by Louise Kean
‘Oh. That … I thought we were just playing word association.’
Cagney walks over and reaches into the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, yanking out a fresh shirt still in its wrapping. He tugs out pins and chucks them on the floor.
‘Why can’t you be nice to her?’
‘Who?’ Cagney throws the last of the pins to the floor and shakes out the shirt violently.
‘You’re nearly forty, Cagney – stop acting like a child.’
Cagney peels off his jumper that is starting to stiffen.
‘Dry clean only – it’s my own fault,’ he says to Christian with a smile and a shrug, throwing it straight in the bin. He is standing in his shorts, socks and shoes.
‘Cagney!’
‘You mean Sunshine downstairs? She isn’t my type.’ He pulls on the dark grey shirt, and walks back around the desk, buttoning himself up. ‘I go for blondes, Christian, you know that.’ He raises his whiskey glass and toasts his friend, although this time he only downs half the double measure he has poured himself.
‘Well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, Cagney, but not today you didn’t! I think she’s hit you somewhere completely new, and it smarts! That’s why you’re so angry, because what kind of fool falls in love at forty?’
‘Are you staying?’ Cagney asks Christian.
‘For a while.’
Cagney retrieves a second beaker from his bottom drawer. ‘For when I have company – you see, I can still entertain!’ and pours out a double measure, passing it to Christian, who accepts it graciously, and knocks it back in one go.
‘And again. I can keep up with the likes of you.’ Christian pulls over a box from the side of the room and sits comfortably on it with his legs either side.
Cagney smirks and refills the glass and passes it back over the desk, before sitting down and leaning back, smiling.
‘Oh, you’ve got your composure back now, I see that, but don’t bother acting for me, Cagney. I know you too well, and it’s so utterly male heterosexual bored-inary. She is causing a carnival in your belly and you don’t know what to do about it. Will you admit it?’
‘That’s not how I fall in love. You’ve never seen me fall in love. It is very different. That was The Taming of the Shrew.’
‘I didn’t see anybody being tamed, Cagney. I think you’re seeing stars. She’s not blonde, is that all it is?’
‘If you like her so much, you marry her! But she’s too exhausting for me. I like my women beautiful and calm, like Windermere on a bright day.’
‘Although … stop me if I am wrong, Cagney, but you haven’t actually loved any of the women you think that you have loved? I mean, correct me if I am wrong, but every woman that has previously fired up your loins has screwed you in a very different way in the end?’
‘What’s your point?’ Cagney’s smile fades as Christian speaks. They aren’t playing any more.
‘I’ve heard love lasts, Cagney. And your great loves, well … they definitely didn’t do that. So do you think that maybe there might be the slimmest of possibilities, the tiniest of chances, that you didn’t actually love Barbies one, two, and three? Maybe, Cagney, maybe this is the way you fall in love. You’ve just never fallen in love before …’ Christian sits back and smiles, patting out the theme from Fame with one hand on his chest, watching Cagney in the dark.
‘I am a forty-year-old three-time divorcé – I think I know what love is.’
‘On the contrary, Cagney, I think you know what love isn’t! I think you know what lust is but that’s a little different. Love is in the heart and the head. It’s not holding your breath. It’s letting it out with a big contented sigh!’ Christian waves his hand in front of him like a magician’s assistant revealing something extraordinary.
‘Christ, you sound like a trashy chat show host.’
‘And you think that’s a bad thing? No, I’ve just decided that this is our once-a-decade necessary chat. Do you remember the last one?’
‘I do.’ Cagney nods his head seriously.
‘And do you remember who needed the most help then?’
‘I do.’
‘I was the only person around actually hurting more than you! I mean, Christ! I was so unhappy. And you helped me, Cagney. Do you remember what you said?’
Cagney sits quietly watching the liquid that swirls in the beaker he cradles in his hands. He doesn’t reply, or raise his eyes, but it is apparent that he heard. He spins around and looks out of his window. There is no moon, just some heavy cloud cover. He sees Sunny turn the corner at the end of the road, going home on her own. She looks young, and small, in the dark. An easy target for some unscrupulous type. Cagney knocks back the last of his drink.
‘I said don’t be scared to be who you are. People will respect you for it.’ Cagney stares out of the window sadly.
‘I knew eventually I’d get to repay the favour. Stop hiding behind your anger, Cagney, or your attitude. And take off your fucking rose-tinted glasses. The world is no worse now than it was fifty years ago, it’s just different. We all live with it – what makes you so special? If you don’t want to open up then don’t open up, but for Christ’s sake stop moaning that people ask you to! Just say no! And you don’t need to cry every time somebody asks how you are. You moan about being told to share when you don’t want to, and yet ironically you won’t shut up about it.’
‘I’m happier on my own.’
‘Do you mean now? Or this pipe dream you have of the floating Caribbean paradise? Because there is no guarantee that it will make you happy. We can all dye our hair, lift our faces, sharpen our noses, run and run and run away. But what’s the point, when it’s all in your head? You need to lean on somebody, let somebody make you feel worthwhile again. You can’t really laugh on your own! You can’t captivate yourself, unless you are some kind of megalomaniac! And now you’re fighting an instinct, a completely new instinct, when, if you had an ounce of courage, you’d grab it with both of those old hands!’
‘Maybe …’ Cagney puts the beaker down on his desk, and reaches into his drawer. ‘Nuts?’ He offers Christian the bag.
‘Who is?’ Christian asks, with an indignant smile.
‘Sunny, for a start. And by the way, when did you two swap blood and boy stories? You seem very friendly …’
‘Jealous, James?’ Christian offers his glass forward to be refilled. Sipping at it, he shudders as the whiskey hits his stomach and burns.
‘You sent me home with her, rather than walking her your damn self, remember? On Friday night?’
‘I remember.’ Cagney sighs and contemplates the mouthful of whiskey in his own beaker, before knocking it back and refilling. ‘I do like her,’ he says finally. ‘She’s got guts.’
‘Yes, she has,’ Christian agrees.
‘But less than she used to!’ Christian sips his drink and repositions himself, crossing his legs comfortably.
‘The funny thing is, I don’t even think I’d care, fat or thin. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but then, now, big, small … it’s not who she is, is it? It’s the fire that I like, behind her eyes. That’s her.’
Christian reaches up and pretends to wipe a tear from his left eye.
‘Stop that right now, you big poof! I’m just saying she’s nice.’
‘You’re saying more than that. You need to find a way to be nice to her, Cagney.’
‘No, I don’t. None of it matters anyway.’ Cagney lowers his head, placing his beaker down on the desk, and his palms flat on the table, studying them carefully.
‘Why the hell not? She likes you back, Cagney. I’d bet my balls on it!’ Christian uncrosses his legs and sits forward urgently.
‘It’s not that. She’s got a boyfriend. That fool at the dinner party, with his phone stuck to his ear.’
‘The surprisingly charming Adrian? Yes, you are right, she is officially with him. But she likes you best, Cagney, I can tell! You just need to help her see the light.’
‘Not while she’s with another man.’ Cagney screws the cap back on to his whiskey, returning a tenth of the bottle to his bottom drawer.
‘Why not, Cagney? I mean, it’s not ideal, but if you see something you want, you should damn well go and get it, because nobody is going to get it for you! And besides, she’ll only leave him if she wants to. You’re not going to put a gun to her head, I hope – you can be pretty intense sometimes. Kidding! Seriously, all you would be doing is presenting her with all the options.’
‘I won’t make her a cheat. She’s the kind of girl who’d hate herself, and then she’d resent me for it.’
‘But she doesn’t even want him, she’s just confused! She won’t hate herself, she’ll love you! Adrian is her past – she just needs you to take her hand and lead her forwards.’
‘She doesn’t need my hand. She’s a big girl, just metaphorically speaking now; she should be able to walk forwards on her own by now, shouldn’t she?’ Cagney smiles innocently at Christian, who sighs.
‘If only life were that easy. Go and get her, Cagney, please. I don’t want to beg you.’
Cagney smiles sadly at Christian. ‘It’s not going to happen. Not while she’s with him. Don’t buy a new hat just yet. It’s like this drink, Christian – it’s not cloudy, it’s clear. It’s black and white, right and wrong. I won’t make her the guilty party. And I won’t take a woman from another man, no matter how little he deserves her. Right and wrong.’ Cagney puts his head in his hands, exhausted.
‘Then let’s both have one last whiskey and toast the beautiful and pure notion of sitting about and waiting for our lives to happen to us, rather than taking it upon ourselves to live a little.’
‘I’ve lived a lot. It’s time for a rest.’
NINE
A Nipple-Flicking Road Trip!
Lisa and I sip at our lime and sodas in Prizzi, a minimalist Italian café decorated with chilli-shaped fairy lights, which are, oddly, bright blue. I have never seen a blue chilli, and I wonder if they do actually exist, but are just unspeakably rare, and the fieriest of the lot. I imagine that they are nurtured exclusively on a farm in the heart of Peru, by one seventy-year-old farmer an inch over five foot, wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson, a machete in his belt, and skin the consistency of a Pirelli tyre. Prizzi is opposite a rugby club, down the road from a rugby club, and around the corner from another rugby club, in Richmond. The entrances are wide, to let vast sets of shoulders in. It is also twenty yards from my and Lisa’s gym. As we sit and sip, I am sure the same thoughts are racing through our heads, even if we choose not to voice them – we should be on a running machine now, working up a sweat, raising our heart rates, burning off our breakfasts instead of sitting down to lunch. We chew on the plastic straws in our drinks instead of the cheese straws in a basket in the middle of our table, as penance. We have just finished a long conversation on the benefits of cross training over Pilates. I managed even to bore myself as I talked about fat-burning zones and comparable calorie burn and core muscle development and tone. Occasionally I’d glance around to make sure nobody else was listening, humiliated at being this dull in public, scared that the manager might eject me from the premises because, like lighting up and puffing on a fat Cuban cigar, I am ruining everybody else’s lunch with my antisocial behaviour.
In the middle of our conversation I remember that Lisa can’t have a discussion, only an argument, taking every opinion or point or fact personally. She uses phrases like, ‘We’re going to have to agree to disagree’, while shaking her head, and, ‘That’s just what I think’, in the face of statements she is unable to refute. I find it irritating. If you can’t say what you mean then you can’t mean what you say.
We are waiting for Anna to arrive for lunch. She has left the baby with her mother on this occasion, as last time she felt that he was giving her disapproving looks whenever she sipped her wine.
‘So, what do you think of those new cheese-and-pineapple-flavoured rice cakes?’ Lisa asks me, as Anna bursts through the door, and I mutter under my breath, ‘Thank God.’
Anna still looks out of shape. She is a large size fourteen, and not an average size ten, which was her pre-baby fighting weight, but she is noticeably smaller than the last time we saw each other. Her face isn’t quite so heavy, her belly not nearly so round and protruding.
I stand up to kiss her hello, and say, ‘Hi, Anna, you look great!’
‘Thanks, hon,’ she says with a wide smile that implies she is pleased with herself today, before kissing Lisa on both cheeks when she too stands to say hello.
‘I have been working my arse off on this new diet, literally. I’ve barely eaten anything for days. I’m doing so well!’ she smiles, and runs her fingers through the underside of her silky dark hair.
‘OK, but, Anna, you know it’s not healthy just to cut out food altogether, because your metabolic rate will slow right down, your body will think you are starving and conserve whatever food that you do eat, especially fat,’ I say concerned, but also like the ultimate Stepford Wife, I’ve heard it so many times in so many different scenarios, I could recite the words in my sleep.
‘Yeah, right, like you eat,’ Anna says with a smile, but her words are dipped in an unfriendly sauce.
‘I do eat, I just eat healthily now,’ I say, reproaching her, my feelings bruised.
‘Sure, Sunny, and how is that straw? Filling?’ she asks with a smirk, looking down at the menu she grabbed on her way in, unable to suppress a small smile to herself as her eyes glaze over but she pretends to read.
‘I’ll have a green salad and a bowl of olives,’ she says to the waiter, who’s just come over, and slams it shut.
‘I’ll have the chicken Caesar salad with no croutons,’ Lisa says.
‘And I’ll have the salad Niçoise without the dough balls or dressing,’ I say, and hand back my menu with a smile.
‘So!’ Lisa leans forward, staring at me with wide eyes in a conspiratorial girlie way, that makes me realise she is wearing mascara for the first time in years. I get a nasty feeling that I have just crash-landed into a bitchy sleepover from the eighties, or that an agenda has been set for this meeting that I haven’t been copied in on.
‘So how is this new man of yours?’ she asks a bit too casually.
‘Adrian.’ I say his name flatly, unimpressed.
‘Adrian,’ Anna repeats his name grandly, and looks up from the table. ‘Come on then, let’s get it over with. Tell us the gossip – you’ll burst otherwise!’
‘He’s engaged,’ I say.
A pregnant pause …
‘Has he asked you to marry him already?’ Lisa asks, knowing it took her four years to get Gregory to propose to her. And she had been dropping hints for three.
‘No. He’s engaged to somebody else,’ I say, shrugging my shoulders, in a ‘whataya gonna do and ain’t life a bitch’ kind of way.
Anna’s mouth falls open, but Lisa reacts in a split second.
‘Oh, Sunny, I am so sorry. I know you really liked him!’ She reaches over to squeeze my hand.
‘I still do,’ I say, wiping a sudden unexpected tear from my eye: I don’t know why it decided to swell and show off in front of these two. I don’t know who that tear is for, because it’s not Adrian.
‘It must be so hard,’ Anna says, reaching over and touching my arm in exactly the same way and place as Lisa just has – even the pressure from her fingers is the same; it mirrors Lisa’s action so utterly it makes a mockery of it. ‘He is the first person you’ve really liked, isn’t he? Who has liked you back, I mean. It must be really hard to walk away …’ she says, holding her glass up to the waiter and mouthing ‘Again, please. Thanks’, and adding a wink on the end. She flicks her hair and dabs at the corners of her lipgloss. I am positive she doesn’t realise how spiteful she sounds.
‘I haven’t,’ I say as nonchalantly as I can.
‘You haven’t what?’ Anna asks, distracted, staring at a group of women on a table behind us
, appraising their hair, their make-up, their shoes, anything visible to the naked eye.
‘I haven’t walked away … yet.’ I brush an imaginary crumb off my sleeve.
‘Sorry?’ It takes a moment for Anna to register and compute this information. ‘What do you mean?’ Her attention lands on me with an almighty crash, and the force of a giant wave.
‘I mean what I say: I haven’t walked away yet.’
‘Well, when are you going to walk away, Sunny?’ she asks me with a look of exaggerated confusion, as if she is asking ‘what is one plus one’ of the class dunce.
‘Well, I don’t know. I might not, as yet …’ I trail off, lacking conviction. Both of their faces twist and contort in front of me, morphing into a strange rage.
‘But you’ll be over him in a week! It’s not like you are married! You’ve only just started seeing him, for God’s sake!’ Lisa says, as if I am acting childishly.
‘I have known him for five years; he’s not just some guy I bumped into in the street last week. And even if he was, how do you know that I’m not in love with him, Lisa? What do you know about it, really?’ I ask as calmly as I can. I want to say, ‘But of course I’m not in love with him’, but I feel like it might dilute my argument.
At this point the waiter arrives and makes a meal of putting the plates down in front of the wrong people. We swap dishes without looking into each other’s eyes.
‘Well, I just don’t understand how you can do what you are doing. I never thought you would be that kind of woman.’ Anna forks up a bunch of salad and stuffs it into her mouth, grabbing an olive almost immediately and throwing it in afterwards. A thought strikes her, and she snatches up the bowl, tossing the olives all over her salad, desperate for flavour.
‘And what kind of woman is that, Anna? What kind of woman am I?’ For effect I put down the fork I have just picked up, place my hands on my lap, sit back in my chair and wait for an embarrassed answer.
But Anna isn’t embarrassed at all: she is in her element. Anna is as happy as a pig in shit.