Charlotte Street (4 page)

‘I probably meant he’s popular, and I’m not to everyone’s taste, especially if they’re health-conscious, and—’

‘That’s not what you meant, is it?’

There was something else behind the coldness, now. Anger? No. What was it? It was resignation. It was like she just couldn’t be bothered any more.

‘Grow up, Jason,’ she said. ‘Find someone else. Anyone else. Move out of that rancid flat – it’s next to a brothel for God’s sake – and move on.’

‘It’s not—’

‘Don’t call me.’

Click.

I listened to the silence for a moment, and then sat up.

‘It’s not a brothel,’ I said.

My head had started to pound, and I checked my phone for dialled calls. I hadn’t made any. I hadn’t phoned her at all. I knew it.

Hey, maybe she was mental. Maybe Gary had turned her mental. That’d be great, if Gary had turned her mental. Then who’d be right? Me, or her friends? Those same friends writing with such casual abandon about how happy they are for them both, about what a great bloke Gary is, about how well-suited and perfectly-matched they are, about …

I stopped.

The faintest glimmer of a hint of a rumour of a memory.

No.

Please, no.

I made it out of bed and stumbled to the laptop. I could see it already.

Whoops.

‘“Whoops” doesn’t seem to quite cut it,’ said Dev, wisely.

He was wearing his
Earthworm Jim
T-shirt and tucking into a full English and a foreign Coke at the café down the road.

‘Nope,’ he said, shaking his head and smiling. ‘“Whoops” is not in any way the appropriate response in this situation.’

He was right. I thought about what I’d done.

I’d carefully and passionately annotated around fourteen online engagement photographs in all, each of which was, in my drunken state, presumably of Wildean splendour and Fry-like wit. I’d presumably thought I sounded sharp, incisive and intelligent. I now realised, in the cold light of day, I sounded more like a tramp banging on the window of Currys.

‘Ah, look,’ said Dev. ‘How many people would’ve seen it? Really?’

‘Everyone. Everyone who looked at their pictures. Her friends, my friends,
our
friends.’

Dev nodded thoughtfully and shrugged it off.

‘Her family. Her many and various colleagues.’

He looked a little more concerned now.

‘
Gary’s
friends.
Gary’s
family.
Gary’s
many and various colleagues.’

‘Right …’

‘Distant relatives. People they haven’t seen in twenty-five years but sat next to in maths. Randoms. Michael Fish.’

‘Michael Fish? The weatherman?’

‘Michael Fish the weatherman, yeah. He plays golf with Gary’s dad.’

‘Well, let’s not worry about Michael Fish the weatherman. I’m sure Michael Fish the weatherman wouldn’t think twice about it.’

I had a sudden flashback and felt my ego shrink to the size of a peanut.

Gary’s face. Gary’s beaming face, so full of joy, so delighted that the woman of his dreams had said yes, the happiest picture he’d ever taken, and underneath it, my name and a picture of me with two thumbs up, next to the words:
HI! I GARY, STUPID MAN’D FACE WHO LIKE A BAD n BORING PIZZA
…
WILL YOU MARRY AND WE CAN ATE PIZZA BUT BAD ONE!!????

Christ.

Stupid Man’d Face?

I shuddered, and took a sip of tea. Dev’s eyes lit up. Not because I was sipping tea – he’s seen me do that before and not even commented – but because the waitress was here. The same waitress he tries to impress
every
time we’re here. Because yes – as we’ve established – there’s
always
a girl.

‘
Dobranoc!
’ he shouted, suddenly. ‘Jak
si masz?
’

The waitress gave him a half-smile and said something back, quietly, and waited for an answer, but Dev didn’t have one, so just stared at her.

Unlikely as it seems, she wandered off again.

‘This is good,’ I said. ‘Eventually, you’ll build up to an actual exchange.’

‘Shouldn’t have worn this T-shirt,’ said Dev, kicking himself. ‘Should’ve worn the
Street Fighter
one.’

He watched her walk away.

‘Whoops,’ I said.

Here’s the thing.

I’ve got absolutely nothing against Gary. He is a perfectly nice, perfectly ordinary man. And I can say that, having met him. An awkward and unexpected encounter at a mutual friend’s birthday, during which I’d behaved impeccably, even made a joke or two, but we could see in each other’s eyes we weren’t supposed to be talking; this wasn’t natural.

If I was still a teacher, I guess I’d mark him like this:

You see? Nice guy. Perfectly nice, perfectly good.

But that’s what annoyed me, I guess. This idea that, ‘He’s okay, he’s good enough, he’ll do’. There was no spark, no light. No stand-out trait. And as I stood there at that party, and looked at him, and at Sarah, over his shoulder, pretending she hadn’t noticed that we were talking and that this was a perfectly normal thing for twenty-first-century grown-ups to deal with, I thought: where’s the magic?

The magic had been there when
we
met, Sarah.

The bar neither of us had been to before. The walk down the South Bank under an almost-full moon. The old lady on the nightbus who asked how long we’d been married. The number you gave me on your doorstep, the call five minutes later from the phonebox at the end of your street, the cheese on toast and wine in your kitchen, the kiss, the next kiss, the promise we made that one day we’d track down that mad old woman and invite her to our wedding.

Okay. Maybe not real magic. Maybe the moon could have been more full, and we could have found something other than cheese on toast, and maybe our teeth shouldn’t have clashed the second time we kissed, but magic enough for me, Sarah. And I thought magic enough for you. That’s a real start to a relationship. A story. What have you and Gary got?

You met at a company away day. You were in the same teambuilding exercise. You got drunk in a Hilton near a motorway. Two months later, due to corporate restructuring, Gary was relocated from Stevenage. You met at seven, you were both on time, and you went to an All Bar One and then a Pizza Express. The next day, Gary helped you get a better deal on a second-hand Golf. Now you’re engaged.

Well, good God, Sarah, I hope you sold the film rights.

But no. That’s all fine. And yes. I’m being an idiot.

But I wanted the beginning to be strong enough to get us to the end, Sarah, and you should have wanted that too. Neither of us should have to settle for a Margherita.

And so, to work.

London Now
is the freesheet I told you about earlier – a kind of
Metro
or
London Paper
, but this one packed to the brim with reviews of things you can do NOW! or TONIGHT! or TOMORROW! It’s aimed at people who just don’t know what to do with themselves, or who like to impress other people on the tube by turning to the Live In London section and circling avant garde Mexican jazz fusion gigs they’ll never go to, and would mispronounce anyway.

There’s the usual mix of other stuff: news straight from our inbox, horoscopes bought in from some mental with a fax machine in the country, pap pics of pop stars and comics stumbling out of the Groucho or Century, there are On This Days,
and Did You Knows, and I Saw Yous, and other ways to start a sentence no one will ever want to hear you finish.

It’s also doomed. We all know it, but there’s only so much a vanity project can do in a market like this. They’d managed a successful launch in Manchester and simply thought they could add a little London content and start a whole new paper in the capital. It was a little swagger in a knee-deep recession, a bold move with a bit of Russian money behind it, but it was Zoe and the team who now had to deal with it day-to-day.

And God, I just listened to myself. I sound ungrateful. And I think I may be giving you a picture of myself I’m not entirely comfortable with. I enjoy the job when there’s enough of it, I have my savings, and being freelance means I have to turn my hand to anything, but that’s also kind of the problem. I have no speciality. I am not
London
Now’s resident
anything
. I’m just a general reviewer, giving general thoughts to the general public about things in general.

Well, I say ‘general thoughts’. That’s not quite true. These thoughts aren’t my general thoughts. They’re extreme versions. Because you have to have an opinion. Last week, I went to a Persian in Bayswater called Sinbad. I suppose if I was still a teacher, I’d have marked it like this:

But now I can’t get away with that. Now I have to say things like:

You see? Ha ha. I am clever.

More barbed, more cynical, more knowing. And all from a man who once gave himself food poisoning cooking chips.

Zoe loved it. She loves all this kind of stuff. And I guess I do it to impress her a bit. Partly because it means she’ll give me more work, but partly also because it’s nice to impress a girl.

I suppose if I were still a teacher, I would mark her like this:

I’m as guilty of faux-cynicism as anyone, by the way. Although I’d hope it was for a forgivable set of reasons. When me and Sarah were splitting up, I described almost every album I was given for review as trashy or slipshod or synthetic (I know nothing about music, unless you count Hall & Oates). I started writing ‘whom’ instead of ‘who’. When she finally left me, I vented by scowling through screenings and crucifying directors (I know nothing about films, either, apart from
The Shawshank Redemption
, which I
love
, and I quite like Pedro Almodovar, too, but I don’t tell anyone because it makes me sound pompous). The simple truth is, I did not care. Life dictated those reviews, not me.

And today, a hungover day after a horrible night, I guess someone’s in for it.

But whom?

‘Abrizzi’s,’ said Zoe.

She was wearing a black polo neck and those glasses she doesn’t really need but which make her look like she’s some kind of commissioning editor on a metropolitan newspaper. Which she likes to remind me she sort of is. I think secretly she doesn’t like the fact that I knew her at university, when she was
all Longpigs T-shirts and 20/20, a doe-eyed Winona Ryder in Converse.

We’d been close at uni. Talked earnestly about the future and our places in it. Then she’d gone her way, which had earned her a desk and those glasses, and I’d gone mine, which had earned me some bags under my eyes.

‘New Italian place, for the New In Town section. Should be nice for you. You used to say breadsticks were just vegetarian pepperami. Remember those days? When you used to get outraged in the Pizza Hut on Haymarket because you thought that them putting out breadsticks was a conspiracy to fill you up and stop you gorging on the rest of the free buffet?’

I am amazed I never became a celebrity chef.

‘You look dreadful, by the way. And what’s that smell?’

‘It might be blackberries,’ I said, ‘Or nerd. I’ve just had breakfast with a nerd.’

‘It’s not blackberries,’ she said. ‘Must be nerd. How
is
Dev?’

‘More like Dev than ever,’ I said, looking at the printout she’d given me. ‘A restaurant, then. Another restaurant.’

She just smiled. She’d had been good to me, throwing work my way, and I was grateful. One night, when things had been going wrong with Sarah, I’d poured my heart out to my old friend, told her the mistakes I’d made in life, been far too honest and drunk and lost. Told her if only I could start again; if only I had something of my own to shape and shift and mould. Despite everything that had happened since, despite the distance that was now between us, I wanted to do right by her, as she was doing by me.