Adults

by Emma Jane Unsworth

  I can’t even remember what I answered in real life.

  MY MOTHER SAYS

  ‘Wait for it! Ooh!’

  She is straddling a bottle of Bollinger. The cork pops out and we both smile in shock. She pours out two coupes. She says it as we cheers:

  ‘Champagne is a verb.’

  Her credo. She used to say it the evenings when she had people round. The séances and tarot nights that descended into social orgies. She didn’t just have people round. She hosted, like a gigolo on a yacht. Those parties. All those people down in the lounge. There was Alan with his mesmerising tracheotomy, Donegan with her granite stare, Glynn with his glowing pate, luminous as the nose-cone of a rocket on re-entry, and old Miss Lunt who used to teach Latin and still came out with the odd phrase when she was startled (or possessed). It sounded like Hell itself. A gabble of voices. Catastrophic singing. I’d sit on my bed, trying to read, willing them all to leave. One time I got up and yelled ‘SPOONBENDER!!!!’ down the stairs. She shot up two flights like a rabbit, mojito muddler in hand. Other times, when they wouldn’t leave, I used to go to the bathroom, take her toothbrush out of the cup, pull down my pants and dab the bristles on my anus like it was giving it a little kiss. Mwa mwa mwa.

  ‘So, how is Unton?’ I ask cordially, to move things along.

  ‘Still the happiest small town in the world.’

  Small town is right. After Hiroshima happened, the local rag, the Unton Chronicle, ran the headline: UNTON MAN INJURED IN JAPANESE BOMB BLAST. Which tells you everything you need to know. Unton’s other claim to fame is a tall black pole in the town square. I showed it to Art on one of the few times I brought him up to visit. ‘Is it a maypole?’ he said, eyes wide. Oh no, I explained, this was the ‘Meat Pole’ – so-called because in ye olden days it was the custom to annually grease the pole and fix a large piece of meat to the top, then watch members of the community attempt to scale it. Sort of like the Wicker Man, but without the craftsmanship. If the climber reached the top they could take the meat home as a prize. That’s my cultural heritage.

  My hand grips my glass. I look at the folds of skin around the stem. In my teens, two separate psychics (friends of hers) told me I’d have four children because I had four creases on the side of my hand. Hilarious. And what did she want for me? A career as a doctor or a lawyer or, as she put it, ‘even a fucking accountant would do, Jenny.’ What was it she said? ‘An English degree will only deepen your female disadvantage. You’ll end up a teacher, or something else entirely that you’ll get into quickly, untrained. Something lowly. Women are expected to nurture and teach. We are the so-called architects of society. You know what I say? Fuck that. I’m shit at relationships and I’m proud of that. I am an ideas woman. An entrepreneur. And I didn’t work my arse off for fifteen years for you to become a cardie-wearing woodland creature.’

  (Becoming a cardie-wearing woodland creature was my rebellion, you understand.)

  I text Kelly:

  Hey

  She texts back:

  SHE LIVES!

  Get this for a curveball: my mother has come to stay

  I knew there had to be some crisis or other

  It is a crisis indeed

  Is she dying?

  Possibly. Will ask

  ‘Are you dying?’ I say. ‘Is this a situation that’s going to end in me wet-wiping your backside and reading you passages from The Little Book of Calm?’

  ‘No,’ she says, and then she sighs. ‘I want to help. I see you’re not yourself. And I can help. Beverly’s staying in my place and paying me rent.’ She sips her champagne. ‘And I might as well tell you, darling. I’ve enrolled on a course to train as a death doula.’

  ‘A death doula? What the fuck is that?’

  ‘Someone who guides a person out of this life and into the next.’

  ‘Right-oh.’

  ‘I already have transferable skills. I can offer the full package, so to speak. My client list is … well, it’s healthy, but it could be healthier, darling, you know. It’s almost as though the unhealthy might be key to my future success, if that’s not too tasteless a thing to say. I didn’t come this far to plateau. There’s a thirty-day training course starting next week in Balham. So you see, your text arrived at the perfect time. I’ve been meaning to get down and now … well, I’m like you all those years ago, aren’t I, your regular Dick Whittington.’

  ‘You can’t stay here for a month.’

  ‘I know! What a notion. I’m sure you have plans, help with money, all that sort of thing. Who are you texting?’

  ‘Kelly.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Fine, I think.’

  ‘She must still be so grateful to you, even all these years down the line. He must be a teenager now.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Still, you never forget when someone has done something for you; you do right by them, don’t you? Forever.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘There’s a bottle of Amaretto in my suitcase.’

  ‘I don’t have more than two drinks per night. For my sleep hygiene.’

  ‘Sleep hygiene? Makes me think of sheep dips.’

  ‘My phone tracks my sleep and I’ve been coming in short lately.’

  ‘They’re all trying to be our friends now, the phones, aren’t they, like the banks. The sleep tracking. The health data. That’s how they get us sucked in and make us need them so they can make us miserable again.’ She chugs her drink.

  ‘Know what I heard? If you have more than two drinks then your body has to spend more time breaking down the alcohol than looking after you.’

  ‘You know what I heard? If you have more than 3.5 units of alcohol per week, you are 85 per cent more likely to be judged by society.’

  HOW I MET KELLY

  I was coming home from a press screening. It was rush hour (it was always rush hour). My cab driver was nice, and Magic FM was playing ‘If You Leave Me Now’ by Chicago. I’d made my excuses for the afterparty, but I was dreading getting home, really – to another lounge full of flatmates. I was sick of all the flatmates by then; round after round, their demands and needs and petty thievery. I couldn’t wait to be alone with my imagination. I was so depressed at the prospect of going home that evening I’d taken a £40 cab to cheer myself up. It was only half working. I was mostly thinking, I could have put this in my savings, and been an inch closer.

  The weirdest thing was, a black balloon bounced across the road in front of the cab about five minutes before, and the driver swerved and we both said Oh! and I suppose it made us both pay attention a bit more, that standard portent of doom. I certainly had my eyes on the road. We drove on another few minutes and that’s when I saw him: a tiny kid, toddling across the grass verge at the side of the carriageway, heading for the road.

  ‘STOP THE CAB!’ I yelled, surprised at the sound of my own authority.

  The driver stopped. ‘I see him!’ the driver said.

  ‘I’m going!’ I shouted, flinging open the door. ‘Call the police!’

  I still don’t know where this person in me came from.

  The child toddled on, picking up speed. I headed for him, fast – my shoes slipping as I accelerated. I have never felt adrenaline like it. I ran and ran, and when I reached him, in the wet grass, he was a few feet from the barrier. He was wearing green pyjamas and little monster slippers streaked up with mud. He stopped. I didn’t. Cars were beeping. A few other cars had stopped. He stopped and pointed at the road. I grabbed him, and he did not want to be picked up. ‘No!’ he said, kicking me with his dirty slippers. ‘No, no!’

  I gripped him like a prize. ‘Shh,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, okay, okay.’ I don’t know where those words came from. Another random voice inside me. Another past life or future life seeping through the cracks. He stopped struggling. I felt accepted, strange and warm.

  I turned my back to the traffic and saw Kelly running towards us. She was monochrome with fear. She barked two barely deciphe
rable syllables in an animal panic – a name I would later come to know. I walked with him towards her.

  INBOX

  Hi Foxface how are you? X x

  Great! How are you? X x

  Awesome! Question: do you want the vintage cups and saucers? I packed them by accident and just realised! X x

  No thanks x x

  Are you sure? You spent ages collecting them from charity shops. You were obsessed with putting mulled wine and hot punch in them at parties x x

  Obsessed is a strong word! I was just zestful, as I recall x x

  Okay well if you’re free next Friday come to my exhibition launch! Would be so great to see you. X x

  I might do. Where is it? I’ve got a few things going on at the mo x x

  From 6.30 p.m. at the Hexagon Gallery on the South Bank. Bring a friend x x

  Okay thanks I usually have work drinks on a Friday but will see xx

  I’ll be wearing a red carnation. Holding a bag of crockery x x

  Seriously don’t worry about the crockery x x

  My mother is asleep in her chair, her bottom lip drooping. I’ve never seen the resemblance. I look back at my phone and then I go into the contacts and add Art’s surname to his name – So formal! So distant! He isn’t just Art – he is an Art. He is Art who?

  I only wish I knew more Arts.

  ART SAID

  ‘Listen, is this still a good thing for us to be doing, do you think?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’m just aware that it’s becoming … stressful.’

  We’d been trying for four months. I was pissing on jumbo bags of mail-order ovulation sticks. I was taking my temperature every morning before I got out of bed. The fucking had gone. In its place was a fever. It rots the crops, that kind of monomania. It curdles the milk. I felt passive, waiting. I hate waiting. Waiting creates too much thinking time. I thought about it a lot, during that time: how I was shrinking into a wench while he was still growing into the adventure of himself.

  ‘Is it?’ I said, chewing my thumb.

  ‘You’re getting pretty … obsessive about it. Like it’s the be-all and end-all. It’s so much pressure to put us under. And I don’t want that. I don’t need it. You know, I need to be in a good headspace to do what I do. To do it well, I mean.’

  ‘Yeah. I just – well, it’s a project, isn’t it. I don’t like to fail.’

  ‘Fail?’ he said. ‘This is not a competition. Come on, let’s go and relax. Only beauty!’ he said. ‘Only beauty in my house!’

  ‘It’s my house.’

  ‘In this house! Our house! Let’s have a beautiful life, and enjoy ourselves, can’t we?’

  He was still taking my picture, now and then. I posed for him. I stood. I sat. I lay. I smiled. Even when he was just snapping for fun, just for him, he’d say, ‘Smile!’ Like that. Like a fucking catcaller. But no one wants to smile all the time, do they? No wants to look like their heart is too soon made glad.

  And then (are you ready?) I started posing alone, in the front room, by the bay window. I held my arm rigid, finger in mouth, pressing. I was waiting for him to come home – knowing that he would go straight to a bar after a job; knowing that I would eat another dinner alone; but still, I stood at that window, staring through another screen, waiting for love to show up.

  Nevertheless.

  We got pregnant. At least, I think we got pregnant. So many things happened to make me doubt it, I started to feel like Queen Victoria by the end with her succession of uterine phantoms.

  But there it was, in blue and white.

  In November, I sent him an emoji of a cross.

  Turning Christian?

  Guess again.

  Woah.

  Yep.

  Wow.

  Innit.

  How do you feel?

  Like I’m awaiting transformation. How do you feel?

  Five.

  Minutes.

  Later.

  Excited!!

  ART SAID

  ‘Are you sure? Like, really really sure?’

  He’d come home with presents – big cartons of juice and boxes of pre-cut fruit. I gave him the test for his own perusal.

  ‘Well, there you go.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t think these things are often wrong.’

  ‘I kind of wish you’d waited for me to do the test.’

  ‘I was just so impatient, and I didn’t really believe it could be.’

  (This was only half true. I’d wanted to manage the potential shame myself. I’d decided that if it was negative, I just wouldn’t tell him.)

  ‘This is my thing now, too,’ Art said. ‘Scary!’

  I wondered if he’d rest his hand proprietorially on my stomach or, anything else gruesome and cheesy like that. But no. We sat there, each holding a large Tetra Pak of juice, looking at each other, and the juice, and the room, alternately, incredulously – unsure whether to hug each other in celebration or whether that would be too self-congratulatory or inappropriate given the ambivalence of feelings (fear/joy, nervous/excited, panic/satisfaction). Personally, I was paralysed. It’s hard to do anything with a big carton of juice in your hand.

  Months later, at the hospital, the nurses made me doubt myself all over again. There’s so little of the HCG hormone in your system, it’s really surprising that you were—

  That I was ever actually pregnant? That’s what I wanted to say. But I was all out of chat that day.

  Sometimes I think I just made it all up. It was part of my perfect personal brand at that point, curated by myself for myself. Put out there to make me like me. Or some twisted shit like that.

  WHAT LASTS?

  I said to Kelly, the night after Art moved out. We were in her kitchenette on the cocktails and coke – brains wired, hearts stretched and pinned. ‘What actually lasts, over time?’

  ‘Passion.’

  ‘Not sex?’

  ‘Not usually. But they can be connected.’

  ‘Art asked me to “milk” him a few weeks ago.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, I found it quite disturbing. Why would a man want to be milked?’

  ‘Maybe he was trying to spice things up.’

  ‘Bum steer.’

  ‘Well, that’s another option.’

  ‘Not for this cowgirl.’

  Kelly speared a maraschino cherry with an acrylic nail. ‘Sex is a funny one. It always changes over time.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘My va-jay-jay.’

  She’s no Schopenhauer, Kelly.

  BAD STAND-UP

  Hi where are you?

  On my way home from work, why?

  You were meant to meet us at the movies at 6 for Sonny’s bday

  Oh shit, I’m so sorry. It’s been a tough week. Totally forgot. So sorry!

  You were meant to bring the cake as well

  So sorry! Like I said, tough week

  It’s okay. Forget it. Just don’t say you can do it if you can’t do it. It’s really important that, with kids

  Are you having some kind of go at me in that ‘as a mother’ way you do sometimes because we did talk about this

  Just forget it, Jenny. Say hi to your mum. See ya.

  GHOSTESS WITH THE MOSTEST

  When I get to the end of the street I detect the unmistakable whiff of burning sage. My heart takes a nosedive. It can mean only one thing: she is bothering the ether.

  Sure enough, as I snick open the front door I hear them. Is there anybody there? Is there anybody there? A terribly random endeavour, don’t you think? Sort of like Chat Roulette, but with ghosts. You’ve literally got a one in three chance of getting a wanker. I always thought of the afterlife as being like an airport waiting lounge, filled with impatient spirits, with one phone at one end, that would occasionally ring and be pounced on. It’s for Kevin! Kevin? And a spirit would sprint over, pushing through the crowds, hand raised. That’s me! I’m Kevin! Wait, don’t hang up!

  My mothe
r would be sitting on a table to hold the room. She always made sure her head was higher than anyone’s, like Caesar. I remember the nights I couldn’t revise because the caterwauling was so loud. My French listening test was a disaster. I arrived late and said I’d run over a dog on my bike; an unconvincing lie, I see that now. The tutor looked at me woefully. I sat down. I had missed half the test. French was my only B. When I got the results it was like a pair of soft breasts sitting there, jiggling, mocking me, among the strong, triangular As. I could not function in that house.

  This is my house.

  Her head darts out of the lounge. ‘Jenny! Come join us!’

  I step forward and say in what I hope is a hushed tone: ‘What are you doing? You know I don’t like being around this.’

  ‘The spirits live amongst us, Jenny.’

  ‘Christ knows where they find the space, with all your coats.’

  ‘It’s just a few people, connecting.’

  ‘Getting drunk, more like.’

  ‘Alcohol is the safest choice in the capital. I forgot how the water makes tea taste like a goat’s arse-pocket.’

  A huge man comes out of the lounge. He has earlobes like medallions of beef. ‘Carmen,’ he says. To me, an enforced and dramatic, ‘Hello.’ To Carmen again: ‘I’m just worried we will run out of time to make contact.’

  He looks stricken. This is the unsavoury part. The wounded and hopeless, the lost. Preyed on.

  ‘Just a moment, Benjamin, love,’ my mother says.

  I look down and see an open cardboard box, filled with A6 flyers. I pull one out.

  Carmen McLaine – Spiritual Healer and Psychic-Medium. Specialist advice on Love and Relationships, Family Matters, Exams, Careers, Jobs, Luck, Death and more. 25 years’ expertise in dealing with Spirit. Pay after results. 07876 211560. Facebook: Carmen McLaine

  ‘What are these?’

  ‘Flyers. I decided to try and drum up a bit of business locally.’

  ‘You’ve put these through people’s doors? Around here?’