The Two of Us (13 page)

Suzi nods as if waiting for me to get to the point.

Finger number three: ‘Rooftop scene – very cinematic, dramatic.’

‘
Two
rooftop scenes,’ Suzi corrects, with just a hint of coy.

‘Yes,’ I say, moving on to finger number four, ‘which brings me to . . .’

Suzi raises her eyebrows. ‘Sex.’

You read my mind
, is what I very nearly say, but I catch myself before I let this unintended insinuation slip past my teeth. If I were single and not expecting twins, I may well have
let it fly. But I’m not, and I am – and very happily. Even so, I can’t help wondering if Suzi, like her protagonist, has ever made love on the rooftop of a Student Union
building.

‘Yes,’ I laugh. ‘We don’t get to shoot too many sex scenes in advertising.’

‘No,’ says Suzi. ‘We don’t, do we?’

‘Poor us,’ I say, pulling a stupid face and taking a glug of wine.

Suzi seems to hesitate before saying, ‘So . . . want to do it?’

‘Excuse me?’

Suzi laughs. ‘Shoot it. Shoot the art student.’

The question catches me flat-footed. ‘I’d love to, honestly, but you might need a bit of a reality check on what a thing like this costs. You’re going to need crew, equipment,
actors.’

Suzi smiles indulgently. ‘You sound like Joe.’

‘Is that an insult?’

‘I’ve got some money,’ she says.

‘Maybe so, but this isn’t some two-header around a kitchen table.’ She’s right; I do sound like Joe. ‘You’ve got, what? Two leads, a bunch of extras, three or
four locations, a rooftop, a night shoot. Even with favours and freebies it’s going to run to . . . God, I don’t know. A lot. You’ll need a producer, too – a bloody good
one.’

‘I’ve got ten grand.’

‘Suzi, that’s a lot of money. But even so . . . I dunno.’

‘My dad died this year,’ she says, and all her bravado and flirtation and whimsy are gone.

‘I’m sorry. I . . . I know what that’s like. My mum died when I was fourteen.’

Suzi puts her hand on mine, smiles sadly. Then just like that she lets my hand go, takes a sip of her wine and seems to snap back into herself. ‘Thing is,’ she says, ‘I
inherited enough to put a deposit on a flat. That’s what Mum wants me to do with it. But a flat’s a flat; one day I’ll sell it and move out and it’ll be gone. If I make this
film, whether it’s shit, fabulous or somewhere in the middle . . .’ Suzi takes a sip of her wine. ‘People always say
Oh it’s what he would have wanted,
don’t
they?’

‘Is it? What he would have wanted?’

‘Honestly, I think he’d rather I bought the flat.’ And she just loses it laughing. It’s infectious and for a moment we must be the most annoying people in the bar.

‘Anyway,’ says Suzi, ‘it’s what I want. I don’t want to write bog roll ads forever, you know what I mean?’

I nod.
Yes, I know what you mean.

Ivy and I are in bed, Nina Simone playing at a low volume, a honeysuckle-scented candle flickering on Ivy’s bedside table next to an open bottle of baby oil. My choice of
music; my choice of lighting.

‘This is very sweet of you, baby, but I can do it myself, you know.’

‘Relax,’ I say, ‘lie back.’ And I continue massaging the oil into Ivy’s drum-tight bump. The sheen highlights a scar that skitters across her belly, and this,
I’m sure, plays a large part in her fear of getting stretchmarks.

‘How about Henry?’ she says.

We still have no idea what genders our twins are. ‘For a boy or a girl?’ I ask.

‘Girl.’

‘I’m working with a Henry, she’s a bit of a knob.’

‘Can you call a girl a knob?’

‘If you can call her Henry, why not? Anyway, she says
ciao
on the phone.’

‘Where’s she from?’

‘Wigan, I think.’

‘Fair enough,’ says Ivy. ‘So that’s a no to Henry.’

I change direction, moving my hand in slow, gradually widening clockwise circles. ‘How about Zara?’ I suggest.

‘I went to school with a Zara; she used to call me Beef.’

‘What, where you . . .?’ I blow out my cheeks, hold my hands around an invisible gut, waddle my shoulders from side to side.

Ivy slaps my hand. ‘No, it evolved from B.F., short for Bride of Frankenstein,’ she indicates the scar on her cheek.

‘Bitch.’

Ivy shrugs. ‘I had worse. And I gave as good as I got. She had really wide-spaced eyes and a super retroussé nose, so I called her Bizzara. And it stuck a damn sight longer than
Beef.’

‘
Touché,
’ I say, resuming my massage and widening the orbit of my hand just enough that my fingers brush against the waistband of Ivy’s knickers.

‘So,’ says Ivy, stretching the single seductive syllable, ‘what’s your porn-star name?’

Of course the massage, the music and the candles were all designed to create a mood, but I hadn’t anticipated such a direct reaction.

‘My . . . what?’

‘You know,’ says Ivy, ‘you take the name of your first pet, add your mother’s maiden name and that’s your porn-star name.’

‘Oh, right, I see. So my pet’s name and . . .?’

‘Mother’s maiden name.’

‘Okay . . . Catch MacCluskey.’

Ivy claps her hands together in delight. ‘That’s brilliant! You’re not kidding me, are you? Are you pulling my leg?’

I shake my head. ‘Goldfish and a Catholic.’

‘I love it!
Catch MacCluskey
.’

‘Go on then, what’s yours?’

‘Mine’s rubbish.’

‘Come on . . . you brought it up.’

Ivy sighs. ‘Fine – Margaret Smith.’

‘Oh, that really is rubbish.’

‘I
know
.’

‘I mean, who has a pet called Margaret?’

Ivy points to herself. ‘That would be me. I wanted a dog or a cat – we’d never had pets, rest of the family weren’t interested – and I nagged and nagged and nagged
until finally, to shut me up, they fobbed me off with a rabbit.’

‘Which you called Margaret.’

‘I was four! We’d never had a pet before and no one told me that pets have names like Fido or Fluffy or . . .
Catch.
And what’s that all about while we’re at it?
Way to give a fish a complex.’

‘We’re Fishers, he’s a Catch. And if we’re critiquing goldfish names, it’s better than Ernest.’

‘Shut up!’

‘You must have figured the rules out by now, you’re forty-
one
, that’s ancien—’

‘Careful,
Catch
. I could kick you in an extremely painful place from here.’ I hold up my hands in submission. ‘If you must know, he’s named after
Hemingway.’

‘The writer chappy?’

‘He wrote
The Old Man and The Sea
, and he was mad for fishing so it works on two . . . are you laughing at me?’

‘Only a little. With you mostly.’

Ivy pouts at me sulkily. ‘It’s still better than Catch.’

Two of the tealights have guttered out now and Nina is approaching the end of her album, so I pour more oil into my hands and begin massaging Ivy’s right thigh.

‘Do pregnant women get stretchmarks there?’ Ivy asks.

‘Depends how huge you get. Relax.’ And Ivy does.

When Ivy returned from book club three hours ago, I was asleep and, apparently, snoring like a hog on the sofa. It was gone ten o’clock but I was starving hungry, so I cooked spaghetti
with pesto and grated cheese and we sat up eating a late supper. We talked about our days, and I felt a pinching guilt for having spent the end of the afternoon and the start of the evening in a
wine bar with an attractive woman. Nothing happened to feel guilty about, of course – no overlong contact, no lingering kisses, no nascent infidelity. We flirted, probably, a little, but with
no objective in mind. But even so, I experience that irritating itch of having misbehaved. I slide my hands down Ivy’s thigh, over her knee and calf and take her foot in my hand, push my
thumbs into the sole. She takes a deep breath, lets it slowly out. In Suzi’s screenplay, there is a scene where a man ties his lover’s ankles to opposite corners of the wrought-iron bed
frame with silk ties. I push it out of my mind and pour more oil into my palm.

‘Ellie?’ Ivy suggests.

I slept with a girl called Ellie, but now is hardly the time to divulge.

‘Had a Smelly Ellie in sixth form,’ I tell her. Which isn’t a million miles from the truth.

‘Kids,’ says Ivy, ‘so cr— Oh!’ her eyes go wide as her hands move reflexively to her belly.

‘What’s up? Are you . . . is everything okay?’

Ivy smiles. ‘Someone,’ she says, stroking her bump as if it were a puppy or a kitten or . . . well, a baby, ‘someone’s restless.’

‘Really, which one?’

‘Hard to tell.’ Then, directed at her bump, ‘Who’s fidgeting, hmm?’

‘First time?’ I ask.

Ivy nods. ‘No one owning up, hey?’ She pushes a hand into her tummy, attempting to elicit some response.

‘Anything?’ I ask.

Ivy shakes her head sadly. ‘Show’s over, I think.’

I don’t actually say the words:
That’s what you think,
but I do raise my eyebrows as I resume massaging Ivy’s legs.

Ivy groans.

‘Does that feel good?’ I say.

But as I look into her face, all the colour drains from Ivy’s cheeks. ‘I . . . I don’t think all that jiggling was such a good idea,’ she says, and then she holds a hand
to her mouth and scampers off to the bathroom to barf.

When I wake the following morning Ivy is not beside me. We’ve been living together for almost eight weeks now, and it’s not unusual for me to wake in an otherwise
empty bed. Ivy used to enjoy starting the day with what she euphemistically calls (
called
) a ‘wriggle’, but now that she has a pair of sweet potatoes using her bladder as a
bouncy castle, it seems the only thing on her waking mind is a pee and a cup of tea.

My old neighbour, Esther, has a theory about pebbles in a jar:

If you place a pebble in a jar every time you make love in the first year of a relationship, then remove a pebble every time you make love thereafter, you will never empty the jar. I get it, and
I don’t doubt it contains a grain (or a pebble) of truth. I just hope, like so much else in our short relationship, this early burst of sexual industriousness isn’t a phenomenon Ivy and
I have managed to tick off in a condensed time frame i.e. in nineteen days instead of twelve months. There are, of course, extenuating factors. In the seven and a half weeks since I moved to
Wimbledon, we’ve both been working, and it would have been hard to arrange schedules that were less aligned. Added to that, on the nights when we are together, Ivy is usually asleep on the
sofa within seconds of nine o’clock ticking over. Even at weekends we’re out of synch. I run and Ivy practises yoga, but we never manage to co-ordinate these things, which equates to
around two hours spent apart on both Saturday and Sunday. She reads, I watch
Columbo
; I walk to the shops, she takes an afternoon nap. And it’s not unpleasant; in fact, it’s
cosy. But too much cosy can get a little . . . well, boring. I like the life we share together; it just feels like we’re living it about twenty years too soon.

This morning I find Ivy in the living room, moving through a yoga routine. Dressed in a pair of sky-blue leggings and a pink vest top, she is currently balanced in Downward Dog. Hinged at the
waist with her hands and feet on the yoga mat and her limbs locked straight, Ivy’s body describes a perfect A-frame.

‘Morning, sweet cheeks,’ I say to her elevated bottom.

Neither Ivy nor her elevated bottom answer.

I pat her on the backside as I walk through to the kitchen, where I flick on the kettle.

‘We should get some full-fat,’ I say.

Ivy can’t see the bottle of skimmed milk I’m brandishing because her head is now squashed between her knees, but she knows what I’m talking about. We have discussed the
fat-content of our milk several times. If I want it, Ivy says, then I should buy it. Problem is, Ivy takes care of the online shop and the only time I think about milk is when I’m standing in
front of an open fridge, holding a carton of what amounts to little more than white water. I mean, is a little milk in my milk really too much to ask?

‘For coffee,’ I say.

Ivy transitions into Cat.

The kettle boils and I make a full cafetiere of coffee.

Into Cow, into Modified Cobra.

‘Want one?’ I ask.

Ivy grunts – through exertion or as an answer, I can’t tell.

‘I’ll take that as a no,’ I say.

‘Kind of doing something,’ she says from between her legs.

Skinny coffee in hand, I take a seat on the sofa and spectate. I have seen Ivy move through these poses many times now. In the first few weeks of our relationship she encouraged me to join in,
which I did; and on more than one occasion our final position was one you don’t perform in public. Ivy transitions into Caterpillar – head on the mat, back arched, bum in the air.

‘Remember when we used to do yoga together?’ I say.

‘Unnh hmm.’

‘Seems like a long time ago.’

‘Uh huh.’

Ivy shifts her weight backward so that she is on all fours. She rotates her hips one way then the other. I doubt it’s actually called Sexy Fox, but that’s the name which comes to
mind.

‘What’s that one called?’

‘Dunno,’ says Ivy.

‘Funny name.’

Ivy doesn’t answer.

‘I could join you if you like?’

‘Haven’t you got things to do?’ says Ivy.

‘All right,’ I say, a little stung. And then, remembering something her brother Frank said when we visited Ivy’s parents: ‘Chillamena Willamena.’

‘Christ, that’s annoying,’ she says, and I don’t remember her reacting the same way when Frank said it.

I leave my unfinished coffee on the arm of the sofa, knowing it will piss Ivy off even further, and go through to the bedroom to change into my running gear. I strap on my iPod and fold a tenner
into my trainer so I can buy a bacon sandwich and a carton of full-fucking-fat milk on the way back.

For the first mile I run angry. And with no clear destination in mind, I run not towards Wimbledon Common, but away from it. Instead of the open spaces, the trees, the pond and the bridle path,
I pound the hard pavements, running beside busy roads and filling my lungs with car fumes. It takes me less than an hour to arrive at my old street in Brixton.