by Sue Teddern
‘So you don’t think Rob and I should try again? I thought maybe you would. You know, as his godmother.’
‘God, no! Draw a line and move on. Just as he has. Regret gets you nowhere. Look to the future, don’t dwell on the past.’
Maybe it’s the whisky, maybe it’s the cosiness of Hilary’s flat and the reassuringly soft cotton of her funny, stripy old jim-jams, but I feel fairly zen about her pronouncements. She hasn’t pissed me off. Another perspective, from someone who knows both parties, is actually quite useful. But it cuts both ways and now it’s time for her to be zen about my pronouncements.
I take a softly-softly approach. ‘Draw a line, you say, Hilary. Move on. Look to the future, don’t dwell on the past.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Be open to new relationships. And friendships. Let new people into your life without prejudice.’
Hilary actually cheers when I say this. She looks thrilled that her lecture has paid off.
I’m not finished yet though. ‘I’ve lost Rob. You’ve lost Val. So we both need to move on and look to the future. Perhaps you could start by getting to know your neighbours. Okay, Toni wasn’t at Greenham Common or marching against the Iraq War. Or maybe she was. We don’t know. But she’s had a full life too and you might learn stuff from her. And from your other neighbours. And from the people who you see every day on the seafront. Like the man in the funny hat who wants you to take part in that marathon thing.’
Hilary has listened, expressionless, occasionally sipping her whisky. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says, finally.
‘You don’t agree with anything I’ve said?’
‘Some bits, yes. Some bits, no.’
‘The point is: if I should move on, so should you. Otherwise you’re a hypocrite.’
She looks shocked, and is actually silent – seemingly lost for words, for probably the first time ever – before conceding, ‘I hate hypocrisy.’
I wait, eyebrows raised.
She sighs. ‘Fair enough, I will try to be nicer to Toni and more open to my life here.’ There’s another pause. ‘But I ruddy well draw the line at mobility scooter marathons so you can pull the plug on that suggestion right now, thank you very much.’
I sleep amazingly well on Hilary’s row of sofa cushions and wake early. I make a mug of her fennel tea, which is surprisingly delicious, wrap myself in an ethnic throw and find a bench on the communal terrace. Toni is there, in a silk kimono, watering geraniums.
‘Hello, love. You stayed over, did you? That’s nice.’ She drains the last drop of water from the watering can and sits beside me, declining a cuppa.
‘I’ll do myself a double decaff once I’m finished, thanks. Irene in Flat 4 is staying with her nephew in Horsham so I promised to take care of her pots. We look after each other here.’
‘That’s good to know,’ I reply. ‘You were right about Hilary not feeling at home yet.’
‘It takes a while for all of us, love. I hated it for the first year. Wondered what the hell I’d let myself in for. Bexhill was so dull after twenty years in Ankara. But after my Ahmet died, I had this urge to come home, see if I could find my roots.’
‘And have you?’
‘I play bridge, I love Cornish pasties and I never miss The Archers. That’ll do for now. You leave Hilary to me. I’ll win her round, whether she likes it or not.’
When I get back to Hilary’s flat, she looks relieved. ‘At last! I saw you on the terrace with Toni. I didn’t want to put the grill on until you got back.’
She makes us bacon rolls which were apparently Frank’s favourite. ‘You still want to know about Frank, don’t you?’ She grins mischievously. ‘Well, hard cheese. All I will say is that he never saw the need for brown sauce and I couldn’t contemplate a bacon roll without. A bit like life really.’
‘Brown sauce is like life? Ketchup too?’
She sneers. ‘Ketchup? Pah! Horrible stuff. Too cloying, too banal. Brown sauce adds spice, it adds oomph. You should never opt for the banal, Annie. You must know what you want and never settle for less. In bacon rolls and in life.’
I can’t lie, this is a great bacon roll and Hilary’s right. It needs the spice of brown sauce, rather than the syrupy sweetness of ketchup. I won’t settle for banal. I will never eat a bacon roll without brown sauce again.
She’s also folded all my clean laundry and carefully placed it, along with Dad’s ashes, on the lid of my suitcase. ‘It isn’t ironed though. I don’t iron. So, where to next?’
That’s easy. According to my tea towel, sea area Wight begins at Beachy Head and finishes in Christchurch. I haven’t been back to Brighton, where I went to university, for at least five years, apart from a friend’s thirty-fifth birthday. And all I saw then were a series of cocktails bars, an Eighties club night and a twin-bedded hotel room. This is my chance to revisit properly.
‘Ah, Brighton,’ Hilary says, with a faraway look. ‘Frank lived there for a while. Now where was it? Silkwood Street, no, Sillwood Street. I’d been such a dull little mouse in my twenties and thirties but I made up for it after that.’
‘So you’re saying there’s hope for me yet?’
Hilary taps her nose and leans forward, as if she’s about to be overheard. ‘If you want to meet someone or just have some fun, surf the net. All human life there: gay, straight, bi, muscly, skinny . . . even a toe sucker or two. It’s my little hobby but you mustn’t tell Robin. He’ll only worry.’
‘You date men off the internet?’ The sentence sounds alien to me, even as the words leave my mouth.
‘Don’t be daft. I don’t date them. They’d be sorely disappointed if a flat-chested 77-year-old with legs like Stilton tottered up. No, I have alter egos: there’s Dani C and Dreamgal. Ooh, and I’ve just invented Bella B. She’s very open-minded, very wild. I may have to bump off the other two.’
‘So what do you do then?’
‘Online assignations. Occasionally quite steamy. But that’s all. If they want to meet in the flesh – pardon the pun – I dump them. They’re probably pensioners in Crawley anyway. Honestly, it’s the best fun ever.’
I have no words. There are none. I try not to look shocked.
‘I’m not suggesting you do what I’m doing, Annie. But there are plenty more fish in the sea, oodles of eligible chaps out there. I can say that because I ruddy well know. If you don’t believe me, ask Bella.’
Chapter Fifteen
September 2004
Glynis and Jeremy were at it again. In the room above Annie’s. Could they not stop shagging for an hour or so, just to give the futon frame a rest? And when they weren’t shagging, they took over the kitchen, giggling while they shoved dripping spoonfuls of milk-sodden Cheerios into each other’s mouths as if they were auditioning for a student production of Last Tango in Paris.
Or they were having a bath together and slopping water over the edge so that it created a damp patch on the downstairs hall ceiling. Annie had mentioned it to them more than once but they were too loved-up to care. Student houses were for now, not for keeps, so a little wear and tear went with the territory. Otherwise what were deposits for?
Had Annie and Duncan been so sex-crazed when they first moved into the Moulsecoomb student house together? Had they not given a fuck about when – or how noisily – they fucked? Possibly. Probably. But, like humming, snoring and farting, it isn’t annoying when you do it.
Annie was pleased for Glynis. She really was. No, honestly, good for her. In the three years they’d been housemates, Annie had never expected her to get herself a boyfriend. Some plain girls just look, well, not the shagging kind. Too busy studying late in the library or banging out essays at 4 a.m., under the glare of an unforgiving anglepoise. So, yes, it was great to be proved wrong. Yay Glynis. Yay Jeremy. If they could just stop grunting and shrieking 24/7.
Annie’s mistake was staying on in the shared house after she graduated. Duncan hadn’t been keen to move out plus it was ridiculously cheap and it sui
ted them. He had regular work in a cafe in the Lanes and she combined part-time childcare for a family in Kemptown with her sales assistant job at the Body Shop. They were ticking over nicely. Whatever they planned to do with their lives post-uni could go on the back burner while they hung out with their mates in pubs, clubs, cafes and at music festivals. Why be boring at 23 when you can be boring at 33 and 43 and frigging forever after that?
After they split up, the room felt wrong. Duncan cleared out all his stuff in a matter of hours – the Chagall print above the fireplace, the Ikea duck-feather duvet and primary-coloured bed linen, the cheese plant, the ghetto blaster. She was left with her candle collection, her secret stash of Boyzone memorabilia and a single polyester duvet for a double mattress.
At night, she would cram in her ear plugs to drown out the shagfest above and write job application letters . . . an internship in Manchester, a planning job in Watford, voluntary work in Benin. She knew she was in a transitional period of her life and, years from now, she’d barely remember it. But right now it felt interminable. You can only march on the spot for so long without becoming worn down and exhausted.
It was a warm, sunny Indian summer Saturday and she wasn’t working, made even better by the fact that when she tweaked her curtains, she saw Glynis and Jeremy going out. Great. She could have a nice quiet lie-in. She made herself poached eggs on toast and a jumbo mug of Gold Blend and took it to her room. She nearly turned on Radio 1 but silence was preferable. Silence was fucking golden. For the first time since she and Duncan had broken up, she felt hopeful, cheery. Hey, maybe she was in the driving seat of her life after all . . .
She was awoken by Glynis and Jeremy at it on the floor upstairs. They must have just popped out to the shops for yet more Cheerios and were now working up an appetite. The wafer-thin foam pillow over her head didn’t work. Duncan’s mum had bought him two good goosedown pillows, which had also left with him. She couldn’t complain or ask the fuckers to tone it down; she’d just look bitter.
Ten minutes later, she was on a bus into Brighton. She needed to get her mother a birthday present anyway. She could mooch around for a few hours, try on frocks in her favourite vintage shops in Kensington Gardens, maybe even see what was on at the cinema. The North Laine neighbourhood buzzed every day of the week, but Saturdays were super-busy, with day-trippers and tourists keen to spend money and soak up the atmosphere.
In a print and frame shop, she found the perfect present for Mum: a poster for The Man who Fell to Earth, one of her favourite films. Plus it wouldn’t be costly to stick in a cardboard tube and pop in the post. Better that than visit for the weekend and get the full-on, worried-parent interrogation on what her plans were and why she’d broken up with Duncan. (‘Such a nice boy.’)
As Annie walked past the open door of the Feathers, her and Duncan’s favourite pub, she saw Simon serving behind the bar. Good old Simon. Nice guy, great sense of humour, but more Duncan’s buddy than hers. She gave him a friendly wave that he returned, beckoning her to come in.
He leant over the bar and gave her a quick kiss as she hauled herself onto a stool. ‘Howdy, Stannie Anley,’ he said, pulling a pint and plonking it in front of her. ‘Packet of dry roasteds to accompany it, madam?’
‘Go on then. What’s the damage?’
‘Put your pennies away. Mi casa su casa.’
Simon had been in the same cohort as Duncan: both studying economics; hanging out together at the SU; even hitching to Spain with two mates during their first summer vac. Simon just scraped through his exams with a 2.2 and had forsworn a career in finance. In his second year, he’d appeared in a student fringe cabaret at the Brighton Festival and had gone down a storm, the overnight star of the show. He was now obsessed with learning the acting business at the coalface, rather than at RADA.
‘So,’ Annie asked, knowing she’d get a detailed response. ‘How are you?’
‘Pretty good, as it happens. Yep, things are on the up and up, I’d say.’
‘Go on then. Spill.’
‘You know I auditioned for a place with that agit-prop theatre group, the All-New Tree Huggers Roadshow? Well, they rang yesterday and I’m in. Three months taking a show around the UK. Art centres and church halls mostly. The Royal Court can wait, mate. I’m double-chuffed. It proves I’m not the only one who thinks I can do this.’
Annie raised her glass. ‘That’s brilliant, Si. I had every faith. That’s another pal abandoning me in Brighton while I ponder my future.’
‘You’ll be okay, Stan. I know you will.’ A customer caught Simon’s eye from the far end of the bar. ‘Don’t you move an inch. As the Schwarzenmeister would say, “Ah’ll be bahck.”’
He did return and she polished off another pint but this time she paid for it; she could see Simon’s manager was on the war path. ‘You can’t just serve the sexy ones,’ he’d snarked as he passed.
‘Bloody jobsworth,’ Simon moaned, once he was out of earshot. ‘I can’t wait to tell him to shove his job up his big fat rear end. This acting gig couldn’t have come at a better time.’
Annie checked her watch. She’d been out of the house for nearly four hours. Surely she could go home now? If nothing else, Glynis and her newfound sex life was just the incentive she needed to do what so many of her friends had already done and find some kind of direction forward. Simon had done it, so could she.
She waved goodbye to him and gathered her shopping. On the street, in the few seconds she took to think about which bus stop to walk to, he ran out after her.
‘Want to come to a party tonight? Emma and Tim’s. Somewhere in darkest Hove. Promised I’d swing by, show my face. You’re welcome to join me.’
Annie didn’t have to think about it. ‘Meet you back here at nine.’
You never know who might be at even the dullest of parties; maybe the man you’ll spend the rest of your life with. So Annie made an effort; she pulled on her best black bootleg jeans, red ballet pumps, a red scoop-neck T-shirt and a ton of junk jewellery.
Simon whistled when he saw her and it suddenly dawned on her: ‘Oh shit, he thinks I’ve done this for him.’ He had changed his grey Gap T-shirt for a blue one. And he’d washed his hair. Bless. They had a swift pint, then caught a bus to beyond the far-flung fringes of Hove, to bloody Portslade. This end of town was alien to Annie. Here be dragons. But the bus ride gave them time to talk. Mostly about Duncan.
‘He seems okay . . . now,’ Simon said. ‘But he was in bits when you two broke up. Really messed up. You must have been too, right?’
Annie nodded sagely, even though the voice inside her head replied, No, not really. She’d told Duncan that they’d come to the end of the road. She was calm and sensitive, every inch the thoughtful girlfriend. For some reason, he hadn’t seen it like that.
Annie knew not to say this to Simon but she honestly thought Duncan had been a bit flouncy and histrionic when she broke the news. Didn’t he know that university relationships rarely – if ever – last? Eras end and theirs had. If he couldn’t see that, he was deluded.
‘It was tough on both of us, Simon,’ she said, looking out of the window for dramatic effect. ‘But it’s a well-known fact that university relationships rarely – if ever – last. We’d come to the end of the road and that was that. Have you spoken to him recently?’
‘I rang him last week, as it happens. About my theatre gig. I thought he’d be pleased. Obviously he was. But he sounded quite, I don’t know – distant. He was like, I’m back in Edinburgh. New job, new friends, new adventures. No time for nostalgia or regret. The only way is up. To quote Yazz. Not that he did. Quote Yazz, I mean. That was my little embellishment kind of thing.’
‘There you are then. He’s fine. We both are. New adventures all round, I say.’
Simon nodded eagerly and put his arm round her. ‘Absolutely, Stannie Anley.’
When the bus terminated in Portslade, they didn’t have to look far to find the party; it announced itself at full volume from t
he top of a side street: ‘Hey Ya’ by OutKast, so loud it made Annie’s lungs judder. As they approached, they could see that the garden was rammed with people trying to get in, trying to get out, sitting on the garden wall, making out by the bins. She’d been to a gazillion parties like this since she started uni. In her first year, it had felt exciting, dangerous even. Now the density and intensity of it made her heart sink. People. Loud music. Crisps, if you were lucky. What was the fucking point?
‘Let’s push our way in,’ Simon suggested. ‘Or, look, we can go around the back and squeeze in through the kitchen.’
‘The kitchen will be twice as heaving. You know it will. Is it even worth it?’
He sighed forlornly. But to give up, cut one’s losses – that was the beginning of the end. A sign of getting old.
Annie hooked her arm in his. ‘Come on, let’s leave them to it. We don’t need them.’
Simon assessed the situation and agreed. Crikey, was she coming on to him? He’d fancied her from afar ever since Dunk first introduced them.
His assessment was totally wrong, but that didn’t stop Annie reciprocating when he kissed her, long and hard, in the bus shelter. It didn’t stop her going back to his place, a pokey little bedsit in Seven Dials. It didn’t stop them sleeping together that night and several more – plus a few mornings – after that. Simon was a thoughtful lover, with magic fingers and a strong sense of ‘what women want’.
They even made a stab at being a ‘couple’ for a week or two but both were distracted by more important things. Annie was offered a job in London and Simon was dumped by the agit-prop theatre group when their first choice became available after all, following a knock-back from EastEnders. They were both quietly relieved to pull the plug on their short-lived fling, now flung. Did it really only last a fortnight?
One thing united them. This hadn’t been a proper ‘thing’. Not really. So Duncan need never know. Agreed? Agreed.