The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

  I pleaded with him to change his mind. Promised I would make it up to him. And for fifteen fuck-filled, wordless minutes he let me believe he’d forgiven me. Then he washed his cock in the bathroom sink and told me he never wanted to keep seeing me once he went to uni anyway. That Tom was welcome to me.

  ‘Never going to happen.’ Harry dismisses the thought. ‘You are literally the girl next door. Besides, it’s too weird for words.’

  ‘I won’t be for long,’ I say in my pathetic defence.

  Harry takes another drag, squints. ‘Won’t be what?’

  ‘The girl next door. You’re moving.’

  She snorts. ‘Oh, babe. Don’t kid yourself. You will always be the girl next door.’

  And I will.

  Because three weeks and two days later, on Monday, 19 October – Black Monday – something called the stock market crashes, which is meaningless to me in our gingerbread house. But not to those in the castle on the other side of the wall. Because, along with dozens of others who crowd the platform of Audley End for the early-morning clickety-clack commute to the city, David loses his job. And along with it, the new house.

  ‘Seriously?’ I say when you tell me. ‘They’re not moving?’

  ‘Not any time soon,’ you reply.

  And I know I should feel bad for David, should worry at what this means for his future, should realize that they may have to move after all, downsize, head to Harlow even, where the houses are smaller and cheaper and the commute shorter. But instead I can only smile.

  And, as you let smoke trail from your painted lips and out of the attic window, let your kohl-rimmed eyes fall on the wall between us and the Lodge, so, it seems, can you.

  Not once have I asked you why, not once have I seen even a snapshot of what might have been going on in your head all that time, all those times.

  I have so many whys, Edie, so many questions. I should have asked them back then, should have forced you to talk to me, or at least to a paid professional. I regret it now, regret all those missed chances, opportunities that offered themselves up even last week.

  But here we are. Me so full of words now and you silent, not even managing to swear. The times I wished you’d shut up, stop saying shit and bloody, at least in front of teachers or friends or their parents; would feel the stab of the word as I watched the flicker of disbelief, and then the disgust in their eyes.

  But now, Edie, I would give my arm to hear you tell someone to fuck off.

  Even me.

  The Swish of the Curtain

  November 1987

  The envelope is half sodden by the time I manage to prise it from our temperamental letter box, a creature that snaps angrily down on my fingers, adding a smear of blood to the wetness.

  You glance up from your second cup of black coffee at my yelp.

  ‘I’ll fix that,’ you say.

  Which means you’ll get David to fix it.

  A month has passed since Black Monday, and he is redundant now in every sense, it seems. Angela has got herself a job as a receptionist at a new beauty salon – ‘Just pin money,’ she says, though we all know it is the only money, for now at least. But she has appearances to keep up, and so David, she tells people, is consulting now. Though the only consulting I have seen him do is to ask you whether you take sugar in black coffee.

  That was why I wrote to Tom – or at least why I told him I was writing. To describe the acute change in atmosphere, the way our world seems off-kilter now, with David home all the time, with Angela out. I told him about Jimmy, too. Told him I was glad of it, that I’d been planning on ending it anyway, a detail I justify by the momentary urge I had for him to disappear that night, for him never to have existed at all. I leave out the times I cried, that I told Harry I’d fucked up, begged her to call him for me, to ask him to take me back.

  Because they weren’t real, I tell myself. They were just a reaction to the threat of change, of loss, panic at the thought of having no one at all.

  Besides, I have to be light, breezy, even. ‘Tell me about Hull,’ I write. ‘Should I apply? The English department’s supposed to be brilliant. Imagine – three years just reading books. What larks, Pip! Larkin was the librarian, so it should be good. I can’t believe you missed him by a year. You could have told him it was true. “This Be The Verse”, I mean. They fuck you up, and all that . . . Anyway, maybe you could show me around sometime. Only if you have the time, of course.’

  And, it seems, he does.

  Dido Sylvia Jones

  The Gingerbread House

  I recognize the handwriting – the looping, even slope – and the address too, because no one else would use my middle name, no one else remember my fairy-tale obsession. And my heart stag-leaps in dread and delight.

  You look up from the chaise longue. ‘What is it, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I lie. ‘Junk.’

  Then, dropping my bag on the floor, I clomp up the stairs as if what I am holding is mere ephemera, of no more import than a churlish chain letter, or a Hallmark card from an erstwhile aunt, fifty pence Sellotaped to the inside. When all the time I am aware that this wet, brown oblong is hotter than a coal.

  I sit on my bed and slip my finger under the flap of the envelope. There is no SWALK on the back, no red seal, and the thin paper almost disintegrates as I pull against the cheap glue. And though his reply is one side to my five, and wide-ruled to my narrow, it says all I need, all I want. That he hadn’t read Larkin before but he has now and, God, I am so right about that poem, right about parents. That yes, Hull is brilliant for English. That yes, I should come up and hang for a bit. And though he doesn’t say what, exactly, hang means in these circumstances, or how long a bit constitutes, I dismiss these as minor details, questions to be dealt with later, in person. Because all that matters, all I can focus on, is that I am going to see Tom again. And this time I will do everything right.

  The phone rings seventeen times before it’s answered. And then it’s by a woman, who I know could be anyone – a housemate, a friend – but still I start when I hear her voice, thick with Northern vowels and a nonchalance I will never manage to attain. ‘One-one-four. Who is it?’

  ‘It’s . . . can I speak to Tom?’

  I hear the phone clatter – against a table, or the wall – and a muffled shout into a void that I try to furnish with mismatched chairs, paint-peeling banisters, his posters Blu-Tacked to flock wallpaper.

  A minute passes as I listen in on the everyday sounds of student life, on muffled drumbeats, a shriek of laughter, the metallic ring of a pan falling; then footsteps, and the fumbling of a receiver being picked up, and, at last, his voice.

  ‘Yello.’

  ‘Hi,’ I manage, a strangled whisper, half menacing, half sexual. Shit. ‘It’s me. Dido.’

  ‘Hello, Me-Dido.’ I hear the smile that stretches his words sideways, and almost sigh in relief. ‘How’s tricks?’

  ‘Tricks is, yeah, good.’ I pause, waiting for him to take his turn. But I’ve misunderstood. It’s still my go. I take a breath. ‘So, I was wondering if it was still OK to come up?’

  There is silence. Then interference, crackling, and the sound of someone – her – in the background. ‘You coming, Tom?’

  A hand muffles the receiver. ‘Yeah, give me a minute.’ Then he is back with me, but already halfway out of the door. ‘Listen, I have to go. Demo, you know.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say, like my life is just so full of moments like this. Like I’m not disappointed.

  But he knows me better than that. ‘I meant it,’ he said. ‘Come whenever. I’ll be here.’

  ‘This weekend?’ I say quickly. Before either of us can change our minds.

  ‘Sure,’ he echoes.

  ‘Cool,’ I reply, my verbal shrug word-perfect for once.

  ‘See you then, then.’

  ‘Not if I see you first.’

  If he replies, I don’t hear it, just the clack of the phone into its holder, leaving me hanging, bathe
d in the buzz of dialling tone, and the hum of potential. And then, cartoon-like in my head, all around me questions soar, borne on the backs of bluebirds and butterflies, asking, Where will I sleep? Will it be in his room? Should I take condoms?

  Who is she?

  Harry is scornful, scathing even. ‘That is beyond stupid,’ she says as we trudge down Borough Lane, coatless despite the cold, and David’s pleas. ‘He’s probably back with Della and you’ll end up looking like a right twat.’

  ‘I don’t care about Della,’ I lie. ‘It’s not about that. It’s so I can see the English department.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ She dismisses my claim as if wafting away a fly.

  ‘Bull true,’ I counter. ‘Besides, you’re the one who told me to do English. You’re the one who said I could be a writer.’

  Harry was obsessed with growing up, with what – or who – she would become. ‘Princess,’ she declared at first. Then, when it was made clear that that would entail either a change in the law or marriage to the ageing and abominable Edward or Andrew, she set her sights on more achievable aims, working her way through the roll call of prima ballerina, pop star, prime minister – the most unlikely of all for a girl like Harry – before settling on the simple, but probable, ‘famous’.

  But me? I struggled even to think of an answer.

  ‘God, it’s not like I’m asking you the valency of boron or something,’ Harry complained that time. ‘Just pick a job.’

  But it’s not as easy as that. It’s not just a case of plucking a career from the handbook.

  ‘Teacher?’ she offered.

  I fake-shuddered. ‘I’d rather stick needles in my eyes,’ I insisted. ‘I’d have to grow a moustache.’

  ‘And never wash,’ Harry added.

  ‘And wear slacks. Slacks!’ I wailed.

  ‘Even the word gives me hives,’ said Harry, having moved on from sarcasm to laconic exaggeration somewhere around the O-level mark. ‘Inventor?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s your problem.’ She fumbled in her bag for a packet of Marlboro, lit one up with a flick of a Zippo, a trick she learned from you. ‘How about artist, then? Like Edie.’

  ‘She’s not an artist,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’d rather be dead than be like my mother.’

  Harry snorted. ‘I’d rather be like yours than mine.’

  ‘You don’t have to live with her,’ I pointed out.

  ‘More’s the pity.’ She blew a smoke ring from Rimmel-coated lips. ‘Oh, wait. I’ve got it. You can be that writer girl. You know, the one in the kitchen sink.’

  ‘Cassandra Mortmain?’ I’d asked, knowing perfectly well the answer was yes.

  ‘Probably. Anyway, not her exactly. But a writer.’

  ‘She doesn’t even have a mother,’ I observed. ‘Just that Topaz woman.’

  ‘The one who wanders around half-naked being weird?’

  She passed me the cigarette, and I vaguely inhaled. ‘Fair point,’ I conceded. ‘That is sort of Edie.’

  ‘It’s totally Edie.’

  I sighed, deliberate, dramatic. ‘Anyway, what would I write about?’

  ‘Us,’ she said, a silent ‘duh’ tagged on, as if it was obvious.

  ‘We haven’t done anything,’ I said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Harry admitted. ‘But we will. I will, anyway. I’m going to be on television one day. On Parkinson.’

  ‘More like Pebble Mill.’

  ‘Fuck off. Anyway, that’s what you’ll do. I bet you my entire Madonna back catalogue and my patent pixie boots you write a book. A heap of them, in fact.’

  What I didn’t tell her, what I don’t tell her, is that it’s not a writer I want to be, but the girl in the book. That the real reason I read – the only reason I read – is because I am imagining myself on the pages, trying to narrate a life for myself more ordered and more accomplished than the one I’m living. It will take me decades to discover that that is what writing really is – a giant game of make-believe. But for now, all I know is that I want to wrap myself in books.

  And Tom.

  She sticks her hands in her back pockets. ‘Just don’t come running to me when it all goes tits up.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I say. ‘Because it won’t, because there are no tits involved.’

  There is silence for a few seconds, while Harry thinks. ‘Do you think mine are too small?’ she asks finally, pulling her Henley top out and peering down. ‘Ricky says anything more than a handful’s a waste, but he’s got massive fucking fingers.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘They’re perfect. You’re perfect.’

  ‘Pff,’ she dismisses. And the conversation is over.

  If you are suspicious, though, you don’t let on. At least not at first.

  ‘Well, the car’s buggered,’ you declare, with less dismay than I would have hoped for. ‘So I hope you weren’t expecting me to drop you at the station.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ I say quickly. ‘I’ll get a bus or something.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ You shudder at the horror of the vomit-smelling Viceroy coach. ‘David will probably run you if you ask.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I mumble.

  That morning, though, you walk in on me in the shower – the bathroom lock broken (I suspect deliberately so, an excuse for Mr Fix-It to visit) – and catch me shaving. And not just my legs.

  ‘David called,’ you announce. ‘You need to leave in half an hour.’

  ‘Jesus, Edie,’ I snap. ‘I could have cut myself.’

  You stare at my pudenda, at the hair-clogged razor, put two and two together.

  ‘He won’t care,’ you say. ‘Not if he’s worth anything.’

  ‘It’s not . . .’ But I don’t bother to finish that sentence, don’t bother to lie, because we both know who it’s for.

  ‘Well, you’d better at least do the other side, I suppose,’ you say eventually. ‘Otherwise you’re going to look awfully skew-whiff.’

  ‘God, Edie. Can you just . . . go?’

  ‘I’m gone,’ you say, turning, your hand waving a goodbye. ‘Just, whatever happens, promise me you’ll use a condom.’

  Why? I say in my head. Worried I’ll end up ruining my life by getting pregnant?

  ‘Two,’ I say out loud. ‘At once.’

  I barely eat on the four-hour train journey, barely breathe, it seems, so that by the time I step onto the wide, pitted platform at Hull Paragon, I am both faint with hunger and shaking from the adrenaline that seems to have replaced my blood pint for pint. All around me vowels are elongated and words stretched and strangled into almost undecipherable sentences by strangers dressed in clothes too tight, too short, too thin, so that I might as well be in the Gare du Nord, not the grim North, so foreign is this land to me.

  Though you have found me five pounds for a taxi, I decide to save it for an emergency, or dinner, and walk to Tom’s instead; walk off the dizzy, I tell myself.

  I should have got the cab, I think.

  I have wended my way slowly past the run-down redbrick two-up two-downs that crowd the station and into the pale stock of the avenues that surround Pearson Park. But despite my lack of speed, despite the season, I am sweating into my specially chosen ‘student’ clothes, my cheap leggings chafing my clean-shaven thighs and riding high into cracks and crevices.

  I’ll ask for a shower, I think, as I check my pocket-creased, library-photocopied street map and turn onto Park Grove. Or he’ll offer me one. And that tiny seed, no more than an accident of circumstance, is all it takes for the fiction to flow. Within seconds I have conjured a scene in which he walks in on me naked in the steam. In the first version he backs away, reddened, flustered, but I, the siren that I am, call him to accompany me, and he strips slowly, tantalizingly, before slipping into the hotel-impeccable bathroom of my mind. In the second version he needs no beckoning at all, but is so overcome at the sight of my voluptuousness, he is hard before he even climbs out of his Calvins.

  ‘Watch it,’ a passer-by
warns, pushed off the pavement by my bulky presence and mental absence.

  I come to, mutter a sorry, add a flush of pink to the patina of sweat that clings to my cheeks. In my imagination I briefly paint this as post-coital glow. In reality I know I appear nothing more than unfit and feverish, a look I am not sure has ever won hearts or minds. Then, checking house numbers, I wince and double back on myself, wiping my face on my coat sleeve before I turn up the cracked and weed-clogged path to 114.

  There’s no bell. Of course not. Instead a felt-tipped sign proclaims in psychedelic lettering that visitors should ‘knock loudly or try round the back’, under which someone has biroed ‘fnarr’.

  I peer down the passageway, a route I will later name in my newly acquired accent as the ‘ginnel’. But for now it’s just a bicycle-strewn side return, layered with a smattering of litter and cat shit. Taking my chances, I hammer on the front door. Once. Then again.

  ‘All right,’ comes a call down a corridor. I see a blurred figure, then a face form behind the stained-glass panels, giving body to a voice I recognize from the phone.

  The door opens, and I see at once that this is her, but also not her – not the her of my imaginings, anyway. This girl is spiked, shaven, short. In one ear she has five piercings; on her T-shirt Tom Robinson lyrics confirm she is glad to be gay.

  So relieved am I that I laugh, a short, sputtering thing, but a laugh nonetheless.

  ‘What’s so fucking funny?’ She pronounces the words like foot. Fooking foony. I echo her, sounding them out in my head. Then remember her question.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I . . . it’s been a long journey.’

  She nods, peers. ‘Dido?’

  And my embarrassment is chased away by smug vanity – the knowledge that I am known, that he has told people about me.

  But what has he told them?

  ‘Attic.’ She gestures behind and up with her head. Then, in case I am as dumb as I look, ‘Top of the stairs.’

  ‘Right, thanks.’ And heaving my heavy rucksack higher on my heavier body, I climb up forty-eight bare-boarded treads to his bedroom.

  The door is closed, and this one – though covered in postcards and photographs and an old Polaroid of its occupant aged seven and naked – bears no instructions as to how to behave in this situation. Do I knock? Or just turn the handle and hope? What if there’s a girl after all – a not-gay one this time – in there with him?