A Certain Chemistry (42 page)

X

Yeah, that’s right,
“Two years later.” You got a problem with that? You thought I was going to appear to Sara the very next day as a golden elephant or something? Get over yourselves.

twelve

Hugh tapped his pen on the notepad in front of him, holding it vertically, so that he was making lots of dots—randomly but rhythmically—on the paper.

“You don’t like it?” I’d just pitched him my idea for the second novel, and he was noticeably not scrambling for his phone and panting that he wanted the lawyers in there with a contract for me to sign
right now
. “It doesn’t
have
to be robots,” I added. “It could be aliens, say. Or the Dutch.”

“No, no, robots are fine,” he replied, and made a great many tiny, rapid nods. “I see what you’re trying to do—thematically—and robots are fine.”

“So what is it? What is it, then? It’s the vagina thing, isn’t it? It is, isn’t it? Christ, Hugh—this is the twenty-first century. People can—”

“No, Tom it’s not the v—it’s not that thing. The idea sounds very . . . intriguing. I’m sure we can go somewhere with it. It’s just that, well, I’m turning forty next week . . .”

“Really? But Hugh, you never mentioned it! Why didn’t you flag it up to me by, oh, I don’t know, going on about it in this very office during endless, miserable reflections on your own mortality for months and months and months? Say?”

“It’s not that. . . .”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. . . . Well, I
am
going to be forty. I hoped I’d have my book finished by the time I was . . . I rewrote a bit last night, you know? It’s crap, Tom—
utter crap
.”

“Still sounds like it’s about you turning forty to me. Despite all those protestations there.”

Hugh dropped his eyes.

“No,” he said. “Really, it’s that I’ve been meaning to tell you I’m having a party.”

“
You’re
having a party?” I laughed out loud. “And to celebrate turning forty too? I thought you’d set your heart on spending the whole day locked in the toilet, sobbing.”

“I had. I don’t know what it is, but now I sort of feel obliged to have one. It’s a feeling that won’t leave me alone, like it’s impolite of me not to have a party. Very odd. Mary has been going on at me too. Insisting I do it.”

“Right . . . will it be fancy dress?”

“Very funny. But anyway . . . the thing is . . . Mary and I would like to invite you.”

“Thanks. Sure—I’d love to come. Don’t know why you’ve made such a big deal about it. Surely you can’t have been worried I wouldn’t, and that the festivities would simply wither without me?”

“No, that’s not it . . . it’s just we want to invite Sara too.”

I hadn’t seen Sara for two years.

“Oh, right.”

“Both Sara and you are our friends, Tom. We’d like you both to be there, but we don’t want it to . . .” He let the sentence fade before saying . . . well, I don’t know what. Perhaps, “. . . we don’t want it to end up with you two throwing trifle at each other in our living room.”

“Come on, Hugh. Sara and I split up
two years ago.
It’s ancient history. I’ve got no problem with her being there at all.” I gave a little laugh. “Maybe you’d be better off asking
her
if she’s okay with
my
being there, eh?”

“Good Lord, Tom—don’t you think we asked Sara if it was okay
first
?”

“Oh. Right. Of course.” I nodded, and then—very offhandedly indeed—added, “And she was fine with it?”

He stared at me evenly. “She said you two were ‘ancient history.’ ”

“Tch. Don’t go looking for subtexts, Hugh. It’s a common phrase. I’ve moved on, and I’m sure Sara’s moved on too. Hasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Has she? Completely? Well . . . that’s good. I wouldn’t like to think that she still had some kind of residual thing there, when I’ve moved on so utterly. That wouldn’t be fair.”

“Maybe you could try to stay in different rooms?”

“Oh, Hugh, get a grip. It’s fine—really. . . . Will she be bringing her boyfriend?”

“Tom—”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding. It’ll be fine.”

I was sure it would be. Fun, even. I think the rule of thumb is that, kept away from absolutely any further provocation whatsoever, Scottish women come down from being murderously angry after about eighteen months. So, hopefully, Sara and I could talk to each other like adults now. We’d got the history, but without the emotion to stir things up. It’d just be like meeting someone you used to fight with at primary school. I was quite looking forward to it, out of curiosity. I was disinterestedly keen to see her. No more than that, though. I had, after all, moved on.

“Glad you could make it, Tom,” said Mary.

I handed her a bottle of wine. “Wouldn’t miss Hugh becoming officially ‘past it’ for the world.”

“Ha, well, you’re about fifteen years too late for that party. We were worried you couldn’t come for some reason, though.”

I had arrived pretty late. I’d deliberately hung back, you see. Waited before turning up—pacing away a couple of hours in my flat. I didn’t want to look, oh, I don’t know, “desperate” or like I hadn’t got a life. Not that anyone would be looking at me to think this, of course. But . . . well, I just felt better not arriving until everyone else was there, that was all.

“Sorry,” I said. “I got bogged down with some work.”

“No problem—just as long as you’ve managed to get here, that’s the important thing.”

“Is Sara here?”

You fucking
idiot,
Tom.

“No, not yet.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Maybe I could say I’d forgotten something and needed to go back home to look for it, until after she’d arrived. Or perhaps I could just hang a placard around my neck reading
TOM. DESPERATE. NO LIFE. PITY ME.
At least it was nice to have options.

Mary looked at me and I felt my face start to heat up and redden, which is bad enough when you’re six, but quite the worst thing imaginable when you’re thirty and a professional writer with your own flat. Quickly, I became intensely wrapped up in the task of undoing the zip on my jacket. Mary continued, “She’s coming later . . . Tom . . .” She hesitated for an uneasy inhalation before continuing, which gave me the chance to head her off.

“Only I know Hugh was
really
”—I laughed and shook my head incredulously—“uptight about our both being here. I thought he might have her under armed guard in the kitchen or something.”

Mary paused for a moment, and her eyes frisked my face for concealed thoughts before she nodded, “Right,” and took my jacket. Then she threw on some cheeriness. “You go in and get yourself a drink, okay? Circulate. Mingle. From what I’ve picked up, the living room’s ‘Amis’ and the dining room’s ‘Movie Adaptations’ and the conservatory is ‘The Tyranny of the Genre’—or, if you search around, you might even be able to find some of
my
friends and have a normal conversation.”

“Thanks, but if experience has taught me anything, I know I’ll probably get a few drinks inside me, then start on Amis.”

I walked, eyes favoring the carpet, into the dining room and over to the food-and-drink table. There was a selection of things. I drank a glass of red wine and stared pensively at the crostini.

The irksome thing—I told myself, slightly annoyed—was that it really wasn’t a big deal, my seeing Sara again. It was just that Hugh and Mary seemed to
think
it was, and I was slipping into confirming their suspicions simply because I was trying so hard to show that they weren’t true. Like that game where you lie in bed at night and try
not
to think about breasts. Erm . . . possibly that’s a game only I play—but you get the idea. I wasn’t remotely hung up on Sara anymore. Sure, I
had
been, immediately after we’d split up. For a time there I was insane, no doubt about it. Unbalanced, irrational, fixated, self-destructive, drainingly depressed—a complete basket case. But that had only lasted, say, two or three weeks or a year. I hadn’t laid eyes on her since that slight unfortunateness at her work, nor had I even heard all that much about her, in fact. Our few mutual friends clearly worked hard never to mention her in my presence, and I’d only come by the odd bit of information after overhearing others talking, or on rare occasions when someone slipped up and forgot I was there. One reason I’d been looking forward to this evening was that it was an opportunity to show everyone, including Sara, that all that nonsense was in the past now.

I was on my second glass of wine and chatting to a couple who were nervous because they suspected that they weren’t quite sure they knew what “the new pornography” was this year when Sara walked into the room with Mary.

The instant I saw her, my throat seemed to swell, my stomach shivered, and my . . . well, let’s just say that it was not a good moment anywhere along the entire length of my digestive tract.
Immediately
I pulled my eyes away from her, back to the people I was talking to—I did it the picosecond I saw her. This instantaneous reaction was eons too slow to avoid her randomly glancing in my direction and seeing that I was looking at her. I recovered by nodding with vigor and intense concentration in response to what the man I was talking to was saying; I also laughed very loudly at his amusing remark. He flinched slightly.

“I don’t think child slavery is terribly funny, actually,” he said.

“What? Oh, no, I wasn’t laughing at that—it just reminded me of . . . a joke.”

“A joke about child slavery?”

“No.” I took a sip of my wine, then shook my head, gravely. “But, that child slavery, eh? Terrible thing. Terrible.”

This was ridiculous. It must have been a good two months since even the concept of Sara’s existence had, for any reason at all, passed through my brain. Yet a fraction of a glimpse of her, and now my palms were sweating. It was surely just a purely reflexive response—something triggered by a former habit. Like an old soldier one day jumping at a car backfiring—it doesn’t mean he’s still shell-shocked, it’s simply an instinctive twitch, an echo of past conditioning, maybe, or the itching of a phantom limb. I was fine. It wasn’t
me;
it was just my dumb-ass autonomic nervous system.

I forced myself into an hour of the smallest talk there has ever been at any party, anywhere in the world, ever. It was
tiny
. Punishingly unengaging. Nanotalk. Oddly, though, all the time I was doing this I could sense where Sara was—directly behind me, off to the left, away in the next room, et cetera. My skin seemed to prickle to indicate her position, as though my body were a compass. This sensation and the conversations I was forcing myself to have became too much eventually. An hour was enough for the look of the thing, surely? So, precisely one hour after I’d first seen that Sara was in the house, I apologized to the person I was with for suddenly realizing that another matter meant I was unable to listen to the rest of his sentence, and went to lay things to rest. Say hello to Sara, earth the current, get rid of all this silliness, and allow myself to exhale.

I found her (I made sure it didn’t seem like I was
looking for
her, obviously) in the kitchen, talking to a man who I assumed made, sold, or fitted wall tiles—he was talking about the wall tiles in the room, and I can’t think of a single reason anyone would do that were they not in the business of making, selling, or fitting them.

“Hi, Sara!”
I said, flashing my eyes wide and taking a half-step back from the surprise of stumbling across her. Of all people. There.

“Hello, Tom,” she replied.

I wasn’t sure how I should read that.

“This is Iain,” she continued.

We shook hands and then Iain talked about tiles until no one at all would have blamed me had I opened the kitchen drawer, taken out a knife, and viciously slain him.

Neither Sara nor I spoke more than an “I see” or a “Really?” but that didn’t make Iain protest that he was having to do all the talking and the one-sidedness was draining him. He went on and on. And on. I could feel my fingernails growing. Couldn’t he see that I wanted him to go away? I think Sara wanted him to go away too. Iain’s place in society was “away”—that was where he could do the most good. Christ, now he’d moved on to grouting. No one could be this dull. I’d rather have spent the time listening to that woman who tells you you haven’t hung up your telephone properly. Forty-five minutes waiting in a bus shelter on a freezing, wet Tuesday evening would be
less
interesting if Iain were there. Jesus.
Please—let him stop
.