Left of the Bang. Claire Lowdon
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house in Islington, waking early to the aftertaste of the raw onion garnish on one of Pitta the Great’s finest doner kebabs. In the bathroom he vomited deliberately and efficiently. Fragments of the night before presented themselves to him as he showered, in no particular order: a taxi ride, a fight outside the kebab shop, Edwin trying to convince everyone to go to Spearmint Rhino, some girls on a bus. Brushing his teeth for the second time, Chris discovered a sadness in himself. He lowered the toothbrush and frowned at his foamy-mouthed reflection for a few moments, trying to locate the origin of this feeling. He spat, rinsed, brushed his teeth again. The onion prevailed.
No one else was up, so Chris let himself out as quietly as he could. He searched his iPod for a song to match the sadness, settling on ‘The Boxer’ by Simon and Garfunkel, from his playlist ‘Bluemood 3’. Despite the title, it was not at all unusual for Chris to listen to this playlist when he was feeling perfectly happy. Chris’s favourite songs dealt exclusively with heartbreak and loneliness and futility and loss. Although he had no personal experience of these conditions, the music people wrote about them seemed to him not only the most beautiful, but also the most vital and profound. Learning the piano as a child, he had been fascinated by the minor scales, by the way two simple semitone shifts suffused the dumb bright landscape of the major with a mysterious sorrow. He would practise his minor arpeggios very slowly with his right foot jammed down hard on the sustaining pedal, relishing the sweet ache that swelled at his sternum as the palimpsest of notes gathered and built. Now, at twenty-five, Chris never felt more alive than when a Chopin nocturne or a Coldplay ballad kindled this same unparsable tightness in his chest, full of heft and feeling, signifying something.
As the train was pulling out of Waterloo, he remembered talking to an affable man with a Scottish accent, and, much more clearly, that this man was the boyfriend of Tamsin. Tamsin. He hadn’t recognised her at first. His instinctive reaction, last night and again now, was one of disappointment bordering on distaste. The Tamsin of his memory was otherwordly, sylphlike, radiantly blonde. Now that ideal had been declared invalid by this older girl with darker, coarser hair and large breasts that seemed to pull her shoulders round and down in sad submission to gravity. The lodestar he’d been fixed on for seven years had turned out to be a microlight.
As soon as Chris articulated these thoughts he felt ashamed of them. Then it occurred to him that Tamsin was no longer a girl but a Woman; and, having fitted a word to her new state, Chris found his old admiration returning with fresh force. A Woman. Of course that was what she was. He felt a buzz of contempt for his younger self, obsessing over a teenage girl, unequal, till now, to the fuller, sweeter reality of Woman.
Oddly enough, the fact of her boyfriend concerned him less than the difference in her appearance had done. Chris was so accustomed to the idea of not having Tamsin that her unavailability felt somehow expected. Besides, the boyfriend’s presence left him in a position that he immediately appreciated as both noble and poignant. The third Schubert Impromptu came on his headphones, then Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’. By the end of ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by the Verve, Chris was resolved: the only decent thing to do was nothing. He wouldn’t ask Edwin for Tamsin’s number. He would make no attempt to find her on Facebook. He would make the sacrifice, he thought, smiling a bittersweet smile at his own benevolence. He would leave their happiness untainted.
When his phone bleeped with a text message inviting him for supper next weekend, it took him several minutes to work out who ‘Callum’ was.
* * *
Callum genuinely did want to see Chris again. The guy was smart, and he had plenty to say about the army. Mostly, though, the invitation was a gesture of goodwill towards Tamsin – to show he was sorry for being so suspicious, to prove that he had set aside his insecurity about Chris.
Jealousy is never rational; it zooms in, it enlarges, it distorts. In Callum’s case, it focused solely on men that Tamsin had slept with. Occasionally this annoyed Tamsin. She found herself wanting to reason with him, to point out that the men she hadn’t slept with – the what-ifs – were surely far more of a threat to him that the ones she had tried and rejected.
This, however, would have been cruel, and she knew it. When it came to Callum and sex, any sort of challenge was liable to be read as an attack.
There had been just one, ostensibly definitive discussion between the two of them on the subject of Callum’s penis. A bold move on Callum’s part, this conversation had taken place nearly three years ago, before they had ever even slept together.
It was their fourth date and they were walking along Grand Union Canal after a chilly picnic lunch on Primrose Hill. Inside a plum-coloured houseboat with apricot detailing, someone was frying onions.
Callum kicked a beech mast. It skittered along the path then dropped, almost noiselessly, into the canal. ‘There’s something you should know about me.’
‘MI6?’ Tamsin had joked, laughing at his sudden seriousness. She tried to imitate his accent. ‘The neem’s Deimpster, Cahllum Deimpster.’
‘It’s about sex.’ Callum was straight-faced.
For a terrible moment, Tamsin wanted to giggle. She blew her nose instead. When she looked at Callum again, the urge had passed. ‘Go on,’ she said, doing her best to sound soberly mature.
‘Well – it’s difficult for me. I mean really difficult. Please’ – he stopped her question with a look – ‘hear me out, okay?’
He assured her that there would be sex, just not much of the traditional penetrative kind. His fingers and tongue, he said with a wry smile, were used to compensating for his incompetent penis. ‘And it isn’t totally defunct. It works maybe forty per cent of the time. Okay, maybe more like thirty. If only I’d kept the receipt for the damn thing.’
Tamsin understood that he was making a joke, but she couldn’t laugh at the bitterness in his voice. Instead, she squeezed his hand and said, gently, ‘Doesn’t it depend a bit on who you’re with? I mean, if you feel comfortable…’ Already she was thinking that she would be the one to make the difference.
‘Yes, actually.’ Callum let out a dry chuckle. ‘The more I care about a girl, the less likely it is to work. In fact, you can take it as a definite compliment if my penis hates you.’
Tamsin looked around; there was no one in sight apart from a lone dog-walker, over a hundred yards ahead of them and safely out of earshot. ‘So … can you … masturbate?’ she asked, bringing out the last word with difficulty. Although she had slept with several people, this was the first time she had talked directly about sex with a man.
Callum nodded. ‘That’s never been an issue.’
A duck laughed in the distance.
‘And can I – can I do that to you?’
‘Perhaps. You can try.’ He frowned. ‘Look, it’s the same deal. Sometimes it works. Mostly it doesn’t.’
Then he had explained that his problem didn’t entail infertility. He wanted her to have all the facts so that she could make an informed decision. ‘I’m not asking for any guarantee of commitment or anything like that.’ Callum coughed to clear the formality from his voice. ‘I just didn’t want you to find out and be shocked. And you see, the thing is, my last—’ He stopped. He’d promised himself that he wasn’t going to go into specifics. ‘Some women have been cool with it, but others haven’t. It’s boring for both of us if you have to make excuses later on to spare my feelings. If you’re just not up for it, say now and I’ll understand.’ He sounded almost angry and he couldn’t meet her eyes.
Tamsin was moved by his vulnerability. ‘Oh, Callum, don’t be ridiculous. Of course, of course I don’t mind. Of course it’s not a problem.’
(And anyway: what else could she say?)
They had stopped under a bridge, its damp bricks padded with the bright olive velvet of moss. Callum cupped Tamsin’s face in his hands. It was a long kiss, fuelled by their relief at reaching the end of a difficult discussion.
*