The A-Z of Us (3 page)

The reality was that the house was in disarray, the builders wouldn't return until after the bank holiday, and the project's principle financial backer, my husband, was now living in a hotel, refusing to speak to me.

It was a mess. A big fucking mess of a mess.

I ripped the plans from the makeshift kitchen table, mashing them together like a schoolgirl crumpling paintings.

Maybe my mother was right. Maybe I am bad to the bone. Maybe I deserved all this.

I called Ian out of panic. I needed to hear his voice. I needed something familiar, a kind word. But most of all, I needed that particular form of male ambivalence I knew Ian would be able to offer. He would not judge me. He would simply try to help. I needed his energy, his overwhelming enthusiasm for giving assistance.

The surprising thing was that the moment he answered the phone I wanted to smash the receiver down, run upstairs to the unmade bed and crawl under the covers, for ever. Suddenly, the last thing on earth I wanted to do was to tell Ian about Raj. To admit that I had failed.

So I tried with all my might to be normal, to chat with
him as old friends do, and then he asked me if I was okay, in that soft reassuring voice that almost requested me not to be okay, so that he could take care of me, so that he could be my best friend once more and come to the rescue as he had done all those times in the past. I'd almost cried, but managed to contain myself at the last moment.

‘Fuck it,' I said to the empty house, as if these were the only two words I had left, the only words I'd ever be able to use again.

And now I lie in the bath twisting my wedding ring round and round my finger. I'm terrified, I know that. I have always feared the unknown, a trepidation that worsened after my father's death. As a little girl I always thanked my parents (silently) for producing me second.

I used to ask Molly incessant nervous questions about what my future had in store. How high was the diving board you had to leap from to pass the swimming exam? Which teachers accepted late homework? How did a tampon work? What was it like to kiss? Was beer disgusting? Was a man's penis really like an uncooked Sainsbury's pork and onion sausage?

To escape my fear, I plunged into romantic fiction – Catherine Cookson, Maeve Binchy, even Jane Austen, intoxicated by the adventurous heroines who laboured and loved, who acted as my surrogates, doing deeds of derring-do and high romance that I knew I'd never be capable of. The funny thing is, now I'm in my own story, I just wish I could turn to the end. To see what happens.

The doorbell rings. For an instant I wonder if it's Raj, returning to talk things through, a bunch of flowers in
hand. My heart races. But Raj has keys, and he never buys flowers. That's my job. I'm the ‘artistic' one. Then I remember calling Ian, and I feel sick once more. I put my head under the water, but the bell keeps ringing.

I open the front door in pyjamas and Raj's big blue towelling bathrobe. Ian stands there, crutches and an
A to Z
map in one hand, a bunch of cheap chrysanthemums in the other, as if on his way to the funeral of someone he doesn't know very well. He looks good, as always – tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed with a faint suntan, like a young Pierce Brosnan – despite the fact he's wearing a pair of Adidas waterproof jogging trousers over a thick white plaster cast.

‘What the hell happened to you?'

‘I broke my ankle in Venezuela. It's a long story.'

Ian puts out his arms, a gesture that's been his way of greeting me since university. I hesitate on the doorstep, terrified that any human contact will somehow soften the taut, agonizing control I've managed to exert over my muscles, mind and heart.

But I know I need this.

Ian steps forward into me, closing his arms around my narrow back, the plastic wrapping of the funeral flowers rustling crisply as he does so. He hugs me gently. I know this feeling, these arms, this scent of faint sweat and Right Guard.

I close my eyes tightly, and let the tears come, finally, like soothing summer rain.

Ian Thompson met Gemma Cook on his third day at Sheffield University. He wandered into the Freshers' Fair looking for something to join (one of the many things he'd learned on his two-year ‘Gap' travels through southeast Asia, Australia and the States, he believed, was that you couldn't just sit back and wait for things to happen, you had to be proactive). Yet his fellow students, with their Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara T-shirts, their unkempt hair and slouching, affected poses seemed so naive, so full of themselves, that he couldn't bear to sign up for anything – especially not the ‘Traveller's Club' with its long-haired private school boys and mis-spelled ‘Zimbwawbe'. Rather than helping him feel more connected to the other students, the Freshers' Fair left him feeling even more alienated, more different, and, Ian admitted secretly to himself, even more superior.

He entered the pizza-eating competition because he felt he had to sign up for something, and it would only last one evening. He was fairly confident of winning. Few people would be able to devour as much pizza as Ian Thompson, following his three-month stint at Zeppy's in Hermosa Beach, California, during which he'd consumed an extra large Spicy American every night, without taking breath.

Sitting down at the trestle table in the student union
on that first Friday night, Ian felt supremely confident, and vaguely hopeful (like most other male students in the bar, he had visions of finding an instant freshers' week girlfriend). He was happy to see that five of the twenty contestants were female, including one slender brunette who glanced at him with a swift smile, sending flashes of tequila-charged excitement spinning around his belly.

Yet the competition wasn't quite what he'd expected. It was to be speed, not quantity. He almost gave up before the first round – he'd not planned to make a fool of himself. But the brunette glanced at him again, and the bell rang, and he discovered that the months at Zeppy's had not been in vain. The pizzas were only small, after all. Ian crammed and gobbled and came second in the first round.

The brunette came last, barely finishing a third of her nine-inch Margarita. Ian tried smiling sympathetically, but she pushed back her chair and hurried away from the table. He never saw her again.

By the fourth round, there were only five contestants left, one of whom was female. She was blonde, with a pretty, gentle face, but a little on the heavy side. Ian preferred slim, small-titted women, preferably with some exotic blood in them. This woman looked consummately English, with her pale skin flushed with drunken embarrassment. She was gulping beer, trying to ignore the jokes and supportive cries of the small group of boys standing behind her. She seemed awkward, as if she had embarked on something she was regretting. Ian wondered if she was an only child, like him. As he stared at her, she glanced
up, and he smiled at her. She looked away and then the bell rang once more.

Ian folded and gulped and won the heat. The blonde came third, scraping into the semi-final. Behind her, the boys whooped and cheered, and she tried to smile more confidently, a forced smile that only served to emphasize her timidity. Ian wanted to speak up, to tell her that it was all right, that it was a stupid competition and everyone would have forgotten about it in the morning. He wanted to tell her to lose, deliberately, if she was feeling uncomfortable. Then the bell pealed. The next pizza, a Neptune with anchovies, proved more difficult to swallow. Ian glanced up as he ripped into the final piece to see the blonde gulp down her last crust. He was third, and out.

He thought about leaving, but he wanted to see what the shy girl with the large appetite would do. He bought a pint and stood opposite her, then the bell rang and he watched carefully as she ignored all the male voices, nimbly folding the nine-inch Spicy American, complete with chilli sauce, cramming it into her mouth. It was a big mouth, Ian noted. He wondered for a moment what it would be like to have his cock in that mouth, but then she gagged on the chilli, turned, and threw up.

The four lanky boys behind her leapt away, shouting and gesticulating as vomit spattered their shoes. Everyone cheered. The blonde girl grabbed a napkin and threw up again, pizza splattering the table. Instinctively, Ian stepped to her side, grasped a pile of napkins, handed them to her and pulled her arm.

‘Come on! The toilet!'

The blonde looked up at him, morsels of vomited pepperoni clinging to her chin and cheeks, and said quietly:

‘I'm Gemma. Very pleased to meet you.'

I was looking for a map. My father, the Reverend John Thompson, loved old maps, in particular anything purporting to be of the Holy Land, pre-1948. I loved them too. They made cheap presents, and they made dad happy. Which was something I didn't seem to achieve very often.

The antiques market took place at strange times, never on the same day. Occasionally I would be in the area and make a quick detour to the Old Seamen's Hall on Gutter Lane, but it would be closed. The randomness of the market's openings intrigued me. There was no number to call, you just had to turn up and hope. It was a canny marketing move. It meant that if you were lucky enough to find the hall open, you were so overjoyed and grateful that you ended up spending far too much money on secondhand junk.

Not that I was lavish. I couldn't exactly afford to be. As a freelance travel writer, I sometimes got to stay in five-star hotels in exotic locations, but I rarely made more than £2,000 a month from my articles, before tax.

And now, even this meagre income was in doubt, following my early morning meeting at the newspaper.

I limped carefully past the antiques market's trestle tables adorned with the immaculately arranged detritus of other people's lives, neatly delineated like museum exhibits – umbrellas, old brass lamps, an animal skull, a strange
blunt tool that might once have been used for amateur dentistry or bludgeoning hedgehogs. The secondhand map stall was hidden at the back of the hall as usual, beneath a low coving.

The bald old man sat behind his table wearing his customary baggy cardigan that looked like his mother might have knitted it sometime during the First World War, and a cloth cap that appeared to have been molested by a small rodent. He nodded at me, then glanced down at my left leg and the heavy white plaster cast that began just below my knee, before returning to his newspaper crossword.

I leaned my crutch gently against one of the cardboard boxes, unbuttoned my linen shirt sleeves and began my search.

The five cardboard boxes were precisely labelled – Americas, Africa, Australasia, Europe, Asia – but I knew from experience that the maps never lurked in the right sections. Here, the world was shifted into chaos – Burgundy could be found in the Middle East, whilst Lebanon sometimes turned up in the Western Isles of Scotland. It was a fluid atlas, full of bizarre geographical partnerships.

I started methodically with the Americas, in the hope that a map of Judea might be loitering in New Mexico, Montana or even Tierra del Fuego. I flicked quickly but meticulously through the maps, each one neatly encased in secondhand cellophane, each with a handwritten affirmation of its antiquity. I didn't really care whether these scrawled attestations were true or fabricated. If the map looked attractive, with intricate line drawing and subtle shading, and it seemed to resemble somewhere that
could be passed off as the Holy Land, I would buy it. My father always seemed grateful.

At the next box, a middle-aged couple was methodically plucking through the maps. They were dressed in matching tracksuits, as if they'd taken time off from intensive training for some domestic sport that had been newly included in the Olympics – synchronized ironing or pairs dusting.

Nonchalantly, I listened to their matrimonial murmurings, a travel writing habit perfected after almost ten years of eavesdropping around the world.

‘I want something pretty,' the woman was saying.

‘Of course, Lovekins. We both do. How about this one? Antarctica. Look, there are drawings of penguins…'

‘I don't know, it's not got any cities or nothing… you know I like ones that have those little houses… there's nothing there, just ice…'

‘It's amazing,' I interjected, quickly. I couldn't help myself. Antarctica is one of my favourite destinations; I've been fortunate enough to go there twice, on small adventure cruises.

‘Sorry?' chirped the man, looking up with alarm.

‘Antarctica.'

‘You've been there?'

‘I'm a travel writer.'

‘We're looking for something nice for the living room,' interjected the woman, with a welcoming smile. ‘We're having it done.'

‘Fall off a horse?' said the man, gesturing to my plaster and crutches.

‘Wrestling a crocodile,' I replied, with a grin.

‘Really?' exhaled the woman, her voice high and squeaky. ‘How brave!'

‘No, Mary, he's joking.'

‘Oh.'

‘I fell off a bus.'

‘Tough luck.'

I nodded, they smiled, I smiled, and we returned to our neighbouring boxes.

To my relief, I found a little map of the Middle East with Palestine in the centre that looked old enough, although it didn't appear to be dated. It caught my eye because of the intricate detailing and the distinctive brown, red and blue shading. It was unlike any my father had, and the sticker read £20, which was at the upper end of my budget, but what the hell. I gave the old man a twenty-pound note. When I turned back, the tracksuit woman was looking at me.

‘All those places. It must be wonderful.'

‘I'm very lucky.'

‘Don't you ever get lonely? You know, travelling on your own?'

‘Not really. I quite like solitude.'

‘I'd get terribly lonely. I can never be on my own. Isn't that right, Trevor?'