A Love Story for Bewildered Girls

by Emma Morgan

  If Laurence was there when she got back from Sam’s or from work, she wanted to go straight back out again; she didn’t like him at all. She had never known Annie to have a boyfriend for more than a few months before. What’s more she was annoyed with herself because she recognized that her aversion might partly be because she felt jealous, an emotion strange to her that seemed to involve constant irritation with Annie. Why are you talking to him and not to me? Why are you doing things with him and not me? Why won’t you even feed me any more or tell me to tidy up or do anything at all apart from barely notice my existence? I am being ignored and it is horrible. I am a child rejected in the playground, she thought, I am a lowly worm not even worth treading on. It felt like the loneliness she had felt at school and might well have gone on feeling for ever if she hadn’t met Annie who needed a flatmate in their first year of university. Violet still remembered Annie’s reaction to her saying that she was studying English. She looked away and Violet thought, I’ve blown it, I’ve blown it.

  ‘You’re studying English which is a dosser subject for people who can’t make up their minds. And you look like a flake.’

  ‘I’m not a flake. I’m a cream egg,’ she had said in an unusually assertive way.

  ‘They’re too sweet,’ said Annie.

  ‘They are, yes.’ And Violet decided, you’re not going to dismiss me that easily and put her case. ‘I’ll wear heels if you want. If I could find any to fit me. I am very wishy-washy. I can’t normally make up my mind about anything apart from Wuthering Heights, which is a book about windows mostly I think. I like Chocolate Buttons and Milky Bars. I’m pretty good at washing up. My room will be a complete tip but I’ll keep it in my room. Or you can put me in a cupboard. I don’t smoke. I’ll mostly be in the library. What do you like then? In chocolate terms, I mean. I think it’s an important question.’

  ‘Fruit and nut,’ said Annie putting her hand out to shake. ‘Am I going to regret this?’ she asked.

  ‘Most probably,’ said Violet.

  She remembered herself wincing at Annie’s titan-like handshake. Thinking about this conversation made her extremely sad. I’m losing Annie, she thought, she’s going away. One of these days she’s going to kick me out and that’ll be that. And ‘the fear’ seemed to have increased again. She still hadn’t told Sam anything about it. What if it made Sam go off her? People were funny with things like that. There were days she still woke up and felt so drained that she couldn’t get out of bed. She threw herself out instead and knelt on the floor with a tightness in her chest. The bathroom seemed many miles away. When she knew Annie would be out she crawled towards it and sat on the floor in there brushing her teeth so hard she made her gums bleed. Sort yourself out, she thought. Sort yourself out. And she thought about her father, she thought about him every day.

  The only thing she could do to cope with all this uncertainty was to draw. Once, and just once, while drunk, she had done a drawing on her wall at Annie’s. It was of a heron she’d seen in the park and the old man with his dog that was looking at it. It wouldn’t rub off after and so she had put a poster of a painting by Matisse over it and hoped to God that Annie never found out. She had taken to looking at it now and then. It was, she was surprised to think, quite good. But I didn’t get the hands right and the heron’s feathers were too flat. Annie wasn’t home. Violet took down the poster and started to draw with a 2B. By the time she had finished the picture had expanded and could no longer be covered by the poster. There were reeds now and some trees. Shit, she thought, shit. At least Annie, as far as she knew, never came into her bedroom any more. She needed to cover it with something, though, and didn’t have another poster big enough. As she stood wondering what to do she realized what the drawing lacked. She wanted to put colour on it. She wanted it badly. When was the last time she really, really wanted anything? She got out her pastels and began to shade it. When she looked at the time, an hour had passed. She remembered that Annie had hairspray and went to the bathroom to find it but when she sprayed it on the wall to fix the pastels, colour ran on to the carpet. She scrubbed at it with a T-shirt and got most of it off. She waited until the wall dried and then put the poster back and where the drawing had expanded put her own sketches up to cover it. They looked nice next to the Matisse. She should have felt guilty and possibly afraid of Annie’s reaction but she didn’t, she felt better. That’s what she needed to do. Draw more.

  This is Grace and why her job was pointless

  Grace no longer loved her job. She had begun to think of herself as not very helpful at all. It was just shelling out money for nothing when what her clients needed was a priest. Absolution. They needed to sit in a confessional and then walk out of there with a list of their sins and their required acts of contrition, but all Grace could do was to make sure the session ran to its allotted time and pass the tissue box if needed. She sat looking at their twisting hands, their tapping feet. At the way they pulled at their rings or fidgeted or coughed. And she listened, all she could do when it came down to it was listen and she wasn’t even great at that any more. She had thought that she had a talent for it but all this time she had been kidding herself. Here we go again, she thought, here we go again.

  Her husband said that she was jealous. Her mother said that she was daft to listen to him. Her dad never spoke to her but then again, he never spoke to anyone. She suspected that her son did drugs but she was too afraid to ask him. Her daughter had a horrible boyfriend with metal decorations on his face and probably also in unspeakable places and she had found a condom packet underneath her bed when she was tidying. And the packet was empty. She was only tidying but her daughter had accused her of spying on her and now she wasn’t speaking to her. And the thing is she thought it was her fault. Grace watched her cry and she did feel sorry for the woman but she had come to disbelieve in therapy; she had come to believe that it was all a waste of time. She would have been better off spending the money on going to Majorca or Tuscany or Rotherham. She would have been better off with an over-enthusiastic trip to a retail park or to Lourdes. Grace had started to think that what she should be doing was giving clients a big slap. She could have started with the slap, worked up to a hug, made them a cup of tea and then given them a cream slice and the Argos catalogue or the Next catalogue depending on personality type. This should have been part of her training: which catalogue to give. She could have got sponsored. Of course, it wasn’t all her fault. Who did she think she was? The President of the United States? She was deluded in the assumption of the grandiose nature of her culpability complex. This stuff happens. Nobody talks to anybody and all of it is shit. Stop thinking about it all and go and eat ice cream.

  Grace had, she came to believe, been watching people cry for far too long. The big grown men. The girls who hid their hands with their sleeves so that you couldn’t see the razor scars. The middle-aged women with the stretch marks underneath their clothes from years of binge and starve. Her store of kindness had run out and her heart was now packed, she had discovered, after years of listening to the repetitive nature of anxiety and pain, in ice. She had buried it at the bottom of a large chest freezer beneath layers of out-of-date steaks and strata of soft fruit that no one ever got around to eating. Her professionalism had got to her finally. She had stopped being able to empathize, stopped being able to feel. She was watching but she wasn’t there. She tested herself at home. She watched Steel Magnolias but when Shelby died she didn’t cry. Death no longer moved her. She watched ET and Elliott’s screaming only got on her nerves. She was in the wrong job and why was that? Possibly, she was scared to say to herself, it was because of Sam. She was so preoccupied with the way their relationship was deteriorating that she couldn’t think straight. It was wrong to blame Sam, though, it was her fault. She could see the person she was becoming but couldn’t stop the development. I am shrill, she thought, I am shrewish and a nag and difficult to be with and I don’t like myself any more. And I don’t know how to stop myself be
ing these things.

  And then something happened that Grace hadn’t been expecting.

  It was a Saturday morning and she was sitting on her sofa with Sam watching a TV programme about cooking that Sam enjoyed but that she wasn’t at all interested in and so she was gazing at the wall instead while she ate Shreddies. Sam had turned up the night before and they had had sex and things had seemed better again. Maybe we just had a hiccup, thought Grace. That’s all it was. And as for my obsession with wanting to tell her I love her, that’s just my neediness showing. She had decided to do her best to make her expectations more realistic. The doorbell rang. Grace went to answer it. Eustacia was on the doorstep.

  ‘What is it?’ said Grace. ‘Has someone died? Is it Cyril?’

  ‘No,’ said Eustacia, ‘I just popped over. I finished the commission I was working on and didn’t want to start anything else and I woke up early and thought, I know, I’ll just pop over to see Grace.’

  ‘You’d better come in then,’ said Grace, knowing full well that Eustacia never ‘popped’ anywhere, she was timetabled up to the hilt.

  ‘Sam, this is my sister Eustacia,’ said Grace as they stood in the sitting room. Sam remained sitting on the sofa.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘How do you do. It’s very nice to meet you,’ said Eustacia, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ And she moved forward to shake Sam’s hand. Sam put her hand out listlessly and Eustacia shook it. Sam returned her eyes to her TV programme and put her feet up on the coffee table.

  ‘Are you two going out somewhere?’ said Sam, not looking at them.

  ‘No,’ said Grace. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Eustacia?’

  ‘Yes please,’ she said.

  ‘Going to change,’ said Sam and left the room.

  ‘She’s just shy,’ said Grace and went to boil the kettle.

  Five minutes later they heard the front door slam and when Grace went and opened it, Sam was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come unannounced,’ said Eustacia. ‘I’m sorry. I frightened her off. I should have phoned but I didn’t want you to say no again. That was wrong of me. I just wanted to meet her very much.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Grace. ‘She has a thing about family. I told you about her awful parents.’

  ‘I wanted her to see that I wasn’t like them,’ said Eustacia and looked as if she might cry.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Grace and put her arm around her. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so furious. She felt ashamed of Sam’s poor behaviour but at least it made her finally understand that Sam would never fit into her family. She just didn’t want to. Why had it taken Grace so long to get this? And did it matter that much? She looked at Eustacia’s sad and disappointed face when she saw her off at the doorstep. Yes, it mattered, it mattered a great deal. Sam didn’t want to belong to Grace’s world and she wasn’t bothered, it seemed, at integrating Grace into hers. She would never come and live with Grace either; Grace saw that she had been kidding herself about that too. Perhaps to her then it would always be a casual thing, something that could be let go of at any moment. So where did that leave them? I could stop this, Grace thought, I could stop this now if I wanted to. But that was so much easier said than done. How do you stop loving someone? How do you stop wanting them? By an effort of will? Do you just wake up one day and weigh the thing up and say, no, I don’t want to do this any more; Sam doesn’t love me but I love Sam, Grace realized fully for the first time. What on earth am I going to do now?

  This is Annie and what was missing

  The money was bothering her. It shouldn’t have been but it was. She thought about it in the morning when she woke up and she thought about it at night before she went to bed. It wasn’t that she wanted him to grovel. Or was it? Maybe she did, even though this didn’t fit with her new kind persona. Perhaps she wanted him to say how grateful he was every time he spoke to her, perhaps she wanted him to fall on to the floor and grab her legs and expound over and over on her massive generosity. She needed at least one more thank you but that thank you was not forthcoming and so, every time she saw him, she felt under-appreciated, and that did not sit well with her. In fact, she realized now, she was annoyed, very annoyed, and not just with him but with herself for lending him the money and getting herself into this situation. At the very least she should tell the therapist and try and ‘work through it’ or whatever you did. What else was she paying her for? And above all she was annoyed by her lack of honesty with everyone. She had always prided herself on her directness. No matter if other people might find it abrasive, that was their lookout, it was important to be honest, but now she wasn’t even being that. What was happening to her? And she had always thought it was her mother who was the one who was the control freak but this morning she had found herself repacking her handbag again and again into ever more organized sections. She hadn’t hired a cleaner but the flat was cleaner than ever. She had even scrubbed the inside of all the kitchen drawers and cupboards, on a Saturday, on her hands and knees with rubber gloves on trying to get into a very difficult to reach corner while she looked forward to bleaching her moustache. What had happened to fun?

  She stood outside Violet’s bedroom listening to her faint snores and wanted to go in there and tell her about Laurence and ask her what to do but she couldn’t make herself. Annie never backed down. This bloody Sam woman, getting in the way. She went to Manfred’s in search of sugar.

  ‘Good to see you, Annie. Today you look especially radiant. Let me give you the Turkish Delight I’ve had tucked away for you.’ He started rooting under his counter and then came up for air with the box in his hand. ‘There you go. I meant to ask you when I saw you, did you get Violet to the therapist?’

  ‘No. I’ve been going instead.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yeah, I’d probably go if I had the … I was going to say something there … let me stick with “nerve”.’

  ‘Part of me thinks it’s weak.’

  ‘I think it’s the opposite. You’re trying to deal with stuff. Good on you. Now, this is not your ordinary Turkish Delight, I’ll have you know. This is the one my family favours. It’s a cut above the rest.’

  She came out of the shop feeling better. She rang Laurence.

  ‘I’m coming round later,’ she said.

  ‘Are you?’ said Laurence, and she didn’t like his offhand tone.

  ‘Yes, I am. Eight o’clock suit you?’

  ‘Could you perhaps bring some wine with you? I’m low.’

  She wanted to say, no, I bloody well can’t, I’m the woman, women don’t bring the wine, but she didn’t.

  ‘I’ll pick something up,’ she said.

  It was seven o’clock and Annie was still ironing, she found it soothing after a long day, ironed sheets, tea towels, socks, knickers even. Her drawers were a marvel of folded beauty, or an anal nightmare depending on how you thought about these things.

  She heard Violet tiptoe into the room. She had known full well that she was there, but, as normal now, had ignored knowing this fact. They were like magnets that repelled each other. Now she didn’t turn around.

  ‘What are you doing on Tuesday evening?’ asked Violet.

  ‘Why?’ said Annie, still not turning around.

  ‘I wanted, I mean, if you would like it, I mean …’

  ‘What?’ asked Annie, who now took out aggression on the iron, which was squirting steam into her face.

  ‘Would you like to come out to dinner with me?’ said Violet, sounding nervous. ‘And with Sam too? It would be nice for you to get to know her, she’s … she’s …’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Great,’ said Violet.

  Annie wrestled the iron back under control and continued ironing.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No,’ said Violet and Annie heard her go back to her room.

>   Annie looked at her watch. She was going to be late getting to Laurence’s but so what? Nothing wrong with making a man wait. Should she just have agreed to that? Probably not. It would be an awful evening, she would guarantee it, but she supposed it might help mend things with Violet and that could only be a good thing. Or maybe it would be easier to follow Violet into her room now and ask her what the hell was going wrong between them? But that seemed too much of a capitulation.

  ‘Thanks for the wine,’ said Laurence when she got to his and handed it to him. He looked at the label. She had deliberately gone for cheaper than she would normally buy just to teach him a lesson, but he made no comment, only slipped it into the freezer to chill quickly. He sat down at the piano and started to play something quiet. She was waiting to be told that she looked beautiful, although she had made only minimal effort on purpose, but he continued playing without looking at her.

  ‘You wanted to see me, Annie?’ he said. ‘Anything I should be worried about?’

  Again, that offhand voice he’d used on the phone. Annie was fed up with this.

  ‘Have you sorted things out now? Financially I mean.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, still playing and without looking at her. ‘All sorted.’

  Thank you, thank you, thank you, you are wonderful, thank you, thought Annie.

  ‘Would you like to go and have a peek at the wine?’

  ‘No,’ said Annie.

  He looked up.

  ‘Everything all right at work?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Good. Good. The glasses are in the cupboard over the sink.’