2000 - Thirtynothing

by Lisa Jewell

  Nice finish, he thought, really stylish closing line.

  ‘Please include me in your life, Delilah,’ he said, ‘please tell me everything. What happened twelve years ago?’

  Delilah pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers. ‘God, I’ve made a real mess of this, haven’t I?’ she sighed. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was just supposed to come to London, find Isab- find Sophie, have a look at her, make sure she was all right and then decide what to do about…’ She cast her gaze downwards, cryptically, towards her crotch. Dig eyed her with confusion but she ignored him and carried on. ‘I had no idea I was going to bump into you and Nadine and how that was going to make me feel.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Look—I saw you first, on Saturday, in the park. I saw you before you saw me and I actually sped up, you know, to avoid you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just wasn’t part of the plan. The plan was all so clean and simple. But then you saw me and you caught up with me and I found myself feeling nostalgic. And I thought, why not? Why not have a bit of fun while I’m in London. You know, I’m the same age as you and Nadine, but the life I live and the life I’ve lived, I feel like a middle-aged woman most of the time. Which is fine. But when I sat there in that coffee-shop with you and Nadine I suddenly felt so old and you seemed so young, with your wacky clothes and your free-and-easy lifestyles, and I was so envious of you both.

  ‘So I went back to Marina’s and started thinking about the old days, about going to gigs with you and wearing outrageous clothes and behaving like a rebel, drinking and smoking, sneering and pouting and being obnoxious, and I suddenly really missed that person. I missed that person who didn’t give a toss what anyone thought, who was streetwise and rude and true to herself. So I met up with you. I wanted a holiday from being Delilah Biggins, Chester Wife, I wanted a night out as Delilah Lillie, Kentish Town Rebel, and there was no one I enjoyed being Delilah Lillie with more than you, Dig.

  ‘It was only going to be the one night. That’s why I kissed you, I suppose. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, and I was so full of adrenalin and so excited to be out with you, away from Alex, away from the country and back, very briefly, in my youth, that I just got carried away. And I kissed you. I shouldn’t have. I know you, Dig. I know how sensitive you are. I should have realized how seriously you would have taken that kiss. It was stupid and self-indulgent of me. Please forgive me…I didn’t mean to lead you on.’

  Dig nodded sagely, wondering at the irony of a beautiful woman asking his forgiveness for kissing him on the lips.

  ‘I didn’t think twice about turning up here and asking you for a bed. You’ve always been one of the kindest-hearted men I knew, Dig. It didn’t occur to me that you still had any feelings towards me—I felt like a charity case, not a woman, when I turned up on your doorstep. I was so desperate, I didn’t think about your feelings. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about the mess. I’m terrible, I know that. I always mean to be tidier—I always intend to put things away—but then I get distracted and I completely forget. And as for the casserole,’ she smiled, ‘let me take you out for one. Tonight. Please! I’ll take you anywhere you like, for any kind of casserole you like.’

  ‘How about a curry-flavoured one?’ teased Dig.

  ‘Absolutely,’ smiled Delilah, ‘a curry-flavoured casserole it is.’

  ‘God, Delilah. I’m sorry to have lost my temper with you like that. It was out of order and it was selfish. It’s just been so frustrating, and then I’ve spent all day thinking I was a dad.’ He laughed wryly. ‘I shouldn’t have got on your case—not after the day you’ve had. You must be feeling shitty.’

  Delilah shook her head and smiled again. ‘D’you know what?’ she said. ‘I’m really not. I thought I would be, but I’m not. Because she’s fine, isn’t she? Sophie’s just fine. The woman who adopted her—her mother—seems a bit of a panicker, but then, maybe if my mother had been a bit more like her…She’s just fine. Lovely house, brother and sister, she’s got everything. The thing I was most scared of was that she’d look like her father—that I’d see him in her. But he’s not there—not at all. She’s all me. She’s fine.’

  ‘Delilah,’ said Dig, seriously, ‘promise me, over dinner, promise me you’ll tell me everything. About Alex and Sophie and who her father is and what happened? Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Delilah, ‘I promise.’

  ‘Bengal Lancer?’

  ‘Bengal Lancer sounds great.’

  Dig slugged back the end of his beer and got to his feet. ‘I’m sorry I followed you—it was sneaky and low.’

  Delilah shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t be sorry. I’m glad you followed me. It’s good to be able to talk to someone about things. And’—she paused for a moment—‘I’m going to need your advice, too. There’s something else I haven’t told you—haven’t told anyone. We can talk about that, too. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  Dig held his hand out to Delilah. As she stood up she leaned into Dig’s chest and wrapped her arms around him. ‘You really are the loveliest bloke in the world, Dig Ryan,’ she said, and Dig squeezed her back, and was delighted to note that there was no sexual response anywhere in his body to the proximity of her warm, fragrant body.

  Well—only a tiny bit.

  He grabbed his coat and passed Delilah her sheepskin, and just as they were about to leave the house, the phone rang.

  ‘Leave it,’ he shouted out to Delilah, ‘let the answerphone pick it up.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ll get it.’

  She was frowning when she wandered back into the hall a few seconds later.

  ‘Who was it?’ asked Dig.

  She shrugged. ‘God knows,’ she said, ‘they hung up when I answered. I did 1471 but it was “from a network which doesn’t transmit numbers.” ’

  Dig shrugged, too, and held the front door open for Delilah.

  He felt curiously light-hearted as he pushed his front door closed behind them and locked it. He was going out for a curry on a Saturday night with a beautiful woman, who, he suddenly and overwhelmingly realized, he wasn’t in love with.

  For the first time in over a week, a sense of normality began to return to him, a sense that things might just be getting better.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Delilah was in one of her effervescent moods as they walked down Camden Road towards Kentish Town Road, bubbling enthusiastically about a deli she’d found in Great Portland Street earlier in the week that had made her the best salt-beef sandwich she’d ever had in her entire life, even better than the ones she’d had in New York on her shopping trips there, and really, really good coffee—but then London was finally getting to grips with the whole coffee thing, wasn’t it, what with Seattles and Aromas and Coffee Republics all over the place, and it was about time, too, because how could London ever hope to be taken seriously as a sophisticated city if you couldn’t even get a decent cup of coffee, for God’s sake?

  Crossing over Torriano Avenue she babbled on, about how awful the suburbs were and how she’d never realized because she’d gone straight from inner London to the deepest depths of the countryside, and it really was very depressing to see how the vast majority of the population actually lived, in terracotta-coloured houses with funny little porches and their two allocated parking spaces among the garden-centre rockeries, with their characterless high streets full of Nexts and Robert Dyases and lacklustre branches of Marks and Spencer which didn’t sell any of the top-of-the-range lines they sold in town, and how she’d actually rather live in an unheated squat in Mile End than live her life in suburban mediocrity with borders on her walls and all over her garden.

  As they trotted briskly down Caversham Road, Delilah regaled him with her thoughts on Gwyneth Paltrow’s love life, and how it looked like she was turning into another Julia Roberts, constantly falling in and out of love with the wrong men, trying to find something real inside all that Hollywood
bullshit while labouring under the weight of self-doubt and feelings of insecurity, and how if she wasn’t careful she could end up single and lonely.

  Unsurprisingly, Dig found himself zoning out, and his eye was caught by a couple walking the other way down the road.

  The man was average-looking with a bad haircut and a damp raincoat and the woman was small and more than a little overweight. There was a sense of completeness to them and when the woman reached up on to her tiptoes and put her lips to the back of his neck, softly, slowly and unselfconsciously, Dig felt an overwhelming sense of sadness. The gesture suddenly struck him as the most intimate thing one person could do to another, more intimate than sex. The back of the neck, he thought, is where it’s at, where all of human intimacy can be found.

  Dig couldn’t remember the last time he’d been intimate enough with someone to want to kiss the back of their neck.

  In fact, the last person he’d felt that way about was Nadine, and that had been twelve years ago. Twelve years! The hairs on Dig’s arms stood on end as the enormity of this realization hit home. He was thirty years old, and he had no intimacy in his life whatsoever. He remembered the conversation he’d had with Nadine in the café, what felt like months ago now, about their disastrous love lives, and how they’d made a joke out of it and made that stupid bet. It had seemed funny then, the fact that none of his relationships lasted longer than a couple of weeks, the fact that his taste in women was veering towards the jailable-offence end of things, the fact that ever since he’d had his heart broken twice in his eighteenth year, he’d been able to relate to women only on either a purely sexual or platonic basis. It had seemed funny then, but now, walking down Caversham Road with Delilah and watching love’s slightly overweight dream walking the other way, oblivious to anyone else on the street, Dig felt suddenly and desperately overcome with disappointment.

  He looked at Delilah and analysed his responses to her now that he knew for a fact that he wasn’t in love with her. Well, there was the obvious and most immediate response, that of the unblemished desire to undo all her buttons and clips and zips and watch her clothes fall effortlessly to the floor leaving her luminously white-underweared and ready to party, but then, that was Dig’s obvious and most immediate response to looking at any beautiful woman. There was nothing that Dig could do about this constituent of his character—he was always going to want to undress beautiful woman. It was just the way he was made.

  But did he feel intimacy for Delilah? Did he feel close to her, part of her, connected to her? Did he want to kiss the back of her neck on the street? It was an interesting question.

  As he followed Delilah’s still talking figure through the streets of Kentish Town, he looked at her narrow back and swaying hips and shiny golden hair, and he realized that they were strangers, complete and utter strangers, and that he most certainly did not want to kiss the back of her neck.

  Delilah was still going on, about some film that he’d never heard of that had just come out in London and had been number one in the States for the last eight weeks, which was amazing apparently because it had been directed by a twenty-two-year-old woman, and Dig felt that no intelligent response to this conversation was required on his part and he could therefore safely drift back into his thoughts without fear of being asked to comment.

  As they walked, Dig found himself staring at other couples, watching the ways they interacted together, deciphering their body language, judging the attractiveness differential between the two parts of each couple and then wondering what other people might make of the Dig and Delilah pairing. Well, they’d probably think that she was very tall and he was very…not so tall. But would other people assume that they were an established couple, nothing out of the ordinary, been together for a couple of years—or maybe they looked like they were on a first date? Would anyone be able to guess just by looking at them that they were ex-teenage-sweethearts reunited coincidentally after twelve years and currently sharing a tiny one-bedroom flat together with a ratty dog that she’d named after him? Would anyone guess that he looked at Delilah now and wondered who the hell she was, that he’d once been completely bonded to this person who was now so thick with secrets that talking to her about anything of any importance was like wading through molasses?

  Dig had had a strange week, a week of change and metamorphosis. For the first time since he was twenty years old Dig was thinking seriously about the future. His ill-judged and unsuccessful attempt at romance last night had been just the tip of the iceberg, because, as he looked at the top of Delilah’s golden head, he realized with a mind-cleansing start that even if he wasn’t in love with Delilah, he wanted to be in love with somebody. Anybody. He was on for it. Totally.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  At the Bengal Lancer, Archad greeted Dig warmly and with surprise.

  ‘You are very early this evening,’ he joked, looking at his watch, and Dig thought, Yes, I am—I have never, in fact been here before eleven o’clock, I have never been here sober and I’ve never said a word to you that wasn’t pliant with alcohol.

  Dig was surprised to find the restaurant heaving. It alarmed him to see his favourite restaurant full of so many smart, sober and quiet people—like finding out that your best mate sings folk songs in his spare time.

  Archad seated them in a booth at the back of the restaurant and handed them a pair of menus, smiling with excitement at Delilah as he backed away. As Dig looked at Delilah across the table he had a sudden déjà vu—the two of them, in Exmouth Market, on Tuesday night—God, had it really been only five days ago?—when he’d been so entranced by her, so thrilled to be sitting in a restaurant with Delilah Lillie, the Love of his Life, praying that she’d stay in London, hoping that…hoping that—What had he been hoping? Hoping that something would happen, he supposed, that someone would let him fall in love with them, hoping that something would change.

  And there was no denying that things had changed, although not in any of the ways he might have imagined. It had been a week of firsts. He’d cleaned his car, he’d woken up before nine on a Saturday and arrived at the Lancer before eleven. He’d taken a woman out to dinner, he’d been seen in public with a Yorkshire Terrier, he’d been to Walton-on-Thames and his towel rota was now so royally fucked that he no longer cared whether he was using Tuesday’s towel or Thursday’s, let alone whether it was black, green, red, dry, damp or dirty.

  But most importantly, he felt unblocked. He felt free and alive. Delilah had changed everything. He was ready for love.

  He looked up from his menu and scanned the busy restaurant, looking for potential lovees. There were plenty of attractive women in there, that was for sure. Women being the operative word. But they were all sitting at little tables for two, smiling at the large, smug men sitting opposite them, men who’d worked it out before Dig, worked out the whole love thing and got there first. The world, he reminded himself, was full to the brim with couples. Everyone knew that. That was what he and Nadine always joked about together. The ‘ands’, they called all their friends these days. Tim and Cat. Si and Angela. Robbie and Rachel.

  Alex and Delilah.

  Couples. Everywhere. No wonder Dig went out with young girls—they might not be on his wavelength, they might have different interests and priorities, but at least they were available. You know—at least after you’d gone to all the trouble of approaching them and talking to them and getting to know them, they didn’t turn round and say, ‘Sorry, you’re a lovely bloke and everything, but I’m in a long-term committed relationship with that large, smug guy over there.’ Or, ‘Sorry, but I’m married to a handsome restaurateur who buys me horses and sends me on shopping trips to New York and I only kissed you for a laugh and I’m really only here to track down my long-lost daughter and…’

  ‘Dig?’

  Dig shook the thoughts from his head and looked up at Delilah. ‘Sorry,’ he smiled, ‘miles away.’

  ‘Are you ready to order?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said,
closing his menu, ‘yeah.’ He didn’t have to look at the menu to know what he was going to order. ‘So, what are you going to do now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well—now that you’ve found Sophie. What are your plans?’

  He tensed his body as he waited for her to answer. Please say you’re going home, he thought to himself, please say you’ll be tidying all your shit away and packing those enormous suitcases and going back to Chester with your weird dog and your pickled onions and your crystals. Please.

  ‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’ teased Delilah, grinning at Dig.

  ‘No!’ he almost shouted. ‘No! Of course not. I just wondered…’

  ‘Well. I guess I’ll be going back home. To Alex.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  She nodded. ‘More than anything. I’ve missed him so much.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Dig, ‘if Alex means so much to you, why didn’t you tell him you were coming to London? Why did you leave him? You must have really hurt him.’

  Delilah nodded again, stiffly, and Dig was alarmed to notice her eyes glaze over with tears. Oh shit—now he’d made her cry. Dig couldn’t bear it when girls cried, especially when it was his fault.