another tent.
‘Oh, fuck off,’ Esme said through her laughter, and as they both
fled across the squelchy mud towards the car park, Tom hoped she’d
forgotten about the final question she’d not yet received an answer
for.
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CHAPTER NINE
1 – 2 pm
A PARTY OF SURPRISES
May 2011 – Belsize Park, London
‘You are coming, aren’t you?’ Tom said, his phone trapped between
ear and shoulder as he opened a packet of confetti.
‘Think so.’
‘Don’t give me “think so”, Neil.’
‘What? I always said I was a maybe.’
‘On Facebook you’re a yes.’
‘Yeah well that’s Facebook, isn’t it?’
‘Just come, okay?’
‘What’s the problem anyway?’ Neil said, still denying Tom the
full commitment he was after.
‘The room’s massive. Much bigger than it was two months ago
when I booked it.’
‘How can a room be bigger now than it was two months ago?
It’s the same bloody room.’
‘You know what I mean,’ Tom said, looking around the cavern-
ous function room of The Lamb pub in Belsize Park. So far, he
had spent an hour moving tables and bar stools around in various
patterns, put up a trestle table to display the cake and a selection
of Esme’s favourite foods, and strung up large blooms of blue and
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white helium balloons. Yet despite all of it, the room still felt much too big. ‘I think I’ve vastly overestimated the amount of space forty
people will take up.’
‘Just like when you used to put on gigs in Lowestoft.’
‘Fuck off,’ Tom said. ‘Just be here. Half past and no later. I don’t
want you ballsing up the surprise.’
‘Fine. Take it I can bring Stace?’
Tom was about to ask who Stace was, but thought better of it.
She’d most likely be the latest in a long line of Neil’s girlfriends.
He had the unfortunate habit of falling deeply in love very quickly
– before just as suddenly becoming acutely aware of his partners’
unforgiveable flaws. The churn of relationships was often too fast to
keep up with. But that wouldn’t stop Neil from becoming deeply
offended if Tom couldn’t remember Stace’s name.
‘Of course,’ Tom said, and hung up the phone. ‘Shit,’ he mut-
tered to himself, as he took in the ramshackle job he had made of
decorating. There was now less than an hour left and still loads to do.
At least he knew that Esme liked the pub. They visited most
weekends, after walks on Hampstead Heath or to sit around doing
the newspaper crossword on rainy Sundays. To them, it was as
personal as a place could be, somewhere they had found and grown
to love in an area they’d become happy calling home. Even if he had
initially been resistant to the very idea of going to a pub to relax.
For Tom, any drinking den was simultaneously tempting and
terrifying, and he felt the need to constantly remind himself of what
he was.
This discomfort meant that he’d cut short their first visits to The
Lamb; offering Esme one of a litany of terrible excuses and lies that
would give them reason to get out minutes after they walked in,
sometimes even before she had ordered.
It’s too busy, we’ll never get a seat.
Sorry. I just feel really sick all of a sudden.
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Why don’t we head home instead? Watch a film or something.
But gradually, as with so many things, Esme’s presence made Tom
feel more at home with his own mind. As long as she was opposite
him, maintaining sobriety as a twenty-something Londoner did not
feel like such constant hard work. Gradual y he began to feel normal
there.
She knew none of this, of course. And now, alone with all the
taps, bottles and optics, Tom felt uneasy. There was no compulsion to
drink. But there was something. A sort of pre-temptation characterised by the knowledge that he could do it. Even if he didn’t want to.
It was a familiar anxiety. One that occasionally rose up, and
once or twice bubbled over in his teens and early twenties. And
as he scattered silver 30! confetti pieces across the tables, he found himself drifting back to the worst moments. His own history was
packed full of case studies that now gave him constant reason to say
no: being carried home by friends; his mum crying as his dad and
sister tried to sober him up with water and coffee at 3 a.m.; alone
in student accommodation, drunk and throwing up on the ancient
carpet. Quitting drink once, on the pretence that his mental make-up
made alcohol problematic, that the two things were incompatible.
Then relapsing a couple of years later, before finally admitting to
himself that he had used alcohol to cover something up – as a way
of trying to cope.
The smell of the disinfectant was nauseating. Tom ran a hand
over the beer tap handles. How easy it would be to fall, to let go of
five years of sobriety. How easily one sip could become one pint,
one session, one failure.
Pins and needles prickled his hands and neck. He tried to bring
Esme to mind: her smile, the feel of her palm on his thigh when
she sensed he was becoming anxious. He must continue doing this
for her, Tom knew. And one day he would tell her everything. Just
not yet.
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Tom checked his watch. Nearly 1.30 p.m., the time he had asked people to arrive on the invitation. Esme herself would be brought
to the pub at 1.45 p.m. by her friend Jamilla, ostensibly for a quick
lunch after a morning in Selfridges.
He re-folded the speech and returned it to his jacket pocket, and
carelessly threw some more confetti around the place. Two young
barmaids (one of whom he vaguely recognised) appeared at the top
of the staircase.
‘Looks nice,’ the short, blonde girl with the northern accent said.
‘Thanks.’
‘Those balloons look a bit low, though. The ceilings are quite high
in here – you can afford to let them go up a bit.’
‘I’ve run out of string.’
‘Well I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ she said, with obvious uncertainty.
‘How many you got coming?’
‘Forty odd.’
‘And you know it’s a minimum spend of two grand, right?’
‘I do,’ Tom said, aware of the irony that, unless his guests drank
enough, his biggest ever bar tab would hit him almost a decade after
he quit drinking.
‘What’s her name, then?’
‘Esme.’
‘Nice name, that. Your wife is she?’
‘Girlfriend.’
‘How long you been together?’
‘Almost four years.’
‘Well she’s lucky to have you. My boyfriend barely buys me a
drink, let alone organises a party.’ She smil
ed and started cutting
fruit for mixers, while Tom perched a board of recent photos of Esme
atop the pub’s mantelpiece.
A creak on the staircase made him turn around. It was Esme’s
parents, Tamas and Lena, who had made a rare trip down to London
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for the party. Tamas reached out and shook Tom’s hand firmly, as though grip and force were measures by which to judge a man. Lena,
meanwhile, hugged him tightly and planted a kiss on his cheek,
leaving behind a greasy smear of dark red lipstick.
‘So wonderful of you to be doing this for our girl, Tom,’ she said.
‘And it all looks lovely.’
‘Thank you.’
‘The balloons look a little low, though.’
Tom forced a smile and excused himself to greet his own parents
before they too came over to make awkward conversation with Tamas
and Lena – because they felt they should, not because they wanted
to.
It wasn’t the first time the four had met. Two months after Esme
and Tom had moved in together in 2009, they had decided that
a small housewarming party would be the ideal opportunity for
their immediate families to get to know each other. Everyone got
along fine. But trying to conjure a friendship between four people
in their late fifties and early sixties, with all their firmly entrenched personality traits, was more or less impossible.
Nonetheless, the four of them gamely persisted to spend entire
functions together, as if it was what their children wanted. Tom
knew that later his dad would describe Tamas as a ‘nice fella’ and
his mum Lena as a ‘lovely woman’, with neither of them able to add
any context to either statement.
‘This all looks lovely, Tom,’ his mum said. ‘And she does deserve
it, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Tom said, as she grasped and shook his upper arm
in proud excitement, perhaps expecting more from the day than she
could reasonably expect to.
‘Might want to let these balloons up a bit, though. Unless all her
mates are dwarves, eh?’ his dad chuckled, before plodding off towards
the bar, no doubt with a joke prepared about London prices.
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Tom heard more footsteps on the stairs. Esme’s friends were arriving, with boyfriends in tow – people Tom knew because he was
always thrown together with them at parties. They were inherited
mates who, after three or four meetings, would add him on Facebook
and send invites to golf days or five-a-side football matches, knowing with relative certainty that Tom would decline (regardless of how
much Esme encouraged him). Perhaps if these ‘away days’ became
less about the post-event drinking, he might one day.
Laura was first to turn up, with Steve (or ‘Ste’), who yelled ‘on
your nod then’ before headbutting a balloon, which floated slowly in
Tom’s direction. He remembered with some relief that, according to
Esme, Laura would soon be leaving Steve for a colleague she’d been
sleeping with, having been up overnight with him to report on the
General Election last year and letting things grow from there. Tom
felt a little sympathetic towards Steve. Or as sympathetic as he could towards a man who spent al his spare time and money in Square
Mile strip clubs.
A procession of friends and their partners followed. Some Tom
had met only a handful of times. They were people from the more
obscure parts of Esme’s life. It seemed like the further she got from
university, the less she saw or spoke to the friends she had made
there. They variously congratulated Tom for organising the party,
marvelled at how he had managed to keep it a secret and, of course,
commented on the low height of the balloons.
‘The pub’s health and safety regulations dictate,’ he eventually
said a little too loudly, snapping at an old school mate of Esme’s
from Leicester who had innocently wondered aloud who had put
the balloons up, ‘that helium inflatables must be at least six feet away from the ceiling.’
Despite the bal oons, the people, the hel os and the how-are-yous,
Tom could not concentrate on the small talk. It was 1.40. Esme
would arrive in five minutes. And as he looked around at almost
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everyone Esme knew and loved, he couldn’t shake the feeling that when she arrived, she’d take one look around, and turn on her heel
to leave.
Was this party an utterly terrible idea?
‘Just me and you. Dinner maybe. Or a weekend away at the
very most,’ Esme had told him when he’d raised the prospect of her
thirtieth earlier in the year. It was New Year’s Day and they were
taking their now-traditional 1st January walk around Regent’s Park
to talk vaguely and flippantly about their hopes and ambitions for
the months ahead.
‘But it’s a big one, Es,’ Tom said, before backtracking suddenly.
‘Not big as in, you know, the number. But big as in a milestone.’
‘Yes. But what do I really have to mark? Everything in my life
now is the same as what it was two years ago. Apart from you it’s
the same as it was five years ago.’
‘One: not true. Two: it’s about more than two years. You’ve done
so much in your twenties. Degree, masters, amazing job, home in
London.’
‘We don’t have a home in London. We rent a flat in London.’
Or of London. Whatever.’
‘I’m not even sure I want to live in London.’
‘Really?’
‘There’s more than one city in England, Tom,’ she said grumpily.
‘This year I’ve done conferences in Bristol, Norwich and Manchester.
All of them seem nice.’
‘My family live near Norwich.’
‘And?’
‘If we moved there they’d be round all the time.’
‘It’s nice to see family.’
‘But all the time?’
‘Fine. Look, all I mean is that I’m coming up to thirty. Great.
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But I don’t want to feel as though everything is set in stone. That I’ve ticked all the boxes and my future’s just a continuation of the
past few years.’ She cracked the ice on a frozen puddle. ‘When our
parents’ generation turned thirty, that’s just how it was. You had your job, your home, your family and your friends. And nothing changed
again until you got to your mid-forties, your kids started to make
their own lives and your friends started getting divorced.’
‘What’s your point, Es?’
‘Thirty doesn’t mean what it used to. I’ve no idea why we celebrate
it.’
‘So what should we celebrate instead?’ Tom asked as they passed
the tennis courts, where paunchy middle-aged men were striving to
impress their young tennis coach with overly ambitious serves and
smashes.
‘The fives.’
‘Huh
?’ Tom said, slightly distracted by the coach himself.
‘We should celebrate the fives. Twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five.
That’s when the milestones happen now. At twenty-five people have
left uni and figured out what they want to do with their lives. Thirtyfive they might have got married or had kids or something.’
‘Forty-five?’
‘Don’t know. Still probably getting divorced.’
‘How cheerful.’
‘At twenty-five you look for the one. At forty-five you look for
anyone. That’s the way it is.’
‘What a bleak picture of the future you paint.’
‘Not bleak. Just realistic.’
‘Anyway. So you’ll have a party when you’re thirty-five?’
‘I don’t really like parties.’
Tom said nothing as they crossed the bridge over the boating lake
and started to walk back north towards Camden.
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‘Why have you gone quiet?’ she asked. ‘Tell me you weren’t thinking about a party.’
‘It might be nice. Get everyone together.’
‘Just no, Tom. No. Not even a “no but really yes”, like when your
sister told Nathan not to buy her a Christmas present and he actually
didn’t. This is an actual no.’
‘Fine,’ Tom said. ‘An actual no. Understood.’
An actual no.
The words reverberated around Tom’s head as the text came in
from Jamilla.
Almost at the pub with Es. Everyone ready? X
Tom replied with a yes, then picked up two glasses and knocked them together to silence the room. Immediately he felt his throat dry, suddenly convinced that all of this was a terrible idea, that it would be better to tell everyone to flee out of the back door.
‘Two minutes away, everyone,’ he called, as a loud cheer rose up
around him.
‘I don’t know how these things work. But let’s get the lights
turned off, keep quiet and we’ll just shout “surprise” when she comes
in.’
The barmaid obliged by turning down the dimmer switch and
casting the room into dark dinginess. Then came a creak on the pub’s
old wooden stairs. Esme.
Tom’s heart began to thump in his chest – what would her re-
action be? Affection? Or anger? Of the kind that would make her
turn around and storm away?
And then, before he knew it, she was there, standing in front of
him – beautiful in black jeans, a white cotton shirt, and heeled shoes with red pom poms on the toes. The look on her face suggested she’d