by Alexis Hall
Greg put a hand on his arm. “Trust me, sweetie, you’re very good at some of it. I’m sorry this . . . fling you had in South Shields didn’t work out, but you’ll meet someone.”
Finally Alfie managed to stand up, shaking off Greg at the same time, because he really wasn’t in the mood to be stroked or soothed or treated like a pet. “I did meet someone. And he hates me because it turns out I bullied the shit out of him fifteen years ago. And there’s nothing I can do to change that.”
“Alfie, come on.” Greg gazed up at him with an infuriating mixture of pity and frustration. “Sometimes sex is just sex. You don’t need to invest deep meaning into it.”
“So, what, that was eight meaningless months we had?”
It was not a good time for Greg to roll his eyes. “No, of course not. I didn’t say that. You’re just so provincial sometimes.”
“Provincial? Just because I have some fucking values? Fuck you. No. Really. Fuck you.” Alfie pulled out his wallet and tossed some twenties onto the table. “That should cover my round. I’m done.”
He shoved the whole pew physically out of his way, scraping it over the flagstones with a nails-on-blackboard squeal, and stormed out.
6
Alfie hailed a cab on the street and was home in about half an hour. He lived in—or rather slept in and occasionally visited—a penthouse apartment at the top of the Landmark West Tower in Canary Wharf. It had interior design.
Sometimes, he kind of hated it.
Dragging a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale out of his otherwise empty fridge, he drank it on the glass-walled balcony. The city glittered silver and gold, its reflection burned into the river and onto the sky.
His phone rang. Kitty. He ignored her.
He was trying not to think. He’d been doing too much of that. But it didn’t seem to be helping with anything. It just meant he was distracted at work, distracted at home. And every time he looked in the mirror he wasn’t sure who was going to look back at him. He thought he’d finally got a handle on who he was, but South Shields and the wedding and Fen had messed it all up again. The truth was, the boy that Fen had known—known and rightly hated—was still part of him. He would be as long as that was all Fen saw when he looked at Alfie.
A text came in. It was from Greg. It said: Oh, and fuck you too.
Alfie’s thumb hovered over the touch screen. It wouldn’t take much to send a Sorry, mate.
But he didn’t.
Because tonight he was Alfie Bell: Shithead.
When they’d been carefully finding their way back to being friends, Kitty had told him she thought caring about someone was pretty resilient, once you got past hurt and anger and all the bad stuff. It was a nice idea, this tough-toffee love of hers stretching between people, but Alfie wasn’t sure he believed in it. He thought maybe it was more like those sugar sticks he used to get from the corner shop, glossy and brittle and easily snapped.
He stared across the water, his mouth full of the taste of home, and remembered different lights.
The ringing of the internal telephone cut across his nonthoughts. It was the front desk. Someone to see him. Greg.
Alfie didn’t really feel like dealing with him, or anyone, but you didn’t send your friends away in the middle of the night. Even if they’d pissed you off.
He met Greg at the door and ushered him wordlessly inside.
Greg’s eyes were faintly red-rimmed as they flicked to the bottle Alfie was still holding. “Tell me there’s something else to drink.”
“You know there is.” He tossed the Newky Brown into the recycling, crossed to the wine rack, and pulled out a bottle. “This do?”
Greg took it from him and studied the label. “With zis merlot you are really spoiling us.”
“Oh shut up.”
“It really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“The fact you like wine.”
Alfie grabbed a corkscrew and set to work. “Can we go like five minutes without you making a big deal out of it?”
“I don’t know. Can you?”
The cork came free with a neat pop, and Alfie set the bottle down on one of his pristine work surfaces. He really wasn’t in the mood to have his parochial irrationalities dissected. “Look, what’s this about?”
Greg stared at the floor. “I thought you might like the opportunity to apologise for being a judgemental prick.” He paused and shuffled. “At the very least, you owe me a hug.”
You couldn’t stay angry with Greg. He got all small and vulnerable. In Alfie’s opinion, this was cheating, but he’d never been able to withstand it. He held out his arms. “Come ’ere.”
“It has to be a proper hug. Not one of those back-slapping-pretending-to-be-straight hugs.”
“Get the fuck over here.”
Greg stepped closer, and Alfie enfolded him. There was something shockingly comforting in the familiar warmth of a body he knew well. He put his lips to Greg’s ear. “I’m sorry I was a judgemental prick, okay?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t take you seriously.”
Alfie squeezed.
“I kind of . . . need to breathe now.”
“Oops. Sorry.” He released a squished and tousled Greg. “Should I get the wine?”
“Yeah, and close those balcony doors. It’s freezing in here.”
“God, what did your last servant die of?”
Greg managed a slightly wobbly smile. “I dumped him.”
While Alfie made a vague attempt to make his apartment habitable, Greg picked up the wine and a couple of glasses and took them over to the sitting area. “You know,” he said, making a futile attempt to get comfortable on Alfie’s leather sofa, “it’s okay to like wine.”
“It’s poncy,” muttered Alfie, sprawling out next to him, and then wincing. The sofa had cost a small fortune, and it certainly looked good. But in every other respect, it was a disaster.
“No, no, pretending is poncy. I pretend. When actually I always choose wine by the label. The blingier the better. So, as far as I’m concerned, this—” Greg sloshed the wine haphazardly into the glasses, and Alfie tried not to wince “—is already something of a disappointment. Just a bunch of grapes. Not even gold grapes. Tragic.”
“You’ll like it. It’s bold but not over the top.”
Greg took a sip. “Oh, you’re so right. Bold. But not over the top.”
“Yeah, but you see what I mean? You like it?” There was something about wine—as uncomfortable as he was with his interest in it—that made Alfie anxious about other people’s approval. Their enjoyment was somehow important to his own. He’d snuck off to a fancy wine tasting once, and the wine itself had been some of the best he’d ever tasted, but it had been infinitely less fun without Greg’s wild guesses (“raspberry, no, plum, no, cinnamon, no, motor oil”) and his eventual, giggling capitulation to whatever Alfie said (“Yes, yes, it does have a velvety finish—and you know what else has a velvety finish?”).
“Yes.” Greg nodded. “In my clueless way, I can tell this is a good wine you’re wasting on me.”
“One of the best merlots of 2007. And I’m not wasting it, I’m sharing it.”
“God, you’re sweet sometimes.” Greg slanted a smile at him.
Alfie didn’t quite have the balls to tell Greg just how much he liked this. How much he missed it. So he shrugged instead. “I shouldn’t have flipped out.”
“Sometimes I . . . I worry you mean it.”
“You what?”
“That you—” Greg was paying a lot of attention to his wine, and Alfie didn’t think he was assessing the viscosity “—believe I’m some kind of flighty man-slut.”
There was a long silence.
“Oh God, you do.”
“No, I don’t. It’s just . . .” Alfie also stared into his glass. The wine was a deep, dark ruby; the light fell into it and drowned. “It’s just I feel things should be a certain way.”
“What do you mean?”
“But those are just constructions,” said Greg, predictably. They’d had this conversation before.
“Yeah, I know you think that.” Alfie leaned forward and topped up his glass. “But my best mate from school got married last Saturday, and I’m sitting here on a sofa I don’t like getting wankered with my ex-boyfriend.”
“Life isn’t a race to socially significant events.” Greg sounded somewhere between sympathetic and exasperated. But then, a lot of wine had been drunk on this sofa. Usually as a prelude to something other than pointless angst. “It’s not . . . Oh, what’s the name of the board game where you’re like in this car and you get little pegs to represent your plastic kids and your, forgive me a heterosexist shudder, plastic wife?”
“The Game of Life, you divvy.”
Now Greg actually shuddered. “God, yes, the most boring game in the universe.”
“What, you mean because you can’t drive off the board to get a blowjob from a trucker?”
“I’ve never had a blowjob from a trucker. Something for the bucket list. But, seriously, that game was the most depressing, normative, banal, reductive pile of crap ever produced.”
“It’s just a game.” Alfie took another drink. He felt a bit fuzzy round the edges. What was that thing of his dad’s? Beer and wine, that’s fine. Wine and beer, oh dear. He’d done it right; he should be fine. Except there wasn’t space in the saying for pink peppercorn cocktails. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s absolutely that bad. Get an arbitrary job, get an arbitrary wife, produce arbitrary children, accumulate arbitrary things.”
This was annoying. Alfie should have been used to it, but somehow he wasn’t. It was easy for Greg to dismiss all this stuff because he’d probably never cared about any of it in the first place. Alfie tried to concentrate on the wine. How much he liked it. The heavy, dark taste of it, black cherries and autumn leaves, sweet and smoky. Fen had been drinking rosé in the pub. Did that mean he liked wine too? And then he found himself imagining the meeting of stained lips.
Which panicked him with its killer combination of being both vivid and inappropriate, so he blurted out in his angry voice, “You do know that for a lot of people those choices aren’t actually arbitrary, right? Like, they’re actually things they want.”
“People want all kinds of pointless shit.” Greg had never been particularly responsive to Alfie’s angry voice. “And the game just feeds into this by treating all this stuff that you claim is a choice, like marriage to someone of the opposite gender and the gradual acquisition of money and children, as inevitable. And all that matters in the end is how much stuff you’ve got.”
“It’s a game for six- to ten-year-olds, not Das Kapital.”
“My point stands. Life is not—”
“Events and things, I get it. Except it is events and things.”
“But not,” Greg insisted, “arbitrary events and things.”
“Will you stop with the ‘everything is arbitrary’ shit? You sound like a teenager who’s just read Sartre.”
“Dear me, what a philosophical evening we’re having.”
Alfie slammed his suddenly empty glass onto the coffee table that had never had coffee on it. “Look, I get this is abstract to you, but it’s real to me. I know I say ‘bastad’ not ‘barrrstarrrd,’ and my parents didn’t pay thirty grand a term for me to go to school, but just because I don’t think like you doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
“Want some ketchup for that chip on your shoulder?” Greg always got pissed when you drew attention to the fact he was loaded. “Just because my family happens to be wealthy doesn’t make my perspective less valid than yours either, you know.”
“All I’m saying . . .” Alfie paused. What was he saying? “All I’m saying is that the people who don’t care about things are the people who already have ’em.”
“That would be like—” Greg mimed being stabbed through the heart “—totally touché, except we’re sitting in your two-million-quid penthouse drinking fifty-quid wine.”
“Oi! I earned these things. I didn’t take them and nobody gave them to me. I work really hard and I fucking deserve them.”
“Yes, but you don’t like them. What’s the point in having them at all if they’re nothing more than symbols?”
“Jesus Christ.” Alfie stifled a groan. “That’s my point, man.”
Greg also set his glass aside and slipped off a pair of tatty canvas shoes that had probably been artfully distressed by ethically employed gibbons and cost a fortune. He twisted sideways and crossed his legs under him. Alfie stopped making dramatic gestures and shuffled backwards, fighting both the sofa and the sudden intensity of Greg’s complete attention. The first time Greg had looked at him like that, with all that hunger and focus, he’d ended up giving Alfie a blowjob (the first he’d ever had from a man) about five seconds later.
“Okay, then.” He spread his hands as if Alfie were about to fill them with confidences like bags of sand. “So what’s it for? What’s the dream?”
“There’s not . . . there’s not a dream. I just want normal stuff. Somebody to come home to. Build a life with. Take care of. This would be for them. Except for the bit where they don’t exist and don’t need it.”
Greg’s eyes went wide. “Omigod, you want a wife!”
“What? No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. You want dinner on the table, how was your day dear, once-a-week sex in a boring position.”
“Actually, I don’t. You just went there on your own, Mr. No-Roles-No-Boundaries, when I said I wanted to share my life with someone.”
Greg, at least, had the grace to blush. “Okay, okay, but you do realise that you’re never going to have what your parents have.”
“Yeah, I got that memo when I realised I liked to suck cock. It’s just . . . It’s like . . . pattern recognition, you know? How else do you figure out how the world works, or what a relationship is, or anything, except by looking at what’s already there? You don’t have to do the same things, but you have to start somewhere.”
“Things aren’t their outward signs, Alfie.”
For a moment, they were still and silent, looking at each other. Greg’s eyes were soft and dark, honey-blurred at the edges like when he was being kissed. Perhaps he was slightly drunk as well.
Then Alfie let out a long, slightly exasperated breath. “That doesn’t actually mean anything. And the only message I’m getting here is you don’t have a fucking clue about any of this, and neither do I.”
“Welcome to the club, sunshine. It’s only you, me, and the rest of the world.”
There was a pause.
“I think,” said Alfie slowly, “I’ve just worked out what I want.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I want to never hear you call me ‘sunshine’ again.”
Greg drooped. “I thought you were serious.”
“I am.” Alfie got to his feet, pins and needles bursting across his arse and down the backs of his thighs, and wove to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that surrounded the hundred and fifty square meters he owned of London. His reflection swam up from beneath the distant light, and wobbled there like the shadow of a fish. He reached out and touched the glass, misty circles forming beneath his fingers. “I wish Fen didn’t hate me.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Alfie lifted a shoulder. “Dunno. Summin else I want.”
“You get all northern when you’re drunk.” Greg unwound himself and padded barefoot across the room, cringing a little from the cold floor. “It’s adorbs.”
“Oh shurrup,” returned Alfie without rancour.
“Why does it bother you so much?”
“Well . . . because I’m not adorbs. That’s for bunnies on the internet. I’m sexy and manly and stuff.”
Greg made a sound perilously close to a giggle. “Yes, darling, you’re very sexy and manly and stuff. What I ac
tually meant was why does it bother you so much that . . . whatshisname—”
“Fen.”
“—doesn’t like you?”
“That’s kind of a weird question coming from someone who once spent an evening crying because of a subtweet.”
“Subtweeting is super mean. But, look, you haven’t thought about this guy in fifteen years. And you clearly didn’t care about him when you were growing up because, in your own words, you bullied the shit out of him.”
Alfie flinched. “It’s not . . . like . . . it’s not something you actively decide, you know? You don’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘Hey I think I’ll ruin someone’s life today.’ So it’s really horrible to have to face up to the fact you kinda did.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“What about Fen?”
“So will he. But, at this point, it’s none of your business.” Alfie must have made some kind of face, because Greg went on, “Oh God, what?”
“I guess I sort of wish it was. Or could be?”
“Well, it can’t,” Greg said mercilessly, “and you should leave him alone.”
“But I’ve fucked everything up so badly. Shouldn’t I at least get the chance to make it better?”
“No . . . I mean, yes, you should make amends if you can. The thing is, you’re not automatically entitled to try. Especially since Fen has made it pretty clear that he doesn’t want anything to do with you.”
Greg had a point. Alfie clung on doggedly anyway. “That was only because I didn’t get it when he first told me.”
“And if you had, he would have jumped into your arms while rainbows flew out of your arse?”
“He probably wouldn’t have thrown plant water over me.”
Greg sighed. “You still can’t make it better, Alfie. You did what you did.”
“I know that.” He banged an impatient hand against the glass, shocking both of them with the dull thump it made. “But I can at least say sorry properly. Show him that I get it. That even though he didn’t matter then, he matters now.”
Greg was staring at him with big, bewildered eyes. “How can he matter? He’s a guy you had sex with once and didn’t even recognise.”