The SECRET TO NOT DROWNING

by Colette Snowden

  “I didn’t know the whole story,” Julie says, looking through the postcards but not really looking at them. “I didn’t remember what she was like at all. I just wanted to know her and wanted to be able to ask about all that stuff. So eventually, when I was about twenty, I decided to go and look for her.”

  She tells me that it took her nearly two years to find her mum. Two years of knocking on doors and talking to neighbours and ringing up strangers and nearly giving up. And at the end of it she’d expected to find a mum that was an alcoholic and a jailbird.

  “To tell you the truth,” Julie says, “I half expected her to be dead.” She pauses over a postcard of Loch Lomond as though she’s found some detail on the picture that’s not quite right. “Actually,” she says, “I half hoped she’d be dead,” and she looks right at me like she’s trying to read my face, like she’s trying to see whether I think she’s awful. But I don’t. I think I’d probably feel the same in her shoes. But I don’t say that. I don’t say anything. I don’t think she wants me to say anything. She just wants me to be on her side. So I just smile at her to let her know I want her to carry on telling me the story.

  So she carries on. She found her mum alive and well and living in a leafy suburb with two cars on the drive, a cat in the window and matching hanging baskets either side of the front door. She found her mum and drove to the house and parked outside four times before she got out, crossed the street and pressed the doorbell. She stood at the door counting to ten, getting ready to turn around, get back in the car and never go back but her mother opened the door and she couldn’t have lied even if she’d wanted to.

  “My mum recognised me straight away,” Julie says. “I look just like her. I look freakishly like her.”

  And then she tells me how her mum had invited her inside but stepped out to look left and right to check that no-one had seen, like some cartoon spy. She tells me how her mother chatted to her about her life and how she had turned it round with the help of a lovely man. How she’d got a job as a waitress when she left prison and the restaurant owner took a shine to her and they ended up married and running the restaurant together and living happily ever after.

  “And then when she’d told me all her good news, she just cried and cried and cried,” Julie says. “She said she was sorry for being such an awful mother and letting me down. And that she wished she’d tried harder to make a good job of being a mum. And that she wished she’d been able to hold on to me. She said she’d thought of me every day and prayed for me to have a happy life.”

  And now it’s Julie that’s crying but it’s just kind of in the background. I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it, but I can see the tears while she’s talking and I’m wondering how much more there can be. But there is more.

  It seems that Linda had never told her husband about Julie. She’d never told him about the stint in prison or the drink problem or anything about her old life that he might not like.

  “So... what?” I ask, “She just wanted you to go and leave her to it?”

  “No,” Julie says, “she just didn’t want to introduce me to her husband. So we meet, just the two of us, every two or three months or so. For lunch or just for a coffee or a walk sometimes.

  “The postcards are hers. Were hers. From the customers at the restaurant. She wanted to give me something personal of hers, but it had to be something that her husband wouldn’t notice so she gave me the cards that she’d collected over all those years. They’re just random bits of kind thoughts from all her friends. Not even friends some of them, just customers. They used to display the postcards in the restaurant. People used to go in and look for their own postcard on the wall.”

  She stops talking and I think she might start properly crying now.

  “They’re nice,” I say, “I like them.”

  “I like them too,” she says.

  And she looks at me and has nothing else to say about it.

  I feel like I owe her something.

  “I was going to have a baby but it’s died and I just can’t believe that it’s gone for good,” I say.

  16

  When I walk into the office everyone looks up and no-one says anything. I feel like I have stuck in time. I feel like I am the freeze-frame on the titles of one of those cheesy American cop shows. I’m just standing there, feeling those twenty-odd eyeballs all on me, feeling like I should just put one foot in front of the other and get to my desk and sit down. But I can’t work out whether I can actually do that or whether I should just turn round and go home. Luckily, someone puts a hand on my shoulder. It’s my line manager, Heidi. She’s a huge woman and the weight and size of her hand on my shoulder make me think, as I always do, how little her name suits her: nothing dainty and little blonde pig-tailed here. Heidi doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t move me towards the desk but her hand on my shoulder has pressed the ‘go’ button. Suddenly my legs start moving again and they choose to move me towards my desk.

  There are flowers on my desk and for a minute I think they might be from Him. It’s only Monday but they still could be from Him. But they’re not. The card reads “Thinking of you at this difficult time, from all your friends in customer support.” I look round the room to nod my thanks to everyone as though I’m some aging film star modestly accepting an award for life-time achievement, but there’s no-one to nod to now. They’ve all stopped looking at me sympathetically and they’re just getting on with their work. Heads down, engrossed, committed. They think I won’t want them to make a fuss. They’re right. I don’t want them to make a fuss but I still want someone to say something.

  Heidi tells me to get myself settled in and then she’ll run through where everything’s up to with me. Mandy has been handling my work while I’ve been off, so the three of us will get our heads together in about half an hour or so, OK? OK. I’ve only been away from this desk for two weeks but it feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like centuries. I want to go home, but what would I do there? Watch crappy TV and eat biscuits and feel sorry for myself. “You’ll be better off here,” I tell myself and, as though she heard me, Mandy chips in: “It’ll be good to occupy your mind with something. You’ll soon get back into the swing of things.” I want to say, “This is my job, you know. I do know what I’m doing. It’s hardly rocket science.” But I remind myself that Mandy’s nice and she’s just trying to say the right thing, like the nurses. “Give yourself five minutes to have a cup of tea and look through your in-tray and you’ll feel like you’ve never been away,” Mandy says and it sounds like a good thing.

  She’s right too. Once my big entrance is over and everyone’s overcome the urge to give me a standing ovation just for making it to my desk, it does feel like I’ve never been away. I’m in the kitchen making three cups of tea (one for me, one for Heidi and one for Mandy – don’t forget the soya milk, she’s trying to go dairy free to please her vegan boyfriend), and the kettle still carries on boiling and shudders so that you have to switch it off at the wall and there are still no clean teaspoons and someone has finished the last of the tea-bags again without putting out a new box. I’ve never been away and nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed. How is that?

  The three of us sit down together and just as Heidi starts to tell me about the delayed deliveries because of a backlog in the Wolverhampton depot her phone rings with an urgent call and I’m left with Mandy again. “You OK?” she whispers and I just nod. What else am I going to do? So she tells me what a nightmare weekend she’s had trying to sort out a dinner party for her boyfriend’s vegan mates and the disaster with the nut roast that just crumbled when she took it out of the tin and the woman who had a nut allergy that couldn’t eat it anyway. “And she turned out to be Guy’s ex-girlfriend, which he managed to keep quiet,” she said, perhaps a bit louder than she meant to: she looked a bit shocked when everyone on the work station behind us turned round to listen in. “Fancy inviting h
er,” she whispered, making it clear to them that this was a private conversation with me, who is never in on the office gossip.

  “I hate cooking anyway,” she says, “what about you?”

  “I love it,” I say. It’s like we’re just meeting for the first time today and I’ve worked with Mandy for nearly two years. She waits for me to keep talking.

  “I love baking most of all,” I add. “I love putting a big dollop of stuff in the oven and bringing out a cake. It’s like magic, don’t you think?”

  “It would be bloody magic if mine came out looking like an actual cake,” she says and she laughs so loud that all the people behind us turn round again and give us one of those ‘shhh!’ looks that teachers use. So then she pulls a face like ‘aren’t we naughty?’ and we giggle quietly like kids.

  “You’ll have to bring some cakes in for us all to pig out on one lunchtime,” Mandy whispers. “Or maybe just for our pod....”

  I can see Heidi coming back over to the table and I nudge Mandy to let her know. She hands me a piece of paper and points at it as if she’s explaining something, but what she says is: “Make sure it’s got proper butter and lots of cream and stuff in it won’t you, this soya crap is bloody killing me!”

  So we run through all the ups and downs of the last two weeks and Heidi runs through the schedule for this week and I go back to my desk and just get on with it. And every now and then Mandy hands me a boiled sweet or puts her head over the little wall thing that separates my desk from hers to pull funny faces while she’s on the phone or make her hands chatter chatter if she can’t get the customer to finish the conversation. Mandy’s always been like this, but not usually with me. Maybe someone’s told her it’s up to her to cheer me up. She’s not doing a bad job, actually.

  At lunch time I wander up to the shops like I usually do to pick something up for lunch and get some fresh air. My phone rings and I end up having to empty out half my handbag on someone’s garden wall to find it, by which time it’s stopped ringing and I’ve got a text message. ‘Hpe ur OK & wrk not 2 awful. Jx’. I don’t know whether to ring her back so I just put the phone in my pocket and carry on walking to the shop while I decide what to do. And once I’ve bought my sandwich I think I’ll just text her, then she’ll know I’ve got her message but I won’t interrupt her by ringing because she might be busy. I get the phone out and think about what I can say in the text but before I even start pressing the buttons it rings again.

  “Hi”, she says, “It’s Julie.”

  “That’s funny,” I say, “I was just about to text you.”

  “Did you get my text from before?”

  “The one from a couple of minutes ago? Yes. That’s why I was going to text you. I’m just out getting a sandwich,” I add, not knowing what else to say. “I’ve treated myself to a vanilla slice.”

  “You certainly know how to live it up,” Julie laughs, “I’ll give you that. Are you OK?”

  “I’m OK,” I say but even as I’m saying it I know I sound unconvincing. “It’s not been that bad. It’s nice to get my head back into work in a way and everyone’s been lovely and everything but...”

  “But you still needed the vanilla slice?” she asks and I know that she knows exactly why I need it. I haven’t finished being self-indulgent yet. I’m still in need of big hugs and a good old sob, but the closest I can get to all of that is my vanilla slice.

  “Actually I could do with a large gin and tonic but I don’t think lunch time drinking’s such a great idea on my first day back.”

  “How about tonight then? After work?”

  “I can’t,” I say, and it’s such an automatic response that I don’t even stop to ask myself whether there’s a way I could do it. “I’d love to,” I say – I want her to know that I’m pleased that she asked – “but I can’t.”

  And if she were me she would leave it at that but Julie is not like me.

  “Why not?” she says. How long has she got? I’m about to say something, I don’t know what I’m about to say, but before I get any words out she says: “Is it because of him?”

  “He doesn’t like me going out,” I tell her, “and anyway, I go swimming on Mondays.”

  And I think she’s going to leave it there.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’ve got to go in to a meeting now, they’re waiting for me. Hope the rest of the day goes OK for you – we’ll speak soon.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Enjoy the vanilla slice.”

  “Thanks,” I say again but she’s already hung up so I just lock the key pad on my phone and fling it back into the bottom of my handbag.

  I walk back to the office with that horrible unease you get when you feel like you’ve said the wrong thing but you can’t put your finger on exactly what went wrong. Julie said she had a meeting and she probably did have a meeting but perhaps she just thinks I’m too much like hard work and she can’t really be bothered. Why should she? It’s not like we were best friends at school, even before I set everyone’s tongues wagging about her. It’s not like she owes me anything. It’s not like I’ve asked her to look after me either. She’s got her own stuff to worry about, I’m sure she has, and her own friends and everything.

  Mandy greets me from her desk with a big smile and a ‘T’ sign made with her two index fingers.

  “I’d love one,” I say and I sit down at my desk to eat my lunch.

  By the time she gets back from the kitchen carrying a mug of tea each for me and her and one for Amy who sits behind us, I’ve almost finished my sandwich and I’m thinking about my vanilla slice and whether I’ll need to go and find a plate and a knife to eat it. It seemed like a good idea in the shop but now it just seems like a good way of getting bits of flaky pastry in the gaps between the keys on my keyboard.

  “Ow, oww, owww, owwww!” Mandy says as she plonks the two mugs of tea she was carrying in her right hand down on the desk. “I knew I should have made two trips. Sorry it took so long. I was just telling Liz about the whole vegan nightmare thing. She reckons I should just meet him half way and go veggie. But I don’t think he’d go for that. What do you think?”

  “I think you should just eat this vanilla slice and not worry about what he thinks.” I say. “What he can’t see he can’t complain about.” And I hand it over to her and she swaps me for a cup of tea which is now less than piping hot but I don’t care. She’s grinning from ear to ear and she doesn’t think it’s weird that I’ve given her my cake, she just thinks it’s great.

  “Oh my God that’s fantastic,” she says. “Did you get this for me?”

  I nod. It’s much nicer for her to think that I got it for her than that I just went off the idea and palmed it off on her. And she’s so pleased. Anyone would think I’d just handed her a winning lottery ticket.

  “You are a complete hero,” she says. “Everyone’s entitled to a little lapse every now and then, aren’t they?” And she doesn’t go and get a plate or a knife or anything, she just pulls open the wrapper and lifts it to her mouth. She hesitates. “Sure you don’t want to go halves?” she says.

  I know it’s a rhetorical question really, and I’m enjoying her excitement much more than I would have enjoyed the cake, so I shake my head and she takes the most enormous bite she can. Crumbs of pastry shoot out across her desk and a big blob of vanilla cream splodges onto her t-shirt but she just laughs. I think for a moment how He would react if he saw me behaving like Mandy. He’d go ballistic. He certainly wouldn’t think much of her. But who cares? I like her and she likes me, even if it is only for today and for the sake of a vanilla slice.

  “Mmmm!” she says with her mouth full and nodding violently towards my handbag.

  “What?”

  “I think that’s your phone,” she says, displaying a mouthful of half-chewed cake.

  So I pick my bag up from the floor and empty it out aga
in onto the desk to find my phone. There’s a text from Julie.

  “How about a quick G&T after swimming?” it says.

  17

  There are other women. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know. I know from the names He mumbles in his sleep. I know from the door He closes quietly before He picks up the phone to dial out. I trust my hunches and my can’t-put-my-finger-on-it funny feelings. I used to be a Charlie’s Angel didn’t I? Trust me, I know.

  There’s a slobbish one. She’s not fat, though, she’s thin. Too thin. And she doesn’t look like a slob, not from the outside. To anyone who doesn’t know her she looks like a high maintenance, well-groomed, seriously vain type. And she is. She takes care over her appearance, spends ages trying on outfits just for going out to work or meeting up for coffee. These shoes, or maybe these shoes, or maybe those shoes with that bag but not with that jacket. Blah, blah, blah. But then when she’s finished strutting up and down in front of the mirror admiring herself, she just dumps the lot on the bedroom floor and gets up in the morning and rummages through the pile for the bits of it she wants to put on. She likes it when people notice her but she couldn’t give a shit what they actually think.

  Her flat is nice: it’s an apartment, one of those city centre conversions with bare brick walls and beams and a balcony overlooking the canal. It’s posh but it’s a mess. There are piles of paper all over the table where she ought to be eating her dinners, or laying out nice romantic meals for Him, even. But she never uses the table for meals and she never tidies it up, she just carries on adding to the pile with receipts and letters and bits that she’s cut out of newspapers. There are newspapers stacked up in the little fireplace where there’s never been a fire and books lined up all around the walls and a bin that’s full of crisp packets all folded up into neat little triangles. But there are no pictures on the walls, no ornaments and no vases. He could never buy her flowers, she has nowhere to put them.