The Two of Us Read online

‘Working on anything interesting?’ Craig asks.

  ‘Actually, I’m working on a short film.’

  ‘Get you,’ says Phil. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Love, I suppose.’

  ‘Aren’t they all?’ says Craig.

  ‘T. . . title?’

  I sigh a little. ‘Reinterpreting Jackson Pollock.’

  There is a beat of silence.

  ‘Interesting,’ says Craig.

  ‘Pollock,’ says Phil.

  ‘B. . . b. . . bollocks!’ says El, as I imagined he would.

  ‘You could be right,’ I admit. ‘I’m not crazy about it.’

  Phil asks me to describe the plot, so I give a rundown of the story: art student meets girl; art student and girl make love on roof of library beneath a skyful of stars; girl dumps art student; art student decides to throw himself from library roof; art student thinks better of it.

  ‘Ki. . . ki. . . killing himself ’c. . . ’cos he got d. . . dumped?’

  ‘There’s more to it than that.’

  ‘’cos he g. . . got f. . . f. . . dumped!’ El seems offended by the idea.

  ‘He doesn’t go through with it.’

  ‘F. . . f. . . fuckig fuckig s. . . stupid!’ El’s brow is knotted in frustration. He goes to put his knife and fork down, his arms not twitching now, but moving as if in slow motion. Even so, as he sets his cutlery down, he inadvertently knocks his cup to the floor. ‘F. . . cunt!’

  ‘Elly, darling,’ says Phil. ‘Settle down.’

  Craig picks up the cup and places it back on the table.

  ‘F. . . f. . . stupid s. . . story,’ El says, and no one corrects him.

  Val Doonican sings ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’ into the silence.

  ‘I’m also shooting a Tampax commercial,’ I say.

  El goes still for a second, the tension seeming to drain from his small, failing body. Phil, Craig and El look at me as if they are assessing my sanity.

  ‘T. . . T. . . Tapax!’

  Craig laughs first, then Phil, then, after another few seconds, El. By the time I join in, we are all laughing so hard that Phil has to get up from the table to stop El falling from his chair, Craig has tears rolling down his cheeks and the back of my head feels like it’s in a vice.

  After Christmas pudding we pull crackers, then move through to the living room to exchange presents. I give El a box set of ’Allo ’Allo, and Phil a gift box full of assorted moisturizers and gels and creams. They give me a cookery book for Christmas and a book on parenting for my birthday. El falls asleep halfway through the first episode of ’Allo ’Allo, with his head resting on Phil’s thigh.

  ‘How’s he been?’ I ask.

  Phil shrugs. ‘He’s not getting any better,’ he says with a sad smile.

  Craig is sitting in an armchair beside the sofa, and he reaches across now, placing his hand on Phil’s wrist and squeezing it. And still no one has said anything to shed any light on who he is or how he fits into this picture. If there is something between Phil and Craig, I won’t be offended and neither will El. Phil knows this (or should) because we have discussed it at excruciating length. El isn’t who he used to be, and Phil deserves romantic companionship as much as anyone else. None of which makes me feel any more comfortable in the middle of whatever this is.

  ‘His tics seem better,’ I say.

  ‘It’s something else,’ Phil says. ‘Begins with a B. B . . . br . . . God, I’m beginning to sound like him now.’

  ‘Bradykinesia,’ says Craig, and how the hell does Craig know about it?

  ‘What’s brady . . . ’

  ‘Bradykinesia. It’s when his muscles sort of freeze,’ Craig explains, clenching his fists in front of his chest. ‘The twitches haven’t gone away entirely, but sometimes they’re replaced with these incredibly slow movements.’

  I look to Phil for confirmation of this. ‘Both arms,’ Phil says. ‘For now.’

  ‘And how are you?’ I ask him.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. He flicks a glance towards Craig and then inspects his fingernails – what’s left of them. ‘In the New Year . . . I’m going to put him in daycare. One day a week.’

  ‘To start with,’ Craig adds, and he nods at Phil as if to say: Isn’t that right?

  Phil doesn’t say anything.

  ‘That’s good,’ I say. ‘About bloody time.’ And Phil smiles.

  The awkwardness from earlier is still present, and I don’t think it will clear until Phil tells me what is or isn’t going on with Craig. It’s close to ten o’clock, so I make my excuses, hug Phil and shake Craig’s hand.

  As I stand to leave, El wakes up. ‘Happy Christmas,’ he says, sleepily and surprisingly easily. ‘G. . . give my love to y’ mum ’n’ d. . . dad.’

  Phil looks at me, slightly aghast, wondering perhaps if I am going to correct El and remind him that my mother died when we were teenagers. That I was in the cinema with him at the moment her car collided with the lorry.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I tell him, and El lowers his head back onto the cushion and falls back to sleep.

  Ivy and Frank are curled up on the sofa when I get back to the flat, some movie on the crappy TV. Ivy has her head on Frank’s shoulder; Frank has his huge sweaty feet on the coffee table, next to a greasy pizza box.

  ‘Nice night?’ asks Ivy.

  I sigh. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Blimey,’ says Frank, ‘I’d hate to see your face after a bad night.’ He laughs, and Ivy gives me a small, apologetic smile.

  I pick up the pizza box and take it to the kitchen bin, which, I discover, is too full to take one more item. I remove the heaving bag from the pedal bin and several cans, packets and wet tea bags clatter and splat to the floor.

  ‘Fucking hell!’

  ‘What’s up?’ Ivy asks.

  ‘The bin,’ I say. ‘Did no one think to empty the bin?’

  ‘Fine,’ says Ivy, and she begins the process of levering herself out of the sofa.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ says Frank, putting a hand on Ivy’s shoulder and getting up himself. But I’ll be fucked if I’m going to let the bastard play the good guy now.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ I say. ‘Watch your film.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Frank says, and I visualize myself throwing a dirty tomato can at the back of his fat head.

  I take the bag downstairs to the bin in the front garden, and the temperature has dropped to somewhere in the region of freezing. When I get back upstairs my nose is running, my head aches and it seems I’m coming down with a sore throat. I must have had my chin on my chest when I came back from El’s, because it’s not until I walk into the flat for the second time this evening that I notice the decorations. Spray-can snowdrifts on the windows; loops of tinsel drooping from the underside of the breakfast bar; silver stars hanging from the light fittings.

  ‘Squidge in?’ says Ivy, patting the cushion beside her.

  But I’m too tired and jaded to squash onto two-thirds of a cushion and watch the arse-end of whatever movie is on the box.

  ‘I’ll see you in bed,’ I tell her.

  ‘Don’t let the bed bugs bite,’ says Frank, and it annoys me more than it probably should.

  I must have been more tired than I realized, because the next thing I know it’s thirteen minutes past one in the morning and I think Ivy is in labour.

  In my dream she was grunting and panting and pushing and shouting all manner of profanities, but as I come to with my pulse racing, she is as still and silent as a rock. Someone, though, is still moaning and gasping and it’s getting louder and more insistent by the second.

  I slip out of bed and pull on a pair of boxer shorts.

  Frank is in what I now think of as his room. He is passed out in my expensive leather armchair in front of my HD TV and a still-playing porn film. From my horrified vantage point in the doorway, I can see a toilet roll balanced on the arm of the chair and enough skin to ascertain that Frank is almost certainly naked.

  T
he room is small and there is scant passing space as I creep to the TV, keeping my eyes pointed away from Frank and whatever mess he’s made on himself and my beautiful recliner. As I turn the TV off, a split-second before the room is dropped into darkness, I spot the DVD case on the floor. And even in the dark I flush with embarrassment. The film is titled Cocktopussy – multi-armed, megaboobed femme stood behind tuxedoed porn star, one hand on his chest, one in his hair, another in his pants. As is often the way with pornography, I’m not entirely sure how this piece came into my possession, and I’m shocked that it still is. I had – or so I thought – a thorough porn clear-out when my last girlfriend, Kate, moved into the Brixton flat last spring. Evidently, this DVD somehow survived that cull, and I’m only glad Frank found it rather than Ivy. I think. I eject the disk, return it to the case and slide it behind the wardrobe, making a mental note in red ink and bloody big letters to retrieve and dispose of it at the next opportunity.

  Sneaking back out of the room is even more precarious now that the room is entirely dark, and it’s not made any easier by my fear of stumbling into Frank’s no-doubt sticky lap. It takes two minutes and all of my skill to escape the room, but I make it undetected and unviolated. I creep back into my own bedroom avoiding all the creaky floorboards, remove my shorts with barely a whisper and lower myself to the mattress like a feather dropping to soft ground.

  ‘Woke me up,’ says Ivy, and she huffs and puffs as she hauls herself out of bed and off to the bathroom.

  By the time she gets back into bed it’s just about one thirty.

  ‘You were up ages,’ she whispers.

  I consider telling Ivy that Frank was watching porn, but decide against it. It’s a bastard thing to do, and it was, after all, my porn.

  ‘Frank left the TV on. I had to turn it off.’

  Ivy sighs. I kiss the back of her neck.

  ‘How was El?’

  ‘No better, no worse. There was some guy there – Craig – I’ve never seen him before. I think . . . I dunno, it was weird.’

  ‘Weird how?’

  ‘I think there might be something going on with him and Phil.’

  ‘Awkward.’

  ‘Yup.’

  Ivy knows the history, and although she hasn’t explicitly said as much, I get the impression she likes – or at least understands – the idea of Phil having a relationship with someone else.

  ‘Was he fit?’

  And despite the hour and clinging funk, I laugh, albeit very quietly. ‘Not my type.’

  ‘Sleep well, babes.’

  ‘Christmas in a week,’ I say.

  Ivy ha-hums.

  ‘We still haven’t talked about where we’re going?’

  Ivy says nothing.

  ‘You awake?’

  ‘Not by choice.’

  ‘That makes two of us,’ I say. ‘And we both know whose fault that is.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Do you know where he’s going to be for Christmas?’ I ask.

  ‘Frank? Here, probably. On his own, poor thing.’

  ‘He won’t go to your folks’ house?’

  ‘Not without Lois and Freddy; Mum and Dad are funny about all that stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Divorce.’

  ‘Funny how?’

  ‘Just funny.’

  I turn on the light.

  Ivy pulls the duvet up over her head. ‘Christ, what are you doing?’

  I pull the duvet down, revealing Ivy’s scrunched-up and pillow-creased face. ‘We haven’t talked about Christmas.’ Ivy opens her eyes with what appears to be great reluctance. ‘Where we’re going.’

  ‘I was planning on going to my parents’,’ she says.

  ‘I was planning the same. I mean, planning on staying with Dad.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘What? Okay, you’ll come with me?’

  Another sigh. ‘Okay, you go to your dad’s.’

  ‘On my own?’

  Ivy props herself up on her elbows, picks up a glass of water from the bedside table and takes a sip. ‘You’re welcome to come with me.’

  ‘Does that mean you want me to come with you?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t mind if you don’t.’

  ‘Well, I’d really like you to come with me,’ I say.

  ‘Mum and Dad’ll be on their own.’

  ‘They have each other.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘What about your other brothers?’

  Ivy shakes her head. ‘Long flights, big families. It’s only for a couple of days.’

  ‘One of them’s my birthday.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry, but . . . this is the last Christmas before we have the babies. I want to be with my parents. I want to be where I’m comfortable.’

  ‘As opposed to my dad’s, where you won’t be comfortable?’

  Ivy shrugs. Yes.

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘It’s not meant to be charming. I’m not making a big deal about you coming with me, am I?’

  ‘No.’ And maybe that’s half the problem, maybe I’d be happier if Ivy did make a big deal about it – at least then I’d know she gave a shit about spending some time with me.

  ‘We can do your birthday when we get back,’ Ivy says. ‘Just me and . . .’ she trails off.

  ‘What? Just the two of us? What are we going to do with Frank? Lock him in his room with a bottle of wine and a packet of pretzels?’

  ‘Shush.’ Ivy frowns, flicks her eyes at the wall separating Frank’s room from ours.

  ‘Really? Shush? Me shush?’

  ‘If it’s not too much to ask.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, and I turn out the light and drop to my pillow like a sack of dirty laundry.

  Approximately thirty seconds later Ivy is breathing the deep slow breaths of someone heavily asleep, and the fact that she can do this while I’m lying here stewing only aggravates me further. In the next room, Frank creaks out of bed and bumbles into the bathroom for a two-minute piss, straight at the water and with the door wide open. And Ivy has the audacity to shush me. My dad described being in love as feeling like you’re running as fast as you can. I felt that way with Ivy when we met, and for about two weeks immediately after. But if I’m honest with myself, lately it feels more like I’m tripping over my feet and that any minute now I might just fall and smash my face into the pavement.

  Chapter 18

  Before this winter, I hadn’t been to the cinema in seventeen years. And here I am for the third time in three weeks. Suzi dips her hand into my popcorn, and I feel an entirely unjustified pang of guilt.

  Yesterday a van arrived from John Lewis, carrying two flat-pack cots, two baby bouncers, two car seats, two Moses baskets, a double buggy, two cuddly elephants and a big box of nipple shields. The corridor of our flat is now an obstacle course; the utility cupboard is packed to capacity and ready to explode like something from a slapstick comedy. This morning I stubbed my toe on the boxed buggy underneath the dining table. In a perverse kind of way, I like the clutter; it’s a great big visual reminder that there’s a great big Frank in the room we should be transforming into a nursery. I stacked the Moses baskets on Ivy’s side of the bed, to make it a little more difficult for her to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And when she stage-whispered ‘bloody baskets’ at six thirty this morning, I saw bright white subtitles reading ‘Bloody Frank’. I probably should have felt guilty, but beside the cuddly elephants in the utility cupboard, there is still a big bloody elephant in the room – Christmas is just four days away now, and I still don’t know where I’ll be unwrapping my presents. And it’s unlikely to get cleared up this evening.

  It should be date night tonight, but Ivy is having Christmas drinks with her book club buddies while I eat popcorn in the dark with Suzi.

  We met to talk about Pollock over lunch. So far Joe has found a director of photography and a soundman, we’ve looked at a couple of locations, briefed a casting director and
it looks like this thing is actually going to happen. Over lunch we talked about the sex scene. It’s going to be tricky for a few reasons. We’ll be shooting on the roof of a four-storey building in the middle of the night. It will be cold and dark and logistically demanding. Suzi and I discussed in what position, or positions, the lovemaking should happen. Unavoidably perhaps, subjectivity coloured the conversation with phrases like ‘If it was me . . .’ ‘The way I would . . .’ and ‘I always find . . .’ And then, once we’d finished our expensive lunch and vicarious sex, Suzi told me we were going ‘on a date’. She said it ironically, but the reality of the afternoon is a little close to the joke and I don’t plan on telling Ivy about it.

  The movie Suzi has taken us to see features almost as much sex and nudity as the DVD behind the wardrobe in Frank’s room. We’ve seen three different couples going at it in a variety of moods, modes and tempos from slow and tender to fast and nasty, and I’m more than a tiny bit turned on. Take the couple presently banging each other’s brains out of their skulls, for example. They have worked together for years and they do not like each other; they despise each other, in fact. They have lied, cheated and connived to undermine each other in the workplace and they are both in line for the same promotion. As the animosity and the stakes rise, the antagonists have each decided they will not leave the office before the other. And so these beautiful lawyers find themselves alone in an otherwise deserted office at three thirty in the morning. They call a temporary truce, find a couple of cold beers and drink them in front of a huge plate-glass window overlooking downtown New York. Before the beers are drunk, however, it’s skirt up, trousers down and the duelling lawyers are screwing up against the window eight storeys above the sidewalk. An exterior shot looking in shows the actress’s buttocks squashed against the glass like a couple of pickled eggs in a jar. The man thrusts with measured, violent strokes, and the impact of the two bodies against glass reverberates around the empty office like a drum on a Viking longship. The scene is erotic and terrifying in equal measure, delivering a fifty-fifty mixture of arousal and vertigo. I like it.

  Suzi leans towards me and when she whispers in my ear she is close enough that I can smell beer and popcorn on her breath. ‘I don’t know whether to cover my eyes or sit on my hands.’