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But I did.
Women are meant to be better communicators, good with words, intuitive with the non-verbal stuff. But I prefer male speak. My mother uses too many words. So does Auntie Sue. Words to analyse, predict, accuse. Most of all, selfish words: look what this does to me, after everything I’ve done, what will people think about me? Me, me, me. You make me look good, you make me look bad.
If I’m sick, it’s me who’s sick. No one else need throw up on my behalf.
As my mother waved and called ‘Coo-ee,’ my stomach churned. My chest heaved. My throat went into spasm. I headed for the house. Walls make me feel safer than the open air. Or canvas.
Later, I was sitting in the marquee feeling a little better. My mother skipped over, full of sympathy. Sympathy for herself because her daughter couldn’t perform any more—she had pulled a sickie.
She said, ‘You must be a doctor when you grow up and you must eat this bread. Then I will tell you what else you must do.’ Or words to that effect.
Anger hides round corners. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear it rumbling, swishing. Like lava surfacing. You feel your body tightening as it grips your muscles and tendons and seeps into your nervous system, and you become hot, steamy, rigid. You can’t keep it trapped inside, it will make its escape.
I pushed the plate away with too much force. I spoke with too much aggression. Then I sat back and let my mother turn my anger into guilt.
‘Sorry, I was only trying to help, I forgot you weren’t feeling well. I thought you’d want to meet that medical student. It’s your life, but I’m here to support you, and it’s just that you need to gather all the information you can. Talk to people, ask questions, and something will come up and you’ll think, Yes, that’s for me. But there’s no hurry, just keep all your options open.’
‘I just feel like…I don’t know.’
‘Go on.’
‘I feel pushed. Kind of.’
‘Well, it’s you pushing yourself most of the time. No one else is pushing you in any way. You’re completely wrong about this, you have nothing to be angry about. I simply don’t want you to have any regrets, that’s all. Regret can niggle you for the rest of your life.’
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s all right. No harm done. Here you are, you can have my bread.’
‘Can I go and play outside?’ asked Eliza. She had scoffed down her food like eating’s an Olympic event or something.
‘I don’t suppose children have to stay for the speeches, Eliza. Off you go then. Jo and I will be here if you need us.’
Ben walked past and winked at me. I smiled. Then I saw him wink at the girl in the pink chiffon dress.
The wedding party was sitting in a line like they were waiting for a bus or something. Victoria and her husband kept looking at each other. Uncle George and Auntie Sue kept looking at each other. The in-laws kept looking at each other. People seem to come in pairs, like book ends. Or shoes. One by one, the men in the line stood up to speak. The audience joined in with romantic sighs, laughter, applause. I saw myself sitting up there in a white dress. My mum and dad beside me. Eliza one of a pair of identical bridesmaids. Everyone in pairs. Perfect.
I miss being a complete family. Two parents. Two children. Two gerbils. I like everything neat and tidy. Life arranged to perfection.
The speeches were over and Mum was chatting to some random man. Middle-aged men in suits all smell the same. She picked a piece of fluff off his shoulder. She smoothed down her skirt. She pushed a piece of hair behind her ear. She said it was a nice tent. She said the mother-in-law’s hat looked like a pancake. She threw back her head and laughed. He laughed too. She said, ‘You have to laugh.’
I stood up and went over.
‘Ah, my daughter, Jo. This is Gordon.’
‘I don’t feel well.’
‘Do you want to go and lie down in the house? Uncle George won’t mind.’
‘I really, really don’t feel well.’
‘Oh, dear, let me think…’
‘I want to go home.’
The challenge. Who comes first?
‘I’ll catch you later.’ Gordon slunk off quietly.
We got into the car in a cloud of apologies. Apology and regret equals blame. We stopped at the end of the village.
‘Jo, if you’re feeling sick, perhaps you’d better swap with Eliza and sit in the front. It was your turn to sit in the front anyway.’
‘It’s all right. I’m feeling much better.’
‘But it was your turn.’
‘Get a life.’
There are different types of silences. There’s the easy, comfortable silence you share with friends. I can sit with my best friend, Scarlet. We can sit in silence like soaking in a warm bath. Then there’s solitary silence, but your own thoughts make it a noisy, frantic silence. The silence in the car was thick and heavy. Like wet concrete waiting to set into something solid. Eliza eased into the silence with soft humming. I thought my mother would slice through it with laughter. Or a shrug-of-the-shoulders remark. Instead, she made us sit in it. She turned on the radio. Radio Two. She hummed along. But too high-pitched.
When did I first feel I’d let my parents down?
I remember when I was six years old. It was our school sports day. I was entered in the sack race and the obstacle race. Lucy Button was better than me. On the day, I stayed at home. I told my mother I hated school. I never wanted to go again. Mum and Dad argued. Dad had taken the day off work. Mum liked to talk to the other mums. I was off reading schemes. I could read what I wanted and Mum liked to tell everyone.
After that, I practised running in a sack all year. I practised crawling under tarpaulins. I practised throwing a bean bag into a hoop. The next year I won both my races but Mum was in hospital, having Eliza. Dad was with her. When I got home, I had to go to the hospital. I saw that Eliza was ugly. I didn’t want her to live in our house. She had my mother’s name and I didn’t. I asked why. I said what about me?
I think Dad was on my side. I don’t know, but there was shouting, right there in the hospital. I had caused a rift be-tween my parents. So? They’d missed me winning my races. Life needed to be balanced like that. Neat and tidy. Ordered and fair.
When we got home from the wedding, I went straight to bed. I was still feeling shitty. That night I dreamt I was running along a winding path towards a big house. I knew I had to run through the house and get to the other side. I didn’t know why, I just knew it had to be done. I ran along corridors but kept coming across dead ends. Then I realised I had to go down some stone steps into a dark cellar. That way I would be able to run through the cellar, climb up some steps at the other end and get through the house. But I lost my way in the dark. Then I woke up and my stomach felt full. I felt like I had been stuffed with cotton wool like a teddy bear. My throat was dry. My forehead was hot. In the morning, Mum left warm toast and a mug of steaming tea on my bedside table. She told me to rest.
There were two weeks left before term started. Sixth form waited ahead like a mountain. Daunting, imposing, frightening. Somehow the wedding had changed things. Another mountain was in view. The future was too steep to climb.
I would make a list. A list limited the time ahead you had to think about. I would make a list of what I needed to do in the remaining two weeks. I got out my pad and pen and stared at the blank page. I didn’t like blank pages. They looked uncertain, open, ambiguous. I started to write, to cure the page of its emptiness, to cure the future of its uncertainty.
• Read through AS curriculums.
• File away GCSE work.
• Tidy desk drawers.
• Keep dream diary.
• Buy Screamhead’s new album.
• Mend puncture on bike.
• Collect photographs.
• Get a new boyfriend.
• Lose a stone.
• Phone Scarlet.
I decided to start at the end and work backwards. Maybe life should be like that. Start off as a crinkly with all that experience. Then feel yourself getting younger and fitter. Life would get better, not worse.
‘Hi, Scarlet. Do you want to come over or shall we meet in town or something?’
Mum came into my room.
‘Only two weeks left of the holiday. It’s flown past, hasn’t it? Eliza’s round at Katie’s for the day. I thought you and I would hit the shops.’
‘I’m going out.’
‘Oh. Right. Where are you off to?’
‘Just out.’
‘Are you meeting Scarlet?’
‘Probably.’
‘Well, maybe we could meet up afterwards. I’ve got a few things to do in town. What do you say?’
But I said nothing. I don’t know why. The wedding seemed to have changed everything. Maybe that’s why I keep thinking back to that day. Even now. It was the start of something. Or the end of something. It was an unhappy day, I know that. It’s just been so hard to recall the feelings, the essence, of the day. All I really remember is the sequence of events, like it was a film or something.
I met Scarlet at Tramps coffee-bar. I had a black coffee. Scarlet had a latte. She spooned three sugars into it, automatically, and stirred it round and round and round. Her arm jangled with the rows of bracelets. The dolphin tattoo on her shoulder bobbed up and down. She put her elbow on the table and propped her head up with her hand. She carried on stirring.
Tramps had an uneven wooden floor and thick pine tables which wobbled when you leant on them. The hiss and splutter of the coffee-machines, the droning chatter of its young customers, the revs and buzz of the traffic outside drowned out our silence. The place smelt of froth and coffee beans and sweat and cinnamon.
‘Life is full of shit,’ sighed Scarlet eventually.
‘Something wrong?’
‘My parents are splitting up—no big surprise—and Blaise has dumped me and I think I’ve picked the wrong subjects for AS levels. It’s all happening at once and I feel like shite. I am so-o-o-o stressed.’
Scarlet started to cry. Large solitary tears like a tap dripping slowly. She cried easily, unashamedly, as if it was normal.
‘Look at me.’ She laughed, and brushed her tears away with the back of her hand.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I asked, and put my hand on her shoulder. Then we hugged. Scarlet was the only person I touched, except perhaps Mum. Mum doesn’t know how to hug me any more. Except sometimes when she forgets I’m grown up. Am I grown up? Anyway, she hugs me like I’m three or something. Like she wants to kiss it better and put a plaster on it. Scarlet’s my best friend and her secrets are my secrets. And my secrets…Well, you have to know what they are yourself first. We hugged in the café so I could share some of my strength. If only I’d had any.
‘Not much to say really,’ she said.
But there was. Scarlet told me her dad was moving thirty miles away and that she had known it was coming but it was still a shock when it happened. That she’d racked her brains to see if there was anything she could have done. That Blaise was a bastard and she hated him. That she thought sciences would be too hard and would make her so-o-o stressed but she might stick with biology. That she felt uncertain and confused and muddled and shitty.
And all the time she cried and sniffed. She blew her nose on her napkin. She didn’t hide her face or go to the toilets. She seemed locked into that space, that time, that moment. The bustle of coffee-bar life ground on, but Scarlet seemed totally unaffected by everything around us.
Eventually she shrugged it off.
‘How was the wedding?’ she asked. ‘Any fit guys?’
‘Mostly mingers. But there was one cute guy, Ben.’
‘Tell me more.’
I leant over the table like there was someone listening or something.
‘He’s a Screamhead freak. We had so-o-o much in common. It was like we’d known each other years. I reckon he works out some. Muscles all over.’
I was whispering. Confiding in Scarlet. Confiding a lie, half a lie anyway.
‘All over?’ said Scarlet, and spluttered out a laugh so that the froth on her coffee went up her nose and made her cough.
We giggled and I nearly felt happy. I had made Scarlet laugh and that would make her feel better. Perhaps it would make me feel better. By osmosis or something.
‘Are you seeing him again?’
‘Might do. Bit of a distance.’
‘Still, you had a good time.’
Did I? Did I have a good time? I wasn’t well, there was something sad about it all, but otherwise…
‘So we’ve both got divorced oldies now,’ I said. I was sure I could help Scarlet out. That would make sense. I could tell her what it was like and then she’d understand and feel OK about it. Maybe.
I looked at Scarlet. How did she manage to cry without get-ting blotches? Her skin was perfect. Pale under her spiky blonde hair. She looked like a pretty pixie. Petite, small slightly turned-up nose, sparkling green eyes. I preferred long hair, but the style suited her. She made me feel clumsy. She said she wished she was tall. But she meant tall and elegant. Not tall and awkward. I liked my shoulder-length hair. I liked my brown eyes. I only got the occasional spot. But my body was all wrong. It was like a puzzle of different body parts all put together wrongly so that somebody else had some of my pieces. I had haphazard bulges here and there. In the wrong places.
We finished our drinks and Scarlet came to the music shop with me and to collect my photographs from Boots. While we were there, we fiddled around with the make-up samples. We sprayed perfume on our wrists and we weighed ourselves.
I got home with my photos and my CD and a number on a piece of paper. I looked at my list. I ticked off ‘Phone Scarlet’, ‘Collect photographs’, and ‘Buy Screamhead’s new album’. I got a pad out and wrote ‘DREAMS’ on the cover. I looked at the first blank page. I wrote about my dream of trying to run through the cellar. I wrote a number next to ‘Lose a stone’.
This was the first time I’d felt happy for months. Was it happiness? I’m not sure now. Can you have happiness without contentment? But I was organised. I was crossing items off a list. I was on a roll. And something felt right.
I rushed out to the bike shed and wrenched the wheel off my bike.
‘Coo-ee,’ shouted Mum. ‘I’m making myself a sandwich for lunch—do you want one?’
‘I ate in town.’
You would think Mum would want something different to eat on a Sunday, her day off from the sandwich shop.
I stayed in the shed while Mum ate her sandwich. Soon, I was glueing the small fabric square onto the inner tube. I left it to dry. I wondered what it would be like to live in the shed. It would be like having your own flat. Cool. I spent the next hour slowly and methodically filing away my work from my GCSE courses and another two tidying out my desk drawers. I threw away a bin bag of paper. More than could have fitted into the drawers. Or so it seemed.
I got out the curriculum papers for my AS level subjects and started to read.
‘Can I have mine in my room?’ I asked Mum at suppertime. I didn’t want to lose the momentum. Spaghetti Bolognese—better than a takeaway.
