Us

‘And then we’ll come back and say goodbye? You won’t even have to bother unpacking, you could just chuck your suitcase in a taxi and head off …’

At which point she sighed and looped her arm through mine as if nothing were wrong. ‘Let’s see. Let’s see what happens.’ And we walked Mr Jones back to the house.

20. maps

A route took shape: Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Verona, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. Of course Connie had been to most of these places before, on an epic odyssey of smoking cannabis and kissing local boys, working as a waitress, a tour guide, an au pair in the years before she started art school. In the early days of our relationship, when my work and our puny finances permitted it, we would sometimes take cheap flights to European cities and Connie would spot a bench, a bar or café and lapse into a reverie about the time she and her friends spent a week sleeping on the beach in Crete, or the wild party she had been to in an abandoned factory outside Prague, or the un-named boy she’d fallen madly in love with in Lyon in ’84, the Citroën mechanic with his strong hands and broken nose and the smell of engine oil in his hair. I’d find a smile and change the subject, but clearly ‘well travelled’ meant something different to Connie. Been there, done him, that was our joke. Europe represented first love and sunsets, cheap red wine and breathless fumbling.

I’d had no such rite of passage, partly because of my father, a fierce patriot who raged against the whole world’s bloody-minded refusal to knuckle down, learn decent English and live like us. Anything that suggested ‘abroad’ made him suspicious: olive oil, the metric system, eating outdoors, yoghurt, mime, duvets, pleasure. His xenophobia was not limited to Europe; it was international and knew no borders. When my parents came to London to celebrate my PhD, I made the mistake of brandishing my cosmopolitanism by taking them to a Chinese restaurant in Tooting. Chiang Mai’s fulfilled my father’s key restaurant criteria in that it was unnervingly cheap and brutally over-lit (‘so you can see what you’re bloody well eating!’) yet I still recall the expression on his face when handed a pair of wooden chopsticks. He pointed them at the waiter, like a switchblade. ‘Knife and fork. Knife. And. Fork.’

Of course we argued about this. The Channel Tunnel, he said, was ‘like leaving your front door open’. What did he imagine might happen? I asked. A great, marauding horde of toreadors and trattoria waiters and onion-sellers pouring out into Folkestone, Kent? In fairness, my father had lost his own father in Belgium in 1944, and perhaps this provided some deep-seated justification for his hostility, but still, it was irrational in such a rational man. To my father, ‘abroad’ was a strange, unknowable place where the milk tasted odd and lasted an unnaturally long time.

So I was not well travelled; in fact I barely knew Europe until I met Connie. Wherever we went, she had been there before. Her European map was already dense with red pins signifying stolen rucksacks, missed flights, languorous kissing in ornamental parks, pregnancy scares, fresh oranges off the tree and ouzo for breakfast. On my very first visit to her flat I had glimpsed several photographs stuck to her fridge, new-wave Connie and her art-school friends with gelled perms, blowing kisses at the camera or smoking topless — topless! and with cigarettes! — on a balcony in Sicily.

My very first visit to her flat. I’m not even through the door yet. She’s still talking to Jake.

21. the ejector-seat

After my sister’s ironic sherry trifle had been disposed of we were all encouraged to swap places and ‘mingle’, Connie and Jake vacating their chairs at ejector-seat speed. ‘Mingling’, it transpired, involved continuing their conversation at a different part of the table, and I watched as the acrobat produced from somewhere, I don’t know where — from his tights, perhaps — a small plastic Ziploc bag of dusty sweets which he offered to Connie, who accepted with a nod, almost a shrug of resignation, before passing the bag to my sister and on around the table. They couldn’t have been very nice sweets, because everyone was grimacing and washing them down with water. Soon I found myself sitting between two actors on drugs, a position that, a number of peer-reviewed research papers have since confirmed, is precisely the worst place a biochemist can be. One of the actors had been performing excerpts from his one-person show, to my mind one person too many and when the Ziploc bag reached us, he broke off and, shook it underneath my nose. At the end of the table, I caught a glimpse of my sister nodding, nodding, eyes wide in encouragement.

‘No thanks,’ I said.

‘You don’t partake?’ said the actor, pouting. ‘You should! Have a cheeky half, it’s lovely.’

‘I’m sorry, but the only acid in my house is deoxyribonucleic—’

‘Hey, has anyone got any chewing gum?’

I left the table.