‘We’ve got to check it out. And actually he gave it to me free.’
‘Oh marvellous, now we’re in debt to them.’
‘He asked a lot about you, actually.’
‘I bet he did. Why not just show him our books, eh? Next time you put that traitorous meat in your mouth, remember Guy’s soft danglies squashed against my window and have some respect.’
‘If I ever put his danglies in my mouth, do I have to think of his burgers?’ Daniel said.
Michelle guffawed and Penny squealed.
Anna laughed and scraped out the rest of her ice cream. When it came to dating’s sour moments, what would she do without her friends to take the taste away? Even if Penny came as an unwanted side dish.
‘Are you two coming to my gig?’ Penny said, frowning. ‘You know The Unsaids are playing?’
Penny phrased this not as if it was the first mention, but as if a) the offer of the gig had already been made and accepted and b) Anna and Michelle were now letting her down with a refusal. Classic Penny.
‘I probably have things to do in the restaurant,’ Michelle said, finishing her ice cream.
‘Oh no, I made sure it was when the restaurant’s closed so Dan can come. Anna, will you be free?’
Anna opened her mouth.
‘I can confirm she will be,’ Michelle cut in.
21
‘Hate to say it, mate, but I’m not remotely surprised,’ Laurence said, not sounding like he was hating it at all.
‘Why?’ said James, not wanting to ask.
They fell briefly silent as the waitress set two tumblers down in front of them, cracking the ring pulls on Dixie beer and pouring two inches into the bottom of each glass.
‘I’ll be back in a moment to see what you guys fancy eating,’ she said. ‘The Red Rice is real good.’
‘Real good?’ James said, when she’d left. ‘If London likes America so much, why doesn’t it go live there?’
Laurence and James had a routine of meeting once a week for dinner out. The rule was that they never went to the same place twice, with the exception of Tayyabs, which was mandatory with a hangover.
Laurence usually chose the venue and this time it was somewhere serving authentic New Orleans po-boys. With authentic Louisiana beverages. In Soho. The main thing was, it was one of the currently talked-about places, and now they could talk about it.
Laurence tipped the liquid in the glass, sniffed it gingerly.
‘It was this or root beer, which tastes like dentist’s mouthwash,’ Laurence said, sipping. ‘Cheers. I’m not surprised Eva’s seeing someone else, because there’s always someone else. Very few people can be bothered to walk out on a solid thing for nothing. A Laurence Law of Life. She wasn’t doing it for the love of the view from her friend Sara’s spare room, was she?’
‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘Sorry you’re cut up your wife’s left you, I bet there’s a wanger involved? That’d have gone well.’
‘Hmmm,’ James studied the mains. ‘Fully dressed with all the fixins. God don’t you hate it when menus talk folksy to you. There best not be any mention of Tommy K sauce.’
The waitress returned and they ordered giant sandwiches with gravy. Despite the dazzling array of proteins that could be stuffed inside these bready behemoths, James had a strong suspicion they all tasted alike by the time they were ‘fully dressed’ with all the ‘fixins’. Fully dressed. He thought of Eva in that drawing, and his appetite waned.
‘What I can’t get over is how cold it was to leave me to find that picture. Imagine it, Loz.’
‘I wouldn’t have to imagine it if you’d had the presence of mind to take a phone snap,’ he said, and James laughed, hollowly.
‘Having to see that, and think of the lovebirds sketching, like that scene in Titanic. Only one notch down from finding sexting photos. And he draws like a five-year-old child …’
James shook his head, as if Finn’s artistic talent was the worst of it.
‘He virtually is a child. Twenty-three. Sheesh,’ Laurence said. ‘I dated a twenty-four-year-old last year. Her favourite music was “skronk”. She’d never heard of John Major. I said, who do you think was running the country between Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair? She said “Was it Michael Parkinson?” I knew then it was over. Shame, because in the sack we were like a pair of drowning cats.’
James squinted. ‘Ah now I feel better. Cheers mate!’
‘Oh yeah. Sorry. You said they’re not doing it though?’
‘Supposedly.’
Once again James was forced to contemplate what this boy had done with his wife – or rather, was plotting to do to his wife. Weren’t sleeping together. Exactly how narrow a definition was that, these days?
It was so incredibly cruel of Eva to let him find out like that. When was she going to tell him? Aside from Loz, James wouldn’t be sharing this with any of his friends and family, if he could help it. He didn’t want them to think badly of Eva. This was the thing about relationships; someone could fire you, and you’d still do their PR.
By this point, James had lost his appetite altogether.
And right on cue, their po-boys arrived, sliced in half and surrounded by not-needed deep-fried extras. The waitress performed the ceremony of ladling gravy over the top of each, departing with: ‘Tuck in, guys!’
‘Look. The age thing. The fact this Finn’s a minor means he is minor. It’s good news.’
‘Is it?’ James picked at a battered onion ring. He’d have to disassemble the sandwich and make such a mess it looked like he’d eaten it. In his distant past he’d dated women who did that. ‘It’s humiliating.’
‘Yeah. She’s not seriously going to leave you for Derek Zoolander. She wants to have kids, right? She’s what, thirty-three? This is a fling.’
‘Guess so,’ James said. ‘Though who the hell knows what Eva’s thinking anymore? I don’t.’
‘Can I give you some advice? Well there’s the business class advice, which you won’t take, so then there’s premium economy.’
‘Which is?’
‘Get revenge. Have a fling of your own. There’s nothing like a taste of your own bullshit to make you realise you don’t like bullshit. As Martin Luther King said.’
‘Hmmm. Not sure.’
‘Why not? Do you realise how lucky you are? You get to have one off the meter right now. No one would blame you, and your wife especially couldn’t blame you.’
‘Who with?’
‘Hah. Don’t give me that. I’m not going to tell you that you could have anyone you want. Are you telling me if Eva came round and you were fumbling with a twenty-four-year-old, it wouldn’t give her cause for pause?’
‘She doesn’t have a key anymore.’
‘Don’t be obtuse.’
James wasn’t at all sure how Eva would react. He didn’t want to inflict more wounds. He wanted to make everything right and good again, not destroy it completely.
‘I wouldn’t drag a blameless twenty-four-year-old into this mess to find out.’
‘And there we differ. It’s not dragging them into any mess if you don’t let emotions cloud it. You’re just giving them a treat. One that’s so rich and indulgent it would be unhealthy for them to have too often. Bloody hell, how do you eat these things?’
Laurence gave up trying to poke an airship-sized dripping sandwich into his mouth and resorted to knife and fork.
‘Thanks, but it doesn’t appeal at the moment.’
‘Another Laurence O’Grady Law of Life – competition focuses your mind on whether you want something or not.’
‘Or not,’ James said. ‘It’s a gamble.’
‘How’s the “do nothing” strategy going? It’s giving Finn a chance to get your wife to suckle his Huckleberries.’
James held up a hand to say ‘enough’ and Laurence nodded.
‘Sorry. It must be shit.’
Laurence refilled their glasses and James noted that, despite both their efforts, they
still had a table full of food.
‘Oh Christ, I forgot to say. You’ll never guess who was in my meeting the other day. That woman you were all over at the reunion. She’s a lecturer at UCL. She’s on a British Museum exhibition we’re doing the app for.’
‘No way! Oh man, this is amazing. First she walks into the wrong room. Then this. There was something special about the Spaniard,’ Laurence said.
‘Italian, as it turns out.’
‘Bella Italia! And a lecturer eh? I’d give her a first. And a second.’
‘God, really? She blew you out. And she was a total pain again in the meeting. She was all “What’s the point of you?” I felt like saying: “You hired us, remember?” Wouldn’t have thought she was your business, in personality or looks,’ James said, brushing his hands.
‘Why not?’
‘Too … dour. Too not covered in make-up. Too covered up in other respects.’
‘This is where you’re wrong. I’m getting bored of girls. I’m ready for a woman. You’re going to have to set us up.’
‘When I’ve got to work with her? She’s probably giving me this grief because you hit on her. No chance.’
‘When you’re done then?’
‘Huh. Maybe. Wait. What was business class advice?’ James asked.
‘What?’
‘You said I wouldn’t take your best advice.’
‘Ah. That,’ Laurence wiped beer foam from his mouth. ‘You should end it with Eva.’
‘I love her,’ James said, shrugging.
‘I said you wouldn’t take it.’
‘Wouldn’t you stick with it, if you’d married the person?’
‘If I ever marry someone I’ll let you know.’
Laurence always said he’d only ever marry for money. ‘Why sign a contract that can only potentially lose you money, otherwise?’ James had long felt a mixture of admiration and repulsion for Laurence’s nihilism. Right now, he positively envied it.
‘Your problem is …’ Laurence whistled. ‘Have I got rights to speak my mind, with no comeback, here?’
James said he had, thinking: as if you didn’t plan to say this anyway.
‘She’s not done this for any reason that I can tell. How are you going to trust her not to do it again?’
James’s very own thoughts.
‘She’ll know if she ever does it again, that’s it, over,’ James said, trying to sound resolute, knowing it sounded weak.
Laurence grimaced.
‘Recipe for a lot of paranoia and grief if you ask me. Think of it as the climber who sawed his own hand off with a pen knife when he was trapped by a boulder. Ending a serious relationship is like that. A lot of pain and ugly in the short term but you have to do it to get your life back.’
‘Haha. So marriage is the boulder? I should be galloping down the mountain, blood spurting from a stump, looking forward to a lifetime of trying to eat nachos with a fairground amusement game claw?’
‘Imagine tenderly stroking the bum of your new woman with that claw! Good times.’
They laughed. As crude as Loz always was, James was glad he’d chosen to tell him about the drawing.
Anyone who’d have said poor you would’ve made him feel worse. He desperately needed to laugh, however emptily.
It was petty, but the notion of getting Eva back, in order to get Eva back, had given him an idea.
22
As usual, Anna woke twenty minutes after she needed to be vertical and doing something, and waited another ten, enjoying the warmth of her bed. She checked the time on her phone, groaned. It was against all that was righteous to have somewhere to be on a Sunday.
She rolled out from under her patchwork quilt. The way some people habitually grasped for their spectacles, her first act was to reach for a band to pull her hair into a giant unruly ponytail-bun. Youthful experiments had taught her that if she cut it shorter, she ended up with a tightly curled, rounded mop, the shape of a dandelion clock, like a superannuated Orphan Annie.
Anna disliked getting up, and dearly loved her giant four-poster brass bed. She’d ignored what the tape measure told her and now she didn’t so much have a bed in her flat as a flat round her bed.
‘And your bed only ever has one person in it!’ her sister had said, with her usual tact.
Her lecturing wages didn’t buy a lot of space in Stoke Newington, to say the least. She had to make hard choices. She preferred bed to bath, and her rather-poky-but-charming galley kitchen, which opened out onto an appealing little garden, was in the end deemed more appealing than having a spare room.
The estate agent had humorously called her bathroom off the bedroom: ‘en suite’, Everyone else called it: ‘Why have you got a shower head in the wardrobe? Oh. Fuck. It IS the shower.’
Anna folded herself into it and out of it, into yesterday’s clothes, and zipped up her boots.
The journey to her parents’ in Barking was the passage back to the past. It wasn’t wholly pleasant, and she felt some relief when she got home again. She felt bad for her family that she felt that way. But it wasn’t her fault that her childhood held so many negative connotations, either.
Anna caught the overland, then the District Line, grabbing a seat. She kept her take-out coffee from slopping out of the tracheotomy hole in the lid with practised steadiness, like someone holding the Olympic torch aloft.
The train emerged from the Underground above street level again. Ah, the sight of that mystical barrier between old and new, Anna and Aureliana – the North Circular. She was back in the scenery of her youth.
Putting her hood up in the late autumnal mizzle, she hurried past the Vicarage Field shopping centre and down the familiar streets. They were lined with pebbledash-scarred 1930s semis, satellite dishes on their roofs like jaunty fascinators. And, she was home. For as long as her parents were alive, it would always be home.
Cliché, she knew, but the house always seemed slightly smaller than it was in memory.
She rang the bell and stamped her feet. Her mum answered the door in her ‘stripper body in tasselled pasties’ vinyl pinny that had ceased to be funny within thirty seconds of Aggy giving it to her one birthday many years ago.
‘Aureliana! I said half twelve!’
‘Sorry, they’re doing repairs on the Tube,’ Anna lied, smoothly.
‘I didn’t hear of any,’ Aggy said, ambling into the hallway with a cut-glass goblet of Prosecco. All of their parents’ glassware looked distinctly ’70s, the kind of vessels that should hold Blue Nun.
‘That’s because Chris drove you?’ Anna said. ‘Hi Chris!’ she called.
‘Hola!’ he bellowed from the sitting room.
‘Or because you’re a big liar, nose like a church spire,’ Aggy said.
‘Me and Mum are going over the seating plans, want to take a look?’
‘I’ll get a drink first,’ Anna said, heading for the kitchen.
The house smelt wonderful, of roast pork and rosemary. Anna’s mum did most of the cooking, but Italian Sunday lunches were Dad’s business. They had the full works – antipasti, primo, secondi, salad, cheese, grappa. Chris always left saying his liver had been turned into pâté.
‘Hi Dad,’ Anna said, finding him shredding lettuce for the salad course.
‘La mia adorata figlia maggiore!’ he said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Wine’s on the side.’
Anna poured herself a hefty half pint of Prosecco.
‘How was your meeting? With the museum people?’
Anna’s dad was incredibly proud of his daughter’s job. Unlike their mother, he tried to grasp the detail.
‘Oh fine, yeah,’ Anna said, leaning against the fridge. She knew if it weren’t for arseing James Fraser the arsehole, she’d be excitedly gabbling about it. She felt a dragging weight of resentment in her gut.
‘It’s coming together.’
‘We will love to see it.’
Down the hallway, she could hear her mother’s delighted laughter
as Chris told an anecdote in his bassy voice.
Anna suspected it’d be the only chance she’d get to speak to her dad alone. Pushing the kitchen door closed, she said in a low voice: ‘Dad. Are they …’ she jerked her head to indicate she meant the intended couple, ‘OK for money?’
He rearranged the tea towel over his shoulder and started potato peeling curls of carrot into the salad.
‘I said to Chris, come to me if you need to, and he said they were fine.’
Anna should feel reassured by this, but she didn’t. Her parents lived on her dad’s pension and what her mum had inherited. It was enough, although it wasn’t lots. And Chris was not in the driving seat with this wedding.
‘Aggy chose a dress costing four grand the other day,’ she mouthed the figure.
She expected her dad to look perturbed. He shrugged. ‘You know your sister, she likes …’ It wasn’t often his English failed him, after four decades. ‘Foof?’
‘Dad! No!’ Anna shrieked.
‘What? Frouf. Foffy faff,’ her dad pulled at an imaginary full skirt, pursed his lips under his moustache and did a little dance, potato peeler held aloft.
‘Foof is a rude word. Stick with faff. Or foffy, whatever that is. Never foof.’
‘Ah. They sound so close. What does foof mean?’
‘Er … it’s something precious to a lady. Never mind.’
‘Your sister will know the cost of things when she is still paying it off in a year. You know how she is, you cannot tell her. She has to find out herself.’
‘I guess so.’
Anna took a sip of her drink and considered she’d done all she could. She wished she could share her father’s good-natured complacency on this.
‘Want a hand with anything?’
‘It is fine.’ He handed her the salad bowl. ‘Put this on the table and say hello. They want to talk to you about the wedding.’
‘No way! I wondered when Aggy was going to mention it,’ Anna said, eye rolling as she took the bowl, and her dad smiled.
As Anna entered the sitting room, Aggy said, ‘Can I confirm for definite you’re not bringing anyone?’
‘Confirmed,’ Anna sighed. ‘Though I’d like to remind you that we all die alone.’
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