didn’t say anything, I just looked at him, his hand still outstretched, holding the note. The stripper moved away quickly to another group of guys, glancing back over her shoulder at me once, in sympathy. Charlie seemed to click into life suddenly, and stood up, stuffing the note into his pocket, pulling his tie off his head, and throwing it on the chair behind him. He looked at me, ran his hand through his hair, ashamed, but not guilty. I looked back at him, and almost cried. His hair was blonder now than it had ever been. His suit was bespoke. He looked ten years older than he ever had before. I could see sweaty patches on his shirt, where the cotton stuck to his body.
‘Alright?’ I said. The rest of the boys looked terribly uncomfortable. I heard one of them whisper to another ‘it’s his old lady,’ but I ignored it. I saw him flinch slightly as he heard it.
‘I was out with the girls, I don’t know how we ended up here. But I’m going now.’ I carried on looking at him, and he stared back, and then looked down, hands on hips, with nothing to say. I turned to go, and then spun around quickly. ‘Is your brother with you?’
‘No.’ Charlie shook his head slowly as he answered.
‘Okay, I’ll see you later.’ I turned and walked away, and didn’t look around until I was outside. They were all waiting for me at the top of the stairs, looking concerned.
‘It’s fine, he’s just out with some clients.’ I laughed and looked away, and we started to walk down the road towards a cab. Amy tried to hold my hand, but I shook it off.
I didn’t see Charlie for a week after that, and I began to wonder if we had somehow called it quits, without even speaking about it. But then he phoned, the following week, to check that I was still coming with him to his boss’s birthday party and, for whatever reason, I said I was. We didn’t mention it again. We both just knew.
Some people get married, have kids, are divorced in six years. Charlie and I have been through a lot, although appearing to have been through nothing at all. Our start was promising and, God knows, we’ve stuck it out. It seemed more sensible to stay together than be apart. We have both hung in there. But we’ve driven each other quietly mad, despite never admitting it. It never seemed that important at the time.
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian film director who said ‘moral indignation is in most cases two percent moral, forty-eight percent indignation, and fifty percent envy.’ I want to have Charlie’s laidback attitude to fucking about, fucking around, acting like an overgrown boy. I envy his ability not to care more than anything. I just can’t help myself caring, in some small part, about everything. I like to call it passion, a passion that seeps through me and won’t be silenced on so many topics.
Phil has it too, the ability not to care about the little things, to take life easily, and let the troubles fall away from him as he strolls through his years. I pretend that I am shocked, but in truth I am only angry that I can’t do the same. Phil’s easiness doesn’t seem quite so mindless, or destructive, mostly because I am not having a relationship with him, and his actions can’t hurt me. Charlie’s still do.
But sexual envy is, of course, not the only kind. We envy other people’s lives, mostly the lives with more money in them, that seem less like hard work. The general populace spends most of its time envying one small band of break-out characters, who are managing to escape the humdrum existence of the rest of us with our money worries and failed relationships. We envy them, and criticize them, and throw abuse in their general direction, and are repelled at their sexual shenanigans, while secretly, and not so secretly, we all want what they’ve got. We all seem to want to be famous. Is it just the money that we want, or the ability to make ourselves look prettier with the cosmetic surgery that they can afford? Being famous seems to me to be a lot of hard work, so it isn’t their schedule that we want – how many of us have to work a twenty-hour day on a regular basis? Our moral outrage when another one of them is arrested for mucking about with fully-grown adults at midnight on Hampstead Heath when there are honestly no kids about is in most parts envy, and that’s what we have to understand. These most beautiful powerful creatures that move about in a world we glimpse but can never touch have a different set of rules to us, rules that apply once you have got past the celebrity gates, and not been blackballed for wanting it too much, or being undeserving. They don’t have to worry about what their boss will think, or their friends. They don’t have to worry about the norms of our society, they are not applicable to them. They move in a world of the most beautiful, desirable creatures on earth, all of whom offer themselves up for the taking. And they dip their fingers in whichever pies suit for the day. A man here, a woman there, they are not the ugly Joes we pass on the street, they look like angels. Given a world where nothing is frowned upon, where you are powerful enough to move from person to person without fear or shame or recrimination, where your sexuality, in private at least, is not an issue, wouldn’t you do the same? If you truly had the ability to sleep with all of these angels, would you turn them down based on the fact that you couldn’t have kids together, or some ancient book says you can’t? I don’t think so.
Of course as we envy their lives, and their cash and their cars, we never stop to think that they envy us. They envy us our freedom to move from our front door to our car door without having a camera stuck in our face, but in some way their huge amounts of cash are supposed to compensate for this. They lusted for fame and therefore they deserve to have the flashlight of our envy in their faces every minute of their waking lives. I’m not sure, when you actually think long and hard about it, what is more valuable – the cars, or the privacy. I’d like a Ferrari and a holiday home on the Med, but I don’t want my sexual moves to be plastered all over the papers for my mother to read. We can only stop our insane jealousy dressed up as outrage when we decide that we are happy with what we are, that we are where we want to be, and doing all the things we want to do. But who is? Just those famous elusive souls. And maybe they aren’t so happy after all, because whenever they slip up, everybody gets to hear about it.
The sun burns down on me as I walk along Charlie’s road, swinging my bag full of vegetables and Martini. Maybe, if the sun goes down, I will talk to him about it. It’s time to end it.
I turn the key in the door, holding my purse in my mouth, and juggling bags. I shove the door with my shoulder, and kick it closed behind me. But I am stopped in my tracks by the sight in front of me. I drop everything, and the Martini bottle clinks on the floorboards, mercifully not breaking, when I see Charlie sitting on the sofa, staring off into space. As the light from the window catches his face, I can see tear stains on his cheeks, damp red eyes, glazed. I see his hands and feet, twitching slightly, and hear the almost imperceptible noise of teeth chattering, as Charlie shakes, slightly, without control. My mind does immediate grotesque calculations. It can only be drugs. The only time I have ever seen Charlie in this state was after a really bad pill a couple of years ago in Brighton. He had moaned and shook and plummeted from deliriousness to despair in seconds and back again. I don’t remember him crying though, even then. He doesn’t acknowledge my entrance, or the bags crashing to the floor. He doesn’t even realize I am here. A splinter of me entertains an impulse, for whatever reason, to grab the Martini and run back out of the room as quickly as I entered it. But my feet are stuck to the spot. It is one of those few occasions when fatigue instantly takes you, and your body is already aware that the emotional effort needed for the next half an hour at least is going to leave you spent.
The good me, the moral me, rushes to the surface before the real me grabs the chance to leg it, and I whisper, ‘Charlie, what have you taken?’ This room does not need noise – it might crack something vital and the whole building will collapse. I don’t want to disturb anything that isn’t already quite clearly disturbed.
I see a flicker in