‘You still don’t drive, then, Dan?’ asks Nicole, as I hand Adam the manuscript.
I shake my head. Now is not the time for Nicole’s irrelevant questions. It is the time to impress Adam with my work.
‘You always said I was the best at writing, Adam. And now I really will be, with the method!’
‘Well, if I said that, I must have meant it, hey?’ he asks, winking at me.
I nod but he doesn’t look at me. It’s okay if he doesn’t remember. I’ll prove myself again, now, get his adulation afresh, when this new work is published. I watch him while he reads. He has a bit of stubble today, blond hairs not quite breaking through, dots instead lining those sharp cheekbones.
‘Haven’t thought of learning?’ Nicole probes. ‘With all those cars at the garage?’
‘I can’t afford to. Besides, it’s so dangerous,’ I reply.
Adam flinches and I notice his eyes move across to the dresser. I see Nicole notice too and her lips tighten. She must hate that photo of Helen, the constant reminder that she is number two. All over the house, there are stills of Nicole from RADA, playing Desdemona, St Joan, Ophelia, all those other classic roles. None after college. I suppose they make her feel young. Or else she really thinks she still looks like that. On the mantelpiece though, it is just Helen. I see it whenever I come round for dinner.
Nicole sees me looking at the photo of Helen.
‘They’ll catch the driver one day,’ she says, kissing the top of Adam’s head. ‘Give you closure.’ She drapes a protective arm around Adam, forming a barrier between him and me.
‘They’ve tried, they failed,’ he says. He kisses her arm but his tone is clipped.
‘I’ve chosen the third-person voice for Luke,’ I say, helping Adam by changing the subject. ‘That way I have more control over him.’ Adam nods, as if he understands.
‘Which novel is this now? Fourth?’ he asks me.
‘Third,’ I lie. There is no need to bother him with the real book three. He is a banker, so his grasp of more, let’s say, boundary breaking art is poor. There are more drinks than books lining the walls of his West Hampstead home, even though he must have emptied most of the whisky in the week after The Accident, before Nicole came along.
Still, even with his banker’s brain, Adam can’t help but notice the dazzle of the lobster paragraph in what he thinks is book three. I’m so pleased with it, I can remember it word for word.
Luke ran his fingers along the hairs on the antennae of the lobster, which blushed as though it had just been caught getting out of a hot bath. Luke examined the little hairs on the antennae. If only he could get that close to a woman, he thought. Then he tore into its flesh.
The bit following on from that passage will be difficult, of course – Luke getting close, to a woman. I’ve never been big on that. Still, I’ll need to man up, apply the method. That’s what he’s cooking the lobster for, you see. To woo her. When she comes to his house.
Nicole is drumming her fingers against the dining-room table. That must be terribly distracting for Adam, when he’s reading my work.
Adam looks up. Good, I think. He will tell her off. Instead, he puts his hand over hers, encircling it, like the twine round the lobster’s pincers earlier. She stops drumming.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘But I put a lot of effort into the risotto. And then Dan turns up already having eaten a lobster, and now you’re too busy reading to eat.’
I catch Adam’s eyes and roll my own, creating a joke out of Nicole’s nagging. Helen used to nag, too. Adam looks away, though, obviously too embarrassed by his second wife to see the humour. Nicole catches the look, glares at Adam, and starts shoving forkfuls of risotto into her mouth. She is looking plump. That explains it.
‘So, what do you make of it, Adam?’ I ask.
I wait for his praise.
‘Same old handwriting from school, isn’t it? Can just about decipher it!’ says Adam, putting the notebook to one side. ‘Still, better than mine!’
Typical of Adam to make these little jokes – it’s part of his charm. He must know how to decipher my handwriting by now, after book two. I know he’s read it, even if he never talks about it. I smile, and move my chair slightly closer to his, so I can point out particular bits in the notebook. I will trace his fingers going over the handwriting, explain to him what it all means.
‘Idiot!’ shouts Nicole, as my movement upsets my plate and the wine next to it, causing them both to splash a red arc over the cream carpet.
I get down on my hands and knees to try to help, at the same time as Nicole descends to the floor. Our heads are almost touching. If I move forward an inch, I could butt her head with my own, see if I meet scalp in that excessive pile of mousy hair.
She looks up at me. I hold her gaze. She looks away quickly, turning her attention to pouring salt on the wine.
I look at her still and under the force of my gaze she looks up again.
‘Sorry, Nicole,’ I say, making my voice as manly as I imagine Luke’s to be. I gently touch her hand and it freezes. Good, she must be electrified by my touch. Here, then, is the woman for me to get close to. For Luke.
As I ride the bus home, I wish I’d been able to tell Adam about book three. I may read it again later, for my own enjoyment, but I don’t intend to share it with anyone. It’s not that I question its brilliance, rather that they wouldn’t understand – wouldn’t understand how necessary the character progression was. Some of it, they would even call brutal. Perhaps parts of it were a little forced. And some of it, they would call sheer coincidence, or a windfall. But in the moment, the characters had to seize their opportunity and could not have acted differently. That’s the real test.
I get off the bus one stop early and run home. That’s the sort of thing Luke might do. He’s quite fit, you see, and I’m not – yet. I want him to start running in the novel, when he gets agitated about what he’s doing.
Luke went for another of his runs, past her house, hoping she would be in, that he could make an excuse and ring the doorbell. He ran holding a bouquet of roses, the thorns digging into his hands, but he did not feel the pain; it was nothing to his love for her.
I map out the paragraph in my head. Too bad there are no roses round here. The pollution from the road has killed off every flower, turned every house grey. Somehow it even seems to have turned the curtains inside the houses grey. As I jog along, I see only houses that either are boarded up or should be. And then I’m back at my own half-house, an ‘a’ to someone else’s ‘b’. ‘A’ is for Adam, though, so I struck lucky there. There are some drawing pins at home, I’m pretty sure. They will do for a start.
In my bedroom I take one of the pins out of the noticeboard. It’s holding up a school picture, one I particularly like: there’s me in my little shorts, standing next to Adam. We were inseparable at school. I was always there, by his side. He used to joke about that, when we were older. ‘Oh, it’s my shadow, Desperate Dan,’ he’d say, and everyone would laugh. He’d cuff me round the head affectionately to show it was a joke, and everyone would laugh some more. Popular, Adam was, and it was good of him to allow me to share in his charismatic glory. One time, I’d popped round to his house just as he was heading out – the rest of the gang were already there. He looked surprised to see me, but his mum insisted that I go out with them too, and so he invited me along. Sure, we both would rather have been alone together, but what can you do? People will always interfere, if you let them. Like Helen, when she came along.
The pin is rather sharper than I’d imagined it to be. And it looks a little rusty. I click the gas ignition