A Certain Chemistry (13 page)

As it was getting awfully close to Sara’s birthday—and I still hadn’t got a clue what to get her—while I was waiting for the toaster to finish I brought my laptop into the dining room and connected to the Net.

Nibbling toast from one hand, I used the other to guide the mouse around, leaping from one hyperlink to the next in search of something I could get for Sara as a present. Two hours later I was still in my nightclothes and I hadn’t got any closer to finding a present for Sara, but I’d seen poorly drawn versions of all the characters in
The Simpsons
in every kind of sexually compromising situation you could imagine. It’d be pleasing to say that, ultimately, I tired of this trudge from one image to the next and disconnected with a weary huff, berating myself for wasting so much time. In fact, I had to stop because I was desperate for a piss.

That’s the problem with John Stuart Mill’s vision of Utopia, you see. He had this dreamy belief that his Utilitarian ideal would work because, given time and education, people would prefer the “higher pleasures.” However, when foreign powers attempt to suck secrets from the finest minds in science and politics, I note that they tend to use the lure of sex far more than the promise of a really good anthology. The thing about humans is that they are, ultimately, only human.

Nevertheless, after I’d been to the toilet, I did at least decide on getting dressed and going out, rather than returning straight away to more cartoon fellatio . . . you know, for J. S. Mill’s sake.

“I need something for Sara’s birthday,” I grumbled into my mobile.

I was wandering randomly around town, growing ever more fed up. No, not fed up,
annoyed
. I was getting more and more annoyed with Sara for having a birthday. It was so selfish. I’d been with Sara when she was buying presents for friends and, first off, she enjoyed searching for them. The state of needing a present, but not having found one yet—how can you
enjoy
that? It makes no sense. It’s like wanting to sit down in the cinema but not being able to find a seat and yet thinking this is splendid, as looking for one is half the fun. Madness. Still, she does indeed
enjoy
the lack of satisfaction that comes from trying to find something but not achieving it. And when, eventually, she
does
locate the present she’s going to buy, there’s a kind of euphoria there. She pays over the money flushed with pleasure. When
I
eventually find the present I’m resigned to buying for a friend, I pay the shop assistant with nothing but a kind of angry, nihilistic despair: “Well, that’s
it
now.
That
’s what they’re getting. I’ve had enough . . . and I’ve bought this now . . . and
that’
s the end of it . . . and if they don’t like it they can just fuck off.” Moreover, I’m additionally irritated by having spent twice what I intended to, and I
always
spend twice what I intended to—out of guilt about buying them something that’s crap. Unpick that one.

So, “I need something for Sara’s birthday,” I grumbled, broken, into my mobile.

“Mmmm . . . have you thought of getting her one of those spa things?” asked Amy. As I’ve hinted before, in return for taking ten percent of everything I earn, Amy gets to be my mom.

“No. What spa things?”

“Where you buy someone a day at a beauty place, out in the country somewhere.”

“Isn’t that just like implying you think they’re ugly? And anyway, what’s the point of it? You can get all the stuff from Superdrug for a few quid. If she wanted to lie in a bath, she could lie in the bath at home.”

“I think the whole point is to get away from your home.”

“Why? What’s wrong with our home?”

“Och, Tom—and I promise you I’m not saying this just because you’re an Englishman—but you really are an utterly clueless fucker.”

A bit harsh, I thought. I am a writer, after all. I think about things deeply, and from various perspectives, day after day; it’s my job. It’s unavoidable that I’m going to be pretty damn insightful and sensitive—I’m a
writer
.

“Look, Amy, just tell me what to do. Sara’s birthday’s only a week away.”

“Surprise her. Plan some really big surprise—horse and carriage, new dress and shoes inside it, she can change as you ride along to the box you’ve secretly booked at the ballet . . . Tom . . . ?
Tom?
”

“If you’re going to take the piss, Amy, then—”

“I’m not taking the piss. What’s wrong with that?”

“The ballet? I
hate
ballet—don’t say it. Don’t say it, because I’ve never heard
Sara
rave about ballet either—I don’t think she’s ever been in her life, in fact.”

“Aha!”

“What?”

“It’s one night, you twat. And it’s something she’s never done before.”

“And supposing—as seems pretty inevitable to me—she doesn’t like it? I want to get her something I
know
she’ll like. I don’t want to risk disappointing her.”

“Even if she hates it, she’ll always be able to say, ‘I don’t like ballet,’ and she’ll go straight from those words to the wonderful memory of how she learned that—with you whisking her away to an evening there on her birthday.”

“Are you . . . ? ‘Whisking her away’? What
the hell
? Are some people from Harlequin threatening you, Amy? They’ve got you tied up right now, haven’t they? Cough once for yes.”

“
You
called
me,
you know.”

“Yes, but not for Gothic fantasies. I didn’t expect you—Christ, you of
all
people—to turn into Mrs. Radcliffe. Can we please keep our feet on the ground? There are about a billion things that could go wrong with a grandiose scheme like that, and anyway, Sara’s a modern woman—she doesn’t want ‘whisking away.’ I mean, okay, she might
say
she does sometimes—but that’s in the abstract. Nice as a fantasy, but she wouldn’t want it really. She likes us to make decisions together. She’d hate to simply have to go along with what I’d decided was best for her.”

“You . . . oh, Jesus, just buy her a dress, then, okay? Buy her a fucking dress.”

“Right . . . What size would you say she is?”

We needn’t concern ourselves with Amy’s reply here. Evidently the contract negotiations had put her under more stress than I’d realized.

A short time later it started to rain: that dirty, tepid rain you’re sometimes cursed enough to have soak you in a city in May. The air became sticky, and the streets smelled like wet denim. I continued to trudge around all the shops, but nothing seemed right for Sara. My wet clothes held in the heat, and before long I didn’t know what was rainwater and what was sweat. In misery and defeat I caught the bus back home.

As soon as I arrived I struggled out of my soaking clothes, got into the shower, had a quick wash, and then exited in the standard fashion: one leg out, other leg inside slips—Jesus!—Fuck!—phew, caught myself in time—whoa, adrenaline rush—I’ve never
felt
so alive! . . . Crap, where are all the towels? I picked up my mobile (
yes,
I take my mobile into the bathroom with me—so?), went and rummaged a fresh towel out of the chest of drawers in the bedroom, and gave myself a brief scrub dry. Then, seeing my crumpled, filthy, wet clothes lying on the floor of the bedroom and the washing basket nearly full, I decided to go downstairs and dump everything in the washing machine. I hoped Sara would note this thoughtful, Domestic Prince–style act and remember it next week, when I’d utterly failed to have found a birthday present for her. Passing back through the kitchen, I flicked the kettle on and padded into the dining room to collect my mug from the table where I’d left it that morning. I put my mobile down by my laptop. Ahhh . . . naked I might be, but here was a laptop, a mobile phone, and the promise of tea—this was how man was
meant
to live. You could keep all the frivolous ephemera of modern society, I thought;
this
was all I needed.

I noticed the envelope lying on the table and idly pulled the photographs out for another look. George’s life in a bag; it vaguely reminded me of when you see people in movies finishing a prison sentence and being handed back an envelope containing who they were twenty years ago. A baby. A girl. An adolescent. A nineteen-year-old emerging wet from the sea. I held on to this particular photo, and sat down. George really was very . . . and she’d not gone downhill, either. In fact . . .

I laid the picture down on the table in front of me and started up my laptop. It took me a few minutes of searching, but yes, there it was. Just for comparison, see how her legs, in this photograph of her in a clinging bathing costume, are no less well formed than they are in this other photograph on the Net where we can look up them to her knickers as she gets out of a car. Interesting. I flicked my eyes back and forth between the two images, pondering how photography captured instants like this—sealed moments in amber. I was thinking about the way future generations would have access to these unposed, unguarded insights into our lives in a way we never could for the people who’d lived before the advent of the camera. It was a fascinating line of thought, and I was a little annoyed that I was being hampered in pursuing it by the irritating distraction of my erection twitching against my stomach. I reached down and moved it around a little, trying to maneuver it into a less intrusive position. It remained determinedly vertical and skittish, but, not to be outdone, this only made me redouble my efforts to wrestle it into submission.

Relatively quickly, this became an end in itself.

Time took on an indistinct quality. Despite this dreamlike dimension, however, in some respects I was remarkably lucid and focused. Here was this stubborn erection that simply refused to go away—either after my initial mental requests or, now, due to my later attempts at a police action using increasingly rapid and vigorous hand intervention. There was clearly only
one way
I was going to rid myself of this unwanted intrusion. Once I’d realized this, I resolved upon a plan of action and strove towards its conclusion with great vim and determination. I was, I had
no
doubt whatsoever, very close to my destination when my mobile phone rang. As always, I snatched it up off the table and answered it. Habit. Completely reflexive, no brain function involved at all—the extreme limit, in fact, of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

“Hhhhhello,” I said. (Okay, “gasped.”)

“Hi, Tom,” replied George.

Oh, Jesus. An avalanche of the most horrific thoughts imaginable fell from my head and plunged cold into my stomach.

“Oh . . . Geor . . . um . . . ‘lo, George. How are things? Going?”

“Fine, fine. Look, the reason I’m calling is this publisher’s thing they’re having while I’m in America. I know you said you didn’t fancy it, but I really would appreciate it if you went for me.”

“Mmm . . . I don’t really . . .” I noticed, absently, that despite the trauma of the situation my hand still appeared to be moving down there. It had stopped very briefly when it had first heard George’s voice, but had managed to retain its grip. And now it had begun moving again. I was, of course, utterly
appalled
by this. I could only imagine it was doing it out of some kind of rebellious thrill at the thought of trying to get away with it—the frisson inherent in (oh dear) trying to pull it off.

“I really would owe you one,” whispered George, simultaneously on the phone, in a bathing suit, and flashing the most
fantastically
prim white knickers at me as she got out of a car.

This was just awful. I
loathed
myself. If
only
there was something I could do to change this situation. Surely there was something I could do to stop this? Sadly, nothing occurred to me.

“Yeah . . . well . . .” I replied, leaning back in my seat slightly.

“Go on, Tom. Go
oooooooon
. . . for me?”

Terrible. A truly terrible state of affairs.

It’s amazing how fast the human mind can go. I don’t mean go
somewhere,
reach a conclusion, but just race along; sprinting through thousands of thoughts, picturing hundreds of possibilities, conjuring up a countless number of spinning images. If there’s a record for the speed of thought, I broke it. I broke it sitting there at the table in the dining room, naked, a bathing-suit photo spread out by my laptop—which was displaying Dave’s Upskirt Pics Page—Georgina Nye on the phone, a thumping erection in my hand, and, from the front door, the voice of Sara calling, “Tom? Are you in?”

“Fuck!”

“What?” replied George, a little surprised.

“Oh, Jesus! Fucking fucking
fucking
. . .”

What do you do first, eh? Stuff the photo back in the envelope? Turn off the laptop? Try to wrench your erection agonizingly down out of sight between your legs? Hang up on George? Look for something to wear? If your girlfriend is only moments away from the door and you won’t have time to do everything, which combination of things
unarguably
hangs you? Leaves you without any hope whatsoever of being able to give a plausible alternative to “Hello. I’m in the dining room naked having a wank over Georgina Nye”? You might say the erection—think about it, though. No erection, but bathing photo, upskirt.jpg, and dining-room nakedness are going to ring bells with Sara—she’s no fool. If I had only the erection to contend with, at least I could try to bluff it: “Ah! Sara!” (Sweeping, theatrical hand movements.) “I’ve been waiting for you!”

“Are you okay?” asked George.

I slammed the lid of the laptop shut. “Yes! Fuck.
Fuck!
”

“Tom?” Sara called, queryingly. She’d obviously heard me scrambling about. Or possibly heard my heartbeat, which was surely a single decibel of loudness away from shattering all the windows in the house. “Tom?”

“Yes,” I called back. I tried to inject it with a kind of offhand, casual, no-need-to-come-into-the-dining-room-there’s-nothing-interesting-happening-here tone.

“Yes what?” asked George.

I looked around the room frantically for something to wear. Not a bleeding thing. Well, that wasn’t strictly true: there was my mobile-phone case. I suppose I could slip that over my erection. Sara would come in, there I’d be with a Simpsons mobile-phone case on my penis, I’d shout, “Ta-da!” and then, all being well, instantaneously have a seizure and die. It was easily the best plan I had.