by Marina Ford
When I entered the conference room, everybody had already gathered there.
Harry was sitting at the head of the table, as usual: cool, composed, and in charge. It had been sort of sexy before I’d seen him naked. Now it was infuriatingly sexy. Steadfastly, I avoided looking at him at all.
I greeted everybody in conference room A of the P&B Design Agency very properly with a solemn “Good morning” and then went to the other end of the table, and began setting up. I was slightly regretting the amount of alcohol I had consumed with Frank when he’d been teaching me. My memory of what I was to do, the different keyboard shortcuts that did things quickly and professionally, was hazy. But I managed to find the presentation, and it showed up behind me on a screen.
Pleased with myself, and still absolutely refusing to meet Harry’s eyes, I passed the prints around the table. Malcolm entered, pulled a chair from the wall, and sat next to Harry, with his arms crossed and self-importance radiating from his entire person.
“Right,” I said, in an attempt to project confidence and command. Calmly, I tried to recollect Frank’s advice about how to make the slide go full screen. I pressed the control key, because I remembered that often did stuff when pressed with another key, but I couldn’t remember which. I could feel Harry’s eyes on me. They were like torches or something very bright at the edge of my vision. I tried the A key. But that hadn’t done what I wanted it to do. The slides on the left all lit up in yellow. I wanted to make it go away, so I hit backspace.
Magically, the entire presentation was now gone. It just vanished. I pressed backspace again. Go back, I willed that stupid computer, go back, goddamn you! It wouldn’t listen to my thoughts.
All of it gone, from slide one all the way to slide twenty-six. The screen behind me, which showed everything I could see on the screen of the laptop in front of me, gave my audience a real-time update on what happened. I grabbed the back of a chair, clenching my jaw.
There was a moment’s heavy silence while I let the truth sink in, and gaped at the now blank, grey space where my beautiful presentation had been seconds before. Everybody around the table was staring at me aghast. Everybody, that is, except for Harry. With his eyebrows raised, he just appeared surprised.
“So,” I said, pulling my shoulders back and clearing my throat. “I am not here to give boring speeches with PowerPoint. My work . . . speaks for itself. It is bold and striking, attention-grabbing and—and interesting.”
Harry had his lips clinched, as though he were trying not to laugh. Wanker.
“Er, I invite you,” I said, lifting my chin, “to, er, examine my prints from the point of view of not a marketing expert, or an artist, or a critic, or even the client.”
Malcolm raised the corner of his lip in a sneer, which was all the more pronounced for the moustache that twitched with it.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t examine them at all,” he muttered audibly enough for me to hear at my end of the room.
“Please, examine them instead,” I continued, ignoring him, “from the point of view of . . . of a single man thinking of a nice place to take a date. Look at them from the point of view of a husband and wife who want a place to spend their monthly date night. See them, if you can, from the point of view of needing somewhere to take a friend or family member, to celebrate the new job they got, the promotion, the engagement, the birth of their first child . . . in short, if you wanted to go someplace nice to eat, what would these images signal to you?”
I spoke about each image in turn, passing the prints around the table, feeling Harry’s gaze on me the entire time. I continued to pretend he wasn’t there at all and maintaining an air of competence and composure. I would be the first to admit that this wasn’t a strength of mine, but at the end Malcolm’s moustache was droopy, from which I gathered I had done a better job than expected.
When I finished, the team clapped and I, relieved, remembered to take a breath.
After the meeting, I was left alone with Malcolm and Harry.
Malcolm said, “So this PowerPoint thing, was that supposed to be an homage to Dead Poets Society or . . .?”
“Sure,” I said, shrugging.
“Very effective,” Harry said, glancing down at the laptop. “You went to some effort to make it look like a genuine presentation too. I was worried there for a minute.” He was no such thing.
“Seems like so much hogwash to me,” Malcolm said. “And these prints, do you mean to change them every week?”
“As long as it takes to find a set that pleases you,” I said. “I go by the feedback you give me.”
Harry whistled. He’d somehow, by some computer magic, managed to retrieve my presentation. There it was again: the pictures, the graphs, the statistics. Twenty-six beautiful slides had abandoned me and returned at his command. Traitors.
“Look at that,” he said to Malcolm, as though in wonder, “you can’t say he’s not dedicated.” He flicked through the slides where I had infographics showing how different people perceive different colours, how different fonts are associated with different moods, and how localised aspects of the design could be made to feel inclusive for people not in the know. Now that all the material in the presentation was before me, I realised how much of this I had meant to say, and how I hadn’t.
“Could you forward this to me?” Harry asked. “While I liked the little show you did, this seems quite interesting, actually. I’d like to read it, if I may.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, meekly.
Malcolm scoffed.
“We’ll see” were his parting words, before he waltzed off, head held high. The door fell shut behind him. Harry and I were left in momentary silence.
“You didn’t make a friend there,” he said, nodding in the direction of the door. “It might have been that time you called him an idiot. Subtleties like that don’t escape him, you know.”
I smiled reflexively, but then remembered I was angry with him, or at least extremely disappointed, made my smile fall, and busied myself with putting my stuff together to leave.
“So,” he said, watching me place the prints in my portfolio bag. “Do you have time to grab lunch?”
“No,” I said. Then, remembering myself, I added, “Sorry, I’m busy.”
“Coffee, then?”
I looked up from my bag. “I really don’t think that would be a good idea.”
He was clearly taken aback. Examining my face, he seemed to seek an explanation. “Oh. Of course. Sorry.”
I don’t know what it was in his surprise that touched me, or whether it was the flattery that he should be so taken aback by my refusal and even hurt by it, but I said, “I could grab a cup of tea, I suppose.”
“There’s a kettle in the common room, if you like. That would save us some time.”
I agreed to that, especially since it meant we wouldn’t be alone. As it turned out, we made our coffees and teas in the coffee-making area of the common room, but then he led me over to his office, where he closed the door behind me so that we were, in fact, very alone—more alone than we would have been had we gone to a coffee shop as he’d initially suggested.
Still, I was determined to carry this meeting out like a professional. I sat down in the chair on the other side of his desk, and he, seeing this, pushed his chair up to sit nearer me, without the desk dividing us.
His office was well-ordered. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were filled with books of every size and colour: books on design, albums about architecture, art, media, film, cartoons, literature. In front of the books, crowding the little space there was, were little ceramic figurines. They were colourful and depicted a large variety of subjects from roosters to two boxing gentlemen facing each other in nothing but breeches with their fists cocked, to young women riding on what looked like zebras.
Harry followed the line of my gaze and said, “I had to move in with my sister and she has nowhere to put them, so they’re here for the time being.”
“What are they?”
“Staffordshire figurines. Quite old. Some of them go all the way to the seventeenth century.”
“Christ.” I stood to examine them more carefully. They were crudely painted, I discovered up close, and seemed to be depicting ordinary scenes of daily life.
“Some were coloured by children,” Harry said, coming to stand next to me. “They were used to decorate middle-class homes centuries ago.”
I picked one that featured a tree and in front of the tree two lads, in Regency costume, embracing. Underneath it said, Friendship.
“Do you think that was nineteenth-century code for ‘roommates’?” I asked.
He laughed. “You have a one-track mind.”
I put it back. There was another one, of a milkmaid and a cow. Underneath, it had a mark that said, Love, KJ. I showed it to Harry. He smiled self-consciously.
“Kieran Jones,” he explained.
I put the figurine back because I didn’t want to go down that track.
“You moved in with your sister?” I asked, picking up on what he’d said earlier. “So that’s why all your stuff was in boxes?”
“Yes.”
We sat down again. It felt strangely formal.
“After Kieran and I split up, I didn’t feel like I could stay in that flat by myself,” he said. I stared in surprise. He and Kieran had split up? When? Because of me? No, the boxes had already been packed by the time I entered the picture.
When I didn’t respond, he continued, “That morning . . . I really owe you an apology for that. I had no idea Kieran had any intention of coming back. He just popped by to pick up some of his stuff, even though I told him I was going to drop it off with him later that day.” He smoothed his trouser leg with one neatly manicured hand.
“He flipped out when he saw you,” he said, visibly uncomfortable. “But you have to understand, we’d been together for seven years. I wouldn’t have been any kinder to any bloke I found in his bed, to be honest. But he’s sorry for what he did, and he’d tell you so himself if I hadn’t begged him to leave it to me. I didn’t think you’d want to be accosted by him again.”
He smiled apologetically. I nodded, though I understood little more than half of what he’d said. What I did hear was that he and Kieran were split up. He was single. Had been single when he went to bed with me. I couldn’t help but smile back at him, my heart lifting.
He reached out his hand to touch my arm, the same place where Kieran had held it.
“I hope he wasn’t too rough with you?”
“It was nothing,” I said, now feeling quite generous-spirited towards the man. Truth be told, Kieran hadn’t really frightened me. I used to box when I was younger, had been quite good in fact, and so he’d only managed to do what he had because I’d let him.
Harry smiled. His hand lingered, warmed on my arm, and then he let go.
“So, er,” I began, feeling as if I’d suddenly lost a great amount of weight. “You live with your sister now?”
“My parents live too far away, in Harpenden. Siobhan’s flat isn’t exactly comfortable, but it’ll do for now while I look for somewhere else to rent. If you know of any place . . .”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.”
We fell silent once more. He sipped his coffee. I reached for my tea.
“So,” I began again, because the silence wasn’t doing anything helpful to my peace of mind. “Seven years. That’s quite a bit of history you two have, huh?”
It was a silly gambit. I had no desire to hear about him and Kieran.
Harry nodded. “It’s been a long time coming. The break up, that is. He has a lot of issues, and we couldn’t ever quite work them out. He wouldn’t introduce me to his family up in Doncaster; he kept telling everyone I was his best friend, his flatmate . . . Hell, once he introduced me as his ‘compadre’ which— Don’t laugh.” He was smiling, though, so I wasn’t too bothered about offending him.
“At first you just swallow it as part and parcel of who he is,” he went on. “But after a while it wears on you. Eventually, we fell out over wanting to buy a place together. That’s to say, I wanted to buy a place together, and he panicked and lost his temper, because apparently it was easier to explain to people that you lived in a studio apartment with another bloke, than that you bought a house with him.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Anyway”—he smiled self-deprecatingly—“I’m sure you don’t want to hear all this nonsense.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’ve never been with anyone that long. It sounds tough.”
Harry shrugged. “It shouldn’t be. I believe that with the right person, it should be easy. At least, it shouldn’t be like pushing a pile of shit up a hill with a fork.”
I laughed. “Well, thanks for that image.”
There was a knock on the door, and Maya’s head appeared.
“Duncan Webb is— Oh.” She stopped when she saw me.
“Ah yes,” Harry said. “I’ll be right there, Maya, thank you.”
She sent me a quick smile, and then ducked out of the room. Harry turned to me.
“I’ve got a meeting,” he said. I rose to my feet.
“I should go too.”
As we approached the door, he raised an arm towards me. Pleasantly surprised, I put my arms around him. He felt weirdly stiff in my embrace. Then I realised, he’d just been reaching past me to open the door. I shut my eyes in embarrassment.
But his frame relaxed, and he exhaled and his one arm returned a mild squeeze. God, he felt good. How did he still smell so good too? It was fifty degrees out there. I was still holding him. He leaned back from me, with an amused smirk.
“Okay, bye,” I said, my mortification swiftly returning, and rushed out of the door. The lift had just appeared at the end of the corridor, and I dashed for it, ducked in, and then wondered why it was that when you needed a sinkhole to open up underneath your feet and swallow you whole, the ground remained firm and you were a goof for the world to admire.
The feel of him stayed with me. For some reason, his scent, the warmth of his arms, the angle of his smile as we let go of each other, they all stayed with me. Who knows why some people do this to us, and others don’t. I’d hugged loads of men in my time, and most wore off as soon as I turned my head.
When I came out of the Tube, my phone buzzed, alerting me to the arrival of new text messages. One of them was from Harry.
You had to leave so quickly, I forgot to ask. Would you like to go out some time?
I was nearly hit by a cyclist as I stood there, staring at the text message, grinning like a maniac.
Chloe eyed me with suspicion and displeasure while I dressed for my date with Harry. To be fair to her, she had plenty of reasons. I’d never in my life worn a shirt and dress trousers or leather shoes where you had to think about what belt went with them. I drew a line at wearing a tie. But the restaurant Harry had picked was fancy, and I didn’t want to look out of place.
“So this Kieran person,” Chloe said from her Danish wicker chair, “he’s out of the picture now, is he?”
“Yup.”
“And this Harry person is single now?”
“Yup.”
“And you believe that poppycock?”
“Yup.”
“So, what happened to ‘lying, cheating son of a bitch’?”
“I was wrong,” I said. “He explained it. It made sense. He’s going through a rough patch.”
If I sounded like Maya now, I didn’t choose to admit it to myself.
Chloe stared at me horrified. “What are you doing?”
“Brushing my hair.”
“Why?”
“It’s what people do!” I said, defensively. Usually I kept it in a ponytail and forgot about it. It occurred to me that Harry probably liked neat men, with neat hair, clean-shaven and all that. I’d clean-shaved for the date. I’d showered very, very thoroughly. I was as polished as one of those weird figurines he collecte
d. Chloe had reasons to be worried.
“I don’t like it.” She narrowed her eyes.
“I’m not asking you to like it,” I said, spraying my deodorant in the air and walking through the cloud of scent. Note to self: buy cologne like an adult.
The restaurant Harry had chosen was Italian. I checked it out online and it struck me as a little extravagant. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be taking me to a nice restaurant if this were just a friend-date. This surely was a date-date. In my excitement, I barely ate anything all day, playing imaginary scenarios over in my head, in which we always ended up on the table, wrestling our clothes off, while making imaginative use of that olive oil they always serve with bread before the meal.
Unfortunately, this resulted in my standing in front of the restaurant that evening waiting for Harry, ravenous and dressed like an overgrown man-child (because the whole ironed shirt, dress trousers look only works when you’re wearing your own suit, rather than one borrowed from your friend whose limbs aren’t as long as your own).
Harry arrived in a cab, dapper in his suit, with his hair clean-cut and parted at the side as usual. I was a little envious how he could pull this off so well, and keep it looking sharp even after a cab ride. I don’t know how it was, but in my case, it was always a toss up between appearing like I’d just escaped a terrible accident or being somewhere on time.
He forbore to notice this, however, and greeted me with a smile and a pat on the arm. I thought this was a bit of a cold greeting for a date, but then I remembered what he’d said about Kieran, and guessed that he probably wasn’t used to PDA.
“Have you been waiting long?” he asked.
I told him I hadn’t, and even stopped myself from bragging that I had, for the first time in my life, arrived on the dot. We went inside and let the waiter seat us at a table by the window. It was a nice sort of place, with warm colours and muted piano music contributing to the “ambience.”