LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL

by Ronan Hession

  ‘So,’ she said.

  ‘So, la, ti, do,’ Leonard sang, falling off his tippy toes at the high note, hardly realising he was doing an impression of Shelley’s sense of humour. Making her laugh was his new favourite thing.

  ‘So, Mr Encyclopaedia, I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Yes, of course. How do you think it went?’ he blurted.

  She laughed a little snot bubble out of her nose and immediately covered it up with her gloved hand.

  ‘Ah, that’s classic.’ She did a sigh of recovery from laughing. ‘It was really nice. Thank you.’

  His move.

  ‘Right then. Could we maybe meet up again? Another lunch or something?’ he suggested.

  ‘You men. Always thinking ahead to your next Meat Feast. I am free Thursdays, so we could do an evening thing if that’s what you meant.’

  ‘Great, great. I just wasn’t sure how you were fixed with your son and everything. That’s great. Yeah, Thursday is free for me.’ As was every other night. ‘How about I meet you in town at the clock tower at about, what, eight?’ he suggested.

  ‘Ah, the clock tower. You old romantic. Okay. See you then. I’ll let you choose the activity. See if you can blow my mind with something.’

  ‘Yes. Okay. Will do.’ Hmmm, he thought.

  ‘See you there and then.’

  Was he supposed to try and kiss her, peck her on the cheek or something? What to do? What to do? What to do?

  He leaned forward awkwardly as she was putting her helmet on and sort of hugged her platonically to the side, at her shoulder.

  ‘Woah, Casanova. Easy with the judo moves. Here,’ and she pecked him on the cheek instructively. It was a subtle way of establishing what they had both guessed, which is that she knew a bit more about that kind of thing than he did.

  She gave him a little ‘tring, tring’ on her bicycle bell as she pulled away.

  Leonard stood there and exhaled, waving to her back as she got lost in the traffic. ‘Boy oh boy,’ he said out loud. Boy oh boy.

  When Shelley got home she looked at what Leonard had written in the encyclopaedias he had signed:

  Dear Patrick,

  Everything in this book is true. The world really is this amazing. Make sure you tell your Mum all about it.

  Yours,

  Leonard

  (The man who really wrote the words for these books.)

  Chapter 12: Gracie loves Andy

  It hadn’t quite worked out as Grace had hoped. Andrew’s flight was due in at about 8pm and she had planned to take a half day and have a relaxing bath, maybe pick up a new perfume or earrings and then cook a nice dinner-cum-supper. She had bought a Japanese cookbook at Christmas that she had yet to try, and was toying with the idea of making something in honour of their planned honeymoon trip to Kyoto, arriving in the middle of the blossom season. They had booked a week there and had a further two weeks off, which they would just plan as they went. It had been busy in the run-up to the wedding and most of all she just wanted time off with Andrew all to herself. They had both been working hard for months and keeping three weeks off for the wedding meant taking very little time off during the rest of the year. Apart from a few days at Christmas and two long weekends—which were eaten up by friends’ weddings—they hadn’t really been off together except for Saturdays and Sundays. With Andrew’s travelling schedule—short in/out visits to Europe’s financial centres to give and receive PowerPoint presentations—the weekends were often a time to catch up and recover. He would sleep in most Saturday mornings, his body jumbled by moving one time zone east, then another time zone west, leaving Grace to enjoy solitary breakfasts or to go for a run. They would start synchronising at around lunchtime on Saturdays and build their weekend from there.

  As she prepared for Andrew’s return from his last pre-wedding trip—an occasion which officially marked their entry onto the runway of married life—things started going wrong at work, as they usually did whenever she planned to leave early. There had been some misunderstanding that the numbers on an order had gone awry, which made the logistics people in the States freak out, so Grace had to wait for the time difference to catch up so that she could un-freak them, and explain that the numbers were cumulative, which is how they were supposed to be done, even if it didn’t look right. The conference call to sort it out took longer than expected as everyone agreed that they had some thinking to do. The people who made the decisions were not on the call, so Grace had to rescue everyone’s wasted time by saying that she would do numbers in both formats for now until a decision was made on the bigger picture. The conference call ended with her thanking ‘you guys’ who could now ‘get back to your breakfast,’ as she realised that the call had killed her plans for a bath, which she had been promising herself ever since she insisted that they get one in the house, and not just a shower room. Eventually she left work at that awkward mid-afternoon period, costing her a precious half day from her holidays, while still looking like she was breezing off early as others stayed behind working.

  She was disappointed about her plans getting unpicked, and not just for Andrew’s sake. The idea had been to make a fuss and to inject some energy into the strangely anticlimactic preparations for the wedding. After a busy few weeks, she was hoping that a nice evening would make her feel in love and dreamy and excited about the imminence of the whole thing. Instead she was just tired and so, so sick of the organising. All she wanted was to get to the wedding day so she could start being a bride and stop being an event manager.

  Grace’s whole job, her whole career, involved sorting things out and putting people straight, but that was easy by comparison. In work she had complete detachment. No matter how well-planned her projects were she always expected road bumps, and had said many times that if there were no crises she would have nothing to do. It was important to her to be good at her job, good enough to be above the need for praise. But when it came to the wedding arrangements, she found herself

  overreacting and becoming agitated about the smallest things. She was frustrated by the flakiness of invite printers, cake makers and other one-person wedding suppliers, and blamed herself for falling for their earnest promises and cutesy services. Then there were the blatant price increases she faced from caterers, hotels, bands and DJs, all milking the happy couple’s wish for a special day. Most of all, she missed the buying power and corporate muscle that she had at the company; the threat of commercial force that stood behind her workplace successes. If she was honest, she was also frustrated and hurt that Andrew had left most of the arrangements, in fact nearly all of them, to her. Yes, she had told him she wanted to do it, and yes, she had very definite ideas about how she wanted things to be done, and she certainly didn’t want him to invent opinions he didn’t truly have just for her sake. But she would have liked, appreciated, him fighting for some role in organising the wedding, as a sign that the details were as special to him as they were to her. Instead, it felt like he was coming to her wedding.

  Grace had promised herself not to start thinking about this stuff when she was tired. It just made her negative, and her negativity would seek out a target and, if she wasn’t careful, she would meet Andrew from the plane and passive-aggressive the life out of the evening.

  On the way home from work, Grace flitted around a couple of shops just to see if she could pick up a new top or a pair of jeans quickly, anything to reset her mood. But the wedding had made her Spartan and money conscious, stopping her from spontaneously splashing out on something nice just to make herself feel better. At one of her favourite boutiques she saw a beautifully-cut jacket that cost the same as the wedding cake and a bag that cost almost as much as her hair and make-up for the wedding day. Instead, she bought a magazine and a packet of popcorn to eat on the train on the way home.

  Grace decided that she would go and meet Andrew at the airport, just like when she was at college and Helen an
d Peter would meet her off the plane after she came back from working away all summer. They would hold up some corny homemade sign with her name on it in bright colours. Then, when she arrived through the gates with her friends she would get so embarrassed, but still, she loved her parents to bits for doing it.

  At home, she took a quick shower and she checked her phone to see if there were any messages from Andrew about delays. There was just a short text: just about to take off, see you soon, x.

  They had met three years previously, at a badminton class. He was a beginner who had enrolled in an improver’s class, with the attitude of ‘How hard can it be?’ She had played as a teen and should have been in the advanced class, but she was rusty after years of not playing and decided to take it easy in the improver’s class. She thrashed him in a practice game during which he joked a lot, and then again in a game where he was clearly trying very hard. His grunting was no match for her technique. At one stage he overreached for a shot and farted through his shorts, which got them both back to bantering and the ulterior purpose behind the game. Inevitably, he asked her out and they stopped attending the badminton lessons, heading to the pub for drinks and flirtation instead.

  Andrew had come from a good family, a good school, a good area and had a good job: the kind of things Grace was impressed by—maybe ‘reassured by’ was more accurate—in spite of herself. He wasn’t specifically materialistic, but he was definitely in that game of trying to be thought successful enough to be above materialism. Grace had been inclined to needle him, not always innocently, especially as he had grown up with two older sisters and was used to being fussed over rather than laughed at. Early in their relationship, Grace caught glandular fever and Andrew could well have found reasons not to stick around, but instead he bought her new pyjamas and read Inspector Morse books to her—back when Morse drove a Lancia—and ignored the texts from his friends about the nights out he was missing. By the time Grace had recovered from the illness, their relationship had matured into something intimate and real, and all from just sitting around and talking to each other.

  Sometimes she wondered whether Andrew was just a bit too conventional for her. He had no real taste in music, he read sports biographies, he enjoyed pubs and rugby matches, and his opinions on politics all amounted to other people pulling up their socks just like he did. At heart, Grace was still a student communist and had a hidden rebellious side. She prided herself on having taste: experimental Laurie Anderson albums that were smarter than any music the boys made; those Lucien Freud portraits that looked like depressed character actors; long, slow Satyajit Ray movies that broke, then filled her heart; and travel choices that avoided the obvious. It had crossed her mind more than once that maybe Andrew was too much of a jock to be a long-term prospect, and at times during those early months she pushed him away, almost willing him to acknowledge that their divergent tastes were a warning sign. But, in spite of these reservations, Grace loved that Andrew didn’t need minding or looking after. He wasn’t complicated or troubled and didn’t have hang-ups or dependencies. He didn’t even depend on Grace. She knew that he would have been able to find happiness in his life no matter how things worked out between them, and that liberated her. It attracted her that she had no extra burdens in the relationship; that she could look after herself within it.

  For Andrew, Grace was simply unlike any woman, any person, he had ever known. He had always gone for perfect girls, girls who looked and spoke as though life’s opportunities were just a matter of time. In Grace, he had met someone who saw through all of that. She was perspicacious without being judgemental; smart but doubting; consummate in whatever she turned her hand to, without ever being consumed by any of it. He liked that she read books, not to have opinions about them, but to find herself in them. There seemed to be a sense of urgency, a sense of mission, about the way she lived her life. Above all this, their love lasted because when it came to the important things, the deep stuff that actually sustains and propels a relationship, their values were inseparably braided. They both loved their parents and had happy, though not necessarily straightforward, childhoods. They both wanted to start a family. And they both prized their mutual understanding that it was perfectly fine to be intimately in love, while retaining some private, sacred space for themselves as individuals within the relationship. Grace didn’t realise how much she needed that until she found it with Andrew, and he was the same with her.

  They each had a history of serial monogamy, though neither had lived with any of their previous partners. While Grace had been through the pantomime of teenage romances, her first proper relationship was at college. David, she had always said, was the ‘funnest’ of her boyfriends. He made her laugh, he made her friends laugh, and was always impossibly up for things. He had rooms on campus and all that that implied. She didn’t really take him that seriously and they just had fun together, the way that young people are supposed to but seldom do. During the whole time that they were dating, she hardly even called him a boyfriend. They broke up when he went abroad on a year out. It was only when she stared into a long summer alone that she realised how much she missed him and how much she had been trying to mirror his easy-going outlook, hardly admitting to herself the earnestness of her feelings. Her competitive side hadn’t let her admit that she was the serious one in the relationship. Last she heard, he was travelling in India.

  Jean-Michel was her other college boyfriend, a guy she went out with ostensibly to keep herself sane during her finals, but who ended up hanging around every bloody day and who kept asking her what she was thinking, which for her, was tantamount to ducking her head under water. She couldn’t bring herself to dump him, not least because she thought that he would become even clingier in the pursuit of closure, so she just decided to be cold towards him instead so that he would dump her. That only provoked him into calling around for more ‘chats’ as he tried to become her counsellor during a difficult time. In the end she became so disgusted at herself because of how creatively mean she could be, that she cheated on him drunkenly at a party with all their mutual friends there. The poor guy offered to forgive her and ‘work through it.’ There were several long letters from him afterwards about how he didn’t hate her and that he hoped she would be happy. It was a nice thing to say if he meant it, but Grace, who was at times a little ungenerous when it came to giving credit, saw it as a his way of holding out for a Hollywood ending. Last she heard, he was working in London and doing well for himself.

  Geoff broke her heart good and proper. A clean knockout, no need to go to the judges’ scorecards. They went out together for over year in those anything-can-happen years in the mid-twenties, when they both started earning good money and had nothing to spend it on except themselves. They had epic weekend nights out, which were boozy and full of running to wherever the next thing was on. It was a stage in their lives where their social circle stretched like an empire. He had a real job doing something in telecoms, but was also involved in the underground music scene and seemed to know everyone. It was the first time Grace had been with someone who was in a different league socially. He was the guy with grass who knew how to roll proper joints. He had droopy eyelids and said ‘man’ without sounding ridiculous. He was creative and played guitar in half a dozen bands, who released their own music as part of a collective. They travelled together: city breaks to Rome and London; and the odd weekend in a rented house by the sea with a bunch of scenesters, discussing politics self-consciously. In the end the betrayal was purely sexual. He had been cheating unapologetically with several girls from the scene, saying something about it being ‘just a physical itch.’ The end was instant and definitive. Grace would have preferred it if she had just flipped and destroyed him in one devastating moment of denouement. Instead, she made a mousey, capitulating exit, dumbstruck by the blatantness of it all. And so she left the scene and the crowd and the energy and the whole period of her life behind her that one evening, as she took a heartbro
ken taxi ride home. His words chased her thoughts round and round in her head, as he had explained, with almost parental simplicity, that the love she was feeling, and which she thought would grow to take over the world, was just some silly puppet show that she alone had thought was real. She cried in every room in Parley View for over two months as Helen nursed her with the chicken soup of motherly comfort and Peter let her lie on his lap as he stroked her tense, ridged eyebrows. And every evening Hungry Paul—dear, dear Hungry Paul—accompanied her on epic Tess of the D’Urbervilles walks, taken in silence and at thinking speed.

  In time, Grace recovered and relapsed and recovered and so on, until life resumed a more normal rhythm, but at a beginner’s level. Everything had to be relearned. She never saw or spoke to Geoff again, though she had scripted every possible future conversation between them, from magnanimous letting go to exacting, equalising character assault. It never came to anything. She learned of his death a couple of years after the event from a girl who had been in a band with him. He had been waiting at a bus stop when a drunk driver mounted the footpath after falling asleep at the wheel. He left behind a girlfriend and two boys.

  It may well be that if you truly want to open a heart, you need to break it open. The deep hurt of her failure with Geoff had taught her what was at stake in relationships. Grace had made the error of giving him a surrendering type of love: devotional, adoring love that she had mistaken for the real thing. But now she knew and understood so much more. Even as she shrank down to her smallest, she could still feel the faint and plucky pulse of her devastated heart. It had continued to beat in the darkest part of her chest during her loneliest moments. Knowing that her heart was always, always alive, and did not simply come to life when she loved, gave her an invincibility. Her heart felt like a chapel that had survived a bombing blitz and took on a divine status afterwards.