Two Halves | Nic Stevenson
Two Halves
Nic Stevenson
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Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Nic Stevenson
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Chapter 1
Looking back now, it feels like for every beat of my heart that summer, there was the kick of a ball. It was all new to me that year: the crisp colour of the grass; red crosses on white; and the religious, exultant emotion of it all. It was the World Cup in Germany that year, the first time I had cared enough to watch more than the final, and the first time I realised that love might mean more than being with one person for the rest of my life.
That year, as with so many others, England played the Grecian hero, predicting and inevitably playing into their own destiny and going out on penalties, but for most people the competition will be memorable for one thing; Zidane’s extra time head butt to the heart of Marco Materazzi in the final – ending the international career of the best player in the world . Italy were never supposed to win that match and lift the Jules Rimmet, and Zidane was never supposed to end his career that way, but football managed to be more like life than anyone expected and the unexpected triumphed.
I watched the first game of the competition on a Friday night after work; down in the pub with the guys to take part in the quadrennial football focus. Later that night, I saw Suzi again. A month later when the final ticked out its inevitable 120 minutes, everything had changed.
Suzi was six years younger than me, but seemed to have lived 10 years longer; she had done everything and been everywhere. We met at a party Gemma had dragged me to, a 2 hour drive south of the river to hang out with a bunch of advertising execs – like a work day but at the weekend. In fact I’m fairly sure I missed one of the England friendlies because of the drive. When we got there, she captured me almost instantly, this hazel-eyed, elfin girl, 22 and fresh back from Kuala Lumpur.
We talked for hours that night, I don’t know what Gemma’s friends thought, but I reckoned Gemma would just be pleased to see me engaging with someone at one of her parties. It was in a big Edwardian terrace in Crystal Palace, owned by one of her trust fund uni friends, with decking and tea light candles across the back garden and a swing seat we shared.
I was settling into my normal role, finding a quiet place to capture my thoughts and make occasional forays into conversation with strangers, when I saw her, alone and chewing a straw, sat in the garden. I spent the next 30 minutes working out how to approach her, how to say hello, how to impress her, before she walked up and invited me to join to her on the swing, like we were five year olds in the local park.
Gemma was doing her usual thing of flitting between every group and drinking enough. I had, of course, driven, so after one Magners switched to Coke, expecting the others’ descent to a drunker level as I stayed sober and upstanding. Suzi changed that, she sipped a glass of wine, but never got drunk in the three hours we were together. We perched side-by-side on the swing and talked about Asia at first; I had travelled in India three summers previously, just before I met Gemma when I started at WMB, and visited Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia after Uni. She had travelled all over, visiting places I hadn’t heard of - even some countries that had passed the encyclopaedia of Scott by.
“And now I’m back here, living in New Cross, working at my sister’s firm and bored to death. All day long surrounded by people who are striving towards something I can’t even understand.” This, about 45 minutes into our relationship came like a plea. “I basically don’t understand how people grow up from who they are until they’re 21 to the people they are for the rest of their lives. It seems like leaping off some giant chasm, never really knowing whether your feet will land down in snow, on sand, against rock or into a deep, freezing river.”
I pause for the first time.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t rant like that, not when we’ve just met.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine.” All I wanted to do at this point was to not say ‘everyone feels that’, and avoid saying, ‘when I was your age...’.
“It’s just, looking back, everything kinda glows, and I look forward and all there is is this drab, plodding future, nothing like I expected but totally unavoidable.”
Welcome to the world I thought, but she looked so uniquely disturbed by this everyday realisation that it touched me and reminded me of the year after I finished uni. I worked as a copy boy in this giant, impersonal ad agency, churning out text for adverts that no-one ever saw. The highlight of 18 months work was being asked to proof read that ad that goes ‘Erer, if you can corect this advert you could geta job as a proof reader.’ I’ve still not worked out how they wanted me to proof that.
“You know, I think a lot of people feel like you do. I know I have done, sometimes still do.” There it was – that inevitable patronising empathy. “ But most people don’t act on it. Most people live it out, always think of themselves as unique and able to have this completely awe-inspiring life, but never actually do anything about it. I always thought that the people who become famous or infamous, Dylans, Warhols, Kerouacs , they’re the ones who don’t ever give up the ideal of achievement.”
Her mother was French, her father Malay – she had ended up growing up in London when he had been posted as a diplomat here for 10 years. They had left when she was 14, she decided that she wanted to stay, so she had, living on floors and in spare rooms for 3 years until she finished her exams and went off to university, a year earlier than the rest of us. After that she had had the life I wished I’d had, drifting through uni and making her money by singing and playing piano in jazz bars around Oxford.
Next to that, my potted biography sounded just that. School, university, travel, job in advertising, long-term girlfriend and carefully nurturing the beginnings of a lifetime of debt. And the new idea of a new career that would make it all ok and make my life interesting again every two to three months until Gemma (usually sensibly) talked me out of it. Last year it had been landscape gardener; then the police; very briefly the army; and recently teaching and journalism. It’s not much of a story, let’s call it modern-everyman ennui, but she listened and chatted and as we told each other the stories of ourselves I knew I wanted to see her again, alone. I could still flatter myself that it was an intellectual thing, not a sexual one, that it was the things we had in common - mainstream jazz and underground rock, indie cinema and trendy literature - that were attractive, not the pixie nose and ever-so nearly but not quite see-through lacy Victorian blouse with no bra beneath it.
As evening turned into night we ate nibbles and chatted more, the tea lights illuminating her face and allowing glimpses of the splash of freckles across her nose. She was there alone. Her sister and her worked at the same firm, the plan had been that she would accompany big sis to get more contacts while sis did her thing with the others, but she had had to cancel at the last minute, leaving Suzi knowing nearly as few people as I did and looking for some to latch on to. The first time being the guy at the party in the corner on his own had paid out for me.
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The feeling of the wall behind my back was uncomfortable, the tightness of my jeans around my thighs was getting painful, the effort of trying to stay on my feet while balancing her weight in my arms was distracting. It should have been the thought that I was in an upstairs bedroom, with a girl I met two hours earlier wrapping her legs around my waist and trying to reach between her legs to manoeuvre me out of my boxers while my long-term girlfriend was downstairs chatting to various trustafarians and hedgies that distracted me. But strangely it only started to worry me when I heard from the open window Gemma’s voice shouting out to the bottom of the garden to see where I was.
“Shit.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you hear that?”
“Um, the sound of desire slipping rapidly away from me? Nope, didn’t notice it so it must still be here.”
“Right, ok, so that was my girlfriend, the girl I came here tonight with, the girl I live with. Anyway, that was her. Looking for me.”
“Well she was outside right? Let’s worry if she actually starts looking in the right spatial dimensions eh?”
“What, like upstairs?”
“Ah ha.”
So we did. Or rather we didn’t. Worry that is.
And that cost us a good three minutes. Meaning that when we heard Gemma’s voice on the stairs coming up, three rooms down the hall (bathroom, we’d tried; second bedroom, already a couple in there; then a locked door) we only had about 30 seconds to get dressed and get out.
“Scott.” The call again, a little hint of impatience, maybe some worry in there too.
“Fuck. Bollocks.”
“I thought that was what we were trying, well roughly.”
Why was she so fucking calm? Did she do this a lot?
“Shit. Get dressed, she’ll be here in a second. You go out that door.”
“Scott!” A exclamation mark in her voice now, I could hear a door handle turning – the bathroom. Two rooms to go before us. Great time to develop acute hearing Scott, if only it could have come with added spidey senses.
“Well I would, but that door’s an ensuite.”
“Shit.” I was pulling up my jeans, trying to do my shirt up one handed while I scrambled around for the belt she had whipped off me.
“Scott...” This one trailing off, worry at the end of the syllable. She’d found the other couple, thank god they had been there to push us further down the corridor. “Oh, er, sorry. Look you haven’t seen a bloke wondering around have you?” The answer was too muffled for me to hear but Gemma obviously didn’t like it. “No you fuck off, who the fuck do you think you are? And what are you, bloody fourteen, shagging in someone else’s bed. Wanker.” Slammed door.
Ah great, now she was pissed off as well. I’d got the jeans sorted, the belt through most of its loops, only the shirt remained. Suzi, wearing so little that dressing was easy, looked like she had started to take the problem more seriously when she heard Gemma having a go. She was scouting round the room for hiding places, realising that in about ten seconds, Gemma was going to plough through the door and we would need to do some serious explaining.
The problem was, minimal design being what it is, there was bloody nowhere for her to go.
I could hear Gemma trying the locked door now. Feet away from us. I felt sweat patches appear under the arms of the still unbuttoned shirt, and as I did the last two buttons up with one hand, pushed Suzi into the bathroom with the other, turned and pulled the door to as Gemma pushed open the other one across the bed.
Our eyes met and she looked somewhere between bemused and ballistic.
“Oh hello.”
“Oh, hello? I suppose you didn’t hear me shouting? Then shouting at the twats next door?”
“Um.”
I was going to need to raise my game.
“Um. No.”
Good job. That would be fine.
“Um. No. I was, I was in the loo to be honest, had the fan on. The, uh, the curry. I think something about it didn’t agree with me.”
“Right.”
“Right. So, I’m, uh, about ready to go. I think. You?”
She was still looking odd. There was a mirror over the bed to my right and her left, I would have had to lean forward and round to see my reflection in it from where I stood, so I was edging around the bed until I could glance in that and at her at the same time. First glance was ok. Shirt on the right way round. Jeans on. Hair. Ah, hair all over the place. I didn’t even remember her touching my hair, but it looked like a wolverine had been burrowing in my barnet. Not a good look and certainly not the one I had had when she had last seen me. As I walked around the bed towards her, self-conscious of my self-consciousness and the sweat on my lip, she moved towards me.
“Yeah, I’m good to go, That’s why I spent the last ten minutes looking for you Scott. But first I need the loo.” She indicated the door behind me with a nod of her chin.
Bollocks. Big fat sweaty scabby bollocks. Who the fuck told her that the door was an ensuite, not a wardrobe, or a dumb waiter, or the ninth portal to the blazing inferno of Hades. Oh right, me.
“You sure? We should probably get going no? Got to be at your parents tomorrow morning. Well, this morning.”
“Yes, I’m sure. I need to pee. It’ll take two minutes.”
“Ok. Right. Listen, like I said, that curry really did not agree with me. To be honest I’d give it a minute in there. Well, actually, I’d give it about an hour in there. And if you’ve got one of those biohazard suits and can pee through it, I’d wear that when you go in.”
I wasn’t convincing anyone.
“Listen, I’ve lived with you deciding to go to the loo just as I want to do my makeup in the morning for long enough to be able to cope I’d say.”
She paused, looked like she might be rethinking her decision, giving me a few long, agonising moments of hope, then she swung the door wide open, took a step into the bathroom and started to close the door behind her.
And sprang backwards out of the room, slamming the door shut and spluttering:
“Jesus fucking god, Scott, that’s disgusting, did you even flush it?”
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The car home, the downstairs loo successfully, I presume, used.
“Who was the girl? I’m used to you going to sit in the corner for all night, but at least tonight you took a little friend.”
“Suzi, she’s in marketing or PR or something.” So candidly concealing. She was an account assistant at fashion PR firm called She Relations. “She was there with her fella, a fellow dragee.” No she wasn’t, she was singularly fellowless. Or at least that’s what she’d told me.
“So you bonded in opposition did you?”
“Something like that.”
I sank back quiet, absorbed by the rain on the windshield and the passing lights, Morrissey softly on the stereo and Gemma slipping from sleep and back. The only thing I could think about, the whole drive home, was ‘what on earth had that pretty little girl done in the bathroom to drive Gemma out so quickly?’
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We pulled up and as I stretched out of the car Gemma shook herself awake. I opened the door and stepped in, waiting for her to follow me. She did, but before I could close the door, she had wrapped herself around me and was whispering about being together and her love for me. I slipped the door shut and held her close, making the promises and praises she expected, but as we made love, Suzi’s face flickered in and out of my mind like a TV picture in a gale.
After, I went downstairs for some water. Mira, the little black cat which was about the only thing I brought to our relationship, was perched on the kitchen table, mewling for attention as I stepped into the darkened room. Even hours later, I could still see the slight upturn of her nose, and hear the delicate accent of her voice. As I petted and spoke to Mari, I was lost in my thoughts of her, and I knew that although it broke every rule, and could lead to worse than that, I would have to see her again. Slipping my hand into my jeans pocket I could feel the sharp corners of her card against my thumb.
With only the light of the street lamp across the road casting orange shadows across the hall I scouted out where my mobile had come to rest as Gemma and I had fallen up the stairs to bed. Pulling out the card, I turned it over to read the message printed across the back in neatly spaced curling writing, Call me. This was more fun than I expected 07790 589895. Pressed into my hand as Gemma was in the toilet, not a word. What did it mean that ‘expected’? Was she talking about the party, our conversation, or maybe my clumsy and out of practice attempts at flirting and even clumsier and even more out-of-practice attempts at sex in someone else’s house?
In a sense it mattered little as I thumbed at the mobile, tapping into the key pad I had a fun time tonight. I want to see you again. You say when and where. Push send and gone, the start of one thing and the end of another.
Chapter 2
Driving again. This time we were going westward around the North Circular in lazy Sunday traffic, past Ikeas and Polish food stores, towards Gemma’s parents in Harrow. It was a Sunday routine, dinner at the parents in the afternoon, pub with her school friends in the evening. Ever since we had met I had got on really well with her parents and her brother Stewart and sister Anna; and her friends were pretty much my friends now too, so Sunday’s routine was something I usually looked forward to.
That morning though, I had been distracted, barely murmuring in response to Gemma’s questions about the night before and raising no interest in the papers or the TV. I had still received no response from my text the previous evening, and was bouncing back and forward between trying to decide when to give it another go or whether to just accept that if she was interested in me she would respond, and if not, it was definitely for the best.
During the drive I had been grateful for the bleating from Radio 1 to distract attention from my distracted attention, but now we were pulling up to the house and I would have to pull it together. Gemma’s parents lived in a huge town house in Harrow on the Hill; a 5 bedroom, 4 bathroom, 3 storey monster with a 30 metre back garden, bought back when London property was worth less than platinum. John, her dad, was a self-made man in the proper sense of the term, not a Richard Branson boaster, but a guy who had come out of school with no qualifications, got himself a trade (plumbing) and worked his way up until he had his own business employing 15 people and pulling in a hefty profit. Next to my hand waving, ‘new economy’ advertising job it was a proper career, masculine, traditional and timeless. We’ll always need a plumber; a senior copywriting exec – that I’m less sure about.
John had been one of the main factors in getting me more and more into football, he was a lifetime Spurs fan, grew up in Northumberland Park about 5 minutes walk from Whitehart Lane and liked to boast that he was in a pram when he went to his first game there. Between him and the constant Arsenal, Chelsea rivalry at the office, a sport I had shown little interest in, and less ability at, since the age of five was dragging me into its nationwide grip. John and I had been to a few Spurs games, me feeling like an impostor, him knowing everyone and making sure I was made welcome – like a personal recruiting sergeant to both the beautiful game and Spurs. It didn’t half grate on him that I lived closer to the Lane than he did, and he lived closer to Stanford Bridge than Spurs.
At least Spurs gave me something to argue with the new money / new success Chelsea fans at work but it still felt wrong for me to be a football fan at all. None of my old friends could quite believe it I don’t think – they’d met me at school or at Uni when my interests were indie music, indie movies and indie lit, just like everyone else. Mind you, I don’t think they could believe that after 3 years with Gemma we had bought a house and were well on our way to the suburban dream of two kids and an Audi – it wasn’t just that it was out of character for me, I think they probably thought she was out of character for me.
Gemma was her father’s daughter. She was one of those girls who was part of the popular set at school, but only on the fringes, the popular girls would gossip and giggle with her but she went back to different group of friends, girls who the popular lot wouldn’t dream of gossiping or giggling with. Nowadays she was a grown up party girl, who liked going out with her mates, drinking and dancing. When she wasn’t out with friends from work she was out with friends from Uni, if she wasn’t out with them, she was out with friends from home.
Every other girl I had dated since school ten years earlier was the quieter type, into her music, usually a mousy looking skinny girl. Gemma was different, never backwards to come forwards, not loud but not a wallflower either. She was blonde, and had a hell of a pair of tits too. She was experienced and fun to be with. The first six months we were together we seemed to spend all our time going out to pubs, clubs, bars, restaurants; running round London and seeing bits I had never known about, her knowing it all with the knowledge of a local; and using every spare minute to have sex: in the office, at hers, at mine, even once on the Tube home.
The best thing about it was when I got together with Gemma I inherited a family network that was closer and stronger than anything I had known. Seeing how her family interacted and how well they all got along hurt because I saw what I had been missing, but the realisation that it was all still open to me if I wanted it was amazing. Within a few months of us being together I felt like a real part of the family, looking after her sister Anna’s baby, going for drinks after work with Stewart, off to the footie with John – things my family had never provided me.
I hopped out of the car and rang the doorbell as Gemma collected the apple sponge she had made the day before from the back seat. Gemma’s mum Helen opened the door and grabbed me in a breath taking hug.
“Hi Hel, how’s things?”
“They’re good good, but you two are late as usual – what have you been doing with my daughter eh? Keeping us all from lunch.”
Gemma piped up from the drive “Hey hey it’s not his fault it’s mine. We were on time but I wanted some groceries on the way.”
“Ah but I bet they’re things to feed him with aren’t they!?”
“Yep, all for me of course, you know your daughter never eats chocolate and never ever drinks red wine.”
It was true though, everyone else was already there when we trooped into the front room, John sat with Harry, Anna’s kid, on his knee; Anna and her husband Joe; Stewart perched on the end of the couch, next to where Helen had been sat until we arrived. All three generations in one room – that alone was more than my family had managed for years, for one reason or another.
Inevitably there was football buzzing on the TV in the corner, it was a big flat screen set and the grass seemed to stretch half way across the wall. It was France playing someone in a friendly before the World Cup. England had beaten Hungary the night before so talk soon turned to the summer’s World Cup and what hope England had. Not much at all according to each of the other three men in the room, and for matter according to two of the women too – both of who knew much more about it all than me. I usually tried to keep quiet at these points for fear of it being obvious that I didn’t really have a clue – one of the first times we met, I had asked John if Joe and Ashley Cole were brothers. Three years later and I can still hear his laughter.
That time though I was chipping in and supporting Anna’s lonely view that this could be our year, that Gerrard, Lampard, Beckham and Rooney could steer the team all the way. But what did I know anyway?
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For a girl with a huge circle of the myspace types of friend (400 and counting), Gemma’s core group of friends was pretty small. To be fair, not as small as mine, but there were a group of 7 of us who were the main players, with assorted girl and boy friends occasionally making an appearance. I liked to think I had moved beyond making appearances into the core group, but really, I suppose the test of that would be if we split up would I still get an invite? I suspected the answer was no, but I knew for sure I wouldn’t go along even if I did.
The group of seven used to meet every Sunday for the pub quiz at the Village Inn in Pinner. The previous week I had slightly fallen out with one of the others, a guy called Stephen who was taking it all a little too seriously. We’d argued over the answer to a question, as you do, and I had won in the end. Typically, he had been right, so we had lost out on the points. As far as I remember it didn’t quite end up in shouting, but there was definitely a bit of raised voices and agro when the answers were read out.
It’s not like we ever won or anything, so it didn’t matter that much to most of us, but apparently it did to him, and he seemed to have held a grudge: he hadn’t said a word to me when we saw them all in the week for lunch. So after we left her parents, firmly stuffed with all sorts of barbequed meat, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the pub that evening.
By the way, I think the question was: Who played Ingrid Bergman’s husband in Casablanca? I was pretty certain that it was Claude Rains. It turned out Stephen knew best and was right to think Rains was another character and it was Paul Henreid. I think the others only believed me because none of them had heard of either of them. Funny what you remember years later. I never really liked Casablanca – what sort of love triangle has both lovers trying to get the other one to take the girl?
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It was a quiet night at the pub that night, the quiz was usually well attended, but for some reason there were only 4 or 5 teams that night, almost guaranteeing us a top five finish. We were a bit like England though, always able to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. As I said, there were seven of us. Gemma and me, Stephen, one Katie and one Katy, and Doug and Clare, the group’s other couple. Stephen had been fine ever since we showed up. He had made a point of approaching me early on while I went for a round, apologising and explaining that last weekend he had split up with his boyfriend, who had been incredibly cruel in the rows they had had all day on Saturday.
I wasn’t sure if that was the best time to admit that after two years of knowing him, I didn’t even know he was gay, but I thought best to keep my ignorance to myself and question to Gemma later. I did my best to console him, and made a bad joke about Humphrey Bogart and Rock Hudson, but it cleared the air between us. Unfortunately, the air didn’t stay that clear.
Doug and Clare had been together for years, since the first class of the first year of senior school they joked. According to Gemma about four years ago, ironically just after their relationship had survived him being at uni in Leeds while she stayed in London, Doug had had a short affair with a girl from work. Apart from that long resolved issue there had never really been any incidents in their relationship. They had just bought a house together, following Gemma and I from renting flats to buying proper houses for grown-ups, but Gemma had mentioned that Clare was talking to her about some tension over the last few months.
Typically, that tension decided to spill over into a full blown row in a quiet country pub in front of all of us, the other quiz teams and the bemused bar staff. It started out minor and escalated, it was like watching a guy throw down a cigarette in a forest and burn a whole city down. It just spread and spread.
As the two of them argued without even looking towards the rest of us, my phone chirped in my pocket and I felt its vibration. Even as it tweeted I felt my mouth go dry. I pulled it out of my pocket, my hand nearly shaking with nervous excitement. I told myself to calm down, it would be someone else, it could be anyone else. But it wasn’t anyone else. It was Suzi.
After about ten minutes of embarrassed silence from us and louder and louder arguing from them, Clare bolted for the door, closely followed first by Doug, then by Katy, leaving just Gemma, Katie, Stephen and I to give up on the quiz and head for home and another week at work.
Chapter 3
The second time I met Suzi, we slept together. It was too easy not to.
It was the Wednesday after, Gemma was away for two days with work, in Aberdeen or somewhere, managing an event for an oil company. Suzi’s text on Sunday had suggested we meet for dinner or drinks on Wednesday without any involvement from me. Any other day, it would have been much harder for what happened to have happened. But on Wednesday, it was easy.
We met after work. She lived in New Cross, so we met in a wine bar in Peckham. She drank a couple of glasses of red; I had a scotch and then a wine. I chose the scotch because I thought I would need it to kill my nerves. As it turned out, I didn’t feel nervous at all, after all the build-up over the last few days (and six rejected t-shirts that morning) once we actually sat down together, it was fine. It felt as natural as breathing to be sat with this pretty, delicate girl drinking in a bar. All this in spite of the fact that at least two of Gemma and my mutual acquaintances through work lived in the area, and as she had got there first and sat against the window, would only need to have walked by and glanced in to catch me, us, out.
As we drank she filled in the blanks from her story for me, telling me about living on friends’ floors while she was a teenager, always feeling slightly out of place, and not being able to bring home her own friends. She had once spent six months sleeping in a shed at the bottom of her best friend’s garden, without the girl’s parents having a clue she was there, stealing in to use the bathroom after they had left for work and always being late for school. Given she had had the opportunity to be posted in some attractive embassy somewhere with her family, I wasn’t quite sympathetic for her, but it did show a hell of a lot of determination for a 13 year old.
We talked university too. She had studied English at Portsmouth but hadn’t had the greatest time. After living independently for so long she had hated her first year in Halls, with proscribed meal times and bad food. She hadn’t got along with the people she shared a block with either, in the end opting to leave after two terms and spend the final term in a room rented while still paying her Hall fees. That’s how she ended up having to play piano as well as doing a waiting job to make enough money to support herself. During her final two years she had kept the jobs on, and consequently hadn’t done so well in her exams at the end of it all, leaving her first of all considering going back to become a teacher; then deciding to go away and travel for a year, before coming back to London and ending up at her sister’s mercy in the jobs market.
I filled my side of the tale in too. 3 years in Cardiff studying journalism, editing the student paper for a year, taking part in the Union activities, living with a group of people I now never saw – the usual things. Next to her experiences I was left feeling a little bereft. Against most people the things I had done and the places I had been were at the top level of normal: uni, travelling, good job, house in Highgate. But somehow, something about her made me feel as though I shouldn’t be in the same pub as her, let alone sharing a table and leaning close to her lips to hear her voice over the background noise. She had such fragile self possession and a confidence that seemed tinged with the sadness of experience, that I felt like a teenage boy trying to date a 30 year old.
As the clock turned around and the hands met each other at 20 to 8, she reached across the table and placed her hand over the back of mine, sending shocks up to my elbow. It was all I could do not to flinch as she touched me.
“Why don’t you come and see my flat, I’ll cook something for you, that way you can stop looking around like a guilty school boy every time someone shouts or the door opens.”
“Sorry, I didn’t realise I was doing, it’s just...”
“I know what it’s just. Don’t worry; I’ll forgive you for not giving me 100% of your attention if you promise it to me when I get you somewhere more private.”
“Um, ok.” The teenage boy was back, it felt wrong that this beautiful, exotic girl was interested in me. I followed her, feeling strangely down she strode through the bar and out into the early evening, early summer sunshine. I couldn’t get my head round to the fact that she was interested in me, in spite of all the things we had in common.
Also, only now that what had been a drink with a friend in a bar - ever so easily explained and nothing to feel guilty about no matter what the truth of the matter was - was becoming something more than that, images kept flashing through my mind. Images of Gemma and me in bed on a Sunday morning reading the papers with Mira laying between us; playing Frisbee with Anna and Joe earlier in the year on Hampstead Heath; the night Gemma and all her friends threw me a hugely unsurprising surprise 26th birthday party – wonderful because I had been depressed about hitting my late ‘twenties; unsurprising because John had managed to give the game away while we were drinking after Spurs played Liverpool.
None of those images stopped me following along though. I’m not sure anything would have done that, I might have been conflicted, but the conflict wasn’t of the Israel/Palestine variety, it was more like a border skirmish between two African states: serious enough for those involved, but it wasn’t going to affect the wider world; in fact, they might not notice at all.
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She gave me a wine and told me to find some music while she cooked. She said it wouldn’t take long, she would just throw together a stir fry and some noodles, so I settled down with my drink, feeling pleasant and listening to a Chet Baker CD I’d found in the middle of her collection. Her music collection was as well-travelled as she was – lots of cds, mostly jazz and blues, a clear taste for Miles Davies and John Coltrane, but mixed in with nineties indie and eighties post punk. I‘d loaded the five CD changer with a variety of discs and set it to shuffle: alongside Chet I’d put in the one Dizzy Gillespie collection I had; a Radiohead cd; one of Nina Simone’s live albums and the Virgin Suicides soundtrack that Air did.
Her flat was a sub-ground floor thing, a tiny bedroom but a huge lounge area, with the kitchen just off the hall opposite the bathroom. Because it was below the ground and only had windows out onto a space that was between the street and the ground floor, the lounge was dim even in summer evening sunshine. Suzi had clearly embraced that though, the window was blocked off with drapes in a variety of colours and the entire room had soft lights all over it; from two old fashioned lamps behind the big sofa; a series of candles over the fireplace that she had lit with a strip of cardboard from the burner when we came in; and wall mounted spot lights with pale pink bulbs.
The flat had proper old wooden floorboards that put the laminate ones we had across the downstairs of our house to shame, they were wide and sandy-coloured and went perfectly with the Victorian shape of the room and the big old fireplace, which was filled with dried flowers. As well as the sofa there were two armchairs of the same old, saggy style; and a small circular table with two chairs – like the mantle, covered in candles and wax.
In the corner was her CD player and a dusty record deck, next to that stood a small upright piano its top piled high with books, papers and scores. There were more books piled around the edges of the room. The only thing missing was a TV. Unless it was well hidden she didn’t appear to have one.
I settled down to wait for dinner, glass in hand gently relaxing and enjoying the music. She called through from the kitchen to say it wouldn’t be much longer, but I could have snuggled into that couch and rested for hours. Mind you, as soon as the smells of frying vegetables wafted through I was glad it wasn’t going to be to long.
“Can you clear some room on the table and come and grab some things please” she called.
I managed to excavate enough space on the small table for the two of us just as she presented me with a bowl full of noodles and stir fry.
“Sorry, I don’t normally eat here and when I do I tend not to use the table, but seeing as there’s company I suppose we should.”
We ate in near silence, me content with enjoying the food, her seemingly deep in thought.
After five or ten minutes of this, with the meal nearly finished, she suddenly piped up:
“You know, I might seem like I’ve got all this armour around me. But really, it’s not like that at all. I’m not sure I’m ready to be hurt, so if we’re going to go any further with this, before I let myself go any further I need you to agree to one thing.”
And I’d thought the invite home from the bar was forward. “Ok, I’m listening.”
“It’s this – please don’t ever try to convince me that this is more than it is. Don’t make any promises you can’t keep. And don’t say anything that you won’t mean the next day.”
I knew what she meant, and thought that I knew where she was coming from, but even so, I paused before replying, and said, quite slowly:
“That’s quite a list, but I think I can do that. You know, I don’t think you’re as fragile as you think you are, but I will do my best not to hurt you, even though you know the deal. In return, I need something too; if you’re ever going to ask me to choose, I need you to give me time to think about it, don’t just say one day I have to choose now, you have to let me have time to think.”
She replied softly, so quiet I could barely here her words, but I did hear them. “I won’t make you choose, I know you’d choose the same way every time.”
-----
After we ate, we sat on the couch holding hands like school kids; I was scared to move closer into her embrace until she invited me. After about 15 minutes of holding hands and speaking softly, just as I was wondering if this was all she wanted, she suddenly pulled me into her arms, and we were kissing. Her mouth fixed to mine with a passion and a fury. Her arms were wrapped around me, one on my back, inside my jumper on my bare skin, the other wandering between my hair and neck, sending shivers down my back.
As our lips parted, she stood and held out her hands to me, then led me through to the bedroom. As we embraced, the CD player clicked round to a new disc, and The Bends began to play softly in the other room. As long as I live I won’t ever forget the soft warmth as I entered her, the buzz from the wine between my ears and Thom Yorke singing “She looks like real thing, she tastes like the real thing” over and over.
Her head on my chest and her body nestled under my arm, in that haze of tired comedown I knew I wasn’t going to leave her bed that night. I’d planned to go home for the night; even though having had her for three years I knew Mira would be fine fending for herself, I still felt bad leaving her. But tonight, this night, she would have to stay home alone.
Chapter 4
In the weeks that followed we saw as much of each other as possible. It was hard for me to manufacture too much time away from home, especially as Gemma worked in the same building as me. But I did my best, and she was flexible and made time when I could see her.
April and May were spent that way. Snatched minutes and hushed conversations. We hadn’t fought, and I had continued to feel the electric shocks of emotion charging through me whenever her skin touched mine. I had only messed up once. It was at the start of May, the first really warm day of the year and with Gemma was out of town for four days I had asked Suzi to come to the house for the first time.
Our house was in Highgate, it was lovely, a quirky layout but never-the-less perfect for us. It was a maisonette and the house it adjoined and ours seemed to meander around each other, so our dining room branched out off the kitchen, with the stairs to the second floor running behind the length of the lounge, so that the second floor was over a bit of the next door house, with their second floor half over our lounge and half striding out above their garage. The second floor was two bedroom and a big bathroom with a huge freestanding tub, again, architectural quirks meant you had to walk through the bathroom to get to the attic room with the third bedroom, with no door between bathroom and stairs we had had to make an ‘occupied’ sign for the stairs to make sure no-one got caught out by visitors using the top room.
The only way such a nice house in such a great location was affordable to us was because it was an uncle of Gemma’s selling it to move to France, on the condition that he and his new wife could use the third bedroom when they were back in country. Gemma hated it when they showed up, but in truth they had only visited three times in the year we had been there, once for only an evening, the second time we were away and the only other time was at Christmas when everyone was in and out anyway so it wasn’t a big deal to me.
It sounds from this introduction that I’m going to say the problem that occurred that night was that Suzi and I were discovered by Gemma’s aunt and uncle, possibly followed by some comic scene where she is forced to hide under the bed or in the wardrobe or something, but it wasn’t as simple as that.
I had promised to cook for her for the first time that night, so when she showed up, dressed in these amazingly short shorts and a strapless top, hair swept back in a pony tail and the slightest dusting of make-up, I put her in the lounge to meet Mira and got on with my cooking. I was making Italian food, nice and easy and even I couldn’t get that too wrong.
We ate in the dining room with light from the venetian blinds casting slanted shadows across the table and a rarer recording of John Coltrane I had noticed in her flat and done my best to find for the occasion playing in the background. After dinner we sat on our long sofa and played with Mira, bouncing her ball at the wall and back, making her slide along the floor chasing it. By the end of it, Mira was looking downright pissed off with us, and Suzi was in fits of giggles at the cat’s antics.
Later, as we lay together in bed after making love, I turned to her and accidently said “I love you”. Not the worst mistake to make you’d think, and easy to excuse, in that bed, at that time, I was quite used to having sex and then saying I love you and it not being cause for remark let alone concern.
But this time it was. Almost as soon as the words were out her eyes filled with tears, I could see she was holding them back, and I pathetically racked my brains to think of the way to take back what I’d said, or undo it somehow.
“Remember the first night?” She asked.
“Yes of course I do.”
“Then you remember that I made you promise that you wouldn’t lead me along, wouldn’t make promises you couldn’t keep, wouldn’t, you know, get my hopes up.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, it’s just, that well, it’s natural, I can’t help how I feel.”
“Then why did you have to say it? It can’t go anywhere so why won’t you help me stop myself falling in love with you. Saying things like that makes me think it’s ok, and I know really it’s not. Look where we are, look what we’re doing.” She was almost shouting now.
“Listen, I’m sorry, I feel how I feel and you feel how you feel. We can’t change that, and I don’t know if we can change anything else. I’ve only know you for 6 weeks, but those weeks have been different, better, than any others I can remember. I know this isn’t ideal, but it is how it is. If you want, I will try to do something about it, but I’m not sure that’s what either of us want right now.”
After that she was quiet for a long time, so long I thought she might have fallen asleep as I watched the soft rise and fall of her back as she breathed. If she was asleep, it didn’t last, as after about 30 minutes she slipped out from under my arm, shrugged off my hand and made her way to the bottom of the bed were her clothes were.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t stay here, I can’t do this at the moment, not here. I’ve got to go. Give me the weekend without contacting me, I need the time to understand my feelings and I can’t do that if I’m seeing you, it’s like static in my head when I’m with you, I can’t think straight.”
She dressed swiftly and was nearly down the stairs before I had time to get out of bed and pull on some jogging bottoms to go after her. If it wasn’t for Mira doing her winding round the legs looking for love act, she’d have gotten clean away, but thanks to the cat I had time to say one more thing before she left...
“Listen, I know this is hard, and it’s weird. I think it’s just as hard for me as it is for you, but I know you’re sacrificing a lot for me, and you are putting your feelings on the line. Fine, take the time you need to think about this, but whether you like it or not, I meant what I said upstairs, I know I made you a promise, but I don’t think telling you how I feel, how I really feel, breaks that promise at all.”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t want to do this now, my head’s too much all over the place, sorry, but I’ve got to go now.”
And with that she opened the door, and slipped out, leaving me with an over-attentive cat digging her claws into my thigh and the rest of the evening in front of me.
-----
After she left, I got myself a beer from the fridge and sat in front of the silent TV thinking about nothing. I understand what she meant about static when I was there, because for the last month it was like al the emotions in my head that weren’t to do with Suzi were TV signals from a faraway place; grey around the edges and fuzzy in the middle. In the background Coltrane was still blowing away, but it was going to take more than Blue Train live to calm my mood.
Outside the house a motorbike backfired and Mira fled for her cat flap – even she was leaving me now. If she had gone for good was it a good thing? Sitting here in the house I shared with Gemma, who I knew I truly loved, despite all the things that had happened in the past few months, it felt like if things between Suzi and I came to an end then, well it wasn’t probably for the best, it was for the best.
The problem with that was, when I said I loved her, if it was a slip, it was a Freudian one. I know I shouldn’t have told her how I felt, or maybe I should have, but I knew it was true to say. The way I felt for Suzi was different to my feelings for Gemma, I think that’s how the two things existed in my mind without any problems. At first Suzi had been a sort of electric attraction, it was physical and probably mental too but not emotional. I’d never cheated before, on any girl, but after a few years with Gemma, easily the only proper relationship I’d had, meeting Suzi had sent a bolt through me that made me wonder if the comfy life with Gemma, and all the great things that came with it, was all I wanted, or was what I wanted at all.
But the longer I spent with Suzi, the more I found out about her, the more things we had in common, the way she was able to finish my sentences for me after a few weeks of seeing her, and how she really listened when I talked, it made the connection emotional not just physical. She wasn’t just filling a gap in my any more, when I wasn’t with her, she was the gap.
Chapter 5
By the next morning I’d made my decision 15 times and remade it thirty more, before deciding that inaction was the best action and that if I couldn’t make my mind up I’d hope that someone else would make it up for me. That didn’t stop me having a sleepless night that I gave up on at about 3am; spending the rest of the night watching old movies on Sky without even Mira for a date, who was clearly still sulking at being ignored for the pretty new girl, and then abandoned by her too.
Gemma was back that day so I left her a note saying the cat had been out all night and would need some food if and when she returned, before heading down to town to go shopping, hoping that retail would distract me from my thoughts – the perfect late stage capitalist.
After wandering aimlessly from Tottenham Court Road to Covent Garden and on through Soho for an hour or so I was ready for the early kick off that day, Spurs Arsenal. This late in the season it was a vital game to win for a top four finish. I decided that shopping wasn’t working, I kept viewing everything I looked at through the filter of either what would Suzi think or what would Gemma think too ‘cool’ or trying too hard and Gemma might think something was up; anything else made me feel like a granddad compared to Suzi – she was only three years younger than me for god sake.
After wandering for another twenty minutes I ended up in the Marlborough Arms on Tottenham Court Road with a group of Spurs boys. The plan worked perfectly and within 15 minutes I was well into the game, especially when Keane put Spurs one nil up. It was Arsenal’s penultimate game at Highbury, so to beat them for the first time at home in the last ever Highbury derby would have been the sweetest goodbye. Typical Arsenal, it wasn’t to be, and they brought Henry off the bench to score the equaliser with five minutes to go.
The point was good, and might just let us finish the season in three games time in fourth but if I’d really wanted to improve my mood, a win was what I needed. As it was only 2pm, I’d had no lunch but McCoys, and sunk 4 pints during the game, I was feeling a bit shitfaced by the end of the game. I needed some after all that and left the pub to go and sit in Soho square to try to sober up. As I walked to the gardens my phone tweeted at me and my heart speed up, I was in no state for a one-to-one with Suzi, but I was dying to hear from her.
Following on the way the rest of my day was going, it wasn’t what I wanted. It was Gemma telling me she’d got home and couldn’t read my writing - she wouldn’t have bothered me but she could read Mira and was worried about the cat. I explained, said she would be fine, she was always wandering off for 24 hours and told Gemma where I was. Mira was her first pet so she was constantly worried about her, she’d never had animals growing up because of her mum’s fur allergy.