A Certain Chemistry (16 page)

“Fine . . . You . . . fine,” I said.

“Great, I’m glad. I’m having a wonderful time here.”

“Apparently,” I replied. I intended this to come out flatly, but it seems that instead it took along enough bitterness to last twelve thousand miles, because after I’d said it there was a pause at the other end of the line. I went cold.

I was expecting George to hang up on me, or break the silence with either “How is it any of
your
business who I sleep with?” or, equally justifiably, “Twat.” Yet, when she did speak again, her voice was apologetic. “Oh, sorry, Tom. I know you didn’t want to go to that thing, and here I am ringing you up and telling you what a great time I’m having while you’re doing it for me.”

“I . . . um . . .” I clarified.

“Look, I’ll make it up to you somehow when I get back, okay? Promise.”

“I . . .” A man’s voice called her name, impatiently, in the background.

“Yes, yes, okay,” she called back to him. “Look, I’ve got to go, Tom. Thanks again, though. See you soon, yeah? Bye.”

She hung up.

“Yes, see you soon. Sorry about snapping there—just a bit stressed out, nothing to do with you. We’ll have a meal when you get back, yes? It’ll be fun. Bye,” I said, to the dead-line tone.

I drank some more lager and, later, swore at a poet. It was the early hours of the morning when I eventually shuffled back to my hotel room.

I was a little drunk.

There were three or four porn channels on the TV, but you had to pay for them and—as McAllister & Campbell were picking up the bill—I didn’t dare. You could see the names of the films that were showing on them by glancing at the on-screen menu, though. I sat on the edge of the bed in my underpants, scanned the titles, and tried to imagine how they might look if I could access them. Every one of them was, as I pictured it, quite astonishingly and unremittingly filthy. That’s quite terrible, really. I mean, this was supposed to be a respectable hotel—young children, unbeknownst to their parents, might accidentally bring up the channel menu and imagine exactly the same relentless depravity that I was. Something ought to be done.

I thought about George saying she’d “make it up to me . . . somehow.” Perhaps it was a prank and she wasn’t really in America (being repeatedly penetrated by Darren Fuckwit Boyle) but just down the road, waiting. Perhaps, two seconds from now, there’d be a knock on the door and in she’d come, laughing and teasing. And wearing that bathing costume from the photo. (But not wearing it for long.)

I picked up my phone, pressed the voice-activated dialing button on the side, and spoke the name with my eyes closed.

“What? Erm, ah, I mean . . . hello?”

“Hi, it’s me,” I said.

“Christ, Tom. What time is it?”

“Um . . .”

“It’s twenty past four.
Jesus
. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be. If you’re going to phone me up at twenty past four in the morning, you should bloody well be being cut out of a car by the emergency services or something.”

“Sorry, Sara . . . I just missed you, that’s all. I wanted to tell you I missed you.”

“Are you pissed?”

“No.”

“So, you’re not pissed and you’re not dying, but you’re calling me to tell me you miss me at four-twenty
A.M
.? What are you—” She stopped abruptly. “Have you copped off with someone?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, the three reasons I’ve just listed are the only ones for an I-miss-you call at this time of night. That’s just a simple fact, Tom.”

“Don’t get ratty. I missed you—that’s all it is. I missed you and I wanted to tell you so.”

“I’ve got to get up for work in three hours. Didn’t you miss me at ten o’clock last night?”

“Sorry.”

“Oh,” she sighed, sleepily. “I’m glad you miss me, Tom, and it’s lovely of you to call and tell me so. . . . Now fuck off, eh?”

“Yes—sorry. Bye.”

“Bye.”

She hung up.

I looked at the phone in my hand for a while, pondering on it as though it were some kind of surrogate Sara, then put it down on the dressing table. The names of the porn films were still cycling around on the TV screen. I sat on the bed in my underpants, read through the titles, thought about George coming into the room wearing, briefly, her bathing costume, and wondered how I might pass the next few minutes.

eight

To celebrate the acceptance of the manuscript, Amy took me out for lunch. It was this kind of thing, the little bits of extra attention she gave her clients, that made you feel such a loyalty to her.

You can gaze out over a small section of Princes Park if you sit by the window on the upper floor of the McDonald’s in Edinburgh. It was a sunny day, and beyond the ferocious congestion at the intersection (it’s a matter of some pride, locally, that Princes Street has the highest mortality rate of any road in Britain), people were sitting on the benches eating ice cream or wandering around in pairs, looking at maps. I popped a chicken nugget into my mouth.

“It’s a huge fucking comfort for me to know,” said Amy, digging around in her tiny tub of ketchup with the end of one of her fries, “that at nearly any time of the day, and almost wherever you are, there’s always a McDonald’s within easy reach should you ever be swept by the desire to hear Whitney Houston singing ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody.’ ”

She reached over to her drink, pushed in the little plastic bump on the lid that’s used to indicate whether something is “diet” or not, and then stroked this newly concave area; she matched thumb to indentation for size and shape, and seemed pleased with her work.

“The Nye woman’s back from America now, you know,” she added.

“Yes, so I understand. She hasn’t called me, though.” Not, of course, that I’d been waiting for her to or anything. I quickly continued, “Had quite a time over there, so I hear.”

“What do you mean?”

“The papers said she was seeing that irritating twat Darren Boyle.”

“You know Darren Boyle?”

“No.”

“Oh, well,” Amy said, sweeping specks of salt from the table with her hand. “I’m not sure about that. Could be bollocks; you know what the papers are like. But as long as it gets her
in
the papers, eh? That’s what matters.”

“So you don’t think it’s true?”

“I’ve no idea—can’t say one way or the other.”

“Right.”

“It’s probably true, though.”

“Why do you think that?”

Amy leaned across to me and lowered her voice. “Well, our Georgina’s supposed to be a bit of a Fuck Monster, isn’t she?”

“Says”—I started to snap back but wrenched the wheel away in the direction of surprised curiosity for a last-minute, second-word recovery—“who?”

“Um . . . no one . . .” She shrugged. “You know,
everyone
.”

“I see.”

“It’s simply what you hear.”

“From whom?”

“
People
. I can’t remember anyone in particular saying anything—it’s just the word on the street, man. She’s supposed to be a flirt.”

“Is that right.” I couldn’t make it sound like a question; I just tried to keep it flat enough not to become a snarl.

“Yeah, kind of a prick-teaser. . . . Except, when she’s finished teasing, she’ll likely as not take it home and sit on it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did she strike you as coquettish at all?”

“Why ask
me
? Did she strike
you
as coquettish?”

“I’ve never met her, have I? Not face-to-face. We’ve only spoken on the phone.”

“And, if you
had
met her, face-to-face, then you’d know?”

“Of course.”

“How?”

“Christ, Tom. Under this calm, professional agent’s exterior there’s still a fully working woman, don’t forget. I’m not so short of estrogen that, given the chance of seeing a woman for a few minutes, I can’t immediately divine to my own satisfaction whether she’s a right slag or not.”

I tore at another chicken nugget.

After a pause, Amy continued casually, “I spoke to Paul the other day.”

“Why did you call him? There aren’t any contract problems, are there?”

“I didn’t call him. I don’t want to speak to him any more than I absolutely have to. I didn’t call him at all. He called me.”

“Okay, so why did he call you?”

“They’ve got a TV interview lined up.
Barker
.”

Benny Barker: chat-show host and wit—a bit in that wanker Darren Boyle’s mold actually, but much sharper, and funnier, and not such a wanker. His show,
Barker,
was on weekly. Good ratings—he was cool enough for the twenty-somethings, wry enough for the thirty-somethings, and twinklingly charming enough to attract women all the way from forty-something up to lying-in-state. He effortlessly got any of the upper B-list celebrities, but also A-listers who wanted to appear hip or “just normal people”—sometimes even visiting American actors.

“Nice spot,” I admitted.

“Barker’s relocating up here for the festival—doing the shows live in Edinburgh, getting the Fringe comics on, local color—all that stuff. As the book hits the shops right after the first show airs, they’ve lined up a mutually beneficial interview.”

“Good,” I said, without much feeling.

“Paul said Nye wanted you to go to it with her. I mean, not appear, obviously, but go to the studio. Moral support, I suppose.”

“Really?” I shuffled excitedly in my seat.

“I told him to fuck off, of course.”

“Did you?”

“Aye. I said you’d already hauled yourself down to London and back to attend that publishing do for her. That was going the extra mile. They could fuck off if they thought you were going to lose another evening hanging around like an idiot just so you could hold Georgina Nye’s hand if she got nervous.”

“I wouldn’t mind, actually.”

“What?”

“No, I mean—pfff—it’d be a bit of a bind, and everything. I wouldn’t really
enjoy
it . . . but it could be quite interesting. I’ve never seen behind the scenes of a TV program.”

“And why would you want to? You know what they say about people who work in TV.”

“Yes, but, even so . . . I just think it’d be quite . . . um, informative.”

“Really? Well, I didn’t think you’d see it like that.”

She fished around in her bag for the few fries that had escaped into it when she’d taken out the box holding the others. There were seven of them. She ate them in two twos and a three. Then she wiped her hands and mouth on the paper towel, scrunched it up, placed it on the tray, reached for her drink, and began sucking it up through the straw.

While she did all this I watched her and clicked the nails of my thumb and index finger together.

In the end, I burst. “So you’ll call back and say I’ll do it?”

“Eh? What? Oh, the interview thing? You want me to phone and say you
would
like to do it after all? Really? You’re that keen?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say
keen
. . .”

“Makes me look a bit of a twat, after I’ve suggested they were pushing their luck even asking, doesn’t it?”

“Well, maybe ‘keen’
does
convey it—I’m very
keen
on seeing the process of television production, close up.”

“I don’t mind looking like a twat, of course—if it’s for your benefit. I’m that kind of agent.”

“I know you are.”

“Abso
lute
ly.”

“You’ll do it, then?”

She sighed.

“Okay, yeah, I’ll do it. Of course I’ll do it.” She got up and began to carry her tray over to the bin. “But you remember that I do things like this for you, okay?”

“Definitely.”

“You wee English fucker.”

And so it was arranged. Amy sorted things out with George’s agent, and I was placed on a guest list. The show was going to be broadcast from one of the many venues that Edinburgh uses for festival shows. Well, during the festival, only the top-level performers get a proper “venue” in the sense of it being a theater or a club. Others make do with “rooms” or tents or any space at all in which you can place a few people and be physically able to stand in front of them. During the festival the tired homeless people have additional competition for shop doorways from desperate dance companies.