The Two of Us Read online

  Phil places the document on the coffee table and hands me a biro. I touch neither.

  ‘So what happens if he . . . if he hurts himself, if he breaks his leg? What if he chokes on his pizza? You just going to stand and watch?’

  I’m not sure Phil buys into my indignation, and I don’t know that I do either. I understand what this is about, I get the need, but to sign it without at least some protest would feel like a betrayal.

  ‘Of course not,’ says Phil, gently.

  ‘Y. . . y. . . you fuckig will.’

  ‘El, shush a moment. It means El won’t ever be hooked up to a machine to keep him breathing. If he has a heart attack he won’t receive CPR.’

  ‘Means I can d. . . d. . .’

  ‘El, please,’ says Phil.

  ‘K. . . ki. . . killjoy.’

  On the doorstep, Phil cries, as he often does. It’s different tonight, though; it feels desperate – like he’s crying not only for El, but for himself, too.

  ‘You need some time on your own,’ I tell him. ‘A break.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says.

  ‘You’re obviously not. I’ve just spent three hours with the bugger and I’m wrecked.’

  ‘I’m seeing the doctor next week.’

  ‘For . . .?’

  Phil shrugs, cries afresh.

  ‘Would you like me to look after him for a day? A whole day?’

  Phil sniffs, pulls himself together. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he says.

  And I wish I believed him.

  Chapter 9

  I’m having what the French call jamais vu. The opposite of the déjà variety.

  It’s a sense of unfamiliarity around a situation you know you have experienced before. And it’s weird.

  Ivy is asleep with her head in my lap. The chicken caesar dishes are in the sink. There’s a romantic comedy on the TV. The difference, I suppose, is that this is now my home. Our home.

  I found tenants for my Brixton flat two days after I advertised for them. They moved in the following weekend. And just like that you are no longer a bachelor living in a bachelor flat in Brixton. You are a father-to-be, living in a slightly feminine flat in Wimbledon Village.

  I run on a common now, instead of in a park; I buy my groceries in a Waitrose rather than a Sainsbury’s; the sweet 63-year-old lady downstairs has been replaced with a surly 14-year-old git. Instead of a James Bond poster in my bedroom, there is a Frida Kahlo print in the bathroom.

  Everything has changed, but nothing really has.

  Esther and Nino helped with the move. Well, Nino helped with the move; Esther sat on the sofa drinking tea with Ivy. And when we’d finished, Nino cooked pizza and we ate dinner together. Ivy, very obviously, wasn’t drinking. Esther made a comment about Wimbledon being a lovely area to raise children, but instead of acknowledging the comment I asked about her own children. Esther told the story of giving birth to her first son in her own bed (‘destroyed the mattress’) in the flat she still lives in forty years later. She cried and told Ivy to look after me for her, Ivy cried, I came close. And thank God for Nino’s silent stoicism. Esther continued to get good and drunk, thanked Nino endlessly for living in a foreign country so she didn’t have to. ‘Your turn now,’ he told her, and then Esther cried again at the thought of leaving London and all its memories behind.

  In tonight’s movie the love-struck couple embark on a two-minute montage of perfect dates: lobster, Ferris wheel, opera, cinema, jet skis. All the things Ivy and I haven’t done. Instead of cartwheeling across a beach at sunset, we’ve leapfrogged the romance and gone straight to starting a family and passing out in front of the telly.

  It’s our twelve-week scan first thing tomorrow morning, and in the evening we are driving to Bristol to visit Ivy’s parents. But everything is backasswards now, so instead of announcing the news that Ivy is pregnant, I will be introduced as the ‘new’ boyfriend. Ivy will be wearing baggy jumpers all weekend, giving her folks the chance to get used to the idea that she has a man before she drops the news that she’s having a baby. We’re going to claim we’ve been seeing each other since February, and I’ve just been too busy to visit. According to our cover story we have been an item for eight months; it sounds a little suspect to me, but Ivy assures me we’ll work out all the details in the fullness of time. Which is fine in theory, but in practice we only have another twenty-eight weeks before one very major detail makes his or her grand entrance.

  Tonight’s movie was never going to make my top-one-hundred list, but it’s made all the more difficult to enjoy because Ivy’s TV is rubbish. She’s a reader and her flat is a testament to the fact. There are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, and another set in our bedroom – all of them heaving with literature. There are piles of books in the kitchen, the bathroom and the hallway cupboard. (Twenty-three of these books – I counted – hold a bookmark in their approximate centre. Further to Ivy’s assertion that quitting a book is a bad habit, these are the novels – Catch-22, Crime and Punishment, Lord of the Rings, etc. – that she has absolutely not abandoned halfway through: ‘If I mark the place I left off, I haven’t quit, I just haven’t finished yet.’) Point being, Ivy would rather read a book than watch TV, and she takes it as a point of pride that her set is practically a museum piece. My TV, on the other hand, is a 42-inch thing of beauty. And it’s balanced on top of a chest of drawers in the spare bedroom – no space for it in the living room, apparently. Also in the spare bedroom are my Xbox, leather armchair, Le Creuset pans, bedding, and a shoebox full of photos. How we’re going to fit a baby in there is anyone’s guess.

  I experience a hot flush that might be trepidation; although it’s more likely a result of my overheated feet. Ivy gave me a moving-in present of Womble slippers: ‘Now that you live in Wimbledon.’ I’ve never been a slipper wearer, and I don’t remember watching The Wombles on TV – although I suppose I must have done; I’ve had the damn theme tune rattling round my head all evening. Nevertheless, I am now the proud (and very warm) owner of a pair of size 10 blue-tartan Uncle Bulgarias.

  On Ivy’s crappy TV the rom-com couple are making love on a beach, going through all the favourite positions, biting their lips, entwining their fingers, gazing into each other’s eyes. They come together and fall back onto the golden sand, thoroughly satisfied and with their hair still perfect.

  I slide my hand down Ivy’s body and onto her growing bump. She shifts position in my lap and begins to snore.

  Everything the same; everything different.

  Jamais vu.

  Chapter 10

  The sonographer introduces herself as Valerie.

  ‘This might come as a bit of a shock,’ she says, holding up a tube of gel. ‘It’s cold.’

  We’re in St George’s Hospital in Tooting, where Ivy plans to have our baby. She’s lying on her back, the top buttons of her jeans unfastened so that the white scalloping of her pants is visible. Her shirt is rolled up to her breastbone, revealing the smooth, curving dome of her formerly flat belly. The sonographer applies the clear gel to Ivy’s stomach and Ivy’s grip tightens around my hand. She is wearing a pair of antique-looking cufflinks in the shape of four-leaf clovers. Whether they were a conscious choice or not, I don’t know.

  The room is bright and friendly; colourful prints on the walls offset the cold clinical greys and whites of the bulky technical equipment. Ivy’s palm is hot and clammy in my hand. This morning she puked longer and harder than she has for weeks. I asked if she was excited about seeing her baby for the first time, and Ivy said she was frightened. I sat in the hallway outside the bathroom, and as she brushed her teeth, I asked did she know that the baby was the size of a lime now? Yes, she said. Did she know the baby has fingers, kidneys, muscles, bones? Ivy closed the bathroom door. When she came out she climbed back into bed and opened a book – code, I assume, for leave me alone.

  Valerie slides the white probe around Ivy’s stomach. ‘Here we are,’ she says. ‘There’s the
head,’ and on a wall-mounted monitor, a round but otherwise indistinct shape comes into view.

  Ivy starts to cry. ‘My baby?’ she says. Asking, rather than declaring, as if she is still reluctant to count this chicken.

  ‘Your baby,’ says the sonographer, smiling like she has the best job in the world. She moves the probe to the side of Ivy’s belly. And then she frowns – not an expression you want to see in a room like this. Ivy doesn’t notice because her eyes have not left the monitor. Valerie turns from the screen and looks at me with an expression that is impossible to read. ‘Er . . .’ she says.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  Valerie might be smiling but it’s hard to be sure because she’s biting her bottom lip. ‘Well . . .’

  Ivy’s head snaps around to the sonographer. ‘What? Is something wr—’

  ‘Everything is perfect,’ Valerie says, finally. ‘More than,’ she adds. ‘See this area here . . .?’ and an onscreen cursor traces a circular area just beneath my baby’s head.

  Ivy nods, I nod.

  ‘That,’ says the sonographer, ‘is the other head.’

  ‘The other . . .?’ I manage, after what feels like forever.

  ‘Baby,’ says Valerie. ‘The other baby.’

  I raise my coffee to my mouth, realize my mouth is already hanging open, decide I don’t want coffee and return the mug to the table. I feel like my hand should be trembling, but I think I’m too numb, too disengaged from my physical self to do anything as organized as tremble.

  Ivy is staring at a small black-and-white photograph, a print-out of our scan, of our children.

  ‘Twins,’ I say.

  Ivy nods.

  My coffee is untouched. I pick it up, get it all the way to my mouth this time and take a sip. It’s cold – not just lukewarm, but as cold as tap water – and leaves a clag of congealed milk skin on my teeth. I might be hungry, but it’s hard to tell. I genuinely can’t recall whether or not I ate breakfast this morning. I glance at my watch and see that it’s still two hours until anything like lunchtime. This doesn’t resolve whether or not I’m hungry, but I do need to get on a train in the next five minutes. The agency has asked me to shoot their toilet roll commercial, and in an hour’s time I have to begin casting for a man in a giant rabbit costume.

  My sister, Maria, had twins. She is fond of telling anyone who will listen that it was the hardest bloody thing she has ever done. This from a woman who had her first child when she was sixteen and raised the baby without any help from the shit-bag absent father. Since then Maria passed her A levels whilst raising one baby, and gained a degree while raising three. She’s run three marathons, all of them in under four hours. She broke her leg skiing and had to crawl out from a copse of trees through four-foot-deep snow dragging a snapped tibia behind her. Twins? She’ll tell you, Hardest bloody thing I have ever done.

  ‘Twins,’ Ivy says, not looking up from the grainy evidence in her hands. In the picture, the babies – plural! – are facing in the same direction, as if one is sitting on the other’s lap. It looks crowded in there.

  I sip my coffee again, having already forgotten that it’s cold and tasteless. I take another sip anyway for something to do – something approaching normal.

  ‘Twins,’ I say.

  ‘Twins,’ says Ivy.

  The casting takes place in an upstairs room above a shoe shop on Carnaby Street. Present are: Joe; Suzi, the agency art director; Henry (female), the agency producer; and myself – although to say I’m present is a stretch.

  ‘Fisher?’ says Joe.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Would you like to take us through the script?’

  The room is white and featureless, maybe eighteen feet wide and long. Also present, standing on an ‘X’ marked on the floor with black electrical tape, is a middle-aged male actor.

  ‘The script?’ I ask.

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ Joe says, forcing a laugh.

  ‘I can do it, if you like,’ says the art director, a pretty girl who looks like she’s only a few years out of art college.

  ‘Might be for the best,’ says Joe, again with the practised laugh. ‘I have to be somewhere in November.’

  ‘So you know loo roll ads, right?’ begins Suzi. ‘How they all have cute cats or puppies or bears? Well, we’re taking the piss out of that.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ says the actor. He’s potbellied, unshaven, sounds like he smokes filterless cigarettes and has done since childhood.

  ‘You’re going to be a bunny,’ says Suzi. ‘Mr Hoppity.’

  ‘What, like a rabbit?’

  ‘It’s as if we’re shooting one of those cliché loo roll adverts,’ says Suzi. ‘Then the director – in the commercial, another actor – he yells “cut”, and you take the head off your costume, revealing yourself to be an actor – not a real bunny.’ Suzi laughs at the ridiculousness of what she’s saying. ‘Sorry, it sounds all a bit . . . God, I dunno . . .’

  ‘Meta?’ suggests Joe.

  ‘Post-ironic?’ Henry tries.

  ‘Wanky!’ says Suzi, and she laughs.

  ‘Wanky,’ says the actor. ‘Gotcha.’

  It’s nice to meet advertising people that don’t take themselves too seriously. People who have no illusions about what it is they’re doing – in this case, selling bog roll. That said, Suzi can’t be older than twenty-four; in a couple of years she’ll undoubtedly be as arrogant, deluded and precocious as the job requires.

  ‘Point is,’ says Henry, ‘you’re not playing a bunny; you’re playing an actor playing a bunny.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ says the actor.

  ‘And you hate it,’ she says. ‘Underneath the suit you’re a tough guy.’

  ‘Like a gangster?’ he asks hopefully.

  ‘In a bunny suit,’ says Joe. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Right-o.’

  ‘Like the loo roll, you see,’ says Suzi. ‘Soft, but tough.’

  ‘Okey-doke. Tough bunny.’

  I’ll need two of everything from now on: two cots, two car seats, two great big fluffy bunnies.

  ‘William?’ asks Joe, his voice one notch up from normal conversational volume.

  Joe only calls me William when he’s patronizing, antagonizing or chastising me, so it’s a good bet that I’ve just missed something.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I say.

  ‘Anything to add?’ says Joe.

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘No, thank you.’

  And so we put the actor through his paces. We give him lines to deliver, ask him to do them in a variety of accents – London, New York, Eastern Bloc. We make him hop like a bunny. And then we do it again with another actor and another and another and I don’t know how many more. Throughout the session, people talk to me, ask my opinion, ask if I want things. For the most part, I have no idea what they are saying, so I limit my responses to a series of ambiguous grunts, monosyllables and variations on the classic deferment I’m not sure, what do you think? Although I abandoned the latter approach after it became apparent someone had just asked whether I wanted tea or coffee.

  ‘Great day, everybody,’ says Joe, and it seems we’re finished. ‘Got some good bunnies, I think.’

  ‘Spoilt for choice,’ says Henry.

  ‘Deffo,’ says Suzi.

  ‘William?’ asks Joe.

  ‘Couldn’t agree more,’ I say. ‘Let’s er . . . you know, sleep on it? Make some decisions next week?’

  ‘Very sensible,’ says Henry. ‘Best not to rush these things.’

  ‘Cool,’ I say.

  ‘But we’ll need a decision by nine a.m. Monday morning, ’kay?’

  ‘Monday,’ I repeat, because my brain is too preoccupied (twins twins twins!) to form a more sophisticated response.

  Joe waits until we are on the street and clear of the agency people before he grabs me by the bicep and demands: ‘What the fuck is going on with you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Who the fuck else was ac— Suzi,’ he says, over my sho
ulder, switching effortlessly from incandescence to slick affability.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Suzi says, ‘I wondered . . . I was wondering if you . . .’

  Joe is still gripping my upper arm, his fingers digging painfully into my flesh. Suzi holds something towards me. It looks like a pink Lego brick. The only remotely feasible explanation I can come up with is that Suzi is psychic, has sensed I am about to become a father, and is presenting me with a gift for my child. I almost tell her that I’ll need two, because I’m having twins. Instead, I just look at her as if she’s mental.

  ‘It’s a script,’ Suzi says. ‘I mean it’s a memory stick, but there’s a, you know, script . . .’

  I take the Lego brick and slide it open, confirming that, yes, it is indeed a memory stick.

  ‘Only if you have the time, of course,’ she says.

  ‘Time?’

  ‘To read it.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I know you know your films,’ she says, blushing, ‘and I’d really appreciate your . . . you know, opinion.’

  I like films, but I wouldn’t claim to know films. What I know is how to drop a movie reference into a commercial treatment so that advertising folk can forget they’re working on, oh I dunno, say a toilet roll commercial. But I don’t know films.

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ I say.

  Suzi smiles. ‘Thank you.’ She holds out her hand for me to shake it, then thinks better of it and goes up on tiptoes to kiss my cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she says again, then walks quickly away.

  Joe, still holding my arm, pulls me around so I am facing him. ‘We will get to that’ – he nods in Suzi’s direction – ‘in a moment, but first things last: what the fuck is wrong with you? If I didn’t know you were too much of a square, I’d swear you were on something.’

  ‘Will you let go of my arm? It’s nearly off, you frigging goon.’

  Joe releases me one finger at a time.

  ‘And I’m not square, you gob-shite. If anyone’s square it’s you, you sodding . . . square.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Can we get a drink?’

  ‘Fuck me inside out,’ says Joe. ‘You’re sure? There’s no chance it’s a terrible mistake?’