Turning Thirty

by Mike Gayle

  ‘No,’ I sighed. ‘Spelling it out will only drag on this painful interlude. You had to go and wake up your conscience and rouse mine at the same time. Don’t you want to do this?’

  ‘Do you?’ asked Ginny, running her fingers through her hair in an agitated fashion.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied but my voice lacked conviction.

  ‘Are you sure sure? Or are you just sure?’

  ‘I’m sure! I’m sure! In fact I don’t think in the history of mankind – and I do mean mankind – that any man has ever been more sure of what I want to do as I am right now.’

  Ginny laughed, and we resumed kissing only to stop seconds later.

  ‘What now?’ I snapped.

  ‘Now that’s a nice tone of voice to use in this context.’

  I laughed. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Good. Now, say we did do this thing we’re about to do, how will we be afterwards? What I mean to say – and I know this is forward planning of the most extreme kind and not at all passionate but I don’t want us to get all . . . y’know.’

  I exhaled heavily and folded my arms defensively. ‘Okay, let’s not do it.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Ginny, surprised. ‘Let’s not be hasty. I’m just looking out for our friendship, that’s all. I would’ve thought that’s a good thing, surely?’ I nodded. She did have a point. ‘Now, stop sulking and let’s discuss this like the adults we are. Okay? Let’s agree right now that we’re not going to get all weird about this.’

  ‘Agreed. Anything else?’

  Ginny thought for a moment. ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  We resumed kissing until once again she stopped mid snog.

  ‘What about if one of us changes our mind?’

  ‘Are you going to change your mind?’ I said shifting positions on the sofa. Ginny’s leg was currently resting on mine and sending it to sleep.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she said, ‘but you might.’

  ‘Believe me, Ginny, I strongly doubt that I’m going to change my mind . . .’

  ‘So we’re agreed?’

  ‘Totally. Anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Well there is . . . ‘

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Just ignore me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Honestly. Come on.’ She kissed my neck in an attempt to encourage me but it was too late. Her ‘nothing’ was ‘something’and despite my best attempts my conscience wouldn’t let me carry on while there was a ‘nothing’ that was ‘something’ lingering in the air.

  ‘What is it?’ I pleaded.

  Ginny laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Matt, I am. This is the last thing, I promise, okay? I just want to make sure that if we do actually do what we’re about to do we should make sure this is a one off. As in never again. As in not to be repeated in this or any other lifetime.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Other than the fact that I’m in a relationship with Ian and you’re getting over your ex-girlfriend and moving to Australia quite soon?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Other than that.’

  ‘Well for one thing, it could result in an extended period of repeated procedures which you know would lead to trouble. Because you know what the other word for repeated procedures is, don’t you?’

  ‘A nightmare?’

  ‘Bingo,’ replied Ginny. ‘And, well . . . we’re not seventeen any more.’

  ‘Actions do have consequences,’ I added.

  ‘Exactly. So maybe we should leave it after all.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, uncoiling myself from her arms sadly. ‘Perhaps we should.’ I sighed and kissed her on the cheek. ‘No harm done, eh?’

  ‘All we did was kiss,’ said Ginny.

  ‘It was a moment of madness,’ I added.

  ‘It didn’t mean anything. It was just . . . nostalgia.’

  ‘A trip down Memory Lane.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘And it shouldn’t happen again.’ I added, carefully.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ginny. ‘You’re right. It should never happen again.’

  sixty-six

  To:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  From:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  Subject:

  Well spotted

  Dear Elaine

  Q: What do you get if you take one ex-boyfriend/not ex-boyfriend/ lodger and an ex-girlfriend/not ex-girlfriend, add a few bottles of wine and leave in a confined space? Yes . . . sadly, my life is that predictable. Just as you said, Ginny and I have indeed ended up snogging but fortunately it stopped before we went too far. It’s funny, we sort of made a joke out of it but I actually feel really bad about it. I mean, she’s got a boyfriend and for the most part they seem happy. We haven’t gone into analysis overtime with this yet because we’ve taken the other option and decided to pretend it didn’t happen. I know this is going to sound like a huuuuuuuuuuge excuse but I’ve been working on the theory that it was just curiosity about the past. We’d been talking about relationships and stuff and, yeah, we had been drinking but the urge to kiss her at that particular moment wasn’t about lust or passion so much as I-wonder-what-it-would-be-like-to-kiss-this-person-who-I-haven’t-kissed-since-I-was-twenty-four? I don’t know what I expected it to be like but it definitely wasn’t like those from the past. To be truthful it was more like . . . well . . . comfort food. Mashed potato loaded with forkfuls of butter; an ice cold beer and a cigarette; a fried English breakfast and a cup of lukewarm tea.

  Poetic, huh? Anyway, as passionless as it was, it’s over, we’re back to normal and I for one am glad.

  Write soon,

  love

  Matt xxx

  To:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  From:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  Re:

  Well spotted

  Dear Matt

  Listen very carefully: I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s not even like I had to use my special woman powers to work that one out. It’s been written all over your e-mails! Listen, you want my advice? Stay clear. You’re leaving next month and, like you say, she seems happy enough with this Ian guy. In spite of myself I actually do understand your weird comfort-food analogy. I guess if you were sleeping on the Sofa from Hell instead of Sara (who, incidentally, is being the biggest pain in the ass with her non-washing of my crockery) and I’d just come in from a crappy day at work (which, by the way, I have), I think I’d want some Matt-Beckford-style comfort food too – something handy, familiar and immediately satisfying!!!! I guess for now I’ll just have to rely on the two-day-old cold pizza that’s in the refrigerator for my comfort kicks.

  Take it easy,

  big love

  Elaine xxx

  PS I know it was a mistake, Matt, but I really do think you shouldn’t let it happen again. I know that if it was me in Ian’s shoes and I found out I’d be devastated. You know me. Honesty is everything.

  sixty-seven

  Thursday. Mid-afternoon. Three o’clock to be exact.

  The reason I was thinking about the time of day was because it struck me as I walked up the high street to the supermarket, with Charlotte holding my hand, that only two months ago at this time of day I would have been sitting in a design-strategy meeting, or possibly a client briefing, or a client proposal meeting, or a design presentation, or a team-strategy meeting, or a team-design-strategy briefing, the difference between the last two being invisible to the naked eye. And now I was on my way to Safeway, in Birmingham, babysitting a friend’s four-year-old, about to do the weekly food shop for my former girlfriend/not girlfriend who was now also my landlady (of sorts).

  Life’s weird like that.

  When we got to the trolley-park, or whatever the place is called where shopping trolleys congregate, Charlotte insisted that she rode in the ‘child goes here’ section in one of the
mammoth shopping trolleys only ever piloted by housewives with Volvo estates. I thoughtabout saying no, because I found that sort of trolley emasculating, but Charlotte and I had already had one altercation that day (I had not allowed her to draw with her mother’s lipstick) and I didn’t see the reason to have another one just because I didn’t want to look girly. So, pushing the huge trolley with a beaming Charlotte at the helm, I made my way through the automatic doors and began shopping in earnest from the list that Ginny had made up for me. If anybody had been watching, which I hope they weren’t, I’m sure I must have looked like a paragon of reconstructed masculinity: a twenty-nine-year-old man with tampons in his trolley and a nearly four-year-old in his charge. The fact that neither the child nor the tampons (or, indeed, the woman the tampons were for) was mine only served to make me more self-conscious.

  Needless to say, I bumped into yet more people I used to go to school with: Adam Heller (then, boy most likely to become a drug dealer; now, a fully qualified dentist); Lionel Orton, whose sister Janine was in my year (then, the boy most likely to be befriended by older boys who wanted to go out with his sister; now, a library assistant at the university); and Faye Jones (then, the girl most likely to become a hairdresser; now, a hairdresser). With each encounter, even if they didn’t enquire, I felt compelled to explain that neither Charlotte nor the tampons were mine, and they all gave me an oh-yeah-pull-the-other-one look of disbelief. What was I afraid of? I asked myself. Word getting around the ex-King’s Heath Comprehensive grapevine that Matt Beckford was a house-husband? Am I really that petty? Just as my subconscious came back with the answer ‘Yes! You are that petty!’ I bumped into Ian, who was standing in the booze aisle reading the label on a bottle of red wine.

  ‘All right?’ I called out. ‘How are you, mate?’

  ‘Matt . . .’ said Ian, distractedly.

  ‘I would’ve thought a man like you would’ve had one of the sportier numbers,’ I said, indicating his large trolley.

  ‘What?’ he said, not quite getting it.

  ‘You know,’ I continued, ‘one of those smaller, more stylish shopping trolleys. The one’s designed for trendy non-cohabiting people like you. Just big enough to carry a couple of packets of fresh pasta, some pesto sauce and a copy of the Guardian.’

  He laughed nervously and looked around him. ‘Oh, right, yeah. I get you.’

  I looked into his trolley surreptitiously. Ian’s inner child was obviously incredibly hungry because I spied eight packets of pickled onion Monster Munch, three packets of Coco-Pops and a large bottle of lemonade among the usual assembly of fresh fruit and vegetables. I thought about letting it go – I knew there was nothing more embarrassing than people making small-talk about your supermarket shopping choices – but I couldn’t.

  ‘Very nutritious,’I commented heartily, waving at his trolley. ‘I haven’t had a packet of Monster Munch in years. Gershwin used to eat them in class all the time at school. The moment he opened the packet he stank the place out.’

  ‘Er . . . yes,’he mumbled.’I . . . er . . . ‘

  Ian didn’t have a chance to finish his sentence because he was interrupted by a young woman brandishing two bottles of white wine. ‘Which do you think? The Hungarian we had last time or this Italian number with fifty pence knocked off?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he said blankly.

  She sighed heavily. ‘You would say that.’ She looked at me, then at him, then looked embarrassed. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Ian, you were in the middle of a conversation.’

  ‘Er . . . yeah,’ said Ian.

  She gave me a little wave. ‘Hello,’ she said cheerily. ‘I don’t think we’ve met before, have we?’

  ‘Hi,’ I said, wishing for all the world that there was another supermarket in King’s Heath that was not quite so popular with people I knew. I shook her hand. ‘I’m Matt Beckford.’

  ‘I’m Susanna, Ian’s other half.’

  Ian looked at me guiltily, like a small boy caught doing something naughty by his parents. Then his face flashed sheer panic but returned to normal just as Susanna turned to look at him for an introduction. ‘Matt’s a friend of a friend at one of the schools I’ve worked at,’ he explained. ‘We met a while ago when I went for a drink after work.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said absentmindedly, ‘in the pub after work—’

  I didn’t finish my sentence as the final surprise of this travesty interrupted. ‘Daddy,’ yelled a small child, holding an older woman’s hand, ‘Jammy Dodgers or chocolate-chip cookies?’

  ‘Neither,’ he called. ‘We don’t want your teeth to fall out, now, do we? Go and put them back, there’s a good boy.’

  ‘We’ve just bumped into a friend of Ian’s,’ said Susanna to the older woman, who, at a guess, was her mother. ‘This is Matt Beckford.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can’t stop. I’ve got to catch a three-year-old grandson with biscuits on his mind.’

  Susanna picked up the conversation. ‘I’m quite sure you’ve never mentioned Matt to me before,’ she said, then cupped her hand beside her mouth and said to me in a stage-whisper, ‘Ian doesn’t tell me anything. I’m always the last to find out anything new. What is it about men that they find communication so difficult?’

  I laughed, maybe a little too loudly because I was now well beyond nervous and really didn’tknow what to do with myself. I laughed so hard that lan had to join in to stop me looking like an idiot. Susanna just stood there, looking at the two of us, clearly aware that her joke hadn’t been that funny.

  ‘Is this your little girl?’ she said, smiling at Charlotte. ‘Hello, sweetheart.’

  Charlotte looked at her blankly, chewed her lip then looked at me.

  ‘She’s a bit quiet,’ I explained, ‘but no, she’s not mine, and neither are these tampons.’

  ‘Tampons?’ said Susanna.

  Damn. She hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Now, there’s a real man,’ she said. ‘Buys his partner’s tampons. Ian would have a heart-attack if I sent him out for some.’

  ‘They’re not my partner’s,’ I explained – but that sounded worse, as if I was about to declare they were mine. ‘They’re Ginny my housemate’s.’

  ‘Ginny who Ian used to work with?’

  My tongue nearly seized up. ‘Er . . . yes.’

  ‘I didn’t realise she was the friend, Ian. You should’ve said. Ginny’s lovely. I’ve only met her a few times when Ian was working at King’s Heath Comp. She was really nice. It was so sad for her when her mother died. I remember Ian telling me about it. She was distraught.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said Susanna, trying to lighten the tone, ‘you and Ginny should come round for dinner sometime. I’d love to see her again.’

  ‘Mmmm, yeah,’ I said. ‘That’d be great, but I know she’s up to her eyeballs in work at the moment so . . .’

  ‘I know what you mean. Well, anyway, just get her to give Ian a call when she’s come through the other side.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, then looked at my watch. ‘Will you look at the time? I really do have to be getting off.’

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ said Ian. ‘It was good to see you again, Matt.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It was good to see you.’ I stopped and looked at Susanna. ‘And it was nice to meet you too.’ I smiled. ‘See you soon.’

  ‘And don’t forget to give us a call,’ said Susanna.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied, relieved to be out of the madness. ‘I’ll get Ginny to ring you soon,’ and then I did that stupid thumb-pointing-up-little-finger-pointing-down international sign language for ‘I’ll call you and I’m not just saying that,’ and left.

  sixty-eight

  It was half past five by the time I’d dropped Charlotte at home and reached Ginny’s. I shouted for her the second I came through the front door: I’d made up my mind to tell her. Knowing her as well as I did I knew she’d be devastated and would more than likely react by shooting t
he messenger and then shouting a stream of abuse in the general direction of the corpse. But I knew I had no other option. There was no way I was going to contemplate keeping this to myself because I’d seen it happen to people before and knew that there was nothing more soul-destroying than dealing with the shock coupled with the fact that all your friends knew before you did.

  I really missed Elaine – she was good at handling extremes of emotion in people and I felt like I was bound to say the wrong thing, which would upset Ginny even more. I didn’t have any idea how I was going to tell her. What was the etiquette here? Was I supposed to ask her how her day had been then slip in a quick ‘Oh, and by the way your boyfriend’s got a wife and kids.’ Or was I supposed to go for the dramatic soap-opera option of handing her a stiff drink and insisting she sit down before delivering the punchline? Then, of course, there was the good-news bad-news option. ‘First the good news: not long until pay-day, eh? Now the bad news: your boyfriend’s a lying toss-bag.’

  This wasn’t going to be easy.

  There was no sign of Ginny but I could hear music coming from her CD player upstairs and the sound of running water emanating from the bathroom. She was listening to Mahler’s third symphony and had it turned up incredibly loud. This, combined with a bath so early in the evening, meant she was trying to cancel out the effects of a really bad day at work.

  ‘Hello?’ I yelled up the stairs, trying to make myself heard above the music. ‘Ginny!’

  ‘I’m in the bath!’ came a muffled voice from behind the bathroom door. ‘Leave me alone until I’m human!’

  ‘I was just . . .’ I tried to work out what to say next. ‘I was just making sure you were all right.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she yelled back. ‘Long, terrible, torturous day. I’ll tell you about it later.’

  I left her to it and dropped off the shopping in the kitchen. As I walked through the living room for the second time it occurred to me to check the answerphone in case Ian had called. Sure enough there was a message for her from an agitated Ian asking her to call him urgently on his mobile. He was evidently trying to make sure that he got in his side of the story before I presented mine. I erased the message, put away the shopping, made two mugs of tea and headed upstairs. Ginny was out of the bath and was now in her bedroom drying her hair.