Talking to Addison

by Jenny Colgan

  ‘What, like puberty?’

  ‘Do you want to be homeless again?’

  ‘No!’ I said emphatically.

  ‘And anyway, I’ve got a right to complain – you’ve got a date and Kate’s obviously met her soul mate, and you’ll all move out and have a squillion babies and I will die all alone.’

  ‘I know!’ I said brightly. ‘When I marry Addison, we’ll stay in the house and you can babysit our beautiful and brainy children.’

  ‘Oh, right. And I’m the sad fantasist.’

  ‘Not at all. He put this Elastoplast on my cheek. I’m going to keep it forever as a symbol of the first time we touched.’

  Josh looked appalled.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick. Holly, please don’t go all gooey over Addison …’

  ‘Too late!’ I exclaimed triumphantly.

  ‘… I really think there’s something a bit wrong with him. You know, like that weird form of train-spottery autism thing that boys are meant to get?’

  He thought for a minute.

  ‘I wonder if I could get it.’

  ‘You could count things, I suppose. Then memorize them.’

  ‘Ah yes. I can see the appeal.’

  ‘Josh,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about me and Addison.’

  Kate, unsurprisingly – well, a little bit surprisingly, I’d have assumed she was a ‘Rules’ girl as it had the kind of anal, personality-smashing techniques she tended to like – chatted to the beautiful thing all night then swanned off with it to dinner somewhere. Le Caprice, I assumed. I had no idea what Le Caprice might be like, but it sounded the kind of place that people who wore designer underwear (I knew Kate did, because I stole a pair of her pants out of the drier once, but I couldn’t get both legs in them) might go.

  Josh and I hadn’t stayed long. He’d decided he had to get back to gen up on some football scores.

  I hung around the next morning, Saturday, to see if she’d come in or not and was disappointed to find that she had and therefore clearly hadn’t gotten into something drunken and debauched, which would have been enjoyable for me. She swanned into the kitchen at around ten, carrying the Financial Times and looking composed and well rested. I busied around, pretending to be making coffee, and bursting to ask her what had gone on, however she calmly sat down and opened her newspaper. I tried to contain my frustration.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Decaf, thanks, if you’re making it. Black, no sugar.’

  I looked over at her.

  ‘That’s a very pointless cup of coffee.’

  She raised her eyebrows at me.

  ‘Actually, it consumes more calories than it contains, like celery.’

  ‘Aha.’ I poured the water out. ‘So that’s what coffee is for.’

  She smiled primly at me and went back to her paper. I tried again.

  ‘It’s my big date today. You know, at the Natural History Museum.’

  ‘How nice for you.’

  ‘Hey, maybe we could double date some time – Finn and I and you and …’

  Kate put her paper down.

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  I tried to imagine the situation and couldn’t.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, aren’t you seeing him again?’

  She immediately bristled.

  ‘Of course I am. I expect John and I will be seeing each other on a regular basis.’

  ‘John? John what?’

  She affected disdain.

  ‘Oh, I don’t recall.’

  ‘Sounds made up to me.’

  ‘What sounds made up?’ mumbled Josh, wobbling in unsteadily like a new-born kitten.

  ‘John Nobody – Kate’s new love.’

  ‘Oh God – another one,’ said Josh, spooning sugar into his coffee.

  ‘WHAT do you mean by that?’ said Kate ferociously.

  ‘I don’t know – how many suave pretty-boy married men have chatted you up this year and not given you their last name in case you dig them up out of the phone book?’

  ‘John is not married. I could tell.’

  Josh and I glanced at each other.

  Suddenly the phone rang, and we all jumped three feet. Kate hopped up, then, when she realized we were watching her, feigned a leisurely gait.

  ‘Ehm … I’ll get that … probably the office.’

  ‘Probably Relate,’ I said, ‘calling you in as a witness.’

  Josh and I peered round the kitchen door as she furiously motioned us away. Her expression quickly revealed her disappointment, however. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

  ‘It’s Addison’s mother.’

  ‘I’ll get him,’ I said quickly, and rapped on his door.

  ‘Hrh?’

  ‘Addison, it’s your mum.’

  ‘Can you tell her I’m out?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to work.’

  ‘He’s in,’ said Kate down the phone.

  ‘Can you tell her … I’m … busy.’

  ‘He’s busy,’ said Kate. ‘Yes, he’s eating. No, much the same. No, no sleep, no. OK, I’ll tell him.’

  She hung up.

  ‘When’s the last time you spoke to your mother, Addison?’ I asked him.

  There was silence from behind the door.

  ‘Not since he’s been here,’ whispered Josh.

  ‘I normally speak to her,’ said Kate. ‘She sounds all right most of the time.’

  ‘Right.’

  Kate bent down to pick up the post. As she did so, something slid out from the pocket of her exquisitely fresh Meg Ryanesque pyjamas.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, grabbing it, but it was clearly her little mobile phone.

  ‘That pesky office, eh?’ said Josh.

  ‘Erm, right.’

  I thought it would take me three minutes to get ready, but of course I had forgotten about my black eye, now puce and vermilion, and found myself in a desperate, excited rush whereby no matter how I tried I couldn’t seem to get it together to leave the house. I’d forgone the Alice Cooper style for a prolonged attempt to whiten it out, which was now making me look like one of those eyebrowless sci-fi entities. I toyed with buying an eye-patch and pretending I was starting an early eighties revival, but it would take too much explaining, and, given that I’d only met this bloke for two minutes, I wanted to appear as non-mad as possible.

  I still hadn’t decided what to do about the nurse thing. After all, I had kind of got this date under false pretences, and it also meant he was a bit of a perv. I hummed and hawed and stomped around a bit, which was clearly annoying Kate. Normally on Saturdays she was up at eight, dashing to gyms and swimming pools and popping into the office and Joseph and the Fifth Floor at Harvey Nicks and going to exhibitions whilst Josh and I lay on the two squashy old sofas in the living room, watched black-and-white films, and ate Jaffa Cakes, but it was eleven thirty and she wasn’t dressed yet. As well as the mobile, her pager was placed on the kitchen table and she seemed to have been reading the same page of the paper for some time.

  ‘Holly, for God’s sake, go. Otherwise he’ll be hanging round the museum by himself all afternoon …’

  ‘Nerds love that, though,’ I argued.

  ‘Just tell him. Tell him you were completely drunk …’

  ‘Hmm, that’s attractive.’

  ‘… or temporarily insane. But please, stop hopping around the kitchen trying to make your mind up about it, because it’s driving me crazy.’

  ‘OK, fine. I’ll go. Oh no, but what if he dumps me in the middle of the museum and I get lost amongst the brontosauri?’

  ‘What if you don’t go and you pass up the best thing you ever had?’ said Kate in a surprisingly dreamy voice.

  ‘What if he can only get off on the idea of people in uniforms? Yeugh.’

  ‘Josh will lend you his old wetsuit. Now, just go.’

  ‘In the wetsuit or not?’

  ‘Out! Get out! Out! Good luck, it’l
l be fine. Now GET OUT!’

  ‘Good luck to you too,’ I yelled back.

  ‘Oh God, I am ALL ALONE,’ I could just hear Josh moan as I left the house.

  Three

  By the time I’d reached the museum in Kensington, I had decided, completely and utterly, that this was the worst idea I had ever followed through in my entire life, worse than the time I thought that that guy’s motorbike would substitute for him not having a personality, and it took a wrist fracture to convince me otherwise. I tried to remember one single boyfriend I’d ever had who hadn’t accidentally made me break a bone, and gave up in disgust. Great. Even if he was nice I was still going to wind up in hospital somehow.

  I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize Finn. And he even had a stupid fish name. God, what was I doing? It was a nice, warm spring day, and I could be lying indoors on the sofa watching TV. But no, here I was, tarted up even though I looked like a road accident victim, going off to meet some spawny pervy speccy git who thought I was porno-nurse.

  This is always the way with me. Plus, I have Teenage Daughter of Nastily Divorced Parents Syndrome, which means, as people like to tell me late at night when I make only the teensiest complaint about my love life, that everyone I ever date will be:

  • The exact opposite of my father, as I hate him so much

  • Exactly like my father, as I hate him so much

  • Some sort of freaky revenge on both my parents

  • Doomed to disaster right from the start as a way of trying to get my parents’ attention

  • Doomed to disaster right from the start as I have never learned how good relationships worked

  • Doomed to disaster right from the start as some sort of genetic fate

  • Doomed to disaster right from the start as I am a Bad Person

  That last one is my guess – plus, whose relationship has ever not ended in disaster? The best way out you can ever hope for is death … But this is why I’m not in therapy, although I wished I was on my way there – or anywhere – the second I saw Finn, standing awkwardly outside the entrance. He seemed as unhappy to be there as I was. God, why do we put ourselves through crap like this?

  ‘Hi!’ I said over-enthusiastically. ‘Hi! Er … it’s Holly …’

  He looked at me confusedly for a second. For God’s sake, he’d asked me.

  ‘Hi! Oh, sorry, ha ha. My God, what happened to your eye?’

  ‘Ehm … a mental patient hit me.’ Almost true.

  ‘Oh my God, you poor thing. What were you doing on the psychiatric wing?’

  ‘Ehmm … just tidying up,’ I said vaguely. Oh God, I couldn’t put up with this for an hour and a half. When he went to pay for me, and I saw it was thirteen pounds for us to get in, I realized I had to act.

  ‘FINN!’ I screeched, as he handed over his Visa. ‘Don’t hand over that card.’

  ‘No, really, I’ll pay,’ he said.

  The swotty girl assistant held on to the card enquiringly.

  ‘No, it’s not that. Ehm, Finn, I think we’re going to the Natural History Museum under false pretences,’ I gabbled. ‘Ehm, I’m not a nurse.’

  He looked at me, confused.

  ‘Sorry … are you a nursing student?’

  ‘No, I mean, I’m nothing to do with nursing at all.’

  ‘I think it’s illegal to impersonate a nurse,’ said the assistant helpfully. I shot her a hard stare.

  ‘It was a … silly joke I was playing with … err, Kate,’ I hastily improvised. ‘She bet me I couldn’t pretend to be a nurse all evening and … well, here we are!’

  ‘Kate playing jokes,’ said Finn meditatively. ‘Never seen that happen.’

  Neither had I.

  ‘I’m so sorry that I dragged you all the way here … It was stupid. I’m really sorry. I’d better go.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ he said. ‘You actually turn up to tell me you’re going.’

  ‘I’ll go round with you,’ said the swotty assistant eagerly. Finn must give off swotty scientist love vibes.

  ‘Haven’t you seen it?’ I asked her rudely.

  Then there was a silence.

  ‘Well, bye then,’ said Finn.

  I looked at him again. He was wearing baggy old cords and a short-sleeved shirt with a pen sticking out of the top pocket, as well as a tweed coat, but – no leather patches. He seemed sweet, confused and not entirely unlike a grown-up Harry Potter. The assistant was already beckoning over her supervisor to tell her she was going on her break.

  ‘I get in for nothing,’ she whispered confidingly to Finn. Hang on, girlfriend! This was my date!

  ‘Well, better make that one, please,’ said Finn. ‘Can you do a student concession?’

  ‘For you, I’m sure,’ said the girl, simpering greasily.

  ‘Don’t you want me to come then?’ I said sulkily.

  He turned round.

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you’d gone.’

  ‘Well, you know, I’m here now.’

  The assistant clucked her tongue against her teeth. Finn thought about it.

  ‘Is your name actually Holly?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. I promise.’

  ‘What do you do, Holly?’

  ‘Ehmm … astronaut?’

  He smiled for the first time.

  ‘Sounds good enough to me. Two please,’ he said to the girl, who looked like she wanted to decapitate me with one of the velociraptor teeth they sold in the gift shop.

  ‘So … who are you?’ he asked, as we went up the rather sad lava-themed escalator.

  ‘Really, nobody,’ I said in shame.

  ‘Nobody at all?’

  ‘I’m Kate’s flatmate.’

  ‘Well, there you go,’ he said. ‘That makes you brave, for a start.’

  ‘And I work as a florist.’

  ‘Really?’ His face lit up. ‘I’m much more interested in botany than medicine, although of course one feeds so much into the other …’

  ‘I don’t know anything about botany either.’

  ‘Really? Oh, you should. Did you know there’s a kind of orchid that fills itself up with sticky stuff, like a pool. Then, when wasps come by, they go in and get so wet they can’t fly out again. The only way out is through a tunnel at the bottom, where the wasp gets stuck and covered in pollen before he’s let out. It’s like a car wash.’

  I was impressed despite myself, and more so when he led me to the case holding it, and pointed it out to me.

  ‘See? There you go – do you see? Orchidae Coryanthus. It’s kind of like a theme park for bugs.’

  ‘So do you just know everything about science then? Is that what you do?’

  ‘Good gracious, no,’ he said, laughing at the very thought, as if knowing the properties of Orchidae Coryanthus off the top of his head could possibly be conceived as knowing quite a lot about science.

  ‘No, really, I just dabble in some things. I am a kind of physicist.’

  ‘A kind of physicist? I didn’t know they had different kinds.’

  ‘A few, yes. I’m into string theory.’

  ‘You look at pieces of string to see what they do? Are snakes involved?’ I asked, glancing anxiously at a particularly long and malevolent one stretched out in front of us, thankfully in a case.

  ‘Well, on a very small level. You see, particle physics only works when we pretend gravity doesn’t exist, but if you want to use quantum and not just classical theory, then string theory can help close the gap.’

  ‘Oh, I see. No, hang on, that makes no sense to me at all.’

  ‘OK, ehm … just think of the world as a kind of resonating guitar string.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s a very beautiful theory,’ he said. ‘It means the world plays like music.’

  ‘What, even the person who punched me?’

  ‘Did they soar like a butterfly and sting like a bee?’

  ‘No, she hit me like a cow.’

  ‘Did you tell her you were a nurse too?’
>
  ‘Noo! I’m sorry about that.’ But he was laughing. ‘I got bullied at my last job. So I decided to leave and someone was obviously going to miss me.’

  ‘You poor thing. You should just tell people you walked into a bus shelter. That’s what I usually do.’

  ‘Why, do you get beaten up a lot?’

  ‘No, but I do walk into bus shelters.’

  We were standing in front of an enormous grizzly bear, and I took the opportunity of Finn studying it closely to study him closely. Well, it was all natural history, after all.

  He was tall, and had extremely curly brown hair sticking out in every direction. He wasn’t skinny and elegant like Addison, but well built and solid. Round dark eyes peered out of what were obviously bottle-thick glasses. I thought longingly for a moment of Addison’s long lashes and dark pools, then snapped myself back to the present.

  ‘Why are you called Finn?’ I said, as he examined the grizzly’s paw prints and I made little growly motions to myself. ‘Are your parents famous shark people or something?’

  ‘Ha! Good variation. Well, it beats the fish-finger theory. Actually, it’s Feynman. My father was desperate to have a physicist in the family. Richard Feynman was a physicist,’ he added, seeing my blank face.

  ‘Why didn’t he just call you Richard?’

  ‘That would have been too obvious.’

  ‘Wow. What’s your middle name?’

  ‘Lavoisier. Just in case the physics didn’t work out.’ He sighed, and I declined to question him any further.

  We stood pondering the great blue whale for a long time, until I realized it wasn’t actually real and got a bit pissed off with it. I was so full of relief, though, that the date wasn’t turning into an unmitigated disaster that I managed to hide it.

  ‘So why do you work at that wankerpit then?’ I asked him.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The City.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m doing research there. It isn’t very interesting.’

  ‘It’s interesting to me.’

  ‘Really? Do you want to hear the advanced mathematics?’

  ‘Ooh, is that the time?’

  ‘See?’ He regarded the whale glumly. ‘Actually, I hate it. I’m trying to formulate whether the stock market works along roughly the same lines as other living systems, and all people seem to be interested in pointing out is that they have “considerably more money than you”.’