Ralph's Party

by Lisa Jewell

  So what was a lovely girl like Jem doing, leaping willy-nilly into bed with a prat like Smith? Ralph was intrigued. He was confused. And he was also a little jealous.

  He headed for the kitchen and a pint glass of tap water, gulping greedily. It was a filthy day, just visible outside the kitchen window; the sky was uniform paper-flat white, and a fine drizzle was slowly moistening the bricks and concrete of South London, turning the crunchy leaves strewn messily around the streets into mulch. The combination of bad weather and bad hangover was rapidly making the journey through London to his draught-ridden, rat-infested studio in Cable Street seem unlikely.

  Maybe all that stuff in her diary was rubbish and she’d wanted Smith from the first moment she saw him. Maybe something had happened between them that night when she’d come to see the flat and Ralph had been in his room. Maybe the air had been thick with the scent of unbridled lust since Jem had moved in and Ralph just hadn’t noticed, like some sad insensitive bastard. Maybe (Ralph hated to think it) maybe the dinner was only really intended for Smith, and they’d both been waiting all night for him to go to bed, giving each other looks across the table every time he’d opened his mouth to say something else, thinking ‘Fuck off, Ralph, Fuck off, Ralph.’ Ralph felt stupid.

  For five years he’d had to listen to Smith droning on and on about that God-awful woman upstairs, that snotty, stuck-up bitch with the attitude problem from hell, who didn’t have even the slightest awareness of Smith’s existence. And now, the first time an eligible woman set foot in their flat and showed a little interest, he’d bedded her. Just like that. That really was the epitome of laziness.

  The post landed on the doormat and Ralph padded down the hall. A cheque from the travel company–£540. Just enough to clear some of his overdraft so that he could start building it up again. Ralph could not remember the last time his account had been in credit. He put the cheque on the hall table – he’d make a trip to the bank later in the day. He noticed that the door to Jem’s room was ajar again. He remembered the tantalizing passage he’d read in her diary yesterday and, his resolve and sense of honour weakened yet more by curiosity, he pushed open the door and scanned the room for the book. Maybe there would be a clue in there, something to explain the extraordinary goings-on of last night.

  The room was still in disarray. Jem’s bed had been slept in, so she’d obviously managed to find her way out of Smith’s bed at some point, the curtains were drawn and the weak light outside struggled through the thick fabric, casting a pink glow over the room. Ralph reached for the light switch and the little glass star lit up. The diary sat with its predecessors under the table by the bed.

  Ralph was caught off guard by his reflection in the wardrobe mirror – so, this is what he looked like, snooping in someone else’s bedroom. He was wearing a pair of old grey longjohns and a baggy grey V-neck jumper, displaying a spray of dark chest hair and a silver chain he’d bought in Bangkok. His hair was short but dishevelled, receding into two gentle dips of baldness, which seemed to retreat at exactly the same rate of acceleration as the hairs on his chest, back and shoulders advanced. His blue eyes were looking a little dull this morning, as they always did when he’d been drinking. But, on the whole, not at all bad for a totally unfit, twenty-Marlboro-a-day, very nearly thirty-one-year-old man.

  Ralph wasn’t a vain man, just one who appreciated how lucky he was not to have to worry about being unattractive – life was difficult enough without being ugly as well. His image looked after itself; he didn’t need to cultivate it. He never put on weight, and the muscles he’d developed during a summer spent labouring on a building site when he was twenty-two had somehow lasted him almost a decade. Losing his hair suited him, and hair care was just a matter of going to the same barber’s he’d been frequenting since art school and asking for a number two. And girls always seemed to buy him clothes. Especially these PR fashion types who got discounts all over the place and half-price designer samples. The jumper he was wearing had been bought for him by Oriel, a beautiful but tedious girl with an obsession with handbags and a small dog called Valentino. He’d seen the same jumper in a shop a few weeks after they split up and had been shocked to see it sporting a price tag of £225. That hadn’t stopped him wearing it at least five times a week without washing it; it was now peppered with small burns caused by hot rocks falling from spliffs, and smelt at close range like an ashtray full of curry which had been stuffed up someone’s armpit for an hour during a heatwave.

  Ralph turned away from the mirror. He wasn’t used to studying himself – it wasn’t unpleasant, just vaguely unsettling. He pushed open the dark wooden doors of the wardrobe.

  The floor was lined with shoes, lots and lots of shoes, little tiny shoes. Some were flat and some had heels, but they all looked as if they had been worn; unlike the impulse buys that constituted the extravagant shoe collections of other girls, these were old friends.

  Her clothes formed an eclectic kaleidoscope of rich browns and reds and greens, and floral prints on chiffon, velvet, suede and silk. They emitted a sweet odour, perfumed with subtle undertones of pubs, cooking oil, wood smoke and spicy food; an aromatic diary of her social life. Ralph pulled out a particularly pretty dress, ankle-length diaphanous georgette printed with small red roses, with thin straps and a stream of impossibly small buttons down the back. He could picture Jem in it, her black curls studded with flowers, her abundant bosom pushing upwards, running barefoot through the grounds of some imaginary grand house, a pink-cheeked Renaissance babe.

  No no no no no no NO! Ralph stopped himself abruptly. He hadn’t come in here to sniff Jem’s clothes and form elaborate Mills and Boon-style fantasies about her. He hadn’t come in here to get a crush on her. Jem was not, was most definitely not, not, NOT, Ralph’s type. No. Blonde, tall, whippet-chested, cool, arrogant, wine-drinking, label-wearing, Elle-reading, ball-attending – that was Ralph’s type.

  Time to get down to business; time to find out what was going on here. Yesterday he’d been in the running, had been, in fact, ahead of the game; yesterday he’d been ‘lean’ and ‘sexy’ and ‘more fun to be with’. Yesterday he had been the object of Jem’s strange and mysterious dreams. Yesterday he’d been Jem’s ‘type’. One day later and he was a spare part.

  All of a sudden he could see the future mapped out before him, and it wasn’t pretty. Jem and Smith were going to become inseparable; he would have to spend hours listening to them having sex, sitting on his own in the armchair while they snuggled together on the sofa. They would decide to get married, and Smith would approach Ralph nervously after the engagement party to broach the subject of him moving out. He’d end up in a cardboard box (no one else would be as understanding about Ralph’s sporadic rent-payment style), and he’d have one Tennents Super too many and be set on fire by hooligans while he lay unconscious in a doorway.

  Why the hell had she gone for Smith? What had he, Ralph, done to put her off? Maybe it was all those smelly shits he’d done; she always seemed to walk into the toilet moments after he’d exited. Or it could be because he hadn’t fussed around her, offering to help when she was cooking, like Smith had. She must have got a fair idea last night of how much money Smith earned – that was always attractive in a man. And Smith had bought her flowers as well, the smarmy bastard – that had to be it. Girls liked flowers. God, if only he’d thought of that. Why Smith? Why not him? Why not him when she’d fancied him more to start with? What was wrong with him? Smith already had a flat and a great job and loads of money, he didn’t need a girlfriend, too. And besides, he was in love with someone else. Ralph felt suddenly nauseous with rancid jealousy, rising to the surface of his soul like lumps of wet toilet paper in a blocked toilet bowl.

  His pulse racing, his resolve and sense of honour now absent, Ralph sat down on Jem’s bed and pulled the diary from the top of the pile. He began to read from the beginning, from January 1996, when Jem had been somewhere else, non-existent, someone he was yet to meet. If Smith was g
oing to go out with her and sleep with her, then he was going to get to know her.

  Lunchtime came and went, and elsewhere people with jobs went out, shopped in Boots, ate sandwiches, bought the Evening Standard, walked around town in suits and shoes and coats. Ralph read.

  By mid afternoon the people with jobs were on the phone, in meetings, making cups of coffee, flirting at the photocopier, immersed in the safety of office life. Ralph read on.

  As the light died at five o’clock and the people with jobs rushed to meet deadlines, tidy their desks, switch off their computers and frank the mail, Ralph still read.

  At six o’clock, or thereabouts, he closed the book, put it back under the table, ruffled the duvet, turned out the light and left the room. He sat at his desk, tapped a Marlboro out of its packet, lit it, smoked it and waited for Jem and Smith to get home.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘What’s she doing here?’ Siobhan asked, in a tone which she hoped sounded casual and light-hearted and didn’t betray what she felt inside – insecure, jealous, nervous. She was just so bloody pretty and sort of fit looking, glowing with health and vitality; all the stuff that had waved goodbye to Siobhan years before. And she had such lovely hair.

  It was Karl’s leaving party at the Sol y Sombra, just a few drinks with his students, some of whom he’d been teaching for five years, to wish him luck in his glittering new career.

  ‘She’s one of my students, didn’t I tell you?’ Karl was drinking from a bottle of lager.

  Definitely not. ‘I don’t think so. You might have, I don’t remember.’

  Cheri didn’t really strike Siobhan as the Ceroc type, she seemed more aerobic, more of a sweating-at-the-gym sort of girl.

  ‘She’s very, very good actually. She was my partner for a while, after you stopped coming.’

  ‘Oh, really.’ A filthy flash of unaccustomed jealousy pierced her stomach. Brightly, brightly, keep smiling, Siobhan; don’t let him know you’re jealous.

  ‘You really don’t like her, do you?’ Karl asked unexpectedly.

  ‘Well, I mean, I don’t know her. She just doesn’t seem like a particularly nice girl, that’s all. Not really my type. She doesn’t pass the Pub Test.’ Karl knew about Siobhan’s Pub Test; it was her way of ascertaining whether or not a girl was her type. She imagined being in a pub with the girl in question. If she could envisage sharing a couple of pints, a bag of crisps and some easy chat with her, she passed; if not, she was happily consigned to the not-my-sort-of girl pile.

  ‘Yeah, I don’t like her either.’

  Brilliant! ‘Oh really, I thought you thought she was all right.’

  ‘No, you were right, Shuv. She’s a selfish cow. I didn’t even invite her tonight, one of the other girls did.’

  ‘So what don’t you like about her?’ Siobhan’s curiosity was aflame. She wasn’t used to Karl forming such forthright opinions about people, doing vindictive things like deliberately not inviting people to parties, calling people ‘selfish cows’.

  ‘I don’t know. I just agree with you, that’s all. There’s something about her I don’t like. I can’t put my finger on it.’ In fact, Karl was furious. He’d told the little bitch not to come tonight and she’d promised she wouldn’t.

  ‘Why would I want to come to some sad little drinks with all those sad little Ceroc people? Don’t worry. Bring your fat girlfriend – she’ll be safe, I promise you.’

  And now here she was, dressed up to the nines in some skin-tight black cotton dress with a low-cut back, drinking lager from a glass and flirting with poor Joe Thomas, the permanently sweaty looking bank clerk with the Buddy Holly glasses and too much Brylcream, who looked as if he was about to die of entirely unconcealed excitement.

  Karl couldn’t remember who’d started this whole mess any more. Obviously he’d noticed Cheri – any man would notice Cheri. But then, life was full of women to be noticed; if you started doomed affairs with all of them you’d never get anywhere. Picking up women wasn’t Karl’s style. It must have been Cheri.

  He’d bumped into her one day at the front door, struggling for her key. He’d just got back from a dance class, so he had on all his fifties gear, and she’d asked him if he’d been to a fancy-dress party. When he’d explained about Ceroc, she told him that she was a dancer, that she’d trained as a ballerina until she was twenty, that she loved rock ‘n’ roll, her father had taught her to jive as a child. So Karl had invited her along to the Sol y Sombra, and she’d come. In retrospect, knowing what sort of a girl she was, she’d probably been flirting like mad with him then, sending out frantic sexual signals that he – honestly – had been completely oblivious to.

  It wasn’t until the first time he danced with her that he felt anything beyond a purely aesthetic appreciation of her. She was quite simply the best dancing partner he’d ever had. Her classical training added beauty and grace to the most basic Ceroc moves and she felt like a hollow doll, light and effortless, feathery and feminine. Ceroc was a man-led dance, and she followed his moves almost telepathically, injecting just the right amount of energy and enthusiasm into her dancing, smiling all the time.

  Karl had been blown away. So blown away, in fact, that he hadn’t mentioned it to Siobhan when he got home that night – not because of guilt, but because he knew he would blush vivid red and Siobhan would ask him why, and then he’d blush even more vivid red, and it just wasn’t worth sowing seeds of doubt in her mind over nothing. So he hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t hidden it either, but Siobhan was obviously never looking out of the window when he and Cheri got back from class together, and since there was no chance of Siobhan and Cheri forming any sort of neighbourly friendship, she had never known.

  Which of course made it easier for Karl neatly to compartmentalize his life when the dancing partnership turned into something a little more carnal. Karl had been shocked rigid when Cheri had first kissed him. It was definitely a scenario that had been swirling pleasantly through his mind for a few weeks, but then, life is full of enjoyable imaginary scenarios, and it would be impossible to enact all of them.

  ‘Let me buy you a beer,’ she’d said one night. And then, when the beer was gone and it was time for them to go, ‘I really fancy another drink. Let me buy you a tequila.’ And then, when those were gone, ‘Let’s have another, go on.’ She’d had to persuade him, jolly him along, but he’d agreed in the end. After a third tequila they were laughing and relaxed, and Cheri had swivelled around towards him on her barstool, smooth brown legs conspicuously crossed, eyelids lowered, her body closing the gap between them and, before any embarrassment had a chance to creep in, she’d locked her eyes on his and kissed him. Gently at first, hoping that she wouldn’t have to do all the work, that he’d respond to the sensual brush of her lips and kiss her back. She’d looked at him again. ‘I love dancers,’ she’d said, her eyes moving from his lips back to his eyes and to his lips again. She’d grazed his lips, a little harder this time. ‘I especially love Irish dancers,’ she’d drawled, ‘with soft lips.’ He’d kissed her then, and Cheri felt a rush of triumph.

  Their kisses had become longer and harder, and his tongue probed deeply into her mouth. He’d brought his chest up close to hers, gripped her back and emitted a small, slightly animal grunt. ‘Let’s go to the office,’ he’d groaned, searching his pockets for the key, and they’d stumbled into the small, stifling room, pungent with the smell of stale cigarette smoke and warm plastic at the end of a long, hot summer’s day.

  Cheri had let her dress drop to the floor, a practised procedure, and smiled at the look on Karl’s face as he saw her for the first time, unwrapped, pert, smooth and naked. He’d been awkward, fumbling with his clothes, clearing a space, never taking his eyes from her body. ‘God you’re beautiful,’ he’d said, rolling a condom on to his erect penis. It was all over in five minutes, hard, fast and uncomfortable. Karl was sweating profusely, his trousers still around his ankles, his quiff drooping and falling into his eyes. ‘Oh, Jeez,’ he k
ept saying as he came, ‘Oh, Jeez.’ And then he’d pulled up his trousers. ‘Shit, it’s hot in here,’ he’d said, and handed her her dress from where it lay on the floor. ‘I’m going to wash my hands.’

  That should have been it really. They should have left it there. But, it seemed, as far as Cheri was concerned, it wasn’t over. It wasn’t over because, although she’d seduced him and aroused him and led him astray, he wasn’t grateful. And she wanted him to be grateful.

  But he wasn’t. He never asked for more than Cheri offered him and took even that with an affronting lack of graciousness. She’d almost had to drag him up to her flat one weekend when he’d told her that Siobhan was away. She’d cleaned the flat from top to bottom, cooked a romantic meal, and Frank Sinatra, his favourite, wafted alluringly from room to room. There were clean sheets, new underwear, flowers. But it hadn’t made any difference. It was longer and more comfortable and less sweaty, but it was still entirely perfunctory, and Karl had wolfed down his dinner afterwards and gone back to his flat to watch telly on his own.

  For his part, Karl wasn’t sure why it had dragged on for so long. In a strange way which he couldn’t quite explain, he was scared of Cheri. Her emptiness and coldness frightened him, and he couldn’t help feeling that if he tried to extricate himself, he might pay dearly for it – Rosanne in a pot of boiling water sort of thing. She’d been so determined to have him, so determined to make him want her that he hadn’t dared go against her wishes. And if he was honest with himself, there’d been something strangely aphrodisiac about that intensity, about his fear – pathetically, it had turned him on.

  He had truly believed that he would never, ever, in a month of forevers be unfaithful to Siobhan; it was more than unthinkable, it was ridiculous. And he certainly would never have thought it possible that he’d end up having a torrid affair with a bimbo – which is all Cheri was, a blonde bimbo with legs up to here and lovely tits, who could dance like an angel.