by Luke Brown
The bishop disappeared into an alcove and came back with the correct headgear.
‘Do you want a booth?’ he asked, before he led us along to the end of the corridor and pulled one of the curtains back to reveal a small table with church pews either side of it. There was a buzzer in the middle of the table. ‘Anything you need, just ring and I’ll bring it for you.’
‘This is sacrilegious,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it?’ said Sophie. ‘Look at this.’ She pulled the house rules off their hook on the wall.
WE GUARANTEE EVERYONE’S PRIVACY IN THIS PLACE OF REPENTANCE.
STRICTLY NO APPROACHING GUESTS IN NEIGHBOURING BOOTHS.
WE WILL NOT ENTER UNLESS YOU BUZZ.
TAKING DRUGS IS ILLEGAL AND A SIN.
WHAT GOES ON IN YOUR CONFESSIONAL IS BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR GOD.
Sophie turned the rules over to reveal that the reverse side of the sign was a mirror, tracked with the faint scratches a razor blade had made on its surface.
I didn’t do as much coke then as I used to when I was younger, and I’ve resolved never to touch it again. It’s not that I ever enjoyed the effects of the drug on its own so much as the intimacy of consumption, the pockets of time alone with a friend to do something quiet and secret and then return, altered and better prepared for the busy room and brand-new people we had temporarily escaped. The appeal of cigarettes had increased enormously for me when you had to go outside for them.
None of us had any coke, but we were in a place designed for making lines and so we yearned for some.
‘Ask Cockburn if he has any,’ I suggested.
Sophie texted. The phone buzzed back immediately. ‘He’s getting some,’ she told me.
In the meantime we sipped gin and tonics and waited.
*
It is no wonder that places that are unbearable without drugs are so popular: they provide such a good reason to do drugs, to ring a number and prove our ingenious ability to satisfy our needs. So we can remove the awkwardness of our boundaries; so it feels natural to reach over and put our hands in each other’s hair and draw our mouths together.
Cockburn had arrived with what we wanted and we had been talking for what might have been hours now.
‘You need to be careful,’ Sophie was telling him. ‘My generation are going to want to burn your houses down.’
‘No they won’t. They’ll be too worried about not inheriting them.’
‘There won’t be anything left,’ she said. ‘You’ll have mortgaged them all to pay Harley Street doctors who say they can make you immortal. You’ll have spunked it all on Viagra and opioid sleeping tablets.’
‘And security guards,’ said Cockburn. ‘With big guns.’
I was enjoying talking to Rochi on my side of the table. She was a TV development executive who spent her Saturdays scrubbing scales and removing guts at a fishmonger’s in Hackney. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It’s a skill,’ she said. ‘I like having a real skill.’
We got in the habit of going out in pairs to smoke, she and I, Cockburn and Sophie.
‘Do you think they’re getting off with each other when we’re out smoking?’ Rochi asked.
‘He’s too old for her, isn’t he?’
‘She doesn’t mind old guys. It annoys her dad. That’s why I thought maybe you and her were going to hit it off.’
‘He is significantly older than me, you know?’
‘You all look the same to me.’
Next time we were in the booth alone I asked, ‘Do you think they’re out there wondering if we’re getting off with each other?’
‘Definitely,’ she said, and we looked at each other for a moment before we leaned in.
Ten
And for nearly a month I was redeemed. I liked nothing more than hearing Rochi tease me. She had taken all the good things from her good school, she was so confident and curious, kind and unembarrassed. When I was next to her I believed that the rich were better than the poor. They hadn’t been deformed by envy and bitterness. They had been free to think and express themselves, to study under the guidance of the world’s best teachers. They were so good-looking and healthy. They had experienced the best of British cultural life. When they married each other it was more than wealth marrying wealth – it was beauty and intelligence marrying beauty and intelligence. You couldn’t blame them for it.
On those light spring evenings I’d walk over to London Fields to the flat Rochi shared with a friend in Broadway Market. She was taking meetings with publishers and production companies about writing her own book and hosting her own TV series about preparing and cooking fish. She was going to be famous.
It was her skill at slicing into fish that left me completely helpless, that she could do something so practical and unsqueamish. She made me think of home, and she liked hearing about home, or tolerated it at least, that blankness at the edge of things, the white noise of the sea, the smell of life fizzing up and going off. I began to imagine taking her there, walking down the street with her and watching people look at her, watching people hate her.
‘This is just a bit of fun, yeah?’ she said one morning when I walked her to the Overground station.
‘I know. Of course!’ I said, but I was too enthusiastic.
‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’
Eleven
My hairdresser and I were discussing his brother, Tony. I played football with Tony every week, Tony who had taken to posting videos about the problem with Islam and feminists and Jeremy Corbyn and the Guardian. He was all in favour of Brexit, and Donald Trump’s election campaign, and this was regarded by some people as such a strange look for a black man that he was frequently accused online of being a white supremacist, hiding behind the profile photo of a black man. This did not make Tony less angry or more liberal, and now he had started wearing a Make America Great Again cap to our weekly five-a-side game, which, as we played in Whitechapel, most people thought was ironic, or just Tony’s quirky style. There was no reason, of course, why a black man should not have the same right as the rest of us to post videos of Tommy Robinson talking about Islamic fascists who ran paedophile gangs, these Muslims who got away with it because of people like me who read the Guardian and hated the working people and refused to condemn their enemies. But we wished he wouldn’t.
‘I try not to get into it with him,’ said Michael, snipping away. ‘He’s still the same guy when we talk about music and Arsenal, still a great uncle to the kids. What do I know anyway? I haven’t read half as much as he has.’
Tony is a handsome and stylish man. He wears his hair in an Afro, wears long coats and colourful scarves, a natty funk-musician from the 1970s. When I was looking for a new football game after university, Michael had introduced me to Tony. He was one of my first London mates who I hadn’t met through university or the bookshop. We’d go for pints after the game and talk about music, go to gigs at Cafe Oto or Village Underground. He worked as a train inspector back and forth into Essex from Liverpool Street every day. And he had become so angry. I watched the videos he posted on Facebook of Tommy Robinson charging into the offices of think tanks to confront people who had labelled him racist, flustered men who would refuse to back up their statements with evidence. I could see how someone could be convinced if this was all they saw of him: how effective a tactic it was to find and confront people who had condemned him on received opinion, who couldn’t precisely point out the incidents in which he’d proved himself to be racist. (Any who could would have been cut from the edit.) People who liked him might have liked him more because of the middle-class people he embarrassed than because of the Muslims he hated. Trails of thumbs-up and lovehearts moved across the videos in animated graphics from left to right across the screen, like immigrants heading back to their own countries.
‘Hey, look, Tony,’ I said, a few days later, while we were walking back to the bike rack in our replica shirts, Arsenal and Fleetwood,
swigging from our water bottles.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’ve been following those links you’ve been posting on Facebook.’
‘Good.’
‘But, you know, you don’t really believe that all Muslims support terrorism and want to take over the country, do you?’
‘Bruv. Don’t patronise me. It’s more complicated than that. That’s not what we’re saying. Course not all of them. Not most. But are they doing enough to condemn it? Nah, they’re not doing that either. We’re funding their schools for them to teach children what’s wrong with our society. It’s our society, man.’
‘And Corbyn being a terrorist too? He’s not a terrorist.’
‘The IRA, man! He supports the IRA!’
‘That was ages ago. Why do you care so much about it?’
‘Bruv, bruv, I can’t do this with you. You’re a nice guy but you’re blind to what’s going on here. Which is you people living miles away from the problem and telling people like me who have to deal with it that there is no problem.’
‘You people? That’s me, is it?’
‘Not all the way, man. Not all the way. But I know where you live. I don’t see you down in Forest Gate, man, do I? I don’t see you all the way down where I am.’
‘Come off it. I live in Dalston. Right by the market.’
‘You live in Dalston now. Not Dalston fifteen years ago, when people could afford to live there.’
‘Well, what about feminism? Equal rights for women? Why’s that a problem?’
‘Oh, bruv. I love women. Equal rights is fine. But that’s not what it is, is it? It’s an agenda that has no interest in a man like me. You know, I’m not doing this with you. We play football together. I like it like that. Let’s keep it that way.’
But shortly after that he stopped coming to football. I followed him for a while on Facebook. He kept getting banned for arguing with the people who accused him of being a white supremacist, and then he was gone for good. And now I don’t know where or how he is.
*
Friday in the local. After months of working for free, Mary was offered a wage at the record company doing their online marketing and PR. We were celebrating: Nathan, me and Jonathan, who was still ‘a week away’ from moving out, as he had been for months now. Although he was always still in a crisp white shirt (he took a bag of them to the cleaners every week and kept them hanging up in his office), he was becoming shabbier in other ways. He seemed torn one week to the next between being clean-shaven and having designer stubble. I saw him going to work one day wearing a pair of new white trainers with one of his suits, a combination he had pointed out to me scathingly in the past: web designer getting married, he called it, or wake at the indie disco. Without Julia he had lost the strength of his certainties. And because of his downfall I’d lost the will to kick him out. We’d all be forced out soon enough.
Nathan must have been wondering why so many of the nights he now spent with Mary were in the company of her two older housemates. He got quieter as we got louder, and abruptly stood up and said he was going.
‘Don’t! Stay!’ said Mary. ‘Let’s carry on back at mine.’
‘No thanks,’ he said, and walked out.
‘I better go after him,’ she said.
‘Leave him alone,’ said Jonathan, but she went anyway.
We could see them through the pub’s open door. She had her hands on Nathan’s shoulders but he was looking away from her. He put his hand on her chest to keep her from hugging him and spoke slowly to her, then turned and walked away. She followed in the same direction and that was all we could see from where we were sitting. I had thought that we had all been having a good time that night.
‘I’m rooting for him,’ I said. ‘He’s a nice boy.’
I looked at Jonathan. He was staring down into his pint. ‘You don’t see many of them around,’ he said.
Though he was still sleeping in the living room I wasn’t seeing all that much of him. He was distracting himself from his marital problems by going out most weeknights. There was always some gig or opening to go to – and Jonathan’s misery had been good for business: he’d found a heap of new clients on his nights out. He was getting into fights too. On one occasion I noticed grazed knuckles on him and a swollen lip.
‘I’m sort of a nice boy,’ I said to Jonathan.
‘You’re thirty-five!’ he said.
‘I’m thirty-three!’
‘You look thirty-five.’
‘You look forty-six.’
‘You don’t look like a nice boy is all I’m saying,’ said Jonathan. ‘Most women don’t want nice. They want men.’
‘That’s not true at all. And if it is, it’s just Stockholm syndrome. Do you and Mary have something going on?’
‘No, course not. I haven’t given up on Julia.’
‘Good.’
‘Mary and I are going out next week, though.’
‘What?’
‘Not a date. I’m borrowing her. Not borrowing her, exactly – that sounds wrong. I’m taking her to party where she’ll meet lots of cool people and have a good time, and where Julia will probably be.’
‘And she knows this?’
‘I didn’t mention Julia. She might think that was a bit weird.’
‘Have you considered that you might be better off without Julia?’
‘What? No.’ He pulled his phone out and unlocked it, looked at it and put it down again. He had been doing this every couple of minutes. He was waiting for something. I wasn’t sure if it was Julia or drugs.
*
On the following Friday I went to Soho for lunch. The dining room in the club was busy and Susannah seemed to know everyone there.
Her role in the company, she told me, was unfortunately not as important as it once was – without demoting her they had hired someone above her. She had to make sure he didn’t take over the relationships with her bestselling authors or she’d become replaceable.
‘Replaceable,’ she sighed. She was fifty-four and her husband had just left her a year ago for ‘a fucking 35-year-old. Well, of course, at that age and childless, if you haven’t found someone you can be attracted to anyone. The bloody fool. He thinks he’s escaping into some youthful vita nuova; he’ll be changing nappies in a year or two, mark my words, and pretending to be happy about it.’
She laughed, and then her face fell.
‘The awful thing is that she works in the same industry. I’ll see them together at book fairs and launch parties – until she has the babies and her career falls on its arse while she’s waiting for them to grow up. God knows how I managed. It was better then, I think, or perhaps it was more acceptable to farm your kids off on someone else. My kids, by the way, are absolutely fine, they’re delightful young people.’
She told me about her kids and after a while I realised I had not listened, distracted by thoughts of what my own imaginary child would be like, and I tried to correct this by earnestly nodding along with a story about her daughter which I didn’t understand.
‘So, what are you going to do with your life?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I don’t want to assume that you’re a bit lost. But you seem a bit lost.’
She cut me off as I became vague and uncomfortable.
‘You strike me as a bright young man, full of creative ideas. And you’re right, the editor positions are full of confident Oxbridge graduates who are used to arguing forcefully and articulately, but there are other ways of getting in the door, particularly for people with years of experience selling books and…’
She told me to apply for a marketing assistant position, that it was possible to progress quickly. I nodded my head and took out my notebook and made notes on what she thought I should say in my application. Do anything you want to me, I wanted to say to her. Tell me to do whatever you like.
‘That’s very kind,’ I said. ‘I’ll definitely apply.’
I wanted to succumb to a powerful change.
She didn’t
go back to the office that afternoon. We sipped glasses of wine until we were drunk enough to move on to cocktails and she introduced me to entertainment lawyers, literary agents and novelists, and Jude Law, who seemed to be wearing a denim jacket without anything underneath, though I was so drunk I suppose it might have been a denim shirt, or Benedict Cumberbatch.
At twelve we decided to go home.
‘Walk me to a cab,’ she said.
As we were getting in I leaned forwards to kiss her, as I assumed she wanted me to. She put her hand between us and laughed. ‘Oh, Paul. That has cheered me up. How funny! Make sure you send in that application.’ And then she got in the car and it drove away, leaving me feeling quite foolish and drunk, disappointed even, but not unhappy, not ashamed. I reeled away to the bus stop, looking for someone else to talk to.
*
I got to the hospital before Amy. A young man in a green hospital gown and socks was sitting on the ground and asking people hopelessly if they could spare a cigarette. I walked over and lit one for him, wondering if I was doing something awful to his health.
I had spoken to Amy on the phone the night before, and she had told me that she had accepted an offer for her flat and had an offer accepted for another, larger flat, in a quieter part of town, the sort of place where young middle-class parents lived. She also told me that the interview to get her job back had gone OK, but they were making her wait for a verdict until a series of other meetings had been conducted. She was due to hear from them first thing in the morning, just before her twelve-week scan, ‘the same morning I’ll discover if my baby is still alive or deformed or—’
‘I’m coming with you,’ I said. ‘I’ll get someone to cover me in the morning.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘OK. Thanks.’
When she arrived I hugged her, carefully. We were running late so we hurried through to the maternity section and checked in at the reception, looking around us at the various couples waiting quietly next to the plastic children’s toys and colourful picture books.
