by Karen Webb
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘Any Welshman worth his salt would go for the front of the dress, not the back.’
* * *
One night at the Duke of Wellington, as we sat watching Cardiff vs. Neath on the giant screen, I headed the last of my snakebite and knew with sudden clarity, I was living the wrong life.
My friend Scarlett said it was the downfall of all English Literature students. We were trained to expect more. We wanted love, drama and passion. The works of literary fiction we studied ruined us for life. Whereas other students wrote theses on canned food or nuclear science, or went off and got well-paid jobs in IT, we wove ourselves into the plots of Gothic drama. At the very least we expected Mr Darcy or Heathcliff.
We didn’t want toasters from Argos.
A married life with Steve would be the end, not the beginning; the final credits on a reel of film. I couldn’t allow my life to be boxed and labelled so soon.
There had to be more.
Admittedly I had accepted the solitary diamond engagement ring paid for with Steve’s beer and fruit machine allowance. At the time, it had seemed the perfect opportunity to experiment with saying ‘yes’ and having that symbolic band of trust slipped over my finger.
My parents’ marriage was not a happy one for either of them. I’d spent my early years hiding under the dining-room table, pulling the tablecloth down and pretending to be safe inside my own home; trying to ignore the twist of my gut at the sound of screams or as my mother threatened to throw pans of boiling chip fat over my dad’s head.
Part of me wanted a home and a family; a place in which to be secure – a grown-up version of the underside of that mahogany table – but another part yearned for adventure, pulling me away from anything conventional. It was a difficult combination of need and desire.
I’d accepted Steve’s proposal because at the moment of his asking I’d felt loved and needed. Safe. But I hadn’t processed the fact that marriage was final, thus precluding the possibility of anything else. Any other adventures. Not just romantic adventures, but adventures in life. My initial feelings of contentment and excitement were quickly replaced with glimpses of a humdrum future containing one main ingredient: rugby. Though not yet married we had already slipped into a monotonous routine. The stuff of nightmares.
* * *
My mother gloated.
It wasn’t a trial run or a dress rehearsal for some future point in time. Half of South Wales was ordering hats and buying toasters.
The idea of saying anything other than ‘yes’ felt cruel and ungrateful; the long and heavy-hearted trail back to the pawnshop, where Steve had bought the ring, awkward. Cringe-worthy even. I had been brought up to make as little fuss as possible, and I knew Steve would react badly. He’d think there was another bloke and there’d be a scene.
All I had said was ‘yes’.
Once I’d said this single word, events sped up like a video on fast-forward, gaining a momentum of their own. This was it. There was a wedding to plan and Steve’s father didn’t look like the sort of man who would understand, now the marquee had been booked, that this was a conceptual rehearsal for some future point in time. For some other man.
Cheques were flying out, and talks were of a wedding venue and even a new house near Steve’s Mam and Dad.
There was no question of my parents paying. Dad was keeping his head down doing refits of Turkish planes. There had been a recent discovery of yet another affair with an air hostess (married this time), and an incident in which my mother had pierced the plywood door in the kitchen by running at his heart with a carving knife. Dad had saved his life by slamming the door closed just in time. Since then he had broken up with his lady friend, handed the keys back to the love nest he had planned to rent, and purchased a new wedding ring for my mother; the first now lying on a rubbish dump at the bottom of a crushed can of Guinness. These events had drained not just the reserves of family patience, but savings too.
That night at the pub, shredding beer mats engorged with spilt lager and listening to the roar of spectators on the giant screen, I realised with overwhelming sadness that I could neither start my life, nor end it, with Steve.
As the crowds around me chanted, I wanted to punch the screen.
The whole wedding idea was superficial, naive, selfish and stupid. It had been an excuse to go down the pier for a party, to buy a new dress. And now my penance was a life of spectatorship stretching before me, season after season. It wasn’t as if I even liked sport. Netball or ice-skating were alright, of course, but that was only because of the glittering costumes and that sexy Torville and Dean dance routine which had won the Olympics. There was nothing sexy about freezing by the side of a rugby field.
The whole family was obsessed.
‘Why do they keep chanting?’ I asked. ‘What’s the point of all this NEATH, NEATH, NEATH?’
‘It’s to show the boys are together,’ Steve said.
Even Mrs Priddy chanted, her voice deliberately deep and sonorous.
There’d been bust-ups about my lack of sporting enthusiasm before. Not least that day when I’d sat with my back to the pitch, facing inwards towards the crowd, to shelter from the wind.
‘Unforgiveable,’ Steve had said, ‘absolutely unforgivable. Some people would kill for a ticket and you sit with your back to the men in black.’
‘I was cold,’ I replied, ‘and bored.’
Steve’s angry glower told me this was not the right answer.
The season never ended. Of course, the rugby season did finally wind to a close, but only to be replaced by something else: the cricket, the tennis, or the snooker. The whole year revolved around an endless season of sporting events, each bleeding into the next.
The only moment of sporting pleasure I’d known was the day I witnessed Imran Khan bat in his crisp white cricket jumper. But with little understanding as to how the game worked, even this vision of beauty merged into a dreamy fantasy, in which I wore a red veil, and sipped tea on a cool terrace while chatting to Imran, in the full knowledge that somehow Steve would disappear, and Imran would take me into his arms and make passionate love to me on a bed of silk, beneath a large rotating fan.
Reaching the end of the pier and dragging my case up the kerb in fury, I realised I didn’t want to live in Neath, nor anywhere near Steve’s parents. This is what they had assumed. I didn’t want to populate any more crowded arenas with my offspring. I wanted to finish my English Degree and work at the Royal Shakespeare Company. I wanted to go home to England! After three years in Wales I was ready for Oxford, Cambridge or Stratford-upon-Avon. Somewhere mellow. Somewhere where the skies didn’t spit hailstones in August and where people didn’t sleep in rugby shirts or wear tops with a number on the back.
It wasn’t that I wanted such an exciting life as my best friend Scarlett. I didn’t want to sail down the Nile or make love in Pondicherry. Only recently she’d told me she had a job as an English teacher lined up in Milan, once we’d graduated, with plans for Bali the following year.
* * *
When I was ten years old my dad accepted a job for Malaysian Airline Systems and moved our family out to Petaling Jaya. At seven o’clock each morning I boarded a local bus to Kuala Lumpur leading my five-year-old brother on a treacherous journey. On one occasion this involved the bus rolling over a dead man who had fallen from a moped dangerously overladen with loaves of bread, the Bee Gees blaring out at full blast from our driver’s radio as we felt the crush of bones against soft-sliced loaves. Such accidents were not uncommon incidents, earning the mobile bread deliverers the sobriquet ‘jam sandwiches’.
We’d experienced adventure at an early age, including a failed kidnapping attempt when my mother, brother and I were held to ransom by a drugged-up taxi man who threatened to drive us to the jungle and string us from a tree unless we handed over all our money and jewels.
I was glad to return to England. My terrified ten-year old self breathing a sigh of relief as the plan
e touched back down at Manchester airport – Ringway, as my grandparents still called it back then. I didn’t want to live in a country that ate monkey brains, having sobbed at the sight of those wooden tables out in the jungle with the circular holes cut through the tops for their heads.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to live in a country that lived and breathed rugby either.
On that last morning with my fiancé, as dawn broke over the valleys of Neath, I woke early and crept from the room, calling a taxi before sunrise. Tiptoeing back to the bed one last time, I looked at Steve snoring in the cocoon of his favourite rugby shirt, knowing that this was the last time I would ever see him.
It was the end of our engagement.
If I stayed another day, I would have to face the music and break things off in person.
Or I could run away like a coward back to Aberystwyth.
* * *
The Student Welfare officer slammed the door of his metal filing cabinet. He opened a new file carefully avoiding my gaze.
He was a pale and shifty looking man.
‘I’m sorry Miss Webb, but we are full. You moved out of halls two years ago and were deleted from our lists at this time. As you know, we give priority to first years and postgraduates.’
‘I know, but my circumstances have changed. I have nowhere else to go.’
‘Hmmm. I see.’
He glanced swiftly at my unkempt appearance as if comprehending this might be true.
‘I’m worried I’ll have to sleep in the Asda car park,’ I said, trying to catch his eye.
There was a pause while the man shuffled papers with fingers speckled with ginger flakes the colour of warm Horlicks.
‘Well, there is one room I suppose,’ he said at last, cracking his finger joints.
‘I only need one.’ I forced a laugh.
‘Highly unorthodox of course,’ he continued, thumbing pages. ‘It’s in the foreign students’ block.’
In Aberystwyth at the time there was a strong sense of who was Welsh and non-Welsh. Who was British and who was foreign. Those so-called “overseas students”.
‘That’s fine by me.’
He grimaced. ‘Most are men of strict faith. All are mature students returning to study after what amounts, for some, as many years working in their own countries. In some cases, ruling their own countries. You do not tick any of my boxes.’
‘I can see that. But I’ll be ever so discreet. They won’t know I’m there.’
There was a pause. It was nearly clocking-off time and the man’s eyes edged to the clock on the wall.
‘Very well. C-block Cwrt Mawr it is. Oh, and Miss Webb, it’s not so much how you will feel about them. It’s how they will feel about you.’
Chapter 3
I mounted Penglais Hill, the mother of all university hills, my entire life stuffed into four black bin liners, care of Dyfed Council, bracing myself against wind and rain. Cwrt Mawr was a sprawling complex of concrete buildings. The units were linked by an artery of pathways and gardens. I saw through the windows that most had bare brick walls like prison cells. C-block was another world, heavy with the smell of garlic and garam masala. At the bottom of the corridor there was a busy looking kitchen where a group of men in long brown robes shouted at each other in an unfamiliar language. They were all older than me. There wasn’t a woman in sight. The oldest looking man looked up and saw me at the door. The group stopped and stared as if I’d interrupted an important meeting at the United Nations. Embarrassed, I walked on.
I located C27 and closed the door behind me, pleased to find a spacious room with a small sink in the corner. The walls were plastered, and being located on the ground floor, my room overlooked an open patch of grass. A group of students walked past clutching files. Perhaps I’d get some work done here at last. It was difficult to concentrate living in town, out of the shadow of the university, and it was a long time since I’d seen anyone carry a pile of books when a six-pack would do.
I unpacked my bag and changed out of my wet clothes.
Anxious for order in my life, I tipped the contents of my bags onto the bed. It wouldn’t take long. Most things could go straight in the bin. There was a desk with a single shelf suspended above it, but I’d no more books with which to line it. The ones I hadn’t already pawned had been stolen. Perhaps I could sell my engagement ring? I pushed the thought back. What was wrong with me? The relationship hadn’t officially been pronounced dead and already I was selling the spoils. I knew it was desperation talking. It was going to be tricky if Dad couldn’t send food money. As I changed into dry clothes, I pondered how to revise without any books. There was always the library of course, but it was a sure bet the books I needed would have been checked out for months by some ‘on track for a double first’ student.
Lost in thought, I took out my spider plant and unravelled its crocheted pot-holder.
I was on a chair, hanging it on a hook by the door, when there was a loud knock. The pot slipped from my hands and smashed to the ground. Cursing, I jumped down and opened the door to find a tall man, with jet-black hair and smooth olive skin, standing in the corridor. He was attractive, with distinctive features; the sort of romantic hero that would climb through the window and leave a box of chocolates by the bed in a 1970s advert. The man was wearing a black-and-white hound-tooth jacket, formal black trousers, a white frilly shirt and an oversized black bow tie.
‘Bonsoir, mademoiselle. I beg pardon for interrupting.’
He could easily have been an extra for ’Allo ’Allo.
‘I’m David and I have come to invite you for dinner. In France, we never allow a beautiful woman to dine alone. You will accept, I hope?’
Perhaps hunger had made me hallucinate.
He scrutinised me, head cocked, with immense eyebrows hovering expressively. He was intense and serious, his manner exquisitely unsettling.
It was laughable. My last two years had been spent on pub crawls with the Ifor Evans rugby team, listening to drunken men playing drinking games. Men for whom a romantic serenade would entail singing, ‘Sit on my face and tell me that you love me’ at my bedroom window before hurling the contents of their stomachs on their trainers.
I know that I had fallen into my relationship with Steve through desperation at not having had a proper boyfriend. A strict father – Don’t come crying to me if you’re pregnant at sixteen! – and seven years of single-sex education had seen to that. The man at my door was a character from a novel with a sexy French accent to boot. He was everything that had eluded me so far. I wanted to curtsy like Elizabeth Bennett, take his hand and float down the communal corridor.
As if reading my thoughts, David held out a hand, proffering a set of slender, sun-kissed fingers. A pause and then a beat. My heart pounded. Or was it my guilty conscience? One thing was undeniable: I was starving. There was a smell of garlic, cumin and coriander wafting up the corridor. It was an almost certain bet that my bank card would be swallowed if I inserted it in the cashpoint. I’d a roof over my head, but food was another matter.
‘Go on then,’ I said, avoiding the hand I so longed to take. ‘Why not?’
I shook the plant from my shoe, crunched over shards of pot and rich Welsh soil, and followed David out of the door. I wasn’t dressed for dinner. My hair lay damp on my shoulders, and my eyeliner had run halfway down my cheeks. As my friends knew, I never left the house without reapplying my pink blusher, but there was no time.
I was wearing my second favourite pair of black leggings now, and a long white jumper stretched out of shape with ghostly knee indentations where I’d pulled the hem down to keep warm.
In first year, back at Ifor Evans first-year Hall of Residence, my hall-mate Cassie had bullied me out of my long Laura Ashely print dresses and forced me to buy a pair of leggings, some black pumps and several bold-coloured jumpers. Once I was fit to be seen on campus, we hung out in the Student Union bar, denim jackets slung over our shoulders, mine on loan from Cassie’s c
ollection. We’d lost touch in recent months; Steve had been more possessive than I should have allowed. Cassie was one of those girls who’d planned to make her first million by the time she was thirty and when I met her ten years later she was on track, with a fashionable apartment, a top job in insurance and a convertible sports car. Steve was wary of my single friends, and after one night too many with my minder glowering in the background, Cassie had dropped me.
Left in charge of my own wardrobe from then on, I’d morphed into the love child of an eighteenth-century milkmaid crossed with an eighties pop star. Stylistically ill-matched, but keenly aware of each other’s physical presence, I followed this tall and gangly Frenchman down the hall corridor, David looking as if he was about to lead me onto the ballroom floor at Blackpool Tower.
* * *
In the kitchen, long canteen style tables were grouped together in the middle of the room. A row of students, mostly male, were seated down both sides. All were older than me, mature for the most part, in their thirties if not forties. David was the youngest, in his mid-twenties.
There was Ahmad from Bagdad, Rafi who lived in Benazir Bhutto’s palace in Pakistan, and Taloob who was a Pakistani prince placed firmly under Rafi’s heavy wing. I was introduced to Josephar from Botswana who studied Agriculture, and a youngish guy, with a pock-marked face and tight jeans called Ramid, who was busily licking the neck of an attractive Malaysian girl called Michelle. He raised a phlegmatic eyebrow to say hello. Most of the students were on the MBA course. They were all studying ‘useful’ things: Business, Farming, Politics, Computers, Soil. I felt I was wasting Government money. How many jobs required Middle English or Old Icelandic?
David told me it was Rafi’s turn to cook dinner. He stirred the contents of an enormous pot with a wooden spoon. He was stout, with a compact barrel of a stomach which swelled his long brown robes. He alternated between smoking and sipping from a tumbler of whisky. This surprised me. I was used to the Welsh not drinking on a Sunday – not officially at least, though there was lots of shuffling at the off-licence with brown paper bags, because of the prohibition on the Sabbath in Dyfed. But I was surprised to see a muslim man drinking.