The Confusion of Karen Carpenter

by Jonathan Harvey

  She’s flipping a beer mat between finger and thumb impatiently, like she’s waiting for some important news, when she leans forward and goes, ‘You and I need a night out, you know, now you’re on your own. We need to get out there and paint the town red,’ she says, smacking her lips after a hearty swig of her G&T. (OK, so she looks healthy, but she’s no Keep-Fit Hitler.)

  Meredith understands my predicament. She recently split with her girlfriend of six years, but because they’re not going to make any money if they sell their house at the moment, they’re still living together. Or something. Or maybe the girlfriend is trying to buy her out, I can’t remember. It’s awkward, anyway.

  ‘Oh God, what? You gonna be dragging me to your fancy lesbetarian bars up Old Compton Street and the like? Oh, I’m really gonna pull up there!’

  She laughs. ‘OK, we do a deal. One night out on the dykey side of the street and another night on Breeder Alley.’

  That’s what she refers to me as: a breeder. We share a chuckle.

  ‘How you feeling?’ she asks, and I gulp. I do – I actually gulp. I think the gulp is loud enough to make people stop what they’re doing and look over. They don’t, but that’s how it feels.

  I sigh and feel myself getting a bit emotional. Must be those two gin and tonics. Damn her forceful alcohol-pushing ways!

  ‘I dunno. Some days are good; some days are bad. I just wish he’d told me why.’

  She nods, taking this in, like she understands.

  ‘Well, the main thing is –’ she leans back, flips the beer mat into the air, catches it between her top lip and her nose, then removes it and replaces it on the table ‘– you shouldn’t blame yourself. It was his choice, not yours.’

  I nod and check my watch. I really should be going. I toy with telling her that I’ve decided to go and see Michael later, but I really can’t be bothered getting into all that now. I can’t let my emotions get the better of me today, not when I have a wake to go to. It’s funny, I’ve not told anyone about my secret plan and I know it will remain precisely that: a secret. Why? Why can’t I tell anyone? It’s nothing to be ashamed of, is it? But something is stopping me. Maybe I fear people will think I’m being a bit desperate. He’s over you, Karen. Deal with it and move on. I know this is what they’ll say, so I don’t offer the information. Job done.

  Instead I politely ask what she’s got planned this weekend. I’m not really interested, but I feign fascination really well as she explains about the netball team she plays for each Saturday ‘just for a hoot’ and how she’s going to a mate’s in the afternoon to watch Mildred Pierce with Kate Winslet. I get a bit confused at first – possibly because I’m not listening properly – and think she is going to Kate Winslet’s house, but she soon explains my mistake. One of her mates has got it on DVD and a gang of them are going to crowd round a widescreen and watch their favourite icon pretending to open a chain of fast-food restaurants. Or something. Jeez, I think, there’ll be enough oestrogen in that telly room to sink the Titanic. I don’t say it out loud, but I do smile to myself at my apt analogy.

  ‘You look a bit like Kate Winslet,’ she says, oddly. For odd it is indeed. I have never, ever been likened to her before, and the reason for that is, I look nothing like her.

  ‘No, I don’t!’ I argue, but in the kind of voice that begs for reaffirmation because secretly I am thrilled. Who wouldn’t be?

  ‘Don’t be offended. She’s beautiful.’

  I’m not offended, and she is certainly beautiful, even when she’s not airbrushed. Why can’t I be airbrushed? Just for a day.

  ‘I know, but I look nothing like her.’

  Meredith shrugs. ‘Just sometimes.’

  There is an odd atmosphere between us I can’t quite put my finger on. She seems a bit distracted as I gather my bits together to leave, but we’re all smiles as she shows me out of the pub and wishes me luck with the task in hand.

  Then, just as I’m walking through the doorway, she grabs my arm and says, ‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right? This evening?’

  Why? Did I tell her about Michael? How I was going to—Oh. She means the funeral. Right.

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Well, you know.’

  ‘Meredith, I’ll be fine. Thanks for the drinks.’

  And I head off. Why shouldn’t I be able to cope with a little funeral wake? Have I really fallen apart that much?

  Oh God. I wish I’d not had those two whole glasses of gin and tonic. Urgh. And gin. Gin of all drinks. The one that makes you maudlin. Not a good choice today of all days, but . . . hey ho.

  I hate the feeling of not being in control, and now that I’m tottering through the estate, I’m regretting it. It’s not a fear that I’m going to be trollied and make a show of myself at the wake byjumping on the coffee table and insisting everyone join me in an out-of-tune rendition of ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’; it’s more that in light of . . . recent events . . . I fear my emotions are going to burst up like a bubbling geyser and I’ll sob hysterically in a corner to a distant relative of the deceased about the one who got away. And that’s probably not the most helpful of things at someone else’s funeral. The funeral, let’s face it, of someone I never knew, or even met. I get flashes of myself stuttering, ‘He just l-left a letter on the k-k-kettle,’ and want to turn round and run away.

  I can’t, though. I promised them I’d go. Well, I promised Kevin. This isn’t about me; it’s about showing a grieving family the support of the school.

  And OK, the dad is hot, but let’s gloss over that.

  If only there was a coffee shop nearby. I could nip in, neck a latte, take control and carry on with what I have to do, but then I remember the familiar moan of all the kids at school: there’s nothing to do round here, nowhere to go. You have to get a bus to the nearest shop, and even the once-busy pawnshop closed down. So finding a Costa or a Starbucks is about as likely as turning a corner and bumping into Sigmund Freud.

  I turn the corner and Sigmund Freud’s at a bus stop, looking lost as he attempts to decipher the timetable.

  Oh. OK. So where’s that Caffè Nero?

  But when he looks at me and asks, in a broad cockney accent, if I can help him work out which is the best bus to get to Bethnal Green, I realize he’s just some old guy with a beard.

  Bye-bye, latte.

  After pointing the Sigmund lookalikey across the road to take a bus in the opposite direction, I give him the (Freudian) slip and totter round to Lorenmead, the road where the O’Keefes live. I wonder when streets stopped having street names, like ‘street’ or ‘road’, and turned into these one-word weirdnesses they have round here. Maybe it was an aspirational decision by whichever architects thought it was clever or cool to build a crisscross of terraces and flats that almost look like they belong in Toy Town. And they probably did when they were built, with their yellow bricks, gaudy royal blue railings and porthole windows. Aesthetically it’s no better or worse than the drab row of greying terraced houses I live on; it just looks more like someone’s idea of a joke, as the estate can only be about fifteen years old. And no one could seriously have thought porthole windows and navy railings were a look that was going to stand the test of time, surely?

  There are matching satellite dishes on every house, in the same position, between the two upstairs windows. They must have been a job lot, all fitted at the same time, by the same company. I’m so lost in the visualization of scores of workmen up ladders fitting a hundred dishes at the same time that I completely miss the O’Keefes’ house and find myself at the wrong end of Lorenmead. OK, aaand backtrack!

  My phone rings as I retrace my steps. I clumsily drag it from my bag and see from the caller ID it’s Rita, Michael’s mum. I kill the call. Why is she so intent on speaking to me? I return the phone to my bag.

  When I find number 29 – I don’t know how I missed it: there’s music blaring out, and the front door is ajar – I nudge the door open and enter an overpopulat
ed hallway. It reminds me of the sort of parties I went to in my student days: people shoved up against walls talking (political then) bollocks, and distant-looking women on the stairs apparently three Prozacs away from a nervous breakdown. The only difference this time is the dress code. We may have worn black at uni, but here the black is of course a much more formal affair. I don’t recognize any of these people, unsurprisingly, so squeeze past trying to cause the minimum of fuss, finally saying to Distant Woman on Stairs Staring into the Middle Distance, ‘Any idea where Kevin is?’

  She just shrugs and says in a kind of stoned way, ‘Somewhere between heaven and hell?’

  I nod.

  Someone else leans in and adds, ‘Think he’s doing the barbecue.’

  Barbecue. At a funeral. In January. But of course.

  Still, at least it’s a pretty good bet that the barbecue will be in the garden, so I force through some more people in the kitchen and head for the light at the end of the tunnel, which I take to be the back door. And – hey presto – I am proved right.

  Well, it is a bright, sunny day, I guess, so why not have a barbecue?

  I look down the long, narrow garden and see it’s not Kevin doing the barbecue at the end of it, but Connor. He is wearing a white shirt and a black tie, perfectly appropriate funeral attire, of course, but with a shiny apron over the top with the body of a naked woman cartooned on it. There are even tassels swinging from the nipples. Real tassels. His face is red and sweaty from the heat of whatever he’s cooking over the flames. Just then I feel a hand in the small of my back and a voice in my ear.

  ‘Miss Carpenter, thank you so much for coming.’

  The way he says it is more like ‘tank’ than ‘thank’ and I know immediately it’s him. I turn and see those eyes again. And how dashing he looks in his smart suit and black tie, loosened at the collar now. I ignore this and shake his hand and say, ‘How you feeling?’ – head cocked to one side, slightly patronizing voice.

  ‘Agh, you know. I’ve had better days.’ He emits a throaty chuckle. ‘Still, the service was lovely. Dead celebratory.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good.’

  Well, you can’t beat dead celebratory.

  ‘There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, though, when Connor read his poem.’

  ‘He wrote a poem? Oh, that’s brilliant!’ God, I sound like a teacher. Rein it in, Karen!

  ‘Yeah. And he insisted on doing a barbecue. It’s something him and his mam did together, you know? So he wanted to do it for her today, even though it’s not exactly barbie weather, you know what I’m saying?’

  I do indeed know what he’s saying, and I look again at the little boy at the end of the garden and feel a huge lump in my throat.

  ‘Anyway. You. Let’s get you a drink.’

  You. I like being called ‘You’. It’s cheeky. It’s— Rein it in, Karen!

  For the next five minutes I feel like Kylie Minogue. That’s not to say I’m five foot one and have an amazing backside; more that I am presented to the assembled throng like a latter-day VIP.

  This is Karen, Connor’s teacher.

  This is Miss Carpenter, Connor’s form tutor. Isn’t it grand? She came to show her support.

  No, this is Karen. Teaches up the school. Yeah, Connor’s teacher.

  And, very kindly, not once does he introduce me as Karen Carpenter. Huge brownie points. No sniggering. No one realizes and guffaws into their tinny.

  I’m really sensible, and gladly so, because when Kevin offers me a white wine, lager or vodka, I turn him down and take a Diet Coke instead. Decorum will be my middle name. When he falls into conversation with the (female) vicar, I break away and trudge down the garden to wait in line for a paper plate of dark brown meats. Not sure what they are – they’re all of the same hue – but I’m guessing the cylindrical ones are sausages, the round flat ones are burgers, and the ones like little fists are chickeny bits. I am proved right.

  ‘You’re doing a really good job, Connor.’ Head up, direct eye contact, very teacherly.

  He smiles proudly and tells me it’s what he used to do with his mum.

  ‘And how are you feeling, mate?’

  I have a habit of doing this: I call the lads I teach ‘mate’. It’s not big, it’s not clever, but they seem to like it.

  He shrugs. ‘Today’s OK.’

  And those two eyes speak volumes. They speak of wisdom beyond his twelve years. I could weep.

  I don’t. I just take a dollop of coleslaw from a side table of condiments and compliment his culinary skills. I use the words ‘Jamie’ and ‘Oliver’, in case you are wondering. Karen Carpenter knows how to keep it real. Blud.

  I look up the garden and see Kevin deep in conversation with a bloke who looks very similar, but for a beard, whom I take to be his brother. Just then a blousy woman with an Eighties perm leans in to me.

  ‘How did you know Toni?’ she asks, sotto voce, as if it’s a secret code.

  I smile and see myself reflected in her very round Deirdre Barlow-from-the-1980s glasses.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t. I’m Connor’s teacher, Karen.’

  She nods, her eyes dancing. ‘Handsome, isn’t he?’

  I blush. ‘Who?’

  ‘Kevin.’

  I blush some more. Is she a mind reader? Her eyes dart up to the top of the garden; then she looks back at me expectantly.

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know. I mean—’

  ‘Dirty old dog, though,’ she interrupts.

  I look at her, taken aback. What on earth does she mean? ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘He’s a dirty old dog,’ she repeats. Then she takes a bite of a beefburger. Some grease rolls down her chin. After she chews for a few seconds, her tongue descends and licks the grease back up. Is she part woman, part lizard?

  ‘I . . . don’t really know him,’ I fluster.

  ‘I do. I live over the road, see.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I miss nothing.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing gets past me, you know?’

  I have no idea where this is going, but it is making me feel uncomfortable.

  She continues, ‘And while poor Toni was ill up the hospital, he had a different woman in here every night. Music blaring out. Disgusting.’

  I am startled, and my face must say I am startled, for she reads it and nods. I am clearly right to be startled and she has got the response she was after.

  ‘God knows what poor Connor must have thought. I mean, he didn’t even wait till she’d died.’

  I don’t know what to say. Gosh.

  ‘So, like I say, dirty old dog. Watch that one,’ she says with foreboding. ‘He’s not all that he appears.’

  With that the woman sweeps away, puts her plate on a nearby garden chair and disappears into the house.

  I look at Kevin again and give myself a bloody big reality check. I actually chuckle. Better not make too much of a habit of that here. Not the done thing to be a human laughing bag at a wake, but I realize now why I have felt so flirtatious with Kevin. He is clearly, to quote Deirdre Perm, ‘a dirty old dog’, a Lothario, a player, and I have only responded to an energy he was giving out to me. He probably doesn’t even fancy me; it’s just in his nature to ooze . . . I dunno . . . sexy stuff. Well, at least I am not going mad, I tell myself. And look which vicar he chose to take the service, stood there on the patio looking like Linda Lusardi in a dog collar. She is – she’s wearing false nails, and her tits aren’t half perky for a lady of the cloth. I’d swear she’s wearing one of those pointy uplift bras from the 1950s. Look at her, laughing at his jokes and flicking her hair. Oh, he’s a dirty old dog all right, and she’s an embarrassment to the church if you ask me.

  I look back at Kevin. He’s right in the middle of Slutty Vicar and Practically Twin Brother, nodding in earnest at something they’re discussing. He doesn’t look like a man who’s just buried his wife. He looks like a hunter-gatherer, out on the pull to nail his prey, then drag it ba
ck to the cave for some naughty games round the campfire. (Did cavemen have campfires? Damn, those gins have made my analogies a bit pants.)

  That said, I don’t feel too critical of him. Who knows what sort of conversations he had with Toni while she was dying at the hospital? OK, so it didn’t look too good to the neighbours, but for all they and I know, Toni might have been encouraging Kevin to find a new partner, grab some happiness and get a new mother for Connor into the bargain. You just don’t know, do you? I remember my mum telling me how common she had found it that when people lose a partner and there are kids involved, they quickly find a new soulmate and move on. The gossipy types go into overdrive; the rest of the world doesn’t even blink an eye.

  Move on. I know this is something I need to do, and I remind myself of the promise I made earlier in the week. I promised myself I’d move forward, find some closure. I recall that before the night is out somehow I must find Michael and talk to him. The realization that I am going to do it excites me. I am going to get answers. Or if not answers, I am at least going to confront Michael and demand an explanation. And if he can’t give me one, I will at least have tried. And I will at least make sure we set up another time, either via letter, or email, or a phone call, when he can tell me. Tonight might not be practical for him. Yeah, well, tough. Him leaving me via a letter on a kettle wasn’t that practical for me either. A shiver of excitement runs up my spine.

  Kevin ambles over. ‘How’s the food?’

  ‘Lovely,’ I say, sounding unnecessarily Irish. ‘Connor’s done a really good job.’

  ‘Do you have far to travel after this? Do you live far?’ Kevin asks.

  I don’t answer. I have the wind in my sails. ‘I’m really sorry, Kevin, but I didn’t realize the time.’

  He looks confused. I’ve only just got here.

  ‘I’m gonna have to shoot.’

  He does a comedy eyes-wide face and says, ‘You have a gun in your handbag?’