Upgrading (36 page)

“Of course, I—”

“Funny thing, is,” she says, the muscles in her pale smooth neck twitching as she fights back the tears. “Funny thing is, I’m always meeting complete … fucking … assholes trying to be nice guys and you’re basically a nice guy trying to be an asshole.” She gives an irritable, confused laugh. “Why? I just don’t understand.”

“Jane, I—”

“Oh, never mind,” she mutters, which is quite a relief because I don’t actually know how to answer this accusation. “You know how I feel about you, Andrew, but you’ve got to decide. I’ve had enough. Like I said, I just can’t do this.” She sniffs and looks around her. “The phone’s working again, you’ve got my number. Just, er …” She starts to walk away and I know she’s crying. I don’t go after her. It would just make it worse.

I begin to walk back home. “Home?” Is that what it is? By the time I get to the King’s Road it has become very dark and as I walk into Sloane Square the heavens open. Big warm splats of rain clear the streets and some people at a café start squealing and running inside.

I don’t care, though. In fact I walk all the way round Eaton Square as well, taking in the warm, sweet-smelling air. By the time I get back I’m well and truly soaked, even my shoes are squelching. I ring the doorbell and Ana Maria opens the door very slowly. She gasps, begins to giggle and opens it properly.

“Mr. Andrew, you soaked.”

I look at her for a moment. This is the woman I’m going to marry.

“I know,” I say unnecessarily. I walk in and trudge upstairs, leaving big soggy grey footprints on the white carpet. I decide to have a bath because I need to think.

By the time Marion gets back at just after eleven I’m sitting in front of the TV still in my bathrobe. She looks slightly surprised to see me.

“How was Vinny?”

“Fine,” I say looking her in the eye and realizing that I must have drunk an awful lot. I’ve spurned Ana Maria’s kind offer of supper. To be honest, I just can’t bear to look at her at the moment. Not since we’ve become engaged.

“Where’d you go? The pub?” she says brightly, putting her bag down on the settee. She eyes the bottle of Scotch sitting on the coffee table next to my feet, neither of which I can be bothered to move. God, Marion don’t you ever give up?

“Yeah.” I don’t care that she’s probably had Chris following me again with his Polaroid camera. He’d have got some good shots this time, though—me charging round the restaurant glaring at the customers while the staff try to decide how much longer they’ll give me before they chuck me out or call the police, me haring around outside looking for Jane, me running along the road in front of on-coming cars to catch her up, her turning her back on me and walking off. In a way I’d quite like Marion to see those pictures, I’d like her to see what I’ll do for someone I really love, really care about, someone who is straightforward and honest and just wants to have a normal relationship, not play weird mind games. And I’d like her to know that I’d never bother to run after her like that.

“Andrew, would you fix me a Perrier with ice, I’m terribly thirsty. I’m just going to change.” She grabs her bag and walks off.

When I get up I realize that actually I’m really pissed. I stumble over to the drinks cabinet, gashing my shin on the coffee table. I look at it for a moment and then kick it hard with the underside of my foot. The huge vase of lilies shifts very slightly but the table itself hardly moves.

i
wake up in the spare room. I can’t quite remember how I got there but I’m just so relieved I don’t have to face Marion. I reach over and check my watch. Twenty past ten. I try and swallow and find that my mouth is dry. I’m horribly hungover, of course, really sick as well because I didn’t eat anything last night. I take a deep breath, stand up and have to sit down on the bed again quickly. I feel hot and cold at the same time and an icy hand seems to be very slowly squeezing my brain. I lie down again, perhaps I’ll fall asleep and feel better when I wake up. But I can’t.

It’s not Jane’s words from last night that chase around my poor, damaged mind, it’s her expression. Disgust. Contempt. And I can’t blame her. I look around the room for a moment and think about the house I’m in. The five-million-pound house in Belgravia. I’ve got the clothes. I’ve been to the restaurants. The truth is I deserve that look of disgust and contempt. Perhaps this my reward for trying to have my cake and eat it, have Jane and my glossy, five-star, designer-clad, business-class lifestyle. Perhaps what I am actually cut out for is to be a bit of passive, brain-dead arm candy for rich old women, after all. Like Mark, except that I haven’t got the guts to go that extra mile and make some real hard cash. I might be shocked at the way he earns his living but he obviously doesn’t care. Better than working in an office. Two fingers to the lot of you. But I can’t quite do it.

I can’t help thinking about Jane, who does work for a weekly salary fix, who does travel on the Tube, trying to open her book under someone else’s armpit, who does save up for cheap holidays on a Greek island and who does talk about what was on telly last night with her colleagues. Jane, who does all the things I used to do, used to think I was too good for. The kind of things that Vinny, Sami, Pete and all my old friends do every day without thinking about them. Ordinary activities that suddenly seem not just routine but comforting and normal. I used to hate them, used to think I could find something better but now I want to do them again. With Jane.

I can’t believe how easily I’ve slipped into this role. Lost my drive, my energy, lost most of my interests, my friends, most of all my self respect. Jane said she had too much dignity to be the other woman but I’ve just got no dignity at all.

What do people think when they see Marion and me eating in expensive restaurants together? When they see us nosing our way up Sloane Street in that huge black BMW with the peak-capped chauffeur—immaculately turned out (as I always am now), rich and very bored? Not just a rich couple with nothing left to say to each other but a rather strange, almost laughable, couple of beautifully dressed oddballs.

I put my bathrobe on and open the door. Marion’s bedroom door is open and I can see that the bed is made.

I go into the main bathroom and let the tap run cold for a while then I splash a few careless handfuls of water onto my face and round my neck. I look up at my puffy bloodshot eyes. I don’t bother to dry myself, too much effort, besides my skin still feels very warm. Carefully holding onto the bannister, I ease myself down the stairs. Still no Marion. Thank God—she must have gone out for the first appointment in her busy schedule.

I have to sit for a while on the bottom step. Then I pull myself up again and walk over to the kitchen to find some cold orange juice. Just as I am approaching the door it is thrown open and Marion appears. Suddenly it’s all too much: her look of surprise and then haughty disdain, the smell of her perfume, the sadistic way she is pulling on her black leather gloves, the roar of the dishwasher behind her and Ana Maria crashing pots and pans about on the draining board. I just have that overwhelming need to get down very low, where I can’t fall down any further, where I belong. Somehow I sense that the floor is my only friend at the moment.

I squat for a few seconds, concentrating on not fainting or throwing up and then look up to see them both staring down at me: Marion’s face a picture of loathing, Ana Maria partly intrigued, partly concerned.

“Can I have some orange juice please, Ana Maria?” I say in a very small voice.

She looks at me for a moment and then mutters “Yes, Mr. Andrew.”

Marion is still staring.

“Oh, what?” I whine.

“Can I have a word?” she says, pushing me out of the kitchen. She is surprisingly strong. Or am I just very weak?

As soon as the door closes she puts her face close to mine. “Now you listen to me, young man, and you listen good. When I invited you to come and live with me I was making a big commitment and doing you an enormous favour, you understand?” She pauses. “Look around this house.” I keep my eyes firmly on the floor. “Look at it!” she hisses. I stare at her and then look around obediently, unable to take anything in. “Everything about it is just the way I like it, designed for me, the best of its kind, absolutely perfect. Not a thing out of place. Everything arranged exactly the way I like it. Just like my life. And I’ve worked fucking hard for that. You, on the other hand, are beginning to bore me just a little bit. You’re the one thing that’s messing things up round here and that’s a real shame. You understand? Do you
understand?”
I nod. “Good.”

There is a pause during which I begin to hear that hissing sound that you get just before you faint. “Andrew,” she says gently. “You’re a real disappointment to me. I thought you and I could have a proper relationship, that I could teach you things, show you another world, help you to grow, but now I’m not so sure. Please prove me wrong.”

She pauses again and adjusts her gloves and then adds in a jolly way, “OK, I’m going for a cranial massage and then to the reflexologist and then my usual epidermal rehydration session. Call me on the mobile if you want to have lunch.” She strides off towards the front door, stopping briefly to rearrange a stray lily.

Getting dressed very slowly, still in the spare bedroom, I stop for a moment and hold my thumping head in my hands. That was probably one of the worst bollockings of my life but what spooked me about our encounter was the fact that when she saw me appear at the kitchen door it wasn’t just revulsion on Marion’s face, she seemed to be rather amused.

After a couple of glasses of orange juice and two aspirin I begin to feel a bit better and so I sit down to watch a bit of
I Love Lucy
and some American chat show in which a girl called Shanaya, who is wearing huge gold loop earrings and a hairstyle that looks like a fairground helter skelter, is telling the heavily lip-glossed hostess that she won’t have sex with her boyfriend until he stops doing her mother as well. “Go on, girl,” shouts someone from the audience and everybody whoops and claps.

Ana Maria, meanwhile, is warming to her task: “Here you are—breakfast for bery sick baby,” she says, bringing a pot of coffee and two slices of toast dripping with butter and marmalade. As my initial nausea begins to subside I realize that I am really quite hungry. The toast is delicious.

“Thanks, Ana Maria, you’re a life saver,” I say, watching her pour some coffee.

“Here—more sugar make you well,” she says, adding two spoonfuls.

“Thank you.”

“Oh, poor sick baby,” she laughs.

“God, I’ll say,” I agree, holding the cup in both hands. “Marion’s furious with me, isn’t she?”

“Madam is old bag.”

“Ana Maria!” I say in mock outrage. This provokes more giggles. We both laugh, glad to release the tension.

“Madam say ‘Don’t be kind Mr. Andrew, he bring it on himself. His own fault drinking whisky.’”

“Don’t remind me, I think I drank half that bottle.”

“Half bottle of whisky?” shrieks Ana Maria. “You bery sick. My poor husband.”

Oh, fuck. Why did she have to say that? I’d almost forgotten. I look up at her. “Sorry,” she says, embarrassed. She looks away for a moment, then picks up the toast plate and goes quickly back into the kitchen. I look down at my coffee in my giltrimmed china cup and realize how quickly I’ve got used to having someone make it and pour it for me. When did I last wash up a cup?

I find myself thinking about Jane walking back to the Tube station trying not to cry like a little girl. Then I imagine having this toast and coffee in bed with her. Like I used to do with Helen at college and when she came to see me at weekends in London. Would toast taste the same with Jane? I imagine going down to the kitchen in Fulham and making it. Odd mugs and chipped plates. Bringing my badly buttered slices up to her. Eating it in bed, getting into trouble for dropping crumbs everywhere—giggling and wiping the butter from her chin. Snuggling down and making love again.

Will that ever happen? I’m planning to marry someone else, someone I don’t love. Someone I can’t even bear to look at anymore. Would I tell Jane—or any other girl—what I’d done? I couldn’t spend the rest of my life without telling her that I’d been married before, could I?

I watch a bit more telly and listen to Shanaya’s sister reveal that she is also sleeping with Shanaya’s boyfriend and then I get up and go into the kitchen to break the news to Ana Maria.

She is sitting at the kitchen table looking at a clothes catalogue. I sit down opposite her. She knows something is up.

“Ana Maria, this marriage thing. I’ve been thinking about it. I—” Her reaction catches me out—she just bursts into tears, pushes the magazine out of the way and puts her head on the table. “Ana Maria, listen … I …”

After a few moments she looks up at me, her breath still slightly irregular. “Please Mr. Andrew … look what I get.” From the pocket of her uniform she extracts a folded letter. It is very flattened and the edges are well worn. I open it carefully and immediately recognize the Home Office logo. It basically tells her that she has less than a month to leave the country or give a reason why she can stay. “I cannot go back dere,” she sobs again.

“Ana Maria, I know.” I reach across the table and take her hand with its stubby fingers and bright red nail polish. “I’m sorry, I just don’t think I’m the one …”

“You want more money, I have money,” she says quickly.

“Oh no, it’s not the money, I don’t care about the money,” I hear myself saying. Did I really say that? “It’s just that …” I don’t actually want to explain that going through this illegal charade makes me feel sick and that I’m afraid of us both getting caught by the police and that it might rob me of the possibility of a real wedding at some point in the future. Or force me to live a lie. Ana Maria’s probably more worried about food and sending money to her family than she is about issues like flowers, choral music and making my mum happy. As I watch her shoulders heaving and tears falling on the catalogue pages I ask her, “Isn’t there someone else who could do it? Mark? Don’t you know someone?” All of which sounds bloody insulting but the whole situation is too weird to worry about that.

“No, we try. My friend, Maria, she might know a guy who do it, but he want too much money and madam won’t pay him because she don’t trust him and there is no time.” She fingers the letter as if it were a death warrant. We sit in silence as I try and think of anyone I know but then I realize that every single one of my friends, hip, urban, fun though they might be, would be just simply appalled at the idea of doing this. I’ve got to try and remember how normal people think, difficult though it is these days.

Then I think about the ceremony—ten minutes, horrible, a bit like going to the dentist, but then I get £15,000, yes
fifteen thousand quid
, let Jerry sort out the legal stuff, Ana Maria’s dream is fulfilled and a year later the divorce thing comes through and no one is any the wiser. I’m single again. After all the hassle I’ve been through over the last few months, I’ll finally have something to show for it. I look at Ana Maria again, she is staring up at me through huge, brown, watery eyes. Oh, God, I’ve come this far, raised her hopes, made plans for myself with it, let’s just do it.

People do worse things for money.

I nod at her. “OK,” I almost whisper. I try to smile.

She smiles back up at me and then begins to cry again. I squeeze her hand and wander out of the kitchen.

Back in the living room I stare out of the window for a while and think about Jane. I’m about as low in her estimation as I could be, so it’s not like this marriage thing, even if she ever possibly knew about it, could make things much worse. OK, Jane, with your shared flat in a crappy old house in Holloway and your job at Paperchase, your nights in front of the telly with tea or cheap white wine and your friends who bring their own cans of lager to barbecues—you’ve got it made. Congratulations!

It’s no good, I start envying her again. That’s the life I know.

I lean forward and let the cool glass of the window soothe my aching, burning forehead. Then I reach for the phone and start to ring Mark’s number but I hang up quickly before it rings, realizing that I need to talk to a real person about this, someone who would understand that you might want to spend some time with someone without crisp fifties being involved so I ring my old direct line at the office. Unsurprisingly I don’t recognize the voice that answers. I ask to speak to Sami.

“Who?” says the voice.

“Sami. That is Classified Ads, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I don’t think there’s anyone here called Sami.”

“There must be: Sami, Asian girl with long hair, sits at the end by the photocopier.”

“Look, I’m sorry, there’s no one here called Sami,” says the voice, obviously getting pretty irritated that I’m stopping him using his phone to do what God put him on earth to do—sell space. “Can’t help you, goodbye. Oh, hang on … What’s your name?”