by Drew Davies
The Shape of Us
A hilarious and emotional page turner about love, life and laughter
Drew Davies
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Drew’s Email Sign-Up
A Letter from Drew
Acknowledgements
To Peter Farmer,
in fond memory of his warmth & wit.
One
‘London,’ they say, eyes twinkling. ‘London is a city for lovers!’
Look down the sweeping avenues of Shaftesbury or Sloane and you’ll find them, hands entwined, cheeks pink and dimpled with joy, loving at each other. On the Tube they’ll self-consciously flirt (though not self-consciously enough, you’ll sniff, ruffling the Evening Standard). He’ll make a grand gesture of offering her the empty seat or perhaps she’ll perch coquettishly on his lap – while the rest of the carriage tries desperately to ignore them.
Yes, London is for the young and in love, but loathed are they by all good Londoners. Like tourists and pigeons, lovers are a blight on this great city – a fact they are completely (and conveniently) blind to. That is, until one day, when a lover finds themselves standing behind a couple so amorously entwined it’s a wonder the cheap bottle of Spanish red they’re holding doesn’t smash to the floor – in fact, they want it to smash – and suddenly our lover finds themselves under stark fluorescents, unable to wait for the self-service checkouts after all and quite out of love with the idea of love. But until then, my friend (twinkle, twinkle), until then!
Here come Chris and Daisy – two soon-to-be lovers – now, both hurrying towards their meeting point near Embankment station, both in their early thirties, both thinking they are the only one who is twelve minutes late for their first date. She is quite lovely – her hair in brown curls that took two attempts and a navy dress she ‘borrowed’ from work that floats in all the right cleavage-type places and none of the thigh-revealing wrong ones. He is holding a copy of The Big Issue that he hopes will make him seem more edgy and less posh than he is, and is wearing jeans that do good things for his rather square buttocks. Chris looks younger than he has a right to and, all things considered, fairly handsome.
A few paces from the meeting point, they finally see each other and realise they are not the only one late, and oh the relief, and how funny to arrive at exactly the same moment, and they take in the smells of each other (him: soap and sandalwood, her: jasmine and the slight zest of something – deodorant?) and talk and laugh like this for some time before realising they have successfully side-stepped the awkward ‘Do I kiss you on one cheek or two?’ routine and cut straight to ‘Can I hold the cuff of your jacket while I adjust my shoe?’ Once Daisy’s heel strap is fastened in place, they walk down the steps to the riverside entrance to Gordon’s Wine Bar, a popular drinking grotto (and the capital’s oldest), still chatting breathlessly, until the gloom and the heat of the cave-like bar stifles them. Why did I suggest this place? Chris thinks. It’s one of those bars he’s always meaning to go to, but never does – in his mind it is full of dripping candles and romantic hideaways – in reality it’s cramped and dark and full of overbearing men, who are yelling at someone called Smithee to get three bottles, not two. With a conspiratorial nod, the couple head back up into the daylight to the long row of tables and chairs outside the bar instead. It’s busy here too, though – they nab one seat, which Daisy guards with Chris’s jacket, while he walks the length of the terrace, seeing if any more are free. As he hustles the tables, she watches his style: charming, direct, not too flirty with the ladies, not too ‘alright, mate?’ with the guys. His first three attempts are thwarted as the empty seats are being held for people, but he pushes on and finally returns to her, eyebrows wiggling in victory, with the prize of another chair.
It is only now, after Chris positions the chair beside Daisy and sits, that they really look at each other.
He’s less goofy than she remembers, or maybe less goofy than the mental image of him she’s been turning around in her mind the past week. Could she kiss him? The answer comes immediately: Yes. Good. Daisy could do with a drink, though. She hopes he’s not going to be one of those men who barely touches his glass, forcing her to sneak sips when he’s not paying attention. She had six months off the booze last year, mostly just to prove she could, and yes, her skin was better and she barely missed a yoga class, but she felt too good, too chaste, and restless, with so much extra time. When she caught herself ironing bed sheets one Saturday morning, she knew it was either start drinking again or join a nunnery.
Chris decides Daisy looks different too, better. What is it? She’s softer around the eyes than when they first met. This is probably not surprising considering he cycled up to her from nowhere and brazenly asked her out. He wasn’t usually so impulsive, but the Boris bike he’d rented had given him such a wonderful sense of freedom, whizzing around the West End with the spokes humming, that he’d felt intoxicated with possibility and found himself compelled to ask for her number, this beautiful woman walking along Carnaby Street, carrying a miniature palm tree, safe in the knowledge that he could whizz away again if she spurned him. She’d peered at him, through the leaves of the palm, with a cool blankness as if this happened all the time, strange man-boys on bikes being so forward, and said that she wouldn’t give him her number but she would take his. He’d assumed this was a deflection and so was surprised when Daisy called the next day to ask him out. He’d said yes, and that was that. There was no other correspondence in the days running up to the date. In fact, they had both wondered if the other would show up at all. But here they were now, in the late September sun, together in one of the most exciting cities in the— and with no drinks, he realises now. He stands up. White? Red? A bottle, yes? She smiles, a broad grin he hasn’t seen before, and there’s a zip of energy in his solar plexus, a tenderness in his lungs, and he walks back down into the gloom again to order drinks, feeling oddly light.
On the other side of London, Adam Jiggins walks from Moorgate station through the Barbican Centre – a large, imposing arts venue – and towards his gym. Adam walks with purpose, or more accurately, does his best to imitate a person who has a purposeful walk. Until four months ago he would have hurried quite naturally: power-walking from his flat in east London’s Hackney to the small digital advertising agency in Farringdon where he worked; jogging to buy lunch before all the good sandwiches were taken, and running/sprinting/diving to catch the bus at the end of the day. But now that he is unemployed (no, between jobs), he has to remind himself to quicken his stride.
The gym is his salvation, an oasis in uncertain times. When his agency began to lose clients, Adam considered joining a cheaper gym – one without the fat white towels rolled up in their cubbyholes, or the pretty blonde girls at the reception desk. He knew he should be downsizing to save money in case – God forbid – anything happened at work, but he had become too used to certain standards, and anyway, it was false economy to join the YMCA, with its questionable showers and rancid mats, because he’d never go. This way Adam had justified shelling out the cr
azy-a-month membership fee even after his bosses had called him into the small meeting room/breakout space to explain ‘the situation’.
‘You’re f-firing me?’ he’d cried, his stammer always worse under stress, taking a grip of one of the handles on the foosball table beside him for support.
‘We have to make some bloody difficult decisions, and it’s killing us. You must know that.’
Adam looked out of the window across to Smithfield Market, where they’d once held public executions, feeling the proverbial rope tighten around his own neck.
‘What if I went p-part-time? I could do three days a week until…?’
‘We just don’t have the work in the pipeline. It’s this climate, everyone in the industry is feeling the pinch.’
‘But we’re d-d-digital!’ he’d almost shouted, letting go of the handle and causing three wooden footballers to spin on their axis.
It didn’t make sense. He’d watched a webinar on it only the other week – digital marketing was the new rock and roll. Companies were moving away from old-world advertising in newspapers and on TV, and spending money on search engines instead. Every movement was tracked, every click counted. Adam had felt a surge of pride, knowing the online adverts he created for pet insurance and wound glue were part of the revolution. How could this be happening? And then it had dawned on him – there was a revolution, yes, and advertisers were spending more online, but only with the good agencies. And to be honest, their agency was not very good. It wasn’t that they were lazy – it was just that before you didn’t have to work so hard to seem competent. You could sprinkle the conversation with ‘social network’ this, and ‘augmented reality’ that, and walk away with a six-figure contract. But now, every university grad was a self-certified social media guru, the market was flooded. And Adam had been washed away.
The memory gives him a stabbing pain in the sternum. He tries to walk taller, puff up his chest. By now he’s worked his way through the Barbican Centre and out the other side into the setting sun, following the pavement that will spit him out near the doorstep of his gym. He checks his watch, still on schedule.
After the shock of unemployment settled, Adam had felt briefly liberated by all the spare time. He could go to the supermarket and spend a whole afternoon browsing the foreign cheese section, or head to a midnight screening of a cult film. Quickly, however, the rush of freedom had faded, and he sensed something else instead: ennui and a familiar depression. It was at the gym he felt it most keenly. If he went at peak times he was acutely aware of a countdown to nine o’clock or the end of lunchtime; a frenetic energy he was no longer able to tap into. Mornings or afternoons were the reverse – languid stretches of emptiness broken only by the retired or infirm padding around the exercise equipment like ghouls, or a damp grey mass, looming in the back of the steam room like some silverbacked gorilla, grunting occasionally. Adam had settled on late in the evening, long after the post-work rush, imagining it made him appear hardworking and driven. He could almost feel a wave of respect from the towel attendant when he arrived close to ten o’clock. Though weekends were more oblique time-wise, he had kept to his new gym routine and visited as late as he could. Routines were good; all the therapists and self-help books agreed on that. So here he was on a sunny Saturday evening – shoulders back, eyes fixed on the middle distance, looking to all the world like your average employed and employable Joe.
His foot gives way under him, causing him to wobble comically, and Adam bends down to see what has made him slip. It’s a corporate identity card in a plastic case belonging to one Mark J. Smith. Adam knows the company, Mercer and Daggen, well – it’s one of those big finance-y investment-y places a few streets over, with its intimidating glass foyer and scowling security guards. Carrying on his way, Adam inspects the photo more closely: Mark J. Smith is an unexceptional-looking man in his mid-thirties, a clone of a million other city workers – cropped brown hair, pink shirt, slightly overweight and with sallow skin from too much alcohol and time spent indoors. If you were playing Guess Who, you’d be stymied – the only distinguishable feature is perhaps that one earlobe seems slightly bigger than the other. Still, Adam feels a pang of jealousy. Even though his old agency had been too small to need such security, the pass feels like a talisman of his past. It annoys him that he covets this pasty man’s job, a job the man himself most likely resents. Sighing, Adam tucks the security card into his wallet, reminding himself to return it to Mercer and Daggen after his workout, and enters the gym to a chorus of pretty blonde girls welcoming him in happy unison.
Dinner is not going well. In an attempt to avoid the ‘zombie monologue’ Chris has experienced so often on dates (dead-eyed regurgitations of family, study, career and relationship history), he has led Daisy on a twisting free-form conversation which has taken in current affairs (avoiding anything too mobilising), film, music, best sick day excuses (they both agree, the more graphically scatological, the better), travel and strangest place names (having visited Tasmania, he has an unfair advantage – Lovely Bottom, Mouldy Hole and Misery Knob are just a few he can list off). To begin with, Daisy takes to the challenge, enjoying the great sweeps in topic (noticing that whenever she raises the subject of work, he steers her onto another topic. Not a red flag, she thinks, but possibly an amber one?), meeting his jokes with riffs of her own, and thinking how nice it is not to be talked at for a change. At one point she places her hand on his, squeezing it to emphasise a punchline, and notes the jolt of electricity that seems to pass through his body.
It’s only when the main courses arrive that things take a turn.
‘And how do you feel about pets?’ she asks, as the waiter grinds pepper over Chris’s Cornish lamb.
‘I’m all for them, as a rule,’ he says, removing the sprig of garnish daintily with his knife and fork. ‘I love dogs,’ (this is no surprise to her, he even looks part Labrador with his big brown eyes and floppy blonde hair), ‘but I am allergic to cats.’
Her heart drops. She knows it’s silly – she doesn’t even own a cat – but Daisy always imagined that one day her dream family would include a kitten. As a child, she had a much-loved mog called Hazel, who had run away when they’d moved house, and she had never gotten over the guilt (she’d walked around the neighbourhood with her mum, looking under every car for weeks). She still has dreams where she puts up ‘Missing’ posters and hears a far-off plaintive mew.
‘What about one of those hypoallergenic ones?’ Daisy says brightly, trying not to make it sound like an interrogation. ‘Or taking a normal cat and shaving it?’
Inside she cringes at the thought of Hazel, shaved and shivering in some abandoned alleyway, but he laughs and she feels she has successfully negotiated herself away from crazy cat lady territory.
‘Doesn’t work, I still swell up,’ he says and puffs out his cheeks.
‘Can you take antihistamines?’ she asks as casually as she can, picking at a mushroom in her risotto.
He stops, a pink slither of meat wobbling on his fork.
‘You’re not one of those crazy cat women, are you? Newspaper all over the floor, bathtubs full of mince?’
She feels her cheeks starting to redden.
‘You are, aren’t you?’
Daisy smiles and rolls her eyes, but he’s enjoying teasing her and won’t let go.
‘How many do you have? Ten? Fifty? I bet you dress them up as Hollywood movie stars and post pictures of them online. Catalie Portman. Tony Purrtis,’ Chris pauses, thinking, ‘George Claw-ny!’ She knows she needs to join in if she’s to save face, but she feels the froth of anger and disappointment bubbling up in her throat, suppressing her sense of humour. ‘Ginger Rogers – that one you don’t even need to change if you get the right colour!’
She feels an impulse to grab the copy of The Big Issue he’s laid carefully beside him and swat him, very hard, around the side of the head.
This is going very well, he thinks.
Adam emerges into the cool
evening air with damp hair and a full-body glow of wellbeing. He’s given up on building muscle (his biceps stubbornly refuse to grow; his arms remain defiantly spindly) or shedding his (slight) beer belly – it’s the endorphins he craves. Although he was no longer so vexed by his stutter, he still enjoyed any activity that put him in close proximity to others, without the obligation to speak.
Remembering the security card in his bag, Adam crosses the road away from the station and walks towards the Museum of London. The City is dead on the weekends – all the eateries closed and most of the pubs too. Adam takes a left at St Anne’s and then down Wood Street onto Cheapside. Mercer and Daggen looms in front of him, the glass windows lit from inside giving it an eerie blue glow. As he draws closer, he’s surprised to find it empty. The reception is fitted out in the usual combination of silver turnstiles, large orb lights dangling from the ceiling and the obligatory massive abstract canvas, a token appeasement for the regular balls-out capitalism (‘look, we buy art – we’re not evil!’). He considers knocking on the glass, but tries the door instead and it pushes open.
‘Yes, please?’ comes a voice, and the head of a black security guard pokes over the reception desk. The guard is in his sixties, and a world away from the neckless bruisers Adam usually sees here during the week. His suit seems too big, as if he’s borrowed it from his dad, and his eyes are bloodshot and tired. Adam wonders if he was sleeping.
‘Ah, hello,’ says Adam, putting down his sports bag on the floor and searching inside it. ‘I, um, I’ve g-got… Oh, I just had it.’