Kitabı oku: «Sixteen, Sixty-One»

1

I was fifteen when my second life began.

It was the summer of 2000. Other things that happened that summer included Julie Fellows allowing Tom Pepper to touch her nipples for the first time, Sam Roberts claiming to have gone all the way with Rose Taylor and her denying it, Wayne Price getting permanently excluded for selling his crushed-up medication on the playground, Mrs Forman resigning her post as head of English amid rumours of an affair with the new science teacher, Pete Sampras winning his thirteenth Grand Slam title at Wimbledon, the leaders of North and South Korea meeting for the first time and the News of the World campaigning for new legislation giving parents the right to know whether a convicted paedophile lived in their area.

Sheltered from such dramas, my first life had been pretty regular. I grew up in a small town in the countryside. I had a mother, a father and a brother. My parents separated when I was eleven, but my mum, my brother and I only moved across town, a few streets away. After we moved, I fell out with my dad for a few years. He began dating twenty-three-year-olds, going to raves and acting like a teenager. I began revising for my SATs, reading books and swapping notes with boys in class. I had my first kiss when I was eleven – with Harry Heeley on the bus back from swimming practice while Kayla Weatherford timed us with her digital watch and Danny King looked out for Mrs Rice walking up the aisle. Shortly after that I started secondary school, where I held hands with Ben Legg, Robbie Burton, Chris Price, Michael Peterson, Stephen Hunt, Simon Shaw, Steven Critchley, David Robson, Gavin Gregs, Reece Cook and a guy at youth club known as Spike.

My favourite item of clothing was a floor-length denim skirt I could hardly walk in. My dark blonde hair reached my shoulder blades in a thick tangle, curtaining my face when I wanted to hide from the world. I’d recently purchased my first pair of tweezers and a box of Jolen personal bleach but had yet to use either, thus noticeable hairs shadowed both my upper lip and between my brows. I was short, not even five foot one – a situation I had tried to rectify a month ago by convincing my dad to spend £16 on five-inch silver platform sandals. I’d worn them with denim pedal-pushers to go shopping and would never again remove the Bowie-esque disasters from beneath my bed.

I considered a day a good one if I managed to avoid embarrassing myself during the seven excruciating hours spent at my mediocre school in the next town. They were few. Most recently, the blonde, bronzed netball captain had seemed to befriend me in order to confirm rumours that I had a crush on Stuart Oxford and, moments after I confided in her, summoned him to tell me – over the sniggers of all around – that he had a girlfriend (a hockey-playing, make-up wearing, French-kissing, Winona Ryder-look-alike girlfriend), but if she and all the other girls in this and every other school coincidentally fell in a vat of beauty-destroying acid, perhaps he’d take me to the cinema. Later that week, I’d also managed to alienate Rachael, the one friend I still had, while we secretly watched her sister’s Sex and the City videos by claiming with confidence that spooning was a kinky form of anal sex and I thought it disgusting. She’d asked her sister to clarify and told me at school the next day that I was full of shit and would probably die a virgin.

While on the topic, though I’d had a few boyfriends and even touched Peter Booth’s thing after we’d been ‘going out’ for six months (but only for a second before feeling utterly repulsed, darting out of the tent to find another cherry-flavoured Hooch and telling him I didn’t want to be his girlfriend any more), I had never handled a condom, still believed you could get pregnant from oral sex and had a poster of Dean Cain dressed as Superman on my wardrobe door that I’d torn out of Shout magazine at the age of twelve.

However, for all my naiveties, I was worldly-wise enough to realise owning up to them was out of the question. I may have known nothing about boys or sex that I hadn’t read in the Barbara Taylor Bradford novels my mum left in the loo, but I had never received less than an A*. I studied long words in the dictionary with the same voracity others my age collected Pokemon cards, I watched the news rather than cartoons and I made it a point to have every adult who met me comment, at least to themselves, ‘She’s so mature for her age.’

Why was I mature? One therapy analysis would conclude it had something to do with being a product of a broken home, my parents splitting up the same year I transferred from primary to secondary school and my devastated mother telling me every nasty thing she could think about my father as we packed our family lives into boxes and moved out of the thirteen-room Georgian detached house that had been a home for the first eleven years of my life. Another would suggest it was down to the amount I read and my stubborn insistence on skipping straight from The Famous Five to Anita Shreve, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker and Paul Auster, bypassing entirely those Goosebumps and Point Horror years that might shape an average teenager’s development. And another theory entirely would say that, as of yet, I wasn’t any more mature for my age than every other teenager who wants to be grown: that it was what came next that thrust me into an adult world with a child’s mind.

My second life began one Saturday in March when I begrudgingly followed my mum to a tea party at a neighbour’s house. We lived on a row of skinny Edwardian semis on the edge of town, the gardens backing on to a small wood beyond which acres of farmland stretched towards the horizon. The party was at the end of the street. Even my brother James decided this outing required sufficiently little effort to warrant attending, so the three of us plodded the few dozen steps along the pavement to be ushered through to the open-plan kitchen of number twenty-seven.

Once inside, the host Annabelle handed us mugs of tea and directed us through clumps of people to help ourselves from the buffet table. I loaded a plate with sausage rolls and fairy cakes and scuttled to a chair in the corner. When I’d swallowed my first mouthful and was reaching for my sugary tea, a voice spoke from my left.

‘I hate these things.’

I looked over and saw the mildly familiar face of Annabelle’s husband.

‘Isn’t this your party?’ I placed another sausage roll on my tongue and, noting the glass of wine in his hand, wondered if he was drunk.

‘Oh yeah, of course you have to put on a show, keep them all happy.’

‘What d’you mean?’ I asked, only half interested.

‘See over there?’ He pointed. ‘My in-laws. She chairs the WI and he sets the church quiz every Tuesday. If I didn’t throw a party, especially for a “big” birthday like this, I’d be hung, drawn and quartered by the gossipy blue-rinse brigade. Barbara’d come knocking on our door asking Annabelle what’s wrong, was I ill? Were we having marital problems? Annabelle would try to shut her mother up and Barb’d shriek, “What will everyone say?” and we’d end up having a party just to calm her down anyway. Much easier this way.’

I tried to stifle a giggle and almost choked on a large flake of pastry as he put on an old woman’s voice and flailed his arms in prim horror.

‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that. How old are you anyway?’

‘How old do you think I am?’ He looked at me with a smile.

‘Oh no, now you’ll get offended.’

‘I promise I won’t.’

‘Hmm, okay. Well, you said it’s a big one, and I’m pretty sure you’re older than my parents, so I guess it must be fifty.’

‘HA!’ His face cracked into a grin and he spilt a little wine on his beige trousers as he chuckled to himself.

‘What?’

‘I think you’re my new best friend.’

‘What, are you older? Fifty-five?’

‘Nope.’ He grinned.

‘Well you can’t be sixty, I don’t believe you’re sixty.’ Sixty was the age of grandparents, that pensionable age where spines curved and walking sticks were suddenly required. The man before me was a little wrinkled and his hair was silver, but his skin was brown, his eyes sparkled and his limbs moved with muscular ease. He certainly betrayed no signs of qualifying for free prescriptions on the NHS. I liked him; he was funny; he couldn’t be sixty.

But he was nodding.

‘Wow.’

‘Yep, I was born in the first half of the last century. It scares me because I don’t feel that old, but I can remember the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.’

I was silent.

‘You don’t even know when that was, do you? Oh dear. 1953. I was eleven. But that’s enough of old-fuddy-duddy talk anyway; let’s speak of youthful things. What rubbish are they teaching you at school these days?’

‘I’m revising for my GCSEs,’ I replied importantly, dismissing his implication that my studies were anything but monumental. ‘And next week I have to pick what subjects to do for A-Level. It’s pretty stressful.’

‘What are you going to take?’

‘Well, at the moment, I think it’ll be Maths, Further Maths, Business and Geography, but I’m not sure.’

He recoiled. ‘Yikes, what would you want to do those for?’

‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘Nothing, they’re just all so dull.’ He faked a long, loud yawn. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘An actuary … or maybe a lawyer.’

‘Oh dear. Child, you’re going to have a boring life. Have you met the people who go into those professions? They have no gnosis, no emotions, no pulse. They’re just money-grubbing machines.’

‘That’s not true,’ I replied defensively, though I’d no idea what ‘gnosis’ meant. ‘Some of the work’s really interesting. And I like numbers.’

‘But what about the poetry? The passion?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t you do English and Art? Aren’t there any subjects that make you feel excited, spark your creativity?’

‘Well, sure. I love English and I gave up Art in Year 9 but I still like sketching and things. They’re not exactly practical career options, though.’

‘Says who?’

‘Um, my mum, my teachers, the careers adviser.’

‘What do they know? They’re stuck in unfulfilling jobs that sap all creativity. What would the world be like if every artist since Shakespeare had followed the advice of their careers advisers and become lawyers instead?’

I was silent.

‘What they don’t want to tell you is that none of it’s real. Earning money and following the system isn’t real living, it’s just what you have to do in order to find the space to live. The whole thing is an elaborate unreality designed to make us conform. Have you read Nineteen Eighty-Four?’

I shook my head.

‘What about Hermann Hesse?’

‘No.’

‘I tell you what, you say you like English, how about I lend you some books? You can take them away and when you’re done, come and have a pot of tea with me and we’ll talk about this actuary business.’

I took away Steppenwolf and The Outsider that day. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Mrs Dalloway, The Age of Innocence, Brighton Rock, The Plague, The Bell Jar, The Pupil and Sophie’s World followed.

Each time I returned a book, Matthew would carry it down the stairs and place it delicately on the farmhouse table while he boiled the kettle. After nestling the cosy on the pot, he’d offer me a chair and, sitting opposite me, begin: ‘So, what did it make you think?’

‘I don’t know.’ I was shy at first; worried my thoughts wouldn’t be deep enough, worried I would have missed the point of the prose, that I wasn’t reading as I was meant to, that he might think me stupid.

‘Come on, there’s no right or wrong answer. I just want to know how the book affected you.’

Gradually, I allowed myself to answer.

‘It made me wonder why people have to conform.’ (Camus)

‘It made me think one single day can offer more beauty and pain than a whole lifetime.’ (Woolf)

‘It made me question whether a society can condition you to accept anything and, if so, whether there’s any such thing as right or wrong.’ (Huxley)

‘It made me think philosophy is like maths: just logic applied to the world. So, if you think hard enough, there must be an answer, but that religion seems to get in the way.’ (Gaarder)

‘It made me think I should dislike the character, but I didn’t.’ (Hesse)

‘It made me wish I’d been born in that time.’ (Sartre)

And, of course, like every girl my age: ‘It reminded me of me.’ (Plath)

‘Excellent.’ Matthew smiled. ‘Existentialism asks all those questions and comes to the conclusion that the only thing that’s for certain is that we exist; we are here. Nothing else is real. All this crap society puts into our heads: money, work, school, cars, class, status, children, wives – everything we’re supposed to care about – it’s completely unreal. True reality is what’s in our minds. And when you accept that, you realise that conforming to society’s rules just makes you a sheep. You might as well die now. Only a few people have the courage to truly accept this and those are the few that stick their heads above the manhole-cover, who make art and seek out love. I call them Uncles. They’re usually persecuted for it, but at least they’re living.’

‘Why “Uncles”?’ I asked.

He frowned as if I’d missed the point, but shrugged and replied, ‘Because parents are too close, they fuck you up, so it’s down to Uncles, relatives with a little distance, to guide you through life. When I was slightly older than you I found a mentor, I called him Uncle. It was a sign of respect back then, but now I know it means more.’

I considered his words after I left. I watched my mum cooking dinner and wondered if she had ever stuck her head above the manhole-cover. I observed James playing on the PlayStation and decided he hadn’t yet realised the world was unreal. Visiting my dad at the weekend, I looked at him tinkering in the shed and thought perhaps he’d never read Camus.

I sat on my bed and looked out the window.

That is unreal, I thought. Only I am real.

At school, I began to feel I was play-acting in my unreality. It made it easier to deal with the popular girls who told me to pluck my eyebrows, but I found my reality a little lonely. I felt like Matthew was the only person who understood it, so I began visiting him more often. If school and home and youth club and the Post Office were all unreal, Matthew’s kitchen and the pack of cards between us were real.

Annabelle often busied herself in her bedroom, but always asked if I wanted to stay for dinner. The three of us gossiped about the neighbours over shepherd’s pie and sometimes climbed the stairs to watch Friends in their living room. I shared the second sofa with the cat.

One evening, after I’d brushed my teeth and was climbing into bed, my mum knocked on my door.

‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course.’

‘I just wanted to say goodnight.’

She looked uncomfortable.

‘Sweetie, I know you’re spending a lot of time with Matthew and that you’re fond of him. I just want you to be a little careful with him.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ She didn’t reply and I looked at her in astonishment. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘I know, he’s a lovely man and I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything, but I’m a mother and I have to worry. So just promise me you’ll look after yourself.’

I made the promise and muttered angrily to myself as she left about just wanting a father figure because she’d picked such a rotten one in the first place.

When I told Matthew of the conversation the following day, he looked concerned.

‘Your mother’s a nice woman, but she’s steeped in the unreality. She’ll never be an Uncle and she’ll never understand. You may have to be more careful from now on.’

‘What do you mean?’

Instead of answering me, he sent me away with a collection of Oscar Wilde plays, one of which, The Importance of Being Earnest, was indicated with a bookmark.

On page 259 I found a word had been circled in pencil.

ALGERNON: … What you really are is a . I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.

JACK: What on earth do you mean?

ALGERNON: You have invented a very useful younger brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable. If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s tonight, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week.

‘You think I should create my own Mr Bunbury?’ I asked the next time I saw Matthew.

‘Sure,’ he smiled, leading me to his study. ‘Bunburying is an essential part of life.’

‘I’m not sure I want to lie, though.’ I perched instinctively on the navy chaise longue.

‘I know you don’t, because you’re honest and true.’ Matthew sighed and sat heavily beside me. ‘But sadly you’ll have to if you want to live freely. It’s the dreadful irony of life that all Uncles really want is to live pure, innocent lives, but society forces them to play its sordid little games.’

‘So, do you have a Bunbury?’ I turned to face him.

‘I have many Bunburys my dear,’ he answered with a wink. ‘I’ve even had to assume whole other identities.’

After making me promise not to tell anyone, he unlocked a drawer in his desk and showed me the credit cards he had in other names.

Albert Sumac.

Leonard Bloom.

Charles Cain.

‘I mainly just use the first one. It’s been necessary for me to hide certain parts of my life from other parts of my life,’ he paused as he relocked the drawer. ‘For, um, financial reasons as well as personal ones.’

‘You’ve stolen money?’ I hiccupped.

‘You’re very blunt.’ His lips curled into that lazy smile I liked.

‘I don’t think I’ll be shocked.’ I sat up straight, feeling suddenly adult. ‘I’m just curious.’

Matthew returned to the chaise and spoke quietly to the bookcase on his left. ‘I took what I needed from my last employer when I left, yes. My son helped me hide it in the Channel Islands, and later I invested it in property in Kew. It was a one-off thing; now I just do a little tinkering of the books with my racing clients and the housing association where one of my flats is. They pay me – well, Albert – to manage the building and I skim a little off the top. It’s no worse than the banks do every day.’

‘And the personal reasons?’ I whispered excitedly.

‘Ah.’ He turned his wrinkled eyes to me. ‘Well, I’m afraid you might be shocked by those.’

‘I’m not a child!’ I blurted.

‘You’re right, you’re not a child. Okay, well I suppose you’ll find out sometime.’ He glanced quickly towards the closed door before whispering that he and Annabelle had an ‘arrangement’. I listened to his words with wide-eyes, neither daring to ask for details about this ‘arrangement’ nor questioning for one moment whether this might be the sort of line all adulterous men use to justify their actions.

‘You mean you see other women?’ My voice hit an embarrassingly-high note.

‘Shhh!’ He sat back with a grin. ‘I think you’re trying to make me blush today. Yes, I have other women. It’s a necessity of being an Uncle … and a man.’

I mulled over this for a moment, and then asked, ‘How many?’

‘Excuse me?’ He raised one caterpillar eyebrow.

‘Sorry, you don’t have to tell me,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m just curious how many women you’ve “needed”?’

‘In my whole life?’ he chuckled. ‘Annabelle asked me that once and made me count. I think it was sixty-three.’

‘You’re lying!’ I choked. ‘That’s ridiculous. It’s probably impossible.’

‘I wish it was,’ he sighed. ‘Sadly, there have only been a few I really cared about. For some, I can’t even remember their names.’

Over the coming weeks, in between philosophical discussions about art and Uncles and gossipy chats about next-door’s decision to cut down the oak tree, Matthew told me about the women in his life.

‘I used to have to sneak girls past the witch I lodged with. We tried every trick in the book. As far as she knew, I had seven sisters who would each visit me on a different night of the week. Stupid old bag!’

I knew it was weird being told these stories, but I enjoyed them. I imagined them as scenes from black-and-white movies flickering through my mind and tried to work out what my silver-haired friend must have been like as a young man.

‘Sometimes, if I liked a girl, I’d treat her to a hotel room. But in those days they wouldn’t let just anyone into hotels, so you had to pretend to have just got married or, if the manager had a heart, you could make up some sob story about her dad being out to get you but you just being a nice lad after all.’

‘My friend Thomas had this plan to put a mattress in the back of his van, but I think it got him more slaps than shags.’

‘I once kissed three generations of the same family. I was in love with Mrs Shelby when I was six and she gave me a kiss after the school play, then later I dated her daughter Jenny, and when she got too old and grey, I took out her daughter Rose.’

‘Jocelyn was an actress. She never had a penny, but her breasts were magnificent.’

‘Linda was a secretary and used to steal office supplies for me, so I could work from my flat. I hated going into Fleet Street; drinking was the only thing that made it bearable.’

‘Amy was fun; she didn’t mind doing it outside or in the car.’

‘Julie almost killed me. She came to pick me up from work so we could go to the pictures, but what I didn’t know was that she’d found out I was going with her flatmate too. Everything seemed normal and she stayed quiet as I chatted about my day, until she turned onto the motorway and just kept accelerating until we were going 120mph and I was clutching the door handle for dear life.’

‘Kate was beautiful, but she peed herself when she had an orgasm. I could never get into that.’

‘Elizabeth and I used to eat at the best restaurants, and then run out without paying. It put us on such a high. But she always fancied my friend more than me.’

‘Lucy wanted to marry me.’

‘Irene did marry me: trapped me into it by getting pregnant. I was still in Norfolk in those days and you couldn’t run out on a girl in farm country. It was different in the city. I liked the city.’

‘Marie – Annabelle’s friend whom I was seeing before her – was utterly neurotic. The stupid cow used to cry after sex and then insist on cooking me bacon and eggs, even in the middle of the night.’

After hearing these tales, when the teapot was cold or empty and Annabelle was making quiet fumbling noises in the hall – indicating she wanted some attention now – I would stumble onto the street and stare bewilderedly at the pavement I had plodded so many times before. I imagined the seven-year-old me, clad in a gingham dress and kicking stones with sensible shoes, and I wondered how she and I were still in the same place, how I could know so much now, yet still have to pretend to be the same little girl living the same little life in the same little town.

One day Matthew played me a Leonard Cohen album and began speaking in a much more serious tone.

‘Of course, what I was looking for yet was afraid to find all those years was what I had right at the beginning. When I went to university, my family made a big deal about it because I was the first one of us not to work on the farm. I wanted to go to Oxford, of course, but I failed my Latin, so Exeter it was. I was reading English Literature and rushed to join the department paper, to set up a John Donne society and to establish the best way to sneak books past the librarians. I was so innocent then, hardly thinking about girls.

‘Suzanne was in one of my lectures. She was from Paris and wore only black. All the boys were in love with her, but for some reason she came over to speak to me. I bought her a hot chocolate at a café and she took me back to meet her flatmate Marie-Anne.’

I noticed with something approaching panic that a tear had dribbled from Matthew’s eyeball.

‘We had from November to June together and it was perfect. The three of us lived in harmony: Marie-Anne and I both totally in love with Suzanne and loving each other for our mutual predicament. I would watch Suzanne spread out on the bed on spring afternoons, reading poetry aloud as Marie-Anne ran a razor ever so gently over her pubic bone, then softly kissed the raw skin.

‘But that upstart Mickey Robinson decided to publish something in the campus paper about our ménage à trois as he called it. It was the biggest scandal of the term and I was hauled into the Dean’s office. He was so embarrassed he couldn’t even look me in the face when he told me I was being sent down. Suzanne’s parents were informed and she was summoned back to France before any of us could say goodbye. But it was Marie-Anne who took it the worst.’

He was crying fully now and, borrowing a gesture learnt from films rather than life, I walked over to his chair and wrapped my skinny arms over his shoulders.

‘What happened to Marie-Anne?’ I asked softly.

‘She hanged herself in our flat. The landlady found her. I wasn’t even allowed to go to the funeral.’

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I learnt about Suzanne and the others, before I’d committed too fully to my second life, Matthew and I had to organise my Bunbury.

‘It’s regrettable, but I think it would be safest if we offered your mother a reason for you to come here so often.’

‘What sort of reason?’

‘Well, perhaps you could work for me. I’ll employ you to sort my books and maybe put my horseracing accounts on the computer. How about that?’