Eating Crow

by Jay Rayner

  Then one morning, out of nowhere, she came to my aid. It was a tutorial on the Paris Commune and I was arguing that it had come about not through some hunger on the part of Parisians for equality, but instead out of their feelings of superiority over and hatred for the rest of France; that the decision to throw up the barricades was merely an expression of cosmopolitan disdain at its most acute. The Parisians simply hated everybody else. It was a great theory save in one regard: I had done no reading whatsoever and had nothing with which to support it. I had plucked it out of the air because I was bored of listening to the tutor, a tiresome man who insisted on calling everyone comrade. He had been arguing that the project emerged out of a genuine belief in the invincible logic of organized equality, and while I appreciated the sentiment, I was irritated by his smugness. I held my ground for about five minutes, and then, just as I was thinking I would have to admit defeat, Jennie waded in magnificently. She cited this history of Paris and that. She quoted Racine and Hugo. She described, in terrifying detail, the machinery of French local government. But it was the last line that stuck with me:

  “As Bocuse wrote in his seminal history of the French peoples, Paris is not a place but a state of mind, which defines itself solely by what it is not. And what it is not is France.” There was silence. The tutor’s nose twitched. He sniffed. Then he looked at his watch and told us he would see us all next week.

  Afterward, outside, with the wind blowing harshly through the stone canyons of the modern campus, I thanked her.

  “But that last quote. Where did you get that one from? Who is Bocuse?”

  She chewed her bottom lip and looked down shyly at the ground. “Paul Bocuse.”

  “The chef Paul Bocuse?”

  She nodded.

  “He wrote a history book?”

  She shook her head. “No, I made it up. I needed something to deal with that little arse.”

  I smiled. The word “arse” seemed so much harder and ruder and mean, coming from Jennie Sampson.

  “So you chose a great French chef?”

  “I was reading one of his books last night and it was the first name that came into my head and, well …”

  “You read recipe books?”

  She blushed. “It’s kind of a hobby of mine.”

  “Are you serious? I can’t believe this. I thought I was the only one who …”

  She came over to my studio the next night, bringing with her a simple and rather nicely executed onion tart. (I supplied a main course of duck that I had confited myself.) We ate dinner and she looked at my collection of cookbooks, and eventually, standing there by the meat section, we kissed. It should have been straightforward after that. There should have been a series of simple maneuvers that would lead us easily from standing to lying, from dressed to naked, from aroused to spent. And there would have been had the man involved not been me.

  I hadn’t stayed a virgin until my twentieth year by chance. It was a part of me, like my battered feet and my ungainly thighs—and it all dated back to that desperate night with Wendy Coleman when she had tried to get hold of me and failed. The experience had been so dismal that two years later, when something approaching sex next offered itself, I was so terrified I would fail to attain the necessary hardness that I remained inconsolably soft.

  This second humiliation led to a third and a fourth and so on until, quite reasonably, I found myself running away from women unless I was horribly and unattractively drunk, in which case there was no chance at all. I wasn’t impotent. I had no trouble doing it by myself, and I did, rather too much at times. For a while I even wondered if I were gay. I overcame excruciating embarrassment and purchased a gay mag from a small newsagent’s in King’s Cross. Swiftly I realized that didn’t do it for me. The pictures were startling and informative and full of pink flesh, but they weren’t arousing. If the thought of sex with other men did not get me going when I was by myself, it was not going to work when I was with someone. Homosexuality wasn’t the solution. My virginity had begun to hang about me like a bad smell. By the time Jennie Sampson rolled up, I was more than a little desperate.

  And yet, halfway through that evening together, I suddenly became convinced that she could be the one. Everything about it seemed right: the setup, the apparent mutual interest, this clinch now on my makeshift bed of two single mattresses slapped down on the floor. Which, of course, was when I began to panic. Surely it couldn’t all go wrong again? Or perhaps it could. How could failure be turned into success when the most important part of the equation—me—had not changed in any way? I heard myself begin to make a speech:

  “I just want you to know I’m not going to have sex with you tonight.”

  “No?”

  “No. I just don’t, not on a first night. Never have, never will. There’s this belief that, you know, men have to perform. That we immediately have to be able to generate these impressive erections to order, whereas women, well, they can just lie there and hope they get into it, and if they don’t, so what.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, there is. I think it’s quite oppressive, actually, although nobody’s ever going to be bothered to start a campaign or anything, are they? I mean, ‘Save Men from the Oppression of the Erection’ isn’t really a rallying cry, is it?”

  “No, I suspect not.”

  “Then there’s the faking thing. Well, you might be able to fake an orgasm, but men, you know, we can’t fake our erections, can we? You’d always find us out, and so, the thing is, well, I just wanted you to know that this is the way it will be tonight and …”

  She was smiling at me. Then she reached out to brush a few stray strands of hair away from my eyes and said, “That’s fine, Marc. We’ll just lie here and do this. This is nice. This is lovely.” And she kissed me again.

  Naturally, half an hour later, I was no longer a virgin.

  Ten

  The first words I said to Jennie the next morning when we awoke were the last words that had been floating about my head as I drifted off to sleep the night before. They were, “Thank you.” I was festering with gratitude.

  She leaned back from me in the bed, yawned, and said, “My pleasure,” as if she had only bought me a drink.

  We agreed to meet later that morning in the Basement Bar, a dimly lit coffee shop in the student union that smelled of stale food and fresh coffee, where the hungover and furtive went to escape daylight. The walls were lined with high-backed booths that were ideal for hiding in. Tucked away in there, nobody could see anybody else, which was why most people went to the Basement Bar. It was why Jennie and I suggested it as a meeting place. We liked the idea of being cloistered away together with our curious knowledge of each other. I arrived early, bought a coffee, and was heading toward one of the farthest booths when someone called out my name.

  “All right, Marky Marc.”

  It would have been easy to acknowledge the call and move on. I could have raised one hand in salute and continued toward that farthest booth. In the Basement Bar nobody’s need for space was ever questioned. The problem was I had time on my hands and time is the enemy of good decision-making. The names of the two lads who had called me over don’t matter now. They were just hyperhormonal men, the big beasts of the student savanna, nostrils open for the scent of an available pheromone. I knew instinctively that if I sat down with them, talk would soon turn to the pressing matter of sex. For these men sexual conquest was a sport to which they offered their own commentary. Too many times I had found myself an uneasy and counterfeit coconspirator. I had sat in too many of these booths listening to this sex talk and, still surprised by my own lack of experience, had chipped in with a special arrangement of knowing guffaws and wisecracks which kept me in the conversation without ever drawing me too close to its center.

  This morning was different. As of the previous night I was what my doctor would have called a sexually active male.

  “Young man, are you sexually active?”

  “Well yes, Doct
or. Yes I am. I am sexually very active. I was sexually active last night, as it happens, thank you for asking.”

  I deserved a place in that booth. I could join the herd out on the savanna. So I slipped in along the warm leatherette bench, scrounged a fag, and sipped my coffee. Off went the conversation, this chatter of capability and willingness, and at some point, buoyed up by success, I joined in. Looking back, I can now see the flow of that conversation spreading out like a mighty river with its tributaries and bifurcations. I can still identify the narrative beats along the way which would have allowed me to send the talk off down another channel; streams which would have left me innocent and unsullied. But the truth is—and I accept this now—I just didn’t want to. I wanted these boys to know that I was one of them. I wanted them to hear me boast about sex. Most of all I wanted them to hear me boast about sex with Jennie Sampson. I needed them to know about it because somehow it would make the whole event seem so much more real. Naturally, in the desperate pursuit of this realness, I was more than willing to lie.

  When one of them said, “Is Jennie Sampson a shouter?,” I answered in the affirmative, even though all I remembered from the night before was the warmth of her breath on my neck and the hum of the fridge in my dour kitchenette.

  But I was flying now, writing my own story lines, crafting my own narrative arc. “She howled,” I said. “I thought someone might call the police, she was so bloody noisy. Seriously, I was so worried I …”

  It took me a few seconds to notice that their gaze had lifted from the Warner Brothers animation of my face to a place just up and behind me. Their lascivious smiles had subsided to be replaced by something closer to a smirk. I said, “What? What is it—”

  “Hello, Jennie,” one of them said cheerily.

  “Yeah, hello,” the other one said, just as eagerly. “We were just talking about you.”

  I swung around. She was standing at the end of the table, a pile of books gripped tightly to her chest. She was blinking and even in the gloom I could see tears beginning to form. God knows how long she’d been in the Basement listening. She could have been in the next booth, her head rested back against the divider that separated us. However long she had been there it was long enough. Behind me the boys started sniggering.

  I tried a welcoming grin and said, “Actually, we were just talking about …” But it was pointless. She sniffed and blinked so that her eyelids fluttered beautifully, and she mouthed the words “You bastard” at me. Then Jennie Sampson turned and fled. We left university without saying another word to each other.

  Once you finally recognize someone it’s hard to imagine how there was ever a time when you failed to identify them. Watching Jennie stride toward me now, down the wide, empty space of the corridor that led to the Foreign Office entrance hall, she was so very much herself that I felt only foolish. How could I not have recognized her? The carefully designed swish of her loose black trousers and the matching jacket may not have belonged to the Jennie Sampson I once knew. There may now have been a pair of sculptured heels beating out a confident rhythm on the checkerboard stone-tiled floor where once there would have been the silence of flat soles. But none of that interfered with the essentials. She was still recognizably Jennie Sampson, the woman I had humiliated.

  I had turned up unannounced shortly before one on the off chance that she might need to break for lunch. If she hadn’t been available, my great plan—and it really was no more developed than this—was to leave my number in the hope that she might call. I didn’t need to. The receptionist had announced tersely, “Ms. Sampson will be down presently,” and now here she was, hard-faced and businesslike. She reached out to shake my hand, as though I had arrived for a prearranged meeting, and said, “I read your column occasionally. You know your stuff but you are sometimes unnecessarily cruel.”

  “Yes. You’re right. I’m attempting to deal with that. It’s why I—”

  “Walk with me,” she said, looking toward the bright rectangle of daylight beyond the open doorway. “I have a package to deliver.” She lifted a manila envelope held in the crook of her neatly tailored arm, before turning to stride out into the sudden clamor of the busy London street. I rushed to catch up, feeling clumsy and uncomfortable beside her self-containment.

  “As I was saying, it’s why I came.”

  “Yes?” This impatiently.

  “I wanted to talk to you about us—well, me. About what I did to you a long time back.”

  “Go on.”

  “Good. Yes. Right. The thing is, I’ve been thinking back to, you know, our time at York together and the way I—well, I lied about you. It was a horrible, dreadful thing to do, nasty and cruel and thoughtless, and I came here today to see you because I wanted to say sorry. I don’t expect you to accept it just like that, but—”

  “Hmm.”

  “—I still feel it’s the right thing to do.”

  We were walking briskly now, she clearing a path through oncoming pedestrians, her gaze fixed dead ahead, me all but skipping to keep up. I felt like I was trying to sell her something she didn’t need—which was, I suppose, the case.

  “Because there’s no point apologizing if you already know someone’s going to accept it, is there? I mean, it’s got to be for its own sake, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes?”

  “And it doesn’t matter how much time has passed, does it?”

  “No?”

  “The thing is, you know …” I was hunting around, trying to work out exactly what the thing was, when the phrase came to me. “The thing is, there’s no statute of limitations on a hurt.”

  I had walked on a few yards before I realized she had stopped. I turned back to her. Suddenly she was alert.

  “What did you say?”

  “Erm, that there’s no, you know, statute of limitations on …”

  “Yes?”

  “… a hurt.”

  “Did you read that somewhere?”

  “No, I just—”

  “It didn’t come from a law book or—”

  “I just made it up, I’m afraid.”

  “And to be absolutely clear, you’re saying sorry to me?”

  “Well, I’m trying to, yes. That’s the plan.”

  “Apologizing?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose so. I don’t expect you want to hear it, but—”

  “No no no. I do want to hear it. Really.” She seemed excited now, as if she had just caught sight of an item in a shop window she had been trying to find for months. She glanced at her chunky watch and said, “Do you have half an hour to spare? My place is not too far from here, just over in that building, actually.”

  “You live in a government ministry?”

  “In one of the tied apartments. A perk of the job. I’m moving out soon. What I’d like to do is …” She stopped as if trying to calm herself. “I know this might sound a bit weird, but I’d like to get you down on camera. A small digital thing I’ve got for recording meetings and stuff. Would you mind? Would you? It would be very helpful to me.”

  “What about your package?”

  She looked down at the manila envelope as if she had forgotten it was there.

  “It can wait,” she said.

  I had no reason to refuse. If she wanted my apology recorded then that was her right.

  She took me to a single-room apartment high up inside one of the Treasury buildings, a grand echoing space of dark parquet floors and long windows that flooded the vault with light. There was a neatly made double bed and, by it, a clothes rail hung with black pantsuits and white blouses. In one corner was a starkly modernist kitchen and, above the work surface, a shelf heavy with thick-spined cookbooks. She asked me to sit down on a pale cream sofa in the seating area while she went to retrieve something from a cupboard in the wall by the bed, which I hadn’t even known was there until she thumped the panel and it sprang open.

  “Here we are,” she said. She came back carrying a tripod and a camera so small it seemed unlikel
y it would be able to fit all of me into its narrow frame. She fumbled around trying to get the two pieces of equipment connected to each other and a minidisk into its drive and the whole kit pointed in the right direction. Finally she seemed satisfied that everything was in place. She pulled up a chair so she could sit next to the tripod and reached up to press the controls.

  “Can you see a little red light on the front, just below the lens?”

  I looked away from her to the camera. “Er, yeah. Yes. I can see it.”

  “Great. It’s recording.” She looked back from the control panel to me. “So, in your own time.”

  I pointed at the camera. “Do you want me to do it to the lens or to you or …”

  She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her head on her hands as if bracing herself. She said, “Doesn’t matter. Whatever feels comfortable. Talk to the camera or to me. Really. Whatever works for you.”

  “Okay,” I said. And then: “From the beginning?”

  “Absolutely. From the beginning.” She smiled encouragingly at me.

  “Right. Here goes.” I closed my eyes for a second, then opened them and looked past the camera at Jennie. She had presented me with the perfect opportunity, a way to move the apology on from being simply a momentary rush of self-serving emotion toward something much more profound, a performance piece that would have a life above and beyond the set piece. I was apologizing for posterity. The arguments with Lynne, the tense exchanges with my brother, the intensity of the previous days faded away. I was focused on the event.

  “I treated you badly and for that I am terribly, terribly sorry. Some people might say it’s such old history that it doesn’t matter now. That we were practically kids. I don’t see it that way. I wasn’t a child. I was an adult who behaved as a child. And the irony is that it was you who helped me into the adulthood I then failed to grasp.”