Music blared above a din of chatter, trendily dressed acquaintances drifted in and out, colleagues had spontaneous notions that they needed to try Navy strength Gimlets and did runs to the local shops.
Work got done, somewhere, in all the bouts of watching YouTube clips of skateboarding kittens in bow-ties, playing Subbuteo and discussing that new American sci-fi crime drama everyone was illegally downloading.
Then, all of a sudden, like flipping a switch, the enlivening chaos became sweet torture to James. The conversation was inane, the music distracting, the flotsam of fashionable passers-through an infuriating interruption. And he’d finally accepted the immutable law that lunchtime drinking = teatime headache. Sometimes it was all James could do not to get to his feet and bellow ‘Look, don’t you all have jobs or homes to go to? Because this is a PLACE OF WORK.’
He felt like a teenager whose parents had left him to run the house to teach him a lesson, and he well and truly wanted them back from holiday, shooing out the louts and getting the dinner on.
He thought he’d kept his feelings masked but lately, Harris – the man who put the party into party whip – had started to needle him, with that school bully’s antennae for a drift in loyalty. When Ramona, the punky Scottish girl with pink hair and a belly-button ring who wore midriff tops year-round, was squeezing Harris’s shoulders and making him shriek, he caught James wincing.
‘Stop, stop, you’re making James hate us!’ he called out. ‘You hate us really, don’t you? Admit it. You. Hate. Us.’
James didn’t want to sound homophobic, but working with Harris, he thought the stereotype of the bitchy queen had possibly become a stereotype for a reason.
And the humdrum petty annoyances of office life were still there, whether they were in a basement in Shoreditch with table football or not. The fridge door was cluttered with magnets holding ‘Can You PLEASE …’ snippy notes. The plastic milk bottles had owners’ names marker-penned on them. People actually got arsey about others using ‘their’ mug. James felt like putting a note up of his own: ‘If you have a special cup, check your age. You may be protected by child labour laws.’
James told himself to enjoy the rare interregnum of quiet before they all arrived. The sense of calm lasted as long as it took for his laptop wallpaper to flash up.
He knew it was slightly appalling to have a scrolling album of photos of your beautiful wife on a device you took to work. He’d mixed the odd one of the cat in there but really, he wasn’t fooling anyone. It was life bragging, plain and simple.
And when that wife left you, it was a carousel of hubris, mockery and pain. James could change it, but he hadn’t told anyone they’d separated and didn’t want to alert suspicion.
He’d turn away for a conversation, turn back, and there would be another perfect Eva Kodak moment. White sunglasses and a ponytail with children’s hair slides at Glastonbury, in front of a Winnebago. Platinum curls and a slash of vermillion lipstick, her white teeth nipping a lobster tail on a birthday date at J Sheekey.
Rumpled bed-head, perched on a windowsill in the Park Hyatt Tokyo at sunrise, in American Apparel vest and pants, recreating Lost in Translation. Classic Eva – raving vanity played as knowing joke.
And of course, the ‘just engaged’ photo with James. A blisteringly hot day, Fortnum’s picnic at the Serpentine and, buried in the hamper, a Love Hearts candy ring saying Be Mine in a tiny blue Tiffany gift box (she chose the real article later).
Eva was wearing a halo of Heidi plaits, and they squeezed into the frame together, flushed with champagne and triumph. James gazed at his grinning face next to her and thought what a stupid, hopeful idiot he looked.
There was that sensation, as if the soft tissue in his chest and throat had suddenly hardened, the same one he’d had when she’d sat him down and said things weren’t working for her and she needed some space and maybe they’d rushed into it.
He sighed, checking he had all his tablets of Apple hardware of varying size about him. He was probably worth about three and a half grand to a mugger.
His mobile rang; Laurence.
‘Jimmy! What’s happening?’
Hmmm. Jimmy wasn’t good. Jimmy was a jaunty alter ego that Loz only conjured into existence when he wanted something.
‘This school reunion tonight.’
‘Yep?’
‘Going?’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because your best mate begged you to go and promised to buy you beers all night, and said we could get gone by nine?’
‘Sorry, no. The thought gives me a prolapse of the soul.’
‘That’s a bit deep.’
‘You realise that at our age everyone will be doing that competitive thing about their kids? It’ll be all about Amalfi Lemon’s “imaginative play”. Brrrr.’
‘Think you’ve forgotten our school. More like “Tyson Biggie is out on parole.”’
‘Why do you want to go?’ James said.
‘Naked curiosity.’
‘Curiosity about whether there’s anyone you’d like to see naked.’
‘Don’t you want to know if Lindsay Bright’s still hot?’ Laurence asked.
‘Yurgh, no. Bet she looks like a Surrey Tory.’
‘But a dirty one, like Louise Mensch. Come on, what else are you doing on a Thursday, now you’re on your own? Watching Takeshi’s Castle in your Y-fronts?’
James winced. His Brabantia bin was crammed with Waitrose meals-for-one packaging.
‘Why would my telly be in my pants?’ he parried, sounding as limp as he felt.
‘Wap waaah.’
James’s phone pipped with a waiting call. Eva.
‘Loz, I’ve got a call. We’ll continue “me saying no” in a minute.’
He clicked to end one call and start another.
‘Hi. How’re you?’ she said.
James did a sarcastic impression of her breezy tone. ‘How’d ya think?’
Sigh.
‘I’ve got some ear drops for Luther. I need to bring them round and show you how to give them to him.’
‘Do you drop them in his ear?’ James hadn’t necessarily decided relentless bitterness was his best tactic, but unfortunately the words always left his mouth before he’d put them through any security checks.
‘Can I come round tonight?’
‘Ah, I can’t tonight. Busy.’
‘With what?’
‘Sorry, is that your business?’
‘It’s just the tone you’re taking with me, James, makes me think you might be being needlessly obstructive.’
‘It’s a school reunion.’
‘A school reunion?’ Eva repeated, incredulous. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was your sort of thing.’
‘Full of surprises. So we’ll have to find another night for Luther.’
After they’d rung off, James allowed himself the sour pleasure of having won a tiny battle in the war. The satisfaction lasted a good three seconds before James realised that now he was going to have to go to this school reunion.
He could lie, but no. This merited some small stray reference on social media as incidental proof – a check in, a photo, a ‘good to see you too’ to some new Facebook addition – to let Eva know she didn’t know him as well as she thought she did.
‘Morning!’ Ramona unwound sheep face ear-muffs from her head. ‘Och, why did I drink on a Wednesday? I am dying, so I am.’
‘Hah,’ James said, which meant, please don’t tell me about it.
Naturally, he spent the next quarter of an hour hearing about it, then she repeated the tale to each new arrival. Wine served in plastic pint beakers got you pissed, who knew.
5
Anna tapped ‘Gavin Jukes’ into Facebook, hoping his name was rare enough to make him easily flush-outable. She wasn’t completely sure why she was looking him up. She wanted one person she could safely say hello to, should he appear.
And there was his profile, second down – she reco
gnised the long nose and chin. She clicked his page, the photo a family portrait. Wife, three kids. Turned out his own gender was not his thing. Lives: Perth, Australia.
Good for you, Gavin. When it came to Rise Park, she could see the appeal in going so far away that if you went any further, you were getting nearer again.
The phone on her desk rang.
‘Parcel for you!’ trilled cheery Jeff on reception.
Anna put the phone down and bounded down the stairs. Jeff was resting the delivery on the counter, a wide, shallow black box with glossy embossed letters, tied up with wide satin ribbon. It subtly but unmistakably trumpeted I have spent more money than I needed to.
‘Something nice?’ Jeff said, then muttered ‘none of my business, of course,’ flushed at the evident thought it could be Agent Provocateur-style rutting wear, the sort of thing with frilly apertures and straps with buckles dangling from it.
Even though it wasn’t, Anna went warm in the face too, knowing she couldn’t correct it without making the suspicion stronger. It was like using the toilet stall with the foul smell and then not being able to warn the next person without them thinking you were trying a poo double bluff.
‘A dress,’ she said, hurriedly, ‘for an … event.’
‘Ah,’ said Jeff, ‘that’s nice,’ avoiding her eyes. In his head, she was obviously already in an Eyes Wide Shut, pointy nose opera mask, grinding away to Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’.
She carried the box up the stairs, back to her office on the flats of her palms, like a pizza. The University College London history department was spread over a row of Georgian townhouses, with high ceilings and huge sash windows.
It was a magical place to work. In her more sentimental moments, Anna felt it was a spiritual reward for schooldays – the dream after the nightmare. The building had that lovely old-fashioned carpety smell and yellow light from large round pendant lamps, as if you were living inside a warm memory.
Anna pushed her office door open with her back, pleased that no one had spied her. She’d feel self-conscious at any cries of ooh let’s see it on then.
Anna might’ve lost her schoolgirl weight and become a perfectly standard dress size, but it didn’t mean she thought and acted like the person she now was. She retained an intense dislike of clothes shops. The advent of online shopping had been a revelation. She would much, much rather use her office as a dressing room.
So when she realised the reunion needed a dress – no, not merely a dress but something truly flash, that would raise two fingers to them all in the form of fabric – she’d gone straight to an expensive designer website and spent the cost of a nice weekend away.
She dislodged the lid, rustling through the layers of tissue paper. There the exorbitant dress lay. Not a lot of material for … well, she wasn’t going to dwell on it.
Anna laid it carefully over a chair and checked the office door was locked, then wriggled out of her shapeless Zara smock, swapping it for the evening gown. She twisted it into place with forefingers and thumbs very carefully, as if it was gossamer, and pulled up a reassuringly chunky zip, with only a little breathing in.
Hmmm. She turned this way and that in front of the mirror. Not quite the transformation she’d hoped for. A black dress is a black dress. She flapped her arms up and down and watched the diaphanous chiffon sleeves waft in the breeze. She heard ‘The Birdie Song’ in her head.
On the website’s mannequin, with its blank white Isaac Asimov robot face, the black Prada shift had looked ‘Rita Hayworth during Happy Hour at the Waldorf Astoria’ chic. Now it was on her, Anna wondered if it was in fact rather blowsy. Like a cruise ship singer who would launch into ‘Unbreak My Heart’ while everyone enjoyed their main of breadcrumbed veal with sautéed potatoes.
Inevitably, as she stared at herself, she remembered that other day, that other dress. And that other girl.
Eventually she picked up her phone.
‘Michelle. I’m not going to the reunion. It’s rank madness and the dress makes me look like Professor Snape.’
‘Yes you are. After you’ve been, you’ll experience an incredible sense of lightness. Like a colon cleanse. Barry! Prep that squid and stop playing Fingermouse with it! Sorry, that last bit wasn’t for you.’
‘I can’t, Michelle. What if they all laugh at me?’
‘They won’t. But even if they did – doesn’t part of you want a chance to live that moment again, but this time, you tell them all to go to hell?’
Anna didn’t want to admit what she was thinking. What if she crumbled, cried and had to face that she was still Aureliana? Aureliana, holding more exam certificates and carrying less weight.
‘Do I look alright in this dress you can’t see?’
‘Is it the Prada one you sent me the link to? BARRY! Get that off that sausage! Do you think you’re working for Aardman fucking Animations? There’s no way you won’t look good. Your problem is going to be you’ll look so good no one will be looking at anyone else.’
‘Knock knock! Permission to enter the bat cave!’ Patrick sing-songed through the door.
‘Michelle, I’ve got to go.’
‘You’re right. You have got to go.’
Anna half laughed, half groaned.
‘Come in!’ Anna called. Cave was a reasonable adjective for Anna’s sinfully messy space on the second floor.
As a lecturer, expert in the Byzantine period, she was allowed some stereotypical nutty professor licence. When it came to housekeeping, she took it. Books were piled on folders piled on more books. The disarray was an insult to a lovely room though, and Anna felt some guilt about it.
Patrick lived down the hall, teaching the wool trade in the Tudor period. They’d started at UCL at a similar time and shared a passion for their work, as well as an ability to laugh at it and talk about something else entirely. This wasn’t to be underestimated in academia. Many of their colleagues were incredibly earnest. Something about experiencing life on an exalted plane of ‘clever’ could lead to malfunctions on the everyday level. As Patrick put it, they were people with brains the size of planets who couldn’t boil an egg.
Patrick often began his day by bringing Anna a cup of tea, drinking his while sitting on the bright blue office supplies chair, once he’d moved a pile of box folders, Anna’s coat and sundry items of course. Anna usually sat at her desk, scanning her emails and gossiping.
Patrick passed Anna her cup.
‘Goodness me, new frock?’ he said, watching Anna set her tea down.
‘Ah, yeah.’ She turned back and stood with her hands on her hips and legs slightly apart, as if she was a plumber about to give her price for addressing a particularly capricious combi-boiler.
‘Is it for the Theodora show? I thought that hadn’t kicked off yet?’ Patrick added.
‘No, I wish. School reunion tonight. Not sure if I should go. I had a molto horrifico time at school.’
Patrick squinted. ‘Oh. Right. So why are you going?’
‘My friend said it would be a defiant gesture. She’s mad, isn’t she? I don’t think I can do it. It’s a stupid plan. Oh, and do us a favour while you’re over there, and top Boris up?’ Anna said, nodding towards the large, beleaguered-looking cheese plant, and a scummy-looking milk bottle of water on the windowsill. ‘I’m thinking Prada and spillages don’t mix.’
He obligingly tipped an inch of greyish fluid into Boris’s soil.
Patrick had very neatly-cut auburn hair and the quivery, undernourished look of someone who had been shucked from a shell, rather than woman-born.
His uniform was fine knit V-necks and a mustard-coloured cord jacket with leather elbow patches. He claimed it had become such an academic cliché it had gone right through cliché and come out the other side as original.
He looked up at a portrait on Anna’s office wall.
‘Ask yourself this. What would your heroine Empress Theodora do?’
‘Have them all killed?’
‘Then seco
nd best; knock ’em dead,’ Patrick said.
6
Anna stood on the stairwell in front of a Blu-tacked sign in a distinctly ungentrified pub in East London with two stark options spelled out in Comic Sans.
Damn, she wished she knew Beth. It was a young name. Probably off to travel the world. She could hear a very bad karaoke rendition of Take That’s ‘Patience’ drifting from Beth’s party HQ.
Anna felt the vodka and oranges she’d had for Dutch courage sizzle acidly in her gut and trudged up the creaking, threadbare stairs and along the musty-smelling corridor to the appointed door. She had the pulse-in-the-neck trepidation of someone navigating the Ghost House at a funfair, her whole body tensed for surprise. Underneath the Milanese chiffon, she was clammy.
Another, deeper breath. She remembered what Michelle had said, that this was a demonstration of strength. She opened the door and stepped into the room. It was near-empty. A few people she didn’t recognise glanced over, returned to their conversations. In her many, many rehearsals in her head, a gallery of familiar faces turned towards her, accompanied by a needle scratch noise on a record. But no, nothing.
The worst of them weren’t even here yet, if they were going to turn up at all. Was she relieved, or disappointed? Weirdly, she was both.
A sagging banner above the bar announced a school reunion: 16 YEARS SINCE WE WERE 16!!!!!! Oh dear, multiple exclamation marks. Like having someone with ADD shaking maracas in your face.
Anna got herself a glass of bathwater-warm Stowells of Chelsea white wine and retreated to a wallflower location on the left hand side of the room. She judged that everyone was only one alcohol unit away from circulating more freely, and she would be approached. She’d throw this drink down and get gone. There, she’d put her head in the lion’s jaws. Done. Extra points for doing it alone. She wasn’t quite sure why that felt so necessary, but it did. Like when the action hero growled: ‘This is something I have to do for myself.’
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