The Consequences of Love

by Gavanndra Hodge

  I smiled for the first time that day.

  ‘So how have you been, Chubbs? We’ve missed you.’

  ‘Really good, thanks.’

  ‘Got a boyfriend yet?’

  I blushed. I couldn’t help it. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You have, I can tell! Ha! J! She’s got a boyfriend,’ he shouted through the door as he pulled on his jeans. ‘So what’s his name?’

  ‘I haven’t got a boyfriend!’

  ‘I hope he’s better than that last one.’

  I gave up saying I didn’t have a boyfriend and smoked a cigarette instead. Julia was still showering. I checked my watch. It was now eleven thirty-nine.

  ‘We really need to get going if we are not going to miss everything.’

  ‘Chill out, girl! It’s not going to disappear in a poof of smoke if we don’t keep to the timetable.’

  Julia came out of the shower, a towel wrapped around her body and another turbaned around her head.

  ‘The towels are so thin in this place,’ she said. Dad watched her admiringly. She went back into the bathroom and locked the door once again.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Really good. The shop’s busy; I’m making a few bob. How are you doing for money?’

  ‘Oh, OK. You know. I saved up quite a bit, but it goes fast. And my wallet got stolen out of my bag the first week I was here. It had quite a lot of cash in it, so that was annoying.’

  Dad found his wallet among the ephemera on the dressing table, lighters and asthma inhalers, make-up and magazines. He pulled out four fifty-pound notes. ‘Here you go, my darling.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said, taking the money and putting it in the little compartment inside my brown suede bag.

  Dad took a white packet out of his wallet. ‘Fancy a toot?’ he said, waving it in my direction.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I replied, and sighed inside as I watched him mash the white powder and cut it into two lines with his debit card.

  I took off my coat.

  Fifteen minutes later Julia came out of the bathroom. She was wearing a pair of very tight black jeans, high heels with strappy bits around the ankle and a tiny purple Lycra wrap-around top. Her stomach was completely exposed. It was basically a bikini with arms.

  ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’ I said. I couldn’t help it – the words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, looking at me. Her hair was still wet, making damp patches on her top.

  ‘I mean, it’s just the shoes. We’re going to be walking quite a bit, seeing quite a lot. I worry that your feet will start to hurt.’

  ‘Oh, G, let’s not do too much walking,’ said Dad. ‘We can get cabs, can’t we? I’ll pay. We are on holiday, remember.’

  Julia had brought a hairdryer with her, but not an adaptor plug. I went to reception to ask for one and when I came back they were giggling about something but went very quiet as soon as they saw me.

  It was nearly twelve.

  Julia spent a long time blow-drying her hair.

  ‘Right, can we go now? I wanted us to pop into the flea market before we went for lunch.’

  ‘Oh, I love flea markets!’ said Julia, picking up her massive black make-up bag before going back into the bathroom and locking the door.

  ‘Dad, we’re not going to have time to see anything at this rate!’

  ‘Give us a break. It’s not our fault the clock’s gone forward!’

  Dad combed his hair and sprayed himself with so much Eau Sauvage aftershave that my nostrils stung.

  ‘So where are we going for lunch then? I’m starving. We haven’t had any breakfast.’

  ‘I thought we could go over to Trastevere. It’s really cool over there.’

  ‘Can’t we go for lunch next to that big fountain with the horses, the one in the film? That would be nice.’

  ‘The Trevi Fountain? But the restaurants round there will cost a bomb, and the food won’t even be that good – they will be filled with tourists.’

  We left the hotel forty-five minutes later. Julia linked arms with Dad and I led them to the Trevi Fountain. Every man who passed us looked at Julia, whistled, said, ‘Che bella!’ She was delighted. So was Dad.

  We got a table in a restaurant in a little alleyway just along from the Trevi Fountain, the menu translated into German, English and Japanese.

  ‘This is perfect, G, isn’t it perfect?’

  ‘Yeah!’ said Julia, who had already been given a red rose, for free, by the man trying to sell flowers to the tourists. After we’d finished lunch Dad ordered another bottle of wine.

  ‘Let’s just sit here for a bit, chill out, this is wonderful,’ he said, and he passed his wallet to Julia, who went inside the restaurant to go to the loo and returned licking her lips and talking too fast.

  We never did go to the museums, or the Bocca della Verità, or the Vatican, or any of the other places I had planned. They loved the flea market though, where the stall holders stared at Julia, open-mouthed, and she bought a little Virgin Mary icon.

  ‘How was your father’s trip to Roma?’ asked Giuseppe.

  ‘Great, thanks. We did loads of stuff. Saw the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, all the museums. My feet are killing me, we did so much walking.’

  ‘Poor feet,’ he said.

  We were sitting next to each other on my bed. Everyone else had gone to sleep. The closing credits to Rimini Jazz! were playing.

  ‘You want I can massage your feet?’

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  I turned off the television and the room went dark. I pulled myself up on to the bed, stretched out my legs, my feet bare. Giuseppe took my foot. He massaged the sole with one hand and stroked my leg with the other. The room was very quiet. Outside the sirens wailed and the Vespas revved. Giuseppe finished with my feet and shuffled further up the bed. He pushed my hair from my forehead. Leant forwards, his face coming towards mine.

  My heart untwisted.

  I knew that his father would never meet my father, but that didn’t matter, not at all.

  27

  2015, London

  How can I tell people who I am?

  I have spent over two decades pretending to be a different person, someone who fits in with the world that I find myself a part of. When people meet me they make so many easy assumptions: nice family, good school, fancy university, impressive job. Some people still ask questions though: why have you got such a funny name, do you have any brothers or sisters, where do you come from? And I never know what to say, where to start or where to stop. I can’t just tell them about the girls and Dad, because I would have to explain about Candy too. I can’t just talk about Dad selling cocaine to pay his half of my school fees – I have to talk about the heroin and the junkies in the sitting room. I can’t just talk about one death – I have to talk about two. It’s all connected: tug on one memory and I find half a dozen more jangling behind it.

  So usually, unless I am feeling particularly antagonistic (at an awards dinner sitting next to the male editor of a magazine, so self-important and patronizing, who looks at me as if to say I know what you are, so I use my story as a weapon) I’ll either swerve the conversation or offer the PG version: London childhood, hippie parents, a bit wild …

  Whom am I protecting?

  At school everyone knew everything about me and it made me feel like a freak show. I couldn’t wait to leave, to escape to a different city, to start the remaking of myself, to be in charge of my own story. And along the way I learnt how to shed people. I have hardly any friends from my childhood, people who knew too much, who looked at me and saw death, drugs, that savage self-confidence which comes from desperation.

  But that is not what Fiona sees, even when she looks at the teenaged version of me.

  Maybe I am not the things that happened to me.

  I decide to start telling the truth. I start gently. I tell someone I have known for over fifteen years, a good friend, about Candy.


  ‘But, Gav, I never knew,’ she says, crying over red wine and steak in a restaurant in Paris.

  I make a decision that from now on, if someone asks, if someone really seems to want to know, then I will tell them everything. Sometimes this is tough when you have only just met and it is a nice dinner party with lovely food and fancy wine, because it is too much. Sometimes they turn their head away looking shell-shocked and I think, I shouldn’t have spoken.

  But then they have a sip of wine and turn back to face me and suddenly we are no longer talking about the mundane things, like holidays or schools, we are talking about the Big Things, death and betrayal and loss and chaos.

  And the more I do it, the more I talk to people, old friends and new ones, the more I discover that we are all hiding some sort of darkness, that the PG version is only ever half the story and the other half is always much more important.

  After these conversations I don’t feel like a freak show any more, I feel lucky to still be here, lucky to have such good friends. Things have changed, me and the people around me.

  I take it a step further. I decide to write an article about what happened to Candy, what happened to me, about how we suppress grief when it is too hard to face, what that suppression does to us. If Candy’s story is told in a magazine, if her photograph is printed, if that story is put online and people share it, that will blow life back into her memory.

  Kate, the editor of Tatler, is coming back from maternity leave, which means I don’t have to be in charge any more and will have the time to do this. Once I start writing I find that the words come fast; they were in me, just waiting to come out, impatient. Why have you waited so long?

  Kate is the first person to read the article, then the sub-editors and the picture editors. Everyone sends kind messages and many people cry. I am pleased at their tears because those are tears for Candy. After the piece is published people I have never met get in touch to tell me how much the piece moved them and helped them, how they lost a sister, a brother, a parent and have never properly grieved, but now they will.

  The article upsets my mother too, but not in the way I expected.

  ‘I didn’t realize that you haven’t got any memories of Candy,’ she says.

  It is as if she is offended that I have not told her this, as if keeping this from her is another example of our lack of intimacy, another betrayal; I would have told my father.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it? You could come over; we could go through the albums. I could tell you about her?’

  This was something Fiona had suggested. ‘Talk to your mother about Candy,’ she said. ‘Cry with her, console each other.’

  But I can’t do it. I can talk to everyone else in the world about Candy. But not my mother. That still feels too hard.

  ‘No, Mum, I don’t think I want to do that just yet. Maybe one day.’

  28

  1997, Cambridge and London

  It was the quiet I loved the most.

  Or was it the smell of cut grass?

  I couldn’t decide.

  I hadn’t known, before I came here, that I actually preferred silence to noise, green spaces to grey ones, early mornings to late nights. It took me a whole year to settle, to stop going back down to London every weekend, to realize that this was where I wanted to be. In my room, in my college, with my books, photocopies of Greek bronzes and Roman busts Blu-Tacked to the walls.

  My dictionaries and stationery were arranged neatly on the desk that faced the gardens. My Latin dictionary bulged awkwardly. I reached instead for my Ancient Greek dictionary, for my guide to irregular Greek verbs, my copy of Agamemnon, its translation, my lined notepad. I ran my index finger along the lines of poetry, trying to get a sense of what I was reading, puzzling my way into that slow trance state. When I got to a word I didn’t know I would look it up in the dictionary and then write it down in neat biro. I squared off verbs in sharpened pencil, underlined matching nouns and adjectives, checked the commentary frequently, wrote prompts alongside the text. I was not the sort to turn up to class with a Loeb (those little red or green hardback books with the text on one side and the English on the other) and pretend to translate. Everyone knew you were doing it anyway, the sham pauses, the reaching for words: ‘Dagger, no sword, he raised his sword …’, the rush towards translation. Everyone knew, especially the professors; they’d been watching students do it for decades.

  What was the point in being here if you were going to pretend? That was what I thought. I’d fought too hard to get here for that. And I loved the past, its grammar and its drama. Virgil made me feel safe; Julius Caesar made me feel excited.

  The Oresteia was tough though, doom intoned from 2,500 years ago with syntax that was fluid and mysterious. The short lines of poetry were spidery and marked with inexplicable lines and dots. Things got easier with Euripides.

  After seventeen lines I put two slices of brown bread in the toaster. I continued to translate, brushing crumbs from my notepad as I drank tea. I stopped once I got to thirty-five lines. It didn’t look like much but it had taken me nearly an hour.

  I got dressed, putting on a short black corduroy skirt, a tight blue T-shirt and black wedge mules. I brushed my hair and put on some mascara. I put my key in my pocket and let the door slam behind me, carrying my text and vocabulary list.

  I walked along the parquet corridors, past communal kitchens that smelt of Chinese five-spice, pushing through double doors that swung behind me as I walked, like ripples in the sea.

  Professor Pat Easterling’s rooms were in one of the newer parts of the building, a square annexe with low ceilings and better toilets. Prof Pat, we called her. The other girls in my year, Elaine, Holly and Kiran, were already waiting, their skirts elasticated and their shoes earnest.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘That was a tough bit of prep!’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Holly.

  ‘I spent all yesterday evening doing it,’ said Elaine.

  Holly checked her watch. ‘It’s time,’ she said. She approached the door and knocked three times.

  ‘Come in!’ said the voice from the other side.

  Holly opened the door and we followed her in.

  ‘Hello, ladies!’ said Prof Pat, who mostly wore muted purple tweeds, even in June, and light-responsive spectacles, so that on sunny days it looked as though she was wearing sunglasses. She was sitting in a low armchair with her back to her patio doors, which opened out on to the gardens, with their bright lawns and lavish herbaceous borders, tended by a large team of gardeners.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, we’re late,’ said Emma, rushing in with Becca, both holding their Loebs, trailing long, unbrushed hair, their clothes jangling with bells and twinkling with mirrors.

  ‘Not to worry, sit down,’ said Prof Pat. Books were piled on the desk behind her and arranged on the shelves, including a number of copies of her edition of The Trachiniae. ‘As it is our last session I thought we might have a little sherry to celebrate. A whole term of nine a.m. Aeschylus. Bravo!’

  Small and delicately etched glasses had already been arranged on a tray. Prof Pat poured a little sherry into each glass and handed them around.

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ said Elaine.

  ‘I’ll have hers,’ said Emma.

  Prof Pat smiled and sat down. ‘Let’s begin.’

  I sipped the sherry. It reminded me of my Dad’s parents in Bromley, of my grandparents’ living room with the turquoise settee and the china figurines of gay ladies with china baskets and china poodles, of the story Dad loved to tell about Mum when she was still drinking. She had got pissed at lunch and had gone up to Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom to go through Dad’s jacket pockets, hoping to find a bit of coke to freshen her up. She found a little paper packet containing powder, and racked herself up a line on the glass-topped dressing table, did it, and then boom, her head exploded, blood trickled from her nose, and she fell off the pink pastel-coloured velour pouffe,
tumbling to the deeply carpeted floor with a thud that had Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, me and even the aggressive Pekingese, Tinker, running up the stairs. What Mum had thought was cocaine was actually heroin, but unlike Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, Mum did not need an injection of adrenaline to her heart to bring her round, Dad just slapped her cheeks a bit and got her to drink a sugary cup of tea. She couldn’t make it up the steep lawn to the car, though; she had to crawl on her hands and knees.

  He falls, convulses, his soul rushes out,

  A gush of murder-blood spouts from him,

  Spattering me with a shower of dark red dew,

  Like the rain Zeus sends down to make the crops bud,

  And I rejoice.

  Clytemnestra has just slit the throat of her husband Agamemnon in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter.

  ‘Lovely translation, thank you,’ said Prof Pat.

  I took the long way back to my room, through the gardens, brushing my hands through the warm lavender, catching a jasmine bloom and rubbing it between my finger and thumb so I would still be able to smell it hours later. I loved to spend whole afternoons lying on the grass, reading, translating, sleeping, the dense and expertly tended lawn soft like a thick carpet.

  I walked up the steps to the entrance of my part of the college building. I just had to drop off my books and get the things I needed for the trip to London.

  I bumped into my friend Lorna on the other side of the door.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you! I’ve just been to your room. But you weren’t there.’

  ‘That’s because I am here,’ I said. I felt a little tipsy from the sherry, from the poetry, from the scented gardens.

  ‘I was just wondering if you could sort me out too. You know.’

  Lorna looked at me, her straight eyebrows rising towards the middle of her forehead, creating a triangular effect, a Hellenistic facial expression, tragic and mournful.