by Fiona Gibson
I glance around the room. It feels pleasantly simple, like the kind of budget hotel room frequented by salesmen. ‘Do you like living here?’ I ask.
‘It’s okay. I’m getting used to it.’ He has his back to me as he piles the magazines onto the shelf.
‘Are you planning to stay?’
Alex turns to face me and says, ‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
He just smiles.
I wake up entangled in pale yellow sheets in a small room which overlooks the bedding factory behind Dock Lane. There are no curtains. The sky is mottled gray, smeared with lilac. Alex stirs behind me and rests a warm hand on my stomach.
I glance down at it, at the fingers turned ocher by the light filtering in through the sheets. He breathes softly into my neck. His hand trails between my legs. I lift his arm, and slide away from him, then lower it into the space I’ve left. He has no job to go to, no need to wake up yet. I wonder if he’s still living off the crop-circle money.
I check the time. Eight-thirty. Not enough time to drive home, wash, get changed and pick up my flute and music for school. I’ll have to call Jen, tell her I overslept, which she’ll know isn’t true. I never oversleep.
I pull on my knickers, socks, sweater, jeans. In the bathroom, I splatter my face with cold water, and use his toothbrush and eucalyptus toothpaste. Then I check the bedroom again.
Alex is still sleeping, flopped over onto his back now. Last night he said he’d made a mistake, realized that as soon as he’d left me. As he was leaving, in fact, in Mo’s clapped-out van. ‘That girl,’ he said, ‘she was nothing to me. It only happened a couple of times.’
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.
He said, ‘I was swept along by her,’ making her sound like a wave.
‘So you’d been seeing her when we were still together.’
‘It was nothing,’ Alex insisted, ‘please believe me.’
I study the softness of his face now, the pale pink of his parted lips. Spending the night with him wasn’t my smartest move; not what the magazines recommend. ‘Accept that it’s over,’ is the advice they trot out. That day at the doctor’s I noticed Sex With Your Ex screaming in fluoro-pink lettering from a magazine cover.
I place my hand—Surf’s scratches are fading now—on Alex’s forearm. He shifts and murmurs, thinking I’m still in bed. But it’s over, this time. I’ll never come here again.
‘Bye, Alex,’ I whisper. Then I kiss him, and run.
20
Running Away
My college place was secured. In six months’ time, I’d be free. The urge to turn and run bubbled inside me every time I rounded the corner and our house came into view. Then, just as freedom gleamed like a pearl in the distance, Dad came up with his Great Idea.
‘What I need,’ he said, tearing off his corduroy jacket, ‘is a new format.’
I looked up from my geography revision and stared at him through the over-long fringe I’d cultivated to try to make myself at least look laissez-faire. I was seventeen, but looked two years younger with my gawky frame and apologetic breasts. I hadn’t even known he’d been thinking about formats. I’d assumed he’d given up, and that we were getting by on his earnings from occasional articles he wrote for an Australian food magazine. ‘What…format?’ I asked.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked hollowly. Dad grasped both of my hands—I flinched, unused to his touch—and said, ‘You.’
I knew, before he uttered another word, that my answer was ‘No.’
‘It’s a father and daughter show,’ he explained. ‘Who better than an ordinary, very ordinary girl—who doesn’t know the first thing about cooking, has never shown the slightest interest in my work—to demonstrate how easy my recipes are?’
‘No!’ I snapped, slamming my ring-bound folder shut.
‘Listen—’
‘I can’t do it. You’ll have to find someone else.’
He seemed to sag then, as if some of the air had gone out of him. ‘I don’t have anyone else,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’ I wanted him to leave the room, to stomp off to the allotment to cuddle That Woman or whatever it was he got up to. Although I performed in concerts without the faintest fluttering of nerves, I had an aversion to being filmed or photographed, to have a lens gawping at me. I was still recovering from being photographed for the Echo for winning an inter-schools solo competition. The photographer—a greasy-faced man with dense sideburns—had insisted on taking my picture in front of our house, in full view of the street, rather than in the back garden as I’d begged him to. He’d dragged his tripod around, gouging up grass and waggling his light meter flamboyantly. Lynette came sniggering down our street and watched us, her kohl-rimmed eyes mocking as the shutter clicked over and over, freezing my smile.
I hoped that Dad would forget about Frankie’s Girl—as he had decided to name the series that would, undoubtedly, wreck my young life—or at least conclude that I was the wrong shape for TV. My elbows were too pointy, my feet long and narrow like canoes. ‘It’s not about your feet,’ Dad insisted. ‘It’s about the interaction between the two of us.’
‘But we don’t,’ I protested.
‘Don’t what, Stella?’
‘Interact!’
‘Well,’ he said quietly, ‘we’ll just have to try.’
I slumped upstairs and lay on Charlie’s bed, staring at the shark pictures that had been pinned up haphazardly with fluorescent drawing pins. Instead of the band posters favored by most boys of his age, he’d opted for great whites and hammer-heads shifting eerily through dark oceans. I wanted to turn into a shark, and spend the rest of my life underwater. Or, better still, I’d be one of those gnarled-looking fish that lurk at the sea bed, five miles deep.
Over the next few days, Dad remained in his study, emerging only for snacks and the bathroom. He’d still be clattering urgently on the typewriter when I went to bed. Finally, he emerged with a sheaf of paper worrying entitled The Script.
He had us read our lines. Mine came out stiff and ill-fitting, as if someone else’s teeth had been jammed into my mouth. ‘Can’t Charlie do this?’ I protested, slouching at the kitchen work top and handing Dad an empty bowl that was supposed to contain bread crumbs, chopped apricots and raw egg.
‘No, he can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s got university.’
‘I’ve got school.’
‘You need a haircut,’ he added. ‘It just sort of…hangs there.’ ‘I’m not doing it, Dad. I’m not going on telly or having my hair cut.’ I was shouting now, clutching the glass bowl to my chest, as if that might protect me.
‘We’re only talking a pilot,’ he said calmly. ‘One show, Stella—two or three days’ work is all I’m asking.’
Dad had already been in touch with his old production company. Enough time had elapsed for them to forgive his small tantrums, his outrage at Frankie’s Feasts being canceled. They were keen, he told me. Very keen. ‘Please, Stella,’ Dad said, desperation shining out of his milky gray eyes.
‘Okay. Just a pilot, a one-off.’
He didn’t thank me or exhibit any emotion that might have resembled gratitude. He just fished out a crumpled fiver from his trouser pocket. ‘That’s for your hair,’ he muttered.
Despite shambolic rehearsals at a run-down studio near the docks in East London—I’d had to miss a whole week of school, with exams looming—the pilot would actually be filmed. ‘I’m not ready,’ I snapped on the morning when Frankie’s Girl was about to become horribly real.
‘Of course you are,’ Dad insisted. We were staying in a twin room in the cheapest hotel he’d been able to find. The huddled terrace had a partial view of King’s Cross station and reeked of the resident Alsatian. Someone had drilled a tiny hole through the wall of our room. I’d lain awake, convinced that a camera lens or a real, human eye, had been peering at me through the hole.
Frankie’s Girl was filmed before an a
ssortment of technicians in grubby T-shirts and oily-looking drainpipe jeans. The producer, whose cigarette intake had accelerated throughout the day, said, ‘Thank you, Frankie, Stella. It’s been quite an experience.’ I knew I’d come across as doleful, as flat as a raft. Dad had tried to overcompensate by bounding energetically, which had made him look marginally out of control.
The day it was broadcast, I met Jen after school. We drifted around town, eating vinegared chips, and I flinched each time we passed a shop with TVs in its window, in case I glimpsed my horrified face. Despite the fact that no one would be watching some tragic low-budget cookery show—at least, no one who mattered—a worryingly high proportion of my schoolmates happened to see it. The following day Kenny White made vile slurping noises behind me in the dinner queue. Someone chalked a picture of me, grinning madly while nibbling the end of a phallic-looking éclair, on a blackboard.
For the rest of the week I feigned illness, lying beneath bobbly nylon sheets with the radio mumbling. I’d creep down for water or biscuits and find Dad at the table, spooning Ambrosia Creamed Rice to his mouth from a tin. He said, ‘I’m sure it’ll be commissioned, we’ll be talking a six-show series at least,’ but the flatness of his voice suggested that even he didn’t believe this. Frankie’s Girl had died before it had properly come into the world.
‘If it does,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to ask Charlie. Call it Frankie’s Boy.’ Dad pretended not to hear. My brain—suddenly grasping the concept of mental arithmetic—figured out, instantly, how many days would pass before I, too, would be able to leave home and be free, just like Charlie. Six months = 182.5 days. I hadn’t even needed to use Dad’s adding machine. I ran upstairs and scrabbled under my bed for the bulky gray calculator Elona had bought me for Christmas.
182 days (I skipped the half, couldn’t be fagged with fractions) = 4,368 hours = 262,080 minutes. As this made it seem terribly far away, I quickly scribbled out my calculations. Six months sounded better.
I left school that June and spent the summer shampooing heads at Shear Brilliance in Bay Street. As my hands swirled through sudsy hair, I’d spirit myself away to music college where I was due to take up my place in September. Something strange was happening to Dad. He seemed to wilt, as if he really minded me leaving. Mum had gone, then Charlie. No series of Frankie’s Girl had been commissioned. The pilot seemed to have been forgotten, like an unpleasant but mercifully brief illness.
One evening, when I’d come home from a late shift at the salon, I caught Dad watching me over the top of his newspaper. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Only a week now,’ he said.
‘Four days,’ I said. ‘I’m moving into the flat on Saturday.’ I tried to sound suitably grief-stricken.
His eyes were gleaming like opals. ‘You’re very like your mother,’ he added.
‘People often say that. I don’t see it myself.’ I didn’t like being observed over the top of the Daily Express.
‘Would you like a special meal before you leave?’
‘Not really, Dad.’
‘Why not? Charlie would come—I’d insist that he came. You could invite a couple of friends—that Jane you’re so fond of.’
‘Jen,’ I corrected him. The idea of being cooked for by Dad—all of us eating together, having a jolly family time—was so alarming and alien that I hoped he’d forget, and wind up spending my last day in Devon at the allotment. I wondered if Mr Bazrai, or even That Woman, had put the idea in his head.
Then I realized. He didn’t want me to go. It wasn’t that he liked me particularly, or cherished my sparkling company; just that I was all he had left.
The meal happened. Dad made a cheese-and-cider fondue, long after fondue sets had been put into hibernation in attics and charity shops. Jen politely dipped cubes of French bread into the oval-shaped orange pot, but I could tell that the cider, or maybe the cheese, weren’t sliding down easily. Charlie, who was conducting a short-lived experiment as a vegan, nibbled only the bread. Carole, a friend from the school orchestra, dipped and swirled with enthusiasm, later complaining of an ache in her gut. ‘It’s the cheese, Carole,’ Dad announced, ‘mixed with all that cold beer you’ve been drinking. It solidifies, you see, forming a ball in your stomach….’
This was Dad’s attempt to cheer up the proceedings. Carole was laughing but her eyes had clouded with fear. ‘We’re probably talking hospital,’ Dad continued, spooning piped cream from his slab of gateau into his mouth. Carole had stopped laughing. Charlie marched upstairs to continue to pack his things.
The girls and I cleared up. We waited until Dad had fallen asleep in the frayed brocade chair and crept out to the Jolly Roger where old wine bottles contained dribbling candles and underage drinkers were warmly welcomed with snakebite and black. ‘Your Dad’s weird,’ Carole announced, slurping her drink.
‘He was just trying to be nice,’ I said lamely.
She knocked back the rest of her purplish drink. She had to go home then; her tummy was hurting too much. I pictured her lying unconscious on a hospital bed having the cheese ball removed. It would be hosed down and photographed for health-education posters warning FONDUE IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH.
Just as well, I decided, that I was leaving.
Next day I moved into the maisonette near London Bridge. I hadn’t known what a maisonette was when I’d answered the ad. My only visit to London had been the school trip. I’d imagined a cottage with a well-tended garden in front, was quite shocked when it turned out to be a two-story slab of stained concrete sandwiched between a kebab shop, in which some gigantic meat product rotated and dripped in a sinister manner, and a tattoo parlor called Prick ’n’ Pix. Beneath the maisonette’s windows were reddish smears where the metal frames were slowly rusting, like the cars on the Slab.
The first recipe arrived a week after I’d moved in. My flatmate, Lennie, a runner for a film company in Wardour Street, peered at the onionskin square over my shoulder and said, ‘Worried about you, is he? Isn’t that sweet.’ She wore oxblood Dr. Martens and tie-dyed dresses from Camden Market. My Devon accent was, she declared, also ‘sweet.’ She read over my shoulder: “‘Blend 1 can tuna, a finely chopped onion, 1 tin kidney beans and 5 tbsps mayonnaise. Use to fill a jacket potato or eat on its own as quick, nutritious snack. I hope you’re eating properly Stella. I know what students are like, drinking too much and not looking after themselves.” How sweet,’ Lennie squealed, laughter tumbling from her burgundy-painted mouth.
I tried to change my voice as the months passed, and become a real Londoner like Lennie. I pored over the Tube map as if it were an exam subject, and started eating falafel. I turned briefly vegan like Charlie, a dietary experiment that coincided with the arrival of a recipe for Brazilian Beef, requiring cubed cow—Lennie referred to meat varieties by their animal names—to be stewed for several hours in strong coffee. Lennie owned a T-shirt with the slogan Meat Kills.
Occasionally Charlie would write to me, jumbling together anecdotes from uni that would have me laughing and crying simultaneously. Lennie was surprised to learn that I had a brother. ‘I’d just assumed,’ she said, ‘with your dad doting on you so much, you must be an only child.’
Lennie never found out about Dad’s TV years; nor did the succession of subsequent flatmates who would always leave something behind when they moved out: a broken lamp, or a bottle of Clairol shampoo, or a pair of tights with the knickers left in, lying under a bed. I liked it that I could talk about Dad as if he were ordinary—as if I, like the new friends I’d made at college, had grown up in a nice, normal home filled with porcelain ornaments and family dinners.
For the first time, I was just me.
Mrs Bones, my flute teacher, wrote to me, her sentences strung across the blue airmail pages like delicate necklaces.
Dear Stella,
I saw your father in town last Wednesday. He looked well but was concerned that you hadn’t been in touch for some time despite him writing to you. I reassured hi
m that you’re happy and settled in London, and that you have a lovely flat in a respectable part of the city.
He mentioned that he is thinking of leaving Devon. In fact, when I passed your house recently I noticed a For Sale sign. I do hope he’s happy, Stella—it can’t be easy for him now that you’ve gone, even though there’s that lady friend who seems extremely nice. I think he misses you very much.
I’ll sign off, now, Stella, and hope that you’ll pop by if you’re home for Christmas. Perhaps we could play the Mozart duets together.
With best wishes,
Lorna Bones
I hadn’t intended to go home for Christmas, but then I fell in love. Thomas, the brother of my current flatmate moved in, ostensibly until he found a permanent place to live. Then my flatmate left, and it made sense for Thomas to relocate from the dented sofa bed in the living room to her room. We liked to joke that I’d stumbled, mildly drunk, into his bedroom after a particularly arduous shift at the pizza restaurant where I worked three evenings a week. He’d tell our friends, ‘If Stella hadn’t had to deal with that bunch of prats throwing garlic bread, then we’d never have got together.’ The way he told it, that it had just happened—a happy accident, devoid of stress or embarrassment—was how it felt to me.
Thomas worked as a sound engineer. I’d wake at odd hours, before the Tube trains had begun to judder beneath the flat, and hear him undressing. I’d feel his warm arms around me, his soft kisses on my neck. Of course I told Thomas about Dad. We spread out the onion squares on the mud-colored carpet and constructed make-believe menus. ‘Tonight, my darling,’ Thomas said, ‘I shall cook for you…. Let’s see…stuffed eggs, followed by gratin au fruits de mer—’Thomas ladled on a French accent, which made me giggle‘—and, to finish, ma petite filou, le soufflé de Grand Marnier.’
For a split second, it was no longer Thomas and me in our London Bridge maisonette. It was Charlie, lurching into exaggerated French, making me laugh, making everything all right.
