Four New Words for Love (21 page)

She looks around at the carnage trying unsuccessfully to find something, finally delves into her bag and produces an old envelope.

‘Have you got a pen?’

He gives her his treasured Cross. She flicks the unfamiliar nib, spotting the paper, and then writes, very laboriously. He winces at the friction. She hands back the pen and looks around for
somewhere conspicuous to leave the note, finally wedging it beneath the front door number plate on the way out. They take the stairs. She has to wait for him. She has a key on a personalised fob
and ushers them in. The place is scrupulous, almost obsessively tidy. She takes his coat and hangs it next to hers in the hall, arranging the four sleeves to hang in parallel. In the living room
she needlessly realigns some magazines. He notices a certain custodial air to her gestures.

‘Is Gina here?’ The mention of the name freezes her in the act of rearranging some scatter cushions on a battered sofa. She exhales and straightens.

‘No. No, Gina’s not here. I was hoping you could tell me where Gina is.’

‘But it’s her bill. It’s her bill with this address.’ He sounds like a querulous schoolboy challenging an unfair mark.

‘And it’s over a year old.’

He blinks, registering this, corroborates it from the bill and feels suddenly exhausted. He sits, frowning morosely at the carpet. The awkward placing of the furniture doesn’t successfully
cover the threadbare patches.

‘Would you like some tea?’

‘I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.’ He has remembered his manners.

‘You’ve an overnight bag and you don’t look as if you’ve the energy to go anywhere.’

‘Tea would be nice. Do you live here?’

‘Yes. I’m looking after it for her.’

She goes through to the kitchen and he finds himself imprisoned in the disembowelled sofa whose structure was illusory. There is little support beneath his bottom and the arms have folded in
like a carnivorous plant, trapping insects. He extracts himself with a lot of grunting effort and stands. He walks to the hall. The kitchen door is open. She smiles shyly at him across the warming
pot and turns to retrieve the caddy. He considers the available doors in the short hall and pushes the first open: bathroom. The next: bedroom, with the same frugal scrupulous appearance of the
living room, a bed with hospital corners and a row of utilitarian shoes in a rack beneath the window. This is an intrusion. He came here to find her, or something, at the expense of propriety if
need be. The last room. He pushes the door open and stands on the threshold for a minute. The air inside is stale, the room dark with drawn curtains. He reaches inside the door and snaps on the
light, standing stock still, taking in the implications of what he sees before venturing in further.

It is a child’s room. In the corner stands a cot with an overhanging mobile, pantomime animals in primary colours swaying slightly in the unaccustomed gust from the opened door. The walls
are lavender, the ceiling yellow, the cornice a bright pastiche of animals and toys, arrested in frozen procession. At his hip, beside the door, is a small coat rail with a confusion of
children’s coats and jackets. On the nearest peg, in the form of a duck’s head, a small scarf is draped. Hanging below is a woollen hat, suspended by ties looped in a bow over the beak.
Inside the hat are tiny mittens. A collapsed pram, so different from the blunt upholstered barrows of his infancy, crouches beneath. A small bureau with a shin-high chair is littered with toys,
which also sprout from an open chest. There is a matching lilac chest of drawers. A series of shelves have been fixed to the wall, adjacent to the cot, and between book ends of opposing elephants,
large cardboard volumes of bright illustrations lean. The drawn curtains are a collage of happy aeroplanes, balloons and spaceships, cheerfully piloted by waving aviators, threading their way round
smiling constellations and a winking moon. In the overhead light he is fixed with the glassy stare of half a dozen dolls and bears. He takes three strides into the centre of the room, the spring of
the pile beneath his feet distinct from the threadbare resistance of the rest of the flat. All her money has gone into this room. There is something not quite right about the colour. It is lacking
in intensity. He takes out a cardboard volume and realises why: there is a mantle of dust here thicker than that which made his house monochrome till she removed it. The girl from the shop
announces her presence with a cough. She leans in and hands him a steaming mug. He moves forward to accept. He is about to apologise for the intrusion.

‘Take your time.’

She closes the door behind her, confronting him with Gina, young, happy, staring at him a dozen times from the collage fastened to the pinboard on the back of the door. And in all the
photographs her head is twinned with the little girl’s, and she wears an expression he has never seen in the flesh.

He is absently holding the mug at the base and realises it is burning his hand. He looks around for somewhere to lay it down when he hears the front door bang open. There is a commotion in the
hall and the bedroom door is flung open again, agitating the mobile. The picture of Gina he was studying is replaced with two young woman in the doorway, also now framed in the proscenium of
memory. The second one has identified herself by her own illumination. She is clutching the crushed envelope. Two large rivulets of mascara stripe her face. The spectacular breasts are heaving
spasmodically as she looks desperately askance at him. The kind girl who delivered the tea has now been identified as the satellite of the photos. Sad to say, he has only succeeded in identifying
her as an ancillary to the other, who is now brandishing the envelope towards him. Neither has entered the room. In reply to the wordless exchange he retrieves the photos from his wallet and hands
them across. They examine them and put their arms around one another. The plain girl almost disappears.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to sit down, but please, not in that settee.’

‘She did try sex.’

The fact that Ruth’s doing the talking isn’t a good sign. Gina normally doesn’t let anyone talk for her.

‘So once he got what he wanted he just pissed off. Typical fucking man.’ And something else struck me. ‘You haven’t risked another...’ and I nod towards the
nursery. At least this makes her look up.

‘Look at this place,’ she says, moving a bit of carpet with her foot.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Look at it. What are the chances of it containing happiness?’

‘What the fuck are you talking about? Is this some kind of
University Challenge
philosophy question? I’m worried about you being knocked up and you’re worried about
furniture.’

‘We didn’t have sex.’

‘Gay.’

‘What?’

‘Name like Simon. Works in a
classical
music shop. Dead giveaway really. How many women go into a
classical
music shop? And now he turns down sex.’

She just sighed and got up and went into her room. If you can’t raise an argument out of her there must be something really wrong. I went through her cupboards looking for biscuits.
It’s astonishing the amount of food and stuff you have to have around for a kid. But no biscuits. Millie woke up. Gina went through and fetched her and took her through to her own room.
That’s something I hadn’t seen for a while. Usually she tries to settle her where she is. I gave it half an hour and looked in. The curtains are drawn against the sun and
everything’s shades of grey. They’re lying together on the bed, face to face, like the last survivors in a lifeboat. Adrift. I thought she was asleep. I go to close the door and she
says, ‘I can’t stay there now.’

‘Where?’

‘Work.’

‘Fuck that. Let him move.’

‘He’s the manager.’

‘A man or a job. A man
and
a job. Neither are worth it. Any biscuits?’

‘No.’

‘There’s not much a Gypsy Cream can’t fix. Want me to go out and get some?’

‘No.’

I could see it was quite serious. I went to Davinder’s for the biscuits and ate half of them on the way up while I thought about it. She once told me I wasn’t a whole person. She
thinks I won’t remember. She thinks I’ve got the recall of a hamster. Some things stick – if they hurt and they’re true. That was true, although I wouldn’t admit as
much to anyone. But she was right. I wasn’t a whole person by her reckoning. And if I look at her now there’s something wrong. For the first time, looking at her poke that bit of carpet
with her foot,
she
looked to me as if
she
wasn’t a whole person. She stepped up to the plate for me more times than I can say. I’ll do it for her.

So I waited till the two posh girls leave and I breeze in. ‘We’re closed,’ he says, and then looking up ‘we don’t keep money on the premises overnight.’

Fuck me. What does he think I am – a one woman ram raid? What did she see in this specimen? And that’s when I saw the flaw in my plan – there wasn’t one. Some kinds of
men just can’t be seduced – dead, gays, some clergy, happily married, and the frightened. He looked petrified. I just assumed I’d work on him, maybe a bit of office gymnastics.
The outlay already offered half a dozen possibilities. And then a nice little talk. And if the fire alarm permits, a sly fag. I mention Gina and he laughs and we work something out. I go home and
tell her and she’s furious and then she’s grateful and then we hug and she burst into tears and admits I
am
a whole person and we watch
Coronation Street
and
everything’s the same. Only better.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m interested in...’ I wave, ‘Glen Miller.’ It’s a moment of inspiration and the only classical composer I can come up with.

‘Are you a friend of Gina’s?’

‘Have I got a badge with ‘poor’ or something stamped on my forehead?’

‘Not your forehead.’

That stopped me for a minute. I liked him better for it.

‘Look. She just wants her job back.’

He looks shocked. ‘I don’t understand. She hasn’t lost her job. I’m expecting her in the day after tomorrow.’

‘Well, you turning her down. It’s a bit of a blow for a girl.’

‘But...’

‘I know, I know.’ But I didn’t know. No one’s ever turned me down. No doubt Gina would argue that I’m not that choosey. And then I hit on my plan. It was the same
as all my other plans and the one I’d half an idea of when I came in. If I overcame his nerves and gave him a bit of relief in the back shop and told her, she could write him off as another
one of these useless bastards she accuses me of hanging around with. And then she wouldn’t feel sad because she hadn’t lost out much. In my imagination I’m even telling her how he
was too anxious and came all over the Jim Reeves CDs, and she’s laughing, and the Custard Creams are tumbling on to the plate like coins.

‘Why don’t we discuss it in the back shop?’

‘No,’ he says, with his eyes on the door, as if he’s going to shout for help from the passing foot traffic. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. She’s welcome
back, and if she’s not coming she should tell me herself.’

I turn to leave and he breathes out, like a bust football.

‘Tell her...’ he says. I turn back. He looks as if he doesn’t know what he wants to tell her, or if he does, he doesn’t want to tell me. ‘Just tell her to let me
know...’

And she does. And thankfully it’s by letter, cause I don’t want her going in and finding out I’d been there. I was looking after Millie while she hauled herself back into town
to see if she can get her old, old job back, when the door goes. I’m on the phone to her mobile while she stands outside the shop, working up her confidence. I can just see her, polishing her
shoes against the calf of her other leg the way she does when she’s nervous. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘you’re a strong confident woman,’ because I’ve been reading
those waiting room magazines again, ‘you’re
inpowered
.’

‘
Empowered.
Who’s at the door?’

‘I’m not a fucking clairvoyant. They can wait a minute. I’m trying to give you confidence because, God knows why, you need it. You’re the cleverest person I know. That
might not be saying much but we both know you’re a lot better than selling bits of ribbon or whatever it is you do down there.’ As I’m saying this I’m walking down the hall.
There’s a pause on her side – I know she’s touched. ‘Look, if you come out in half an hour’s time and you’re still on the bru then you’re no worse off than
you are now.’

‘It might be Dad.’

I open the door and there are the two toothpaste adverts I waited on to leave the shop before I went in. Both are staring round with the curiosity of a puppy. One opens her mouth about to
speak.

‘Who is it?’

‘Got to go,’ I say, and jab the phone. I look behind them into the landing in case he’s with them too. But he isn’t.