Crazy Paving (8 page)

She had her own place just off the Caledonian Road, an airy maisonette furnished by a few artfully arranged pieces of junk. It wasn’t really hers, she explained, she was just looking after
it for her father. She was a production assistant for a film company. Every now and then she would disappear ‘on shoots’ and he would be rigid with jealousy until she returned. He hated
her job, although he never told her so. He also hated her postman, and the man in the corner shop where she bought milk. He hated anyone or anything that claimed her time or attention, attention
that by rights belonged to him.

For four months, everything was fine. They met each other’s parents. They met each other’s friends (he hated hers). They spent every weekend together, except when she was away.

The change began just before Christmas. He was desperate for them to spend it together. She insisted on going to stay with her family and he was hurt not to be invited. ‘It isn’t
you
,’ she said to him, stroking his forehead as he lay with his head in her lap. ‘It’s just, we’ve never brought boyfriends home, any of us. It would be strange,
that’s all.’ Boyfriends. Boyfriends plural. I am A Boyfriend, he thought.

Christmas stretched into New Year. She was taking time off, she told him on the phone.

‘Time off from me?’

‘No, silly. Time off from work, everything.’

He rang her every day.

When she returned, he knew that things had changed. He could sense her slipping. The more she slipped, the more he clung. The more he clung, the more she slipped. Eventually he said to her one
night, ‘Things aren’t working out. I think I need more space.’ To his horror she replied, ‘Yes, you’re right.’

They clung on for another month, out of habit, picking fights with each other so they would have a concrete explanation to give their friends. All through this terrible time he had an ever
growing sense of unreality. Two forces ruled his life: the inevitability of what was happening and his inability to do what he wanted most: reverse the process. At last, in a final attempt to take
control, he let himself into her flat while she was out and removed his belongings. He put the key in an envelope and dropped it through the door. She rang him a week later and he told the lads to
say he wasn’t in.

For six months, he wanted to die. After that, he was merely miserable. He went back to Linda who accepted him with good grace, knowing she was no more than a consolation prize. He despised her
for not being Ellen, so he treated her badly and then despised himself. On Saturdays, he went out with his flatmates and drank himself stupid. One night, he got into a fight. On the Sunday morning
he woke up with a sore nose and realised that self-destruction was no fun. It was time to be honest with Linda and cut down on the booze.

He only saw Ellen once after that. It was nearly a year after they had broken up. He was sitting on the tube, the Piccadilly line, between Green Park and Piccadilly Circus. The train had come to
a stop in the middle of a tunnel. It made a few half-hearted chugging noises, then there was silence; the weird unearthly silence that comes deep underground after a great deal of noise. The
passengers pulled faces, not meeting each other’s gazes. William sighed and sat back in his seat. He was thinking about the Planned Maintenance report on Shepherd’s Bush market. He
wondered if he should add a sum for repair of external cladding.

Then he heard her voice.

‘Shall we eat first or later?’

All at once, he felt his stomach fold in on itself. His scalp seemed to shrink. It was her voice, so close and clear he felt tempted to lift his head and respond.

Shall we
?

She was the only person he knew who used the word ‘shall’ so frequently. He looked around. Most of the seats were full and there were several people standing nearby. In front of him
was a woman in a red coat and a man and boy in matching baseball caps. Where was she?

To his left there was the glass panel that divided his row of seats from the area between the doors. He looked up. She was just the other side of the panel, facing away from him. Her back was
pressed against it. She was inches away. He had been hurtling along a tube tunnel with her only inches away. If the train hadn’t stopped he might never have realised she was there. Her head
was leaning back against the panel. Her brown curls were crushed against the glass. She was wearing the green coat she had bought in the New Year sales after that awful Christmas. ‘Shall I
have the green or the blue?’ she had asked him, holding them both up, one in each hand. ‘Which one shall I have?’ He had been so terrified of giving the wrong answer he had merely
shrugged.

Then he saw, next to the crushed brown curls – just above the right shoulder of the green coat – a hand.

The palm of the hand was pressing the glass, the fingers splayed. It was a rough hand, a large hand. It was a male hand.

Oh God, he thought. Not this. Not now. He couldn’t bear to look and he couldn’t bear not to.

The man had not answered her question. William listened. He knew those pauses, the slow conversations, the lingering looks. Then the man spoke. His voice was deep, with a slight lilt, Welsh,
perhaps. He spoke warmly, slowly, a smile in every syllable.

‘Come here girl.’

William closed his eyes. He felt sick and hot. When he opened them again he looked resolutely ahead, at the man and boy in front of him. They were both looking over at Ellen. Then the man looked
down at his son and grinned. William looked at the other passengers. Several were glancing over in Ellen’s direction. Inches away from him, separated only by a panel of glass, the only woman
he had ever loved was being kissed by someone else.

All at once he was overwhelmed with fury. Why should that stupid man in front of him grin down at his son in that stupid, knowing manner? How could Ellen make a spectacle of herself like that?
He wanted to stand up and say to those nearby, ‘I was with her when she bought that coat. She hasn’t told him
that
, I bet.’

The train started with a jolt. The standing passengers staggered. He heard Ellen giggle.

They hurtled down the tunnel. The noise was deafening. As they pulled into Piccadilly Circus, William was already pushing his way through the other passengers, away from Ellen and her growling
Welsh companion, as far away as he could get. At the door he stumbled against a Japanese woman and kicked a large box at her feet. ‘Sorry,’ said the woman.

He joined the other passengers jostling along the platform. Half-way to the yellow exit sign, he realised that his legs were shaking. She was there, a matter of yards behind him. Perhaps she was
settling down into the seat he had left, still warm from his body. He could have spoken to her, touched her even. Now she would never know. She would carry on, her evening undisturbed when his had
been torn apart. He sank into a nearby seat. The other passengers rushed by. By the time they had cleared, the train had started to move. He watched it, trying to work out when Ellen’s
carriage would pass, willing Ellen to see him. The train picked up speed. The windows flashed past. The people inside became momentary images, then coloured blurs. The train disappeared into the
tunnel with a rush of wind and a huge rattling sound that echoed down the empty platform.

He sat on the plastic seat, alone. He gripped the edge of it with his hands. He thought, I am in pain. I am in so much pain I can’t stand it. All the achievements of the last few months
seemed nothing. His promotion, his new car, the evening class he had started to get himself out of the flat: nothing; worthless.

He knew then that this small incident had set him back months.

He rose from his seat, breathing deeply. Then he turned slowly, as if he was an old man, and began the seemingly endless walk down the platform.

It was three years before he got seriously involved with anybody else and when he did he married her. Alison was tiny, efficient, funny. She wore neat little trouser suits with
high heels which would have looked old-fashioned on another woman her age but she somehow carried it off. Her hair was very short. She made jokes about looking like a pixie. Everyone (i.e. his
parents) agreed; she was just right.

He was careful not to rush things. They went out for six months and were engaged for a year. They bought a small two-bedroomed terrace in Bromley and moved in four months before the wedding. He
was so swept up with the business of purchasing property that he almost forgot they were getting married as well. Luckily, Alison had it all organised. She showed him the wedding list one night and
asked if there was anything he thought she had left off. He cast his eye down it: crockery, cutlery, china, a yoghurt maker (he liked yoghurt), a pine hat stand . . . He shook his head in wonder
and thought, we get all this just for having sex?

In the fortnight before the event, Alison disappeared altogether into a miasma of bridesmaids, car hire, disco equipment and unexpected aunties. He felt deserted and duly had an attack of last
minute nerves. This, it turned out, had also been planned for. Alison took him out to dinner and told him she would be worried if he
wasn’t
having last minute doubts. The next time
he saw her alone was at Gatwick airport, when they had bid the best man goodbye and gone to join the check-in queue. They were on their way to Portugal. They were man and wife.

I have a wife, he said to himself as they handed over their passports. At the boarding gate, he waited for her outside the Ladies. There is my wife, he thought, as she emerged. On the plane, he
said to the stewardess, ‘My wife would like some orange juice.’

The novelty of having a wife lasted well through the first year of marriage. By then, he also had a son.

Paul was a boisterous boy who rarely cried and played with whatever he was handed: a wooden spoon, a holepunch, a piece of lettuce. By the time he was three, it was clear that he would be
handsome and good at sports. William felt overwhelmed with gratitude. Paul was exactly the sort of boy he had spent his childhood wanting to be: unanalytical, good natured, not overly clever. He
felt grateful to the child. He also felt grateful to Alison. How well organised of her to produce this neat little thing for him to care for. How considerate of her to give him all this certainty.
Occasionally, he went drinking with other men who complained about their wives and children; the demands, the expense. William was hard put to come up with any complaints about Alison and Paul,
although he did his best.

Sitting at his desk in John Blow House, William bent down and pushed a hand into the inside pocket of his jacket, which was slung over the back of his chair. He pulled out a
small leather wallet – maroon-coloured – and flipped it open. Behind a square of plastic was a picture of his wife and child. Alison was smiling brightly. Her teeth gleamed. Paul was
frowning and looking over to the left. William had been there when the shots were done, at a photographer’s in Bromley High Street. Later, they had taken Paul for a burger and chips. He was
up all night vomiting.

William closed the wallet and put it back into his pocket. Then he rose and went round the office divide, to Annette’s desk. She had not yet returned. He sat down in her swivel chair and,
for the want of anything useful to do, swivelled.

He turned and looked up as she returned. Seeing him sitting at her desk, she looked slightly startled. Then she smiled. She approached and lifted up her handbag, which sat next to her computer
keyboard. She opened it and replaced the hairspray and brush. As she did, her hair fell forward. He gazed at her.

‘Well?’ she said, a little awkwardly.

He could not interpret the word. Well. Did that mean,
Well what now?
Maybe it meant,
Well get off my seat, I have typing to do
.

He stood. She was an inch or so taller than him.

He reached out and placed his hand around her upper arm. Through the thin softness of her jumper, he could feel how slender she was. His hand seemed large and rough by comparison. She did not
move. He could not bring himself to meet her gaze in case it held reproof, so he stared at her throat; her pale, fragile, immaculate throat.

Then he felt the lightest of touches, her hand on his shoulder, resting her fingers there for a moment. The feel of them burned through the light cotton of his shirt.

There was a pause during which the air caved in, the clouds collided, and the stars burst into fatal showers that set the sky alight.

They both heard it at the same moment: the unmistakably prosaic sound of Raymond whistling to himself as he strode down the office, the chink of loose change in his pocket. They broke apart.
Annette dropped down into her chair and lifted her hands to the computer keyboard. William reeled away, wondering, as the world righted, how on earth he was going to find his way back to his
desk.

The only parts of school that Helly had enjoyed were taking up smoking and her history project. Their teacher, a thin Scottish man they called The Beard, had asked them all to
think of a local topic. Helly, along with four others in the class, had come up with
The History of Stockwell Tube Station
. It had been one of the first to open, on the fourth of November
1890, as part of the City & South London Railway. There was a display in the local library.

She had started the project with some zeal, drawing the front cover before she had even written the introduction. The earliest tubes had distinctive domed roofs which housed the lifts. She drew
her dome with great care. The rest of the station had been built with red bricks and decorated with white tiles. She bought a tin of Lakeland pencils specially for the task and drew three Victorian
ladies, complete with bustles and parasols, promenading in front of the station. They held their parasols at an angle and their faces were smudgy, like the one in a Degas painting she had seen in
the school secretary’s office. At the end of two weeks she had the best drawing she had ever done and a contents list.