by Roxie Cooper
Unable to remove my gaze from The Kiss, I deliver my verdict.
‘They’ve completely lost themselves in each other. They’re so involved in the kiss, it’s like the world has fallen away – they’re oblivious to anyone else. It’s raw emotion. They’re entwined, infatuated with each other, becoming one. The kiss is so intimate, you can barely even see their faces. It just makes the fact they can’t be with each other even more tragic.’
I suddenly look at Jamie, snapping myself out of this art trance I’ve weirdly found myself in. He looks so proud, smiling at me.
‘About that kiss, though, you’ve missed something,’ he says, walking me around to the part of the sculpture where the heads are. ‘They don’t actually kiss. Despite being called The Kiss, it actually captures the moment seconds before. It’s said that their forbidden love is symbolised by the lack of touch between their lips.’
‘So, it’s actually a non-kiss?’
‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘And I love that. It doesn’t detract from the piece; if anything, it makes it stronger. Sometimes there’s far more passion, meaning and sensuality in what isn’t there, than what is. Very often, the most beautiful, sensual moments are actually when nothing happens. This piece is far more romantic, and says more, than one showing them having sex, for example.’
‘Like the drawing?’ I add. He looks puzzled, clearly forgetting that was one of the first things he taught me in that art workshop years ago.
‘You know, “Sometimes it’s what’s around the lines you draw which is important, in the shadows”, or something?’ I remind him.
‘Yes,’ he smiles. ‘That.’
We stand facing each other, next to this beautiful piece of art depicting doomed lovers and sexual infatuation, and I’m unsure how much longer we can stay here and make reference to how their struggles mirror our own. It’s not easy for either of us. I’m also aware that the day is wearing on and we will have to be heading back to the train station soon. Neither of us want it to end, though.
‘Right,’ he says, snapping us out of the place neither of us can afford to be in. ‘A drink before we get the train?’
‘Sure!’ I reply. I need a fucking drink after all that.
Sitting next to each other in a crowded bar, we talk non-stop about everything else apart from the elephant in the room – us. It’s busy, so we have to sit close enough that our legs and arms touch. Darkness falls outside and it’s bustling with tourists in the bars around the train station. We decide I should get the first train back and Jamie will get the one after.
I’m tempted to ask if we can stay longer, but I know I can’t.
We enter King’s Cross station and locate my train on the departure boards. It leaves in twelve minutes.
Walking over to the platform, I try to think of the right words to say which sum up how grateful I am that he came to meet me today. I need to pitch this right. I can’t be overemotional about it. I feel sick. There are people running about all around us which is probably a good thing. I think I’d crumble if we were alone. I dare not even think about him returning home to his wife and child.
Stopping just before the platform, he turns to face me.
‘Thank you for such a wonderful day, Stephanie.’
‘No, thank you. It’s been truly amazing. I’ve loved every minute. Especially the art chat!’ I say, forcing a smile.
He doesn’t reply. Instead, he edges closer towards me, sliding his right hand around my waist, as his left hand reaches up into the back of my hair. His face moves closer to mine so that our noses brush against each other. His eyes remain open, gazing straight into mine. The tension between us crackles as I place my hands delicately on his chest. He very gently takes a handful of my hair and pulls it downwards, so that my head lifts up ever so slightly. He doesn’t break my gaze the entire time, but places his mouth millimetres away from mine and keeps it there for what must only be a few seconds, but it feels like minutes.
A non-kiss.
The world falls away and nobody else matters. I don’t see, hear or care about them. When he slowly breaks away, neither of us say anything. It’s the perfect goodbye: words would ruin it.
I’m only minutes out of the capital on the whooshing train when I see my phone light up. It’s Jamie.
A sweep of excitement rushes over me. I didn’t expect anything from him, that non-kiss was enough. It says simply:
What we have … it’s this. Thank you for a beautiful day. Xx
As always, there’s a link to YouTube. It takes me to a black and white video. Two people sit on stools playing guitars, singing … and that’s it. No grand orchestra or hitting the big notes. Just two voices with great harmonies. Extreme’s ‘More Than Words’.
I have the perfect song to send to him. I pop the video into a text message and add:
I understand. I enjoyed every second. Xxx
The lyrics are beautiful.
The video is ghostly and grainy. I love those ones, from the ’60s; they’re so atmospheric. It’s dramatic and moving. Her haunting tones echo throughout the studio she’s in, hypnotising everyone there.
Her voice has a sadness to it; I’ve always found it rather melancholic.
Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’. As the song goes on, I realise that if I want to keep him as part of my life, I need to get on with my own.
Can it even work? I’ve no idea. I just need to remain detached, not get jealous and just be happy that weave what we have.
But I’ve had one of the best days of my life today. No, scratch that – probably the best. I want that feeling all the time. Do people actually have that? Am I expecting too much? His wife has that, I bet. I get eight hours of bliss a year.
And now I have to go home to my husband and pretend everything is fine. I can’t even remember the last time Matt and I went out and had fun – not that it would even be on the same scale as Jamie and I. Oh, yes, it was the Charity Gala night with work about six weeks ago. I got drunk on all the free booze and Matt dragged me home early, feeling frisky. The entire sexual experience lasted less than two minutes.
Six weeks ago.
And I haven’t had a period since …
CHAPTER 14
Wednesday 15 December 2010
Jamie
‘Welcome to the exhibition of Cal Mendez. May I see your invitation, please?’
Helen and I throw a glance towards each other. In the chaos which ensued before I left to meet her in London, which included getting ready at lightning speed, calming a screaming Seb, ensuring all the bottles were made up and the baby food was defrosted for the babysitter, it never entered my mind that I’d need an invitation.
Helen laughs at the surly woman, peeking over her shoulder through the doorway to the exhibition. ‘Oh! We don’t need an invitation. We’re his best friends.’
‘Invitation only, I’m afraid,’ she snaps. Her slicked-back hair and heavy eye-shadow make her look as if she got lost on the way to Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted To Love’ video.
‘Don’t let them in! Bloody riff-raff!’ yells a familiar voice. Cal parts the crowd, charismatic as ever, insisting we are allowed in – minus an invitation.
‘So pleased you could make it!’ God, it’s good to see him. ‘And Helen, looking radiant!’ he says, leaping towards her.
‘Cal, charming as ever!’ she says, beaming. The three of us back together. Like the old days.
Cal’s speciality is leatherwork. He designs and creates exquisite accessories, footwear and couture. I hear him asking Helen about Seb as my eyes flit around the room.
All of his items are carefully and beautifully displayed under delicate lighting, intended to show the pieces off. I recognise some of them from pictures he’s sent me over the past few months. They were half-finished at that point; a leather outline of a shoulder cape, the external skeleton of a headpiece, both of which are now covered in ornate and intricate decoration. Rich berry-reds, browns and golds adorn the piec
es. It’s amazing to see what they’ve been transformed into. That’s the thing I love with art: transforming raw materials into things of exceptional beauty. They are stunning to look at. He’s obviously worked so incredibly hard for this. I’m stupidly proud of him. The room is full of people admiring his work, and rightly so.
‘Mate, what do you think?’ he asks as Helen goes off for drinks.
‘I’m actually speechless,’ I say. ‘Unbelievably good.’
Cal smiles, bashfully. He is probably the most confident person I know, but he still gets nervous before an exhibition. Only I know that, though. He’s a larger-than-life character and I was drawn to him on my first day of university. He sashayed into class wearing shades, tight jeans, heeled boots and a shirt pretty much undone to the waist. He wanted to be Prince back in the day – didn’t we all? His dad is Spanish, so he’s blessed with olive skin and jet-black hair with a slight curl. Needless to say, absolutely every single girl fancied the arse off him, and lots of boys too. Loads of people thought he was gay. He started getting tattoos and wearing eyeliner the further into art school we got, which just made his fan club even bigger. This is a guy who has absolutely no issue with his sexuality – he’s just an infectious, assured character who charms everyone he comes into contact with.
Cal, Helen and I hung out together for three years. We went to gigs, created stuff in the art studio, went drinking, visited art galleries and talked about our dreams.
‘So, how’s fatherhood? I really, really appreciate you coming tonight. I know you can’t stay long. School night and everything,’ Cal says.
I smile. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world. But yeah, it’s knackering! We’re getting through it though. Can’t complain.’
Helen returns with three glasses of champagne for us, and we all clink.
‘To the triumvirate!’ she says.
‘Jamie! Helen!’ a Geordie voice screeches from behind us. Helen and I smile, turning around.
‘Vicky! Brilliant to see you!’ I say, reaching out to hug her.
Vicky – Cal’s wife – is a tiny blonde woman, who looks even smaller when she stands next to him. She is stunningly beautiful, with big blue eyes and big blonde hair. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her not looking like a ’60s bombshell – that’s her look. You’d look at her and assume she’s some kind of model, but she’s actually some kind of shit-hot corporate lawyer in Canary Wharf.
Helen and I couldn’t believe it when he said he’d met The One. Given his tendency to have a different girlfriend every other week, we were sceptical. No girl had ever held his interest before … until Vicky came along. I remember the weekend he came to visit us in Manchester, saying he’d fallen for some girl … a lawyer! They’d met at a Prince night at a club in East London. He’d spotted her during ‘U Got The Look’ and went over to talk to her, using the song as an intro. They chatted all night and he knew there and then she was the girl he was going to spend the rest of his life with. We tried gently telling him it might not work, given that they were from different worlds. That she might be too straight-laced for him and he was … well … very ‘Cal’. But they proved everyone wrong by buggering off to get married in Las Vegas without telling a soul. That was three years ago.
Vicky and Cal are a great match.
‘How are you both?’ she says, and kisses Helen. ‘How’s the bairn?’
‘He’s really good, thank you! How’s things with you?’ Helen asks.
‘Oh, you know. Boring work! I’ll be glad to get this one back,’ Vicky says, nodding at Cal and tenderly holding on to his arm. ‘He’s put so much work into this, I’ve barely seen him! Couldn’t be prouder though, obviously.’
‘It’s incredible, Cal,’ Helen says. ‘All those years paid off.’
‘How’s work, Helen? Must be hard with the little one?’ Vicky asks.
‘Yeah, it’s tough on both of us,’ she admits, quite rightly. ‘I went back to work after four months because of the new promotion so it’s been really full-on. Think we are both pretty much sleepwalking through the days at the moment!’
‘I can imagine!’
‘You look incredible!’ Helen says. ‘I feel so fat and haggard next to you!’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I say, reaching out and putting my arm around Helen’s waist. ‘You look beautiful.’ And she does. She was worried about tonight, what to wear, how to do her hair. She thinks she’s gained loads of weight, which she hasn’t. She’s doing remarkably well considering she’s working full-time and being a mum and we’ve just relocated to another part of the country.
At that point Cal and Vicky get dragged away by some people so we take the opportunity to have a mooch around and get another drink.
Helen messages the babysitter to make sure Seb is OK, which he is, and we discuss whether we’ve got him enough Christmas presents.
‘Are you picking him up from nursery at normal time on Monday or will he have to stay longer because I’ll be back late?’ she asks.
‘No, I should be fine for Monday. Thursday I may have a problem …’
‘Right, I’ll sort that,’ she says, typing something into the calendar on her phone.
‘Will he be walking soon?! What age do they start walking at?’ I ask out of the blue.
‘Not yet!’ Helen laughs. ‘Maybe in about four or five months! God, can you imagine when he’s properly mobile, though? God help us!’
‘I know!’ Just the very thought of him brings a smile to my face.
‘Is this the first time we’ve been Seb-less since he was born?’ Helen asks, like it’s just dawned on her.
‘Yep!’ I reply without hesitation. I know it is because this was my worry when we moved down here, how we’d do anything together without help around the corner.
‘Well, now Daisy can babysit we can do it more often,’ she says. Daisy is one of the girls from Seb’s nursery who does babysitting outside of work. It’s a relief knowing it’s there if we want it. Both of us have been living in an exhausting cycle of work, Seb and home for the past seven months and have had no time for each other.
Later, I sneak off to find the man of the moment as people start drifting away. He’s been surrounded by people all night.
‘You’ve done all right, Cal Mendez,’ I say and smile, holding my beer out to clink his bottle, as we finally get a moment alone together.
‘Yeah, took blood, sweat and tears, though,’ he says, clinking it back and sitting down beside me, facing one of his finest pieces – a headpiece he created for an international dance company. It’s like something out of a fantasy film. A colourful burst of gold, pink and shiny brown feathers. ‘Don’t tell anyone about the tears, though.’
‘Wouldn’t dare!’
‘You could have all this,’ he says, looking around the exhibition space.
‘That’s kind. But I don’t have your talent, Cal.’
‘Oh, shut up! Are you serious?’ He raises his voice, turning to face me. ‘You’re one of the best artists I’ve ever seen.’
‘No, I’m not!’
‘You think you couldn’t do this? Get this? Are you kidding me? I’m no more talented than you,’ he goes on, animating his speech with his hands. God, he’s had too much to drink. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘Life! We can’t all be artists like you, Cal.’
He looks at me, confused. Anger flashes across his face and he shakes his head.
‘Do you even remember how good you are? That fire you’ve got inside you? Your stuff used to blow me away,’ he says, intently. ‘This,’ he says, looking around, ‘is all risk. It’s about putting yourself out there at the right time. Showing it to the right people. Hard work at the right time. That’s it.’
Taking a drink of my beer, he can see I’m not sold. There’s a world between me and achieving anything like this.
‘Do you remember what you were doing in the summer of 1999?’ he asks, randomly.
‘What?’
‘Do you remember?’
‘Erm,’ I murmur, raising my eyebrows, desperately trying to recollect that timeline, ‘I think I was doing the summer internship with Paul Hewitt.’
‘Yep,’ he says. ‘How did you get that?’
‘We had to submit a portfolio, like, the spring beforehand,’ I tell him. What on earth is he going on about?
‘How many people applied for that?’
‘Christ, I dunno!’
‘Eighty-seven,’ he says, with absolute certainty.
‘OK …’
‘And you won it.’
‘Right.’
‘I know eighty-seven people applied for that because I was one of them. I really wanted that internship, Jamie. I loved that artist. We all wanted it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, slightly embarrassed.
‘I never told you this,’ he says, picking at the label on his bottle of beer, ‘but before we had to submit our portfolio, I looked at yours. I saw it in the art studio one day and took a peek.’
‘Really?’
‘Yep.’
‘And?’
‘It proper pissed me off, Jamie,’ he says like he’s actually pissed off with me right here and now. ‘Because I knew you were better than me. That shit was effortless to you. You were streets ahead of me – and everyone else. Your interpretation of things the rest of us even mildly struggle with is mind-blowing sometimes.’
I can’t look at him. I’ve never been any good with praise. Hearing it from someone as talented as him makes me feel embarrassed, so I just stare at his exhibition piece.
‘You took risks in your art. You won that internship – of course you did, you deserved it. But I went home after seeing that and I was angry because I knew I had to up my game. Because I knew I had to make myself stand out. Because, in this life, you don’t get anywhere without taking risks.’
An image of Stephanie flashes through my mind when he says this. I turn to face him again, almost as if to knock it out of my head.
‘You could still have all this. You just need to remember how good you are and keep the dream alive. Art is about making yourself vulnerable, but people have to see it. They won’t if it’s stuck in your garage, mate.’