by Voss, Louise
But I couldn’t do it.
‘Are you all right?’ Adam asked, and the concern in his voice was almost the final straw. I felt my knees begin to buckle, and I dropped the tile cutters onto the table, chipping an edge off Paula’s tiled streetlamp.
‘Fine,’ I managed. ‘Sorry, I, er—I’ll be back in a minute.’
I turned and, trying not to run, walked unsteadily towards a door by the stage with a sheet of A4 paper sellotaped to it, bearing the word TIOLET written in a childish hand in different shades of felt tip pen. Tiolet, like violet, I thought vaguely. A much more attractive word than toilet. I pushed open the door and found myself in a short corridor, with another, open door at the end leading to the aforementioned ‘tiolet’. I squeezed in and sat down on the toilet seat, shaking. It was a shabby room with pipes running up the flaky marooned-painted walls. Marbled drops of red in the tiny cracked basin in the corner indicated that this was where Mitch’s finger-bandaging operation had taken place.
The air in the little bathroom was scented with a not-unpleasant smell that I hadn’t smelled for nearly thirty years, but which came back to me immediately as soon as I breathed in, a welcome distraction from the pain in my head and heart: it was the exact scent of the cages I used to keep my hamsters in, when I was a child. Either the cages themselves, or the wood shavings they used for their bedding. The memory felt like an unexpected gift, in a way, and I remembered how much I’d loved those hamsters, the tiny light balls of fluff with their shiny eyes and caramel coloured fur.
I put my head in my hands and thought of my dad giving me the hamsters for Christmas, remembering his glee at my reaction, and then I thought what a terrible shame it would be if Ken never became a father. Despite his excessive working hours (although, who knew, perhaps a baby might be reason enough for him to cut back on the work commitments) he’d be a fantastic dad.
Suddenly I wanted to go home. This was futile, ridiculous. Running the taps first in the sink first, to rinse out Ralph’s bloodstains, I washed the tile and cement dust off my hands, and splashed my face. Then, taking a deep breath, I walked back into the hall.
‘Sure you’re all right?’ Adam asked again.
I pretended to look surprised. ‘All right? Yes, of course, I’m fine.’ I looked exaggeratedly at my watch. ‘But I’m afraid I’m going to have to shoot off now—I didn’t realize how much time had passed.’
‘You will be back again soon, won’t you?’ asked Ralph plaintively, and I nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve really enjoyed myself.’ That much at least was true. I felt a very satisfying glow of having accomplished something for the community. OK, so it was only a tile basket, and OK, so it wasn’t even my own community, but that didn’t really matter. Secretly I didn’t think for a moment that I would be back, the preposterousness of the situation once more settling on my shoulders almost palpably, like a heavy snowfall, but no matter. Not really. I hadn’t met Max but at least I knew that Adam was—unless I was an utterly terrible judge of character—a good man and a loving father. There was nothing really to gain from meeting Max. He couldn’t replace Holly or the others, and I really ought to have been looking forwards, not backwards.
I said my goodbyes to the group, and Adam came over to shake my hand. His own felt large, dusty and cracked and hard, and I thought, those are the hands he hugs Max with. He looked me in the eye and said, like he knew there was more to it than a desire on my part to crack tiles: ‘I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk properly. I do hope I’ll see you again.’
I smiled until my cheeks ached and nodded enthusiastically, waving behind me when I got to the door and carolling more ‘byees’ to everyone; but as soon I got outside the fake enthusiasm fell away from me like a discarded overcoat, my shoulders slumped, and I felt the corners of my mouth droop.
I wished I’d never gone there.
Chapter 11
I wept most of the way home, steady tears dripping into my lap. The tears weren’t just for Holly - it would have been Dad’s birthday that day, a fact that I’d managed to push to the back of my mind in the earlier excitement of meeting Adam.
I tried to calculate how old he’d have been, bearing in mind that he died when I was eighteen, in 1986, aged fifty-two, but I couldn’t make my brain do the maths. I couldn’t bear to think of us all having a jolly birthday party round at Lil’s, probably, with Olly and Russ, and a lavish birthday cake; Dad sucking at his pipe and grumbling mildly about his advancing old age, reading his cards and smiling. It hurt.
‘You’re a user, Anna,’ I said out loud. ‘It’s your fault he’s not alive.’ A large bug crashed and exploded on my windscreen, and for a moment I wished myself into similar instant oblivion. I use everybody, I thought bitterly, and I always have done. I remembered with shame my ‘nice hair on arms’ comment just that day, and shuddered. Then I remembered further back, to Dad. I hadn’t plunged a bread knife between his ribs or anything, but I was haunted by the thought that I might just as well have done.
My father had died immediately after he found out that I was having an affair with his best friend Greg. He’d had a heart attack in the pub, the local that he and Greg always frequented. It was called the Fox and Goose, a dingy place with maroon walls and sticky purple lino, which seemed to have Whitesnake perpetually on the jukebox. It wasn’t that either Dad or Greg liked Whitesnake particularly—Greg was into Prog Rock, and Dad had been more of an Acker Bilk man - but they had been drinking there so long that they probably ceased to notice the dubious music years before.
Greg had taken Dad there that night to break the news that he was in love with me. They’d have been at the small table in the corner, anyway, furthest away from the jukebox. Greg would have been smoking Silk Cut, squeezing his eyes shut, inhaling each drag deeply from the side of his mouth and drinking chasers with his pints; whilst Dad stuck to bitter and tinkered with his pipe, laying out all the pieces of pipe-smoking paraphernalia on the table in front of him, but rarely touching a match to the tiny bird’s nest of tobacco in the cherrywood bowl.
I wish I could have stopped time right at that moment, at that table, in that pub; rushed in and put my hands over Greg’s mouth to hush him up, so that I could be driving home to celebrate Dad’s seventy-whateverth birthday with him now, instead of replaying the scene over and over in mind as I’d done for the last sixteen years…I would so loved to have been driving home to celebrate Dad’s birthday with him.
He would almost certainly have been wearing his habitual stay-press slacks with the knife-edge creases that day, either his mossy green ones, or the bilge brown: the uniform of most dads up and down the country until well into the Eighties, before Gap began its rapid ascent to world sartorial domination. Greg would, doubtless, have been in his jeans. It was the fact that Greg bucked the trend and wore jeans which had made me fall in love with him in the first place. The jeans and the cigarettes had set him apart from all the other fathers; tricking me into believing that he was on my wavelength, blinding me to his coarse skin and the broken blood vessels in his cheeks, the hallmarks of a burgeoning forty-five year old lush. I mean, they were proper Lee jeans, without any sort of creases ironed into them.
It sounded so trivial, but one of the things I really missed about my dad was that he never lived to acquire a fashion sense. Mum at least lasted into her late sixties, outliving him by ten years. Dad would have been such an attractive septuagenarian. He was rake slim and tall, with the easy smile of a model and floppy hair, like Jeremy Irons in Brideshead Revisited. But he was shy, too, and I think in a way he had looked up to the younger Greg. Admired his louche good looks, casual trendiness, and ability to drink vast quantities of alcohol and still chat up women with aplomb.
Although it had been a huge deal at the time, what Greg and I actually had was nothing very much, not when I thought back to it. A few fumbles on the kitchen floor late at night, after my parents had gone to bed, the white ceramic tiles freezing against the hot skin of my back. His hand inside my bra, his
alcohol-scented promises in my ear, hours and hours of passionate, Silk Cut-flavoured kisses.
I’d wanted him, for years, and I systematically set about making him fall for me. After the squeaky-voiced, spotty teenage wimps from the boys’ school, his masculinity was as overpowering as a strong aftershave, and by the time I was sixteen, I was obsessed with him. At every opportunity I sent him sly, flirtatious glances from under my eyelashes, making sure that my school shirt was artlessly untucked and the hem of my skirt sliding high up my thighs as I crossed my legs in front of him. I watched him shift in his seat and prickle with sweat, and my thrilling newfound power made me hug myself with excitement.
He and his wife Jeanette used to come round for drinks and dinner on a regular basis, and when they did, I made sure I was always available to hand round nibbles and top up Cinzanos. One night, when Dad had popped out to buy more wine and Mum was upstairs showing Jeanette the new bedroom curtains, Greg and I found ourselves alone, at last. We were both shaking—although it later occurred to me that Greg’s unsteady hand as he pulled on his Silk Cut might have been attributable to mild delirium tremens.
‘You’re so grown up these days, Anna,’ he said, leaning forward, his eyes glittering with lust.
‘So when are you going to take me out to dinner, then?’ I managed to reply, blushing furiously at the blatant come-on.
‘Whenever you like. You tell me when you’re free.’ We were staring fixedly at each other, like frightened rabbits.
‘I’m very busy,’ I replied, trying desperately to affect insouciance. ‘But I’ll look in my diary - I’m sure I could fit you into a small space somewhere.’ Boom boom!, as Basil Brush would have said.
The double-entendre hadn’t been intentional, but it certainly hit the mark. Greg’s pupils had instantly dilated even further, and his gaze shifted to my breasts. He later confirmed that it was the moment when he fell in love with me, as opposed to just lusting after me, which he claimed to have been doing for years prior to that.
‘Freudian slip?’ he’d murmured, moving closer. I could feel the heat blazing in my cheeks. I wanted to move away, but couldn’t, paralysed by his glorious manly confidence. His lips were millimetres from mine, when we heard footsteps in the hall, and we sprang apart. My hands were shaking.
‘Red or white?’ Dad sang, coming back into the room with his pipe in one hand and an off-licence carrier bag in the other. ‘Anna, go up and ask the girls which they’d like, would you?’
That had been eight months before Greg told Dad about us; during which time Greg and I had done everything we possibly could, sexually speaking, without penetration actually occurring. Poor Greg. I felt quite sorry for him. He had been, to put it crudely, gagging for it. For the first few weeks he’d relished the sexiness of our foreplay, but as time went on, he must have been thinking that he was just too old for heavy petting. But I had not let him go all the way. I thought that was probably why he convinced himself that he really was in love with me, enough to risk telling Dad, and to risk losing his wife.
On that horrific evening, Greg and I had engineered a hasty liaison behind the trolley train in the Asda car park, shortly before he’d been due to meet Daddy in the pub. Through plumes of Silk Cut he’d told me that he was going to leave Jeanette, and ‘that was that’. I remembered him grinding out the cigarette stub under the sole of his Dunlop Green Flash trainers. Adults never wore trainers in those days, except for the performance of physical exercise. It was another thing which had impressed me about him.
‘That’s that’, he’d said. If he hadn’t said it, I’d have told him not to. I was in love with him, but I was eighteen years old, and the gates of adulthood, with all the freedom and potential just visible through the bars, were just beginning to swing open. I had finished my ‘A’ levels, and had a place at Reading University, starting that October, studying English and Drama. However much I adored his jeans and Green Flashes, his Silk Cuts and his hairy chest, I did not wish to start taking huge bagfuls of his dirty washing down to the launderette, or cook him steak and chips every night. Not to mention the grief I’d have got from my family about it - Jeanette was Mum’s best friend.
But because he’d said it so firmly, all my rehearsed objections had dissolved on my tongue like sherbet. He seemed so convinced, so masterful, that I couldn’t argue. I rationalised it by thinking that if he wanted to leave her all that much, it probably wasn’t anything to do with me anyway. I could still go to college, I’d just come and visit him at weekends. Or he could move to London with me. And I felt ready to lose my virginity. When I told him so, he instantly looked at his watch.
‘I won’t be long,’ he said. ‘See you in the Feathers in half an hour. I’ll tell your dad, meet you after for a quick debrief, then I’ll get off home and break it to Jeanette. Our new life starts here! And don’t worry, it’ll all be fine.’
That had been the last time I ever saw Greg alone. I’d sat at the bar in the Feathers, a pub round the corner from the Fox and Goose, for two hours after that, waiting for him, my trembling fingers nursing the dregs of a warm blackcurrant and soda, but he hadn’t come. I’d even heard the wail of the ambulance siren going past the door, without knowing its destination. Eventually I’d gone home to find the hastily scribbled note from Mum telling me to meet them at the hospital, but by the time I got there, it had been too late.
Greg and Jeanette had been at the funeral, of course, but every time Greg had looked meaningfully across at me, I’d stared at the carpet, filled with horror and revulsion. The mere thought of his hairy chest - and what I’d encountered due south of it—made me want to vomit with guilt into the tepid vol-au-vents which Mum handed round back at ours after the service.
At least he hadn’t decided to tell Jeanette first, I thought. That at least had been a small comfort.
Chapter 12
‘Vicky, please let me in, I’m outside your front door. I’ve been worried about you. I only want to see how you are.’
A small voice floated down the stairs: ‘Mummy, do you think I’m adorable?’
There was no answer from Vicky, as far as I could tell, to either of us. I tried again.
‘Vicky, come down, please. I’ll keep phoning and knocking you until you do. Anyway, I promise I won’t take up much of your time… Or I could take Crystal to the swings, if you like.’
‘Mummy, am I?’
‘I’ll fill up your whole answering machine tape. I know you’re there, I can hear Crystal through the letterbox.’
I heard Vicky’s voice then, somewhere upstairs. ‘Yes, Crystal, you’re adorable. Most of the time.’
A pause, an inhalation I could swear I heard too, then a howl of outrage: ‘I WANT TO BE ADORABLE ALL THE TIME!’
Good grief, but that child was a drama queen. However, it seemed that she had succeeded where I was failing, to flush Vicky out of the undergrowth of her turmoil. Footsteps thumped down the stairs and the door swung abruptly open. Vicky stood in the doorway, a cross expression on her face and Pat riding on her left hip. She wore no make-up and her hair badly needed a wash. Her skin was a familiar greenish hue which would have left me in no doubt that she was pregnant, even if she hadn’t suspected it herself.
‘Sorry Anna, I didn’t hear you knocking.’
Remembering that I was meant to be here to offer moral support, I let the obvious lie slide. Instead, I leaned in and planted a kiss on her cheek, followed by another on Pat’s plump smooth one. I had a sudden urge to take him out in the car just so that I could drive over a cattle-grid and watch his cheeks wobble. He was that sort of a baby.
‘Hello you two. Any chance of a cup of tea? Give us a cuddle, Pat.’
Somewhat ungraciously, Vicky stood aside and admitted me, passing Pat into my outstretched arms. Her house was even more of a mess than ours was, but where our mess had a neglected mien to it, a sort of chilly, damp mess; Vicky’s was the messy chaos of small children, exhaustion and not enough hours in the day. Toys were strewn o
n all the floors, including on the not-very-clean kitchen tiles, and the breakfast things were still on the table despite its being half past eleven.
‘You sit down,’ I said to her, ‘and I’ll make the tea. Where’s Crystal?’
‘In a strop upstairs, as per. Hiding in our wardrobe. Hopefully she won’t find any mothballs and eat them. Oh, I can’t wait for term to start.’
Vicky flopped down onto a pile of un-ironed baby clothes in a wicker armchair in the kitchen. I put Pat down and he immediately crawled away to play with the standard lamp in the corner, so I chased after him and picked him up again.
‘Come on, Patch, you can help me make tea. You can pour out the boiling water for me.’
Vicky must have been in a bad way, because she didn’t even look up to check that I was joking. She was staring into space, chewing the skin around her thumbnail. She looked utterly defeated.
I came over and crouched down in front of her, putting my hands on her knees, as Pat made another bid for freedom in the opposite direction. There was a rough, sticky pinkish patch on the front of the left leg of her jeans, which I hazarded a guess was yesterday’s yogurt. ‘So you are pregnant, then,’ I said. She nodded, misery etched into the creases of her forehead.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered.
I would never have suggested that she didn’t need to do anything except take plenty of folic acid and let nature take its course, but I couldn’t help thinking it.
‘Have you told Peter yet?’
‘No. He’ll be thrilled,’ she said glumly. ‘If he was as stressed about it as I am, it would be so much easier. I wouldn’t feel so alone.’
