Left of the Bang

Callum smiled, pleased with the compliment. ‘I’m writing a book, a sort of military history thing … Sorry – what’s a “CF”?’

‘CF, charlie foxtrot – means “cluster fuck”, basically a major beasting. Also a verb, as in, I got cluster-fucked. Which you do, at Sandhurst. That’s the whole point.’

The two men laughed and clinked beer bottles properly this time, acknowledging their approval of one another.

‘Is it true that you lot are using “muggle” for “civilian” now?’

They were fifteen minutes into a discussion on military slang when Callum noticed Tamsin watching them from across the room with an uninterpretable expression on her face. Callum waved her over, eager to show off his new find.

‘Here, Tam, come on, I want you to meet—’

‘Chris.’ Tamsin said the name at the same time as Callum. ‘It is Chris, isn’t it?’

‘Have we…?’ The boy was embarrassed. Then his soft mouth pulled tight in an enormous grin. ‘My god – it’s Tamsin!’

‘Do you know each other?’ Callum asked, unnecessarily.

‘I can’t believe you recognised me under all this shit!’ Chris was still grinning broadly. ‘How do you guys—’

‘Callum’s my boyfriend.’ As if to illustrate this, Tamsin kissed Callum on the cheek. There was a longish pause. ‘So … what are you up to these days, Chris?’

‘Well, actually, I’m in the army—’ Chris began, but he was interrupted by a violent thump on his shoulder. Leo’s brother Edwin, a small, smooth-faced man with thick dark eyebrows, had come to claim his friend.

‘Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve been waiting for this bastard to come and do shots with us for over half an hour.’

‘Great to meet you.’ Chris shook Callum’s hand vigorously. ‘And – and to see you too, Tamsin,’ he added, looking slightly confused.

‘Right fucker, your first one’s a triple,’ said Edwin, as he marched Chris over to their friends.

‘Where do you know him from?’ Callum asked Tamsin.

She looked vague. ‘Ages ago. I don’t know him at all, really.’ Tamsin’s unusually large eyelids gave her face a sleepy, sensual expression. When she had been drinking it sometimes seemed to Callum as if it cost her a physical effort to keep her eyes from closing altogether.

‘Callum, you dirty great faggot, where have you been all my life?’ It was Will again, pulling Callum into a back-slapping hug. Tamsin made a face at Callum over Will’s shoulder, but allowed herself to be led off to meet Will’s ‘reinforcements’, who were busy re-stocking the drinks table with stronger stuff. The playpen was being packed away.

* * *

Tamsin woke from a dream about Bolognese sauce to the smell of Bolognese sauce. Then she remembered it was Sunday, and the smell modulated to bacon. She squinted at the other side of the bed. Callum was already up. Hoping to defer her hangover for another five minutes, she pulled the duvet over her head and settled back down into the pillow.

The flush of the toilet woke her again. Tamsin came out from under the duvet and the smell adjusted itself for a third and final time. The door to the little en suite bathroom was ajar.

‘Callum. God. You could at least shut the door,’ she croaked.

Callum emerged from the bathroom with an apologetic grin. He opened the window, filling the room with the fumes of the Edgware Road and the sickly strawberry scent from the shisha bar on the ground floor.

‘Shit, I feel rough.’ Tamsin pressed three fingers to each temple and glared up at Callum. ‘Why aren’t you in more pain?’

Callum sat down on the bed. ‘Because I wasn’t half as full of it as you were, you nugget.’ He leaned in for a kiss, but Tamsin clamped her lips shut.

‘Mm-mmm.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t taste good. And I’m not kissing you while this room still stinks. En suite. Jesus. Maybe the least romantic proposition ever.’

‘All right, all right,’ he laughed, running a hand over his khaki-coloured hair, which immediately sprang back to attention. ‘I’ll get us some coffee.’

Callum came back with coffee, toast and yesterday’s newspapers, the cutlery jittering on the tray as he bent to settle it in Tamsin’s lap. He perched on the windowsill with his own mug, watching Tamsin through steam lit white by the morning sun. Her loose cotton vest sagged in the middle and he could see the two parallel lines marking the start of her breasts. In the beginning, Tamsin had been embarrassed by her breasts, which were full and heavy and sat low on her chest. It had taken Callum a long time to get her to sleep without her bra on, and even longer to persuade her to stand up naked in front of him. Her left breast was noticeably larger than her right, something she hated and he adored.

‘You perving?’ asked Tamsin, without looking up from her paper.

‘Who, me? Never.’

There was a longish silence. Then Callum said, ‘Chris seems like a nice guy.’ The words had a slightly processed, unnatural timbre. This was because Callum had been preparing to say them ever since Tamsin woke up.

‘Mmm?’ Tamsin glanced up distractedly. ‘Oh yeah. Yeah, he does.’

‘How did you say you knew him?’

‘I didn’t say, did I?’ Now Tamsin put the paper down, frowning slightly. ‘I don’t remember if I said. I don’t think I did.’ She paused. ‘It was my first year at College. He was going out with a friend of mine for a bit. So I saw him a couple of times, through her. Then they broke up and I didn’t see him again. Until last night.’

Tamsin was surprised by both the lie and the facility with which she’d invented it.

‘Which friend?’ Callum wanted to know.

‘Girl called Kitty,’ Tamsin said. ‘Don’t think you ever met her.’

‘You didn’t know him biblically?’

‘What?’

‘Did you – sorry.’ Callum winced at his own question.

‘Christ, Callum!’ Tamsin shook her head in exasperation. ‘No. No I did not sleep with him.’

‘Okay. Sorry. Tam, I’m sorry. I just wondered. I don’t know why.’ Smiling sheepishly, Callum padded over to the bed and got in beside Tamsin.

‘Am I allowed to kiss you yet?’ he asked.

Tamsin put two fingers to his lips. ‘Only if you promise to stop being an idiot,’ she said, looking stern. ‘And be gentle, okay? My head hurts.’

Callum made a little growling noise and pretended to bite her fingers. Then he kissed her, very softly, on the upper lip. The blue-and-green-checked duvet had slipped halfway down the bed. Callum tugged it up over their shoulders and drew Tamsin towards him for a hug, tucking her head under his chin. Her hair smelled of Herbal Essences shampoo and Marlboro Lights.

‘I love you,’ Tamsin said to Callum’s collarbone. ‘I love you and I really should get up. I’m so behind with my practice it’s not even funny.’ She yawned and stretched, then drew in for another kiss. ‘Right. That’s it. I’m up.’

Callum lay with his hands behind his head and watched her dress. Halfway through the process – pale yellow cotton bra and faded jeans, no T-shirt – she went into the bathroom to clean her teeth and came back with a thick white blob of moisturiser above each corner of her upper lip. This was a preventative measure, talisman against the two deep lines flanking her father’s mouth. He watched her twisting the dome of her deodorant into her armpits. As she waited for it to dry, she held her arms away from her sides in a slightly simian pose. Callum knew all of this by heart and he loved it.

* * *

On the way from Callum’s flat to the bus stop, Tamsin stopped between the Halal Fish’n’Chip shop and the Discount Drug Co. She wanted to undo it all, to go back and tell Callum the truth about Chris. She had never lied to him about anything like this before, and she wasn’t entirely sure why she had now.

But then, she thought, she had never told anyone about what happened – or rather, what didn’t happen – on the tube that day. At first, the enormity of her parents’ break-up had simply displaced everything around it. Later, when she remembered the incident, she felt no compulsion to turn it into an anecdote. As a little girl, one of Tamsin’s greatest pleasures was to eat an apple and throw away the core, in the knowledge that she was the first and last human being ever to set eyes on the sleek mahogany pips at its centre. A similar impulse had governed her silence on the subject of Chris and the suitcase. The story formed a secret fold in the fabric of her life, and it seemed that to talk about it would be to spoil it, somehow.

Tamsin had been staring unseeingly into the window of the Discount Drug Co. – which, inexplicably, sold nothing even remotely pharmaceutical, just fake Gucci handbags and Louis Vuitton luggage sets. The salesman saw her looking and came to the door. ‘You want real leather, I give you good price.’

Tamsin shook her head and moved away. She couldn’t confess to Callum now. The fact that she’d lied in the first place would only create grounds for suspicion when really, she knew, there were none.

On the bus, the Edgware Road moved past jerkily, in instalments. Starbucks, M&S, Tesco Metro, traffic lights. Four newsagents all offering money transfer and mobile phone unlocking. More traffic lights. The man sitting in front of her got off at Paddington. Tamsin watched him down the street, thinking that his short, tight Afro had looked like a black version of one of those green kitchen scourers. She wondered whether it felt anything like a scourer, then wondered if that was a terrible thing to wonder. She realised that she’d never touched a black person’s hair and the thought suddenly seemed very shameful to her.

This was the sort of thing that bothered Tamsin. It also bothered her that she was twenty-five and still living with her mother in Notting Hill. Notting Hill itself bothered her. Taking the bus, she saw the Burberry hijabs and oil-black puffa jackets steadily giving way to faded denim and Havaiana flip flops. And then, when she got off, the walk down from the relative buzz of Pembridge Road into the hush of the side streets with their milk-white villas and dense green gardens. In central London, quiet like this has a direct correlation with money.

Quietest of all was Ashcombe Mews, where Tamsin lived with Roz, and, some of the time, her younger sister Serena (Beanie). Tamsin unlocked the door of Number 8 and stepped from the sunny street into the dark hallway. When her mother bought the house five years ago with the money from the divorce settlement, she had immediately painted all of the ground-floor rooms a rich midnight blue. She also coloured her long, naturally white-blonde hair black with a home-dye kit from Boots. Colour therapy, she had snapped at anyone who dared to wonder why. Then the dye grew out, leaving a ragged chevron of blonde and grey down the middle of her head. Smoking in dark glasses, Roz had looked like Ozzy Osbourne.

All this was before she discovered her new vocation. It was her friend Meredith Sykes (fifty-four, twice divorced, CEO of a successful lingerie chain) who first came up with the idea of the lectures. Initially, Roz was unconvinced. Her experience of heartbreak seemed too private to be of interest to anyone else. ‘But these are powerful universal tropes you’ve tapped into,’ Meredith had urged. ‘What you did to Bertrand – people dream about that sort of stuff all the time, but you actually went ahead and did it. Of course people will want to hear about it.’

She was right. Within a year, Roz was giving several talks a month on the healing properties of revenge. The audiences were small and exclusive: she advertised solely through word of mouth, and charged a considerable amount for her time. Roz found she liked the work. It went some way to filling the gap that singing had left in her life. She was still performing, after all, and she was still very good at it: her audiences loved her for the way she tempered the rhetoric of empowerment with just the right amount of self-irony. Grateful clients would send her photographs and even videos of their own acts of retribution, which Roz incorporated into her PowerPoint slideshow. She was especially popular with divorce parties.

These days Roz’s hair was still black, but she had it done professionally now, by Errol at Matthew Hershington’s in Maida Vale. Every three weeks, Errol ‘curated’ her hair (his word) into an inky bob shaped steeply at the back. Tamsin had been the one to encourage these visits in the first place (‘You need to start looking after yourself, Mummy, spend some time on you for a change’), but she didn’t like the cut. It was too severe. Her mother’s neck was unforgivingly exposed, rigged with tendons that longer hair had kept hidden. She looked harder, as well as older.

But Roz was not quite the indomitable ideal she endorsed in her lectures. Her anger, unlike Tamsin’s, contained impurities. It kept reverting back to a baser metal: sadness.

Today Tamsin found her mother hunched over her laptop, engrossed in a website with a familiar mid-blue banner at the top of the page.

‘Facebook? Mummy, what are you doing on there? Please don’t tell me you’ve signed up, it’s really naff when older people—’

‘It’s fine, I’m using a different name, she doesn’t even know I’m looking.’ Roz spoke quickly, with a low intensity to her voice that Tamsin dreaded.

‘Who doesn’t know you’re looking?’ Tamsin asked, although there could be only one answer.

‘Tammy, look, it’s her page. I can see everything about her – all her photos, all the stupid things she posts on her board—’

‘Wall,’ Tamsin murmured, bending forward so that she could see over her mother’s shoulder.

‘God, but she’s a shameless self-promoter,’ Roz went on. ‘Every bloody concert … here, listen to this: “Glyndebourne rehearsals start tomorrow, so excited! Adès might just be my number one all-time hero, can’t believe I get to work with him!” Who cares? Why does she think anyone’s interested in her stupid little life?’

‘Okay, that’s enough. Let me have it.’ Tamsin put out a hand for the laptop.

Roz hesitated, momentarily defiant; but then her shoulders sagged in defeat and she relinquished the laptop meekly. She applied her index fingers to the corners of her eyes to stop two tears that were forming there. ‘I just don’t understand how he can bear to be with someone like that. Why her? Why her?’

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Tamsin, grimly, ‘is why you’re still asking yourself these pointless questions. No, really, I don’t get it. How can you still be giving headspace to someone who treated you so badly? Think about it, Roz’ – Tamsin reserved her mother’s name for moments like this – ‘it just doesn’t make any sense, does it? Well, does it?’

They had arrived, with practised speed, at an old impasse in an old argument. Roz shrugged helplessly. She couldn’t explain why she still thought about Bertrand so much. Her daughter’s fierce logic left no room for the fact that he was there in her dreams every other night, being kind.

Tamsin raked her shoulder-length hair away from her face with her fingertips and held it scrunched at the back of her head. ‘Sometimes it’s almost as if you’ve forgotten what he did,’ she said, sitting down heavily on the sofa next to Roz.

These were the opening lines of a story they both knew very well indeed, a story that began with the basic facts of Bertrand’s betrayal and ended, by way of a list (not comprehensive) of the lies he had told, with a series of exhortations to emotional strength and independence. The trajectory of her mother’s response – from silent tears through increasingly resolute sniffs to the desired declarations of outrage and contempt – was as familiar to Tamsin as the story itself.

‘Shall I tell you something, Tamsin? I’m glad that what happened happened. I really am. To think that I lived with a monster like that for so many years with no idea of his capacity for cruelty—’

When the initial fervour of her renewed indignation had subsided, Roz gripped her daughter tightly around the waist and leaned her head sideways onto Tamsin’s shoulder.

‘What would I do without you.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Mmmm.’ Tamsin’s features contracted briefly in a frown her mother couldn’t see. Then she stood up and smiled brightly at Roz. ‘Right. Cup of tea and a cigarette?’

Serena was in the kitchen, eating a bowl of artisan ravioli.

‘That stuff’s expensive, you know,’ Tamsin told her sister as she filled the kettle. ‘You’re not meant to eat it like it’s cereal.’

‘So?’ said Serena through a mouthful of the pasta. ‘It’s not like you paid for it.’

Serena was wearing nothing but a navy-blue polo shirt belonging to an old boyfriend. On her tiny frame, it functioned as a dress: the sleeves reached past her elbows, the hem skimmed her pinkish knees. Like Roz, Serena was just five foot two. She had fine silvery-blonde hair, which she wore pinned up high in a smooth, glossy twist. Her top two front teeth protruded very slightly, resting behind her lower lip and pushing it forward into a permanent pout. All of this – the hair, the teeth, the twenty-three inch waist – was Roz’s. Roz was privately ashamed of how much more strongly she felt the genetic allegiance between herself and her younger daughter. But again and again, she found herself both comforted and moved by the perpetual surprise of this everyday miracle.

Tamsin pushed a cup of tea towards Roz, who was holding her mobile phone away from her at arm’s length like a hand mirror in order to read a text message. Her glasses were on the counter, within easy reach. Tamsin bit back her irritation at this and turned it instead on Serena.

‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ she wanted to know. Serena, who had none of Tamsin’s scruples about accepting Bertrand’s money, shared a town house in Clapham with three girlfriends. Generally, she only came home if she wanted Roz to look after her in the run-up to a big concert.

‘Nice to see you too. I had my driving test yesterday, didn’t I? And before you ask’ – Serena got up and scraped the last two ravioli into the bin – ‘I didn’t pass.’

‘Bad luck.’ Tamsin spoke without a trace of sympathy. ‘What happened?’

‘I ran over a squirrel.’

Tamsin laughed and some tea exploded out through her nose. She wiped her dripping face on her sleeve, still sniggering.

‘It’s not funny.’ Serena looked upset.

‘It is if you have a sense of humour.’

‘I don’t have time for this.’ Serena stalked across the reclaimed flagstones towards the door. ‘I’ve got to practise.’

Tamsin slumped into the chair where her sister had been sitting. In a vase at the centre of the table, six dying tulips formed a histrionic tableau, their heads hanging heavily from the s-bends of their stems. A few petals, faded from red to a weak tea brown, were stuck to the tabletop. From the music room came the sound of Serena warming up her reed in fast, staccato bursts.

Roz tucked her mobile phone into the pocket of her tight black jeans and sat down at the table next to Tamsin. ‘You could try to be a bit nicer to Beanie, Tam. She’s very disappointed. She really needed to pass that test.’

‘No, she didn’t. She lives in London. There are buses and tubes and pavements. She doesn’t need to drive.’

Tamsin was aware that this was the conversational equivalent of picking a newly formed scab, but she said it anyway. She scraped at one of the decomposing tulip petals with her thumbnail as she waited for the reply she didn’t want to hear.

‘Bean’s got a lot of touring coming up this summer. You know that.’ Her mother’s voice was maddeningly gentle. ‘Having a car would make her life a lot easier.’

‘Sure. Like it’s not easy enough already,’ said Tamsin, moving her hand out of reach of a solicitous pat.

‘Tammy. Look at me.’ Roz pulled her chair closer to the table. She felt slightly awkward, as she often did when called on to play mother to her eldest daughter. ‘It is easier for her. You know it’s a specialism, she’s a rare commodity. You’re one of an overwhelming majority. It was always going to be harder for you.’

This was an excuse that had long since lost its power to comfort Tamsin, even though, outwardly, it still made sense. Serena was a baroque musician; she played the recorder and the oboe d’amore. In the tiny, closed world of Early Music, she was a big talent. It was statistically much more difficult to make it as a concert pianist – as Tamsin was trying to do.

The real reason Tamsin wasn’t making it, wasn’t ever going to make it, was that although she was very good indeed, very good indeed wasn’t quite good enough. Serena was more than good enough. She was indisputably the better musician. Roz’s attempts to prevent this unacknow-ledged fact from coming between her two daughters were proving ineffective. Tamsin’s envy, once furtive and self-censoring, no longer bothered to conceal itself. Increasingly, Serena felt the weight of this envy and resented it. It was boring for her to have to downplay her successes the whole time. She was sick of being sensitive.

Tamsin rubbed a bit of petal between her thumb and middle finger and flicked it sulkily across the table. ‘I don’t care if she’s got a concert, she can’t have the music room all day. I do have work to do too, you know.’ She pushed her chair back from the table with some force and stood up, annoyed by her own petulance yet unable to move away from it.

‘Tammy—’

But her daughter was already gone. The kitchen door swung slowly shut behind her, muting the sound of Serena’s playing.

* * *

Two pints of Foster’s, a gin and tonic, the best part of a bottle of wine, a bottle of Beck’s, a triple shot of tequila, some more wine, a Jägerbomb, a pint of Stella and a good deal of whisky: it is hardly surprising that the following morning, Chris Kimura remembered very little about his encounter with Tamsin and Callum. In fact, he didn’t remember it at all until he was on the train back to Bulford. Chris had spent the night at Edwin’s 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.