and flabby and bruised. He shouldn’t be here, in front of my friends, making me look like an idiot.
Nim, Jules and Jake had picked up their coats and bags, as well as mine, and were trying to usher me to the door. Amy was staring at me, trying to work out what she could reasonably say about my boyfriend, who she at first really quite liked, but had recently come to almost despise. I could tell from her eyes that she was framing sentences in her head that wouldn’t upset me, but which would get her point across as well – I could also tell it wasn’t easy.
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, and marched towards where Charlie was supposed to be, hearing Jules whispering to the others behind me, ‘he really has changed, hasn’t he. Poor Nix.’ I shuddered at the pity of it all.
As I got closer to the group of guys, I could hear a laugh coming from within their circle. His laugh had always been too loud. I was five feet away when I saw one of the guys he worked with clock me coming towards them, and shove the guy sitting in front of him, obscured by one of the others. I could see notes flying towards a girl on the stage, who was kneeling close to the guys, massaging her plastic tits, and licking her lips, and pulling at her G-string as if she might take it off. She looked … hairless. Suddenly, an arm sprang into view, waving a fifty pound note at the stripper, and then the crowd seemed to clear, and I could see the note was attached to a hand, to a suited arm, to a man with spiky hair and sideburns, with the top button of his shirt undone, and his tie, knotted around his head like an idiot. The man was leering at the kneeling woman, and it was a smile I didn’t recognize – it was seedy and sordid and desperate and arrogant and awful. It was still Charlie, though.
All the other boys were staring at me now, not the stripper, and one of them was nudging Charlie hard on the arm, but his attention couldn’t be dragged from the bare breasts in front of him, pushed together to receive his fifty pound note. I stood and watched his mates desperately try and get his attention, with my hands on my hips, just waiting. Finally one of them said ‘Charlie’ loudly, and he turned quickly.
‘I’m fucking busy, what?’ and then he looked past his comrade, and saw me, his girlfriend, standing a few feet away.
I 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
