Twelve

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Twelve
Vanessa Jones

How should a young woman live now?Lily is waiting, as ever, for the weekend, waiting to get out of the city, waiting for that ever-elusive, life-defining, climactic episode, the one that will ‘explain to me everything that’s gone before, and everything that’s to come’.She’s been friends with the decisive Edward and the freewheeling Josh for years, and makes what progress she does by clinging on to them. She seeks a narrative for her life, a story to dress in, and embarks on a daring, blind romance that begins on a train with the mysterious Colin, but just as swiftly talks herself out of it, out of commitment. Meanwhile, next door, Shirley, a plainer, simpler woman, just gets on with things, caring for home, husband and baby, making strides, repeating cycles.Will Lily reach her epiphany? Will she recognize it when it arrives? Will it really change her life? Does she even need one?

Copyright (#ulink_13ede321-0bde-5aac-bade-dc1c91ca1694)

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2000

Copyright © Vanessa Jones 2000

Vanessa Jones asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006551942

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008228415

Version: 2016–11-08

Praise (#ulink_0c325ccf-e596-585f-ade8-e485df49f477)

From the reviews for Twelve:

‘Lily is a twentysomething woman living in London with a dull job and no man. Lily’s confessional narrative tracks her confusion, her sense that she should be somewhere else, someone else. In an effort to escape the “steep rock face” of a working week, she seeks respite with weekends in the country, parties and a date with a stranger. But she can’t escape the feeling that there’s something missing, that she’s a bit-part actor in her own life … As Twelve progresses, Jones layers each chapter with a different character’s voice: old friends, a down-to-earth neighbour and Lily’s date, Colin. There are sensitive, incisive observations and a knack with words that twists the imagination. By asking the unexpected, this first novel is unsettling, unusual and perceptive.’ Amazon.co.uk

‘Debut novelist Vanessa Jones uses her vividly realised group of self-absorbed twentysomethings to make some keen observations about urban isolation and longing.’ The List

‘A zippy, fresh first novel’ The Voice

Dedication (#ulink_d1ebe008-ce06-596e-983c-f1439034de41)

For Joyce and Noël

Contents

Cover (#ud4523740-076a-5f0b-a90b-0a847fd2d5fa)

Title Page (#ufde5dfde-a4b4-5f78-88f1-ee1558c97ac3)

Copyright (#ulink_b0ffbce8-f67e-55b0-8a4f-466d67f16de7)

Praise (#ulink_9f021e1f-5ea0-5895-9e6b-5b8983e84cf9)

Dedication (#ulink_4867f544-55af-54e1-8967-f2a2849de15a)

One (#ulink_28b5100e-4b0b-567e-8cd2-f9d0a917b2c7)

Two (#ulink_e49e957d-9e64-5c2a-bb32-c7115e239c65)

Three (#ulink_5ed55576-e499-56dc-bb1d-9d9f3d544067)

Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

one (#ulink_11770cad-3bbb-53da-9996-81eec12b34bc)

Every Friday night we rehearse the desertion of the city. Its pull becomes a push – a heartbeat pumping us out – to its limits and beyond. Trouble is we’ve got varicose veins. Or gout – look at this road. Stasis. We’re always stuck on this spooky bit of road, and it is always the same. Once it must have been a normal slice of quiet suburbia, but now most of the houses are boarded up: sold to the department of transport, bought by the department of road expansion, leased to the drivers of these cars.

One resident in every ten is hanging on. And they have painted their cause on the boards of their neighbours, their rantings against the drivers and their exhausts, dirt, noise. But I have only ever seen this in evidence and never the protesters themselves. ‘Time is suspended here,’ I say to Edward, who’s driving. ‘The anti-car campaigners always in precisely this state of invisible outrage, the cars in exactly this state of non-movement.’ Every moment is a freeze-frame in an action movie – it is a sculpture, a still life.

He doesn’t answer because he’s considering his next move in a word game we’re playing, a meaningless game, the way to win it is not to come to the end of it, its only point is to pass the time. ‘How apt,’ I think, and laugh. I say ‘Everything’s a metaphor,’ and then, ‘– I love statements like that which prove your point.’

Edward says, ‘You talk absolute shit, do you know that, Lily?’

‘The car is the city’s metaphor for freedom,’ I say, ‘its get-out clause’ – but once in, freedom is lost. We have no choice but to go with this not-so flow. Breathing in. People use this gas to kill themselves!

‘T-H-M,’ says Edward.

Country weekends. Weekends away. ‘I’m going away for the weekend.’ Maybe one day no one will live in the country. Perhaps one day it will be populated only from Friday evenings till Monday mornings and the city in hush.

‘Your go,’ says Edward. ‘God, this is boring.’

‘Well, we could have a conversation.’

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘You start.’

Edward and I are friends. We are better friends in theory than in practice. I love him, but what does that mean? We are going to his parents’ house, which is my favourite house – I love it and I like to think I have an understanding with it. It is elegant and grand, it is family and snug. How? Every room I want to breathe-in. I am always given the same bedroom, which I call Lily’s Room, but Edward’s family call it Bobbin’s room after some great aunt who lived there once. It feels like home to me but it is not my home, and I do not belong to it.

When we arrive, we’ll see through the window Edward’s parents sitting at the table in the middle of the kitchen. If you go in through the back door (and I have never been in through the front), the first room you come to is the kitchen. It is dark, in the way that a wood is dark. We’ll leave our bags in the car. We’ll walk in looking exhausted and dirty in the way parents expect, and secretly like. Edward’s mum will make room for us at the table. She’ll jump up and try to fetch us things, and Edward and his dad will tell her to sit back down. Then the others will arrive and there’ll be a general commotion involving luggage and kisses and fragments of lives. There’ll be a massive lasagne for supper and a treacle tart and after Edward’s parents have gone to bed, we’ll go into the drawing room and drink coffee, and take drugs.

I often wonder how much our parents would like us if they knew the whole truth.

Edward has quite an odd collection of friends which he likes to mix and match on these weekends. And although some of them look like they’re mutual, really I only see them these days by proxy, when I’m with him. We look uncomfortable in the drawing room. We are neither old enough nor young enough to own it. We look like props on the over-stuffed sofas, smugly smoking our joints or, now that we all have a bit more money, snorting a surreptitious line of cocaine. We are an uneasy mix of tailored suits and denim jackets. We have almost completely let go our dreams into the i-wish abyss. But not quite. Another year perhaps, two? at most five.

We’re never at our best on Friday nights. Something it is about coming to the country. We all invest the ‘country’ with some sort of healing power, and I don’t know whether it actually possesses it, but I do think it’s odd that anyone should lead a life they need constant respite from. Tonight I’ll go to bed earlier than I have done all week. Tonight I’ll sleep in Lily’s bed, next to the window which looks out onto fields of sheep. I’ll read a few lines of the Agatha Christie novel that’s always on the bedside table and listen to the silence. It’ll be dark. Properly dark like it is in a memory. No dreams.

After breakfast, before lunch, we go for a walk. To nowhere in particular. Edward’s garden becomes fields becomes the whole wide world. It is summer and the trees look heavy. Flowers bud bloom and rot on their stalks – decadence. If Edward’s mum had come with us we should have heard the names of them all, but today she doesn’t come. Too busy in her usually mysterious way. I’ve never met a mother who isn’t. They make lists, which sometimes branch off into sublists: a, b, c, d. In her absence I ask Edward to name everything. It is another game we play. If he doesn’t know, he knows to make it up. I find this delightful, like being a gummy child. Or Eve.

He points out to the others the line of cedars visible from this hill. He has taught me to love cedars – the elegant stillness of their elongated limbs – but weeping beeches are my favourite trees. They look like the sea stopped. There is one in his garden, and sitting under it I get a panoramic view of everyone’s calves playing croquet. There are sounds but not the words they are making. I’m wondering what Edward talks about when I’m not there and whether he has the same conversations. The light under here is the same as the light of the kitchen. Hands on mallets on balls. Clock-clock.

He is a fanatic games player, Edward. Chinese checkers, bridge, chess and on rainy days, Risk. I have spent whole weekends watching him try for world domination. He tells me that tonight will be perfect for murder so we bring the dining room outside. Tablecloth, candles, the whole kit and boodle. It is an old crone of a moon. Ace of hearts kills; Jack detects.

Edward says ‘the secret of life is to enjoy the world without wanting to possess it’ – but not everyone can borrow such an eden. I feel like pointing this out to him as we drive past the high-rises on the way back to town. I don’t, because we’re having an argument. The same argument we always have on the way back home about me, and how I expect to be driven to my front door. I quite like it because by the time it’s over we have driven to my front door. Rewind. All return journeys are shorter, like the last half of the week once you’ve got past the hill of Thursday, 12 p.m.

Tonight Shirley is watering the hollyhock in her front garden. I say garden, but really it is just the space between the road stop and her house start. She planted it out last year and this summer her hollyhock has swollen to gigantic proportions. It really is an extraordinary sight, barely diminished by her presence next to it.

I have discovered that it is a mistake to make friends with your next door neighbours. I can’t slide into my house now without having some intercourse with her and tonight I’m just not in the mood. It’s the same as going back to school after the long summer holidays. You’ve got something precious from home in your bag, and suddenly you see your teacher or your best friend and it’s sullied. You’re back down to earth and it was only a dream – silly. When I get in I’ll put a bag of blueberries down, and Edward’s mum’s chocolate brownies, and they’ll seem completely out of place and stupid. I’ll go to my room, and it will look like time hasn’t passed, like nothing’s happened. I can’t bear it. I want to hold on for a bit longer before I believe it. ‘Put your sunglasses on,’ says Edward. I do, I get away with ‘Nice weekend?’ and ‘Yes, thank you.’

At the moment, everything reminds me of being at school. Our individual lives are minute replicas of our whole species’ evolution. When a baby gets up onto its two legs it becomes homo erectus, becomes homo sapiens. Thinking man. It occurred to me at the ends of term that the school was a magnet momentarily switched off scattering us, its iron filings, into the beyond. This is how I feel again on Friday nights when we abandon our city, one day never to return. But which day? We live in the meantime. At school there is that sense of another life that will be yours, and now I sense it too. Home – not far away, but too far to touch.

In the meantime, this is my home. Josh is in the kitchen smoking a cigarette. There are five clean shirts on the table beside him, sunday-evening-newly-ironed. The working week is a steep rock face, and tonight is for laying out our crampons. Tomorrow we’ll put on our garb and ointments and we’ll leave the tent for the week ahead. Monday morning a little slow, but we’re picking up momentum. We’re more in the flow by Tuesday; throw the rope, click the clip, up a bit. On Wednesday we can neither see the ground beneath nor the summit above us, we’re dangling on Wednesday. Then dragging ourselves up by our fingernails on Thursday and panting at 12 p.m. Thursday afternoon is – the edge of the abyss: the relief, the run towards it, the ground falling away, time accelerating, it’s a roller coaster we’re on, we’re all feeling a little hysterical, silly we somersault towards The Weekend.

Tonight is just the beginning. Tonight I’m not looking forwards, I’m remembering. I’m hanging onto time and willing it to slow down. I kiss Josh’s forehead. I take my mementos out of my bag and as I predicted they look vaguely flat and tired. Still. They’re still brownies, they’re still blueberries and cream, and one of life’s treats. Josh and I eat them in the garden with a cup of coffee. He swings his legs up onto the bench so his knees hold his elbows hold his hands hold his head. He says he thinks the most highly-evolved form of life is the jellyfish and wishes he could be one, floating. He is one big sigh Josh, and not always of relief.

In mawkish moments it has always been Josh and me. Before we met – I don’t like to think about it – I couldn’t survive it now that I know better. In that respect, perhaps, I’m with God and his adamance on the Tree of Knowledge – once you know things it is very hard to unknow them. It is Josh has created this garden, he insisted on it. He said, in the summer, it’s like having a spare room. It is too small for a lawnmower so he put down paving and a step. To cut us off from Shirley on one side and mr faceless on the other he erected a wooden fence that creaks like a ship in the wind. He doesn’t believe in buying plants, so from trips to the country, from front yards we passed on the street, from commemorative gardens in town he has ripped cuttings. Usually under cover of darkness, but never intended. His garden has grown exactly as he has grown, slowly and by series of chance. It is the same with all his possessions, furniture, clothes, books and friends. I try to be more like him but I am too much in a hurry. I have an idea and like to realise it all at once. He waits, and he finds the design by accident. He is far less often disappointed.

I don’t think I have ever seen the garden looking as real as it does this year. It has come into itself. The plants are growing so thickly that it looks like a secret, but still it manages to steal the sun. In it, on the paving, Josh has drawn a backgammon board in chalk. A game of skill and chance. He suggests one.

Could I ever not understand backgammon? could I survive without Josh? how did people get hold of me before my mobile phone? can we forget concepts once we have them? could we unlearn the word “car”? Luxury turns right turns given turns necessity. When I was younger I could almost have moved in with someone who lived in a barrel of water, but I have definite needs now, definite edges. I don’t understand how anyone manages to fall in love after the age of seventeen. I do understand claustrophobia.

Because every day I make the decision to see exclusively. I must not register certain realities – like: there is no silence, or: I am never further than ten feet away from another person above below left right – for I am going down a tunnel. And looking straight ahead it seems there is room to manoeuvre but noticing the backdrop is never starting again, and attempting to turn around is: panic.

Josh and I make packed lunches for each other. It started off as an economy drive but has become a game of surprise. It was his turn last week and on Wednesday he shocked me with a cockle sandwich. It was a coup, not least because he did it on the most uninspiring day of the week. This week it’s my go, and I’ve decided on a radically different approach, five days of egg mayonnaise. It’s a huge price for not-that-funny a joke I realise this morning as I’m slicing the bread. For a start, egg mayonnaise first thing. For another, I too have to eat it. For a third, if someone did it to me I’d think they were very sad. Will he? Well …? Here we go.

When we first started working, we used to smoke a joint before we left the house. I don’t know how we did it, it is entirely unthinkable now. At the least delay on the underground, we’d come home and phone in to say we were catching a bus. We did wonder if they could hear us filling the kettle on the end of the line, but we decided we didn’t care – they could sack us – then we’d roll another. Funny how you get over it without noticing. Funny how what the company does was once ‘what they do’ and is now ‘what we do’. Funny how it doesn’t hurt.

Still, Monday morning it is definitely them and us and ‘them’ is everyone apart from me and Josh. We stride to the station, we sandwich ourselves between varying amounts of aliens and we look straight ahead, soft focus.

So many people all rushing to do their jobs. I wish I knew whether they enjoyed them, or got from them some sense of satisfaction. To my mind, work is the most monumental waste of time. I know that I could be thinking a larger thought, or having a more interesting conversation elsewhere. But I suffer from a lack of imagination. I don’t know where elsewhere is, or how to make it pay my rent, I can’t picture anything that could keep me interested nine-to-five, monday-to-friday, forty-eight-weeks-of-the-year. And I’m inclined to believe that everyone agrees with me for if they didn’t, surely there’d be no such word as ‘holiday’. Watching them, joining them struggle for space in this survival-of-the-fittest test first thing in the morning, every morning, the city seems to me a complex organism with a terminal disease. The new age has notions which oppose its ethic – fitness, health food, relaxation – and the age of communication has negated its reason to be.

After twenty minutes, Josh goes east and I go west. When I was little, I used to steal application forms and leaflets from banks, and with some other small friend whose every detail is now lost to me, played ‘work’ which consisted of, fundamentally, filling in these forms and reorganising them in piles. This is pretty much what I find myself doing for real now and it’s somewhat lost its appeal. The origami heaps on my desk are exactly how I left them minus my friday-air of elation. As far as they’re concerned, the weekend was my illusion.

It is ironic that, as an atheist to the work ethic, I have incarnated as a recruitment consultant. It startles me sometimes that my journey to this point is entirely due to a secretarial course that I never wanted to take. If I could unlearn to type, how different my life might have been. I started here as a temporary secretary and I have never left. Well, you’ve got to do something and I’m no good at first days. On my first day at school I got sent to the corner for colouring the moon in yellow and not knowing why I’d used that colour; I hated being new and I was new often. Now, I’m an old hand and no longer a secretary, in fact I’ve got one of my own. He tells me this morning that I have wall-to-wall interviews till lunch time. Time will fly then. Then I’ll think of Josh, ignorantly tucking in.

Time is subjective. The interviewees sitting in reception find the ten minutes until I can see them an eternity of sweating palms. The fly on the wall beside them spies in an even slower motion which lets it dodge the swiftest of swatting hands. Someone has found life on Mars. Well. Even if it were more than a single-celled bacteria, it would be as distinct from a human as a fly, or a lion. It would have no knowledge of day or night, week weekend, month year century millennium. We have invented millennia. And although I know we’ve made them up, I can’t help but feel apocalyptic at this point in time, in the madness of weekday mornings, on the Friday nights when we abandon our metropolis, one day never to return.

The city is sick. At its centre is chaos because everyone within it is dispensable, yet the central icon of our times is: the individual. In a tunnel though, there is no direction but straight ahead. Evolution involves the collation of information, to no end but survival, but how will we survive? I may feel apocalyptic but I’ve no idea what should happen next, I suffer a lack of imagination. And so does everyone else, I imagine. We’re neither-nor. We laud people over machines, but we can’t help looking forward to the day when computers can make love to us. We’re unsure whether to live organically farming or safe within the helmet of a virtual world. It is the end of the decade, the century and the millennium. It is Thursday Afternoon all over the world and this is what I’m wondering: where are we going for the weekend?

two (#ulink_55865a06-e065-5028-ab26-6c2b29db5199)

Shirley’s father died when she was eleven months old. It is this, she says, that has given her her unique spin on the politics of men and women. ‘Being brought up without a father,’ she tells us quite often, although now it doesn’t grate so, ‘gives you a very different outlook. It means you don’t play to roles.’ She is married to Andrew and together they have a small son called Oliver.

It is because of Oliver that Shirley and I met in the first place. She was background music before then, heavily pregnant when we moved in and leading to a few do you think they know they’re alive? conversations: babies in stomachs and bodies in general and breast-feeding (it can’t be right). But babies, they perform the same function as dogs do in human interaction. You pretend you’ve not noticed the person queuing next to you for the past three months and then all of a sudden it’s ‘hello, fella’ and ‘isn’t he sweet?’ and ‘does he bite?’

This house has Shirley on one side, mr faceless on the other and behind it, garden-to-garden back-to-back, it has naked neighbours. These others have neither children nor animals and so have remained objects of peeking and conjecture. Sometimes sitting in the garden, doing my thing while they are doing theirs, it seems like we are plastic figures placed in toy town being repositioned by a giant child. To him, mr faceless is a secret. He is intriguing because neither Josh nor I are able to describe him. If we saw him somewhere other we’d never recognise him, and we quite often have arguments about the colour of his hair. Our naked neighbours live in a flat parallel with our first floor. On weekday mornings, they iron shirts in their boxer shorts and they eat cereal in them at the weekends. I go red when I see them on the street fully clothed. They have the bodies of young gods and I’m sure that to the child in charge they’re superheroes. And me and Josh … ?

Shirley, because we spoke, dwells in the realms of bleak reality. She is a constant source of minor irritation. She claims not to play to roles with Andrew, but she has taken to them with a vigour with me. Like her marriage though, I’m sure she views our relationship as evidence to support her theories and, vexingly, I see how she could be justified. Still, there must be degrees of correctness, in the end I must know that I’m more right than she is, otherwise we’d agree.

Not that she knows we disagree. This is one of the things that most annoys me about myself.

I have no idea what Shirley was like before she became a parent, but she so entirely epitomised the last few weeks of pregnancy that I’m sure that she has taken to every stage of her life with like completeness. As soon as she became a mother to Oliver she became a mother to me, and now feels it her duty to advise me on the complicated process of love. This morning she came round to drop off Oliver and dropped off also the benefit of her experience. She said ‘No red lipstick today then?’

I said, ‘No, I didn’t like it, I could feel it on my lips. And anyway Josh told me I looked like a man in drag.’

‘Well of course he would say that,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you before, living with Josh is a terrible put-off.’

Shirley quite often begins her sentences with ‘well of course’, especially those relating to Josh. She has her own ideas about him and the reason we are friends. She is very fond of telling me that he likes me, of course, because I look like a boy. I did wonder this morning whether I was going to hear this again, but it was the red lipstick (one of her cast-offs) that had grabbed her attention. She said, ‘You know, despite the fact that men – well, most of the men that I know – say they don’t like too much, really they prefer plain girls who wear make-up to beautiful girls who don’t, because they are making an effort. Men like us to make an effort you know, otherwise they say “I see you’ve let yourself go.”’

I really hope that Shirley isn’t right. Her version of life, love, women and men is one which makes me want to let myself go. Floating. Up into the air.

Oliver has come round today because Shirley and Andrew have gone off house hunting. They are hoping to move to the north of the city where Shirley assures me that the air is cleaner. I do worry that when they move I might never see him again. He’s three. He’s the only person I have known all his life. I don’t like children, and I hope this isn’t the reason I’ve made an exception in his case. He has soft brown hair and an enquiring look. His favourite thing to do when he comes round to our house is to make rose-petal perfume from one of Shirley’s bushes that has spilled over our fence, and which Josh has trained to grow underneath his window.

Today he is sorting petals into piles according to size and shape. Each pile has twelve petals in because that’s as far as he can count. He is possessed by an intensity of concentration that I have no recollection of in myself. Maybe one day. Sitting here watching him, I am aware, as I so often am with him, that these days we have together remain in his mind for only the shortest of spaces, soon to be collated into the murky swamp that is childhood. When he moves up north, if I never see him again, how long will he remember me? And I’ll know him until I die.

I used to (and I still do sometimes, only now he doesn’t take it seriously) try to take him back as far as he could go. When he began to speak I thought, it’s not that long since he was in the womb, not that long before he was. And I’d sit him down and ask him questions, hoping he’d remember and I’d get an answer to the secret we’re all longing to tell. Sadly nothing. And now he knows what I want to hear and makes up stories. Usually involving plots Andrew has read to him the night before. Before he was born he was a pirate, he was a wrestler and, most surprisingly, he was a small blue bicycle called Bertie.

Little scrap, he only weighed five pounds when he was born. I was fascinated to watch him and work out exactly when he acquired his edges. At first, he thought the whole wide world was the same person and that person was him. Admittedly he had his favourites, but if Shirley had died, or if I had died, he wouldn’t have noticed. God needs us more than we need Him.

Oliver and I have discovered together that if you put rose petals into cold water and then boil them, the perfume is far more fragrant than if the water’s warm to start with. Also the more water the better, but boiled off to just a tiny amount and then put in the blender to mush.

I have to say that the rose-petal perfume started as a demonic joke. A couple of years ago, Josh and I were convinced it was up to us to change everyone’s opinion, especially Shirley’s. We were unreasonably irritated by her ‘being brought up without a father’ conversations, which were usually followed by trite examples of her conjugal arrangements with Andrew. ‘He and I just do the things we’re best at,’ she continues to explain, quite patiently, ‘I do the girly things and he does the manly things, but that’s because we’re good at them.’

To Shirley, ‘manly things’ means taking out the rubbish.