Paullina Simons - A Beggar’s Kingdom

Julian, too.

“Let me ask you a question, Jules,” Ashton said one night, late on the Central Line, as they were heading home thoroughly inebriated after last rounds at the Counting House.

“You’re in no state to question me, especially in that tone of voice,” Julian said, “and I’m certainly in no state to answer you.”

“In other words, the perfect time to have a serious conversation—when we’re both three sheets to the wind. Let me ask you: when you meet this girl, does she know who you are?”

“Why would she? How could she?”

“Uh-huh. But at the very least her name is Josephine, right?”

“No—because it wasn’t her name,” Julian said. “Her name was Mia.”

“Wait, so, a derivative of the most common name in the English language?”

“She falls in love with me!”

“Don’t shout, we’re on the tube,” Ashton said. “People will think we’re drunk.”

“We are drunk.”

After they got off at Notting Hill Gate and were staggering home, Ashton resumed. “Jules, have you considered the possibility that it’s just a random girl?”

“You think I’m on the receiving end of some cosmic prank? Go to hell.”

“Oh, sure, I mean, what are the chances of finding a nipply, lusty, brown-haired, brown-eyed chick named Mary who falls for you?”

“I’m done listening to you.”

But Ashton was on a roll. “You think you’re falling in love with Josephine, but it’s just some murdering broad named Mallory.”

“Am I listening?”

“You hook up with her in a brothel of all places—where naturally all true love begins—and she goes all doe-eyed on you, tells you you’re her one and only john, starts killing and stealing, and your first thought is— Josephine !”

“I’m not only not listening, I’m no longer your friend.” Julian tried to speed up, but drunk Ashton was a faster and more coherent man than drunk Julian.

“Are you pissed off because you know I’m right?”

“Why are you still speaking?” Julian said. “You think I travel through time so I can hook up with a stranger? What about her feelings for me?”

Ashton’s smile was from one side of the street to the other. “Jules, that’s my other point. Can we get real for a sec?”

“No.”

“We roomed together and lived together, lest you forgot.”

“I wish I forgot.”

“In our sophomore year, your bed was separated from mine by a thin sheet we hung up for fake privacy. Do you remember? Did you think this sheet was soundproof?”

“Go to hell.”

“I know all about you. Plus Gwen used to brag to Riley, who would then scold me—oh, and thanks for that, too, by the way. Julian does this, and Julian does that. Fuck you, buddy.” A grinning Ashton hooked his long arm around Julian’s neck as they zigzagged down the sidewalk. Julian tried to get away, but Ashton wouldn’t let him.

“Your point?”

“My point is,” Ashton said, “that any girl would be happy to biblically acquaint herself with you.”

“Get off me.”

“During foreplay you could ask her if she’s the one, and I promise you, promise you, by the time you get to the afterglow, she’ll be chirping yes! Yes, I’m the one, Jules! Wait, no, it’s me, I’m the one!”

Julian pushed Ashton off him. “You’re ridiculous.”

“But am I wrong?”

“Both ridiculous and wrong.”

“Here’s my final point,” Ashton said, grabbing Julian again. “Why do you have to spelunk, box, swim, bust up your body? Why can’t you find them and seduce them right here in London, in the comfort of your own home, in your tiny, woefully inadequate bed?”

“I’m moving out.”

“I promise to set you up only with brown-eyed girls named Maria. I know about a dozen off the top of my head.”

“I’m packing my shit as soon as we get home.”

“I’m not saying love again. I’m saying …”

“Shut up.”

Ashton was laughing, his arm around Julian’s neck. “You’ve tried it your way, Jules. You’ve tried it your way twice. Come on, buddy. Now let’s try it Ashton’s way.”

And Julian said okay. “I’ll try it Ashton’s way, said the barmaid to the bishop.”

Julian didn’t know how his friend accomplished these things, but Ashton did set him up with an attractive brown-haired woman named Mary. They went out for a bite and a drink at her local pub and ended up at her place near the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth. When they were still at the pub, he told her he wasn’t looking for anything serious, and the woman said thank God because she wasn’t either.

Julian left in the middle of the night. There was no tube and he couldn’t find a cab, so he had to hoof home five miles across Lambeth Bridge and around Hyde Park. The next morning when Ashton asked him how it went, Julian said, “What can I tell you, everything is worse south of the river.” They both chuckled. “But on the bright side, the Imperial War Museum is near her. Let’s go grab a bite and check it out.”

“No, thank you. I don’t do anything south of the river, especially having to do with the war.”

And so it went.

Julian sparred with four different partners on four different days. He hit the speedbag five times a week with a thousand blurs of his gloved fists. He pummeled the heavy bag three times a week with five hundred blows of thunder. The bag would fall before Julian fell, and the blows reverberated through the gym, the glass in the grubby windows rattling with Julian’s immense anger. He pounded the bag to cleanse his body of rage, he swam miles in the local gym pool to exhaust himself, and when that still didn’t work, he slept with the women he chatted up in pubs and clubs and Franz Ferdinand concerts. They weren’t all named Mary. And Ashton’s theory proved not entirely correct. Not one of them, no matter how brown-haired and brown-eyed and Mary-monikered, no matter how long-limbed and white skinned, felt remotely like the Mary of Clerkenwell or the Mallory of the Silver Cross. Or the Josephine of L.A. Not one quantum particle of them felt like the girl he was eternally entangled with.

But Ashton was right: Julian had to move on. He had to try to find a way to live again. At the very least he had to have sex again.

And at the very least, that’s what he did.

On Sunday mornings, Ashton would crawl out of his room to find Julian making coffee or eating leftovers, and there would be another irate woman yelling, Callie from Portobello, Candy from King’s Road, a girl from the Botanist and from the Colbert. “Howling in the night, yelling in the mornings, destroying speedbags,” Ashton said. “All you do is fuck and fight. Both with the same temper.”

“I’m doing what you told me to, remember? You’re never happy.”

“When will it end? I’m going crazy from the racket, both in the middle of the night and in the mornings. I’m going to charge the noise-cancelling headphones you forced me to buy against my share of the rent. Can’t you stay at their place? Are you doing this deliberately? Are you making our apartment uninhabitable so I start praying you’ll go do the time warp again?” Ashton grinned at his own cleverness.

“Ash, I know it’s difficult for you to believe,” said Julian, “but when I’m with a girl, I hardly think of you at all. One might say never.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Women left Julian nasty messages or waited by his front door to shout obscenities to his face. You never called me, you piece of shit. You said you would and you never did, and then I saw you in the pub with someone else. I know you said we weren’t serious, but you could’ve called me. Julian was left neutral by it. Other women couldn’t move the needle, they broke their mouths on his bitter stone, shattering as they came, while he kept waiting for the end-bell to ring. It never did. Rage was blacker than blindness, blacker than grief.