One Day (23 page)

At the drinks afterwards, own-brand cola flows like wine, and there are also five bottles of sparkling perry to share among the adults. Ian sits in a corner of the sports hall with a plate of mini kievs and a plastic cup of Beecham’s Powders that he has brought to the party specially, and he massages his sinuses, smiles and waits patiently as Emma soaks up the praise. ‘Good enough for the West End!’ someone says, somewhat unrealistically, and she doesn’t even mind when Rodney Chance, her Fagin, boozy on spiked Panda Pops, tells her that she’s ‘pretty fit for a teacher’. Mr Godalming (‘please, call me Phil’) congratulates her while Fiona, ruddy-cheeked like a farmer’s wife, looks on, bored and bad tempered. ‘We should talk, in September, about your future here,’ says Phil, leaning in and kissing her goodbye, causing
some of the kids, and some of the staff, to make a ‘whoooo’ noise.

Unlike most showbusiness parties it’s all over by nine forty-five, and instead of a stretch limo, Emma and Ian take the 55, the 19 and the Piccadilly Line home. ‘I’m so proud of you—’ says Ian, his head resting against hers ‘—but I think it’s settled on my lungs.’

As soon as she enters the flat she can smell the flowers. The vast bouquet of red roses lolls in a casserole on the kitchen table.

‘Oh my God, Ian, they’re beautiful.’

‘Not from me,’ he mumbles.

‘Oh. Who then?’

‘Golden Boy, I expect. They came this morning. Completely over the top if you ask me. I’m going to have a hot bath. See if I can shift it.’

She removes her coat and opens the small card. ‘Apologies for sulking. Hope it goes well tonight. Much love Dx’. That’s all. She reads it twice, looks at her watch, and quickly turns on the TV to watch Dexter’s big break.

Forty-five minutes later, as the final credits roll, she frowns and tries to make sense of what she has just seen. She doesn’t know much about television, but she is pretty sure that Dexter hasn’t shone. He has looked shaky, actually frightened sometimes. Fluffing lines, looking at the wrong camera, he has seemed amateurish and inept and as if sensing his unease the people he has interviewed – the rapper on tour, the four cocky young Mancunians – have responded with disdain or sarcasm. The studio audience glares too, like surly teenagers at a pantomime, arms crossed high on their chests. For the first time since she met him he appears to be making an effort. Might he be, well, drunk? She doesn’t know much about the media, but she can recognise a car crashing. By the time the last band plays out her hand has come to cover her face, and she knows enough about TV to know this is not ideal. There’s a lot of irony about these days, but surely not to the extent that booing is good.

She turns the TV off. From the bathroom comes the sound of Ian honking into a flannel. She closes the door and picks up the phone, moulding her mouth into a congratulatory smile and in an empty flat in Belsize Park the answering machine picks up. ‘So – talk to me!’ says Dexter, and Emma goes into her act. ‘Hey you! Hiya! I know you’re at the party so just wanted to say, well first of all, thank you for the flowers. So beautiful, Dex, you shouldn’t have. But mainly – Well! Done! You! You were fantastic, just really relaxed and funny, I thought it was fantastic, just a really, really, great, great show, really.’ She hesitates: don’t say ‘really’. If you say ‘really’ too often it sounds like ‘not-really’. She continues. ‘I’m still not sure about that t-shirt-under-suit-jacket-thing, and it’s always refreshing to see women dancing in cages, but Dexter, apart from that, it was just excellent. Really. I’m really so
proud
of you, Dex. In case you’re interested,
Oliver!
went alright too.’

She senses her own performance is losing conviction now, and decides to bring it to a close.

‘So. There you go. We’ve both got something to celebrate! Thanks again for the roses. Have a good night. Let’s talk tomorrow. I’m seeing you Tuesday, is that right? And well done, you. Seriously. Well done you. Bye.’

At the party afterwards Dexter stands alone at the bar, arms crossed, shoulders hunched. People cross to congratulate him but no-one lingers long and the pats on the shoulder have come to feel like consolation or, at best, well done on missing that penalty. He has continued to drink steadily but the champagne seems stale in his mouth and nothing seems to lift the sense of disappointment, anti-climax, creeping shame.

‘Wahey,’ says Suki Meadows in a contemplative mood. Once the co-star, now clearly the star, she sits next to him. ‘Look at you, all mean and moody.’

‘Hey, Suki.’

‘So! That went well, I thought!’

Dexter is unconvinced but they chink glasses just the same. ‘Sorry about that … booze thing. I owe you an apology.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘It was just something to loosen me up, you know.’

‘Still, we should talk about it. Some other time.’

‘Okay.’

‘Because I’m not going out there again with you off your tits, Dex.’

‘I know. You won’t. And I’ll make it up to you.’

She leans her shoulder against his, and puts her chin on his shoulder. ‘Next week?’

‘Next week?’

‘Buy me dinner. Somewhere expensive, mind. Next Tuesday.’

Her forehead is touching his now, her hand on his thigh. He was meant to be having dinner with Emma on Tuesday, but knows that he can always cancel Emma, she won’t mind. ‘Okay. Next Tuesday.’

‘Can’t wait.’ She pinches his thigh. ‘So. You gonna cheer up now?’

‘I’ll try.’

Suki Meadows leans over and kisses his cheek, then puts her mouth very, very close to his ear.

‘NOW COME AND SAY HELLO TO MY MUUUUUUM!’

Walthamstow and Soho

The words glowed in bilious green on the word-processor’s screen: the product of a whole morning’s work. She sat at the tiny school desk in the tiny back room of the tiny new flat, read the words, then read them again while behind her the immersion heater gurgled in derision.

At weekends, or in the evenings if she could find the energy, Emma wrote. She had made a start on two novels (one set in a gulag, the other in a post-apocalyptic future), a children’s picture book, with her own illustrations, about a giraffe with a short neck, a gritty, angry TV drama about social workers called ‘Tough Shit’, a fringe play about the complex emotional lives of twenty-somethings, a fantasy novel for teenagers featuring evil robot teachers, a stream-of-consciousness radio play about
a dying Suffragette, a comic strip and a sonnet. None had been completed, not even the fourteen lines of sonnet.

These words on the screen represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven years old, and later lots of Chandler and James M. Cain too. There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same – you couldn’t just soak it up then squeeze it out again. She found herself unable to think of a name for her detective, let alone a cohesive original plot, and even her pseudonym was poor: Emma T. Wilde? She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives
trying
things. She had tried being in a band, writing plays and children’s books, she had tried acting and getting a job in publishing. Perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish. She used the computer’s word-count feature. Thirty-five words, including the title page and her rotten pseudonym. Emma groaned, released the hydraulic lever on the side of her office chair and sank a little closer to the carpet.

There was a knock on the plywood door. ‘How are things in the Anne Frank wing?’

That line again. For Ian, a joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hands like a cheap umbrella. When they had first started seeing each other, approximately ninety per cent of what Ian said came under the heading of ‘humour’ in that it involved a pun, a funny voice, some comic intent. Over time she had hoped to get this down to forty per cent, forty being a workable allowance, but nearly two years later the figure stood at seventy-five, and domestic life continued against this tinnitus of mirth. Was it really possible for someone to be ‘on’ for the best part of two years? She had got rid of his black bedsheets, the beer mats, secretly culled his underpants and there were fewer of his
famous ‘Summer Roasts’, but even so she was reaching the limits of how much it’s possible to change a man.

‘Nice cup of tea for the lady?’ he said, in the voice of a cockney char.

‘No thanks, love.’

‘Eggy bread?’ Scottish now. ‘Can ae do you some eggy bread, ma wee snootch?’

Snootch was a recent development. When pressed to justify himself, Ian had explained that it was because she was just so snootchy, so very, very snootch. There’d been a suggestion that she might reciprocate by calling him skootch; skootch and snootch, snootchy and skootchy, but it hadn’t stuck.

‘… wee slice of eggy bread? Line your stomach for tonight?’

Tonight
. There it was. Often when Ian was working through his dialects it was because he had something on his mind that couldn’t be said in a natural voice.

‘Big night, tonight. Out on the town with Mike TV.’

She decided to ignore the remark, but he wasn’t making it easy. His chin resting on her head, he read the words on the screen.

‘Portrait in Crimson…
’

She covered the screen with her hand. ‘Don’t read over my shoulder, please.’

‘Emma T. Wilde. Who’s Emma T. Wilde?’

‘My pseudonym. Ian—’

‘You know what the T stands for?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Terrific. Tremendous.’

‘Tired, as in sick and—’

‘If you ever want me to read it—’

‘Why would you want to read it? It’s crap.’

‘Nothing you do is crap.’

‘Well this is.’ Twisting her head away, she clicked the monitor off and without turning round she knew he’d be doing his hangdog look. All too often this was how she found herself with
Ian, switching back and forth between irritation and remorse. ‘Sorry!’ she said, taking his hand by the fingers and shaking it.

He kissed the top of her head, then spoke into her hair. ‘You know what I think it stands for? “The” as in “The Bollocks”. Emma T. B. Wilde.’

With that, he left; a classic technique, compliment and run. Keen not to cave in straightaway, Emma pushed the door to, turned the monitor back on, read the words there, shuddered visibly, closed the file and dragged it to the icon of the wastebasket. An electronic crumpling noise, the sound of writing.

The squeal of the smoke alarm indicated that Ian was cooking. She stood and followed the smell of burning butter down the hall into the kitchen/diner; not a separate room, just the greasiest quarter of the living room of the flat that they had bought together. Emma had been unsure about buying; it felt like the kind of place that the police get called to, she said, but Ian had worn her down. It was crazy to rent, they saw each other most nights anyway, it was near her school, a foot on the ladder etc. and so they had scraped together the deposit and bought some books on interior decoration, including one that told you how to paint plywood so that it looked like fine Italian marble. There had been inspirational talk of putting the fireplace back in, of bookshelves and fitted cupboards and storage solutions. Exposed floorboards! Ian would hire a sander and expose the floorboards as law demanded. On a wet Saturday in February they had lifted the carpet, peered despondently underneath at the mess of mouldering chipboard, disintegrating underlay and old newspapers, then guiltily nailed it all back in place as if disposing of a corpse. There was something unpersuasive and impermanent about these attempts at home-making, as if they were children building a den, and despite the fresh paint, the prints on the walls, the new furniture, the flat retained its shabby, temporary air.

Now Ian stood in the kitchenette in a shaft of smoky sunlight with his broad back towards her. Emma watched him from the doorway, taking in the familiar old grey t-shirt with the holes
in, an inch of his underpants visible above his track-suit bottoms, his ‘tracky botts’. She could see the words Calvin Klein against the brown hair on the small of his back and it occurred to her that this was probably not at all what Calvin Klein had in mind.

She spoke to break the silence. ‘Isn’t that getting a bit burnt?’

‘Not burnt,
crispy.’

‘I say burnt, you say crispy.’

‘Let’s call the whole thing off!’

Silence.

‘I can see the top of your underpants,’ she said.

‘Yes, that’s deliberate.’ Lisping, effeminate voice. ‘It’s called fashion, sweetheart.’

‘Well it’s certainly very provocative.’

Nothing, just the sound of food burning.

But it was Ian’s turn to cave this time. ‘So. Where’s Alpha Boy taking you then?’ he said, without turning round.

‘Somewhere in Soho, I don’t know.’ In fact she did know, but the restaurant’s name was a recent by-word for modish, metropolitan dining and she didn’t want to make matters worse. ‘Ian, if you don’t want me to go tonight—’

‘No, you go, enjoy yourself—’

‘Or if you want to come with us?—’

‘What, Harry and Sally and me? Oh, I don’t think so, do you?’

‘You’d be very welcome.’

‘The two of you bantering and talking over me all night—’

‘We don’t do that—’

‘You did last time!’

‘No, we didn’t!’

‘You’re sure you don’t want some eggy bread?’