Better Than Easy

by Nick Alexander

  It’s surprisingly appealing, which makes me worry, not for the first time, about this self destructive streak in me, always tempted to blow everything to smithereens, always tempted by a fresh start – something new, something better, something different.

  *

  Back in the flat, the light already fading as the bad weather moves back in, I check my email hoping for reassuring words from Tom, but of course there are none. Feeling only vaguely guilty despite my decision not to do so, I check Tom’s secret email account to see if he’s writing to anyone else, but it only contains a reply to the message he posted in the hill-walking forum. I click on the link and watch the hill-walking pages appear, first Tom’s request asking if Jean is still running hill-walking weekends from his gîte, and then below it, an anonymous reply from someone called ChampiRando.

  “Jean has moved away,” ChampiRando writes. “And he hasn’t visited the forum for over a year. But I hear the gîte has been sold, so maybe the new owners will be running walking tours as well - watch this space.”

  I log out from Tom’s account, sigh and close the laptop. And then I frown and open it again and study the messages. How could ChampiRando know that we are buying the gîte? Unless ChampiRando is Chantal. But why would Chantal say he has moved away? I suppose that the truth isn’t something she’d want to start discussing on a public forum. But then again, if it is Chantal, why not say, “We’re selling up – I’m selling up.”

  I scratch the bridge of my nose and look at the message again. The message may be anonymous, but the IP address is showing: 213.186.33.5. It probably just belongs to Chantal’s Internet provider, but all the same, I google an IP tracking site and type in the numbers – a trick I learnt in my last job. The trace says that the number belongs to Egyptian Internet provider EGnet. I type the same numbers into a web-browser, fully expecting the operation to fail, but very slowly a web page appears: Egyptour – Your local guide to the treasures of Egypt.

  Now why, I wonder, would an Egyptian tour operator be reading French hill-walking forums, and how could they know anything about the sale of the gîte? I’m just picking up the phone to call Tom to discuss it when, luckily, I’m interrupted by a knock on the door. It’s only once I’m standing next to the insurance assessor, watching him peer at my stained ceiling and grimace as he lays a hand on the damp mattress, that I remember I can’t talk to Tom about it. I’m not supposed to have been fishing in his email in the first place.

  Strategic Paranoia

  It turns out that Jenny’s insurer can send someone to repaint my ceiling, or I can do it myself. If I do, they will pay me three hundred Euros, and because a pot of paint is less than forty, and I’m time-rich and potentially soon to be money-poor, Monday lunchtime when the phone rings I’m at the top of a ladder splattering paint everywhere. I groan at the interruption and clamber down and lay the roller in the paint tray. I wipe my hands on my old jeans and grab the handset.

  “Oh, hi Tom,” I say. “I’m kind of busy painting the ceiling.” It’s not that I don’t want to talk to him, it’s just truly not a good time.

  “Is everything OK?” Tom asks.

  “Sure,” I tell him. “I’m just up to my nipples in white paint.”

  “Humm,” Tom says, causing me to frown.

  “Is everything OK with you?” I ask.

  “I suppose,” he says.

  I crease my brow and scrunch my nose at the handset. Whatever this is, I had better call him later to sort it out. “OK then, well, I’ll call you as soon as I’ve finished the first coat,” I say.

  “I’ll be out by then,” he says gloomily.

  “OK, then we’ll talk this evening.”

  “OK,” he says. “If I’m in.”

  I let out a huge sigh and resign myself to scraping dried paint off the floor and maybe even buying a new roller. “OK Tom, what’s up?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says, somehow managing to make the denial sound aggressive.

  I say nothing, knowing that it’s the best way to prompt him to continue.

  “Last time I called you were just going out,” he says.

  I nod. “Yeah?” I say, puzzled.

  “And the time before you were just going to sleep.”

  I roll my eyes. “OK,” I say. “Well, it’s just coincidence. These things happen. Everything’s fine Tom. It’s just I’m … I was worried about the paint drying on the roller, but …”

  “Just go then,” Tom says.

  “But,” I continue forcefully, “I’ve decided it doesn’t matter, so here I am. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Nothing really,” Tom says. “You just seem distant lately.”

  “Lately?” I say.

  “Yeah, since I came home.”

  I frown at the use of the word home, but decide not to take issue with it right now. “Well, since you went home, I am distant Tom,” I say. “I’m about a thousand miles distant. But you chose that, not me, babe.” The babe is an afterthought, an attempt at avoiding all-out conflict. “It’s nothing we can’t handle though, is it?” I add.

  Tom clears his throat. “I’m not sure,” he says.

  “What do you mean, ‘You’re not sure?’”

  “It’s just, well, if we go on this way, it could be the end of us,” he says.

  I pull a grimace at the sudden dramatic twist. “What are you on about? Carry on like what?”

  “I feel like I’m single,” he says. “I don’t feel like I’m in a couple. You’re just not there. Only I don’t feel able to do the things I used to do when I was single either. It’s weird. I’m bored.”

  I rub the bridge of my nose. “It’s not weird Tom,” I say. “You’re not free to do the things you used to do when you were single because you aren’t single.”

  “Yeah,” he says vaguely. “Only every time I even try to talk to you you’re too busy even to do that.”

  I run a hand across my beard and wonder if this is true in any way. It certainly doesn’t feel true. It sounds to me like pure paranoia, or an attempt at engineering a dispute. “Babe,” I say. “I’m on the phone with you right now. I’m …”

  “But even now, you’d rather not be,” he says. “Even now, you’d rather be painting the ceiling. And you hate painting ceilings. You told me. I mean, if something’s changed then you should tell me, that’s all I’m saying. Because, I need to know where I’m at so that … I need to know, that’s all.”

  “Look Tom,” I say, starting to feel riled. “It sounds to me like you want to go shag around and you’re trying to pin the blame for that …”

  “How can you say that?” he interrupts. “You see what you’re like? I mean, where did that come from?”

  “You’re going on about what you used to do when you were single,” I say. “What did you mean? Masturbation?”

  “I meant going out clubbing and stuff.”

  I shake my head. “And what’s to stop you doing that?” I say. “Certainly not me.”

  “Well if I do, I might meet someone,” he says. “I mean, that’s why I used to go out in the first place.”

  “I think you want me to authorise you having a shag, but I’m not going to. You chose to go back. You chose to be on your own for Christmas. You chose for me not to come with you.”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Tom says. “I haven’t even thought of having a shag, as you so beautifully put it.”

  My mobile starts to vibrate and then chime.

  “Is that your mobile?” Tom asks.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I answer pedantically. “I haven’t looked.”

  “Why?” Tom asks. “Who might it be?”

  I shake my head. “Tom,” I say. “What’s got into you? Have you taken something? Have you smoked some dodgy weed or something? Because you’re sounding really weird, really paranoid.”

  “Be my guest,” Tom says, ignoring the question. “Answer it. It’s probab
ly your lover.”

  For a second I’m speechless. I’m just about to cry foul, just about to tell Tom that he’s projecting his own guilty desires onto me, when he beats me to the punch by making the exact same accusation. “That’s why the accusations are flying,” he says. “You’re projecting your own desires onto me. It’s you who wants to shag around.”

  I cross the room shaking my head and glance at the screen of my mobile. “It was Ricardo,” I say. “Happy now?”

  “Ricardo?” Tom says.

  “Rick – Jenny’s boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” he says glumly.

  I sit back down and spin the mobile on the coffee table. “I just don’t know where all this has come from,” I say.

  “You had better phone him back,” Tom says. “Say hi from me.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “OK, talk later,” Tom says.

  I struggle to get past my anger, to find a soothing comment to end this conversation, something that will prepare the way for the next call, but before I can think of anything Tom hangs up. I put the paint-stained handset back on the stand, making a mental note to clean it quickly, and shake my head. “Jesus!” I say.

  I finger the mobile, wondering whether to phone Ricardo back or wait till later, when there’s an heavy rap on the door. “That’ll be my lover,” I mutter, opening the door to reveal the pompier version of Ricardo, mobile in hand. If only.

  “I call, but …” he says, somehow smiling but looking worried at the same time.

  I wave the mobile at him. “I was about to phone you back,” I say. “I was on the phone to Tom.”

  “He’s OK?” he asks, still hovering on the doormat.

  I nod and struggle to wipe away the slapped-arse expression I’m sure I have on my face. “Yeah, fine.” I say.

  “You eat already?” Ricardo asks. “Only I just finished.” He makes an open palmed gesture here conveying that this is the reason he is dressed as he is, “and I think maybe you will have lunch with me.”

  I sigh. “I’m actually painting, Ricardo,” I say, copying the gesture, to explain the paint-splashed outfit.

  He grins. “I can see,” he says, reaching out and touching my nose. “You have on your face. Maybe I can help you and then we have lunch.”

  I shrug. “No, I have loads of food in and I only have one roller, so …” I say.

  “OK, maybe I make lunch and you finish the paint?” he says.

  Back at the top of the ladder, as I listen to Ricardo clomping around my kitchen in his boots, and even occasionally breaking into song – in Spanish – I can’t help but wonder whether his calm assured insistence is a sign of naivety or arrogance.

  Personally, I’m always over-primed to take things as a sign that I’m not wanted, already on the verge of bowing out at the slightest hint that someone might not prefer my presence. And then I think about how easily, lazily generous Ricardo is. For all his good points, and though I can’t think of them at this instant, I acknowledge to myself that he has many, Tom would never turn up with surprise pizzas, he would never offer to make lunch while you finish something. You can ask Tom to do just about anything, and if you start to do it he will watch and be ready to help, but he would never spontaneously offer, let alone insist. There’s something infinitely touching about Ricardo’s gestures, and, I wonder, something maybe lacking in Tom’s inability to ever act in the same way.

  Ricardo makes two simple salads from the contents of the refrigerator, and for some unknown reason toasts ten slices of bread, and then we sit to eat, he in his navy blue pompier outfit, me in my paint splattered clothes. He’s in a good mood, smiling and jovial (is he always like this I wonder?), and he tells me about his morning, “So boring, I just wait for the phone to ring, but nothing. It’s a terrible thing to hope for some catastrophe,” and I explain about the insurance deal, and why I’m painting the ceiling myself, and when we finish, as if he lives here, he clears the table, dumps the plates in the dishwasher, kisses me on both cheeks and makes for the door. “I have to go change,” he says. “And then I have to go do some shopping.”

  I hold the door open and smile at him. “Thanks,” I say. “That was a good surprise. Again!”

  He nods. “Oh, yes. And tomorrow – I want to ask you what you are doing tomorrow?”

  I shrug. “Tomorrow?” I repeat.

  “Christmas!” he laughs, all white teeth and smile lines. “La Réveillon!”

  “Ah shit, yeah,” I say. “Christmas Eve. I forgot. I’ve been trying to forget I think.”

  “Jenny say you should come have dinner at home. She say, says?”

  I nod. “Says,” I repeat.

  “She says you don’t like to be alone. So you should have dinner with me.”

  I shrug and grin. “Well, if Jenny says,” I say. “Who would dare defy her?”

  Ricardo frowns. “You will come?”

  I nod. “Sure,” I say. “That would be great. I’ll bring wine, and what, maybe a dessert?”

  “Bring champagne,” Ricardo says. “It’s Christmas. Again!”

  I work my way, incredibly slowly it seems, through the day. As I apply a second coat of paint, note that the stain is already seeping through, and head off to the DIY store for fresh advice, it strikes me that the three hundred euro deal maybe isn’t so generous after all. I think vaguely about Christmas dinner with Ricardo, and what I should wear, and what I should take, but mainly it’s the conversation with Tom that plays over and over in my mind, tying my stomach in knots as my mood swings from concern to anger and back again.

  I decide to wait for him to call me once he’s feeling more rational. Trying to talk before he reaches that point can, it seems, only make things worse. But at midnight, fearing that even the noxious paint fumes won’t get me to sleep, I cave in and phone first his landline, and then his mobile. This only makes my sleep problems worse because he doesn’t answer either.

  At three a.m. and then again at six, I awaken and have to peer bleary-eyed at my email just in case it bears news, so by ten a.m. on Christmas Eve, by the time I finally get up, I feel like I have barely slept at all.

  While the coffee brews, I try Tom’s numbers again, but there’s still no answer, so I call Jenny and ask her to intervene, mentioning the spectre of Tom’s mini breakdown to justify my concern.

  She seemingly relishes our little drama. “To be honest,” she tells me, “I’m going out of my mind with Christmas TV and sunflower seeds. And it’s not even Christmas yet. It’ll be a pleasure.”

  “Sunflower seeds?” I say.

  “Don’t ask,” Jenny says.

  “But what …”

  “Really,” Jenny says. “Don’t ask.”

  We agree that if she manages to speak to him at all she’ll call me back, which she fails to do, and as evening approaches, I start to realise that the last thing I feel like is a celebratory dinner with Ricardo. When I phone him however to test the idea of cancelling, he not only declares that everything is ready for the, “best English Christmas dinner ever,” but that he has just spoken to Jenny and that she has instructed him not to let me back-out.

  Unavoidable Mistletoe

  Ricardo’s flat, overlooking the port, is in a typical Niçois building – the staircase is all blown light bulbs and flaky paintwork. But when he opens the door, I find myself in something that looks like an Ikea demonstrator: how to fit everything into twenty square meters – gorgeously.

  The lounge, which has two French windows overlooking the harbour, has a parquet floor, a shaggy woollen rug and a velvety designer-sag sofa bed. The lighting is provided by six small spot-lamps highlighting tasteful paintings on the rough whitewashed walls. I smile at him and hand him my dripping brolly, which he props up in the shower.

  I look around approvingly. It’s all a bit too tidy – he could turn out to be a bit of a maniac which could end up being a challenge for Jenny – but it has to be said, the tiny flat is really quite beautifully arranged.

  “Come
!” he says, beckoning me to follow. “I cook!”

  Ricardo welcomes me into his space like an old friend, pointing me towards the bar and leaving me to serve drinks while he battles in the tiny kitchen. I feel at home; I feel like an old friend, but this all leaves me feeling a little confused, because, of course, I’m neither. I serve two glasses of whisky on ice and we clink glasses and Ricardo resumes beating his Yorkshire pudding batter. “Jenny gave me,” he says, nodding at the recipe. “She says it is essential for Christmas dinner.”

  I sip my whisky and watch Ricardo, and the drink works its magic and the edge fades from my mood, leaving only the relaxed at-home feeling. It crosses my mind that everything looks, in this instant, even more like a page from a brochure, all good use of space, low lighting and easy smiles. But it feels good – it feels a damned sight better than wherever my head has been for the last forty-eight hours; I can feel the muscles in my neck relaxing one by one as Ricardo babbles on.

  He has made a huge effort to make me an English Christmas dinner, as he keeps emphasising, and I start to salivate as he finishes trimming the Brussels sprouts, and as the smell of roast potatoes begins to waft from the oven.

  “This I do last, I think?” he asks, pointing the plastic jug of batter at me.

  I shrug. “Sorry, I never made Yorkshire pudding,” I say.

  “But is essential Ricky,” he says, apparently mocking Jenny.

  I nod and smile. “Yes, it is. But I don’t know how to do them.”

  Ricardo shrugs and nods to himself. “I think when the turkey is nearly done.”

  I grit my teeth. “Turkey?” I say.

  Ricardo nods. “Traditional also,” he declares.

  I nod. “I’m a vegetarian. You know that, right?”

  He nods. “Yes. I know,” he says happily. “No meat. Only turkey.” He glances up and catches my eye and begins to frown with realisation.

  Amazingly, my principles desert me. After twenty years of vegetarianism, I just can’t bring myself to tell him that vegetarians don’t eat turkey. I force a grin. “Oh, that’s good then,” I say. “As long as there’s no meat.”