The One Before the One (23 page)

Wayne smiles and pokes the food around his plate. We both know it’s pretty grim but we’re too polite to say.

‘I’m really flattered you liked it,’ he says. ‘Such an experienced reader as yourself. Whilst you’re here, can I ask you what you thought of …?’

But then he’s interrupted by the arrival of a group of drunk, raucous girls, all wearing hard hats, boiler suits and fake moustaches.
MEL’S ERECTION PROJECT
is emblazoned on the their backs.

We look at each other.

‘Hen do,’ we say in unison and Wayne flops his head dramatically on his table

‘It’s not your fault,’ I laugh. ‘Blame Alexis Steele. She’s the one who booked it!’

We try to have a conversation, but it becomes more and more impossible what with Mel’s Erection Project chanting beside us, embarrassing the Hen with a quiz about her sex life. Now and again, random words come at us: Masturbation! S&M! Crotchless knickers! And at first we try to ignore it, then realize that’s utterly futile and ridiculous and start pissing ourselves instead, putting in our penny’s worth: ‘Nipple tassels!’ I shout out of the side of my mouth. ‘Gimp mask!’ says Wayne.

But things take an even more farcical turn for the worst, because then we hear it. Opera. Someone singing
opera?
And then, as if this night couldn’t get more surreal, there’s a woman with an enormous heaving bosom, singing tonsil-quivering opera at the top of her voice, right next to our table. The hens start to squeal. I don’t know how to react.

‘Oh Jesus,’ says Wayne. ‘Do you think we should go?’

We pile outside laughing.

‘Jesus Christ, I thought her left breast was going to make an escape for it at one point!’ says Wayne. ‘Teenager’s taste, eh? And it looked so promising at first. I thought Lex had got it bang on the money.’

‘I think Mel’s Erection Project did it for me,’ I say. ‘That really topped it off.’

We catch our breath. The light has fallen and the sky is bruise-coloured. All around us, theatreland is waking up.

‘So what do you fancy doing now?’ says Wayne.

‘What, me?’

He laughs.

‘No, that pensioner over there.’

I am so used to nights out with Martin, where everything is pre-planned, pre-booked, offers from the
Standard
ringed in highlighter, that this completely throws me.

‘God, I was hoping you might have some idea?’ He smiles at me, hopefully, and I feel bad to let him down.

‘Sorry, I’m a bit rubbish, never really venture outside SW11.’

‘Really?’ he says, surprised.

‘Really.’ I wince.

‘Well, I reckon now we’ve got you north of the river, we have to make the most of it. So, Caroline.’ He eyes me up. ‘Miss Faithfull, in that lovely dress of yours, what do you want to do now?’

‘What, like, anything?’

‘Yeah, what would be your ideal night? Fuck it, we’re on a date, aren’t we?’

I laugh. I love his directness about the situation; it makes me feel wanted.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ I say, feeling terribly self-conscious, rubbish at this spontaneity thing. ‘Picnic in a moonlit park, walk along the river, some cool, dingy rock bar I’ve never been to, tequilas, dancing, outrageous, drunken harlot behaviour?’

His eyes widen.

‘I’m joking, of course. I’m already too pissed for date one.’ I catch myself. ‘Not that there’s necessarily going to be another one …’

He smiles. ‘So let’s do it,’ he says.

‘Do what?’

‘What you said – your perfect night out. I’ve got a magic carpet, you see, I can take you anywhere.’

I tut. ‘Now, you’re just showing off.’

‘Ah, but I’m not.’ He starts to walk. ‘Come over here.’

He takes me by the hand and I note how nice it is just to hold a man’s hand who isn’t someone’s husband – and leads me to a motorbike bay on the opposite side of the road – so that’s why he wasn’t drinking much. Panic rises in my chest.

‘Oh no, ah-ah.’ I shake my head. ‘I don’t do motorbikes. I’m sorry. I went on one once in 1992. The guy was mental.
He had a total death wish. We went about a million miles per hour and I swear I saw my life flash before me – I thought that was it, over, finito. I started to say goodbye to everyone I love in my head, think about who might come to my funeral. I got off that motorbike, I was sheet white, sheet white, Wayne, and I …’ I stop. He’s laughing at me, actually bent over laughing at me.

‘What?’ I say.

‘Nothing, it’s just …’ He composes himself. ‘That was seventeen years ago. I think, maybe, it might be time to give it another go?’

‘So just hold onto me, or hold onto the side and lean with the bike, okay?’

‘Okay.’

We’re on the bike. I can’t believe he got me on the bike. Putting the helmet on was embarrassing enough, me getting it stuck somewhere around my ears. And then he starts the engine and he revs it so much that I squeal helplessly from within my visor, a muffled, desperate squeal like I’m being attacked. Could this be the most embarrassing first date ever?

Then, then … It’s amazing. I don’t know what happens for the next half-hour, but I’m on a motorbike and I feel like I’m flying.

We race through Aldwych, pass coach trips of middle-aged ladies going to see
Grumpy Old Women
at the theatre and here’s us, I think, young, carefree, on a growling, daring machine and I feel light and heady, like I’m in a French film.

We wind along the Strand, darting in and out of buses. At one point I actually feel the heat of a red bus brush my bare thighs and clench every muscle in my body, screaming with a mixture of delight and terror.

Wayne keeps turning his head and shouting something to me, but I can’t hear him above the crawling, honking,
heaving traffic. The air smells of burnt sugar. I grip on even tighter. It’s only as we turn into Waterloo Bridge that I realize what it is he’s trying to say.

‘You’ve got your hands around my neck!’

‘Sorry. I can’t help it!’ I shout back as the wind hits my face so hard it makes my cheeks shake.

‘Hold onto the …’

‘What?’

‘Hold onto the sides!’

‘But I can’t!’

‘You have to. You’re gonna fucking strangle me!’

So I loosen my grip, slowly, gingerly – here goes, here I come – And with all the fearlessness I can muster, every last scrap of courage I possess, I take my shaking hands from around his neck and place them around his waist. It feels terrifying and thrilling. It feels like I just leapt out of the plane – except there’s no parachute. How the hell was I staying on this thing? But wow!
I get it now.
We are flying over Waterloo Bridge and I am doing it. I am leaning with the bike! It reminds me of the time I went for a trial day’s diving. If I could just relax, let go of the ever-present threat of death for a second, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

And this is beautiful. This city I live in that yawns at either side of us now is so beautiful. Boats glide beneath us, so tiny looking as they make it out into the wide mass of water, glittering with a golden, sinking sun. The river curves to the left, fairy lights string the Victoria Embankment, a neon sign glides across the smooth façade of the National Theatre:
AFTER THE DANCE
SHOWING NOW …

Down below, everything seeming to unfurl so slowly and gracefully, whilst up here, if I dare to open my eyes for a second, the city flashes before me at the speed of lightning.

I can feel the warmth of Wayne’s body beneath my
fingertips, the vibrations of the engine on my thighs. Every now and then I catch his face in the wing mirror. He’s grinning at me.

We turn along York Road, the London Eye appearing like a tricycle wheel that a giant left by mistake in the middle of London. There’s a 24-hour shop and Wayne parks up. ‘Supplies?’ he says. ‘For the picnic in the park?’

So we park up and go inside, but I can’t get my helmet off, so I’m walking around in this brightly lit grocery store, looking and feeling like an astronaut just landed on planet earth.

‘Er, Wayne? I can’t get my helmet off.’

But my voice is muffled beneath the visor and he can’t hear me so I just give up. It’s only as I’m standing behind him in the queue, paying, that he realizes and almost wets himself laughing.

‘You’ve been in this shop all that time and not been able to get your helmet off?’

‘I did try to tell you.’

We put supplies in the back box and carry on: over Westminster Bridge, the Houses of Parliament backlit now by a red sun, hovering like a hot-air balloon. We almost hug the statue of Winston Churchill, we’re leaning so much around Westminster Place. There are the protestors against the Iraq War, camped outside Parliament. A teenage girl shouts at us from the window of a pink limousine. Foreign students take pictures of themselves outside some important building or other. Everywhere there is the sound of the city: the perpetual honking of horns, the gaseous, wheezing sigh of the buses as they stop and start – one great, pulsating heart that we are right in the middle of.

We eventually get to St James’s Park where we picnic under a weeping willow, Buckingham Palace just visible over the
tops of the trees. Everything has stopped now, but the sound of the journey still rings in my ears.

After eating, we both lie on the grass. Wayne folds his arms across his stomach. They’re toned, and I stare at them. I want to touch them. I watch his chest rise and fall, his eyelids flicker, the light of the moon drifting across them. His mouth is wide, slightly open, like he’s inviting me to kiss it. You’re gorgeous, I think. It’s like this thought has always been in the peripheries of my mind and yet it’s only now that it’s fully crystalized. A snog would be nice, I think, just to put my lips on his right now and taste him. But what with him driving and me deciding that to get leathered all on my own might be a bit wrong, we’re stone-cold sober. Control yourself, Steele. Steel yourself …

No. 4: Ask open questions …

‘So,’ I sigh.

Wayne smiles without opening his eyes.

‘Who is Justine? Tell me about Justine.’

‘Ah, this,’ he says, stroking his tattoo. ‘My battle scar. Justine was my fiancée.’

‘You were
engaged?’
I sit up on my elbows and he opens one eye.

‘Don’t look so surprised.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She dumped me. Three months before our wedding.’

‘Oh.’ I shift on the grass, I feel my heart beat. ‘Why?’

‘She just fell out of love with me – unbelievable, I know, but we wanted different things. She wasn’t right for me, and it’s okay, I’m over it now.’

‘You must have been gutted! Were you very in love with her? How long were you together?’

‘Blimey, that’s three questions, the answers to which are yes, yes, and eight years.

Eight
years?

‘But like I said, we were wrong for each other. It was the best thing that ever happened to me although I couldn’t see that at the time.’

I want to ask questions and more questions. I think about Martin and I. Would Martin ever come to feel that way in time? I hoped so.

Wayne pauses, looks up at me through shrewd green eyes.

‘I used to make these lists,’ he says. ‘Reams and reams of lists about my future. I used to make them as a kid, too, about stupid things like
Cars I will own in my lifetime in ascending order of price.’

‘Like Kevin Hart,’ I say.

‘Yeah. Like Kevin Hart.’

‘So anyway, when I got older and particularly when I was with Justine, I became obsessed about “Stuff I want to do” lists. But after a while I realized they were just keeping my head above water; that I made them to stay sane.’

I give a little laugh. This all rang so true. Maybe all that time Wayne was saying that people who made lists were masking some deeper unhappiness, he was right, when I just dismissed him as a self-help bore.

‘Justine would never, ever want to do the same things as me; we were going in different directions.’

‘So what sort of things did you have on these lists?’

‘Oh, live in London for a while, travel around America, write a book. But then one day I realized they were just dream lists, that by committing this stuff to paper was a bit like a wannabe writer talking about writing – it wasn’t the same as actually
doing
it. In a way, Justine finishing with me was a blessing in disguise because it was only once I was on my own and heartbroken that I felt driven to start to make things happen.’

‘So, that’s when you moved to London and started writing the book?’

‘Yes – and travelling. I rode around Africa on that old heap of metal last year.’

I watch him, both his eyes closed again, and think how much I admire him. I would never do anything as bold as to drive around Africa on a motorbike. I could hardly drive around London without having a hernia.

‘So, do you think you’d ever get the tattoo removed?’ I ask.

He grins.

‘No way, it’s my battle scar, this,’ he says. Then, hand on heart in comedy mock-drama, ‘The pain, Caroline, it’s part of me.’

I giggle. He opens both his eyes this time, and a slow smiles creeps across his face.

‘Plus, she’s not alone, I’m afraid.’ He lifts up his top. There’s a tacky little heart tattoo with an arrow through and the name Tracey on it, on his right hip bone.

‘Oh my God!’

‘And this …’ he bends forward and there’s one along the base of his back that reads, Christabel, She’s a Rolling Stone.

He pulls down his T-shirt and grimaces at me. ‘I mostly regret that one.’

I shake my head, laughing in disbelief.

‘What were you thinking of! And Christabel?! Sounds like you made her up!’

‘What you saying?’ he laughs. ‘I lost my virginity to Christabel. She went like a train, did Christabel.’

I jab him in the arm. ‘Wayne Campbell!’

‘Seriously, we were the real-life Romeo and Juliet, doomed teenage sweethearts. Me the local motherless urchin from the council estate, her the daughter of a barrister.’

‘Motherless?’

He closes his eyes again. ‘Yeah, Mum died when I was fifteen. Breast cancer. It’s okay, it was a long time ago now.’

I look at him in awe, study his face, his eyes flickering beneath the lids. Wayne I decide, is not like anyone else I know. He is so open with his feelings, so straightforward. I feel embarrassed, me with my middle-class parents who may not have been sane but were alive at least. What had I endured? Divorce. Big deal. And yet Wayne seemed so much more of a happier person than me, a functioning, positive person.