Walking on Trampolines

by Frances Whiting

  I ran until I saw them, and the last image clicked into place, the two of them, naked, silvery fish beneath the dock.

  Josh sat up with his hand on his mouth, and said ‘Lulu.’ Annabelle brought her knees to her chest, as my own buckled beneath me.

  I said their names, my arms outstretched – for what?

  For what? I always asked myself later, long after they had dried themselves off and dressed themselves and packed up and walked silently past me, Annabelle’s head down, moving purposefully through the bush, and Josh behind her, crying, but not, I supposed, for me, because when I looked up, my arms were empty.

  *

  Annabelle and Josh would spend the next few years doing all the things Josh and I were meant to do: Josh helping Annabelle put on her backpack, laughing as she fell with the weight of it. They would travel and take pictures with the camera Fergus had given them as a going-away present, they would drink too much red wine in crooked little bars in Spain, they would squint their eyes against the whitewashed walls that hold up the Greek Islands, they would land like lemmings in Earls Court in London, and I would stay at home, in the streets I grew up on.

  I would stay at home with Harry and Rose, look out my window and wonder which one of them I ached for more.

  ‘I don’t want you working here anymore, Lulu.’

  I looked up from my desk to see Harry standing beside it in his navy boilersuit, rubbing the back of his neck as if he were trying to erase it.

  ‘I don’t want you in the office anymore,’ he repeated, still rubbing, and I knew from the way he said it he’d been practising the words.

  ‘Well, that makes a lot of sense, Harry,’ I smiled. ‘Your books are finally up-to-date, the billing system’s sorted, all the apprenticeships are done. Sheez, what more do you want from me?’

  ‘Not from you, for you, love.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not what I want from you, it’s what I want for you.’

  ‘Very deep, Harry, you really are plumbing the depths today.’

  My eyes flicked back to my computer screen as Harry shut the office door, his work boots leaving tiny mounds of black dirt on the carpet – Rose would have a fit, I thought automatically.

  Harry rolled a chair from across the room and sat down beside me.

  ‘It’s time for you to start living, Lulu.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re twenty-two now, and you’ve been moping around this office and at home since you were eighteen, ever since Annabelle and Josh left.’

  I put my hand up to stop him.

  ‘No, love, I know we’re not meant to mention their names, but it’s bloody ridiculous. What’s happened has happened and they’re long gone. You can’t keep flogging a dead horse, especially after it’s bolted.’ Harry took the hanky out of his pocket and handed it to me, just in case. ‘You’ve been wonderful, Lulu, with the business expanding the way it has, but it’s not right, love, it’s wrong of me to keep you here running the show.’

  ‘I’ve liked it.’

  ‘No, you haven’t, Lulu, you’ve borne it out, that’s all.’

  I stared at the computer screen.

  Of course I had borne it out.

  My ambition had not been to say: ‘Good morning, de Longland Plumbers, how can I help you?’, driving my car to work sites where men in hard hats wolf-whistled long and low, and only stopped when someone told them I was the boss’s daughter. I had never sat on my bed and dreamt of doing spreadsheets until my eyes burnt behind their lids.

  This was not the life I had been hurtling towards through the school gates on that last day, my hat caught on the sky’s breath, every nerve singing with what was to be.

  I had never imagined I would stay so still.

  But if my life did not remotely resemble the one I had planned, it was still, at least, a life. I had found comfort in its inertia, in the familiar rhythms of the office, where I arrived at half past seven and flicked the kettle on a minute after that, and at home, where even Rose’s moods, mercurial as they were, had their own pattern. Her depression waxed and waned, leaving our house in shadow or light, but always there, Rose, our very own paper moon.

  We lived around it, Harry reading his paper quietly in the garden, the boys thundering down the stairs to be picked up for swim squad, flicking their towels at me on the way. Sixteen years old, they ate like bears and looked like giants and came to me when Rose crumbled.

  The thought of leaving them, or any of it, filled me with panic.

  ‘Harry, I don’t want to do anything else.’

  ‘Yes, you do, and you know you do. Your mother and I want you to try something else, Lulu, go to uni, like you were meant to, go travelling, do anything, love, but do something – and do it somewhere else.’

  There it was.

  ‘You’re firing me and kicking me out?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it,’ he grinned, and took the hanky back to blow on it loudly.

  *

  Rose came down to my car in Betty – blue and white seersucker bumps, big pockets – and thrust a basket filled with cakes and buns and biscuits covered in checked tea towels into my hands.

  ‘Rose,’ I said, ‘it’s an hour and a half drive, there’s enough food here for a week.’

  ‘I know, but you can give some to Simone when you see her – I saw her on television the other night and she’s as skinny as a stick! Now, you’d better go if you want to miss the traffic.’

  I put the basket in the passenger seat, smiled at Rose, who smiled back, our eyes holding.

  ‘Off you go,’ she said, crossing her arms.

  I kissed her, got in, and pulled out of the driveway, stopping briefly at the end of the street to take a look at her in the rear-view mirror, waving until the very last moment when I turned the corner and headed for the city in a car that smelled like a cinnamon bun.

  Simone was already ensconced in city life, clawing her way up the television ladder and hanging on with grim determination as those about her fell, and sharing a flat with a girl called Beth who wore kimonos and smoked a lot.

  ‘You can stay with us for a few weeks until you find your feet,’ Simone had said on the phone, ‘or until Beth dies of emphysema – then you can have her room.’

  I moved in temporarily with the two of them, unpacking Rose’s offerings before an incredulous Beth, who said: ‘Are those baked goods? I didn’t know anyone did baked goods anymore . . .’, then proceeded to work her way through Rose’s basket, in between puffs.

  After Harry had told me it was time to end one sort of life and begin another, I’d gone home to appeal to Rose – but she’d simply echoed everything he’d said. So had Mattie and Sam, who’d professed that they too wanted me gone so they would no longer have to share a room.

  A few days later I’d told Stella, who’d said, ‘It’s time,’ and burst into tears, and Simone, who’d sighed over the phone, then said: ‘Just get here, Lulu, stop fucking around.’

  Having not much of a life had its advantages – there wasn’t much of it to pack up: just my clothes, my résumé, and the ‘city survival kit’ the boys who worked for Harry presented me with on my last day.

  Pete, Micko, Chook, Simon, Lizard and Alexi had stood in a half-circle around me and shifted their feet while I opened it. A torch, a penknife, an oxygen mask, a street directory, and finally a pair of faux-fur-trimmed handcuffs and a box of ‘maximum pleasure’ ribbed condoms.

  ‘You never know your luck in the big city, Lulu!’ Micko had shouted while they all fell about laughing, and our first-year apprentice, Lizard – so called because he was always flat out like one – grew pink at his ears.

  They toasted me with warm chardonnay out of plastic cups, and surprised me with a ludicrously large card that said, ‘You’ll be missed’, on which Chook had crossed out the ‘m’ and repla
ced it with a ‘p’.

  We were all half-drunk when we left the office, Micko ruffling my hair with his red hands and saying, ‘You’re a good girl, Lulu, you’ll be right.’

  *

  Two weeks later, I was curled up on a mattress in Simone’s spare room, praying that I would be.

  Something had happened that day by the jetty all those years ago, something had burrowed its way beneath my skin through the damp earth and stayed there. It made me feel both invisible and obvious, the sort of person it would take people a long time to notice, and then, when they did, wonder why they had bothered.

  When men looked at me with interested eyes, it made me flinch. Not that it happened often – none of the single blokes, names emblazoned on pockets, who worked for Harry over the years ever asked me out, maybe because I was the boss’s daughter, maybe because there was not one thing about me that invited them to.

  It stamped me with a sourness I could almost taste.

  When snippets of stories about Josh and Annabelle filtered back to our home town, Mrs Delaney calling from behind her fence: ‘Well, your two old chums are certainly making a name for themselves, photojournalists, aren’t they, dear?’ it made me want to slap her stupid doughy face.

  Once, an accidental sighting of them in a magazine in the newsagency made me sway where I stood and I held their faces in my hands, awash with bitterness.

  But mostly, whatever got a hold of me that day by the river made me sad. Not Rose-sad, not lost in another place hopelessness, but face-pressed-to-the-window sad, watching from behind the glass.

  I had left home without much of a fight, not having much of a fight left in me. But somewhere along the drive to the city, I felt a shift, as if my body was uncoiling a little from its confines. It might have been that I was only twenty-two and youth has its own way of shouting in your ear and making you sing, but driving to Simone’s that day I began to let go.

  Stella was right. It was time. All I had to do was let the air in.

  That night I closed my eyes and went to sleep in Simone’s flat, and felt Rose’s hand on my cheek.

  *

  The next morning I was in the kitchen looking through the classifieds when Beth came in, adjusting the sash on her kimono as she sat down beside me.

  ‘Watcha doing?’

  ‘Looking for a job.’

  ‘What sort of job?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. Something that’s not working for my father’s plumbing company.’

  ‘Right, so obviously you’re very picky – what are you good at?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and realised it was true.

  ‘Are you a leso?’ she asked, reaching for her pack of cigarettes and fishing one out.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Are you,’ she whispered dramatically, ‘a friend of Dorothy’s?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said uncertainly. ‘Is she a mate of Simone’s?’

  Beth threw her head back and laughed so hard she immediately began choking on her cigarette, screwing up her little face and clawing at her throat until I passed her some water.

  She gulped it down, wiped her eyes and blinked at me.

  ‘You know what?’ she said, ‘I’ve a feeling you’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.’

  Later, when Simone and Beth had left for work – Simone to a production meeting and Beth to the dental surgery where she worked, I presumed, as the anaesthetist by breathing on people – I took the number out of my handbag.

  Are you a secret worrier? the woman’s voice on the radio had asked, about halfway between my house and Simone’s. Is the only person holding you back, you? Do you want to reclaim the power that you know is in you?

  ‘Yes,’ I had whispered in the car. ‘I do.’

  Then call the Epstein Institute, a respected name in personal growth since 1982, and join our Worrier Women Workshop – we’ll teach you how to roar.

  I felt a bit ridiculous dialling the number, but something had made me pull over in the car and write it down, and after being so quiet for so long, I was pretty sure I was ready to roar, or at least howl a little.

  ‘Hello, the Epstein Institute,’ a woman’s voice – not the one from the radio, I noticed – said. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m interested in one of your workshops, the one for women who worry too much.’

  ‘I, I’m sorry, which one?’

  ‘The, um, Worrier Women Workshop,’ I replied. ‘You know, ah, for women who want to roar.’

  There was a long pause, then a snort of laughter.

  ‘It’s Warrior Women, love, Warrior Women.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘“Warrior Women”. Of course, well, I’m sorry to trouble you, but no, I don’t think I’m one of those.’

  I hung up, not with a roar but a whimper.

  Simone laughed even harder than the woman on the phone when I told her and Beth what I had done over two and a half bottles of red wine and a takeaway curry that night.

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t sign up, Lulu,’ Simone said, ‘you probably would have had to go on some ghastly weekend away where they make you kill a pig and smear its blood on each other’s boobs or something . . . Actually, maybe I should go!’

  ‘Well, I think,’ Beth said, swaying in her kimono and talking through the cigarette dangling between her lips, ‘that it was very brave of you to call, Lulu, and you know what else I think?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you are a warrior woman, setting off for a new life with your basket of baked goods . . .’

  ‘More like Red Riding Hood,’ Simone said, yawning. ‘I’m off to bed.’

  A little later, as I passed by her room on the way to mine, a little unsteady on my feet, I said in a half-whisper, ‘Simone, are you awake?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  ‘I wanted to say thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For letting me stay.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Simone?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I love you,’ I told her.

  ‘I love you too, Lulu.’

  ‘But not in that way.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I’m not a friend of Dorothy’s,’ I whispered. ‘I’m very sorry, Simone.’

  ‘Goodnight, Tallulah,’ she said, and I heard her smile in the darkness.

  *

  The next morning Simone had gone out for a run – I had no idea how – and Beth was sitting slumped in the chair at the corner of the kitchen, reaching into her pockets for cigarettes, putting one to her mouth, taking it out again, and saying, ‘No, even I can’t do it this morning.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Love one – that was a pretty good night, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, it was.’

  ‘I still can’t believe,’ she said, a laugh forming in her throat and slowly working its way up to a hack, ‘I still can’t believe you said “the one for women who worry too much”.’ Her little body seized up as a cough rattled at her throat.

  ‘Here,’ I said, handing her a glass of water to put out the fire.

  When she finished coughing she said, ‘So, what exactly do you worry so much about, Lulu? For example, what’s the one thing that is worrying you the most right now?’

  I looked at her, so tiny, curled up in the wooden chair, her feet barely reaching the floor, and thought about all the things that were on my mind that morning – that I wouldn’t find a job, or a place to live, that I would have to go scurrying back to Harry and Rose, that everyone would say knowingly, ‘I see the de Longland girl’s home again’, that I would always, despite the long drive between me and my home town and the air rushing through the window, continue to feel the way I had felt for the last four years for the res
t of my life.

  Then I looked at Beth and thought of the thing that was really, really bothering me.

  ‘I am really worried,’ I said, pointing at the packet of cigarettes on the table, ‘that those things are going to kill you.’

  *

  I spent that day looking for a job in the paper, and by the end of it had three appointments, all at temp agencies, all for places who wanted someone to come in, answer the phone, type a few letters, file a few orders, arrive on time, leave on time, and not nick anybody’s lunch out of the fridge.

  Perfect.

  I wonder what would have happened if I’d got a job like that.

  Instead, Simone insisted I go and see her friend Loreli Marks, of the Marks and Abbott recruitment agency.

  ‘They do mostly media work,’ Simone said, ‘in television or radio or advertising or marketing firms, and then they have a creative arm where they work with galleries and theatres and agencies. It’s still office work, but at least the offices have a bit of life about them – you might meet someone famous.’

  ‘I already know someone famous – you!’

  ‘Not yet, Lulu,’ she smiled, ‘but I will be.’

  *

  ‘Your reference is terrific,’ Loreli beamed at me, her bright red lipstick like two, glossy ribbons stretched across her face, ‘even if it is from your father.’

  ‘I haven’t really worked for anyone else, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said crisply. ‘Your typing is excellent, your shorthand’s very good, your book-keeping skills are completely up-to-date and your presentation is terrific. I wish I had a hundred of you, Tallulah,’ she said, ‘but I don’t, so the question is where to send you where it will do you and me the most good – and I think I’m going to give you to Duncan.’