“What look?”
“That look. The one you get whenever I start discussing the NHS with your dad.”
“Well, it’s just that I can’t decide what’s worse. The fact that you spent forty-six and a half minutes looking at the Kentucky Fried Chicken website last Thursday night or the fact that you spent two and a half hours trying to download “One Dollar for Seven Days of Lesbians”.”
Shit. I knew there was something else I was meant to do before she came home.
Alison lights up a post-coital cigarette, passes it over to me and curls up against my arm with her head on my chest.
“Better?” I say, reaching down to stroke her hair off her face.
“Mmmmn,” she says, ‘much.”
This feel good. It’s taken us a couple of hours to get completely relaxed with one another again, but two cups of tea, three Bacardi Breezers and one fantastic shag later and we’re both completely cured.
“I felt like I was going on a date,” she says, pulling the sheet up to her breasts and sliding on to her back.
“Really?” I say, running my hand across her stomach. “How so?”
“Well, you know, I was nervous about seeing you, I suppose.”
“How could you have been nervous?”
“Well, not nervous, then, excited. I mean, it’s weird, I spent the whole morning deciding what I was going to wear. And look at you1 bet you just picked up the first thing you could find and drove straight over to meet me.”
I shrug my shoulders and pass her the cigarette.
“Hey,” she says, ‘you’re starting to get a couple of grey hairs at the side.”
“Am I?” I say. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Yeah,” she says, climbing on top of me and kissing my chest. “I like it. Makes you look sexy.”
“Hmmmn,” I say, ‘maybe you should go away to Bruges more often.”
“Hmmmn,” she says, ‘maybe you should spend more time trying to download “One Dollar for Seven Days of Lesbians”.”
We have sweaty, tangled, welcome-home sex one more time for good measure and then Alison curls up next to me and falls asleep. She really is spectacularly good looking: giant Jaggeresque mouth that would look ridiculous on anyone else, cute lopsided nose covered in a crop of rust-coloured freckles, and that incredible fifties porn-star body that still makes me want to jump her the second she comes through the door.
There’s a thin frown running across her forehead, and I reach over and trace my fingers along the length of its crease. She looks vulnerable when she’s asleep; it’s the only time she does. I think she worries that the world might get the better of her while she hasn’t got her eye on it; that it might find a way to do her down while she sleeps. It makes me feel insanely protective. I want to burn her laptop and set fire to her mobile phone, and I don’t want the outside world to be able to get anywhere near her.
And those eyes. Those gorgeous, flinty, sexy, ink-blot-blue eyes that always seem to know exactly what I’m thinking.
“What are you thinking?” she says, opening her eyes and curling her arm round my waist.
“Nothing much,” I say. “I was just wondering if you were asleep, that’s all.”
She looks up at me and smiles.
“I missed you too,” she says. “I missed you too.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it before?” “Because I wanted it to be a surprise?” “But you should have said something on the phone.” “I thought you’d be happy about it.” “I am.” “Well, it doesn’t sound like it to me.”
This evening is starting out very badly indeed. We’re buckled into the back of a death-trap minicab heading west through Camden into town and I’ve just told Alison all about the band going out on tour with Scarface. I didn’t mean to. I meant to tell her over dinner. After they’d lit the candles. After we’d ordered our food. I meant to wait until we were halfway through our first bottle of house red wine.
“So how long is it going to be for?”
“Two weeks,” I say, reaching into my pocket for the tour dates. “It’s going to be brilliant. We’re playing at some really big venues: Manchester Apollo, Glasgow Barrowlands, The Royal Court in Liverpool, and we get to finish the whole thing off back down here in London.”
“I see,” she says, turning her face to look out of the window.
“At The Shepherd’s Bush Empire,” I say with a small flourish.
“I see,” she says again.
I don’t know what’s wrong with her. I thought she’d be excited about it. I thought she’d be pleased that something was finally beginning to happen. She’s been like this all day. Ever since
I asked her how her job was going in Bruges. Ever since I asked her how tall Didier was. Maybe I should have waited until the end of CD.-UK before I started quizzing her about the pillow mints.
“I am pleased for you,” she says, reaching into her bag for her lip salve and dabbing it on to her mouth. “Honestly. It’s amazing news, Danny. Well done.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I mean, we haven’t got a particularly good slot or anything but, you know, it could mean a lot of exposure for us. Vince thinks it’s the best chance we’ve got of finding ourselves a record deal by the end of the year.”
“That’s great,” she says, turning back to the window. “That’s really great.”
The moment we arrive at the restaurant I realise that I’ve screwed up. It’s all wrong. It’s tacky and noisy and cramped and even if we ditch the starters and stick to pasta and mineral water I know it’s still going to cost me a small fortune. P feel totally out of place: everyone is done up in shirts and jewellery and bespoke designer suits, and I’m the only bloke in the whole gaff who isn’t wearing a Rolex and a girlfriend half his age.
I watch Alison adding up the Essex-style ambience: the brick-shaped bouncers by the door, the ice-cream-shaped waitresses at the tables, and the gold tasselled rope strung across the entrance to the members-only bar.
This is lovely, Danny,” she says, shooting me a market trader wink. “Very classy and not at all vulgar.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Kostas recommended it. I didn’t realise it would be quite so flash.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she says, putting her arm through mine. “It’ll be fun. We can play spot the boob job and guess which children’s TV presenter has just snorted coke in the bogs.”
“You sure?”
“Definitely.”
She starts to laugh. She’s just spotted a low-league soap
actress with ‘tits’ written across her chest in glitter and ‘arse’ written across the seat of her jeans in Braille.
“How do you know it says arse?” I say, taking our reservation number out of my wallet.
“Educated guess,” she says. “Educated guess.”
According to an eighteen-year-old death camp commandant called Tamara, we’re late for our booking.
“I’m afraid you’re late for your booking, Mr. McQueen.”
“Are we?”
“Yes. It says here that you booked a table for eight o’clock.”
I look at my watch. It’s just gone ten past.
“But it’s only ten past.”
“Exactly.”
“What do you mean, exactly’? We’re only ten minutes late. That’s nothing.”
“Well, we operate a very strict shift system here at Food. We have three sittings per night and if you arrive late it compromises the rest of the evening’s diners. You should have been told that when you booked.”
“But it’s only ten minutes.”
“Exactly.”
“Six hundred seconds.”
“Exactly.”
“Less than a quarter of an hour.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, examining her table plan and shooting me the kind of look that indicates that she isn’t sorry at all, ‘there’s really not much I can do. We’ve already given away your table. Our next available booking isn’t until … let me see… eleven fifteen.”
“Eleven fifteen? That’s three hours away. What are we supposed to do until then? I’m starving. I’ve only had a couple of slices of Marmite toast all day.”
“Well, if you like you could always wait at the bar.”
“For three hours?”
“Sorry, it’s the best I can do.”
The rest of the West End is officially full even the restaurants in Chinatown are turning people away and the only place we can find a table is in a Spaghetti House full of tourists near Piccadilly Circus.
“Sorry about that,” I say. “I should have known better than to take a recommendation from Kostas.”
“That’s OK,” she says. “I didn’t fancy eating there anyway. I’d only have got drunk and ended up writing “penis” across your trousers in Braille.”
“You don’t mind, then?”
“No, and let’s face it, it could have been worse. We could have ended up at an Angus Steak House.”
“Or a Bernie Inn.”
“Or a Harvester.”
“Or a McDonald’s.”
“I suppose we’re lucky, then,” I say, looking down at the sticky plastic menu and wondering what to have.
“Yeah,” she says, ‘we certainly are.”
Alison looks fantastic tonight, completely out of place with the rest of the customers. She’s wearing a posh silk dress with a deep slit up the side and she’s got a giant purple flower pinned into her hair that makes her look a bit Hawaiian. Everyone is staring at her: the waiters, the barman and the door girl, and the funny little bloke in the kitchen who looks like he’s just about to do something gross to our mixed green salad. Actually, there’s a small chance he might just be looking at me. Alison insisted I made a bit of an effort when she found out I was taking her somewhere expensive, so I’m wearing the trousers I wore to my nan’s funeral last year: they’re almost ten per cent wool and they itch like a bastard. It’s not right, though, she deserves to be somewhere better than this. She deserves someone better than me.
“So what are you going to have?” I say, trying not to look like I’m scratching the edge of my left buttock with my spoon.
“The works,” she says. “Prawn cocktail, spaghetti Bolognese, Black Forest gateau and a bottle of the house Chianti. But only if it comes in one of those wicker basket thingies. What about you?”
“Half a ripe avocado, steak and chips and a generous helping of Death by Chocolate, “the ladies’ favourite”.”
“Excellent choice,” she says. “Excellent choice.”
This meal is going far better than I’d anticipated. We’ve only had to wait twenty-five minutes for our starters and I’ve managed to keep Alison highly entertained with a whole series of interesting facts from the KFC website and some astonishing details about the bloke who invented Thousand Island dressing.
“Yeah,” I say, as I watch her slip another ketchup-coated prawn in her mouth, ‘he came from this part of upstate New York where there are, em… lots of islands.”
“I see.”
“Apparently he was the same man who invented the Waldorf salad.”
“Wow, busy guy.”
“Exactly,” I say, pointing my fork in the air for extra emphasis. “I bet that ponce Oliver has never invented his own salad dressing.”
“No,” she says, ‘probably not.”
“So, how are you getting on with the whole mayonnaise on the chips issue?” I ask, attempting to keep up the culinary theme.
“Not bad,” she says. “I quite like it, actually. It’s a bit sickly at first but you sort of get used to it after a while.”
“Right,” I say. “I bet old Didier likes a bit of mayonnaise on his chips of a teatime.”
“Danny.”
“Sorry, sorry. I know, he’s five foot nothing with a club foot and a huge hairy mole on his upper lip.”
“Exactly.”
“So I shouldn’t be jealous about him taking my girlfriend out for expensive dinners, then?”
“No.”
“You’d rather be drinking cheap Chianti at the Spaghetti House with me?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“No question, and anyway, it’s me who should be jealous. You’re the one about to go on tour with a rock band. You’re the one who’s going to be boozing it up every night and taking class A drugs and sleeping with groupies and—’
“Yeah, right. Me, Vince and Matty head to toe in a bed and-breakfast bunk bed. We’re bound to be inundated with offers.”
“Well, you never know.”
“I do. I’m certain. The nearest I’m going to get to an illicit sexual encounter is waking up with one of Vince’s sweaty socks stuck to my head. And anyway, why would I want to waste my time with a bunch of greasy teenage groupies when I’ve got a gorgeous girlfriend like you to come home to?”
Good answer.
After a quality moment working out how many coffee beans we can stuff into our amaretto glasses before they overflow, we decide to pay up and take a walk down to the embankment to look at the London Eye. It’s a clear night. The river is dark and oily and still and you can see the wheel’s reflection turning through the water like a giant metal Polo mint. There’s a light breeze coming off the water and I wrap my denim jacket round Alison’s shoulders to keep her warm. It feels good. It feels fresher than it has for days.
“Sorry about earlier,” she says, sitting down next to me on
one of the graffiti-covered benches. “I am pleased about the tour. You must be excited about it.”
“Thanks,” I say, shielding a match from the wind and lighting us both a cigarette. “So why were you being so dismissive about it before?”
Tm not sure. I think it’s because you seemed so full of yourself. You were going on and on about it the whole way up here in the cab, and the thing is you’ve hardly asked me anything about what I’ve been up to in Bruges.”
“I have.”
“No. You haven’t. You asked me how tall Didier was and if he was keen on mints. You didn’t ask me anything about my job or the city or where I was working or anything.”
“Right, you’re right, I’m sorry. Er… how are you finding the job?”
“It’s OK, I suppose.”
“Just OK?”
“Well, it’s much more corporate than I thought it would be. They’re pretty set in their ways. I suggested they redesign their company website to tie in with the product launch but they wouldn’t hear of it. I don’t know, I suppose I thought it would be a bit more creative, that’s all.”
“Right,” I say. “Bummer.”
“And it’s long hours,” she says, picking at some loose flakes of paint on the bench. “They agreed to let me have the afternoon off yesterday but some evenings I haven’t left the office until gone nine.”
“Well, sod that,” I say. “Tell them they’re working you too hard. I mean, you’re in charge, aren’t you? You’re overseeing the whole project.”