by Emma Morgan
‘There’s something I want to watch,’ said Annie, changing channels.
‘Annie, I …’ said Violet.
‘You what?’
‘I went to the cinema.’
Annie was always interested, it was one of her best characteristics, and she always listened properly and analysed everything and so everything that Violet did was witnessed and repeated back to her and she could look at it more dispassionately and attempt to make sense of it. She was so used to having Annie’s opinion that she took this for granted. But this time Annie didn’t even look at her. Violet considered her options.
She could go and stand in front of Annie and force her into a conversation.
She could pick up the saucepan and empty the contents over Annie’s pretty head.
She could leave the flat with a degree of operatic intensity completely alien to her. But where could she go? She couldn’t go back to Sam’s and she was too tired to go to a café and she didn’t like pubs and wasn’t it too early for them anyway? Back to the park bench from yesterday? But then Sam might think she was stalking her. I want her to like me, Violet realized.
She could go to her room.
There seemed to be only one viable option open to her personality type, so she went to the fridge and looked at her shelf for something to do. A jar of capers and two yoghurts, all out of date. She took the jar and crept off to her room. Now instead of feeling good she felt rubbish, as if ‘the fear’ was creeping up on her again. It had seemed to be a bit better. The woman seemed to help. Or maybe it was just having something else to focus on. That was good. Why couldn’t Annie see that? After the capers, which she ate even though she didn’t want to, she put on Leftfield, but only quietly in case it upset Annie, and listened for a while and wondered why Annie, who was never weird, was being weird. She found a pencil and drew a picture of Sam’s back from memory. She pushed it into the piles of other drawings on her desk. Then she got into bed and pulled the duvet right up to her ears. I have slept with a woman for the first time, she thought. This could be counted as a momentous occasion except that I have no one to speak to about it apart from Annie who is sulking for some reason I don’t understand and who therefore won’t listen, and my mother who I can’t bear to tell. It was all so strange. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.
This is Grace and the problem of the inability to mix
‘I don’t believe in this patriarchal hegemony,’ said a friend of Sam’s called Ned. He had a man bun which evinced immediate distrust in Grace and wore braces over his shirt. He looked like he was in a folky sort of band but he was a graphic designer/hairdresser apparently. Sam’s friends seemed heavy on the ‘I’m a freelancer’, or ‘I do something digital’ or ‘I have multiple occupations all of them cool’. To be honest she wasn’t that keen on Sam’s friends – they were what Grace would have described as ‘trendy’, even though ‘trendy’ wasn’t a word she had heard used since school and was a word she was sure they wouldn’t ascribe to themselves. She might also have gone for ‘pretentious’ if pushed.
‘Yeah, it’s all like very non-representational,’ said another of her friends whose name was Ellie, a girl with greyish-pink hair in plaits. She too was a slasher – some sort of florist/website creator. ‘I’m a floral designer,’ she said, and looked at Grace as if she couldn’t possibly know what one of them was. Grace found that when she was asked for her opinion by these people she had the same sort of stomach pain as when asked by a nun in geography exactly where Jakarta was. ‘Um,’ she found herself saying a lot, ‘er’. When did she get so tongue-tied? After a while she noticed that if she said nothing at all, no one seemed to care, and she was ignored completely, as if she wasn’t even sitting there. This was probably better but made her very uncomfortable. Occasionally Sam would try to bring her back into the conversation but sometimes she seemed to forget, leaning across her to make her point and Grace felt completely invisible.
Sam liked to hang out with these friends in bars with school chairs and mismatched tables whose legs, much to Grace’s frustration, were wonky on the cement floors. Bars next to expensive barbers with old-fashioned chairs in, bars with bare brick walls and artistic photos on the walls of derelict buildings and names like ‘Space Dog’. ‘I’m just going down to the dog,’ Sam would say and did not seem to find that funny. ‘Want to come?’ Er, thought Grace, um, well, no. ‘OK,’ she said, even though these places seemed to be permeated with the smell of pulled pork and only served something called ‘craft beer’. What was wrong with a normal type of pub? She felt that these people looked down on her. She found Sam’s friends cold and this confused her because Sam wasn’t cold at all.
One night they went out with Ellie to a gay club in town. Ellie had been friends with Sam since Sam came to Leeds and Grace tried not to be jealous of that. She also tried not to think that awful thought that they had once had a thing. Grace didn’t mind the club, she liked the feel of the bass coming up through her shoes, but she wasn’t a great dancer.
‘I’ll just stay here,’ she said to Sam.
‘OK,’ said Sam, not seeming bothered, and went to dance with Ellie in a close way that seemed much too familiar. Grace was left standing with her back to the wall holding her drink, smiling at nothing, trying not to stare at anybody in an unusual outfit. She felt horribly exposed; she was obviously not meant to be there. A girl with a short skirt who must have been all of twenty came over and stood next to Grace.
‘Do you want to dance?’ said the girl.
‘What?’ said Grace. The music was so loud she couldn’t hear properly.
The girl put her mouth near Grace’s ear and shouted into it, ‘Do you want to dance?’ and then to Grace’s surprise licked her ear. Grace flinched away, and the girl grinned. ‘I like older women,’ said the girl. ‘You’re sexy.’
‘What?’ said Grace.
‘I like you, you’re sexy,’ yelled the girl into her ear. The bass was building.
‘Er,’ said Grace, ‘er, no.’
‘Yes, you are,’ said the girl.
‘I can’t dance with you. My girlfriend’s over there,’ said Grace to get herself out of this uncomfortable situation.
‘Where?’
Grace pointed to Sam, who was dancing in a group of men with very few clothes on.
‘She’s sexy too,’ said the girl. ‘Come on, let’s dance.’
Grace had always been very poor at saying no to the insistent.
‘I’m too old,’ she said. ‘To dance,’ although she meant ‘for you to be chatting me up, dear’.
‘No, you’re not!’
‘I think I am.’
‘Oh OK, I get it, you don’t like me.’
‘I’ve got a girlfriend,’ said Grace weakly.
‘Right then,’ and the girl moved off. Grace felt bad for having offended her. She considered going after her to explain things more clearly but the girl was no longer to be seen.
‘Who was that girl?’ Sam shouted into Grace’s ear when she came back.
‘I don’t know, she asked me to dance,’ Grace yelled back.
‘Why didn’t you go?’
‘I didn’t want to. Anyway, wouldn’t you mind?’
‘Why should I mind? Don’t you want to dance?’
‘I’m all right here.’
Ellie came up and pushed something into Grace’s hand.
‘Take this,’ she shouted, grinning. Grace looked at her palm with the little white pill on top of it.
‘I don’t want to,’ shouted Grace.
‘What? I can’t hear you,’ Ellie shouted.
‘I’m not going to take this.’
‘Haven’t you ever taken one before?’ shouted Sam.
‘No, and I don’t want to start.’
‘Fair enough,’ Sam mouthed, and she went away with Ellie again, and they disappeared into the crowd and Grace was left against the wall, not knowing what to do with the pill or with herself for that matter. In the end, she dropped the pill on t
he floor and crushed it under her boot and left without saying goodbye to teach Sam a lesson. What lesson? That she shouldn’t be abandoned? That Sam should mind her getting chatted up? That Ellie was a bad influence? Grace had a headache. As she walked back to her car she thought, I would much rather have been with my sisters in the palm house having a nice scone and a good cup of tea. She went home, expecting Sam to ring her soon, but then Grace fell asleep and when she woke up in the morning Sam still hadn’t rung and Grace felt a surge of panic and rang her. It took a while for Sam to reach the phone.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Grace.
‘Sure, why wouldn’t I be? Where did you go?’ Sam asked, sounding sleepy but not especially interested.
‘Home,’ Grace said to underline a point. Home alone. You let me go home alone.
‘Didn’t you have a good time?’ said Sam.
‘No. No, I didn’t.’
‘Then I won’t take you again.’
Sam didn’t seem bothered and Grace resented this although she was moderately pleased with herself for showing that she had boundaries. They never went to another club and Sam stopped asking her to go out with her friends. I don’t want to go anyway, thought Grace, but it would still be nice to be asked. She invited Sam out with her friends but Sam always seemed to be too busy. This disconcerted Grace no end – this inability to mix their social circles, but what could she do? Nothing, it seemed.
‘I’ve got to meet Ned, he’s DJ-ing.’
‘I didn’t know he did that too. I could come there later,’ said Grace.
‘Don’t worry, I know you’ve got an early start,’ said Sam.
‘I could bring Dolores. Or my friend Marcia, she’s into music. Or Andy, you’ll like Andy, he’s funny. I’ll get a couple of people together, I haven’t gone out with any of them for ages. What time?’
‘Are you sure that’s their sort of thing? It’s very experimental.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
‘Might not be their cup of tea.’
‘What sort of music?’
‘It’s a fusion.’
‘Of what?’
‘This and that.’
Why don’t you just say that you don’t want us to come, thought Grace. That my friends aren’t cool enough for you. That the three-year age gap between us is apparently some kind of unjumpable gulf. They’re so young and hip and we, the over-thirties, would be better off with an evening in our slippers listening to something classical. Why don’t you just say that?
Every time Grace mentioned the possibility of them visiting Eustacia or going to Tess’s farm, Sam came up with an excuse. It got so that Grace was embarrassed to ask but she persisted. Her family were important to her; how could Sam know her properly if she didn’t know them? Unless Sam didn’t want to know her properly. And Grace felt a lurch of something she couldn’t name. No, that couldn’t be it. Sam didn’t do family, she’d said that, it wasn’t just Grace’s family, it was a general rule and Grace would have to accept that. Maybe though they could try something more casual than a full-on visit. They could go to Bettys in York with Bella and Augusta for tea and cake. That wasn’t too much to ask, surely. Sam said no. It was as if Grace was banging her head against a brick wall while denying that the wall was there.
This is Annie in therapy
‘So that’s what I said to him,’ said Annie to Grace.
‘And how do you feel about that?’
‘It’s not that I don’t care about him, I do. I like him a lot. I just don’t do love.’
‘Would you say that you don’t feel love or that you don’t express love?’
‘I love people but I just don’t feel the need to tell them I do all the time.’
‘Have you ever told someone you love them?’
‘No, never. And I don’t see why I should bloody start now.’
‘You seem upset, Annie.’
‘It was like he was expecting something from me that I couldn’t give him. Like a baby bird expecting food from its mother.’
‘That’s a very interesting analogy.’
‘Because we were talking about children?’
‘Do you find it difficult when someone expects a lot from you?’
‘I do enough of that at work. Living up to people’s expectations. I did enough of it in my childhood too. My mother always expected so much of us.’
To Annie’s chagrin she seemed to spend most of her time in therapy complaining about her mother.
‘And your father?’ asked Grace.
Annie had come to like her. She seemed calm, never surprised by anything and never looked at you as if to say, ‘Why the hell did you say that?’
‘He’s a good person. He adores my mother. Does everything she wants. My biggest memory of him from when I was a kid, though, was him having to drop his work clothes, including his socks, at the back door and go upstairs in his underpants as soon as he came in so as not to get dirt anywhere. She couldn’t abide dirt. I mean the sofa was wrapped in plastic, for God’s sake! I’m talking about her again, aren’t I? I like my dad, I do, it’s …’
‘Yes?’
‘I think he’s weak. Easily pushed around. He should stand up to my mum more. Do more stuff because he wants to do it. Not because she does.’
‘Is there an example you could give me?’
‘Well, there’s this thing that’s weird, well, I think it’s weird knowing them: he was in this band with her when they were young. Twenties, before they had me. They did well round our way. Working men’s clubs, that kind of thing. But they stopped it. I only know this because he told me once when he was the worse for wear. Lady V and the Dreamers. I can’t work out if I like it or not. My mum – she’s amazingly beautiful. Like a film star. And apparently, she could sing, though I’ve never heard her in my life. She’s always been more interested in telling us off than singing.’
‘And so then what happened?’
‘She got pregnant. And after that maybe she didn’t think it was a suitable thing. I mean, they didn’t make any money, as far as I know. It was a laugh, my dad said. I don’t think, don’t get me wrong, I admire my mum, that his life has had a lot of fun in it. Nailbrushes and the application of perfectly straight wallpaper to suit my mum’s demands yes. Fun no. And I reckon he’d have liked to get back to the band but it was always my mum’s decisions about everything. I don’t want to be like her, that’s part of it, the reason I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want to have to give up my life in the way she did. I might want to one day, but not right now. And she’s on at me all the time. Even about living with Violet, I told you about Violet, didn’t I? We have a good time together even if we aren’t speaking that much.’
‘Is there a reason for that?’
‘She’s got this girlfriend and I don’t like her. I don’t trust her. She’s using Violet. She’s that type. But Violet, how can I explain about her? She’s easily led, that’s the thing. She hasn’t been very happy recently and then this woman came along, and I suppose swept her off her feet is the way to say it although that does sound dead old-fashioned. She’s not even a lesbian, I think. Violet, that is. She’s just got taken over by someone with a stronger personality than her. And there’s nothing I can do although I’ve got a bad feeling about this woman, I’m worried that Violet is going to end up getting hurt.’
‘And how do you feel about that?’
‘Fucking frustrated.’ There was a silence. ‘Sorry for swearing,’ said Annie.
‘It’s not a problem, Annie. It sounds like there’re a lot of stressful events going on in your life right now.’
‘And I haven’t even told you about Dubai.’
‘Yes?’
‘I got headhunted. About four months ago. It’s a big firm and the money’s amazing.’
‘That sounds good.’
‘But it would mean travelling. They’ve got a lot of offices. Shanghai. Dubai. New York. All over the place. I’d have to move to one of them.’
&nb
sp; ‘Is that a problem?’
‘Well, I don’t think I’m a great flyer but that’s not really it.’
‘Then …’
‘I said no.’
‘Could you tell me why?’
‘How am I going to tell my mum? By the way, not interested in families at all, I’m going off jetting around the world.’
‘She might not have the reaction that you’re expecting.’
‘You don’t know my mum. She may well be proud of me and my job but she’d never say it. And she wants me to have kids so much she’s blind to anything else. That’s one thing. And then there’s Violet. I don’t know what to do about Violet. I couldn’t leave her on her own. She’d … well, God only knows what she’d do.’
‘But you would like this job?’
‘I’d love it. I’d really love it. But there’s no way.’
‘And Laurence?’
‘He may be the best chance I’ll ever have. I should know better than to walk away from that. And I do like him, I like him a lot.’
This is Grace asking the wrong thing
They went fishing. Sam loved fishing. Grace didn’t know what she felt about it until she tried it. That was Sam’s advice to her as though it was truffles she was about to eat or tripe. Grace had already tried various things with Sam that she hadn’t tried before and none of them had worked out well. The climbing wall had been a horrible experience for a woman with little upper body strength. She found herself halfway up it being shouted at by an instructor and Sam. ‘Put your leg there! No, there!’ and she looked at where she was supposed to put her leg and thought that they must be joking. By the time she got back down she was shaking all over. Sam patted her on the back and said, ‘It’ll be better next time, I promise.’ The weed that they smoked together one evening was so strong that Grace was sick in Sam’s loo. She had no interest whatsoever in looking at pictures of naked women as Sam had once suggested. And fishing, she found, was sitting for hours by the side of a river staring at the water in complete silence. Grace thought that if she had liked complete silence then she’d have been a Quaker. She hoped Sam wasn’t going to take her there too. They caught a fish in the end, or rather Sam did but she took the hook out of the fish’s mouth and threw it back. Why? Because she was semi-vegetarian and because she didn’t like killing fish. It baffled Grace. She thought it was stupid but of course she didn’t tell Sam that. She didn’t tell her about the fox-hunting she’d done as a child either or how she had once shot a rabbit. That’s not a good thing, she thought – when you start to edit yourself to fit. What was she afraid of? It was an easy question to answer. She was always afraid that Sam would find her boring and unadventurous, the kind of person who didn’t enjoy new things. This thought depressed her. She was too set in her ways, she was too conventional.