The industrial cheese had set solid like plastic, and in sudden disgust Emma pushed it away and reached into her bag, pulling out an expensive new black leather notebook with a stubby fountain pen clipped to the cover. Turning to a fresh new page of creamy white paper, she quickly began to write.
Nachos
It was the nachos that did it
.The steaming variegated mess like the mess of her life
Summing up all that was wrong
With
Her
Life
.‘Time for change’ comes the voice from the street
.Outside on the Kentish Town Road
There is laughter
But here, in the smoky attic room
There are only
The Nachos
.Cheese, like life, has become
Hard and
Cold
Like Plastic
And there is no laughter in the high room
.
Emma stopped writing, then looked away and stared at the ceiling, as if giving someone a chance to hide. She looked back at the page in the hope of being surprised by the brilliance of what was there.
She shuddered and gave a long groan, then laughed, shaking her head as she methodically scratched out each line, cross-hatching on top of this until each word was obliterated. Soon there was so much ink that it had soaked through the paper. She turned back a page to where the blots had seeped through and glanced at what was written there.
Edinburgh morning, 4 a.m.
We lie in the single bed and talk about the
Future, make our guesses
and as he speaks I look at him, think
‘Handsome’, stupid word, and think
‘might this be it? The elusive thing?’
Blackbirds sing outside and the
Sunlight warms the curtains …
Once more she shuddered, as if peeking beneath a bandage, and snapped the notebook shut. Good God, ‘the elusive thing’. She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.
Putting the notebook away, she reached for yesterday’s
Sunday Mirror
instead and began to eat the nachos, the elusive nachos, surprised all over again at how very comforting very bad food can be.
Ian was in the doorway. ‘That guy’s here again.’
‘What guy?’
‘Your friend, the handsome one. He’s got some girl with him.’ And immediately Emma knew which guy Ian was talking about.
She watched them from the kitchen, nose pressed against the greasy glass of the circular window as they slumped insolently in a central booth, sipping gaudy drinks and laughing at the menu. The girl was long and slim with pale skin, black eye make-up and black, black hair, cut short and expensively asymmetrical, her long legs in sheer black leggings and high-ankled boots. Both a little drunk, they were behaving in that self-consciously wild and reckless way that people slip into when they know they’re being watched: pop-video behaviour, and Emma thought how satisfying it would be to stride out onto the restaurant floor and cosh them both with tightly packed burritos-of-the-day.
Two big hands draped on her shoulders. ‘Schhhhhwing,’ said Ian, resting his chin on her head. ‘Who is she?’
‘No idea.’ Emma rubbed at the mark her nose had made on the window. ‘I lose track.’
‘She’s a new one then.’
‘Dexter has a very short attention span. Like a baby. Or a monkey. You need to dangle something shiny in front of him.’ That’s what this girl is, she thought: something shiny.
‘So do you think it’s true what they say? About girls liking bastards.’
‘He’s not a bastard. He’s an idiot.’
‘Do girls like idiots then?’
Dexter had stuck his cocktail umbrella behind his ear now, the girl collapsing into enchanted laughter at the genius of it.
‘Certainly seems that way,’ said Emma. What was it, she wondered, this need to brandish his shiny new metropolitan life at her? As soon as she’d met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her. Even so this would be the third girlfriend, lover, whatever, that she had met in the last nine months, Dexter presenting them up to her like a dog with a fat pigeon in his mouth. Was it some kind of sick revenge for something? Because she got a better degree than him? Didn’t he know what this was doing to her, sat at table nine with their groins jammed in each other’s faces?
‘Can’t you go, Ian? It’s your section.’
‘He asked for you.’
She sighed, wiped her hands on her apron, removed the baseball cap from her head to minimise the shame and pushed the swing door open.
‘So – do you want to hear the specials or what?’
Dexter stood up quickly, untangling himself from the girl’s long limbs, and threw his arms around his old, old friend. ‘Hey there, how are you, Em? Big hug!’ Since starting to work in the TV industry he had developed a mania for hugging, or for Big Hugging. The company of TV presenters had rubbed off on him, and he spoke to her now less like an old friend, more like our next very special guest.
‘Emma, this—’ He placed one hand on the girl’s bare, bony shoulder, forming a chain between them. ‘This is Naomi, pronounced Gnome-y.’
‘Hello, Gnome-y,’ smiled Emma. Naomi smiled back, the drinking straw nipped tight between white teeth.
‘Hey, come and join us for a margarita!’ Boozy and sentimental, he tugged on Emma’s hand.
‘Can’t, Dex, I’m working.’
‘Come on, five minutes. I want to buy you a drunk. A
drink!
I mean a drink.’
Ian joined them now, his notebook poised. ‘So shall I get you guys something to eat?’ he asked convivially.
The girl wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t
think
so!’
‘Dexter, you’ve met Ian, haven’t you?’ said Emma quickly.
‘No, no, I haven’t,’ said Dexter. ‘Yes, several times,’ said Ian, and there was a moment of silence as they stood there, the staff and the customers.
‘So, Ian, can we get two, no, three of the “Remember the Alamo” margaritas. Two or three? Em, are you joining us?’
‘Dexter, I told you. I’m working.’
‘Okay, in that case, do you know what? We’ll leave it then. Just the bill, please, um …’ Ian left and Dexter beckoned to Emma and in a low voice said, ‘Hey, look, is there any way I can, you know …’
‘What?’
‘Give you the money for the drinks.’
Emma stared blankly. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What I mean is, is there any way I can, you know,
tip
you?’
‘Tip me?’
‘Exactly. Tip you.’
‘Why?’
‘No reason, Em,’ said Dex. ‘I just really, really want to tip you,’ and Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away.
On Primrose Hill, Dexter slept in the evening sun, shirt unbuttoned, hands beneath his head, a half-empty bottle of grocer’s white wine warming by his side as he slipped from the hangover of the afternoon into drunkenness again. The parched yellow grass of the hill was crowded with young professional people, many straight from their offices, talking and laughing as three different stereos competed with each other, and Dexter lay in the centre of it all and dreamt about television.
The idea of being a professional photographer had been abandoned
without much of a fight. He knew that he was a decent amateur, probably always would be, but to become exceptional, a Cartier-Bresson, a Capa or a Brandt, would require toil, rejection and struggle, and he wasn’t sure if struggle suited him. Television, on the other hand, television wanted him right now. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Growing up there had always been a television in the home, but there was something a little unwholesome about watching the thing. Now, in the last nine months it had suddenly come to dominate his life. He was a convert, and with the passion of the new recruit he found himself getting quite emotional about the medium, as if he had finally found a spiritual home.
And no, it didn’t have the arty gleam of photography or the credibility of reporting from a war zone, but TV mattered, TV was the future. Democracy in action, it touched people’s lives in the most immediate way, shaped opinions, provoked and entertained and engaged far more effectively than all those books that no-one read or plays that no-one went to see. Emma could say what she liked about the Tories (Dexter was no fan either, though more for reasons of style than principle) but they had certainly shaken up the media. Until recently, broadcasting had seemed stuffy, worthy and dull; heavily unionised, grey and bureaucratic, full of bearded lifers and do-gooders and old dears pushing tea-trolleys; a sort of showbiz branch of the Civil Service. Redlight Productions, on the other hand, was part of the boom of new, youthful, privately owned independent companies wresting the means of production away from those fusty old Reithian dinosaurs. There was money in the media; the fact sang out from the primary-coloured open-plan offices with their state-of-the-art computer systems and generous communal fridges.
His rise through this world had been meteoric. The woman he had met on a train in India with the glossy black bob and tiny spectacles had given him his first job as a runner, then a researcher, and now he was Assistant Producer, Asst Prod, on
UP4IT
, a weekend magazine programme that mixed live music
and outrageous stand-up with reports on issues that ‘really affect young people today’: STDs, drugs, dance music, drugs, police brutality, drugs. Dexter produced hyperactive little films of grim housing estates shot from crazy angles through fish-eye lenses, the clouds speeded up to a soundtrack of acid house. There was even talk of putting him in front of the cameras in the next series. He was excelling, he was flying and there seemed to be every possibility that he might make his parents proud.
‘I work in TV’; just saying it gave him satisfaction. He liked striding down Berwick Street to an edit-suite with a jiffy bag of videotapes, nodding at people just like him. He liked the sushi platters and the launch parties, he liked drinking from water coolers and ordering couriers and saying things like ‘we’ve got to lose six seconds’. Secretly, he liked the fact that it was one of the better-looking industries, and one that valued youth. No chance, in this brave new world of TV, of walking into a conference room to find a group of sixty-two-year-olds brainstorming. What happened to TV people when they reached a certain age? Where did they go? Never mind, it suited him, as did the preponderance of young women like Naomi: hard, ambitious, metropolitan. In rare moments of self-doubt, Dexter had once worried that a lack of intellect might hold him back in life, but here was a job where confidence, energy, perhaps even a certain arrogance were what mattered, all qualities that lay within his grasp. Yes, you had to be smart, but not Emma-smart. Just politic, shrewd, ambitious.
He loved his new flat in nearby Belsize Park, all dark wood and gunmetal, and he loved London, spread out vast and hazy before him on this St Swithin’s Day, and he wanted to share all this excitement with Emma, introduce her to new possibilities, new experiences, new social circles; to make her life more like his own. Who knows, perhaps Naomi and Emma might even become friends.
Soothed by these thoughts, and on the verge of sleep, he
was woken by a shadow across his face. He opened one eye, squinting up.
‘Hello, beautiful.’
Emma kicked him sharply in the hip.
‘Ow!’
‘Don’t you ever,
ever
do that again!’
‘Do what?’
‘You know what! Like I’m in a zoo, you poking me with a stick, laughing—’
‘I wasn’t laughing at you!’
‘I watched you, sat straddling your girlfriend, chuckling away—’
‘She isn’t my girlfriend, and we were laughing at the menu—’
‘You were laughing at where I work.’
‘So? You do!’
‘Yes, because I
work
there. I’m laughing in the face of adversity, you’re just laughing in my face!’
‘Em, I would never, ever—’
‘That’s what it feels like.’
‘Well I apologise.’
‘Good.’ She folded her legs beneath her and sat next to him. ‘Now do your shirt up and pass me the bottle.’
‘And she really isn’t my girlfriend.’ He fastened three low shirt buttons, waiting for her to take the bait. When she didn’t, he prodded again. ‘We’re just sleeping together every now and then, that’s all.’
As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavoured to harden herself to Dexter’s indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head. These days she barely even flinched. ‘That’s nice for you both, I’m sure.’ She poured wine into a plastic cup. ‘So if she’s not your girlfriend, what do I call her?’
‘I don’t know. “Lover”?’
‘Doesn’t that imply affection?’
‘How about “conquest”?’ he grinned. ‘Can I say “conquest” these days?’
‘Or “victim”. I like “victim”.’ Emma lay back suddenly and squeezed her fingers awkwardly into the pockets of her jeans. ‘You can have that back ’n’ all.’ She tossed a tightly wadded ten-pound note onto his chest.
‘No way.’
‘Yes way.’
‘That’s yours!’
‘Dexter, listen to me. You don’t tip friends.’
‘It’s not a tip, it’s a gift.’
‘And cash is not a gift. If you want to buy me something, that’s very nice, but not cash. It’s embarrassing.’
He sighed, and stuffed the money back into his pocket. ‘I apologise. Again.’
‘Fine,’ she said, and lay down beside him. ‘Go on then. Tell me all about it.’
Grinning, he raised himself up on his elbows. ‘So we were having this wrap party at the weekend—’
Wrap party
, she thought. He has become someone who goes to
wrap parties
.
‘—and I’d seen her around at the office so I went over to say hi, hello, welcome to the team, very formal, hand outstretched, and she smiled up at me, winked, put her hand on the back of my head and pulled me towards her and she—’ He lowered his voice to a thrilled whisper. ‘—kissed me, right?’