by Sarah Rayne
As Xavier is reading the message a second time, Murray re-enters, propping the door open with his foot and twisting inelegantly through the space with a coffee in each hand.
‘Caught you checking your mail! I knew you cer . . . couldn’t be as cool as you made out!’
‘Fair cop,’ says Xavier, and is about to mention the email, but something in Murray’s ever-rumpled appearance deters him: it’s all too easy to imagine him at home, opening his inbox with an unshakeable optimism which, deep down, he knows is ill-founded.
‘No luck, anyway,’ Xavier says, quickly shutting down his email. ‘No replies.’
‘You and me both, then,’ says Murray. ‘Wer, what is it about us?’
‘It could be the fact we’re awake when everyone else is asleep?’
Xavier sees a solitary car winding its way out of the car park, probably driven by a caretaker relieved after a six-hour circuit of the draughty corridors.
‘But I only told a couple of people that I’m on the radio. I didn’t want them to be freaked out by me being wer . . . well known.’
‘Or maybe we’re just a couple of ugly fuckers,’ Xavier adds, and feels guilty at the gratitude, the complicity, in Murray’s laugh.
Late the following afternoon, Xavier is leaving the house to visit the corner shop when he meets Tamara from the flat above coming the other way. He only really knows her name from her mail, which sits in the communal entrance hall. Xavier always picks up and leaves Mel’s letters outside her door, Tamara’s outside hers. Tamara only moved in a few months ago and most of their conversations have been like the one that occurs now:
‘Hi there!’
‘Hi . . .’
‘Just off out to the shop?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I could have picked up something for you,’ says Tamara briskly as if there has been a regrettable logistical lapse.
‘Oh, it’s fine. The walk will do me good,’ says Xavier.
‘Up to anything nice tonight?’
‘Working,’ he says.
Although they’ve had many versions of this chat, she’s never asked what he does for a job, which suits Xavier nicely. He’s not sure why exactly he doesn’t like people knowing that he is Xavier Ireland, from the radio. Someone like Tamara, a council officer in her late twenties, in bed by ten, with a boyfriend, is unlikely to have heard of him. Anyway, so what if she had? There’s something about the anonymity of the show that he values, though: something important about maintaining a division between the people who tune in and solicit his advice, and the people who can hear his choice of TV show, and his bath water escaping through the pipes.
‘What about you?’
‘Going to stay in and have a quiet one,’ says Tamara. ‘Telly and a bath. Too cold to do anything else!’
‘It is cold,’ Xavier agrees.
Around now is where the conversation normally falters.
‘Well, have a nice night!’
‘And you!’
And up the hill he continues, while Tamara’s heels carry her down to 11 Bayham Road.
That evening, watching a news-discussion show on TV, Xavier feels an obscure but palpable loneliness chewing gently at him. He catches himself daydreaming about Matilda cooking, naked but for a pair of boots, on one of many hot, drowsy afternoons in their apartment in Melbourne. As comfortable nude as clothed, she would drive him mad by wandering around the place with no cover except the gauze of freckles over her shoulders, as she took work calls on the phone. He loved being the only one to know. ‘Matilda speaking,’ she would say in her best business voice, as if the client were the only thing that mattered to her, all the time looking him so squarely in the eye that he felt naked. ‘What can I help you with?’
It’s a struggle to reverse the trend of these daydreams once they’re under way, and later in the evening, somewhat to his own surprise, Xavier finds himself calling the Australian girl who emailed him. The phone rings almost into voicemail before she answers, clearly from a crowded bar.
‘Gemma speaking.’
She sounds pleased to hear from him. They make an arrangement. Xavier is reviewing a Romanian film, playing tomorrow night in a tiny arts theatre on Wardour Street, for a high-end cinema magazine. It’s not exactly the sort of film you choose for a date, but it is meant to be a comedy, and Gemma sounds enthusiastic.
‘So I’ll meet you at eight outside the cinema?’
‘Awesome!’
Xavier is still not sure, even as the conversation ends, why he’s done this. Normally he goes alone to press screenings, or takes Murray who arrives late and crunches his popcorn too loudly. Anyway, it’s done. He’s not been on any sort of date for four months. You have to make an effort sometimes, he tells himself. Even if you don’t think you’re looking for romance, you should be open to the possibility. That’s the advice he would give on the show. But he doesn’t necessarily take his own advice anywhere near as seriously as everyone else does.
*
On the Friday night – one of his nights off from the show – Xavier sets out for his date with Gemma. He wears a suit jacket with jeans and a black shirt; maybe it’s a bit formal, but he thinks the combination works well. He glances at the mirror in the bathroom. He is, undeniably, fairly handsome – tall, blue-eyed – a fact he registers without its having any real impact on his morale: good looks, like money, fame, sexual prowess and so on, are a lot more interesting to those who don’t have them than to those who do. He sports four days’ stubble. Xavier has a seemingly permanent air of health, a residual boon of his outdoorsy, suburban life in Australia. He has very long, delicate fingers, like a pianist, which indeed he was for a while at school, attending lessons with Russell. He gave up quietly after becoming aware that Russell was being made miserable by the comparison between them. ‘I’m hardly coordinated enough to sit down on the fucking stool,’ Russell complained, ‘let alone play a scale.’
Mel smiles at him through the window as he leaves, and moves the tubby arm of a momentarily cooperative Jamie in a wave. Xavier walks fifteen minutes to the tube and gets the Northern Line down to Leicester Square.
At about the same time, Jacqueline Carstairs, the journalist, is setting out from her house in Hampstead to review a restaurant. She waits at the corner for a bus. She had a dinner companion lined up – her husband is away on a golf weekend, her son Frankie being babysat, though at thirteen he hates that phrase – but the friend pulled out, by text, an hour ago. She stands at the bus stop, on an evening which keeps threatening rain without delivering, wishing she had dressed for either a warm or a cold night: she’s tried to hedge her bets with a dress and pullover which are unnatural partners, and the whole outfit feels overdone and hot and awkward. Her phone’s battery is low, she forgot to charge it before leaving, and this again annoys her. But the real source of her bad mood, which she can feel hovering somewhere close behind her like an overzealous translator rendering every thought into a regret, is what happened to Frankie last week.
She was at home, researching an article, when the call came through from the Deputy Head.
‘Are you the mother of Frankie Carstairs?’
For a moment the question sent needles of fear into every exposed point of her skin.
‘Yes, I am. What is it? What’s happened?’
‘Well, er . . . he’s been the victim of some, er . . . some bullying, that’s all. A group of boys, I’m afraid, roughed him up in the snow. Actually outside the school grounds, but nonetheless, we are dealing with—’
‘What do you mean, “roughed him up”?’
‘A bit of pushing and shoving, and – well, we’ve sent him to A and E.’
‘A and E!’ Jacqueline felt the needles jabbing at her again. ‘Is he all right?’ She resented having to ask a virtual stranger for reassurance like this.
‘He’s quite all right. As I say, the matter’s being dealt with at our end.’
‘I hope it is being dealt with,’ was all she could say, petula
ntly, ‘or . . .’
‘I can assure you,’ the Deputy Head said confidently, having anticipated this and practised his speech, ‘we are taking this matter very seriously.’
When she got to the hospital, Frankie was having the first of six stitches.
‘It’s nothing, it doesn’t matter,’ he muttered. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he kept repeating in the back of the Volvo, sitting forlornly next to the giant A-Z of Britain, staring out of the window.
‘You know if you are being bullied, you must always tell someone . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter, Mum.’
But it did matter. He locked himself in the bathroom for an hour that night, didn’t come down to dinner, and pretended to be sick to get out of school later that week. Jacqueline felt more and more ashamed of herself as the days went by. Hadn’t she hoped, on that snowy day, that his school would stay open, so she would have a few extra hours of solitude – even though at thirteen Frankie was perfectly capable of keeping himself occupied? And hasn’t she in general allowed her husband to do more than the lion’s share of parenting duties recently, citing pressures of work? What kind of mother is so hell-bent on writing 2,500 words on Chilean wine that her son comes home with his cheek split open? What kind of mother has a Writers’ Guild award on her mantelpiece with a press cutting praising her lucidity of thought and prose, but can’t work out what to say to her downhearted son as he sits at the kitchen table toying with a forkful of peas? And is now flouncing off to review a restaurant in Soho – called Chico’s, for God’s sake, she hates it already – while her son barricades himself in his room? What kind of mother doesn’t know what is going through her son’s head?
The restaurant’s stinging review has in some senses already been written, however hard the chef may be toiling right now over a spatchcock with market vegetables served in a rich jus. It was written when Xavier failed to save Frankie from getting beaten up in the snow.
Gemma’s teeth are very white, like bathroom fittings in a showroom. She is pretty, thinks Xavier, the way the presenter of a TV holiday show is pretty: healthy-looking, symmetrically smiling, clinical. She is doing casual work in London for the year. She says ‘anyway’ a lot.
‘So, anyway, this is pretty cool, reviewing films?’
‘Yeah, I just do a couple a week,’ says Xavier, ‘alongside the, er, other stuff.’
‘What else was it you said you did?’
‘I work for a radio station.’
‘Cool! How long have you done that?’
‘I kind of fell into it when I came over here.’
‘What did you do in Australia?’
Xavier looks at his shoes.
‘I kind of – well, various things. What about you? When you go back to Australia, I mean? What do you want to do?’
‘Oh, you know, I’ll probably look for something in, like, a bar and see what comes up. I mean, my dream is to be a fashion designer, but, you know, I don’t think that’s going to happen!’
She laughs, as if the likely futility of her dream is little cause for worry. Xavier feels an internal lurch of unease. They’re not well matched. For a second he wants to make some excuse and disappear.
‘Anyway, this is a cool place,’ says Gemma, looking around the cinema’s small bar, its framed posters for foreign-language films with an impressed wariness like someone looking at overpriced rugs in a foreign market. Xavier’s mind flickers unavoidably back to the Zodiac Cinema in Melbourne, with its colonial pomp, its plush red velvet curtains across the screen, two grand, semicircular balconies watching over the stalls, and its fanatical projectionist, who would sometimes come out and give an unscheduled talk about the film before it began.
Tonight, Xavier and Gemma are among a very small number of people in the cinema. When the lights go down, Gemma puts her hand on Xavier’s. He feels an automatic fluttering, like a flag picking up a breeze, and is almost resentful at how easily it happens.
‘No trailers!’ she whispers in surprise, as the British Board of Film Classification certificate makes its stately appearance on the screen, the traditional introduction which in a couple of decades will seem as nostalgic, as antiquated, as the captions of a silent movie do today.
The film is called The Non-Existent Man, and concerns a man who suddenly finds his friends and family behaving as though he were dead. It’s a political metaphor, Xavier half-gathers, something to do with the question of how a human defines himself in a society that discourages individuality.
Around halfway through, and as he’s starting to warm to the premise, Gemma begins to pass comment in a series of indiscreet mutters.
‘This is a bit depressing! I thought it was a comedy!’ And then, not long after, ‘What was the point of that scene?’
Again, Xavier feels in his stomach the awkward weight of a social mismatch. It’s not her fault that he loathes any sort of chat during a film. She is not to know that, once, at the Zodiac, after a campaign of shushing had come to nothing, he stood up and berated a couple who had been keeping up an ironic commentary to impress one another.
‘Why don’t you just go for a beer!’ he shouted. ‘This is a fucking cinema!’
There was a ripple of applause and laughter from other punters.
The couple did, sure enough, leave before the end of the film, and the other three formed a cordon around Xavier afterwards, in case the miscreants were waiting somewhere with reinforcements. But the only person they met was the projectionist, who shook Xavier’s hand and offered him free tickets for the rest of the year.
That was eight years ago, and nowadays Xavier doesn’t challenge anyone, especially the girl he’s brought with him on a date, however misguided a date it has come to seem. Gemma gets up to go as soon as the final frame gives way to the credits, slipping back into her bag the phone which she played with for the final twenty minutes.
‘So what are you going to say in the review?’ she asks as they come out into the stinging air and begin the plod down Wardour Street, where drunk people are queuing at cash machines, staggering out of kebab shops with hamper-sized slabs of meat sweating into white paper packages, and throwing themselves onto the bonnets of taxis, like drowning men at lifeboats.
‘Well,’ Xavier says, ‘I thought it was a clever idea, but maybe a bit heavy-handed.’
‘A bit what?’
‘A bit, er . . .’
‘It was depressing,’ Gemma says.
Where Wardour Street comes out onto Oxford Street, two men are propping up a girl vomiting on her shoes.
‘Are we going back to yours?’ asks Gemma.
Not far away, Jacqueline Carstairs is coming to the end of an unsatisfactory evening at Chico’s. Of course, it could hardly have been a satisfactory one, since the snowball attack on her son has been a more significant component than the food or service or décor or any other aspect of the experience. The restaurant didn’t do much to help itself, though. On arrival she had to wait for ten minutes in the narrow neck of the room, constantly jostled by waiters on their way past with jugs of sangria, because the manager couldn’t find her booking. When eventually seated, Jacqueline dined next to a rowdy table of executives celebrating a birthday, and felt self-conscious on her own; she cursed her friend Roz for pulling out. And then the wait for her peppers stuffed with goat’s cheese, followed by the spatchcock, was long and infuriating and not really justified by the food itself, which was tasty enough, but well executed rather than exciting.
Still, as she sips a black coffee and begins to draft the review in her head – The furore over Chico’s only emphasizes the dearth of world-class Spanish cuisine in the capital – she is aware that it will not really be a review of the fare at the restaurant, but of her own mental soup. She looks around the room as it descends into an aviary, feeling a sudden disgust for the fleshy executives digesting their paella, the clatter of cutlery, the underdressed women yelping over dessert cocktails, the anonymous swipe of the card removing invisible cash, the food and
drink swilling around overfed bodies, the waiters directing flatulent men towards the toilets with a weary angling of the head. She thinks of Frankie’s cut face again and then, with an almost violent distaste, of the idiotically hyperbolic phrases that have filled some of her past reviews.
A restaurant like this, inevitably, lives and dies by its seafood mains.
This eatery is part of the lifeblood of Notting Hill.
The faux-classical pretensions deal a fatal blow to this unprepossessing joint.
Who the hell cares about food? Why does anyone allow her to write this nonsense, as if it is a matter of pressing importance whether a piece of sea bream has been cooked for exactly the right length of time, as if the quality of the paintings hanging on the wall of some Shoreditch café is a moral question rather than a matter of frivolous taste? Jacqueline gestures in vain to try to get the bill. A middle manager dressed like a call girl totters by, almost catching Jacqueline with her flailing arm, hooting with laughter as she mimes something comprehensible only to the people on her table and barges through the door of the Ladies.
By the time the bill comes on its smug silver plate, Jacqueline has mentally composed the first scathing paragraph of the review which will appear in next week’s Evening Standard, a review which will be unfair on Chico’s, a restaurant that happened to get in the way at the wrong time. But there it will be all the same, in black-and-white.
As he sees the flat through the eyes of his visitor, Xavier registers all sorts of mini-squalors. When he first moved in he was quite rigorous about housework, as part of the general new leaf of energy and positivity he intended to turn over by coming to England, but that resolution has flagged. Some mugs haven’t seen the sink for many months. There are cobwebs in the kitchen corners; the bin needs emptying, too, and gives off a faint whiff of something rancid. Then there are the cupboards with their resident semi-retired comestibles. Xavier knows there is a scrunched-up towel on the bathroom floor, and the toilet is passably clean at best. Even the lounge, where they sit down with a bottle of wine, is dusty and littered with opened but not dealt with mail. The sofa has needed replacing for years.