By this point he’d all but given up on the idea of coming back to try to finish his degree. Summer was creeping toward them and it made him anxious just thinking about the idea of being back in classes again.
“So you’re just going to sit about in London working in a porno shop?” Diane asked him. “What happened to you making decisions, or is this really the height of your ambition? You need to find out what you want to do for yourself. If you’re not going to finish your degree you need to work out how you’re going to have a career.”
“But—”
She waved away his protests. “I’m serious. I won’t hear another word about it.” She put her hands on the sides of his face and squeezed, turning his mouth into a comedy fish. “You need to believe in yourself a bit more and just bloody get out there. What’s your dream job, your dream career?”
She released the fish and waited for him to answer.
What was his dream job? More importantly, what could he say that she wouldn’t laugh at?
“Working in the community somehow, or something, I suppose.”
Diane narrowed her eyes, searching his face for signs of facetiousness.
“Well then, good,” she said. “So that’s the first positive step. You know the area you want to work in. You just need some experience. That means an office job, first up. So as soon as you’re back in London you’re going to find one. Agreed?”
“Yeah,” Andrew mumbled.
“Don’t sulk!” Diane said, and when he didn’t respond she moved down the bed and blew a fierce raspberry on his belly.
“What about you then?” Andrew laughed, pulling her up so that she was lying on top of him. “What’s your dream job?”
Diane rested her head on his chest. “Well, as much as I spent my entire adolescence saying I’d do the complete opposite of my parents, hence the philosophy degree blah blah blah, I’m thinking about a law conversion.”
“Oh yeah? Brokering deals for drug-dealing informants, that sort of thing?”
“The fact that’s your first thought makes me think you’ve been watching lots of terrible straight-to-video films from your shop.”
“It was either that or the porn.”
“And you’ve not watched any of that.”
“Absolutely not.”
“So if you want to have some ‘alone time’ you just picture . . .”
“You. Exclusively you. Wearing nothing but a smock made out of pages from Virginia Woolf novels.”
“I thought as much.”
She rolled off him so they were lying side by side.
“So, you’re going to be a lawyer then,” Andrew said.
“Either that or an astronaut,” she yawned.
Andrew laughed. “You can’t have a Welsh astronaut. That’s ridiculous!”
“Um, why not?” Diane said.
Andrew prepared his best Valleys accent. “Well there now, rrrright. That’s a small step for man, that is, and a great big giant one for mankind, see.”
Diane huffed and went to climb out of bed, but Andrew dived and grabbed her arm that she’d left deliberately dangling there. He loved it when she did that. Teasing him. Knowing that she would only get as far as a step away before he pulled her toward him.
—
Back in London, he spent his time behind the video shop counter circling jobs in the paper. He’d just sold a horrific-looking video to a gaunt-faced man who explained, “Wanking helps me with the come-downs,” when the phone rang. Five minutes later he replaced the receiver and considered the possibility that the woman who’d just asked him to come in for an interview might have been hired by Gavin as some sort of cruel act of revenge.
“Firstly, you’re insane,” Diane said when he spoke to her from the phone box later that evening (Bella, gorgeous busty blonde). “Secondly, I’m pretty sure I’m entitled to say I told you so. So we can do that now or wait till after you’ve actually got the job. It’s up to you . . .”
The interview was for an admin assistant at the local council. He borrowed one of the Irish boys’ suits, which had once belonged to his father. Checking his pockets as he sat in the waiting room, he found a ticket stub from a 1964 production of a play called Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which had been performed at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Had Sally gone to Philadelphia when she was in the States? He couldn’t remember, and he’d long since thrown away the postcards. He decided that the optimism of the title was a good omen.
The following morning, Diane’s opening line as she picked up the phone to him was “I told you so.”
“What would you have done if you’d said that and I hadn’t got it?” Andrew laughed.
“Um, pretended it was one of my other boyfriends?”
“Oi!”
A pause.
“Wait, you are joking, right?”
A sigh.
“Yes, Andrew, I’m joking. Hamish Brown accidentally touched my boob while trying to fix an overhead projector last week, that’s about as close as I’ve come to cheating on you . . .”
Despite himself, Andrew spent possibly 70 percent (okay, 80; 90, tops) of the time worrying about Diane’s being enticed away by someone. He always pictured a floppy-haired rower called Rufus, for some reason. All broad shoulders and old money.
“Luckily for you, fictional Rufus is no match for a real-life skinny philosophy dropout who works in a porno shop and lives with two speed freaks.”
Andrew was so nervous on his first morning at the council that he was forced to make a decision on whether it was less strange to spend the entire time on the toilet or to be sitting at his desk wincing with stomach cramps every five seconds. Thankfully, he managed to get through the day, and then a week, and then a month, without shitting himself or accidentally setting anything on fire. (“We really need to work on your benchmarks,” Diane told him.)
Then the most glorious of days arrived: June 11, 1995. Diane’s course was over, and she was coming to London. Andrew said good-bye to the two Irish boys, who were surprisingly emotional (though that could have been because they’d been up for three days straight) and piled all his stuff into the taxi waiting to take him to the flat he’d found for him and Diane, who’d managed to get everything into a couple of suitcases and taken the train from Bristol.
“Mum wanted to drive me,” she said, “but I was a bit worried you might’ve rented us a crack den or something and I didn’t want her having a panic attack.”
“Ah. Hmm. Funny you should say that . . .”
“Oh god . . .”
Andrew couldn’t be sure the tiny flat he’d found off the Old Kent Road hadn’t ever been used as a crack den—it was a rough-and-ready sort of building with scuff marks on the corridor walls and a dewy smell about the place—but as he lay in bed that night, Diane sleeping next to him, her knees curled up to her chest, he couldn’t stop smiling. This already felt like home.
Their moving coincided with a summer that brought with it a fiercely cloying heat. July was particularly punishing. Andrew bought a fan and he and Diane sat in their underwear in the front room when it got too hot to go out. They both became mildly obsessed with Wimbledon that month, Steffi Graf being a particular hero to Diane.
“This is just too bloody hot, isn’t it?” Diane yawned, lying down on her front as Graf signed autographs before leaving center court.