A Certain Chemistry (10 page)

“Because he wanted to be sure the perfect things were packed, of course—just what she’d have packed herself. If you packed for me before a holiday I’d have one dress—which you’d choose at random—and you’d fill the rest of the suitcase with stockings and suspenders.”

“Pff. The reason he asked them was so that he involved as many people, for as long as possible, in knowing how simply
marvelous
he was. He didn’t call her outside, did he? Didn’t ask her there, where—if there was any problem—she wouldn’t be so embarrassed? No, he did it in front of all the people in the shop, because he wanted the biggest audience for
his
performance. I bet every time she starts to tell the story he’s right there by her side, isn’t he? Grinning like a twat.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

Her reply was to hoist up her nightdress and moon at me.

Bit of an own goal, though, of course. Men can moon and it’s funny or abusive or whatever. If a woman bends over and shows her bare bottom to you, well, the worst that can happen is you’ll be too choked up with gratitude to get the words “Thank you” out properly. And, what’s more, Sara’s gesture was especially doomed to failure because she was unfortunate enough to possess a particularly fantastic bottom.

She waggled it in my face a little, to emphasize the insult she was making.

Yup.

“Well,” she said, letting her nightdress fall back down, “
I
think what he did was great, and so did all the girls at work. I know you’re English and everything, but it’d be nice if you did something like that, just once. Just to show you love me.”

“I do love you.”

“Tch—I
know
you love me.”

“So, what are you—”

“I said to
show
you loved me.”

“But if you know anyway, then—”

“To
show
it.”

“But you’ve said you kn—”

“Christ, Tom.” She smiled and kissed me on the top of the head. “It’s not science, okay? It’s art. You’re a lovely man, a wonderful boyfriend, a talented writer . . . and a complete fucking idiot. Anyway, I’m off to bed now.”

“I’ll come too,” I said, starting to shut down the computer.

“I thought you said you’d got work to do.”

“Yeah . . . well.”

“Well?”

“Well, that was before you got your bottom out.”

“Ahhh . . .”

“You had this incredible bottom hidden under your nightdress. Who knew?”

She walked away into the bedroom, calling back, “And suppose I’m not in the mood?”

“Oh . . . right. Well, I have got work to do, so I can—”

She appeared back in the bedroom doorway.

“Tch. I said
suppose
.”

five

“You could do with a haircut,” said Sara. She’d bent down to give me a peck on the neck on her way out to work.

“Could I?”

“Well, unless you’re going to grow it long—are you going to grow it long?”

“I’m too old to grow it long.”

“What does that mean? You think your twenty-eight-year-old scalp wouldn’t take the strain?”

“I mean that only under-twenties can have long hair.”

“You can have long hair if you want.”

“People would laugh.”

“Fuck ’em.”

“Yeah, you’re right, of course. I sound like Hugh. I can do what I want: it’s my hair. I wasn’t put on earth just to behave how
they
want me to. . . . Fuck ’em.”

“You look better with short hair, though.”

“I’ll go to the barber’s today.”

After Sara had left I went up to my room and scratched at the book a little more. I was trying to get the feel right. Unusually for a ghosting, I was inventing the voice I wanted—creating George, rather than aping her. I wanted Romantic, but not dreamy. I thought that her voice should sound idealistic, yet practical. And strong. And Scottish. And I was digging myself into a hole. I pecked at the keyboard, just to see what happened.

When I was a little girl in Mauchline, I used to stand on the corner of Loudoun Street and look up at the post office. I thought it was an enchanted place: a mystic portal to the rest of the world. The Masonic Lodge was above it (and who knew what strange wizardry went on in there?), but the magic of the post office was its own, and far exceeded anything that men might achieve through the power of rolled-up trouser legs. Parcels were passed into its insides and there, hidden behind the imperious, red-brick Victorian walls, amazingly—impossibly—they were given the means to travel to anywhere in the world. The power to be in Laggan or London, New York or New Delhi. Standing before the post office, in the drizzle, with my wrinkled woolly tights, my scuff-toed shoes (despite my mother’s repeated urgings, I was addicted to dragging my feet), and the big raincoat my sister had been rather too keen to hand down to me, I couldn’t imagine anything more magical than being able to go to all those different places. Now, of course, I know that the truly magical thing isn’t the places you go to, it’s the little bit of your home you always take along.

Dreadful. Trite, saccharine, the joke about the trouser legs was impossibly weak and, in any case, coming after the “who knew what wizardry” bit awkwardly smudged the child-George/adult-George voice. The hand-me-down coat was a nice image (I quickly double-checked my notes to confirm that George
had
got an older sister—she had. Phew), but a bit obvious, really. And my information about Mauchline was from a 1950s tourist guide to Scotland I’d dug out of the attic. George certainly hadn’t mentioned the post office at all, so before I went building her psyche around it I really ought to have a look at something more recent. It’d be a bit embarrassing if the book came out and someone said, “Er, the post office was demolished in 1961. Georgina Nye must have been looking up wistfully at the front of Safeway.” So: pretty much uniformly risible, then.

I’d show it to George and her agent and, if they liked it, carry on in the same vein.

My phone rang; the caller display read “Anonymous.” (Note to self: not only begin a book with a phone call but with one where the caller display reads “Anonymous.”) I snatched it off the table and “yellowed” into it.

“Hi, Tom. It’s George here.” She was phoning from her hotel.

“Hello, George. How’s it going?”

“Fine, fine. I just wondered if you needed another interview now? I’m off to Glasgow for filming tomorrow, and I’ll be heading back to London when that’s done. This afternoon might be the last face-to-face opportunity we have for a while. . . .”

“Oh, right.”

“I’m free this afternoon. You could come over to the hotel, any time after three.”

“Yes, that’d be useful. There
are
a few things I’d like to go over.”

“Okay, I’ll see you here then.”

“Righto.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

That was quite exciting. Well, not
exciting,
obviously. Useful. It would be quite
useful
to get to see George again, to get the chance to check up on some facts at this point. I was clearly “excited” simply to have such a “useful” opportunity.

I needed a haircut.

I’d better get a haircut before I met George. It’d be very unprofessional to turn up at her hotel room poorly haired.

I called around but, even on an unremarkable Wednesday, it was tricky to get an appointment. The best I could do was a place that said they could “fit me in” if I turned up at two o’clock. That was tight if I had to be at George’s hotel by three, but it’d have to do.

“That’s cutting it fine,” I said. “But then, I suppose fine cutting is your business.”

“. . . So, do you want the two o’clock or not?”

“Yes . . . yes, please.”

A man walking into a women’s hairdresser’s is treated with wariness and suspicion. In the eyes of the women in the shop I was almost certainly some kind of pervert and needed to be dealt with strictly, so I didn’t try to get away with anything. “Yes, I’m a hairdresser,” the body language of the woman tying a plastic apron brusquely around my neck was saying to me, “but I’m
not
easy.”

She pushed a toe on the pedal of my chair, and I descended with a hiss. “What do you want?” she asked me in the mirror, her eyes adding, “As if I didn’t know—you weirdo.”

“Um . . . can you just, you know, tidy it up a bit?”

She stared at me. I lifted up my arms and indicated my requirements by the vaguest of actions—as though both my ears were hot and I was fanning them with my hands. She nodded and set about her work. Pointedly, she didn’t say anything to me, not even asking whether I was going on holiday this year. All around us the other women hairdressers and their women clients bubbled with talk. One woman of about fifty (with small locks of hair teased out of the holes in a rubber highlighting cap, so her head looked like a semiflaccid, balding porcupine) was relating the trouble she’d had with the council about that hedge. Her hairdresser spent as much time paused, arms akimbo, shaking her head at the astonishing twists and turns of the story as she did doing any actual bleaching. Another was worn out with everything that needed to be done for the wedding; she didn’t know how she was going to organize it all—and Jimmy was useless, of course. And I was just becoming quite enraptured by the whispered tale of someone else’s sister from Spean Bridge when I heard the sirens.

Through the plate-glass windows at the front of the shop we could see that people had stopped in the street and that police cars were pulling up onto the pavement. While we were still wondering what had happened, an officer opened the door and leaned in.

“We’ve received a bomb threat. I need everyone to evacuate this area now. If you’ve seen any suspicious packages or people, please let us know.” He leaned back out of the doorway and darted off to the next shop. There was a pause inside the hairdresser’s—a silent suspension of everything. Then a loudspeaker outside began repeating pretty much the same message as the officer had given, and we all flicked into action. The overriding desire of everyone present was to begin, as quickly as possible, to complain. Sighing, tutting and moaning that somebody had to plant a bomb . . .
here
. . .
now
. It was just typical. Making us get up and traipse down the street halfway through a haircut? Well . . . it had just better not turn out to be a hoax, that’s all.

Now, while it was patently ridiculous for a woman having her roots done to complain that she was being interrupted by something as trivial as a bomb,
I
was due—in less than twenty-five minutes—to see Georgina Nye. I couldn’t turn up at Georgina Nye’s hotel room with my hair halfway through a cut. I’d look like a mental patient.

“Couldn’t we just finish off?” I pleaded to the hairdresser, who was tugging her coat on.

“What?”

“Couldn’t you just finish doing my haircut, before we go?”

“There’s a bomb scare.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But you, well . . . look at my
hair
.”

“Tanya, come
on,
” an older woman I guessed was the owner called from the doorway.

“I’m coming. This gentleman was just trying to persuade me to stay and finish his cut.”

The owner squinted at me.

“What is it? A dry cut?”

“Aye,” Tanya nodded. “I was trying to leave some of the length on top.”

“Mmmm, don’t overdo it, though. His hair hasn’t got the thickness.”

“Okay.”

“Now, come on, for God’s sake. We could all be dead any second.”

I hurried out into the street, pausing half in, half out of the doorway and shouting after them.

“Couldn’t you take some scissors?” I pleaded. They were hurrying off up the street and didn’t reply. I sprinted after them. (Hoping that all was not lost and wanting to keep the atmosphere, I was still wearing the plastic apron. It flapped around at my sides as I ran along—imagine Batman with bed hair and his cape on backwards.) “We could get to a safe distance and you could finish off—”

“Sorry,” said the owner without looking back at me. “Can’t have Tanya cutting hair out in the street. Our insurance won’t cover it.”

“What insurance? It’s
a haircut
. Nothing can happen to . . . well, bombs aside, obviously—nothing can happen to you getting a haircut.”