A Certain Chemistry (43 page)

Finally—decades after he’d started—Iain waggled his glass in the air and said, “Well . . . I need a refill.”

“You need a fucking good kicking is what you need,” I said. (I was addled by Iain-fatigue, okay? Anyone would have said the same thing—honestly.)

Iain balanced a squint between surprise and distress.

“Ahhh!” I added, pointing my finger at him and grinning.

“Oh—ha ha! Nice one,” he replied, grinning back happily, and went off to get another drink. (And then, I hoped, to emigrate and die.)

Sara and I stood together in silence for a moment. I sipped at my glass of wine and looked with interest at those things in the kitchen that most unmistakably weren’t her.

“You look well,” Sara said (very, very suddenly, it seemed to me).

“Thanks. So do you. . . . I see you’ve cut your hair short.”

She reached up and ruffled it, as though checking it was still there, and still short. “Och—aye. I did that
years
ago. . . . As a statement, to be honest.” She laughed. “I went out and did it just because I knew you’d hate it short.”

“Right.”

“And I hated it.”

I nodded.

“But,” she said, running her fingers through it again, “it’s kind of grown on me now.”

“Hair does that.”

“Funny.”

I sipped at my wine some more.

“Amy couldn’t come, I understand?” Sara said.

“That’s right. She thought it was too long a trip up from London, until the baby’s older.”

“Aye. Of course. She’s still your agent, though, right? Even now she lives down there and everything?”

“Oh, yeah. Marriage and motherhood haven’t slowed her down. Quite the opposite, in fact. She’s
forever
telling me that London is simply the only place to be if you’re a literary agent.”

Sara smiled. “How things change.”

“How they do . . . indeed.”

Another wine-sipping pause.

“So,” I asked, much as I’d ask any acquaintance about her partner, just to show interest, “you’re going out with a professional cyclist, I hear?”

About ten months ago this piece of information had slipped out of Hugh’s mouth, and all over me, while he was taking a phone call from Mary as we were having lunch together. He’d immediately become flusteringly apologetic. I’d ribbed him mercilessly, of course. That he could tumble into hysteria simply because he’d let it out that Sara was seeing someone? Good Lord—as though after all this time the idea of her being with someone else had the slightest impact on me! Bless. What an old mother hen you are, Hugh! Then, still chuckling visibly all the way, I popped off briefly to the restaurant’s toilet and threw up.

For a while afterwards, whenever I thought about her having sex with this other man (which I tended to do rather a lot), I’d gag with nausea. Then, perhaps, get spinning, stumbling drunk and spend an evening scrawling “BITCH” and “SLAG” on bits of paper until I felt I was ready to move on to punching the wardrobe and crying.

But that’s all a normal part of the healing process, right? And, anyway, it was
months
ago; obviously I was over all that now.

Sara huffed out a little laugh. “I
was
.”

“Broke up?” I asked, enduring actual physical pain from forcing my expression into one of concern and sympathy.

“Aye . . . aye.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Aww—no big deal. It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Right.”

“And seeing him shave his legs creeped me out.”

“Fair enough.”

We did a bit of throat clearing. It seemed like the time for it.

“And you?” Sara asked. “Are you seeing anyone?”

“Nah—I haven’t seen anyone since we split up.” I immediately realized that this sounded astonishingly unimpressive or, even worse, as though I were clumsily trying to imply that she’d always be the only one for me—that my sexual side had disappeared the day she left. “I’ve done an
awful
lot of wanking, though,” I hastily added.

“Naturally—you’re a writer.” She flicked the rim of her wineglass with her fingernail. It rang out with a pure but deeply, deeply irritating note. “I read your book, by the way.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Oh—I think I
did,
actually. Anyway, I enjoyed it.”

“
Enjoyed
it?”

“Well, not ‘enjoyed’ . . .”

“
The Observer
called it ‘unremittingly grisly and harrowing—a suppurating wound of a novel.’ ”

“Aye, well, what do they know?”

“Oh, they were praising it. It’s serious literary fiction. I didn’t write it to be
enjoyed:
I hope I’m a good enough writer to be beyond that.”

“Okay, then. I found it ‘raw.’ Is that all right?”

“What about ‘uncomfortable’?”

“Oh,
aye
—definitely.”

“Excellent.”

“I’ve heard it sold quite well.”

“Hmm . . .”

“Didn’t it?”

“It was a ‘cult hit.’ ”

“What’s that?”

“You know what a ‘hit’ is?”

She shrugged. “I suppose so.”

“This was a ‘cult hit.’ ”

“Ah.”

I made a dismissive wave. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that I stay true to myself . . . and I think the next one will do better—it’s got robots.”

“Killer robots?”

“Too soon to say. I’ve missed you, you know?”

It wouldn’t stay in any longer. I was amazed I’d managed to keep it in this long, quite frankly.

“Aye, well . . .” She looked down and flicked her glass again. The shrill chime it made annoyed my teeth.

“I . . .” Oh, Jesus. “Do you want another drink? Only I’m keen to try some of the stuff Mary and Hugh smuggled back from the Gambia. They say it’s used over there to celebrate special occasions, flavor stews, and as a traditional way of executing goat thieves. You want to try some? It’ll be fun. The label has a picture of a defibrillator on it. What do you say? Eh?”

She showed me the outer layer of a smile. “No—you go ahead. I’m just going to have a wee chat with some folk . . . catch up on the gossip . . . you know.”

“Okay, sure. Well, I’ll be off to tackle that drink then . . . It was good to see you, Sara.”

“Aye. You too, Tom.”

With a show of buoyant energy, I left the kitchen and headed off through the house.

So—that was that. What was there left to do? Or say? I’d wanted—no, I’d
needed
—to tell her I’d missed her, and I’d done it. Before I’d seen her again tonight I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed to tell her that. To tell her it while I was sober and rational. So that, hopefully, it didn’t sound like nothing but a jilted boyfriend whining about his own feelings but instead assured
her
that she was a person who was special enough always to be missed. Well, it was out of my system now. That was everything, surely? There wasn’t any air left to clear. Anything from now on could only count as willful digging up, not finally laying to rest. Hmm . . . if this was closure, then it was vastly overrated.

Awww—crap.

Crap, crap, crap. You’re going to regret this, Tom. . . . The trouble is, you’ll regret it even more if you don’t try.

I spent the remainder of the evening talking to people I didn’t know very well about things I didn’t care about at all. Mary proposed a toast that luridly drove embarrassment into Hugh’s shattering chest, we sang what a jolly good fellow he was, and he made a short speech, which somehow brought together his appreciation that everyone had come with how bacteria had now developed immunity to all the antibiotics available and a new plague era must surely be upon us. It was classic Hugh, and provoked an enthusiastic round of applause and some cheering. All the time, however, I had Sara in the corner of my eye and the front of my mind.

At last, I spotted her telling Hugh and Mary that she was leaving. (I couldn’t hear what she was saying—I was across the room—but the “Weeeeell, I’d better be making a move now . . .” speech is unmistakable even with no sound.) I nipped over to them all with my most rapid casualness.

“Weeeeell,” I said, glancing at my watch, “I’d better be making a move. It’s been great fun, Hugh, Mary.” I looked across and smiled. “I leave the rest of the wine to you, Sara.”

“Oh, I’m leaving now too.”

“
Are
you?”

“Aye—my cab’s outside.”

“Really? Um, look, I couldn’t use it as well, could I? You can get out at your place, and I’ll carry on with it. It’ll save me having to call a cab for myself and wait around for it to arrive. I’ll pick up the whole tab, obviously . . .” I raised my eyebrows questioningly and left them there, for ages. I noticed Hugh and Mary tighten, as though someone had increased the tension of their spines by a half-turn or so.

“I’m sure it won’t take long for another cab to arrive, Tom,” said Mary. “And Sara’s house and your flat aren’t really in the same direction—you’ll be paying a lot for the detour.”

“Tch—it’s only money,” I tutted. “Sara?”

“Aye, fine—whatever,” she replied with a shrug.

“Sara, you—” began Mary, but Sara showed that she had a general idea of what Mary was about to say—and that it was all right and Mary shouldn’t worry about it—by riding right over the top of her before she could say it.

“Okay, let’s go—don’t want to keep the driver waiting. Hugh—happy birthday. Mary—I’ll phone you in the week, okay? Come on, Tom.”

We hurried out to the cab.

The whole journey was occupied with my thinking of things to say that couldn’t possibly be taken as hinting at anything else. It was the conversational equivalent of playing Taboo. Sara seemed genuinely okay with me being there, though, if a little quiet. The real moment, the one that started the buzzing in my ears, came when we finally pulled up outside her house.

“Well . . .” said Sara.

“Well . . .” I nodded in agreement.

“My house,” she said, with a wave in its direction.

I peered out at it standing cold in the eerie semidarkness of the sodium streetlights. “Still looks the same.”

“It is. You ought to see inside—I haven’t even vacuumed since you were last there.” She laughed. “I’m Miss fucking Havisham.”

“
Could
I see inside?”

Sara let her laugh die gently and stared at me with those eyes of hers. (Not that she could have stared at me with anything else, obviously; I simply mean that her look was all the more piercing because of the eyes she had available.) She didn’t say anything, and neither did I. There was just the hum of the taxi’s engine, the small creaks of the seats, and our breathing, yet the intensity of it was both exhilarating and utterly unbearable. The air was completely still, but I felt as though a wind were blowing into my face.

“If I were to say you could come in for a coffee,” Sara said evenly—and about half a second before the impossibly taut atmosphere in the back of that cab would have been broken anyway by my pissing myself, because of the impossibly taut atmosphere in the back of that cab—“would you have the good sense to realize that there wasn’t, and I don’t want there to be, any more to it than that?”

“Jesus—
of course
.”

“Okay . . . would you like to come in for a coffee?”

“Yeah—why not.”

Sara went to the house while I paid for the cab. She left the door open; I pushed it back and stepped inside.

The hallway ambushed me. I wasn’t expecting it to be armed with such an unsettling mixture of familiarity and otherness. And it smelled. Not bad—it didn’t stink. But it smelled of “our house.” That says it all, really. Because you can’t smell your own house—everyone else’s house smells to some extent, but you can’t smell your own house at all, your nose is dead to it. So, for me to be able to smell it and for it to smell like our house, which is something you can’t smell—that’s also my emotional response for you, right there.

Sara made some coffee and we went into the living room. I sat on the sofa; she sat in a chair.

I looked around the room, which was exactly as it had always been. (I couldn’t help especially noticing that it still had the same carpet.) “I like what you’ve done with it,” I said.

“Aye—I was going for a kind of retro feel.”

I blew on my coffee.

“Was I really shite in bed?” I asked.

“Ha! That’s the one thing that’s stuck in your mind, isn’t it?”

“No, no . . . I just . . .”

“You were okay.”

“Okay?”

Sara sat and smiled at me.

I nodded. “I see,” I said. “You’re going to leave me here, holding ‘okay,’ aren’t you?”

She sat and smiled.

I looked down into my mug. “Do you ever have any regrets?” I asked.

“Regrets? That I went off and fucked someone else, you mean? Yes, I—no, hold on, wait a minute . . .”

“Right, I deserve that, obviously. I just meant . . . do you ever wonder if it might have worked out differently?”

“Had there not been that whole ‘massive-betrayal’ thing?”

“Do you ever wonder?”

“If you hadn’t decided to throw away everything for a quick shag with an actress?”

“
Do
you ever wonder?”

“. . . Sometimes. Of course I think about it, sometimes.”

I put my coffee down on the table and leaned towards her.

She started with alarm. “On the coaster!” she said.

“Oh . . . sorry.” I moved the mug and leaned closer to her again. “Sara, we were really great together, once. And I think about you all the time—”

“When you’re doing all that wanking?”

“No.”

She blew on her coffee and stared at me.

“Seriously,” I said. “I think about you every time I walk past the freezer section in Safeway, for example. And I hardly ever wank in there.”

“Oh, aye—you say that
now
. . .”

“I’d like to try again.”

“Don’t you remember what I said when we were in the cab? Coffee is as far as I want to go, Tom.”

“I’ve changed, Sara. I
really
have.”

“Tom . . .
so have I
. A lot.”

“I can see that. . . . But I still love you. It’s as simple as that. Filter out the noise, look past the scenery, and it
is
as simple as that: when I look at you, I know I still love you.”