The Aftermath: Chapter One
Wherein we meet our anti-hero and -heroine Hugo Champion and Amory Trevor-Hopkins
PART ONE: AFTER
One
It wasn’t the illness as such that Hugo Champion found so objectionable. It was everything else that surrounded the wholly dubious experience of being sick, not the least of which was the bloody inconvenience of it all. For the virus couldn’t have come at a worse time. Amory had insisted on a destination wedding despite his multiple and at times quite passionate protestations to the contrary. Destination weddings were vulgar and selfish, he’d argued – less about the nuptials and everything about the location, which, Amory had counter-argued, was entirely the point. Amory lived her life through the lens of her iPhone. Fair enough, Hugo supposed, given that social media was where she made her money (a small fortune actually) and – if he allowed himself to be honest – was what kept them up in relative style in their two bedroom townhouse off the King’s Road.
Hugo hated admitting that Amory was the breadwinner between them. His salary as a senior acquisitions editor at one of London’s most prestigious – albeit independent…very independent – book publishers was hardly adequate at best and downright demoralizing at worst. But he loved the antiquated eccentricity of his chosen industry and couldn’t imagine working anywhere else. And the fact that he worked in publishing he knew made him seem far more interesting than he also knew he actually was, which almost but not quite made up for his paltry wages – at least when compared to Amory’s monthly haul. He tried not to dwell on the disparity of their individual socio-economic profiles. And, he supposed, it somewhat helped that he came from a family whose name still carried not inconsiderable weight in these topsy-turvy times. But he also feared that time was running out for him – not just for him, but for his kind – and he wondered what that meant for his future with Amory.
In fact, it had been the stuff of his nightmares, those vaguely hallucinogenic visions he had had in the midst of his night sweats in his hospital bed at the very nadir of his illness, ventilator shoved down his throat, kept awake by the incessant beeping of his bed-side monitors. And while Hugo hated the World War Two comparisons foisted on the public by grasping politicians and a cloying press that looked for heroics where for the most part it was just regular people doing their everyday jobs, he also had to admit that when he finally came out on the other side after six terrifying weeks of his life hanging in the balance, and as the NHS staff and care workers applauded him like he was a hero (okay, fair enough) as he left the ward to go home to Chelsea, he felt as though he had just – barely – won a war.
“Bora Bora is definitely out this year,” Amory said just moments after he’d been bundled into the back seat of a taxi with the last of the cheering and clapping still echoing in his ears. “As is Tulum, Bali, Vanuatu, and that island off the coast of Brazil that’s so exclusive it’s like an ecological refuge for puffin penguins or something that I knew might be a long shot but I thought maybe we might stand a chance given the fact that I campaigned so heavily for them last year after that David Attenborough series made everyone fall in love with puffins again.”
She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were firmly fixed on the screen of her iPhone, crimson nail tapping and swiping to her own internal syncopated rhythm. Amory was in the zone. Hugo could only wonder at her focus.
“Puffins are cute though,” she said. “Even if they don’t really do anything and I don’t think they’re particularly endangered anymore, thanks to all that work I did for them with the foundation. I hope the motherfuckers appreciate it.”
Amory took herself very seriously. Her earnestness had been one of the things that had first attracted Hugo. She was never without a cause. But sometimes he found her dedication, well, rather restrictive and, when he gave himself permission to do so, which had been more and more often pre-pandemic and now post-hospitalization even more so, he found himself questioning her sincerity, and then instantly feeling guilty for his momentary lapse of support. Amory had never been anything but kind to him, albeit in her own way. He hated feeling uncharitable.
“We still can’t travel anywhere,” Amory continued, her eyes flicking back and forth in the direction of her swipes. “I mean really. Isn’t it time we all just fucking moved on? I mean it’s so shit. We’re supposed to be getting married. This is supposed to be the time of our fucking lives. I mean we’re young. We’re fit. We run marathons.”
“You run marathons,” Hugo corrected with a glimmer in his eye that he hoped looked playful if only Amory would take a breath and actually look at him, “unless you count the distance between my hospital bed and the loo.”
“All I’m saying is, I think it’s unfair.”
“What’s unfair?”
“I mean fine. If you have to lock up the oldies and the more vulnerable among us then that’s one thing. But the rest of us, I mean, we’re not the ones getting sick. We’re not the ones dying. So what’s the point of keeping us isolated too?”
Hugo felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle.
“Uh…Earth to Amory…what do you think just happened to me?”
She looked at him then. Over the top of her iPhone. Her blue eyes large and uncomprehending. Hugo hated that look.
“What?” she asked.
Hugo hated that look because he knew she wasn’t being disingenuous. He hated that look because he also knew there was no use in trying to make a point.
“Forget it,” he said. He rubbed the plaster over the vein in his hand where they had kept him connected to his fluids and the monitors, the very things that had kept him alive these past six weeks, that and the nurses and doctors. Where had Amory been? Okay, fair enough, she’d been self-isolating by law, but still. Her ignorance irritated him because he knew it was willful and there was nothing he could do to change it.
“Oh that,” she said with a vaguely distasteful cluck. Oh that. “Well, I mean, I don’t think…I mean, I’m still not convinced what you had wasn’t just a bug. Or a bad case of food poisoning. I mean I did tell you not to eat that leftover moo goo gai pan, but as usual you don’t listen. And what happened to you? You paid the price for not listening to me. Hello? Chinese food? I feel like your fucking mother sometimes.”
And that was it. That was the extent of Amory’s sympathy.
She went back to swiping and scrolling, swiping and scrolling, her nail tapping and sliding, tapping and sliding. Hugo wished he had his ear buds handy to drown at the noise of her with silence. He leaned his head against the taxi window and stared at the world outside. How strangely desolated it all seemed.
“Where is everyone?” he asked.
“Who?”
Hugo gestured out the window – at the sidewalk along the Embankment past the Houses of Parliament heading toward Pimlico. He felt as though he and Amory were traveling in the only taxi in the entire city and he wondered if this was real or whether it was his imagination – a waking version of the nightmares that reminded him of those endless nights on the ventilator when it really didn’t look like he was going to pull through – and he was tempted to tap on the partition between them and the driver and tell him to stop, to let him out so he could walk or wake up or run or do something – anything – that would get him away from the maddening roar of Amory’s nails tapping on her iPhone screen. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her but he couldn’t stand to look out the window anymore either. Something wasn’t right. Where was everyone? What had he missed? It felt a bit like he’d missed the memo that told everyone to stay home that day. But then, after six weeks confined to the virus ward, he was sure there were plenty of memos he’d missed. Had the world really changed so completely that people were afraid to even walk their dogs?
“Oh.” Amory tossed her phone down on the seat beside her with an impatient flourish. She was good at things like that. “I can’t even right now.”
“Can’t even what?”
“Chloe just reminded me. I mean, she’s right and I did say I’d host the fucking thing but I forgot it was tonight and what with everything else it slipped my mind and now she’s just WhatsApped me asking if it was okay if she brought a friend and I’m like, I can’t deal with you right now, but that’s not exactly something you can really say to Chloe Templeton – I mean she’s fucking Chloe Templeton! – so I told her of course it was okay and now she’s bringing this guy I don’t really know and don’t really like and it makes me uncomfortable because he’s not part of my social bubble – this guy, not Chloe – and it feels vaguely sketchy and I think it may even be breaking the law and the last thing I need is for the neighbors to call the po-po and haul me off to the slammer for breaking the umpteenth fucking lockdown rule. I’ve caught them spying. You can’t trust anyone these days.”
Hugo didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He lay his head against the back of his seat and looked at her and she looked at him and they looked at each other and Hugo didn’t think he’d ever felt so confused or so goddamned lucky to have a girl like Amory Trevor-Hopkins looking at him and he wondered what he’d done to be both so fortunate and so god-damned at the same time, because a girl like Amory Trevor-Hopkins was both a blessing and a curse for any bloke and he couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that he was that bloke and she was his blessing and his curse to deal with, his and his alone.
“What?” she asked.
“What what?”
They communicated in questions. Their intimacy wasn’t based on affirmations.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Are you up for it?”
“For what?” he asked for he genuinely had no idea what she was talking about.
Amory shrugged. She glanced furtively at her phone and he was relieved that she left it alone, for now.
“Chloe’s thing,” she explained as if this was explanation enough. “It’s for her foundation. SASS – Sisters Against Sweat Shops. We’re having a facemask party. The girls are getting together and we’re drinking Prosecco and we’re going to pretend that we’re designing facemasks for the poor Black girls of Malawi, but really it’s just an excuse for us to drink Prosecco and listen to Chloe talk.”
“Why Malawi?”
“Why not Malawi?”
“I don’t know,” Hugo said. “I would guess there are plenty of people here in the UK who need facemasks too. When I was in hospital—“
Amory shook her head. She wagged her finger at him almost apoplectically and shook her head like an epileptic, Hugo thought, and again he didn’t know whether he should admire her or ask the driver to pull over so he could get out and run far, far away.
“That’s the problem,” she said. “You’ve been in hospital for too long.”
“That’s not my fault. I was sick.”
“The world has changed.”
“Clearly. All you have to do is look outside and—“
“The world has changed.” Not a question, a statement.
“I wasn’t disputing you,” he said, suddenly feeling very much on the defensive, but about what he wasn’t sure.
“Black lives matter.”
“Okay.”
“Wakonda forever. Hence,” Amory practically spat, “facemasks for the poor bBack girls of Malawi.”
End of.
They rode along in silence. Hugo stared out the window, simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the zombie apocalypse of it all. And Amory. She was a woman possessed. He’d always suspected she had tendencies but to see them so manifest was unnerving. Who was this person? What had happened to her in the six weeks of his hospital confinement? What had he missed? For clearly he had missed something. Hugo wondered if there was another guy. Or, another woman. Not that that was necessarily the stuff of his fantasies, even though he thought it probably should have been. There had been a time at uni, not long after they had first started hooking up when she’d asked him if he might be more interested in her if they added a third to their party. Guy or girl, she said, it didn’t matter. Hugo knew that he was meant to be turned on by the offer and that for most guys of his age and supposed persuasion, what Amory had suggested represented the opportunity of a lifetime. He knew this and he knew how he was meant to react. And the fact that he hadn’t reacted the way Amory had anticipated clearly indicated there was something rather grievously wrong with him, beyond the fact that he was a fairly typical Englishman of a certain class prone to bouts of spluttering and social awkwardness when confronted with situations very obviously outside the norm, or rather, his norm.
For her part, Amory interpreted his lack of overt enthusiasm as a slap in the face. She accused him of being judgmental, of making her feel like a dirty whore, like a sexual deviant, a freak. Of course, he’d meant no such thing, but her wrath at his all-too-stereotypical dithering brooked no dissuasion. As he later came to realize, with Amory it was very much her way or the highway and any deviation from her intended path sent her down a spiral of spite and insecurity that no amount of alcohol, pills, or therapy could mitigate. In his less charitable moments, Hugo wondered if perhaps the alcohol, pills, and therapy were the problem, but of course he couldn’t say that, couldn’t even think it.
They broke up after that – the first of many mini break-ups as it would turn out. After a year, Hugo had lost count of how many times he and Amory had decided to “give each other permission” (Amory’s phrasing). Hugo had never really felt the need. There was something special about Amory. Any idiot could see that. And it went beyond her looks, which were certainly better than average but perhaps just shy of a ten – something about her mouth or the permanent crease between her brows or the way her blue eyes always seemed to stare out of their sockets in an expression of perpetual confrontation that made her appear severe even when she wasn’t trying to be. She had been a blonde at uni -- blonde blonde, in fact – but now, seven years later, she had long since returned to her natural color –“don’t fuck with me black,” she called it – which unfortunately had a rather hardening effect that only served to accent the intensity of Amory’s resting face. Hugo preferred her as a blonde, but again, he didn’t dare confess this.
He looked at her again. She was looking at her phone, swiping and scrolling, tapping and swiping and scrolling, and he noticed for the first time since they’d left hospital that there was something different about her appearance, something rather strikingly different but he couldn’t for the life of him tell what. He wondered if this lack of acknowledgment of her very evident yet wholly anonymous transformation was what was making her so cross. But again, he was at a loss to comment.
“You finally noticed?”
“What?”
“Fuck you’re thick sometimes.”
Hugo couldn’t disagree.
“Do you like it?”
“Sure?”
“I told Pascal I needed a change. You know, to represent this new me in this new world? The new normal? I didn’t think he’d agree but Chloe arranged a car to pick me up and take me to this top secret location where Pascal had set up his chair. I had to wear a fucking blindfold it was so secret. It was so obvious that I was doing something highly irregular and if I got caught I couldn’t give anything away. On account of the lockdown?”
Her hair. She’d changed her hair. Not the color though. The cut. Of course.
“Anyway it’s been a godsend. I feel like a new woman. I think people take me more seriously when I have short hair.”
It was very short. How had he not noticed it before? Amory’s hair was cut like a boy’s – short back and sides – with a fittingly severe part on the right with nary a strand out of place. It was short but he didn’t doubt it still took her hours to style. He thought she looked like a lesbian.
“I would have posted it to my feed but then Chloe reminded me that it might actually cost me followers which is the last thing I need during this difficult and unprecedented time. I need to be expanding my reach. I’m branching out into new markets. It’s all about the process of reinvention, of maximizing one’s relevance, this journey I’m on. Chloe thinks I’m brave.”
Hugo nodded. He realized he had nothing to contribute to this conversation. But then, he and Amory didn’t really have conversations. Amory talked and he listened. Or didn’t listen. He’d stopped listening now. Chloe Templeton irritated him. More than irritated him, in fact, Hugo held Chloe in contempt. He knew the way he felt about Chloe Templeton wasn’t rational but he couldn’t help himself. He felt she was the third person in their relationship. And he’d often wondered whether there was more going on between Amory and Chloe than met the eye.
“You look like Chloe,” he said.
She flinched. Bullseye.
“Was it Chloe who told you to get your hair cut like her or did you do it because you wanted to?”
“I don’t even know what that means?”
“Fucking hell, Amory. Sometimes—“
“What?”
But that was it. That was all he had to say. He wanted to lash out. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted her to know that he wanted to hurt her but that was where it ended. Hugo didn’t think himself a particularly vindictive person. He didn’t like hurting Amory for the sake of hurting her. He hurt her to prove a point. In fact, if he really considered it, his motivation was less about hurting her and everything about the way it made him feel to exert that control over her. For it was a certain kind of control. And it was the only control he felt he could really exert because in most ways Amory was unquestionably a superior being to him. He wasn’t worthy. And that was a problem. The problem. Hugo didn’t know how he’d get over it.
“You know how I feel about Chloe,” he said. He’d told her before but he didn’t think Amory had ever really listened.
“You’re jealous of her. You’re jealous because she has a title and you don’t.”
“That’s not where I was going.”
“But it’s true though, isn’t it?”
“No.” And again, that was it. Well, partially it. Hugo wished he could say of himself that such things as titles and the trappings that came with them meant nothing to him, that he was above all that aristocratic palaver, that despite his impressive lineage he was at heart just a regular bloke who wanted to be treated like a regular bloke, left alone to hang out with his mates down the pub at the weekend, have a few pints, play darts, watch the footie, and then go home, sleep off the hangover and look forward to it all again seven days later. To Hugo, being a regular bloke was like living the dream, something to aspire to and even take pride in. But no amount of trying to convince himself that his status in life was otherwise was enough to make it so.
Hugo knew that there was nothing about him or his family or his lifestyle that was remotely regular bloke-ish. But instead of making peace with his at times really rather oppressive reality, he preferred to dream … and take his resentment out on Amory in quiet and quietly passive-aggressive ways: like going along with her – agreeing with her – but then undercutting her when he most knew it would hurt, just as he was doing right now and would probably continue to do so for as long as they remained together, or rather for as long as she would put up with him. Hugo knew when the time came – as it inevitably would, for what relationship lasted forever anymore, or even should? – it would be Amory who’d walk out on him.
For as much as he resented her – hated her at times – Hugo also knew of himself that he’d rather endure and suffer in silence than strike out on his own along a different and unfamiliar path that, ironically, didn’t include Amory. Yes, he hated Amory at times, but more often – and more deeply – Hugo hated himself. Six weeks in hospital without a single visitor (albeit due to social distancing measures and not because he was a friendless loser, well not entirely) gave Hugo time to think and reflect and still there wasn’t much he decided at the end of it all that he’d have done or would do differently. What kind of hypocrite did that make him? He didn’t care to ponder.
“You’re such a snob,” Amory said with a sniff that accented the fact that she thought being a snob was the very lowest of the low even though she herself represented what Hugo thought was the worst kind of snob a person could be – the snob who doesn’t think they’re a snob and goes around calling other people snobs to deflect from their own snobbishness. It was so typical of Amory he could do nothing else but laugh.
“And Chloe thinks you’re a snob too,” she continued, just to add insult to injury. “Chloe doesn’t like you very much. In fact, Chloe doesn’t like you at all.”
The words stung, as they were of course intended to.
“We’re even then,” he replied somewhat petulantly, more petulantly that he would have liked. “I’ve never cared for Chloe much either. And that foundation of hers? I happen to know for a fact that she didn’t fund it herself.”
Amory rolled her eyes.
“Of course she didn’t, but that doesn’t make it any less her foundation or its cause any less relevant. Her family situation has always been…delicate, even more so now with her stepmother calling the shots. I mean I’ve never met the woman but from what Chloe tells me, she sounds absolutely horrific: a gold digger if ever there was one. Poor Chloe. She’s such a dear. And so lucky to have someone like Spencer looking after her and making sure she’s happy. Chloe deserves to be happy.”
“Spencer’s a sap.”
Hugo had his own notions about Chloe’s on-again-off-again boyfriend but he didn’t feel like dragging them out into the open, at least not in the present conversation. Amory was aware of his notions too. Everyone in their set was. But everyone was too discreet to call it what it was. And Hugo didn’t feel like being the whistleblower. At least not just yet.
“Anyways,” Amory said, picking up her phone again with a desultory yawn that spoke more accurately toward her opinion of the current topic than mere words could ever convey, “the whole gang is over at ours tonight at eight. Don’t be horrible.”
“I’m never horrible,” Hugo muttered. He looked out the window as they turned onto the King’s Road. The old familiar haunts flashed by. The landscape still looked desiccated. Hugo shuddered in spite of himself. It was all too familiar to him, and yet, strangely – disconcertingly – not.