‘Rattling on like a . . . mad old cow. I’m sorry, I’m tired, bad day, and I’m sorry for being so . . . boring.’
‘You’re not that boring.’
‘I am, Dex. God, I swear, I bore myself.’
‘Well you don’t bore me.’ He took her hand in his. ‘You could never bore me. You’re one in a million, Em.’
‘I’m not even one in three.’
He kicked her foot with his. ‘Em?’
‘What?’
‘Just take it, will you? Just shut up and take it.’
They regarded each other for a moment. He lay down once more, and after a moment she followed and jumped a little when she found out that he had slid his arm beneath her shoulders. There was a self-conscious moment of mutual discomfort before she turned onto her side and curled towards him. Tightening his arm around her, he spoke into the top of her head.
‘You know what I can’t understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, I mean endlessly, I’ve been telling you for years. So why don’t you believe it? Why do you think people say that stuff, Em? Do you think it’s a conspiracy, people secretly ganging up to be nice about you?’
She pressed her head against his shoulder to make him stop or else she felt she might cry. ‘You’re nice. But I should go.’
‘No, stay a bit longer. We’ll get another bottle.’
‘Isn’t Naomi waiting for you somewhere? Her little mouth crammed full of drugs like a little druggy hamster.’ She puffed out her cheeks and Dexter laughed, and she began to feel a little better.
They stayed there for a while, then walked down to the off-licence and back up the hill to see the sun set over the city, drinking wine and eating nothing but a large bag of expensive crisps. Strange animal cries could be heard from Regents Park Zoo, and finally they were the last people on the hill.
‘I should get home,’ she said, standing woozily.
‘You could stay at mine if you wanted.’
She thought of the journey home, the Northern Line, the top deck of the N38 bus, then the long perilous walk to the flat that smelt unaccountably of fried onions. When she finally got home the central heating would probably be on and Tilly Killick would be there with her dressing-gown hanging open, clinging to the radiators like a gecko and eating pesto out of the jar. There would be teeth marks in the Irish Cheddar and thirtysomething on TV, and she didn’t want to go.
‘Borrow a toothbrush?’ said Dexter, as if reading her thoughts. ‘Sleep on the sofa?’
She imagined a night spent on the creaking black leather of Dexter’s modular sofa, her head spinning with booze and confusion, before deciding that life was already complicated enough. She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Rules of Engagement
WEDNESDAY, 15 JULY 1992
The Dodecanese Islands, Greece
And then some days you wake up and everything is perfect.
This fine bright St Swithin’s Day found them under an immense blue sky with not the smallest chance of rain, on the sun deck of the ferry that steamed slowly across the Aegean. In new sunglasses and holiday clothes they lay side by side in the morning sun, sleeping off last night’s taverna hangover. Day two of a ten-day island-hopping holiday, and The Rules of Engagement were still holding firm.
A sort of platonic Geneva Convention, The Rules were a set of basic prohibitions compiled before departure to ensure that the holiday didn’t get ‘complicated’. Emma was single again; a brief, undistinguished relationship with Spike, a bicycle repairman whose fingers smelt perpetually of WD40, had ended with barely a shrug on either side, but had at least served to give her confidence a boost. And her bicycle had never been in better shape.
For his part Dexter had stopped seeing Naomi because, he said, it was ‘getting too intense’, whatever the hell that meant. Since then he had passed through Avril, Mary, a Sara, a Sarah, a Sandra and a Yolande before alighting on Ingrid, a ferocious model turned fashion-stylist who had been forced to give up modelling – she had told Emma this with a straight face – because ‘her breasts were too large for the catwalk’, and as she said this it seemed as if Dexter might explode with pride.
Ingrid was the kind of sexually confident girl who wore her bra on top of her shirt, and although she was by no means threatened by Emma or indeed by anyone on this earth, it had been decided by all parties that it might be better to get a few things straight before the swimwear was unveiled, the cocktails were drunk. Not that anything was likely to happen; that brief window had closed some years ago and they were immune to each other now, secure in the confines of firm friendship. Nevertheless, on a Friday night in June, Dexter and Emma had sat outside the pub on Hampstead Heath and compiled The Rules.
Number One: separate bedrooms. Whatever happened, there were to be no shared beds, neither double nor single, no drunken cuddles or hugs; they were not students anymore. ‘And I don’t see the point of cuddling anyway,’ Dexter had said. ‘Cuddling just gives you cramp,’ and Emma had agreed and added:
‘No flirting either. Rule Two.’
‘Well I don’t flirt, so . . .’ said Dexter, rubbing his foot against the inside of her shin.
‘Seriously though, no having a few drinks and getting frisky.’
‘“Frisky”?’
‘You know what I mean. No funny business.’
‘What, with you?’
‘With me or anyone. In fact that’s Rule Three. I don’t want to have to sit there like a lemon while you’re rubbing oil into Lotte from Stuttgart.’
‘Em, that is not going to happen.’
‘No, it isn’t. Because it’s a Rule.’
Rule Number Four, at Emma’s insistence, was the no nudity clause. No skinny-dipping: physical modesty and discretion at all times. She did not want to see Dexter in his underpants or in the shower or, God forbid, going to the toilet. In retaliation, Dexter proposed Rule Number Five. No Scrabble. More and more of his friends were playing it now, in a knowing ironic way, triple-word-score-craving freaks, but it seemed to him like a game designed expressly to make him feel stupid and bored. No Scrabble and no Boggle either; he wasn’t dead yet.
Now on Day Two, with The Rules still in place, they lay on the deck of the ancient rust-spotted ferry as it chugged slowly from Rhodes towards the smaller Dodecanese islands. Their first night had been spent in the Old Town, drinking sugary cocktails from hollowed-out pineapples, unable to stop grinning at each other with the novelty of it all. The ferry had left Rhodes while it was still dark and now at nine a.m. they lay quietly nursing their hangovers, feeling the throb of the engines in their churning liquid stomachs, eating oranges, quietly reading, quietly burning, entirely happy in each other’s silence.
Dexter cracked first, sighing and placing his book on his chest: Nabokov’s Lolita, a gift from Emma who was responsible for selecting all the holiday reading, a great breeze-block of books, a mobile library that took up most of her suitcase.
A moment passed. He sighed again, for effect.
‘What’s up with you?’ said Emma, without looking up from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.
‘I can’t get into it.’
‘It’s a masterpiece.’
‘Makes my head hurt.’
‘I should have got something with pictures or flaps.’
‘Oh, I am enjoying it—’
‘Very Hungry Caterpillar or something—’
‘I’m just finding it a bit dense. It’s just this bloke banging on about how horny he is all the time.’
‘I thought it would strike a chord.’ She raised her sunglasses. ‘It’s a very erotic book, Dex.’
‘Only if you’re into little girls.’
‘Tell me one more time, why were you sacked from that Language School in Rome?’
‘I’ve told you, she was twenty-three years old, Em!’
‘Go to sleep then.’ She picked up her Russian novel. ‘Philistine.’
He settled his head once more against his rucksack, but two people were by his side now, casting a shadow over his face. The girl was pretty and nervous, the boy large and pale, almost magnesium white in the morning sun.
‘Scuse me,’ said the girl in a Midlands accent.
Dexter shielded his eyes and smiled broadly up at them. ‘Hi there.’
‘Aren’t you that bloke off the telly?’
‘Might be,’ said Dexter, sitting and removing his sunglasses with a raffish little flick of his head. Emma quietly groaned.
‘What’s it called? largin’ it!’ The title of the TV show was always spelt in lower case, lower being the more fashionable of the two cases at this time.
Dexter held his hand up. ‘Guilty as charged!’
Emma laughed briefly through her nose, and Dexter shot her a look. ‘Funny bit,’ she explained, nodding towards her Dostoyevsky.
‘I knew I’d seen you on the telly!’ The girl nudged her boyfriend. ‘I said so, didn’t I?’
The pale man shuffled and mumbled, then silence. Dexter became aware of the chug of the engines and Lolita lying open on his chest. He slipped it quietly into his bag. ‘On holiday, are ya?’ he asked. The question was clearly redundant, but allowed him to slip into his television persona, that of a really great, down to earth guy who they’d just met at the bar.
‘Yeah, holiday,’ mumbled the man.
More dead air. ‘This is my friend Emma.’
Emma peered over her sunglasses. ‘Hi there.’
The girl squinted at her. ‘Are you on television too?’
‘Me? God, no.’ She widened her eyes. ‘Though it is my dream.’