by Holly Bourne
‘You can have sex on your period, you know?’ I tell her, picking up a small spoon and stirring the foam in.
She shakes her head. ‘Not on my periods. It would be like that scene from The Shining where that tidal wave of blood cascades all down the hallway.’ I put down my drink and Dee notices and starts laughing.
I am so jealous of Dee and all the sex that she’s having that I almost can’t bear to look at her. I stir my coffee more vigorously and can hardly bring myself to ask about him.
I did not see this coming.
I did not invite her to the wedding as my plus one only for her to never come back to the room because she was having ridiculous sex with Nigel. We were supposed to stay up all night laughing and watching the film channel. Instead I lay on my four-poster bed, cradling my swollen pizza-stomach and listened to someone have sex through the wall. It might’ve even been her. But I am a friend and I am happy for her and she deserves to be happy, so I say, ‘Things still going well between you?’
Dee’s face softens and she smiles shyly. The sun hits her hair from behind and she looks so beautiful I could spew. ‘They seem to be,’ she says. ‘I don’t know. It’s early days, isn’t it?’
We discuss all the ways in which it could go wrong from here. We pore over every bit of evidence we’ve gleaned so far about Nigel, and Nigel’s life, and Nigel’s ex-girlfriends, and Nigel’s pension plan, and the fact that Nigel owns his own place in Clapham. But I can see from the way her eyes are dewy, and from the way she smiles whenever I say his name, that my friend is falling for this man. This man is going to be on the agenda. Whether they end up married and growing old together, or in a future break-up where we’ll pore again over all the aforementioned evidence in the stark light of hindsight, whichever way it goes, Nigel is going to be A Significant.
Swimmers butterfly through the turquoise water, circles of trendy mothers jiggle babies on their laps and attempt to catch up through them, and I try to smile for Dee. Try to smile and be a good friend and be happy for her while her glow only reminds me of my lack of glow.
The pancakes arrive and we laugh at how small they are and order another stack. I eat them greedily and then hate myself straight afterwards and work out how many extra steps I need to do to alleviate the guilt. I suggest a walk around the park and we push back our chairs and join the throngs of people circling the enclosed green square.
‘What’s Tom up to today?’ Dee asks, as we stand to one side so we’re not mown down by children on scooters. The parents run after them and apologise with that ‘I think they’re cute so this isn’t a real apology’ arrogance. Dee and I smile through gritted teeth and say it’s OK when it isn’t.
‘Working. He’s on deadline. But we’re having a night in together. They’ve just released series two of The Reckoning.’
‘Oh, I’ve not started that yet. But everyone’s raving about it.’
‘It’s shit,’ I inform her. ‘And everyone’s lying so they sound smart and sophisticated. But it’s the only thing Tom will agree to watch with me at the moment.’ I sigh, not wanting to go there. I feel like whenever I talk to anyone about him I spit out poison. Like bitterness hiccups. ‘Anyway, what you up to tonight? You going out with Nigel?’
Dee’s smitten smile appears again and she plays with her silver necklace. ‘Yeah. He’s booked a table up the Shard. I’ve never been up there actually.’
‘Oh real dates! I miss real dates,’ I complain. ‘I miss doing exciting things in those beginning days.’
Dee doesn’t even deny that it’s good. That it’s better than what I have. All she says is, ‘At least you don’t have the stress about needing a poo in his house though.’
‘I mean there’s always, always a silver lining to everything, isn’t there?’ I laugh.
The park is filled with late daffodils and the hopeful promise of a good summer. We stroll around the park three times, always keeping our heads turned away from the trafficky road that circles us. I smile as I remember the poo obstacle-courses I went through at the start with Tom. Like on our road trip around America, where I kept coming up with excuses to ‘go to the hotel lobby’ so I could use the loo next to reception. And the first evenings at his flat, where my stomach became bloated and sore from holding in wind.
Dee gets out her phone and I know it’s Nigel from the way she smiles. I am happy for her, I am happy for her, I am happy for her. I check mine, almost out of instinct. There’s no message from Tom because he knows where I am and all our messages are totally mechanical these days. ‘My train is delayed, won’t be home until ten.’ ‘Do you mind getting some milk on the way back from work?’ ‘Out of cat food.’ Sometimes we really go for it and send each other photos of Cat sitting in a funny position. But only rarely. My phone is clogged with notifications though. I put up an old photo this morning of me wearing ‘ice-cream-leg jeans’ when I was twenty-seven. ‘Remember these, f*ckers?’ I’d asked.
A thousand likes suggest they remember.
‘So, you still upset about that review?’ Dee asks me, putting her phone back into the pocket of her yellow mac.
‘Yes. She only gave me four stars, not five.’
Dee navigates the next question expertly. ‘I mean, she’s clearly a heinous bitch but, Tor, do you have any idea – any – about what to write next?’
I dodge another scooter and glare at the offending child. ‘I’ve not got time to write,’ I snap. ‘They’re flying me all over the freaking world to promote this new book.’
‘Yes, I know that but … well … it’s not a new book, is it?’ Dee says delicately. ‘It’s your old one with an added foreword and a summery jacket? You’ve not written anything new in years. Is there not another topic you want to explore or something?’
I am not happy she is bringing this up. Especially as she knows all this. She knows about my clichéd second-book-syndrome and adjoining writer’s block. Since Who The F*ck Am I? came out, it’s been so nuts I’ve not had a chance to think. That’s why we’ve re-released it as a summer edition – to give me time to come up with something else to say.
‘What’s your point?’ I ask her.
‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘It’s just you were so happy when you were writing your book. And I want you to be happy again. I think it would help things with Tom if you had a new project to focus on.’
I shake my head. ‘Tom and I are fine. Really,’ I protest as she pulls a face. ‘This is just what relationships are like after six years. No matter how in love you are at the start, it’s always stale and hard work after six years. Love changes over time.’
Dee looks unconvinced and I feel a stab of anger. I mean, it’s not like she would know. She’s never been in a relationship that lasted more than two years. And yeah, Nigel probably seems like Prince fucking Charming right now, but everyone does at the beginning. There is so much you can project onto a new person before you know what their poo smells like and at what time of day they tend to do one.
I do not like the atmosphere crackling between us as we take in the spring blossom and laugh at the family of baby ducks on the pond. There’s a tiny sliver of judgement oozing from both sides and I hate how this happens. How friendship is a constant acclimatisation to your ever-changing life circumstances. Dee and I were fine when we were both cynical and unhappy. But now Nigel’s turned up and is taking her up the Shard and she’s temporarily happy and I’m permanently not and we have to adjust again.
It won’t last, I think.
I’m not proud of myself for thinking it.
But it won’t.
It never does with Dee. The reasons why it won’t last are already laid out like a trail of coins to be collected by Sonic the Hedgehog. He works in finance and she will get bored of him. Her whimsical nature will become jarring after a while, when he stops finding how often she leaves her phone on the bus cute. Nigel will, at some point, struggle with how many men she’s slept with. Her totally messed-up relationship with her parents will
start seeping into them. He will secretly worry that she’s damaged. He will start looking for signs of damage to prove his hypothesis and then wilfully misinterpret her behaviour. He’s probably even shit in bed, but she’ll only admit this a month after the break-up after three bottles of wine. ‘I know we had sex all the time, but I never came,’ she’ll say and I’ll gasp in horror and say, ‘Oh my God, really? Back then I was so jealous of you.’ She’ll laugh and say, ‘Well I didn’t want to admit it to myself, did I? I thought he was The One, Tori, I really did.’ And I will say ‘I know you did.’ And I’ll put my arm around her and let her cry on my shoulder. Because this is what always happens and I can’t see why Nigel will be any different.
*
Oh, this is better.
My head lies cradled in Tom’s lap and his fingers run through the lengths of my hair. We’ve pulled the curtains on the glinting London skyline and we’re curled around each other, watching TV with Cat asleep on the armrest. This feels good. We’ve had a Marks and Spencer’s ‘Dine in for Two’ deal and didn’t even argue about which main to pick. Tom told me all about the upcoming article he’s writing about Las Vegas tourism and it was actually pretty interesting. We’ve got ten whole days before either of us have to go away on business and we chatted through our calendars, working out when we can spend quality time together. Acknowledging we will miss one another, that the bond will be strained – and the thought makes both of us sad and uncomfortable. It’s such a relief when you realise you will still miss them when they go away.
‘We could even get cocktails up the Shard next weekend,’ I say hopefully.
‘That’s a great idea.’
See! We can do it too. You just need to make the effort sometimes. That’s what everybody says anyway. And, yes, Dee may be having heady depraved sex in all sorts of positions right now but I wouldn’t swap that for this. This feeling of comfort and security. The fact that I know everything there is to know about this man running his fingers through my hair. Intimacy. That is what this moment is. Intimacy. It cannot be rushed or forced. It can only be grown delicately over years of learning, sharing and negotiation, and even then it’s a fair-weather crop. Like asparagus. Intimacy is like asparagus. That’s quite good actually, I should use it in one of my posts.
We watch The Reckoning and you know what? It’s OK really. I can see what all of the fuss is about. It’s really well shot and well acted and there is a strong female lead that’s problematic enough to keep newspaper columnists busy discussing whether she’s a good feminist or not. Tom really likes it. I bliss out, my eyes heavy with contentment as we watch the first half. Tom even bends down and kisses me on the cheek. The gentleness of it. Oh, I love him. I love him I love him I love him. I know I complain about him constantly but I do love him. I just forget sometimes that it can be like this. So safe, so secure, so snugly. Totally in tune with one another, focused on one another.
The adverts come on. All three minutes and twenty-nine seconds of them.
Both of us get out our phones.
Scroll refresh. Scroll refresh. What have I missed since last time?
@TheRealTori Watching #TheReckoning. If last series is anything to go by, whoever I fancy will end up being the one who did it.
Tom sits up alertly, tipping me off his lap so he can check up on numerous sporting achievements.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he mutters, and I know his football team must’ve done something wrong. I also know better than to ask him about it. The news is like a bad smell, seeping into the air around us. He’s going to be twitchy and irritable now, unless they pull it back. This is something I’ve never been able to adjust to. My relationship and my own mood and how nice my evening is depending on whether a bunch of overpaid eighteen-year-olds kick a ball in the right way. But I know better than to argue. I just tune it out. Turn down the dimmer switch, pretend it’s not happening. They may score by the next ad break and then Tom will smile again and clap and beam at me and reward me with a big hug that I know has nothing to do with me but makes me feel happy anyway. And it’s not like I’m not distracted by my own phone and the things it tells me. Counting notifications, frowning at a post from a rival author thanking the Telegraph for picking her book as a ‘top summer read’ and not mine. The adverts finish and Tom puts his phone back but he doesn’t return my head to his lap. I can almost taste his sourness on my tongue. Why can’t he support a better football team? One that actually wins? If you’re going to chain your emotional well-being to the outcome of a football team, why pick Aston Villa?
We are jolted back into the programme, however, when someone is shot in the face. They zoom in on the exploded skull and the violence is unnecessary and awful, but Tom doesn’t seem to mind as much as I do. I bury my face into his shirt as a joke, but also to try and revive the physical closeness. He laughs, but gently pushes me off him. The rejection stings yet I stuff the feeling down into my guts because we are having a nice evening and it wasn’t a big deal anyway. The programme goes on. The strong female lead finds the dead body with the exploded skull and has a theory about what happened that none of the male characters agree with. Tom’s distracted. He keeps checking his phone, making exasperated gasps each time. There’s yet another ad break and I retrieve my own phone to see if anything interesting has happened in the ten minutes since I last checked.
Bingo. Jessica has uploaded her honeymoon album.
I double-tap eagerly, turning my screen sideways so it takes up the entirety of my phone. Jesus Christ, she’s published over four hundred photos. Every single second of their Caribbean trip has been documented. Every single outfit she’s worn has been photographically noted, full-length, before going out to a place where she has taken a photo of every single meal before eating it. They have cheersed themselves with cocktails and taken a photo of the cocktails and the cheersing. There are photos of them at the airport and on the aeroplane, and of every towel-arrangement the hotel staff left for them on the end of their bed. Jessica’s painted toenails appear at least five times against the backdrop of a beautiful beach. There are dozens of stealthy photos of Jessica, taken as though she’s just naturally rollicking around on the beach and just happens to be in her bikini – all for the sole purpose of us seeing the lasting effects of her wedding diet. She cartwheels on a plain of white sand, oh, so carefree is she – her legs open to better show off the un-bulginess at the tops of her thighs.
I shove my phone at Tom in disbelief. ‘Look at this!’ I say to him. ‘Jessica’s uploaded over four hundred photos!’
Tom pulls a face, but it’s not at what I’m showing him on my phone. He’s pulling a face because he’s annoyed I’m trying to talk to him when he is still preoccupied with the football.
‘That’s just Jessica,’ he says, dismissing it as nothing before jabbing his thumb on his own phone to refresh, to refresh, to refresh.
I ignore his lack of interest because I need someone to vent to. ‘I mean, it’s like they’ve spent every second of this honeymoon taking photos!’ I cry, waving my phone closer. ‘Aren’t they supposed to be banging each other’s brains out? I mean, if they were really that happy, why are they spending so much time trying to convince us of that?’
‘Hmm.’ Tom looks down at his phone. He hits refresh again.
‘I mean, it’s madness, right?’
‘YES!’ Tom leaps in the air. The smile on his face is so huge, so much bigger than one I am ever able to give him. ‘GOAAAAL,’ he yells. ‘GOAAAAL.’ He reaches out and pulls me up to celebrate. Cat is so startled she runs out of the room. Tom spins me around on his arm, then dips me backwards to give me a Hollywood kiss. I laugh and pretend I’m dazzled by it.
‘You scored?’ I ask, like he had anything – anything – to do with it.
‘We scored! Last minute of the game and we only needed to equalise. Get in. Get in.’ He dances out of the room and comes back cradling Cat like she’s the FA cup. She squirms in his arms as he ballroom dances with her regardless.
>
I suppose he thinks I find this attractive.
I don’t.
And I try not to think about why it’s OK for him to care so much about this pointless game when he cares so little about other things. Like cancer going uncured and children starving in Africa and one in four women being a victim of rape, and his girlfriend needing him, really needing him to act this happy about her. But we’re having a nice evening and this is so preferable to how he’d behave if they’d lost, so I dance with him and Cat and let him spin me.
The programme starts again. It takes a while for Tom to get back into it. He’s scrolling through his phone – checking to see what people online are saying about this particular game of football. I take a bitchy screen-grab of Jessica’s honeymoon album and fire it off to Dee for reassurance. It takes a further fifteen minutes for Tom to settle but he’s so happy that he puts my head into his lap again. I can feel him smiling. We drift back into the show and lose ourselves in the strong female character proving everyone wrong yet again. Tom rubs my back and strokes my face with his finger and it feels amazing.
In the last ad break, I roll over so I’m looking right up at him. ‘Your face looks weird from this angle,’ I tell him. ‘It’s like an alien’s.’
‘Yours does too.’
We both start pulling faces, grimacing, poking our tongues out, raising our eyebrows, making our faces weirder. ‘Stop it! You’re freaking me out!’ I tell him.
‘You are too.’
I lean up and kiss him. He makes a noise like ‘Mwha!’ and raises his eyebrows – stopping the kiss from progressing before it’s even begun. But we still kissed. We still did the kissing that couples do.
In the final quarter, the strong female lead is kidnapped by her crazy ex-boyfriend who she still has a thing for. He’s only kidnapping her for her own safety, he tells her. Because she’s got too close to the wrong people. She kicks herself around in the chair she’s tied to and shakes her head angrily at him. He leans down to remove her gag and, the moment he does, they are kissing. Hungrily. Angrily. The sort of kiss that is so damn sexy and yet you don’t dare admit it for fear of what that means about your feminist sensibilities. Soon the crazy ex-boyfriend has pulled down her top. He’s kissing her breasts and she’s groaning loudly and you know they’re about to have incredible sex. And even though everything about this scene is completely messed up, and problematic, and even though it’s just two actors simulating something, and even though the newspaper columnists are going to have a field day with this tomorrow …
