by Anna Maxted
It makes sense. Lots of women fall in love with their best male friends. Partly because that means you actually get on, and partly because the freedom to fart at will is so enticing. With an ordinary boyfriend you have to hold it in for the first six months.
Clasping my guilty secret and the Daily Mail to my chest, I shuffle into work on Monday hoping to avoid Tina. I’m not fit to breathe the same air. Happily, I learn that she’s out of the office today, and that Lizzy is on a shoot. I sit at my desk like a Stepford employee and by lunchtime I’ve ruthlessly slashed my bullying feature to a miserly 1,200 words. That kind of thing is easier when you hate yourself. (Last week, when I didn’t yet realise I wanted Tina’s man, I regretfully hacked twenty-three words off it but Laetitia threw it back and threatened to kill it unless I cut the feature to a ‘readable length’.)
I deposit a hard copy on her desk and say tonelessly, ‘I’ll start my feature on How To Get Ahead When Your Boss Hates You this afternoon. Do you want anything from outside?’
Laetitia glowers at me and snaps, ‘I’ll get it myself, I’m not a frigging cripple.’
I glance aghast at the Editor, whose eight-year-old son has MS. Laetitia follows my gaze, sees the Editor standing by the photocopier with folded arms, and blanches. ‘Hasta la vista, baby,’ I think, wave at Laetitia, and walk out. She doesn’t say a word. She’s said enough already, I think coolly, as I step from the stuffy building into the cold air.
I wander around Covent Garden like – I fancy – a lost soul but more realistically, a lost tourist. After ten minutes of wandering I can no longer bear my own droopiness so I banish Luke from my head and walk briskly to Broadwick Street in Soho. I dash into the first art shop I see and start prowling. Aquamarine blue, deep violet, and ivory black – the paint names are richly seductive but I know less than nothing about art and can’t choose. Wistful watercolours or passionate oils? A vast expanse of canvas or a small sketch book? A huge bristle brush or a pencil? I check the price of a large canvas and – forget passing out, I nearly pass on.
Less is more, I tell myself sternly – despite fervently believing that more is more – and reach for a small palette of paints and a square canvas. Then I race back to work. Laetitia is not at her desk, and doesn’t reappear all afternoon, so I am excused from the usual errands and get a wodge of work done. At a conservative estimate, How To Get Ahead When Your Boss Hates You looks like romping home at 9,000 words. It is 6.02 and I’m wondering if I shouldn’t stay late – six ten perhaps? – to work on it, when the phone rings. ‘Yes?’ I say dully.
‘Helen?’ says my caller. ‘You alright? You sound like an old woman.’
I feel joyful and irked all squashed into one big dizzy ball. ‘Luke!’ I exclaim. ‘How are you?’ Luke tells me he’s fine. But he sounds as antsy as an ant in a pant. ‘What is it?’ I say.
‘I need to see you,’ says Luke. ‘Urgently. Can we meet?’
The blood roars in my ears and I squeak, ‘Yeah, sure, what, tonight?’
Luke says, ‘I’ll see you outside your office in fifteen.’
I tell him I’ll see him then, and do a full three minutes of working late. Urgently. What does that mean? Luke has realised that I am The One and wants to profess his undying love? He wants to borrow a fiver? If his affections have reverted to me, he must feel dreadful about Tina.
Suddenly I remember I have a shiny face and unplucked eyebrows so I spend nine minutes performing emergency cosmetic surgery. At 6.17 I stand back to survey the results and see I look exactly the same except matt. I gallop into the street cursing and run smackbang into Luke. ‘Whew!’ he gasps. ‘Check out the blusher! Wotcha Mr Punch!’ Then he laughs (alone) at his hilarious joke. ‘We’d better go to the Punch & Judy!’ he continues. ‘Ha ha!’
Am I really in love with this man? I wonder, confused. Tom wouldn’t be so crass. Not that crass is so bad. And Tom does have the capacity to be crass. The ketchup trick wasn’t exactly sophisticated. But then, Tom’s crassness makes me laugh and want to kiss him whereas Luke’s doesn’t. Probably because Tom knows me well enough to understand that I graciously pardon crimes of crassness against others but will in no way forgive them against myself.
Luke and I descend into the bubbling cityboy cauldron of Covent Garden’s Punch & Judy and I am tongue-tied with confusion. Luke grins wickedly and says, ‘I’ve got news for you that you’re going to like.’ Oh God. I am The One. He trots off to buy me a drink and there is a sick feeling in the pit of my throat.
I watch Luke jostling at the bar and picking at his backside (I assume his briefs have ridden up) and I think, no. I can’t do this to Tina. Not now, not ever. There are some rules you don’t break and I don’t mean wearing leggings in public. Naturally I am agog to hear Luke’s declaration, as I am a woman who never gets proposed to, not even by mistake. No man has ever said he loves me, and I can count the number of Valentine cards I’ve received on the thumb of one hand. (It was from my mother, the year I turned sixteen and decided that this February I was going to do what all the other girls did – only I had to buy it, stamp it, and address it.) Still. I’ve survived this long without an I love you, I think I’ll be able to struggle on. I won’t let Luke embarrass himself – it would be gratifying but unfair.
Luke waves a beer in front of my nose and sits down, still grinning like a maniac. You don’t smile in London! As Luke sits, I leap up like a spring salmon whose bottom has just been groped by a trout and gabble, ‘Luke, I know what you’re going to say, but I think it’s best I don’t hear it. What you did for Tina at Vivienne’s party was very sweet, if a little naff, and I’d hold out for her because I know she’s keen, it’s just that she needs time, alright, okay, bye!’ As I flee the besuited crowds I glance back, once, at Luke and see he is still clutching the two beer bottles. The expression on his face is utter incomprehension.
But curiously, no trace of devastation.
I collapse into a cab, still clutching the box of paints I bought earlier. I hold the art shop bag tightly and think, no Bud for me thanks – just a bloody martyr on the rocks. I might as well burn myself at the stake. Hey, maybe if I incinerate myself in a sack my father will pick me up at the other end. ‘Yeah, Mr Bradshaw, parcel for you, we had to unwrap it to check the contents, it’s labelled “your daughter” but she looks like a pointless heap of ashes, shall we return to sender?’ I imagine my father’s irritation at being distracted from a heavenly hole in one, and slump in my seat. Oh, me and Dad are alright, but I’m still a reject. I’ve spurned Luke’s advances about as elegantly as a ballerina in wellington boots. I was an ego-shimmer away from betraying one of my closest friends. Well, at least everyone else will have a nice life. I feel a vicious urge to conpound my misery, so I redirect the cab driver.
‘This is a surprise,’ quavers Nana Flo, undoing the heavy chain on her flimsy door. ‘And what can I do for you?’ A rhetorical question.
‘I didn’t get a proper chance to talk to you at Vivienne’s yesterday,’ I shout over the television’s volume, ‘so I came to see you.’ Nana Flo glances longingly at the screen and says she’ll set the video. ‘Shall I make tea?’ I say, hoping she’ll say no. My voice sounds strange because I’m breathing through my mouth – Nana doesn’t believe in opening windows and her flat pongs even by Luke’s standards.
‘The teapot’s on the side,’ says Nana. Her ankles click as she clutches the TV Times and kneels painfully on the carpet.
‘Shall I set it, Nana?’ I say anxiously, but she banishes me to the kitchen. Five minutes on, Nana is sitting back in her recliner chair and I am perched like a paralysed parrot on the edge of her sofa.
But I know why I’m here. I want to talk to Nana about Grandpa and it can’t wait.
Maybe I’m a parasite who wants to soothe my pain by leeching off hers. Maybe understanding a fraction of her loss will diminish my own. Or maybe I just want to talk with my grandmother because I’m sick of the silence in our family.
Understandably, Nana is
surprised at my interest. She wants to know why I want to know. I tell her a vague but piquant tale about having lost the love of my life. (The tale is vague because I’m not sure if the love of my life is Tom or Luke but the cliché neatly covers both eventualities.) I suspect Nana doesn’t believe me – the rolling snort is some indication – but at least it gets her talking.
Florence and Gerald met at a bus stop. He told her he was a confirmed bachelor then three days later gazed into her wide blue eyes and asked her to marry him. They were engaged for ten months as Florence’s father wouldn’t allow them to marry sooner – and went to Torquay for their honeymoon. ‘There was barbed wire up, but I got through it and went in the water. I was so much in love, I was bouncing along,’ says Nana, sipping her tea. The picture is so unlike her that I stare at her skinny, wizened face, trying to imagine my grandmother as a young woman so much in love that she was bouncing along. After Gerald died, she knew she’d never remarry.
I gulp. ‘Why not, Nana?’ I say, sniffling.
‘He was such a wonderful husband, the short time I had him,’ she replies. Then, dry-eyed, she looks straight at me, weeping on her sofa, and says softly, ‘I couldn’t replace him.’
Nana is sharper than I give her credit for. She knows I am crying half for me. ‘So what’s wrong with you?’ she says, brusquely reverting to the Nana I know. Feeling ashamed in the presence of a woman who possesses the courage I lack, I tell her about Tom and I tell her about Luke. ‘Luke?’ she exclaims, her reedy voice so loud and incredulous that my china teacup clatters on its saucer. ‘Nonsense! That long-haired fool! He’s not for you! You’re jealous is what you are! Oh he’s pleasant enough, but I know feckless when I see it!’
As a minicab ferries me home, I wonder why – even with a hundred and twenty quids’ worth of new prescription lenses – I am always the last to see the obvious. Honestly. Talk about a prat.
Chapter 50
THERE’S A TIME in your life when you have to stop looking back and start looking forward because otherwise you’re going to walk down the road one day and bump into a lamp-post. But it’s not easy. When my father died I felt like the smooth carpet of my existence had been carefully positioned over a large hole. Until then I’d skipped carelessly around it, blind to its fateful presence.
And one sly day I stepped on it and fell, down, down, like Alice in a merciless Wonderland, dragging precarious everything in my wake, all of it chaos, toppling, crashing, falling, and I was consumed by madness, irrational whirling emotions from nowhere, I was wrenched from the assumed safety of my paper house, engulfed by a freak wave that lunged without warning from a glassy sea, wrecking all that I believed in and forcing me to start again at the beginning. How could I make sense of that lot if I didn’t look back?
And when I looked I saw that grief is a murky pool of endless depth, and in a year of wallowing you might barely dip your toe in the water. Me, I was afraid of drowning. I learned to swim slowly and I’m still learning. Now I realise that sometimes it’s only possible to go forward if you do look back. But not for ever. Talking to Nana Flo I realise how a person can be paralysed by their own past and stay bitter for a hundred years. So the evening after we speak, I decide to indulge in one last backward glance before plodding onward like a little donkey. As opposed to a big ass.
I bolt home feeling sparky. Laetitia is still under a cloud and ostentatiously talking about opportunities elsewhere, and suddenly the office is less of a gulag. And tonight I have a date with Tom. Admittedly, he doesn’t know about it but, as I don’t want a bucket of scorn tipped on my head, I don’t want him to know. I plan to come and go like the tooth fairy on a one-night stand. I wish him happiness and I need him to know it. But I can’t quite bring myself to wish his girlfriend happiness. I try to be gracious in defeat but keep hoping she’ll go bald. Possibly I wish Tom happiness on the condition he lives like a trappist monk. (Although he can keep his flat and I’ll allow civilian clothes.) He can’t reasonably expect more from me – in fact he should count himself lucky. Why, other women would be threading prawns into his curtains! This isn’t an option for me because I don’t sew.
I wait until dark. Then I tie my hair back, curl my eyelashes (he isn’t going to see me, but I’ve made the ‘I won’t score tonight, I’ll wear my grey period knickers’ mistake once too often) and dress in black. I look like a young Italian widow. Not. Then I scamper to the car carrying the art bumf. As this is an undercover assignment I briefly consider wearing sunglasses and wish the Toyota didn’t look so much like an unlicensed minicab. But I don’t and it does. I drive to Tom’s road speedily enough to make all four tyres and one pedestrian squeal. As I approach I slow to a crawl and click off my headlights. (Which is such a thrill I decide that if I don’t blossom at Girltime in the spring of Laetitia’s inevitable resignation I shall retrain as a private investigator. I’ve read the books.)
I check that the street is deserted, then slide out of the car, shut the door gently, and tiptoe towards Tom’s ground-floor flat. Warm yellow light spills from his windows although the curtains are tightly drawn. Holding my breath, I inch open the metal gate. It squeaks like a mouse at the mouse dentist. I wince, and creep up the garden path. The rabbit foot is hammering hard in my chest and I don’t know if my face is damp with drizzle or sweat.
Softly, I prop the bag containing the paintbox and canvas against the side of Tom’s green front door. I have stuck an envelope addressed to him on the bag. Should I ring his bell and do a runner? Leaving it for him to find by chance is risky – what if the postman’s named Tom? I’ll make an informed decision. First I need to assess the subject’s location and how long I have to make my getaway. I glance up at the chink at the top of the curtains and feel peeved at Tom for having curtains. He thinks he’s so fascinating to the outside world? He’s paranoid someone will spy on him?
At this point, I wonder if I shouldn’t have worn sensible shoes. A thought I dismiss instantly, as I regard sensible shoes on a par with bum bags. They mark you out as staid. I’m staid enough without advertising the fact. That said, sensible shoes are useful if and when you decide to climb on top of a metal bin to peer over the top of your ex-lover’s curtains. I check the bin is stable, and clamber up, using the window frame as support. I crouch on the slippery surface and, wobbling like a jelly on a surfboard, attempt to stand.
The lid instantly collapses and I and the bin crash to the ground in a great cacophonous din that rings through Kentish Town loud enough for the neighbours to prosecute.
I lie stunned on the grass with a chicken carcass resting on my stomach and a stinky crush of eggshell in my hair for three dizzy seconds before the front door swings open and Tom jumps out. I don’t know what the protocol is when found trespassing and spying and coated in rubbish so I say ‘Hi.’ Tom stares at me like I’m naked and I am about to tell him it’s rude to stare when he exclaims, ‘What are you doing?’
‘A bin project, what does it look like?’ I say crossly, moving my ankle to see if it’s broken.
‘Are you okay?’ he says, stooping. He has a strange expression on his face and I can’t tell if he’s smiling. I nod. Tom removes the chicken carcass from my stomach and drop-kicks it across the lawn. It leaves a patch of grease and flecks of old skin on my black top. Well thank heaven I curled my eyelashes. ‘Why didn’t you ring?’ says Tom, crouching.
‘I did ring,’ I squeak indignantly, ‘You told me to piss off!’
Tom looks embarrassed. He glances at his feet and stutters, ‘No, I meant ring the door, just now.’ My confusion must show because he blurts, ‘Luke didn’t tell you!’
‘Tell me what?’ I say, trying to wipe the rain off my glasses without smearing yolk in my eyes. I was hoping he’d notice the art bag but he’s walked straight past it. Which means instead of him romantically discovering it and bursting into nostalgic tears, I am going to have to plonkily point it out to him and it’ll be as awkward as sex in a bath. Your stomach bunches up and the aesthetics are
ruined.
‘Tell me what?’ I repeat, as Tom seems to have lost the power of speech.
He recovers it, abruptly, in a babble: ‘I wanted to tell you, I was going to tell you but I didn’t know how you’d react so I asked Luke yesterday and he said don’t chance it, he’d tell you and then the fucker disappears and I didn’t know if he’d told you and I couldn’t get hold of him and I wanted to tell you myself and—’
‘Tell me what?’ I shout, screwing up my face and trying to recall Luke’s exact words.
Tom picks a baked bean off my shoulder and says, ‘So if you don’t know, why are you here?’ Here we go.
‘I bought you a thing,’ I mumble, ‘it’s by the door.’
Tom looks as startled as if I’ve just bopped him on the head with a wholemeal bap. He jumps up, sees the bag, and rips open the envelope containing the note. He reads aloud,
‘It’s about time you started painting again, love Helen’
and to my dismay – although I knew this would happen and rue the day that Tom purchased a cheap bin – his mouth trembles and he blinks furiously. This makes me want to cry.
‘Your nose is running,’ I say sternly, trying to lighten the atmosphere, ‘do you want to wipe it on my sleeve?’ My binside manner obviously requires polish, because Tom covers his eyes with both hands and shakes his head. I look longingly at his square shoulders and tousled hair but decide it’s best to wait this one out. Feeling like a gorilla, I pick chicken bits off my top and eggshell from my hair. Then I gently touch Tom on the arm and say, ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
Tom looks up and smiles in a way that thrills me. He says softly, ‘You did a kind thing.’ Even though the rest of me is as sodden as a British Bank Holiday, my throat feels parched suddenly. My God! You don’t pick a baked bean off the shoulder of someone you despise or smile thrillingly at them (unless you roar past their Mini in your new Testarossa) – could it be that after months of banishment from the kindgom of love I am being ushered back to within its hallowed portals! I gulp and stare at Tom, willing him to speak. And he does.
