by Luke Tredget
‘Your birthday present,’ he says. She holds up the ring as if it has just appeared in her hand and she is only now seeing it for the first time. ‘But you knew that already, didn’t you?’
She doesn’t offer a reply, because it doesn’t feel necessary; she just closes the ring box slowly, her fingers absorbing its clamlike bite. Eventually Pete sighs and says: ‘We’ve always been nice to each other, you and me. We’ve always been … considerate. Whatever is going on, we should talk about it. It’s not right, us living around each other like this.’ He doesn’t sound happy, by any stretch, but there is a solidity to his voice that makes him seem calm, authoritative. Maybe he was relieved to learn that she had discovered the ring, which to him must have instantly explained her recent behaviour. ‘How did you find it, by the way?’
‘Find what?’
‘The ring.’
‘Oh. I was looking for loose change.’
‘In the pocket of my suit?’
‘I was looking everywhere. I turned the whole flat upside down. I only needed 20p for some milk.’
‘Milk,’ he repeats brightly, as if he finds it amusing that all this should have been founded on something so trivial. ‘It’s quite amazing, actually. I only had it here for four days; the rest of the time it was with Bean. Just four days. That was over two months ago.’ Anna stares at her twined fingers and smart boots, says nothing. ‘Two whole months. And you never thought to say anything.’
‘I was trying to make a decision.’
‘I see. So I suppose we can deduce that you weren’t exactly bowled over by the idea?’
He says this with a brave smile, but there is an unmistakable sadness in his eyes, and for the first time she has the urge to go to him, to scrub out the cold distance between them. There is something inhuman about this empty six feet of space; this conversation – no matter how difficult and painful – should at least be delivered from a distance befitting the feelings that existed between them, that still exist. How nice it would be to go to him and make him smile by saying, quite honestly, that the answer was usually yes. In all the hundreds of times she posed herself the question, the answer was usually yes. But she can’t do this. She is not that person any more. More to the point, he is not that man either. She thinks of Zahra’s face blushing in the pub, the deleted messages on his phone. She places the ring box on the table and stands up straight to face him.
‘I’ve had doubts.’
‘About getting married?’ says Pete, after a pause.
‘About the whole thing.’
‘See, this isn’t so bad? We’re talking about it. Good. So you had doubts. About what?’
This time Anna pauses, as she fumbles at a series of formulations in her mind; it is like they are speaking on a satellite phone. Eventually, she says: ‘I doubted if we were happy. I doubted if we wanted the same things. I felt like we saw a lot of things differently. And I wondered if we were a good match for each other.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. She senses that Pete is going to pump her for examples, is not going to allow her a single euphemism or generalisation. ‘Loads of things. Our score.’
‘Our score?’
‘It’s low.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘Yes, it is; 70 is below the national average.’
‘Well, what does that matter? It’s just a computer-generated number. What matters is between me and you.’
‘But the number is about me and you. You know it is. This is the first time we’ve mentioned the number in four years. It’s like a taboo.’
‘We haven’t mentioned it because it isn’t important. You’re completely oversold on the whole thing.’
‘Well,’ she says, quietly, with a little shrug, ‘I suppose that’s one of the things we see differently.’
Pete doesn’t reply to this, and it feels like she has won this point; he sinks into himself while searching for a new angle. And after a moment he does wag a finger, and reminds her that she used to say they complemented each other. She is ready for this, too.
‘And maybe we did,’ she says. ‘But now I think we hold each other back.’
Predictably, Pete asks how so, and the only image that springs to mind is being in some sultry villa in Greece, drinking sugary espresso with silt at the bottom; she tells him she wants to travel and would like to live abroad.
‘So do I,’ he says. ‘So does everyone.’
‘But you want this more,’ she says, moving her arm in a vague sweep that is meant to encompass his textbooks, their flat, their entire lives in cold grey London. ‘I’m serious. I don’t want to wait until I’m retired to go on a cruise.’
He chews on this for a moment, and says: ‘We could talk about moving overseas.’
‘No, Pete,’ she says, and she’s had enough of this now, his questions, his demand for examples, his playing dumb. ‘That’s just one tiny thing. The point is we’re different. We want different things. There are other people better suited to us. To you, as well. Girls that you have more in common with. Girls that want the same things as you. Surely you feel it too. I know you do.’
He makes a little disbelieving smile at her and asks if she’s serious; she shrugs and says that she is.
‘So let me get this straight,’ he says, his smile gone. ‘You’re saying that you know – for a fact – that I’d rather be with other girls?’
His tone is pressuring her to doubt herself, but she thinks of Zahra and him at the dinner party, Zahra and him discussing botany and cooking, Zahra and him smiling and laughing together. She repeats that she does, and for the first time Pete loses his cool.
‘How does that make any fucking sense? At all? To anyone?’ He stands up from the sofa and takes a step towards her, jabbing a finger towards her chest. ‘You found an engagement ring, and yet stand there accusing me of wanting to be with other girls. Please, explain to me how that works.’
The heat of his frustration is such that she turns away from him, and it takes her a moment to organise herself to respond.
‘Because I found other stuff as well,’ she says. ‘I know about you and Zahra.’
His slow approach is halted as if he has walked into a pane of glass. There is a moment of blank confusion, as if time has stopped altogether, and then his face creases up and he says, simply: ‘What?’
‘Don’t play dumb, Pete. I know you had a thing going on. And that you agreed to not see each other. I know all about it. She told me as much herself.’ Pete looks like he’s had the wind knocked from him. He takes a step back from her and begins rubbing his face vigorously. She thinks maybe this is the start of a blubbering confession, but when he removes his hands he just looks drained.
‘Fuck me,’ he mumbles. ‘You’ve really lost it this time.’
‘So you’re denying it?’
‘Yes I’m fucking denying it. It didn’t happen!’
‘Then why did you delete your messages?’
‘What? You checked my phone?’
‘There’s a massive gap where the messages between you and Zahra should be. Why did you delete them?’
‘I didn’t delete anything.’
‘Where are they, then?’
Again he stops and rubs his face, this time moaning in exasperation.
‘We use WhatsApp as well. The same as everyone else.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes, Miss Marple. How does that fit with your genius theory?’
She scans her memory of him having WhatsApp back then, of them using it to track him down in Kew Gardens, but it doesn’t seem to fit.
‘Show me, then,’ she says. ‘Show me the messages.’
‘No fucking way. You don’t deserve it.’
‘It will take ten seconds. Just show me the messages from last summer, and I’ll take it all back.’
Pete turns away from her, and as he does so she sees a tension around his eyes, the same look of concern that Zahra wore in the pu
b. It seems that she has him cornered.
‘Come on, Pete,’ she says. ‘What have you got to hide?’
Then he steps towards her, wearing a penitent look of sadness and contrition, and she knows it really is true, truer than she ever thought.
‘Listen, Anna,’ he says, his arms reaching out as if to take her into a hug. Without thinking about it she slaps him, for the first time ever – a good clean thwack.
‘My best friend,’ she says, her voice warped by a sob.
Pete is wincing in the wake of the slap, but then with a few blinks and a shake of his head he is back to normal, as if nothing has happened. ‘Listen to me,’ he says, through gritted teeth. ‘I didn’t do anything.’
He takes hold of her wrist, so she swings at him with the other one. He catches this as well, and now has hold of both of her writhing arms.
‘Nothing happened,’ he repeats, at point-blank range, his breath a hot wind in her face. ‘You’ve got to trust me. We wouldn’t do that to you. I promise. Look me in the eyes.’
He says many more things like this at high volume, as they step about the floorboards; David downstairs must be wondering what has got into the nice couple above him. Pete says the words ‘love’ and ‘promise’ and ‘trust’ over and over again, and also asks her to look him in the eyes. Eventually she does this, and they are close and wide enough for her to see the flecks of green around the pupils, and the tiny red veins in the white. He asks her to believe him, to trust him, and his earnest insistence is irresistible – she knows he isn’t lying. After a time they stop their slow dancing steps around the floor, and her struggling arms fall slack within his hands.
Then they are just standing there, in a pose that could be thought of as affectionate. He says, softly now, that nothing happened, that he loves her and that he’d never do anything like that. Then he rearranges his hands so they are holding not her wrists but her clammy palms instead.
‘Do you know what I’d like to do?’ he says, in a new voice altogether, now forward-looking and friendly, as if he has just had a new idea. ‘I’d like to go back in time. To turn the clock back to before you found the ring. No, even better: to before I even bought the ring. Can’t we just do that? Can’t we just pretend?’
She looks down at their hands and is surprised by how enticing this idea sounds.
‘How about I just take the ring back and we forget all this craziness? We can use the money to go on a holiday instead. Perhaps Morocco or Sicily. Just you and me and the beach.’
The look in his eyes and his talk of a holiday has made Anna weak with nostalgia. The idea of lying on the beach and feeling the sun pressing down on their bare bodies like a dry weight fills her with such a powerful yearning that tears spill over her eyelids, and she is defenceless against Pete pulling her into his arms.
‘Baby,’ he says, kissing the damp side of her head. ‘Baby, baby, baby.’
The room darkens as her face presses into the cotton of his T-shirt; through her nose she breathes air flavoured with sweat and the organic detergent he buys. Instinctively, her hands discover one another on the other side of his wide back, and press into the padded flesh around his spine. Pete whispers that he has missed her, and Anna hears herself say that she has missed him too. It is amazing, to find that it still isn’t over; despite all the supposedly irreversible decisions and actions, all she has to do is go upstairs with Pete, delete Kismet on her phone, and it will be as if none of this has happened. She searches within herself for the certainty that was hers an hour ago, or even a few minutes ago, that this life in Kilburn is merely a simulation, and that her real life with Geoff is just beginning. She pictures Geoff driving with stiff, fixed arms. She thinks of them looking down over London, the city a luminous cluster of stars. She thinks of kissing him under the awning of the jewellery shop. She thinks of the way he rotates his hand as he talks, and the dream of her dad, telling her not to be afraid. She thinks of the very first time she saw him standing before her, holding out his phone in front of him, showing her their number, the number 81. That does it. Heavy locks turn within her, and she is filled with the hardness and strength to end it, to end it now.
‘Stop it, Pete,’ she says. She pushes from his embrace and into clean air; the change feels elemental, like cresting the side of a pool. ‘There’s more. I’ve been using Kismet.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve been using Kismet. I wanted to test my feelings. To see how I felt about us. And I met someone.’
Pete doesn’t even blink; he is utterly still. Before she has a chance to change her mind, she explains the rest. Feeling like her voice is coming from outside herself, she tells him she met an 81, that his name is Geoff, that he is a reporter too. These words sound unbelievable, even to her, so she takes her phone from her bag and shows him proof. She tells him she spent the night of her birthday with him, that she’s spent most afternoons with him since, that she’s been with him all weekend. She tells him he asked her to switch off, and she said yes. It only takes a moment to say and do all this, but a moment dragged out in a thicker, liquid time. When she falls silent Pete is seated on the sofa, his eyes pointing down to the space between his knees, as still as a statue.
‘However you want to react,’ she says, ‘that’s fine with me. It’s your reaction.’
He still doesn’t respond, and to fill the void she carries on talking. She tells him she didn’t have a choice, that she’s been depressed, that she doesn’t belong in Kilburn or her job or her life, and that she needs to change. It is a long speech, bringing in her inventions and his love of food and her love of music and her dad and lots of other things beside. Then she tells him this is a good thing for him, too, that it is probably the best thing she could do to him; she has the presence of mind to recognise the absurdity of saying this to a man who appears frozen through shock. Eventually she crouches down in front of him, like a person trying to peer through the keyhole of a locked door. When she lays a hand on his knee and says his name, he finally reacts. He brushes her hand away and then pushes her whole body so hard that she falls on her side. Then he stands up and without a word leaves the room. The bathroom light twangs on and the toilet flushes and she can hear Pete coughing or heaving or maybe sobbing.
The next thing she knows she is seated on the sofa – time is moving strangely now – and listening to footsteps in the bedroom above. She hears the ladder creak and then Pete is standing in the doorway, a holdall on his shoulder.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he says, eventually. And then, as if to prove this, he opens his mouth and no words come out. Then he tries again, and says: ‘I think you’ve made an awful mistake.’
Don’t go, thinks Anna. For her part, she cannot speak at all, but despite her numb and mute state she still knows that it would be a terrible conclusion for Pete to leave with his holdall. It is late now, and if anyone leaves it should be her. But for some reason she is unable to turn these thoughts into words, and just stares listlessly at him.
‘Goodbye, Anna.’
She wants to tell him to stay, but she’s thinking at half speed, and before she’s organised her thoughts she can hear him going down the stairs. She listens to each of his slow, heavy steps and braces herself for the slam of the door. But it doesn’t come. There is instead a silence, and after a moment she realises he must be standing at the bottom of the stairs, thinking. After a moment she hears more footsteps, this time climbing up the stairs, and her whole body is flooded with relief to think that he is coming back, that it still isn’t over. When he pushes open the living-room door she tries to conjure all her regret and contrition into her expression, but he doesn’t see it. He walks straight to the table, picks up his textbooks and the ring, and then walks out again, without even looking at her. Then he is on the stairs again, this time taking them quickly and heavily, two at a time, before the door slams and he is gone.
Anna sits there with the same contrite look on her face, for the benefit of no one.
&nbs
p; Monday
When Anna wakes she is alone in bed, and the room is filled with the pallid grey light of dawn. For a moment she doesn’t remember what happened, and then she does: Pete is gone. She moans and turns her face into her pillow. Her bedside clock says 6.18 a.m.; at 11 a.m. she has to interview Gwyneth Paltrow. This seems a ludicrous idea; she feels barely capable of speaking to a ticket inspector or a cafe waitress, or even getting out of bed at all. It is like some vital organs have been wrenched from her, and the body that remains is merely an empty and fragile shell.
Last night she cried herself to sleep. She thought this was just an expression, but that’s exactly what happened. When Pete left she began weeping, and the tears kept gathering strength and pace until they reached a kind of cruising altitude and refused to stop, even when she tried to distract herself with television, her phone, doing some washing-up. When they did finally abate she imagined it was because she had no more tears left. But when she climbed the ladder into the bedroom she immediately spotted the little dish of foreign coins, like a topological record of all their holidays, and a moment later she was lying face down on the bed, this time immersed in a fit of tears from which she didn’t recover, but instead slipped directly into sleep.
Anna continues watching the clock move through 6.21 a.m., 6.22 a.m., 6.23 a.m., thinking she should text Stuart to say she is sick and that she will be staying in bed all day. But then, at 6.26 a.m., without consciously deciding to do so, she swings her legs from the bed and rises to her feet.
She goes to the toilet, showers, brushes her teeth, climbs back up the ladder, and around these modest achievements a sense of herself begins to gather; her insides regain their heft and shape. Once again she feels capable of basic tasks, such as walking down the street and buying things in shops and having conversations with Ingrid and perhaps even Stuart. But interviewing Gwyneth Paltrow? She pushes the idea to the side of her mind, to be dealt with in a few hours, and focuses on finding a clean pair of socks. There aren’t any, and this discovery threatens to plunge her back into despair, until she decides to simply go without. Her feet are damp and swollen from the shower, and forcing them into the tough leather boots is a challenge – the fact that she succeeds is, Anna feels, another testament to her resilience and grit.
