The Forever Girl

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “You actually told him that you had gone to Singapore?”

  “Yes. I know it sounds stupid, but I did. I suppose …”

  He waited.

  “I suppose I wanted him to think that I had a life of my own … I suppose I hoped it would somehow make me more interesting.” She looked ashamed. “Does that sound odd to you?”

  He looked as if he was making an effort to understand. “What do you expect me to say? No, it’s quite normal to tell somebody you’re in Singapore when you aren’t? Is that what you expect?”

  She did not answer.

  “I suppose,” Greg continued, “that people try to impress others in strange ways. Maybe being in Singapore would impress him – I don’t know. But what bothers me is the point of it all. Why? I mean, most people would just tell him the truth, don’t you think? They’d go up to him and say something like I’ve always had the hots for you.”

  “Would they?”

  He grinned. “I would, if I were a woman and there was this guy I wanted.”

  “That’s what Frieda said. That’s what everybody’s said all along.”

  He shrugged. “Well, there you are. I think that’s about it.”

  She wanted to explain – as much to herself as to him. “But the problem is this: I know how he feels about me. He doesn’t think of me in that way. I’m just a friend to him – somebody he’s known since he was six or whatever. That’s all.” She paused before the hardest admission. “And there’s somebody else. He’s seeing this girl.”

  Greg sighed. “Another girl? Oh well, that’s not so good, is it? If somebody has somebody else, there’s not much you can do.”

  “He’ll never love me,” Clover said. “I know that. And I know that if I were to go up to him and tell him how I felt that would probably end our friendship. He’d feel sorry for me and … and that’s the last thing I want. I’m a little bit of his life right now, but I’d be less if he decided that he had to keep me … keep me at arm’s length because I had gone and fallen in love with him and spoiled everything.” She stared at Greg, hoping he would understand. “Do you see what I mean? If somebody falls in love with you and you don’t fall in love with them, then they’re just a nuisance. You’re embarrassed. You want them to go away.” She willed him to react. “Do you get what I’m trying to say?”

  He tried. “Maybe. A bit.” Now he looked intrigued. “So let me get this straight: you’ve told him that you’ve gone on to Singapore?”

  “Yes. I know that sounds …”

  “Weird.”

  She said nothing, and he continued: “So now he’s back from Adelaide and he thinks you’re in Singapore staying with this girl …”

  “Judy.”

  He looked at her dubiously. “Who exists?”

  “Of course she exists.”

  “I just wanted to make sure how big the fantasy is. That’s all.” He looked thoughtful. “It’s peculiar, but you know what? I suppose it’s harmless – and fun too. You’re inventing a life for yourself there?”

  She nodded. “It sort of grew. I sent him an e-mail telling him I’d gone and he sent one back. He asked me about Singapore and what it was like and I was so pleased that he had actually answered me that I wrote back.”

  “Telling him about it?”

  She looked down at the floor. “It was an excuse to be in touch with him. I bought a book – a guide book. And one of those coffee table books with pictures.”

  He suddenly gave a whoop of delight. “Oh, Clover, you crack me up! You’re serious fun – in a vaguely worrying sort of way.”

  “He wrote back … again.”

  “And you continued with the story?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of it invented? Made up?”

  “I told you: Judy exists. And I was going to stay with her for a few days on the way back. So it’s true – in a way. All I’ve done is to bring it forward by a few weeks.”

  They had been talking in the kitchen of the flat, and now he got up from his chair and walked over to the window. “You know what? Let’s make one up. Could I try? Get your computer and write it down.”

  “Do you …”

  “Yes, come on. Clover’s day in Singapore. You go shopping. That’s what people do in Singapore. Big shopping place. And you buy …” He broke off to consider. “You buy a T-shirt. Big deal. But that sounds just right because people do that sort of thing, don’t they? They go out shopping and they come back with a tee-shirt. Yours says … You know what it says? It says Foreign Girl, but you can’t resist it because you think it says it all. You are a foreign girl, and here’s this T-shirt that admits it. It’s a very honest T-shirt.”

  He warmed to his theme. “And on the way back to the flat somebody steals your purse. You don’t know how it happened, but it goes. Maybe there was this guy – yes, there was, I remember now – this guy brushes past you and he says how sorry he is but he’s actually taken your purse and he goes off in the crowd.”

  “There’s no crime in Singapore. My book said that. Or they have a very low rate of crime.”

  He laughed. “That’s what they say. And maybe it’s true. But even if it is, there’s bound to be some crime. So you go to the police station and … and it’s really clean. Clean policemen, clean desks, clean criminals – not very many of them, of course – and this sergeant … It was a sergeant, wasn’t it?”

  She entered into the spirit of it. “Yes. He was Sergeant Foo. He had one of those name badges on and it said Sergeant Foo.”

  He said, “Oh, I like that guy. I wouldn’t cross him, but I like him. Sergeant Foo takes your statement and then he says, This is very regrettable. Rest assured, lady, that we will catch this … this malefactor. He will be severely punished. And then you went home. And Judy had invited these people over for dinner and she didn’t have any …”

  “Arborio rice. She was going to do Italian and she needed some Arborio rice.”

  “So you went out to this shop round the corner,” he said. “And there was this whole stack of Arborio rice because there were some Italians living nearby and they were always wanting Arborio rice. All the time.”

  They laughed together. “Silly girl,” said Greg, gazing at her fondly.

  She avoided his gaze. She did not feel silly. Nothing about her feelings for James was silly.

  She had imagined that there would be one or two e-mails from Singapore, but she was to be proved wrong. James replied to each, often almost immediately, and began to include, in his responses, news of his own. There was a different tone to his e-mails now – something that she had not noticed in his earlier messages. He had been almost business-like before and had said little about himself and what he was doing; now he seemed more open, more inclined to chat. He told her about Adelaide and the hotel that he was staying in. “It’s one of those old Australian hotels that were always built on street corners,” he wrote. “There’s a pub in it called the Happy Wallaby – I’m not inventing this; it really is – and this fills with rather rowdy locals each evening and it depresses me, I’m sorry to say, and I wish I were back in Melbourne. I like this country, and I know that I’m half Australian – just like you’re half American, aren’t you? – but there are little corners of it that seem … I don’t know the word. Is it lost? Is that what I’m trying to say? There are places where somehow everything is lost in the vastness of it all. The buildings stand there against a backdrop of emptiness, or mountains, or whatever it is and they seem adrift. It’s like being on the sea. And if there’s a wind, you find yourself thinking, Where’s this wind come from?”

  She wrote back to him: “I know what you mean about Australia. I liked it too – not that I saw very much of it. And I liked the people – I liked them a lot, but you could very easily feel lonely there, couldn’t you?”

  ‘Yes,” he replied. “You could feel lonely.”

  She stopped saying very much about Singapore. This was not because she had no ideas as to what she was doing in her Singaporean
life – she and Greg spent hours imagining it, and his suggestions, although occasionally preposterous, would have made up a quite credible daily life – but she felt increasingly guilty about the fact that what she was saying amounted to lies. She was deceiving James, and she did not like doing it. And yet she had started it; the whole conception had been hers.

  In due course she would tell him, she decided. She would make light of it – as if it were a long-drawn-out joke, and as harmless as a joke might be. He might be surprised, but surely he would not be hurt by what she would portray as innocent imaginative play.

  “I’m going back early,” he wrote. “The audit took less time than they thought we’d need and so it’s back to Melbourne for all three of us. But not for long. Listen to this: Singapore. The firm has a big client there – it’s an Australian engineering firm that does a lot of South-East Asian work and they’re looked after by our office in Singapore. But one of their staff is in London for a month and another has been poached by an American firm. So … Singapore for two of us from the Melbourne office – for five weeks – quite a big deal for a first year trainee but that’s par for the course with this firm, apparently. Right, then … dinner next week? I love Chinese food and somebody told me you can get it cooked on wood fires in Singapore. And there are these big food markets where you can eat – have you been? I leave here on Wednesday, which gives me three days to get ready after I get back to Melbourne. Tuesday or Wednesday suit you?”

  She read the message twice, and then sat still, appalled by what she had done. She had known that there was a risk that her deception would be exposed, but she had not imagined that it would happen so soon. She went to Greg, who read the e-mail and then raised an eyebrow. “Exposure, Clove. It happens. So what are you going to do? Come clean?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I’m going to tell him eventually. But I can’t do it now. I can’t face it.”

  He was silent.

  She reached her decision. “I’m going there. As soon as I can.”

  “Singapore?”

  “Yes. I was going to see Judy anyway.”

  He made a face. “Money?”

  She explained about her father’s gift. “I can afford it. I’ll have to pay to change the ticket again, but I can do that.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe this, you know. You’ll do anything it seems for this guy – anything. Except tell him the truth about how you feel.”

  “How can I?”

  “Open your mouth and speak. It’s that simple. Give him a call. Ask him. Say: Are you still going out with that other girl? And if he says yes, then end of story. If he says no, then you could say what everybody’s been telling you to say. Get it sorted out one way or another.”

  “No.”

  “That’s all you can say? No?”

  “Yes. I mean, no.”

  “I give up,” he said harshly, and then, almost immediately, relented. “Sorry. I wish I could be positive, but how can you be positive about something that has disaster written all over it?” He repeated the word to underline his warning. “Disaster.”

  32

  Judy gave her an enthusiastic welcome.

  “I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you’re here,” she said. “I’ve asked tons of people to visit me and not one has taken me up on the invitation. Not a single one – apart from you.”

  They were standing at the window of the spare room in her flat. This flat was in a building that was not high by Singaporean standards – four storeys, arranged around a courtyard dominated by an inviting blue swimming pool. Two young children, brother and sister, frolicked in the water at the shallow end of the pool, watched by a uniformed nurse. The nurse spoke constantly on her phone, occasionally getting up, mid-conversation, to admonish the boy for splashing his sister too enthusiastically.

  “Those children,” said Judy, “belong to some people on the floor below. You never see the parents with them – just one of the Filipina nurses. There are two of them – the Filipinas – and I’ve got to know one of them quite well, but not this one. They spend their lives working for other people, although they have children of their own back home. The other woman’s sister works in the Middle East. She looks after the children of some ruling family over there. She says the children never even learn to tie their own shoe-laces because they have a Filipina to do it for them. Can you imagine that?”

  Clover watched the children. She had grown up with that sort of thing in the Caymans, where the Jamaicans did the work of the Filipinas.

  Judy looked at her and smiled. “The truth is – I’m bored stiff. I don’t know what to do. I’m only here because my parents want me to be. I’m going to have to talk to them about leading my own life.”

  “Do another degree,” said Clover.

  “That’s what I’m planning to do. That’s what master’s degrees are for, aren’t they? To keep graduates out of the unemployment statistics.” She paused. “How long do you want to stay?”

  Clover suggested two weeks and Judy gave a cry of delight. “Oh my God, that’s fantastic. I thought you were going to say two days. That’s what most people do – they come here on their way to Australia or Bali or somewhere sexy like that and then they go. Or, in my case, they don’t come in the first place.”

  Clover took a deep breath. She knew that she would have no alternative but to tell Judy about her deception, and now she did so. Hearing her own account of what happened only served to deepen her disquiet. “I know it sounds stupid,” she said at the end. “But that’s what I did.”

  Judy’s reaction took her by surprise. “Totally reasonable,” she said.

  “So you don’t disapprove?”

  “Why should I disapprove? Nobody’s died.”

  Clover said that she felt that she had involved Judy in her dishonesty.

  “No,” said Judy. “You didn’t. It’s entirely up to me as to whether I play along with this – and I’m cool with it. Absolutely. Men mislead women all the time – they’re such liars – this is just a return match.”

  “You’ll back me up? You’ll go along with what I said happened?”

  “Of course. Just give me the details.”

  She gave her the broad details of the imaginary life that she had created for herself. Judy listened with growing amusement. “We had a terrific time together,” she said. “Our virtual life was much more interesting than real life.”

  “We’re going out for dinner on Tuesday,” Clover said.

  “Tuesday? Good. I’m free.”

  Clover was silent for a few moments. She had invited herself to Singapore and she could hardly tell her friend that she was not welcome at dinner. Judy, though, picked up her hesitation.

  “Sorry, it was going to be just the two of you. I shouldn’t have …”

  “No, I’d like you to come. You’ll have the chance to catch up with him.”

  Judy did not protest. “All right. Thank you. I haven’t seen him for ages. Not since Cayman, really – we didn’t connect in Edinburgh.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be keen to see you.”

  Judy smiled. “I know this really great place where everybody wants to go these days. My father knows the owner – we’ll get in no matter what time we arrive.”

  She made a list of the places that she had mentioned to James in her e-mails to him, and asked Judy about these, reading out what she had written – the fiction of her created life.

  Judy seemed bemused. “You wrote that about me?” she said. “You told him that we went out for a meal and saw that movie and so on? All of that?”

  Clover nodded ruefully. What had started with so little thought, what had seemed so innocent and inoffensive at the time, had now taken on the appearance of a monstrous deception. “I don’t know why I did it,” she said. “Well, I do, I suppose … I suppose I wanted to be involved with him. I wanted him to pay attention to me and what I was do
ing. Does that make sense to you?”

  “It does. In a way – as a form of attention seeking.”

  “I feel such a fraud,” said Clover.

  Judy laughed. “But you are,” although she rapidly added, “No offence, of course.”

  And soon, rather sooner than she might have wished, James arrived in Singapore and telephoned from his hotel. She took the call with trepidation, signalling to Judy across the room. “Him?” mouthed Judy.

  She nodded, and Judy gave the thumbs up signal.

  After the call, Clover said, “He never phoned me before, you know. Or hardly ever. It was always me.”

  Judy was encouraging. “I’ve got a good feeling about this,” she said. “I think that something’s changed. I think it’s over between him and …”

  “Shelley.”

  “Yes. He wants to see you, I think.”

  “You really think so?”

  Judy grinned. “Well, why else would he bother?”

  “Maybe he just wants somebody to show him round Singapore.”

  Judy shook her head. “People don’t need to be shown round Singapore,” she said. “You get a map and places are where they’re meant to be. It’s very well organised. No, I think at long last he’s come round.”

  “I feel as if I know this place,” he said.

  Judy had poured him a beer and was sitting opposite James in the flat. Clover was on the sofa next to him.

  “You’ve been to Singapore?” Judy said.

  “No. Not Singapore. This flat. Clover wrote to me and told me what she was doing. What you were doing.”

  Judy caught Clover’s eye, and smiled. “Chick lit,” she said.

  “Two Single Girls in Singapore. How about that for a title? Fiction section, of course.”

  James seemed amused. “It wasn’t very steamy,” he said.

  “The whole place is steamy,” retorted Judy. “You’ve probably been in air conditioning since you arrived. Open the window. Let in the steam.”

  Clover felt uncomfortable about this exchange and tried to change the subject. “Judy knows this place for dinner,” she said. “What’s it called, Judy?”