And Kurt and I? We opened our first restaurant in Smithfields two years ago. Our second in Mayfair a year later. We appear in the latest Michelin. It’s been a wild, heady ride, no doubt about it. Kurt was happy to take on the public relations part of our partnership and he fulfilled his role so well.
It’s just that, lately, I’ve had to put off his media appearances – it’s too much for one person, sometimes. He’d come home so tired and drawn…he’d lost so much weight and that’s bad for our kind of business, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you. And besides, we haven’t spent much time together lately and that’s bad for any relationship, isn’t it?
It’s still good though – he’s such a sweet boy. When I look at him now, I’m reminded of why I fell in love with him in the first place. Tenderness. That’s what everyone looks for in a lover, isn’t it?
Freedom Fighter
It was going to be a momentous day but of course, he didn’t know that when he woke up. Peter Drewett wasn’t normally aware of much before his first cup of tea in the morning, and so his peace remained unbroken until the middle of breakfast. He was reaching for his second piece of toast when it happened. His fingers closed upon the rigid crust and as he lifted it to his plate, he looked at his wife and thought I have absolutely nothing left to say to you.
That was it, that was all. He made no sound but his eyelids fluttered in shock and the toast dropped onto his plate, unheeded. Peter stared at his wife’s face, the same face he’d seen every morning for the past twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years! It was a lifetime. And now he had nothing left to say to her - nothing at all.
He reached for his cup of tea, noting with interest and a small amount of panic that his fingers were shaking. His wife, of course, noticed nothing. Mary Drewett was a fat, fair creature, buttoned tightly into the grey woollen cardigan that she habitually wore to breakfast. In the submerged strata of her face could be seen traces of the pert, pretty girl she’d once been. Peter stared at her. It could have been a stranger sitting across from him, despite the familiarity of that awful cardigan. He brought the china mug to his lips and gulped helplessly at the lukewarm liquid within. He felt lost, as if his chair was drifting gently on the current of an unseen ocean, floating him away from his old, tired, unwanted life. He was sure the walls of the kitchen shimmered for a second. The floor tilted beneath the soles of his slippers and he closed his eyes, suddenly dizzy.
Upstairs, under the hot gush of the shower, things were no better. He felt panicky, nibbled by anxiety; as if he’d missed a vital life-preserving appointment. I’m forty-eight, he thought incredulously. Half my life is gone. He stepped out of the shower and waded through the gauzy white sheets of steam that hung in the air. He wiped the mirror over the sink with a trembling hand. Forty-eight. And somehow, his forty-eight wasn’t the forty-eight of those creatures glimpsed in glossy magazines, or the figures who cavorted in the tiny glass compound of the television. His was a much older type of forty-eight. He was almost an old man.
He dressed himself in a daze, clinging to the old routine of his working day. He buttoned his white, short sleeved shirt and pulled on his grey, polyester-wool-mix suit, dull as pewter except for the oily shine of the elbows and knees. Peter thought of the train journey ahead of him, and the office routine ahead of that. He sold advertising space for a glossy car magazine. How many hours, how many years of his life had been spent in that little, grey box of a cubicle, headset clamped to his ears, listening to the oleaginous tone of his voice as he tried to persuade yet another reluctant customer of the need to buy a three centimetre, bordered box in the last five pages of the magazine? He’d never really thought about it before but he suddenly realised he was the one of the oldest people in the office. No, he was the oldest. He had gradually become surrounded by children; children who thought they were adults, strident, spike-haired children in any number of ridiculous clothes. Did they laugh at him behind his back? He reddened with shame as he straightened his tie and smoothed the sparse strands of his remaining hair back behind his ears. He’d always worn a tie to work – Mary bought them for him for his birthday and sometimes for Christmas. Every year he unwrapped another slither of coloured nylon to noose about his neck.
He kissed Mary as he always did before he left the house. She, as always, gave no sign that the brief press of his mouth upon her cheek gave her any pleasure. As he shut the front door behind him, Peter tried to remember when they last made love. It was early July now so… he found himself shrinking from the fact that it could have been last year. Perhaps on his birthday? He plodded towards the train station, briefcase dragging at his hand. He looked at it resentfully. Why did he carry this to work and back every day? It wasn’t as if he was a top business executive, his briefcase stuffed with important papers, vibrating with the urgent trill of his mobile phone. This case contained nothing more earth shattering than yesterday’s copy of the Daily Mail, an empty Kit Kat wrapper and some hieroglyphic squiggles on a torn piece of yellow paper. Peter frowned. Suddenly, the briefcase seemed indicative of his whole wasted, failed life. He felt a sudden, breathless surge of anger – fury, not at broken dreams but at having no dreams left at all.
There was only one thing to be done and as he was now crossing the footbridge over the river, he did it. The case flew in a widening arc, wheeling above the water like a square black bird, before splashing into the river in a cacophony of droplets. Peter laughed and the two people who’d been walking ahead of him looked back briefly. They saw nothing but a nondescript middle-aged man clinging to the railings of the bridge and turned back, uninterested.
Peter remained at the railings, clutching them in both hands. He was aghast – he’d just thrown his briefcase in the river! – and yet exhilarated at the same time. “Begone dull care,” he said to himself, giggling quietly and wondering whether it was part of a quotation and if so, from what. Slowly, he let go of the railings. The concentric circles that marked the spot where his luckless briefcase had landed gradually smoothed out into flat, reflective river water.
Peter began walking again. He let his footsteps continue in the direction of the railway station, past the newsagent’s shop on the corner. As he passed the entrance, he caught a glimpse of ‘his’ car magazine on the racks inside by the open door and his stomach contracted. He wasn’t going to work today. He wasn’t going back to work again, ever. All of a sudden, an enormous exhilarating energy possessed him. He felt his spine straighten, his weary, dragging posture spring into something energetic and upright. He climbed the steps to the railway platform but didn’t turn right onto Platform Two, as he had done every weekday for the past fifteen years. Instead, he let his new, vibrant feet cross the bridge and take him to Platform One, the one for London. A train was just drawing up as he reached the platform and he joined the mass of people that were sucked into the carriage doorways as if by an unseen force.