Better Than Easy Read online

  Better Than Easy

  Nick Alexander was born in Margate, and has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and France. When he isn’t writing, he is the editor of the gay literature site BIGfib.com. His latest novel, The Case of the Missing Boyfriend, was an eBook bestseller in early 2011, netting sixty thousand downloads and reaching number 1 on Amazon. Nick lives in the southern French Alps with two mogs, a couple of goldfish and a complete set of Pedro Almodovar films. Visit his website at www.nick-alexander.com

  Also by Nick Alexander

  THE FIFTY REASONS SERIES

  Fifty Reasons to Say Goodbye

  Sottopassaggio

  Good Thing, Bad Thing

  Better Than Easy

  Sleight of Hand

  SHORT STORIES

  13.55 Eastern Standard Time

  FICTION

  The Case of the Missing Boyfriend

  Better than Easy

  Nick Alexander

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by BIGfib Books.

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 2011by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Nick Alexander, 2009

  The moral right of Nick Alexander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-0-85789-638-4 (eBook)

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Combining

  Dogs, Rhubarb and Pantaloons

  Dreams On Hold

  All About Tom

  Mental Infidelity

  All About Who?

  Sixty-Forty Split

  Uh Oh!

  The Pot and The Kettle

  A Perfect Day

  Post Mortem

  A Question Of Belief

  Surprise Guest

  Petites Mensonges

  Badly Timed Abandonment

  Sex Like Chocolate

  Strategic Paranoia

  Unavoidable Mistletoe

  Deserving Better

  Waam Baam…

  The End Of The World

  Two Days

  This Friend Of Mine

  Selfish Contrition

  Best Friend

  Knowing

  Living In A Fairytale

  Reasons For Champagne

  Good Enough

  Expert Advice

  Lies, Damn Lies, And Politics

  Keeping Everyone Happy

  Two Bit Farce

  Three Letters

  Phasing Out

  The Key

  Bad Acting

  What You’re Good At

  Casting Error

  If Things Were Different

  It’s True Though, Isn’t It?

  A Tiny Goodbye

  Vaporising Hope

  Better Than Easy

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Richard Labonte and to Rosemary, Allan and Giovanni for their help with the final manuscript. Thanks to Apple computer for making such wonderful reliable work tools, and to BIGfib for making this book a reality.

  Do not pray for easy lives.

  Pray to be stronger men!

  Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers.

  Pray for power equal to your tasks.

  Phillips Brooks

  Combining

  Sleep evades me. The wind is hurling itself, invisible battalions crashing against the shutters. I imagine that the subsonic thuds are the lines they show on weather maps, smashing to smithereens, cartoon style, on the walls of the building, hopelessly, pointlessly.

  Tom sleeps through it all, dreaming it would seem – his mouth is working constantly, his tongue clicks occasionally against the roof of his mouth.

  I can feel the warmth of his body or maybe something more than just warmth – his aura? – jumping across the gap where our thighs nearly meet. From the waist up our bodies curve away into separateness.

  Another subsonic wave collides with the bedroom window. I can feel the air inside the room move too. There must be a gap somewhere.

  I roll onto my side and study Tom’s features; he looks beautiful. He’s no slouch when awake, but asleep he looks younger – peaceful, neutral somehow.

  I know he’s still asleep precisely because our bodies aren’t touching. When awake Tom always positions himself so that there is at least one point of contact – unless we’re at war. In winter he hugs me like a koala, hot and comforting against the cold extremities of the bed, while in summer it can be just a heel, or a shin; the simple contact of a finger, a toe, his dick… but whatever the season, there’s always a spot where our bodies meet. And then sleep takes him and he rolls away.

  I sigh and smile at the contented look on his face and wonder if he is truly happy. He’s so hard to read when awake – he gives so little away. And then I roll onto my back and wonder what the day will bring.

  I think of a song by Holcombe Waller – my current musical obsession. “Hey oh, hey oh, hey oh; who controls your emotions?”

  For Tom will wake up soon and the nature of the day will begin to crystallise, like some complex mathematical result of putting his star sign or biorhythms, or whatever controls our emotions, together with mine. Or maybe the day already exists somewhere over the horizon, and we just have to sit and watch as the weather of the day – sunshine or storms, cold shoulders or popcorn – slides invisibly into place.

  A few drops of rain lash against the window revealing at least one aspect of what’s in store. I move myself an inch to the right so that our legs are touching. It feels so good, that soft human warmth, magical – mystical almost. Tom replies with an “Umh,” sound and then with stunningly crisp diction, does his sleep-talking thing – answering, I reckon, a dream telephone.

  “Hello? Yes?” he says. “One moment. I’ll put you through.”

  As I start to smirk he raises his knees and breaks wind – a vibrating two-second whoopee-cushion number.

  “Jesus!” I snigger. “Tom!”

  Tom clears his throat. “Uh?” he says, maybe to me, maybe to his dream caller.

  I study his face and see the smoothness slip away, see the brow wrinkle, see him change from angel (OK… farting angel) to human being as something slips into and possesses his body. Ego maybe? His face takes on a recognisable configuration: bleary, slightly irritated. “You woke me,” he says.

  “You farted,” I reply.

  “I was asleep,” he says, groaning and rolling away. As he turns he pushes a foot out backwards to find my leg – all is not lost.

  I yawn and stretch luxuriantly, then curl towards his back and think that no matter what the day brings – rain and storms or sunshine and laughter – fifteen hours from now we will be back in this bed, cuddled together in animal comfort, for the simple reason that we have decided that, from now on, this is how it is goi
ng to be.

  *

  We duck, laughing, into Monoprix. It’s raining hard now, and still too windy for umbrellas – water is trickling down my back.

  Tom runs his fingers up through his normally spiky hair. “Wow!” he says. “You never warned me about the joys of the Mediterranean climate.”

  I shrug and shiver. “It’s November – at least when it rains it rains… And it never lasts more than a couple of days.” I pick up a shopping basket.

  “So,” Tom says pushing through the turnstile. “Where’s the frozen stuff?”

  “You’re gonna be disappointed,” I say, pointing the way. Monoprix is like a New York supermarket, sandwiched into the available, ancient space, aisles not big enough for a full-width trolley. The frozen food section is about three square meters.

  I follow him – intrigued and determined not to say anything, just to see what he buys. I’m thinking about this strange mutant entity that is coupledom: not Tom, nor I, but a pick and mix of both. It’s surprising and intriguing to watch the boundaries fade, the compromises form, as this third entity that is us appears.

  In French law, legal associations or companies are called a Personne Morale – those thus joined together create a new legal “person,” with the same legal and moral requirements as an individual, and it strikes me that coupledom is similar. There is Mark and there is Tom, and there is a third person called us. A third person that likes this but not that, that hangs out with him but not her … And right now we’re in the process of deciding every aspect of who this new being will be.

  We’ve been together a while now, of course. But when we lived apart, though there were moments when we formed an us, ultimately we still had very individual identities, habits: the books I read, the TV Tom watches, the friends Tom sees, the shopping that goes into each refrigerator – in my case, vegetables, cheese, butter, in Tom’s, frozen pizzas and oven chips. Now we’re living together we’re slowly whittling away at the individualities to get to a common core. It’s not less… for every friend I stop seeing because Tom doesn’t seem to like them much, I usually gain one from his side, and for every meal I stop cooking, something else replaces it. But it is different. And that process of negotiating common ground isn’t dull, and it’s not entirely without pain.

  Tom drops two frozen pizzas into the basket, and says, as an afterthought, “Two of these? I love these spinach ones.”

  I used to make pizza – with flour and yeast and mozzarella cheese. Frozen pizza somehow feels naughty, hedonistic even. “Sure!” I say, grinning and following Tom on through the store.

  He grabs a bag of washed salad leaves and despite myself I intervene. “Can we just get a lettuce?” I ask. I’m sure someone, somewhere in the world truly doesn’t have the time or energy to rinse a lettuce leaf, but that person isn’t me.

  Tom hesitates then drops the bag. “Sure,” he says, then, looking perplexed, as if this is maybe a challenge, a trick question he thinks he might get wrong, he adds, “You choose.”

  As we leave the store with our hybrid shopping – Tom’s pizzas, my lettuce, Tom’s Molten Centre Chocolate Pudding (!), my eggs and flour, Tom says, “So… A film?”

  I frown. “A film?”

  Tom smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Shall we go see what’s on in English?” He nods in the direction of the cinema, not two hundred yards away across Place Garibaldi.

  I smile and nod. “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

  “Not much else to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon,” Tom says, pulling his collar up and heading off.

  Not much indeed – it’s a great idea, and strangely, one that would never cross my mind, for no reason I can think of except that it isn’t something I do on a Saturday afternoon.

  “Will the frozen stuff be OK?” I ask, trotting to catch up.

  “We’ll just eat it when we get back,” he says.

  So, it’s a pizza and cinema kind of a Saturday then. I feel like I’m living someone else’s life. I push my lip out and nod approvingly. It feels just fine.

  “Tom,” I say, back at the flat. “Do you have to?” After our special Saturday, I’m feeling quite in love with Tom. I would have liked the feeling to last a little longer.

  “Have to what, babe?” he asks.

  We’ve been in for seconds. The shopping is still defrosting in the carrier bags beside him on the big red sofa. “Do you have to skin up?” I ask trying to keep the petulant tone from my voice.

  Tom shrugs and clicks the remote, switching on the TV. “Have you come over all evangelical on me?” he asks, licking the edge of the paper and expertly sealing the joint.

  I force a smile and move to the arm of the sofa. I ruffle his hair. “It’s not that. It’s just that once you start smoking, well, that’s it. Nothing else happens,” I say.

  Tom lights the end of the joint and shrugs. “We’ve been out,” he says. “We’ve seen a film, we’ve bought dinner, what else do you want to do?” He clicks the remote, swapping from one Saturday game show to another; only this one is a little louder.

  I was thinking of a snooze and a shag actually. I’ve nothing against dope, though it doesn’t seem to do it for me – if anything it makes me paranoid and depressed. But if you can’t join in, if you’re sitting on the outside, it just makes other people so boring. I’m not evangelical at all – it’s just, well, give me an evening with someone doing coke or speed any day. And Tom, once he starts smoking, really won’t do anything else. The joint equals Game Over. No cooking, no cleaning, no going out – that I can cope with. But it also means permanent trash TV dominating the living room, no visible awareness of my existence, no meaningful discussion, and above all, no sex. Despite the myth, dope does not make Tom horny. I try to think how to reply, but the moment has passed. Tom is already lost in the TV, blowing smoke rings into the air, and settling back into the couch, struggling half-heartedly to kick off his trainers.

  “You smoke a lot these days,” I say.

  Tom replies without pulling his eyes from the TV. “I always did,” he says. “It’s just you weren’t there to see it. It’s what I do. It’s how I relax.” He proffers the joint over his shoulder at me.

  “Nah,” I say. “I think I’ll go out for a walk along the seafront. The weather’s changed. The rain’s stopped. I’ll check at Jenny’s on the way out – see if she’s up for it.”

  “Why?” he asks. “We just got in.”

  I shrug. “Dunno really,” I say. “It’s just what I do.”

  *

  Sunday morning and who could ask for more? I writhe and stretch, basking in the warmth of the bed, the sound of the rain hammering down anew mixes with Tom’s saxophone practice wafting from the office. Strips of dim light pushing through the shutters pattern the ceiling.

  The sax inevitably makes me think of Steve – it always happens and it always makes me feel a little guilty, as if thinking about Steve is being unfaithful to Tom in some way. I sigh and stretch again and tell myself that it’s OK to think about him. It was of course, Steve’s Selmer that Tom is playing.

  I wonder how good his playing was. He was a professional; it’s what he did for a living, so he must have been good. I listen for a while. For once Tom is playing a complete tune – a Sade song I recognise – dodgy taste but tuneful. I wonder, in a vague, parallel universe kind of way, what would have happened if Steve hadn’t died. Would he have been next door instead? I smile and wonder if he farted in his sleep. Would we have even got to this stage or was it just another of those illusory love affairs? Silly to be wasting thinking time over it if that’s the case. Silly to be wasting time thinking about a dead man anyway.

  “He’s dead!” I think, jerking myself out of the reverie. “Get over it!”

  Tom’s playing pauses for a second as he coughs with gusto, then picks up where he left off. “Your Love Is King” – yep, that’s the song. A bit dated, but as Tom pointed out, he’s been half-heartedly trying to learn it since it first came out.

  I th
ink about other relationships I’ve had and how some of them were better in some ways, some of them worse in others, but then I decide it’s ultimately pointless – like browsing Ikea catalogues or reading beauty magazines; it can only make you feel dissatisfied with what you’ve got – a solid relationship with farting, burping, underpant-discarding, pot-smoking Tom. Far better to focus on the positives of here and now.

  I throw back the quilt, suddenly optimistic and ready for the day. I stand and pull on my jogging trousers and head through to the office. Tom pauses his playing as I open the door, lowers the sax and grins at me. He looks hopelessly cute in a dishevelled kind of way. “Did I wake you?” he asks.

  I bat a hand at the thick smog hanging in the air and grin to show I don’t really mean it. “Nah,” I say. “It’s lovely. Can’t think of a nicer way to wake up.”

  Tom grins again and raises the instrument to his lips again, then pauses and says, “Oh, there are croissants and coffee in the kitchen.”

  I blink at him slowly and nod. “Thanks,” I say.

  As I pour the coffee I think about the fact that this gorgeous feeling – Sunday morning with someone playing the sax in another room – was a sort of recurring dream of my perfect relationship. It all started years ago when a busker woke me up in exactly that way one Sunday morning by playing beneath my window. He had been cute, and I remember having thought, “Imagine waking up to that every Sunday.” And I wonder at the power of life to order coincidences, meetings, chance; to replace actors with fresh personnel when required – seemingly whatever it takes to make sure the future manifests exactly as imagined.

  Dogs, Rhubarb and Pantaloons

  For a moment, above the noise of the vacuum cleaner, Tom isn’t aware of my presence, and I’m able to observe him. He’s wearing just his boxer shorts and a t-shirt, plus thick woolly socks, and he has a rolled cigarette – or more probably a joint – hanging from his mouth. He’s frowning with concentration as he tries to get the supposedly marvellous, but in reality useless, Dyson to suck up the dust in the corners.