People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  All I really wanted was to ask you a question. Just one. That’s why I was there. I had my hand up, at the end, for ages. You saw me. You took a question from the woman in front of me instead, the one whose hair you complimented. You took a question from the woman on my right, who you knew by name, the one whose “question” turned out to be more of an aimless anecdote about herself.

  Then someone said that was all the time there was for questions.

  I did try to talk to you, afterward, but everyone else was trying to talk to you as well. So I just stood around, holding the same glass of lukewarm white wine I had been nursing all evening, and tried to catch your eye—but didn’t.

  There was no reason for you to recognize me, of course. There was no reason why my face ought to have stood out from the crowd. Even if we had talked, even if I had introduced myself, there is no reason for my name—or hers—to have rung any bells at all.

  And seeing you there, seeing you going about your life as normal, seeing you surrounded by all those people, seeing you laughing and smiling and happy, that was when I knew. When I knew that I had been lying to myself. That I had not moved on, had not come to terms with anything. That I had not forgiven you, could never forgive you.

  That was when I knew what I was going to do.

  All I had to work out was how and where and when.

  Chapter Two

  Dan

  People often remark that it must be lovely for me, being a writer, getting to spend so much time at home and see so much of Emmy and the kids. I suppose one thing this illustrates is how little work most people think being a writer involves.

  Six in the morning—that was when I used to get up. By six fifteen I’d be at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee and my laptop, looking over the last paragraph or two from the day before. By seven thirty, I would aim to have done at least five hundred words. By eight thirty, I’d be ready for my second pot of coffee. By lunchtime, ideally, I would be getting near my word-count target for the day, meaning I could devote the afternoon to plotting out the next bit and answering emails and chasing payment for the bits of literary journalism I used to knock out with a glass of wine in the evenings or over the weekends.

  That was then.

  A few minutes after six o’clock this morning, I was creeping downstairs in the dark to try to avoid waking anyone up in the hope that I might get a little work done before the rest of the household woke (and in about 66 percent of cases immediately started yowling or screaming or demanding things). On the very lowest step, I stumbled on some kind of talking unicorn, which skittered across the floorboards and started singing a song about rainbows. In the darkness, ears pricked, I held my breath and waited. I didn’t have to wait very long. For such a small creature, he has quite the pair of lungs on him, my son. “Sorry,” I said to Emmy, as she handed him over. “You might want to check his nappy,” she told me. As I was passing Coco’s room, a little voice asked sleepily through the door what time it was. “Time to go back to sleep,” I said.

  Bear, on the other hand, was up for good. I took him down to the kitchen and changed his nappy and stuck him in a new outfit and deposited the old one in a bag on top of the washing machine, which I noted would need emptying later, and then we sat on the couch in the corner by the fridge. For the next half an hour, he screamed as I jiggled him on my knee and tried to get him to drink from his bottle. Then I burped him and put him in a carrier and walked him up and down the garden for another half an hour while he screamed some more. Then it was seven o’clock and time to hand him back to Emmy and wake Coco up for her breakfast.

  “My God, was that an hour?” Emmy asked me.

  To the minute.

  Christ, it takes a lot of energy, having two kids. I don’t know how people whose children don’t sleep as well as ours manage it. We were extremely lucky, Emmy and I, in that right from early on, three or four months old, Coco was sleeping a solid twelve hours a night. Down, out, sparko. If we took her to a party in a car seat, we could just put her down in a corner or in the room next door, and she would snooze the whole evening away—and from the looks of things, Bear is going to be the same. Not that you’d know any of this from Emmy’s Instagram account, of course, with all its talk of twitching eyelids and dark bags and frayed, knackered nerves. It was obvious from the start that as brands went, “the mum whose baby sleeps like a dream” was a nonstarter. No content there. To be honest, we don’t make a big thing of it with other parents of young children either.

  A little after eight—8:07, to be precise—with Bear down for his first nap, with Coco and Emmy upstairs discussing my daughter’s outfit for the day, with two hours of solid parenting behind me, it’s time to microwave the cold cup of coffee I made myself ninety minutes ago, fire up the laptop, and attempt to will myself into an appropriate state of mind to begin the day’s creative labors.

  By eight forty-five I have reread what I wrote yesterday and tweaked it, and I am ready to begin getting some new words down on the page.

  At nine thirty the front doorbell goes.

  “Should I get that?” I call up the stairs.

  In the past three-quarters of an hour I’ve written a grand total of twenty-six new words and am currently debating whether or not I should delete twenty-four of them.

  I am in no mood for interruptions.

  “I’ll get it, shall I?”

  There is no answer from upstairs.

  The doorbell rings again.

  I let out a pointed sigh for the benefit of the empty room and push my chair back from the table.

  It’s at the back of the house, on the ground floor, our kitchen. When I first bought this place back in 2008, with some money that came to me when my father died, it was for me and a bunch of mates to live in and we hardly used this room at all, except to hang up the washing. It had a threadbare couch in it, a clock that didn’t work, a sticky linoleum floor, and a washing machine that leaked every time you used it. The back window looked out onto a little concrete area with a corrugated plastic roof. One of the very first things Emmy suggested when she moved in was that we get rid of all that and extend into the garden and turn this into a proper living-cooking-dining area. Which is exactly what we did.

  The house itself is at the end of a terrace of identical Georgian houses about half a mile from the Tube, opposite a very gentrified pub. When I was first looking to buy in this area, it was pitched to me as up-and-coming. Now it has very much up-and-come. There used to be fights outside the pub opposite on a fairly regular basis come chucking-out time on a Friday night, proper rolling-on-a-car-hood, torn-shirt, smashed-pint-glass dustups. Now you can’t get a table for brunch at the weekend unless you’ve booked one, and the menu features cod cheeks, lentils, and chorizo.

  One of the reasons I try to get as much writing as I can done in the morning is that after about midday the doorbell never stops. Every time Emmy asks a question on Instagram like, “Coco has decided she doesn’t like her multivitamin—which new one should we try?” or “Does anyone know a serum that can get rid of these eye bags?” or even “Our blender has broken—which one do you mamas recommend?” she immediately gets a flood of messages from PRs asking if they can courier something round. Which is precisely why she does it, of course—it’s quicker and cheaper than an Amazon order. All this week Emmy has been moaning about her hair, and all this week companies have been sending us free hair straighteners, free styling products, free shampoos and conditioners in ribbon-tied bags stuffed with tissue paper.

  I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I’m pretty sure that when Tolstoy was writing War and Peace he didn’t have to get up and sign for another box of free stuff every five minutes.

  To get to the front door, you go past the end of the stairs up to the first floor (three bedrooms, one bathroom) and past the living room, where the sofa and TV and toys are. Squeezing past a pram, a balance bike, a micro scooter, and the overloaded coat rack, I step for the second time on the same dropped unicorn and
swear. You would hardly believe the cleaner came yesterday. There are Lego bricks everywhere. Shoes everywhere. I have turned my back for five minutes, and the place is a total fucking mess. The novelist and man of letters Cyril Connolly once rather sneeringly wrote that the pram in the hallway is the enemy of art. In our house the pram in the hallway is also the enemy of being able to get down the bloody hallway. I inch my way around it, check my hair in the mirror, and open the door.

  Standing on the doorstep are two people, a man and a woman. The woman is youngish, in her late twenties perhaps, not unattractive, vaguely familiar-looking, with ash-blond hair tied back in a messy ponytail. She is wearing a denim jacket and from the looks of things had been just about to try the doorbell for a fourth time. The man is slightly older, thirtysomething, balding, bearded. At their feet there is a large bag. The man has another bag over his shoulder and a camera around his neck.

  “You must be Papabare,” says the woman with the ponytail. “I’m Jess Watts.”

  The name is vaguely familiar too, but only as we are shaking hands does it come to me from where.

  Jesus Christ.

  The Sunday Times.

  It’s only the journalist and photographer from the Sunday bloody Times, here to interview and photograph Emmy and me.

  Jess Watts asks me if I would mind giving them a hand with the bags. Of course not, I say. Then I pick up the large bag with a slight grunt and gesture them into the house.

  “Do come in, do come in.”

  Apologizing about us all having to squeeze around the pram and everything else, I lead them through to the living room. The mess is even worse in here. Someone appears to have shredded the leftover weekend papers and thrown them about the place. The TV remotes are on the floor. There are crayons everywhere. As I turn to tell the cameraman where to dump his bag, I catch Jess making a note of something with a pen in a little notebook.

  I am about to say something about how I thought they were coming on Wednesday—that’s certainly what the note on our fridge calendar says, the day I remember Emmy and myself discussing—when I realize this is Wednesday. It is unbelievable how easy it is as the parent of a new baby to lose track of the days. I can remember Sunday. I can remember Monday. What on earth happened on Tuesday? My mind is a blank. I suspect when I opened the door my face was a bit of a blank too.

  “Can I get you a cup of tea?” I offer. “A coffee?”

  They order one white coffee with two sugars, one herbal tea with a little honey if we have it.

  “Emmy!” I call up the stairs.

  I really think my wife might have reminded me that today was the day the Sunday Times were coming. Just mentioned it, you know. Perhaps when I came to bed last night or handed over the baby this morning. I have not shaved for a day or two. My hair is unwashed. One of my socks is inside out. I would have had time to scatter some interesting books around, as opposed to a sun-wrinkled two-day-old copy of the Evening Standard. It’s hard to look like a serious person when you are standing there in an old denim shirt with two buttons missing and a smear of porridge on the lapel.

  The Sunday Times. A five-page spread. At home with the Instaparents. I make a mental note to email my agent about the article and let her know when it is coming out. No publicity, as they say. It would be good to email her anyway, to be honest, just to remind her I’m still alive.

  The man with the camera and the interviewer are now discussing whether to do the shoot or the interview first. He starts wandering around the room taking light readings, looking thoughtful. “This end of the house is where people usually take photos,” I say helpfully, pointing through to the conservatory. “On this armchair, with the garden behind.” Not that I’m usually in the photo shoots, of course. Sometimes, occasionally, I am just out of shot, pulling faces at Coco or observing. More often, when the house gets invaded like this, I retreat to the studio at the end of the garden with my laptop. I say studio. It’s more of a shed. But it does have a light bulb and a heater.

  The woman has taken down from one of the bookshelves a photograph from our wedding day—Emmy and me and her childhood friend and maid of honor, Polly, the three of us arm in arm and smiling. Poor old Polly; she obviously hated that dress. Emmy took our wedding day as an opportunity to give her best friend—a pretty enough girl, even if she does dress a bit like my mum—the makeover she had always politely but firmly refused. It was a public service for her single friend, Emmy said, before looking over the guest list and asking if I had invited anyone without a girlfriend, wife, or partner. Personally, I thought Polly’s dress looked great, but every time the camera was pointed in the other direction or Emmy wasn’t looking, I would catch her covering up her bare arms and shoulders with a bobbly cardigan or taking off a high-heeled shoe to rub the ball of one of her feet. To her credit, no matter how uncomfortable she felt, Polly kept a smile on her face the whole day long. Even if the eligible friend we sat next to her at dinner did spend the whole meal chatting up the girl on the other side of him.

  “So I understand you write novels, Dan,” the woman from the Sunday Times says, with a faint smile, putting the picture back. She says it in the manner of someone who’s not even going to pretend that my name is familiar or that they might once have read something I’d written.

  I sort of laugh and say something like, “I guess so,” and then I point out the hardback and paperback copies of my book on the shelf and the spine of the Hungarian edition next to that. She angles the hardback copy out a bit, examines the cover, and lets the book fall back into place on the shelf with a slight clunk.

  “Hmm,” she says. “When did it come out?”

  I tell her seven years ago, and as I’m saying it realize it was actually eight. Eight years. It’s hard to believe that. It certainly came as a shock to me when Emmy gently suggested that it was time for me to stop using the author’s photo from the back cover as my profile picture on Facebook. “It’s a nice photograph,” she told me reassuringly. “It just doesn’t really look like you.” Anymore being the unspoken word hanging in the air.

  The photographer asks me what the book was about—that question authors always hate, with was providing the final twist of the scalpel. At one time I probably would have told him that if I could boil down what it’s about to a single sentence or two I would not have needed to write the thing. In another mood I might have joked that it was about two hundred and fifty pages, or £7.99. I am no longer quite that much of a twat, I hope. I tell him it is about a guy who marries a lobster. He laughs. I find myself warming to him.

  It was pretty well received at the time, my novel. Generous cover blurb from Louis de Bernières. Book of the week in the Guardian. Reviewed with only mild condescension in the London Review of Books and with approval in the Times Literary Supplement. Film rights optioned. On the back flap, in my leather jacket, leaning against a brick wall in black and white, I smoke with the air of a man with a bright future in front of him.

  It was a fortnight after the book came out that I met Emmy.

  Seeing her for the first time across the room will always remain one of the defining moments of my life.

  It was a Thursday night, the opening of a mutual friend’s bar on Kingsland Road, the height of the summer, an evening so hot that most people were standing outside on the pavement. There’d been free drinks at one point, but by the time I arrived there were just a load of buckets of melted ice with empty wine bottles in them. The crush at the bar was three deep. It had been a long day. I had things to do in the morning. I was just looking around for the mate whose bar it was to say hello and goodbye and apologize for not staying longer when I spotted her. She was standing at one of the tables by the window. She was wearing a low-cut jumpsuit. Back then, before it went an Instagram-friendly shade of cerise, Emmy’s hair—a little longer than it is now—was more or less its natural shade of blond. She was eating a chicken wing with her fingers. She was literally the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Emmy looked up. Our eyes met.
She smiled at me, faintly quizzically, slightly frowning. I smiled back. I could not see a drink on the table. I made my way over and asked if she wanted one. The rest is history. That night she came back to my place. Three weeks later I asked her to move in with me. I asked her to marry me within the year.

  It was only much later that I realized how little Emmy can see without her glasses when she doesn’t have her contact lenses in. Not for ages did she confess that they had been bothering her earlier—something to do with the high pollen count, perhaps—and she had taken them out, and her smile across the room that night had been at a vague pink shape she could just about sense was staring in her direction and assumed was a fashion PR. It was only later I found out she already had a boyfriend, called Giles, who was on a work secondment to Zurich, and was as surprised to learn they were no longer in an exclusive relationship as I was to learn of his existence. There was an awkward moment a fortnight into things when he called and I answered and told him to stop pestering Emmy, and he told me they’d been going out for three years.

  She has always had a fairly complicated relationship with the truth, my wife.

  I guess that business with Giles might have bothered some people. I guess some couples, starting out, might have felt it cast a bit of a pall over things. I genuinely can’t remember it troubling either of us very much at all. As I recall, by that weekend we were already telling it as a funny story, and very quickly after that it became the centerpiece of our repertoire of dinner party anecdotes, both of us with our agreed part to play in the telling of it, our allotted lines.

  “The fact of the matter is,” Emmy would always say, “I knew from the moment I met Dan he was the man I was going to marry, so the fact I was seeing someone else seemed irrelevant. I had already broken up with Giles in my head; he was history. I just hadn’t got around to telling him that yet.” She would shrug sheepishly as she said this, offer a rueful smile, glance across at me.