Left of the Bang. Claire Lowdon
surely, he felt everyone he loved in the world was here, in this room. There was little Jake Simonson, excitedly telling everyone about his first architectural commission. There were Victor and Caitlin, a serious, hard-working pair of actuaries, deeply bronzed and full of stories from the year-long trip to India that everyone thought they’d never make; Zander Pownall, messing about in the playpen with his two-year-old son, no trace of the long depression he’d suffered in his mid-twenties; Antoine Namani, another neurosurgeon, making everyone laugh with his medically inflected rap (‘I’m malignant, you’re benign, when I lay down a rhyme, I metastasise straight into yo’ spine’). And, of course, Tamsin, his Tamsin, beautiful tonight in a long wrap skirt tied high at the waist, her sulkiness visible only to him – which in itself felt like something precious. It was, thought Callum fuzzily, a roomful of happy endings.
Fetching a fresh beer from the drinks table, Callum noticed a tall man he’d never met before, dressed in a vamped-up nurse’s outfit: tiny white skirt, choppy blonde wig, lumpily stuffed fake breasts. Under a grainy layer of foundation, the ghosts of several large freckles were visible. It was easily the most outrageous costume of the evening. When Callum complimented him on it, the man thanked him by lifting up the skirt to display a pair of women’s knickers, his penis squashed obscenely behind the sheer fabric.
‘Practically standard issue these days,’ the nurse-man said cheerfully. ‘No self-respecting officer seen dead at a party without see-through panties.’
‘You’re in the army?’ Callum was immediately interested.
‘Yes, sir. Just finished at Sandhurst,’ said the man with irrepressible pride. He tugged off the wig, revealing a full head of closely-cropped black hair, which he proceeded to scratch with the innocent abandon of a dog shaking itself after a swim.
‘And how did you find Sandhurst?’
‘Still recovering from the final exercise. It was a total CF.’
‘Is that the ten-day one? Diamond Victory?’
‘Dynamic Victory. It’s a beast.’ The boy looked impressed. ‘How do you know that?’
Callum smiled, pleased with the compliment. ‘I’m writing a book, a sort of military history thing … Sorry – what’s a “CF”?’
‘CF, charlie foxtrot – means “cluster fuck”, basically a major beasting. Also a verb, as in, I got cluster-fucked. Which you do, at Sandhurst. That’s the whole point.’
The two men laughed and clinked beer bottles properly this time, acknowledging their approval of one another.
‘Is it true that you lot are using “muggle” for “civilian” now?’
They were fifteen minutes into a discussion on military slang when Callum noticed Tamsin watching them from across the room with an uninterpretable expression on her face. Callum waved her over, eager to show off his new find.
‘Here, Tam, come on, I want you to meet—’
‘Chris.’ Tamsin said the name at the same time as Callum. ‘It is Chris, isn’t it?’
‘Have we…?’ The boy was embarrassed. Then his soft mouth pulled tight in an enormous grin. ‘My god – it’s Tamsin!’
‘Do you know each other?’ Callum asked, unnecessarily.
‘I can’t believe you recognised me under all this shit!’ Chris was still grinning broadly. ‘How do you guys—’
‘Callum’s my boyfriend.’ As if to illustrate this, Tamsin kissed Callum on the cheek. There was a longish pause. ‘So … what are you up to these days, Chris?’
‘Well, actually, I’m in the army—’ Chris began, but he was interrupted by a violent thump on his shoulder. Leo’s brother Edwin, a small, smooth-faced man with thick dark eyebrows, had come to claim his friend.
‘Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve been waiting for this bastard to come and do shots with us for over half an hour.’
‘Great to meet you.’ Chris shook Callum’s hand vigorously. ‘And – and to see you too, Tamsin,’ he added, looking slightly confused.
‘Right fucker, your first one’s a triple,’ said Edwin, as he marched Chris over to their friends.
‘Where do you know him from?’ Callum asked Tamsin.
She looked vague. ‘Ages ago. I don’t know him at all, really.’ Tamsin’s unusually large eyelids gave her face a sleepy, sensual expression. When she had been drinking it sometimes seemed to Callum as if it cost her a physical effort to keep her eyes from closing altogether.
‘Callum, you dirty great faggot, where have you been all my life?’ It was Will again, pulling Callum into a back-slapping hug. Tamsin made a face at Callum over Will’s shoulder, but allowed herself to be led off to meet Will’s ‘reinforcements’, who were busy re-stocking the drinks table with stronger stuff. The playpen was being packed away.
* * *
Tamsin woke from a dream about Bolognese sauce to the smell of Bolognese sauce. Then she remembered it was Sunday, and the smell modulated to bacon. She squinted at the other side of the bed. Callum was already up. Hoping to defer her hangover for another five minutes, she pulled the duvet over her head and settled back down into the pillow.
The flush of the toilet woke her again. Tamsin came out from under the duvet and the smell adjusted itself for a third and final time. The door to the little en suite bathroom was ajar.
‘Callum. God. You could at least shut the door,’ she croaked.
Callum emerged from the bathroom with an apologetic grin. He opened the window, filling the room with the fumes of the Edgware Road and the sickly strawberry scent from the shisha bar on the ground floor.
‘Shit, I feel rough.’ Tamsin pressed three fingers to each temple and glared up at Callum. ‘Why aren’t you in more pain?’
Callum sat down on the bed. ‘Because I wasn’t half as full of it as you were, you nugget.’ He leaned in for a kiss, but Tamsin clamped her lips shut.
‘Mm-mmm.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t taste good. And I’m not kissing you while this room still stinks. En suite. Jesus. Maybe the least romantic proposition ever.’
‘All right, all right,’ he laughed, running a hand over his khaki-coloured hair, which immediately sprang back to attention. ‘I’ll get us some coffee.’
Callum came back with coffee, toast and yesterday’s newspapers, the cutlery jittering on the tray as he bent to settle it in Tamsin’s lap. He perched on the windowsill with his own mug, watching Tamsin through steam lit white by the morning sun. Her loose cotton vest sagged in the middle and he could see the two parallel lines marking the start of her breasts. In the beginning, Tamsin had been embarrassed by her breasts, which were full and heavy and sat low on her chest. It had taken Callum a long time to get her to sleep without her bra on, and even longer to persuade her to stand up naked in front of him. Her left breast was noticeably larger than her right, something she hated and he adored.
‘You perving?’ asked Tamsin, without looking up from her paper.
‘Who, me? Never.’
There was a longish silence. Then Callum said, ‘Chris seems like a nice guy.’ The words had a slightly processed, unnatural timbre. This was because Callum had been preparing to say them ever since Tamsin woke up.
‘Mmm?’ Tamsin glanced up distractedly. ‘Oh yeah. Yeah, he does.’
‘How did you say you knew him?’
‘I didn’t say, did I?’ Now Tamsin put the paper down, frowning slightly. ‘I don’t remember if I said. I don’t think I did.’ She paused. ‘It was my first year at College. He was going out with a friend of mine for a bit. So I saw him a couple of times, through her. Then they broke up and I didn’t see him