by Joanna Nadin
‘Anything?’ she asks, nodding at the paper.
‘Not today,’ I reply.
She swallows her mouthful of Ryvita. ‘Did you see anyone?’
‘I . . .’ I toy with my ham sandwich. ‘No one. Not to talk to, anyway.’
‘Harry rang,’ she says then. ‘She might come home at the weekend.’
‘Oh,’ I say, torn between joy and panic. ‘Should I move my stuff?’
‘No, she can use Tom’s room,’ she assures me. Then, conspiratorial now, ‘She’s bringing someone. A man.’
‘Max?’ I say.
‘You’ve met him?’
‘No,’ I assure her. ‘Just . . . heard about him.’
‘Well, it sounds serious,’ she says. ‘I only hope he’s less alarming than the last one. He was from Wigan. And had a tattoo of Daffy Duck on his . . . his buttock.’ She shudders, though it is unclear as to which is the worst offence.
‘I don’t think Max will have that,’ I say. ‘And he’s from Muswell Hill, I think.’
‘Oh. Jewish,’ she says then. ‘Of course, you only want your children to be happy,’ she adds. ‘But, well, there are limits.’
We don’t talk about Tom. Not really, anyway. I know he’s in America. I know he has a baby – a boy called Charles, like my monkey, though this one is shortened to Charlie, I am told. I’m also told he visits rarely, his wife reluctant to bring a baby on a plane.
But I don’t need to talk about him. I don’t need promise, or excitement, or possibility. I need this – this humdrum lunch and, later, supper, television or Radio 4, and bed early and on my own.
No, there will be no surprises, no wonderful occurrences or adventures to which I can say a silent, secret, satisfied, ‘What larks, Pip!’
Because larks are far away, over the wall and in another time, and that is where I want them to stay. Can you understand that, Edie?
Can you forgive me?
Brighton Rock
July 2000
Where did you imagine you’d be at thirty?
I had plans, Edie, so many plans; dreams spun from silken fiction and woven into the wide, gold fabric of a life picture-book-perfect. I was going to be a vet’s wife, baking cakes and bottle-feeding orphaned lambs while my clever, patient, hardy husband tramped the unnameable moors to reach a distressed cow or trapped pony. Then, when Dr Who replaced the Herriots in the schedule and my imagination, I was going to be the hero’s assistant, handing him the tools he needed to save the world, and keeping the Tardis tidy, preferably in tight Lycra and a borrowed body. Next up was vampire slayer, then vintage record store owner, a roster of almost limitless fancy, tempered not by lack of talent or resources, but only by the paucity of books in our library or whether or not we owned a television at that particular point.
When do we close the doors on these possible selves? On private eye or prime minister or even on a minor role in Pretty in Pink? When did I decide that what I really, really wanted was to turn thirty putting commas into other people’s stories? Living in someone else’s house, with someone else’s parents; a hermit crab or changeling child. If I make it sound desperate, depressing, I exaggerate; my life is far from wretched. I have work, still, despite everything. And while the Lodge is not quite the enchanted castle I hoped for as a child, I am free to come and go as I please, I have company when I need it, and a room of my own when I don’t.
But I am not making books, conjuring adventures of my own. Instead, like a brazen and bitter literature student, I am trying to force other people’s words to better fit the mould I have in mind. And the Lodge – this is the life I coveted aged seven or seventeen, not one I should be playing out in the last year of my twenties.
I knew that without you having to tell me.
It’s June when you hand me your brilliant idea like it’s a golden egg on a platter. You text me to meet you at that cafe – a place we seem to have settled on as neutral territory, no man’s land; a place where your only allowable vice is caffeine; where voices cannot be raised too high; where, over slow weeks and months, we have brokered some kind of accord, weak and unspoken though it is.
‘I’m already here,’ I reply. Am here most days, working in a booth in the corner, the chatter and clatter of coffee cups a white noise that doesn’t interrupt my work but instead comforts me, lulling me into a sense that I am part of something, still. You, though, you come dancing into this soft fog like a Fuseli-painted Puck or Ariel, all wide, kohl-ringed eyes, skinny limbs and chiffon. A child playing dress-up, you are unignorable; you demand attention, your words scattergunning out, a tumble of ideas and exclamations that make me wonder, again, what you are on, or if you should be on something. But you are fine, you insisted last week, and I trust you. I am trying to trust you.
‘Here,’ you say, handing me a smudged and Sellotaped-down envelope, your fingers tip-tapping on the table as I turn it over, try to work out what could possibly be inside, what is the worst it could be?
‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘Birthday present,’ you say.
‘It’s not my birthday for three weeks.’
You roll your eyes. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, why are there always so many bloody rules with you? Just open it, will you?’
‘Sorry,’ I say, and slip a finger under the seal, pull it hard against the vellum.
I peer into the fold, looking for a crumpled twenty, or a cheque, maybe, or more likely, I think, some strange postcard you have found, a junk shop or behind-the-sideboard relic from the 1930s. Instead I see four oblongs of card edged in orange, and shake them out onto the table.
‘Train tickets?’
‘Yes!’ you confirm, as if this is a game of bingo. ‘But to where?’
I pick one up, scan the small print, pray it isn’t London, or, worse, Wales – some pilgrimage to a red tent to worship our vaginas, your latest phase of self-discovery. ‘Brighton?’
‘Yes!’ I score again, it seems. ‘A road trip! Well, a train trip. We’ll stay at the Grand, of course.’ You wait for a smile or a thank you, but I’m still trying to imagine us going away, being together for – I check the train times – two whole days. ‘Oh, God,’ you say. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t like Brighton. Everyone likes Brighton. Especially the gays. The gays love Brighton. And I love the gays. And besides, we owe it to ourselves. You’ll be thirty. And I’ll be fifty next year. Fifty. Imagine that!’
I start at that, come to. If thirty is an improbable age for me to wear, fifty is impossible on you. Because, though your skin bears testament to your years of Rothmans and rollies, though there is something of the Miss Havisham about you – your insistence on wearing a dead woman’s dresses, the decrepit attic in which you spend all day and night sometimes, sculpting, stalking – you still have a youth worthy of Pan or The Picture of Dorian Gray.
‘It will be a joint celebration – you, me and Nina.’
‘Nina?’
‘She would have been a hundred this year. Did you know that?’
I shake my head. All I know of Great-Aunt Nina is that she paid for – pays for – almost everything; her legacy – itself inherited from her lesbian lover, an elderly American – squirrelled away in stocks and shares. So that, while she permitted herself only a meagre, cluttered existence in later life, she allowed you to raise a child, albeit in what I believed at the time to be abject poverty, our only extravagances strawberry Mivvis, cigarettes and alcohol – ‘Essentials, Di,’ you insisted. ‘Fucking essentials!’ More than that, she allowed you to paint instead of work, and even then only when the fancy took you – an act that has been either the making or breaking of you; I am yet to decide. No wonder your brother hated you.
‘Well, she would have been. So, to Brighton, and to me, you and Nina.’ You raise your double espresso in toast, and, resigned but smiling, I raise a tea in return. ‘And to the gays!’ you add.
I feel eyes on us, not for the first time. But for once I am defiant, welcome it. ‘To the gays,’ I repeat, and at once I
am a nine-year-old, giddy with delight at the thought of going to the seaside, and a twenty-nine-year-old, sobering swiftly at the thought of what trail of havoc you might wreak.
Angela gives me a present before I leave – a necklace, a single pearl set in silver on a slender chain. ‘From all of us,’ she says. ‘Harry and Tom, too.’
Though Harry has given me another gift – a book she had told me about last time she was home, some self-help guide she had pressed on me. ‘Read it,’ she said. ‘It will totally change your life.’
‘Do I look that needy?’
But she didn’t need to dignify that with a reply. Instead, she took the book back. ‘I’ll get you your own copy.’
I looked at Max, eyes pleading for backup, but he had shrugged and smiled, happy to indulge her, his half-hippy slip of a girlfriend.
‘Thank you,’ I say to Angela now. ‘I’ll wear it to dinner.’
‘Does Edie do dinner?’ David asks. ‘I thought she lived on wine and inspiration.’
I look at Angela for a tightening of the jaw, but she lets this go, lets so much go now. ‘Have fun,’ she says. Then clarifies it. ‘But call. If you need to.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I say. ‘It’s only Edie.’
And that is when I see it, a slight purse of the lips, not at the thought of you, but at my folly. She knows me. And she knows what you are capable of.
Brighton is everything the postcards promise: tacky and brash and kiss-me-quick, but genteel too, a refined, elderly lesbian of a town, courting a young lover off the estates. And while the Pavilion is gaudy, glittering, a show-off costume piece of paste to hypnotize the crowds, the Grand – rebuilt now after the fire – still glows, a duller ruby red, but a jewel nonetheless. We leave our bags – yours an overstuffed silk-lined suitcase, mine a borrowed backpack – in our twin-bedded room, and head out immediately, too wired to have the showers and rest we had promised ourselves after a torturous train journey, the carriage July-packed. Or too nervous, for the thought of getting undressed in front of you, or lying down in the same space after so long, seems an impossibility to me right now. So instead I stave it off by asking to go shopping, play the slots on the pier, and we fly along the seafront, red-faced and sweating in our too-many clothes on this too-beautiful day, purses fat with ten-pound notes for the shops and pockets jangling with pennies for the arcade.
On North Laine you flit magpie-like from stall to stall, drawn to a heavy telephone, a string of pink pearls, a pair of sparkling ruby slippers – the kind I would wear in my Dorothy dreams, closing my eyes and clicking my heels together and chanting there’s no place like home, hoping to wake up in technicolor Kansas instead of our faded Kodak kitchen. You buy the shoes, regardless of size, then push them into my hands.
‘What are these for?’ I ask.
‘Your birthday,’ you say. ‘You are a six, aren’t you?’
I nod, stunned that you remember, that you ever knew in the first place.
‘Well, put them on, then.’
Without argument, I pull off my scuffed ballet flats and slip on scarlet heels. Cinderella-like, they fit, and you drop my old shoes into a bin and insist I wear these for the rest of the day: ‘For ever!’ Then pull me, clip-clopping along cobbled streets, back to the seafront for all the fun of the fair.
I should have taken photos, Edie – the almost-thirty- and fifty-year-old, dressed for the opera, or cocktails, but wielding not champagne flutes but plastic hammers, playing Cracky Crab and Whack-A-Mole, pushing coppers into the Tuppenny Falls and silver into the slot machines, crossing our fingers for a row of cherries or gold bars. But maybe we didn’t seem strange at all, not in this town. And I could see then why you wanted to come; wondered, in fact, why you hadn’t before, hadn’t moved here, even, this sanctuary for the strange, for the misfits and the differently magnificent. So that my heels, and your hat – some concoction you found in a box in the attic that contrives to look like a dismembered cormorant – barely warrant a second glance.
‘Nina lived here,’ you tell me then. ‘Well, her lover did. I visited once. She brought the two of us – me and Lawrence – on the pretext of a day at the beach. Instead we ate lemon cake and drank soda while they canoodled on the chaise longue. He – Daddy – raged when he found out.’
‘Who told him? Lawrence?’
You pause then, let out a laugh, a short, incredulous sound. ‘No. Me. I wanted to shock him, I think. Look how that worked out.’
Of course, you. You who stamped through life making so much noise, making your presence known, blazed through it like it was your job to light the world. ‘Where?’ I ask quickly. ‘I mean, where did she live?’
You shrug, look around at the rows of stucco fronts and iron railings, try desperately to jog your drink- and dream-addled memory. ‘There,’ you say, flapping a hand towards a four-storey end of terrace. ‘Yes, probably there.’
I indulge you, so taken are you with this.
‘I always thought you’d be gay,’ you say then, your voice tinged with disappointment. ‘All that wearing shapeless clothes, and traipsing round after Harry and locking yourselves in the bathroom together.’
‘Jesus, Edie. Really?’
‘What? I’m just saying. Would it have been such a bad thing?’
‘What, having a lesbian lover?’ I pause. ‘Well, you’d know.’
‘Touché.’ You smile wryly. ‘Better than bloody Jimmy, anyway.’
‘Touché,’ I concede.
But when I try to imagine Harry and me, picture us, all I can see is that sterile, staid six-year-old kiss; all I can feel is the fury and fire of Tom’s lips on mine, and I have to turn away, my cheeks heat-filled.
‘She wrote a book, you know.’
‘Who did? Nina?’
‘No, her lover! God, are you even listening?’
‘Yes, I . . .’
‘A children’s book. Surprised you haven’t come across it. What was it called? Something about a fairy. She had a strange name.’
‘The fairy?’
You bristle again at my idiocy, or your lack of alcohol. ‘No, the lover. Porter. Or Piper – that was it – Piper Something.’
I shake my head. I don’t know of any Pipers, haven’t come across one stacked between Blyton and Bagnold and Dahl.
‘You should write one,’ you say then.
‘What?’ I look at you, assuming this is a joke, or a throwaway remark, another of your you’re amazing, I adore your work, you’re touched comments that you dole out like penny chews. But your eyes brim with belief, your head nods like a dashboard dog.
‘Yes, you should. Write something,’ you say. As if it is that easy. As if I could have said to you, all those years ago, paint something, and not be met with a roll call of reasons why not.
‘Write what?’
‘God, I don’t know,’ you say. ‘I’m pictures, not words. Something brilliant and tragic. Jane Eyre,’ you suggest.
‘I think that one’s taken.’
‘You know what I mean.’
I pause, allowing this chink in. ‘Maybe,’ I say.
‘That means no.’
‘That means maybe. I haven’t thought about it before.’
This is a lie, of course. I have thought about it ever since Harry made that bet. Have tried, and balled it up and pushed it to the bottom of the bin so that it can’t taunt me, tell me I am a fool for even thinking I might pull this off.
‘Do it,’ you say. ‘For me. For my birthday present.’
‘That doesn’t give me much time,’ I say, swiftly changing the subject – your trick, I think.
‘Christ, don’t remind me,’ you sigh. ‘Fifty. I know I’ve said it before, but bloody hell. I need a drink.’
‘You need food.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ you insist. ‘I ate on the train.’
‘You ate an apple and four Minstrels,’ I point out. ‘And anyway, I need food.’
‘Fine. You eat, I’ll drink.’
‘
Fine,’ I agree. One drink, I think. One drink is nothing, in the Edie scheme of things.
But one Merlot turns into two, and then a bottle. Then you run out of cash and have left your card in the room, so we return to the hotel bar where we can put everything on a tab.
‘We could just get a bottle in the Co-op,’ I suggest. ‘Take it up to the room.’
‘Dear God, have I taught you nothing?’ And with that you dismiss me to a bar stool, and order a bottle of Fleurie, determined to drink into the night, because your appetite is whetted and your tongue loosened and you have too much to say – everything to say.
‘I mean it,’ you tell me again. ‘You have to bloody write.’
‘I don’t have to do anything,’ I point out. Pointlessly, it seems.
‘What, so you’re happy as you are?’
I bristle at the truth of this. But still, seventeen again, I push it. ‘And how am I, exactly?’
‘Second-hand art,’ you say. ‘Like those people who paint Hirst’s dots for him. You’re just helping, you’re not doing.’
‘Maybe I want to just help.’
You shake your head. ‘No, you don’t. You’re like me,’ you insist.
I am nothing like you, I want to reply, but I swallow the thought and let you go on.
‘You need to create. You think I don’t know you, Di, but I do. I always have. Stories: that’s all you lived for. Still do. And you’re not making one of your own in the real world, so why not do it on paper?’
‘What do you mean, I’m not making one?’
You pour yourself another glass. Top up a slug of mine. ‘You can’t tell me living at the Lodge is the stuff of fairy tales.’
‘No . . . I—’
‘So if you’re going to stay with Terry and fucking June, at least write yourself a better ending.’
‘Who said I’m going to stay there?’
You snort. ‘It’s been six months.’
Seven, I think. But who’s counting? ‘And?’
‘And have you even looked at another place?’
‘Yes,’ I lie.
You pause, play with your rings, readjust your ridiculous hat. ‘It’s not normal.’
