Connie always dozes when the alarm goes off whereas I am already awake. Connie puts her bra on before any of her other clothes, I work on the lower half then proceed upwards. Connie likes a manual toothbrush, I swear by electric. Connie talks on the phone for hours, I am brief and to the point. Connie carves a roast chicken like a surgeon, I make excellent stews. Connie is late for flights, whereas I like to be there the requisite two hours before departure, because why would they ask if they didn’t mean it? Connie has a facility for mimicry and dancing, I do not. Connie dislikes mugs but rarely uses a saucer with a teacup, habitually burns toast, hates having her ears touched or whispered into, licks jam off her knife, chews ice-cubes and sometimes, shockingly to me, eats raw bacon off the chopping board. Connie likes gritty award-winning dramas, old musicals and berating politicians on the news. I like documentaries about extreme weather conditions. She dislikes tulips and roses, cauliflower and swede, and eats tomatoes as if they were apples, wiping the juice from her chin with her thumb. She paints her toenails in front of the TV on Sunday nights, each leg raised in turn in a wonderful way, sheds a startling amount of hair into the plughole yet never removes it, has a terrifying dent in her scalp which she calls her ‘metal plate’ from a childhood mishap on a diving board, a surprising number of black fillings in her teeth, a raised mole on her left shoulder, two piercings in each ear. She leaves a certain smell on her pillow, prefers red wine to white, thinks chocolate is overrated, and has an infinite capacity for sleep, could sleep standing up if she chose. We made these discoveries each day, then stood and undressed on opposite sides of the bed in which we made love 90, then 80, then 70 per cent of our nights. We witnessed all the petty maladies, the stomach upsets and chest infections, the gnarled toenails, the ingrowing hairs, boils and rashes that took the gleam off the person we had first presented. No matter, no panic, these things happen, and instead we shopped for food together, pushing the trolley a little self-consciously at first, trying on this domesticity. We had what we ironically referred to as our ‘drinks cabinet’ and brought back lurid liqueurs when we travelled abroad. We argued over tea, Connie favouring fragrant, vaguely medicinal brews over regular tea-bags. We argued once again when she destroyed my fridge by defrosting the freezer section with a screwdriver, then again about the efficacy of Chinese medicine, and once more about furniture, as my perfectly decent sofa-bed was removed and replaced with Connie’s smoky, baggy velvet affair. My fitted carpets, chosen for their hard-wearing neutrality — ‘office carpets’, she called them — were torn up. We painted the floorboards together, as young couples must.
There were other changes, too. Connie was, in those days, ferociously untidy. She isn’t like that now and I suppose it’s one of the ways in which I’ve managed to change her, but in those days she used to leave a trail of pen lids, sweet-wrappers, hair slides and grips and pins, elastic bands, pieces of costume jewellery, the backs of earrings, packets of tissues, a single piece of gum wrapped in foil, small change from around the world. It was not unusual for her to reach into the pocket of a capacious coat for keys and to pull out a small wrench, a stolen ashtray, a desiccated apple-core or the stone of a mango. Books were left face down on the toilet cistern, discarded clothes were pushed into a corner like fallen leaves. She liked to ‘leave dishes to soak’, an act of self-deception that I’ve always abhorred.
But, for the most part, I didn’t mind. Light travels differently in a room that contains another person; it reflects and refracts so that even when she was silent or sleeping I knew that she was there. I loved the evidence of her past presence, and the promise of her return, the way she changed the smell of that gloomy little flat. I had been unhappy there, but that was in the past. It felt like being cured of some debilitating disease, and I was jubilant. ‘Domestic bliss’ — the pairing of those words made perfect sense to me. I don’t mean to strike an inappropriate note, but few things have ever made me happier in my life than the sight of Connie’s underwear drying on my radiator.
London changed, too. The city that had always seemed somewhat mean and grey, ineptly conceived, impractical and dour, became renewed. Connie was a Londoner and knew it like a cabbie. Street markets and drinking dens, Chinese, Turkish, Thai shops and restaurants and greasy spoons. It was like discovering that the somewhat dreary house in which you’ve grown up has one hundred further rooms, each leading off the other, each full of strangeness or beauty or noise. The city where I lived made sense because Connie Moore was in it.
