Shine, Pamela! Shine! (Out of Line collection)

by Kate Atkinson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Kate Costello Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542020602

  Cover design by Zoe Norvell

  Pamela had been thoroughly divorced for some years now. “Happily so!” she would declare gaily if asked. Sometimes she said, “Best thing that ever happened to me!” with equal exuberance. Neither statement was particularly true, but she was a great believer in exclamation marks. They glossed even the dullest statement (“It’s raining!”). They were also useful in turning a negative into a positive, especially when attempting to compliment one’s friends, as in, for example, “Your hair! You’ve changed it!” (Equally “Your dress! Those shoes! That color on you!”)

  Judge not, that ye be not judged was Pamela’s motto, being only too well aware of her own equally tragic shortcomings in the style department. She shopped mainly from Marks & Spencer or the JD Williams catalog and had recently taken to wearing shoes that fastened with Velcro, which everyone knows is an incontrovertible sign of age (but so comfortable!). And for years now Pamela had worn her hair in what she thought of as a “menopausal bob,” sheared off just below chin level and colored at home to disguise (although, let’s face it, not really) the relentless gray.

  Pamela had retired a few months ago from a lifelong career as a teacher in a Church of England primary school during which her working days had been endlessly peppered with those same exclamation marks. Generations of children had been cajoled by her to make jazz hands and “put a sparkle on it” when mumbling in the annual nativity or plodding through their reading out loud. “Don’t slouch! Speak clearly! Shine!”

  “If you can’t say something nice,” she had tutored her own children, Amy and Nicholas, “then don’t say anything at all.” “Jesus, Mother,” Amy said, “you’re such a fucking marshmallow.” Take out the obscenity and stick on an exclamation mark and it was almost (but not quite) a compliment. Amy was thirty-two, training to be a heart surgeon, perhaps in the hope that while a patient was lying on the operating table with their chest cut open she might be able to steal their heart, seeing as she didn’t have one of her own (just joking!). Nicholas was two years younger than Amy (thirty!) and unlike his sister seemed to have no ambition at all beyond reaching the top level in Assassin’s Creed. He had recently moved back home. Or “Nick’s living at home again!” if you put a sparkle on it. And, believe me, Pamela tried to.

  Pamela was, in fact, neither happily nor unhappily divorced—she was simply divorced. The divorce in question took place over fifteen years ago now, which was time enough for the humiliation and shock to have died down into embers of resentment that were only occasionally fanned back into flames of fury.

  Pamela had been completely blindsided by Alistair’s decision to walk out—literally—on the marriage. They had just filled the dishwasher together, and as she turned the knob to Eco-wash, he said, “I’ll be off now then,” as if he had been waiting for one last cleaning cycle before leaving. “Off where?” Pamela puzzled. Just “off,” apparently. He had a bag packed in the boot of his company car. She didn’t know which was more surprising—that he was leaving or that he’d packed his own bag. “Want to do a bit of living while I still can,” he said. Well, don’t we all? Pamela thought.

  “Sex, drugs, rock and roll,” he laughed sheepishly, although really he was only interested in the first one of those. “Sow my wild oats,” he said. “Never got a chance when I was young.” He’d already begun apparently, broadcasting his seed with someone called Lorraine in Acquisitions. “Nothing serious, just a bit of fun.”

  “Fun?” Pamela echoed. She’d never thought of the word being used in this context. “Fun” was something she associated with pantomimes and games of Pin the Tail on the Donkey (did anyone play that anymore?).

  “Yes, fun,” he said defensively.

  He had done his duty, Alistair said. Mortgage paid, both children safely into their teens, all the hurdles of middle-class life successfully jumped. “The kids won’t miss me,” he said. (It was true, they hardly noticed his absence, which said something about his paternal involvement.) When Pamela objected to this unexpected turn of affairs—again, literally—he said, “Come on, Pam, you know there’s more to life than this.” Was there? How would she know?

  He had already met with a solicitor, he said. The separation papers were all drawn up just waiting her approval. She could keep the house in exchange for his pension pot, everything else they’d split down the middle. He wanted to be fair. (“Fair?”)

  Pamela was caught so unawares by all of this advance planning that she couldn’t think of anything to say. (“You’re such a fucking doormat, Mother,” Amy said.) “I’m keeping the dog,” she said eventually.

  “Whatever,” Alistair said. The dog—Bobby—was apparently the last thing on his mind.

  Lorraine was soon out of the picture and Alistair proceeded to conduct a series of short-lived relationships with a succession of women before eventually alighting on “Hayley,” who was twenty-five years younger than Pamela, flesh still as firm as unripe apricots, thanks to good genes and endless step and spin. Pamela had been to a spin class (bad idea).

  Pamela couldn’t understand what Hayley saw in Alistair. “What—apart from his money?” Amy said. Alistair was in “corporate finance,” something which he had never managed to explain successfully to his family. Not, Pamela suspected, because he thought they wouldn’t understand but because they would understand only too well. “Basically,” he said, “taking money from the rich to give to the even richer.” That made it seem like it was harmless but in the equation of wealth the rich always ended up on the plus side. “And the poor just get poorer?” Pamela said. “What are you—Robin Hood?” Alistair griped. I wish, Pamela thought.

  Alistair had no time for the poor and never gave to the needy. His firm held a big charity ball every year and he “did his bit” by taking on the role of auctioneer, doling out high-end prizes to his fellow financiers. (Two days golfing at Gleneagles, all inclusive, or Royal Gallery tickets for the Edinburgh Tattoo.) One of the upsides to divorce for Pamela was not having to be wheeled out for those kinds of evenings, not having to spend hours in the hairdresser to achieve an updo that made her look like Princess Anne on a particularly bad day and then don a fancy frock that might have walked out of the eighties under its own steam. (Although Pamela suspected that she probably always looked as if she’d just stepped out of that most unfortunate of decades.)

  And, of course, there would be a ceilidh afterward. She hated ceilidhs! It was something that, as a sedate Englishwoman, Pamela had never come to terms with. All that terrible tumpety-tump, tumpety-tump fiddle and accordion music—and don’t get her started on the murdered cats-in-a-sack sound of the bagpipes. Not to mention the dancing that managed to be both childishly simple and fiendishly complicated at the same time, the men in kilts whooping like they were extras in Braveheart and the women splitting their faces with smiles while they were being flun
g around like beanbags, the whole room permeated by the sour scent of whisky.

  Although, of course nothing, nothing was as bad as the company’s annual Burns Night. If Pamela ever had to address a haggis, it would be very difficult to put a sparkle on anything she might have to say to a boiled sheep’s stomach stuffed with offal. It was only some time after her divorce that Pamela began to realize that she had never really liked Scotland (“It’s raining!”) and she had begun to spend a lot of time daydreaming about a little cottage in Wiltshire or Shropshire, although she’d never been to either place.

  Courtesy of cuckoo mother bird Hayley, Amy and Nicholas had been supplanted by two new children (Mimi and Noah). For a long time Alistair’s original children snubbed his new family (“Yeugh!” Amy said when learning of Hayley’s first pregnancy), but now they appeared quite reconciled to the usurpers in their nest. Amy had recently, reluctantly, revealed to her mother that she was intending to spend Christmas with them. And hard on the heels of this disclosure was Nicholas’s announcement that he was going to spend the holiday with his “mates” in Ibiza.

  Pamela had always felt that spending Christmas Day with both her children was a touchstone of something, although she wasn’t entirely sure what. Their love for her perhaps, although like Shropshire and Wiltshire it often seemed more of an idea than a reality.

  Her insides felt ripped open by this joint festive betrayal but she exclaimed, “How nice for you!” And at least Nicholas had friends, following years of adolescent alienation. Pamela suspected he would score quite highly on the sociopathy scale. He’d started a new job recently, as a data-processing drone in the Scottish headquarters of a big insurance firm, and every morning he donned his cheap chain-store suit and set off with surprising, even alarming, enthusiasm. He liked the job, he said. He liked the “guys from the office” (the mates). And no thank you, he didn’t want to do something “more creative and fulfilling.” And yes, he would start looking for another flat soon and could you please stop nagging?

  Amy had even started referring to Mimi and Noah as her “brother and sister,” which although technically true, or at least half-true, only served to rip open Pamela’s insides even further. And Amy had been out for a drink with Hayley (“Stepmom,” said not so much ironically as affectionately). Hayley was “a bit of a laugh,” the implication being that Pamela wasn’t. Soon it would take all Amy’s surgical skills to sew her mother back up again.

  “You should find someone else as well,” Pamela’s friend Fiona said. (“Yeugh,” Amy said.)

  Pamela could count the lovers in her life on the fingers of one hand. All white males of a certain disposition. One of her many (many) regrets was not having made it to the second hand. She doubted she would get there now. All she could see in the mirror these days were an increasingly wattled neck and the strange springy beard hairs that sprouted dementedly overnight. Our bodies, ourselves. Her belly was as blobby as a jellyfish (her entire body to be honest) and yet she, too, had once been as firm as unripe apricots. Pamela missed her younger self. The heavy plait that bounced on her back like a horse’s tail when she jumped to find the net in netball. The speed and strength in her calves. Fingernails like pale shells, the arches of her feet as fine as those of the ballerina that, when she was a girl, had revolved on her music box to a rinkety-tink version of Für Elise. And her smooth, milky skin, dusted all over with fine freckles that Alistair had once found “cute” but now had to be checked every year for skin cancer.

  Pamela met Alistair at university, a Scottish one, far from her hometown (which was a good thing). He was two years older, studying economics and politics, on track for a first. Pamela was doing a degree in English on the basis that she “liked reading” and was heading for a third at best. Unformed in mind and thought, she was nonetheless aware that she had missed the heyday of women’s liberation (she had thought feminism was over, as if it could ever be over). Missed, too, the Swinging Sixties, the Summer of Love, the sense of everything being new and plastic and shiny. Her entrance into adulthood was against a grim backdrop of sullen industrial unrest and to a soundtrack of punk. Alistair seemed reliable in this landscape. He had a clear sense of direction and a sturdy Aberdeen accent and promised a certainty about life, born of a granite-solid upbringing, something that the shifting sands of Pamela’s own childhood had singularly lacked. That childhood had been blighted by—no! No, no, no. Don’t go there, Pamela! Keep to the sunny side of the street!

  If she had her time over again, she wouldn’t have bothered with university, certainly wouldn’t have bothered with Alistair. She would have gone straight from school to Paris. Sat in Café de Flore smoking Gauloises while sipping tiny espressos or little glasses of milky Pernod. And then lain languidly in the warm, rumpled sheets of a bed in a garret with a view of the city’s rooftops, a lover by her side. This vision was based on a Scottish Opera production of La bohème that years ago Alistair’s parents had taken them to during the International Festival. Art was dangerous—it gave you ideas.

  Since Alistair’s precipitous exit Pamela had made some halfhearted attempts at relationships, enduring the tribulations of putting herself on a dating site that supposedly matched you by age and interests. There were photographs of the candidates—like police mug shots—of hopeful but innately disappointed middle-aged men, all claiming a sense of humor and a decent income and a desire for “companionship.” Half of them wore headgear of some kind. They might as well have been holding a sign that said, “Yes, I’m pretending not to have male-pattern baldness.” Pamela hardly ever came across a man with a sense of humor and yet the internet was apparently teeming with them.

  Baseball cap wearers were rejected out of hand. A man in a French beret held her attention for all of five minutes in a wine bar before telling her (“I’m being up front here, Pam”) that he had a predilection for “kinky sex.” (Yeugh.) Another candidate for her hand had been photographed in a knitted cap and a three-day beard that made him look like he was in the Special Forces—which was attractive, obviously—but he turned out to be an accountant with halitosis and, as was the way with many men she met, had spent half the evening detailing his route to the wine bar, including nearly every junction on the M8.

  A man in a Panama hat seemed promising—the hat indicated a certain traditional English elegance—cricket matches and Pimm’s perhaps. He arrived bearing a single red rose for her and addressed her in fruity, theatrical tones—“Pamela! At last!” She exchanged raised eyebrows with the woman who ran the wine bar, who was beginning to seem like an old friend by now. The evening went rapidly downhill when he revealed that he had recently moved up here (“in exile”) and had been a founding member of his local UKIP branch back in Nottingham. (“Now Farage—there’s a politician you can trust.”)

  Pamela came to the conclusion that she had spent enough precious hours of her ever-dwindling time on earth making awkward conversation (“You photograph postboxes—really?”) with a variety of stolid men—chaps, blokes, and straightforward pillocks. And anyway, it wasn’t as if she was looking for love. Love always entailed unwanted consequences. She would have been quite happy with the occasional little run out to the country. She imagined a duck pond on the village green, a stroll around an ancient church, a nice pub lunch in a beer garden—the kinds of things that were undoubtedly common in Wiltshire or Shropshire, less so in Edinburgh. You didn’t need a man for any of that. A woman would do as well, even a dog if sex was off-limits. The dog Alistair had given her custody of was dead now and had not yet been replaced because Pamela didn’t think that any other dog could fill the aching hole that Bobby had left in her heart.

  And besides she had plenty to occupy her—book club, gardening club, Pilates, her National Trust membership, her Historic Scotland membership, aquarobics at the local leisure center, not to mention a never-ending supply of stimulating evening classes. Retirement wasn’t for wimps!

  And sex (“sex” always seemed such a crude word to Pamela) was surely sim
ply a biological imperative? What, after all, was the point of it once you were no longer capable of childbearing? The members of her book club delicately referred to it as the “change,” as if they were metamorphosing into new creatures. “We are, Pam!” a flushed Fiona said, spilling red wine all over her copy of The Goldfinch, not to mention Pamela’s sofa. Pamela was actually quite happy to be an infertile field no longer plowed, but everyone in her peer group seemed giddy with the idea of carrying on as if they were twenty-year-olds. “Bob’s on Viagra,” Sheila said in a confidential whisper (yes, definitely yeugh) as they did leg circles on their mats in Pilates.

  “And sex,” Hannah murmured on the other side of her, “it really does get better as you get more mature.” Pamela thought of overripe cheese slowly melting all over the place. Why couldn’t they just be satisfied with the getting of wisdom? Pamela wanted to die with her own hips and her own teeth; beyond that she didn’t have much of a goal. Of course it would be nice to be a grandmother, to see her DNA sailing off into the future, but that seemed even more unlikely than hanging on to her own hips. (“Christ, Mother, I am never having children,” Amy said with venom that was unusual even for her.)

  The last time Pamela had sex (she really must find another word for it) was well over three years ago now. A teacher called Torquil. It sounded like an alphabet primer to Pamela’s ears. T is for Torquil, Torquil is a Teacher. P is for Pamela, Pamela is . . . what was Pamela? Pamela wondered. Prudent, patient? Pessimistic? No! She had always been such an optimist, even in the face of blatant hopelessness. (Nicholas, for example.)

  Torquil was nearly sixty, with a beard, which said everything you needed to know about him really. Pamela met him at an evening class, An Introduction to Italian Art, a ten-week course which culminated in a three-day trip to Florence. Until their departure for Italy their intimacy had been restricted to a joint responsibility for coffee and biscuits during the break in class. Torquil made her a badge that said “Biscuit Monitor,” which Pamela had gone to great lengths to avoid wearing (“Oh, no—I left it at home again!”). It seemed an immature gesture from such a patently mature man. (“Marking my time to retirement.”) Pamela wouldn’t have been surprised if he photographed postboxes in his spare time.