CLAUDIA
In the end, I couldn’t seem to come up with an excuse not to have dinner with John. I saw him in the corner as soon as I walked in and my tummy did a little flip. He had chosen a beautiful restaurant to meet. I wasn’t sure what was worse: telling him my sordid news in a place like this – candles on each table, murmured conversations peppered with the chink of fine glass, the chip-chip of silver on bone china – or a fast food outlet with fluorescent lighting. How was I meant to say chlamydia in this room? Then again, I hadn’t set foot in McDonalds since I was a teenager and I wasn’t intending to any time soon, so this wasn’t actually an argument. He had also seen me. I took a deep breath and walked across the room.
He stood up for me as I took my seat. I wished he wouldn’t. Not tonight.
‘You look lovely,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’ I picked up the menu. I had really thought I could do this. I thought I wanted to but now I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to get the words out.
I had left work early that day and sat in a hot bath at home for twenty minutes, hoping to boil my nerves into submission. It worked long enough for me to dress and get out of the door but as I travelled across town, they started writhing away in my belly again. I tried to ignore them, to take control of the situation. In the back of the black cab, I wrote down a list of all the men from the last six months in careful script. I reached twelve but I had a feeling there were a couple missing. I could sense them rather than remember who they were. But my head was noisy and not behaving. I snapped my notebook shut. There was the restaurant. First things first, I had to tell John.
‘So . . .’ John put his menu down. I waited for him to ask me how I was. That was when I was going to tell him the truth. Straight into it, get it over and done with.
‘Have you heard about Greg and Laura?’ he asked.
Oh, thank you! He knew some office gossip and it became clear to me that he was easing me into the evening. It could be possible that I had never spent time with a man with better social skills. We chatted about our colleagues and the starters came, were eaten and were cleared. The elephant in the room sat politely a little out of view and my nervous tummy settled down a little.
Over the main course we stayed on another safe topic: sharing tales of woe and stupidity from holidays. John told me an elaborate tale from his last holiday, when he found himself stranded in a small village in France waiting for his motorbike to be fixed. The locals were about as welcoming to this large Englishman as Mrs Thatcher was to the miners. He was a natural, spinning out the story bit by bit, making himself the self-deprecating hero who tried every way he could to ingratiate himself with the locals and failed. I almost forgot why I was there and was surprised to find myself laughing. I reached for my mineral water.
‘You’re not drinking?’
‘I don’t really feel like it,’ I answered, trying to brush him off. He smiled, as if me not drinking was something to be excited about.
Finally, as we were drinking coffee, I invited the elephant to come and join us.
‘John, I need to talk to you,’ I said.
John put his cup down on its saucer, linked his fingers together and rested them on the table. That’s weird, I thought. He’s reminding me of someone.
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Right. OK.’ I paused and took a breath. ‘I went to the doctor last week.’
John smiled again, as if I’d just given him a present and he was about to open it.
‘Yes?’
I paused. I wished he wouldn’t look so expectant.
‘I . . . ah . . . I found out yesterday that I’ve tested positive for an STI.’ There, I’d said it.
John’s face stopped shining abruptly. ‘Y-you’ve what?’ he stammered.
I sighed. I didn’t want to have to say it again. ‘I’ve tested positive for an STI, chlamydia to be precise.’ Argh, wash your mouth out.
‘Oh dear,’ he said evenly, blinking as if that would somehow make his brain take in the information faster.
‘Yes,’ I said. I couldn’t think of what else to say so I took another sip of coffee. It was lukewarm and tasted stale. I realised in that moment that I’d expected to feel relief when I told him but now I just felt tired.
‘So,’ I prodded after a bit, ‘you’ll need to get tested for it too.’
He looked at me, his mouth grim. ‘Yes, of course.’
We sat in silence until I couldn’t bear the tension any longer, at which point I excused myself to a thankfully empty bathroom and leant on the basin to stare in the mirror. A very jaded Claudia looked back. My lips were flat and turned down at each corner, drawing down my cheeks, my eyes, my nose and making me look much older, beakier even. And sad, so sad. What did John see in me in the first place? All I could see now was a washed-up old hag. I felt overwhelmed with loneliness.
The waitress was taking John’s card when I returned. We were off then. I hovered next to the table, my handbag in hand and waited for the waitress to leave.
‘So I’d better go home,’ I said.
John didn’t look up. ‘OK,’ he said to his fingers. And then I had it – Papa linked his fingers together like that. My gentle, darling father. Hot pain stabbed my belly and tears welled, threatening to overflow. There was no way John had given me this horrid STI. How on earth could I have thought he’d given it to me? He was a tart, sure, but it took one to know one. Yet seeing his fingers quietly interlocked with those big hands, I could see he was also a gentleman, a solid, self-aware man. I choked out a quiet goodbye and hurried out into the dark night, running down the street, trying to run from the disappointment, the dreadful realisation that I’d met my equal at long last, slept with him, brushed him off and then told him he might have chlamydia.