The Trouble with Henry and Zoe Read online

  ‘Yes,’ says Zoe, smiling at me over her shoulder. ‘But only a little.’

  I am both literally and figuratively lost, but I have nowhere better to be, so I pedal on to wherever Zoe is leading me. After no more than a minute, the silhouette of a structure – angular, layered and almost as tall as the trees – comes into view.

  ‘It’s a peace pagoda,’ Zoe says, circling clockwise around its perimeter. ‘Sometimes in the morning, if you’re early enough, there’s a monk.’

  About twenty pedal pushes in circumference, the pagoda is accessible by about a dozen steps on each of three sides. At the centre is a broad white column, inset with four gilded panels or statues, each as big as a man and glowing warmly in the lamplight.

  ‘What does he do? This monk.’

  ‘Walks, bangs a drum. Monk stuff, you know. I cycle past here if I’m going in early, but I’ve only seen him once.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘I thought you might appreciate it. What with you working at a Buddhist hairdressers, and everything.’ She smiles at me teasingly.

  ‘I do.’

  On our third revolution, Zoe peels away, heading back towards the traffic and the bustle of late night London. I make one more circuit of the peace pagoda then follow after her.

  I’ve had more dates in the last four months than in my whole life leading up to them. Some have ended in bed, one in tears, and one or two have resulted in brief follow-ups. Confident, ambitious, funny, attractive women for the most part, but no one I’d walk out on a wedding for. And on more than a dozen of these dates, I’ve gone home wondering if I didn’t suffer some kind of synaptic malfunction seven months ago in that cold castle. But these last two hours with this funny, reticent, awkward editor – I’ve enjoyed them more than all those dates and drunken fucks placed end to end. Maybe because this isn’t actually a date; no contrivances and no expectations.

  After ten minutes of slow riding, Zoe coasts to a stop. ‘This is me,’ she says, pointing her handlebars in the direction of a long side street disappearing into a pinpoint of converging street lamps.

  ‘Right,’ I say, stopping beside her. ‘You want me to . . . will you be alright?’

  ‘Thank you. And thank you again for the . . .’ She flicks her eyes up towards her helmet.

  ‘You’re welcome. Look after it for me.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Zoe.

  ‘Plans for the weekend?’ I ask, a little abruptly.

  Zoe takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. ‘Not much; working.’

  ‘The books?’

  Zoe shakes her head. ‘Pub. The Duck and Cover,’ she says, swivelling her handlebars so her lights point down the quiet high street. ‘Got to pay the rent,’ she says, playing my own words back to me.

  ‘It won’t pay itself,’ I say inanely, buying time and trying to draw this moment out.

  Zoe laughs politely. ‘You? Plans, I mean.’

  ‘I er . . . well, I’m supposed to have a date on Saturday.’

  Zoe nods at this. ‘Supposed?’

  ‘Well, I could . . . cancel?’

  Zoe winces. She actually winces, her teeth coming together, eyes tightening, head withdrawing away from me by maybe an inch.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I just . . .’ but there’s no easy way of ending that sentence, so I opt instead for closing my eyes and trying to make myself vanish. When I open them again, Zoe is still there, but at least she is smiling now.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘it’s fine, I . . .’ She nods her head from side to side, as if rehearsing a line inside her skull. ‘I’m going travelling.’

  ‘What, this weekend? I thought you were working.’

  Zoe laughs. ‘September.’

  ‘Like a holiday travelling, or travelling travelling?’

  ‘The last one.’ She smiles apologetically at this. ‘So . . . you know.’

  ‘Sounds amazing,’ I say, forcing a smile. ‘Where to?’

  Zoe shakes her head. ‘I really need to decide.’

  ‘You going there for long? Sorry . . . I sound like I’m interrogating you.’

  Zoe laughs. ‘It’s fine. Maybe a year? More, less, I . . . I dunno.’

  ‘Okay . . . well, I guess I’d better . . . cut and run.’

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

  My intentions are modest as I lean in to kiss Zoe, aiming for nothing more than a peck on the cheek. Perched on our bicycles, it’s a slow, cautious approach requiring a good deal of balance and concentration. I put my hand against the side of Zoe’s face, and the additional contact seems to ground and stabilize us; she leans into me, increasing the pressure of her cheek against my lips. As my hand slides to the nape of her neck Zoe turns her head towards me and my lips glide across her cheek, bringing our mouths together.

  Two seconds, maybe ten . . . and Zoe – slowly – withdraws.

  ‘I should go. I have to . . . go.’

  I’m inclined to ask Zoe if she’s sure, but the look in her eyes has already answered. ‘See you around . . .’ I say, trying to pitch it somewhere just west of a question.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Enjoy your date.’

  Zoe

  The Pleasant Awkwardness

  Enjoy your date? Damn.

  On the last two hundred metres of my ride home, I replay the conclusion to my unusual night. The pleasant awkwardness, that slow opportunistic kiss. And my smug sounding farewell: Enjoy your date.

  Why didn’t I go the whole hog and invite him to have a nice life? In the grand scheme – the scheme in which I travel the world, find myself, become independent, develop a deep all-over tan – I suppose it doesn’t matter. Even so, I can’t help but wonder how it would go if I’d met him two years from now – what the new, found, Zoe would make of Henry and his don’t-ask eyes. What she would make of that kiss?

  It’s been seven months since I lost Alex and the small house still feels too big when I wheel my bike through the front door. For a while I found the silence terrifying, walking from room to room, checking behind the doors, in the wardrobes and under the bed for intruders. Sometimes waking up in the middle of the night and doing the same, clutching a broken banister rail that we never did get around to replacing.

  There’s mail on the mat and I pick it up with an acquired sense of trepidation. Mostly junk, but a postcard from my parents who seem to be visiting a different European city every month at the moment. So far this year they have done Rome, Madrid and – the origin of this postcard – Zagreb. They invite me each time, but I’m yet to take them up on the offer.

  There is just one envelope addressed to Alex today. I can get them stopped, fill in some forms and enclose one of my remaining photocopies of his death certificate. But perversely, I like receiving these offers of low-interest credit cards, invitations to wine clubs, or, like this one, an opportunity to insure my property against damage caused as a result of a burst water main. I add the envelope to the small pile on the shelf beside the front door, slip off my backpack and hang up my helmet. My bike stays in the house most nights – after all, it’s not like it’s in anyone’s way.

  There’s a message on my phone from Rachel, asking if I made it home okay.

  I send one back, reassuring her that I’m alive, but keep the rest of the details to myself.

  Walking upstairs, I pause in front of the photograph taken on the day we moved in, me laughing at some comment from Alex. I touch my finger to his face . . .

  Goodnight, Alex.

  . . . and in the moonlight hazing down the stairs through the open bathroom door, the glass is smudged with fingerprints. I’ll clean it on Sunday. While Henry is waking up next to his date and wondering whether he made a mistake or not.

  It has nothing to do with me, but as I inspect my new graduated bob in the bathroom mirror, I hope he decides that he did.

  After I’ve taken off my make-up and brushed my teeth, I change into my pyjamas and climb into bed. Some mornings, but it’s becoming less frequent now,
I wake up expecting to find Alex lying beside me. On those days, I roll over onto his side of the mattress, feeling the cold of the sheets where they should be warm. Some mornings I cry, and on other days I simply feel a numb absence. Sometimes when I wake to the fresh realization that he isn’t there, I experience an awful skewering guilt for not missing him more. I roll over onto his side of the bed now, open his bedside drawer and remove the iPad. I turn it on with the same sense of apprehension that I experience on finding a pile of mail inside the front door. Worse today, because she always mails him in the first week of a new month.

  The iPad is set up with both of our email accounts, so it’s not like I’m actually snooping. It’s all just sitting there, available at a single touch. His inbox is filled almost exclusively with junk now, the electronic equivalent of the envelopes that drop through the letterbox – discount codes, special offers, concert dates. Occasionally, he will receive a message from an old colleague or acquaintance looking to reconnect, and I reply with a cut and paste explanation of what happened last October.

  It wasn’t until February, four months after his death, that I plucked up the courage – the defiance, maybe – to trawl through his message history. There were no emails to or from a lover; no evidence of the affair I had feared. Not proving Alex’s innocence – maybe he was simply careful – but neither confirming his guilt. The only woman he wrote to with any regularity was his mother.

  Within a day or two of a new month turning over, she would email her son, filling him in on a variety of domestic events, family news and local gossip. And Alex would reply in kind, long, warm, funny emails, about work, football, his lunch, a funny dream. About me. Expressing a simple affection and contentment that shines a harsh light on my own misgivings. Working forwards from last summer, I read the emails they exchanged in July, August, September and – the last time Alex wrote to his mother – October. He told her we had argued about the wallpaper, expressing his regret for acting like a ‘complete pillock’. He told his mother that he would make it up to me at Christmas. But Christmas never happened.

  Ready to delete Alex’s account, I scrolled upwards through the junk correspondence of November and December. But when I came to January, my drifting eyes locked onto a single glaring dreadful email. Two short paragraphs of a mother’s farewell to her dead boy, pouring out her pain and loss and incomprehension and telling him they would be together again one day soon. There was another, unopened and forever unanswered sent in February. When I checked again in March, there was another, and again at the beginning of April. The raw heartbreak gradually giving way to a more prosaic familiarity. Today is the fifth of May, and my heart tightens as I click on the familiar greeting: Hello Son.

  May

  May 5 at 10:04 AM

  From: Audrey

  To: Alex Williams

  Hello Son

  It’s a strange thing typing those two words, they make me feel so sad and so close to you at the same time. It’s as if I can see your face more clearly when I type them, and I get a feeling, like a small fist inside my chest. Not so strange, if you think about it, you and your brother, you’re part of me in the most real way imaginable. So when I feel that tight hand inside me, I know it’s you in some shape or form.

  It’s the middle of spring now, or is it the end? Either way, the roses are beginning to come out, although we’ve had a lot of greenfly this year. I put a few of the better stems in a vase next to your urn. It’s that blue vase you and Zoe gave me for Christmas and it always makes me think of the pair of you.

  I write to Zoe too. She doesn’t always have the time to write back, but we deal with our grief in different ways don’t we. I think her friends are looking after her, and she seems to be busy with work. It’s good to see her settling back into life. Such a lovely girl. I think you found a good one there son, it’s such a shame the two of you never had a chance to build a life together. I’ve told her she’s welcome to visit any time, but I haven’t seen her since your funeral. It’s a long way for her to come, I suppose, and not a very happy trip at that.

  I was looking at your old football medals the other week, and it made my heart so terribly heavy pet. Quite took me by surprise, and I had to take a short lie on your bed. I’ll be honest Alex, I could have laid there all day if I’d let myself, but life goes on doesn’t it.

  I’m going to the bridge club tonight with Maureen. She’s very lovely, and has been so kind to me over the last few months. But between you and me son, she can go on if you let her. You’d think no one had had a hip replacement before!

  I think about you all the time son, and I keep you in my prayers.

  I miss you so much – all my love and all my heart

  Mum xx

  Henry

  All New

  It’s my job to look at bad teeth. Well, it is on Fridays. Even so, I have to suppress a wince when Jenny Tseung opens wide. Maybe working only one day a week at the chair has made me soft, but this dreadful collection of wonky brown enamel, more gaps than teeth, is painful just to look at.

  Her skin is largely unlined, but it appears thin and delicate, stretched tight over unusually large cheekbones. According to her records, she is seventy-two and last visited the dentist nine years ago. Visibly nervous, she holds my hand in hers as we talk. Jenny speaks in broken, heavily accented English, and has a habit of speaking from behind her hand – but while her discourse can be hard to follow, it’s easy to understand that her confidence is as shaky as her remaining teeth.

  ‘Ha! You not look like dentist,’ she says. ‘My son shave his head too, you know.’

  ‘Stylish guy,’ I say.

  ‘I don’ like,’ Jenny says. ‘On my son, look like a . . . a kei ji gwo.’

  ‘A ki . . . sorry, Jenny?’

  ‘Kei ji gwo, what you say it . . . fruit, like a—’ Jenny breaks off into what I assume is Cantonese before returning with, ‘. . . like hairy egg, haha! Green, innit.’

  ‘A kiwi fruit!’

  ‘Yah, that’s it. Head like a green fruit. Your head good shape, though. Your head suit you.’

  The dental nurse looks at me and raises her eyebrows.

  ‘Thank you, Jenny. So, what can we do for you today?’

  Jenny pats my hand. Her fingers are crooked and swollen with arthritis at the knuckles. ‘Yes,’ says Jenny, holding a hand to her mouth. ‘You have gir’frien?’

  Whether it’s confusion, embarrassment, nerves or loneliness, it’s not unusual for patients, particularly the elderly, to talk around the issue, and I’ve found it’s often best to let them find their way to the point.

  ‘Er . . . no, I have a date tomorrow, though.’

  Enjoy your date, Zoe said last night.

  As if drawing a line under my clumsy attempt at flirting. But – and I’ve replayed it several times now – I felt she was drawing that line reluctantly.

  ‘I married forty-seven year,’ Jenny says.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Wow, haha! Yes, wow. I use be very pretty, you know. Maybe you don’ believe, but—’

  ‘I bet you were,’ I say, and I mean it. Her hair is thinning slightly, but has kept its colour and hangs past her shoulders. Her wide eyes are yellowed, but alive with warmth and humour, and yes, I bet Jenny has turned a lot of heads in her time. The past tense of my declaration is floating and I’m inclined to correct it – are, Jenny, you are – but it would be patronizing, and besides, I don’t think Jenny needs it. ‘So . . . your teeth.’

  She nods, pats my hand again. ‘Is too late to fix?’

  ‘Not at all. Do you have pain?’

  Jenny nods. ‘Very. You give me new teeth, though. Or new.’

  ‘Or new?’

  ‘All new,’ she says, indicating the entirety of her mouth. ‘All new, all white.’

  ‘Jenny, that’s a lot of work.’

  ‘I have a money, you know. Is expensive, innit?’

  ‘It will be, yes. But, it’s also . . . it’s a lot
of work.’

  I take x-rays, photographs and impressions. Some teeth need extracting and those that are viable will have to be chopped down and crowned. Over several weeks and visits, Jenny will require nine titanium implants and twenty-eight pieces of porcelain. It will be the most complicated dental work I’ve performed, and as to who is more nervous – me or Jenny – well, toss a coin.

  ‘Okay, Jenny, that’s you done for today. Talk to the receptionist on the way out and she’ll book you another appointment in about two to four weeks.’

  ‘Good good,’ says Jenny, shuffling off the chair. ‘An’ you enjoy date, innit.’

  Zoe

  Compactualized

  I fear I have become compactualized.

  Or maybe the proper word is condensified, it’s hard to be sure. The world is out there doing Friday night, and I’m in here doing . . . this.

  The darkness is so complete my eyes could never in a thousand years adjust to it. Funny . . . how we refer to absolute dark as a ‘completeness’, when it is in fact an absolute absence – if there is so much as a single photon in here, then it’s a very determined little particle. I need to get out; I’ve done what I need to do and the air is heavy with my recycled breath. But it is kind of cosy, sitting here, drifting, in my ten-tog bubble.

  When you work in a five-thousand-employee, cross-continent law firm, you become inoculated against corporate nonsense. You inhale and ingest words like diagonality and intellactual without coming out in so much as a rash, let alone throwing up. I thought I’d left all that behind when I moved to the faraway land of once upon a time, but publishing, too, it seems, is a breeding ground for bullshit. Approximately once a month we have a ‘lunch and learn’ – some industry somebody talks for an hour about the demise of bookshops, the rise of digital, harnessing the power of social media, whatever. This is the price of your ‘free’ lunch. You take a notebook, pretend to listen and eat as many sandwiches, wraps and muffins as possible before people start giving you funny looks. Today’s price of admission was a slow hour on ‘Adjusting the picture book format to digital constraints’, or, in the words of our guest, ‘compactualization’. I really could have done without, but last pay day is a distant memory and my purse is empty. So I took a seat near the sandwiches, and pretended to take notes while I worked out my budget – it’s tight as a fat man’s hat, but I have econominimized, scrimproved and budjettisoned.