Vince and Joy (20 page)

‘Oh,’ he said looking at her with concern, ‘here, let me take your coat.’

‘Oh, no, no,’ she smiled, hugging it to her protectively, ‘I’m a bit chilly. I think I’ll keep it on.’

This failed to prompt an offer to dispense some kind of heat, so she tucked her frozen hands into her pockets and lowered herself on to one of the sofas, loath to take them out even when he handed her a long glass of chilled champagne.

‘Here’s to inauspicious beginnings,’ he said, raising his glass to hers.

‘Indeed,’ she smiled, her teeth chattering slighdy.

‘Oh, dear,’ he said, ‘you really are cold, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘I’m absolutely freezing.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘One of the reasons this place was such a steal was that it needed a central heating system put in, but it was summer when I moved in and by the time winter came round I’d kind of got used to living without it. It’s boarding school,’ he smiled apologetically. ‘Toughens you up. Here, let me see if I can dig out my old blow heater. I won’t be a tick.’

George came back a few minutes later clutching a big metal box that looked as if it would burst into flames
the moment it was plugged in. The acrid smell of burning dust accompanied the first few creaking wafts of warm air, but after a few minutes the small room started to thaw, and fifteen minutes later Joy finally felt warm enough to remove her coat. George put on an Arrested Development CD and poured them some more champagne. He lifted the green blanket on the coffee table and pulled out a small wooden box.

‘I don’t know how you feel about this,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it’s a rather big part of my life.’ And then he did something incredibly unexpected. He pulled out a packet of Rizlas and proceeded to knock together a gigantic spliff.

‘You know something,’ said Joy, watching his hands in action, ‘you really are a very unexpected person.’

‘I am?’

Yes. You just keep confounding all my expectations. I mean, the first time I saw you, I thought you looked like a vicar, then tonight, well, you looked like the archetypal accountant in your suit and tie, and now you’re sitting here in your jeans, listening to Arrested Development, making a spliff. I just don’t know what to make of you.’

George smiled, as if he’d been told this before. And would it surprise you even more if I told you that I was once a punk?’ he said. ‘Have a look at these.’

He pulled another box from under the coffee table and handed it to Joy. Inside the box was a big wadge of photographs, mainly the small square ones on matt paper from the 1970s. She leafed through the pictures, groups of gawping 1970s and 1980s public school youth, a
plethora of batwing tops and narrow jeans, army surplus jackets and cap-sleeved T-shirts, cigarettes, stuck-out tongues, stilettos and plastic earrings, too much hair, electric guitars, mopeds, drum kits and spotty chins.

‘Which one’s you?’

‘Can’t you tell?’

‘No.’

‘There,’ he said, pointing to a thin boy with backcombed hair, a horizontally striped T-shirt and a German shepherd dog wearing a bandana.

‘No!’ she exclaimed, looking closer at the blurred image.

‘And that one.’ He pointed at another picture of an even thinner boy with bleached blond tufty hair and a sulky-looking teenage girl with pink hair sitting on his lap.

‘God,’ she said, ‘you look so different. And who’s the girl?’

‘That’s Phoebe – my teenage sweetheart.’

Joy studied the girl closely, subconsciously trying to validate her own unexpected presence in George’s life with the existence of other women who’d taken the same path.

‘She’s very pretty.’

‘Yes,’ he said, peering over her shoulder at the picture, ‘she was. I’m afraid I’m terribly shallow. I only date very pretty women.’ He smiled at her and lit the spliff, and Joy suddenly realized that this whole physical attraction thing was totally relative. Compared to other men she’d dated, George wasn’t especially good-looking. But in his
own
estimation he was ‘handsome’ and therefore attractive enough to be able to stipulate that he would date
only pretty women. And hence, in his mind, there was nothing incongruous about Joy agreeing to a second date and sitting here now drinking champagne in his flat. And if he thought that they made a good match and Phoebe thought that he was a good catch, then maybe she was the one with the problem.

And just then, as if to compound this train of thought, the phone rang and George tutted. Oh, God,’ he said, ‘that’ll be Tara.’

‘Tara?’

‘Yes. The psycho ex, remember? I’ll get rid of her.’

Joy sat and listened in wonder as George fended off what sounded from her point of view like a barrage of hysteria and tears from the other end of the line before finally hanging up with a terse, ‘Please don’t call here again.’

‘Woah,’ said Joy, all agog with the drama of it, ‘what was that all about?’

‘Oh, God,’ he said, flopping down on the sofa and running his fingers through his hair, ‘she’s heard through the grapevine that I’m seeing someone and she’s freaking out about it. I knew this would happen.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘so she’s not over it yet?’

‘Sadly not. She’s convinced herself that we’re going to get back together, and I suppose the fact that I’ve been single for so long just added fuel to her conviction. And now she’s finally having to accept that it’s over. And if I sounded a litde cruel just then, it was very much to be kind, I can assure you. She’s been deluding herself for too long now and it’s not healthy. She needs to move on… ‘ He shook his head sadly as he considered the mental
state of his poor, lovesick ex-girlfriend, and Joy felt her suspicion growing that maybe there was nothing wrong with George at all and that her resistance towards him was entirely a matter of a bad first impression and her own narrow-mindedness.

So when George finally made a move and kissed Joy on the lips, she’d already decided that she was going to go with the flow and see what happened. And when it came fifteen minutes later to the practicality of getting Joy back to Finsbury Park at nearly one in the morning, it was inevitable that the option of Joy staying the night was going to arise.

‘You take the bed,’ he said. I can curl up here on the sofa.’

But Joy had already decided that even though she didn’t have any overwhelming desire to have sex with him right now, that if she could accept the possibility of sex with George at some point in the near future, then she wasn’t putting herself in a particularly hazardous position by agreeing to share a bed with him. And so she found herself ten minutes later, wearing one of George’s T-shirts and huddled under a rather damp duvet in George’s ice-cold bedroom watching him getting undressed and realizing with a start that he actually had a very nice body – well-formed pecs, a smattering of chest hair, lovely skin with a lingering hint of summer tan.

‘I thought you said you had an “unimpressive” physique,’ she teased. ‘You’ve got a lovely body’

‘Thank you,’ he said, beaming with delight, ‘I’ve been going to the gym quite regularly since I’ve been single. You’re the first person to see the results, so I suppose
I didn’t want to comment without objectivity. Now, would it make you feel more comfortable if I were to wear a T-shirt to bed, too?’

Joy shrugged. ‘What would you normally wear?’

‘Well, that would be nothing.’

Joy eyed him in his boxer shorts and decided she wasn’t quite ready for that. ‘Shorts are fine,’ she said.

He hopped under the duvet with her and turned his head to face her.

‘Do you know something?’ he said, smiling at her like a small boy. ‘I’ve had this fantasy ever since I was a teenager…’

‘Oh, yes…’

‘No – not that sort of fantasy. A chaste fantasy. A fantasy about the girl I’d end up with. And I know this probably sounds terribly asinine, but I knew that she would have black hair and a one-syllable name. And ever since I got your letter I’ve just had this feeling, quite overwhelming, that you’re her…’

And for some reason the idea of living up to the exacting adolescent fantasies of a teenage George struck her as an enormous compliment, so when he looked at her with his soft green eyes and asked her for a hug – ’Purely platonic, I promise.’ – she acquiesced. And the hug, inevitably, turned into a kiss, and the kiss tuned into a passionate embrace and, before she knew it, she was staring at the back of George’s neck while he rifled frantically through his bedside cabinet for a condom.

Joy didn’t regret sleeping with George when they awoke the following morning. Joy never regretted sleeping with
anyone. The only sort of sex you should regret, she believed, was the sort you’d given to someone who didn’t deserve it.

He brought the death-trap blow heater into the bedroom and made her a cup of tea in an attempt to warm her up, but even under a thick duvet she was still too cold to even contemplate getting out of bed.

‘Look,’ she said, making an oval of her mouth and breathing out, ‘you can see my breath.’

Oh, God,’ George said, dropping his head into his hands, ‘this is dreadful. Here I am with the most radi-andy beautiful woman in the whole world lying naked in my bed and I can’t even give her the basic luxury of bodily warmth. Here!’ he exclaimed, brightening. ‘How about a nice hot bath? The boiler here churns out gallons of hot water. You could just lie there and keep topping it up until your bones get warm.’

‘But what about getting there?’

‘I’ll get you a blanket.’

He returned and wrapped her chivalrously in a rather scratchy blanket, then ushered her into a steamy bathroom.

‘No bubbles?’

‘Oh, God.’ He slapped his head. ‘I’m such a disaster. I can’t believe I didn’t think of bubbles.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she smiled, hopping into the steaming hot bath and feeling her bones melt with relief.

‘Now, I’ve put a towel in the tumble dryer to warm up,’ he said. ‘Just let me know when you want to get out and I’ll fetch it for you.’ He stopped and folded his arms, a smile spreading across his face as he stared at her.’ You
really are quite exquisite,’ he said. ‘The most perfect, perfect thing I’ve ever seen.’ He smiled at her for a bit longer, before snapping out of his reverie. ‘Now. Can I get you another cup of tea?’

Joy lay in the bath for nearly an hour while George brought her cups of tea, slices of toast and a steady stream of compliments. They then spent the rest of the day in bed where they talked and had sex and talked and had sex until the streetlights outside the window flickered on at four o’clock and threw amber shadows over the bedclothes.

The world had shrunk over the course of the past twenty-four hours. Where once there had been a thriving city heaving with millions of bodies, there were now just two people huddled together under a duvet in a small, dark room in the corner of a flat, floating alone in the blackness of the cosmos.

Everything had lost its context, and Joy no longer knew where she was going. And it wasn’t until their stomachs started growling at eight o’clock and Joy found her way back into the clothes she’d discarded the previous night in order to leave the confines of the flat and find something to eat that any semblance of objectivity returned to her, and she suddenly remembered that, even though she’d now been on two dates with George, spent twelve hours in bed with him and had sex with him four times, she still didn’t find him in the least bit attractive.

Julia’s strange friend Bella was round again on Saturday night when Joy got back from George’s. There were many strange things about Bella, but by far the strangest was the fact that he was a man.

Joy had first encountered Bella (apparently his given name was Barry) the day after she moved in. He’d been sitting on the sofa watching
Songs of Praise
when she walked through the living room on her way to the kitchen to get her morning cup of tea, an emaciated little creature in black leggings and a huge black jumper that nearly swallowed him whole. He had thin brown hair worn in a blunt shoulder-length bob, eyebrows plucked to the point of almost nonexistence and the scrub-faced, exposed look of a man who was often to be found in full make-up.

He’d made a big show of jumping when Joy walked into the room, clutching his heart and exclaiming about what a fright she’d given him. Then he’d uncoiled himself from the sofa like a little grass snake and introduced himself. I’m Bella – Julia’s little sister’ Joy had been at a loss to know what to say. I know,’ he’d said, we don’t look anything alike’

It turned out of course that he was neither Julia’s sister nor her brother, but was, in fact, her Very best friend in all the world’.

Julia absolutely adored him, but as far as Joy could make out he was vain, neurotic and totally fucked up. In his head he was a captivating, glamorous but ever-so-slightly tragic queen living the urban homosexual dream. In reality he spent all his time hanging out with Julia eating Hobnobs on her sofa and bitching about everyone on the telly. Apparently he had a drag act – Bella Bella – but he’d fallen out with the management at the club where he had his spot and nobody else had seen fit to book him since. He’d never had a boyfriend because, according to Julia, he hated gay men, and he struck Joy as one of the most inherently unhappy people she’d ever met in her life.