‘So, how you doing, birthday girl?’
‘Taking stock, Shiv. I’m taking stock. You will too when it comes for you, this one. The big five-oh. I’ve been in forward motion, Shiv. All my life. I’ve seen other people fall down along the way and just kept pushing on. I mean, I’m not saying it’s led to the success you’ve had, but I can see it. A long clear line through my life, push push push, don’t stop. Like, what are those things they put on horses, to make them focus?’
‘Blinkers.’
‘Blinkers. It’s not that I’ve had some brilliant career or that this line has even been a straight one, you know? Just that I’ve never lost that focus. I’ve never settled for anything I didn’t feel was right. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have.’
Siobhan looked at the clock above the bar, committed herself to missing the last train home.
‘But you didn’t, and that makes you you.’
Clio was in full surge now, words vomiting from her almost before she could shape them.
‘I dunno, Shiv. I kind of feel like you and me, we didn’t pay attention when they were trying to beat us down. You watch women trying to go through their lives and there’s always some sort of fucking thing that chucks them off eventually, like, they’re bred without ambition, or they have it all knocked out of them? Internalized repression. You hear me? And, God knows, it wasn’t that I had a stable or even supportive childhood, fuck no, so I don’t know where I got it from. It strikes me that it’s a very male trait, this thing we have. Not saying, like, that the desire to push yourself forward is all to do with whichever chromosome you have. I think it’s there at the beginning in all of us, and most little girls are ground right down by it. I’ve seen brilliant women drop out of the race because there wasn’t enough security or because they faced too much misogyny and couldn’t get any higher, or they got pregnant, or they were worried about their biological clocks … they always give up, like it’s been pre-programmed inside them. Built-in obsolescence, making way for a younger model. But not us, babe.’
Siobhan had had many conversations like this with Clio over the years. Drunk, in bars, at the ends of nights. She was trying to remember if they’d ever actually spoken sober, but she’d concluded that this was probably how Clio conducted most of her conversations – after all, it had been how Siobhan herself had conversed for most of her adult life, long, rambling monologues where the other participant could nod along emphatically or shout against the flow, trying to change its direction. She prepared to wade in.
‘I don’t know. I feel it. I feel that little voice trying to whisper me down most days. A lot more now, since the kids. It’s been a constant fight against it, to do anything.’
‘No, you’re wrong. I don’t see that for you—’
‘And yeah, when you’re nineteen or twenty-one and the whole fucking world is telling you you’re great and sexy, of course you believe them, you take it as read. But all of those people had agendas. I mean, that skinny little body I used to have, those perky wee tits, they were other people’s currency. I might not have shagged anyone for work, but I changed hands a lot more than I’m comfortable admitting, and when there weren’t enough drugs to block it out, it took its toll. I mean, they sold that whole first album on a picture of my crotch, babe. Your single cover, the one with the tight T-shirt for “Rise Up”? And you’re telling me you’ve never faced it? Come on, Clio. Your whole career has been marked by blokes shouting you down.’
‘And I’ve never listened to them. That’s the point I’m making. Neither have you. This is why – I’m trying to pass on my wisdom here, you know. Woman artist to woman artist. You and me, we have something deep inside us that drives us that other women have lost, I think.’
There was an image nudging away in Siobhan’s head. Some bins, a street light.
‘Clio. I’m forty-two, with over twenty years in the music business behind me. I’m not that much younger than you and I’m not a wee lassie any more. Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to feel now. I’m bloody exhausted, is how I feel. I told myself this shit for years, too; that I’d managed to make it through the machine, the way it grinds you up, because I was in some way hardier or smarter than the other girls. Then I got to forty and the interest started drying up because fewer people want to fuck a pudgy wee woman who can’t shift the baby weight—’
‘It’s not shit,’ Clio was saying, her voice getting louder, as a pair of hands planted themselves on the sides of the booth, fencing them in to a tiny space together.
‘Ladies. What are we drinking?’
He just wouldn’t go away, would he? Siobhan glared at him. Clio gave him a quick look.
‘Gin and white wine, Neil. Thanks.’
‘Not all together, I hope?’
Neither of them laughed and he backed away towards the empty bar, nodding, looking for purpose.
‘So you’re telling me,’ Siobhan said, enjoying the space between her words but speaking quickly enough that Clio couldn’t start in again, ‘that you’ve never found yourself subjugated or disadvantaged by being a woman?’
‘Not in here, no.’ She tapped the coiled, pinned arrangement of hair. ‘The outside world can say what it wants; I can rest easy knowing that I’ve stayed true to me. I’ve never had to compromise my sense of self for a sniff at fame or anything. It’s made me hard and good, and I’m fucking proud of that is all I’m trying to say.’
Siobhan remembered the noise that journalist guy had made in that alleyway, all those years ago. That groaning that men did. It wasn’t even a very logical argument, when she thought about it, but it was obvious that Clio needed to tell herself this story, had needed to rewrite her past to get herself to this moment. Maybe she genuinely didn’t remember? Maybe it didn’t suit her to remember. Who knows, Siobhan thought, what bits of my history are hiding from me? Let her have it. On her birthday. Let her be.
Three glasses were plonked down on the table, an announcement of presence.
‘So. Ladies. Having a good night?’ he said.
IDA
Euston–Oxenholme, 2011
Just before the train pulled out and north, a woman shoved herself down into the seat opposite. Arms and legs flustered, big showy movements to take off her jacket, cram her bag under the table. She looked about herself irritably, hard face, trampy make-up, thin lips drawn. A bad light coming off her and the iron-rich smell of blood between them in the hot carriage; time of the month and wants everyone to know it, Ida thought, raising her magazine up higher, a feeble barrier between them. She’d bought the magazine for this very purpose. Peeping over, Ida saw the woman had taken out a book and wasn’t reading it, a notepad and wasn’t writing in it. She fiddled with a phone and stared out the window, all of her gestures screaming for attention.
Ida knew this type. Her own sister, God rest her, had been this type. The sort of person who sucked in all the light, recast everyone else as the spear carriers in her own personal drama. May had given nothing and nothing and nothing for seventy-two years; at her funeral people had whispered that Ida was an unfeeling bitch, or just in shock, sitting up there in the front row and not crying a drop. It was relief, that’s what it was, and it was none of their business what else.
This woman wanted Ida. She had some long story to tell, fat with indignation, full of people who had done her wrong, and she needed Ida to sit there, clucking and patting her shoulder, agreeing that every outrage was terrible, terrible. Then they’d get to Oxenholme and Ida would get off the train and the woman would have forgotten her face before the doors had even closed. Ida didn’t need this story. She didn’t need anything from this woman at all, and she was old and ugly enough now to know that you could resist these people, when they clamoured for you, even in emotional distress, and not feel guilty afterwards. Ida had her smart new suitcase packed and her hair done, and she was off for a spa weekend she’d got a great deal on in the back of the Express. She would get off the train, and she would not think of the woman aga
in, even if it meant rereading the same gruesome stories of incest, celebrity divorce and freakish cysts the size of footballs for the whole three-hour journey. That magazine was not coming down.
It worked well enough, for the first half hour or so. The woman tutted loudly, tried to buffet her way in with interjections in a surprisingly lovely, soft Scottish accent. ‘That’s the ticket inspector coming.’ ‘Don’t suppose you have change of a fiver, do you?’ Ida grunted upward and downward in turn from behind her shield. You’ve mistaken me for a nice old lady, my girl, she thought. Should have caught me when I was a nice young lady.
They were just pulling out of Crewe when the woman’s phone rang, a little burst of classical music or something that Ida knew from somewhere. It wasn’t unpleasant. She almost broke cover to point out that this was the quiet carriage, but caught herself just in time.
‘It is. Um, two-two-sixty-seven-two-five-four-four. Yes. Right. OK. Please.’
…
‘No.’
…
‘So there’s no chance it could—’
…
‘I’m here, I’m here. I just – just taking it in.’
‘No, I’m on my way up north just now. It’s my mother’s birthday. Do you need me to—’
…
‘I just. Can you – is there. Is there. Absolutely no way it could turn around or still still still still continue?’
…
‘Yeah I can do yeah no OK I will—’
…
‘Yes. Thank you. OK. Thank you. Yes. Thank you.’
The woman didn’t seem to be moving. She’d put her own invisible shield up, didn’t want Ida any more. Wasn’t aware of Ida.
Ida risked lowering the magazine. The woman was looking down in the direction of the table. Her left hand was there, open, palm up, no ring, but she wasn’t really looking at it. Moving gently and quickly, Ida extracted herself from the seat, careful not to nudge the woman’s legs. She’d always loved the feeling of walking down a train carriage, against the direction of travel, the pull on her body as it fought the risk of stumbling. People saw the nice old lady coming, hauling herself from handle to handle on the edges of seats, and moved themselves in without meeting her eye. In what it had pleased the train guard to call ‘the dining carriage’, although ‘grimy coffee stand with three sandwiches and a beer fridge’ might have been closer to the truth, a uniformed man with a sagging face groaned at her as he scooshed hot water over teabags.
‘You would not believe the day that I’m having, my love.’
‘No,’ she said, handing him the exact money and closing her face to him. ‘I probably wouldn’t.’
Back at the seat, she nudged the second cup across the table to the woman, who was still in exactly the same position, and readied herself for a conversation she’d had twice before and would have once more in her life.
‘It’s got sugar in it,’ she said. ‘For the shock.’
The woman nodded slowly, and curled her hands around the cardboard slip cover.
‘I’ve lost my baby,’ she said.
‘I thought it might have been that,’ Ida said.
It broke the seal, and the tears began.
‘The tea’ll help,’ said Ida. ‘Well, nothing will help. Not now. And not for a good few months, my duck, I’m going to be honest with you. But take a sip of tea. The heat and the sugar will just bring you back to yourself again.’
The woman nodded.
‘How long?’ Ida asked.
‘Eight weeks,’ said the woman. ‘I only found out a month ago.’
‘Was it a planned one?’
‘No. God no. I thought I’d managed to avoi— Well. I’m not exactly in the first flush of youth, am I.’
‘Mm. “Youth” is a relative thing,’ said Ida. The woman almost smiled.
‘Is it your first?’
The woman nodded, then remembered something, shook her head.
‘I’m bleeding. I’ve been bleeding for a while. That’s how I found out. They did tests – but they thought it was holding steady. The numbers were going up, but they’ve dropped now. Too much. They’ve dropped too much.’
‘And they’re telling you – what? Just to wait it out?’
‘Just to let this thing carry on dying. I’m just to go about my day, and it will keep dying, and eventually the numbers will tell me that it’s properly dead. I might need antibiotics, to f—. To fight it. Make my body flush it out. Like an infection. I didn’t even know if I wanted it. I was thinking about getting rid of it. And then I was thinking, if it could push its way through my old ovaries and a condom, it must have some force behind it, you know, like maybe it was meant to be. But no. But no. Little – fucking – quitter, eh? Scuse my language.’
Ida waved a hand to brush away the word, brought it down on the table to rest near the woman’s wrist.
‘My last one was at forty-six. I thought it was the change. A nasty little postscript on the end of twenty years.’
‘Your last one?’
‘There were five.’ The woman gulped air. ‘I’m telling you this because in the next few months you’re going to realize that nobody will talk about it with you. At all. It happens to so many women and they all keep it to themselves, buttoned all the way up. Oh, I don’t know why. Maybe we just don’t want to bother people with it. Because it’s about blood, death and, you know, our parts, and nobody wants to think about those. It’s not nice for people. Anyway, you’re going to find the silence around it very hard, my duck. Very hard indeed. At least this way you’re prepared for it.’
‘I can’t imagine coping with five. I can’t imagine coping with this one.’
‘It didn’t get easier; I changed to accommodate it. We changed, my husband and me.’
The woman flinched a little, and Ida thought she wouldn’t ask. She carried on. ‘He wanted it more than me, at first, anyway. He gave up hoping round about the third one, but I was determined to prove I could do it. Needed to have a victory over my body, or God, or fate or something. Silly young fool I was. Should have just accepted it, I told myself later. Adopted, something. The last one broke him.’
She left the space between them, a courtesy. The woman finished her tea and set the cup down.
‘My boyfriend doesn’t know.’
Boyfriend, then.
‘He’s – we had all these conversations about, oh, aren’t we lucky, neither of us want kids, they would just, like, stop us from doing what we want to. Don’t we have this good life. And we do. We do. But I think – I don’t really want to think about this, but if I’m honest, it’s always been there – he’s fourteen years younger than me, you see. And we keep it quiet, because of his family and his fans and all that, load of bullshit. But I think, if it came to it, I think nothing would scare him off faster than a baby shackling him to this. This mess. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times he tells me otherwise, and I’m not asking him for it. I’m not. I’m not one of those needy fucking arseholes – sorry – always nipping away at their men, tell me you love me, tell me you love me. It’s there, though.’
Ida nodded, squeezed her hand quickly, put it back under the table again. The woman turned away and put her face on the window for a while, shuddering out the occasional sob.
‘The other thing you need to be prepared for is the way it will come back on you,’ Ida said, after a pause. ‘Some months away, maybe even years, you can think it’s fine. You might have stopped remembering it every day, you might have moved on. And then you’ll see something on telly, or maybe your body will do something, and it can hit you all over again. Often in the worst places. When you’re at work. When you’re waiting in the queue at the post office. Whenever your brain is running low on energy and has nothing to distract itself. Now that, that does get better over the years. It’s the sort of thing a silly old woman would say, but time really is a great healer in this case. I want you to know that too.’
‘But I need to get over it. I never wanted
them. I never did. I actually got divorced because I never wanted them – did me a favour there, right enough. But still. I’m not the mothering kind. I’m just not. This doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Never mind all that. This is a physical trauma. It’s happening to your body, which is flooding you with hormones, and they’re unleashing all these emotions. You just need to let it happen for now. Get yourself somewhere safe for tonight – I overheard you say you’re going to visit your mother?’
The woman snorted. ‘She’ll be no use. She’s possibly the last person anyone would ever want to turn to in this situation. Ha! With such a fucking – sorry – shining example of glorious motherhood it’s no wonder I didnay want kids, eh. It’s not even her actual birthday – that was last week. She doesn’t let me take her out on her actual birthday because she’s always got plans with her husband and his people. And we have to meet in a big town away from where she actually lives because she’s ashamed of me. She tells me as much. Every time. Yeah, that’s going to be a real balm for the soul.’
Ida thought for a second.
‘Do you know what I would do? Put her off for a night. Sometimes, I like to check myself into a hotel. One of the big ones, run by a big company. Maybe one with a spa. Somewhere where nobody knows you, and there are people on call to bring you what you want and call you Miss whatever-your-name-is. They give you a clean, lovely room with a door that locks behind you and a big dressing gown to put on. And you make that room yours, for a night, make it into whatever you want it to be. You’d need to spend a bit of money, mind you.’
The woman followed her eyeline, over the ripped jeans, shabby rucksack, chipped nail polish, and managed a bit more of a smile.
‘I’ve never really agreed with that sort of place.’
‘You’ve never been to one, then. You pick up a phone – it’ll probably be someone from Poland or some place like that, because nobody British works in hotels any more it seems – and you tell them that you want steak and chips, maybe, and a glass of sherry. Whatever you fancy. And it comes to your door. And you can eat it on a big bed, or in a bubble bath. The whole point about these places is that they’re anonymous and nobody asks any questions. These people are actually paid to serve you – you don’t even have to thank them.’ You could probably even swear at them if you like, seeing as it comes so naturally to you, she thought and didn’t say.
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