What You Make It Read online

  Steve was still in the position I'd been in a year before, and although I'd never met her, this girl Tamsin fitted the mould perfectly. She was supposed to have temporarily split up from someone else, someone who was bigger than Steve, had a flasher job, but who happened to be out of the country. Steve had met her through the usual splatter of coincidence that in retrospect looks too dark and foreboding to be the result of pure chance. He had, to give him credit, pegged her as an ‘unusual person’ from the very first date.

  At first fairly subtly, and then with surprising persistence, Tamsin had suggested a period of casual acquaintance, to include excursions into the sexual arena. This period would end with no strings, it was proposed, when her boyfriend returned from abroad. She would return to him, Steve could get back to his life, and everything would be neatly tidied away.

  Though this was the sort of suggestion which is supposed to send male hormones ricocheting round their glands in a frenzy of joy, it had struck Steve as rather odd. In my capacity as a scarred foot soldier in similar campaigns, he chewed it over with me. My advice had been simple.

  Don't even fucking think about it.

  Why? Because.

  Because it wouldn't work that way. Because the sex wouldn't be as good as he hoped, and wouldn't make him any happier. And because when you've slept with someone once, there's no good reason for it not to happen again – and once it's happened twice you're in a relationship, never mind what it says in your contract.

  I could picture, almost as though it was happening in front of me, what would take place the evening before Tamsin's boyfriend returned. She'd meet Steve for a drink, in some pub that meant something to both of them. The stage would be carefully set. Steve would be nervous, but relieved that the strange interlude was over. You don't get anything for free, and few things make you more nervous than an apparent gift from the Gods. Steve would buy a couple of drinks and sit down, ready to be hearty and make the usual promises of friendship, and then Tamsin would speak.

  ‘Well,’ she'd say, and pause, and smile brightly, ‘what are we going to do?’

  Steve would cough, and stare, and ask what she meant, and then it would all come out. She'd changed her mind. After all, there was something between them, wasn't there? Something important. She was going to tell her boyfriend she'd fallen in love with someone else. He'd be angry, of course, and she'd have to move out of his flat, and she'd have nowhere to stay… but between her and Steve, and the love that they shared, she was sure they'd be able to work it out.

  When someone says something like that to you, you're not allowed to just run yelping out of the bar, although that's much the best thing you could do. There are rules of human engagement. And so Steve would swallow, try not to pass out, and settle down to having one of the worst evenings of his life. There would be tears, brave smiles, and a horrendous scene in a public place. Possibly screaming. I've seen it happen. After four hours he'd think he'd got away with it, and would limp sweating back to his flat.

  Then the next day the calls would start, and the letters, and the visits. Steve would spend a month looking like a hunted animal, and would eventually emerge bewildered, frightened, and feeling absolutely terrible about something he'd never done.

  And if he was anything like me, in four months he'd end up doing exactly the same thing again.

  I knew Steve well enough to be able to plot all this with absolute confidence, and so I told him to stay well clear. He was my friend, so he listened, and thought about it, and realized I was speaking not with forked tongue.

  And then, being a man, he'd gone ahead and done it anyway.

  Two days later I was sitting at my desk again. I spend a lot of time sitting there. Working at it, rather less.

  I was staring out of the window, and I was smoking. I am a keen, dedicated, probably almost professional smoker, and recognize a period of time I call ‘a cigarette's-worth’. It's about five or six minutes, the length of time it takes to smoke a fag, but the actual duration isn't really the point.

  Thus when I'm supposed to be working, I'll take a break to do a cigarette's-worth of reading, a cigarette's-worth of leafing pointlessly through magazines, or a cigarette's-worth of staring into space. This is different from the usual reading, leafing through magazines and staring into space which I do when I'm supposed to be working – though I'll almost certainly be smoking when I do those too – in that it's a conscious decision, a marked-off period of time during which I am deliberately, instead of merely effectively, not working.

  I sighed and turned my intellect to the task of staring at the computer and randomly spiralling the cursor round the screen. This, I find, can keep me occupied for hours. Sometimes, as that afternoon, I dally with a variant of the technique, which involves clicking the mouse at intervals while I'm spiralling. This is both pointless and silly, as sometimes it accidentally moves some of my folders around on the computer desktop. But that's all right, because I can then do a cigarette's-worth of moving them all back so they're neat and tidy again.

  When I finally started to resurface from my reverie, I noticed that I was whirling the cursor over the folder which holds my letters. I could tell that at a glance because I'd once spent most of an afternoon – on a client's time, naturally – making its icon look like a little letter coming out of an envelope. I work for a number of people in a variety of capacities, but I can't honestly say I represent value for money to any of them.

  I double-clicked on the folder to open it, and stared vaguely at the sub-folders inside, each labelled with the name of the person to whom the contents had been sent. The names on some of them were enough to make me wince, without even exploring the terrible stuff inside. Like I said, I advised Steve on the basis of my own experience. Ginny's folder was there, as was Jackie's, Yvonne's and Mel's, amongst less frightening ones holding letters to various other ex's, friends and the tax office. There was also, I noticed, a folder which didn't appear to have a name. I was about to investigate when the phone rang.

  It was Steve, and he'd done it again.

  I should stress here that, despite appearances, Steve and I are not a couple of typical lads who can't wait to swop tales of sexual derring-do with each other. Over a long and arduous period we've earned our Politically Correct badges, and are in any event both fairly private people. I would never discuss Monica with him even if he asked, which he simply wouldn't. Reports on random sex are different, though – it's more like a sports news update. And don't try telling me that women don't do it too.

  The last time we'd spoken Steve had sworn curiosity had now been satisfied, and that he wasn't going to end up in bed with Tamsin again. I'd been sceptical. If someone wants to do it again, how are you going to avoid it? Turning down a man is one thing: women have a right not to sleep with someone if they don't want to, and many men will respect that, intellectually if not in practice. It's the way of the world. Being denied sex is a key feature of being a male earthling, and it's only the grace with which you accept it that determines how you're perceived.

  Turning down a woman is something completely different. Turning down a woman, when she has taken that step and made that offer, comes across as such a wholesale rejection, such a spine-chillingly loud slap in the face, that it's almost impossible to do, however much you want to.

  Steve had gone out to dinner with Tamsin, armed no doubt with the best of intentions, and it had happened again.

  Sighing heavily, I got down to the task of telling Steve yet again that he was making a mistake. I see it as my role in life, discouraging other people from having fun. We knocked it back and forth for a while, and then there was a pause.

  ‘There's something else,’ he said, eventually.

  ‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘What? She doesn't believe you've got someone else?’ Steve had told Tamsin that he too was loosely attached to someone abroad, and that she was coming back soon. I'd liked the way he was thinking, but hadn't held out much hope that it would make a difference.

&nbs
p; ‘No. She told me that she'd taken something. She took something last time as well, apparently.’ I assumed that he was talking about drugs, and was about to wax indifferent when he continued. ‘Last time it was photos.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Last time she stayed round mine, when I was in the shower, she took some photos from the flat.’

  ‘She did what?’

  ‘She had prints done, large prints, and then gave the originals back to me this morning.’

  ‘Photos of what?’

  ‘Of me.’

  I didn't say anything for a moment. I was reeling slightly. Though I enjoy being proved right as much as the next man, I didn't like the sound of this.

  ‘Where were they? The photos? I mean, were they just lying around, in a drawer, or what?’

  ‘They were in an album. It was on my desk.’

  ‘Did you show them to her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She just opened it, without permission, and took the photos.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That's not ideal, is it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And now she's taken something else?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don't know. She wouldn't tell me.’

  At the weekend Steve called me again. Monica and I were splatted in front of the television, stupefied with pizza. When the phone rang Monica advised me to ignore it, but I find that difficult to do if I haven't spoken to my parents that day, which I hadn't. So I answered it, and on finding it was Steve settled back to banter with half my mind, while trying to keep track of whatever it was we were watching. A documentary on Cane Toads, I suspect – comfort television. Monica had just walked out to make some coffee when Steve stopped abruptly, and said he wanted to ask me a favour. Something in the tone of his voice made me sit up and tune out the toads, despite the fact that they were cutely rolling onto their backs to have their stomachs rubbed, just like my cat used to do.

  Steve wondered whether Monica and I could be talked into going out the following night. The fact that he was asking in those terms made it obvious what he was really saying. I asked, and he admitted that a double date was what he had in mind.

  I breathed out heavily for comedy value, pretending that what he was asking was a bit of a tall order. Normally, he would have got the joke. He didn't. He rapidly said that he wouldn't have asked, except he didn't know what else to do. Tamsin had phoned him at least three times each day since they last saw each other. He was calling from his office rather than home, late on a Sunday afternoon, because pretending he had work to do was the only way he'd been able to avoid spending the day with her. Nothing else he'd been able to come up with, from the fact that he was tired to claiming that he needed to paint the ceiling, had been able to dissuade her. Because, after all, she could come and help paint the ceiling. And if he was tired, well, they didn't have to do anything, did they? She could just come round, bring some food, and they could curl up together …

  When he got to that point, I stopped pretending and rapidly agreed, making it clear what I was doing and waggling my eyebrows at Monica for her approval. She rolled her eyes but then nodded with a smile. ‘MeN’, she was clearly thinking, and who can blame her? I made arrangements with Steve to meet him at a cinema in town the following evening.

  When we'd finished I put the phone down and sipped my coffee. Monica nudged me a few minutes later to bring me out of my reverie, but it stayed on my mind. Steve was a calm, level-headed person. He'd known what he was getting into – I'd warned him often enough.

  I could understand him being rattled. But he'd almost sounded afraid.

  I had to spend the afternoon at a client's on Monday, which I didn't mind too much. It meant I could drink their coffee and waste their time, instead of merely my own. I hung around till half-six and then went round the corner to meet Monica in a pub.

  We were both in high spirits when we left an hour later. Neither of us had bothered to eat any lunch, and after three drinks in quick succession peered rather owlishly at each other when we re-emerged into the fading light outside. Hand in hand we walked down the street towards Oxford Circus, and I sent up silent thanks To Whom It May Concern.

  There'd been times when I thought I would never have this again, when I thought I would spend the remaining evenings of my life nodding in polite fury at the utterances of someone I didn't really know, never mind like, much less love. It wouldn't have been their fault, nor even mine really. It's simply the way things are when people come together out of hurt rather than happiness. When you try to use people as band-aids you merely reinfect the wound, and every moment you spend with them is like a speck of glass working itself deeper into your flesh. If it gets in far enough then the wound closes up, sealing the alien matter inside you. Women are used to having their lives and bodies invaded; men aren't, and so I think they struggle against it more. On the outside everything looks good enough, and you are the only person who can feel the fresh little cuts that tear every waking moment. The only way to get it out is to rip yourself apart, and so instead you sit and nod, and pretend that nothing matters.

  The difference between that state and the one I felt with Monica was the biggest difference in the world, and as we careered slowly down the pavement towards Piccadilly I gripped her hand very, very tightly.

  We were a few minutes early at the cinema, and while Monica went off to the toilet I sourced a large amount of soft drinks from the counter in the centre of the foyer. I considered buying a tray of tacos, cheese and jalopeños, and then patiently talked myself out of it. There are things that one likes that one simply should not have, and in my case thin slivers of green plutonium are among them. As I counted out my change I thought I saw some familiar colours pass on one side of me, but when I looked up Monica hadn't yet returned, and there was no sign of Steve.

  I took the drinks, stood next to one of the free-standing ashtrays, and set about mainlining as much nicotine as I could before the show started. It's impossible to find a cinema you can smoke in these days, though I see that rustling, clearing one's throat repetitively and loudly explaining the plot to your neighbours are still very much allowed. Monica still wasn't back, but that didn't surprise me. I know what happens in women's toilets. They step through a portal to another dimension, where they assume their true form and gambol through dream-lit forests, tarrying awhile on their home planet to bask in the last moonglow of autumn, before returning to the cursed twilight of this dread prison world. At least, I assume it has to be something like that. I can't see any other conceivable explanation for how bloody long it takes. Yes, I know there are often queues, but that's because everyone takes so bloody long, isn't it?

  I was halfway through my first cigarette when I spotted Steve on the other side of the room. He was wearing his leather jacket, hands thrust deep in pockets, and craning his neck as he looked round the foyer. People kept coming between us and so I had a minute to observe him, and to see that a woman of average build was standing fairly close to him. She had her back to me, but there was something familiar about her, and suddenly I knew what Tamsin had taken the last time she'd stayed at Steve's. She was wearing one of his sweaters, a sweater that Monica and I had given him at Christmas.

  I faltered, stopped waving, and withdrew my hand, needing a moment to assimilate this.

  Okay, so it wasn't any big deal. A jury of her peers would be unlikely to give her the death penalty. But it was wrong. It was wrong in some way that seemed to strike at me personally. When Monica and I had chosen the sweater we hadn't been going out with each other for very long, and she'd only met Steve on one rather stilted occasion. Steve and I never exchanged more than perfunctory gifts, and so I'd been surprised at her suggestion that we look for a sweater for him. He'd commented on his wardrobe when they met, apparently, bemoaning the fact that he never got round to buying anything presentable. I understood that Monica's desire was due partly to the fact that she was simply ver
y nice, but also out of a wish to start forging a bond between her and my best friend, so we'd had a merry time trawling round a variety of men's clothes shops before finding one we both thought he would appreciate.

  He'd liked it, and wore it often. And now this woman had taken it without his permission, and was wearing it as proof of a relationship which Steve didn't want to have. Okay, it was his fault for not being strong enough to keep away from her. But this was something else, something more than a misjudgement on her part, more than demanding too much too soon. It was invasive.

  Steve eventually saw me, and I smiled and started towards them. At the same moment Monica emerged from the women's toilets, and we reached them at about the same time. Doubtless reading Steve's face, Tamsin turned to face us.

  When I saw her my heart stopped, and I felt as if I had fallen suddenly into a dream of freezing water. The brief, liquid spell came and went in a moment, and I dragged my eyes off her to listen to what Steve was saying. I heard the words, but couldn't make any sense of them. My mind was elsewhere.

  I'd met Tamsin before, and her name was not Tamsin.

  When the film finished at half past ten, I wanted to go. I'd spent the last two hours taking covert looks to my left, where ‘Tamsin’ had been sitting, and while the initial spasm of complete panic had passed, I still felt extremely bad. I wanted to say goodnight and go home, but the look in Steve's eyes told me that my job wasn't yet finished.

  So, after a pointless few moments of dithering, we went round the corner to a pub Steve and I occasionally drank in. Tamsin took Steve's hand and led him to a table. I asked everyone what they wanted to drink, avoiding Tamsin's eye, and went towards the bar. On an afterthought I diverted my course towards the Gents. What I wanted most of all was a chance to think without anyone being able to see my face.

  Inside, I splashed cold water over my hands and rubbed them over my cheeks and forehead. Then I just leaned on the basin and stared at nothing at all.