Just thinking it was hurtful enough, I’m sure. Just behaving it was hurtful. And I liked her even though she was weird. I was her friend as much as anyone. But she just brushed it off. She expected people to think she was weird and in a way I even think she liked it. I think she cultivated it. Better weird than boring.
I don’t think I hurt her with the nickname but I did hurt her. Not on purpose though. Definitely not on purpose. How was I supposed to know, when my mum told me I’d be weird if I’d been through what she’d been through, that I wasn’t supposed to share the information? I thought I was defending her in the playground. Pleading her side, producing mitigating circumstances as she galloped round the edges of the playground instead of standing in a line doing clapping rhymes like the rest of us.
“When Suzy was a teenager a teenager Suzy was, and she went ‘ooh ah, I lost my bra, I left my knickers in my boyfriend’s car.’” Clap-clap, clap-clap-clap, clap-clap, clap-clap, clap-clap-clap...
While she trotted round us in her own horsey world: “Clip clop, clip clop, OK Snowdrop, ready for a canter.”
I can’t help laughing to myself, remembering the stupid shades of normal behaviour in the playground, but He pops his head round the door to see how dinner is coming along just as I’m grinning at the thought of all that senseless clapping.
“Having fun in here?” He says.
So I stop smiling and put the kettle on for some water to boil the potatoes.
“It should be ready in about ten or fifteen,” I tell Him and He picks up the bottle of wine without saying anything else and closes the door behind Him.
And with the potatoes on I take the meat out of the oven and peel the carrots with the uneasiness of guilt weighing heavily on me. The guilt is at least twenty-five years old but it still makes me feel queasy in my stomach. I never meant to make Julie the centre of everyone’s gossip but I did, and the sinking feeling I had aged eleven when I was told I was a bully comes straight back to me when I think of me in that playground. Even when I try to think of something else, I can’t shake it off.
So I don’t want to think about Julie and all of that, and I don’t want to think about the hospital and the baby and all of that, so I’m trying to find something to distract me. What’s on the TV? I won’t be able to watch it: Mum’s here so we’ll keep it switched off unless there’s something she wants to see. I won’t be able to watch it but I can run through what’s on tonight. What day is it? What day is it? I can’t even think what day it is.
And before I know it I have cut my finger peeling the carrots and it won’t stop bleeding. It’s bleeding all over the carrots and I can’t stop it. I wrap a piece of kitchen roll round it and try to carry on peeling but the paper just keeps falling off and my finger just keeps bleeding and I can’t peel the bloody carrots. I’m crying and I don’t want to cry, I just want to peel the fucking carrots, get the dinner on the table and have them both tell me what a good job I’ve done. But now the potatoes will be too soft by the time the carrots are cooked and how am I going to be able to serve everything up without getting blood on it?
I abandon the kitchen roll and just run my finger under the tap. The cold water stings and runs pink into the sink. The finger is numb and the water runs clear but as soon as I turn the tap off it starts bleeding again. I just stand there watching it, reaching for the tap and hesitating with my uncut hand halfway between the tap and my bleeding finger.
Maybe He hears me crying. Maybe He just uses that radar He has to sense when I’m weak enough to snap in two. But anyway He comes back in the kitchen, glass of wine in hand.
“What on earth’s the matter?”
And when I tell Him that I’ve cut my finger and show Him the little nick, which miraculously stops bleeding the minute He looks at it, I feel stupid.
“You stupid woman,” He says. “You shouldn’t be trusted with sharp objects.” He smiles when He says it but I’m not convinced He’s joking. He sends me up to the bathroom to look for a plaster.
“Sort yourself out,” He says. “D’you think your mother wants to see you like this? Just take your wine with you, calm yourself down and I’ll take over in here.”
So now He’s the hero of the hour. He’s the cavalry. I take my place at the table with my mum and He serves the dinner that I’ve cooked as though He’s Fanny bloody Craddock.
“I’ve buttered the potatoes and the carrots, Jean,” He says as He puts them on the table. He hasn’t put them on the plates, He’s brought them to the table in the white serving dishes that we got as wedding presents and never use. “I know you don’t get to keep that trim waistline without keeping an eye on the calories, but it’s only a bit and they taste so much nicer with a little bit of butter.”
My husband is flirting with my mother and she is sitting there lapping it up while I sit here letting Him pass off the meal I’ve cooked as his own. My blood is boiling. I want to pick up those fancy serving dishes and hurl one at each of them. But I don’t. Of course I don’t, they were a wedding present after all, and it’d be a shame to smash them after I’ve kept them nice all this time. He can see I’m cross, though. Even He can see that.
“Are you OK Marion?”
“I’m fine,” I say, “My finger’s just stinging where I cut it.”
“She always was clumsy,” Mum smiles, helpfully.
Too boring for a nickname, too clumsy to be trusted with sharp knives. Great.
“Lucky I was here to save the day,” He smiles back at her. And He serves my mum and then Himself and then hands the dishes over to me with a “help yourself.”
The food is lovely but I don’t feel hungry. I don’t want to be here. I would like to be swimming in the cold, silent water at the swimming baths. I would like to be in that big echoing space with a bunch of familiar strangers where the only sounds are the gentle splish splash of my muscles pushing me through the water and the counting and thinking inside my own head, driving me on. I wonder whether Julie would sit at the table forcing herself to eat food she didn’t really want just so that she didn’t make a fuss. Just so that she didn’t get accused of making a fuss. I wonder what Julie would do if she were me?
“I’m quite surprised at how friendly Julie was, aren’t you?” Mum says, pointing towards me with a piece of potato on the end of her fork before she puts it in her mouth.
“It was good to see her,” I say. “She hasn’t changed a bit.”
I’m hoping that Mum will just agree with me and move on and leave me to force down my dinner in peace. But even if she wanted to let me off the hook, He’s never going to let her leave it there. The can of worms has been opened… too late to do anything to close it again now.
He lets me carry on eating for a few seconds without asking anything. He watches me chewing on my food, waiting for me to volunteer some information. But I don’t know where to start. I know the best thing to do would be to get in there early. Find a way of cutting the conversation about Julie short and move on. That would be the best thing to do but I don’t know where to start. And while I’m panicking and thinking ‘How can I do this? How can I steer Him away from this?’ I can see Him enjoying me squirm. And He knows exactly how long He can leave it before my mother moves us off on another tangent. He leaves it just a few long seconds and then He asks:
“So why shouldn’t Julie be friendly towards Marion?”
He asks my mum, not me. He knows she loves to dig up a good anecdote. He knows she’ll always give Him the long answer. And she does.
“Marion used to call Julie ‘The Weirdy Girl’,” my mum tells Him. “She wasn’t the only one, they all did. You know what kids are like...”
He nods. He knows. Of course He does. He used to be one.
“Well, they were friends really, and so were me and Joyce, Julie’s mum.” She pauses for a piece of broccoli. “So I wanted her to stop using that stupid nickname. I mean, t
hose things can be hurtful, can’t they?”
He nods. “They can. Of course they can.”
“So I kept telling her to stop it but it was like a bad habit with her,” my mum goes on. “She was terrible for bad habits, weren’t you Marion? You should have seen the lengths I had to go to, to stop her from biting her nails. She would have bitten them right down to the quick and had them bleeding if I hadn’t worked so hard at helping her stop.”
And I spot my chance. This is the tangent I’ve been looking for. Here’s where I can draw my mum away from Julie and get her talking about something else instead.
“Yeah, but look at them now,” I say, holding my hands up for them both to admire my nails. Not long but not bitten, just a sensible length. “No-one would ever guess, would they–”
“Go on Jean,” He interrupts.
“You used to go mad at me about chewing my hair as well Mum, do you remember?” I say. “You used to tell me that I’d get a hair ball in my stomach and die if I didn’t stop chewing it. Do you remember?”
“I do,” she says, “and you never listened about that either.”
She pauses for a sip of wine and He jumps straight back in again.
“So what happened with Julie?” He asks.
And then she tells Him. She tells Him how she had told me that I would be weird too if I’d been through what Julie had been through. She pauses to tell Him how she always used to try to drum it into me that there were plenty of people worse off than me and I should spare a thought.
“She wouldn’t just take that at face value where Julie was concerned though,” my mum says, pushing a token, calorie-laden potato to the edge of her plate before putting her knife and fork down carefully across the middle of it. “So in the end I had to tell her about Julie’s real mum being an alcoholic and her being put into care and her mum ending up in prison and Julie ending up being adopted.
“Joyce wasn’t her real mum, you see, she adopted her. And heaven knows she had her work cut out for her and she used to confide in me about what a tough time Julie had had and the nightmares she used to have sometimes and how hard it was listening to her cry for her real mum when all her real mum had ever done was neglect her.”
My mum takes a breath, picks up her fork again and uses it sideways to cut in half the potato she had left. While she pauses to eat this half a potato, I try once more to change the subject.
“It doesn’t seem to have done her any harm in the long run though, does it?” and I’m about to start talking about how nice her house looked and how I sometimes walk down that street because the trees are so lovely but He knows there’s more to be said.
“So go on Jean,” He says, topping up her glass. “What happened after you told Marion all about it?”
I can feel my stomach churning and there is nothing I can do. I can’t ask her not to finish the story. I want to say ‘just shut up will you.’ I want to say ‘you never told me it was a secret, Mum. You should have told me not to say anything.’ I think about spilling my wine ‘by accident’ – after all, I am notoriously clumsy – but we’re too far down the track for that. At best I could delay the end of the story, but now that He’s seen me squirm He’d come back to it anyway. So I don’t try to put off the inevitable; instead I just sit at my place pushing carrots around my plate.
And she tells Him. She tells Him that I blabbed the whole story to the whole school. She tells Him that I spread gossip that had Julie crying in lessons and refusing to go to school in the morning. She tells Him how the school called her and asked her to come in and discuss how I had been bullying one of the other children by spreading gossip about her. She tells Him how Joyce turned up at our house in a rage, screaming at my mum for telling me and screaming at me for telling my friends. She tells Him how difficult it had been for her to have her daughter branded a bully. She tells Him how disappointed she had been in me.
I can’t speak. I have that burning in my throat, the same as I had in the headmaster’s office when it all happened. If I open my mouth I will cry and I’m not going to cry. That’s pathetic. It was a long time ago. Ages. I was just a little girl then and I didn’t know that I was hurting anyone. I didn’t mean to do it, I want to stand up and yell ‘I didn’t mean to do it, you know! I just wanted to make the other kids understand she was weird for a reason’ but I can’t do that. It’s a lame excuse anyway.
I just sit in my seat squeezing the place on my hand where I cut it when I was peeling the carrots. I make it bleed again. I make it hurt like hell. That’s where it hurts, just in my hand. Just in my hand and nowhere else. And tears come to my eyes despite my best efforts to stop them.
“Are you OK?” He says, looking towards Mum to enlist her interest.
“It’s just my hand,” I tell Him. “It’s hurting where I cut it before.”
“Sounds like an excuse to get out of the washing up to me,” He jokes to my mum, handing me his plate. So I take the plates into the kitchen, take off the plaster and wash the blood off my finger for a second time, letting the cold, cold water get colder and colder and pour over my finger until all the red in it has gone and it’s just clear and cold. Then I make some coffee and take in the cake.
It takes a few trips to bring in the cake and the coffee and the cups and the plates and all of that and they’re just chatting about something completely different by the time I sit down. She’s waxing lyrical about how lovely her spring bulbs have been this year and He takes the opportunity, while they’re on the subject of flowers, to get in a mention of the ones He bought me to welcome me home from the hospital.
“You’ve got a good one here,” she says as I pour the coffee. “There aren’t many women whose husbands still buy them flowers after so many years.”
“Not just for special occasions either,” He chips in, blowing his own trumpet. “Every Tuesday too, without fail.”
“She’s a lucky girl,” my mum says to Him, smiling at me.
I don’t say anything.
“Well it’s nice to know there’s still plenty to discover about each other after so many years,” He says. “I didn’t know I was married to a bully and a gossip.”
He’s not going to let it drop. She has handed Him a stick to poke at me again and again and He’s having fun. He can prod me and poke me as much as He likes and I can do nothing to stop Him. The only thing I can do is pretend I’m not bothered. But I’m not very good at that. He can tell when I’m bothered and He knows I am now.
I pick up the knife to cut the cake. “Just a small piece for me,” says my mum, bang on cue, and He and I almost share a smile.
“And watch yourself with the knife, Marion,” He smiles at her, changing his allegiance once again. “It’s sharp you know.”
It’s OK, though. I can rise above it. I don’t even have to visualise stabbing Him, Psycho style, at the dinner table because soon he’ll be tucking into my cake and He won’t be able to help but enjoy it.
But when I cut into the cake it’s still soft in the middle. Not exactly raw, but undercooked and a bit gooey. It might still be OK. It could still be OK. It’s a chocolate fudge cake, who’s to say that it’s not supposed to be like that? So I cut it anyway, a small piece for her, a big piece for Him and a normal piece for me. I hand them out and hope for the best.
My mother can see that it’s gooey where it’s not supposed to be and she does her best to save me the embarrassment. She eats from the outside edge then uses the old waistline excuse to leave the rest untouched on her plate.
“It’s so rich,” she says, “I can feel the inches appearing with every mouthful.”
He’s not going to let me off so easily. He prods it and pokes at it.
“Is this cake supposed to be so mushy?”
I tell Him it’s not. I tell Him I was in a bit of a rush getting everything ready today.
“Why,” He says, “what else di
d you have to do? You’ve been off work all day.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I think it’s probably because I’ve been upset and your mood kind of shows in the cake when you’re baking.”
“Bullshit,” He coughs under his breath so that I can hear it and my mum thinks he’s just choking on the inedible cake.
So I stop making excuses and just try to make out like it’s not that bad. I eat all mine and make a show of enjoying it.
“I quite like it like this, actually,” I say.
“Well I think it’s revolting,” He says and pushes it away. “I’m sorry Jean,” He says, “I’ll see if we’ve got any biscuits.”
And when He leaves the room to look for biscuits my mum makes excuses for Him.
“He’s probably just a bit upset. You know, about the baby. And worried about you too.”
“Probably,” I say.
I clear the last plates and cups, load the dishwasher and switch it on. I make his sandwiches ready for the morning. I ask them do they want a cup of tea and I tell them I’m going to take mine upstairs with me to bed.
“Your mum’s come all this way to see you, Marion,” He says.
But she lets me off the hook. She says I’m bound to be tired after everything I’ve been through. She gets up out of her chair and gives me a big hug and tells me to sleep well. He lets me bend down to give Him a peck on the cheek.
“I’ll try not to wake you when I come up,” He says.
11
Sometimes I have dreams that start off as dreams and end up as nightmares.
I am meeting Julie the Weirdy Girl for lunch and I can’t wait. I have this strange kind of 1950s throwback dress on, with orange flowers on it. It’s not like anything I actually own. It’s nothing like anything I would wear in real life. But in the dream I think I look fab. In the dream I feel sure that Julie will like the dress. I’m meeting her for lunch but I’m taking my own cake. I made the cake and it’s in my kitchen but it’s not like homemade cake, it’s more like something that you would buy at some fancy deli and it’s already sliced up and in one of those little white cardboard boxes with the flip top lid like they have at the baker’s.
The SECRET TO NOT DROWNING Page 6
