To Dare

by Jemma Wayne

  “Eliza had what?” prompted Sarah. “What about Eliza?”

  But Veronica only smiled. The tempo had touched her. She was doing this now.

  Veronica reached over to David and intercepted the hand he was using to reach for his wife. “We played this game where we would concoct all sorts of awful choices, and then have to decide which horror we would pick.”

  “It was typical childish stuff,” Sarah shrugged, shaking her head ever so slightly at David, but finally conceding to the direction of the conversation.

  “Like what?” asked George.

  “Like, to save your family’s life, what would you do: go to school naked, or kiss the ugly science teacher.”

  “Well that’s a good one for you now,” joked George. “Didn’t you tell me there’s an ugly science teacher? What would you do?”

  “Oh, we absolutely have to play this now,” grinned Veronica. “I’d kiss the teacher of course. You wouldn’t mind would you, darling?” She kissed George quickly on the lips, and he looked at her, puzzled. It was, she realised, the first time in months, even when in the throes of ovulation, that they had kissed.

  “I might mind a little,” grinned George, looking at her questioningly.

  She kissed him again.

  “Okay, your turn,” Veronica declared, turning to Sarah.

  “Uh oh,” laughed George, a more open laugh than she’d heard in many months.

  “Sarah, what would you do… never be able to sleep with your hubby again…” She mimed a breaking heart to David. “Or, be able to sleep with him, but first have to make out with another man in front of him.”

  “What?” Now Sarah laughed, uncomfortably.

  David intercepted. “Make out?” He shook his head in exaggerated bemusement. “There’s been a time warp, surely. I’m fifteen again.”

  George chuckled, but Veronica grinned boldly. “Yep, make out. Smooch, French, snog, kiss, whatever you kids want to call it. With another man, let’s say a man who you both know, let’s say, well how about George?”

  George gamely raised his eyebrows at Sarah in mock seduction. Sarah laughed again. She shifted on her seat.

  “I’m not sure if—” David began, but this time it was Sarah who interrupted. Raising her gaze to Veronica, she looked at her defiantly. Daringly.

  “Well I’d kiss George of course,” she decided.

  Now George laughed loudly and David was forced to smile along with him, even adding a ‘lucky man’ or two. But the women only stared at each other.

  “Wow,” said Veronica eventually.

  “What?”

  “I just mean, wow, that’s my husband. And yours is right there.”

  “Veronica! Seriously?”

  Veronica allowed a long, cumbersome pause, watching as it almost visibly stretched across the table. But finally, she laughed. “Of course not seriously, Sarah! Gosh!”

  Now they all laughed, uneasily, except for Veronica who felt uncommonly in command. She hadn’t quite decided to pilfer from Sarah’s confidence, not consciously, not wholly, but it was working. It was working.

  “Your turn,” she said, pointing dangerously at David. “Would you…”

  But he held up his hand. “I can answer already,” he told them.

  “Oh? Interesting…”

  “My answer is… I would… thank you so much for a wonderful evening, but regretfully mention that we have to relieve the babysitter.”

  “Cop out,” shouted George. “Total cop out,” but he got up to get the coats, leaving Veronica to stifle a sudden, sinking sense of deflation.

  There followed the usual exchanges of thanks and declarations of how lovely the evening had been and promises to do it again, and soon they found themselves in the hallway where Veronica drew Sarah into an embrace, as she did so inhaling the summer scent of Sarah’s old family home. “Have you been to your parents’ today?” she inquired. “You smell of it.”

  “I smell?” said Sarah. “Lovely. Thanks.” She gave another forced laugh, but Veronica continued with renewed earnestness, fondness, the scent grabbing her lungs.

  “I’ve always remembered that smell – mango and coconut. Your mum had those candles everywhere.”

  “Oh,” said Sarah more carefully. “Yes. She still does. Good memory.”

  “There you go!”

  Sarah looked at Veronica then in a way that she couldn’t quite decipher, before shrugging off the strangely extended pause as though it was nothing. “Goodbye, George, lovely to have met you.” She air-kissed him on the cheek. “Bye again, Veronica.”

  “See you soon Mrs Beckham.” Veronica said this cheerily, innocently, then leant forward to kiss David. “And you too, Mr Beckham. Don’t be late for school. Oh wait, wow, I’ve just heard it.”

  “What?” asked Sarah.

  “David, Beckham. Like David Beckham, the footballer.”

  “Oh that’s brilliant!” exclaimed George, clapping David on the back. “I can tell my mates I know Beckham.”

  “Except,” continued Veronica. “Sorry, David, but you strike me as more of a chess player. And you were so sporty, Sarah, I might have expected the real thing.”

  David laughed. “Unfortunately you’re right, I’m no footballer,” he said.

  His smile was as warm as ever, but it was with notable decision that he placed his hand on Sarah’s back and guided her towards the door.

  Sarah

  David T Beckham was in fact born Tennyson David Beckham, a gesture of reverence to his mother’s favourite poet. The more commonplace middle name was a concession to his father’s desire to bind just a hint of Jewishness to the son they had already agreed would be raised secular. But the two doting parents hadn’t accounted for the singular love of tradition, nor the determinedly unassuming nature of their artistically brilliant boy. By the time he moved into secondary school, Tennyson had been discarded in favour of the just-a-hint David, and David had reintroduced Shabbat prayers and kosher food into the Beckham household. When, just a year later, the eponymous footballer shot to stardom and David became subject to continual school-yard jibes – generally centred around the irony of such an un-athletic boy sharing a name with such a specimen of athleticism – David merely laughed at the incongruity, and continued on in his own passions, which were piano, drama, and of course his beloved art. He never told his growing group of faithful friends the history of the T initial, and stuck fast to a course of quiet self-possession that as he grew older disarmed men and women alike. After their first date, Sarah described him to Eliza as the most generous, kind and emotionally intelligent man she had ever met, not to mention handsome. To which Eliza obligingly mock-puked.

  But David really was all of those things, and Sarah knew that he remained entirely comfortable in their decision for him to be the children’s primary carer, their means to let her fly. Besides, he loved his part-time position at the museum. And he had never once regretted the choice not to pursue a path of artistic illustriousness, despite the talent for it.

  He would, however, she knew, have noticed her over-compensation. Her own need to explain and justify.

  “Sorry,” she said, the second they were in the car.

  “She riled you,” he shrugged. “How come?” He started the engine of their Toyota Prius and quietly pulled out of the street.

  “Old power games.”

  “You shouldn’t play them.”

  Sarah threw her hands into the air with exaggerated drama. “I know. Tell that to the twelve-year-old inside me!”

  David pulled to a stop at a traffic light and looked at her. “Why didn’t you tell her about Eliza?”

  “Ugh, I don’t know.” Sarah lowered her hands and placed one comfortably on his, slipping her fingers into a familiar tangle. “I guess I just feel wary of her.”

  “I can see why,” said David. “Was she always like that?”

  “Yeah. Master of manipulation. But a lot of other things, too.”

  He nodded.

  An
d Sarah nodded. And squeezed his fingers in full stop, pushing deeper inside her the nagging sounds of resentment and blame, the secrets of the TCR sealed still in wood. “Sorry,” she offered again, and this time David bestowed his forgiveness with a counter-squeeze.

  Then he grinned. “Now, about this naked swim…”

  Simone

  Terry traces her spine with the tips of his fingers. She’s drunk too much, with him, but he is still standing and she is curled up, vodka and beer prying frozen memories out of their icy vaults.

  “Don’t waste your tears on them,” Terry is saying, without having to ask. “They ignored you, they didn’t deserve you.”

  She sniffs.

  “They made you hurt yourself.”

  She sniffs again.

  “I won’t ever ignore you, you know. I see you. I always have.”

  Simone sits up and arranges herself across Terry’s chest. The bruise by her mouth doesn’t hurt anymore and she presses her face into his shirt. His fingers still stroke her, but gently, not pushing for more. He never means to push.

  “We’re two peas in a pod really, aren’t we? We’re the ones who see things how they are. We found each other. We protect each other. You’ve always got me now. I’ll see you right.”

  She smiles at him. He’s right. He’s always right. His chest is sturdy. His breath steady. His arms around her, strong.

  Veronica

  The cotton of her dress stuck to her thighs, which were itching with an unprecedented fury. It was one of those rare English days when it is hotter in London than even Lake Como or Cannes or the blue-topped cliffs of Santorini. She had been awake all night, tossing in the heat, listening for the neighbours whose too-loud music had continued undiminished, and feeling her breasts. Even in the light of day, her nipples were tender and she was sure they were marginally enlarged. There had been a gentle throbbing in her abdomen all morning, and she had felt distinctly lightheaded. She could barely breathe with the hope of it. She had said nothing to George.

  Since the dinner party, there had been a tentative bridging of the distance between them, a cautious probing of possibility. It was as though they’d glimpsed different, older versions of themselves, and were bathing now in that sliver of nostalgic light. They’d been snapping less, returning to a state of presuming good intentions, instead of the opposite. But if she was wrong, if she wasn’t pregnant, if this wasn’t it, the disappointment would smash everything.

  They talked around harmless things. George had wanted to know all about Veronica’s friendship with Sarah. He had listened with mirth to her stories from that year, as much as she could remember in any case, and at the end of it all he had declared Sarah good for her.

  “I like David, too,” he told her one evening when they were grabbing a small glass of wine at The Lansdowne pub, basking in the energy of the creatives around them, pretending the passion was theirs. “He’s a salt of the earth type, isn’t he? Refreshing.”

  “Yes. Sarah’s like that too. Always was.”

  “Not very ambitious though.” George ran a hand through his hair and looked up at her with unusual attention. He was still in his suit, though his tie was removed, and he had selected the Piaget with the white face and simple numerals. On his wrist were the cufflinks from their wedding. There was something about a well-dressed man that was endearing to Veronica – not the price tags, but the care with which it suggested he shaped himself. Some people saw such dressing as an expression of money, or power, but to Veronica it revealed the reverse – a thoughtfulness about oneself, a concern about the opinions of others, a susceptibility.

  “Sarah is. Ambitious.”

  “Oh I don’t mean it derogatively,” George clarified. “It must be nice to be content with your lot, not feel a need to achieve.”

  Despite the clues of clothing, this was as close as George had come in the past year to actually articulating a vulnerability. “Like you do?” she asked.

  “Like we do,” he corrected.

  “Do you like to achieve though, or need to?” Veronica probed carefully, her tone shifting a little towards the soft searching of their early days. This, however, was too much for George. He sidestepped her earnestness and laughed jauntily.

  “It’s just like a game of rugby, isn’t it? Glory goes to the man who makes the try.”

  “No stickers for participation?”

  “Definitely not.”

  Veronica laughed, reluctantly accepting George’s blitheness. Her legs itched and a frustration crept with it through her skin. She could feel herself growing impatient. But it was better to be talking about something than nothing. “Oh the stickers!” she declared cooperatively.

  They were in safe territory now. Veronica, George knew, despised the relentless supply of stickers she was required to distribute to already sheltered children. How would they ever learn that the world wasn’t like that, she’d demanded once of George. Not everybody won, not everybody could have all that they wanted. “What if you don’t play rugby?” she asked him breezily.

  “Football then. If you’re playing footie, you want to be up front, scoring the goals.”

  “Like Beckham,” smiled Veronica.

  “That was brilliant,” George laughed. “He’s so not a Beckham. I like him though.”

  As it happened, both Beckhams had, in Veronica’s estimation, been avoiding her. Sarah had not even done her Monday school collection, sending David in her stead, and although David had conversed with apparent warmth at the classroom door, there wasn’t the familiarity Veronica had thought might have flourished over the sharing of secrets and wine. The resulting feeling of rejection stirred a dormant rage in Veronica. It wasn’t that Sarah had been nasty. It wasn’t that David was impolite. There was nothing specific she could accuse either of them of doing. But there was a lack of something, again a lack.

  It burned most in regard to Sarah. Of course you can’t force somebody to like you, you can’t force a person to care. And perhaps, to be fair, Sarah had simply recognised the oh-so-subtle dinner-party conversation for exactly what it was: a game of manipulation. In the aftermath, washing wine glasses at the kitchen sink, Veronica had regretted those childish digs. Despite the fleeting restoration of confidence they had imbued, despite the seductiveness of that, it wasn’t necessary, she’d told herself. She had plenty of friends now with whom there was a healthier dynamic, friends she had made in the years of enough-ness. That bitchy pre-teen wasn’t who she, now, wanted to be. Yet, for some reason, she couldn’t let Sarah go. And she couldn’t stop trying to taunt her, either into friendship or defeat. She’d ‘lost’ a homework that Amelia had clearly spent much time upon and requested she do it again. She’d chosen not to select Amelia, plainly one of the best, for that term’s chess team. She’d written all sorts of comments on Amelia’s work, hoping to provoke Sarah into coming in. All week she’d done everything she could think of to see her again, to reel her back, to make her want her, to prove, just as she had proven once before, that she, Veronica, wasn’t the one lacking and in need. The thought accompanied her as cotton flapped against itchy thighs. It accompanied her as she felt again nausea rising in her mouth. It was there as she breathed deeply in, and more deeply out, and held the air in her lungs in alternative waves of hope and envy.

  The heat, however, that Friday, seemed to smother everything. At speed on her bike, Veronica weaved past the mosque on Regent’s Park Road and veered right. Pulling over in St John’s Wood High Street, she tried not to dwell on the pregnancy test she was buying from the pharmacy. She slipped it into her bag as though it was a pack of gum, as though all it might do was freshen her breath, and then jumped breezily back onto her bike, trying to ignore the poppy-seed-sized hope in her belly. But throughout the remainder of the journey to work, thoughts slipped through whirring spokes. She couldn’t stop them: images of herself taking the test into the staff toilets, wrapping the validating stick in tissue, trying to hide her elation until she could present it at the end
of the day to George. She thought over and again about how delighted that would make him. She calculated how many weeks it would be until they could reveal that delight to the world. She envisaged which room they would use as a nursery and wondered how they might further soundproof it from the neighbours’ raves. She allowed herself to explore the imagined future in which two became three, lacking nothing.

  In the furthest-most cubicle, her stomach churned. It was silly really, she had done this so many times before – waited for a few seconds of pee to pronounce her future. But on all those other occasions, she had already felt the answer somewhere inside of her, and thus prepared herself for disappointment. This time was different. This time she knew, knew it to be the opposite, and in readiness she unboxed the test and removed the stick from its plastic casing and held it at the ready.

  The blood was not heavy.

  A thin, barely-there streak on her knickers.

  But barely-there was still there, masked during her journey, she supposed, by the sweatiness of the day.

  She stared at it staining cotton. The redness choked her, darkness around her throat. Tightening. Suffocating.

  Yet, also, deep inside the thumping of her veins, there was a pushing back. It couldn’t be true. Not this time. She’d been so sure. Perhaps this blood was implantation bleeding. She’d read about that – women thought they had their period, but it wasn’t, it was this, and they didn’t realise they were pregnant until months later. She touched her breasts. Her nipples were still sore, and her stomach throbbed, and there’d been that dizziness. It had to be. Veronica thrust the stick hopefully beneath her, forcing herself to relax enough to pee, then wrapped the test in tissue while she waited for the result. One minute. Two. Three to be certain. It was long ago that she’d given up on the tests where you had to squint your eyes to determine the presence, or not, of a blue line – anything could be wished into visibility. Now she bought the digital ones that were firm and forthright; either she was Pregnant or Not Pregnant. She was right or she was wrong. She was a mother, or she wasn’t. Success or failure. The answer would not be ambiguous. Still, she waited a fourth minute more.