Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (33 page)

No heckles this time, just some good-willed chuckles.

“No, this is love. This is proper love. Because not only is she as beautiful as she is lovely, she’s all those other things the love of your life is supposed to be. Funny and clever and brave and feisty. I love her.” James looked pained, which seemed to make the crowd laugh. “Trouble is I don’t know how to tell her. I know that really, the goods should speak for themselves.” He gestured up and down the length of his body. “I’m a sexy guy, right? I think we can all agree on that.” Willow smiled. The crowd was warming to James and his lovelorn persona. “But I want to impress her. She’s the kind of girl that you want to impress. I want to show her things that will make her gasp in wonder.”

“Show her your dick!”

“I said make her gasp in wonder, mate—not disappoint her. But the thing, the one thing I really want to do, is make her laugh.” James was silent for a moment, his pathetic expression enough this time to raise laughter.

“The trouble is I’m not a funny guy. My day job is accounting. I can’t exactly whisper in her ear”—James put on a sexy and for some reason French accent—“Did you know that if you file your tax return online by September thirtieth the revenue will work out what you have to pay for you?” He looked at a pretty girl sitting near the stage. “Are you turned on?”

She giggled and nodded.

“Oh, cool. Maybe I will try it.”

This time even Chloe chuckled.

“So I’ve decided that as soon as I get her alone, I’m going to ask her out. You know, when it’s just me and her. But I can’t seem to come up with a good enough reason for her to want to spend any time alone with me. I thought about asking her to dinner, but that’s just too much pressure. I mean, that’s an hour where you are sitting across a table from someone, trying to be fascinating. My brain will be trying to be funny and my penis will be trying to get me laid and at some point my mouth will fuck up and I’ll say don’t you think it would be hilarious if we had sex in the toilet, and she’ll throw wine at me and storm out and then . . . then it will be
much
harder to marry her.”

This time the laugh was studded with a smattering of applause.

“Is he really talking about you?” Sam asked.

“I’m pretty sure he isn’t,” Willow said, uncomfortable. “It’s an act, isn’t it?”

“Because I love this woman, I love her. Do you understand me? I love her.” James cocked his head to one side. “Starting to sound a teensy bit stalkerish, I know, but I am completely sincere. Yes, I have only met her four times, but they were the best four ten minutes of my life, and if you add them up, that’s nearly an hour. That’s like
nearly
three-quarters of an hour and I defy anyone in this room to say that you can’t fall in love in forty minutes. Especially if you’re drunk.” There were cheers and wolf whistles. “But I’m not drunk . . . yet. I’m stone cold sober and I am in love. It is a bit of a worry that she doesn’t seem to want to be around me for longer than ten minutes at a time, I grant you. But that’s okay. Accountants are very efficient—we can get a lot done in ten minutes. . . .”

Willow looked around her. The fifty or so people in the room were all engaged with James. They were all smiling,
laughing. His humor wasn’t obvious, he didn’t have joke after joke lined up, really he was just having a conversation with them, but it was one that they seemed to want to have.

“So I invited her here tonight, to see me in action. Impress her with my razor-sharp wit.” James paused for a long moment, unafraid of the silence. “I’m going to start any minute now.”

“Where is she then?” a rather drunk woman demanded. “Ask her out!”

The crowd applauded and cheered.

“He’s going to ask you out in front of all these people,” Kayla said, clapping her hands like a delighted child. “You are going to be really embarrassed, Willow!”

“Fuck, is he? Nightmare!” Chloe sat up, suddenly wide-eyed.

“Is he?” Sam asked, his shoulders squaring.

“He’d better not,” Daniel warned.

“Why not?” Kayla asked him. “Daniel, why not?”

“Of course he isn’t going to ask me out, don’t be ridiculous. . . . He wouldn’t.” Willow hoped desperately that she was right.

“Er, Willow?” James said her name into the microphone.

“Oh my God,” Holly said. “He is too.”

“I knew it!” Kayla was triumphant.

“Please will you have dinner with me after?”

The single spotlight that had previously been focused on James swung onto her, the intense light dazzling her instantly. Willow tried to shield her face from the light, but still she couldn’t see; all she could feel was someone’s hand on her shoulder, another person touching her leg, like she was being pushed or jostled.

“Willow, I really think you belong to me.”

From a distance she heard Holly speak as if her voice was lost somewhere inside Willow’s head.

“Okay, this is stupid. Can’t you see she doesn’t like it? Let her go, I think she could do with some air.”

“What you need to understand”—James’s voice altered, echoing deeper and darker in her head, a voice that belonged to someone else—“is that you belong to me now. No one will ever love you the way that I do.”

In a heartbeat Willow was paralyzed, heart-racing fear and anxiety coursing through her veins.

“Willow?” she heard her sister’s voice, felt concerned hands all over her.

“Look, get that bloody light off of her,” she heard Holly snap.

Everyone was looking at her; Willow was afraid to open her eyes. Everyone could tell, everyone knew . . . and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Then the spotlight snapped off and the room fell mostly into darkness, except for the lights behind the bar.

Pushing her chair back, Willow shoved her way free of the table and stumbled toward the door, cheers and wolf whistles following her as she practically fell down the stairs, throwing herself out into the freezing night, gasping the cold in, even though the icy chill made her lungs contract and cough.

What had happened, which moment had it been that had filled her with panic? The light in her eyes, the hands on her legs, the tone of voice—no, it had been the words, the words that reminded her of something long ago, something whispered in her ear. “I own you now, Willow, you belong to me. Never forget that.”

“How could I ever forget that,” Willow whispered to herself. “I never can.”

Steadying herself against the rough wall of the pub, Willow concentrated on the cars swathing through the rain and muck, their red brake lights blinking into the distance, the lights of Battersea Bridge shining like beacons, lighting a way across the dark, dirty river. How foolish she had been to think that shoes,
a coat and a grubby bit of metal might be all the armor that she needed to be out in the world. As soon as she tried, as soon as she made an effort to join the human race, something would always happen to remind her of all the reasons why she couldn’t.

Willow turned away as James appeared, her coat in his hand.

“Your sister wanted to come, and your ex-husband and Daniel are more or less on the verge of forming an alliance in order to kill me, but I asked them to let me apologize first.” James struggled with knowing what to say. “In my head that was really witty and romantic, charming and sweet. I had no idea you’d be quite so horrified, I’m so sorry, Willow. I’m so . . . fucking mortified.”

Willow steeled herself before turning to take the coat, drawing it around her and buttoning it up against both the cold and him. James fell silent, taking a packet of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and lighting one. “I wasn’t joking up there, not about any of it, but especially not about knowing what to say. I never know what to say, I never get it right. I don’t read people or signals right, ever . . . but I want you to know that . . .” James said nothing for a long time, his mouth working, but no words emerging. Desperate to be allowed to leave, Willow took the lit cigarette out of his hand and took a drag on it, inhaling too quickly so that the acrid smoke made her cough and choke again, and she remembered the scent of pipe smoke hanging in the hair above her head.

She forced herself to speak. “Look, it’s not your fault. Most girls would have loved that, I’m just . . . I’ve got . . . issues.”

“Having a spotlight shone in your eyes and being discussed in public issues?” James asked her. “Because now I come to think of it, I think most people have those issues.”

Willow said nothing. It was all she could do to concentrate on smoking and not throwing up.

“I’ve got issues,” James told her, babbling on regardless. “I’ve got more issues than
Playboy
. I can’t go for a poo if I’m not at home, I say ‘poo’ and I’m forty. . . . I can’t stand the sound of other people chewing, it makes me want to vomit, and I can never tell what another person is thinking even if it’s written all over their face. And I only stopped stuttering when I was twenty-one after several very expensive sessions of speech therapy that I paid for by working in a fast-food restaurant. Honestly, you want to try standing in a stripy apron and saying do you want f-f-f-fries with that. I’m issue-led. I’m Issue Boy. I’ve got more hang-ups than . . . I can’t think of a punch line.”

Willow rubbed her hands across her face.

“Look, it’s fine—you haven’t done anything wrong, James. I had a bit of a trauma as a child. I’m mainly fine now, but sometimes I get flashbacks when I least expect them and I panic.” Willow was quite straightforward.

“Oh God, really? What, a car crash or something?” James asked.

“Something like that.”

“Fuck.” James ran his fingers through his hair. “Fuck. I am a twat. I should have realized that my debut onstage is not the right time to ask a girl out. Why do I never get these things right? It’s my destiny to live alone, you know. I can’t be trusted with other people.”

“That’s something we have in common then.” Willow mustered the hint of a smile. “You were good, though, people liked you, right up until the part where you publicly humiliated me.”

“Christ!” James kicked the pub wall and then winced. “Fucking boating shoes, how did they become fashionable?”

“I’m not sure they did,” Willow told him, stubbing the cigarette out on the wall.

“What does make you laugh?” James asked her suddenly. “I
mean, if me breaking my toe, kicking a wall in a pair of midlife-crisis canvas shoes that should only ever really be seen on the teenage members of an indie band doesn’t, then what does?”

Willow shrugged. “I don’t know, funny stuff. You, you made me laugh tonight. Before publicly humiliating me.”

“No, I didn’t,” James told her. “I was watching you out of the corner of my eye the whole time. You smiled, you looked at other people laughing, but you didn’t laugh. I’ve known you for quite a while now, Willow, and I’ve never ever seen you laugh.”

“Don’t be silly, I do,” Willow said, unsettled. “I laugh all the time.”

Just then the pub doors burst open and almost all of the people that Willow knew bundled out in something just short of a posse.

“Right, twat, your five minutes to grovel is up. Now get away from my sister.” Holly, rather fortified by her large gin, barged her way between James and Willow, hands on hips. “Are you all right, baby?”

“I’m fine,” Willow said, with some surprise. It was true. She was fine. Usually when those moments overtook her it was an age before her hands stopped shaking, her heart stopped racing, the sick nausea abated to functional levels again, but James had turned up and distracted her with his talk of issues and his stupid shoes and his declaration that she never laughed. And now she thought about it, Willow found that she couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed. Not just belly-laughed, rolled around on the floor laughed, but even chuckled politely.

“Right, we’re going home.” Sam beckoned to her. “Come on, Willow.”

“You are a dick,” Chloe said menacingly to James, determined to get her boot in. “Willow wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last man on the planet.”

“I’m fine, you know.” Willow held up her hands. “Just a bit embarrassed. It’s not James’s fault I freaked out.”

“It is his fault, it is your fault, mate,” Daniel said. “How many times have I told you, you are better off not saying anything to anyone?”

“That’s a bit harsh.” Willow frowned. “Lay off him.”

“I’m sticking up for you, Will!” Daniel exclaimed, crossing in front of Sam to stand close to her. “You okay?” he asked her in a low voice.

“I’m fine!” Willow pushed him back. “Holly, I laugh, don’t I?”

“’Course you do, when things are funny.” Holly scowled at James, an effect that was somewhat lessened by her bloodshot eyes.

“Right, when was the last time you saw me laugh, today, right? In Hamleys, when the girls were rolling around in the soft toys and we dressed up like fairies? We all laughed, didn’t we?”

“I didn’t,” Chloe said. “And actually neither did you. You smiled. You smile a lot, Willow.”