Turning Thirty

by Mike Gayle

  thirty-four

  To:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  From:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  Subject:

  re: Sorry

  Dear Matt

  I’m sorry you’re sorry. I shouldn’t have sent that last e-mail about your last e-mail (????). You know sometimes it’s all okay and then sometimes it’s not. But I don’t want you to be sorry. Okay? I’ve decided that I need to start going out more. Sara and I are going to some bars after work and are planning a real killer girl’s night out and then to top it off we’re going dancing! Listen to me, I sound like ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ era Madonna!

  love Elaine xxx

  Month Two

  Date: Feb 1st

  Days left until thirtieth birthday: 59

  State of mind: Positive(ish)

  thirty-five

  To:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  From:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  Subject:

  Gershwin’s birthday

  Dear Elaine

  Just had the maddest twenty-four hours with Gershwin. We bumped into Ginny, an old schoolfriend of ours (who we haven’t seen in six years). To cut a long story short Gershwin and I ended up going to Ginny’s for an ‘all back to mine’ and then next day Gershwin and Ginny bunked off work and we ended up hanging out all day.

  Hope you’re well,

  love

  Matt xxx

  To:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  From:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  Subject:

  ?????

  Dear Matt

  Looks like we’ve both been out on the town. Sara and I went to a bar uptown and had a great time. Sara’s kind of semi moved into the apartment. The Sofa from Hell is all hers. She’s been having major hassles with Johnny lately so I said she could crash here.

  love

  Elaine

  PS I’m glad you’re having a good time with your friends in England.

  PPS Wish Gershwin a belated happy birthday for me when you see him next.

  PPPS ‘ . . . an old schoolfriend of ours . . . who we haven’t seen in six years . . .’ Oh, please!!!!! Old high-school girlfriend alert! (Or the UK equivalent.) You are sooooooooo transparent it’s quite adorable.

  To:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  From:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  Subject:

  Old girlfriend paranoia

  Dear Ms Psychic Hot-line

  For your information, Ginny isn’t an ex-girlfriend . . . not a proper one anyway. She was more of a friend that’s a girl than anything. She has a boyfriend who she’s very happy with. Okay?

  love

  Matt

  To:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  From:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  Subject:

  Sarcasm

  Dear Matt

  I love it when you get all defensive. What was it like seeing her after all this time? I only ask because when I saw one of my old high-school boyfriends, Vance Erdmann, a while back, I was well and truly disgusted with myself! He had the worst mullet haircut I’ve ever seen. He looked like he should’ve been a WWF wrestler called ‘The Disaster Zone.’ I guess Ginny wasn’t that bad if you and Gershwin hung out with her all night. Only kidding.

  love Elaine

  To:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  From:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  Subject:

  FriendsM

  Dear E

  It was good to see Ginny after all this time. But all that romance stuff felt like a million years ago. Put it this way, when the thing I had with Ginny was at its height you were fifteen – probably still ‘making out’ with Vance whatshisname (who on earth would call their child Vance?!!!!). It’s all history. But it’s history that makes us who we are . . . which brings me to an idea I’ve had . . . Seeing Ginny reminded me of the old days when I lived here. Remember I told you there used to be a whole group of us? Well, since I’ve got time on my hands and nothing better to do with it I think I might look up my old friends Katrina, Bev, Elliot and Pete. I have no idea where they are or what they’re up to but I think it would be a laugh to maybe speak to them on the phone or even see them. What do you think? Is this more thirty-people wonky behaviour?

  love

  Matt xxx

  thirty-six

  ‘Oi, mate!’ someone yelled. ‘Over here! Over here!’

  ‘Man on!’ screamed another, at the top of his voice. ‘Man on !’

  ‘On my head!’ shouted another, as if his life depended on it. ‘On my head!’

  Despite the urgency in their voices, all I could think of in reaction to the verbal hounding of me was:

  1) Why on earth did I let Gershwin persuade me to play five-a-side football at half past nine on a Sunday morning?

  2) How long until half-time?

  3) Oh, no, I think I’m going to vomit.

  Gershwin, Tom (of Davina and Tom), Joel (of Christina and Joel), Dom (of Dom and Polly) and I were, apparently, the King’s Heath Harriers. They’d been playing together as a team now for two years and were dedicated, if not particularly talented. Usually Neil (of Neil and Sarah) played as well, but he’d been called to the hospital at short notice and had had to cancel, which was why Gershwin had called me at a quarter to eight that morning. I really didn’t want to play because the last time I’d tried to exercise – just before August, when Elaine managed to wangle a couple of free weekend passes to a new health club – it had taken me over a week and a half just to stop aching when I breathed in. Gershwin said that if they didn’t have enough for a team they’d have to forfeit the match and would effectively lose their shot at winning the league that season. He’d said all of this with such unswerving conviction, as if it really was a matter of life and death, that I’d agreed to do it. How the equivalent of a kick-around in the park had become so serious I wasn’t sure. But I soon found out.

  The other team, the imaginatively titled Stirchley Wanderers, looked exactly the same as us – a thirty-people team built up of husbands, boyfriends, young fathers and middle managers all throwing themselves recklessly around a sports gym like the last ten years hadn’t happened. Actually, Joel (who, it turned out, was only twenty-eight) was quite fit and zippy with the ball. Tom and Gershwin were hard working, if not exactly on tip-top form health and performance wise.

  Dom and I, however, were our team’s weak point, but even Dom wasn’t half as bad as I was. After ten minutes of racing backwards and forwards I thought I was about to pass out through lack of oxygen and throw up from moving around too much. The rest of the team were used to the pace, because although they, too, looked as if they were about an inch and a half away from a coronary, they still managed to play a determined game of football. In the end we lost 2–1 (the Stirchley Wanderers, I suspect, were slightly younger than us) but we did put up a brave fight. And none braver than I, because when the whistle went for full-time, while the others were shaking hands and patting the backs of the Stirchley Wanderers, I was collapsed on the floor in a heap, sweating out of places that I hadn’t realised had sweat glands.

  I thought I was going to die.

  I really did.

  Later, in the bar at the gym, as we all sat around drinking manly pints of orange juice, because it was too early for a beer, everyone congratulated me on my performance. And they weren’t being sarcastic. In the car, driving back to King’s Heath, Gershwin and I talked of nothing but football. We dissected the game, talked strategy and even suggested that it might be a good idea to have mid-week training sessions. It was all talk, of course, but comforting all the same.

  ‘Do you fancy coming to ours for Sunday dinner?’ asked Gershwin.

  ‘What are you having?’ I asked.

  ‘Normally it would be something exotic like toast so that we could spend th
e rest of the day on the sofa but Zoë’s mum and dad are coming down from Doncaster so we’re having the works – chicken, veg, roast spuds, the lot. As I don’t much get on with them your company would be appreciated. Are you in?’

  ‘I’d love to, mate, but I promised to make an appearance at the Beckford family dinner table today.’

  ‘They won’t mind you missing one Sunday dinner surely? You live there.’

  ‘Yeah, they will,’ I replied. ‘My mum’s got a good memory for these things. Since your birthday and the-staying-out-all-nightwithout-telling-them episode I’ve had to walk on eggshells – especially with my mum. Skipping a Sunday dinner would set me back several trips to the supermarket.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He sighed. ‘It was a good night, though.’

  ‘Your birthday?’

  ‘Yeah. And the next day up that hill. When I went into work the day after that I had to keep faking a bit of a cough as though I was struggling with pneumonia but had dragged my sorry arse into work because I’m such a martyr. I was brilliant. Utterly convincing. My boss even asked if I was sure I didn’t want to go home.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Gershwin despondently. ‘The work was piled up high enough as it was without me making things worse.’ He stopped as we pulled up outside my parents’ house. ‘Have you thought any more about Ginny?’

  ‘A bit, I suppose,’ I admitted casually. ‘I know you’d like to think I was going to get all obsessed with her . . .’

  Gershwin laughed. ‘So you’re not?’

  ‘Far from it, mate. She and lan seem right loved-up. I doubt very much that she’d want to give it all up for me.’ I paused, thinking. ‘Still, it was nice to know that we could be friends now that the curse is finally broken.’

  ‘Zoë seemed to think that there was definite electricity between the two of you. I couldn’t see it myself but she tends to be quite good on such things.’

  I tried not to look pleased but I probably failed. ‘Nah,’ I said casually. ‘It wasn’t electricity, it was nostalgia. The two are easy to confuse.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Gershwin, still smirking.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, though . . .’ I continued, ‘ . . . about us, you know, you, me and Ginny. I think my brain’s gearing up for my birthday. I get the feeling that I’m going to be one of the where-am-I-going-how-did-I-get-here? turning-thirty types. It’s a bit crap that, especially as I was hoping to do the whole thing gracefully. Instead it looks as though I’m going to abandon all dignity and go kicking and screaming all the way. I’m rambling. And I’m pretty sure I’m not making any sense, but seeing you and Ginny – people I’ve known for years – has kind of helped me put things into some kind of context.’

  ‘I know what you’re saying,’ said Gershwin. ‘It’s been good having you back, here, even if you’re only back for a bit. It’s easy to forget how good the old times were. It’s nice to revel in the past every now and again.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, reaching my point. ‘That’s why I’m thinking about getting in touch with the others – Katrina, Elliot, Bev and Pete. It’s just an idea I had. I’d like to see them all just once, you know, to see if they’re still the same people. I’ve got time on my hands until I move to Sydney and I haven’t really got anything better to do. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Gershwin. ‘I mean, you’ve been lucky with Ginny and me because, well, we’re quality stock,’ he said. ‘Not that the rest of them aren’t, but you know what I mean. People change. People can disappoint you. It’s easy to do. Take this, for example. Last summer Zoë and I went to the wedding of one of her friends from university. Zoë’s old best friend, Michelle, was there too. They’d been really close at university but had lost touch after graduating – you know how it is, it happens on both sides. When Zoë knew her, this girl was a bit of a flaky hippie chick type, but in the three years since they’d met she’d changed into this horrible bitch-monster with a French boyfriend, a flash car and a bad attitude. She blanked Zoë. Didn’t even look at her. We got our revenge, though,’he said, smiling slyly. ‘She was staying at the hotel where the wedding reception was held, so we found out her room number, pretended it was our room and asked for an alarm call at five-minute intervals from five o’clock onwards because we were such heavy sleepers.’

  ‘The moral being that the things you might’ve had in common back then might not be enough any more?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Gershwin. ‘It’s sad, but true. I’m not saying don’t do it because I could be wrong. All I’m saying is, don’t be surprised.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, after a few moments, ‘it’s just a theory, surely. And, like all theories, the only way to find out for sure is to go and see for yourself.’

  thirty-seven

  To:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  From:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  Subject:

  re: Walking down Memory Lane

  Dear Matt

  Take my advice: do not do this. All that’ll happen is that you’ll spoil what few great memories you have of these people. You’ve been lucky with Ginny and Gershwin, but I’d hate to think how you’d react if the people you get in touch with all had changed into the world’s biggest assholes. Remember that weekend when I met up with a bunch of girlfriends from my old high school in Brooklyn? How much of a nightmare was that? I hated every single one of them! My old best friend Lucy Buchanan had smoked so much dope in college I couldn’t even get her to construct a meaningful sentence; Sheena Deaver couldn’t see what was wrong with dating a semi-Nazi old enough to be her father; Stephanie Dolfini couldn’t talk about anything apart from her hugely rich paediatrician fiancé; and even poor Yona ‘Top of the Class’ Hughes was never the same after she had to drop out of Stamford because she’d burned herself out in high school (although that wasn’t her fault). My advice – stay clear. The thing about rummaging about in the past is that you never know what you might find.

  love

  Elaine xxx

  PS But at the end of the day you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do!

  thirty-eight

  Bev Turner

  (Then, the girl most likely to say: ‘I’m not a Goth, I just like dark clothing.’ Now: Mrs Bev McCarthy, Senior FrenchTutor, North Yorkshire Adult Education Language Department, Sheffield.)

  Back when I was a teenager every school had its Bev Turner: the girl who, on reaching her fifteenth birthday, dyed her hair black, stopped going out in the sun and started wearing dodgy Gothmakeup. Call her a Goth and she’d get really annoyed and swear blind that she wasn’t. Point out that she looked like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club and she’d probably tell you to get stuffed but would be secretly pleased. But then ask her why, if she wasn’t a Goth, she insisted on looking like a Goth, listening to woefully crap Goth music and never going out in the sun, and she’d probably threaten violence. On top of the Goth/not Goth thing, my Bev Turner had the added dysfunction of having parents that seemed to be permanently in the middle of a long divorce.

  I loved Bev. I really did. I found her fascinating. Just thinking about her in those days made me laugh because, for as long as I knew her, she was the patron saint of gloom, doom and bad news. She always wore a sardonic smile, listened to the most depressing music on earth and had a thing for celebrities who had died young. Sylvia Plath, of course, was her favourite, followed by James Dean, and lan Curtis of Joy Division. That sort of teen brooding was incredibly attractive and I always suspected that quite a number of boys at school secretly fancied her because she was such an unknown and unknowable quantity. No one ever went as far as asking her out because she was too scary for any teenage boy – or grown man, for that matter – but the idea was there. And despite her fondness for suicidal celebrities, depression and black clothing, Bev had a wicked sense of humour and never failed to make me laugh.

  In the sixth form Bev and I got into the habit of spending o
ur free periods in King’s Heath park. I’d eat my sandwiches and she’d chain-smoke until the nicotine rush made her queasy. Then we’d sit and pontificate about life in a way that makes me shudder with embarrassment just thinking about it. When everyone went off to university Bev didn’t bother taking up her place at an all-women Oxford college to study Spanish and French but instead took a year out to travel around India. When she came home after five months it was to earn enough money to travel again, this time to Australia. After that she went to the Far East, spent some time in Japan then returned to India. By the time Gershwin got married, which was the last time any of us saw her, her trips back to England were infrequent.

  Late on Sunday afternoon, having spent some time letting my mother’s sprout-free Sunday dinner digest, I decided to make Bev the first of my old friends with whom I’d get in touch. Finding her current number was easy enough because I had her gran’s phone number in Chelmsley Wood. Bev used to stay with her whenever even she felt she was getting too weird and in need of grandparental guidance. Although the old lady was hard of hearing, after a protracted, confused conversation she furnished me with an English phone number for Bev. I thanked her, said goodbye, and hung up. Then I picked up the phone again and dialled.

  ‘Hello?’

  It was a woman’s voice.

  ‘Hi? I’m looking for a Bev Turner?’