The History of Us

by Jonathan Harvey

Who’s to say it’s not Mr Billericay, or Mr Love, or Finty?

  Leon.

  They all have reason enough to want to put the shits up me, but something keeps bringing me back to Billy.

  Which is why I now find myself walking along Josephine Avenue, wondering what I will say when I see him. After all, this is hardly a ‘Ding dong, Avon calling!’ kind of moment.

  In the movie version in my mind, which I’ve played time and time again in the run-up to this day, it would all be so straightforward. I would hang about in Brixton and he would magically appear. I would confront him, he would break down, apologize and all would be almost forgiven. What’s a little murder or rape threat when it’s amongst family, hmm? We would move on. We would progress.

  But of course, no matter how much pacing up and down I do, he doesn’t magically appear like Mr Benn’s shopkeeper. So I go and find his house. And ring the bell. Which is when I discover there is nobody in.

  Oh well. Plan B.

  Plan B involves going off to do some shopping for a few hours, and coming back later. Which is what I do.

  Then I ring the bell again.

  This time, success.

  The shock of seeing him in the flesh after so long, despite having traced him on social media, despite knowing what he looked like. To see it in online photos was one thing; in the flesh it is completely another. It’s like seeing a celebrity for the first time, someone you are so familiar with but in the flesh there is difference of some sort. The difference with Billy being that the last time I saw him, that inauspicious night in Kettner’s, he was a boy. And now he is definitely a man. The realization makes me falter. And when he realizes who I am, he falters too. Then I go in for the kill. I am not going to let the fact that he is a grown man, towering over me, stop me from having my say. And in order to be persuasive I have to be confident and convincing.

  ‘Why did you do it?!’

  ‘Jocelyn . . .’ he gasps. And it’s not a greeting, it’s his mouth making noise before his brain tells him to stop.

  ‘I know it was you. I know it is you.’

  ‘What’s me?’

  And in that moment, I know I’m right. If he didn’t have a guilty conscience he’d be instantly more combative, he’d tell me to piss off or get lost and send me on my way, or at least ASK what I’m doing here now, after all this time. But no, he joins in. He plays ball. I’ve got him.

  ‘I don’t know how you worked out I was Jamie-Lee, but you did. Well done.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘And guess what, Billy. I may have spent a lifetime showing you up, embarrassing you; well, you got your own back now.’

  ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘You think I’m sick and twisted? Well, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I’ve got every mind to go to the police.’

  ‘You’ve got no proof!’

  Ah, the confident veneer is cracking. Good.

  ‘My private detective traced your IP address. Good work, Billy.’

  His face freezes. I know I’ve won. I know he will now stop. I don’t know whether to hit him or hug him. Instead I turn and walk away. It’s a bright day, sunny. Light bounces off car roofs, workmen on scaffolding have their tops off. I could stop for a second and wonder at how I produced a son so capable of sending such hideous messages to a woman, intent on scaring her. Well, he picked on the wrong woman there. I could punish myself and say, well is it any wonder, after he was lied to for so long? But I won’t let anything crack my veneer today. The traffic on Brixton Hill is at a standstill as I amble down towards the tube. I put my sunglasses on so no-one will recognize me. But then, this is Brixton. I will blend in just fine.

  But then someone shouts from a car window, ‘OI! CUNT! YOU BRING SHAME ON OUR COMMUNITY!’

  I don’t even look, though I am tempted to say, ‘The juxtaposition of the vulgarity of the word “cunt” and the pretentiousness of “our community” is really rather sweet. Well done.’

  Instead I hurry into the tube station. I swipe my card over the Oyster reader before descending into the bowels of hell: just another sunny day underground. The air is full of the smell of BO and the sound of an announcer warning us to always travel with a bottle of water, and my head is swimming. I have got away with it. I have got away with winging it with Billy and being correct about who was out to hurt me, and I feel kind of invincible. This feels good. My gut instinct was correct, and now I have put an end to it.

  I don’t need him in my life so I don’t need to protect his feelings – he’s certainly never protected mine – so I don’t see why I should worry about any ongoing conflict between him and me.

  He will do well in life, I’m sure. He has to, he has my genes. He was well dressed when he opened the door. Nicely turned out, groomed. He smelt of scent, soap. I have nothing to worry about there.

  There is a tube about to depart. As the doors go to close I jump on, and someone follows suit behind me. They seem to get caught in the closing doors. I turn to help them.

  It’s him.

  He wrestles free of the door, and it whizzes shut quickly. The carriage is full. The train lurches into action. We are almost glued together in the corner by the door. He leans in to me and speaks quietly. I don’t know why I am so scared. I am amongst people, I am not alone. He can’t hurt me when so many can see, surely? But the fact that he has followed me and I didn’t realize unnerves me. And makes me wonder what else he is capable of.

  ‘Can you blame me?’ he asks.

  I say nothing.

  ‘My mother, the whore. Spouting all that bullshit to earn herself a dime.’

  ‘A dime? How very transatlantic of you.’

  ‘I mean. She can’t even tell me who my dad is. That’s how much of a slut she really is.’

  He can see he is getting to me. He smiles.

  ‘What’s the matter, Jocelyn? I’m only doing what you do for a living. Saying it how it is.’

  ‘You want to know who your dad is, little boy?’ I spit back.

  And now it’s his turn to stay silent.

  ‘OK then. I’ll tell you.’

  KATHLEEN

  London, 2010

  ‘Happy fortieth birthday, Kathleen!!’

  The clink of glasses filled the air. I’d’ve liked to have said you could hear the pop of champagne corks drowning out the pianist, but as most of these people were my buddies from AA, it was more the fizz of Diet Coke bottles being unscrewed. Still, the buffet looked nice, if a little vegan-y. Lot of pulses. And a cheese and pineapple hedgehog because, as someone kindly pointed out, I was a child of the Seventies. We were in a room above a restaurant in Clapham and the jukebox was belting out Seventies classics to make me feel really at home. I vaguely recognized some of them. Oh God, this could be dreadful.

  No. Come on, Kathleen. Relax. Enjoy your lentils. Enjoy yourself.

  Life, finally, was good. After screwing around and screwing everything up, I had finally got things back on track. I had a job, working in the womenswear section at House of Fraser on Victoria Street. I had my own flat, renting from a glorious couple I’d met through AA, and I’d not had a drink for almost five years. And do you know what? It felt good. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I woke up in the morning and my first thought wasn’t Oh SHIT. Who do I have to call to work out what I did last night?

  And I was finally getting some experience with counselling. I had gone on the Samaritans training course but they hadn’t felt I was ready to join their ranks, and they’d asked me to return when I’d had a year out of rehab. Anyway, one night at AA I heard one of the members talking about a new telephone counselling service that had been set up to rival Samaritans. Going on the assumption that a lot of people got lonely or upset late at night, Late Night was now up and running in a few centres in London and around the country. I looked them up online, applied for an interview and then spent a few weekends doing their training courses. They didn’t seem to mind that I was fresh o
ut of rehab, and I’d been volunteering for them for nearly five years now.

  I got a lot out of my time at Late Night. I volunteered once a fortnight and the service ran from eight at night to eight in the morning – spurring me to comment at the first training session I went to, ‘Late night and early morning might be a better name.’ Which had actually got a huge laugh, as if no-one had ever said it before. Now you might understand why I got so much out of volunteering there. They thought I was fecking hilarious!

  Mostly, what I got out of working there was a satisfaction that I was doing something in life other than taking. I was giving something back. It might well have been a cliché, but for me it was true. I hoped that I was helping our callers in some small way, the way I had been helped by others over the years. There was a lot to be said for random acts of kindness, and there was a lot to be said for just listening when someone was in a bad way.

  Life really had never been better.

  The thirty-year-old me would have found the forty-year-old me deeply annoying, probably. I travelled everywhere by retro pushbike and always tried to do at least three random acts of kindness a day. I looked in regularly on some local old people, and I walked the dog of someone who was going through a nervous breakdown.

  And guess what? It made me so happy.

  It was on one of these dog walks that I met Harry. He had an elderly Jack Russell called Ajax who was on his last legs. Ajax had gone blind, and I thought it was so sweet because Harry spent the whole time on their walks ringing this cowbell thing to show Ajax which direction he was walking in. The kindness of it made my heart melt. For a few weeks we just exchanged the odd nod and pleasantry. And then eventually he asked me out for a drink, and I blurted out, ‘I can’t. I’m an alcoholic!’ – which I hadn’t meant to sound like the biggest knockback ever, but sadly, it did. So the next time I saw him I asked him out for dinner and he blurted out, ‘I can’t. I have an eating disorder!’ and I kind of gasped, and then he laughed and I realized he was joking and it broke the ice, and now six months on I was about to move in with him, and everything was rosy.

  See what happens when you keep your powder dry and do random acts of kindness? The universe pays you back. And it had paid me back with Harry Monroe. See? He even had a movie-star surname.

  One of my AA pals came over, Viv. She was quite a bit older than me but one of those women who could quite easily have been forty-five or nearly sixty, you just couldn’t tell. And she was extremely competitive. If you had a headache, she’d had her head amputated. Anyway, she was really into this Random Acts of Kindness thing and was always showing off about how she’d fed a small principality with the leftovers in her fridge and stuff, and it looked like tonight, even though it was my special party, was still going to be played on her showy-off terms.

  ‘Hey, Kitty Kat.’

  She always called me Kitty Kat. It really got on my twitty twat.

  ‘Hey, Viv.’

  Air kisses. Of course she air-kissed!

  ‘Hippety-hoppety-happy birthday, presh!’

  Yes. That was how she spoke.

  ‘Thanks, hon.’ Usually I detested people who used the H word, but she brought out the worst in me.

  ‘I know it’s your birthday and stuff, but have you done your randoms today?’

  ‘Yeah, I went and bought a homeless guy a coffee from McDonald’s,’ I said.

  She pulled a face. ‘Poor thing, McDonald’s coffee is hideous.’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘My cleaning lady was telling me how her juicer had broken? So I gave her my old one. She actually cried.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so sweet of you, Viv.’

  ‘I know. I’ve just become really altruistic since I knocked the old boozy-woozy on the head.’

  ‘Well, guess what?’ I said, knowing I was going to TROUNCE her out of the ballpark.

  ‘What?!’ She looked concerned. She knew I was going to one-up the tits off her.

  ‘I’m leaving my own fortieth birthday party to go and volunteer at Late Night. You know? The counselling service I volunteer at?’

  She paled. She looked like she might vomit. Then she rubbed my arm and I could see her thinking, I have to let it go, it’s her fortieth. She rubbed my arm. ‘Saint Kathleen of the telephone counselling.’

  I’ll have that, I thought.

  The party was soon winding down. The good thing about a load of alkies is that even though they’re on the Diet Cokes, they’re usually knackered by the time most normal parties are about to kick off. And I’d purposefully had my party in the afternoon so it kept me free to go to Late Night. I know most people thought I was mad to be volunteering there on the night of my actual birthday; but when the rota had come up and I saw I’d been allocated this slot, I was going to cancel it, but then I thought, oh sod it, why not? I enjoyed it. If it was a quiet night I got to watch a bit of TV and stuff my face on chocolates, and if it was a busy night the minutes and hours flew by.

  Late Night was the brainchild of a woman called Angela-Dawn, who wore brightly coloured kaftans and had dyed green hair. If you Googled ‘stereotypical tree-hugging bleeding heart’ you’d probably come up with a photo of her. You didn’t see much of her once you were working there, but her presence could be felt throughout. Everything about the offices was touchy feely. There were inspirational quotes painted on the walls. Things like, Small lights have a way of being seen in a dark world. Alongside a photo of a tealight.

  The offices, such as they were, were above a kebab shop on the Holloway Road. They comprised three main rooms – one where you took the calls, one containing two single beds for volunteers to sleep in, and a meeting room in case callers dropped by. And there was a tiny bathroom and toilet.

  You only ever worked in pairs. One man, one woman, so that callers always had someone of a gender they felt comfortable talking to. This particular night my colleague was a guy I’d done several shifts with, Noel, a mixed-race guy with a soft Scottish accent. He was reading a newspaper when I arrived, tutting and shaking his head.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, this Wikileaks thing.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘All the stuff about the war with Afghanistan, amazing.’

  ‘I know, right?’ Again, still no idea. ‘Right! What’s on the telly?’

  And I switched on the portable that sat on our mutual desk. I flicked through the channels. ‘Let’s hope it’s a busy night, then, there’s fuck-all on.’

  He gave me that look – as if to say he wasn’t sure if I was joking or not, but rather hoped I was. So I came over all Viv with him, and leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Ignore me. I’m just a bit bonkers coz it’s my birthday. And it’s quite a big one.’

  ‘Fifty?’ he said, a bit too quickly.

  I shook my head. I clearly looked horrified.

  ‘I’m only joking!’ he said – again, a bit too quickly. Which told me he had not been. BASTARD. So I busied myself with the log book, as I told him about my amazing birthday party.

  Basically, Angela-Dawn liked us to keep a log of every call we took. Although we claimed to be a confidential organization, she felt we should write down in as much detail as possible what each caller said and how we helped them. It meant that we could keep an eye on regular callers, of which there were several. It was also meant to help us process the call and the effect that it might have had on us. For me, also, it made a great read when I arrived for each session. It was better than Valley of the Dolls!

  I was just getting stuck into a written description of someone who had phoned up while clearly masturbating, when the phone rang. Noel and I looked to each other. He held his hand out, indicating that I should answer.

  ‘Well, it’s your birthday,’ he said, sarcastically. Which I didn’t like. But I answered it anyway.

  ‘Late Night, Kirsty speaking. How can I help you?’

  Angela-Dawn’s rule was we all had to have false names, j
ust so the callers couldn’t track us through Facebook and kill us or something.

  The person on the other end of the phone was crying.

  ‘Take your time.’

  It was a woman. She sounded very distressed. I stood, and took the phone into the bedroom so that Noel wouldn’t put me off, and so that he could put the telly on if he wanted. I must have waited a good minute or so before she finally spoke.

  I recognized her voice immediately.

  It was Jocelyn.

  And she talked away. She talked away, because as far as she was concerned, this was a confidential call and my name was Kirsty. Why wouldn’t it be?

  ‘What’s your name, my love?’ I asked, like a concerned mother. All soft and gentle.

  When she said ‘Lindsey,’ I still knew it was her. If I could be Kirsty, she could be whoever she wanted. It was, it was her.

  I asked her why she was upset.

  ‘I have this boyfriend. Mr Billericay. And he puts this pressure on me.’

  Mr Billericay? What kind of a name was that?

  ‘And I should just tell him what happened to me in the past, because . . . oh, what’s the point? It’s like . . . like I can only cope with bastards because of what happened to me back then.’

  ‘Aha?’

  What did happen to you back then? I let space hang in the air. I knew she would fill it, and she did.

  ‘I come from Liverpool. I know you can’t tell by my voice. But I had to go back to Liverpool this week for work, and . . .’

  She started crying again.

  Liverpool.

  Lovely.

  I should have stopped the call at that point. I should have explained that I thought I might know who she was, and that I needed my colleague to take over. But I didn’t. I didn’t even get excited. I just relaxed. I lay back on the single bed. And went along for the ride.

  ‘I’ve not really been back there since . . . since . . .’

  ‘Since what, Lindsey?’

  ‘Since I ran away.’

  ‘And why did you run away, Lindsey? What was making you so upset? Take your time. But there must’ve been something.’