Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

Though it was true enough, she hated herself for the way it was coming out.

The poor man was visibly reeling. “Is… Is… Izzy, where did all this come from? You resigned? What are you saying—what’s happened? I mean, come on, baby, you can’t just walk in and do this, just say all this out of nowhere. Out of totally nowhere. Jesus. Baby.”

He sat back, shaking his head, white-faced, his hand still on his mouse. But even in this moment she thought she detected a hint of melodramatic self-indulgence in his aspect. And already he was trying to make out that she was mad, an irrational woman. That old, old male gambit. And yes, it was all gambits with Sasha. She let this feed her determination.

“What I have just said is a little bit bullshitty, Sash, I know. I’m sorry. I do have a lot of stuff to sort… but that’s not the reason I’m saying that I want to bring this to an end. I—”

“We have to talk. Like, we have to talk right now.” He was up, reaching for his jacket. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go somewhere. Right now.”

He was coming toward her. She had to say it. She had to stop him before he tried to hold her.

“I want to end it because I am not in love with you. That is the truth. Sasha. I am sorry.”

He was very close now—suddenly handsome again, suddenly sweet, suddenly a man she could learn to love after all. But she met his gaze directly. Ordered the ducts of her eyes dry even as she felt her tears rising. Continued to hold his eyes with hers for a moment. Let her words find their way in. Let him hear. Let him know. There was no way back from that sentence.

Then she was passing him, heading by the sofa, carrying her shoes, exhausted. And in that moment, their bedroom was the saddest thing she had ever seen. Their shallow closet, their clothes mixed up on the chair, the cartoons that they had bought together, their photos, Sasha and Isabella swapping cocktails, Sasha and Isabella arm in arm on the cable car in San Francisco, Sasha and Isabella kissing for the camera she was holding at arm’s length, Sasha and Isabella dancing together, this duvet they shared, these pillows, this bed, this life.

Over.

“Hello.”

“Hello. Gabriel Glover?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Frank. From Quality Kitchens.”

“Hi.”

“Erm… can you come out? Don’t want to leave the van… Have you got the parking permit?”

A minute later, in jogging top and shorts, he was face to face with Frank Delaney himself: fifty-five, swept-back, dyed black hair, string vest, and hand-rolled cigarette; six-two, big hands, big shoulders, potbelly, long, fridge-carrying arms, wearing the default smirk of a man who has seen it all before, knows a thing or two (especially about women, so he’d have you believe)—a maverick, but still the best in the business, and already right at home in Gabriel’s entrance hall.

Without really thinking (he couldn’t think), Gabriel confessed that he did not have a parking permit. He must have looked blank or panicked or in need of leadership or something, because Frank nodded slowly and then said, “Oh, bollocks. Well, you’d better go and get one, mate. I suppose I’ll have to wait here in the van.”

“Right. Where do you get ’em?”

“Kentish Town. Spring Place. You know it?”

“No.”

Three minutes later, knees creaking to the off-beat of the never-oiled chain, he was cycling crazily across, through, between the furious morning traffic—rigid arms, rigid knuckles, rigid handlebars, rigid face set against the rigid city’s petrol rush.

Fifteen minutes after that (head like a sack of sickened Moscow rats), he was queuing with fat sassy gasmen, stick-thin chippies, wiry sparkies, bum-wielding builders. He was the only private citizen in the city, he noticed, to be collecting a parking permit on behalf of his workman.

Twenty minutes more were lost (and forty much-lamented quid) before he had filled in all the forms, signed everything, survived the looks, the jibes, the scorn, and was back on his bike pedaling furiously home, fearful both that Frank would have departed in disgust at the delay and that Lina would have arrived off her dawn flight back from a weekend in Stockholm. And perhaps these thoughts or the sudden rain (or the memory of his mother’s war on cars) distracted him.

As he came off a curb, plastic-covered parking permit in one hand, house keys in the other, the front wheel somehow jerked left and he hadn’t sufficient grip on the handlebars to correct it. He lost control and down he went, hard and sideways onto the pavement—clatter of bike, scrape of limbs, pain, and yet more disbelief. To counter the embarrassment, he had, of course, to jump back on as quickly as possible, though he was well aware that this was in many ways more ridiculous than falling off in the first place. Ladies, gents, I assure you that the accident you have just witnessed was all but planned… As if anyone cared.

They lived in Tufnell Park, North London, and not bad. They had four rooms: big bedroom, big bathroom, a small nameless room (that screamed in certain cartoonish nightmares for a child), and a decent lounge, down one side of which was their kitchen. Given that to live in the city was for the vast majority of Londoners to live in a dark, vole-sized hole, they were lucky. Ridiculously small and silly by any other standard, in London of the twenty-first century, their flat was modestly desirable.

Or rather, used to be, before they (Lina) had decided to get the kitchen “done.” Now, alas, all was dust, rubble, and dereliction. Week six, and everybody involved, including the flat itself, was showing signs of having had enough. In one sense, and as past participles go, having the kitchen “done” described the process well—though maybe not quite robustly enough to Gabriel’s mind. Rather, it seemed to him that under the pretense of “installing” the new kitchen, the fitters were actually serially abusing it: shoving it up against the walls and banging it every which way they knew how—as hard and as often as they could; ripping it apart, pushing it down, forcing it into places it did not want to go; hurting it, flipping it over this way and that for their brutal pleasure; breaking it, smacking it about, calling it all the filthy names they knew; scratching it, breaking off its knobs, dropping its drawers; fucking it forward, backward, side to side, good and proper, once and for all. And when one guy got tired, another took over and went at it again, as hard as he could for five days straight.

All of this, plus all of everything else, as well as the need to stop all of this and stop all of everything else, was on his mind as he came haring up his street, bike clanking unnaturally loudly. Haring up the street to find Lina looking every bit as fresh and pristine as the face on the North of Sweden Tourist Board’s 1992 press campaign (clear lakes, snow-white mountains, nature’s undiminished purity), which job she had in fact held when she was seventeen. Haring up the street to find Lina standing beneath an umbrella, giving instructions in her measured and sensible voice to Frank, who, unbelievably, was taking down notes as she spoke.

His brakes squealed him to a histrionic halt. There was pavement muck on his trousers, blood on the elbow of his jogging top, white skin-scrapes on his hands, and rainwater on his nose. He tried his best to smile. He was staggered by her… her competence. Nobody was angry or crying or about to die. Nobody was talking about Leonard Cohen or the appalling adolescence of the new world leaders or why they were still tearing down the Amazon or anything remotely like that; they were actually talking about the kitchen sink. And in the chaotic and unpredictable way these things happen to men, as she looked up at him, he was struck by desire. He wanted her there and then. He wanted her as he always wanted her—at the least appropriate moments life could conjure. To kiss those lips now. To hold her now. Shut the door against Frank and all his kind. Fall on each other in the hall. Cast off clothes as best they could. Raise her skirt. Go at it like Olympian gods made mortal for half an hour only.