Another Country (11 page)

Chapter 14

‘Sweetie, are you ready?' Her voice was getting an edge. Early July, a Sunday evening. She had not gone to the gym; he had spent part of the afternoon on the telephone, just as they'd been about to go out to the flea market together, and she had begun to read but not been able to; a small argument, a make up, a stint in bed, and she was wondering with irritation where the time had gone.

Richard was ironing a shirt.

‘I'll just be a couple of minutes,' he said, grinning at her.

Leela went and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was growing out, and she had put some stuff in it. She'd put on eyeliner, and a dress she liked.

She turned again. Richard was painstakingly ironing the back of the left sleeve.

‘You're only going to put a jumper over it anyway,' she said.

‘But I might take the jumper off inside.'

The figure in the mirror turned away from itself in exasperation. It folded its arms; the shoulders went up, towards the ears.

An hour later, out of the tube, they walked for a long time around a small area, repeatedly consulting the A–Z.

‘Shit, we should have brought something,' Leela said. She was feeling uneasy. ‘We're really late.'

They were near a dark square. She was suddenly filled with rage, and tears. ‘Why couldn't you iron your fucking shirt earlier?' Her hands balled up; she began to cry.

Forty-five minutes later, they got to Ellen's door. It was open, the party had spilled into the corridor. Richard was smiling; he held a bottle of wine. Leela felt shaken. She was smiling too – she didn't know what she was feeling: hatred, fear, or merely the hope of release.

‘Leela!' Amy grabbed them as soon as they came in. Leela got caught, to her surprise, saying hello to smiling, diffident Doug, an ex-boyfriend of Amy's: they'd been in a play together in their first year at college. Amy grabbed Richard's arm and began to have an intent conversation with him, still holding his arm, which irritated Leela, who remembered Amy pinning her to the wall of a women's toilet and hissing ‘Stop flirting with Doug!' Leela had been baffled; she hadn't even been attracted to Doug, who equally certainly wasn't interested in her.

Doug was saying something: he brought over a blonde Canadian girl who was his girlfriend, and Leela, thinking the other woman was sweet, talked to her for a while.

Amy grabbed Leela's arm and dragged her outside. ‘Stop being so fucking disloyal!'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘Stop talking to that bitch!'

‘Why's she a bitch?'

‘Fucking blonde, blondie, blonde bitch!' said Amy.

‘You're ratted.'

‘Yeah yeah, whatever. The point is, you shouldn't have been talking to her.'

‘But why? You don't still care about Doug.'

‘That's not the point. He rejected me, he rejected me.'

‘I'm going inside.'

‘No!'

‘What about Andrew?' Leela tried.

‘Andrew's obviously much better than Doug. Obviously. He's like a nine or
ten
, and Doug's a six. But,' and Amy's voice rose, ‘he's
married
, right, so whassthepoint? Whassthepoint of it all? And anyway, you're my best friend.' Her hand tightened around Leela's arm. Some of the girls on the balcony looked at them and grinned.

‘Look, another thing,' Leela said. ‘Why were you flirting with Richard?' She had to repeat herself.

‘Oh, don't be absurd,' Amy said.

Leela shivered. It wasn't warm. ‘You kept touching his arm. You wouldn't have liked it if I'd done that. Remember the time you accused me of flirting with Doug?' Boring Doug, she appended silently.

Amy bent close and spoke loudly. ‘Leela, I'm not interested in Richard.'

‘All right!'

‘I'd never flirt with your boyfriend.'

‘All right, all right,' said Leela, now wondering where he was. ‘Let's go back in.'

‘Give me a hug!'

Leela allowed herself to be tightly held. Amy nearly unbalanced her. ‘Let's go back inside. Let's get a drink.'

Leela watched her head towards the kitchen; on the way she was stopped by three different people who cried her name and whom she hugged and paused to talk to.

The party was full of yellow light, of chatter heard around a corner, of laughter, of music turned on and off, up and down, vaguely familiar faces, and girls who were well dressed, potential enemies: sometimes she felt there was an army of attractive women, agents of which kept appearing in her field of vision when she was out with Richard. The apparently unattractive, uninteresting girl was also to be feared, because she might be a double bluff. There was only one of Leela but many of the others. Sometimes she longed to acknowledge defeat. Richard was across the room now, smiling and talking to a pretty girl. She would give it a few minutes, then go over and say hello.

A long time later, when Richard was drunk enough, he agreed to go home. Leela had, by superhuman effort, reappeared only once in a while to find out who he was talking to – assorted girls, then, for a brief respite, a man, but who turned out to have a beautiful girlfriend who came to talk to Richard at length. Leela had said she wanted to go; Richard had smiled and said calmly, ‘Maybe one more drink.' Forty minutes later, he was done. It struck Leela that she'd spent the last five hours feeling under threat; and this was a party she'd wanted to go to.

Amy reappeared. ‘Leela, are you leaving? I want to leave too.'

Richard telephoned a cab and they went down to wait. When it appeared, Amy sat in the middle. She burst into tears.

‘What's the matter?' Leela asked. She felt sorry for Amy, but also exasperated, and fearful too: Richard would judge her for how well she responded to this crisis. Worse, he might find Amy attractive amid it. What if he fantasised about her?

‘Oh, it's just, oh, oh,' Amy cried. She put her hands to her face and sobbed. The taxi drove through dark east London streets. She continued to cry loudly, smeared her hands across her face, and sniffed. ‘Oh, it was just seeing Doug.'

‘Doug?'

‘I liked him so much, and he doesn't like me at all, and – oh, it was just awful.'

They arrived at Amy's flat. Leela gave the driver instructions about where to stop. Suddenly Amy turned to her. ‘Come and stay at mine. Please,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Please, please.' She begged with her whole body.

Leela's imagination briefly saw her doing the right thing. ‘But I want to go back to Richard's,' she said.

‘Please Leela.'

Richard said politely, ‘Amy, you're more than welcome to come to mine.'

‘No, I don't want to, thank you, it's really kind of you. Leela, please stay,' she implored.

‘Come to Richard's,' said Leela, hoping Amy wouldn't.

‘No, it's fine. Thank you, thank you both. Can I give you some money for the cab?'

‘Don't be silly, we were going this way anyway.'

‘Goodnight.' She hurried out, her bag half open, towards the door, and they watched her find the key and wrench it open.

‘I hope she's going to be all right,' Richard said.

‘I wanted to stay with you,' Leela said. She had spent the evening preventing herself from guarding him, and she wanted to retreat into his hermetic world, where she would be unhappy but not under threat of loss.

‘Maybe you should have gone with her. She seemed really upset.'

Leela was silent. Later, they discussed Amy, and she explained that her friend could be inconsistent, selfish, and on occasion untrustworthy.

Chapter 15

She woke early, used to going to the gym. With the new job, the commute had become longer. When she came into consciousness, it was as though at the tail end of a dream: no, she was thinking, no, no. She became aware of the duvet, the blinds, the room, its walls, where she was. She rejected all of these, but especially the other body in the bed. She would lie there in semi-conscious fury, thinking, this can't go on, I must do something; then she would get up and begin to make her peace with the day in small repeated actions: going to the bathroom, brushing her teeth, washing and examining her face, or going to the kitchen to make coffee; opening the living-room curtains. Summer was ending, with faded, charming days of residual warmth.

At Finchley Road she crossed the platform and waited till a Metropolitan line train rumbled up. A few people got out, and she found a seat. She carried her heavy new bag, with the laptop from work.

The train drew past neat brick houses and the backs of gardens which she liked to look into; past tower blocks, roads, bridges, and later, humdrum fields, in some of which a few horses stood chewing. She had marvelled when she'd gone for the interview: the ProPage office, which described its location as west London, seemed to be in another world. These were the suburbs, a mid-sized town not much larger and uglier than the one she'd grown up in, but as a satellite of London, people here had a confidence Leela and her contemporaries would have envied.

She'd arrived at work, or nearly, and that brought its own reluctance. She walked slowly along the platform. The tarmac had deep depressions which filled with water. Leaves, curled, forked at the ends, yellow, brown, and parchment, sometimes magenta, fell into these miniature reservoirs and were displayed.

To get to the office she walked through the shopping centre, where assistants in black clothing were brusquely rearranging racks of dresses, jumpers, and jeans.

The office was in a high-rise shared with other professional service companies – an accountancy firm, a lawyer's. In the lobby, she waited for the lift, and stared at the points of her new shoes. When the door opened on her floor, she knew, she would walk out quite fast, as though impatient for the day to begin.

‘Hey there!' She looked up at the sound of comic reproach and after a pause recognised Judy, who worked in the same part of the firm.

‘Oh, sorry. World of my own,' said Leela. She smiled for Judy and regretted for herself that it wasn't possible actually to live in a world of her own. What if she had indeed devised this world? Could I have done this, she wondered of the lift, the tan stockings of the girl on her left, the horrible carpet?

‘And
this
is it?' the other girl enquired, her Scottish voice full of sarcasm but also a cheer that came from her youth. Or perhaps from the fact that she was crazy. Leela grinned at her, taking in the messily scraped-back hair, the drop of eye make-up on her cheek, and the tiny rip in her black jeans, worn under a jacket.

‘God, I'm so hungover,' Judy complained. The lift door opened. They shambled out together onto the fifth floor.

‘Could you put this on my desk? Why don't you come and lurk near the art guys?' Judy put her bag into Leela's hand and wandered away. ‘Do you want a coffee?' floated back at her.

‘No thanks,' Leela said quickly. Almost no one made it strong enough. She plugged in her laptop, put Judy's bag on her desk, and logged onto the system. She must check her horoscope.

Judy came back with coffee and put it down. It spilled slightly. ‘Shit …' She began to use a tissue to mop it up. Mere coffee, Leela thought, could look so offputting. Her wave of revulsion reminded her of the time just before adolescence when she'd hardly been able to eat, suddenly hyper-aware of the chomping, swallowing, digesting sounds of her family around her at the table: her mother, picking up a piece of chapati and scraping after a last lick of gravy; her sister eating in enormous, swift mouthfuls; her father's small teeth quietly grinding at a piece of meat. She remembered a poem for children about a boy who becomes translucent, so that everyone can see his food as it is masticated, passes through the first part of the gut, then turns into chyme – a word that by itself could make her feel sick. And what happened at the end of the poem? Did the entire family kill themselves because life had become too disgusting? She didn't remember.

‘So why haven't I seen you for a few days? You went somewhere, didn't you – no, wait,' Judy was saying. She flicked the tissue into the bin. ‘I remember. You went to a wedding.'

‘Yeah, one of Richard's friends from school.'

‘Where was it again?'

‘Nowhere. Devon. Beautiful place, estuary, cottages, that sort of thing. Country church. We stayed in a really nice hotel.'

‘Uh huh?' Judy was picking black nail varnish from one fingernail.

‘Mm, that's very lady-like of you.'

The other girl grinned. ‘It is, isn't it? So, did you have fun at the wedding?'

I hate weddings, Leela contemplated explaining, and I hate enforced fun. Richard's friends make me nervous in large groups and, sometimes, bored in small ones, and I spent the entire time before and most of the time during it waiting for him to embarrass me by flirting with someone or just make me feel crap by staring at someone. She thought tangentially of the man she'd seen at the wedding. She'd been introduced to him, but forgotten his name. He'd come on his own, seemed to know few people, and had kept to himself, inappropriately dressed in chinos and a torn jumper, looking cheerful. She'd envied him because he was alone.

But she hadn't been at ProPage long enough to start being honest. ‘Yeah, it was great,' she said.

Judy gave her a bored look. ‘Right,' she said. Her computer whirred into life. ‘Now,' she said, ‘which piss-boring page of the leading business-to-business monthly for reinsurers should I lay out first?'

‘Yeah, let's go out for a quick drink.' They were at Amy's flat. ‘I'm not really up for anything big though.'

‘I'm
so
not up for anything big. Jeez.' Amy shut the door behind her with a bang. They ran down the narrow stairs and were in the street, then the main road.

‘How about here? It's pretty average, but doesn't look horribly loud,' Amy said. And, at the bar, ‘I think I'd like white wine. What about you? Shall we just get a bottle? It's less than two glasses each would be.'

Leela carried the bottle, Amy the glasses. They sat at a wooden table on an elevated platform with a railing round it: an imitation, several times removed, of something in a nineteenth-century painting.

‘Cheers. So, how's it going with Andrew?'

‘Oh, it's been a hideous week or two. First, I saw him three times the week before last.'

‘Wasn't that nice?'

‘It was
lovely
. It was lovely. But then I didn't hear from him for a week. He was in Brussels, he was doing some stuff. Then he and Laura went away for a few days. It feels so shit not to hear from him after spending so much time together.'

‘It must do.' Leela tried to look sympathetic. They'd had a conversation in which Amy had berated her for not being supportive enough about Andrew. And Leela's interest in talking about him had increased since she'd met him.

Amy's voice had risen, and a couple of men at another table looked at them curiously. Leela was aware of their slight movements, and their voices lowering, then she stopped looking. Something caught the corner of her eye: one of them was waving at her and Amy. Leela, startled, peered at him, but didn't recognise him.

‘I know, I know, it's my own fucking fault,' Amy was saying savagely.

‘It's not easy though,' Leela said. ‘I mean, what are you supposed to do? At least he's interesting and nice and intelligent. He's not threatened by you.'

‘Obviously,' Amy snorted.

‘I don't really get the whole thing. I don't get what's supposed to be the thing to do.'

‘I should have met the man I was going to marry at university,' Amy said with irritation.

Leela grinned. ‘Too late now.'

‘I'm sure that's what was supposed to happen.'

The wine tasted sweet, but only faintly. Leela was hungry and drank more, till the sugar and alcohol hit her. Amy tipped the last drops into her glass.

‘Another bottle?'

‘Uh, well –'

When she returned to the table, Leela was declining an offer of a drink from the man who'd waved at them.

‘Why won't you let us buy you ladies a drink?'

‘Because,' Amy interjected, ‘we already have a drink. See? Have wine. No want to talk to you.'

Fuelled by their indignation, they drank faster.

‘So, what's happening? I need to know everything,' Amy said.

‘I've got to go to this hideous dinner thing tomorrow. I suppose it might be all right. One of Richard's friends. He lives with his parents, in Richmond or something.'

‘Why will it be hideous?'

‘Because they're cripplingly posh. What am I supposed to do with my knives and forks? I mean, no, don't tell me, I know what to do with them. But what the fuck? There always ends up being some small random other knife sitting about that you didn't reckon on, and you end up buttering your bread with the
proper
knife, then have to eat your dinner with the little one and look like a cretin.'

‘Supper. I've started calling it supper.'

‘What?'

‘I think it's more posh,' Amy articulated clearly, ‘so I've started saying supper.'

‘For fuck's sake.'

It turned out the second bottle was also over. Both of them were drunk, but it was only nine. Amy had a brainwave. ‘I can't get another hangover. Let's go back to my flat and do an aerobics DVD.'

‘What are you
talking
about?'

‘It'll make us metabolise the alcohol faster. We've just poisoned ourselves. Our livers are dying.'

‘Cheery.'

They went to her house, and Leela lay on the sofa, the room doing aerobics around her head, while Amy watched an apparently interminable film on television, saying that staying up would allow the alcohol to be processed. Leela fell asleep. The next day she had to rush, shower, borrow clothes, and scramble to get to work.

‘Thank you,' Leela heard herself say for the fifth time in about three minutes. She couldn't remember the rules. In her family people said it all the time, even when being served in restaurants; later, she'd come to suspect the habit betrayed how middle class she was. She was irritated with herself for even thinking about it; she was what she was – wasn't she? ‘Supper' popped into her mind. They had popped round for supper. She tensed and waited to hear someone say it.

‘The paella is delicious,' Richard said. He smiled at Seb's mother, who smiled back at him. Leela echoed the praise.

‘It's a family recipe,' Seb's mother said. ‘We get the rice from a place on the King's Road, it makes all the difference. And Seb went to get the mussels this morning because the fish man didn't come this week.'