Helen Monks Takhar - Precious You

We both looked at our glasses, only a drip in each of them. You poured the remainder of the bottle into my glass. I sensed our evening drawing to a close. I didn’t want it over yet.

‘Writing was a real escape for me. Not just journalism, writing my own stuff too. I wrote my first manuscript, just for me, to get my head together about … childhood stuff, I suppose. Does your blog help you get your head straight?’

‘I guess. That and my diary. I try to work out my future by processing the past and reporting on the present there.’

‘I used to keep my notepad with me at all times in case I ran into a story, but also if I had a thought about something or other I wanted to get down. Iain used to call it my “little book of lottery tickets”. One of them had the winning line on it, the one that would help me write the next manuscript. The One. The one that would save me, get me out of Leadership and put my life where it deserved to be …’

‘Wow. It sounds like, what did you say your husband’s called again, Iain? He sounds super-supportive.’

‘Iain. My partner, not my husband.’

You’d invited him into the conversation and then I really let myself go, encouraging you to excavate me, draw things to the surface. Because when I spoke about Iain, it felt so good to share all the gestures, big and small, that made him so wonderful. When our relationship seemed of interest to you, he and I became my proudest achievement. I seemed to be educating you about proper, grown-up partnerships. You asked me more and more questions.

‘How did you know Iain was right for you?’

‘I suppose I fell for him, hard. I sort of realised when I met him, I thought I’d been walking forward into my life. I mean, I had, but I’d been limping on one leg, because now I felt complete, balanced, a left leg to the right.’

And then I started telling you how Iain and I had come to sleep with other people, figuring I could educate you about the world, how things could be. ‘We were at a party and I had this thought that we shouldn’t deny ourselves, even though we knew we were going to be together for a long time, maybe forever. He knew exactly what I meant. That’s why we work, Lily. We have rules, like I said. We talked about everyone before and after.’

‘Who were the other guys you were with?’

‘God, all sorts really. Contacts. Friends. Friends of friends. A good many colleagues. Interns. Lots of interns.’ I immediately regretted saying this as your face twitched when I said ‘interns’ and I instantly tried to cover my tracks. In truth, there had been fewer takers over recent years, which couldn’t have helped me much. It suggested either that I wasn’t as attractive as I was when I was younger and/or most of the millennial generation were as ridiculously puritanical about sex in the workplace as I suspected. It’s hard to say which I found intuitively more disappointing. ‘I mean, yes, interns, but not for a while. Mostly when I was closer to their age. The thing with Asif? We have a bit more of a connection than interns from back in the day. He’s like my work-husband. We don’t play that way anymore, by the way. My idea.’

‘Sure,’ you nodded, giving nothing away. ‘So, what’s Iain’s type?’

‘Well, he doesn’t do wallflowers. He likes the firecrackers. Women who aren’t backwards in coming forwards, if you know what I mean.’

I liked talking about the women of yesteryear, who I really was and how I played things before living made me sick. It was all so amazingly sexy then. Until it wasn’t. Until it started to feel like an effort, like every other plate I had to keep spinning in my life. Even before I got properly ill, I’d barely looked at another man for months. Iain had calmed right down too. We’d fallen into a slower rhythm. Gone was the bed-hopping high summer, and in came a calmer September which risked heading to the freezing dead of winter if I wasn’t careful. And I wasn’t careful enough in the end, because of you.

‘What about you? Is there anyone special in your life?’

‘No, not at the moment. Hey, I’d love to meet Iain one day.’

And I let you leave it there. Because I immediately had an image of the three of us together: sat around a table, wine and conversation flying between us. We’d laugh; I’d catch Iain’s eye and he’d send me a smile that told me he was glad I’d met you, happy I had someone new to share my thoughts with, enlivened by the idea you’d be good for me, and therefore, for both of us.

‘What are you doing this weekend? Why don’t the three of us have lunch?’

‘Hey, that’d be perfect.’

We swapped numbers.

You made me take a selfie with you. It felt stupid and foreign, holding my phone on high in an unpractised way. You corrected the angle of my arm at first, your thin fingers grasping the muscles on the inside of my upper arm. I could smell all of you.

‘No, higher up. You never done this before?’

‘Erm, yeah, not as much as you lot …’ Then, in friendly frustration, you took my phone off me before scrunching into my side and miraculously working out how to put on the flash and some kind of flattering filter before handing my phone back. I loved how good we both looked in that picture. How close. In age. In comradery. In friendship. You were giving me a direct line to who I used to be: young and fun, someone you would fight to be friends with, not avoid.

I’ve looked at that picture you took of us a million times. It was far enough away that you can’t see my pissed redness, my dark circles, my desperation. Nor could I see the black energy hiding behind your eyes. Like our selfie, I vowed that at our planned Sunday lunch with Iain you would see the very best of me again.

It got to chucking-out time and you said you needed to get your bike from the yard behind the office. As we started to leave, I was overwhelmed by the idea of hugging you. I felt like we’d breached something, moved somewhere together. I stood up woozily. I remember you holding my forearm to steady me and that somehow becoming a prolonged embrace. I could feel something between us, something powerful. I didn’t want the night to end. We finally pulled away from each other.

‘You going to be OK, cycling half-cut? You could leave it overnight; I could pick up a couple of bottles along the way. We could keep talking.’

‘Think I’ll sit the next dance out, thanks all the same. I’m not actually that much of a drinker?’

I faltered for a second and clawed back an image of a finger of wine untouched in the bottom of your glass.

I was mortified.

I’d drunk and blathered on about myself and my life, while you’d listened on soberly, watching as I gulped down the booze, telling you another one of my difficult little secrets, throwing in a good amount of intimate and revealing details about Iain for good measure. You’d topped me up again and again, but you hadn’t refilled your own glass once. Was it because you were one of those oh-so-serious twenty-odd-year-olds who barely drinks, needing to wake up with a clear head in order to optimise their days? Or perhaps you felt bad because you hadn’t money to pay for any of the drinks? Or was it more deliberate than this? Paranoid anxiety needled me. But I didn’t know who I should trust less, myself, or you. And I desperately didn’t want to take the sheen off those moments where we seemed to connect.

Yet dread still rose to the surface of my uncertainty and embarrassment: the sense of you wanting me malleable, that you set out to expose me and you’d succeeded. I had the idea you somehow knew the ways to see me for what I really was. And once again, I’d spent time alone with you and discovered almost nothing about you in return.