Vince and Joy (29 page)

And now here she was darting around Selfridges, feeling time falling through her fingers like grains of rice. She’d bought her mother a dressing gown, in plain cotton lawn, and a sachet of potpourri. She’d bought Maxine,
her best friend from school who lived in San Diego, a tin in the shape of a London bus and filled with treacle toffee, and her cousin Tracy who lived in Poole a book about iguanas because she collected them.

It was already twelve o’clock and that was as far as she’d got. She hadn’t bought anything at all for George yet, and he’d been her primary target for the day. She let the price tag of an overpriced silk tie fall sadly from between her fingertips and made a decision.

A wok.

She would get George a wok. A proper steel, round-bottomed wok from Chinatown. And some of those bamboo steamers. And nice chopsticks and some rice bowls. He’d love them.

She didn’t have time to walk to Chinatown, so she hopped on a bus outside Selfridges with the intention of getting off at Piccadilly Circus.

The lower deck was jammed full, half with humans, half with carrier bags, so she hoisted her own bags to one side and made her way up the narrow staircase to the top deck. She grabbed a window seat to the left of the bus, tucked her bags under the seat in front of her and turned to stare out of the window. The pavements of Oxford Street were awash with humanity. They streamed across junctions, so heavy in numbers that they overrode the traffic lights – cars came a poor second in these circumstances.

The sky above the rooftops of Oxford Street was a chalky white. The Christmas lights strung across the road on steel gibbets creaked gently back and forth as the bus passed under them. On the corner of Oxford Street and
Regent Street a man in a donkey jacket baked chestnuts over a glowing brazier, scooping them into paper bags for tourists. Joy felt a sudden surge of excitement at her state of relative freedom and hugged it to herself. She loved travelling by bus. All there was to look at on the Tube were rows of ugly people and the floor. The bus, on the other hand, was a moving theatre, and after her claustrophobia in Selfridges just now it was nice to get some distance from other human beings.

The bus turned right into Regent Street, and Joy stared down on to the tops of strangers’ heads, trying to imagine lives for them, wondering what it felt like to be them. As the bus passed Hamleys her gazed passed briefly over another stranger standing by the front doors, before being dramatically snapped back towards him.

A man. A hugely handsome man. A handsome man in a charcoal grey overcoat and Levi 501s.

Vincent Mellon.

Her heart bounced up towards her throat, and she sat bolt upright.

He had one hand in his pocket and the other was clutching a mass of carrier bags. He turned slowly to watch the window display, a family of robotic dinosaurs arranged on a snow-covered hill behind a window emblazoned with the
Jurassic Park
logo, before turning back again.

The bus came to a halt behind a long line of traffic that extended well beyond the next set of traffic lights. It occurred to Joy that she could pick up her bags, climb off the bus and go to say hello. That maybe this was some kind of sign. That maybe she wasn’t supposed to
be staring at him, but talking to him instead, turning the page in the book, finding out what happened next. This all occurred to her in the space of two seconds. It took another four or five seconds for her to think of all the reasons why she shouldn’t get off the bus and say hello – she’d be embarrassed, not know what to say. He’d be embarrassed, not know what to say. She didn’t have time. She’d be late home.

By the time she’d persuaded herself that this was much more than a coincidence, that she had at this very moment a piece of paper with his telephone number on it in her coat pocket and that maybe there was a
reason
for Vince being there, another five seconds had elapsed. She glanced ahead to reassure herself that the traffic wasn’t about to start moving again and was about to lift herself from her seat when the doors to Hamleys opened and a beautiful girl emerged, carrying a small boy in her arms. She was tall and slim, dressed in a shiny black leather jacket and jeans. Her hair was an oil slick of black that hung halfway down her back and was held from her face with black sunglasses. She beamed at Vince, and he beamed at her. She passed the little boy to him and reached to kiss him on his cheek. The little boy threw his arms around his neck, the beautiful girl slipped her hand through the crook of his arm and the three of them turned and strode away towards Oxford Circus looking like an impossibly glossy template for modern family life.

Joy let her grip loosen on the shopping bags and caught her breath.

Of course, she thought. Of course.

Vince was married, had a beautiful little boy. Of course.

His wife looked like a model.

It made sense.

She’d thought he was out of her league that first time she’d seen him in Hunstanton. He must have been feeling a bit desperate, nearly nineteen years old and still a virgin. And it wasn’t as if he’d had a lot of girls to choose from at the Seavue Holiday Home Park. He must have decided that she’d do for a holiday fling, taken advantage of her willingness to sleep with him, found her note the morning after and been thoroughly relieved that he wouldn’t have to take things any further.

But then, she thought, what about that story Bella had told her? What about the friend with the crystal ball and the tarot cards? What about him being ‘in love’ with her?

It was a joke, wasn’t it? They’d been mucking about. Maybe he’d told his friend all about the girl he’d lost his virginity to and they’d been laughing about her, about her perverted father and her awful family and her pathetic little note with its declaration of undying love. It all made sense.

And now he’d moved on and upgraded to pneumatic, chiselled model girls, while she’d moved on and downgraded to moody accountants who placed personal ads. She thought about Stuart Bigmore and Vivica and their wreck in Andalusia and their plans to start a family. She imagined their children, beautiful, ethereal, dark-eyed angels. And then she thought about Ally. He’d probably met someone, too, she mused, probably met some beautiful woman in New Zealand whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life with and have children with. Someone extraordinary. Someone special. Someone completely different to her.

For weeks, she’d been living under the delusion that she was somehow
better
than George – that she was out of his league. But now, as she watched Vince and his beautiful family disappear into the Underground, the dislocation suddenly shifted and her life fell into place. She and George were the same; she and George were made for each other. And when she thought of George now, she felt soothed by the knowledge that to him she was every bit as beautiful as the girl with black hair who’d given Vince a son, that to him she was every bit as special as moody, artistic Vivica who’d lured Stuart down the aisle and out of the country at such a young age and that to him she was extraordinary enough for him to want to marry her and be with her for ever to the exclusion of all other women.

She slipped her hand into her coat pocket and felt around for a piece of paper. She pulled it out and stared at Vince’s phone number for a moment, before folding it in half, screwing it into a small ball and letting it fall to the floor of the bus.

And then she took Vince Mellon and put him in a little box in her mind, labelled it ‘the past’ and focused afresh on her future.

Vince finally finished with Magda the following week.

It happened when she arrived at his flat bearing holiday brochures and talking enthusiastically of Tenerife. Talking about June. Scaring the living daylights out of him.

It had been one of those awful, clichéd, ‘We need to talk’, ‘It’s not you; it’s me’ type of conversations. Magda had cried the whole way through, huge glassy tears that seemed to emanate from every part of her eyeballs and streaked her face brown with muddy mascara. That was the worst thing about girls crying, Vince felt. It didn’t just make you feel like a prize bastard, but it made them look ugly as well, and when a girl looked ugly it made you feel sorry for them, and once you felt sorry for a girl then the whole dynamic of the thing changed completely. The girl ceased to be a proper human being and became instead an asexual object of pity, like a little old man with a dowager’s hump or a tiny puppy with a broken paw.

The whole awful scenario had lasted about four hours. Four wholly unnecessary hours as far as Vince was concerned. Everything that needed to be said got said within the first ten minutes; after that it was all pointless hypothesizing, recriminating, regurgitating and questioning. But because the dumping had taken place at
his
flat he’d had
no choice but to keep going until
she
called a halt to it – asking her to leave, he felt, would have been beyond the pale.

There’d been a foul thirty-minute wait for the minicab he’d called to collect her, mainly because they’d said it would only be ten minutes and he and Magda didn’t have an extra twenty minutes’ worth of conversation left between them. And then she’d gone. He’d stood at the window to watch her leave, as he’d done a hundred times before, checking out the minicab driver, making sure he didn’t look like a sadistic rapist, memorizing his number plate. And then he’d let the curtain fall back, collected his empty mug and some wine glasses, and gone to bed. Single and alone.

Single and unemployed.

It was the first time he’d been either since he was nineteen years old.

And suddenly finding himself both at the same time was a very peculiar feeling indeed.

He woke up the following morning in the full knowledge that nobody cared where he was. There would be no chirpy phone call from Magda asking what he was up to, no call to the office to explain his absence. It was like he’d suddenly ceased to exist. The sensation was as scary as it was liberating.

He spent that week doing all the things that he’d always imagined he’d do if he didn’t have to go to work. He read an entire book in a day. He ironed five shirts, six pairs of trousers and a bed sheet. He went to the supermarket and spent forty-five minutes deciding what to
cook for his dinner. He drank beer at lunchtime. He met up with friends in their lunch hour, friends who smelled of offices and the Underground, feeling smug as they watched hands racing round clocks and hurtled back to their desks at one o’clock. He discovered shops in Finsbury Park he’d never known existed before and came home clutching exotic-smelling jars of Moroccan chilli paste, strange vegetables he didn’t know what to do with and cans full of things called ‘foul mesdames’.

After a few days of this, the novelty began to wear off and he remembered that there were other things he’d always dreamed of doing in the absence of having the stupidest job in the world.

Like writing a book.

Like learning something new.

Like travelling.

Like having a job that made him really happy.

He bought a copy of
Floodlight
and perused it for self-improving evening classes, but never got further than circling a few options before losing it under a cushion on the sofa.

He bought a book called
How To Write a Bestseller
and read the introduction.

He went to Trailfinders and picked up some round-the-world brochures, realized that he couldn’t afford to go and gave them to Cass to read in the toilet.

He bought the
Guardian
and searched the recruitment pages for the perfect job, only to discover that it didn’t exist, and that, even if it did, he wouldn’t get it because he was too young and too inexperienced.

And every single day, without fail, he fabricated some
excuse or other to walk past 44 Wilberforce Road and glance nonchalantly at the front door.

He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He knew she’d moved out, that she was living in south London somewhere. But you never know, he reasoned with himself, she might have left something behind, come back to visit,
changed her mind.

He saw the big woman, Julia, occasionally. He ducked out of view if he happened upon her, not really wanting to have to explain his presence outside her house to her, not wanting to have any kind of discourse with her at all, really. But he liked to see her. It gave him a kind of warm glow to catch a glimpse of someone who’d been on such recent intimate terms with Joy, made him feel connected in a way, as if, if he really wanted to see Joy, he could. Not that he did want to see Joy. That was off the agenda for now, obviously. He’d totally missed the boat there.

Cass, of course, hadn’t stopped going on about the Incredible Coincidence since, and was now completely convinced that Madeleine not only had been a famous monk in a former life, but had also had dozens of former lives and been someone hugely wise, important and mystical in each and every one of them. She was furious with Vince for not following Madeleine’s lead and making contact with Joy.

‘She’s in love with someone, for fuck’s sake. She’s getting married.’

‘Christ,’ she muttered, ‘so what if she’s getting married? What’s that got to do with anything? This is destiny we’re talking about. Fate wants you to be together. You can’t
ignore the signs. The minute you put that note into my hand – no, in fact, the minute you even mentioned her name – I knew it. I just knew that you and she were meant to be. It was overwhelming. Overpowering. And Madeleine knew it, too. She found her for you, found your one true love. And you’re just going to throw that away?’