After the Party (3 page)

Jem slowed her pace and let him walk ahead of her. She realized she was slightly breathless, a fluttering of panic in the pit of her belly. He'd seen her, she knew that. He knew that she'd seen him. They were now ignoring each other. Maybe he felt it too, she wondered, maybe he felt the danger of the two of them being free to . . . Free to what, exactly? She was as good as married. They were parents. What was she afraid of? She stared at the back of his head on the escalator and tried to imagine what would happen if she caught up with him at the bottom. What would she say? “Hi! Look at us! No kids!” Then what? A train had just pulled in as she approached the platform and she ran for it, forgetting momentarily about the man called Joel ahead of her and there he was, as she shot through the doors, glanced around for a spare seat. He was already seated, surrounded by spare seats, but she turned the other way, squeezed herself between two men, pulled a paperback out of her handbag, pretended to read it. It was a stupid book; her sister had forced it on her just now. On the cover was a photograph of a young woman in flimsy clothes, lying in long silky grass, looking forlorn and possibly recently abused. It had a silly title too.
Forgetting Amber
. Still, it was better than staring at the ads, or the ridges in the floor. She glanced surreptitiously at Joel. He was reading a freebie paper. He knew she was there. She knew he was there. They were still ignoring each other.

She imagined another conversation, the one they'd have at the swings, or outside Pizza Express in a few days' time. “So,” he'd say, “I saw you on the underground the other day. How come you didn't say hello?” And she would blush and then decide to be truthful. “I didn't say hello,” she'd say, “because I find you attractive. And if I'd said hello, we might have started talking and if we'd started talking I might have found that you were
dull, or stupid, or unappealing in some way, and then I wouldn't be able to find you attractive anymore. Or worse still, we might have started talking and discovered that we didn't want to stop talking. We might have made a connection and I am not free to make a connection. Do you see?” “Oh,” he would say and smile, his cheeks coloring slightly. “Yes. I see.” And hopefully that would be enough to explain, to ensure that he never spoke to her again.

The man called Joel did not, as she'd predicted, get off at Victoria, nor at Green Park, nor at Oxford Circus. The spaces between stops felt interminable. She read the opening line of the silly book around twenty to thirty times.
Please get off this train
, she chanted to herself,
please get off, I need to breathe
. But the longer he stayed on the train the more convinced she became that this meant something, this coincidence, this proximity, and when the tube pulled into Warren Street and the man called Joel rolled up his freebie paper and sauntered toward the doors, Jem knew it. This was her stop. It was also his stop. Something was going to happen. She slid the silly book into her handbag and got to her feet.

R
alph felt the emptiness of the house and it chilled him. This wasn't the same emptiness that he felt when Jem and the kids were out; this was a different emptiness. Today, for the first time in a very long time, his family was disparate. Scarlett was at nursery, Blake was at Lulu's and Jem was off to a business meeting somewhere in central London. She'd left the house half an hour ago in heels and tailoring, her scruffy curls tightly secured in clips and bands, her lips painted vermilion. It was her, the other Jem, the Jem who didn't wander in and out of the house all day in well-worn skinny jeans and scuffed Converse sneakers, lugging shopping-laden strollers behind her, smelling of milk and Johnson's wipes. From the studio window, he'd watched her and the baby leave, and it looked as if she were stealing their baby, that petite, elegant woman in tartan and heels an inch too tall for her. And then they'd turned the corner and suddenly he was alone.

Rather than feeling liberated by this open expanse of solitude, Ralph felt distracted by it and immediately put down his paintbrush and headed for the tiny balcony off his studio to smoke a cigarette. The balcony had been added when the previous owners had converted the loft into a studio space and it had always seemed unpleasantly flimsy to Ralph, a few pieces of metal bolted together with oversized wing nuts, barely seeming
strong enough to hold his weight. Whenever he stood on it he subconsciously held on to the wall with his left hand, as if, in the event of the balcony's finally giving way under his feet and hurtling three storeys to the patio below, he would somehow be able to embed his fingers into the brickwork, where he would dangle, Harold Lloyd–like, until his rescuers arrived.

The balcony overlooked the garden, a typical south London patch of land the shape of an A5 envelope and not much bigger. The beginning of March was not a happy time for gardens. The grass was mulchy, the neglected plastic toys that littered the decking and the lawn were tinged green and the swing under the apple tree swung forlornly back and forth in a chilly breeze. Beyond their small garden, Ralph could see more terraces, more sad gardens, a school playground and the fire escapes skirting the roofs of the parade of shops around the corner. He could be anywhere, he thought desolately, absolutely anywhere. He might as well be in the suburbs. All that effort, all that money, all that saving and searching and financing and settling and this was it: a three-bed terrace in the back end of Herne Hill, a view of nothing, a scrap of grass, a dangerous dangly balcony.

He sucked the last dregs from the end of his cigarette and brought it back inside, where he let it drop into a jar of brown water on the windowsill. The email was still open on his computer. It had arrived this morning, from California, from Smith, his oldest friend.

“It is 81 degrees today and I am off to the beach. Wanna come??”

It was meant as a joke, just a throwaway line to rub Ralph's face in the fact that while he was trapped in a loft in south London on a dreary Wednesday morning, Smith, tanned and lean, was jogging past girls with augmented breasts and minimal
pubic hair along vast expanses of creamy beach. It wasn't supposed to be an invitation, but every time Ralph looked at it, it seemed more and more as if it should be. And now, seeing Jem leaving the nest, taking her baby bird to be looked after by someone else, wearing high heels, it seemed a phase of his life had just drawn to a close. They could be separate now. They could be apart. For the past seven years Ralph and Jem had been bound together by trying to get pregnant, by miscarriages, by more trying, then, finally, by babies and breastfeeding schedules and now that glue was starting to unstick. They'd finished. They were fragmenting. He could go.
He could go
.

He paused, questioning the quiet euphoria that suffused his body as he thought of escape. Did that mean he was unhappy?
Could
he be unhappy? He had it all. He had Jem, he had two beautiful children, a house, a career.

He looked at himself in the mirror that was bolted above the paint-splattered sink in the corner of his studio. He looked okay. Considering he was forty-two. Considering he barely saw the sun these days. Considering he hadn't had a holiday in two years. Considering he smoked thirty cigarettes a day. Considering he hadn't had sex for nearly seven months. He looked okay.

What had he thought forty-two would be like? How had he pictured it? He'd assumed there would be a wife, that there would be children. And he'd assumed that both the wife and the children would be beautiful, of course he had; who dreams of an ugly family? He might not have predicted, though, that he would still be painting. His career had always been precarious, a little like his balcony, a funny, rickety old thing, not to be trusted. The fact that he would be making a living from oil and canvas would have been surprising to him. Less surprising would have been the extent of that living: enough for mortgage
repayments, for nursery fees, for car repairs and grocery deliveries, enough for birthday dinners in smart restaurants, enough for Diesel jeans and Monsoon baby clothes and proper cigarettes and a cab home after a night out.

But still, not enough.

Eleven years ago Ralph's star had risen. Eleven years ago all his dreams had come true one icy March night, in an art gallery in Notting Hill. Ralph had declared his undying love to his soul mate and been acclaimed a star. Eleven years ago Ralph had felt it—something that most people never get to feel—the sharp punch of success. The girl of his dreams! His! The respect of his peers! Goal!

Now he was just a man with a family who painted pictures for middle-class people who couldn't afford real art.

He heard the stillness of the house again; it came to him ominously, like the barely audible rumble of a faraway train. He looked around his studio, at the half-finished canvases, the uninspiring hands and faces and still lifes of poppies and daisies, the same safe ground, trodden over again and again because it paid the mortgage.

He sighed and decided to go to the gym.

•  •  •

The gym.

This was not a place that Ralph ever imagined he would have cause to haunt.

But he was here today, not for calorie-burning or muscle-toning, just for the background noise. He wanted to move among other human beings, in a coolly detached way, wanted to smell their smells and overhear their mobile phone conversations and watch their bodies moving in time to some unheard music. He wanted to be part of something, even if it was just midmorning at a slightly grubby gym in south London.

He picked a treadmill that was comfortably apart from other exercisers and hung his towel over the handle. He typed in the settings, stumbling for a moment as he always did over the number 42 when asked to input his age—really, it seemed so unnaturally old—and then he started to walk. He'd forgotten his earphones so had to make do with watching the screens overhead silently. Screen one showed an R&B video; three sphinxlike women in red hot pants and bandeau tops, gyrating, pursing full lips, passing hands across taut bellies. Ralph watched for a while, wondering why every time he came here a woman under the age of thirty wearing hardly any clothes was gyrating unsmilingly on that screen. Every single time. Ralph thought of Scarlett, imagined her here beside him watching that screen, her pale jaw hanging slightly open as it always did when she watched TV. What would her small, spongelike brain make of these women, impossibly engineered, humorless, characterless, thrusting, shining statues, imploring the world to buy some man's music with every flick of their hips? And if Scarlett was to watch her, and women like her, all day long, what would she learn of womanhood, what would she think of musicianship, what would it say to her about fame?

Ralph shook his head sadly and glanced at the next screen. A real-life action show: paramedics prising a middle-aged man out of an accordioned car. His head was held in place with a plastic neck brace, his nose and mouth covered with an oxygen mask. His eyes flicked from side to side as he allowed a man in a fluorescent jacket to gently pull him away from beneath his bent steering wheel. A few moments before, he had been a bloke driving somewhere, who knew where, to buy cigarettes, to work, to pick up a new bit for his power drill? Now he was trussed up inside a written-off car, about to spend the day, at the very least, in hospital, all the while being filmed by a man with a
camera, to be broadcast on national television. How much more surprising and unsettling a turn could a normal day take? Ralph knew that the man was alive and well because they kept cutting to clips of him in a studio, reliving his nightmare to an off-screen interviewer, but still, thought Ralph, an ordinary life, touched forever, never to be the same again.

In contrast, screen three showed a series of slightly overweight models parading up and down a tacky TV studio in “outsize” clothes. Ralph wasn't sure where he stood on the subject of overweight models. Or overweight women in general, really. Try as he might to be piously PC about the whole thing, he couldn't quite get beyond thinking that women that shape generally looked better in corsets and French knickers than they did in tailored trousers and natty waistcoats. But he did know that the pompous little man officiously directing the big women up and down the studio floor as if his job were on a par with oncology would probably have benefited from an unforeseen car crash and a little new perspective on his existence.

On the fourth screen there was a news report from somewhere in Middle America, square-faced men and women with signs, lambasting pissed-off-looking people in cars for not adhering to some scripture or other that governed their lives. Their faces were hard with blind belief, their mouths were oblongs of disregard for other people's values. The people in the cars batted them away as if they were wasps bothering their lunch. How could the people with the signs possibly believe that these actions would lead to any more believers? How could they not know that all they were bringing about with their shouting and their bombast and their ugly talk of Christ and saved souls was repulsion?

Ralph looked around him at the sparsely occupied
gymnasium. Were there believers in here? he wondered. Were any of these normal-looking men and women likely to pick up a sign on a Saturday morning and yell at people for not seeing the world the same way they did? He glanced again at the screens overhead, at the thrusting women in red, the broken man in the broken car, the larger ladies in the frumpy clothes and then once more at the angry Americans with their signs, and for a second it hit him, somewhere round the side of his head, a shocking thought:
What if they were right?

What if those Americans were right?

What if there was a God? What if his son had saved all our souls? What if religion were true? Would it make sense of all the nonsense in the world? All the flukes, all the coincidences, all the miscarriages and car crashes and people worrying about being fat? Where, he wondered, did all that belief come from? It had to come from somewhere? It had to have some substance, surely?