The SECRET TO NOT DROWNING

by Colette Snowden

  “I’m fine now, honest,” I say, giving him back my cup of hot, sweet tea, which is still half full.

  “Nonsense,” he says, “I’ll give you a lift home.”

  “I was just on my way out, actually,” I tell him, but he’s not taking no for an answer.

  “You were nearly on your way out permanently just then, love,” he answers. “I think you need to go home, don’t you?”

  Is that a rhetorical question? He might think I need to go home but I don’t want to go home. I really don’t want to go home. I want to go to Julie’s for lunch like I’ve planned. She’ll be waiting for me and I’ll be late now and He thinks I’ve gone shopping for shoes and He’ll have a fit if I turn up at the front door in the cab of a great big truck. I’m not even sure it would fit down our street. I’m not even sure I can trust this guy. Just because he’s been nice to me, it doesn’t mean he’s actually nice does it?

  “Come on love,” he says again. “Will there be anyone in when you get home?”

  It’s clear that he’s not going to give up so I just lie.

  “My sister will be there,” I tell him.

  “Great, you hop in and we’ll get going.”

  “Thank you so much,” I say and I direct him to Julie’s house and thank him again before I climb down the steps of his truck, scraping the back of my leg on the metal edge of the step as I go.

  “No more playing in the traffic,” he grins at me as he leans over to close the door of the cab.

  “No,” I say. “Thanks again.” And he just drives off and waves and that’s it.

  I’m still a bit dazed. I have a funny kind of invincible feeling: the truck didn’t get me, so nothing can. It’s a good feeling to have. I was nervous as hell this morning. Lying to Him about where I was going. Wondering what to wear so that I look nice but not like I’ve dressed up to look nice. I thought maybe she was setting me up to get me back for all that stuff all those years ago. But now I’m not bothered. If the truck didn’t get me, Julie can’t get me. Nothing can get me. I am Wonder Woman. I am superhuman. I am ready for anything.

  But when I knock on the door of Julie’s house there is no answer and I wasn’t really ready for that. I knock again and I’m embarrassed now. I can’t see them but I can feel the curtains twitching in the houses all around. I arrive in a big noisy lorry on Julie’s quiet, tree-lined street and then I walk up to the front door and just keep knocking even though she’s evidently not even in. ‘Who is this freak?’ they must be thinking. Valid question. I’d be thinking that myself if someone turned up at my neighbour’s house in a whacking great big truck and carried on knocking even though there was no answer. I almost expect one of them to come out and invite me in for a cup of tea or a nip of something stronger. I’m wondering whether it’s my day for good Samaritans.

  But after three progressively louder knocks on the door with no response and only silent curiosity from the neighbours, all my paranoia about why Julie really invited me comes flooding back and I just need to get out of there. So I dash back up the path as though I’ve just forgotten something important and that’s when I trip. I’m not even sure what I trip on, my own feet probably. And that’s when Julie finally appears at the front door.

  “God,” she says, “are you all right?” and she strides across to me and makes me take her arm so that she can lead me into the house like I’m some old pensioner who insists on trying to manage without a walking stick.

  I’m sitting on Julie’s settee with a glass of wine in my hand – definitely much more effective for shock or whatever than the truck driver’s sweet plastic-flask-flavoured tea. She’s telling me about the disaster she’s had with the risotto. She left it for a minute while she went to the loo but then she got distracted and emptied the bin in the bathroom before she went downstairs and by the time she made it back into the kitchen the whole thing had caught and burnt itself to the bottom of the pan. So when I knocked on the door she was out the back scraping the charred remains of our lunch into the bin and that’s why she didn’t hear me knocking.

  “And there’s me thinking that you’re good at everything,” I say. It must be drinking wine in the afternoon. I never normally say things like that to people. And straight away I can feel myself blushing and I wish I hadn’t said it.

  But she just laughs. Not in a horrible way. Not in the way that people laugh if you walk into a lamp post or come back from the loo with your skirt all caught up in your knickers. Her laugh is a thank you.

  “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you. People who only know me at work think I’m good at everything. But most people who’ve ever seen me do anything in a kitchen assume that I’m completely crap at pretty much everything. And they might have a point.”

  I make all those noises that people make when they want to politely contradict someone who’s telling them how rubbish they are. ‘I’m sure that’s not true, I can’t believe that for a minute, I bet you’re good at lots of things.’

  But she seems determined to make sure I know just how rubbish she can be. She tells me about the time that she invited people she works with round for dinner and everything went pear-shaped. One of them was vegetarian and she didn’t know and had nothing to offer her apart from a plate of vegetables and a lump of cheese. For the rest she had cooked roast duck and proudly brought it to the table ready to carve and it had looked great and smelled fantastic until one of her guests noticed that the giblets were still there, stuffed inside the duck in a plastic bag that had now melted all over the inside of the carcass.

  “If I’d just known my limits and carved the stupid thing in the kitchen,” she says, “no-one would ever have known and I’d just have had the vegetables and cheese embarrassment to deal with.”

  She carries on, telling me all about her cooking disasters and the times she’s arranged to meet up with people then completely forgotten, or invited people round and got the days mixed up. We laugh and drink more wine and I can’t believe I’m laughing so much. I can’t believe that Julie the Weirdy Girl has ever laughed this much in her life before. This isn’t her. This isn’t the solemn girl I knew at school, galloping around, semi-joining in, mostly knowing everything about everything and going on about it and getting on people’s nerves. How did she grow up into someone who can laugh like that? How did she grow up into someone who can celebrate how totally crap she is and laugh out loud about it?

  We’re laughing and she has tears pouring down her face and I’m listening to her endless stream of anecdotes trying to think of one of my own. And I remember the cake.

  “I had a disaster with a cake when my mum came over to stay last week,” I say. “It looked cooked on the outside but it was still all soggy in the middle.”

  “I bet it was still nice,” she says. I wonder why she’s being so kind. “So did you eat it?”

  “Yes,” I tell her. “My mum and my husband had a little bit after dinner and I ate the rest.”

  And now I’ve totally broken the spell. My story isn’t funny. And even though I haven’t given the punchline, she still seems to know that it’s an anti-joke. She’s stopped laughing. She’s stopped laugh-crying and we’re sitting there in awkward silence.

  “I’m dying for a wee,” she says. “Then I can offer you my speciality beans on toast.” And she disappears off up the stairs leaving me alone to snoop around her living room.

  It’s what you might call tidy-cluttered. There are piles of stuff but it’s all in neat, meant-to-be-there piles. The magazines are with the magazines, the newspapers are with the newspapers and there’s a box with bits of torn-out stuff that she must want to keep for something. The piece on the top is an interview with a playwright all about the new play she’s written and the production that’s in rehearsal in London. I read the first couple of paragraphs, the intro. It just rattles on about the girl, how young she is, what she’s wearing, how she’s clutching a latte and
chain smoking and twiddling her hair round her finger. Fancy being twenty-two and writing a play that’s good enough for people to put on in a London theatre and then having them just rattle on about your hair-twiddling habits when they come to interview you. If I were her I’d be cross about that. I’d love to be her.

  There’s a table by the window that’s like an old fashioned desk. One of those huge solid things that weighs a ton, with drawers down each side. It’s covered in papers and Post-it notes. There are even Post-it notes stuck to the drawers. Julie must have a lot to remember. I try not to read them but you can’t help trying to read little notes like that, just lying around, can you? It doesn’t matter anyway because I can’t read them even when I give in to temptation and have a proper look. Her writing looks lovely, all curly with little squiggles. But you can’t read it. I bet even she can’t read it. The top of the desk, under all the papers and everything, is a big sheet of glass and under that are postcards. Tons of them, all spread out so that you can see the pictures but not lined up straight. They look as though someone has piled them up neatly then spread out the pile with their arms and plonked the glass on top. I wonder if that’s what she did? I wonder if these are postcards that people have sent her or ones that she’s collected from places she’s been. I’m dying to read what’s on the back of them.

  She comes back in the room.

  “The beans are on,” she says. “Now, would you like the speciality of the house: grated cheese on top, or are you a beans on toast purist?”

  I wasn’t listening. I was looking at a picture of Venice and wondering if she’s actually been there.

  “What?”

  “Beans on toast,” she says. “I was just wondering whether you’d like them with or without cheese? You know,” she says, “Instead of the risotto disaster?”

  “Yes,” I say, “cheese would be nice, if there’s enough.”

  “There’s always enough cheese,” she says, “I practically live on cheese on toast.”

  But she’s not going back to the kitchen, she’s coming across the room to see what I was looking at. And now I’m embarrassed for snooping.

  “I’m so sorry,” I gush. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m so nosey. I just thought the pictures looked interesting. I really wish I’d travelled more.”

  “You make it sound like all travel is banned as of this afternoon.”

  I don’t answer. He hates airports. Says He’d rather be in the car getting somewhere than sit in an airport for hours then take your life in your hands when you finally step onto the plane. He says there’s plenty to see in this country and we might think about going abroad when we’ve got bored with it here. He says I’m crabby in hot weather anyway. One day maybe I’ll go to the airport with £500 in my pocket and get on the next flight to wherever. I’d like to think I would. It’d be great to do that and not even care that you hadn’t packed all your little essentials. But I can’t really see me doing it.

  I don’t answer. So she jumps in again.

  “God,” she says, “don’t worry. I always thought postcards were fair game anyway: they don’t even arrive in an envelope, so normal rules don’t apply.”

  I still feel embarrassed and it must be obvious because she tries to make me feel better yet again.

  “I have a terrible bathroom cabinet habit,” she says. “It’s so hard not to, don’t you think? Especially if you can half see things through the door or there’s stuff standing on top. You start looking and then you start wondering what else they have in there and before you know it you know their full medical history, including the piles and the athlete’s foot, and you wish you hadn’t been so nosey.”

  “I’ll make sure I check yours out while I’m here,” I say. And I can’t believe I’ve said it. But it’s fine. She laughs.

  “Oh shit,” she says, “the beans!” and she darts off into the kitchen to rescue the pan full of beans that she put on the stove before she came in to make my excuses for me.

  We eat slightly charcoaly beans on not very warm toast with cheese grated on top at the table in the kitchen. There’s a tablecloth on it and I wonder if she has a cloth on the table all the time or just because I was coming over for lunch. My mum always says that you should keep the standards day in, day out, that you would expect to have if the Queen came to tea. I always used to wonder why she said it, because the Queen was never going to come to our house for tea and I couldn’t imagine anyone less exciting as a tea-time guest anyway. But maybe Julie’s mum had the same housewives’ motto as my mum did. Maybe my mum even learnt it from her. It’s funny to be in a house where I don’t know the rules and no-one is bothered whether I stick to them or not.

  “Eat up,” Julie says, putting brown sauce on top of hers and offering me the bottle. “I’ve got cheesecake for afters. Shop bought, don’t worry. And then we can have a look at the postcards in the living room, if you like.”

  15

  I have always envied people who like coffee. Proper coffee. I’ve always wanted to like it, but the taste of it never lives up to the smell. And because I’m not from a family of coffee drinkers or a coffee-drinking marriage, I don’t understand the mysteries of coffee making. I’m not in the club. I can swoon at the lovely smell of every Starbucks I ever pass from outside on the street but they would probably refuse me at the door if I ever tried to go in. I have some kind of invisible sign on my forehead that says ‘She Only Drinks Instant’ and the coffee fraternity would snub me if I came anywhere near.

  Julie is not like that. She sweeps her plate into the washing up bowl and is tinkering with the coffee machine even before I’ve finished my beans on toast. She is measuring out coffee from a packet and measuring water into a jug then pouring it into the top of the machine. There are handles and nozzles and little knobs everywhere. It’s like a circus act. Any minute now it will play a tune, doves will fly out of the top, there’ll be a blinding flash and the machine will transport us back in time to some 19th century freak show where I’ll try not to stare at the bearded lady while Julie takes a bow for demonstrating her fabulous machine.

  I don’t like real coffee (not for the want of trying), but I don’t tell her that. I like that she assumes I like it. I’ll just have to drink it. Or accept it and then pretend I forgot to drink it. That’s what I’ll do. I’m just thinking that that’s what I’ll do when she asks me do I take milk.

  “Yes,” I say, “I like it with lots of milk.” Genius. With any luck I won’t even be able to taste the coffee very much. With any luck this could be the start of me actually beginning to like real coffee.

  What Julie said about being rubbish in the kitchen clearly wasn’t true. I’m watching her with the coffee machine and she’s like a concert pianist. She plays it by heart, she’s barely looking what’s she’s doing but the whole room smells of coffee now so she must be pressing all the right buttons in the right order.

  She hands me a cup of milky coffee. Hers is black.

  “You don’t take sugar do you?” she grimaces. “I don’t think I’ve got any.”

  I tell her I don’t and she sweeps her brow in an over-the-top display of theatrical relief. She’s funny and I like her more than I can ever remember liking her as a kid.

  “Come on then,” she says. “Come and have a proper look at the postcards on my desk. I can take the glass off if you like.”

  So we’re sitting on the floor, me kneeling up and her cross-legged like they used to make us sit in school assembly. She has dumped all the paper work that was on the desk in three neat piles on the floor and I’ve helped her lift the big sheet of glass off the desk so that we can get at all the postcards underneath. There are even more than I’d thought. They are heaped on top of one another so some of them were almost completely hidden by others before we took the glass off. I am looking the way my mum always taught me – with my eyes not my fingers – but she wants me to dive in. She pic
ks up a couple and hands them to me to show me. I still feel like I can’t touch them. Even with her implied permission I feel like I mustn’t move anything in case she can never get them back the way they were before.

  And then it’s as though she can read my mind.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, “They’re not in any particular order. I get them out and look at them and then put them back any old way whenever I feel like it,” she says. “I like it that the order they’re in changes sometimes. I work at this desk, I see it every day but I look much more when the pictures have been moved around. Even if I move just one or two just a little bit, it’s amazing what I might see that I’d forgotten all about.”

  So, with her permission, I finally start ransacking the display of postcards on her desk. I take one, look at the picture and then look back down across the whole lot and choose a few more. I feel like that woman off Countdown, picking up cards to allow the contestants to play the game. I feel as if we are playing some kind of game and she’ll be quizzing me later on which cards I picked up and why. Maybe she will.

  She lets me look through the cards I’ve picked without saying anything. She lets me turn them over and glance at the back without saying anything. And when I look up to see whether she minds if I read them she just nods towards them. She wants me to read them. She’s asking me to read them.

  All the cards I look at are addressed to someone called Linda. They’re just postcards from people’s holidays. Just stuff about the weather and the food and this place they visited that was nice and what fun the kids had on the beach. There are no great secrets in them. Nothing special.

  And then she starts to tell me. She tells me how the postcards belonged to her mother. Not her mother that I know, the one who knows my mum. The postcards belonged to her birth mother. The one who had Julie taken away from her. The one whose life was a mess. The one that Julie could barely remember but missed like hell all the same.