Charlotte Street

by Danny Wallace

  I smiled, shook my head.

  ‘Hey, let’s go out!’ she said.

  I was confused.

  ‘We are out.’

  ‘Then let’s go further out.’

  I didn’t know if I was ‘with’ Abbey or not tonight, but I guessed I probably wasn’t, because at one point she greeted another man by kissing him full on the lips.

  We were at The Good Mixer, in Camden, surrounded by snake-hipped hipsters. Already, we’d visited an Indian takeaway on Castlehaven Road because they gave away free Bombay Mix, plus we’d popped in to the Hawley Arms, where we’d seen Nick Grimshaw hunched in a corner animatedly squabbling with a tall man in a silly hat.

  There is something that sounds young, and exciting, and cool, about heading to Camden on a whim. In reality, it makes me very uncomfortable. Safeguards are needed. A sturdy pair of shoes, to navigate through the cricks and cracks of discarded chicken bones underfoot. A look of polite but steely determination to get past the men offering you drugs every six or seven feet, like helpers at a marathon offering cups of water.

  ‘Hashish, mate?’ says the first man.

  ‘Hashish?’ says the second.

  ‘Hash?’ says the third, just in case in the last twelve feet you’ve reconsidered, radically rethought your life and suddenly developed quite a craving.

  ‘Why?’ you want to shout. ‘What makes yours better than his? At least put some effort in! You will never make it onto Dragon’s Den with a pitch like that!’

  I was tired already, and it was only 11.45.

  I knew it was ‘only’ 11.45, because Abbey kept using the word ‘only’ whenever whatever time it was was mentioned. It could ‘only’ be Judgement Day and Abbey would find one last bar for us to go to before we hit the Pearly Gates Arms.

  This, of course, was why I liked her. She reminded me of the way things had been. Before Sarah, even. Time was, I could do all-nighters like Abbey. I kept it going, too, for longer into my twenties than might necessarily have been healthy. It was a way of being footloose, of being fancy-free, in a way the city’s so practised at encouraging.

  So anyway, the guy that Abbey kissed – briefly, I kept telling myself; it was very brief – turned out to be in a band too, and that was when I realised that Abbey probably mainly hung out with boys in bands. I decided to be supercool. I started to use the word ‘man’ again.

  ‘Can I getcha a drink, man?’ I said. In my head, saying ‘getcha’ was cool, but I’d forgotten that the next word was ‘a’, so saying ‘getcha a’ was pretty cumbersome and made me sound like perhaps I had an impediment of some kind.

  ‘I’m cool,’ said the boy, and that was annoying, because he was right.

  ‘Back in a mo,’ said Abbey.

  I looked around and once more felt very old indeed. There were skinny jeans and skinny ties and tight-fitting tees and military boots and porkpie hats and lots of swaying and stumbling and slurring around the dimly-lit pool table. With Abbey gone, I was hit by a wave of self-consciousness. I thought about what I was wearing. Jeans, so that was okay, but they weren’t jeans like these people were wearing. I wouldn’t know where to buy jeans like these people were wearing. I had a shirt I’d seen someone in GQ put on, and some Converse, but here I stuck out like a sore thumb. How old were these people? Twenty? Twenty-one? Any one of these people could have been my pupils. Any one of them might right now have been thinking: is that sir? Is that sir-in-his-thirties sir? Here in the Good Mixer? Walking amongst us?

  ‘What’s the name of your band?’ I asked the boy, and he barely looked at me, maybe in case he caught whatever it was I’d caught that made you old, and he mumbled, ‘Bearpit Liars.’

  ‘Good name,’ I said, and he just nodded, then wandered off.

  And then:

  ‘Ta-dah!’

  It was Abbey. She was back. But she wasn’t wearing her Bowie T-shirt anymore.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked, shocked.

  ‘Stole it,’ she said.

  ‘You stole that T-shirt? When?’

  ‘When I went to the toilet at the restaurant. I think it makes me look very professional.’

  I read the T-shirt again.

  A magical slice of pizza heaven! – Jason Priestley, London Now!

  ‘Well, it makes you look professional in the sense that it makes you look like you work at Abrizzi’s.’

  ‘Well, I have heard excellent things about their pizzas,’ she said. ‘Hey, where did Jay go?’

  ‘Jay? Jay who you … kissed?’

  Ah, Jay. You win. Looks like I’ll be leaving soon.

  ‘Relax,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably kiss you at some point.’

  Or maybe I’ll stay a little longer.

  ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ she said.

  I don’t know who goes for walks after midnight in Camden. Literally no one in the history of Camden or its neighbouring boroughs has thought going for a walk after midnight down by the lock is a good idea. Plus, I feel I have made my own thoughts on walking around Camden at night quite clear, but obviously I hadn’t made them clear enough to Abbey, because she seemed deadset on walking, not just through Camden, but right down by the houseboats, lit by candles and decorated by cans, under blinking, jittery, not-at-all-reliable streetlights.

  But when a girl has said she might at some point kiss you, you sort of agree to a lot of things. Even if they are by a canal.

  We walked a little further, past two dark shapes I was certain were muggers but turned out to be a nervous man and a little dog.

  ‘So what kind was it?’ asked Abbey. ‘The camera you found?’

  I smiled. The camera again. Maybe she had a thing for cameras.

  ‘It was a disposable.’

  ‘Cooool,’ said Abbey. ‘So old-school. Something about them, though. It’s like instant nostalgia. Like, those photos mean something because they were thought about, then taken. Not like the billion you end up with after a night out on your phone or whatever. Those photos are just wallpaper. Disposable is permanent.’

  ‘You should meet my flatmate. You’d get on.’

  ‘And the girl? What’s happening with her?’

  I frowned.

  ‘How did you know there was a girl?’

  ‘Well, when you said she was pregnant I kind of assumed.’

  ‘Oh. That girl. The ex girl.’

  ‘You’re getting over her.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because she wasn’t the first girl you thought of. She was the second girl you thought of. One day she’ll be the third and then you won’t even think of her at all.’

  I kicked at some leaves.

  ‘Yeah, it’s just … you know. When we broke up, it—’

  ‘How did you break up?’

  And as we sat down on a bench, I started to tell Abbey about it, and she stared out at the canal, and made the appropriate noises, and asked the right questions, and then I prepared myself to tell her the one thing that I’ve been avoiding telling you up until now.

  Because we’ve been getting on, I feel, you and me. We had a rocky start where maybe I was a bit grumpy, but you know I had my reasons, and a lot of the time that was down to the Jezynowka, and now, just as we’re starting to properly click, I end up on a bench with an exciting girl and I get to the bit where I know you’re not going to like me any more.

  And when I told her, she looked at me with pity in her eyes, but it was just so hard to tell who that pity was for.

  THIRTEEN

  Or ‘Who Said The World Was Fair?’

  ‘Jesus, Jason, what’s wrong?’

  I hadn’t known where to go so I’d come here.

  ‘In, come in,’ she says, and I push past her in the narrow, dim doorway of the flat on Blackstock Road it’d taken so long to find in the dark.

  ‘Where’s your flatmate?’ I say, noticing the Vietnamese for one, the single wine glass, the TV tuned to the news at ten.

  ‘I don’t have one?’ she says, like a
question, and for some reason I’m impressed, like she’s grown up without me noticing, but we’re both in our thirties and this is really the least we can expect by now.

  ‘Do you want wine?’ she says, as I lean away from her, suddenly paranoid she’ll smell the liquor on my breath. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  My eyes are glassy, maybe from the booze or the cold or the crying and I’m shaking slightly from the injustice of it all, the anger, and the sleet.

  ‘You’re freezing,’ she says. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I think I’m breaking down,’ I say, as honestly as I can, my smile a fake and my eyes welling up, and this has been a day of honesty all round. ‘I think I’m breaking down and I don’t know how to cope.’

  And then it all comes out, and I can tell there are heavy, jagged, heaving sobs just below the surface, and she can tell too because she treats me with kid gloves and asks me if I want a baked potato or something, and this small kindness so innocently put near brings me to my knees.

  I want the world back to where it was, before all this kicked off, before all the gin and whatever the opposite of a tonic is, but also I want to be treated like this, like she’s treating me, not told I have to grow up or get past it or sort my life out.

  Because that wasn’t fair. I didn’t ask for this to happen, I don’t know why it’s affected me the way it has, but it has, and why am I the only one who gets it?

  But I’m not, am I? Because she gets it. Maybe because it’s new, maybe because she doesn’t have to deal with it day in and day out, but finally I feel I’m talking to someone who cares, someone who can see a different future for me, away from St John’s and Dylan and despair.

  You cared, Sarah, but why did that have to stop so suddenly? Who turned that tap off? Who’s ever been told they have to grow up and get on with their life and not felt patronised and misunderstood?

  And I grab a tumbler and pour myself a giant glass of wine and she turns the heating up just for me, which again breaks my heart it’s so nice, and I tell all, and she gets it, and soon it’s past midnight and she finds the whisky she forgot to give her dad for Christmas, and this is all so warming, so nourishing, so nurturing, and then my hand finds that it’s nearer her leg than it should be and quietly I realise what a beautiful person she’s always been, what a great friend, how right this all seems.

  I leaned against the kitchen counter and immediately jolted away. I thought I’d just crushed a fly under the palm of my hand but it was only one of Dev’s Sugar Puffs.

  I laid it on the side of the sink, knowing he’d probably come looking for it later.

  It had been a long night, and as the kettle clicked off and I reached for the teabags I thought about it some more.

  It had been good to talk. She was a good listener.

  And then I realised I was a terrible listener, as I’d forgotten whether she wanted sugar or not.

  ‘No, ta!’ she called out, from the bedroom, and perhaps a fifth of a nanosecond later Dev’s door shot open and his head popped out, like a meerkat who might just have heard a lion.

  ‘What was that?’ he mouthed.

  ‘That was Abbey,’ I mouthed back, and once the shock had dissipated he padded over to me in his pants.

  ‘That is terrific news,’ he said quietly. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ I said, and he made he face which implied he wished I hadn’t told him that.

  And nothing had happened. There had been no kiss. I got the feeling lots of boys hadn’t kissed Abbey.

  ‘We going out for breakfast, your treat?’ he said. ‘Because I’ve got something to tell you if we are.’

  In the bedroom, my pillow folded and folded again behind her, and wearing a T-shirt she’d found on my floor, Abbey tapped about on the laptop.

  ‘Your Facebook was still open,’ she said, sympathetically, pointing at the screen. ‘Do you want to know?’

  ‘Know what?’ I said, laying her tea down on the floor.

  ‘“Sarah is …’” she said, willing me to finish the status update myself. I shrugged.

  ‘“… trying on dresses”.’

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just shrugged again.

  Wedding dresses? Maternity dresses? Her status updates gave me information I didn’t want and questions I couldn’t answer.

  For some reason I thought of Mum. She took our break-up badly. She’d love to have been helping Sarah now, advising on a wedding dress, or helping select maternity dresses, planning for the day she became a mother-in-law and a grandmother again. Stephen had married Amy, and they Skyped when they could, but I knew Mum had had plans for me, too.

  I guess parents are the hidden victims of a break-up. They watch their futures cancelled, their wedding speeches disappear, their walks in the parks with the buggy to feed the ducks or have a picnic slide away thanks to one argument, or one misdeed, or one selfish act. And then they’re forced to reset, and hope that in another month or another year or whenever you can, you’ll meet someone and they can start to secretly hope and plan again. In the meantime, they stick by your side, because you’re on their team, but the hope they had is gone, replaced by Billy Elliot or awkward dinners for three.

  ‘Oh, Jason,’ my mum had said, sadly, on the phone, the night I told her. ‘What now? What happens now?’

  It was all thanks to that stupid thing, just a stupid thing, but a thing nevertheless. And if I were a smaller man, I would blame it on the kid, a thuggish, bullish, angry kid at school. Racist, of course, but with no idea why, and angry at the world, but essentially nothing more than another mugger-in-waiting. And I sound bitter here, and I sound snobby again, but I ask you, how could I not, when Dylan did what he did? And when he did, I had to get out. I didn’t do this lightly, and no matter what Sarah will tell you, I didn’t take this decision quickly. She didn’t get it. I couldn’t believe it. This girl I’d been with for so long, she just didn’t get it.

  One day Dylan decided he wanted to kill a teacher.

  I know – it sounds dramatic. But I know this because that’s what the police reports said. He didn’t plan to; he’d never seemed to want to before; he just decided. And so he’d gone home one lunchtime, to the estate opposite St John’s, overlooking the courtyard, and with his mate Spencer Gray he’d loaded up his brother’s air rifle and taken aim at the classroom nearest the front, where I happened to be teaching year nine what a spinning jenny was.

  It was just a flash at first. Just a tiny something that caught my eye, and the lightest of cracks. I’d carried on, but there it was again, like a firefly or the smallest, fastest shooting star across the room, in front of the posters about crop rotation and fallow fields.

  I glanced at the window, saw the hole – small and round and perfect – and at first I remember thinking someone must’ve had a peashooter, but peas don’t go through glass, and kids haven’t used peashooters since the Beano, and then, though I couldn’t quite believe it, I started to realise what was happening.

  Forty policemen had turned up in the end. The kids had loved it, their faces pressed up against the glass, checking out the guns and body armour like it was News 24 they were watching, not real life on a grey north London afternoon. I’d managed to get everyone out, quietly and sensibly, and really, he’d never had any chance of hurting anyone, not with an air rifle that size, but nevertheless it was the intent, the thought, the sadness, the fury and the hate that had the effect on me, and I went home that night and after I’d had my Findus Crispy Pancakes and a bottle of Rioja it hit me. And I cried. And not just cried, but bawled like a baby, until I shook, and spluttered, and couldn’t catch my breath again.

  Sarah had been so sympathetic at first, and full of warmth. She’d arranged the rest of the week off work, and I took a few days, too, but the shock ate up the hours before I knew where they’d gone. I became guarded and suspicious and nervous. I wanted to stay in, safe, soothed by the sounds of Come Dine with Me or Watchdog or anything that represented norma
lity. After a while, perhaps naturally, Sarah became less sympathetic.

  ‘For God’s sake, he’s just a kid,’ she’d said one evening, as we prepared to argue for the third or fourth or fifth time that day. ‘He didn’t know what he was doing! It was just some tiny air rifle!’

  I can see her frustrations now. I couldn’t at the time. I was so engulfed in myself, in me the victim. And maybe she was just trying to do what her mother was always suggesting: get me to snap out of it. But you can’t just snap out of something like that. I was in charge that day. I was the teacher Dylan had chosen. Yes, only because I happened to be in that room opposite that estate at that time, but it was precisely the randomness that scared me so, and proved the world to be more dangerous than I’d thought.

  And I was angry. I was angry at Dylan, angry at the world, angry at Sarah for her disappointment in me as a man, whether that was true or not. The fact is, my life changed when Dylan cocked that rifle. I guess in some ways, he did kill a teacher that day. He certainly killed a relationship.

  But no.

  No, I’ll take the blame for that one.

  ‘So,’ said Abbey, interrupting my thoughts, ‘I deleted her.’

  ‘Hmm?’ I said.

  ‘I deleted her. It’s not fair of her. She knows you can read this stuff and it must hurt, so I deleted her from your whole social network.’

  I smiled, thinking she was joking, because she did those little finger quotes when she said ‘social network’, but she just took a sip of her tea and carried on clicking around.

  ‘You … sorry, you did what?’

  She looked up at me, innocently, and shrugged.

  ‘It’s for the best. Trust me.’

  Trust her? I hardly knew her.

  ‘Abbey, why the hell would you do that?’

  I was angry now.

  ‘You know nothing about me, not really. How can I trust you on this? You never met Sarah, you don’t know what you’re on about, and now you come round and you delete her? She’ll know! She’ll see I’ve deleted her!’