Less Than Three

by Jess Whitecroft

  “Successful day,” I said, later, when I met Simon in the Albany. “I have a job and you have a date. Everything’s coming up roses.”

  But Simon was in no mood to celebrate. He was tapping away on his phone. “Bear with me,” he said, holding up a finger.

  “Really?”

  “Hound Of The Baskervilles,” he said. “Study In Scarlet…what was the third one?”

  “Boscombe Valley Mystery,” I said, wondering if he was channelling Benedict Cumberbatch’s wildly unlovable Holmes. “Wait, are you taking notes on what I told you?”

  “Of course I am. I need to recall the conversation as if I’d been the one that was having it with him in the first place.” He frowned and put down the phone. “Maybe you should have recorded the conversation.”

  “Well, that’s not weird and creepy at all.”

  He sighed. “I just want to be accurate, Nathan.”

  “He’s a person,” I said. “Not a ruptured disc. People are okay with a certain degree of inaccuracy. Actually some people spend their entire lives at a hundred and eighty degrees to reality as the rest of us understand it and still end up as head of the Foreign Office. It’s fine.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “The whole thing has to be consistent. He can’t ever find out that that was really you. Did you use…lines?”

  “Lines?”

  “Yes. ‘What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?’ And so on.”

  I swallowed my mouthful of beer very carefully. “Welp, I think we’ve finally got to the root of your pulling problem.”

  “What?”

  “Lines?” I said. “Lines are for Dolores Umbridge, Simon. Lines are not for lovers. I went into the bookshop, asked him if he had a copy of Bell’s Operations of Surgery and followed the conversation as it arose.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I just did. There’s no formula. There are no mnemonics you can learn. There’s no instruction manual for people.”

  “There is,” he said. “Gray’s Anatomy is in its forty-first edition.” He smiled. There. That was a joke. A Simon joke.

  “You’re not funny,” I said. “Look, if you want to get to know him, just talk to him. Ask him questions about himself.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Where he’s from. What he likes. What he dislikes. Fuck it, ask him his favourite colour if nothing else comes to mind; all that really matters is that you’re genuinely interested in the answer.” He had the phone out again. “And stop taking notes.”

  “I have to,” he said. “There’s no way I’ll remember all of this.” He shook his head. “No, there has to be some better way to do this. Maybe some sort of earpiece.”

  “Cyrano with a Bluetooth?”

  “Exactly.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Firstly because wearing an earpiece in public makes you look like a bellend, and secondly because I’m not doing this for you. I can’t do this for you.”

  Simon folded his arms and raised his eyebrows. He looked so much better with two. It really was a remarkable difference. “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Both,” I said. “Look, I got you into UCL, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And does that mean that I would have been qualified to take your place at UCL and train to be a doctor?”

  “No,” he said. “You didn’t have the grades. Plus you nearly fainted that time you had to pull out a wasp sting.”

  “See? Just because I can pass the interview doesn’t mean I’m qualified to perform spinal surgery. There are some things only you can do, and this is one of them. I like girls, remember?”

  3

  And that’s how I ended up sitting in Russell Square Gardens, relaying first date instructions through a Bluetooth headset to my brother.

  It wasn’t going very well. He was panicking and Roxane hadn’t so much as wandered onto the balcony yet.

  “Tell me what to say,” he said, desperately.

  “No. Use your own damn words.”

  “I don’t know what to say to him.”

  “Well, figure it out,” I said, watching a couple of teenage lovers splash through the fountain. They were lithe and brown and beautiful, and had no idea of how many pigeons had probably shat in that fountain in the space of a single afternoon. “I told you. Ask questions. Listen to the answers. And for God’s sake, don’t talk about spinal trauma. It’s not sexy.”

  “Oh shit,” said Simon. “He’s here. He’s coming in. What do I say?”

  “‘Hello. How are you?’”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. Flail. Crap yourself. Ask him what his favourite colour is. Jesus, Simon – just talk to him. Like we discussed, remember?”

  Like we discussed, before he bottled it and messaged me saying he’d found the smallest Bluetooth headset in the world and nobody would even know he was wearing an earpiece, because this was the one stage psychics used. And that was when I’d agreed to go along with it, because I was so not in the mood to listen to Simon go off on another one of his rants about psychics and faith healers.

  I watched the lovers walk away, their wet footprints rapidly drying on the concrete, and listened in. “Hello,” Simon said. “How are you?”

  Good opener. At that point I assume Rob said something about the broiling temperature in the city and Simon jumped in with both feet.

  “Oh, I know. It’s awful. Whole planet’s cooked. Once it gets hot enough to melt the frozen carbon traps under the ocean it’s going to make the Permian Extinction look like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic, but hopefully we’ll all have died in unsurvivable heatwaves by then.”

  “Cheery opener,” I said. “I think I preferred the spinal trauma.”

  “Sorry,” Simon said, and I didn’t know if he was talking to Rob or me or both. “I’m being depressing, aren’t I?”

  “A bit,” said Rob, and I could hear him surprisingly clearly. “On the other hand you’re not tweeting angry madness at strangers every time they hashtag climate change.”

  “Oh, I don’t really do Twitter. If I wanted to live in the comments section of articles and YouTube videos I’d…well, let’s just say I’d present myself for psychiatric evaluation sooner rather than later.”

  Rob’s laugh honked over the headset. This was going fine. What the hell was Simon worried about?

  “It’s not so bad,” I heard Rob say. “Fewer Nazis than YouTube, although that’s not saying much.”

  “Oh, YouTube. I don't know what happened to that. It used to be videos of cats and babies, but now it seems like it's determined to get me into Jordan Peterson, no matter how much I kick and scream.”

  “Oh, him. With the lobsters. What the hell is all that about?”

  “Something about serotonin and lobster hierarchy,” said Simon, and I settled in to listen to what the hell was going on with the lobsters, because I had no idea either. “The more serotonin a lobster has the more dominant the lobster, which is why we should all strive to be more dominant because it’s good for our serotonin levels…no, I know. It’s nonsense. You can’t use lobsters as a paradigm for human behaviour, never mind for the uptake of neurotransmitters. They’re lobsters. Even people who write self-help books are about a million times brighter than a lobster: they don’t even have brains, just a collection of basal ganglia. They’re not even mammals. The last time we shared an evolutionary ancestor with a lobster was back when things were still evolving the first rudimentary digestive tracts.”

  A small girl in a pink t-shirt – proclaiming PRINCESS in sparkly silver letters – was dithering at the edge of the fountain. She scowled at me and splashed her bare feet in the water. There was no sign of a parent.

  “And furthermore, serotonin isn’t exclusive to humans and lobsters anyway, even if you leave aside the whole chicken and egg situation of what came first – the serotonin or the dominance…”

  “Okay, that’s enou
gh lobster chat,” I said. “Now offer to buy the man a drink. It’s thirty degrees and we’re all boiling, never mind the lobsters.”

  The child continued to splash and scowl. I remembered that kids could drown in about four inches of water and felt suddenly nervous. Then I spotted a blonde wrangling an ice-cream covered toddler over by a bench. I had a feeling that this was Mum, because although she wasn’t wearing a t-shirt that said so, the younger child was dressed all in blue and his t-shirt said MISTER MONSTER. I looked over and hoped she was about to come and remove the pink one from the water’s edge, but no such luck.

  “…had one the other week in this pub in Greenwich,” Rob was saying. “Near the observatory. You would have loved it, actually. You could hardly move in there for Newton memorabilia.”

  “Now, he would have loved that.”

  “I know, right? The ego. One of the worst personalities in science.”

  “All right, I’m off,” I said. “You’re doing fine, and there’s an enraged child that keeps staring at me.” The pink one was scowling with a purpose now. What was her problem?

  “How was the Bell book?” I heard Rob say.

  “Uh…the what now?”

  “Joseph Bell?”

  “Um…yes. It was…interesting.” Oh God. I shouldn’t have told him I was leaving. I should have just left, because he’d gone into a panic. “I’m sorry, but did you know your hip was touching me?”

  “Yes,” said Rob flirtatiously. “And now my elbow’s touching you, too.”

  Fuck. There was physical contact going on? Okay, now we had a problem, because Simon wasn’t a hugger. The only time he got hands-on was when there was exposed bone involved.

  “Right,” Simon said. “Just so we’re clear, this is definitely a date, isn’t it?”

  Shit. Did Roxane fuck on first dates? There was no way he was ready for that.

  “Yes,” he said, and I could hear the words ‘help me’ in his voice. The little girl was coming over. Freckles and a scowl beneath a big, pink bow. “Yes, it’s a date.”

  “Hang on in there,” I said. “I’ll get right back to you, only there’s a kid here and she’s giving me that Children Of The Corn stare.” I lowered the phone. “Can I help you? Are you lost?”

  The girl glowered at my coffee cup on the bench, glowered back at me and said, “Put your cup in the bin.”

  “I…I will.”

  “Now.”

  “In a minute,” I said. “I’m busy right now.”

  She wasn’t having it. “My mummy,” she said. “Says that people who litter ought to be hung up by their toenails and get beaten with rubber hoses.”

  “Your mummy might have an anger management problem.” I said. Simon was currently going down in flames, anxiously rambling about where exactly in the pub they wanted to sit. “Please go away.”

  She didn’t budge. “Put. Your. Cup. In. The. Bin.”

  “I haven’t finished with it yet,” I said.

  “…well, the window’s nice, but it’s rather warm. And the booths are cooler, but you might be claustrophobic…”

  Great. The entire concept of ‘a date’ had broken my brother’s brain. Meanwhile, Little Miss Angry came stomping up to my cup, snatched it and tipped it upside down.

  “It’s empty,” she said. “Put it in the bin.”

  “No,” I said. I would usually have put it in the bin, but it was the principle of the thing. If I’d wanted to be ordered around by eight year olds I would have had children already. “If it bothers you that much, you do it.”

  “No. It’s your cup.”

  “And the bin is right there.”

  The blonde came over, having subdued the ice-cream covered blue one long enough to strap him into a pushchair. “Maisie?” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “Your daughter has aggressive opinions about littering,” I said.

  “So she should,” said the mother. “People who litter should be—”

  “—hung up by their toenails and beaten with rubber hoses. Yes, we covered that.”

  “He wouldn’t put the cup in the bin, Mummy,” said Maisie, with an awful Machiavellian sweetness that made me very afraid for her younger brother.

  “I was about to,” I said.

  “You weren’t,” she said. “You stood up and you were going to leave it there. I saw you.”

  “Oh my God, fine.” I picked up the cup and placed it in the bin. “Happy?”

  Simon was melting down faster than a Greenland ice sheet. He’d lurched awkwardly into a stilted conversation about the cocktail menu. “I don’t think I’ve ever tried a daiquiri before.”

  Shit. Daiquiri. That was the word we’d agreed on. The one that said he needed an exit strategy. Not that Mummy gave a shit about my problems. Oh no, she was standing there giving me a stinkeye that spoke volumes about where Maisie had got it from.

  “There’s no need to get snippy,” she said.

  “Piss off,” I said, and she covered Maisie’s ears, giving me a moment to escape and call Simon. “All right. Get out of there. You’re flailing.”

  “I know,” said Simon, obviously talking into his phone now. “Keep a close eye on the oxygen sats and if it starts going cyanotic check for clots. I’m on my way…” He took a breath. “…I am so sorry about this.”

  I hid behind a large tree and peeked furtively as Maisie and her mother left the garden. By now the tiny blue bundle in the pushchair was getting in on the act, and he was thrashing against his restraints like a straightjacketed maniac, screaming at the top of his tiny lungs. Perhaps he also had strong opinions on littering. Or perhaps he just didn’t like blue, or all forms of marketing driven gender essentialism. Couldn’t exactly blame him for that.

  Simon came hurrying forth from the general direction of the Albany. There were dark sweat patches under his arms and he looked scared to death. “What happened?” he said. “Lines. I needed lines.”

  “I’m sorry. I was being accosted by an incredibly angry primary schooler. Had a bee in her bonnet about recycling. And you were doing fine.”

  “Yes, until he started touching me. And then he said it was a date and—”

  “—all your massive social malfunctions happened at once,” I said. “Yeah. I know. I was listening.”

  Simon sagged against the bole of the tree. “Oh my God. What am I going to do? He’s lovely.”

  “And he’s into you.”

  “Do you think so?”

  I groaned. “Simon. Touching. Flirting. These are blindingly obvious social cues.”

  “I know, but what if he wants to have sex?”

  “Uh…have sex with him? Assuming you want to. I’m guessing you do, if you’re taking him out for a drink.”

  “Not yet. I thought this would be…slower.”

  “Nobody has time for slow any more,” I said. “As you pointed out in your opener, the planet’s cooking and we’re staring down the barrel of a carbon apocalypse. The days of whispering sweet words under his window in the moonlight are over.”

  “Some sweet words would have been helpful, Nathan. Some fucking Cyrano you are.”

  “I told you – I have neither the nose nor the inclination. Now, go and do whatever surgery you were pretending to do, then call him back, tell him you’re sorry and make another date. And this time prepare for flirting.”

  *

  I wasn’t prepared for flirting either. And I was not prepared for my newest co-star, Nadia. Obviously I had expected my Madame de Tourvel to be attractive, but when she walked into the room it was not the words of Laclos that sprung to mind but those of my new best friend, Rostand.

  When one looks at her one thinks of a peach smiling at a strawberry!

  She wore her pale red hair tied up in a severe, ballet-dancer bun, baring a long white neck and a dusting of freckles at the nape. Her handshake was wet, because she’d been juggling a bag and a sweating, dewed water bottle at the same time, so that her first word to me was an apology. “Sorry – gro
ss.”

  “It’s okay. It’s just water.”

  She screwed the cap back on the bottle and checked me out. “So you must be Valmont,” she said. “You’re not what I expected.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “Maybe,” she said, with a little one-shouldered shrug. Her eyes were perfectly green, her nose tip-tilted, her mouth just a bit too generous for her narrow, pointed chin. She was absolutely gorgeous, and somewhat intimidating. She’d done television, after all. And films. Extra stuff and art house films, but she’d done a lot more than me, and looked to be at least five years younger.

  “Show her what you’ve got so far, Nathan,” said Rupa. “Let’s get into this.”

  And so we did. Straight in. We did the first scene between Tourvel and Valmont, one I’d only read through before, and Rupa must had planned it this way, because I found the whole thing jarring. It was Tourvel’s very first appearance in the play, where she’s hanging out at Valmont’s Aunt Rosamonde’s chateau and Valmont – who has been watching her very carefully – performs a ‘secret’ act of charity on his aunt’s estate, knowing full well that Madame de Tourvel has a huntsman who follows him every day to spy on him. The huntsman goes back to Tourvel, tells her that he’s seen Valmont single-handedly rescuing a family from destitution and Tourvel – who knows Valmont only by his wicked reputation – is delighted to see the good in him.

  Whereupon Valmont drops on her like a leopard pouncing out of a tree.

  As soon as we were alone I fell to my knees, leaping in and announcing that I’d been driven to reform my character out of love for her. She shook her head and backed away and I kept hammering away, begging, cajoling, beseeching, blaming her for making me feel this way about her.

  “I’m sorry, I have to stop for a second,” I said, because my throat was dry. “Was it always so quick, the way he moves on her?”

  “I think the implication is that he’s been hanging around in the country for a while,” said Rupa. “He’s been working on her, if you like.”

  “You make it sound so horrible,” I said, and took a mouthful of water. The small rehearsal room was stifling.