Naomi Alderman - The Lessons

I nodded.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m a bit worried about him. He’s restless down there in the country. Edgy. It’s not good for him, and it’s not good for Nicola. I said he should come to London when your holidays start, to get away for a few days.’

She finished her tea, put the mug on the bedside table and, looking away, said, ‘None of us know how long this marriage will last, but he needs a friend, James. Whether they stay together or not. You shouldn’t keep away from him. Promise me you won’t.’

And I thought of what it would take to say no, again, to this.

‘All right,’ I said, as she turned off the light.

*

I said the following things to myself. Number one, Mark doesn’t know. If Jess doesn’t know — and she didn’t, of that I was sure — then Mark could not know how I felt. Number two, he doesn’t want you. He’s got his own ideas about the right way to live, about what he’s doing now. You don’t figure in them, except as a friend, so pull yourself together. Number three, if he doesn’t know and he doesn’t want you, then the only thing that can make anything go wrong is you. It’s just a matter of willpower, James, just like resisting an extra Yorkshire pudding at Sunday lunch. All you have to do is not act, not say anything, not do anything that would make him think you wanted him. Come on, James, you’re good at not doing things. This should be easy.

He pulled up at our door around lunchtime on the first day of my holidays in his little red sports car. His hair had grown longer than before, touching his collar and creeping around the sides of his face. In jeans, a white shirt with thin blue stripes and a battered blazer, he looked like the boy in school who was always on the verge of expulsion. He beeped the horn and leapt out of the car, all energy, and hugged me.

That first day, we were like students again. We went to Piccadilly Circus, where Mark declared loudly how much better the lights were in Times Square. He bought a disposable camera and insisted I take pictures of him posing next to Eros, one foot off the ground, as if about to take flight.

‘He’s supposed,’ he shouted, although I was only three feet away from him, ‘to be facing the other way . He’s supposed to be firing his arrow down Shaftesbury Avenue. It’s a joke, you see — he’s supposed to be burying his shaft in Shaftesbury Avenue. Do you see, James? Do you understand?’

I nodded and went red. The tourists sitting on the statue’s steps looked at us. I thought, they must think we’re lovers.

In the British Museum, walking through the hushed marble halls, he began to talk nonsense at the loudest possible volume.

‘I mean, what do you think, James?’ he said. ‘I think she’s making a fuss about nothing. After all, I only gave her a BLACK EYE.’

This directed at full blast towards an elderly couple peering at a Greek fresco.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I mean HONESTLY, if she’s going to provoke me, she’ll have to expect to get a HOT IRON IN THE FACE FROM TIME TO TIME.’

‘What?!’ I said.

The elderly couple looked at us in horror and scurried away.

He grinned. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you try one. How about the sketchers?’

He motioned with his head towards two young men sitting at the foot of a broken statue, pencilling furiously in their sketchbooks.

We strolled towards them and I searched my mind for something funny to say. As we walked past, I found myself declaring, ‘He’s making such a bloody fuss, you’d think I’d given him AIDS. After all, it was only CHLAMYDIA.’

And Mark replied, not missing a beat, ‘But he did get it in his THROAT, DARLING.’

The adrenalin pumped in my throat and my heart and my brain. I thought, this is exactly what I need. This, exactly this. I cast a glance over my shoulder as we left the room. The sketchers were staring at us, their drawing momentarily forgotten. When we walked into the next room I began to laugh and soon I could not stop, and the frowns and the stares of the serious museum-goers were nothing to me.

On the way out of the museum, we went to the lavatories. Under the eyes of the other men, he pulled me into a cubicle with him and I thought, another tease? I could not tell and I thought, perhaps, James, he does know and perhaps he does want. But he only pulled a tiny plastic bag filled with white powder out of his pocket and said in, at last, a whisper, ‘Powder your nose?’

‘We’re in the British Museum, Mark.’ I could not keep the tone of shock out of my voice. ‘The British Museum . You can’t do that in the British Museum.’

We were crammed into the cubicle, almost touching but not quite.

He said, ‘You don’t imagine I’m the first person to have done this?’

He tipped a little of the powder on to the toilet cistern, pulled a credit card out of his wallet and began to chop at it, scraping it into two orderly lines.

‘Someone will catch us,’ I hissed.

He leaned in very close to me and whispered, ‘Only if you don’t stop talking.’

I tried to look through the gap at the hinge of the toilet door to see if anyone was staring at us: two men together in a cubicle, surely doing something offensive to someone. But there was no staring anywhere. I turned back. Mark had rolled a £50 note into a tube. He proffered it to me.

‘Go on,’ he said.

I thought, I am being offered drugs in the toilets of the British Museum. This is what my life has been missing up to this moment. I shook my head again. Mark shrugged.

‘Your loss,’ he said, and snorted both lines. As he tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling and his eyes watered and he began to grin I thought, yes, perhaps this is all that I need. Just this is quite sufficient.

The next day, Mark arrived at 2 p.m., beeping his horn and doing a handstand in the streets while he waited for me.

‘Do you know,’ I said, bending over to talk to his head, ‘that there are two parking tickets on your windscreen?’

‘Oh, those!’ he said. ‘I just wait for the letters to come and send them to the banker. Come on. Let’s go and see the wizard.’

And I thought of the energy it would take to explain to Mark the workings of the Penalty Charge system and how intensely useless it would be and instead just said, ‘The wizard?’

The wizard lived in a grimy basement flat in Clerkenwell. His name was Jee, he had pale skin, dirty blond hair and wore a patterned smock and brightly coloured hat.

He greeted Mark warmly with a hug, looked me up and down through narrowed eyes and said to Mark, ‘You sure?’

‘Oh, totally. He’s never done a thing wrong in his life, have you, James?’

‘S’what I mean,’ said Jee.

‘Nah, he’s all right,’ Mark said, and we walked through the door.

It was clear to me at once that he was rich, that he had been born rich. My time spent with Mark and his friends had accustomed me to sifting the long-term rich from the nouveau from the purely aspirational. The key is the possession of objects which are clearly tremendously expensive but are treated with disdain and often held in surroundings of squalor. In Jee’s case, the kitchen with its broken orange plastic dish rack and dirty cupboards was enlivened by an enormous espresso machine, worth at least £1,000. But the machine had not been cared for: its surface was already pockmarked with kitchen grease and old coffee grounds had been dumped on the top. No one who had had to work to acquire this thing — either to buy it or to steal it — would have treated it in this way.

In Jee’s living room, a group of men were hunched over a low mosaic-topped table, examining a collection of small coloured tablets and printed paper squares. From a distance, they looked like schoolboys admiring a selection of marbles and stickers.