Page 56 of Beautiful Losers

Jack looks taken aback.

‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business,’ I say. ‘I have a habit of coming out with non sequiturs at inappropriate moments. Once, right after sex with Cillian, I asked him if he’d heard President Xi’s latest speech threatening military action if the West tried to stick its oar in over Taiwan. My brain tends to leap from one thing to another. It’s not like it was a reflection of the ride or anything. Though it has been said that women have better sex under socialism.’

Thankfully, I have some filter left. I don’t tell Jack, for example, that I’ve been wanting to ask him if he had plans to patch things up with Helen from the moment he got into the car this morning. Maybe longer. That unlike Cillian’sviews on the greater China policy, Jack’s opinion on the future of his marriage matters. It matters a lot. It matters more than it should. And that scares me.

He surveys me for a moment.

‘You’re wrong, you know,’ he says. ‘About not having more to offer. I think you have a lot of potential.’

29

It’s funny, the useless information your brain is capable of storing. For instance, I couldn’t recall a single fact from the book I’ve just finished about the migrant crisis in Europe, but I can tell you that a work colleague of Yiv’s was breastfed until he was nine. Or that Cillian has never seen any of the Indiana Jones movies. Or that Dermot Cleary suffers from arachibutyrophobia, a fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. (Once, Ciara from the weekend supplement dipped a medjool date into a jar of the stuff. The paper was running an extract from a wellness influencer’s new book, and Ciara had to test the recipes to ensure they were user-friendly. She was working her way through ‘Peanut Butter Medjool Dates’ – Ingredients: peanut butter; medjool dates. Method: Dip medjool dates into peanut butter – when Dermot walked past her desk and promptly got HR to move the entire magazine to the other side of the building.)

This stuff seems trivial. What does a rare phobia or the amount of time your mother spent lactating really tell us about someone? Sure, Dermot can be floored by a breakfast spread, but he’s also disrupted institutions with his columns. Cillian missed out on a formative childhood experience, yet it hasn’t stopped him from, in his own words, ‘helping people tap into the child-like wonder in us all’.

In the seven weeks I’ve known Jack, I’ve accumulated a series of facts about the man. He enjoys punctuality and expensive grooming products. He has a scar just above his left kneecap, acquired from the time he stuck a blue biro into his leg when he was four, to see if he would bleed ink. He has a habit of saying ‘panino’ when referring to the popular Italian snack in the singular – grammatically correct, but infuriatingly smug. Cheese slices the colour of radioactive waste are his guilty pleasure. He believes mansplaining isn’t a thing.

Such information offers us nothing, except, I suppose, a kind of reassurance that we all have them – quirks and preferences, ways of being built up over the years. That if you stripped us of our circumstances and hot takes on the world, we’re each of us essentially the same – just a bunch of cells that need food, water and shelter to survive. Or, as Dad once charmingly put it, ‘We all have the same holes, Fiadh. Even the queen of England has to take a daily shit.’

Jack Hamilton is a person who likes highly processed cheese and believes mansplaining isn’t a thing. Depending on your feelings on cheese and mansplaining, these are potentially inflammatory pieces of information. But what if they weren’t? What if these were just more facts, and not an insight into Jack’s soul? What if we regarded one another as theculmination of our beliefs, choices, actions, as more than our demonstrably poor taste in dairy products?

~

I’m having this quiet epiphany as I’m deep-cleaning the interior of my car. My impromptu trip with Jack the other day made me realise a valet is long overdue. On our way back from Lautrec, Jack reached into the glove compartment to get another CD and pulled out a half-eaten jar of hazelnut spread and a soiled teaspoon.

I spot Jack running down the lane and wave at him. He jogs up to me as I’m extracting a mould-covered apple from underneath Ari’s seat cover.

‘Need a hand?’ he says, running in place.

‘Sure. Got a hazmat suit?’ I joke, gingerly dropping the apple into a bin bag.

‘Give me a minute,’ he says, slightly out of breath.

He walks off, and I wonder if he does actually have a hazmat suit in his room. It’s on the more extreme side of pandemic precaution, but I commend his commitment to good hygiene practice. He returns a few minutes later, holding something shiny in his hand.

‘Some music while we work?’ he says, grinning.

He holdsPhat Beatsin the air, shaking it like he’s won a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

I click my tongue. ‘Seriously?’

‘Just one song. It’s a good ’un, I promise.’

I shake my head. ‘Go on then.’

I continue tossing wrappers and plastic bottles into the bin bag while Jack fiddles with the CD player in thefront seat. Through the headrest, I can see the back of his neck, gleaming with sweat.

‘Here we go,’ he says, rubbing his hands together gleefully.

One, Two, One, Two, Three, Eoww!

Jack turns round to face me, bouncing his head in time with the music.

‘New Radicals,’ I smile, in spite of myself.

‘Arguably the best song of the nineties,’ he says.

‘That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?’ I bend down, pressing my ear against the floor as I reach underneath Jack’s seat.

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