The A-Z of Us (10 page)

‘All right, Raj?' he says, in that voice men use to other men when they're embarrassed about something.

This vocal interruption seems to galvanize Raj. He turns quickly (quite gracefully, I think), and disappears up the creaking, uneven staircase. I listen to his light footsteps, vanishing higher, away from me and the mess I've created.

I try to hear what they're saying from the safety of the landing. I dragged myself there thirty seconds after Gemma followed Raj upstairs, counting carefully, one, two, three… hauling my club foot up each creaking step like a large Amazonian sloth. What I hear through the closed bedroom door is this:

‘I'm so sorry, Raj.'

Silence.

‘I never intended to hurt you. I'm just really confused at the moment.'

Silence.

‘I washed your shirt, the grey one.'

‘Which one?'

‘Your Friday shirt.'

Sounds of rummaging.

‘I'm really, really sorry, Raj. Can't we just talk about this?'

‘There's nothing to say. Perhaps it's for the best.'

‘We don't know that. It's just me, everything's so mixed up right now…'

‘I'll call you. We can arrange to discuss matters fully. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting to get to.'

The door opens and I turn, the heavy plaster cast swinging round with a momentum all its own; my left leg buckles, and I fall down the stairs on my backside, ugh, ugh, ugh.

I land, on my back.

‘Ooof!'

As I wriggle my toes for signs of life, I think that it's a good thing my ankle's already broken.

Raj steps off the last stair, adroitly rounding my prone body. I look up, and attempt a smile. Raj holds out his hand.

‘Are you okay?'

I take the warm, soft, damp hand and Raj yanks me up with surprising ease. I wonder if he works out.

‘Er… thanks.'

Raj lets go of my hand, and takes a step back. I look at him.

‘Take care of her,' Raj declares, curtly, before I can open my mouth. ‘She shouldn't be alone at the moment.'

With that he's gone, striding from the building site paid for by his £350 an hour billing fee. In his right hand he grips a large full holdall bag, no doubt containing enough clothes and possessions to enable him to stay away from the house for many weeks to come. The front door closes gently.

Painfully, I ascend the rickety stairs once more and knock on the bedroom door. No answer. I open the door. The lights are off, the curtains drawn. As I squint into the darkness, I can just make out her form curled tightly onto the bed.

‘Hey, Gem.'

Nothing.

‘It's going to be okay, it'll all work itself out…'

Nothing.

‘Can I get you anything?'

‘Go away! I need to sleep!'

I turn and leave the room.

I hobble up again twenty minutes later, painstakingly touting a cup of camomile tea. I whisper further queries about her emotional and physical state, but there's no reply, so I leave the tea by the bedside. When I return after a further thirty minutes of worrying, she appears to be sleeping. Gentle snores emanate from the small mound of sheets at the far side of the large double bed. I remain for a while by the door, listening to the murmur of her breathing. Intermittently, a diminutive high-pitched nasal whistle punctuates the small sniffles. I smile, remembering how this trait drove all her room-mates at Sheffield mad. Only Neil professed to appreciate it. He said it reminded him of a kettle his grandmother once owned.

I sit in the unfinished kitchen for a long time, admiring the fan of shattered vase on the floor by the wall. I like the way the sliver shards catch the light, spraying shimmering flecks on to the dark brick. It's random, but strangely beautiful. I have no desire to clean it up.

The pizza box lies open, as if recently robbed. I feel a little queasy. Everything is off-kilter, like a picture tilted at an angle.

I wonder, in this moment, whether Gemma is thinking about Neil at all. I know from my own limited experience that the first thing men do when they break up with someone is to think about their exes. They take out the old map from the bottom of the drawer, with its well-worn creases and loving fingerprints on familiar landmarks, and fondly retrace old journeys.

On Gemma's map, Neil isn't just any old ex. He was her first love.

I smile at the memory of the two of them in Sheffield that first Christmas, cuddled up on my sofa in the house on Eccleshall Road. I asked them, with weary undergraduate sarcasm, when they thought the wedding would be. Gemma took Neil's hand quickly in her own, and replied sarcastically:

‘I'm only in it for his money.'

Neil nodded, and added, more earnestly:

‘We've only just met.'

I liked Neil. He was Scottish, from a Borders farming family, studying Veterinary Science at Liverpool. Gemma met him during rag week when the Liverpool students invaded Sheffield and there was an almighty party in the Student Union. He was about my height, but with the epic chunkiness of a man bred from bull-rearing ancestors, with thick rugby-playing shoulders and thighs the size of children. He and Gemma were inseparable when they started dating, meeting every weekend, doing essays together in the library, campaigning in London against student fees, going to obscure foreign films in which nobody spoke and everyone was naked.

Neil never seemed jealous of me (not that he had any reason to be). He was always friendly, always good-humoured.

If I were Gemma, I'd be thinking about Neil. But fortunately, women aren't that shallow.

I call Molly from Gemma's fancy charcoal phone. It rings and rings before cutting to her answering service. I leave
a quick message, not mentioning Raj. At the end of the message I find myself mumbling ‘Love you, babes…', before hanging up hurriedly.

I panic. I should never have said that. I wasn't thinking, I'm tired. I'm worried that she will take those three words and construct in her mind a tourniquet that will tighten around her, suffocating her. She doesn't want to hear that I love her. I don't love her. They were just words.

The problem is, women behave differently with words. They treat words with far more respect and seriousness. Men hold little value in language. From an early age we don't communicate with words, we don't learn their nuances and subtleties. We kick our footballs, cycle our bikes, punch our best friends, and construct a physical language for ourselves. Words are never as important as actions to the male mind. So in adult life, we cast out words like francs in a world of euros – women think they're worth something, that we value them in the same way they do. But we don't.

It annoys me that Raj left Gemma because of words. It doesn't seem very manly.

I wonder if I should call Molly back and explain this theory to her.

My ankle hurts. I push open the large glass door that leads out onto the garden. The rain has stopped and the evening air is cooler now. In a few days it'll be September, and there's already an autumnal crispness. I stand, looking out into the encroaching dusk. I wonder how big the garden is, and whether there are any tomatoes. I think that perhaps, now that Raj is gone, I could plant some for my
friend. Then I feel guilty. It's still not clear if Raj being gone is a good thing.

I look out into the shadows and shapes start to form amorphously as my eyes adjust – a few trees, a cement mixer, a spade.

I don't understand why Gemma hasn't told her sister about Raj. As an only child, I dreamed of having a sibling to share confidences with, to unite with against parental tyranny. But I was always on my own. I had an imaginary friend when I was six, but the Astronaut was a useless confidant, only interested in taking rockets to Mars, or exploring the molten core of the earth on my tricycle.

If I were Gemma, I'd tell Molly everything. It wouldn't be difficult spilling the beans to such a beautiful woman. Just looking into those eyes would make you confess to everything. To anything.

If I'm honest I've always fancied Molly. You'd have to be gay not to. I first met her while Gemma and I were at university, but I was careful to be nothing more than friendly towards her. I'd always wondered about us getting together – she seemed to like me – but then I started travelling, and I was dating a series of foreign women who flew to England at the weekends, and then she got engaged and married Will, the dashing stockbroking genius.

I hardly saw anything of her during the three years she was married. Then Gemma told me on the phone one night that her sister was getting a divorce, and to my surprise an electric spark of desire flashed through my stomach.

We got together at Gemma's office party. We all got badly drunk and ended up back at Molly's loft playing
drinking games. Raj was absent, for some reason I can't remember, and Gemma drank too much and threw up. Molly and I helped her to bed, and ended up talking, sitting outside the door to the guest bedroom on the premise of keeping an eye on Gemma. We drank vodka from the bottle, and chatted about music and films and people we fancied, and it seemed so easy, vodka-talk, and I noticed the small crow's feet at the edge of Molly's eyes when she smiled, and her long slender fingers.

Despite being adverse to instinctive acts of passion, I took another swig and leaned over and kissed her quickly on the neck. Her flesh was hot. She hesitated, and I was terrified in that instant that she'd slap me. Then in a miraculous moment, she moved her mouth against mine, soft-hot, and we kissed for a while. I pinched her nipple, then moved my hand to her lap where I undid her Levi's.

She breathed in, I pressed my damp hot hand against her flat stomach, still kissing, it was easy, good and right, and my spread fingers smoothed down, the first soft bristle of pubic hair, and I slid my middle finger further down, to touch the crease of her. She was wet. She moaned and shivered.

I shifted, delicious agony, finger moving deeper, closer, wetter and she exhaled my name ‘Ian' and with both hands pushed me away gently, wriggling back, taking my hand and slipping it upwards out of her, casting it to one side as if severing it from my arm.

We went for breakfast, just the two of us, the following day, and at the tube station she kissed me, the kiss that started everything.

‘Can I call you?' I asked, my heart thumping. She looked at me, head cocked slightly to one side and whispered:

‘Why not.'

I danced all the way home.

The next morning, when I come downstairs, Gemma is sitting once more in the front window of the semi-derelict house. She looks wrecked – her eyes puffed as if she's recently finished crying, her nails bitten low, her body seemingly shrunken overnight, skeletal beneath the loose pyjamas and hooded sweatshirt.

She's in a terrible mood. She declines my offer of coffee or tea, or any other form of beverage (which is fortunate, because the only other form of beverage is a third of a bottle of gin, which is going to do neither of us any good).

I make some Lavazza, and propose sitting out on the unfinished patio.

‘Make the most of the sun?'

Gemma shakes her head, without looking up.

‘It's a lovely day.'

‘For fuck's sake, Ian, I just want to sit here and do fuck all! All right?!'

When Gemma uses two fucks in a sentence, it's time to leave her alone. I open the glass doors and walk out, slyly leaving one of them open, to allow a sliver of fresh late-August air into the house that I hope will blow in and dispel the unhappy scent of decay.

I stand in the bright sunshine, sipping my coffee. I wish Gemma could be enticed outside, to be cured by the end-of-summer morning sun and a cup of Italian Arabica. I try to put myself into her head, but I can't imagine how
she's feeling. Unlike my own, Gemma's travails are, as she noted so bravely the previous day, her own doing. Whereas I can blame others (Venezuelan bus companies, ginger-headed landlords, the Virgin Mary) Gemma has to wake up each morning knowing that the reason she feels so miserable is because she's made herself feel miserable.

The sunshine liberates me and I realize I've been feeling cooped up. I don't understand why, when she lives next to a park, Gemma won't leave the house. I've never liked interiors, preferring the open spaces of the great outdoors, even in London. I like to move (hence my career choice). The broken ankle is a severe strain on my psyche, on my basic nomadic need to relocate. Only another couple of weeks, I tell myself forcefully.

I look around the sixty-foot-long garden. It's big for London, an advantage, I suppose, of moving to one of the more extraneous boroughs. It is, like most of the house interior, a mess. A hole has been dug for some uncertain purpose, which is now filled with rainwater. Concrete slabs lie like gravestones in the far corner. The only feature of any discernible beauty, as far as I'm concerned, is a mature tree by the back fence that must have been planted when the houses were originally built, sometime at the end of the nineteenth century.

I love trees – they seem so stable, so sure of themselves with their confident spreading branches and unseen solid roots – so unlike people in their steadfastness when faced with adverse elements. I often mention them in my travel articles:

The majestic plane trees line the Cours Mirabeau like ancient courtiers saluting the Sun King
.

A hillside of ochre aspens, nodding lazily in Colorado's early autumn breeze, is more beautiful than any Van Gogh
.

I sat beneath a venerable palm tree, laden with voluptuous dates, and wondered how many sheikhs, spies and scorpions had sat in its benevolent shade before me
.

This tree, I notice on closer inspection, is a walnut, laden with green fruit. I imagine the legions of meaty testicular nuts, lurking inside their fleshy feminine cups, and shiver slightly. I have a sudden urgent desire to see Molly. I want to have sex with her, to feel her, to hold her close to me, despite my comedy ankle plaster.