“Wait, hold the phone,” said Poppy, piling on. “Your brother? Your identical twin brother?”
“Yes.”
“Who has the exact same genes as you and is gay?”
All three women made the same smug ‘ahh, science’ face at once.
“Actually it’s more complicated than that,” I said. “It’s not any one gene. It’s a combination of genes and it can express itself in many ways.”
“Is one of those expressions wearing summer waistcoats?” said Poppy.
“That’s not gay. That’s fashion.”
“Knockoff Prada loafers?” said Poppy, fluttering her eyelashes and cracking the other two up.
“Fuck you. They’re genuine.”
Nadia was the only one who was really nice about it. She steered me away, leaving the other two cackling, and explained she was sort of seeing someone, compounding my humiliation.
“It’s funny,” Rupa said, on our way out of the building. “When you first came in I thought you were too gay to play Valmont straight. Then you came into that second audition and you were…I don’t know. A whole lot more hetero.”
“Whatever,” I said. I was in no mood to analyse what that meant – that I’d come off a whole lot straighter while still partially in character as a gay man, namely my brother.
Sore, sunburnt and bent out of shape, I checked my phone. There was one message, a text from Rob. Three words. Are we okay?
I honestly didn’t know the answer to that. The only thing that made any sense in that moment was the desire to see him, and I wasn’t that far away from the book shop. Part of me knew I was supposed to feel worse about being shot down by Nadia, and that I’d only asked her out because she was pretty and playing my love interest, and that I didn’t really know her all that well at all. Not in the way I’d got to know Rob.
He was at the shop. I saw him through the window. He was wearing a sunburn to match mine, and that black t-shirt that made his waist look as fine as blown glass. I watched as he disappeared between the shelves, took a deep breath, and followed him in.
I found him in the same section where we’d first spoken. Down by the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. He turned his head to look at me, then froze, a book still in his hand, poised on the edge of the shelf. He pushed it into place without looking at it, his eyes fixed on me. Feverish. Focused. That – I knew now – was how he must have been looking at me from behind his sunglasses, when the atmosphere had shifted and turned heavy between us, like the air before thunder.
Are we okay?
Were we okay? No. We were in terrible trouble, because his eyes seemed even brighter with every step I took towards him. They were so clear, so perfectly blue, his pupils large and dark. I reached out. His beard was soft under my hand, and I could no longer resist. I reached around and touched that cloudy, curly blond hair, and it was even softer than I could have imagined. He looked dazed, drugged. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all, but then I kissed him and it was like the first touch of my lips brought him back to life. He made a low, needy noise in the back of his throat and then we were all hands on hot faces, fingers twining in hair. His mouth tasted like certainty, like something that made so much sense that for a moment the inside of my brain was cool and dark and perfectly empty, serene as the inside of a flotation tank.
As first kisses went, it was perfect.
And that was when I remembered that it wasn’t the first.
He looked up at me, his breath trembling, his lips wet. I could see the flicker of ‘oops’ in his eyes, but he had no idea. “This is bad, isn’t it?” he said, obviously talking about his previous relationship with Simon.
“Yeah,” I said, my cool, dark serenity shattered now. Now my brain was more like that moment inside a flotation tank when the occupant has an anxiety attack in the dark and can’t find the panic button.
Rob reached for me again, but I pulled away.
“No,” I said. “I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell you here,” I said. “How much longer do you have on the clock?”
He glanced at his watch. “Uh…about twenty minutes.”
“You know the Albany?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Meet you there?”
9
“So,” he said, half an hour later, when he slid into a booth at the Albany. “What’s going on? And why do you look like you’re about to tell me that you just infected me with smallpox?”
I pushed a glass of Glenmorangie towards him.
“Whisky?” he said. “Before dinner? Nathan, what’s the matter? You’re scaring me.”
I took a belt from my own drink. My mouth felt like the Sahara. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t even know how to begin to explain this to you…”
“Explain what?”
This was so fucked up. I should have kept quiet and kept on kissing him. If I’d done that we could be on our way to his place right now, playing footsies on the District Line and breathlessly planning how fast we were going to get one another naked. But I’d said it now. The words had erupted out of me like a belch – I have to tell you something – and there was no taking it back. And he was never going to look at me in the same way again.
“You know when you go to university and they ask you to come in for an interview?” I said, starting at the beginning.
“Yeah.”
“And you know Simon went to UCL?”
“Yes.”
“He had…he had everything,” I said. “Everything he needed to get in. He had the grades, he had the brains, he had the determination.” Here it was. “And he had a near crippling case of social anxiety.”
Rob looked baffled. He was so pretty when he was confused. “Okay,” he said. “And what does that have to do with us?”
I took another sip. Dutch courage. “He didn’t sit the interview,” I said. “I did.”
I waited for it to sink in. I could see it in his eyes, the moment when I slid down past the level of pond slime in his estimations. He went very pale all of a sudden, too pale, and then I realised where his mind had taken him – somewhere so dark and ugly that it hurt to think he could ever entertain it. But of course he had to, because the implication was there.
“No,” I said, scrambling to assure. “No, Rob – listen to me. We never did that. You slept with Simon, and only Simon.”
Oh God. What the fuck had I done? He looked horrified, and he had every right to be. “So what did you do?” he said.
“When Simon came into the bookshop,” I said. “Asking about Joseph Bell…”
“…Manual Of The Operations Of Surgery,” he said, like he was clinging to the one bit of sanity he had left.
“Yes. That was me. That wasn’t Simon. That was me.”
Rob just stared.
“I’m sorry, okay?” I said, into the too-long silence. “He was so obviously smitten with you, and he didn’t know how to break the ice, so he asked me…”
He shook his head. “Oh my God. You people are insane.”
“We’re not. I promise. We’re not. We’re quite normal.”
“No. You are not,” he said, his eyes too wet. “This is not normal.”
“Please let me finish?” I said.
“There’s more?” He looked as though he was going to throw up. He held up a finger, warning me to stop talking, then tossed back the whisky in one mouthful. He shuddered and glared at me across the table. “Go on,” he said.
“He met you here,” I said. “He had…he had an earpiece, okay? I was supposed to be helping, feeding him lines – you know. Like Cyrano de Bergerac. Only I got into this whole thing in Russell Square gardens with a kid named Maisie threatening to go postal over a coffee cup…” Oh shit, I wasn’t explaining this very well at all. “It doesn’t really matter…”
“It doesn’t?” said Rob, in a tone that could etch glass. “You deceived me, and it doesn’t matter?”
“No, I don’t mean that. Of c
ourse it matters. The coffee cup. The kid. That part doesn’t matter. Look, he got cold feet. I was no help to him over the earpiece on account of the kid, and he…well, you were there. He crashed and burned. Got cold feet and pretended he had to hurry off back to the hospital.”
“And then what?” he said. Because he knew there was more. He had to. My guilt was probably scrawled all over my face.
“The cold feet…continued,” I said. “He said he needed help. Smoothing things over with you.”
He shook his head slowly. “And by ‘smoothing things over’ I’m guessing you mean he needed his brother to impersonate him and charm me all over again?”
“You were charmed?”
His eyes flashed a warning. Not charmed enough. Oh God.
“Yes,” I said. “That time at the gallery. That was me, too.”
He was staring at me in that terrible way again, the one where I could see all the puzzle pieces connecting in his head to reveal one ugly, fucked up picture. He was thinking of that kiss.
“I’m sorry,” I said, after too long a pause.
Rob’s blue eyes turned glacial. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said.
“I’m sorry. That was why I came to introduce myself to you. So that you knew I existed. So that he couldn’t ask me to pull that shit any more. And because…because I felt bad.”
“You felt bad?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop fucking saying that!” His voice rose. People were looking. He lowered his voice, but I could tell this was far worse than I had ever planned for. “You’re sorry? Is Simon sorry? Because he fucked me. He knew that this…chicanery had gone down and he still went to bed with me.”
“I know,” I said, choosing my words very carefully. “He’s…he’s not good at feelings.”
Rob gave a humourless bark of laughter. “Yeah, no shit. He may very well be a sociopath.” He shook his head. He looked as though he could barely stand to look at me, and I didn’t blame him. “How many times did this happen?” he said. “You owe me that. You owe me the truth.”
“Twice,” I said. “Once in the bookshop, and at the gallery. That was all.”
“Oh, that was all?”
“I’m sor—” He cut me off with a look.
“Stop saying that,” he said. “I don’t want your apologies. And I don’t want your explanations, either. Just…just leave me the fuck alone.”
*
Nadia screamed.
She was red-faced, the tendons in her neck standing out, strands of her hair sticking to her wet face. She flailed out and swung at me, and I didn’t turn my head in time. Her hand made contact, but the sting of the slap felt like only a fraction of what I deserved right now.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s beyond my control.”
She shrieked her lines back at me. Some distant part of me could tell we were killing this. The adrenaline was flowing and I was fighting to hold myself still, struggling against my natural instincts to soothe the hurt I’d caused, because she was loudly and graphically losing her mind in front of me. And I was the reason why.
I grabbed her streaming hair and pulled, forcing her to look at me. She was all snot and tears and open mouth. Absolute bewilderment. Heartbreaking.
“It’s the way of the world,” I said. “Quite beyond my control.”
And that was where I left her. Destroyed. Face down on the floor. And I left what was left of my tiny, atrophied heart there, too. That’s what I was looking at, when I turned to walk away. That was who the tears were for. Me. The person I’d caught a glimpse of while I loved her. The person I could never be.
I left her moaning, and walked away.
We’d done it. I could feel the buzz in the room even before Rupa spoke. Nadia rose from the floor, grinning through her tears. “Nailed it,” she sang, and got up. “Nathan, I’m so sorry – did I slap you?”
“It wasn’t hard,” I said, but somehow I was still crying. That one small leak I’d permitted myself while in character had turned into a damburst. I excused myself and fled the scene, hurrying out into the small yard between buildings. The sky above was blank and blue and pitiless, the solitary patch of grass cooked to a baked straw brown. Everything hurt. I’d made such a mess of everything, and I had no way of cleaning it up. If this was a romantic comedy then this would be the time for grand gestures – cue cards and carol singers, fist-fights with rivals, boomboxes under the window at midnight.
But it wasn’t. This was real life, a place where all of those things that looked so good on film looked more like grounds for a restraining order or sectioning under the Mental Health Act.
Rupa stuck her head out of the door. “Fucking hell, Valmont,” she said, slinking out into the courtyard. “Are you all right?”
I sniffed, snotted and tried to get a grip of myself. “Yeah. Fine.” She handed me a packet of tissues. “Thank you. God, why does everyone in this play end up in tears?”
“Because it’s a play about horrible people doing horrible things to each other,” she said, fishing a pack of low tars and a lighter out of her bag. “It was bound to end in tears, let’s face it.” She stepped back and lit up. “You want one?”
“No, thank you. Haven’t done that in years. And you should stop, by the way.”
“I know,” she said, throwing her head back and blowing smoke up towards the flat blue sky. “But I’m collecting the Health Warning photographs. All I need now is the gangrenous foot, the throat tumour and the naked guy and I’ll have the complete set.”
“Naked guy? What’s a naked guy doing on government health warnings?”
“He’s curled up. Foetal. Brooding. Caption says Smoking Causes Erectile Dysfunction.”
“Oh, I see. Yeah. That’s definitely foetal position time.”
She leaned noirishly into the shadows by the door frame, the smoke drifting in front of her large, leaf-shaped eyes. This wasn’t a tea and sympathy moment. She was looking at me the way an artist looks at her palette, the way she often looked at me, and even in the depths of my misery I was pleased to see the satisfaction in her eyes.
“So?” I said, wanting praise. I had earned it, after all.
Rupa smiled. “You did good.”
“No, I didn’t. I did a horrible, horrible thing.”
“Yep. And you showed me that. You showed me a man who’s been playing at being in love for so long that he no longer understands that real feelings can hurt him. And when they do? Oof.”
“Depth?” I said.
“Fathoms. Keep it up. You were a star out there – both of you. This is going to be the best fucking Dangerous Liaisons in London in a very long time.”
At least something was working, because the rest of my life felt broken. When I went home that evening I was fully expecting another night alone, listening to the nearby rumble of trains and wondering where Rob was and what he was thinking. But for once Simon was home. He was torturing my old violin so thoroughly that I heard it before I’d even entered the front door.
“Jesus, what are you doing?” I said.
“What does it look like?” he said.
“Hard to say. You’re holding that bow like a bone saw.”
He looked incredibly tired, pale and stubbly, with big dark shadows under his eyes. He’d been working like a maniac since he broke up with Rob, and I couldn’t blame him. Life without Rob was grey and unpleasant.
“Here,” I said, sitting down beside him. “Let me show you. Bend the thumb…yeah. Like that. First two fingers go like that…that’s it. Thumb in the middle. Each finger should be about a finger breadth apart. Little finger sits on top. Bring those two down to the hair, but don’t touch it.” The bow string looked brittle. “God, has this thing even been rosined this side of the millennium?”
“Probably not,” said Simon, trying and failing to emulate my hand position. “How do you do that? How do you still have the muscle memory after all these years? Look at the state of me: I’m like a crab with
rheumatoid arthritis.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You might do better trying to learn the violin when you’re not half dead from exhaustion. Just a thought.”
He raised an ungroomed eyebrow. “Half dead?”
“Fully dead. I was being generous. You look like you crawled out of a mausoleum.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He gave me a furtive glance. “You look pretty bad yourself,” he said. “Have you been crying?”
“Occupational hazard. Dangerous Liaisons is a seriously lachrymose play.”
“Lachrymose,” he said. “Hmm.” Simon could never resist long words. When we were kids he would sit down and read the dictionary from cover to cover.
We sat in silence for a moment, two halves of the same whole. I had an unaccountable urge to tell him I loved him, but thought better of it. He had the emotional range of sand at the best of times.
“How are you?” I asked. It seemed like a compromise.
“Oh. You know. Fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” said Simon, but I knew he wasn’t. Because he had a Rob shaped hole in his life, too.
“I hardly ever see you these days. You’ve been working like mad.”
“That’s generally how it works for junior surgeons,” he said. “I have to put in at least four more years of this before I join those hallowed few who can do five hip replacements a year and spend the rest of the time fucking off to Tuscany.”
I tried to picture it. Simon on a vineyard, with his feet up, sipping Barolo and listening to Puccini. “You?” I said. “In Tuscany? You’d be bored out of your mind. You’d be diagnosing goats and looking for hips to replace.”
“I might not,” he said. “I might finally learn to play the violin.” He sat back on the couch and sighed. “Learn to make my own pasta. Make a complete fool of myself over someone who looks like Rupert Graves did in A Room With A View.”
It had been a while since I’d seen that film, and it took me a moment. Freddy Honeychurch. Lucy’s brother. Had a nude scene, if I remembered rightly.
“With the dark hair?”
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