by Holly Seddon
We went to the Cannon Cinema in Yeovil, an old cinema from the 1930s tucked down a little side street. Going in felt like slipping between decades. He picked me up on the back of his skinny bike and I wrapped my arms around his abdomen and breathed in the leather smell as deeply as I could. We went no faster than 30mph the whole way but I was exhilarated. This was it. What it was all about. We watched Rain Man at the pictures and Will cried. To this day, I couldn’t tell you what happened in that film, I didn’t take in a second of it. Afterwards, we got burgers from Wimpy and I had to chew each bite about ten million times before I could gag it down. I was smitten.
We went out three more times. On the last time, instead of the planned trip to a pub he came to my empty house. ‘This is a great house!’ he said. No playing it cool, and no grumbling about my family’s money either. We had sex. My second-ever time. It was more comfortable, or perhaps less uncomfortable, than the first. Almost fun in a way I figured would become progressively more fun with practice. Afterwards, he kissed me and got dressed in no rush, uninhibited as I huddled smiling on the bed with my covers like a cocoon.
After he left, I sashayed around my room like I was Marilyn Monroe, bathing for hours and reshaving the whole length of my legs for the next day. Just in case.
I didn’t stop smiling all night. I can say that with one 100 per cent certainty because I stayed awake, literally, all night. Too keyed up to sleep.
I forgot to pick Paul up the next morning and arrived at college late with wrinkly eyelids, my face continually contorting between yawns and smiles. I tried to be neutral but as soon as I saw my friend Gemma my smile broke loose again and I ran over to her.
‘Guess what?’ I said.
‘Will’s dead,’ she said. And then she clapped her hand over her mouth and burst into tears. ‘Sorry,’ she spluttered. ‘He came off his bike—’ she tried to say.
‘We had sex,’ I said, ‘that’s what I was going to say. We had sex and I really like him.’ She stared at me. ‘Liked him,’ I said quietly and then I sat at the edge of the college corridor and cried.
I probably cried more over Will than I did my mum. Maybe it was emotional maturity, maybe it was drama. It felt genuine. It felt like being burned with ice, twenty-four hours a day.
All the talk at college was about Will’s accident. The conspiracy theories, the lies. I knew he wouldn’t have been speeding, especially through the village. Because it was in my village. And yes, it was just after he left my house. Perfect, isn’t it?
Paul thought so. Paul thought I was wallowing and that it was distasteful. Every time I talked about Will, Paul would change the subject, or try to jolly me into the person I was before. But I didn’t want to do a fucking Baldrick impression, I wanted to have had more than a few weeks of being a teenager in love. Happy, untainted love.
I didn’t care what Paul thought. I didn’t care about his rules for how to behave, his judgement, his impatience for me to forget. I hadn’t exactly loved Will, not yet, but I could have. I really could have. I still get tearful when I think about him now. And I hide that more carefully than I would an illicit lover.
I read everything in the paper about Will back then. I read about his grieving mother, a woman I would have hoped to be introduced to as ‘Kate, my girlfriend’. A woman to whom I remained a stranger and always would be.
I read about the unfortunate coincidence, the freak accident, that it was no-one’s fault. Something in the road, just by The Swan, debris from a storm. The drinkers had run out to help and he’d died with his head in Lorraine’s lap, of all people. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep or I just wanted to dwell in my own anger, I would bitterly imagine her stroking his hair, talking to him and congratulating herself on her humanity.
He wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for me. His mother wouldn’t have lost her only son if it wasn’t for me. I wailed into my bedcovers at night for weeks.
But I was seventeen, and guilt soon gave way to baby nihilism.
By July, I stopped going to the pub so much and started talking to other people in my classes rather than Gemma, Sarah or Kirstin. I avoided anyone that I associated with Will. I started to gravitate to the ravers, ‘the druggies’, as Paul called them. The ones who didn’t ask big complicated things of me, didn’t need me to be fucking clever all the time. I started to crave easy fun.
There was a dive club in Yeovil but I’d never been. A girl called Anna who occasionally turned up to my business class invited me. Or more to the point, one day she lifted her hungover head up from the table next to me and growled, ‘You going to Vipers on Friday?’
‘Yeah, ’course,’ I said as nonchalantly as possible with a racing heart.
That Friday, I got to the peeling door of the club at 9 p.m., tired already and trying to hide it. I’d spent a chunk of my allowance getting a taxi all the way from the village because I couldn’t drive in the high heels I’d chosen. My mother’s. I slipped inside easily, paying my £1 entry fee without any questions about my age.
I lurked at the side, scanning the smoky dark. My heels stuck to the floor and my eyes stung and I accepted a strong and filthy cigarette from a guy I barely recognised from college. I was relieved to burn it down far enough to be able to drop it, stub it out, the taste filling my throat and wrapping around my tonsils.
I bought a Bacardi and Coke, the first drink that came to mind. I sipped it slowly and thought about leaving. Eventually, Anna and some other faces I vaguely recognised from college and the pub came in. The music seemed to pulse a little bit harder, the crowd looked a little bit hotter.
Anna herself was just a peripheral character, the queen bee was a girl called Jax (short, I’m pretty sure, for the less streetwise Jacqueline). Jax was in her early twenties, a perennial further education student who re-enrolled every year so she could claim the dole and housing benefit. I say this without judgement, I’m merely reporting it. She was proud of her approach. She lived in a large bedsit over a pub where she sometimes worked behind the bar for cash. She was poor enough to be thin, and savvy enough to look amazing. I look back now and I wonder what sad end awaited her, given that this was her peak. And it really was her peak.
Jax entered the club that night wearing fake fur and Debbie Harry hair. She was flanked by a gaggle of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds she’d picked up on her various and occasional college attendances. She was our Jerry Hall. Or maybe our Brigitte Nielsen. Nearing six foot in heels, hair bleached so translucent you could see the lights of the DJ booth through it. She was obsessed with Nico, who’d died in Ibiza the previous year. She was well-practised at being cool and the illusion worked, we all looked up to her. That first night in the club, as I danced awkwardly to ‘Ride On Time’ by Black Box, I stole little glances at her.
It didn’t take long to manoeuvre myself into the inner sanctum. It was mostly a case of just always being there. I spent that summer drinking in parks, flicking through magazines (that I always had to buy because Jax and her crew were permanently brassic) and dying my hair bright red in Jax’s flat. I smoked half-heartedly, fags and joints. It was the sort of fun that you looked forward to remembering, rather than truly enjoyed at the time.
Every Friday and Saturday night was spent at Vipers with Jax, Anna and a rotating bunch of heavily made-up faces with black-rimmed eyes. I soon learned that girls like us got in free and that in exchange bouncers were allowed to touch your arse. I learned that drinking other people’s drinks or accepting free drinks from older guys were the best ways to keep costs down and that no-one respected an expensive outfit. I learned that nobody minded if you asked stupid questions so long as you had cash. I learned that there was an unspoken camaraderie, that even near-strangers will hold each other’s hair back or talk someone down if they’re freaking out. I learned that acid doesn’t agree with me. At all.
I toyed with the idea of tattooing ‘don’t settle’ on my thigh, from my mother’s last words. I couldn’t do it. Thank God, the thought of the kid
s running their fingertips along it questioningly as I get dressed or take them swimming. . . not that I thought about that back in 1989.
It was the first summer I’d spent without Paul since we were kids. I didn’t even see Viv. I would sometimes drive past Paul at the bus stop and pretend not to see him. I wanted to be rudderless and unaccountable. It’s funny looking back, but I never considered my dad’s feelings or concerns. Never thought about letting him down or keeping out of his eyes so I could do what I wanted. I finally did not give a shit.
I did wonder what my mum would have thought, though. Would she have been pleased to see me hurtling around with wild abandon, finally? Or worry about history repeating?
I was approaching the age she’d married my dad and that was confusing me more than ever. I’ve never got to the bottom of that strange brew. I doubt I ever will.
I went back to college in September but I struggled to stay motivated. I didn’t really want to see Anna and Jax by then, their painted schtick got boring fast. I was tired of their need for attention at all cost, their draining of my money. I tried to re-engage with Gemma, Kirstin and Sarah but they seemed so desperately naive and young. And they were still talking endlessly about Will.
In the end, as I always have, I made my way back to Paul.
We never mentioned the summer, but Viv nearly popped my lungs hugging me the first day I drove Paul home after college.
‘I don’t know what happened between you two,’ she said quietly into my ear, ‘but you know you’re always welcome here.’ I felt my shoulders slacken and we stood like that for some time.
‘Come on then,’ she said, giving my arms a final vigorous rub. ‘Let’s put a brew on.’
Paul and I did our English coursework together, but he despised anything I read out about business and I couldn’t help but yawn over his spoutings on the Russian Revolution. We read our respective books; he’d spent his summer mining through the Beats and out the other side. By autumn, he’d become obsessed with Percy Shelley and William Blake. I had nothing to offer, I’d spent the summer reading Cosmopolitan, so I was still on the same copy of London Fields by Martin Amis that I’d been on when Will died.
At college, I did my art in private, letting myself into the classroom at lunchtime to carry on working on canvases, or sitting at the sewing machine in the textiles room enjoying the quiet. I put my portfolio together painstakingly, only showing Viv and never showing Paul.
At home, I crept into my mother’s long-abandoned studio and set up camp. It had been locked for years, Secret Garden style, and most of the paints and glues had seized up and frozen like some terrible accident had happened, Chernobyl or a modern-day Pompeii. A part of me had wanted to feel some kind of connected shiver, some kind of ghostly connection to my mother through our art. Ugh, I was so pretentious. Once I’d cleared myself a space, opened the doors and put music on, I found I was able to sketch, stitch or paint without feeling haunted. And having actually looked around, sizing up the few bits of painting and silversmithing my mum had toyed with, I realised something a bit flattening. She wasn’t very good.
It took a few weeks for me to actually spend a night at the Loxtons’ again. On the sofa, as before, but not before before. It was different but the same, in that uniquely late-teens way. One foot in childhood, one foot out the door. But it was the only place I had that felt anything like home, and I was glad to be back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
November 2012 – Friday
Downstairs, Paul is cooking chilli crab linguine. I can smell garlic and fresh red chilli sizzling in olive oil. He’s restored now, but was tender for most of the day, quiet and contemplative. I let him nurse his hangover discreetly, offering to take the kids out by myself and tip-toeing around him. He insisted on coming out to the beach with us, blowing away the funk. And then said nothing and stared out to sea, or fiddled with his phone.
I don’t know how he can stand to but right now he’s dismantling a big fat crab that he bought on the seafront earlier today, the kids’ eyes bulging at its monstrous, dead snippers. I couldn’t bear to watch him digging the flesh out of every nook and cranny, scraping into the tip of each claw, so I’ve come upstairs to fuss over the presents again. To check the letter is still here, where I left it. My idiot, irrational fear on Tuesday has stayed with me, as has the guilt over interrogating Harry about a letter he had never even seen.
The letter feels so potent that I half expect it to have leaked into my things, staining them poison green.
I’ve been rehearsing tomorrow’s dinner in my head. Trying to work out the order of things: the gifts, the food and the letter. The food, the gifts and the letter. I’ve revised mental cue cards, night like I used to for big pitches, but when I think about speaking, my mouth feels like it’s been sealed up. The delicate skin of my lips knitted together.
It will hurt to open them.
I found the letter tucked inside a paperback edition of E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady in Paul’s library, while looking for gift ideas. I read that book years ago when I was too young to enjoy it or get the point.
I hadn’t even meant to pick that particular book up, I pulled it out by accident and felt something bulging under the cover.
And now I’ve read this letter so many times that I don’t need my copy any more. And it is a copy, whizzed off on our printer-cum-scanner-cum-photocopier grey box in the study, usually reserved solely for printing out the flurries of permission slips emailed like a meteor shower from the school each week.
After making my copy, I slipped the original back between Delafield’s covers. Luckily when I found it, it sat just inside the front page and hadn’t been positioned strategically next to a specific page number that I hadn’t noted when plucking it out, heavy-handed and curious. I wondered if he’d read the letter over and over like I did. Whether he tucked it inside years ago and left it to grow there like an abscess. Or whether he lashed himself with it every day in a grand act of self-flagellation.
My copy is floppy and soft from my constant pawing at it. The edges are dyed denim blue from my pocket, the copied handwriting faded grey. The three looping, tightly packed letters of the name are barely there. A ghost name. Viv.
2002
I backed away from John even more after meeting his pregnant wife in the normal office light. Before that, it had been easy to think of her as a caricature: ‘her indoors’.
I’d first met her years before at a very boozy work function. At that point, I had yet to see her husband’s naked body in the sunlight streaming under hotel roller blinds.
When I met her again in the office – in my territory – it made her, and her baby, seem more real.
So I backed away more, but that seemed to make John hungrier. He started to come into my office for spurious reasons. Making a wink-wink play of closing the internal blinds, only for me to reopen them.
After a few weeks of this extra attention, I was in my office working late. My eyes were swimming. Numbers floating and colours trickling into my vision. It was just past nine and I was openly yawning, wriggling in my seat to stay awake.
I had no intention of doing anything that involved any effort, except dragging my bones out onto the street to hail a cab.
But when John knocked on my door, there was something about the look on his face. Something about the urgency with which he kissed me. I could lie and say I was too tired to resist, or that I was lonely and vulnerable. But the truth is more pedestrian: after the relentless chew of work, it just felt really good to be held. So I went with it. Looking back now, it was obvious. This was his last hurrah. A kid on the way, man of principles, time to close that chapter. That was the source of his hunger, not me.
We finished still wearing our clothes and as I buttoned up my blouse, he said: ‘I’m going to miss this.’
And even though I’d been trying to back away from the affair, when I realised afterwards that my most consistent romantic relationship – if you can call
it that – had just ended, I was surprised by the dent it left in me. John wasn’t my husband or my boyfriend. He was my boss and my lover. And then he was just my boss again. I wasn’t an idiot either, I knew I had to behave carefully or I would be inching myself onto the ledge ready for him to kick me off. No-one wants their ex-mistress making herself heard, not at work.
So I cried on the way home after that doomed desk fuck, sitting in the back of a black cab that smelled of someone else’s perfume. The cabbie had made small talk about his daughters while I started to sob, feeling stupid and small and disposable. Eventually the driver noticed and said, ‘Alright, love, it’ll be alright’, and then he stopped talking. Maybe he was thinking about his girls, how they’d never be caught sobbing in the back of a cab over some bloke.
When I got inside my flat, I said a quick hello to Paul who was working on a chunky TMC laptop at the table, and then sat in the bath adding more and more hot water until my head whistled.
I could hear Paul outside, shuffling up to the bathroom and then walking away again. Eventually, he knocked.
‘I’m in the bath!’ I called, covering my breasts with my hands even though he was the other side of the door.
‘I know,’ came the reply. ‘I just wondered if you wanted a glass of wine? I’ve got my eyes closed.’
‘I’d love one,’ I managed through fresh tears.
He fumbled his way in, and, true to his word, his eyes were closed. He held a large glass out for me to take in my slippery hand.
‘Can I sit on the loo?’ he asked.
‘I’d like that.’
He sat there for over an hour, making me laugh through my snivels, talking about nothing, his eyes screwed shut the whole time.
The environment at work was more toxic than ever, or maybe I just noticed it because it touched me at last. The politics were more pronounced, the double crosses more ruthless. But while I wasn’t the one that set Lucy up a few weeks after that, I can see why she thought I was.
