Less Than Three

by Jess Whitecroft

  “Okay, I don’t understand any of what just happened,” I said. “Or why it happened.”

  “I know, right?”

  “I don’t understand why you were watching that crap in the first place,” said Simon, who had wandered back in, pretending to be deeply fascinated by a carton of yoghurt. “Doesn’t it frustrate you, watching someone mess everything up like that?”

  “No,” said Rob, shifting on the couch to make room for him. “It’s funny. Besides, you can learn so much from the mistakes of others. I went through a phase where I only read bad books, just to understand why they were considered so awful. There’s nothing like reading someone else’s purple prose to remind you why you should keep it concise and avoid contorted metaphors.”

  “And how are you coming along with that, by the way?” said Simon, pulling Rob’s feet into his lap. “The novel, I mean?”

  Rob narrowed his eyes. “If you Stewie Griffin me about my novel I will murder you in your sleep.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Simon. “Besides, Nathan’s the one who can do the voice.”

  Rob didn’t laugh. I suspected Simon had touched a nerve, and he must have done, because for once they – and I – had a quiet night.

  *

  Kissing scenes were seldom fun, even when the person you got to kiss was as beautiful as Nadia was. There was always a level of awkwardness engendered by throwing yourself into an intimate moment on purpose, and it wasn’t made any less awkward by the fact that I was playing a man who was basically telling a woman that he would kill himself if she didn’t let him fuck her.

  She was crying when I started to kiss her, her lips trembling under mine, then it was as if she’d channelled all of Tourvel’s denial and desperation, grabbed hold of my hair and devoured me.

  It was a dream come true, but all my carefully hoarded sense memories in that moment went sideways and all I could feel was the tickle of Rob’s beard, and the dusty upholstery smell of the London Underground. I moaned as I returned the kiss and she echoed it deep in her long, white throat, her waist tiny under my arm. I scooped her up from the floor and carried her to the plastic chairs that were standing in for a chaise longue. She was sobbing again, and I knew this was my cue to pity her, to look at her in a way Valmont had never looked at his prey before, and find tenderness deep inside himself.

  But she was crying so hard, and it was starting to unnerve me, and my line flew clean out of my head. “Are you all right?” I said.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Valmont,” said Rupa, but Nadia shook her head.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t…”

  “Shh, it’s okay,” I said. “Is it the scene? Is it a bit rapey?”

  She shook her head again and scrubbed her hands over her face. “No. I’m okay. I’m sorry – I think I was just looking for an excuse to cry. This fucking weather…I don’t think I’ve had a decent night’s sleep since June. And nextdoor has this feral toddler that wakes up every night – on the dot – at four in the morning and screams.”

  “Oh God,” said Rupa, coming to the rescue with tissues. “Is he still doing that?”

  “Yes. And then the other side of the terrace just got a dog. A Yorkie. And every time a bus goes past it goes into a ten minute yapping session. I’ve tried everything. Earplugs, noise cancelling headphones, whacking a broom against the wall while screaming – nothing works.”

  “You poor thing. Let me get you some water.”

  “Thanks, Ru.”

  “You’re welcome. For what it’s worth, you nailed that kiss. I could smell the desperation from across the room.”

  “Yeah, for what it’s worth,” said Nadia, as Rupa left to use the vending machine. She looked flat and washed out and utterly exhausted.

  “You were great,” I said. “Maybe a little bit overkill on the tears, but…”

  She laughed and snuffled and blew her nose. “Oh God, Nathan – what are we doing?”

  “Making out while sobbing?”

  “Pretending to make out while sobbing,” she said. “Sometimes I think half the work of acting is telling yourself that what you’re doing isn’t completely insane. Do you ever have those moments?”

  “What? The ones where it hits you that it’s a ridiculous way to try to make a living?” I said. “Oh yeah. All the time.” And sometimes when I wasn’t even getting paid and was just filling in for my brother. Actually especially when I was filling in for my brother.

  “What do your family think of it?”

  “They saw it coming,” I said. “And were resigned to it. I was putting on one-man versions of The Wizard Of Oz in the living room while I was still in pull-ups. Then they were like ‘Fuck it, we’ve got two. The other one can be a doctor and take care of us in our old age.’”

  She laughed, this time without snuffling. Her eyes were dry. “Mine were furious,” she said. “Still are.”

  “Why? What did they want you to do?”

  “Marketing,” said Nadia, making a sick face. “That’s what my degree is in. And I hated it. Every minute of it. From the very first moment I knew I’d made a mistake, but you know how it is when you’re seventeen and all the adults around you act like the choices you make right now are critical and written in blood and will forever determine whether you reach the giddy heights of a middle class tax bracket or die in a skip, eating cat food.

  “‘Get a sensible degree,’ they said. ‘Something you can use.’ So I did, and every time I heard the words ‘conversion rate’ or ‘demographic’ it was like the sound of someone taking a bite out of my soul. I got a two-two and it’s worse than useless, because I should have been doing something I loved. I should have been doing this, and now I’m at a disadvantage because I’m surrounded by people like you, with Performing Arts degrees, or Poppy, who was booking acting jobs before her second teeth came through.” She sighed and stared off into the middle distance. “And my parents keep saying I’m pissing away a lucrative career. And I probably am, let’s face it.”

  “You missed out one crucial thing,” I said. “In the course of that rant.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The part where you’re a really fucking good actor.”

  She turned pink. “You’re so nice.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m horrible.”

  “I bet you aren’t,” she said, and smiled. It was like the sun coming out after rain. “You know…I could just about go for that drink right now.”

  I narrowly resisted the urge to punch the air. “Not gin?”

  She laughed. “No. Not gin. But anything else that gets you drunk is good.”

  We went to the pub after rehearsals. By a weird coincidence, she’d grown up in Chichester, not far from where I’d been to university, so I told some stories about wandering around stoned on the South Downs, or the time a friend persuaded me that it would be a really interesting experience to do mushrooms and then go to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Arundel, where I’d freaked out after watching ducks diving in clear water. In my shroomed-out state I’d been convinced that they were trapped under glass.

  It was a pleasant evening, and I was walking on sunshine when I got home. It was only when I found Simon alone that I realised that all the way back across London I’d been looking forward to telling Rob about it, because I’d never told him the duck story.

  “Where’s Rob?” I said. “I thought he was coming round tonight.”

  “No, not tonight,” said Simon, too brusquely, and I decided not to ask.

  I had a bizarre dream that night. Bright, blazing Technicolor. I was at an art exhibit full of flat, fierce eyed lions and larger than life blossoms cheerfully nicked from Henri Rousseau. Huge primary coloured boxes were bolted to the walls, sometimes empty, sometimes containing pop psych, block-capital phrases like YOU ARE NOT YOUR BODY and WE MOVE MOUNTAINS BECAUSE WE CAN.

  I remembered that one, because even by the blurred rules of dream logic it seemed exceptionally stupid. And my
dad was there, looking astonishingly thin and tanned. “You look well,” I said, and he patted his flat stomach and said, almost shamefacedly, “Well, I’ve been looking after myself. Been seeing someone, actually. You’d like him. He owns the gallery.”

  Was everyone at it but me? So my newly gay dad introduced me to his new gay boyfriend, and it was Gus Fring from Breaking Bad, looking the part of the gallery owner in an Italian suit that must have cost the best part of five grand. And they looked happy and I was doing my best to be open-minded, but it was still Fring, and with Fring came boxcutters and large plastic drums full of acid. Then someone bought a real lion to the party, for some reason, or maybe one had come to life and leapt out of the painting – I’m not entirely clear, but I remember crouching in a stairwell because someone said you had to make yourself small to avoid a lion, and as the lion bounded over our huddled bodies to freedom I felt its paw – huge, heavy and surprisingly velvety – in the middle of my back. I felt the pressure as it prepared to spring again, felt the end of its claws and thought oh no, and then I was back in my own bed.

  Rob was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame. He was shirtless and looking at his phone. “Simon says he won’t be home tonight,” he said, and gave me a sheepish, hopeful look. “So he asked if you wouldn’t mind…you know. Doing the necessary.”

  He started to unfasten his jeans, and that was when I realised I was still dreaming. My bedroom walls were completely covered in black plastic bin bags. “It keeps the heat out,” said Rob, by now stark naked and fully erect. I remember thinking how golden his pubes were. He slipped into bed beside me, looked up at me and said “Okay?” as if he expected me to start.

  “Yeah, fine,” I said, and fucked him. Really fucked him, with him on his hands and knees, then on his back with his feet in the air and his erection jiggling above the concave curve of his belly. Then he was on top of me, riding my dick and breathlessly moaning “I’m gonna come, I’m gonna come,” the way he sometimes did for twenty minutes at a time when I was trying to sleep in the next room. It was a thoroughly filthy sex dream, full of fleshy pink details and vivid sensations, and some small, half-awake part of my brain was telling me that it was fine to be this into it, because any minute now he was going to turn into Nadia.

  But he didn’t. “I think your dick is bigger than your brother’s,” he said, when we were lying there afterwards, wrecked and shocked and sweaty.

  “Oh Christ, don’t say things like that,” I said. “I’m dreaming. You’re like the voice of my raw id right now.”

  Rob laughed and ran his hand over my chest. He was soft and glowing with satisfaction, and I couldn’t help but feel smug that I’d made him look like that. In your face, Simon. “How’s your superego feeling right now?” Rob said, and I knew the answer to that one. A-Level Psychology. Unit One. History of Psychology. Sigmund Freud – Id, Ego and Superego. The superego was the part that most answered to the name of ‘conscience’, and it wasn’t feeling particularly well.

  I woke up with a guilty erection. I was just debating whether to make the most of it (after all, I probably needed it if I was having sex dreams about my brother’s boyfriend) when I heard Simon say ‘fuck’s sake,’ and that was that. No matter how many times we’d tried and failed to read one another’s minds when we were kids, I still couldn’t rid myself of the superstitious fear that he could somehow see into my head.

  I got up and went to see what the matter was. Simon was making tea, his mouth a straight line and his shoulders set at an angle that reminded me of Mum. Yep, that was a Mum face all right. One of the ones she pulled when everything was so fucked that there was no other logical thing to do besides put the kettle on.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, because I had to.

  He shook his head – a small, almost reflexive shudder, like a horse flicking a fly from its ear. “Rob dumped me,” he said.

  “Oh. Oh God. Shit.” I put my hand on the back of his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” he said, patting my hand in acknowledgment. He wasn’t a hugger. “It was never going to work anyway. Not with all his…art. Wank. Bullshit.”

  He took his tea into the living room. Art wank bullshit. No, that wasn’t going to fly as an explanation. Especially not after all the hard work I’d done to bring them together.

  I made myself a cup and followed him. “All right,” I said. “What happened?”

  Simon shrugged. “Apparently I made fun of him as an artist,” said Simon, sarcastically.

  “Oh fuck,” I said. The picture was already emerging, and it wasn’t pretty. “What did you do? Did you say his novel was shit?”

  “No. I said his novel was non-existent, which it is.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “There’s no but, Nathan. It doesn’t exist. He hasn’t written it yet.”

  “It exists in his head. It’s very real to him.”

  “And in my head, I’m a concert violinist,” said Simon, nodding at the abandoned instrument beside the window. “It doesn’t mean I am. Even if I did take lessons, it doesn’t mean I’m ever going to play the Albert Hall. Until I actually pick the thing up and take some lessons, I’m not a violinist. I’m just a man who owns a violin.”

  “Technically you don’t,” I said. “The violin is still mine. I just let you borrow it.”

  “Whatever.” My brother was a hard empiricist at the best of times, and the creative process? Forget it. You may as well explain Esperanto to a cat. “Until he writes a novel, he is not a novelist, and that’s that. He was always complaining that it was making him crazy, so I told him to pull his thumb out of his arse and write the bloody thing.”

  “You do know it’s not that simple?” I said, which I knew was a stupid question before I’d even finished asking it.

  “It is that simple,” said Simon. “If you’re a writer, you write. Like if you’re a surgeon, you operate. How would it work if I wandered into work saying the muse wasn’t with me today or whatever? That young girl would have no feet.” He stared me down. “Am I wrong?”

  “You’re not wrong, Walter,” I said. “You’re just an asshole.”

  He frowned. “Who’s Walter? Wait – is that from something?”

  “Ugh.” I got up from the couch, in no mood to explain to someone who would never, ever get it.

  8

  Chelsea Harbour looked expensive and was. I nearly got flattened by a Jaguar on a pedestrian crossing: even getting run over was posher in this borough. The crossing signal was still beeping, but I obviously wasn’t moving fast enough for the Hooray Henry behind the wheel. He leaned hard on his horn and I turned to glare through the windscreen, catching sight of a smooth face. Unlined and petulant. A touch of the David Cameron about it – a perfect pink egg of privilege. I held up a middle finger and kept on walking.

  No, this couldn’t be the place. There was a glittering new waterside development, where a two bedroom would probably set you back the best part of two million. Rob couldn’t afford to live here, unless he was secretly wealthy and slumming it. The harbour was full of sleek white boats, some with their names written in Cyrillic characters. I don’t know why, but the idea of Rob being rich turned me off. He was too thoughtful and sweet to spend his life surrounded by people like Eggface back there, let alone be one of them.

  I was about to turn around and head back when I saw him.

  His mop of blond curls was unmistakable. He was kneeling on the top of a blue barge, a vessel that might have looked cute in a different harbour, but here – set against all those shining white miniature yachts – it looked scruffy. It was an affront, a cheery little fuck-you, and it instantly made my heart feel lighter. He was no Eggface. He was just someone who happened to live in Chelsea Harbour.

  He was busy putting plants in bigger pots, and only looked up when I was standing on the pier.

  “So,” I said. “When you said a small piece of real estate…”

  Rob straightened up and peele
d off his gardening gloves. “It’s one way of staying ahead of global warming,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “You know what I’m doing here. Do I have permission to come aboard?”

  “Of course.”

  I stepped onto the boat. He led me down a tiny flight of stairs into a surprisingly spacious living room, all mellow wood and with a houndstooth couch against the wall. Or was it a bulkhead? I wasn’t sure of the nautical terms. The partition was given over entirely to bookshelves, and in the wheelhouse was a tiny little dining table with a laptop on it.

  “Well, this is fucking adorable,” I said.

  “Some might say twee,” he said, trying to conceal his pleasure, whether at the compliment or seeing me again. I couldn’t be sure.

  “No. Twee is when something is trying to hard to be cute. This isn’t trying. This just is.”

  “Want me to give you the tour?” He stood with his bare toes curled in the shaggy fibres of the red rug. There was a smudge of soil on his forehead where he must have pushed his hair back from his face, and he was flushed from the sun. He looked like he’d be warm to the touch, and the thought of him showing me his bedroom did something to me, something that would have been weird at the best of times, but was even more so under these circumstances. This was my brother’s ex, and I was straight.

  “Or maybe you’d just like to get straight to it?” said Rob, with a flash of defensiveness. “Something to drink?”

  “Uh…water, if you have it.”

  He breathed a short, humourless laugh and went into what I assumed was the galley. That was right. The kitchen was called a galley. I knew that much.