by Luke Brown
*
She was laughing by the time she saw me to the door. ‘You didn’t drink your Coke,’ she said, handing it back to me. ‘It’s full to the top.’
‘This should be some kind of epiphany for me. A spur to throw down my crutches and walk unaided.’
I took a swig.
‘Stagger unaided,’ she said.
‘Remember what I said: if the photographer suggests anything unusual, remind him this is for a book interview, lock yourself in the bathroom and ring me on my mobile.’
‘I’ll handle him. Don’t worry.’
I leaned over and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Thanks again. I hope I see you around. If you were serious before about inviting me round for dinner sometime, I’d love to come.’
She looked at me curiously, as if I had nearly tricked her into something unpleasant. She frowned. ‘Andrew is always encouraging me to invite friends round. I suppose he might like you once he’d got over his disappointment that I’d invited a man and not a woman.’
‘I could bring a woman, if you liked.’
‘You bragger. No, thanks.’
‘Just a bottle of wine, then.’
‘And a half-bottle of whisky for the doorstep.’
‘I’d turn up sober, I promise.’
‘Best not promise. You never know when literature will need you again. Goodbye, Paul.’
‘Bye, Emily.’
She shut the door. I stood there for a few seconds and listened for her footsteps on the other side. After about ten seconds I heard her going back up the stairs and I turned away too.
Three
The bookshop where I work is in Bloomsbury, surrounded by universities and libraries and the British Museum. My colleagues here come from a separate planet from my colleagues at White Jesus, being, in the main, graceful, thoughtful people, well read in political philosophy, current affairs, poetry and literary fiction.
‘Have you heard about Leo?’ asked Helen, as soon as I walked through the door. Helen is the shop’s manager, a woman my age from Hull. ‘A hundred K,’ she said, which is not the kind of thing she usually said, and I wished I were not aware of the context, that my least favourite colleague Leo had been talking to publishers about the novel he had written.
‘K?’ I said.
‘A hundred thousand pounds.’
‘That’s a lot of M,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘Is he going to resign?’
‘I didn’t think of that. Would you resign?’
‘No. Or I’d spend half of it in six months and half of it on subsequent rehab.’
‘Thank God for you, Paul. I can rely on you not to go anywhere.’
‘Particularly if you give me a pay rise.’
‘Ah, Paul.’
‘Have you spoken to him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is he unbearable?’
‘A little bit.’
‘You’re less bitter than me. That means he’s totally unbearable.’
‘I’ll leave you to judge it. How was Emily Nardini?’
I breathed out. ‘If you say something stupid to her—’
‘Which you did.’
‘Which I did – she looks just like her photo. But on perhaps as many as two separate occasions I actually made her laugh. Then she looks different.’
‘You haven’t fallen for her, have you? You look like you have.’
‘I fall in love with everyone I meet. For a little bit.’
‘You’re like George Eliot. She used to fall in love with everyone she met.’
‘I’m glad someone’s finally noticed. That’s why I hit it off so well with Emily Nardini.’
Helen bent to look something up on the computer. ‘That must be why. Where did this meeting take place?’
‘Her flat, in Holland Park. It’s huge. She lives with what appears to be a rich man. I thought I’d be meeting her in a rented room somewhere but she has the run of the place.’
‘You know who she lives with, don’t you?’
‘No. Who?’
‘Andrew Lancaster.’
Andrew Lancaster. I recognised the name, but it was one of those sturdy names anyone could have. There were probably three famous Andrew Lancasters.
‘The popular historian. Left-wing, at least to start with. Professor at UCL. Pally for a while with the Blair government. Increasingly right-wing, say his enemies. No fan of the Tories.’
‘Oh, yeah. Of course, I’ve sold hundreds of his books without giving him any thought. He sounds…’
‘Clever? Accomplished?’
‘I was going to use the word “distinguished”.’
‘Distinguished, yes.’
‘And to be called “distinguished”, you have to be how old?’
‘In general or particular?’
‘Of course, in general.’
‘I think he’s in his late fifties.’
*
My own accommodation was a little different from Emily’s. I lived with a young woman who was not my girlfriend on the Kingsland Road in Dalston, in a place my friends and I named ‘the château’ when we moved in eleven years ago. It’s a two-bedroom flat that during our tenancy has regularly been a three-bedroom and six-person flat. We didn’t need to have so many people living here to afford the place but it always felt selfish to have a living room and kitchen when a friend needed somewhere cheap to live. The happiest times I remember here were those times when we spoke always about how much we hated living here, when I lived with my friends Stuart and Lenny and our girlfriends, Monica, Kate and Anya, queuing in the winter mornings for a shower, the ceiling paint flaking down like snow, or when we crammed into the kitchen to try to make dinner, to find space in the fridge, to locate the milk, Hoover or ironing board, our keys, our hash, a stash of cocaine lost three years ago during a party which we still remained optimistic would one day show up, and one day did, in a secret compartment not one of us remembered hacking out of The Line of Beauty with a razor blade. Monica was the first to leave, when she took what was going to be a two-year job in Melbourne. Stuart and Kate left a year ago to buy a house in Margate; and for a while Lenny and I had rooms to ourselves and the rare luxury of a living room (Anya was staying mostly at her parents’ by then). We had lived together for nearly ten years, earning what money we needed in ways we found convenient; Lenny made it that long as a musician and professional skateboarder before he was eventually defeated by the idea of a ‘career’ when the fear of not having one became magnified out of all proportion by marijuana-smoking. He is back in Coventry at his parents’ now, working as a teaching assistant. When I speak to him on the phone he is happier than he was during those last years in London, those anticlimactic months when we had what we had always thought we wanted: a TV and a sofa in a room designed for TV-watching. It was not enough. ‘For years I was convinced something awful was going to happen to me,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s happened now. It’s much better now I know what it is.’ I hadn’t wanted to replace Lenny in a hurry; it was not urgent on such low rent, and it might have seemed indecent, like marrying again weeks after being widowed; but then I met Mary.
The château is located on the two floors above a branch of inexpensive British patisseries, and though the rent is cheap beyond all proportion for London, there are reasons why it would be offered cheap in a saner world. Waking up in the top bedrooms, the smell of the steak bakes that drifts up through the floorboards is not so pungent, but Stuart and particularly Kate (a vegan), who had what is now the living room downstairs, never quite got used to their closer proximity to the ovens in the shop. It is a mixed blessing to be upstairs: our central heating system is erratic, and our roof porous. In the middle of one memorable dream I woke up choking on dust, looking up at Monica’s face as it slowly revealed itself to be the moon seen through a new hole in the roof. I have lived here for over a decade now, moving rooms only once after Monica left me and I switched to the room next door where s
he wouldn’t be quite as absent. While the rest of the area’s real-estate value has risen to the extent that it may even rival Emily’s W11, I have never had to pay more than the £100 a month I first agreed to in the year after I finished my undergraduate degree. Paying, by this mixture of good fortune and tenaciousness, what might be the cheapest rent in London, I do as little as possible to remind our landlord that we exist – the place has not been decorated or refurbished for at least a decade, and I suspect four. The last time we called him was when the hole appeared in my bedroom’s ceiling; mostly, I carry out my own repairs, unskilfully, using a collection of cheap tools and screws we keep in a child’s Superman lunch box. Another peculiarity of our château – it has no address. It does not exist, and nor do we – we receive no polling cards, we pay no council tax. Our gas and electricity operate with tokens, and Harpreet, one of the chefs pâtissiers downstairs, has been kind enough to let us share their wi-fi. Arriving chez nous, vous allez down the alley and into the backyard before climbing a rickety fire escape into the kitchen, I feel constantly on the verge of being found out. We have our post sent to our places of work, those of us who have places of work, and at the moment that happens to be all of us, including the temporary guest downstairs who I am hoping will sort things out soon with his wife.
*
He was in when I got back, lying on the sofa under a single Postman Pat duvet cover that had belonged to a previous resident. There were childhood remnants in all of our flats which someone had been too sentimental to throw away. Jonathan’s boots were peeping out, and he was watching EastEnders. ‘How do you make Netflix come on?’ he asked.
‘Our TV isn’t well educated enough,’ I told him.
He turned it off. ‘Fuck it, then. Normal TV is bollocks now.’
‘Any news on Julia?’
‘Oh, don’t mention her. I’ve had a bad enough day.’
I have known Jonathan since we met on our magazine journalism degree at the London College of Printing, which wasn’t such a comic idea in the last year of the last millennium, before they changed its name to sound less archaic. Jonathan has always been an entrepreneurial spirit. He sold Spanish cigarettes and Dutch ecstasy on campus, and by our final year he was wearing Paul Smith suits to seminars and the pub. He had started working for White Jesus in the summer of our second year, which was where he met his wife Julia, two years his senior and the only daughter of a surgeon and a psychiatrist. It was at this time he began to insist on being called Jonathan rather than Jonny. She had thrown him out a month ago and he had been living in our living room since. I still hadn’t got to the bottom of what he had done that was bad enough to be thrown out by Julia. They’d always been proud of being sexually adventurous; so I didn’t think it was infidelity, unless there was some line of etiquette he’d overstepped. According to him, they were just ‘working some stuff through’.
He turned up one night with a bottle of Jameson’s and a bag of ice. I was touched at the time that he’d chosen me to come to, though I wonder if he had anyone else, or if I was just the softest touch he knew. We barely saw each other outside of work functions these days: Jonathan, the advertising director, is also de facto publisher of White Jesus during the frequent absences of the millionaire who owns that title and the magazine. I couldn’t afford to go to Jonathan and Julia’s wedding, on a Greek island; and Monica preferred to avoid them after that one time when they’d tried to inveigle us into an orgy with them. I never went to the magazine’s offices if I could help it.
‘Where’s Mary?’ I asked.
‘She’s in her room with that little twerp she hangs out with.’
‘They’re not…?’
‘They might be.’
*
We are both in love with our housemate Mary, and confused as to whether we love her as another little sister, the mother we miss, or the girlfriend we covet. Probably a mixture of all three: the overdetermined love of man for woman that makes life so full of jeopardy for women.
I first met Mary in the middle of an argument I was having with a cyclist on Theobald’s Road. Riding east in the early evening, I was always part of a large peloton: sensible commuters with panniers and fluorescent jackets mingling with posing faux-couriers atop lurid bikes with one gear. I was feeling quite rueful and sensitive about the bike I was riding: the old racer my father had given me was stolen as divine punishment on the night I split up with the woman I went out with too soon after Monica, and the quickest and lightest bike I could buy with the £150 budget I managed to scrabble together looked like something that belonged to a seven-year-old girl, a fixie with rave-orange frame and lipstick-pink tyres. For a brief while the chain had even matched the tyres, until London’s filth did its quick work. There were a lot of garish bikes on the road, but I hadn’t seen one worse than mine. Even the hipsters had baulked at it, hence the knock-down price I had it for from a Chinese bike shop on Hackney Road. If I shut my eyes, it was an OK ride, quick with narrow handlebars, but shutting one’s eyes on London’s roads is not sustainable, and observing myself atop this bike in window reflections was inspiring a crisis of identity in me: I am by inclination and prescription an unshaven wearer of thick-rimmed spectacles, and this bike had closed the circle. There was no denying any more that I was a man with beard and glasses wearing a messenger bag and riding his pink and orange bike to Hackney. There was always violence on the roads, but I began to provoke it more often.
On the day I met Mary I judged the space between the curb and a bus too narrow to safely undertake and held my distance. ‘Out of the way then,’ came a voice from behind me, followed by the sound of a rubber horn. I turned round. There was a man in short shorts and white socks perched on a bicycle like mine, almost identical, except for the rubber horn he had attached.
‘Pardon?’ I said.
‘Just fucking get down there mate,’ he said, ‘or get out of the fucking way.’
The next thing I knew I was off my bike and had his T-shirt in my hand, shouting about my friend Sam who had died in a bike accident.
Until I was pushed away from him by a young woman who herself then began to shout at him, about her friend Heidi who had been crushed to death on the inside of a lorry that had turned left without indicating.
‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘Sorry!’ He must have been twice the weight of the woman who was prodding him in the chest. She backed away from him a step and scowled at him, and he took the opportunity to ride off, looking behind him to check that neither of us were following him. She wandered over to a bike that was lying on the pavement and picked it up, holding a hand over her eyes when I walked up to her.
‘Thank you,’ I said to her. ‘And I’m so sorry about your friend.’
She lowered her hand and squinted at my bike. ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’
I have no friend called Sam who died in a bike accident. But it felt like I did when I had the cyclist’s T-shirt bunched in my fist.
She was still looking at my bike.
‘This isn’t my bike I’m riding,’ I told her. ‘Just so you know, it doesn’t belong to me.’
She wiped her eyes and tried to smile. ‘It’s very colourful,’ she said. She had a basket on her bike, containing a handbag and a pair of heels.
‘You look shaken up,’ I said. ‘Let me buy you a drink. Come on. I insist.’
In the pub Mary told me about the interview she had just been to, to work as an intern at a major record label, a job that came with no salary except a ten-pound per diem for a sandwich and bus fare. She had got the ‘job’. I asked her how she was going to afford to do her job.
‘I work in a bar and I won’t eat food.’
‘Or sleep.’
‘No, I won’t do much of that either.’
When she told me about her band, and how she thought they might be about to be offered a record deal, the only philanthropic thing to suggest was that she move into our place. Only above Gregg’s can a person be free to dream and create in this city. S
he was suspicious, but took my number, and said she’d come round the next day to take a look.
The next day there was a knock at the back door. Mary was standing there, smiling, in a dress and trainers, next to a tall young man with lots of hair falling across smooth cheeks. ‘This is my friend, Nathan,’ she said. ‘He’s just here in case you turn out to be a pervert.’
‘Hi, Nathan,’ I said, ‘what a sensible precaution,’ and I shook his hand.
I showed them the room; dusty and tatty, with a beige carpet coming loose and watercolour peach walls, but room-sized, in a prime location, for one-sixth of her current rent, a rent she paid for the privilege of four or five hours’ sleep a night between a bar shift and interning. I did not tell her about some of the things the bed had seen over the last decade.
‘Have a think about it,’ I said, but of course she moved in. She had artistic ambition. She had no choice.
*
Nathan is the twerp Jonathan referred to. Twerp is unkind. He’s a sweet boy, but he’d never been up in Mary’s room before.
‘It’s your fault they’re up there,’ I said to Jonathan. ‘They think this is your bedroom.’
‘It is my bedroom!’ He held up the Postman Pat quilt as evidence.
‘We should discuss that.’
‘Just give me a week. I’m working on Julia.’
‘What is actually the problem?’ I picked up two empty cans and crumpled them noisily.
‘Oh, mate. It’s too complicated. I’d bore you stupid.’
I took the cans to the recycling box in the kitchen, then went up to my room, just across from Mary’s. To my horror, I could hear a man’s heavy gasping. The door was ajar and I shouted hello.
‘Come in!’ she called.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Come in!’
I went in, where I found her and Nathan sitting up against her headboard, fully clothed, giggling. Between them was one of those shiny chrome contraptions for filling balloons full of nitrous oxide.
