The Trouble with Henry and Zoe (11 page)

On Saturday, the night before we flew to France, Alex’s London friends met for drinks in his memory. No one used the word ‘wake’, but that’s what it was. I realized early
on that my presence was killing the atmosphere, so stayed as long as was decent before making my excuses and calling a taxi. Besides which, I had to leave for the airport at eight the next morning.
So this was not Zoe the magnanimous, this was Zoe the knackered with half a pizza and an entire bar of chocolate in the fridge.

As I opened the door to the taxi, a voice called my name. One of Alex’s closest friends, Tom.

‘Tom, hey.’

‘Zo, I . . . I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk. It’s a bit . . . you know.’

I noticed Tom had his coat on. ‘Are you not staying?’

Tom shook his head. ‘Hugh’s doing my head in, to be honest. The whole overdone grief thing. “To Al!”’ he said, raising an invisible pint, mocking Hugh’s loud
and repeated toasts. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, smiling, then, despite myself, laughing. I know how close Tom and Alex were, and I don’t doubt his grief. ‘I don’t think Alex liked him
all that much.’

‘Well,’ said Tom, rubbing a hand over his stubble, ‘I’m afraid that if I stay much longer I might twat him.’

‘Share a cab,’ I said, and I knew exactly what I was doing.

‘It’s not really on your way, Zo.’

‘I know. I . . . I don’t feel like being on my own tonight. Watch a movie with me?’

We didn’t even turn the TV on. Instead, we opened a bottle of wine and sat at opposite ends of the sofa with the bar of chocolate sitting on a cushion between us like a gradually
diminishing barrier. When we started kissing, with instant and urgent intensity, I stood up from the sofa, taking Tom’s hand and motioning for him to come with me.

He shook his head, ‘Let’s stay down here,’ and pulled me back onto the seat beside him. Maybe it made him feel less guilty; fucking me on the sofa instead of his best
friend’s bed. But Alex and I had made love on those three cushions more than once, so there was no such leniency for my conscience.

‘We can’t sleep on here,’ I said afterwards, the wine, the chocolate and the urgency finished.

‘I’ll take the bed, you take the sofa,’ Tom said, laughing. And I was grateful for that; that he chose not to give the guilt any oxygen. That he didn’t call a cab and
leave me on my own like a coward.

‘I’ll get you a blanket,’ I said, throwing a cushion at him.

We ate breakfast together the next morning, the final wisps of whatever had happened in the night lingering (an overlong good-morning kiss), before dispersing gradually over coffee (a touching
of hands) and toast (a complicit, apologetic smile). We were embarrassed enough to satisfy decency, and both understood – I think – that this one time was forgivable and understandable
and possibly even natural, but that it would never happen again.

‘Zozo?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Your go, sweetheart.’

My parents are both smiling at me, attempting to project amusement instead of concern.

‘Sorry, miles away. Blame the hot chocolate.’

I don’t really know what that means, but my parents laugh and I make a show of examining my tiles.

E-E-E-I-G-L-V

From the minute I picked my last few tiles from the bag, I knew I could hang GRIEVE off the end of WRONG. But triple letter score on the V or not, I can’t bring myself to do it. LIVE is
slightly more bearable, but it’ll only net me seven points, so is hardly worth the discomfort.

‘R-E-L-I-E-V-E,’ I say, ‘triple on the I, twelve points.’

My hair is a mess.

Not just untidy or unkempt, but an erratic, uneven, split-ended disaster area. I’ve seen bus drivers with better hair. That said, I haven’t had it cut since the week before my
scheduled wedding, so this shouldn’t come as a shock. A lot can happen in fourteen weeks. Looking at my reflection, if I had to guess my profession going by nothing but the chaos attempting
to escape my scalp, I’d probably conclude I was the drummer in a pub tribute band –
Less Zepp, Deep Mauve, Bums N’ Roses
, or something similarly cringeworthy. Or maybe
I’d mistake me for a brilliant academic, an alcoholic mechanic, or a drug-dealing taxi driver. Not a dentist. Certainly not a hairdresser’s son.

The man massaging my shoulders is called Gus, and he is the proprietor of this establishment. I haven’t asked him to do this, and he didn’t ask if I minded, but he’s doing it
all the same. Kneading the muscles of my neck as we both regard my cartoon mop. What I’ve asked this man to do is cut my hair, but he clearly doesn’t know where to start. Nothing about
Gus suggests a sexual inclination in any particular or exclusive direction, but he is certainly sexually
present
– confident, uninhibited, coiffed yet rough, ruggedly masculine yet
somehow effete. If he has an orientation at all, I’d guess it’s a three hundred and sixty degree humankind kind of thing. I wouldn’t trust him with my girlfriend, if I had one, or
my mother, or grandmother if I had one that was still breathing. Paradoxically, though, despite his palpable sexual readiness, I don’t detect anything aimed at me. I’m probably below
his radar. No, this massage, this deep, insistent full-handed mauling, seems to be the physical manifestation of Gus’s thought process as he considers the quantum problem of my hair.

‘I’m in your hands,’ I told Gus after he sat me in the chair and asked what I wanted. Who knew he’d take it so literally.

‘Let’s give it a wash,’ says Gus. ‘Might make more sense once it’s wet.’

In a peculiar variation on the great unfathomable tradition, the place is called The Hairy Krishna; the sign above the door features a fat Buddha with rock star locks, a pair of scissors in one
hand and a hairdryer in the other.

After a hurried breakfast in the Black Horse three months ago (leaving the rental car under my old man’s care), I pointed the brick-gouged Audi south, hitting London shortly after lunch.
Following the path of least resistance, I found myself on a busy high street south of the Thames, with nothing more on my mind than a pee and a spot of lunch. After an overpriced pie and pint, I
found a room in a guesthouse across the street, booked two weeks’ accommodation and went back to the pub to watch the boxing. By the following Tuesday I had four offers of work and took the
one closest to the guesthouse; eight weeks’ paternity cover at a dental practice five minutes from my front door.

I have barely stepped beyond the triangle formed between the Red Lion, the Lavender Lodge and 32 White since. Within that roughly one mile isosceles are more amenities and distractions than in
the entire village I called home for the majority of my life. Amongst others, there are bars, restaurants, gyms, a cinema, a supermarket, launderette and Gus’s bohemian hairdressing salon.
Not that I’ve availed myself to any great extent of the local attractions; I have worked every shift offered to me, including on-call duty over both Christmas and New Year’s Day.

We also have two charity shops, one of which sold me fifty jigsaw puzzles for twenty-five pounds. The puzzles range from five hundred to two thousand pieces printed with detailed images of the
countryside, the sky at night, and everything that lies between the two. I have even bought myself a specifically designed jigsaw mat, so I can roll up my work before turning in for the night.
After my first four weeks in a single room in the Lavender Lodge, the ‘premier suite’ became available – double bed, TV, toilet, shower, bay window, mini kitchen and folding
table. So I packed my bag and moved up one flight of stairs. Occasionally I venture beyond my small triangle to hit pads, jump rope and shadow box at a shabby boxing gym nudging the southeast
border of the borough. Otherwise, I work, watch old movies, assemble poster-sized jigsaw puzzles and think.

I think about how I have exiled myself from my family and my home, how I have escaped to one of the most vibrant cities in the world, only to live like a hermit, shuttling between work and the
sofa where I eat meals for one in front of old black and white movies I’ve seen dozens of times before. If I measure my life now against the one I ran out on, the significant differences are
that I am now crushingly lonely but much improved at jigsaw puzzles. It’s depressing.

I call my parents once a week, my mother alternating between tearful hostility and weepy melancholia, Dad talking about the pub, the weather, the fight if there’s been one. In the first
few weeks following my exile I called Brian, too, but we’d never talked on the phone before, other than to name a time and a pub, so our cross-country phone calls were awkward, tentative
affairs. Maybe because the default topic was so uncomfortable. In the immediate aftermath of the ruined wedding, anyone even closely associated with me, meaning Brian, meaning my parents, was
contaminated with the fallout. There was a general belief in the first wave of hysteria that the best man must have been complicit, and Big Boots had to physically restrain both Mad George and
April’s father as the mania turned into physicality. The Black Horse was boycotted, the way the home of a serial killer might be; a local embarrassment fit only for demolition or burning.
Small pubs operate on a precarious profit margin at the best of times, and if it hadn’t been for April’s intervention, my parents could easily have gone out of business. Hearing this
– how she would drink defiantly at the bar with my mother, and stand beside Big Boots in front of the big screen on fight night – I felt myself admire and . . . maybe even love her,
more than I ever had before. This realization has caused me more than once to doubt the wisdom of my early morning flit, but I would never say as much to Brian. With stubborn parochial elasticity,
village life appears to have contracted back into shape and routine, returning more completely to its old form the longer the irritant has been removed.

And if a year from now, I were to walk into the village, whistling a jaunty tune with a bindle over my shoulder and a cheeky apologetic grin on my face . . . what then? Certainly no fatted
burgers would be thrown on the barbecue. No, the obstinacy that keeps small towns constant comes with a long memory. The can of old vitriol would be opened, stirred and thrown over me and all
within splashing distance. Probably, this is why Brian and I no longer talk. All for what? How, when and where does it end?

I think about this a lot, and I think I have the answer.

The answer, I think, is love.

Gus towels my thatch semi-dry and transfers me back to the chair in front of the mirror.

‘Date?’ he asks, running a comb through my hair.

I’m reasonably sure this is an enquiry rather than an offer, so I nod cautiously.

‘Nice one,’ says Gus, frowning at a hank of my hair.

If there’s one thing the movies I watched with my mother have taught me, it’s that love justifies everything. In
His Girl Friday
, Cary Grant schemed, lied, stole, kidnapped,
and demonstrated a sociopathic lack of compassion and conscience – but it’s okay. He did it for love. Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
stormed a wedding, assaulted the congregation
with a crucifix and ran off with the bride. But it’s fine, we get it, he was following his heart.

Love conquers, explains and excuses all. Love heals, too, and I want it to heal April. I hope she finds a better man than me, a better man for her. I doubt she will ever fully forgive me, and
neither would I blame her, but she may at least come to tolerate me. And my mother will surely appreciate that it was all for the best once she sees April fulfil her own happy ending. And what
about me? Would she wish anything less for her only son?

Last night I signed up to an online dating agency.

For the greater good
, I told myself.

I was approximately fifteen hundred pieces into a two-thousand-piece haystack and finding it less exciting than you might imagine. The devil will find work for idle hands, they say. And,
apparently, for fingers that do jigsaws. I opened my laptop and typed the word ‘dating’ into the search bar. Just to see what came up, of course. I clicked on the first link, out of
nothing more than idle curiosity. A free trial, it said. So I filled in my name, chose an old picture, answered six inane questions. Clicked the red, heart-shaped button. Just for something to pass
the time, really. Before I’d managed to assemble another twenty pieces of identical beige, I had three offers. The speed with which these responses came in might suggest a certain . . .
eagerness. But as I brushed my teeth before bed, one thing was glaringly apparent. No amount of romantic optimism could compensate for my hair.

‘Undercuts are in,’ says Gus.

‘Hmmm, I dunno.’

‘I know,’ says Gus. ‘Between me an’ you, I find ’em a bit . . .’

‘Shit?’

‘Yeah,’ says Gus, slapping me on the back. ‘Shit. Exactly.’

‘Any ideas?’

Gus shakes his head. ‘Jojo would know what to do.’

‘Who’s Jojo?’

‘Genius with a pair of scissors. I’d be lost without her.’

‘Where is she?’

Gus shrugs. ‘Australia.’

‘Maybe we should just start over,’ I say to Gus.

‘But we only just met,’ he says, giving my shoulder a squeeze.

I reach up from under my gown and pull a length of hair away from my head. Gus nods at me in the mirror, then inserts his hands into the depths of my hair, pushing and threading them through the
dense mat until his fingers find my skull.

‘Nice-shaped head,’ he says.

‘Thank you.’

‘No birthmarks full of sixes?’

‘None that I know of.’

‘Fuck it,’ he says. ‘Let’s find out.’ And he moonwalks across the floor to retrieve his clippers, pirouettes and moonwalks back. ‘Local?’ asks Gus,
examining my head and deciding where to start.

‘Ish,’ I say.

‘That a northern accent?’

I nod.

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Middle of nowhere,’ I say. And then I smile apologetically, hoping it will take the edge off my curt response to a friendly enquiry. This might be the longest face-to-face
conversation I’ve had in the last two months that didn’t involve teeth, and I don’t want to ruin it.