by Emlyn Rees
‘Well, let’s just say this isn’t her scene.’ Susan pulls a face as she holds open the door. ‘Not Gucci enough, darling,’ she adds in a confidential whisper, ‘if you know what I mean.’
I find Fred chatting by the bar. He smiles at me and hands me a drink, but he’s mid conversation with two men. They’re talking what I assume is e-business speak, but could well be Martian. Astounded, I make wide eyes at Fred over the rim of my glass.
‘Sorry,’ says Fred, interrupting. He gives me a reassuring look. ‘Let me translate. This is Peter and Tim. They are home shopping. All you could want from lipstick to lampshades. This is Mickey.’
‘So are you another one of Fred’s mob?’ Peter asks, in a florid cockney accent. He’s short, bald and he taps his thick platinum ring on his glass with frenetic energy.
‘No, no,’ I stutter, feeling like an impostor. ‘I’m … I’m a florist.’
‘A florist,’ says Peter. He nods his head for a moment. ‘You could be just the person we’re looking for. Don’t you reckon, Tim?’
Tim, who’s clearly Peter’s assistant, nods eagerly.
‘Oh, no, really … I’ve only got a little shop. It’s nothing –’ I start.
‘It’s great,’ interrupts Fred, discreetly sliding his foot towards mine and pressing against it. ‘It’s in Kensal Rise near your offices.’
‘Yeah, we’re down on the canal.’ Peter sniffs and looks at me. ‘I don’t suppose you could come in and cheer the place up, could you? I don’t go in for all that floral basket shit. But our New York office has these wicked flowers all over the place. All modern …’
I look between Peter and Fred and back at Peter. ‘Well ... I could have a look …’ I say, taking my cue from Fred, who nods encouragingly.
‘You’d be brilliant,’ he says, before turning to Peter. ‘Believe me, she’s excellent.’
‘Fix it, Tim.’ Peter nods, turning away. ‘Later, Fred. Mickey …’
‘Can I have your number?’ asks Tim, pulling out an electronic pocket organiser.
I smile at Fred, as I tell Tim my details.
‘I’ll call you on Monday to arrange an appointment.’ Tim says decisively as he snaps his organiser shut.
Fred clinks glasses with me after he’s gone. ‘See, that wasn’t so hard. You never know. Peter’s company’s huge. If you get in there, you’ll be laughing.’
‘Hm, well, we’ll see.’ I smile, not wanting to be optimistic. I can’t believe Fred has done me such a favour and made it seem so effortless. I feel like a complete amateur by comparison. I’ve spent the last few months tied up in knots over the copy for an advert I put in the local paper and here’s Fred casually doing mega deals over a few drinks. Compared with my little flower business, this all seems like a different world.
‘Don’t you have to … you know … mingle?’ I ask, as Fred draws me over to the bar and huddles up next to me.
‘I should, but I’m not going to.’ He grins as he pushes another cocktail towards me.
‘I warn you,’ I say, taking a sip of the heady fruit concoction. ‘I’m not used to drinking. These taste lethal.’
‘I think we should go and check out the virtual reality game in the jungle section. What do you say?’ He smiles.
‘Ah, I see,’ I tease. ‘Trying to get me pissed, so that you can beat me. That old chestnut. Well, you can’t get round me that easily.’
I reach out to try and jab Fred in the ribs, as the alcohol hits my brain, but he’s too quick and ducks out of the way.
‘Come on.’ He grins. ‘Let’s see how those old reflexes of yours are.’
‘Huh!’ I snort. ‘Still razor. Just you wait.’
But as I follow Fred, I don’t feel razor sharp, I feel fuzzy and happy in a floppy sort of way. I’m glad Rebecca isn’t here. It’s wonderful having the most popular and important man in the room all to myself, even though I know it won’t last. And as we scurry past all the attractive, fashionable girls, I want to stop, point at Fred and say in a very loud voice. ‘See him? He was mine, once. I had him.’
The next day I’m felled by the worst hangover I’ve experienced in years. I’m not really with it as I try and throw together a Sunday lunch and my mood isn’t improved when Joe comes through from his bedroom with the telephone.
‘It’s Grandma,’ he says, passing me the phone. I wipe my hands on a tea towel and take it. There’s no greeting from my mother.
‘I can’t get over it. After all this time and I thought you’d got that out of your system ages ago. Fred Roper!’ she says, sounding genuinely shocked. ‘Joe’s been telling me all about him.’
‘Hello, Mum,’ I say, ignoring her outrage, feeling an unusual double whammy of old and new heckles rising.
‘It’s taken me right back. When I think of his father! Oh!’ She takes a sharp intake of breath and I picture her on the stairs in her house in Rushton, dramatically putting her hand to her chest.
Immediately I feel my defences spring up like spikes in a fortress. ‘What exactly is the problem?’ I ask through gritted teeth, wishing I had the nerve to say ‘your problem’ instead.
‘Well, you know, I’ve always said –’
‘Mum!’ I interrupt, my patience snapping. ‘Can you just drop it. That was a long time ago. Fred’s got a completely new life now. He’s responsible and kind and, for your information, it’s wonderful seeing him again. He isn’t anything like Miles …’ I stop myself, angry that I’m doing the thing I always do and justifying myself to her. I know it never works.
‘But what about Joe? Think of him –’
‘Mum!’ I take a deep breath. ‘Please. This has got nothing to do with you.’
‘I’m just concerned for my grandson, darling. Someone’s got to look out for him,’ she says in a peeved voice and I have to stop myself from growling. Ever since Joe was born, she’s always managed to imply that I’m a terrible mother. I have to prevent myself from rising. I’m not even going to start on her faults. I’m incredibly tempted to let rip and challenge her about the letters and for ruining Fred and me all those years ago. But there’s no point. She thinks she’s in the right. She always thought she was in the right. There’s no sense in explaining to her all the damage she’s done, because she’d simply deny it.
‘Did you ring for any particular reason?’ I ask pointedly.
‘We’re going to your father’s cousin’s wake the weekend after next weekend,’ she says. ‘I was wondering whether you could come over and feed Oscar while we’re away.’
Oscar is my parents’ ancient cat.
‘Only everyone around here seems to be on holiday at the moment,’ she continues and I can tell this is for my father’s benefit who must be nearby.
‘Sure,’ I say and ring off as soon as possible.
As the week progresses, I don’t stop feeling out of sorts and on edge. But it’s not the business that’s worrying me, or Joe, or any of the things that usually preoccupy my mind. No, my problem is that, despite my mother’s best efforts to put me off, I’ve got Fred head. Or, more specifically, Fred in the head.
He keeps popping into my thoughts and I find myself having imaginary conversations with him. As the days go by and I don’t hear from him, I crave communication. On Thursday, I’m up at dawn buying from the market and, by the time I’m back at the shop refreshing all the stock, Lisa has had enough.
As usual, we’re in the back of the shop, behind the till. There’s not much room, only just enough for a wide table and an old porcelain sink. I’ve fixed up a couple of shelves, which are haphazardly stacked with ribbons, the credit card machine, a kettle and jar of coffee and, the most essential item of the lot, the radio, which plays a morning pop show. Between Lisa and me, the table is stacked with heaps of foliage, including all types of variegated ferns and fern. On top is a bundle of flowers, their stems all pointing towards us and we work through them, one by one, snipping the bottoms of their stems and rinsing them, before arranging them in the black bucke
ts.
To an untrained eye it looks completely chaotic, but one of the most satisfying things about my job is that by nine o’clock, when I open the doors, the flowers will look their best and the shop serene and ordered. Well, that’s the plan, anyway.
‘Mickey?’ Lisa clicks her fingers in front of my face.
‘Huh?’
‘Come back.’
I shake my head and smile at her.
‘You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?’
I shift uncomfortably. ‘Wasn’t it something about the oasis order?’
‘Yes. About five minutes ago.’ She looks exasperated.
‘Sorry.’
Lisa puts down her secateurs. ‘I know you’re thinking about him.’
‘Who?’ I ask innocently, but I know I’ve been rumbled.
Lisa puts one hand on her hip and raises her eyebrows at me. ‘I don’t know what it is between you and Fred,’ she says. ‘But it’s obviously unfinished business. When are you seeing him again?’
‘I don’t know.’ I sigh heavily, jabbing a length of wire into the head of an orange gerbera and winding it down around the stem. ‘That’s just the problem. I don’t know anything. We had such a great time the other night, but it was all left so open-ended.’
‘Do you want to see him?’
‘Of course I do, but it’s too complicated. He’s about to get married for starters.’
‘So why did he invite you to that launch party the other night?’
I shrug hopelessly.
‘Look, you were going to tell him about Peter, from the launch. Why don’t you just go round and see him?’ she continues.
‘What? Now?’
‘Why not? You’re always the one telling me to be impulsive.’
‘But it’s first thing in the morning.’
‘So? When was time ever important in these things?’
It takes a further half-hour to convince myself that Lisa has a point. By the time I get into the van, I feel giddy with nerves and excitement, as if I’m about to do something incredibly naughty. It’s crazy, really, because if I’m trying to prove a point, I’m only proving it to myself. There’s no one else around whom this matters to, yet I still have a full-blown conversation trying to persuade prim Mickey that this is a good idea.
When I find it, Fred’s street isn’t what I’d expected. I’d imagined it would be somewhere plush and posh, but it’s an average scruffy London thoroughfare with budding plane trees and a potholed bus lane. I double-check it in my battered A-Z against the address I scrawled in eyeliner in my book when Fred dropped me and Joe off in a cab after the party, and park on a yellow line outside the dilapidated town house. I must have driven down this road countless times and it strikes me now how incredible it is that Fred was here all the time and I never knew.
I turn off the engine and get out of the van as a jogger comes out from a house two doors down and starts panting up the street towards me. I nod and say hello, but the middle-aged man looks at me suspiciously and gives me a wide berth.
There’s obviously a tag war going on in the neighbourhood, because every spare bit of wall is sprayed with layers of colourful graffiti. I push my sunglasses to the top of my head and look up at the assortment of flaking windows of Fred’s building, wondering which is his flat. There seems no sign of life in any of them, except for a fat ginger cat who sits in the front bay window on the ground floor, slowly blinking in the sunshine.
There’s a loud clatter as over the road the owner of a café pulls up the metal shutters and I decide to bide a bit of time and psych myself up before I intrude on Fred. Inside the café the owner pulls down a plastic chair from the chipped Formica table so that I can sit down. He winks at me and whistles along to the radio as he sweeps the floor, and it occurs to me, as I fiddle with the sugar shaker, that I haven’t had time just to sit like this on my own for as long as I can remember. I rest my chin on my fist and relish the moment, letting my nostrils fill with the aroma of fresh coffee as my eyes relax against the sun which streams through the windows, illuminating a shimmering spotlight of dust. On the other side of the window is Fred’s house and I realise I’m experiencing an emotion so ridiculously familiar to me that it almost makes me laugh.
Despite all our fears, when we finished at Rushton Primary and I started at Bowley Comp after the hot summer, the fact that Fred was at a different school hardly made any impact on our lives at all. We adapted to the way things were, as children do. He had new friends and so did I, but we still had each other when other friends had gone home and during the long Sunday evening slog between TV no man’s land and bedtime.
At the time I was jealous. His posh prep school sounded interesting, with its big sports fields, language laboratory and swanky art department. That said, I wouldn’t have swapped my Saturday mornings when Dad cooked a fry-up for Fred’s unreasonable weekend lessons, but at least Fred appeared to be learning. As far as I could see, my own long-haul journey through the education system at Bowley Comprehensive seemed boring and fairly pointless by comparison.
When anything major happened – there was a fight or falling out – I told Fred, but mostly by the time I got home each evening the experience of school had washed over me and left me feeling pretty much as I had done the evening before. Apart from the fact that the loos smelt more than Rushton Primary and there was more puss on the mirrors, the only real differences I could discern at Bowley Comprehensive was that the chairs were bigger, the detentions longer and we had to walk further between lessons.
In class, as in Rushton Primary, I was constantly told off for daydreaming or chattering at the back and the only thing that inspired me was the large faded map of the world that covered one wall of our classroom. I would gaze up at the contoured pastel land masses, rolling the names of foreign cities around on my tongue, and childishly fantasise about zooming round them in a souped-up red car with a go-faster stripe on a mission to find cunningly disguised 00Fred, who had the local lingo sussed, and was at the ready to shoot the baddies and restore order.
Back in reality, it was instalments of Dallas and the extra-curricular details of school life that kept me interested on a day-to-day basis. I smoked cigarettes at the bottom of the sports field, did derogatory impressions of all the teachers and scratched rude words on the school desks with a compass at every available opportunity. I only avoided getting into serious trouble because Pippa, my old primary school stooge, let me copy her neat homework on the bus each morning, in return for my reassurance that she could be the deputy leader of our gang.
As gang leader, I busied myself by being the meddling expert on who was friends with whom, who preferred which male singer out of which pop band and who had the latest hairstyle courtesy of Crops and Bobbers, the hairdressers in Bowley High Street. And the most consuming topic of the lot – boys.
Needless to say, the ones we came into contact with at school were revolting and worthy of our scorn, but secretly we were all fascinated. To prove my superiority, I let slip to the girls in my class that I’d French-kissed a boy and made up facial expressions, that gave each one of them a very different impression of the experience I’d actually had. Mickey’s Secret Snog became a whispered talking point and, for want of any better gossip, my fame as a kisser was so exaggerated and so many contenders were put forward as to the identity of the kissee, that it grew impossible to own up to the fact that it had only been Fred.
At first I was amazed that I wasn’t exposed as the liar I was, but as time went on and the fabrication of my advanced state of secret sexual enlightenment continued, I revelled in my notoriety. Not to be outdone by Tracey Hitchin, my rival in 2C, I spread it about that I had ‘come on’ first. Not even Pippa knew the truth. Amazingly, no one ever sussed that I stuffed toilet paper down the tiny cups of my trainer bra. Nor did they twig that the swollen abdomen I displayed once a month, like a pregnant woman, was a combination of cheese and onion crisps and clever muscle control. While everyone clucked
around whispering ‘poor Mickey’, I milked my so-called womanhood to such an extent that I almost believed I had actually written the letter that was printed in the problem page of Jackie magazine about a tampon that had become stuck … up there.
In truth, I had no idea what to expect from up there. I avoided any conversation with my mum on the subject, assuming that I was deeply dysfunctional and weird. In private, I studied my flat chest and childish body impatiently, and prayed hard for something, anything, to start happening for real.
Then, when I was thirteen, Fred finished at Rathborne Prep School and went away to boarding school. Even though we’d been warned and were expecting it, the fact that he was now going to be away permanently came as a terrible shock. To me, it seemed as if he was going to the other side of the planet. As he drove away from Hill Drive in Miles’s Porsche, I knew that an era had ended and, despite making Fred swear on his life that he’d correspond every week and give me all the glamorous details of life away from home, he didn’t.
In his absence, the world went crazy as puberty kicked in. Out went the toilet paper from my bra and in its place my breasts grew and grew, as did the battles I had with my parents over the various tempestuous and always short-lived love affairs I embarked on with a motley selection of spotty youths. When Fred came home, I hardly saw him, such was my preoccupation with my dramatic and, what I considered to be extremely fulfilled, life. I had records to buy, hair to dye, parties to attend and Fred was just the boy next door. The posh boy at that.
So nothing prepared me for the shock of Fred’s homecoming in the Christmas holidays two years later. All of a sudden he was different: not only taller and broader, but with real stubble and a fashionable haircut. As I peeked through the gap in the net curtains in our dining room and saw him embracing Louisa, his mother, on the drive next door, swamping her in the folds of a second-hand, yet incredibly trendy, khaki army coat, there was no doubt in my mind that Fred had turned into a man. Even through steamed-up glass, I was smitten.
I wasn’t the only one. With a desperate need for fresh blood of the male variety in Rushton, especially with the Christmas disco coming up, nearly every one of my female rivals earmarked Fred as slow-dance snog material. Even Annabel Roberts, the prettiest girl in my class and target of all my bitching, decided to befriend me when she found out that Fred and I were next-door neighbours.
