29
It’s funny, the useless information your brain is capable of storing. For instance, I couldn’t recall a single fact from the book I’ve just finished about the migrant crisis in Europe, but I can tell you that a work colleague of Yiv’s was breastfed until he was nine. Or that Cillian has never seen any of the Indiana Jones movies. Or that Dermot Cleary suffers from arachibutyrophobia, a fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. (Once, Ciara from the weekend supplement dipped a medjool date into a jar of the stuff. The paper was running an extract from a wellness influencer’s new book, and Ciara had to test the recipes to ensure they were user-friendly. She was working her way through ‘Peanut Butter Medjool Dates’ – Ingredients: peanut butter; medjool dates. Method: Dip medjool dates into peanut butter – when Dermot walked past her desk and promptly got HR to move the entire magazine to the other side of the building.)
This stuff seems trivial. What does a rare phobia or the amount of time your mother spent lactating really tell us about someone? Sure, Dermot can be floored by a breakfast spread, but he’s also disrupted institutions with his columns. Cillian missed out on a formative childhood experience, yet it hasn’t stopped him from, in his own words, ‘helping people tap into the child-like wonder in us all’.
In the seven weeks I’ve known Jack, I’ve accumulated a series of facts about the man. He enjoys punctuality and expensive grooming products. He has a scar just above his left kneecap, acquired from the time he stuck a blue biro into his leg when he was four, to see if he would bleed ink. He has a habit of saying ‘panino’ when referring to the popular Italian snack in the singular – grammatically correct, but infuriatingly smug. Cheese slices the colour of radioactive waste are his guilty pleasure. He believes mansplaining isn’t a thing.
Such information offers us nothing, except, I suppose, a kind of reassurance that we all have them – quirks and preferences, ways of being built up over the years. That if you stripped us of our circumstances and hot takes on the world, we’re each of us essentially the same – just a bunch of cells that need food, water and shelter to survive. Or, as Dad once charmingly put it, ‘We all have the same holes, Fiadh. Even the queen of England has to take a daily shit.’
Jack Hamilton is a person who likes highly processed cheese and believes mansplaining isn’t a thing. Depending on your feelings on cheese and mansplaining, these are potentially inflammatory pieces of information. But what if they weren’t? What if these were just more facts, and not an insight into Jack’s soul? What if we regarded one another as the culmination of our beliefs, choices, actions, as more than our demonstrably poor taste in dairy products?
~
I’m having this quiet epiphany as I’m deep-cleaning the interior of my car. My impromptu trip with Jack the other day made me realise a valet is long overdue. On our way back from Lautrec, Jack reached into the glove compartment to get another CD and pulled out a half-eaten jar of hazelnut spread and a soiled teaspoon.
I spot Jack running down the lane and wave at him. He jogs up to me as I’m extracting a mould-covered apple from underneath Ari’s seat cover.
‘Need a hand?’ he says, running in place.
‘Sure. Got a hazmat suit?’ I joke, gingerly dropping the apple into a bin bag.
‘Give me a minute,’ he says, slightly out of breath.
He walks off, and I wonder if he does actually have a hazmat suit in his room. It’s on the more extreme side of pandemic precaution, but I commend his commitment to good hygiene practice. He returns a few minutes later, holding something shiny in his hand.
‘Some music while we work?’ he says, grinning.
He holds Phat Beats in the air, shaking it like he’s won a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
I click my tongue. ‘Seriously?’
‘Just one song. It’s a good ’un, I promise.’
I shake my head. ‘Go on then.’
I continue tossing wrappers and plastic bottles into the bin bag while Jack fiddles with the CD player in the front seat. Through the headrest, I can see the back of his neck, gleaming with sweat.
‘Here we go,’ he says, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
One, Two, One, Two, Three, Eoww!
Jack turns round to face me, bouncing his head in time with the music.
‘New Radicals,’ I smile, in spite of myself.
‘Arguably the best song of the nineties,’ he says.
‘That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?’ I bend down, pressing my ear against the floor as I reach underneath Jack’s seat.
You’ve got the music in you
‘Oh, come on. It’s the ultimate anthem,’ Jack enthuses, wrapping his arm around the headrest and looking down at my back. ‘A cracking mix of pop and alt-rock, the lyrics just the right side of transgressive – what’s not to love?’
‘It’s just so … optimistic,’ I say in a muffled voice from underneath the seat as I retrieve one of Ari ’ s socks. I sit up, my head banging against the armrest.
‘And yet cynical at the same time,’ says Jack, turning round and stepping out of the car. He puts his right hand on the door and pulls up his left calf, stretching his quads. ‘It’s an indictment of our hyper-consumerist, celebrity-obsessed culture. Did you know Gregg Alexander wrote the lyrics about Marilyn Manson et al to see what everyone would focus on – the celebrity bashing or the criticism of health-insurance companies and big banks?’
His t-shirt, covered in patches of damp, is straining with lightly toned muscle.
‘Nothing’s changed,’ I say, exiting the car and leaning against it to get some respite from the heat. ‘Inequality kills one person every four seconds, but hey guys, have you seen Kim Kardashian’s cat lip-synching to “Gold Digger”?’
‘You don’t think much of your fellow humans, do you?’
‘I think …’ I consider for a moment. ‘I think I’m revising my view of humanity.’
He turns in the opposite direction, grabbing his right foot. I can’t see the expression on his face.
One dance left
This world is gonna pull through
‘I remember reading an interview with Alexander,’ he says, turning his head over his shoulder and raising his voice over the music. ‘He said that the band didn’t want to shove their social message down people’s throats when they were performing live. That when they went on stage, they weren’t afraid to be vulnerable and happy. Even if the happiness didn’t last, they let themselves enjoy the moment. I think you can be deeply sceptical of the world, and still enjoy the good stuff, take the wins when they come.’
What’s real can’t die
He turns round and is studying me closely now with an alert expression, and it feels weird and uncomfortable and natural and incredibly sexually charged all at the same time, and I don’t know what to do. So I do the logical thing and start playing vigorous air guitar to The Best Song of The Nineties. Jack laughs and crosses his arms as he watches. He doesn’t take his gaze off me. Not for a second. Not even when I turn my back to him and slide my knees on the ground in the ultimate rock ing-out stance. I stand up, giddy and breathless, buzzing from the exercise and sticky from the heat – a tuft of hair sticking to the sweat on my cheek. Jack takes a step towards me. I freeze, leaning back on the car as he stands in front of me, our bodies almost touching. I can hear him breathing, see the rise and fall in his chest as he looks down at me. I raise my eyes to meet his. He lifts his hand and pushes the sticky strand of hair back off my face. He’s going to kiss me, I think, terrified and thrilled in equal measure. This is really happening.
‘What is this noise?’
We jump, turning our heads in the direction of the disgruntled voice. Myriam is looking around her on the terrace, holding a pickled cucumber, her nose scrunched in disgust.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ she says, looking surprised at seeing us together.
Jack steps back. The spell is broken, though Myriam’s apology is proof I didn’t imagine the spark between us. I straighten up and reach for the bin bag. Jack mutters something about putting Deep Heat on his calf muscle and walks off. The song plays to fade.
Don’t let go
One dance left