Ralph's Party (5 page)

'Helo, Pete.'

She surveyed the trays of ducks' feet and pigs' ears, the yards of shiny lilac intestines, the hunks of glistening white fat and rows of pink trotters.

Til have a pound of chicken breast, please, with the skins off.'

'What are you cooking tonight, then?' he asked. He always wanted to know what she was cooking.

'Oh, just a Thai Green Curry.'

'Making your own paste, are you?'

'Of course,' she smiled. 'Don't I always?'

Thin slices?'

'Yes, please.'

'Who's the lucky dinner-guest tonight then?' he asked, deftly slicing through the pink meat with a lethal-looking knife.

'New flatmates — I'm trying to make a good impression.'

Jem took the chicken and put it in her basket. Who knows where the chickens from which these breasts had been wrenched came from? There was no handy label explaining their origin, no soft white-paper duvet for the breasts to rest on as they traveled from supermarket shelf to the purchaser's fridge. They were anonymous, and Jem felt that bit more adventurous for choosing them from among the gory remnants which other supermarkets would never put on view.

The shop was crowded, ful of Chinese locals buying food for supper, of souschefs from Chinatown restaurants picking up an extra sack of rice or two for the evening rush, of tourists just looking, and amateurs. Amateurs were people who liked the atmosphere but didn't know what to buy, and their baskets invariably held a couple of packets of twenty-five-pence instant noodles, a jar of oyster sauce and a can of something preposterous like Squid in Malaysian Curry Sauce that Jem knew would end up in the bin because it stood to reason that squid in a can would be disgusting. Jem always felt a rather nasty sense of superiority as her basket went through the check-out in front of an amateur, feeling proud of her bunches of fragrant fresh coriander, packets of glossy green lime leaves, cans of creamy coconut milk, spindly sprays of lemongrass and hairy bunches of rose-pink shalots.

She looped her carrier bags over her wrists and headed for Shaftesbury Avenue. The sky was darkening to a deep plummy shade of black and the streets of Soho were assuming the night-time air of temptation and provocation that always excited her. She glimpsed the animated faces of couples over pints in pub windows, absorbed and stimulated even on a Monday night by the conversation and facial expressions of their obviously new-found love, and she felt lonely for a moment, until she remembered where she was going and the romantic potential that lay ahead.

Smith couldn't tel whether Jem was a wine girl or a beer girl so he picked up both. Maybe she didn't drink at al — he grabbed a bottle of Perrier. He was in the vintner's around the corner from his office in Liverpool

Street. 'Vintner's.' The City was just as pretentious as the West End in some ways, with its fake antiquity and overblown traditions.

What was wrong with caling it an off-licence, for Christ's sake?

He took his purchases to the recently distressed mahogany counter and a traditional shopkeeper wearing a deep-green cotton apron and steel-framed glasses zapped them through the til with an olde-worlde barcode gun. Smith realized he was in a bad mood. He almost threw his card at the unfortunate vintner and bristled with unnecessary impatience as he roled the bottles in tissue paper and put them into a bag. The copper bel on a spring which rang as he closed the door behind him irritated him.

He walked across Finsbury Circus noticing how cold it was and thinking how it had seemed like only days ago that he had sat here basking in his shirtsleeves watching old farts playing bowls in his lunch hour. He was always much happier in the summer.

He wished that Jem wasn't cooking tonight. He realy wasn't in the mood to be pleasant and interested and conversational, he just wanted to sit in front of the television and have a big fat spliff and a lager and not talk to anyone. He was aware that this was exactly why he had decided that a flatmate would be a good idea in the first place, but just not tonight, that's al. Tomorrow night would be fine.

The presentation would be finished by then, James would be off his back and he would probably have bought a bottle of champagne and a bunch of flowers to celebrate, and Jem would have been impressed by how friendly he was, how amusing and how sincere in his appreciation of the great effort she had made to cook them this meal. Just not tonight.

Smith arranged his briefcase and bag in one hand to grab the escalator rail with his other as he descended into Liverpool Street station. He took large confident strides and fumed as someone in front of him, a tourist who obviously had absolutely no understanding of escalator etiquette on the Underground, came to a halt.

'Excuse me, please,' he muttered huffily. The tourist turned and shuffled into the space to the right good-naturedly, apologizing with a smile. Smith felt guilty for a second, thinking of the times he had been a tourist himself.

He sweated on the Circle line, feeling irritated by every other person in the carriage with him — they were too smely, too noisy, too close, too tal, too fat, holding too much newspaper or just offensively unattractive. Smith had fantasies about embedding pickaxes into their skuls.

He wondered what he and Ralph and Jem were going to talk about that evening over supper. As he thought about it, it occurred to him how little he knew about Jem. He'd avoided talking to her whenever possible and didn't even know how old she was, where abouts in London she worked, whether or not she had a boyfriend - for some reason he found himself hoping that she didn't — al he knew was that she had a name nearly as sily as his, she liked honey in her tea, she drove a horrible Austin Alegro and she was realy quite attractive. Not a Cheri, of course, not a magnificent specimen of wel-toned, shiny, angelic goldenness like Cheri. But she was approachably pretty, smal and sexy and sort of fluffy, like a proper girl. She had a sweet, unthreatening voice and she never wore trousers -

Smith respected that in a woman. But for some reason, he had no idea why, she made him feel uncomfortable.

The doors of the Tube train opened at Sloane Square and Smith tumbled out of the carriage gratefuly, glad to breathe in the fresh, crisp night air. When he'd first bought the flat in Battersea, eight years ago, Smith had got a real kick out of alighting at Sloane Square. After al, the plebs waiting for friends and dates outside the station weren't to know that he didn't live in SW3, as he breezed past them swinging his briefcase confidently down the King's Road.

He couldn't give a toss now what anyone thought. He was way past that sort of immature posing and knew that nobody waiting outside the station even noticed him, let alone gave a shit about where he lived.

The flower stand outside the station caught his attention - it looked brave and colourful against the now almost leafless, grey October backdrop of Sloane Square and he decided that he would buy some flowers for Jem after al. She was paying for dinner and he didn't suppose she had much money. He selected three fat posies of peonies, bright and unpretentious — he didn't want it to look like a come-on.

The act of buying the flowers seemed to trigger a calming chemical in his brain and he felt his mood improve as he boarded the bus, flashed his pass at the driver and took his usual seat at the back.

As the bus passed over Battersea Bridge and filed with the glow of the pomegranate sunset filtering through the birthday-cake lights of Albert Bridge, Smith felt a smal rush of euphoria. He alowed himself a little smile, and began to look forward to the novelty of a home-cooked meal and a conversation with a pretty girl.

As usual, Siobhan had eaten by the time Karl got home after his Ceroc class. Siobhan had gone with him when he first started teaching. She would don one of her old fifties dresses bought from Kensington Market and fil it out with frothy petticoats, slide on some ruby-red lipstick and black eyeliner, put her hair up in a pony-tail, and the two of them would get into the black Embassy and drive down to the Sol y Sombra feeling like Natalie Wood and James Dean. But when they got Rosanne she felt guilty about leaving her on her own five nights a week and had gradualy stopped going. And these days she wouldn't be able to fit into any of her old dresses anyway.

Now she would watch Karl as he slicked Black and White gel through his black curls and slid into his peg trousers and genuine Hawaian shirt, looking, apart from a little less hair along his hairline, exactly as he'd looked fifteen years ago. He was a briliant dancer and an even better teacher; some of his ex-pupils had gone on to teach their own classes. He was always much in demand at weddings and parties because he made women look and feel as if they could dance.

'Has someone else moved in downstairs?' he asked, unlacing his worn but shiny brogues. 'There was a girl in the kitchen just now when I walked past, cooking.'

'Was she smal and dark?'

Tes.'

'I've seen her coming in and out al week. She must be a new flatmate or something.'

Karl wandered into the kitchen and put his arms around Siobhan's substantial waist and his chin on her shoulder. She reached back to ruffle his hair and realized, too late, that it was Ceroc night.

'Eugh, I've got Black and White al over my hands. Yuck!' She made a dash for the tap. Karl slapped her bottom gently.

As he left the room, the smile disappeared from his face. He sat down on the sofa, and put his head in his hands. He could hear Siobhan next door, singing softly as she washed her hands. Her voice was gentle and melodic. She sounded like a little girl, an innocent little girl. He wanted to cry. He wished he was on his own so that he could sob and sob until his heart broke. He had been robbed, robbed of his baby. It had been taken away from him without his permission, without his knowledge.

Just one floor away, in the flat upstairs, his baby had been growing and breathing and sleeping in Cheri's womb, a mass of cels the size of a fingernail, with eyes and feet and thumbs, carrying in it the strands of his DNA, of his black curly hair and his bad temper in the mornings and his funny big toes, and she'd kiled it without even thinking to mention it to him.

The fact that she'd ended their affair today, casualy, over pan-fried scalops with lime juice and fresh coriander, meant nothing.
Cheri
meant nothing to him, except hair and sex and a dancing partner.

But she'd kiled his baby and she realy didn't seem to care. He'd looked at her cold and untroubled face — she'd seemed more concerned with the texture of her scalops than the' murder she'd committed - and he'd hated her, realy, realy hated her.

'One in three pregnancies ends in miscarriage, you know, it's not such a big deal. It could have just died anyway and you'd never have known, neither of us would ever have known,' she'd explained wearily, as if she had to explain away an abortion to some distraught, cheated-out-of-fatherhood ex-lover every lunchtime.

'And what would you have said to Siobhan anyway? "Oh, darling, you know that girl who lives upstairs, that one you don't like, wel, I've been fucking her and guess what? Marvelous news, she's pregnant." Yes, I'm sure dear, fat, barren Shuv would have been
very
pleased for you.' She'd arched her perfect eyebrows impatiently and turned to inform a passing waiter that her scalops were too tough, and would he mind bringing her a linguine with chili and clams?

Karl had no idea what he would have said to Siobhan had circumstances been otherwise; practicalities were not prevalent in his helter-skelter thought processes — al he could think about was the fact that his chance had gone. His baby had been in a womb.

Suppose he and Siobhan had been so desperate for a child that they'd gone to a surrogate mother — it would stil have been his sperm, another woman's egg, another woman's womb — what was the difference? He had about as much feeling for Cheri as a plastic syringe would have.

As he sat listening to Siobhan preparing his dinner in the next room, remembering the pain on her face when she'd been told at the age of twenty-one that she was infertile, that she'd never be able to have a baby,

he vowed he'd have his revenge. He wasn't sure how he'd do it, but when the opportunity arose, he would make Cheri feel bad, as bad as he felt now.

Smith hadn't known whether to laugh or cry al day. He'd had two hours' sleep, eight cans of lager and two tequilas the night before and now it was Tuesday and he only had another couple of hours to complete the presentation that his financial PR company was putting together for one of the largest banks in the country. The office was in a state of complete panic and James was being more painful than Smith could have ever thought possible. He was usualy an unruffled, dignified sort of a chap, who prided himself on his elegance, but when the heat was on, the loose brush of silvery hair that usualy covered his balding skul stood upright, his silk tie refused to sit in a neat vertical line and smal wet patches appeared under the arms of his Jermyn Street shirt.

His face was florid now, and he was shouting at Diana to 'Open some fucking windows in here! It smels like a Bedouin fucking-tent.' Diana, who hated working and was waiting for her pink-faced jelybaby of a boyfriend to propose and alow her to live the life of leisure she felt she deserved, had reached breaking-point half an hour ago and was about to cry.

Smith moved back to his desk and looked at his screen. He'd written one line of the proposal so far, 'Quirk & Quirk is one of the City's longest established PR houses with a reputation for ...', and it sat on the screen now, reminding him vindictively of his hungover state, mocking him for being so irresponsible, daring him, chaleng-ing him to write another line without thinking about last night.

Smith felt his bowels begin to move. He picked up a copy of
PR

Week,
and checking that James wasn't watching his every move, as he tended to do when he was in a panic, he walked towards the toilets.

Sitting in the shiny white cubicle staring blankly at the magazine on his lap, his reflections on the previous evening persisted. What a night, what a completely unexpected night. And what a mess. He put his face into his hands and smoothed back his thick hair with his palms, enjoying the feeling of the skin on his face stretching taut.