The Trouble with Henry and Zoe (5 page)

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 the 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.

Since the age of twelve, Henry had worked in his mother’s salon, Love & Die. Perhaps the signwriters had never been employed by a hairdresser or a fish and chip shop before this
particular commission, but they had taken it upon themselves to correct the perceived misspelling of Die. And so, instead of a pun on the universal connection between love and appropriate hair
colour, his mother’s salon had been given a more philosophical identity. As it happened, Sheila Smith had been quite taken with the name, and besides, the signwriter had offered her a fifty
per cent discount.

Initially, Henry’s duties were limited to sweeping and picking up dropped pins with a horseshoe-shaped magnet that looked like something from a
Roadrunner
cartoon. From there he
graduated to washing hair, applying dye, rollers and perming solution. The first time he wielded scissors was to trim his mother’s fringe, her coaching him on how to pull the hair tight with
the fingers of his free hand, to cut with clean confident strokes of the scissors. Next, she taught him to use thinning scissors, then how to cut over a comb. At fifteen his mother let him cut her
hair into a short retro crop; he learned to cut choppy layers, clean angles and feathered textures. By sixteen he was – to the profound disappointment of his father – cutting paying
customers’ hair on Saturdays. A little over ten years ago, the most popular haircut in the village and surrounding postcodes was a graduated bob. Not because the style was in fashion, but
because Love & Die was offering the cut for free plus a cup of instant coffee and a biscuit. ‘If you can cut a grad-bob, you can cut owt,’ Henry’s mother claimed, and in the
summer between the lower- and upper-sixth form, she was determined her son would master this holy grail of women’s hairdressing. More than once, Sheila Smith had to step in and salvage her
son’s handiwork, but by the time Henry returned to school for his final year, he could style a grad-bob with geometric precision, choosing a severe decline or gentle descent depending on the
set of his client’s features. For more adventurous ladies, he had created an asymmetric variation that his mother found a little showy, but nevertheless impressive. And despite this, April
would not let Henry so much as tidy her split ends.

Lying in his single student bed, with his fingers twined in Bobbi’s chaotic curls, Henry had been thinking of the various ways he might tackle such a head of hair, when Bobbi, seemingly
reading his mind, had said, ‘Anything but one of those Lego bobs.’ Henry found a pair of sharpish scissors in a first aid kit in the communal kitchen, and borrowed a pair of clippers
from a guy on the floor below. With these less than perfect tools, he styled her a punky undercut and choppy fringe that looked fine in the campus nightclub, but was going to be as conspicuous as a
lesbian kiss in their mutual hometown.

When the summer term ended, Henry stayed on in Sheffield for the first time since leaving home. He found work on a building site, and pulled pints in a rough local three evenings a week. Bobbi
visited more weekends than not, and the relationship developed a layer of cosy intimacy and familiarity. Henry enjoyed Bobbi’s garrulous, playful attitude; but at the same time he found it
slightly contrived – the rom-com kook – and a little exhausting: the constant jokes, and twirls, and ‘do you think?’ The sex was fantastically – almost
pornographically – satisfying, but also had an element of performance about it; something he yearned for on a Thursday while they made arrangements for the weekend, but tired of by Sunday
afternoon, as he looked at the clock waiting for the time when he could walk her to the station.

To her friends and family at home, Bobbi claimed her weekend excursions were trips to visit a girl befriended on an open day at Edinburgh University – a fictitious character called Penelope,
whose name she adopted as a pet moniker for Henry:
Where shall we eat, Pen? Penny for your thoughts, Penny. Fuck me, Penelope
!

The affair ended, as they both knew it would, in September, when Bobbi began her course in Edinburgh. There were continued phone calls, but these tapered off through the autumn term. Bobbi
travelled south to see Henry once in October, and he made the trip north the following month, but he saw little of the university campus. It was clear from Bobbi’s demeanour that there was
another man on the scene. She didn’t introduce him to her friends, and appeared furtive when they left her room, eschewing the student bars for more touristy spots in the city. Even so, it
was a beautiful weekend; the theatrics had gone from the bedroom, but it had been replaced with an unostentatious intimacy. Perhaps because they both sensed this relationship –
fling
– had run its course, and were both fine with that. In many ways it had been a perfect affair; perfect in its timing and duration. Henry knew Bobbi was not the one for him; that she would
drive him crazy for anything longer than a week, let alone a lifetime. But she picked him up; and it was her not-Aprilness as much as her own nature that had moved him past the disappointment and
sadness of splitting up with his childhood sweetheart.

‘Look after yourself, Penelope.’ And when they kissed on the platform, Henry felt a small warm lump in his chest.

When Henry went home for Christmas, it was the first time he had returned to his hometown in seven months. When eventually he did bump into April (Tesco’s: her buying a bottle of wine and
a tub of Ben and Jerry’s icecream; him buying a twelve-pack of toilet rolls) it had been less awkward than he had feared. They had talked easily; April seeming pleased to see him and
genuinely interested in how he was getting on at university. Henry had nodded at the wine in April’s hand. ‘Quiet night in?’ he said, his expression making the deeper enquiry.
‘Something like that,’ she said, blushing. They laughed off their embarrassment, but Henry also felt a pinch of sadness. Or maybe jealousy. He didn’t imagine for one second that April
wouldn’t have seen or dated other men in the half year since their break-up, but here was the confirmation – and at Christmas, too. They kissed on the cheek and wished each other a
Happy New Year.

It was inevitable they would get back together, April liked to tell people. ‘We just needed some time and perspective to appreciate how lucky we were, didn’t we,
Henry?’

Three years, it turns out, was sufficient.

Fate –
good or bad
? – nudging them back towards each other.

Henry was qualified and working in Sheffield when his mother called to say Big Boots had been in an accident. The call came past midnight, waking Henry from a deep sleep, and before he even
picked up the phone, he had a sense that something serious had happened. His father had been rushed to hospital with fractures to both wrists and three ribs, the latter precipitating a collapse of
his right lung. Henry’s first thought was that his father had been assaulted, whereas the reality – a drunken tumble into the cellar – was both more mundane and, somehow, more
frustrating. Henry left a voicemail at the surgery, cancelling his list, then jumped into his car and broke the speed limit all the way to the hospital.

Big Boots’ injuries required a chest drain, two surgeries and intensive rehabilitation. And despite his determination to prove the quacks wrong, the old fighter was barely able to feed
himself, let alone run a bar and throw out drunks. As he had several years before, Henry fell into a routine of weekly trips home, this time so he could help to run the pub and care for his father.
Since April was working full time in Love & Die, it was a natural step for her to help out in the Black Horse at this difficult time. Frequently, Henry found himself tending the bar with his
ex-girlfriend, the old affection coalescing around them, a more mature and meaningful thing now. Sometimes he would walk April home after a shift, occasionally sneaking up to her room before
returning to the pub to clean the tables and help Big Boots brush his teeth the following morning.

There were complications, both medical and romantic. April was in a relationship, but unhappily so, and the extent of her affections were uneven and unpredictable. But on the other hand, she did
save his father’s life. After successful treatment on his lung, his symptoms deteriorated. Unknown to anyone but the man himself, Big Boots was in constant and worsening pain –
experiencing a stabbing sensation in his chest every time he drew breath. During a lull behind the bar one weekday night, April had popped upstairs to make him a cup of tea, only to find the old
man on his knees and sweating glass beads. Refusing to take no for an answer, April drove Big Boots to the hospital where it was ascertained that he had developed empyema – a collection of
pus on the lung. Left untreated for much longer, the outcome would very likely have been fatal. Further surgery was required, and Big Boots’ recovery was pushed back further still. Towards
the end of October, some seven months after the initial accident, Big Boots was finally and fully discharged. April, always doted on by Henry’s parents, was by now as much a family member as
Henry himself. And having fallen in love as smoothly as they had fallen out of that same state three years ago, the expectation was that he would make it official.

As well as pulling pints and flirting with the locals, April took great care and pride in what passed for interior decor in the Black Horse: spray-can snowdrifts in the windows at Christmas,
patriotic bunting for internationals, poppies and flags for Remembrance, coconuts and plastic palms in the summer. With Big Boots back on his feet in time for Hallowe’en, April took to her
task with unprecedented enthusiasm: cobwebs, lanterns, haunted bed sheets and plastic critters. When Henry came home one weekend with pots of alginate normally used for taking impressions of teeth,
he told April they were making severed jelly fingers. And as she pressed her small hands into the goopy compound, she did not for one second suspect Henry was measuring her finger for a diamond
ring.

When Henry thinks back to that Hallowe’en night, the memory doesn’t make him smile the way it should. Maybe April sensed something was coming, there were too many familiar faces in
the pub; friends from school, both sets of parents. Henry’s mother as excited and awkward as a toddler on Christmas Eve. Even April’s brother, Mad George, was in attendance. Of course
she knew. So when Henry knelt on the sticky carpet, and the chatter died away, April’s eyes went wide in expectation rather than shock. Her hands going to her heart, the way they do it in the
movies. ‘Will you marry me?’ Henry had asked, presenting the ring that would fit April’s finger perfectly.

And as the question floated in the air, he watched April’s eyes flick towards the ring. For a fraction of a second he registered a trace of disappointment on her face. And then it was gone
– her eyes found Henry’s, her smile pulled wide. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’