Expectation

by Anna Hope

  ‘All right.’ Sarah reaches down, scoops Ruby on to her lap, strokes her skull with an absent hand. There is quiet, the sound of Ruby’s motorboat purring. Lissa finishes the last of her food.

  ‘Your generation,’ her mother says quietly. ‘Honestly. You baffle me, you really do.’

  ‘And why is that?’ Lissa pushes away her bowl.

  ‘Well. You’ve had everything. The fruits of our labour. The fruits of our activism. Good God, we got out there and we changed the world for you. For our daughters. And what have you done with it?’

  The question hangs heavy in the summer air. Sarah closes her eyes, as though summoning something from the depths.

  ‘When I was at Greenham. Standing there with thousands of other women. Hand in hand around the base. You were there, beside me. Do you remember?’

  ‘I remember.’

  A dusty campsite. A fence, covered with children’s toys. Other children who knew all the words to all the songs. Ruddy-faced women huddled beneath tarpaulins drinking endless cups of tea. Her mother’s friends: Laurie and Ina and Caro and Rose. No men. The only men the soldiers who patrolled on the other side of the wall, their guns held against their chests.

  She remembers a terrible blue dawn when the police came and dragged her mother out of the tent by her hair. She remembers the fear that her mother would be shot.

  She remembers crying, asking to go home. Sarah taking her to a phone box and calling Lissa’s father, who came to get her in his black Volvo. She remembers the look on Sarah’s face as her father drove away. The disappointment. As though she had expected more.

  ‘We fought for you. We fought for you to be extraordinary. We changed the world for you and what have you done with it?’

  Lissa stares at the wall where the wisteria fights for space with the ivy.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, a tight, familiar feeling rising in her chest. ‘If I let you down.’

  ‘Oh God,’ says Sarah, grinding out her cigarette in the remains of her lunch. ‘Don’t be so bloody dramatic. That’s not what I meant at all.’

  She takes the overground from Gospel Oak to Camden Road. It is full, this Saturday afternoon, packed with families heading home from the Heath. Children yowl and carp, their faces pink and smeared with the remains of sun cream and ice cream and crumbly bits of picnic, their parents harassed and rosy, a couple of bottles down. Women her age, fresh from the Ladies’ Pond, the ends of their hair damp. At Camden she manages to find a seat. The heat is terrible, the day overdone. Beside her, a teenager, the whites of his eyes red, blasts music from his headphones.

  The train empties out at Hackney Central and Lissa makes her way across the park. Here – the province of the young – things are just getting going, the barbecues cranking up, people in groups of five or ten or twenty, the drift of cigarette smoke and charcoal and weed and the undertow of booze and coke and the night to come. She passes two young women, skirts hitched to their waists, holding on to each other and cackling as they piss behind a tree.

  Her flat is just adjacent to the park, in the basement of the old house. She moved down here when she was still with Declan, who gave her the money for the deposit and helped her with rent. Since the break-up she has managed to hang on to it through a precarious combination of her life modelling, the call-centre work, the occasional acting job and some tax credits to top it up. She has stumbled through, has survived. Just.

  Inside it is mercifully cool, and she drops her bag in the tiny hall, goes into the kitchen, fills a glass, and drinks down water from the tap. On the other side of the garden wall someone is being sung to – Happy Birthday, sing the half-cut voices, to youuuuuuuuu!!!

  She lies down in the bedroom and shuts her eyes. Her head hurts – from the alcohol, from her mother, from the sun. We changed the world for you and what have you done with it?

  She knows what Sarah thinks. That she has wasted time – fumbled the baton in the intergenerational feminist relay.

  What she should have said – Our best. We’re just doing our fucking best.

  The tinny blare of music from the park is irritating her and she goes next door to the living room, closing the blinds against the low sun.

  She slides a DVD from her bag – Autumn Sonata. Sarah had a copy in the dusty TV room, a Bergman box set. The cover is an intense close-up of the two actresses. She weighs it for a moment in her hand, then takes it and her computer over to the couch and slides it in.

  At first she is bored, put off by the simplistic, static camera work, the clunky monologues to camera, and considers turning it off, but then Ingrid Bergman sweeps in and the film ignites. It is like watching a boxing match between two heavyweights, evenly matched, round after round of brutal pummelling, as a mother and a daughter go head to head, raking over the bones of their relationship. Half an hour in and Lissa is aware she is holding her breath. By the end of the film she is a small tense ball, arms locked around her knees.

  When it is finished, she gets up and walks around the living room, feeling the blood come painfully back into her limbs. She rolls herself a cigarette and pulls up the window, sitting on the sill as she smokes. It has grown dark outside, and the night air lifts her skin in her vest top. The smell of petrol mingles with the smell of fried food, the charcoal of the barbecues drifting from the park.

  She thinks of Nathan, of his face in the library. I needed therapy after that film. The sort of thing that most men don’t say. But then, Nathan has never been most men.

  It was down to Sarah that she met him. The first time was just after she turned twelve, when she refused to sit for her mother any more, and since Saturdays were Sarah’s painting day, Sarah found herself a different model and Lissa was left to herself.

  After a few weeks of watching crappy Saturday-morning telly, she began leaving the house and walking down the hill to Camden without telling Sarah where she was going. Kids not much older than her were hanging out in groups on the canal. She took to buying a Coke from a newsagent’s and then sitting on the bridge to watch them. Nathan was one of those kids. No particular tribe, just a North London teenager who hung out and smoked weed on a Saturday afternoon on the canal.

  Once, on a chill afternoon, he came over to her. Are you all right? You look cold. She admitted she was and he lent her his jumper. It was big and warm and he had done that teenage thing of making holes for his thumbs, and they shared a can of cider. He gave her her first cigarette.

  A few years later they would see each other at Camden Palace. They would hug each other – the way you did then, with your whole wide self – you could tell each other you loved each other and mean it, high and platonic in your tracksuit on a Friday night. Then he went off to university and she never had his number and she didn’t see him for years, until that night at Sarah’s opening, bumping into him just after graduation, introducing him to Hannah. When she was already with Declan.

  He must be nearly forty now.

  She takes out her phone and composes a text.

  Bergman slayed me. Thank you, I think.

  She puts a kiss. Takes it away. Adds it again. Deletes the text. Writes another.

  How did you know?

  Deletes it. Puts down her phone.

  How did you know? Did you know? Did you know it would make me feel like this? Can I call you? I need to speak.

  She picks up her phone again and writes:

  Thanks for the Bergman. Loved it. Liss. X

  Soulmates

  2008–9

  The night of Hannah’s wedding Cate has sex with the only other single person on her table, one of Nathan’s cousins, a thirty-eight-year-old banker in the City. They get slaughtered on cava during the reception and fuck in the toilets at the Pub on the Park. After that she meets him quite often. He calls her sometimes at eleven o’clock at night and she goes over to his house. He owns a whole house to himself, which he lives in alone, on the far reaches of London Fields, over towards Queensbridge Road. He has already flipped a house in Dals
ton. He has a kitchen with a huge range on which he never seems to cook, as there are always takeaway packets filling up the bin.

  Mostly they have sex there, in his house, but sometimes, if he is away on business, which he often is, they meet in hotels in Manchester or Birmingham or Newcastle, rooms of featureless luxury. They watch porn together. Having rarely watched porn before, she is surprised by how much she enjoys it. Once, they have sex in front of his computer in front of another couple who are having sex in their room in front of their computer somewhere in the southern states of the USA. It definitely turns her on.

  This arrangement continues for several months. They never meet in the daytime. He never asks her to a gallery, or out for dinner. He is her secret. She feels shame when she thinks of him. Sometimes he goes quiet for a few weeks and she knows he is having sex with someone else. Sometimes she wants to hate him for not being someone else. But he is not a bad man. He is not a wanker. He has many good qualities. He just does not want her to be his girlfriend and, in truth, she does not want him to be her boyfriend either.

  One day he stops calling. She tries him a couple of times, then waits for the text that will signal he is ready to resume intimacy. Instead she receives a short, polite message that tells her he has met someone and is getting engaged.

  She is thirty-three years old. She understands that this man has taken up a space in her life, space that could have been filled by a proper partner. She has not had a proper partner since she left Lucy, in a forest in Oregon, almost ten years ago. But then, in the intervening years, she has come to suspect that Lucy was never really hers.

  She is seized by a sense of desperation. She will do Guardian Soulmates. It is the only sensible option. She chooses a photograph of herself from Hannah’s hen do in Greece. It is taken from a distance and she is sitting on a wall and she doesn’t look too fat. The drop-down option gives her pause:

  Women seeking Men.

  Men seeking Women.

  Women seeking Women.

  Men seeking Men.

  For simplicity’s sake, she chooses number one. She calls herself LitChick, talks about her love of books, of politics, of Modernist writers, of the history of the East End.

  She goes on a date with a guy who is in a band. He is skinny and short and Scottish and wearing black jeans. He has no bottom. His eyes scope the room behind her while he speaks. After one beer he gets a text and stands up. Gotta go, he says, and leans over to kiss her on the cheek.

  She travels to Covent Garden, to a huge outdoor pub in the plaza that is full of tourists. She meets a man in a suit who looks shifty and depressed. He is recently divorced, he tells her. His wife wants custody of the kids. When she is with him she feels as though she can’t breathe. She excuses herself to go to the toilet and walks quickly out of the pub towards the Tube.

  She carries on, more dates, more men, aware that this is not good for her – that it hurts her – but like gambling, like an addiction, she is compelled to carry on.

  In despair, one afternoon, she goes downstairs to Lissa’s flat.

  She is nervous as she knocks. I wouldn’t have come, she wants to say, unless I was desperate. I know you don’t want to see me. I know you’re still angry.

  But Lissa, when she opens her door, is pleasant enough.

  She shows Lissa her profile. Jesus, says Lissa. Do yourself a favour. With Lissa’s help she chooses another picture – one closer up, of her laughing.

  And boobs, says Lissa.

  Really?

  Definitely a bit of boob.

  They craft a different profile, one that sounds less serious. You want to sound as though you’re OK without a partner, says Lissa. Nothing scares them off like need.

  She wonders when and where Lissa learned these rules.

  This time she is more successful. Lots of men seem to want to date her. She meets a man – good-looking in an unobtrusive way. He has ginger hair and glasses. Her heart rises when she meets him. They have a drink and then they go to a restaurant. They argue about Philip Roth. He writes freelance book reviews while temping. He takes his glasses off and wipes them quite often. It is a tic she decides is endearing. He is small, but she doesn’t mind. They finish dinner and pay half each. They kiss lightly on the lips – the tiniest bit of tongue – and say how great it was and go their separate ways. She hears nothing from him. She checks her computer constantly. She sends him a message. Another one. She starts to feel she might be going mad. After a while she sees he is active on there. He has changed his profile. Changed his picture. He says he would like to meet someone who likes books.

  In these moods everything is black. In these moods all men are damaged monsters. As is she. Everyone tells her that everyone meets online nowadays, cheering her on from the sidelines, but in these moods she knows it is just the leftovers. The leavings. She cannot imagine Lissa, for instance, ever going on there to find a man.

  She shows Lissa the pictures of the men. These leavings. These leftovers. Listen, says Lissa. You’re going for the wrong ones. They’re all too skinny. Too cerebral. What you want is a bear. What about him? She points to a man with a beard and bags underneath his eyes. He looks kind. Or him? She leans forward and clicks the profile of a tattooed man with a baseball cap. There you go, she says. Try him.

  They meet in the Dove on Broadway Market. They drink ale and talk about music and food. He is a chef. He knows nothing about politics or books. He has no A levels. He left school to go to catering college and he has lived in Paris and Marseilles and speaks fluent French. She feels she has been waiting her whole life to meet a man with no A levels who speaks fluent, backstreet Marseilles slang. He does not flirt. When he takes off his cap she sees that he is starting to go bald. She sees his small reflexive flinch as he monitors her reaction. But now, two hours into their date and several pints down, she has no reaction to monitor because by now she has decided that he could have lost all of his hair and she would not mind. He tells her that one day he would like to own a restaurant. No pretensions, simple cooking, local food. He asks her about herself. She tells him about her job, working for a small company, pairing community projects with big banks. The office on the edge of Canary Wharf. Queuing on her lunch break with all the suits. She makes it sound funny. She tells him about a five-a-side football match between local kids and a German bank. How the kids thrashed them. How pleased she was. He likes this story, as she hoped he would. About the Bengali women’s group she took to a meeting this morning at the Bank of America, nervously fluttering in their saris like beautiful birds.

  That’s good, he says. That’s good work. Those bankers. You should take that lot of bastards for whatever you can.

  Yeah, she smiles, I’ll drink to that.

  When he goes up to get more drinks she sees that he is trying to hold his stomach in. By the end of the third pint he has stopped trying. They kiss on the street outside, their hands in each other’s hair.

  They go back to his. It is a large studio in a run-down block overlooking the canal. He has a futon and a wall of records. He plays her vintage reggae and opens a bottle of wine. The bed is messy and he hastily covers it with a throw.

  I wasn’t expecting anyone back here, he says. She believes him, and she likes him even more. They are hungry and he says he will cook. She watches him chop vegetables with startling efficiency. He must be drunk but his knife does not slip. His tattoos. His wide forearms. Lissa was right. What she needed was a bear.

  He cooks pasta with capers and chilli and fresh tomatoes. It is unbelievably delicious. When they have eaten they have sex on the unmade bed. She is astonished by how lovely he is to fuck.

  In the morning the sun rises over the gas tower, over the canal. She counts his tattoos; he tells her the story of each one.

  And what’s this? he says, catching her wrist, tracing her spider with his fingertip.

  Oh, that? she says, pulling her hand away. Just a nineties thing.

  Three months later she is pregnant. Nine months
later they are married. Seventeen months later she is living in Canterbury.

  It is as though life has decided for her. Has picked her up and turned her round and deposited her a long, long way from home.

  2010

  Cate

  ‘Come on,’ she says brightly to Tom in his high chair, where he sits solemnly eating a banana. ‘We’re going on a trip today. To see Hannah!’

  Sam looks up from his phone. ‘It’s Saturday,’ he says.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Saturday is my day.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But I want to see Hannah and she works in the week. I thought you’d be pleased. You can go back to bed.’

  ‘I mean …’ He pushes his baseball cap back on his head. ‘I was going to go to Mum’s, but if you’re sure. Where are you meeting her?’

  ‘In Hampstead. On the Heath.’

  ‘London?’ He stares at her, uncomprehending. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I miss her. I miss London. And Tom’s growing so much, and she misses him and …’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I mean, with everything … I just – can’t imagine that’s true.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well – if you were Hannah, would you miss Tom?’

  She looks down at her hands, takes a breath. ‘He’s her godson. And yes, I think I might. They say being around babies is good for women trying to conceive.’

  Tom giggles and she looks up. He is grinning at them both, clapping his hands together, his latest trick.

  She sources those little Tupperware cartons she bought, back when she thought she was going to mash and purée and blend his food herself, finds them at the back of the cupboard, stacks two with apple slices, rice cakes, fills his sippy cup with water, the changing bag with nappies, gathers the sling, a change of clothes, bundles Tom into his coat, grabs her wallet and makes for the door. Sam rises to open it, staring sceptically at the world outside. ‘What shall I tell my mum?’ he says, scratching his beard.