Vince and Joy

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Surname?’

  ‘Downer.’

  ‘Oh. My. God.’ Cass slammed her hand over her mouth and began hyperventilating.

  ‘Is it her?’ said Julia. ‘Is it the same girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ breathed Cass.

  ‘Spooky,’ said the man called Bella, coming back into the room with a fistful of mugs.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Vince.

  ‘Sugar?’ said Bella, plonking mugs of coffee on to a table.

  ‘I mean,’ Cass got to her feet and began pacing the room manically, ‘we’ve done nothing but talk about this Joy girl for ages. She came up in a tarot reading I did for Vince and he admitted that he was still in love with her…’

  ‘I am not in love with her,’ he interjected.

  ‘… and that was why he was so crap at relationships, then he decided to find her and I even bought a crystal ball, you know, looking for this girl, this mysterious Joy, and all the time she was here. Here. Just around the corner. This is just, like, the freakiest thing ever.’

  ‘Sugar?’ demanded Bella again, wagging the teaspoon up and down impatiently.

  ‘Vince, can you believe this?’ Cass flopped back on to the sofa, quivering with excitement.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s unbelievable.’

  He couldn’t decide what to feel. He subconsciously sniffed the air, searching for physical evidence of Joy’s recent presence in this strange flat with these bizarre people.

  ‘How is she – was she?’ he muttered. ‘Is she well?’

  ‘She’s getting married,’ said Bella, abruptly.

  ‘Oh,’ said Vince.

  ‘Next month. To a bloke she met in the classifieds.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Vince again. ‘You’re joking,’ said Cass.

  ‘No. It’s true,’ said Julia, whipping the teaspoon out of Bella’s hand and ladling three spoons of sugar into her coffee. ‘She moved in two months ago, then she met this fellow called George through a personal ad and he’s completely swept her off her feet, got engaged last week and now they’re getting married. Frankly, it’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard…’

  Vince gulped. ‘But isn’t she, a bit young to be getting married? I mean, she’s only twenty-five. I would have thought… ‘ He trailed off. What would he have thought? That someone as special as Joy wouldn’t be snapped up while she was still fresh? That every man she met wouldn’t fall insanely in love with her and want to marry her on the spot? Of course she was getting married.

  Yes, she’s young. But she’s very mature.’

  ‘And what’s he like, this George?’

  ‘Never met him,’ said Bella, ‘I reckon he’s got three eyes and a wart on the end of his nose.’

  ‘Bell!’ Julia reprimanded. ‘Stop being awful. I’m sure George is lovely’

  ‘Bet he’s not. Bet he looks like a hyena.’

  ‘Oh, God – just ignore him,’ said Julia. ‘He’s just a horrible person. No, I’m sure George is completely divine. And I know that Joy is totally head over heels in love, and that is all that matters.’

  ‘When’s she getting married?’ Vince ventured.

  ‘Christmas Eve,’ hissed Bella. ‘Chelsea Town Hall. Will you turn up and stop the wedding?’

  ‘Er, no,’ said Vince, feeling genuinely taken aback by the suggestion.

  ‘Oh, you should. You should hurtle in when the vicar says that bit about any persons here present and say, “She can’t marry him – he looks like a warthog and he’s got no central heating!’”

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Well, that’s what she said. Said his flat’s like a blooming meat packer’s. And it’s in south London.’ Bella shuddered theatrically. ‘Imagine living in south London without heating. Urgh. It doesn’t bear thinking about. And then you should pick her up and run down the King’s Road with her, as fast as your little legs can carry you.’

  ‘Bella!’ said Julia. ‘Will you stop being so awful.’

  ‘Seriously, though – what are you going to do?’ said Cass.

  Vince shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘She’s happy. That’s all that matters.’ And that was all that mattered. He’d simply left it too late, he thought. Joy had been living round the corner, ripe for the plucking and ready to fall in love, and he’d got here nine weeks too late. Someone in the Big Boardroom in the Sky had obviously had a good hard look at his record and decided, on this occasion, not to offer him a promotion.

  They stayed for another half an hour, discussing the Incredible Coincidence and drinking Julia’s shockingly strong coffee. By the time they got up to leave at four o’clock, Cass and Julia appeared to be in love with each other, and Bella had finished the entire packet of Hobnobs without offering one to anyone.

  At the front door they swapped numbers and made promises to keep in touch. Bella threw them a half-hearted farewell from his crumb-strewn blanket. ‘See you on Christmas Eve,’ he said to Vince, tapping his nose. ‘Chelsea Town Hall. Don’t forget.’

  Vince smiled wryly. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh, go on,’ he said, ‘stir it up. Life’s too short.’

  ‘No,’ said Vince, ‘I’ll leave it. It wasn’t meant to be.’

  Bella pursed his mouth. ‘Your loss,’ he said.

  And as he and Cass wandered round the corner back to the flat on Blackstock Road, Bella’s last words to him echoed in his head, and Vince wondered if maybe he was right.

  Thirty

  Joy felt a shiver of excitement as she boarded the northbound Victoria Line at Oxford Circus on Thursday evening. She was on her way to Bella’s bedsit on Seven Sisters Road for her second dress fitting. It was the first time in over a week she’d headed north after work, and for some reason the very notion filled her with a sort of nostalgic longing. Not that she wasn’t happy living in Stockwell – Stockwell was very nice, and she and George were very happy – but it was nice to get a bit of space, a bit of distance from which to view her new existence. And, poignantly, her new journey home seemed to reflect the general direction her life had taken over the course of the past three months as she turned left instead of right, went south instead of north.

  She grabbed a seat and looked at her fellow passengers, feeling a comforting sense of kinship, of being among her own people again – north London people. She glanced at her reflection in the black of the window opposite as the train hammered its way from Kings Cross to Highbury and Islington, and wondered if it showed, her new state of foreignness.

  And then she glanced down at her ring, the only outward manifestation of the new world she inhabited and she twisted it back and forth and round and round her finger until the train pulled into Finsbury Park.

  *

  Bella’s bedsit was a full and complete explanation for the fact that he spent most of his life sitting round at Julia’s.

  In a room that could not have been much bigger than ten feet by ten feet, there were no fewer than three separate clothes rails, a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. Clothes were piled on the floor and hanging from picture hooks on every wall. Yet more clothes hung from the curtain rail, from the back of the door and over the radiator. There was even a plastic clothes drier underneath the sink festooned with an eclectic variety of pants, socks and underwired bras.

  ‘I collect them,’ he explained. ‘They speak to me. “Bella,” they say, “Bella, take us home. We want to come and live with you.’” He fingered a lime-green chiffon cocktail dress while he talked. ‘I just can’t resist them.’

  He made her some tea by microwaving a mug of water, chucking a tea bag in it, then pouring in some milk, which he kept on his windowsill. It was overly creamy, slightly tangy, but Joy sipped the tea politely and perched herself on the edge of Bella’s single bed, careful not to crush an ostrich feather hat.

  ‘Have I have got the most amazing thing to tell you.’ Bella removed the ostrich feather hat and squeezed up next to Joy on the bed. He was squirming with excitement.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Joy, ‘what
?’

  ‘If I said the name “Vince” to you, what would you say?’

  Joy choked on her tea.

  ‘So you know who I’m talking about, then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Joy, wiping tea off her chin. ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Tall, fair, handsome. Still in love with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know exactly who I mean. I can tell by the look on your face.’

  ‘Well, there was a Vince…’

  ‘Yes. Tall, fair, handsome, still in love with you and living on Blackstock Road.’

  ‘Bella, can you start again? I’m all confused.’

  ‘Right.’ Bella brought his legs up on to the bed and crossed them. ‘Door goes Saturday afternoon, just after you moved out. There’s some hysterical witch in a patchwork hat standing there with the most gorgeous man. They come in and she starts screaming at Jules about that sodding cat…’

  ‘Cat?’

  ‘Yes. Mou-Shou. Turns out the cat’s hers and also that he’s a she, but anyway, she’s going, “Ooh my cat, it’s the centre of my tiny petty little world and you’re so horrible for letting him come in here and blah-de-blah-de-blah,” and Jules explains that the reason the cat’s always round at hers is because it’s in love with you. Joy. And then witchy woman says, “Ooh, Joy, we’ve been looking for a girl called Joy.” And it turns out that this bloke Vince used to go out with you and thinks he’s still in love with you and the witch woman’s been doing tarot readings and gazing into crystal balls and God knows what else trying to trace you so that he can proclaim his undying for you. And he’s there, in your flat, literally like an hour after you’ve moved out. I mean, is that the freakiest thing ever, or what?!’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Joy, clamping a hand over her mouth. ‘That is unbelievable. Vince Mellon. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘So – what are you going to do? Are you going to see him?’

  ‘God. I don’t know. I mean… Christ! Did he really say he was still in love with me?’

  ‘Yes! No. Well, the girl said he was in love with you, and he only disagreed a little bit. But I think he was just embarrassed.’

  ‘So this girl wasn’t his girlfriend, then?’

  ‘No. She was just a friend.’

  ‘Vince Mellon.’ She sighed and rested her chin on her hand as she brought his face into her mind’s eye. ‘God, he was gorgeous.’ She recalled his gentle hazel eyes, the way his hair fell on to his forehead, his big, solid skull and wide-set shoulders. She hadn’t thought about him properly for so long she’d almost forgotten that he existed in flesh and bone. Whenever she thought about him she tended to shudder with embarrassment and stop the train of thought in its tracks before the notion of her father manhandling Vince’s mum made its way into her head.

  She still didn’t know exactly what had happened that night. All she knew was that her mother was clammy with shame, using words like ‘disgusting’, ‘ashamed’ and ‘humiliated’, while her father was bolshie and defensive, using words like ‘a bit of fun’, ‘overreacted’, ‘too much to drink’, ‘prick tease’ and ‘working-class scum’.

  It had been her mother’s idea to leave that night.

  ‘I can never face that poor woman again,’ her mother had said, throwing clothes into a suitcase, while Joy’s father examined his bandaged nose in the mirror, a picture of exquisite self-pity.

  Joy had almost knocked on Vince’s bedroom window before they left, to say goodbye, to give him her note, but she’d changed her mind at the last minute and left it pinioned under a pebble on the outside step.

  It took nearly six months for Joy finally to resign herself to the fact that Vince wasn’t going to get in touch. She liked to think his lack of communication was due to loyalty to his mother rather than any lack of affection for her. She didn’t blame him – what man would want to get involved with a family like hers?

  Because their relationship hadn’t ended, but had instead evaporated slowly in a hazy blur of passing days, she hadn’t been left with a broken heart, but rather a strange sense of longing for something she couldn’t quite describe. In her heart, Vincent Mellon existed as a vague, sun-dappled montage of fairground smells and cawing seagulls, of sweaty hands and Monopoly pieces and of feeling madly, deliriously in love for the first time in her life. He was the person she referred to when she told people she’d lost her virginity at eighteen to a man she met in Hunstanton. He was a part of her history that lived in its own dimension, separate and distinct from everything else, like a film or a book.

  But now he was living just around the corner. He still existed. In three dimensions. She gulped.

  ‘How was he?’ she said.

  ‘Fine, I guess. But then I don’t know what he’s normally like.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’ She didn’t know why she’d asked that – she just wanted to picture him, she supposed.

  ‘Jeans. Grey jumper. Grey overcoat. Very minimal. Very smart. Very fucking sexy’

  ‘Did you tell him I was getting married?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Should have seen his face. Poor boy was devastated.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. Couldn’t believe his bad luck. I told him to come to the wedding and whisk you away’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘Bella, that’s awful.’

  ‘He won’t come. Don’t worry. But I thought he at least deserved the option. And talking of options – ’ He brought out a leather bag from beneath his bed and unzipped it. ‘Here. You deserve the option, too.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s his phone number. Just in case you change your mind about Georgie Porgie.’

  Joy looked down at the crumpled piece of paper. ‘Is that his handwriting?’

  ‘No. It’s mine. I copied it down for you.’

  She studied the numbers on the paper as if they were magic hieroglyphics, the key to the gates of a secret civilization. ‘What makes you think I’m going to change my mind?’

  Bella shrugged. ‘I don’t. But, you know, it’s all a bit sudden, isn’t it?’ He picked at the corner of his duvet cover, then looked up at her. ‘I wonder,’ he began, ‘do you think maybe you’re rushing into it because of your dad?’

  ‘My dad?’

  ‘Yeah. You know, maybe this wedding thing, maybe it’s your way of dealing with your parents splitting up?’

  Joy frowned.

  ‘It’s just, when my dad died I know I went off the rails a bit. Got obsessed with this man. He was married. Completely unobtainable. But I was just craving a bit of stability, a bit of attention, you know. And I wondered if maybe you were doing the same. Trying to replace your dad, kind of thing.’

  Joy shook her head. ‘I know this sounds awful,’ she said, ‘but I don’t really care. I don’t miss him. Not at all.’

  ‘Yeah, well I wasn’t that close to my dad, either, but your parents, you know, they’re part of you, make you who you are, whether you like it or not. And when part of that goes, however it happens, it leaves a big hole. And it’s only natural to try to fill it.’

  Joy nodded, and ran a finger along Vince’s phone number. ‘I don’t know,’she said. ‘I feel like I should be sad, but I’m just not. My mum seems to be coping really well with it and I don’t miss him and it’s almost better in a way. Better without him. And George… ‘ she paused, ‘George is just the nicest, kindest, sweetest, most intelligent man I’ve ever met. He loves me and cares for me, he respects me… oh, and he makes me come… ‘ She grinned.

  ‘Oh, per-lease,’ Bella grimaced.

  ‘Well, seriously. What more could a girl ask for?’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Well, do you love him?’

  Joy gulped and cast her eyes downwards. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘As much as he loves you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of
course I do. Wouldn’t be marrying him otherwise, would I.’

  ‘And do you love him as much as you loved that Vince?’ He pointed at the piece of paper.

  Joy’s eyes strayed to the note, to the angles and curves of the letters that made up his name. She remembered the way her heart had pumped when she first saw him, the intensity of her desire to undress him, to be naked with him, the way she’d felt like she could say whatever she wanted and be fully understood and do whatever she wanted and be totally accepted. She remembered how easy it had all been, how open and bright, like being in an empty whitewashed room with all the windows wide open. She remembered the feel of his hand around her bare shoulder, the way they’d fit together so snugly as they walked along the seafront and how she’d truly believed she’d found her soul mate on a Hunstanton caravan site.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s different. That was a holiday romance. I was a teenager. You feel things more intensely when you’re a teenager.’

  Bella pursed his lips. ‘Well, anyway, maybe once the dust’s setded and you’ve had a chance to think about things, you might decide to wait. And maybe one day you’ll think about old Vince and wonder what he’s up to and what might have been. And at least you’ll have that –’ He pointed at the paper. ‘The option.’

  They fell silent for a second. A door slammed across the landing. Joy stared at the paper.

  ‘Well,’ she said, as she folded it in half and slipped it into her coat pocket, ‘thank you. I’ll put it somewhere safe.’

  And then they both put the notion of handsome, local, lovelorn Vince somewhere safe while they concentrated on the altogether less thorny issue of what exact shade of cream her wedding dress was to be.

  All the lights were off in the flat when Joy got home at 9.45 that night. She tiptoed towards the bedroom, expecting to see the outline of George tucked up under the duvet, but the bed was flat.

  She pushed open the door to the living room and found George sitting on the sofa, reading a book by the light of a solitary candle. He failed to glance up as she entered the room.

  ‘Has there been a power cut?’ she said, removing her coat.

  ‘No,’ he said, slowly turning a page.