Left of the Bang. Claire Lowdon
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it? – they’re amazing. This one, here – this one’s the best.’ Chris pointed to the biggest of the four sketches. The charcoal Tamsin was on her back, her arms thrown up above her head and her eyes lightly closed as if she were resting briefly rather than actually sleeping. Tamsin liked it, too, but she loyally nominated Callum’s favourite, a less flattering rendition of her asleep on her side, her lower cheek slightly sagged by gravity.
‘And this is all Callum’s own work, right?’
‘Yup. He paints a little, too, but basically he likes pencil best.’
‘Is there anything the guy doesn’t do?’
Tamsin smiled. The conversation felt horribly stiff and formal, but Chris’s appreciation of Callum was genuine, and it endeared him to her even further.
‘I mean, he could sell these.’ Chris passed his open palm over the sketches very slowly, holding it an inch above the surface. Tamsin was surprised by his hands: they were older than they should be, with dry, split nails and dirt that lay so deep in the seams of his knuckles it looked as if it had been sewn in. Her gaze strayed up his torso to the collar of his shirt (finely woven cotton, with pink-white-blue stripes that reminded her of toothpaste). The top two buttons were undone. There were three soft hairs in the notch at the base of his throat, sweetly exposed.
To quash this alarming thought Tamsin began talking, at speed.
‘He does, actually. Sell them. At his school, he does portraits – from photographs of the children, usually just a simple head-and-shoulders thing, but sometimes he’ll do group ones with siblings, even pets. Personally I think it’s a bit of a waste. But the parents are willing to pay silly money for it, so…’
She trailed off. This wasn’t right at all. She hadn’t meant to criticise Callum to Chris; having done so, she felt guilty of a small betrayal.
They lapsed into silence again. Tamsin took the remote control from the coffee table and fiddled for a while with the black plastic cover of the battery compartment.
‘Listen, I just want to say—’
She looked up, startled by the urgency in Chris’s voice. He was sitting right forward on the edge of the sofa.
‘Last time,’ he went on, ‘when we had supper – I think I might’ve drunk a bit too much – I’m sorry about the speech.’
Tamsin smiled. ‘It’s fine, we were all quite—’
‘To tell the truth I was a bit nervous about meeting you again.’ He paused for a moment as if waiting for permission to continue. Outside in the street, someone honked a car horn once, twice, then a third time, long and loud. The sound bent and died. Tamsin avoided Chris’s gaze but he didn’t seem to notice her discomfort.
‘The thing is…’ he began again, then stopped. He didn’t even know what he was trying to say. That he had been thinking about her for seven years? That he loved her? That he was just glad to see her, and to see her happy? All absurd, Chris thought, blushing to himself as he heard and rejected each of these options.
‘Hello hello!’
Callum was at the door, red-faced from his long ride home. The tangerine sheen of his orange lycra cycling gear was darkly stained with sweat at the crotch and armpits, while a larger stain formed a peninsula tapering from his neckline down to his navel. Tamsin launched herself on him, mindless of the sweat.
* * *
The Duke’s Head was an old South London pub that had recently been subjected to a trendy makeover. Tamsin found herself sitting between Chris and Will on a reclaimed church pew, presided over by a working set of traffic lights. She was horribly conscious of her proximity to Chris. Each time she relaxed, her knee drifted over to touch his thigh. She couldn’t tell whether Chris was aware of this, too, but judging from his awkwardness in Callum’s flat, it seemed likely that he was. Her buttocks ached with the effort of avoiding contact.
Across the table, Leah was looking terrific in a navy-blue bandeau dress and a pair of gold earrings shaped like Celtic knots. Leah rarely drank alcohol; this evening she was sipping grapefruit juice through a straw, carefully preserving the pearly gloss that coated her lips. ‘Mmm, very smart,’ Tamsin had said when Leah emerged from the bedroom in her high heels and immaculate makeup. Not quite a compliment – the implication being that Leah was overdressed for an evening in the pub. Leah had replied, in her habitual tone of sullen apathy, that she was going out later. She always had somewhere else to go on to, though they never met the friends she went with.
Sitting next to Leah were Big Mac (Ollie Macfarlane) and his girlfriend Suze. Big Mac was a consultant at Deloitte. He had a fine bass voice; at Cambridge, he had been a King’s choral scholar. His intention had been to work at Deloitte for a few years to build up his savings, then make a go of it as a singer – a plan he talked about with decreasing conviction as each year went by. Big Mac identified as Scottish: despite a fruity Home Counties accent, he wore his kilt more often than Callum did. He was extremely fat and suffered from a minor addiction to cheese-and-onion crisps. Right now he was irritated because the pub only served chilli cashews and wasabi nuts; but also because Suze was making no attempt to disguise her admiration for Second Lieutenant Kimura and his daredevil tales from the Rifles’ recent training exercise in the Kenyan wilderness.
‘And there it was, right in front of us, the monster itself’ – Chris paused for effect; Suze appeared to be holding her breath – ‘a zebra, munching on some leaves!’
Apart from Big Mac, everyone laughed. Chris was the man of the moment – a fresh face with an exciting job and a large backlog of anecdotes that nobody had heard before.
‘Oh my god, it sounds so frightening!’ Suze panted, still recovering from the suspense before the punchline.
Suze was what Will unkindly referred to as a ‘stealth moose’ – gorgeous from a distance, with her catwalk figure and long blonde hair, but alarmingly ugly up close. She had a bad squint and her features were out-of-focus with the worst acne scars Chris had ever seen. Now she leaned even further across the table towards him, her smallish breasts squeezed awkwardly together by her upper arms. She evidently expected some sort of response, but Chris couldn’t think of anything to say. He blinked, uncomfortable under the blaze of her admiration. He was still getting used to the effect of his military persona on some women.
‘What about women?’ It was as if Will had read his mind. ‘Surely certain, how can I put this, needs arise?’
Chris nodded. ‘Yes, that’s a real problem, actually – we had a few days’ leave in the local town at the end of the jungle training and the guys had to be given a fairly in-depth refresher session on sexual health. I was worried that the doctor’s spiel had been a wee bit too technical for some of the younger guys, so I took a bunch of them aside to paraphrase.’ Now Chris adopted a slow, too-loud tone, as if he were talking to someone mentally impaired. ‘If you get AIDS, you will die. All the hookers have AIDS. If you don’t want AIDS, do not stick any part of your body into any part of their bodies. If you’re going to be a real retard about it, though, bag up.’
He chuckled drily. ‘One young lad invited me to join him and his friends back at their room for “some fun”. Turned out they’d taken my lesson to heart: they’d paid a girl to strip and lie there naked while they all stood round and wanked on her.’
There was a brief silence while everyone decided whether to be interested or shocked or coolly unfazed. Suze was no longer leaning over towards Chris. She glanced round at the others, trying to gauge their reactions.
‘And you – what did you do?’ demanded Big Mac.
At last Chris heard the personal hostility in Big Mac’s tone. ‘I went back to my hotel room and watched porn on my laptop,’ he said evenly.
‘How old were these guys, on average?’ Callum asked. It was the first time he’d spoken in a while.
Chris sat a little straighter in his seat, lighting up at the pleasure of talking