Mark emerged halfway through our lunch. His ten-quid-at-the-barber standard brown haircut was dishevelled like a schoolboy’s, his chin dusted with stubble. His pale face looked both plump and deflated, like a faulty airbed dragged out from the attic. His small grey eyes were sticky and bloodshot.
“Big night?” I asked, the note of judgement in my voice as bright and sonorous as a middle C.
“A bit, yeah, a bit,” he said, leaning down to give me a kiss on the cheek. “Was out with Joe.”
“Oh yeah, what did you guys get up to?”
“Was meant to be just a few at the pub, but things got a bit out of hand. He ended up losing a bet and eating twenty quid.”
“Eating it?”
“Yeah, two ten-pound notes,” he said, laughing to himself. Katherine shook her head and closed her eyes, in mock dismay. “Then he was sick outside the Duck and Crown and he tried to see if he could find the pieces in the vomit and stick the notes back together again to buy another round!”
“The one that got away,” I said.
“We were celebrating his engagement,” he said pointedly, before getting up to go to the fridge.
“Did he tell you?” Katherine asked.
“Yes, he told me he was going to propose. Then I saw it on Instagram.” It had been impossible to miss the press-release photo and statement Lucy had issued of the pair of them, like it was news from Clarence House. Mark and Katherine had been the first to like and comment enthusiastically. Married people loved doing this to newly engaged people—it was how I imagined celebrities must reverently nod at each other across a posh restaurant.
“Has Kat showed you the house?” Mark boomed from behind the fridge door.
“No?”
“Oh,” she said, reaching for a piece of paper from a drawer in the sideboard. “We’ve made an offer.” She pushed the picture and description of the house towards me.
“Starting to get really excited about getting out of this hellhole of a city,” Mark said, transporting a plate of crisps, carrot batons and cocktail sausages to the table along with a giant tub of hummus and a tin of sweetcorn. I longed to point out that he seemed to think this “hellhole” was more than suitable when he wanted to use it as a giant playground to destroy with other fellow man-babies on a Friday night out.
The house description showed a four-bed modern home in a commutable Surrey village, crassly made to look like a red-brick Georgian cottage. The asking price was written in bold at the top, as overblown as the building itself. I thought about how sensitive I had been to Lola when I had bought my tiny one-bed flat, which I knew was something she might never be able to do; how I had hidden the price from her, how I had downplayed the perks of home ownership and reminded her of how freeing renting could be. This was not a courtesy that Katherine felt obliged to show. I could sit an A level in the details of Katherine and Mark’s life together over the last decade. Every asset, every purchase, every detail of their wedding, every potential baby name. Tradition dictates that metamorphoses belong to the married—the rest of us exist in a static state.
“It looks lovely,” I lied.
“It’s got a great garden for the kids,” Katherine said.
“So brilliant,” I said, already running out of adjectives.
“Joe said you’ve got a new bloke,” Mark said, using a large crisp as a ladle from which to shove a cocktail sausage in his mouth.
“Oh yes! How is he?” Katherine asked.
“A bloody big bugger, according to Joe!”
“Joe hasn’t even met him,” I said.
“He’s found a photo of him online. Says he looks like Jesus crossed with the Incredible Hulk. He’s seething about it, absolutely seething. It’s hilarious.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“Oh, you know him. He’s a loveable but insecure child.” Mark said this while mashing a dollop of hummus directly into the tin of sweetcorn.
“When can we meet him?” Katherine asked.
“Soon,” I said. “He’s got to meet Joe first.”
“Can I come watch?” Mark asked.
* * *
—
I saw Joe a few weeks later. I decided to meet him an hour before Max was due to arrive, to avoid doing a catch-up chat in front of Max and potentially making him feel alienated. We agreed on a centrally located pub, as centrally located pubs are the apolitical socializing territory. Everything had to be as neutral as possible—I could tell that Max felt nervous about spending time with the man whom I’d been in my most significant and longest relationship with; a man who was still such an important part of my life and friendship group. And I could tell Joe felt uncomfortable at the thought of potentially being replaced as my most significant relationship. Neither had said so explicitly, but, like so many other times in my life, I had been presented with a man in a muddle of feelings and I had found the correct vocabulary to match it. It was also down to me to manage and marshal those feelings in a way that made them feel as safe and comfortable as possible. Being a heterosexual woman who loved men meant being a translator for their emotions, a palliative nurse for their pride and a hostage negotiator for their egos.
“How’s wedding planning going?” I asked Joe, who was wearing the grey denim shirt he had obviously forgotten he’d called his “slimming shirt” for all the years we were together. The buttons strained across him, the dark, downy hair of his belly visible through the gaps.
“I’ve sort of let Lucy get on with that,” he said, avoiding my gaze by staring into his pint. “She’s really got the eye for design, you know?”
There’s nothing I loved more than watching a man merrily surrender to full-blown emasculation via wedding planning. “When’s it going to be?”
“Spring.”
“Wow, that’s fast.”
“Yeah. I’ve got something I want to ask you.”
“No, I won’t marry you, you should have asked me when you had the chance.”
“Nina.”
“Sorry.”
“As you know, you’re a very important person in my life. Probably the most important person in my life, other than Lucy.”
“Right,” I said, uncomfortable with this unusual tone of sincerity from Joe.
“And Lionel Messi!” he said, with a nervous chuckle.
“Okay.”
“Anyway, I want you to be a part of the wedding. Originally, I thought I’d ask you to do a reading, but I know you’d find it cheesy, and I also want you to be there with me the morning of.”
“Right.”
“Will you be one of my ushers?”
“Yes!” I said, relieved that I wouldn’t have to stand at a lectern in a pastel-coloured dress I’d never wear again bleating “love is patient, love is kind” for the 754th time in my life. “I’d love that. It would be an honour. Oh, Joe, that’s so lovely of you. Do I get to wear a suit?”
“Yes. Or whatever you like.”
“Can I come to the piss-up the night before?”
“Yes! You can stay in the pub with me and the best man and the other ushers.”
“And can I come to the stag?”
“Er, no, actually.”
“What?!”
“I know, I know, it’s a bummer,” he said. “But it’s Lucy’s one request. She’s fine with you being usher, but she doesn’t want you on the stag do.”
“Why not?”
“Nina, my future wife is letting me stay in the room next door to my ex-girlfriend the night before my wedding because I need you for emotional support. I think she’s being very understanding. I think we should give her this.”
“Okay,” I said reluctantly. “I can’t wait, Joe. I’ll do the best ushering you’ve ever seen.”
“Will Max be okay with it, do you think? He’ll be invited, of course.”
“Oh, definitely,” I said. “He likes that we’re so close. He thinks exes being friends is elegant.”
“How’s it going with you two?”
“Great!” I said. “I think. Obviously, I have very little to compare it to. But it feels fun and easy, which I think means it’s going well.”
“Are you two exclusive?”
“ ‘Exclusive,’ ” I parroted. “I don’t think I’ve heard that word since school.”
“You know what I mean, are you just seeing each other?”
“I haven’t felt the need to ask that. I thought it was just a given.”
“Have you said you love each other?” he continued.
I left a slightly too long pause.
“Why are you talking about my relationship like some nosy teenage girl?”
“I’m not!”
“Yes, you are. ‘Are you exclusive,’ ‘have you said you love each other.’ You’ll be asking me what base we’ve got to next.”
“I’m just trying to gauge how serious it is.”
“It’s serious,” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have arranged this.”
* * *
—
Max arrived on time, with his curls jostled from cycling in the wind. I waved at him across the pub, the door of which I had been nervously watching while trying to listen to Joe speak in a bit too much detail about his most recent parking ticket and the subsequent argument with the council he had found himself embroiled in. It was a disorientating moment when Max smiled at me and I realized that the person I felt closest to was the one walking towards me, not the one sitting next to me at the table. I never thought anyone would be able to eclipse the familiarity I had felt with Joe, and yet there I was, sitting at a pub, my insides radiating in response to Max’s arrival. Something had shifted—dynamics of power always rearrange themselves when you’re not watching them. We kissed on the lips, politely and briefly.
“Max, this is Joe; Joe, this is Max.”
“All right, mate,” Joe said, giving him a handshake. “Nice to meet you.”
“Same, mate, nice to meet you.”
Mate. Male conversational currency as widely effective as the euro.
“What can I get you?” Joe asked.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m up, I’ll get it. Pint of…?”
“Lager,” Joe said, the slight chest-puff returning. “Thanks, mate.”
“And a G and T for you?” he asked.
“Yes please.”
“Double?”
“Yes please,” I said.
“Atta girl,” Max said, before kissing the top of my head and going to the bar. Joe and I resolutely continued to discuss our various gripes with our respective local councils as Max ordered drinks, both determined not to comment on the strangeness of the situation we found ourselves in.
When he returned, Max was the first to initiate the formalities of the pair of them getting to know each other.
“Nina said you work in sports PR?”
“That’s right,” Joe said.
“Anything you specialize in?”
“Football, mainly.”
“Oh, awesome.”
“You a football fan?”
“Not really, more of a rugby guy.”
This was the first in a series of conversational fly-swats that the pair of them did to each other. Someone would float a topic in the air that could open up at least five minutes of pleasant chit-chat, and the other would whack the plastic swatter over it, killing small-talk potential in seconds.
“Who do you support?” Max offered as a condolence.
“Sheffield United.”
“Ah,” he said, then shrugged. “I mean, means nothing to me.”
“Nina’s a supporter.”
I laughed. “Well, I’m not sure about—”
“Yeah you are. You loved those matches I took you to. Once you got over the bad catering.”
“Nina George Dean,” Max said, with gentle surprise. “You told me you hate football. In fact, we talked at length about it on one of our first dates.”
“I hate the culture around football. And the noise. And I hate those horrible pasties. But I don’t mind the matches.”
“Don’t mind them? You went mad for them!” Joe enthused. “I couldn’t keep you in your seat!”
“They can be fun in a live setting,” I said swattingly, for some reason desperate to move on to something else.
“Or maybe you just loved them because you’re so competitive.”
“Are you competitive?” Max asked, his face wrinkling quizzically.
“Oh Christ, yes,” Joe continued. “I think we broke up, what, maybe five times during a game of Scrabble?”
“I like rules,” I relented. “Joe has a very weak grasp of spelling and grammatical rules.”
“And you had a very firm grasp around my neck, that one time I landed a triple word score for flapjack!” Joe finished with an excitable, climactic look on his face—the one he got when he thought he’d “won” the conversation with wit. There was a brief silence while everyone sipped their drinks. This was the sort of Joe joke I would normally appease with a laugh, but that felt like a lie in front of Max. There was a daftness that I shared with Joe, and a seriousness that I shared with Max. Both were parts of me and both were true, but both seemed so in conflict with each opposing representative present. I hadn’t anticipated that this merging of people meant this merging of selves—it made me think anxiously about myself in a way that was unfamiliar.
“How’s The Tiny Kitchen going?” Joe asked.
“Good! The proofs arrived this week.”
“Exciting! What’s it like?” Joe looked expectantly at Max.
“What’s what like?” he asked, having obviously been distracted with another thought.
“Nina’s new book, what’s it like?”
I was both intrigued and apprehensive about his answer. I had left proofs of The Tiny Kitchen and copies and translated copies of Taste in the flat over recent weeks and had noticed that Max hadn’t so much as picked them up to read the back of them.
“I haven’t read it yet.”
“Oh, right,” Joe said. “Did you read Taste?”
“I haven’t actually yet, mate, no,” he said, this particular “mate” laced with the paternal passive aggression of a tired father wanting his annoying teenage son to shut up. I had never seen him impatient. I had never seen him anything but relaxed and charming. I realized that, in over three months, I’d never really seen him with anyone. Sometimes bar staff, sometimes passing dogs in the park. But mostly I had only seen Max exist in reaction to me.
“You’ve got to read it, Max!” Joe said, making me both love and hate him in equal measure.
“I will.”
“If I started dating someone who’d written a memoir, I would have read it within the first month. Maybe I’m just nosy.”
“I thought it was a cookbook?”
“It’s both, it’s a memoir with recipes. Or a cookbook with memoir chapters, depending on how you spin it,” I said, glancing back and forth between them, conscious of not weighting my gaze towards one man more. I felt like a flying trapeze artist—one of them was the jumping-off platform, the other the catcher, and I was desperately trying to keep things swinging without a fall. We were only one drink in and I was exhausted.
“I’m keen to get to know Nina as Nina,” Max said. “Rather than an author everyone else gets to know, if that makes sense?”
“I see, I see,” Joe said. I could tell he couldn’t “see” at all, but I appreciated his diplomacy. “Where are you from, Max?”
“Somerset.”
“Nice one,” Joe said meaninglessly.
“Do you know it?”
“I went for a
weekend away near Taunton once, but otherwise no,” Joe replied. Swat. “Are your parents still based there?”
“My mum is. My dad lives in Australia.”
Australia? Why had Max never told me his father lived in Australia? I tried to keep an unwarranted look of betrayal from my face.
“Oh yeah? How long has he lived there?” Joe asked.
“He left when I was thirteen.”
“I see. Do you get out there to see him much?”
“No, it’s not really that kind of relationship.”
“I’m sorry,” Joe said.
“Not your fault, is it?” Max replied. It was the sort of sarcastic comment from a man that I hated—aggressively literal and belligerent. “Another round?”
* * *
—
“You didn’t tell me your dad moved to Australia,” I said as Max and I got into my bed after what felt like the longest three drinks of my life.
“I told you my dad left when I was a kid.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me he left and moved to the other side of the world.”
“Oh, didn’t I? Well, he did.”
“Is that why you never see him?”
“To be honest, I think that’s how much he’d want to see me if he were here,” he said, plumping my pillows with unusual force.
“Okay,” I said, sliding under the duvet next to him. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Do I want to talk about my absent father right now? Right before we go to sleep and before my nine a.m. presentation tomorrow? No, not really.”
“Okay.”
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