The First Fight
Jack
From the moment that Jessica gave me her email address, I haven’t stopped thinking about her. Every time my mind isn’t occupied by something else, and often when it should be, my imagination drifts to her standing in the street outside the exam room, a halo of red-gold frizz against the sun, agonisingly beautiful in a short silk skirt printed with little elephants and a white T-shirt which left a band of skin exposed below her navel. Fortunately this fixation is just about permissible, because Jessica Richards is still very much in my life.
I’ve spent the last eleven months living in Oxford. She’s been home in Surrey. So we’ve emailed each other every single day for a year. We’ve tried to meet up before, but her mum has been so ill that leaving her wasn’t an option. A few weeks ago, I walked over to the college IT room to start on an essay and I had an email from her, telling me that she wanted to come and see me. I’d like a change of scene , she wrote. I just want to do something fun. I want to feel normal.
So it has become my sole mission in life to make sure that I deliver something fun, and something normal. But I’ve already hit a stumbling block: the sleeping arrangements.
Because I’m doing my master’s, I don’t live in one of the colleges – instead I’ve got a double bed in a shared house on Ship Street.
It’s nice.
Central.
But it’s not huge, and there isn’t a sofa.
In films, whenever a man and a woman are forced to share a bedroom, the man gallantly says ‘I’ll take the sofa’ and then somehow their sexual tension is so magically palpable that they just end up having sex anyway.
I don’t have a sofa, not in my room and not in the house – the landlord sacrificed the living room to make more money off another bedroom.
So, I’m going to have to sleep on the floor.
But if I’m going to sleep on the floor, then really I need an air mattress because the floor is covered with that sort of hard plastic carpet that they put down in primary schools, presumably because while it is technically a carpet, it’s very easy to clean if someone is sick on it.
To be honest, it’s probably on the floor of this student house for the same reason.
So in a non-bed-sharing timeline, the air mattress is essential.
The question is when to inflate it.
Blowing up the aforementioned air mattress means plugging in the pump, and then waiting what would inevitably feel like thirty-five minutes for it to inflate. It’s about as awkward of a moment as you can create, and if I’ve screwed up the date so badly that she definitely doesn’t want to have sex with me, I think watching this air mattress inflate might actually finish me off.
I could pre-inflate it, of course. But then when she arrives, she’ll see it, and either think that I don’t want to have sex with her (about which she would be very, very wrong) or that I’m such a colossal loser I couldn’t even bet on myself persuading her to sleep with me.
There’s also another minor detail, which is that I haven’t actually fully, technically, completely, had sex before. So it’s possible that I’m using the air mattress as a bit of a distraction from my embarrassing status as a 22-year-old virgin.
I’m standing over the uninflated mattress when the doorbell rings. I don’t move; it’ll just be Claude’s Amazon delivery of protein powder. When I’d told him that I thought Amazon only did books, he’d laughed for about half an hour. The bell rings again and I sigh in frustration. Clearly, no one in this house realises that I am wrestling with the single most important decision anyone has ever made. I go downstairs, still in my school PE shorts and KONY 2012 T-shirt, and throw the door open. But standing on the doorstep isn’t a delivery driver. It’s a girl. A woman. A person somewhere between girl and woman. She’s got green eyes and red hair and she looks so beautiful, so glamorous and so familiar that for a second I think she must be famous.
‘I got an earlier train,’ she says. ‘And then I realised that was probably really inconvenient and really rude, but I was already on my way here, so I just—’
I drink her in for a moment and she’s so beautiful that I stop thinking about the fact that I’m wearing a pair of shorts that say St Aloysius Boys Rugby VIII team, or that there’s a half-unwrapped air mattress on my bedroom floor. Instead I do the first genuinely cool thing that I’ve ever done. I reach forward, I wrap my arms around her waist, and I kiss her. I finally understand why other people think that this objectively slightly disgusting activity is a good idea. Because they’re right. It’s a really good idea. The best idea.
‘Hi.’ She smiles.
‘Hi.’
For some reason, and I really can’t fathom what that reason would have been, I told a girl named Calliope that we’d come to a party she’s throwing tonight. I only agreed to it casually on the way out of a seminar, but since then she’s asked me three times and sent me an inbox message on Facebook to confirm.
So when Jessica and I emerge from between the sheets after the best two hours of my life, during which I dispose of my virginity without completely embarrassing myself, and all I want to do is lie there and count her freckles, instead I have to tell her that we’re going out. ‘It’s just down the road,’ I say apologetically. ‘And we can leave after an hour.’
‘Cool,’ she says, getting up and finding her knickers from the bottom of the duvet. ‘A party sounds fun.’
A party does sound fun. This is, by that metric, not going to be a party because it is almost certainly not going to be fun. Parties around here, at least the ones I get invited to, are people standing in each other’s rooms without any music, talking about their essays.
I want to warn Jessica, as she puts on a pair of denim hot pants and a pink floral crop top, that she’s going to be overdressed, but she looks beautiful and I’m worried it’ll come across like I’m complaining, or worse, judging. So I say nothing as she draws a massive wing of eyeliner on each eye and then laces up the highest heeled boots I’ve ever seen in my life. We walk, hand in hand, my feelings for her a slight sunburn after a day on the beach, warming my skin. It’s going to be a crap party because they always are, but if I’m totally honest, there’s a prickle of excitement about showing off that I’m with Jessica.
‘I’m really glad you came,’ I say eventually.
‘Me too.’
‘How is she?’
She winces at the question. ‘Not good. I felt like I shouldn’t leave her. I keep thinking, if anything happened ...’
‘If anything happened, I’d get you back there as quickly as humanly possible.’
She gives me a weak smile. ‘Thanks.’
‘I know I don’t know your mum,’ I say, very aware of what delicate ground I’m walking, but determined not to ignore the thing that has dominated Jessica’s life for the last year. ‘But she raised you, and you’re the most single-minded person I’ve ever known. So I don’t think she’d have told you to come unless she meant it.’
There’s a smile at the edges of her lips.
‘How did you two meet?’ Calliope asks when we arrive. She’s wearing a jumper with END APARTHEID knitted into it. There is no music, and only a handful of people leaning against the walls. I cringe for her, but she doesn’t seem worried about it.
‘It’s quite a funny story,’ I begin. ‘We were queueing up to take our final exams at Bristol, and Jessica was in front of me, and she asked me if she could borrow a pen.’
‘You went to your finals without a pen?’ Calliope is very tall and slender with bright blonde hair and a lot of opinions about wealth distribution for someone who went to Benenden.
‘I figured it was a fair bet someone would have one.’ Jessica smiles. ‘And this nerd had one of those foot-long plastic pencil cases with like, twenty.’
‘WHSmith’s sells them in twenty-packs,’ I say defensively. ‘It would be arbitrary not to bring them all.’
‘And how long have you been together?’ Calliope asks.
‘Oh, no, we’re not officially together,’ I say quickly. The last thing I want is Jess to assume that I’ve been walking around Oxford talking about my stunning girlfriend who ‘doesn’t go here’. She’s taken great pains to use the words ‘seeing each other’ and ‘hanging out’ in our emails. Obviously, one day I’m going to have to have a big drink and then man up and ask her if she’s willing to consider being my girlfriend, but the fact she’s turned up in Oxford and consented to come to this embarrassing attempt at a party is enough of a win for now.
‘I’m going to get another drink,’ Jessica says, tapping the mug that Calliope had poured two fingers of red wine into when we arrived.
I watch as she disappears through the dozen people standing around the kitchen and goes outside to light a cigarette on the pavement. I want to follow her but Calliope is talking at me about a guy on our course who doesn’t know the difference between illusion and allusion, and I’ve never understood how you’re supposed to leave a conversation in a social setting. Through the window, I can see Jessica talking to two broad-shouldered boys in rugby shirts who seem to have stopped on the way somewhere. The windows are open because the air is warm; I can catch the scent of smoke but not what they’re saying. My phone buzzes, and I look down to read the message: met some guys outside, going to follow them to another party and see if it’s fun, catch up later?
By the time I look up from reading it, she’s gone. I stay at the party, furious, for another hour. I listen to boring stories from boring people, and I simmer with confusion and hurt. Eventually I make my excuses to Calliope.
‘Where did your friend go?’ she asks.
‘She met some meaty sports blokes and went off with them,’ I reply, surprised at the vitriol in my voice.
‘Seems more her speed,’ she replies.
‘What?’
‘Well. She’s not exactly – you know. She looks like more of a party girl than a reader.’
I fix her with what I hope is a look of disdain. ‘You know, for someone who talks a lot about the patriarchy, you’ve made a pretty lazy judgement about another woman.’ And then I walk out.
Three hours later, back at the flat and having received exactly zero messages from her, I call Jessica.
‘Hi!’ she shouts when she picks up. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m at home,’ I say, like a Victorian father. ‘Where are you?’
‘Some club, it’s really shit. Do you want to come join?’
‘No,’ I say.
There’s a change in background noise and I can tell she’s gone somewhere quieter so we can talk. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘I thought you were here to see me,’ I say, hating the childish whine to my voice. ‘Not random blokes from the street.’
‘It was quite clear you needed some space with that girl,’ she snaps.
‘What girl? Look, do you want me to come and find you? Or do you want to come home? I mean back. To mine.’
We have a long, irritating discussion where neither of us can decide what to do and eventually it’s agreed that I’ll meet her and we’ll go home. So I trudge over to the Purple Turtle and collect her, once again feeling like the most enormous loser. We walk home, no longer hand in hand. How did this go from the absolute best day to the absolute worst?
We stop at a kebab van at Jessica’s insistence. She orders something complicated involving extra halloumi, and then we arrive back at mine, still in total silence. Creep up the stairs. Get to my bedroom. And sit in more silence.
‘Jack,’ Jessica says.
‘Yes?’
‘I know you’re upset, but I really want to eat my kebab.’
I can’t stop myself from laughing. ‘I think it’s very important that you eat your kebab,’ I say.
She does eat it. And then, once she’s licked the mayonnaise off the inside of the foil, she looks at me. ‘Right. What’s the problem here?’
‘I don’t understand why you left?’ I say eventually, because someone needs to say something.
‘What?’ she snaps. ‘How could you not understand?’
And then it starts. We go around and around and around. She talks about how Calliope was rude and snooty, I inexplicably try to defend her despite completely agreeing. I say that it was poor form of her to go off with other blokes hours after we’d had sex and she accuses me of being a puritan. At some point I start trying to defend the party Calliope threw and I realise that I’m fighting for the sake of fighting. I need to stop it. She’s been caring for her mum non-stop, of course she wanted to blow off steam. I should have thought to take us to a club instead of the worst party in human history.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, trying to form a sentence which is apologetic without being weak. I look over. She’s fallen asleep, lying on her front, on the bed. I consider waking her up so we can go back for round five thousand of this argument. You’re not supposed to let the sun go down on an argument, everyone always says that.
I go and start to try to inflate the air mattress, but the pump is too loud and it’ll wake Jessica, so I sort of lie on the half-deflated shell.
‘Jack,’ Jessica murmurs, half asleep.
‘Yes?’
‘Come and sleep with me even though I smell of onions.’
I lie next to her and fall asleep almost instantly.
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she says, as she rolls over and stretches. I look at her stomach under the white pyjama T-shirt she changed into at some point during our row.
‘Me too,’ I add.
‘I just wish you’d told me that you didn’t think we were dating.’ She sighs, getting up. ‘I’m going to be honest. I was starting to have feelings for you.’
I sit bolt up, like a cartoon character. ‘When did I say that?’
‘At that party last night. Your friend asked how long we’d been together and you like, sprained a muscle trying to tell her that we weren’t dating.’
‘What?!’ I say in disbelief. ‘I didn’t want you to think I was being presumptuous. I thought you’d be embarrassed if I said we were together.’
She looks at me in confusion. ‘Why?’
‘Many, many years of being a massive loser?’
Jessica rolls her eyes. ‘Okay, well, I came halfway across the country, we had sex and then you told me to get dressed so we could go to a party with a girl who clearly fancies you, and then rushed to tell her that I’m not your girlfriend. That’s not loser behaviour, that’s horrible fuck-boy behaviour.’
I’m aghast. ‘But that’s not what happened! I was trying to show you that I’ve got a fun life here so you might want to come back. I didn’t think I was supposed to want you to be my girlfriend.’
She smiles and comes to sit back down. ‘Are you telling me that we wasted four hours arguing about this last night, when actually you want us to be together, and I want us to be together?’
I nod.
‘Why didn’t you just say that? Last night?’
I sigh. ‘Honestly? I didn’t really know what we were arguing about. We’d been going for like, hours. I’d completely lost track of where we’d started.’
‘And of how much we like each other.’
‘Exactly.’
‘We’re idiots,’ she says, leaning in for a kiss. ‘Let’s never stay up arguing like that ever, ever again.’
Jessica
It’s half six in the morning and I’m sitting in a well-worn leather chair while a make-up artist makes it look like I had more than four hours of broken sleep. The room smells comfortingly of hairspray and coconut. There are hundreds of neatly organised products arranged on a black towel in front of me, lipsticks and palettes glinting under the huge lights, my coffee cup wedged in among a row of rose-gold-cased lipsticks.
‘You’ve got such beautiful hair,’ says the make-up artist, as she dusts powder over my nose. ‘I like it this length. What made you go for the chop?’
I look at myself in the mirror and wonder if it’s time to go from two areas of Botox to three. I consider telling her that despite captioning my recent pictures #BeautyHasNoAge, I felt having waist-length hair in my mid-thirties was running the risk of looking like someone who homeschools nine children on a farm in Utah. So, the day after my last birthday, I booked an appointment with a snooty French hairdresser who charged an eye-watering sum to take my hair from my mid-back to my shoulders.
‘I’d always had it long and I just fancied a change,’ I tell her. ‘And honestly it’s so much less work.’ I am lying through my teeth – it’s way, way more work to make this perfect cut look half decent. ‘Jack was heartbroken, weren’t you?’
I look over at Jack, who is slumped in his chair, reading a battered Penguin paperback, not listening. ‘Darling?’
‘What?’
‘I was just saying that you were upset when I cut my hair.’
‘Oh. Yes. I liked it long. It’s still nice, though.’ He drains the last of his coffee and then goes back to his book.
‘He’s terrible in the mornings. Not human until after his first coffee!’ I joke. Why am I talking like this? I sound like an embarrassing millennial cliché.
‘You wait until you’ve got kids,’ the make-up artist says, as she takes a bottle of hairspray from a shelf. I hear that comment, or a version of it, at least once a week and every single time it’s like someone’s tipped a glass of cold water over my lap. ‘Close your eyes and hold your breath.’ I’m not sure why she’s going to spray my hair – there’s no chance the glossy curls she created will drop between now and my making it on set. I try to brush off her comment, glad of an excuse to squeeze my eyes shut.
I look at Jack, but he’s too engrossed in whichever dead Russian he’s currently reading to have heard anything.
I know he’s tired, and I know it’s been a lot of press, but God, I wish he could just look a bit happier to be here and maybe even try to enjoy it.
We’re so unbelievably lucky to have landed this interview, the publishers literally rang us to tell us what a win it was.
It could really change things for us, and if we seem like we don’t want to be here, then we might not get asked back.
Yes, Morning Chat is a slightly tacky morning programme, and yes, the studio is a long way from our house.
But everyone we know has to get up early and wrestle their kids into school uniforms, or drag themselves on to the train to get to an office, and then spend the day sitting at a desk, being told what to do.
We get to sit in a chauffeur-driven car, have our hair and make-up done, and then perch on a sofa for ten minutes and have a quick chat with people about their problems.
Clay said we’ll sell at least five hundred books from the exposure, and they’re paying us ￡400 each for doing it.
It’s the easiest, most privileged job a person could do.
But Jack is just moping.
I’m pretty sure, I think, my outrage mounting, that if this was something like going on Radio 4 to talk about some complicated political crisis, he’d pull it together even if he was tired.
‘Are we nearly ready?’ a runner asks, putting her head around the door.
The first time we did the show, I hadn’t been able to believe that they really ran around with headsets and clipboards, just like in a drama.
This must be the fourth or fifth time we’ve been here, but I’ve never stopped feeling like a tourist.
I know better than to ask for selfies with the other guests but inside I’m still squealing.
I have a last look in the mirror, checking that everything is as smooth as it can be.
I didn’t used to be vain about it, but HD television is not kind, and if there’s a single bump on my skin, I’ll have people all over Twitter talking about how old I’m looking.
I don’t blame them.
We’re claiming to have a perfect marriage, we can’t be surprised if that makes people want to pick holes in everything we do.
Clay warned me when we started that I was making a tricky bed for myself.
And he’s right.
I am professionally smug and there are plenty of people on the internet who hate me for it. If I wasn’t me then I would probably hate me for it. I have an easy, fun, lucrative job and a lot of really expensive stuff I don’t pay for, of course people are going to start threads speculating that a spot near my top lip is a cold sore. But I’d take that a million times over going back to the miserable marketing job I had before all of this.
They shepherd us from the make-up room, along the dark corridors and down to the sound stage, where the hosts, Graham and Lily, are sitting on a pink sofa, staring at their phones.
It’s a strange place.
The studio itself is huge, with triple-height ceilings and these enormous doors that slide open so you can move bits of furniture around.
It’s dark and there are props and random bits of wood leaning against the walls.
And then in the middle of it, brightly lit, sort of like a doll’s house, is the set.
It’s a perfect fake living room, with sofas and a kitchen table, even a little breakfast bar with a stove.
The backdrop is a TV screen showing a cityscape of Central London, with boats gliding up the river.
The first time I came here, I was shocked.
All the times I’d had the show on in the background of a morning, I’d always thought it was a real window.
Graham has been on telly for decades, originally in politics, but now soft and fluffy for the morning audience.
He used to do the show with a woman named Cate, who was equally smiley and about his age.
As of last year, Lily has been her replacement, brought in to appeal to a younger, yummier-mummy audience.
She’s beautiful, even more so in real life than she is on telly.
Rail-thin, with an enormous diamond engagement ring on her left hand and lips which are very definitely not her own.
Last week, the papers were saying that her husband has been sexting someone from Love Island .
I’ve got no idea if it’s true, and I really hope she won’t try to talk to me about it.
People do that sometimes.
I had an MP come up to me in the bathroom at a restaurant once and ask me how she could get her husband to listen to her properly.
I wanted to tell her that I had no bloody idea, and that if she found something that works, to tell me what it was.
I didn’t say that, of course. I told her to assess her communication style and mimic the way that he speaks to her. They haven’t announced a split since then, so I guess that’s something.