by Neal Doran
‘He always had these emergency work things, or somebody else he just had to catch up with. They’ve happened when I’m around too.’
‘Yeah. He always got calls. Used to be somebody phoned. Now it’s a text, some awkward shuffling about the flat huffing and puffing about bosses and clients, and twenty minutes later he’s gone.’
‘It’s the technology… People aren’t talking any more. It could be office policy to save money. The art of conversation is dying…’
‘There’s never any texts. I hear them come in, but they no longer exist. I checked his phone the other day, and he has messages to pick up bread I sent in 2009, but last Sunday afternoon, at a time I heard them coming in, and he said it was the office? Nothing. Why’s he deleting them?’
‘Commercially sensitive information? He’s being careful about confidentiality? You just don’t know…’
‘I can’t believe you’re still defending him,’ she said, curling back up on the sofa, arms wrapped protectively around an embroidered pillow. The anger seemed to have blown out of her as she looked down, picking the ends of her hair, and talking to the floor.
‘And you cannot believe how much I hate that he’s turned me into one of those women. Making dinners he doesn’t show up to eat. Spying on his phone, checking his pockets.’
‘Any cash?’
She laughed grimly.
‘No, no cash. No hastily drafted love poetry either, or first-class tickets for two to Barbados in his and some floozy’s name. And nobody else’s knickers. It’s like he’s read a book how not to get caught cheating.’
‘Or, y’know, maybe it is something else. We don’t know.’
‘Do you honestly think there’s an innocent explanation to all this? You haven’t suspected anything?’ She sounded more amazed at how I couldn’t face up to what my friend was doing now, rather than angry at me, or him.
‘Well. There’d been a couple of things I’d wondered about, but I just didn’t think he would.’
‘You’ve met my husband, right?’
‘But you two…’
‘It’s been good for a while, but you know what he’s like.’
‘Exactly! He’s a flirt. He always acts like a tart.’
‘And you think it’s always just an act?’
‘It isn’t?’
‘You two really don’t talk about anything, do you?’
It was my turn to get a bit defensive. If she was right I would have known about this stuff. He was my best friend, after all.
‘We talk! OK, so maybe not directly about the big stuff, but when there’s a problem we do. And we might not be married but we’ve still been through some difficult times.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yeah. Like with Kate when she left. We talked a lot then, about the future, relationships, all that stuff.’
‘When he was around every night?’
‘Yeah. Well, not every night — I wasn’t that needy. But he was there when he could help.’
‘He told me it was every night for about a fortnight. And staying over because you were too miserable to leave on your own?’
‘Um…’
Hannah watched me as what she was saying dawned on me. He’d spent a fair bit of time back then talking about this client he was working with who was very smiley, very leggy, and had an incredibly dirty laugh. I’d thought at the time it was meant as proof of the idea that there wereplenty more fish in the sea. I hadn’t realised he was still angling without the appropriate licence.
Her eyebrows said I told you so, and I started to feel queasy, and a little betrayed myself. We both sat there sadly staring at patches of the living-room wall.
‘So what are you going to do now?’ I eventually asked.
‘Aside from TALK to him and let him know how I’m FEELING so he can UNDERSTAND I’m UPSET about his BOFFING his PA, you mean?’ she asked in a pompous voice, which I suspect might just have been taking the piss out of me a bit. But at least the life was coming back into her voice.
‘Huh. Maybe it should be my turn first if he’s really been slapping “Kick Me” signs on my back all these years and I didn’t know it.’ Hannah’s remark about being a punchline was still stinging.
‘I’m sorry, hun, I shouldn’t have said that. He doesn’t think of you as a joke. I don’t know if there’s anyone he worries about as much. I was being mean and silly. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m sorry for dragging you into the middle. You aren’t the philandering wanker here, but I am blaming you as you’re the one who introduced me to him.’
I shrugged, taking responsibility for my crimes like a man.
‘And stop telling me it might be nothing and everything’s going to be OK!’ she said with a growl and a smile that was only slightly wobbly around the edges. Again, I held up my hands, accepting my culpability.
‘But, hey, your date, tell me about that. My God, you got arrested again? And your eye! Who was this woman? What happened?’
‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ I said. ‘I did a wheelie on a motorbike, and we passed Peter Stringfellow!’
‘Peter Stringfellow!’
‘Well, Sam said it was him, I couldn’t see. I had my eyes shut and was trying to decide whether I had time to join one of the world’s major religions before my imminent death.’
I started telling Hannah all about my day, as if our row had never happened. I explained about the kleptomaniac I had thought for a moment might be my ideal woman. She was asking all the right questions to get the interesting details about what Sam had said, and how she’d said it, and even knew which top it was that she’d pinched, and admired her taste. It was while I was telling her about the hummus guy, and how stressed I was getting because the garlicky chickpeas were repeating on me in the interview room, that I noticed she’d gone a bit quiet again. I looked over to see that she was crying. Seeing me look at her, she shook her head and waved me to continue, saying, ‘Get on with it, garlic breath,’ but I couldn’t.
I walked to the sofa and finally gave her that hug I’d been planning for when I came in the room. She collapsed sobbing on my shoulder and I could feel a clammy dampness on my neck from her tears. With my arms around her, I sat there and stroked her hair and stared at our reflection in the window looking out into the dark of the street.
With a shudder, she seemed to calm a little, and I pulled back to see her face, blotchy and red from crying.
As she sniffed and wiped a hand across her eyes and nose she bit her lip and looked up at me wide-eyed.
I swallowed as I felt my throat constricting and looked back, still holding her.
Then my head started leaning down towards her, her face slowly getting closer to mine.
‘Don’t,’ she said, standing up and jerking away from me.
I jumped up backwards, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. She shakily refilled her wine glass, and sat down again, legs drawn up to her chest, turning on the TV to some talent show with a barely adolescent girl belting out show tunes to near hysterical applause. It was as if I weren’t there in the room any more.
After standing there for what felt like hours, but was probably no more than a minute, I picked up my coat, and said a limp goodbye. Then I told her to call if there was anything I could do. As a friend.
Or if there was anything that she needed that I could help with. As a friend.
Or something I could talk to Rob about. As a friend.
Or if there was anything at all she needed I could provide on a friendship basis. Then I said goodbye again, mumbled a quick sorry, and finally left the house.
I woke up to my alarm, not realising I had finally drifted off to sleep, and phoned in sick on the office answer machine while my voice still sounded groggy and flat. I had an enormous headache, which I thought might be something to do with the fall on my head that had caused a bruise the size of a large steak to come up on the side of my face. Or it could have been the hours I’d spent since I’d got home, going o
ver what had happened while hiding under my duvet.
I hadn’t done anything, I kept trying to tell myself.
Nothing had happened.
I’d moved my head a bit while I was comforting a friend with a platonic hug. Maybe she just felt she wanted her personal space back. Or she misunderstood my gesture, when really all I’d been doing was…what? Checking to see she’d not got snot all over her face after her crying jag?
Maybe if I worked at convincing myself of one of these alternatives, I thought, there’d be a chance that I could convince other people too.
But what had I been thinking? Every time that question played through my head I couldn’t think at all, and couldn’t lie still, turning one way then the other in the cloying warmth of my bed. Were Rob and Hannah breaking up? Was he cheating, and did I not know, or not want to know? How was I supposed to act when I saw them again?
Questions kept repeating in my head, sounding more and more like the narration of a reality TV documentary. Still sleepless at nearly four in the morning, I’d turned on the TV in my bedroom, and hoped a Frasier DVD would distract me to sleep. I lay there, not watching the screen but listening to the rat-a-tat dialogue and conscious of the colours reflecting on the wall.
What would have happened if Hannah had gone to kiss me back? I think it might have been while I let myself finally think about that that I might have drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Fifteen
One thing about having one side of your face banged up after a run-in with a pavement slab was you got a bit of personal space on the tube. So getting into work on Tuesday morning was a relatively comfortable experience. I was also lucky that when above ground it was one of those cold, porcelain-blue, clear days, so I could wear my sunglasses in the face of the still-rising sun without feeling like a total pillock. After lying in bed too long, and toying with not going in again, I was running late, so would be entering an already full office and be forced to speak to people, which I wasn’t looking forward to. Still, I figured it was going to be better than sitting at home drinking black tea all day because the milk had run out, and keeping my mobile switched off because I didn’t want to speak to anyone, and then turning it on to check it every fifteen minutes in case someone did want to speak to me.
I headed into the office building and I checked how I looked in the mirrored walls of the lift up to the third floor. From the comfortable brown shoes up I was the model of a modern, casually smart office worker. Until you reached my head, where one tired, bloodshot eye was mismatched with one barely open, but even more bloodshot one. The colours and tones of the bruising on my face were changing again, I could tell. I’d spent a large portion of Monday looking at the damage in a mirror, and it was like watching a sunset. It kept changing, but you only noticed the changes after they happened.
‘Ohmigod, Dan! Are you OK? Those children didn’t mug you again, did they?’
I tell you, you let one group of teenagers take your wallet and your Oyster card — they didn’t want my ‘gay’ phone — because you think you’ve seen one of them has a knife, and you’re never allowed to forget it. Janice was the first person I bumped into once I was through the door. She gripped my forearm with a casually vice-like grip, and stared intently into my bad eye.
‘No, no children were involved, just a fall.’ I tried to set aside her hand but couldn’t, despite a fair bit of tugging.
‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know. They’re feral. I was reading about them in Femail. You could’ve been killed!’
I managed to escape but before I was past Reception Tony, the overly peppy American pharmaceuticals expert, was heading straight for me.
‘Taylor! Helluva shiner, man. I should see the other guy, right, buddy?’
‘Only if there was a chance he could do something worse to you, you brash little tosspot,’ I mumbled as he trotted past, giving me a far too hard pat on the back as he went. I got as far as the first row of cubicles before Jennifer and Mandy from Reception bumped into me and started asking about my injuries. That was quite nice, actually. They normally barely said a word to me, and the sympathetic cooing and arm-stroking gave me a bit of a boost. That buzz lasted until about the time Weird Boring Chris started telling me little-known facts about periorbital hematoma. Apparently there was potential with head trauma for undiscovered clots to cause sudden strokes and even death days later, with the victim none the wiser right up to the moment they hit the floor in a coma.
Finally reaching my desk, I fired up the computer to check onto some medical health sites to see whether the slight itch I was getting in my left ear lobe could be a hidden sign of imminent embolism, or whether I was just getting a spot. The idea of work didn’t seem very appealing, but luckily things looked quiet. The only internal email of note I’d received since I’d left on Friday was one sent five minutes ago from Nigel, my boss, making sure I didn’t have any clients coming in today, and to hide myself in case anyone else did. It felt slightly sinister that he’d learnt about my hideous appearance quite so soon after I’d walked into the office and it only supported the rumours he had some sort of multi-camera CCTV system hidden away in there. But the warmth and concern for employees’ well-being that could be read between the lines of the instructions not to be seen in public compensated for all that.
Hiding at my desk seemed the ideal thing to do today, and the lack of proper work meant I could get on with what I intended to do with the morning — write an email to Hannah that pretended that absolutely nothing had happened, while simultaneously apologising for it. I needed to do that soon-ish so that I could get in touch with Rob, who’d called and texted a couple of times since Sunday night but who I’d ignored. I was too nervous to speak to him before checking with Hannah what was going on with them, and what he knew.
One of the thoughts that had kept coming back to me was what if, in a ferocious argument about fidelity, Hannah had hit Rob with the low blow of saying his best friend had tried to get off with her that night — not that that was exactly what had happened, I remembered to tell myself. I didn’t think that she would. But then, I didn’t think Rob was the sort of person to have affairs at the office. Or that I was the sort to make passes at friends’ wives — although that — stick with the programme, Taylor — had been a misunderstanding.
I settled down for a day of email diplomacy. I needed it all to come together before this evening, when I’d be hanging out with Rob at the monthly Tuesday Night Poker meet-up at Angus’s flat. I sat there, fingers hovering over the keyboard, for minutes on end. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what to say to her. All the casual references to too much drink and adrenalin I’d been planning on the way in sounded hollow. And there was something, a tiny devil on my shoulder replete with pitchfork and red horns, suggesting maybe it was proving so difficult because I didn’t want to apologise.
‘Morning, Danny, you’re back in this hellhole!’
Delphine, wearing a cream V-neck sweater and tight navy trousers that seemed designed to, well, make men’s trousers get a bit tight too, sauntered to my desk. I forced my eyes to stay up at eye level as she launched into a catalogue of her latest dramas.
‘You wouldn’t believe what he did zis weekend — he left me alone so he could go and visit his grandmother. He told me before she’d been dead for five years! And my ‘airdresser ruined my hair, and my client is getting pissy about getting reports when it hasn’t even been two weeks since the deadline, and, my God, what happened to your eye?’
I blushed a bit as she leaned in, her forehead cutely knotting as she examined my bruise with concern and, I suspected, a quiver of excitement.
‘It was…listen, would you mind if I didn’t talk about it?’
‘Ohh, Danny, you can tell me…’
I didn’t know if it was possible for a woman to make her cleavage look instantly bigger when she wanted to know something, but I’d have sworn that was what happened when I wouldn’t tell Delphine what was going on.
&nbs
p; ‘Really, I’d rather not.’
‘Were you in a fight?’
‘No, just a little fall. Nothing to remark upon.’
I was surprising myself with the ability I was suddenly displaying to not give Delphine everything she wanted, but for once I had other priorities, and I didn’t have the time to get into drawn-out discussions about being rugby-tackled by London’s most dedicated shop guard.
‘You’re hiding something from me, I know,’ she purred.
I gave a non-committal shrug.
‘Oh. OK,’ she said, with a look of barely hidden irritation that made her eyes flash, ‘I will find out from you on Saturday. Á plus tard.‘
She walked off, and for the first time since she’d been here I couldn’t be bothered to swivel in my chair slightly to watch her go. Well, OK, I did shift around a little bit, and, my goodness, a bit of indignation managed to put even more sway in those hips, and those trousers could almost make a man forget his tiny social circle was about to implode. I also wondered what she meant about Saturday.
‘Jesus, half your face looks like the skin on an old banana!’
Jamie the new guy was standing next to me, looking down on my bad side. I think he might have been there for a while, equally distracted by Delphine’s petulant departure. ‘Don’t tell me, I know, one of those weekends, eh. But the story’s never as interesting as the damage looks, right? Been a while since I’ve woken up with a mystery injury though.’
‘Yep, dull, dull story,’ I agreed.
‘So good weekend, though?’
‘Oh, you know, pretended to be a woman online, went shoplifting and got arrested, participated in the collapse of a friend’s marriage.’
‘Excellent! I stayed in and watched TV with a few beers too. Anything planned for the next one?’
‘Aside from a spot of armed robbery and adultery? Absolutely nothing.’
‘Great, ‘cos I was just popping by to let you know we’re having a bit of a party in our flat this weekend. Few of the girls from here are coming, and wanted to know if you fancied it too.’
