A Certain Chemistry (17 page)

I think “experimental dance” ought to stop now, by the way. I’m not going to make a big thing about this; I just think it ought to stop.

Benny Barker, of course, had got a prime place right on (appropriately) George Street. His show was on the Friday—national TV—and George’s book went on sale on the Saturday. It was great publicity, especially as both Barker and George would be keen to ride the Scottish wave. George had been given a list of the questions she was going to be asked. This suited everyone: George wouldn’t have to face any awkward enquiries or things she was uncomfortable talking about, while Barker knew that she’d have the time to prepare some snappy answers, which was good for the show in general and, therefore, naturally, for him personally. Amy had e-mailed me the list of questions, because she said George’s agent wanted to make sure the ones about the book got suitably clever replies. I’d e-mailed back some quietly brilliant off-the-cuff responses for George to make.

I was, um . . .
niggled,
that’ll do—I don’t want to overstate the case—I was niggled that all this was going on via Amy and Paul. George could simply have talked to me herself, couldn’t she? That would have been easier. Still, I didn’t let this niggling impact on the quality of the sparkling retorts I prepared for her—I’m a professional. She can do everything via our agents, if that’s what she wants. And she can go off to America and let Darren grinning-twat Boyle fuck her brains out too. It’s nothing to me; it won’t affect
my
work.

Where Sara was concerned, on the other hand, I did rather get it wrong with my nonchalance level about the evening. I’d played it cool with her. My going along to the show was no big deal, I’d shrugged—that, in fact, was why I’d forgotten to mention it to her until the day before it happened. Why should I have mentioned it earlier? It was a trivial thing. I upgraded it from “mundane” to full “wearisome” when Sara continued with her line that it
was
quite exciting: Benny Barker, watching a live TV show being made, from behind the scenes, all that.

“Why didn’t you ask if I could go too?” Sara had said.

“Well, like I’ve told you, it’ll be
sooo
dull. I was just keeping you out of being caught up in the tedium of it. You know—protecting you, really.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t find it dull, and you know I’m desperate to meet Georgina Nye,” Sara had replied, before pulling a really dirty trick by adding, “And anyway, you could have asked me what I wanted, couldn’t you? Not just decided for me.”

Low blow or what?

“Well, yes . . .” I’d replied, changing tack, and pausing for a moment or two while I looked for another tack to change to. “But there’s also the security issue.”

“What?”

“Security. And popularity.
Everyone
wants to get to see the show—”

“Fools. Clearly we’re the only ones who know how dull it is, eh?”

“It’s a . . . look, there’s everyone and his mom trying to get in, and only a limited space, and the security people really don’t want to let
anyone at all
in . . . do you think
I’d
be there if I wasn’t needed for the show? They’re allowing me in, grudgingly, because they have to so I can support Georgina. So what chance do you think I’d have with ‘Oh, and can my girlfriend come too, please?’ Eh?”

“You could have
tried
.”

“I . . .” I held on to the
I
for a long time, and then just released it as a defeated sigh. “Yes, you’re right. Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

Sara had looked at my penitent face for a while, then rolled her eyes. “Aww . . . never mind. Just promise me you’ll have a really shite time.”

Then she’d smiled. Christ, but she was beautiful.

“Done.”

“No, listen to me: a
really
shite time.”

“I’ll probably attempt to take my own life as a cry for help. I promise.”

After this I’d continued—spontaneously—to remark upon how boring it was going to be. Unfortunately, all my efforts to convince Sara that I was off to spend an evening equivalent on the excitement scale to watching the bite in an apple go brown while listening to Portishead worked against me when the time came around and I turned into the bride’s mother. I tried to label my obvious, jittery excitement “huffy irritation” in the hope that it would get by on false papers, but I don’t think I got anywhere near pulling it off. I paced around and fussed over my shirt and checked my watch every couple of minutes—and this was
hours
before the time I was due to leave. Eventually, I simply bolted. A good hour and a half ahead of the time I’d been told to arrive, I got myself into the city center and flung myself into the pub nearest to the hall.

The place was a boiling soup of people, but I got myself a lager from the bar—impressively, after being overlooked only four times in favor of people who’d arrived after me and whom I hoped fucking died; their slumping corpses pinning down the barman in such a way as to hamper his respiration until he, too, fucking died. Then I sat down on a chair that had been left on its own by a small table.

There’s a strict limit to the amount of time you can be in a pub alone before every single person looks at you and thinks, “He’s been stood up, he has.” In the U.K. the time limit currently stands at sixteen minutes. You can try to affect that you
haven’t,
in fact, been stood up. That you are (1) a desperate, desperate man out on his own hoping to pull—please God—tonight and thus bring an end to the years of agonizing loneliness and nightly, mechanical, yet frantic masturbation sessions followed by self-loathing and late-night TV until briefly given some reprieve by a sweaty, fitful sleep, or (2) an incorrigible alcoholic. Option 2 is the popular choice. Either one is better than being stood up, though. Having no partner is, at least, nothing personal—it’s really just a general state of affairs, rather than a slight aimed at you in particular. Being stood up, on the other hand, is the most unambiguous, targeted comment it’s possible to make. It’s not blurred or diluted by the presence of everyone else in the world (because you’re basically being rejected from a shortlist of one). It says that, although someone has made a commitment to see you—perhaps after suffering a head injury or as a practical joke—when it came to the crunch they couldn’t go through with it; they simply could not bear the idea of being with you. With
you,
solely and specifically.

After sixteen minutes, I noticed the people in the pub flicking glances at me and welling up with pity. Had I set out a hat and a cardboard sign,
STOOD UP,
I reckon I could have made quite a decent amount of money. Instead, I chose to smile wryly—indicating that I knew they were thinking I’d been stood up but that nothing could be farther from the truth and, in fact, the irony of their thinking it amused me greatly. This tactic worked for a little over a minute and a half, after which I left to sit in another pub. Fortunately—and this may surprise you—Edinburgh isn’t a place where it’s difficult to find a drink, so I easily went through three more lagers in three more locations until it was time for me to turn up at the Benny Barker show.

The doorman called some kind of assistant to take me into the greenroom they’d set up inside the theater. Here, backstage, I could have a glass of wine, eat nibbles, and watch the show on a TV monitor. Some might say that these are precisely the same things you could have done had you stayed at home, but that would make you some random punter on the outside; here you were bathed in the specialness of being on the inside. Other than me, the only people there were the members of this week’s boy band (who were in the charts with a song that I’d never admit to liking and who looked a lot uglier in real life), a few of their entourage, and an anxious-looking Benny Barker show helper wearing a headset into which she periodically shouted,
“What?”
They all ignored me, and I was happy to be ignored. Nerves and four quite rapid lagers had left me feeling a bit sick, as it happened.

It was telling that no one else was in the greenroom. Benny Barker usually had several guests, but George was big enough for it to be her alone tonight (the band would simply be miming to their single halfway through the program, as is traditional on chat shows). It was a Georgina Nye special. One, it seemed to me, that was rather short on the Georgina Nye. There wasn’t long to go before the show started. Where was she?

I ate some peanuts, which did wonders for my nausea, and strolled around the room slowly, pretending to be fascinated by things: the flower arrangement, the wine bottles, random bits of wiring. I was looking at the place where two sheets of wallpaper met and running my finger along the join with an apparent mixture of scientific scrutiny and childlike awe when the door opened and George finally arrived. She was, as always, frothing with controlled energy and easy, unshowy confidence. Dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, she looked utterly spectacular. She glanced around, saw me, grinned, rolled her eyes, and then came directly over—seeming not to notice that there was anyone else but the two of us in the room. This, I must admit, made me feel pretty spectacular too. It’s completely astonishing what four lagers and the attention of a soap star can do for your self-esteem.

“Just our luck, isn’t it?” she said, laughing.

“Yeah.” I laughed back. Then I cleared my throat and asked, “What is?”

You know that phrase “It’s the beer talking”? It felt like I was bringing that to life in an unusually literal way. It wasn’t that the quartet of lagers had loosened my verbal restraints. No, that wasn’t how it felt at all. When I saw George come through the door, if you’d asked me what I was going to say to her when she got over to me, I’d have been at a loss to give you any response whatsoever. I simply couldn’t find any words within me: my head had been scrubbed of them. At any other time, I’d probably have had no choice except to just stand there and bark at her. However, though my brain and mouth weren’t up to stitching vocal sounds together in any meaningful way, it seemed that the four bottles of Stella I had on board were relaxed and chatty.
They
were doing the talking for me. Odd as it sounds, that was the sensation:
I
was, unaccountably, tongue-tied, but these things were coming out of my mouth—they didn’t pass through my brain at any point, and I had no inkling what the lager was going to say until the words had stepped out from between my lips and into the room.

“Oh, haven’t they told you?” said George. “Benny Barker’s sick.”

“Since when?”

“Since yesterday morning, apparently. They’re saying it’s a stomach virus.”

“They’re
saying
? What is it really?”

“Um, a stomach virus—it’s the doctors who are saying it.”

“Oh, right. . . . So, what’s happening, then? They clearly haven’t canceled the show.”

“They’ve got one of the comics who was up here for the festival to do it. He’s a pal of Benny’s . . . damn. Can’t remember his name now . . . He’s been tipped for the Perrier, and—Paddy! That’s it, Paddy Adams.” She repeated the name to herself five times, insistently hammering it home.

“Paddy Adams.” I nodded.

“You’ve heard of him?”

“Yeah. He’s pretty funny. Very surreal. Clever. Students like him. Though, obviously, that’s not his fault.”

“Right.”

“He’s a good choice. He’s likable, but he’s still reasonably unknown, so there’ll be no sense of competition. It’ll be your show.”

“They tell me he’s been briefed and has worked really hard to prepare himself. It’s his first major TV show, and he’s nervous.”

“Christ, so am I. And all I have to do is stand here and eat peanuts.”

“It’ll be okay, though. I hope.”

“Did you get the replies I did for the book questions?”

“Yes, they’re great.” She reached out and squeezed my arm. “Thanks.”

At this point the lager ran out. I pleaded with it to deliver just one more sentence, but it’d talked itself dry. I stood there and grinned at her. A big, dopey, idiot grin that just went on and on. I could see the boy band glancing over at the two of us, and I could tell they assumed that George was meeting me for charity. Thankfully, the woman with the headset—who I’d believed was climactically nervous before but who I now realized had many higher levels of quivering, frantic distress yet to tap—juddered over and, shouting, near tears, into her microphone (“What? I’m . . .
What?
”), led George out of the room.

I had a glass of wine. It was awful. Simply dreadful. I’m not big on wine to start with, and peanuts don’t really improve the taste of it, but I’m sure anyone would have found this particular stuff just as unspeakably appalling as I did. I had another glass.

Before long the show started. I sat down on a tubular-steel-and-black-leather chair that was probably worth more than all the furniture in my house combined and watched the monitors. Adams came on and did a minute or so of stand-up using the fact that he was hosting the show instead of Benny Barker as a basis for the routine. He seemed a little overanxious to please and he was obviously an unknown to most of the audience, but he was funny and had a kind of bemused-looking charm and it didn’t take long for everything to feel comfortable. Good for him. And, more important, good for George.

After this, he sat down on the big, curved Benny Barker sofa and introduced George. To a jazzed-up version of the theme to
The Firth,
she trotted in from the wings—looking for all the world as though she were just turning up at a friend’s party, rather than stepping out in front of a big studio audience and millions of television viewers to chat to a man she’d never met and whose name she had difficulty remembering. However silly and pointless this celebrity nonsense was, there was no denying that it was still difficult to do it with the apparent ease and naturalness that George could. That in itself required real skill; she had a talent for being able to seem normal in the most abnormal circumstances.

And just
look
at her arse in those jeans too. Wow.

There was a little preliminary chat—Isn’t Edinburgh great? Aren’t Scottish people great? Isn’t this old Scottish theater, in Edinburgh, great?—then Adams pulled out his intrigued eyebrows and asked his first proper question. At which point every single muscle in my bowels fell limp. It was astonishing in the most horrific way—a nightmarish turn of events that no one could have predicted.