by Julie Cohen
‘They’re photographs,’ he said, coming into the room. ‘I haven’t had the chance to put them up yet.’ He gave her one of the mugs he held. ‘Your cup of tea. Finally.’
‘I think I liked what we were doing even more than a cup of tea.’ She curled up on the sofa and he nudged beside her, his arm around her shoulders. He was only wearing his boxer shorts. She couldn’t resist running her hand up his thigh, watching how the hairs, stroked against the grain, stood up and clung to her palm.
‘Where are the kids?’ he asked. ‘With their father? I was too distracted to ask.’
‘With Honor. My mother-in-law. She hasn’t rung, so I assume they’re fine.’ She hoped they were fine; guilt threaded into her gut. She could run back and check.
But actually, Honor was right. She did deserve some time for herself. ‘What are the photographs of?’
‘You’re welcome to have a look.’
She knelt by the box and lifted the framed photos out, one by one, dreading the photographs of old girlfriends. But they were landscapes: bleak and rocky, ice and water. Some black and white, some colour. A blue interior of ice, a red and black lava field, a scooped-out green valley.
‘You took these?’
‘I’ve spent quite a few holidays in Iceland. I love the geology. This one.’ He reached past her and took out a photo: it was white and blue curves, like the spiral of a snail shell. The scale was impossible to determine. ‘I have a thing about glaciers.’
‘So the teaching is a hobby?’
‘The teaching is a job. The glaciers are a hobby. The mass, and how slowly they move, and how they change the environment. Mountains literally moved by water. It puts everything in perspective.’ He laughed. ‘All the rest of my family like to go somewhere warm on holiday. My mum calls me a penguin.’
‘Penguins aren’t in Iceland.’
‘Well, my mum isn’t always scientifically accurate.’ He put the photo down. ‘Anyway, there. You’ve discovered my dark secret.’
‘That’s it? Glaciers?’
‘You’re right, glaciers aren’t a secret. My Year Sevens are sick of me banging on about them.’ He grinned at her. ‘You’re my only secret.’
‘I think you’re mine, too.’
‘That means we have a lot in common.’
No, she thought. We have each other in common, and that is all. She picked up the photo he’d lain down. ‘You should put these up. They’re beautiful.’
He gestured at the clean walls. ‘It’s my fear of damaging the house. Also, I haven’t got a great eye. I’ve had them framed, but I wouldn’t know where they’d look best.’
‘I’ll help you do it,’ she said, and then blushed. Here she was, at his house for the first time, having made love with him once and exchanged some texts, and she was pushing herself forward into his life. Offering to help decorate his house, to help him become domesticated. As if she were his mother.
‘Like you need more jobs to do, right?’ he said. ‘Come here.’ She went willingly onto his lap. He slipped his hand underneath his T-shirt that she wore.
‘You want to again?’ she asked.
‘And again, if we have time.’ He nuzzled her ear. ‘Tell me a secret. Something about you I don’t know yet.’
‘I’m only a mum,’ she said, kissing his shoulder, the hollow of his collarbone. ‘I’m not the kind of person who sneaks out on a Saturday to meet her lover.’
‘I’m not either,’ he said. ‘But now we both are.’ He laid her back against the cushions.
When she let herself into her house, even later than that, her body weary and singing, Oscar and Iris were in the same position, bent over the tablet.
‘You’re back,’ said Honor. ‘Did you have a good time?’
Marcus’s hands on her breasts, his mouth on the curve of her hip. Suddenly she was conscious of her chin and neck. They must be red from the stubble on Marcus’s face.
‘Yes, very nice,’ she said, putting her hand over her chin in a pose she hoped looked thoughtful rather than embarrassed. ‘Have you had lunch?’
‘Not yet.’
Jo perched on the arm of the sofa, next to Oscar, and ruffled his hair. So fine and soft. ‘You haven’t been playing on these the whole time, have you?’
‘The birds hate the pigs, Mummy!’
‘No,’ said Iris.
‘We’ve been fine,’ said Honor.
‘It’s just … normally we try to limit screen time.’ She winced as she said it. She knew it was her own guilt talking.
‘Why?’
‘It’s – you know, it’s not recommended for children to spend too much time on the computer, or watching television.’ It’s also not recommended for children to be abandoned whilst their mother carries on a torrid affair with the next-door neighbour. ‘I usually give them an hour a day.’
‘The ability of the middle classes to punish themselves is incredible. If tablets had existed when I was their age, I would never have got off the sofa. And I hardly think that I’m intellectually disadvantaged.’
Jo rubbed her chin. ‘I’ll get lunch, shall I?’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lydia
THIS IS WHAT love feels like.
It’s a burning in your chest. A free fall through whooshing air. It’s an itch in your skin which can only be soothed by touching. It’s how you store up every little word and expression and hoard it for later, when you can go through it in your head and look for the coded messages. It makes you greedy and jealous and resentful and sad. It makes you hate the person you were born as – a jigsaw with a piece out of place where your heart should be.
No. I want to think about the good parts, not the bad parts.
Love gives everything another meaning, another layer on top. It means that even a wave or a smile is significant. It makes food taste better; it makes air delicious. It makes the blood pumping through your body feel like a miracle. And when you think about it, how unlikely is it that out of all the atoms in the universe, they have somehow combined to make both you and the person you love, and that chance has brought you together to be on the same patch of Earth at the same time as each other. There must be a million reasons why you should never have existed, why you should never have met. And yet you did, one morning at the school gates when neither of you had anyone but each other.
Sometimes I think about fate. If Dad hadn’t died, if Mum hadn’t married Richard, I would never have met Avril. Maybe I would have been happier. We would never have moved, or maybe we’d have gone back to Cambridge and maybe I would have met a girl who could have loved me back. Maybe I’d be out; maybe I would have told Dad and he would have told Mum and everything would be calm now, no scene or worries. Maybe I would feel normal, or as normal as I ever could.
But I would never have met Avril. Never seen her smiling at me across a crowd, never shared secrets and bags of crisps, never linked arms or held hands or breathed next to each other at night. And the thought of that is worse than the thought that I’ve missed maybe being happy, maybe in another time, another place.
Since I’ve met her, every April has been her month. I haven’t told anyone; like so many things about Avril, it’s my secret. I watch the trees and flowers bud and spring into new life and I’m always happy. It feels like the world is starting over again and that something has been renewed in me.
If I love her, if I truly love her, I want to love her no matter what. I want to understand it for the miracle it is. I want to love her without being greedy, without being jealous. In a pure way. In the best way, without any consideration of my own happiness.
Can you even love that way, in the real world? When you’re itching and burning and hurting? When all you want to do is scream and kick things and rail against the fact that Avril was born without that thing that I have that makes me love her?
This is what love feels like. It feels hopeless and helpless, like holding on to a slippery rock in a churning sea. And I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
I wouldn’t.
‘What are you writing about?’ asked Bailey, and Lydia shut her notebook.
‘Nothing. Just some formulae.’
The bell had gone and everyone else had left the Maths classroom, but Bailey lingered by Lydia’s desk. ‘It looked like words, not numbers.’
‘I think better in words. Sometimes I write down the problems in words so I can understand them better.’ She stood and began shovelling her books into her bag.
‘I was wondering if maybe, if you’d like to come over to mine today maybe after school,’ said Bailey.
Today? Seriously? Their last day before exam leave, their last day of proper school ever, before exams and the sixth form?
‘I don’t know. I think I’m doing something with Avril.’ She was doing something with Avril: a party at Sophie’s house, while her parents were working late. It had been planned weeks ago. Harry would be there.
‘Avril could come too. I like Avril.’
‘Everyone likes Avril,’ snapped Lydia, and walked out of the classroom, Bailey tagging along with her.
‘Well, just let me know,’ said Bailey. ‘You could stay for tea and stuff if you wanted. My mum makes this really good pizza. It’s gluten free but you’d never know it.’
From the corridor behind them, a burst of laughter. It sounded like Erin’s.
‘Maybe,’ said Lydia, and as soon as they got to the door of the Maths block, she peeled away, walking rapidly across the school yard towards Geography, even though it was break. She wanted a few minutes on her own. If worse came to worse, she could go into Mr Graham’s room. He never locked it and she could pretend to be doing some extra revision.
A group of Year Sevens came chattering out and after them, Mr Graham. He was reading something on his phone and when he saw Lydia he stopped, staring at her for a minute as if he couldn’t quite place her. Then he smiled, as he always did. The younger kids called him Mr Grin because everyone knew the rule that new teachers weren’t supposed to smile for the entire first term they taught at a school, so that all the students would think they were mean. Mr Graham had smiled right away, in his very first tutor session with Lydia’s group. He wanted to be liked. It was a weakness in a teacher, and he got some stick from some of the boys in her year because of it, but you couldn’t exactly tell a teacher they should be less nice. They had to figure out those things for themselves.
‘How’s it going, Lydia?’ he asked her and she smiled back at him, a fake smile, but he’d never know that, because it was the same fake smile she’d been giving everyone.
‘Good,’ she said.
‘Were you coming to see me about something?’ He stuffed his phone in his pocket, almost guiltily, and Lydia wondered if he’d been looking at porn on it or something. Glacier porn. Girls posed on icebergs. She and Avril had a joke about it, like they had a joke about Miss Brayton’s inappropriate fixation with all the sexual metaphors in every single thing they read.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I was just going to dump my stuff before the lesson.’
‘Oh, OK. Go ahead, be my guest. I’ll be back in a minute.’ He smiled again, even broader than the last smile, and walked off rapidly to mainline caffeine or whatever it was that teachers did in their staff room during break time. She watched him go, and then slipped round the building past the shrubbery, to the place near the fence where sometimes people went for fags.
She didn’t recognize them at first: it was just two blue jumpers and a mass of dark hair leaning against the brick building, on the blank side without any windows. Then she saw his black trainers, her long legs, his hand up her top, rucking it up so that Lydia could see a glimpse of smooth belly. The abandoned bags with the keychain Lydia had given Avril lying on the ground. Then she saw their faces, properly saw their faces: eyes closed, mouths pressed together.
The bottom fell out of her stomach. She bit her lip to stop from making any noise and backed away. Their faces hung in front of her, the little moist sounds their lips were making as they snogged. Her back hit something – at first she thought it was a tree or a post, but then it laughed and she smelled stale cigarettes and it was Winston Anthony, saying ‘Watch where you’re going.’
Lydia fled to the girls’ cloakroom. There was a queue – there was always a queue at break time, and more girls standing at the mirrors doing their hair – but she pushed through and took the final cubicle, ignoring the protests of the other girls. She sat on the toilet with her head in her hands while they complained loudly about her. She thought she might be sick.
She knew they snogged, she knew it was happening. Why was it so bad to see it? His hand up her top, the way his legs were spread and planted on the ground as if he owned it.
She sat there until the end of break and then went to Geography, where Mr Graham said something to her that she didn’t hear, and where Avril came in late, breathless and pink-cheeked. She poked Lydia on the shoulder as she passed and Lydia just looked down at the practice exam that Mr Graham had given back to her, as if she were more interested in his pencilled-in comments than in anything else.
It was the last day of proper school, the last day they were still children.
‘So, can you?’
Bailey was waiting for her outside the school gates. Avril had gone to Sophie’s; all the girls had gone, but Lydia had pretended she needed to talk with Mr Singh about something so she told her to go on ahead with Erin and Sophie and she’d catch up.
‘Can I what?’ Lydia asked.
‘Can you come over to mine?’
Bailey was alone. She was still wearing those goddamn ankle socks. From the expression on her face she had been thinking of nothing except for this question since she’d asked it this morning. Did she even know about Sophie’s party? No, she couldn’t. She had a round face with freckles, light blue eyes and a crooked fringe, and in the inflection of her voice and the wrinkle in her forehead Lydia could see every inch of her loneliness. Imagine being so eager for a friend that you had to wait by the school gates just to have someone to talk to. Imagine if being a puppy dog was preferable to being alone.
Lydia had never been alone. Not since she’d met Avril at these same gates, going in. Since then, she’d never had to be afraid of being alone.
Until now.
‘Fine,’ she said to Bailey. ‘I’ll come over for a while. I just have to text my mum.’
Bailey nearly sagged with relief, though she had the good sense to not show it for more than a split second. ‘OK, that’s cool. Let’s go.’
Lydia texted her mum as they walked, and Bailey got out her phone too and made as if she were checking it for messages, but there obviously wasn’t anything there, so she put it back. Lydia considered texting Avril, but she couldn’t think of anything natural to say, anything normal. Anyway, Avril wasn’t likely to miss her if Harry was there.
‘My mum will be at work,’ Bailey told her. ‘She works in IT and my dad is an engineer. What about your mum and dad?’
‘My mum doesn’t work and my dad is dead.’
‘Oh,’ said Bailey.
‘He died ten years ago.’
‘Oh, OK,’ said Bailey, clearly relieved. ‘What did he do before that?’
‘He was a lecturer in Physics at the university.’
‘We used to live in Southampton,’ said Bailey. ‘Before we moved here. My mum never minds if I have friends over. I used to have lots of friends over every day when I lived in Southampton.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘And we used to have pizza parties and sleepovers and stuff. I was really sorry to leave all my friends behind in Southampton. But we still stay in touch.’
Lydia nodded. Bailey, emboldened, continued.
‘I used to have this one friend Susannah, you would have loved her. She was really sporty and clever and fun. We used to go shopping together, just hanging out and meeting other friends, for the whole day. On a Saturday. And we used to go to concerts and stuff.’
Lydia gla
nced at her from the corner of her eye. Did this Susannah actually exist? And if she did, was she really Bailey’s friend, or just someone that Bailey wished were her friend?
‘What kind of concerts?’ she asked.
‘Oh, you know. Everything. Susannah’s dad played in a band, so he knows lots of musicians and we used to go to these local gigs for free. We were going to maybe go to Reading Festival together this summer but then we had to move. We might still go, though.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Maybe you could come if you wanted.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You would like Susannah, I think you would be friends. And I had other friends, too. There was this one girl, she really reminded me of Erin and stuff. Do you think that Erin would think it was funny that I knew this girl in Southampton who was a lot like her?’
‘How was she like her?’
‘Oh you know, she was pretty like her. And popular. Always laughing. You know. Here’s my house, it’s this one here. It’s really close to school, which is handy. That’s why my mum and dad chose this one, though we looked at loads of them.’
Bailey’s house was a semi-detached brick cube with diamond-paned windows, older than Lydia’s and smaller, with a neatly-trimmed lawn for a front garden and several in offensive hedges near the white PVC front door. There were no cars parked in the drive and nothing to distinguish it from the other houses on Tennyson Road.
Bailey took a key out of her satchel and unlocked the door. ‘Want a Coke?’
Lydia followed her through to the kitchen. Breakfast dishes were still in the sink and the refrigerator sported a large collection of novelty magnets in the shapes of pigs.
‘Wow, someone likes pigs,’ commented Lydia.
