A Certain Chemistry (39 page)

I lit a cigarette. “Want one?” I called, offering the packet.

She shook her head.

I poked at a pebble with my toe, moving it around for a while and then making a shot for the drain at the edge of the road. It was deflected by an uneven curbstone and missed, shooting off to the left.

“Fuck,”
I hissed quietly to myself with great irritation.

The council really ought to do something about the curbstones in this city.

I took another drag on my cigarette and looked over at George. “I wouldn’t sell the story, you know,” I said.

She looked back at me, briefly. “I know,” she said, then looked away again. “Paul is scared to death . . . but I never thought you would. It just wouldn’t be you.”

“Do you love me?”

“No.”

She could have hesitated. Couldn’t she? You know, just for a second—what would it have hurt?

“Did you love me at all?” Well, you have to ask, don’t you? You’re going to get second prize with a “Yes . . . once”—that or a “No—not really” that provides you with a full-blown feeling of victimhood, misery, martyrdom, and self-pity. Either way you’ll have
something
to take home.

George took a heavy breath. Pulling lots of air in, holding it for a time, and then releasing it abruptly. She briefly glanced over at me. “I think I loved the idea of you.”

“Right . . . right . . .” I nodded. “So . . . what the fuck does
that
mean, then?”

“I loved what you had—what you were. Settled, secure, comfortable, not controlled by ambition . . . Sara, the semi, and the steady, quiet jobs. How your girlfriend never needed to worry about what you saw in her—whether it was false, whether you didn’t love her but really just . . .”

“The
idea
of her?”

“Touché.”

I tossed my cigarette onto the ground and stubbed it out viciously with my foot—tearing it to pieces, smearing its innards across the pavement. It seemed the perfect thing to do at that moment—required, really. Trouble was, I hadn’t finished it. In fact, I’d only had a few drags. Christ—it was only half smoked. What a waste. And I still wanted to smoke too. I lit another one. Bugger.

“It wasn’t conscious, you know?” George went on. “I didn’t realize what was really attracting me to you until later.”

“When it wasn’t there.”

“I suppose.”

“Well . . . I see . . . Attracted to me because of the life I had, rather than who I was. . . .” I nodded that I understood. “Bit of a fucking psycho, aren’t you, really?”

“My therapist says I have problems with security and self-esteem.”

“Ah—that’s different, then.”

George became a little angry and looked at me properly for the first time. “Can you honestly say that you weren’t attracted to me partly because I’m ‘Georgina Nye’? Under all that loud dismissal of celebrity, weren’t you
remotely
excited at the thought of having sex with someone who was on the telly?”

I wanted to say, “No. That
never
mattered at all,” as I had to Sara. But I didn’t. The dreadful thing was, I wasn’t sure now. Could I say that it never mattered
at all
? That it didn’t for one moment pass through my mind and give me a tiny thrill? And, if it did, if I was—even partly—attracted to her not because of anything she was but because of the life she had, then was I just as much of a fucking psycho as she was? This was pretty fundamental stuff about my personality.

Best not to think about it.

I shrugged.

“Well,” said George, rather triumphantly, “there you go.”

Ha. Got her—because actually, of course, I’d admitted
nothing
.

George peered through the window at Amy and Paul. They were hunched close, still talking. “I think they need more than a few minutes,” she said. “I’m going to find a cab. Tell Paul I’m making my own way back, would you?”

“Sure.”

“You know,” she said, turning across to look at me apologetically, “I never meant to—”

“Oh—
don’t
.” I smiled. “Let’s keep at least one cliché in the box.”

George smiled back. “Well . . . look after yourself, Tom. I hope things turn out right for you.”

“Yeah. And I hope you . . . well, that you stay hugely famous and unbelievably rich. If nothing else, I think this whole mess has taught you what’s
really
important to you, and you’ll never again be tempted by the chimera of relentless anonymity and far, far less money.”

She laughed and punched me playfully in the chest. I smiled back (even though she’d actually hit a pen that was in my pocket and knocked it
right
into my nipple and it really hurt). Then she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, before turning around and walking away down the street. I watched her go, wondering whether she would turn around. Indulge in a brief glance, maybe—for “one last look.” She didn’t, though. She simply kept on walking until she rounded the bend and there was nothing left but an empty road.

“First time she mentioned her therapist,” I said to myself. “I should have known right then.”

That would have made quite a good bit in a script, I reckoned. I could see it now: bittersweet, certainly, but ultimately the amiable closing of a chapter. Tom—a little sad, but a little wiser too—was ready to make a fresh start.

In fact, I just felt like shit.

Or so I thought. When people say, “I couldn’t be happier!” they may well be right. When they say, “I couldn’t be any more miserable,” they are almost certainly grossly underestimating. I’d
thought
I’d felt like shit that day, but really I’d barely even entered the intestine.

The days and weeks that followed were filled—stuffed to bursting point—with the absence of Sara. I sat in my hotel room and wanted to cry. I did cry too, obviously, but even worse was the wanting to cry, the feeling of being filled with agonizing despair that needed to be released somehow—crying, shouting, punching the wall,
anything
that might vent the awful pressure of it inside me. Sitting there with clenched fists and clenched teeth. Pleading with the air in the hope that there might be a deity passing who’d be prepared to strike a deal; begging that the physical horror of this choking, viscous misery be cut out of me at any price.

Simply being awake hurt. Consciousness was something that had to be borne like an open wound until sleep gave me a little respite. And sleep was pretty halfhearted about doing that, too. I’d lie in bed all day, and sleep fitfully through the night. Combined with this, I drank as much as I could and thus spent great sheets of time bobbing about on the surreal ocean between sleep and wakefulness—sometimes just below the surface, sometimes just above it, but at all times never quite sure which was which.

I think I went mad, to be honest. I certainly did things that only a mad person would do. I didn’t wash, shave, change my clothes, sleep properly, or get sober for three days, and I then went to stand outside Sara’s store as she left work . . . in the belief that seeing me like this might prompt her to take me back. Seriously—that’s where my mind was: “Tom! You stink! Oh—how I’ve missed you!” I telephoned—over and over again—just to hear Sara’s voice on the answerphone. Then, when the time came to leave a message, I’d stay on the line, silently. There was this lunatic notion in my mind that maybe—just . . . maybe—one time she’d be sitting there, listening to the silence, knowing it was me and, sensing my pain, she’d pick up and suggest we give it another try. That was where my mind was. I wasn’t some mute, disturbing phone stalker—I was a desperate man, reaching out, reassuring her that I still loved her and was waiting. I’d go to places where I thought I might see her. I don’t mean to our . . . to her house or anything as literal as that. I mean that I’d think and think about where she might be at any given time—a pub she liked, or a shop, or anywhere at all—and get myself over to that place. The idiot idea here was that we’d “accidentally” meet—I’d be as surprised as she was, “Well,
fancy
bumping into you”—and then . . . well, I don’t know, but it’d end up with her inviting me back and everything returning to how it had been before.
That’
s where my mind was—in the entirely insane belief that it might
somehow
lead to a reconciliation, I’d spend six hours on a Sunday wandering endlessly around the B&Q on Ingles Green Road. And after the first four hours, unsurprisingly, at least one security guard tends to start wandering around a few paces behind you. Worst of all, I began to hate couples. I’d see a couple on the street and hate that they were together and happy and blithely—carelessly—unmindful of the dizzying good fortune of their situation.

I was useless. Completely surplus to the earth’s requirements in every sense. It might be a standard image—the writer, hemorrhaging despair, a bottle of bourbon by his side, racing against the keyboard to keep up with the outpouring of words—but depression isn’t really a creative fire at all, it’s actually a smothering blanket. I couldn’t even raise the will to switch on my laptop, let alone drag out a few leaden sentences. All I had the energy or desire to do was sit around feeling weak and ghastly and sick. And if I was no good to myself, then I was a positive impediment to the lives of those around me. I’d turn up at Hugh’s office and talk. Rambling, repetitive, self-pitying near-monologues half full of needy, awkward silences. Hugh tried to help. He attempted to get me to move on, or consider other things, or just get some kind of grip at all. That in itself was a crushing situation to be in—
Hugh
trying to cheer me up. What kind of miserable fucker must you be if
Hugh
is telling you to count your blessings? It was like being talked down from a ledge by Sylvia Plath.

And, in an irony whose sweetness I can only compare to being hit in the mouth with a wrench, there was also the splendid and timely fact that Amy and Paul had become an open, official pairing. Amy tried to keep it from my view as much as possible, but I knew it was there. For a start, she was unpleasantly happy. How
anyone,
anyone
in the entire world,
could have the sheer, thoughtless vulgarity to be happy when
this was happening to me
made me bitter and angry at humanity’s selfishness, but for
Amy
to be happy—with George’s agent moreover—was almost disloyal. I was saved from hating her only by the knowledge that it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t really Amy who was against me—it was the universe. Fate was a sadistic bully and I was its target; I was a victim of malicious providential harassment.

Naturally, I realized that Sara was the only woman in the world for me—would always be the only woman for me—in an agonizing epiphany fairly early on in this period. Armed with this new and world-altering knowledge, I wrote long letters to her explaining my discovery. The first one I ended with the words “it’s unbearable that I’ve come to see this only now. I know it’s too late and you won’t take me back, but I needed to tell you how I felt anyway. Don’t worry—I don’t expect a reply.”

When, after about five days, I hadn’t received a reply (a reply hinting that, on the basis of this new evidence, she’d take me back), I wrote another letter. This one began by asking that I be excused for the second intrusion, but there were a few technical points I’d forgotten to include in the previous letter and I thought they ought to be mentioned for the sake of completeness. I also cleverly tried to win her over by very subtly implying that she was cold and pitiless and indifferent to the pain I was feeling. I got no reply to this letter either. Naturally, therefore, I wrote more letters. However, the letters I wrote after the two openers had a steadier rhythm and a more reliable format and could pretty much be relied upon to begin by apologizing self-loathingly for what I’d said in the previous letter, and to end by saying it again.

I can’t quite remember the moment when I realized what I needed to do if I ever wanted to have Sara forgive me. I’d known for a long time that she’d need to believe that I was different now, but I can’t say when the specific sign that would convince her of this became obvious to me. I think the understanding grew, piece by piece, over a period of many days and nights. Tellingly, as it did, I began to see also that it wasn’t something I needed to do just for Sara. I saw that it was important for me as well. I’d been a shit. A thoughtless, pompous shit, and I needed to change. Not just because that way I stood a chance of being with Sara again, but also because I
simply needed to change
. Old Tom had to be cast aside forever and New Tom had to step up and take over. After I accepted this, everything else was just details. I had a purpose now, and hope; I felt better than I had in weeks.

(Though, to be honest, I still felt like shit. But, you know,
better
shit.)

I’d picked the day based on nothing. It was simply “two Saturdays away” from when I judged that I’d got all the arrangements in place, or at least knew what they all were. Given that it was that day by chance, but couldn’t be changed on the spur of the moment—moved on a couple of days because it was raining, say—I was lucky beyond anything I deserved that it was glorious. A dry, clear, sunny autumn day. The kind of day that seems, above all else,
clean
. The kind of day when even the far distance is as sharp as glass. The kind of day that, when you step out into it, somehow provokes you, completely against your character, to take a big, purifying breath of air and then stand there smiling, arms akimbo.

Learning from experience, I’d had a haircut earlier in the week rather than taking the risk of waiting until the day itself. I’d prepared almost everything else earlier too. The chauffeur-driven limo was one thing that could, conceivably, go wrong—because that wasn’t arriving until later in the day—but I simply had to rely on it being there, the chauffeur not being sick, and so on. There was no way around that, though. I wasn’t about to
buy
a limo and
employ
a chauffeur just so I could use them for this one day—hiring them for a few hours was wincingly expensive enough. And, anyway, at least a stretch limo, even if it broke down, was better than a coach and horses. The coach and horses was what I’d thought of first, of course, but I rapidly realized that a coach and horses was just stupid. The limo had a DVD player in it, for a start.