Prior Engagements

by Sarah Goodwin

  I looked at him, and smiled despite myself. “Dorian, if what you’re telling me is that all your interesting little quirks and scary personal stuff is behind this door, can I remind you that you’ve seen the ins and outs of everything I own?”

  Dorian looked shamefacedly at the wall behind my left ear.

  “Trust me, nothing in the world could shock me, not after all the weird things I’ve seen growing up in town that’s fifty-percent students and twenty-percent alcoholics,” I assured him.

  Dorian applied a little pressure to the handle, but still looked unsure.

  “You don’t have to let me in there, it’s fine,” I told him, “just, you know, whenever you’re ready, I will be too.”

  Dorian looked at me, and in once easy motion, twisted the handle and opened the door.

  And I know, I know that I just gave the reassuring speech of my life, and that I was trying to be a good wife, and an understanding woman. I know that I’ve been waxing hard as nails about my life in the dingy end of Bath and the dodgy whole of Bristol.

  But truthfully?

  I nearly pissed myself in shock.

  Dorian’s secret room was as big as my entire flat. Wood floored and high ceilinged. Not that you could see much of either.

  The room was packed with stuff. There really was no other word for the collection of detritus. Bales of newspapers were stacked around the walls, protruding three piles deep into the room and standing higher than Dorian himself. Stuck to the wall above them were plastic baggys of cigarette ends and plastic straws, receipts and bottle tops. Balanced on the sash windowsills were heaps of books, which filled the entire aperture, until the only light came from the chandelier overhead, which was wreathed in old tights, single gloves, dangling trainers and plaited wreaths of plastic shopping bags. The rest of the room was piled with a combination of junk shop china, street rubbish, black plastic sacks, tires and hundreds of other random objects, from splintered chairs to fifty tins of peaches in syrup to a dressmaker’s dummy wearing a shabby black overcoat and a dented fedora.

  A wall of crap filled the room, piled and stacked so tightly together that entering the room would have been impossible. I stood, struck dumb by the sheer size of the tip that lived inside the pristine walls of the apartment. As I gaped, a pair of flesh toned leggings fell from the chandelier and plopped down onto the head of the dress maker’s dummy.

  “So...you’re a....hoarder?” I said, hoping against hope that he’d laugh it off and tell me that it was an amazing art exhibit that was a steal at fifty-thousand dollars. Or else that this is all stuff left by his last lover, who went crazy and tried to kill him. But instead he looks at me apologetically, and nods.

  “It’s...become quite a problem since I started living independently,” Dorian admits, “as a child I collected stones, silver spoons, tins, cigarette ends...but my parents kept a tight reign over the contents of my room. Since moving here....well, I’ve changed apartments six times in the last two years, each time just to find a little more space for things.”

  “OK...” I said, not daring to take my eyes off of the wall of junk in front of me, lest it cascade over me.

  “I know, it’s completely unreasonable to ask you live with this,” Dorian said, looking at the room, “I shall just have to...get rid of it.” He looked so miserable as he said it, that I actually felt almost guilty. These were Dorian’s things, OK, so they were mostly bits of rubbish (actual, literal rubbish) but he wanted them in his home. Who was I to sweep in and, not twenty minutes after my arrival, try and deprive him of them.

  “You don’t have to,” I assured him, “maybe...we could talk about it later, decide what you could stand to lose?”

  Dorian looked relived. “I have been in the process of finding a suitable therapist for a while. Perhaps then I’ll be more inclined to thin out my collection.”

  I smiled.

  Dorian smiled shyly back.

  “I was thinking of preparing a salad for dinner, is that alright?”

  “Yup,” I said, despite loathing salad with a passion (any other person looks at a salad and things ‘ooh, chicken nestled in all this lovely greenery, I can’t wait to eat it all’ whenever I see a salad I think ‘who has over garnished all this proper food?’) I yawned hugely, aware that it sounded like an angry wookie and made me look like an angrier walrus.

  “I think I might need a nap,” I conceded.

  “Hey, it’s your home too,” Dorian smiled.

  I padded into the bedroom, listening to Dorian as he rattled bottles of vinegar and oil in the kitchen. The bedroom put even the luxuriousness of the Chalet de Les Kippers to shame. The bed was huge, and made up in shades of cream and burnt sienna (browny-red to those of you who chose useful degrees) with huge pillows and a duvet stuffed with feathers. I curled up on one side of it and covered myself with a silky, cream fur throw.

  OK, so Dorian was a bit of a (pathologically obsessive) hoarder, I could live with that. Really it was only that one room, it wasn’t as if the whole apartment was full of stuff. It was quite minimalist really.

  As my eyes drifted shut I caught sight of something under the antique dresser on the other side of the room. Was that...?

  I dragged myself out of bed and went over to investigate, kneeling down and pulling at the object.

  Yes. Yes it was. A traffic cone. Behind it, pushed into the darkness under the dresser, was a shoebox, which, when I opened it, turned out to be full of old pens. Biros and felt tips, pencil stubs and even the odd fountain pen, mostly chewed at the ends and out of ink.

  Oh Jesus, how much stuff did he have in here?

  Quietly, feeling incredibly guilty, I went quickly around the room and peeped into all the drawers and under the bed. The draws held neatly folded socks and underwear, cufflinks, all the normal things a man might need in his bedroom. Only the bottom draw was occupied with something unusual – about fifty shot glasses, some with the names of bars on them.

  The walk-in wardrobe was full of suits, shirts, black trousers and a few bits of casual clothing. But at the back of a rail that supported jumpers and winter clothes was a suitcase full of newspapers and tatty leaflets for random medical procedures, tourist spots and emergency hotlines. Almost as if Dorian had accepted every pamphlet he’d ever been offered on the street.

  I was beginning to suspect that he had.

  I lay down again, closing my eyes, but I was too worried to sleep. This was a serious problem. If I didn’t watch out, I’d find myself marooned in a sea of junk. I’d assumed that Dorian’s engagements had failed because his prospective partners were too snobby to be with a starving artist back before he’d made it big, or, (a more recent theory) due to their disapproval of his contract with Georgio Casablancas. But maybe it was because of this, his ‘collection’. I couldn’t deny it, if we were dating, and this was my first visit to Dorian’s home, I would be shimmying down a drainpipe, vowing never again to go out with men I met on Plentyoffish.com.

  As it was, we were married. For richer and for poorer, in strange-mental-sickness and in health. I’d already given up Will, what did this quirk matter?

  Dorian tapped lightly on the door when dinner was ready. We ate in the spacious kitchen, and I managed to eat a few leaves of rocket (rocket, dandelion, it all looked the same to me – green and terribly, terribly insubstantial) along with the chicken that I winkled out from between the leaves.

  It was oddly silent between us, and I realised, as we crunched in the softly lit kitchen, that this was the first time we’d really been alone together for any length of time. There’d always been a busy restaurant atmosphere, parental supervision or a minor medical emergency going on that meant we’d had little time to sit and realise that we...well, that we didn’t have much to talk about. It was like an awkward first date. Dorian seemed to still be embarrassed over the state of his spare room, and I was feeling more than a little depressed about leaving my Mum and Will behind me. The result was that we ate in silence, washed up
together, and then, almost paralysed by awkwardness, made our way to bed.

  Rustling under the sheets, I became very aware that I didn’t want to move too much. That in my pyjamas I was too hot, and yet I couldn’t summon the courage to take them off. It was like being at a sleepover all over again – unable to squirm about for fear of waking your friends, not able to scratch your bum in the middle of the night when the label in your PJ bottoms was driving you crazy.

  The bed was so big that I couldn’t even really feel it when Dorian turned over. Thankfully, because we’d crossed a dateline and were feeling the ill effects of it, we were both asleep within about ten minutes.

  The next morning, some of the awkwardness lingered, but the dawning of a new day had given us purpose. Dorian had work to do in his studio, a small room that had been made by putting a partition in the living room. And myself? I had to find something to occupy my life for the next few months. I wasn’t actually allowed to have a job, we had discovered, while I was ‘on vacation’. So, I would need to find ways of keeping myself busy and out of Dorian’s way while he worked.

  My go-to activity of choice, when I don’t want to think, is to read. Unfortunately, I had finished my crappy detective book (which was, at that moment, lying waterlogged in a bin at the Chalet de Les Kippers) and had not picked up a new one when we went to my flat. So, my first job? Finding a charity shop, or a thrift store, I supposed, and getting my hands on a new book, or five.

  I said goodbye to Dorian after breakfast, and descended to the street in the lift. I was, almost instantly, more relaxed, and ashamed for being so. I hadn’t been able to breathe since we’d arrived at his apartment, almost as if, now that we weren’t on my home turf, I’d lost every bit of confidence I’d ever had.

  I walked around uselessly for a while, taking random streets and trying to get my bearings. The block system of street design, so different from the English method of ‘where’re it lays, there let it be built’, made it very clear that I was very much not at home. Fortunately, I found what I was looking for before I gave up, or was devoured by Americans (who were everywhere, almost as if they owned the goddamn place) who stalked past me in sunglasses and fashionably slouchy t-shirts.

  To find my way I utilised my reading skills. Dorian’s apartment was on Prince Street, which stretched on and on in both directions. As I circled onto Lafayette Street and then onto Crosby street, essentially rounding the block, I came upon a bookshop, the Housing Works Bookstore Café to be exact, which I almost walked past, mainly because it looked like a cooler-than-thou coffee/coffee table book emporium. But I was chilly, and in need of tea, so I took a closer look.

  A sign on the door informed me that everything that the shop sold was donated, and that all profits went to Housing Works, which I gathered was a charity. I pushed the door open, amazed that someone had combined my two favourite things (charity shops and eateries). Inside the imposing building, I found myself drowned in the smell of fresh coffee and pastry crisping, and was very pleased to be so. The place had the look of an upmarket Waterstones, with polished wood floors, red vinyl topped tables and cosy mismatched chairs. Persian rugs, or excellent imitations, were laid out under the tables and chairs, and lights hung on long cables from the unfinished ceiling, with those huge tin shades that appeared only in ancient libraries in even older films.

  It was the books that grabbed my attention. Books on round carousels of shelves, on floor to ceiling bookcases, on wheeled trolleys and piled into great stacks topped with sheets of glass or rough boards to make tables. So very many books that I almost swooned.

  I was not quite so overcome however, as to forget my desire for tea (what English person ever is?) so I approached the shiny counter and its steam shrouded barista. I had some dollars in my purse, strange and long and green, which I’d changed up the day before on our way to the airport. I still didn’t quite trust them. But then, as the Galactic song goes – ‘Any legal tender with a white man in the centre’, (or off to the side somewhere, if you’re Darwin).

  “Can I have a cup of tea, please?” I asked the young woman behind the counter. She had on an unapproachably cool expression and a pair of glasses, with, I noticed, clear glass in them, as opposed to lenses. A hipster then, some things were apparently douchey on an international level.

  “Earl Grey, Darjeeling, Oolong, Assam, Green, White, Green with Lemon, Lapsang, Pu-erh, Keemun...” she trailed off, looking at me expectantly, “would you like to see the tea menu?”

  Jesus. I’d had enough of this in Bath, where simply asking for tea was no longer enough, you had to know its vintage, and sample it like fancy wine. As someone who drank wine by the case, and bought it on discount from the internet, I was not about to stand for the poncification of my tea.

  “Just regular tea please,” I said, being sure to be polite (because if there’s one thing waitressing teaches you it’s to be polite and to tip – lest saliva or something less innocent end up in your order).

  The woman arched her eyebrow and ducked under the counter, returning with a dented cardboard box of Twinning’s Every Day.

  “This?”

  “Yes please.”

  She made the tea, but with an expression that said ‘my time is being wasted, I am a beverage artiste’. I accepted the cup (which like all coffee shop cups, came with a redundant saucer and had a handle not designed for human hands) and went to sit down. Once I’d parked my bum, I scanned the covers of the books nearest to me and started the lengthy process of making my selection. I always choose books in the same way, and judge them on the following, in order – 1. Title, 2.Cover, 3.Blurb, 4.Recommendation quote (Nuts and Cosmo – No) and finally, 5. First page, and random middle page. Will would never go book shopping with me for this very reason.

  I picked a few possible candidates, and, as I considered the merits of a pirate thriller vs. a historical rewrite of the Boer war with ninjas, I read a leaflet about volunteering at the bookshop. There was an idea.

  Purely to annoy the barista, in a small, non-spit-worthy way, I ordered another plain tea to go. I also bought both books, as I reasoned I’d have a lot of time to fill with ninjas and pirates, as I tried not to bother Dorian.

  Once I was back out on the street, with virgin novels weighing down my handbag, and a hot cup of tea in my hand, it seemed only natural to find a bench and park myself in the sunlight for a nice long reading session. I still couldn’t get over the noise and bustle of the place. Bath, a town in city clothing, had never swarmed with this much energy. Even this early there were people everywhere, businesses opening noisily, goods being delivered, cars already forming a crush of traffic and the sounds of other, similar activities in the distance. As far as my eyes could see, and even as far as it was possible to hear, the city was alive and crawling with purposeful people.

  My response to this busyness was to walk down the street, and sit down on an iron bench, planting myself firmly against the progress of a new day.

  I flipped open the cover of the pirate thriller (titled, Mutiny Over a Bounty) and read a few pages about a hapless pirate named Skudnick, who had a passion for coconut and chocolate. The book declined in quality quite alarmingly, until the turning of each new page made me wince. Having been disappointed I put the book down on the bench for someone else to find and take home.

  I took the plastic lid off of my cup of tea and looked around me, in search of something, anything, to occupy my time.

  The building opposite me was vacant, as if someone had purposefully stolen everything interesting from it to spite me. The building was three stories of stone architecture that looked almost like that of Bath, pale stone covered in tarry exhaust residue. The ground floor looked like it had once been a shop front, but the dirty glass and layers of posters and flyers pasted to it suggested that it had been empty for a long time. A shame really. It looked like the kind of place that really should be occupied, filled with gorgeous things and made grand and beautiful (or maybe it was only my recent meeting w
ith Fifi that made me think so). A building so big and solid seeming would make an amazing hotel, or a posh school, or a café (yes, I thought it, and in that moment I knew that’s all I would ever see in vacant places, all the warmth of Raspberry Bs, which I’d never find anywhere else).

  I poured the rest of my tea onto the pavement, and watched it sluice dust and cigarette ends away in its wake.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Slowly, Dorian and I found our rhythm.

  We’d get up in the morning, have cups of tea, and then Dorian would go to work on his latest illustrations, and I’d go out. When I returned, sometime in the afternoon, we’d have lunch and talk about what we were going to make of the apartment. Sometimes we went shopping, though we rarely bought anything, just peered at the eccentric furnishings in the nearby shops and raised our eyebrows at each other. In the evenings we watched television, which had no English channels, but could be depended on to supply re-runs of Friends and some drama or another. Dinner was always a low point of the day, simply because Dorian was a fan of exotic vegetables and the occasional snippet of lean protein. (By the end of the second week I was prepared to chew my arm off, just so I could sear it with garlic butter and onion rings).

  Our days were perfectly average, normal, and companionable. The ideal start to married cohabitation.

  (I suppose, if you really wanted to niggle, we did spend quite a lot of time apart. But a healthy amount of distance was only to be expected. What married couple lived out of each other’s pockets like lovesick teenagers? Exactly).

  Unwieldy chunks of time dripped past, like dollops of porridge, while Dorian and I remained comfortably together and, thankfully, didn’t seem to grow more distant from each other as I’d feared we might (though we grew no closer either).

  Three weeks went by. Dorian finished one project and started on another, and I raided the bookshop repeatedly and continued to alternately read and pace the streets and cafés of Soho (It sounds romantic, but the streets of Soho were just as dull and dirty as the streets of Bristol and Bath, and they made my feet equally sore. Every book I read there only made my head buzz more with...what? loneliness? But I wasn’t alone, at least I wouldn’t have been if I’d stayed at home with Dorian).