The Trouble with Henry and Zoe (6 page)

The following day they caught a train to Liverpool, exchanging the ring for another, larger and more expensive one. The difference in price wasn’t extraordinary, and Henry didn’t
begrudge spending the money. But even so, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had made a mistake.

And this is the problem – he can’t be trusted with himself. He cannot be relied upon to intelligently sift his emotions and find the truth beneath all the layers of thought and doubt
and indecision. Henry loved April, right up until he didn’t. And then back the other way, changing his mind like a kid in a comic shop. Changing his heart. April never asked how he had known
what size ring to buy, so Henry never told her.

He has finished his tea and the clock tells him it is now 3.31 a.m. Tomorrow morning he will wake up next to his wife in the four-poster bed on the other side of the castle. Their suitcases are
packed, passports and sun cream all in the appropriate compartments of their luggage. The newlyweds will take a ten-minute taxi ride to the train station, a train to Manchester airport, an internal
flight to Heathrow then a long wait before a two-hour flight to Ibiza. They will arrive at their hotel close to midnight, fatigued and clammy with travel. There is an earlier flight, arriving at a
more civilized time, but to make all the connections they would have to catch the 5.28 a.m. from the local station – the first train of the day. It is Saturday morning now and Henry wonders whether
the trains run to the same timetable today as they will tomorrow.

He estimates the station is six miles from the castle, a cold walk along dark twisting lanes. On foot it would take ninety minutes, maybe as long as two hours. He looks at the clock as it clicks
over to 3.33.

Of course he had a girlfriend.

Zoe all but laughed when he told her.

Alex was already in the pub when Zoe arrived, drinking what she guessed was a gin and tonic. He spotted her walking towards him and immediately stood up, waving a short salute across the room.
She was surprised to see DJ Lexx wearing a suit, but before she had a chance to make a glib comment about it (scrolling through her mind:
Been to court? Been to a wedding? Blimey, is this what
all DJs wear on their days off
?), Alex had stepped away from the table, gesturing for Zoe to sit while he asked what she was drinking.

The pub Alex had suggested turned out to be a charmless cave tucked away in a knot of narrow cobbled streets with names – Ludgate, Newgate – that reminded Zoe of Dickens and his city
of urchins, riots and Victorian gaols. They were a stone’s throw from St Paul’s Cathedral, and this grotty boozer seemed a peculiar choice in an area replete with far more salubrious
wine and cocktail bars. Perhaps Alex thought it was cosy, or characterful or intimate.

When he returned to the table with Zoe’s drink, Alex was visibly awkward. If they’d been dating already she would have sworn he was about to dump her. She’d been planning what
type of kiss to greet him with (cheek or lips; peck or subtly lingering, delicately foreshadowing), but the moment had gone and Alex’s discomfort was contagious.

‘Cheers,’ she said, raising her glass, air-clinking and taking a sip of generic red wine. ‘So, is this what all DJs wear on their days off?’

‘Sorry, what?’

Zoe thumbed invisible lapels. ‘The suit.’

‘Ah, oh, right, yeah. Actually, I . . . I work in the City. Well, kind of, oil and gas. It’s a bit . . .’ Alex made an apologetic shrug and blew air through his lips.
‘Well, it’s oil and gas.’

Zoe nodded, trying to hide her disappointment. ‘Cool. I mean . . . great! That’s . . . people always need oil and gas. Do they?’

‘Well, let’s hope so, otherwise I’m out of a job.’

‘You could always DJ?’

Alex laughed. ‘That would be nice.’

‘So . . . at our party thing, what was that?’

‘Favour for a friend. Well, I got paid, but . . . not much.’

‘And free champagne.’

Alex smiled. ‘Yes, and free champagne. But not enough to give up the day job, unfortunately.’ He seemed to hesitate a moment before saying: ‘I did play at a fairly big club in
Thailand for a while.’

‘Thailand?’

After graduating, Alex had secured a job at the firm where he still works today. He had managed to defer his start date for twelve months, planning to DJ his way from Asia to Australia to
America and anywhere else the wind blew him. But finding gigs that paid anything other than alcohol was easier imagined than realized. Alex was running dangerously low on money and optimism, when
various circumstances aligned and the DJ gods span him in the direction of a regular set paying paper wages. The location was less idyllic than Koh Lanta or Rai Leh, but it was a good opportunity
to bank some much-needed cash. Four weeks into Alex’s Phuket residency, however, the club owner accused him of stealing, threatened him with a machete, and said if Alex was still in Phuket by
the weekend something ‘crinical’ would happen to him.

‘Crinical?’

‘I didn’t know if he meant criminal, critical or what,’ Alex continued. ‘I mean, considering the mad bastard was waving a machete around I guess it all amounted to the
same thing, but – have you been to Thailand? – I’d had a bunch of diet pills, speed basically, and a magic-mushroom milkshake, and, well, I was having trouble processing it,
danger and all, so I’m saying to him: “
Crinical
? What’s crinical?” And he’s practically foaming at the mouth, shouting: “Crinical. I send you to the
doctor’s crinic. You understand me now?”’

Something – besides the vaguely Alex Garland plot – didn’t ring true about Alex’s story; he was fidgeting with his watch and seemed reluctant to hold eye contact. On the
other hand, the detail (‘crinical’) felt too specific not to be authentic. But if Zoe doubted him, Alex didn’t seem to notice. He went on to tell Zoe how the club owner not only
refused to pay his four weeks’ outstanding wages, but also ‘confiscated’ his record collection and headphones. So with neither money nor music, Alex had little option but to
return to the UK. A friend put him up on their sofa, and through various contacts Alex was able to land a couple of ‘eighty-quid gigs’ in large pubs and small clubs.

‘What about your records?’ Zoe asked, trying not to sound like she was interrogating a flimsy story.

‘Borrowed some off a friend.’

The answer felt deliberately terse, something in its delivery seeming to say:
Can we leave it at that?

Zoe nodded.

Alex laughed. ‘Sorry, it’s a mad story, I know. I tend not to bring it up because it sounds like so much bullshit. Like
The Beach
with DJs.’

Zoe laughed now. ‘The thought never crossed my mind.’

Alex took a sip of his drink and continued. ‘And so I played a few gigs in London, but by the time September rolled around I had two hundred quid in the bank, a ten grand loan, and so . .
.’ he pulled at the lapels of his very nice suit, ‘. . . oil and gas.’

‘At least you got a good story out of it.’

Alex nodded as if this was fair enough. Then he sighed. ‘There’s something I should tell you.’

Zoe closed her eyes, took a breath. ‘If you tell me you’re married or you’ve got a girlfriend, I swear to God’ – she raised her glass of wine –
‘you’re going to need a dry cleaners.’

Alex smiled at that, briefly. He reached across the table, took hold of Zoe’s wrist and lowered her glass-holding hand to the table.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘It’s not . . . it’s not exactly . . .’

‘Well, aren’t you just full of surprises.’

‘L—’

‘Let you explain. Is that what you were about to say? Wh . . . do they give you a handbook?’

‘Zoe—’

‘You can’t sit here with your hand on my wrist all night, Alex. For one thing, what if your girlfriend walked in?’

‘She’s not. She’s . . . I’m going to end it.’

Zoe glanced pointedly down at the table, the glass still in her hand, Alex’s hand (nice watch, clean fingernails) still firmly gripping her wrist.

‘Do you promise not to throw it on me?’

‘I haven’t decided. If you’d bought a better red, I’d be more inclined to drink it. But this tastes like someone’s gran made it in a mop bucket.’

‘You’re funny,’ Alex said, smiling. ‘Almost as funny as a bloke.’

‘Yes, I’m a laugh a minute, me. Zoe Bubbles, they call me.’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘Nope. And I don’t know why I’m telling you. My flatmates at uni came up with it; called me Zoe Bubbles, Zoe Bubbs, Bubbs, ZeeBee. God, I’m wittering.’

‘I like your wittering. ZeeBee.’

Zoe unpicked Alex’s fingers from around her wrist. They both looked at the glass. Zoe shook her head in resignation, took a sip, winced. ‘Never call me that again. You know what
“Bubbly” is a byword for, don’t you?’

‘Fat.’

‘First things first, I was not “fat”, I was . . . bonnie. But I was young and we drank pints and ate a lot of chips.’

‘Nothing wrong with bonnie. Although I prefer “cuddly”.’

‘Cute doesn’t suit you. And second things second, my nickname had nothing to do with the
former
size of my bum.’

A look from Alex:
Really?

‘Like I said, it’s because I’m a laugh a fucking minute.’

‘I like you,’ Alex said then. A flash of the cool confidence she had seen at the summer party, and it was impossible not to fall for it. She smiled thinly as her anger (at least
one-quarter contrived, after all) cooled.

‘Right, here’s the plan. You go to the bar and get me a decent glass of red. Then we can get to the bottom of this “not my girlfriend” business and decide where we go
from there.’

Alex nodded, stood and reached for Zoe’s glass. ‘I’ll keep it,’ she said. ‘I still might need it.’

Alex came back from the bar with a bottle and two glasses; the glibness had gone, replaced with an expression of nervous sincerity. He filled their glasses, then backtracked to Phuket.

The ‘thing’ he had allegedly stolen from the Thai club owner turned out to be a German girl called Ines. Ines was also taking a year out after graduating and before embarking on a
career in London; in her case, out of Heidelberg University, and into a large American bank. Alex and Ines ‘got together’, which would have been fine, but for the fact the club owner
had formed the idea that Ines was already taken – by him. Zoe had many questions, but Ines (no doubt privileged and beautiful) was the competition, and it didn’t do to appear too
interested in the ‘other woman’. ‘Coke,’ was pretty much all Alex offered by way of explaining this pivotal misunderstanding, and Zoe allowed it to remain it that. For now,
at least.

Alex had no money and Ines had no agenda, but she did have friends in London and a house off the King’s Road, paid for (confirming half of Zoe’s assumptions) by her father. They flew
back to London and shacked up in the pastel blue two-bedroom mews house in the heart of Chelsea. Their neighbour on one side was an investment banker; on the other a gruff gentleman who had played
bass in at least two bands Alex had heard of from the sixties. After two weeks of eating in restaurants with heavy cutlery, and drinking expensive coffee from small cups, Alex took the train north
to visit his mother and brother in a now defunct mining town. He made the return trip carrying two suitcases full of clothes, books and photographs, and by Sunday evening he and Ines were living
together.

Sipping her wine a little too quickly, Zoe did not particularly want to know which members-only clubs Alex and Ines frequented, or how much Ines spent on clothes, or which socialites they
befriended. But this was how Alex chose to tell his story, building up to the point in his own sweet way. And, okay, she was maybe a little interested.

‘Have you ever felt trapped by a bad decision?’ Alex had asked.

Zoe thought about the patches of eczema on her shins. She thought about pulling her hair in the bath, and the Sunday night blues that had seeped backwards so far she had come to dread the entire
weekend, leaving work on a Friday depressed because she would be walking back through the revolving doors all too soon. Shredding a document at work earlier today, she had wondered how much sick
leave she would get if her fingers became accidentally jammed in the mechanism. Two weeks, had been her guess, and the exchange had felt worryingly tempting.

Zoe nodded.

‘I knew on the train back to London that I was making a mistake.’

‘Why?’

Alex sighed. ‘Ines isn’t exactly . . . dazzling company.’

‘But you went to all those cool clubs and ate in all those fancy restaurants.’ Laying on the sarcasm a bit thick, but what the hell. ‘So it took you how long to figure that
out? A month?’

‘Thailand’s weird. Everything’s . . . it’s different . . . weird.’

‘Is she beautiful?’
Damn
.

Alex swirled his wine and watched the drops run down the inside of the glass. He nodded without looking up. ‘Yup.’

Annoying. And Zoe felt suddenly self-conscious about her nose – cute, it’s been called,
cute as a button
, but the phrase has always made her think of mushrooms. And now the
damned thing was itching. Even so, there was something flattering about being courted over a beautiful German woman.

‘Rich, beautiful and . . . a banker, did you say?’

Another nod from Alex.

So that’s why we’re drinking in a back-alley ale-house. So we
don’t get spotted by Ines or any of her City colleagues.

‘Rich, beautiful and intelligent,’ said Zoe. ‘That’s the fantasy, isn’t it?’

Alex looked up and laughed. ‘Actually, that’s rich, beautiful and dumb.’

‘So which am I?’

Alex smiled but resisted the bait.

‘Long story short,’ he said. ‘It was wrong – is wrong – but I stayed too long. It was too easy, too convenient, I guess.’

‘How long?’

‘About eighteen months.’

‘So you chat up girls at discos—’

‘Discos?’

‘Invite them out for a drink in a dingy pub, bare your soul, then catch the last tube home to the rich, beautiful, boring girlfriend on the King’s Road.’