by Joanna Nadin
He pauses, and for a moment I think he’s seen through the lie, thinks I’m cheating on him. But, like he says, who else would have me? ‘You missed dinner,’ he says at last.
I stare at the food. Hot, it must have been magnificent, a MasterChef-worthy plate, the kind I would praise him for, tell him he has talent beyond politics, that he should think about opening a restaurant one day.
Now it lies cold and congealed, an unappealing mass of insipid fish and cloying sauce, and a dark chocolate tart that I know I will have to walk to work for a week to compensate for.
‘Eat it,’ he says.
‘I’m not—’
‘Eat it.’
Each mouthful is an effort, each accompanied by an impulse to gag. But my instinct for self-defence is stronger, and so I swallow them down as he watches, impassive, and drinks his way steadily through an entire bottle of red.
Later, as he lies sweating in bed, and I in the bath, washing off shame and the smell of vomit, I realize I am that woman – the one on television; the one in the mirror.
And I know now it isn’t my fault. That I shouldn’t have to apologize, to say sorry. But I am. I’m sorry.
I’m sorry I didn’t tell him to go fuck himself that night, or the next or for months after.
I’m sorry I didn’t call you and tell you you were right all along.
And I’m sorry I put you through it at all.
But do you know what I thought the worst part was back then? That when I let the cold, clouded water run down the plughole, I let something else run out too: blue-black ink and looped, careless numerals.
I could have traced her, I suppose. Could have called LWT and asked for a girl called Harry. But I saw it as a sign again, fate. And anyway, the next day Jimmy bought me silk pyjamas and told me I looked like Lana Turner. So instead of seeking out Narnia that day, I turned my back, shut myself in my small world and prayed instead for a happy ending.
The Party
December 1999
Do you remember 1999?
The song, I mean. Prince in his Purple Rain Paisley Park finest, singing he had a lion in his pocket, a line I took to be literal, and imagined a cat nestled in the velvet of his suit as he strutted and pranced and told us to party.
And we did party – you, me and Harry; we danced in the kitchen like it was the last night of the last year of the millennium, 1999 no more than a number, a date so absurdly distant that we were sure we’d be dead or famous by then.
As if it were impossible the day would ever come.
I remember another time, too. New Year’s Eve, 1986 – our last New Year’s Eve together – in the Duke, drunk on cheap cider and youth and possibility, Harry with her lipstick smeared, my obsessively applied lip balm disappointingly intact, despite strategically placing myself next to Tom as the clock tick-tocked towards midnight.
The pub is packed, bodies spilling out onto the pavement and already gathering around the war memorial, plastic pint glasses and fags in hand, a spliff being passed around behind backs before the police do their hourly check. Inside, someone puts Prince on the jukebox and another cheer goes up.
‘Oh God!’ Harry yells. ‘I love this song.’ And she grabs my hand to pull me up to dance.
But as I rise I am struck by the realization that in 1999 we won’t even be here. There is uni, then work, and then, what? So that even with my fingers clasped in hers I have the sense of being unanchored, seasick at the prospect of an open ocean.
‘What are we going to do?’ I ask. ‘In 1999.’
Harry pulls a face. ‘God, as if I’ll be hanging round with you two losers. I’ll be in bloody – I don’t know – LA or something.’
‘Bollocks you will,’ Tom snorts. ‘You’ll be married and living in Chipping fucking Sodbury or something.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Bull true.’
I smile wanly at the back and forth, the banter that I know by heart, could join in if I weren’t so unsettled.
‘We should come back here,’ I say then. ‘Like the cast of Bugsy Malone did.’
Tom raises an eyebrow. ‘They came to the Duke?’
‘Oh, ha ha. They met something like ten years after the film under the clock at Waterloo. I read it somewhere. In the playscript, I think.’
‘What, so whatever we’re doing, whoever we’re with, on New Year’s Eve 1999 we show up in a shitty pub in a small town in Essex?’
‘For old times’ sake,’ I insist.
Tom smiles. ‘For auld lang syne.’
Harry rolls her eyes, expertly. ‘Oh, fuck it. Fine. We’ll meet back here in 1999. At this very table. But, God, can we just dance now?’
And so we do, we dance like someone’s got a bomb and we could die anyway. We dance our lives away.
We dance like it’s 1999.
And did we meet up?
Well, let me tell you, Edie. Because, though it wasn’t the night any of us planned, it was one to remember.
They call it falling with child, like it’s easy, one slip and I will be pregnant. But I cannot even do that right, and each month the evidence is there in my bloodstained knickers, in the tampons that I wrap in toilet roll and push to the bottom of the bin.
By July I become more covert with my bathroom habits, try to hide it when it comes. But he wants sex, and when he pulls out it’s unmistakable. ‘I’ll leave you,’ he threatens. ‘If you don’t get pregnant by next month.’
But August comes and goes, marked by red in my diary and knickers, and his threat proves empty as he simply stays and fucks me harder, as if that will force the issue.
By December he’s suspicious. ‘It’s the drugs,’ he says. ‘They’ve fucked you up inside.’
I don’t bother to point out that I never took coke until I met him. That I never took it except with him. That I only took it because if I didn’t, everything seemed, would be, so much worse.
Besides, it’s not the coke.
When I imagine a life inside me, a being I will be responsible for, I feel a clutching at my stomach, a needling, and I cannot eat, cannot breathe for the claustrophobia of it. So that when I feel the familiar cramps, see the red bloom on white satin, I feel not shame – not at first, anyway – but a flood of relief. So much so that just a month after seeing Harry, I go to the surgery on Grove Lane, sit with the fat-cheeked toddlers and the sallow-faced mothers and wait my turn to see the same doctor who, five months before that, gave me a prescription for folic acid.
‘We could fit a coil,’ she says, impassive. ‘It’s far more effective.’
The coil is also far more there. And it’s possible, just possible, he’d be able to feel it. ‘No, thanks. I’ll be careful.’
And I am. So very, very careful.
The pills are foil-popped and dropped into a freezer bag which is then rolled and hidden in the toe of a pair of boots that sit, unworn, at the back of my wardrobe. He will not find them, I tell myself. But still, like Poe’s telltale heart, I can feel them, hear them, see them. They pulse out their presence so that I am whelmed by panic, can barely concentrate on even the simplest of tasks.
My life is a squalid mess, I realize, ridden with lies and ripe with deceit and held together with nothing stronger than a spool of cotton. Because two weeks after that I am sacked. Jude tells me it’s the cutbacks, but I know she is trying to be kind, trying to cover for my inability to spot what could have been the next Harry Potter, but which has been sold instead to Macmillan in a three-way auction. I can freelance, she tells me. I’ll have to go back to copy-editing, but it’s better than nothing.
Alone in the toilets, I sob. But at home, to him, fresh make-up on, fixed smile, I spin. It’s perfect, I tell him. Better this way because I can work in the evenings, when the baby comes.
But there is no baby, of course.
And even without the boot-hidden pills, the chances would be dwindling. Jimmy works late and when he does get to bed he’s too tired to fuck, pushing me away when I try to show willing
.
‘You work too much,’ I tell him.
‘We need the money,’ he says. ‘Now you’re not working. We’ve got a wedding to pay for. Remember?’
A wedding that looms over us – less than a month away, but which we discuss almost never, still less look forward to. ‘I am working,’ I say, nodding at the three-hundred-page manuscript that sits, still in its elastic bands, on the coffee table.
‘How many of those do you need to do to make your half of the mortgage?’
I shrug. I don’t know. Don’t want to think about it. Our mortgage runs into four figures a month as, at Jimmy’s insistence, we stretched ourselves while our earning power was on the increase.
‘Right. So, until you sort yourself out, I’ll be doing all the overtime I can get.’
And he walks out, leaving me alone with 70,000 words of dystopia and the needling knowledge that he doesn’t get paid overtime. He’s paid well, but extra hours in politics are done for love, not money.
Love.
And so it begins.
And ends.
It’s 31 December 1999. The night we planned to party with lions in our pockets, party like there’s no tomorrow.
Or some of us did.
‘I’m working,’ he says.
The lie drips bitter. But this time I’m not swallowing. This is what I’ve both dreaded and prayed for: a silver bullet. A kind of legitimacy. Something I can cite without implicating myself in my own pathetic situation. The possibility of it consumes me, adrenaline flooding my veins and sending my stomach into a sickly churn.
I swallow, breathe, say the line. ‘I thought Blair was going to the Dome. He can’t need you for that, surely?’
He snorts. ‘Like you’d know.’
‘I just thought we were doing something. Together,’ I add, a last chance for redemption, or confirmation.
‘Well, things change.’
‘Really?’ I am clawing now, desperate for the truth, but terrified of change.
‘Yes, really. Why? Do you want to call TB and check? For fuck’s sake, Di. It’s not like I want to go.’
‘No, I . . . What am I supposed to do now?’
‘I don’t know. Watch the Hootenanny. Call a friend.’
‘I don’t have any,’ I want to say. ‘Not any more, you’ve seen to that.’ But instead I slip out a maybe and a shrug.
‘Whatever,’ he says, the conversation over. ‘I need to shower.’
His phone is on the table. I wait until the water’s running and the radio turned on, then tiptoe, heart hammering, into the bedroom, click it open, scroll down to her name in his messages, and read.
I will myself to ignore the filth along with the endearments. I need facts, that’s all. A time and place.
And that is how, on Millennium Eve, I find myself standing in a shop doorway off Brick Lane, stone-cold sober but wired to all hell, waiting for my boyfriend to show up to shag some girl.
It is less than ten minutes before he rounds the corner, sees me, stops in his tracks. I can feel him thinking, trying to conjure excuses as to why he’s not with Tony, not in Greenwich, why he’s this side of the river at all. But he has nothing, so instead it gets turned on me.
‘What the fuck?’
I should cower; every instinct is telling me to, to find an excuse, to dismiss it as coincidence, to kiss him, make it better. But I can’t do it any more. Something has awoken in me, some part I had forgotten about, or disowned – the child who said bugger just to see the effect it had, who walked swing-hipped in your wake, flipping the bird at the world: she is here now. And others too, crowding in my consciousness – whip-smart Becky Sharp, fearless Scout Finch, even Jane Eyre is here, stoic, determined.
So instead of making excuses, I ask for his. ‘Who is she?’ I counter.
I do not win the argument. I do not rise triumphant, strike a blow for female-kind. But the result is the same: we are done. I leave not with a flourish, with a final fuck you, but a flippant shove, dismissed, so that I trip in the litter-filled gutter, plunging a foot into a puddle of ten-pint puke. Satisfied my life cannot possibly sink any lower, I pick my way along the pavement, dodging the crowds and the cans, pushing through air thick with anticipation.
But my night is over, isn’t it? My decade done.
And now what? Now where?
I need a drink. Can have one, now the charade is over.
The few pubs I can find are all closed for private parties so I walk through heaving streets until I find a corner shop, bravely unboarded and blazingly lit, its Sikh owner determined to stay the course and reap the rewards.
I point at a bottle of overpriced Smirnoff standing alone, odd in a line-up of Cherry 20/20 and Thunderbird.
‘Party time?’ the man says, grinning gap-toothed as I hand over a twenty, get coins back in change.
I force a smile. ‘Like it’s 1999.’
He smiles back blankly. ‘It is 1999,’ he says.
I take the bottle, refusing the plastic bag he holds out. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I say.
Cowbells clanging my exit behind me, I walk down Brick Lane, find a windowsill, and sit and watch and listen to the hum of the world. A world on the edge of a new one, or of extinction, some say. But whichever, the anticipation thickens the air so that it is an intoxicating soup; just breathing on a night like this is a buzz. And I am doing more than that.
The bottle is almost empty now, and I need to pee. But there is nowhere open, so I squat behind a dusty Transit van and let a stream of pure alcohol piss run into the gutter. Then I stand, swaying, wondering what next. The Underground station I used earlier is shut now: understaffed, the sign says. I could get a bus, I think, but the numbers are confusing and I am unsure where I am or where I want to go.
Or who I want to see.
I want to be looked after, I think.
I want to be loved.
I wanna be adored, I sing in my head.
Then I see it, as a Blakean vision first, I think, before it rises before me in reality, lit up like Coleridge’s pleasure-dome against a sea of slum-dirty dead ends.
Liverpool Street station.
Gateway to Essex.
I stumble to the ticket machine, fumble with change. Buy a ticket to fuck knows where, it doesn’t matter as long as it gets me through the barrier. Then I’m on the platform and pelting pell-mell to make it into a carriage.
I fall into a seat as the doors sound their closing beeps, lean my hot cheek against the cool Plexiglas as we pull out and off, clickety-clacking past yellow bricks and down the track, dancing our way to the Duke and to midnight.
‘Walden,’ I whisper to my sorry, drunken self. ‘Walden, I am coming home.’
That is the last pin-sharp memory I have. The rest of the night is a swaying haze of faces. Snapshots, really, that is all: single moments caught in time that, no matter how hard I try, I cannot fill in or fix the fading edges.
An albino-haired driver in a beat-up blue car – I must have blagged a lift from him from the station, because I don’t remember paying.
The bar at the Duke – I bought a drink, or someone bought me one, because there is a glass in my hand in the picture; I can feel it cold against my hot skin, feel the curved rim against my tempted teeth.
The back of a boy – tour dates on a now-grey T-shirt, hair grown out and curling at the ends – and me calling, ‘Tom!’ But when he turns, his teenage eyes are glazed and his slack mouth is not one I have kissed, and I stumble out onto the high street, sticking two fingers up at Prince who is still singing, still exhorting me to party.
I tried, I tell him. But they did not come.
Next I see our house, and this is clear in my vision, Edie, you need to know that. You need to know that when I climbed the hill I wasn’t looking for them, not for Tom or Harry. I was looking for you.
I was coming home.
But the door is locked and the key gone or moved and I am too drunk to scrabble under stones. So I go down the side ginnel and
into our back garden. I must have been looking for another key, Edie. Or hoped that the back door would be swinging carelessly open, or at least on the latch. But you are safety-conscious, it seems, or someone is, because when I rattle the door it moves only millimetres; when I peer through the window all I can see is stillness, all I can hear is silence.
But it was you I came looking for – don’t you see? You I wanted, needed that night. It was only accident that I ended up where I did, that I ended up doing what I did. It was foolish, I know that, not just drunk but in any state. Because I was no longer a child: no longer Heidi, nimble as a mountain goat; no longer George with knees still scabbed from climbing. I was a grown woman with a stomach full of alcohol and a head full of memories, and that, Edie, is a dangerous combination. Because together they make us do desperate things, and I must have been desperate to do this. To push my way through dead nettles. To pull myself up onto the lowest branch. To haul myself up and over a wall.
‘Harry,’ I shout, Queen, if not of Bloody Everything, then at least of this flint castle. ‘Harry, are you home?’
A light flicks on in the big house, and I see a face in a window. A man. ‘Tom?’ I yell. ‘Tom, it’s me!’
And I raise my hand to wave.
But as I do, I feel my foot slip; feel my fingers grasping at branches but coming away clutching nothing but night air; feel myself teeter for a second, wondering if I might right myself, or, better still, fly.
And at that wondrous thought I spread my arms, an idiot Icarus, and give myself over to the mercy of the gods and gravity.
And I topple forward off the wall and hit not a paddling pool this time, but cold, hard ground.
I wake up with Simon Le Bon staring down at me, take a second to fathom this seeming impossibility before the first rush of vomit flies up my gullet and I lean over the side of the bed and hurl.
It hits not the carpet but a bucket, spattering its pink plastic sides in a flume of orange. I am at the seaside now, though where I don’t remember. Yarmouth, maybe? On a day trip. The image of the sea and the effort of thought send my insides rising on the bob and swell and I let out another burst of vodka and ginger biscuits, the only food I remember eating in the last few days.
