The Seven Year Itch

by Emlyn Rees

  Is there a me and him?

  ‘What about you? What do you love about the city?’ I ask, desperate to keep the conversation going, or steer it somewhere else, I no longer know which.

  ‘Ah, well, everyone thinks the countryside is inspirational, but I’d say the city’s the place for dreams,’ Tom says.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘So what are your dreams?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I have any, not any more.’

  ‘You never run out of dreams, surely?’

  ‘I always dreamed of getting married and having kids.’

  ‘What about other stuff? What do you want for yourself?’

  ‘Just to keep it all afloat. To try and be happy.’

  ‘OK, but say that was a given, then what would you really want?’ he asks.

  To be with Jack. That’s the answer my heart gives. In a flash. Then I remember everything that’s happened. How far removed my fantasy for us is from how we actually live.

  And the fact that we’re not even talking to each other.

  So I tell Tom that I’d like to do something interesting with my life, before it passes me by. That I’d love to get involved in the whole world of radio, except that I have no idea how to do it. I tell him that I feel stupid for even thinking I could get a job, with no experience – but rather than agreeing with me, like Jack would, Tom seems to think I should go for it.

  ‘If you had your own show, I’d listen every day,’ he says.

  My own show, indeed. Even the thought seems crazy. Crazy, but wonderful, too.

  ‘So you do have dreams, after all,’ he says, smiling at me. ‘You see, I knew you did.’

  ‘I’ve never really discussed it. I’ve been too embarrassed . . .’

  ‘You shouldn’t be. Why shouldn’t you do it? Why shouldn’t it be you who gets a lucky break?’

  ‘Because I’m not a very lucky person.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘Well . . . I haven’t won the lottery yet.’

  Somehow, my words sound hollow. Being with Tom has made me feel very lucky indeed, like I’ve been blessed in some way.

  It’s been so long since I’ve had this kind of conversation, contemplated the bigger picture of life and put everything into perspective. It’s been a while, too, since I’ve met anyone who lives life like Tom does. Who reaches for the stars and gets there.

  ‘I wish I could be like you,’ I blurt out. ‘You know, doing what you really want to be doing and travelling and . . . I don’t know, you just seem to have it all sussed.’

  ‘I don’t know whether that’s true. I haven’t got it all sussed, but I suppose I do believe that you owe it to yourself to make your life amazing.’

  We have reached Charing Cross and stand outside by the entrance to the tube. It crosses my mind that this is the exact central point of London. That when you see London 65 on the side of the motorway, it means sixty-five miles to here. I get the impression I’m right at the centre of the universe.

  People rush all around us, but Tom and I stand quite still. I feel strangely emotional. I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want this bubble to burst.

  ‘I had a good time, tonight,’ I tell him.

  ‘Me too. It was a blast.’

  ‘Well . . . bye then, Tom,’ I say, but my heart is hammering. As I look at him and his eyes meet mine, I feel incredibly, intensely alive.

  ‘Thanks for dinner.’

  He nods. ‘You’ll be OK getting home?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  But I don’t move. My feet won’t move.

  ‘I’ll tell H you’re a great catch,’ I say, but my voice sounds funny.

  Neither of us moves.

  We stay staring at one another.

  And there’s no point in denying it any more. The thing I’ve been trying to ignore all night is suddenly glaringly obvious and right in my face.

  I fancy the pants off him.

  Plain and simple.

  My body is aching with desire.

  And he must feel it too, because I seem to be watching myself in close-up as the space between our faces closes.

  Then his lips are on mine, and I feel like there’s a tornado in my head.

  We stay still, our lips pressed together in the softest kiss, and I feel as if my feet have left the pavement and I’m floating. Then his arms fold around me and I’m surrounded by him. His smell, his body. I’m blown away by his difference. Like the feeling of stepping out of a plane when you land somewhere hot and exotic in the middle of winter.

  Then his tongue presses into my mouth.

  And the tornado blows the top of my head off. I remember everything.

  Jack.

  Me.

  Ben.

  I stumble backwards, away from Tom.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, holding up his hands. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  I’m so flustered, I’m trembling all over.

  ‘It’s OK, I understand,’ he says.

  But how can he possibly understand? That I’ve totally taken leave of my senses. That this shouldn’t be . . . can’t be happening.

  ‘I’m . . . I just . . . haven’t felt this kind of connection before, that’s all,’ he says.

  Neither have I, not since I first kissed Jack, but I can’t tell Tom that. I can’t speak.

  ‘I didn’t mean to . . .’ he repeats.

  I put my fingers to my lips and shake my head. A small whimper escapes. I feel like there’s a spotlight shining down on me.

  Then he steps towards me and holds the top of my arms.

  ‘The thing is, I don’t think you realise how amazing you are, Amy. How beautiful . . .’

  ‘Tom. Please. Don’t.’

  I look at him now, and as his eyes connect with mine, I want to cry, because he seems confused too. As if something bigger than us both has overtaken us.

  And then he says, ‘Listen, I know this is crazy, Amy . . . but . . . can I see you again?’

  10

  Jack

  Up On The Roof

  I’m sweating like a racehorse in the winner’s enclosure, after carrying ten sacks of potting compost up ten flights of stairs. Without pausing for breath, I drain an iced bottle of Evian. Then, slowly, I exhale.

  From where I’m standing, I can see the Houses of Parliament and the top of the Millennium Wheel. I’m on the newly teak-decked rooftop of an eight-storey Covent Garden office building, and the sun’s beating down on my bare back. Distant aircraft cross the clear sky like ice-skate blades on a frozen pond. The steady hum of traffic rises up from the street below, mixed with the occasional shout and beeping of horns. Traces of the nearby fast-food joints reach me on the warm breeze: pizza, garlic bread, burgers and fries . . .

  Yet where I am, it feels more like an oasis than the centre of a city of ten million souls.

  The rooftop’s perimeter is lined with a lush variety of tall and hardy standards, like bay, bamboo, chusan palm, euonymus and hibiscus, all of them in terracotta troughs and pots. In the middle is a beach shack constructed from corrugated iron and driftwood, which is fitted with a bespoke, curved wooden bar that’s shaped like a surfboard.

  Behind the bar are two glass-fronted drinks fridges and a row of optics, which make me want to pull on some surf shorts, kick back with a cocktail, and laze the rest of the day away.

  In other words, it’s extremely funky and enticing up here. But then I would say that, seeing as I designed the layout myself.

  This building’s owned by an ad agency called Pep Talk, a slick, hipster operation, headed by an extremely short and chubby Hawaiian named James Peters, who went to boarding school with my boss Rupert.

  James, or ‘Slim Jim’, as he perversely likes to be called, wanted a little slice of his homeland here in London to use for corporate entertainment, and that’s exactly what I’ve given him. He came up to see the finished article ten minutes ago, and gave it, and me, a rapturous reception.

  Which me
ans Rupert should be indebted to me too. Which is no bad thing, what with my annual review coming up next week. Who knows? I might even get a bonus – and with that bonus, I might even pay for some business cards of my own and lease myself a van . . .

  I feel proud as I look around, but not as elated as I expected. I think it’s because there’s no one here to share the moment. Or no one important. Meaning Amy. Because normally, on something this big, she’d be the first person I’d want to show it off to. I’d want her opinion and I’d want her to think it was cool. Because that would make me feel cool too.

  Dom and Lee – both of them South Africans in their early twenties, with sandy shoulder-length hair – are leaning over the rooftop railing, smoking roll-ups and watching the girls go by below.

  ‘Hey, Boss,’ Dom calls out to me, ‘come and check out this chick. She’s got a cleavage you could chuck a Coke can down, without it touching the sides . . .’

  Hmm. A mammary recycling unit. An original and intriguing concept, to be sure, and yet, somehow, I can’t quite see Westminster City Council incorporating it as an integral part of their refuse disposal scheme.

  ‘And she’s got an arse like a ripe peach,’ adds Pete, another of my Greensleeves colleagues.

  Normally, I’d be right there alongside them, merrily leering away. It’s pathetic, I know, but every man has an inner wolf-whistling builder that needs letting off the leash from time to time.

  But not today.

  Today, sex is the last thing on my mind. In fact, the way I currently feel, you could stick me in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion with a bunch of nymphomaniac Bunnies telling me how my every horny wish is their desire, and what I’d actually ask them to do is put their crotchless panties and peephole bras back on, and leave me alone with a nice hot cup of cocoa and an Inspector Morse DVD.

  To feel desire for someone else, I think, first you need to feel desired yourself.

  And after last night, I feel about as attractive as a pair of skid-marked Y-fronts.

  Last night, Amy went out to see H. It was only meant to be for a quick drink, but she didn’t get back until gone midnight. During her absence, she didn’t call me once. Then when she did finally come home . . . nada. Not a Hello, or an Are you still awake? Nothing at all.

  She didn’t even undress in front of me. Like a shy room-mate on a school trip, she retreated into the bathroom fully clothed. I listened to the shower running for what seemed like an age. When she came back, she was wrapped in a dressing gown, which she kept on as she lay down on top of the duvet, right at the edge of the mattress, as far away from me as she could.

  How long can a row go on?

  That’s what I want to know.

  Because this one’s gone far, and wide, and deep.

  I used to think of my relationship with Amy as a beautiful mountain that we were climbing together, but now I find myself sliding back down its sharpened scree alone, with my fingertips raw and bloody from where I’ve been trying and failing to hold on . . .

  I’ve been waiting for Amy to reach out to help me back up.

  But she hasn’t.

  And I don’t know if I can climb back up to the summit alone. Particularly, as I’m not sure that Amy even wants me there beside her any more.

  If she doesn’t want me there beside her, then I don’t know if I want her.

  If it was just sex and physical affection she was withholding, if she was just punishing me in some crazy Victorian style, like when she told me to sleep in the spare room the other night, then I could handle it.

  If we were fighting, I could handle that too. If she was calling me every name under the sun, I could soak that up like a sponge.

  Even if she was sulking, I could weather it. Because at least then I’d know that I could tease her out of it. Or that at some point, she’d crack.

  But we’re not fighting. Or sulking. We’re just . . . co-existing. Like mushrooms in a darkened room. Or goldfish in a bowl.

  That’s what I can’t handle: her indifference.

  The way she looks at me like she no longer cares – like she’d rather be somewhere else instead.

  It pisses me off. It makes me want to ignore her too. So that’s what I’ve been doing. And why shouldn’t I? She’s the one in the wrong. She’s the one who flew the chicken across the kitchen. It’s she who won’t back down.

  So the attitude I’ve been sending back at her is this:

  Well, hello, Immovable Object, I’m the Unstoppable Force . . .

  Which is why it comes as a surprise when my phone buzzes, and I see that it’s Amy’s name that’s flashing on the screen. It’s the first time she’s called me at work in days.

  I say, ‘Hi.’

  She says, ‘I need to see you. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

  Not, Why don’t we meet for lunch? or, Do you fancy hooking up for a quick coffee? Nothing so casual. She emphasises the word need. Twice. As in, This is necessary. It’s something we have to do. Whether I want to or not.

  No sooner have these words left her mouth than the hairs on the back of my neck – the primeval warning mechanism put there by nature to alert me to the approach of famished sabre-toothed tigers, rabid mammoths, falling trees, and other mortal perils – stiffen like a porcupine’s spines.

  My heart thuds. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But I can hear the tension in her voice. Then Ben starts to cry in the background. ‘Is something wrong with Ben?’ I demand.

  ‘No. I just need to speak to you. Face to face.’

  Face to face?

  My heart begins to race.

  First There’s something I need to talk to you about . . . and now: Face to face . . . Even in isolation these phrases would be unnerving. But paired up like this? Well, it’s like putting Smith and Wesson together. Or Kung and Fu. Or Celine and Dion.

  They’re downright unpleasant and threatening, in other words, and I don’t like them one bit.

  You don’t reach my age without having mastered a few basic survival skills, and recognising the inherent danger posed by these two phrases is about as basic a rule as ‘Don’t eat the yellow snow’ is to an Eskimo.

  Amy might as well be sitting here in front of me, with a John Malkovich unhinged smile, loading bullets with my name on them into a gun.

  Because the plain fact is that There’s something I need to talk to you about and Face to face are invariably followed by a because. And that because is rarely a nice because. It’s hardly ever a ‘Because I wanted to tell you how much I love you’, or ‘Because I’ve bought you a cuddly-wuddly kitten as a present’.

  It’s more usually a nasty kind of because, like: Because Jane Sanders told me you fingered her on the school trip to St Fagan’s Folk Museum last week, you lying, cheating bastard. (Clare Fleming, my then girlfriend of two weeks, to me in June 1987, a second before she tipped a blue raspberry Slush Puppie over my head, and told me that I used more hair mousse than a girl.)

  Or:

  Because I don’t want to go out with you any more, because I want to go out with Brian Wilkinson instead, because his nob’s the size of a Swiss roll, his balls are as big as haggises, and his dad’s just bought him a brand-new Renault 5. And because Clare Fleming’s right: you do use more hair mousse than a girl. (Jane Sanders, my then girlfriend of six days, to me in July 1987, a second before she got into Brian ‘Whopper’ Wilkinson’s factory-fresh Renault 5 and he wheelspun her out of my life.)

  ‘Can you meet me or not?’ Amy asks.

  Wearily – because that’s exactly what this row’s doing to me, draining me of energy, like a vampire draining me of blood – I check the sky for forks of lightning, sudden eclipses of the sun, and swarms of bats. My ears strain for the sound of melodramatic piano chords, blasting out Duh! Duh! Duh! Duurrghs!

  But none of these traditional portents of imminent doom are present, and so, reluctantly, I agree.

  After all, this could be the breakthrough I’
ve been waiting for. She could be about to admit that she’s wrong.

  Pummelled By A Succession Of Body Blows

  A sense of apprehension balloons inside me as I approach St James’s Park. Rather than an ordinary civilian strolling to meet his family in one of London’s prettier Royal Parks, I feel more like a lone gunslinger advancing nervously down the dusty deserted main street of a lawless Wild West frontier town. From which direction will the first shot ring out? Will I survive till sundown, or end up in a shallow grave?

  As I cross the wide expanse of the tree-lined Mall, I glance over at the ugly hulk of Buckingham Palace. I bet Princes William and Harry don’t get snagged up in webs of female trickery like this. They probably outsource their emotional entanglements to a butler or faithful family retainer instead:

  ‘Chop chop, Jeeves. Find out what the wilful wench wants – and if she persists in buggering one about, then lock her up in the Tower for a decade or two, until she sees the error of her ways. Oh, yes. And in the meantime, Jeeves, prithee fetch me a bevy of buxom peasant girls and my jewel-encrusted fornicating sheath. For I do believe I have the right royal horn.’

  In the eighteenth century, St James’s Park was a notorious spot for gentlemen to go a-whoring, but these days it’s dedicated to far more civilised pursuits.

  I walk past a bony bunch of pensioners practising t’ai chi, and a fat guy wheezing on the ground doing press-ups, being chivvied along by a personal trainer who looks like she’s just stepped out of a salon. In the distance, there’s a woman lying on the grass in a pink bikini, like a Barbie doll left behind after a children’s picnic.

  As I get nearer to the café where Amy and I have arranged to meet, I scan the well-heeled mothers out parading their posh kids in their posh prams, until I locate The Blue Gingham Buggy from Hell, which sticks out like a Sinclair C5 in a Grand Prix starting line-up.

  Amy’s standing in the shade of a giant sycamore tree. She’s wearing a long white skirt and a black vest top, with her hair tied up. I smile, as I watch Ben stumbling ineffectively after a squirrel, like a drunk chasing a ten-pound note that’s been snatched by the wind.