“I’m not crying because we can’t do it,” she says. “It’s not that. It’s just that … I lived with you. You were my partner just a few weeks ago. And now you’re worried I might kill you, and you’re entitled to worry. Isn’t that a terrible thing? Isn’t that sad?” She shakes her head and sobs, and climbs off me, and we sit there side by side in the backseat saying nothing, just watching the drips crawl down the windows.
Later, I wonder whether I was really worried about where Ray has been. Is he bisexual, or an intravenous drug user? I doubt it. (He wouldn’t have the guts for either.) Has he ever slept with an intravenous drug user, or has he ever slept with someone who’s slept with a bisexual male? I have no idea, and that ignorance gives me every right to insist on protection. But in truth it was the symbolism that interested me more than the fear. I wanted to hurt her, on this day of all days, just because it’s the first time since she left that I’ve been able to.
We drive to a pub, a twee little mock-country place that serves nice beer and expensive sandwiches and sit in a corner and talk. I buy some more fags and she smokes half of them or, rather, she lights one, takes a drag or two, grimaces, stubs it out and then five minutes later takes another. She stubs them out with such violence that they cannot be salvaged, and when she does it I can’t concentrate on what she’s saying, because I’m too busy watching my fags disappear. Eventually she notices and says she’ll buy me some more and I feel mean.
We talk about her dad, mostly, or rather, what life will be like without him. And then we talk about what life will be like generally without dads, and whether it’s the thing that makes you feel grown-up, finally. (Laura thinks not, on the evidence available to date.) I don’t want to talk about this stuff, of course: I want to talk about Ray and me and whether we’ll ever come as close to having sex again and whether the warmth and intimacy of this conversation means anything, but I manage to hold myself back.
And then, just as I have begun to accept that none of this is going to be about me me me, she sighs, and slumps back against her chair, and says, half smiling, half despairing, “I’m too tired not to go out with you.”
There’s a kind of double negative here—‘too tired’ is a negative because it’s not very positive—and it takes me a while to work out what she means.
“So, hold on: if you had a bit more energy, we’d stay split. But as it is, what with you being wiped out, you’d like us to get back together.”
She nods. “Everything’s too hard. Maybe another time I would have had the guts to be on my own, but not now I haven’t.”
“What about Ray?”
“Ray’s a disaster. I don’t know what that was all about, really, except sometimes you need someone to lob into the middle of a bad relationship like a hand grenade, and blow it all apart.”
I’d like to talk, in some detail, about all the ways in which Ray is a disaster; in fact, I’d like to make a list on the back of a beermat and keep it forever. Maybe another time.
“And now you’re out of the bad relationship, and you have blown it all apart, you want to be back in it, and put it back together again.”
“Yes. I know none of this is very romantic, and there will be romantic bits at some stage, I’m sure. But I need to be with someone, and I need to be with someone I know and get on with OK, and you’ve made it clear that you want me back, so … ”
And wouldn’t you know it? Suddenly I feel panicky, and sick, and I want to get record label logos painted on my walls and sleep with American recording artists. I take Laura’s hand and kiss her on the cheek.
There’s a terrible scene back at the house, of course. Mrs Lydon is in tears, and Jo is angry, and the few guests that are left stare into their drinks and don’t say anything. Laura takes her mum through to the kitchen and shuts the door, and I stand in the sitting room with Jo, shrugging my shoulders and shaking my head and raising my eyebrows and shifting from foot to foot and doing anything else I can think of to suggest embarrassment, sympathy, disapproval, and misfortune. When my eyebrows are sore, and I have nearly shaken my head off its hinges, and I have walked the best part of a mile on the spot, Laura emerges from the kitchen in a state and tugs me by the arm.
“We’re going home,” she says, and that is how our relationship resumes its course.
Twenty-seven
Five conversations:
1. (Third day, out for a curry, Laura paying.)
“I’ll bet you did. I’ll bet you sat there, five minutes after I’d gone, smoking a fag,”—she always emphasizes the word, to show that she disapproves—“and thinking to yourself, cor, this is all right, I can cope with this. And then you sat and thought up some stupid idea for the flat … I know, I know, you were going to get some guy to paint record label logos on the wall before I moved in, weren’t you? I’ll bet you sat there, smoking a fag, and thinking, I wonder if I’ve still got that guy’s phone number?”
I look away so she can’t see me smile, but it’s no use. “God, I’m so right, aren’t I? I’m so right I can’t believe it. And then—hold on, hold on—” she puts her fingers to her temples, as if she’s receiving the images into her brain—“and then you thought, plenty more fish in the sea, been feeling like a bit of new for ages, and then you stuck something on the hi-fi, and everything was right in your pathetic little world.”
“And then what?”
“And then you went to work, and you didn’t say anything to Dick or Barry, and you were fine until Liz let the cat out of the bag, and then you became suicidal.”
“And then I slept with someone else.”
She doesn’t hear me.
“When you were fucking around with that prat Ray, I was screwing an American singer-songwriter who looks like Susan Dey out of L.A.Law.”
She still doesn’t hear me. She just breaks off a bit of papadum and dips it in the mango chutney.
“And I was all right. Not too bad. Quite good, in fact.”
No reaction. Maybe I should try again, this time out loud, with my voice instead of the inside of my head.
“You know it all, don’t you?”
She shrugs, and smiles, and makes her smug face.
2. (Seventh day, bed, afterward.)
“You don’t really expect me to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because what purpose would it serve? I could describe every second of every time, and there weren’t that many of them, and you’d be hurt, but you still wouldn’t understand the first thing about anything that mattered.”
“I don’t care. I just want to know.”
“Want to know what?”
“What it was like.”
She huffs. “It was like sex. What else could it be like?”
Even this answer I find hurtful. I had hoped it wouldn’t be like sex at all; I had hoped that it would be like something much more boring or unpleasant, instead.
“Was it like good sex or was it like bad sex?”
“What’s the difference?”
“You know the difference.”
“I never asked you how your extracurricular activities went.”
“Yes, you did. I remember. ‘Have a nice time, dear?’ ”
“It was a rhetorical question. Look, we’re OK now. We’ve just had a nice time. Let’s leave it at that.”
“OK, OK. But the nice time we’ve just had … was it nicer, as nice, or less nice than the nice times you were having a couple of weeks ago?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Oh, come on, Laura. Just say anything. Fib, if you want. It’d make me feel better, and it’d stop me asking you questions.”
“I was going to fib, and now I can’t, because you’d know I was fibbing.”
“Why would you want to fib, anyway?”
“To make you feel better.”
And so it goes. I want to know (except, of course, I don’t want to know) about multiple orgasms and ten times a night and blow jobs and positions that I’ve never even heard of, but I haven’t the courage to ask, and she would never tell me. I know they’ve done it, and that’s bad enough; all I can hope for now is damage limitation. I want her to say that it was dull, that it was bog-standard, lie-back-and-think-of-Rob sort of sex, that Meg Ryan had more fun in the delicatessen than Laura had at Ray’s place. Is that too much to ask?