Ed hung on his friend’s every word, nodding in approval. Vicky tore her glare from Jenny’s direction and stared at the two men, all of a sudden looking blank, as if she had been stonewalled, excluded forcibly from a club that she could never join. Jenny watched her, suddenly realising what the problem was. Vicky was trying to break into a circle that was unbreakable.
The tight circle made up of Ed and Guillaume.
It was then that Jenny also realised that Vicky couldn’t bear for Guillaume to pay attention to anyone but her – and since they had arrived, Guillaume had slipped into his familiar way of being completely wrapped up in Ed. Of course. Jenny had realised a long time ago that the two men were best left alone but Vicky didn’t have this insight. And she was jealous.
“Oh, here we go,” she sighed dramatically. “Africa, Africa, Africa – always on about Africa, aren’t you, lover?”
If she hoped the endearment would draw Guillaume back to her, she couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, it was as if her mention of Africa – as if intoning the magic word three times – somehow reminded him of something and he turned his attention even further away from her to grab his coat which was slung behind him on the sofa.
He held it by the collar in his left hand and rummaged through the pockets with his right, fumbling and searching everywhere until he retrieved his prize.
“Man – Ed, you have got to listen to this – it’s the one I was telling you about, yeah?” he said, thrusting a CD case at his friend who stuffed a cheese-laden cracker into his mouth, his cheeks bulging as he wiped his hand on his jeans and accepted the case.
“What’s this?” he muttered, spraying crumbs down his polo shirt and flicking them off absentmindedly with one hand while examining the proffered gift with the other.
Jenny watched Vicky as her face contorted at a rapid rate. Disgust at the crumbs, disappointment and frustration as Guillaume again took the conversation in a direction away from her. She slumped back onto the sofa and stared into space, her expression sullen.
“What is this, mate?” Ed asked, holding the case close to his eyes at first and then at an exaggerated distance to emphasise the fact that he couldn’t make out his friend’s handwriting on the amateur recording. Guillaume ignored him, pumped with passion about his subject.
“Tuareg music, man, from Mali. I picked it up when I was in Africa.”
Vicky’s eyes rolled dramatically and she tutted loudly, to no avail.
“These guys are rebels and refugees – just listen to the rhythms – that beat – this is the music of the desert, my friend. Put it on. Put. It. On!”
Ed acted instantly, pushing himself to his feet and shaking out the pins and needles before crossing to the CD player on the bookshelves behind where he had been sitting. He pressed ‘play’ and the room was instantly filled with sounds of drums and guitars, the beat infectious. Guillaume threw his head back and laughed aloud, clapping his hands in obvious joy. Ed, perennially reserved, stood listening, his chin in his palm while his index finger beat out the time on his cheek.
“Don’t encourage him,” Vicky hissed suddenly at her brother, drawing her feet back up sharply underneath her on the sofa and arranging her seating position so that she faced away from Guillaume. She looked disdainfully over her shoulder at him as he moved his arms, eyes shut, in time with the music. “All he wants to talk about – bloody Africa.” she hissed, not once taking her eyes off him. Guillaume remained oblivious. “So in love with Africa he’s missing all the good stuff under his nose here in London!”
Guillaume continued to ignore her. Jenny glanced from Vicky to him and back again, remaining silent.
“So where did you get all this lot, then?” demanded Vicky, turning her attention back to Jenny. She pointed at the now depleted cheeseboard – a mess of crumbs and grape-stalks and strawberry hulls. “Your cheeseboard, that everyone seems to love so much. Where might one get such amazing cheese?”
Vicky glared again at Guillaume, and then back at Jenny whose eyes widened as she tried to figure out if Vicky was making some sort of joke. It was soon clear that she wasn’t.
Jenny cleared her throat and looked nervously at Ed before replying. “I bought it all today – there’s a market nearby on Wednesday mornings – all this stuff is organic and fresh from people’s farms and stuff . . .”
“And how was you able to get to a farmer’s market on a Wednesday morning? Pull a sickie, did you?” demanded Vicky. “That’s hardly responsible, is it? Fine way to go about losing a job, if you ask me.”
Ed interrupted her from his standing position behind Jenny in front of the CD player. “Says the girl who’s managed to hold down her current position for a whopping – what is it, three months now?”
Vicky glared at her brother. “I work in retail, Edmund,” she sneered. “It’s a field where there is high personnel turnover.”
Ed snorted. “You mean you’ve never stuck at anything any longer in your life.” He looked back at Guillaume. “Gui, I’m not sure I’m crazy about this stuff . . .”
“Actually I’ve given up work,” blurted Jenny suddenly, regretting it instantly. She hadn’t wanted Ed’s family to know yet, not until she’d figured out what she was going to do next. It had only happened a couple of weeks before, after all.
Vicky reacted as if she had been shot. “You’ve what?” she demanded.
Jenny threw another glance at Ed. “I’ve – we’ve decided that I should take some time out,” she muttered quietly.
Vicky turned suddenly red and pushed herself upright on the couch, all the while glaring at Jenny.
“To do what exactly?” she demanded. “Sponge off my big brother? My mother’s always said this was your plan, what with our Ed doing so well for himself. She was right – she knew this day would come and here it is. Little Miss Retain her Independence shows her true colours at last!”
It was Ed who stepped in. “Steady on, Vicky,” he said, in disbelief at his sister’s outpouring of vitriol. “It was my idea actually. Jenny didn’t want to give up work – but we decided together that it was the best thing for us and Bee. It’s nothing to do with you, or Mum for that matter.”
An awkward silence fell across the room, apart from the jangling guitars from the CD player. When it eventually broke the silence, Guillaume’s voice was rich and positive. And directed at Jenny.
“Congratulations,” he said firmly. “I think that’s absolutely bloody great news. I love it when I hear about people shaking off The Man, striking out on their own.”
“It’s great, isn’t it, Gui?” agreed Ed.
“Absolutely bloody fantastic, man. Breaking free from the shackles and all that.”
Jenny blushed.
“So what you gonna do with yourself then, if you’re having a ‘break’ as you call it,” spat Vicky.
Buoyed by Ed and Guillaume’s support, Jenny felt more able. “Oh, I don’t know just yet,” she shrugged nonchalantly. “Learn to drive, probably. Do a course in origami – get some pigeons, run a flea circus – who knows?” She finished the sentence with a grin and a glance over her shoulder at Ed. They exchanged a smile.
“A flea circus! Loving it!” guffawed Guillaume suddenly, clapping his hands loudly. “Seriously, Jen – hats off! A toast to you!” He picked up his half empty wineglass and raised it in her direction, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on her as he took a generous slug.
Jenny smiled back, making rare eye contact with her husband’s friend. An eye contact that she suddenly found difficult to break. For a split second, she felt the others fade from the room, the music go quiet and her stomach lurch in a disconcerting way.
The spell was broken by Ed clinking his glass loudly against Guillaume’s.
“See, Jen? I told you that some people would agree with me that it’s bloody great, didn’t I?” he said, taking a moment to direct a pointed glare at his sister who limply lifted her own glass in toast and then made a point of slamming it down again on the table, deli
berately avoiding her coaster yet again.
“Unlike, however,” Ed continued jokingly, “this bloody music! Sorry, Gui, but it’s a thumbs-down from me. I’m in a little bit of a Radiohead mood, actually, if that’s okay with everyone?”
Without waiting for an answer, Ed crossed back again toward the CD player and pressed ‘eject’ for the second time. Vicky groaned loudly but Ed ignored her and went about inserting OK Computer into the vacant CD holder and pressing ‘play’, before turning sharply and flicking Guillaume’s CD rapidly back in the direction of its owner who made a fumbled catch. Guillaume replaced the CD into the case that Ed had left on the coffee table and smiled at Jenny.
“Does he make you listen to this miserable droning all the time?” he beamed jokingly, nodding at Ed as he did so, holding her in the same, intense stare as before.
“I like Radiohead,” mumbled Jenny awkwardly, trying her best to ignore the sensation of heat as her colour rose, like a schoolgirl being spoken to by the teacher on whom she has a crush. She didn’t know what possessed her to suddenly take a deep breath and fix Guillaume with a stare of her own. “But I liked your music too,” she said boldly. “A lot, in fact.”
Guillaume held her stare and responded by smiling a lazy grin – like a sleeping tiger, she thought. And Jenny smiled back. Not quite sure why, but not quite able to stop herself either.
Chapter 18
1999
Jenny
And that was how it began.
I’m alone upstairs just now. Ed is in the kitchen, preparing lunch, and Bee is playing in her room. I can hear her singing to herself. She gets that from me, I think. At least, I like to think that. Being dead, as I am, I like to grasp what I can that connects me to her – apart from the genes. As she gets older, I see that all of her mannerisms seem to come from her father. Starting a sentence with a long ‘well . . .’ when she can’t think of what to say next, the way she rests her chin in her hand to think or to listen intently. There is little left of me.
I was a choir girl all the way through school. Until my mum died and I couldn’t do it any more. It made me too emotional to carry on so I gave up. Made me think of her so much that I couldn’t sing a note for fear that I’d cry – and I had to stay strong. For my dad, myself, for everyone really. It pained me when people would sympathise with me – when they’d make that ‘oh-my-God-I’m-so-sorry-for-your-loss’ face. It embarrassed me – worse, it made me feel sorry for them. They were right – it was my loss, not theirs. So it shouldn’t make them feel bad. And I’d be at pains to let them know this. Would cast it aside with a flick of my hand, reassure them that it was fine, that I was fine, that it was all hands on deck at home and sorry, no, I couldn’t go to the disco, or get to hockey practice any more or pop down to the precinct on Saturday. I couldn’t bear being felt sorry for, being watched sympathetically in case I fell apart – the spectre at the feast. Which is ironic, considering my current status.
When Mum died, I had to change my priorities. I had a house to look after, and my dad – not that my schoolmates could really understand that – but I just couldn’t drop everything at the slightest invitation. So people stopped asking.
So when I got to college, to Darvill’s, I had a blank slate, a fresh start. And people there took it that this was just the way I was, and left me to it.
Such responsibility I had. It must be why I found it easy to look after Bee. Well, since I’d lost mine, I’d had to be a mother, didn’t I? A sort of mother to my father. Which wasn’t right – but if I didn’t do it, then who would have? And all of my life, up until that summer – the summer before I died – it hadn’t bothered me. I wouldn’t say that I was happy, but I was okay – willing to accept that this was the way that things were. I was fine with the missed nights out with friends – girlie nights of nail-painting and too much cheap wine – the dates that never happened.
I was fine with the fact that my own company was the best I could hope for.
Unaware, truly, of how much I had missed.
Which was maybe why I didn’t fight those feelings that hit me like a freight train that summer. I would have dismissed them out of hand before but maybe there was something different about that year – something I couldn’t control, something I didn’t expect – the wind blowing a certain way – or something I saw on TV or in a newspaper that triggered my subconscious into realising that pieces of my life were void and blank. Maybe it was just pent-up normal teenage-girl stuff that I had denied for years that needed to escape – a rush of hormones, or passions or desires or whatever it is that girls are supposed to experience, that I had sat on, like an overfull suitcase, while I kept house and tried to keep my father sane. Maybe that was it. Maybe I had just denied the insanity that screamed through my bones at having to take on all that responsibility because my surviving parent had relinquished his? Maybe it was all of those things that finally bobbed to the surface, that blew the lid off the suitcase and scattered pieces of me everywhere. Whatever it was, for that short time – it can’t have been more than a month or so – I was a different woman.
Take my wardrobe, for starters – that’s where I am now. Looking through my wardrobe in the corner of the room that Ed and I shared. He won’t so much as open the doors. He did once – but he closed them as quickly. It must have been something silly like a scent, or the sight of a pattern or a fabric possibly. Or maybe it was all the new stuff. Things he’d never seen before. The things I bought that summer of 1997. Abandoning my jeans and band T-shirts for smart linen pants, baby-doll dresses and shifts; ditching my trainers for pumps and wedge-heeled sandals; hanging up my perennial parka for smart blazers; acquiring little black numbers – things that showed my legs – which weren’t bad, of course, but they weren’t something that I’d shown off since I was six; skirts and scarves and accessories – finally taking Ed up on his offer to spend some of his hard-earned cash.
It was insanity of course: what was I thinking, spending someone else’s money? Before then, it would have been inconceivable, but for those weeks it was like I had a desperate longing, a thirst to change – to change everything about myself. As if scales had lifted from my eyes and I saw myself for the dull, frightened, uninspired, frustrated, unkempt thing that I was. I wanted, for the first time in my life, new things, shiny things, pretty things – I wanted to be new and shiny and pretty. To walk a little taller, stand with a little more attitude. I wanted to take Jenny Mycroft and shake her until the old one fell out and I could kick her to one side with my foot and replace her with the 1997 model: deluxe, polished, new and improved.
I don’t know if Ed liked it or not. He never said. In all honesty I never asked – one half of me told myself that I didn’t actually care what he thought – that my re-invention was entirely my business. The other half didn’t want to hear his opinion in case he didn’t like any of it. In case he wanted the old me back, and at that time such a thing was unthinkable. New Jenny could never go back to the frayed ends of denim and canvas trainers, to the Nirvana T-shirts and combats.
I think that the haircut might have been a step too far, however. He loved my long hair. And home I came in the middle of August one Saturday afternoon with it all gone, chopped into the tightest of tight pixie cuts. The hairdresser had swooned at my audacity, had tried to talk me into a ‘Rachel’ – all the rage at the time – but I wanted none of it. New Jenny didn’t do things by half. And Ed, being Ed, hated it – I could tell – but he was too diplomatic to say.
There was one person, of course, who loved it. Who said he loved the way it framed my face, and made my eyes look enormous and deep and all-knowing. Who said it made me lighter and taller and look like some sort of shape-shifting wood creature. And yes, Guillaume could speak like that when he wanted to, in such a way that it never sounded like the total bullshit that it actually was. What Vicky so elegantly called the “knicker-drop talk”.
Maybe she had more to do with it all than I let on, of course. Vicky – my nemesis
– was part of the reason that I wanted to turn myself inside out and into something new. And as I stand here and look in my wardrobe – the low-cut tops, the short skirts slit high up the thigh, the tiny crop tops with spaghetti straps – I think I must have actually wanted to look like her.
To look like Vicky because some warped element of my subconscious knew that Guillaume liked – or had liked at one point – how Vicky looked. And I wanted Guillaume to like me.
All of it was fast and it was slow at the same time. After the night in our house, when Vicky’s behaviour finally revealed just some of the nasty black filling underneath the shiny shell, after the ridiculous cheeseboard debacle, after I had announced that I was finally leaving my dead-end job, Guillaume seemed to sit up and see me in a whole new light for some reason.
In retrospect, I see myself in one too. A great spotlight that shows me for the fickle, shallow, undeserving cow that I am. After all, at 7 p.m. that evening, I had hated him, hated his pretentiousness, hated how everything about him was so contrived – the sudden yearning for Africa, his clothes, his hair, his ever-changing accent, the stupid hat. I hated how groomed he was – when not in his native stuff, he wore black trousers and sharp black shirts, trendy leather jackets worn with caps and scarves – he could even look good in linen. I hated the fact that he didn’t have to work because his parents were so wealthy they could afford to keep him in his lavish lifestyle.
And then by 10 p.m. he was my co-conspirator, bonding over some tenuous appreciation for the same obscure album – partly out of spite on my part because I knew Vicky hated it and I wanted to get my own back on her for trying to humiliate me the entire evening.
I am ashamed of myself now. Because in my boredom, I somehow turned toward him like a flower to the sun and virtually simpered.
And it grew from there.
And then it crossed a line.
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