The Confusion of Karen Carpenter

by Jonathan Harvey

‘Oh, my wife. With an “i” on the end.’

  Ah, that explains it. Toni.

  ‘Oh, I see. I’m sorry. Erm . . .’

  I look at both platters. Round plastic trays with various canapés. Both trays are much of a muchness. I am about to tell him that but realize he’ll probably appreciate some directness now.

  Confidently I point to the tray in his right hand. ‘I think this selection’s nicer than that one.’

  He looks, nods. He is in agreement. ‘Good call.’

  I like the way he says it and find myself flicking my hair back like I’m at a bar and we’re chatting over a few drinks.

  Which we are not.

  This is a man in mourning.

  This is the parent of one of my pupils.

  Stop this now, Karen.

  I clear my throat as he plops the chosen platter in his trolley and switch my tone to authoritarian, professional, slightly lezzy. ‘This must be a really tough time for you all.’

  He nods again, leans on the trolley, seems to suck in a load of air – his cheeks balloon – then sighs it all out of the side of his mouth. ‘It’s Connor I’m most worried about.’

  I cock my head to the side as I have seen many do to me over the last few weeks. ‘For sure,’ I say. I never say, ‘For sure.’ It doesn’t sound like me. It sounds like someone in an Irish film pretending to be Oirish, and failing.

  ‘I was . . . Oh, this is going to sound daft,’ he says.

  ‘No, go on – it’s fine.’

  ‘I was going to invite you to the funeral.’

  I find myself blushing, like he had been contemplating asking me out on a date.

  Karen, stop this.

  ‘You know, ’cos you’ve been such an important figure in Connor’s life . . . are such an important. . . but then I figured it was probably not the done thing and . . . well, you’ll be teaching anyway, right?’

  ‘When is it again? Friday?’

  He nods. ‘Three o’clock. Fountain Lakes Crem.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I’m teaching till half past. Shame. I would have come, actually. I think it’s really important the kids see that we care.’

  He nods again.

  ‘When I say “we”, I mean teachers.’

  His eyes widen. He looks really impressed. ‘Well, you can always come to the do afterwards, but you’re probably busy.’

  I shake my head quickly. ‘What sort of time?’

  ‘Erm. Well, I imagine we’ll be kicking off at four-ish. Why don’t you come straight after school?’

  ‘OK,’ I say brightly, then remind myself it’s not a date.

  Stop this, Karen!

  ‘I think that’ll be really good for my working relationship with Connor.’

  He nods. ‘Me too. God, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be daft – it’s the least I can do.’

  ‘It’s brilliant, really brilliant. Anyway, don’t let me stop you. You must get on with your shop.’

  ‘Yes, I must.’

  Must I? Damn!

  I look down at my trolley and see that I have four bottles of wine and a copy of Heat. He looks too and giggles.

  ‘That’s my kind of diet,’ he says with a dirty chuckle. A very nice dirty chuckle.

  ‘Oh, I’m just off to get loads of fresh veg and salady bits. I’m really healthy. My body’s a temple.’

  Move away from him now, Karen. You are talking complete and utter gibberish.

  ‘Toodle-oo, anyway!’ I chirrup, and push away my trolley.

  The swerve to the left makes me crash into the opposite row of freezers. I yank it with all the strength I can muster and try my best to move away from Kevin O’Keefe in a ladylike fashion.

  Toodle-oo. I said, ‘Toodle-oo.’ I never say, ‘Toodle-oo.’

  On the bus home I hate myself. My boyfriend only left me a matter of weeks ago and the first man who speaks to me I have flirted with like some sad slapper.

  Then I remind myself that he wasn’t flirting with me; he was talking to me as some sort of spiritual guide for his son. He probably views me a bit like a nun. And that makes me feel better.

  I tell myself that as long as I don’t carry on flirting with him, I’ll be fine.

  I find that I am smiling and I realize that, for the first time in ages, I have returned from the supermarket with a smile on my face.

  I phone Wendy when I get in and gabble the occurrences of the past half-hour to her.

  ‘You did what? You flirted with the grieving father of one of your pupils?’

  ‘Yes. I should be struck off. From the feminist sisterhood and from teaching. In that order.’

  ‘Is he hot?’

  ‘Yes. In a grieving-widower type way.’

  ‘Grieving widower with pre-teen child unsure how to see a way forward. My God, if this was a movie, he’d be played by Huge Grant.’

  ‘No fucking way!’ I snap, showing I mean business. I, Karen Carpenter, rarely swear. Much.

  ‘Aha?’

  ‘It would have to be someone much more macho and swarthy than Huge Grant.’

  ‘Firth?’

  ‘Tch!’

  ‘We’re running out of bankable British heart-throbs.’

  ‘He’s Irish.’

  ‘The other one. What’s his name? Looks like Kevin out of Coronation Street . . .’

  ‘Colin Farrell? No. He pisses on the Farrell. Wendy, he’s uncastable. He’s a one-off. He just is.’

  She sighs, sounding disappointed, then says, ‘I hope you’re not giving yourself a hard time over this. It was one conversation.’

  ‘I know, but I’m treating his wife’s wake like a first date. I might even wear my wedding dress.’

  ‘You’re joking, right?’

  ‘Right. But only about the dress. I am excited about going, and not for the moral welfare of Connor.’

  ‘Then put a stop to that and start again. This is fine. He’s just the dad of one of your kids and he needs your help with his son.’

  ‘I flirted,’ I insist. ‘I did a flicky hair thing. I giggled. I was coquettish. If I’d had one, I would have fanned myself like something out of Dangerous Liaisons.’

  She chuckles warmly, then says, ‘Stop giving yourself a hard time. It’s fine. It’s cool. It sounds like he didn’t notice anyway.’

  She’s got a point actually: I don’t think he did, which in itself is a blessing and a curse.

  ‘Kags, the thing you’ve got to remember is . . . you’ve not chatted to a guy for twenty years.’

  Well, that’s wrong – I speak to men every day. I’m not some kind of radical separatist hairy-lady person.

  ‘I mean, flirted. One on one.’

  Oh, what, so I’ve flirted in a group? I may not be a radical separatist hairy-lady person, but that doesn’t make me a swinger!

  ‘And, OK, so it’s a non-starter with this Kelvin guy.’

  ‘Kevin!’ I correct her sharply. ‘His name’s Kevin.’

  Oh God, I’m protecting his image already.

  ‘But, you know, sooner or later you will get chatted up. And it’s OK. You’re single now.’

  She’s right. I am. And I find it utterly depressing.

  As an image of a cat walking across a Westminster Abbey jigsaw looms into view, she continues, ‘And let’s be honest. You’ve felt pretty much single for the last few years.’

  I wasn’t expecting that: brutal honesty. Oh well, I guess that’s what best friends are for.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you know, Michael did you a favour in a way. You’d been looking for a way out for a while.’

  I let the words hang in the air.

  I don’t like these words.

  I have been hanging on to the idea that Michael was lovely and everything was hunky-dory. The concept kept me warm at night. The concept helped me grieve the relationship. I had a good thing, and now that good thing has gone. Therefore it’s OK to feel sad.

  ‘Sorry,’
she adds softly.

  I say nothing, taking in the enormity of what she has just said. She interprets it as offence and apologizes again and tries to explain what she meant, but I’m not offended. I am chastened. Chastened because it’s the truth. And sometimes, oh yes, the truth hurts. And for some stupid reason, it’s hurting now.

  When I eventually hang up, I reflect on the bizarreness of the human spirit. How we can squirrel away information and not bring it out to cause us pain, and how we can feel a hundred kinds of vulnerable just by remembering, with sudden clarity, how we once felt. I attempt to bury the information again, for then it won’t hurt me. Denial is a comfortably numb place to be. I see now why Rochelle coped so well.

  Well, before she murdered her husband’s lover. In Cornwall.

  I find it hard to put the notion back in its box now, though. I see my heart as a big chest with lots of boxes, drawers and flaps, but it’s hard to get the flap to open for this one. It seems to have wedged shut.

  I tell Mum over dinner. We’re having Arctic roll with fresh strawberries.

  ‘Wendy says Michael going’s a good thing,’ I say provocatively, daring her to agree, but she is my mother – she won’t. She will offer unto me succour. Or something.

  ‘Can I be honest, kid?’ Mum says, checking her teeth in the back of her spoon. She spots a lipstick stain and rubs it with her finger.

  I nod.

  She takes a deep breath. ‘I didn’t really like Michael.’

  Oh God, they’re all at it. I feel the axis of the earth shift. A seismic force has grabbed the house and swivelled it round twenty degrees. I’m surprised the furniture doesn’t slide across the lino.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, kid. He was a nice lad, and he was from a good home, but I thought he treated you something rotten towards the end. The last few years, I know he had his demons, but he wasn’t exactly nice to you, was he?’

  It’s those demons. Someone else mentioned those recently, but for now I can’t think who.

  ‘He wasn’t himself, Mum.’

  ‘I know, love, I know. All I’m saying is . . . maybe Wendy’s got a point.’

  I sit stewing. Like an apple in a pot.

  ‘I still think you’ve got rats, you know. Or maybe it’s a trapped bird,’ she sighs, thinks, then changes her mind. ‘No. I reckon it’s rats. This is London, after all.’

  I roll my eyes and she looks hurt.

  ‘Rita phoned me today.’

  I bristle.

  ‘She says she’s left umpteen messages for you, but you never call her back.’

  ‘I don’t want to speak to her.’

  Rita is Michael’s mum. I don’t want to rake over the coals of the end of my relationship with her. I’m not ready for her sympathy.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve phoned her back a few times, but she’s never in,’ I fib.

  Mum nods.

  I go and lie on my bed after dinner while Mum watches something else in Danish on BBC iPlayer. Surprisingly I don’t mull over what Wendy has said, or Mum. At the moment I don’t care. The only thing I care about is that . . . if things were as bad as they say, maybe Michael has gone for good. Maybe he won’t just walk in one day, apologize and ask if we can start again. I realize now that I have, to some extent, been banking on that. That made it all just about bearable. Now, though, that possibility is vanishing into a fog of uncertainty. I close my eyes, wanting to see him. If I can just remember another nice thing about him, maybe he will return.

  After a while I see him. He’s there. Clear as crystal.

  ‘See this green line here?’

  ‘Aha?’

  ‘Well, that’s the District line, and you need to take that from here, Earls Court, all the way to here, Embankment. OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Ish.’

  I looked at Michael, huddled over the Tube map on the back of the A to Z that he’d laid out on the coffee table. We’d not yet bought a couch, so we knelt on the floor peering at the multicoloured lines that represented the transport system of our new city.

  ‘Or . . .’ he continued dramatically ‘. . . you can take the Circle line. That’s the yellow one here’.

  I nodded.

  ‘Clear?’ he checked.

  ‘As mud.’

  He sighed, trying not to get exasperated. ‘And then when you get to Embankment, you have to walk up the street to Charing Cross – the big station – and get your next train from there.’

  My eyes were glazing over now.

  ‘Karen! Concentrate!’

  ‘I am concentrating. It’s just really hard. How come you understand how it all works and I don’t?’

  ‘’Cos I’ve been sitting here working it all out. Look -’ and his voice softened ‘– why don’t I come with you? Save you getting lost. How are you gonna educate a bunch ofarl cockneys if you can’t even get yourself to the school?’

  I smiled. My boyfriend was ace.

  Everyone had said this relationship wouldn’t work, but here we were living in London and – da nah! – still together. I was the only person on my course at uni who had the same boyfriend when she started the four-year course as when she finished. Detractors doubted our longevity for two reasons. One, he was living in Liverpool and I was in Hull. Two, I was doing a degree and he was working in an Italian restaurant. Apparently that made me his intellectual superior, which was just rubbish – anyone who met Michael knew that he was one of the brainiest people around. He certainly got a handle on the transport system quicker than me, with my BSc joint honours (2:2).

  He loved me. He must have done: everyone said so. He’d even moved to London to be with me because I’d got a teaching job here. And listen to this – he got the train in with me every morning for the first few weeks to keep me company till I found my feet, and my way around the London transport network. You see, our first flat was in Earls Court and yet I was teaching in south-east London in a place called Thamesmead. Before we moved down, judging from the map, the commute looked OK – long but OK – but in reality it was quite draining. I had to go on the Tube from Earls Court to Embankment, walk up to Charing Cross and take an overground train to Abbey Wood. I then had to take a bus from Abbey Wood to the school. This journey took an hour and a half on a good day.

  So my days were long and tiring, but one thing that was sweet was that Michael got up every morning without fail with me at six thirty, made tea and toast, and accompanied me on my journey. Other commuters read books, papers; we chatted and ate toast and drank tea, making each other laugh.

  A few times a week he even met me after school, to accompany me home, and sometimes we’d be really adventurous and get off the train at Greenwich to take a boat back to Charing Cross. I’d never really wanted to live in London – truth be told, it was the only place that had plenty of special needs jobs going – but now that we were here, it was our playground, our film set. Everywhere felt so familiar from the telly, and we had a ball as each weekend we explored a new part of the city we didn’t know: Camden Market one week, Hampstead Heath the next; Columbia Road Flower Market one Sunday, a ride on the Docklands Light Railway the next. Cor blimey, strike a light, guv’nor! The world was our oyster.

  He spent his days going to job interviews. Eventually he landed a job as a waiter in an Indian restaurant in Soho called Namaste Bombay. It meant we saw a lot less of each other. He’d roll in at one or two in the morning, smelling ofkorma and spilt beer, and we’d spoon for a few hours before I had to get up for my early start.

  Sometimes, if he had a day off, he’d still come and surprise me at the school gates, waiting for me with a bunch of flowers, and we’d cross London together, but then, after a few months at Namaste Bombay, he announced that he wanted a change of scene. At first I thought he meant he wanted to leave London. I argued we couldn’t. We needed my job to pay the rent. He laughed, though, and explained he’d had enough of waiting tables. He said he wanted to be a Tube driver.

  A Tube driver. I couldn’t believe it!

  ‘D’yo
u think I can do it, Karen?’

  Did I?

  ‘Definitely. You can do anything if you put your mind to it.’

  And of course I was right.

  I snap out of my reverie with a crashing realization. It was one of the first thoughts I had after Michael left: how on earth am I going to afford to stay in this house without Michael? How on earth will I be able to afford to pay the mortgage without his monthly wage coming in? I am a sensible person and so have some money put by to pay about three months’ on my own, but after that I am royally screwed. How did I forget this? Did I choose to forget this? This is one conundrum I cannot put back in its box. This is one I will have to face head on. I am going to have to put the house on the market, sell up and move on.

  What if no one wants to buy it, though? There is a recession on. Everyone is being cautious. Who will want to live in this tiny two-up, two-down terraced house in the wrong part of East Ham? Actually, come to think of it, is there a right part of East Ham? Panic rises in my chest as I fear I will become another statistic. Repossession is nine-tenths of the law or something. I will have to act, and soon. I must be strong, proactive, forthright. I cannot afford to go under. I cannot let this happen.

  Oh God.

  SIX

  ‘It’s simple,’ says Wendy the next day as I chat to her on the phone during my break duty outside the girls’ loos. ‘Take in a lodger.’

  A lodger. Why didn’t I think of that?

  ‘Oh, Wendy, that’s a brilliant idea.’

  The relief. The relief is fantastic. After a sleepless night I now feel some energy seeping into me for the first time today. A weight is being lifted from my shoulders and I could float away on this icy breeze that’s spinning round the playground.

  ‘Or . . . move out for a few months and rent the whole house out. You’re in a prime spot for the Olympics. You’ll be able to rent it out for a fortune.’

  She has a point. Thus far I have been dreading the Olympics happening, as everyone reckons it’s going to clog up the local transport system. Everyone round here has a good old moan about it at the drop of a hat.

  ‘To who?’

  ‘I dunno. The Croatian curling team, or some Yanks who are really into sport or something.’

  I have images of six butch women with curling sticks hanging out in my kitchen. It doesn’t look right. (The image, not the kitchen. My kitchen’s quite nice.)