31 Dream Street (28 page)

‘Is that nice?’ she said.

‘Well, it’s not awful, but…’ He stopped when his gaze fell upon the empty box sitting on his bed. It had a photograph of the contraption on the lid and the words ‘Hair styling kit’ and ‘clippers’. He looked at the floor. Tiny tumbleweeds of his hair lay on the carpet. He slapped his hand against his cheek, where for nearly half his life there had been hair. He felt skin, soft and smooth, like the underbelly of a kitten. ‘Oh, my God! Melinda! No!’

He got to his feet and felt the contraption skidding through his hair.

‘Shit, Toby, will you sit still?’

‘Oh, God,’ he grabbed the side of his head and felt a channel of baldness. ‘Oh, Jesus!’

‘Toby, just sit down.’

‘No! I won’t. Oh, God, what have you done?!
What have you done?!
’ He raced to the mirror and gazed at his reflection. He had one sideburn and a section of hair missing. He looked like he had a terrible, terrible illness.

‘Toby, don’t panic. Come over here and I’ll sort it out for you.’

‘I can’t believe you’ve shaved my sideburn off.’

‘Well, what did you think I was going to do with a pair of clippers?’

‘I didn’t know they were clippers.’

‘Well, what on earth did you think they were?’

‘I don’t know, some kind of massage device. I thought you were going to give me a massage.’

Melinda slapped her hands over her mouth and let out a snort of laughter. ‘Oh, shit,’ she said. ‘Oh, fuck a duck, Toby. I’m sorry. I thought everyone knew what clippers look like.’

‘Yes, well, apparently not.’ Toby looked at himself in the mirror again. He looked away, in horror. ‘Oh, Christ, Melinda. What are we going to do?’

59

Con breathed in. He touched his hair and peered into a blackened window at his blurred reflection. He breathed out again. Then he pushed open the door to the fashion department, with an air that he hoped was breezy and businesslike. The first thing he saw was the back of Daisy’s head. She was standing over the fax machine, watching a document ooze through the mechanism, page by page. She was wearing a blue thigh-length sweater over a cream lace petticoat with tan boots, and her hair was in a bun. Con moved his trolley quickly to the post tray near Daisy’s desk, hoping that she wouldn’t turn round and see him. A girl in horn-rimmed glasses passed him a Jiffy bag, unsmilingly. He dropped it into his trolley and kept moving. Just as he reached the post tray, Daisy’s phone started ringing. She tutted and sighed and turned round. When she saw Con hovering near her desk, she went stiff, momentarily, before looking away. She returned to her desk and picked up her phone.

‘
Hello. Daisy Beens
.’

Con turned and started loading his trolley from the tray. Daisy was chatting to someone. It sounded like a friend.

A minute later she hung up and walked towards him.
‘I’ve got a few more letters,’ she said, coldly. ‘Can you wait a sec.’

He nodded, tersely, and waited while she sorted through her mail. He stared through the window at the blotchy, drizzle-laden sky outside. Someone a few desks along squealed with laughter. ‘No!’ she breathed down the phone. ‘That’s the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard!’

A middle-aged woman came out of an office, followed by a harassed young minion clutching a pile of notes. Daisy turned and handed Con a small wedge of cream envelopes. ‘First class,’ she said, ‘please.’ And then she walked back to the fax machine and picked up the paper document.

Con pushed his trolley back into the corridor and exhaled, his flesh crawling with embarrassment, guilt and sadness.

60

Toby glanced at the time on his PC.

11.23 a.m.

He sighed and pulled his boots from underneath his bed.

He wound a scarf round his neck and picked up an old mug.

He paused before he left his room, and glanced at himself in the mirror. He still couldn’t countenance the more or less hairless man who stared back at him. They’d been forced to take the whole lot off. Melinda had tried a short-back-and-sides, but Toby had looked like a neo-Nazi, so she’d just kept going with clippers until he was left with a smattering of stubble. The sideburns, of course, were beyond rescuing. She’d taken the second one off and Toby had watched it fall to the floor in tufts with a sad, heartbroken gulp.

Seeing so much of his face alarmed him. He constantly felt like he had his flies undone, or his underwear showing. He stroked his cheeks continually, feeling for stuff that used to be there. His scalp was bizarre, pink and unaired, like a testicle. He wore hats pretty much all the time now. Melinda had insisted that he looked gorgeous, ‘like that bloke in
Doctor Who
’. But to his eyes he just looked bald – and slightly alarming. He bared his teeth at his reflection, and gulped.

In half an hour he would be at the dentist. He’d phoned to book an appointment with the hygienist and they’d somehow, by some kind of dental stealth, booked him in for a standard appointment, too. He hadn’t been to the dentist in years. They would, he knew it, insist on pulling out half his teeth and then on drilling holes in the rest of them. He would be in there for at least three hours and would leave feeling as if he’d been chewing a pint glass. If he was lucky.

Toby wasn’t scared of dentists – just annoyed by them.
Doctors
didn’t make you show up twice a year just to check that you were OK. Doctors waited until you felt ill enough to show up of your own volition. Why couldn’t dentists do the same? Why did they make you feel guilty if you didn’t see them for a while? Surely it was a good thing if you didn’t come, as it meant that you weren’t in any pain, that things were ticking along nicely.

He took his boots and his mug downstairs. He put the mug on the black granite work surface of his new kitchen and pulled on his boots. The kitchen fitters had finished last night and it was, of course, the most beautiful kitchen Toby had ever seen. It had aubergine-coloured cabinets and a six-ring hob and a barbecue and a breakfast bar and an American fridge with a water dispenser. The kitchen floors had been stripped and stained to look like American walnut and there were a dozen twinkling halogen lights hanging from tracks on the ceiling. And, thanks to Damian’s canny buying, the whole thing had come in at only
£
5,000 more than he’d meant to spend.

Melinda’s food boxes were piled up by the back door, waiting to be unpacked tonight. Sticking out of the top was her tequila. Before he’d had a chance to question what he was doing, Toby had removed the cap and swallowed three large slugs. He didn’t trust anaesthetics. If some dentist was going to start slicing his mouth open, he wanted to be sure he wasn’t going to feel anything. He tipped the bottle to his lips again and swallowed some more. He glanced at the bottle in his hands. It was nearly empty. He finished it.

61

It was three-twenty. Leah had arranged to meet Toby outside Park Road Baths at three o’clock. She glanced up and down the road once more before giving up and making her way inside.

The pool was quiet. She liked coming on her day off. She padded barefoot to the end of the pool and slid into the water. It was lukewarm, viscous, immediately calming. She ploughed up and down the pool, feeling the tension leave her shoulder blades, her neck, her hips. After four lengths, she stopped and hugged the edge of the pool for a moment. And that was when she saw him.

She wasn’t sure it was him at first, the tall, thin man in the tiny schoolboy Speedos that clung film-like to every lump and bump of his genitals. He had no hair and a very strange lopsided face. But as he approached and began to smile, she knew without a doubt. It was Toby.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said, ‘Toby. You look so… what happened to your…? Oh, my God.’

‘I’m a monster,’ he said. ‘Melinda attacked me with a pair of clippers, then a man called Mr Shiyarayagan pulled out one of my teeth.’ He opened his mouth to show her the gap. ‘Now I am virtually naked in a public
place for the first time since my school days. Bits of me are just falling off. I am being slowly disassembled. By next week, I will be bereft of any covering at all. I’ll just be bones.’

The left side of his face was slightly swollen and palsied with anaesthetic. His voice was muffled. ‘And I’m sorry I’m so late. It all took so long at the dentist’s. I saw the hygienist, too, who felt that my teeth needed nearly an hour’s worth of her attention.’ He shook his head, disbelievingly. ‘It’s been a very strange week.’

‘Well,’ said Leah, ‘you may as well continue the theme. Jump in!’

‘Oh, God.’ Toby peered at the water. ‘I really… this is just so… I haven’t been in a pool for so long. I mean, maybe I can’t even swim any more?’

‘Of course you can. Come on. Jump in.’

Toby was looking a little bit wobbly. He stood on the side of the pool contemplating the water, swaying slightly.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes,’ he said distractedly. ‘I am. It’s just the air in here, it’s so…
blue
, isn’t it? Doesn’t it make you feel light-headed?’

‘No,’ laughed Leah.

‘You’re probably used to it. It must be the chlorine. Or something. I have to say, I’m feeling really a bit odd.’ He took a step closer to the edge and closed his eyes. He swayed unsteadily to the left, then he swayed unsteadily to the right. Then his entire being, all six foot
something of it, swayed forwards, poker straight and head first into the shallow end of the pool.

‘Oh, my God, Toby!’ Leah watched in horror as a thin plume of red ribboned its way up to the surface of the pool. Toby’s body lay motionless on the bottom of the pool. The lifeguard blew a whistle and people started running towards them. Leah hooked her arms under Toby’s armpits and brought him to the surface. ‘Oh, shit, Toby, are you OK?’

His eyes were closed and he had a large gash above his right eye. An elderly man appeared at Leah’s side and helped her pull him from the pool. Leah scrambled out of the water and pushed her way to Toby through a cluster of people. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, pushing past the lifeguard. ‘I’m a qualified first-aider.’ Toby was unconscious and bleeding profusely. She tipped his head backward and pinched his nose. Then she pulled his lips apart and brought her mouth down over his, to apply the kiss of life. Someone had pressed a towel to his forehead and someone else was calling an ambulance. Leah pushed her hands against Toby’s chest, then blew into his mouth again. Still he didn’t breathe. Still he didn’t open his eyes.

‘Here,’ said the lifeguard, pulling her back by the shoulder, ‘please get out of the way.’

‘No!’ Leah pulled away from him and continued pumping. Finally, as she took her mouth away from his for the fourth time, Toby coughed. Leah rocked back onto her heels and exhaled, heavily. There was an audible sigh of relief from the crowd of onlookers. Toby
coughed again and this time a fountain of chlorinated water left his mouth. The third time he coughed, he vomited, copiously, all down his chest and onto the tiled floor. The crowd of onlookers inched back.

Toby opened his eyes and looked straight at Leah. Then he looked round at the sea of faces. Then he sat up. ‘Leah,’ he croaked, looking at her in awe. ‘Did I just drown?’

‘Yes,’ she nodded.

‘But you saved me?’

She nodded again.

He touched his fingertips to his temple. ‘Am I bleeding?’

‘Uh-huh. There’s an ambulance coming.’

‘Oh, God, what’s going on, Leah? What’s happening to me?’

‘It’s fine,’ she soothed. ‘You’ll be fine. Do you think you can stand up?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘No. I don’t know. Do you think I should try?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, God,’ he said, glancing at the floor. ‘Oh, God. There’s sick everywhere. Did I do that?’

‘Yup.’

‘Oh, how disgusting. I’m so sorry. Did you have to kiss me, with, you know,
sick
on me?’

She smiled and helped him to his feet. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you did that after I kissed you.’

‘Oh, thank God.’ He took the bloodied towel from the man who’d been holding it against his head. ‘Thank
you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, everybody. And I’m really sorry,’ he said to the lifeguard, ‘about the mess.’ His foot hit a slippery patch of sick and he skidded slightly as they moved towards the changing rooms. He clung on to Leah, his bare skin against hers. She pulled him towards her by the waist and was struck by the feel of his flesh under her hands. It felt so hard, so vital, compared to Amitabh’s softly upholstered body. She thought fleetingly of the hundreds of times she’d glimpsed Toby’s backlit form in the window of his bedroom, of the occasional sightings of him on the street, bundled up in peculiar clothes, strange hats, an abundance of hair and layers and coverings. Even in the summer he covered his legs, his arms, his head. It was oddly gratifying, almost
thrilling
, to see him unwrapped, stripped bare of his hair, his clothes, his dignity. It made him real, not just another character in her own personal soap opera, but a
man
.

Someone retrieved Toby’s clothes from the changing rooms and they sat together in reception, waiting for the ambulance.

‘You’ll need stitches in that,’ said Leah, peering underneath the bloodstained towel.

‘Ah, well,’ said Toby wryly, ‘that just caps off my week, I suppose.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ said Leah. ‘I feel really guilty.’

‘Oh, no.’ He looked at her in concern. ‘Really, you mustn’t feel guilty.’

‘Well, I do. It was my idea for you to come swimming.
And now you’re injured. You could have
died
in there, Toby.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s entirely my fault. I had tequila for breakfast…’

‘You didn’t?!’

‘Yes. I’m ashamed to admit that I did. Not because I have a drink problem because, really, if I have any drink problem at all, it’s that I don’t drink
enough
. Although from my recent appearances you’d probably find that hard to believe. And then God knows what they gave me at the dentist. Gas and air and drugs and…’ He shuddered. ‘I was a fool to come. But I’ve just been looking forward so much to seeing you…’