Sadiq, Terry and Ray were putting on their coats, their impromptu dominoes coaching session having evidently wound up. There was no sign of Maurice – I recalled seeing him with the group earlier, but he must have left early. Perhaps he hadn’t enjoyed being the centre of attention as much as Ray had seemed to.
‘You look like you need a sit-down and something to eat,’ Drew said, and as soon as he said it I realised my feet hurt like crazy, my mouth was bone-dry from having barely had time to sip my pint glass of water and I felt light-headed with hunger.
‘Yes, you take your break, Alice,’ Shirley said, her good humour restored by her triumph in the general knowledge game. ‘I’ll mind the bar. Go on!’
I hesitated for a second, then checked my phone. I’d texted Joe earlier, a conciliatory but not grovelling message saying how sorry I was that we’d had a row the previous night. I’d already been in bed by the time he got home, and, to my shame, I’d pretended to be asleep until eventually I actually did fall asleep; and when I’d woken up that morning he’d either been asleep or more likely pretending to be. He’d read my message several hours ago, and now there was a reply:
Okay, I’m sorry too. But we need to talk. I love you.
Should I go home? I could be there in ten minutes, talk to Joe and try and make things right, and be back in a couple of hours to see the rest of the evening service through and close up.
But then Drew handed me a bottle of Peroni, its sides beaded with condensation, and said he’d get Zoë to shove a shepherdless pie in the oven for me. As if pulled by a magnet, I moved towards one of the free tables, the one by the shelves of games, and collapsed into a chair like a puppet with its strings cut. Taking a deep swallow of my cold, almost bitter beer, I ran my fingers over the piles of brightly coloured boxes, thinking how weird it was that this old-fashioned entertainment should have proved such a hit.
‘Mind if I join you? I brought this over.’ Archie was standing next to me, holding my plate of food and a glass of red wine. ‘Looks like you’ve had quite a day.’
‘It’s been insane.’ I gestured to the seat opposite and he passed me my dinner and sat down, resting his elbows on the table. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so knackered.’
I picked up my fork and dug into my food. It was delicious, the lentil filling laced with red wine, the mashed potato smooth and rich with a crisp golden top. I couldn't help it – even though she might be my rival, even though I’d brought her to work in the pub for reasons that weren’t entirely about the profitability of the business, I had to admit to myself that a large part of the success of the night had been down to Zoë’s cooking and her relentless hard work.
‘Fancy a game of Scrabble?’ Archie asked.
‘Scrabble?’ Even though I’d been surrounded by board games all afternoon, his suggestion took me by surprise.
‘One of the most popular games of all time. More than half of British families own a set.’
‘Do they?’
‘I’m sure I read that somewhere. Anyway – shall we?’
I should go home. Go home and talk to Joe. But my legs were so tired and the beer was so refreshing and I still had almost half my dinner left.
‘Go on then.’
I reached behind me for the set and Archie arranged the board between us while I finished my food. Drew brought over another beer for me and another red wine for Archie and introduced himself. I felt a fleeting sense of weirdness as they shook hands, but then told myself that there was nothing weird about it at all – they were just business neighbours, after all.
I scrutinised my Scrabble tiles, my tired brain seeming to change into a different gear as I looked at the letters. Across the table, Archie was frowning, too, his fingers shuffling the tiles around. Suddenly, the letters in front of me jumped into place, without me even having to order them. I tried to keep my face calm, then remembered it wasn’t poker I was playing.
CHINTZY, I spelled out on the board.
‘What? Way to start the game! Jeez, and you get a bonus for using all your letters, too.’
‘I know, right? How lucky was that?’
Then I saw a similar spark of excitement in Archie’s face, just like the one I’d felt. Across my Z, he spelled out JEZEBEL.
‘What the… That’s amazing.’
‘Yup. Without your Z I’d have been screwed.’
We looked at each other, and suddenly we were both laughing helplessly.
‘Your go,’ he said, when I’d managed to catch my breath. There were no more epic scores – Archie turned out to be a two-letter-word ninja, wringing the maximum score out of each turn by spelling EM, ID and YO, but I got lucky with a blank and managed to get QUEASY.
‘What?’ I asked when he’d taken his next turn. ‘Qi? That’s never a word.’
‘It certainly is. It’s a concept in Chinese philosophy and medicine. Means life energy. Here, I’ll show you.’
He tapped on his phone and passed it over.
‘Sheesh! Okay, genius, I was wrong.’
‘And you lose a turn.’
‘What? No way. That wasn’t an official challenge. I was just checking.’
And we both cracked up again.
Fifteen minutes later, Archie had played his last letters and I was left with an unusable K and a D.
‘So that’s three hundred and forty-three to me, and three hundred and…’ He paused.
‘Go on! Come on, spill! I won, didn’t I?’
‘Three hundred and fifteen to you.’
‘Bollocks! I’ll have to get revenge sometime.’
Archie grinned. ‘You can try.’
We both laughed again, and then, abruptly, I stopped. I could feel a cold draught on the back on my neck, like someone had left the door of the pub open. I got up to go and close it and saw Joe standing in the doorway, watching us. There was no way of knowing how long he’d been there for.
Eighteen
‘How’s the crayfish and rocket?’ Heather asked.
We were eating our lunch in the upstairs seating area overlooking the garden where we sat in summer; it was a cold, blustery day and I’d been battered by gusts of rain on my walk from the station.
I looked morosely at my sandwich. ‘Disappointing. I knew it would be, before I even bought it, but by then I’d committed. You know how it is.’
‘Pret regret. If it’s not a thing, it ought to be. That’s why I always have the same. You know where you are with tuna and cucumber.’
‘I thought you always had it because it’s your fave? Like, your death-row meal?’
‘Death row? Oh my God, no, that would be… I don’t know. The set menu from Hawksmoor, maybe. The Yorkshire pudding thing, then a steak with triple-cooked chips, then the salted caramel sticky toffee pudding. Or my mum’s lasagne, with garlic bread and a bucket of red wine. Or cheese. Like, a whole cheese board all to myself. I only order this every time because I know exactly what I’m getting. It’s perfectly nice, under five hundred calories – bosh. I’ve got enough to think about in my life without having to waste valuable decision-making energy on lunch.’
I laughed. We’d missed our lunches together for a few weeks – Heather had been in New York with work, then on annual leave before her sister’s wedding, then in court. And I’d been busy, relentlessly busy at the pub. But recent events had made me long to catch up with my friend, and I’d sent her a WhatsApp that – I’d realised as soon as I’d pressed the blue arrow – sounded like I was having some sort of crisis.
‘Anyway, so,’ Heather said, ‘you were just playing Scrabble. What’s the drama?’
‘I know.’ I nodded miserably. ‘Just bloody Scrabble. But it’s like it’s set off the Cold War between Joe and me. I mean, I can kind of see it from his point of view. We barely see each other, we had a horrible row over Zoë when he tried to take me out for a romantic dinner, and then he turns up at the pub and there I am sitting on my arse drinking beer with a hot man.’
‘So he’s ho
t, is he? This Archie?’
‘He’s all right.’
Heather raised an eyebrow.
‘Okay, okay. Yes, he’s hot. He’s hot, and he’s nice, and he’s funny. But that’s almost not the point. What’s winding Joe up is that he’s there, the same way Zoë being there winds me up. He runs the shop next door to the pub. We see each other a few times a week. He comes in for lunch, I go round there to ask for craft beer recommendations.’
‘Craft beer recommendations? Is that what they’re calling it now?’
‘Heather! Don’t be daft. I was about to say, more to the point, he’s got a girlfriend. Both of us are, like, totally not interested in each other that way. At all.’
With a twinge of guilt I thought of the online Scrabble app Archie had sent me an invite to download, the long-running games we’d been playing over the past ten days, the thrill of pleasure it gave me every time I came up with a killer word. Oh, and the way, when I checked my phone in bed in the mornings, I angled the screen ever so slightly away from Joe when I went on to that particular app.
But it was just a game! Scrabble, for fuck’s sake. Since when has getting a Z on a triple-letter square counted as cheating? Okay, maybe if you played an American spelling in the British English version it might, but still.
‘Well, then surely you just said to Joe, “Yeah, I was having a break from work and a chat with an acquaintance, what’s your problem?”’
‘I would have done. But things are so weird between us right now, I couldn’t even do that. If he’d been like, “Are you shagging that man with the beard and the mad two-letter word skills, bitch?” then I could have told him to cop on and stop being so ridiculous. But he didn’t. He came over and said hi and he and Archie had a chat about the declining bee population – Archie’s sister’s into bees, it’s seriously cool; he gave me some of their honey to take home – and then I had to get back to work and they carried on sitting together, all civilised.’
‘That’s okay, though, right? I mean, civilised is good.’
‘Yeah, it would be. But Joe and I’d had a massive row and we still hadn’t sorted it. We still haven’t now, not really. I mean, we’re talking and stuff, but things between us have been so off for a while now, and now they’re even more off.’
‘Off how?’
‘He’s being distant. Almost polite. In the mornings, if we’re up at the same time, which we aren’t always, he’ll say, “Can I make you a coffee, Alice?” When before we used to argue about whose turn it was. And with Zoë living with us, I suppose I notice it more. The only time I see him acting like his old self, having a laugh and stuff, is when he’s with her. With me he’s all kind of formal. And I can’t properly talk to him, because whenever we’re both there, she’s there too. It’s all kinds of weird.’
‘You all living together? Slightly like a later episode of Friends, yeah, it is.’
‘The one where Joe realises he ended up with the wrong girl?’
‘Pfft, he didn’t. You two are great together. I’m sure this is just a blip. But you and Zoë, working together – how’s that working out?’
‘Better than I thought it would. She’s okay, actually. Like, I wouldn’t want to be her friend or anything, necessarily, but she’s okay. She’s an incredible cook. And her cat’s cute, now I’ve got to know him. But she’s just so… I dunno. All the things I’m not.’
‘Thick? Incompetent? A bitch? Looks like the back end of the number thirty-three bus?’
I laughed. ‘Thanks. No, none of that. She’s really pretty, and she works out at one of those fucking terrifying gyms where all the weightlifters go, so she’s got this amazing figure. But it’s not that. She’s just kind of… sparkling. Dynamic. Like, she goes after what she wants and she gets it.’
‘And you don’t? Cos it kind of looks to me like you wanted to be a lawyer, and you worked your nuts off for that, and you could still have it if you wanted it, but you decided you wanted this pub thing instead, and now you’ve got that. And you wanted your perfect relationship with Joe and you’ve got that too. It’s just you’re maybe going through a rough patch right now.’
‘What if it’s not a rough patch? What if it’s terminal? What if Joe’s still in love with Zoë?’
‘What makes you think he might be?’
‘I… I don’t know. Just the way she is, and the way he and I are. And he was in love with her, when they were together. I asked him. And with things so off between him and me, if she did decide to make a massive play for him, then now would be the time, wouldn’t it?’
I thought again of that little bundle of cards in Zoë’s bed and cringed inwardly. There was no way I was going to admit to Heather that I’d been through Zoë’s private stuff.
‘She stole some of his underwear,’ I said.
‘She what? Okay, now we’re going full Fatal Attraction. Lock up your bunnies. This is not a drill.’
‘Not now,’ I admitted. ‘But years ago, when they were together. Joe told me he had a pair of silk boxers with Bart Simpson on them, and they’d mysteriously vanished, and what did I find in Zoë's washing?’
‘Oh, give over, Miss Marple. One, zillions of people have Bart Simpson kecks. You’ve no way of knowing they’re the same ones. Two, even if she did end up taking them when she and Joe were together, and kept them, that’s only, like, two out of ten on my weirdness scale.’
‘Maybe,’ I agreed reluctantly. ‘But honestly, Heath, you should see her legs. And more importantly, you should see Joe looking at them sometimes.’
‘Alice. Come on. Seriously, you need to stop doing this to yourself. If things aren’t great with you and Joe, talk to him. Stop projecting stupid stuff onto this Zoë girl. Everyone thinks they’re in love at some point, when they’re young and daft. Well, everyone except me.’
I looked at her, surprised. She was looking at me almost confrontationally, as if she’d said something shocking. Which she kind of had, in the sense that it was news to me.
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘You mean you’ve never been in love? Never even thought you were? Not even with whatsisname, who you said was the hottest man you’ve ever banged, only you couldn’t stand the way he ate toast?’
Heather smiled, which I was grateful for. ‘Rufus. Oh my God, he was lovely actually. We went out for about six weeks, and if only he’d been gluten-intolerant or a low-carber or something, we might still be together. But then I made the fatal error of offering him breakfast one morning at my flat.’
‘Go on,’ I urged, although I’d heard the story before.
‘I mean, for the love of God. Toast. Doesn’t everyone learn how to eat toast when they’re, like, two? Not Rufus. I swear, it was like he suddenly turned into a Visigoth. Chomping, tearing at it with his teeth like it might run away, spraying crumbs everywhere – it was grotesque.’
‘And once you’d seen it, you couldn’t unsee it?’
‘Exactly. After that, I had the Ick.’
I nodded. This was also ground we’d covered before.
‘Every time he kissed me, I wanted to wipe my mouth afterwards in case he’d left toast crumbs on it. Even if it was first thing in the morning, he hadn’t eaten anything for twelve hours and he’d just cleaned his teeth. That’s how the Ick works.’
‘I got that with one of my very first boyfriends, back when I was uni,’ I said. ‘It was pretty short-lived. The relationship, not the Ick.’
‘Because once the Ick’s there, it’s there to stay.’
‘Correct. With this bloke – Stephen – it was… Oh my God, I can hardly bear to think about it.’
‘Go on, Alice! What did he do?’
‘He…’ I covered my face with my hands. ‘He had a name for his penis.’
‘No!’
‘Yep. Nigel. I mean really, fucking Nigel. Although in hindsight, it did look a bit like Nigel Farage.’
‘Nigel Farage looks like lots of people’s penises.’
‘This is true. But
anyway, he talked about it all the time, like, “Come and give Nigel a kiss, Alice.”’
‘Eeeuuuw!’
‘Exactly. The Ick set in right there. But I thought I was in love, and I tried to pretend it was all cute and quirky.’
‘My God, woman! Have some self-respect! Okay, I guess it was a long time ago and you were young and naïve. But what happened to make you see how wrong it was?’
I looked around. Lunch hour in the City was almost over; the tables around us were empty. Heather would have to go soon, too, as would I. I lowered my voice a bit and carried on.
‘He gave my fanny a name, too.’
‘He gave your… No way. Are you going to tell me what it was, or shall I guess?’
‘You’d never get there. It was Belinda.’
Heather doubled over, her hair almost brushing the tabletop. ‘Belinda? Did you ever find out why? His childhood nanny? A Playboy centrefold?’
‘I honestly have no idea. I never asked, but every time he said, “Is Belinda feeling frisky?” I just about died from the Ick.’
‘You were still shagging him? Jesus. What happened to make you realise what a terrible mistake that was?’
I put my hands up to my face. My cheeks were burning, just remembering it.
‘So he must’ve given all his girlfriends’ minges names. And one time, he called mine the wrong one.’
‘Oh for fuck’s… He didn’t.’
‘He did. He was like, “Nigel’s grown, look. Nigel wants to get intimate with Veronica – I mean Belinda.”’
‘Veronica! I’m dying.’
‘Mmhmm. So that became a terminal case of the Ick, right there.’
‘Alice, you poor thing. No wonder you’re worried about this Zoë. Basically, you’ve got deep-seated ex-related trauma thanks to Nigel and Veronica.’ Heather looked at her watch. ‘Shit, it’s almost two. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes, so I’m going to have to leg it. Thanks so much for this – you’ve cheered me right up. And talk to Joe, okay?’
Just Saying: An absolutely perfect and feel-good romantic comedy Page 17