Five Days Apart Read online

  There was a girl I passed every day at the same time on her way to work in a travel agency across from the college who never looked at me, but she knew I was there. The same little flick of her head away from me. Every day walking past her on an empty street and I never acknowledged her, because if I did, who knew what might happen?

  How many others? Beautiful girls or girls that only I seemed to notice. Girls who nearly and almost and might just have. But never did. I never said. I never stopped and asked or told. It might have worked out if I had. I could have been transformed, might have seen something in one of their faces that made me relax and realize that they were as keen as I was. I could have come up with the first line, something funny to defuse the situation, and after that it would be easy. I knew it should be easy. But the fact that I never did anything shows how unrealistic I thought it was that I would get it right.

  The first time I kissed a girl was when I was seventeen. I was drunk at a party in the house of some friend of Alex’s and it had nothing to do with me. I was sitting on a couch trying to keep the room from taking off, and a girl sat beside me. She didn’t say anything, just leaned over and kissed me. She pushed me back and lay on top of me and we just kept at it. I didn’t know her name or what she looked like. I didn’t care. I was just glad that at last it was happening and tried to silence the weedy little voices talking about me that might have been in my head.

  That was like a breakthrough. Over the next few years there was a succession of girls I met when I was out drinking. I would wander around until I saw a girl that looked as lost as me, and we would move toward each other, smiling, knowing what was going to happen, knowing that tonight at least we would have achieved something. We would be like everybody else. There were thousands of people for whom these things didn’t come easy, people that had to push themselves and who thought too much about what they should be doing for it ever to be natural. We were lucky to live in a country where being drunk demonstrated your bona fide status as a fun person, a normal enthusiastic member of society, who would puke and cry and do stupid things like everybody else. Drink opened a door, maybe not to the world of your more enthusiastic dreams but to a place where you could get your head down for the night. Not the French film scenario, approaching mysterious girls in coffee shops and ending up in a shadowy bedroom within the hour. Not the joy of being approached—how much easier that would have been.

  I thought about it sometimes though. An alternative world where the words would come to me in the right order at the right time. I would be cool and still and show her what I wanted and she would respond. Wandering around, I thought about how it would work. Me and a girl together, laughing, close, her whispering into my ear, talking about the rest of them. The other people who weren’t in on it all. Not a part of our world. At night I would see us in a flat where she lived alone, a huge white-walled, hessian-floored room with a bed in the middle and nothing else. Lying wrapped around her, feeling the warmth of another person, a part of her world, listening to her breathing and waiting for my own to match it. The same depth. In and out. Together.

  It seemed like it should be a simple thing, the ability to meet somebody and say something normal. To smile and be friendly and maybe even funny. I saw it in Alex from when I met him first. He was fluent, and it didn’t seem to cost him a thought. By the time we left school he’d been talking to people the way you’re supposed to for fifteen years. I tried. Set a low bar for myself and still tripped over it. I could barely string a sentence together.

  “Just relax,” he used to say to me. “Think to yourself that they’re as worried as you are.”

  “You have no idea how worried I am,” I said in reply.

  “You see,” he said. “You can be funny.”

  “With you,” I said. “But what use is that?”

  He understood better than anyone I knew how to use words. By charming, impressing, joking, cajoling, and wooing, he could achieve his goals. When he turned it on, he could get anything.

  He did what I wouldn’t. He went up to girls everywhere. He spoke to them, smiling, and the words came and the girls responded because that’s what happens when good-looking guys make jokes to girls on the street. I would stand in the background, hovering, watching as they touched their hair and blushed and laughed or pretended that they weren’t impressed. Sometimes they looked past him at me, made eye contact, and shook their heads, smiling.

  “Did he just say what I think he did? Isn’t he terrible?” they were saying. “What a load of charming old shit.”

  “I know,” my look said back, “pure bullshit,” always wondering if they would see through it, but knowing that they never would.

  Later the same girls would move closer, drawn in to him—I don’t think they even knew they were doing it—until eventually they were in his space, their attention on him fully now, and he would speak to them as if he had known them forever. I’d heard what he said. It was nothing much. Simple stuff. They were just words. An implication of intimacy. A question that got bigger as you thought about it. An over-the-top compliment. A thin line, but he got it right.

  Once or twice I tried to have the same approach, the same casual tone, the same feigned indifference. I couldn’t do it. At best I was cryptic. More often leery, lechy, cocky, rude, and once it started to go wrong there was no getting it back. I would walk away huffing and puffing, face burning. I realized then that it wasn’t just what Alex said that made them respond, but much more. I didn’t have it. I had other gifts that maybe he would have wanted. I could get a job anytime. I had math. Programming skills. An orderly mind. Et cetera.

  He told me about them, even when I said I didn’t want to know. Where they went and what they had done. It all seemed so unthinking and easy and fun. They never lasted more than a week or two, and when he finished with them they vanished from his life.

  “This last one,” he had told me once. “Do you know what she wanted me to do?”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Filthy,” he said. “I almost didn’t do it. That one that you said looked underage.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked him. “You know it upsets me.”

  “You want to know,” he said. “You need to know what’s out there. What you’re missing out on.”

  “Why?” I asked him. “Why do you need to tell me? What good is it to me? Are you trying to make me unhappy?”

  “I’m trying to get you off your arse,” he said. “I’m trying to get you out there. You should use what you have. You’re a good-looking boy. The last one said it to me. Thought she might have a friend for you.”

  “No, she didn’t,” I said, trying to sound skeptical but not able to hide the hope.

  “She did,” he said again, smiling at me, turning on the charm like I was one of them.

  “So?” I said. “What did you say?”

  “Well, it’s not going to happen now,” he said. “She’s gone now. That’s not the point at all.”

  But when the demons visited him, he came to me. Sometimes after a big weekend when he hadn’t slept in days, done too much of everything, when there was a girl somewhere waiting for him to show, he’d turn up at my place. He needed to be bolstered on a Sunday night. To spend time with somebody who would feed him and tell him that everything was all right. He only did the things he did because they were fun. No harm meant. No damage done. Everybody would move on, and by next weekend things would be better. He knew I’d tell him what he needed to be told if he asked, but he rarely did. It was enough to know that I was there. Watch TV and say nothing. Talk about anything at all. It made it better. All that performing, all the fun and happiness and the edgy promise of a Friday night when Sunday seems very far away. It cost him something. Not much and not all the time, but when it did, when he needed to turn off from everything, say nothing, clear his head, h
e did it with me. Stop talking, no thinking. Just sit on a couch drinking tea and watching the one hundred sexiest ads of the eighties. Do you remember, he said laughing in the short bursts that would mend him. Do you remember?

  He was a mess. He kept pieces of paper with ideas, plans, phone numbers, names of people he met wherever he went. Ideas for films, places he wanted to go, books he heard about that he felt he should read. He lost things all the time. He wouldn’t use a wallet, so he was always dropping money. I knew the drill when a taxi driver would ring me to say that he’d found this phone in the back of his car and mine was the last number called. Endless bank cards went through the washing machine. He had no student card, so he used to get other people to borrow books from the library for him, then pay the fines for him when he forgot to bring them back. I tried to help him. I gave him address books and diaries, a wallet for his twenty-first. He thanked me and said how this was the thing that he had been lacking. This was the thing to put him right. Nothing ever changed.

  He asked me about everything. Computers and bank accounts and law and history and politics and news. Geography. How do you get to Clare? How much is car insurance? What’s wrong with my phone? What’s a P45? What’s a good rate of interest for a loan? Is astrology bollocks? As if I knew everything, as if I was plugged into the world in a way that he wasn’t. Because outside of the social context, he didn’t really work. He wasn’t practical and he turned to me for help. I had some idea about most of the things he asked me, but never any depth. I could brief him like a private secretary so that in any situation he’d be able to offer an opinion, but really I was bluffing.

  It was always the same. We knew how it was. What we each needed. The things that he would do and the things that I wouldn’t. It was who we were. It was how we were together.

  But I knew that I hadn’t sat back this time. I had made the effort and had done everything that I thought was needed. I had behaved the way that he had always told me I should. I made the phone calls and had that one-sided secret intimacy of her talking in my ear, my whole body buzzing with excitement as I became convinced that something was going to happen. I had told him about it. I had talked to her friend and had shown that I was capable of having a conversation. I had looked for the signs that she might be interested, and when I thought they were there, I had stuck with it.

  It was different because I wanted her, from when I saw her first. I had been prepared to ignore the risk of embarrassment and rejection and all those things that I was forever afraid of because of her. Because of the excitement, that thrill that I had felt on the first night, how everything seemed then to lead me back to her, I was ready to try.

  Had she never been interested? Was that how she behaved with everyone? Had she been using me to get to him? Had all the laughing and eye contact and touching been for his benefit, goading him into action, telling him, “You better make a move here or I might do something with this guy.”

  It made no sense to me. I may not have been good at pushing myself to the front of a crowd, charming random strangers, chatting girls up, but I thought I could read people. All that time saying nothing, sitting in the corner in pubs and at parties just watching, meant that I had seen things that I wasn’t supposed to see. The masks that slipped when people turned away. How they revealed themselves.

  I’d known Alex for long enough, and he wasn’t bad. Silly sometimes and reckless and overexuberant, but not cruel. He wouldn’t punish me. He had never let me down, even at times when it would have been easy or beneficial for him.

  The most likely thing seemed to be that he would turn up eventually and talk about how drunk he had been. He might try and reinterpret the facts in a way that would make what he did seem like a minor transgression. A mistake. Maybe it was. But he knew what I wanted and how I had seen her. He knew that it was different, and when I tried to do something about it, this was what had happened. Let there be no room for doubt. He knew.

  Three days later I still hadn’t heard from him. When the doorbell rang on the Wednesday evening, I knew it was him. I waited before standing and going to it, waited again with my hand above the lock before opening it, not really wanting to have this conversation. He looked worn out when I saw him.

  “How are you?” he said. I didn’t speak. “Can I come in?”

  I walked away from the door, leaving it open, and sat on the couch in the living room. He sat opposite. He took out a cigarette and tried to light it. The lighter flashed but didn’t catch. He shook it and then paused.

  “Do you want one? Do you mind if I do?” he asked. I shrugged, and he put it down.

  “Are you pissed off?” he said after a bit. I watched him in silence, making him work. “Listen . . . ,” he said.

  “Don’t you start,” I said. “Don’t you fucking even talk to me. You and your talk. Don’t you say anything.”

  The anger in me came out of nowhere. We sat there, him leaning on his knees looking at the ground in front of me, his shoulders slumped and not much of an expression on his face. I wondered if I let him speak how long it would be before he started explaining himself and what I would do then. If I didn’t think, I could find myself hitting him. Just swinging at him, not knowing if I would stop.

  But there was another part of me that could see him leaving my place in an hour or two, maybe even three or four, laughing, everything back to normal, smiles and jokes from him as he left. The vision of it taunted me and I promised myself that I wouldn’t let it happen. If nothing else, at least not that. I had to be resolved. I had to remind myself not to make it easy for him.

  “So,” I said when I was ready, “why did you do that?”

  He looked up at me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t tell you—”

  “Please do. Tell me exactly.”

  He blew out and pushed back his hair. He picked up the cigarette again, held it unlit between his fingers.

  “I’m not excusing myself, okay?” he said then. “I’m not saying it was right. I’m just trying to explain to you what happened. That’s all. I’ll do that, and then I’ll go.” He looked at me. I gave him nothing. Didn’t move or speak or show anything. “It wasn’t me,” he said then.

  I laughed.

  “Really?” I said. “It looked a lot like you.”

  “I mean, I didn’t make a move on her or anything. She grabbed me. We were just walking out behind you, and she grabbed me and kissed me and that was it. All evening when we were talking to her in the pub and when you were talking to the friend, there was something there. I felt it and she felt it and I knew it was going to happen. I was going to tell you when we got outside. I swear to you, I was going to take you aside and ask you would it be all right. Because it was different. I know it wasn’t fair, and if you hadn’t agreed, I promise you I would have left it, but this sort of thing doesn’t happen to me. She’s different than everyone else.”

  “I know,” I said. “I told you that when I saw her. Remember?”

  “Yes. You did. But I didn’t know that the two of us would connect like that. Me and her.”

  “Connect? I’m sorry, but what the fuck are you talking about? What does that mean? How many girls have you ‘connected’ with in the past year? Twenty, maybe?”

  “One,” he said. “This year. All my life. Just one. You absolutely have to believe me.” I sat looking at him. He looked like a missionary about to die for the cause. Clear-eyed and overflowing with truth, so emotional that if I had reached out and touched him, I think he would have cried. He needed me to understand. He prayed that I might.

  “I don’t have to believe anything,” I said. “I know you. It’s always like this. You meet a girl and do whatever you have to do to get her and then after a week you’re on to the next one. Each of them is the most amazing girl you’ve ever met before and then a few days later it’s another story. They’re all clingy
and irritating and so awful you can’t bring yourself to say their name, if you ever even knew it. The same girl transformed in a couple of days. You tell me all this every week.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Yeah, it is,” I said. “This time I thought you might stop and think. That you’d let me at least try before diving in.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “What? What can you say to make me think it’s any different? If you were me, how would you interpret it?”

  I sat there, and he looked at me. He couldn’t argue or try to charm his way out of this. He couldn’t make a joke to defuse the situation. Without his usual repertoire, he was lost. The two of us sat in silence, waiting to see what would happen.

  “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “It just wasn’t like that. I didn’t weigh it up and decide that what I wanted was more important.”

  “That’s exactly what you did. It has to be. Look what happened.”

  “No, David. No. I had no option.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “I didn’t. You have to know that I wouldn’t have done this if there had been any other way. You are my friend. You know I wouldn’t hurt you. I care about your feelings. I’m not a complete fucking animal. But things just happened the way they did. That’s all. I know what you wanted, and I wish it could have worked out for you, I really do, but it wasn’t going to happen. I know from talking to her that it wasn’t. Do you think I intended things to end up like this? Of course I didn’t.”

  The nightmare of what he had said took a moment to sink in.

  “What did you say to her? About me?”