Us

by David Nicholls

  ‘Douglas, please sit down.’

  ‘No, no I must keep going—’

  ‘Two minutes will not make a difference.’

  ‘Here, take the twenty—’

  ‘Douglas, I’m leaving tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That’s fine, I don’t want any change, but I really must—’

  ‘Douglas, I said I’m leaving. Venice. I probably won’t see you again.’

  ‘Oh. I see. You are? I’m sorry, I …’ Perhaps I should have sat down at this point, but I continued to stand. ‘Well, it was very nice to meet you, Freja,’ I said and offered my hand.

  ‘And you,’ she said, taking it with little enthusiasm. ‘Good luck. I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for.’

  But I was already running away.

  113. the serpentine

  We were different after the affair.

  Not unhappy, but more formal, on our best behaviour. As Connie became quiet and withdrawn so I became overly attentive, like a waiter who constantly asks how you’re finding the food. How was your day? What would you like to do tonight, what shall we eat, what shall we watch? But pretending that nothing has changed is a change in itself. The fact remained that one of us had wronged, one of us had been wronged, and my determination to overlook this fact had turned me into a particularly unctuous and ingratiating parole officer.

  There had been conditions for her return, a certain ‘laying down of the law’, but nothing too onerous or unreasonable. Of course, she would not see or speak to this ‘guy’ again. We would try to be more open and honest about our dissatisfactions and irritations. We would go out together more, talk more, be kinder to each other and, for my part, I would endeavour not to refer to the infidelity. It would not be forgotten – how could it be? But neither would it be wielded as a weapon or a negotiating tool, or a justification for infidelity on my part, a condition that I happily accepted.

  More importantly we decided that we would commit wholeheartedly to the project of starting a family and, sure enough, within a few months of almost breaking up, I received a telephone call.

  ‘Have you had lunch yet?’ she asked, with affected casualness.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Come and meet me in the park, by the Serpentine. We’ll have a picnic!’

  Outside my window it was a blustery day in late October, hardly picnic weather. ‘All right. All right, I will,’ I said, and then I knew. I knew why she wanted to meet. I hung up and sat for some time at my desk, not moving, but laughing quietly to myself. We would be parents. I would be a father – a husband and a father. It felt like some wonderful promotion. I told my colleagues that I’d be late back.

  In Hyde Park, I saw her some way off, standing by the Serpentine, hands in pockets, collar raised. The grin that she struggled to suppress confirmed my suspicions and as I approached I felt such … it’s a very broad term, ‘love’, so elastic in its definition as to be almost useless, but there is no other word, except perhaps adoration. Adoration would do too, at a push.

  We kissed, briefly, casually. I had decided to play dumb. ‘So. This is a nice surprise.’

  ‘Let’s walk a little, shall we?’

  ‘I’ve not brought anything to eat.’

  ‘Me neither. Let’s just walk.’ We walked. ‘What time do you have to be back at the lab?’ she said.

  ‘No rush. Why?’

  ‘Because there’s something I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘That sounds intriguing …’ Perhaps I rubbed my chin, I can’t recall. I’ve never been obliged to choose between science and a career on the stage.

  ‘Douglas. I’m pregnant!’

  And then there was no need to act, we just laughed, and hugged and kissed. She took my arm, and we walked around the Serpentine three, perhaps four times, talking, speculating, making plans until the day grew dark and the streetlamps came on. She would be a wonderful mother, I had no doubt, and I – well, I would do my best. The notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is patently nonsense, but we had sailed close to disaster, my wife and I, and survived, and we were now about to embark on this next chapter with renewed zeal. We would not be apart again.

  114. home-making

  Some wag once remarked that married couples only have children so that they have something to talk about. A rather cynical view, I suppose, but it was certainly true that Connie’s pregnancy led to something of a renaissance in our marriage. The highs and lows of the process are so well documented in film and television that they are scarcely worth recounting here, except to confirm that, yes, there were bouts of morning sickness, insomnia, aching feet and tempestuous mood swings. There were comical food cravings and times when the sheer strain of carrying that ever-growing load drove Connie into tearful rages. In the face of the irrational demands and sudden furies, I adopted the persona of an attentive butler, thick-skinned, uncomplaining and able, cooking careful meals, organising visitors, making tea. It suited me.

  And pregnancy suited Connie, too, as she swelled and bloomed in magnificent ways. The smoky parties, the late nights and hangovers were set aside with surprising ease, almost relief, and now she was rarely without a bag of desiccated fruit or some awful juice of a pondweed green. That’s not to say that she became pious or saintly about the condition. She was funny again, pretending irritation, fury sometimes at this new encumbrance. ‘Look what you’ve done to me! Look!’ We stayed at home now, hibernating through the winter into spring. Watched films and banal quiz shows. Lay on the sofa, reading. The spare room was finally acknowledged as the nursery and we equipped and decorated it in a defiantly unisex fashion, classical music playing on the stereo, proper grown-ups now. At night I pushed my thumbs into the hard soles of her aching feet. We were home-making, a dreary and pedestrian activity to anyone but us, and we were happy.

  We returned to the hospital for our second scan with only a small amount of trepidation, just enough not to seem complacent. After all, we were healthy and responsible adults in a medically advanced country in the final years of the twentieth century. The chances of anything going wrong seemed vanishingly small and sure enough, there it was on the screen, a blurred comma of flesh and soft bone animated with those jerky movements suggestive of a stick puppet. Beautiful, we said. Objectively, of course, there is no such thing as a beautiful scan; it’s a bad photocopy of a vertebrate that looks, frankly, like something you might find in an underground lake. But does any parent find this not beautiful? There was the heart, the size of a raspberry, pulsing away; there were the fingers. Does any parent ever shrug and refuse the printout? We held hands and laughed.

  But the ‘it’ was troubling. Would we like to know the sex? Yes please, we said, and squinted at the image I couldn’t see it myself, but apparently it was a girl. I would have a daughter, and although I had never expressed a preference, I must confess that I was secretly pleased. I had experienced, and was continuing to experience, the awkwardness of the father–son relationship, but didn’t all daughters love their dads and vice versa? Probably there was a certain amount of relief, too; wouldn’t our daughter look to Connie for advice and guidance? Wouldn’t she be the role model and soul-mate, as well as the butt of the biggest rows? They’d swap clothes and confide and when adolescence came around, the doors would slam in Connie’s face, not mine. As a father to a daughter, all I’d have to do was provide the lifts, the pocket money, the understanding ear and proud paternal hug at graduation. All I’d have to do was worry about her, and that was entirely within my abilities.

  We took our smudged image home and stuck it on a pinboard, surrounded by Post-it notes with all the names we liked – or rather all the names Connie liked, my imagination balking at anything more esoteric than Emily, Charlotte, Jessica, Grace. Perversely, Connie settled on Jane, a name so ordinary that it was practically avant-garde. We rubbed the bump with oil. Connie stopped work and readied the house, I worked long hours on a new project, zebrafish now, and waited for the call.

 
And here, with some reluctance, I must return to that notion of time as a loop of celluloid. The first snip of the scissors came on London Bridge on the night I met my wife, but where was that second cut? While her affair had been traumatic, it would be worth reliving if only for the happiness of what came after, the winter and spring of her pregnancy during which our marriage once again made perfect sense.

  But some things cannot be lived through twice and so, if asked, I think I’d like to make that other cut round about now please.

  115. pompidou paris accordion cat amazing

  Could there be a clearer indicator of the dizzying pace of technological change than the demise of the internet café? Once so space-age, so cutting-edge, portals to a world of knowledge and fantasy, until cheap wifi and the smart phone rendered them obsolete, and they became as quaint and anachronistic as the telegram office or the video rental outlet.

  In Venice, only one internet café remained, situated in a gloomy little parade of shops near a housing estate in Cannaregio. Exhausted and made lame by my second circuit of the city I took refuge in its cool, dark interior, squeezing past a wall of telephone booths where Indians and Pakistanis, Arabs and Africans chattered urgently, to the computer bays where the poor and desperate joined the scammers, the blackmailers and stalkers, all of us hunched and furtive on swivel chairs leaking yellow foam in the unhealthy glow of the screens. Explosions and laser-blasts could be heard to my left where a nine-year-old boy was hammering his keyboard as aliens disintegrated all around, while to my right an earnest young man stared intently at a page of dense Arabic script. I smiled hello and turned to my computer. The console and keyboard were ancient and filthy, the dirty cream of old Bakelite, but I was exhausted and almost out of credit on my tablet and so I sat there, grateful, in the room that smelt of wet cardboard and instant coffee, and took my quest online.

  Doubts had begun to assail me. I knew from Albie’s call to the hotel that he and Cat had been heading this way, but what if they had changed their minds, or left already? In need of reassurance, I searched for

  an alchemist, tossing ingredients into a cauldron in the vain hope of finding gold. I searched for

  I saw things no man should ever see, but I did not see my son. Taking a more direct approach, I searched for Albie Petersen. Ever the contrarian, Albie was not a slave to social media and, besides, his accounts were locked. But his friends were not so cagey or discreet and I found that I could easily fill the screen with snaps of my son; at parties with a cigarette dangling blatantly from pouting lips, on stage with his terrible college band (I had been there but couldn’t bear to listen, had sneaked out to check the car was locked, had stayed in the car). Here he was as a Nazi in Cabaret (I was working late that week) and here with a girlfriend that I vaguely remembered, the one before the one before, a lovely quiet girl, heartbroken now I imagined, my son her first love. Here he was lounging on some riverbank on an overcast day in some previous summer, his body bony and pale and visibly goose-bumped, then, in a series of consecutive snaps, arms and legs wheeling as he let go of a rope swing and plummeted into the river. I laughed at this, my neighbour glancing from my face to the screen, which I changed quickly, double-clicking on some of Albie’s photographic work from an online exhibition: a dilapidated shed in an allotment, a close-up of tree bark, and a rather good portrait in high-contrast black and white of two elderly men on the same allotment, their faces extraordinarily gnarled and wrinkled, creased deeply like the bark, which was the point I suppose. I liked this one, and I resolved to tell him that I liked it if and when I found him.

  I would never find him, I knew that now. The quest was absurd, a delusional attempt to salvage some dignity from this whole disastrous trip, to make amends for years of fumbling, mumbling incoherence. People travelling in Europe do not bump into each other, it’s just not possible. If he returned, and surely he would return eventually, he would do so in his own time. The image that I’d cherished, that I would carry him back to my wife like a fireman emerging from a burning building, was a vain and self-indulgent fantasy. The only reason I remained in Europe was because I was too scared and humiliated to go home and face the future. I closed the page of images of Albie.

  The YouTube searches remained open underneath. I would try one more time. I typed in pompidou paris accordion cat street performer, flicked though screen after screen of beat-boxing flautists, Siamese cats on piano keyboards and depressing clips of living statues, and there in the bleak, uncharted depths of the fourth page of search results, was Cat in an unseasonable velvet top hat, playing ‘Psycho Killer’ on the forecourt of the Pompidou. ‘Yes!’ I said out loud.

  I let the video play, the four hundred and eighty-sixth person to do so, and read the prose beneath.

  Saw this gr8 busker wen in Paris. She great, she crazy buy her Cd Kat play rock accordion –styl!!!!!

  Underneath, another contributor was in a more critical mood:

  haha she sing like u speak English … i.e. wewy wewy painful where u lurn English dum boy hahaha

  The debate continued in Socratic form for several exchanges. The video, I noted, was two years old. No matter. I had made a small breakthrough: Cat was a Kat.

  Encouraged, I began my search again: kat accordion cover version, kat street performer and found her once again, sitting on a bed in a crowded, candlelit room. Melbourne, apparently. The video had been uploaded some six months before, had been viewed a modest forty-six times and consisted of a spirited rendition of ‘Hey Jude’, with the other party guests banging beer bottles together, playing the bongos, etc. The video was twenty-two minutes long and seemed unlikely to ‘go viral’. Had I been immortal I might have watched it all, but there was no need because in the description I found:

  Our old friend Katherine ‘Kat’ Kilgour from Theatre Factory still singing the songs and doin’ her thang. Love u Kat Babe, Holly

  Kat Kilgour. I had a surname, and not a Smith or Evans either. I searched again, striking a rich seam now, linking from one video to the next until I found what I’d been searching for.

  In an Italianate square, in blazing sunlight, Kat and Albie perched on the steps of an ornate church, singing ‘Homeward Bound’, the old Simon and Garfunkel song. A strangely old-fashioned choice of song, as distant in time to my son as the Charleston was to me, but part of the very small cultural legacy that I had passed on to Albie. Connie had never cared for Simon and Garfunkel, thought them too middle-of-the-road, but as a small boy Albie had loved them, and on long car journeys we’d play the Greatest Hits, Albie and I singing along, much to Connie’s irritation. Had he suggested the song to Kat, or vice versa? Did he even think of it as something that he’d taken from me? Did he want to come home?

  ‘Too loud!’ said the war-gaming boy to my left, and I realised that I had been singing along too. I apologised, pulled on a pair of greasy headphones and turned my attention back to the video, posted two days previously and viewed a modest three times. The description, while at least literate, provided no further assistance. ‘Saw these guys on our tour of Italy and talked to them afterwards. She’s called Kat Kilgour and she’s really talented!!!’ And what about Albie, hm? In truth the harmonies were experimental, the crowd small and indifferent. Still, I felt such pleasure in seeing him again. He looked well. Perhaps not ‘well’, exactly – skinny and hunched and none too fresh – but he looked exactly like a student backpacker should, and he was safe.

  But where was he? I played the video once more, a detective looking for clues. The church, the café, the pigeons, the square, the tourists – it might have been anywhere in Italy. I freeze-framed, took screen grabs, zoomed in on Albie, his clothes, his face, looking for goodness knows what. I zoomed in on the faces of the few indifferent tourists, on the shop fronts and walls in case of street names, I let the video play and play again, grabbing shots at key moments until something drew my eye to a knot of people coming into frame in the final seconds, a man crouching at a café table to confer with a tourist, a
striped T-shirt, a black hat with a ribbon.

  A gondolier.

  ‘Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!’

  116. the vivaldi experience

  Taking full advantage of my online anonymity, I left my comment – ‘You guys are excellent! The boy in particular! Please, please stay in Venice!’ – then emailed myself a link to the page and hurried back to the pensione, hobbling but in high spirits. Tomorrow was the day that our pre-paid reservation at the hotel came in to force. Lured by the offer of free residency in a nice hotel, chosen for its comfort, convenience and romance, might not Albie take the room? Connie had been calling him from our home in England. Clean sheets, a shower, no parents, a chance to impress his girlfriend with one of her beloved buffet breakfasts? I felt certain he would come. All I would need to do was take a seat at a pavement café nearby and wait. What I would say, other than sorry and come home, remained a mystery, but I would have got something right for once.

  Pausing at reception, I wrote a note on the back of a flyer for The Vivaldi Experience.

  Freja, apologies for my rudeness today. You must think me unhinged, and you are not the only one to do so. Please let me make amends by buying you dinner tonight, then perhaps I can explain a little too. If the idea does not appal you I am in room 56, the super-heated cupboard near the roof. And if I don’t hear from you by eight p.m., it was extremely nice to meet you. I enjoyed our trip to the ACCaDEMia very much! Best wishes, Douglas

  Before I could reconsider, I handed it to the receptionist for the Danish lady travelling alone. Freja Kristensen? Grazie mille. Then I climbed the stairs stiffly and sat heavily on the bed. The treacherous running shoes were removed with a queasy sucking sound. Where was their promised comfort now? Despite my best efforts with bandages and plasters, my feet looked as if they’d been eaten by crabs. The blisters on the knuckles of my toes had burst, the new flesh rubbed raw, and on the soles of my feet dead skin hung down like tattered flags. Swelling rendered my other shoes, a pair of serviceable brown brogues, unwearable, and so I did my best to patch my wounds while I waited for my lady friend to call.