Vince and Joy (15 page)

Of course he knew that the chances of this happening were slim to remote – she could be living in New Zealand or Paris or Barnsley; she might be married or even dead. But he just had this strange, tingly feeling (he couldn’t think of a better way of putting it) that if he just kept his eyes peeled then he might draw her towards him with his positive energy.

Patently, he’d been living with Cass for far too long.

And now this new information – confirmation that she hadn’t done a runner because she wished she hadn’t slept with him, the possibility that she’d wanted to see him again, that she might have been waiting for his call, fretting,
crying
even. Maybe when she thought about Vince she thought of him as the One That Got Away. Or maybe she thought of him as That Bastard Shit Who Robbed Me of My Virginity Then Never Called. But more likely she’d probably just thought that Vince had been so outraged by what her father had done to his mother that he’d refused to have anything more to do with her and didn’t blame him in the slightest for not getting in touch.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the bottom line was that fate had fucked up and Vince couldn’t rest until he’d
seen her again. And it wasn’t enough just to wait for fate to throw her back into his path; he had to do something more proactive.

‘I’m going to find her,’ he said, crunching his empty lager can in his fist with the force of his resolve.

‘What?!’ spluttered Chris.

‘Yeah. I’m going to find Joy. Track her down.’

‘And how exactly are you planning on doing that?’

‘Christ, I dunno. It can’t be that hard, can it? She’s got an unusual name. I’ll think of something.’

He looked from Chris to his mother, both of whom were looking at him with a mixture of pity and bewilderment.

‘Vince, mate,’ Chris said as he grabbed Vince’s knee under the table, ‘I’m not being funny or anything, but what’s the point? Eh? It’s much harder walking backwards, you know – you can’t see where you’re going and you bump into things. Keep moving on, that’s my attitude.’

‘Yes,’ said Vince, ‘I hear what you’re saying. But what if you were walking down the street and you suddenly realized you’d dropped a really expensive watch on the pavement half a mile back? You’d walk back to get it, wouldn’t you?’

Chris shrugged, ‘I suppose.’

‘Well, Joy’s that expensive watch, and I only just realized I dropped her.’

Chris smiled, and squeezed his knee. ‘Well, in that case you’d better start running before some thieving bastard picks her up and pawns her for a fiver.’

And then he winked, and Vince knew that he understood.

Joy ripped the plastic casing off her tuna mayonnaise sandwich and opened up the
Evening Standard
at the flat-share section.

She’d persuaded herself six months ago that she could afford to pay £85 a week for a high-ceilinged studio flat in a Gothic Victorian mansion in Hammersmith; that it was worth it for the luxury of living alone. But then she’d split up with Ally three months ago and, without the long, lazy Sundays in bed with the papers and the cosy nights drinking wine together in front of the TV, coming home alone to an empty flat every night had lost its appeal. And when her cashcard had been swallowed by a machine at Oxford Circus last night when she tried to withdraw £10, she knew it was time for the beautiful, overpriced studio flat to go. It was time to find a flat share.

She picked up a blue felt-tip and started circling ads that caught her eye.

Two girls, a garden and a cat in Chiswick.

Five young professionals with a ‘luxury’ spare room in Battersea.

Two guys in Highbury who liked smokers.

She was sitting in the smoky staff room of ColourPro Reprographics, a massive print shop and art suppliers near Carnaby Street. There were tea rings on the Formica-topped
tables, and the sprinkled remnants of somebody else’s sandwich. Behind her Mark and Big Lee, two man mountains of unloved flesh in ColourPro T-shirts and clammy-looking trainers, were eating individual Domino’s pizzas and slurping Coke out of enormous paper cups. An empty paper cup whistled past her ear and hit the wastepaper bin under the sink with a thud. Big Lee got to his feet and punched the air triumphantly.

‘Yes-sab!’
he said, high-fiving Mark inelegantly.

Joy sighed and looked at the clock. It was twelve-twenty. She still had another forty minutes of her lunch hour left, and no one to share it with. She glanced through the tiny barred window over the sink and saw fat droplets of rain splashing the dimpled glass. Another dull day in W1. Another long lunch hour killing time. Rachel, her only real friend at ColourPro, had left the previous week to work in the art department of a glossy travel magazine. It had dawned on her when she got into work on Monday morning that she didn’t really like anyone else here, and now she felt like the new girl all over again.

She’d been at ColourPro for nearly a year. She’d only taken the job in the first place because it had been misleadingly advertised in the
Guardian
Media section to appeal to graduates with art degrees. In reality it was a cattle market for slightly geeky technical types who liked the smell of chemicals and drinking pints of cloudy ale after work. All thirty-two members of staff were obliged to wear the standard-issue ColourPro T-shirt, and the owners operated all sorts of ‘crazy’ motivational schemes such as paintballing days and bungee jumping. But despite all their best efforts to promote a ‘one big happy
ColourPro family’ environment, the staff turnover was remarkably fast, and Joy now found herself in the strange position of being one of the longest-serving members of staff. If she wasn’t careful, she mused, she’d end up being promoted.

She flicked idly through the paper as she pondered her stagnant and uninspiring existence, and found herself looking at the personal ads at the back. Lonely Londoners, she thought, perusing them unthinkingly, look at them all. Dozens,
hundreds,
of them. Black, white, short, tall, young, old, gay, straight, north, south, east and west. All alone. All prepared to go to the effort and embarrassment of placing an advert in a public place to break the stalemate. She could see why, in a way. It was soul-destroying out there, even if you were a reasonably attractive young woman with fairly good social skills. But imagine being ‘Curvy brunette, 5’ 1”, 56 years old, true romantic looking for soul mate.’ Or ‘Shy lesbian, 43, looking for friends for fun and socializing. Peckham area.’

Joy had been single for three months, since Ally had been made redundant by his company and decided to spend his pay-off on a round-the-world trip. Without her. Since he’d gone she’d been on two dates with men who’d never called again, been stood up outside the Swiss Centre on a Wednesday night by a man she hadn’t even fancied in the first place and snogged a guy at a party who’d just taken five Es and was snogging everyone he happened upon, male or female, in the name of peace and love.

There were loads of blokes here at ColourPro, but most of them were disgusting, and the ones that weren’t
disgusting were gone and on to the next job before she had a chance to do anything about it. The only men who paid her any attention these days were the plimsolled foreigners handing out cards for language schools at Tottenham Court Road, lonely Africans who drove her home in minicabs and most recently, on Saturday night, a gone-to-seed man in cheap shoes called Ronald, who didn’t seem to have noticed that he wasn’t handsome any more. She’d started to feel invisible, as if she was sliding off a giant radar she’d only just realized existed. It was a strange and depressing sensation.

She sighed and turned the page. And suddenly her eye was caught by one of the adverts in the second column:

Handsome male, 29
, likes: Thai food, empty beaches, extravagant picnics and
Twin Peaks.
Loves: London, life. Lives: SW8. Favourite park: Battersea. Looking for a beautiful girl to cook for and share with.

When she came to ponder it in years to come, as she frequently would, she would be unable to remember exactly what it was about the ad that appealed to her so greatly. Maybe it was the hint of sunshine in the picnics and the beaches, on a dreary September afternoon. Maybe it was the promise of good food and pampering. Maybe it was the suggestion that London and life were concepts worthy of love. Or maybe she was just incredibly shallow and had been reeled in by the word ‘handsome’. But for whatever reason, for one unrepeatable moment in time, the advert had flashed acid neon out of the pallid paper, twinkling with multicoloured fairy lights and dancing Catherine wheels. Joy felt a shiver of anticipation running
down her spine as she gently traced the outline of the ad with her blue felt-tip, and slowly refolded the paper.

‘Want anything from the shops?’ she said, turning to Mark and Big Lee.

They both looked up at her as if she’d just offered them her toenail clippings.

‘Er, no thanks. We’re all right.’

‘OK.’

She took the paper and a handful of 10p pieces to the phone booth on the corner of Carnaby Street and Great Marlborough Street and made arrangements to view three flats that evening: one in Highbury, one in Tufnell Park and one in Finsbury Park. And then she went back to work and spent the rest of the afternoon mentally composing a letter to Mr Thai-Food-and-Twin-Peaks, little knowing as she did how much of an impact she was to make on her destiny that day, in more ways than one.

‘Oh, Joy,’ Barbara said, peering uncertainly through the windscreen at the street scene in front of her, ‘I’m not sure I like this area very much. It’s not like Hammersmith.’

Joy knew Finsbury Park fairly well, had been here to go bowling, for the Fleadh, but she’d never before been about to move into a flat here and was now seeing it through very different eyes. There were no appealing shops, no recognizable supermarkets,
coffee shops, clothes shops, newsagents’. No WH Smiths, no Boots, no Marks & Spencer – none of the usual bedrocks of a British high street. Just scruffy off-licences, pungent fast-food outlets, late-night groceries displaying piles of withered peppers and black bananas, and makeshift boutiques selling knock-off sportswear and leopard-print miniskirts. Joy couldn’t argue with her mother. Finsbury Park was undoubtedly very different to Hammersmith.

The flat was on the ground floor of a chunky Victorian house on Wilberforce Road, a quiet side turning parallel with Blackstock Road.

Julia, her new flatmate, was there to let them in. She was a big girl, Julia, in every respect. Five foot eight, a size sixteen at the very least and stupidly overendowed on the bosom front. She was wearing a loose T-shirt when she greeted them at the door, and her enormous waist-level breasts roamed unfettered beneath the flimsy
fabric like two baby hippos. On her feet she wore shocking pink angora socks and in her hand she held a smouldering mauve Sobranie. Her thick copper hair had patently been on recent and very intimate terms with her pillow, and was scrunched up into a kind of bird’s nest at the back.

‘Joy, darling, welcome.’ She transferred her mauve cigarette to her other hand and enveloped Joy in a soft, smoky, bedsheety embrace. ‘And this must be mum. Mum – welcome.’ She leaned into a startled Barbara and kissed her firmly on both cheeks. ‘Apologies for my ungodly appearance. A bit of a heavy session last night. Now, let me get you both a nice strong cup of coffee.’ She led them through the hallway, through the living room, which was littered with empty wine bottles and dirty glasses, and into the kitchen, which showed all the signs of a raucous dinner party. A pot of something brown and meaty-looking sat on the hob, and a little table was scattered with bowls of crisp crumbs and congealed dips. On a copy of last week’s
Sunday Times
magazine sat a packet of Rizlas, a ripped-up Tube ticket and an ashtray full of multicoloured Sobranie stubs and squished-down spliff butts.

‘Yes,’ said Julia, tipping damp mounds of coffee grounds out of a cafetière and into a precariously full pedal bin, ‘had a few friends over last night. All got a bit messy. Couldn’t get rid of them until the early hours. Hence the ungodly mess.’ She rinsed the cafetière and began spooning fresh grounds into it from a tin. Joy glanced at her mother, who was doing her best to look as if she often found herself in kitchens full of dirty
dishes and drug paraphernalia on a Saturday afternoon.

‘Well,’ she said a minute later, as she unlocked the boot of her car, ‘she seems like a character.’

‘She wasn’t quite so… haphazard when I came to see the flat,’ said Joy. ‘She was wearing a trouser suit. And the flat wasn’t such a mess. I think she must have tidied it specially for the viewings.’

‘Well, I think she seems like fun. I think you’ll have fun with her.’

‘Do you really?’

‘Yes. I do. She seems the sort to get you out of yourself. You know. Could do with losing a pound or two, though.’

‘Mum!’

‘Well, it’s true. All that lovely thick hair and such a pretty face. Seems a shame for her to be so big. And at her age.’

Mum, despite having been overweight all her adult life, had always had a tendency to come down very hard on other overweight women. It was as if she saw her own situation as hopeless and felt that it was up to other big women to fight the good fight on her behalf.