Watching Edie

‘You think?’ A strange half-smile plays around her lips as she turns back to her reflection in the mirror, and I can tell that she’s no longer here with me, that it’s him in the room with her now, not me.

Even before we reach the top of the hill we hear it: the screams and music and the dull roar of generators, loudspeaker voices and a klaxon’s wail. And then, there we are, Edie and I, looking down at it all spread out below us, the coloured lights and the big wheel and the people and the caravans and the stalls. A magical, other world transported into the middle of Braxton fields.

Edie nudges me in the ribs and I look down to see a bottle of vodka in her hand. I shake my head but when she grins and thrusts it at me again, something makes me hesitate. Real life recedes and in its place I see spread out below me in the lights and music and laughter a million shimmering possibilities. On impulse I take the bottle from her and swig it back, the liquid choking and burning my throat, making me splutter while Edie laughs. ‘Come on,’ she says, grabbing my hand, and we run down the hill together, to where the fair waits for us, the vodka trailing excitement through me like a firework.

I can’t believe I’m here, that my parents have let me come. I’d walked in on one of their arguments earlier, too excited by Edie’s phone call to notice the sound of voices hissing from beneath the closed kitchen door like a gas leak. I think Dad had let me go to make Mum cross. ‘For pity’s sake, Jennifer, she’s sixteen,’ he’d said, and I ran to get my coat, not daring to catch Mum’s eye, my head already full of Edie and of what we’d do tonight.

And now here we are in the midst of it all: little kids with fluorescent rings around their necks, candy floss and giant cuddly toys and goldfish in bags, groups of lads with cans of beer and girls shrieking on the Hearts and Diamonds. A loudspeaker booms a thudding bass as we stand by a ride called Moon Rocket that sends a cage of screaming people soaring into the air. It’s amazing, the colours and noise and lights, but when I turn to Edie I suddenly realize that she’s scanning the crowds as if searching for something. ‘Are you all right?’ I ask her.

She shrugs. ‘Yeah, sure. What shall we go on? Have you got any money?’ Excitedly I pull out the handful of notes I’d grabbed from my savings box before coming tonight and her eyes widen. ‘Christ, Heather,’ she laughs. ‘You been robbing banks now too?’

We go on everything, running from ride to ride. I don’t mind paying for everything at all. I drink more vodka and I laugh and scream as if, were I to stop for a moment, the night might end, the fair and all its possibilities might vanish. But when I notice again Edie’s distracted expression I understand with a stab of disappointment that it’s him she’s looking for, the lad from the square – it’s him who she came for tonight. And soon I’m searching him out too, in the gaps between the rides where the fair’s bright lights don’t quite reach, faces lingering in the shadows, mouths sucking on cigarettes and sipping from cans. Strangers’ eyes flickering back at us, but he’s not there.

The last ride we go on is the waltzers and we spin round and round, the speed and the motion causing Edie to slide along the plastic seat towards me. I feel her softness and her hard angles as she lands against me, catch the scent of her hair. We’re dizzy when we get off, giddy and disorientated and laughing, but I look up and there he is. Standing with some other lads a few metres away, down by the side of the dodgems, huddled over something that they’re passing between them. It’s him. He’s half-turned away from us but it’s definitely Connor, and suddenly he looks up, his face flashing red, yellow, purple, green, his eyes scanning the crowds before landing on Edie, dark and steady as the barrels of a gun.

I try to steer her away but I’m too late. Her eyes are locked on his and it’s as if he’s a magician, a hypnotist, the way she goes to him, as though sleepwalking, as though the rest of the world and all its light and music has vanished. I trail after her and just before she reaches him I pull on her arm. ‘What?’ she asks, without looking away from him, without dropping his eyes, even for a second.

‘It’s late. I better go home.’

‘OK,’ she says, already moving off again. ‘I’ll see you later, yeah?’

‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘No.’ She shrugs off my hand and I feel a sharp slap of rejection. ‘Go home,’ she says. ‘I’m staying here.’ And she moves away, to where he’s waiting for her. For a moment I watch her go before I turn back through the crowds alone.

After

The floorboards are bare except for a large, colourful rug, the shelves full of paperback books. Somewhere, down the hall, a crackling record plays a song by a man with a scratchy, rasping voice. I sit on the sofa alone, twisting my fingers together, wishing I hadn’t come. Above my head, occasional thumps and dragging sounds are interrupted by intermittent swearing: the man who had opened the door to me three minutes ago had clearly forgotten I was coming. ‘Won’t be long,’ he shouts, and I go to the bay window to look out at the street.

This part of New Cross is different from mine. The neat terraced houses have freshly painted front doors in muted shades of green or blue or grey; little olive trees stand neatly outside them in terracotta pots. Down the road a pub that had once been dilapidated for years has tables and hanging baskets out front, where couples drink beer in the sunshine, their babies asleep in expensive buggies. I turn back to the room and look around me, taking in the books, the prints on the walls, the stylish furniture and rugs – the sort of place I’d once imagined myself living, in fact. And I think about that old me as if of a stranger, so certain I’d been that the world would be mine for the taking one day.

At that moment a boy of about five walks into the room. He’s mixed race and very lovely looking with a cloud of light brown Afro hair and deep blue eyes. He’s gazing at me very seriously, as if unsure whether I’m real or not. ‘Hi there,’ I say after a silence, just as the man returns, carrying with effort a cot.

‘Here you go,’ he says, smiling. ‘Sorry about that.’ He puts his hand on the boy’s head and they watch me scrabble about in my bag for my purse.

‘Thirty, was it?’ I ask.

He nods and takes the money I hand him. ‘Cheers. You want me to dismantle it to put in your car, or do you have a van or something?’ It’s only then that I realize – and the stupidity of it leaves me gaping at him with embarrassment – I had entirely forgotten to think about how I’d get it home.

The child and his father look back at me expectantly. Down the hall, the record comes to an end. ‘I don’t have a car,’ I admit.

He looks at me in surprise, his gaze dropping to my seven-month bump. ‘Were you going to carry it home on your back?’

And so, several minutes later, despite my many protestations, I find myself sat between the boy, whose name I learn is Stan, and the man who tells me he’s called James, in the front seat of a battered pickup truck, being driven home with the cot sliding and rattling behind us. I’m overcome with embarrassment.

‘Stop apologizing,’ James says. ‘It’s no trouble, really.’

I glance sideways at him. He’s nice enough looking, with very black skin and an attractive, open face, but though he’s in his thirties and well spoken, he’s wearing a bizarre assortment of clothes: a neon orange jumper with army trousers and paint-splattered boots, his hair cut in peroxide blond tufts. He looks like a student, or a homeless person, I think. During the short drive he’s never quiet or still, whistling between his teeth, commenting on other people’s driving, asking me questions about when I’m due, what I do, where I’m from, all the while ruffling his son’s hair, thumping the horn or drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. I can’t think of anything to say to him. He’s exhausting and I’m relieved when we reach my building at last.

He jumps out and starts unloading the cot on to the pavement. ‘You got someone to help you carry it in?’ he asks. ‘Which floor do you live on?’

I shrug. ‘It’s OK. I can manage.’

He looks at me and I see it dawn on him that there’s no one to help. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he says. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

And I feel hemmed in by his persistence, his insistence on helping me. I wish he would leave the cot and me alone here on the street. But up the three flights of stairs he follows me, carrying the cot awkwardly, swearing under his breath each time he bangs it against his shin, the little boy trailing after us.

When I open the door to my flat, the threadbare carpet, the old, ugly furniture and the dirty paintwork look suddenly much worse than they did half an hour before. ‘Put it anywhere,’ I say. He hoists it through into the lounge, knocking a shelf and sending its contents scattering, magazines and old bills and a dozen or so loose pages of drawings falling at our feet. I kneel down, hurriedly grabbing at the pictures and stuffing them back into the folder. But it’s too late: he plucks one from where it landed on his foot and begins examining it. ‘These yours?’ he asks, and I feel my face begin to burn, so painful is it to have this stranger – anyone at all – look at my sketches; my inky landscapes peopled by their spindly ghosts.

I hold out my hand to take it from him, but he’s still engrossed. ‘This is actually really good,’ he says slowly, and then he looks at me, his expression different now, curious, reassessing. ‘Do you paint too, or just draw?’ he asks, ‘Because I—’

But I snatch the drawing from his hand. ‘No, I don’t do anything,’ I say, stuffing it back into the folder and moving away.

There’s a brief, surprised silence. I look at the door.

‘Right,’ he says stiffly. ‘Sorry,’ and he takes his son’s hand and starts to leave.

‘Thanks for the cot,’ I manage to mumble when they reach the door, and he smiles again his easy smile.

‘No problem.’ It’s a nice smile, and for a second or two I allow myself to return it, until Connor’s face flashes across my mind and I turn away with a thumping heart, busying myself with the scattered papers while they let themselves out, closing the door behind them.

As my belly grows I find myself thinking increasingly of my mum. I wonder what she felt like being pregnant with me, whether she felt as scared as I do, whether she loved me right away. She was only seventeen when I was born and for as long as I can remember we fought and bickered like sisters. I was six when my dad walked out and I blamed her for his leaving. And yet, in my heart, I always knew we loved each other, a part of me understanding that the passion with which we hurt each other came from something strong enough to withstand the blows we inflicted. Looking back, I guess I always felt that we would have time to work things out eventually, not imagining what was to come; that we would one day have to cut all ties and never speak again.

When I first came to London and lived with Uncle Geoff I would hear him sometimes on the phone to her, passing on news of how I was doing. Sometimes, when he thought I was out of earshot, I would hear him asking her to talk to me, but she never would and I never picked up the phone myself. I don’t blame her for cutting me off, because I left her no choice, not really. If I’d stayed she would have had to have done something, told someone about what happened that night, so by turning her back she was protecting me in a way. And I think, now, that by confessing to her, I was looking for her to force an end to it all – to put a stop to Connor and me.

And still I dream about Heather. Night after night my sleeping mind replays what happened between us in Fremton. I see us at the quarry, all of us: Heather and me, Connor and Niall, Rabbit and Boyo and Tully and the rest. Even the same music is playing on the car stereo and I see again the sinking sun as it stains the quarry’s water red and gold. In the small hours when I wake, breathless and panicky after reliving it all again, I try to make sense of Heather’s behaviour when she visited me. How she’d acted as though nothing had happened back then, as though we were just old friends catching up. Sometimes, in the long sleepless hours before dawn, I wonder if I’d imagined it all, been mistaken somehow in the part she played that night – perhaps time and memory had played tricks, distorted things. But even before the thought has properly formed I know that I’m deluding myself. Whatever it is that Heather wants from me now, nothing can change that.

I’m on my way to the hospital and letting myself out of the front door when the new tenant, the ginger woman from the ground-floor flat, arrives on the steps in front of me, and I look at her with curiosity as I hold the door open for her. She’s very thin and covered in tattoos – a tapestry of names and patterns and hearts and flowers that seems to cover every inch of her. I smile but she doesn’t look at me and though I’m not sure what it is about her that makes me want to talk to her I tentatively clear my throat and say, ‘Hi, I’m Edie, I live—’ But she only nods curtly in response, avoiding my gaze and turning her back on me abruptly as she lets herself into her flat, closing the door behind her. I stare after her, before beginning the long, slow process of getting myself to the hospital.

These days I’m more belly than person; a bump on legs, as if I, or the person I was, has been entirely replaced by my unborn child. And the rest of the world seems to collude in this. In the street, elderly women reach out with narrowed, hungry eyes to touch my belly as though, Buddha-like, it might bring them luck. At my hospital visits I wait, obedient and detached as I’m weighed and measured and scanned and tested, and I feel entirely separate from the life that’s growing inside me. I faithfully attend every appointment and read every leaflet and booklet that’s pressed on me, but if I try to imagine the baby inside me I find that I can’t. When the midwife asks me if I want to know the gender I shake my head in panic, because I only know that I have one wish: I hope with all my heart that it isn’t a girl.

The bus takes me through New Cross towards Camberwell, winding through narrow back roads then on to Peckham High Street, past dusty, sun-baked shopfronts, the jumbled mixture of Georgian terraces and council blocks, strings of nail bars and chicken shops and newly arrived delis and fashionable bars. When we reach Denmark Hill twenty minutes later, the sprawl of King’s College Hospital looms to my right, the low Victorian red bricks of the Maudsley psychiatric unit to my left. I get off at the busy intersection and begin to head towards the maternity unit.

Just as I’m turning into the main entrance I glance across the road and freeze. A woman is standing at the bus stop, turned away and half concealed by the waiting queue of people, but her hair and build and posture is so like Heather’s that my stomach plummets with fright. I crane my neck but a bus pulls up obscuring my view and though I wait, my mouth dry, my heart knocking, by the time it’s moved on again the queue has halved and the woman I’d seen has gone. I stand there for a long time, fear twisting in my gut. But surely it wasn’t her. It couldn’t possibly be. Just another in a long line of lookalikes I’ve spotted over the years – my mind playing tricks again, that’s all. I tell myself to get a grip, the baby gives a hefty kick to my bladder and I hurry on my way.

Today the antenatal waiting room is busy and nearly every orange plastic chair is taken. A small wall-mounted TV shows a daytime property programme, its sound turned low. Women in various stages of pregnancy come and go, each clutching identical blue cardboard folders and occasionally trailing a toddler, a boyfriend or a husband in various states of boredom, excitement or fear. I take the one remaining seat, next to an exhausted-looking Irish woman who nags her four children to get up off the floor, stop fighting, be quiet. I check my ticket. Thirty-nine. The LED screen flashes number twenty-one. I sigh and along with nearly everyone else pull out my iPhone and turn it on.

But a small commotion at the door causes me to look up. A heavily pregnant teenage girl waddles in wearing tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops and shouting at a lad behind her. ‘Fuck off,’ she screams, ‘Fuck off, right? I don’t want you here. I don’t fucking want you here!’ The lad says nothing, his head bowed. They sit on opposite sides of the room, he with his chin almost on his chest, her glaring furiously at him. And as I watch, he looks up and makes brief eye contact with me. He is, I realize, about twenty, the same age Connor was when I first met him, though they are nothing alike – the wounded, vulnerable expression of this stranger is nothing you’d ever have seen on Connor’s face.

In that instant I’m transported back to the night of the fair, the night it all began. I see Connor staring at me across the fairground, feel again the electric charge of excitement. I’d walked towards him and said his name and he’d thrown away his cigarette and nodded. I’d felt suddenly shy and for something to do had taken a swig of the vodka before passing it to him.

‘I saw you,’ he said, when he’d drunk some. ‘On the waltzers, with the fat girl,’ and I’d shivered at the thought of him watching me without me knowing it, those sea-green eyes on me. He’d looked away, and I’d started to panic because he might go: he might walk away and I didn’t know how or when I’d see him again. So I’d blurted the first thing that came to me. ‘Want to go on a ride?’ and he’d smiled; it broke across his face, a beautiful smile, wide and sudden and with such sweetness it had taken my breath away.

In the waiting room the Irish woman gathers up her children and heads towards one of the consulting rooms, but I’m barely aware of my surroundings now, lost as I am in the memory of that night. The big wheel had taken us up into the dark sky, his jeans rough against my bare leg, dark hairs on his arms and stubble on his cheek and a faint smell of sweat and aftershave and cigarettes and something deeper and more pungent, something masculine, indefinable. A man, he was, a proper man, and excitement had fizzed inside me as I’d drunk in his long lashes, the curve of his skull, the line of his neck, and I’d had to sit on my hands to stop myself from touching him.

He pulled a spliff from his pocket and lit it, before turning and squinting at me through the smoke. When he’d passed it to me I’d sucked it down and the hit was instantaneous, mixing with the vodka in dizzying waves, and I’d closed my eyes, then felt the suddenness of his lips on mine, hot and soft and hard, dry and wet, his tongue pushing into my mouth. I touched him, my fingers beneath his jacket eager, hungry, running them over the fabric of his T-shirt, feeling the skin and muscle and flesh of him. Even though I was so nervous I could hardly breathe, I couldn’t stop myself, had no shame, no self-control as I kissed him, ran my lips against his jaw, buried my nose in his neck, breathing him in.

What little I’d done with lads before had been nothing like this. I left that old me there, behind the last tree at the end of the playing fields in Withington, and took a leap into something else, something new. He was touching me too, his hands rough and careless over my chest, beneath my skirt, parting my thighs, slipping his hand beneath my knickers, and the bit of me that would normally smack his fingers away, tell him to get lost, was silenced. I was only feeling and sensation, the big wheel carrying us round and round as I trembled into his neck, not wanting him to stop.

In the hospital waiting room a large West Indian woman touches my arm. ‘Is that you, honey?’ she asks, nodding at the number flashing on the wall.

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘Yeah. Thank you.’ And I gather up my things, pull myself laboriously to my feet and walk towards my midwife’s room.

Before

Edie lives in Tyner’s Cross, the bit of Fremton between the Pembroke Estate and the rest of the town. A scattering of cul-de-sacs and council houses and new builds, as though Fremton proper had emptied out its pockets one day and this rag-bag jumble was what had tumbled out. We get to Edie’s street, a row of small, pebble-dashed houses with falling-down fences, front yards strewn with junk and weeds, and she glances at me. ‘Not like round your way, is it? Mind you, our old place wasn’t much better.’ She sighs, then says, ‘One day I’m going to be rich, Heather. I’m going to move to London, go to Saint Martins and become an amazing artist. I’m going to have a gorgeous flat, and people will go to galleries and buy my pictures for millions,’ she laughs, as though she’s only joking, but I feel a rush of admiration. I want to tell her that I believe her, that it sounds amazing and that I think she could do anything if she set her mind to it, but before I can speak we’ve stopped outside a house with a peeling yellow front door and Edie’s pulling a key from her bag.

At that moment it swings open and a short, stocky woman comes out. She stops abruptly when she sees us, her small eyes flickering over me without interest before turning eagerly on Edie. ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘There you are, Edith.’ She takes a step forward and puts a hand on Edie’s arm, standing very close. Her hungry smile shows a mouth full of sharp little teeth. ‘I’d been wondering where you’d got to. How are you? Everything OK?’

Edie gently releases herself. ‘Fine thanks, Janine.’ She shoots me a look; ‘Mum’s physio,’ she explains.

The woman nods. ‘You look after your mum now. We’ll have her up and about in no time.’ Her gaze lingers on Edie, hot and slippery.

‘Right you are,’ Edie says. ‘See you next time.’ And together we hurry through into the hallway, Edie laughing into her hand as soon as she closes the door. ‘Yuk,’ she says, and though I roll my eyes and nod, unease shifts inside me, an unpleasant memory of playground taunts, an ugly word to describe shameful, unnatural things. I force myself to rid the woman from my mind as I follow Edie down the hall.

The living room is small and cluttered and I drink it all in eagerly, not wanting to miss even the smallest detail. ‘It’s basically mostly my nan’s old stuff,’ Edie tells me carelessly, but I think it’s lovely. Little china ornaments on every surface, flowery wallpaper and a thick, swirly brown carpet and a green sofa with a matching foot stool. A vase of plastic flowers on the brown-tiled mantelpiece. It’s untidy and stuffy and smells of burnt dust and cats, but I know instantly I’d rather live here than my house any day.

Edie throws her keys on the coffee table. ‘Mum,’ she calls, ‘I’m back.’

A woman walks slowly in on crutches and I remember how Edie had told me her mum had been in a car accident. Even in her nightclothes she looks beautiful, so glamorous and young, with make-up and long hair and a pink silky dressing gown very different from the one my mum’s usually buttoned up in. She glances at me and smiles briefly but before I can say anything she looks past me and says to Edie accusingly, ‘Where have you been? I had to wait for that bloody woman to turn up just to have a cup of tea.’

Edie rolls her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’ll make one now, shall I?’

Her mum takes a pack of cigarettes from her dressing-gown pocket and lights one. ‘Don’t put yourself out.’ With difficulty, she lowers herself on to the couch and, picking up the remote, turns on the TV, staring sulkily at the screen.

‘Fine,’ Edie mutters. ‘Come on, Heather.’

I murmur a quick goodbye before hurrying after her.

Her bedroom is tiny, barely large enough for the single bed that she’s lying face down on. Half-unpacked cardboard boxes cover almost every inch of the worn pink carpet and I gingerly step over them until I’m standing by her feet. ‘Are you all right?’ I ask.

Her voice is muffled by her pillow. ‘She does my head in. I wish my dad was still around.’

‘Where is he?’ I ask, sitting down.

‘God knows. Buggered off years ago. They were only young when they had me. She drove him away, always on at him about something. Nag nag nag, the way she does with me. Tells me I wouldn’t understand, like I’m a bloody kid. But I know it’s her fault he left, that’s for sure.’ There’s a pause before she adds, ‘And I’ve not seen him since. Not even a phone call.’ She sits up and gnaws at her fingernails, her eyes dark and brooding. Tentatively I move closer to her and, after a few seconds’ hesitation, put my arm around her. She sinks against me, resting her head upon my shoulder as though she were a little girl and my heart thumps loudly as I stroke her hair. After a silence she murmurs, ‘God, it’s shit not having any brothers or sisters, isn’t it? Someone else to deal with all their crap. Don’t you ever wish you weren’t an only, Heather?’ When I don’t reply she glances up at me and her face falls. ‘Christ, what’s the matter? What have I said?’