A Certain Chemistry (29 page)

I had three enemies. One, obviously, was time. The second, related, was distance; while it was, I had no doubt, possible to cycle flat-out to Sara’s work, whether it was possible for
me
to cycle flat-out to Sara’s work was another matter. My legs were already beginning to feel the strain, and I hadn’t even got out of the service road down to the railway station yet. The final enemy was despair, and this one was the most subtle and the most dangerous of them all. Part of my brain was telling me that I couldn’t possibly make it, so why additionally torture myself physically? This part of my brain was concerned for my heart, sympathetic to the increasing pain in my legs and, basically, just wanted what was best for me. I liked this part of my brain. Not only were its arguments compelling, but I also felt real affection there. Against it was a screeching, pitiless bastard of an inner voice that was telling me that I
could
get there in time if I just
pedaled harder
. I despised this voice utterly. It was haranguing and sadistic and also, I felt, anti-intellectual. Fascistic, practically; I really ought to ignore it simply on principle. Yet I had to put these personal feelings aside and somehow keep going. It’s amazing how alluring despair is sometimes: how it almost brings tears to your eyes to resist surrendering yourself to the relaxing ecstasy of it.

This bicycle was
so
not the fucking “Positive Visualization Express.”

After cycling at top speed for something over an hour and a half, I snatched a look at my watch and was simultaneously encouraged and devastated to see I’d been cycling for eight minutes.

There’s a muscle that runs down the top of your leg—the quadriceps femoris—and this muscle has a very special characteristic. If you cycle for, say, something over eight minutes, then this muscle will absorb into itself all the distilled human misery of the world. That’s “the distilled human misery of the world,” then, “in the top section of your leg.” It appears that, where any other muscle would simply cease to function, the quadriceps femoris can keep on going, hurting more and more and more. Yes, it becomes weak and rubbery, but it never
quite
gives up entirely; if you apply enough will, it seems it can always be made to push down one more, agonizing, time. Interestingly, the quadriceps femoris is the same muscle that will lose
just
enough strength to ensure that, on the third day of a skiing holiday, the hospital has a nice selection of horrific injuries caused by people not quite making that turn. The quadriceps femoris is the Judas in your leg.

I wasn’t going to make it. I had twelve minutes until Sara finished work, switched on her phone, and heard me fucking George in the lavatory of the 4:23 from Bathgate to Edinburgh, and I
wasn’t going to make it
.

I redoubled my efforts. I can declare with absolute confidence that no one whatsoever who happened to be watching me at this moment said, “Ah,
there’
s a man who’s redoubled his efforts.” It would have been quicker if I’d simply got off the bike, lain down, and allowed a group of small boys to kick my body along the pavement. Quicker, and less painful too. I could taste my ragged lungs in my mouth. My legs were simply sacks filled with some kind of dense, liquid metal. I was clinging, sopping, sagging wet with sweat. It was as though someone had filled a bath with sweat, and I’d fallen into it fully clothed. Where the wind hit my exposed wet skin, there was a sensation of fierce chilling, but it was superficial: an icy sheen that stung the surface but didn’t reduce my core temperature in any way at all.

I had four minutes left and was no longer checking time remaining against distance remaining and calculating a hope score. It now seemed so impossible I’d get there in time that to analyze it mentally just battered my will to keep going.

At the bottom of a steep hill was the road that eventually led to Sara’s work. I turned into it, which would have been lovely, had the bike turned into it too. Instead, its front tire lost its grip on the tarmac and fled into the air, rearing up like a bucking horse. The bike and I parted ways, and it gamboled untidily into a lamppost while I skidded across the surface of the road on a knee and an elbow. When I finally scraped to a halt, on all fours, I looked up into the face of a dog. Higher up, its owner—an old man with thin white hair—peered down at me with concern and asked, “Are you all right?” I cupped my hands towards him, pleading.

“Why can’t I just
die
?” I asked.

He shrugged.

I grunted to my feet and limped over to where the bicycle had landed. The front mudguard was twisted into the wheel, but I twisted it out again and it seemed that otherwise it was fine. So, I got back on and started to pedal off once more. I had two minutes. It simply wasn’t possible to get there in two minutes.

Yet it’s funny how the body reacts in times of extreme crisis. You know, like those stories you hear about women lifting a car off their children? There seems to be an override switch on what’s physically possible; enough stress and it gets flipped, and you become superhuman. Something like this happened to me, and I pedaled like you simply would not believe. My legs spun, whipping the chain around at hissing speed and sending the bike rocketing along the road. It seemed I had more power than ever before and an infinite supply of energy. Miraculously, with just
three seconds
to go before my time was up, I glanced up and realized that I was nowhere near Sara’s work. Absolutely
nowhere
bleeding near it. I was, though, a lot closer than one would have guessed I’d be. I continued to pedal, knowing that I was, at least, within two minutes of getting there. Two minutes later, I revised this assessment. But three minutes after that I rounded a corner and could actually see her shop. I gritted my teeth and pumped my legs with every last iota of determination left in my body. Five yards from pulling up alongside the double doors at the front I jerked on the brakes and, the instant I was traveling slowly enough, jumped off the bike and ran—allowing the riderless bicycle to skid off into the wall in front of a newsagent’s with a fatal-sounding, clattering crash. It had served its purpose now, bravely given its all to get me there. I hoped I never saw the hateful pile of crap ever again.

I ran the final couple of yards to PolarCity and was,
at last,
standing in front of its glass doors. The sign on it read
CLOSED,
but Susan—Sara’s colleague, whose children I’d come close to traumatizing with nudity a few months previously—was just on the other side, looking down at a set of keys. I banged frantically on the glass with the flat of my hands and shouted, “Susan!” She looked up, caught sight of me, and all the blood in her face instantly fled the country. To steady her nerves, I bellowed, “LET ME IN!” and banged on the glass again. She took a step backwards into a promotional display of Cinnamon fucking Grahams, but then she seemed to become aware that, under the injuries, sweat, and filth, it was me. This realization, I have to say, failed to tempt the blood back into her face. She did, however, come over to the door and, after a bit of scrambling with the keys, let me in.

“Tom!” she said. “Fuck!”

“Where’s Sara?” I asked, but I’d spotted her before she answered.

“She’s checking a till. We had a—”

“Thanks,” I said, heading over to where Sara was standing with a couple of other members of staff and a plump, middle-aged man who was obviously a customer.

“What’s happened?” Susan called from behind me, but I didn’t bother to answer. I carried on towards Sara. She and the others had heard the commotion of my entry and were now standing motionless, watching my approach. It only took a moment for me to reach them. Sara looked bewildered, her colleagues stunned, and the shopper terrified out of his wits (I think he suspected I was the deformed, maniac member of staff they kept in the attic to unleash after hours on customers who disputed their change). I came to an unsteady halt.

“Can I use your toilet?” I asked.

Sara took a step closer, her eyes racing all over me in alarm. “Tom—what’s happened?”

“Oh, nothing, I’m fine. I’ve just got back.”

“From London?”

“From London? I mean, yeah—from London, and—”

“Jesus—did you
run
all the way?”

“No, I—”

“God, look at your eye!” She reached forward and poked the bruise with her finger. (Why does everyone feel they have to do that?)

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” she said, but looked like she might try for another poke. I backed away a little. “Sorry,” she said again. “How did you get that?”

Knowing she was going to ask this question, I’d given it some thought, as it happens. “I fell” was uncomplicated enough, but it’s what people always say when they’re lying about an injury, isn’t it? I had no reason to believe that Sara would be suspicious, but this explanation’s “the dog ate my homework” quality seemed to me to invite mistrust. As I’d said to George, it was best to stick to the facts as far as possible and say that someone had hit me; I’d merely change the location.

Thinking about it some more, though, I realized I’d forgotten to factor Sara’s response into the equation. For example, I’d toyed with “I was hit by a tramp.” London, as everyone knows, is full of tramps, and telling a Scot that you’d gone to London for the day and been punched in the face, spontaneously, for no reason, by a tramp would be easy to sell. The trouble with this idea, however, was that Sara was unlikely to let it lie. Falling over is simple idiocy; being punched by a tramp is an anecdote. She’d want to know where it happened, what I’d been doing there, if anyone else was around, and, if so, did they help? What did he look like? Did he try to steal anything? Was he on his own? Had I reported it to the police? I’d have to invent a whole narrative, possibly some supporting characters too, and I’d then have to remember it all correctly every time Sara asked me to repeat it to people. (Which she would do—I had no trouble whatsoever hearing Sara saying the words “Tom, tell Carole about how that tramp beat you up in London.”)

These two options—fall or tramp—were still competing for supremacy right up to the time Sara asked, “How did you get that?” But now she
had
asked it and was standing in front of me waiting for an answer, I couldn’t dither any longer. She was staring at me. Come on, Tom—you have to reply now.

“I fell over a tramp.”

Bollocks.

“What?”

“I fell . . . Look, I’ll explain later. Can I just use your toilets first?”

She wanted to continue with me but glanced awkwardly back at the group waiting and watching by the till. “Aye,” she exhaled. “Of course. You know where they are.”

I scurried off. I did indeed know where they were. They were in the staff area, which was beyond the office and just off from the cloakroom,
where everyone left their coats and bags
.

It took me only seconds to get to the cloakroom and locate Sara’s coat. About a dozen staff worked at the store, and they were a pretty close-knit lot; no one had any misgivings about leaving their things unattended in the staff area. In Sara’s pockets, freely accessible to me, were her car keys, her purse, and her mobile phone.

Her mobile phone was in my hand!

I’d done it!

Now what?!

Briefly, I thought about smashing it on the floor. Hurling it down with all my strength so it shattered into a thousand pieces. I’d then search through them until I found the SIM card, which I’d eat. I didn’t rule this option out, but I did decide that it wouldn’t be easy to explain. Easier to explain than a voice-mail recording in which George and I spoke in candid fashion to the accompaniment of gasps, grunts, and slapping flesh—yes—so, as I say, I didn’t rule it out, but I owed it to myself to try simply deleting the message first.

I switched the mobile on. It awoke with a soft glow and, it seemed to me, the most piercing, deafening electronic trill ever emitted by anything—it was like a two-second rave. “Shut
uuuup
!” I hissed at it, shaking it in my hand and pointing threateningly at the hard, hard floor, just so it knew I meant business. Sara’s mobile—like every mobile in the world except mine—was difficult and confusing to operate. It had some kind of impenetrable menu system that was full of illogically ordered, pointless things I didn’t want and moved the wrong way when I tried to scroll through it. I was in far too much of a hurry to give it more than a few seconds of my time. Instead, I decided to try the button marked with those three arcs of increasing size that are the international symbol for “noise.” I guessed this was probably a quick-access key for her voice mail. Though, with this bleeding phone, I didn’t entirely dismiss the possibility that it would instead activate a shrieking, teeth-shatteringly loud, personal-attack alarm. I took a breath and pressed it. The phone dialed, and after a single ring the call was answered by a slightly posh, vaguely erotic, electronic voice. This high-class robot call girl welcomed me to my voice mail and said I had one new message which, unprompted, the phone then began to play. Jesus.
Jeeee
sus. If Sara had heard this . . .
Jeee
sus. I stabbed at the 2 key to delete it. This had no effect. Can you believe that? After scientists have worked for
years
to establish that the 2 key is the delete key, after everyone in the world has accepted that this is the most efficient, elegant, and instinctive key and has adopted it as a standard as universally accepted as Mayday or Greenwich mean time, after all this, the spiteful, surreal, anarchist network Sara was on had decided it should be something else. Unbelievable.

I heard Sara’s voice. She’d come into the staff room one had to pass through to get to where I was. Quickly, I darted off into the toilet—just a tiny room with a single lavatory and a sink—sat down, and locked the door. My fingers hadn’t yet let go of the bolt when I head Sara calling me from out in the cloakroom. “Tom?” Then, again, “Tom, are you okay?” Her voice now so close that I could tell she was
right
outside my door—probably almost pressing her ear to it to listen. Even though the locked door was there, she was only inches away from me. It was awfully uncomfortable for me to feel her there when the phone pressed to my head was replaying George and me having sex. I had to tell myself over and over that it was impossible for Sara to hear it.