The Two of Us Read online

  There is still so much Ivy and I don’t know about each other – things you don’t drop into conversation, but discover piece by piece as your relationship develops and moves forward. Our relationship proper is only four months old, so there are many pieces left to uncover. Ivy knows that my mother died in a traffic accident, but she doesn’t know Mum was driving to collect me from the cinema, and she doesn’t know that I haven’t been to the movies since.

  But as I wait for Ivy outside the train station, I have a dreadful feeling – emphasis on dread – that this is where my surprise date is scheduled to happen. The Wimbledon Odeon is visible from where I’m standing, and the thought of going inside is affecting me physically. I can feel my heart thumping, my stomach is knotted and, despite the cold, my head and back are prickled with sweat. But I’m okay with it, I think. I can’t live the rest of my life not taking my children to the pictures, and if not tonight then at some point soon I will be forced to man up, bite the bullet and grasp the popcorn. And on some level, I’ll be disappointed if we’re not going to the flicks tonight. After all, it’s not like there’s anyone driving here to pick me up afterwards.

  I turn away from the cinema to scan the throng pouring through the ticket barriers. It’s dark already and there must be hundreds of people pushing and jostling through the gates.

  ‘Looking for anyone in particular?’ a voice whispers behind me, and her breath is warm against my ear.

  Ivy’s hair is tucked up inside a white, knitted hat that might look nerdy on anyone else but her. ‘Excited?’ she asks.

  ‘Depends where we’re going.’

  ‘Well, as it’s our first official date night, I thought we should have a traditional date.’

  ‘Does it involve popcorn?’

  ‘You bet your sweet butt it involves popcorn.’

  ‘In that case, I’m excited.’

  And we walk arm in arm to the cinema.

  The movie is Oscar nominated, apparently. Ivy tells me this as we walk up Wimbledon Hill on the way home, not linking arms now, but holding hands. When she asks what I thought of the film, I tell her I can see why it was nominated, but this is something of a white lie – a ‘porky pie’, as Esther would say. Not that I didn’t enjoy the movie; when I paid attention I thought it was well worth the price of admission. Unfortunately, for the majority of the two hours, my mind was elsewhere.

  I thought about Mum and the day she died. I remembered being confused when El’s dad collected us from the cinema – how he told me she’d been in an accident and how there was a police car in the driveway when he dropped me at home. I thought about how precious and precarious life is, how easy to take for granted. On Tuesday, Suzi emailed me the fifteen-page script for her short film. When it’s finished she will send it to agents and producers to generate interest in her feature-length script. And while Ivy and I sat in the Wimbledon Odeon, I fantasized about what it would be like to direct a movie instead of a commercial for toilet roll. But it’s not just about me anymore, is it? My obligation now is to my children and their mother. To put cash in the bank and food on the table. And my thoughts went round again: remembering, fantasizing, fretting, imagining.

  As we walk up the hill towards The Village, Ivy asks: ‘What do you think that guy – the priest – what do you think he meant when he said, “Never is a lot longer than forever”?’

  ‘There was a priest?’ I ask.

  Ivy stops walking. ‘You were in the same movie as me, right?’

  ‘Kind of,’ I tell her, and then I tell her about the day my mother died.

  It’s a Friday afternoon and Christmas is less than three weeks away, so the pub is as tightly packed as Santa’s sack. Nevertheless, Joe and I have a table to ourselves, tucked away in the corner. For the second time in a week I have managed to surround myself with a force field of unapproachability. Last Tuesday it was a mental-patient wardrobe, today it is four kilos of Limburger. This afternoon we attended the pre-production meeting for the cheese commercial, where the client presented everybody with a whopping great lump of product. As he distributed the cheese, the marketing manager proudly informed us that this particular cheese has been voted the ‘seventh most pungent’ in the world. And the knowledge that there are six cheeses more foul-smelling than this one is enough to give anyone some very weird nightmares. It took two hours to finalize the details for the shoot; two hours in a small room with eight head-sized hunks of the seventh-most-stinky cheese in the world and the radiators turned up full blast. And although the script stank only slightly less than its object, I smiled and paid attention and laughed and told everybody what a special privilege it was to be working with them. And not simply because I’m a consummate professional, but because Joe loves all that bullshit and I need Joe.

  It would appear that my obsequiousness has paid off, because as well as smelling of cheese, Joe is positively reeking of bonhomie. He returns to our table carrying two pints and wearing an elf cap at a jaunty angle.

  ‘Good elf,’ he says, raising his glass.

  ‘Very funny,’ I tell him, and even though it isn’t, I can’t help but laugh.

  ‘Right, now as we’re in the festive spirit, I’ve got a present for you . . .’ Joe reaches into his bag and produces a brown A4 envelope. He slides it across the table.

  ‘You shouldn’t have,’ I say, and I take the envelope and place it in my own bag.

  ‘Okay,’ says Joe, ‘I’ll bite, it’s for—’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fine, fuck it,’ says Joe, his festive spirit evaporating rapidly. ‘I’ll give it to someone else. Someone with a scrap of gratitude.’

  ‘Why’re you being all uppity? You don’t care what I think of the script, just whether I say yes or not.’

  Joe inhales, sighs. ‘Listen, I get that you have a new agenda all of a sudden, and I’m glad you’re being all can do. But I like what I do; I enjoy it. And when you get all fucking supercilious on me’ – I raise my eyebrows – ‘yeah,’ Joe says, ‘I know what supercilious means; it means to act like a smug wanker. And when you act like a smug wanker, well, it wears a bit fucking thin. Know what I mean?’

  I’ve known Joe for years, and I know him well enough not to take this lambasting too personally. Particularly when he’s started on his third pint. Even so, it’s never nice being called a smug wanker.

  ‘Whoa, hold on! I was having a joke. It was a fucking joke, all right.’

  ‘Yeah, well, not a very funny one.’

  ‘Really? Unlike good elf?’

  Joe goes to say something then decides to take a good glug of his pint instead.

  I hold up my hands in surrender. ‘I’m sorry. What’s it for? The script.’

  ‘Tampax.’

  I close my eyes and count to three inside my head. When I open them again, Joe is staring at me, arms crossed and impassive. ‘How much?’ I say.

  ‘Six.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘Six is fucking good,’ Joe says. ‘For a one-day shoot.’

  ‘One condition.’

  ‘What? More games, now, is it?’

  I pull an envelope of my own from my bag. Inside is Suzi’s script, which has a title now: Reinterpreting Jackson Pollock – or simply Pollock, as we now refer to it after several emails, phone calls and script revisions. I pass the envelope to Joe.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Open it.’

  Joe does. He glances at the title on the front page, nods to himself and turns to page one. By the time he’s finished reading – in silence and without looking up once – I have finished my pint while Joe has barely touched his.

  ‘And?’ he says, finally.

  So I tell him; I tell him about Suzi, about her screenplay, and about her ten thousand pounds. Joe slides the manuscript back into its envelope and takes a measured sip of his pint.

  I look at the envelope, then at Joe. ‘So?’

  ‘It’s all right. Title’s a bit shit.’

  ‘Is that it?’ I as
k.

  ‘What are you asking me, William? Do I like it? Will I invest in it? Am I happy about you working for a different bloody production company? What?’

  ‘Would you like to produce it?’

  Joe likes to pretend he’s above sentiment, but he’s a big soft bastard at his core, and an involuntary smile ripples across his face. ‘Me?’ he says, pointing a finger at his chest.

  ‘You,’ I say.

  Joe downs his pint in one long gulp, belches and recomposes his world-weary façade. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Might as well.’

  By the time I leave the Goose, Friday afternoon has given way to Friday evening. I’m not staggering drunk, but I’d have a hard time walking a tightrope. Ivy has been working on a perfume commercial today, so she could be back anywhere between an hour ago and three hours hence. I call but her phone goes straight to voicemail. It’s not quite seven o’clock when my train arrives in Wimbledon, but the sun set some time ago and it feels later. My legs are heavy and my bladder full as I trudge up to The Village, and the walk is a long one tonight. As I crest Wimbledon Hill, the extortionate butcher is beginning to shut up shop. I’ve sobered up considerably, but there’s enough booze in my system that I walk in of my own free will and allow them to extort more than forty pounds out of me for a fillet of beef, a few slices of pancetta and a string of sausages.

  Ivy isn’t back so I turn the radio up loud, open the wine and get cooking. The place is beginning to feel like home and while the food bubbles, I plump up the cushions, feed the goldfish and browse the bookshelves, flicking through a selection of Ivy’s unfinished novels and reading the paragraphs where she left off.

  I set two places at the table, improvise a candlestick holder from an eggcup and line up something acoustic on the iPod. Ivy has been a significant part of my life for four months now and our babies are halfway to being born, to being tiny humans curled up between us on the bed. And still, neither of us has said those three significant words. Or at least not without a mouthful of cashmere.

  When I lived with Kate we used to tell each other ‘I love you’ every night before turning out the lights. Except when we didn’t. On the nights – and there were several – when we took an argument to the bed with us, the three little words went unuttered. Which was exactly like telling each other: I don’t love you – not tonight. So I like that Ivy and I don’t trot the words out by rote, turning them into a platitude on the nights we say them and a weapon on the nights we don’t. But I do love her, and I’m going to tell her tonight.

  I’m dozing on the sofa when I hear Ivy knocking hard on the front door and it takes me a moment to remember where I am. According to the mantelpiece clock it’s nearly nine. There’s another knock, and the extra iron in Ivy’s diet must be working because it sounds like she’s about to knock the door off its hinges. I shout that I’m coming, light the candle, check my hair and, because I’m a crazy, whacky, funny kind of guy, I unbutton my shirt to my navel, take a flower from its vase and place it between my teeth. Ivy hammers again.

  ‘Coming,’ I shout. Except, with the flower between my teeth it sounds more like Kerning.

  It doesn’t cross my mind to wonder why Ivy is knocking and not using her key. She often knocks when she returns from a shoot – her van is full of expensive make-up and equipment, and it’s getting increasingly difficult for her to carry the boxes up to the flat.

  So it’s a heck of a shock to find her brother, Frank, standing on the doorstep.

  ‘You shouldn’t have,’ he says.

  ‘Frank,’ I reply around a mouthful of gerbera.

  ‘But since you did . . .’ and Frank hugs me tight enough to make my head throb. ‘Blimey,’ he says, releasing me, ‘what’s that smell?’

  ‘Limburger,’ I say, rebuttoning my shirt.

  ‘Jaysus! Whose limb, and how long have they been dead!’

  ‘It’s a cheese.’

  ‘Er, durr? You going to invite me in or what?’

  Once I get Frank and his suitcase inside the flat proper, I ask what he’s doing in London, and he rambles vaguely about friends, work, his sister and spontaneity.

  ‘So when was this . . . arranged?’

  Frank shrugs and blows air through his lips in a loose raspberry. ‘Oh, I dunno, couple of hours ago? Lunchtime, maybe.’ He spots the table set for two, the candle flickering in its eggcup, and he grimaces apologetically. ‘Ooops.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell him, ‘I cooked plenty.’

  ‘What we having?’

  ‘Boeuf bourguignon.’

  ‘Fancy pantsy!’

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Tell you what; you jump in the shower, and I’ll get this open,’ he says, producing a bottle of Merlot from a carrier bag. ‘Red! I must be psychic.’

  And I am so dumbfounded that I do exactly as I’m told. When I return to the living room – clean, dry and wearing clothes that don’t reek of cheese – Ivy is back and all the windows are open, letting in the cold winter air.

  ‘Hey, hon,’ she says from the sofa. ‘Guess who’s coming to supper!’ And despite feeling just a little shanghaied, I laugh.

  I kiss Ivy on the forehead. ‘You hot?’

  ‘What? No, why?’

  ‘The windows.’

  ‘I opened ’em,’ Frank says, wafting a hand in front of his nose. ‘Get the pong of that fromage out.’

  ‘Fromage?’ asks Ivy.

  I explain about the cheese; and once we’ve ascertained that Ivy can’t eat it and Frank wouldn’t if his life depended on it, I wrap the reeking, sweating hunk of Limburger inside three carrier bags and dump it in the bin outside the flat. If nothing else it should keep the foxes away.

  While Frank and Ivy catch up and share old in-jokes, I unset the table and salvage the boeuf bourguignon with a good glug of Frank’s wine. We eat off our laps, in front of the TV and squashed three-abreast on the sofa. Frank, at one end, is as wide across the shoulders as a supervillain, so I’m crammed onto two-thirds of a cushion at the other end, with the hard arm of the sofa digging into my ribs. Ivy’s baby brother is in a drinking mood and he’s dragging me with him. Approximately every five minutes he commands, ‘William. Glass,’ and reaches across Ivy to ensure my glass is sloshingly full.

  ‘So,’ I say, as nonchalantly as possible, ‘you’re staying the night?’

  ‘If that’s all right, William?’

  ‘Fisher.’

  ‘Yeah, Fisher.’

  ‘Plans for the rest of the weekend?’ I ask, trying not to sound too eager to get rid of him.

  It’s not that I don’t like Frank; he’s the archetypal ‘lovely bloke’ – big, cuddly, daft-hearted and amusing in a loud, lummoxing kind of way. It’s not hard to imagine us being friends (or, getting a little ahead of myself, being the kind of brothers-in-law that can spend an afternoon in the pub unaccompanied by their spouses – if, that is, Frank still has one). Imagining us spending a quiet weekend together three abreast on this couch, however, that’s a little trickier to get my head around. I had plans for this evening, and they didn’t involve an eighteen-stone dentist.

  ‘We thought we’d just hang out,’ Ivy says, which clarifies nothing.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say. And when I go to put my arm around Ivy’s shoulders, I find Frank’s already there.

  ‘William! Glass.’

  And before I can object, the spout of our second bottle is thrust in front of my face. Frank begins to pour, but the bottle is practically empty and he only manages to fill my glass to within a finger’s width of the rim.

  ‘Ooops! I’ll open another, shall I?’ And as he rises from the sofa, Ivy and I expand sideways into the suddenly available space.

  While Frank is selecting another bottle of my wine, I turn to Ivy and send her a subtle shrug: shoulders lifting, wrists rotating outward, head tilting to the right, eyes widening, every movement measured in millimetres. What’s going on? Ivy scrunches up her brow: What do you mean? I raise my eyebrows, point my chin over my s
houlder to where Frank is rattling around for a corkscrew: Your brother! Ivy bites her bottom lip, gives a minute shake of her head: Not now. I turn down one corner of my mouth and sigh: Fine.

  ‘Not interrupting anything, am I?’ says Frank, wedging himself back into place.

  I begin to answer but the air is forced from my lungs as I am once again compressed into the corner of the sofa.

  ‘Glass,’ he says, reaching across Ivy and topping my Merlot with Pinot Noir until the meniscus bulges over the rim.

  There wasn’t as much sex on TV when I was a young boy living with my parents, but whenever there was, Dad would jump up as if his chair had been electrified and change the channel. Later, when I reached my teens, he would simply leave the room, tutting and muttering and not returning until the filthy business was completed. And awkward as it was, it has nothing on watching a movie romp in the company of my pregnant girlfriend and her hulking great brother. Frank’s strategy for dealing with embarrassing sex scenes is to deliver a running commentary in a variety of comedy voices and regional accents.

  Hello! Someone’s feeling frisky! Is that a banana in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? Ha ha ha. Allow me to help you with those, love . . . Oo, pink lacy ones, saucy. And they’re off! Badddoinggg! Shall we adjourn to the kitchen table? Never mind the dishes, we’ll pop to Ikea tomorrow. Get a hotdog, ha ha. Look at his face! Looks like he’s struggling with a crossword. One up, four letters, begins with a B, ends in K . . . B-O-N-K! Cheers, darling, how was it for you? Ha ha ha ha!

  And all the way through this excruciating one-man show, I’m waiting, praying, for Ivy to tell him to just shut the hell up, but she says not a word. And now, as I sneak a sideways glance at her, I see why. Squashed between us like a wilted flower, Ivy is still sitting but her chin has dropped onto her chest. I lift her head as gently as possible and see that her eyes are fully closed. A delicate snore escapes her open mouth.