rang Tom. As I’d guessed, he was round at Twirly’s, having stayed the night. They were in bed, he said, but they were just getting up. Come round and meet Twirly, he said.
Tom isn’t one of those people who likes to keep his various friends in different compartments and behaves differently according to which compartment he’s dealing with. Tom trusts everyone to get along and to be themselves. I like that. They were both in the bedroom. ‘Twirly — Jerry,’ he said, then he excused himself to go downstairs and make coffee.
There was nowhere to sit but on the bed. Twirly and I exchanged pleasantries while she removed her dressing-gown and pyjamas and searched for items of clothing and put them on. Between taking things off and putting things on, she had to bend over a lot as she foraged in low drawers and the laundry basket. ‘Nice tatts,’ I observed. ‘Like them?’ she said. ‘Come round when Tom’s not here, cockle, and you can show me yours if you want.’ Tom came in with the coffees. ‘What did I tell you?’ he beamed. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’
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