chapter 20, part 1

Even the adverts were taking the piss.

'The colour for the season? It's grey,' the women on the television said as Ben flipped between channels. Adverts for carpets and blinds in cool dove tones flooded muted window displays, and the wall at the Underground station was scrubbed and painted over in its standard concrete shade--even the graffiti artists that took to it after seemed to have bought out the grey scale section of the local B&Q.

Summer was cold and wet and not a summer at all. London was a sea of black jackets and black trousers and pewter piercings. The Ancient Ones had both come down with something hacking and wet and taken on a pallor the colour of dust. Christine was stopping by more and more often, and even she had done something ridiculous and dyed her hair a dull silver. Maria, who had a penchant and a trust fund for the latest fashions, spent so much time in black that Ben wouldn't have been surprised if she picked up a hood and scythe on her next shopping spree.

Ben bought the cat a flash new bowtie, bright red with golden bells. It lasted three minutes before Bill killed it and vomited up red threads onto his pillowcase.

'You need out of that hellhole,' his sister-in-law Shawna said on the phone, sounding just a bit desperate herself. Ben could hear the wail of his newest niece in the background and his nephew chanting 'mum' with increasing urgency. 'Come back to Swansea. Just for a while. When's the last time you had a holiday? Christmas?'

Ben couldn't remember. Ben didn't particularly want a holiday. He was doing perfectly fine at work. The new clerk was the old-fashioned old-chap sort that knew how to entertain solicitors with ribald stories that would turn Ben's stomach, but was professional enough and made sure that cases found their way onto Ben's desk. It wasn't the amount of work he was used to getting from Tessa, but it was enough. He wasn't sure he could deal with more at the moment anyway.

'Maybe not for a while,' Shawna said. 'Maybe forever. We have barristers in Swansea, you know. Or go for something less high stress. Retrain for property sales or whatever. Your flat's probably worth a fortune. You've paid it off, haven't you? You could sell it and buy somewhere nice on the Gower, then sell bloody ice creams for all we care. That city isn't good for you.'

Ben entertained the brief image of doing exactly that--manning a Cornetto trolley on the beach like he had when he was a boy, shaded by an umbrella, passing slow moments by watching families amble past, sometimes, when it was warm enough, the odd, dry-mouth-inducing fat woman in a clingy bikini. Sometimes he'd scribble a quick sketch in the back of the unused receipts book, trying to capture the curves of a body, the bulges, the swells. He was never good at faces, though. They'd always looked plastic, indistinct. Back then, he had trouble reconciling the soul of a person, what was in the eyes, with the rest of the body. It was lust. Nothing more.

It hadn't been lust with Tessa. Not just. He would never draw her, either. Never see if he'd beaten what eluded him, if he could duplicate the rush of affection in her dark eyes.

Finally, in August, he gave in. He bought his train ticket, drugged his cat, stuffed him a pet carrier, and set off on a two week holiday to South Wales, to promised sunshine and an attic room away from the nursery. He'd be back on the 19th of August, late afternoon, when - in some city church he'd forgotten the name of - Tessa would be married and out of his life for good.

'Benny boy,' his brother Roger said at the train station, hugging him with ham-sized arms as Bill mewled plaintively in his cat carrier. 'You look like shit.'

'I know,' Ben said.

'Welcome home,' his brother said with a clap on the shoulder. 'Shawna's made roast.'

'I'm not hungry.'

'Sorry, what was that, ***?'

'I'm starving.'

'That's more like it.'

++

The house was chaos, though a cheerful sort that gently jack-hammered away at the heavy grey concrete weighing down Ben's heart. His nephews treated him to sloppy blackcurrant kisses and his sister-in-law piled roast potatoes onto his plate until he'd pop. Upstairs, Bill slept off the rest of the sedatives in Ben's attic room. Downstairs, his brother fed the kids while Shawna leaned across the table, new-mother-boobs spilling out of her top, and asked him, 'So is it a girl, then?'

'Is Uncle Ben getting married?' his niece asked, cutting a tube of macaroni in half with her plastic fork.

'No,' Ben said. 'Never.'

Her reply was tearful. 'Why not?'

'For fuck's sake,' Ben said under his breath.

'You shouldn't swear,' his (ever-pious) nephew said.

'Finish your dinner,' Roger snapped, looking from daughter to son to wife. 'And mind your own bloody business. All of you.'

Of course Rog was just as big of a gossip as his wife and children, though he was much better at hiding it. He corralled Ben into the office with a bottle of whiskey after dinner, and they sat there with a pack of cards as Roger dealt a game that he knew very well that Ben would lose.

'Go on then,' Rog said. 'What's her name?'

'Tessa,' Ben mumbled.

'Tessa,' Roger said. He took a deep breath and laid down his cards. Ben had won the first hand.

He pushed his coins across to Ben. 'That's the last time we're going to hear that name in this house.'

'Sorry?' Ben said.

'Don't "sorry?" me with your posh twatery, Ben. I know what you're like. You want to talk about things. And obsess over them. And pick every bloody fucking thing apart until you can't move from your bed. What was the last one's name?'

'That was in school.'

'Over twenty years ago.' Roger threw out his hands to the cramped surrounding, the His and Hers matching desks scattered with blueprints and receipts. 'And yet here you are again.'

He was right. Here he was again. Always at conflict within himself, never coming to terms with what he was, what he liked, who he liked. Always embarrassed or insecure or unsure, always a wimp, always too scared to do something unless it literally fell into his lap. Tessa would have winded him if she'd tried, and he'd still have waited on her to take his face between her hands and kiss him. Where had the man gone that had sat Tessa across from him and told her to take more? Where had that exhilarating rush of power disappeared to?

Gone, probably, as soon as he set eyes on Guy, and had the faintest clue of what went on at home when Ben wasn't there to see.

'Just deal the next hand, please,' Ben grumbled.

Roger took his cards and slid them aside. 'You know what they say.' Roger twisted his lips into a little smile, the bald pate of his head gleaming in the office light. 'Best way to get over a woman?'

'No, Rog,' Ben said.

'Serious, mate. It's happening.'

'No.'

&ap os;Just Shawna's ex-colleague. Biggest tits I've ever seen, this one. Arse to match. Think you'd like her.'

'Rog, shut the fuck up.'

++

To be fair, she did have quite sizeable breasts, and not a bad backside, either. Leighann was even pleasant enough to talk to, and while she bored easily of his bloodiest work anecdotes (not something Ben was used to) they shared a former school and a few former teachers, and happily exchanged stories of mutual acquaintances in an evening in which Ben only thought of Tessa twice.

The first time was when she pushed her burger and chips away half-finished and said, 'Eyes bigger than my stomach, I have.'

In which Ben could perfectly picture Tessa in her place, pulling that plate closer with a raised eyebrow, daring him tell her she wasn't done.

The second time was in Ben's car outside her flat, when Leighann went in for the kiss and slid his hand directly onto her belly.

'Rog told me you liked this sort of thing,' she whispered, gripping his fingers, which in turn gripped the slight roll of tum. 'I looked it up. Read what you might like. You do like it, don't you?'

'I, uh.' Ben squeezed. His fingers felt raw and cracking at the knuckles.

"My ex-husband was always on me to lose weight. I thought it was kind of odd at first, the whole chubby-chaser thing, but has to be better than him, yeah?' She patted his hand. 'Would you like to come in for a drink before you go home?'

'I...erm...'

Tessa. Tessa Tessa Tessa. Something about the mention of the ex-husband was what did it. The sudden unbidden image that flung itself into his head: Tessa in a too-small dressing gown, satiated by pizza...three pizzas. Tessa, red-faced and angry and tearful, trying to get her wants across to a man who refused to listen to her past the haze of his own lust. Ben wasn't that guy.

'I had a nice evening,' Ben said, unhanding her belly and shifting back to the driver's side. 'I'm just not...ready.'

'Bad break up?'

'Something like that,' Ben replied, face reddening.

She gave him a sympathetic smile, then kissed him on the cheek.

'Night, Ben,' she said.

'Night, Leighann,' he replied, and he didn't miss her when she shut the car door with a slam.

++