Chapter Twenty-Eight
Alex
It goes on like that for a while: a couple of times a week, Alex and Jess meet up at her flat, or at his, or in a coffee shop – his preferred option, far from a bed, far from temptation.
In between, they work on their own pages, their own characters.
They swap pages and then edit them. Alex spends a few days with each set of parents.
His stepmum wants to know about his next book; his brother asks about his love life; his dad scratches behind his ear and just wants to check Alex is okay and doesn’t need any financial help.
To all these things, he answers evasively, and not in a subtle way: Look at the time or Nice weather for the time of year, he jokes, and they leave him alone, continue to tiptoe around the contours of his life.
Imagine if they knew about his therapist, he thinks.
Let alone Jess, or the book: this book that he is beginning to believe could be the Next Big Thing in his career, maybe even also the Next Big Thing on the British book scene.
He knows he shouldn’t get his hopes up, but it’s a challenge.
He’s not proud of this, but he misses the good old days when he was a literary darling: the people he got to hang out with, the events he got invited to, the thunderous applause of the crowd in a Hay Festival marquee.
He is daring to believe that he could have some, if not all, of it back, and the thought of sharing the limelight with Jess is a surprisingly pleasant one.
And through all of this, he tries, really hard and very unsuccessfully, not to think about Jess during every waking hour: her laughter, her intensity, her quick humour.
He tries not to think about the disappointment on her face when he teased the word girlfriend and then ripped it away from her.
It’s for your own good, he wishes he could tell her.
You deserve better than me. He’s brought this up in therapy.
His therapist asked, ‘Don’t you think that’s up to her to decide?
’ But he is protecting her by not giving her the option.
Once he is sorted, once he is on the right dose of medication, once he feels like he’s on an even keel and ready to be a worthy boyfriend – then, he’ll seek her out.
And maybe he’ll have missed the boat by then, maybe she’ll have found someone else.
But it’s a risk he’s willing to take. She deserves to be happy, to be with someone stable.
And if he messes this up, he’ll never forgive himself – for hurting her, for causing emotional turmoil, for ruining a fruitful creative partnership.
In the meantime, he’s enjoying getting to know her as a friend – a friend with an always-surprising wardrobe and a never-ending supply of different glasses.
Or even a friend with benefits, if those benefits include apple-scented hair and the thrill of being near someone who admires him despite not having been easily won over by his name and his sales figures.
She’s told him about her family; he’s told her about his.
‘You know,’ she says to him one day, as he drapes his summer jacket over the back of his chair in their favourite coffee shop. ‘I keep expecting you to have a technicolour coat.’
He looks at her blankly. Not because he doesn’t know the reference, but because she doesn’t seem to see the irony: she’s wearing her own multi-coloured clothing, a playsuit with asymmetric patterns that almost hurts his eyes to look at.
‘Like Joseph,’ she clarifies.
Ah. This is a common mistake. ‘Joseph wasn’t the oldest. He was the favourite.
There’s a difference.’ And doesn’t he know it.
If anyone among his siblings was going to have a coat of many colours, it would be David, the baby of the interminable family.
He who, in the eyes of just about all of them, can do no wrong.
She scrunches up her face.
‘So who’s the oldest in the Joseph story?’
‘Reuben. The boringly responsible one, who stops his brothers from killing Joseph and decides for some reason that throwing him into a cistern is the way forward.’
She looks at him intensely. ‘Is that how you see yourself? Boringly responsible?’
He would have thought this was obvious. ‘Yes.’ He twirls his pencil, deciding how much to tell her. ‘Remember how you ribbed me once for going to America to do an MFA when there are perfectly good courses here?’
She nods.
‘It was my own act of rebellion. I wanted to write, and I didn’t want to keep getting interrupted by my family needing something from me.
The older of my siblings were always calling in babysitting favours, and my younger ones always needed driving around or helping with homework.
When you have a family as big as mine, there’s always someone having an emergency, and there’s only so much your parents can handle on top of busy, responsible jobs and new families and marriages they’re determined to make a success of, the second time around.
So nine times out of ten, I was the one who dealt with that emergency.
And I was happy to, you know? I love my family.
Until suddenly I wasn’t. I wanted time to myself.
I wanted to be able to get into the creative zone and not worry about getting yanked out of it by a desperate text from one of my siblings asking for advice or whatever.
So I left. Hardest thing I’ve ever done.
None of them understood, because of course I didn’t give them the real reason.
My sister Jen did some research and presented Norwich to me as an option.
I was gutted that Iowa rejected me. Thankfully, American University saved me by giving me a scholarship, and that was as good an excuse as any.
And I think DC was a lot more fun than a middle-of-nowhere city would have been, anyway.
The fly-over states, they call that part of the country. I guess there’s a reason for that.’
He takes a breath. Phew. He hadn’t meant to be so honest all at once, to tell her all of that. He feels vulnerable now. He closes his eyes and waits for Jess’s response.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘That explains a lot.’
‘Like what, exactly?’
‘You. Being the way you are.’
He isn’t sure if this is a compliment, but it feels dangerous to ask.
‘Okay,’ he says uncertainly. Now that he’s been so open, so frighteningly vulnerable, he feels emboldened to ask the same of Jess. He’d like her to open up, if she wants to. He won’t push. He’ll just nudge the door ajar.
He runs a hand through his hair, aware as he’s doing it that his therapist has picked up on this anxious gesture of his. ‘What about you, Jess? What do you think explains you?’
She bites her lower lip and exhales slowly. He doesn’t know, of course, what’s going through her head. But if he had to guess, he’d say she’s wondering whether to deflect. Back to him, or back to something lighter, something more fun. But to her credit, she does neither of those things.
‘I suppose,’ she says, her voice likely as light as she can make it in this moment. ‘A therapist would probably say that my never knowing my dad explains a lot about me.’
He lets the moment land, lets her hear her own words. And then he asks, gently, ‘And do you think that’s true?’
She shakes her head. ‘I honestly don’t think about it that much. My childhood was just normal to me.’
Of course you don’t think about it that much, Alex wants to say.
You escape, rather than facing up to difficult feelings.
Into books and romance and adventure. Nothing too difficult, nothing too sad.
But he doesn’t go there. Not yet. There’ll be a time for that, probably. He wants to lead her there gently.
‘Do you think,’ he begins instead, aware that he might be poking a bruise, ‘that it might be a good idea if you did?’
Jess visibly flinches; her sharp intake of breath is audible. He wonders if he’s gone too far; he curses himself inwardly when he can see in her face that she’d like nothing more than to run away.
‘Too many feelings,’ she says, her voice on the edge of trembling.
‘Easier to put them in a tightly shut-up box and never open it?’
She nods. But Alex is learning in therapy that it isn’t, in fact, easier.
It might seem it at the time, but you might not have any control over when the box springs open, its contents leaking all over your life and your relationships.
He considers whether to say any of this and opts for a middle ground instead, a creaking open of that box.
‘Is there anything you know about your dad that you’d be willing to share with me?’
He watches as her face changes, moving through a variety of expressions to reflect no doubt, a multitude of emotions. Even her eyes seem to cycle through different combinations of colours, but he is probably imagining that.
She settles on something at last. ‘He was French,’ she says. ‘My mum met him on her year abroad in N?mes.’
This is a start. He can work with this. Then something occurs to him. ‘Jess … Martin?’
‘It’s not really Martin,’ she admits. ‘It’s pronounced the French way. It rhymes with vin.’
‘Martin,’ he says, taking care with the nasal vowel at the end.
He thinks, briefly, of Hyacinth Bucket and her insistence on the Bouquet pronunciation.
But now isn’t the time to bring it up – it feels like the wrong moment to gear-shift into humour.
Not to mention that she would probably tease him for being an old man with a working knowledge of Nineties culture, even if that was technically before his time. ‘That’s beautiful.’
But then it’s her turn to gear-shift. ‘Yeah, I find that guttural French r to be the height of beauty.’
He knows her well enough by now, though, to know what she is doing: deflecting from difficult emotions. ‘Do you speak French?’ he asks, knowing the answer before he’s even formulated the question.
She shakes her head. ‘Latin’s as close as I got.’
‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc.’ After it, therefore because of it.
A phrase known and beloved by fans of The West Wing the world over, for too long and complicated a reason to bring into this conversation.
He is testing her, gently – will she rise to the challenge, respond with a quote from this favourite TV show, or stare at him blankly instead?
She pushes her glasses up her nose, counters with her own random Latin expression. ‘In vino veritas.’
‘Veni, vidi, vici,’ he says, and then they’re both out of stock Latin.
I came; I saw; I conquered. And it feels oddly apt, this phrase.
It feels as if he has, in some way, conquered – won – by getting Jess to talk about her dad, to crack open that box a tiny bit.
They are friends with benefits, after all, and those benefits should include being able to talk to each other about the hard stuff.
Even though, if he’s perfectly honest, he finds it as terrifying as she does.