To Be Someone (34 page)

The phone rang. My heart leapt at the thought that it might be Vinnie, ringing to cancel, but when I picked it up, it was only Sam.

“Hi, what’s up?” she asked.

I walked with the cordless phone over to the full-length freestanding mirror in my bedroom and stood naked in front of it. “I’ve got a date, that’s what’s up,” I said proudly.

There was a screech from the other end. “Who with?”

I surveyed my body, trying to see it through someone else’s eyes. Large but perky breasts, tight stomach. Hips and thighs a tiny bit bigger than I’d have liked, but still a safe size twelve. I thanked God that I hadn’t stayed chubby. It was so difficult to be in the world’s spotlight if you were carrying even a few extra pounds.

“He’s called Vinnie, I met him in a shop, he’s originally from Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, whatever. He’s coming round for dinner.”

There was a slight pause.

“You met him in a shop? What shop? What does he do?”

“The deli. He doesn’t work there or anything. We just got talking and then went for a drink to the pub. He’s a mature student, does art and design. Oh, Sam, he’s so hot. All thin and trendy, with a really sexy way of talking. Confident. I like that in a man.”

“And does he … I mean, did he … know who you are?”

“That’s the best bit—I really don’t think he did. He didn’t say anything, anyway. Isn’t that neat? He just fancied me for my own sake.”

Sam sounded thoughtful. “Yeah—that’s great. Just be careful, okay, Helena? Don’t get carried away. I’m not sure how I feel about him coming to your house, though. He could be anyone. Do you want me and Timothy to come over for moral support? We’re not doing anything tonight.”

I laughed. “No way! I don’t want you gate-crashing my romantic dinner, thanks very much! But I appreciate your concern. I’ll call you first thing in the morning and tell you how it goes.”

“You’d better.”

“Anyway, gotta go, Sam. I have to start cooking. Thanks for ringing. Lots of love.”

“Good luck. Lots of love to you, too, Helena. Let’s meet up tomorrow, okay? You can give me all the gory details over lunch.”

“Okay. Deal. Bye.”

“Bye.”

It was only after we’d hung up that I realized I’d forgotten to ask how she was feeling.

I got dressed, finally deciding on my Agent Provocateur underwear underneath a low-key but very sexy Ghost dress. The steam had dissipated from the bathroom mirror when I returned, so I leaned against the sink and got to work on my face. Foundation, blusher, golden-brown eye shadow, black eyeliner and mascara, and finally a tawny-gold–colored lipstick. A generous squirt of perfume completed the transformation.

I flung my wet towel over the shower-curtain rail and picked the sodden bath mat up off the floor, feeling new, polished, and as ready as I’d ever be. It was six-twenty.

By six-thirty, I was in the kitchen chopping fennel and mashing garlic. There was a bang at the door at around six-forty, just as I’d put the fennel into boiling water and weighed out four ounces of pine kernels.

“It’s Vinnie,” he said, through the stained-glass panel in the front door.

“Oh, hello,” I replied from the hall, completely overcome with panic. Thank God I’d put my makeup on before beginning to cook.

“Well, are you going to let me in, then?” he called, mock-impatient, through the letterbox.

I opened the door.

“You’re early,” I said nervously.

Vinnie looked me up and down appraisingly. “You look totally gorgeous,” he said. “Great house, too. Do you live here alone?”

I nodded, blushing at the compliment. He looked exactly the same as he had earlier, right down to the large brown paper bag he held in his arms. A five o’clock shadow gave away the fact that he probably hadn’t spent hours in the bath, and the same clothes indicated the unlikelihood of him agonizing in front of an open wardrobe. Still, that was guys for you.

Vinnie stomped down the hall into the kitchen as if he’d been there a hundred times before, plonked the bag down on the table, and unpacked it. It turned out to contain not his groceries from earlier, but a medium-sized bottle of gin, a large plastic bottle of tonic, two lemons, a packet of Gauloises, and a family-sized pack of tortilla chips.

“Thought we could get started with a few G and Ts,” he said airily. “Where do you keep your glasses?”

Somewhat surprised, I got two tumblers out of the cupboard. “How do you know that I like gin?” I asked.

“Oh, most people like gin. You do, don’t you?”

“Well, kind of, but …”

“There you are, then.”

He sloshed a large measure into each glass, topped it up with tonic, and helped himself to ice from the freezer. I stood and watched, mouth agape, as he deftly chopped up lemons, found a bowl to pour the tortilla chips into, opened his packet of cigarettes, and without asking my permission, lit one from the gas ring on the hob.

“Make yourself at home,” I said sarcastically.

“Cheers,” he replied through a cloud of evil-smelling smoke, handing me a glass. “Your good health. Now, shall we adjourn to somewhere more comfortable before dinner? That looks done,” he added, turning off the gas underneath the bubbling fennel. “Why don’t you just strain it, and then you can finish the cooking later?”

“I’m surprised you don’t want to strain it. You’ve done everything else,” I said, fetching a colander. Again the sarcasm seemed lost on Vinnie.

“Oh, no—you’re in charge.”

Somehow I found his assertiveness very attractive. He was so different from any other man I’d ever met, and I wondered if it could be because he wasn’t the slightest bit in awe of me. I showed him back down the hall into the sitting room and offered him a choice of sofas. But he leapt over to the stereo and pounced on the Massive Attack CD case I’d left out from earlier.

“Hey, I love this. It’s amazing. Is it in the machine? Great, let’s listen to this.”

He pressed Play and the opening bars of “Safe from Harm” chugged out around the room again. “Fantastic album, this. Much better than the follow-up—although that was pretty great, too.”

“Bit of an expert, then, are you?” I inquired. If he was that much of an expert on music, surely he’d have known who I was.

“Well, I know a lot about most things,” he replied shamelessly, grinning at me.

The first G&Ts slid down very easily, and Vinnie insisted on dashing off to the kitchen to replenish our glasses himself.

“I just love this house,” he kept saying to me.

During the second drink, I learned that Vinnie shared a place in Richmond with an Asian girl from a course he was taking; that he was twenty-seven; that he used to be a graphic designer but he’d gone back to college because he wanted to be an artist instead; and that, like me, he was an only child. He didn’t ask me anything about myself, not even what I did for a living, for which I was grateful.

By the time he’d rushed off to fix us a third gin, I was feeling very drunk. On the verge of being too pissed to either cook or want to eat, I decided that I’d better get back to my pasta and my orange sauce. Unsteadily, I followed him back into the kitchen.

Vinnie had his back to me. He was hunched over the little portable TV that lived on the end of the kitchen work surface, concentrating on something hidden by his shoulder. I wondered what he was doing—at first I thought he was writing, using the top of the television to lean on.

I studied the part of his profile visible to me: pale skin, one or two not-unattractive pockmarks, lovely cheekbones. Light from a halogen spotlight above him glinted off the lenses of his round tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses and filtered through his stubble. He was actually not as good-looking as I remembered him from the pub—his appeal came more from his sexual confidence than his physical attributes. He had wiry hair, which defied gravity and stood straight up, like Kramer’s from
Seinfeld
, and I could smell his aftershave from where I was leaning against the doorframe. At least he’d bothered to put aftershave on, even if he had skipped the actual shaving part.

I stood watching his thin back curved over in its black-and-white stripy T-shirt, and for a second I felt an overwhelming attraction to him.

Then I realized exactly what he was doing, and attraction turned to fury. He was chopping out two neat lines of cocaine—with my credit card, on top of my TV. I couldn’t believe it. All Sam’s words of warning came flooding back.

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” I said, outraged at his lack of manners and his presumption.

Cynthia Grant gave me that TV, I thought. She’d be horrified. It was an old, nasty little twelve-inch, encased in grimy white plastic, with a bunny-eared aerial that sat shakily on its top. She’d wanted me to have it when I first bought the house—it had been her own “kitchen telly,” but she said she had nearly sliced the tips of her fingers off by trying to watch soap operas and prepare meals at the same time, so please would I take it away? I’d laughed and said, “So I can slice my own fingers off?” but it had been in my kitchen ever since.

Vinnie had moved the bunny aerial down onto the worktop so as to have more room to maneuver. The cocaine he was expertly chopping out hardly showed up at all on the white surface, but this did not make it any more acceptable.

“How dare you do that in my house!” I spluttered. “Get out, now!”

Vinnie looked a picture of contrition.

“Oh, God, I’m so, so sorry. I had no idea you’d object. You just seem like such a cool person, I was sure you’d be into a little livener now and again. You know, special occasion and all that. I’m bang out of order, I know. If it upsets you, I’ll leave, now.”

He immediately swept the cocaine back into its white paper package, folded it safely into the corners, and put it back in his jeans pocket, before standing up to face me. He was hitching up his baggy jeans by the belt loops and shuffling from foot to foot like a guilty schoolboy, and I suddenly had the urge to put my arms around his hard waist. In my heels, I was about two inches taller than him, so he had to look up into my face.

“You don’t have to go. But I warn you, though, I won’t sleep with you,” I blurted, feeling foolish.

“Who said anything about sex?” he asked innocently, touching my breast lightly.

“Get off. And don’t even think about getting that stuff out again, do you hear me? I don’t do drugs, not even spliff, and I won’t have them in my house.”

“Awww. You’re such a spoilsport. You’ll have another G and T, though, won’t you, eh?” he said hopefully, turning back to his more legal supplies.

I couldn’t believe his nerve. It was extraordinary, but it just made me fancy him even more. I watched him clumping around in his heavy Doc Martens, whistling, opening and closing cupboards, crashing ice cubes from a tray, chopping more lemons, the
hiss
and
fizz
of the tonic bottle being unscrewed again.

I felt as if suddenly there had been a tilt, and it was I who had come to visit him in his house. It left me standing aimlessly, like an uncomfortable stranger amid my own familiarity, waiting for an invitation to be seated.

Vinnie flourished two more huge gin and tonics and a bowl of chips, and ushered me out of the kitchen back into the sitting room.

“I really think I should start dinner now,” I said weakly, wondering if perhaps this was all a bizarre dream.

“I don’t know about you,” Vinnie said, “but I’m actually not all that hungry now. We’re having such a laugh. What do you say we just keep drinking for a bit?”

As if under some spell—to think that I’d believed I could put a spell on him!—I found myself saying, “OK, well, if you don’t want to eat … I’m not very hungry now either.”

“Cheers,” he said, handing me my drink. We clinked glasses, and he smiled slowly, almost sheepishly. Later, after I got to know him better, I found out that it was the smile that meant, “Come on, play the game, I know you know what this is about.”

We gazed at each other for a long time, too long for there to be any doubt about what we both wanted. I must not sleep with him, not yet, I thought. But I was transfixed by the sexy curve of his lips, and the way his eyes held mine in a blatantly flirtatious way. I found myself wondering what his kisses would be like.

Vinnie got up to rifle through my record collection, running a commentary on its contents as he did so. “How can you admit to having a Bruce Springsteen CD? American jingoistic crap!” “Incredible! You’re the only person I know who has the Unknown Cases record!”

He put on a CD, listened to one track, took it off again, put on another. In between tracks he moved from sofa to armchair to the floor by my feet, where he briefly pleated the fringes of the rug, before hopping back up to the sofa, talking talking talking all the time, and chain-smoking.

“Get your shoes off the sofa,” I said when I could get a word in edgeways. “Why are you so bloody hyperactive?”

His familiarity with me was causing me to behave in an equally familiar way toward him. I didn’t recognize myself.

“Can’t help it. Must be my natural high spirits. Speaking of which,” he said, bouncing up from the sofa like Tigger in monochrome, “another drink?”