The Two of Us (22 page)

‘I was planning on going to my parents’,’ she says.

‘I was planning the same. I mean, planning on staying with Dad.’

‘Okay.’

‘What? Okay, you’ll come with me?’

Another sigh. ‘Okay, you go to your dad’s.’

‘On my own?’

Ivy props herself up on her elbows, picks up a glass of water from the bedside table and takes a sip. ‘You’re welcome to come with me.’

‘Does that mean you
want
me to come with you?’

‘Yes. But I don’t mind if you don’t.’

‘Well, I’d
really
like you to come with me,’ I say.

‘Mum and Dad’ll be on their own.’

‘They have each other.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘What about your other brothers?’

Ivy shakes her head. ‘Long flights, big families. It’s only for a couple of days.’

‘One of them’s my birthday.’

‘I know, I’m sorry, but . . . this is the last Christmas before we have the babies. I want to be with my parents. I want to be where I’m comfortable.’

‘As opposed to my dad’s, where you won’t be comfortable?’

Ivy shrugs.
Yes.

‘Charming.’

‘It’s not meant to be charming. I’m not making a big deal about you coming with me, am I?’

‘No.’ And maybe that’s half the problem, maybe I’d be happier if Ivy did make a big deal about it – at least then I’d know she gave a shit about spending some
time with me.

‘We can do your birthday when we get back,’ Ivy says. ‘Just me and . . .’ she trails off.

‘What? Just the two of us? What are we going to do with Frank? Lock him in his room with a bottle of wine and a packet of pretzels?’

‘Shush.’ Ivy frowns, flicks her eyes at the wall separating Frank’s room from ours.

‘Really? Shush? Me shush?’

‘If it’s not too much to ask.’

‘Fine,’ I say, and I turn out the light and drop to my pillow like a sack of dirty laundry.

Approximately thirty seconds later Ivy is breathing the deep slow breaths of someone heavily asleep, and the fact that she can do this while I’m lying here stewing only aggravates me
further. In the next room, Frank creaks out of bed and bumbles into the bathroom for a two-minute piss, straight at the water and with the door wide open. And Ivy has the audacity to shush me. My
dad described being in love as feeling like you’re running as fast as you can. I felt that way with Ivy when we met, and for about two weeks immediately after. But if I’m honest with
myself, lately it feels more like I’m tripping over my feet and that any minute now I might just fall and smash my face into the pavement.

Before this winter, I hadn’t been to the cinema in seventeen years. And here I am for the third time in three weeks. Suzi dips her hand into my popcorn, and I feel an
entirely unjustified pang of guilt.

Yesterday a van arrived from John Lewis, carrying two flat-pack cots, two baby bouncers, two car seats, two Moses baskets, a double buggy, two cuddly elephants and a big box of nipple shields.
The corridor of our flat is now an obstacle course; the utility cupboard is packed to capacity and ready to explode like something from a slapstick comedy. This morning I stubbed my toe on the
boxed buggy underneath the dining table. In a perverse kind of way, I like the clutter; it’s a great big visual reminder that there’s a great big Frank in the room we should be
transforming into a nursery. I stacked the Moses baskets on Ivy’s side of the bed, to make it a little more difficult for her to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And when she
stage-whispered ‘bloody baskets’ at six thirty this morning, I saw bright white subtitles reading ‘Bloody Frank’. I probably should have felt guilty, but beside the cuddly
elephants in the utility cupboard, there is still a big bloody elephant in the room – Christmas is just four days away now, and I still don’t know where I’ll be unwrapping my
presents. And it’s unlikely to get cleared up this evening.

It should be date night tonight, but Ivy is having Christmas drinks with her book club buddies while I eat popcorn in the dark with Suzi.

We met to talk about
Pollock
over lunch. So far Joe has found a director of photography and a soundman, we’ve looked at a couple of locations, briefed a casting director and it
looks like this thing is actually going to happen. Over lunch we talked about the sex scene. It’s going to be tricky for a few reasons. We’ll be shooting on the roof of a four-storey
building in the middle of the night. It will be cold and dark and logistically demanding. Suzi and I discussed in what position, or positions, the lovemaking should happen. Unavoidably perhaps,
subjectivity coloured the conversation with phrases like ‘If it was me . . .’ ‘The way I would . . .’ and ‘I always find . . .’ And then, once we’d
finished our expensive lunch and vicarious sex, Suzi told me we were going ‘on a date’. She said it ironically, but the reality of the afternoon is a little close to the joke and I
don’t plan on telling Ivy about it.

The movie Suzi has taken us to see features almost as much sex and nudity as the DVD behind the wardrobe in Frank’s room. We’ve seen three different couples going at it in a variety
of moods, modes and tempos from slow and tender to fast and nasty, and I’m more than a tiny bit turned on. Take the couple presently banging each other’s brains out of their skulls, for
example. They have worked together for years and they do not like each other; they despise each other, in fact. They have lied, cheated and connived to undermine each other in the workplace and
they are both in line for the same promotion. As the animosity and the stakes rise, the antagonists have each decided they will not leave the office before the other. And so these beautiful lawyers
find themselves alone in an otherwise deserted office at three thirty in the morning. They call a temporary truce, find a couple of cold beers and drink them in front of a huge plate-glass window
overlooking downtown New York. Before the beers are drunk, however, it’s skirt up, trousers down and the duelling lawyers are screwing up against the window eight storeys above the sidewalk.
An exterior shot looking in shows the actress’s buttocks squashed against the glass like a couple of pickled eggs in a jar. The man thrusts with measured, violent strokes, and the impact of
the two bodies against glass reverberates around the empty office like a drum on a Viking longship. The scene is erotic and terrifying in equal measure, delivering a fifty-fifty mixture of arousal
and vertigo. I like it.

Suzi leans towards me and when she whispers in my ear she is close enough that I can smell beer and popcorn on her breath. ‘I don’t know whether to cover my eyes or sit on my
hands.’

I fake a quiet laugh, because I’m not sure how to interpret the comment. Suzi and I met around ten weeks ago and we’ve spent a lot of time together – not all of it talking
about toilet paper or Jackson Pollock. We are amused, entertained and annoyed by the same things, we make each other laugh, and talk about our lives. This afternoon over lunch, Suzi told me she had
split up with her boyfriend. He dumped her, it seems, and I couldn’t help but feel a pang – entirely unbidden – of happiness about it. I’ve never met the guy and know
nothing about him, but the knowledge that Suzi is available appeals to something in my genetic code. She asked how Ivy and the twins were and I told her about our unresolved argument over where to
spend Christmas. I told Suzi about Frank and the strain it’s placing on our domestic bliss.

In the movie, the lawyers are somehow still fucking. They relocate onto a desk – as couples screwing in offices are wont to do – scattering Post-it notes and paperclips all over the
carpet.

I lean across to Suzi. ‘Sit on your hands,’ I tell her, and a twang of something primal thrums between my legs.

Tonight is the Sprocket Hole Christmas party. I don’t want to be here, but Joe insisted. As well as being a chance to get stinking drunk and tell each other how wonderful
we all are, the Christmas party is attended by numerous clients, and the more I schmooze the more I earn in the New Year. It’s past eleven now and the party is showing no signs of slowing
down. I’m all out of schmooze and the drink is turning my stomach.

Yesterday afternoon, after we left the cinema, Suzi and I went on to a wine bar and drank too much. Even so, I was home and in bed before Ivy came back from book club. I don’t know what
time she came home, but she was sleeping beside me when I woke at five thirty with a hangover. I kissed her on the cheek, crept – as I so often do these days – out of bed, dressed in
the hallway, then drove (probably still over the limit) across London to spend the next twelve hours shooting a commercial for tampons. It still took me six Panadol Extra, four Nurofen Express, one
Lemsip and four litres of skinny latte to get me to the final shot and ‘it’s a wrap’. That was three hours ago now, and all I wanted to do was crawl home and pull a pillow over my
head. But instead, I’m trapped inside a Christmas party. I’m hot with fatigue, my headache is still antagonizing me, I have a cloud of mizzly non-specific booze-induced guilt hovering
over me and I miss Ivy.

I summon my final grain of energy, haul myself to my feet and begin the long journey to the exit. Weaving a path of least resistance, detouring away from anyone I recognize, I’m three feet
from the door when Suzi appears before me.

I knew she was here, but Suzi is one of the last people I want to see tonight. We had a great time at the cinema and in the bar yesterday, we laughed, drank and flirted. And although I feel a
little grubby about it, I can live with it. It’s more than that, though. I told Suzi things about Ivy I ought to have kept to myself – I bitched again about Frank and about Christmas, I
told Suzi that Ivy is ten years older than me, I told her Ivy used the toilet with the door open and I told her we hadn’t had sex in four months. And that – these intimate revelations
– feel like a betrayal. I woke up this morning with the memory of that indiscreet tittle-tattle fresh in my mind and it hurt more than my not insignificant hangover. Last night’s
revelation that I had been chaste for four months tugged the conversation into dangerous waters. Sex, albeit in script format, has become a key theme between Suzi and me, and, inevitably, our
exploration of the topic moved from speculation to revelation. We talked about our first times, our best times and worst times. We discussed appetites and skirted around preferences, and in the not
uncomfortable silences in between we regarded each other appraisingly, a raised eyebrow, a pursed smile. I’ve been around enough to know when I’m getting a green light, and at any other
time in my life last night would have ended with me and Suzi in bed or up against a wall in some dark alley. And that knowledge doesn’t make me feel particularly great about myself. We live
at opposite ends of London, but I walked Suzi to her tube stop. Before we kissed good night, we looked at each other for a split second longer than necessary, assessing, maybe, just what kind of
kiss we were puckering up for. Suzi initiated, landing a closed-mouthed kiss on my lips. Not a snog nor anything resembling one, but it was more than a kiss on the cheek. At several points during
the day, as Suzi and I had regarded each other like kittens eyeing balls of wool, or like cats sizing up mice, I wondered not so much what Suzi would be like in bed (I’m confident she’d
be a lot of fun), but what she might be like the morning after, and the morning after that and the day after that. When Suzi laughed and blushed and asked what was I thinking, I said
‘nothing’ in a way that suggested something. What I was thinking – the process influenced by alcohol and lust – was that Suzi and I would be great together.

But as my own tube travelled south, I knew I was wrong. We would throw ourselves into each other, go to bars, meet the friends, maybe spend a weekend away near the sea. And then the novelty
would fade. We would irritate each other, ignore the phone, make excuses and – after one too many goodbye-fucks – move on, with the manner of our break-up vandalizing all the good stuff
that went before. I don’t know how I know, but I do; I’ve been there before and my (smarter) subconscious mind has recognized the signs: the forced laughter, perhaps; the tendency to
egocentricity; the asymmetric ears. Whatever it is, it’s there, under the surface like a nascent zit. As the train approached Wimbledon, my thoughts veered into animosity. Suzi knows very
fucking well that Ivy is pregnant with my twins, and for her to flirt with me the way she undeniably does, to waft the suggestion of sex under my nose . . . well, what does that really say about
her? And the way I lapped it up and played the game and flirted back, what does that say about me?

Ivy and I are squabbling more frequently and with, it seems, deeper irritation. More often than not the catalyst is trivial, and I can’t work out whether that diminishes or compounds the
issue. Everything is out of sequence and it’s skewed my perspective. The business about where to spend Christmas, for example. It’s possible that if Ivy weren’t twenty-one weeks
pregnant, I’d have no problem spending the holiday apart. But, like it or not, we’re a family now and how can you honestly know if you’re meant to be together when circumstance is
dictating terms? And being with Suzi only seems to blur the distinction. So, yeah, she’s pretty much the last person I want to talk to tonight. But here she is, standing before me and
blocking my exit from this festive free-for-all.

‘Sneaking off?’ she says.

‘Long day,’ I say.

‘How was the shoot?’

‘Uninspiring.’ And I’m not being truculent on purpose, but really, what else is there to say about it?

Suzi looks a little unsettled by my demeanour. ‘Fair enough,’ she says, and passes me a small present wrapped in Jackson Pollock-style wrapping paper. ‘Happy
Christmas.’

And don’t I feel like a dick.

‘I didn’t get you anything. I’m sorry. I’ve been . . . you know.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Suzi says. ‘It’s only a book.’ And she balances on tiptoes and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Happy Christmas, yeah.’