by Louise Voss
But I wasn’t too worried because I knew Siobhan would love what I’d written – and I was confident that she’d want to call me to talk about it. She…shit, there’s the phone now.
It wasn’t her. Someone for Simon. Of course it wouldn’t be her. She’ll want to play it cool, won’t want to let me know how excited she was to read my words straight away. I expect she’ll call tomorrow, Thursday. I wish I still had my mobile – I’d forgotten what it’s like to have to literally wait by the phone.
I doubt I’ll be able to sleep tonight. Too excited.
Thursday
Had a terrible evening. Sat in the living room watching TV and waiting for the phone to ring. Nothing on except a programme about lions: all they seem to do is sleep and shag. Looked at the cover of Siobhan’s novel: the naked woman; Siobhan’s picture; the two merging into one. I stared at the phone. It stared back, mocking me. It rang at one point, making me leap off the sofa. It was Si, asking if I wanted to join him and Nat for a drink.
‘I can’t.’
He sighed. ‘You need to get out more, Alex. You couldn’t come out the other night because of your writing class. You can’t keep turning down our invitations. We’ll get offended.’ I could hear the clink of glasses in the background, Christina on the jukebox. I put the phone down, worried about blocking the line.
I smoked six cigarettes and rummaged through Si’s bedside cabinet, trying to find his dope stash. Just a few hard crumbs. I ate them. They didn’t do anything.
At ten, I checked the phone connection. At this point, I realised how sad I was being. Maybe I should unplug the phone, I thought. Then when she tried to ring she wouldn’t be able to get hold of me; it would just ring and ring, and she’d be there getting worried, wondering where I was. I knelt down to pull the cord out of the wall. But I couldn’t do it.
I wish I’d had the chance to talk to her after the class. Maybe I was too subtle, simply writing my phone number. Perhaps I should have made some ‘call me’ sign in class. But that would have made me look like a twat. And I’m sure Siobhan’s the kind of person who understands subtlety. Her novel is subtle. So why hasn’t she taken the hint and called? Does she think I’m just a loser who doesn’t even have a mobile phone?
Or maybe she’s just shyer than she seems.
Friday
Maybe she lost my number. That could be it. She might have lost the card I gave her somehow. She might even have lost her bag. Maybe she’s been hunting her flat or house, getting frantic, wanting to call me, worrying that I’ll be upset. Of course, I’ll reassure her, I’ll tell her it’s fine, let’s go for a drink, a meal, and who knows what will follow.
Friday night, and I’m in my bedroom. It’s eleven thirty and, through the thin walls, Si and Nat are at it again, doing more for Anglo-French relations than Concorde, hypermarkets and Julian Barnes combined. I’ve put my headphones on, to drown it out, but when I close my eyes all I can see is flesh.
But it’s not just sex. It isn’t. No, no, I’m not being dirty. Not like when mum caught me in the bathroom, caught me with the magazine. And she made me scrub with the pumice stone: made me scrub my hands and … no, that’s the past. I don’t want to remember it.
Saturday
No call again. I went out for a walk, up towards the college. I wasn’t sure if Siobhan teaches there at the weekend; thought I might bump into her. I didn’t.
When I got home, I knocked on Simon’s door.
‘Enter at your own risk.’
I went in. The room stank of dope and sex. No sign of Natalie. Simon was on his iMac, looking at porn on the Web. The girl on the screen looked very young; I had to look away.
‘Did anyone call for me?’ I asked.
He reached for his cigarettes and lit up.
‘Yeah…actually, some chick did ring.’
‘What? When?’
‘Yesterday afternoon when you were at work.’
‘What did she say?’
He grinned. ‘She asked if I wanted to save money on my gas bill.’
‘You git.’
‘She was nice, actually. Maybe I could have fixed you up on a blind date.’ He laughed and coughed simultaneously.
In my mind, I grabbed hold of his stupid, grinning head and shoved it through the screen of his computer. In reality, I just muttered, ‘Arsehole,’ and left the room.
‘Don’t get eggy, Alex,’ he called after me. ‘It was only a joke.’
I came into my room and slammed the door. Then I turned on my own PC, staring at the flickering screen while it booted up, the hard disk grinding away. I could see my reflection in the monitor screen. My hair was all over the place and my eyes looked puffy. I needed a bath.
But if the phone rang while I was in there …
I logged onto Facebook and typed Siobhan’s name into the search bar. There were five Siobhan McGowan’s in the UK, plus some more in Ireland and a page full in the States. Two of them were listed as living in London on the search results. Of those two, one had a picture of a baby as their profile picture; the other had a picture of a cat.
Siobhan doesn’t have a baby - but I remembered her telling us she had a cat when she first introduced herself to the class. I clicked through. Because her privacy settings were preventing me from seeing her full profile, I was only able to see a small amount of information, including the fact that she had 82 friends. Twice as many as me. I scanned the list. None of the others from class were on there.
My mouse cursor hovered over the ‘Add as friend’ button. Should I do it? Why not. After all, we were friends, weren’t we? Certainly better friends than half of the people I have listed as friends, most of whom are colleagues or people I haven’t seen or wanted to see since I left school.
I clicked the button then had a tremulous little daydream about how long it would be before I saw the words ‘In a relationship with Alex Parkinson’ appear on her page.
Then I hovered over the ‘Poke’ button but thought that was taking things a bit too far.
For the next two hours I refreshed the page repeatedly. I learned that one of my ‘friends’ was bored, that another had a cold, and that one of them had just finished watching the second series of Prison Break on box set. But Siobhan hadn’t yet confirmed me as a friend. I checked Twitter but all I found was an account in the name Siobhan MacGowan with a single tweet that had been made six months ago: ‘So this is Twitter, eh? Wonder what all the fuss is about. Am going to tweet every day.’ Couldn’t be her, unless she’d accidentally added an extra ‘a’ into her surname - unlikely, I’d say.
Monday
I decided this morning it was time to stop moping around. Stop being pathetic and passive. Do something, Alex. I went into work with a plan, albeit a dangerous one. I was going to commit one of the few sackable offences.
I sat down at my desk and put my headset on. My supervisor, Jackie, looked over at me, making sure I wasn’t wasting time before logging on. As we’re consistently being told, Bookjungle is the biggest online retailer in the world – not that you’d know it from our wages – and we have to keep our customers happy by letting them talk to us like we’re shit and not keeping them waiting when they want to tell us this.
I took a couple of calls from people moaning about delays in receiving their books, then did what I’m not supposed to do.
Checking that nobody was watching, I went into what we call the ‘back office’, the part of the computer system that the public can’t see. It’s the database where we keep all our customers’ details. We need to be able to access it in order to answer their queries: we can see their address and all the books and CDs they’ve ordered. But we’re only allowed to look up the details of customers we speak to, and only if we need the information to deal with their enquiry, to prevent you looking up the details of your friends and enemies. To deter us, the system generates random reports, which mean that you have to be able to show the supervisor that you spoke to the customer you were looking up. These reports onl
y capture one in fifty of the customers we look up, but it’s not usually worth taking that chance.
Today, it was worth that chance.
I was quietly confident that Siobhan would be a customer of ours. After all, we are the biggest of our kind, and anyone who reads a lot, like Siobhan must, was more than likely to have ordered a book from us.
I typed her name.
There were 13 Siobhan McGowans on the database. Most were in Ireland, but three were in London, one more than on Facebook. Two of them had North London postcodes. I wasn’t sure which one it would be so I looked at them both. I felt jumpy and sweaty as I hurried to look up the details. The first Siobhan McGowan had bought a few CDs (Norah Jones, Gareth Gates – Jesus wept) and one Delia Smith cookbook. Surely that wasn’t my Siobhan? I’d be very disappointed if it was. I clicked on the second Siobhan and looked at her list of purchases. It was huge. I quickly scanned the list: Ryan Adams, The Cure, Belle and Sebastian, Sting…well, nobody’s perfect. And among the many books was one about teaching creative writing – and Tara Lies Awake by Siobhan McGowan! In fact, she’d ordered her own book several times. I clicked another icon and there were her personal details. Her home and mobile numbers and email address. I copied them, pasted them into an email, then sent it to myself at home, deleting the message from my sent items folder.
I couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the day.
All I could think was, I know where she lives.
Victoria Gardens was a pleasant little street: nice and quiet, curving off the main road, a small Victorian terrace, aptly enough. Close enough to Camden to be hip, and close enough to Hampstead to be respectable and safe. Siobhan lived at number 54. I walked down the odd-numbered side of the street, trying to act casual, trying not to look like I was reading the numbers on the doors. I was having a job in the dim light anyway, but luckily number 54 had a big brass sign on the front door. Siobhan’s house. Just a few feet away.
Close enough to sense her.
After this initial recce, I came home to check there were no phone messages. There weren’t. Then I went on to Google Maps and found the location of her house. It was only a thirty minute walk from my place, if I took the short cuts I carefully worked out.
I couldn’t phone her because she’d want to know where I’d got her number from. Oh, I was snooping on the computers at work, breaking the Data Protection Act, Siobhan. No. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t email her either, for the same reason. But I could walk by her house again, and maybe, just maybe, I’d get lucky. She’d come outside and look surprised and I’d say, ‘How strange, I’ve got a friend who lives down here. I’ve just been to see him. Yes, I’d love a cup of coffee. You lost the card with my number in? No, don’t worry, I knew it would be something like that. And I do have a mobile, by the way, it’s just been nicked. Ha ha.’
I had a bath and downed a couple of glasses of Absolut. Not enough to get me pissed; just a bit of Dutch courage. Or Swedish courage, I should say.
It was nearly nine by the time I had enough Swedish courage to return to Siobhan’s house. It was dark, the sodium orange streetlights illuminating the alleys I cut through. There weren’t many people around: a few dog walkers, a bunch of teenage boys and girls hanging out by the Lock, buckling under the weight of their facial jewellery. I walked past them and on towards Hampstead.
When I got to number 54, I didn’t stop – just walked straight by, glancing to my right. The lights were off downstairs, but there was a light on in the first floor front room which I assumed was the bedroom: not a bright light, maybe a lamp, or candles. It was just before ten – too early for her to be in bed, surely?
I walked to the end of the road then back, again sticking to the odd-numbered side. I lit a cigarette. I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t keep walking up and down, could I? I felt sick. Should I go and knock on the door? No, of course not. What excuse would I give? There were none.
I thought it would be okay to walk by one more time. I felt like there were hundreds of little butterflies going crazy inside me; a thousand newborn spiders wriggling in my stomach.
I was about five houses down from Siobhan’s when her downstairs light came on. Very quickly afterwards, the front door opened.
I ducked behind a car before anyone emerged. My breathing seemed so loud to me I was worried she might be able to hear it from across the road. But when I risked a glimpse around the car’s bonnet, I saw that the person who emerged wasn’t her. It was a bloke, a big, dark-haired rugger-bugger type. My heart sank.
Then I heard the door shut, and the next thing I knew footsteps were coming straight towards me.
I held my breath, wondering what the hell I should do. But then the footsteps ceased, and a car door opened and closed. The engine revved up and I peered through the window of the car I was crouching behind. I could see him in his car; a huge exhausted-looking man. He gripped the steering wheel and drove off.
I memorised his licence plate number.
And after all the lights had gone off in Siobhan’s house, I came home.
Chapter 5
Siobhan
Monday
As soon as he was through my front door, Phil told me that he and Lynn had split up.
‘Why?’ I asked, trying not to gloat visibly.
‘We want different things,’ he said. I nearly laughed out loud. That easy, catch-all, convenience excuse, like bands breaking up because of ‘musical differences’. In my opinion, couples should want different things. Life would be pretty excruciating if couples wore matching clothes, ordered the same things off menus, went to the same place on holiday every year for the rest of their lives because they both liked it. Of course I knew he really meant ‘she wants kids and I don’t,’ but I didn’t care. I didn’t even feel sorry for her, which surprised me. I suppose I always imagined myself as more empathic than that.
‘So the holiday’s off?’
He nodded, looking so crestfallen that I forgot he was technically out of bounds now, and touched his shoulder. It made me shiver with possibilities and remembered sensations, the way his solid body felt underneath that stripy shirt. I’d forgotten that he always really turned me on – until we actually got down to it, that is. With Phil, the idea was always better than the reality: anticipation was everything. It’s weird how my body used to dupe me into thinking it was going to be great. I must be a sexual optimist, if such a term exists.
‘And what are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘You know I’m not a fan of unannounced visitors – what if the house had been a mess?’
He half laughed, stretching out on the sofa the way he used to, having to bend his knees so his feet didn’t stick over the end. He was flattening all my cushions and I wanted to pull them out from under him and bang them together to fluff them up again.
‘Your house is never a mess, Shuv. I just wanted to talk to an old friend, that’s all. You don’t mind, do you?’
An old friend? I’m not a sodding old friend! His socks were worn thin on the soles and I thought, I’d have chucked that pair away long ago. I hadn’t noticed him take his shoes off, but when I looked over, there they were in the hall, just like old times. I wondered if the next time I turned around he’d be stark naked and I wouldn’t have noticed him undressing either.
‘It was nice to see you the other day outside Starbucks. I’m sorry if I was a bit short – Lynn and I were rowing then too, and I – well – seeing you just made me miss you more than ever.’
I must have looked at him with a particularly gormless expression on my face. He reached out and touched my cheek, and I felt a callous on his finger scrape against my skin. ‘I really miss you, Siobhan,’ he said.
Suddenly I just wanted him so badly that I thought I was going to cry, like craving chocolate when your blood sugar is at rock bottom, or that overwhelming desire for a glass of wine at the end of a long, hard day. I wanted the familiarity of his skin and his soft clumsy kisses, even his hairy chest. I wanted someone to bring me
tea in the morning.
I practically dragged him up to the bedroom and ripped off his clothes, and then there was the shock of the cold bedclothes over and under our hot flesh…
…and nothing had changed. The cat hair still made him sneeze. He squashed me under his weight. He moaned and grunted and thrust, ripping at my hair and using his fingers in all the wrong places. I’d been really turned on for the first two minutes but then I just kept thinking, I want a real man. I wanted to be fucked by a man with a dick like a truncheon, not this skinny little excuse for a penis. I want to come three times in a night.
I’m sorry, but Phil is ridiculous in bed. I’d forgotten quite how ridiculous, but really, all that contrived ass-slapping and cringeworthy fantasy-whispering. How can he think it’s a turn-on? And worse: now he’s started using all this yucky babytalk – ‘Does my ‘ikkle Shuvvie want it bad from her big boy Phil?’ Ugh!! (And ‘big boy?’ I mean, hello? Who’s he trying to kid?) I was rolling my eyes when he came. The baby talk must be Lynn’s influence – he never used to do that.
All in all, the idea of Phil is still way better than the reality of Phil. He’s a lovely bloke, and we did care about each other, and he made me laugh and bought me tampons without blanching if I needed him to – but now I remember why I wasn’t heartbroken when he finished with me. Now I remember that I’d thought, oh well, might get a decent shag now, if anyone will still have me.
Nice as it was to think about getting tea brought to me in the morning, I suddenly couldn’t countenance the idea of Phil staying the night; this night, or any other. I’d get my own tea – no big deal. But before I could say ‘yes, well, thanks for that, Phil, but I really must be getting on with my life now’ he’d jumped out of bed and headed for the bathroom to wash his willy in the sink, as he always did. (It’s such an unpleasant thought – really, the male anatomy is pretty revolting, once you take away the components of arousal. Perhaps I ought to become a lesbian instead, like Kathy.)
