0568188_DCD32_david_nicholls_one_day

CHAPTER NINE

Cigarettes and Alcohol

SATURDAY, 15 JULY 1995

Walthamstowand Soho

The words glowed in bilious green on the wordprocessor’s screen: the product of a whole morning’s work. She sat at the tiny school desk in the tiny back room of the tiny new flat, read the words, then read them again while behind her the immersion heater gurgled in derision.

At weekends, or in the evenings if she could find the energy, Emma wrote. She had made a start on two novels (one set in a gulag, the other in a post-apocalyptic future), a children’s picture book, with her own illustrations, about a giraffe with a short neck, a gritty, angry TV drama about social workers called ‘Tough Shit’, a fringe play about the complex emotional lives of twenty-somethings, a fantasy novel for teenagers featuring evil robot teachers, a

stream-of-consciousness radio play about a dying Suffragette, a comic strip and a sonnet. None had been completed, not even the fourteen lines of sonnet.

These words on the screen represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven years old, and later lots of Chandler and James M. Cain too. There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same – you couldn’t just soak it up then squeeze it out again. She found herself unable to think of a name for her detective, let alone a cohesive original plot, and even her pseudonym was poor: Emma T. Wilde? She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things. She had tried being in a band, writing plays and children’s books, she had tried acting and getting a job in publishing. Perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish. She used the computer’s wordcount feature. Thirty-five words, including the title page and her rotten pseudonym. Emma groaned, released the hydraulic lever on the side of her office chair and sank a little closer to the carpet.

There was a knock on the plywood door. ‘How are things in the Anne Frank wing?’

That line again. For Ian, a joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hands like a cheap umbrella. When they had first started seeing each other, approximately ninety

per cent of what Ian said came under the heading of ‘humour’ in that it involved a pun, a funny voice, some comic intent. Over time she had hoped to get this down to forty per cent, forty being a workable allowance, but nearly two years later the figure stood at seventy-five, and domestic life continued against this tinnitus of mirth. Was it really possible for someone to be ‘on’ for the best part of two years? She had got rid of his black bedsheets, the beer mats, secretly culled his underpants and there were fewer of his famous ‘Summer Roasts’, but even so she was reaching the limits of how much it’s possible to change a man.

‘Nice cup of tea for the lady?’ he said, in the voice of a cockney char.

‘No thanks, love.’

‘Eggy bread?’ Scottish now. ‘Can ae do you some eggy bread, ma wee snootch?’

Snootch was a recent development. When pressed to justify himself, Ian had explained that it was because she was just so snootchy, so very, very snootch. There’d been a suggestion that she might reciprocate by calling him skootch; skootch and snootch, snootchy and skootchy, but it hadn’t stuck.

‘ . . . wee slice of eggy bread? Line your stomach for tonight?’

Tonight. There it was. Often when Ian was working through his dialects it was because he had something on his mind that couldn’t be said in a natural voice.

‘Big night, tonight. Out on the town with Mike TV.’

She decided to ignore the remark, but he wasn’t

making it easy. His chin resting on her head, he read the words on the screen.

‘Portrait in Crimson . . .’

She covered the screen with her hand. ‘Don’t read over my shoulder, please.’

‘Emma T. Wilde. Who’s Emma T. Wilde?’ ‘My pseudonym. Ian—’

‘You know what the T stands for?’ ‘Terrible.’

‘Terrific. Tremendous.’ ‘Tired, as in sick and—’

‘If you ever want me to read it—’

‘Why would you want to read it? It’s crap.’ ‘Nothing you do is crap.’

‘Well this is.’ Twisting her head away, she clicked the monitor off and without turning round she knew he’d be doing his hangdog look. All too often this was how she found herself with Ian, switching back and forth between irritation and remorse. ‘Sorry!’ she said, taking his hand by the fingers and shaking it.

He kissed the top of her head, then spoke into her hair. ‘You know what I think it stands for? “The” as in “The Bollocks”. Emma T. B. Wilde.’

With that, he left; a classic technique, compliment and run. Keen not to cave in straightaway, Emma pushed the door to, turned the monitor back on, read the words there, shuddered visibly, closed the file and dragged it to the icon of the wastebasket. An electronic crumpling noise, the sound of writing.

The squeal of the smoke alarm indicated that Ian was

cooking. She stood and followed the smell of burning butter down the hall into the kitchen/diner; not a separate room, just the greasiest quarter of the living room of the flat that they had bought together. Emma had been unsure about buying; it felt like the kind of place that the police get called to, she said, but Ian had worn her down. It was crazy to rent, they saw each other most nights anyway, it was near her school, a foot on the ladder etc. and so they had scraped together the deposit and bought some books on interior decoration, including one that told you how to paint plywood so that it looked like fine Italian marble. There had been inspirational talk of putting the fireplace back in, of bookshelves and fitted cupboards and storage solutions. Exposed floorboards! Ian would hire a sander and expose the floorboards as law demanded. On a wet Saturday in February they had lifted the carpet, peered despondently underneath at the mess of mouldering chipboard, disintegrating underlay and old news papers, then guiltily nailed it all back in place as if disposing of a corpse. There was something unpersuasive and impermanent about these attempts at home-making, as if they were children building a den, and despite the fresh paint, the prints on the walls, the new furniture, the flat retained its shabby, temporary air.

Now Ian stood in the kitchenette in a shaft of smoky sunlight with his broad back towards her. Emma watched him from the doorway, taking in the familiar old grey t-shirt with the holes in, an inch of his underpants visible above his track-suit bottoms, his ‘tracky botts’. She could see the words Calvin Klein against the brown hair on the small of

his back and it occurred to her that this was probably not at all what Calvin Klein had in mind.

She spoke to break the silence. ‘Isn’t that getting a bit burnt?’

‘Not burnt, crispy.’

‘I say burnt, you say crispy.’ ‘Let’s call the whole thing off!’

Silence.

‘I can see the top of your underpants,’ she said.

‘Yes, that’s deliberate.’ Lisping, effeminate voice. ‘It’s called fashion, sweetheart.’

‘Well it’s certainly very provocative.’ Nothing, just the sound of food burning.

But it was Ian’s turn to cave this time. ‘So. Where’s Alpha Boy taking you then?’ he said, without turning round.

‘Somewhere in Soho, I don’t know.’ In fact she did know, but the restaurant’s name was a recent by-word for modish, metropolitan dining and she didn’t want to make matters worse. ‘Ian, if you don’t want me to go tonight—’

‘No, you go, enjoy yourself—’

‘Or if you want to come with us?—’

‘What, Harry and Sally and me? Oh, I don’t think so, do you?’

‘You’d be very welcome.’

‘The two of you bantering and talking over me all night—’

‘We don’t do that—’ ‘You did last time!’ ‘No, we didn’t!’

‘You’re sure you don’t want some eggy bread?’

‘No!’

‘And anyway, I’ve got a gig tonight, haven’t I? House of Ha Ha, Putney.’

‘A paid gig?’

‘Yes, a paid gig!’ he snapped. ‘So I’m fine, thank you very much.’ He started searching noisily in the cupboard for some brown sauce. ‘Don’t you worry about me.’

Emma sighed irritably. ‘If you don’t want me to go, just say so.’

‘Em, we’re not joined at the hip. You go if you want. Enjoy yourself.’ The sauce bottle wheezed consumptively. ‘Just don’t get off with him, will you?’

‘Well that’s hardly going to happen, is it?’ ‘No, so you keep saying.’

‘He’s going out with Suki Meadows.’ ‘But if he wasn’t?’

‘If he wasn’t it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference, because I love you.’

Still this wasn’t enough. Ian said nothing and Emma sighed, crossed the kitchen, her feet sucking on the lino, and looped her arms around his waist, feeling him pull it in as she did so. Pressing her face against his back, she inhaled the familiar warm body smell, kissed the fabric of his t-shirt, mumbled ‘Stop being daft’ and they stood like this for a while, until it became clear that Ian was keen to start eating. ‘Right. Better mark these essays,’ she said, and walked away. Twenty-eight numbing opinions on viewpoint in To Kill a Mockingbird.

‘Em?’ he said as she reached the door. ‘What are you doing this afty? Round about seventeen-hundred hours?’

‘Should be finished. Why?’

He hitched himself up onto the kitchen units with the plate on his lap. ‘Thought we might go to bed, for, you know, a bit of afternoon delight.’

I love him, she thought, I’m just not in love with him and also I don’t love him. I’ve tried, I’ve strained to love him but I can’t. I am building a life with a man I don’t love, and I don’t know what to do about it.

‘Maybe,’ she said from the doorway. ‘May-be,’ and she pouted her lips into a kiss, smiled and closed the door.

There were no more mornings, only mornings after.

Heart thumping, soaked with sweat, Dexter was woken just after midday by a man bellowing outside, but it turned out to be M People. He had fallen asleep in front of the television again, and was now being urged to search for the hero inside himself.

The Saturdays after the Late-Night Lock-In were always spent like this, in the stale air, blinds drawn against the sun. Had she still been around, his mother would have been shouting up the stairs for him to get up and do something with the day, but instead he sat smoking on the black leather sofa in last night’s underpants, playing Ultimate Doom on the PlayStation and trying not to move his head.

By mid-afternoon he could feel weekend melancholy creep up on him and so decided to practise his mixing. Something of an amateur DJ, Dexter had a wallful of CDs

and rare vinyl in bespoke pine racks, two turntables and a microphone, all tax-deductible, and could often be spotted in record shops in Soho, wearing an immense pair of headphones like halved coconuts. Still in his underpants, he mixed idly back and forth between break-beats on his brand new CD mixing decks in preparation for the next big-night-in with mates. But something was missing, and he soon gave up. ‘CD’s not vinyl,’ he announced, then realised that he had said this to an entirely empty room.

Melancholy again, he sighed and crossed to the kitchen, moving slowly like a man recovering from surgery. The massive fridge was full to overflowing with bottles of an exciting new brand of upmarket cider. As well as presenting the show (‘Car-crash television’ they called it, apparently a good thing), he had recently expanded into voiceovers. He was ‘classless’ they said, also apparently a good thing, the exemplar of a new breed of British man: metropolitan, moneyed, not embarrassed by his masculinity, his sex-drive, his liking for cars and big titanium watches and gadgets in brushed steel. So far he had done voiceovers for this premium bottled cider, designed to appeal to a young Ted Baker-wearing crowd, and a new breed of men’s razor, an extraordinary sci-fi object with a multitude of blades and a lubricating strip that left a mucal trail, as if someone had sneezed on your chin.

He had even dipped his toe into the world of modelling, a long-standing ambition that he had never dared to voice, and which he was quick to dismiss as ‘just a bit of a laugh’. Only this month he had featured in a

fashion spread in a men’s magazine, the theme ‘gangsterchic’, and over nine pages he had chewed cigars or lain riddled with bullets in a number of tailored doublebreasted suits. Copies of the magazine were accidentally scattered round the flat, so that guests might casually stumble upon it. There was even a copy by the toilet, and he sometimes found himself sitting there and staring at his own photo, dead but beautifully tailored and splayed across the bonnet of a Jag.

Presenting car-crash television was fine for a while, but you could only crash the car so many times. At some point in the future he would have to do something good as opposed to so-bad-it’s-good, and in an attempt to acquire some credibility he had set up his own production company, Mayhem TV plc. At the moment Mayhem only existed as a stylish logo on some heavy stationery, but that would surely change. It would have to; as his agent Aaron had said, ‘You’re a great Youth Presenter, Dexy. Trouble is, you’re not a Youth.’ What else might he be capable of, given the breaks? Acting? He knew a lot of actors, both professionally and socially, played poker with a few of them, and frankly if they could do it . . .

Yes, professionally and socially, the last couple of years had been a time of opportunity, of great new mates, canapés and premieres, helicopter rides and a lot of yammering about football. There had been low points of course: a sense of anxiety and crippling dread, one or two instances of public vomiting. There was something about his presence in a bar or club that made other men want to shout abuse or even hit him, and recently he had been