The Trouble with Henry and Zoe (21 page)

Sunni smiles, shrugs. ‘I’m an atheist, but I still think it should be Christmas.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ says Charles.

‘Or,’ I say, ‘how about Xenophobe?’

Claire stands up. ‘Zoe, can I have a word?’

Her office is not the book-lined, oak-panelled, leather-upholstered chamber one might expect of a senior editorial director. It’s plain, austere and the stuffing is hanging out of her
chair. But she does keep a bottle of Scotch in her bottom drawer; whether this is a nod to convention or a medical necessity, no one knows, but it’s no secret and now it’s on the
table.

‘Better?’

‘It helps,’ I say, raising my glass.

I could tell Claire that today is the day I first met my dead boyfriend, but I think that would be weak. And anyway, it’s not the reason I unloaded on Charles. ‘Sorry about that,
Claire. I’ve got things on my mind. No excuse, I know, but . . .’

‘P is for Prick,’ says Claire, smiling.

‘And Professionalism, I suppose.’

‘Oh dear,’ says Claire. ‘We seem to have our roles reversed. Are you okay?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘Sure?’

I nod. ‘I’m sure. I . . . I wasn’t going to do this for a few weeks but, now as we’re here . . .’

‘Darling?’

‘R is for Resignation,’ I say.

‘Oh, Zoe, darling.’ Claire gets up from her chair, puts her arms around me and kisses my cheek. ‘Tell me, tell me all about it.’

And I do, I tell her about the day I met Alex, the night I met Henry, the coffee on Albert Bridge and Scrabble in the Duck and Cover.

When it becomes apparent that this is going to be more involved than a five-minute chat, Claire pops out to confirm with Charles that C is for Christmas, X is for Xylophone, and S is for shove
it up your bum if you don’t bloody well like it. When she returns two minutes later, my boss has acquired a plate of muffins. I tell her about the house, the mortgage, the fight over the
wallpaper, the creaky floorboard and my one-way ticket to Thailand. By the time I get to the part where I accused our author of being a xenophobe, we’ve finished the muffins, the whisky and
most of a box of tissues.

Everything is temporary.

Temporary teeth, temporary boyfriend.

Jenny’s implants have integrated perfectly, and today I am chopping down her remaining thirteen teeth, grinding them into pegs that, like their titanium counterparts, will hold her new
porcelain crowns. It’s the longest day in the process, removing the crowns from her last appointment, cleaning the implants, taking a full mouth impression and then fitting a complete
mouthful of temporary crowns that she will wear while her new teeth are prepared in the lab.

Jenny cried when she saw her mouth full of crude, white temporary teeth, and I had to calm her down so I could remind her that we still had another appointment to go. Normally, I would colour
match the crowns to her existing teeth, but this isn’t an issue for Jenny – there are no teeth left.

‘Is a bright white, you know. I tell you, white smile.’

‘Look at this.’ I show Jenny a row of mounted veneers, ranging from Hollywood white to a more subdued shade, still white but tinged with yellow – what a paint company might
call Vanilla Cream, or some such.

Jenny rests an arthritic finger on the Hollywood incisor.

‘It will look wrong,’ I tell her.

‘White. Look white.’

‘When you get older, Jenny, your teeth darken naturally. Something more like this’ – I slide her finger along the row of veneers – ‘will look a lot more
natural.’

Jenny slides her finger all the way back to Hollywood. And, well, it’s her money, her teeth, her smile.

‘Quite right,’ I tell her.

‘Hah, joke! Quite white, innit. Quite white, haha!’

And I laugh right along, because, really, who the hell am I, jilter, outcast, idiot, to tell anyone how to live their life.

Since the cake tasting and our pledge of temporary monogamy, Zoe and I have seen considerably more of each other. She drops in on Fridays now, a change of clothes in her backpack, and stays
until early Sunday evening. We watch films, take long walks, play games in the Duck and Cover. We don’t leave each other’s side for forty-eight hours, making me feel her imminent
departure more keenly than ever. Perhaps that explains my compulsion to invite her out for what you might call conventional dates – cinema, restaurant, theatre – despite the fact I know
she will refuse. Zoe is saving for her travels and watching every penny, but at the same time she is too . . . proud, I suppose, to let me foot the bill. I tried again on Sunday.

‘Let’s go out. Sunday dinner and a bottle of wine.’

‘I don’t get paid until next week.’

‘My treat.’

‘I don’t want treating, it makes me feel bad.’

‘I’d rather pay for both than not go. I’m being selfish, see, so it’s okay. You’d be indulging me.’

‘Can’t we just . . . hang out?’

‘All we do is “hang out”. Aren’t you bored?’

Stupid thing to say.

‘Why? Are you?’ An edge to Zoe’s voice.

‘You know that’s not what I mean. Let me take you out.’

Zoe sighed. ‘It’s sweet of you, honestly, but . . . I’d feel better if you didn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, okay. Look, I’m sorry, I . . . it’s just important to me.’

I should have left it there. ‘What about me, about what’s important to me?’

‘I don’t know, Henry. How could I know? I don’t know anything about you.’

‘You know where I live. Which is more than I can say about you.’

‘Don’t. Please . . . can’t we just enjoy this while it . . .’

‘What? While it lasts?’

Zoe sighs, the set of her eyebrows appearing to say:
Well, yes, that’s the situation. Thanks for spelling it out.

‘Zoe, that’s what I’m trying to do. To enjoy it. But . . .’

‘But what?’

‘I don’t want us to be nothing more than . . .’

Zoe looked at me intently; as if she knew exactly what I meant (of course she knew) but was curious to see whether I was stupid enough to say it out loud. There’s a phrase people use that
describes our relationship very well, and it’s been bouncing around the inside of my head for weeks. Maybe I’d had too much wine, not enough sleep, or seen too many rotten teeth, but
the words had made their way to the tip of my tongue, and the taste of them was nauseating.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

Zoe slid towards me and rested her head on my shoulder. I don’t know if it was an apology or forgiveness, but I let the matter drop and we moved quietly through the rest of the day. We
have two months left, and even if I could change that fact, I don’t know that I should. Zoe clearly has baggage and it’s obvious this trip is important to her. Maybe I should be glad
she’s going before she has a chance to find out who I really am. ‘See you around,’ we said when Zoe left in the evening, but as usual nothing was arranged.

The routine is that one or the other of us will call on Friday afternoon, and then Zoe will arrive a few hours later with two pairs of knickers in her backpack. I’m holding out, waiting to
see if Zoe will take the initiative, but she is better at this game than I am, and I’m losing my nerve.

‘She call an a message yet?’ asks Jenny, as I check my phone for the seventh time.

‘Not yet.’

‘Maybe got other man, haha.’

‘You’re a laugh a minute today, Jenny.’

‘Good joke though, innit.’

‘Well, I hope so, otherwise I’ve just wasted twenty-eight quid on a pair of ladies’ flip-flops.’

It’s six o’clock when I stagger out of Claire’s office; the way my head feels it should be dark, but it’s a bright July evening and I have to shield my
phone from the sun before I can read the screen. I have one message from Henry:

I feel like I’m teetering on an emotional precipice and the last thing I need is a surprise. I don’t know if I can handle any affection either, for that matter. All of a sudden it
feels like it would be wrong – disrespectful, maybe – to cuddle up with Henry on the anniversary of the day I met Alex. I type out a short reply, the grey characters allowing me to
project a mood and humour I couldn’t pull off in the flesh:

I’m too drunk to ride my bike, but it’s a clear evening and I am in no hurry to be back at the house. There was mail for Alex again yesterday, and if there’s more tonight I
might just tear my hair out. I send a kiss back to Henry, turn my phone to silent and start walking. I walk through Soho, past the Friday night drinkers, spilled onto the pavements, laughing,
shouting, flirting. I cut through quiet exclusive streets, past giant houses and walled gardens until I reach Albert Bridge. There is no one selling coffee at this time of day, and the thousand
lightbulbs are cold and will remain so for a few hours yet. This is city time, and the bridge is heavy with traffic, noise and exhaust fumes. If I came here for a small slice of recent nostalgia
– and maybe I did – then I’m more of a fool than I give myself credit for.

It takes a little over three hours to walk home, and if I’d thought it through I would have worn different shoes. I’m sweaty, my feet hurt, and my hair stinks. I’ve gone in and
out of hunger, and all I need now is a long bath and twelve hours’ sleep. There’s no mail for Alex, and when I draw level with his picture on the stairs, I blow him a kiss and do my
best version of his patented head wobble. I never could do it, and looking at my reflection superimposed over the picture I first laugh and then cry. But it’s okay, it feels right and it
feels somehow good. ‘Hey, babes,’ I whisper, and then I touch my finger to his face and go to run a bath.

There’s half a bottle of wine in the fridge, so while the bath runs I pour most of it into a glass and take it upstairs with a trio of tea lights and a box of matches. The bath is full but
I immediately sense something is wrong. The temperature in the room is wrong, there is no steam on the mirror, no steam above the water. And when I put my arm into the bath, the water is as cold as
my chardonnay.

The pig of a boiler is unresponsive. I press buttons, fiddle with the controls, consult the manual. But nothing happens. And the absurdity of it makes me laugh again; today of all days, my
boiler has died. I finish my wine in one gulp, pull a book down from the shelf and take myself to bed.

I spend Saturday afternoon cleaning Alex’s old mountain bike. I wish it were a more unpleasant job, but the truth is Al’s bike is disappointingly free from mud,
grass, sand and deer shit. We bought our bikes as Christmas presents for each other almost two years ago. And we were going to cover so many miles; exploring the green spaces and hidden paths of
our city, maybe even ride to Brighton. So much for ‘going to’; we took the bikes out that first weekend and maybe two or three times since, but we never got to Brighton, we didn’t
even get out of South London. We even bought a backpack that doubled as a picnic hamper, but we never used it.

On eBay, a two-year-old Kona Fire Mountain can fetch around £200.

Which is a long way short of the £1,850 it’s going to take to replace the pig of a boiler, which, the plumber confirmed, is beyond repair. ‘Lucky it didn’t explode and
take the ’ole ’ouse wiv it, luv.’

It crossed my mind to simply put up with it; that ten weeks of cold showers might toughen me up for my travels. But I figure there’s plenty of time for that on the actual travels, which is
kind of the point, after all. And besides, I can hardly rent the place out with a broken boiler.

I called Winston about five minutes after the plumber left and told him I’ll take any additional shifts going; he asked if I could start at four tonight instead of seven, so that’s
another eighteen pounds off the deficit.

Going by recently completed auctions, a pair of Technics 1210 MK3 decks can fetch up to £675.

You can get another £230 for a matching four-channel mixer.

A Marantz amplifier and a pair of Dali Zensor speakers could go for £200 and £100 respectively. But they could go for a lot less.

Since losing his records in Thailand, Alex had begun the process of rebuilding his collection, but even so he had fewer than a hundred pieces of round black plastic, which might, if I’m
lucky, fetch £50. Perhaps, if I were to sell the discs one by one, or drag them around specialist shops, I could sell them for a few hundred pounds, but I don’t think I have the will or
the energy.

A set of vintage Pioneer headphones might have gone for another £70 to £100, but Alex’s were smashed when he was struck by a car last October. The scanner he bought but never
used might fetch ten quid, but there’s so much guilt attached to it, it’s not worth the headache.

And finally, an Xbox 360 in good condition with seven games might bring in £75.

All in, on a good day, that’s £1,530, and still a few hundred quid short of a new boiler plus installation.

A Leica M3 in good working condition can go for anywhere north of £500, maybe as much as the £800 Alex originally paid for it. I’d be back on track with a few hundred quid
spare to spend on bikinis, food and maybe a couple of cinema tickets. I feel no conflict whatsoever about selling Alex’s bike, decks, discs and so on; I’ll never use them, plus we
should have fixed the damn boiler while he was still around to take hot showers. So it’s poor old Al’s responsibility as much as mine. More than this, though, I feel lighter, as if
these items, even stored out of sight in the shed, have been weighing me down. But I can’t let go of the camera. I love that Alex bought it on a stupid drunken impulse, and I’m sad that
he never used it as much as he should. If I keep anything, I’ll keep this.