Triangles

by Andrea Newman

  ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane,’ said the first youth to Geraldine with a coarse laugh.

  ‘No, me Jane,’ said Lucy. ‘She Natasha.’ Oh well, why not? she thought.

  The hangers-on, bored, started to drift away, but the friend repeated carefully, pointing at himself, ‘Me Peter,’ and then pointing at Geraldine, ‘You Natasha.’ Lucy began to feel sorry for him.

  ‘Tell her to say something in English,’ said the first youth.

  Just then the organist stopped playing; there was faint applause, and in the ensuing silence, loudly and clearly Geraldine said, ‘Prick.’

  Lucy saw incredulity on the faces of the two young men. Right, she thought, that does it. Time to go home before we get into real trouble. ‘She’s feeling sick,’ she announced, seizing Geraldine’s arm and jerking her to her feet. ‘We must go.’ Nobody moved and Lucy, beginning to panic, added, ‘Come on, you’d better move, she might throw up all over you. You heard her say she feels sick.’

  The young men drew back, still looking puzzled, not sure now what they had heard. Lucy frogmarched Geraldine to the door and into the car park.

  ‘I hate men,’ said Geraldine.

  ‘They were harmless,’ said Lucy.

  Geraldine sat in the car with Lucy beside her and began to laugh. First the kitten chuckle, then the tiger roar. Then she started to cry.

  ‘Please, Geraldine,’ Lucy said. ‘Let’s go. Are you okay to drive? Please don’t let’s just sit here.’

  Geraldine started the car. ‘I don’t know what I did wrong,’ she said. ‘I had children, I cooked dinners, I was good in bed. I entertained his friends. Why didn’t Charlie want me?’

  ‘Let’s go home,’ Lucy begged.

  Geraldine drove slowly this time, so slowly and carefully that Lucy was sure that the police, should they meet any, would stop them. When they were nearly home Geraldine suddenly said, ‘Well, he was a proper Charlie then,’ but neither of them laughed. Lucy had heard of people being tired to the bone but she thought that her own exhaustion went beyond that: she was tired right through the marrow of her bones and could easily melt into a little exhausted pool on the floor of Geraldine’s car.

  Geraldine stopped outside Lucy’s flat. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Keep in touch.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucy.

  ‘I mean properly,’ said Geraldine. ‘Not just Christmas cards. And any time you fancy a weekend in Bristol, just give me a ring.’

  Lucy kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Take care,’ she said. ‘Drive carefully and good luck with everything.’

  ‘It was lovely seeing you again,’ said Geraldine.

  Lucy waved until she was out of sight. Going upstairs and into her empty, silent flat, she felt curiously light and optimistic. Apart from the exhaustion, she seemed washed new, as on the day after a hangover. There were, it appeared, worse fates in the world than being alone. She had learnt that much; Geraldine had taught her something.

  She opened the windows to get rid of the smoke. If someone new came along, so much the better, but if not, well … She stood on the balcony and looked at the sea and found herself smiling.

  A Long Way from Paradise

  When the letter with the airline ticket arrived, Abigail didn’t know what to do. She carried it around with her for several days and kept looking at it, on the bus or in her desk at school. At night she put it under her pillow. She knew she would have to tell her mother about it eventually but she needed time to think and she wanted to keep it a secret while she thought. She didn’t want to talk to anyone about it until she had decided what to do.

  At first there was a temptation to tear it up and send it back to him with no letter, nothing, just the pieces in an envelope. That would show him how she felt, and serve him right too. But she didn’t. Then she was angry with herself for being so feeble. If she gave in as easily as that, he would only think he could buy her off with a holiday. It was like a bribe to make her forgive him, to pretend everything was all right.

  She took out his letter, a bit crumpled now, and read it again.

  Darling Abby,

  I do wish you’d write to me. I know you’re very cross with me for going away and you’ve every right to be, although I did try to explain why I had to go. But I’d still rather have a cross letter than no letter at all. I miss you very much. Can’t you write and tell me how you feel and I’ll answer you the best I can. It’s awful writing all these letters and never getting a reply. It’s as if my letters have got stuck at the post office and never reached you at all.

  I’m enclosing a ticket for you to come out here in the Xmas holidays. All you have to do is ring up the airline for dates and flights. Please come – we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Apart from that, I think you’d like it here. Now that the rainy season’s over, it’s lovely, warm and sunny. There are brightly coloured birds everywhere that come and steal the sugar at breakfast, and the flowers are amazing – you almost need sunglasses to look at them. Just think – you could be lying on the beach getting a fantastic suntan while all your friends are getting chilblains in the snow.

  There was more, but she didn’t read it all again. His letters were always like that, telling her how nice the place was and how much she’d like it, and often enclosing a few snapshots of himself against some scenic bit of landscape. He was always alone, which reminded her of the person who must have taken the photograph. The only difference with this letter was the ticket.

  The temptation was enormous: she ached to see him again. Already his image was becoming faint and when she looked at the pictures he seemed somehow unfamiliar. Perhaps it was the unaccustomed suntan, making him appear younger; she tried to tell herself that. But she was afraid he was beginning to look like a stranger enjoying himself on a beach, a stranger who wrote her letters she did not answer. They had never been apart before, so these were the first letters she had ever received from him.

  She finally decided to tell her mother when they were washing up. It was easier for them to talk about important things when their hands were busy and they didn’t have to look at each other. Even so, it was hard to get the words out and when she did, they came in a rush.

  ‘Dad’s sent me a ticket.’

  For just a second Mum’s hands stopped moving in the soapy water; then they darted about faster than ever. It was still odd to see them without a wedding ring: as if she and Dad had never been married at all. When she first took it off, Abigail had hoped it meant she was ready to start going out with people again, like the man at work who was always asking her. But it hadn’t turned out that way. It meant she was giving up. She had stopped wearing make-up at the same time, stopped wearing rubber gloves for washing up, like now, as if she didn’t care what she looked like any more.

  It was so unlike her: she had always been so smart and modern, keen to look nice, proud of her job. She and Dad had even argued about her dressing up for work. He’d hardly recognise her now, Abigail thought.

  ‘He wants me to go out there in the holidays,’ she went on, bolder now it was out. She hated having to feel sorry for Mum: it hurt and made her angry. She didn’t want to be grown up and responsible. She wanted Mum to look after her and make Dad come back. ‘But I shan’t go,’ she added sharply.

  ‘Why not?’ Mum asked, sounding oddly casual.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Course you do.’ She stopped washing up, wiped her hands and put an arm round Abigail. ‘It’s only natural. Of course you want to see him again.’

  Abigail squirmed away. She hated it when Mum hugged her. It didn’t happen very often but it always made her want to cry. She was afraid that if she cried Mum would cry too and somehow that seemed very dangerous, as if it would make everything fall apart. She had never seen Mum cry, though she had heard her often enough through the bedroom wall. She did her own crying at night too, but silently, and sometimes, if she really couldn’t avoid it, in the loo at school. She resented it bitterly: she was sure Dad wasn’t crying. He was too b
usy enjoying himself in the sunshine with that girl. If he could manage so well without them both, then she and Mum should be able to manage without him.

  ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I’d have to see her too and I’m not going to do that. He must be joking if he thinks I’d go out there for a holiday while she’s hanging about.’

  Mum went back to the sink. ‘You’ll have to meet her eventually,’ she said, sounding very calm and reasonable.

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Because he’s probably going to marry her.’

  ‘But you’re not divorced.’ It was a shock, a blow to the stomach, to hear her worst fears put into words.

  ‘No, but we will be next year.’ Mum emptied the washing-up water and it gurgled away. ‘He’s got a new life out there, lovey, and he’s not coming back. You need to see him. He still loves you, you know. It was me he wanted to leave, not you.’

  ‘Yes, you told me all that,’ Abigail snapped. Before Dad left, he and Mum had got together and explained it all to her, about how they had got married too young and how they had changed over the years and that was why they had been having a lot of rows until they got very polite and hardly talked at all. Now they were going to separate, but it was all for the best and she would have two homes instead of one and of course they both loved her as much as ever. It was quite a speech, quite a double act: in fact the most united thing she had seen them do in years. But it reminded her of American films and she didn’t believe any of it. They were saying what they thought they ought to say.

  She was right. After they’d finished their big speech and while she was still dumb with shock that the thing she’d always feared had actually happened, Mum added sharply, ‘Well, aren’t you going to tell her the rest of it?’

  For just a second Dad looked like a cringing dog that knows it’s going to be beaten, then he became very angry. ‘I see. You want to play it that way, do you?’

  ‘She might as well know the truth,’ said Mum, looking at her nail varnish. ‘She’ll have to know sooner or later.’

  ‘Your version, you mean,’ Dad said.

  ‘Just the facts,’ said Mum.

  Abigail wanted to scream and run away, but she didn’t move.

  ‘He’s got this girl at work.’ said Mum. ‘She’s one of the waitresses and she’s twenty-six and he’s going away with her.’

  ‘God, you’re a bitch,’ said Dad.

  ‘I mean really away,’ said Mum. ‘Far away. They’re going to run away to an island in the sun and live happily ever after.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Dad yelled. Abigail put her hands over her ears. She pictured the waitress as someone with wild hair and a slightly tarty, cross-eyed look, rather like Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces. She was desperately embarrassed to think of Dad with a girl.

  ‘I know it’s a shock,’ Dad said to her gently, ‘and I’m sorry, but I’m sure once you meet her –’

  ‘I’m never going to meet her,’ she said. ‘I hate her.’ Dad had become disgusting and ridiculous, like vicars and schoolteachers you read about in the papers when they ran off with teenagers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mum said. ‘I shouldn’t have told her like that.’

  Abigail rocked herself to and fro, the way she did when she had a painful period, to make the backache go away. Her parents became united again. They tried to hug her but she wouldn’t let them. They apologised to her as if she were grown up. They made tea and tried to persuade her to drink it.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ Abigail said. In some perverse way she almost enjoyed seeing how guilty and miserable they looked. When she got to her room she put on a record very loud, knowing that for once they wouldn’t dare ask her to turn it down. She lay on the bed and tried to think about what had happened but none of it seemed real. The music drowned it out.

  Dad moved into a bedsit and she was supposed to visit him at weekends but then she found out that the girl was sharing the bedsit with him. Julie, her name was. After that Abigail wouldn’t visit him any more and they had to meet in parks and coffee bars.

  He tried to explain about the island, how it was a great opportunity. He tried to make it sound like work, not a glorious holiday.

  ‘Julie has friends there and they’re opening a small hotel. I’d be in charge of the restaurant. It’d be almost like having my own place.’

  The name still hurt, making her sour. It seemed to intrude into every conversation they had. ‘I don’t see why. You’d still be working for someone else, just like now.’

  ‘I know it’s a long way,’ he said, picking up what she hadn’t said, ‘but you could come out there in the holidays. And if you go to college next year I’d only see you in the holidays anyway.’

  All that was true, but surely he didn’t imagine that made it all right. She punished him by saying she had to go home early to do extra homework, since he was so keen she should go to college, and she wouldn’t have time to see him on Sunday. She thought he sounded almost like someone of her own age when he talked about the restaurant, and it made her angry.

  ‘He always wanted his own place,’ Mum said when she mentioned it. ‘When we got married, that was what we were going to do.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘It cost too much. And I thought – oh, it sounds silly now, but I thought working together would be a mistake.’

  Abigail wondered why she didn’t say it was simply more fun to work in publishing, to start as a secretary and become a press officer. It was liberated; it was glamorous. It fitted in with all Mum’s ideas about women being entitled to exciting jobs. Abigail agreed with her. But how had Dad felt about it? By the time he got home from the restaurant at night, Mum was asleep, and by the time he woke up in the morning, she had gone to work. It had only left Sundays for them to be together, and after they had read the papers and argued about who was going to cook, there was hardly time to do anything except watch television. Cooking seemed such a silly thing to argue about, but they always did. Either Dad complained that the last thing he wanted to do on his day off was cook, and Mum replied that she’d done it for six days already and why should she keep a dog and bark herself; or Dad went out of his way to stop Mum cooking by finding fault with what she cooked and saying he might as well do it, at least he’d get it right. Sometimes Abigail cooked, just to shut them up, but it didn’t seem to make the atmosphere any better, so more often she went out.

  ‘They’re probably arguing about something else,’ said her friend Lorna, who listened to lots of phone-in problems on the radio and considered herself quite an expert. ‘I expect it’s sex or money. It usually is. Do they shout a lot?’

  ‘They used to,’ Abigail said. ‘But they stopped. They haven’t had a proper row for ages.’ At first she had been relieved: it had been awful to lie in bed and listen to their raised voices. But now that Lorna made her think about it, the silence she had welcomed as peaceful did in fact have an ominous aspect. She didn’t count the Sunday arguments as rows: they were only bickering.

  The night before he left, he took her out to dinner as if she were grown up, but she couldn’t eat much because her throat was so tight with trying not to cry. He kept saying they’d soon be together again and she mustn’t feel he was deserting her because he loved her more than anything in the world.

  Not more than anyone, though, she wanted to say. Not more than Julie, or you wouldn’t be going away with her. But she couldn’t say it. She couldn’t hurt him the way he’d hurt her, and besides, she didn’t want him to agree with her.

  ‘It wasn’t something I did, was it?’ she said instead. She’d been longing to ask that because the idea hung about in her mind, although Lorna said it was childish, the sort of thing kids got in their heads. It was always coming up on her phone-in programmes and Abigail was too old to think like that, she said. People got divorced all the time and it was sex and money and boredom, nothing to do with their children. Abigail wished she thought Lorna was right.

  ‘No,’
he said, ‘no, you mustn’t think that. Promise me you won’t, not ever.’ And she saw tears come into his eyes. She was horribly embarrassed but relieved as well, as if he was crying for her and she could believe him now. He gave her a big, tight, almost suffocating bear-hug (the sort she had liked as a child, squealing with fright) when he took her home, and she couldn’t cry at all. She kept thinking of Mum inside the house with the radio turned up loud, and Julie back at the flat waiting for him to come home and help her with the packing. Perhaps he would say, ‘God, that was awful,’ and she would put her arms round him and say, ‘I know, darling, I know, but it’s over now, don’t think about it.’

  They couldn’t say goodbye. When she disentangled herself from the hug, she ran up the path to the door as fast as she could and let herself in without looking back. Mum called out, ‘Abby?’ and she called back, ‘Mm,’ which was all she could manage without breaking down. Mum’s voice sounded strange too and she didn’t say any more, but let Abigail run upstairs to her room without asking if she wanted a hot drink or anything, the way she usually did.

  Abigail thought she would lie awake for hours but she didn’t. Exhausted by the evening, she fell asleep almost at once, only to wake early, at peace for a moment, before she remembered that there was something bad to remember. It was a sensation she had previously only associated with exams.

  She lay in bed, staring at the clock and picturing Dad at the airport, with Julie a self-satisfied blur beside him. She imagined them so hard that they became like people in a film. She concentrated on wishing Julie dead and when that didn’t work, when the Julie-figure simply wouldn’t collapse, no matter how much she willed it, she pictured instead Dad changing his mind, and that seemed to work better. She could see him shaking his head and saying, ‘It’s no good, I can’t do it, I just can’t leave them.’ Then he was running away from the departure lounge, leaving Julie alone. She didn’t follow, in Abigail’s film; she just looked sad and resigned, admitting defeat. In her heart she knew it served her right.