David Nicholls - One Day

Now Ian stood in the kitchenette in a shaft of smoky sunlight with his broad back towards her. Emma watched him from the doorway, taking in the familiar old grey t-shirt with the holes in, an inch of his underpants visible above his track-suit bottoms, his ‘tracky botts’. She could see the words Calvin Klein against the brown hair on the small of his back and it occurred to her that this was probably not at all what Calvin Klein had in mind.

She spoke to break the silence. ‘Isn’t that getting a bit burnt?’

‘Not burnt, crispy .’

‘I say burnt, you say crispy.’

‘ Let’s call the whole thing off!’

Silence.

‘I can see the top of your underpants,’ she said.

‘Yes, that’s deliberate.’ Lisping, effeminate voice. ‘It’s called fashion, sweetheart.’

‘Well it’s certainly very provocative.’

Nothing, just the sound of food burning.

But it was Ian’s turn to cave this time. ‘So. Where’s Alpha Boy taking you then?’ he said, without turning round.

‘Somewhere in Soho, I don’t know.’ In fact she did know, but the restaurant’s name was a recent by-word for modish, metropolitan dining and she didn’t want to make matters worse. ‘Ian, if you don’t want me to go tonight—’

‘No, you go, enjoy yourself—’

‘Or if you want to come with us?—’

‘What, Harry and Sally and me? Oh, I don’t think so, do you?’

‘You’d be very welcome.’

‘The two of you bantering and talking over me all night—’

‘We don’t do that—’

‘You did last time!’

‘No, we didn’t!’

‘You’re sure you don’t want some eggy bread?’

‘No!’

‘And anyway, I’ve got a gig tonight, haven’t I? House of Ha Ha, Putney.’

‘A paid gig?’

‘Yes, a paid gig!’ he snapped. ‘So I’m fine, thank you very much.’ He started searching noisily in the cupboard for some brown sauce. ‘Don’t you worry about me.’

Emma sighed irritably. ‘If you don’t want me to go, just say so.’

‘Em, we’re not joined at the hip. You go if you want. Enjoy yourself.’ The sauce bottle wheezed consumptively. ‘Just don’t get off with him, will you?’

‘Well that’s hardly going to happen, is it?’

‘No, so you keep saying.’

‘He’s going out with Suki Meadows.’

‘But if he wasn’t?’

‘If he wasn’t it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference, because I love you.’

Still this wasn’t enough. Ian said nothing and Emma sighed, crossed the kitchen, her feet sucking on the lino, and looped her arms around his waist, feeling him pull it in as she did so. Pressing her face against his back, she inhaled the familiar warm body smell, kissed the fabric of his t-shirt, mumbled ‘Stop being daft’ and they stood like this for a while, until it became clear that Ian was keen to start eating. ‘Right. Better mark these essays,’ she said, and walked away. Twenty-eight numbing opinions on viewpoint in To Kill a Mockingbird .

‘Em?’ he said as she reached the door. ‘What are you doing this afty? Round about seventeen-hundred hours?’

‘Should be finished. Why?’

He hitched himself up onto the kitchen units with the plate on his lap. ‘Thought we might go to bed, for, you know, a bit of afternoon delight.’

I love him, she thought, I’m just not in love with him and also I don’t love him. I’ve tried, I’ve strained to love him but I can’t. I am building a life with a man I don’t love, and I don’t know what to do about it.

‘Maybe,’ she said from the doorway. ‘May-be,’ and she pouted her lips into a kiss, smiled and closed the door.

∗ ∗ ∗

There were no more mornings, only mornings after.

Heart thumping, soaked with sweat, Dexter was woken just after midday by a man bellowing outside, but it turned out to be M People. He had fallen asleep in front of the television again, and was now being urged to search for the hero inside himself.

The Saturdays after the Late-Night Lock-In were always spent like this, in the stale air, blinds drawn against the sun. Had she still been around, his mother would have been shouting up the stairs for him to get up and do something with the day, but instead he sat smoking on the black leather sofa in last night’s underpants, playing Ultimate Doom on the PlayStation and trying not to move his head.

By mid-afternoon he could feel weekend melancholy creep up on him and so decided to practise his mixing. Something of an amateur DJ, Dexter had a wallful of CDs and rare vinyl in bespoke pine racks, two turntables and a microphone, all tax-deductible, and could often be spotted in record shops in Soho, wearing an immense pair of headphones like halved coconuts. Still in his underpants, he mixed idly back and forth between break-beats on his brand new CD mixing decks in preparation for the next big-night-in with mates. But something was missing, and he soon gave up. ‘CD’s not vinyl,’ he announced, then realised that he had said this to an entirely empty room.

Melancholy again, he sighed and crossed to the kitchen, moving slowly like a man recovering from surgery. The massive fridge was full to overflowing with bottles of an exciting new brand of upmarket cider. As well as presenting the show (‘Car-crash television’ they called it, apparently a good thing), he had recently expanded into voiceovers. He was ‘classless’ they said, also apparently a good thing, the exemplar of a new breed of British man: metropolitan, moneyed, not embarrassed by his masculinity, his sex-drive, his liking for cars and big titanium watches and gadgets in brushed steel. So far he had done voiceovers for this premium bottled cider, designed to appeal to a young Ted Baker-wearing crowd, and a new breed of men’s razor, an extraordinary sci-fi object with a multitude of blades and a lubricating strip that left a mucal trail, as if someone had sneezed on your chin.

He had even dipped his toe into the world of modelling, a long-standing ambition that he had never dared to voice, and which he was quick to dismiss as ‘just a bit of a laugh’. Only this month he had featured in a fashion spread in a men’s magazine, the theme ‘gangster-chic’, and over nine pages he had chewed cigars or lain riddled with bullets in a number of tailored double-breasted suits. Copies of the magazine were accidentally scattered round the flat, so that guests might casually stumble upon it. There was even a copy by the toilet, and he sometimes found himself sitting there and staring at his own photo, dead but beautifully tailored and splayed across the bonnet of a Jag.

Presenting car-crash television was fine for a while, but you could only crash the car so many times. At some point in the future he would have to do something good as opposed to so-bad-it’s-good, and in an attempt to acquire some credibility he had set up his own production company, Mayhem TV plc. At the moment Mayhem only existed as a stylish logo on some heavy stationery, but that would surely change. It would have to; as his agent Aaron had said, ‘You’re a great Youth Presenter, Dexy. Trouble is, you’re not a Youth.’ What else might he be capable of, given the breaks? Acting? He knew a lot of actors, both professionally and socially, played poker with a few of them, and frankly if they could do it. .

Yes, professionally and socially, the last couple of years had been a time of opportunity, of great new mates, canapés and premieres, helicopter rides and a lot of yammering about football. There had been low points of course: a sense of anxiety and crippling dread, one or two instances of public vomiting. There was something about his presence in a bar or club that made other men want to shout abuse or even hit him, and recently he had been bottled off-stage while introducing a Kula Shaker concert — that was no fun. In a recent what’s hot and what’s not column, he had been listed as not-hot. This not-hotness had weighed heavily on his mind, but he tried to dismiss it as envy. Envy was just the tax you paid on success.