Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  ‘One minute.’ My heart seemed to be pounding at an improbable rate, I could hear it in my ears, and I placed the heel of my hand on my sternum. A shame now, to have to call an ambulance. I splashed my face with the rusty water, dried it with the edge of my T-shirt and went next door.

  The nightlights meant that the room was lit from below like a Victorian music hall, casting high shadows on the wall. Champagne – cava – lay under ice in a green plastic washing-up bowl, along with two chipped mugs. Fran knelt, changing the disc. ‘Marvin Gaye or Elliott Smith? Or are they both too obvious? Marvin, I think.’ She pressed play and stood. In the minutes I’d been next door, regulating my heart, Fran had somehow contrived to change clothes into a dress that I’d not seen before, black with large red roses and thin straps. There was a smear of lipstick too, hastily and unhappily applied because she was already sucking her lips to remove it.

  ‘You look beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t bring anything nice to wear.’

  ‘Well go home and change! Sorry. Shouting. Um …’ She tucked her hair behind her ear, and looked round the room. ‘By the way, I’ve, um, found something for us to do. Board games!’ She crossed to the shelves. ‘They’ve got Scrabble, Boggle, Pictionary. Operation’s the sexiest. I mean it’s practically foreplay, but the batteries are probably flat. Monopoly?’

  ‘Maybe later.’

  ‘You don’t want to start a game of Monopoly?’

  ‘Not this second.’

  ‘You can be banker. I realise it’s a time commitment. Or there’s a jigsaw. View from Waterloo Bridge, five thousand pieces.’

  ‘Maybe if it rains tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay. So – what do you want to do now?’

  ‘I just really want to kiss you.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Good. Come on then.’

  And so we kissed for some time. I knew from all of those songs about taking it slow, making the night last a long time and seeing the sun come up, that longevity was the key to success, and so we stopped to open the cava, and to make jokes and, once drunk enough, to slow-dance, stopping to move some of the nightlights that were dangerously near the curtains. ‘Imagine the headlines,’ said Fran, ‘“Virgin Dies in Blaze”.’ We finished the wine and I made two vodka and Cokes and Fran put Portishead on the CD player, then took it off again – too doomy – and played Mazzy Star instead. But there was something a little awkward about it all, and the white sheet of the sofa-bed glowed radioactively throughout until eventually we found ourselves there, undressing clumsily then finally making love.

  And again, there’s a problem of language because there was scarcely time to make anything at all. It would be wonderful to boast of some great, modulated and sustained act, full of shifting moods and tempo changes like some epic symphony. But the mere fact of it, the responsibility to make things happen in a certain way, meant that the whole thing was quite overwhelming, threatening at all times to spin out of control. I’d been led to believe that in moments of passion, some ability would kick in, an erotic sixth sense, instinctive like dancing – not my dancing, someone else’s dancing. Instead, it was the most extreme version yet of not knowing what to do with my hands. Not just hands, but mouth and eyes and hips, and though I’d yet to learn to drive a manual car, I imagined the co-ordination required would be something like this. Why, in all the depictions of sexual intercourse I’d ever seen, did everyone move around so much and with so much vigour? Surely that was a lie, and surely the only way to sustain the act for any length of time would be to treat it with steely, taut concentration, trying not to be distracted by the great cacophony of questions in my head. Should I maintain eye contact or is that creepy? If I look away, is that cold? Are we too near the edge of the bed? Does her head hurt, hanging off like that? Should we pause and budge up? ‘Budge up’ – isn’t that a funny phrase? That candle, is it still too near the bottom of the curtain, and now the sheet is untucked, should we stop and tuck in the sheet? If I close my eyes, will it last longer? She’s smiling – is smiling good, or is she trying not to laugh? What’s my face doing? Are we allowed to talk? Am I too heavy? Consequently, the moment of crisis was a little too much of a crisis, a thrilling panic, like that stretched moment when something irreplaceable, an ancient vase say, is knocked from a shelf, judders and then seems to hang suspended as you wonder, will it fall? Please don’t fall, it’s too precious, don’t fall, before accepting regretfully that, yes, there’s nothing you can do now, it’s going to fall, so that the moment was literally breath-taking and something that I’d probably have to apologise for.

  But despite all the anxieties, the overwhelming sensation was amazement; that I should be permitted to do such a thing and with such a person, that she should not just allow it but urge it on. Gratitude is too weak a word, humble and wheedling, but if it’s possible to imagine an intense, active passionate gratitude, then that is what I felt. Saying ‘thank you very much’, as if I’d been handed my change in a shop, was out of the question. I’d also got the impression that saying ‘I love you’ while making love was frowned upon, and that for those words to slip out in the throes of passion – especially the first time – would have been like passing wind: inappropriate and fatal to the mood. I’d resolved to do neither and had succeeded, but there was no doubt that I did love her and would never love or want anyone more as long as I lived, and that a sincere attempt had been made, not entirely successfully, to focus and communicate this in the act of love.

  I wasn’t sure I’d got this point across. Certainly, I wasn’t able to put it into words. All I could manage was, ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘You all right?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Yes, just need to …’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Just a moment …’

  ‘Okay. No rush.’

  ‘I need to …’

  It was some time before I could speak again.

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Cramp?’ she said.

  ‘Not exactly. Was it …?’

  ‘“All right for you?”’

  ‘I wasn’t going to ask that,’ I said, though I was.

  ‘It was lovely.’

  ‘It was quite quick, I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘I thought I’d get to move around a bit more.’

  ‘Next time.’

  ‘So you didn’t have …?’

  ‘An orgasm. Oh, yes, about, what, nine?’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Why, did you?’

  ‘Ha.’

  ‘Shh. Just lie there. It was really lovely, like I said. And the first time is always a bit like that. It’s just like, I don’t know …’

  ‘Clearing your throat?’

  ‘No! That’s gross. What I was going to say was, it’s like … have you ever made pancakes? Well, when you make pancakes, the first one’s always a bit of a try-out.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ I said, ‘I’m the bad pancake.’

  ‘It’s not bad, it’s still delicious, but the next one’s better. What I mean is, everyone makes a fuss about the first time, but it’s the second or the fourth or the twelfth that matters. And we’ve got all weekend. The main thing is’ – she took my hand and stared into my eyes – ‘you came to me as but a boy, and now you are a man.’

  We laughed and she pulled up the second sheet. To be lying in a bed with the whole length of our bodies pressed together was, in its own way, just as intimate and startling as the sex itself and I was newly grateful that this had happened here rather than down the back of the sofa.

  ‘Don’t fall asleep, will you?’ she said.

  ‘Not for a bit. You look beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you. You too.’

  ‘Well, handsome.’

  ‘No, beautiful,’ and she laid her hand gently on my face and slipped her little finger into my nostril.

  ‘Can you not do that please?’

&nbs
p; ‘Is it not sexy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just trying something new. So. How does it feel? Manhood?’

  ‘All right. Do I look different?’

  ‘Worldly-wise. Also, this is new …’

  ‘Oh, sorry.’ The condom still lay against my thigh like some freshly shed skin. ‘Should I get rid of it?’

  ‘No, keep it on. Wear it always, to remember me.’

  I removed the thing, tied a knot with a dexterity and deftness that had escaped me earlier.

  ‘Boys love to really look at it. Why is that?’

  ‘Dunno. It’s disgusting but sort of amazing too.’

  ‘Look at you, holding it up to the light. It’s like you’ve won a goldfish. All proud. They should put markings up the side, in millilitres. And at the top, write “Kapow!”’

  ‘What do I do with it?’

  ‘Oh, keep it. You have to keep the first one.’

  ‘In my wallet.’

  ‘Yeah, like a lock of my hair. Take it out and look at it.’

  ‘But surely you should keep it.’

  ‘I’m okay, thanks. Put it down now.’

  We rearranged the sofa cushions into pillows of a sort, and reached for our vodka and Cokes, syrupy and flat. Soon we were drunk enough to dance to old Prince songs, though Fran looked better doing this than I did, my nakedness providing one more reason not to lift my feet off the floor. We were also smudged with dust and grime. In the shower we squeezed beneath the feeble trickle, alternately scalding then freezing and barely wet enough to scrape the dirt from each other’s bodies with the blade of pink soap. ‘It’s like we’re in a Bond movie,’ shouted Fran over the roar of the cheap plastic water heater. No towel, and so we dried each other on yesterday’s T-shirts, and soon we were back on the sofa-bed, less panicked and self-conscious this time, more at ease and Fran was right, that was the time that mattered.

  ‘I have bought the mansion of a love’

  We must have drifted off to sleep at three or four. We’d been listening to music as the nightlights puttered out one by one and the last song I heard was ‘Lilac Wine’, the Nina Simone version, the low thrum-thrum-thrum of it.

  ‘I like how she sings “lie-lark”.’

  ‘Make wine from lilacs is terrible idea,’ she mumbled into my neck. We were very drunk now.

  ‘Sweet and heady, she says.’

  ‘All right. Let’s try it. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Have it as spritzer.’

  ‘Ha.’ I heard the crackle of her smile. ‘Ssh. Sleep.’ And so we slept.

  But the novelty and thrill of having her there, the warmth of her in the heat of the night, her movement in sleep, the springs and struts of the sofa-bed, meant that I was wide awake a few hours later, mouth dry, head booming. In the grey dawn light, the room had taken on a new type of squalor. We’d drunk the entirety of our weekend’s supplies on the first night. The empty bottles now lay close to my face at the side of the bed, alongside a great many condom wrappers, a half-eaten packet of biscuits, a pint glass of cloudy water and the saucer we’d used as an ashtray. At any other time I might have groaned and clutched at my head but this seemed to me like the bedside detritus of a new man, a man of experience, a lover’s bedside. Looking at Fran, I actually began to laugh, a mad, gleeful laugh that I had to stifle with my hand.

  She looked terrible, far, far worse than I had ever seen her before. Her mouth hung open gormlessly and I could feel her breath, hot and stale and boozy like the back room of a pub, and I loved this, loved the black smudges round her eyes and the grease on her forehead, the wine stains in her cracked lips and the spot on her chin that had formed in the night like a mushroom, and because I loved the stinking realness of her head on my shoulder and the damp warmth of her thigh across mine and the smell of bodies that seeped from beneath the sweat-damp tangled sheet, I wondered – if I stay very, very still, how long might this last?

  But the bladder will have its say and eventually I extricated myself. Standing in the bathroom, brushing my teeth and peeing at the same time, queasy and full of mysterious aches, I heard the sound of tyres on the gravel. Thoughtlessly, I flushed the toilet and now it seemed to roar like a dinosaur as, through the frosted glass, I watched the abstract shape of Bernard stepping out of the car. Crouching, I scuttled back to the living room where Fran sat with the sheet held across her. I pressed my finger to my lips and found a line of sight through the gap in the curtains. Bernard was a few feet away, fiddling with the latch on the gate to the estate while Polly strained to see her reflection in the wing mirror, wiping at the lipstick in the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Hurry, Bernard,’ she said, ‘we’ll miss the train,’ and I was close enough to hear Bernard mutter under his breath then climb back into the car.

  And then they were gone.

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘It’s safe.’

  ‘We don’t need to whisper any more.’

  ‘We weren’t whispering.’

  ‘We don’t need to forget to whisper any more,’ she shouted and I leapt onto the bed and kissed her.

  ‘You’ve brushed your teeth.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Cheat. I stink.’

  ‘You don’t,’ I said, though she did, and we kissed until we both tasted the same.

  We stood in T-shirts frying eggs in butter and drinking instant coffee. We squeezed together under the pathetic shower then went back to bed. Finally, late in the morning …

  ‘Shall we take a walk around the garden?’

  Like burglars, we had checked the grounds for alarms. The main house would be out of bounds, but the rest of the orchards, woods and meadows would be ours as long as we stayed out of sight of the road. Oh, I have bought the mansion of a love, says Juliet, but not possessed it. Here we were, the morning after, in full possession.

  But the day was overcast, the light softer, the first leaves on the sycamores and oaks starting to curl and turn brown. It might have been the first day of autumn and we pulled each other close as we walked through the woods that led to the main grounds, eerily quiet today, an empty stage.

  ‘Imagine living somewhere like this.’

  ‘Must be weird, mustn’t it?’ said Fran. ‘It’s not something I think about. Big houses, money. Maybe it’s something that comes on when you’re older. Love of stuff. I hope not.’

  ‘Harper thinks about it. He’s got all these car magazines and he sort of paws and turns the corners of the ones he’s going to buy. And hi-fis and all that stuff – cameras, big watches that tell you how far underwater you are. He’s not showing off, he just likes it, like a hobby.’

  ‘But you don’t want a big watch, do you?’

  ‘No. Same time, I don’t want to be poor.’ Spoken aloud, the word sounded so strange and old-fashioned that I wondered if I’d mispronounced it. Certainly I wished I hadn’t said it.

  ‘Do you worry about money now?’

  ‘Not with the wages I’m pulling in at the petrol station.’

  ‘Big bucks.’

  ‘Loaded. But my dad worries and I worry because he worries … so it’s sort of infectious.’

  ‘I just want enough money not to worry about money.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘And a job I like doing.’

  ‘Famous?’

  ‘God, no. I mean, famous as a by-product of the work, not for its own sake. Fame’s the big watch. Who wants that? I’d much rather just be doing good work. With lots of friends, and in love and having lots of sex. There. Put it like that, it sounds really easy.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean, really, what’s the problem? We’re halfway there.’

  Abruptly, we lapsed into silence. We could talk with ease about anything except the future. September hung ahead of us like a heavy curtain. The subject made me sulky, but to not discuss what might lie on the other side was absurd and cowardly too. We were too young to have subjects that we couldn’t talk about.

  In a while, after
taking a breath, she said, ‘I think you should go to college.’

  ‘Nah, I’m going to get a job.’

  ‘Sure, but even if you don’t get the grades—’

  ‘Which I won’t.’

  ‘—you could work then retake.’

  ‘It’s not for me.’

  ‘Just Maths and English, so you could do other things.’

  ‘No, that’s over now.’

  ‘But you’re really smart, Charlie, I wouldn’t be with you if you weren’t.’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else, yeah?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She took my arm and we left the subject, but teetering, about to fall.

  We’d brought books and an ancient Thermos flask we’d found and filled with instant coffee, and we walked down through our gardens towards our favourite spot at the top of the meadow, near the place where we’d first met.

  ‘What did you think? The first time.’

  ‘I thought – who’s this freak?’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Lurking about with his top off, scaring the shit out of people.’

  ‘I wasn’t lurking, I was reading.’

  ‘I didn’t think it for long. When I’d calmed down, I thought, he’s all right. He seems safe.’

  ‘“Safe”?’

  ‘Trust me, girls don’t always think that with boys alone. It’s a good thing. I thought you were funny, too, the way you looked at my ankle like you had this medical training. I watched your face while you did it. You looked handsome. You mustn’t get big-headed, but it’s possible that I exaggerated the extent of my injuries –’ and here she yelped with pain, and slipped into a rolling, broken-hipped limp, one hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Yes, I did wonder about that.’

  ‘You didn’t believe me?’

  ‘The limp, it kind of came and went.’

  ‘It did not! How dare you! Anyway, it worked. You came back, didn’t you? When I saw you, on the second day, I just wanted to laugh, partly ’cause it was funny, you grinning and bearing it like that, me winning—’