by Kate Spicer
I feel alone in my stupidity. But I am not alone.
I’d read research that analysed wastewater in major European cities. London’s urine showed by far the highest midweek cocaine usage. In 2016 nearly a gram per 1,000 people. Ballpark, there are around 10,000 others out there messing up the rest of their week. This is one of the most soothing statistical life rafts to cling on to for any person rapidly coming down in the back of a London taxi at dawn.
There aren’t any upsides to this situation.
I wind down the window as the cab grumbles past Hyde Park on Bayswater Road. At this time of the morning there are a few people out, the joggers, dog walkers and jet-lagged. I envy them being on the right side of dawn. Wedging myself tightly against the window, I look out and breathe in the green-scented air blowing off the park. What goes up must come down, ‘… Up by two p.m.: work ‘til eight …’
Charlie likes to be in bed by nine because he has a proper job and he loves it. Early to bed, early to rise. If my calculations are correct, I will have just missed him and his sober judgement. I clank slowly up the metal steps to our first-floor flat and open the door on quiet air hanging with the smell of supper. Sausages. There are pigletty snoring sounds up above. The lazy bugger is having a lie-in. It’s just after six. He has not got up for work as early as I hoped. I undress where I stand, leaving a heap of fag-scented clothes and knickers sunny side up on the kitchen floor. Using hands and feet, I climb the steep narrow stairs to our loft bedroom and lurch in a drunken sham creep across the room.
‘Mmn time i’it?’ His voice muffled with sleep and duvet. I say nothing. More awake now, he says, disgusted, ‘Urgh, you stink.’
I want to tell him it’s three a.m. There’s such a difference between six a.m. and three. But there it goes. The infuriating tinkling scales of misery. All two of us know the time now: it is 6.07a.m. The time Charlie gets up, except for those days when he gets up at 5.15 to go to the gym or at 4 to catch the first flight to Frankfurt.
‘Soweeee,’ I say, slipping into bed.
‘Loser,’ he mumbles.
Assuming the recovery position, ‘I know.’
Over the years Charlie got used to me crashing up the white wooden stairs at dawn. Every so often, I’d come staggering in breathing wine fumes to find him brushing down his crisp suit, polishing his Italian loafers and ramping up the rage for a day at the office.
Whatever mood he was in when he left the flat, always before seven a.m., often six, his last act was squirting himself a halo of gentleman’s fragrance by an old French perfumier. He haunted every room he entered with the smell of creamy leather, lavender and Amalfi lemons. No matter how badly we were getting on the one thing I could reliably love was that smell. I’m not sure what he could reliably love about me. For a man with a serious job, he tolerated my rampages with mostly uncommon patience.
On this particular dawn sleep doesn’t come easy and I have to go back downstairs and climb on the kitchen counter to get at the stash of hard booze on top of the fridge.
‘The car’s on a yellow line,’ he calls from the sink, where he is performing his final ablution, that spritz of the £200 cologne. ‘Can you manage to move it before eight thirty?’ He comes out, looks at me and turns back to the mirror, shaking his head and mumbling, ‘Stupid question. I suggest you put the lid back on the tequila and go to bed, Kate.’
Turning on his leather-soled Ferragamo loafers he leaves without looking back at me standing several feet above him, naked, on the kitchen counter, one elbow on top of the fridge and an eggcup of booze in my hand. ‘sssmezcal acshly.’
The kitchen door slams, leaving me alone with the odour of sausages, Amalfi lemons and his moral superiority. I do feel a touch better now. I’m home.
My more extreme nocturnal habits didn’t make our relationship easy. While I was frolicking in the starry gutters of London town Charlie provided a stable structure for me to hang my life around. Our relationship was an experiment in opposites that always threatened to implode but, miraculously, never quite did. Until him my love life was a steady cycle of relationships formed in sexual ecstasy and doomed to last no longer than the 18 months to two years until the bonding hormone oxytocin runs out, when your hormone bank is bled dry of lust and the scales fall from your eyes once blinded by love. Reality and relationships had never ever worked for me, until Charlie.
When Charlie appeared on the cusp of my forties, I was nobly thinking I was ‘post-men’ and wondering how to pull off this modern spinster business with aplomb. I was lying on the sofa pretending to be interested in an election debate on the television while scrolling through Twitter, where everyone was trying to make clever jokes about #election2010. I tried to focus on the telly because engaging with it, watching Newsnight, reading the Financial Times and being serious, I reasoned, would help me raise my working game above the ridiculous norm, like my most recent piece for Esquire: ‘I Took A Walk-On Role in a Porn Movie.’
My eyes kept flitting back to the screen of my worn BlackBerry. Ping, a notification came up from someone I didn’t know: ‘Thought your walk-on part in a porn movie story was very funny.’ We tweeted throughout the debate until I learned how close he lived to me and he suggested we meet for a drink at Julie’s, a restaurant round the corner. Nah. You’re all right, I said. Stalker alert!
Another week, another election debate, he pinged me again. I’ve admitted I’m bored of politics this time and within ten minutes I’m cycling to Julie’s. If nothing else, he could stand me a couple of their overpriced gins.
As I walked in I spotted a guy sitting in the window with large blond swishy hair, he is bellowing at the lady bartender. His belly rolls over his boot-cut jeans, which last fitted him in the eighties. He is shout-talking in a posh voice – the worst shouting voice of all. Jesus. This was the guy off Twitter. At the bar, I ordered a gin for my trouble. I’d sink it and dash back home for homeopathic minutes of Newsnight.
‘Kate?’ Right there, less than a foot from me at the bar, was a tall man with short dark hair, big ridiculously clear white eyes and clean fresh skin, wearing a pair of spanking new cream Converse and dark blue raw denim Edwin jeans. Very together-looking, very much not the dickhead bellowing over there. ‘Charlie.’ He stuck out a hand. ‘From Twitter?’
This changed things. Within a few sips of the gin, it was apparent I had myself a tall single male with no immediate evidence of: addiction issues, a flotilla of exes, a beer gut, hair loss or insolvency. There were single men around but most of the decent available ones were serial modelisers and didn’t want to commit to an old crone of 40 like me. These guys were constantly on the hunt for a hot trophy girlfriend, with the emphasis on girl. A decent human male interested in an actual relationship with a normal 40-year-old woman who doesn’t look like Elle MacPherson, that’s incredibly rare. What was wrong with him?
We both laughed at the bellyaching arrogance of Lady Di hair over by the window. ‘I thought he was you,’ I said.
‘No, sorry. Unfortunately, I am me,’ he said.
I’d struck gold without suffering so much as a blow-dry. When we started spending the night together, I found it so sexy the way he woke up, neatly fucked me and then set about costuming himself for a job in the City where he did something sensible to do with deals. After he left, fragrant and sharp, I would spread myself wide across his white sheets and have another hour or three of sleep.
There were problems, there always are in relationships. The big one was that despite being six years younger than me, Charlie was a sensible grown-up and I wasn’t. The messy me slugging mescal from an eggcup this morning was far cleaner and tidier than the one he’d met six years ago. Still, I struggled to keep up with his high standards, or, more to the point, I didn’t want to. On Saturday mornings he got up and did stuff, immediately, even if he had a hangover. He never idled or loafed. Dilettante trust-fund kids disgusted him, whereas I thought they had the best life.
Somehow he managed to put up with an id
le, permanently almost-broke, girlfriend. And somehow I managed to put up with a turbocharged, workaholic boyfriend. Occasionally we even had fun. Having motored through enough relationships to last some women several lifetimes, I knew this was as good as it got – even though it was a royal pain in the arse sometimes.
With only the 1,000 words to get up for, which I make feeble attempts to ‘think about’ as my spooling mind wrestles with the hangover, it is afternoon by the time I finally haul my stinking carcass from the bed. In that time I hadn’t only slept, I’d made three cups of tea, and eaten one piece of toast and two bags of Quavers.
Under the duvet, in between dribbling, coma-like bouts of sleep, I sent Charlie busy texts full of lies suggesting a productive, if hungover, day. ‘At market want anything’, adding a green puking emoji for truthiness. I’d given up on filing the copy on time and set the alarm for 4 p.m., when I’d need to start pulling the domestic situation together if I didn’t want to piss my hard-working boyfriend off.
Three or four days of half a life lie ahead, feeling emotionally low and uncomfortably numb. That’s a drug hangover for you. What goes up must come down.
All I need now is strong caffeine. Time to get up and soldier on.
With porridge-coloured walls and a dark concrete floor, Coffee Plant on Portobello Road functions like a grim needle exchange for discerning caffeine addicts. In fact, that’s pretty much what it is. In the mornings its loo is always busy with the motions of recently stimulated middle-aged bowels. They sell good coffee, a lot of it: if you count the ‘Gershon therapeutic roast’, which is a green bean used for enemas and colonics, that’s 27 different types of bean behind the wooden counter.
I lock my bike to its own wheel and lean it against the wall outside. A small girl is waddling along behind her mother very slowly and I walk in front and through the heavy glass door but I do not hold it for them. The door closes on the child’s face. The woman comes in after me and gets right up in my face with a righteous form of indignant maternal fury. ‘You knew, you knew, you knew she was there.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ The emphasis on the so doesn’t come out quite right. I sound a bitch. ‘I just assumed you’d get the door for your own child. Is she OK?’
A squirm of shame runs through me. Had I known? Did I feel annoyed by being co-opted into plodding adoring reverence of this small child? Yes, I need coffee, but did I need to dash through the door so fast – after all one could hardly describe my day as ‘busy’. The scene in the coffee shop can be fractious sometimes, over-attentive parents, kids running up and down screaming, around recovering addicts from the Salvation Army’s AA and NA meetings over the road. It’s an all-human-life place. I love it.
The incident stirs the dark matter I have been consciously pressing into a corner of my body for the last ten years or so of my life since my friends started breeding. I’d been at the fair a few weeks ago with a friend who was having IVF.
I was trying to persuade her to go on a scary ride but she was worried about the IVF. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll shake the eggs up, make them more vital,’ I said.
When we were on the ride with my IVF friend looking on, her eggs calm and restful, my other friend said, ‘You know, Kate, that was some harsh banter. It was too harsh.’
It’s like I’ve shut that side of myself down. I don’t even know how I feel about it. What’s the point of pining and grieving over a life that never lived inside you. Just get on with it. Soldier on. But there’s a fractious, almost violent boredom I feel when baby chat cranks up. It comes up again as this woman berates me for not putting my hands between my knees and bending down to say, ‘Can I get the door for you, you magnificent little princess?’
A shrink might say, ‘Let’s talk about that.’
Women disappear into motherhood; even when they’re physically in the room they’re more or less absent. Often friends turned mothers wouldn’t register conversation or your presence or a gesture of kindness. Sometimes the mother would fold over her child as if to protect it from the entire world, including you. It’s a weirdly humiliating feeling.
I’d seen a man do it as well. It was a man I had a long and crappy affair with and I’d been staying at his during an access visit from his son. His son had got up in the night and he’d cocooned the child entirely within his arms and chest and told me to leave. The sound of my feet in stupid sexy high heels as I edged out of the room and creaked across his stripped floorboards to the front door only emphasised an isolating and painful moment. Stuff like that hardens you.
Stuff like that eventually drove me away from families, and I spent more time hanging out with single friends, men especially, as most of the women were mothers now. It drove me back to Tim’s so often that I could remember the six digit code for his gate. Not an excuse. I hate excuses. As someone who is constantly late with work, there is always an excuse, sometimes it’s even a good one. Sometimes your grandmother really has died. The truth is all excuses are bullshit. Excuses are for babyish people.
Not having kids had left me without purpose, distraction or anything to do. Unlike for Charlie, work was not enough. Someone once said, ‘Just fighting for yourself is defensive and grim.’ Yes. That. It’s that. I cannot escape the constant screaming question, ‘Is this it?’
Very little of the Notting Hill I inhabit looks like the one in the Working Title movie. The floppy-haired posh people who sometimes drank a bit too much wine lived down the road in Fulham and Wandsworth, and, if they had money, in Kensington. We had posh people round here, but they were party-loving flakes or flint-eyed fashionistas. We had ex-junkie gentry, and copious numbers of David Cameron’s trendy Tory chums. Their public school privilege is diluted by one of the most ethnically diverse corners of this country. At last count, more than 90 different ethnic groups in North Kensington, the realest corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and the most fun. So yah, I sometimes waved cheery greetings to the son of a Duke or brushed past the man who wrote Notting Hill, pottering around his neighbourhood in an anorak.
Equally though, there were copious other strands of Britishness – the second, third and fourth generation Portuguese, Moroccans, Spanish or Colombians – the more recent arrivals from Sudan and Somalia. And underpinning it all, intensely on August Bank Holiday weekend, were the West Indian contingent who arrived with Windrush in the fifties. The magic is in the mix. I knew all sorts round here but no one remotely like Hugh Grant or his charming, bumbling, harmless pals in that movie. Hugh lives in Earl’s Court on the other side of the borough. Everyone knows that, don’t they?
In the coffee shop queue I see Keith, who is an elegant PR from Northern Ireland. He’s so neatly pressed I don’t want him to see me with my paranoid, twitchy hangover. Shrinking behind a French girl in a men’s Crombie coat, I hide in the queue. Before, that is, I clock the tan and white whippet at his side. My overwhelming urge to touch it overrides any concerns about my old skanky jeans. ‘Hey Keith,’ I say, smiling, and bending to one side. ‘Is this yours?’
‘Kate!’ He greets me with a warm enthusiasm that disarms me. ‘Yes, this is my boy, this is Castor.’ The dog stands still as I stroke him from the tip of his skull and along his back. The effect is not much different to a dose of Valium. My skin still feels crusted with the fag-drenched crud of last night and I laugh it off to Keith with some explanatory detail of my stinking hangover and dawn bedtime. His snorting laugh has a ‘been there’ lilt of grim empathy. ‘What goes up must come down.’
‘Innit!’
Keith and I sit down at a Formica table to take our cups of bastard-strong caffeine together. I soothe myself on his dog’s silky ears, swirling them in my fingers, smoothing my hands over the length of his back’s slithery soft fur. I am almost groaning with pleasure. ‘He’s lovely, Keith.’ The dog is still and calm. He stands there beside me.
I could weep like a Catholic at the foot of the cross begging for forgiveness and eternal love. Instead I say, ‘What are they like, wh
ippets? Do they need a lot of exercise?’
‘He’s a lurcher, actually. God knows what other breeds are in there, definitely lots of whippet, maybe a bit of Labrador. I got him from a farm in Kent for £100. And no. He gets two walks a day and then he sleeps.’
‘I’d love to have a dog,’ I say.
We gossip about work a bit. ‘I’d better get back and do some writing.’
He gives me the cynical raised eyebrow. ‘Really? Come for a walk.’
‘Oh, ok’.
In Keith’s Audi, Castor stands in the back with his chin resting on the top of the seat behind me. I can feel his warm long snout against my neck. We talk about keeping a dog in London. ‘These dogs are great. You don’t need a garden. They’re calm. They’re clean.’
Family lore dictated dogs were unhappy in London. I’d always wanted a dog but was sent scurrying from the idea by a belief system drummed in since birth. Dogs and London don’t mix. We walk at Wormwood Scrubs, a 60 acre expanse of near-deserted scrub and woodland next to the famous prison. I didn’t even know it was here.
Back at home I clear all evidence of the hopeless day’s recovery. I smooth the sheets and whumpf the duvet up, expelling my miserable sweaty traces. I smooth it so hard, it looks like Charlie has made it. Well, not that good. But there’ll be none of his pissed-off huffing and blowing at the sight of my tangled hungover bed. In this flurry of activity and improvement, I will energy into my depleted body. What goes up, must come down; and go up again.
Tim texts me, ‘Such a fun naughty night. So good to see you.’ I delete it. I know Charlie’s walking home, shiny shoes going clip-clip down the street, smart leather document folder tucked under his arm. He’s probably taking important calls but I know, also, he’ll be wondering what chaotic state the flat is in and his slovenly self-employed girlfriend too.
