by Lisa Jewell
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not going to miraculously turn into a twentythree-year-old when you have your midlife crisis, you know?’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ, Millie…’ Sean smiled wryly and got to his feet.
‘Ooh. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m just supposed to say “Yes” really enigmatically and gracefully, like I always knew you’d want to marry me, aren’t I?’
‘Well, yes, that’s the…’
‘Yes! Yes! Double yes! Yes, I’d love to marry you. If you’re sure you know what you’re doing and you’ve really thought about this and you don’t mind hanging out with an old woman and…’
‘Millie!’
‘Sorry.’
‘So that’s a yes, then?’
‘Yes! Oh God, yes, definitely!’
‘Do you want your ring, then?’
‘Oh my God! You got me a ring?’ She brought her hands to her mouth and Sean could see tears shining in her eyes.
‘Uh-huh.’ He headed indoors to retrieve the ring from its drawer, his heart thumping with excitement.
She gasped in wonder when he presented her with the box. ‘You’re really serious aren’t you?’ She opened it, slowly and reverentially, and sucked in her breath when she caught sight of the diamond baguette. And then Sean slipped it on to her finger and she burst into tears.
‘Oh God,’ she snivelled through tears and laughter, ‘I’m getting married.’ She turned to face the world, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted across the London skyline, ‘I’m getting married!’And then she turned back to Sean and looked at him with tear-streaked eyes. ‘I love you so much, Sean London. We are going to be so incredibly happy together. You know that, don’t you?’
And Sean smiled because he did know that. ‘Come on,’ he said, wiping some tears away from under her eyes, let’s go into my dank, musty hovel of a bedroom and have fantastic post-proposal, engaged-to-be-married sex.’
He didn’t need to ask twice.
Just What He Always Wanted
‘Happy birthday, Tony.’ Ness handed him a huge and very heavy gift, wrapped in lurid green holographic paper topped with a fuchsia bow.
‘Thanks.’
‘Thirty-five,’ she said, for about the hundredth time that evening, ‘I can’t believe you’re thirty-five.’
He grimaced and began peeling away the holographic paper. Inside was a cardboard box. It had the words ‘Organically Grown Pineapples’ printed on it. ‘Cool,’ he said, ‘pineapples.’
Ness threw him a withering smile. ‘Come on,’ she urged, ‘open it.’ She was almost quivering with excitement as Tony ripped the parcel tape off the box and pulled open the flaps.
Tony looked inside. It was some kind of electronic thing. It was black and clunky. He pulled it out and examined it.
Ness was looking at him, anticipation shining from her eyes. ‘Don’t you know what it is?’
Tony examined it further. ‘Erm, some kind of time machine?’
‘No! It’s a Betamax video player! For you to watch all your old Betamax tapes on!’
‘Aaah,’ said Tony, realization dawning. ‘Aaah! God, Ness, that’s brilliant. That’s so brilliant. Thank you.’And it really was brilliant. The Londons had owned a Betamax back in the seventies when nobody knew any better and Tony had recorded all his favourite programmes religiously for a couple of years, until the VHS had taken off and they got rid of it. But he’d kept his Betamax tapes for all these years; determined that one day he’d get himself a player and have a stride down memory lane. ‘Where the hell did you get it from?’
‘Well – it was a bit of a mare, actually. I started looking about six months ago and nearly got one at a car-boot sale, but it was completely knackered so I had a look on the Internet, but it all got a bit complicated. And then I got this one at the electric shop on Church Road. Just happened to be driving past, went in, there it was.’
‘God, Ness, thank you,’ he leant over to kiss her and she clamped her hands on to his cheeks and gave him a big smacker on the lips.
‘You are very welcome indeed.’ She grinned at him happily and Tony felt a creeping sense of unease in his gut. She’d gone to so much trouble, been so thoughtful, bought him the best kind of gift, the gift you really, really wanted but didn’t know you wanted. A gift that showed that she listened to him, that she remembered things he said, that what was important to him was important to her.
A gift that showed she cared.
Way too much.
Tony felt a plume of guilt rising in his chest. ‘Come on,’ he said, looking at his watch and putting the Beta-max back in the pineapple box, ‘we’d better get moving. We’re going to be late.’
The Loneliest Penguin
Mum had made it lovely in the living room – candles, a huge fire, Sinatra playing in the background. It was just the five of them right now: Mum, Dad, Ned, Ness and him. Hands darted in and out of bowls of nuts and Bombay mix, Dad threw pistachio shells on to the fire where they hissed and crackled, Mum sat radiant with joy at the prospect of having her whole brood together under her roof again.
Tony perched himself on the arm of a sofa and ignored the feel of Ness’s arm as it fell across his lap and gripped his kneecap affectionately. He accepted a glass of red wine from his mother and took a large gulp, swilling it around his mouth, letting the lukewarm liquid reach into every crevice, numbing him.
The fire in the grate was throwing off far too much heat and Tony felt himself melting inside his fleece. He was just about to take it off when the doorbell rang. Jesus. It was them. He pulled his fleece back down, touched his hair, adjusted his posture, tried his hardest to look natural – which was nigh on impossible when every nerve in his body was jangling with anticipation.
He eyed the living-room door nonchalantly, drumming his fingertips casually against the side of his wine glass. And then there she was, standing in the doorway, just behind Sean. Everything else seemed to fade away, then – the introduction, the laughter, the sheer joyful volume of familial reunion. He was deaf to it all. All he was aware of was this beautiful perfect person standing uncertainly in the doorway, smiling at what was happening in front of her, looking as excited as everyone else in the room, even though she was a stranger.
‘Everyone, this is Millie. Millie, this is everyone.’
‘Sean, honestly, what sort of an introduction is that?’ scolded Bernie, taking Millie by the hand and introducing her to everyone properly. Tony could barely breathe. She looked even better than he remembered, in an embroidered suede skirt, leather boots and a tight red sweater. Her hair was clipped back with a few mahogany strands hanging loose around her face. And she was wearing red lipstick.
‘And you’ve met Tony and Ness, haven’t you?’
‘Yes. Of course. Hi again,’ she beamed at them both, and then leant in towards Tony and grabbed his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, properly, so that he could feel the ridges in her lips against his skin. ‘Happy birthday!’
‘Thank you,’ he muttered, breathing in deeply. She smelt of fresh air and London rain.
He watched in awe as she leant in again to kiss Ness. Everything was still there, just as he remembered: the flecked eyes, the thick hair, the plump lips, the tawny skin, the blunt nails, the silver rings… But, hold on, one more silver ring than last time. A slender, silver ring, embracing a large diamond, third finger, left hand. The same finger on which he’d worn a band for eight years. An heirloom, he supposed dismissively, a grandmother’s ring, something she wore on special occasions, probably the only finger it fit.
‘Lovely to see you again, Ness,’ she said, and the sound of her lips smacking against Ness’s cheeks reverberated around Tony’s head.
Sean leant in to hug him, then – a quick slap on the back, Happy Birthday, mate, a gift of some sort thrust into his hands – but all he was aware of was the fact that she was in the room. The woman he’d been fantasizing about for nearly two weeks. She was sitting over there, drinking wine, her legs c
rossed, in his parents’ home. And she was going to be around all night.
Someone cracked a joke about the state of Goldie. ‘Oh no,’ said Millie, petting him furiously, ‘I think he’s lovely.’ Goldie rolled over and offered up his horrible old belly, which Millie tickled obligingly, and Tony could never have imagined that the day would come when he would want, more than anything in the world, to be a senile, malodorous golden retriever.
‘At least he’s passed the age of the involuntary penile emergence,’ said Sean, and everyone laughed.
Tony laughed too but stopped abruptly when he caught sight of his reflection in the glass doors of a cabinet and almost didn’t recognize himself. And then he remembered – this was who he was now, a fat and very nearly middle-aged man, sweating lightly inside too many clothes, his cheeks flushed from the fire and the wine, his hair unkempt and woolly where he’d pulled his T-shirt over his head when he was getting ready.
His dad wandered around the room with a bottle of wine, a roll-up hanging from the corner of his mouth. ‘Top up?’ he said to Tony.
‘Yeah, please.’ He let his dad top his glass up to the rim and then took a big gulp.
‘Tony?’
‘What?’ He snapped out of his reverie as he felt Ness banging his kneecap.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘About the card?’
‘What card?’
Ness rolled her eyes. ‘Wakey wakey,’ she teased, ‘Millie was just saying that the first card she bought for Sean – it was one of yours.’
‘No. Really? Which one?’
Millie sat forward on the sofa and readied herself to describe the card to him. ‘It’s this sort of shape,’ she said, describing a thin rectangle, ‘and it’s got a cartoon drawing of a penguin on the front, a really tiny ”’ she indicated the tininess between thumb and index finger – ‘little penguin with this sad little expression on his face and he’s sitting all on his own on this glacier, nothing around for miles and it says…’
‘ “I’m feeling lonely”,’ Tony finished.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s right. But not because I was lonely or anything. I just really liked the expression on the little penguin’s face. It just – got me. Did you draw it, Tony?’
‘No,’ said Tony, wishing more than anything that he had. ‘No. I commissioned it, though. It was by a woman, actually – a woman called… called…’ he clicked his fingers, desperately trying to recall the name of the artist, ‘Sybil? Something? Something French. “S” something…’ He racked his brain so hard it hurt, wanting, needing, to give Millie the information she wanted, to give her anything, anything at all.
‘Oh,’ she said, watching him struggle, ‘don’t worry about it – it’ll say on the back of the card. I’ll look at it when we get back to Sean’s.’
‘You’re staying at Sean’s tonight?’ he asked in surprise. He just couldn’t quite imagine Millie walking through Sean’s estate, taking that aluminium-lined, graffiti-ed lift up to his grotty little flat that always smelt of stale bedsheets.
‘Yes,’ she nodded and smiled, ‘I was there on Wednesday as well, wasn’t I, Sean?’ she winked at him.
‘You most certainly were, Millie,’ he said, returning her wink.
‘Shall we…?’ she wiggled her eyebrows at him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘d’you think…?’
‘It’s up to you,’ she said.
‘Let’s do it,’ he said.
And they held hands and turned to face everyone and it looked as if their faces were about to split open with excitement and Sean squeezed Millie’s hand and Millie beamed and he said, ‘We’ve got something we’d like to tell you.’
‘Oh yes,’ Bernie sat bolt upright and gave them her undivided attention.
‘Well,’ said Sean, exchanging a nauseatingly complicitous look with Millie, ‘on Wednesday night, I asked Millie if she’d marry me…’
Mum screamed and went rigid, her hands flying to her face to cover her mouth.
‘… and she said yes. We’re getting married!’
For a second the whole room fell into a suspended silence. Tony looked around nervously. It looked like a game of musical statues.
‘See!’ said Ned triumphantly, pointing a finger at Tony. ‘Didn’t I tell you – didn’t I say?’
And then the room erupted. Everyone leapt to their feet to congratulate them and kiss them. Mum sent Gerry to the off-licence to get a bottle of champagne. Ness started crying. Ned went upstairs to get his camera. But not one person said, ‘Hold on a second, you two hardly know each other – don’t you think you’re rushing into this a bit?’Not one person did the responsible thing. It was pathetic, this desperate thrill-seeking Ooh, wonderful, someone’s getting married, that lifts my dull little life out of the doldrums for a minute or two, who cares if they’re making the greatest mistake of their life or not. Jesus.
Someone passed him a glass of champagne and he knocked back half of it, unthinkingly. ‘Tony,’ his mum chastised, ‘wait for the toast! Honestly…’
Everyone was talking dates and proposals and rings and dresses, Ness was running her hand up and down his thigh, and Tony was left to stare at his reflection in the cabinet doors and wonder when exactly his life had turned out like this.
He’d been the catch. Him. Tony. He’d been the big brother, the good-looking one, the successful businessman. He’d been the one with the beautiful wife and the big house, the jeep and the bank account that never went into the red. Sean had just been his little brother, the scamp, the worry to his mother, the one who couldn’t stick at anything.
But now Sean was ‘the author’ and being ‘the author’ meant that everything previously seen as negative about him had sort of fallen into place. Being ‘the author’ meant that a scruffy, lazy guy with smelly trainers who lived on a Catford council estate could persuade a woman like Millie to marry him. And being ‘the author’ meant that he was the catch of the family now, not Tony. Not any more. Jesus.
Tony waited glumly for the toast, raised his glass half-heartedly and knocked back some more champagne. This wasn’t right. There were constants in life, important constants, things to anchor you to the world – things like the fact that your mother would always love you, no matter what, and that one day you were going to die. And that you would always, whatever happened in life, be the big brother. But Tony didn’t feel like the big brother any more. He felt like the slightly overweight, dull-witted younger brother who was never going to leave home and get married. He looked at Sean, glowing and triumphant, and at Ned, the beloved prodigal baby of the family. He looked at Ness again, his ‘saviour’, as she bonded with his mother and it occurred to him that his mother would probably choose Ness over him if she was ever called upon to do so. And then, as if to compound these pathetic feelings of insecurity about his previously unquestioned positioning within the family, a skeletal figure suddenly appeared in the doorway.
‘Gervase! Come in love, come in. You’re just in time. We’ve just had some wonderful news. Gerry, get Gervase a glass for his champagne. Tony, love, shift over a bit, let Gervase sit down.’
Tony shifted over and found himself clinging to the very edges of the gathering. He downed another mouthful of champagne and felt almost swamped by resentment.
He felt insignificant. He felt awkward. He felt as lonesome, dejected and detached from everyone as that little penguin on the front of Millie’s card.
He didn’t fit in any more. He wanted to start again.
He wanted another chance.
Ness didn’t stay over that night. Tony really couldn’t stomach the prospect. He just wanted to get into his own bed, on his own, think about Millie and feel sorry for himself. He didn’t want Ness there, wrapping her never-ending legs around him, trying to cheer him up, being infernally upbeat – being his so-called fucking saviour. She whinged a bit but he feigned a splitting headache and an early start and ordered her a minicab and felt him
self crumple with relief as he closed the door behind her. And, as he watched her from his living-room window, folding her long legs into the minicab, flirting with the driver, as he listened to her raucous laughter ringing around the mews even with the doors of the car closed, he felt suddenly angry with her. More than angry – completely, lividly furious. Ness, he suddenly felt, was the problem with everything. She was the symbol of the disintegration of his life and the abrupt end of his youth. If you were to draw a line through the middle of Tony’s life to divide it into ‘good times’ and ‘bad times’it would fall directly at the very point where Ness had come into it.
He was still thin when he and Jo split up, still up for it and positive about the future. And then Ness had come into his life and made him laugh. She’d been up for it, too – the two of them had gone out every night, drinking themselves into oblivion, laughing, eating, spending money. She’d taken his mind off any latent fears he might have had about his future as a single man and made him feel good about himself. And the sex had been a revelation after so long with the same woman. Ness’s appetite for sex more than equalled her appetite for food and drink and she was up for everything. Tony had grown quite fond of her over the months, looked forward to seeing her more and more. And then, even though it wasn’t supposed to have been anything serious, somehow, because all his friends were pairing off, they’d ended up as an item. Friends felt more comfortable spending time with Tony when he was part of a couple and they all loved Ness, thought she was so good for Tony. So she became part of the gang and part of his life. And no one had ever really asked him if he minded. They were so keen for the two of them to be together, for TonyAndNess to be a couple, that it just sort of happened. And he shouldn’t have let it, he thought now, he shouldn’t have let Ness knit herself so tightly into his life, because she’d blinded him to possibilities. The possibility of true love and a real future. He’d been living a compromise for ten years, thinking that that was all life could offer. He should have taken his chance when Jo had left, just like she did, taken the opportunity to find true love, to find what Sean had found, to find Millie, to love Millie, to marry Millie. Instead of just dreaming about her.