I picked up the phone, bold as you please, an
d texted:
Cleaver, Jones here. I want to talk to you. Can I see you this week?
He texted back immediately:
Daniel Cleaver
Rather out of the blue, Jones, but why the hell not? Be delighted to see you. Friday night? I shall pick you up and take you out to dinner in my new car.
Blimey. Is it that easy? Have I been sitting here being so obsessed with making sure people think I don’t fancy them, in case they think I’m needy, that they actually think I don’t fancy them?
FRIDAY 13 OCTOBER
7 p.m. Daniel’s car, South London. “Like the car, do you, Jones?”
As Daniel and I zoomed across Waterloo Bridge, I was desperately trying to find a moment to bring up the baby before we got to the restaurant, lest the whole thing caused a public scene, but Daniel was completely obsessed with his new Mercedes.
“It seems like it’s purring like a kitten, but put your foot down and whooomph!”
Daniel suddenly accelerated, causing an alarming lurch in my stomach.
“Do you like the pale grey interiors, Jones? I was going to go for black, or even a rather luscious blood red, but I thought this was delicate and actually rather pretty.”
—
Daniel had chosen Nobu restaurant on Park Lane, which was the sort of place where one might easily run into Posh and Becks or indeed Brad and Angelina (in which case I could have settled the argument once and for all with Mum about whether or not Maddox was how Angelina “got” Brad Pitt).
Sadly, there were no visible celebrities. It was rather, I assume, like going on Safari and finding there were no lions or tigers. There was, however, an unmistakable scent of fish in the air.
As the waiter led us to the table, Daniel still hadn’t paused for breath long enough for me to bring up, well, anything, really. He had now moved on from his new car to his new novel, The Poetics of Time.
“Conceptually, it’s Time’s Arrow in reverse. The characters believe time is moving backwards, but it’s actually moving forwards.”
“But wouldn’t that just mean time is moving in the direction it normally does move in?” I said.
“It’s a conceptual novel, Jones. It’s existential.”
What was the matter with him? Normally Daniel’s only interest was getting you to tell him what knickers you used to wear at school.
“Yes, but still,” I said doggedly, as the waiters brought us the menus, “wouldn’t it be a bit obvious, that it wasn’t?”
The menu was all fish, different kinds of fish: sushi fish, tempura fish, fish that had been spoon-fed on sake for hundreds of years. I felt the baby thrashing in a frenzy of fish outrage.
“Wasn’t what, Jones?”
“Going backwards. I mean, if time was going backwards, you’d notice straightaway. Cars would be going backwards. Fish would be swimming backwards,” I said, feeling a lurch in my stomach.
“Fish?”
Through my new, pregnancy-induced passivity, I let Daniel order the food and carry on about his backwards-though-not-backwards book. It was all very odd. Daniel seemed to have developed some sort of urge to be taken seriously. Maybe it was to do with the advancing years. The car too! I was having a baby and Daniel was having a cliché.
“You see, this is an alternate conceptual universe, Jones,” continued Daniel. “There are no fish in The Poetics of Time.”
“Well! That’s something to be grateful for!” I said, brightly. As the waiter placed the food—all fish—in front of us, I felt I really had to get away from The Poetics of Time and on to the meat of the matter.
“It’s a new reality which makes one question one’s very…”