He and my wife had been best friends since secondary school. He used to vet her early boyfriends, warn them that any emotional pain wreaked upon her would come back to them doubled, in the form of normal pain. At university, they had the kind of friendship where they platonically shared a bed during bad break-ups, bad comedowns. When Garthene and I got together she had even warned me that I would need to be comfortable with her receiving regular intimate texts from a buff alpha who was good at football. Still, standing there, I understood that no amount of contextualizing back-story could make this situation feel good.
As my eyes adjusted, I could see that Lee was fully clothed, wearing earplugs and an airline eye mask that had the words wake me up to eat printed on it in ten different languages. Garthene was in one of my T-shirts and was, I realized, as her face lit up with blue light, awake and texting.
I went around to her side of the bed. “Morning,” I said.
“I would have put him on the sofa but you were there.”
“Of course,” I said. “Totally understand. Did he tell you about last night?”
“He did.”
“It was almost certainly not as bad as that,” I said.
“Okay.” She carried on texting.
On the floor was an open leather weekend bag containing some of Lee’s clothes. The uniform of handsome people, fresh white T-shirts and blue jeans. Next to his bag there was the travel cot, the collapsible pram, the pop-up playpen. We were running out of space. I hoped he wouldn’t stay long.
“Of course he can stay as long as he wants,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Might have to.” She stared at her phone.
“Who’re you texting?”
“Marie.”
“Oh,” I said.
She mouthed the words: She says it’s over with Lee.
“But not over over?” I said.
I glimpsed the stream of messages on her phone. An intimidating lack of emojis.
“Does he know?” I pointed to the body beside her.
Lee pulled off his eye mask. “Hey, I’m right here, you fuckers.”
Garthene suggested we go for lunch at one of our favorite restaurants, Old Orient. I knew this could only be in order to deliver bad news. She made sure we got the booth by the noisy mini-waterfall, so that our talk could be private. I ordered what we always order—“famous Chinese beef” and “Asian rice”—fully conscious there are thirty-six distinct culinary traditions in mainland China alone. It’s the offensive lack of cultural nuance that makes this a place where nobody feels judged.
“Don’t worry. She does this every couple of years,” Lee said. “To keep things fresh.”
“Does what?” Garthene said.
“Breaks up with me. She thinks I’m too secure. She doesn’t understand the difference between arrogance and accurate self-worth,” he said, and he showed us most of his teeth.
“Tell me you’re still drunk,” she said.
“If you need me to be.” He raised his hand and asked the waitress for beer. She said she’d be back in a minute to take his order and, luckily for us, he believed her. Terrible service was part of the reason we loved this place.
“Lee, listen, I think she’s genuinely unhappy,” she said.
“Well, it wouldn’t work if she didn’t pretend to mean it.”
“Wow, okay,” Garthene said, and she took hold of her teacup. There is a scientific study that proves holding hot drinks makes people appear warmer, kinder, more trustworthy. “Then I need to tell you something.”
“Is it about how you’ve realized that monogamy is just a way for ugly people to turn their forgettable faces into a matter of principle?” he said. “No offense to you two.”
I took none. I’d had my small taste of adultery. That nugget of near-betrayal would sustain me till death.
“No,” she said, “it’s about how you make her feel guilty for being insufficiently promiscuous.”
He screwed up his face. “Please,” he said.
“Marie has only ever slept with you.”
“Come on,” he said. “I lived with her. I watched her. She went away for weekends. She had business trips.”
Garthene put the cup down and slid a hand across the red tablecloth toward him. “Sweetheart, I think they were actual business trips.”
Marie was codirector of a qualitative research company. Her job involved having deep, personal conversations with ordinary people about, for example, life, death, love, and fate, as a way to better understand, for example, dishwasher tablets. She was often conducting intense discussions in airless basements and could Lee be blamed for his assumptions?
He looked around the restaurant, as though there might be some evidence of her infidelity here. He stared at the mini-waterfall, stared through it as though trying to see into the steam room of the upmarket hotel where his wife—he was beginning to realize now—was receiving a completely professional massage.
“So what are you saying?” he said. “I need to stop fucking around?”
Garthene took hold of his hand. “I think it might be too late for that.”
We watched his torso shift beneath his shirt as he tried to become a different person.
“All she has to do is ask,” he said. “I could easily live without.”
Garthene did not contradict him.
The waitress brought the food.
We let silence descend while Lee scanned his memory for any evidence that he was the sort of person who could handle being faithful. Here was a man whose penis had never been told no. He looked down at the bowl of steaming orange beef from which I had selected the softest-looking piece of meat because chewing was difficult for me. It shivered in my chopsticks, resembling a human ear. His eyes were full of panic as he watched me pop it in.
By the time we walked home, Lee was leaning on Garthene. His eyes were squeezed closed, with beads along the joins as though unprofessionally glued. I have always struggled to believe that very good-looking people can achieve authentic melancholy but he was helping me shake off that prejudice.
We neared the office of our estate agent, Daniel Lorrigan. He was the one person on this earth to whom we wished to appear boring and normal. He was a Kiwi with sun-damaged skin and a narrow head, a head we worshiped and despised and always cheerfully waved at past the bottles of Perrier in display fridges. It was within his power to grant or crush our dreams, specifically the horrible maisonette on which we were now gambling all wealth and happiness. He’d told us it was the last family home at its price point within the M25. Once this house was gone we might as well move near my parents in Suffolk, endure the community spirit that fills their numb and empty lives.
I saw my bruised reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows and, behind me, Lee, wet-faced and putting weight on my visibly pregnant wife. We did not look like valued clients. Daniel waved and smiled from behind his desk, his sunburn picked out by the screen’s fluorescence.
I pulled out the sofa bed and made it nice for Lee. We kept spare sheets, pillows and a stained duvet in a laundry bag at the bottom of my wardrobe. Once we moved into the horrible maisonette, we would buy nice linens and keep them in a dedicated cupboard, but we were not those people yet.
All that week, Lee slobbed around our flat, calling in sick to work and eating our best granola—the granola so expensive we treat it only as a topping for other, cheaper cereals. It wasn’t until Saturday that I encouraged him to attend a house party at Dave’s. At best, I thought he might see Marie and they would get back together. At second best, I thought he might sleep with a stranger and spend the night at their place. At third best, I thought he might take every drug and forget our address.
But early on Sunday morning, I awoke to something burning. I opened my eyes in the darkness of our bedroom. They say you smell burnt toast just before you have a stroke. And, in retrospect, that might have been preferable. A mini stroke, nothing major, but enough to remind Garthene that she valued my life.
Instead, it was clear by the sound of the pedal bin clanging shut that Lee had come home from the party and was burning actual toast. Garthene stirred at the noise but did not wake. I listened to the bread bin rattle open. We have this very distinctive-sounding bread bin, mid-century chrome, with powerful springs that clatter the lid back. He was going in for a second round.
I sat there, hoping for the sake of our marriage that Lee would successfully complete this entry-level culinary task then pass out for many days on the sofa bed. But a minute passed and a fresh wave of carbonized particulates came under the door. He had ruined the second batch. That takes a special kind of derangement and could only mean his mind was lost to sorrow and drugs.
I hoped Garthene would not wake because, if she did, she would almost certainly get straight out of bed and provide Lee with emotional support. I sat there wishing him unconsciousness. It is amazing how easily depressed people become unsympathetic. I caught myself feeling grateful that Garthene’s sinuses were blocked —one of the lesser-known side effects of pregnancy.
Lee opened the cutlery drawer and Garthene’s breathing shallowed as he clumsily searched for an implement. Then came a sound. Shik, shik, shik. A sharp noise like scratching ice from a windscreen. Shik, shik, shik. He was aggressively scraping the burnt bits into the sink. Shik, shik, shik. Garthene’s body stiffened beside me.
“What’s he doing?” she said.
“He’s hungry,” I said.
Shik, shik, shik.
In my mind, I saw the black dust falling.
“Has he only just come home?” she said.
“Yes but don’t worry. He was probably just having a lot of carefree fun.”
She frowned and checked the time on her phone. There were numerous missed calls, all from Lee. “Oh God,” she said, and she threw back the duvet.
When I came through, Lee had his head on the kitchen table beside a bottle of brandy with Garthene sitting next to him, rubbing his back, and she had damp splodges and black crumbs on the shoulder of her towelling gown, where he’d been weeping against her.
“You’ll feel better after you’ve had some sleep,” she said.
“I don’t want to feel better,” he said.
“How was the party?”
“I’m going out,” he said.
He scraped his chair back and picked up the brandy.
“Hang on,” Garthene said. “We’re coming with you.”
I really didn’t want to go with him. I wanted to stay in a dark warm room with my wife.
“That’s right, man,” I said. “We won’t let you out of our sight.”
We took him to Hackney Downs. It wasn’t a royal or pretty park, just a large square of grass with two tree-lined pathways that crossed in the middle. It was precisely this rudimentary quality that made it feel a safe place to take Lee. No fountains, no swans, nothing that might upset him with beauty or romance.
“What happened?” Garthene asked him.
“Nothing,” he said, and he ran ahead of us.
We watched him jump a low fence into the quiet, wood-chipped playground, past a sign that said: No Unaccompanied Adults. He got straight on the swings. We approached him from behind, feeling a breeze each time he swung back, the faint scent of tobacco still leaching from him, his shirt inflating. The frame groaned and shivered in the ground as he picked up speed. The heft of an adult male.
“Lee,” Garthene said, “was Marie at the party?”
“Who’s Marie?” he said.
He was now swinging so high that I could see the molded rubber of the seat’s underside each time he came back. He was trying to swing free of his body. The chain went slack at the apex of his swing—a moment of weightlessness—then there was a snapping noise when it grew taut again.
“The thing about her,” Lee said, “is that she’s got terrible taste in men.” The pitch of his voice shifted as he swung, making him sound younger then older, slipping in and out of puberty.
“Did you speak to her?” Garthene said. She went around to stand in front of him, stepping over the brandy which was wedged into the wood chips.
“She always likes the good-looking muscly ones,” he yelled, “and then acts surprised when we turn out to be awful.”
There was the sound of a gate closing and two young girls approached across the playground. They had dresses on, one white, one pink, and they both wore complex sports trainers with bubbles of transparent plastic embedded in the soles. When they looked at me, their expressions let me know my bruised face was very impressive.
“Lee, we should go,” I said.
“No way!” he said.
“I think you should let these nice little girls use the swing,” I said.
“They can use the other one!” he said.
We could see the girls’ father approaching across the park, picking up pace as he realized we were not accompanied by a child, except the one in utero. I walked around to the front of the swing and gave Lee a serious look. His dismount went badly and he fell hard to his palms and knees. The girl in the white dress walked up to the swing and held the shuddering chain. The girl in the pink had noticed, nestled in the wood chips, the bulbous bottle of brandy, which, beneath her gaze, looked absurd and evil. They turned to Lee.
“How old are you?” the white dress said.
He padded around on all fours.
“I’m thirty-three, girls. Pretty young! Super eligible!”
Something about the way their eyes tried to make sense of him was painful. Lee took a swig of the brandy. He suppressed a burp and blew it up toward the sky, as though exhaling cigarette smoke. The gate swung and the girls’ father entered the playground, a tall black guy in a wax jacket and loafers without socks. Lee offered him the bottle.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
Lee spoke in a baby voice: “But I’m with my mam-oo and dad-oo.”
The two girls gathered in against their father’s legs.
“We’re sorry about him,” I said, pulling Lee up.
“My own two parents, ashamed!” he said.
Garthene held the gate open as I guided Lee through. We felt the heat of judgment on the backs of our necks.
At the tennis courts, we stopped to listen to an elderly gentleman practicing his first serve, his grunts weirdly erotic. Lee made sex faces in time with each exertion noise.
“Harder,” he told the man, in a breathy voice.
Once we got him out of the park, he walked a few steps ahead of us, trying the handles of all the car doors.
“So, did you speak to Marie?”
“No. Apparently she wanted to have a quiet one at home. On a Saturday night,” he said, then he tapped his index finger against his chin as though deep in thought. “I’ve known her a long time and I must say that sounds highly suspicious.”
Outside the vegan café, he found a small Peugeot’s passenger side door that did open and he roared with laughter and got in, his knees pressed against the glove box. We dragged him out on to the pavement and shut the door behind him.
“Haven’t you two got better things to do?” he said.
Garthene told him we didn’t then poured the brandy down a drain.
We walked toward the Church of the Mountain of Healing Faith where the street was busy with people in suits and ornate robes, more getting out of family vehicles, checking for cyclists as they opened their doors. We became separated from Lee as we weaved through and then he started to run. We should have reacted more quickly. We watched him go straight past the door to our building and turn down Glenarm Road.
“Lee!” I yelled.
Garthene stopped. She closed her eyes.
“Where’s he going?” I said.
“He still has the keys to Marie’s flat.”
We heard his footsteps getting quieter.
While Garthene got out her phone and called Marie, I asked my body to run.
Marie lived in a small, gated development, an oval of neat grass around which fiftee
n detached buildings were arranged in a three-quarter circle. The spear-topped gates were manned twenty-four hours a day. We dared not ask Marie about her annual service charge. People who own their own homes have to find something to waste their money on.
Our favorite guard was Yuku, and as I rounded the corner at pace, I could see Lee hugging him around the waist, lifting him off the floor. Yuku was the son of a Gurkha and, sometimes, at Marie and Lee’s parties, when all of our friends revealed themselves as incredibly boring, I liked to come down and talk to him about his family history and his brief, unbeaten mixed martial arts career, about the inflated bodies of men three times his size going gorgeously limp as he crushed their carotid artery. Lee put Yuku down and went through the gate. Yuku was still chuckling when I got there, out of breath.
“Ray, my friend, who ruined your face?”
“Don’t worry, Yuku,” I said. “I totally deserved it.”
He liked that and he let me pass.
I followed the scuff marks on the lawn to Marie’s house. Lee was already inside but had left the front door open, indicating that some small sober part of him wanted me to restrain his worst instincts. I went inside. On the dining table, I saw there were two empty glasses, two dirty plates, and a half-finished bottle of real-cork wine with both its front and back labels peeled off and shredded, the scraps arranged in the table’s center as a cruel, conspicuous shrine to sexual tension.
I stepped quietly up the stairs and down the corridor toward the open door of Marie’s bedroom. That’s where I saw Lee. He was army-crawling on his stomach, disappearing out of sight around the end of the bed. Marie was on the near side, facing me, the sheet pulled to her neck, her sleeping expression so relaxed as to be unfamiliar, hair tucked like a chin strap. Her phone was vibrating silently on her bedside table, presumably Garthene, the handset shuffling toward the edge. I stopped just outside the room, and that’s when I saw a large man sleeping beside Marie with one hand behind his head. His armpit hair was cutely but naturalistically parted. He either had a full-body tan or a Mediterranean bloodline. The phone stopped twitching for a few seconds then started again until the handset hung, half on the table, half off. Perhaps it would have been better if I’d let it clatter loudly on the floorboards and wake everyone so that Lee and this new man could speak in the basic language of physical violence, make a scene on the lawn, have Yuku render them both unconscious. Instead I stepped forward and caught the phone as it fell.