One Day

  ‘ . . . wee slice of eggy bread? Line your stomach for tonight?’

  Tonight. There it was. Often when Ian was working through his dialects it was because he had something on his mind that couldn’t be said in a natural voice.

  ‘Big night, tonight. Out on the town with Mike TV.’

  She decided to ignore the remark, but he wasn’t making it easy. His chin resting on her head, he read the words on the screen.

  ‘Portrait in Crimson . . .’

  She covered the screen with her hand. ‘Don’t read over my shoulder, please.’

  ‘Emma T. Wilde. Who’s Emma T. Wilde?’

  ‘My pseudonym. Ian—’

  ‘You know what the T stands for?’

  ‘Terrible.’

  ‘Terrific. Tremendous.’

  ‘Tired, as in sick and—’

  ‘If you ever want me to read it—’

  ‘Why would you want to read it? It’s crap.’

  ‘Nothing you do is crap.’

  ‘Well this is.’ Twisting her head away, she clicked the monitor off and without turning round she knew he’d be doing his hangdog look. All too often this was how she found herself with Ian, switching back and forth between irritation and remorse. ‘Sorry!’ she said, taking his hand by the fingers and shaking it.

  He kissed the top of her head, then spoke into her hair. ‘You know what I think it stands for? “The” as in “The Bollocks”. Emma T. B. Wilde.’

  With that, he left; a classic technique, compliment and run. Keen not to cave in straightaway, Emma pushed the door to, turned the monitor back on, read the words there, shuddered visibly, closed the file and dragged it to the icon of the wastebasket. An electronic crumpling noise, the sound of writing.

  The squeal of the smoke alarm indicated that Ian was cooking. She stood and followed the smell of burning butter down the hall into the kitchen/diner; not a separate room, just the greasiest quarter of the living room of the flat that they had bought together. Emma had been unsure about buying; it felt like the kind of place that the police get called to, she said, but Ian had worn her down. It was crazy to rent, they saw each other most nights anyway, it was near her school, a foot on the ladder etc. and so they had scraped together the deposit and bought some books on interior decoration, including one that told you how to paint plywood so that it looked like fine Italian marble. There had been inspirational talk of putting the fireplace back in, of bookshelves and fitted cupboards and storage solutions. Exposed floorboards! Ian would hire a sander and expose the floorboards as law demanded. On a wet Saturday in February they had lifted the carpet, peered despondently underneath at the mess of mouldering chipboard, disintegrating underlay and old news papers, then guiltily nailed it all back in place as if disposing of a corpse. There was something unpersuasive and impermanent about these attempts at home-making, as if they were children building a den, and despite the fresh paint, the prints on the walls, the new furniture, the flat retained its shabby, temporary air.

  Now Ian stood in the kitchenette in a shaft of smoky sunlight with his broad back towards her. Emma watched him from the doorway, taking in the familiar old grey t-shirt with the holes in, an inch of his underpants visible above his track-suit bottoms, his ‘tracky botts’. She could see the words Calvin Klein against the brown hair on the small of his back and it occurred to her that this was probably not at all what Calvin Klein had in mind.

  She spoke to break the silence. ‘Isn’t that getting a bit burnt?’

  ‘Not burnt, crispy.’

  ‘I say burnt, you say crispy.’

  ‘Let’s call the whole thing off!’

  Silence.

  ‘I can see the top of your underpants,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s deliberate.’ Lisping, effeminate voice. ‘It’s called fashion, sweetheart.’

  ‘Well it’s certainly very provocative.’

  Nothing, just the sound of food burning.

  But it was Ian’s turn to cave this time. ‘So. Where’s Alpha Boy taking you then?’ he said, without turning round.

  ‘Somewhere in Soho, I don’t know.’ In fact she did know, but the restaurant’s name was a recent by-word for modish, metropolitan dining and she didn’t want to make matters worse. ‘Ian, if you don’t want me to go tonight—’

  ‘No, you go, enjoy yourself—’

  ‘Or if you want to come with us?—’

  ‘What, Harry and Sally and me? Oh, I don’t think so, do you?’

  ‘You’d be very welcome.’

  ‘The two of you bantering and talking over me all night—’

  ‘We don’t do that—’

  ‘You did last time!’

  ‘No, we didn’t!’

  ‘You’re sure you don’t want some eggy bread?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘And anyway, I’ve got a gig tonight, haven’t I? House of Ha Ha, Putney.’

  ‘A paid gig?’

  ‘Yes, a paid gig!’ he snapped. ‘So I’m fine, thank you very much.’ He started searching noisily in the cupboard for some brown sauce. ‘Don’t you worry about me.’

  Emma sighed irritably. ‘If you don’t want me to go, just say so.’

  ‘Em, we’re not joined at the hip. You go if you want. Enjoy yourself.’ The sauce bottle wheezed consumptively. ‘Just don’t get off with him, will you?’

  ‘Well that’s hardly going to happen, is it?’

  ‘No, so you keep saying.’

  ‘He’s going out with Suki Meadows.’

  ‘But if he wasn’t?’

  ‘If he wasn’t it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference, because I love you.’

  Still this wasn’t enough. Ian said nothing and Emma sighed, crossed the kitchen, her feet sucking on the lino, and looped her arms around his waist, feeling him pull it in as she did so. Pressing her face against his back, she inhaled the familiar warm body smell, kissed the fabric of his t-shirt, mumbled ‘Stop being daft’ and they stood like this for a while, until it became clear that Ian was keen to start eating. ‘Right. Better mark these essays,’ she said, and walked away. Twenty-eight numbing opinions on viewpoint in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  ‘Em?’ he said as she reached the door. ‘What are you doing this afty? Round about seventeen-hundred hours?’

  ‘Should be finished. Why?’

  He hitched himself up onto the kitchen units with the plate on his lap. ‘Thought we might go to bed, for, you know, a bit of afternoon delight.’

  I love him, she thought, I’m just not in love with him and also I don’t love him. I’ve tried, I’ve strained to love him but I can’t. I am building a life with a man I don’t love, and I don’t know what to do about it.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said from the doorway. ‘May-be,’ and she pouted her lips into a kiss, smiled and closed the door.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  There were no more mornings, only mornings after.

  Heart thumping, soaked with sweat, Dexter was woken just after midday by a man bellowing outside, but it turned out to be M People. He had fallen asleep in front of the television again, and was now being urged to search for the hero inside himself.

  The Saturdays after the Late-Night Lock-In were always spent like this, in the stale air, blinds drawn against the sun. Had she still been around, his mother would have been shouting up the stairs for him to get up and do something with the day, but instead he sat smoking on the black leather sofa in last night’s underpants, playing Ultimate Doom on the PlayStation and trying not to move his head.

  By mid-afternoon he could feel weekend melancholy creep up on him and so decided to practise his mixing. Something of an amateur DJ, Dexter had a wallful of CDs and rare vinyl in bespoke pine racks, two turntables and a microphone, all tax-deductible, and could often be spotted in record shops in Soho, wearing an immense pair of headphones like halved coconuts. Still in his underpants, he mixed idly back and forth between break-beats on his brand new CD mixing decks in preparation for the next big-night-in with mates
. But something was missing, and he soon gave up. ‘CD’s not vinyl,’ he announced, then realised that he had said this to an entirely empty room.

  Melancholy again, he sighed and crossed to the kitchen, moving slowly like a man recovering from surgery. The massive fridge was full to overflowing with bottles of an exciting new brand of upmarket cider. As well as presenting the show (‘Car-crash television’ they called it, apparently a good thing), he had recently expanded into voiceovers. He was ‘classless’ they said, also apparently a good thing, the exemplar of a new breed of British man: metropolitan, moneyed, not embarrassed by his masculinity, his sex-drive, his liking for cars and big titanium watches and gadgets in brushed steel. So far he had done voiceovers for this premium bottled cider, designed to appeal to a young Ted Baker-wearing crowd, and a new breed of men’s razor, an extraordinary sci-fi object with a multitude of blades and a lubricating strip that left a mucal trail, as if someone had sneezed on your chin.

  He had even dipped his toe into the world of modelling, a long-standing ambition that he had never dared to voice, and which he was quick to dismiss as ‘just a bit of a laugh’. Only this month he had featured in a fashion spread in a men’s magazine, the theme ‘gangster-chic’, and over nine pages he had chewed cigars or lain riddled with bullets in a number of tailored double-breasted suits. Copies of the magazine were accidentally scattered round the flat, so that guests might casually stumble upon it. There was even a copy by the toilet, and he sometimes found himself sitting there and staring at his own photo, dead but beautifully tailored and splayed across the bonnet of a Jag.

  Presenting car-crash television was fine for a while, but you could only crash the car so many times. At some point in the future he would have to do something good as opposed to so-bad-it’s-good, and in an attempt to acquire some credibility he had set up his own production company, Mayhem TV plc. At the moment Mayhem only existed as a stylish logo on some heavy stationery, but that would surely change. It would have to; as his agent Aaron had said, ‘You’re a great Youth Presenter, Dexy. Trouble is, you’re not a Youth.’ What else might he be capable of, given the breaks? Acting? He knew a lot of actors, both professionally and socially, played poker with a few of them, and frankly if they could do it . . .

  Yes, professionally and socially, the last couple of years had been a time of opportunity, of great new mates, canapés and premieres, helicopter rides and a lot of yammering about football. There had been low points of course: a sense of anxiety and crippling dread, one or two instances of public vomiting. There was something about his presence in a bar or club that made other men want to shout abuse or even hit him, and recently he had been bottled off-stage while introducing a Kula Shaker concert – that was no fun. In a recent what’s hot and what’s not column, he had been listed as not-hot. This not-hotness had weighed heavily on his mind, but he tried to dismiss it as envy. Envy was just the tax you paid on success.

  There had been other sacrifices on his part. Regretfully he had been obliged to shuffle off some old friends from University, because after all it wasn’t 1988 anymore. His old flatmate Callum, the one he was meant to start a business with, continued to leave increasingly sarcastic messages, but Dexter hoped he’d get the idea soon. What were you meant to do, all live in a big house together for the rest of your lives? No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them. With this in mind, he had adopted a three-in, one-out policy. In place of the old friends he had let go, he had taken on thirty, forty, fifty more successful, better-looking friends. It was impossible to argue with the sheer volume of friends, even if he wasn’t sure he actually liked all of them. He was famous, no, notorious for his cocktails, his reckless generosity, his DJ-ing and his after-after-show parties back at his flat, and many were the mornings that he had woken in the smoky wreckage to find that his wallet had been stolen.

  Never mind. There had never been a better time to be young, male, successful and British. London was buzzing and he felt as if this was somehow down to him. A VAT-registered man in possession of a modem and a mini-disk player, a famous girlfriend and many, many cufflinks, he owned a fridge full of premium cider and a bathroom full of multi-bladed razors, and though he disliked cider and the razors gave him a rash, life was pretty good here, with the blinds down in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the year, in the middle of the decade, close to the centre of the most exciting city on earth.

  The afternoon stretched before him. Soon it would be time to call his dealer. There was a party tonight in a huge house off Ladbroke Grove. He had to see Emma for dinner first, but could probably get rid of her by eleven.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Emma lay in the avocado bathtub and heard the front door close as Ian set off on the long journey to the House of Ha Ha in Putney to perform his stand-up act: fifteen unhappy minutes on some differences between cats and dogs. She reached for her glass of wine on the bathroom floor, held it in both hands and frowned at the mixer taps. It was remarkable how quickly the glee of home ownership had faded, how insubstantial and tatty their combined possessions seemed in the small flat with its thin walls and someone else’s carpets. It wasn’t that the place was dirty – every single surface had been scrubbed with a wire-brush – but it retained an unnerving stickiness and a smell of old cardboard that seemed impossible to shift. On their first night, after the front door had closed and the champagne had been opened, she had felt like bursting into tears. It’s bound to take time before it feels like our home, Ian had said as he held her in bed that night, and at least they had their foot on the ladder. But the idea of scaling that ladder together, rung by rung over the years, filled her with a terrible gloom. And what was at the top?

  Enough of this. Tonight was meant to be a special occasion, a celebration, and she hauled herself from the bathtub, brushed and flossed her teeth until her gums were sore, sprayed herself liberally with an invigorating floral woodiness, then searched her sparse wardrobe for an outfit that didn’t make her look like Miss Morley the English teacher on a night out with her famous friend. She decided on some painful shoes and a small black cocktail dress that she had bought while drunk in Karen Millen.

  She looked at her watch and, with time to kill, flicked on the television. On a nationwide quest to find Britain’s Most Talented Pet, Suki Meadows was standing on Scarborough sea-front, introducing the viewers to a dog who could play the drums, the dog waving his limbs in the direction of a tiny snare, drumsticks gaffer-taped to his paws. Instead of finding this image justly disturbing, Suki Meadows was laughing, bubbling and fizzing away, and for a moment Emma contemplated phoning Dexter, making up an excuse and going back to bed. Because, really, what was the point?

  It wasn’t just the effervescing girlfriend. The fact was Em and Dex didn’t get on that well these days. More often than not he would cancel their meetings at the last minute, and when they did see each other he seemed distracted, uncomfortable. They spoke to each other in strange, strangulated voices, and had lost the knack of making each other laugh, jeering at each other instead in a spiteful, mocking tone. Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead? It was unrealistic to expect a friendship to last forever, and she had lots of other friends: the old college crowd, her friends from school, and Ian of course. But to whom could she confide about Ian? Not Dexter, not anymore. The dog played the drums and Suki Meadows laughed and laughed and Emma snapped the TV off.

  In the hallway she examined herself in the mirror. She had been hoping for understated sophistication, but she felt like a make-over, abandoned halfway through. Recently she had been eating more pepperoni than she had ever thought possible, and there was the result; a little pot belly. Had he been there, Ian would have said that she looked beautiful, but all she saw was the swell of her belly through black satin. She placed her hand on it, closed the front door, and began the long journey from an ex-council flat in
E17 to WC2.

  ‘WAHEY!’

  A hot summer night on Frith Street, and he was on the phone to Suki.

  ‘DID YOU SEE IT?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘THE DOG! PLAYING THE DRUMS! IT WAS AMAZING!’

  Dexter stood outside Bar Italia, sleek and matt black in shirt and suit, a little trilby-style hat pushed back on his head, the mobile phone held four inches from his ear. He had the sensation that if he hung up he would still be able to hear her.

  ‘ . . . LITTLE DRUMSTICKS ON HIS LITTLE PAWS!’

  ‘It was hysterical,’ he said, though in truth he couldn’t bring himself to watch. Envy was not a comfortable emotion for Dexter, but he knew the whispers – that Suki was the real talent, that she had been carrying him – and comforted himself with the notion that Suki’s current high profile, large salary and popular appeal were a kind of artistic compromise. Britain’s Most Talented Pet? He would never sell out like that. Even if someone asked him to.

  ‘NINE MILLION VIEWERS THEY RECKON THIS WEEK. TEN, MAYBE . . .’

  ‘Suki, can I just explain something about the telephone? You don’t have to shout into it? The phone does that bit for you . . .’

  She huffed and hung up on him, and from across the road, Emma took a moment to stand and watch as Dexter swore at the phone in his hand. He still looked great in a suit. It was a shame about the hat but at least he wasn’t wearing those ridiculous headphones. She watched his face brighten as he saw her and she felt a swell of affection and hope for the evening.

  ‘You really should get rid of that,’ she said, nodding towards the phone.

  He slipped it into his pocket and kissed her cheek. ‘So you’ve got a choice, you can either phone me, actually me personally, or you can phone a building in which I might just happen to be at the time—’

  ‘Phone the building.’

  ‘And if I miss the call?’

  ‘Well God forbid you should miss a call.’