Read Talking It Over for Free Online

battleships. It’s that game where you make a grid on a sheet of graph paper and each player has one battleship (four squares), two cruisers (three squares), three destroyers (two squares) and so on, then you have to knock out the opponent’s fleet. We played game after game. One of us had to sit on the floor of the phone box while the other stood up and rested on the shelf where you open out the directories. I spent the morning sitting on the floor and the afternoon standing up at the shelf. For lunch we had damp oat-cakes we’d bought at the village shop. We played battleships all day, and nobody wanted to use the phone. I can’t remember who won. In the late afternoon the weather cleared and we walked back to the youth hostel. I pulled my hood down and my hair was dry; Oliver’s was still soaking wet. The sun came out and Oliver linked his arm through mine. We passed a lady in her front garden. Oliver bowed to her and said, ‘Behold, madam, the dry monk and the damp sinner.’ She looked puzzled, and we walked on keeping step with one another, arm-in-arm.
    I took Gillian to see Oliver a few weeks after we met. I had to explain him a bit first, because from meeting me you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell what my best friend was like, and Oliver can get up people’s nostrils. I said he had various slightly eccentric habits and tastes, but that if you ignored them you quickly got through to the real Oliver. I saidhe’d probably have the curtains drawn and the place would smell of joss-sticks, but if she behaved as if nothing was out of the ordinary, all would be fine. Well, she did behave as if nothing was out of the ordinary, and I began to suspect that Oliver was a little displeased. When all’s said and done, Oliver does like to cause a bit of a stir. He does enjoy some come-back.
    ‘He wasn’t as odd as you’d made him out to be, your friend,’ Gillian said as we left.
    ‘Good.’
    I didn’t explain that Oliver had been uncharacteristically well-behaved.
    ‘I like him. He’s funny. He’s rather good-looking. Does he wear make-up?’
    ‘Not to my knowledge.’
    ‘Must have been the lighting,’ she said.
    Later, over a tandoori dinner, I was on my second lager, and something, I don’t know what, got into me. I felt I could ask questions, I felt she wouldn’t mind.
    ‘Do you wear make-up?’ We’d been discussing something else, and I said it out of the blue, but in my mind it was as if we’d just been talking about Oliver, and the way she answered, as if she thought we’d just been talking about Oliver too and there wasn’t any break in that conversation even though we’d been through lots of different subjects in the meantime, made me feel very cheerful.
    ‘No. Can’t you tell?’
    ‘I’m not very good at telling.’
    There was a half-eaten chicken tikka in front of her and a half-drunk glass of white wine. Between us stood a fat redcandle, whose flame was beginning to drown in a pond of wax, and a purple African violet made of plastic. By the light of that candle I looked at Gillian’s face, properly, for the first time. She … well, you’ve seen her for yourself, haven’t you? Did you spot that tiny patch of freckles on her left cheek? You did? Anyway, that evening her hair was swept up over her ears at the sides and fastened back with two tortoise-shell clips, her eyes seemed dark as dark, and I just couldn’t get over her. I looked and I looked as the candle fought with the wax and cast a flickering light on her face, and I just couldn’t get over her.
    ‘I don’t either,’ I finally said.
    ‘Don’t what?’ This time she hadn’t picked up the thread automatically.
    ‘Wear make-up.’
    ‘Good. Do you mind if I wear trainers with 501s?’
    ‘You can wear whatever you want to as far as I’m concerned.’
    ‘That’s a rash statement.’
    ‘I’m feeling rash.’
    Later, I drove her back to the flat she shared and stood leaning against some rusted railings while she