Cam insisted on cooking from a recipe on his brand-new iPad, something he’d queued up for on release morning. It ran out of battery halfway through, and his dhal stuck to the bottom of the pan while he was trying to find the charger. The boyfriend, whose name was Seb, had only just got his first smartphone. After several bottles of red wine, once the candles had started dripping on to the reclaimed wood dining table, Clara had told Maisie that she was a film director.
‘Or, I want to be,’ she’d said. ‘Everything I do is working towards that.’
‘She’s being modest,’ Seb had said, which isn’t the word Cam would have used. ‘She’s really fucking good.’
They were not Cam’s kind of people. Seb, with his haughty scowl and his beaten-up black headphones, apparently made a living as an actor. His first film was playing on ‘select screens’ that year, so Maisie dragged Cam to a wanky arthouse cinema in Dalston to show their support. Most of Seb’s other roles were in obscure daytime soaps, and he still worked shifts in a pub to scrape together extra cash. Cam would be embarrassed, if his girlfriend was the breadwinner. Clara was leaving her full-time job in production to work on set. Her latest short film was getting buzz, whatever that meant. The entire thing was uploaded on to YouTube, so Cam and Maisie watched it through the prism of an HDMI cable hooked up to their tiny TV. Twenty-two minutes of Cam’s life that he would never get back.
‘She’s so cool,’ Maisie said afterwards, pacing the apartment as if discussing a teenage crush. ‘And she’s definitely going to be famous.’ A crestfallen pause. ‘I wish I was brave enough to do something like that.’
‘You’re too sensible to do something like that,’ Cam had said.
It was supposed to be a compliment.
When Cam had first met Maisie at Leeds University, she’d been studying literature. They’d grown up since then. Cam didn’t row any more, and Maisie didn’t talk about being a poet. But now, Maisie was writing again. Cam caught her reading a copy ofSlaughterhouse-Fivefilled with Clara’s scrawly annotations, then passing her own well-thumbed anthology of MaryOliver poems over the garden fence in return. He knew that nothing good could come of this. When Maisie was made redundant from her job in PR, early in that third year, Cam knew it was because she’d stopped making an effort. In the months that followed, she’d said she was looking for jobs, but he’d more than once commandeered her laptop and found every tab open to the Open University.
It was in this context that they arrived at the barbecue laid on for a reluctant Seb’s twenty-eighth birthday. It was August, and the city felt uncomfortable. There were riots on the streets. Maisie made a peach and feta salad, and Cam brought a four-pack of Punk IPA. When they arrived, a stoner called Ryan was sharing a joint with Ren, who was about to move to the Netherlands and was clearly looking for a way to broadcast this fact. Some guy called Smudge was setting up his Bluetooth speakers next to a bin full of booze and ice, plunging a set of keys into the side of a beer can. Then there was the vet, with his Alex Turner haircut, whose name Cam had missed, and who seemed most interested in talking to the dog. And to Maisie, who always gravitated towards pets in social situations like these.
At one point, Cam caught the vet showing Maisie his lucky guitar pick. He couldn’t help but feel like he’d stumbled upon something untoward.
The Mayans had predicted that the world would end in the final months of that fourth year. In the face of apocalypse, the country was seized with a kind of patriotic optimism. The Diamond Jubilee. The opening ceremony of the London Olympics.When Cam hung an enormous Union Jack over their front windows, Clara, the enemy next door, asked if he was starting a far-right political party.
Maisie had found this incredibly funny, but then, Maisie had long since switched her allegiances to Clara’s side of the fence. The pair of them were always going to readings at independent bookshops together, or to see the kind of cerebral films to which Cam was allergic. That year alone, Clara had directed a music video for a semi-successful band, and an aftershave advert that was actually being shown on TV. Maisie said that she always saw Clara’s drawings popping up on something called Pinterest.
‘She does drawings now?’ Cam had replied, exasperated.
‘She’s a multi-disciplinarian,’ Maisie had replied, with the pompousness of someone deploying a new term for the first time.
‘She’s a show-off.’
He certainly felt like Clara should have stuck to drawing when he stumbled upon Maisie watching her next short film.
‘Is it for kids?’ he’d said.
‘Why would you think that?’
‘It’s got puppets in it.’
Maisie had sighed as if Cam was the most stupid man in the world. ‘It’s a metaphor.’
‘Well, it’s not that clever,’ Cam had said. ‘Anyone could do it.’
‘Even me?’
They were arguing all the time by that point. They arrived for Seb’s next birthday with sour faces, watched the happy couple at the grill through gritted teeth. Seb and Clara were always acting like teenagers, hands running up and down oneanother as if they weren’t surrounded by other people. Cam was drunk already, and he could tell that Maisie was annoyed with him. She moved to the other side of the patio with a guy who looked familiar. He realised it was the vet, his nauseatingly glossy hair now tied up in a man bun. His name was Nimesh, and he was making her laugh far more than anyone who wasn’t her boyfriend should.
‘Why did you become a vet?’ Cam could hear Maisie asking.
‘I think animals are better company than humans,’ he replied. ‘Better judges of character, too.’
Ryan was walking around with a film camera, taking candid pictures, and Cam was in half a mind to stamp the contraption into the floor. Jasper was licking Maisie’s hands, canoodling harder with her than Seb was with Clara. Cam sulked off to the fridge, snooped around Seb and Clara’s flat with Maisie’s half-empty bottle of rosé in his hand. He muttered to himself as he looked upon the ruffled bedsheets, Clara’s hand-drawn picture of Seb and Jasper hanging above their bed.
Cam drained the bottle. Maisie would never write a poem about him.
The fifth year started with Clara’s thirtieth birthday. Cam felt like a spare part, standing in the corner and checking his phone as Clara’s sister emerged from the kitchen, carrying an enormous cake with some help from Maisie. Clara’s sister was pregnant, fit to burst. Cam could tell that he’d touched a nerve, when he made that innocuous comment to Clara in front of everyone.
‘You next?’
A rare case of Seb and Clara being on different wavelengths.
