The Trouble with Henry and Zoe Read online

Not since she changed careers from law to publishing, so almost three years now.

  Maybe I should buy myself a badge, she thinks.

  She remembers sitting in the bath on a Sunday evening, heavy with depression and anxiety at another week in a job she hated. Pulling handfuls of hair until it felt like her skin would tear if her hair didn’t come loose. Twice, in fact, Zoe had pulled too hard and found herself holding a fistful of long black strands. An online search told Zoe that this compulsion was called trichotillomania; the fast alliterative syllables made her scalp itch, and the accompanying images of plucked shame-faced women, staring out of the screen like abandoned doll-heads, proved to be fast and effective therapy. Went cold turkey, before I ended up looking like a plucked chicken, Zoe thinks, relaxing her grip on her hair and reaching for the conditioner.

  As the conditioner soaks in, Zoe shaves her legs with Alex’s razor. He hates her using it on her legs, but she hates him leaving it out on the sink, so that makes them even. When he’d hooked his hands under her leg this morning, Zoe cringed, knowing he would have felt the wild stubble scratching against his soft hands. She inspects her shins for patches of eczema and sees none.

  And why would she? Life is good: she’s working on a new book – not a ‘baby-book’, thank you very much, but a story for emerging readers. Sure, it features a rhyming cat and a gnomic cheetah, but it’s a book with an important message for the little ones: be happy with who you are. An important message for the big ones, too.

  Zoe taps the razor on the side of the bath, her and Alex’s intermingled stubble floating off together in a clag of green-tinted soap. Almost romantic in a gross kind of way. And Alex is romantic when the mood takes him. Yes, he’s a bit blokey sometimes – a bit forgetful, maybe, a bit messy, a bit . . . whatever, blokey. But it goes with the strong footballer’s legs, the hairy chest, brown voice and dimpled chin. She knows she’s biased, but of all her friends’ men Alex is easily the best looking. And besides, isn’t he her knight in shining armour? If she’s enjoying her new career, then she should thank Alex for giving her the courage and support to leave the last one.

  The bathwater has turned cool and the surface is speckled with black dashes of Alex’s beard and Zoe’s leg hair. She holds her breath and sinks under the surface, pinching her nose closed with one hand and fanning out her hair with the other. She’ll have to shower before she towels off now.

  When she gets out of the bath, she calls down the stairs to Alex but he still hasn’t returned from the shops. Unless he’s playing his decks or some Xbox game with his headphones on. He can be incredibly thoughtful like that, after all. He knows how much she likes her sleep and has learned where all the creaky floorboards are so he can move about the house ‘like a ninja’. It would be easier, of course, if he would just fix the floorboards, but less cute, perhaps. If he is downstairs, Zoe hopes he’s playing records and not shooting zombies. She likes seeing him behind his decks, pouting a little as he nods to the beat; some men look silly when they head-nod, particularly when they pout, but Alex is handsome enough to pull it off. Plus, he always gives the impression that he’s not taking himself entirely seriously – a glimmer in his eye that says: I know. He can slide his head side to side like Indian ladies do when they’re dancing – but rather than thinking it makes him look cool, it always seems to amuse him. Whenever she went to watch him play a set, when he did his head-wobble thing, he’d seek her out, dancing in the crowd, and wink: I know. She fell in love with that look, with the man behind it. He did it the first time they met.

  It was Zoe’s fourth summer party at the law firm, and after making an exhibition of herself at the second and third, she was drinking slowly and selectively. As such, she was relatively sober when the handsome DJ had appeared beside her at the bar.

  ‘Buy you a drink?’

  ‘It’s a free bar,’ Zoe had said, returning his smile.

  The DJ lowered his voice. ‘Shh . . .’ he said, winking. ‘Let’s pretend.’

  Zoe nodded. Whispered back: ‘Okay.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, as if just noticing Zoe. ‘Buy you a drink?’

  ‘Sure, I’ll have a glass of champagne, please.’

  Affecting surprise, panic, anxiety at this lady’s expensive tastes. ‘Champagne? I . . .’

  Zoe played along with the improvisation. ‘Is that a problem?’

  After a moment’s hesitation. ‘No, God no, it’s just’– the DJ patted his pockets – ‘I think I’ve left my wallet in my Ferrari.’

  ‘We’ve all been there,’ Zoe said. ‘Let me get these, you can buy them next time.’

  The DJ raised his thick eyebrows (If we had children, they would be born with thick black hair, Zoe thought). ‘Next time?’

  Zoe wasn’t given to acts of bold flirtation, but having stumbled into this one she allowed herself to be carried along. ‘Is this a routine?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, laughing.

  The role-play over – but at the right time, before the charade became forced and clunky – Zoe turned to the bar and ordered two glasses of champagne.

  ‘So what do I call you?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘DJ Lexx’ – the head wobble and self-deprecating smile – ‘if you want to book me for a set. Alex if you want to meet me for a drink next week.’

  Zoe clinked her glass against his. ‘Cheers, Alex.’

  Henry

  Locally Sourced

  In the castle it is now only nine hours until Henry slides a ring onto April’s finger. His room comes with a small kettle, mugs, teabags, cartons of everlasting milk and sachets of cheap coffee. Henry fills the kettle in the en suite bathroom and brings it back into the room to boil. The small appliance sounds like a steam train in the predawn hush and, afraid of waking his best man, Henry unplugs it before the water is fully boiled.

  Brian mutters something in his sleep. They have been best friends since the day Henry relieved Brian of a tooth, and Brian helped Henry acquire a new nickname. In their early teens they made birdhouses to sell to the tourists, perfecting a simple design made from a single plank of wood. Recycled slats from builders’ pallets were fine, but needed sanding to remove the splinters. The boys’ preferred material was ‘reclaimed perimeter panels’, and for several years there wasn’t an intact fence in the village. Fortunately for the enterprising vandals, no one connected the mysterious phenomenon with the boys’ booming trade in birdhouses – ‘Handmade with locally sourced materials’.

  Is Brian happy? Henry wonders. He left school at sixteen with four GCSEs, took an apprenticeship changing tyres and oil in a small garage, still works there now, drives a nice enough car, lives in a nice enough house and shags a nice enough girl whenever the opportunity presents itself. He gets pissed on Fridays, plays rugby on Saturdays and – Henry has no doubt – sleeps as soundly as a child seven nights a week. Yeah, why wouldn’t he be happy?

  Locally sourced, Henry muses.

  He remembers filling in university applications. He and April had been dating for less than six months, but neither one doubted that this was the real thing. April had no plans to stay in school a moment longer than necessary, and Henry had promised to apply only to ‘local’ universities. They would see each other every weekend, and throughout the holidays. And after all, they said, everyone knows that absence makes the heart grow fonder. And so, while his mother braided April’s hair in front of Pretty Woman, Henry completed forms for Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds. London held a greater allure, but while April had said it was his decision, her tone had made the consequences clear. And he loved her; if it was a choice between April and London he would take April, and gladly.

  ‘Why dentistry, anyway?’ April had asked.

  Henry had thought about this, of course, and had his theories, but they sounded insincere, mercenary or – infinitely worse to a seventeen-year-old boy – silly.

  Henry’s family moved to the village just in time for Henry to complete the last two years of primary school. He had thought that
being a boxer’s son would make him popular, or at the very least deter anyone with designs on his lunch money. So the new boy made sure to introduce the fact as quickly and often as possible. Within a day he had been in two fights (losing both) and acquired the nickname Little Boots. One of the earliest domestic arguments Henry remembers is the one about his pugilistic education. Big Boots had wanted to get Henry in a pair of gloves as soon as the boy could walk, but his mother – under threat of divorce – had insisted he go nowhere near a boxing gym until he turned eleven. So while his father taught him to throw a stiff jab and a reasonable right cross, Henry was in no way a fighter. And as this fact (the black eyes and split lips) became increasingly apparent, there was no shortage of boys eager to take their turn dumping the boxer’s son on his backside. Henry lost these playground bouts more often than he won, but invariably came a good second, making up in heart what he lacked in talent. In all likelihood, Henry would still be known as Little Boots today, had he not punched out Brian’s tooth and earned himself a new alias. Stunned at this rare success, Henry had picked up the dislodged tooth, wiped it on the front of his shirt and handed it back to his bleeding and bewildered assailant.

  ‘Thinks he’s a flippin’ dentist,’ someone had said from the circle of surrounding boys.

  And that’s all it took.

  Of course, he hadn’t chosen a degree based on his primary school nickname; but neither could he entirely dismiss the notion that a seed had been sewn the day he went home with tooth marks in his knuckles.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Henry in response to April’s question. ‘So long as people have teeth they’ll need dentists, I suppose.’

  ‘Talking of,’ said his mother, indicating a laughing Julia Roberts, ‘you wouldn’t want her taking a bite out of your apple.’

  And his girlfriend returned her attention to the movie.

  With few exceptions, Henry climbed on a train every term-time Friday night for his first three and a half years at university. He knew the timetable, how many paces the platform was from one end to the other, the pattern of the stonework on the station’s outer arches, the shape of its iron skeleton. He lost count of the parties, stunts and trysts he heard about on Monday mornings. The circle he had associated with in the crucial first term remained friendly, but, inevitably, they stopped asking what he was doing on a Friday night, stopped the cajoling charade of imploring him to stick around for the weekend. Henry sensed their frustration at having to clarify (and consequently diminish) the in-jokes that had blossomed at parties he had missed, and so he stopped asking for explanations, instead grinning through the laughter in mute isolation. He stopped rugby training in the week because he couldn’t play matches at the weekend; he stopped going to the cinema because he felt like a gatecrasher in a gang and a creep on his own. He attended all his lectures, studied hard and scored high eighties in all his exams.

  During the summer between his third and fourth years, April had begun talking about engagement. Two of her friends had children now, another was engaged, another married; at nineteen years old April was talking about life passing her by. The conversations they had in bed on Friday nights were frequently melodramatic and often tearful; accusations thrown and demands made. His mother harangued him for taking ‘that sweet beautiful girl’ for granted. ‘Don’t you dare turn into your father,’ she had said. And inside his head, Henry shot back: Just so long as she doesn’t turn into you.

  After an entire summer together – squabbling not infrequently – it seemed the couple could quite easily bear to be parted. Henry had suggested it might be better if he came back once fortnightly from now on, citing the old line about absence and its effect on the human heart. April had immediately and unsmilingly accepted the idea, and Henry discovered that skipping one weekend made it easy to skip two. He made new friendships, went to fancy dress parties, seventies discos and indie gigs. He and April talked on the phone, sent texts and emails. They missed each other, they said, but Henry suspected April’s declarations were as hollow as his own.

  So while it was fundamentally sad, it was neither a surprise nor an intestinal wrench when, halfway through the final term of his fourth year, April told Henry it was over.

  It had been Theresa Johnston’s birthday that weekend, and in the evening a gang of them had followed the girls into town to celebrate in a new American-themed bar with bric-a-brac decor and a small illuminated dancefloor. They drank sweet cocktails, ate chicken wings, sticky ribs and nachos, and – in the diluting presence of a dozen other bodies – enjoyed themselves tremendously. Henry spent more time that evening talking to April’s friend Bobbi than to April. After close to a year travelling around Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Bobbi was departing for Edinburgh University in the autumn. Like many of her friends, April had left school at sixteen, and Henry was somewhat in awe of Bobbi’s almost defiant intrepidity. They sat at the bar sipping Long Island iced-teas, while Bobbi told about hidden coves, island spiders and full-moon parties, intercutting her anecdotes with questions about the more proximal mysteries of campus life, student cuisine and mixed-sex housing, her eyebrows arching suggestively at this last. She asked how Henry was coping with a ‘long-distance’ relationship, her expression turning sincere and solicitous. ‘Is everything okay?’ she asked, placing her hand on top of Henry’s.

  Bobbi wasn’t pretty in the way that April was; in the way of footballers’ wives, girl-band members and minor blonde celebrities. Ask ten men in this bar to choose between them, and ten would pick April. At Edinburgh University, though, the ratio might not be so overwhelming. Freckled, gap-toothed and with messy, shoulder-length ringlets, Bobbi had something more appealing than a conventional aesthetic. She was interesting. Henry looked into her eyes as she told him about the modules – child development, behavioural economics, personality and cognition – she would be studying in her first year. He watched the way she tucked her hair behind her small but slightly prominent ears and saw that she would never ‘scrub up’; she would not one day pull a clip from her hair, ditch a pair of spectacles and transform into an ideal of beauty – no, this was it, gawky, asymmetrical, wide-nosed and still . . . not beautiful, but confident and honest and sexy. And Bobbi knew it, which only added to the effect.

  ‘How far is Edinburgh from Sheffield, do you think?’ Bobbi asked after a long pause, during which Henry had failed to answer her question about long-term relationships. Henry looked up from the table (Bobbi’s hand still lying unselfconsciously on top of his) and smiled. ‘Only a few hours on the train,’ he said. ‘Maybe half a bottle of wine and a few chapters on child economics, or whatever.’

  Bobbi had burst out laughing. ‘Sounds like my kind of ticket,’ she said, inclining her head to the side as if inspecting a painting for some revealing detail. She looked at Henry that way for a moment before abruptly clapping her hands together and jumping down from her barstool. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Got dancing to do. See you around, okay.’

  Henry spent the remainder of the night talking to Brian, reminiscing about old times and drinking too much cheap lager. He watched a succession of men dancing in amongst the girls, bumping deliberately up against them, then cupping their hand against an ear and nodding towards the bar. By far the most popular target was April, and Henry watched with neither pride nor jealousy as his girlfriend laughed flirtatiously, frowned in mock reproval, smiled at some compliment and, ultimately, shook her head. He wondered how this scenario would play out in his absence, and found himself wondering if April wouldn’t be happier with someone else.

  In their taxi home at the end of the night, April had snuggled up close to Henry, linking her arm through his and nestling her head against the side of his neck. But Henry’s body knew what the taxi driver, watching them in the rear-view mirror, couldn’t see. That this physical gesture was one of sadness not intimacy. There was affection too, but it was tired and resigned – maybe it was the passive weight of April’s head; the mindless, almost autistic back and forth of her thumb on th
e back of his hand; the exaggerated sound of her exhaled breath . . . but Henry’s head, and shoulder, and hand – every part of him in contact with April – could feel the inevitable sitting silent and lumpen between them.

  It wasn’t until they were in bed and the lights were off that April had sat up and announced into the darkness: ‘I think we need a break.’ Nothing as final and clear-cut as It’s over, but they both knew it amounted to the same thing. They declared their mutual sadness, reassured each other of their enduring affection, and made love with a passion that had been absent for close to a year. It was no one’s fault; it was simply a sad fact of growing up and growing apart.

  The following morning, after dressing with her back to him, April had kissed Henry goodbye, and told him she loved him, he would always be special to her, and everything about them was right except the timing. After she left the bedroom, Henry heard another door open and the muffled sounds of his mother and April talking in the corridor – reassuring sounds, soothing coos, a kiss. April worked in his mother’s salon full time now, and where the relationship had once projected the cutesy feel of stepmother and surrogate daughter, it had matured into a deep, almost sororal friendship. And Henry had no doubt that his mother knew his relationship was over well before he did.

  It took Bobbi less than a week to contact Henry in the wake of his break-up with April. The first text simply asked if he was okay, she called him ‘hon’ and signed off with a single ‘x’.

  Henry had been immediately aroused by this brief and fundamentally innocuous message. He replied that he was fine, making a pragmatic and open-ended reference to his newfound freedom. Within a week they were talking on the phone. No longer about April and Henry’s breakup – they had exhausted that line of enquiry within a few short texts – but about small town life, student life, their degrees, the books they were reading, the colour of the sky. Three weeks later Bobbi stayed in Sheffield for the weekend – two days of long walks, late night talks and greedy sex. It was the first of several visits that summer, and on only her second stay in Henry’s small student room, Bobbi allowed him to do something to her that April never would: she let Henry cut her hair.