We’re eating at a chain restaurant. Italian. Big pepper mills and oil bottles with long dead chillies in them. I’m in love with the un-her now. The everything she isn’t. She suspects something.
“So…” She begins. A chirpiness humming in her lower jaw, her hair bouncing side to side as she punctures the air with excitement.
She’s got something she wants to talk about. Something I don’t want to talk about.
“Yes?” I say, but I’ve already ruined the tone. She knows it. I know it, but she continues regardless, keen to just speak.
“Charlotte Tillbery have offered me a full time job. I begin next Monday. Excited!” She purrs sweetly, oiled by cosmetic dreams and red wax.
“That’s good!” I say, looking into her face as she looks into mine. Her eyes darken.
“I know what you’re going to say!”
“I’m not going to say anything!” I reply, knowing that she knows what I wanted to say.
“But it’s good. I’m making friends and it’s going to get me out of the place that I’m in.” She pauses, placing a fork of pasta behind her perfect teeth. She’s right.
“You’re right.” I say, raising a glass to toast.
“And then.” She curls her neck, fills her lips and peers back at me baby fawn, “we can start looking for a place together.” She lets out a little shriek that petrifies the hairs inside my earhole.
I smile. At her. At everything. The room is full of un-secrets. Gossip and noise told to everyone, told to just the one. The place is sick with lined couples. Pews of pearlescent teeth bared, soft eyes, hair strokes, tensed chests.
Separated by tables of silence, complete with long, mournful looks-out to the somewhere else, are dens of chatter. Small corners of flavoursome titbits about who said what and about whom drive at the air. Conversations about where to get a sari fitted for a wedding in Goa. Serious talks about what we used to do in school. A hushed wordfall on Gary’s balding and his diminishing sex drive.
Yeah, well, maybe he is having an affair. Maybe he’s having it because he’s disappointed by your desperate attempts to look youthful. Maybe he lost his hair because he realised he’d chosen to spend the rest of his life with a woman that he barely loved before the first baby, sporting her large front teeth and thin hair, came along. Maybe he’s thinking about killing himself because the thought of having to spend one more evening in with you watching television whilst you text your friends and get half drunk on Malbec are more than he could possibly bear.
“I was thinking maybe Finchley.”
Pulling the wine to my face and my face back to hers: “Yeah, Finchley is good. Cheap. We could find a nice place. Two beds are pretty affordable there.”
“But we need to agree how things will go. I’m not having it like your place.” She checks herself, a vulpine eye slide to the right. “Don’t get me wrong, you’ve got better! But we’re not having a chair just for stuff.” Her left hand is thrown up into the air. Open palmed, it’s a no.
“Then where do I put my stuff?”
“Away!” She affirms. I’m an idiot, but:
“Away where?”
“Drawers. In the basket. We need a basket. Oh!” She’s in full flow. A sip of wine with a finger raised baying my silence. “I want a trunk. A big wooden one. At the end of the bed. We can put the sheets and the blankets in there.”
“What’s wrong with the cupboard? The cupboard is good for those things.”
“There are other things we put in the cupboard.”
“What other things?”
“Other things. My things. Your things. You do know that we’re going to have a lot of things.” A brief checklist plays in her head, “I’ve got a lot of things that I want to buy.” She’s being playful. Dainty. Her words glisten, dusted with wet powder sugar.
“I bet you do,” I say, committing to nothing.
The waitress has caught her eye. Like she has caught everyone else’s eye. A sheer zip of nylon cracks as she places foot after foot, thigh after thigh, forward after forward. Her tight knot of dyed black hair pulls her forehead tight, and her fine shoulders meander like a cello through the room.
I look too. She looks at me. She looks at me.
“Can I take this?” Her dull, foreign tongue stabbing the words.
“Yes please, thanks. It was excellent.” My lips are dripping in pleasantries and my wide eyes softened to sickness.
She, the she that’s the waitress knee bends and grabs the plate from below. The false nail on her thumb imprisons a small shipful of sauce.
She’s watching me. I’m watching her. Her nail.
“And you?” A tight smile.
“Yes. Thanks.” She manages taut words, her eyes falling back to mine, which are placed back on hers. She falls back into her seat, square shoulders digging into the wooden frame.
Simple cogs have turned again. Easily loosened. Easily tightened.
“So what do I get to have in the house?” I ask. Stabbing wildly at the leaking hole in our little wooden boat.
“Whatever you want.”
I lean into the table. Knowing I shouldn’t: “Oh come on!” I say. Weary. So weary.
“Yeah. Whatever. Shall we get the bill?”
I retract and fall back into my seat too. Defeated eyes wander the room again and find the cellist smouldering behind the bar. She’s joking with a Spaniard with black beard and black polo shirt. She touches his shoulder. They’re probably fucking.
“Yeah, sure.” I say.
Spinning around, fine black hair sculpts around her anger. With a wave and a spider’s smile she pulls the waitress back from her affair. Shimmering in frustration, I’m presented the card machine scraped with our cargo.
We paid. I paid. Looking intently at the machine and the table and the floor and the ceiling.
The industrial bulbs glowed orange spirals. The air conditioning blew hot air on my face before the door. The door closed slowly behind my hands.
We walked in silence for a while. The remnants of summer causing a sweat under my coat. She’s cold, pulling her jacket tight with folded arms and a raised collar.
“What do you want to do now?” I ask her.
“I don’t care. Whatever. You want to have a drink?”
“I wouldn’t mind.” I never mind.
“So we’ll go somewhere and get a drink.” And our footsteps clip the pavement. Mine loud, hers soft, unheard. We say nothing to each other, just separately smoke cigarettes. She exhales loudly.
Passing a blackened park with black iron fence, I peer into nothing. A swaying of leaves on the tree and dark shadows on dark grass. The yellow glow of streetlamps barely penetrates its un-space, its locked-off verdancy. Here where couples sit and play sweet games, and tell each other sweet things. When the day permits. When the light allows.
I turn to her, “look, let’s not argue. I can’t keep doing this.”
She doesn’t look up. Doesn’t break her stride. Doesn’t stop the steady puffs and heavy breaths of her third cigarette in a row. “This?” Her granite lungs saying one, solitary granite word.
“Arguing over nothing. This mood that you’re in. This thing that’s going on between us now.”
She looks at me briefly, the way an uncle looks at a psychopathic child, then she drops her arms to her side, outstretching her fingers, searching for words, pulling for sounds from the air around her. I can’t help but admire the practice. This perfect little show. A tour de force in exasperation and a lack of language. Then, clasping her chest again, she’s found them.
“You don’t love me anymore. I don’t think you ever did, but you definitely don’t love me anymore.”
Me. In love with the un-her.
“That’s not true. Why do you say that?” I’m more interested in the actual reason than assuaging her doubts. I’d become all-too acquainted with this conversation and the one that follows. If she wants to practice dramatics, I want to practice them too.
“Why are you saying this?” I ask, having thrown my arms wide. She had kept hers close to her chest, choosing instead to glance at me, then a couple walking past, then the pavement. She’s waiting to be out of earshot. I wait too. Keenly.
“Because you don’t. You don’t tell me I’m pretty anymore. You don’t want to have sex with me. You probably wanted to fuck that waitress.”
“I told you you looked great earlier when I first saw you. You do look great!” This is all said through clenched teeth. She looks great. Beautiful. Stunningly so. Something unnervingly alluring festers in her eyes and the sharp shape of her face. Though the desire to confirm my admiration of this otherworldliness is lost to the intemperance of her nature. She barbs. Barbs hard.
“And the waitress?! You’re telling me you didn’t want to fuck her?” She lets out a caustic laugh that crawls through the knocks in my spine. “I saw the way you looked at her.” Her mouth was wide now. Her eyes were fierce, Siberian. Well versed with cold winter and cold hearts.
I had no answer. Just a look of despondency to throw at her, then the blanket sky, then nowhere.
“We can’t have one nice evening. This is a joke.” Her muffled voice is dampened by the cotton of her jumper.
“What? Now you’re just mirroring what I’m saying.” I say, unsure what I had said before, but, goddamn, sometimes you’ve just got to say something. “I was the one who took you out for dinner, now I just get this treatment again. This fucking attitude. Over and over again. But of course – of course – it’s my fault.” I pause. More for emphasis than to think. To relax my tone. “Just tell me what did I do?”
“What did you do?!” I’d pulled the hairpin. The stupid hairpin that I always pulled. “It’s your attitude. You can’t see it. You act like I don’t mean anything to you.” She spins on the spot, her wet eyes black. I want to pull her close to me and kiss her and tell her I’m sorry for whatever I can be sorry for, but there’s a grey repulsion just slight enough to hold me back.
“It’s like I’m just some dog to call when you’re bored, and you don’t see what I do for you. I gave you more love than I have given to anyone else. I did everything for you, and you just sit there and act like you don’t give a shit.”
“I just sit there and act like me!”
“You sit there and act like a piece of shit!”
Fierce silence swells between us. Then, gently, the warm smell of the pub lathers the air. The black fire warbles out of existence with the hum of people and the ochre yellow of the upturned lights: The Cross Keys washed in orange text against the green hoardings.
“How are we my sweet?” I ask, dumbly, of the hovel I was about to fizz away in.
“What?!”
“Nothing, sorry. I was talking to myself. Can we go in and just have a drink? You can have a nice little cider and calm down.” I bare my teeth, smiling in a way.
“I don’t want a cider.” She’s a young girl again, turning away sweets from her well-breasted grandmother.
“Fine, a vodka soda.”
“Fine.” And as I open the door for her she glances, for less than a second, at me, at my stupid beaming face, and almost manages a smile before she’s torn back into the horror of our lives.
It’s a nice pub inside. Well, I say nice. It’s a pub. It’s got carpet and bits where it’s wood instead of carpet. The floor leads, as you’d expect, up to a bar and there are teak stained pillars holding the low ceiling high. The room itself is split into little areas, fenced off with bannisters and inexplicable sets of two steps. A rotund man has a half full glass of Fosters pressed neatly between his breasts by the fruit machine, his face lit gold and red.
On the walls are little cartoons from, I guess, the 50’s. A few blue and gold jerseys hang in one section, along with a couple of hurleys crossed at their thick necks. It’s half busy.
She’s at the bar before me, pressing her folded arms into the sticky wood, pulling air slowly over her tongue.
“What you having?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking.”
She’ll have half a cider.
“Hey, what can I get you?” The barman is twenty something, cheerful. Probably doing a nice degree somewhere and enjoying himself adequately. Peering over the counter at the floor fridges behind, she’s straining her glassless eyes.
“What ciders do you have?”
He runs off the list, the ones you know are there, that we all know are always there, finishing with the ones on tap. The ones that are always on tap. Still, she’s got to think for a few seconds. Think about how to ask for half a pint of cider. I ask for a lager beer. A normal one.
He springs off, happy to pour a couple of patrons a couple of drinks. My eyes meandering through the back row of spirits, I catch myself in the mirror behind the bar. God. Why do they need these things? To deter drunken arseholes from being drunken arseholes is the answer, but those guys are going to be those guys regardless. Instead it hurts the me’s of this world. The sad wretches with sorry eyes who’d rather get a punch in the face from some big lump than have to acknowledge their own faces in public. Still, I’m looking suitably dishevelled, I think. A Sean Penn type.
She’s looking at herself too, pulling a face that she thinks looks natural and sexy. Really it looks sour and hard, but then some guys go in for that sort of thing. I know I do.
We get the drinks. He smiles again, glad to let us tap our card – young barman – and we’re on our own again in the wild. Taking a sip off the top of my pint, I let my eyes dart around the room for a place to sit.
“Where shall we go?” I ask.
“I dunno, where do you want to go?”
“Let’s just go outside for a smoke.”
“But it’s cold outside.”
“Well, where shall we go then?”
“Let’s just go for a cigarette outside.”
“But it’s cold?”
“Yeah well where are we going to go in here?”
“Ok, let’s just go outside.”
And just like that we go outside like we always go outside.
“See. They’ve got heaters. It’s fine.” I proudly point at the faded black push buttons, then press with the same finger seconds later. “Bam,” I say.
Bathed in an orange sea, she sits opposite me on a wooden table, her lower jaw chattering viciously. I’m pretty sure that’s for show.
“Come on, it’s not that cold,” I say, grubbily. Like I will snap her out of pretending that it’s cold so we can just agree on something for a while.
“It’s freezing. Brrrrr!” She provides her own sound effects, and I an open mouth as I drain a third of my pint.
“Well, you should be used to it by now! This is nothing!”
“Yeah.” She agrees in the most disagreeable way, then grabs her cigarettes from her pocket, throws them on the table and pats her jacket. “You got a lighter?”
I do, and I watch her lift a cigarette from the box and bring it to her mouth as I search for it. Her black nails chipping, she holds the stick between her two fingers and clicks both menthol balls with her teeth. Holding the cigarette with her big whites, she grabs her hair together behind her head and starts tying it up just as I’ve found it.
I go to light her up, but her hand reaches out and grabs it from me. Two flicks and she’s lit, her hair tied and her neck climbs back into her shoulders. “Thanks.” She says. And I watch her for a second as she does something to my insides.
“What?” She asks. She wants me to know she’s still mad.
“Just thinking about how sexy you are.” I light a cigarette of my own, blowing the smoke playfully towards her face.
“Whatever,” she replies. Her hand waving the smoke from her knotted brow. “You’re just saying that now because you don’t want me to be mad at you.”
“Well, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t true.”
“Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still mad at you.”
“Well.”
“Well.”
“Nothing much I can do here then,” I answer, draining another third of the beer.
And that’s when I saw him. Me.
Down through the metal fence posts. Blackened by shadows and the tarmac of the road behind, I saw him looking, peering over her shoulder at me. A strange figure silhouetted against the quiet street. Unmoving. Just watching. Watching me.
“…see, you’re not evening listening to me now!” She continues from something I wasn’t listening to, her face enraged.
“No, I… It’s just I thought I saw someone over there.” I look over her shoulder again, but the empty street is just that again.
“Who? One of your whores again?” A question that makes no sense with or without context.
“It was strange. I just.” This will make me sound like I have really lost my mind this time, I think, and choose to just say nothing. “Someone was stood there, I thought he was looking at us, but he’s gone now anyway. Sorry, what were you saying?”
“You’re scaring me now.”
“No, it was nothing. Seriously. Just me being weird. Please, tell me, I’m listening.”
“I was telling you that I have had enough of this. I can’t keep carrying on like everything is ok when clearly it isn’t.” Her tone is one of exasperation, dread and reluctance, flecked with little crystals of hope. Like she wants me to allay her suspicions and tell her that I understand her, that I know, and I will work on myself to make it work. That I know everything I do wrong and that I am making a concerted effort to change for me and for her. Mostly for her.
“Yeah, I understand. I think you’re right.” I manage, my mind split by a dense fog from where I am right now and where I am there. In my head. In that street.
“Right about what?” She demands.
“Right about how you feel. I don’t want you to feel like this, but if I can’t do anything to make it go away, then what can I do? I don’t want you to be upset and angry all the time with me, and, frankly, I’m not sure how I am managing it most of the time. So if you want to just end it I’ll go.” I’m toying with draining the rest of the beer and making a diva like exit, showcasing the wiggle of my legs as I walk through the door without looking back.
“That’s not what I’m saying, fuck! I told you you never listen. I don’t want it to be over.”
Her voice increases in volume and hurt, a bell toll to something lurking in the recesses of my heart. I pull her hand between mine, running my thumb over her knuckles. I never did feel like this did much. You always see it, in films. The sad moment, the emotional crescendo, the hand grab and the look into the eyes. But here I am with the wrought bones and cold flesh between my fingers and I feel just that; wrought bones and cold flesh.
“I love you,” she says. A but lingering in her throat, but I interrupt instead.
“I know you do. And I’m sorry. It’s going to be alright between us, ok? It’s just a phase.”
Tears are welling in the crevices of her eyes, “I just want it to be like it was, you know. At the beginning. When we were so in love. We were so happy. I want to feel that happiness again.”
“We won’t feel like that again, those times are gone. But we will feel even better, I promise.” I’m not sure if I am lying to her or to myself. Or whether that even really makes sense.
“Yeah? You promise me?” She’s the child again, searching in earnest for some meaning in the inexplicable. Me; the adult that’s supposed to offer an answer.
“Yeah, I do.”
She pulls her hand back, wiping her tears against the back of her knuckles, laughing at the absurdity of it all.
“Is my makeup ok?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Listen, do you want to get out of here?” I feel tired and lost and scared. My mind awash with what I saw or didn’t see. What was or wasn’t there.
“Yeah, let’s go.” She picks her cigarette packet up and flings it into her bag with her other things. I drain the rest of my pint as she stands, leaving her half of cider barely touched. As she walks towards the backdoor I find myself peering into that empty street again, searching for something in the night.