The Shape of Us: A hilarious and emotional page turner about love, life and laughter

by Drew Davies

  The security guard looks down impassively as Adam pulls out his sweaty gym gear (he hopes the guard can’t smell his shoes) until finally he finds the photo card and holds it up with a triumphant ‘Aha!’ The guard nods and his head disappears again behind the desk, and Adam hears a click at the silver turnstiles as a small red light turns to green.

  Adam takes a step towards the desk. ‘I think you’ve…’

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ says the security guard, who’s now seated, and gives Adam a wave of his hand in the direction beyond the turnstiles as if he has better things to do than sit here chatting (go back to sleep, perhaps?). Adam places the ID card on the reception counter and the security guard stares at it for a moment and then (was that a sigh he heard?) dutifully picks it up to examine it. Adam is about to explain he found it at The Barbican when the security guard grunts and nods again, and hands the card back with another quick wave towards the turnstile. ‘Yes, yes, Mr Smith,’ he says, sitting back down in his chair.

  Adam is stunned. How can he have been mistaken for the grey-skinned schlub in the photo? He is not even thirty yet and he’s thin! Perhaps the guard’s eyes are rheumy? Adam is about to turn around and go, when he picks up the ID card instead and takes another look at the dark circles under Mark J. Smith’s eyes. Feeling a sudden surge of energy, he pockets it, picks up his bag, walks through the turnstile – they make a satisfying ‘tink-tink-tink’ sound – and he is on the other side, heading into the depths of Mercer and Daggen like a man with purpose, a man who belongs, and for the first time in nearly four months, he believes it.

  She has decided the date must end. Chris seems sweet – too sweet, Daisy thinks now, but he is not her type after all. The cat thing is not the deal breaker – she’s not that petty, for the right guy she would forgo all furry animals. But only for the right guy, which clearly, he’s not (he’s a bit too posh anyway, someone her dad might call ‘Port Side’ on his radio to the taxi controller, a code that his passenger was firmly of the Upper Crust). However, Daisy isn’t about to make a fuss. The last thing she wants is for him to realise he’s ruined the evening and will never see her again. The date might be over, but she doesn’t want to ruin the illusion of the date – she hasn’t stolen the dress from work for nothing. To this end, Daisy smiles through dessert, but turns down coffee. Chris doesn’t seem to have noticed she is now completely closed off to him, and this is both pleasing and worrying to her. It’s pleasing, because she’s glad she can give the semblance of an interested party even during an aberration of an evening like this, but worrying because she wonders if her days are running out to find a suitor who will not only see through the facade, but call her on it.

  On a scale of one to ten, Chris is seven drunk and eight point five randy. Each time Daisy glances down to her lap (he thinks she is being demure, in reality she is checking the time on her phone), he takes a mental photograph of her plunging neckline. He then returns his focus to her face to examine the image – the summer tanned skin on her neck and chest, and that wonderful crevice that leads to two perfectly ample breasts. When the mental image fades he simply waits for her to glance down again to renew it.

  After the bill is paid (Daisy makes certain they split it), they find themselves on the street again and she is about to make her excuses when Chris suggests one last drink at this great place he knows, just over the bridge. She scrunches up her nose and starts to say how late it is, and she should really get going, and he wonders: should I kiss her? As his brain processes this thought, Chris stares awkwardly at her, mouth slack, eyes wide. Like a puppy, she thinks, a big goofy puppy. And there’s something so harmless about him now – definitely not sexy, but cute – that Daisy doesn’t have the heart to crush his feelings, and so she lets him take her by the hand and lead them into the night. They walk towards Embankment Pier and over the Hungerford footbridge, taking in the River Thames and all the lights around it, looking to all the world like young, happy lovers.

  One drink, Daisy thinks, one drink and I’m gone.

  The bar is tucked beneath the next bridge and he orders two large mojitos – she’s forgotten how much she likes them – and they sit on tall barstools and feel that giddy feeling brought about by strong drinks and dangling legs. As they are officially dutching this date now, Daisy buys the next and final round, but then they need a shot for the road (her shout), and it tastes so delicious, like toffees, that they must have another one (his shout) and a chaser of something the barman calls a Wet Nurse, which is so silky and throat-warming they have one more, and somehow they are out of the bar now and have met people on the street, a short Italian in a leather jacket and his cigarette-smoking girlfriend – they have made friends! Where are they going? Can they come too? Of course! And they laugh at their good fortune and hail a cab, bundling together inside, and when they arrive at the new bar in Vauxhall (or is it a club? The Italians’ English isn’t great), the pair feel connected to their new friends in a way rarely felt in London and when asked how long they’ve been a couple, Chris replies, ‘What time is it?’ and Daisy laughs, although the Italians don’t seem to get the joke. The line for the club (it must be a club – they can hear a thumping bass) is long, and aren’t there a lot of men in the queue? And it is time for the Italians to laugh now because it’s a gay club, and Chris runs a hand through his floppy blonde hair and tries not to ogle as two women in front of them kiss.

  A breeze has picked up – Daisy shivers, pulling Chris’s jacket around her tighter, and wonders if he’s really gay after all and engineered this whole ‘accidental’ expedition on purpose. She decides it doesn’t matter – maybe it’s better this way? – but feels a twinge of disappointment, which surprises her.

  After bouncers pat down their pockets and search his wallet (no condom, Chris thinks, thankfully), they skip up a small flight of steps and into the belly of the club. It’s warm in here, almost radiantly hot, and seems to be heated by the naked, gyrating bodies of hundreds of attractive young men. Chris bows formally and takes Daisy’s hand (cor, he is posh, she thinks), twirling her once, twice. Someone claps and whoops, and they don’t know if it’s for them or not, but cheered by the music and the happy crowd, they dance together, arms in the air, unselfconsciously. And now the Italians are back with drinks for all of them – hooray! – and the music really kicks in, and it’s a song Daisy thinks she knows, and everything is spinning, spinning.

  Several cocktails later, the couple find themselves quite seriously drunk. At some point, the male Italian leads them, like two stumbling, doe-eyed children, towards the toilets and into the women’s loos. This is not so strange as it might ordinarily have been – the room is full of men: muscled ones with huge chunks of meat for arms, skinny vested boys checking their shoulders for acne in the mirrors, and drag queens cackling together by the hand dryers. Women are definitely in the minority in these, the women’s toilets.

  The Italian enters a stall and beckons the other two in. Giggling bemusedly, they join him, but this takes some choreography, the Italian sliding behind the toilet door to allow Daisy and Chris to squeeze in and squash up either side of the cistern so he can close the door again and lock it. Taking out his wallet, he removes a small plastic bag full of white powder.

  ‘What is it?’ they ask in unison, both apprehensive.

  The Italian taps the bag with his finger.

  ‘K,’ he says, his teeth chattering.

  ‘What does it do?’

  The Italian smiles. ‘Make you feel good, feel floaty.’

  Daisy remembers listening to a segment about ketamine on Woman’s Hour – what had been the risks? Her mind draws a blank, but she remembers they tranquilised horses with it. Fortunately, Chris looks as nervous as she is.

  ‘You try?’ the Italian asks.

  ‘Not for me,’ Chris replies. ‘I don’t want to commandeer your supply.’

  ‘Supply? You want?’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine.’

  ‘It’s okay, I get,’
says the Italian, and he opens the door and shuts it again behind him. It happens so quickly – poof and he’s gone – that they laugh in confusion. Should they leave too? Alone, they are instantly shy. Daisy’s hand is on the door handle when Chris finally takes his moment and, touching the back of her head, turns her face to meet his mouth.

  He’s kissing me, she thinks. I’m kissing him. She closes her eyes, feeling a wonderful bubbly sensation rise through her body. I hope my lips aren’t sweaty.

  Daisy touches Chris’s shoulder, and he flinches.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, startled by his reaction.

  ‘Don’t be,’ he replies, shaking his head. ‘It’s just an old war wound.’

  ‘What war was that?’

  Chris kisses her again. ‘Life,’ he says, between kisses, and Daisy tactfully slips her hands down to his arm, away from his shoulder.

  They’re still kissing when the cubicle door opens and they’re joined again by another person. Imagining it to be their friend, the sound of a cockney accent makes them jump.

  ‘Your Italian mate said you wanted to buy some K?’

  They turn to find a bulldog of a man inside the cubicle with them. If everything didn’t feel so warm and wonderful from the kiss, Daisy might have screamed.

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’ Chris says, sounding painfully clipped and upper class.

  ‘Do you want to buy some K?’ the man repeats slowly. He has a boxer’s squashed nose and cauliflower ears, a shaved head and tattoos up the side of his neck. In a building full of Brazilian go-go boys, he must stand out like a glow stick.

  ‘Er, sure,’ Chris replies. Just buy the stuff, he thinks, keep him happy and we can escape.

  The drug dealer sniffs and takes a manila parcel out of his jacket pocket and opens it. Inside is an array of small paper envelopes and plastic bags full of coloured pills. He takes out one of the envelopes, and opens the top flap, peering inside. They watch him together, transfixed. Unsatisfied with the contents, the dealer closes the flap again and chucks it back in the big manila parcel.

  ‘My mother died recently,’ he says casually, taking out another small envelope.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Daisy replies automatically.

  The drug dealer nods gravely but says nothing, focusing on the contents of the envelope instead.

  ‘Were you very close?’ she offers, because it seems like the polite thing to say.

  ‘Not really,’ he says, taking his cue, ‘not to begin with, anyway. She wasn’t always there for me, my mum. Didn’t always agree with my choices. But over the past few years we started to bond again.’ He holds up the small origami envelope. ‘She’d help me out, make these paper wraps to put the K and coke in, and I’d give her pocket money in return. The doctor told her she had only a few weeks left and when we were clearing out her house, I found this stack of wraps she’d been working on, hidden beside a bookshelf. She was stock-piling them because she knew she wasn’t going to be around for much longer and didn’t want me to run out.’ The couple look at each other, not knowing what to say, or if it’s even appropriate to speak. ‘Couldn’t use them. Her eyesight was so bad towards the end she couldn’t fold properly, so I’m stuck with thousands of these badly-made wraps. I can’t use them, and I can’t throw them away because, you know, they’re the final thing my mum gave to me before she died.’

  The dealer has found the envelope he’s searching for and hands it over.

  ‘Funny, life. Right, that’s forty quid.’

  Adam wakes at dawn in the makeshift bed he’s created out of three cushions, a coat and an old copy of the Financial Times. He’s aware of a nagging concern that perhaps it wasn’t the best decision to set up camp in this spacious corner office with its leather furniture and view of St Paul’s Cathedral – being discovered here might increase the severity of recrimination – but the rows of computer cubicles outside felt too exposed. No, tucked under this desk he is practically invisible, even if someone were to come into the room – if they wanted to sit at the desk though, then he’d have problems.

  Pulling a pink sheet of the newspaper around his shoulders, he feels snug. The bed – a nest, Adam thinks sleepily, I’m like an animal curled up in its nest – is surprisingly comfortable and he’s slept better than he has for weeks. He knows he must leave before he’s found in the morning, but he’s lulled by the hum of the fluorescent lights and his eyes start to close again.

  ‘One more hour,’ he murmurs. ‘One more hour and I’ll go.’

  Two

  JoJo, Joan to her late mother, is sixty-three years old and should know better. She scans the other customers in the Primrose Hill café and is greeted by the approving faces of at least six yummy mummies. JoJo can guess what they’re thinking: how sweet to be so in love still, I hope we’re like that at their age! A few of the mothers turn back to their friends and say these very words as if JoJo can’t hear them, as if she and Frank are animals in a zoo, a couple of ancient pandas, unthreatening as a greeting card image. She smiles to herself, and Frank, seeing the smile, squeezes her hand. They have been sitting like this for nearly half an hour, neither of them speaking, alternatively staring down at the table or out towards the park. Their lattes have gone cold and formed thick milky skins.

  JoJo and Frank are sixty-three and sixty-five respectively and have just agreed to begin an affair. Although, JoJo ponders, is it an affair if you’re already married to the man? If there’s a third person involved, and she doesn’t know, then yes. Yes, it is. JoJo didn’t like the term ‘affair’, though. Rather, it was a ‘reclamation’– she was reclaiming Frank back from his pretty, young, devious mistress. It was not a complete transaction yet, but that was only a matter of time (and will, which JoJo had to spare).

  She looks around the café. Yummy mummies, JoJo thinks, they don’t seem so yummy to me. They’re too athletic and angular; they’d catch in your throat and choke you (it never ceased to amaze her – after leaving her family’s struggling farm on the outskirts of Johannesburg as a teenager – that status and style for women in the West would be predominated by the ability not to eat). And yet, with all their gaunt athleticism, the children still seem to run free, spilling things or banging the things that can’t be spilled and, as a general rule, crying. The mothers are either too busy breastfeeding to do anything, or seem bemused, as if their child is delighting them in some way: ‘Look at little Gregory, smashing his cup against that woman’s leg, how clever.’

  The café, an old DIY shop, has kept some of the original features: a cupboard behind the counter full of small drawers once used to sort nails is now home to organic teabags with names like Earth Mother Cleansing Broth, and the walls are dotted with antique signs for metal polishes and lubrications. It’s an odd mix, the industrial and the maternal, but it helps highlight to JoJo what she is really looking at: baby machines.

  JoJo turns her attention back to Frank, who has closed his eyes and is humming to himself. It’s the opening of Bach’s ‘Brandenburg Concerto No. 4’ if she’s not mistaken, the bit before it gets too fast and unhummable. She joins in too, best she can – she’s never had a natural ear – and Frank opens his eyes and smiles fondly at her.

  But it won’t all be hand holding and humming. There will be sex. Comforting, her mother used to call it back in South Africa euphemistically, they will comfort each other. It’s been months of abstinence and JoJo is looking forward to it, not in the skin-tingling way she did in her twenties, or the dread of her teens, but in the way one looks forward to a good meal. There are details they have to sort out first, though. Yes, details. Now who’s speaking in code? she thinks wryly.

  She lets go of Frank’s hand and starts to get up. Chivalrously, he stands too, or tries to: the tables beside them wedge them both in. JoJo has to sit again and pull the table towards her to let Frank out first – it presses into her stomach in a very unflattering way – and then he pulls the table back to release her.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she say
s matter-of-factly and moves to go, but he pulls her back and kisses her tenderly on the cheek.

  He really must love me, she thinks, stepping over a small child as she goes again – the old fool. She checks herself. She’s not going to let cynicism seep into today. Today is a cynic-free zone. Today she is happy. She has everything she wants, has wanted, for months now. She has Frank. Again. She, JoJo, has Frank again.

  JoJo is surprised to find the toilet unoccupied, but takes this as another sign the world is aligning in her favour. She closes the door, remembering to lock it (the shame of being sprung in a public loo!), shuffles up her dress, pulls down her underwear, and sits. Her new medication is doing strange things to her bladder and recently, she’s been peeing like an ox. It smells slightly metallic too, as if it’s been left overnight in a rusty can. That’s what I’ve become, she thinks, a rusty old can. At least she’s continent. JoJo’s heard the horror stories, ripped this, nappy that, and counts herself lucky. As she waits, she adjusts her wedding band, the one Frank gave her all those years ago. Well, not that one exactly. She lost that one down the sink in the late eighties and this is a replacement. JoJo never told him, but she feels she could now – perhaps she will – and is impressed with the change in herself. Also impressive: she’s still peeing like a burst dam. She checks the loo roll. Sufficient. She prepares a few sheets and her mind slips back to the wedding day itself.

  They were married at the registry office in Wimbledon. The church wedding had to wait another twelve months because although Frank had been divorced for well over two years, they were both officially Catholic, and the Church liked to make things as difficult as they could. JoJo had worn a dress Frank liked to call her ‘smart little number’ – dark blue satin that stopped just above the knees with a very fetching silken braid around the waist. As always, Frank was in a suit, but had pimped his outfit (‘pimped’ was the right expression, wasn’t it?) with a trilby, which made him look like the lesser-known Kray triplet. How they laughed that day! Everything seemed to go wrong. As they signed the marriage licence, the pen had snapped under the pressure of Frank’s heavy signature and blue ink exploded everywhere. On the way back to the hotel, the cab had almost run out of petrol and Frank had to lend the driver five pounds to buy some more, because for some unknown and impractical reason, the cabby wasn’t carrying any cash. And the hotel itself! Clean, which was a blessing, but almost too sterile: reeking of ammonia, it felt like a hospital ward. But after messing it up the best they could during the day, they spent the night locked in each other’s embrace, more than making up for it.