Clearly I was out of my depth. Irony, was that the difference? My own cultural tastes were fairly unsophisticated but at least they were sincere, and how was I to tell the good kind of bad taste from the bad kind of bad taste? How did one listen to a piece of music ironically? How did one adjust one’s ears? An ABBA album in my hands would be a source of derision, in Connie’s a sign of cool, and yet it was still the same verse-chorus-verse. Was the vinyl imbued with different qualities, depending on who played it? I had, for instance, been a long-time advocate of the music of Billy Joel, particularly his early- to middle-period albums, and this had been the cause of some mockery from the hipper, edgier biochemists. Bland, they called him, middle-of-the-road and safe. Yet here on Connie’s jukebox was Barry Manilow, a far less sophisticated artist. What did Connie do to ‘Mandy’ that somehow rendered it ‘cool’?
The same applied to décor. The paraphernalia that gave Connie and her flatmate art-school credibility — the medical school skeleton, parts of mannequins, the stuffed animals — would have made me look like a serial killer. I dreaded the day that Connie would see my Balham flat — the flat-pack furniture and bare magnolia walls, the comatose yucca plant, the all-too-prominent television. Yet I also dreaded the idea that she might not make it that far.
Of course, she’d be mortified to be reminded of all this. Ironic bad taste is harder to pull off in a comfortable family home, where a phone that looks like a lobster is unlikely to raise much of a smile. That baton has been passed to Albie, forever on the lookout for interesting road signs or the disembodied heads of dolls.
What they both still share, though, is a fetish for postcards. Albie has plastered his bedroom with them, like very expensive wallpaper, and so we dutifully found ourselves in the Louvre gift shop, both of them compiling great stacks of
In Whitechapel, postcards covered the whole of the kitchen wall, two or three thick at some points, jumbled in with Polaroids of her art-school friends. There were a lot of punk-ish girls posing with cigarettes, but I was also struck by the number of handsome young men on display, usually with Connie or Fran draped adoringly around them, pouting and blowing kisses. Men in army fatigues or paint-stained overalls; men with eccentric facial hair; intimidating, unsmiling men, and one in particular, a shaven-headed thug with very blue eyes, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a bottle of beer in his hand. An action-movie mercenary staring at the camera while Connie clung to him or kissed the top of his stubbled head or pressed her cheek to his; impossible to ignore the infatuation in her, awful to see it too.
‘I should probably take those down,’ she said, behind me.
‘Is that …?’
‘That’s Angelo. My ex.’
‘He is. He’s also not important to me any more. Like I said, I’m going to take them down.’ With a little tug she tore the most prominent photo from the wall and placed it in the pocket of her dressing gown. Not in the bin, but in her breast pocket, next to — well, her breast.
There was a moment’s silence. We had made it to Sunday afternoon, a time of the week that always threatens to tip over into an almost unbearable gloom, and I wanted very much to leave on a positive note. ‘Perhaps I’d better go.’
‘The hostage is escaping.’
‘If I make a run for it, will you stop me?’
‘I don’t know. Do you want to be stopped?’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Then let’s go back to bed.’
Excruciating, isn’t it? But that was how we spoke to each other once upon a time. It was a new voice for me. Something had changed and I had no doubt, as I finally stumbled from the house on Sunday night, aching and comically dishevelled, heading back to Balham on empty trains, that I was in love with Connie Moore.
