by Louise Kean
‘She left and I went out on to the balcony, with a beer. It’s been so hot, I couldn’t go to bed, I couldn’t sleep. The sheets needed changing, so I put them in the machine and came out for a beer. It was still so light out. You know how light it can be, with all the street-lamps, and it was like the sun was already up. It was so hot.’ He looks giddy, and closes his eyes, picturing it in his head. This is turning into some kind of love story – the sun was beating down, I’ve found somebody else – just get on with it! I cross my arms subconsciously.
‘I leaned on the balcony for a while and just watched her go.’ He pauses. I clear my throat to interrupt, tell him not to bother going on, I know where this is heading – he has found somebody else, somebody permanent, but he talks quickly, to stop me butting in.
‘And I saw her walking down the road. She was swinging her arse, still drunk, strutting, looking like a tart in her bikini top.’ A look of disgust sweeps his face, and I am a little taken aback. Maybe this isn’t going where I thought.
‘And I thought at the time that women shouldn’t walk around on their own like that at night. If she’d have asked me, I would have called her a cab,’ he says, like an apology, ‘but she looked confident.’ Charlie takes a deep breath.
‘I saw the guy, a normal guy, a guy from the City, a guy like me. I saw him grab her from behind, spin her around, and hit her, throw her against the wall.’
My mouth hangs open and I say ‘shit’ involuntarily. His words are like exclamation marks, hanging in the air. He is trying, and managing, to impress on me how serious this is. This poor girl has been attacked, and Charlie feels responsible. So this is why he is so all over the place. I blink deliberately to take it in – the world is not safe any more. But as I take it in, Charlie starts talking again.
‘I saw the rage in his face, as he dragged her into the alley. I saw him hit her, and her eye kind of exploded, and went blue. I didn’t know what to do. She fell back against the wall. He wasn’t holding her, he just hit her. But I didn’t know what he would do if I didn’t stop him.’ Charlie’s pupils dilate as he speaks, and so do mine. This is all getting a bit gruesome. Alarm bells are ringing everywhere.
‘I put my beer down, grabbed my keys. They were in my jacket pocket. I didn’t need the jacket because it was still so hot outside.’ Charlie’s words quicken, as he talks at the pace of the events he is telling. I don’t want to interrupt now. Has he stopped an attack? Has he become somebody’s hero?
‘I went out and pressed for the lift, and the lifts are good here, you know that, and it came right away.’ His hands gesture, as if he is telling an audience of one hundred, and not just me.
‘It was so quiet going down in the lift, apart from that music – music to watch girls go by. It’s been the same music for weeks. I liked it at first but now it’s just starting to annoy me. And all I could think of were those lyrics, I couldn’t get them out of my head, and the girl in the street.’ He pauses suddenly. I gesture with my eyes for him to carry on, and he whispers, through fresh tears,
‘I don’t even know her name.’ How has he managed to make me feel sorry for him suddenly, as he tells me about last night’s antics with another woman? But I do feel sorry for him, somehow. He looks heartbroken.
‘I could see her lying in the alley. There was blood running from her nose, but her clothes weren’t ripped. She was unconscious. I was in front of her, and I tried to wake her up, but she wouldn’t wake up. The guy was gone. She wasn’t dead, because I checked her pulse. She was breathing, she just wasn’t awake.
‘I had lost my mobile again, left it in a cab going to Lloyds, and then to Deutsche Bank, I had so many meetings that day. We had got the Lloyds deal. Four million. That’s why we’d been out. I walked to the payphone, I had never seen it before, but there’s a payphone right by the newsagent’s.’ He points out of the window to prove his point.
‘And I called the police and said that I needed an ambulance.’
‘Good for you, Charlie – good for you.’ I smile at him, and feel a lump in my throat – I am strangely proud. He stopped something awful happening. He ignores me, he is in full flow, he doesn’t want my praise yet.
‘But I didn’t think it would do any good to wait with her, I couldn’t make a statement, because what if you found out, and then I’d have to admit that I’d slept with her, and then if they had done tests, well, you know.’ Charlie is pleading with me to understand this bit, the bit that signifies she meant nothing to him. I find it hard to swallow, maybe because of the lump in my throat.
‘I came back up here and watched them arrive, a couple of minutes later. They found her, but then the ambulance blocked my view and I couldn’t see anything after that, so I went to bed.’ His last words are like a full stop to everything. He went to bed? I swallow hard, and the lump in my throat disappears. He went to bed! Charlie isn’t looking at me, and luckily, because he would see the look of disbelief on my face – how can he go from a hero to an insensitive arsehole in the space of ten words?
He obviously doesn’t think anything of this, as he carries on, but I feel my back stiffen and my chest tighten at everything he is going to say to me now.
‘But this morning I felt strange, I felt bad. I felt like it was my fault somehow. I felt nauseous.’ Well, that’s something at least. He realizes it was wrong to just bugger off to bed.
‘I got on the tube, but it was so hot. I don’t know why I got the tube; I should have got a cab. There was this old woman, like an old-fashioned secretary, standing next to me and her perfume was so strong it turned my stomach even more.’ He wrinkles his nose. ‘I only had to stay on for a few stops, but by the time I got off, I felt so hot and sticky, and sweaty and sick, and my head was itching.’
Charlie is talking with his whole body now, animatedly, reliving it all. He is quietly buzzing, and the room, in darkness, doesn’t seem dark at all.
‘I ran to the toilets in the mainline station, but the door wouldn’t open. I could feel the sickness rising up my throat, and I tried to hold it down, while I barged the door. But I felt so weak and hot. I got it open on the fourth go, but then this terrible smell came out.’ Charlie puts his hand over his mouth and I think he is going to be sick when he gags. I pull away slightly, and move my feet out of firing distance.
But from behind his hand, he continues. ‘I had never smelt anything like it, and there was this guy, just slumped into the dirty sink. He was stiff as a board. His face was blue, and his fingers were all twisted at weird angles.’
‘Jesus,’ I say again, completely involuntarily.
Charlie hangs his head in shame. ‘I threw up all over him.’
The thought of it makes him retch again.
‘Somebody shouted out, and then people started coming, the station attendants, all holding their noses, their eyes watering from the smell of my sick and his death. I had to get away, and I pushed past the guard and up the escalators, and outside.’
We both catch our breath – Charlie has certainly had a terrible day. I rub the back of my neck, and try and unknot the tension that has built in the last twenty minutes listening to Charlie’s story.
‘What happened then?’ I ask, hungry for more dreadful gossip.
‘I thought I felt better – I got to work and had some water, but then some guy, Piers, from the backroom, just some fucking research guy, he made a crack about me having thrown up on my suit. I had been sick on the bottom of my Armani trousers. Sick all over them. They told me to cool off, after I hit him, so I came home.’
‘You hit somebody at work?’ I ask, incredulous. Charlie would never normally do anything to jeopardize his work – he lives for his work.
‘Yeah, I did – I’m not proud of it! Anyway, I tried to change but I couldn’t find anything. Everything needed washing.’ Charlie turns and looks at the kitchen behind him, and then looks back at me, gesturing behind him. ‘I started washing all my clothes.’
He sounds like a child who has been caug
ht doing something they shouldn’t, getting his nice, expensive, dry-clean only work suits all wet. I look towards the kitchen and sure enough the floor is covered with water, and all of Charlie’s suits are spread, sopping wet, across the floor.
‘This dress was the only thing I could find, that didn’t need cleaning. You must have left it here one night. I don’t know, it was here, so I put it on.’
‘Charlie, stop!’ I put a hand up. ‘Charlie, this is all absolutely awful, don’t get me wrong – but the dress? That bit I don’t get – why put on a dress?’ I search his face for an answer, but he looks at me with impatience.
‘I just told you – everything else needed washing!’ He looks at me like I’m the idiot. I am starting to worry. He thinks there is logic there.
‘Anyway, I ran out of soap powder so I went downstairs to the newsagent’s, and the guy told me to get out, that he didn’t want to serve me! I told him he had served me hundreds of times before, but he pushed me out onto the street, and that’s when I fell and banged my eye on the kerb.’ He points to the dried-up slit above his eye. ‘I had the washing powder, though, I just hadn’t paid for it. So I brought it back up. And then, I don’t know, I sat here for a while … and then you came in.’
I look down and for the first time register that Charlie has a packet of soap powder by his side. It has half spilled out onto the carpet.
I make my deduction quickly – he has completely lost it. This whole strange sequence of events has made him snap, and he has turned into a dress-wearing, hygiene freak, class ‘A’ nutter. Is this what happens when people go mad? I always thought it would be a steady process and you would notice them changing over a period of months, making occasional bird noises, or claiming to be Mother Teresa, or you’d catch them eating compost. But Charlie appears to have leap-frogged the progressive type of madness, and just gone straight for the looney tunes version of boys in ill-fitting dresses talking gibberish. Nobody would blame me for dumping a mad man, surely? Or would they think me cold? I do a quick mental tot up in my head and draw the conclusion that I would need to look supportive for about three weeks, and then I could claim strain and give him the heave-ho, as long as he is safely ensconced in a home, with some crayons, where he can’t get to me in one last rational act of anger and passion. It’s amazing how quickly you plan the next month of your life, four seconds to be precise. But then I’ve always been an A grade student; it might take somebody else a little longer. I have forgotten Charlie is still in the room, as I make my getaway plans, but he speaks and I jump slightly in surprise.
‘I need to get away for a few days, Nicola. I think I’m cracking up.’
It’s the understatement of the year – ‘I think I’m cracking up’ from the guy in the hot blue Lycra and no pants, with tear stains down his cheeks from half an hour’s bawling.
‘Charlie, will you be alright, just going off by yourself? Go and stay with your brother or something instead.’ I am relieved to hear him say he wants to get away, and he isn’t expecting me to stick around. It would be hypocritical of us both. Maybe he’s not so mad after all, and has just had a bad couple of days. Don’t get me wrong, I am horrified by his experience, but I can’t pretend I wasn’t about to end this twisted relationship, and I can’t pretend our problems have just disappeared. I want him to get out of London, clear his head of the trauma of the last few days, and then come back, either still completely mad, although this is obviously not my wish, or more realistically, insensitive and tactless as ever. I dread breaking up with people, even though I haven’t had to do it for years, I can still remember how horrible it is. I hate the weeks leading up to it, when you can feel it coming, when you haven’t admitted it to yourself yet, but you know what you are going to do. The sentences are already forming in your mind, you just aren’t quite ready to say them out loud yet. And then gradually, you find yourself rehearsing it in your head at night, like some school production of Shakespeare, stumbling over your lines. By the time it comes to actually doing it, you are a professional. Then he pleads with you, with his eyes, and his words. He reaches out and grabs your hand, just a little too roughly, and tries to stop his voice from breaking, and grabs at the tears at the sides of his eyes.
Except that’s not how it turns out at all. You fluff up your lines, your own voice breaks with emotion, he just sits, no dramatic response, understanding that it’s been on the cards for a while. And he is reasonable. It’s not romantic, it’s pathetic and he is stronger than you. You know you have done the right thing, and that you weren’t compatible and you hadn’t been happy. But even so you have just, and of your own volition, completely ostracized one of your best friends, the person you have spent most of your time with for the last six months or whatever.
I have always felt better being dumped. You have no choice in that matter. At least you can get on with it, spurred on by rage or pride or secret relief that he has done it now and not waited a couple of weeks, by which time you would have been forced to do it yourself.
‘Charlie, where are you going to go?’
He looks at me desperately, and grabs my hand again, too quickly for me to pull it away. His voice rises. The madness is back again, I just know it, he’s about to say something stupid:
‘I need you to come with me. Nicola, come with me, you have to. I’m losing it. I can’t ask anybody else. Nix, please – I don’t know what’s happening to me.’
I hadn’t expected this. It’s not the best time for us to take a weekend break. Maybe I should tell him … confess all.
‘Nicola, if the last six years mean anything to you at all, please come with me.’
I can’t go with him, I just can’t. I can’t tell him I don’t want to see him any more, but I can’t swing the other way. He has pushed it too far for this – he has spent the last year showing no thought for my feelings, and yet now he expects me to pick up the pieces during some early midlife crisis. This isn’t fair. He can’t expect me to do this – he can’t be this selfish.
‘The thing is, Charlie, and kind of on that subject … maybe it would be better if you stay with your parents? Or with your brother, or down in Devon at the cottage? Don’t you think that would be better? Come on, Charlie, be honest, I don’t know how we’d cope for a weekend together. I think that maybe I’m not the best person for you to be with, while you sort your head out.’
He wrings my hands with his, and his eyes plead with me. ‘Nicola, please. I promise I won’t touch you. We’ll go just as friends. You were going to finish with me, I know that.’ Again, I am shocked. I didn’t realize he knew. His sudden insanity is lending him a clarity that is quite off-putting, especially considering that, before today, it has been known to take him three weeks to notice I’ve had my hair coloured. Now, now he manages to guess what I am about to say before I say it! He’s got some kind of Uri Geller thing going on. I contemplate getting a spoon, to test it out properly, but then realize I don’t really want to be handing him metal implements, no matter how blunt.
‘It’s fine,’ he says, as he registers my surprise as guilty shock. ‘And I promise, after this, you never have to see me again. But please, Nix, do this for me. Help me out. I know I’ve been a cheating arsehole shit, thoughtless and insensitive, but please. Just help me. I can’t stop crying … I feel like my head’s going to cave in.’ On cue, he starts sobbing again. I don’t know what the hell to do.
‘Charlie, I really don’t think it’s a good idea, plus, you know, Evil Ghost 2 is playing up, José is going to have my arse if it goes over budget, and…’ Charlie grabs the sides of my face and pulls me close to him, forcing me to look into his eyes. There’s a deep fear in there, and he genuinely believes he is losing it. I feel my body, previously stiff with tension, soften slightly at those eyes . There is something familiar in them that I haven’t seen for an age, or maybe I just feel needed.
‘Charlie, how about this,’ I whisper, ‘we’ll go away. We’ll go down to Devon, stay in your parents’ cottage,
and just sort you out. Because I know you are scared now, but I really, honestly, truly believe that all you need is some sleep, and some clean air, and some perspective, and you will be fine. But then, hon, then we don’t have to have the conversation we were going to have. Then we don’t see each other as much. Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ Charlie whispers back, and doesn’t seem to have heard anything other than my agreeing to look after him for the next couple of days.
‘But Charlie …’ I have to get this clear now, if I am going to do it.
‘Charlie, when we are done – Charlie, look at me.’ I hold his chin and pull his head up, so he is looking at me with his teary eyes.
‘When Devon is done and we come back, and you are your old self again,’ I force a smile, ‘then we’re done, ok?’ I nod my head at him, as if to encourage agreement. ‘Then we go our separate ways, ok? You’ll feel better, I promise. And we should go just as friends, just like you said. Separate rooms, separate beds, we’ll just chill out, and get you better.’ A wave of relief sweeps over me – I don’t have to have the conversation after all. This conversation that I have been putting off for nearly a year doesn’t need to happen now. Thank God!
Charlie drops his head into my lap and says, all of a sudden, ‘Of course, thank you. Now can I go in this? I feel comfortable in this.’ He gestures down at the dress. It was obviously my turn for a moment of madness. What have I let myself in for?
‘No, Charlie, I think you should get changed.’
‘But,’ he points like a child towards the kitchen, then says pathetically, on the brink of tears again, ‘I have nothing to wear! Do you have anything I can borrow? What about that sundress I bought you last year?’
The wave subsides. Shit.
I’m With Stupid
I pay the cabbie, tell him to keep the twenty, and try to direct Charlie into Paddington without too much fuss. He keeps trying to take off the Burberry mac I have made him wear, pulling at it like Houdini in chains. Underneath, he is still in the blue Lycra number. We have been unable to find anything else that wasn’t soaking wet or covered in dried-on soap suds. His hair has flopped, all the blond spikes now stuck to his forehead, and his sideburns are still covered in soap powder. Even his out of work clothes, his FCUK jeans, his trendy clothes that so few men can pull off, were soaking wet on the kitchen floor. The eggshell blue lambswool Nicole Farhi jumper my parents bought him last Christmas lay crushed and shrunken and ruined forever in a pile on the tiles. I am incredibly self-conscious about his almost nakedness, and the fact that he has refused to put any underpants on before leaving the flat. He is intermittently laughing and sobbing, and it was all I could do to make the taxi driver take us in the first place. I had hailed a few cabs which had slowed down and pulled over and then accelerated quickly as soon as they caught sight of Charlie giggling like a schoolgirl and waving his arms around like a mad scientist. I resolutely shouted out after each one of them, ‘I’ve taken your plate numbers! I’m reporting you!’ but they were long gone, and I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have picked us up. A big blond guy with blood on his face and a blue dress popping out from under his flasher’s mac, and a stressed-looking girl carrying all the bags and chain-smoking. We’re hardly Posh and Becks.