by Jemma Wayne
If it hadn’t been for meeting George, she probably would never have left Kenya. She thought about that sometimes, more lately, and wondered if she’d made the right choice. But when George had looked at her that first night, he seemed to see her, to know her. And after he extended his trip and they spent almost two weeks together under the sticky Kenyan sun, she found that she still both wanted him and felt wanted by him, yet, astonishingly, was not in control of him, nor controlled by him, and thus, in possession of such rare, mythical grounding and balance, agreed to follow him home.
There ensued the search for a flat they could share; the greedy immersion into each other’s circles of friends; and they spent long hours dissecting their childhoods with an honesty that startled and thrilled them, measuring their own experiences against the other, both finding providence in moments of symmetry. Throughout this sustained flurry of early exploration, then later commitment, engagement, marriage, Veronica knew that things with George were different from any relationship she’d had previously. She felt not so much his presence, but, simply, an unaccustomed lack of lack. As though he was the illusive piece that had always been missing.
It lasted a long time really, those years of contentment. Three, almost four years. Until slowly, gradually, the old sense of absence crept in again, and George felt it too, and they realised that what they lacked now, was a baby.
The only other occasion in which Veronica could remember feeling this way was the summer before Oman, before Kent, when she spent three weeks living in Sarah’s house, enjoying Sarah’s family, and forgetting that she wasn’t, in fact, Sarah.
“Lovely,” she smiled again to David.
Sarah
The text from David arrived just as Sarah reached her parents’ house: Dinner with Veronica next Thu. 8pm. See you after your session x
And just like that, all the calmness and clarity that she had spent the last hour assembling with her counsellor, dissolved into a dry mouth, shortness of breath, and heaving nausea. Telling her mother that she needed some air, Sarah threw open the back door, and without intention, found herself here, at the bottom of the garden.
The pool house that had existed twenty-two years earlier was now a dilapidated shed, but in truth, ‘pool house’ had always been a flattering fancy. Even back then, ‘in its heyday’, as her mother would say, the wooden slats of roof were regularly commandeered by nesting birds, the banister that enclosed a token deck dripped some kind of sticky substance which nobody could identify, and the three tiny rooms inside were never decorated with anything beyond a fridge. There were a few summers when Sarah’s mother ‘rolled up her sleeves’ and ‘got in gear’ and spent a day cleaning and clearing and fighting with cobwebs. Then she would bang the lounger cushions until most of the gunk from the previous summer had landed in the bushes, and fill the fridge with Cherry Coke and white chocolate Magnums, and stock the changing room with spare towels, declaring the pool house open. But then inevitably, being England and being June, it would rain for three weeks solid, and by the time they actually spent an afternoon swimming, the cushions would be sodden, and persistent spiders would have re-spun their webs, and the towels would somehow have developed a stale, slightly rotten odour. In the end, they dashed with dripping costumes inside the main area to grab ice creams from the fridge, and sometimes remembered to put their wet goggles and floats into the changing room, and didn’t even enter the third space at the back. None of them could quite say what that room was for anyway. It had the idea of bunk beds, except that the ‘beds’ were hard slats of painted wood, and there was no ladder to the top one, and there was only one miniscule window, not even big enough to climb through, and an inadequate single light bulb, and the door that led from the changing room sometimes got stuck.
It was Veronica who decided that this would be their chatting place. The Chatting Room. TCR, she called it. Whispered to Sarah, depending on her mood, either as a question or a command.
Sarah had been part dreading and part looking forward to Veronica’s visit. It had been ‘in the diary’ for months, requested by the girls but arranged painstakingly by their parents. Veronica’s father worked for the UN and that summer he was needed – so they were needed – for six weeks in Oman. Veronica had pleaded with her mother to stay, but the most her mother would agree to was a week with Veronica’s grandmother, and two weeks at camp. That left three long weeks unaccounted for. So they had concocted this scheme. “It’s really a lot of hassle you know,” Sarah’s mother had said to her after one logistics phone call with Veronica’s mother. “And Veronica is used, I think, to a fair bit more… space, and… stuff. Are you sure you’re not going to get fed up with each other after a day?”
“She’s my best friend,” Sarah had answered, in the superior tone specifically endowed to twelve-year-old girls.
Eliza, sitting in the corner of the lounge engrossed in a Sweet Valley High book, rolled her eyes. She did this frequently of late. She’d ‘started’ four weeks before her thirteenth birthday and since then seemed to think she was above everything, or at least everything to do with her younger sister. As though a knowledge of sanitary pads demarcated adulthood.
“And Eliza’s tedious these days,” Sarah added for good measure. “Veronica will actually do something with her life more adventurous than reading books we could have managed when we were six.”
Eliza rolled her eyes again.
“Oh, no comeback?” Sarah goaded.
Eliza didn’t even look up from her page.
It was true: as desperately as Sarah longed for her sister to delight in the games they’d once conspired in, she would these days have more fun with Veronica. But all this was before they’d broken up.
It was terrible timing, two days before the holidays. They’d been ‘in a two’ all term. The previous term there’d been talk about joining up with Jenny and Nicole to form a four, but Veronica didn’t like Nicole since she’d stolen her box of ink cartridges, so in the end they’d stayed as they were. Until Lisa Markozy’s sleepover.
There was always a danger with sleepovers that if you didn’t attend, everyone else would bitch about you, and come Monday you’d find that the whole social order of life had been rearranged. This is exactly what happened to Sarah, who had been at Grandma Sadie’s seventy-fifth birthday in Dorset, and not the sleepover, when Veronica had started sucking up to Beth.
Usually, they both considered Beth to be just a little too close to slaggy. All of the girls talked about what they had done with boys – snogging and laying on top of them and such; but nobody had really done any of that. Beth, on the other hand, had a real boyfriend she had not only ‘got off with’, but had let ‘touch her up’. She’d already ‘started’, the first one in their class, and had pert apple-sized boobs that needed a real bra where the rest of them still had uneven chicken nuggets. So that was why Beth’s boyfriend had wanted to touch her; but Sarah and Veronica had agreed that Beth should not have said yes.
It was Lisa Markozy herself who told Sarah about Beth and Veronica. Apparently, it started while they were still eating pizza and playing truth or dare. Beth had spun the Coke bottle and it had landed on Veronica, who had chosen Truth. Beth’s question had been the following (Lisa recounted it word for word): “Do you sometimes wish that Sarah wasn’t a bit sad? And do you think she holds you back?” ‘Sad’ did not mean unhappy; it was their lingo for somebody who was a loser, not necessarily geeky but definitely socially stunted, too childish, not cool. On the cusp of puberty and teenage-dom, it was the biggest insult they could throw at each other. Of course, Veronica was caught. She could hardly say that Sarah wasn’t holding her back, because that would make her sad too, and Beth had cleverly elevated her as something different and better. But, “She should have told Beth to stop being a bitch,” Lisa declared. Instead, Veronica had confirmed Beth’s suspicions that Sarah was indeed the reason for her own curtailed coolness, and later they’d pulled their sleeping bags next to each other and whispered into th
e early hours. The next day, everybody somehow knew that Sarah’s uncle had tried once to kill himself – which was something she had told only Veronica – and also that Sarah wished she had bigger boobs.
In English on Monday, Sarah had sent Veronica a note to say that she should consider their friendship terminated, but Veronica had already been sitting next to Beth by then and showed her the note, and laughed. So it was definitely over, and that lunch break they gathered their friends by the lockers and announced together that they were broken up. There was general shock. Sarah and Veronica had been a two since, well, forever. It had been almost an entire year since they’d joined the school and their names ran into each other when people spoke. Saranveronica. Saranveronica. It had always slightly gratified Sarah and irritated Veronica that Sarah’s name came first.
But no longer. And unless she wanted to ‘swallow her pride’ and confess to her mother that worse than growing fed up with each other after a day, they were already not speaking – in other words, that Sarah was wrong and her mother had been right – there was no way she could tell anyone at home what had happened. Had Eliza not been entirely obsessed by her own life, then it was possible that even without being told, her sister may have guessed that something was up, and fixed it; but she didn’t. So Sarah awaited the arrival of her ex-best friend seven days into the summer holidays, freezing every time the phone rang, trepidatious both that it was and wasn’t Veronica’s mother calling to cancel. The call, however, never came and Veronica arrived, as planned, in time for lunch that Friday.
While the mothers were having tea in the kitchen, the girls, unspeaking, heaved Veronica’s suitcase up the stairs to Sarah’s room. A second bed had been pulled out of the spare room and Veronica sat on it, staring at her feet. Sarah sat opposite her, waiting. There was no reason that she should be the one to cave and speak first, she was on home ground. She folded her arms and crossed her skinny legs twice around themselves.
At least three minutes slowly ticked by before Veronica started to giggle. “You idiot, you look like a pretzel,” she laughed, slapping Sarah’s leg playfully. “You’re such a doofus.”
“Too sad for you?” Sarah prickled. She lifted her legs away from Veronica up onto her bed.
“Oh Sawah, you know I didn’t mean it,” Veronica soothed in a sing-song baby voice. “I’m so-wee. You know I don’t think you’re sad.”
“Stop doing the voice,” Sarah admonished, though she knew Veronica was aware that she found it hilarious, especially when she did it to teachers. “If you don’t think I’m sad, then why did you–”
But Veronica had now leapt onto Sarah’s bed and was nuzzling her face into her shoulder. “Sa-wah, don’t be cwoss Sa-wah…”
And it was difficult and not entirely practical to keep the argument going.
She supposed she could ‘forgive but don’t forget’. (There were a number of phrases like this that Sarah’s mother had doctored, unintentionally, and passed on in their distorted state to her daughter.)
“I’m so-wee Sa-wah. You’re my BFF Sawah. Sawah–”
“Oh fine,” said Sarah, pushing Veronica away, though struggling to remain aloof amidst the infectiousness of her affection. “Fine.”
Veronica grinned then, kissing her smack on the cheek. And Sarah could not help but bask in her enthusiasm, and feel glad that Veronica was here for three whole weeks.
And so their days at the swimming pool began. Punctuated by games of swing-ball in the garden, and trips to the tennis club, and occasional dinners out. One night, after a dinner at TGI Fridays, Veronica arrived back home bursting with excitement, and even after an hour making up a dance routine to Bon Jovi’s ‘Always’, and after an ‘extension’ downstairs so they could watch a 15 rated video, she was incapable of calming down. Even an hour later, after Sarah’s mother had been in twice to tell them to go to sleep, and Eliza had screamed at them from across the corridor, Veronica still kept leaping out of bed to tickle Sarah’s feet or chuck something across the room at her, and in the end Sarah herself went past sleepy, and they sat together on her bed, listing in reverse order first the prettiest girls in their year, then the cleverest, then the ones most likely to get off with somebody first, until they ran out of ideas for lists and Veronica suggested a midnight swim.
Sarah’s parents’ home sat in its semi-detached plot of suburban greenery, with open windows and unbolted doors. A gleaming ‘top-of-the-range’ alarm system had been fitted a year or two earlier, but since the dog was likely to set it off in the middle of the night, it remained gleaming and unset.
Saranveronica slipped quietly out of the lounge door and padded gleefully across scorched, crunchy grass, down the steps to the sunken pool area. It was still warm, with just the faint chill of night-time. They were already in their costumes – Sarah’s a multicoloured two-piece with a frill around the knickers; Veronica’s a matching neon pink version. They hadn’t dared open the linen cupboard in case of a squeak, so carried damp towels that they’d used earlier, and made a great show of stuffing them over their mouths to stifle their laughter. If anybody was looking, the far right corner of the pool could be seen clearly from Sarah’s parents’ bedroom, but the rest of it was shielded from sight and together they darted through the dark, down the steps, and to the pool house. As suspected, the key had been left in the lock, and Sarah swiftly turned it, allowing them to fall into the changing room and right through to the room at the back before releasing their guffaws against the closed door and wooden walls and tiny window. The single light bulb illuminated a moth that seemed to flutter on the rise and fall of their sniggers.
“Come on then,” Veronica said eventually, when their laughter had at last died down, and she opened the door to the changing room where she unlatched the cupboard that housed the switch for the pool cover.
“You know, my parents will go mad if they catch us,” Sarah warned, a grain of sense for a moment interrupting the adventure. She was blighted by this always, unable to resist the great family sentiments of responsibility and right. “We’re not allowed down here without them knowing. Even in the day.”
“It’s not dangerous,” Veronica sighed, hand on hip.
“I know. But they don’t like it. And they might see the cover moving when it gets to the deep end.”
“It’s dark.”
“Yeah but the movement and stuff…”
“So let’s only open it halfway.”
To this Sarah had no response, so stood aside, tension curling her bare toes, while Veronica carefully held down the switch until the cover had retreated halfway up the shadowy water.
The swim was short-lived. Although the water was heated, in the night air their teeth quickly chattered. And though it was thrilling to dive down, lost in the darkness of liquid abyss, they found themselves to be suddenly alert to every rustle of leaf and squawk of bird and floating piece of garden debris. The adventure, however, was not a failure, Veronica made sure of that, despite their premature return to the pool house. Instead of swimming, she coined The Chatting Room and made such a production of it that quickly this seemed the real objective of their night-time sojourn, and not the fleeting frolic in the water.
“This room will be for serious chatting only,” she stated, wrapped in her damp towel, the two of them shivering and huddled with bent knees on the bottom bunk. “Things we wouldn’t usually talk about. Or that we don’t want other people to hear.”
“Okay,” said Sarah. “Like what?”
“Like, what we really think about people. Or, about each other. Or things about our families, or just things we think, but stuff we wouldn’t tell other people.”
“O-kayyy,” Sarah repeated. “Like what?”
“Like… I don’t know.”
“It’s your idea.”
“Forget it,” Veronica decided with a nonchalant flap of her hand. She stood up and with the towel still draped over her, wriggled out of her wet costume. With her foot, she flicked it up to her hand and hung it
on the top bunk, the drips splashing on the floor between them. Veronica clicked her toes against the floor. “Okay, I’ve got a different idea.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, so we’ll come down here every night. And each of us has to think of one really hard, really embarrassing question, something we wouldn’t usually ask, and the other one either has to answer it, or do a dare. But it has to be a really hard dare, harder than the question.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, you start,” said Veronica, pulling her scrunchie out of her fair hair and tugging knots between her fingers.
“I haven’t had time to think of anything good,” Sarah answered, untying her own ponytail and sucking on the chlorinated end.
“Fine, well then tonight let’s just do dares,” Veronica grinned. “You go first.” She abandoned her knots and pulled her towel closer around herself, looking at Sarah with an air of excited defiance. “But it has to be hard.”
“Okay,” said Sarah. “Okay…”
More clicking of Veronica’s toes punctuated ticking seconds. “Come on,” she sighed.
“Okay. Okay, I dare you… to go outside on your own, and stand on the deck for thirty seconds—”
“Hard, Sarah,” Veronica admonished.
“Naked,” finished Sarah. “And you have to leave your towel inside.” She giggled. “And you have to do thirty seconds of our Bon Jovi dance.”
