Vince and Joy (36 page)

‘Fair enough,’ said Jon, ‘I totally understand, I really do. I just think it’s fantastic. I’m so excited for you guys. Little Jessie, going to be a mummy’ He beamed at Jess and she beamed at him. ‘No one deserves it more than you.’ And then they suddenly swooped on each other and hugged for a full twenty seconds.

‘Oh, Jon,’ said Jess, her arms circled loosely round his waist, ‘it’s so good to have you here.’

‘It’s so good to be here.’ He kissed her on the forehead, then hugged her again. They both made squeezy bear-hug noises while Vince stood and watched, feeling completely excess to requirements.

‘Promise me you’ll never go away again.’

‘Ah, now. You know I can’t promise that. But I do promise not to leave it so long between visits next time.’

‘That’ll do for now,’ she smiled, and pulled away from him, but not before tapping him lightly on the bum with the palm of her hand.

Vince cleared his throat, not to draw attention to himself, but out of sheer embarrassment. He felt like he was watching young lovers. He felt like he should excuse himself from the room. Instead, he fell to the sofa and picked up a copy of Jon’s in-flight magazine.

‘How was your, er… flight?’ he managed, flicking mindlessly through the thick, glossy pages.

‘Good,’ said Jon, joining him on the sofa, ‘yeah. Not bad. Bit of turbulence coming in, but otherwise it was cool.’

‘Virgin any good?’ he asked, pointing at the magazine. He didn’t know why he’d asked this, had no idea whatsoever. He had no intention of flying anywhere any time soon, but the image of Jess’s hand on Jon’s arse was stuck in his mind like a paused video and he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘great. Upper Class – not first class as such, more like business, but pretty good value for money, I thought.’

Vince gulped. Jon was the kind of guy who flew first class as a matter of course. He’d feared as much. He’d suspected that that casual, understated lambswool sweater had a glimmer of something expensive about it, that those worn-out combats weren’t from Gap. And that tiny silver hoop in his left lobe was starting to look more and more platinum by the minute.

He was working-class boy made good.

He was handsome and rich and successful.

He was warm and friendly and confident.

He was everything that Vince wasn’t. And everything that he wanted to be.

‘Right. I hope you two are hungry. I’ve made enough for at least eight hungry men.’

‘What are we having?’ Vince rubbed his hands, trying to work some enthusiasm into himself.

‘Spaghetti and meatballs.’

‘Oh, you beauty!’ said Jon. ‘My favourite! I can’t believe you remembered.’

‘How could I forget!’ Jess winked at him and disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Wow,’ said Vince, his voice cracking slightly with the strain of not sounding peeved, ‘you
are
honoured. All I ever get is steamed fish and vegetables.’

Jon shrugged. ‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘maybe you should try leaving the country for four years.’ He smiled at Vince, as if to underline the fact that he wasn’t being serious, but it didn’t matter anyway.

Vince was way too far down Insecurity Avenue to be guided back now.

Jon was perfect. Absolutely perfect, in every way.

He didn’t walk around in skimpy towels and he didn’t get in Vince and Jess’s way. He didn’t talk through
The Sopranos
and he didn’t watch
Ri:se
in the mornings. He didn’t hog the phone and he didn’t flirt with Jess. He didn’t show off about his sexy job and he didn’t flash his cash.

His sofa bed was folded away every morning before Vince and Jess had even stirred, the cushions replaced in the exact configuration in which he’d found them. He watered all of Jess’s desiccated plants and somehow brought them back to life. He made the best cup of tea this side of Vince’s grandmother and was always in a good mood, the kind of good mood that rubbed off on Vince and put an extra spring in his step when he left Jess’s flat in the morning. Vince had used the bathroom one morning after Jon had been in there for long enough to suggest a bowel movement and the room had smelled, literally, of roses.

He even complimented Vince on his skills as a driving instructor.

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I never thought I’d live to see Jess behind the wheel of a car, let alone
survive
with Jess behind the wheel of a car! But she’s really good. You must be a great teacher.’

Vince didn’t want to tell him that Jess was actually a natural driver, that his teaching had nothing to do with it, and smiled nonchalantly instead, gratefully absorbing his approval.

Vince was walking a tightrope between love and hate. Some days he wanted to slap Jon on the back and tell him how great he was. Other days he wanted to throw acid in his face.

At a time in his life when Vince had finally started to feel like a man, when everything was falling into place, Jon had come along and made him start questioning everything. He’d accepted that someone as sexy and cool and charismatic as Jess wanted to be with him because he had only one context in which to view her. Without Jon, Jess was just a low-paid hospital radio producer who lived in a small rented flat in Enfield, went to yoga three times a week at the local church hall, shopped at Budgen’s, drove a Micra, cut her own hair and liked having a lot of sex.

In the context of Jon, however, she suddenly became an exotic creature who could have married a successful music producer and spent her life flitting between LA, Sydney and Cape Town. She could have had platinum credit cards, diamond earrings and beautiful children with thick hair. She could have had her own yoga instructor, a macrobiotic chef and a four-wheel drive Jeep. In the context of Jon, everything about Jess looked different. In the context of Jon, she and Vince made absolutely zero sense as a couple, and the whole notion of them making a baby together seemed somehow comical.

In the context of Jon, Jess, basically, was completely out of Vince’s league.

‘Why did you and Jon split up?’ he asked her one night. He held his breath, hoping for an explanation that would put his mind at rest – that they’d split up because Jon was impotent, because she stopped fancying him, because he was a brutal serial killer – anything. He should have known that he wouldn’t get what he wanted.

‘I don’t know, really,’ she said, running her fingertip around the curves of his ear. ‘Jon was really ambitious when he was younger. I just wanted to party. I think we kind of went on different journeys, drifted apart.’

‘Ha,’ he said, attempting to sound blasé, ‘ironic, really, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

‘That you split up because you were too much of a party girl and now you’re so abstemious – maybe if you’d stuck together for a bit longer you would have drifted back together again.’ Say no, he thought, his teeth clenched tightly together, say no. Laugh sardonically. Shrug it off. Pooh-pooh the very notion. Please.

‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘I never really thought about that before. It’s possible, I guess. But, you know, life has its own agenda. Jon and I split up for a reason. You and I met for a reason. It’s all predestined, isn’t it? No point wondering what if… ?’

Vince nodded, but inside he was shouting, ‘
Bullshit!
’ He hated all that destiny bollocks. His old flatmate Cass had tried to shove it down his throat. All that business with Joy and that stupid bloody cat. She’d tried to persuade
him that it was a
sign,
that it meant something, when all it had meant was that Joy had chosen to live in the same part of London as him for a while and that Cass’s cat had good taste in people.

If destiny could bring two people together, then it could just as easily tear them apart, and, if it could tear two people apart, then it could just as easily bring them back together again. There was no beginning, middle and end to destiny. It wasn’t neat and manageable. It was random and scary. It did what it wanted. And if it wanted to bring Jon back into Jess’s life so that she could suddenly wonder what the hell she was doing trying to make babies with a loser like Vince, then it would.

‘So, if Jon had come back six months ago, before I met you, what do you think might have happened?’

Jess made a noise that suggested that she was much more interested in sleeping than discussing what-ifs.

‘You see,’ Vince persisted, ‘there’s no bad history between you, is there. You’re best friends; he’s a really good-looking bloke; you used to be in love. What would have stopped you?’

‘Oh, Christ.’ Jess turned over on to her side. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t see him like that any more. He’s a mate. He’s just… Jon.’

Exactly, thought Vince,
exactly.
That was the whole point. Jon was just Jon, and Jon was total and utter perfection.

Joy slid her Switch card back into her purse and pulled the carrier bag off the end of the counter.

It had started to rain, suddenly and heavily. A crescent of people stood in the entrance to the supermarket, peering at the sky through the glass doors, while their shopping sat in flaccid bags at their feet.

Joy, having expected rain, pulled her umbrella out of her handbag and unfurled it. Car tyres fizzed over the wet tarmac and people walked with an added urgency. A man ran past Joy, bumping her with his elbow.

There’s no point in running, she wanted to shout after him, they’ve done tests and you only stay 5 per cent drier if you run through a rain shower than if you walk.

Joy’s bag was full of food for dinner. It was her turn to cook. That was how it worked. George cooked on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Joy cooked on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and on Sundays they went out for dinner. Tonight she was making something from
The Naked Chef –
a big bowl of soup with chicken and noodles. George was recovering from a cold and it had sounded nice and medicinal.

It was amazing to Joy how quickly they’d slipped back into their old routines.

For the first couple of days George had been on best behaviour. He’d agreed with her that things needed to
change; he’d promised he’d do something about his mood swings; he’d gone so far as to suggest having her mother over for Sunday lunch. They cleaned the house and talked about holidays and made plans for the future. They even had sex on a Tuesday. The relationship felt fresh and clean – it felt like it had felt back in the early days when George had adored her, before he’d decided that she was the cause of all his woes.

But then, as the days drifted by, everything settled down. The house returned to its state of squalor. The plans came to nothing. George retreated back into himself. And life continued as if Joy had never packed a bag and left him alone in this suburban prison.

They lived in Esher now. They’d moved here three years ago when George decided to give up working to write his Great British Novel. It was a tiny two-up-two-down cottage off the high street and had cost half as much as he’d sold his three-bedroom flat in Stockwell for. The rest of the money was sitting in a high-interest account paying for George’s extended sabbatical. It was supposed to have been for only a year. George had moved here full of hope, bristling with excitement as he plugged in his laptop and flexed his fingers. He’d been convinced that by the time the New Year arrived he’d be sitting on a big fat manuscript and a publishing deal. But by the following January he was eleven pages into his fourth attempt, three previous books aborted halfway through and sitting in cold storage.

His money had started to run out a few months earlier, and he’d been forced to take on some accounting work to keep himself out of debt – his clients ranged
from a local florist to a piano teacher and a mobile hairdresser. He hated every minute of it, resenting the intrusion of these random elements of the outside world into his writing time and his domestic cocoon.

George and Joy never had guests to their house. Joy’s mother pretended to understand, but was patently baffled by the fact that the man she’d so happily watched her daughter marrying six years earlier had never so much as rustled up a bowl of pasta for her and only ever came to see her in her own home for fleeting, impatient visits, usually en route to somewhere else. When Barbara did manage to pin them down for the occasional Sunday lunch, George would start glancing at clocks and watches the moment he’d swallowed his last mouthful of apple crumble, making no attempt to hide his uneasiness at being so far outside of his comfort zone.

For one allegedly so well brought up, George could be incredibly ill mannered.

Julia and Bella had turned up one Friday night a few weeks earlier. It was transparently a rescue mission masquerading as an impromptu ‘we were just passing’ visit. Joy and George had just finished dinner and were about to watch a video. The doorbell rang and George twitched the front curtains, his body bristling with irritation and dread.

‘Oh, my God,’ he said, letting the curtain fall, ‘it’s your dreadful friends. That vile little man and the loud woman with the chest.’

‘Julia and Bella? You’re kidding.’

‘Unfortunately not.’

Joy gulped. She hadn’t seen Julia and Bella for nearly two years. They spoke on the phone from time to time, but both of them had grown bored with trying to get her to come out with them. Joy had given up her social life a long time ago. It wasn’t worth the long silences and the sulking and the grief. It was easier just to make her excuses and stay at home with George. It had been better when she was still working in town, at ColourPro. She’d been able to see people in her lunch hour. Now she was based in Surrey, even that tiny little social avenue had been blocked off and she saw no one but George.