by Kate Davies
OK, it said.
But it wasn’t from Carys. It was from my mother. My actual 58-year-old mother.
I was a bit put out. I had accidentally invited my mother lesbian clubbing with me, and she was half-hearted about it?
I texted her back: That message wasn’t meant for you, Mum.
Oh, she replied. I was looking forward to it.
I felt a bit sorry for Mum. My dad was obviously spending too much time recording YouTube videos in his bedroom like a teenage boy to accompany her to the theatre/restaurants/other evening activities that are appropriate for people who are almost old enough to collect their state pension.
I was about to text Carys for real this time, when the phone rang.
I looked at the number.
It was Sam.
I picked up. Of course I did.
‘Hello?’ I said, as stern as I could manage.
‘Hello?’
‘Sam?’
I heard her let out a breath. ‘Babes,’ she said. ‘I miss you so much.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I’m so sorry about how we left things. I should never have spoken to you like that.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have.’
‘Please give me another chance,’ she said, voice small. ‘Please? I’m not the same without you. I can’t live without you.’
‘Yes, you can.’ Stay strong, I told myself. You are strong.
‘I can’t. I can’t.’ Her voice was creeping up the octave, pleading. ‘I won’t have anything if you leave me.’
‘I thought you were the one who broke up with me.’
‘What? That’s not what happened! That’s not what happened at all! Please, babes. Don’t you miss me?’
‘You called me abusive.’ A couple who’d just walked out of Homebase turned to look at me.
After a moment, she said, ‘You did use abusive language.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t need this—’
‘Just come over so we can talk?’ Sam said. ‘Please? And if you still want it to be over I’ll respect your decision.’
I could feel the acid bubble of anxiety in my stomach. But I had to see her again, just like I have to bite my fingers till I bleed when I’m anxious.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll come over.’
‘Thank you,’ Sam said pathetically. ‘Thank you, babes. Tonight?’
‘Not tonight,’ I said. ‘I can come over tomorrow if you like.’
‘Yes, please,’ Sam said. ‘You won’t regret it. I promise.’
I knew Alice wouldn’t be pleased about me going to see Sam, so I bought a nice bottle of red and some Kettle Chips at the corner shop to soften the news. The fact I was nervous about telling my best friend I might be getting back together with the woman that I loved should have given me a clue that the whole thing was a terrible plan. I can’t trust my own instincts when it comes to relationships, I’ve learned – or rather I can, but I can argue my way around them so that I blame my debilitating dread on a rainy day, or the fact that I’m never going to be able to afford to buy a house in London, or whatever. But I have always trusted Alice’s judgement. If anything, she’s a bit too generous about people. But she wasn’t generous about Sam at all.
Kettle Chips under my arm, red wine in front of me like a weapon, I climbed the stairs to our flat and opened the door.
‘Julia?’ Alice called. ‘Come in! I’ve made roast veg! We’re not talking about Dave tonight. Or Sam.’
I walked into the kitchen and put the wine down on the kitchen counter. ‘Actually,’ I said, opening the Kettle Chips, ‘I have some news about Sam.’
Alice straightened up. ‘You’re not getting back together with her.’
‘I’m going to her house to talk.’
There was an unpleasant silence.
I crunched a Kettle Chip.
‘Why, though?’
‘We’re just going to talk.’
‘I’ve seen you crying so many times because of her—’
‘I have to, OK?’ I said, quite snappily. ‘I don’t want to regret breaking up with her.’
‘You won’t,’ Alice said, pity in her eyes, which was the last thing I wanted. ‘I don’t regret breaking up with Dave, do I?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘You do. A bit.’
Alice’s eyes went cold. ‘No, I don’t. Don’t make this about me.’
‘You miss him, and he misses you.’
‘Have you been talking to him?’
I reached for another crisp and didn’t answer.
‘You’re my friend first! Not his!’
‘I’m not taking sides! We are not twelve years old!’ And in that moment I felt horribly vindictive, and I said, ‘You still love him, and now you want me to be single, because you don’t want to see me happy when you’re feeling lonely and miserable.’
Alice took a step backwards, as though I’d pushed her, and said, ‘Fuck you.’ And then she slammed out of the kitchen.
It’s incredible the power a swear word can have in the mouth of someone who doesn’t usually use them.
I could hear Alice crying in her bedroom. I felt sick with myself. Alice was my best friend. She was just looking out for me. I’d go to Sam’s tomorrow, but I’d end it, for sure.
44. LOVE, ACTUALLY?
I kept my head low as I walked to my desk the next morning – I’d agreed to go for a drink with Smriti after work, for my first Fast Stream coaching session. It was too late to come up with a decent excuse for bailing on her – a sick grandmother or a family dinner – so the only possible way of getting out of the situation was to feign illness. I started giving some half-hearted coughs, and I made myself an ostentatious Lemsip. I walked slowly to the loo, past Smriti’s office, and collected some tissues so I could blow my nose loudly at my desk.
At five o’clock I looked up to see Smriti hovering by my desk. ‘You ready?’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m really not feeling good. Can we do this next week instead?’
‘Of course! You poor thing!’ she said. ‘Stay home tomorrow if you’re still sick!’
Uzo rolled her eyes at me from across the desk divide.
I tried to calm myself down on the bus to Homerton by naming things I could see out of the window: cyclists. Rain. Falling leaves. Wellington boots. Happy couples, sharing umbrellas. Two friends eating KFC.
And then my phone rang and made me jump. It was my mother.
‘Julia. It’s your mother. Hi.’
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘What are you doing, darling?’
‘I’m on a bus. About to get off.’ I tucked my phone under my chin and shouldered my bag, making my way down the stairs.
‘Homerton station,’ said the treacherous automated voice over the Tannoy.
‘Isn’t that where Sam lives?’ Mum asked.
‘I broke up with Sam,’ I said. The bus stopped, and I stepped out into the rain.
‘Alice told me you were thinking of getting back together with her.’
I stopped still on the pavement. ‘What?’
‘She’s worried about you, darling. You haven’t been yourself since you’ve been with Sam.’
‘I don’t need to hear this—’
‘I know what I’m talking about,’ Mum said. ‘I was in an abusive relationship before I met your father—’
‘I am not in an abusive relationship!’
‘She’s controlling you!’
‘She’s not!’
‘So come home. Come home now, don’t go to her house. I’ve made a Victoria sponge. And Dad’s trying to grow a moustache! That’ll give you a good laugh.’
‘I can’t,’ I said.
She didn’t answer.
‘Look, I’m not coming all the way to Oxford to admire Dad’s facial hair. I’m right outside Sam’s house—’
‘Do not get back together with that woman!’
‘Just— fuck off, Mum,’ I said.
&
nbsp; She didn’t say anything. I had never told her to fuck off before.
I felt shaky and wired and out of control. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said. ‘But it’s none of your business.’ I hung up and took a breath and walked on to Sam’s, purpose in my footsteps. How dare she tell me what to do? How dare Alice?
Sam’s lights were on. I could hear some sort of low murmuring – she was listening to the radio. I rang the doorbell and waited.
She opened the door halfway, as though she wasn’t sure who it would be, and when she saw it was me, she caught me in a hug so tight that I could hardly move – a hug that reminded me of the one women’s rugby practice I went to at university, which resulted in me not being able to move my head for a week.
‘I’m so glad you came,’ Sam said. ‘I wasn’t sure you would.’ And she kissed me.
It’s funny how things can curdle. Like milk – delicious on your Weetabix one day, the next day like drinking a disgusting vinegar/cheese hybrid. Just a few weeks previously, Sam’s kisses had made me pulse with desire for her. But when she kissed me that evening, it felt too hot, too wet.
Sam led me into the flat. There was something different about it – I wasn’t sure what, at first. It felt lighter. Much bigger, too, and emptier.
I walked into the living room and looked around. The paintings were missing. The naked women, the parade of past sexual conquests, were gone. Rectangles of dust and unfaded paint marked the places where they had been.
‘You didn’t have to do this,’ I said.
She smiled and took my hand, and said, ‘Wait, you haven’t seen the best bit,’ and led me over to her bed.
The wall above the bed was covered with a painting – a bigger-than-life-size painting of my naked body. Sam usually used fluorescent colours, an exaggerated palette, but this painting was muted, naturalistic, exact. It was beautiful – somehow she’d caught the way I carried myself, the texture of my skin (slightly spotty), my one grey pubic hair. She mostly worked from life, but I’d definitely have noticed if she’d been feverishly following me around, crosshatching my jawline, so she must have painted this from memory. Which made the accuracy a little disturbing.
I guess I’d finally inspired an intense emotion in Sam.
‘Do you like it?’ she asked, so proud, like a cat presenting a dead mouse to its owner.
‘It’s – really good.’
‘You don’t like it.’
‘I do—’
‘Really?’
Sam was standing next to me, watching my face for a reaction. When she didn’t get one, she said, ‘Aren’t you pleased? It’s the first in a new series. It’s going to be called “Every Woman I’ve Ever Really Loved”. But the paintings will all be of you. Do you get it?’
I nodded.
‘And there’s something else.’ She smiled and took my hands. ‘I’ve missed you so much the last couple of weeks. So, so much.’ She closed her eyes and shook her head. ‘I know it’s been hard recently, but we’ve been together a while now, and I’ve realized that I want to be with you. Properly with you.’
‘Not having sex with other people?’
She shook her head. ‘Just me and you.’ She smiled, and I was taken aback again by how utterly I was attracted to her.
Walk away, said the voice in my head – the sensible voice that tells me not to get in unlicensed taxis. Get out, it said. You’ll be happier without her. But this was what I’d been waiting to hear her say all along.
Yes, what she’d done was creepy, in a way. Slightly stalkerish, you could say. A tiny bit manipulative and controlling, maybe. But it was a grand gesture, too, and aren’t lots of grand gestures creepy? Think about Meg Ryan stalking Tom Hanks, a vulnerable widower, in Sleepless in Seattle, luring him to the top of a tall building with his young son; think about Andrew Lincoln in Love Actually, filming a close-up video of Keira Knightley’s face at her wedding to his best friend and watching it over and over on VHS before declaring his love for her with bits of cardboard; and Phantom of the Opera – I can’t remember the details of the plot but I feel like there’s a bit of kidnap involved. Sometimes love and obsession are hard to tell apart, that’s all I’m saying.
I told her we could take things one step at a time. And I didn’t exactly protest when she led me to the bed and fucked me with her biggest cock, hard, so that I cried out. She put her hand over my mouth to shut me up. I felt such relief, afterwards, such a high, and the only reason I couldn’t fall asleep for ages was the thought that Alice would know I was spending the night with Sam and that she’d be angry with me.
Sam walked me to the station the next morning, holding my hand tight. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said, as we reached the Overground. ‘Let’s go away next weekend.’
‘Not to do any SM or anything.’
‘No!’ said Sam. ‘No, no. Much too soon for that! Let’s just rent a cottage somewhere and get away from it all. A cheap one. It’ll be gorgeous. What do you say?’
She looked so excited by the idea, so young and adorable, that I didn’t have the heart to say no. If I was going to give it another go with her I might as well really give it a go, right? And what was I going to do otherwise? Cook recipes from Delia Smith’s One is Fun!, do laundry and not speak to Alice?
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Thank you,’ Sam said, pulling me in for a hug. ‘Thank you. You won’t regret it!’
‘I know,’ I said, smiling apologetically over Sam’s shoulder at the commuters trying to edge past us.
‘I’ll have a look at places when I get to the studio. You don’t have to do a thing. I’m in charge. I’ll take care of everything.’
45. SHAG PILE VIRGIN
It’s almost impressive how little Alice and I saw each other that week. Her alarm would go off before mine, a harsh, insistent, bleating beep, more like a fire alarm than a wake-up call, and I’d hear her stumble to the shower, and the water hissing down on her. I’d run to the kitchen and take my cereal back to my room and watch episode after episode of The Crown out of spite, because we’d promised to watch it together.
I still had my swing dance friends, though, who were refreshingly unjudgemental about me giving it another chance with Sam.
‘You can’t help who you fall for,’ said Ella, who had her arm around Zhu.
‘As long as this doesn’t mean you’re going to back out of joining Friends of Dorothy,’ said Zhu.
‘Of course I won’t,’ I said, though I saw Bo throw Zhu a sceptical look.
‘Have fun in Lyme Regis,’ said Rebecca. She smiled nostalgically. ‘Text us about the exciting sex.’
‘Rebecca!’ said Bo, hitting her arm. ‘Seriously!’
Sam and I had decided not to see each other till the Friday night of our trip – or rather, I’d decided, and she’d agreed – but she texted me every morning and lunchtime, texts I’d have killed to receive just a few months previously; things like Good morning babes. I love you so much, forever xxxx and You’re the only one for me. Do you know that? Xxxx and How’s your day going? Thinking about your gorgeous cunt and wishing I were going down on you xxxxxx. But now her messages made me feel twitchy and anxious, as though she was right behind me all the time, as though she was inside my head, reading my thoughts. And sure, there had always been the risk that she might bugger off with another woman, or decide to have a threesome and expect me to accept it, or that she’d want to tie me to a lamppost and pretend to be Jack the Ripper, or whatever – but that was all sex-related stuff, which was sort of exciting. Since we’d agreed to go away I’d been thinking about what Jane had told me about Sam and her ex – about how possessive Sam had been – and now I was nervous more generally.
After Alice left for work that Friday morning I opened the bathroom door and the steam from her shower hit my face, clammy and scented with her mint shower gel. The mirror was smeared with her fingerprints and her wet footprints made the tiles slippery. It reminded me of Denis Severs’ House, a strange Georgian townhouse in the Ci
ty we’d been to on our work Christmas outing the year before, where the rooms are full of half-eaten food and still-smouldering candles so that it feels ghostly, as though someone has just left. ‘You’ll be fine,’ I said to myself out loud, as Alice wasn’t there to say it for me. ‘You are going to be just fine.’
I left work five minutes late and ran to the station to meet Sam. She had decided not to take the car to Lyme – too exhausting to drive for three-and-a-half hours on a Friday night – and I was glad; I wasn’t massively keen on the idea of getting into Sam’s car again after our trip home from the Shard. I caught a crowded Tube. I was wearing my winter coat, and by the time we got to Waterloo my hair was stuck to my forehead like strands of limp seaweed on a rock.
My bag was heavy, so I stood on the escalator, and as we reached the top, a woman bashed into me with a tattered weekend bag. She turned to apologize, and I saw that it was Ella, in a very fetching bottle-green suit.
‘Hey!’ she said.
‘Hey!’ I said back.
But people were walking up the escalator behind her, so she couldn’t stop to talk. She gave me a wave. I looked around for her as I emerged into the mainline station, but she was already lost in the Friday-night crowd.
I’d arranged to meet Sam beneath the announcement boards. I saw her before she saw me and I felt a wave of hope and love as I watched her watching for me, jostled by commuters. I wasn’t late yet, but I could tell she was worried I wouldn’t turn up. I wondered briefly what would happen if I just turned around and left the station.
But then she saw me, and her whole body relaxed. As I walked towards her, she said, ‘I can’t believe how beautiful you are.’
A young woman in a duffel coat turned to see who had said such a lovely thing, and blushed when she noticed me notice her.
‘I look like a slug,’ I said to Sam, shy suddenly. ‘You, though. You look amazing.’ And she did. She was dressed all in black with new leather boots, shiny ones, not yet scuffed.
‘You think so?’
I nodded.
She pulled me to her and held me the way you hold someone when you fear you might be about to lose them, or when you’ve just lost them and you’ve got them back, and I held her that way too, and I began to cry, in a nice way.