by Louise Kean
‘I don’t need one. I’m happy as I am.’
‘What, this?’ I say with a laugh, gesturing up and down his sloped and drunken form. ‘Drinking and sleeping with strangers? This is your idea of happy?’
‘Darling, this is a lot of people’s idea of very happy.’
‘Maybe so, but it’s only temporary. It’s not real, or permanent. It’s gin-soaked and it will hurt like hell tomorrow. It’s not an answer to anything, is it?’
‘But darling, that’s why people have pets. If you want to feel all warm and cute and cuddly, you get a dog, or a cat, or a baby.’ He reels off the list and makes no distinction between any of them.
‘A baby? Babies aren’t pets!’
‘Yes they are, as bloody good as. You have to feed them, clear up their shit and pay for them. That’s a pet, right?’
‘And they love you, and you protect them and teach them and share with them …’ I nod my head at him like he’s the class dunce, incapable of understanding.
‘Oh it’s a borrowed fucking innocence, Susan.’
‘Scarlet,’ I say.
‘Can’t I just call you Make-up?’ he asks.
‘Absolutely not,’ I say.
‘Okay, Scarlet, but pets certainly aren’t real happiness, darling. They just put more pressure on. You think with their smiles and their wagging tails and gurgles that they are the valves that let out the pressure, but they just add to it. You need more money to buy them things, but you also need more time to spend with them so they don’t grow up disturbed.’
‘I assume both your parents were workaholics,’ I say.
He looks angry. Something turns. ‘You’re very familiar with me, Scarlet, and I’m not sure that I like it. I’m Key Cast. You’re Make-up. You can be quite cutting for somebody that I have barely spoken to.’
‘I guess I just feel like I know you already,’ I say.
‘I feel like I know you too, or I’d like to know how you feel, at least.’
‘I don’t even know me!’ I say. ‘Not any more. I always thought I’d be loyal and faithful, but I’m not. I have sex with men who aren’t my boyfriend: my nights are sprinkled with encounters that range from tiny chaste kisses to violent fellatio for Gods sake! And alleyway fumbles under skirts, and boobs poking out of bras, and strange, maimed sex angles …’
‘Seriously?’ He grins at me like the Cheshire cat.
‘Oh Jesus, I’m not telling you to turn you on. I’m drunk. I’m saying it’s a bad thing, not a roller coaster of fun. I need to stop talking now. I need to go.’
‘Wait, Scarlet. Wait. What are you looking for? What’s with the search?’ His hand rests gently on my arm, and his whole demeanour softens as if he just thawed out of an icy shell.
‘Do you really want to know?’ I ask.
‘Yes. Of course. What are you looking for, Scarlet?’ he asks, straight-faced and serious.
‘I think I just want what everybody wants, whether they articulate it or not. I just want something real. I want to experience a series of … joyful moments … that I can’t corrupt with my own cynicism, or somebody else’s. More than that, even. I want to share this series of joyful moments with somebody, and have them feel it too.’
‘You’re absolutely right, Scarlet, I’ve never thought of it like that, and it’s perfect, it’s exactly what I want. Joy. You want that, and so do I, Scarlet, so do I.’
‘I have to be honest, Tom, I’m surprised you feel that way.’
‘But darling, you don’t even know me.’ Tom’s eyes widen and he smiles at me innocently. Maybe I have read him wrong. Maybe my own cynicism has morphed him into something ugly, something that he isn’t.
‘That’s true, I barely know you,’ I say. His finger brushes my thigh, but I let it pass. It’s probably unintentional and I need to stop jumping to crazy conclusions. Maybe I’m the arsehole and Tom is just this sweet guy that I’ve completely misread, and projected all my gender anxieties onto?
We sit and smile at each other, and I reach for my red wine and take a slug.
Tom leans forward and whispers, ‘Shall we take this outside?’
For God’s sake. I was right the first time.
‘You have got to be kidding me … what is wrong with you?’
‘What?’
‘No, I do not want to come outside with you.’
‘I mean for joy, Scarlet. We could be joyful together, I know this alley. Oh come on!’
‘Hell no! You think I’m going to find my joyful moment in some seedy alley? Are you crazy?’
‘Okay, whatever, darling, don’t have a hernia. But I think you should give it a try, it might cheer you the fuck up. And from what I’ve heard you’re not getting it at home. We all have needs, Scarlet, don’t be embarrassed. Come on, just a quick one?’ he asks, shameless.
‘Oh all right then.’
‘Great!’ He claps his hands.
‘Are you kidding? I was joking! Of course not!’ I say, and slap his hand off my thigh, where it has taken up position again.
‘Your loss,’ he replies, then gets up and walks off. I stare after him in disbelief. He’s a dinosaur. I hate him. And I hate how easy it would be to say yes.
Gavin throws himself down angrily in the space that Tom leaves.
‘Gavin, did you tell Arabella that … that I’m not “getting any” at home?’ I ask, embarrassed.
‘I might have mentioned it, why?’ He knocks back half of his drink in one gulp.
‘Because she bloody well told Tom and he just offered to fill in the gaps!’
‘Did you say no?’ he asks, eyeing up the other half of his drink.
‘Of course I said no!’
‘Then what’s the problem?’ he shrugs, and throws back his head and his glass. ‘And why “of course”? He’s a good-looking guy, so Arabella tells me.’
‘Because he’s a sleaze-hound.’
Gavin makes a sound that is half sigh, half moan, and slaps his head with one massive hand.
‘Are you all right?’ I am alarmed to see a red palm imprint on his cheek – he doesn’t know his own strength.
‘Yes. No. Yes. Tell me a joke, Scarlet. Cheer me up. She’s ignoring me now because I told her she was making a spectacle of herself.’
‘Because women always like that, well done,’ I say. Men amaze me. They can’t say their feelings are hurt or that they feel jealous or unhappy. They have to tell a woman that she is making a fool of herself. It’s never about how they feel. Now isn’t the time to share that with Gavin, though. So instead I say, ‘Two snowmen standing in a field. One says to the other, can you smell carrots?’
Gavin nods his head and smiles. ‘That’s good. Again.’
‘Two Goldfish in a tank. One says to the other, who’s driving this thing?’
‘Nice. I like it. More.’
‘A tractor turns into a field. That was unexpected.’ The only jokes I can remember are the ones that my nephews tell me, but at least they are quick.
‘That’s good, but you haven’t told that one right. Plus two thirds of your jokes are about fields.’
‘Yes I have told it right. And maybe I just like fields …’
‘No you haven’t, I’ve heard it before. It’s supposed to be different.’ He pokes me in the ribs and I poke him back, as Arabella swishes her coat on at the door and leaves with somebody else, exit stage left, applause, standing ovation. I don’t see who is holding her hand to pull her up the stairs, but I look around and I can’t see Tom. I check my watch: it’s twenty to two in the morning, and the bar has emptied out, there are only ten or so people left.
‘Aren’t you going to go after her?’ I ask, sadly.
‘What’s the point?’
‘The point is you’re her boyfriend. The point is that … it will make you sad if you don’t.’
‘She’s an adult. She can do what she wants.’
‘Yes, but you don’t want her to. She’ll think you don’t care. You should tell her how you feel.’
; ‘Maybe I don’t care. Tell me more jokes, Scarlet.’ He looks up at me with his huge saucer-shaped eyes, and takes my hand to hold. His hand is so big it makes mine look like a child’s. He is so large and comforting, like an oversized quilt that I could throw over myself to make me feel better about everything.
‘Do you live on your own, Gavin?’ I ask.
‘I do.’ He nods his head. We stare at each other.
It would be so easy … but I don’t want to. It will make things worse. I think this is the first time in a long while that I have located the button in my head that when pressed, even when drunk, alarms ‘You don’t want to do this. You think that you do, and it will feel nice tonight, but it will feel terrible tomorrow.’
‘Well turn the heating up when you get in, and sleep well, lovely Gavin. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
I push myself to my feet and grab my bag.
‘Wait.’ Gavin stands up and ducks automatically, in case of low-flying aircraft or birds. ‘Wait. Do you want me to get you a cab or something?’
Gavin hasn’t found his switch.
‘No, it’s fine. It’s a Monday, there will be loads.’
‘No, let me get you a cab.’
Gavin grabs his jacket and gestures for me to climb the stairs up and out. We fire out onto Shaftesbury Avenue and a stream of black cabs with their lights on flow past us. I hail one down and mercifully he pulls up inches from my heels.
‘Hey, Scarlet, wait. Where do you live?’ Gavin asks, grabbing one of my hands and pulling me around.
‘The opposite direction to you. Goodnight, Gavin, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I say, and jump in the cab.
‘Central Ealing,’ I tell the driver, and wave to Gavin. The numbers on the clock immediately start to tick as we pull off. Gavin gives me a half-hearted wave back.
The cab pulls up outside my flat at 2.20 a.m.
I pay the driver and look up. The instantly recognisable blue haze of a TV in a room with the lights turned off streams out from my living-room windows. Amazingly, Ben is still up.
Climbing the stairs I can hear giggling from the living room, but it’s strictly male. Ben’s friend Iggy is here.
Iggy is five years older than Ben, and moronic in its purest sense. Whenever he sees me he stares as if I’m the only woman he’s ever been this close too – which I probably am. He’s almost primeval: short, with a lot of hair everywhere – on his face, on his arms, poking up out of his T-shirt at the front and back, and he has slightly wonky eyes that follow me around the room, and yet can never actually meet mine when I speak to him. He has a large belly and a big round woman’s arse. I have never known him have a girlfriend in the three years since we were introduced, but he always crosses his legs approximately two minutes after I enter any room that he is in. I don’t flatter myself that this is peculiar to me. I could send my grandmother in before me and I’m sure he’d do exactly the same. He was the best man at Ben’s wedding, apparently, and made an appalling speech that died like a pheasant full of shot. He is also very confrontational, and tries to contradict everything that I say, but without imagination. Often he just says, ‘I don’t agree.’ For instance, I’ll say ‘It’s hot today’ when it’s ninety degrees in the shade outside, and he’ll sit there, with sweat dripping off him like a whore in church, and say, ‘I don’t agree.’
He works at the store with Ben. They play a lot of Championship Manager. From the giggling I can tell that they are both drunk, and I smell skunk wafting through my flat.
I hear Iggy mutter, ‘Is that Scarlet?’
‘Sounds like it.’
‘Do you want me to, you know, clear off?’
‘Don’t bother, she’ll go straight to bed.’
‘But don’t you want to, you know …’
Ben doesn’t answer.
I consider going straight to bed like the man said, but instead walk into the living room, flipping the overhead lights on.
Both of them cover their eyes and swear like teenagers in a town precinct. ‘Jesus, Scar, turn the light down,’ Ben says.
I dim it slightly. Ben curses again.
‘What you watching?’ I ask.
‘Revenge of the Sith,’ Iggy replies. ‘All right, Scarlet?’
‘I’m okay, Iggy, how are you?’
‘Yeah, good, thanks.’ Iggy snatches at his jeans and crosses his legs.
Ben just sits there staring at the TV.
I shrug at him.
‘What?’ he asks like a stroppy teenager.
‘But thanks for asking how I am, Iggy, it’s nice to know that somebody cares.’ I smile sarcastically at Ben and fold my arms.
‘Jesus, Scar, you just said you were okay.’
Ben doesn’t drag his eyes away from the vengeful Sith.
‘Do I get a kiss hello perhaps?’ I ask, raising my eyes.
‘You don’t even give me a chance!’ he says, and sighs, making a huge deal of pushing himself up off the sofa.
Just as he makes it upright I say, ‘Don’t bother’, and walk into the kitchen.
I hear the pair of them trying to whisper, except half of Ealing can probably hear them.
‘Iggy, mate, you’d probably better go after all. She’s got the arse. I’m going to bed.’
I hear them shuffling around in the living room, the TV being turned off and papers being thrown in the bin, while I pour myself a bowl of Alpen and grab the milk from the fridge. Shuffled heavy footsteps fly down the stairs and the front door slams shut.
Ben leans in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed. ‘Good night then?’ he asks, rubbing one eye and yawning, texting somebody on his phone.
‘Yeah, it was okay.’ I nod my head and take a mouthful of muesli. ‘Who are you texting?’
‘Nobody’ he says, and shoves his phone in his pocket. I shiver.
‘What’s this job?’ he asks, shaking his head to wake himself up.
‘A theatre, a play. Tennessee Williams. Dolly Russell, she’s this old actress. She won an Oscar.’
‘And who’s the bloke?’
‘Tennessee Williams? He wrote the play. He’s dead now.’
Ben pulls an impressed face and raises his eyes. Of course I can tell that he isn’t actually impressed. He would be impressed if I’d said Dolly played third Ewok on the left in Return of the Jedi, and Tennessee Williams wrote three episodes of Red Dwarf.
‘I could probably get us tickets if you want to see it?’ I say, taking another mouthful of cereal.
‘Maybe.’ He nods his head, wipes the other eye, crosses his legs. His T-shirt says ‘So you wanna play?’ in lime green on black. His pyjama trousers are red and black checked, the ones that my mum bought him for Christmas from Gap last year. He is barefoot. His hair is dark and scruffy, falling over his ears. He lifts an arm and deliberately messes it up with his hand, and stretches. He lets his hands drop back to his sides. His phone beeps in his pocket.
‘Yeah, or, you know, take your mum or something. Or Helen, she’s more into that kind of stuff, isn’t she?’ His eyes are closing as he speaks. He pulls out his phone, and presses a button, and smiles.
‘Who is that?’ I ask.
‘Jesus, it’s just Iggy, okay?’ he sighs, and stuffs it back in his trouser pocket.
I nod my head at him. ‘Okay. You just saw him, but, if you say so. And as for the theatre, well, I could take Helen, but I thought it might be something nice for us to do, Ben. We could grab a Thai afterwards, there’s a great one on Old Compton …’
I see him grimace at the word Thai. I’ve already kicked my shoes off in the hallway, but I feel the urge to go and pull one back on and boot him in the stomach with it. Instead I smile and wait for him to answer.
‘Maybe. But then I’d have to come all the way up into town …’
‘Yeah, I know it’s a long way. I mean I do it nearly every day, Ben, it’s such an inconvenience.’ I nod my head at him and smile sarcastically again and I see him raise his eyes to heaven. He sighs.
&nbs
p; ‘You know how tired I am by the time I’ve finished work, Scar. I just want to collapse on the sofa, eat my tea, watch some telly.’
‘Yep, yep, yep, I know,’ I say, nodding my head, trying not to cry. I have never cried as much as I do now, not even when I was a baby. My mum says I was never a ‘crier’, even when she threw me at my dad one time that he got home really late from work. She literally threw me at him down the length of the hallway. Luckily he dropped his suitcase and caught me. She apologised for that when she told me the story. But these days all it takes is one wrong word and my eyes flood like potholes in a hail storm. And I have never been this tired either.
‘Well,’ Ben stretches and looks guilty, ‘I’m exhausted so I’m going to go to bed.’ He smiles apologetically. He knows the direction I’m heading in, and tries to sidestep it, but something in me won’t let him.
‘I’m done here,’ I say, swallowing a last mouthful of Alpen and dumping the half-full bowl on the counter, ‘I’ll come too.’
‘Oh, okay.’ Ben looks nervous. ‘Well, do you want the bathroom first?’ he asks.
‘Why don’t we leave the bathroom for a bit?’ I reply, and muster up my bravest smile.
‘Oh.’ He drops his head with a pained expression: I am forcing him to have to explain something to me for the tenth time, like how to tune in the TV, or work the smoothie-maker. He sighs, embarrassed that I am putting him in this position.
‘Do you mind if we don’t, Scar? I’m knackered. I had a really hard day. Maybe in the morning …’
‘Right. Right. It doesn’t really matter if I mind, though, does it?’ I feel the tears sting my eyes.
‘And as we both know, we never do it in the morning, because it will make you late for work, so …’
‘What now? Oh for God’s sakes, Scar, I’m sorry but I’m tired!’
‘You’re not sorry, and you are permanently tired. Are you having an affair?’ I ask. I haven’t turned the light on in the kitchen. We are badly lit from the light in the hallway behind him.
‘No,’ he says, shaking his head, feigning the kind of exhaustion that suggests he’s just climbed a mountain, or swum the channel.
‘Do you promise me, Ben? Because that would be a shitty thing to do, you get that, right? To promise me that you aren’t having an affair, and then to do it anyway. I mean, I don’t know what you told Katie, you know, if she ever asked, when we were, you know … But that would be a rubbish thing to do, to do it again. With Katie, well, that was unfortunate circumstances, but that doesn’t mean, you know, that you have to do it again …’
