Don't Get Me Wrong

by Marianne Kavanagh

  Sometimes I worry, thought Kim, that we’ve forgotten how to have fun.

  “So go on, then,” said Damaris. “Tell me about Jake.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  It was a Thursday evening at the end of February. Outside the night was frosty and calm, twinkling with startling whiteness. Peckham Rye looked like something out of Narnia. But inside the flat, decorated with small blue Babygros hung over the radiators, it was cozy and warm. Eva had gone to her postnatal yoga class. It’s not vanity, she said. I just want to be able to get enough stomach muscles back to make it possible to get out of bed.

  Damaris had come to help with babysitting. “If you’re not going to tell me anything interesting about Jake, I might as well go home.”

  “Oh, please don’t go,” said Kim. “There might be a medical emergency.”

  “What kind of medical emergency?”

  “I don’t know. Babies do all sorts of strange things.”

  “I haven’t done pediatrics yet. You probably know more than I do.”

  Which was probably true. Kim had pretty much moved in after the birth. Otis, still in the frowning blur of newborn discomfort, hated being apart from Eva. But Kim was a good substitute. In the evenings, while Eva had a bath, she sat with him on her lap, singing him Otis Redding songs and telling him interesting facts about London housing shortages.

  “It’s the first time I’ve seen you since Christmas,” said Damaris, “so you don’t have to tell me much. Anything would do. Hobbies? Dietary habits? Political leanings?”

  But Kim couldn’t talk about Jake. Not yet. She hadn’t worked out what she felt herself. All she knew for certain was that she’d never met anyone like him. He was a mass of contradictions. On the one hand, he was eccentric, self-absorbed, and sentimental, blunt to the point of rudeness. On the other, he was clever, kind, and well-read, and anxious to share his encyclopedic knowledge with anyone who needed it.

  Sometimes he just seemed weird. He was drawn to anything quirky—dogs that looked like Yoda, the African horned melon, Borat, an evaluation of Empedocles. Once, on the bus, he had a long conversation with someone wearing a witch’s hat made entirely from black bin liners and chatted away animatedly about heat-resistant plastics. But this strangeness also made Kim laugh. He loved the absurd—typos in newspaper headlines, pompous CEOs. He marveled every time at the signs on two identical staircases at Angel tube, one saying UP and the other DOWN. “Who worked out which was which?” he said, his eyes bright with laughter. “Who made the ultimate decision?”

  But more important—much more important than any of this—he made her feel desirable. He made her feel beautiful. He made her feel significant. Whenever he looked at her with that intense expression in his pale blue eyes, she knew that she had his complete attention. No one else mattered. There had been other boyfriends. At Edinburgh, she’d had an on-off relationship for nearly a year with Rob, a geography student obsessed with Black Sabbath and the Vaselines. But this was different. The first time Jake kissed her—when she felt his awkwardness fall away, like a heavy coat slipping from his shoulders—Kim felt for the first time the dizzying excitement of a lover’s gratitude. Jake was amazed that she liked him. He seemed humbled by her interest. He said he was the luckiest man in the world. And Kim—who hated swaggering, overconfident masculinity—found this completely disarming. She was made to understand, for the first time in her life, that being pale and scruffy, with no interest in clothes, makeup, or jewelry, was highly erotic. Jake admired her hands, her eyes, her shoulders, her waist. He said she should be an artist’s model because she was so perfectly in proportion. It was ridiculous, of course, this extravagant praise. She didn’t take any of it seriously. But she liked it. She liked feeling, for once, that she had looks worth talking about.

  What made this all the more exciting was that you would never have cast Jake as a romantic hero. You wouldn’t have looked at him and seen Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler, or Russell Crowe’s Maximus, or Daniel Craig’s James Bond. But somehow, in her company, he was transformed. Kim wandered around in a state of secret astonishment, marveling at her hidden powers.

  She was surprised to discover that Jake had a very hairy chest. It seemed rampantly sexual on someone so fey. Like finding Harry Potter with a condom in his pocket.

  At first, she was wary. She couldn’t quite trust his adoration. Something about having Eva as an elder sister—fine, fair, ethereal Eva—had made her lose confidence. She felt plain by comparison. Her mother’s perpetual criticism hadn’t helped. Obviously you take after your father rather than me. Square shoulders. And such a determined chin. If only you put a bit of effort into your appearance. A touch of makeup, a good haircut, and you’d be almost presentable. You owe it to other people to make the best of yourself. All of us have a duty to make the world a more beautiful place.

  Kim watched anxiously the first time Jake met her sister. Would he realize his mistake? Faced with the real thing, would he turn round, see Kim properly for the first time, and back off in horror? Kim could see that Eva and Jake liked each other. Eva was, after all—in her own way—almost as eccentric as he was. But, strangely, within minutes of their first meeting, Kim could see that Jake didn’t gaze at Eva in the way that most men did. He didn’t stare at her with desperate longing, his mouth open and his tongue hanging out.

  Much later, lying in Jake’s bed, collapsed over his solid hairiness, Kim steeled herself to ask the question. “So what did you think of my sister?”

  Jake frowned. “She’s quite nervous, isn’t she? Not very sure of herself.”

  “What else?”

  “You won’t like it if I say what I think. You never do.”

  “I want to know,” said Kim in a small voice, bracing herself for the worst.

  “She’s really white. Do you think she might be anemic?”

  Jake’s flat in Stockwell was a strange and unnerving place—a junk shop of bits and pieces randomly displayed, with no logic or order. Every surface was covered with postcards, knives, Matchbox cars, medical instruments, opera glasses, briar-wood pipes, Chinese incense burners, melon ballers, hoof picks, and decorative teaspoons. His book collection was similarly wide-ranging—Kafka, the Koran, C. S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  The first time she visited, Kim tried to clear a bit of space on a chair for her coat and bag. But she disturbed so much dust that she didn’t bother after that. It seemed to make more sense to follow Jake’s lead and just place anything you were likely to need urgently on top of everything else.

  “Kim?”

  Kim snapped back to the present—a cold February evening in the flat on Peckham Rye.

  “If I ask you questions about him, will you answer?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kim. “It depends what they are.”

  Damaris laughed. “OK, something safe. Is it a problem working together?”

  “Not really. He’s very disciplined. It’s like he’s got different compartments in his head. At work, I’m just his research assistant.”

  “And what about you?”

  Sometimes I find myself lusting after him at the photocopier. It’s something about his thighs. “I think it’s OK because we’ve got our own little office. So we don’t have to pretend to other people that there’s nothing going on.”

  Damaris put her head on one side. “You really like him, don’t you?”

  Kim felt herself getting flustered. “Why don’t you come round the next time you’ve got a few days off? I’ll ask him to supper. And then you can meet him properly.”

  “Here? Or in New Cross?”

  Kim’s smile faded. When she’d moved in with Eva and Otis, she’d left Izzie behind in the decaying bedsit. “I’m not sure.”

  Damaris raised her eyebrows.

  Kim, always sensitive to criticism, bristled. “What?”

  “I was just thinking about all the scruples you used to have about living in a flat that Harry had
paid for.”

  “Eva needs me. That’s what’s important.”

  “And Izzie’s OK with that?”

  Kim looked guilty. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for ages. And when we do meet, she’s always in such a rush.” Last time, she thought, we met in a pub in Holborn. Izzie had just finished her cleaning shift round the corner—a block of offices with palm trees in the foyer. She had half a lager and a packet of crisps, and then said she had to be somewhere. She left in such a hurry that she forgot her notebook, which seemed to be full of random lists of people and world events.

  “Off to meet her secret lover.”

  Kim frowned. Izzie definitely had a secret. But she didn’t look like someone in the throes of a full-blown love affair. Most of the time, she just looked terrified.

  “What about your landlord? The man who earns more in five minutes than you could earn in five years?”

  Kim shrugged. “He doesn’t come round much.”

  “Doesn’t he?” Damaris looked surprised.

  Or maybe he chooses his moments, thought Kim. Maybe he comes to see Eva and Otis when he knows I’m not here.

  “He’s at Mum’s all the time,” said Damaris. “Whenever I call round, he’s sitting at the kitchen table having a cup of tea.”

  Kim tried to look as if this was something she already knew. But inside she was seething. Was Harry trying to take over Christine, too?

  “She’s always loved Harry,” said Damaris. “She thinks he should be the next governor of the Bank of England.”

  • • •

  “Most stand-ups talk about sex. Have you noticed? It always gets a laugh. For female comics, it’s an easy laugh. The kind of nervous laugh you get when people have had a shock. Or your granddad says something racist. Because most men in the audience are surprised that women have an opinion about sex at all. They don’t think it ever crosses our minds. Because we’re too busy thinking about shoes. As for two women having sex with each other, well, how would that work? I promise you I had that conversation once. It’s like the man who goes on holiday to Paris and stands there by the Eiffel Tower thinking, How do two French people talk to each other if neither understands a word of English? There’s a man in the front row down there looking really shifty. You’ve been thinking that for years, haven’t you, pet? So sex gets a laugh because it’s like food—enjoyable, but with negative side effects. Like going out for a curry. You pile everything in, chew it, swallow it, sit there belching, burping and farting, and finally end up on the toilet. Overall, as an experience, you might rate it at ninety percent, but not because of the gassy parts. The reason we all laugh at sex is because we’re frightened of it. It makes us feel insecure. Because you never really know, do you, whether you’re doing it right. However long you’ve spent secretly watching porn. You can’t pass a test like you do with driving. (Although that might be quite good. You could practice your emergency stops.) And when you have sex with someone else—rather than just with yourself—you’re meant to make sure the other person has a good time. So while you’re eating your chicken korma, you’re watching to see if he’s enjoying his vindaloo. The problem is, he might not tell you the truth. Because people never do in relationships, do they? So you might say, ‘Are you enjoying that, pet?’ and he’ll look at you with his eyes watering and say, ‘Yes.’ Or he’ll make a big song and dance about ordering everything on the menu—papadums, prawn curry, stuffed paratha—and then, when it comes, he’s finished before you’ve even started. They say in women’s magazines that sex is all about communication. I’m not so sure. I think sex is all about keeping secrets. You have to look as if you’re being carried away on a wave of passion. But inside you’re thinking, Do I even like curry?”

  • • •

  Grace sounded furious. “Really, Kim, I do think you could be trying a bit harder. It’s all very well saying you can’t interfere, but just leaving them to go their own way isn’t helping, is it? Have you thought about poor little Otis?”

  Sometimes when her mother was ranting down the phone from the South of France, Kim had fantasies of pretending the flat was on fire, or there was a burst water main, or a tiger had escaped from London Zoo and was roaming Peckham Rye looking for lunch. Of course, being an independent twenty-two-year-old with a job and a shared bedsit in New Cross (even if she wasn’t living there and was, instead, spending the majority of her time in a flat paid for by Harry), it should have been easy to say to her mother, Look, I’m not enjoying this conversation, it’s not getting us anywhere, and I think the time has come for us to talk to each other in a more rational and grown-up manner. Instead, because Grace always made her feel about five years old, Kim gripped the receiver tightly and prayed for it all to be over as quickly as possible. “Otis is fine, Mum.”

  “Poor little Otis is not fine. He doesn’t have a father. I know it’s very modern to pretend that women can manage all on their own, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of financial support. I should know. The years I had to manage on a pittance.”

  “But Harry is—”

  “If I can’t be there myself, and I can’t—I simply can’t—I am relying on you to get this situation under control. As I’ve said before, they clearly adore each other. They have a child together. There really is no reason why this whole unsatisfactory situation shouldn’t be cleared up as quickly as possible. All it needs, Kim, is a little imagination. A little finesse. A little creative thought. And I should have imagined, if only for your sister’s sake, that you would have wanted to put just a tiny bit of effort into thinking how this could be achieved.”

  “But, Mum, I can’t—”

  “There’s no such word as ‘can’t.’ That’s just negative thinking. All the great men in the world had dreams that people said were impossible. Martin Luther King. Laurence Olivier. Marlon Brando. Hitchcock himself. Focus on the goal, and go for it. If I were in London, I’d do it myself. I’d ring Harry. I’d say to him, Look, this has to stop. We can’t all carry on like this. Enough is enough. But my hands are tied. I’m here, with Jean-Marc, in a Mediterranean villa miles from England. There’s nothing I can do. So it has to be you, Kim. It has to be you.”

  “But—”

  “You can’t just sit around hoping this nightmare situation will resolve itself. Because what you’ll discover, as you get older, is that men are very shallow. They lose interest. Something to do with testosterone. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen many times. One minute they’re excited, and the next it’s all disappeared. So act now before it’s too late. If you don’t, you’ll wake up one day and find he’s got a job in New York or decided he’s in love with another woman. That’s what happens. Men are like kites. You think you’ve got them under control, and then suddenly they’ve flown off and there’s no way you’re ever going to catch them. Kim? Kim? Are you listening?”

  • • •

  Jake, with his wide-ranging knowledge on a huge number of subjects, was able to explain anything she didn’t understand. It could be Mayan art, Miles Davis, or the offside rule—Jake had the facts at his fingertips.

  He liked teaching her. Now that they were finally living together in Jake’s flat, he seemed less diffident. You could almost say, thought Kim, that he’s quite domineering.

  But then, she thought, I have so much to learn.

  One evening in September, Kim was watching the TV news. Long queues had formed outside branches of Northern Rock all over the UK. Since hearing about an emergency loan from the Bank of England, customers were frightened the bank was going under. They wanted their money back.

  “So should they be worried?” said Kim. Jake was sitting on a hard dining room chair, texting. Sometimes, up against a publication deadline, he wore a silver earpiece so that he never missed a call. It gave him a slightly robotic air, like a bouncer or a Cyberman.

  “What?” he said, thumbs busy.

  “All those people queuing for their money.”

  Jake gave his usual secretive smile. “Not a
ccording to the chairman of the Treasury Select Committee.”

  “And is he right?”

  “The British Bankers’ Association says that Northern Rock is sound.”

  Kim, feeling increasingly like a small child whose ice lolly is melting, said, “But why is it happening?”

  Jake looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure how much you know.”

  “Nothing, really.”

  Jake nodded. “It’s the global money markets.”

  Kim waited for more.

  “The international perspective,” said Jake. “Quite complicated, really.”

  “Oh,” said Kim.

  • • •

  “Sometimes I worry my standards are too high.”

  Damaris looked exhausted. She’d had a new haircut, a close crop that showed off the beautiful shape of her head. But it had also left her looking naked and defenseless. Christine was even more anxious than usual. When Kim called round to the house in Nunhead for a cup of tea—ending up staying for roast chicken and a trifle—Christine kept asking if she thought Damaris was working too hard.

  “I think medics have to.”

  Christine shook her head. “She’s nothing but bones. When are you next seeing her? I’ve made her bread pudding and ginger cake.”

  Kim had a horrible suspicion that Christine’s food parcels ended up in a communal kitchen at the hospital, torn open by anyone who happened to be passing and reduced to a pile of crumbs in a single night shift.

  It was Sunday afternoon, and they were sitting on a patch of grass in the ornamental gardens on Peckham Rye. All around them was a random jumble of Londoners—mothers with buggies, dog walkers, joggers, a man dressed in white practicing Tai Chi, and an elderly woman in Wellington boots and a woolly hat chatting to herself while she picked up litter. Kim was always faintly astonished to find formal avenues and pergolas in the middle of a wild expanse of common land in southeast London. But then Peckham Rye was full of secrets. The poet William Blake saw angels there.