Running in Heels (29 page)

WE LAUGH, SELF-CONSCIOUSLY AT FIRST, THEN
louder; it's infectious, like chicken pox. We laugh until we're laughing so hard, I feel it would be a pity to stop. Also, I don't want to be the party pooper. I keep thinking of the high-ranking official at a Nazi rally who—after a twenty-minute standing ovation for Hitler—decided his palms were sore, enough was enough, and sat down. I'm not suggesting that if I cease cackling Andy will have me shot, but I don't want to offend him.

Just as I'm starting to fret, Andy comes to my rescue: he shakes his head and grabs a chair, his laughter subsiding to a snigger, then a smirk. I breathe a secret sigh of relief, and join him at the table.

“Do you want a drink?” I say politely. “Or do you have to go?”

Andy hesitates. “Well, if you've got a minute, I'll have a tea.”

“Minute?” I blurt without thinking. “I've got the whole darn night! I mean,” I correct hastily, “I'm not in a rush.”

To clear up every last morsel of misunderstanding, I gabble, “I met up with some friends from work today, I didn't know how long we'd be out, so I didn't plan anything. In the end, I got home before sex. Six! Sex! I mean, six! So when I say I've got the whole night, that's what I meant.”

Shut up, says a sensible voice inside my head. I obey. I rush to the sink and fill up the kettle. Jesus Christ! Andy says nothing. As he lacks the social decorum to usher the conversation forward, I voice the first thought that wanders brainward, namely, “It's funny how you and Babs are so
British
in your eating habits, despite your mum. Babs is hooked on tea as well, and you, ordering take-out pizza that time, it's, it's like mooning in the face of your roots!”

I turn round, to see Andy smiling at me.
“Bella!”
he cries in a cod-Italian accent. “What is it-a you want-eh? My mamma, she
grow up in Italia, she taste da pizza at Pizza Hut, she say, ‘Oh my goodness! No please!' but-a me and my sister, we live in-a Stanmore for all of our lives! We like-a da Twinings, we like-a da Eeenglish breakfast, we don wanna be call ‘Spaghetti' by da children in school, eh!” Reverting to his normal voice, he says, “Italians drink tea too, Nat. If you haven't planned to do anything tonight, does that mean you're free?”

My hand jerks and a splash of boiling water spills onto the floor. “Oops. Yes, I am. Are, er, you?”

I brace myself for the biting retort, “No, Sad Girl, like most functioning young hipsters on a Friday night, I'm glamorously engaged, I was merely filling an awkward silence.”

“My evening is a void. What would you like to do? We could get something to eat”—Andy seems to recollect himself—“or not. We could go to the cinema, although that would be a waste, sitting in silence watching a big TV—or, I know, we could go to the Tate Modern—it's been open for years and I still haven't been and the longer I leave it, the more I feel ashamed. Like I'm less of a complete human being. Tea helps, though,” he adds, taking a sip.

“The Tate Modern!” I exclaim. “I'd love to go there. But where is it? Isn't it on a patch of wasteland?”

“Yeah,” says Andy. “South London.”

 

T
wo hours later, I'm culturally enriched in that I now know to avoid modern art when stepping out with a guy I find attractive but haven't yet kissed, as stumbling across videos of naked men dancing to unheard music merely highlights the issue. When we retreat to the café, believe it or not, I'm glad.

I take a brazen bite of my dark chocolate tart. (Andy kept repeating, “I'm going to have something but you don't have to,” until I felt obliged to prove my normality. Sort of like allowing Kurt Russell to test my blood for alien content in
The Thing
.) Then I sip my peppermint tea, warming my hands on the mug
and—now that I'm no longer the scarlet woman who tore his family apart—tell Andy about the offer of deli work versus the offer of dry-cleaning work. Deli work is the lesser of the two evils (in that it's marginally more acceptable to the outside world) and so I'm psyching myself up to accept.

“It is, believe it or not, a laugh,” he says. “It's like a paper route, we've all done it. It's such a friendly place. You just have to be able to put up with Mum, bitching and moaning about British food and British eating habits and complaining that all the English customers demand the same sandwich, day in, day out, never trying something new, and always wanting to cram in fifty different fillings—salami and pastrami and cheese…. In Italy, you stick to
one
so you can taste the flavor. It drives her mad, and she goes on and on about it.”

“Oh,” I say, smiling, “I wouldn't mind, I've had worse than that.”

Andy takes a gulp of beer. “So have you got anything else lined up or are you going to take it easy for a bit? You mentioned the PR work, but you said you were sick of it.”

I smile, surprised. Most of the men I know are identical in their ability to delete great chunks of information twenty seconds after you've slashed open your psyche like a pomegranate to share it with them.
My
brain clings to trivia like a booger to a finger. Nine years ago, my first “love”—incidentally, a bold and mocking parody of that word—mentioned the name of the guy who helped out on his parents' farm. Nine years later, the ghostly identity of Bunny Grimshaw, a man I've never met, never want to, and never will, continues to hop about my consciousness, occupying valuable disk space.
Why?

“Well remembered,” I say, stunned by the realization that I
am
sick of PR—and lighting a cigarette to help myself think. “I'm doing it, for the paltry cash, but it's not my life's dream.”

“So what is?” asks Andy, leaning forward.

I pause. The quickest way to kill a fantasy is to make it real. Oh, what the hell.

“There is,” I say, “one thing that, well, interests me. But it'll sound ridiculous, I'd have to train, and it would probably cost a fortune, and then, even then I might not be good at it, I might not get a job, and my mum would be devastated.”

“Well,” says Andy. “That's the positive side. What about the negative?”

I laugh. “I'm just being realistic.”

Andy shakes his head. “You haven't even told me what it
is
yet.”

I pause. “It's…it's this thing called Pilates, it's a form of exercise but not entirely, it's very popular right now, so it would be very competitive, but I love it, I've only done it a few times, so it's a bit mad, but, if there was nothing stopping me, if I could do whatever I wanted, I think I'd like to do a course in it.”

I wait for Andy to laugh at me. Instead he says, “Pilates, I know about that. Sasha, my ex, used to teach it. She was always banging on about it being holistic. Good for body and soul blah blah, looking at how everything functions in relation to everything else. She was always trying to force me along to a class. I think it would be
great
for you!”

I hate it when people say that. I also think, if I had a penny for every time Andy said “Sasha, my ex,” I'd have at least fifteen p.

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” says Andy, “I remember her talking about one guy, a rugby player, painfully shy, and she said Pilates totally changed him, made him feel good about himself. Something about making the method fit the person. I never tried it. I'm not an exercise person. Unless I'm doing it unconsciously it makes me feel like a loser. But, er, that's just me. And I loved Sivananda. But you know, you get back to London, and all your mates laugh at you. No, sod it. Natalie, you've inspired me! You do your Pilates course, and I'll enroll in an Sivananda class.”

Call me narrow-minded, but I don't find this deal attractive. I'm just not forward thinking. I apologize.

“Okay, great!”

Andy sticks out his hand and we shake on it. “If that's what you know you want to do, Nat, go for it. Did you get a severance package?”

His enthusiasm is a pleasure
and
a pressure. Usually, when someone expects something of me, I become paralyzed with fear of failing them and inevitably do. Then again, I react exactly the same way when someone expects nothing of me. Best not to think about that.

“Yes,” I mutter, gazing out of the window at London's darkly glittering skyline. “I could use some of that. We'll see. Maybe I'll make some calls.”

I trust these banalities will dilute his interest and glance hopefully at his beer bottle to see if it's empty. It isn't.

“Do you, um, miss Sasha still?” I blurt, desperately. I wonder if this is a faux pas and if I should assume the crash position.

He seems unbothered. “Funny you should ask,” he murmurs, “I've been thinking about her this week.”

“Don't you normally?” I ask. Good grief! I think about ex-boyfriends for years after a relationship's demise—how they're doing, how they're doing in relation to me, wishing them well but not
too
well. (I'm of the opinion that it doesn't do for exes to get above themselves.) The other day I caught myself wondering about Saul: hoping he was happy in his work but observing a respectful mourning period of celibacy. Now that I don't have to endure the teeth-gritting irritations of his day-to-day presence and personality, I feel increasingly fond of him.

“No,” says Andy, “not normally.” He stops, then adds, “Hardly ever.”

I nod.

“I don't see any point.” He stops again.

I say, “I'm increasing your word ration from five to ten.”

He laughs. “Dear Pot, Love Kettle.”

Your sister says that too, I think.

“When she left me,” he adds suddenly, “it was the biggest shock of my life. It was like…like…your
grandparents
divorcing.”

“Or your parents,” I say.

“Yeah!” cries Andy. “Inconceivable! Er—god, sorry.”

“Don't worry,” I reply, “I know what you mean.”

“When Sasha went—she was very civil about it, very cool—that was what hit me. She was there physically, but as she talked I realized she'd emotionally left the relationship a while back. She'd met some bloke, she didn't want to cheat on me, that would be the worst thing, she said—as if, so long as she didn't actually screw this geezer, she wasn't cheating on me. She wanted to end it
honorably
.”

He snorts.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. She left, I cut off. I didn't want her name mentioned. I didn't want to think about her, see her, know about her. She thought—this was the most hilarious thing—she thought that one day we could be friends! Er,
why?
You make a choice, you face the consequences. You kick someone in the teeth, you don't get a hug. You can't have it all your own way. For me, it was, you walk out that door, have a nice life. My family were supportive but I didn't need it. I had to get away. Well, more than that. I didn't feel like
me
anymore. That's what it felt like. I didn't feel comfortable. Or fine. Nothing felt right. My office wasn't exactly a place where you cry about girls. So I quit the job and ran. A quit-and-run.” Andy smiles weakly.

“But how could you
help
thinking about her?”

Andy looks into my eyes. “It's possible to cut out an unpleasant feeling like a cancer,” he says. “Isn't it?”

“Y-yes,” I stammer. I add quickly, “So, why think about her now?”

Andy grimaces. “I thought about her after that row with you, actually. When I stormed off to have a go at Simon. I
lost
it—I went mental. I was shaking, ready to beat the shit out of him, and then I saw myself in the car mirror—it freaked me out. I just thought, This is about
Sasha
. I mean, Babs and I are close, closer than we used to be—it's better now we're older. But it hit me—the
way I felt, it wasn't all about Babs, a lot of it was about me and Sash. The thing with Simon brought it back, all this crap I thought was gone. I felt like I was being cheated on. I felt more like I was being cheated on than when I
was
being cheated on!” Andy shrugs.

“Siblings,” he says with a sigh—in what a sharp publicist would recognize as a “bridging technique”—“what can you do, eh? So, ah, how are you”—I
knew
it!—“and Tony getting on? Is he still creating reasons to be annoyed with you?”

What the hell, I think, for the second time this evening and, probably, in my life. I tell Andy about the Secret Love Child Furor.

“Oh yeah,” says Andy, as I nearly fall off my seat. “I know about that.”

“You
do
?” I croak. “Did…did Babs tell you?”

“No,” he replies, “Tony did. Not about you telling your mum and redecorating the walls in mash,” he adds at my incredulous face, “I didn't know about that bit. I'm impressed. I'd like to have seen that.” He winks at me: “It's a boy thing. But, yeah, Tony. He told me about his daughter—soon after it—she—happened.”

It takes a supreme effort to keep my jaw shut.

“To be honest,” Andy continues, “I thought it was pathetic. Trying to keep a secret like that. I didn't think he'd manage it. He did, though, didn't he? Only Tony. Eleven years is pretty good going. Christ, he must have been
livid
with you. It must have been the first time ever he hasn't gotten his own way.”

I hear myself say—in a voice like squeezed lemons—“It wouldn't surprise me.”

Andy smiles tightly. “I'm sure.”

I drain my peppermint tea—which is now freezing and tastes like spat-out toothpaste.

“It must be tough on your mum, the news about the kid,” declares Andy—who, I am convinced, suffers from a compulsion that a satirist once described as “speaking your brain”—“I'm sure she's thrilled and all, but, to realize what she's missed, and
that Tony kept it from her. That's got to smart. She worships him, doesn't she?”