by James Flint
Knowing full well that any sign of impatience on his part could capsize his plans for the evening, Matthew did his best to join in. The talking went on. There were more drinks. At half past eight he touched Caitlin on the arm.
‘We should go.’
‘You can’t go!’ said David Tate, who was one of the group. ‘You’ve just got here.’
‘We’ve got a reservation,’ Matthew said.
‘Oooh, a reservation. Fancy!’
‘Matty’s taking me out,’ Caitlin said, rolling her eyes. Matthew couldn’t tell if she was happy about the fact or taking the piss.
‘We’re celebrating.’
‘Hey,’ said Caitlin, eyes not rolling now but lighting up. ‘Why don’t you all come?’
Matthew started to panic. ‘But we’ve only booked for two!’
‘Oh they won’t care,’ Caitlin said. ‘That place is always half-empty anyway.’
‘Noodles, anyone?’ said David, enjoying the look of horror on Matthew’s face. ‘Chicken chow mein? Personally I quite fancy a drop of bird’s nest soup and a bowl of ducks’ tongues.’
Caitlin evidently thought this was hilarious. It took Matthew another fifteen minutes to extract her from the bar and get her across the street to the restaurant, and then only once it had been established that everyone else, David included, had already eaten.
The place was half-empty, as Caitlin had said it would be. They took their seats at one of the tables overlooking Sheep Street and thus the half-timbered frame of Vintner. Not wanting to be dragged back there even mentally, Matthew cast his gaze around the room, trying to find reassurance in the arrangement of paper lanterns, black lacquer tables, carved wooden screens.
The waiter brought menus.
‘What would you like?’ Matthew asked, as he scanned through the dishes.
‘I don’t know if I’m that hungry, to be honest,’ Caitlin said.
‘Well, maybe something to drink. And prawn crackers. We should definitely get some prawn crackers.’
Caitlin shrugged. Matthew put down the menu and stared at her.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. Why?’
‘Because, to be honest, you don’t really seem like you want to be here.’
‘Of course I do.’ She picked up her menu, opened it. ‘How about some ducks’ tongues?’ she giggled.
‘Want me to go over the road and fetch David?’
‘If you like.’
The waiter reappeared and asked if they were ready to order. Matthew sent him away.
‘Come on Cait,’ he said, trying to use the interruption to help him change tack. ‘I just want to celebrate with you. It’s a big deal for us, this is: you finishing your exams. In a few months we could be moving into a place at Warwick together. Think of that.’
Caitlin reached for her bag and began hunting for something inside it. Her cigarettes. She took one out and lit it.
‘I don’t think that’s going to happen,’ she blurted, between puffs.
Matthew sighed, exasperated. ‘Well that’s a pretty defeatist attitude. You’ve studied really hard. You’re going to get good grades, I just know it.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Doesn’t matter? Why doesn’t it matter?’
She sucked again on her Marlboro Light, exhaled, and looked at him. He didn’t recognise the look. The Caitlin that he knew, she wasn’t there.
‘Because I didn’t put Warwick on my UCAS form.’
Her words had come to him in disordered fragments, their phonemes utterly discrete, but once he’d deciphered what she’d said Matthew just got up from the table and walked away. Initially, thinking he might throw up, he was heading for the toilets, but he didn’t know where they were and, unable to summon the self-possession required to look for them, he ended up heading down the stairs and back the way they’d come in until he found himself outside.
What Caitlin’s action meant he did not know. It was the antithesis of meaning, meaning’s antimatter: it rendered meaning void. The last year, the last two years of his life, everything he’d told himself and struggled for, all those hours and weeks and months he’d spent trudging the streets rattling a tin, all the jejune goals and romantic self-assurances he spun himself, all of this crumpled and collapsed into a psychological singularity so dense it seemed to suck in his entire soul.
Caitlin had followed him out and was now standing there in the small open plaza on the corner of Sheep Street talking to him. But it was like he was inside a television and she was standing in front of it yelling pointlessly at the screen. Why would she do that? Why would she even try to communicate? Did she not understand that what she saw of him was just a broadcast signal, that in reality he was standing many, many miles away, that there was glass, and antennae, and great tracts of open space between the two of them? He was beyond her now, and she beyond him. They were separate people, strangers. They would not touch again.
There were some issues, later, because he did not drive her home that night but instead abandoned her in town without the cash for a cab. Sheila and Tony called his parents to complain, but when Miles and Margaret brought it to his attention he simply told them the truth as he now saw it: that he did not know who she was. For a long time after that he refused to hear her name spoken in front of him. If anyone so much as mentioned her, he would just get up and leave the room.
He went to Warwick that September, or at least he packed his stuff and moved into his campus dorm. But that was about as far as it went. He didn’t attend any lectures or show up at his seminars. He spent most of his time on the payphone in the hallway of his building or on the bus to London, making one of many trips to the Greenpeace head office where he was engaged in a relentless campaign to badger his way into a job, any job, even if it meant scrubbing the office floor. As it turned out, the time he’d spent running teams in the Midlands counted for quite a lot, and eventually he was offered an entry-level position.
He left Warwick without telling either the university or his family. Just packed up and left. For the next few years he was travelling continually wherever Greenpeace sent him, until a funding crisis meant cuts to his expenses and the already fairly minimal salary they were paying him. He heard about the EcoPath job from a friend, applied for it, got it, and off the back of it took out a 95 per cent interest-only mortgage on the flat in Oxford’s Summertown.
The day after he took possession of the property a cat showed up in the backyard, half-starved, missing an eye, covered in fleas, and demanding food and attention as if by natural right. Perhaps he did have a right: perhaps he’d belonged to the previous owners and lived there already; Matthew never found out. But he recognised a kindred spirit when he saw one, and so he took the cat in, fed him, paid his vet bills, fixed him up. He named him Max, chosen for no other reason than it seemed to suit him. And Max must have liked something about the arrangement. At any rate, he stuck around.
STAG
TOBY STRAUSS WAS A DIRECTOR at Simple Eye, the production company that Caitlin worked for. He was also married and had two kids. Caitlin had met him when she’d been a line producer on Beat Your Neighbour, a property reality show in which two homeowners in the same street competed to see who could build an extension on their house the fastest and still add more value to their property than their rivals did to theirs.
Toby, with his floppy blond fringe, battered but expensive quilted jackets, designer jeans and suede walking boots had, in her mind, been an attractive but distant figure for most of the chaotic shooting schedule. Their relationship changed, however, when one of the couples they’d been filming turned out not to own their house at all.
This was a major crisis. The team was just a few weeks away from delivery and the couple – the Nashtons – were among the most televisual and entertaining of their subjects. They’d looked set to be the champions of the series, and now it transpired that not only were they not the owners of their property, but they had no planning permission for the extension
they’d constructed. The local council was insisting that the extension be demolished at the expense of the actual owner, who’d been notified by the letting agency and who was threatening to sue both the Nashtons and Simple Eye for the damages incurred.
‘It’s a fucking disaster,’ Toby moaned, head in hands, after he and Caitlin had been left alone in the Simple Eye boardroom by the deeply unimpressed Head of Commissioning. ‘Our best strand. We’re going to have to recut the whole series. We may even have to reshoot.’
Caitlin sat in silence, watching Toby’s fine hair undulating between his fingers like seaweed between the spars of a wreck. He’d been gentleman enough not to throw her to the wolves in the meeting they’d just endured, but it was her fault that the paperwork hadn’t been checked. Ever since the gaffe had been discovered she’d been writing apologies and resignation letters in her mind. So far they hadn’t been needed, but now that moment had surely arrived.
Toby lifted his head.
‘Let’s go to the pub,’ he said.
They went to the pub. Not the usual one, on the corner across from the Simple Eye offices, but another, a few streets away, the Nelson, which was quieter and more intimate. Better, Caitlin thought, for doing the deed. Though if Toby was going to try and assuage any guilt he might feel over her dismissal by buying her a drink, she wished he wouldn’t bother.
Toby returned to the booth in which they’d settled with a beer for him and a white wine for her. He’d got a tube of Pringles too, which Caitlin couldn’t help but feel was a little excessive. He was here to sack her. They didn’t need nibbles.
He placed the drinks on the table, slid along the banquette, and took a gulp of his beer.
‘What a prick he is,’ he said, setting down his glass.
‘I know it’s all my fault,’ Caitlin said. ‘I know I’ve got to go. Please get on with it.’
Toby looked blank for a second. ‘What? Don’t be daft. You didn’t take all of that seriously, did you?’
‘But I should have done proper checks on the paperwork.’
Toby waved his hand. ‘We’re a production company, not a bloody bank. Listen Cait. You’re the best line producer I ever had. You come early, you stay late, you work hard, you don’t need reminding of the blindingly obvious and you’re capable of handling more than one thing at a time, even when it’s not your make-up or your boyfriend. You made a mistake, or, more accurately, you were fooled by some people who it turns out were basically mad. It happens. I’m not about to lose you over it, whatever Simon thinks.’
Caitlin didn’t know what to say.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. Here. Have a Pringle.’
Their eyes met and they both grinned. The grim cloud hanging over them dissipated. Suddenly none of it seemed to matter very much.
‘Christ,’ Toby said. ‘All this fuss over a shitty property show. I never wanted to do this, you know.’
‘What, Beat Your Neighbour?’
‘No. Well, yes, that too. I meant telly. I never wanted to work in telly. I mean, what boy spends his teenage years dreaming of making tedious reality shows about the housing market? I wanted to be a film director, like everyone else. Thought that directing telly would be a good route in. How wrong I was.’
‘Well you’re hardly past it.’
‘Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment. But my chance has gone, I think. Especially given the state of the film industry in this country. The government has pulled all the tax breaks, you know. The whole thing, such as it is, is collapsing. It’s like the nineteen-eighties all over again.’
‘There’s always TV drama. What’s wrong with that?’
Toby faux-retched. ‘God, where do I start?’
‘Oh come on. There’s lots of great series made all the time.’
‘Name me one. Made in Britain – not America. And not a comedy or a costume drama.’
Caitlin hesitated. Suddenly comedies and costume dramas were all that came to mind.
‘Told you. Incredible series are spilling out of the States faster than you can watch them, and here, what have we got? Big Brother and Jane Austen adaptations.’
‘There’s The Office.’
‘Comedy. Doesn’t count.’ Toby tipped the last Pringles’ shards into his mouth and crushed the tube between the heels of his hands. ‘What about you? What brought you to the glorious land of TV UK?’
Caitlin looked away, as she generally did when asked about herself. Her story was well practised, but however many times she repeated it, it never sat snug. ‘I – I don’t know really. Sad, isn’t it? I suppose I thought it would be interesting, and fun, and not all that hard. At school I really wanted to be an architect, but then I got scared off by the maths and the thought of seven years’ training. I didn’t know if I could face asking my parents to support me through that, only to discover at the end of it that I wasn’t much good, or I didn’t like it, or whatever. So here I am.’
‘So you didn’t have the self-belief to do what you really wanted to do.’
‘Well, nor did you.’
‘Touché. You’re right. I didn’t. And I still don’t. We both live inside our own quiet tragedies, don’t we? Another drink?’
‘Oh …’ Caitlin reached for her bag, but Toby was already on his feet.
‘No, no. Come on. On me. You’ve had a shite enough day as it is. Same again?’
Caitlin nodded. ‘Sure – thanks.’
‘And here, while you’re waiting.’ He dug into his pocket and tossed something on to her side of the table: a small folded envelope of paper cut from a magazine. ‘If you fancy it.’
Oh thank God, thought Caitlin. This would make things so much easier.
While Toby was at the bar she disappeared to the Ladies and helped herself to a couple of lines of the powder the packet contained; when she returned she passed it back to its owner, who then went off to the Gents.
They carried on in this vein for another couple of hours. Then Toby mentioned that he was living in a rented flat a few streets away, while he went through a trial separation from his wife.
Caitlin was drunk. ‘You make it sound like surgery,’ she said.
‘It kind of is. Without an anaesthetic.’ He motioned at his empty glass. ‘Unless you count that.’
They giggled conspiratorially and their arms touched. Soon afterwards Toby placed his leg against Caitlin’s underneath the table. She didn’t move away. When they got outside, they both started walking in the same direction. Neither of them said anything about where they were going. Neither of them needed to.
—————
Caitlin spent many evenings at Toby’s place after that, though that first time was the only occasion they made love in the hallway. She would go there late, usually after a dinner eaten alone in her flat in Shoreditch, yoyo-ing up and down the Central Line in the process. The property production was soon behind them, the crisis with the couple that didn’t own their house somehow resolved and faded to inconsequence, and they had moved on to new – and separate – projects. Toby was shooting outside London and travelling a lot; Caitlin had hoped he might request her as his production manager, but he didn’t. She thought about mentioning it to him but decided against it: when it came down to it she knew he wouldn’t want to mix business and pleasure, and she wouldn’t either. It would be childish to make an issue of it.
But it did mean she didn’t see a great deal of him, because he didn’t seem to want to mix pleasure with pleasure much either. Their time together was always brief because his kids had to come first, which was fair enough. But after three months she still hadn’t met them and they hadn’t been told about her, as far as she knew. And he hadn’t introduced her to a single one of his friends.
The excuse was the divorce. Toby didn’t want his wife to find out he had a lover; it might play against him if things got messy and they ended up in court. Which was fine as far as it went, but after six months of making herself available, usually at short notice
and often at what seemed like Toby’s whim, Caitlin was starting to question their entire relationship.
She discussed the situation with Beth, the landlady at The Crusader, a pub that Caitlin frequented in Shoreditch, not far from her flat.
‘He’s using you,’ Beth told her straight away. ‘He needs to get real.’
‘It’s hard for him though,’ Caitlin said. ‘He’s under so much pressure.’
Beth had no time for such limp empathies. ‘I wouldn’t put up with it. Has he told you when the divorce is due to come through?’
Caitlin shook her head.
‘You want to be careful. He could be having you on. I don’t want to slag him off or anything, but if you ask me I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still sleeping with his wife.’
‘They’re barely on speaking terms.’
‘Look babe, she’s his wife. They’ve got two kids. Trust me, they’re speaking. The only question is: are they still shagging? I mean, where does he spend his nights when you’re not at his flat?’
‘At his flat. Or in a hotel, when he’s on location.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Of course. Why would he lie?’
Beth pulled on her cigarette and vented two long streams of smoke from her nostrils.
‘Er, because he’s a man, duck. That’s what they do.’
Caitlin laughed. But the seed of doubt had been planted.
The next time Toby called her she told him she was busy and she couldn’t see him that night. The plan, once she got off the phone, was to drive over and see if the lights were on in his flat. But now that the first step had been taken, she felt slightly ridiculous. Was she really going to get in her car and go and spy on her lover?
Well, yes, apparently so. Because here she was driving through town to Shepherd’s Bush and parking across the road from Toby’s block, within direct line of sight of his darkened windows.
The lights were off. This, unfortunately, proved nothing. He could have gone out for a meal or met a friend for a drink. He could be anywhere. What was she supposed to do now? Sit here on stakeout for the whole night? She did the first of several hits of coke from the supply she kept in her handbag and smoked the first of several cigarettes. She waited one hour, then two. This was ludicrous. She was freezing, ragged, high. She thought of Beth. Why was she taking advice from a landlady, someone whose job was to sell her alcohol, for Christ’s sake?