Kitabı oku: «One Thing Led to Another»
One Thing
Led to Another
Katy Regan
For Louis and Fergus
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
One Thing Led to Another
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Two minutes it says to wait, two minutes and bam! Your life changed forever. Imagine that. No God, on second thoughts, let’s not. Let’s just calm down, breathe deeply and concentrate. I take off my watch. It’s one of those underwater sports ones. Great for boiling eggs and ideal for timing how long my mother can monologue on the phone whilst I am doing something else.
I never dreamt I’d be using it for this.
I set it: 2.00. The numbers glow neon in the darkness, a countdown to my fate. Could I be? If I really thought I was, surely I’d have chosen somewhere better than a self-cleaning toilet in the middle of SE1 to have such a life-changing experience.
1.45
It was only once. Once! Out of only a handful of times that we’d even bloody done it in the first place – that we thought we’d…how can I put this…leave it to Jim’s impeccable timing and wing it.
1.40
But there’s winging it and winging it, isn’t there? And the more images of that night come at me like film stills on double speed replay, the more I’m thinking the odds are stacked against us.
1.35
There’s the position for a start. Oh Shit. Me on my back, legs wrapped around his neck in possibly the most sperm receptive position of all time, on day 16 ( I know, I’ve counted, about a million times) of my cycle.
1.00
And then there were the knickers: black satin tie-at-the-side jobs, and on a school night. I mean, what kind of whore am I? And the fact I can’t drive. If only I could drive, this could all have been avoided. If my mother had just bought me driving lessons at seventeen like every other reasonable mother in the whole world, if she had just trusted me, not assumed I was an accident waiting to happen (quite literally), I would have driven home, safely home, very probably in a thoroughly un-alluring pair of Bhs briefs, and been tucked up in bed by 11 p.m. instead of flat on my back with my legs around Jim Ashcroft’s neck.
0.40
Please God, I’m begging you. I cannot be pregnant. I don’t even have a boyfriend. Jim and I are just good friends. So good, admittedly, we tend to fall into each other’s beds after one too many on a Friday night when the proposition of a cuddle seems like a good idea, but still, we are ‘just good friends’.
0.27
I know this because after each encounter (and for the record there’s been more than could constitute ‘a one off’ but less than could constitute ‘seeing each other’) we don’t spend all weekend together. We don’t visit garden centres or use cutesy voices on the phone. And I certainly never buy his mother’s birthday present on his behalf.
0.20
Having stayed the night at each other’s houses we get up then go our separate ways. Me back to my girly shared house in Islington and Jim to his south London bachelor pad. Two single people, two ends of London, two different lives. So you can see if this test is positive, it’s hardly going to be Swiss Family Robinson.
0.15
But once is all it takes isn’t it? And what if the man I decided to take a chance with had a Superhero sperm? A bloody non-conformist little sperm that when the masses herded in one direction, turned on its tail and butterfly stroked in the other shouting, Vive La Revolution! That would be typical of Jim. He’s the most non-conformist free spirit I’ve ever met. And it only takes one. One sperm, one chance, one moment, for all the other moments in the rest of your life to be changed forever.
But anyway…
0.07
We’re about to find out…
0.05
I pick up the test.
0.04
I hold it under the light of my phone.
0.03
I’m looking at it now, reading it feverishly like I remember looking for my degree results on a board of thousands.
0.02
All I can concentrate on is the sound of my pulse throbbing but I’m glaring at it, gripping it tight in my hands and I’m trying to see straight and…
0.00
Beep beep beep
…I AM! Shit I am! There’s two lines! There’s two…!
Oh. No.
But there’s not.
I’m not. Because there’s two lines, but there’s no cross. Which means it’s negative. No baby. Thank you Lord.
CHAPTER ONE
‘Seven weeks before I was due, the silly bugger got down on one knee whilst I was washing up. We tied the knot at Lancaster Registry Office, with a lollipop lady as the witness and Eddie with a daffodil in his buttonhole. My waters broke, just as we were about to consummate our wedding in a B&B in Lytham St Anne’s. Eddie has never forgiven Joel for the timing, and he’s thirty-three now.’
Linda, 56, Preston
I’d always believed that sleeping with your male best friend would have one of two outcomes. Either it would be a unanimous disaster, from which your friendship would never recover. Or it would be an epiphany. You’d wonder why on earth you’d never done this before.
I’d experienced the first: Gavin Stroud, Manchester University, 1998. Gavin was my best mate on my French course, until a moment of inebriated madness – round about the four-pint point, the point at which I obviously believed I was irresistible to all members of the opposite sex. That’s also the point at which I should have gone to bed, my dignity still intact. But no, it was at this point I decided Gavin Stroud needed to know this: that my French oral in class wasn’t half as good as that in the bedroom and that I looked erotic dancing to Purple Rain. We went back to my room in halls, shut the orange and brown curtains and poured each other glass after glass of cheap white wine. With each glass, the edges of his face grew more blurred as did any good judgement I’d ever possessed. After an hour of Purple Rain on repeat play and even longer trying to get a comatosed Gavin to maintain an erection long enough to get a condom on, we passed out. When I woke up, head feeling like someone had mown over it, the blackheads on his nose rather too close for comfort, I knew it had been a big, huge, no…colossal mistake. The five-minute walk across campus to our first tutorial that day was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. How can you act normally when you’ve just spent the night wrestling with your (I think I could now safely say) ex friend’s uncooperative penis? Trust me. There’s no coming back from there.
But Jim is different. Sex with him is never a disaster, it’s just it has never been a light-bulb moment either. It’s just, you know, nice. Like getting into a warm bath after a freezing day, or finding a twenty pound note in your jeans pocket.
We met in November 1997, second floor of the John Rylands Library, Manchester University, both of us wading through our very first English essay in Critical Theory (critically dreary more like). At eighteen years old I was a dangerous mixture of ecstatic and terrified to be officially ‘independent’. Two years my senior, Jim seemed like he’d been knocking around on his own all his life. He was sitting opposite me with his head buried in The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes as was I (and probably every other first year English Lit student in there). But it was the intense frown that really made me laugh, it told of utter and total bafflement. My feelings exactly!
‘Is that making about as much sense to you as it is to me?’ I said, hoping this guy with legs so long his feet were nearly touching mine under the table was in need of distraction too.
Jim looked up.
‘I.e. none whatsoever?’
‘That’s the one!’
He smiled, broadly.
‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If this death of the author lark means it’s all down to the reader’s interpretation then I’m screwed because I haven’t got the first clue what this French nutter’s on about.’
‘Me neither,’ I whispered back. ‘I thought I’d be studying books, literature – you know, novels innit…’ Jim laughed. ‘But it’s all structuralism this and post-structuralism that, seminology…’
‘Semiology,’ he corrected.
‘Yeah, that’s what I meant,’ I said, feeling suddenly embarrassed.
That was it, we were off. Couldn’t shut us up for two whole hours. We sacked off work and went for a pint in the end because neither of us could fathom what ‘Barthes Simpson’ as we christened him that day was on about and we were having too much of a good time chatting. When I stepped out of the student union into the crisp November air, I felt like we’d cracked the secret to something that afternoon, Jim and I. Life, probably, or maybe that was just the beer. But for all the personality fireworks I didn’t fancy Jim that day, still don’t, maybe that’s why sex with him has never been a big deal. It’s not that Jim’s un-fanciable, far from it, he’s just not my type. He’s cigarette-thin with Scottish skin and dark hair that flicks out at the sides and on top due to cow licks and various double crowns. He’s got nice full lips – if a little gormless on occasions; a sturdy, prominent nose – attractive on a man I’ve always thought; and green, sparkly eyes that crinkle up so much when he laughs they almost disappear. But I’ve never felt the urge to tear his clothes off.
And so if you had told me on that day we met (or any other day during the next eight years and six months which is how long it took us to kiss, never mind have sex: hardly a whirlwind romance) that one day James Ashcroft and I would be occasional shag partners, I’d never have believed it. But we are and it’s strange, most of all because I don’t really get why it did take us so long. Until one warm weekend last May to be exact.
It was supposed to be two days’ hard graft cleaning up my parents’ caravan, which along with fifty or so other caravans on the tiny site in Whitby hung precariously off a cliff like a stranded sheep. I’d agreed to give it a makeover in return for a hundred quid from my dad and Jim was the only person I knew who had a power drill, but from the first moment we got there, it felt more like a holiday than hard work.
I’ve never known lager taste so good as that first, exhausted pint drunk with Jim at the end of day one. We sat on a bench outside a pub in the town – the Flask and Dolphin – a prime spot with harbour views, and seagulls fat as milk jugs squawking round our feet. I remember the vinegary smart of fish and chips in the air, the lull of bobbing boats, the warmth of the sun on my chest and the feeling that I’d not been so happy for a long time. I told him all about my childhood holidays spent here in Whitby. He told me about endless summers holed up in Stoke-on-Trent, playing Connect Four in his front porch, bored out of his mind.
One pint turned into two, into three, into four, until suddenly it was almost dark and we were surrounded by towers of empty glasses and a sense of anticipation as sharp as salt air.
Jim sighed. ‘This rocks.’ he said, lifting his face to the sinking sun. ‘I’ve had the best day I’ve had in ages.’ Then he turned, his head resting on the wall and he added, ‘With you’. And it didn’t feel awkward. I didn’t get that feeling I was going to regret this in the morning. I just put my glass down, threw my legs sideways over his knee and snogged him like we’d been going out for twenty odd years and this was one of those rare romantic nights made for rekindling the flame.
We’d kissed now, what the hell – sex back at the caravan seemed like the most obvious next step. Afterwards, we sat and talked on the beach until a red dawn flooded the water. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ said Jim. ‘I’m probably closer to you than I am to anyone.’ And the thing was, right at that moment, I felt exactly the same.
When I opened my eyes late the next morning to find the sun in slices on the floral duvet and the North Sea wind whistling in through the windows, I felt strangely and yet wonderfully at home and at ease.
‘So, Jarvis, that was going to happen all along, was it not?’ I remember Jim muttering as he stood in his palm tree underpants pouring coffee into two chipped mugs. And I agreed. ‘Predictable as death,’ were the words I mumbled from underneath the duvet.
After all, if you rate one another highly enough to be close friends in the first place, then chances are, if you’re opposite sexes, it’s only a matter of time. That’s not to say there aren’t consequences. A quick scan of the carnage when I finally emerged that morning revealed my bra was hung on the back of a chair, my knickers gusset-side-up on the caravan hob. There were CDs scattered all over the floor, ransacked in a frenzy of drunken delight, not one in its case. We’d danced to Take That, to George Michael, to Billy Joel for crying out loud! I’d made five thousand times the fool of myself as I had with Gavin Stroud and yet I wasn’t one bit embarrassed.
I don’t know what I expected after that night. I suppose I would have been happy to give a relationship a try, but then I was also petrified of ruining what we had. In the end, Jim made that decision for me, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little deflated.
I called him on the Monday, the night after we got back. ‘I had a brilliant time this weekend,’ I said. Good opening I thought, perhaps this is where he says he couldn’t agree more and asks me out?
Or not.
‘Me too,’ he giggled. ‘It was right laugh. I have particularly fond memories of you doing a routine to ‘Relight My Fire’ wearing only your pants.’
Brilliant, I thought. Absolutely typical. Could it be, perhaps, that I failed to give off the right signals?
But maybe that was no bad thing. Maybe there’s a reason we felt no embarrassment whatsoever after our antics. So unembarrassed were we, in fact, that, a year later, we seem to have fallen into a habit of just ‘doing it’ whenever the need for a little no-strings nookie grabs us.
‘Think of it as a way of extending the fun we’re having,’ Jim always says, usually naked which doesn’t exactly help, ‘like going to an after-hours bar.’
And this suits me too, because I don’t think I know what I want. I can’t fathom the workings of his brain either if truth be told. All I know is that Jim Ashcroft and I have crossed the line. We are no longer purely platonic, nor lovers either. We’re just two misguided fools frolicking about in a vast sprawling, savannah-sized space commonly known as ‘The Grey Area’.
It’s a week since the pregnancy scare and frankly it’s a good job it was just a scare since all I seem to have done since then is accompany people to the pub. Such is the curse of the unattached I’ve always thought. What with no fall-back plan – no flat/wedding/dog to save up for – we, The Unhooked, are expected to attend everything.
Take tonight for example. ‘I may kill someone if I don’t get drunk this very evening,’ was Vicky’s raspy threat down the receiver that I, in a mid-afternoon slump, had cradled between my head and the desk. Dylan had decorated the walls with macaroni cheese, she said, Richard had come home from a hard day’s work as zoo keeper at London Zoo chatting to kids about the mating habits of camels to find his own kid, the two foot rhino, bulldozing around the house in a toddler rage and his dear, lovely wife, coiled like a cobra, ready to pounce at any time.
I love Vicky, which is weird because it was far from love at first sight. In fact, thinking back to that first day we met in Owens Park Halls when she introduced herself in her Yorkshire, ‘this-is-me-like-it-or-lump-it’ way, I’m ashamed to say a little part of me withered with disappointment.
How could I, Tess Jarvis, owner of:
Old Skool Trainers (various)
New (but artfully battered) leather jacket
Entire works of Bob Dylan
Ministry of Sound: The Annual, volumes two and three (because at eighteen years old I am both artily intellectual and just mainstream enough, you understand)
Poster of Che Guevara (because I care about other countries and Politics)
Obsession with Ewan MacGregor
Occasional marujana habit that I fully intend to upgrade to ‘moderate’
possibly be sharing a room with Victoria Peddlar, owner of:
Fluffy penguin slippers
Fake designer sweatshirts worn over stone washed jeans (various)
Entire works of Take That
That’s What I Call Power Ballads 1, 2 and 3
Poster of Patrick Swayze (because nobody puts Vicky Peddlar in the corner)
Obsession with Dirty Dancing
Moderate horoscope-reading habit (soon to be upgraded to borderline obsessional).
But it was true and I was utterly gutted. Especially since I’d just met a girl called Gina who had already designated her room as Smoking HQ. A room I wished I was sharing more than anything else in the world. Gina was the coolest girl in our halls and a guaranteed route to mischief, every night of the week. She had big curly hair that she wore in low bunches, boasted a dragon tattoo that snaked across her stomach, said ‘wicked’ a lot and owned a bong. And as if that wasn’t enough to make your average eighteen-year-old fresher practically pay to be her friend, she had about a million of her own friends from boarding school who were all as cool as she was.
It’s easy to see how this Peddlar girl didn’t even get a look in during those first few days at university.
‘Rich says I can go out…I just need someone to go with and guess-what? You’re the lucky lady!’ Vicky shouted over Dylan. I don’t mind really, Vicks often inspires in me selfless acts of love. When she was holed up in hospital, thirty-seven weeks pregnant, ankles as fat as an elephant’s, blood pressure soaring, I travelled half way across London to bring her the only thing that would satiate her queer, hormonal taste buds. Deep fried aubergines served up on a silver platter (well, a polystyrene tray, anyway).
I’d soon found out there was far more to this girl from Huddersfield than first met the eye. She could really put it away, for one. A childhood spent pulling pints in her parents’ pub saw to that. She had real talent too, which whoever you are, I’ve always thought, can only add to your credibility.
I will never forget the last night of Freshers’ Week, the night of the Owens Park talent competition. Vicky stood up, dressed in her Benetton sweatshirt, swinging her mousy ponytail. She took the mike in one hand and holding a pint of cider in the other, she began to sing. It was ‘Cry Me a River’, and it was utterly brilliant. Nobody moved or spoke, everyone just stared at this girl, this Big Bird of a girl who was suddenly possessed by the ghost of Ella Fitzgerald. She finished the song, put the mike down on the table, gulped down the rest of her cider and sat down. There were five seconds of dumbfounded silence, save for Gina whispering ‘fucking hell’ next to me. Then we began to clap, first slowly and then uproarious applause. It was brilliant, mind-blowing, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and even then, as stupid and self-absorbed and inexperienced at life as I was, I knew that you didn’t sing a song with soul like that if you hadn’t experienced things which, I knew instinctively, I hadn’t. Things like your mum walking out on your dad for a man half her age and then dying of ovarian cancer two months later; things like watching your dad go from jovial pub landlord to suicidal recluse; things like bringing up two little brothers pretty much single-handed as well as singing in your dad’s pub in the evenings for the tips. So yes, there was a lot more to Victoria Peddlar. Gina got the Vicky thing too, eventually, and we had things to teach each other back then. Gina and I taught Vicky how to skin up, accentuate that splendid bosom with something other than sweatshirts and basically be an irresponsible teenager – something she’d kind of missed. And Vicky was our surrogate mother when we needed one most, I suppose. Always the one with the plan of action, the best hangover cures. And the fact she’d seen a lot in her short life meant you waking up in some inappropriate bloke’s bed with no recollection of the night before was no big deal. ‘Look, nobody died, did they?’ Vicky would say, sitting on my bed as I growled under the duvet with shame. ‘And look on the bright side, at least you didn’t get so drunk you shat yourself.’ (Ever since a girl called Julianne Breeze had, actually, got so drunk she shat herself, this had been the scale against which we measured all mortifying events. After all, nothing could ever, ever be that bad.)
A fortnight into term one, Gina, Vicky and I were pretty much inseparable. By late November I’d brought Jim into the fold and we’d became a proper gang. Or as my dad put it, ‘A foursome to be reckoned with.’
And I loved my friends, I idolized them, still do. Tonight one of them is simply asking me to accompany her to a public house, her first baby-free night for weeks, for a couple of quiet beers on a Thursday night. I can usually think of nothing I’d rather do, it’s just tonight, I could do with a little help. I need Jim.
From: tess_jarvis@giant.co.uk
To: james_ashcroft@westminster.edu.uk
Peddlar needs beer. I need bed. Help?
It only takes a few seconds for the reply to pop into my inbox which means Jim must be in the staff room.
From: james_ashcroft@westminster.edu.uk
To: tess_jarvis@giant.co.uk
No can do, have hot date. I can come for the first hour to ease the pain but then I have to shoot. Going to see Swan Lake??! (help)
The thought of Jim watching the Dying Swan, whilst wondering when he’s going to fit in a pint and a snog brings a smile to my face. Still, an hour of his support is better than nothing so I call Vicks back and say, ‘You’re on.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘The day we brought Jen and Ming home from China was the happiest day of our lives. I was forty-four. We’d been trying to become parents for almost two decades, and had travelled half way across the world to adopt a baby. Three months later, I had a routine scan about my polycystic ovaries. “Mrs Freed,” said the doctor his face waxy white. “Were you aware you were pregnant? With twins”?’
Jenny, 46, Southampton
So here I am again, fifth night out on the trot, in the Coach and Horses, Soho, a warm smoky pub that smells of damp coats and stale beer, with Vicky and Jim, my very best mates.
‘Wine for the lady, Stella for Sir in the corner,’ I say, passing Jim his pint.
‘Aw thanks, you’re a beauty.’ He downs half of it in one go. ‘Chaucer and fourteen-year-olds, I tell you, it does me in every time.’
‘So Jimbo,’ says Vicky, pouring herself a bowlful of wine. ‘How come your “loverrrr”, or is she your girlfriend?’ Jim groans at this. ‘How come she’s managed to drag you to Swan Lake? When we went to see Les Miserables you said – and I quote – “It was just a load of old women with massive jugs, bounding about the stage for what felt like days.”’
Jim looks up at me from his pint, a moustache of froth on his top lip. I raise an eyebrow.
‘Did I?’ he says, genuinely incredulous. ‘Sorry Vicks, what an absolute knob.’
‘Apology accepted – even though it was my birthday, if I remember rightly – but anyway, you still haven’t answered the question.’
‘What question?’
‘How come you’re going to the ballet when you don’t even like musicals?’
‘I don’t not like musicals,’ says Jim, nervously pulling on his jacket collar. ‘I just don’t like all of them that’s all.’
‘So exactly what musicals do you like?’ says Vicky. I can tell she is enjoying this line of questioning.
‘Chicago,’ Jim shrugs.
‘Chicago?’ Vicky splutters.
‘Yeah, Chicago. You know, the one that was made into a gangster film.’
‘The one with loads of chicks in suspenders and stockings, you mean?’ I cut in.
‘That’s the one,’ winks Jim.
Vicky nods her head sagely.
‘Ah yes,’ she says. ‘I should imagine you like that one.’
Jim looks at us, gives a short laugh, then looks away, shaking his head.
This is his ‘teacher’ face. It says, ‘will you all just grow up’. And the thing is, annoyingly, it kind of becomes him. Whereas everyone else went through – and came out the other side of – the ‘I want to become a teacher’ stage (spurred on by fantasies of standing on tables making inspiring speeches like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society), Jim actually did it. And he was a natural too. So much so that in less than three years of teaching English to the little tyrants at Westminster City School he had been made Head of Department. Jim can talk about Shakespeare like he’s talking about Neighbours: he knows his stuff, is genuinely mad about the subject and yet manages to never sound like a pretentious wanker. Well, hardly ever…
‘Look,’ Jim says, wearily. ‘This girl’s quite nice, she happens to like ballet, she quite likes me and she wants me to go. Since when is it a crime for a man to indulge in some culture anyway, and what is this? The Spanish Inquisition?’
‘No, it’s just, it’s quite girlfriendy, going to the ballet just because “she likes it”.’ I poke his arm playfully. ‘Selflessness, I’d say, is the first sign of true love.’
Vicky folds her arms industriously.
‘Annalisa won’t be best pleased,’ she chips in.
Annalisa is that rare thing: a holiday fling that goes on being a holiday fling. Jim met her in Rimini on a lads’ holiday a few years ago and they’ve had an ‘understanding’ (basically to be each other’s bit of no-strings fun when he visits Italy or she visits London) ever since.
‘Give it a rest will you.’ Jim sinks back in his chair. ‘Annalisa wouldn’t care and anyway, Claire’s a lovely girl but she doesn’t want anything serious anymore than I do. You two are just jealous. I’ve got a date, I’m going somewhere interesting. Meanwhile, you’re in this rubbish pub talking about makeup and periods. Probably.’
This is what we do, us lot, wind each other up. Sometimes I forget I’ve had sex with Jim. I forget he has seen me naked in all sorts of compromising positions. I don’t remember how he’s caressed my boobs, taken baths with me and commented on my rather relaxed upkeep of hair removal. It’s like we are experts at compartmentalization. When we’re having sex, we’re tender and intimate. When we’re not, we’re mates. That’s all, nothing more, nothing less. Just mates.
I look at Jim.
‘So, what are you wearing for your “hot date”?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean when are you getting changed, you know, into your going-out clothes?’
Jim examines his attire. Then looks at Vicky. He actually looks a bit hurt. A little part of me wants to give him a hug.
‘This is it,’ he says. ‘This is what I’m wearing.’
‘You are kidding,’ I say. Vicky erupts, spraying scampi fries everywhere. ‘This is the ballet, Jim. You’ll get chucked out looking like that.’
‘Like what? What’s the matter with me?’
‘Like an Austin Powers/raver cross breed?’
‘Aw, give over Tess. He looks alright, don’t you Jimbo?’ Vicky puts an arm around him, trying not to laugh.
Jim looks at me.
‘What?’ he says, a smile curling at the sides of his mouth. ‘It’s a bloody good jacket this, I’ll have you know. It’s Ellesse, not your Top Man bollocks. Top notch.’
Vicky and I are pissing ourselves now. Jim’s had that jacket since about 1991. Which was about the time Ellesse was last cool.
‘Where’s your whistle and your acid tabs?’ I joke. ‘And I bet it’s still got that fag burn in the back.’
Jim sticks his bottom lip out in a mock show of hurt.
‘Come ’ere, I’m only kidding,’ I say, getting his head and putting it into an affectionate head-lock. ‘You look cool. Honestly. You really do. Kind of…what would I say? Sports casual with a seventies twist.’
We all laugh but the fact is, he does look cool, in a Jim-eclectic kind of a way. It’s a mish-mash of decades, what with the Ellesse jacket, the seventies tank top and cords, but there’s something attractive about a man who doesn’t try too hard and Jim’s certainly not guilty of that. In fact Jim doesn’t so much ‘do’ fashion as happen upon it when by the laws of probability means he does, occasionally, pull something OK out of his wardrobe.
Jim stands up, zips up his jacket and announces he’s going. ‘Well, thank you, Fashion Police,’ he says. ‘But I’m now going to get myself some refined company. A woman who knows how to conduct herself, a woman who appreciates cutting-edge style when she sees it.’
Kylie’s ‘Spinning Around’ comes onto the jukebox. Jim stands up and shimmies to the bar, his small bottom wiggling.
‘Nice moves, Ashcroft!’ I shout after him. ‘The girl won’t be able to resist!’
With this, he downs the rest of his pint, puts his glass on the bar, flashes us a V-sign and dashes out of the door. I watch him as he goes, bouncing along the pavement on his Reebok Classics, hands in pockets, head down.
When I turn back, Vicky’s staring at me.
‘What?’
‘You’re smiling,’ she says.
‘Am I?’
‘Yeah, you’re really smiling.’
Here we go again.
A night out with Vicky is a bit like that film Groundhog Day. From the moment I walk in to the moment she disappears into the night only just catching the last train to Beckenham by the skin of her teeth, I know exactly what’s coming: as many bottles of house red as we can fit in and the obligatory ‘but-you-are-really-secretly-in-love-with-Jim, aren’t you?’ conversation.
Vicky has a huge soft spot for Jim. ‘So, are you two like fuck buddies? I mean, is that how you’d define yourselves?’ she asks, looking at me over her wine glass.
She no doubt got this awful term from some sordid programme about weird peoples’ sex lives hosted by Jenny Éclair, but she has a point: ‘Friends who have sex’, that’s exactly what we are. But we’re not, either, not in my eyes anyway, because ‘fuck buddy’ suggests it’s all about the sex and not much about the friendship and Jim and I are the complete opposite to that. ‘Fuck buddies (if ever there were such a grim thing) are all about sex on tap without the emotional complications that come with actually caring about someone,’ I say to her. ‘And I do care about him, I love him to bits.’
‘I know you do,’ she says, over-enunciating the words as though I am deaf. ‘And he loves you – hello! – a lot.’
‘But not like that,’ I say, staring into my glass. I always feel uncomfortable when she starts on this one. ‘As disappointing as that is – and believe me, I’m disappointed too, it’s not like that. Jim and I are just mates. Mates who occasionally shag and probably shouldn’t, I know, I know; but we’re still just mates.’
Vicky shakes her head, defeated.
‘Pretty weird ones if you ask me.’
And on we went. Until I found myself stumbling out of the pub, at almost midnight, into the crisp ring of night air and no hope of getting home before one a.m.
I decide to pass on the cab and walk through Soho, to catch a bus on Oxford Street.
There’s nowhere quite like Soho at night. It’s like the set of a West End show itself, alive with movement, light and noise. As I walk down Old Compton Street, the gay guys sit outside French patisseries with one leg snaked around the other, scarves wrapped tight around their necks, sipping their espressos. Steam from the last washing up of the evening rises from the basements and bar workers settle in for their end of shift beer.
I cut across Dean Street towards Wardour Street, snaking through the crowds of people queuing for late-night bars, members’ clubs and restaurants.
This part of London, it’s the playground of the free. A zone for those who don’t have to make any decisions yet, the circumstances of their lives still unravelling, for those still playing.
And just for now, I’m playing too. But I’ve got a funny feeling that for me, the game’s almost over, the final whistle is nearly up and I have to make some decisions and sort out what I actually want from life.
It’s ludicrous to think I could have been pregnant with Jim’s baby last week. Besides anything else, as I held that test in my hand, the potential father of the potential baby was on a date, just as he is tonight, and that can’t be right, can it?
I had been tempted to send a text. HELLO, DADDY-TO-BE would have served him right, out gallivanting while I was in a self-cleaning toilet having a near nervous breakdown.
But I couldn’t do it in the end. ‘It’s negative,’ I texted. ‘You’re off the hook.’
I didn’t even get his reply until I was standing at the bar in the Camden Head an hour later: ‘Thank fuck for that. And you had me believing that paunch was all baby.’
Cheeky git! So much for sharing the weight of responsibility.
I turn into Wardour Street where a herd of twenty-somethings, the boys all moulded hair and skinny jeans, the girls with sultry, smoky eyes, are careering across the street, singing and laughing. One of the girls is sat on what must be her boyfriend’s shoulders, lanky arms in the air, swigging a bottle of beer. Still high on the buzz of London, I think: we were like that; that would, once, have been me, Jim, Gina and Vicky, strutting our way from one late bar to the next, back to someone’s place, more beer, maybe some drugs, not caring about the next day, masters at navigating a day’s work on no sleep.
We still give it our best shot (even Vicky, who I sometimes think would sell an organ for a good night out). It’s just, sometimes I get the feeling that I’ve accelerated through most of my twenties in a beer-fuelled haze, only to arrive at almost thirty still accelerating in a beer-fuelled haze, when really I should be putting the brakes on, or at least starting to look where I’m going.
‘Next question,’ says Gina, adjusting her bikini top. Her boobs jostle about in the water, like dumplings in a boiling pan. ‘Marcus?’
Marcus licks the spliff he’s holding and sticks it down, then gestures to Gina for the lighter.
‘OK,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a good one. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever said in an interview?’
Jasper cracks open a beer with a fizz.
‘I once asked an interviewer when the baby was due,’ he mumbles from beneath his trilby.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ I ask.
‘She wasn’t pregnant.’
I almost wet myself laughing at this one. I don’t know why, it’s just the thought of Jasper attending an interview – like, ever – is suddenly hilarious. Jasper is an artist. He does ‘installations’. This is absolutely no disrespect to people who are actually artists, who do, actually do installations. But in Jasper’s case, it roughly translates as ‘on the dole’.
Ooops, so much for the contemplative mood brought on by my life-affirming walk through Soho. It’s now two a.m. and I am in the Jacuzzi with Gina (now my flatmate) her current shag Jasper and a man I have never met before in my life. This is all too often the case these days; I don’t plan to have a large one, it just sort of happens. It’s one of the perils of having a Jacuzzi in the basement of your house.
Gina and I didn’t plan to live together this long; that just ‘sort of happened’ too. In our second and third university years, all four of us shacked up in a house in Rusholme. Then when we graduated, we all moved down to London together. Jim did his PGCE and then because he was now officially one of London’s ‘key workers’, got a ‘part-ownership’ deal and put down a deposit on a flat with money he’d saved from his weekend job selling padded cards in boxes with messages like ‘To the One I Love’. Gina, Vicky and I moved into 21 Linton Street in upmarket Islington, and that was it.
At that point I, having spent an awful lot of time watching tragic documentaries about people with ten-stone tumours, was doing a diploma in magazine journalism, with a view to interviewing people about stuff like that all the time. I thought I’d made it living in N1, a career in the media at my fingertips. Trouble was, with its crumbly black steps and security grating, our house looked like the Hammer House of Horrors on an otherwise elegant row of white Georgian townhouses. But we loved it. And we loved our landlady almost as much. Mrs Broke-Snell had her hair blow-dried every other day and only ever shopped in Harrods Food Hall. It’s a shame she didn’t pay as much attention to the upkeep of her properties as she did to herself but at least she had the genius idea (and a sufficient level of insanity) to install DA-DA-DAR!! THE JACUZZI.
Doubtless the most ingenious popularity device ever known to man, the Jacuzzi comes complete with wooden surround, massage jets, and a film of mould growing around the outside. 21 Linton Street has always been THE back-to-mine post-party house, scores of people padding their soap-sudded feet from the hall to the basement and vice versa, to shrivel up in our Jacuzzi and have drunken conversations about where we’ll all be in five years time. The trouble is, those five years are up now. You’d think that the novelty of having deep and meaningfuls in our swimwear would have somewhat worn off but we’re still at it.
Though Jim took my room when I went travelling in 2002 – he rented his flat out for some much needed cash – it was always very much a single girls’ pad. Then Vicky committed the ultimate crime (in Gina’s eyes anyway) which was to not only marry Richard, but have his babies. It was, of course, totally predictable but still, Gina and I didn’t expect to be here nearly a decade later. In fact Gina was so convinced that whatever bloke she was shagging at the time was about to ask her to move in with him, she didn’t buy a bed for two years.
And I thought I’d be long gone by now, married, living in a garden flat, but we’re both still here, maxing up the rent so we don’t have to get in a third person. Gina continues to go out with tossers (the sort who talk about moving in together by week three, and who have dumped her by week five). And I just coast along quite happily, cheered by the odd shag with Jim, wondering how I wound up, twenty-eight and a half, living like an ageing student.
When I eventually recover from my laughing fit I realize Gina’s glaring at me. Gina doesn’t like people laughing at her boyfriends, even when they offer up the jokes themselves.
‘Tess can do better than that, can’t you Tess?’ she says, playfully. ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever said in an interview?’
Here we go, Gina loves to wheel this one out at every social occasion. ‘Do I have to?’ I groan.
‘Yes, you have to. It’s genius. Go on.’
‘I once told the Head of a PR company that I was fluent in Italian,’ I sigh. ‘Which would have been fine, if I hadn’t failed GCSE.’ Everyone waits for the punch-line. ‘And she hadn’t been Italian.’
Gina claps her hand with glee. ‘Love it! Cracks me up every time! I wouldn’t mind,’ she continues, hardly able to talk she’s laughing so much, ‘but her name was fucking Luisa Vincenzi!!’
And I have to admit. It is quite funny.
It is only when Marcus starts to get fresh, playing footsie in the water, I come to my senses, realize I am shrivelled like a prune, and am utterly and totally shit-faced. When I eventually make it to the sanctuary of my bedroom it’s gone three a.m. I climb into bed, sink back into the coolness of my pillow and exhale, slowly, deeply. Outside I can still hear cars whizzing past, the faint sound of engines revving, London still alive and throbbing. I don’t know how I’m going to get up tomorrow, or make it through the day on four hours’ sleep.
The other thing I don’t know, is that somewhere deep inside of me, cells are multiplying, life is just beginning.
CHAPTER THREE
‘Funnily enough, Chris was watching football when I came home. “Right,” I said, “do you want the good news or the bad?” “Good news,” he said. “I’m pregnant,” I said. “And the bad?” “It’s due in June.” I called him immediately after Grace was born, but he didn’t pick up. When I heard Pearce and Bates had both missed penalties, I punched the air. Needless to say, divorce proceedings were already underway.’
Laura, 25, Leicester
The next morning, I’m sitting on a stool drinking tea in the kitchen when Gina wanders in with Jasper, still complete with trilby.
‘God, rough as a bear’s arse,’ she yawns, reaching above my head to get mugs out of the cupboard so I have to duck, spilling tea all over my nightie.
I wince slightly as the heat hits my skin. ‘Don’t feel too clever myself. How about you Jasper? You feeling rough? You’ve got the right idea with that hat, that’s for sure.’
Gina raises an eyebrow, she knows I’m being sarcastic but he doesn’t hear me anyway. He’s got his hands down his pants and his head in last Saturday’s copy of the Guardian Weekend.
Gina wanders over to the kettle, coughing, or rather hacking, and switches it on then pulls her curvaceous little frame up onto the worktop. There’s a flash of red knickers from underneath her dressing gown.
‘Jesus, I need to give up the fags,’ she says, when she’s eventually recovered from her coughing fit. She’s been saying that for ten years. I got her four sessions with a hypnotist once, in return for being in a health feature in Believe It! magazine. It did nothing to help her kick the habit, but she did gain a new one: the hypnotist. Blaise Tapp he was called, and that was his real name. She ended up shagging him for three months.
‘Tea or coffee Jasper?’
‘Er, coffee. But only if it’s proper coffee. One sugar please.’
He leans back on the kitchen chair, stretching his arms above his head. He’s wearing a string vest, so I can see his thick, dark underarm hair sprouting forth like those fake moustaches you get in joke shops.
I get up to put my bowl into the dishwasher and realize I’m wearing no bra and my nipples are probably on show.
Gina opens her side of the cupboard. We did try sharing everything once, but due to our clashing eating habits, i.e. I eat like a horse and she eats hardly anything, it didn’t work out that well.
‘Fuck, no coffee,’ she mutters under her breath.
‘Have you got any real coffee I can borrow Jarvis?’
I get it out of the cupboard and hand it her; she doesn’t say thank you.
Gina can be a bit like this: brusque, bordering on rude. It gets people’s backs up sometimes. Jim goes into teacher mode and tells her off and Vicky just steers clear. And me? Well, I’m well practiced I suppose. Gina may act like a tough little cookie, but she’s soft as treacle inside, sensitive as anything. I definitely blame the parents: palmed off to nannies as a baby, sent off to boarding school aged eight. I suppose earning £70,000 plus in the City it’s not as if Gina needs someone to give her financial security, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that even though she resists it like an exhausted toddler resists sleep, she just needs to be loved. Which is why I worry about her choice of men.
Jasper excuses himself and goes for a shower, his jeans hanging off his arse to reveal the start of a most unsightly hairy crack. I worry I’m turning into my mother.
‘He’s such an interesting guy, isn’t he?’ says Gina, walking over to the kitchen window and putting her nose to the glass. Outside, the morning light is cobalt blue, like a church window. ‘So creative.’
So obviously a prat, I want to say, but I don’t. I couldn’t. I mean it’s not that he is an evil person or anything, he just isn’t boyfriend material. And Gina, more than anyone else I know, could really do with a boyfriend.
I am getting out of the shower when I hear my mobile. Oh for God’s sake, piss off! Who can possibly have something so important to say, that it needs saying at eight a.m.?
I get to the phone on the fifth ring.
‘Hello?’
‘Tess?!’
Even though she has known me and my voice for nearly thirty years, my mother still behaves as if I am Terry Waite, and this is the first time she has spoken to me after twenty-five years in captivity. I wouldn’t mind, but this level of drama can be quite exhausting, especially when she sometimes rings twice a day.
‘Oh it’s you. Hi mum,’ I say, sitting down on my bed. I am only wearing my towel and am dripping wet through.
‘Oh, thank God. Thank God you’re OK,’ she says breathlessly.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
Had there been a national disaster whilst I was in the shower? A bombing, a military coup? A tsunami perhaps?
‘I just worry about you down there, that’s all. There’s always that part of you when you’re a mum – you’ll see when you become one! – that worries something might have happened in the night.’ Remembering the near miss I had last week, I wince at this, hold the receiver away from my head.
Welcome to the world of Pat Jarvis. Fifty-four, happily married to Tony Jarvis, two wonderful children, Tess and Edward, the loveliest woman on earth, and pathologically pessimistic, especially when it comes to the safety of her own children.
If there had been a train crash in, say, Cardiff, my mother would not rule out the chance that I had been interviewing someone in Wales that day and am therefore lying dead and mutilated on the rail-track. If I am not able to get back to her within half an hour of her ringing, she’ll imagine me bound and gagged in the boot of a crack-dealer’s car, as my phone rings futilely in my coat pocket. When I was a little girl, she would refuse to let me help her bake in case I got my hand mangled in the whisks of her electric blender or my jugular slashed through with a bread knife. To cut a long story short, my mother is constantly amazed that at twenty-eight years old, I am still alive. Such is her faith in my ability merely to survive.
‘I was just calling you to remind you about your brother’s birthday. But before we talk about that, I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news.’
Now there’s a surprise.
‘David Jewson died yesterday. Sixty-two, dropped dead in his garden, just like that.’
She awaits my reaction as I trawl through my brain, trying for the life of me to remember who David Jewson is.
‘That’s terrible. But…um…who’s David Jewson?’
Mum sighs. This is not quite the reaction she was hoping for.
‘Oh come on, you do know David Jewson, Tessa. You went to school with his daughter, Beverley. Lovely girl, very pretty, works at Natwest in town.’
Beverley Jewson had middle-aged hair and once won Young Citizen of the Year (need I say more?). That doesn’t make it any less terrible for her to lose her dad, of course, but why does my mum insist on banging on about the merits of other people’s children all the time? Wasn’t I pretty? Wasn’t I intelligent? (Wasn’t I deplorably childish and should pull myself together?)
‘Oh yes, I remember Beverley now,’ I say, biting my lip. ‘That’s awful. Absolutely terrible.’
‘Well it was Tess, it really was,’ she says, perking up. ‘The thing was, he was perfectly fine last week. I saw him in the Spar as I was buying your dad a chicken Kiev for his tea. There I was, digging around in the freezer section when I felt this hand on my back and heard this voice say, “Hi Pat, is that you?” I felt awful because I had my bi-focals on at the time and I didn’t recognize him and…’
Bla bla bla…
I am only roused from the catatonic state brought on by one of my mum’s monologues when I hear her say…
‘And your dad’s fifty-seven this year and he’s not getting any younger. And, he’s in one of his “funny moods” again.’
Dad gets in what mum calls his ‘funny moods’ every few months. He goes a bit quiet, watches telly a lot and potters around his greenhouse more than usual, but that’s about it. I don’t know why she gets all stressed about it. You just have to know how to handle him, i.e. leave him alone and stop nagging him, poor man.
‘For God’s sake, mum, dad’s not going to drop down dead. He’s got more energy than you and me put together.’
This is true. My dad owns a construction company so he’s up and down ladders, lifting sacks of cement daily. On top of that, he’s on the golf course every weekend and last year he ran the Morecambe 10K race dressed as a shrimp for Cancer Research. What my mum lacks in get up and go, my dad makes up for ten fold. If anything it’s my mum whose health is dodgy, the amount of time she spends sitting on her backside scoffing stilton and watching Emmerdale.
‘You’re right lovey, you’re absolutely right,’ she sighs. ‘But the mind does boggle. I mean, alive one minute, dead as a doorpost the next. He was just mowing his lawn at the time, can you believe it? Who’d have thought mowing your lawn could kill you.’
I chuckle to myself at the characteristic lunacy of this comment. If mum had her way, we would all be bubble-wrapped and crash-helmeted in order to protect us from the potentially life-threatening nature of grass cuttings.
It’s ten more minutes at least before she shows any sign of hanging up and allowing me to get ready for work.
‘Now, don’t forget Ed’s birthday will you? It’s next Monday so make sure you post a card on Saturday because there’s no post on a Sunday and…’
‘Yes mum. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a complete imbecile.’ I hold the receiver under my chin as I attempt to put on knickers. ‘I’ll speak to you soon. Bye! Bye…!’
I press ‘end call’ and feel instantly guilt-ridden. Poor mum. Living in London, I never seem to have the time for leisurely phone calls with her anymore and I sometimes worry she feels jealous that I manage it with my dad. It’s just, me and dad have an understanding. Whereas my mum and my brother were born with a tendency to gossip and dramatize, to expect the very worst and then delight in going on about it when that prophecy is fulfilled, me and my dad have always come at life rather more sunny-side-up: in the belief that everything and everyone is good, until proved otherwise.
I finally leave the house at 8.40 a.m. thinking I’ll just have time, if I’m quick, to pop into Star’s before catching the bus. Star’s is the dry cleaners on New North Road. Its run by a family of Turkish Cypriots, headed up by Emete, whose numerous spare tyres and racoon-ringed eyes belie an energy level so phenomenal, you wonder if this woman could pop out another five babies to add to her brood this week, and still get the whole street’s ironing done.
The bell sounds as I push open the door. Emete bustles to the front of the shop, a tape measure around her neck.
‘Tessa, my love. What a wonderful start to the day!’ She opens her arms – each the size of one of my thighs – and places an enthusiastic kiss on both cheeks.
‘Hi Emete. Morning Omer!’ I shout, peering through the rows of plastic bags to the back of the shop where Emete’s husband sits, coffee in hand, reading the newspaper. He raises a hand without looking up.
‘Now angel, what can I do for you?’ Emete pins a pink ticket to somebody’s jacket and hangs it up on a rail to her right.
I hear the doorbell go again and am half-aware of a presence beside me.
‘It’s this shirt,’ I say, taking the linen shirt out of the bag and laying it out in front of us. ‘It was in my last lot of dry cleaning but it’s not mine, there must have been a mix up.’
Emete puts the safety pin she was holding between her teeth and holds it up to the light. ‘How strange,’ she says.
‘Very strange,’ says a voice. I recognize it instantly. ‘I’ve got the same problem.’
Another item of clothing appears on the counter.
I stare at the white linen dress in front of me, and then at the hands placed on top of it: tanned, big, with slender fingers and round, shell-pink nails. I’d know those hands anywhere. I trace the arms, lean, boyish, a perfect covering of fine, black hair and then the face, I’m looking at the face. My hand goes to my mouth, my heart starts to race.
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