The Trouble with Henry and Zoe Read online

  ‘Haircut,’ I say, smiling and rubbing my hand over my shorn scalp.

  ‘Pardon?’

  The woman looks like she cuts her own hair with a breadknife, having first turned around on the spot twenty times to make it interesting. ‘Me, I mean. My . . . hair. Different from the photo,’ I say, holding out my hand for my passport.

  The woman holds the document to the light.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est? Ici?’

  ‘Sorry, my French is . . . mal?’

  ‘Il y a un trou. Ici.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t understand.’

  The woman places my open passport on the counter, rotates it through one hundred and eighty degrees, and taps my impassive photograph. ‘Sur les yeux.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s me.’

  The woman shakes her head. ‘C’est troué. Regardez; look.’ And she points to her eyes, first one and then the other. So I look again at my face, and I have to admit there is a certain deadness to my expression.

  ‘’oles,’ she says, and she turns the photograph page over, revealing two small protrusions corresponding to the position of my eyes. To further clarify the issue, the woman folds the back cover away from the page and holds my picture against the glass. Sunlight shines through the two puncture marks on the photograph, turning me into Henry Smith the sinister android.

  ‘Ah,’ I say, ‘holes.’ And I remember inspecting my passport for graffiti, scissor and burn marks outside April’s parents’ house. Right before George hurled a burger at my chest. If I’d studied it for five seconds longer, I might have noticed the tiny holes where April, it seems, decided to jab a pair of pins through my eyeballs. And I remember her laughter when I asked for my passport. Bravo April. Bravo.

  ‘Is no good,’ says the woman, closing my passport.

  ‘No, it’s fine, it’s me.’

  ‘Mais, c’est troué.’

  ‘It was a joke.’

  ‘Is funny?’ She doesn’t look amused.

  ‘Well, obviously not, no.’

  ‘You do it?’

  ‘Me? No! God no.’

  ‘Who do it?’

  ‘Hah, well, that would probably be my girlfriend. Well, fiancée, actually.’

  ‘Ah! Fiancée, you get marry, yes.’

  ‘Actually no, we broke up.’

  ‘Break up?’

  I snap an invisible pencil, make the appropriate sound effect.

  ‘Oh.’

  I nod at this woman, her tone softening now we have finally come to understand each other. ‘Yes, she went a little . . .’ I do a crazy face.

  The woman shakes her head, and picks up the phone.

  I’m a time traveller.

  The return flight from Paris to London didn’t depart until seven in the evening. Arriving in London at approximately the same time. But you’d be surprised just how much gin and tonic you can drink in the blink of an eye, particularly if you go for trebles. I don’t know whether or not time travel increases the effects of alcohol, but when I stood from my seat at Heathrow, it was as if the plane had landed in a pocket of ground level turbulence. There’s probably a PhD in it all somewhere. Once a vandalized passport has been identified, it’s not even a matter of discretion. The local authorities stick you on the first flight home, the airline gets slapped with a fine, you are penalized in units of time – a brief sentence served in departure lounges, economy class and baggage reclaim. I drove here this morning, fourteen hours ago now, or maybe it’s sixteen accounting for the temporal nonsense. Whether I am coming or going is a matter for debate. Either way, I am too drunk to walk straight let alone drive home through London traffic. But time travel can fix that one, too. Ten months ago, almost to the day, I booked a room at the Hilton in Manchester airport after leaving my fiancée on her wedding day. Approximately three hundred days later, I book a room at the Heathrow Hilton, after leaving a different girl at a different wedding.

  It’s enough to make your head spin.

  It’s enough to make you sick.

  Zoe

  The Grand Romantic Gesture

  We walk through the exit marked NOTHING TO DECLARE, and I have to bite my lip to stop from snorting. The last thing I need is to be detained by customs. Vicky is wearing dark glasses, and the smell of wine clings to her like a mouldy cape. I shouldn’t feel smug (particularly when you jumped into bed with a Frenchman less than forty-eight hours ago), but I am rather pleased with myself for avoiding a hangover. I’ve attended maybe five or six weddings, but my memories of them are a jumbled haze of flowers, dancing and painful mornings after. But, with the exception of a glass of champagne for the toast, I went through this one fuelled by nothing stronger than orange juice and coffee. It’s amazing how much you see when your eyes retain the ability to focus. Prowling singles, jaded couples, loving partners. Despite everything, I missed Henry.

  A part of me wondered if he would go for the grand romantic gesture, turning up unannounced like the hero from one of those old movies. But maybe he’s glad to be out of this mess, after all. And I wouldn’t blame him. If I’m honest – and, new promise to myself, I plan on being nothing less – I was disappointed when he failed to clatter through the swing doors, bellowing my name. I slept with my boyfriend’s best friend a week after he was killed. I slept with a random wedding guest a week after walking out on Henry – jilting him, now that I think of it. So who am I to judge anyone? The ceremony and speeches moved me to tears; happy tears at the sincere and simple affection between Rachel and Steve. Maybe a little envy, too, but if you can’t feel sorry for yourself at a wedding, then where the hell else? Christophe sidled up to me for the first dance, but after I removed his hand from my bottom he moved on to someone else. And good for him. Vicky snogged someone from a completely separate function, and I was in bed before midnight.

  This morning, while the rest of the guests slept off their hangovers, I walked and thought and was quiet. I contemplated the future and the past, travelling through time and alternate realities in the hush of the French woodland. Thinking about choices, decisions, accidents and coincidences; about the past and the future. Thinking about thinking and about feeling and the difference between the two. And I thought, not for the first time, that I think too much.

  I focused on the pattern of light between the leaves overhead, listened to the warmth of all the surrounding green, and thought about nothing at all.

  Vicky is tugging at my sleeve. ‘Is that Shitbag?’

  Standing in amongst the huddle of waiting families and cab drivers is Henry. Like the drivers, he’s holding a makeshift sign – an A4 sheet of paper on which is written a single word: SORRY.

  When he smiles, all the defences are lifted from his eyes – and it changes him. The moody caution I first found so attractive is gone, replaced with simple, bright sincerity. And it works. What I want to do is jump into his arms, just like they do in the movies. So that’s exactly what I do.

  Henry

  Complicated Story

  Zoe launches herself at me, throwing her arms around my neck and very nearly pulling my head off. It feels like my spine is about to snap, but this warm forgiving body pressed close against my own is more than I could have hoped for – more than I deserve – so if ever there was a time to dig deep and man up, this is it.

  ‘Missed you,’ I say, hugging her tight and relieving some of the torque on my skeleton.

  ‘Yes,’ Zoe says, appearing to miss the strain in my voice. ‘I missed you, too.’

  ‘Get – a – room.’

  Vicky is looking at me over the top of her sunglasses; her bloodshot eyes are hard to read, a combination of resentment and resignation perhaps.

  ‘Got one,’ I tell her, over Zoe’s shoulder.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Complicated story,’ I say.

  Zoe relaxes her grip around my neck, and I lower her to her feet. ‘Wouldn’t expect anything less from you,’ she says, but she’s still smiling. I barely had time to regist
er the fact before she launched herself at me, but she’s had a haircut since I last saw her. And not a good one.

  ‘This is . . . interesting,’ I say, brushing my fingers through her hair.

  ‘Complicated story,’ she says.

  ‘So. How was the wedding?’

  She’s only been out of the country for two nights, but Zoe answers with an authentic but endearing Gallic shrug.

  ‘Well, I’m never drinking again,’ says Vicky, ‘that’s for sure.’

  ‘I hear that,’ I tell her.

  ‘Been partying?’ says Vicky, a note of derision in her voice.

  ‘I’ve got the car,’ I say. ‘Let’s get your bags and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  Zoe raises her eyebrows. ‘You have a car?’

  ‘It’s . . .’

  ‘Yeah, I get it,’ says Vicky. ‘Complicated.’

  Zoe

  I’ll Most Likely Kill You In The Morning

  Henry moves his hands through my hair, and I refuse to think about Christophe doing the same thing forty-eight hours ago. I. Refuse.

  On the drive back into London, Henry told us about his brilliant plan, his perforated passport and summary deportation from France. He slept the night in the airport hotel and spent the best part of Sunday floating on his back in the pool. ‘Thinking,’ he said, after we dropped Vicky at her flat. She is more reluctant than me to forgive Henry – a non-inclusive goodbye, aimed only at me, a pointed ignorance of Henry’s own farewell, an emphatic closing of his car door. The difference, I suppose, is that I can empathize. I can see how he let it go too far; how he found himself in that castle bedroom, sleepless not with doubt but with certainty. Henry told me about April, getting together, breaking up, getting together again . . . sneaking out of the castle as the sun came up. It was a long story and we drove back and forth over the Thames, zigzagging its bridges and taking random turns and roads and exits, just driving and talking. The car itself has been vandalized; deeply and deliberately gouged along both sides – a gift from the disgruntled brother of Henry’s ex-fiancée. It’s been hard on him. April is now overdue with Henry’s best man’s baby, which must be disconcerting on several levels. I received Henry’s story as if it were about someone other than the man sitting beside me. And in a way, it was.

  ‘My place or mine?’ I asked him.

  We stopped for groceries on the way, dropped into Henry’s for a change of clothes and his scissors. In my garden now, a mirror propped against the shed, I watch Henry in reflection as he examines my hair. He lifts what’s left of my fringe and snips at it with his scissors.

  ‘Are you sure you should be taking any more off?’ I ask.

  ‘If I could add it on, I would. But’ – cutting again – ‘what’s done is done.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Is that a big question or,’ he tugs at a lock of my hair, ‘hah, a big question?’

  ‘Both, I guess.’

  ‘Try and make the best of a disaster,’ he says.

  ‘Will you stay in London?’

  Henry shakes his head. ‘I haven’t really thought about it. Trying not to, anyway. It’s a shame you missed the party,’ he says. ‘My dad would have liked you.’

  ‘Not your mum?’

  ‘She’d . . . she’d love you,’ he says. His expression flickers with something like embarrassment before he looks away. Henry moves to the back of my head, teases out the short hacked hair between his fingers and snips millimetres from the tips. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,’ he says.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  Henry shrugs, shakes his head.

  It was late when I arrived home after my aborted trip to see his parents, and I inflicted all my vandalism – negatives, sugar bride and groom, my hair – indoors. The birdhouse Henry made hangs from a nail on the side of the shed, unpopulated but still intact.

  ‘When I went up last week,’ Henry says, ‘my mum told me . . . she more or less admitted to having had an affair. Or a fling or a . . . whatever.’

  ‘Awkward.’

  ‘Uh huh. Her and Dad both, if I understood her. But . . . what I did was worse. I think it’s the worst thing anyone I know has ever done. So . . .’ He sighs heavily. ‘Not something you share with someone you care about.’

  ‘I slept with someone,’ I say, before I’ve decided exactly what it is I’m confessing to. Henry’s expression collapses. His lips part but he says nothing.

  I shake my head, take hold of his hand. ‘After Alex died,’ I say.

  Henry relaxes incrementally, and squats down at my feet.

  ‘Maybe a week after he died,’ I go on. ‘I . . . we were celebrating – that’s not right, remembering him; a wake, I suppose you’d call it. And . . . he was one of Alex’s best friends.’

  Henry says nothing, merely smiles and nods. He appears entirely unfazed by this revelation, and I think – no, I feel – I feel a deep and keen and physical love for him. I feel it in my scalp and my lungs and the palms of my hands.

  ‘What I’m trying to say is . . . I understand. I understand how we can do . . . things. Make mistakes.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,’ he says again. ‘I was ashamed.’

  ‘What’s done is done,’ I say.

  Henry smiles, kisses me, resumes fiddling with my hair.

  ‘Leave it,’ I tell him. ‘It’s got a year to grow out.’ Which kind of bursts whatever bubble we were inflating.

  Henry cooks while I shower, and we eat off our laps in front of the TV, a horror movie where a petulant but inventive death refuses to be denied.

  ‘My dad’s always been big on tradition,’ I say.

  ‘What, like Christmas?’

  ‘Mostly, yes. Like flying kites on New Year’s Day . . .’ I drift off, realizing I won’t be around for that particular tradition this year.

  ‘We always have an argument at Christmas,’ Henry says. ‘Without fail. And New Year. And Easter.’

  ‘Do you know that film, The Princess Bride?’

  ‘Sounds a bit girly.’

  ‘You’d like it, I think. Pirates et cetera. We used to watch it every Boxing Day, for years. Ruining all the best lines by saying them out loud. Inconceivable. As you wish. My name is Inigo Montoya, and so on. There’s this one: Good night, Westley. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning. Or something like that.’

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘Westley is a cabin boy on the Dread Pirate Roberts’ ship. And Roberts says this to him every night.’

  ‘I’ll most likely kill you in the morning?’

  ‘Every night for three years. The point is, he never does. Kill him. They just continue on with their adventure. He . . . loves him, I suppose.’

  Henry turns to look at me, a realization dawning in his eyes. ‘So he lives?’

  I nod. ‘Happily ever after . . .’

  ‘Sounds nice.’

  ‘What I’m saying, Henry Smith . . . is I don’t want to leave you behind.’

  Henry inspects his hands, first the palms, then the backs, as if looking for answers.

  ‘Bloody hell, Henry, do you want to come to Thailand, or what?’

  Henry laughs, nods.

  ‘Is that a yes?’

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll need to get a new passport.’

  Henry

  Postcardoes

  ‘Zoe good?’ Gus says.

  He’s rolling a cigarette as I apply foils to my client’s head.

  ‘She’s great,’ I tell him.

  ‘Gonna miss her, huh?’

  I turn to face Gus. Wince.

  He puts his tobacco down. ‘No?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘When?’

  I hold up four fingers.

  Gus picks up his cigarette and continues rolling. ‘Better send postcards, man. Lots of postcardoes.’

  September

  September 1 at 7.21 PM

  From: Audrey

  To: Alex Willia
ms

  Hello Son

  I had a nice surprise last month. Just after your birthday, Zoe wrote to me. It was nice to hear from her after all these months, sad but nice at the same time. We wallow in our own grief sometimes, and forget that other people are hurting too. When your dad died, I missed him desperately. But I had you and Pat, and we all held each other together. But Zoe doesn’t have that in her life and it must be so hard for her.

  She’s decided to go travelling. Like you did after your degree. I was a little shocked at the idea, but I can see now how it will help her to move on and heal. It feels odd to say it, but if I could have one wish for Zoe, it would be that she finds someone new to share her life with. I know how much you loved her Alex, and I know you’d want her to have that again. I told her as much. I told her life is for living and sharing and loving, and I told her to get out there and make the most of every moment.

  I think what Zoe is doing is incredibly brave and I admire her for it. Because if we don’t move on, well, we wither don’t we. So, I’ve decided that I’m going to move on too. I’m going to stop writing these letters. It’s been a comfort to me in a lot of ways, but I don’t think it’s healthy – it keeps the pain alive and that’s not the part of you I want to hold on to.

  I don’t need to write letters to keep you in my heart – you were there before you were born and you’ll be there as long as it keeps beating. So this is it.

  Goodbye my beautiful boy.

  All my love and all my heart

  Mum xx

  Henry

  Something Hidden

  Zoe has lightbulbs that were more difficult to replace than me.

  Literally; one of them was so old the metal fitting had become fused to the Bakelite housing and I had to replace the whole thing. From start to finish, including a trip to B&Q and a mild electrocution, the whole re-lightbulbing project spanned three days. Gus replaced me in a single three-minute phone call. The dental practice replaced me in an afternoon. Dorothy struggled, taking a whole day and a half to find a replacement lodger for my room. April is a mother now, to a baby girl called Violet Sheila. Brian called personally (unsupervised while April spent the night in hospital with her daughter), and gave me all the important statistics. Half-drunk and very emotional, he informed me that ‘Vi’ has her mother’s eyes – which is wonderful news for the little one.