by Luke Tredget
*
It has become habit for Anna to meet Zahra in a pub near her flat – primarily due to the supposed building works, but also to avoid Keir’s lordly presence – and tonight they arrange to meet in the pub filled with taxidermy at the end of Essex Road. There is something grotesque and decadent about being surrounded by so many stuffed animals, but it is the place where Anna first told Zahra about finding the ring and her plan to join Kismet, and for this reason alone she suggests it, drawn to the idea of symmetry, completion, closure.
She arrives early, and is surprised to find Zahra waiting for her at the bar, wearing a new pair of round-framed glasses. They haven’t seen each other or spoken for almost a week, perhaps a record, and for a second Anna puts aside the uncomfortable burden of what must be discussed and gives herself over to friendliness.
‘Look at you,’ she says, pulling Zahra into a hug. ‘You look like a sexy secretary from the fifties.’ But Zahra is stiff in her arms and mumbles something about the glasses being on offer, before moving the conversation on to Pete and asking how he is.
‘You want to get straight down to business, don’t you?’ says Anna, as they take their two glasses of wine to a small table beside a cabinet of preserved butterflies.
‘What do you expect? I haven’t heard a peep out of you all week.’
‘That’s because there isn’t a peep to report.’
They settle into their seats, and Zahra says she doesn’t know what she means.
‘Just that. Me and Pete haven’t spoken about it. It’s like a silent impasse or something. I came home on Saturday and we were going to chat, but then I fell asleep and since then he’s been avoiding me.’
‘Since then? Are you serious? He still thinks you spent the night at mine?’
Anna just shrugs, and Zahra’s mouth falls open in disbelief.
‘How can you live with someone and not talk about you running away like that?’
‘We’ve barely seen each other. He’s been sleeping on the sofa, and we’ve both been really busy with our work. It’s his first exam next week.’ This feels like a valid point, but it makes Zahra plant her elbows on the table and place her head in her hands.
‘His first exam,’ she groans. ‘This is too fucked up.’
The intensity of Zahra’s reaction is beginning to work on Anna, and she doubts her certainty that Pete is fine. But she holds her composure and explains that Pete doesn’t seem that shook up, that he’s good at compartmentalising, and in any case he only thinks she ran away to Zahra’s on her birthday – hardly cause for a nervous breakdown.
‘I know you feel guilty for lying to him, but honestly, he seems fine.’
‘He’s not fine,’ snaps Zahra. ‘You’re pushing him to the brink. He could be about to … I don’t know … to collapse.’
Anna raises her eyebrows at this possibility and shrugs, while looking deeply into Zahra’s eyes.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she says casually, taking a sip of wine. ‘I suppose you know him better than me.’
This makes Zahra flinch. ‘What? No. That’s not what I’m saying. But I don’t think you understand anything at the moment. You’re being crazy.’ She says this quietly while looking away, no doubt at one stuffed animal or another, and for a moment she appears deflated. She hasn’t touched her wine. Then she comes to life again, as if she has just worked something out.
‘You know what I think?’ says Zahra, her eyes narrowed behind her owlish new glasses. ‘I think you haven’t told Pete because you’re not sure about this other guy.’
‘Geoff. His name is Geoff.’
Zahra’s face contorts, as if a bad smell has been blown across the table.
‘Of course I’m sure about him. It’s not even like there’s a decision to be made. He’s an 81, for God’s sake.’
‘It can’t be just about the number.’
‘It’s not about the number. The number is about everything. He’s perfect for me.’ She explains how they are both journalists, are both obsessed with innovation and travelling the world, how they have the same subversive attitude towards pretty much everything; in short, that he brings out the person she’s always wanted to be. She thinks but doesn’t add – and the thought alone sends a shiver through her groin – that the sex is unreal.
‘Have you switched off, then?’
‘Not yet.’
‘How come? If everything is so perfect.’
‘We will, soon. But it has to be at least halfway romantic. It’s not something you can just blurt out over breakfast.’
‘And you’ll string Pete along until then?’
Anna sighs and shakes her head, and makes a conscious effort to resist the urge to argue. When she does respond it is in a measured, pragmatic tone, delivering a pre-planned speech.
‘Look. I know you think I’m doing something terrible to Pete. But this is for his good too. We’re not a very good match. I know you think we are, but we’re not. I don’t want the same things as him. I don’t want the same things as most people. A few years ago, when my dad died, I think I lost sight of that for a while. And since then I’ve been drifting. I’ve been depressed. And now it feels like I’ve woken up again.’
Zahra is looking at Anna with a concerned and thoughtful expression, even a hint of a smile; maybe she has finally managed to get through to her. Zahra reaches across the table and lays a hand upon Anna’s.
‘Do you think’, says Zahra, in a tentative little voice, ‘this is all about your dad?’
‘No I fucking don’t,’ says Anna, pulling her hand back. ‘Why does everyone always think that? This is a happy situation. I’m just doing what I want, what’s good for me. Why can’t you be at least a bit supportive?’
‘Because you’re throwing away something special,’ says Zahra, in a wheedling voice. ‘Pete is a great guy. I don’t want you to do something you’ll regret. That we’ll all regret.’
This time something snaps.
‘Maybe you should go out with him,’ says Anna, deadpan, taking another large gulp of wine. ‘Since you think he’s so damn special.’
Zahra scoffs and shakes her head, and then commences to fidget: she checks her watch, checks her phone and finally takes a sip of wine. Anna watches her, remains entirely still.
‘Hey, Z. How come you never come to my flat any more?’
‘What are you talking about? I was there last week.’
‘But before my birthday. You hadn’t been for months and months. You used to come round all the time. Sometimes when I wasn’t even there. Why did you suddenly stop?’
Zahra looks concerned now. ‘What kind of questions are these?’ she asks.
‘Just questions. Why was it?’
‘You’re being weird.’
‘No I’m not. They’re simple questions. Come on.’
Zahra rolls her eyes, as if it is annoying to have to engage with whatever game Anna is playing.
‘I don’t know. Lots of reasons. We were really busy with the kitchen for ages, for one. These things don’t always happen for a reason.’
‘Right. The kitchen. That huge renovation. It was just strange how during my party, Keir said it only took you a month.’
‘You know what Keir’s like: he always exaggerates to win an argument.’
Anna nods and smiles, says that she’s probably right.
‘But it did get me thinking. About the last time you came round. It was after Notting Hill Carnival. You stayed at mine afterwards. The next morning I had to work and left you and Pete alone in the flat. After that, you never came round. Not once.’
Blood has risen to Zahra’s face. She appears to be quivering slightly. Anna, for her part, is both thrilled and terrified. After a while Zahra raises both palms in the air.
‘This is nuts. You’re nuts.’ She stands and takes her coat from the back of the chair.
‘You’re leaving?’
‘I can’t be fucked with this.’
‘But we’re having a convers
ation.’
‘I’m not staying to answer questions like these,’ she says, pulling on her coat. Her cheeks are burning red. ‘And if Pete asks me again, I’m not going to lie to him. Call me when you’re not fucking insane.’
With that she walks across the pub. Anna watches her push through the door, then her eyes flick between various people who are looking at her; she realises their conversation has turned almost every head in the room. Anna locks eyes with the barman and shrugs, intimating that her unpredictable friend is out of control, though she imagines she probably looks quite distressed herself. Her pulse is thrumming through her temples, and when she holds out a hand it trembles alarmingly. This rush of pure feeling is then translated into more precise emotions as she replays Zahra’s evasiveness, her blushing, her running away like that. It is a strange cocktail of feelings. On a visceral level she feels shocked and sad, for she never expected it to be confirmed so blatantly. In another, darker corner of her soul she feels grim satisfaction for being proved right. And on the highest level, the cool glass pane of her consciousness, she feels that this is a useful development: it means that her inevitable confrontation with Pete will not be a one-sided confession from her, with him playing the innocent martyr. She tells herself not to be upset, and reaches across the table and slides Zahra’s barely touched glass of wine across to her, deciding to stay and drink both. But she is distracted by the ghostly print of Zahra’s lips on her glass, and holds it up to inspect further. The pinkish residue of lip gloss is as finely etched as a fingerprint, and for some reason this granular evidence of Zahra’s being makes the sad shocked feeling swell up within Anna, and she has to put down the glass and twist around in her seat, unable to look at it at all.
*
Just after 10.30 p.m. Anna arrives in Kilburn and walks to Mowbray Road. She hovers on the porch for a moment and then unlocks the door and creeps inside with the care of a bomb defuser, which proves to be unnecessary, since the flat is dark and lifeless. She should probably linger in the living room and wait for Pete to return but this is once again overpowered by the desire to avoid him, to put the showdown off for one more day. She quickly sheds her bag and coat and brushes her teeth before climbing up the ladder.
Once in bed she finds she isn’t sleepy. She tries a breathing technique that Geoff told her induces sleep – in for seven seconds, hold for four, out for eight – but it doesn’t work. As with other recent nights, her thoughts do not unspool into drowsy nonsense and then oblivion, but instead become more lucid and energised – she can hear his voice in her inner ear and see his face in her mind’s eye, and this soon morphs into a full-colour narrative of the two of them in a villa in Greece, on the terrace at night, the stars twinkling like the co-ordinates of their perfect alignment. Even the sad remnants of her conversation with Zahra only interrupts her for a second or two, and then she is back in Greece, the fantasy floating onwards without any conscious steering. She imagines a daytime scene, her and Geoff sunbathing naked, having sex in the pool, going to a tiny beach and coating each other’s bodies in grey mud which is baked to a dry crust by the sun; it is almost as if she is watching an internal film of her own construction, until the vision is burst by the scratch of a key in the front door.
Pete’s footsteps have always been heavy, but it seems he is making a special effort to stomp about. He thuds up the stairs, drops something on the dining table, goes through to the bathroom, turns on taps, flushes the toilet, then plods through the hallway. Anna expects to hear him re-enter the living room and flop down on the sofa, and is alarmed to hear the ladder whine as he clasps it and begins to climb towards her. Anna turns to the wall and clamps her eyes shut, a second before the hatch opens and Pete heaves himself onto the floorboards.
He staggers about, turning on a lamp, emptying his pockets, unbuckling his belt, then falls eerily silent. She can hear nothing besides her rapid heartbeat in her ear. To make so little noise he must be standing still, probably in the central point of the bedroom where the sloping ceiling allows him to stand upright. Anna strains to hear something above the static hum and eventually makes out the wheeze of his breathing. He must be standing there watching her, and she imagines the spot between her shoulder blades where his eyes are aiming. He must also sense she isn’t asleep, and is trying to decide whether to finally have it out with her and demand to know what’s going on. Anna braces herself for this confrontation, and in a way wills him to initiate it; she has been ready for this conversation since she returned from Elephant and Castle on Saturday afternoon, in the same clothes as her birthday, a fallen woman in her thirties. She expected to find a shell-shocked Pete, a broken home, and to spend the day in bleak reckoning. But when she entered the flat Pete was in the living room with his textbook, and stood to face her, looking more concerned than angry. He didn’t appear broken, he was still Pete; the only difference from the night before was that his stubble had returned as a grey shadow. He asked if she’d been at Zahra’s, and in a moment of cowardice and fatigue she simply kept her eyes averted, said nothing and allowed the suggestion to be accepted as fact. Then he kissed her on the forehead and hugged her, told her everything was alright, and generally did his calm-down-Anna routine.
‘I’ll make us some lunch,’ he said, and she suspected this was a ploy he had picked up from his textbooks. She remembered him saying once that you shouldn’t have an emotional conversation if you are tired, hungry or angry. ‘And then we’ll have a chat, okay?’
Anna said that she’d like a shower as well, and he said this was fine – totally fine – that she should take her time, and then they’d have a chat. Those were the last words to have passed between them: and then we’ll have a chat. Instead of having a meal and talking everything through, Anna fell asleep. She hadn’t meant to, but she had been up most of the previous night with Geoff, and the heat and steam of the shower intensified her tiredness, and as she dried herself in the bedroom the desire to lie down and close her eyes was irresistible. The next thing she knew it was Sunday morning. She was alone in the flat. She walked around in a daze, trying to work out what happened, and deduced from the dents in the cushions that Pete must have slept on the sofa. She then found a message on a deck of Post-it notes, saying he had gone to Bean’s. He had written these few words so hard that an imprint was visible on the next Post-it note, and the one after that. Since then he has slept on the sofa every night, has stayed out late every evening, and appears to have gone out of his way to avoid her, apparently trying to shame her into breaking the silence. And here he is now, standing over her, watching, saying nothing.
A full minute passes, and Pete is still standing there. Anna feels as lifeless as a fallen log, so stiff and inanimate it is strange that the air keeps moving in and out of her. She thinks maybe he is plying another technique, that he knows she is awake and will find his silent waiting unbearable. But just as she is about to sit up and say ‘Fuck it,’ he comes to life again. He exhales massively and drops his trousers, the buckle of his belt clattering against the floorboards. Then he staggers about, hits the lamp and comes to the bed; the mattress complains as he flops down next to her, and seconds later he is snoring. It is obvious from the stale sour smell that he has been drinking beer, lots of it, and that whatever he did in the bathroom didn’t involve brushing his teeth. Now that the moment has passed she regrets not waiting up in the living room and speaking to him. She wonders if Zahra could be right, if he really is on the brink. Either way, there is no chance of her achieving sleep now, with him snoring next to her. She slithers out the end of the bed, grabs her dressing gown and climbs through the hatch.
Before setting up a bed on the sofa she decides to do some exploring and learn more about Pete’s state of mind. The heavy items she heard him drop on the table are his textbooks and notepad. Anna flicks through the notepad, looking for signs of an impending breakdown, but all she finds is page after page of bullet points on educational theory, conflict resolution and conceptualisation, all written o
ut in his fragile and wayward handwriting. Pete is getting on with things, as she knew he would: getting on with things is his way. Perhaps he is chalking up her behaviour to some kind of existential crisis about turning thirty, only vaguely related to him, or is attributing it to her dad, as everyone else seems to. She continues flicking through the pages, reassured by every blank margin, until suddenly, halfway through the notebook, there is a doodle that fills the upper corner of the left page: he has drawn the letter ‘A’ in ornate 3D shading.
A lump expands in Anna’s throat. She takes conscious control of her breathing and flicks through the remaining pages, looking for more, blinking the blurring liquid from her eyes. There is nothing until the last page of notes, probably from earlier that same day. Again it is a large drawing of elaborate design, only this time it is the letter ‘Z’. A to Z, she thinks. Anna to Zahra. Beginning to end.
