There was a pause, and then he smiled, and we all laughed, relieved.
“I always said you public schoolboys were a bunch of fucking bum-bandits,” said Andrew. “But we're getting off the point. You sure you're not going to call her bluff on the blow job?”
“Sure. And it wasn't a bluff.”
“You mean it was for real?” said Ludo.
“No. It wasn't for anything. It's just the sort of thing she says.”
But still, on the walk home, I thought about those porn-star blow jobs, a pleasure intermittently interrupted by the appearance of Tomkin and his Mallomars.
PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 11
I know that I'd decided to forgive and forget the Uma Thursday thing, but for Christ's sake, what kind of slut would go to a playgroup in a miniskirt without her panties? No kind of slut. He's lying, he's showing off. Weird how boys need that kind of fantasy to make them feel like men. Even that sad little crew. I don't mean Ludo, I mean the others. I've only met them a few times. Sean had a party for his thirtieth. Leo and Odette came, looking like a comedy double act—she all knees and elbows and pageboy haircut, and he small and dark with existentialist angst written all over him, like someone going as a Parisian philosopher to a fancy dress party. Andrew jabbered nervously when he came in, and I thought he was going to wet his pants, he looked so scared of me. He stammered something about the crazy woman in Mauritius, obviously trying to impress me with the fact that he'd found some girl to tolerate him as a suitor as long as he stayed more than seven thousand miles away from her.
What a horror that party was. Sean wouldn't let me get in any caterers, so he spent most of the time panicking and shouting in the kitchen while I had to do front-of-house duty. “I just want to make it a normal party” he'd whined, “not all people in bake-o-foil suits and zebra handbags.” At least Katie and Veronica were there, and we spent some quality time making fun of the fashion retards. At about two in the morning, an ex-girlfriend of Sean's managed to get in and smashed a sausage roll into his face, breaking his glasses—though I'm not sure if that's an indictment of the density of his puff pastry or the flimsiness of his eyewear. The last thing I heard as I went down the corridor to the bedroom was her high-pitched screech: “You said you were just going out to get some chips …”
I'm jealous. There: it's out now. I'm jealous of a woman I don't even believe in. Is that because jealousy is always a phantom that stalks your brain and never a real thing? Is it because jealousy only lives when you think, fear, suspect, dread, and then when you find him in bed with some lumpy creature, tits flopping like dead jellyfish, what you feel is either hatred or contempt but not jealousy? It's never happened to me before, so I don't know.
I met Ludo in a bar in Camden. A bit grungy for me, but at least there was no chance of seeing anyone I knew. It was funny walking through Camden. Of course, I spent some wild teenage years here, back in the late eighties when Camden felt like the beating heart of cool. Music blasted out of pubs and the place felt young, and I was blind to the drunks and junkies strewn lifelessly about the pavements like victims of a nerve gas attack. I was a victim of a different sort in my huge Doc Martens, my thick black tights, my miniskirt (straining at the seams), and a T-shirt—yes, a T-shirt—with, in the name of God, shoulder pads. I don't want to think what was happening with my hair back then. I sometimes have a scary dream in which my hair is like one of the new high-tech fabrics engineered with a “memory” so that it goes back into shape after it's been stretched or crushed. At some vital engagement—say, for example, meeting some guy … anyway, at some time when I least want it to happen, my hair suddenly zaps back into a feather cut or a shag or a bob, or whatever, or even reverts to a time—and yes, there was such a time—when I simply had hair on my head in no special style at all.
Well now at least I had my hair right. Subtle, wheat-field highlights, with a Bardot blow-dry. The slightly scary thing is that, as I was coming out of the salon, whom should I meet going in but—yes, you've guessed it—Katie. We kissed quickly—she wanted to hurry on to sort out those roots, and I wanted to get away from her because hypocrisy really isn't one of my vices. Which reminds me of something that Veronica once said. We were at a party and Katie had been making a joke about her cynicism and manipulativeness, and Veronica said, “You aren't really like this, Katie. You're just pretending to be a hypocrite,” which I didn't properly absorb at the time but which later seemed both funny and true. It was then that I began to think that Veronica might be something more than just the slightly lumpy PR creature of first impressions. Of course, she and Katie went back some way to when they were both dowdy provincials in Slough or Berkhamsted or one of those places.
I was five minutes late. We'd arranged to meet early, at seven. I don't know, it seemed somehow more innocent that way. And easier to excuse our way out of. Ludo was standing at the bar, looking awkward. He was poking about at the top of a bottle of Mexican beer. He was smartly dressed in a dark suit with a deep blue open-necked shirt. I was wearing my Sunday-best jeans (dry-clean only), the ones with an appliquéd winking dog on the bum pocket, and then I'd let rip with a slither of midriff below my expensively distressed cashmere top. Hair down—obvious but effective.
He looked up as soon as I came through the door. It must have been coincidence, or perhaps he'd been checking every few seconds, but it felt like magic. He didn't really smile but went back to playing with his bottle.
“I thought they'd stopped doing this years ago,” he said.
“Doing what?” I'd expected a kiss or something.
“Putting lime in the neck of the bottle. I tried to pull it out, but it just went in deeper.”
“That can happen,” I said, with a heavy dose of filthy innocence, and he blushed.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked, still looking uncomfortable.
“A glass of white wine would be nice.”
“I'll get a bottle.” He looked quickly at the scribbles on a blackboard over the bar, and turning to the barman, a gaunt, weak-looking Latin boy with a thin line of beard drawn carefully around his face, he said, “A bottle of… the New Zealand sauvignon, please. Thanks.”
We found a table. The barman brought the wine over and, with what was either a smirk or a leer, lit the stubby candle between us.
We made some conversation. My work. His work. Christ, perhaps even how pleasant the weather was, for May.
Finally, after an embarrassing pause, I asked, “What did you say to Katie?”
“To Katie? Oh, you mean about tonight. I said I was meeting the boys. I said football. A TV in the pub. There's a European Cup game. Liverpool are playing Marseille.”
“It's the new Barcelona, apparently.”
Ludo looked strangely interested by this.
“Marseille the new Barcelona? No, they had a good spell back in the early nineties, but they've fallen away since then. Only scraped into the European Cup this year because of the general weakness of the French league. But Barcelona … Ah, that's not what you meant, was it?”
I giggled.
“No. I meant, according to all the magazines, it's the next new style capital. Trendy place to live. Stylish hotels. Good shops. Wallpaper very keen on it.”
Now he laughed, too. “ Wallpaper! God I hate that. The way it assumes that you simply don't count, don't count in any way unless you've got the right kind of chairs, unless you live solely for labels and names and New York and Milan, unless your idea of heaven is lying languidly on a Mies van der Rohe lounger with two male models draped across you.”
It was the longest speech I'd ever heard him make.
“Sounds okay to me. And you're forgetting, I've seen your apartment.”
“That's Katie, not me.”
“God you boys are all the same. The straight ones, I mean. You don't want to have to put in the effort to perfect your living space, but you're quite happy to live there once it's ready for you.”
In the little silence that followed (a
more comfortable silence this time), I thought, as I had tried not to think, about the differences between Ludo and Sean. In some ways, they were very alike. They'd both fallen for fashionistas but equally both rebelled against the hectic, superficial, glorious fashion world. Although they were both good-looking, I'd give Sean the edge in features, but Ludo was definitely sexier. He had more depth; Sean, more life. Sean told better jokes, but Ludo looked as if he could … move you. Sean was taller, Ludo broader. Sean darker, Ludo stronger. Sean had quick, small hands; Ludo, those big, fat, competent fingers and blunt nails. Hands that could bend things, break things, twist a drake's neck, mend its broken wing. But the key to Ludo, the thing about him was that he wasn't Sean.
I was drunk. I'd been drinking too quickly and hadn't eaten anything. It suddenly occurred to me that if I left now, I'd be able to put Harry to bed, and I so wanted to put him to bed, to feel him curl into me as I read him The Flopsie Bunnies or Faster, Faster, Little Red Train or the weird book of Japanese folk tales, full of idiot boys, pervy monkeys, cackling hags, and wrinkly old men he'd taken an inexplicable fancy to.
“I think I should go home.”
Ludo looked disappointed, but only for a second.
“That's fine. A good idea. I can go to the pub and watch the match. I'll wait for a taxi with you. I mean, wait with you for a taxi.”
Outside it had started to rain. That was annoying because I was wearing my beautiful new ivory suede shoes on the understanding that it would be dry. I should have remembered that it always rained in Camden. Ludo shuffled up his jacket without taking it off and made an umbrella with it for us both. I stood close to him, getting what shelter I could. I shivered, and he drew me closer. Again, I was aware of his size and strength, and I felt suddenly weak by comparison, like a wet leaf flattened against a branch. He had a wonderful clean, human smell—unscented soap, rain, earth. A taxi came down from Haver-stock Hill, going into town. Ludo waved, and the driver flicked off his light. He had to U-turn across the road, which would take a minute or two with the traffic. Ludo looked down at me. He put his fingers on my chin and raised my face. I was passive, but that in itself was a choice, because I could have pulled away or cracked a joke or slapped him. And slowly his lips came down to mine, and his touch was so gentle for such a big man, and his kiss tasted of the rain. And then he put a hand to the small of my back and pressed me close to him, and for the first time, I lost my passivity, and I kissed him back, and for a second, I thought that I had fainted, because I could not feel the ground beneath my feet, but then I understood that he had lifted me up in his arms as we kissed, and again I was helpless, like a bird in the jaws of a cat.
SEANJOURNALELEVEN.DOC
SUPPLEMENT
I got them for Harry. I'd read a piece in The Guardian saying that fish oil supplements make kids clever and well behaved and stop them from vandalizing bus shelters. I popped straight into Holland and Barrett and bought a great drum containing two hundred and fifty one-a-day capsules. Looked like the real McCoy from the label. Each capsule enclosed 1,000—yes, 1,000—milligrams of fish oil, which meant 180 and 120 milligrams, respectively, of eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids, which I took to be the stuff in fish oil that did the good work. I made a joke about stopping my coy carp from squeaking when I bought the fish oil, and the woman gave me a mad-customer-mollification smile, as her hand twitched toward the undercounter panic button.
Doubts set in when I got the bottle home, unzipped the plastic sealing strip (there should be a name for that. Franicle? Tiffle? Spart?), and flicked off the lid. A faint fishy aroma floated out. I'd encountered a similar smell once when, as a child, I found a dead porpoise on a beach in Ireland. And then there was Melanie Moody, when I was fourteen, who … never mind. The point is, it wasn't very nice. But it was the capsules themselves that made me think I'd never get one inside Harry. Too big. Plain too big. As big as his thumb. Whole shoals must have gone into the cod squeezer to get that much oil. No way I was going to hide that in his yogurt or slip it in with the Smarties. I tried giving him one, just saying “nice” as he sat in his high chair, watching TV. He took it, bit it, and then his face collapsed, allowing the oil and pulped gelatin casing to dribble out. He went into a pitiful silent howl of anguish, and it took two juice cartons and a spoonful of jam to get the foul taste out of his mouth, if not out of his memory.
No, he was never going to swallow that one again. And rather than throw away perfectly good dietary supplements, I decided to give those omega-3 fatty acids the chance to work their magic on my free radicals or dodgy joints or calcite deposits or whatever they were supposed to do. Take one to three capsules per day, it said. Still with that adolescent superstition that some medicines can get you stoned or high if you take loads of them, and bearing in mind that there were a lot of the horse pills to get through, I gulped six.
Then the buzzer went.
The little electronic window on the intercom told me it was her. It was only half ten. She'd said she'd come round for lunch. I'd assumed twelve thirty or one. I checked myself in the hallway mirror. Shirt, jeans (better do up those buttons), fine. Hair a bit funny. Smooth it down. No, ruffle it up. Smooth it down again. No time for unguents. Harry was sitting in the old cardboard box I'd told him was a castle. He had a hairbrush in there with him he used as a gun. He also had a Maglite torch he used as a gun and, completing the arsenal, a toy gun he used as a gun. He was quite content shuffling his hardware, making a variety of “bang” (primitive projectile weapon) and “ghzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz” (advanced light-based neutrino weapon) noises.
I ran down to help her in with the stroller. Her boy was a few months older than Harry. He had a thick cap of white hair and pale, unblinking eyes that made you want to run screaming. We all squished into the elevator. Uma hadn't looked at me, busying herself instead with mechanical issues: folding the stroller, pressing random buttons in the elevator, and so on. She was wearing black jeans and a white blouse unbuttoned enough for me to get a reasonable look at her bra, which was red. I was thinking about the oddness of being able to see the bottom of the bra, the bit that joined the two cups together, without being able to see either any more of the bra or any of the actual breast itself, when I felt a strange surge in abdominal pressure. I thought that I sensed a “plock” from within. Something in me began to rise.
I was going to belch.
I was not going to belch!
I was belching.
I would not belch!
I swallowed back hard. Frustratingly, the elevator was stopping at all the floors. Uma was saying something about nice old elevators. Reminded her of New York. I nodded my head and swallowed hard again. No good. Silently, a drizzle of bilious air escaped, insinuating its way past the various fleshy flaps and valves designed specifically to keep just such jinn safely bottled. The smell of fetid Thai fish sauce, of old anchovy cans, of stale vaginal discharge from a cancerous halibut, filled the closed space. Uma started, as if I'd pinched her bum.
“What's that smell?” she said.
I thought fast. “Cats.”
“What cats?” She gave a little retch.
“Oh, just cats. They sometimes get into the elevator system. Have to be flushed out.”
“What do you mean ‘elevator system’? Do you mean the elevator?”
“Yes. And the, um, ducting. They get in there.”
“Yes, you said. And have to be flushed out. And why do they smell of fish?”
“It's the food.”
“What, you feed the stray cats in your elevator ducting?”
“They steal it. And then sometimes they're sick. Ah, here we are.”
I made tea. The boy, whose name was Oscar, unsuccessfully stormed Harry's castle. Uma opened some windows.
“Lovely apartment,” she said, after wandering around for a while.
“Bit of a mess. Celeste has big plans for it.”
“What kind of plans?”
“Well, from what I can work out, wherever th
ere is currently a wall, there's going to be a hole, and wherever there's a hole, there's going to be a wall. And all of my stuff will be thrown out, again.”
“Again?”
“Oh, you know, when we first moved in together, she threw out everything I'd ever bought—not much, I admit, but still … And now, over the years, I've bought some more things, and it's time for them to be thrown out.”
“Nice. But I don't think you should change anything. I think the place is fine as it is.”
“I don't understand. You're a girl and you don't think apartments should be done up on a six-month rolling basis, incorporating whatever bits of tat happen to be in the latest copy of Elle Decor?”
“Why do you always go on about the differences between men and women? I've noticed it's a thing about you. A really, really annoying thing.”
For some reason, we were now sitting side by side, but still a fair distance apart—say, two feet—on our big beige sofa (Celeste hits me when I call it a couch or a settee). Beige except for the Paul Klee scribblings in unerasable blue ink and the more recent and as yet unscoured slug trails of snot and drool. I was picking thoughtfully at one of those as Uma was speaking.
“It's not that I think there are any …”—what was the word? I looked at the ink ideograms with which Harry had decorated the cushions—“indelible differences between men and women. Or major differences that set women and men apart as classes—all the differences among individuals are much more important than the differences between groups—but, well, I don't know, sometimes thinking and talking as if there were these differences can be a creative way of getting at the heart of things, of thinking about people and what they're like. In general. Or even in specific.” I think I may have ended lamely with “Sort of but sincerely hope I didn't.
The Marriage Diaries Page 11