A Certain Chemistry (3 page)

“Haddock.”

Sara’s concentration started to drift away from me because her favorite soap,
The Firth,
had restarted. It was set in a fictional coastal town and featured the harshly lit lives of the varied inhabitants. There was a marriage every year and a dramatic death every two—regular as clockwork. The gaps between these were filled with feuds, rivalries, affairs, and some kind of storyline that could pick up extra publicity by being promoted in the media as the show “dealing with issues” or “helping understanding” or some such—a character having dyslexia, say, or the effect that a parent being convicted of cannibalism has on the wider family. The show had been running for about a million years.

“Haddock.” I nodded.

“Aye,” she replied, mistily, as if speaking under hypnosis. “A haddock omelette in chicken gravy. There’s some Spaghetti Hoops too.”

Sara had a very
promiscuous
attitude towards food: what might be called an unusually inclusive meal gestalt. She didn’t like everything (“Olives—bleugh!,” for example), but if she
did
like it, then that was that. If she enjoyed ice cream and she enjoyed fried eggs, and they were both in the house, then it was as likely as not to be ice cream and fried eggs for lunch. Being a writer (even if only a ghostwriting hack of one) and therefore fatiguingly condemned by my nature to look for causes, influences, and even—in moments of particular weakness—
reasons
for things, I would have been inclined to put this down to her job. She worked as a supervisor in a food shop. PolarCity; one of those big, chuck-it-out/sell-it-cheap places that carries mostly frozen food. For Sara, I would have mused—had I been writing her rather than living with her—food is simply a continuum that goes from the baskets near the entrance to the checkouts by the exit; put into sections only for the convenience of storage, it all goes into the same carrier bags in the end. That’s what I would have said. That would have been neat. The trouble with this wry analysis as applied to real-world Sara—Sara out of the laboratory conditions of a narrative—is that it would be utter bollocks. Sara had been like this with food before she’d ever gone to work in PolarCity. She’d been like it ever since I’d known her.

When I’d met Sara she worked in an off-license. She worked behind the counter at my off-license and I’d see her when I went in to buy a packet of fags or a few cans of lager. I thought she was attractive, right from the very first time I saw her there. Okay, so the person she replaced was a sullen, bird-eyed Glaswegian who’d had one hand moving disturbingly in his pocket on every single occasion I encountered him, but she’d have caught my notice favorably even without the comparison. She wasn’t beautiful as defined by the stag-night consciousness of magazines like
FHM
or
Maxim
but had a kind of, well (don’t laugh), a kind of
allure
. Charging down from her head like the Golden Horde was a boiling mass of ginger hair—yep,
ginger.
I’m not going to resort to euphemisms here. I’m not going to drop my eyes and mumble something about Sara being “a redhead” or “flame-haired.” She’s ginger. Deal with it. In any case, the fact that she had ginger hair didn’t jump out at me all that much. For a start, I was still only twenty-two, and when you meet a woman at that age you don’t think much about her being ginger—you’re not remotely considering having
children
with her, after all. Also, I’d been living in Scotland for quite a while, and there are so many ginger-haired people here that you become almost numb to it. Her skin was pale (some slight freckling, nothing disastrous)—almost bone white, in fact—and her frame heroin thin. Actually, I suppose she looked quite ill, but then I think, subconsciously, I find that kind of look appealing—it’s probably the capital-
R
Romantic in me. The thing that struck me more than anything else, however, was her eyes. Pale blue, as clear and sparkling as the wineglass in a washing-up liquid advert and, even then, starting to line at the edges from smiling. Sara smiled all the time. She used to smile at me as I came into the shop, smile at me when I put the cans on the counter, and smile at me when I said good-bye.
Knowing
smiles too, that was the thing. Her face smiled, but her eyes looked at me and knew,
told me
they knew. She’d smile as I gave her my money, but her eyes would snag mine and say, “I know you looked at my arse when I turned round to get that packet of Marlboros off the shelf just then. You stared at the contours of my thin, soft dress and wondered if that was a thong I was wearing, or if my knickers had just
really
ridden up there; and you thought that, either way, it was a pretty good state of affairs as far as you were concerned. I know you thought that, and guess what? That’s fine. I’m okay with it. In fact, I even find it amusing and cute in some kind of schoolboyish way. What do you think about that, eh?” It’s powerful stuff when a pair of eyes puts you on the spot that way.

At first I tried to put a cordon around her. It was transference, surely? I associated her with lager and fags,
that’
s why my heart picked up speed and my mouth slipped into an involuntary smile whenever I thought of her. Falling for the woman in the off-license? How sad was that? Textbook pathetic—like becoming smitten with your nurse or your mother. No, hold on—not your mother. Whatever, you know what I mean. But it wouldn’t go away. I found myself “forgetting” things. I’d “forget” to buy a box of matches, so I had to go back to the shop a second time. I’d suddenly decide at ten-thirty at night that I needed to sprint over and get a single packet of crisps. Not because of her—no, simply owing to my sensing that my body wouldn’t settle because it lacked salt. This madness continued for a while, but things really became fatally unhinged when I found myself standing at the counter holding a bottle of dry white wine.

When she’d first started working in the shop I’d come in for a four-pack of lager produced by no one you’ve ever heard of—“Weinermeister: brewed under license in a big shed in Doncaster,” that kind of thing. I’d scan the stock, ignoring everything but the price labels and the alcohol content of each item, do a quick cost-divided-by-strength calculation to work out the underlying Getting Pissed score of everything, and then go with whatever seemed most efficiently engineered. But then, one evening, as my fingers reached for the week’s special offer, I happened to glance towards Sara and she, of course, smiled. My hand hovered uncertainly over the cans, then it reared up and began to rub my chin mendaciously; I was pretending to consider my choice based on more impressive criteria. “Mmmm . . . what
would
be an appropriate lager to accompany the
lapin à la moutarde
I’m having for dinner?” And I picked up a four-pack of Carlsberg instead.

I’d crossed a line.

The next time I went in I bought McEwan’s Export. Then Kronenbourg 1664, then just two cans of lager and a bottle (a
bottle,
mind—sophisticated) of Guinness, then . . . well, basically at the end of the road I wound up standing at the counter holding a bottle of fucking dry white wine. I was trying to convince the woman who worked in the off-license that I was urbane and multilayered using some sort of alcohol semaphore.

Then the final phase hit me: I lost the ability to speak. Good job, you might think, when the only place left for me to go by this stage would have been to ask whether she perhaps had this wine in a “carafe.” But sadly, I don’t mean that I went mute, just that I abandoned words in favor of making more or less random noises with my mouth.

I have a problem, you see. I’m a reasonably articulate person—no great raconteur or anything, but I’m passable enough at stringing phonemes together to convey simple ideas. I can talk to women without any problem, talk to them without either awkwardness or embarrassingly misjudged, bombastic shouting—I didn’t go to a public school, after all. Even women I find attractive don’t interfere with my communication skills (I am perfectly able to speak with my tongue hanging out). However, when and if I move from finding a woman attractive to having “a thing” for her—even if I don’t realize, consciously, that I
have
got “a thing” for her at this point—then my ability to speak to her at anything approaching adult level simply leaves town.

I believe I was halfway through buying a cheekily crisp Chablis, twenty Marlboros, and a bag of pork scratchings one evening when my evil, rat-bastard id decided—flick of a switch—that I’d now got “a thing” for Sara and should therefore shed the English language. I could actually feel the words molt from me and fall uselessly to the ground; tumbling over my shoes, scattering across the counter like tiny ball bearings and bouncing randomly over the floor of the shop. I only had to say, “No, that’s fine” (because I
didn’t
want anything else) and “Thanks. Bye, then,” for Christ’s sake. But every time I made a grab for the sentences, the effort blew the words out of my grasp—like when you try to catch a thistledown but the very movement of your hand through the air causes it to pull off an impressively rapid, evasive loop-the-loop and you open your hand to find nothing. I just stood staring at her for what seemed like most of the 1990s with a kind of vacant, hillbilly grin on my face
(“Don’ you be payin’ no nevermind to young Cousin Tom—ain’t a scrap o’ malice in the boy, but he done had a diff’cult birth”)
before I finally marshaled the array of forces needed to produce a noise like Goofy laughing, and then left the shop. I went home, drank the Chablis in ten minutes, and awoke the next morning halfway up the stairs with my trousers round my knees. (I like to imagine—still—that I was trying to make it to bed.)

Things could have continued quite happily along these lines until either Sara got a job somewhere else or my liver exploded. I tried, a couple of times, to slip in (you know, pulling myself back just as I was leaving, as a sudden afterthought) a “Do you live around here, at all?” or a “So, what do you like to do when you’re not working in this off-license?” or even a “What’s your name, by the way?” On the first attempt someone else came into the shop just as I was about to begin speaking. Naturally, I fled. The second time I tried I ended up buying a box of fifty cocktail umbrellas. Having failed twice, wretchedly, I did what any sensible man would do: I retreated into a bunker and hoped for a miracle.

Later that week there was a miracle.

Okay, not quite a miracle, but a favorable coincidence, at least. I was still working for the newspaper at this time. A bunch of us had gone out to the pub after work to celebrate some occasion or other (I can’t remember what it was now, but clearly to cajole a group of journalists into an evening’s drinking it must have been something pretty special). We were sitting there, discussing the issues of the day, when Sara strolled into the bar enclosed within a semipermeable casing of friends. A woman called Beverly had just had her decree absolute come through, and they’d all dropped in for a few drinks before moving on to a club. Even better, one of Sara’s friends turned out to be the cousin of our young production assistant. She quickly took the opportunity to come over and embarrass him, and thus our two gangs intermingled. It was perfect. I was by Sara, in a social setting, but not under any pressure to form sentences for her. I could slowly ease myself in—the occasional “Yeah . . .” or “Haha . . .” from the sidelines being enough to keep me in the match. I even gleaned that her name
was
Sara. (Make a note of that, I thought; that could come in useful later. There’s no stopping me when I get going, there really isn’t.)

When the women went on to the club, a few of us went with them. This was a bit of a backwards step, really. By the end of the pub session I was doing rather well. I’d edged around to where Sara was standing so that, not at all infrequently, our forearms brushed. I’d uttered—okay, to the group at large, but my eyes paused on her—an entire phrase (“I’m just popping to the toilet”). I’d even offered her a crisp, and—get this—
she’d taken one
. The club, however, pulled the rug from under me, and I was cast into a smelly, sweating, shuddering hell. Another hour or so in the pub and I could probably have pulled off a “That’s a lovely necklace” (at which point you’re practically fumbling impatiently with each other’s zips, of course). But that was irrelevant now because, even if I could summon up that kind of captivating patter, it was almost impossible to hear anything above the deafening roar of the music. Basically, anything that couldn’t be shouted in fewer than five syllables was both too prone to sonic attrition and also too painful to be worth it. We can add to this the fact that I dance like a fool, and also that I seemed to be a catastrophic half a decade astray; I bumped against a group while I was getting a drink at the bar, and one of them shouted, “Watch it, Granddad!” Granddad. I was, I reiterate, twenty-two years old at this point.

It went on and on. For
hours
. I watched Sara dance and got so drunk that I came out sober on the other side. Every so often one of our party would leave off creating a humiliating spectacle amid the other dancers, come over to me at the bar, shout, “Waaaah!” (I’d shout, “Waaaah!” back), grab a quick drink, and then rush back to abase himself some more. When it was well into the early hours, some kind of collective consciousness in our party eventually called a halt, and we splattered out into the street—giggling, stumbling, hoarse, sucking greedily at the wonderful, cool oxygen. Taxis were summoned, and while some called it a night, quite a few of us went back—for “a nightcap”—to what turned out to be the flat Sara shared with two friends.

And I slept with her.

Lord, she was pissed. More or less insensible and giving the acute impression that she might pass out at any moment. It causes a bit of an internal struggle when you’re faced with a woman who’s inviting you to bed while she’s so clearly mentally incapacitated by alcohol—a real dilemma. How you resolve the situation in a way that allows you to feel comfortable is a purely personal decision, I believe; I’d certainly never judge anyone for taking a particular route. I mean, obviously, you want to have sex with her, but at the same time you’re a little uncomfortable with the idea that she might puke over you. I decided that the best thing for both of us was if I just had sex with her very quickly—then it’d all be seen to and if she
did
feel a bit nauseous later on, well, she wouldn’t have me to worry about and that’d at least be one thing off her mind.