‘Where’s this “sweetheart” thing come from, Ian? I’m not sure if I like it.’
He returns to his search and mumbles something into the drawer, ‘fuck off, Em’ perhaps. Is he drunk, she wonders? On the dressing table, there’s an open can of strong cheap lager. Drunk – now there’s a good idea. At that moment, Emma decides to set out to get drunk as soon as possible. Why not? It seems to work for everyone else. Excited by the project, she walks to the kitchen to make a start.
He follows her through. ‘So, where were you then?’
‘I told you. At school, rehearsing.’
‘What were you rehearsing?’
‘Bugsy Malone. It’s a lot of laughs. Why, you want tickets?’
‘No thanks.’
‘There’s splurge guns.’
‘I reckon you’ve been with someone.’
‘Oh, please – here we go again.’ She opens the fridge. There’s half a bottle of wine, but this is one of those times when only spirits will do. ‘Ian, what is this obsession with me being with someone? Why can’t it just be that you and me weren’t right for each other?’ With a hard yank, she cracks the seal of the frosted-up freezer compartment. Ice scatters on the floor.
‘But we are right for each other!’
‘Well fine then, if you say so, let’s get back together!’ Behind some ancient minced beef crispy pancakes, there is a bottle of vodka. ‘Yes!’ She slides the crispy pancakes to Ian. ‘Here – these are yours. I’m granting you custody.’ Slamming the fridge, she reaches for a glass. ‘And anyway, what if I was with someone, Ian? So what? We broke up, remember?’
‘Rings a bell, rings a bell. So who is he then?’
She’s pouring the vodka, two inches. ‘Who’s who?’
‘Your new boyfriend? Go on, just tell me, I won’t mind,’ he sneers. ‘We’re still friends after all.’
Emma gulps from her glass then stoops for a moment, elbows on the counter top, the heels of her hands pressed against her eyes as she feels the icy liquid slide down her throat. A moment passes.
‘It’s Mr Godalming. The headmaster. We’ve been having this affair on and off for the past nine months, but I think it’s mainly been about the sex. To be honest, the whole thing’s a bit degrading for both of us. Makes me a bit ashamed. Bit sad. Still, like I keep saying, at least there are no kids involved! There you go—’ She speaks into her glass. ‘Now you know.’
The room is silent. Eventually . . .
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘Look out the window, have a look, see for yourself. He’s waiting in the car. Navy blue Sierra . . .’
He sniffs, incredulous. ‘It’s not fucking funny, Emma.’
Emma places her empty glass on the counter and exhales slowly. ‘No, I know it’s not. In no way could the situation be described as funny.’ She turns and faces him. ‘I’ve told you, Ian, I’m not seeing anyone. I’m not in love with anyone and I don’t want to be. I just want to be left alone . . .’
‘I’ve got a theory!’ he says, proudly.
‘What theory?’
‘I know who it is.’
She sighs. ‘Who is it then, Sherlock?’
‘Dexter!’ he says, triumphantly.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake—’ She drains the glass.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’
She laughs bitterly. ‘God, I wish—’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing. Ian, as you well know, I haven’t spoken to Dexter for months—’
‘Or so you say!’
‘You’re being ridiculous, Ian. What, you think we’ve been having this secret love affair behind everyone’s back?’
‘That’s what the evidence seems to suggest.’
‘Evidence? What evidence?’
And for the first time, Ian looks a little sheepish. ‘Your notebooks.’
A moment, then she puts her glass out of reach so that she won’t be tempted to throw it. ‘You’ve been reading my notebooks?’
‘I’ve glanced. Once or twice. Over the years.’
‘You bastard—’
‘The little bits of poetry, those magical ten days in Greece, all that yearning, all that desire—’
‘How dare you! How dare you go behind my back like that!’
‘You left them lying round! What do you expect!’
‘I expected some trust and I expected you to have some dignity—’
‘And anyway I didn’t need to read them, it was so bloody obvious, the two of you—’
‘—but I have limited reserves of sympathy, Ian! Months of you moaning and moping and whining and hanging round like a kicked dog. Well if you ever turn up out of the blue like this and start going through my drawers, I swear I will call the fucking police—’
‘Go on then! Go on, call them!’ and he steps towards her, his arms out to the side filling the little room. ‘It’s my flat too, remember?’
‘Is it? How come? You never paid the mortgage! I did that! You never did anything, just lay around feeling sorry for yourself—’
‘That’s not true!’
‘And whatever money you did earn went on stupid videos and take-away—’
‘I chipped in! When I could—’
‘Well it wasn’t enough! Oh, God I hate this flat, and I hate my life here. I have got to get out of here or I will go crazy—’
‘This was our home!’ he protests, desperately.
‘I was never happy here, Ian. Why couldn’t you see that? I just got . . . stuck here, we both did. Surely you must know that.’
He has never seen her like this, or heard her say these things. Shocked, his eyes wide like a panicked child, he stumbles towards her. ‘Calm down!’ He’s gripping her arm now. ‘Don’t say things like that—’
‘Get away from me, Ian! I mean it, Ian! Just get away!’ They’re shouting at each other now and she thinks, Oh God, we’ve become one of those crazy couples you hear through the walls at night. Somewhere, someone’s thinking, should I call the police? How did it come to this? ‘Get out!’ she shouts as he desperately tries to put his arms around her. ‘Just give me your keys and get out, I don’t want to see you anymore—’
And then just as suddenly, they’re both crying, slumped on the floor in the narrow hallway of the flat they had bought together with such hope. Ian’s hand is covering his face, and he’s struggling to speak between great sobs and gulps of air. ‘I can’t stand this. Why is this happening to me? This is hell. I’m in hell, Em!’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’ She wraps her arms around his shoulder.
‘Why can’t you just love me? Why can’t you just be in love with me? You were once, weren’t you? In the beginning.’
‘Course I was.’
‘Well why can’t you be in love with me again?’
‘Oh Ian, I can’t. I’ve tried, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.’
Some time later they lie together on the floor in the same spot, as if they’ve been washed up there. Her head is on his shoulder, her arm across his chest, taking in the smell of him, the warm, comfortable smell that she had become so used to. Eventually, he speaks.
‘I should go.’
‘I think you should.’
Keeping his red, swollen face averted, he sits and nods towards the mess of paper, notebooks and photographs on the bedroom floor. ‘You know what makes me sad?’
‘Go on.’
‘That there aren’t more photographs of us. Together I mean. There’s thousands of you and Dex, hardly any of just you and me. Not recent anyway. It’s like we just stopped taking them.’
‘No decent camera,’ she says weakly, but he chooses to accept it.
‘Sorry for . . . you know, flipping out like that, going through your stuff. Completely unacceptable behaviour.’
‘S’alright. Just don’t do it again.’
‘Some of the stories are quite good, by the way.’
‘Thank you. Though they were meant to be private.
’
‘What’s the point of that? You’ll have to show them to someone someday. Put yourself out there.’
‘Okay, maybe I will. One day.’
‘Not the poems. Don’t show them the poems, but the stories. They’re good. You’re a good writer. You’re clever.’
‘Thank you, Ian.’
His face starts to crumple. ‘It wasn’t so bad, was it? Living here with me?’
‘It was great. I’m just taking it all out on you, that’s all.’
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘Nothing to tell.’
‘So.’
‘So.’ They smile at each other. He is standing by the door now, one hand on the handle, not quite able to leave.
‘One last thing.’
‘Go on.’
‘You’re not seeing him, are you? I mean Dexter. I’m just being paranoid.’
She sighs and shakes her head. ‘Ian, I swear to you on my life. I am not seeing Dexter.’
‘’Cos I saw in the papers that he’d split up with his girlfriend and I thought, you and me breaking up, and him being single again—’
‘I haven’t seen Dexter for, God, ages.’
‘But did anything happen? While you and I were together? Between you and Dexter, behind my back? Because I can’t bear the idea—’
‘Ian – nothing happened between me and Dexter,’ she says, hoping he’ll leave without asking the next question.
‘But did you want it to?’
Did she? Yes, sometimes. Often.
‘No. No, I didn’t. We were just friends, that’s all.’
‘Okay. Good.’ He looks at her, and tries to smile. ‘I miss you so much, Em.’
‘I know you do.’
He puts his hand to his stomach. ‘I feel sick with it.’
‘It’ll pass.’
‘Will it? Because I think I might be going a bit mad.’
‘I know. But I can’t help you, Ian.’
‘You could always . . . change your mind.’
‘I can’t. I won’t. I’m sorry.’
‘Righto.’ He shrugs and smiles with his lips tucked in, his Stan Laurel smile. ‘Still. No harm in asking is there?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I still think you’re The Bollocks, mind.’
She smiles because he wants her to smile. ‘No, you’re The Bollocks, Ian.’
‘Well I’m not going to stand here and argue about it!’ He sighs, unable to keep it up, and reaches for the door. ‘Okay then. Love to Mrs M. See you around.’
‘See you around.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
He turns and pulls the door open sharply, kicking the bottom so that it gave the illusion of having hit him in the face. Emma laughs dutifully, then Ian takes a deep breath and is gone. She sits on the floor for one minute more then stands suddenly, and with a renewed sense of purpose grabs her keys and strides out of the flat.
The sound of a summer evening in E17, shouts and screams echoing off the buildings, a few St George’s flags still hanging limply. She strides across the forecourt. Isn’t she meant to have a close circle of kooky friends to help her get through all this? Shouldn’t she be sitting on a low baggy sofa with six or seven attractive zany metropolitans, isn’t that what city life is meant to be like? But either they live two hours away or they’re with families or boyfriends, and thankfully in the absence of kooky pals, there is the off-licence called, confusingly, depressingly, Booze’R’Us.
Intimidating kids are cycling in lazy circles near the entrance, but she’s fearless now, and marches through their centre, eyes fixed forward. In the shop she picks out the least dubious bottle of wine and joins the queue. The man in front of her has a cobweb tattooed on his face, and while she waits for him to count out enough small change for two litres of strong cider, she notices the bottle of champagne locked in a glass cabinet. It’s dusty, like a relic of some unimaginably luxurious past.
‘I’ll have that champagne too, please,’ she says. The shopkeeper looks suspicious, but sure enough the money is there, bunched tightly in her hand.
‘Celebration, is it?’
‘Exactly. Big, big celebration.’ Then, on a whim. ‘Twenty Marlboro too.’
With the bottles swinging in a flimsy plastic bag against her hip, she steps out of the shop, cramming the cigarette into her mouth as if it were the antidote to something. Immediately she hears a voice.
‘Miss Morley?’
She looks around, guiltily.
‘Miss Morley? Over here!’
And striding towards her on long legs is Sonya Richards, her protégé, her project. The skinny, bunched-up little girl who played the Artful Dodger has transformed, and Sonya is startling now: tall, hair scraped back, self-assured. Emma has a perfect vision of herself as Sonya must see her; hunched and red-eyed, fag in mouth on the threshold of Booze’R’Us. A role model, an inspiration. Absurdly, she hides the lit cigarette behind her back.
‘How are you, Miss?’ Sonya is looking a little ill at ease now, eyes flicking from side to side as if regretting coming over.
‘I’m great! Great? How are you, Sonya?’
‘Okay, Miss.’
‘How’s college? Everything going alright?’
‘Yeah, really good.’
‘A-levels next year, right?’
‘That’s right.’ Sonya is glancing furtively at the plastic bag of booze chinking at Emma’s side, the plume of smoke curling from behind her back.
‘University next year?’
‘Nottingham, I hope. If I get the grades.’
‘You will. You will.’
‘Thanks to you,’ says Sonya, but without much conviction.
There’s a silence. In desperation Emma holds up the bottles in one hand, the fags in the other and waggles them. ‘WEEKLY SHOP!’ she says.
Sonya seems confused. ‘Well. I’d better get going.’
‘Okay, Sonya, really great to see you. Sonya? Good luck, yeah? Really good luck,’ but Sonya is already striding off without looking back and Emma, one of those carpe diem-type teachers, watches her go.
Later that night, a strange thing happens. Half asleep, lying on the sofa with the TV on and the empty bottle at her feet, she is woken by Dexter Mayhew’s voice. She doesn’t understand quite what he’s saying – something about first-person-shooters and multiplayer options and non-stop shoot-em-up action. Confused and concerned she forces her eyes open, and he is standing right in front of her.
Emma hauls herself upright and smiles. She has seen this show before. Game On is a late-night TV programme, with all the hot news and views from the computer games scene. The set is a red-lit dungeon composed of polystyrene boulders, as if playing computer games were a sort of purgatory, and in this dungeon whey-faced gamers sit hunched in front of a giant screen as Dexter Mayhew urges them to press their buttons faster, faster, shoot, shoot.
The games, the tournaments, are inter-cut with earnest reviews in which Dexter and a token woman with orange hair discuss the week’s hot new releases. Maybe it’s just Emma’s tiny television, but he looks a little puffy these days, a little grey. Perhaps it’s just that small screen, but something has gone missing. The swagger she remembers has gone. He is talking about Duke Nukem 3D and he seems uncertain, a little embarrassed even. Nevertheless she feels a great wave of affection for Dexter Mayhew. In eight years not a day has gone by when she hasn’t thought of him. She misses him and she wants him back. I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right. I will call him, she thinks, as she falls asleep.
Tomorrow. First thing tomorrow, I will call him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Two Meetings
TUESDAY, 15 JULY 1997
Soho and the South Bank
‘So. The bad news is, they’re cancelling Game On.’
‘They are? Really?’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘Right. Okay. Right.
Did they give a reason why?’
‘No, Dexy, they just don’t feel they’ve cracked a way of conveying the piquant romance of computer gaming to a late-night TV audience. The channel thinks that they haven’t got the ingredients quite right, so they’re cancelling the show.’
‘I see.’
‘ . . . starting again with a different presenter.’
‘And a different name?’
‘No, they’re still calling it Game On.’
‘Right. So – so it’s still the same show then.’
‘They’re making a lot of significant changes.’
‘But it’s still called Game On?’
‘Yes.’
‘Same set, same format and everything.’
‘Broadly speaking.’
‘But with a different presenter.’
‘Yes. A different presenter.’
‘Who?’
‘Don’t know. Not you though.’
‘They didn’t say who?’
‘They said younger. Someone younger, they were going younger. That’s all I know.’
‘So . . . in other words, I have been sacked.’
‘Well, I suppose another way of looking at it is that, yes, in this instance, they’ve decided to go in a different direction. A direction that’s away from you.’
‘Okay. Okay. So – what’s the good news?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Well, you said “the bad news is they’re cancelling the show”. What’s the good news?’
‘That’s it. That’s all. That’s all the news I have.’
At that precise same moment, barely two miles away across the Thames, Emma Morley stands in an ascending lift with her old friend Stephanie Shaw.
‘The main thing is, and I can’t say this enough – don’t be intimidated.’
‘Why would I be intimidated?’
‘She’s a legend, Em, in publishing. She’s notorious.’
‘Notorious? For what?’
‘For being a . . . big personality,’ and even though they are the only people in the lift, Stephanie Shaw drops her voice into a whisper. ‘She’s a wonderful editor, she’s just a little . . . eccentric that’s all.’
They ride the next twenty storeys in silence. Beside her Stephanie Shaw stands smart, petite in a crisp white shirt – no, not a shirt, a blouse – tight black pencil skirt, a neat little bob, years away from the sullen Goth who sat next to her in tutorials all that time ago, and Emma is surprised to find herself intimidated by her old acquaintance; her professional demeanour, her no-nonsense manner. Stephanie Shaw has probably sacked people. She probably says things like ‘photocopy this for me!’ If Emma did the same at school they’d laugh in her face. In the lift, hands clasped in front of her, Emma has a sudden urge to giggle. It’s like they’re playing at a game called ‘Offices’.
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