Upgrading (40 page)

“Can we talk?”

She looks down at the counter.

“Not here. Ring me tonight if you want. Vinny’s got the number.”

“Jane, I’ve finished with Marion.” It feels good to say it finally.

“Andrew, please, not here.” Something is wrong. I try to catch her eye, hoping that my news just hasn’t sunk in, that she hasn’t understood yet. I reach across the counter and try to touch her hand but she moves back.

“Jane, I’ve left her.” I take a deep breath and say it. “Look, I love you. I want to talk.” She winces and looks away.

“Oh shit, Andrew.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Please, not here, not now. Can we talk about it later?”

“All right, all right.” I try to look her in the face but she is still staring down at the counter. “Just tell me everything’s all right, that you’re pleased and …”

But she doesn’t. Then she looks up, but not at me.

“Are you all right, Jane?” A woman is now standing next to me at the counter.

“Yes, I’m fine. Sorry. Can I just have a few minutes off the floor?”

“Of course, I’ll get Belinda to cover for you,” says the woman, looking at me. I’m still staring at Jane, trying to work out what she is thinking. Silently she leads me across the shop and we go out through the fire exit into a long, dimly lit corridor. Jane stands against the wall opposite me.

“Andrew … oh, Christ, how can I say this?” Finally she looks me in the eye and begins to shake her head very slowly.

“Oh, no, please.” I realize it’s me speaking.

“Well, what did you expect? I thought you might try and ring me the next morning. I don’t know what’s going on. You’re
living
with another woman, for God’s sake—”

“I know but like I said, I had no money—”

“Let me finish.” She stares at the wall next to me. Then she laughs bitterly. “I was going to say I thought it was over but it was never really on, was it?” I can’t answer that. “Was it? Andrew, if you really cared about me you’d have rung me the day after we had that—we
didn’t
have that stupid drink in that stupid bar. You just went back to her. What did you expect me to do?”

“I had to get things sorted out.” No, I don’t really believe that.

“Sorted out?” She laughs again. “All you had to do was to end it with her—if you really wanted to.” She looks at me. Now I’m looking down, trying to avoid her eyes. “I told you I wasn’t the sort of girl who’d be the other woman and I meant it.”

“I know you did.” I take a deep breath. “Jane, look, I’m sorry, I’ve been so stupid.”

“It’s not that,” she says softly. “You’ve been so weak. That’s what got me. Andrew, I really liked you, I think I still do, but you’ve been so pathetically weak.”

I open my mouth to speak but I can’t think of anything to say. Jane is silent. The fire door bursts open again and a woman walks into the corridor and looks slightly startled. She mutters something apologetic and then carries on.

“I told you, it’s too late. Look, this is my last day here. I’m going to South America tomorrow.”

“What?”

“I’m flying to Buenos Aires tomorrow afternoon.”

“Why? Who with?”

“A friend from university. I handed in my notice here the day after we met and they let me go early. Remember we talked about South America in the pub that night? Well, I’m doing it.”

“What about when you get back?”

“Andrew, I’ve told you. Please don’t make this worse. Look, I’ve got to get back to work.” She sniffs back a tear. “Goodbye.” She walks back towards the door and pauses for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she says, without looking round.

The sun is breaking through the clouds as I leave the shop. I begin to walk down Tottenham Court Road towards Oxford Street. As I approach the Tube station a girl comes up to me, looks me in the eye and says something to me in a sad, soft voice. She has long blonde hair and pale blue eyes. But it’s her skin—so clear and so pale you can almost see the veins underneath it. Her eyes open wider, almost in fear, and she speaks to me again.

“What did you say?” I ask. I’ve got no money if she’s begging or looking for business. She seems so vulnerable, so unworldly that I wonder whether perhaps I’ve found someone who’s in worse shit than I am, somebody who has managed with great skill and determination to fuck up their life more badly than I have.

She fixes me with a desperate look and touches my arm.

“I say you want learn English?” I look down. She has a flyer in her hand.

“No,” I tell her. “No, thank you.”

I never went back to Marion’s. Slowly I walked all the way from Tottenham Court Road to Fulham. I’d probably have walked even if I’d had the Tube fare. I rehearsed all the things I should have said to Jane, trying to cap her arguments as if winning these little battles would help me win the war I had so hopelessly lost. At the beginning of Knightsbridge I nearly started back again at one point. Then I stopped at Hyde Park Corner, watched the traffic for a while from the safety of the pavement and carried on walking west again.

By the time I got back to Vinny’s it was gone four o’clock. I sat down on the step to wait. It rained again, I think, and at one point a woman walked past with a pushchair and a Walkman, telling the little boy running alongside her “No! I said no. You’ve already had one—don’t be greedy.”

“Andrew?” says Vinny. I look up at him.

“Hi,” I say, my voice surprising me with its huskiness.

“What you doing here?” he says, apparently only slightly surprised to see me.

“Fuck knows.”

He lets me in and we have a long game of One A Side Indoor Football, silent and intense. Both gasping and gleaming with sweat, we come to a sort of natural full time and Vinny takes a couple of my remaining beers out of the fridge. He chucks me one. I open it on the side of the kitchen table and drink.

“Well?” says Vinny after he has done the same.

“My room still free?”

Vinny smiles. “Yep.”

“Good.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“No.” I take another swig of beer. “Well, not yet, anyway.”

*   *   *

I found a job in a pub round the corner the next day. My mum and dad were horrified when I told them I’d left the media sales business (OK, I couldn’t bring myself to say “sacked”) to go and work in a pub. Later though, my dad was quite impressed when I told him how much I got cash in hand with overtime. I had visions of him trying to find a reference to this in one of his self-help books. (“Don’t be a service industry wuss! Implement multidirectional manual glass-stacking procedures to suit your personal dynamic opening time schedule!”).

The flat’s landlord still had my deposit and I calculated that I could actually make my rent quite easily with my new income—and I didn’t have to start work until ten. Yes, Marion did ring for me—three or four times. Each time she just left a tight-lipped message asking me to call her as if she was chasing up a debt or ringing to enquire why I’d missed a dental appointment. I never returned her calls.

I got into the habit of letting the answer machine click in rather than answer the phone just in case it was Marion again, or Mark or Jonathan or a dozen other people I didn’t want to speak to. But one evening when I was at home between shifts drinking tea and reading the paper in the living room I picked it up without thinking. It was Sami.

“Sami?” I gasped.

“The one and only,” she giggled. “The notorious.”

“What, what? Where are you? Are you all right? I’ve been trying to get hold of you but I didn’t have your—are you all right?” I was cradling the receiver as if the connection might break at any moment.

“All right, all right,” she laughed. “I’m staying with a friend at the moment. I’m OK.”

“Thank God. I rang the office and they wouldn’t give me your number.”

“I bet they wouldn’t—probably Debbie’s attempt to punish
both
of us.” Her voice sounded different—deeper, more self-assured.

“So what happened? You and Wheatley? I can’t believe it.”

She laughed. “Neither can I. Neither could anyone else.”

“How … when?” There were so many questions.

She told me their affair had started about six months ago when he called down to our office for some figures. Sami was working late and she happened to know where the relevant papers were kept so she brought them up to him.

“We spent some time going through them in his office and by that time it was gone ten o’clock so he offered me a lift home. We stopped for a drink in a wine bar nearby,” she said, sounding rather well rehearsed. No doubt she had told this story to quite a few people already. “After that we had a drink or dinner together a few times, very discreetly, of course, and then—”

My mind was racing for more clues. I remembered Sami’s strange reaction—more than simple embarrassment—when we bumped into him that morning in the lobby.

“But he’s such a creep,” I blurted out.

“Don’t laugh, but he’s actually quite charming when you get to know him and quite funny actually.” She giggled at my stunned, sceptical silence. “Really. Anyway, I suppose he made me feel good, special. Suddenly a rich, successful … I don’t know … powerful man takes an interest in you, someone who knows how the world works, someone older and more sophisticated who takes you to expensive restaurants …” Sounding less practised, she drifted off for a second. “Do you see what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said quietly.

“And it wasn’t just sex—it was more than that. We only slept together a few times, at weekends away and things.”

“I think I can understand.”

“Not many people can. My parents don’t know why I left such a good job, they’re always going on at me. I told my sister a while ago and she just couldn’t believe it, kept asking how I could do a thing like that. Then my brother, Jat, overheard us talking about it one evening and the next morning he went round to the office and just blew up. He won’t speak to me but apparently it was awful.”

“So Maria told me.”

Sami said, “Then I realised that you were doing something similar … I mean, going out with an older woman.”

“Sort of,” I said, comparing Ken Wheatley to Marion for a moment but then feeling slightly disgusted at the thought of both of them. “I don’t think I was as much a victim as you were, though. I asked for it.”

“Victim? It takes two to tango.” Sami and her phrases.

“I suppose so. But that’s all over now.”

“You split up?”

“Yep.” Then I said, “Sami, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t believe it was happening at first and and then, well, you had troubles of your own, didn’t you? How could I?”

I swallowed hard. “Oh, fuck, I’m so sorry. If only I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own problems, so—”

“Half asleep at your desk?”

“Well, yeah, I suppose so. Otherwise perhaps I would have noticed something.”

“Andrew, men
never
notice these things.”

I laughed. We made a date to meet for a drink, the first evening out I’d planned for a long time and I hadn’t been so excited about a date since Jane.

One weird thing I noticed was that although my biggest work concerns were checking that we weren’t running out of clean glasses during opening times and my greatest challenge was trying to understand how the till worked, I was actually enjoying the experience of working again.

When I was with Marion at first I thought that if a day off work was enjoyable and a week off was even nicer then, by simple arithmetic, a lifetime off must be better still. Every day a holiday! Just what I always wanted. Like winning the Lottery.

But it’s not. It’s like being unemployed except that you’re not even aiming towards something. You fill your days but in the same way you kill time on a rainy Sunday afternoon. “A task fills the time allocated to it” or something like that, says Parkinson’s Law, according to what we learnt at college and it’s amazing how long you can spin out going to the shop to buy a newspaper if you work at it.

While I was serving one evening some men in suits came in shouting about bonuses and it occurred to me that you can place the various different ways you can get money on a sort of ladder of merit. You can earn it (which is pretty high up), you can make it yourself (also quite high up—unless, perhaps, you’re poor, sad Errin’s dad), you can earn cash in hand (like I’m doing now and that is slightly lower down), you can inherit it (quite far down), you can steal it (further down) or you can beg for it (just a bit higher up, perhaps?).

I’d probably put Marion, a serial alimony beneficiary, quite low down and the same with Jonathan the pimp, Viv the hooker and Mark the rent boy. I don’t quite know where Channing, Charles and Victoria and lots of the other people I met would come because I still don’t know how they made their millions but I’d put the scheming, desperate little shit I became somewhere beneath all of them. I was right when I was at Errin’s that night—the way you get money can bugger you up. Like I said: make it and it can turn you mean and bitter, inherit and it can make you soft and decadent. Beg it from someone you’re living off, leaching off, and it makes you both.