Please

by Peter Wild

  ‘Well, not quite, but it’s not far off the mark. Look, are you going to be able to finish the story?’

  ‘I said I’d do it so I’ll do it.’

  ‘Good, thank you. And what about Church of the Poison Mind? Shall I slate you in for that?’

  ‘Oh, yes, absolutely brilliant! The eagerly awaited Culture Club anthology.’

  ‘You’re being ironic, aren’t you…? Hello…? Hello…?’

  Word document (trashed):

  A View to a Kill

  Frenzied, hysterical, utterly detached from any vestige of reason, Spencer plunged the knife into

  Post-it left on fridge:

  Gone to murder one of the Taylor brothers. Either will do. Both would be a bonus. Don’t wait up.

  Nowhere Fast

  Jeremy Sheldon

  I chose to write a story inspired by ‘Nowhere Fast’ because I couldn’t get the following line out of my head: ‘And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion, I’d get such a shock I’d probably jump In the ocean…’ Now it seems I can’t get Leo, the narrator, out of my head and he’s developed into the central character of a longer piece.

  ‘Leo, for heaven’s sake…’

  I looked up from the washbasin to see Sorrel standing at the door. For a moment, I wondered what I’d done wrong, then realised that I’d forgotten to switch off the tap while I was brushing my teeth, the latest development in her plans to save the planet single-handedly.

  ‘How many times do I have to remind you?’ she snapped, reaching in front of me and twisting it closed before I could move.

  I grunted an apology through the toothpaste foam, long accustomed to what the girls and I sometimes called ‘Mummy’s Rules’ (usually when Mummy wasn’t listening), but Sorrel had already marched downstairs, eager to start preparing for the arrival of ‘Marcus and Opal’, some new friends she’d invited to the house for dinner that evening. A few minutes later, I joined her to find that she already had a list of chores waiting for me to attend to while she went out to the shops. Scrubbing the toilet. Sweeping the front path. Mopping the kitchen floor. Later, I was sipping a mug of tea and surveying my handiwork when she returned with the food.

  ‘So,’ I asked, ‘who are they?’

  ‘Marcus is another columnist at the paper,’ Sorrel replied.

  I could have guessed as much. Recently, our whole lives had started to revolve around ‘the paper’. But when had she started pronouncing the ‘N’ in columnist? I wasn’t sure.

  ‘He writes about design,’ she added, somewhat vaguely it seemed to me. ‘Opal is a yoga teacher.’

  ‘And you met them when?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ Sorrel replied. ‘Marcus emailed me out the blue the other day to tell me how much he’s been enjoying my column. I thought it might be nice to invite them over. Perhaps you can wear that shirt I bought you last Christmas.’

  Sorrel spent the rest of the day fretting about ‘the state of the knives and forks’, hoovering every horizontal surface in the house, placing tea-lights in the freshly glistening bathroom and roasting a butternut squash. Whether the fact that her column that weekend extolled ‘the wholesome beauty of gourds’ was a coincidence or part of her grand design wasn’t clear. Either way, I spent the rest of the day washing and polishing new (new!) wineglasses that she’d bought in Crouch End, ironing a tablecloth and driving the girls to St Albans to stay with their grandparents. I returned to find the hallway transformed with strings of tiny ‘box’ lights (where she’d stashed the girls’ clutter, I never found out, but it reappeared piece by piece throughout the following week) and new ‘throws’ tossed over each of the sofas in the scrubbed sitting room.

  ‘What do you think?’ Sorrel asked. ‘I thought the place could do with some sprucing up.’

  ‘Very nice,’ I replied, taking it all in and thinking that it looked as if we were about to redecorate. Who were this ‘Marcus and Opal’? Whoever they were, they were clearly too important for Sorrel’s standard ‘take us as they find us’ approach to those that called round.

  Half an hour later I was ready and eager to welcome but then had to wait another forty minutes until the doorbell finally rang.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ I called out, and pulled open the front door to find what appeared to be a pair of sixth-formers waiting on the doorstep.

  ‘Hi there. You must be Marcus and Opal?’

  The boy pulled a hand out of a pocket and thrust it forward.

  ‘Marcus. You’re Lionel, right? Good to meet you, pal.’

  I hadn’t had time to correct him before Sorrel shunted past to welcome them both, kissing them both on each cheek, I noticed, even though she’d met neither of them before.

  ‘Marcus, wonderful to meet you finally. And you must be Opal? So glad you’ve braved your way to the wilds of Finsbury Park.’

  ‘We brought bubbles,’ Opal mewed in response, proffering two wrapped bottles.

  ‘Champagne, how thoughtful,’ I said, taking them from her.

  ‘Prosecco, actually,’ Marcus corrected. ‘There’s this really good offie on Columbia Road. Family business, literally been there for decades. We never go anywhere else. Thought champagne was a little obvious.’

  ‘Well, we’re even more thankful for it in that case,’ I mumbled, drowned out by Sorrel’s encouragement that we should move to somewhere ‘more comfortable’.

  I led Marcus into the sitting room and offered him a seat on one of the newly shrouded sofas while Sorrel and Opal went to the kitchen to fetch some glasses.

  ‘Sorry we’re a bit late,’ he started, a gold signet ring flashing through his spiky hair. ‘I was writing copy for a mate’s website. Totally lost track of the time.’

  ‘I understood that you were a journalist,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I do all sorts of things,’ he replied, as if the idea of doing one thing was impossible. ‘Viral marketing, art, DJing…’

  ‘I see. That all sounds very interesting.’

  ‘And what about you? What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a teacher.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What subject?’

  ‘Well, my subject’s History. But my responsibilities pretty much keep me out of the classroom.’

  ‘Responsibilities?’

  I replied that I was a headmaster.

  ‘Headmaster, eh? Don’t look old enough.’

  I wondered whether I needed to qualify that, at thirty-nine, I was the youngest headmaster in the borough (a source of some pride when the appointment was first made) or whether to respond by telling him that he didn’t look old enough to write for the colour supplement of the weekend edition of a national newspaper. It was then, however, that Opal and Sorrel reappeared with a tray of glasses, a bowl of Japanese rice crackers and an opened bottle of ‘bubbles’.

  ‘Opal’s just been telling me about a new initiative she’s come up with,’ Sorrel chimed as she set the tray down.

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s got this brilliant idea of teaching yoga at schools. I was saying that she should discuss it with you. Maybe there’s scope for a pilot scheme at St Stephen’s?’

  ‘It sounds like a lovely idea, in theory, very progressive,’ I replied. ‘In practice, it’s challenge enough to get pupils to focus on the basics. It might be hard getting them to respond to something quite so…unconventional.’

  ‘There’s nothing more basic than yoga,’ Opal chirped. ‘Children today are so out of touch with their bodies, it’s no wonder that none of them can sit still long enough to learn anything.’

  ‘You should give it some thought,’ added Marcus. ‘No one can afford not to think outside the box these days. Might give you another string to your bow.’

  I held back from various responses, relieved to be able to concentrate on pouring drinks while Sorrel continued to enquire about Opal’s yoga classes and suggest she might come along to one. What form did Opal teach? Apparently she’d just recently returned from a retreat in Thailand where she’d ‘go
t into Bikram’. Was Bikram really more dynamic? Sorrel asked. Didn’t a hybrid of the Ashtanga and Iyengar forms provide a better balance? Opal mused that ‘no form was better than its teacher’ and this pretty much set the pattern for the evening that followed. I was used to some of Sorrel’s more exotic ideas, her macrobiotic fasts, her Ayurvedic consultations, her implementation of a bokashi bin in the corner of the kitchen, her insistence we all use fennel toothpaste, her abhorrence of plastic carrier bags (and bleach and meat and monocrops and television and supermarkets and a whole detailed portfolio of other evils). I was more than used to being on the fringe of conversations whose terms I could only just decode (I’d spent my whole working life ignoring frenzied childish chatter about a vast array of alien objects, anything from Pokemon to P Diddy), but I was surprised to find three adults having a conversation in my kitchen in which I was barely included, let alone able to understand. Marcus seemed to lead at all times, his topics ranging from ‘New Transgressionist’ literature and the ‘Brick Lane Jazz-Artcore’ scene to ‘Africanism’ and ‘Modern-Classic’ design (the syllables of this last item crunched together without space for breath). And of course there was talk of his and Opal’s most recent trip to India (‘sourcing various things,’ he admitted mysteriously) and talk of his various installation projects (‘I’m making work for a couple of spaces at the moment…’) and a tremendous amount of time spent outlining the plans he had for his and Opal’s loft apartment on Vyner Street.

  ‘Are you going for a Modern-Classic look?’ I asked as politely as I could.

  ‘Nah, something more Revisionist-Ethnic.’

  This opened half an hour of discussion about Opal’s fondness for South African fabrics that somehow segued into a report on Marcus and Opal’s planned trip to New Zealand.

  ‘What about the carbon emissions created by such a long flight?’ I asked, choosing not to bother adding that their recent flights to Mumbai and back had also produced the same, and waited for Sorrel to add her own concerns. Our most recent summer holiday had been taken on the Scilly Isles rather than Paxos (my first choice of destination) and it had taken all my skills of negotiation to ensure that we hadn’t had to bicycle our way to the West Country. Yet no such concern left Sorrel’s lips, only a murmur of approval at Marcus’s announcement that he and Opal would offset the carbon footprint of the journey with a payment towards the Forest Stewardship Council.

  ‘Very clever,’ I replied.

  ‘Well,’ Marcus sighed, ‘none of us can keep taking and taking from the planet without giving something back.’

  This comment seemed to mark a lull in the conversation and I wondered whether Marcus had finally run out of steam. Not a chance. Sorrel suggested we sit ‘soft’ (like pronouncing the N in ‘columnist’, this was a recent addition to her vocabulary) and busied herself preparing a pot of green tea (and a cup of vervain for Opal) while I led the way back to the sitting room, where Marcus launched into a new phase of the evening. This seemed to take the form of an interview. Had I tried the new Jaliscan restaurant in Hoxton Square? Had I logged on to reaganomicon.com (a website dedicated to the 1980s ‘but in an ironic way’)? Had I heard of Tinariwin?

  ‘Where’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Not where, Lionel, but who,’ hooted Opal.

  Marcus was in the process of telling me that they were a ‘sub-Saharan blues band’ when Sorrel reappeared with the drinks and Fair Trade chocolates and I breathed a sigh of relief that Marcus could resume directing his commentary at her rather than me. And still it continued, Marcus and Sorrel exchanging information on a range of people they’d seen at ‘launches’ and ‘private views’. In Marcus’s opinion, Mikey Fischer was a shameless ‘rock slagger’. Did Sorrel know that Pip Tomkins was cheating on her magazine-editor husband with Jakey Smallbright? Had Marcus seen how poor Vic Morton’s last show had been? (‘Poor?’ he’d replied. ‘It was fuckin’ destitute.’). And what about Kane Pullet-Smith, seen desperately schmoozing with Chloe Forbes at the Alarm Bar the previous week in an attempt to get his own column?

  How did Sorrel know all these people? When had she met them? I thought back over the last year or so since Sorrel had started writing her articles. She went out perhaps once a fortnight to ‘a work thing’ but always dismissed the events as pretentious and tiresome. According to Marcus’s testimony, it all sounded like a backstage orgy at a rock concert. ‘Parky’ (whoever he was) had been ‘busted doing it in the toilets with some cocktail waitress by his missus.’ Other characters had variously been caught ‘boffing’, ‘doinking’ and ‘thrumming’. And there was the consistent if unspoken implication that everyone was taking drugs all the time, Marcus included (he’d build on a sequence of smug inferences before pulling up short and claiming he’d better ‘plead the fifth’ with a sideways glance in my direction).

  Opal sat there listening to it all, batting her eyelids at Marcus. As for me, I tried not to look at my watch too often and contributed little to the conversation beyond the addition of a few neutral grunts for the hour that elapsed before they ordered their cab and finally left.

  ‘That was fun,’ Sorrel exclaimed once we’d waved them off and walked back inside.

  ‘You must be joking?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Perhaps I should have sensed the warning signals, the speed of her response, the sharpening of her tone. But I’d drunk more than my normal amount and was in no mood for circumspection.

  ‘I mean,’ I said, piling the dirty teacups on to the tray and carrying them through to the kitchen, ‘that he must have been the most pretentious person I’ve ever met.’

  ‘I thought he was charming and interesting,’ Sorrel replied. ‘You might take note of that. You weren’t…’

  She broke off.

  ‘I wasn’t what exactly?’ I asked, slamming the tray down on the kitchen counter and turning to face her.

  ‘There’s no need to be aggressive.’

  ‘I’m not being aggressive. Tell me what you were about to say.’

  Sorrel started clearing the kitchen table.

  ‘I was about to say,’ she began, eyes focused on the dirty plates and cutlery, ‘that you weren’t exactly the most enlightening company tonight. I think you could have made more of an effort. I always make an effort to back you up in your work…’

  ‘More of an effort! I’m still trying to work out why I’ve spent half my weekend cleaning the house so that you can impress those fools. I thought you had better judgement than…’

  ‘Leo,’ she interrupted, ‘you’ve drunk too much and you’re embarrassing yourself. Perhaps you should just go upstairs to bed.’

  ‘He was an idiot and you know it.’

  ‘Marcus is one of the most respected writers at the paper…’

  ‘Of course, the paper, I wondered when that was going to come up. Do you know how ridiculous you sound? It’s not as if you’re writing the leader column for The Times. All you’re doing is writing a few hundred words about bloody diets once a week. It’s hardly…’

  I stopped, realising that I didn’t want to finish my intended sentence. Sorrel had stared back at me for a few seconds.

  ‘You know,’ she replied quietly, ‘I think you’re jealous.’

  ‘Jealous? Of him?’

  ‘No.’ She sighed, pushing a strand of red hair back from her face. ‘Of me. I’ve finally been given the chance to do something I believe in. Now you’re not the centre of attention round here, all you can do is undermine me.’

  She walked out of the room at that point. Moments later, the sound of our bedroom door slamming echoed down the stairs. I stood there in the kitchen without moving for a few moments, cheeks and fingertips burning, heart thumping away. Had I been unfair? I didn’t think so. I’d been putting up with ‘Mummy’s Rules’ for long enough and every time I broke one of them, I was reprimanded as if I were a little boy. How come she’d let some trust-funded chancer behave like a spoiled brat and decided that I was the one at fault? Weren�
�t Marcus and Opal the kind of middle-class hypocrites that Sorrel loathed?

  Perhaps not. Perhaps I was being unfair. What had Sorrel and I been like when we were in our mid-twenties? I thought back to our PGCE days, both of us giddy with high ideals and convinced we were going to transform the lives of young people. We were going to foster social change in the classroom, the ‘sharp end’, as Sorrel was fond of saying back then. And now? Even I had to admit that spending my days managing budgets and staff felt as far away from those lofty ambitions as one could get. Perhaps everyone deserved the chance to change as life’s realities closed in.

  I turned off all the lights downstairs and trudged slowly up to the bathroom, where I brushed my teeth (the tap dutifully switched off during the brushing itself) before opening our bedroom door as quietly as I could and creeping inside. Sorrel was already in bed with the lights off, her back facing me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered in the darkness. ‘I guess I got carried away just now. Can you forgive me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I took my clothes off and slid into bed next to her, pulling the covers tight around us.

  ‘I really am sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK, Leo. I just want to forget about it.’

  I tired to gauge her tone. Her anger seemed to have subsided but I couldn’t be sure. We lay there for a few moments, the sound of her breathing faint in my ears, before I reached an exploratory arm out towards her and tried to gather her closer to me. Would she shrug me off? No, her body shifted a little and soon her back was pressed against my chest, her buttocks pressed against my groin. Before I knew it, I had an erection growing in the space in between. Had Sorrel noticed? I tried to focus on some kind of quotidian image, anything (marking, morning assembly, staff meetings) to will it away, only for an image of Sorrel churning beneath me to flash up in its place.

  Slowly, my fingertips pulsing with heat, I reached round to cup her breast in my hand. It had been months. Perhaps all we’d needed was a row to clear the air.