A Certain Chemistry (24 page)

“They didn’t tell me that.”

“Your agent will be there—Paul mentioned she would be.”

“Ah, right. Probably thought there was no need for me, then.”

“If you turned up, though, that’d be perfectly fine. We could go off somewhere and have lunch afterwards; there’d be nothing remarkable about that. Lunch could run on. Happens all the time.”

Sara opened the door.

“Right. Okay. Yes,” I barked into the phone. “Five percent. Yes. Tuesday. Yes. Good-bye, then.”

George understood. “Bye,” she cooed, and I hung up.

“Oh,” said Sara, “you’re here.”

“Yes.”

“Who was on the phone?”

“Georgina Nye.” I sighed wearily, and wrinkled my face.

“Why did you come in here to speak to her?”

“Because of the TV. I couldn’t hear properly with the TV on.”

“No, why did you come in
here
? I wasn’t suggesting you’d
snook off
.” She said the words in an elaborate hiss and waggled her fingers in the air, to emphasize the fact that she was only joking. (I wondered if she was only joking.) “I’m simply curious as to why you decided to talk on the lavvy.”

“Ohhhh,”
I said. “
Riiiiight
. I just wanted to use the toilet.”

“That desperately? Eww. Weren’t you afraid she’d hear?”

“Well . . .” Occasionally, you just get lucky. “I’ve got a bit of a stomach thing. I’ve had it all day.” Of all the random things I could have bought—just to have bought
something
—what did I get? Sometimes blind chance helps you out. “I got some tablets in town—they’re in my jacket. You couldn’t go and get me a couple, could you?”

“Why didn’t you say?” She turned and began to make her way off down the stairs to the coatrack.

“I’m too dignified.”

“Ha.” She reached the bottom of the stairs and pulled down my jacket. “Which pocket?”

Oh, my mistake—this wasn’t one of those times when blind chance was helping me out.

Fuck.

“No! Actually—forget about it.” The chances of Sara finding the antidiarrhea tablets were
exactly
the same as those of her finding my cigarettes. “I’ll come down myself.”

“I’m here now.”

I yanked at my trousers, flushed the toilet (for effect), and bunny-hopped frantically towards the door. “Yes, but . . .”

You might think that I was overreacting, especially as I had a rather more devastating secret under my hat. You might think that flying into a panic at the thought of Sara discovering my cigarettes was a bit needlessly hysterical. In which case, I’ll use my mysterious psychic powers to somehow . . . inexplicably . . . know that you are not someone who is in a long-term relationship with a nonsmoker—a relationship that you entered as a smoker but from which position you moved in step with your blossoming love. In those circumstances, being uncovered as apostate chills your blood even as a purely theoretical prospect. The (admittedly similar) situation of being found in possession of a bacon sandwich by your vegetarian partner—even
that
—is better. In that case you will be judged to be simply evil, nothing more stinging than a treacherous, lying murderer. The nonsmoking partner, however, will be “disappointed with you.” Not only can she never trust you again, but you’ve also broken her heart, and also “really let yourself down.” What’s more, you have no case. It’s easy enough to plead that the pig was already dead anyway and, you know, tastes
great
. You have none of this ratiocinative moral armor to protect you with smoking, however. You’ll have to face “Do you
want
to kill yourself?” and “Are you stupid?” and “What’s so good about it? Tell me.
Go on,
” and all you’ll be able to do is mumble, “Sorry,” and hope you get sent to your room as quickly as possible so it’ll all end. Oh—and it won’t
ever
end.

So, hurling myself out of the bathroom with my trousers halfway down was actually a perfectly measured response.

“Yes, but”—I scrambled down to her at the top speed of a man descending a flight of stairs without his trousers on properly—“I’ve finished on the lavatory now and . . .” I finished the sentence by turning her around and kissing her greedily.

She smiled. “Hmmm, nice. Even if”—she slapped my face playfully—“it’s not the most romantic thing ever to explicitly put me in second place after the lavvy.”

“No.” I put my hand on her face. “I’d never let you be second to anything, Sara. Never.”

You can imagine the silent, lonely anguish I had to endure telling her this, when its deeper meaning was apparent only to me. I managed it, though. Sometimes you find an inner strength that you never suspected you had.

Monday was a hell that wouldn’t end.

It had no purpose, no reason for being; it simply insisted on hanging around like a tedious, unwanted guest, keeping me from Tuesday and George. I tried to do a bit of work, sorting out my files, but I couldn’t stay focused. With Sara at work, I could at least go out into the garden and have a smoke, but only carefully, as I was worried one of the neighbors might see and grass me up. There was also the bother of digging little holes to bury the dog ends, and then I had to brush my teeth, take a shower, and change my clothes. If I’d simply told myself I’d smoke all day, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but every one was a just-this-one, so I had to keep changing back into my smoky clothes before having another cigarette and then showering again afterwards. By teatime I could have assisted at an operation.

The evening was slightly less awful. Not because I was closer to Tuesday (the tantalizing effect of this counteracted any possible satisfaction) but because Sara was there. I had something to concentrate on—that is, trying my hardest to be as nice to her as possible. As there was every likelihood (at least, I hoped there was) of my being unfaithful to her again the next day, I was keen that she should want for nothing this evening. Television? What did she want to watch? Cup of tea? I’d get it. This wasn’t for my own benefit, by the way. I didn’t have any inchoate notion of being able to build up a karmic stockpile that I could draw on to balance out tomorrow’s infidelity. It was, as I’ve said, purely because I felt I owed it to her. If you love your girlfriend, but you’re planning to have sex with another woman the next day, then you feel a responsibility to massage her feet for absolutely however long she wants you to. It’s all about respect, really.

Tuesday finally saw fit to arrive, and I warmed up with a bit of pacing around the living room before somehow convincing myself that it wasn’t too early to begin heading for McAllister & Campbell.

Nobody sat by me on the bus. That’s unremarkable, but I couldn’t help feeling that
today
people weren’t sitting by me because they could see into my head. It was messy in there. There’s a whole world of difference between being unfaithful unexpectedly—in the disorientating swirl of the moment—and catching the bus across town to be unfaithful. This was calculated. You can’t dismiss as temporary insanity an infidelity for which you’ve made sure you have the correct change.

The writer in me pleads for lies again here, incidentally. He wants to play up that standard story point in the second act where the protagonist—
after much internal struggle
—finally commits to a course of action. He wants me to say how I nearly turned back: how I even rang the bell and moved to stand by the door halfway through the journey . . . before my desire stared me down and finally—broken and accepting—I returned to my seat through the curious looks of the other passengers. That never happened. I felt guilty, yes, and I was harried by the realization that I was doing this calmly and thus culpably. But I never once made a move to abandon the path I was taking or embarked upon an unsuccessful attempt to pull back from the brink. Terrible really, that—on top of everything else—I could also have used some work on my character arc.

Moreover, the thing that was playing on my mind even more than the formalization of my infidelity was how things would go with George. I didn’t have to consider how things would go the last time—they went before I knew they were going at all. Now, however, I was worried. What would I talk about? Should I make “advances” or wait for her? Would she still feel the same, seeing me again in . . . well, in daylight? The first thing I did when I got off the bus was to have a cigarette and another little pace.

I’d intended to stroll into the McAllister & Campbell offices when everyone was already having the meeting—“Oh! You’re all here! What a surprise!”—but I couldn’t endure the waiting and so I turned up early. Hugh was in his office, alone, staring out the window.

“Hi, Hugh.”

“Ah, Tom, hello. How are you?”

“Fine, fine. You?”

“Oh . . .” He looked down into his lap and shook his head, slowly. “You know.”

“Right.”

“I did some more work on my book last night.”

“How’s it g—” He interrupted my question with a simply heartbreaking facial expression. “Oh. Well . . .” I have no idea what words of consolation I was hoping to find, but I was saved from the trauma of looking for them because Amy, George, and a man I guessed was her agent, Paul, strolled brightly into the office.

“Tom,” said Amy, with an oddly large amount of surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I just popped by. Why?”

“No reason. It’s just that we’re having a meeting. I didn’t expect you.”

“Should I . . .” I made a vague, proto, thousandth of a step in the direction of the door.

“No.” Amy waved me down with her hands. “It’s fine. I didn’t mention it because it’s only a general postlaunch chat. I didn’t think you’d be interested. Stay, though—we can sit at the back together and make farty noises with our armpits.”

“Hello, Amy,” said Fiona, entering the office.

“Fi!” Amy peered at her. “Have you done something with your hair?”

“No, it’s—”

“I thought not. But you said you wanted to.”

“I didn’t.”

“
Didn’t
you?” Amy bit her lip and then questioned herself thoughtfully. “God . . . who
was
talking to me about your hair, then?”

Fiona marched to a seat. “Shall we get on?”

“I like your hair, love,” chirped Paul with what I suppose in London they’d call a cheeky grin. “Lovely—a proper posh bird’s cut.” Annoyance sprinted briefly across Amy’s face, Fiona thanked him unenthusiastically, and we all made to sit down at Hugh’s table (I sat between Amy and George). As I was halfway to being seated Fiona said, “Tom? Turned up unexpectedly again, then?”

I don’t think she anticipated my answering at all, so to show I could hold my own if we were going to exchange snide comments, I replied, “Yes.”

One all, I reckon.

The meeting started and almost immediately became very dull indeed. It was uniformly good news about the book; all sorts of things were going as they should, new opportunities were presenting themselves, and if you’re the kind of person who gets a buzz out of the flawless execution of a business plan—Fiona, let’s say—I’m sure you’d have had a great time. To “keep up the momentum,” they’d decided to have some sort of belated launch party in a couple of weeks, around the time the festival ended. It’d be billed as a celebration of the success of the book—a thank-you to George from McAllister & Campbell—but it was basically a way to get some people from the media around and manufacture another reason to have the book mentioned everywhere. A very grim prospect for an evening, if you ask me. I said it was a great idea and I’d look forward to it. Really, I had my mind on more human matters, however. Jesus—
I
wasn’t hypnotized by sales figures or percentages of net or promotional parties. At the end of the day, it was just money and marketing, and what did that matter when, right next to me, George had on a short denim skirt?

Hugh said how proud he was of everyone. Lots of times. This was my first contact with George’s agent, Paul, and he struck me as not only the wide boy Amy had described but also quite dangerous. He was stocky and thick-necked and prone to weaving his head about as he spoke—like a former boxer who now “sorted people out” for some firm that specialized in delivering meat and extorting money from betting shops. I suspect he had that combination of physicality and easy arrogance that some middle-class women find “awfully thrilling.” I imagined him to be agent to the Krays. Also, he was keen to haggle over things. There wasn’t really anything to haggle over; I think he simply enjoyed the haggling experience. Amy kept spinning glances at him, but didn’t send any acidic comments in his direction (I was so proud of her professional restraint). Fiona repeatedly and variously told us what she thought the thing we must remember was. As at almost every publishing meeting, fifteen minutes of stuff was said, it took an hour and a half, and someone provided biscuits. When we hit something like the seventy-minute mark, however, I couldn’t have cared less if everyone had begun speaking in tongues, because at that point George started to feel my crotch under the table.

There was something quite inexpressibly exciting about this. George feeling my crotch under the table . . . Partly, I think, it was the secrecy of it—everyone else there having no idea what we were up to. The other great aspect of it was that she was feeling my crotch. I think that bit would have worked anywhere, really. It felt thrillingly daring. It wasn’t: no one around the table looking at us could possibly have seen that anything was going on (though they might have suspected that I’d popped a few tablets of Ecstasy before arriving). It just
seemed
daring.

After a while George stopped, carefully placing both her hands on top of the table. While everyone else was concerned with some marketing detail, George gave me a look that included subtle performances from both raised eyebrows and dropped eyes. I glanced quickly around the table, then slid my hand down onto her bare leg. It was cool, or my hand was hot—whatever the precise balance, it felt absolutely right that they should join together in search of equilibrium. I pretended to stare down at some papers that Fiona had given everybody. They contained a few good review quotes from various sources, some tables of figures, and a sales projection, and were of no interest to me at all at this point in my life. I couldn’t even see what was on them, in the sense of the marks that were the letters and the numbers being interpreted and given meaning by my brain. My brain was concentrating entirely on the sensation of my fingers running over George’s leg. I had no spare capacity left to faff around with requests from my visual cortex, because my mind was filled utterly with the experience of George’s skin. Like a snake moving over a branch, I curved my hand across the top of her leg a few inches above her knee. It slipped easily down over onto the other side so that my palm lay against the inside of one leg while the inside of her other brushed lightly against the back of my fingers. Then, subtly—appearing to everyone else at the table as though she were merely adjusting her position slightly as part of a movement that was really more concerned with shuffling the papers in front of her—she opened her legs wider. Maybe I’ve got an especially highly attuned ability to pick up clues from body language, I don’t know, but somehow I knew this was an invitation. Gently, slowly, in a series of advances and retreats, I moved my hand up along the inside of her thigh. Her legs were firm; I could tell she ran all those miles every day and blessed every treadmilling inch of them. They were smooth too, but not lifelessly so—not like plastic or enamel; there was still friction as my skin ran over hers, and I could feel a tiny, light down prickling against my touch. I could even lift away from her skin, glide a fraction of a millimeter above it, yet still remain connected as I skimmed across the ends of those soft hairs with my fingertips. And as I moved farther up between her legs, it grew hotter. I’m sure there was an identifiable difference in temperature even half an inch one way or the other; the heat didn’t rise in a gentle slope but leapt along in an ever-steepening curve as each cautious edging of my fingers moved them into an area wildly hotter than the previous one. I could even feel the heat radiating now. From just a short distance farther up, from the point where her legs joined, came a heat whose source I wasn’t touching, and yet it was a glow that even now felt warm against the back of my hand. It was like the sun on my skin in summer.