A Certain Chemistry (26 page)

Despite what I’d told Sara, we weren’t in London, of course. We were in Bathgate. Bathgate is about twenty miles outside Edinburgh and, quite probably, George and I were the only people in the entire history of the British Isles who, when arranging a night of illicit passion, had
ever
settled upon speeding away to Bathgate. But it takes thirty minutes on the train and they run regularly, okay? It’s all very well following your heart, but you still have to be practical about some things.

After a little searching around, we found a place to stay (I booked a double room for the night while George kept out of sight). Once I had the key, George and I waited for an opportunity and then sneaked up to the room (in a series of little dashes, eyes scanning each area—like saboteurs infiltrating a building). We made it up the two floors, stormed in—laughing from the tension—slammed the door shut behind us, and had the most frantic, hungry, and thrashing sex. After this we made ourselves two cups of tea. (Tea-making facilities were provided in all the rooms at no additional cost.)

George sat in bed next to me, blowing thoughtfully into her cup. I stared dreamily across at the television. It was off but had one of those set-top portable aerials that never quite get any station clearly and that, therefore, no mortal man can help fiddling with in addictive, perpetual hope. During the course of events, my underpants had somehow got draped over this aerial. It was the most curious thing but, from where I was sitting, the arrangement of folds made them a near-perfect likeness of the head of Richard Nixon, in profile.

“What shall we do tonight?” asked George.

I looked at her precisely as I imagine Cary Grant would have, had he been asked that question in this situation.

“There’s no need to leer,” she said, laughing. “I think we can assume
that’
s a certainty. I mean what
else
shall we do?”

“What would you like to do?” I asked, silently hoping that her reply was going to include a rubber nurse’s uniform in some way.

“Hmm . . . I’d like to go out to a pub. Go out to a pub for a drink and then get a kebab on the way back.”

“Right . . .” I pondered this unexpectedly exotic request. “Isn’t that a bit risky, though? Being seen out in such a public place together? Rather than just staying here and smearing each other with fruit.”

“Smearing each other with fruit?”

“Or whatever.”

“I see. But anyway, I think we can get away with it. We won’t be doing anything in public that’s . . . you know. So, it won’t be risky like that. And I’ll keep my hair under my hat—that always seems to be enough to prevent most people from recognizing me. What’s more, if anyone asks, I can say that I just
look
like Georgina Nye, that, ‘I
know—
people are
always
mistaking me for her.’ I do that sometimes anyway.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. It would be quite exciting. A bit like being spies in occupied France—adopting assumed identities, having a cover story. “I could say you were a prostitute who played on your similarity as a selling point—you know, men hired you so they could pretend they were having sex with Georgina Nye.”

“Yes. Or we could just leave it at saying that I looked like her.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay.”

“We’ll be normal people tonight, then? Out for a few bevvies and a kebab, eh, lover?”

“Och, aye. Ah wouldna say no, hen.”

“That is
the
worst attempt at a Scottish accent I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah, yeah, what the fuck do you know? You live in Chiswick.”

She laughed, then leaned across and bit my ear.

“Ow!”

I put my cup of tea down and began to extract my revenge on her in nibbling ways.

You know, maybe this would all work out fine after all. It felt so wonderful, so natural, here with George. As for Sara, well, she didn’t know anything about us, and it wasn’t like she and George would be constantly bumping into each other. I could carry on just as before with Sara—which was important to me, as I loved her and certainly didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize our relationship—and see George, say, three nights a week. Everyone would be happy. And people did that kind of thing all the time, didn’t they? You’re forever reading about some bloke who’s died and it’s only then that they discover he’d had two wives, in two different parts of the country, for thirty years. I’d got it far easier, as I didn’t have to hide Sara from George, and there was less traveling involved too. Christ—it was hard to see a way in which this
couldn’t
work. Why did I insist on giving myself such a hard time about it? If I simply accepted the situation, it was fine.

“Can I have . . .” I’d now got to the stage of waving my money in the air as the barman walked past (to somebody else); it wasn’t helping a great deal. Barmen do it deliberately. If they can see you’re out with a woman, they deliberately pass you over in favor of everyone else, so you look like an ineffectual twat. It’s a warped, power thing. I bet there’s a correlation between involvement in animal torture and getting a job as a barman. And women are simply unable to respect you if you can’t get served at the bar. Oh, sure, some of them will pretend it’s not important, or even make a joke about it, but deep down they can never feel the same way about you again. If I didn’t get two lagers in within the next minute and a half, George would be looking elsewhere for sexual fulfillment—I’d be a fool to kid myself otherwise.

“Excuse me! Do you think I could get some drinks,
please
?” Shouting at the barman is a hazardous tactic. It’s likely to make him respond by not serving you even more flamboyantly, just to reestablish his position in the hierarchy. And you’ll get no support from the other punters—quite the opposite; they’ll all glare at you and tut, hoping that the barman will see this and favor them. They don’t care about justice—it’s all politics. If shouting at the barman is high-risk, then shouting at the barman with an English accent in a Scottish pub is positively reckless. Perhaps it was the sheer obviousness of this that helped my cause. The barman peered at me for a moment, concluded that all the evidence pointed to my being some kind of lunatic, and—reasoning that his careful torments were wasted on a madman—served me.

I swaggered back to the table carrying the two bottles of lager like a prehistoric hunter returning to his woman bearing an elk on his shoulders.

“Thanks,” said George.

I merely smiled in response.

She lit a cigarette and showed me the packet. I took one, and she offered me the flame of her lighter (allowing me to do that “steadying her hand” thing—and we all know how hot that makes both of the parties involved). This was great. In a pub, with Georgina Nye, having a fag. Life didn’t get much better than that.

“What are you going to do now, then?” I asked.

“Worried I’ll start feeling you up under the table again?”

“No, I meant—that would be great, by the way—but I meant, what are you—really fantastic, actually—I meant what are you going to do workwise? Now the book’s done.”

“Oh, right. Well, there’s
The Firth,
of course—I think I’ve got a health scare coming up, which’ll be cool—but, long-term, I really want to break into America.”

“Why?”

“Erm. Because it’s big.”

“Not as big as China.”

“Who wants to be famous in China?”

“Interesting.” I nodded in a scientific manner.

“What?”

“That it’s not just numbers. That it’s no good a third of the world knowing who you are, if it’s the wrong third.”

“Well . . . America’s the dream, isn’t it? As a teenager I always dreamed about Hollywood—I’m sure everyone does.”

“I dreamed about Madonna.”

“Ha . . . and what do you dream about now?”

“Madonna.”

“My, how you’ve grown.”

“Oh, we do different things nowadays. Oddly, as we’ve aged together she’s actually become even
more
supple.” I rocked forward at this point, missing the ashtray with my suavely flicked cigarette ash because somebody had barged into the back of me. I turned round, glowering. Behind me was a man with a head as solid, as battered and as misshapen as a champion conker. His bright blue eyes were poorly focused in that way that tells you a person is an idiot, but they were definitely looking right at me. I didn’t know why—perhaps he didn’t like my accent, or my attitude, or the fact I was with a beautiful woman. Morons really don’t need sturdy reasons to take exception to you. In any case, I flung aside my glower, speedily whipped my view away from him and, by way of a pretext, glanced up at the clock over the bar, pretending to check its time against my wristwatch using these facial expressions: “agitated,” “thoughtful,” “annoyed,” and, finally, “resigned.”

“Well, it sounds like you and Madonna are very happy together,” George said as I turned back to face her, “but I’ve got an uphill struggle in America. We were over there trying to make some headway, get me a
tiny
part in
something,
but it’s brutal.”

“Yeah, I—”

“
What
did you just call me?” said the tight, angry little mouth of Conker Head Man. He’d banged his drink down hard onto our table as he rapidly pushed his face to within a quarter of an inch of mine.

I leaned back in my chair to be far enough away so that I could see him without it making me go cross-eyed. “Pardon?” I said.

“Oh,
’Pardon,’
” he replied, putting on a caricature effeminate voice and pursing his lips.
“Pardon,”
he repeated, this time to his two friends, who were standing a little behind him. They all laughed—revealing that, between them, they had enough teeth for a wily dentist to salvage a single mouth. Conker Head Man turned back to me (his companions seemed content merely to stay back, watch, and concentrate on lowering the collective IQ of Scotland). “I
said
. . . What did you just call me?”

“I didn’t call you
anything,
” I said. “I didn’t even mention you at all.”

He inclined his head, incredulous. Scarcely able to believe what he had just heard, and anxious to give me every chance to clear up any possible misunderstanding, he said, “Are you calling me a liar?”

I have no idea why they do this. Whose benefit is it for? Mine? His? Onlookers? Not a single person believes there’s been a genuine slight, so why don’t they just say, “I’ve decided to pick a fight with you. I understand you don’t want to fight me, but that’s of no consequence; I am resolute in my desire.” No, they always have to go through this moronic ritual. There’s never even any attempt to try something new—“Are you calling into question my ability to process vocal sounds?” or something. Always it comes down to “Are you calling me a liar?” My weary critique of the banality of his performance caused me, instinctively, to roll my eyes, smile, and let out a little sigh.

This response broke the tension of the moment. His muscles relaxed and he let out a self-deprecatory chuckle before sitting down with us to share a drink and become, as the years passed, one of my truest and most valued friends.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just stop things at pivotal moments, go home, and write what happened next? Actually, of course, he punched me in the throat.

Fortunately, he was a bit obstructed by people around him, and he was crouching, and the angle was awkward, so the blow had very much less power than he could justifiably have hoped for. Despite this, I made a retching sound, grabbed at my neck, and spectacularly failed to think, “Well—that could have been a lot worse.”

“Hey!” George shouted across at Conk. “Leave him alone!” She started to get up.

“Stay out of this, hen. This is between me and your boyfriend here.” The rest of the people in the pub had gone quiet, watching, and their odd silence made it sound even louder when another voice called out.

“Oi! Stop that right now!” yelled the barman. Phew, the cavalry. “The pair of you—take it outside.” So, not the cavalry, then—just someone who wanted me to get killed a little farther to the left.

“Come on,” Conk snarled at me. “You and me. Let’s settle this out the front . . . or are you too much of a fucking queer?”

I ought to have said, “I’m staying right where I am, and phoning the police. Because you’re a fuck-witted, juvenile loser with grave self-esteem problems and I couldn’t give a shit what you or anyone else in this pub thinks. Moreover, I ridicule the implication that gay men are cowardly, and the fact that you reach for such stereotypes shows you are ignorant and prejudiced—possibly it’s even a smokescreen produced by the misplaced self-loathing you feel about your own, secret homosexuality.” However, George was there, so I replied, “Lead the fucking way, mate.”

My reasoning appeared to be, “I can’t let George see I’m afraid. No, it’s far better for me and our relationship if instead I let her watch me have the shit kicked out of me.”

George even called, “Tom—don’t . . .” to me, but I waved her protestations aside with a hand. This was a matter of honor, a timeless male thing. The simple fact was that this tosser had started this, and now he was going to have to damn well learn that I was not the kind of man who was unable to curl up into a ball and whimper while he systematically broke all of my bones and ruptured a few internal organs. I stood up without any signs of hesitation; doing this revealed that he was a good five inches shorter than me. I resist saying that this was “probably his real problem,” lest I too fall into silly stereotyping. But it probably was, right? I felt a small smirk of satisfaction at realizing how obvious the causes of his character flaws were, but, well . . . it’s odd how quickly you move past every single bit of revelatory gratification that can be squeezed out of the knowledge that you’re about to be beaten up by a tiny homosexual.

Conk strode towards the door with his mates, and I followed. The other people in the pub parted for us. I moved resolutely, a narrow-eyed, tight-lipped look of determination on my face. Courageously, I hoped I wouldn’t start to cry before I got outside—if I could just make it to the fight and get slaughtered, then I’d be in too much of a mess for anyone to notice and it’d be okay.