Us

  ‘Hello, Paul Newman. Come …’

  I took a seat on a sort of vinyl platform. The bedroom, if bedroom is the right word, contained a sink and a rudimentary shower and was lit in a deep red, and I thought for a moment what a terrific place it would be for developing photographs. A cheap fan blew ineffectually, a kettle sat in the corner. There was a microwave, and a powerful smell of some chemical approximation of coconut. ‘I watched the whole thing from the window. You are a very unlucky man, Paul Newman,’ she said, and laughed. ‘They were big guys. I think they might have killed you, or at least emptied your bank.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him to claim on insurance. He has insurance, that is what insurance is for! You are shaking.’ She illustrated with juddering hands. ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Tea would be lovely. Thank you.’ While we waited for the kettle to boil I became very aware of her bare bottom, which was large, dimpled and never more than half a metre from my face. I turned to the window onto the street, intrigued to see the booth from this point of view, and noted that she had exactly the same swivelling office chair that I’d once had in my lab, though I didn’t point this out. Instead I turned to the TV.

  ‘Ah, I see that you have Downton Abbey here too!’

  Regina shrugged. ‘You want to watch something else?’ she said, and indicated a small pile of pornographic DVDs.

  ‘No, no. Downton’s fine.’ Without asking, she stirred two sugars into the tea and passed me my mug, and I noticed that my hands were indeed shaking. I used my left palm as a saucer. At a loss for conversation, I asked, ‘So – have you been working here long?’

  Regina told me that she had been doing this for six or seven years. Her parents were Nigerian, but she had been born in Amsterdam and had started working here through a friend. The winter was depressing and it was hard to pay the rent on the little booth without the tourists around, but she had some regular customers that she could rely on. Summer, on the other hand, was too busy, too much, and she shook her head woefully. ‘Stag nights!’ she said, and wagged a finger at me as if I had been organising them all. Apparently a lot of men required drink to get their courage up, then found themselves unable to perform. ‘They still have to pay, of course!’ she said, pointing a finger with some menace and I laughed and nodded and agreed that this was only fair. I asked if she knew her colleagues and she said they were mainly friendly, though some girls had been tricked into coming here from Russia and Eastern Europe, and this made Regina sad and angry. ‘They think they’re going to be dancers, can you believe that? Dancers! Like the world needs all these dancers!’

  After a moment, she said, ‘What do you do, Paul Newman?’

  ‘Insurance,’ I said, giddy on my whimsical flight of fancy. ‘I’m on holiday here with my wife and son.’

  ‘I have a son too,’ she said.

  ‘Mine’s seventeen.’

  ‘Mine’s only five.’

  ‘Five is a lovely age,’ I said, which I’ve always thought an idiotic remark. When do ages stop being ‘lovely’? ‘Five’s lovely, but fifty-four’s a bastard’ – that should be the follow-up. Anyway, Regina’s five-year-old son, it transpired, lived in Antwerp with his grandparents because she didn’t want any of them seeing her at work, and at this point the little room took on a sombre air and we sat in silence for a minute or so, watching events below stairs at Downton and contemplating the anxieties of parenthood.

  But all in all, it was an interesting and informative conversation, not one I’d expected to have that evening and I did feel we’d made some sort of connection. But I was also aware of eating into her time and also that she was practically naked, and so I stood and reached for my wallet.

  ‘Regina, you’ve been really kind, but we’ve been talking for a while so I really want to pay you something …’

  ‘Okay,’ she shrugged. ‘It’s fifty for complete service.’

  ‘Oh, no. No, no, no. I don’t need a complete service.’

  ‘Okay, Paul Newman, you tell me what you do need?’

  ‘I don’t need anything! I’m here with my family.’

  She shrugged again, and took the mug from my hand. ‘Everyone has a family.’

  ‘No, we’re here for the Rijksmuseum.’

  ‘Yes,’ she laughed, ‘I hear that a lot.’

  ‘My wife’s off with my son. The only reason I’m here at all is because I was looking for a Chinese restaurant.’ This made her laugh even more. ‘Please, don’t laugh at me, Regina, it’s true. I was just looking for somewhere to … I just wanted to find …’ And I imagine that at this point some kind of delayed shock kicked in, combined with the stresses and strains of the last few days, because for some reason I seemed to be crying in absurd, jagged gasps, hunched over on the vinyl bench, one hand pressed across my eyes, like a mask.

  I wish I could report here that Regina told me to put my money away and held me to her warm, soft breast and soothed my brow, the kind of thing that would happen in an arty film or novel. Two lost souls meeting, or some such nonsense. But in real life lost souls don’t meet, they just wander about and I think, in all honesty, she was as embarrassed as I was. A nervous breakdown in a red-lit booth was a breach in etiquette, and there was a palpable briskness as Regina took the remaining hundred euros, stood and opened the door.

  ‘Goodbye, Paul Newman,’ she said, her hand on my shoulder. ‘Go and find your family.’

  80. mellow times

  In the Mellow Times Café they played Bob Marley’s Greatest Hits, which even I would have rejected as a little obvious. My bud-tender, a tall boy called Tomas with a patchy beard and a flute-y, lisping voice, asked me what I wanted, and I asked for something that would simultaneously calm me down and cheer me up, not too strong; did such a brand exist? Seemingly it did; he gave me something called Pineapple Gold and, like a good GP, advised me not to combine it with alcohol, though it was too late for that advice as I had already been to several bars.

  Back in the honeymoon suite, I pulled out my phone and noted a series of texts from Connie that I imagined represented a spiral of lunacy:

  Where are you?

  Call me!!!

  It fun here!! Join us

  come have fun

  u ok hun?

  funny old man callme!!!

  love you loads

  But even that last message failed to cheer me. ‘I love you’ is an interesting phrase, in that apparently small alterations – taking away the ‘I’, adding a word like ‘lots’ or ‘loads’ – render it meaningless. I opened the windows wide, set the Jacuzzi to massage, placed my ‘gear’ in a saucer on the edge and climbed in.

  I wish I could report some psychedelic odyssey. Instead, I felt the same sense of overheated melancholy that I usually associate with three p.m. on Boxing Day. Good God, did people really go to prison for this? My head hummed with the unpleasant throbbing one feels in a bath that’s too hot, a sensation amplified by the fact that I was in a bath that was too hot, bubbling and churning like some terrible casserole. The drug was failing to bring about the amnesia I craved. I was, if anything, even more painfully aware of the failure of my best hopes. Despite my efforts, or perhaps because of them, the Petersens were stumbling. If there had been two of us, or four of us, perhaps there might have been some balance. But together we had the grace of a three-legged dog, hobbling from place to place.

  By now I was feeling rather ill. The bedroom smelt like a burning spice rack and it was a non-smoking room, too, adding to my paranoia. My heart was beating far too fast and I became convinced that it would pop like my father’s and I would expire like a rock star, on the floor of an Amsterdam sex hotel after three beers and two puffs of a very mild joint. One hand on my chest, still soaking wet, I stumbled into our absurd bed and waited beneath damp sheets for Connie to come home.

  She returned at three a.m., just as she had that first summer. It had been my firm intention to sulk but she was dopily affectionate, settling h
er head on my shoulder. Her hair smelt smoky, there was an unfamiliar spirit on her breath and a slight, not unpleasant smell of sweat.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she murmured. ‘What a night.’

  ‘Was it fun?’

  ‘In a teenage kind of way. We went to see bands! Did you get my texts? We missed you. Where were you?’

  ‘I met a prostitute. Called Regina. Then I OD’ed in the Jacuzzi.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, is that right?’

  ‘Where’s Albie?’

  ‘He’s next door. I think he brought some friends back.’ And sure enough, through the door of our adjoining rooms could be heard the sound of laughter, and an accordion playing ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’.

  81. exposed floorboards

  From now on there would be no more returns at three or four in the morning. Now we went to bed and woke together, stood at the sink and brushed our teeth, shaping the habits and tics, the gestures and dances of a life together, beginning the process by which things that are thrilling and new become familiar, scuffed and well loved. Specifically …

  Connie always dozes when the alarm goes off whereas I am already awake. Connie puts her bra on before any of her other clothes, I work on the lower half then proceed upwards. Connie likes a manual toothbrush, I swear by electric. Connie talks on the phone for hours, I am brief and to the point. Connie carves a roast chicken like a surgeon, I make excellent stews. Connie is late for flights, whereas I like to be there the requisite two hours before departure, because why would they ask if they didn’t mean it? Connie has a facility for mimicry and dancing, I do not. Connie dislikes mugs but rarely uses a saucer with a teacup, habitually burns toast, hates having her ears touched or whispered into, licks jam off her knife, chews ice-cubes and sometimes, shockingly to me, eats raw bacon off the chopping board. Connie likes gritty award-winning dramas, old musicals and berating politicians on the news. I like documentaries about extreme weather conditions. She dislikes tulips and roses, cauliflower and swede, and eats tomatoes as if they were apples, wiping the juice from her chin with her thumb. She paints her toenails in front of the TV on Sunday nights, each leg raised in turn in a wonderful way, sheds a startling amount of hair into the plughole yet never removes it, has a terrifying dent in her scalp which she calls her ‘metal plate’ from a childhood mishap on a diving board, a surprising number of black fillings in her teeth, a raised mole on her left shoulder, two piercings in each ear. She leaves a certain smell on her pillow, prefers red wine to white, thinks chocolate is overrated, and has an infinite capacity for sleep, could sleep standing up if she chose. We made these discoveries each day, then stood and undressed on opposite sides of the bed in which we made love 90, then 80, then 70 per cent of our nights. We witnessed all the petty maladies, the stomach upsets and chest infections, the gnarled toenails, the ingrowing hairs, boils and rashes that took the gleam off the person we had first presented. No matter, no panic, these things happen, and instead we shopped for food together, pushing the trolley a little self-consciously at first, trying on this domesticity. We had what we ironically referred to as our ‘drinks cabinet’ and brought back lurid liqueurs when we travelled abroad. We argued over tea, Connie favouring fragrant, vaguely medicinal brews over regular tea-bags. We argued once again when she destroyed my fridge by defrosting the freezer section with a screwdriver, then again about the efficacy of Chinese medicine, and once more about furniture, as my perfectly decent sofa-bed was removed and replaced with Connie’s smoky, baggy velvet affair. My fitted carpets, chosen for their hard-wearing neutrality – ‘office carpets’, she called them – were torn up. We painted the floorboards together, as young couples must.

  There were other changes, too. Connie was, in those days, ferociously untidy. She isn’t like that now and I suppose it’s one of the ways in which I’ve managed to change her, but in those days she used to leave a trail of pen lids, sweet-wrappers, hair slides and grips and pins, elastic bands, pieces of costume jewellery, the backs of earrings, packets of tissues, a single piece of gum wrapped in foil, small change from around the world. It was not unusual for her to reach into the pocket of a capacious coat for keys and to pull out a small wrench, a stolen ashtray, a desiccated apple-core or the stone of a mango. Books were left face down on the toilet cistern, discarded clothes were pushed into a corner like fallen leaves. She liked to ‘leave dishes to soak’, an act of self-deception that I’ve always abhorred.

  But, for the most part, I didn’t mind. Light travels differently in a room that contains another person; it reflects and refracts so that even when she was silent or sleeping I knew that she was there. I loved the evidence of her past presence, and the promise of her return, the way she changed the smell of that gloomy little flat. I had been unhappy there, but that was in the past. It felt like being cured of some debilitating disease, and I was jubilant. ‘Domestic bliss’ – the pairing of those words made perfect sense to me. I don’t mean to strike an inappropriate note, but few things have ever made me happier in my life than the sight of Connie’s underwear drying on my radiator.

  82. kilburn

  London changed, too. The city that had always seemed somewhat mean and grey, ineptly conceived, impractical and dour, became renewed. Connie was a Londoner and knew it like a cabbie. Street markets and drinking dens, Chinese, Turkish, Thai shops and restaurants and greasy spoons. It was like discovering that the somewhat dreary house in which you’ve grown up has one hundred further rooms, each leading off the other, each full of strangeness or beauty or noise. The city where I lived made sense because Connie Moore was in it.

  After eighteen months together we sold my Balham flat, scraped our savings into a pile, somehow acquired a joint mortgage and bought a place that would feel like ours. North of the river this time, a top-floor flat in Kilburn, larger, lighter, better for parties – not criteria that had ever troubled me before – with a small but pleasant spare room. The purpose of this room was vague. Perhaps people could stay over, or perhaps Connie could start painting again – she had not painted for a while, despite my encouragement, but had given up her share of the studio and was working full time in the St James gallery. Artists, she said, had a few years after college in which to make an impression and she felt this hadn’t happened. She still sold paintings, but less frequently, and she did not replace them with new work. Well, never mind, perhaps now she would have the space she needed. ‘And this …’ said Connie to Fran, swinging open the door, ‘is the nursery!’ and they both laughed for some time.

  We pulled up the carpets there too, and threw a housewarming party, the first party I had ever thrown. My friends from the lab eyed her friends from the arts like rival gangs at a teenage disco, but there were cocktails, and one of Connie’s musician friends DJ-ed and soon there was dancing – dancing, in my own home! – the two clans emulsifying after a vigorous shake. At midnight the neighbours came up to complain. Connie pressed drinks into their hands and told them to change out of their pyjamas and soon they were dancing too. ‘You see this?’ said my sister Karen, drunk and self-satisfied, her arms tight around the necks of Connie and me. ‘This was my idea!’ She squeezed a little tighter. ‘Just imagine, D, if you’d stayed at home that night. Imagine!’

  When the last guest had finally left we made strong coffee and stood at the sink washing glasses together in the late-summer dawn, the windows wide open onto the roofs of north-west London. Begrudgingly, I had to admit there was a great deal to thank my sister for. Though not my field, I was familiar with the notion of alternative realities, but was not used to occupying the one I liked the best.

  83. two single beds, pushed together

  So much changed during those years that it became impossible to conceal the truth from my parents, and so one Easter we drove east. Connie was an undeservedly confident driver and owned a battle-scarred old Volvo with moss growing in the window frames and a forest floor of crisp packets, cracked cassette cases and old A-to-Zs. She drove with a kind of belligerent sloppiness, changin
g the music more often than she changed gear, so that tensions were already quite high as we pulled up outside my family home, Victorian red-brick, lawn neat, gravel raked.

  I had met Connie’s family many times. It was impossible not to, given their closeness, and generally we got on very well. Her half-brothers would gather around me at family events, calling me ‘Professor’ and urging me to visit various north-east London takeaways, insisting, ‘Anything you want, on the house.’ Kemal, her step-father, thought me ‘a true gent’, and a far better proposition than the hooligans she usually brought home. Only Shirley, Connie’s mother, remained sceptical. ‘How’s Angelo?’ she would ask. ‘What’s Angelo up to? Have you seen Angelo?’ ‘It’s because Angelo used to flirt with her,’ Connie explained. It was never suggested that I should flirt, too.

  Arriving at my parents’, I wondered whether Connie might flirt with my father and perhaps draw him out of his spiked shell. Was that worth a try? Curtains twitched as we pulled up. My father’s hand raised at the window, my mother at the front door. Hello, would you mind taking your shoes off?

  Connie was completely charming, of course, but I’d always been led to believe that one talked to parents in the same polite, over-enunciated tone used for customs officials and police officers, conversation kept within tight parameters. What a lovely home, we’ve brought you some flowers, no more wine for me! Connie, however, made a great show of not altering her tone at all, simply talking to them like normal people.

  But they weren’t normal people, they were my parents. Connie was charming and bright, but my father smelt the artiness on her and it made him anxious. My mother was bemused. Who was this attractive, glamorous, outspoken creature, holding hands with her son? ‘She’s very vivacious,’ she whispered as the kettle boiled. It was as if I’d turned up wearing an immense fur coat. Separate rooms would have been too draconian, but despite there being a perfectly good double bed, we were shown into the spare room with two singles, my mother holding open the door as if to say, ‘Here it is, your den of filth and shame.’ Connie was never one to shy away from a fight, and I imagined my parents in the dining room below, staring at the ceiling, cigarettes suspended halfway to their mouths at the sound of Connie and me pushing the beds together, giggling. Teenage rebellion, at the age of thirty-three.