by Luke Brown
‘Why don’t you come back?’ I asked him. The party was fun and I couldn’t see why we’d want to leave so early. And I know too that he would have been very much up for it if I had proposed we lie around together on a bed with a woman he’d been kissing all day. He admitted as much when I challenged him on this.
Peter certainly puts on the appearance of being an open-minded boy, but in principle is not the same as in practice. Women friends of mine who have had threesomes – all of them with two women and one man – have had similar scruples, but they’ve pushed past them. I don’t blame Peter for having scruples. I don’t want him to do anything he doesn’t want to. No one has the right to do that to anyone, and the fact that it is us women being pressured most of the time doesn’t give us permission to act like the men who pressure women to do things we don’t want to. But isn’t it telling how much more willing we are to go along with men’s fantasies, and how less willing they are to go along with ours? How much of this is the way we have been conditioned by the patriarchy to be obedient and compliant? Are we just much sexier than men, less vanilla, is it just easier to find each other attractive, to want to cooperate? Or have men tricked us into believing this for their own selfish interest?
I think this last question was running through my mind when I told him I didn’t mind if he left but I was going to stay. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’m going.’ He took a long time to go, standing at the door of the flat and looking at me. Then he changed his mind and came back. For a little bit. A very small amount of time. Then he left, and we haven’t spoken since.
I strode up Gower Street towards the campus where Andrew worked, light on my feet and joyful in the way my disappointment was unhinging me. I was very late back to work and did not care. Term might not have been fully under way but there were a lot of young people with backpacks looking up at the buildings around us in the way that newcomers to the city do. You could have such a fine time in these streets when the other people were in their offices.
I had only ever walked past the courtyard of the campus at a clip, seen it out of the corner of my eye, but it made a different impression when you turned into it and looked up at the grand roof on its white stone pillars. It was a long way from the college on the Elephant and Castle roundabout. I sat on a bench and took it in.
But enough of that. When I stood up I asked a woman if she knew where the History department was, and she directed me out onto Gordon Square. It was only a few doors down from Virginia’s house, from John Maynard’s. I walked past the reception and smiled and headed up some stairs. No one I passed in the corridor looked at me like I didn’t belong.
Eventually I found Andrew Lancaster’s office. Nothing stuck to his door but his name and one piece of paper which listed one office hour. I knocked. Nothing. I turned the door handle and it opened. I looked up and down the corridor then stepped in, closing the door behind me. It was a big room, with tables pushed together with enough chairs around them to accommodate a seminar group. Two walls were completely covered with books, and outside his window was a big oak tree, and beyond that was Gordon Square. The light of his computer tower was flickering at his desk by the window. I strummed his keyboard and his screen turned on. Password required. I typed ‘EmilyNardini1981’ and other variations, before it told me I needed to wait half an hour to try again. His desk was stacked with books and scribbled notes. I read the notes. They were not salacious. And leaning against his monitor was a photo of Emily, looking up from an outdoor café table somewhere – Paris? – a mock-suspicious look, coquettish and sceptical, the why-do-I-love-you? look.
I took the photo and put it inside my jacket pocket. Then I opened the door, checked the corridor and left without anyone seeing me. Rather than go back the way I had come, I carried on up the corridor, reading about lecturers’ niche interests on the posters on their doors. One room, with a glass window, was labelled as the PhD study room. I looked through the window and saw two men and a woman working at computers. The woman was Andrew’s student, the one with whom he definitely wasn’t having an affair. I opened the door and everyone looked up.
‘Hi,’ I said to her. ‘Chloe, isn’t it?’
‘Er. Hi?’
‘I’m Paul. Andrew’s friend. We had dinner that time.’
‘Oh, yes. You left abruptly with Emily.’
‘Yes.’
She was looking at me warily, but there was curiosity mixed in with her distrust.
‘You haven’t seen him, have you? I’ve just tried his office but he’s not there.’
‘No. I haven’t seen him yet today.’ Her mouth was beginning to smile.
‘Yet. OK. Well, if you do see him, let him know I was looking for him, won’t you?’
‘Sure. Shall I tell him what you want with him?’
‘No. Unless you have time for a coffee? I could explain better then.’
She started by shaking her head. ‘Oh, no, no. Oh, I’m— OK,’ she said. ‘Sure. OK. Yes.’
Twenty
‘When are you happiest?’ you ask.
‘I don’t know. A good day in the shop, talking to customers. Staying at home with a book. Flirting with someone at the bar. Heading out with a wallet full of twenties and a fully charged phone.’
‘You almost sounded wholesome for a second there.’
‘I’m still unconvinced that any of those activities are any more wholesome than the others.’
‘Really?’
‘What’s wrong with getting inebriated and going to bed with strangers? Surely it’s wonderful, a reason to be alive.’
‘There are consequences though, aren’t there?’
‘I know. But I’m not cut out to be wholesome.’
‘Everyone can be as wholesome as they want to be.’
‘You sound very American there.’
‘And you sound very British.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Glib, superior, dodging away from analysis, unwilling to focus on self-improvement.’
‘Happiest in the past.’
‘Unable to be happy in the future.’
‘You think?’
‘It looks that way. But you specifically – I think you might be able to be happy.’
‘Great! How do I do it?’
‘Change the way you live your life.’
‘Oh, right. Well. What a con. It’s like the last noble truth of Buddhism – one defeats sorrow by… following the twelvefold path of Enlightenment. You think you’ve finished and you’ve got a list of loads more to do.’
‘I didn’t know you’d studied Buddhism, Paul.’
‘That was when I stopped. Now you’re doing that straight face again you do when you’re secretly laughing at me. Stop it.’
*
On my last day Helen had ordered me a leaving cake decorated with a pair of scissors, and the cake-makers seemed to have assumed that I was a hairdresser; we all gathered around the box as Helen opened it to reveal something the shape of a record deck smothered in glittery icing, topped not only with a pair of scissors, but a to-scale sculpture in marzipan of a pair of hair straighteners, and a comb made from black icing.
‘Can you eat glitter?’ asked Helen.
‘You never told me you were so gay, Paul,’ said Leo.
‘I’m just not into men who look like you.’
‘Have you read Sophie Lancaster’s last column?’ asked Helen.
‘That’s not me she’s referring to,’ I said, but Leo was already on his phone looking for it.
Helen had congratulated me cautiously when I told her I was leaving, as if I was playing some kind of prank. She repeated ‘digital marketing’ in the same tone she might have ‘the Catholic priesthood’. Leo quoted Bill Hicks and advised me to think again, or to kill myself. There was no rationalising what I would do: I would be one of Satan’s little helpers.
‘Trying to persuade people to buy books? Literary fiction? Critiques of neo-liberalism?’
‘I’m joking. A
nd wow. It’s weird hearing the word neoliberalism come out of your mouth.’
‘I’ve never really got used to it coming out of anyone’s mouth.’
‘It has a specific meaning, you know?’
‘Yeah, and… seven syllables.’
‘You won’t be doing that stuff, anyway. You’ll be making book trailers for Jeffrey Archer.’
‘What’s a book trailer?’
‘How did you get this job again?’
‘I needed it.’
Which wasn’t strictly true. Helen had offered to find me more shifts when I’d told her that the reason I was leaving was so I could get a mortgage. After a few months my bank statements together with our deposit might have looked plausible to moneylenders. But I didn’t want to wait. I was scared they would change their mind, that there had been a mistake. The new job clarified things neatly for the lenders, and now I was this far stepped in shit, it was easiest to buy a new pair of shoes.
*
Towards the end of the day I began to say hello to a suspicious number of my friends who were converging on the shop.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked Helen.
‘Everyone has come to enjoy their last glimpse of one of the strangest characters this shop has seen.’
‘I see what’s happening here,’ I said.
‘Good. In that case it won’t ruin the surprise if you help Leo carry up the Prosecco and the ice bucket. We bought quite a lot, as it’s for you.’
*
A lot of my friends and favourite customers were there. No Jonathan, who had disappeared from my life again. But Mary was there with Nathan, and I hadn’t ever seen Nathan looking so happy. She’d told me the night before that she’d found a place in Clapton to move into; Nathan was going to help her move.
Helen was hassling me to give a speech when I felt hands on my waist, and I turned to see Sophie, smiling ruefully up at me.
‘You,’ I said.
‘Me,’ she said.
‘Are you Sophie Lancaster?’ asked Leo. ‘I’m a big fan of your column.’
‘Are you? I thought it was mostly women who read it.’
‘Oh, no, of course not. Not all men are uninterested in the perspectives of women.’
I thought I might be sick.
Sophie was coughing on her prosecco. ‘That’s a… refreshing attitude,’ she said, when she had recovered.
‘Do you mind if I give you a proof copy of my novel? Penguin are publishing it in January?’ said Leo.
I thought I might be violently sick.
‘Thank you,’ she said, glancing at me. ‘I’d love one.’
Leo looked at me too, then back to her. ‘Let me go and fetch you one. They’ve really pushed the boat out. Limited-edition hardbacks.’
‘Poor guy. I expect it’s going to be a huge flop,’ I said, when he had gone away.
‘Don’t be bitter, Paul.’
‘If you read the thing and like it and express that opinion in public, you will never hear from me again.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind in case it comes in handy.’
‘It’s nice to speak to you, though,’ I said, ‘in spite of that job you did on me in your article.’
‘It was you not doing a job on him, as I remember.’
‘There is a difference between being selfish and not wanting to give a man I’d just met a blow job.’
‘Not according to most of you men.’
‘You meet too many of the wrong sort. Like that phoney who’ll be back in a minute. I might write a book for women about how to spot awful men, seeing as a lot of you don’t seem very good at it. Paul has been a dickhead all his life. Join him as he reveals all the tricks that dickheads use to pretend they’re not dickheads. I have the shoutline already: It takes a wanker to know a wanker.’
‘You’re not so bad,’ she said. ‘I still think you stormed out earlier than you needed to from that party, but I’m sorry. It was an awful scene. I should have left with you. I was just – I had it in my head that I was doing the right thing, that the right thing is difficult sometimes, antithetical, that the right thing involves hurting people. It would be easier just to be nice, but there’s something larger at stake.’
‘That, and you were high and horny and fancied him.’
‘Well, that too. But if I had the choice again, I would leave with you.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Though think of the fun we could have—’
‘Oh, look – it’s your dad.’
Andrew and Emily were walking in the door at the front of the shop. Andrew made himself smile at me and walked over to us with his hand on the small of his faithless fiancée’s back. He nodded at me then turned to his daughter.
‘Hello, Sophie! You’ve been very busy in print.’
‘So’ve you, Dad.’
He moved forwards and kissed her, then he held out his hand to me. I took it, and leaned over to kiss Emily too.
‘Are you well, Paul?’ he said, squinting a little.
‘I’m well,’ I said.
Helen came over, tapped Emily on the shoulder and asked her to sign some stock. That left Sophie and me alone with her father.
‘How are you, darling?’ he said.
‘I told you, I’m fine,’ I said.
Both of them looked at me and shook their heads. Leo strode towards us, brandishing his book and beaming.
‘I just need to use the toilet,’ I said, and walked off.
*
I had never been so pleased to see Amy as when I returned to the shop floor. She was frowning, looking in the direction of Sophie and Leo.
‘Thank God I’ve found you,’ we said simultaneously. ‘Thanks for coming,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure I would have, if I’d known that she would be here. I thought that was over.’
‘She’s all right.’
‘You seem committed to deceiving yourself about that.’
‘Honestly, she can be quite lovely. It’s just not her official brand. And don’t worry. It’s over between us. Almost certainly.’
‘What happened? And why would you want to be with someone whose best quality is being less obnoxious than she seems? Watch out: she’s spotted us.’
She had. She was looking over Leo’s book while he talked to her. I watched her put her hand on his arm.
‘She’s flirting with him because I’m watching,’ I said. ‘The man is unfanciable. It’s sad, really.’
‘Is he unfanciable?’ said Amy.
‘Don’t say things like that. I can’t afford to fall out with you for good too.’
‘Let’s change the subject then. Have you thought any more about what we might do to mark Mum’s first anniversary?’
‘I haven’t. I mean, I have, but I haven’t thought of anything good.’
‘Plant a tree?’
‘Where? We haven’t got anywhere to plant a tree.’
‘OK, not a fucking tree then. I know I’m not the only one who cares about this, so why are you pretending not to?
‘I’m not. I care. I’m sorry. I’ll think harder about it.’
‘You have to.’ She looked around her at the crowded room. ‘Are you OK? About leaving here? You’ve been here forever.’
‘I have no idea how I am. Are you OK? How are you feeling?’
‘I have no idea how I am. I’m scared.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
‘At least you can have a drink.’
‘I’m going to have twenty.’
‘Mine and yours?’
‘You can always rely on me to pick up the slack, Amy.’
‘What a lucky sister I am.’
‘I’m a lucky brother. I mean that, seriously. Thanks for coming.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Don’t be soppy.’
‘Are you still in touch with Ben?’
‘Yeah. I was going to tell you. He came to the last scan and now I’ve asked him to be the birth partner. He’s going to come up for some NC
T stuff I’ve signed up for.’
‘Great.’
‘You’re not put out? I took your offer seriously, you know?’
‘I’m not the dad. Of course I’m not put out. I’m relieved.’
‘It would be weird having you in there.’
‘You’re telling me. Thank God for Ben. But I’ll come over, stay over, whenever you want me. You can rely on me.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘We’ll see.’
*
I approached Andrew later, after I’d had a few drinks and said goodbye to Amy.
‘Would you like a piece of hairdresser cake?’ I asked.
‘No, thank you. I hear you came looking for me in my office.’
‘Oh, yeah. I wanted to clear the air.’
‘OK.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘The air was clear, as far as I’m concerned. I explained to you what I had noticed and you reacted to it angrily. Perhaps reasonably. I’m sorry if I got you wrong.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘I wasn’t worrying about it.’ He looked over to his daughter who was laughing at something Leo had just told her. ‘Sophie says you’re not together now.’
‘We were never really together.’
‘That’s what she said. When you came looking for me, did you go into my room, by any chance?’
‘No, I just knocked on the door.’
‘Because I’ve noticed something’s missing.’
‘Do you not lock your door?’
‘I do now. How was your coffee with Chloe?’
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he said.
‘What did she say to you about it?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘She said she thought you were just being friendly.’
‘I am friendly.’
‘Some might say over-friendly.’
‘Are you looking forward to your wedding?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
I thought I might be about to tell him something. Then Leo came over to demand I made a speech.
