‘OK. Details,’ Greg said as his face split into a smile that could only have been conjured up by the devil himself. He was going to tell the truth. He was going to tell the truth and get me into the biggest trouble I’ve been in since I was twelve and broke Eric’s Action Man on purpose. Had we been in a film, I’d be leaping across the room in slow motion screaming: ‘NOOOOOO!!!’ right about now.
‘She’s average-looking . . .’ EXCUSE ME?! You are so going to get a kicking, I telepathically said to him. ‘You know, hair, two eyes, nose, mouth. And she’s got the most amazing body, all curves and smooth skin . . .’ All right, you made that sound lascivious enough to rescind that kicking. ‘Um . . . She’s all the usual stuff, clever, funny, thoughtful, friendly, etc., etc. I don’t know. I can’t put it into words without diminishing what I feel. She’s whole. But not. Hypnotic.’
That was me he was talking about. Me. Amber Salpone. Hypnotic. I fingered the word in my head. Hypnotic. I liked that. Liked the feel, the touch, the essence of what he was saying.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. Found I couldn’t and swallowed harder to get rid of it, dipped my head to secretly blink dry my teared-up eyes. How pathetic was I? All he’d said was . . . I blinked harder.
‘What makes her different from all the other girls you’ve screwed, then screwed over?’ Jen asked, destroying the reverential atmosphere.
Hurt flashed across Greg’s face. ‘I don’t know, she’s different. I adore everything about her,’ he said. ‘She’s everything I ever wanted in a girlfriend and everything I didn’t know I needed in a girlfriend, too.’
‘You’ve only known her a week,’ Jen scoffed.
‘I only got together with her a week ago. Our paths have crossed before, but it was only last week that I finally got her interested.’
Jen turned to me. ‘Did you know about this?’
‘Not, erm, until recently. Very, very recently.’ Not a lie, just not the complete truth.
‘I’m literally the last to know,’ Jen said. She crossed her arms, sat back, stuck out her bottom lip.
‘He didn’t tell me he felt like that,’ I protested.
‘Me neither,’ Matt said.
‘You obviously have a way of bringing out the poet in him,’ I said.
‘Hmmm, maybe. But I can’t believe he feels like that after a week.’
‘Thing is –’ Matt started.
‘Can everyone stop talking about me like I’m not here, and stop acting like I’m incapable of feeling anything other than lust,’ Greg snapped. ‘I feel a lot for her but it’s only been a week. I want to keep it low-key, but rest assured I’ll keep you all posted on any developments.’ Greg put his champagne glass on the floor beside his foot. He hadn’t taken a sip, nor put the glass near his mouth – he wasn’t even going to pretend to celebrate. ‘H’OK.’ He leapt out of the leather armchair. ‘I’ve got plans, so I’m off. Amber, can I give you a lift?’
‘Nah, Amber’s staying for dinner,’ Jen said.
This was news to me. ‘Sorry?’ I turned to Jen. She flushed. Matt, knackered as he was, was suddenly on his feet, moving around the living room, straightening his stuff on the mantelpiece, doing something. Anything.
‘One of our friends is single,’ Jen said, ‘and, erm, he’s really, really nice, so we thought we’d invite him over for dinner tonight to meet you.’
She made it sound like this was no ‘biggie’. Like I should simply slot myself into her plans to pair me off. It would be her plan too: Matt was the epitome of the selfish gene, he didn’t give a flying toffee if I was single or attached. It didn’t affect his life, so he didn’t think about it.
Whereas Jen . . . During my celibacy she’d been doing all she could to pair me off with the ugliest blokes on earth. Anyone who says looks don’t matter is lying. Looks are important – if they weren’t we wouldn’t spend so much time dressing up and slathering on make-up and fixing our hair – we all just happen to find different things attractive. Physical beauty that could lead to anything romantic for me was inextricably linked to someone’s personality. To their ability to capture and communicate with my mind, imagination and sense of humour. To conjure up a spark of recognition. There was this thing I read once that said love is recognising ourselves in someone else and delighting in that recognition. And that was what was galling about the people Jen set me up with – she’d known me for about twelve years and she still thought I could even think about kissing someone who started a joke, ‘There was this Englishman, Irishman and black man . . .’ Without exception they were all lacking in anything I could work with. I’d tried, honestly I had, then I gave up all pretence of caring what any of them thought or said. Any blind date disguised as a dinner party she’d arranged resulted in me getting openly drunk rather than talking, and staggering off home before dessert. After I left during the main meal last time, she had, for the most part, stopped doing it.
Having said that, on those occasions when she did stitch me up, she’d at least warned me we were having dinner. I wasn’t sat in sweat-dried clothes with frizzed-up hair and aching muscles.
A mist descended upon my body, seeping into my aching muscles, swelling the veins in my brain and speeding up my heart.
Who the hell is she to decide who I should date?
This was it. She was going to get the full length of my tongue this time. I’d reached the end of my tether when it came to Jen and blind dates. Shouting wasn’t part of the Amber Salpone repertoire of response to anger: the only person I’d ever shouted at was Greg and that was generally after a rescue that had enraged me to the point of me wanting to lash out at him. But I’d never shouted at Jen. I’d come close to it a couple of times, of course, but not actually done it. I’d seen, over the years, that when someone shouted at Jen it produced a steely determination that flashed first in her eyes, then resulted in her screwing said person over weeks, sometimes months, down the line. Sarcasm and snapping, I’d found, yielded the best results. However, this time, sod sarcasm and snapping – she was getting the full extension of my lungs.
I opened my mouth to scream that I was Greg’s ‘hypnotic’ woman; to yell, ‘I’m worth much more than the idiots you feel obliged to set me up with.’
‘Didn’t you say you were meeting people in town?’ Greg interjected.
‘Oh?’ Jen was surprised.
‘Yes, Jen, I have a life,’ I went to say.
‘Yeah, come on, Nectar,’ Greg cut in. ‘I’ll drive you home so you can get tarted up. And if you don’t take forever, I’ll drop you off afterwards.’
Greg took my hand then pulled me out of the chair, bundled me out of the living room and then out of the flat. I realised two miles down the road I hadn’t said a word after ‘Sorry?’ Greg had not only saved Jen from a mouthful, he’d virtually raised my hand and waved it at them.
chapter ten
the honesty clause
‘Do you mind if we stop at mine on the way back?’ Greg asked as we hit Headingley, on the way to my place. Traffic seemed to have appeared from nowhere, we’d been bumper to bumper with a green Mini for about, oooh, forever. The silence in the van’s cabin and my nefarious mood brought on by the blind date hadn’t helped the appearance of time crawling by.
‘Course, why would you be any different to every other person trying to run my life?’ I snapped.
My new lover took a deep, deep breath, then exhaled at length. ‘We could spend the evening there now Matt’s gone,’ he continued, clearly not about to be drawn into a row he hadn’t started. ‘Rocky’s away with his girlfriend. We’ve the house to ourselves.’
OK, it’s not Greg’s fault my best mate has issues with me being single. It’s not Greg’s fault I haven’t got around to telling Jen where to shove her blind dates, I reminded myself. ‘All right, but let’s not stay over – I know how toxic your bedroom is.’
‘I tidied up a bit,’ he said, ‘just in case.’
Greg had lived with Matt and Rocky since they’d moved
out of halls in the second year of college about ten years ago. After they graduated, Rocky’s parents had bought the house for him. This meant Rocky and Greg and Matt could do it up as they saw fit. Greg had painted his bedroom white, put pictures of scantily clad women on the walls, moved a double bed in and basically used the floor to file his books, clothes, magazines, papers, shoes, videos, DVDs, CDs, etc. I’d been in there a few times and while he’d picked a path across the carnage littering the floor, I’d stood in one spot, too scared to move in case I caught something. Greg had once explained that he kept his room in a state because it kept women away – at no point would he be tempted to invite one back. His room was his palace, his castle, his sanctuary, and he avoided letting any woman in there to sleep over or even to have sex because that would mean she had a bit more of him. She could get up and run her finger along his dusty shelves, see which books he had, which books were most battered, most thumbed. She could open drawers, see where he kept his pants, where he kept his T-shirts, how he rolled up his socks. Greg’s room was a no-woman zone and he’d done his best to keep it that way. That’s why I’d said not to stay over, I was giving him a way of rejecting me without rejecting me.
‘Do you fancy a takeaway?’ Greg said as he undid the deadlock on his blue front door. ‘Or I’ll cook something.’ He slid his key into the Yale lock.
‘I don’t mind,’ I replied.
‘Why don’t you put your bag and coat in my room while I get us some beers.’ Greg tossed the van keys onto the little wooden table beside the door and wandered towards the kitchen without offering me so much as a cuddle. He wasn’t going to be drawn into a row and he obviously wasn’t going to snog me, either.
I climbed the steep, narrow stairs, each one covered in a hideous red and blue Paisley carpet that Rocky’s mum had chosen, but the lads had been too lame to argue with her about. At the top I took a right to Greg’s room. He’d got the biggest room when they’d tossed for it. I assumed they meant tossed a coin, but seeing as there were three of them and two sides to a coin . . . well, I didn’t like to think it through too deeply.
In the past few years Rocky had converted the attic into his bedroom and the bathroom was moved up from the basement to his old bedroom. The basement then became the boys’ playroom with a snooker table, dartboard, cards table and small fridge with nothing but beer in it. Anyone else would’ve rented out the room – Rocky, Matt and Greg wanted a playroom. They lived such masculine lives I still maintained it a modern miracle that any of them had girlfriends.
I opened the door of Greg’s room, stood in the doorway, dropped my black rucksack, then stopped in the middle of slipping off my jacket. Slowly, my mouth fell open. Greg had tidied up. The floor was clear, all the pictures of airbrushed women had been taken down, each surface had been polished. The bed was made with pure white bedlinen and he’d sprinkled red and pink rose petals on top. Around the room, draped on the bookcases, along the mantelpiece and around the window sill were fairy lights.
The whole thing was dressed up like something from a movie. It put me in mind of that moment in a romantic comedy when the hero wins the heart of every woman in the audience by doing something like converting his meagre accommodation into a fairy grotto or selling his prized possession so he can be with the heroine for ever and ever. I’d never fallen for such acts in films. What man would waste his time doing all that, I used to think, when he knows he’s going to get laid anyway? This one, obviously.
‘Do you like it?’ Greg whispered, coming up behind me and enveloping me in his arms. The tug in my body, the physical manifestation of fancying him, surged through me again. He drew slow circles on my abdomen and each stroke made my body tug harder.
I nodded, unable to speak because the lump had returned to my throat. If he kept this up I could grow to feel more than ‘fancy’ about him. A lot more. And that would mean . . .
Are you sure you want to do this? I asked myself. This is another step along that road to the unknown. Are you sure you want to start down there?
In our fairy-lit room we lay entwined, laughing, giggling, chatting quietly like two people in a movie – all we lacked was a strategically placed sheet. I was calm and warm and satisfied. He was like a fleece blanket in which I’d been wrapped up. My usually frantic brain was at rest. I wasn’t thinking about shopping, or cleaning, or work, or joining a gym, or visiting my family . . . I was in the here and now.
Greg stroked my cheek so softly it was how I’d imagined a butterfly’s wing would feel, a whisper of a touch. ‘Are you asleep?’ he asked.
‘Not quite,’ I murmured back.
‘Do you want to talk?’
‘We are talking,’ I said, my eyes closed.
‘I mean talk about stuff.’
‘Like what?’ I mumbled, allowing sleep to seep into my senses.
‘You, um, know everything about my past, but I know virtually nothing about yours. Like how many people you’ve slept with.’
‘More than ten, less than twenty-two,’ I mumbled, my stock answer.
‘Or why your last relationship ended.’
‘Mmmmm . . .’
‘So . . . why did your last relationship end?’ Greg prompted.
‘Hmmm,’ I said, trying to concentrate. ‘Ummm, Jackie Brown.’
‘What?’ Greg said, knocking silk rose petals onto the floor as he sat up.
I exhaled in frustration. Now I was awake. ‘All right, you tell me who my last relationship was with, and I’ll tell you why it ended.’
‘Um . . . I remember a few months after Jen and Matt got together you weren’t around as much because you had a boyfriend. And I know he didn’t particularly like me because we were friends. But I never knew who he was.’
Didn’t particularly like you? I thought. That’s like saying the Grand Canyon is a pin-prick in the desert. Sean hated Greg. Not ‘didn’t like’ or ‘resented’ – full-blooded, eye-narrowing, muscle-clenching hatred. I didn’t know it was possible to hate a person that much if you haven’t met them (apart from me and Tom Cruise, but that’s different). But Sean was living proof. He refused to meet Greg, not even so he could put a face to his hatred (‘Why would I want to meet that tosser?’ was his usual refrain) and became moody every time I met with Greg – even if Jen and Matt were going to be there. ‘I can tell he fancies you from the way he leaves messages on your answerphone,’ Sean constantly complained. Never mind I’d told him a million times I didn’t fancy Greg back.
Greg didn’t help matters. One time he’d walked in on me getting changed at Jen’s flat and got a flash of bare back, maybe a bit of bum and thigh, nothing more. Greg, in his infinite humour, rang my answerphone and sang ‘The Thong Song’ (I didn’t wear thongs, but there weren’t any songs that said, ‘Let me see those sensible black pants’) into it. I’d innocently played the message when Sean was there and felt the temperature in the room plummet. Sean’s soft features had hardened as he gritted his teeth, a muscle pulsating in his neck. Some bloke wanting to see your girlfriend’s pants wasn’t funny, especially when you hated the bloke doing the asking. I dived for the delete button and erased all evidence of Greg being interested in my underwear. ‘If he touches you, I’ll kill him,’ Sean said in that scary tone gangsters in The Godfather employ right before they sanction the murdering of someone’s kin.
‘But you were my friend, you were supposed to show an interest,’ I said to Greg in the here and now.
‘I was interested but I sort of fancied you, so didn’t want to know about you and another bloke, I couldn’t handle it.’
‘Why do you want to know now?’
‘You’re my girlfriend, I can handle it,’ he replied. Then added quietly: ‘Mostly.’
‘Do we have to talk about this now?’ I said.
‘Yes. Tell me why it ended and I’ll drop it.’
I sighed. ‘I told you. Jackie Brown.’
‘Is she a real person?’
‘No. The film. That piece of filth nonsense by Q
uentin Tarantino called Jackie Brown,’ I hissed. I paused, waiting for the heavens to come crashing in. ‘Wow! I said something by Tarantino was rubbish and the world didn’t end.’
Greg’s face fell. ‘But, Pulp Fiction—’
‘Had a horrific rape scene that didn’t need to be in it,’ I cut in before I got a thesis on how amazingly postmodern it was. I’d heard all arguments on that film from people inside and outside the industry and not one of them had managed to convince me that it or Tarantino was a genius. Just because something was postmodern didn’t stop it from being crap. ‘Everyone seems to think if you’re young and into film, you have to like Tarantino. Well, Sean – my boyfriend you didn’t want to know about because you sort of fancied me – thought that Tarantino was God and that Jackie Brown was something akin to the Holy Grail.
‘And that’s fair enough. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even if it’s wrong. Except I told Sean what I thought so, the day he brought that film to my flat, I flipped. I said not to put it near my video, and he flipped in return. By the time he’d finished having a go at me, I was the Antichrist, I was crap in bed and I’d always be alone. And that’s why my relationship ended, because of Jackie Brown.’
‘Did you talk much about getting back together?’
‘After that day, we never spoke again.’
‘What, not at all?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Do you think he used Jackie Brown as an excuse to chuck you?’
‘To be honest, I try not to think about it, what with it being such a bloody stupid reason to break up and all.’
‘So, if he wanted you back, what would you say?’
‘We split up eighteen months ago, if he wanted me back, he’d have said something by now.’
‘No, but just say he did?’
‘He w—’
‘I want to know.’
I was reaching for the sarky answer, the one I’d normally give to Greg, my mate, when I caught his expression as reflections of the fairy lights twinkled in his eyes. He was worried. It hit me as hard as a lorry, he was genuinely scared. Maybe he didn’t think he’d be able to compete with someone from my past. Maybe he feared the idea of Sean being The One That Got Away. Whatever it was, he was scared. It wasn’t an emotion I’d ever associated with him when it came to women, but he was. He was, and I couldn’t add to that by being sarky. Besides, he was Greg, my lover, only sadistic bastards messed with their lover’s emotions.