The Two of Us Read online

‘So,’ Ivy says to Frank. ‘What’s going on?’

  Frank sighs heavily, and it’s as if someone has opened a valve in the side of him. His shoulders sag, his head drops, he appears to shrink in his seat.

  Frank, it turns out, is married, but not happily. The reasons why aren’t gone into; Ivy knows the story and it’s been going on for a long time. Frank and his wife, Lois, have talked, fought, sought counselling and currently sleep under the same roof but in separate rooms. It seems that they both know the marriage is irreconcilable, but – mainly because of their 3-year-old son – they haven’t yet constructively discussed the next phase. Ken and Eva know nothing about this. Frank, a dentist, has told his parents he’s in Bristol to attend a conference on a new type of ceramic implant. And so, while Frank and Lois grope about for the courage to do what needs to be done, they spend alternate weekends visiting family or friends, telling lies, and leaving their unhappy spouse in the marital home to think of new ways of becoming their child’s favourite parent.

  It’s been a hell of a day – I’m drunk, hungover, tired, wired, happy, freaked and wrung out all at the same time.

  ‘Never get married,’ says Frank, heavy-eyed now with drink.

  I look at Ivy; Ivy looks away. ‘How’s Freddy?’ she asks.

  Frank nods: fine. ‘You two are lucky,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I know.’

  ‘Twins,’ he says, prodding his sister’s tummy. ‘At least if it goes tits up you get to keep one each. Ha ha!’

  Chapter 11

  Peach.

  Lemon.

  Apple.

  Avocado.

  Onion.

  Sweet potato . . .

  Chapter 12

  ‘How’s your better half?’ asks Joe.

  At eighteen weeks, the babies are about the size of a pair of small sweet potatoes. Big enough that Ivy is now visibly pregnant. Two weeks ago she was offered a seat on the tube; telling me about it that evening, she feigned all manner of offence, but her smile told me she had taken great pleasure in this small rite of passage.

  The babies have distinct fingers and toes, their muscles are strengthening. They have taste buds and eyelashes. Fingernails. Three weeks ago, Ivy and I went to a bonfire on Wimbledon Common; the twins have functioning ears now and they would have heard the fireworks exploding overhead. A normal – single baby – pregnancy tends to last thirty-nine weeks; twins come around two weeks earlier, meaning we are now very nearly halfway to our April 11th due date.

  ‘All good,’ I say to Joe. ‘They’re the size of a pair of sweet potatoes.’

  ‘What?’ says Joe, miming a pair of breasts. ‘Her . . . thingummies?’

  ‘The twins, you pillock. The twins are the size of a couple of . . . Christ.’

  ‘And how about her . . . you know?’ and again with the cupped hands in front of his chest.

  ‘Bigger than a pair of sweet potatoes,’ I tell him.

  Actually, they’re huge – well past the honeydew-melon stage. It was Ivy’s birthday one month ago, and I bought her underwear – a 36DD maternity bra that’s sexier than I would previously have thought possible. But every time I try to get anywhere near her new and improved boobs, Ivy fends me off, complaining they’re too sore to touch. We haven’t had sex since the day before we visited my dad more than three months ago – it’s torture.

  But now isn’t the time and here isn’t the place. We’re in a darkened edit suite in Soho, working on the final cut of our loo roll commercial. Henry and Suzi from the agency are sitting behind me somewhere in the gloom. Onscreen Mr Hoppity is dancing around a maypole with six children, each trailing a different coloured roll of Softex toilet tissue.

  ‘What do you think, Suzi?’ I ask.

  ‘What? About your girlfriend’s jubblies?’

  ‘No,’ I say, pointing at the monitor, ‘the edit.’

  ‘Joke,’ says Suzi.

  ‘Durr,’ says Joe.

  ‘I think it’s awesome,’ Suzi says. ‘Nothing else to add.’

  ‘Henry?’ I ask.

  Henry looks up from her iPhone. ‘I was happy with it yesterday,’ she says a little tetchily. These places cost upwards of seven hundred quid a day, so of course she was happy with it yesterday.

  ‘In that case,’ says Joe, clapping his hands together, ‘I declare this edit closed. Now, who’s going to buy me a pint? Fisher?’

  ‘Got to be somewhere, mate. Sorry.’

  ‘Where? Who with?’

  ‘Just somewhere.’

  ‘You’re meant to be my best man.’

  ‘This is an edit, Joseph, not your wedding.’

  ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Ladies?’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Suzi. ‘Got to be somewhere, too.’

  Henry shrugs. ‘Twenty-two shopping days till Christmas,’ she says, stepping out of the room. ‘I like anything Chanel, by the way.’

  ‘Later,’ Suzi says, following Henry out of the room. She gives me a knowing smile, and then she, too, is gone.

  ‘Why do I bother?’ Joe asks. ‘Advertising? Might as well work in a bloody bank.’

  ‘I’ll see you on Friday,’ I say. ‘We’ll have a pint then.’

  ‘Here,’ he says, handing me a brown envelope. ‘Was going to give it you later, but seeing as how you have more important things to do.’

  ‘What is it?’ I say.

  ‘Your next mission.’

  ‘Script?’

  Joe nods, and I take the envelope and transfer it directly into my bag.

  ‘Not going to read it, pull a face, kick up a stink?’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘Cheese,’ says Joe.

  ‘Love it,’ I say. ‘When are we meeting the agency?’

  ‘A-S-A fucking P, buddy. Got to be in the can by Christmas.’

  Which means another five-to-ten grand in my bank account shortly thereafter. And that’s got to be good for a few packets of nappies.

  ‘Set it up then.’

  Joe looks at me incredulously. ‘Serious?’

  ‘I never joke about cheese,’ I tell him.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, William Fisher,’ he says, ruffling my hair. ‘Being up the duff suits you. Suits you very well indeed.’

  The meeting isn’t exactly clandestine, but we are nevertheless in a bar that charges more for a small glass of wine than Joe would ever dream of paying for a bottle – so it’s unlikely he’ll wander in and discover us. Also, it’s the first Monday of the month, which means Ivy will be at her book club until around nine, so I can get half drunk with impunity.

  ‘So?’ says Suzi. ‘You read it?’ She fidgets nervously with her ring, a chunky silver band holding an oval turquoise stone, rotating it half a turn clockwise then back the other way.

  ‘I have,’ I say, and I catch myself mirroring Suzi’s nervous fingerplay, swivelling my wine glass through half-turns on the table top.

  ‘And . . .?’

  Suzi’s screenplay is a collection of nine interconnected stories. Three of them involve sex, and one of those involves a female protagonist with a penchant for autoerotic asphyxiation. It’s not my thing, but each to her own, whatever floats your boat, blows your skirt up, or, as the case may be, turns your face blue. Far from being gratuitous, the sex in general and fetish in particular do serve a purpose within the grand scheme of the plot. The problem I have with these scenes is how damned good they are – how inventive, how erotic, how . . . well, sexy. And as I read these scenes, I couldn’t help picturing Suzi slap bang in the middle of them. After all, ‘write what you know’, don’t they always say? Take the character with a thing for asphyxiation: when she clenches her slender hands around the throat of whomever it is she is simultaneously choking and fucking, the camera lingers on a ring she wears on the little finger of her right hand. We see it when she’s throttling her lover, and we see it again when she is working, holding a stethoscope to one of her patients. It’s a device to connect and contrast the different facets of this complex, unreliab
le, paradoxical character. Which is all fine and filmic. But the ring itself – a fat gold band holding an oval onyx stone – it sounds a lot like the one Suzi can’t stop fidgeting with in the right here and now. And it’s making it extraordinarily difficult for me to not imagine her naked and gyrating on top of some lucky guy’s lap.

  ‘I like it,’ I say. ‘I like it a lot.’

  And even though I don’t intend any subtext, I blush.

  ‘The plot,’ I qualify. ‘Good stories, good characters.’

  ‘Only good?’ Suzi says, teasing, but she’s nowhere near as convincing as Ivy.

  ‘Good’s good,’ I tell her, and I wink involuntarily, reflexively.

  ‘Thank you,’ Suzi says, revolving the turquoise ring around her finger.

  ‘But . . .’ I say, and Suzi’s brow creases in a minuscule wince. She placed a good deal of trust in me when she asked for my opinion, and to lavish disingenuous praise on her script now would be unfair. Cowardly, even. So I press on, ‘. . . it’s uneven,’ I tell her.

  Suzi’s wince deepens, but I get the impression I’m not telling her anything she doesn’t know.

  After a little more wine and waffling, I manage to articulate my criticism in more constructive terms. I mean it when I tell Suzi that a couple of her stories are outstanding. I mean it literally, and explain that these standouts make the remaining plotlines feel flat or inconsequential by comparison.

  ‘What’s your favourite?’ Suzi asks.

  ‘Probably the one with the art student.’

  Suzi nods in agreement, smiles. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, good story,’ I tick this point off on one finger.

  ‘Always helps,’ Suzi says, and laughs. She holds eye contact while she sips her wine.

  I move on to my second finger. ‘Interesting characters – I mean, the girl’s a bit of a bitch, but she’s a good character.’

  Suzi nods as if waiting for me to get to the point.

  Finger number three: ‘Rooftop scene – very cinematic, dramatic.’

  ‘Two rooftop scenes,’ Suzi corrects, with just a hint of coy.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, moving on to finger number four, ‘which brings me to . . .’

  Suzi raises her eyebrows. ‘Sex.’

  You read my mind, is what I very nearly say, but I catch myself before I let this unintended insinuation slip past my teeth. If I were single and not expecting twins, I may well have let it fly. But I’m not, and I am – and very happily. Even so, I can’t help wondering if Suzi, like her protagonist, has ever made love on the rooftop of a Student Union building.

  ‘Yes,’ I laugh. ‘We don’t get to shoot too many sex scenes in advertising.’

  ‘No,’ says Suzi. ‘We don’t, do we?’

  ‘Poor us,’ I say, pulling a stupid face and taking a glug of wine.

  Suzi seems to hesitate before saying, ‘So . . . want to do it?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Suzi laughs. ‘Shoot it. Shoot the art student.’

  The question catches me flat-footed. ‘I’d love to, honestly, but you might need a bit of a reality check on what a thing like this costs. You’re going to need crew, equipment, actors.’

  Suzi smiles indulgently. ‘You sound like Joe.’

  ‘Is that an insult?’

  ‘I’ve got some money,’ she says.

  ‘Maybe so, but this isn’t some two-header around a kitchen table.’ She’s right; I do sound like Joe. ‘You’ve got, what? Two leads, a bunch of extras, three or four locations, a rooftop, a night shoot. Even with favours and freebies it’s going to run to . . . God, I don’t know. A lot. You’ll need a producer, too – a bloody good one.’

  ‘I’ve got ten grand.’

  ‘Suzi, that’s a lot of money. But even so . . . I dunno.’

  ‘My dad died this year,’ she says, and all her bravado and flirtation and whimsy are gone.

  ‘I’m sorry. I . . . I know what that’s like. My mum died when I was fourteen.’

  Suzi puts her hand on mine, smiles sadly. Then just like that she lets my hand go, takes a sip of her wine and seems to snap back into herself. ‘Thing is,’ she says, ‘I inherited enough to put a deposit on a flat. That’s what Mum wants me to do with it. But a flat’s a flat; one day I’ll sell it and move out and it’ll be gone. If I make this film, whether it’s shit, fabulous or somewhere in the middle . . .’ Suzi takes a sip of her wine. ‘People always say Oh it’s what he would have wanted, don’t they?’

  ‘Is it? What he would have wanted?’

  ‘Honestly, I think he’d rather I bought the flat.’ And she just loses it laughing. It’s infectious and for a moment we must be the most annoying people in the bar.

  ‘Anyway,’ says Suzi, ‘it’s what I want. I don’t want to write bog roll ads forever, you know what I mean?’

  I nod. Yes, I know what you mean.

  Ivy and I are in bed, Nina Simone playing at a low volume, a honeysuckle-scented candle flickering on Ivy’s bedside table next to an open bottle of baby oil. My choice of music; my choice of lighting.

  ‘This is very sweet of you, baby, but I can do it myself, you know.’

  ‘Relax,’ I say, ‘lie back.’ And I continue massaging the oil into Ivy’s drum-tight bump. The sheen highlights a scar that skitters across her belly, and this, I’m sure, plays a large part in her fear of getting stretchmarks.

  ‘How about Henry?’ she says.

  We still have no idea what genders our twins are. ‘For a boy or a girl?’ I ask.

  ‘Girl.’

  ‘I’m working with a Henry, she’s a bit of a knob.’

  ‘Can you call a girl a knob?’

  ‘If you can call her Henry, why not? Anyway, she says ciao on the phone.’

  ‘Where’s she from?’

  ‘Wigan, I think.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ says Ivy. ‘So that’s a no to Henry.’

  I change direction, moving my hand in slow, gradually widening clockwise circles. ‘How about Zara?’ I suggest.

  ‘I went to school with a Zara; she used to call me Beef.’

  ‘What, where you . . .?’ I blow out my cheeks, hold my hands around an invisible gut, waddle my shoulders from side to side.

  Ivy slaps my hand. ‘No, it evolved from B.F., short for Bride of Frankenstein,’ she indicates the scar on her cheek.

  ‘Bitch.’

  Ivy shrugs. ‘I had worse. And I gave as good as I got. She had really wide-spaced eyes and a super retroussé nose, so I called her Bizzara. And it stuck a damn sight longer than Beef.’

  ‘Touché,’ I say, resuming my massage and widening the orbit of my hand just enough that my fingers brush against the waistband of Ivy’s knickers.

  ‘So,’ says Ivy, stretching the single seductive syllable, ‘what’s your porn-star name?’

  Of course the massage, the music and the candles were all designed to create a mood, but I hadn’t anticipated such a direct reaction.

  ‘My . . . what?’

  ‘You know,’ says Ivy, ‘you take the name of your first pet, add your mother’s maiden name and that’s your porn-star name.’

  ‘Oh, right, I see. So my pet’s name and . . .?’

  ‘Mother’s maiden name.’

  ‘Okay . . . Catch MacCluskey.’

  Ivy claps her hands together in delight. ‘That’s brilliant! You’re not kidding me, are you? Are you pulling my leg?’

  I shake my head. ‘Goldfish and a Catholic.’

  ‘I love it! Catch MacCluskey.’

  ‘Go on then, what’s yours?’

  ‘Mine’s rubbish.’

  ‘Come on . . . you brought it up.’

  Ivy sighs. ‘Fine – Margaret Smith.’

  ‘Oh, that really is rubbish.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean, who has a pet called Margaret?’

  Ivy points to herself. ‘That would be me. I wanted a dog or a cat – we’d never had pets, rest of the family weren’t interested – and I nagged and nagged and nagg
ed until finally, to shut me up, they fobbed me off with a rabbit.’

  ‘Which you called Margaret.’

  ‘I was four! We’d never had a pet before and no one told me that pets have names like Fido or Fluffy or . . . Catch. And what’s that all about while we’re at it? Way to give a fish a complex.’

  ‘We’re Fishers, he’s a Catch. And if we’re critiquing goldfish names, it’s better than Ernest.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘You must have figured the rules out by now, you’re forty-one, that’s ancien—’

  ‘Careful, Catch. I could kick you in an extremely painful place from here.’ I hold up my hands in submission. ‘If you must know, he’s named after Hemingway.’

  ‘The writer chappy?’

  ‘He wrote The Old Man and The Sea, and he was mad for fishing so it works on two . . . are you laughing at me?’

  ‘Only a little. With you mostly.’

  Ivy pouts at me sulkily. ‘It’s still better than Catch.’

  Two of the tealights have guttered out now and Nina is approaching the end of her album, so I pour more oil into my hands and begin massaging Ivy’s right thigh.

  ‘Do pregnant women get stretchmarks there?’ Ivy asks.

  ‘Depends how huge you get. Relax.’ And Ivy does.

  When Ivy returned from book club three hours ago, I was asleep and, apparently, snoring like a hog on the sofa. It was gone ten o’clock but I was starving hungry, so I cooked spaghetti with pesto and grated cheese and we sat up eating a late supper. We talked about our days, and I felt a pinching guilt for having spent the end of the afternoon and the start of the evening in a wine bar with an attractive woman. Nothing happened to feel guilty about, of course – no overlong contact, no lingering kisses, no nascent infidelity. We flirted, probably, a little, but with no objective in mind. But even so, I experience that irritating itch of having misbehaved. I slide my hands down Ivy’s thigh, over her knee and calf and take her foot in my hand, push my thumbs into the sole. She takes a deep breath, lets it slowly out. In Suzi’s screenplay, there is a scene where a man ties his lover’s ankles to opposite corners of the wrought-iron bed frame with silk ties. I push it out of my mind and pour more oil into my palm.

  ‘Ellie?’ Ivy suggests.