A Certain Chemistry (14 page)

“Nothing,” I whispered to George. “Look, I have to go, I—”

I could hear the rattle of coat hangers by the front door. “Tom!” Sara shouted. “I’ve got Lindsey and Beth with me. I said we’d look after them for an hour while Susan does some stock taking.”

Susan was a work mate of Sara’s at the freezer store. She had two daughters, Lindsey (6) and Beth (4).

So, that was it, then. I was going to jail.

“Tom? So . . . will you go to the publisher’s evening?” George asked.

“What? Yes, whatever, yes”—there were the French windows—“Anything.
Yes
.”

“That’s great!”

“Yeah, it is. I’ve got to go. Love you. Bye.”

“Ha—love you too.”

“Sorry, I’m not . . . it’s . . .”

“It’s okay,” she said, a laugh in her voice. “Bye.” She hung up.

So, I could get out of the French windows into the garden. I walked over to them. Yes.
Yes!
Because then I’d be naked in the garden, with no way of getting back into the house other than to stroll back into the dining room, naked, through the French windows.

The door opened. I dived to the floor, pulling the photographs off the table as I did so.

Fortunately, because the table was between us, I was not immediately visible to anyone standing in the doorway. I poked my head up into view.

“Hello, Lindsey,” I said. “Hello, Beth. I’ve just knocked some papers off the table . . . and I’m picking them up.”

“Do you—”

“
No!
I don’t need any help, thanks. Why don’t you two go into the other room? You can watch a video.”

“What videos have you got?” asked Lindsey.

“Oh, I don’t know. Loads of them.”

“Any children’s videos? Only Mom doesn’t like Beth seeing scary things—it gives her nightmares.”

Well, she’d definitely be better off with
any
of the videos in there than she would be glancing under this bloody table, then.

“I’m not sure what’s there, Lindsey. You take Beth and have a look.”

“Okay.”

“You’re sweating,” said Beth.

“Yes. Go with your sister now.”

They left. But where was Sara? I strained my ears and picked up a tinkling of cutlery coming from the kitchen. I was in the dining room; to my left lay Sara, to my right Lindsey and Beth. Could I get through the hall and up the stairs without being spotted? If they stayed in their rooms, and had the doors closed, certainly. But, though I didn’t know about Lindsey and Beth, I was sure Sara’s door would be open. Sara had never closed a door in her life (as I was a devoted door shutter myself, it drove me mad). Still, who knew how long I had even this half-chance? I had to make a break for it—there wasn’t a moment to lose. So that I had at least
something
to cover my shame if the worst happened and Lindsey and Beth spotted me, I unplugged the laptop and pressed it over my groin.

I’m no saint, I’ll freely admit, but I’m not an evil man. I’m not a mass murderer or a tyrant; I’ve never made off with the pension fund of a group of war widows or sent a tiny child to an orphanage so I could steal its inheritance. Given this, I think that I really didn’t deserve, at this moment, what with all my other troubles, to burn my genitals against the extremely hot plastic on the bottom of an improperly ventilated laptop case. Is there anyone who would not concede me this point?

You unexpectedly burn your genitals, you say, “Fuck!”—I don’t care who you are. How I managed to bark it so quietly, I still don’t know. My
word,
it stung. I grabbed at my scorched erection and gripped it tightly—my face scrunched up, my eyes closed, and my lips twisted back to expose my gritted teeth as I hissed, “Grrrrrrrraaaaaaahhhhhh”: had anyone walked in at this instant and taken in the tableau I fear they might have jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion. Thankfully, no one did, and—despite the clock ticking—I took a few seconds to examine myself for heat damage. (However busy a man might be, he will always find the time to check his erection if he’s burnt it on a laptop case—it’s common knowledge.) I couldn’t see any marks. From the pain, I’d expected to see the laptop’s serial number, in reverse, and the ventilation grille branded onto it: my speeding mind had already played awkward host to the somewhat tricky problem of how I might explain to a doctor, and to Sara, why it was that I’d seemingly bar-coded my own penis. Luckily, though, burning your genitalia always feels worse than it is, and there were no visible signs of harm. As with any injury, however, the blood was rushing to the site. As it happens, that particular site had not been short of blood rushing to it before this, so now it was like it had been allocated its own heart. It bobbed. In time with my racing pulse, it bobbed up and down; repeatedly flicking its chin up in recognition of someone I couldn’t see—“Hey—how you going?” I flattened it, struggling, under the laptop (carefully turning the case round first so I used the cool upper side this time).

Laptop clasped over my groin, I crept to the door and, like someone opening a package to see whether there was a bomb inside, warily eased it back so I could peer outside. I couldn’t see the living room from this position—it was right next to me, its door on the same wall—and I’d just have to hope that either the door was closed or the girls were too busy looking over videos to notice a naked man running through the hallway. I could see into the kitchen, though, because it was at the end of the hall, perpendicular to my room. The door, of course, was open, and Sara was in there preparing some food. I closed my door until it was open about the width of a single human hair and watched her through the crack. She was by the sink cutting up cheese and placing the slices into a bowl that looked as though it contained some kind of fruit yogurt. I was sufficiently far behind her to be out of her line of sight but certainly not enough so that she wouldn’t notice the movement out of the corner of her eye if I attempted to leave the room. I needed to wait until she was in a better position before making a run for it.

Then she turned round to face right at me. My soul left my body. Really—it was as though something deep in the heart of me was abruptly sucked clean out. I went cold, I stopped breathing, all my limbs sagged—it was like someone had flicked my power off.

She popped a yogurty cheese slice into her mouth and placed the bowl down by the cooker. Obviously, though I could see her plainly, she couldn’t see me—not even my wide, terrified eye—beyond the tiny sliver of a gap I was looking through. I ordered my lungs to start working again and, with not a little pride, noted that I hadn’t pissed all over the carpet. Sara started to hum a tune to herself (“Champagne Supernova,” I think, but I couldn’t swear to it) and moved over to search for something in one of the overhead cupboards. Her back was to me. This was my chance, and who knew whether I’d get another? Over the top, lads.

Clutching the laptop hard to myself, like a security blanket, I whipped open the door as quickly and as quietly as I could. With my jaws locked tightly together from tension, I sprinted out into the hallway, past the living room (the door was open, but the girls weren’t anywhere in view), round the newel post, and off up the stairs.

No one squealed behind me: I’d made it.

I ran into the bedroom and threw on the first pieces of clothing I found in the drawers. When I stood there finally—undiscovered and fully clothed—I felt like the KING OF THE FUCKING WORLD. I made a little fist and shook it. “Yessssss!”

I wandered casually back downstairs. Sara was no longer in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table in the dining room with her bowl of cheese and yogurt, absently flicking through the photos of George from the envelope I’d left lying there.

“Hi,” I said, pecking her on the top of her head.

“Where were you? I thought you were in here.”

“Tch—I’ve been for a pee. Is that okay?”

“Aye, of course. I just didn’t see you go past.”

“I said hello,” I sighed. “You were humming in there in your own little world, though.”

“Oh, right . . . these for the book, are they?”

“Yep. Publishers always like them. A picture is worth a thousand words, and nearly as many extra sales, I reckon.”

She leafed past the childhood stuff and paused on the swimsuit picture.

“Nice figure,” she said, admiringly.

I leaned over her shoulder and squinted at it to convey the impression that I hadn’t really given the photo more than a casual glance before now.

“Hmm . . .” I shrugged, unenthusiastically. “She’s not really my type.”

IV

I’m sorry
you had to witness that, I really am. You’re classy people, some of you, and you shouldn’t have to be confronted with that kind of thing. If it’s any consolation, just think how Tom’s going to feel when you all meet up in the afterlife and he learns that the bunch of you sat there watching him trying to get a quick one off the wrist, huh?

Of course, I’ve got to take some responsibility myself, and I’m big enough to put up my hands and accept part of the blame—that’s why I’m here telling you all this now. When I started this whole thing—you know, the universe and all that stuff—I thought it’d be a nice little distraction. I’d set it up, leave it running, sit back and watch it like a lava lamp—kind of fascinated, kind of just letting my mind drift. You know what I mean? But, anyways, to keep it working you need to have the whole sex thing, and so I put that in the mix. Never thought it’d be such a big deal, I swear to you, I really didn’t. It’s like, okay, I heard this thing about Rachman and Hodgson the other day. These guys are scientists—I’m a real science freak, by the way. Do you watch the Discovery Channel? It’s great—I
love
that stuff. You see, I didn’t have a clue about how anything works—why would I have? I want a whale, I go, “Boom—whale,” and that’s it—bada-bing, bada-boom. I’m not going to get all caught up in the details, am I? I mean, the devil’s in the details, right? Ha ha—“the devil’s in the details”—get it? No, no, I’m kidding you again. Relax, there’s no devil—why would I make a devil? What am I, stupid? But that’s a good one, right? “The devil’s in the details.” Ha ha. Anyways, what I’m saying is, these scientists come along, and they study stuff and investigate and explain how everything works. And I’m, like, “Wow! A whale. So
that
’s how I did that . . . cool.” So, same thing, these guys Rachman and Hodgson—Stan and Ray—Stan and Ray do these experiments to see if they can persuade people to have, you know, “a thing” for boots. They’re basically seeing if they can grow a fetish in the lab, right? Because, they’re thinking, some people have these things anyways, so let’s see if we can understand how that could happen by trying to make one of our own. And they chose to make one for boots. Don’t ask me why. Maybe they think using underwear would cloud the issue, you know, and trying to get folks to have the hots for a gas turbine engine is just making things hard for themselves—so they settles on boots. Whatever, ask them if you want—it’s not important to what I’m telling you here. Anyways, they do it. Stan and Ray do these, you know, kind of, conditioning things with volunteers, and eventually they get guys to go, “Phwoar!” when you show them a picture of a boot.

So, back there, Tom was doing a bit of conditioning of his own. Self-condition: reinforcing his attraction to George by looking at pictures of her while . . . you know, “applying stimulation.” He didn’t know that, of course. He didn’t intend to do it, but that’s what he was doing all the same. Maybe some of you might want to bear that in mind, eh? Be aware of what you’re doing sometimes—just so you avoid getting yourselves more into spin dryers or certain kinds of fruit or socks full of Jell-O than you ever intended. It’s okay, I’m not going to name names: you know who you are.

But that’s not the most important thing here. The most important thing is what happened
after
Stan and Ray worked their shoe trick. You see, they got a result, and they’re happy. They go out for a meal to celebrate, maybe, I don’t know—and then, because they’re straight-up guys, they set about
de
conditioning the volunteers. Ridding them of this unfortunate boot attraction that’s been created for the purposes of scientific investigation. And here’s the thing, right . . . a lot of the volunteers don’t
want
to be “cured.” They’re into it now. I mean, you can imagine how it is for them. It’s like they’ve discovered a whole new sex or something. They can probably spend the entire afternoon standing looking through the window of a shoe shop; it’s probably like watching an orgy for them, right? It’s just a programmed reaction . . . but
that’s all “normal” attraction
is. I simply put it in there to make sure you kept things going—but to guarantee that, it needed to be powerful. So powerful it has Tom playing five-knuckle shuffle in his dining room when the house is empty. So powerful, right, so
powerful
that it seems more than functional, it seems precious and mystical to those who feel it. The boot squad don’t want to have their desire for a nicely turned insole taken away from them, but would
you
want
your
desire removed? If some doctor said to you, “We’re going to do a desire-ectomy on you, so that all those feelings you have looking at a film star or a singer or a model or the person across the road no longer get in the way and you can live your life undistracted by such urges,” would
you
go in for the operation? Like I said, this is partly my fault. I make things important for you guys, and then I’m all surprised when you feel they’re important in ways I didn’t intend. I needed them to be strong; I never intended them to be special.

I’m sorry about that. Really, I am.

seven

“What did Tom get you?” asked Hugh’s wife, Mary.

We were having a small party for Sara’s birthday. Sara’s friends and a couple of her less dangerous relatives were wandering around with precarious paper plates of sausage rolls and crisps in one hand and glasses of sparkling wine in the other, asking one another what they did for a living, responding, “Oh,
really
?” and then falling silent. Sara had friends from all sorts of places; I had Hugh. I knew a few other people, old colleagues from the newspaper and so on, but no one I saw regularly or felt any need to invite round because it was my girlfriend’s birthday. That was fine by me, incidentally. I’m not hugely gregarious, and it was quite enough for me to have Hugh, and Amy. Except Amy wasn’t really my friend: she was my agent—a thing simultaneously less and more than a friend. Amy I hadn’t invited to the party; she would, I knew, have felt uncomfortable about it. Like it was crossing a line. She’d have felt that there was a kind of nonspecific, visceral ickiness to her being there—in the same way there might be if a man were having a birthday party and his wife invited her gynecologist.

Hugh I’d expected to be a damper on any reckless attempts at celebration, but I hadn’t thought Mary would come in and almost immediately turn down the ambient joy.

Sara and I had had a row that morning. We didn’t have many rows—Sara’s too upbeat and good-natured, and I’m too lazy—so, when we
did
have them, we tended not to know how to have them properly. We were underrehearsed and unsure of our lines and our cues, and there was confusion about who should start bits, and, crucially, we had no idea where the end was.

It had begun almost first thing in the morning. I’d been working on the book until very late the previous night, and because of this I didn’t wake up early so I could rouse Sara with a kiss and a breakfast tray, as is a birthday requirement in our house. Sara was determined to get her due, however, so instead of getting up, she sat there, in bed, for God knows how long, waiting for me to wake. I think she grew irritable during this period. In fact, I have a suspicion that the reason I woke even when I did was due to her finally losing patience—I know for certain that I awoke with a start, my ear was unaccountably painful, and Sara was rubbing her elbow.

Anyway, once I was awake, I got up and did my duty. I returned with the tray and her birthday card. The card turned out to have an ill-fitting verse inside it, which annoyed Sara further, but really, what kind of freak reads the verses in cards before he buys them? Sara carefully stood the card on the bedside table.

“Present?” she said, noting that I hadn’t brought one in with the tray and card, and glancing around the room a little for effect.

“Ah,” I replied, remembering I’d prepared something. “I’ve got you a present, but it’s nothing I could wrap.”

Sara sat up straighter in the bed and cheered a little. She wriggled expectantly. “What is it?”

I popped out into my den and returned with an envelope. “It’s a thing that’s going to happen later,” I continued, “but I did do this envelope. Just so you had something to open now.”

She took—snatched, in fact—the envelope from my hand and flexed it with her fingers in examination. “Tickets?” she offered.

“No.” I smiled back. “Not quite tickets.”

“Ohhhh . . .” she squeaked, girlishly excited. She tore open the envelope wildly and unfolded the piece of paper inside as fast as she could.

“It’s a year’s subscription to
ProCycling,
” I said, in confirmation (even though she had stared fixedly at it for what I judged was long enough to read it five times over). “I did it over the Web, but I thought I’d print out the e-mail confirmation of the order, just so you had something to open this morning.”

She reread the printout in motionless silence, oh . . . perhaps another twelve times.

Finally, she placed it back in the envelope, put the envelope on the bedside table by the card, and said, “Thanks.”

Over the course of the following twenty minutes or so—from nowhere—an argument developed.

And it never really ended. We’d prepared everything for the party by running on a kind of chill professionalism—“I’ll grate the cheese with you, but it doesn’t mean I
like
you, okay?” As we moved about the house getting things ready we never missed an opportunity to pass each other soundlessly in the hallway without making eye contact.

This is the context, then, in which Mary had asked Sara, “What did Tom get you?”

“A magazine subscription,” she replied, with a smile that gave everyone goose bumps.

“Oh,” said Mary. “That’s nice.”

“Yes. Isn’t it?”

“It’s a cycling magazine,” I cut in defensively. “You know how Sara loves cycling. And this is an American magazine—I had to do the subscription on the Web.”

“Oh,” said Mary. “That’s nice.”

Hugh, sensing an atmosphere, changed the subject. Though, of course, Hugh only had one subject he was capable of changing to, so it didn’t give a huge lift to the mood.

“Twenty-nine, eh?” he said to Sara. “You’ve still got a little chance left at life at twenty-nine. You probably don’t realize it, probably think you’ve already let all the good years slip away, but really, you’ve still got at least one more shot. Trust me.”

“I’m fine about being twenty-nine.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Georgina Nye is
thirty,
” I said, hoping this would encouragingly illustrate a point but, simultaneously with uttering the words, completely forgetting what that point could possibly be.

There was a short silence, after which Hugh said, “Exactly—there you go.” Everyone looked into their wineglasses for a moment, and then Hugh started raising our spirits once more. “Of course,” he mused, “a lot of people think it’s all over and done with bar the credits when you hit thirty, but that’s not true at all. No, complete nonsense. Your life’s not really finished until you reach thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five, eh? You’re thirty-seven, Hugh,” I said, “and you’re still talking.”

“Oh, you shuffle on, of course you do—but it’s just waiting, really. Once you hit thirty-five your body starts to fall apart; simply
careers
downhill faster than you ever thought possible. All of a sudden you notice your scalp shining through your hair when you look in the mirror, and you begin collecting fat—which you can’t seem to lose whatever you do—and comprehensively, bodywide, you sag. You can stand there in the shower for ages, just grabbing great bits of yourself, pulling them up, and then watching them drop, heavy, lifeless, and wobbling, the second you release them from your grasp.” Hugh was staring down, but his eyes weren’t focusing on anything. “You start to squint at things, you start to drift towards elasticated waistbands, you start to think about your joints, you start to worry about what you eat, you start to fall asleep during the evening news, you start to say things like, ‘Ohhhh . . . I’ve been sitting in one position too long.’ At thirty-five it all unravels so rapidly you can’t even take it all in. That’s why . . .” He raised his sad eyes to me. “. . . Have you ever filled in a survey or a questionnaire? They have age categories: under a year, one to seven, seven to fourteen, fourteen to twenty-one, twenty-one to thirty-four . . . thirty-five to seventy. That’s the last category, thirty-five to
seventy
. Sometimes they don’t even bother softening the blow at all by writing the seventy, it’s just ‘thirty-five and over’—’thirty-five to death.’ ‘Thirty-five’—
whoosh!
” He swung his arm out and looked off into the distance, like he was throwing a Frisbee. “To infinity. Welcome on board the number thirty-five—next stop, the grave.”