Just Like You Read online

  They were walking home together. Emma lived two streets farther on, in one of the larger houses down the hill. They had been neighbors, once upon a time, but after the separation, that house had been sold and Lucy and the boys had moved to a smaller place.

  “Are the boys with Paul this weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  “So if it does go well tonight . . .”

  “I’m not going to sleep with anyone tonight.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Have you ever been unfaithful to David?”

  “Lucy! Really!”

  “What?”

  “You can’t ask that!”

  “Because?”

  “It’s private.”

  The information Emma did not wish to divulge was that she had been entirely faithful to her husband for the duration of her married life, Lucy knew that. It was her deep, dark secret: that despite all the talk about eating people up and pork loins, Emma had done nothing and would never do anything. Yes, it was pathetic, but the truth was she was just another depressed and lonely married woman who wouldn’t give up on the idea that a young man might want to fuck her. And what was wrong with that, really? Whatever got you through.

  “Why is my sex life open to discussion when yours isn’t?”

  “Because you’re single.”

  “Single people are allowed a private sex life.”

  “But you know David.”

  “I wouldn’t say anything.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “So you have been unfaithful.”

  “Let’s change the subject.”

  And thus Emma’s honor was spared.

  * * *

  —

  She liked the new quiet of Saturday afternoons. In the winter, when it was too wet to play football on the playing field with their friends, one of the boys watched people watching football on the results program while listening to grime and playing a game on his phone, and the other played FIFA on the Xbox while shouting at friends through the headset. That was a lot of different noise she didn’t want to hear. Now that they spent Saturdays with Paul, she could read, do the crossword, listen to music that would have made her sons snort with fury (Mozart) or amusement (Carole King). It was the early evenings she didn’t like. A family house, even a family house that had shrunk due to force of circumstance, belonged to a family, and the seven o’clock silence seemed a failure of sorts. It wasn’t her failure, at least in her opinion, but it didn’t matter who claimed it.

  * * *

  —

  And tonight she didn’t even have to cook, an activity that was much more important than she’d realized before the lonely Saturdays. Cooking kept the evening away from the afternoon—it was a punctuation mark, stopping the long sentence of the day from tripping over itself and becoming garbled. So then what, without the cooking of pasta and the chopping of onions? She refused to be one of those women who filled in the time before a date by trying things on in the bedroom. In the movies, these sessions always came in montages, and maybe she would try on her whole wardrobe if the changes didn’t involve undressing at any point, if the clothes just magically appeared on the body while there was a song about new tomorrows playing on the soundtrack.

  Anyway, to actually think about her appearance would be giving the evening a gravity and investment it didn’t deserve. She didn’t know this man, and he didn’t sound terribly exciting. His name was Ted and he worked in consumer publishing. If Ted represented a new tomorrow, she might simply stay in bed until Monday. Maybe she wouldn’t even change. She looked perfectly presentable, she thought. If he didn’t like women who wore jeans and a T-shirt on a date, he could fuck off. Maybe she’d put a proper top on, though. She looked at the crossword. “Across solutions all refer to a theme which is otherwise undefined.” Great. You had to discover the theme before you could get the solutions, and you had to get the solutions before you discovered the theme. She seemed to spend most of her life doing that. She put the T.V. on instead.

  * * *

  —

  They smiled at each other.

  “So.”

  “So.”

  They’d done the ordering drinks bit, and they were now pretending to look at the menu. He was probably five years older than her, and he was neither unattractive nor handsome. He was balding, but he had accepted it, so the remaining hair was shaved neatly but not aggressively. The crinkles around his eyes showed that he smiled a lot, and his teeth were straight and white. Only the shirt, which was regrettably both black and floral, rang any alarm bells, but it looked like it might have been purchased specially for the occasion. If so, this was both sweet and sad. All in all, he looked exactly like the kind of man she might have expected to be meeting on a blind date set up by a mutual friend: pleasant, damaged, harmless, and with a blind faith in the power of another woman to lead him out of his loneliness. She wondered whether he was feeling some kind of version of the same thing, but she didn’t think she gave off the same melancholy. Maybe she was kidding herself. She knew within seconds there would be no second date.

  “Who’s going to go first?”

  Who’s going to go first? Dear God. This was conversation as lavatory, where there was only room for one at a time. You go first, she wanted to say. There’s never a queue for the gents. But then, they weren’t here to have fun. They were here to find out whether they could bear to contemplate some kind of substitute sad-sack relationship, and in order to do that, stories—stories about pain, loss, mismanagement, and wrongdoing—had to be got out of the way. She could tell from his atmosphere of defeat that the wrongdoing was not his.

  “You go.”

  “Well. I’m Ted. Which you knew. And I’m a friend of Natasha’s.”

  He made a gesture toward her, an unfurling arm, as if he were asking her to take a bow. This was to indicate that Lucy too was one of Natasha’s friends, which was why they were pretending to look at menus together in the first place.

  “I have two girls, Holly and Marcie, thirteen and eleven, and I’m very involved in their lives but I’m no longer with their mum.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Oh,” said Ted. “No. I don’t know what Natasha has told you, but Amy’s not a bad person. I mean, she made some mistakes, but . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” said Lucy. “It was a silly joke.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Well, if you were still with her, you shouldn’t really be out on blind dates.”

  Ted pointed at her. She’d only met him five minutes ago and there’d already been the unfurled arm thing and a point. He’d make a good crossing guard, but that wasn’t necessarily what she was looking for in a partner.

  “Ah. Yes. That would be funny. Funny peculiar, I meant.”

  “My joke was supposed to be funny ha-ha.”

  “No, no. It was a good joke. But if that’s what I actually was doing, it would be funny peculiar.”

  “Am I allowed to ask what happened?”

  “With Amy?”

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged.

  “She met someone.”

  “Ah.”

  The shrug did not indicate acceptance. The shrug was a carefully casual way of disguising acute and undigested pain.

  “I don’t know. It takes two to tango and all that,” he said.

  “Well. There were two. Her and him.”

  “I wasn’t talking about, you know. The other party.”

  “You were tangoing too?”

  He really didn’t seem the type, but what did she know?

  “No! Not if tangoing means . . . What does it mean?”

  “I suppose I was asking you whether it took four to tango?”

  “Four? How did we get from two to four?”

  “You and s
omeone.”

  “Oh. No. God, no. No.”

  “So in what way were you tangoing?”

  “I wish I hadn’t started with the tango.”

  “Let’s stop.”

  “I suppose I was trying to say that if someone is properly happy in a marriage, then there’s no room for somebody else.”

  “Oh, you’re one of those.”

  “Is that bad? Are we bad?”

  Perhaps she had sounded too withering.

  “No, no. Not bad. Just . . . too thoughtful.”

  “Really? Can you be too thoughtful?”

  Of course you couldn’t. It was just that somehow, Ted’s over-thoughtfulness had tipped over into wetness and self-pity.

  “The thing is, I don’t know how unhappy your wife was.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  “So she probably wasn’t that unhappy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You seem like a reasonably sensitive guy. You’d have noticed. She was probably just medium. Neither happy nor unhappy. Like most people.”

  She didn’t know what she was talking about, but she was beginning to see that blind dates, especially unsuccessful ones with no promise of a future relationship, could offer all sorts of riches. You could provide uninformed and unasked-for opinion, and you could be as nosy as you wanted. Lucy frequently felt the urge to go up to strangers—someone reading an unlikely book, say, or a young woman in tears on her mobile, or a white cycle courier with long dreadlocks—and ask them what the deal was. Just that. “What’s the deal here?”

  Well, if she wasn’t worried about finding a partner of any kind, for life, sex, or even tennis, she could sit down at a table like this one, with a man like Ted, and ask him what the deal was, and he couldn’t tell her to mind her own business because they were here to cut to the chase. Until relatively recently, she had believed that the phrase had something to do with hunting, and that therefore it had been in English usage for hundreds of years. But one quiet Saturday afternoon, after a crossword answer, she had googled it, and she now knew that it came from the early days of cinema, and meant more or less exactly what it said: get to the exciting part as quickly as possible. Hal Roach, the man thought to have coined the phrase, probably never imagined it would be used to describe the moment in a meal where two divorced people talked about their disappointment and oversensitivity. But then, that was the way life went. Lucy was forty-two, and unlikely ever again to find herself strapped to a railway line while a locomotive bore down on her. She had been through that with Paul.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Ted. “I thought she was medium.”

  “Well, when you’re medium, there’s always room for a third party.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. So that’s what I should have been watching out for, you reckon?”

  “No. You can’t watch out for medium. That’s the whole point. If everyone ran off with other people when they’re medium, nobody would stay married for five minutes.”

  Lucy wondered whether they had good sex, and then remembered that she was on a first date and there wouldn’t be a second. She could ask anything.

  “Was the sex OK? Did it . . . was it regular?”

  “Amy was very attractive. Is, I should say. More attractive than me. I probably married out of my league.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I’ve probably got a picture somewhere.”

  He started to search his jacket for his phone.

  “No, no, I understand what attractive means. I don’t see how it relates to sex.”

  “I was always a bit intimidated.”

  She had no idea what that meant, or how it might be applied to the subject under discussion, but she had reached the limits of her appetite for detail.

  “So you’re looking for someone plain.”

  “I know that sounds weird, but I really am. And I should say that when I saw you walk in, I was a bit disappointed. Sorry. Once bitten twice shy and all that.”

  “You’re quite a smooth talker, you know that?”

  He laughed.

  “Your turn.s”

  “Oh, dear. Already?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Lucy, friend of Natasha’s, two boys, Dylan and Al, ten and eight, very, very involved in their lives, probably more than I want to be, no longer with their dad.”

  “And you’re an English teacher.”

  “Yes. Head of Department at Park Road.”

  “We had a look at that for the girls.”

  “And found it wanting?”

  “No. It was very impressive. But Amy wanted them to have what she’d had.”

  “Private.”

  “Well, yes. Not just that. Smaller class sizes, more people . . .”

  “Smaller classes, more people? That’s some school.”

  “No, no, more people that . . .”

  Lucy knew lots of people who sent their kids to private schools, and they never failed to make a mess of explaining how they had arrived at their decision. The reasons usually involved some kind of complex, barely comprehensible sensitivity that prevented the child from attending the local comprehensive, so even though the parents would have loved to send them up the road, it just wouldn’t work in this particular case, what with the shyness, or the undiagnosed dyslexia, or an extraordinary talent that needed the kind of excavation and nurture the state was in no position to provide. Lucy decided that she would have sex with the first father who said, simply, are you fucking kidding me? That school is full of psychopaths, gangsters, kids who don’t speak English, teachers who don’t speak English, twelve-year-olds who stink of weed, eleven-year-olds who will beat my daughter up simply because she reads Plato in her lunch break.

  “More people that are . . .”

  “Like them?”

  Ted looked at her gratefully.

  “I suppose that’s it. There are actually lots of Asian girls at Bluebell. Chinese and Indian. So it’s not . . .”

  “I understand. It’s fine.”

  “Where are your boys?”

  “Francis Bacon.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard good things about that.”

  He seemed relieved, as if the boys’ attendance at a half-decent school provided proof that she wasn’t a complete ideological lunatic.

  “And why . . . Well, why are you here?”

  “Why am I single? Natasha didn’t say anything?”

  “A little bit.”

  “Well, the headlines tell the whole story.”

  “How’s he doing now?”

  “OK. He’s clean. Rehab, counseling . . . He’s done everything he should have done years ago.”

  “And he doesn’t want to come back?”

  “Oh, yes. He can’t see what the problem is.”

  “And what is the problem?”

  “I hate him.”

  “Presumably that can change.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Everyone seemed to think that forgiveness was just within reach, there, on the next table, and all she had to do was get up and turn on the tap, but perversity and bitterness were stopping her. She was angry, yes, but there was no tap. Paul had spent all their money. Paul had ruined too many birthdays. Paul had called her a bitch and a cunt too many times. Paul had hit a Deliveroo driver, and brought cocaine and dealers into the house where his children lived. She would know him for the rest of her life, and one day, if they put enough years between the past and the future, she could imagine the rage subsiding. But subsiding rage was not the same thing as love. Maybe Ted would have seemed like an attractive option to some women who had endured something similar, but she didn’t need someone to be kind to her. She wanted intellectual stimulation and sexual excitement, and if she couldn’t have that then she didn’t ne
ed anybody.

  “Natasha says you’re a big reader,” said Ted, who clearly didn’t want to talk about hatred any more.

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “I tried to do some swotting up, but I’d be lying if I said it was my thing.”

  Lucy wondered what the swotting up had entailed. Had he read the books pages of the Sunday Times? Had he read a book, or read every book published in the last five years?

  “That’s OK.”

  “I’m much happier with a good series on Netflix.”

  Lucy liked a good series on Netflix too. They got through the rest of the evening easily enough. Lucy was not young, she knew. She was roughly halfway through her life. But surely she was younger than this?

  2

  Seven minutes of the game left, nil-nil, and Lucas took a massive swipe at the ball with his wrong foot, missed it completely, and whacked the opposing winger in the stomach, right in the middle of the area, right in front of the referee. The other kid went down, not because he was looking for a penalty, but because all the air and maybe even a couple of internal organs had been thumped out of him. Joseph was fond of Lucas. He wasn’t much good at football, and he wasn’t very bright, but Joseph had been coaching him for three years, and he’d never once missed training or a match. He was a good kid despite his father, who was not a good or even a reasonable man, and who, like his son, turned up to every game. Parental pride often rendered him temporarily blind, and when the referee pointed to the spot, there was a volley of abuse that wasn’t shocking because Joseph had heard it all before.

  “Are you fucking kidding, ref?”

  This was delivered at such a volume that the referee, fifty yards away, turned round and stared at him.

  “Keep it down, John,” said Joseph.

  “Were you watching?”

  “Yes. It was a nailed-on pen.”

  The opposing winger was still lying on the ground, being comforted by the opposition coach.