The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

  ‘Better?’

  I look up and see her then, her hair fanned out around her face, still golden, lit up by the sunlight that pours through the crack in the curtains.

  An angel. An—

  ‘Angela.’

  She smiles, comes over to the bed, wipes my face with a wet flannel.

  I open my mouth, let out not sick but a sob this time.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ she says.

  But I do cry. I cry for an hour, for all that has gone before, all that has been lost, and for this, this found thing, this seed of possibility, an accident of drink and timing and circumstance.

  And she lets me, lets me sob and puke, hands me a glass of water, then changes her mind and holds it to my lips so I can drink, my own hands too shaky not to spill it. Old habits die hard.

  ‘David,’ she shouts. ‘Can you fetch a J-cloth?’

  Then she turns back to me.

  ‘It’s all going to be fine, Di. You’ll see,’ she says. ‘It’s all going to be fine.’

  And I, who believe in fairy tales, in handsome princes, and happy endings, who has clutched on to these fictions as if they were tangible fact, nod and say solemnly to myself, ‘It is.’

  The Incredible Journey

  February 2000

  I’ve thought a lot about forgiveness these last few weeks; what it is that allows us to crack open our hardened carapaces, cleave our hearts to someone again. Is it the passing of time? Or distance, maybe? The clarity that comes with a sudden change in circumstances? Or a mortal threat.

  For parents, perhaps, it is easier – at least to forgive a child. Even one who is not their own. Because I may not be the prodigal daughter, but I am a child in need of a parent. And though their absolution is neither full, nor immediate, David and Angela offer me clemency and grace and a bedroom decorated with Smash Hits posters, and I accept with the barely tempered desperation and disbelief of a wino offered a sip of Lafite.

  I wake again, mouth sour, stomach sore and hair strung with flakes of vomit. I heave myself up onto my elbows and see that the bucket has been cleaned, returned – just in case – but Angela is elsewhere. Dizzy and drained, still more confused, I lie back again and try to trace the path that led me here, follow the piecemeal trail of breadcrumbs that have not been stolen by birds or soaked away by so much alcohol. In a muddled montage, lacking either strict chronology or a sweeping soundtrack, I see Jimmy’s contorted face, eyes bulging, lips flecked with spittle that spatters my own already tear-damp face; I see cashmere-covered arms – baby blue – and a shoulder I bury my face into as I am carried from the garden; I feel my bewilderment when I demand to see Tom, only to be told he is in America, that Harry is in London; I see the swift look between them when I ask to see you; I see the unbodied hope that sent me climbing into the boughs of an apple tree, and the you-shaped truth that had me fall.

  I slept after that, was sick, then slept some more – a cycle that must have continued for close to twenty-four hours as the thin January light is waning already, so that it seems pointless to open the curtains on a day that is almost closed, pointless almost to get up. But I am not a sick child, or a hung-over teenager; I do not have that privilege. Besides, this is not even my house, and my presence in it deserves an explanation, an apology. But there is so much to say sorry for I hardly know where to begin. My foolishness? My audacity? Or yours, all those years ago?

  But when I finally summon the will to stand on shaking legs, to tread the familiar shag of landing carpet and down the stairs to the kitchen, I manage only those two little words, without any qualification or quantification, before I am silenced.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ David tells me.

  ‘But . . . God, what must you think?’

  Angela’s tight face tells me she thinks I am a fool and a mess, but that I am something – someone – else too; that if she steps in now I may be rescued yet, that I am not an entirely lost cause.

  ‘We think you must have had a terrible time,’ she says. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Toast?’ asks David.

  I nod and he pulls out a stool so I can sit at the breakfast bar – a term and thing you scoffed at, scorned for its aspiration, its pathetic attempt to conjure New York glamour in staid small-town Essex. But that bar had once represented everything I yearned for, and as I sit there, waiting for my two rounds of sliced white with jam, I cling to it as if it is not tired melamine but a raft in the wreck of my life.

  It is all I have to cling to, I think to myself, this house, these people. These people who offer me breakfast for supper; who lay out towels for me to have a shower, and fresh pyjamas for when I am clean; who tell me not even to think of leaving tonight; who let me watch television in the den until I fall asleep, then carry me to bed and leave water, aspirin and a book on the bedside table for when I wake at three, thirsty, aching and alone.

  I love them, these people. I owe them. So that in the morning, while David makes eggs, I tell Angela about Jimmy. Not everything, for there are too many details that I cannot bear to have her know – cannot bear to have her think of me like that, lest she compares me to you – but the bones of it. I tell her I am bruised but not broken; jobless, homeless, but not broke. That there is money saved – for the flat that never was, the wedding that never was, the baby that never was.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I say, as much to me as to her, then repeat it, as if it is a charm and speaking it aloud will make it come true.

  ‘Where will you go?’ David asks.

  ‘London,’ I say, as if there could be any other answer.

  ‘But where exactly, I mean.’

  ‘Oh. I . . .’ I trail off. Because ‘friends’ is too vague to be believed and besides, I have already told Angela that Jimmy saw to that. ‘I’ll find somewhere,’ I say. ‘Maybe near Harry. I saw her. Did she tell you?’ I laugh then at that detail, a fake, desperate sound, because it is fake, desperate – I don’t even know where she lives, still less if I could afford it, given my employment status, or lack of it.

  David glances at Angela and I feel it again – that tacit understanding between them, hard-won-back.

  ‘You can stay here,’ she says.

  ‘In Saffron Walden?’ I reply, as incredulous as if they were offering me Timbuctoo or Narnia itself.

  ‘You don’t need to be in London, do you?’ she asks.

  I shake my head. I don’t, not now, I suppose. I can freelance from anywhere, after all. But—

  ‘Only if you want,’ David adds quickly. ‘And only until Edie – your mum – gets back.’

  ‘I don’t even know where she is,’ I say. Or that she’ll want me, or I her.

  He nods. ‘Then stay here,’ he says. ‘Please.’

  And there it is: my transforming potion in a glittering glass vial. This is my chance to start again, be someone new – someone better. Not by changing my name through deed poll or marriage, but by becoming a child again. Away from Jimmy, whom I only disappoint; away from a city whose streets offer up only fool’s gold; back instead in Neverland. I am Peter Pan – no, a Lost Boy, I think, as I drink thick Horlicks from a Wedgwood mug, as I push my feet into slippers a size too small, as I fall asleep under the fading camera pouts of long-failed pop stars. And so safe do I feel, so content, that I fail to hear the tick-tock of the crocodile that tells me a villain is coming – this one dressed not as Hook, but instead in a black ballgown and paint-spattered boots.

  A time-tattered Tinkerbell.

  You.

  It is a month before I see you. A month in which David has driven me to Peckham, waited reluctantly outside the flat, pacing the narrow, gum-spattered pavement while I pack, though he knows Jimmy is out, that his pleas, protests and, inevitably, insults will not have the chance to persuade me. A month in which I have hung my spoils in Harry’s room: my clothes, my precious books, and, to Angela’s disbelief and, I suspect, disgust, a stuffed raven in a glass dome that has somehow survived the journey. I have run away from the big,
bad wolf and hidden myself in the turret of an almost-castle that I spent hours, weeks gazing at, weaving fictions about. But when I look through the glass, see the paint-peeling, tumbledown gingerbread house squatting in a forest, it is not with triumph, but a strange sense of shame, and a needling, night-whispered truth that that is where I truly belong.

  I have called – of course I have. Did you think I wouldn’t? But the door goes unanswered and the phone rings out and your mobile, I assume, is long lost or broken. So that I have become used to a town without you, without your foghorn presence dogging me, defining me. So that when I do finally bump into you, I am thrown, panicked.

  I am standing outside Smith’s in the sunshine, clutching a Guardian and a Mars bar, neither available at the Lodge, despite its bounty. You are peering into a gift shop window, staring magpie-like at the silverware, or your own reflection, and though the urge to call your name is immediate, instinctive, I find the word sticking in my throat, offering me a reprieve – the chance to double back, or run. But it is pointless, isn’t it, in this small town? Where you are infamous and my return is, if not celebrated, at least noted. And so I push it out, a jagged flint of a name:

  ‘Edie!’

  Your head snaps round at the sound, and I see recognition and guileless delight sour swiftly into bristling indignation, a stubborn refusal to smile.

  I cross the road because it is abundantly clear that you will not.

  ‘Edie, I . . . it’s good to see you.’

  You smell of stale smoke and unwashed hair, yet your eyebrows are perfectly plucked, and you arch one in defiance. ‘You’re back, then?’

  ‘Yes. I called, but—’

  ‘Day trip, is it?’ you interrupt. ‘I suppose he’s with you.’

  ‘No,’ I blurt.

  ‘No it’s not a day trip, or no he’s not here?’

  ‘Edie,’ I plead.

  You look at me, see something – guilt? Or desperation, maybe. Whichever, your hard shell softens and a glimmer of Edie flickers before me. ‘It’s just you’re the last person I expected to see,’ you say.

  ‘I know.’ I drop my head – the beginnings of an apology. ‘And I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I can explain. I want to explain. Can I come over? Or – ’ I clutch at straws, find myself grasping a nettle – ‘maybe you have time for coffee now?’

  ‘We could go for a drink.’

  ‘It’s not even eleven,’ I say automatically.

  ‘Plus ça change,’ you sigh. ‘Fine, coffee then. But I warn you I’ve had two already and I’ll be peeing for bloody Britain.’

  ‘Good to know,’ I say.

  ‘And I need a fag first.’

  Plus ça change, I think.

  The coffee shop is new, but then so is half the town, at least to me. This one is tiny, up a turning staircase and fugged with the steam of scalding water and hot gossip.

  I order while you stub out your cigarette: a decaff latte for me – my nerves already jangled; double espresso for you – ‘All that milk makes my stomach turn,’ you had declared with an exaggerated shudder. ‘Cow juice.’

  ‘So you’re, what, vegan now?’ I asked.

  ‘Vegetarian, vegan, whatever.’

  Whatever, I thought, as I wondered whether you ate at all or existed entirely on coffee and cigarettes.

  ‘So where is he?’ you ask now as you clatter into the extruded-plastic chair, peer disappointedly at the sub-Riley prints on the off-white walls. ‘Jimmy, I mean. Obviously.’

  I wish then I had ignored the Pollyanna in me, ordered something stronger. ‘London,’ I say, then add a clarifying, ‘I assume.’

  You pause while this plays out in your head – the possibility, and probability.

  ‘I left him,’ I tell you before you decide otherwise. I leave out the cheating, the why that loses me the upper hand, though I am sure you have guessed.

  But if you do, you don’t let on. ‘Well, about bloody time,’ you say. ‘Christ, I bet the McGowans are in conniption fits. I’m surprised you haven’t been tarred and feathered and strung up on the bloody war memorial.’

  ‘They’re trying,’ I admit.

  For all their scorn at Jimmy and his pretensions, his poofter’s wardrobe, he remains a McGowan, and I, therefore, have segued seamlessly from stuck-up girlfriend to sworn enemy, a status that shines as patent as their cheap church shoes when they call me names outside Cromwell Road Costcutter – a shop I swiftly learn to avoid.

  ‘Bloody yokels,’ you say, and I am grateful.

  An apology sits on my lips, but I don’t have a chance to offer it as your caffeine-fuelled questions pile up into a teetering tower of whens and hows and whys and what, exactly, you would have done.

  ‘So did you take the good stuff? Did you fuck with him? You should have. I know a woman who mixed up all the CDs in her utter fucker of an ex’s collection. Took him years to sort those out. He was blind, you see.’

  I shake my head. I have done nothing like that, would not dare. Did not dare even take half the towels, half the bedding, half the money from the joint account, money I had earned.

  ‘Or prawns,’ you declare triumphantly. ‘You can sew them into the sofa. Takes weeks to work out where the smell’s coming from.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘We could still do that. Have you got keys?’

  I recall posting my set back through the letter box, am thankful for its clanking closure. ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Shame,’ you say. ‘So when did you get here, then? I’ve been away, you know. Retreat in Wales. Bloody wet, and apparently you’re not supposed to shag the tutors. Anyway, I only got in last night and I had to come out to get something. What was it? Oh, I’ll remember later—’

  ‘Edie.’ I push in, because the more you you become, the more I need to tell you about who I am now – where I am. ‘I’ve been here a while. A month, actually.’ Then, as if explaining it to a small child, or slow-wit: ‘I’m living here.’

  But despite this addendum, I can see you still don’t quite understand what I’m trying to tell you. ‘Listen, Edie,’ I say, and steel myself to utter a curse, as potent as the thirteenth fairy’s, as damning as any dwarf’s. ‘I’m staying at the Lodge.’

  For a moment, a strung-out, hope-clinging moment, you don’t get it, or don’t believe it. But then truth pricks you with its spindle, and your gaunt face contorts, becomes cold again, hard, skeletal.

  ‘You weren’t home,’ I try to explain.

  ‘So, what? You just knocked on the door and pretty pleased and they decked the fucking halls and invited you to move in?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t like that. It’s not like that.’

  ‘Well, it must be something like that.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I needed . . . help.’

  You flap your hand, swatting my needs away like a fly. ‘So you could have called.’

  ‘I did. I told you that,’ I insist.

  ‘When?’

  ‘New Year’s Eve. You were gone,’ I add, trying to turn it on you.

  ‘But I was here for months before that. Why didn’t you call then?’

  Because I was scared you would answer. Or worse, hang up. But I don’t tell you that; I just shrug, like an insolent teen.

  ‘And there’s a spare bloody key under the stone turtle thing, you know that.’

  ‘I forgot,’ I say, but it’s a lie and we both know it.

  You scrabble in your bag for a cigarette, pull one out with your lips, then see the No smoking sign and slam it down on the table, gold threads of tobacco scattering over sterile white. ‘I suppose you’ve forgotten what they did,’ you say then. ‘To me. To us.’

  ‘I don’t blame them,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ you say, your voice edged with contempt. ‘You blame me.’

  I shake my head but it’s another lie and I am no actress.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ you snap.

  When is it? I think.

  ‘It was his fault. And hers. If she wasn’t so b
loody . . . seized up.’

  I don’t want to do this. Not now. Not ever. I have an overwhelming urge to stick my fingers in my ears, say, ‘La la la, I can’t hear you.’ Instead I manage a more adult, ‘Just stop it.’

  The words slap and you are startled. ‘So that’s it, then?’

  ‘What’s it?’

  ‘You’ve got a new home and everything’s just dandy now, is it? You got your happy ending?’

  ‘Hardly,’ I say.

  ‘Good,’ you reply. Then, into the heavy silence that hangs after it, ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  But you did. And we contemplate the weight of that against time that ticks round treacle-slow.

  ‘How will you get to work?’ you ask eventually.

  ‘I’m freelancing,’ I say. ‘I can work from—’ I stop myself, but you hear it anyway.

  ‘Oh, just say it.’ You almost smile. ‘Home. You can work from home.’

  I don’t answer, instead reach for my coffee, a poor man’s Dutch courage, but it has cooled to a thin, unappealing soup, and I set it down again.

  This, it seems, is your cue. ‘Well, this has been lovely,’ you say, standing. ‘We must do it again sometime.’

  I try to stand but I am wedged in somehow and besides, you dismiss the gesture. ‘Don’t bother,’ you say. ‘I’m late.’

  ‘What for?’ I ask.

  ‘Stuff,’ you say, flapping your hand. ‘A thing.’

  I nod.

  ‘I’d say give me your address but that would be overkill.’

  ‘Edie,’ I plead.

  I see your droop then, my neediness awakening an atavistic maternalism. ‘I’m sorry,’ you staccato out. ‘It’s just a lot to take in.’

  ‘It’s a lot for me, too.’

  And so the scene trails off. You leave; I stay, order another coffee, which I let grow cold while I trawl through adverts for jobs I won’t apply for, at least not yet.

  I’m not ready to move on. To leave the Lodge. I want to savour this time, clutch it tight in my pocket like the jewel it is.

  When I get home – home! Just listen to that word! As absurd to me then as it was insulting to you – I find lunch already on the table and Angela seated, waiting.