Come Together Read online

  ‘And if that fails?’

  I down the water, wipe my lips. ‘It never does.’

  But there’s a first time for everything.

  The clock display winks over from 08.40 to 08.46. The heating has been running at max for over an hour now, and I can only conclude that Catherine Bradshaw’s ID has been falsified and that, rather than being born in Oxford, she was actually born in Bombay. In the summer. In a heatwave. Next to a furnace. At high noon. My iced water cheat has failed. With the summer sun beating down on the closed windows and the radiators boiling, I might as well be locked in a sauna. Sweat bleeds from my brow. The pillow which props up my head has transformed into a hot-water bottle, the duvet into an electric blanket. Bradshaw, however, is playing it literally and metaphorically cool. Not one groan of discomfort. Not one request for the window to be opened, or water to be brought. Nothing but the regular pattern of her breathing, and the relaxed expression of deep sleep on her face. The ice maiden.

  Plan B.

  ‘Catherine,’ I say, sitting upright. ‘Cath?’ I guess, louder this time, shaking her shoulder. ‘Cathy?’

  ‘Mmmmm?’ she finally replies, her eyes still closed.

  ‘You’ve got to get up. I’ve got to get going. I’m running late.’

  She burrows into her eyes with her knuckles and looks at her watch. ‘It’s not even nine,’ she complains, pulling the duvet tighter round her shoulders and closing her eyes again. ‘I thought you said you weren’t working today … I thought we were both going to take the day off … Pact, you know? We made a pact.’

  This is true. This was the justification for extending the evening beyond the club.

  ‘I know,’ I say, ‘but the gallery’s just called. They’ve got an American collector interested in some of my stuff,’ I lie. ‘He wants to meet me. This morning. He’s flying back to LA this afternoon, so I haven’t got a choice.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ she says, sitting up, ‘I hear you.’

  By the time she has showered and dressed, it’s a quarter past nine. She walks through to the kitchen, where I’m sitting staring blankly at the surface of the kitchen table. As table surfaces go, it’s not a bad one to feign preoccupation with. It was Matt’s idea, cannibalising the pub sign that used to hang over the front door. Shame we couldn’t have left it hanging there, but some of the Churchill Arms’ ex-locals weren’t too bright, kept homing in on it and seeking lock-ins in the middle of the night. I continue to stare. Winston Churchill stares disapprovingly back. Never, in the field of human relationships … OK, OK, let’s get this show on the road.

  I don’t offer her:

  a) Coffee

  b) A lift home

  c) Small talk

  Instead, I push my mug away, get to my feet and say, ‘Right, let’s get going.’

  I flick my memory back to her wallet as I walk to the front door and her footsteps clack across the tiles behind me. She lives in Fulham, so she can catch the tube.

  ‘The tube’s only a couple of minutes’ walk,’ I tell her as we step outside.

  I close the door behind us and we walk twenty yards down the street until we draw level with Matt’s Spitfire.

  ‘Yours?’ she asks as I rest my hand on the roof.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, and moving swiftly on. ‘You want to keep going to the end of the street and then take a left. The station’s about four hundred yards further on.’

  Instead of saying goodbye and walking off out of my life and back into her own, she scans the other side of the road. Her eyes eventually settle on the bus stop.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she says,’ I’ll bus it. It’ll be quicker.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, although it definitely isn’t,’ I’ll see you around, then.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She looks at me uncertainly. ‘I’ve left my number in your room. On a fag packet. On the bedside table.’

  ‘I thought you were going to Australia?’

  ‘I am. But not for six weeks.’

  ‘Oh.’

  We stand looking awkwardly around for a few seconds.

  ‘Are you going, then?’ she asks.

  ‘Sure. Right now.’ Pointlessly, I pull at the door handle. I grimace. ‘Keys. Forgot my keys.’ I half wave at her, avoiding eye contact. ‘See you around.’

  ‘Yeah, you said.’

  I walk quickly back to the house and shut the door behind me. I check my watch: twenty past. Slowly, I creep round the living room door. Using the bar, which runs along the back wall, for cover, I peer out through the window on to the street. Catherine Bradshaw is now standing at the bus stop directly opposite the house. I sink to my knees and stare up at the empty row of optics. Shit. I’m tired. I’m knackered. Sally McCullen, a woman I’ve spent the best part of the last two weeks obsessing over, is due here in just over half an hour. And Catherine Bradshaw is waiting at one of the least-visited bus stops on the planet, without magazine or newspaper or book or Walkman, with nothing better to do than idly watch the front door to Matt’s house and wait for me to reappear and drive off in a convertible, which isn’t mine, to meet an American art collector, who doesn’t exist.

  A voice inside me is saying, So what? So what if you don’t reappear and thereby confirm her suspicion that the whole gallery/ collector routine is just an elaborate scam to get rid of her? So what if she’s still waiting for the bus to arrive at ten o’clock when you greet McCullen on the doorstep? We’ve only just met. We aren’t going out. So, the voice continues, why couldn’t you have been honest with her? What’s the big deal? Why couldn’t you have just told her thanks for the shag. It was fun. But the door’s that way. Wouldn’t life be simpler now if you’d just done that? Well, wouldn’t it?

  But a range of other voices disagree.

  There’s the selfish one: she’s Chloe’s neighbour and mate and Chloe is your mate. Dump on Catherine, dump on Chloe by association. Carry on that way and watch your social circle collapse into a flat line of inactivity. The insecure one: you don’t want her, or anyone else for that matter, going through life propagating the opinion, or even just keeping it to themselves, that you’re an arsehole. The decent one: you’re a nice guy and nice guys leave nice girls feeling nice about themselves.

  But, while I suppose all of these voices are speaking the truth, none of them is telling the core truth. In fact, the core truth has nothing to do with reasoning at all. Nothing so intelligent. It’s down to conditioning, plain and simple. It’s down to the way I’ve been programmed. Not something I consider, just something I instinctively am.

  It’s easy to kid yourself that when you bail out of a relationship you simply swap your couple habits for single ones. I broke up with Zoe Thompson between 6 and 9 p.m. on Saturday, 13 May 1995, between the time I returned from a weekend of heart-searching and tears at my mum’s house and the time her father came to collect her from the rented flat we’d spent the past fifteen months turning into a home. We’d been going out with each other for just over two years. In the months that followed, alterations in my lifestyle and emotional habits included:

  a) Stopping using fabric conditioner and watching holes inexplicably appear in my socks

  b) No longer replacing my toothbrush every three months, so that it reached the point where it felt like I was brushing my teeth with a strip of shag-pile carpet

  c) Using my fingernails rather than nail scissors to trim my toenails

  d) Turning the bed sheet over every couple of weeks rather than washing it

  e) No longer feeling guilty for talking to someone of the opposite sex who wasn’t safe (i.e. a mate’s girlfriend, or a long-standing girl friend of mine who Zoe got on with, or a friend of Zoe’s)

  f) Wearing condoms during sexual intercourse

  g) Sleeping with a pillow hugged between my arms rather than a person I loved

  h) Lying in bed on my own on Sunday mornings, wishing I still had someone I cared about enough to want to spend the day with her

  But other habits I’d developed during the
time I’d been going out with Zoe continued to thrive, despite the fact that she was no longer there to thought-police me, because they’d now become mine. These included:

  a) Going to sleep on the right side of the bed, despite the fact I now had a double to myself on which I could have sprawled at any angle I chose

  b) Doing my washing up after each meal instead of performing a crockery and cutlery blitz at the end of each week

  c) Savouring the taste of vegetables and salads, rather than dismissing them as items made obsolete by the advent of vitamin pills

  d) Leaving the seat down on the toilet

  e) Watching EastEnders

  f) Attempting to steer the conversation away from football results when in mixed gender company

  g) Looking women in the face rather than the cleavage whilst addressing them

  h) Understanding that other people’s egos, in spite of what outside appearances might lead you to believe, are just as fragile and easily cracked as your own

  Now, I’m not a shrink and I have no way of explaining why some of these Zoe-learnt habits have stuck whilst others have dropped away. What I do know is that those that are left are for real, as much a part of me as my fingerprints. And that includes the other people’s egos bit.

  Sure, chances are Catherine Bradshaw is going to be just as glad to see the back of me as I am of her. Chances are that leaving her telephone number was probably just her way of making me feel better, or making her feel better, or both. Chances are that even if I do call her she’ll probably deny all knowledge of me, or develop a hitherto unknown talent for speaking fluent Latvian the moment she recognises my voice. But, equally, there’s a slim chance that she does give a damn. And that possibility means that if I treat her like crap, I’ll end up feeling like crap myself. So spin it round: treat her good and feel good as a result. Selfless and selfish side by side. The perfect combination for a clean conscience.

  Luckily, Matt’s car keys are hanging on a dart on the board in the kitchen and so, within a few minutes, I’m waving across the street at Bradshaw, climbing into Matt’s Spit, adjusting the seat and mirror and slipping the key into the ignition. Driving round the block, I ponder over the facts that I’m not insured, and that Matt might well react by holding a knife to my throat and making me eat my recently dismembered genitalia if he so much as suspects that I’ve taken his pride and joy for a spin. I park the Spit in a side street, well away from the bus stop, cut the engine and switch on the radio.

  Four songs, one traffic update, one news flash and two cigarettes later, I risk getting out and walking up the street to take a peek. Just as I’m approaching the corner, slowing down to peer round and check that my road is now a Bradshaw-free zone, a bus drives past. I freeze, my eyes connecting through the window with those of Catherine Bradshaw. I watch as she shakes her head and raises her middle finger in salute.

  There are some thoughts you don’t have to be telepathic to pick up. Arsehole is one of them.

  It’s late afternoon. I’m leaning back against the wall in my studio, smoking a cigarette, gazing at the canvas propped up on the easel that I’ve just repositioned by the French windows overlooking the garden. Sunlight fills the room with the kind of bright light you get from an unshaded bulb.

  The studio’s at the back of the house. Uniform white ceiling and walls, broken up by sketches and colour studies. The floorboards are unvarnished, left how I found them when I ripped up the beer-stained carpet shortly after moving in. Matt was cool about it, partly because the room was a mess anyway – little more than a storage space for the boxes he’d never quite got round to unpacking after he’d shifted all his stuff from his parents’ home back in Bristol – and partly because he knew I couldn’t afford to rent anywhere else. With the carpet gone and the walls repainted, only the pool table remains as a testimony to the Churchill Arms’ glory days.

  One thing I told Bradshaw last night was true: I don’t work Fridays. Not regular pay cheque work, anyway. That happens Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, down at Paulie’s Gallery. Paulie calls me his manager, but seeing as I’m the only person who works there, I don’t get too power-happy about the title. What I actually do is sit at the desk at the front of the gallery and flick through magazines or novels, and wait for the phone to ring, which it rarely does – unless it’s Paulie checking up on me from whatever Med-based gin palace he happens to be at. Occasionally, someone will come in and browse, maybe ask me a question or two about one of the paintings. Even more occasionally, maybe three times a month, they’ll buy something and I’ll run up the till and fix them with a receipt, arrange delivery or collection. But mostly it’s just reading, or gazing out on to the street, watching people go by.

  But Fridays, Fridays along with Mondays, I own. Fridays and Mondays, the only thing I have to manage is myself. And I try to do just that. I try not to leave the house, not unless it’s vital, like popping down to LoCost on the corner to buy cigarettes and cans of Pepsi Max, or having to grovel to my bank manager over The Bottomless Hole (a.k.a. my overdraft). I try to respond to my alarm clock at the same time I would if I was aiming to get to Paulie’s to open it up on time (10 a.m.), I shower and, if he’s there, I chat with Matt while he eats his breakfast. Then I go through to the studio and switch on the radio for company. I light a cigarette, select a brush and pick up where I left off.

  All this I try, but quite often I end up getting up late and taking things from there.

  I continue to gaze at the canvas. Apart from the dose of morning Bradshaw-aggro, it’s been a productive day. Ten through till four, with an hour off for lunch. Everything has gone according to plan. Apart from the needing a radio for company part. I haven’t. But that’s been part of another plan.

  ‘So,’ McCullen asks, coming back into the studio, standing between me and the canvas, blocking my view, ‘are you pleased?’

  McCullen is five foot eight and slim. Her hair is blonde and hangs like straw halfway down her spine. She has a sexy laugh.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, and not just because I can’t see the canvas, but because I’ve been concentrating too long. I need to get away from it for a while, rest my eyes before I can view it objectively again. ‘What do you think?’

  She turns round and faces me. ‘I like it.’

  I’m pleased; I like her too.

  A lot.

  We met two weeks ago at a party my sister, Kate, threw to celebrate her twentieth birthday. Kate is a student at UCL, History and Spanish. Her boyfriend’s name is Phil. He does French, also at UCL. He met McCullen on his course in his first year and they became good friends, managed to stay good friends, and moved into a shared house last year. Kate and McCullen became mates. That’s our connection. That’s how I ended up talking to her in Kate’s kitchen to begin with.

  Kate had already told her a lot about me, and the painting I’d given Kate for her birthday was hanging on the living room wall, so it was easy to get a conversation going. McCullen asked me about my painting. She’d done art at school, still went sketching some weekends. I asked her why she’d stopped and she blamed her parents, said they’d told her that she should keep it on as a hobby, but meanwhile get some vocational qualifications. I told her about the limited success I’d had so far – the three paintings I’d sold to collectors and the promising notices I’d got after I’d sneakily held an exhibition at Paulie’s for my work a couple of months before. She asked me what I was working on at the moment and, because I was drunk, and because she was wonderful, and because she’d side-stepped all my subtle approaches and obviously had no intention of going home with me, I told her I was planning a series of life studies. I asked her if she’d sit for me and asked her to please, please, please say yes.

  And, miraculously, she did.

  Or, rather, she asked, ‘How much?’

  And I replied, ‘I was rather hoping you’d do it for nothing.’

  And she said, ‘No way.’

  And I suggested, ‘Twenty pounds?�
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  And she said, ‘Thirty.’

  And I said, ‘Done.’

  And why not? I just had been.

  McCullen walks over to the sofa, giving me a clear view of the canvas again. I look from her to it and back again. Somehow the two don’t connect. Not because the painting is a bad likeness, just that during the hours I’ve been translating her body from three dimensions into two, I’ve stopped seeing her as a whole being, more a collection of contours and shades. Now that she has form again, she’s resurrected. No longer an object I want to study, but a woman I want to touch. Very badly indeed.

  In truth, this thought has been flashing sporadically in and out of my mind since she arrived this morning, about three minutes after I’d finished parking Matt’s Spit inch-perfectly back in its space and readjusting its seat and mirror. I fixed her coffee, made small talk and showed her the studio. She undressed in the bathroom and returned to the studio with a towel wrapped round her. I made a show of setting up the canvas, tried not to stare at her as she walked across the room, and generally tried to put her at her ease.

  ‘How do you want me?’ she asked.

  Now. Over the pool table. In the shower. On a beach. In an aeroplane. Covered in whipped cream and melted chocolate. The answers kept coming and in any other circumstances I’d have selected one of them and gone for it. But I was a professional, right? I was an artist and she was a model. I was paying her to be here and she was here to take her clothes off for money and art, right? Right. End of story.

  ‘Over on the sofa,’ I told her. ‘Just lie down and make sure you’re comfortable.’

  She walked over and, with her back to me, unwrapped the towel, folded it neatly on the floor, and lay down on her front on the sofa.

  ‘How’s that?’ she asked.

  Well, from an aesthetic point of view, that was just fine. The pose, with the side of her head resting on her crossed hands, eyes towards me, looked natural, as if she were waking from a deep sleep. The light was good, too. A block of shadow slanted across the lower half of her legs. It was pretty much perfect.