All the while Tom wondering if there’d be more questions, or if this
was it.
‘Okay,’ Esme said quietly. She took his hand as she spoke. ‘You
know we’ve all been there?’
Tom nodded at this. He wanted to say that, no, we haven’t all
been there. Certainly she hadn’t. His ‘there’ was an altogether different place from her drunk night out that ended with a friend holding
her hair back as she threw up.
‘And it’s fine to decide that, Tom,’ Esme continued. ‘It really is.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry, Es. I guess I think people
might . . . judge.’
‘And so what if they do? It’s your life, your choice. I’m proud of
you for not just doing what everyone else does. I love you for it.’
Esme leant over to kiss him. He kissed her back.
*
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‘You can’t be fucking serious, Tom,’ Annabel said, almost slamming her pint glass down onto the table. She was angry. Tom knew she
had the right to be.
‘Annabel, I’m—’
‘I really can’t believe you sometimes.’
‘Leave it, eh?’ Neil said.
‘It’s not as if it was just a dose of the flu, Neil.’
‘Look. If he doesn’t want her to know at the moment, it’s not up
to us. He’ll tell her when the time’s right.’
‘Neil.’
‘Topic off limits. Along with Murray’s ex-girlfriends,’ Neil said, as
Tom checked his watch again, trying not to look worried.
‘Oh, I was going to kick off with an ex-girlfriend story when
she got here!’ Pod said. ‘Town-wide manhunt. Murray found in a
compromising situation with the geography teacher’s daughter when
he should’ve been at his Saturday job.’
‘Pod,’ Tom said, sensing Annabel’s annoyance growing.
‘What? How about when you nicked that scarecrow, dressed it up
and tried to sneak it into the nightclub as your date?’ he said. ‘Or
when you almost got arrested for throwing a snowball at a police car.’
‘None of it,’ Tom said. ‘I don’t want her to think I’m—’
‘A prick?’ Neil said, which Tom ignored while the others laughed.
‘I’m really pleased you two find this so funny,’ Annabel said,
sounding like a disapproving teacher.
‘Could everyone just stop?’ Tom said firmly. ‘I don’t want her
thinking I’m someone . . . else. You know? An earlier version of
myself. What you said earlier about making a go of it. I do want to.
It’s just I’m always a bit scared about myself, you know?’
His friends went quiet. They knew what he was referring to, the
particular part of Tom that had died that evening five years ago.
‘I love her. She loves me. If things go right this could be amazing.’
The table went silent. The banter and jokes now gone.
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‘Fine, Tom. But you know deep down that not telling her isn’t going to help things “go right”. You have to realise that.’
‘Annie, come on,’ Neil repeated, jumping in to defend Tom.
‘Do you think it’s okay, honestly okay, that she doesn’t know?’
‘It’s Tom’s choice.’
‘How long have you been together now?’ she said, turning back
to him.
‘Almost four months.’
‘And she knows none of it?’
‘I said, she knows bits.’
‘Bits.’
‘Annabel.’
‘I think it’s wrong,’ she said, as the door opened.
‘Stop,’ Tom said.
‘No, Tom. If you’re going to make this work I really—’
‘I said stop,’ he said firmly, and Annabel looked around. ‘She’s here,’ he said.
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CHAPTER FOUR
8 – 9 am
BUILDING A HOME TOGETHER
April 2009 – Belsize Park, London
Tom had been awake for almost an hour already, shocked into con-
sciousness by an explosion of glass which turned out to be the bin
men emptying last night’s bottles from the pub next door. Now in
a terrible mood it was impossible to get back to sleep from, despite
Esme next to him still snoozing soundly.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t raised the possibility that this might
happen.
‘It’s is a single-glazed maisonette, ten metres from The Essex Arms
pub, Es,’ he’d said eight weeks ago when they were on the bed in his
tiny studio flat discussing what it would be like when they finally
moved in together. ‘And I’m a really light sleeper.’
‘The agent said you can barely hear the pub at night.’
‘How many nights do you think he’s spent there?’
‘Tom, please. It’s nice. It’s in Belsize Park. It’s got that period
charm I like.’
‘Along with thin walls and a draught. Also, the communal hallway
looks like a murderer’s den.’
‘You are impossible to please,’ she said.
In fairness, Tom had presented an alternative: a two-bed at the
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bottom end of Finchley Road, with a window that looked out onto train tracks popular with both rats and the city’s lesser pigeons. If he was honest, the only good thing about it was the quietness, though
for Tom that was always the most important quality in a house. He
knew that she’d hate it the moment he found it online.
Esme, meanwhile, had found loads of potential properties, each
more unsuitable for Tom than the last. There was the one in Muswell
Hill, which he had vetoed for being ‘too cut off and above a branch
of Pizza Express’. A place in Camden was condemned because the
door led out onto the high street and so, Tom worried, would be
coated in piss every Friday and Saturday night. And then there was
the big, top-floor flat in West Hampstead that seemed perfect, until
the weird neighbour came over to introduce himself during their
viewing.
They’d spent a grand total of three weekends at the beginning of
the year touring wintry North London’s property barrel scrapings,
driven about in a series of estate agency-owned Mini Coopers to
view grotty flats full of other people’s stuff.
Until they found this place.
For Esme, it was ‘the one’. For Tom it was ‘the closest to the
one’ that he had thus far seen. It was nice and it was homely. Both
important qualities, because – although he never properly admitted
it before they started looking – the idea of moving in with Esme
terrified him.
The thing was (or one of the things was) she had lived with her previous partner and therefore already understood the politics of it;
the unspoken things that people just did so they could rub along
fine. Tom, on the other hand, didn’t know anything about such
things. It was all new to him: from the decision to move in together,
to picking out the flat and sharing its space.
Aside from living back with his parents for a couple of years,
he had been a stranger to co
habiting since his solitary year at the
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University of Hertfordshire, when he was squeezed with seven others into a run-down 1970s block that smelled of vinyl flooring and cheap
furniture polish. Again, Esme had had an entirely different experience of university halls. Higher education – and the cohabitation that
came with it – accounted for five years of her life, and she’d loved
every moment: three at Oxford, studying modern languages and
linguistics, plus another two at UCL to complete her training to
become a child speech therapist.
For all his fear, uncertainty and doubt, the debate was eventually
settled in a branch of Starbucks in Queen’s Park. They were sipping
hot chocolates and looking over the one-page brochures for the
four places that comprised their shortlist when Esme confronted
his prevaricating and nit-picking.
‘Look. Do you even want to live together?’ she had asked, after
he’d complained about the fees attached to the move and suggested,
again, that they spend a few months living in the relative safety of
his studio, instead of getting their own place.
‘Yes. Of course I do,’ he had said, withholding again the fact that
moving out of a place he was comfortable in calling home terrified
him. As did the intimacy that would come with living with Esme.
‘Then you have to get over the fact that nowhere we live will be
perfect. Christ, Tom. This is London. We’ll probably only be there
for two years before the bastard landlord hikes the rent up and we’re
forced to leave.’
‘Well . . .’
‘So could you stop finding some ridiculous fault with every single
place we see?’ she continued, before he could find something to
disagree with. ‘There’s nothing wrong with any of the flats we’ve
looked at, really. Except the pissy door place in Camden.’
‘I know, Es. I do.’
‘So what is it then? Knowing you, I’m guessing that you’re scared
about this whole thing. It’s new, it’s removing you from somewhere
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you felt comfortable. But it’s fine to be hesitant about this stuff, Tom,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘Jesus, I’m scared too.’
‘You?’ Tom said, surprised, this admission being entirely contrary
to the established architecture of their relationship: him the awkward, socially inept one; her the sound, level, determined picture of a life well lived.
‘Of course I’m bloody scared. There’d have to be something wrong
with you if you weren’t. Christ, Tom. With most people, you only
see maybe twenty per cent of what they’re actually like. When you
live with them, it’s a hundred per cent. All the pretty bits and all the ugly bits. The nights when I don’t want you to come over because I’m
in jogging bottoms and wearing a face pack? Wel , you’l be there.
When I’m ill and want to be left alone, you’ll be there. We’re going
to share a bathroom, for God’s sake! Which is just about the most
horrendous thing imaginable.’
‘I suppose,’ he said, smiling.
‘When you share a life with someone, you share the whole bloody
thing. Not just the bits you want someone to see. But what’s the
alternative?’
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I know you’re right.’
‘Good. Now pick one,’ she’d said, holding three sheets of paper
in her hand, like it was a card trick. ‘Because I’ll tell you now I am not going to beg you to live with me, Tom. I’m not.’
Something in her expression warned him now was not the time
to raise other concerns about his innate fear of change. Esme, he
realised, was not just asking him to pick somewhere to live, she was
seeking confirmation that they had a future together. That there was
something to build on for the years to come. That this was not one
of those relationships that ticks along for a year before falling apart at the first sign of commitment.
They’d got too close to that once already.
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‘This one,’ Tom said, pointing to the Belsize maisonette. ‘If you like it?’
‘I do,’ Esme said with a smile, and took out her phone to call
the agent.
And now, there they were.
Esme still asleep and the noise outside growing, with engines of
sports cars taken for weekend spins, slamming doors, the bleeps of reversing trucks. At one point he heard a posh voice yell, presumably
to her dog, ‘Oh Digby, not there,’ and hoped that ‘there’ did not
mean his doorstep.
Stacks of branded cardboard boxes pilfered from various North
London supermarkets sat against almost every wall. But instead of
being full of Monster Munch, Fairy Liquid and Pedigree Chum,
they contained the worldly possessions of Tom and Esme – collected
yesterday from their now old homes in Camden and Pimlico, and
driven (uncertainly by Tom) in a van through the centre of the city.
Her alarm clock said 8.30. Meaning nothing had stirred her now
for over an hour and a half. This, he could foresee, was how it
would be: him up early most days, never quite getting used to the
noise, but putting up with it as he would a broken doorbell or a
loose floorboard. Those things that are initially annoying, but are
eventually forgotten, and oddly missed when they’re gone. Esme
asleep, soundly curled up in the foetal position with the duvet pulled up to where her neck met her jaw.
Giving up on waking her himself, Tom climbed out of bed and
went into their little living room, separated from the kitchen by
a breakfast bar and a cheap plastic dining table to accompany the
most basic furniture the landlord had bought for the flat. Their new
home was in various stages of chaos. On the kitchen worktops sat
the remnants of last night’s takeaway Chinese, alongside the three
cheese graters, two kettles and four colanders they now owned – the
result of the coming together of their material lives.
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He was looking through a small stack of Esme’s books when she shuffled into the living room, wearing her red-chequered pyjama
trousers and his large, dark-blue hoodie, cuffs rolled up to the elbows.
‘Morning,’ Tom said cheerfully.
‘How long have you been trying to wake me up for?’ she said,
groggily.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The nudging, the music,’ she said, stopping to yawn. ‘The stamp-
ing around.’
‘What, you were awake?’ he said. She kissed him on the cheek,
yawned and ran her fingers through her hair. Then began opening
cupboards, looking for something that clearly wasn’t there before
eventually giving up and trying the fridge, from which she took a
piece of bread and put it in the toaster.
‘I was drifting,’ she said. ‘Why do you keep bread in the fridge?’
‘The fridge is where bread goes.’
‘The bread bin is where bread goes.’
‘We don’t have�
��’
‘Add it to the list,’ she said, pointing to a piece of paper fixed to
the fridge, on which she had detailed everything they were missing
and would need within the next day or two: an ironing board, more
plates, teaspoons, a bathmat. Tom had argued against the latter,
insisting that they could just lay a towel on the floor. But Esme had
insisted that she, as an almost thirty-year-old woman, refused to live like a student or a grimy bachelor.
‘I’m making tea,’ Tom said. ‘You can finish the job while you’re
making breakfast.’
‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘Rule five, remember? Also, I’m making me
breakfast. You can sort yourself out.’
‘This is how it’s going to be, is it?’ he said, taking her faded and
chipped Oxford University mug down from the cupboard she had
designated for glasses and cups. ‘Every man for himself. Or herself.’
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‘You know, I didn’t know where I was when I opened my eyes,’
she said, ignoring him.
‘You are Esme Simon,’ Tom said, sarcastically and slowly. ‘I am
Tom Murray. And this,’ he said, gesturing around the room. ‘Is our
flat in Belsize Park, London. The year is 2009—’
‘Shut up. Idiot,’ she said, spreading marmalade on her toast and
taking it into the living room without a plate. They couldn’t find
the plates and had eaten last night’s Chinese straight from their foil boxes.
She dropped down onto the couch and took a bite. Tom placed
her tea down on the boxy IKEA coffee table that adorned every rental
flat he had ever seen. She looked at the colour of it, as she did every time he made it.
‘You know it’s bloody noisy here,’ Tom said.
‘It’s fine.’
‘Every morning the bin men collect the bottles from that pub.’
‘We’ve only been here for one morning.’
‘Fine. Some mornings the bin men collect the bottles from the
pub.’
‘And?’ she said, pushing herself upright.
‘It sounds like the end of the world.’
‘Don’t be melodramatic, Tom.’
‘There are also people talking outside. They’re noisy too.’
‘Yes, how awful. People talking. Perhaps we should write to the council?’
‘Barking dogs. Runners.’
‘Okay. Tom, you are aware we live in London, yes?’
Jamie Fewery Page 6
