Kitabı oku: «Here’s Looking At You»
HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU
MHAIRI MCFARLANE
For Helen
A school friend who’s more like a sister
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
Rise Park Comprehensive, East London, 1997
The last day of term
‘Ladies and gentlemen. Mr Elton John!’
Gavin Jukes, in huge pipe-cleaner spectacles and a duck costume, strode out to deafening cheers. Well, strode out as well you can in canary yellow foam feet: a jaunty waddle. He sat down at the keyboard – with some difficulty due to the padded tail – and started bashing noiselessly at a keyboard, carolling along with ‘Are You Ready For Love’.
Standing in the stage wings, Aureliana adjusted the sash on her 1970s peach polyester maternity gown with knife-pleat skirt, and touched a hand to her hair-sprayed bouffant.
She took a deep, shaky breath, inhaling that school sports hall odour of tennis shoe rubber, Impulse body spray and ripe adolescent hormones.
The leavers’ Mock Rock was a simple but wildly successful formula: dress up as a pop star, the sillier the outfit the better, and mime along to an old hit.
And thank God, the crowd loved Gavin.
According to all witless graffiti that tackled the topic of Gavin Jukes, he was ‘a massive gayer’. And yet he’d fearlessly chosen to impersonate a flamboyant homosexual singer, to this rapturous reception?
Perhaps Aureliana Alessi, the weirdo who ate whiffy lasagne in Tupperware for lunch instead of Mighty White sandwiches, might also finally be laughed with, rather than at.
It was as if school had been a pantomime, with everyone merely playing roles, and villains and heroes alike came on to take their bows together at the end.
Even Lindsay and Cara, Aureliana’s most committed antagonists, dressed in minis and platform boots as Agnetha and Anni-Frid from ABBA, had studiously left her alone today.
Their coven members were swigging contraband ‘Minkoff’ brand vodka from bottles of Happy Shopper cola and watching her with their heavily Rimmelled eyes, but keeping their distance. Aureliana wouldn’t have minded a nip of something herself.
Maybe the Mock Rock magic came from the fact that popular older kids were already like rock stars to the younger. Apart from James Fraser. He was like a rock star to everyone. Aureliana glanced over at him and told herself again that this would be fine because she’d be on stage with James Fraser.
James Fraser. The mere music of saying his name made her stomach lining dissolve.
She’d been skiving PE in the library a week ago, re-reading a Sweet Valley High book, when he’d approached her.
‘Hi Aureliana. Aren’t you meant to be in PE?’
It was the most extraordinary moment.
James Fraser, God of Rise Park, was for the first time speaking to her. To her.
He knew her name. Not just the ‘Italian Galleon’ or ‘Pavagrotty’ ones.
He knew her timetable?
He smiled a lazy smile. Aureliana had never seen him this close up before.
It was like meeting your idol – all those hours spent obsessing over their every detail and suddenly confronted with them in the walking, talking flesh. And what flesh. That incredible white lit-from-within skin, like a church candle flame burning low and glowing through the wax. The oil-spill shiny black hair and the purple-blue eyes.
She’d actually tried to draw him in her Forever Friends diary once, using felt tips. It didn’t work, he ended up a ringer for Shakin’ Stevens. She reverted back to the usual hearts and flowers doodles, and the legend ‘AA 4 JF 4EVA’.
‘Don’t blame you. PE’s such crap.’
Aureliana made a sort of disbelieving honk noise and nodded vigorously. Sporty James secretly hated PE too?! This was proof. They were meant to be.
‘I was wondering, the Mock Rock. I thought doing Freddie Mercury and the opera singer could be funny? A duet, me and you? Fancy it?’
Aureliana nodded. He’d used the phrase ‘me and you’. Fantasies had become reality. Right then he could’ve said I’m planning on jumping out of that window. Doesn’t look a long way down, me and you, fancy it? and she’d have followed.
It was only in the days after that she pondered the wisdom of going on stage as one of Rise Park’s most fat, foreign and bullied, next to its sex god pin-up. What if all the worst bitches crucified her for it? But, she’d reasoned she’d never see any of them again after today, and they wouldn’t wreck James Fraser’s big moment.
She thought James might want to rehearse but he’d never suggested it, and she didn’t want to look pushy. He knew what he was doing, he always did.
Perhaps they should’ve conferred on wardrobe though. Aureliana thought the deal was that they went all out. She’d backcombed her hair into something approximating a soprano’s coif and plastered her face with pan stick. James, from what she could see, had only drawn on a cad’s pencil moustache. But then she didn’t know what she expected – he was unlikely to do a frontless leotard and stick-on chest wig.
Gavin was taking his bows. Oh, God. This was it. Here goes. James ambled over to her side and she’d never felt more important or special.
The Mock Rock’s MC, Mr Towers, cued the music. Dry ice gushed out with a soft hiss, and the opening bars of the ‘Barcelona’ track swelled.
They walked onto the stage to deafening cheers and applause. Aureliana gazed at the gallery of delighted faces, getting an exhilarating glimpse into what it was like to be James Fraser. To feel that much excitement and goodwill reflected back at the very sight of you.
She turned to him, to exchange a nervous grin of solidarity before the singing started, but James was giving her a funny smirk and backing away into the wings again.
It was a green Praline Triangle that got her first, glancing off her cheek and arcing onto the stage floor. She felt a small pain in her stomach as another missile hit its target, like a rubber band being snapped against her body. A purple one with the hazelnut sailed past her head and she ducked out of the way, only to catch a toffee penny on the chin.
And then came a hurricane of Quality Street, as the air filled with a blizzard of shiny, multi-coloured shrapnel. Mr Towers turned the music off and started shouting to try to restore order, but all in vain.
Aureliana looked over in desperation at James. He was bent nearly double with laughter. His friend Laurence had one arm slung round his best mate’s head, the other arm busy with a fist-pumping triumphal gesture.
Lindsay and Cara had tears of mirth streaming down their maquillaged faces, holding on to each other for support.
It took a moment for Aureliana to accept what was happening.
That this had been planned from the start. That someone had gone to the trouble of buying dozens of those big tins of sweets and handed them round the audience. That they had been given a cue to start lobbing them, and for everyone else, this was the extra helping of mock in the grand finale.
Slowly, it dawned on her that her crush might not have been as secret as she thought. This she found even more humiliating than being at the centre of the confectionery tornado.
She could see Gavin trying to remonstrate with them all from underneath his duck bill hat.
James Fraser was clapping and he uttered a three-syllable, single word, as he looked at her, enunciating clearly. Elephant.
Aureliana had long ago steeled herself not to cry under pressure. Not only did she not want to give her tormentors the satisfaction, she’d figured out the less reaction you gave bullies, the faster they lost interest. She saw no reason to break that rule now and start weeping in front of a vast and hostile audience.
Unfortunately, at that moment of dignified resolve, she was hit with a Coconut Éclair in the left eye, and they both started streaming anyway.
1
Anna stepped out of the stark autumn chill and squeezed into the steamy warmth of the restaurant. It was buzzing with conversations and pounding music, set at the weekend has started pitch.
‘Table for two please!’ Anna bellowed, feeling that flutter of nerves and anticipation, tinged with scepticism. When it came to crap dates, she had her proficiency badge.
Thanks to practice, Anna knew to choose lively and not-overtly-romantic venues to take the pressure off. And the trend for sharer plates that arrived at different times was a gift. With the traditional three courses, there was nothing worse than a date going badly, and knowing you were locked in the deadening back-and-forth of really and where are you from originally until the just an espresso for me, please.
Of course, you could simply go for a drink and cut out the dining. However, Anna vetoed alcohol and no food since an incident where she woke up at the end of the Central Line with only a patchy memory of how she got there, holding a plastic pineapple ice-bucket and a phone bearing eleven texts of increasing incoherence and pornography.
The intimidatingly young and cool waitress took her name and ushered her down into the dark basement.
Anna stood in the three-deep crush at the bar among the mouthy straight-from-work suits, wondering if tonight would be the night.
By ‘the night’, she meant the one she fantasised would be mentioned in the best man’s speech in the splendour of The Old Rectory, as he stood in a shaft of sunshine splintered through mullioned windows.
For those of you that don’t know, Neil met Anna on an internet date. I’m told he was attracted to her sparkling sense of humour and the fact she’d got him a drink without being asked. (Pause for weak laughter.)
She eventually part-screeched and part-semaphored an order for herself and her date, and found a corner to loiter in.
Honestly, she remonstrated with herself, an internet date is basically an interview for a shag. Isn’t that pressure enough without mentally spooling forward to imaginary nuptials? Anna wasn’t at all obsessed with getting married, per se; she was simply keen to find the person who mattered. She was thirty-two and the bastard was taking his time. So much so that she suspected he’d got lost en route and accidentally married someone else.
She scanned the throng for a ghostly echo of the face she’d seen in the pictures. Not only was it dark, but Anna was used to a disconnect between the profile photographs and reality. In her online profile, she’d tried to balance out a few flattering snaps against a realistic sample to avoid the horrific prospect of her date’s face dropping when she arrived. Men, she guessed, thought more pragmatically: once they had you in the room, their charisma could take over.
‘Hello, are you Anna?’
She managed to turn ninety degrees to see a cheerful, inoffensive-looking man with thinning brown hair grinning at her delightedly in the murk. He was wearing a Berghaus jacket. Fell-walking wear on someone who wasn’t fell walking. Hmmm.
On first impressions, Anna wasn’t too sure about Neil’s dress sense. I’m pleased to say she chose his outfit today, or he’d probably have said his vows in Gore-Tex …
He looked approachable and trustworthy, however, smiling his gap-toothed smile. Not a problem for her; Anna was not the slightest bit fussed about pretty boys. In fact, she was positively suspicious of them.
‘I’m Neil,’ he said, shaking her hand and going for a peck on the cheek.
Anna proffered the spare Negroni she was holding.
‘What’s that?’ Neil said.
‘It’s gin and Campari. A favourite drink from my homeland.’
‘I’m a beer man, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh,’ Anna withdrew it and felt foolish.
Chrissake, wouldn’t you drink it to be polite? she thought. Then: maybe this is something we’ll laugh about eventually.
Apparently Anna was shocked to discover Neil didn’t drink cocktails and he made a great first impression by disappearing off in pursuit of a beer. Start as you mean to go on eh, Neil? (Pause for more weak laughter.)
Anna knocked back her Negroni and quickly made inroads with the second. At that moment, as ’80s Madonna hammered in her ears, she was Singlehood In London, distilled. It was all too familiar a feeling for her, experiencing intense loneliness in a room so crowded it must be nearing a fire regulation risk, feeling as if life was happening elsewhere. Right when she was supposedly in the beating heart at the centre of everything.
No! Positive thinking. Anna repeated the mantra she’d rehearsed a thousand times: how many happy couples trot out a dinner party origins tale about how they didn’t fancy each other at first? Or even like each other?
She didn’t want to be that woman bearing a checklist, always finding that suitors fell short in some respect or another. As if you were measuring space for a new fridge and moaning about the compromise in the dimensions of the ice-box.
Plus, it hadn’t taken her many internet dates to realise that the There You Are thunderbolt she’d so craved simply didn’t exist. As her mum always said, you have to rub the sticks to get the spark.
‘Sorry, a few of those and I’d be out for the count. Falling-down juice,’ Neil said, returning with his Birra Moretti. Anna wanted him to be nice and this to be fun with every fibre of her being.
‘Yes, I’ll probably wish I’d followed your example tomorrow,’ Anna shouted, over the music, and Neil smiled, making Anna feel she could make this work through sheer force of will.
Neil was a writer for a business and technology magazine and seemed, as per their previous communications, the kind of decent, personable and reliable sort who you’d fully expect to have a wife, kids and a shed.
They’d spoken only briefly online. Anna had banned the prolonged woo-by-electronic-billet-doux since the hugely painful disappointment of Scottish Tom the author, whose wit, charm and literary allusions she fell hard for, over a course of months. She’d started to live for the ping of the new message alert. She was halfway to in love by the time they finally planned to meet up, when he apologetically disclosed a) a spell in Rampton Secure Hospital and b) a ‘sort of wife’. After that, Anna changed her sort of Gmail address.
As the alcohol took effect, she found herself laughing at Neil’s tales about the ‘rubber chicken’ speaker circuit and shyster make-a-million industry gurus.
By the time they got to the table and over-ordered soak-up-the-booze-mattresses like meatballs, calamari and pizza, Anna was telling herself that maybe Neil was exactly the kind of solidly plausible candidate she needed to take a chance on.
‘Anna isn’t a very Italian name?’ Neil asked, as they both prodded battered hoops of squid and dragged them through a small pot of aioli.
‘It’s short for Aureliana. I changed it after school. Too … flowery, I suppose,’ she said, cupping a hand underneath her fork as the squid made a late bid to get back to the sea. ‘I’m not very flowery really.’
‘Hah no. I can see that,’ Neil said, which seemed a trifle presumptuous.
Her free hand involuntarily moved to her hair, which was in the usual messy knot. Perhaps she should’ve done more with it. And added make-up beyond reddish tinted lip balm, applied in haste while on the Tube. Start as you mean to go on, she always reasoned. No point pretending to be a dolly-bird type and disappointing him later.
‘The pork and fennel meatballs are the best variety, by the way,’ Anna said. ‘I’ve tried them all and can confirm.’
‘Have you been here a lot?’ Neil said mildly, and Anna squirmed a little.
‘A fair amount. With friends as well as dates.’
‘It’s OK. We’re in our thirties. You don’t need to pretend to be the blushing ingénue with me,’ he said, and Anna found something rather dislikeable in his pointing out her discomfort. Although maybe it was merely a slightly inept attempt to put her at ease.
Conversation stalled amid a loud Prince track, one of the ones where he went squeaky and frantic about wanting to filth a lady.
‘I’m actually poly,’ Neil said.
He’s actually Polly?! ‘Sorry?’ Anna leaned in sharply against the noise, fork in mid-air.
‘As in polyamorous. Multiple partners who all know about each other,’ he added.
‘Ah yes. I see!’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘Of course not!’ Anna said, perhaps too enthusiastically, fussing with what was left on her plate, thinking: I don’t know.
‘I don’t believe monogamy is our natural state but I realise that’s what a lot of people are looking for. I’m willing to give it a try for the right person though,’ he smiled.
‘Ah.’ Good of you.
‘And perhaps I should say that I’m into mild sub and dom. All hetero, but I’m not vanilla.’
Anna gave a grimace-smile and debated whether to say: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak kink.’
What was she supposed to do with this information? Blind dating fast-tracked the personal stuff, that was for sure.
‘I mean, I’m not that out there in the scene,’ Neil continued. ‘I’ve tried figging. But we’re not in the realms of the Shaved Gorilla though, hahaha.’
He was invoking shaving and animals in the boudoir. And figs, if that was what figging involved. Anna wasn’t disappointed anymore. Disappointment was a motorway junction ago. She was passing through into severe bewilderment and at this rate she was likely to take the next exit into a Welcome Break.
‘You?’ Neil said.
‘What?’
‘Anything your “thing”?’
Anna opened her mouth to reply and faltered. She’d usually go with ‘none of your business’, but they were on a date and it putatively was his business. ‘Uh … uhm. Usual sex.’
‘Usual sex.’ Oh God. She was underprepared and over-refreshed. This was like that temp job in a cinema one summer where, during the fun selection process, she’d been asked: ‘If your personality was a sandwich filling, which would it be?’ She got brain-blankness and said: ‘Cheese.’ ‘Just cheese?’ ‘Just cheese.’ ‘Because …?’ ‘It’s normal.’ Normal cheese and usual sex. She shouldn’t even be on the internet.
Neil surveyed her over the rim of his water glass.
‘Oh. OK. From your profile I thought you presented as heteronormative but might be genderqueer, for some reason.’
Anna didn’t want to admit she didn’t know what the key parts of that sentence meant.
‘Sorry if this is quite confronting,’ Neil continued. ‘I’m a big believer in honesty. I think most relationships fail because of lying and hypocrisy and pretending to be something you’re not. Much better to say This Is Who I Am and be completely open than for you to say on our fourth date, woah.’ Neil held his hands up and beamed reassuringly, ‘You like piss play?’
So ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to charge your glasses and raise a toast to the happy couple, Neil and Anna. And to the blushing bride, bottoms-up. You’ll want a full bladder for later. (Applause.)
2
‘Right, I’ve got Inspector Google on this Shaved Gorilla bullshit,’ Michelle said, squinting at her iPhone screen, Marlboro Light aloft in the other hand, smoke curling upwards in the empty dining room.
Anna couldn’t have coped with so many bad dates without the prospect of her friends to flee to at the end of the evening. Fortunately they worked hours that made them ideally suited to nightcaps rather than nights out.
Michelle’s ‘traditional British cooking with a twist’ was served at The Pantry, just off Upper Street in Islington. It was Grade II listed, with antique chandeliers, potted palms and buttercream wooden panelling. The kind of place where you have wartime affairs with men called Freddy in BBC dramas, and use phrases like ‘it was a horrid business’.
Daniel, Michelle’s long-standing front of house, was one of those semi-famous maître d’s who got mentioned in Time Out for being a ‘character’. The word character could be a euphemism for ‘tiresome git’, but Daniel had genuine charm and authentic eccentricity.
It was partly his appearance: a sweep of thick sandy hair, a bushy beard and high-magnification glasses which gave him cartoon eyes. He looked like a Looney Tunes lion crossed with an Open University professor. He dressed like Toad of Toad Hall in vintage tweed suits and spoke with an arch, old-fashioned cadence, like a junior Alan Bennett.
The three of them often met for drinks once Michelle had closed up, draped across the waiting area sofas, as the stubby candles guttered on the tables. Michelle was businesslike in her chef’s whites and kitchen-only Crocs. Her short, shiny bob, dyed exactly the same red you found in curry houses on tandoori chicken, was worn tucked behind her ears. She had ginormous hazelnut-coloured eyes, a generous painterly mouth, and a statuesque figure that flowed from a prow of a bosom. A supermodel, but out of time. She was instead stuck in an era where people would call her a beauty but a ‘big girl’.
‘Maybe it’s not deviant,’ Daniel said from across the room, where he was sweeping up. ‘Maybe everyone else but us is doing the shaved gorilla and the funky chicken and the … jugged hare.’
‘I’ve had jugged hare on the menu and I can assure you it’s nothing you want to be a sexual euphemism, given the amount of blood involved,’ Michelle said, still peering at her phone.
Daniel set his broom down and joined them.
‘Someone asked me why I wasn’t wearing a hair net today,’ he said vaguely, as he poured out a port from the cluster of bottles on the low-slung table.
‘What? Who? Did you say “Do you think you’re in Pork Farms”?’ Michelle asked.
‘Your head hair, but not your beard?’ Anna asked.
‘No, they said that was unhygienic too.’
‘A beard net? Because there’d be nothing more reassuring than someone serving you food in a surgeon’s mask,’ Michelle said. ‘Hang on. Who asked you this? Was it table five who had the vegan, the wheat intolerant and the one who subbed the cheese for more salad in the Stilton and walnut salad?’
‘Yep.’
‘How did I know? A band of pleasure dodgers.’
‘Subbed the cheese?’ Anna asked. She could’ve applied her brain to it, but she was by now pretty drunk.
‘Americanism. Infuriating trend. Act as if they’re in a sandwich bar saying hold the mayo, extra pickle,’ Michelle said.
‘We’re firmly in the era of the fussy fuck I’m afraid and there’s nothing we can do about it,’ Daniel said.
His Yorkshire-accented lisp pronounced it more as futhy fug, so it sounded like it could safely be uttered on a Radio 4 panel show. This was Daniel’s secret in defusing problems, Anna thought: whatever the words, the expression was gentle.
Michelle ran her index finger up her phone screen.
‘Gotcha! The Shaved Gorilla … oh my,’ she said, as she read. ‘I’m not sure our grandfathers died for this.’
‘He did say this is what he isn’t into?’ Daniel said.
‘Dan, get with it. Classic grooming technique to float it as a joke first,’ Michelle said, shaking her head. ‘Brace yourself, it’s something gruesome with jism.’ She turned her phone screen to Anna, who squinted, read it and grimaced.
‘Want me to try figging?’ Michelle asked.
‘No! I never want to try figging! I want to meet a nice man who wants to have standard sex with just me. Has that really gone so far out of fashion?’
‘If something’s never been in fashion it can never go out,’ Daniel said, tweaking his own lapels, as Anna weakly shoulder-punched him.
3
‘I mean, where’s the romance and mystery?’ Anna continued, holding up her glass for a refill. ‘Mr Darcy said you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. Not, you must allow me to tell you I’m into this spunk-throwing thing.’
‘We don’t live in the right era for an Anna,’ Michelle agreed. ‘Not much formality and wooing. But, you know. If you lived in Jane Austen time you’d have teeth like Sugar Puffs and seven kids with no pain relief. Swings and roundabouts. What appealed about this Neil’s profile, before you met him?’
‘Uhm. He seemed sane and pleasant enough,’ Anna shrugged.
Michelle flicked her fag into the Illy coffee cup that was performing ashtray duties. She was constantly giving up, then falling off the wagon.
Anna and Michelle had met in their early twenties at WeightWatchers. Anna had passed with flying colours, Michelle had flunked. One day, their bouncy cult leader was barking: ‘Strong minds need healthy bodies!’ and Michelle had said loudly, in her West Country lilt: ‘That’s Stephen Hawking told, by Jet from Gladiators,’ and then, into the shocked silence, ‘Fuck this, I’m off for a boneless bucket.’ That week, Anna missed her weigh-in and made a best mate.
‘“Sane and pleasant enough” is aiming a bit low? I’ve hired staff that had more going for them than that.’
‘I dunno. I just spent an evening with a man who talked about weeing on people as a leisure activity and demanded to know what I like in bed. So in the face of that, I’ll take sane and pleasant. Try internet dating, and your expectations would tumble too.’
Michelle had people she called when she fancied a tumble. She’d had her heart broken by a married man and insisted she was not interested in looking for further disappointment.
‘But you make my point for me, my love. That was someone “safe”, so why not take a risk on Mr Exciting?’
‘Even if they agreed to a date, I don’t want to handle Mr Exciting’s disappointment when he turns up and meets me.’
There was a brief pause while Frank Sinatra bellowed his way through ‘Strangers in the Night’, from the stereo held together with duct tape underneath the till.
‘Are we going to say it?’ Michelle said, looking to Daniel. ‘Fuck it, I’m going to say it. Anna, there’s modesty, which is a lovely quality. Then there’s underrating yourself to a self-harming degree. You are bloody brilliant. What disappointment are you talking about?’
Anna sighed and leaned back against the sofa.
‘Hah, well. I’m not though, am I? Or I wouldn’t have been single forever.’
Anna’s British gran Maude had a dreadful saying about the lonely folly of romantic ideas above your station: ‘She wouldn’t have a walker and the riders didn’t stop’.
It had given eleven-year-old Anna the chills. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Some women think they’re too good for those who want them, but when they’re not good enough for the men they want, they end up alone.’
Maude had been an utter misery-tits about everything. But a misery-tits could be right, several times a day.
‘When did you get this idea you’re in some way not good enough?’ Michelle said.
‘That’d be school.’
A pause. Michelle and Daniel knew the stories of course, right up to the Mock Rock. And they knew about The Thing That Happened After. There was a tense pause, as much as anything could be tense when they were supine with alcohol at knocking one in the morning.
Michelle sensitively turned the focus, for a moment.
‘I’m not sure hanging round with us two does you good. We’re no help. I’m perma-single and Dan’s … settled down.’
There was another pause as Michelle used the phrase ‘settled down’ with some sceptical reluctance.
Daniel had been with the somewhat droopy Penny for nearly a year. She was a singer in fiddle-folk band The Unsaid Things and sufferer of ME. Michelle was deeply sceptical of the ME, and claimed Penny was in fact a sufferer of POOR ME syndrome. Daniel met Penny when she’d waitressed at The Pantry and been sacked for being useless, so Michelle felt she had some rights to an opinion. An unflattering one.
‘You are a help. you’re helping right now,’ Anna said.
‘By the way,’ Michelle waved at a bowl on the table, ‘you’ve heard of Omelette Arnold Bennett. Well these are Homemade Scotch Eggs from Arnold’s buffet. Dig in.’
For all her tough talking, Michelle was kind and generous to a fault, and had supplied food for a former customer’s funeral earlier in the day.
‘I’ve been eyeing them like a wolf for the last hour, but I feel guilty eating a dead man’s eggs,’ Daniel said.
‘They’re from the wake, Daniel,’ Michelle said. ‘No one goes to their own wake. Ergo, they’re not Arnold’s.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Daniel said. ‘Egg-scused. Eggs-culpated.’ He picked up an egg, and started eating it like an apple.
‘Arnold’s brother dropped them off. He told me what Arnold’s last words were. Well, strictly speaking, his penultimate words. His final-final words were not the cloudy lemonade, Ros but that wasn’t as profound. Are you ready? It’s a bit of a choker.’
Anna looked at her with glassy eyes and nodded.
Michelle tapped her cigarette. ‘He said he wished he hadn’t wasted so much time being scared.’
‘Of what?’ Anna said.
Michelle shrugged.
‘Didn’t say. Life terrors, I guess. We’re scared of all sorts of things that won’t kill us, aren’t we? The things we live our lives around avoiding. Then we realise when we get to the end that what we should’ve been afraid of was a life lived by avoiding things.’
‘Fear of fear itself,’ Daniel said, wiping breadcrumbs out of his beard.
Anna thought about this. What was she scared of? Being alone? Not really. It was her natural state, given that she’d been single almost all of her adult life. She was scared of never being in love, she supposed. Hang on, no – that wasn’t fear, exactly. More disappointment, or sadness. So what was the fear she was living around? Hah. As if she didn’t know the answer.
It was the fear of ever being that girl again.
She thought of the email that had dropped into her inbox a week ago, which had coated her in a sheen of unseasonal sweat as soon as she saw it.
‘Some fears are justified,’ Anna said, ‘like my fear of heights.’
‘Or my fear of bald cats,’ Daniel said.
‘How is that rational?’ Michelle said.
‘Cats keep all their secrets in their fur. Don’t trust one with nothing to lose.’
‘Or my fear of going to my school reunion next Thursday,’ Anna said.
‘What?’ Michelle said. ‘That does NOT count. You have to go!’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘To say, screw you all, look at me now. You didn’t break me. You could slay the demon forever, this way. Wouldn’t that feel good?’
‘I don’t care what they think of me now,’ Anna said, with feeling.
‘Actually going proves it.’
‘No it doesn’t. It looks like I’m arsed.’
‘Not true. And look, if he’s there …’
‘He won’t be,’ Anna cut in, feeling a little breathless at the thought. ‘No way would he go. It would be a million miles beneath him.’
‘Then there’s even less reason to avoid it. Do you ever want to be Arnold, wondering what life would’ve been like if you’d not wasted time being scared? This school show, the Glee thing where they were vile. You’ve never seen them since that day, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then it’s a loose end. An unfaced thing. That’s why it’s still got a hold over you.’
‘Great Crom!’ Daniel said, sitting up, looking in the direction of the restaurant’s picture windows.
Anna and Michelle turned in their seats to see a thirty-something man hooting with laughter. His trousers and pants were at half mast, while he looked over his shoulder at people beyond.
‘He’s flashing us!’ Anna said.
‘That’s the king and the privy council,’ Daniel agreed.
They stared some more and saw the lights of a crowd in the distance, the firefly blink of camera phones going off.
‘I think he’s mooning his mates and we’re getting the nasty by-product,’ Michelle said.
The man lost his balance and staggered forwards, landing with a soft but significant thud against the glass.
‘Woah, woah, woah!’ Michelle was fast on her feet and over to him, rapping her knuckles against the glass. ‘These windows cost five grand, mate! Five grand!’
A moment of slapstick comedy followed as a pissed man with his chap hanging out realised that there was a woman on the other side of the window. He screamed and ran away, trying to pull his jeans up as he went.
Anna and Daniel, weakened by alcohol, were left senseless with laughter.
Michelle returned, flopping down on the sofa and clicking at a fresh cigarette with her lighter.
‘Tell these fuckers what you think of them, Anna. Seriously. Show them you’re not scared and they didn’t get the better of you. Why not? If you avoid them, you’re wasting time being scared of nothing. Don’t let fear win.’
‘I don’t think I can,’ Anna said, laughter subsiding. ‘I really don’t think I can.’
‘And that’s exactly why you have to do it.’
4
In the merciful hush of the empty office, James was nasally assaulted by the sticky, urinary smell of lager spill.
The odour was rising from the detritus of last night’s riotous session of beer pong. The cleaner had started fighting back against the mess generated by freewheeling urban hipster creatives, tacitly making it clear what was within her jurisdiction. Alcoholic games popularised by North American college students clearly fell outside.
Just as soon as James felt irritated about her work-to-rule, the emotion was superseded by guilt. Office manager Harris got stuck into arguing with the cleaner whenever their paths crossed and James didn’t know how he could do it. She’s your mum’s age, wears saggy leggings and dusts your desk for a living. All you should do is mumble thanks and leave her a Lindt reindeer and twenty quid at Christmas, or you’re an utter bastard. Mind you, on all the evidence, Harris was an utter bastard.
For about the last six months at Parlez, James had really wished someone would come in and shout at his colleagues. Not him, obviously. Someone else.
When he’d first arrived here – a multi-channel digital partner offering bespoke, dynamic strategies to bring your brand to life – he thought he’d found some kind of Valhalla in EC1. It was the kind of place careers advisors would’ve told sixteen-year-olds didn’t exist.
Music blared above a din of chatter, trendily dressed acquaintances drifted in and out, colleagues had spontaneous notions that they needed to try Navy strength Gimlets and did runs to the local shops.
Work got done, somewhere, in all the bouts of watching YouTube clips of skateboarding kittens in bow-ties, playing Subbuteo and discussing that new American sci-fi crime drama everyone was illegally downloading.
Then, all of a sudden, like flipping a switch, the enlivening chaos became sweet torture to James. The conversation was inane, the music distracting, the flotsam of fashionable passers-through an infuriating interruption. And he’d finally accepted the immutable law that lunchtime drinking = teatime headache. Sometimes it was all James could do not to get to his feet and bellow ‘Look, don’t you all have jobs or homes to go to? Because this is a PLACE OF WORK.’
He felt like a teenager whose parents had left him to run the house to teach him a lesson, and he well and truly wanted them back from holiday, shooing out the louts and getting the dinner on.
He thought he’d kept his feelings masked but lately, Harris – the man who put the party into party whip – had started to needle him, with that school bully’s antennae for a drift in loyalty. When Ramona, the punky Scottish girl with pink hair and a belly-button ring who wore midriff tops year-round, was squeezing Harris’s shoulders and making him shriek, he caught James wincing.
‘Stop, stop, you’re making James hate us!’ he called out. ‘You hate us really, don’t you? Admit it. You. Hate. Us.’
James didn’t want to sound homophobic, but working with Harris, he thought the stereotype of the bitchy queen had possibly become a stereotype for a reason.
And the humdrum petty annoyances of office life were still there, whether they were in a basement in Shoreditch with table football or not. The fridge door was cluttered with magnets holding ‘Can You PLEASE …’ snippy notes. The plastic milk bottles had owners’ names marker-penned on them. People actually got arsey about others using ‘their’ mug. James felt like putting a note up of his own: ‘If you have a special cup, check your age. You may be protected by child labour laws.’
James told himself to enjoy the rare interregnum of quiet before they all arrived. The sense of calm lasted as long as it took for his laptop wallpaper to flash up.
He knew it was slightly appalling to have a scrolling album of photos of your beautiful wife on a device you took to work. He’d mixed the odd one of the cat in there but really, he wasn’t fooling anyone. It was life bragging, plain and simple.
And when that wife left you, it was a carousel of hubris, mockery and pain. James could change it, but he hadn’t told anyone they’d separated and didn’t want to alert suspicion.
He’d turn away for a conversation, turn back, and there would be another perfect Eva Kodak moment. White sunglasses and a ponytail with children’s hair slides at Glastonbury, in front of a Winnebago. Platinum curls and a slash of vermillion lipstick, her white teeth nipping a lobster tail on a birthday date at J Sheekey.
Rumpled bed-head, perched on a windowsill in the Park Hyatt Tokyo at sunrise, in American Apparel vest and pants, recreating Lost in Translation. Classic Eva – raving vanity played as knowing joke.
And of course, the ‘just engaged’ photo with James. A blisteringly hot day, Fortnum’s picnic at the Serpentine and, buried in the hamper, a Love Hearts candy ring saying Be Mine in a tiny blue Tiffany gift box (she chose the real article later).
Eva was wearing a halo of Heidi plaits, and they squeezed into the frame together, flushed with champagne and triumph. James gazed at his grinning face next to her and thought what a stupid, hopeful idiot he looked.
There was that sensation, as if the soft tissue in his chest and throat had suddenly hardened, the same one he’d had when she’d sat him down and said things weren’t working for her and she needed some space and maybe they’d rushed into it.
He sighed, checking he had all his tablets of Apple hardware of varying size about him. He was probably worth about three and a half grand to a mugger.
His mobile rang; Laurence.
‘Jimmy! What’s happening?’
Hmmm. Jimmy wasn’t good. Jimmy was a jaunty alter ego that Loz only conjured into existence when he wanted something.
‘This school reunion tonight.’
‘Yep?’
‘Going?’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because your best mate begged you to go and promised to buy you beers all night, and said we could get gone by nine?’
‘Sorry, no. The thought gives me a prolapse of the soul.’
‘That’s a bit deep.’
‘You realise that at our age everyone will be doing that competitive thing about their kids? It’ll be all about Amalfi Lemon’s “imaginative play”. Brrrr.’
‘Think you’ve forgotten our school. More like “Tyson Biggie is out on parole.”’
‘Why do you want to go?’ James said.
‘Naked curiosity.’
‘Curiosity about whether there’s anyone you’d like to see naked.’
‘Don’t you want to know if Lindsay Bright’s still hot?’ Laurence asked.
‘Yurgh, no. Bet she looks like a Surrey Tory.’
‘But a dirty one, like Louise Mensch. Come on, what else are you doing on a Thursday, now you’re on your own? Watching Takeshi’s Castle in your Y-fronts?’
James winced. His Brabantia bin was crammed with Waitrose meals-for-one packaging.
‘Why would my telly be in my pants?’ he parried, sounding as limp as he felt.
‘Wap waaah.’
James’s phone pipped with a waiting call. Eva.
‘Loz, I’ve got a call. We’ll continue “me saying no” in a minute.’
He clicked to end one call and start another.
‘Hi. How’re you?’ she said.
James did a sarcastic impression of her breezy tone. ‘How’d ya think?’
Sigh.
‘I’ve got some ear drops for Luther. I need to bring them round and show you how to give them to him.’
‘Do you drop them in his ear?’ James hadn’t necessarily decided relentless bitterness was his best tactic, but unfortunately the words always left his mouth before he’d put them through any security checks.
‘Can I come round tonight?’
‘Ah, I can’t tonight. Busy.’
‘With what?’
‘Sorry, is that your business?’
‘It’s just the tone you’re taking with me, James, makes me think you might be being needlessly obstructive.’
‘It’s a school reunion.’
‘A school reunion?’ Eva repeated, incredulous. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was your sort of thing.’
‘Full of surprises. So we’ll have to find another night for Luther.’
After they’d rung off, James allowed himself the sour pleasure of having won a tiny battle in the war. The satisfaction lasted a good three seconds before James realised that now he was going to have to go to this school reunion.
He could lie, but no. This merited some small stray reference on social media as incidental proof – a check in, a photo, a ‘good to see you too’ to some new Facebook addition – to let Eva know she didn’t know him as well as she thought she did.
‘Morning!’ Ramona unwound sheep face ear-muffs from her head. ‘Och, why did I drink on a Wednesday? I am dying, so I am.’
‘Hah,’ James said, which meant, please don’t tell me about it.
Naturally, he spent the next quarter of an hour hearing about it, then she repeated the tale to each new arrival. Wine served in plastic pint beakers got you pissed, who knew.
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