“It is horrible,” said Nadia. “The only reason he wants her is to prove that he can have her.”
“I know, and it’s making me very uncomfortable.”
“Good,” said Rupa. “It should. This is Dangerous Liaisons for the post-MeToo world. I want it to be unpleasant. You’re Harvey Weinstein, you’re Donald Trump grabbing them by the pussy, you’re—”
“—a reprehensible and unrepentant rapist,” I said, feeling queasy. “Yeah. I get it.”
“Do you?” she said, hands on hips. “Because sometimes I think you still think this is some charming drawing room comedy. This isn’t Oscar Wilde, Nathan.”
“No. I know. I’m aware of that. It’s just…unsettling. That’s all.”
“Then work with that,” she said. “Analyse those feelings and try to figure out how you’d act if you were disconnected from them. Or explore them. Either way, give me dimension. Give me depth.”
Give me depth, she said, like it wasn’t a thing that actors work their whole lives to bring to their roles. Afterwards I wanted to talk to her and try to nail her down into something more specific, but she had to rush off and Nadia was right there, being all wistfully beautiful while she packed away her script and readjusted her hair.
“How do you think that went?” I asked her, desperate for praise.
“All right. Bit nervous, but I always am the first time.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You’ve done a lot more than me.”
“Mm,” she said, with a tight, self-deprecating smile. “Background extra on Emmerdale. It’s the big time, baby.” She had her arms up, rewinding the knot of her lovely strawberry blonde hair. Her bare armpits were perfectly white, but in that instant I found myself thinking of Rob, of being pressed against him between the narrow shelves of the bookshop. A whiff of boy sweat, and something spicy.
“There’s a slight difference,” said Nadia. “Between being centre stage and sitting in the back of the Woolpack, nursing a pretend gin and tonic.”
“Pretend gin and tonic?”
“Soda water,” she said. “Pissed extras are a massive insurance liability.”
Maybe it was the heat, but my brain felt fuzzy around the edges today. “Right. That makes sense,” I said, and decided to just go for it. “Do you…um…do you want to go and get a real gin and tonic?”
“Thanks,” she said, picking up her bag. “But it’s a bit early in the day for me to hit the hard stuff. Besides, I’m not really a gin person. Can’t get along with juniper. But some other time?”
“Sure,” I said, and I had the sinking feeling that she was only being polite. “I look forward to it.”
She gave that one-shouldered shrug again and adjusted her enormous brown leather bag. “We’re going to be spending a lot of time together,” she said. “May as well find out what I’m working with. See ya!”
“Yeah.” I watched her walk away. Working. Great. Of course the really beautiful co-star had to be the consummate professional. And what the hell was my problem? ‘Do you want to go and get a real gin and tonic?’ It wasn’t even three o’clock. Way to look like a hopeless drunk there, Nathan.
But there was no time to feel sorry for myself, because I had the late afternoon/evening shift at work, an overpriced bar on Floral Street where I mixed cocktails for tourists and the kind of fashionable arseholes who could afford to hang around Floral Street in the first place.
I got there on time, but Pavlo – my friend and flatmate – was still wearing a scowl. I immediately suspected something to do with the large group of girls sitting in the window. You didn’t need to give them a second look to tell that they fell squarely into the second category of Covent Garden people. They had fantastically shiny hair and fistfuls of boutique bags, and they were busy admiring the kind of new shoes you could buy just down the road, if for some reason you were okay with dropping over five hundred on a pair of red sandals that were more strap than shoe. The words BAD TIPPERS may as well have been written above their heads in neon.
“Two strawberry martini,” said Pavlo, before I’d even had time to get behind the bar. “And hurry. You see what state I’m in here.”
“…I mean, it’s such a different vibe to Knightsbridge,” one of the women was saying, in impeccably Benenden tones. “It’s so quirky – I love it.” She pronounced ‘so’ as ‘say’ and I guessed that the West End was her idea of slumming. “Excuse me,” she said, as I walked away from delivering part of their massive drinks order. “But is the balsamic in the strawberry martini gluten free?”
“It’s balsamic vinegar,” I said, which I knew was the wrong fucking answer, but I said it anyway.
“Yah, I know that,” she said. “But is there barley used in the fermentation process?”
It was literally a dot of strawberry balsamic in the very bottom of the glass. Nobody with even the most severe degree of celiac disease was going to swell up and shit out their lower intestine from that, even if it had happened to contain gluten.
“No, that’s malt vinegar, Tasha,” said another one. “Balsamic’s fine. They don’t use barley.”
But Tasha still sideeyed the drinks. “Mmm, I’d better be on the safe side,” she said, and replaced her untouched drink on my tray. “Make it a Cosmo instead. And no vinegar. I don’t know why you’re putting balsamic in a cocktail anyway.”
Pavlo’s scowl could be felt from across the room. The balsamic had been his idea. It sat at the bottom of the strawberry martini and worked its magic on the strawberry juice, then provided a shot of intense, tart sweetness at the end of the drink.
He was in a funny mood anyway. As we were cleaning up after the rich girls – who, true to form, had left a couple of pound coins sitting in an ice-cube puddle – I asked him flat out what had crawled up his bum and died.
“Is flat,” he said. “I was gonna tell you later, because we had Sex And The City girls here…”
“Oh God,” I said, my stomach sinking. We didn’t have the best relationship with our landlord lately. “Are the ants back?”
“They are selling it.”
“What? The ants?” I said, and then it hit me. He was talking about the landlord. “Oh, you’re fucking joking.”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“They can’t do that,” I said, but I knew they absolutely could. And would. “I can’t afford to move. Not now.” I thought sadly of the strawberry martini I’d had to toss away earlier. I could have drained it in one gulp right now. “Did they say when?”
“We have a month,” said Pavlo.
“A month? No. They have to give us more notice than that. I think it’s like ninety days or something.”
He shrugged. “Good luck,” he said. “You could try Citizen’s Advice Bureau, but…”
“Yeah. I know. I’d be better off trying to find somewhere to live.” I sighed, trying to digest this mess. I really didn’t have time for this. I had finally landed a role I’d been wanting to play since I was a teenager and not only was I going to have to pull unspecified ‘depth’ out of my arse somehow, but I was also going to have to move house at the same time? This was not good for my creative process.
“All right,” I said. No need to panic. We could sort this. “So what do we do? Do we look for something together? We’re used to one another, after all.”
Pavlo’s sheepish expression said my day was about to get even worse.
“What?” I said, bracing myself.
“I have a friend,” he said. “She has a bar. In Spain.”
I groaned and sagged against the bar sink. “Of course you do.”
“I’m sorry, but is EU country…”
“…as opposed to a soon-to-be Brexited wasteland,” I said. “Yep. I understand. Totally not your fault.”
“You have family in London, yeah?”
Yeah. I had family in London. I had Simon.
“It’s fine,” Simon said, much later, when I was at his place in Clapham, licking my wounds. “We’ve share
d accommodation before.” I’d just come off duty at the bar, and he had only left the operating theatre an hour before. He was still full of adrenaline, talking a mile a minute about bones, while chopping vegetables for a late night salad. “As a matter of fact, you could say you were my very first flatmate.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said, wincing as he launched a knife into an avocado pit and wiggled it hopefully. “And that’s not how you take the stone out of an avocado.”
“It is. I’ve seen chefs do it.”
“And are you a chef?”
“I’m a surgeon,” he said. “I think I know my way around a knife, Nathan.”
“You don’t,” I said, extricating the huge butcher knife from the avocado. “For some strange reason those skills aren’t transferable.”
“It would help if you kept the knives sharp. I caught you chopping lemons with that one, and I bet you didn’t even sharpen it, did you? Blunt knives are dangerous.”
“You’re dangerous. And this is exactly what I’m talking about. You’re already nagging me and I haven’t even moved in yet. If I do move in, we’ll kill one another.”
“Stop being so dramatic, Nathan. We shared a uterus and managed not to kill each other.”
“Not for want of trying,” I said. “I know full well why I was over a pound lighter than you. You were trying to absorb me, so you could be one of those interesting people with two sets of genes.”
Simon frowned for a minute. “What? Chimerism? How would that work? We have the same genes, idiot.” He marched out of the kitchen and turned on the hallway light. I followed, curious. “Look,” he said. “You need somewhere to live, and I have space.”
He switched on the light to his spare room/office. When he’d first moved in he’d shunted a lot of boxes in there to get them out of the way, and it looked as though most of them were still there. And that in the intervening time, quite a few of those boxes had fallen in love and raised baby boxes. There was junk everywhere, piled high on top of the wardrobe and the filing cabinet, almost up to the high, Victorian ceiling.
“You must be fucking joking,” I said.
“I’m not. Obviously I’ll tidy up a bit…”
“A bit?” I spotted an old black leather case I hadn’t seen in years. “Jesus Christ, is that my old violin? I wonder where it had got to.”
“Oh, yes. I borrowed it.”
“When?”
“Don’t remember, exactly,” he said. “But I think it was when Tony Blair was prime minister.”
I sighed, aware that I had very little choice in the matter. Besides, it would take some stress off me. Give me time to find some depth, whatever or wherever that was.
4
So I moved to Clapham, with my brother. Which was nice, but the trouble with people rescuing you from homelessness was that you sort of ended up a bit indebted to them, even if that person had hogged the placenta once upon a time.
Simon was making my debt very obvious, too. He huffed and puffed around the flat, sighing heavily and letting his finger linger over the ‘create account’ button on Twitter, because today – yes, definitely today – was going to be the day he tweeted Rob.
But he didn’t, and so I gave in.
“All right,” I said, one afternoon when we were both on late shifts and glad of it, because the daytime heat was as thick and monstrous as Boris Johnson. “Stop sighing. I can take a hint. What do you want me to do this time?”
“Do it like we did it the first time,” said Simon, fanning himself with my copy of Dangerous Liaisons. He’d been filling in as a very mechanical Merteuil, helping me learn my lines. “You pretend to be me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because three people in a relationship is complicated enough, let alone when two of them are pretending to be the same person.” I said. “Besides, he’s clearly a sexy little beast. If he hasn’t lost interest yet then he might want to fuck me. You, rather.”
“So tell him you – I – want to go slow,” said Simon. “Go to an art gallery or something. Somewhere where you can’t do that kind of thing.”
I sucked my teeth. “Yeah. This is probably a bad time to tell you I once shagged a lady friend in the toilets at the Tate Modern, isn’t it?”
He huffed. “Well, I can understand that,” he said. “There’s more human emotion in a sordid bathroom fuck than there is in any of the so-called art at the Tate Modern.”
“You are such a fossil. Just because you don’t get conceptual art.”
“I do get conceptual art,” said Simon. “Someone unloads a pile of bricks in a room, says, ‘That will be twenty-five grand and a Turner Prize, please,’ and some rich idiot duly forks over the money. Then a bunch of other idiots go off and write thinkpieces for the Guardian about the lustrous fabrics and fine embroidery on the emperor’s beautiful new clothes.”
“Right,” I said, lazily eyeing the current Picasso exhibition on my phone. “And what do you think art should be, then? A bunch of fat cherubs lying around farting on clouds, while some naked goddess stuffs grapes in her mouth? God, you’re so fusty – I expect you prefer the National, don’t you?”
“I do, actually. And the National Portrait Gallery. I always thought it would be fascinating if they could borrow a lot of portraits of the various Habsburgs, so that you could chart the expression of mandibular prognathism through such a fantastically shallow gene pool.”
“Of course. That’s why you love old paintings. So you can retroactively diagnose the subjects with interesting old timey diseases.”
“Obviously,” said Simon. “Did you know Caravaggio’s Cupid most likely had rickets?”
“Nope, but now I do. Thank you for that piece of awful information.”
“You’re welcome. Look, all you have to do is go on one date. Grease the social wheels for me.”
“Simon, you can’t outsource your entire love life.”
“I’m not,” he said. “One date. That’s all. You saw how I freeze up.”
“Yeah, and then what happens? We come to the next date and you’re all ‘You do it. I’ll freeze up,’ and then the next and the next and the next, and before I know it I’m proposing to your boyfriend for you. If by which point he hasn’t figured out I’m at the wrong end of the Kinsey Scale, by the way.”
He snorted. “Oh please. The Kinsey Scale is practically obsolete. It’s based on a lot of bad data from a man who used to poke toothbrushes down his urethra.”
I crossed my legs and forgot how to blink. “He did what?”
“They call it sounding, apparently.”
“Why? Because it’s somehow even worse than it sounds?”
“I don’t know the etymology,” said Simon. “But supposedly he used to enjoy it, bristles first. He later circumcised himself with a craft knife in the bathtub, apparently out of curiosity.”
I pulled a pillow into my lap. For protection. My extremities had gone numb and my head was all swimmy. “Why are you telling me these terrible things?”
“I’m just saying. Alfred Kinsey was sexually…odd. And that the data he gathered might be coloured by that oddness. Anyway, it’s irrelevant, because you’re going to take him to the National Gallery, look at Van Goghs and make conversation.”
“Am I, now?”
“Yes,” said Simon, fiddling with his phone. “I don’t let anyone go below the waist until at least the third date.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that there was a large middle ground between sour-faced puritan and poking toothbrushes down your dickhole, but it was only then that I caught sight of the little blue quill button on the corner of his screen. “Wait – are you fucking tweeting?”
“Yes,” he said, and got up off the sofa.
“Simon, are you tweeting him?”
He was already in the kitchen before I could get up. “No,” he said. “I’m direct messaging him.”
I jumped up and followed him. He was way ahead of me, and held the pho
ne high above his head, forgetting that we were exactly the same height. I swatted at it, and Simon – regressing by the second – scrambled up on a kitchen chair out of reach.
“Stop it,” I said.
“No. It’s all set up. You’re going to meet him at the National tomorrow afternoon, and you’re going to look at the paintings and then have tea in the crypt of St Martin’s.”
“The crypt? Who takes someone to a crypt on a second date? Or any date? Who do you think you are? Van Helsing?”
“It’ll be nice and cool down there.”
“Yes, that’s because it’s a crypt. For storing corpses.”
“Don’t be so ridiculous,” he said, still standing on a kitchen chair, holding the phone above his head. “They don’t use it for that any more. On Wednesdays they have jazz nights.”
Somewhere there was a joke about not being seen dead at a jazz night, but I was far too annoyed to make it. “You’re basically taking advantage of how you rescued me from homelessness,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes. But love has made me desperate.”
“Oh, it’s love now?”
“Yes, actually.”
I squinted up at him. “If the words Love, Actually ever pass your lips then I’m afraid I’m going to have to flip the script and go all Dead Ringers on you. Just so you know.”
Simon stepped down from the chair, looking insufferable. “Look me in the eye and tell me he isn’t perfect.”
“He’s very attractive,” I said. “And he seems nice. But nobody’s perfect, Simon. Don’t go putting him on a pedestal, now. Because that way lies heartbreak. You won’t be able to handle it when you find out he has secret disgusting habits, like picking his nose, or reading the Daily Express.”
The next day was ferociously hot. I went to meet Rob in Trafalgar Square. I tried to catch some of the spray from the fountains, but crowds of people had already had the same idea, so when the spray did float towards me on the scant breeze it felt as though it had already been warmed by the sweat and breath of all the others who were trying to cool off.
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