by Mike Gayle
I poured more wine into our now half-drunk glasses and we began our meal, which was undoubtedly the best thing I’d eaten since we’d split up. As I chewed a mouthful of fondant potatoes Mel apologized for not cooking something proper and I told her not to worry. Why? Because this was yet another thing she . . .
. . . would never do with Rob 1!
The meal over, two empty wine bottles on the table and a third already open, we tucked into dessert, a summer fruits pudding for her and a cherry cheesecake (my favorite) for me. Everything felt relaxed. Everything felt . . . okay.
“This is nice,” said Mel, moving her chair next to mine so that she could sample my pudding as well as her own without stretching. “We were always friends as well as boyfriend and girlfriend, don’t you think?”
“Yeah”—I nudged her gently with my shoulder—“buddy.”
She nudged me back, slightly harder. “Yeah . . . mate.”
I nudged her in return harder still. “Yeah . . . chum.”
She then proceeded to nudge me so hard that I fell off my chair. Laughing hysterically from my position on the floor I managed a “Yeah . . . pal!” as Mel tried to help me up. Holding on to my hand, she lost her balance and ended up on top of me in a fit of giggles. Having determined that the wine was making it too difficult for either of us to stand up, I grabbed the remaining bottle from the table and on all fours we crawled our way to the living room to relax.
“So, you’re okay?” I asked, slouching back on the sofa sipping another glass of wine. “I mean, everything’s good in your life?”
Mel didn’t answer. I nudged her again. “Yeah.” She shook her head as if waking herself up. “Sorry, you must excuse me. I was just thinking . . . Sitting here, drinking too much wine, talking, laughing. This kind of comfortable doesn’t happen overnight.”
“No.” I kicked off my trainers. “You’re right it doesn’t.”
“People always go on about how fantastic relationships are in the beginning, and of course everyone hates relationships when they end, but what about the middles? The middles where you know everything there is to know. Where you can look at the person you love and know what they’re thinking; see something on the telly and know how they’d react; when you know exactly what they’d wear to come round and see you.”
I smiled fondly. “Did you know what I’d be wearing tonight?”
“Look under Fat Buddha’s bum,” she said.
I slid off the sofa, crawled over to the mantelpiece and picked up the small ceramic Buddha Julie and Mark had brought back from a trip to Thailand several years ago. Fat Buddha used to be the butt of all our politically incorrect jokes about fat men when we were together. I picked him up by his neck and underneath was a torn-out page from a pocket diary. It read, “White T-shirt. Jeans. Trainers. Corduroy jacket.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you knew exactly what I was going to wear?” I said, crawling back to the sofa.
“I’m not trying to tell you anything.” She laughed. “I bet you’ve even got your marl gray underpants on.”
This was typical Mel. I remember her once telling me that as a teenager she’d been a massive fan of the pop band Wham! So much so that she knew every personal detail about George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, right down to their shoe sizes. I’m sure back then she didn’t question why she collected all this information—she did it simply because it made her happy, not realizing that she was actually learning skills that she’d one day need in the future. Seventeen years or so down the line, she was still an avid collector of personal details, only this time round they were mine. In the four years we’d been together Mel had learned off by heart every detail about me—chest size, name of first girlfriend, favorite episode of Dad’s Army—everything. I’d often wondered why she’d done this, but it was only now, as I sat on the sofa that I realized that there was indeed a method to her madness. To her, to know truly, was to be intimate. To be intimate was to know the person you love as well as you know your own self. She’d built up the information inside her head to the point where she had created a virtual me, a model which she could use to predict my behavior down to the last detail—even to the choice of color of underwear. I was impressed.
“Congratulations,” I mocked. “When’s your membership to the Magic Circle arriving?”
“Ahhhh,” she joked. “Have I hurt your feelings?”
“No,” I said, faking a sulk.
Mel leaned toward me. “Come here,” she said, rubbing my cheeks. “Let me make it all better.”
Then she kissed me.
Then I kissed her.
Then we fumbled about with each other’s clothing.
Then we fumbled some more.
And life came back to where there had been none.
And so we did it.
Twice.
Okay, once and a half.
Rays of sunshine broke through the curtains, rousing me from my slumber. Consciousness came immediately, but I didn’t move in case I woke Mel. Instead I slowly opened my eyes and carefully maneuvered my body to face her. I quickly realized I needn’t have bothered being so quiet. She was already up and making shower noises. I lay back on the pillow, arms behind my head, and savored the sweet smell of victory.
I always knew we’d get back together. I knew it would just be a matter of time. We meant too much to each other to give up so easily. I think we’ll take things slowly to begin with. See each other twice a week until we’re safe. And then everything will carry on as it was before. Except this time I’ll make sure that I never lose her again.
Mel entered the bedroom wearing her hooded white toweling dressing gown, brandishing her hair dryer sternly. Her hair was still wet. She didn’t look happy.
“My hair dryer’s dead, Duffy,” she said. “This is a sign.”
“Of what?”
“A sign to punish me for what we did . . . there”—she pointed to her bedroom rug—“and there”—she pointed at a small peach armchair her gran had given her—“and there”—she pointed to the bed. “My hair, Duffy. What am I going to do? I can’t go to an important meeting with wet hair.”
I sat up in bed and tried to do that sexy, ruffled look that characters in big Hollywood films always have the day after. I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror on the wall. I looked about as sexy as an alcoholic tramp. “It’s probably the fuse,” I said helpfully.
“You don’t know that,” she snapped exasperatedly. “You know bugger all about DIY. Remember, you were the one who fitted a handle on my bathroom door upside down, and three years later it’s still the same way.”
This was not the mood I’d expected. I was hoping for a little joy. Maybe even euphoria. Irritability at my presence expressed through a knackered electrical appliance wasn’t really what I had in mind.
“I take it you regret last night.”
Mel flopped down heavily into her peach armchair. “Regret? Duffy, this is beyond regret. I cheated on Rob! I can’t believe I did that.”
I instantly felt relieved. She didn’t regret last night at all, she was merely torturing herself because she felt bad that she was going to have to hurt Rob 1 when she dumped him. She needed help. She needed Bloke Logic.
“There you are wrong, Mel,” I said pointedly. “What you did . . . what we did, well, it’s not cheating. Not really. It’s just a question of timing. You were going to dump Rob 1 anyway, so the fact that we did what we did before you’d told him, is at the very worst a gray area.”
Mel’s face transformed from neutral to thunderous instantly. “Point one!” she yelled. “Will you stop referring to Rob as Rob 1? It’s really annoying! Point two: it’s not a gray area, Duffy! It’s very black and white. Point three: I’m not going to dump Rob. You and I should not have done what we did. It was very wrong.”
I felt my body deflate in humiliation. “But I thought . . .”
“Well, you thought wrong. Has your position on togetherness changed?”
I didn’t answer.
“Yes, well, mine hasn’t either!” She stood up and came over to sit on the bed next to me with her head in her hands. Her anger disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. “Now look what we’ve done,” she said. “What about this friends thing we had going?”
“It’s still there,” I said dejectedly. “Just as long as we stay away from £4.99 bottles of red wine.” I searched around for my underwear. It felt ridiculous being the only one naked in the room. “Can you pass my clothes, please?”
Mel picked up my jeans off the floor and threw them at me playfully. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“You came around to seduce me. Looking all cute and worn out.”
“I did no such thing!” I protested.
She laughed. “Why not? Aren’t I good enough to seduce, eh?”
“What about you?” I said accusingly. “You only invited me round here because you were jealous that I was together with Alexa. All this time I’ve had to listen to you go on about Rob 1, but it was okay, because you had someone else. The minute I found someone else, though, you didn’t like it, did you?”
I knew I shouldn’t have said it. Yes, it was true. Yes, it scored a few points on the self-righteous scoreboard. But was it worth it? Not at all. Yet another LEAVE WELL ALONE option that I’d failed to exercise. Why do I always say the wrong thing at the wrong time?
Mel didn’t say another word to me. Instead she got dressed, put on her jacket and shoes, grabbed her briefcase and hermetically sealed the door with a slam so forceful something fell and crashed on the floor next door. I got up and looked into the living room. Fat Buddha was lying smashed on the floor with his head rolling toward the sofa. I picked up the pieces sadly and placed them on the coffee table.
I walked back to the bedroom and looked out of the window. I watched as Mel got into her car, slamming the door shut behind her. It was a bizarre scene to watch, because all the time I kept thinking, Her hair is still wet.
. . . and your plan is?
“Duffy, it’s Mel.”
“Hi,” I said cagily. It had been two weeks since I’d last heard from her. “When did you get back from Tuscany?”
“Half an hour ago.”
“How was it . . . your holiday, I mean?”
“It was all right,” she said dismissively. “I don’t think the food agreed with me. I kept being sick all the time.”
Was it too much to ask for Rob 1 to be ill too? A touch of gastroenteritis. A smidgen of dysentery. A tinge of beri-beri. “Did Rob suffer too?”
“He couldn’t go in the end. Something came up at work.”
Excellent! Better than disease—penalized by hard work.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said airily.
“I’m sure you are,” she said sardonically. “But none of this has anything to do with why I’ve called. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said last time we were together. You were right: I think I was jealous about you and Alexa. It was wrong of me to invite you round and to let what happened happen. I suppose I just wanted to see if you still wanted me, and if you’re truthful you wanted to know exactly the same thing. You have to admit it, Duff.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Of course you do,” she persisted, her voice revealing a complete lack of doubt. “Don’t forget how well I know you.”
“Okay, you’re right,” I admitted finally. “But where does that leave us? You still have feelings for me. I still have feelings for you. You want one thing, I want something else, and to top it all we’re both seeing other people.”
“The way I see it,” said Mel authoritatively, making it clear that she’d given the matter a great deal of thought, “we’ve got to face up to the fact that, irrational as it may seem, we still mean a lot to each other but want different things from life. We were together for a long time, and that kind of intense feeling isn’t just going to disappear. We undoubtedly still feel the need to be part of each other’s lives—”
I interrupted. I could feel that Mel was going into over-analyzing mode—finding fifteen different ways of saying exactly the same thing. I’d had enough. I just wanted her to get to the point. “. . . and your plan is?”
“If only you knew how annoying that is, Duffy!” she snapped exasperatedly. “My plan is that as we can’t live with each other and we appear to be unable to live without each other, we have to do the mature thing. The adult thing.” She still wasn’t getting to the point.
“And that is?”
“Well, the way I see it, one of us has a well-developed conscience while the other likes to pretend that he hasn’t, even though I know he bloody well has. And so in the same manner that criminals are sometimes forced by courts to face up to their wrongdoings by meeting the victims of their crime, we should meet each other’s new partners.”
I coughed nervously. “You’re joking, right?”
“It totally makes sense, Duff.”
“On Planet Psychotic perhaps, but here on earth I think you’ll find that what you’ve suggested is deranged.”
Mel continued, unruffled. “Once we meet each other’s new partners they’ll both become real. This way I can convert the image of Alexa as ‘that bitch off the TV who’s sleeping with my ex-boyfriend’ to ‘Alexa, the human being who finds herself in the middle of this terribly entangled situation.’ She becomes real.”
“But aren’t you forgetting one small thing?”
“What?”
“I’ve already met Rob 1 ‘that tosspot who’s going out with my ex-girlfriend,’ so I can be excused from this nightmare. He didn’t become ‘Rob 1 the unfortunate individual caught up between two people who’ ”—I chose my words carefully—“ ‘have strong feelings for each other.’ I loathed him before I met him and totally despised him after the event. It’s just the way it goes.”
“Let me explain this to you, Duffy,” said Mel, adopting a businesslike tone I suspected she used at work with difficult clients, “in terms you can understand. We can’t carry on being friends if we don’t try to do something to rectify this situation. That’s no phone calls. No meeting up together. No letters. E-mails. No communication whatsoever. I know it’ll be difficult but it’s the only way if you won’t do this.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” she said. “Anyway,” her voice was much lighter in tone now she’d got my attention, “you haven’t met Rob properly at all. He’s a really nice guy. He likes you. He told me so.”
It was all I could do to stop myself from tutting contemptuously. “I bet he’s told you he’s not jealous that you phone me either; that he’s happy we’re still in each other’s lives; that it doesn’t bother him when you mention my name . . .”
“Yes,” snapped Mel.
“Mel, these are guy lies! Can’t you see that? It’s not in our natures to like He-Who-Was-There-Before-Us. It’s natural selection. The selfish gene.”
“Look, I’m serious. We have to do something. And we have to do it now.” She played her trump card. “Have you got a better solution?”
“No,” I said.
“Then it looks like we’re going with mine, then, doesn’t it? Next Saturday night. You and Alexa come round to mine. I’ll make something nice and we’ll sort out this whole thing.”
“But won’t they think it’s suspicious that we’re suddenly having this meeting? I mean, you’re not going to tell Rob 1 about what happened, are you?”
“You know what a terrible liar I am. I feel like I’m going to be struck down by a bolt of lightning every time I tell my mum that I didn’t skip breakfast, but this would hurt Rob too much.” She paused. “How would Alexa react?”
“She’d be really mad,” I lied. I hadn’t the faintest clue what Alexa would think. “Absolutely furious.”
It was the day of the dinner invitation and I’d just arrived at Alexa’s. I was wearing a dark burgundy suit without a tie in a bid to look both
smart and casual. Alexa, however, had insisted on dressing up. She was wearing a purple top that had all the seams on the outside by a Dutch designer whose name I couldn’t pronounce, and black wide-legged trousers from Joseph. I knew all this information about the labels because she’d insisted that I accompany her on a shopping spree in New Bond Street for the whole afternoon. It was a truly frightening experience. Not only did she not bother looking at a single price tag the whole time we were out, but she deliberated over a pair of shoes for three hours and still didn’t buy them. Shopping for soft furnishings with Mel was a doddle compared to this.
“Come in,” said Alexa, holding open her front door. I followed her into the lounge. “Do you want a drink? I’m having a glass of wine.”
“Yeah, go on, then,” I said, sitting down on the sofa. I looked down at Alexa’s feet as she handed me the glass of wine. “Are those what I think they are?”
“Yes.” She laughed. “The second I got home I knew I wanted them after all. I called a cab and went straight back to the shop and bought them. And even if I do say so myself, they look fantastic.”
“They do,” I said. I took a moment to take in her whole outfit. “In fact all of you looks fantastic.”
“You don’t look too bad yourself.”
She sat down next to me and took a sip of her wine. “I’ve got to tell you something that I know you’re not going to like,” she said.
“What is it?” I asked, hoping she was going to deliver the “this isn’t working out” speech. It had been obvious for quite a while that Alexa and I were never really meant to be. She was beautiful, fun to be with, and for all her pretensions actually quite down to earth, but she wasn’t right for me. Though cured, I was still feigning impotence—a sign, if any were needed, that things weren’t quite right—and when I’d explained Mel’s suggestion to her earlier in the week she’d said yes without even blinking an eyelid. No one normal should want to meet their current partner’s ex-partner that much. If it had been the other way round and Alexa had wanted me to meet any of her ex-boyfriends, there would’ve been no way I’d have done it. We just weren’t suited. I didn’t mind, though, because I really did think we could be friends—especially as, technically speaking, we hadn’t seen each other totally naked.
