Here’s Looking At You

3

‘I mean, where’s the romance and mystery?’ Anna continued, holding up her glass for a refill. ‘Mr Darcy said you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. Not, you must allow me to tell you I’m into this spunk-throwing thing.’

‘We don’t live in the right era for an Anna,’ Michelle agreed. ‘Not much formality and wooing. But, you know. If you lived in Jane Austen time you’d have teeth like Sugar Puffs and seven kids with no pain relief. Swings and roundabouts. What appealed about this Neil’s profile, before you met him?’

‘Uhm. He seemed sane and pleasant enough,’ Anna shrugged.

Michelle flicked her fag into the Illy coffee cup that was performing ashtray duties. She was constantly giving up, then falling off the wagon.

Anna and Michelle had met in their early twenties at WeightWatchers. Anna had passed with flying colours, Michelle had flunked. One day, their bouncy cult leader was barking: ‘Strong minds need healthy bodies!’ and Michelle had said loudly, in her West Country lilt: ‘That’s Stephen Hawking told, by Jet from Gladiators,’ and then, into the shocked silence, ‘Fuck this, I’m off for a boneless bucket.’ That week, Anna missed her weigh-in and made a best mate.

‘“Sane and pleasant enough” is aiming a bit low? I’ve hired staff that had more going for them than that.’

‘I dunno. I just spent an evening with a man who talked about weeing on people as a leisure activity and demanded to know what I like in bed. So in the face of that, I’ll take sane and pleasant. Try internet dating, and your expectations would tumble too.’

Michelle had people she called when she fancied a tumble. She’d had her heart broken by a married man and insisted she was not interested in looking for further disappointment.

‘But you make my point for me, my love. That was someone “safe”, so why not take a risk on Mr Exciting?’

‘Even if they agreed to a date, I don’t want to handle Mr Exciting’s disappointment when he turns up and meets me.’

There was a brief pause while Frank Sinatra bellowed his way through ‘Strangers in the Night’, from the stereo held together with duct tape underneath the till.

‘Are we going to say it?’ Michelle said, looking to Daniel. ‘Fuck it, I’m going to say it. Anna, there’s modesty, which is a lovely quality. Then there’s underrating yourself to a self-harming degree. You are bloody brilliant. What disappointment are you talking about?’

Anna sighed and leaned back against the sofa.

‘Hah, well. I’m not though, am I? Or I wouldn’t have been single forever.’

Anna’s British gran Maude had a dreadful saying about the lonely folly of romantic ideas above your station: ‘She wouldn’t have a walker and the riders didn’t stop’.

It had given eleven-year-old Anna the chills. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Some women think they’re too good for those who want them, but when they’re not good enough for the men they want, they end up alone.’

Maude had been an utter misery-tits about everything. But a misery-tits could be right, several times a day.

‘When did you get this idea you’re in some way not good enough?’ Michelle said.

‘That’d be school.’

A pause. Michelle and Daniel knew the stories of course, right up to the Mock Rock. And they knew about The Thing That Happened After. There was a tense pause, as much as anything could be tense when they were supine with alcohol at knocking one in the morning.

Michelle sensitively turned the focus, for a moment.

‘I’m not sure hanging round with us two does you good. We’re no help. I’m perma-single and Dan’s … settled down.’

There was another pause as Michelle used the phrase ‘settled down’ with some sceptical reluctance.

Daniel had been with the somewhat droopy Penny for nearly a year. She was a singer in fiddle-folk band The Unsaid Things and sufferer of ME. Michelle was deeply sceptical of the ME, and claimed Penny was in fact a sufferer of POOR ME syndrome. Daniel met Penny when she’d waitressed at The Pantry and been sacked for being useless, so Michelle felt she had some rights to an opinion. An unflattering one.

‘You are a help. you’re helping right now,’ Anna said.

‘By the way,’ Michelle waved at a bowl on the table, ‘you’ve heard of Omelette Arnold Bennett. Well these are Homemade Scotch Eggs from Arnold’s buffet. Dig in.’

For all her tough talking, Michelle was kind and generous to a fault, and had supplied food for a former customer’s funeral earlier in the day.

‘I’ve been eyeing them like a wolf for the last hour, but I feel guilty eating a dead man’s eggs,’ Daniel said.

‘They’re from the wake, Daniel,’ Michelle said. ‘No one goes to their own wake. Ergo, they’re not Arnold’s.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Daniel said. ‘Egg-scused. Eggs-culpated.’ He picked up an egg, and started eating it like an apple.

‘Arnold’s brother dropped them off. He told me what Arnold’s last words were. Well, strictly speaking, his penultimate words. His final-final words were not the cloudy lemonade, Ros but that wasn’t as profound. Are you ready? It’s a bit of a choker.’

Anna looked at her with glassy eyes and nodded.

Michelle tapped her cigarette. ‘He said he wished he hadn’t wasted so much time being scared.’

‘Of what?’ Anna said.

Michelle shrugged.

‘Didn’t say. Life terrors, I guess. We’re scared of all sorts of things that won’t kill us, aren’t we? The things we live our lives around avoiding. Then we realise when we get to the end that what we should’ve been afraid of was a life lived by avoiding things.’

‘Fear of fear itself,’ Daniel said, wiping breadcrumbs out of his beard.

Anna thought about this. What was she scared of? Being alone? Not really. It was her natural state, given that she’d been single almost all of her adult life. She was scared of never being in love, she supposed. Hang on, no – that wasn’t fear, exactly. More disappointment, or sadness. So what was the fear she was living around? Hah. As if she didn’t know the answer.

It was the fear of ever being that girl again.

She thought of the email that had dropped into her inbox a week ago, which had coated her in a sheen of unseasonal sweat as soon as she saw it.

‘Some fears are justified,’ Anna said, ‘like my fear of heights.’

‘Or my fear of bald cats,’ Daniel said.

‘How is that rational?’ Michelle said.

‘Cats keep all their secrets in their fur. Don’t trust one with nothing to lose.’

‘Or my fear of going to my school reunion next Thursday,’ Anna said.

‘What?’ Michelle said. ‘That does NOT count. You have to go!’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘To say, screw you all, look at me now. You didn’t break me. You could slay the demon forever, this way. Wouldn’t that feel good?’

‘I don’t care what they think of me now,’ Anna said, with feeling.

‘Actually going proves it.’

‘No it doesn’t. It looks like I’m arsed.’

‘Not true. And look, if he’s there …’

‘He won’t be,’ Anna cut in, feeling a little breathless at the thought. ‘No way would he go. It would be a million miles beneath him.’

‘Then there’s even less reason to avoid it. Do you ever want to be Arnold, wondering what life would’ve been like if you’d not wasted time being scared? This school show, the Glee thing where they were vile. You’ve never seen them since that day, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then it’s a loose end. An unfaced thing. That’s why it’s still got a hold over you.’

‘Great Crom!’ Daniel said, sitting up, looking in the direction of the restaurant’s picture windows.

Anna and Michelle turned in their seats to see a thirty-something man hooting with laughter. His trousers and pants were at half mast, while he looked over his shoulder at people beyond.

‘He’s flashing us!’ Anna said.

‘That’s the king and the privy council,’ Daniel agreed.

They stared some more and saw the lights of a crowd in the distance, the firefly blink of camera phones going off.

‘I think he’s mooning his mates and we’re getting the nasty by-product,’ Michelle said.

The man lost his balance and staggered forwards, landing with a soft but significant thud against the glass.

‘Woah, woah, woah!’ Michelle was fast on her feet and over to him, rapping her knuckles against the glass. ‘These windows cost five grand, mate! Five grand!’

A moment of slapstick comedy followed as a pissed man with his chap hanging out realised that there was a woman on the other side of the window. He screamed and ran away, trying to pull his jeans up as he went.

Anna and Daniel, weakened by alcohol, were left senseless with laughter.

Michelle returned, flopping down on the sofa and clicking at a fresh cigarette with her lighter.

‘Tell these fuckers what you think of them, Anna. Seriously. Show them you’re not scared and they didn’t get the better of you. Why not? If you avoid them, you’re wasting time being scared of nothing. Don’t let fear win.’

‘I don’t think I can,’ Anna said, laughter subsiding. ‘I really don’t think I can.’

‘And that’s exactly why you have to do it.’

4

In the merciful hush of the empty office, James was nasally assaulted by the sticky, urinary smell of lager spill.

The odour was rising from the detritus of last night’s riotous session of beer pong. The cleaner had started fighting back against the mess generated by freewheeling urban hipster creatives, tacitly making it clear what was within her jurisdiction. Alcoholic games popularised by North American college students clearly fell outside.

Just as soon as James felt irritated about her work-to-rule, the emotion was superseded by guilt. Office manager Harris got stuck into arguing with the cleaner whenever their paths crossed and James didn’t know how he could do it. She’s your mum’s age, wears saggy leggings and dusts your desk for a living. All you should do is mumble thanks and leave her a Lindt reindeer and twenty quid at Christmas, or you’re an utter bastard. Mind you, on all the evidence, Harris was an utter bastard.

For about the last six months at Parlez, James had really wished someone would come in and shout at his colleagues. Not him, obviously. Someone else.

When he’d first arrived here – a multi-channel digital partner offering bespoke, dynamic strategies to bring your brand to life – he thought he’d found some kind of Valhalla in EC1. It was the kind of place careers advisors would’ve told sixteen-year-olds didn’t exist.

Music blared above a din of chatter, trendily dressed acquaintances drifted in and out, colleagues had spontaneous notions that they needed to try Navy strength Gimlets and did runs to the local shops.

Work got done, somewhere, in all the bouts of watching YouTube clips of skateboarding kittens in bow-ties, playing Subbuteo and discussing that new American sci-fi crime drama everyone was illegally downloading.

Then, all of a sudden, like flipping a switch, the enlivening chaos became sweet torture to James. The conversation was inane, the music distracting, the flotsam of fashionable passers-through an infuriating interruption. And he’d finally accepted the immutable law that lunchtime drinking = teatime headache. Sometimes it was all James could do not to get to his feet and bellow ‘Look, don’t you all have jobs or homes to go to? Because this is a PLACE OF WORK.’

He felt like a teenager whose parents had left him to run the house to teach him a lesson, and he well and truly wanted them back from holiday, shooing out the louts and getting the dinner on.

He thought he’d kept his feelings masked but lately, Harris – the man who put the party into party whip – had started to needle him, with that school bully’s antennae for a drift in loyalty. When Ramona, the punky Scottish girl with pink hair and a belly-button ring who wore midriff tops year-round, was squeezing Harris’s shoulders and making him shriek, he caught James wincing.

‘Stop, stop, you’re making James hate us!’ he called out. ‘You hate us really, don’t you? Admit it. You. Hate. Us.’

James didn’t want to sound homophobic, but working with Harris, he thought the stereotype of the bitchy queen had possibly become a stereotype for a reason.

And the humdrum petty annoyances of office life were still there, whether they were in a basement in Shoreditch with table football or not. The fridge door was cluttered with magnets holding ‘Can You PLEASE …’ snippy notes. The plastic milk bottles had owners’ names marker-penned on them. People actually got arsey about others using ‘their’ mug. James felt like putting a note up of his own: ‘If you have a special cup, check your age. You may be protected by child labour laws.’

James told himself to enjoy the rare interregnum of quiet before they all arrived. The sense of calm lasted as long as it took for his laptop wallpaper to flash up.

He knew it was slightly appalling to have a scrolling album of photos of your beautiful wife on a device you took to work. He’d mixed the odd one of the cat in there but really, he wasn’t fooling anyone. It was life bragging, plain and simple.

And when that wife left you, it was a carousel of hubris, mockery and pain. James could change it, but he hadn’t told anyone they’d separated and didn’t want to alert suspicion.

He’d turn away for a conversation, turn back, and there would be another perfect Eva Kodak moment. White sunglasses and a ponytail with children’s hair slides at Glastonbury, in front of a Winnebago. Platinum curls and a slash of vermillion lipstick, her white teeth nipping a lobster tail on a birthday date at J Sheekey.

Rumpled bed-head, perched on a windowsill in the Park Hyatt Tokyo at sunrise, in American Apparel vest and pants, recreating Lost in Translation. Classic Eva – raving vanity played as knowing joke.

And of course, the ‘just engaged’ photo with James. A blisteringly hot day, Fortnum’s picnic at the Serpentine and, buried in the hamper, a Love Hearts candy ring saying Be Mine in a tiny blue Tiffany gift box (she chose the real article later).

Eva was wearing a halo of Heidi plaits, and they squeezed into the frame together, flushed with champagne and triumph. James gazed at his grinning face next to her and thought what a stupid, hopeful idiot he looked.

There was that sensation, as if the soft tissue in his chest and throat had suddenly hardened, the same one he’d had when she’d sat him down and said things weren’t working for her and she needed some space and maybe they’d rushed into it.

He sighed, checking he had all his tablets of Apple hardware of varying size about him. He was probably worth about three and a half grand to a mugger.

His mobile rang; Laurence.

‘Jimmy! What’s happening?’

Hmmm. Jimmy wasn’t good. Jimmy was a jaunty alter ego that Loz only conjured into existence when he wanted something.

‘This school reunion tonight.’

‘Yep?’

‘Going?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because your best mate begged you to go and promised to buy you beers all night, and said we could get gone by nine?’

‘Sorry, no. The thought gives me a prolapse of the soul.’

‘That’s a bit deep.’

‘You realise that at our age everyone will be doing that competitive thing about their kids? It’ll be all about Amalfi Lemon’s “imaginative play”. Brrrr.’

‘Think you’ve forgotten our school. More like “Tyson Biggie is out on parole.”’

‘Why do you want to go?’ James said.

‘Naked curiosity.’

‘Curiosity about whether there’s anyone you’d like to see naked.’

‘Don’t you want to know if Lindsay Bright’s still hot?’ Laurence asked.

‘Yurgh, no. Bet she looks like a Surrey Tory.’

‘But a dirty one, like Louise Mensch. Come on, what else are you doing on a Thursday, now you’re on your own? Watching Takeshi’s Castle in your Y-fronts?’

James winced. His Brabantia bin was crammed with Waitrose meals-for-one packaging.

‘Why would my telly be in my pants?’ he parried, sounding as limp as he felt.

‘Wap waaah.’

James’s phone pipped with a waiting call. Eva.

‘Loz, I’ve got a call. We’ll continue “me saying no” in a minute.’

He clicked to end one call and start another.

‘Hi. How’re you?’ she said.

James did a sarcastic impression of her breezy tone. ‘How’d ya think?’

Sigh.

‘I’ve got some ear drops for Luther. I need to bring them round and show you how to give them to him.’

‘Do you drop them in his ear?’ James hadn’t necessarily decided relentless bitterness was his best tactic, but unfortunately the words always left his mouth before he’d put them through any security checks.

‘Can I come round tonight?’

‘Ah, I can’t tonight. Busy.’

‘With what?’

‘Sorry, is that your business?’

‘It’s just the tone you’re taking with me, James, makes me think you might be being needlessly obstructive.’

‘It’s a school reunion.’

‘A school reunion?’ Eva repeated, incredulous. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was your sort of thing.’

‘Full of surprises. So we’ll have to find another night for Luther.’

After they’d rung off, James allowed himself the sour pleasure of having won a tiny battle in the war. The satisfaction lasted a good three seconds before James realised that now he was going to have to go to this school reunion.

He could lie, but no. This merited some small stray reference on social media as incidental proof – a check in, a photo, a ‘good to see you too’ to some new Facebook addition – to let Eva know she didn’t know him as well as she thought she did.

‘Morning!’ Ramona unwound sheep face ear-muffs from her head. ‘Och, why did I drink on a Wednesday? I am dying, so I am.’

‘Hah,’ James said, which meant, please don’t tell me about it.

Naturally, he spent the next quarter of an hour hearing about it, then she repeated the tale to each new arrival. Wine served in plastic pint beakers got you pissed, who knew.

5

Anna tapped ‘Gavin Jukes’ into Facebook, hoping his name was rare enough to make him easily flush-outable. She wasn’t completely sure why she was looking him up. She wanted one person she could safely say hello to, should he appear.

And there was his profile, second down – she recognised the long nose and chin. She clicked his page, the photo a family portrait. Wife, three kids. Turned out his own gender was not his thing. Lives: Perth, Australia.

Good for you, Gavin. When it came to Rise Park, she could see the appeal in going so far away that if you went any further, you were getting nearer again.

The phone on her desk rang.

‘Parcel for you!’ trilled cheery Jeff on reception.

Anna put the phone down and bounded down the stairs. Jeff was resting the delivery on the counter, a wide, shallow black box with glossy embossed letters, tied up with wide satin ribbon. It subtly but unmistakably trumpeted I have spent more money than I needed to.

‘Something nice?’ Jeff said, then muttered ‘none of my business, of course,’ flushed at the evident thought it could be Agent Provocateur-style rutting wear, the sort of thing with frilly apertures and straps with buckles dangling from it.

Even though it wasn’t, Anna went warm in the face too, knowing she couldn’t correct it without making the suspicion stronger. It was like using the toilet stall with the foul smell and then not being able to warn the next person without them thinking you were trying a poo double bluff.

‘A dress,’ she said, hurriedly, ‘for an … event.’

‘Ah,’ said Jeff, ‘that’s nice,’ avoiding her eyes. In his head, she was obviously already in an Eyes Wide Shut, pointy nose opera mask, grinding away to Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’.

She carried the box up the stairs, back to her office on the flats of her palms, like a pizza. The University College London history department was spread over a row of Georgian townhouses, with high ceilings and huge sash windows.

It was a magical place to work. In her more sentimental moments, Anna felt it was a spiritual reward for schooldays – the dream after the nightmare. The building had that lovely old-fashioned carpety smell and yellow light from large round pendant lamps, as if you were living inside a warm memory.

Anna pushed her office door open with her back, pleased that no one had spied her. She’d feel self-conscious at any cries of ooh let’s see it on then.

Anna might’ve lost her schoolgirl weight and become a perfectly standard dress size, but it didn’t mean she thought and acted like the person she now was. She retained an intense dislike of clothes shops. The advent of online shopping had been a revelation. She would much, much rather use her office as a dressing room.

So when she realised the reunion needed a dress – no, not merely a dress but something truly flash, that would raise two fingers to them all in the form of fabric – she’d gone straight to an expensive designer website and spent the cost of a nice weekend away.

She dislodged the lid, rustling through the layers of tissue paper. There the exorbitant dress lay. Not a lot of material for … well, she wasn’t going to dwell on it.

Anna laid it carefully over a chair and checked the office door was locked, then wriggled out of her shapeless Zara smock, swapping it for the evening gown. She twisted it into place with forefingers and thumbs very carefully, as if it was gossamer, and pulled up a reassuringly chunky zip, with only a little breathing in.