by Joanna Nadin
‘Tom did it.’
I feel my want slip-slide away as swiftly as it took hold, and fear take its place. ‘Did what?’ I ask, stupidly, pointlessly.
‘Duh, it. You know. All the way. God, Di, you’re so frigid.’
‘I . . .’ But there’s no point defending myself. So instead I ask the one question I do not want an answer to. ‘Who with?’
‘Some girl called Marina,’ Harry replies. ‘Lives in Hampstead. Total rich bitch.’
‘Oh,’ I say, struck dumb with this information.
But really, what else is there to say? I missed my chance. If I’d been there, I could have stopped him. I might, just might, have made him fall for me instead. And now I will never be his first, and maybe not his anything. I forget the fact that I am far from being ready for sex, forget that his feelings for me are far from apparent, let alone confirmed. Instead I seethe. For days I suffer, nursing this betrayal – by you, not him – like a wound. But instead of letting it heal, I poke at it, pick at the edges whenever it begins to scab over. So that by the time you finally ask me what’s wrong, my loathing is complete and my decrial Oscar-worthy. But do I voice a word of it?
‘Nothing,’ I yell. ‘Just, God, shut up!’
‘Hormones,’ Jermaine says. ‘Bloody mental, both of you.’
And God knows he was wrong about most things – that hair didn’t need washing; that best-before dates were all a load of bollocks; that women were conditioned to clean things, it was scientifically proven (the final nail in his coffin, though it took more than two years to hammer that one in) – but about me and you, Edie?
I think he was probably right.
The Outsiders
July 1985
As we grow up and then older we each follow our own particular, meandering path. We can tell ourselves that we are all connected, from corner-huddled cliques to whole classrooms of kindred spirits, but the truth is we come together only briefly, then scatter like crows into our little lives again. But there are moments in time when our messy topography collapses in on itself, distance dissipates, and we all stand and face the same way, experiencing the same profound shock or joy or fear. So that later, when asked, every one of us will know where we were and what we were doing when Mandela was released, when John Peel died, when the Twin Towers came down.
The thirteenth of July 1985. That day is etched so clearly in my mind, in such minute detail, that I can pause and rewind the memory time after time and the tape will never stretch or snap; it will always show me the same perfect replay.
It was the day that rocked the world. Or so the tag line went.
And, oh, how mine rocked.
I could have watched it at ours, should have done. Except that fate, in the shape of Jermaine, had decided two days before that TV was doing something strange to his brain – addling it, contorting it so that time and space refused to obey the laws of physics – and had unplugged it, along with the microwave and the lava lamp. We both knew it was the rank dope he smoked from the moment he stumbled out of bed to the point he fell asleep on the sofa. But you, two weeks into the latest in a string of part-time and half-hearted jobs, said nothing and I, disgusted by your weakness and the mere fact of his existence, just skulked in my room and turned up the radio, telling myself that books and music were all that mattered anyway.
‘But what are you going to do on Saturday?’ Harry asks.
We are walking up the hill from school, skirts rolled up, shirts untucked; perspiration glowing on her fake-bronzed forehead, sweat dripping unpleasantly down my pale neck, down the backs of my thighs, and pooling in the crevice between my too-heavy breasts.
‘For what?’
She looks at me as if I am retarded, or deliberately obtuse, or both. ‘Duh, Live Aid.’
I shrug. Her concern for me, though genuine, is edged with her own complicated reasoning. Because thanks to her recent but repeated fumblings with seventeen-year-old Don Juan Gary Bennett, Harry has been upgraded in the upper-school stock market from outer circle to inner-clique mafia, which comes not only with canteen seating privileges and entrance to the sixth-form common room, but also, it seems, a golden ticket to Wembley courtesy of Gary’s dad who does something at Sony. He couldn’t get me one, Harry said. I told her I didn’t fancy it anyway. Which was as fat a lie as the nonchalance I’m currently trying to conjure.
‘Listen on the radio, I suppose.’
But she’s not letting that go. ‘You could watch it at ours,’ she offers. ‘Mum wouldn’t mind.’
I pretend to consider it. ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But wouldn’t that be weird?’
‘Why? Tom’s going to be there. I’m recording it and he’s going to change tapes and stuff.’
It becomes clear. This offer is all about her need, not mine; I have to watch so I can look for her in the crowd because, in some future echo of iPhone Insta-culture, if no one sees her doing it, it might as well never have happened. But my tracing-paper-thin veil of couldn’t-give-a is falling fast as I struggle against the heat and this new nugget of Tom-based knowledge. ‘What about Caroline?’ I ask.
‘Athletics,’ she says. ‘Sheffield. Two-day thing.’
The relief that washes over me is followed by a more familiar surge of self-loathing. Caroline is the new Katy. But unlike her predecessor, whose tendency to allow unfettered access to her skimpy knickers rendered her ultimately disposable, Caroline is self-restraint and ambition personified: Deputy Head Girl, joint school Labour Society chair, and county long jump champion. Worse, she is five foot seven and weighs eight and a half stone, which is several inches more and several pounds fewer than me. But on the other hand she’s at least two hundred miles away, all night, and, according to official records, she’s never gone beyond third base. Not that I’ve even been to second, unless you count Ian Lambert pretending my left breast was a car horn and honking it twice during a lull in chemistry. And that was through three layers of clothing and more painful and embarrassing than thrilling. And not that Tom would even go to first with me. But I can wait, I tell myself. I am playing a long game.
‘God, Di, come on. It’s not like I’ve asked if you want to sit my maths O level for me, which I totally might, apparently Paul Burrell did it last year for Kev Thingy and no one even knew.’
‘You know.’
‘Not the point. Anyway, do you want to come over or not?’
I picture us then. Me and him in the den, lolling on beanbags, curtains drawn against the heat and light of the afternoon, our fingers brushing over a bowl of Twiglets.
‘Yes, I . . .’ The word escapes my lips before I have time to rein it in, to even pretend to consider my options.
‘Cool. I’ll say you’ll be over by half eleven or something.’
‘Half eleven?’
I get the idiot child look again. ‘It starts at twelve. And you don’t want to miss any of it, do you?’
Any of Tom, I think. The concert at Wembley goes on until ten at night; I know because Harry’s not due back until one or two in the morning. And even after that there’s Philadelphia. They’re, what? Six hours behind? I am being offered more than twelve hours alone in a darkened room with Tom. No, I don’t want to miss a single minute.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
As we trudge our way up Borough Lane, my swollen feet begin to blister in my battered sandals, and the sun pinks the backs of my arms, as if letting out an I-told-you-so sigh that I will be sore and sorry tomorrow, but tomorrow doesn’t matter. Right now my strange small world feels splendid in its perfection, and by Saturday my sunburn will be yesterday’s news, faded into a fresh constellation of freckles, which I imagine him tracing with his fingertips, if not tongue.
But if life is never how it appears in books, it resembles still less the complicated scenarios I come up with in my vivid nearly-fifteen-year-old imagination. By Saturday, my arms and nose are still livid from the lack of sun cream and abundance of time spent trolling around the field while Harry watches Ga
ry play cricket. (‘If you got married, and had a kid, you could name it Barry,’ I’d said. ‘Or Larry.’ ‘Oh, fuck off,’ she’d replied, unwrapping a stick of Doublemint to cover the cigarette she’d just bummed off Tina over at the far edge of the fencing. ‘I’m not going to marry him. He wants to work in Harlow, for God’s sake. I mean, I’d rather die.’ And all the while I was trying to yank down my shirt sleeves to cover the ever-reddening skin, and avoid having ‘Red Hot’ added to the ‘Dildo’ that still echoed behind me down corridors.)
Now, in the dark of the den, the scarlet has softened, aided by a layer of hastily bought after-sun, but this has left a strange, silvery patina, so that my skin glows more ghost-like than ever. Over the top I am wearing Tom’s cast-off Led Zeppelin T-shirt and a floor-length black skirt that Harry has assured me is flattering, but which contrives to give me the overall appearance of a half-hearted goth. But if I am failing to look the part, I am succeeding at least in the role of girl-who-knows-about-music, a part I have studied for at length, aided, incredibly, by Jermaine’s eclectic vinyl collection and outlandish opinions. So that, instead of dismissing the Four Tops as irrelevant, or music for leftover casuals in their Kappa and Nike, I can confidently suggest that no other city has successfully crafted such a unique sound as Detroit.
‘God, yeah.’ Tom swigs from a bottle of by-now warm and flat Coke, that I am almost sure is a third spitback, but am totally sure I would swallow if given the chance. ‘Although Nashville might argue.’
‘Yeah, totally,’ I agree, with no clue as to what I am agreeing to as, uselessly, Jermaine has not seen fit to include any country and western in his catalogue (because, as he will tell me later, it’s music for racist retards, which even at the time I suspect of inaccuracy).
We agree too on the ubiquity of Sade and her easy-listening lounge sound, although her signature look we both admire for its simplicity and authenticity. Sting is dismissed as try-hard and his decision to disband the Police as premature; Bryan Ferry is slick, a dandy, a man ahead of his time, whose lyrics are nothing less than poetry, whose look exceeds Byron; Howard Jones a one-hit wonder whom no one will have heard of in five years’ time.
And then there is U2.
It’s not so much that I love U2 as that I want to be plucked from the crowd by Bono; pulled up on stage from the crush of bodies, rescued by the knight in shining black leather. I can barely breathe as I watch. There is not an atom of my body that doesn’t wish that that girl from the front row were me; that doesn’t understand how that must feel – the suburban nobody becoming not just somebody but world famous, beamed by satellite into thousands, no, millions of homes. That doesn’t know how seething Harry will be right now: not only has she not featured on screen for a single second, but some dull brunette is up there, dancing, and she is lost in a sea of sweating faces. But that sea – that sea is the point. Because right now I feel part of something big. Bigger than this small town, this small life.
This is it. This is my Kennedy moment. Years later I will feel the same overwhelming optimism when, in February 1990, in the passenger seat of a clapped-out Nissan halfway up the A14, I hear that that bogeyman of our youth F. W. de Klerk is releasing all non-violent political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. I will feel it again in November 1991 in a crowd of strangers on a southbound platform at Tottenham Court Road, when London Underground shares the news via the arrival boards that Terry Waite has been released. In May 1997, so full of belief will I be at the election of Labour’s great hope Tony Blair that I will embrace, if not the devil himself, then his great pretender.
But this, this is my first. And in this moment I believe that anything is possible. So rose-tinted is my vision, so open my heart, that I turn to him, expectant, my face tilted up in readiness for the kiss that is coming.
He turns and looks at me long and hard.
‘Bono’s a dick,’ he says and takes another handful of Wotsits.
It is late now, the curtain closed on Wembley, the crowd emptying out to Tube stations and waiting cars. The TV is still on, though, Duran Duran dancing on the screen down the feed from Philadelphia, but the atmosphere has changed, slipped from elation and expectation to, in Tom’s case, disillusion, and in mine, the desperation that dull girls feel at the end of the disco when they are still, awkwardly, dancing alone. We are just inches away from each other, slumped on the beanbags, but almost flat now, as if we are in bed, a closeness so habitual when we were small that Mrs Trevelyan doesn’t even bother to bestow a second glance on us when she comes in with ten o’clock hot chocolate. But we have not lain like this for years now, and never without Harry. And she is not due back for at least another hour; currently, I estimate, dawdling around the North Circular, snogging on the back seat of Mr Bennett’s Audi, blissfully unaware that there has not been a single shot of her on screen all day.
‘Do you want any more Twiglets?’ I offer.
As pick-up lines go, it ranks amongst the worst. But, I reason, if he says yes, I can reach right over him to put the bowl down on his side of our makeshift make-out palace. And then, when he smells the Impulse I have sprayed liberally not just under my arms but over every inch of perspiring flesh, when he feels my not-insubstantial breasts brush his chest, he will be unable to resist me; will pull me into an embrace that will be at once tender and swollen with lust.
But my cue is not just rebuffed, but seemingly ignored entirely; met with silence broken only by his slow, heavy breathing and Simon Le Bon singing blue silver.
‘Tom?’
He shifts his body, rolls a few inches onto his right-hand side, rolls towards me. My heartbeat speeds, racing ahead of me, of the music, to a near-vibration. Is he? Does he?
But as a sudden flash of stage lighting in Philly bathes le Bon in sodium glory, it reveals a less than potent scene in Essex. Tom hasn’t turned to me for either a true love’s kiss or Twiglets. Tom, it seems, has not even heard the question. Because Tom is fast asleep.
My stomach slops around, a soup of junk food and adrenaline, my heart still humming. I know what I should do, what good girls do, and I am a good girl, after all. I should get up now. I should turn off the television, tread softly along the cream carpet, then skip across the dew-damp lawn and through the gate back to my world.
Instead I have a reckless thought: a thrilling ‘what if?’.
What if I were to kiss him? Right now, while he was asleep? What is the worst that could happen? He could wake and be horrified. But I could say I slipped trying to get the Tizer. On the other hand he could wake and, though momentarily surprised, be at the mercy of his own desire and pull me closer to him, on top of him, like Stewpot did to Claire in Grange Hill that time.
And so, in my second most daring act of bravery to date, I lean towards him, until I can feel the rise and fall of his breath on my lips, smell the faint tang of artificial cheese powder, and I kiss him.
For a single exquisite second our lips touch, and then, panicked, I pull away, scared my prince will turn into a frog and lollop off.
But he doesn’t. He doesn’t recoil. He doesn’t even open his eyes.
He is surrendered only to sleep.
Yet I am not disappointed. Because somehow, inexplicably, I have won. I have got away with a taste of ecstasy without being caught, humiliated, told I am not that sort of girl and he is not the sort of boy I will ever, ever have. That kiss, for me, is nothing less than a seal of possibility, a promise that one day, maybe, he will feel it lingering on his lips and will want to return it.
But for now, I can act as if nothing has happened. I can fall asleep next to this wondrous boy – a boy I have seen naked in a paddling pool, seen peeing in the woods, seen masturbating in the fading perfection of the Wendy house – without beating the butterfly wings that will skitter chaos across an invisible web, wrecking our fragile trinity of best friend, brother and me. And yet this day has still rocked my world.
I wake gone three to an empty room. But before I haul myself up I lean in
to the still-warm space his body has left, inhale the smell of him, put my arm across the Tom-shaped hole I still see etched in the air.
‘Er, what are you doing?’
I start, my head shooting up, sending a spasm of pain down my right shoulder.
‘Harry?’
‘No, the fucking Dalai Lama.’
‘I . . . when did you get back?’ I ask, trying to calculate how much she can possibly have seen, or how much she will deduce. But the answer is little, and nothing. Because this is Harry. She has entered stage right, so whatever my intentions or whatever the directions, the scene is always only about her.
‘An hour ago? But I totally can’t sleep. I’m buzzing and I didn’t even take anything. Apart from a whole beer. But I peed that out hours ago. Oh my God, it was amazing. Did you see? I mean, not the concert, did you see me?’
I raise myself up, turn so I am propped on my elbows, and take a big breath.
‘Yeah, we did. We totally did.’
Later, I will brief Tom, and we will tell her that her five seconds of fame must have been during a cassette change, and she will curse Tom and sulk at me for at least a day. But right now Harry’s elation is so complete, her conviction that the world turns solely for her so unwavering, that my lie is worth it. Because now, for the first time in a long time, and for a long time, we have both got exactly what we want. Our lives, little though they are, are perfect. This is that moment we will talk about in years to come, a moment we will be able to relay to strangers and it will still resonate.
So that when they ask, ‘Where were you, when Live Aid was on?’ Harry will say, ‘I was there. I mean, obviously. You can see me on TV. My first appearance.’
And me? I will say I was just at a friend’s house in Essex, watching at home. Eating crisps, stealing kisses and planting a seed of hope for the future.
Baby Blue
April 1986
I have so many questions, Edie. Questions I should have asked you long ago when they burned so bright they turned my every thought to hot suspicion or vitriol and my hands into tightly balled fists. What happened with your mother and father that would make you refuse their love, and yet not Great-Aunt Nina’s money? Why did you drop out of art school then barely pick up a brush for years? Why did we move here, to this place, when you professed to hate small towns so much? Questions I should have asked when you had the words to answer them. Except I was always scared the answer to one or all would be: ‘you’.
