Matt nodded a nod of understanding and rolled the words ‘art student’ around in his mouth.
‘Yeah, I see them sometimes, art students. Wearing big glasses. Saw a bunch of them recently down the Wimpy all wearing false moustaches. Dunno why. So why’s she hanging around with you two?’
‘Why wouldn’t she?’ I said, a little defensively, but then: ‘Aside from the fact that she’s ten years younger than us and infinitely cooler. I mean, you’re
both
those things, too, apart from the second one.’
Matt laughed. It was good when Matt laughed. We were on the way to becoming proper friends. There was still that slight
frost between us whenever we’d first meet; things needed to thaw before he forgot I wasn’t his teacher and he’d stopped being my pupil. But laughing was good.
‘All I’m saying,’ he said, trying to choose his words carefully, but failing, ‘is are you, like, going out with her?’
‘No,’ I said, quickly, and embarrassed. ‘No, we’re just friends.’
The door opened. A customer walked in. We turned to stare at him and he faltered slightly as he wondered whether he’d interrupted something. Dev lowered his
Daily Star
in surprise. The customer closed the door gently behind him as he left.
‘“We Just Clicked!”’ said Dev, and Matt and I turned round.
‘There’s a story here,’ he said, ‘about a bloke who found a camera.’
This piqued my interest.
‘He found a camera, a digital one, when he was on holiday, and he looked at the photos and he put them on Facebook. The bloke whose camera it was got recognised by some friend-of-a-friend and he got his camera back. Nice.’
‘Six degrees of separation,’ I said, feeling clever.
‘Six what?’ said Matt.
‘Everyone’s connected to everyone,’ I said.
The bell above the door tinkled again, but I didn’t bother looking round this time, because this sometimes happened with Dev; he was an intimidating force on the North London videogames scene, so customers often had to take a run-up at walking in.
‘You can pick anyone in the world, and I’ll know someone who’ll know someone who knows someone, until eventually you find them. They say you can do it in six little steps. I’ve never tried it, because why would I, but it’s a thought, isn’t it?’
But Dev wasn’t looking at me in a way that suggested he was impressed. Dev was looking at me in a way that suggested he was scared of what was about to happen next.
‘Hello, Jason.’
I turned around.
‘Hi, Sarah,’ I heard myself say.
It was the first time I’d seen her in … God, how long had it been? She was wearing clothes I hadn’t seen before. Still tanned and healthy from the Andorra. There it was. The ring. A sign of her permanent commitment to Gary, the wild man of Stevenage. My eyes flicked to her belly: not showing yet, not quite. Oh. She’d bought a new watchstrap. Funny, the things you take in when you see an ex.
‘Who are you trying to find?’ she said, making it sound light and airy and like maybe she could help.
‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘You know. Somebody. A customer. Of Dev’s.’
‘You’re lying,’ she said, smiling.
‘I’m
not
lying,’ I said, churlishly, not understanding why she always thought I was lying these days, even though I was. And then, maybe because I was so used to feeling that way, the shame came pouring back; the embarrassment and the
shame
. The shame was the worst. The guilt, strangely, was second, but always there, always locked at the back of my throat and deep in my chest for all the days I hadn’t told her, but the shame second, all-encompassing and rich and thorough.
Because the thing I hadn’t wanted to tell you – the thing I think you already know – is that about one month after Dylan and his air rifle, after about one month of near-constant support from Sarah, of hugs and tea, and tears and blackness from me, I repaid her for the one time she fell down, the one time she told me off, the one time she thought I should snap out of it, by getting angry and getting drunk and going out and sleeping with someone else. Sleeping, in fact, with Zoe.
Yeah.
You see?
It’s worse now it’s Zoe.
We stood, staring at each other, not quite sure what to say next, when in walked Abbey, beaming, and holding four cigars.
‘Oh,’ said Sarah. ‘And you must be the Russian prostitute.’
I think there’s something nice about not knowing. There’s plenty of stuff I don’t know. And plenty of stuff I do that I’d rather I didn’t. But not knowing – and not knowing you don’t know – is something else. It frees up the mind. It means you can project.
That’s what I’d been doing with The Girl, of course. This projecting. Finding meaning where perhaps there was none, basing it all on so little: a whip-quick half-smile on a dark night on Charlotte Street. But that was better than reality. Because this, right now, sitting in stony silence outside the café down the road with Sarah, her fiddling with a spoon, me waiting for our coffees to arrive:
this
was reality.
The guys had fallen into silence, too, when Sarah had walked into the shop. They’d exchanged pleasantries, Dev had given her a hug, but they knew this wasn’t a social visit. This was an anti-social visit.
‘So …’ she said, and then Pamela was upon us, splashing the coffees down next to a silver pot in which a thousand packets of sugar were suffocating each other for space.
‘Do you think we could get some extra sugar?’ I said, deadpan, and Sarah smiled.
‘Yes,’ said Pamela. ‘No friend today?’
Dev would be thrilled. The long game was working!
‘No, he’s actually busy with some humanitarian work right now,’ I said.
I made a mental note to tell him he was now a humanitarian. He’d pretended to be harder things in the past. A priest. A commercial airline pilot. An Indian prince. Pamela shrugged and walked off.
‘Dev’s latest crush?’ said Sarah, when Pamela was out of earshot.
‘Pamela.’
‘He likes girls in uniform.’
‘Is a pinny a uniform?’
Inside the café, Pamela’s boss was shouting at her. We paused for a microsecond, then continued nonplussed.
‘Remember the time he was after that other girl?’
‘You’re going to have to be more specific than that,’ I said, raising my eyebrows. ‘
Much
more specific.’
I guess talking about Dev was easier than talking about us, but then so was talking about anything else, including the rise of national socialism, or swingball.
‘You know the one,’ she said, pointing her spoon at me. ‘The one he said was The One.’
Oh. Well, that was different. There’d only ever been one The One. They’d met at an indie night at the Garage on Highbury Corner, when we could still go to indie nights at the Garage without looking like we were someone’s dad waiting to pick them up. Dev had wooed her, pined for her, missed her when she wasn’t around, picked her dry cleaning up for her, dropped her dry cleaning off for her, learned to cook her favourite dish in case she ever popped round, though she never would, and then after three weeks it turned out she still didn’t
even know his surname. He was crushed. I think that’s why he had the business cards printed.
Sarah smiled as she remembered something.
‘I always remember the night after, he said—’
‘Yes. That was amazing. “You can say what you like about love, but you can’t say it’s good”.’
‘And we spent the whole evening giving him examples of people who’d disagree. Operas written in the name of love, paintings painted, mountains climbed, countries conquered.’
‘The defining works of Phil Collins, Elvis Costello and Billy Joel, little-bitty-insects named things in Latin for love, the whole point of Heart FM.’
‘And still he was like, “Okay, leave it with me, I’ll think on”.’
A chuckle and a comfortable pause. The type Sarah used to say she liked best. These pauses weren’t ours any more, though. They were there just to be filled.
‘And how’s Gary?’ I said, skirting around.
‘Gary is great.’
‘That’s great.’
‘He’s great.’
‘Great.’
‘He’s out looking for a new car.’
‘That’s terrific news.’
‘The Golf started to play up, and I can’t drive his Lexus, and—’
‘People carrier. You’ll need a people carrier soon.’
I pointed at her belly. She bit her lip and nodded.
‘Why are you here, Sarah? I’ve said sorry, and I talked to Gary, and—’
‘I wanted to see you face to face. I don’t know why you’re acting the way you’ve been acting. The drunk messages on our photos I’m starting to understand, because I should have told
you first, or not first, exactly, but at the same time. But this isn’t my fault. This is your fault.’
I stared at my coffee.
‘We both have new beginnings. Let’s be grateful for that. And who knows how long we’d have lasted anyway?’
She smiled and sipped her coffee but all I could think was, What?
What?!
‘What do you mean, who knows how long we’d have lasted? I made a mistake, I was in a horrible place you didn’t understand. You
know
this.’
‘It was stale anyway, Jason. Sometimes things just go stale. I used to annoy the hell out of you, and you certainly annoyed the hell out of me.’
‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘You were perfect.’
‘You hated the way I always wanted to be early for things. You hated the way I had to lock and unlock and lock the door whenever we left the house, just so I knew it was locked.’
‘These are so trivial!’ I said, but really I wanted to shout it. There was the flip between sadness and anger in my stomach, and I didn’t know which would win. ‘You don’t give up on someone because they make sure the house is locked!’
‘They’re tiny things, but they mean something bigger. You’re only remembering the positives. You doing what you did was something we needed. It was a great clarifier, Jase.’
‘I didn’t want anything clarified, though,’ I said.
‘It took you betraying me to realise there was nothing much there for either of us to betray any more.’
‘Don’t rewrite the past, Sarah,’ I said, because this was horrible; this was like her revenge. At least let me think I’d messed up something good; don’t make me think there was never anything there.
‘The problem with you, Jase, is that you’re in love with the
idea
of being in love.’
‘Oh, you got that from a film. That’s just something people say. And what’s wrong with that anyway? A little romance in life?’
‘It’s fine, but you also need structure. You need reliability. You were always talking about leaving your job and doing God knows what. You never talked about marriage, or kids, or—’
‘That’s such a cliché! We’re not those people – those people are on TV! You’re being the sensible woman and making me out to be the childish man! This isn’t Doc Martin! I’m not Gary or Tony and you’re not Deborah or the one who lived upstairs!’
Annoyingly, I was kind of proving her point.
‘Life isn’t a series of Martin Clunes references,’ she said, sitting back, and that would have made me laugh ordinarily, but this was just too important.
‘Look, all I mean is, you’re completely making this sound like something it wasn’t. And I suppose kids and marriage is what Gary opened up with on your very first date, is it? Great tactic. At the Hilton or Wagamama or wherever it was? No moonlit walk for you two, then? No
story
to look back on?’
‘The last thing a relationship needs is a story. A story is just a story. Who cares how people met? Literally no one.’
‘I care.’
‘Literally just
you
, then. We’d been together four years when we split, Jase. I was thirty. My priorities changed. Haven’t yours?’
I thought about it. What were my priorities? I racked my brains. I must have some. But all I could think of was that I needed to get some bread and a pint of milk, plus the bath could really do with some new sealant round the tiles.
‘Then when I saw you’d … “deleted me”,’ said Sarah.
She made little finger quotes. I frowned.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s such a childish thing. Me, I mean; I’m being childish. We’re not teenagers. We’re not going to argue about MySpace or Facebook or any of that. You’re free to delete or unfollow whoever you want, and—’
Abbey. Abbey must’ve done it. She must’ve left it up to me and then when I finally chickened out and made an excuse about making a toastie, she must’ve deleted her from my account.
‘Thing is, I actually respect you for doing it. One of us needed to. You need space; you need to do what I did and start again. It’s just … it hurt a bit. Like you were shutting me out.’
Good, I thought.
I’m pleased that it hurt.
And I felt cheered, even though it was the most selfish thing in the world, it felt good to have hurt her, to have made some progress, to have chipped away at something, because it meant that she cared, somewhere; that I still mattered. I had hurt her once already in our relationship, and done it badly. And now here I was celebrating having done it again, celebrating the most minute and childish victory.
And that was when I realised that this is not how someone should behave. And that this selfish victory was pathetic, and hollow, and meaningless.
‘I didn’t delete you,’ I said, smally. ‘My friend did. The Russian prostitute.’
She brightened, ever-so-slightly, but I noticed, because I always noticed the smallest things about Sarah.
‘I’d thought about it,’ I admitted. ‘Not out of spite, but because it’s hard to watch you starting again, when I’m living with Dev above a shop.’
A council lorry ground by. We held the rims of our cups to the table as the ground shook and the air turned to diesel.
‘But I couldn’t. And I wouldn’t. We share a history, and I’m all about looking forward, that’s what I’ve decided to do. But what’s the point in abandoning the past? It’d be a waste, no?’
She smiled.
Opened her handbag.
Got out an envelope and slid it across the table.
‘I’d love it if you’d consider this,’ she said, her smile halfhope, half-apology.