Of course we argued about this. The Channel Tunnel, he said, was ‘like leaving your front door open’. What did he imagine might happen? I asked. A great, marauding horde of toreadors and trattoria waiters and onion-sellers pouring out into Folkestone, Kent? In fairness, my father had lost his own father in Belgium in 1944, and perhaps this provided some deep-seated justification for his hostility, but still, it was irrational in such a rational man. To my father, ‘abroad’ was a strange, unknowable place where the milk tasted odd and lasted an unnaturally long time.
So I was not well travelled; in fact I barely knew Europe until I met Connie. Wherever we went, she had been there before. Her European map was already dense with red pins signifying stolen rucksacks, missed flights, languorous kissing in ornamental parks, pregnancy scares, fresh oranges off the tree and ouzo for breakfast. On my very first visit to her flat I had glimpsed several photographs stuck to her fridge, new-wave Connie and her art-school friends with gelled perms, blowing kisses at the camera or smoking topless — topless! and with cigarettes! — on a balcony in Sicily.
My very first visit to her flat. I’m not even through the door yet. She’s still talking to Jake.
After my sister’s ironic sherry trifle had been disposed of we were all encouraged to swap places and ‘mingle’, Connie and Jake vacating their chairs at ejector-seat speed. ‘Mingling’, it transpired, involved continuing their conversation at a different part of the table, and I watched as the acrobat produced from somewhere, I don’t know where — from his tights, perhaps — a small plastic Ziploc bag of dusty sweets which he offered to Connie, who accepted with a nod, almost a shrug of resignation, before passing the bag to my sister and on around the table. They couldn’t have been very nice sweets, because everyone was grimacing and washing them down with water. Soon I found myself sitting between two actors on drugs, a position that, a number of peer-reviewed research papers have since confirmed, is precisely the worst place a biochemist can be. One of the actors had been performing excerpts from his one-person show, to my mind one person too many and when the Ziploc bag reached us, he broke off and, shook it underneath my nose. At the end of the table, I caught a glimpse of my sister nodding, nodding, eyes wide in encouragement.
‘No thanks,’ I said.
‘You don’t partake?’ said the actor, pouting. ‘You should! Have a cheeky half, it’s lovely.’
‘I’m sorry, but the only acid in my house is deoxyribonucleic—’
‘Hey, has anyone got any chewing gum?’
I left the table.
Karen intercepted me in her bedroom where I was searching through great piles of overcoats.
‘You’re going? It’s not even ten!’
‘I don’t really think it’s my “scene”, Karen.’
‘You don’t know until you try it.’ She was looking terrifically pleased with herself, my sister. Not quite brave enough to rebel in my parents’ presence, she enjoyed using me as their proxy. I was simply the nearest old square to hand. ‘Why are you so boring, D?’
‘Oh, I practise every night.’
‘It drives me crazy!’
‘Just as well I’m leaving, then.’ I had found my coat and was wrapping my scarf around my neck.
‘Stay and try it.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want to, pusher-man! Why are you so keen for me to do something that I don’t want to do?’
‘Because I think you should try things! It might reveal a new part of your personality.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this is it. This is everything, this is all there is.’
Karen placed her hand on my chest. ‘I think Connie likes you.’
‘Oh. Really.’
‘In fact she told me so.’
‘You are such a liar, Karen.’
‘She said she found you very interesting, even all that science stuff. She said it made a change to meet someone who was interested in something other than themselves.’
‘I can’t find my other glove. There’s a glove here somewhere …’
‘She said she found you very attractive.’
I laughed. ‘Then the drugs have kicked in.’
‘I know! I was as surprised as you.’
‘And what makes you think I like her?’
‘Your lolling tongue. Also, you’d be insane not to. Everyone loves Connie, she’s amazing.’
‘If you find my other glove, can you keep it for me please? It looks like … well, this one. Obviously.’
Karen blocked my way to the bedroom door, and began unwrapping the scarf from my neck. ‘Stay. Just for half an hour. The moment people start touching each other’s faces, then you can go.’
It did not take long for the 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylampthetamine to seep through the bedrock of tuna pasta bake. It was as if an invisible presence were wandering the room, tapping people on the head with a wand that turned them into idiots.
‘Let’s sit soft!’ commanded my sister, eyes goggling, and the guests moved from the kitchen. I put the Pyrex in to soak before being dragged into the tiny living room, which was decked out as a kind of shabby harem with pillows on the floor, candles recklessly tickling the bottom of curtains and the air grey with cigarette smoke. Carole King’s Tapestry was replaced by something with a tinny snare and choppy piano. The word ‘bass’ was rhymed with ‘face’ and soon the dancing began. One of Karen’s friends, I noticed, was topless under dungarees.
I was beginning to feel foolish. It was like waiting in a queue for a rollercoaster that I had no intention of riding. Why did I remain, leaning in a corner, making stilted conversation with a dramaturg? My motivation slouched on a beanbag, Jake curled up at her feet like an immense ginger cat. Karen was right; I had liked this girl immediately. I liked her obvious intelligence, the keen attention she directed at people. I liked the humour that played perpetually in the corner of her mouth and smudged eyes. And I found her attractive, of course — her face, her figure …
Well, these days, Connie’s figure is the subject of perpetual care and a recurring circular argument — I look awful, no you don’t, yes I do, you look wonderful — an endless rally that I can do nothing to break. She feels, has always felt, that she is too large. You look wonderful to me, I say. She shrugs this away. I look like a blurred photo of myself, she says, I no longer have cheekbones — as if this was what anyone wanted in a face: bones. The truth is I feel the same way about her now as I did back then, which is to say very strongly. We had so little in common and yet she seemed to me to have more wit and grace and life in her than anyone in that crowded room, or indeed my world at that time.
So I waited, and eventually she caught my eye and smiled wonderfully, and Jake’s eyes followed too. He growled and tried to take her wrist as she stood — a little unsteadily, I noticed. She removed his hand and crossed the room towards me.
I excused myself from the dramaturg.
‘You’re still here!’ she said in my ear.
‘Just for a while,’ I said in hers.