‘And you never cried?’ Jenni had asked when I first told her.
I’d shrugged my shoulders. ‘Cry at what?’
‘That’s not healthy,’ she’d argued. ‘I swear the way you break into tears at films and the Olympics is a way of letting it out.’
What was ‘it’? Being homeless, adrift? My mother?
‘More than that,’ she’d contended. ‘How about the fact you never talk about being kicked out, or the distance from your father?’
She was right. She knew parts of me better than I’d ever admit.
‘But especially your mother.’
I’d shrink into the protection of my shell at this point, avoid the personality surgery. I needed Jenni to love the person I wanted to be, a good fiancé, the dashing business analyst designing slick new systems, not the person I had been, a boy tramping the streets because he had no bed.
In the end I stayed with my cricket captain and his wife. I had their boxroom for two weeks before the government put me in a council flat and I moved what possessions I had into a bedsit on the edge of an industrial estate.
Whoever I am now, started then. That cell of a home. The dawn shifts in a plastics factory. That season playing for Nottinghamshire at cricket and rugby, yet drinking and taking drugs. Out every night because I had no one telling me what time to go to bed.
But I also had boundless energy. Driven by what I couldn’t say. Anger? Relief? I’d never wanted to move into Les’s house anyway.
Not one of my classmates had thoughts of university, but from what I could see of my future I’d be condemned to my old pit town if I didn’t get away to study. The following years I fitted in about five different lives. College, being a rugby and cricket star, the borderline alcoholic.
And my first girlfriend, Siobhan, the damage of what one heart could do to another.
ON THE SECOND DAY in New York, after a hellish afternoon explaining to the vice-presidents that without rapid changes to the job structure there would be no bank, neither the acquired nor the acquiring, and therefore no jobs to restructure, I walked through Union Square. Between flitting about market stalls helping myself to free slices of apple, trying to think about nothing but the tart, crisp bites, I came across the kittens in cages. Kept outside a pet shop, six or seven bundles of fur rolled, played and mewled for the passers-by, myself included, stopping to stare at two tabbies curled up asleep despite the sidewalk throng.
Of course, I thought about our own cats.
A fortnight after the wedding Jenni and I walked the river path from Chelsea and crossed the Thames. A warm, blue September day. The four-pronged stack of Battersea power station like an upturned plug, barges unzipping the water below, Jenni clutching my hand that bit firmer than usual.
And the knot in my stomach tightening, Kay strolling alongside us like a ghost.
‘Does the colour really matter?’ She was asking about the two kittens we’d decided to take in from the cattery.
‘A pair of tabbies, a ginger tom, I don’t mind.’
‘Aren’t tabbies always girls?’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, her furrowed brow giving it some serious thought. ‘Only if you’re a girl.’ She laughed.
Subconsciously, we knew getting two cats was a test for having children. If we could look after a couple of mewling kittens then surely a baby would be a natural progression.
‘Can we manage them in the flat?’ asked Jenni as we got to the Battersea Dogs and Cats home. ‘We did say we were going to wait until after Christmas.’
Since the wedding I needed as much distraction from my thoughts as possible. Two kittens tearing around a cramped flat suddenly seemed a brilliant idea. ‘We’ll manage,’ I assured her. ‘How hard is it to stroke a cat and put some food in a bowl?’
‘For someone who loves cats, you make it sound very clinical. You’ll soon be cooing over them like the big softie you are.’
She was right. I was nearly thirty years old, a rugby-playing flyer in the City, and the sight of a kitten could turn me into a doting mess.
They always had done. Once my sister and I had found a pregnant stray in a skip at the back of the supermarket, taken her home and hidden her in the garage. I crept downstairs each morning, poured out a saucer of milk and stole a strip of bacon from the fridge. Luckily, when Les discovered them it was too late. The kittens had come out in translucent sacs, gasped and cried into life. He immediately put an ad in the paper and sold them for five pounds each.
Jenni’s theory was that my affinity with cats was with their fierce independence, because a cat belonged to no one but itself. ‘Just like you on a bad day,’ she’d needle, using my ‘cat association’ as the incision point for dissecting a part of my personality she said I guarded. ‘And if there’s anything that worries me about us, it’s that.’
‘That’ was my reluctance to talk about my childhood, an upbringing very different from Jenni’s. Not the fact I lived on an estate where friends went to prison instead of Cambridge or Oxford, or that we went on holiday to Butlins while Jenni took ski trips to Val d’Isère, but the sudden flight from home, the abusive stepfather. My mother.
And if this makes us seem a mismatched couple, I should remark on how we were attracted to not only the foreignness in each other, but also the drive to assert ourselves as individuals. Jenni’s determination to overcome a privileged past, her battle to become a woman beyond the chequebook of her father, was similar to my need to be a man beyond a deadbeat estate, the runaway child.
Anyway, differences or not, on the subject of cats we were equal.
‘Oh my God.’ Jenni had pointed through the window in the cattery. ‘Look at those. It’s like they’re wearing gloves.’
‘They’re polydactyls,’ said the teenage volunteer. ‘Six fingers.’
We picked the two fluffiest from the litter and saved them from the cattery. ‘Mittens,’ Jenni named the slightly larger one. ‘And what about the other?’ she asked in the taxi, poking a finger through the carrier. ‘You should name her.’
For a week the other had no moniker. I had some strange blockage on choosing the right name. On finding out that Hemingway had kept dozens of polydactyls I looked around for something fitting, but despite having read several of his novels could only recall a single heroine, the nurse, Catherine, in A Farewell to Arms.
‘Catherine,’ repeated Jenni, cradling the kitten as if it was her very own unnamed baby. ‘Catherine!’ She tested how it would sound as a call.
I practised, too. ‘Catherine!’
The kitten fidgeted in her arms. ‘Then her nickname would be Cat.’ She laughed.
‘I guess that’s a no, then?’
‘Well, not necessarily.’ She put Catherine down on the rug, rolled her over and rubbed her tummy until she purred like an old-fashioned dialling tone. ‘What happens to Catherine in the book?’
‘I remember them rowing across a lake to escape the Germans, then something about hiding in a Swiss chalet cocooned in snow.’
All that fortnight Jenni had woken earlier than me, calling me a lazybones and not knowing I’d been sitting at the kitchen table until dawn, pacing about the flat in the dark and standing at the window watching taxis trundle over the speed bumps, the revellers coming home from clubs. Or, like a prisoner working out in solitary, done dozens of sit-ups and press-ups. Anything to take my mind from the wedding, the woman I’d given a lift to the airport.
Waking on those mornings, before my mind assembled, and my conscience stretched off enough to start beating up my soul, I’d steal a few minutes of bliss when the kittens jumped in bed, purring, tumbling over each other.
Then getting up, the routine of breakfast, ironing shirts and choosing ties, thoughts of that humid day in August like an elephant in the room that only I could see.
I WATCHED HER PAINTED nails trace a route to Heathrow across the map. And my God I inhaled her perfume. So suddenly I was thinking about the sm
allest details, the skin on the back of her hands, the neat scar under her eyebrow.
Kay pressed her finger to the page. ‘We’re right here.’
The emptiness I felt when she averted her eyes at the reception, or at the moment she kissed Segur goodbye in the hotel, was filled once she sat in my car.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Left out of the entrance, I think.’
‘Looks good from this angle.’ She had the atlas splayed across her lap. We drove from the car park. She wore sunglasses against the dazzle of the morning sun, as did I, hidden from each other behind darkened lenses and functional conversation about which turns to take. My first comments beyond the directions were about the beautiful weather and the journey time dependent on the traffic into London.
‘I’d better not get us lost, then.’
And I was still drunk, focusing hard on the road, narrow country lanes lined by hedgerows and stone walls.
‘Shoot,’ said Kay, as the trees and fields sped past, the car handling like a hovercraft. ‘We should have taken the right back there.’
I pulled into a gateway facing swaying cornfields. Blades of grass glittered with drops of silver dew.
‘How beautiful.’
It was. I swear if I opened up that same page in the road atlas now I could point to that very gateway, perhaps see our miniature selves sitting in the car above the billowing fields, watching the wind sweep across the wheat like a wave through an ocean.
And if I could, would I lean in and advise that man in the gateway? Would I counsel him, as I often do clients in my line of work, on the outcomes of bad decisions, that the choices one makes in a split second may have repercussions for years?
Yes. Yes, I would.
But a road atlas is no more than a map of where, not who and when. Certainly not why.
We were pointed away from the rising sun. Kay took off her sunglasses, revealed her eyes and returned my stare, held it long enough to make me afraid of her. Afraid of myself.
Deliberately, I believe, she broke the moment. ‘How’s your wife with a map?’
‘Not bad,’ I replied, before correcting her that Jenni was my fiancée.
‘When’s the big day?’
I swiftly put the car into reverse. ‘May next year.’
As I pulled into that narrow lane we returned to basic conversation, how far to the next turn, where I should get petrol. We were pretending to ourselves that we hadn’t just stared at one another for so long.
And when I glanced down at the junction she was pointing to on the map, I should have been looking at the road, ready for the flock of geese waiting just around the bend.
Like the timing of the shower on the wedding day, if those geese had grazed a different stretch of tarmac at a different hour, that stare between Kay and me might have been the end of something that had yet to start.
That was about to.
I COULD SEE A bat with the head of a dog, eagles carved from stone. From my balcony over Manhattan I studied gargoyles on the building below.
Sober, I felt hungover. Not with alcohol, but from the buzz and flutter of data. Faces and names I had to remember. It was the morning after a meet and greet with the bank managers we were being paid to fire, the teams of staff we could cull or save. I’d spent a long day in a walnut-panelled office suite in a snapped together tower, spaced out in another continent. Empty-headed boy from the Midlands in a New York boardroom.
Watching the minutes tick past until I had to get dressed and go to work, listening to the street sounds flowing like a rushing river, as if a great flood gushed down the avenues, I felt so detached from my body that I could have been washed into the Atlantic.
I was jet-lagged, but at least I was sleeping.
For weeks after the wedding the insomnia continued, as if an invisible hand would shake me awake if I managed to drop off. Getting into bed with Jenni and knowing that I was going to lie there and stare at the ceiling was torturous. She had no idea that I paced the flat, exercised on the kitchen floor, or simply sat on the rug and let the kittens jump over me while she dreamed the night away.
Luckily, work was hectic. In fact, hectic was being kind to the state of the banks, the economy. I liked to compare the financial system to a rickety plane flying above the Alps, losing engine power, rock face looming and the crew desperately throwing overboard what they could to keep altitude. While it struggled over those mountains, the rising, falling peaks like the zigzag progress of the stock exchange, the crew knew there weren’t enough parachutes to go round. If the plane, the banks, went down, some of them would float to earth while others would burn in the fiery wreckage.
For the US economy I preferred the analogy of a busted drug lord. From the brokers selling shoddy mortgages like corner boys peddling deals to the syndicate bosses at the top, rich, untouchable. And all the big banks getting their cut, then all the big banks missing their cut when the homeowners stopped paying and started defaulting.
But I was glad of the panic, the overtime. I believe the crash kept me sane, allowing me downtime from my own existence. I hid in numbers, streams of data, cold, exact facts, the same maths that make sense of the universe itself.
I began to numb the memory, although not entirely. The guilt I felt thinking of Kay during sex with Jenni ensured she occupied those spaces I thought were ours.
But when September skies blew over, fresh and gleaned of cloud, the season of change, I’d relegated what happened between Kay and me, the detour from that lift to Heathrow, to no more than a pre-wedding panic. I convinced myself it was a reaction to seeing friends tie the knot. And the vows, till death us do part, the solemn oath of commitment.
I was sleeping again, managing to wake without Kay as my first thought. For a month I’d flitted in and out of dreams sensing her very presence, as if she’d stood at the foot of our bed the entire night.
So back to the morning routine, not that Jenni knew of any break. I usually showered first, jumped out for Jenni to jump in, then browned the toast and brewed the coffee. If we were lucky enough for the postman to arrive before we left for work I’d grab the mail and sift through the bills and flyers, ads for takeaways and increasingly desperate estate agents.
‘Hey!’ sparked Jenni, coming from the bathroom, her wet hair bundled in a white towel. ‘Who’s got the purple envelope?’
I took it from behind a gas bill. It was a thick, decorated envelope addressed to us both.
‘The wedding photos!’ she guessed, correctly, before I slit the paper to find a CD titled Mark and Briony’s Wedding Album.
‘Do you want to pop it in your laptop while I get dressed?’
I mumbled I didn’t have time.
‘Time to put a CD into a computer?’
Of course I did. I just wasn’t ready for who I might see floating across my screen.
When she came back into the kitchen, suited and perfumed, brushing her bright blond hair, I had the photos scrolling on a slideshow.
‘Any good ones?’ she asked, yanking loose strands from her brush and dropping them into the bin.
‘I haven’t looked yet.’
‘Haven’t looked?’ She sounded annoyed. Annoyed that I was washing up instead of being whisked into Neverland by the thousand or so wedding snaps flashing into the kitchen.
‘I’ve been playing housemaid.’
‘I know, I know. Mr Poppins.’ She poured her coffee. ‘Five minutes, let’s have a quick look.’
Impatient with the slideshow, the repetitive snaps of guests we didn’t know, couldn’t remember seeing at the wedding or the reception, and would most likely never see again, Jenni, thankfully, clicked the ‘Church’ folder. In these photos I knew I was safe. Safe from an image of Kay, of once again seeing her standing between Jenni and me. Because I knew she hadn’t attended the service. Not that anyone told me she didn’t attend, simply that I’d have remembered, had it hard-wired into my synapses as was the image of her running through the rain.
‘How sweet
,’ cooed Jenni over a sweeping shot of the train being carried up the church steps by the bridesmaids. ‘And wasn’t he a cutie.’ She pointed at the pageboy, a waistcoated toddler with curly blond locks. ‘He nearly stole the show.’
I made the expected sounds of agreement, nodded. Then the shots of the ceremony, the austere priest and the grey stone contrasted with the beaming bride, that huge font with twelve apostles carved into it. Except Judas, I noticed, who was represented by a blank figure.
‘She lost about a stone, you know?’
And not forgetting the wedding dress, how it illuminated the dim church.
When Jenni got to the close-ups of Mark slipping the ring on Briony’s finger, the gold band of marriage, I thought back to our own engagement, Christmas at Jenni’s.
If snow had fallen that year, and a robin redbreast had perched on the windowsill to peer in on the open fire crackling in the hearth, I’d have believed in a man climbing down chimneys with sacks of toys. I thought Christmases like that, the roaring fire and tipsy uncles, cousins in new dresses and ironed shirts, only existed on Hallmark cards. Growing up I was hardly celebrating Yuletide with a bowl of gruel, but watching the Bond film with my sister while my mum and Les snored the afternoon away was a world apart from vintage port and a roasted turkey the size of a hippo. After a few drinks chatting with her uncle, her cousin and other ruddy-faced men warmed with alcohol and the satisfaction of their gathered families, we sat around a table in the conservatory.
‘Raise your glasses,’ swayed her father. ‘First toast to the cook.’
We touched drinks. Jenni, ecstatic that I was ‘fitting in’, kissed me on the cheek. Her father saw the exchange. ‘And you two,’ he joked. ‘Keep your hands off each other.’
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 3