She stopped for a bowl of creamy carbonara and garlic bread at a little restaurant called Lucia’s, over the road from Covent Garden. It was the first thing she’d eaten since leaving Melbourne that actually had flavour.
‘Twelve pounds,’ she thought out loud as she handed over her credit card. ‘I wonder what that is in Australian money.’
‘Probably one hundred of your dingo dollars, love,’ said the cashier. Lizzie helped herself to a complimentary mint.
She walked for eight hours straight. Her idea was to fight off the jetlag by tiring herself out. When she arrived back at the hotel it was 1.30 a.m. and she called Jim. Then it was sleep again.
She woke to a strange buzzing noise which she realised, after a groggy few seconds, was the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘Lizzie. Keith Race here. How ya doin’? Just thought I’d remind you about the little get-together at our place today. Still got that card I gave you?’
‘Yeah, somewhere.’
‘’Bout two. Come over earlier if you want and meet the wife. Just give that card to the cabbie and he’ll sort you out.’
‘Okay. See you then.’
Lizzie looked at the clock. It was 11 a.m. She picked up her A–Z of London, stuck Keith’s card inside and decided she’d leave early and walk. If it all went arse-over-tits she could always hail a cab.
She showered and tarted herself up, pulling on a soft, emerald-green jersey dress. She’d packed it as an afterthought, but she loved this dress. It was crushable, with a low scoop neck and a flared skirt that stopped just below the knee. She’d picked it up in a maternity seconds place and had worn it through both of her pregnancies. She called it the Wonder Dress; every time she washed it, no matter how far she’d stretched it or how much her body had grown or shrunk, it snapped back into shape and hugged her hips and breasts. It was getting old now. There was pilling under the arms and a tiny hole near the hem. But no woman on the planet had squeezed so much wear out of maternity gear as Lizzie. She was still wearing her maternity bras, and Scarlet had been weaned for over a year.
She pulled on some black tights and black boots and grabbed her brown leather jacket, which smelt faintly of cigarettes and frangipani body butter. She felt foggy but great. Light. No strollers. No kids to wrestle into the car. No sticky fingers. On her way out she gave herself one last check in the mirror. Her hair looked flat and dull. She’d forgotten to pack her shampoo and the hotel stuff left something to be desired. She grabbed a tortoiseshell clip from her toiletries bag, twisted her hair onto the back of her head and plucked one red rose from a vase in the bathroom. She poked it into her hair and walked out the door.
‘Ah, Lizzie! Perfect timing. The twins have just woken up.’ Keith ushered her in. ‘I don’t suppose you can breastfeed.’
‘Sorry, Keith. But you can drink this if you’re that thirsty.’ Lizzie handed him a bottle of Jacob’s Creek cab sav that she’d picked up from an offie on the way.
Keith showed her through the house, slightly embarrassed and slightly thrilled by its understated sophistication. ‘And this is my wife, Becky. Becky, Lizzie Quealy.’
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Becky said as she swung a baby over her shoulder and burped it.
‘Really? Those charges were never proven.’
‘Can I get you a drink? Beer, champagne, wine?’
‘Wine, please. Red would be lovely.’
It was just after one o’clock and the wine hit her like a tonne of bricks. After two glasses and a piece of potato-and-leek frittata, the jetlag fairy got her. She wasn’t embarrassed; she just had to sleep. Her body gave her no other option.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she told Keith. ‘I’ve just hit the wall. Is there any chance I could lie down somewhere?’
Keith showed her to the spare room and she was swallowed by sleep before her head even hit the pillow.
She woke up with a start two hours later, busting to have a wee. Disorientated, she threw her legs over the side of the bed and ventured into the hallway. She opened the next door along. A bedroom. But at the far end of the corridor, a door was ajar. She tiptoed down the hall, poked her head in, and there was a man changing a baby’s nappy.
‘Sorry,’ said Lizzie hurriedly. ‘I’m looking for the toilet.’
The man looked up and for a second her brain froze. It was Tom.
‘Lizzie?’
‘Tom?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Trying to find a toilet.’
‘Next on your right.’
Lizzie disappeared, then stuck her head back through the doorway. ‘Wait for me. I’ll just be a sec.’
Tom was stunned. ‘Well, fuck me. Lizzie Quealy,’ he said to Marks or Sparks. The baby looked at him and gurgled. And then peed on his shirt.
CHAPTER 8
When Tom finished teaching in Japan, he decided to take the Trans-Siberian Express to Moscow. He had a bulletproof plan: get back to England with an amazing photo essay about the trip, get it published in National Geographic and be picked up as the youngest Magnum photographer in history. He wouldn’t have to spend even a single day pretending to be a lawyer.
It was a brilliant plan – until his Leica’s shutter stopped firing in Siberia after a couple of skinheads tried to nick it. The only reason he still had it at all was that Lizzie was with him when it happened. She had the inspired idea to lift her shirt and yell, ‘Oi, guys, check this out.’ While the thugs were staring dumbstruck at her breasts, Tom snatched the camera back just before the cops arrived. It was like a scene out of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. That’s what had most attracted him to Lizzie: she was part Tank Girl, part Lara Croft and part Annie Get Your Gun. She was the heroine of her own novel.
It wasn’t the law that bothered him. It was the soul-destroying hours, the culture and, more than anything, the thought of telling people he was a lawyer. ‘Oh, you’re a lawyer? What do you call one hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.’ He’d seen lots of happy law students but not one happy lawyer. As soon as they started working, they aged so quickly. And it seemed the further they climbed up the food chain – from associate to partner to senior partner – the more broken veins in their faces and the bigger the bags under their eyes. He’d only done law because he had the marks and the girls were supposed to be better looking than in the humanities.
And then he’d met Lizzie.
She was one of those earthy Australian girls, disarmingly and hilariously abrupt and with no idea how sexy she was. She had an amazing bullshit detector; just when everyone was thinking it, she’d say something like ‘Get your hand off it, you wanker.’ The more he saw of her, the more he liked her.
She was travelling alone and Tom was travelling with Mad Will, only he was more Crap Will than Mad Will now – lovesick for a Japanese girl called Momoko, he lay on his bunk all day, being maudlin.
‘C’mon, mate, you’re just cock-struck. Don’t be so boring,’ Tom would say.
‘But I love her, mate.’ And then Will would look out the window and sigh.
When they arrived in Mongolia, Will did something only an insane person would do. He flew back to Osaka with Mongolian Airlines, which was as close as you could get to a death wish. Tom didn’t understand it. The wordless Asian beauty thing had never done much for him. He preferred rude brunettes with big tits and big bottoms.
Anyway, he was really starting to fancy Lizzie. But as anyone who has ever travelled by train would know, it wasn’t easy.
The carriage was full of foreigners, which created immediate intimacy – just add vodka. You found yourself chatting with people you wouldn’t piss on under ordinary circumstances. It was like musical chairs: each morning you’d get up and cruise the cabins, seeing who was up and what was on offer. In one room there’d be a game of chess
and in the next would be four people reading books and in the next a best travel story competition.
‘They say you’re pretty safe if you don’t eat the meat and you just drink bottled water.’
‘Well, I ate vegetarian for the whole trip and in Bombay I got so sick I almost had to be airlifted home.’
‘Airlifted home? I spent four weeks in a coma in Caracas. They even got a priest in to give me the last rites.’
‘Well, we’re staying in a Mongolian yurt for two days.’
‘Two days? We’re staying for a week.’
‘Really? Well, in Cambodia I was kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge for a fortnight.’
‘Okay, you win. Who’s for a game of travel Scrabble?’
There were eight cabins in the carriage and four narrow bunks in each. After Will left, Tom and Lizzie found themselves sharing with a smelly Dutch guy and an American frat boy who spent the whole trip telling mind-numbingly boring drug stories. ‘And like it was, like, so, like, amazing, and we were all like totally ripped. It was awesome, dude.’
But the lack of privacy just exacerbated the frisson between Tom and Lizzie. Everything was more exciting. He remembered running up and down the train one night with her, playing chasey, and ending up in an upstairs compartment full of bench seats and entire Russian families surrounded by large blue, white and red storage bags. It hadn’t dawned on Lizzie that there was any class other than the one they were in. Of course, Tom assumed there were classes. He was English.
There was a man sitting in one corner with a salami and a bottle of vodka. He cut them both a piece of sausage and Lizzie ran back to the cabin for her can of Kraft cheese, determined to give him something in return.
Tom thought Lizzie had the sexiest voice he’d ever heard. He’d never given the Australian accent much thought before, but her laconic lilt with its drawn-out vowels really did it for him. ‘So, whaddya reckon, mate? Is it vodka o’clock or what?’ Sometimes she’d take the piss out of herself and pretend she was Kylie Minogue’s character from Neighbours. ‘Rack off, Shane, you’ve pranged me car, chucked a spaz and I’ve had a gutful. Why don’t you bugger off an’ try an’ crack on to Cheryl?’ When Tom attempted an Australian accent, Lizzie would laugh hysterically and tell him he sounded like a New Zealander. Or, if it was really bad, a South African.
One day the train went through five different time zones. It felt as if they were in a dream. They would stop at a station for fifteen minutes and the locals would bring out fresh food for them to buy. Everyone in the carriage would buy as much as possible: cheese pirozhki, warm potato salad with gherkins and sour cream, freshly baked bread and late-season Roma tomatoes just picked. That night they enjoyed a communal feast.
It was unseasonably warm for autumn and Lizzie and Tom stood in the open doorway, somewhere between Jining and Ulaanbaatar. They passed the vodka bottle back and forth between them as they stared out into the inky darkness. Every now and then they would pass a little house and through a window they would see a kitchen lit up and someone inside: a man in a singlet reading the paper, a woman doing the ironing, a mother holding a baby up to the window to see the train. They didn’t know what time it was or where they were. And they couldn’t care less.
They had invented a drinking game when they discovered that they were both massive fans of Billy Bragg. One would start a song and they would take it in turns to sing the next lyric. If you choked, you had to skol.
‘My friend said she could see no way ahead—’
‘And I was probably better off without you.’
‘She said to face up to the fact—’
‘That you weren’t coming back—’
‘And she could make me happy like you used to.’
‘But I’m sorry to say … Ahhhh, fuck it.’
Lizzie handed him the bottle and Tom drank.
‘Okay. It’s bad timing and me—’
‘We find a lot of things out this way.’
‘And there’s you. A little black cloud in a dress.’
‘The temptation to take the precious things we have apart—’
‘To see how they work—’
‘Must be resisted for they never fit together again.’
‘Ah, oh, hang on. I’ve got it, something about virtue never tested is no virtue at all?’
‘Nup. If this is rain, let it fall on me and drown me.’
‘That’s right … If these are tears, let them fall.’
‘Too little too late, mate.’ And Tom passed the bottle to Lizzie. She skolled and looked at him. Was it actually possible that she was getting better looking?
‘Where were we?’
‘Here, I think.’
And Tom finally leant over, put his hand on her neck and kissed her on the lips. He kissed her and she kissed him back for a long, long time as they hurtled through Russia in the middle of the night. Lizzie dropped the bottle to the floor. They were both vibrating, shaking with the relief of it all, but each thought the other was shivering in the cold. It was as if there was something wet and warm running through their veins and now it was flowing between them and for a second Tom thought to himself, I could do this forever. When they paused for breath, Lizzie looked at him and glowed.
‘One of them’s off her food—’
‘And the other one’s off his head—’
‘And both of them are off down the boozer—’
‘To … think … of … Oh, shit, where’s the bottle?’
The next morning, when they woke on Lizzie’s bunk, the Dutch guy and the frat boy were elsewhere. They climbed down and Tom stood behind Lizzie and put his arms around her. He smelt her neck and she leant back into him as they watched the Gobi Desert go by.
‘Where are we?’
‘In the middle of nowhere. Actually, it looks like the Nullarbor.’ Lizzie looked up at Tom and he kissed her forehead. ‘The middle of nowhere always looks the same, no matter where you are.’
At that very moment, a dozen Mongolian horsemen dressed in traditional clothes rode past in the opposite direction.
Tom couldn’t remember ever being this happy before.
CHAPTER 9
By the time Lizzie came back, Marks or Sparks was dressed and Lizzie had straightened herself up, splashed water on her face and nicked back into the spare room to reapply her lipstick.
‘Fuck, I thought you were in Boston.’
‘I only stayed there six months. It didn’t work out. I thought you were in Australia.’
‘I am. I’m here for a BBC thing, with Keith.’
They looked at each other.
‘And who’s this?’ Lizzie said, talking the baby’s hand.
‘Not sure. Marcus or Spensley.’
‘Oh, one of the twins. I thought he was yours. Seen one, seen ’em all. Jetlag.’
‘Oh, no. He could be my godson, though. I’m godfather of one of them and I’m afraid I can’t tell them apart.’
‘So, no kids?’
‘Oh, yes. One. Celia. She’s six.’
‘So you’re married?’
‘Yeah. You?’
‘Me? Two kids, a girl and a boy.’
‘Are they with you?’
‘No, they’re at home with Jim, their father.’
‘So you’re not …’
‘Oh, sorry, yes, we are. I mean, we’re together, but we’re not married. We’re what old-fashioned people call de factos. How do you know Keith, anyway?’
‘He’s my brother-in-law. Married my wife’s sister.’
‘So your wife is here?’
‘She was. She left about twenty minutes ago. She had to take Celia to a birthday party.’
There was silence. And they both sparkled.
‘God, it’s great to see you, Lizz
ie. Let’s go downstairs and get a drink.’
Tom and Lizzie grabbed a Heineken each and holed themselves up in a corner.
‘Being John Malkovich was great but I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Fucking brilliant.’
‘You reckon? I thought it was a great script fucked up in the edit.’
‘Seriously, Lizzie?’
‘Nah, I heard a mate of mine who works in film say it and I thought it sounded like I knew what I was talking about. I haven’t seen it. But you know that movie Troy? There was a review in one of the Australian papers that said, “Wooden horse, wooden actors, wouldn’t see it.” Isn’t that brilliant?’
‘I seem to remember you were a bit of an Ian McEwan fan. I still don’t think he should have won the Booker for Amsterdam.’
‘I agree, but have you read Enduring Love yet?’
‘I couldn’t put it down. I cancelled a client so I could finish it. I’m never going on a hot-air balloon as long as I live.’
‘So I’m singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” – you know, doing the pig, the cow, the sheep. Oh, you probably don’t know. You’re probably far too posh to look after your own children …’
‘Matter of fact, I am too posh. But I do happen to know that song.’
‘Anyhow, I turn to this quiet kid and say, “So what’s your favourite animal, mate?” And he looks at me and says, “My mum.”’
‘Seriously, I think either the Americans should have to pass an IQ test to vote or the rest of the world should get to vote with them. The outcome affects us far more than them and they know bugger all about what’s going on in the rest of the world.’
‘Well, if you Australians are so clever, how did you end up with John Howard?’
‘Okay, Tom, you got me there. Another drink?’
‘So you’re a celebrity, Lizzie?’
‘Not really, just a professional loudmouth. You’re the one who’s a success. You’ve got a job.’
The Happiness Show Page 6