These Days of Ours (31 page)

‘Works of art are never finished,’ said Kate, in the lofty tone she used for aphorisms. ‘They’re merely abandoned.’

‘Very true. You’re my personal guru. Can you believe that next May you’ll actually be able to walk into a bookshop and buy a novel with my name on it?’ Charlie looked the
way Flo did on rollercoasters, just before she threw up.

‘
Charles Garland
.’ That person was a stranger to Kate; the book was pure Charlie, all the way through.

‘You weren’t here to celebrate the deal.’ Charlie leaned in, his face suddenly enormous. ‘You owe me a big night out.’

The stars had aligned above the last-gasp pitch by Charlie’s disenchanted agent. The twentieth editor to read his manuscript had seen potential in it, renaming it on the spot.
‘
BLOKE
’ ran contrary to all of Charlie’s earnest suggestions, but he had to admit that in shiny black lettering on a plain white cover it was eye catching. After the
publishers named a figure more than he earned in five years of consulting, Charlie would have let them call his book anything at all.

‘And that’s only the beginning,’ his agent claimed. Charlie’s life had gone up a gear overnight. His agent, now his bestest friend in all the world, had danced off to
sell translation rights in over thirty territories and was currently standing by his phone waiting to hear from Sony about a possible movie version. Charlie and Kate had spent happy hours on Skype
casting
BLOKE: THE MOVIE
, and fantasising about Charlie’s Oscar acceptance speech. ‘If you don’t thank me,’ Kate warned, ‘I’ll beat you senseless with
your little gold statuette.’

As Charlie dissolved into fizzy lines, Kate said, ‘You do know that Becca’s only pretending she hasn’t read it to annoy you, don’t you? She thinks it’s brilliant.
She’s sorry now that she nagged you so much about leaving your job to write. She had no idea you were so talented.’

The Charlie on the screen tried not to look chuffed. ‘Does she realise the character of the horrific ex-wife who drowns in a speedboat accident is based on her?’

‘Not. A. Clue.’

‘Typical.’ Charlie sat back in his chair and gazed at his ceiling, so far away in London. ‘I love that woman. Even after all the crap she put me through. There’s nobody
quite like Becca. It’s as if she’s full of love she can’t express and it all comes out sideways. Now I’m getting older I appreciate one-offs, people who really are
themselves
and make no bones about it.’

‘I love her too. It’s a life sentence.’ Charlie had more to forgive than he knew. Kate would never squeal about the double-cross that split them up. Kate held up the top page
from the pile. ‘I bet Anna’s enchanted by this!’

BLOKE
’s dedication read
For Anna, this bloke’s bird.

‘She doesn’t know yet.’

‘Funny that you dedicate your book to her but you won’t give her a key to your flat.’

Hints, many of them heavy enough to break through to the flat below, had been dropped by Anna about taking their relationship to the next level but Charlie had misconstrued them all.
‘Plenty of time for all that. Why get bogged down in domesticity when we’re having so much fun? I want to chase her around in her underwear, not argue about whose turn it is to bleach
the loo.’

‘This is so you, Charlie. You make out it’s just fun and games yet you dedicate your book to her. You’re in love.’ Again.
Charlie falls in love
, thought Kate,
with the same regularity I have a bikini wax.

‘I like being in love.’ Since ‘that’ call from his agent it had been impossible to dent Charlie’s good humour. ‘You like being in love, too, madam. It’s
not just the dodgy connection that’s making your face glow. You look different. You look ten years younger. Still not as young as Anna, but it’s a start. And all because you’re in
love.’

Charlie was the only one who knew. ‘Wish I
felt
ten years younger but yes, OK, you got me, it does feel amazing. I’ve never felt this way.’
Not even about you.
One day Kate would tot up how many of her sentences were finished off in her mind when she spoke to Charlie.

‘When it’s right, you know it.’

‘Like you and Anna?’

‘Naughty. Putting words in my mouth.’

‘What’s that I see behind you? Already spending your loot?’ It had been an age since Charlie had disposable income; the majority of his earnings went straight to Becca and
Flo.

Swivelling so Kate could appreciate every one of the widescreen TV’s fifty glorious inches, Charlie said, ‘Isn’t it great? Now I can watch all the shit programmes I normally
watch, only
huge
.’

‘It makes your flat look tiny.’

Even Charlie’s modest home looked like another, ostentatious planet after seven months at Yulan House. The squashy sofa, the pile rug, the old fireplace with quaint tiled surround, the
framed Picasso print, the nostalgic lava lamp all added up to a busy opulence quite unlike the room Kate sat in.

It was a cell. Bare and clean and neat, her allotted bedroom affected the way Kate thought. When she sat on her iron bed, just wide enough for one and covered with a simple striped cover, Kate
could focus. She had civilised her scampering wayward feelings between these cream walls.

It was easier to differentiate between the important and the trivial in this spartan environment. Answers became obvious, rising out of the fog. At first she’d found the room austere but
now she knew the few items in it like friends. They all had an application and most had the patina of the second-hand and well used. Kate scrunched up her toes on the rag rug the children had made
for her, appreciating its softness all the more for the contrast between it and the ubiquitous blue lino.

Happily isolated, Kate hadn’t missed the constant stream of news and comment the internet had pumped into her brain back in the UK. The important events got through; Jia Tang wanted the
children at Yulan House to grow up as world citizens. For the trivial, Kate relied on Becca, who had told her breathlessly about the leak of nude celebrity photos on the web. That had seemed
inconsequential to Kate, who’d spent the day holding a traumatised, abandoned four year old, but the news of Robin Williams’s death had saddened her.
The world needs its
funnymen.

‘Charlie, can you hear that?’ Kate cocked her head. A song Kate had taught the children about the English alphabet drifted in from a classroom across the courtyard. It sounded like
small bells chiming.

‘Nah. I can only hear the traffic outside my window. How’re you going to cope with noisy old London after all that time down a dirt track in China?’

‘Honestly? I’m not sure.’

The doorbell sounded at Charlie’s end, a murky sound as if underwater. ‘That’ll be Anna. Gotta go. We’re eating at some overpriced hipster shack she heard about on
Twitter.’

‘See you soon IRL.’

The screen died.

Kate stood on tiptoe to see her face in the small framed mirror that hung on an awkwardly positioned nail. Her hair, uncut since her arrival, was scooped into a ponytail that
tickled her back.

A pile of underwear awaited its turn to go into the open suitcase, along with some paperbacks, a wash bag and the photograph of Dad she loved so much, the one of him with a young Kate on his lap
and a Chinese teapot in the background. It had sat on her chest of drawers in a smart leather travelling frame for the duration of Kate’s stay at Yulan House.

Whipping a clean tee shirt out of the case, she pulled it over her head and that was her party prep accomplished. Fashion had fallen away, like other irrelevances. The kids found her foreignness
interesting enough without any embellishment. Kate pulled out her make-up bag and peered at its tubs and brushes as if they were relics of a bygone civilisation whose peculiar ways were nothing
like her own.

Ping!
An email arrived.
I bet that’s him
.

It was.

As Kate lifted her hand to type a response, another email arrived.