Читать книгу All at Sea - Decca Aitkenhead, Decca Aitkenhead - Страница 9

We met in a pub on the edge of Victoria Park, a five-minute walk from Ainsworth Road. I told myself it was only lunch, but averted my gaze from passers-by on the way, burning with nerves. Tony was standing at the bar when I arrived. The impulse to touch him took my breath away. The pub was practically empty, and in the hush I thought our hellos sounded artificially tinny.

We didn’t eat. I don’t remember either of us even suggesting it. We sat at a table in the corner and talked, knees and elbows brushing together. Nothing significant was said. It was a bitter January day, and by mid-afternoon the light was already failing when Tony suggested a stroll across the park. He was wearing a beige quilted coat, and as the wind whipped up he drew me into its warmth and wrapped his arm around me. The path was ankle-deep in dry leaves, and scrunched as we walked in silence. When we reached the trees on the far side near the canal, he lowered his head and kissed me.

The first kiss had been the central preoccupation of almost every magazine and novel I read when I was young, and a ceaseless topic for discussion among my friends. The discrepancy between thrilling accounts of fireworks and euphoria, and my personal experience in the clammy arms of boys half my height, was disappointing. But when Tony kissed me in the park, I thought I might actually faint. The intensity of joy was unlike anything I had ever known; I was weightless, delirious. We kissed again before he got in his car, and I floated home in a daze. I lay on the sofa and stared at the ceiling for six hours.

He phoned shortly after ten that night. We had never talked about our feelings for each other, but his voice was suddenly urgent. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how this sounds, and I don’t know what it means for us. But Decca, I love you. That’s all I’ve got to say.’ I was stunned. He couldn’t possibly mean it. We barely knew each other. ‘I love you too,’ I said.

Did I? I couldn’t. It was preposterous, insane. Wasn’t it? When I heard myself say the words again, they didn’t feel like a lie. He said he had to go and see someone in north London, and would I like to come? He picked me up at the bottom of the road. 50 Cent was playing in the car, and as I stepped in a terrible fear seized me. If I could see myself now, would this look like nothing but an adolescent gangsta fantasy? Should I be embarrassed? But as he reached across and kissed me, I didn’t care. I was lost.

All of Tony’s caution had melted away. He held my hand as we drove, and his friend in Tottenham must have been startled to open his door to a pair of giggling sweethearts. While they talked in the kitchen I buried my face in the coat of his gigantic dog, until Tony led me out onto the balcony and his friend pretended not to notice while we kissed. When Tony dropped me home I lay awake until dawn, replaying the day in my head, smiling into the pillow.

What did I think we were doing? I had no idea. As I couldn’t see the question leading anywhere particularly promising, I decided to stop asking. The truth was, I wasn’t really thinking at all. I was already beyond reason, deranged by a chemical longing to be back in Tony’s arms.

If I managed to do any work that month, I do not remember. Every day we would find somewhere to meet – in Tony’s car by the canal, a dingy pub on Bethnal Green Road, his friend’s flat in Hackney – and each assignation grew more unmanageably intense. We met in an ill-advisably chichi wine bar one night, and were quickly asked to leave; the manager said our kissing was making the other customers uncomfortable. We fell out of the door, laughing into the night, semi-hysterical with mortification. Neither of us was surprised; the sexual tension was making us uncomfortable too. Often Tony would be pouring with sweat by the time we parted, and I would walk home shaking.

For as long as we were only kissing, I told myself we still had a choice. We could still pull back from the brink of what looked, in my clearer-headed moments, like incontrovertible lunacy. When I was away from Tony and could think straight, whatever it was that we shared began to seem ludicrously flimsy. Only a fool could expect it to bear the weight of anything as momentous as a decision to be together. He and I were so farcically incompatible in every way, I wondered whether the person each of us was falling for was nothing more than a fantasy of physical infatuation, and existed only in the confines of the other’s fevered mind. At least once a day I resolved to end it. The resolve would last until the next time I saw him.

Before long our meetings assumed a familiar pattern. We would both agree that this had to stop at once. After all, I would point out, he was married. He would remind me that they had decided to separate. It was my understanding, I would say, that married men were notorious for saying that sort of thing. Exasperated by my scepticism, he would get huffy and point out that I was a married woman. ‘I can’t see that remaining the case for much longer,’ I would say. He would protest: ‘But you’ve got a lovely husband, and a great life. Look at me, Dec – I’m a criminal. No one in your world would want you to be with me. If you were my daughter, I wouldn’t want you to be with me either.’ It was, we would agree, hopeless. Then we would kiss until our lips burned and people began to stare. Before parting we would tell each other this was absolutely the last time we would meet. The promise didn’t always last long enough for us to get home. After a particularly anguished farewell I hadn’t got out of second gear before my phone pinged. ‘HC?’ the text read. I turned the car around and was back with him in a bar called Hackney Central in under five minutes.

When Tony’s wife and daughter went away on holiday for a week, our meetings grew longer but no less agitated or inconclusive. The night before their return we spent hours on the phone, revisiting the impossibility of the situation. Surely this had to be the end, once and for all. I hung up, desolate but decisive. A minute later the phone rang again. ‘Tone, we’ve agreed this can’t go on,’ I told him sternly. ‘Dec,’ he said, in a voice I scarcely recognised. ‘My mum’s died. My brother just called. She’s dead. I need to see you.’

I got dressed and drove to his house. Since that day in the park both our homes had been out of bounds; the injunction was unspoken but did not need to be stated, and as I knocked on his door it felt like trespass. All fastidiousness was forgotten when he opened it. Tony looked shell-shocked, his eyes vacant and black. His mother hadn’t been well, but no one had dreamt her condition was critical. I rocked him in my arms on the living-room sofa until dawn broke and his wife and daughter would soon be arriving home. For once we didn’t bother to pretend we were saying goodbye.

On the day Paul came home Tony was in Leeds with his family, taking care of funeral arrangements. I hoped the 200 miles between us might create some space to accommodate the sudden intrusion of reality – spouses, families, bereavement – and wondered if Paul’s reappearance would bring me to my senses. When he arrived there was a stiff, mechanical quality to our embrace, and a lifelessness in our conversation more deathly than any I could recall. Every attempt at a genuine exchange seemed to run out of steam, tailing off into claustrophobic silence. We were like distant colleagues in a lift.

I had organised a welcome-home dinner the following night. My cousin Ewan would be joining us. Halfway through cooking I realised we needed sour cream, so jumped in the car to pop to the supermarket. On my way I called Tony. He was back from Leeds, and in a café around the corner. We met in a side street behind the supermarket. I climbed into his car and clung to him like to a life raft. I can’t have been in his car for more than three minutes, but long enough to know that I was about to go home for the last time. Whatever happened next, it couldn’t be this.

The dinner passed in a charade of distraction, while my words and my thoughts parted company. ‘Pass the pepper, please.’ Am I seriously going to leave Paul for Tony? Of course not. ‘Tell us about your new job, Ewan.’ Then am I leaving Paul because of Tony? Well yes, obviously. But not because I think Tony and I have a future. We would be miserable together. If I couldn’t make a life with Paul work, I’m hardly going to manage it with a crack-smoking drug dealer. ‘What was the press pack like in Indonesia? … Who was out there with you?’ I have to leave, because I cannot be sneaking about having illicit trysts behind supermarkets – it is shameful, this can’t be who I am. If I cannot keep away from Tony now that Paul is back, the only option with any shred of integrity is to leave. What happens after that is irrelevant, so there’s no point even trying to work out a plan. ‘There’s coffee if anyone would like some,’ I say.

Was it even integrity? I wasn’t sure. It might be staggering naïvety. All I knew was that for all of my life until Tony, I had been immune to infidelity. This was nothing to boast about, for it had nothing to do with virtue. It was simply that I had never been tempted to stray. Even with the most comedic of comedy boyfriends, it didn’t occur to me to be anything other than faithful, because I never looked at anyone else. Now I could not look my own husband in the eye. A longing to go to bed with Tony was no reason to think I could spend my life with him, but enough to tell me I could not be with Paul.

I scrutinised my own logic anxiously. Was I being ridiculous? Other people happily spend half their married lives fancying someone else. They’re not unworldly enough to mistake common temptation for marital curtains. If only I was French. I still loved my husband, even if I couldn’t stand to be with him; the horror of deceit made me nauseous. Or was I just pretending to be appalled, in order to dress up cheap betrayal in bogus honour?

After Paul went to bed I sat up late, gazing down on Ainsworth Road from a top-floor window. I thought about our wedding day, and about our families, and our friends. I pictured an imaginary grenade in my hand. Was I really about to pull the pin and lob it into this life we had built together? I wondered what would be left after the explosion.

My bag was packed before Paul awoke. ‘I’m leaving,’ I told him. The air was flat, deadened by defeat. ‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll be at Tom and Charlotte’s,’ I said. ‘Okay,’ he said. I drove to our old friends in Kentish Town, wondering what they would say, and what I had done. They were taken aback. They put me in the spare room, and I thought I would stay for perhaps a week or two while I worked out what to do.

Two days later Tony called and asked to meet me in Hackney. As he got out of his car, I saw a large black canvas holdall in one hand. He held it up, in the manner of a chancellor on budget day. ‘I’ve left,’ he announced breathlessly. What was he talking about? It took me a moment to register what he meant. ‘I’ve left. I want to be with you. You’re my girl now.’

And that was how Tony and I became the most implausible couple I have ever known.

If you have nowhere to live in London, need to find somewhere fast, and don’t own the most rudimentary household items – vacuum cleaner, ironing board, kettle – where do you go? Tony was the sort of person who always knew someone to call. He had a friend who owned a lettings agency – ‘Bit dodgy,’ Tony grinned, ‘but he owes me a favour’ – so after a quick call we made our way to the office.

Should Channel 4 ever want to make a docusoap about the East End property market, I could show them just the place to film. When we first walked in I half wondered whether cameras weren’t already installed, for every detail had been so finely observed – the directional haircuts and ski tans, the rhyming slang and restless testosterone – the room looked more like a reality TV set than real life. All the young men seemed to know Tony, and were on their feet in a flash. As I watched them fizz and buzz around him, competing for his wisecracks (‘Think you’ve got enough gel in that hairdo, mate?’, ‘Call that a watch?’), I saw the extraordinary effect he had on other men. By my terms, Tony’s social technique was borderline rude. Men found it mysteriously flattering, and compelling.

What we needed, Tony explained to the boss, was a short-term lease on a fully furnished flat equipped with everything right down to teaspoons. ‘Well that’s Canary Wharf, Tone, innit?’ I thought he had to be joking. I wasn’t living there. In an improbability contest, moving to Canary Wharf would beat leaving my husband for a drug dealer hands down.

Canary Wharf is a brutally modern development of shiny skyscrapers in what used to be London’s old East End docklands. Only a few miles south of Hackney, it feels more like Tokyo. Early each morning, driverless trains deliver young professionals in suits to their desks in the glittering high-rise concrete forest where they sit at screens all day making multinationals richer until it’s time to eat sushi in air-conditioned branches of international restaurant chains, or work out in corporate gyms. It looks like a child’s drawing of capitalist alienation – only, of course, there are few children there to draw it. There aren’t really any old people either, nor any trees, or greenery, or clutter. It was my idea of perfect hell. Now it was my new home. By teatime we had rented the sort of executive apartment designed for IT executives from Shanghai who like concrete and glass; it made me feel as if we had gone into internal exile.

Panic mounted when we unpacked our respective bags. Tony kept returning from his car with more armfuls of clothes – designer jeans, endless boots, pair after pair of identical trainers – and wrestled to cram them into his half of the wardrobe. When I had hung all of mine up, they occupied less than nine inches of rail. The comically lopsided spectacle made us both laugh, but as a metaphor for what we had embarked on it felt ominous. I was moving in with someone so fantastically unlike me, even our wardrobe looked like a joke. The recklessness of sudden domestic intimacy with a man I had only just slept with hit me again next morning, when we stood side by side in the bathroom brushing our teeth. I could see our faces in the mirror, but the reflection felt unreal, as if an imposter had kidnapped my identity.