Ralph's Party (6 page)

What was he supposed to do now? It was al going to be so horribly embarrassing. Smith just wasn't used to women coming on to him. In the days before Cheri, before he'd given up on women, it had always been up to him, he'd always made the running. Jem had realy taken him by surprise last night, and he'd been too drunk to think about what he was doing. He felt guilty now, almost like he'd been unfaithful to Cheri. He'd saved himself for five years, five whole years, and now he'd blown it — just like that. It was al very flattering, the first time in years his ego had received a massage.

And it had been enjoyable,
extremely
enjoyable. But he realy shouldn't let it go any further. He hoped to God i that Jem regretted it as much as he did. Maybe she would prefer to forget about it too.

And if not? He'd have to tel her, tonight, tel her it was al a dreadful mistake. Then what? Shit. The atmosphere would be terrible. She'd move out and he'd have to find another flatmate. What was he supposed to say to her? What the hel were they going to do? And why the fuck hadn't he thought about this at the time?

He stared dismaly at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. He looked appaling. He felt appaling. He had to write that proposal. He felt like storming into James's office, slamming his fists on the desk and saying, Tm sorry, James, but I have a life, and I don't give a shit about Quirk & Quirk's long-established reputation. Write it yourself, you manic old bastard —

I'm going home.' But he wouldn't, of course. He took a deep breath and walked back into the claustrophobic mayhem of the office.

James was franticaly pressing buttons on the fax machine.

'Diana, Diana, what the hel is the matter with this stupid machine?'

he was muttering, his upright hair making him look like some kind of ageing budgerigar.

'Have you pressed Send, Mr Quirk?' she asked with weary impatience.

'Of course, I pressed Send. Look, can someone else please do this, I realy don't have the time.'

Diana made a face at James's retreating back and headed towards the fax machine. She noticed that Smith was back.

'Someone caled for you while you were out, a girl. There's a message on your desk.' She raised her eyebrows.

Smith peeled the yelow note from his computer screen.
'Gem
called - thanks for last night and fancy going for a drink
tonight? Please call back.'
His heart lurched in his chest, and he felt a hot flush rise up from his neck.

Oh, shit. Now what?

'Morning, Stela.' Jem was exhausted and hungover and could feel the bags beneath her eyes puling at her eyelids.

'Morning, Jem, you look wel today. Is that a new lipstick you're wearing? It suits you.'

Thanks, Stela.'

Ridiculous. Jem knew she looked like shit. Jem and Stela had been working together at the theatrical agency for over three years now, and every single morning without fail Stela would furnish Jem with a compliment and every single morning it would be one that she had never heard before. Taking account of holidays, Jem had calculated that five compliments a week equaled two hundred and forty compliments a year and a grand total of seven hundred and twenty compliments in al, al of them different.

'How did it go last night?' Stela enquired, in her usual ingratiating manner. She was hovering over Jem's desk with that desperate look on her face, like she'd been waiting since six o'clock that morning for Jem to get into work so she could ask her just that question.

Stela was thirty-three years old, six foot two, and stil a virgin. She had hair the colour of yelowing newspaper, the remains of a perm at the ends, which never seemed to grow or change. She wore the same pale-blue eyeliner every day, which only succeeded in making her round

eyes look even more damp and watery than they were.
As
far
as
Jem could tel she had no life whatsoever, and chewed gratefuly on whatever scraps of Jem's not particularly exciting life she chose to throw her. 'How did your sister's eye test go?' she'd ask concernedly. 'How's your friend Lily getting on with her new boyfriend?' (She'd never met Lily.) 'What colour walpaper did your mother choose in the end?' (She didn't know Jem's mother.) 'Oh, the duck-egg ... lovely.'

Jem wished she could say she was fond of Stela, that she had a soft spot for her, that she'd miss her if she wasn't around, but it wasn't true. She was a huge galumphing giant of a pain in the arse, and on a morning like this morning, with a thumping dehydrated headache and a lot on her mind, she found it took al the patience and civility she could muster to form even the curtest of replies.

'Oh, fine, fine. It went fine, thank you.' Jem smiled tightly and tried to look busy.

'Good,' triled Stela, thriled that Jem had had a Monday night good enough to be described as fine. 'Stil enjoying the new flat?'

'Oh, yes, lovely - super. Very much, thank you.' Jem was running out of fake enthusiasm.

Stela's phone rang at that moment and Jem breathed a sigh of relief.

She felt a smal blush of coy embarrassment and excitement spread across her face and towards her chest as snapshot images of last night's events flashed unbidden through her mind. Smith had bought her peonies - he'd actualy bought her peonies, her favourite flowers in the whole world. The minute he walked in and shyly handed them to her muttering, 'Just to say thanks for the meal,' she'd known without

the slightest douht that it was
him.
She'd stood in the kitchen and looked at the two men last night, and it was blindingly obvious in an instant. On one side was Smith looking handsomely careworn in a nice grey suit and a pale lilac shirt and tie, and on the other was Ralph wearing a foul baggy grey jumper that he appeared to wear every day and a most unbecoming pair of vaguely obscene-looking longjohns.

'D'you need any help?' Smith had asked, as Ralph wandered back into the living room and back on to the sofa to watch
EastEnders.

Smith - two; Ralph -nil.

Finaly they sat down to eat. The entire flat was infused with the aroma of coconut, garlic and coriander and the almost heavenly scent of Thai fragrant rice. Ralph and Smith were in raptures.

'This is the most delicious thing I have ever eaten in my whole life!'

declared Ralph.

'Better than anything I've had in a restaurant,' agreed Smith.

It had taken a few of cans of lager to lubricate the evening, after the seam of compliments on the quality of the food had run dry, and Jem had found herself doing most of the work to start with, asking the two men about themselves.

Smith worked in the City, she discovered, for a PR company dealing largely with financial institutions. He'd worked as a City dealer before that but had been in danger of burning himself out so had taken a fairly substantial cut in salary to change career. But, reading between the lines, he was stil earning somewhere in the region of four times Jem's modest salary. He'd lived in Almanac Road for eight years - he'd saved vast

amounts of money working in the City during the boom and living with his parents in Croydon after he left university and paid cash for the flat when Battersea was stil relatively good value. Ralph had moved in shortly afterwards.

To her surprise she'd learned that Ralph was an artist. She had a cliched idea of what an artist looked like and it wasn't Ralph. She'd been wondering what he did for a living and had noticed that he never seemed to leave the house. He hadn't painted for a few months, he'd been doing sporadic freelance graphic design on his Apple Mac, but it seemed that his income was chicken-feed, just enough to cover living expenses, beer, cigarettes and drugs and the odd cab. home. He seemed uncomfortable talking about his lack of direction and staled career. He'd been the star of his year at the Royal Colege of Art, and his degree show had been met with much over-excitement from critics and buyers. He showed Jem a smal book of press cuttings from the time, moody black-and-white photographs of'the artist' accompanying glowing articles ful of phrases like 'formidable talent', 'genius', 'exciting new star of his generation'. He'd had a few successful exhibitions, sold some paintings for what had felt at the time like extraordinary amounts of money and then everything had gone quiet. New 'exciting stars of their generation' had displaced him and for the last few years he'd been relegated to exhibiting his work in City wine bars and hotel foyers.

Td love to see some of your work,' Jem had said. 'Have you got any of it here?'

Yeah, Ralph, I'd love to see some of your work too,' said Smith, turning to Jem. 'I've lived with this bloke for eight years and I've never seen anything he's done

at the studio. Not a Polaroid, nothing. Show her your degree-show book, Ralphie.'

Ralph grunted but loped off to find it.

He'd returned with a large hardback book which fel open easily to a double-page spread headed 'Ralph McLeary' and a picture entitled 'Dangerous Sands Shifting 1985.' Jem didn't understand or care much for modern art but the picture made an instantaneous impact, and she turned the page with interest, to 'Noxious Gases and Ultraviolet 1985' and a smaler picture entitled 'Violent Electrical Storms 1985'.

The paintings were abstract but rich in colour and although seemingly flat and one-dimensional, Jem felt surges of energy bursting from them.

'Ralph, these are great, realy ...' She searched for a word that wouldn't sound ignorant,'... dramatic, energetic, scary almost. And I don't usualy like modern stuff. These are briliant!'

'Thanks.' Ralph had looked pleased despite himself and closed the book. 'Anyway, you've had to ask enough questions tonight. Tel us about yourself.'

Jem always hated talking about herself, but she told them in as few words as possible about Smalhead Management, the theatrical agency where she'd worked for three years, how she'd recently been promoted from secretary to Junior Talent Manager and was learning the ropes from Jarvis Smalhead (they'd laughed at his name), the outrageously camp agency boss who had high hopes for her. She recounted the almost never-ending series of mini-dramas and crises she had to deal with every day involving a bizarre colection of aged luwies and prima donnas. She told them about the painful Stela and her obsession with Jem's life, about her eccen-trie mother and her long-suffering father and her idylic childhood growing up in a cottage in Devon. She explained that her name was short for Jemima and that before she moved into Almanac Road she'd been living with her sister Lulu in a vast, partialy furnished flat off Queenstown Road. Lulu was moving her boyfriend in, and his three children from a previous marriage, and although she'd been welcome to stay, Jem had decided to move on.

They'd carried on chatting as Smith and Jem cleared the table (Smith - three; Ralph - nil), and the more Jem watched Smith the more she felt sure. He was definitely the quieter of the two, the more restrained. He sat straighter at the table, his table manners were more precise, his laugh more controled than Ralph's, and there was something vulnerable about him that appealed to her, a certain sadness, a loneliness. Ralph was good fun and probably more similar to Jem in a lot of ways, but although Smith seemed more uptight, she felt a closeness to him.

Once she'd decided she knew it wouldn't take much to set the bal roling, to lead Smith gently by the hand into a relationship. She just hadn't expected the bal to start roling quite so soon, or quite so fast.

Ralph had got up from the table at about eleven, kissed Jem unsteadily on the hand, thanked her profusely for the meal, proclaimed it a milestone in his gastronomic life and gone to bed, leaving Jem and Smith alone.

Jem hadn't wasted any time. 'Do you believe in fate?' she'd asked, roling a spliff on the pine surface of the kitchen table.

'What do you mean?'

'You know, everything happening for a reason, events and moments being preordained. Like me being here tonight. If I'd seen a double room I liked last week I wouldn't have come to see your room. I would be sitting in someone else's kitchen now, talking to someone completely different, and I wouldn't even know you and youi lovely flat existed.' She paused briefly. 'Except, that's not quite true.' She stopped to search for a Tube ticket in her handbag to use for a roach. She wondered how much she could say to Smith.

Smith wondered what on earth she was going on about and wished he could focus on her a bit more clearly.

This is going to sound weird — do you promise you won't think I'm a nutcase?' she asked, tearing off a smal piece of cardboard.

Smith reached for a bottle of tequila. 'Promise,' he said.

Wel, ever since I was a teenager, I've had a recurring dream.'

'Ye-es,' Smith slid the shot glass in front of her. God, she realy was cute.

'Just a realy nice image of a tal house on a curved road with a basement and little trees outside. I'm walking down the road and I look into one of the flats and there's a man sitting on the sofa with his back to the window. He's smoking and talking to someone I can't see and he's smiling and happy and relaxed and I realy, realy want to go in. The flat looks warm and welcoming and I just have this very strong feeling I'm supposed to be living there - it doesn't feel right that I don't, that I have to walk past and never get to know the man inside, never be part of his life. And that's it, that's the dream. And then, that night I came to see the flat, I just knew it was the same flat -1 felt it. It was so familiar, so safe, just the way it felt in the dream. And I looked down, just like in the dream, and I saw a man sitting on the sofa and talking to someone out of view.' She paused. 'Do you think I'm mad? Are you going to kick me out?' Jem laughed nervously.

Smith fought the smile that was twitching at the corners of his mouth. He didn't know where this weird conversation was going, but for some reason, he felt compeled to keep it going. He arranged his features into an expression of serious consideration.

'No, I don't think you're mad at al. I think that's realy rather amazing.'

'But that's not al. I hope you don't think this is realy heavy or anything ... Oh, I don't know whether to say this or not...'