I forced my eyes open and found the phone, looked at it.
It took a moment to register the name. Or not the name. But why the name.
SARAH.
What time was it? Seven? Eight?
I couldn’t. Not now. I’m not prepared. I needed coffee, and maybe a series of notes and things to say that would make me seem diffident and unaffected. I pressed divert and stared at the ceiling. That’d send her a message, I thought. Let her know she can’t rely on me to just answer whenever she …
It was buzzing again. I held it up.
Maybe something’s happened. Maybe Gary’s dumped her. Maybe I should be there for her at this time of need. Show her how sensitive and brilliant I can be.
ACCEPT.
‘Hello?’
Wow, my voice was low.
‘Jase?’
‘Hey.’
And croaky. Low and croaky.
‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’
She didn’t sound upset. She sounded cold. Stern. She sounded like Sarah.
I realised she probably didn’t know I knew.
Okay, I decided. Just tell me you’re engaged.
‘Rough night?’ she said.
Yes, as it happens, Sarah, a very rough night indeed. Now how about you tell me you’re engaged and I can act surprised and mature.
‘Just a … I just had a couple of drinks with Dev, and—’
‘Why are you such a dick, Jase?’
I frowned. That wasn’t in the script. And anyway, it’s Mr Dick to you.
A second passed.
‘I’m … what do you …’
‘You could at least be happy for me, Jason. You can’t blame me for any of this. We both made choices, and …’ Not this.
Not this conversation again.
‘Happy about what?’ I said, innocently.
‘You know what.’
How did she know I knew what? What?
‘Sarah—’
‘I’m engaged, Jason. Are you happy now I’ve said it like that?’
‘I … well, that’s good news!’ I said. ‘Good for you.’
‘That’s not what you said last night.’
I blinked a couple of times. Had I called her? Had she called me? I glanced over at the table in the corner. A streak of blackberry brandy had made its way down one leg, and there, next to it, the messenger: my laptop, my betrayer, still on, still proudly displaying a bright and colourful photo of a very happy Sarah.
‘Last night,’ she said, ‘you seemed to think it was a bad move.’
‘No, I’d never.’
‘You said it was a bad move and that all my friends were bad friends for not stopping me making the greatest mistake any woman has ever made in sacrificing any chance of getting back together with you for a life of Margherita pizzas and stupid days.’
‘Stupid days?’
‘Gary’s very upset. He’s very sensitive. He feels you’ve humiliated him. You said he was the Margherita of Men. You said you were like a Meat Feast and he was like a Margherita.’
‘I probably meant he’s popular, and I’m not to everyone’s taste, especially if they’re health-conscious, and—’
‘That’s not what you meant, is it?’
There was something else behind the coldness, now. Anger? No. What was it? It was resignation. It was like she just couldn’t be bothered any more.
‘Grow up, Jason,’ she said. ‘Find someone else. Anyone else. Move out of that rancid flat – it’s next to a brothel for God’s sake – and move on.’
‘It’s not—’
‘Don’t call me.’
Click.
I listened to the silence for a moment, and then sat up.
‘It’s not a brothel,’ I said.
My head had started to pound, and I checked my phone for dialled calls. I hadn’t made any. I hadn’t phoned her at all. I knew it.
Hey, maybe she was mental. Maybe Gary had turned her mental. That’d be great, if Gary had turned her mental. Then who’d be right? Me, or her friends? Those same friends writing with such casual abandon about how happy they are for them both, about what a great bloke Gary is, about how well-suited and perfectly-matched they are, about …
I stopped.
The faintest glimmer of a hint of a rumour of a memory.
No.
Please, no.
I made it out of bed and stumbled to the laptop. I could see it already.
Whoops.
‘“Whoops” doesn’t seem to quite cut it,’ said Dev, wisely.
He was wearing his Earthworm Jim T-shirt and tucking into a full English and a foreign Coke at the café down the road.
‘Nope,’ he said, shaking his head and smiling. ‘“Whoops” is not in any way the appropriate response in this situation.’
He was right. I thought about what I’d done.
I’d carefully and passionately annotated around fourteen online engagement photographs in all, each of which was, in my drunken state, presumably of Wildean splendour and Fry-like wit. I’d presumably thought I sounded sharp, incisive and intelligent. I now realised, in the cold light of day, I sounded more like a tramp banging on the window of Currys.
‘Ah, look,’ said Dev. ‘How many people would’ve seen it? Really?’
‘Everyone. Everyone who looked at their pictures. Her friends, my friends, our friends.’
Dev nodded thoughtfully and shrugged it off.
‘Her family. Her many and various colleagues.’
He looked a little more concerned now.
‘Gary’s friends. Gary’s family. Gary’s many and various colleagues.’
‘Right …’
‘Distant relatives. People they haven’t seen in twenty-five years but sat next to in maths. Randoms. Michael Fish.’
‘Michael Fish? The weatherman?’
‘Michael Fish the weatherman, yeah. He plays golf with Gary’s dad.’
‘Well, let’s not worry about Michael Fish the weatherman. I’m sure Michael Fish the weatherman wouldn’t think twice about it.’
I had a sudden flashback and felt my ego shrink to the size of a peanut.
Gary’s face. Gary’s beaming face, so full of joy, so delighted that the woman of his dreams had said yes, the happiest picture he’d ever taken, and underneath it, my name and a picture of me with two thumbs up, next to the words: HI! I GARY, STUPID MAN’D FACE WHO LIKE A BAD n BORING PIZZA … WILL YOU MARRY AND WE CAN ATE PIZZA BUT BAD ONE!!????
Christ.
Stupid Man’d Face?
I shuddered, and took a sip of tea. Dev’s eyes lit up. Not because I was sipping tea – he’s seen me do that before and not even commented – but because the waitress was here. The same waitress he tries to impress every time we’re here. Because yes – as we’ve established – there’s always a girl.
‘Dobranoc!’ he shouted, suddenly. ‘Jak si masz?’
The waitress gave him a half-smile and said something back, quietly, and waited for an answer, but Dev didn’t have one, so just stared at her.
Unlikely as it seems, she wandered off again.
‘This is good,’ I said. ‘Eventually, you’ll build up to an actual exchange.’
‘Shouldn’t have worn this T-shirt,’ said Dev, kicking himself. ‘Should’ve worn the Street Fighter one.’
He watched her walk away.
‘Whoops,’ I said.
Here’s the thing.
I’ve got absolutely nothing against Gary. He is a perfectly nice, perfectly ordinary man. And I can say that, having met him. An awkward and unexpected encounter at a mutual friend’s birthday, during which I’d behaved impeccably, even made a joke or two, but we could see in each other’s eyes we weren’t supposed to be talking; this wasn’t natural.
If I was still a teacher, I guess I’d mark him like this:
Appearance: Average.
Conversation: Average.
Overall: Gary is a very pleasant pupil not weighed down by ambition or
thought. You will always know exactly where you are with him. And that is Stevenage.
You see? Nice guy. Perfectly nice, perfectly good.
But that’s what annoyed me, I guess. This idea that, ‘He’s okay, he’s good enough, he’ll do’. There was no spark, no light. No stand-out trait. And as I stood there at that party, and looked at him, and at Sarah, over his shoulder, pretending she hadn’t noticed that we were talking and that this was a perfectly normal thing for twenty-first-century grown-ups to deal with, I thought: where’s the magic?
The magic had been there when we met, Sarah.
The bar neither of us had been to before. The walk down the South Bank under an almost-full moon. The old lady on the nightbus who asked how long we’d been married. The number you gave me on your doorstep, the call five minutes later from the phonebox at the end of your street, the cheese on toast and wine in your kitchen, the kiss, the next kiss, the promise we made that one day we’d track down that mad old woman and invite her to our wedding.
Okay. Maybe not real magic. Maybe the moon could have been more full, and we could have found something other than cheese on toast, and maybe our teeth shouldn’t have clashed the second time we kissed, but magic enough for me, Sarah. And I thought magic enough for you. That’s a real start to a relationship. A story. What have you and Gary got?
You met at a company away day. You were in the same teambuilding exercise. You got drunk in a Hilton near a motorway. Two months later, due to corporate restructuring, Gary was relocated from Stevenage. You met at seven, you were both on time, and you went to an All Bar One and then a Pizza Express. The next day, Gary helped you get a better deal on a second-hand Golf. Now you’re engaged.
Well, good God, Sarah, I hope you sold the film rights.
But no. That’s all fine. And yes. I’m being an idiot.
But I wanted the beginning to be strong enough to get us to the end, Sarah, and you should have wanted that too. Neither of us should have to settle for a Margherita.
And so, to work.
London Now is the freesheet I told you about earlier – a kind of Metro or London Paper, but this one packed to the brim with reviews of things you can do NOW! or TONIGHT! or TOMORROW! It’s aimed at people who just don’t know what to do with themselves, or who like to impress other people on the tube by turning to the Live In London section and circling avant garde Mexican jazz fusion gigs they’ll never go to, and would mispronounce anyway.
There’s the usual mix of other stuff: news straight from our inbox, horoscopes bought in from some mental with a fax machine in the country, pap pics of pop stars and comics stumbling out of the Groucho or Century, there are On This Days, and Did You Knows, and I Saw Yous, and other ways to start a sentence no one will ever want to hear you finish.
It’s also doomed. We all know it, but there’s only so much a vanity project can do in a market like this. They’d managed a successful launch in Manchester and simply thought they could add a little London content and start a whole new paper in the capital. It was a little swagger in a knee-deep recession, a bold move with a bit of Russian money behind it, but it was Zoe and the team who now had to deal with it day-to-day.
And God, I just listened to myself. I sound ungrateful. And I think I may be giving you a picture of myself I’m not entirely comfortable with. I enjoy the job when there’s enough of it, I have my savings, and being freelance means I have to turn my hand to anything, but that’s also kind of the problem. I have no speciality. I am not London Now’s resident anything. I’m just a general reviewer, giving general thoughts to the general public about things in general.
Well, I say ‘general thoughts’. That’s not quite true. These thoughts aren’t my general thoughts. They’re extreme versions. Because you have to have an opinion. Last week, I went to a Persian in Bayswater called Sinbad. I suppose if I was still a teacher, I’d have marked it like this:
Starter: Yep, fine, absolutely fine, nothing special, but okay.
Main: Not bad, I ate it all, so yeah.
Overall: This place is okay, so if you’re in the area, and you are hungry, and you like Persian food, give it a go, or not. I’m not fussed.
But now I can’t get away with that. Now I have to say things like:
Starter: Bland, turgid, ironically a non-starter.
Main: Insult to possible internal injury.
Overall: Irritatingly forgettable. If it were a name referring to its food, Sinbad could not be made up of two more apt syllables.
You see? Ha ha. I am clever.
More barbed, more cynical, more knowing. And all from a man who once gave himself food poisoning cooking chips.
Zoe loved it. She loves all this kind of stuff. And I guess I do it to impress her a bit. Partly because it means she’ll give me more work, but partly also because it’s nice to impress a girl.
I suppose if I were still a teacher, I would mark her like this:
Appearance: Zoe Alice Harper is neat and tidy with an eye for the latest fashions, as evidenced by the very many ASOS bags that litter the area around her desk. Her hair, once a long chestnut mane, is now cut into a bob, which is the type of thing that can happen when you have a ‘long lunch’ and are feeling unnaturally gregarious in the stylist’s chair. Zoe would do well to remember this in future.
Attitude: Zoe is a girl with ambition and drive, whose work is consistent and above average, although her greatest dream, I think, if I can break character for just a moment, is to work on one of those I Hate Everything columns. You know the ones. The ones that tell you everything is appalling. Every new TV show or story in the news has some terrible downside to it that is a complete affront to the person writing it, furious that they could have spent their time doing other, more important things, like microwaving some pasta, or staring. That they could have done a better job, even though they’d never make it past the first wave of interviews. That everything would be better if they were in charge. Problem is, I don’t think she’s really like that. It’s just the trend. A way to get noticed. A shortcut to humour, like those people at dinner parties who mistake cynicism for wit, or bile for interesting opinion.
Still. It’s her own time she’s wasting.
(© The Teacher’s Bumper Book of Handy Phrases) Overall: I applaud her confidence and like her new hair and predict great things.
I’m as guilty of faux-cynicism as anyone, by the way. Although I’d hope it was for a forgivable set of reasons. When me and Sarah were splitting up, I described almost every album I was given for review as trashy or slipshod or synthetic (I know nothing about music, unless you count Hall & Oates). I started writing ‘whom’ instead of ‘who’. When she finally left me, I vented by scowling through screenings and crucifying directors (I know nothing about films, either, apart from The Shawshank Redemption, which I love, and I quite like Pedro Almodovar, too, but I don’t tell anyone because it makes me sound pompous). The simple truth is, I did not care. Life dictated those reviews, not me.
And today, a hungover day after a horrible night, I guess someone’s in for it.
But whom?
‘Abrizzi’s,’ said Zoe.
She was wearing a black polo neck and those glasses she doesn’t really need but which make her look like she’s some kind of commissioning editor on a metropolitan newspaper. Which she likes to remind me she sort of is. I think secretly she doesn’t like the fact that I knew her at university, when she was all Longpigs T-shirts and 20/20, a doe-eyed Winona Ryder in Converse.
We’d been close at uni. Talked earnestly about the future and our places in it. Then she’d gone her way, which had earned her a desk and those glasses, and I’d gone mine, which had earned me some bags under my eyes.
‘New Italian place, for the New In Town section. Should be nice for you. You used to say breadsticks were just vegetarian pepperami. Remember those days? When you used to get outraged in the Pizza Hut on Haymarket because you thought that them putting out breadsticks was a conspiracy to fill you u
p and stop you gorging on the rest of the free buffet?’
I am amazed I never became a celebrity chef.
‘You look dreadful, by the way. And what’s that smell?’
‘It might be blackberries,’ I said, ‘Or nerd. I’ve just had breakfast with a nerd.’
‘It’s not blackberries,’ she said. ‘Must be nerd. How is Dev?’
‘More like Dev than ever,’ I said, looking at the printout she’d given me. ‘A restaurant, then. Another restaurant.’
She just smiled. She’d had been good to me, throwing work my way, and I was grateful. One night, when things had been going wrong with Sarah, I’d poured my heart out to my old friend, told her the mistakes I’d made in life, been far too honest and drunk and lost. Told her if only I could start again; if only I had something of my own to shape and shift and mould. Despite everything that had happened since, despite the distance that was now between us, I wanted to do right by her, as she was doing by me.
She’d loved the last review, I could see that, because something about it had appealed to the world-weary woman this girl wanted to be. But instantly I had it again: this crystal-clear vision I’ve been having. The head chef at Sinbad, eagerly awaiting the return of one of his waiters, because he’s heard the restaurant’s finally been reviewed, and he can’t wait to see what they thought. ‘A food critic!’ he’ll be thinking. ‘At last! A well-travelled and knowledgeable urban connoisseur! What delights await me? How do my wonders translate to the written word?’ And then, as the waiter dashes in from the tube holding a rain-spattered copy of London Now over his head, his stomach will sink and his eyes sting as the words ‘irritatingly forgettable’ are forever branded onto his heart. And as his ventricles smoulder, and his eyes cloud over, it won’t occur to him that really, that phrase makes no sense, because why would you be irritated by something you can’t even be bothered to remember? And yet it’ll all be fine. Tomorrow night, there will be as many people in Sinbad as there are tonight. No one else even cares. Even I only cared for about half an hour, and then I watched The Weakest Link. But Mr Sinbad? Mr Sinbad will carry those words with him to the grave, feeling a little less of a chef on the way. And all thanks to a man who can’t even remember what it was he ordered.