You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) Read online

  Felix and I looked at each other for a long moment, then I saw his face relax into a delighted smile, and realised mine had, too.

  “You followed the clues,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you would. If you hadn’t come, I was going to drink to your birthday on my own. Which would almost certainly have got messy.”

  “I did follow the clues,” I said. “Felix, I… thanks. Really, that was such a sweet thing to do. And the presents.”

  I gestured at the scarf over the back of my chair, the pendant on its chain around my throat, and the roses, which I’d have to ask Dmitri to put in water before they wilted in the heat. Or not, because then I’d have to tell Jonathan…

  “It was fun,” Felix said, “wasn’t it? At least, I hope you had as much fun being the hunter as I did being the quarry. You caught up quicker than I expected – I saw you coming when I left the clue in Kensington Gardens. I had to hide behind a tree, then leg it. People were giving me some seriously strange looks.”

  I laughed. “I had a head start. I was in town already when I got your text, so I must’ve gained at least half an hour on you before I even saw the first clue.”

  “Cheating! I demand a rematch,” Felix said.

  “No way! I didn’t know, I just happened to be there. You can’t set traps for people assuming they’ll be sprung to your schedule.”

  Felix looked suddenly serious. “This isn’t a trap, you know, Laura.”

  “Then what is it, exactly?”

  “It’s a birthday present. No strings, no conditions. Just something I thought might make you smile. Because, you know, I remember you smiling all the time. But now you don’t. Not so much, anyway.”

  “I smile a lot,” I said, not smiling. “I do, Felix. My life is great. It’s not what I expected it to be when I was twenty-two, but who the hell’s life is, fifteen years later?”

  “Mine is,” he said.

  We were interrupted by Dmitri bringing food, and I realised as I watched him place dish after dish on the table that I’d not only finished the glass of vodka he’d given me a few minutes ago, but another one as well.

  Soon our table was piled with silver dishes of blinis, dumplings, smoked salmon, salads, and a small pewter bowl piled with pearls of caviar that were the same colour, and had the same gentle gloss, as the metal that held them.

  “Felix…” I began to protest.

  Dmitri waved a hand at the caviar. “Is my treat. On the house. Here, we love our old friends.”

  We thanked him effusively – there was nothing else to do – nothing except make sure every morsel of food was eaten so as not to hurt his feelings. My diet was going to have to be forgotten today, even though I didn’t feel like eating at all.

  I spooned sour cream on to a lacy pancake, added a morsel of caviar and bit into it. The pearls popped in my mouth like bubbles, releasing a taste of the sea, then a blast of richness and sourness. And all at once, I was hungry – for food, for fun, for sex, for more vodka, for Felix.

  We tore into the meal as if we hadn’t eaten in weeks, downing shot after shot of vodka, exchanging tastes of things that were particularly good.

  “Have you tried this?” Felix said, passing me a fork laden with something that looked like shreds of ruby-red glass.

  “It’s beetroot, isn’t it? I hate beetroot.” I looked anxiously around in case Dmitri might hear and be hurt, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “Bollocks you do. You used to love this stuff.”

  “Did I?” In spite of myself, I parted my lips and ate, and the taste came flooding back. It wasn’t like the beetroot I’d convinced myself in the intervening years I disliked, a muddy, depressing vegetable that looked a bit like menstrual blood and was about as appetising.

  “Fuck,” I said. “More. And tell me how you do it – how you’re still living the dream.”

  Felix forked up the last of the beetroot and passed it to me, then he tenderly spooned the final few morsels of caviar on to a blini and fed me that too. Then he poured as another shot of vodka – the bottle was more than half gone.

  “Do you want to see?” he said. “Do you want to know how I do it?”

  When Darcey was a baby and didn’t sleep – I mean, I know all babies don’t sleep, but she never, ever did, she was the world champion of mad, screaming insomnia – I developed a clock in my head. I used to count beats, then bars, and they’d extend into minutes and hours, marking the time until, finally, she gave in and passed out. The habit had stuck, and now, when I got into bed at night, I found myself counting, counting relentlessly away the minutes until I’d be wrenched from rest again. And even when I was awake, I was conscious always of time passing in musical notes. It sounds stupid and pretentious, but there it was. So in spite of the food and the chat and the alcohol, I knew that about two hours had passed since I arrived at the restaurant, and I didn’t need to check my watch to know I had three left before I needed to report to the school gate and the nursery door, punctual and ideally sober.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Come on then.” Dmitri appeared with the bill, and Felix paid it, after a short and shouty debate which, even though I couldn’t understand a word, I realised involved Dmitri not having charged us for lots of what we’d eaten and drunk, and refusing to do so.

  I deliberately dawdled putting on my coat, letting Felix go ahead, and left three twenty pound notes on the table, so that although Dmitri’s generosity would be acknowledged, his staff, who I knew worked brutally long hours, wouldn’t suffer for their boss’s grand gesture.

  When we emerged into the shining afternoon, I realised just how pissed I was, reeling a bit and clutching at Felix’s arm.

  “Are you okay, babe?” he said. “Want me to get you a taxi?”

  “No, no,” I protested. “I’m fine. Come on, show me what you’re going to show me.”

  “Laura. Are you sure you don’t want to go home?”

  Felix looked at me, his face swimming slightly in and out of focus.

  “No, I don’t want to go home,” I said.

  Felix kept his hand on my arm as we walked to the Tube station. Not like a lover, but not quite like a guide either – it was a gentle, reassuring contact, and I was grateful for it, because the dazzling sunlight was making me feel even more pissed than I had indoors. This is why lunchtime drinking is such a terrible idea, I thought. One of the reasons, anyway.

  There was a Piccadilly line train arriving just as we stepped off the escalator and, instinctively, we both hurried forward, squeezing into the carriage seconds before the doors slammed shut.

  “Made it,” Felix said, grinning.

  “We did,” I grinned back. “But you haven’t told me where we’re going.”

  “It’s a surprise.” His face had gone still and almost grim, the smile vanished. “Another surprise for your birthday.”

  In the harsh fluorescent light, I could clearly see the lines on his skin, the faint creases around his eyes and mouth that I’d noticed earlier. As he reached up to grip the handrail, I was sure I could see the outline of ribs through his shirt, and I realised how lean he was – the body I’d known so well years ago had changed, transformed from a powerful, muscular machine into something rangier, more angular.

  You’re not twenty-two yourself any more, Laura, I reminded myself, conscious of the extra stone I was carrying and hoping that the harsh light wouldn’t show that my make-up had gone patchy, my nose was pink from the vodka, and my roots needed touching up. But I knew he’d seen all those things about me, just as I’d seen the shadows on his jaw and the sharpness of his cheekbones.

  The train pulled in to Covent Garden station and I moved instinctively towards the doors, but Felix put his hand back on my elbow and stopped me.

  “No?” I said. “Not here?”

  “Not here.”

  We thundered on through station after station, heading into what felt like the distant reaches of North London, until after another six or seven stops, Felix said, “
Right, here we are.”

  I followed him up the escalator and through seemingly endless corridors of the unfamiliar station, until we ascended a flight of stairs back into the sunlight.

  “Welcome to Finsbury Park,” Felix said, “Home to Arsenal Football Club, the first of the great nineteenth-century parks and the best bagel shop in London.”

  Traffic roared past us along a street lined with fried chicken shops, bookies and huge discount stores selling everything you could possibly want, however tiny your disposable income. There were two rival shops on opposite sides of the street, one of which advertised all its merchandise at a pound, and the second at ninety-nine pence. It wasn’t all that different, really, from our high street at home, but here there was no organic butcher, no chichi mum and baby shops, no Waitrose. I wondered what it was like to walk into a shop and see something you needed, then have to walk across the road and see if you could buy the same thing for a penny less, because it would make a difference to how many things you were able to buy.

  “It’s zone two,” Felix said, as if reading my thoughts. “It’s a highly desirable area.” His fingers put quotes around the words, and I realised he was mocking me.

  I felt suddenly ashamed, conscious of the bubble of privilege in which I lived. It hadn’t been that long ago that I’d bought Darcey’s clothes on eBay and scoured the supermarket for discount packs of nappies. But within just a few years, I’d left all that so far behind I could barely remember it.

  Felix turned down a side road lined with what must once have been grand homes for prosperous Victorian families. Now, their stucco fronts were peeling and multiple bells jostled for position at their front doors.

  “Nearly there,” he said.

  Since we’d got off the train, I hadn’t said a word. My mouth was dry and tasted sour; I wished I’d accepted his offer to get me a cab and gone home. I could have had a cold shower, made some coffee and been early to fetch Darcey from school.

  “Felix, do you mind if I…”

  “Here we are,” he said. He pushed open one of the heavy front doors, which had an ornate, if tarnished, brass knob at its centre, and led me into a carpeted lobby. There was a makeshift reception desk squeezed against one wall, so tightly that the disinterested concierge sat next to it in a shabby office chair.

  “Hey, Danielle,” Felix said, and she looked up from filing her nails, her face lighting up.

  “Hiya, Felix, lovely day,” she said.

  “Isn’t it? This is my friend Laura. Laura, Danielle.”

  “Hello.” I shook her soft, cool hand, and she gave me a brief smile then returned to her manicure.

  Felix led me up the stairs, which were covered in the same worn, figured carpet as the hallway. We hurried up three flights, until my thighs were tired and my lungs staring to burn. It was airless and very hot; a smell of burned toast and unwashed bedding seemed to have seeped into the wallpaper. Then he turned on to the landing and fitted a key into one of three identical, scuffed white doors.

  “After you,” he said.

  Through the fug of vodka, I realised what must be happening. This place – this was one of those hotels you read about that rent rooms by the hour, where people come with prostitutes, or to have sordid, illicit sex when they have nowhere else to go. And the way the woman downstairs – Danielle – had greeted Felix, clearly he was no stranger to this place, or this kind of transaction. My stomach lurched with horror, there was a sudden flood of saliva into my mouth and a rush of sweat down my back, and I realised I was going to be sick.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” I gasped. “Please, Felix, quick.”

  “Laura, what’s…” The he looked at me, realised, and took my arm again, bundling me upstairs to a half-landing and through a door with a ‘Ladies’ sign on it.

  I fell to my knees on to the cold tiled floor and vomited gruesomely, while Felix held my hair and patted my back. When the first spasms had passed, he said, “I’ll be right back,” and closed the door behind him.

  I straightened up, feeling suddenly much, much better, and glanced in the mirror. God, I was a sight – my skin greenish-pale in the harsh light that bounced off the spotlessly clean white walls, my hair limp around my face. Before I could start any emergency repair work, there was a tap on the door and Felix’s voice said, “Only me.”

  He opened the door a crack and passed me a tube of toothpaste and a brush still in its blister pack, a parcel of wet wipes, a clean towel and a bottle of water.

  “Will you be able to find your way back to my room? I’ll wait there for you. It’s four B; I’ll leave the door open, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said faintly.

  I cleaned my teeth, depositing the toothbrush in the bin, cleaned my ravaged make-up off with the wet wipes and smeared some handcream from the tube in my bag on to my tight, flushed skin. I had the wherewithal to do a pretty decent repair job: a sample size of foundation, lipstick, an eye crayon – but what was the point? My dignity was well and truly gone, flushed down the loo along with all the vodka.

  So I combed my hair, gulped some of the deliciously cold water and made my way only slightly shakily back to room four B.

  I realised as soon as I pushed open the door how wrong I’d got it. This wasn’t a room Felix rented by the hour. It was bare and tidy, certainly, but someone lived here. A laptop was open on the bedside table. The hook on the back of the door was laden with clothes on hangers. A stack of books was piled almost as high as the small, wall-mounted telly.

  Felix was lying on the bed, his legs outstretched and his hands behind his head.

  “Okay?”

  “Better,” I said. “I’m really sorry. God, I’m so embarrassed.”

  He held out his arms, and I moved in for a hug, then lay down next to him.

  “Laura, please. It’s my fault.”

  “It’s not. I drank too much, and then you brought me here, and for some reason I thought…”

  “What?” He rested his warm hand on my cold, clammy one.

  “I thought it was some kind of… I don’t know… flophouse.”

  I turned to look at him, just in time to see him suppress a wave of laughter. “Flophouse? How retro of you! To be fair, two of my neighbours are on the game, but they don’t transact here – they’d be chucked out sharpish if they did. Amour and Summer – which aren’t their actual names, obviously. But they live here, and I do, too.”

  “I know,” I said. “I get that, now. But I didn’t understand – you said you were living in a hotel, and I thought…”

  “What? Malmaison? The Savoy? Sweetheart, you know better than that.”

  “I do now,” I said again, hunching my shoulders and squirming a bit with mortification. “But I was thinking… I kind of pictured you living like we always imagined we would. All glamorous and… you know.”

  “And I still am,” Felix said. “Imagining it, I mean. That’s what I wanted you to see. You asked about living the dream – and this is it, right here. I’m living, and I’ve still got the dream, the hunger I’ve always had. I’m going to make it big, I know I am. And even if I don’t, I wake up every morning knowing something amazing is going to happen to me.”

  “Really?”

  “Hell, yes.” Felix laughed, and pushed back his hair. “Let me tell you a story. I went to a casting a couple of weeks ago. My agent said they wanted a guy who could play a wizard, and I thought, great, I can do magic, I can nail this part. So I turned up, and there was a whole row of us sat there, actors like me. And right at the end, there was this bloke with long white hair and a beard down to his waist. And I thought, what am I even doing here?”

  I laughed. “Did you get the part?”

  “Of course I fucking didn’t. But I’m still laughing about it. I’m still standing. And I know I’m ready now, Laura, ready for something huge. The Flight of Fancy Dream is going to New York, and they want me to go too – I’m leaving in a couple of weeks. So I don’t mind living in a flophouse for now.”
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  “You’re going to New York?” I said. “Next month?”

  Felix said, “Yes, why?”

  Knowing I shouldn’t, I said, “I’ll be there. I’ll be there in August, too.”

  And I told him the dates.

  We lay there on the narrow bed, looking at each other. I’d stopped feeling drunk or sick; I wasn’t aware of anything, really, except the sense of infinite possibility Felix said he felt. For a moment, I saw the world through his eyes – a place where dreams could come true, where material things were unimportant, where happiness was found in an alternate reality, on a stage where, for a brief while, hundreds of people loved you more than anything else in the world.

  My breathing deepened thinking about it, remembering it. I closed my eyes and for a moment I was back there, on stage, on pointe, applause ringing in my ears. I could even feel rose petals brushing my cheeks.

  Then I realised it was Felix’s fingers.

  “Laura,” he said. “Wake up.”

  I was snapped back to reality as abruptly if an elastic band had twanged my face.

  “Shit! What time is it?”

  I glanced at my watch, panicked, and called Zé.

  “Listen, I’m really sorry, but I’ve been held up. Please could you collect Darcey and take her back to yours?”

  “Sure,” she said, as if it were nothing at all. “Juniper was asking if she could come over after school anyway. There’s some new YouTube thing, evidently. Want me to give her supper?”

  I thanked her over and over, then called nursery and grovelled, saying I’d be late to pick up Owen, too.

  Felix watched me silently.

  “So, I guess I need to go now,” I said, once my calls were made.

  “Of course you do. Want me to walk you to the station?”

  I didn’t. I wanted to stay here, in the surprisingly clean room, and draw the curtains and take him in my arms and for our clothes to magically vanish, and for the dream I’d had and lost to penetrate me when his body did, and for my life to somehow, suddenly, change to one in which there were no kitchen worktops to buff, no shirts to iron, no future to worry about.