Left of the Bang. Claire Lowdon
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oil in huge square cans and shopped in Borough Market at least once a fortnight. This evening he was doing one of his staple dinner party menus: scallops on a minted pea puree followed by slow-cooked rabbit ragout, with panacotta (dead simple, actually) for dessert. When the buzzer buzzed, he was up to his elbows in rabbit, picking through the mess of meat to check for the smaller bones.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Tamsin quickly, even though Callum was already wiping his hands clean.
Tamsin had managed to keep her face neutral when Callum told her he’d invited Chris round for supper. Really, she was terrified – terrified that Chris might recount, as an amusing anecdote, the real story of how they met, and expose her version of their history for a fiction. She needed to tell him not to tell – but she had no idea how to communicate this with Callum in the room. Now she hurried over to answer the door, half-hoping to whisper a warning to Chris before he entered the flat.
‘Hi, hello,’ said Chris, stepping towards her. He paused, moved his head from left to right like a tennis player waiting to return a serve, coughed twice, then thrust out his hand.
‘Hi,’ said Tamsin, as they shook. She felt afresh the strangeness of seeing this figure from the almost-forgotten past. Without the makeup and the nurse’s outfit, he looked much more like the boy she remembered, although he was older now, with a man’s broader frame and a strong neck thickened by exercise. There was something unnatural about his physique, as if his muscles had been inflated very suddenly: Clark Kent transformed into Superman. His T-shirt had clearly been bought for a scrawnier version of himself.
Impossible, she realised, to say anything to Chris now. ‘It’s, er, nice to see you,’ she told him. ‘Again.’
Chris nodded fervently. ‘I know, it’s so weird, it’s one of the strangest things that’s ever—’
‘Come on through, come on through,’ she said loudly, desperate to prevent his sentence from heading any further in that particular direction.
‘Chris, hi, good to see you again, mate.’ Callum waved to them from the little open kitchen, jovial but distracted. ‘Tam, I can’t find the bloody mint leaves. They’re not in the fridge, they should be in the fridge.’
Tamsin stepped over to the fridge and produced the packet of mint, eyebrows arched.
‘God, I hate it when you do that,’ said Callum, coming up behind her and putting his arms round her waist.
Tamsin twisted round in his arms so that she was facing him. ‘It’s because your peripheral vision’s no good.’ Her tone was pertly flirtatious. ‘Men didn’t need it, you see, when they were chasing woolly mammoths.’
Usually, Callum had scant patience with Tamsin’s penchant for evolutionary psychology. But right now they were performing, as couples do in company, a pat double act. Callum tucked his hands up under his armpits and capered like an ape until Tamsin pretended to cuff him round the head.
‘Right,’ he said, turning to Chris. ‘Enough of all that. Let me get you a drink.’
This little routine wasn’t wasted on Chris. He had accepted Callum’s invitation out of a sense of kismet: because he barely remembered giving Callum his number, the text message seemed, somehow, to be a call to destiny, a prompt it would be foolish to ignore. His initial resolution to leave Tamsin and Callum in peace had dissolved in a froth of conjecture (was she unhappy with Callum? was Callum unhappy with her? how had she felt, meeting him again after all those years?). Now he was here and he could see the situation for what it was – domestic bliss – his role was very clear. There were no decisions to make, no moral dilemmas to brood over. He would talk to Callum, eat his supper, adore Tamsin from afar, then go back to barracks life.
What he hadn’t bargained on was liking Callum quite as much as he did. Chris would meet his few non-army friends at the weekends for sixteen hours of expensive hedonism before crawling back to Bulford. In contrast, Callum and his compact little flat were, as Chris pronounced loudly over pudding, ‘the peak of civilisation’. It was all wonderful: Callum’s cooking, the canvas photo prints of Moroccan souks and Scottish islands (all Callum’s own work), the complete set of Loeb classics on the homemade bookshelves, the electric drum kit in the corner of the room on which Callum let him mess about and finally, after much protesting, demonstrated a short but breathtaking burst of eight against nine.
‘Our Callum’s something of a Renaissance man,’ Tamsin remarked, drollery a poor mask for her pride.
Best of all, Callum appeared to be fascinated by Chris. He asked question after question about the army, and actually took out a small notebook when they got started on the history of the machine gun.
‘Can you believe it? Gatling, the guy who was basically responsible for the machine gun mark two – after the Maxim, that is – genuinely thought he was saving lives. One soldier kills a hundred times more people, so you need a hundred times less soldiers. I mean, go figure.’
Tamsin watched them as they talked, feeling relieved that they had not, so far, approached the question of her history with Chris. Yet she was also feeling curiously excluded. She had been dreading conversation about Afghanistan or Iraq, two subjects on which she felt herself to be embarrassingly under-informed. But neither Chris nor Callum seemed interested in what she thought.
‘You think of bullets, you think of bangs, right?’ Chris was saying. ‘’S’nothing like that at all. More of a whipcrack sound, a sort of stinging, high-pitched whine, peeow, peeeow.’
He had his head dipped low as if he were actually in a trench, sheltering from rifle fire. Callum was leaning back in his chair, legs crossed at the ankle and hands behind his head, nodding slowly with an expression of shrewd attention on his face.
Finally, Callum left to go to the toilet and Tamsin took her chance.
‘Listen,’ she said, keeping her voice low. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound too crazy, but I haven’t actually told Callum that whole thing about how we met. It just seemed … I told him you used to date a friend of mine, years ago, and that I met you once or twice through her. Shit, this does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’
But to her surprise, Chris was immediately compliant, even grateful, for this alternative version of events. He didn’t appear to think it was odd that she hadn’t told Callum the real story of how they knew one another.
‘God no, of course, that’s much better,’ he said. ‘We met through your friend, perfect. Thanks. Seriously, thanks.’ He sounded relieved.
(Chris was embarrassed: by what he now perceived as unforgivable cowardice that day on the tube. It didn’t look too hot for Second Lieutenant Kimura to be running away from a suitcase. Tamsin’s lie allowed him to save face. Was she just as ashamed, he wondered? Or was it something else she was hiding from Callum? Even as he rejected this interpretation as absurd, he found himself feeling faintly, pleasantly hopeful.)
They finished the meal with port and Stilton. It had been a boozy evening. Halfway through his second glass of port, Chris became almost tearful.
‘People, they ask me, they ask me all the time why I joined the army. I wish I could show them this, all this.’ He flung his arms open to indicate the room. ‘This is my answer. People like you two, all this decency, and culture – this is exactly what I’m fighting for. We’re fighting the bastards who’ll throw acid in the eyes of schoolgirls so that this, this paradise – because, for all its faults, the UK really is paradise – this paradise that allows people like you guys to just be, to do your thing…’ He raised his glass in a reverent toast. ‘I wish you all the best. I really do.’
Callum reached over to plunge the coffee, hiding a smile at the younger man’s emotion.
Later, at the door, Chris kissed Tamsin on both cheeks, then pulled Callum into a backslapping hug. ‘Great evening. Pukka scran.’
Callum laughed. ‘Pleasure. Like I say, you’re welcome any time.’
A door banged somewhere