Left of the Bang. Claire Lowdon

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СКАЧАТЬ my boyfriend.’ As if to illustrate this, Tamsin kissed Callum on the cheek. There was a longish pause. ‘So … what are you up to these days, Chris?’

      ‘Well, actually, I’m in the army—’ Chris began, but he was interrupted by a violent thump on his shoulder. Leo’s brother Edwin, a small, smooth-faced man with thick dark eyebrows, had come to claim his friend.

      ‘Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve been waiting for this bastard to come and do shots with us for over half an hour.’

      ‘Great to meet you.’ Chris shook Callum’s hand vigorously. ‘And – and to see you too, Tamsin,’ he added, looking slightly confused.

      ‘Right fucker, your first one’s a triple,’ said Edwin, as he marched Chris over to their friends.

      ‘Where do you know him from?’ Callum asked Tamsin.

      She looked vague. ‘Ages ago. I don’t know him at all, really.’ Tamsin’s unusually large eyelids gave her face a sleepy, sensual expression. When she had been drinking it sometimes seemed to Callum as if it cost her a physical effort to keep her eyes from closing altogether.

      ‘Callum, you dirty great faggot, where have you been all my life?’ It was Will again, pulling Callum into a back-slapping hug. Tamsin made a face at Callum over Will’s shoulder, but allowed herself to be led off to meet Will’s ‘reinforcements’, who were busy re-stocking the drinks table with stronger stuff. The playpen was being packed away.

      * * *

      Tamsin woke from a dream about Bolognese sauce to the smell of Bolognese sauce. Then she remembered it was Sunday, and the smell modulated to bacon. She squinted at the other side of the bed. Callum was already up. Hoping to defer her hangover for another five minutes, she pulled the duvet over her head and settled back down into the pillow.

      The flush of the toilet woke her again. Tamsin came out from under the duvet and the smell adjusted itself for a third and final time. The door to the little en suite bathroom was ajar.

      ‘Callum. God. You could at least shut the door,’ she croaked.

      Callum emerged from the bathroom with an apologetic grin. He opened the window, filling the room with the fumes of the Edgware Road and the sickly strawberry scent from the shisha bar on the ground floor.

      ‘Shit, I feel rough.’ Tamsin pressed three fingers to each temple and glared up at Callum. ‘Why aren’t you in more pain?’

      Callum sat down on the bed. ‘Because I wasn’t half as full of it as you were, you nugget.’ He leaned in for a kiss, but Tamsin clamped her lips shut.

      ‘Mm-mmm.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t taste good. And I’m not kissing you while this room still stinks. En suite. Jesus. Maybe the least romantic proposition ever.’

      ‘All right, all right,’ he laughed, running a hand over his khaki-coloured hair, which immediately sprang back to attention. ‘I’ll get us some coffee.’

      Callum came back with coffee, toast and yesterday’s newspapers, the cutlery jittering on the tray as he bent to settle it in Tamsin’s lap. He perched on the windowsill with his own mug, watching Tamsin through steam lit white by the morning sun. Her loose cotton vest sagged in the middle and he could see the two parallel lines marking the start of her breasts. In the beginning, Tamsin had been embarrassed by her breasts, which were full and heavy and sat low on her chest. It had taken Callum a long time to get her to sleep without her bra on, and even longer to persuade her to stand up naked in front of him. Her left breast was noticeably larger than her right, something she hated and he adored.

      ‘You perving?’ asked Tamsin, without looking up from her paper.

      ‘Who, me? Never.’

      There was a longish silence. Then Callum said, ‘Chris seems like a nice guy.’ The words had a slightly processed, unnatural timbre. This was because Callum had been preparing to say them ever since Tamsin woke up.

      ‘Mmm?’ Tamsin glanced up distractedly. ‘Oh yeah. Yeah, he does.’

      ‘How did you say you knew him?’

      ‘I didn’t say, did I?’ Now Tamsin put the paper down, frowning slightly. ‘I don’t remember if I said. I don’t think I did.’ She paused. ‘It was my first year at College. He was going out with a friend of mine for a bit. So I saw him a couple of times, through her. Then they broke up and I didn’t see him again. Until last night.’

      Tamsin was surprised by both the lie and the facility with which she’d invented it.

      ‘Which friend?’ Callum wanted to know.

      ‘Girl called Kitty,’ Tamsin said. ‘Don’t think you ever met her.’

      ‘You didn’t know him biblically?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Did you – sorry.’ Callum winced at his own question.

      ‘Christ, Callum!’ Tamsin shook her head in exasperation. ‘No. No I did not sleep with him.’

      ‘Okay. Sorry. Tam, I’m sorry. I just wondered. I don’t know why.’ Smiling sheepishly, Callum padded over to the bed and got in beside Tamsin.

      ‘Am I allowed to kiss you yet?’ he asked.

      Tamsin put two fingers to his lips. ‘Only if you promise to stop being an idiot,’ she said, looking stern. ‘And be gentle, okay? My head hurts.’

      Callum made a little growling noise and pretended to bite her fingers. Then he kissed her, very softly, on the upper lip. The blue-and-green-checked duvet had slipped halfway down the bed. Callum tugged it up over their shoulders and drew Tamsin towards him for a hug, tucking her head under his chin. Her hair smelled of Herbal Essences shampoo and Marlboro Lights.

      ‘I love you,’ Tamsin said to Callum’s collarbone. ‘I love you and I really should get up. I’m so behind with my practice it’s not even funny.’ She yawned and stretched, then drew in for another kiss. ‘Right. That’s it. I’m up.’

      Callum lay with his hands behind his head and watched her dress. Halfway through the process – pale yellow cotton bra and faded jeans, no T-shirt – she went into the bathroom to clean her teeth and came back with a thick white blob of moisturiser above each corner of her upper lip. This was a preventative measure, talisman against the two deep lines flanking her father’s mouth. He watched her twisting the dome of her deodorant into her armpits. As she waited for it to dry, she held her arms away from her sides in a slightly simian pose. Callum knew all of this by heart and he loved it.

      * * *

      On the way from Callum’s flat to the bus stop, Tamsin stopped between the Halal Fish’n’Chip shop and the Discount Drug Co. She wanted to undo it all, to go back and tell Callum the truth about Chris. She had never lied to him about anything like this before, and she wasn’t entirely sure why she had now.

      But then, she thought, she had never told anyone about what happened – or rather, what didn’t happen – on the tube that day. At first, the enormity of her parents’ break-up had simply displaced everything around it. Later, when she remembered the incident, СКАЧАТЬ