One Thing Led to Another (4 page)
Omer finally speaks and when he does, it’s worth every syllable.
‘So how do you two know each other?’ he says, flashing his gummy smile.
Laurence takes hold of one of my hands. He looks at me from under those heavy lids.
‘She was my girlfriend,’ he says finally, proudly even. ‘We went out together, for two years. Till I went and ballsed it up.’
Laurence and I met in April 2000 – the unseasonably warm spring of our final year – and all I was doing in Manchester was lazing about campus with Gina, sipping beer out of plastic glasses.
‘Do you fancy coming to this party?’ Gina asked one day.
‘Er, yeah!’ I said. (Was the Pope a Catholic?) ‘What kind of party? Count me in.’
‘A garden party,’ she said. ‘At my mate Laurence’s parents’ house in Sussex. They have one every year.’
She said Laurence was studying media studies at Leeds University and was a mate from boarding school. I can’t say that ‘garden party’ really got my pulse racing but as with
most things involving Gina, there were a few surprises in store. For starters, any preconceptions I had about ‘parents’ and ‘garden party’ were swiftly eradicated the moment we accelerated up to the main gates in Gina’s Fiat Bravo (the purchase of which I hold entirely responsible for me delaying learning to drive). There was some kind of French rap music, the sort you expect to throb from Parisian banlieue, reverberating from their huge, sprawling farmhouse as we walked up the long gravel path. Huge red and gold lanterns adorned the front of the house. A barefoot, wild-haired woman wearing a sequinned waistcoat and holding an enormous glass of red wine almost ran towards us, arms out-stretched. ‘Bienvenue and welcome!’ she cried, kissing Gina then me on both cheeks. (I immediately had a personality crush.) She was Laurence’s mum – or Joelle as she insisted we call her – something which seemed biologically impossible since she looked about thirty. She’d been in England for twenty years, even though her French accent was still treacle-thick. Joelle and Laurence’s dad, Paul, had met when he was a student in Aix-en-Provence and Joelle was working as a life model (so French! I loved her even more). Now he was a lecturer in French at the University of Sussex and skulked about the house wearing Woody Allen-style glasses and smoking Camel Reds. Joelle poured us equally huge glasses of wine. ‘Make yourselves at home,’ she said. ‘All my boys are outside.’
At that point, a bare-chested young man sauntered into the kitchen, wrapped his arms around Joelle, who was stirring something sweet and spicy on the Aga, and kissed her on the cheek. ‘And this,’ she said, reaching on her tip toes and kissing him back, ‘is my most beautiful and most idle one.’
I should have let that be my warning, but I fell in love – well, it was all-consuming, primeval lust at that point – on the spot.
Laurence was six foot two with closely cropped black curls which looked like they would spring to life like his mother’s if he let them, sultry dark eyes with languorous lids and an exquisite dimple in his left cheek. He was wearing Levis twisted jeans and white flip-flops that showed off the most perfect tanned toes. I remember curling mine, complete with chipped purple nail varnish and the odd unsuccessfully frozen verucca, inside my trainers.
We’re standing outside the dry cleaners now, Emete and Omer still watching from the window.
‘So what are you doing now?’ Laurence says it as if we have options.
(A coffee maybe? Stiff G&T? I suppose a quick session back at mine would be out of the question?)
‘Oh, work, unfortunately,’ I say, hoisting myself back down to earth. ‘And you?’
‘Yeah, work,’ says Laurence.
‘What kind of…?’
‘Bar manager. I manage a bar in Clerkenwell,’ he says, hands in pockets. ‘My dad’s gutted I’m not a lawyer or a doctor or a fucking philosopher come to think of that but you know me.’
‘I know you.’
‘Never one to do as I’m told.’
We shuffle from foot to foot grinning inanely and not knowing quite what to do with ourselves.
‘So God, I mean, how come I’ve never seen you around here before?’ I say, wanting to keep him here, not wanting this to end. ‘Where are you living?’
‘Not here. I mean, here for now, but not usually. I’m staying at a mate’s. And you? You live with Gina of course, for which you clearly deserve a medal.’
‘She’s alright, is Marshall,’ I laugh. ‘You’ve just got to be strict. We live on Linton Street. You come out of that dry
cleaners and turn first right. Bit of a party house as you can imagine…’
‘So I’m told,’ says Laurence. ‘So how is work in the big bad world of publishing? Still tragedy correspondent?’
‘Tragedy correspondent?’
‘Yeah, Gina said you earn a living hearing other people’s sob stories.’
‘Cheeky cow!’
He backtracks with a smile.
‘In a good way.’
‘It’s “triumph over tragedy”, get it right. Even if they’ve been taken in by a polyamorous cult, had all their limbs amputated and all their family have been massacred by a crazed gunman, there’s always a positive angle. And if there isn’t, we just make one up.’
‘Like?’
‘Like he didn’t like his family anyway. Or his legs come to think of it.’
Laurence laughs. I find my face reddening with pleasure.
‘I forgot how funny you are.’ He studies me. ‘And quite how foxy.’
It’s a good job we both see a bus trundling towards us at that point, otherwise I might have had to react to that statement and it would definitely, have been idiotic.
‘Well, this is me,’ Laurence says, taking his wallet out of his pocket. ‘But here, here’s my card.’
‘And here’s mine,’ I say, hastily rummaging in my bag and handing over my fuscia pink business card with
Believe It!
’s slogan emblazoned all over it:
From the touching to the twisted, every single week!
Classy.
‘Thanks, um…’ As Laurence reads the card I see his eyebrows flicker and inwardly cringe. He says, ‘Just ring the bar, I’m usually there. Well, I come and go.’
Like a cat. An elusive cat.
He gives me a kiss on the cheek ‘Bye,’ he says.
‘Yeah, bye,’ I say dumbly.
Then he runs across the road, and I keep watching him. He’s almost jogging now, his rucksack over one shoulder, his jacket riding up. Cute arse. Gorgeous arse. Round and perfectly formed and slightly uplifted and filling out those jeans like an arse should. He still makes the blood rush to my nether regions. He still makes my head surge with indecent thoughts.
It’s 8.30 a.m., barely an hour since I got up, and I am walking to work in broad daylight, wondering how the hell we buggered that one up.
‘When I said my vows, “In sickness and in health”, little did I know how far that would be tested. But when I saw Howard in hospital bandaged and bloodied, his face unrecognisable from the burns, there was no doubt in my mind that he was still my Howard. Freddie was born three weeks after the bomb and it’s been so hard. But even now, I look at both my boys and all I see is that they are the spitting image of each other.’
Dee, 32, London
I stride into the atrium of Giant Publishing with, miraculously, fourteen minutes to spare. 9.16 and already the place looks like Piccadilly Circus only shinier.
I get into a lift with two people: one is Justine Lamb, the Editorial Director, head to toe in cream cashmere. The other is Brian Worsnop, owner of the lowest hairline in trichological history, currently devouring a Ginster’s Scotch Egg, very noisily.
He beams at me, revealing bits of sausage meat between his dentures.
‘Super night last Friday wasn’t it? You looked a little merry, to say the least, I particularly liked your…’
‘Yes, OK, Brian.’ I smile, tight-lipped. Justine Lamb does not need to know about my drunken impressions of Blanche Jewell, our MD, complete with a pair of enormous false teeth.
I landed my job as writer on
Believe It!
magazine in 2003, as soon as I got back from what turned out to be a pretty traumatic year travelling. It was the least glamorous title in Giant Publishing’s portfolio and was edited by Judith Hogg, a pigeon-chested tumour of a woman who couldn’t feel empathy if her life depended on it. However, it was a proper job in journalism and with stories like ‘
I lost my nose but still sniffed out love’
it was hard not to see the funny side. The relentless interviewing of people with such shit lives meant you couldn’t help but think your own was maybe not that bad. It was the perfect distraction from a broken heart, too. A heart broken by Laurence Cane.
Bing! The lift door opens and I stride out, into a pool of morning sun which drenches the office in an orange-pink glow.
‘Morning Tess.’
‘Morning Jocelyn.’
Jocelyn, our receptionist, is from Perth in Australia. She has a shocking-red bob that swings around her face when she walks or even moves (mainly due to a sort of wave effect brought on by her sheer size) and a bottom as wide as her homeland.
I feel I can say this and not sound fattist because Jocelyn is far from embarrassed about her body. In fact she accentuates her ‘womanly curves’ with sleeveless, bingo-wing-revealing tops in lurid prints and tight, white, cellulite-enhancing trousers.
‘May I say Tessa, you look fintistic today,’ she trills, biting into a ham and cheese croissant. ‘Off on a date tonight by any chance, met someone nice on the Internet again?’
Ever since I made the grave mistake of telling Jocelyn I
had a date with a guy from Match.com, she has asked me this question on average twice a week.
‘No, not tonight, Jocelyn,’ I say, hanging up my coat. ‘I’ve gone off men from the Internet anyway, all they ever seem to be into is skydiving and bungee jumping if their photos are anything to go by.’
‘Quite right too,’ says Jocelyn. ‘I’ve never been one for adrenaline sports myself.’
Back at my desk, I hear Anne-Marie busily relaying the latest in the saga of Vegan Boyfriend to someone on the phone. ‘He won’t even kiss me if I’ve eaten a bacon sandwich, you know,’ she’s saying proudly, pop-sock-clad feet up on the desk. ‘
That’s
how committed he is.’
I give her a little wave, she gives me one back. I turn on my computer and see the little red light is flashing on my phone.
‘You have two new messages,’ says the automated voice.
Beep.
‘Hiya…is that Tess? This is Keeley. You came to our house last week to interview me and Dean. Fing is, yeah, we woz a bit pissed when we did the interview. Dean had just bought me that bottle of Asti to help with the nerves and now we’re worried everyone’s gonna find out…’
Oh dear. Another second thoughts casualty. You’d think what with the tape running and the photographer turning up, people might realize the larger ramifications before they start blabbing about their boyfriend’s penis enlargement to the national press.
Next!
I try to concentrate but thoughts of Laurence are like a swarm of butterflies in my brain.
Next is a message from a woman from Dudley. Her husband is forty-three stone and bed-ridden, can we do a campaign to save his life?
‘Before I ballsed it up,’ he said. I can’t stop those words from circulating in my mind. Admittedly, there had been a brief moment when I felt like punching the air – it is only right he should have suffered a bit after what he did to me. But that was years ago now and anyway, let’s face it, I ballsed it up too. If I hadn’t been so flighty, if I hadn’t done a Tess special and buggered off around the world, assuming everything would be hunky dory when I got back, maybe we would be together now, in love, married, maybe even a baby on the way.
I’ve got seventeen things to do on my desktop To Do list but I all I can do is day-dream. The fact is, when I look back to my two and a half years with Laurence the entire era reverberates with a huge WHAT IF. What if I had engaged my head as well as my heart, what if I had not been so naïve, what if I had been thinner, more demure, more exotic. What if, for example, I had not got caught having sex with Laurence Cane the very first time I met him, by Mrs Cane herself? At
her
garden party. Maybe it was jinxed from the start.
I blame the sun. That and his liberal parents who plied us with an endless flow of Beaujolais. (My parents would have provided two boxes of Asda’s best, announcing, ‘and when that’s finished, it’s finished, Tessa.’) By three a.m. everyone who was going home had gone and Gina had passed out on the sofa-bed in the spare room. So, it was just the two of us, talking and drinking at the kitchen table.
‘Your mum’s so cool,’ I slurred, nursing about my eightieth glass of wine, my teeth black as a peasant’s. ‘So exotic and bohemian.’
Laurence laughed. ‘Everyone says that,’ he said. ‘And yeah, I suppose she is.’ Then he paused, hesitated, then said, ‘But she’s not as cool as you.’
That’s when he turned to me, took my face in his hands
and started kissing me, passionately and urgently. ‘You’re funny,’ he said.
‘Funny?’
‘Yeah, and kinda sexy, you make me laugh.’
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. But what did it matter anyway? I was snogging a Thierry Henry look-alike.
He reached inside my top and placed his hand on my breast. ‘Come here,’ he whispered, fixing me with eyes that told me how much he wanted me. Then his hand was suddenly in my bra and he drew me close and we were kissing, harder this time, our tongues exploring each other’s mouths hungrily, hot, quick breath moist on my skin. He gestured for me to hold my arms up, he removed my top. He removed my bra. And not with a teenage fumble, but in one, smooth, masterful stroke, as if he undressed women for a living.
Then, pulling me upwards, never taking his lips from mine, he put his hands around my waist and picked me up, sitting me on the table in front of him. His hands were big and warm and as they explored me: my shoulders, my neck, my stomach, the nerves in my groin suddenly sparked into action.
‘Should we be doing this?’ I looked at him, eyes shining under the table lamp.
‘Don’t you want to?’
‘Yes, yes, of course I bloody want to!’ I said, which came out far more eager than I had anticipated.
‘Well that’s good then,’ he said, looking at me from under canopy-sized eyelashes.
He swept my hair back from my face, then gently pushed me back onto the table, never diverting from my gaze.
‘Stop it!’ I giggled. ‘Your parents might come down, your brothers might hear!’
‘So what,’ he said, ‘I don’t give a shit.’
He undid my jeans and I undid his, my hands trembling, and we were kissing all over each other’s faces and necks and he ran
his hands through my hair, pushing it back from my face and kissing me again. Then he was flicking his tongue all over my nipples and I was moaning and half laughing at the same time and pulling him into me and we were going at it hammer and tongs over this huge oak table and I’d already decided it was true what they said about French men. And the lamp above us was creaking slightly with the motion of us, and I felt like Vanessa Paradis in one of those late-night saucy films. Then:
‘Putain de merde Maman! Qu’est ce que tu fou?!’
Doing a course in French, I knew this loosely translated as ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Then Laurence leapt off me, his erection waving about like a rather awkward third person and pulled up his jeans.
‘Oooh la la.’ I noted the distinct lack of humour in his mother’s voice. Then in her face. She was standing right in front of us. ‘It’s three a.m. And you have a bedroom to go to, Jesus Laurence, have some respect.’
And then I said the weirdest thing, to this day I don’t know what possessed me.
‘Merci beaucoup!’ I shouted after her. Just like that. No joke. I nearly died.
‘
What
did you say?’ Laurence said incredulously. Eyeing me up like he’d just spent the last half an hour getting off with a mutant.
But I couldn’t say anything. I covered my face with my hands.
My stomach churns at the memory. I turn back to my inbox and there it is.
From:
[email protected]I was wondering, now we have our glad rags back, you free tomorrow night?
I am now!
I am on my way back from lunch, after reciting the email word for word and relaying the whole dry cleaners scenario to Anne-Marie and Jocelyn and basically the entire office, when I feel the growling vibration of a text message in my pocket.
It’s Jim.
Warren. House party tomorrow. Keep it free.
Presumptuous or what! Now I get my own back. I text:
Sorry, no can do, have hot date with sexy ex. Ha! Kiss that! One all. I do have a social life of my own, you know.
My phone rings immediately. ‘Jim’ flashes up.
‘Oh, now that is lame,’ he says.
‘Come again?’
‘Resurrecting an old boyfriend. I don’t think that counts.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t realize this was a competition!’ I laugh.
‘You started it. You’re the one who said “one all”.’
Jim is always like this when he is on school holidays. Too much time on his hands, gets very childish.
‘It’s a date isn’t it?’ I say. ‘He’s a bloke isn’t he? He fancies me, I fancy him, what’s not to like?’
‘Fine, it’s just, you know, take your good friend Jim for example. Not one to resort to dredging up old flames when in need of a bit of excitement, I travelled far and wide for romance and found an Italian corker who can offer me first class stays at exquisite hotels with no strings attached.’
‘Annalisa found you, remember? White as a sheet, having just barfed in a bin in Rimini town centre you were so hungover, I seem to remember.’
‘She didn’t know I’d just barfed in a bin.’
‘Bet she did, bet she could smell it on you.’ (I always sink to Jim’s level eventually.)
‘No, I was gentlemanly and paid for her coffee actually and anyway she fell for my northern charm and quick wit.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Yeah, whatever. The point is, I thought you hated Laurence?’
‘What makes you think it’s Laurence?! I know it’s hard to believe but I have had other boyfriends, you know.’
‘Not ones you’d call your “sexy” ex, you haven’t.’
I protest but Jim’s right. I would not call any of my other exes my sexy ex. Not because they weren’t sexy at all (I like to think I have upheld some standards in my life) but because Laurence was THE sexy ex. The One. Or as near as damned as I’ve ever been to it.
‘Anyway,’ I continue, feeling ever so slightly triumphant, that Jim has even thought about my past relationships enough to even make this observation, ‘I never said I hated him.’ Did I? He broke my heart; I was gutted for a while. OK, maybe I hated his guts for a while but I never actually hated him. ‘We were young, I expected too much. That was like, seven thousand years ago now anyway. Give the guy a break.’
‘I’ve got nothing against Laurence,’ protests Jim. ‘It was you that he upset, or have you forgotten the night you got back from travelling and demanded I come round, having drunk a bottle of wine in about half an hour feeling practically suicidal? What makes you think he’s changed is all I’m saying.’
‘Jesus Jim, it’s just a date, he didn’t ask me to marry him.’
‘OK. Well that’s OK then,’ says Jim, cheerily now. ‘Have a good time and make sure you give old Cane a damn good seeing to.’
I hang up, walk back to work smiling to myself. Jim really is weird sometimes.
I text Gina ‘how’s the evil hangover?’ And look at my watch: 1.53 p.m. There’s seven minutes till lunch officially
ends. Still, a lot can happen in seven whole minutes. I go to the Ladies and then, I don’t know why, perhaps it’s women’s instinct that draws my attention just then, to something in my bag. Shimmering among the bus tickets and leaflets about cultural events I know I will never get round to attending, the blue wrapper containing the other pregnancy test from the pack of two I bought glints at me from the bottom of my bag. I’m not pregnant, I can’t be, I had a negative test. (Shelley Newcombe told me back in Year 9 that you can never have a positive after a negative.) But it cost me fifteen pounds and I really don’t like waste. And so I go into a cubicle and I get it out. It’s less of a conscious decision, more of a cleaning-up exercise, just as you might eat the one leftover stick of Kit-Kat that was making your desk look untidy. I wee on the little stick and balance it on top of the toilet roll holder, not thinking, just doing. Then I set the timer on my watch for two minutes.
1.50
This is ridiculous, I’ve even got PMT: sore boobs, knackered, short fuse, the Works