‘I just don’t see it, mate,’ James reasoned.
‘See what? We’re just meeting up to see how it goes.’
‘I don’t like the balance of this dalliance,’ he said. ‘You started on the back-foot and now . . . ’ He had to pull his head back in as another passenger passed toward the door with the Underground rattling and heaving to a stop. When she had passed and he had looked her up and down, he leaned back across, elbows on his knees and his head jutting across the carriage at Vic. The doors hissed and closed, and the dry grime of the Underground was in the air, as James picked up his point. ‘I just don’t think a girl like this is for you.’
Vic raised an eyebrow, quizzical, and sceptical. ‘From what I know, I don’t like it,’ James continued, then paused. ‘I can’t have my wingman in a relationship. She’s already fucked up one Saturday night.’
‘Let’s just go to the party,’ Vic responded. ‘I’m not holding your hand here, mate. If you go around moping . . . I’m here for women. Pure and simple. Friendship is for weekdays.’
It was a typical North London house; tall, narrow, three floors and an attic. It seemed to be falling apart from the inside; cobwebs in high corners, cracked plaster on the ceilings, a wafer blanket of dust on every surface, manky furnishings, drafty windows and crocked doors. But above all the mess, in every room, the walls were dressed in the wildest paintings; violently vibrant in colour, curlicues and hard edges thrown together, parts of images merging with seas of indiscriminate pattern and chaos. They were arresting and incomprehensible, and juxtaposed against their creator, and the evening’s host, who was typical. You would have guessed what he looked like just by the aspirations of his work; tall, gaunt, elaborately limbed, flowing scarf, dismissive of the minions on one hand and fawning on the other.
Lali was sitting on the artist’s lap when they arrived. She had a glass of wine in her hand, dancing in the air to the rhythm of her seduction – in to her lips for a suggestive sip and then waltzing back out to the beat of her vexing refrain. The artist looked enthralled, his own party playing out around him, without him, as she wrapped his overlong scarf one more time around his neck.
When Vic caught her eye, she curled her lip and nodded at him. He acknowledged her with a casual wave but when she just turned back to the artist, Vic was left wondering what to do with his hand, now that it was out there, conspicuously. He glanced about for James, but he was already moving away toward a group of mostly girls by the fireplace.
As he watched Lali kiss the artist, Vic was already on his way to the door. But then she stood up, patted the artist with condescending lightness upon the cheek, pulled her skirt straight, and walked over to Vic. She gently moved people to the side as she crossed the room; parting human seas to ruin him.
There were no awkward kisses on the cheek. She kissed Vic on the lips, just like she had kissed artist, only these lips were Vic’s, and asked, ‘Alright?’
She came and went over the course of hours and Vic didn’t feel as lost as he usually would in a house of strangers. James disappeared around midnight, out the door with two giggling girls and some old Uni friend he’d met. He pleaded with Vic to come with him and sighed when Vic opted, instead, to remain talking with a group of strangers, waiting for Lali to come back to him, to sustain him for another hour.
Some time later she descended on him, drunk and amorous, and ushered him to a bedroom. She closed the door behind them and led him to the bed. She leaned intently against him until he toppled onto it. He was among a pile of coats. She reached through the darkness and placed a hand on his chest, then crawled on top of him. As she straddled him, Vic could feel her sharp heels digging into his thighs. He felt her breath in his ear and the flesh of her cleavage resting on his chin. She whispered, ‘We need to find my coat. It’s home time.’
It seemed familiar, already.
One Saturday night became two, and three, and gradually developed into whole weekends spent together. As the weekends then crept into the weekdays, Vic came to stay over at her flat a couple of evenings during the week. Their social circles started to contract and amalgamate, and they became something more than casual.
Vic felt as though he was acquiring what he had sought from the start, an understanding of who she was, of her mystery. The mere accumulation of time spent together gave him a false sense of knowing. He thought that in meeting more of her friends and browsing her music collection, and knowing how she took her coffee and what she wore to bed, that he was getting closer to her. He mistook, in a very modern way, information for knowledge.
He thought that having visited Buckingham Palace together, for instance, and worked out that they both liked the horses, that he liked some of the paintings and she just didn’t care, and that neither of them had any interest in the gardens, that they were in some way known to each other. And this feeling was buttressed by its location in one of her energetic, gregarious phases. A time when Vic had forgotten the flippant meanness that she had first shown to him.
She was busy and dynamic, engrossed in the project that was the prying open of his closeted world, his self-contained and tiny contentment. Vic imagined that he must have seemed quaint to her, a young man of roughly her age but utterly anachronistic; he didn’t embrace London’s vastness, preferring, instead, to survive in tiny pockets of the place that were familiar and safe. He didn’t like clubs or any kind of music that didn’t involve a guitar, and he certainly didn’t like city tours. He was swallowed up by the city, in many respects, softly anonymous among the flash and the tittup. Not lonely exactly, or independent, but not unhappy either.
The visit to the Palace was one of her attempts to broaden Vic’s world.
‘I thought you were a man of education,’ she said, as if that was the trammel to catch him.
‘I’ve no interest.’
‘You don’t have to curtsy to Her Majesty on the way through or anything,’ she gibed.
As they walked along Constitutional Hill, flanked on the right by Buckingham Palace Gardens and on the left by Green Park, Vic began honing in on the core of his disgruntlement. ‘It’s the false reverence of the term. That bowed-head kind of paying homage . . . I mean what has she ever done? You pay for all her privilege with your taxes. With my bloody taxes! And just because somebody decided that they were a special family hundreds of years ago, or because they killed off some other family that thought they were special. I don’t get it. It infuriates me. The French had the right idea – lynch the bastards!’ he finished, bringing his loosely conceived republican tirade to an end as they came to the gates of the palace.
‘That’s beautiful, Vic,’ she said, a little impatiently. ‘Now, come on.’
The frisky argumentativeness, characteristic of what they seemed to be developing into, emboldened Vic’s trust in Lali. His initial fear that their relationship lacked commonality was allayed by the feeling that their differences might turn out to be as capable of sustaining them as any illusive commonality. This promise stripped her unpredictability of its foreboding, freed him to invest everything in her honed aesthetic.
The extravagance and decadence of the palace confirmed for him the righteousness of his indignation. ‘A gold effing coach!’ he hissed into her ear, as they toured the Royal Mews. The royal collection held not a single painting he recognized but he enjoyed the hour of culture he would otherwise have ignored. The horses, pronounced in their muscularity and bay colouring, were less contentiously impressive; naturally awesome, dignified, and calm as they trotted past. But beyond the horses and the art, there was only what they dismissed as the royal shrubbery and pigeons, and Lali wasn’t for pretence. Her anarchical impatience had them through the gardens and on their way down Buckingham Palace Road, towards Victoria