A Certain Chemistry (30 page)

“Yeah, I’m fine—I’ll be out in a second,” I called back. Meaning I’d be out when this damn recording ended and the electric bint told me what the bloody delete key was. I thought about pressing all the keys in turn, but it was too risky. What if I pressed one and it said, “Message saved. Good-bye”? I’d have to start all over again. And anyway, knowing this insistently grisly network, it’d probably say, “Message saved, and additionally sent to local radio station. Good-bye.” I’d just have to stick with it.

“Are you sure?” Sara asked, unconvinced.

“Yes. I was just really desperate for the toilet.”

“Right . . . So when did you . . .” There were footsteps and I could tell by her voice—the way its tone changed and the way she spoke louder, calling back across to me—that she was moving away from the door. She’d be going to put on her coat. She’d put on her coat and right away reach into the pocket to turn her phone on. She’d do it instinctively, I knew she would.

“Sara,” I called. “Stay here.”

I heard her footsteps return. “What? What is it? Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes, I just . . . missed you,” I said, while I continued to fuck George in my ear. Christ—why didn’t I hurry up and come? What was I trying to prove?

“What?”

“I missed you. It’s nice to be back and have you here with me.”

“While you’re on the lavatory?”

“. . . Yes.” Idiot. Quick—say something to distract her, something she won’t be able to resist. “So—how was your day?”

“Oh, you know . . . a wee problem with a customer
right
at the end. It’s always
right
at the end. I had to check the till . . .” Footsteps, change of tone—she was heading for her coat again. “. . . but it was—”

“Sara—stay there! I’ll be finished in a second.”

“And I need to be right outside the door for that, do I? Is there going to be a big finale?”

“No . . . I just . . .” Sweet dancing Jesus—
at last:
the message finished. Robo-Hooker informed me that to erase the message I needed to press 7. (
7
. 7! Can you
believe
that? Who the hell uses 7 as the delete key? This network was clearly controlled by some kind of demonic cult.) I did this and was rewarded with the wonderful, wonderful confirmation, “Message deleted.” What a truly beautiful pair of words. I flushed the toilet, for credibility. “I’m coming out now!” I shouted to Sara. I was completely unable to keep a joyous, euphoric color out of my voice.

“No, wait a second,” she shouted back. “The press aren’t quite ready. . . .”

Keeping the phone behind my back, I opened the door, leapt out, and kissed Sara full on the mouth before she could say anything. I used this maneuver to circle around, while keeping my back to her, and move on over to her coat. In an easy movement, I took it down from the peg, slipped her mobile back into the pocket, and held it out for her to put on. Smooth, flawless, and innocuous. Well, apart from the fact that I’d never held out Sara’s coat for her to put on before in all the time we’d been together—so she just stared at it, assuming I was holding it up to show her something.

“What?” she asked, peering harder.

“Nothing. I’m just holding your coat out for you.”

“Why?”

“. . . Because I missed you.”

She stared at me in silence for a second or two.

“Riiiight . . .” she said eventually. She worked herself into her coat and looked at me again. “So, what happened in London, then?”

“I signed the contracts. It was no big deal. Though it did need to be done urgently. But it was no big deal besides that.”

“And then what happened?”

“Nothing happened. I watched a bit of TV at the hotel. Had a drink in the bar. All very dull.”

“Obviously. But the bit of story I’m kind of fishing for here is how you came to turn up at the door to the shop looking like you’d just done a triathlon while being gang-raped.”

I laughed far too much at this, far, far too much. I wouldn’t have blamed Sara if she’d assumed I’d become hysterical and slapped me but, as it happened, she was distracted. As I predicted, habit had ensured that one of the first things she did was put her hand into her pocket and pull out her mobile phone to switch it on. However, when she got it out she discovered that it was already on.

“My phone’s on,” she said.

“Yes, it is.” I nodded.

I hoped this would put an end to the matter.

“But I turned it off this morning. I always turn it off when I get to work—it’s part of my little ritual of getting ready.”

“Maybe you forgot today. What do you fancy eating this evening—perhaps we could go out somewhere?”

“No, I definitely turned it off. I remember because as I was doing it I said to Susan that the battery was very low.”

“Right . . . Well, someone might have knocked into your coat and it switched the phone on accidentally.”

“Can that happen?”

“Oh yes,” I said, with some considerable feeling, “the buttons on mobiles are
way
too bloody sensitive.”

“Hmm . . .”

She looked at the phone and wrinkled up her nose in thought.

What she was thinking I didn’t really know. But I knew precisely what I
didn’t
want her to be thinking. I didn’t want her to be thinking, “Hmm . . . I’ll just have a quick look at what (and when) the last outgoing call was . . .” That was what I’d do. This thought existed in the world, but had not yet made it into Sara’s head. It was my mission now to block its path using all my skill and knowledge of psychology.

“Boo!” I shouted, jumping in front of her, grinning, and shaking her by the shoulders.

“Jesus!”

“What?”

“Jesus . . . you scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry. I was just being playful. . . . I’ve missed you.”

“Tom—what the
fuck
have you been up to? Look at the state of you. You’re soaked in sweat, filthy, your clothes are ripped, you’ve got a black eye, and now—Christ help us—you’re being
playful
. What the fuck has happened?”

“Right. Yes. Come on, I’ll tell you on the way to the car,” I said, guiding her towards the door. “It’s simply unbelievable.”

That, at least, was perfectly true. I wouldn’t say another true thing for the next fifteen minutes.

It was great to soak in the bath. Good for both my muscles and my soul. I even experienced a small, secret moment of satisfaction as I undressed to get in. As everyone knows, the accepted practice is that the wife discovers her husband’s infidelity when he takes off his shirt to get changed and she sees scratches on his back. It’s an old standard that’s still used because it’s so flexible. You can have a nice switch—the wife, domestic angel, is perhaps fussing maternally over his clothes when the discovery is made. Or maybe they’re about to get into bed when, iconically, the mistress is shown to be with them. You can even work up a nice little metaphor about scars if you fancy. And it would, of course, have been especially gratifying (dramatically) to have the writer caught out by such an old writers’ cliché. But it wasn’t going to happen here. I allowed myself a smile at the knowledge that I was in such a
fucking awful state
that—even if there’d been any there—a few scratches on my back weren’t going to be enough to betray me. I had the black eye, great, raw abrasions on my elbow and my knee, and a lucky dip of various other scrapes and bruises all over the place—mostly from the bike crash but also, I suspected, quite a few from the toilet fucking. Christ, George—in a moment of passion—could have bitten my whole bleeding ear off and I’d have gotten away with it the way I looked now.

I stayed in the bath until my hands became like W. H. Auden’s proverbial bollocks. It was sheer joy to lie there, but I was also reluctant to go back down and face Sara again; I’d had more than enough of being cross-examined for one day. She wasn’t nasty about it or anything; she simply wanted to clarify bits that she felt she’d misunderstood because they sounded utterly insane. Obviously, you can imagine the position that put me in. It was like doing improv under gunfire.

But, oddly, when I eventually did lace up my courage and go back downstairs, Sara didn’t pursue the matter. We had something to eat, watched a little TV, she asked how the book was doing, and we chatted about this and that. It was all very pleasant. Comfortable. Being with George was fantastic, but it was lovely to be with Sara and feel comfortable. To sit on the sofa and eat a bag of crisps while she looked through the
Argos
catalog for a new hair dryer. When we lay in bed, her head on my chest as I finished reading a magazine article, I felt truly content.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the party?” she said.

“Hmm . . . ?” I replied, vaguely. In what I judged to be the manner of a man who, deep in his magazine, hadn’t quite heard what she’d said, rather than one who absolutely had heard what she’d said and was wincingly thinking, “Fuck it.”

“I said, why didn’t you tell me about the party?”

“Hmm . . . ?” I tried again, just to reiterate how casual I was. “. . . What party?”

“The party they’re having to celebrate the book launch having gone so well.”

Somehow, I stopped myself from replying, “Oh,
that
party.” Instead I turned the page of my magazine (for effect; I wasn’t reading—I didn’t even know what words were in front of me) and then said, offhandedly, “Why should I have mentioned it? It’s just a dull publicity thing.”

“Because you
know
I’ve been wanting to meet Georgina Nye, and I could at the party.”

“Not sure they’d let you in. It’s for the media, really, and you know what—”

“No, I
can
go.” There was a depressing certainty to the way Sara said this.

“Really?” I said, affecting to squint with increased interest at the magazine. (A piece of acting strenuous enough that it did make me actually absorb a little of what was on the page. I turned to another one, briskly—on the hunch that I’d now spent quite long enough appearing to be engrossed in what turned out to be an advert for an antithrush cream.)

“Aye. I popped round to Hugh and Mary’s while you were away, to collect a video they’d done for me of the Havant International Grand Prix—”

“Ah, I’m away for an evening, so you settle down with a cycling video . . .”

“No—it wasn’t—it was just . . .” She wasn’t going to be diverted. “Look, never mind that. The point is, while I was there they mentioned the party. I can certainly go to it if I want to. They assumed I would be going, in fact.”

“Oh, right.” Oh, bugger. “Good.” Shit. “I didn’t really think about it. Like I say, it’s just a boring media event, really. I wasn’t going to go myself.”

“I’ll go, even if you don’t.”

Nice one—that worked well.

“I
wasn’t
going to go myself . . . but then I thought I’d
have
to, or I’d look snotty. Maybe I can network a bit too.”

“Won’t Amy be there to do that for you?”

“I suppose so, but—”

“Aye, Amy
will
be there. I rang her last night to ask if she was going.”

My stomach was clenched up to the size of a walnut by now. I wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea of Sara, George, and me being together in the same room. I was hugely
less
uncomfortable about it, however, than about Sara being there alone with her, while I sat at home biting my fingernails. If Sara was going to meet George, I wanted to be there to keep an eye on things. Suppose George let something slip accidentally? It was far better for me to be on hand to firefight. Yet the terror of possibilities I’d imagined for the party became positively adorable by comparison now that it turned out Sara had called Amy last night. The only conceivable way I could hear that conversation opening was with Sara saying, “Amy, as Tom’s in London signing that contract thing at the moment . . . ,” and Amy replying, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You could have called me,” I said. I thought about going on to say, “Because Amy’s been having some mental problems recently—hallucinations, memory loss, pathological lying, that kind of thing.” But I was caught in the indecision of whether it was better to get this in early or to appear to announce it reluctantly, sadly, in response to Sara’s asking why Amy had said she didn’t know anything about any contract amendments or my being in London. Sara continued before I’d reached a conclusion.

“Oh, I didn’t want to bother you, and it just seemed natural to ask Amy herself what she was doing, rather than ask you. It’s not like you’d know everything about her, is it? She’s just your agent.”

“Right.”

“And it’s a wonder you know anything at all, if you ask me—she’s very vague . . . or perhaps she’s more vague with me than with you. . . .”

“Vague?”

“I was on the phone with her for about ten minutes, and I don’t think she gave me a clear answer to anything apart from that she was going to the party. Actually, I’m not sure whether I’d call it vague or evasive, now I come to think about it. She struck me as a bit devious.”

“She’s an agent.”

“I know I don’t talk to her a great deal—well, she always stays away from me, doesn’t she?—but I’ve never noticed it so much before.”

I shrugged. Because I couldn’t think of anything even more noncommittal to do.

“Anyway,” Sara continued, “at least she told me she was going to the party.
You
didn’t even mention the party. All this evening I kept bringing up the book and asking how things were going and what was happening, and you never thought to mention it to me. It was like you were hiding it.”

“Hiding it?
Hiding
it? I didn’t realize I was being interrogated. I simply thought we were chatting, and some silly publicity party didn’t seem worth mentioning. If you’d simply
asked
me, I’d have told you.”

“Why would I ask you when I didn’t know about it?”

“But you did.”

“You didn’t know that.”

I was getting whipped here. I evacuated my troops under cover of a huge, theatrical, exasperated sigh. We regrouped and counterattacked somewhere else in the hope that it’d be less well defended.