An Almost Perfect Moon. Jamie Holland

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СКАЧАТЬ been lovely. Still, it had been a long time ago. He’d been eighteen then. They’d met, briefly, in Africa, where both had been spending six months before going on to university. But they would probably never have seen each other again had it not been for the fact that their parents lived quite close to each other in Suffolk. Sitting outside their tents watching the sun set over the Ngorongoro Crater, the world had never seemed bigger; discovering they lived barely fifteen miles apart back home struck them as a particularly strange piece of serendipity. On his return, he bravely called her up. Her father was in the RAF and they’d only been posted there a couple of years before, while Harry had lived in the same house in Polstead all his life. He was able to take her places she’d never been before – the best pubs, the prettiest spots. The relationship moved fast. Most of his other friends were still away, so he and Jenny spent almost all of the final couple of months before university together, totally wrapped up in their own little microcosm into which no one else was allowed or required to enter. They would meet up in the evenings and drive to a pub, or go to see a film. At weekends they took themselves off camping, walking for miles and miles and talking incessantly, so that in a short time Harry felt he knew more about Jenny than just about anyone he’d ever met. They even took a week off to go to Paris together, holding hands as they idled around Montmartre, gazing into each other’s eyes across café tables. Making love by night. Harry remembered feeling quite heady with the romance of it.

      He felt he’d come of age during his time with her. What were his previous relationships compared with what he had with Jenny? Nothing. Merely insignificant teenage fumblings. Everything was different with her. They were just so right together, they laughed so much, had so much fun, and the summer days seemed so particularly summery: long, light and warm. Youth tasting the cup of adulthood without the weights of responsibility. When he wasn’t with her, he thought about her: the smell of her dark flowing hair; the long eyelashes that protected her hazel eyes. He would think of the delicate curve of her neck and the outline of her collar bone, so sensuous, feminine and alluring. Harry felt an intensity to his love, his feelings given added confidence by Jenny’s incredible love for him.

      So how had he allowed her to melt away from his life? Everything had changed once he got to Cambridge. He was there, and Jenny was in London, beginning four years of teacher training at Roehampton. They were no longer half-an-hour apart and it was no longer summer. For a brief, blissful while, they had been flowing in the same wind, but with the flick of a switch, their lives were suddenly set on totally different courses. All around him at Cambridge, his fellow students were getting drunk, debating the meaning of life and sleeping with one another. Jenny sounded distant on the phone and hurt when he didn’t ring when he said he would. He began to feel resentful that she seemed to depend on him so much; the balance of their relationship had somehow shifted. When she came to visit him, early on in the term, he felt embarrassed: young freshers weren’t supposed to be involved in serious – and hence boring – relationships; they were meant to be young bucks, carefree, unshackled and irresponsible. By the Sunday afternoon, Harry was snapping at her irritably and she was looking at him with disbelieving pain. They went for a walk across the water meadows, but it was no good. The magic of the summer had gone. Then she asked him whether he’d slept with anyone else, and he admitted he had. He’d got drunk, ended up in some girl’s bed, screwing her while someone else was sick in the corridor outside. It hadn’t meant a thing and he hadn’t seen or spoken to her since. Jenny looked desolate. Without saying another word, she drove off in her cluttered Peugeot. It was the last time he saw her.

      From rather enjoying thinking about the fun they’d had that summer, Harry now felt rather depressed. To make matters worse, he’d never really gone out with anyone else at Cambridge. All those pathetic plans to sleep around and be a ‘free agent’ – what a sham. He’d kissed quite a lot of people, slept with some of them, and then started seeing a girl called Katrina in his last two terms. Looking back on it now, he realized he had been fairly horrible to her too. He rarely saw her during the day, creeping round to her rooms last thing, spending the night with her, then drifting off the following morning. Once they’d left, the – the relationship, if it could be called that, ground to a halt. They liked each other, but not enough to make an effort any more.

      Who came next? A year of being single and jealous of friends who had settled relationships, and then Jo, an old Cambridge friend. She had been single for a while too, so it became a pairing of convenience. They carried on being friends, only now they slept together. Harry wondered whether he might feel more for her once he knew every inch of her body. But he didn’t. Then she found someone to fall in love with properly and that was that. They were still friends though, which was more than he could say for Jenny or Katrina. And Jo got married to the man she’d fallen in love with. Harry and he became friends too, and when they asked him to design the service sheet, he felt only too happy to help out. He liked doing that kind of work. It was something slightly different, didn’t take long, and all the compliments at the wedding gave him a smug sense of satisfaction.

      Harry switched on the radio, hoping for some old classics on Radio Two or Heart FM, but didn’t recognize anything they were playing, so switched to Classic FM instead. It was never long before they played something he knew, and the stuff he’d never heard before was always bearable as background noise. Soon after Jo, he’d started seeing a New Zealander called Tanya. She was almost very beautiful, but something about the end of her nose and her slightly crooked teeth spoilt things. And he also had a suspicion that her eyes were just slightly too wide apart. He kept hoping that somehow these minor flaws would iron themselves out as he grew more and more fond of her. It was Ben who put him straight. Tanya’s flaws weren’t her nose or teeth. It was simply that they weren’t really suited. Harry knew his friend was right, but carried on going out with her until, fortunately, she decided to go back to New Zealand. As he waved her off at Heathrow, Harry felt an enormous sense of relief and liberation sweep over him.

      There was only one other person he’d slept with before Julia. Christ, he couldn’t even remember her name. That was terrible. He stopped painting and stood back, rubbing his chin. A man’s name, shortened for a girl. Sam, or Marty. Toni? What was it? Clary. That was it. Not a man’s name at all. She’d been voracious though, pulling off his clothes the moment they were in her room, then leading him to the shower and getting straight down to business. He remembered thinking her sexual confidence must stem from experience, and then becoming terrified she might give him some dreadful sexually transmitted disease. Still, she was feisty and attractive, and Harry was slightly drunk and his fears quickly subsided. But after making love for a second time back in her room, she pulled out a cigarette and started to smoke. He hadn’t touched a cigarette himself for a couple of years and the smell, at that time in the early hours of the morning, seemed particularly repugnant. The lights were off, but the room was still suffused by a faint orange glow from the streetlights outside, and Harry watched in horror as the burning red tip glowed brighter every time she inhaled. Then, her fix of nicotine complete, she leant across him, her left nipple brushing against his chest, and stubbed it out on a plate on the bedside cabinet.

      ‘Hmm,’ she breathed over him, and thrust her tongue in his mouth once more. The taste was vile, like kissing an ash-tray, and completely unerotic. The next morning he left as soon as he could, appalled at his own cheapness.

      That had been nearly two years ago. Until Julia, he’d forsaken casual sex and any relationship vowing that unless he met someone he could fall in love with, he would rather stay both single and chaste. Harry smiled to himself. He hadn’t thought about his former girlfriends for ages. But it was sad that with the exception of Jenny, he’d slept with five people and only really liked one of them. That was Jo, and she’d been a friend anyway. If he’d known what he knew now, he wondered, would he have discarded Jenny so casually? But at the time, in his youthful imagination, he’d pictured a future full of wild love affairs and nights of passion with a string of beautiful women, until someone swept him off his feet so completely he’d never want for anything again. He stopped painting again, and went upstairs and out onto the road, clutching his phone.

      ‘Ben, hi, it’s me,’ he said into the phone.

      ‘Oh, СКАЧАТЬ