The Dictionary of Failed Relationships Read online

  But as she reached to pick up the phone, her hand would not move. Though her brain could send the signal, the fingers would not rise or even twitch. She tried lifting her left hand. It was locked down tight by her side, as though the palm were glued to the bed. She tried to lift her cheek from the pillow, but her head was as heavy as a sleeping child’s. She felt a panic rise from her stomach to her throat.

  Her answering machine was right where it always was on the nightstand, but it wouldn’t pick up. The signals persisted, a two-second ring followed by a two-second pause, two-second ring, two-second pause. After ten, she waited for the caller to give up and hang up; and after twenty, she waited again. But even then the phone would not hush. Rose stared at the receiver, blinking in rhythm to the rings.

  DAGENHAM

  By Anna Maxted

  Da·gen·ham ’da-gn-m, ’dag-nm [geographical name] 1: former municipal borough Southeast England in Essex, now part of Barking and Dagenham, a borough of East Greater London, England, population 139,900. 2: okay, so strictly speaking, the place name isn’t important. Everybody has their own geographic location for it. What’s important is it’s where the story began, the story of him or of the two of you, and it’s a name that causes either great sadness or joy.

  There is, thought Tamara, simply no excuse to look a mess on the beach. All that seaside perfection requires is a little planning and no piggery. (Why do some people make such a meal out of dieting? Eat less cake. And do Pilates, not aerobics. Aerobics is undignified, and probably oppressive.)

  Once you have the correct body, book your salon toffee-cream tan, commission a hard-liner fascist beautician—you want an effective bikini wax, not some twit picking daisies—and find the Jackie O. of shades. Your hair should be long enough to tie back unless, of course, you wish to resemble Don King in a gale, and your designer swimsuit should be a gorgeous, extortionate feat of engineering. The beachwear equivalent of a plasma TV.

  This isn’t exactly rocket science. More like junior high science.

  And yet, thought Tamara, frowning behind her D&G sunglasses, almost every woman on the beach looked a mess. Bright white, or scorched red, most were heavy with sag and wobble. And blotchy. And frizz-haired. Not to mention the hair on their heads. And where had the poor dears been tricked into buying their costumes? Did Target sell beachwear? A host of floral atrocities, each one with a low-cut pant, the nasty sheeny material covering every bit of those generous bottoms. Was there anything more suburban than a thick-sewn gusset? And as for their accessories! Navy-and-white striped shoulder bags, with golden anchors embroidered in the middle as a final monstrous touch!

  Nicholas, surveying the men, was equally appalled. One didn’t fly first class to one of the most exclusive hotels on the planet (courtesy of Elegant Resorts) to share the private beach with this sort of person. The entire point of holidaying at the Datai—“an idyllic retreat on the beautiful Malaysian island of Langkawi, set on the edge of an ancient virgin rain forest”—was that this sort of person wouldn’t be able to afford the Datai. Nicholas rolled over on his sun-lounger in disgust and groped for a Camel. “Tammy,” he said, tapping gray ash onto the golden sand, “I don’t want to alarm you, but take a look at that.”

  A fifth Pimm’s had made his voice loud, harsher than usual. He jerked his chin toward a man with shaved hair, a pale, untoned stomach, and a smattering of freckles on his back. Some sort of hooligan, here to get laid and lagered and to read bloody John Grisham, no doubt. Only language those sort of people understand, John Grisham. (Nicholas himself read bloody John Grisham, but he read him ironically, which was an altogether different affair.) He squinted at the thug’s book, a lip curl at the ready. The Mind of God. Eh?

  Tamara’s cool blue eyes followed his gaze. Nicholas, never one to let fact get in the way of a mediocre line, bawled, “Dagenham comes to the Datai!”

  Tamara, for whom spite also took precedence over reality, added, “Do you think he’s looking for the pictures?”

  Together, they hooted with laughter.

  Julie tried to concentrate on The Portrait of a Lady, but it was difficult. If you asked her (although this was unlikely, as when you come from Brentwood, people are not overly interested in your opinion on Henry James), she would have said that the book needed a good edit. From what Julie could gather from the leisurely introduction, the man had written the tome primarily to impress his literary mates. Apparently, James’s brother had had the temerity to accuse a previous effort, The Europeans, of being “thin.” The Portrait of a Lady was thick. Five hundred and seventy-eight pages thick. Julie preferred Jane Austen.

  Not that she was a snob or anything. She wouldn’t chuck Maeve Binchy out of bed. And an Elizabeth Berg was like a warm hug. But Jane Austen was her favorite. Such lovely manners they had in her books! (Julie had been raised on the premise that “manners cost nothing”—her mother had been a devout fan of anything that cost nothing. Consequently, her daughter was polite and clean, and every glass from which she drank had once contained Nutella. When a pensioner hobbled onto the train, and the pudgy young men and hard young women remained in their seats, Julie was as shocked the tenth time she saw such an occurrence as she was the first.)

  “You know,” she said to Darrell, “this isn’t half as good as Emma. With Emma, everyone spoke in character, and the plot was spot-on. With this, everyone just says what the author wants to say himself. And the plot is weak. There’s no motivation. And critics accuse Jane Austen of being narrow. As far as I can tell, James doesn’t have any more, like, breadth; it’s just that, occasionally, he sticks in a pompous paragraph about America or Europe. I’m halfway through and I still can’t get a grip on the heroine. Maybe it’s just me.”

  Darrell raised an eyebrow. He was not a reader of fiction, preferring fact. Whether it was history, philosophy, biography, or superstition, How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction or The Fall of Che Guevara, Darrell sucked up knowledge like spaghetti. If he wasn’t learning, he was bored. And where he came from, if you were bored, you got into trouble. Like throwing a trashcan through a shop window just to see what would happen. (Which, any way that you looked at it, was not good.) Happily, Darrell had a little more imagination than this as well as the sense to put his computer-literate mind to lucrative use. He waved his own book about in reply.

  “This bloke. Paul Davies. He’s wicked. He’s top. He’s a cosmologist, which, next to being an astronaut, is really cool. He’s writing about the whole meaning of existence—pretty much that the universe is far too complex and peculiar to be the result of coincidence. That maybe there’s something else that aided it— it’s really hard to explain. It’s just like that there might be a God, and the universe and our reality might be an expression of that.”

  “Wow,” said Julie, who was more comfortable with escapism. (Julie had spent most of her life escaping. Via willowy romantic novels, hard work, Saturday jobs, and by pronouncing all her consonants—anything, basically, that would remove her from where she came from.)

  “I’m boring you. Never mind. I’m going in the sea. Coming?”

  “Later.” Julie reclined on her lounger and watched her friend pad toward the water’s edge. A bubble of happiness welled to the surface, and she smiled. To be here. In this place. It was amazing. She dug her Wal-Mart sun lotion out of her new bag—she was proud of that bag; like yacht-wear, it was appropriate—and blobbed cream on her pale sun-starved legs. She stretched, luxuriating in the toasty heat like a cat. The colors of the place. Aquamarine. Bright blue. White. Green. She was Dorothy in Munchkinland after a lifetime of Kansas gray. As a teenager, Julie had vowed that when she was a grown-up she would have foreign holidays. She had made the vow on the day she heard her mother whispering about Cheryl Cooper’s girl, from next door, dead of breast cancer at thirty, and never been abroad.

  A raucous laugh rang above the sh-sh-hush of the sea. A short distance down the beach, a lanky man in loud shorts and a hard-faced woman in oddly large sun
glasses (she looked like a blue-bottle, thought Julie) were haw-hawing with their pink mouths open. Julie tensed. Their noses were pointing at Darrell. She couldn’t hear their conversation, but she didn’t need to. They were laughing at him. She knew it. Julie—who’d been a fat kid at a rough school—could spot a sneer at ten paces. Such people wore a furtive look and a gleeful aura. Julie tried to hear what had already been said, spooling back the tape of her subconscious. It turfed up “Dagenham.”

  The arrogance of those who have enough money not to give a damn. Hurt, she looked at Darrell again and tried to see him through their eyes. He’d razored off all his hair the night before, as it was “easier.” Berk. His soft stomach. Well, the man had survived on economy sausages all through college, and he refused to believe that a Snickers bar was fattening (because it was “tiny”). So. A bit of pudge and the wrong haircut. Shame fought pain.

  And then, a rip of rage tore through her. You never could get away. Darrell himself said that. If not proud, he was defiant about his roots. But Julie had been running since the age of nine. After educating herself sick and training in accountancy (what could be more middle class?), she had presumed her new identity complete. But this rich couple saw through her Penguin Classic and her careful speech to her common core.

  But that was the thing with other people. If you came from Essex, no one allowed you to be intelligent. Not your friends, not your teachers. You were conditioned to be thick. If it hadn’t been for their parents’ vicarious ambition and their own desperate claustrophobia, Julie and Darrell would be working in the local supermarket. At college, expectations of stupidity subsided (there, the Ilford accent was emulated by students from Hampshire to Hampstead), then, upon graduation, resurged. Julie recalled the football thugs running riot through Amsterdam a year back. One man, in particular, had the legend Pussy Hunter tattooed on his huge gut. Yet these people couldn’t differentiate between Darrell (who, incidentally, loved cats) and Mr. Pussy Hunter!

  When Darrell sauntered back from the sea, Julie smiled, but the gorgeous light had been leached from the day. “Let’s go in,” she said. “I’m sunburned.”

  Although Nicholas and Tamara always availed themselves of the finest that Elegant Resorts could offer, they might as well have stayed in London and paid their local builder to tip a skip of sand into their garden, for all the exploring they did. Nicholas despised any culture other than that of greed, and he wouldn’t shift his (rather big) womanly bottom off its sun-lounger for the whole fortnight—except to use the Mediterranean Sea/Indian Ocean/ Andaman Sea as a luxury open-air urinal. Yet, here they were, on a tour of the coastline. Tammy was determined to return to work browner than thou—and a day on a boat would accelerate her tan. Nicholas occasionally deferred to his girlfriend so that she would indulge his sexual peccadillos (nappy, nipple, nanny— don’t ask).

  “I thought this was private,” exclaimed Tamara as she saw the other couple already sitting in the motorboat. “Yes,” said the guide, grinning. “Only four people—private!” Someone should teach you how to floss, thought Tamara. Nicholas nudged her. “We should have stayed on the beach,” he said, not bothering to lower his voice. “We’ll pick up all sorts of common habits.”

  When she saw them, Julie’s heart shrank inside her ribcage. She turned away as Tamara climbed into the boat. It wobbled and so did Tamara. “Careful,” cried Darrell. He instinctively held out his hand, and instinctively, Tamara took it, then a moment later let it go.

  Tamara arranged herself so that every socially acceptable body part was exposed to sunshine. She decided that Dagenham looked less, mmm, trailer park clothed: baggy shorts, a red crew-necked T-shirt, Adidas sneakers. (Nicholas wore his holiday uniform: navy baseball cap, Mambo shorts, Lacoste top, and deck shoes.) Tamara closed her eyes. Dagenham insisted on chatting to the guide, and his voice grated. It was so . . . naive. His frowsy girlfriend—a secretary, no doubt—remained silent. Tamara noted that the woman’s lipstick was bigger than her lips. Really! Collagen was invented for people like you, she thought. Nicholas yawned without covering his mouth. Tamara could see strings of saliva, tacky and white. He’d overdone it in the sun yesterday and was broiled red—a good color for an angry person, but it didn’t flatter him. She twitched. Occasionally, you wanted charm with your diamonds.

  “So, where you from then?”

  Tamara realized in shock that Dagenham was addressing her.

  “Kensington,” she replied (rewriting his question as “Where do you live?” as she didn’t wish to answer “East Croydon”).

  “Rude of me,” added Dagenham, extending a hand. “Darrell.”

  “Tamara.” She didn’t bother to introduce Nicholas. On her salary, she was above manners.

  “Wotcha,” said Darrell. Tamara tried not to smile and succeeded.

  Julie stormed into the lobby, Darrell trotting behind her like a bewildered puppy. “What? What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nah, go on. What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Please, Jules, what?”

  “Nothing.” That bitch. That cow. And her boyfriend with a jaw like Judge Dredd. They were both too haughty to acknowledge her and Darrell’s presence. That witch, deigning to humor Darrell, like Queen Elizabeth meeting a homeless person. And Darrell, too artless to realize he was a clown to these people. Six feet tall, but in need of protection. Julie felt possessive. Not that she . . .

  “Look,” said Darrell, later by the pool, nudging her from quite possibly the longest paragraph in the world.

  “Don’t pretend we’re speaking!” snapped Julie, hating herself. She hated herself for having pale English skin, for finding Henry James a bore, for liking the maraschino cherry in her daiquiri (you can take the girl out of Essex . . . ), but most of all she hated herself for behaving like a wife. The whole point of being Darrell’s oldest and dearest friend was that her status was higher than that of squeeze. The Michelles, the Nicoles, the Simones, they’d come and go, but her relationship with Darrell was a constant. And now, after one morning with that braying horse of a woman, Julie found herself reduced to a sulking cliché. She had felt threatened.

  “Look, though.” She looked. A small gray-brown monkey scampered along the poolside, whipped a banana slice from the side of a cocktail glass with his curiously human fingers, and crouched to dig through an open bag. (He had good taste for a monkey, as he’d ignored Julie’s $12.99 thrift-store bargain and had gone straight for Tamara’s pale pink Hermès number.) “Nicholas!” shrieked Tamara. Nicholas took three threatening steps toward the monkey and roared, “Sod off!” The monkey took three threatening steps toward Nicholas and roared something as rude in monkey language. Nicholas saw the large yellow pointed teeth, and he backed away.

  “Bit of a berk, innee?” said Darrell. “Wonder what she’s doing with him.”

  “What do you care?”

  She was tempted to tell him about the Dagenham jibe. It wasn’t that she wanted to hurt him. She wanted to share her hurt—as if telling him would dilute it. She couldn’t bear that Darrell was intrigued by this woman, like Mellors lusting after Lady Chatterley.

  “She’s all right,” said Darrell. He winked at Julie. “I might have a pop.”

  Julie forced a smile. Suddenly, despite the beauty and the sunshine and the sharp colors, her head was as gray and congested as a motorway. She couldn’t hear herself think for all the dirt and noise, heat and fury inside her. She wished for regression—to be a speck in the womb, with a mind fresh and clean, a blank slate unblemished by the endless layers of grime that life heaps upon you. The irony was that she’d come here for peace.

  Nicholas and Tamara were eating dinner on their fantastic balcony with its endless view of the sea and rain forest (and pool area), and Tamara was trying to get drunk. She had a better time with Nicholas when she was drunk. His jokes would become funnier and sex would be more bearable. Sex was a pastime they undertook more out of a sense of obligation than passion. Because Nicho
las wasn’t great with women. His world as a rain-maker was one of silver Porsche Carreras, and yes sirs. Of twenty-hour working days and dinners at Nobu (a cold restaurant for cold people). Of brands and bonuses and closing deals on slopes. Women were merely another commodity that became increasingly available in proportion to your wealth. (Tamara knew about the lap-dancing clubs and the fifty grand blown on coke and hookers.) But Nicholas was awkward with women. If Tamara were honest, their one shared interest was the denigration of the rest of the human race.

  A shadow down by the pool caught her eye. Tamara stubbed out her cigarette in the remains of her lobster and stood up faster than she had intended. “I’m going for a walk,” she announced and walked out, leaving Nicholas to his Cristal and Tom Clancy.

  Darrell stared over the luscious trees to the glittering ocean and saw none of it. Women. What was it with them? Or rather, what was it with her? They required you to be telepathic, omniscient— a cross between God and David Blaine. That silent treatment was a killer. He couldn’t stand the dishonesty of it. Obviously, he had committed a foul, heinous crime (in his sleep, perhaps?) and was being punished. It was totally out of character. The reasons he prized Julie as his great mate were that she was fun, funny, and, that rarest of female attributes, reasonable.

  Unlike Simone—or was it Nicole?—who had forbidden him to drink water after nine P.M. because she couldn’t stand being woken in the night by his trips to the toilet, Julie was rational. Sensible. Balanced. This was why he adored her. (Plus, she was well-stacked, he couldn’t tell a lie.) So why this abrupt and terrifying bout of insanity?