Exciting Times(48)

My abbreviation felt pointed. ‘A’ implied both that he wasn’t bothered typing two additional characters and that the indefinite article was quite enough for me. I wanted to reply: i agree that i am the least definite of any article.





38

That weekend I rang Tom. As we spoke, I stood on the balcony and watched children outrunning parents and put-upon cynophiles being walked by their Great Danes. We talked about Tom first. Things had gone downhill with his latest paramour. This gave him an appetite to hear about my love life, I suspected because it made him grateful not to have one.

‘I can’t believe you thought I hadn’t guessed about Edith,’ he said.

‘Was it obvious?’

‘So what did you think would happen?’

‘You mean, what did I think would happen if I didn’t tell her?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, broadly this,’ I said.

Tom said: ‘I struggle to think of you as the older one sometimes.’

‘I should tell her,’ I said.

Tom said he wasn’t going to tell me what to do, but that I should think about who I’d choose. I mightn’t have to, but if one of them said that, I needed to know what I’d say.

I told Tom I didn’t know. I didn’t want to weigh them up against each other.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘don’t compare them. But how do you feel when you’re with them? Or, I mean, how do you act around them?’

That question was less daunting.

‘I’m not nice to Julian,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t love me and I feel like that means there’s something wrong with me, so then I want to believe the problem is actually him. We laugh a lot, but I’m a horrible person when I’m with him. I want to make him feel as bad as I do.’

It surprised me to learn that about myself, but there it was, out in the spitting air, echoed back to me thanks to the dodgy connection.

‘That’s not good,’ said Tom. ‘For either of you.’

‘It’s not. He’s not over his ex. I shouldn’t hold that against him.’

‘And what about Edith? What are you like around her?’

‘Kinder. More forgiving. And the sex is better.’

‘I didn’t need to know that.’

‘Just giving you the facts.’

‘Cool. Well, like I said, I can’t tell you what to do. How long until he’s back?’

‘Two days now.’

‘So one day to tell her.’

‘I probably won’t,’ I said.

‘That literally doesn’t surprise me.’

‘I know. But it was good talking it through. Thanks, Tom.’ I didn’t tell him that often. ‘I know it’s not easy being straight with me.’

‘It’s not. You punish people for it.’

‘I’d better go.’

‘Sure.’

‘Tom?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Thanks again. And thank Mam for me, too.’

‘You sound like you’re off to the trenches.’

I said: ‘You’re not wrong.’

*

Later that Sunday, Edith came over to the flat. We finally burned my Jo Malone candle. She had a red indent across her back where her bra dug in. I traced over the ridge and said I wondered what would happen if you wore a bra for a hundred consecutive hours, as in, would you get a scar. It was my last day left to tell her about Julian before he got back, and I was asking her about skincare. My behaviour was fascinating.

‘Have you heard bras cause cancer?’ she said. ‘It’s probably quackery, but I worry. There’s a lower breast cancer rate in countries where fewer women wear bras. But it’s hard to establish the cause because not wearing a bra correlates with not doing stuff like eating junk food.’

I said: ‘Junk food causes cancer?’

‘We don’t know what causes cancer,’ she said. ‘Beyond drinking and smoking. But you already know they’re bad.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’ Then: ‘By the way, Julian’s back next week.’

I was an idiot. I had no idea why I’d just said that. Probably it was that I’d told Tom I’d keep putting it off. Once I told someone I’d do something, I always did the opposite.

Her hair was a thick black brush on my pillow. It occurred to me that most beds did not come with a particular Edith, that actually most people had no Edith at all, and that those people had to sleep in those beds or other relevant furniture and pretend to be happy.

‘Is he,’ she said.

I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

‘I’m just after finding out,’ I said.

‘And this thing,’ Edith said, pausing, not to decide what ‘this thing’ meant but so the break would be long enough that she didn’t have to put words on it, ‘this thing between you, it’ll continue?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You living with him.’

‘He’s my flatmate, so.’

‘You don’t pay rent,’ she said, in a just-observing voice like Julian’s.

‘It’s complicated,’ I said.

‘It’s weird,’ – still seemingly just observing.