Before he put his key in the lock, he paused and turned around.
“Listen,” he said, and then he didn’t say anything, so we listened.
“I don’t hear anything,” said Jess.
“No, I didn’t mean that sort of listen. I meant, Listen, I’m going to tell you something.”
“Go on, then,” said Jess. “Spit it out.”
“It’s very late. So just… be respectful of the neighbours.”
“That’s it?”
“No.” He took a deep breath. “There’ll probably be someone in there.”
“In your flat?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know what you’d call her. My date. Whatever.”
“You had a date for the evening?” I tried to keep my voice in neutral, but, you know, Jesus… What kind of evening had she had? One moment you’re sitting in a club or whatever, the next he’s disappeared because he wants to jump off a building.
“Yes. What of it?”
“Nothing. Just…” There was no need to say any more. We could leave the rest to the imagination.
“Fucking hell,” said Jess. “What kind of date ends up with you sitting on the fucking ledge of a tower-block?”
“An unsuccessful one,” said Martin.
“I should think it was fucking unsuccessful,” said Jess.
“Yes,” said Martin. “That’s why I described it as such.”
He opened the door to his flat and ushered us in ahead of him; so we saw the girl sitting on the sofa a moment before he did. She was maybe ten or fifteen years younger than him, and pretty, in a kind of bimbo TV weather-girl way; she was wearing an expensive-looking black dress, and she’d been crying a whole lot. She stared at us, and then at him.
“Where have you been?” She was trying to keep it light, but she couldn’t quite pull it off.
“Just out. Met some…” He gestured at us.
“Met some who?”
“You know. People.”
“And that’s why you left in the middle of the evening?”
“No. I didn’t know I was going to run into this crowd when I left.”
“And which crowd are they?” said the girl.
I wanted to hear Martin answer the question, because it might have been funny, but Jess interrupted.
“You’re Penny Chambers,” said Jess.
She didn’t say anything, probably because she knew that already. We stared at her.
“Penny Chambers,” said Maureen. She was gaping like a fucking fish.
Penny Chambers still didn’t say anything, for the same reasons as before.
“Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin ,” said Maureen.
No response for a third time. I don’t know much about English television stars, but I got it. If Martin was Regis, then Penny was Kathy Lee. The English Regis had been nailing the English Kathy Lee, and then disappeared to kill himself. That was pretty fucking hilarious, you have to admit.
“Are you two going out?” Jess asked her.
“You’d better ask him,” said Penny. “He’s the one who vanished in the middle of a dinner party.”
“Are you two going out?” Jess asked him.
“I’m sorry,” said Martin.
“Answer the question,” said Penny. “I’m interested.”
“This isn’t really the time to talk about it,” said Martin.
“So there’s clearly some doubt,” Penny said. “Which is news to me.”
“It’s complicated,” said Martin. “You knew that.”
“Nope.”
“You knew I wasn’t happy.”
“Yes, I knew you weren’t happy. But I didn’t know you were unhappy about me.”
“I wasn’t… It’s not… Can we talk later? In private?”
He stopped, and gestured around the room again at the three staring faces. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that, as a rule, potential suicides tend to be pretty self-absorbed: those last few weeks, it’s pretty much all me me me. So we were gulping this shit down a) because it was not about us and b) because it was not a conversation likely to depress the hell out of us. It was, for the moment, just a fight between a boyfriend and a girlfriend, and it was taking us out of ourselves.
“And when will we be in private?”
“Soon. But probably not immediately.”
“Right. And what do we talk about in the meantime? With your three friends here?”
No one knew what to say to that. Martin was the host, so it was up to him to find the common ground. And good luck to him.
“I think you should call Tom and Christine,” said Penny.
“Yeah, I will. Tomorrow.”
“They must think you’re so rude.”
“Who are Tom and Christine? The people you were having dinner with?”
“Yes.”
“What did you tell them?”
“He told them he was going to the toilet,” said Penny.
Jess burst out laughing. Martin glanced at her, replayed in his head the lame excuse he’d used, and then smirked, very briefly, at his shoes. It was a weirdly familiar moment. You know when you’re being torn a new asshole by your dad for some crime you’ve committed, while a pal watches and tries not to laugh? And you try not to catch his eye, because then you’ll laugh too? Well, that’s what it was like. Anyway, Penny spotted the little-boy smirk and flew across the room at the little boy in question. He grabbed her wrists to prevent her from hitting him.
“How dare you find it funny.”
“I’m sorry. Really. I know it’s not funny in any way.” He tried to hug her, but she pushed herself away from him and sat down again.
“We need a drink,” said Martin. “Would you mind if they stayed for one?”
I’ll take a drink off just about anybody in any situation, but even I wasn’t sure whether to take this one. In the end, though, I was just too thirsty.
Martin
It was only when we got back to the flat that I had any recollection of describing Penny as a right bitch who would fuck anybody and snort anything. But when had I said that? I spent the next thirty minutes or so praying that it had been before Jess’s arrival, when Maureen and I were on our own; if Jess had heard, then I had no doubt that my opinion of Penny would be passed on.
And, needless to say, it was hardly a considered opinion anyway. Penny and I don’t live together, but we’d been seeing each other for a few months, more or less ever since I got out of prison, and as you can imagine she had to endure a fair amount of difficulty in that time. We didn’t want the press to know that we’d been seeing each other, so we never went out anywhere, and we wore hats and sunglasses more often than was strictly necessary. I had—still have, will always have—an ex-wife and children. I was only partially employed, on a dismal cable channel. And as I may have mentioned before, I wasn’t terribly cheerful.
And we had a history. There was a brief affair when we were co-presenting, but we were both married to other people, and so the affair ended, painfully and sadly. And then, finally, after much bad timing and many recriminations, we got together, but we’d missed the moment. I had become soiled goods. I was broken, finished, a wreck, scraping the bottom of my own barrel; she was still at the top of her game, beautiful and young and famous, broadcasting to millions every morning. I couldn’t believe that she wanted to be with me for any reason other than nostalgia and pity, and she couldn’t persuade me otherwise. A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle-class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don’t understand, and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are. Anyway, she read a book about this couple who were in love but couldn’t get together for donkey’s years and then finally managed it, aged about one hundred. She adored it and made me read it, and it took me about as long to get through as it took the characters to pair off. Well, our relationship felt like that, except the old biddies in the book had a better time than Penny and I were having. A few weeks before Christmas, in a fit of self-disgust and despair, I told her to bugger off, and so she went out that night with some guest on the show, a TV chef, and he gave her her first-ever line of coke, and they ended up in bed, and she came round to see me the next morning in floods of tears. That’s why I told Maureen she was a right bitch who would snort anything and fuck anybody. I can see now that this was a bit on the harsh side.