Charlotte Street (25 page)

Pamela strode out and dropped another thousand packets of sugar on the table.

Dev and I dropped Abbey off at Victoria to catch the six o’clock to Brighton.

‘What are you guys doing next Friday?’ she said.

‘Dunno,’ I said.

‘I’ll call you,’ she said, kissing us both on the cheeks and backing away, saluting us with an unlit cigar.

‘She is totally hot for us,’ said Dev, watching her go. ‘By the way, I told her I have a degree in sculpture. If you could remember that, that would really help me out.’

‘Right. To Charlotte Street,’ I said. But not for why you think.

‘You came!’ said Clem, clutching his beer tightly. He’d scratched off the label almost entirely, his nerves having taken full control of his fingers.

‘It was pick of the day in
London Now
,’ I said. ‘We
had
to come.’

‘Don’t judge me too harshly,’ he said, winking. ‘It’s only my third giggle.’

Clem had started calling his comedy gigs ‘giggles’. I hoped it wasn’t typical of his set, but I had a feeling it might be.

‘This is Dev, my flatmate,’ I said.

‘What’s Dev short for?’ said Clem, and Dev was about to tell him, but then Clem said, ‘Because he’s got little legs!’

Dev stared at him. Clem tried to explain.

‘What’s Dev short for? He’s got little legs.’

He burst out laughing and made a whoosh sound to imply it’d gone over Dev’s head, which I suppose, if he were that short, it would’ve.

We stood at the back of Chucklehead, in a part-time disco maybe sixty feet from Percy Passage, and took in the scene. A hen party on the front row, already drunk and rowdy at just gone half seven, the bride-to-be at the centre of a mass of pink wings and halos. A group of foreign students behind them, victims of a last-minute flyering campaign, lured in by promises of the night of their lives and a genuine London experience. A middle-aged couple behind them, possibly fooled by badly-photocopied photos of Jimmy Carr and Michael McIntyre, neither of whom, I would wager, had ever turned up to ply their trade at the Chucklehead, when Wembley or the O2 at least had a backstage area and free water.

By the bar, Clem was ingratiating himself with the other comics, trying to talk about the skill and craft of joke writing while they attempted to get into the right headspace to get the night started and over with as soon as possible, not one hundred per cent keen on taking advice from this middle-aged two-gig open spot.

‘So what do you think the story is with Abbey?’ said Dev, nudging me.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Why’s she so keen to spend her Friday and Saturday with us? Why does she want to meet up next week?’

‘I think she finds us charming.’

Dev laughed.

It
was
a little ludicrous, I thought.

‘She’ll get bored,’ Dev said. ‘They always do. She seems like a free spirit, and they flit about a lot, don’t they? They sort of collect friends and stick them into groups: “These are my music friends. These are my arty friends. These are my thirtysomething lady-challenged should-really-have-settled-down-by-now friends from gritty north London.
They
eat in
cafés
!”’

‘I dunno. She helped. She sort of helped with Sarah. Forced the issue, made us talk openly about things.’

‘And is she—’

‘I don’t know if she has a boyfriend. You should ask her.’

‘If I ask her, she’ll say yes. It’s better not to know. That way you’re always in with a chance. Even if they’re with their husbands, and you’ve just watched them take their vows,
never
ask them if they’re married.
Totally
ruins your chances.’

And then the compère was on the stage to introduce the giggle, and Clem started to scratch off his second label of the night.

‘Ohhh, yes,’ said Clem, pushing through the double doors of the club and out onto the street, cleverly trying to be the dog from that advert. ‘Ohhh,
yes
.’

He half-punched the air as Dev and I followed him outside, wondering what to say.

‘You certainly seemed to be having fun up there,’ said Dev, and I was annoyed, because that was precisely the level of non-commitment I wanted to have. ‘How do
you
feel it went?’

‘Me? Three words:
Worst
Great Western! You heard the response!’

We just smiled. We
had
heard it, but mainly we had heard it as a shuffle, or cough.

‘I need a drink!’ said Clem, waving his hands in front of himself like he’d had simply the most
unbelievable
evening.

‘Thing about the travelcard stuff,’ said Clem, as we sat, staring at our cocktails, ‘is that it’s
just
inclusive enough. Everyone’s seen a travelcard; everyone’s bought a travelcard. So when I say, “This travelcard says I can get to King’s Cross by ‘any route permitted’”, and then I say, “so I can go via the
moon
, can I?”, it gets a big laugh, because everyone’s seen a travelcard, but no one’s thought of going to the moon with one.’

We were ten minutes in to Clem’s dissection of a five-minute set, and we were still on the first joke. Dev had zoned out the second Clem had started speaking, staring around the bar of the Charlotte Street Hotel: Clem’s little treat to thank us for our support. I don’t think he’d realised that his little treat would cost him about £30 a drink. He’d tried haggling with the barman but that hadn’t worked, so now he was going to make us work for our cocktails.

‘If you had to pinpoint a favourite moment,’ he said. ‘What would that be? I’m just interested.’

‘Um …’ I said, pretending to think. The windows were open and outside, the pavements filled with tables and chatter and wine. An elegantly-dressed doorman fiddled with his cuffs, pretending he wasn’t waiting for the end of his shift, while Dev stared at a group of girls, all straightened hair and Louboutin shoes, their Blackberry Pearls forming a caravan around three Sauv Blancs and two vodka limes, as if to say, ‘Yes, we are high-powered and successful and work-oriented, but here on Charlotte Street we play hard, too.’

‘Because my favourite moment,’ said Clem, oblivious to the fact that no one had replied, ‘was probably that ad-lib, where the guy dropped the glass, and I said, “Careful, now!”.’

‘That
was
a good bit,’ I said, encouragingly, and Dev seemed surprised that someone else was talking.

‘Oh, what am I doing?’ said Clem, mock-slapping his forehead. ‘Tonight’s not all about me. What were
your
favourite bits?’

‘You just asked that, didn’t you?’ said Dev.

‘But you didn’t answer,’ said Clem.

‘I liked the ad-lib,’ said Dev.

‘But that’s what I said,’ said Clem.

‘Well, there you go,’ said Dev, and Clem looked grumpy.

‘I should head off anyway,’ said Clem. ‘Need to work on my material. Big giggle at the Smile High Club next week. Need to nail it. Then the aim is corporates. That’s where the money is.’

He drained his cocktail and banged the glass down on the table.

‘Cocktail is a funny word, isn’t it, considering it contains neither?’

I forced a laugh and he smiled, broadly.

‘Well,
that’s
going in the set!’ he said, and then, as I worked out what my reaction should be, he seemed to have spotted someone at the bar.

‘Oh, was your brother at the giggle?’ he said. ‘Kept that quiet!’

‘Who?’ I said.

‘Your brother. Isn’t that your brother at the bar?’

‘Jase hasn’t got a brother,’ said Dev.

I turned to look.

‘I never forget a face,’ said Clem. ‘Or a watch. Or a
watch
face!’

The man he meant was deciding which beer to go for. He was asking questions and tapping the pumps. And then he half-turned, and …
oh
…

‘Not that I can see his watch now, of course,’ said Clem. ‘But I could in that photo you had.’

I froze.

People sometimes say they froze, but they don’t mean it like I mean it. I froze, good and proper, because it was him. He was here. He was here in this bar.

‘What does he do again?’ asked Clem. ‘What does he do, your brother?’

‘Yes,’ said Dev, now realising, now recognising, now smiling. ‘What does your brother do?’

‘Chiropractor,’ I said, quietly reaching for the memory of whatever I’d told Clem that day.

‘I thought he was an orthodontist?’

‘He dabbles.’

‘And his wife has yellow hair?’

‘All over her head.’

‘Right. Well, anyway,’ said Clem, as I stared on, and he started to say something about getting his things together and wondering if he should get the bus or the tube or maybe splash out on a taxi, but I’d stopped listening, because here he was – the man, Chunk, the chunky watch man, and maybe that meant that
she
would be here, too.

I suppose it made sense I’d bump into him here. They both must work around Charlotte Street. He’s well-to-do, with his Alaska flat and his watch and his tan and his special edition car. Makes sense he’d be schmoozing at the Charlotte Street Hotel, where you can either buy a drink or pay your rent. He’s probably wooing a client, sealing a deal.

My eyes scanned the room again. Was she here? Was she here too?

And then something strange happened. I began to wish that she wouldn’t be. It swept over me and stayed there, this feeling of absolutely not wanting her to be here. I would
hate
it if she were here, in fact.

I didn’t feel ready, for one thing, though my eyes scanned the room, just in case. I hadn’t had a haircut, and I didn’t like what I was wearing, and I felt like a self-conscious teenage girl dressed for church and surprised by the news she might be about to meet that guy from a boyband who happens to be a friend-of-a-friend of her parents.

Second: if she
was
here, in this ground floor bar on Charlotte Street, in amongst the Blackberry Pearls and the shiny hair and the Louboutins, that meant she was here with
him
. And if she was here with him, there’s no way she could ever be here with me.

And third (God, there was a
third
!): if she was here with him, and not here with me, that would be it. It would be over. The romance and mystery and intrigue of stealing a girl’s photographs and then using them to try to stalk her – that classic Mills & Boon plotline – would be over for good.

I studied the man for as long as I could without feeling like I might be noticed. Well-cut classic navy blue suit, light-blue shirt, silk tie. Shiny shoes, but with silver buckles. I felt glad about that. I’m not sure I could love any girl that loved a guy with buckles on his shoes. He was built well, which makes me feel better than saying he was well-built, and his hair was longer at the back than it looked on the photos.

He was wearing no wedding ring.

‘You should go up and talk to him,’ said Dev. ‘Find something out about him. Ask him if he’s got a girlfriend.’

‘You think I should walk up to this stranger in a bar and ask him if he’s got a girlfriend?’

‘Not straight away, no. Ask him what football team he supports, something manly, and
then
ask him if he’s got a girlfriend.’

‘So I should walk up to a man in a bar, ask him what team he supports and then say, “Do you have a girlfriend?”’

‘You are deliberately trying to make this sound like a gay thing.’

I looked over at him again, drinking his half of Peroni, and laughing with another man. Colleague? Friend? Whoever he was, he was leaning up against the bar, like he belonged here, like the Charlotte Street Hotel was his, and this was his party, full of strangers he’d allowed to drop by.

Our plan had been to drink these and then slope off to the Newman Arms for a couple amongst our own kind, but now Dev looked excited.

‘I’m going to go up if you don’t,’ he said. ‘He must work round here, and either she was visiting him when you kept seeing her, or she works here too. They might just be colleagues.’

‘Do not go up,’ I said, fixing him with a very serious look indeed. ‘This is not about him, it’s about her, and she’s not here.’

But what I was really afraid of was Dev striking up a conversation with the man, explaining the photos, saying what a terrific coincidence this is, and then somehow agreeing to hand them over to him. Because then I would be robbed. Robbed of the chance. Robbed of the moment. The moment I craved. The moment I hadn’t told him I felt could be the start of something. The beginning of a story. The kind of thing Sarah, now older, now more cynical, jaded by life and jaded by me, would laugh at, but which I never would. The kind of thing men aren’t supposed to want, or crave, or admit to, because it’s far easier to say only women want these things, and all
we
want is to watch
Top Gear
in our
Top Gear
T-shirts and have silent, bowed women bring us our
Top Gear
magazines.

And as I was about to explain that to Dev, he stood up and marched straight over to the bar.

‘Well, it thrills me to say,’ said Dev, minutes later, outside the Fitzroy Tavern and shaking slightly with delight, ‘that now we know you’re definitely in with a shot. I think you’re definitely in with a shot.’

We stood, pints in hand, relieved to be back amongst our own, staring through the window of the dimly-lit bar. Dev had used the moment and was now revelling in the information he had brought back from the front.

‘And why do I think that? Because that man in there—’ he pointed, and I batted his hand down in case we were seen ‘— has absolutely no sense of humour. And you have the beginnings of one, so you’re winning.’

I looked to the glass again. The man’s friend must just have said something funny, because the man slapped him on his arm and reared his head back in laughter. From a distance, the man
seemed
to have a sense of humour, but I was willing to believe Dev on this one.

‘It’s always topping lists, isn’t it, sense of humour?’ he said, looking ponderous. ‘It’s always right up there, so I don’t know what he’s got going for him, other than money and looks and possibly charm. But you – you have nearly a sense of humour.’