by Emma Morgan
‘That would be weird! Going to the park I mean. She’d think I was stalking her.’
‘Stalking? What is stalking?’
‘Following someone about. In a bad way. Trying to find out about them.’
‘Yes, that is a very bad thing,’ said Dolores, tut-tutting and shaking her head. ‘That happened to my cousin’s sister-in-law. Very, very bad. But not the same at all. You go and look for her. I promise you it will be good. She is a pretty girl and you are a pretty girl. You will have fun together. Lots of fun.’
And Dolores winked in a lascivious way that nearly put Grace off completely. Sam, she thought, Sam. Now all the people she ever met, male or female or even dogs, would remind her of that name.
‘Couldn’t you find out her surname for me?’ Grace said. Dolores had disappeared into her house but Grace stayed on the doorstep. ‘Then I could try and find her on Facebook,’ she called down the hall.
‘You could stalk her on the net,’ said Dolores, reappearing so suddenly that Grace jumped. In one hand was a packet of ham, in the other a packet of biscuits. She waved these items up and down like a market trader offering his wares.
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘My cousin’s sister-in-law, she had trouble with that too. No, not good. Go and look for her. A lot more romantic. You need romance, I know it.’
‘Probably,’ Grace said under her breath.
‘The jamón serrano or the polvorones?’ asked Dolores. ‘Or the two?’
Grace went to the park every day after work for a week as though she was there for the exercise. She wasn’t looking for the woman called Sam, she was simply taking a stroll. Her sister Tess had rung her and asked if she wanted to go over to her farm in the Dales for the weekend but Grace had said no, without telling her why. It wasn’t that Tess would have teased her, Tess was too nice a person for that, but that her own embarrassment stopped her. And what was she supposed to say anyway? Can’t come and see you, am busy stalking the park. Then she went on Saturday after breakfast. This is ridiculous, she thought, this is creepy and sad, why can’t I do this online? But how many Sams are there? Millions. And anyway, I’m not obsessive and this isn’t stalking, I’m just perseverant, but she felt ashamed of herself and didn’t admit to anyone what she wanted. What did she want? She wanted to have that woman lie down next to her so that she could caress her entire body. She wanted to tell her all her secrets, dull as most of them were. She tried to stop going but failed; it was as though there was a line stretched tight between her and the woman that couldn’t be perceived by the naked eye. Had she fallen in love at first sight? Was this uncomfortable niggling pull what it felt like? If so she didn’t like it much. No, she was better than this. Her past relationships hadn’t all failed because of her, they hadn’t worked out, that was all. It wouldn’t be that difficult to find someone else to go out with, she’d done it before. She wasn’t even sure if this woman was a nice person and anyway, if she had been interested in her, Sam would have asked for her number. This was a waste of her time. She would stop doing this.
It was the eighth consecutive time that Grace went to the park that she found her. She would like to have thought that she found her on the day she was going to give up trying, but this probably wasn’t true. The woman called Sam was pollarding a tree with her back to Grace, there so casually, so easily, handling her clippers with skill. Thank God, thought Grace, and wanted to go straight up to Sam and hug her and say, ‘I’ve found you. At long last I’ve found you.’
‘Hi,’ she said, hanging back. ‘Well, this is a surprise! I didn’t know you worked here!’
‘Hi,’ said Sam, looking round and resting her clippers on the ground. ‘Nice to see you, Grace. How are you?’
‘Would you like to do something?’ Grace said. This time Sam wouldn’t be allowed to disappear on her. This time she would be the one in charge.
‘What, now? I’m busy for about the next four hours. After that if you like? What do you want to do? You choose. How are your ears by the way?’
‘Fine,’ said Grace.
Grace tried to think of an activity more interesting than the library or a walk or a café and less painful than piercing. She liked swimming but it was too much for Sam to see her in a swimsuit before she got to know her better. She was ashamed of her ugly feet apart from anything. Badminton? Too wimpy? The cinema? It seemed dull but nothing else came to mind.
‘The cinema?’ she asked.
‘We could go to roller derby,’ said Sam. ‘I go now and then.’
‘OK,’ said Grace, not knowing what roller derby was.
For this actual ‘date’ she tried to dress up by wearing a skirt that she had once mistakenly bought to go to a family wedding in, even though she never wore skirts. There had also been a matching fascinator, Grace was ashamed to recall. How her sisters had tried not to laugh. It was red, unlike the rest of her clothes which were grey or black or navy, and turned out to be so tight now she could get it on but not breathe well in it. Grace hated dressing up even more than liver but she felt she should try to show that she was taking this seriously. Was this serious? No, this was not. It was just a date. She was only showing she had tried, that was polite after all. She slicked on the red lipstick which an orange-tinged woman with long eyelashes like a cow had sold her to go with the skirt. Why had she paid fifteen pounds to look like a man on a stag night in drag? It reminded her of when she was a child and she and her sisters had plastered themselves with the dried-up palettes of eyeshadows and the worn-down lipsticks from their mother’s dressing table; the effect was that of elderly colour-blind chanteuses who had put their make-up on drunk. They used to dance around the room pretending to be their mother complaining about the Russians. ‘It’s all gulag mentality, darling,’ they’d say to each other, although they didn’t know what that meant, ‘work, work, work and the ice in the studios, darling. I’m permanently frozen! And don’t even mention the rations! It’s like Stalingrad all over again!’ She wiped the lipstick off and leant her head against the bathroom mirror. Why was this so stressful? She’d never felt like this before a date before. She looked at herself in the mirror. Like a lady of the night who had recently eaten a very large burger. At least she wasn’t tempted by the fascinator. It would have to do.
By the time she got to the rink she felt acutely uncomfortable, not least because her knickers kept going up her bum. She sat behind the barricade and rearranged herself surreptitiously. She adopted her best smile. The worst thing about this, she thought, was that she wanted Sam to like her. She hadn’t felt this since school. Perhaps she could tell Sam that something had come up at work, yes, that was a good idea, a therapeutic emergency, and just give up on this. It was never going to work out. It felt, for whatever reason, too anxiety-inducing. Sam came on to the rink wearing the shortest of shorts. Grace found herself unable to move. Something went on inside her, something physiological. Her heart, her head and her groin all went thump, thump, thump at the same time. At first, she thought that this might be the signal for some kind of seizure.
To her surprise, roller derby turned out to be a violent sport involving women skating round and round and shoving and pushing each other, often until someone fell over. It looked highly dangerous, a fact borne out by the helmets and the knee pads and what must surely be impending bruises. Grace soon gave up leaning towards the action and started leaning as far away as she could. She sat watching Sam barge people out of the way in an aggressive fashion and was intimidated by her toughness. The only thing that she liked about it was the backs of the women’s T-shirts. Marauder. Hammerhead. The Black Avenger. The back of Sam’s T-shirt said, ‘Tiger’. Everything else reminded her of being chased down the hockey pitch by girls who wanted to hurt her. To her great relief nobody suggested that she try it but one large woman did tell her, ‘It’s the best sport ever,’ while spitting her mouthguard into her hand. Anything that involved a mouthguard, decided Grace then and there, will never involve me.
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br /> After the skating the other girls were going to the pub, but Sam refused and instead they went for a coffee in a nearby café before Sam suggested something else to her like hand-to-hand combat or knife-throwing. At the end of the date, if this was a date, was she supposed to kiss her? She had too much saliva in her mouth and had only brushed her teeth once before leaving the house. She didn’t eat the cake Sam suggested because the skirt situation made eating impossible. Sam sat opposite her munching away. Grace was aware that if she budged forward her knees would touch Sam’s but was that too intimate?
This is what Grace learnt about the woman called Sam: she came from Shrewsbury but she’d moved to Leeds five years ago. She thought that Yorkshire people were friendly and she liked the Leeds accent. She’d once slept in a cemetery for a dare as a teenager but had woken up at 4 a.m. scared and ran out. She liked mint tea. She liked chocolate cake. She didn’t wear make-up. She didn’t seem to ever wear a bra. Her T-shirt was tight and Grace could see her nipples but tried not to look directly at them and then had problems focusing on Sam’s face. Sam was of course short for Samantha. She liked the park in the rain and all the ducks and geese swimming in it on the lake. She’d once seen a heron there. Grace memorized these facts for a future exam on Sam. She hoped it would be multiple choice because an essay question at this stage would be a stretch.
This is what Sam learnt about Grace: not very much because Grace filled every tiny silence with a question. It wasn’t that she couldn’t take silences, after all they were an important part of her job: the pregnant pause, the ill-considered gap, the long exhale before the crying started. What Grace feared the most was that Sam would walk out of the door and she would never see her again. Or that then she would have to re-stalk the park in an ever more embarrassing fashion.
‘I’d better go,’ said Sam, pushing back her chair.
‘Yeah right, of course, yeah,’ said Grace.
They both stood up.
‘It was nice to meet you again, Grace,’ said Sam.
‘You too, great, thanks,’ said Grace.
Sam turned away.
‘Maybe,’ Grace said, ‘you might like to give me your phone number. Or I could give you mine. Whichever.’
‘So that you can try roller derby?’ said Sam and smiled.
‘Please no,’ said Grace.
‘I’ve got no mobile,’ Sam said, ‘but you can leave a message on my home phone.’
Grace found a card in her wallet and wrote her mobile on it and put Sam’s number into her phone.
‘You’re a psychotherapist?’ asked Sam.
‘Oh yeah, that,’ said Grace.
‘That’s interesting,’ said Sam, and Grace mentally cheered.
‘Do you want a lift?’ said Grace.
‘I’ll get the bus, thanks.’
Sam moved forward and kissed Grace on the cheek. Grace could smell the faint scent of coconut in her hair.
‘I think the earrings look nice,’ said Sam quietly into her ear and then, before Grace could react, took her face away and walked off. It seemed that Grace would have to get used to her back view, which admittedly was an attractive one. Sam strode with long legs, she almost loped. Grace stood still, thinking about the kiss. She was relieved about the lack of tongue action, she wasn’t ready for that yet, but even when Sam kissed her that quickly she felt her heart lurch and wanted to put her arms around her and hold her tight. She resisted the urge to run after Sam and do just that.
Grace tried to wait a week before phoning but she managed only three days. Over the course of this time she analysed herself. Sam seemed an interesting enough person. She was certainly conventionally attractive. But nothing explained what Grace felt about her, which was both that she wanted to go around to her house and stand under the window and woo her Romeo style and that she wanted to lick her all over. The combination of these two urges disturbed her a great deal.
After three days she rang and left a message so full of ums and ers and digressions that she wished she could erase it. Sam didn’t ring back. Grace rang again two days later, two days of pacing around practising her new message which she tried to write out so that she could read it aloud, but the sound of the beep made her panic and she couldn’t prevent herself from saying, ‘Perhaps you didn’t get my message?’ Sam didn’t ring back. Grace was not surprised, considering the incompetence of the messages, and so she pretended to herself that she didn’t care anyway. She didn’t mention Sam to any of her friends as an amusing anecdote, she didn’t ring Eustacia or Tess to ask for advice. She tried to ignore the desires that wouldn’t go away and bury herself in work, she tried to go back to the contented sort of life she had had before but she felt constantly on edge. What if she met Sam in the street? It would be typical now that she wanted to avoid her. Because she had been rejected and, as it turned out, being rejected was shit. Had she been right to be the one to ring? Maybe it should have been the other way around. If only she had waited. One of her straight friends had once had the stupidity to ask her, ‘But who is the man?’ ‘What do you mean, who is the man?’ ‘Who, you know, does the asking? You know, rings up, suggests places to go, pays?’ Grace thought that this was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘whoever, whatever.’ God, was being heterosexual that rigid and old-fashioned? Apparently so. How horrible, she thought, how boring. But possibly there were rules about these things that she still didn’t understand. Well, there’s nothing else I can do now, she told herself.
‘And the girl?’ asked Dolores. ‘The girl Sam. The one with the nipples sticking out of her T-shirt at my party. Yes, yes, I saw. How is she?’
‘Oh, I met up with her once but it didn’t work out. Not my type,’ said Grace.
‘Shame, shame,’ said Dolores. ‘Do not worry, I’ll find you another girl quick.’
‘Please don’t,’ said Grace.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Dolores, ‘don’t be shy now.’
And yet Grace spent far too much time imagining various romantic and carnal scenes that were never going to occur, and at night she dreamed repetitively that Sam was following her down the long upstairs corridor of her childhood home but that every time Grace turned around she had disappeared. She had got into Grace’s head and there was, it seemed, no getting her out.
This is Violet and her mother on a Tuesday afternoon
‘Steve has lost all interest,’ said Violet’s mother, as she precision-chopped carrots for a stew. The kitchen was large and bright, full of 4 p.m. July sun, and Violet was half blinded, rocking back and forth in a kitchen chair and waiting for her mother to tell her to stop doing that. She had made an enormous effort and gone what seemed to her a very long way from Leeds to Cheshire on the train to see her mother in the hope that it might help. She had managed this feat of endurance by listening to loud Beethoven on her headphones, eating far too many wine gums and drawing tiny pictures of the scenery in her sketchbook. It seemed to have been a good decision because not only had it not induced a panic attack but she also found her mother’s home comforting when she got there. Annie’s flat, while expensively decorated, did not have the same cosiness factor; nothing was worn down or old as it was here. The journey had exhausted her, and she wanted no more than to go and lie down in the room her mother still referred to as ‘Violet’s room’ even though she hadn’t lived in this house for ten years, the room with the candy-striped wallpaper and the shelves full of trampolining trophies.
‘Are you listening to me?’ said her mother.
‘All interest in what?’
‘He’s gone off it.’
‘Gone off what?’
‘Sex.’
‘I didn’t want to know that,’ Violet said, catching her fall from the chair just in time, blushing and turning away towards the window. She had avoided any mention of sex near her mother since ‘the sex talk’ when she was fourteen. She still couldn’t think of that now without extreme embarrassment. ‘The lawn needs mowing. When
’s Steve coming back?’
‘I know it’s hard for you to talk about these things,’ said her mother. ‘God knows I could never have spoken to my mother about sex. But I don’t know who else to turn to.’
Violet turned around at the sound of her mother’s voice. And it was true, her mother, who never cried, not even at her own parents’ funerals, was crying. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen with a Heineken apron on, the one Steve used for barbecuing in, Steve, who was not, and never would be her father, but who was the only substitute she had for the one in France whom she had never met. She didn’t mind Steve, he was a good enough replacement for someone she didn’t know and didn’t much want to. The apron was much too big for her mother and hung down to her ankles and she was crying with her face down into her navy polo neck and the dog was licking her floury hands. Violet had always liked her mother’s hands; she had got fatter as she got older and now they were dimpled and her wedding ring was entrenched in the skin of her finger, but they were hands that Violet associated with placing a cold flannel on her forehead when she was ill or tucking her into bed at night. That was why she was here – she wanted to be comforted and patted and told that everything was going to be all right.
‘The dog seems to be licking your hands, Mum.’
‘Bad dog. Don’t do that. Go out. Go out. Can you put him outside? He takes no notice of me. He’s Steve’s dog.’
And she went to wash her hands and Violet shooed the dog out and shut the door to the hall. Her mother’s pink lipstick was off centre and her mascara had rubbed, and it made Violet feel sad. She would have liked to leave the room or better the house. She shouldn’t have come.
‘What about your GP? What about if you told him a bit about it?’ she asked, sitting back down.
‘No,’ said her mother, blowing her nose on a tissue from her apron pocket. ‘No, I couldn’t talk to him. I’ve got no sexual problems myself,’ and she swayed slightly.