Story four: The hardest florist in Stockwell

There comes a moment in everybody’s life, thought Pete, just after him and Mike had been kicked out of Stockings, when you have to ask yourself questions. Questions like am I a nice person? And, more importantly, do I care?

New Covent Garden flower market, reborn in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in a warehouse just off the treeless Nine Elms Road, bursts into bloom at three a.m. every weekday and four on Saturdays. Daisy-like, it opens on the cusp of night and morning, when even the hardest-core clubber is thinking about a breather, or a night bus, at the same time as the first early-shifters are wriggling in their beds, anticipating the alarm clock and the grey, subdued ride in on the first tube of the day.
At four in the morning, most of London, even the West End, is dead, echoless, shining with overnight rain. But New Covent Garden is a wet blaze of rainbow petals and foliage, a land of midnight sun under the arc-lights’ intense gold. People look sharper, brighter, among the petals, behind the dazzle; the strangeness of the hour softens their faces and ebbs the rancour from their raucous voices. Or so it seemed to Pete. But by this stage, Pete was so drunk he was almost sober again, and he could barely understand his own thoughts, let alone express them to anyone else.

He’d been trying to hail a cab for half an hour now, while meandering down through Victoria, its shuttered shops and tea-haunted caffs, and over Vauxhall Bridge more or less in the direction of home. And then he’d remembered hearing about the flower market in class, long ago, some evening when he’d barely been listening; probably flirting with Liz or Heidi or one of the others; maybe twisting sappy, bright brown stems into a lopsided love-heart for one or other of them. Their tutor had asked if anyone wanted to train professionally, become a florist. He’d snorted with derision.
“Yeah, right,” he’d said. “I’d be the hardest florist in Stockwell.”
“You’d have some competition,” she said. She’d been in the bloom business for thirty years and astonished them by telling them about the dawn flower market where all the florists went to buy their stock. In Vauxhall, of all places.

Pete reckoned that inside there’d at least be a café, or a burger stand or something, and that some food would help him think. It was cold now, and last night’s mizzle still hung in the wet indoor air, freshening the blooms and dewing the florists’ faces with rainwater sweat. The lights on the striped stalls glistened in rain-jewelled hair and scarves. Even Pete’s black wool overcoat, bludgeoned with daily use, sparkled.
It had almost been a good night. Him and Mike and Ash, just like old times. Ash’s wife was pregnant. Mike was getting married, thinking of leaving London. Nothing like old times, in fact, come to think of it. Pete had bought a bottle at the bar and greeted them with fake-punches.
“Lads,” he’d said, “tonight we’re drinking to forget!”
They’d asked him what he wanted to forget and he’d just shaken his head and grinned. Whatever it was, he’d forgotten now. His plan had clearly worked. Under the hard yellow pub light, they’d looked balder and fatter, Ash’s gut straining against his Thomas Pink, Mike’s thinning hair like buzz-cut baby fuzz, his scalp sweating and shining underneath.
He’d always carried a picture of the three of them in his head from Bolivia, where they’d spent their summer after university trekking and camping and doing drugs and other stupid shit that made him wince with fear and pride when he thought about it now. The boys in the photograph were lean, tanned, careless, up for it. They were laughing at the camera. The people at the table no longer looked like the same ones in the photograph. They looked like the target audience for over-25 nightclubs. Like dads on the razz. And now the camera was laughing at them.
That was when Pete realised it was going to be a heavy night.

He wandered slowly, meditatively, past a stall bursting with roses, every scent and hue, crammed together in explosive abundance, scarlet, ivory, apricot; petals striped like paint-dribbled walls and graduated like a dawn sky, butter-gold to salmon-pink. The smell of sap and waxy petals; the naive Turkish Delight sweetness of heavy-headed tea-roses, pale and faint, then rich as chocolate when you bent your head down as though to kiss them. Pete stopped and stared, transfixed.
Naturally, the main reason he’d done the course was because it was a sure-fire way to pull, but he’d always liked flowers; their delicate perfumes and juices, the astonishing softness of petals between your fingers, the abundant uselessness of them. Like women, he’d said to Mike and Ash after the first week of class. He’d meant it as a joke – obviously, of course he had – but Mike had looked embarrassed and Ash had muttered something about watching what he said. Pete didn’t know when, or how, they’d got so humourless. His fellow novice flower-arrangers, the women especially, had laughed at the very same punchline when he’d said it in class. And if the girls could take a joke, why couldn’t Mike and Ash?

“Can I help?”
The girl who ran the stall poked her head between a couple of tall bunches and cocked pertly, like a pigeon. She had black hair and eyes, and soft pink cheeks which almost matched the petals framing her. He thought of telling her that she looked like a rose between two thorns, but wasn’t sure she’d get the gag, or the reference. She looked very young. She might get offended.
“How much for ten?” he asked.
“This is wholesale. The smallest bunch is twenty.”
He felt in his pocket. Was that a screwed-up note, or a credit card receipt? Did she take cards?
“All right, twenty. The dark red ones.”
He’d need some sort of gift for Liz when he got home. Most questions could be pre-empted by presenting her with a huge bouquet. She wouldn’t have got in until two or three, anyway, what with her flight times. Jet lag would keep her awake. He could say he’d spent the evening watching telly, couldn’t sleep, then had a romantic impulse and walked down to Vauxhall to get her some flowers. To remind her of how they’d met. Yeah. It was the sort of thing she’d believe he’d do. It was the sort of thing he would do. He was doing it, wasn’t he?
He handed over his note – a twenty – and got a tenner back. The flower-girl’s red fingers were warm against his, for an instant. He blinked.
“You sure that’s the right change, love?”
“Yep, it’s a tenner for twenty, twenty quid for fifty.”
“You got a special offer on, or do you just like my face?”
She smiled despite herself, if only at the ridiculousness of the idea, and looked down.
“No, it’s always this cheap. Wholesale, like I said.”
He smiled his thanks and walked away carefully. Not bad, considering. No slurring, no swaying; he took pride in it. Luckily, he’d always been able to handle his drink. So had Mike and Ash, once, but tonight they’d had to send Ash home in a cab when it was barely past midnight.
“Night night Cinderella.” Pete had sung, waving at Ash’s slumped figure through the rain-dashed taxi window.
“That’ll be the last we see of him once Nadia drops the sprog,” Mike had said, morosely. And Pete knew that it was true.
After that, Mike had got drunk and sullen very quickly. He’d sworn his head off, voice rasping and snagged like a broken tooth, when the bouncer wouldn’t let them into Spearmint Rhino. Stockings came later. Pete had had to drag him back down to Soho, to Bar Italia, where he fed Mike espresso and water. He’d wondered idly, mutinously, when it had come to this; the booze buzz just hitting you, the good times starting to roll, and the next thing you knew the club had closed, it was spitting tepid rain, and you were spoon-feeding caffeine to a piss-eyed thirtysomething at a wet outside table, where you had to keep catching the cups and glasses so they didn’t slide off the tabletop and smash on the ground. Who made me your fucking fielder, he thought, staring angrily into Mike’s glazed and wandering eyes. But just for a second. Beer gave him a temper like a flash fire. He was all right now. Pete was always all right.

It had been a twelve-week course, and he’d wasted the first six pursuing Heidi, a sharp-fringed radical playwright, one of the youngest in the group but getting nowhere fast. After a long, circuitous night in the Nest, she’d finally taken him home. She’d been almost too pissed to speak, although not to shove him heavily onto the futon and go at his neck like a cat shaking a mouse. At the next class, she’d confessed over beige machine-coffee that she had a boyfriend. Not that you could tell. Liz had been a better long-term prospect overall – more predictable. Unhappier, by a slender margin. Elegant. And she didn’t keep secrets from herself, or from anyone else.
Pete still thought of Heidi, occasionally, when he had a spare moment in the showers or punishing the treadmill at the gym. He had dark, vague memories of their night together, although he wasn’t completely sure that some of them weren’t drawn from dreams. Pete had extremely erotic dreams. Sometimes, if he was lucky, they stayed with him through the day, shivering through his body at unexpected moments, catching him off-guard, like a whiff of last night’s aftershave. She’d been springy, musky, like a rutting fox. One night only though. Not worth it, otherwise. Like freesias, heady Heidi didn’t last.
He’d found the class on the Hotcourses website. It ran every Friday evening for three months in some Institute of Further Education in far-flung Richmond, and was administered by Goldsmith’s College. He’d been lonely and not afraid to admit it. All his mates were shacked up, married or engaged or, God forbid, starting a family, and he had a lot of catching up to do if he didn’t want to end up as the sad fucker in the corner of the pub staring bleakly at the big screen for the rest of his life.
He’d tried a reading group, but he’d hated most of the books, which had rendered him virtually silent every week – after all, everyone got a chance to choose a novel for the group to read, so criticising people’s favourite writers was taken as a personal attack. Shame they’d all had such shit taste, though. The most attractive women always chose the worst books, he noticed. Grace, the trophy wife, had made them wade through some post-apocalyptic cod-philosophical shite. Millie the grad student had chosen a comedy fantasy novel – presumably as a joke, or to show that she wasn’t an intellectual snob. He’d left the group after they’d voted seven to five that the Christmas party should be fancy dress, with everyone coming as their favourite literary character.

He chased the smell of bacon and chips down an alley loud with carnations and tulips. Turning right, Pete lingered at a stall that sold freesias and arum lilies. The lilies were heavily perfumed, elegant, leggy, expensive; the high-class call girl of flowers. Easy to display, too; you only needed one or two stems and the vase was full. He bought freesias.

Flower arranging, the brilliant, barefaced incongruity of it, had been a stroke of genius. It had allowed him to be at once a rare commodity, cherished and unique, constantly solicited (as poor Nicholas sat back, ignored and amused) for the “man’s perspective”.
“They treat you like a fucking orchid,” Nicholas had told him when they stepped outside together for a fag. “Like you’re the only bloke here.”
Pete had shaken his head, embarrassed. Not that he had any problem with his unique position. He was more than tolerated; he was a privileged spy in the house of women. He thought, as he stood amongst a gaggle of them, nose buried in the ubiquitous metallic tea, listening with a fierce attention he never displayed in class, of those journalists who trained and shipped out with troops to Iraq. Embedded, they called it. Bedded more like, if he had his way. And, over the next few months, he did.
He’d clocked the married women at once. Even the ones who didn’t wear weeding rings, for whatever reason, had something about them. A reserve. A lack of need. They weren’t as hungry for his attention as the others, the singletons and the divorcees. Liz he’d found hard to gauge. She wore a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. Was she divorced? Separated? He’d wondered briefly if she maybe had a girlfriend.
There was a pub around the corner from the college – the Eagle’s Nest, right opposite the bus stop, so that when a few of them had taken to going out for drinks after class there would always be one or two glasses left half-finished on the table as people saw the 65 coming and leapt out to flag it down. It turned out, over the course of a few conversations, a few nights of understanding nods and delicate enquiries, that Liz was married after all. It was to Pete’s credit that he’d moved in on her anyway, correctly guessing that if she was spending her Friday nights wrapping stems with a bunch of desperate housewives in South-West London, her relationship probably wasn’t going too well.

He turned a corner and caught the early-morning sun blazing through the high, grimy eastern windows; its raw brassy yellow hurt his eyes. The tubes must have started again by now; the sounds and light were becoming fuller, more familiar. The roses and freesias ached on his arm. He felt like a diva at the end of an opera, swooning under the weight of flowers.
At the largest stall in the market, decked out like a painter’s palette with vivid swathes of gardenias, gerberas, poppies, chrysanthemums, irises, pansies, hollyhocks, daisies, sweet peas, Sweet Williams and many other varieties whose names and colours twitched sleeping memories, he discovered that they took cards, and bought several bunches of the freshest and brightest blooms. The stallholder gave Pete another bag and improvised a sort of quiver so he could carry them all. Pete had no idea what he was going to do with them, but he was petal-drunk, and knew that somehow he’d make it work.
Liz would love it; would love him for it. A bushel of blossoms said spontaneity, generosity, romance. And their anniversary – or what he reckoned was their anniversary, although, to his secret disappointment, they hadn’t discussed it – was around now. They’d been together for a year: she deserved a flat full of flowers. They both did. Congratulations and celebrations – wasn’t that how the song went? Mike and Ash had told him, barely joking, that Liz deserved a medal. She’d kept him on the straight and narrow for longer than anyone. He was almost starting to like it.

Pete considered there to be four cardinal virtues: loyalty, honesty, charity and bravery. Although he was pretty sure he was all right on most of them (well, maybe not honesty so much; but he’d always been honest with himself and that, he reasoned, had to count for something) bravery was the one he prided himself on. It was a brave man who’d take a challenge like Liz head-on, pursue her, woo her, and eventually win her; but it took exceptional daring to do it while knocking off two other classmates at the same time.
Pete’s average looks weren’t a problem – women distrusted men who were too attractive, thank God – but he still had to soften them up first, get past their sleaze defences. Had to prove to them that he was a nice guy, but not the kind that finished last. It was a fucking tricky balancing act, frankly, but he had it down. The best way was to make friends first. First came the trust, then the lust. A blurred and beautiful image faded into his head of women falling into his arms like ripening fruit, like freshly cut flowers.

Women didn’t look at him as much since Liz; he seemed to have faded, somehow, into the background. Or perhaps he just wasn’t trying as hard. And all those meals out and nights in didn’t help; it was harder and harder to motivate himself to go to the gym when Liz and lasagne and a bottle or two of Bordeaux were waiting for him at home. What was the point of pushing himself towards washboard abs he’d never have? By the time your shirt came off (unless it was a particularly wild night) the woman had already made up her mind. He thought about the girl in Stockings. She’d certainly made up her mind. Decisive, like Liz.
He trudged home, the sunrise behind him, until he hit Stockwell. It was somewhere around six when he got in, because Mehdi’s was opening up, but the flat was still empty. More flight delays, terror scares and whatnot. Sometimes if she was exhausted after a trip she just checked into a hotel airport and slept it off. He’d come back that evening to find the kitchen table arrayed with strange new spirits and national foods, like a stall at a harvest festival. She always brought him back presents.
Pete staggered up the narrow stairs, bowed under the mass of petals. There was no message on the home phone, but she never called that number anyway. She’d have left a message on his mobile, wherever that was now. Somewhere outside Stockings, probably.
Fizzing with new energy, he filled the lounge, the kitchen, the bedroom with bloom. He worked diligently, slicing the stems at diagonal angles, prinking the petals and arranging the flowers in complementary colourways; blue and yellow, pink and white. He propped them in vases; then, when he ran out, in pitchers and jugs, raiding the under-sink cupboard. He cherry-picked the recycling and placed single stems of red roses in empty wine bottles on the stairs, one on each tread, all the way up. Such a lot of bottles.
The remaining flowers he strewed on the bed, ripping handfuls of petals off the more tired and broken roses and scattering them over the duvet and floor. It was a gesture of thankfulness and propitiation, disguised as romance. In the dark crack of his heart, Pete knew it was gratitude that moved him, not love. He didn’t mind admitting that he was grateful she’d still have him. Ash and Mike were just amazed. He was dog-tired, almost hallucinating, by the time he’d finished. All-nighters were hitting him harder and harder. His head bobbed and jerked as he stripped off his socks and crawled into the mussed sheets. He felt exhilarated, but exhausted too, like after drugs, or sex. Or stairs, these days.
He closed his eyes and the darkness span. He shouldn’t have done that nasty coke Mike had scraped up from somewhere. He shouldn’t have smoked that pack of Bensons in the club. Liz would smell them on him. She’d probably scent the cigarette smoke even before the roses. Like a sniffer dog, she was. Those wide silent eyes. Those narrow otter nostrils, the finely calibrated instrument of her small nose. She had a profile like a Victorian cameo. Like that other girl tonight, that girl in the club, in Stockings.
He shouldn’t have tried to chat her up. Stockings wasn’t a place for conversation. At least he’d known better than to touch her while she was giving him a dance, but he certainly shouldn’t have followed her into the Ladies afterwards. But she’d reminded him of Liz – of the Liz from photos of twenty years ago, a young Liz he’d never known. He felt jealous of Liz’s past. He wanted to have been there. But he hadn’t had much luck explaining that to the bouncer on the way out.

Pete woke at midday, his head dry and mouth sticky like a pub floor. The light piercing the blinds hurt him. Through narrowed, swollen eyelids, he saw red petals spattering the floorboards, peppering the wizened, half-eaten pizzas still in their boxes, the carrion of fried chicken. The bedroom was carpeted with crumpled newspapers and plastic bags. From somewhere came the sharp reek of vomit. He brushed at his face and torn rose petals came away on his fingers, dark and bruised. The sickly odour of freesias rose from the musty bedspread, making him gag.
And now he remembered why Liz wasn’t home yet. She’d told him last week, just before the business trip. She’d managed to pack everything she needed into two bags and a suitcase, and she wasn’t coming back.
That was what he’d been drinking to forget. That was it.