by Linus Peters
Having said that, in no way could you compare what I was doing now with when I was writing letters to Frances. That was everything. This is a cheap thrill. A computer game. An act of imagination between me and a machine.
Several weeks went by. Several happy, unhindered weeks apart from the slight guilt I felt about the game I’d invented. Though, actually, I could already see it wasn’t going to be the problem I first feared. In fact, it’s rather appropriate that it sprang out of looking at pornography, because it seems to have the same limited lifespan. A couple of evenings I didn’t even bother. It’s just my occasional cry into cyberspace, asking, not to be saved, but maybe not to feel so alone.
I did try switching to Google, then Yahoo, in an effort to keep things going, but it was much the same result, and soon I began to lose interest. In fact, to prove how much, when Luca suggested starting to play squash again on Monday evenings, I agreed without a moment’s thought or hesitation.
To my surprise, he seemed completely distracted. I’ve never seen him play so half-heartedly. I beat him three games in a row. Nor did he seem that concerned. Normally he fights for every point as if he’s going to have to pay for it in blood. It was only later, when we stopped off for a drink at my local, that I discovered why.
I returned from the toilet to find him staring at the label of this rather obscure Australian “cab sav” he’d insisted upon ordering.
“Too young,” he sighed, as I sat down.
“I’ve had worse,” I said, though conceding he was the expert.
“Not the wine! The girl!”
“Oh!” I said, remembering that before I’d gone to the toilet he’d mentioned something about a student from Goldsmiths he’d met in a photo gallery.
“Far too young.”
For a moment he said no more, just sighed repeatedly, and I began to realise this was a little more than one of his innumerable weekly encounters with the opposite sex.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. We just talked for a while, then said goodbye.”
“No coffee, no drink, no meal!” I cried in mock surprise.
“Probably doesn’t use a knife and fork,” he sneered. “Too bourgeois.”
I stared at him. This wasn’t like Luca. “You really didn’t ask her out?” He shook his head. “Not even for her phone number?”
“No!”
I paused for a moment, balked by his obvious irritation. “How old was she?”
“What does it matter? Twenty maybe.”
“Seen you with younger.”
“Only in very special cases,” he informed me.
I smirked to myself but let the remark go. It was unusual for Luca to be so upset by a refusal. He worked on the principle that for every ten women he asked out, he’d probably get knocked back four times, which still put him six up on those who didn’t have the courage to do anything.
“How old do you think I am?” he asked.
“I know how old you are.”
“But if you didn’t know.”
“Thirty five,” I answered truthfully.
He nodded his head. “She said it would be like going out with her father. That we’d go to a club and I’d end up dancing the ‘funky chicken’ - whatever that might be.” He grunted to himself, ignoring my laughter. “I’ve had compliments on my dancing.”
I nodded in agreement, well aware that if anyone was questioning his ability on the dance floor, they’d form a firing party for mine.
“What do people think of me, Simon?” he asked.
“That you’re a stupid I-ti who for some bizarre reason prefers dreary England to sunny Italy.”
“No, really, what do they think? What do you think?”
“I don’t know. In what respect?”
“The girls! The ‘popsies’, as Charlie calls them. Do they think I’m superficial? Immature? That I can’t conduct a proper relationship with a grown woman? Is that what they say?”
I turned and looked at him. Just at that moment he did appear a little like a child. A worried child who thought he might’ve done something wrong.
“Actually, most conversations I’ve heard about you seem to revolve around endless repetitions of the phrase ‘lucky bastard’.”
“Mm,” he muttered, in his mood still a long way from satisfied. “There is another side to me.”
“Yes, I know, and it might be a far more profound one, but for most people, it’s nowhere near as interesting.”
“The English,” he groaned, shaking his head. “Obsessed by sex, embarrassed by love. ”
“Maybe,” I said, chuckling.
“I read philosophy. Poetry. What do they read? ... Tabloid newspapers.” He stopped, sighing to himself, far too upset to bother extending his argument. “Lorna.”
“Sorry?”
“That’s her name.”
“Oh.”
“Quite like it, actually,” he said, nodding his head as if it had been a long and deeply considered decision.
For a while we sat in silence. I’d never seen him in this mood before. Whether it was love or rejection, I didn’t know, but Luca without a twinkle in his eyes, without a smile on his face, wasn’t Luca at all.
“I think I might get an early night,” he eventually said. “I’m feeling rather tired.”
“Hey, no, Luca! Come on,” I said. “Tell me about it. Christ, I owe you. Over and over, I owe you.”
“No, it’s nothing like that,” he lied, producing his wallet and taking out a generous contribution to the bill. “Finish the wine, won’t you.”
A few moments later he completed his familiar ritual of shaking my hand, patting me on the shoulder, then waving as he got to the door. Exiting so quickly and quietly, it was like an embarrassed shadow chasing after its body. For some time I sat there on my own, feeling a little disturbed at having seen him that way. That even Luca, under all that Latin bonhomie, that seemingly unbreachable good nature, had his weaknesses. As if really there’s no such thing as people, no such thing as personalities, only circumstances, and our only individuality is how we react to them.
Later I walked home, a little drunk from having consumed more than my fair share of the wine. Thinking about Frances, how happy I was, how glad I didn’t have to go out there and compete anymore. Okay, if I’m really honest about it, feeling a touch of that lover’s smugness that pisses us all off so much when we don’t have a partner.
I felt so pleased to see the lights on in the flat, to know she was already home. I bounded eagerly up the stairs, expecting to find her at her computer, but for once it wasn’t even turned on, and there was no sign of her.
“Hi!” I called out. “Frances?”
She didn’t answer and I went to look for her. I found her in the bedroom, sitting at Charlie’s computer, staring at the screen. One look at her horrified expression was enough to know what she was reading.
Jesus, I’m a fool! A computer illiterate fucking idiot! Something had gone wrong with her computer, she’d needed to send an e-mail urgently, and had turned to mine. I mean, I thought I’d deleted them; that every word, every trace, had been erased forever. Yet somehow she’d found my e-mails to Juliana, all of them, and had been reading them through one by one.
“Oh shit!” I groaned, instantly realising I was in a lot of trouble. “No, Frances. Frances, look, they haven’t gone anywhere. They were never meant to.” She turned and glared at me, demanding more. “It was just a kind of game.”
“The same one as when you wrote to me?”
“No! Of course not! I don’t want to see Juliana again.”
“You just want to sleep with her?”
“No!”
“Despite the fact that you’ve never known a body like hers, nor anyone who uses it the way she does?” she said, quoting me.
“Oh shit!” I cursed, realising how awful that sounded.
“All you apparently need is the money,” she sneered, an expression I barely recognised on her face. I went quie
t. I’d never told her that. I never wanted her to know. “A prostitute?”
I gave a very long sigh. “Yes.”
“Well, that’s different,” she said. “I can’t compete with a professional.”
“Frances!” I cried, trying to take hold of her, but she shoved me away. “There’s no competition. I don’t want to be with her. Not for any reason.”
“What exactly did she do?” she asked me.
“What?”
“What did she do that was so good?”
“Nothing!”
“You talk a lot about nothing.”
“Frances, please!” I implored her. “I know it must seem insane, but they were never meant for Juliana. They were never meant for anyone.”
“I still want to know what she did,” she persisted. “I mean, is this just my inferiority complex or have I been missing out all this time? Are there a whole range of things in bed that my limited imagination has never even considered?”
“No!” I cried. “It was just a game! A computer game!”
“Like Solitaire?” she sneered.
“In a way, yes! ... I love you, and you alone!.”
Again we fell silent. The odd thing was, she actually seemed to believe me, and yet there was something else, an expression I didn’t understand, as if this fitted into a much bigger picture.
Finally she seemed to make some kind of decision, turning and heading for the door. “Well, one thing’s for certain,” she said, “I’ll never have sex with you again.”
If it hadn’t been Charlie’s laptop, I would’ve picked it up and thrown it across the room. How could I have been so stupid? Everything she’d said had been right, had been perfectly understandable, right down to not wanting to have sex with me anymore. Who could blame her for that after what she’d read?
I slumped slowly down in front of the computer, my words to Juliana still on the screen. Some things you just can’t explain, no matter how hard you try. Perhaps because the facts simply don’t fit with your explanation. Because basically you’re not dealing with the truth as it’s perceived by others.
Like so many people in this world, I hadn’t so much been bad as stupid. Yet in the end, the results are frequently the same.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I didn’t really know Frances over the next week or so. She didn’t rant, didn’t rave – I would’ve preferred it if she had – but there wasn’t a moment when I was unaware of how upset she was. We went out a couple of times - to see some old friends of hers playing in a band, down to visit Jill and Ian again - and no one said anything, but that might’ve been because they were wondering what was wrong with me. Because I tell you, I was walking fear. I knew she had this weakness for running, that that was her way of dealing with things she felt threatened by, and was convinced that was what she was going to do.
It got to the point where I couldn’t bear to leave her. Not even for a few hours. Just in case I came back and found her gone. If I had to go into the office I’d keep finding excuses to phone, panicking if she didn’t answer straight away, grabbing my coat, getting ready to leave, only to find that she’d finally pick up.
Another time I walked into the bedroom to see her sorting out some old clothes for Oxfam and thought she was packing. She saw the look on my face, realised I’d drawn the wrong conclusion, and hastily explained. In a way it was funny. Not that either of us laughed. And later, when I thought about it again, I began to worry even more. I mean, why was she sorting through her clothes? What was she preparing for?
Even Monday nights, her French classes, became long hours of torture. If she was overdue, I’d start checking her stuff to see if she’d taken anything. When she did finally get home, sometimes quite late, I’d make sure I was in bed, the light off, pretending to be asleep. She’d always undress as quietly as she could, trying not to wake me and risk having to go over it again - my endless apologies and explanations.
True to her word, she never approached me for sex, nor even gave the impression it was still part of our relationship. It hurt, but what could I say? I had no one to blame but myself. I was determined to take whatever was coming, no matter what it might be, just as long as it wasn’t the ultimate penalty.
How long we would’ve gone on like that, I don’t know. What with me constantly watching her, getting ready to block her path if she made for the door, and her desperately trying not to give into her natural impulses, not to run as fast and far away as possible. There was no obvious solution, no long-term healing strategy, just the irrefutable and oft-quoted mantra that I loved her more than life itself and would do anything not to lose her again.
But do you know something? No matter what we think, no matter how determined we might be, sometimes that just isn’t enough.
Luca was still too immersed in his own problems to appreciate how much I was at the mercy of mine. God knows what this Goldsmiths student has, but whatever it is, he couldn’t get it out of his head. He started to come in every morning with croissants and ‘real coffee’ for us, from the cafe across the road, though we both knew that, actually, it was just a little bribery to give him the opportunity to talk.
The odd thing was, no matter how often he brought Laura up, he never had one positive thing to say about her.
“I bet you,” he said one morning, and at a time that seemed indecently early for such a topic, “she’s one of those English girls who never changes her underwear.”
“Luca!” I protested.
“You can be sure of it. Her hair’s all tousled and pinned in tight little bunches. Like tea-bags. And dyed red!” he said, as if in Italy that was a corporal offence.
“Sounds very nice,” I commented dryly.
“Why do so many girls in England fight their sexuality? Shapeless clothing, no make-up. What are they afraid of?”
“Please,” I said, holding my hand up. “Don’t drag me into this.”
He paused for a moment, dropping croissant crumbs all over my desk. “She laughed at the way I dressed. Can you believe that?”
“What were you wearing?”
“Jeans. My Barbour,” he replied, like many of his fellow country men and women, regarding that particular garment as the very last word in elegance and style. “She said she could never go out with a man who wore anything that looked clean and ironed .. I should’ve rolled in the gutter. Maybe she’d have fancied me.”
“Luca?”
“Yes.”
“It was ages ago.”
“What was?”
“That you met this girl.”
“She annoyed me,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“Why don’t you go back to the gallery? Maybe she goes there every Sunday.”
“I tried. Two weeks in a row,” he told me, again brushing crumbs off himself, this time onto the carpet. “I hung round for so long I had to buy something.”
My phone rang and he immediately got up to leave, as if another person had intruded upon our conversation and now he felt embarrassed by it.
“You could always go and wait outside Goldsmiths,” I said.
“What with - a bag of sweeties?”
“Or a change of underwear,” I suggested.
I picked the phone up and he went to return to his office, making sneering faces of mock laughter at me as he went.
“Simon Clayton.”
“Simon, it’s me. Charlie. Don’t say my name.”
“What?”
“Don’t say my bloody name!”
“Oh. Right.”
“Is the I-ti there?”
“Not anymore.”
“Good.” He paused for rather a long time, confusing me even more than I was already. “Simon, I want you to come and see me. Without letting the bloody I-ti know. Or anyone else come to that.”
“Okay.”
“Now,” he instructed.
“Right.”
“Let’s get this bloody well over with.”
There was a long pause. I didn�
�t understand but knew enough to realise that now was not the time to ask questions. “I’ve got to go over to Paddington and pick up one of those little Mercs. I should be with you in about an hour.”
“Not a word to anyone,” he repeated.
Actually, it took a bit longer than I thought, but I was still there before twelve. Once again I entered his drive, taking it somewhat more tentatively than Luca had, approaching the house in measured fashion, merely jabbing my finger at the door bell rather than prolonging it.
This time there was no delay, no drawing of bolts or applying of the security chain. Instead the door was immediately opened, and the small figure of Isobel stood there, looking a lot healthier than last time, though still noticeably nervous. Her make-up was a little smudged and appeared to have been done in a hurry, and she wore a floral dress that, though it looked new, seemed more suited to someone older than her fifty odd years. As if she’d bought it from one of those catalogues.
“Hello, Simon. Come on in.”
“Hi, Isobel.”
“He’s in the study. You know the way, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll bring you some coffee through in a moment.”
I walked down the long dark wooden-parqueted hall to the door of Charlie’s study, giving a kind of cursory knock that might, in fact, be no more than a fumble at the door handle, then entered.
Despite being comfortably around 20 degrees outside, there was a fire lit, and beside it, rather bent and moulded into the wing of his armchair, sat an old man. Or leastways, that was my first reaction. My second was to shut down every thought I had in my head and concentrate solely on maintaining my composure.
It was Charlie. This hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, pale-faced frail stick of an old man, with his clothes, his checked country shirt and brown corduroy trousers, hanging limply off him, was Charlie. Big, bluff, bruising Charlie. All his hair had gone, and despite the fact that it was trying to grow back, where it had once been brown and straight, now it was grey and wispy. Even his moustache had gone. He just sat there, staring into the fire, and I realised the reason was because he was waiting for me to get this over with, that he couldn’t bear to see my reaction.