But maybe a drink would be nice, maybe offer an apology, for running out on him like that, maybe end up at the Den, for old time’s sake.
Not today, though.
The Kicks were on
T4
. Though my portable fizzed and crackled, I could tell Rick Edwards really seemed to love them.
‘Brighton’s brightest,’ he called them.
Things were going pretty well for the boys. I know I’d only met them a couple of times, and I know they’d met a hundred journalists since, from proper papers, too, like
The Times
and the
Guardian
, who adored these rock ‘n’ roll upstarts (
Uh-oh! Move over Arctics!
screamed the
NME
;
Things are about to Kick off
, warned
Q
) but I’d always feel a little linked to them. And I kept looking to the sides of the screen, just in case I could see Abbey, or a hint of electric blue shoe.
I hadn’t spoken to Abbey since that night. I’d tried, but I’d failed. It had taken me a while, but I’d realised, slowly and grimly, what I’d done. What right had I had to do what I did? Not a day had gone by that I hadn’t kicked myself for it. Of course she’d be angry with me. If she’d wanted people to know about her songs, she’d … well … she’d have sung them. Something about that night – the way the CD had been poking out of her bag, willing itself seen, and all right after we’d talked of life, and ambition and dreams … it made me feel like what I was doing was undeniably right. A favour.
Now I could see that it wasn’t. I could see now that I’d stumbled into someone’s private life, and … no, not stumbled. Stumbled implies something accidental. No, I’d broken in. I’d kicked the door down; like a burglar, I’d rifled through her secrets, and then I’d taken them, and worse … I’d shown them to the world. That wasn’t fair.
So, after a few unanswered texts and a couple of unpicked-up calls, I took to keeping myself to myself. In some ways, it was nice. I was reading more. Eating Iceland meals-for-one and mindlessly reading the ingredients while Radio 4’s ‘Play for Today’ was on. Things were calm, I guess, and I was resigned to life. Because once again, I’d seen where hope could get me. Better to live without it, I reasoned. Better to be surprised when something good happens, than to try and make it happen yourself and fail.
I turned the telly off. For the first time in days, I had somewhere to be.
‘So,’ said the man. ‘You’ve been out of the business how long?’
‘About eighteen months.’
‘Not gone well?’
‘It’s gone fine. I’m ready for a new challenge.’
‘How do you approach a challenge?’
‘Well, I’m a teamplayer, though I’m equally suited to working alone.’
‘And you worked here, at St John’s?’
‘I did.’
‘You decided to leave, why?’
‘It should all be there, in my file.’
‘Ah yes.’ A pause. ‘Weaknesses?’
‘Chocolate.’
‘Ha ha! Lovely sense of humour!’
‘Thank you. But seriously, I’m a perfectionist, that’s probably my main weakness.’
‘Terrific.’ The man looked at me. ‘So how are you fixed the week after next?’
I was going to be a supply teacher.
There was nothing wrong with that, I know. I had the form, the qualifications, the experience, and people weren’t exactly
lining up to spend more time at St John’s. Yeah, so it was a bit of a step back, seeing as I’d been deputy head of department, and it was a step in a different direction from the one I’d always told myself I wanted to be going, but it was work. Work I could do, too.
And being back in St John’s had reminded me of someone.
Not Dylan Bale, either, which had been my fear. How embarrassing a meltdown would have been. How embarrassing to have to flinch every time I passed a window, and all thanks to a kid and an air rifle.
No. I was thinking of Matt.
Where had he gone? I’d texted him a few times, followed it up with a call, but his number had been disconnected and I didn’t know what to do. Had I done something? Let him down, too?
I wanted to talk to him, though. The stuff with Dev, the stuff with Abbey … well, he knew them. He might have advice.
And then, on the way back from St John’s, I found myself either by accident or design at the Sainsbury’s by Angel tube, browsing the falafel, and I realised just how close I was to Chapel Market.
It was 10 a.m. and men in England tops were drinking pints under a George cross outside the Alma with their dogs.
I knew where the garage was: just beyond the DIY shops and chicken cottages of Chapel Market, tucked down a side-street with a giant hand-painted
mot’s
&
repair’s
on its wall.
As soon as I got there, I instantly felt that creeping feeling of uncertainty and unease that washes over me, sickeningly, when surrounded by men. Not men in general. Not men in pubs or men in suits or men like your dad or mine. Real men, with black-bruised nails from car doors or hammers, and
swallows on their wrists, and chain-link gold swaddling thick leather necks.
I prepared to drop my aitches.
‘All right?’ I said, to the main one, as he watched over the others, the one I should probably call the ‘gaffer’ or something.
He put down a tool I couldn’t identify and wiped his hand on the side of his overalls. He looked exactly the way a child would draw a mechanic.
‘Matt around?’ I said, attempting to seem disinterested, or at the very least distracted by a car they had up on that machine that makes cars go up that I’ve only ever seen in places like this.
‘Matt?’ he said.
‘Fowler?’ I said, grateful he had a surname out of
East-Enders
. ‘Matt Fowler?’
‘Matt Fowler?’ he said. ‘You know him?’
This, I realised, would be one of those conversations that goes better if dealt with exclusively in questions.
‘Is he about?’ I said, hoping we’d soon start dealing in facts.
‘Warren?’ shouted the man, turning. ‘Is Matt about?’
I looked over at Warren, who started laughing.
‘Dean?’ he shouted, to another man, fiddling with a radio at the back. ‘Where’s Matt?’
Dean started laughing and nodding.
‘He’s with his university chums!’ he said, and they all started laughing together.
‘He’s where?’ I said.
‘Matt hasn’t been here in about a month. He had an epiphany!’
They all started laughing again. Warren got back to work, shaking his head and smiling at the word ‘epiphany’.
‘Do you know where he is?’ I said.
‘I imagine he’s gone boating,’ said the man. ‘Or, whatcha-call it … scrumping. No, not scrumping. Cramming. For his “finals”!’
I wasn’t sure if they were taking the piss, and if they were, out of who? Matt? Or me? Me, with my clean clothes and delicate little never-done-a-day’s-work grease-free hands.
‘Is Matt … at university?’ I asked.
How? You don’t just go to university. You study, you do exams, you get A-Levels, you apply. You sit down and go through prospectuses and when you realise you have no idea what you’re doing you end up doing Geography at Cardiff.
‘He has, if you count a room above a chippie as a university,’ said the man, and he cleaned his fingers, and smiled at me.
This would be the end of our conversation.
I trudged back to Blackstock Road.
When I told you a minute ago I’d found myself a little flat on Blackstock Road, I mean I found myself living in a little flat on Blackstock Road.
And it was with someone.
It’s not something I’d have bet on happening, post-Tropicana. But I needed a friend and now she was the closest I had.
I’d stormed round that night, a beacon of rage and injustice and disappointment, lost and sad and alone.
‘Jesus, Jason, what’s going on?’ she’d said, answering the door, and I’d pushed past her, into the dim and narrow hallway in this flat it’d taken so long to find in the dark, just as it had done once before, when all this started.
Zoe and I talked long and hard that night. She apologised for what she’d said about my career and whether or not I should look for it in Highgate Cemetery. She’d been under a lot of pressure, she said, and the last thing she needed was
what happened today, and
London Now
was in pretty deep trouble, might only have a few months left, plus Rob the Reviews Ed had been on at her about coming back, and
blah blah blah blah blah
.
I knew what she’d done because I’d done it myself. Sometimes you hurt someone who’s hurt you, because it’s like a tiny victory. Your own little PS on an event that still stings.
So we talked about that day. But also, slowly, we talked about what had happened that night, in that other life.
‘We were friends who sort of took advantage of each other,’ she said, and while once the guilt would have flashed through me in an instant now there was a dull ache of resignation.
‘It was my fault,’ I’d said.
‘It was mine, too. I just didn’t know what to do. I loved you once, as a friend, I mean. It hurt to see you in pain. I mean it almost physically hurt. I was trying to make you see that everything would be okay. Like, if you left your job, I could throw some work your way, maybe you could find what you wanted to do. But there was never any question of what you should do with Sarah. I never said anything about that but then you kissed me and I don’t know how it didn’t stop there but it didn’t.’
Part of me had always wondered what would have happened if Zoe and I had got together afterwards. But what I wanted was Sarah. It would never have worked, the two of us, the shame and the recriminations, the soul-slashing guilt was just too claustrophobic. It wouldn’t have been honest. It wasn’t the plan. We couldn’t just improvise our way into it.
But what about now? I thought, looking at her.
I’d given Zoe most of whatever I had in my account at the time to cover things. This wasn’t a permanent thing, of course; it was just until I found my feet again. I just hadn’t known what
else to do when I’d moved out of Dev’s and craved something familiar, something warm. I needed to tell Sarah I was moving, but how could I tell her where I’d ended up? And when I decided just to play it vague, this happened:
Me: ‘Hey, so I’m just checking in, I got the invite, I meant to RSVP, and—’
Sarah: ‘Wow! It’s you. You’ve got a nerve, I’ll give you that.’
Me: ‘Eh?’
Sarah: ‘You think I’m stupid? I was waiting to see if you’d call, and here you are. Thing that bugs me most is you know I thought you’d grown up. And you could have told me you hadn’t. But you came along and just pretended like you had. You didn’t come clean, you didn’t admit it; you just let me down again.’
Me: ‘Are you talking about—’
Sarah: ‘Drugging my guests? Yes. Yes, I am talking about you and your odd little friends turning up at my engagement do like a mental bunch of Chuckle Brothers and feeding my guests drugs. It was Anna that worked it out. Thought she had food poisoning so had some tests done. Nearly lost her job.’
Me: ‘That was all a misunderstanding, that was—’
Sarah: ‘Gary vomited all the way home. I had to drive the Lexus. We need all new foot carpets.’
Me: ‘Please tell Gary I will pay for—’
Sarah: ‘Anna tried to take a lamp post on the bus with her.’
Me: [laughing] ‘I’m … did Anna—’
Sarah: ‘Great. You find it as funny now as you did then. Have you ever seen someone try and get a lamp post on to a bus? It is not dignified, okay, and she didn’t deserve that. I’m getting married in eight weeks, Jason, and it’s a shame we will never speak again. Because we will never, ever speak again.
Good luck growing up. It’s as likely to happen as any of your other pathetic little dreams. Oh, and give
Zoe
my love.’
Click
.
So she knew. Dev, maybe? I suppose if I were still a teacher,
I’d …
Oh. I am.
Anyway, when Zoe got back from work the next day, we’d met up at the Bank of Friendship.
We’d met every night since, in the kitchen, at about seven-thirty.
Things had been frosty at first, like this had been inevitable from that first drunken time, like it had been prophesied. That didn’t make us comfortable. We hadn’t chosen this. It had just happened. Nothing
else
had happened, not yet, which I put down to the pressure of Something Possibly Happening; we were essentially just strange, weary flatmates trying to make a tawdry history something respectable. But then one night, with
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
in the background, she said, ‘This is good. Me and you, in this flat, together.’
I put my spoon down in my soup, and looked at her. This felt like the chat I didn’t want to have. The one about the future, where this is going, are we an ‘us’? Mentally, I started preparing. I still had those nine boxes, packed flat under the bed. I still had Addison Lee’s number for another people carrier. I wasn’t sure about this. I didn’t think this was our deal.
Thing was, I still sort of needed her. I had no Dev. I’d re-angered Sarah. I hadn’t seen Abbey, and Matt had disappeared off the face of the earth.
I steeled myself.
‘Because,’ she said, ‘it means there’s no more guessing. Sometimes I’d wonder what would it have been like if we’d
ended up together after you and Sarah. I was doing you a favour at
London Now
but also I was seeing who you were. I hoped I wouldn’t like you. But also I know that sometimes it’s better not to know.’
I was still just looking at her. She was pretending to be casual, like she was reading this out of the paper.
‘Luckily, with you, I do know now. And so do you, which is important, especially after what you lost. And there can never be any of that longing, or anything. Because I think, to be clear: we both know we’re not right for each other in almost any single way.’
I laughed and picked up my spoon again. You hear about people falling into things; you hear about them staying there for ever because they don’t have the strength to pull themselves out. That could’ve been what happened in Blackstock Road. This could’ve been the end of the story. This could all have been about how I ended up moving from a flat above a videogame shop next to a place everyone thought was a brothel but wasn’t, to another, smaller flat with a cracked back window and a lamp that hung too low over the table, and all because I was weak, and tired, and beaten.