Don't Get Me Wrong (13 page)

•  •  •

“So it was all because of George Clooney?”

Damaris looked offended. “No.”

“You just said you decided to become a doctor because of box sets of
ER
.”

“I didn't say it was because of George Clooney.”

“Eriq La Salle?”

Damaris shook her head.

“Who, then?”

Damaris bit her lip. “Noah Wyle?”

“Of course,” said Kim. “The super-intelligent, super-rich, super-repressed John Carter.”

“Are you saying I only fancy men with trust funds?”

“I don't know,” said Kim. “Do you?”

Damaris laughed. It lit up her face. You could see her perfect white teeth. Kim liked imagining Damaris as a GP. You'll make people better just by smiling at them, she thought. They'll come into the surgery feeling ill and tired, weighed down by the gas bill and rising damp and why the car won't start, and you'll be sitting there with your stethoscope and your slim fingers, your eyes full of sympathy, and suddenly life won't seem so bad after all.

But you didn't see Damaris smile much. Or hear her laugh. She took her training very seriously. The habit of hard work begun in childhood was so strong that she rarely stopped to look around and see how far she'd come. Damaris had always pushed herself. Christine may have been chivvying in the background, but it was Damaris who set the pace. At school, she and Kim had been labeled the Nerds. While their friends were out partying, they sat side by side in the library, putting in the hours. Kim needed the structure. Damaris needed the grades. Something of that seriousness had hung around their conversations ever since. Whenever you get together, Eva would say, you're like a couple of old professors in tweed jackets, smelling of ancient books and tobacco.

Sometimes I worry, thought Kim, that we've forgotten how to have fun.

“So go on, then,” said Damaris. “Tell me about Jake.”

“There's nothing to tell.”

It was a Thursday evening at the end of February. Outside the night was frosty and calm, twinkling with startling whiteness. Peckham Rye looked like something out of Narnia. But inside the flat, decorated with small blue Babygros hung over the radiators, it was cozy and warm. Eva had gone to her postnatal yoga class. It's not vanity, she said. I just want to be able to get enough stomach muscles back to make it possible to get out of bed.

Damaris had come to help with babysitting. “If you're not going to tell me anything interesting about Jake, I might as well go home.”

“Oh, please don't go,” said Kim. “There might be a medical emergency.”

“What kind of medical emergency?”

“I don't know. Babies do all sorts of strange things.”

“I haven't done pediatrics yet. You probably know more than I do.”

Which was probably true. Kim had pretty much moved in after the birth. Otis, still in the frowning blur of newborn discomfort, hated being apart from Eva. But Kim was a good substitute. In the evenings, while Eva had a bath, she sat with him on her lap, singing him Otis Redding songs and telling him interesting facts about London housing shortages.

“It's the first time I've seen you since Christmas,” said Damaris, “so you don't have to tell me much. Anything would do. Hobbies? Dietary habits? Political leanings?”

But Kim couldn't talk about Jake. Not yet. She hadn't worked
out what she felt herself. All she knew for certain was that she'd never met anyone like him. He was a mass of contradictions. On the one hand, he was eccentric, self-absorbed, and sentimental, blunt to the point of rudeness. On the other, he was clever, kind, and well-read, and anxious to share his encyclopedic knowledge with anyone who needed it.

Sometimes he just seemed weird. He was drawn to anything quirky—dogs that looked like Yoda, the African horned melon, Borat, an evaluation of Empedocles. Once, on the bus, he had a long conversation with someone wearing a witch's hat made entirely from black bin liners and chatted away animatedly about heat-resistant plastics. But this strangeness also made Kim laugh. He loved the absurd—typos in newspaper headlines, pompous CEOs. He marveled every time at the signs on two identical staircases at Angel tube, one saying
UP
and the other
DOWN
. “Who worked out which was which?” he said, his eyes bright with laughter. “Who made the ultimate decision?”

But more important—much more important than any of this—he made her feel desirable. He made her feel beautiful. He made her feel significant. Whenever he looked at her with that intense expression in his pale blue eyes, she knew that she had his complete attention. No one else mattered. There had been other boyfriends. At Edinburgh, she'd had an on-off relationship for nearly a year with Rob, a geography student obsessed with Black Sabbath and the Vaselines. But this was different. The first time Jake kissed her—when she felt his awkwardness fall away, like a heavy coat slipping from his shoulders—Kim felt for the first time the dizzying excitement of a lover's gratitude. Jake was amazed that she liked him. He seemed humbled by her interest.
He said he was the luckiest man in the world. And Kim—who hated swaggering, overconfident masculinity—found this completely disarming. She was made to understand, for the first time in her life, that being pale and scruffy, with no interest in clothes, makeup, or jewelry, was highly erotic. Jake admired her hands, her eyes, her shoulders, her waist. He said she should be an artist's model because she was so perfectly in proportion. It was ridiculous, of course, this extravagant praise. She didn't take any of it seriously. But she liked it. She liked feeling, for once, that she had looks worth talking about.

What made this all the more exciting was that you would never have cast Jake as a romantic hero. You wouldn't have looked at him and seen Clark Gable's Rhett Butler, or Russell Crowe's Maximus, or Daniel Craig's James Bond. But somehow, in her company, he was transformed. Kim wandered around in a state of secret astonishment, marveling at her hidden powers.

She was surprised to discover that Jake had a very hairy chest. It seemed rampantly sexual on someone so fey. Like finding Harry Potter with a condom in his pocket.

At first, she was wary. She couldn't quite trust his adoration.
S
omething about having Eva as an elder sister—fine, fair, ethereal Eva—had made her lose confidence. She felt plain by comparison. Her mother's perpetual criticism hadn't helped.
Obviously you take after your father rather than me. Square shoulders. And such a determined chin. If only you put a bit of effort into your appearance. A touch of makeup, a good haircut, and you'd be almost presentable. You owe it to other people to make the best of yourself. All of us have a duty to make the world a more beautiful place.

Kim watched anxiously the first time Jake met her sister.
Would he realize his mistake? Faced with the real thing, would he turn round, see Kim properly for the first time, and back off in horror? Kim could see that Eva and Jake liked each other. Eva was, after all—in her own way—almost as eccentric as he was. But, strangely, within minutes of their first meeting, Kim could see that Jake didn't gaze at Eva in the way that most men did. He didn't stare at her with desperate longing, his mouth open and his tongue hanging out.

Much later, lying in Jake's bed, collapsed over his solid hairiness, Kim steeled herself to ask the question. “So what did you think of my sister?”

Jake frowned. “She's quite nervous, isn't she? Not very sure of herself.”

“What else?”

“You won't like it if I say what I think. You never do.”

“I want to know,” said Kim in a small voice, bracing herself for the worst.

“She's really white. Do you think she might be anemic?”

Jake's flat in Stockwell was a strange and unnerving place—a junk shop of bits and pieces randomly displayed, with no logic or order. Every surface was covered with postcards, knives, Matchbox cars, medical instruments, opera glasses, briar-wood pipes, Chinese incense burners, melon ballers, hoof picks, and decorative teaspoons. His book collection was similarly wide-ranging—Kafka, the Koran, C. S. Lewis, Toni Morrison,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
.

The first time she visited, Kim tried to clear a bit of space on a chair for her coat and bag. But she disturbed so much dust that she didn't bother after that. It seemed to make more sense
to follow Jake's lead and just place anything you were likely to need urgently on top of everything else.

“Kim?”

Kim snapped back to the present—a cold February evening in the flat on Peckham Rye.

“If I ask you questions about him, will you answer?”

“I don't know,” said Kim. “It depends what they are.”

Damaris laughed. “OK, something safe. Is it a problem working together?”

“Not really. He's very disciplined. It's like he's got different compartments in his head. At work, I'm just his research assistant.”

“And what about you?”

Sometimes I find myself lusting after him at the photocopier. It's something about his thighs. “I think it's OK because we've got our own little office. So we don't have to pretend to other people that there's nothing going on.”

Damaris put her head on one side. “You really like him, don't you?”

Kim felt herself getting flustered. “Why don't you come round the next time you've got a few days off? I'll ask him to supper. And then you can meet him properly.”

“Here? Or in New Cross?”

Kim's smile faded. When she'd moved in with Eva and Otis, she'd left Izzie behind in the decaying bedsit. “I'm not sure.”

Damaris raised her eyebrows.

Kim, always sensitive to criticism, bristled. “What?”

“I was just thinking about all the scruples you used to have about living in a flat that Harry had paid for.”

“Eva needs me. That's what's important.”

“And Izzie's OK with that?”

Kim looked guilty. “I don't know. I haven't seen her for ages. And when we do meet, she's always in such a rush.” Last time, she thought, we met in a pub in Holborn. Izzie had just finished her cleaning shift round the corner—a block of offices with palm trees in the foyer. She had half a lager and a packet of crisps, and then said she had to be somewhere. She left in such a hurry that she forgot her notebook, which seemed to be full of random lists of people and world events.

“Off to meet her secret lover.”

Kim frowned. Izzie definitely had a secret. But she didn't look like someone in the throes of a full-blown love affair. Most of the time, she just looked terrified.

“What about your landlord? The man who earns more in five minutes than you could earn in five years?”

Kim shrugged. “He doesn't come round much.”

“Doesn't he?” Damaris looked surprised.

Or maybe he chooses his moments, thought Kim. Maybe he comes to see Eva and Otis when he knows I'm not here.

“He's at Mum's all the time,” said Damaris. “Whenever I call round, he's sitting at the kitchen table having a cup of tea.”

Kim tried to look as if this was something she already knew. But inside she was seething. Was Harry trying to take over Christine, too?

“She's always loved Harry,” said Damaris. “She thinks he should be the next governor of the Bank of England.”

•  •  •

“Most stand-ups talk about sex. Have you noticed? It always gets a laugh. For female comics, it's an easy laugh. The kind of nervous laugh you get when people have had a shock. Or your granddad says something racist. Because most men in the audience are surprised that women have an opinion about sex at all. They don't think it ever crosses our minds. Because we're too busy thinking about shoes. As for two women having sex with each other, well, how would that work? I promise you I had that conversation once. It's like the man who goes on holiday to Paris and stands there by the Eiffel Tower thinking, How do two French people talk to each other if neither understands a word of English? There's a man in the front row down there looking really shifty. You've been thinking that for years, haven't you, pet? So sex gets a laugh because it's like food—enjoyable, but with negative side effects. Like going out for a curry. You pile everything in, chew it, swallow it, sit there belching, burping and farting, and finally end up on the toilet. Overall, as an experience, you might rate it at ninety percent, but not because of the gassy parts. The reason we all laugh at sex is because we're frightened of it. It makes us feel insecure. Because you never really know, do you, whether you're doing it right. However long you've spent secretly watching porn. You can't pass a test like you do with driving. (Although that might be quite good. You could practice your emergency stops.) And when you have sex with someone else—rather than just with yourself—you're meant to make sure the other person has a good time. So while you're eating your chicken korma, you're watching to see if he's enjoying his vindaloo. The problem is, he might not tell you the truth. Because people never do in relationships, do they? So you might
say, ‘Are you enjoying that, pet?' and he'll look at you with his eyes watering and say, ‘Yes.' Or he'll make a big song and dance about ordering everything on the menu—papadums, prawn curry, stuffed paratha—and then, when it comes, he's finished before you've even started. They say in women's magazines that sex is all about communication. I'm not so sure. I think sex is all about keeping secrets. You have to look as if you're being carried away on a wave of passion. But inside you're thinking, Do I even like curry?”

•  •  •

Grace sounded furious. “Really, Kim, I do think you could be trying a bit harder. It's all very well saying you can't interfere, but just leaving them to go their own way isn't helping, is it? Have you thought about poor little Otis?”