by Clare Empson
‘Books,’ he says. ‘I found an old Elizabeth David cookbook and I used to read it at night when I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been collecting second-hand recipe books ever since.’
I want to ask him why he couldn’t sleep, but we are so brand new, he and I, and his face closes up whenever he talks about his childhood, so I allow the moment to slide.
Rick arrives first, a relief for me, with a bottle of wine wrapped in a twist of white tissue paper on which he has drawn felt-tipped stars and crescent moons interspersed with smiley faces. He is wearing purple corduroy bell-bottoms and a white peasant top, bought, he told me, in a boutique in Neal Street selling exclusively female fashion.
‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘I was not the only male browsing the rails. And they were not shopping for their girlfriends.’
‘Wow,’ he says now, looking around Jake’s burgundy, orange and purple sitting room. ‘This place is cool. The vibe of a strip joint, if you know what I mean.’
Eddie and Tom arrive and we all squash around the tiny kitchen table with our tumblers of Mateus Rosé. Jake and I have been together for almost three weeks, and I know he is holding this dinner so I can get to know the band.
‘We’re family to each other,’ he told me. ‘Especially me and Eddie. The two of us grew up in the same town. There’s nothing we don’t know about each other.’
I forced myself to ask Jake about Eddie then.
‘Why is he so distant with me? It’s as if he doesn’t like me.’
‘How could anyone not like you?’ Jake said. ‘It’s just that he’s protective of me. He knew my family – especially my wicked grandfather …’ he laughed as he said this, but I caught the sudden darkness in his eyes, a film of gloom, ‘and he’s been looking out for me ever since.’
I can tell Jake has relayed some of this conversation to Eddie, because there’s a noticeable difference in the way he treats me tonight, asking me questions about college and home.
‘Alice’s father is a prize jerk by all accounts,’ Jake says.
‘Oh yeah, the wannabe vicar. Isn’t he a churchwarden or something, Alice?’ Rick asks.
‘A canon. He gets to dole out communion on Sundays. He loves that. And sometimes he gives the sermon – and if he doesn’t, he gives it to my mother and me at the lunch table. He did a whole sermon about Soho that he called Soho-dom and Gomorrah.’
Everyone laughs at that.
Eddie says, ‘Have you heard about this gay and lesbian march that’s happening? Your father will be apoplectic when he finds out. Apparently everyone is going to walk to Hyde Park, kissing and holding hands in the street. I think it’s brilliant. We should all go along and show our support.’
Am I the only one who sees how still Rick becomes when he hears this? I’ve suspected he is gay all along, but he keeps his sexual identity resolutely hidden, even from me, his best friend.
‘Are you gay, Rick?’ Jake says, casually, almost in passing, and for a moment the air around me freezes. I force myself to meet Rick’s gaze and I see the shock that comes into his face. Shock, confusion, then something else. All of a sudden he’s laughing.
‘Oh my God! Fuck! Yes, I am gay.’ He says it slowly, like an announcement. ‘I just haven’t admitted it to anyone before.’
He’s looking at me and I’m looking at him; it’s often this way with us. As if there is no one else in the room. I reach out across the table to grab his hand.
‘Alice,’ he says.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ I tell him.
And then we are all laughing and Eddie thumps Rick on the shoulder and says, ‘Well done, mate. Who the fuck cares? Gay, straight, bisexual, whatever.’
Rick shakes his head.
‘That was so much easier than I thought.’
‘When did you find out you were gay? Or did you always know?’ Tom asks.
‘At school, when I was maybe sixteen or seventeen. Up until then I was putting up posters of Brigitte Bardot and hoping I might feel something. I’ve spent years hiding who I am, pinning my hopes on marriage and kids and the whole heterosexual dream. Like that was ever going to happen.’
The night turns into a celebration. More bottles of wine are opened and the bouillabaisse is, hands down, the most delicious thing I have ever eaten. None of us manages to do much more than groan as we dip our toasted Italian bread into the tomatoey, fishy sauce. Even the salad, with its sharp garlicky dressing, is an explosion of flavours in the mouth.
After dinner, Eddie rolls a joint, which he lights and passes to me. ‘Ladies first,’ he says with a formal mock bow, and I take a couple of tiny tokes before I move it on.
We listen to the new album from Stone the Crows, a blues act whose star is in ascension. They were playing exactly the same size venues as Disciples – the Rainbow Room, the Marquee – but overnight their popularity has soared. Tom, Eddie and Jake unpick the music, what they like, what they don’t, and throughout the entire record Rick sits in silence with a half-smile that never leaves his face. I glance at him whenever I can. No one else realises it, but tonight is monumental, the landmark moment when he catapults from one way of life to another, no turning back.
After everyone has left, Jake and l lie together on the sofa and I tell him, ‘You are a miracle worker, did you know that? Did you see how happy Rick was? He left this place looking like he was going to conquer the world.’
‘Next mission, Tom,’ Jake says. ‘But I think we’ve got a long way to go with that one.’
‘You think he’s …?’
‘I’m sure he is. But Tom doesn’t. Not yet.’
‘It must be so hard having to keep it all inside, and feeling so ashamed when there’s no reason to. But unless you tell people, they can’t help.’
‘And that, Alice Garland,’ Jake leans over to kiss my forehead, my nose, finally my mouth, ‘is the crux of everything. You can’t conquer your demons if you don’t bring them out into the open.’
I’m surprised by his lack of self-perception, this man who keeps his sadness trapped inside him. Later, in the darkness, my fingers reach for his hands, brushing lightly over his ragged, bumpy wrists, and I vow to myself that one day, someday soon, I will wrestle Jake’s demons from him and banish them for good.
Now
Luke
Adoptees may try to integrate their birth parent into their lives too quickly. They are anxious to traverse the missing years as quickly as possible and forge a strong mother/child bond. Inevitably this may backfire.
Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris
Alice is to become our nanny. However many times I say that to myself, I still can’t quite take it in. In other words, Alice, my actual mother, whom I have known less than two months, will be here week after week ensconced in our family lives. As reunions go, you’d have to say this one has been pretty phenomenal.
We struck the deal, Alice, Hannah and I – and Samuel, of course, cocooned on his grandmother’s lap – over tea and eclairs in the French Café. Alice will arrive at 9.30 a.m. and leave at 6 p.m., Tuesday to Thursday, though she has offered to work extra days whenever Hannah needs it. She won’t accept any more than a hundred pounds a week, which is considerably less than any of the au pairs we saw. We tried to insist on paying more, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Look at him,’ she said, stroking the back of Samuel’s neck with her index finger. ‘He’s so adorable, frankly I should be paying you.’
‘You’re just saying that to make us feel better,’ I said, and Alice laughed.
‘Luke, it works for all of us. You need someone you can trust and I’m ready for a change in my life. It’s perfect.’
On our last night before Hannah returns to work, I cook fillet steak and open a bottle of our favourite Rioja. Candles burning on the table, Samuel wide awake and passed across the table from one to the other as
we take turns to eat.
‘I’m going to miss him.’
‘Of course you are, but it’s only for three days. And once you’re in the office, working on a piece, you’ll forget about him.’
‘I will not,’ Hannah says, a little fierily. ‘But at least I won’t have to worry about him. We couldn’t find a safer pair of hands if we tried.’
‘Are we asking too much of Alice?’
‘No, I think she genuinely wants to do it. She’s so close to Samuel already. It’s almost uncanny.’
‘I hope it brings Alice and me closer too.’
‘Alice has bonded so quickly with Samuel because he reminds her of you.’
‘Far easier to deal with a baby than the weird, fucked-up grown-up version.’
Hannah laughs. ‘Exactly.’
We’re making tea and getting ready to go up to bed when the phone rings. It’s 9.30, which means it’s my mother, also making her last-minute preparations for bed, including her nightly phone call.
‘Hello, darling, just ringing to wish Hannah good luck tomorrow.’
‘Hi, Mum. Would you like to speak to her?’
‘No, no, I’m sure she’s busy getting ready. Send her my love. So the new au pair is starting in the morning? What’s her name?’
Duplicity is hard. It steals the words from your tongue, the breath from your lungs.
‘Alice.’
‘Alice?’ my mother says, and I wonder in my coldly alert, paranoid state if her mind is whirring with all the Alices she has known. Alice, Alice, now where have I heard that name before? ‘Alice who?’
‘Oh, er, God, I can’t remember her surname.’
‘Darling, you are hopeless.’ My mother is laughing. ‘How old is she?’
‘Um, fortyish, I think.’
‘Oh, quite old then. What’s her situation?’
If only I’d insisted on passing the phone to Hannah; she would have dealt with this inquisition so much better than me. She is sitting on the bench, Samuel asleep in her arms, watching me intently.
‘How do you mean, Mum? She’s a part-time painter. Looking to supplement her income, I guess.’
‘But what’s her experience with babies? She is a proper au pair, isn’t she?’
‘Of course she is. Mum, let’s talk tomorrow. Hannah is keen to get an early night.’
I hang up and join Hannah on the bench, bent double with the drama of it all.
‘Oh babe,’ she says, ‘this is so complicated, isn’t it? But the moment your mum knows about Alice, it’s going to feel easier.’
‘I can’t tell her.’
‘Not yet. But soon. Things will become much simpler once Christina knows who Alice really is.’
Such prescient words. If only I’d listened. If only I had told my mother the truth.
Then
Alice
Jake shows me a different way to live. He cares about nothing and wants to try everything; to say that he has opened my eyes sexually in the space of a few short days is a dramatic understatement. But it’s more than that. His whole life is dedicated to small acts of pleasure, from the ritualistic Italian cappuccino to a night spent watching shooting stars in Hyde Park (we broke in by climbing over the locked gates, and spent hours on a bench wrapped up in blankets, and I think it might be the most romantic thing I will ever do).
It’s his idea to spend a whole weekend in bed, forty-eight hours of decadent living during which we get dressed only once, to visit the little shop across the road for provisions.
Amir, the owner, laughs when he sees what we have lined up on the counter.
A bottle of cava, another of white wine, milk, a jar of Nescafé’s Blend 37, a loaf of Mother’s Pride, a packet of ginger nuts.
‘All the essentials, yeah?’ he says.
‘Think we’ve got it covered,’ Jake says, wrapping an arm around my shoulders.
In the kitchen, we unpack the shopping together like any married couple: milk in the fridge, tea and biscuits in the cupboard, champagne into the fridge. I am boiling the kettle for tea, my back turned to Jake, when he surprises me with his hands inside my shirt, the sharp cold of two ice cubes against my nipples.
I cry out, but then I feel the warmth of his mouth against my neck and it turns into a gasp of pleasure instead.
I try to turn around to kiss him, but he whispers, ‘No,’ and I am used to this game of taking turns. I love it. I live for it.
‘We’re going to need a lot of time, a lot of weekends,’ he says afterwards, as we lie on the brown sofa, and our future of committed eroticism stretches out in front of us, a whole infinity of lovemaking.
Jake carries the television into his bedroom and we watch one show after another: Doctor Who, The Goodies, Parkinson. There’s an Omnibus on Andy Warhol, and the two of us watch entranced. Like everyone else, we’re fascinated with Warhol. So much has been written about him, but it’s rare to see him on TV, the man famed for his fiercely guarded privacy.
‘Rick is going to be as big as Warhol, if not bigger,’ I tell Jake. ‘I overheard Gordon saying so the other day.’
Jake picks up my hand and kisses it without taking his eyes away from the screen.
‘I live in hope that one day, Alice Garland, you might actually believe in yourself. You’re just as talented as him.’
We drink the champagne at two o’clock in the morning out of cheap tumblers bought with Green Shield stamps; I recognise them because we have the same ones at home. My father often makes my mother a gin and tonic in one of these glasses, his own evening whisky in fine crystal inherited from his parents; small, everyday acts of pettiness intended to grind her down.
‘Why do you put up with him?’
‘Because we’re frightened of him. His temper. The rages that can blow up from nowhere. He’s tolerable most of the time, but when he drinks, it’s a nightmare.’
‘Alcoholic?’
‘I don’t really know. It doesn’t seem to take much to make him turn. Three glasses of wine and he’ll fly off the handle. It’s like he’s just waiting for me or my mother to say the wrong thing so he can start yelling at us. You get inured to it after a while. My mother just drifts off into her dreamworld and I suppose I closed down a bit more each time. I felt like I was marking out the time until I could leave.’
‘Poor baby,’ Jake says, kissing me. ‘I hope he never hurt you. Physically, I mean.’
‘No. Thank God. Sometimes I thought he might. But he always pulled himself back at the last minute.’
Jake is quiet for a moment.
‘My grandfather was violent. All the time. But I never let him break me.’
‘You really hate him, don’t you?’
He shrugs. ‘He’s dead, so … I guess I just need to let it all go.’
Instinctively, I want to reach for his poor scarred wrists, but I hold myself back and try to believe in this cloak of imperturbability he shrugs on whenever I question him, as if the past cannot touch him. I think his wrists are proof of exactly the opposite: the past did break him.
In the morning, we are in the bathroom together, Jake shaving in front of the mirror, me about to have a shower, when I open up the cabinet to look for soap. And there inside are two boxes of medication I am instantly drawn to. I take them out and look at their names. Phenelzine and Largactil. They look nothing like the antibiotics I was prescribed throughout most of my childhood for recurring tonsillitis.
‘Phen-el-zine.’ I sound out the word like a child learning the alphabet. ‘These look heavy-duty. What are they?’
Jake puts down his razor and turns to me, his half-shaved chin segmented by white foam.
‘Antidepressants and antipsychotics. I’ve been on them for years. Ever since I was sixteen.’
‘Psychotics?’
‘That doesn’t make me a psycho, i
f that’s what you’re thinking. Just a depressive. But not any more. I stopped taking them a while ago. I hate the way they fur up my brain. I can’t write properly when my mind is all blurry, it slows me down.’
He takes the first packet of pills from me and starts popping them out, one by one, into the lavatory.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Moving on. Like I should have done a long time ago.’
This is all happening too fast. I want to stop him, to snatch the pills out of his hands and put them back in the cupboard. Just in case. I am just getting used to the information that Jake has spent the past ten years on heavy medication, and now, in a heartbeat, he is throwing it away. What if his symptoms come back? I feel in this moment completely out of my depth.
‘Jake! Stop. Shouldn’t you talk to the doctor first?’
‘Do I seem depressed to you? Or euphorically happy?’
‘Well, happy right now, but …’
I watch, helplessly, as he picks up the next packet and empties out the contents.
‘Come here,’ he says.
He closes the loo seat and sits down, pulling me onto his lap.
‘I promise there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Depression?’
I nod, too full of the moment for words, too fearful of what I’m about to find out.
‘It’s like being underwater while the rest of the world rushes by. You’d like to come up for air, only you have no energy, none at all; you might as well be paralysed. So instead you exist in a curled-up ball of bleakness.’
I press my cheek against his, eyes squeezed shut. My tears are a weakness when he’s been through so much.
‘Alice, look at me.’
I open my eyes, and he kisses me.
‘There’s no need to be sad. You have to believe me when I tell you that it’s over. I’ve felt good for a long time, even before the cataclysmic, life-changing arrival of you. Do you believe me?’
