Bonding, page 24
‘When it comes to you and me, she’s a little, you know’ – I searched for the word – ‘territorial.’
‘So, you and her? I mean, really?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ I said.
‘It’s not like it hadn’t crossed my mind, but really?’ He thought about it for a second. Then he pulled an intrigued face.
‘Don’t,’ I said.
I sat beside him on the sofa.
‘Just forgive me.’
‘Should I?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at me thoughtfully.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said. ‘But in the meantime, you realize I’m going to have to punish you?’
•
I could feel the tension in his body that night. He didn’t tell me where he’d been for the past two weeks but I got the sense he’d spent a lot of that time alone. It had been long enough for both of us to realize that the damage had been done, just as Lara had known it would be. I found myself privately furious with her again, another arduous duel with her long shadow.
There was something different in the way Tom handled me that night. He was rough, despite my swollen leg which he’d always treated so reverently in the past. I felt as if he was searching my body for signs of Lara, trying to know for sure what it was I wanted – and to understand what he could handle. It was a tough, annihilating fight for our lives. Then later, he held himself inside me and asked me what it had been like with her. He wanted to know how she had touched me, then he made me show him. He was as aroused as he was unsure what it meant. He came before me for the first time. I didn’t lie to him, I told him everything. It was an experiment as much as anything else, and between us, by the morning, we had resolved something.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said afterwards.
‘I know,’ I said.
39
If it was true that desire was a contagion – that it was just an echo of what other people wanted – then the Netflix Top 10 Today was a sobering reflection of the situation. I was watching Dubai Hustle on the sofa. Tom had been hauled out of town again and my leg was still swollen, although now in a plastic brace. I’d expected to spend the night on my own and was in one of his old sweatshirts, eating cereal when the doorbell rang. It was Grace. I hadn’t thought she’d want to see me again. I’d sent her a long email to apologize but that had been a week ago and she hadn’t replied. I opened the door to find her small, anoraked figure soaked with rain. She was carrying a bag of groceries. She filled the fridge and sat on the end of the sofa, sliding a small box of beer across the table.
‘I thought you might need looking after,’ she said, as if by way of reconciliation. ‘I know Tom’s been busy these last few weeks.’
She opened two Coronas and handed one to me.
It was cruel the pretence that there was equality in marriage. I let her pick out a film. She went for Wuthering Heights by Andrea Arnold. We sat through the opening scenes in what turned out to be an amicable silence.
‘So, you know her,’ she said eventually.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I should have done. I wish I had.’
‘What’s wrong with men?’
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with Niall.’
‘My life is fucked.’
‘You’ll be happier without him.’
‘If this goes to court, I’m done.’
‘You’ll be fine.’
‘I’m worried they’ll give him Evie.’
She looked miserable.
‘They won’t.’
‘Well, even if they don’t, what then? I pay some stranger to raise her while I’m away? Sometimes I wonder what the point is.’
‘This is the point,’ I said. ‘This is what the money is for, to give you some control.’
‘You’d think so.’
There were dark circles around her eyes that she’d covered up with pale concealer. She looked like someone who was running a very long and gruelling race. I wanted to hug her but I wasn’t sure how she would take it. She didn’t seem like someone who was used to being touched.
‘I’m sorry I covered for him.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
She didn’t say much else that night, she just sat beside me and watched the film.
•
It was March by the time my brace came off although my leg was still weak from disuse. After such a long time at home, the outside world felt overwhelming. Everything felt far too real. I hadn’t seen Lara since that day at the hotel, which I tried not to overthink. It was my first day back at the office. I took the Tube for the first time in weeks. It was rush hour and the sickly smell of bodies hit me as soon as I reached the platform. It stank of coconut oil and sweat.
I’m sorry about your dad, I wrote to Lara.
Then I deleted it and tried again. I spent a while composing different versions, all of which sounded too half-hearted to be real apologies, not because I didn’t want to smooth things over – I did, I felt bad for her – but I also couldn’t bring myself to surrender. It was pathetic but the truth was I felt too aggrieved that she’d left it up to me again. She was ruthless. I knew it was irrational but I just wasn’t ready to give in to her. On the other hand, I knew we’d see each other at work. In the end, running out of time, I circled back to my original version.
There was a long and calculated wait.
It’s not your problem, she answered.
That was it.
Hello old friend, I thought as I stepped back into the building that morning, the familiar sinking feeling dropping through my stomach. It was going to be a long day.
•
Grace had booked a conference room at the Crowne Plaza. She was standing on her own on a small stage, a group of sales reps from Pharmacon hanging around at the back. It was launch day for the UK sales team, which meant stepping out of the relative safety of Neura Therapeutics’ little set-up and firing up the full force of Pharmacon’s sales operation. Along one wall was a salad buffet, along the other a Nespresso machine and a bowl of those cheap biscuits that come in see-through plastic packets. I stood uncomfortably by the door, directing people to their seats. I’d already started looking at new jobs, and with my prospects back on life support, I’d agreed to volunteer today. The Eudaxa campaign had become a guilty pleasure, a sojourn from my life that I enjoyed at the safe distance of someone who had no responsibility for it.
Floyd was late. He’d turned up on his own in jeans and a pair of complicated trainers. He seemed a bit spaced out, as if he’d just finished his mid-morning Vipassana. Once everyone had taken their seats, I dimmed the lights.
‘Eudaxa,’ Grace announced solemnly, ‘is here. She’s here to provide the glue that has long been missing from our communities … from our societies … from our families. She’s here to optimize our networks. She’s here to mobilize the value lying latent within them. She is empathy, togetherness, compassion. She is a revolution in the way we live.’
She paused for a moment, glancing at Floyd who seemed intoxicated by this vision.
‘Because we’re all,’ she gazed up at the screen, ‘Better Together With Eudaxa.’
The speech went on and on. I caught one of the execs scrolling through talkSPORT. It was dark by the time we finally made it out.
‘You killed it,’ Tom said.
She wasn’t listening.
‘Floyd looked fucking ecstatic, did you see him?’
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her, as we got into the car.
‘Nothing,’ she replied tersely.
Then she nodded at the console by the handbrake. There was a small pink metallic device lying in one of the compartments.
‘It’s been there since this morning. Am I going mad?’
We all knew what it was. It was one of Lara’s keyring chargers. Openr: A Safe Place to Play it said in red Helvetica.
‘Doesn’t she have a car of her own to fuck my husband in?’ Grace said calmly.
I caught Tom’s eye, he looked panicked. I could tell he wasn’t used to seeing her like this.
She started the engine and drove in silence for a while – then suddenly, she stamped on the accelerator.
‘I don’t know who he is any more,’ she said, her voice cracking. Her knuckles were white around the wheel. ‘But I’ll tell you this much, I hate the cunt.’
She started crying. Tom touched her shoulder.
‘I can’t keep doing this,’ she said.
‘You can. Listen, work is going great. Niall can wait. Let’s deal with him when this is over.’
For a second, I thought she was going to calm down, but instead, she swung the car over the kerb, screeched to a halt and started banging her head against the steering wheel.
‘Grace,’ Tom said gently.
She didn’t respond. Instead, she got out of the car and dragged Niall’s kettle bells out of the boot. Then she started smashing them, one by one, against the windscreen until it shattered.
40
It was a small plot of land on La Gomera, an island off the north-west coast of Africa. It was the second smallest of the Canaries, an almost perfect green circle surrounded by a vast expanse of ocean.
‘This place is in the mountains,’ Tom said. ‘It’s close to El Cercado.’
We’d both arrived home late from work that night and were on his balcony. It was raining lightly. I studied the picture on his screen. The house was modest. It was built from stone. It looked as if it had been there for a long time. There was almost nothing around it, just a low barn and a crude driveway that cut through a field of tough-looking shrubs.
‘I was going to show you earlier but I wasn’t sure,’ he said.
‘This is where you want to go?’
‘If you’ll come with me.’
‘You want to be a hermit?’
‘Just for a while, long enough to get my head together.’
‘And then what?’
‘I’m not sure yet, I just want to get away from all of this.’ He waved his hand around the flat, taking in my laptop, all of the devices on the table, his expensive kitchen, the tower blocks outside.
It was an obvious thing to say, but I understood why he’d said it. He wasn’t motivated by work in the way I’d first assumed. It wasn’t money that drove him, or even status. I think it was more the need to prove that he was OK, that there wasn’t anything wrong with him.
‘I’ve spent my life trying to influence people,’ he said. ‘I want to have some influence over myself.’
‘You think it’s possible to escape all of this?’
‘I think it’s easier in a place like that.’
There were vines climbing over the house and a long garden inclined towards the valley. The land was high in the mountains, surrounded by woodland that stretched out towards the coast.
‘It looks like something from another time.’
‘It’s a bit of a backwater. That’s why I like it.’
‘You think we can do this?’
‘Why not? I’ve already been approved for a mortgage on this place. I could rent it out, it’ll give us an income. Not much but enough to live on for a while.’
‘What would we do there?’
‘Nothing, we’d just exist. And, you know,’ he said nonchalantly.
‘What?’
‘We could think about the future.’
He said it so meaningfully, I almost laughed. He watched me closely, trying to gauge my reaction. I must have stayed quiet for too long because he suddenly seemed panicked.
‘Is it too much?’
I looked at him.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
•
Towards the end of April I missed a call from Ashley. She left a voicemail asking if she could rent my room out. I hadn’t said anything about leaving but I’d barely been home in weeks. She was sprawled on the sofa when I went over there, a damp towel wrapped around her shoulders. Her hair was packed into cling film, Vaseline smeared along her hairline. She didn’t look very pleased to see me.
‘Where have you been?’ she said.
We’d lived together for almost three years but that night, we might as well have been strangers. In some ways, I’d barely known her at all, I had only a broken picture of who she was. I knew that she was thirty-five years old, a woman living a supposedly ordinary life. She’d told me that she’d grown up with her parents somewhere in rural Cornwall, although she’d always insisted that she didn’t have much in common with them. She’d found her childhood difficult, in that she’d been raised by a man who worked away a lot – her father did something in the military – and a mother with whom she could barely communicate at all. Her mother had grown up in their village but was the only one remaining of four siblings. The place had changed completely in her lifetime, it was now empty half the year as the other houses were rented out to tourists, but she seemed entrenched in her corner of the world and rarely left, even to visit Ashley. She was a woman who seemed so packed, not just with her own memories, fantasies, gossip, everyday routines, but also with those of other people, with whom she seemed to experience no inhibitions whatsoever. She never stopped talking, spilling out the accumulated contents of a lifetime of formless exchanges, empathizing with people, comforting them, complaining, arguing, ignoring them, gossiping. She was a porous mass of never-ending chit chat – to the point that it was difficult to know how much of what she said she really meant, or how much was even true. I got the feeling she sometimes told stories about herself that had actually happened to other people, not exactly on purpose but because she couldn’t remember where her own experience ended and theirs began. Ashley, by contrast, resisted her mother’s attempts to infiltrate her life. She always described her mother as lacking in self-awareness, I think because she viewed her own ‘self’ as something to be guarded, improved upon and assessed competitively. It was a property. You had to work on it. The goal was to raise its value. ‘It’s about boundaries,’ she told me.
‘Let’s stay in touch,’ I said, once I’d finished packing my things.
She barely wrenched her eyes from her laptop. I knew we probably wouldn’t see each other again.
•
As early as the first week of May there were signs that the campaign was going well.
‘You were right,’ Tom said as he sat with Grace in the corner of the Gatwick Aspire Lounge. They were on their way to the Glasgow Congress of Clinical Pharmacology. The early sales figures had come through. Press releases had gone out. Consultants from all over the world were gathering for talks about Eudaxa. All of the major conferences had been booked. The campaign was in its second month.
Grace was busy on the phone to her daughter. She seemed outwardly OK. She’d had her hair cut differently and she was wearing brand new sunglasses. She’d gone for a hard black Prada style that she’d picked up in duty free.
‘These numbers are ahead of target,’ Tom said.
‘Well, let’s not relax just yet.’
She swivelled her screen around to show Evie the airport.
Tom went to the bar anyway and returned with a celebratory glass of champagne and non-alcoholic beer for himself.
‘To making it out of this project alive,’ he said, raising his bottle.
Grace raised an eyebrow.
‘Better Together,’ she said drily.
A small boy at the table next to them was playing some kind of shooting game, his tablet propped up on his lap while he sucked on the straw of a large milkshake. He swerved hard into Tom’s shoulder as he eviscerated a medieval village. Tom drank his beer and watched him.
‘By the way, your phone was ringing while you were at the bar,’ Grace said.
He checked his calls.
‘It’s just a friend, I’ll call her later.’
He didn’t read Lara’s message until that night. The boy veered violently out of his seat, knocking the milkshake over with his elbow. The liquid splashed all over the carpet as his tablet vibrated in a fanfare of explosions.
41
Lara had arranged for both of us to meet her at a bar that Thursday. The place was almost empty when we arrived.
‘Where is she?’ Tom said impatiently.
Another twenty minutes passed before she finally appeared. She sat down wordlessly and slid her phone across the table to Tom.
‘I thought you should probably hear it from me,’ she said.
She sat in silence as he watched the video.
‘So what?’ Tom said. ‘It’s a party.’
She glanced in my direction, a little aggrieved.
‘So we throw these parties,’ she said patiently. ‘You’ve been to one of them yourself.’
‘And?’
‘This was the last one.’ She looked at him meaningfully, then back at me.
‘It looks like your usual thing,’ he said dismissively.
‘They’re on drugs.’
‘So what?’
‘They’re high,’ she repeated slowly.
‘What exactly are you saying?’
‘What do you think I’m saying?’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘I’m telling you, it is.’
‘At a sex party? It’s prescription only.’
‘Well, they’re getting hold of it somehow.’
‘It’s not a party drug.’
‘It is now.’
He looked doubtful. ‘You’re going to have to give me more than this.’
‘Come and see for yourself, if you like. We’ve got another event coming up in Spain.’
‘How long have these rumours been going around?’
‘They’re not rumours. I’m doing you a favour.’
‘Why?’
‘Peace offering,’ she said.
He looked even more unconvinced.
‘Like I said, come and see it for yourself.’
‘Thanks,’ I cut in diplomatically.
‘You’re welcome.’
