Love You Madly. Alex George

she has taken a pair of Tiffany cufflinks with her.

      Each piece of the jigsaw slams into place with a resounding smash. The dreamy silences, all those late nights at the office – suddenly everything begins to make terrible sense.

      Is one of her Paris-bound colleagues a gym enthusiast with a thing for Ravel?

      It would explain why Anna was hiding the cufflinks in the first place, and it would explain why she didn’t wake me up this morning. She wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a flamboyantly uxorious goodbye if she is off to Paris to shag like a jack rabbit with somebody else.

      I spend the rest of the day struggling to find alternative explanations for everything I’ve seen, everything I know. The more I wrestle with the facts, the more they obstinately shape themselves towards the unthinkable.

      Is Anna having an affair?

      I haven’t even got to the gut-busting punch line yet, the little detail that makes this all so especially sad:

      We went to Paris on our honeymoon.

      See? You couldn’t make it up.

      Our jazz quartet rehearses every Tuesday evening at Gavin’s loft. At six o’clock I pack up my saxophone and catch the Tube to Old Street, numb from a dayful of worry.

      Gavin is a graphic designer of some sort. He’s obviously good at it, because he’s loaded. He lives in a vast loft conversion on the fringes of Clerkenwell, all exposed brick, double-height ceilings, and stripped pine floors. There’s a baby grand piano in one corner. He even has a Raiders of the Lost Ark pinball machine. It feels more like a film set than a place where a real person should actually live. It’s every bachelor’s fantasy wankpad.

      Gavin’s homogenised but expensive taste is derived in large part from the glossy magazines to which he is addicted. I have seen him rip open the latest edition of GQ, salivating as he gazes with barely suppressed ardour at the most recent techno-gizmo or the newest Paul Smith loafers. You can see his eyes glinting with deranged lust as he compulsively turns the pages. He just loves labels. He just loves stuff.

      I press the doorbell, gazing anxiously in both directions as I wait to be buzzed inside. The entrance to Gavin’s building is shrouded in dark shadows which give me the creeps. Shifty characters with tattoos on their arms hang around on street corners, talking into mobile phones and staring menacingly at passers-by. I am waiting for the inevitable day when I am robbed and brutally murdered, all within pressing distance of Gavin’s doorbell. The atmosphere of palpable violence doesn’t seem to bother Gavin. Perhaps the attendant dangers of living here are immaterial, given the hipness of the milieu. Perhaps the attendant dangers of living here are the reason for the hipness of the milieu.

      Gavin’s voice crackles out of the small metal box by the front door. ‘All right,’ he says cheerfully. He knows it’s me; I am being scrutinised by the unblinking eye of a small security camera above the intercom. I make sure the front door closes firmly behind me before climbing the stairs to Gavin’s loft.

      He is standing by the door, waiting for me.

      ‘Hi Gav,’ I say.

      ‘Matt. How’s tricks?’

      ‘Tricks are dandy. My novel’s just been published, actually.’

      ‘Really,’ says Gavin.

      ‘It’s called Licked,’ I tell him.

      ‘Nice title.’

      I perform a playful shuffle. ‘You could buy a copy if you liked,’ I say.

      ‘Yeah,’ agrees Gavin, laughing. ‘Course I could. Come on, the others are already here.’

      I follow Gavin in. The twins, Ronnie and Abdullah, are setting up their instruments at the other end of the room, next to the piano. ‘All right Matt, you poncy fucker!’ shouts Ron Fries from behind his half-erected drum kit.

      ‘Do you want a beer?’ asks Gavin. ‘I’ve got this fantastic bottled stuff from Korea. It’s made by albino monks in this isolated monastery on top of a mountain. They trample the hops with their feet.’

      ‘Yeah, go on then,’ I reply doubtfully.

      Gavin goes to his beautiful open-plan kitchen and opens an enormous Smeg fridge, which is taller than I am. Apart from about twenty bottles of beer, the fridge is empty. He takes out a bottle, prises the cap off, and hands it to me. I take a tentative sip. As I swallow, I start to believe the story about the monks trampling the hops. The beer has a distinct odour of smelly feet. I carry my saxophone towards the twins at the far end of the room.

      As twins go, Ron and Abdullah Fries could not be less identical. Ron is a huge, stocky bear of a man; Abdullah is tall and thin. Abdullah’s wild shock of unruly red hair and mash of orange freckles make him look at least five years younger than his brother, but in fact he is the older of the two, by about forty-five minutes.

      ‘All right, Matt,’ says Abdullah as I approach. He raises his own bottle of Korean beer to me in friendly salute. I’m sure that Abdullah isn’t supposed to drink: he became a Buddhist years ago.

      The Fries twins were born in East London in the middle of the Sixties. For newly-born twin brothers it was an unfortunate confluence of time and place, as there were only ever two names that they were going to be given. Ron was all right, but the subsequent proliferation of McDonalds restaurants, and Abdullah’s adoption of a Muslim name, has always led me to suspect that his conversion to Buddhism was due less to any spiritual conviction than a simple but heartfelt desire to change his name from Reg Fries.

      Ron finishes setting up, and pulls out his drumsticks. He plays a few press rolls, and then puts on a pair of dark glasses. As soon as the shades go on, Ron is firmly installed in his own jazz dream world, where he is American, and black. While he acts out this peculiar fantasy, he insists on speaking some ghastly argot of his imagination, an excruciating cocktail of bastardised Harlem jive and flat estuary vowels.

      ‘You sorry-assed bitches ready to get down and play some shit?’ he drawls, sounding like Sammy Davis Jr marooned in Basildon. Gavin and I exchange glances.

      ‘Getting there,’ says Gavin, riffling through pages of sheet music by the piano.