by Luke Brown
‘And you, Paul, I hope you’ll come too,’ he said, which Emily looked startled by before she said yes, and nodded her head at me.
‘Perhaps we could both bring a witness,’ said Andrew to Emily.
I was not even supposed to be witnessing this. I had the sense that he was trying not to smirk at me.
‘I’m sorry there’s no champagne,’ he said. ‘I should have said earlier when we hadn’t drunk so much, but we weren’t intending to tell you in front of Paul.’
Emily looked up at me then and made a little shrug of apology.
I excused myself and went to the bathroom, where I locked the door before opening the bathroom cabinet and looking around. There were some ominous-looking pills I liked the look of. Heart medicine, I hoped. Things to help dangerously high blood pressure. Or to stabilise suicidal moods. I shook a couple out and took a picture of the bottles. I couldn’t see any Viagra, though he probably kept that in his bedroom, or in his office drawers. Hair dye? None that I could see. That was a shame. Valium! Xanax! Hello, old friends. Perhaps they were Emily’s. Perhaps he was an anxious man behind the facade. About what? Where were his troubles? I borrowed a couple of each of the pills, anyway, before I unlocked the door and stepped out.
In the hall Andrew was hugging Sophie. She kept her arms loose by her side. When they parted Sophie’s eyes were shut. She waited a few seconds before opening them.
After I’d hugged Emily, Andrew shook my hand while squeezing my shoulder with his other hand. Again, the smirk on his face that I had not worked out how to trouble. Not yet. ‘Look after my daughter!’ he said.
‘Daddy,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after him.’
Thirteen
Next time I come you ask me to list what it is that makes me angry.
‘What it is?’
‘Aren’t there things that make you angry?’
‘If people are things.’
‘Well. Can you give me a list of people’s actions that make you angry?’
‘Oh, God, where to start?’
‘Take your time.’
‘It’s like when people ask you what your favourite book is. There’re too many shining examples to pick one. You always forget to say Anna Karenina.’
You look past me and I know it’s at the other clock on the wall behind. I don’t like thinking of the way we must exhaust you. I hope there’s someone who listens to your problems.
‘In general might we say it’s when people refuse to see things the way you do?’
‘You’re asking if I’m just as bad as everyone else? One of those good guys who know that they’re the good guys. God, I hate those fuckers. I hate the fucking good guys.’
You look at me for at least a minute and I keep quiet too, staring at the box of tissues on the coffee table between us. Is it wise to provoke the wankaholics like that? I think about saying. So I do. You ignore that and carry on.
‘Do you think it’s impossible to be a good guy?’
‘No. Just extremely difficult.’
‘By whose standards?’
‘Jesus? J. K. Rowling?’
‘I see. The very highest authorities. And you – you’re not a good guy? You don’t think you’re a good guy?’
‘Recently I’ve been behaving even worse than the good guys.’
It’s not a big smile you make but it’s something.
*
And so it came to the day of the EU vote, and the people voted. Except for me, for I was not on the electoral register, a consequence of my unusual address. But everyone I knew in London who could vote voted, and apart from the occasional lunatic exception we voted to stay. We were all calm, or pretending to be calm.
Mary and Jonathan were going out that night to a summer party in the Serpentine Pavilion. ‘Pop stars and fashion designers, actors, that sort of thing,’ said Jonathan.
‘Save it for Mary,’ I said, who had done herself up in a sequinned blue dress and bright silver sandals, her hair piled up in a way I’d never seen before.
‘You look good,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Your shoulders look very naked.’
‘Get lost.’
She was back in my room two minutes later.
‘Are you sure I look all right? This dress is just H&M. Is it a bit basic?’
‘Your beauty is so bright it’s blinding.’ I reached over and put on my sunglasses. ‘No, I still can’t look at you.’
I put a pillow over my head and she went out.
Then Jonathan came in. ‘How do I look, mate?’
‘You’ve never once cared about my opinion of how you look.’
‘Yeah, you’re right. Why am I asking your opinion?’
He was wearing one of his skinny suits that had been so fashionable when he started at the magazine.
‘Where’s your hat?’ I asked.
‘I don’t have a hat, you cunt.’
‘Then where do you keep your razor in case you get into a bit of bother?’
‘Let’s go, Mary,’ he said.
She checked herself in my mirror and pouted, tipped her face from side to side.
Lucky Jonathan. He moved into the mirror beside her and I watched them watching themselves framed together. They might have made a nice-looking couple for a few years; I might have been very jealous if I hadn’t had my own assignation that evening.
*
In the morning, dazed and underslept, I waited for Emily on the terrace of Euston station. We were taking the train up to Preston where we’d get another train to the end of the line, and from there the tram further up the coast to the end of another line. The next day we had an excursion planned. Emily was writing a long essay for a literary magazine prompted by a new biography of Charlotte Brontë, and we were going to get the train east for an hour to visit the parsonage where she and her sisters had written their novels.
When she arrived we headed to Marks & Spencer’s for supplies for the journey. Emily bought a bottle of water and some carrots. I bought some orange juice to mix into a breakfast cocktail with a bottle of fizzy French wine one or two letters away from champagne.
I needed the drink that day. I’d stayed up till five in the morning in a flat in Camden with Sophie and her friends, where we watched the results come in until it was clear there had been no mistake. I had invited Sophie back to mine when I got my Uber, but she couldn’t stop watching. ‘Stay a bit longer,’ she said, lying back with her legs over the laps of me and a guy called Antonio, an actor from her college who claimed to be writing a sitcom about an entomologist, and I kept staying longer until I suspected she was trying to make me miss my train, and left on my own.
After two hours’ sleep my alarm went off and I turned the telly on to watch the prime minister resign and Farage walk into what looked like a golf club full of cheering red-faced recruitment consultants wearing too much suit. Business journalists showed the pound crashing. On Facebook, acquaintances were taking it personally, talking about the racist pigs who lived outside of the city, who had ruined the country, from whom we needed to secede, form our own nation, which we would allow Scotland to be part of too.
Emily and I sat on the terrace in the sun with coffees and waited for our platform to be called while we discussed the new world we had woken into. Andrew had been up all night talking to friends on the phone, and now he was writing notes for articles, taking phone calls from radio producers. ‘He lives for these moments,’ she said.
‘For catastrophe.’
‘That’s it. He’s never happier than when he’s appalled by something.’
‘Like his daughter.’ I didn’t mention that Sophie had sent me a text an hour ago, telling me she had a commission for an article she was going to write that day and also an appearance on Radio 4 to talk about how the exit polls showed that the elder generation had betrayed the younger, and what the young needed to do about it now. She hadn’t been to sleep at all, she wrote. She was furiously exhilarated.
It was the worst and best thing that had ever happened to her.
The train was called and we walked through the concourse to our platform.
When we found seats at a table, Emily unzipped her suitcase to find the book she couldn’t find in her handbag. I could smell the fabric softener of her clothes, and I looked with her at the neatly rolled tights, the folded dresses and jumpers packed in around paperbacks and her laptop, the side netting filled with creams and make-up. A woman’s things. How I missed this stuff. I missed Monica and wanted her back. I missed Emily even as I sat beside her. I might have missed her for her generalness as much as her specificity, for the warmth of her body as much as her paraphernalia, for her shape as much as the outline of it. Sometimes, in front of toilet doors I would be unable to work out for a moment which were the men’s and which were the women’s; the stick man could be a stick woman until you added a black triangle, a skirt to make a woman a woman and a man her opposite.
‘Would you like a glass of wine mixed with orange juice, Emily?’ I asked.
‘No, thanks. The same as when you asked if I’d help you drink it when you bought it, and whether I thought you should buy two bottles.’
‘The offer remains open at any time. This is real French Charlemagne. You might not be able to get this stuff soon.’
‘Let’s read for a bit,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’ll go mad if I don’t.’
She read her novel and I tried to read mine. The sun beat through the warehouses and foliage and for whole minutes I would forget myself and trance out before I refreshed the news on my phone, typed an ill-advised reply to one of the London secessionists, who I hated at that moment even more than the Leave voters, who I hated considerably too. I was glad to be travelling away from London that day. The opinion pieces were multiplying already.
‘Would you like a carrot?’ asked Emily. A cool carrot on a summer’s day. The flashing sun and fizzy citrus and rocking on the tracks, the fever of collapse – what I began to feel as the anger left me was euphoria, and I was careful to avoid looking directly at Emily, worried that my face would show her something that could only be read as love, chaotic love, enough to scare her into getting off the train and returning home.
When we stopped at Warrington fourteen men in nearly identical T-shirts boarded, all carrying an open tin of lager. They formed a line throughout the carriage, looking up and down and trying to work out where to sit. On the front of each of their bright-orange T-shirts it said ‘Baz’s Blackpool Stag Do 2016’, and on the back each man had an individual nickname. From our vantage point we could only make out #dangleballs, #shewassixteenhonest!, #fishyfinger and #lukeskywanker.
‘We seem to be surrounded by digital natives,’ said Emily. ‘I think I need an orange juice and Charlemagne.’
I happily poured her one and we kept our heads down while they mooed at each other. ‘Who’s the fitty sitting down?’ said one of them, and Emily groaned.
‘If I say I’m gay can I feel your tits?’ came another disembodied voice.
‘What does that even mean?’ she whispered to me.
‘Don’t try to understand. We get off in five minutes,’ I said.
We ran to change platforms in Preston and had the gratifying sight of seeing the first of their gang arrive at the doors just as they were shutting.
‘Oh, this is wonderful!’ she said as we pulled away. She blew a kiss to the man who had pounded on the door.
‘Hashtag: victory to the fitty sitting down.’
‘Hashtag: what kind of place have you fucking brought me to?’
‘It’s not like that where we are, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Their bodies would never be found if they drew attention to themselves like that where we’re going.’
‘I like the sound of this place,’ she said.
‘Steady on.’
Emily kept her book in her bag, and I finally felt I could ask her about her engagement. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a ring.
She looked down at her left hand. ‘No. God, no. He offered to buy me one but all that money wasted on a pretty “Keep Away” sign, with some gem mined by a modern-day slave in a country torn by civil war? Nah. Anyway, he didn’t propose to me; we proposed to each other.’
‘As it should be.’
‘I don’t know why I’m saying this. It was his idea. I was just very happy about it.’
‘Were you?’
‘I’ve never been happier in my life with someone. I don’t want it to end. It’s nice to know he feels the same way.’
‘So did he get down on one knee?’
‘No! Thank God!’
‘Why thank God?’
‘It would be embarrassing. Is that how you’d propose?’
‘I can’t propose to anyone. I have yet to make my fortune.’
‘It’s not the nineteenth century.’
‘It’s not not the nineteenth century either. Anyway, I probably wouldn’t. Get down on one knee. It’s a bit needy. If you do it in public it’s outright manipulative. Especially if I’d asked your father too.’
‘My father?’
‘I thought we were talking about how I’d propose to you.’
‘Not to me, to one.’
‘To one.’ I looked out of the window.
‘If you asked my dad for permission first, that would be a definite refusal from me. Unless he refused. In which case a definite acceptance.’
‘And where do I find your father? And how do I annoy him?’
‘Oh, would you?’ She rested her hand on my knee for a second and then took it off. ‘Just stand next to him and breathe. Back at my gran’s, in Partick. Just stand next to him and appear cheerful.’
‘Perhaps he’d like me. I get on with most people.’
She looked me up and down. ‘He’d detest you.’
‘What about Andrew? Who would he hate the most?’
‘Andrew.’
‘Why?’
‘He has more money than you. He’s more concentratedly English. I don’t mean English, I mean middle class. I don’t mean middle class, I mean successful. He’s more confident.’
‘You’re mistaking arrogance for confidence.’
‘Hey!’
‘But he does have more money than me. That’s why I need to seek my fortune.’
‘Let me know when you find it, though I’ll certainly be married by then.’
‘Oh, that’s OK,’ I said. ‘You can’t rush success.’
She smiled and shook her head. This wasn’t serious. ‘Any more questions before we move on?’
‘Will you wear a white dress?’
‘I will not.’
‘You have that white dress you wore to your launch party. Perhaps that’s what gave him the idea. You looked very marriable that evening.’
She gave me a look and picked up her book again.
‘We’re just about to pull in,’ I said.
She put her book down and took out her phone and we updated ourselves on the news in stunned silence.
Across the fields, the red tip of Blackpool Tower appeared in the cloudless blue. I pointed it out to Emily.
‘Sorry if it was awkward for you, the other day,’ she said, still looking out of the window. ‘We didn’t mean for you to be there then.’
‘It’s OK. I didn’t mind.’
‘Sophie took it better than I’d expected.’
‘Really?’
‘I imagined it being slightly worse.’
The tower disappeared behind a row of houses.
‘What did you and Sophie do when you left together?’ she asked.
‘Oh, you know.’
‘No?’
‘We went to the pub.’
‘Did you stay long?’
‘No.’
‘And – are you friends?’
‘There are things I like about her.’
‘Which things?’
‘She’s trying: she actually believes she can do something to change the world. When she’s not
insulting me or boasting about her achievements she’s quite funny. She has this idea that everything is a battle – it’s useful to her, it’s how she writes her pieces – but she forgets it after a while. Or she does with me. She doesn’t seem to feel the need to outshine me like she does you.’
‘And you like that about her, do you?’ Emily said, incredulously.
Which stung a little.
*
Sophie’s questions about my relationship with Emily had been more direct.
‘What is it with you two anyway?’ she said, as soon as we’d got into the Uber she’d ordered. ‘Are you fucking?’
‘Do you really think I’d come round for Sunday lunch with her and Andrew if we were having an affair?’
‘You might find it erotic. You might get off on rubbing my dad’s nose in it. In fact you look like just the sort who’d enjoy that.’
The driver glanced behind him.
‘There’s something between you,’ she continued. ‘Those little glances you give each other when you think we’re not watching.’
‘That’s us being satirical when you say something objectionable.’
She didn’t like this. ‘So you feel superior to me, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Only when you say outrageous things.’
‘And what have you two done to be able to judge whether I’m being outrageous or not? I can see it with her: she’s got her books, her prizes – but you? What’ve you done, Paul? What have you achieved?’
‘Not much. But nor have I ever tried to belittle someone because of their lack of achievements. You know, for someone who doesn’t shut up about being a socialist, you sound just like a Tory.’
She breathed in quickly, then smiled. ‘What else is wrong with me?’
‘Oh, Jesus, you’re perfect – there’s nothing wrong with you.’
‘No. What’s wrong with me?’
‘Really?’
‘I want to know.’
‘OK. You talk over people.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You don’t listen. You have rehearsed opinions on things you haven’t read. You’re obsessed with privilege and unaware of how your own privilege makes you think. You’re rude and aggressive. You’re elitist. You’re transparently on the make.’
