by Lisa Jewell
‘So,’ she says, keeping her body language neutral and taking a measured sip from her Theakstones, ‘Phil. How’ve you been?’
‘Oh, you know. Not bad.’ He takes a noisy slurp of his beer and wipes his mouth with the back of one hand. ‘You?’ He looks nervous, as if he’s scared of her.
‘Fine,’ she smiles, ‘great, in fact.’
‘So,’ he says, ‘what inspired you to get in touch again, after all this time—do I owe you money?’ He laughs, extra loud to ensure that Nadine knows he’s only joking, but it occurs to her that this is what he’s really thinking.
‘Well,’ she replies, ‘there was that fifty quid you took out of the piggy-bank! But seriously—I just wanted to find out how you were. What you’ve been up to. I just felt…I dunno…you spend so many years with someone, you’re so close to someone and then suddenly, overnight, they’re not in your life any more. They just get on a train and disappear for ten years. I wanted to hear your story, I suppose, the “Story of Philip Rich!”’
Phil exhales through tight lips and eyes her sceptically. ‘You got all night?’ he asks.
Nadine nods, enthusiastically. She senses a story here, something behind that look, and suddenly decides that the only way she is going to be able to get through this evening is by pretending that Phil isn’t really a part of her history, isn’t a bloke she lived with and loved ten years ago, but is in fact someone she’s interviewing for a magazine or researching for a novel, that sort of thing. ‘Start at the beginning,’ she says. ‘Start at the end of us…’
Nadine was disappointed to learn that Phil had gone back to London when they split up, gone back home and not to the remote Yorkshire village she’d been fondly imagining for some strange reason. He had come back, moved in with his parents, sold all his camera equipment, extended his bank loan and, with a shocking lack of business judgement, at the height of an international recession bought back the photographic lighting company he’d sold to fund his degree. For a song, he said, laughing wryly at his own stupidity.
He was made bankrupt six months later and had a nervous breakdown.
His life then, it seemed, took a series of very unexpected and out-of-character turns, and Phil spent most of the nineties trying to ‘find himself ’ through one alternative route after another—crystals, meditation, Chinese herbs, Buddhism and Taoism. He moved from town to town and from woman to woman in search of happiness and fulfilment until his failure to find either led him to a drink problem and yet another broken relationship on a travellers’ site in Warwickshire.
On the day he left the site, he walked three miles to Nuneaton in the rain clutching a bottle of Taunton Dry, walked into a launderette, pissed in a tumble-drier, swore at an old man and nicked the money he’d left out for his next wash. He stole £1.50 and for that he got a three-month prison sentence.
‘Best thing that ever happened to me,’ he said, ‘cut through all my bullshit.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Nadine, who was as gripped by his story as any Cutting Edge documentary.
‘Being inside—I dunno, I’d spent so much of my life convinced that there was some big reason for me being here. First I thought it was to be rich, to be the consummate businessman with the mobile phone and the sharp suit and the keen mind. That didn’t work out. Then I thought I was supposed to be creative and stylish, on the cutting edge, you know, some really cool photographer-type with dark glasses and a sexy girlfriend.’ He glanced at Nadine and raised his eyebrows at her. She laughed. ‘And that, as you know, didn’t work out at all. So I got into all that alternative stuff, thought maybe I was meant to be a great healer or something. And when that didn’t make me happy I moved towards the whole lifestyle thing, thought that if I could immerse myself in another world, then that would make me special.
‘It was like…it was like I was trying on personas for fit, d’you know what I mean? Seeing what suited me. And then discarding them when I realized that they made me look like a twat.’ He laughed hoarsely.
‘It took a stretch inside to make me understand that some people aren’t here for any big reason—they’re just here. And I realized then that I’m one of those people and that there’s nothing actually wrong with that—d’you know what I mean? It’s all right just to be a normal bloke, do a normal job and have normal friends. It was like a huge weight off my shoulders working that one out. And the pressure just sort of disappeared—it had been like this great big ugly parrot sitting on my shoulder all my life, and while I was inside it flew away.’ Phil shrugged and lit a Rothman.
Nadine breathed out deeply. ‘Fuck, Phil,’ she said, ‘I mean—I always knew that you wouldn’t have had a boring life, but I can’t believe how much has happened to you, how many changes you’ve made. It makes me feel so boring and…predictable. God—I haven’t done anything with my life.’
‘What about the photography? Still taking pictures?’
She nodded.
‘Making a living from it?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘a very good living, actually.’
‘Oh yeah?’ His body language suddenly became very focused on Nadine. ‘Got a nice flat and all that?’
‘Yes,’ nodded Nadine, proudly.
‘That’s great. I’m really pleased for you. What sort of work have you been doing?’
‘Oh’—she shrugged, suddenly remembering what Phil’s attitude towards commercial photography had been at university, and expecting him to judge her—‘editorial, mainly. Him magazine. Do you know it?’
‘Yeah. Tits and arses, isn’t it?’
‘Well, there’s a lot more to it than that. But I have been known to take the odd picture of an arse, yes.’ She smiled, nervously, waiting for Phil to chastise her for selling out. But he didn’t. He smiled, too, and then he almost laughed. Nadine breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I thought you’d be horrified,’ she said. ‘I thought I was about to get a lecture about the evils of commerce!’
‘Nah,’ said Phil, ‘I think it’s great. Really great. Christ, I was a right wanker at Manchester, wasn’t I? So pretentious. Who the fuck did I think I was?’ He laughed then, properly and, as the conversation progressed, it became more and more obvious that Phil wasn’t the same person she’d known all those years ago, at all. He was ten years older, at least a stone thinner, and seemed to have a completely different set of priorities.
‘So,’ she said, ‘when did you move back to London again?’
‘Straight from the nick. March 1997.’
‘Back to your parents?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you’re still there?’
Phil shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘nah. I’ve got a place in Finsbury Park now. A Peabody flat. My…er…grandparents sublet it to me.’
Nadine was confused. ‘But you were at your parents’ when I phoned their number?’
Phil shook his head, again. ‘Nah. I was at mine, in Finsbury Park. I took the number with me when I went.’
‘But…but…didn’t your parents want to keep their number?’
Phil put down his pint and took a deep breath. He stared deep into Nadine’s eyes, hardened his mouth and clenched his jaw.
‘No. They don’t need their number any more. They’re dead.’
The bluntness of his response took Nadine somewhat by surprise. ‘I see,’ she said, having managed to train herself out of the knee-jerk response of apologizing for the bereaved’s misfortune. ‘How long? How long have they been dead?’
Phil shrugged and took a slug of his beer. ‘A year,’ he said, ‘a year and a bit.’
‘What? Both of them?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘They died together?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh God—how awful. What happened?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Yes I do.’
‘It’s not nice.’
‘Tell me,’ said Nadine, her curiosity now stimulated beyond her control. ‘I can take it.’
&n
bsp; Phil sighed and fell into a thoughtful silence, staring into the depths of his pint. Nadine thought he wasn’t going to tell her, but eventually he looked up and opened his mouth, gazing into the distance while he waited, like a sluggish standpipe, for the words to come.
‘My mum had lung cancer,’ he began, ‘she’d fought it for three years. They thought she was dead at one time, performed last rites and everything. But my mum wasn’t having any of that. You remember my mum? She was a right old battleaxe and she fought it. And the tumour just kind of dissolved. They X-rayed her lungs one day and the tumour had gone. Everyone said it was a miracle. She said it was the evil thoughts she’d sent it—she called it Beelzebub, that lump. She hated it.’ He smiled wryly. ‘She reckoned that’s what killed it—none of this positive-thinking malarkey, none of all that alternative stuff that I was into. Anyway, she makes a full recovery, and then two months later my dad’s diagnosed with breast cancer. Nah,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know men could get it either, but they can. Here.’ He indicated his pectorals. ‘So, he’s in hospital, having tests, operations, treatments, just like my mum, and it’s looking bad for a while—the lump’s quite big and they have to remove most of the flesh from around his chest, they’ve taken away his nipple and everything—it was a fucking mess’—he winced—‘but a year later and he’s got the all-clear from the hospital and he’s told he can get on with his life.
‘So, after, you know, everything the pair of them have been through, they decide that they deserve a bit of a break, a bit of time away in the sunshine. So they cash in some Premium Bonds and book themselves a two-week cruise around the Mediterranean—it was off-season, so it wasn’t too pricey. And I wave them off at Portsmouth and away they go. I’ll never forget their faces on that deck—they looked so happy and, you know, excited.
‘Anyway. And this is all according to witnesses, you know, obviously I wasn’t there, but this is what happened, apparently. Mum had had a bad sardine, or something—she wasn’t used to that sort of food—and she had a dodgy gut, you know, puking up, the squits, the works. So she’s hanging off the side of the boat one night, puking her guts up while my dad’s stroking her back and all that. Suddenly the ship lurches to one side, quite violently, and Mum’s thrown to the other side of the boat, puking up as she goes, and there’s puke absolutely everywhere. She’s landed by some steep steps down to the next deck, metal steps, you know, like you get on boats, and knocked her head off one of those pipe things, and when Dad sees the blood starting to drip down her face he comes legging it across the deck towards her, not noticing that the floor’s all slick with vomit.
‘So’—Phil took a deep breath and slurp of beer before continuing—‘he’s legging it across all this vomit, and he slips, and as he slips the boat lurches again and he’s gone, according to someone who saw it all, he’s gone gliding like a fucking ice-skater over the floor and then sort of tipped over, head first, through the door-way leading to the staircase and straight down those metal steps, head over heel over head, over heel, bang bang bang bang bang bang…’
He stopped again for a second to compose himself. Nadine held her breath. ‘He copped it immediately, according to the ship’s doctor. The fall snapped his spine. He didn’t suffer…’
‘Oh God. That’s awful,’ gasped Nadine, ‘and what about your mother? What happened to your mother?’
Phil exhaled loudly. ‘Well, she was in a bit of a state, obviously, what with my dad being dead and everything, and she was still puking up. The doctor sticks a plaster on her head where it’s cut and gives her a sedative and something for her stomach, and she’s sent back to her cabin. When the doctor knocked on her door early the next morning there was no answer so he got the steward bloke to let him in, and there she was, lying in bed’—he took another swig of his drink and looked at Nadine—‘dead.’
‘What! But how?!’
‘It was the knock on the head. It was worse than they’d thought. A blood clot, apparently. She would’ve died in her sleep. She wouldn’t have suffered, either. At least neither of them suffered.’
‘Oh, Phil. You poor thing. That’s one of the worst stories I’ve ever heard.’
‘I told you, didn’t I? Told you it was bad. My dad died from slipping over in my mum’s puke. Nice, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, Phil’—Nadine instinctively grabbed his hand across the table—‘you poor, poor thing.’
‘Yeah,’ he muttered, ‘well.’
‘So. You couldn’t bear to live in the house any more after they went?’
‘Eh?’
‘You know. Your parents’ house…?’
‘Oh. Right. No. It…er…I did live there for a while after they died. It was mine, legally. They left it to me.’
‘What. And you sold it?’
‘Erm…no. Not exactly. I…I…Oh God. This is another bad thing, you know. The house. Another bad thing.’
‘Go on,’ soothed Nadine.
‘You sure you want to hear this?’
Nadine nodded. ‘If you’re sure you want to tell me.’
‘I haven’t really talked about all this before, properly, you know.’
‘Well, maybe you should.’
Phil sighed and took a deep breath. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you’re right. I might as well tell you everything then, eh? Since you’re listening.’ He stopped and stared at her then, intently. ‘You know something,’ he said, ‘you’re still as beautiful as you ever were. Even more beautiful, if anything.’
Nadine blushed and looked away, embarrassed by the unexpected compliment and Phil’s piercing gaze.
‘Sorry,’ he smiled, ‘sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Anyway. The house. I met this girl, Mandy, when I was inside. She was a visitor. Came to see me every day. We were both in our late thirties, both single, both a bit lost and lonely. She was such a great girl, a real laugh, game for anything, you know what I mean? She kind of brought me out of myself, gave me self-confidence, that sort of thing. It was different this time—she was a real person and I wasn’t looking for anything from her, I wasn’t looking for this mystical life any more. I just wanted to settle down with her, maybe a kid or two, an ordinary life. Anyway, when I got out we got engaged. I wanted to do it properly—the traditional way. My parents were made up, her parents were made up, everyone was over the moon. She was working for a computer company, technical stuff, and I’d just started working for this company, erecting marquees, earning a fair bit, and we opened a joint bank account, started putting away a couple of hundred quid a month. Saving up for the wedding. She wanted a big wedding. That was her dream. Big white dress and flower arrangements and string quartets—she wanted the lot, not just what our parents could afford. I wasn’t bothered, myself, but I went along with it. Anything Mandy wanted was fine by me. So we’re both working all the hours, saving every month, staying in, watching this money growing slowly, day by day.
‘After a year, we had five grand in that bank account. Then Mandy gets a promotion—becomes a programmer—and suddenly she’s earning, three, four, five times as much as me, and she’s putting that much more in the account. A few months later and there’s twelve grand in it. We’d reached our goal, we can afford the silver-service dinner and the master of ceremonies and the real champagne and the honeymoon in Antigua. Mandy’s really excited. We set a date, we send out the invites, we book the honeymoon, the reception. It’s all systems go.
‘Then Mandy phones me at work one day—she’s going off to pick up her wedding dress after work. It was costing two grand, this thing, it’s all she could talk about—the dress this, the dress that, the dress the other. This dress was the most important thing in the world to her. Anyway. I’m on my way home that night, and I happen to be driving past this dress shop, you know, where she’s picking her dress up from, and I decide to pop in, give her a lift. So, I walk into this shop and the assistant tells me, “Oh no, Miss Taylor, she’s already left. She left about ten minutes ago. Are you the groom?” “Yes, I say, I’m the g
room.” “Well,” she says, “maybe you should make sure she’s all right, she seemed a bit”—what was it she said?—she seemed a bit agitated, yeah, agitated when she left.” “Agitated?” I say. “Yeah,” she says, “a bit upset.”
‘So, I suddenly get this really bad feeling. You know how they say—someone walking over your grave? Well, that’s what it was like. So I goes legging it from this shop, and it was summer so it was still light, and I’m running towards the river as fast as I can—I don’t know why, I’ve just got this feeling. And then, as I get towards Putney Bridge, dodging the traffic, running between the cars, I see her, half-way up the bridge. And I’m shouting her name, over and over—“Mandy! Mandy!” She’s got her dress on, this huge wedding dress, and a big veil and tiara and everything. And she’s just standing there, staring into the river. I’m calling her name but she doesn’t turn around, and I’m running towards her, towards the bridge. And as I’m running I’m watching her, like it’s in slow motion, watching her lift up this big petticoat skirt of her dress and climbing on to the bridge, on to the actual stone-wall thing. She’s standing there on the wall and staring into the water, just staring.’ Phil stopped talking for a while and Nadine didn’t try to fill the silence.
‘I’m nearly on the bridge by now and I’m still calling out her name, and then, just as I set foot on the bridge, she turns towards me and I can see that she’s smiling. She’s smiling straight at me, a strange sort of smile. She slowly lifts up her veil and throws it back over her head, and then she turns back towards the water, and I’m running and running, and even though it feels like she’s doing all this really slowly, she can’t be because I don’t get there in time, and as I’m running towards her I see her reach up on to her tiptoes, and then she puts her arms out, like this, out by her sides, and then…then she just lets herself fall, she doesn’t jump, just lets herself fall, face first into the water, and all the fabric in her dress makes her sort of float down, like a parachute. And I stop, just for a second, I stop running and I turn to look in the water, because, and this sounds really bad, but because it looks so extraordinary, she looks so extraordinary, floating there, in the black water, in her big white dress. She looks like a swan or something, you know? It was surreal…
