Winner Takes It All - Part 2

 

Three

 

 

 

Alex couldn’t remember when she last felt so bored. She had a stack of paperwork to get through and was dying to get started on the project her father had set her, and instead she was stuck here in The Amersham Arms, watching The Bell Jar -  Tim’s other passion. As well as conducting ridiculous and pointless research projects, he also played the keyboard and acted as a sort of manager for the group. Alex couldn’t possibly begin to imagine who would pay good money to watch a bunch of middle class students who were all around thirty, performing their fey little songs.

 

As well as her contempt at the music, Alex also couldn’t stand the group members. Justin, Tim’s best friend and Mini Me was the guitarist; an extremely irritating girl called Annika played drums and the singer was Toby Jenson – quite possibly the most annoying man Alex had ever met. He liked to consider himself an activist, a socialist and generally right on and yet his father was a life peer, a member of the Conservative party and somewhere right of Ghengis Khan. Toby couldn’t be blamed for his father’s sins, but there was something about him that made Alex feel he was pretending to be a man of the people and come the day the trust fund matured he’d go running back into the fold of his family.

 

Right now they were performing ‘Gone’ a song about a teenager who has a secret abortion and kills herself. Alex sat surrounded by mainly Tim’s fellow academics who were swaying to the whistful music, pursing their lips and nodding appreciatively, feeling somehow worthy because they were listening to songs with ‘proper’ lyrics. Alex couldn’t share their enthusiasm and this made her feel slightly guilty. Of the Cusack family, it was only Paula and her brood who were academically inclined; none of the others had bothered beyond A’levels. Alex had excelled at sport in school and had gone to the University of Essex to study Sports Science. However her first year hadn’t involved much studying, more getting drunk and sleeping with the various boys who thought she was gorgeous. She met Tim in the library when she couldn’t find a book and asked him for help. They got chatting, he asked her to attend a lecture on the Suffrage movement, and flattered, she agreed and that was it, her life changed.

 

Tim Bradbury was unlike any other boy Alex had been out with. His father was Professor of Modern Art at Manchester University; his mother Georgina Gray was a well-known feminist writer. He liked Radiohead and Pink Floyd and introduced her to older indie bands like the Pixies and Throwing Muses. He was good looking in a sort of geeky way, and Alex had felt so excited to be allowed into the inner sanctum of the university intellectuals. Christian was delighted when she asked if she could switch to Media Studies, pleased that one of his children was actually doing something academic.  Alex suddenly became an authority on dissecting film and television shows; sitting in groups with Tim’s’ brainy friends feeling awfully superior to the students she used to hang around with.

 

It all changed somewhat in 2001 when they graduated. Alex went to work for her father’s company while Tim remained in academia. They moved into a flat in Hoxton and Alex would come home from a stressful day at work to find the place in a mess while Tim was sat at the table writing his MA in Early Cinema. She hoped it would all stop when he got his further degree and he would start looking for a job in the ‘real world.’ However he was offered a position in the Research Department of the University of North West London, excited because they were frequently given huge amounts of money by the EU to study the most ridiculous topics. Alex grew more and more frustrated with him, wondering when he would finally leave ‘school’ and decide to become a grown up. After all, he was almost thirty one; by the time her father was that age, he’d been running Sheridans for eight years.