David Nicholls: One Day

Why am I here?

Am I really making a difference?

Why can’t she put some clothes on?

What is that smell?

Where do I want to be right now?

She wanted to be in Rome, with Dexter Mayhew. In bed.

‘Shaftes-bury Avenue.’

‘No, Shafts-bury. Three syllables.’

‘Lychester Square.’

‘Leicester Square, two syllables.’

‘Why not Lychester?’

‘No idea.’

‘But you are meant to be my teacher, you are meant to know.’

‘Sorry,’ Dexter shrugged.

‘Well I think it is stupid language,’ said Tove Angstrom, and punched him in the shoulder.

‘ A stupid language. I couldn’t agree with you more. No need to hit me though.’

‘I apologise,’ said Tove, kissing his shoulder, then his neck and mouth, and Dexter was once again struck by how rewarding teaching could be.

They lay in a tangle of cushions on the terracotta floor of his tiny room, having given up on the single bed as inadequate for their needs. In the brochure for the Percy Shelley International School of English, the teachers’ accommodation had been described as ‘some comfortable with many mitigating features’ and this summed it up perfectly. His room in the Centro Storico was dull and institutional, but there was at least a balcony, a foot-wide sill overlooking a picturesque square that, in a very Roman way, also functioned as a car park. Each morning he was woken by the sound of office-workers breezily reversing their cars into each other.

But in the middle of this humid July afternoon, the only sound came from the wheels of tourist suitcases rumbling on the cobbles below, and they lay with the windows wide open, kissing lazily, her hair clinging to his face, thick and dark and smelling of some Danish shampoo: artificial pine and cigarette smoke. She reached across his chest for the packet on the floor, lit two cigarettes and passed him one, and he shuffled up onto the pillows, letting the cigarette dangle from his lip like Belmondo or someone in a Fellini film. He had never seen a Belmondo or Fellini film, but was familiar with the postcards: stylish, black and white. Dexter didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.

They kissed again, and he wondered vaguely if there was some moral or ethical dimension to this situation. Of course the time to worry about the pros and cons of sleeping with a student would have been after the College party, while Tove was perching unsteadily on the edge of his bed and unzipping her knee-length boots. Even then, in the muddle of red wine and desire he had found himself wondering what Emma Morley would say. Even as Tove twirled her tongue in his ear, he had conducted his defence: she’s nineteen, an adult, and anyway I’m not a real teacher. Besides, Emma was a long way away at this moment, changing the world from a mini-bus on the ring road of a provincial town, and what was all this to do with Emma anyway? Tove’s knee-length boots sagged in the corner of the room now, in the hostel where overnight visitors were strictly forbidden.

He shifted his body to a cooler patch of terracotta, peering out of the window to try to gauge the time from the small square of vivid blue sky. The rhythm of Tove’s breathing was changing as she slipped into sleep, but he had an important appointment to keep. He dropped the last two inches of cigarette into a wine glass, and stretched for his wristwatch, which lay on an unread copy of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man .

‘Tove, I’ve got to go.’

She groaned in protest.

‘I’m meeting my parents, I’ve got to leave now.’

‘Can I come too?’

He laughed. ‘Don’t think so, Tove. Besides you’ve got a grammar test on Monday. Go and revise.’

‘You test me. Test me now.’

‘Okay, verbs. Present continuous.’

She coiled one leg around him, using the leverage to pull herself on top of him. ‘I am kissing, you are kissing, he is kissing, she is kissing. .’

He pulled himself up on his elbows. ‘Seriously, Tove. .’

‘Ten more minutes,’ she whispered in his ear, and he sank back to the floor. Why not, he thought? After all, I’m in Rome, it’s a beautiful day. I am twenty-four years old, financially secure, healthy. I ache and I am doing something that I shouldn’t be doing, and I am very, very lucky.

The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.

And how is Rome? How is La Dolce Vita? (look it up). I imagine you right now at a café table, drinking one of those ‘cappuccinos’ we hear so much about, and wolf-whistling at everything. You’re probably wearing sunglasses to read this. Well take them off, you look ridiculous. Did you get the books I sent you? Primo Levi is a fine Italian writer. It’s to remind you that life isn’t all gelati and espadrilles. Life can’t always be like the opening of Betty Blue . And how is teaching? Please promise me you’re not sleeping with your students. That would just be so. . disappointing.

Must go now. Bottom of page looms, and in the other room I can hear the thrilling murmur of our audience as they throw chairs at each other. I finish this job in two weeks THANK GOD, then Gary Nutkin, our director, wants me to devise a show for infant schools about Apartheid. With PUPPETS for fuck’s sake. Six months in a Transit on the M 6 with a Desmond Tutu marionette on my lap. I might give that one a miss. Besides, I’ve written this two-woman play about Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson called ‘Two Lives’ (either that or ‘Two Depressed Lesbians’). Maybe I’ll put that on in a pub-theatre somewhere. Once I’d explained to Candy who Virginia Woolf was, she said that she really, really wanted to play her, but only if she can take her top off, so that’s the casting sorted. I’ll be Emily Dickinson, and keep my top on. I’ll reserve you tickets.

In the meantime, I have to choose whether to sign-on in Leeds or sign-on in London. Choices, choices. I’ve been trying to fight moving to London — it’s so PREDICTABLE, moving to London — but my old flatmate Tilly Killick (remember her? Big red glasses, strident views, sideburns?) has a spare room in Clapton. She calls it her ‘box room’, which doesn’t bode well. What’s Clapton like? Are you coming back to London soon? Hey! Maybe we could be flatmates?

‘Flatmates?’ Emma hesitated, shook her head and groaned, then wrote ‘Just kidding!!!!’ She groaned again. ‘Just kidding’ was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word. Too late to scribble it out now, but how to sign off? ‘All the best’ was too formal, ‘tout mon amour’ too affected, ‘all my love’ too corny, and now Gary Nutkin was in the doorway once again.

‘Okay, places everyone!’ Sorrowfully he held the door open as if leading them to the firing squad, and quickly, before she could change her mind, she wrote— God I miss you, Dex — then her signature and a single kiss scratched deep into the pale blue air-mail paper.

In the Piazza della Rotunda, Dexter’s mother sat at a café table, a novel held loosely in one hand, her eyes closed and her head tilted back and to the side like a bird to catch the last of the afternoon sun. Rather than arrive straightaway, Dexter took a moment to sit amongst the tourists on the steps of the Pantheon and watch as the waiter approached and picked up her ashtray, startling her. They both laughed, and from the theatrical movement of her mouth and arms he could tell that she was speaking her terrible Italian, her hand on the waiter’s arm, patting it flirtatiously. With no apparent idea what had been said, the waiter nevertheless grinned and flirted back, then walked away, glancing over his shoulder at the beautiful English woman who had touched his arm and talked incomprehensibly.