A Certain Chemistry (31 page)

“Christ, Sara, I’ve had a shitty time—rushing about, falling over that tramp, and everything—and now I come back and you start laying into me too. About
nothing
. About not bothering to tell you something that’s not very important and that you knew about anyway.” I
was
genuinely indignant here, by the way, not solely faking it for effect. I
did
feel put-upon and harassed. I mean—Jesus—as if I weren’t under enough stress trying to juggle the lies involved with having an affair, without my girlfriend making it harder for me. I was clearly getting the shitty end of the stick.

Sara looked up into my eyes for an uncomfortable amount of time. Long enough, in fact, for holding my wounded expression to start hurting my eyebrow muscles. Eventually she sighed and laid her head back down on my chest.

“I’m sorry, Tom. I just . . .”

She left the “I just . . .” door open there, inviting me to go through it holding a “Just what?,” I think. I wasn’t about to, though. Lord no. I would have liked to have nailed the bugger shut, but as there was no reply that would do that, I simply let the thing flap open in the wind instead. It was the best result available.

After a few moments, I started stroking Sara’s hair, appeasingly. I did this for a while, pretending to have gone back to reading the magazine. Because of the position of her head, I couldn’t see her eyes, but I sensed that they were open; Sara’s eyes were penetrating enough for me to be able to feel them staring even when they were out of view. I didn’t let on that I felt her eyes were still peering into the pensive space of the bedroom, though, because then I’d have been caught in the trap of either having to ask, “What are you thinking?”—which was clearly a frightful direction in which to begin traveling—or be seen to blatantly
not
ask, “What are you thinking?”—which was tantamount to a comprehensive confession of guilt. Instead I tried to stroke her hair in the way that you’d stroke the hair of someone whose eyes you believed to be closed. Things, as you can see, had now descended to a quite terrifying level of subtlety. I wanted to change my position in the bed, because it was aggravating one of my bruises, but I didn’t dare. The situation was
that
brittle. Any sudden movement or noise or even the repositioning of a single buttock could be a catalyst for a discussion flaring up. I continued to stroke her head until I judged I could risk a tiny, tiny signaling yawn and then slowly switched off the light and settled down in bed.

The darkness was silent for a little while, and then Sara, without moving, whispered,

“Do you love me?”

“Like what? Like a bogie loves the underside of a table? More than there are pictures of people’s cats on the Internet? Like what?”

“Not like anything. Just . . . do you love me?”

I pulled her tightly to me, almost crushingly tightly.

“Christ,
yes
. Of course, I love you.”

“Anything you’d like to tell me?” asked Amy, a tiny instant before detonating a horizontal explosion of cigarette smoke from between her lips.

“No . . .” I said, rather awkwardly. “No, not really.”

“Fair enough.”

I hadn’t seen or spoken to Amy for over a week. I know some people don’t speak to their agent for months on end, but Amy and I hardly ever went more than a few days without meeting up or at least talking on the phone. This was partly Amy’s carefully emphasized “I’m your agent; we are a single spirit” technique. I don’t know how many other clients Amy had—it was certainly dozens—but she always made you feel you were not merely her favorite but (a few piffling contractual technicalities aside) actually her only one. I think (and I certainly
like
to think) it wasn’t purely artifice, though. I’m sure she sometimes met me for lunch simply because she wanted to have lunch with me. So we could chat and she could order several bottles of wine, without having to worry that I’d drink any of them. It was she who’d suggested we meet today for a general discussion of how
Growing
was doing, and she who’d picked the bar.

“Fair enough,” she repeated, archly. “But it makes it tricky to know what to say to your girlfriend when I don’t know what
not
to say, you get what I mean?”

“Yeah . . . thanks for covering for me the other day. I appreciate it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was just a misunderstanding, though.”

“Uhhhh . . . huh.”

“It
was
. Crossed lines.”

“Abso
lute
ly.”

I responded by sighing with a huge, extended fizz.

“Okay, Tom”—she shrugged—“don’t go into a huffy. I’m not your Jiminy fucking Cricket—don’t think I’m going all prying and extracurricular on you here. Okay, yes, I admit, I did sort of hope you’d moved beyond your odd fetish for women who have the special charm of an industrial estate—”

“I wasn’t seeing Fiona.”

“Did I
say
Fiona?”

“It was just crossed lines.”

“Whatever. I’m simply advising you to think things through. . . . People should always think things through.”

She emptied her glass of wine and drew on her cigarette for the time it took her to fill it up again. I’d spent the past week—since George and I had last met—engaged in various sneaks, but the sneaking of cigarettes was perhaps the trickiest. Sara’s nose was terrifying. She could easily have made a living sniffing out cigarette smugglers at Dover Customs. I was seriously considering renting a flat somewhere, under an assumed name, just so I could have a fag.

“Could I bum a cigarette?” I flicked my chin at Amy’s packet on the table.

“When did you start smoking?” she asked. In precisely the annoying kind of way you’d imagine she would.

“I didn’t say I’d started smoking, I just asked if I could have a cigarette.”

“Are you going to use it as part of a magic act you’re developing?”

“It
is
possible to smoke a cigarette without having ‘started smoking,’ you know.”

“Too subtle for me, Tom—I’m just an agent, not a writer, remember?”

“Look, if you don’t want to give me one, just say so.”

“No, no, take—please do.”

“
Thank
you. Let it never be said that there’s such a thing as a Scot who’s tight with their fags.”

I lit the cigarette. It was fantastic.

Amy looked at me quietly for a while. I thought for a moment that she was going to say something I’d rather not hear, but fortunately, while any potential statements were still brewing, her peculiar mental thermostat flicked off and she glazed over. I enjoyed a couple of tranquil drags on my cigarette while I waited for her to return. After a few seconds, power was restored to her body, the focus poured back into her eyes, and with a start she said, “So . . . anyway . . .
Growing,
then.”

“I understand it’s selling really well. Haven’t they done two reprints already?”

“They’re doing a
third
now. Paul is gutted.”

“Why?”

“Because he can see that it’s going to go through the two hundred K barrier and he’ll have to give us the extra money we agreed on. He’d rather hand over one of his own bollocks than another two percent. In fact, he’s as good as doing that anyway, because he knows I outmaneuvered him and got the best deal. His bollocks are already mine.”

“Good for you.”

“And
you
. When we cross that two hundred K mark it’ll put another thirty thousand pounds in your pocket.”

“I’ll begin clearing out a pocket.”

“A little dance would be appropriate around now, Tom. Christ almighty—this deal has earned us twenty times more than we’ve ever got paid before.”

“No, no, I’m very pleased . . . there
is
more to life than money, though.”

“Well, now you’ve just started rambling.”

“Amy . . .”

“What?”

“. . . nothing.”

She nodded slowly. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going round.” She almost seemed to say this to herself as much as to me.

We tapped the ash off our cigarettes together in silence for a few seconds.

“Right!” said Amy, abruptly brightening through an effort of will. “You sit there, Tom, and smoke cigarettes like a true nonsmoker while I get myself
very
drunk indeed.”

“Okay.”

“Keep an eye on me. After the third bottle I might try to start a fight with someone, but if I don’t, I’ll need you to remind me.”

“Righto.”

I was keeping in touch with George mostly through text messages between our mobile phones. This, I have to say, was unbelievably hot. I’d set my “incoming text alert” to “vibrate”; each new message from George was signaled by a secret tingling in the area of my waist. If there’s anyone who needs me to point out the two different levels at work there, I suggest you forget about everything and just go outside and watch the clouds instead. The texting had been born of necessity (George was massively busy with publicity and didn’t have a moment to herself for most of the day), but it actually turned out to be very,
very
erotic. I’d never have thought that exchanging a few blocky words while miles and miles apart could affect my breathing and send tingles racing all over my body (generally racing in the direction of my groin). That’s what happened, though. In fact, the few times we managed to speak on the phone were almost an anticlimax compared with the texting. I hoped that, when we got a chance to meet again, we wouldn’t be left cold by being physically together and naked and have to sit on opposite sides of the room texting each other, “Harder!” and, “Oh, YES!”

The downside of all this textual intercourse was that I had to conceal it from Sara. This was awful. I’d feel a message arrive and have to sneak off to read it. It was skin-pricklingly exciting to do this—but, as I say, awful. It felt terrible to be deceiving Sara about this thrillingly clandestine communication. Not only that, but I kept popping off to the toilet so often to read and reply to the messages that Sara thought I was developing prostate trouble.

It was especially tricky to hide everything because Sara was watching me. At first I told myself it was nothing but the paranoia that travels with treachery: that she wasn’t
really
behaving any differently, it was simply that my overwrought eyes were seeing reflections of their own guilt. I had, after all, imagined in the past that she was scrutinizing me—ages before I’d started seeing George, back when I was utterly blameless. It wasn’t just imagination this time, though. Sara was definitely behaving differently. She was quieter, for one thing, and she always seemed to look at me intently when I spoke, like she was running a visual polygraph.

Any tiny foothold for the hope that I was merely delusional was removed when one day I asked her, “What’s wrong?” Obviously, I wasn’t in the habit of asking Sara things like this. I had, however, done it a few times during the years we’d been together when—usually surfing on a wave of lager—I’d snuggle up to her and whisper, “What’s wrong?” on the hunch that she would probably reply, “Well . . . I’ve been wanting you to do something astonishingly dirty to me, but it’s
so
filthy that I’m embarrassed to admit that I crave it.” So far, my hunches there had turned out to be wrong. Instead, she had somehow always managed to find other, nonsexual things that were troubling her to fill up the three or four hours after I’d asked the question. So now, when (hoping I could reset things to normal by an exchange along the lines of “What’s wrong?” “I think you’re sleeping with Georgina Nye.” “I’m not.” “Oh, right. Phew”) I nestled close to her on the sofa and asked, “What’s wrong?” and got the reply “Nothing,” well, I
knew
things weren’t right.

I tried not to resent her. I tried to remain unaffected by the fact that everything to do with George was fun and exhilarating and sexy while, over the past week or so, being with Sara increasingly seemed to be a wearing, stressful time spent having to be constantly on my guard. I mean, I loved both George and Sara, and I didn’t want to play favorites. Sara made it quite difficult for me on occasion, though, and I was rather proud of my impartial benevolence in not judging her.

I think it’s accurate to say that the tension in the house tightened as we approached the party. Nothing actually
happened,
nothing was actually
said,
but there was a definite increase in the air’s ambient voltage.

We scarcely said a word as we prepared when the night finally arrived. Sara, who normally took about a minute and a half to get ready to go out anywhere, spent nearly two hours changing in and out of clothes and fiddling with her hair. I told myself that this evening would be the end of it all: Sara would meet George, the suspicions would boil away under the heat of George’s charm and our obviously platonic, purely professional relationship, and everything would be fine again. (And then, hopefully, George and I could slip away for a rapid, frantic shag somewhere.) Despite trying to convince myself that the party was really a good thing, however, I still wanted it to be over with as soon as possible.

It was being held at a function room in one of the hotels in the city and it didn’t start until pretty late (if you’re after attracting the media, then holding a party after most places have stopped serving drinks is always a good strategy). Sara was adamant that we take a taxi there, rather than go in her car. This meant she intended to get pissed. (I could have driven the car, of course, but if Sara was going to get pissed, then my getting pissed too was an option I wanted to keep open.) When the taxi arrived, things picked up a little. I called up to Sara, “The cab’s here,” and she called back down, “Okay.” Sadly, however, we failed to build on this conversation. We climbed into the back of the cab, and the switch that turns on the little “doors now locked” red light also seemed to operate as a mute button because Sara and I fell into the type of concentration-demanding silence that one normally only experiences when in a lift with a stranger.

Central Edinburgh fragments at night. It fractures visually as the eclectic whole of the city in daylight, its bony soup, becomes a deep, inky sea erratically strewn with distinct structures. The major landmarks (the National Gallery, say, or the Bank of Scotland—above all, the Castle) shine under powerful floodlights so that they push themselves forward, tearing holes in the night. Sara and I sat in the taxi together, silently looking out at the shattered city through opposite windows.