The Two of Us Read online

  We’re eating dessert (the room is silent for a rare moment as everyone savours their cheesecake) when Dad announces: ‘By the ways, William, I’ll take your old room tonight, you and Ivy can use my bed.’

  It’s probably less than the five thousand years it feels like, but there is definitely a long awkward pause where my father’s words – in particular the word ‘use’ – hang above the table. Ivy, fork still held between her lips, looks at my dad, smiles, hum-mumbles the twin syllables of Thank you. Or maybe it’s Blimey.

  Maria glances across at Ivy and smirks. Hector looks at me and winces. I look at my cheesecake and feel my cheeks flush.

  On the drive down I had wondered about the sleeping arrangements. Dad’s as Catholic as guilt and the only double bed in the house is his, which had me resigned to spending my first night sleeping alone since Ivy and I got together. On the one hand it would be a shame; on the other it was bound to happen sooner or later and, to be perfectly honest, I’m exhausted. Plus, it would avoid any embarrassing conversations with my father.

  ‘Changed the sheets,’ says Dad. And when I make the mistake of making eye contact, the silly bastard winks. It’s not a lascivious wink by any means; if I had to guess, I’d say it was self-congratulatory at being so modern and goddamned organized. But a wink is a wink and, if I had to put a flag in the ground, that would be the moment my sex life died.

  The awkwardness as we undress for bed is tangible; I stumble removing my jeans, embarrassed by my pale, dangling nakedness; and Ivy, for the first time in our time together, climbs into bed wearing pants and a T-shirt. I was in all likelihood conceived in this bed, and whilst I have no desire for anything more risqué than a kiss on the lips, I am a little affronted by Ivy’s assumption that the games are over. Also, I’ve drunk a bottle and a half of wine, so my mouth comments before my brain has a chance to edit.

  ‘You’re shy all of a sudden,’ I say, slurring the s’s slightly.

  ‘I’m tired,’ says Ivy. ‘If that’s okay?’

  If that’s okay?

  Maybe I’ve drunk more than I realize, because I hear myself saying: ‘Fine. Whatever.’ And the weight of the two words pulls at the corners of my mouth.

  And while nothing gets thrown, neither ornaments nor accusations, this is the closest thing we’ve had to an argument and there is no affection in the room when I turn out the light and climb into my dad’s bed.

  I locate Ivy’s head with my hands and it’s turned away from me. ‘G’night,’ I say, kissing her hair.

  Ivy sighs. ‘Night,’ she says, and she says it very very quietly.

  We kiss in the morning, but it’s lost something during the night – urgency, electricity, promise . . . something. It doesn’t help that I have a pig of a hangover, although Ivy seems to have escaped any ill effects.

  She spends a long time in the en suite shower, emerging from the steaming room dry, dressed and with her hair turbaned in a towel. And this sudden absence of casual nakedness, it jars. Besides the scars on the left side of her face, throat and neck, Ivy has scars on her belly, hip, right forearm, right thigh and right breast. And still she will pad about the flat naked or nearly so; feeding the fish, making coffee, eating her Bran Flakes. We must have spent half of our waking time together without a stitch on. So, yeah, when she steps out of the bathroom in jeans, shirt and a cardigan, it jars.

  In the time it takes me to step in and out of the shower, Ivy is gone. I find her downstairs, talking to Dad, who has inelegantly heaped three cartons of juice, every box of cereal and every jar and tub of spreadable substance he owns on the kitchen table. He is now trying to make tea and butter toast at the same time and is making a woeful mess of both.

  ‘Are you sure I can’t do something?’ Ivy asks.

  ‘All under control,’ Dad says, putting the lid on the teapot after two attempts. ‘Now, how’d you take your tea— damn! You said coffee, didn’t you?’

  ‘Tea’s fine.’

  And instead of just leaving the tea to brew, Dad pours the pot down the sink.

  ‘Scatterbrain,’ he says, palming his forehead. ‘No, you said coffee, you get coffee. Instant okay?’

  Ivy is a confirmed coffee snob and I know she would rather drink nothing than drink instant, so when she tells Dad, ‘Instant’s perfect,’ I feel a fresh pang of affection for her.

  As Dad begins refilling the kettle, the kitchen smoke alarm starts emitting a jagged high-pitched beep, and my nagging headache mutates instantly into a snarling monster with very sharp teeth. Black smoke is issuing from the toaster and Dad stands frozen, looking from the toaster to the alarm, trying to decide which one to tackle first. Still clutching the kettle, Dad snatches up a mop from beside the fridge and whacks the smoke alarm three times until it falls to the floor in two separate pieces, one of which is somehow still beeping (albeit less enthusiastically). He stamps on it once and it dies. The toaster pops.

  Dad smiles at Ivy like a lunatic. ‘Needed a new one anyway,’ he says.

  I pick up the fragments of smoke detector as Dad retrieves the charred toast and proceeds to scrape the burnt slices over the sink.

  ‘Dig in,’ says Dad, brandishing a blackened knife at the stacked boxes of cereal in a manner that suggests he won’t be happy until we’ve eaten all of it. And so we eat a breakfast of burnt toast, powdery muesli and instant coffee, while Dad picks up where he left off last night, questioning Ivy and humiliating me.

  Mercifully, Ivy has work tomorrow – a two-day shoot for a German car manufacturer – and we’re on the road before ten o’clock and before Dad can inflict any further damage to the domestic appliances or my relationship with Ivy. He insists on making us a packed lunch and sends us on our way with enough brown bananas, soft pears and thick, Clingfilm-wrapped cheese sandwiches to keep us going for a week. There’s a significant possibility that I’m still over the limit, so Ivy drives and I press my head against the cool glass of the passenger-side window in an attempt to take some of the heat out of my hangover.

  The Fiat came courtesy of my best friend, El; he gave it to me when he became too severely affected by Huntington’s disease to drive. One bumper sticker invites fellow road users to honk if they’re horny, whilst the other (‘bummer sticker’, El calls it) declares: ‘I’m so gay I can’t even drive straight’. And so, as we proceed south on the M6, we are honked and hooted and air-horned by car after car after van after eighteen-wheeled juggernaut. It was kind of amusing last week. Today, less so.

  ‘I wonder if they think I’m a woman,’ I say as a Ford Galaxy passes us, parping its horn, three gleeful children waving from the rear window.

  ‘Why would they think that?’ says Ivy, not smiling.

  ‘You know . . . the bumper stickers.’ Ivy frowns. ‘Well, you’re obviously not a man.’ I wait for a smile of acknowledgement; don’t get one. ‘So presumably, if we’re a gay couple, I’m a woman.’ I rub my hand over my shorn auburn hair. ‘The manly one.’

  ‘Maybe they think we’re just friends,’ says Ivy.

  I spend the next several miles fretting over whether or not I have offended Ivy. Maybe some of her best friends are lesbians. Or an aunty. She’s never mentioned it and the subject didn’t come up during last night’s interrogation, but anything is possible.

  A new song starts on the radio: ‘Could It Be Magic’.

  ‘So who’s your favourite Beatle?’ I ask.

  Ivy flicks her eyes in my direction. ‘You do know this is Take That?’

  To be honest, I thought it was Boyzone, but I nod anyway. ‘Of course.’

  Ivy says nothing.

  ‘Well?’ I venture.

  ‘What?’

  There’s an impatient sharpness to Ivy’s response, and now I’m certain she’s being pissy. Probably because I was being insensitive or something last night.

  ‘The Beatles,’ I say brightly, deciding that rather than apologizing for (and, therefore, reminding Ivy of) last night’s behaviour, the best policy is to gloss over all th
is silliness with a bright coat of chirpy good humour. ‘John, Paul, Ringo or the other one,’ I say.

  ‘The other one,’ says my beloved.

  ‘Mick or Keef?’ I persist.

  ‘Didn’t we do twenty questions last night?’

  ‘Yes, we did. Well, you lot did; I was cooking. Thing is, it made me realize how much we still don’t know about each other. That’s all.’

  Ivy pulls into the outside lane to overtake a convoy of cars that are doing around three miles an hour under the speed limit. It’s hard going on the Fiat, and it rattles as we creep past several cars and vans slowly enough that I could reach through my window and shake hands with every one of the drivers. We pull back into the middle lane and I start breathing again.

  ‘Sorry about last night,’ I say, abandoning my policy of dumb ignorance.

  ‘It’s fine. They’re lovely.’

  ‘I meant me . . . I’m sorry about me.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  And I wait for thirty seconds, but Ivy doesn’t say I’m lovely too.

  And of course I’m in no hurry to know Ivy’s favourite Take That song; and I don’t really care what GCSEs she sat, or what her first cat was called. But there are other details – trivial, too, in their own way – that it feels almost negligent not to know.

  ‘I don’t even know when your birthday is.’

  ‘October twenty-ninth,’ she says.

  There’s a beat of silence. Ivy glances sideways, holds my gaze for a second, cocks an eyebrow incrementally. Something resembling a smile tugs the corner of her mouth. ‘I’ll be forty-one,’ she says, turning her attention back to the road.

  Eight cars, two vans and two wagons pass us before I formulate a response.

  ‘Cool,’ I say. As if, instead of her age, Ivy has just nonchalantly disclosed some impressive talent or skill: I used to play guitar in a heavy metal band, I ran the marathon in 2:58, I can assemble an AK47 blindfolded. ‘Cool.’

  But this information has thrown me (not that it would take a great deal to upset my precarious equilibrium this morning) and neither of us says another word for the next thirty miles or so.

  Ivy will be forty-one on her next birthday, making her over nine years older than me. When she was my age, I was twenty-two. When she was twenty-two, I was thirteen. And, moving in the opposite direction, when I’m the age she is now, Ivy will be fifty – and cut that cake any way you like, that’s old. I don’t want to think about how old Ivy will be when I turn fifty – fifty is a good age for men: a time of distinguished grey highlights, and not so much wrinkles as lines of hard-won wisdom. How old Ivy will be when I hit my half-century gives me the heebie-crawling-jeebies. She doesn’t look old; her body is firm and her skin, where it’s not crisscrossed with scars, is smooth. I am fighting a strong urge, now, to turn and inspect the corners of her eyes for nascent crow’s-feet. Things will even out, I imagine, when I turn eighty. Also, women tend to live longer than men, so Ivy being almost a decade older than me improves the chances of us dying together, holding hands on the sofa in front of a slowly fading log fire in our retirement cottage on the coast. So there’s that.

  We stop at the services for a pee, and Ivy takes so long to pay her visit that I begin to worry she has either been abducted or simply taken a lift from a handsome stranger. When she does get back to the car she looks, if anything, more dejected than she has all morning. I’ve bought her a massive bag of Skittles, which I now present with a chimp-like grin, but Ivy says she’s feeling lousy and asks will I drive. She makes an improvised pillow from a folded jumper, reclines her seat as far as it will go – which isn’t far – and closes her eyes. And so we put more miles behind us, cars and motorbikes and vans honking their horns and pulling goon faces from the windows as they tear past.

  Where did it all go wrong? is the question I keep coming back to. Surely our little spat last night, if it even qualifies as a spat, can’t be responsible for Ivy’s sudden withdrawal. We have just spent the most romantic, loved-up, slightly sickeningly blissed-out three weeks of my life together. We have not left each other’s side, we started calling each other ‘babe’ without feeling completely silly about it, we made love every day, we made toast in the nude. And now . . . just nothing. The paranoid snob inside wonders can it be the peeling paint on Dad’s front door, the Formica kitchen units, the loose loo seat; but I know it’s not. And if it is, then Ivy isn’t the person I thought she was. Maybe she feels awkward about her age. Maybe I simply annoy the hell out of her and she’s only just realized it. Maybe she looked at my dad buffooning around the kitchen and saw the future me. Or maybe she is simply premenstrual – and I’m so desperate to know what’s bugging her, I’m sorely tempted to ask. But I suspect the question would be unlikely to reverse Ivy’s current funk.

  By the time we cross the M25 and re-enter London’s gravity, I’ve eaten the entire bag of Skittles and I feel sick. And without any prompting, like she hasn’t been sleeping at all but simply sitting still with her eyes closed, Ivy straightens in her seat and cricks her neck from side to side.

  ‘Morning,’ I say, more brightly than I feel.

  ‘Hey,’ says Ivy. She smiles, but there isn’t much behind it.

  ‘Your place or mine?’ I say, but I already know I’m not going to like the answer.

  Ivy has work tomorrow, she tells me, she’s tired, she needs to do laundry, take a bath, feed her goldfish, etc.

  Her flat is opposite the fourth lamppost on the left, down a tree-lined street in Wimbledon. We had our first kiss right here, in this car, beside this lamppost. But whatever frisson crackled about us then, it’s been replaced with a glutinous awkwardness. I get out of the car and remove Ivy’s bags from the boot. She takes her suitcase, declining my offer of help, and we stand clumsily on the pavement, Ivy not inviting me in, and me not asking. A wave of indignation surges through me, sweeping away the introspection and doubt, and leaving in its wake annoyance, disappointment and scraps of broken ego.

  ‘Right then,’ I say. ‘Suppose I’ll be off.’

  Ivy puts her suitcase down, gives me a silent hug and kisses the side of my neck. She holds it for a count of seconds, for about as long as you’d hold a final goodbye. She puts a hand to my cheek, smiles with her mouth but not with her eyes, says: ‘I had a nice time. Thank you.’

  ‘Sure,’ I tell her. ‘Enjoy your bath.’

  We kiss once more, Ivy turns to cross the road and I’m gone before she gets her key in the door.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Get r. . . get rid that pi. . . pnapple.’

  El can’t always access the words he needs; and when he can, he can’t always get them out of his mouth. It’s much more than a stammer. The effort shows on his face as he attempts to force a word out against the kind of resistance you might encounter trying to blow syrup through a straw. Even so, manners cost nothing.

  ‘Magic word?’ I say.

  ‘P. . . p. . . fuckig pronto.’

  ‘That’s better,’ I tell him, plucking the chunks of pineapple from his slice of pizza.

  El opens wide and I feed the tip of the folded slice into his mouth. His head wobbles but he succeeds in taking a bite without getting any more tomato sauce on his already smeared face. Beneath the sauce he has a deep tan, but it’s not enough to create even an illusion of health. El and his partner, Phil, returned from a holiday in San Francisco two days ago. It’s unlikely El has deteriorated significantly while he’s been away, but his twitches and wobbles and speech do seem worse.

  ‘Wh. . . wh. . . wh. . .’

  ‘Who?’ I try, and El shakes his head. ‘What?’

  El shakes his head again. ‘Lass one,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  El nods. ‘Why? Why would you p. . . put pnapple on a p. . .’ He points a trembling finger at the pizza sitting between us.

  ‘It’s a Hawaiian,’ I tell him. ‘You ordered it.’

  El shrugs. ‘Like the name.’

  Like all best friends living wi
thin ten miles of each other in London, El and I used to see each other about three times a year. But there’s nothing quite like terminal illness to cure apathy. So around two years ago, when the Huntington’s disease began to sink its teeth into him, we got into a routine of meeting every Tuesday. Initially we’d go to the pub, but as El’s condition progressed he lost his tolerance for drink along with his inhibitions and grasp of social niceties. We changed venue to the local curry house, arriving early in the evening when the place was empty and El could swear, twitch, stammer and drop his glass without an audience. But in the last few months, even that has become too difficult. So now it’s pizza and alcohol-free beer in El’s own living room.

  I suppose that somewhere in my mind he exists as the ten-year-old boy I rode my bike with, the teenager that I bought stolen pornography from, and the man who used to make me cry with laughter; and it’s as if all the decline El has endured in the last few years – the constant twitching and jerking; lack of co-ordination, balance, and empathy; the weight loss, the loss, in fact, of all the subtleties and nuances that make El El – it feels today as if all the damage has been compacted into the three weeks he’s been away. And whilst I know it hasn’t, his speech is undeniably worse. Before he left for the pub, Phil told me he’s finding it increasingly necessary to help El find his words, form his thoughts and understand what other people are saying to him.

  I help myself to a slice of Quattro Formaggi, fold it in half, take a bite.

  ‘Still f. . . fuckig that g. . . woman,’ El says, looking at me, amused, waiting for a reaction.

  ‘I don’t remember saying anything about fucking.’

  ‘P. . . P. . . Pippa, wasn’ it? Bounthy bounthy!’

  ‘Ivy,’ I say, wincing inwardly. ‘Her name is Ivy.’

  ‘G. . . g. . . grows on you,’ he says, and although, like so many others, he said it the first time he heard Ivy’s name, it makes me laugh because it’s evidence that the old El is still – at least partially – with us.

  ‘Wh. . . wh. . . wh. . .’