by Mike Gayle
Dan didn’t say a word. It was almost like he was in a trance, trapped in his subconscious weighing up the current situation on his internal scales of justice. On the one side was his pride, and on the other his love for Meena. Whatever the result, in the end he decided to bail out—to try and save what was left of his dignity.
“Hang on,” said Dan, regaining his confidence. “You’re leaving me? I’m the one who said, ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ I’m leaving you, okay?”
“You’re damned right you’re leaving me,” said Meena. “I spent months looking for this flat to rent and I want you out of it now!”
“Now?”
“No, yesterday.” She pointed to the door. “I want you to find yourself a time machine like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, I want you to climb into it, switch on the controls and erase yourself from my history.”
His newfound confidence began to falter. “But where will I go?”
“I don’t care, but whichever stone you crawl under, you can take that one with you!” She pointed at me. It was the first time Meena had addressed me directly in months. She usually refused to acknowledge my existence in the hope I’d somehow dissipate, like an embarrassing fart from an elderly relative.
“It’s not enough that you assassinate my character, now you’re having a go at my mates?” said Dan in my defense—although strictly speaking it wasn’t in my defense, he was just trying to score points now. “I thought you said you liked Duffy.”
“Is there no limit to your feeblemindedness?” she said, as if addressing a mischievous five-year-old. “I can’t stand Duffy. He eats our food. Watches our TV. Uses our telephone.” I momentarily contemplated some sort of financial offering to make amends for the phone abuse, but all I had in my pockets was a twenty-pence piece and a Blockbuster video card. “I want you”—she pointed at me again—“and I want you”—she pointed at him—“out now!”
“Well, I’m not going.” Dan crossed his arms defiantly. “This is my flat as much as it is yours. So if you want me out of your life so badly, you’d better start packing.”
That was then. Before I moved in Dan and I were just equally non-achieving mates from the comedy circuit, but after twelve months together we were so similar it was scary. We liked the same films, TV, music and sitcoms. The only thing we differed on was relationships. While I had the steadiest of steady girlfriends, after Meena, Dan became a subscriber to what he called the Kebab Theory of Women—“A nice idea on a post-pub Friday night but not the sort of thing you want on the pillow when you wake up next day.” I couldn’t help but think that it was all an act to stop himself from getting hurt again, but as acts go it was remarkably convincing.
Dan didn’t seem to want to talk about Meena for the minute, so leaving the wedding invitation open on top of the bookcase next to my seat I disappeared to the kitchen and emptied the remains of a three-day-old jar of Ragu over a bowl of cold pasta and shoved it into the microwave. I watched impatiently as the bowl rotated in the oven, and thought about the wedding invitation. Meena was clearly rubbing it in—letting him know that she’d moved on and he hadn’t. Hell indeed had no fury like a woman scorned.
Scratching his stomach absentmindedly Dan came into the kitchen, opened the fridge door and peered in. “There’s nothing to eat,” he said, rooting about. “Can I have that cheese you bought last week?”
“No problem.” I threw a packet of cream crackers at him. “Have these as well.” I returned to staring at the microwave waiting for the ping. “Does it bother you that Meena’s getting married?”
“No,” said Dan a little too quickly and then changed subjects. “What kind of cheese is this?”
“Dunno,” I said. “Cheddar I think.” Dan didn’t want to talk about Meena and her impending nuptials when there were clearly more pressing topics to discuss like cheese. I didn’t blame him. He wasn’t made of stone, but it was pointless talking about something that he had no control over. He’d do his grieving in private and if he needed me to accompany him on an evening of Drinking and Forgetting down our local, the Haversham Arms, then accompany him I would.
After what felt like a decade the microwave pinged and I made my way back to the living room with my steaming bowl of pasta. As Dan flicked between the weather report on BBC1 and a documentary on Channel Four about burglars in Leeds, I wondered if I should collect his opinion on The Proposal to add to those of Vernie, Charlie and my mother.
“So that’s why you’ve been moping round the flat like a lovesick teenager,” he said after I filled him in on the details of The Proposal. “You told me she’d gone on a course for work.”
“Yeah, well, I lied,” I confessed. “The thing is, what do I do now?”
“I’ll tell you what to do,” he said, switching channels with the remote. “Do nothing. Take it from me, there’s no way she’s going to dump you just because you don’t want to get married. You’ve been with her what . . . three years?”
“Four years,” I admitted.
“Four years! You’re practically Mr. and Mrs. anyway. My advice—keep your head down and wait for it all to blow over.”
I liked the sound of that. “Pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Exactly. Head in the sand, mate. It was most likely just one of those moments that’s best forgotten. She’s probably embarrassed she even mentioned it to you. I bet you that’s why she hasn’t called.”
I gave his advice the consideration it deserved. Ignoring this whole thing in the hope that it might go away was an extremely attractive proposition—neither of us had to lose face and we could go on with life as it was before.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” he said confidently. “Listen, Duffy, it’s like this: Mel’s invested three—”
“Four,” I corrected.
“All right, four years of her life with you. She’s got you pretty much well trained. Think how long it would take her to get another bloke to your level of obedience.”
“So you’re saying she’s not going to dump me because she’s too lazy to train someone else?”
“Sort of.”
“Thing is . . .” I began.
“Don’t tell me that you’re actually considering getting married.” Dan shook his head in disbelief. “Have I taught you nothing? Did I not teach you The Ways of the Bachelor? And now you want to go over to the dark side? I can’t believe you. I forgave you for that regular girlfriend thing because, well, it was quaint. But getting married? This is definitely one of your worst ideas. It’ll be the end of life as you know it. Everything changes.” He looked over at Meena’s invitation on the bookcase. “Me and Meena would’ve ended up getting married. Now what kind of mistake would that have been?”
Dan was depressing me beyond belief. “Cheers, Yoda,” I said curtly. “I’ll sort it out myself.”
I stood up, picked up the remote control from the arm of the sofa Dan was sitting on, and returned to my seat, flicking through the channels erratically while I shoveled huge forkfuls of my now cold pasta dinner into my mouth.
This was the closest Dan and I had ever come to an argument. He must have felt bad about it too, because he left the room and returned minutes later with a maxi pack of Skips and two cans of Red Stripe as a peace offering. Tearing open the bag he placed it carefully on the carpet between us and handed me a Red Stripe while he searched for the video remote control. “Forget the crappy pasta and forget Mel for the minute. Eat Skips, drink beer, watch telly and stop thinking,” he said sagely. “Thinking isn’t good for either of us.”
Even Nosferatu seemed
to be smiling
It was now nine days since I’d last seen or heard from Mel. The advice of my mum, sister, brother-in-law and flatmate had been rattling around my head for days without having any effect on me other than giving me a headache. I couldn’t escape the feeling that at the age of twenty-eight the answer to my predicament really should’ve come from inside me and not from friend
s and relatives. Which is why, I decided, that even though I still wasn’t sure how I felt about marriage, it was time for Mel and me to talk and come up with a solution that we could both live with.
“Oh, it’s you.”
It was Julie who answered the door to Mel’s flat. She was the only person in the world who could make “Oh, it’s you” sound like “Burn in hell, you unfortunate bag of crap.” It was a bad sign that she’d taken over door-answering duties, because it meant without question that she’d been spending every second since The Proposal at Mel’s, rubbishing my good name.
Julie—whom I referred to in private as Nosferatu, Princess of Darkness, for no other reason than it made me laugh—was Mel’s best friend and my archenemy. The first time I met her I was incredibly nervous, because Mel had told me that if I could pass the Julie Test, then meeting her parents would be a piece of cake. Over poached oysters with iceberg butter sauce at Julie’s house, I watched her mentally ticking off the points against me as I revealed I was a temp (-4), had dropped out of university (-2), was constantly broke (-6), considered amusing people in the back room of a pub was a smart career move (-4) and was doing little to rectify any of my point-minusing situations (-10).
At the end of the evening it was clear to both me and Mel that I’d failed the Julie Test with a record-breakingly bad score. I remember thinking, If my performance tonight is anything to go by, Mel’s parents are really going to hate me. Julie, however, loved Mel just like Thelma loved Louise, although without the lesbian subtext, and so for her sake she tolerated me as if I was a bad habit—like nail-biting or not washing your hands after you’ve used the toilet—that Mel just couldn’t break.
Julie lived with and was engaged to Mark, whom I quite liked but for the fact I was totally intimidated by his success. He made music videos for hideously famous bands, was always traveling to glamorous places and to top it all was two years younger than me—which galled me immensely. Mark was one of life’s doers. While I’d been drinking cider in the park and chasing girls who didn’t know better, as a teenager he’d been writing and shooting short films on a Super 8 camera. We had no common ground whatsoever. Occasionally when we all went out together he’d try and draw me into a conversation about high-performance sports cars, trekking holidays in China or his latest music video, and every time without fail I’d just look at him vacantly, desperately hoping that at some point he would ask me what was going on in EastEnders so that I’d have something to contribute to the conversation.
Together, Mark and Julie were couple perfection at its Two-newspapers-on-a-Sunday-his-’n’-hers-Birkenstocks-three-foreign-holidays-a-year-and-smug-about-it worst. But there was no escaping them because we “double coupled” all the time, usually at Julie’s insistence. I never understood why she stipulated that we did so many things together. It was as if because she and Mark were a couple they were only allowed to socialize with other couples for fear of catching single-people disease.
“All right, Jules?” I said chirpily. Julie loathed being called Jules more than anything. “Are you going to let me in or what?”
Guardedly Julie opened the door to the communal hallway of the house and let me in, but I could tell she was in two minds about whether to do so. “What do you want?”
“I’ve just popped round to hear what you think’s wrong with me this week.”
“How long have you got?” she snorted, flicking a stray strand of strawberry blonde hair out of her eyes.
“As long as you want,” I said, grimacing.
She let me in and we squared up to each other in the hallway like two gunfighters at the O.K. Corral. As I stared deeply into her defiant pale blue eyes, I was reminded of something I’d read once in a magazine. Apparently when two animals hold each other’s direct gaze for longer than a minute, the laws of nature state they will either tear each other to pieces or copulate. The thought of having carnal knowledge of Julie unsettled me so much that I began to smile nervously.
“Well, for starters,” said Julie, ignoring the grin fixed to my face, “you’re a selfish pig. You have no respect for Mel or her feelings.”
“And?”
“You’re inconsiderate.”
“And?”
“You do that hateful thing where you roll your eyes.”
“And?”
“You put everything else that’s in your life before Mel.”
“Errrrrrrrr!” I made the annoying quiz-buzzer-type noise from Just a Minute on Radio 4. “Repetition. I think you’ll find putting everything that’s in my life before Mel is the same as being selfish.”
Julie scowled threateningly. She was officially angry now, which in an incredibly petty sort of way made me happy. “You would say that you—”
“You don’t know anything about me, Julie,” I interrupted. “You just think you do. I do respect Mel and her feelings, I don’t put everything that’s in my life before her . . .” I paused briefly. “But I admit I do occasionally leave the toilet seat up, which might be interpreted as inconsiderate, and I definitely do that thing where I roll my eyes, but that doesn’t exactly make me Darth Vader in a pair of Levi’s, does it?”
Julie screwed up her face angrily like a bulldog chewing a wasp. “I don’t know what she ever saw in you . . .” she began furiously, but then her voice trailed off. Pants, I thought nervously. If she’s not going to tear me to pieces maybe she is going to have sex with me after all. Fortunately I soon discovered what had stopped her outburst so abruptly. It was Mel.
“Oh, please, you two,” sighed Mel. “Can’t you ever just give it a rest?”
Like a petulant child Julie threw a thunderous “It was all his fault” glance in my direction while I cranked my ever-so-angelic smile up in the hope it would make Julie melt, or combust, or whatever it is that vampires do when they’ve been defeated.
Mel was wearing her it’s-Saturday-therefore-I-shop clothes—jeans, white T-shirt, and a long thick woollen hooded top. She’d had a haircut, too, and it made her face look that little bit more beautiful. I resisted a genuine compulsion to tell her that she looked stunning, because I knew she’d only think I was trying to flatter her. So instead I smiled warmly, hoping that the upward curling of the corners of my lips would somehow convey my keen appreciation. Mel didn’t return my smile, though. Her expression revealed neither approval nor disapproval of my appearance in her hallway, although the manner in which she sat wearily on the bottom stair was a strong indicator that I was far from being back in favor.
“How are you?” she said abruptly.
“Okay,” I mumbled. “How are you?”
Silence.
“How’s work?”
Silence.
I hated arguments like this. I wanted her to stop being angry with me. “I love you, you know,” I said, kneeling down in front of her.
“So you say.” She took off her jacket. “Is that all you came to tell me?”
I looked into her eyes, trying to find the real her. The Mel sitting in front of me was Hard Mel, an alter ego she sometimes utilized to stop herself from forgiving me when she knew she really shouldn’t. It was true that she was too forgiving and perhaps I did deserve the harsh treatment I was receiving, but even so, I thought this was a bit much. The offense of Not Knowing When to Marry Your Long-term Girlfriend was new legislation and I felt quite strongly that the marathon begging, shuffling and scraping I’d done in the past week was more than recompense.
So I waited, saying nothing. The silence was so uncomfortable even Julie felt the need to disappear upstairs to Mel’s flat on the pretext of getting a glass of water. The longer I said nothing, the more Hard Mel stared through me like I didn’t exist. Soon whatever regret I had about the way I’d treated Mel was swallowed up whole by resentment. What I’d done wrong was no longer the point. It wasn’t about apology, making up or explanation. All that counted now was winning.
“This is pointless.” I sighed. “You’re not in the right mood to talk. Okay. I’ll come bac
k later.”
1–0
In a single swoop I’d claimed the moral high ground, belittled her feelings and made myself out to be the last remaining reasonable person left on Planet Earth.
“You can’t stand being wrong, can you?” retorted Mel. “You’re not man enough to admit when you’ve made a mistake.”
1–1
The moral high ground that I craved so highly was all Mel’s. She’d pinpointed my insecurities and cast slurs upon my masculinity. I was in great danger of looking stupid.
“Whatever,” I sighed exasperatedly.
2–1
Argument shorthand for “I’m pretending that I can’t be bothered to argue with you.” I’m bound to win now, I thought spitefully, and then Mel started to cry.
Game over.
This wasn’t fair at all. “Whatever” wasn’t a phrase worthy of tears. Mel had cheated by using the crying card when I hadn’t even provoked it. Most of our big arguments ended with tears. She’d say something horrible. I’d say something equally horrible. She’d cry. And I’d feel guilty. Tears were the secret weapon from which I had no defense. One day, I decided, I’m going to get into an argument with Mel and burst into tears before she does, just so she can see how it feels.
I hated seeing her cry. Absolutely hated it. I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her I was sorry, but I knew she’d just reject my peace offering. So instead, brushing past Julie—who had returned to watch the intriguing spectacle of two people not talking—I shook my head in her direction in a high-minded “I pity you” manner, and opened the door.