A Certain Chemistry (37 page)

I sat on the edge of the bed and opened the first bottle; it made a satisfying
cr-r-r-ick
as all the tiny metal connectors on the lid snapped under my expert and dashing twist. The spirit was pleasingly sharp. It stung my tongue and lips and felt like a penance, like an alcoholic Hail Mary. My determination to get absolution spurred me to drink another almost right away. I sat still for a moment . . . Christ—I felt really, really sick. I was going to puke in a second. . . . No, hold on . . . it was okay; it had passed. I reached forward and opened a Pernod.

Just the
tiniest
little bit after midnight I telephoned Sara.

“Hello?” she said. She sounded sleepy.

“It’s me . . . I love you.”

“Tom—”

“I really, really, really, really, really,
really
love you, Sara.”

“Tom?”

“What?”

“I want you to piss off now, and never call me again—okay?”

“But I
love
you. Don’t you care that I
love you
? You
bitch
! You—no! I didn’t mean that!”

“Tom—”

“Don’t hang up!
Please
. . . it’s . . .
I love you
.”

“Yeah—me, Georgina Nye—”

“It’s over between George and me. Finished.”

“Ahhh . . .”

“You’re the only one I want.”

“So, she dumped you.”

“She
didn’t
dump me . . . the
bitch
. . . it’s that agent of hers—I’m going to smash his fucking face in. . . . She didn’t . . . I mean, this is about me and you—it’s got nothing to do with her.”

“Good-bye, Tom.”

“No! No—I need to tell you something—”

“Bye.”

“No—
please
. Listen. I’ve got to tell you this, okay . . . ? Just let me say this
one thing
.”

“What? What is it?”

“It’s . . . right. Sara?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“I’m disconnecting the phone from the wall.”

The line went dead.

I looked my mobile right in the face.
“Bitch!”
I shouted at it. “Well, fuck you, then! Right, if that’s the way you want it . . . Fuck . . . You.”

I rang the land line again, but it was disconnected. I rang Sara’s mobile. It was switched off, so I left a message explaining that I loved her. There was nothing else I could do now but return to the minibar.

I don’t know when I finally drifted off to sleep, but I didn’t wake up until about eleven-thirty the next morning. All I could recover about the previous night’s events, using the physical evidence available rather than my memory, was (a) I’d continued to drink—the minibar was ravaged; (b) at some point I’d smashed a vase, and then tried to hide the bits from the hotel staff by pushing them inside the air-conditioning grille; (c) I couldn’t say how many text messages I’d sent, but the last five were retained by my phone and were “i love you,” “I LOVE YOU,” “you fucking BITCH,” “im missing you” (that one was sent to George), and (back to Sara again) “I LOOOOOOOOOOVE YOU”; and (d) I was deeply,
deeply
wrong about not needing to use the toilet again.

I tried to ring Sara’s mobile to apologize for my behavior the previous night. Possibly with a view to then moving on to apologize about various other things too. I got a “number unavailable” message, though. I couldn’t think of any reason for this except that Sara had either changed her number or had had me barred from calling it. I was drenched by misery. Not that grandiose, Gothic misery either—just an ugly, wretched bleakness. It was the emotional equivalent of sitting there in wet clothes—like I’d been caught in some kind of grim downpour and left damp with pathetic sadness.

I was miserable, I was a twat, and the cause of my misery was that I was a twat. Rearrange those pieces any way you fancy, and you’re not going to be able to avoid the conclusion that you are, definitively, a “miserable twat.”

I called Amy and arranged to meet her that evening. I’d prepared a little speech: “Never mind
why
. . . it’s just important that I see you. There’s something I need to say,” but she never gave me the chance.

“Amy? Are you free this evening?”

“Um, yeah. Eight-thirty, at Galluzzi’s, okay?”

“Yeah. I—”

“Right, see you then. Bye.”

I bet she was about to see another client. Everybody was trying to emphasize how unspecial I was, it seemed.

I took a shower and changed into the only alternative set of clothes I had with me. After that I did nothing. Nothing at all. I lay half sitting up on the bed, without even turning the TV on (any noise seemed harsh and painful, not because I had a hangover—I didn’t, in fact—but simply because it was a vulgar intrusion into my sorrow, inappropriate and grating), and smoked and smoked until, by the time I had to leave to meet Amy, my breathing sounded like a bicycle pump.

“Christ, Tom—
well done!
”

Amy had paused for only a couple of seconds after my, apropos of nothing, announcement that I’d been sleeping with George, and now, as she replied, her eyes were sparkling. She reached across, grabbed my shoulder, and gave it a tiny, congratulatory shake.
“Well done,”
she repeated.

“You said she was a Fuck Monster.”

“That’s what I’ve heard, aye—but a completely A-list Fuck Monster. If you divide the number of people who’ve poked her by the number of people who’d’ve
liked to have
poked her, you probably get a figure that’s actually smaller than for the world’s top nun.”

“So you think having sex with Georgina Nye is . . . what? An achievement to be proud of?”

“Abso
lute
ly. It’s Georgina Nye. I mean . . . Christ, Tom—
well done
.”

“Sara doesn’t see it quite like that.”

“Ah, right . . . so Sara knows, then?”

I lit a cigarette. “Yeah . . . she’s thrown me out.”

“How did she find out about it?”

“Fiona. Well, really, it was lots of things, a steady drip of things. But, for brevity, let’s just say it was that fucking bitch Fiona.”

“That makes sense.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, you’d gone off her, hadn’t you?”

“I was never
on
her,” I said, tapping my cigarette repeatedly against the rim of the ashtray. “And even if—for argument’s sake—we say I was, then she never fancied me back.”

Amy tutted. “Tch—what’s that got to do with it?”

“So why should she care? And I’m sure she didn’t mean to give me away, in any case. She’d just had a bit too much to drink and—”

“Her subconscious desire slipped out.”

“But she
didn’t fancy—
”

“Not
that
desire, you bampot: her desire for revenge. With Fiona, everything’s about Fiona. She might not have fancied you, but she wanted
you
to fancy
her
. And she certainly didn’t want you to stop fancying her because you’d moved on to someone else. And certainly not someone with a far better arse than she has.”

“I—”

“Ha!” Amy clapped her hands together in delight. “Georgina Nye’s arse—officially the U.K.’s best arse according to the readers of at least two national magazines! Fucking
brilliant
! Fiona must have been near-suicidal—I can’t wait to see her.”

“I think George’s agent has already given her a hard time.”

“Not as hard as . . . Hold on, you mean Paul knows about this already?”

“I think so . . . I think he’s made sure George won’t be seeing me anymore too.”

“How long has Paul known?”

“Um, I can’t say. Since Saturday morning, maybe.”

“Right . . .”

Amy topped up her Chianti. The wine sloshed in flamboyantly and a bit spilled over the edge of the glass. I watched it snake down the side, like a tear of blood.

Jesus—“like a tear of blood.” I’d actually thought that. When you find yourself thinking in the kind of similes that normally remain safely in the diaries of fourteen-year-old girls, then you
know
you’re in a bad way. “Like a tear of blood.”
Jesus
.

“Amy . . . I’m a bit fucked up,” I said.

“Aye. That’s understandable, Tom. I can imagine what you’re going through. Still, there
are
positives. I mean, you’re going to make fucking
thousands
from the book.”

“The book?”

“The book.
I Poked Georgina Nye
. . . the
book
.”

“I’m not going to do a book.”

“Oh, I wasn’t serious about the title. . . . Though, come to think of it, if we used asterisks, that’d be great:
I asterisk, asterisk, asterisk–ed Georgina Nye
. If pushed, we’d just say it was ‘loved.’ But that we blanked it because
love
is a dirty word for her. Christ—this thing writes itself!”

“It’ll have to, because
I’m
not writing it.”

“Tom, Tom—you’ve
got
to write it. You can’t possibly pass up an opportunity like this. You’ll be financially secure for life.”

“I’m not writing a book.”

“Tom . . .” She lowered her voice and took on a sorrowful look. “This is your chance to give a true account, to tell
your
side of the story.”

“Jesus, Amy! You can’t use that line on me. That’s
our
line. How can you sit there and use our line on me?”

“Because it always works.”

“Well, it’s not going to this time. I’m not writing a book.”

“And Sara? You think Sara isn’t going to sell the story?”

“She won’t.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“Because you know her.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me . . . since she found out about you and George, has she been just like the woman you’ve known for the past however many years it is?”

God, she was good. I was
so
lucky to have Amy as my agent.

“That’s not the point.”

“In what way isn’t it exactly, irrefutably, overwhelmingly the point?”

“Sara has no story to sell. She’s an unknown supermarket supervisor whose nobody boyfriend slept with Georgina Nye, and she didn’t know anything about it. There’s a magazine feature in it—”

“Two-page, nonexclusive. I’m thinking one of the more upmarket women’s mags—say,
marie claire
?”

“Yeah, they pay quite— No! Shut up. She
could
make a few pounds, but she has no details . . . or anything, really. Sara wouldn’t do it, but she
definitely
wouldn’t do it for what would be on offer.”

“Tch—and
that’
s your point?”

“No. My point is that—even if she did do it . . .
I
won’t. We both know that we always try to make it about somebody else—reactive: ‘setting the record straight,’ or ‘not allowing him to get away with it,’ or ‘letting the world know what you’re
really
like.’ But, really, it’s about me. And I don’t think it’s right. If I did it, I’d be demeaning myself. It’s about my own sense of what’s honorable.”

“Holy fucking shite! Drink up, Tom—you’re wanted back in
The Iliad
. Listen to yourself. You don’t hold the morality of Great Britain in the balance here. It’s a simple business deal. If you pass this up, all that happens is that you miss out on
hundreds of thousands of pounds
. That’s all.
You
miss out. Georgina Nye—Georgina Nye and fucking Paul Dugan—walk away smiling.
You
miss out and life goes on—they don’t start erecting statues of you or anything.”

“I don’t care. Like I said, it’s about me, and
I
don’t want to do it.”

“Then you’re nuts.”

“Quite probably. But I’m afraid this is a time when you’re getting ten percent of bugger-all.”

“I wasn’t thinking about my ten percent.”

I did a thing with my eyes.

“Okay,” she said, “I mean I wasn’t
only
thinking about my ten percent. I was thinking about what was best for you too. I know how people can have these conflicts between their emotions and good financial sense—
believe
me, I do—and I just wanted you to think this through. If you’re determined to piss away a fortune because of the samurai fucking code or whatever, then fine. I think you’re wrong, but I’ll go along with it because it’s what you want.” Amy scrunched her cigarette out in the ashtray. “I’m your agent—but I’m your friend too.”

“Which are you most?”

“Hey—don’t push it, okay? I’ve reached out now, so just don’t fucking push it.”

There was a short silence. I turned the cigarette packet over and over on top of the table.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose I’d better tell you why I wanted to see you.”

“What? You mean it wasn’t to tell me about poking Nye? Christ—what now? Are you going to peel your face back and confess you’re from the planet Zerg?”

“I want you to arrange for me to see George. Call her agent and set it up.”

“Not very likely, Tom. Celebrity? Spurned lover? Paul isn’t going to allow that. He’ll assume you’re going to attack her.”

“I’m not going to attack her.”

“Right—that’ll be my negotiating position, then.”

“Listen—you and Paul can be there too. Set it up somewhere public—though, obviously, not
too
public—and all four of us can meet. I need to see her face-to-face one more time, that’s all. . . .”

Amy stared at me and nodded slowly.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, “I
am not
going to attack her.”

“I didn’t say—”

“Quite apart from anything else,” I added sadly, “she’d easily be able to kick the shit out of me.”

“I still can’t see Paul allowing it. You and me are the last people he wants to have sitting across the table.”

“He will. Public place, all of us present—that’ll help. But what’s more, he’ll be terrified I’m going to write the story. If he thinks there’s
any
chance he can prevent it with his cockney banter—backed up by George being there to play on my affection—then he won’t be able to resist.”

“Mmmm,” Amy admitted, “you’ve got something there.”

“I’ll be fine. Really. I just need to see her. I can’t make it end for me without seeing her.”