Charlotte Street (37 page)

‘I mean, we’d be terrible together,’ she said, looking up at me at last. ‘Look how you hold a spoon. I could not be with a man, long-term, who holds a spoon like that. Plus there’s your pretentious films, which I know you don’t watch, because you’ve still not taken the Jim Jarmusch box set out of the wrapper. And you never got rid of those boxes under the bed, which also shows the level of commitment you’re offering.’

I smiled. We were two unhappy people, living with each other for a while, knowing there was someone else to be around for a while, happy with that. Now we could stop going through
the motions. Now I could take the sofa at nights; she could stop pretending she was asleep when I stumbled in.

She was no Dev. But I had a friend again.

‘Shall we go out?’ I said.

Zoe snorted spritzer through her nose.

‘“Stupid Man’d face”!’ she exclaimed, and someone at the next table turned to look at her. ‘This is a fantastic insult. Once you’ve worked out it’s an insult, it’s a fantastic one.’

‘I’m pleased you approve.’

‘And what was her reaction? No, forget that. What was
Gary’s
reaction?’

She seemed delighted by all this.

‘He called me buddy a lot and tried to bond.’

‘The best revenge!’ she said. ‘He’s a pro. Totally proves to Sarah what a man he is and what a child you are. Genius.’

This was nice. It could have been awkward, talking about the aftermath of an event in which Zoe played no small part. But it was nice. Saying it all out loud somehow rid it of its awfulness and punctured my pomposity. It felt like I’d gained something back in my life. An old friend, someone who knew me, someone who used to revel in my inadequacies over student union Snakebite and rain-spattered rollies and apparently hadn’t changed.

The strain had gone. I had missed her.

‘So then what?’ she was saying, leaning forward, eager for more.

‘Then I deleted her from my Facebook friends,’ I said. ‘Except I didn’t; Abbey did, but weirdly it seemed to make her think I was a grown-up handling the situation with aplomb.’

‘Very twenty-first century. Very mature of you. What then?’

‘Then I ended up going to her engagement party and Abbey handed out narcotics to the various guests and it all kind of
went downhill from there again because her best friend Anna tried to take a lamp post on a bus and Gary was sick on some foot carpets.’

Zoe slapped the table and shouted, ‘Ha!’

‘Oh, we should’ve done a feature on this, Jason,’ she said. ‘“How to take a break up like a man”.’

I smiled and took a sip of my drink.

‘They’ll be married soon and I’m sure it’ll all be forgotten.’

‘How long now?’

‘A month. They want to move quickly so that when the baby is born Gary can introduce himself formally as Sarah’s husband.’

She laughed. ‘And this Abbey … this singer. She’s the girl? The one you left the message in the paper for? Because secretly, I thought that was sweet. I didn’t want to say anything because … well, I guess it went nowhere. Or went wrong. Hence you crashing in Blackstock Road instead of with her—’

‘Abbey’s not The Girl. Abbey’s a girl but not
The
Girl.’

‘So who’s “The Girl”?’

I laughed. This was nice. It was like clearing the air, somehow. No awkwardness, no regret, just friendship.

‘I don’t know who she is,’ I said.

She scrunched up her nose and theatrically clicked her finger to alert the barman she’d need another drink for this. He ignored her and continued wiping down a glass.

‘You don’t know? You don’t know who “The Girl” is? Are you being metaphorical? Like, you know her, but you’ll never know the real her? Are you being daytime drama about this?’

‘I am being literal. I literally don’t know who she is. And yet in a way I kind of mean the opposite.’

‘You
are
being daytime drama!’

She turned to the barman, annoyed, as if to say I’ve-asked-you-
once
, but he remained resolutely adhered to the you-need-to-actually
-ask
rule on which barmen seem so keen.

I got up to get her that drink, and to work out how to tell the story. And when I sat back down and I’d finished, she looked me in the eye, and said, ‘You always said a relationship needed a beginning. You’ve got that. So what are you going to do about the end? Because this – me and you sitting in this dank Highbury pub before traipsing back to a grim Highbury flat – this
can’t
be how it ends.’

‘And yet,’ I said, my hands in the air, my mind made up. ‘And yet it is.’

‘
Dank?
’ said the barman.

There was a time and a place for The Girl.

I had to take the hints life was throwing at me. No Dev, no Abbey, no Sarah. No
London Now
, no prospects, no hope.

I was starting to think it might be me.

Sometimes life isn’t magical, you see. Sometimes life is everyday. It’s a trip to a keycutters in a rushed lunch break. It’s the light, high rattle of a lightbulb’s broken filament. It’s your neighbour coming round to tell you you’ve left your car lights on.

Yes, rarely it’s something other. Maybe it’s the glance of a girl on Charlotte Street, for example. But how long before a glance runs out? How long can you keep coasting on a look?

If I was going to sort myself out, I had to prioritise the practical. There are too many tramps out there who had big dreams.

And there were things to sort out. My friendships. My own flat. My job.

Zoe’s interest had been nice, but it was the interest of someone just wanting to hear the end of a story. She didn’t have to get out there and make it happen. Making it happen was hard. It took effort, and time, and … well … I had a job now. Places to be and things to do. And plans, I had plans.

I’ll be honest, I felt a little empty. Like an ambition had been thwarted or a dream left unrealised. Like I’d been close, somehow, but close to what? Looking at it, I’d been no closer to her yesterday than I had been when this all started. I mean, sure, I’d found her ex-boyfriend, but what had that cost me, that little discovery? And how wonderfully had I messed it up? My life, which had been getting steadily worse, if that was in any way possible, had been made just that little bit more awful by that little jaunt. But still the emptiness was there. The ache of giving up on something you hoped might be magical.

The magical could wait.

It was time for the everyday.

Day Three at St John’s
. ‘Oh, you’re back,’ said Jane Woollacombe, head of Maths, in that way people do when they’ve heard you’re back from somewhere but didn’t actually notice you’d gone. We were in the hallway of the Maths block, all green lino and peach walls, like we’d pressed a button marked 1970s to see what’d happen.

‘And how was … where did you go exactly, in the end? Travelling or something?’

‘Nope, not travelling.’

She fiddled with her butterfly brooch, nervously.

‘Career break, then?’

‘Not that I’d intended.’

She looked at me blankly.

‘I tried something,’ I said, as casually as I could. ‘It didn’t work out. I was living on peanuts, moving very slowly, so I decided to cut my losses.’

‘Oh,’ she said, her face falling. ‘Well, you didn’t fail. Because you tried.’

‘Didn’t say I failed,’ I said.

‘And how’s … um …’

‘Sarah and I split up. A while ago.’

‘Well, relationships … you know. That’s not failing either.’

‘I didn’t say any of this was failing.’

‘Well, good, because you didn’t. Some people just use that word, don’t they, and they shouldn’t, so you tell them that trying is what counts.’

‘Who’s been saying the word “fail”?’

‘Doesn’t matter. No one. People who do aren’t worth talking to anyway.’

She eyed Mr Willis, suspiciously, through the squared glass of the door next to us, and raised her wild eyebrows.

‘And it’s not like
he’s
ever done anything with his life, is it? Collecting car horn noises, or whatever his hobby is? You tell him that.’

She lifted herself up on to the balls of her feet, turned and scooted away.

I looked once more at Mr Willis. He smiled at me and waved.

Room 3Gc was the one I wasn’t looking forward to sitting in again.

Room 3Gc was overlooked by the estate.

I walked in, a few minutes before my class would arrive, and paused for a second.

Just there, in the window – tiny, imperceptible, probably unrecognisable to anyone but me – a crack and a hurried repair job.

The only evidence that it had ever happened at all.

My eyes flicked up towards the estate. Which window had it been?

And then the bell rang, and I jolted.

And I told myself to deal with it.

‘Oi, sir!’ said a kid, by the gates.

There’d been a fight here a day or two before between someone from St John’s and a group of kids from the technical college near Stokey. Mr Willis and myself were supposed to be acting as some kind of barrier to this happening again, even though the closest I’d come to a fight was that night in Whitby where I’d had to be rescued by a former pupil, and Mr Willis increasingly looked like exactly the type of man who’d collected car horn noises, actually.

I looked at the kid. Maybe fourteen or so. Holding a half-massacred Chomp. He’d done that thing to his tie to make it incredibly short. I don’t know how they do that. I imagine they just buy toddler-size. ‘You’re Mr Priestley, yeah?’

‘I’m Mr Priestley, yeah.’

‘You know my brother,’ he said, as my eyes flicked over his shoulder. A kid pushed another kid into a wall, then they both looked at me, guilty, and laughed loudly to show they were friends. ‘Matt Fowler?’

Matt’s brother?

‘I do,’ I said. ‘But I haven’t seen him in ages. How is he?’

‘Busy,’ he said.

‘At the garage?’ Maybe those guys had been taking the mickey the other day. He could’ve been anywhere. Tea run. Sick. The Arcades.

‘Nah,’ he continued. ‘He’s busy with work and that.’

A thought struck me. Tony is a really weird name for a fourteen-year-old. I ignored it.

‘Yeah, but work where? I was near Chapel Market the other day – I didn’t see him about.’

‘He don’t work there no more.’

‘
Doesn’t
work there
any
more. No, I heard. Where’s he now?’

‘Burger King, innit.’

‘
Isn’t it
. And saying “isn’t it” after Burger King doesn’t really work. Why’s he working at Burger King? What happened at the garage?’

The kid shrugged and sniffed.

‘Didn’t want to do it no more. Couldn’t do that and his course. So he does Burger King four nights, then works down the Queen’s Head rest of it.’

‘You need to work on your grammar, Tony,’ I said. ‘And what do you mean, his course?’

I got it.

I now got it.

The thing that had always concerned me about Matt was his rage. It was a rage I’d seen at school, of course, the day he’d nearly blinded a kid with a compass … though that depends on who you choose to believe, of course. The school board had gone with the kid. Unprovoked attack, he’d said. As soon as Matt could get out of there, he was gone. I’d thought perhaps there’d been a mistake, that Matt had been treated unfairly and lost his faith in the system. But then, that night in Whitby, when he’d saved our skins with a show of might … I’d been unnerved as well as grateful. Because I’d seen his rage close-up. The roar, the anger, all served up neatly with a length of pipe and a phonebox.

But now I got it. It wasn’t rage. It was
frustration
.

Matt Fowler had left his job at the garage near Chapel Market in order to better himself. That’s how I’d chosen to phrase it, until I realised he wasn’t someone out of a Jane Austen novel. He’d left to Do Something. He’d had the epiphany his
mates had found so funny. And that led him to a part-time diploma course. Tuesday and Thursday evenings between seven and ten. Saturdays between ten and five. It cost £4,500 in deposits, but with something to show for it at the end. He’d sold his bike, his PlayStation, his phone, whatever else he could, and he’d given his notice at the garage. He was working all hours to make up for it, but this was it, this was Doing Something. More specifically, a Sound Engineering and Music Production foundation course, just off Denmark Street.

I thought back to Whitby. ‘I wanna
make
something,’ he’d said. I thought he meant
of
himself. Turns out he meant both.

I looked it all up when I got home and felt excited for him. There were only five people per course. He’d learn about mixing, patching, signal flow, multitrack, compression, noise gates, digital delays, DAW sequencing, VCOs, VCFs, VCAs and a million other things I couldn’t tell you the first thing about.

At the end of it all he could expect to make tea for grumpy engineers for six months or so, get some on-the-job training in return for being a dogsbody, but sooner or later he’d catch that break that’d one day make him a studio engineer himself. I found myself weirdly jealous while absolutely delighted.

He’d found his thing.

Zoe was still taking great pleasure in teasing me about The Girl.

‘You’ve got to go for it,’ she said, stirring the pot. We were having hot dog stew – the only thing we could put together from the vegetables in the fridge and the lone tin in the cupboard. It could have been 1997, in a Leicester flat with Dev. ‘I completely think you should ring Estonia Marsh back and tell her you want to do that
Wake Up Call
thing.’

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘From now on, I’ll let fate deal with my life. Dev was always on about fate.’

‘You’re talking like he’s passed away. He’s on Caledonian Road.’

‘Brick Lane, now, actually,’ I said. ‘I saw on Facebook. He’s made the move. Going to be looking after one of his dad’s restaurants. So no more Power Up! Officially shuts down next week.’

‘Funny, things like Facebook, or Twitter. Just seeing a second of someone else’s life. Almost means you don’t have to see them again. You’re just drip-fed their moments. You lose all the other stuff in between. It’s
efficient
friendship.’