Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  During this, I’d watched as she raised her eyebrows, knitted them, squinted, pulled her hair into her mouth and bit it then tucked it away, each expression derailing me, compelling me on into some other half-finished phrase, with some words barely more than sounds until they ran out like the last drips from a hose.

  ‘So. Anyway. What d’you think?’

  And when they’d finally run dry, she said, quite clearly, ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right. Well, fair enough.’

  She shrugged. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Is it a boyfriend?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Is it Miles?’

  ‘What? What? No!’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I just thought—’

  ‘Why would it be Miles?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just – maybe you don’t like the idea, that’s fine.’

  ‘It’s not that either.’

  ‘Well, tell me, ’cause it’s embarrassing to keep guessing.’

  ‘I haven’t got time! I’m doing this, I’ve got lines to learn …’ She wafted the pages of the script.

  ‘Well, it is the eponymous role.’

  ‘Exactly! I want to do it properly.’

  ‘But surely weekends …’

  ‘No, that’s when I see my friends. The only way you’re going to see me …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Come back Monday.’

  I looked left and right, saw the faces watching from the bus shelter. ‘Just Monday?’

  ‘No, let’s say the whole week. You have to make it to Friday.’

  She held out the script at arm’s length and, like the poet, I said, ‘Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  She laughed. ‘Sorry, that’s the deal.’

  ‘But on Friday we can go out?’

  ‘No, on Friday I will give it some serious thought.’

  ‘And make a decision?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Depending on what?’

  ‘The usual. How we get on …’

  ‘Whether I’m any good?’

  ‘No, ’course not. It’s not an audition.’

  ‘Well, not in that sense, maybe.’

  ‘Not that kind of audition.’

  ‘But it’s not definite? The coffee?’

  ‘At this stage of negotiations, that’s all I’m prepared to offer.’

  ‘You realise this is blackmail.’

  ‘It’s only blackmail if you do something you’re ashamed of.’

  ‘What, like Theatre Sports?’

  ‘It’s more of a bribe, really. Or an incentive.’ Once again, she held out the pages, and I took them and bundled them quickly into my rucksack.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said and placed my foot on the highest pedal to push off. ‘Bye.’

  ‘Bye then!’ she said, and here she quickly put her hand on my shoulder and as I turned, she leant in quickly, pressed her cheek against mine so that I could feel sweat on skin – hers or mine, I wasn’t sure – and whispered in my ear.

  ‘Sweet sorrow and all that.’

  Then she was walking towards her friends, stopping to turn. ‘Monday!’ she said.

  I cycled off to work, thinking ‘sweet sorrow’, that’s exactly right. ‘Sweet sorrow.’ It wasn’t until Monday morning that I discovered she’d taken it from the play.

  Part Two

  JULY

  –

  I’ve seen plays that were more exciting than this. Honest to God – plays!

  Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

  Wedding

  We’d decided on a winter wedding, and to make a virtue of the fact. ‘Small and exclusive, but not because no one likes us.’ Niamh was my fiancée, though I’d learnt not to use the word. ‘It sounds so fancy,’ she’d said, ‘with that little accent and all those “e”s.’

  ‘It’s very you.’

  ‘Oh, you think?’

  ‘Even when we’re married, I’m still going to call you my fiancée.’

  ‘Yes, try that.’

  In the ten years that we’d been together, we’d been to many weddings: an Italian olive grove at sunset, a picture-postcard English country church, on the roof of a New York skyscraper. Niamh was from Dublin, and we’d stood on an immense windblown Irish beach, the bride arriving on a white stallion from a vast distance away, like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia, too far by far, so that Niamh had to retreat into the dunes to hide her laughter. I found it impossible to imagine the two of us in any of these scenarios, and Niamh felt the same: ‘When I look in your eyes and think of what you mean to me,’ she said, ‘I just think “registry office”.’

  ‘Maybe not even that. Can we do it online?’

  ‘Or we could elope, just the two of us. Though we’d have to bring my parents. The four of us.’

  ‘Is it still eloping if you bring your parents?’

  We’d met in a briefly fashionable east London restaurant during the messy and unwholesome years of my late twenties. I bartended, Niamh was the manager and before too long she had joined the list of two, perhaps three people who I can plausibly claim have saved my life. Our existence at that time was practically nocturnal and steeped in vodka, and the rate of attrition amongst our friends was high, but a few had gone on to run successful restaurants, and this was how we’d found the venue for our wedding, our very small wedding, in the top room of a pub. The scale would be a sign of our security and confidence. Only the insecure rode white horses, and we’d just mumble ‘I do’ out of the side of our mouths then see our friends. We would invite just ten people, later twenty, then thirty. If we set the tables in a square, we could make it forty, and surely this would be enough.

  We looked at the list that night in bed. The numbers stood at thirty-eight.

  ‘But these are all my friends,’ said Niamh.

  ‘They’re my friends too.’

  ‘But aren’t there old school friends you want to invite?’

  ‘No, I’m okay.’

  ‘Or old girlfriends?’

  ‘Why would I want to do that? Why would you even want me to?’

  ‘I want to see whatshername.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shakespeare girl.’

  ‘Her name was Fran Fisher.’

  ‘I still can’t believe you were actually in a play.’

  ‘Here were the servants of your adversary and yours—’

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘—close fighting ere I did approach—’

  ‘Stop please, I don’t like it.’

  ‘—I drew to part them. In the instant came the fiery Tybalt—’

  ‘I hope that wasn’t how you did it.’

  ‘More or less. And yet I never acted again.’

  ‘Theatre’s loss.’

  ‘I know. That’s the real tragedy.’

  ‘And when you met her, was it like in the play? Was it love at first sight?’

  ‘Nah. At most it was fancy at first sight.’

  ‘Fancy at first sight. Is that from Shakespeare too?’

  ‘I just mean love’s a big word for it. You’re a different person then, aren’t you? At that age. It’s … something else.’

  ‘So invite her!’

  ‘I’m not going to invite Fran Fisher to our wedding.’

  ‘Why not? If she was so great.’

  ‘I don’t know where she is!’ I said, which at that time was true. ‘I’ve not spoken to her for … twenty years!’

  ‘But I want to see her!’

  ‘Aren’t you scared that I might just walk off during the vows?’

  ‘That’s exactly why I want her there. Get a bit of a Four Weddings vibe going on, bit of tension, bit of an edge.’

  ‘She’s probably married by now. Probably got kids.’

  ‘So? Look her up online, it can’t be hard.’

  ‘Like I said, I’m fine. I don’t ever think of her.’
<
br />   And I didn’t ever think of her, except from time to time.

  Over the years I’d watched a cult of nostalgia grow, facilitated by technology, and noticed, too, how the very notion of ‘the past’ had been subject to a kind of crazed inflation, so that friends went misty-eyed when recalling the events of the last Bank Holiday. I tried not to dwell on my own history, not because I thought of it as more than averagely unhappy or traumatic, but because I no longer felt the need. At other, less happy times of my life, I’d made a religion of the past, resorting to it like alcohol – no wonder they go together – and I can still cause my shoulders to touch my ears when I remember the drunken phone call I made to Fran’s mother on the millennial New Year’s Eve. How was she? Could I maybe have her number? ‘I’ll tell you what, Charlie,’ she’d said, kind and calm, ‘phone me in the morning, and if you still want it, I’ll happily give it to you.’

  I’d not called back, not spoken to Claire Fisher since, and what reason could I possibly have to go back now, now that life was finally taking on some shape, some permanence? I had no photo albums, no diaries, no old address books; I resisted social media. No need to draw on the past to fill gaps in the present. Thirty-eight guests would be plenty.

  And then a month before the wedding, an email arrived, a screen grab of a Facebook page announcing a London reunion for the Full Fathom Five Theatre Co-operative, 1996–2001. Above it, a note from my best man:

  Got to be done, don’t you think? See you there.

  Heron

  It was also the summer that I began my life of crime.

  The petrol station was at the edge of town, the last stop before the motorway on a long, straight road that ran through the pine plantation. I’d got the job through Mike, a barrel-chested local businessman who flirted with Mum at the golf-club reception desk. Mike owned a franchise – he loved this word – of three small petrol stations. ‘The thing about the franchise,’ he’d told me at our first meeting in his scrappy office cubicle, ‘is that it’s like a family. Big business but with a human face.’ Mike’s own human face was dominated by a drooping moustache, the weight of which seemed to drag his features down, and as he spoke he would stroke it with the back of his forefinger as if trying to lull it to sleep. The job, I knew, was part of his flirtation with Mum, and because I was not yet seventeen, I was encouraged to treat it as ‘an apprenticeship’. I would get paid cash in hand and there’d be none of that fuss with national insurance, holiday or sick pay. I could even sign on if I wanted to, soon as school was over. It was, said Mike, a win-win and so I’d started work on the day of my last exam, twelve hours a week, three pounds twenty an hour.

  But just as every job brought duties, responsibilities and a uniform, so every job came with its own scam, and it didn’t take long to find a way to subsidise the scandalous wages. As part of his franchise, Mike took part in a popular scratch card game with instant cash prizes or, more commonly, the consolation of cheap crystal-effect glasses. As cashier, I’d hand over a card with every qualifying purchase, wait while they scrubbed away with the edge of a coin, then, with a certain ceremony, present the driver with six gorgeous champagne flutes. One in every twenty cards brought a cash prize too, but I needn’t imagine I could sit there and scratch away. All prizes would be accounted for, and the security camera over my shoulder would make sure of that.

  But on my first solo shift, dazed and overwhelmed with the sudden rush of commuter trade, I’d neglected to hand one or two of the cards to impatient customers, then three or four or five. If I kept a tally and used my body as a shield, it was possible for me to palm these extra scratch cards and slip them into my pocket.

  Back at home, bedroom door locked, heart pounding, I scraped away the thin foil. Soon a set of four cut-glass brandy snifters was mine, then four lager glasses, then nothing and then – ten pounds, more than three hours’ wages. It would be reckless to take the cash myself but I could plausibly forget to hand out, say, one in four cards. As long as I kept a careful tally of those I’d missed, as long as I slipped the cards away with my back to the camera, there was nothing to stop me passing them on to an accomplice. As my best friend, Martin Harper was the obvious choice.

  After a few weeks, I was only handing out scratch cards if specifically reminded by the customer, at which point I would slap my forehead in a pantomime of forgetfulness. The unclaimed cards I’d palm stiffly into my pocket like an amateur conjurer and then, in an extra flourish of squalid paranoia, into my underpants while holding my breath in the fetid customer toilet. Once a week, I’d take the stack of cards to Martin Harper’s house, where we’d close the door to the den, put on loud music and scratch away like old gangsters counting our haul, which, in our most audacious week, came to £70, thirty-six champagne flutes and twenty-four highball tumblers.

  There was, of course, no justification for any of this, beyond a vague, unexamined sense that someone needed to teach petrol a lesson. Yes, I was being paid off the books but Mike was always perfectly affable and decent to me. On the other hand, Mike wouldn’t be losing a penny or a single customer, the vast majority of whom left the station none the wiser. Who was the victim? This was a game of chance and who was to say that they had any more right to good fortune or glassware than I did? Philosophically speaking, the money didn’t even exist until the foil was scraped away, so the customers were losing nothing but the possibility of gain, rather than the gain itself. Like the falling tree in the forest or the cat in its closed box, these mental gymnastics made my head spin but were necessary if I was to convince myself the crime was victimless, and this was how I passed many of the guilty hours between three and four and five in the morning.

  Perhaps I’d have felt better if I’d been using the cash to help sustain the family, a dutiful and noble son, but this was only partly the case. Dad had been signing on since bankruptcy and the arrival of a bill or a request for a new pair of shoes could easily send him spinning into panic and gloom. I sometimes pictured myself handing him a roll of banknotes – there you go, Dad, just chipping in – but was unable to finish the scene without indignity or embarrassment on both our parts. My contribution had to be secret. If Dad gave me cash to buy groceries or takeaway, I would pay and return the money to his wallet, and this gave me a terrific, self-congratulatory sense of piety, like a sort of sneaky Jesus.

  But the pleasure was fleeting, and for the most part I spent the money on booze, computer games, trainers; protection from the humiliation of ‘I can’t afford it’. Stealing stopped me feeling poor and for all my guilt and worry there was a swagger to it too. I could buy my round and any excess cash was rolled tightly and stashed in the hollow tubing of the bunk bed, like tools for an escape hidden in a cell.

  On that particular Friday night, I left Fran and looped round the ring road, changed into my green nylon tabard, chatted to my co-worker Marjorie and took her place at the till. Six until seven thirty were the busiest hours, then a lull broken only by the gang of kids from the estate down the road bundling through the doors to grab confectionery from the shelves: not shoplifting, more a brazen smash and grab. I went into my speech – please don’t do that. Put it back, please. You have to pay for that – and they bundled out and stood at the forecourt window, cramming chocolate and crisps into their mouths and laughing, while I pretended to call the police.

  Then another lull. I took the play script from my bag and stared for some time at the cover. Turning the page felt like opening an exam paper for a language I didn’t speak, a meaty, strange language with weird grammar. I looked at the cast list, found Sampson some way down, then turned to Act I, Scene I. Two households, both alike in dignity.

  I closed the script, went to the confectionery rack, stood in the camera’s blind spot and quickly ate a Twix.

  I read FHM.

  At ten minutes before nine, a battered VW pulled up. Harper stepped out of his brother’s car, checked left and right. I hid the play beneath the counter and slipped into character. The following perf
ormance was carried out with deadpan sobriety, as if in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I am good.’

  ‘My brother has won some money on the scratch cards. Can I please cash them in here please?’

  ‘Certainly! May I see the cards?’

  ‘Yes. Here are the cards.’

  I inspected them with professional care and took the cash from the till. A smirk played around Harper’s lips and with a wink he folded the money, walked back to his brother’s car and drove away. A queasy, anxious period of time followed as I sat listening for the sound of sirens, imagining a squad of police cars sweeping onto the forecourt, the click of the cuffs, a large hand protecting my head as I was folded into the backseat.

  But nothing happened, and I sometimes wondered – was this the perfect crime? As far as I could tell, the scam had only one flaw; each ten-pound cash prize could generate enough glassware to stock a small bar. To begin with I’d been smuggling the surplus home in my rucksack, until all available cupboard space was crammed with more garage glasses than we could ever hope to use. They were not something to hand down through the generations; moulded like a pineapple hand-grenade, the ‘crystal’ was of such low quality that it would shatter with an alarming pop if used for anything as unconventional as, say, a cold drink, turning the enjoyment of a chilled beer on a warm day into a kind of Russian roulette. Still I brought them home until the day I found my father on his hands and knees, sweeping up the shrapnel with a dustpan and brush. ‘I swear, next time it’ll take my face off. Don’t bring any more home now, Charlie, please?’

  Another plan was needed. Turning off the pumps and forecourt lights at nine, I patted the stack of cards in my underpants and, in the darkness of the stock room, loaded a small chandelier’s worth next to the pages of Romeo and Juliet, then climbed gingerly on to my bike and cycled away, avoiding any bumps or vibrations for fear that one exploding glass would start a chain reaction. I pictured my corpse, shards of highball tumblers and champagne flutes embedded down my spine like the plates on a stegosaurus. I imagined the stack of bloodied evidence handed over to my parents, who would be torn between grief and embarrassment. ‘We found these scratch cards in his underpants.’