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One

Typical and atypical of our time, we both felt we were owned. Owned by our jobs, by our debts, by our responsibilities; our lives enclosed by the usual circles - had to have the car to get the job, had to have the wage to pay for the car; and, to live within commuting distance of the job, had to buy a house, had to have enough of a wage to pay the mortgage; and, to earn that kind of money, we had to put in the hours, as well as - to keep the job - demonstrate 'commitment' to our employers.
      Both, thus, were running hard to stay in the same place; and the place we were in, neither of us wanted to be.
      Nor were our personal histories that much out of the ordinary. We came from marital households where the men had risen early and the women slept late. From my marriage I had a daughter, Emily. From his marriage Martin had two sons, Scott and Barney. Emily was younger than Scott, older than Barney.
      Our ex-wives had custody of our children; and a goodly portion of our wages went to the Child Support Agency. Both of us had access to our children at weekends. Which was another reason we had to have our own house - for our weekend children to be able to stay with us. To make up my money I had to work every weekend that Emily didn't come.
      Nor were the reasons for our divorces that dissimilar or that unusual. Our wives had wanted more than we had been capable of offering; or had been prepared to offer.
      I enjoyed/enjoy domestic activities - reading, gardening, films, computers, and pottering generally. My wife, Jacqui, liked to go out. She went to pubs, clubs, cinema and dinners with 'friends'. After Emily's birth, with only my wage supporting us, we hadn't that much spending money. It had been easier, therefore, for me to stay at home and to babysit than to work the extra hours to afford a babysitter - and still not have the spare time to go out. So Jacqui went her own way. On her own, she inevitably met another. (Or, doubt of her still has me ask, did she so deliberately engineer our marriage so that she could go out and meet another?)
      A.N. Other didn't hang around much after the divorce. Jacqui now calls herself a single parent, has acquired a lexicon of cracks about selfish and couldn't-care-less men; born of the men she has known since, but directed also at her stay-at-home ex: me.
      At weekends Emily and I baked, went on walks, made things, did her homework, talked. Which was all in sharp contrast to her mother's "Don't you start!" fast food and video life style.
      Martin was a sportsman. Therein lay the seeds of his divorce. While he was out playing football in the winters, tennis in the summers, his wife, Tina, went from flirting with an unemployed neighbour, to sneaking around to his house.
      Another neighbour - the neighbourhood gossip passing on the news under the cover of concern - told Martin that she didn't like to say anything, but she was worried for the safety of the two toddlers left alone …
      Martin, accused of neglect by Tina, tried to save the marriage and to win Tina back. During that prolonged attempt there followed various confusing configurations of who was living where with whom. First of all, so far as I could make out, the neighbour's working wife moved out with her three children and back to her mother's. Tina moved into the neighbour's house with Martin's two boys. The other wife then came back with her children. So her husband and Tina moved into a new flat. There wasn't enough room there for Scott and Barney, so Martin paid the estranged wife - who could no longer go out to work because she had no-one to look after her own three children - to look after his boys as well. Finally, with the new man unable to pay the rent on the flat, Tina asked Martin to take her back. After a few weeks of polite and careful domesticity, Martin moved out. And, to escape the gossip - of the staffroom and the PTA - after that summer term he moved to this town, this school.
      Complicated; but nothing that unusual there.
      What made Martin and I different was that on Tuesdays he came round to my house, and I cooked for him. And, on Thursdays, I went round to Martin's house, and he cooked for me.
     

Two

I first met Martin at the swimming pool.
      Our local swimming pool is one of those that has a few plastic tables and chairs on a viewing platform, the glass sloping out over the blue-bottomed pool. The idea, I presume, and given that one table boasts a damp green umbrella, is to create a beach atmosphere. Which is made to fail miserably by the indoors reek of chlorine and the chill humidity.
      I was up there ostensibly watching Emily and her friend, Mary, who was staying with us that weekend. Skinny in their swimsuits they were busy down there, sleek as seals, practising for their school's next swimming badge.
      I had a Saturday broadsheet, limp from the moist air, spread in bits over the ribbed table; and, at arm's length, a beaker of the vending machine's tepid coffee, which tasted no different to its tea.
      Martin asked if he could sit at my table. All the other tables had at least one mother at them, some with bored toddlers or unsporting older children. The swimming pool backs onto a sports hall, Saturday activities aimed at children - gymnastics, football club, table tennis league, et al - anything, other than let the poor children be bored. Children have to be doing, to be seen to be doing. But I'm getting ahead of myself …
      In English society, at our age (late twenties), to sit oneself at the table of a woman on her own could in itself be construed as a sexual overture and be responded to as such.
      That looks and sounds so pathetic written down; but it is, sadly, oh so true. Because so unused are we English to human contact now, so insular have our little lives become, so fed tabloid motives of semi-clad sex, that a man cannot now ask to sit at a table occupied by an unaccompanied woman without his seeming to have some sexual intent.
      I think, moving my bits of Saturday newspaper to make room for Martin's plastic beaker of coffee, that's what I said that day to Martin. I do run off at the mouth at times.
      Martin smiled at my rabbiting on. Which wasn't easy for him, as he had some facial discomfort - one puffed out red marble of an eye. Which could have been why, that day, he hadn't fancied his chances with any of the young mothers. No, he too had already moved way beyond that.
      Where I am white, black-haired, wiry and intense, Martin's outdoor complexion was topped with floppy brown hair; and he was lean, long and bendy in the middle. A sporty type, the sole reason he wasn't in the pool showing off to his two sons - got to be doing on access weekends - was because of the eye infection he had caught two weeks before - while swimming.
      His competitive sporting edge unchallenged by my verbosity - although he turned out to be no mean talker himself - formed the basis for the beginning of our friendship.
      That Saturday morning he simply found himself in agreement with my yabbering on - on the importance of tables in family life, how there could be no family life without the family sitting around the table, facing one another as they talked, or listened. How, I asked him, could any family build an internal communication system while shoulder to shoulder, shushing one another, facing the television?
      Martin agreed. But it was only on his access weekends that his sons were made to sit at table. It was only on his weekends that they didn't have meals out of the microwave. It was only on his weekends that they were allowed out of doors and to get dirty. On their mother's weekends, Martin said (that day or later), they were trailed around the shops Saturdays, and on Sundays they were left to sprawl the whole day away in front of the telly.
      (It was that day.) Mention of shopping had me launch into one of my diatribes against consumerism. Martin listened and chuckled at what he thought, then, were some of my more outrageous assertions.
      Then Emily came up dripping and shivering, and I said that it was time for her to come out. She begged five more minutes. I pretended to waver, reluctantly agreed, but insisted that both she and Mary be out by then, and that they must both then stand in the showers for two minutes with the water as hot as they could bear it.
      Yes. That was the beginning.
      But there it would have ended if, the next time we had met, we had not both been on our way back from the local SPAR store, both of us laden with ingredients for that Saturday's meal.
      Martin recognised me first: his eye was no longer swollen. We reintroduced ourselves; and, as Emily and that weekend's friend skipped on ahead, and Martin's two boys trailed sluggishly behind, Martin and I enthusiastically talked cooking and recipes. And it was on that day, extolling each our culinary specialities, that we agreed to cook for one another. Bags were put down, names, addresses and phone numbers exchanged.
      Martin was to be the first to cook. Sportsman that he was, he wanted to show off. So it began …
      At the beginning of the 21st Century Martin and I were not as British men were commonly represented, but neither were we that untypical. The friendship between us, however, and certainly our criminal partnership, was unique.

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