by Joanna Nadin
My eyes widen, incredulous. ‘And living with you would be?’
You raise an eyebrow, sip your drink. ‘Well, I never asked. But, yes, actually. At least it’s your actual home.’
Living with you would be – was always – so far from normal I want to laugh, throw my hands up, or this drink at you; the kind of scene someone would write – that I could write. But instead I mumble that I am tired, and drunk, and need to lie down.
You pout, oblivious to my reasons. ‘But you’re the birthday girl.’
‘Not until tomorrow,’ I say, ‘and I won’t enjoy it if I’m hung-over.’
‘Go on, then,’ you sing-song. ‘Run along, little Alice in Wonderland, back up the rabbit hole to the real world.’
‘You’re not coming?’
You dangle the bottle in mid-air. ‘Still a glass left, darling.’
I smile thinly, pick up my bag, and my shoes, and tread barefoot across ornate carpet, welts on my heels, heading for the lift.
‘Don’t wait up,’ you call after me.
I don’t even bother to turn around.
I wake at four to a headache and an empty bed. I flick on the bedside lamp, but you’re not in the en suite, haven’t popped out for something – anything. The sheets are unrumpled, the cover still pulled up high.
You didn’t come home.
I sigh, pull on a jumper and my spare trainers, pad out of the door, down the dizzying vortex of a staircase and then peer into the bar in the hope you have fallen asleep there, that I will find you propped against the pumps, or in a corner somewhere, snoring with your glass still in hand.
But the bar is closed, the chairs empty.
I know then, in one jolting moment, what Angela must have felt those nights Harry didn’t show up, and didn’t bother calling. The questions that must have played through her head. And for a second I wonder if you ever felt that, or would have done, had I ever given you reason. The fact that I am now here, worrying about you, suggests a negative. But this cold drip of disappointment does nothing to soothe me, offers me no solace.
What if you’ve been drugged?
What if you’ve been raped?
What if you’ve wandered drunk down the beach and waded in, been accidentally washed out to sea?
Or worse, on purpose.
A light flicks on and a voice – male, Polish, I think – asks, ‘Can I help you?’
I turn, squinting, towards it, shake my head. ‘I . . . have you seen a woman in a black dress? And a hat. She was wearing a hat.’
The man shrugs. ‘I only start shift at ten. No hat lady. Maybe she take hat off?’
I want to smile, at the thought you would ever do something so obvious. But even without the hat he would remember you, I think, would know you were the kind of woman who could, would, wear a hat indoors.
‘Sorry for disturbing you,’ I say.
‘Sure she will turn up,’ he tells me, nodding.
‘I’m sure she will,’ I reply.
But I’m not sure. Not sure at all. Whether you’re alive. Whether you’ll come back. And whether it will be alone or if you’ll have found another Jermaine or some other fuck-up to tag along.
I wait in the room, exhausting the individual sachets of coffee, and, when that runs out, some herbal tea that tastes like soap. But what it lacks in caffeine it makes up for in shuddering disgust, so that the result is much the same.
By six, I have written you a scene sordid and sex-filled, grateful only that, at nearly fifty, at least the morning-after pill will be redundant.
By seven, your channel-drowned body has washed up on the shoreline of my imagination, your feathered hat no more than flotsam now.
By eight, I am poised to call the police, fumbling in your purse for a photo, cursing myself for not carrying one, for rarely carrying a camera at all, when the door rattles in its jambs. ‘Di,’ comes the giggling stage whisper. ‘Di, are you awake?’
I drop your bag and yank open the door. ‘Edie?’ My instinct is to grasp you, hold you tight, the lost child returned, all the possibilities of kidnap dismissed now. But, like Angela, my relief is tempered with anger and instead I blurt out, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’
Your eyes widen, at that word on my lips, and at your own derring-do. ‘Di, it was marvellous,’ you tell me, pushing past and flopping down onto a bed. Mine, of course. ‘I met some men – some gays! I told them I was an artist – a sculptress! – and they told me they worshipped my hat and I was the new queen of their fairyland. Then we went to a club – I forget where, it was underground, or in a tunnel or something – and I danced in a cage. A cage! Bloody pooped now, though.’
I feel the adrenaline that has carried me through the last four hours now ball my fingers into fists. ‘Seriously?’ I say. ‘You were clubbing?’
‘Yes, clubbing,’ you echo. ‘Like the old days. Like London. Toni would have loved it.’
‘Huh,’ is all I manage to that. And anything else would have been overkill anyway. Because within a minute, you are deep in drunken sleep.
On my birthday.
My thirtieth birthday.
I get home early afternoon, David picking me up from the station without question. Angela looks up from her hydrangeas as the car pulls into the drive, stands to offer me a hand and a head tilt.
‘I’m sorry you fought,’ she says.
‘It wasn’t a fight,’ I say. ‘It was just . . . Edie.’
She smiles. Not gloating, like you assume. I know you assume. Rather understanding. ‘Well, there’s cake in the kitchen,’ she says briskly. ‘And the kettle’s just boiled. Come down when you’re ready.’
At this, I feel my throat tighten and tears prick my eyes.
‘Happy birthday,’ she says.
David touches my arm. ‘Yes, happy birthday, Di.’
I could hug him. Could bury my face in the flannel shirt and his shoulder and sob. Beg him to adopt me.
But instead I swallow it down, and then later, after we have toasted my health and happiness with tea and Victoria sponge, after we have eaten crumpets for supper in front of the telly, watching the news and a game show and a rerun of something I never saw in the first place, I scrabble through the recycling for last week’s Walden Reporter, slope to my room and search the small ads for flats to let.
Less than a month later, David helps me move into a tiny one-bedroom flat on Castle Street, the downstairs half of a cornflower-painted and pargeted terrace. The last tenants have left a bed, and I have a sofa from Sworders auction house and some old pots and pans that Angela claims she never uses. And, more than that, I have a home of my own – my first. I send out change of address cards: to Jude, to Harry, to Tom, and, pushed through the letter box after a five-minute dither on the doorstep, to you.
Two weeks later an envelope drops onto my mat – an invitation to a private preview at Kettle’s Yard. I don’t go to the opening, don’t want to stand idly by while you preen and parade, or worse, try to parade me. Instead I view your pieces on an early Saturday when I know you will still be in bed, leave a note in the visitors’ book. A week after that you text me to meet in the cafe and I agree. Our conversation is stilted for minutes, then slips back into banter, through tantrum and back again. I tell you you drink too much. You tell me I don’t drink enough, live enough. I snap that I’ve started writing but that no, I won’t show it to you. Won’t show anyone until it is done. And you sulk until I let you see my notebook, and I sulk when you worry my handwriting slopes the wrong way, a sign, you claim, of psychopathy.
And so our merry dance of break-up and make-up whirligigged on, an over-loud, over-bright carousel ride. Unable to live with each other, but incapable of striking out on our own.
Angela told me once that you didn’t deserve me. Harry, that we were co-dependent – a word she has learned from that self-help book and taken to heart.
Do we depend on each other? Did we?
I don’t think so.
However much I tried to den
y it, and you tried to destroy it, it was more than that.
It is more than that.
You have to believe that, Edie.
Numbers
September 2001
As a child, I had a list: a neatly ordered though constantly shifting ranking of who I loved the most in the world; who I would save, variously, from quicksand, from a volcano, or from the jaws of the big, bad wolf – all perils that loomed large in my imagination then and, I assumed, would take up an awful lot of time and resourcefulness in adulthood.
When I was four, in the Before days, the order was this:
1. You.
2. Toni.
3. Denzil.
4. The black lady in the corner shop who slipped me strawberry bonbons or a liquorice twist while you were calculating alcohol content per penny.
5. Chinese Clive, who had reigned at number three for seven consecutive months, but dropped two places since a) using up my excitingly striped Aquafresh toothpaste, leaving me with your cough-drop-tasting Euthymol, and b) kissing you with his minty-fresh breath.
By the time I was seven you had slipped too, to a sorry fourth place behind Tom and Harry, behind even that toy monkey I clung to, whose ranking was adjusted only according to his behaviour in the stories I wove for him. Though you were, at least, above the dead raven, who lacked the poseability for games or the malleable tummy to accompany me for naps.
You knew, too. You had asked me, as you were wont to do when happy-drunk or hung-over-sad. ‘Who do you love best?’ you demanded. And I looked you in the eye and said, without malice, but without skipping a single beat, ‘Harry’.
‘Charming,’ you replied.
‘Then Tom,’ I continued. ‘Then Charles, then you.’
You fiddled with a cigarette, pulled up a slipped camisole shoulder. ‘But I love you most of all,’ you said, awaiting an adjustment.
But I had merely shrugged, not for a moment having assumed anything less, in my audacity.
‘Most of the time,’ you clarified.
And so the small, black seeds of doubt were sown; no more than shrivelled pips then, but ones that sprung shoots, tendrils climbing like bindweed, clutching on to every imagined slight, every evident spurn.
The affair, of course, sent my list into a whirl of uncertainty. Your transgression was an attack on all those whom I had held dear, held tight like coins in a torn pocket, so you tumbled in punishment. But when Tom and Harry voluntarily extricated themselves, who was there permanently to place at all but a long-dead bird and a plush toy?
Your restoration was slow, slight, and in any case stalled by Jimmy, who took over management of my preferences of friends as he did food, as he did almost everything on which I might have held an opinion. But in all of this you were there, if begrudgingly, at least somewhere; you were never crossed off entirely. Others came and went – Jimmy, of course; Jude, briefly, when I was her golden child, clay to be moulded in her mirror image, until she realized I had other plans, or smaller ones; a man I met in the library the Christmas after I turned thirty, and who I took home and fucked slowly on a sofa dappled with fairy lights, who I thought might be a gift, but two days later made clear he was promised to someone else – but you were a constant presence, a recipient of my love and promise to pull from sinking mud or snapping jaws even as reason told me to let you go and save myself. Not that I would ever have told you that.
More fool me.
By the summer of 2001, you have edged your way back up to provisional prime position, though this, I admit, is down to lack of participants as much as anything else. But we have, yet again, fostered a strange balance: you bring round wine that I pretend to drink, and I cook food you push around your plate to give the effect of eating. On my way home from David and Angela’s I call round, just to say hello, I insist. Then you tell me to make myself at home, while you finish whatever fat-nippled breast or buttock it is you are sculpting right now, but instead I crouch down and pull Cif and a squeegee from the cabinet under the sink, and begin to rescue the kitchen from the wasteland it has become, yet again; will become, within another month.
But then someone appears; a long-lost runner crosses the Atlantic and shows up on our doorstep, bearing belated birthday gifts – saltwater taffy, a silver-dipped shell on a chain, and, best of all, a tow-headed two-year-old who goes – to his grandmother’s visible disdain – by the name of Chuck.
Tom and his boy have come home. And within minutes, they are both at the top of the table.
I should pull an Angela face, recoil at this miniature, this mannequin, or at least feel nothing. But when he is handed to me on a sun-parched summer lawn – this crumpled, babbling boy – I am instantly smitten.
‘You should see him,’ I tell you. ‘He’s adorable.’
‘Tom or the child?’ you say, peevishly poking at oil-slicked spaghetti as if it might at any moment come alive.
‘Oh, ha ha. Chuck,’ I say. ‘I read him some Seuss. Fox in Socks and The Sneetches. He didn’t fidget at all. And I think he likes me.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ you say. ‘You’re turning into one of them.’
‘One of who?’
‘Bridget bloody Jones. All thirty-something and desperate. Like your eggs will overboil.’
‘My eggs are fine,’ I snap. ‘And anyway, I’m not saying I want a child. I just like this one. He’s . . . I don’t know.’
But I do know. He’s Tom. Like someone made a Shrinky Dink of him and put it in the oven. Made him small enough to hold onto, to keep. ‘It’s so odd,’ I say. ‘I thought he’d be more like her. But he’s not.’ Not once he’s out of those bloody button-down shirts, anyway.
‘What’s she like?’ you ask then. ‘Like a boiled moose? Or is that just in your dreams?’
I ignore both your petulance and insight. ‘She’s like a Kennedy,’ I say. ‘You know, pretty. Neat. Thin.’
‘Angela must love her, then.’
Not as much as she should. But then she’s stolen her boy across the sea and far away, is moving him further still into upstate New York.
On this travesty, Angela and I are in seething agreement.
‘It’s for the children, really,’ he says. ‘I’d rather stay in the city.’
I miss it at first, that plural, fail to recognize its fecundity, its fat belly, so at odds with her flatness. But then it is ink on water and in the Rorschach blot I see that Hansel and Gretel snapshot perfection. Two parents, two children, and a picket-fenced house in the commutable suburbs. An all-American, and once-mine, dream.
‘She’s pregnant?’ I blurt.
He glances over the lawn from our hideout under the tree house – for we are too shy, if not creaking-limbed, to climb it now – and looks back, red-faced. ‘Don’t say anything,’ he says. ‘I haven’t told Mum. It’s still early.’
‘Well, congratulations,’ I manage.
‘It wasn’t planned, exactly,’ he says. And I know it should be cold comfort, not consolation, but I clutch on to it anyway, a chink in her impeccable armour.
‘Chuck will be thrilled,’ I say.
We watch as he totters across to Harry, gives her a handful of muddy flowers torn from a pansy patch that she holds out at arm’s length as if they might bite her. ‘I guess,’ he replies, his syntax and accent hung with hot-dog carts and Central Park.
I push it then. Need to know. ‘So are you, you know . . . thrilled?’ I ask.
He laughs, as if this is absurd, as if it matters. ‘Enough. It’s hard, I guess.’
‘Having children?’
He looks at me, and I see the seventeen-year-old standing awkward in front of me, see a fifteen-year-old reflected in his eyes. ‘Being grown-up,’ he says.
I feel the pitter-pat of cat feet, a tickle on my spine, and have to exhale to expel them, to stop my hand reaching up to his cheek, to stopper up the words I really want to say, fumble for something else, anything to defuse this.
But he lights the touchpaper. ‘Are you happy?’ he
asks.
The air closes in on me. Am I? I think. Am I happy? I haven’t asked myself, haven’t dared even to think it in case I find my life lacking. Still. ‘It’s good to be back here,’ I say. But it comes out as a question, an upturn on the last word, and I try to substantiate it. ‘London didn’t . . . it wasn’t . . . good for me. Jimmy—’
‘I know,’ he says.
‘You do?’
‘Mum told me.’
‘Oh.’ My voice has slipped from query to fear.
‘It’s OK. Not the gory details.’ He smiles quickly.
I nod. Only because she doesn’t know them, I think.
‘Did he . . . no, don’t tell me. I couldn’t bear it. I’m . . . I’m just glad things worked out. You know, with Mum and Dad and coming back and everything.’
‘Me too.’
‘So you are, then?’
My face forms a question mark.
‘Happy?’ he repeats.
‘Getting there,’ I say. Then, remembering, ‘And work’s good. I mean, not just work, but I’m writing.’
‘Really?’
I nod.
‘Fuck. That’s . . . I don’t know why I’m surprised. I always . . . I knew you would.’
‘Well . . . I am.’ Or trying. I have sentences scribbled on serviettes, strange names copied out on the backs of envelopes, newspaper stories snipped from their chip-wrapper destiny, all saved and stuck down in a ring-bound notebook. I have opening lines, chapters, even, but no happy ending. No end at all.
‘And . . . are you seeing anyone?’
The air closes again, so that I am swimming in soupy heat. ‘I . . .’ There have been men. The one from the library, another I met in John Lewis, who handed me his number in the lift between Lingerie and Homeware and then disappeared into a display of Wedgwood. And now there is another – a neighbour, Mark. A man I have not kissed, not even suggested I might. Because he is too quiet, too kind, too there. He, though, has made his feelings clear.
‘No,’ I say. ‘No one. Are you?’ I say.
‘Seeing someone?’
‘No.’ I laugh, grateful for the easy cue. ‘Happy, I mean.’
