Dan Taylor Is Giving Up on Women (15 page)

‘Are you all right?’ she asked, sounding a bit as if she must have just woken up.

‘Oh, boy, all right? I’ve never had so much fun with my shoelaces removed,’ I said breezily, still elated to be free. ‘I may have cried at one point, but is that one of those times when women think it’s cute that guys blub, or one of
the creepy and sad ones like sex? I tell you though, after taking a ride in an ambulance and a cop car this week on your handpicked dates all you need to do is set me up with an arsonist who’ll set fire to my sofa and I’ll have completed the full set for emergency services.’

The other end of the line was silent, when I had expected Hannah to jump in to continue my day of interrogation.

‘You there? Think it’s a bad line — can you hear me?’

‘I’m here,’ she said in a detached, flat voice. ‘I don’t know where Rob is. But he’s definitely having an affair.’

I jumped in a cab as soon as I hung up from the call, and headed for South Wimbledon. On the way I tried to get hold of Rob on his mobile, half dreading his picking up, half hoping just a quick chat would completely resolve the situation and I could tell Hannah she had nothing to worry about. The phone went straight to answer machine, and I didn’t leave a message, so I was on my own for this one. Deep down I wasn’t too sure speaking to him would have helped anyway.

At their front door Hannah wordlessly buzzed me into their apartment, and I headed up the stairs to find her sitting on the couch nursing a large, overly full glass of wine. I had thought I’d go in and give her a big hug and tell her everything was going to be all right, but every angle of her body was giving out the message to not go anywhere too near her.

‘So your date didn’t go well, then,’ she said.

‘My date? Don’t worry about my date! How are you? What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter,’ she said, slowly getting up to get me a glass of wine, before slumping back into the sofa.

‘It must be a mix-up,’ I said. ‘He’s been working a lot lately. He sounds like he’s under a lot of pressure. And you know what he’s like — the more tense he is, the more outrageously he flirts. He’s probably dying to get home, and will be able to make everything make sense.’

‘Yeah,’ she said blankly.

‘I mean, what made you think this?’

‘There’s things that have been different. You get to know when something isn’t right.’

‘Is it about the row yesterday? ‘Cos it could just be he went a bit over the top on a night out but that doesn’t mean anything more serious than that…’

‘It’s not just yesterday.’

‘Have you spoken to him about it?’

‘No.’

‘Well, there you are!’ I said.

I became conscious I was bouncing around the room and looming, while Hannah was sitting low on the couch, so I dumped my overcoat on the floor and dropped down into the oversized beanbag by the TV to try and get some eye contact. The beanbag was a little more giving than I’d thought, but I struggled to sit upright and looked at Hannah, trying to look concerned and reassuring at the same time.

‘It’s a communication thing. You see it all the time. You don’t talk about something you’re worried about and it starts growing into something bigger than it is,’ I said.

Hannah was finally looking straight at me, but not in a way I might have hoped, as the unnerving cold blankness on her face started giving way to something narrow-eyed and hotter.

‘You need to let him know what you’re feeling,’ I babbled. ‘Couples all the time let things bothering them slide for the sake of an easy life, but the tension builds up, like a pimple on the side of your forehead, just waiting for the merest bit of pressure to splat red and yellow all over the bathroom mirror.’

The beanbag seemed to be giving way from underneath me and I slid further and further down towards the floor.

‘You need to get this out in the open, and maybe it won’t seem so bad.’

Obviously I was aware that Hannah got angry, and obviously this was an appropriate time for her to be angry. But
it was really rather scary to have her angry at me…

‘Oh, so it’s easy. Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘I’m not saying that, but things always seem better when you confront them head-on. Sure it’ll be no fun to do it, but it’ll pay to talk to him about what you feel.’

‘Talk to him? Like you do when you guys are all out and he spends half the night using you as a punchline? Talk about it? Like you and him have ever talked about anything directly in your lives, when you could just sweep it away, pretend it never happened. I know, when he gets home we’ll make it all better by watching the first series of
thirty
fucking
something
together, eh?’

Hannah was up and pacing now, and I was left stuck in the beanbag squinting up at her, blinded by the blaring light of the floor lamp shining behind her, and blindsided by what she said.

‘And it’s not about what I feel, it’s about who he’s feeling, the cheating bastard.’

‘But how can you be sure something’s going on?

‘Oh, I forgot, you’re the one that lives with him every day. Who’d know if he’s lying, or not talking because he’s feeling guilty about being an arsehole. You’re the one sat at home in a damp flat pretending to know where he is when his mother calls.’

‘He always had these emergency work things, or somebody else he just had to catch up with. They’ve happened when I’m around too.’

‘Yeah. He always got calls. Used to be somebody phoned. Now it’s a text, some awkward shuffling about the flat huffing and puffing about bosses and clients, and twenty minutes later he’s gone.’

‘It’s the technology… People aren’t talking any more. It could be office policy to save money. The art of conversation is dying…’

‘There’s never any texts. I hear them come in, but they no longer exist. I checked his phone the other day, and he has messages to pick up bread I sent in 2009, but last Sunday afternoon, at a time I heard them coming in, and he said it was the office? Nothing. Why’s he deleting them?’

‘Commercially sensitive information? He’s being careful about confidentiality? You just don’t know…’

‘I can’t believe you’re still defending him,’ she said, curling back up on the sofa, arms wrapped protectively around an embroidered pillow. The anger seemed to have blown out of her as she looked down, picking the ends of her hair, and talking to the floor.

‘And you cannot believe how much I hate that he’s turned me into one of those women. Making dinners he doesn’t show up to eat. Spying on his phone, checking his pockets.’

‘Any cash?’

She laughed grimly.

‘No, no cash. No hastily drafted love poetry either, or first-class tickets for two to Barbados in his and some floozy’s name. And nobody else’s knickers. It’s like he’s read a book how not to get caught cheating.’

‘Or, y’know, maybe it is something else. We don’t know.’

‘Do you honestly think there’s an innocent explanation to all this? You haven’t suspected anything?’ She sounded more amazed at how I couldn’t face up to what my friend was doing now, rather than angry at me, or him.

‘Well. There’d been a couple of things I’d wondered about, but I just didn’t think he would.’

‘You’ve met my husband, right?’

‘But you two…’

‘It’s been good for a while, but you know what he’s like.’

‘Exactly! He’s a flirt. He always acts like a tart.’

‘And you think it’s always just an act?’

‘It isn’t?’

‘You two really don’t talk about anything, do you?’

It was my turn to get a bit defensive. If she was right I would have known about this stuff. He was my best friend, after all.

‘We talk! OK, so maybe not
directly
about the big stuff, but when there’s a problem we do. And we might not be married but we’ve still been through some difficult times.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yeah. Like with Kate when she left. We talked a lot then, about the future, relationships, all that stuff.’

‘When he was around every night?’

‘Yeah. Well, not every night — I wasn’t
that
needy. But he was there when he could help.’

‘He told me it was every night for about a fortnight. And staying over because you were too miserable to leave on your own?’

‘Um…’

Hannah watched me as what she was saying dawned on me. He’d spent a fair bit of time back then talking about this client he was working with who was very smiley, very leggy, and had an incredibly dirty laugh. I’d thought at the time it was meant as proof of the idea that there wereplenty more fish in the sea. I hadn’t realised he was still angling without the appropriate licence.

Her eyebrows said I told you so, and I started to feel queasy, and a little betrayed myself. We both sat there sadly staring at patches of the living-room wall.

‘So what are you going to do now?’ I eventually asked.

‘Aside from
TALK
to him and let him know how I’m
FEELING
so he can
UNDERSTAND
I’m
UPSET
about his
BOFFING
his PA, you mean?’ she asked in a pompous voice, which I suspect might just have been taking the piss out of me a bit. But at least the life was coming back into her voice.

‘Huh. Maybe it should be my turn first if he’s really been slapping “Kick Me” signs on my back all these years and I didn’t know it.’ Hannah’s remark about being a punchline was still stinging.

‘I’m sorry, hun, I shouldn’t have said that. He doesn’t think of you as a joke. I don’t know if there’s anyone he worries about as much. I was being mean and silly. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m sorry for dragging you into the middle. You aren’t the philandering wanker here, but I am blaming you as you’re the one who introduced me to him.’

I shrugged, taking responsibility for my crimes like a man.

‘And stop telling me it might be nothing and everything’s going to be OK!’ she said with a growl and a smile that was only slightly wobbly around the edges. Again, I held up my hands, accepting my culpability.

‘But, hey, your date, tell me about that. My God, you got arrested again? And your eye! Who was this woman? What happened?’

‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ I said. ‘I did a wheelie on a motorbike, and we passed Peter Stringfellow!’

‘Peter Stringfellow!’

‘Well, Sam said it was him, I couldn’t see. I had my eyes shut and was trying to decide whether I had time to join one of the world’s major religions before my imminent death.’

I started telling Hannah all about my day, as if our row had never happened. I explained about the kleptomaniac I
had thought for a moment might be my ideal woman. She was asking all the right questions to get the interesting details about what Sam had said, and how she’d said it, and even knew which top it was that she’d pinched, and admired her taste. It was while I was telling her about the hummus guy, and how stressed I was getting because the garlicky chickpeas were repeating on me in the interview room, that I noticed she’d gone a bit quiet again. I looked over to see that she was crying. Seeing me look at her, she shook her head and waved me to continue, saying, ‘Get on with it, garlic breath,’ but I couldn’t.

I walked to the sofa and finally gave her that hug I’d been planning for when I came in the room. She collapsed sobbing on my shoulder and I could feel a clammy dampness on my neck from her tears. With my arms around her, I sat there and stroked her hair and stared at our reflection in the window looking out into the dark of the street.

With a shudder, she seemed to calm a little, and I pulled back to see her face, blotchy and red from crying.

As she sniffed and wiped a hand across her eyes and nose she bit her lip and looked up at me wide-eyed.

I swallowed as I felt my throat constricting and looked back, still holding her.

Then my head started leaning down towards her, her face slowly getting closer to mine.

‘Don’t,’ she said, standing up and jerking away from me.

I jumped up backwards, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. She shakily refilled her wine glass, and sat down again, legs drawn up to her chest, turning on the TV to some talent show with a barely adolescent girl belting out show tunes to near hysterical applause. It was as if I weren’t there in the room any more.

After standing there for what felt like hours, but was probably no more than a minute, I picked up my coat, and said a limp goodbye. Then I told her to call if there was anything I could do. As a friend.

Or if there was anything that she needed that I could help with. As a friend.

Or something I could talk to Rob about. As a friend.

Or if there was anything at all she needed I could provide on a friendship basis. Then I said goodbye again, mumbled a quick sorry, and finally left the house.

I woke up to my alarm, not realising I had finally drifted off to sleep, and phoned in sick on the office answer machine while my voice still sounded groggy and flat. I had an enormous headache, which I thought might be something to do with the fall on my head that had caused a bruise the size of a large steak to come up on the side of my face. Or it could have been the hours I’d spent since I’d got home, going over what had happened while hiding under my duvet.

I hadn’t done anything, I kept trying to tell myself.

Nothing had happened.

I’d moved my head a bit while I was comforting a friend with a platonic hug. Maybe she just felt she wanted her personal space back. Or she misunderstood my gesture, when really all I’d been doing was…what? Checking to see she’d not got snot all over her face after her crying jag?

Maybe if I worked at convincing myself of one of these alternatives, I thought, there’d be a chance that I could convince other people too.

But what had I been thinking? Every time that question played through my head I couldn’t think at all, and couldn’t lie still, turning one way then the other in the cloying warmth of my bed. Were Rob and Hannah breaking up? Was he cheating, and did I not know, or not want to know? How was I supposed to act when I saw them again?

Questions kept repeating in my head, sounding more and more like the narration of a reality TV documentary. Still sleepless at nearly four in the morning, I’d turned on the TV in my bedroom, and hoped a
Frasier
DVD
would distract me to sleep. I lay there, not watching the screen but listening to the rat-a-tat dialogue and conscious of the colours reflecting on the wall.

What would have happened if Hannah had gone to kiss me back? I think it might have been while I let myself finally think about that that I might have drifted off to sleep.