Can't Let Go

by Jane Hill

  Eighteen

  I saw a lot of Zoey after that. I'd always been careful not to let people into my life, but there was something about her that felt familiar, safe. I recognised her, in a way. She seemed to be the me that I could have been. If Lizzie, that annoying, theatrical, attention grabbing teenager, had been allowed to grow up normally; if she had calmed down and found a focus, had learned how to interact with other human beings; learned some patience and some generosity, learned how to share and make room for other people . . . if all those things had happened, then maybe Zoey was the kind of person she would have grown up to be.

  I enjoyed spending time with Zoey. We got into the habit of meeting up late afternoon or early evening. She worked lunchtimes in a bar in the West End, and didn't want to trek all the way home to Clapham on those long, hot afternoons if she had a gig in central London; and because she was preparing for her Edinburgh show she had a gig almost every evening. I kept her company. It was the school holidays, and I wanted to fill the time. We found places to hang out where we could kill time and stay cool. We'd go and see teatime screenings of films in air conditioned cinemas – we didn't really care what we saw. Or we'd drink iced coffee or herbal tea in cool, white basement cafes in art galleries and museums. Sometimes we'd go for an early meal, finding cheap deals in ethnic restaurants – dim sum, cut-price Indian buffets, a little Italian restaurant with Chianti bottles on the wall and an early-bird set-price meal, an Ethiopian place where we ate spicy meat stew with flatbread and our fingers. Zoey always enthused over her food. Even in the worst restaurants she would find something she liked. She liked to share her food – holding bits out for me to try, or picking things from my plate. I liked it. It made me feel part of a proper friendship.

  Sometimes I'd go to her gigs with her. I became a comedy groupie, you might say. Zoey seemed as reluctant as I was to have an empty diary, although presumably for different reasons. 'I'd rather do an open ten than sit at home doing nothing,' she told me. An 'open ten', I'd learned, was an unpaid ten-minute spot that newer comics did in the middle of a comedy bill, in order to get experience and to showcase what they could do. A 'paid twenty' was what she preferred, but she said, 'It's all stage time. It's all good.'

  I became interested in what Zoey called 'the room' – not just what each venue looked like, but how it – or rather the audience in that room – responded. There were fascinating differences. One night there was a gig at a club with an all-woman line-up, a glitzy room in Clerkenwell with chandeliers and exposed pipes sprayed in gold paint. The largely female audience was loudly enthusiastic, particularly at anything remotely filthy. They whooped and stamped their feet when Zoey did her oral-sex material. Then there was a gig down in leafy Richmond in a cramped room above a pub. It was an older audience, a lot of couples in their thirties and forties, and they were polite and supportive but much quieter. Zoey seemed to struggle, the first time I'd ever seen her do less than brilliantly. It was a tiny stage area, hemmed in by tables, giving her less room to roam around than usual. She was doing her tried and tested routine but it was clear to me that she expected a more enthusiastic response. In the middle of one bit of material, a woman sitting in the front suddenly called out, 'I love your trousers. Where did you get them?'

  'Weirdest heckle ever,' said Zoey afterwards. 'And you know what? I could have done something with it. I got these pants at Fat Face. There's gotta be a line there. Some kind of veiled insult . . .' She screwed up her face, trying to work it out, and I wondered if next time I saw her live there'd be a new joke about it.

  With Zoey, the conversation was often about her material, her jokes. She would try things out on me and get me to respond, and we would free-associate. I liked it. I felt that I was involved in her creative process, and it gave me a buzz to listen to her on stage, making comedy out of something that one of us had seen or mentioned earlier in the week. And also, it was the kind of conversation I could do. In a way, it was similar to listening to Danny talk about music. Zoey didn't want to know anything about me. She didn't want to hear deep stuff: secrets and revelations and what I really thought about things. She just needed to use me as a sounding board. We kept it mostly shallow, and I found that comforting.

  One evening, when Zoey didn't have a gig, we spent another evening in her flat, that cosy little space hidden high in the eaves of the big house in Clapham. She cooked for me. She opened all the windows wide and turned on a fan, and tried to get some air into the flat. The smell of garlic, bacon and tomatoes wafted out of the minuscule cupboard of a kitchen as she cooked spaghetti sauce, which she pronounced the American way, with the emphasis on the word 'spaghetti' rather than 'sauce'. I sipped red wine and browsed the books on her shelves.

  Her book collection looked like mine would have done, had I not had several purges in my life. She had the whole Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, in well thumbed paperbacks. I'd loved those books when I was a child. I'd left my copies in a box in my parents' attic and when they'd moved to the bungalow where they now lived I'd told them to get rid of all my childhood stuff. They sold all my books to a dealer for the grand sum of thirty pounds. Zoey had a whole row of Dorothy L. Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle; she had Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, a few Dickens. She had books by P.G. Wodehouse and Nancy Mitford. She had Rebecca and The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird; she had Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Scruples by Judith Krantz. I'd owned all of these at some point in my life, and I'd jettisoned them all along the way. I had left many of my books behind in a flat in Finsbury Park that I had shared with three other people including a guy called Julian. I walked away when things got uncomfortably serious between Julian and me, and I hadn't had the time or inclination to work out which books were mine. And besides, they wouldn't have fitted in the boot of my car.

  I pulled the copy of Scruples from Zoey's shelf and flicked through it fondly. It was the book that taught me everything I thought I needed to know about sex. Something was scrawled inside the cover. 'Who's Judith Spiegelman?' I asked as I deciphered the handwriting.

  Zoey laughed from the kitchen. She came back into the main room, drying her hands on a towel. 'Me, until the big split. Zoey's my middle name. I figured it suited the new me better.'

  I looked at her, standing there, laughing, the light catching the tips of her frizzy hair and making them glow golden. Her green eyes held mine, unblinkingly, and I came very close to telling her – not the whole story, but about Lizzie, and about changing my name when I was eighteen. It was something else we had in common. But instead I turned away and pretended to be incredibly interested in the postcards on the wall. I should have told her. I wish I had. Things might have been so different if we had shared our secrets.

  Nineteen

  I saw a lot of Danny, too. I'd spend the early part of the evening with Zoey, and then, if I wasn't going to her gig, I would go out later with Danny. I'd get home and instead of my usual long nights with a book or the television, I'd go round to Danny's flat and we'd do something – anything – together. Two or three times a week we went out or stayed in together. I'd never been so busy, so in demand, in my life.

  Danny took me to see some kind of folky American band at the Barbican: lots of banjos and fiddles. I didn't like it much. There was no atmosphere in that big auditorium, and the audience seemed to be made up of deeply serious people stroking their chins appreciatively. Afterwards we went for a curry and Danny explained the music to me. I loved it when he did that. His voice was very soft and I could pick up the gist without having to listen to every single word. But for as long as he talked, that was a whole part of the conversation where I knew I was safe from questions or from having to talk about myself.

  Then, another night, we went to see a friend of his who played in a band. I enjoyed that a lot more. It was noisy, dark, smoky and very hot, and I snuggled up to Danny and got lost in the music. We stayed in together some nights as well, round at his flat. He would cook me pasta or we'd order a
takeaway, and we watched D V D boxed sets of intense American T V crime dramas, or listened to some of his favourite music. And we talked. Not about ourselves, but about things: films and T V and music and books.

  Neither Danny nor I were that good at normal conversation. We exchanged facts and opinions and talked about things – actual tangible things, not feelings – because that felt safe. With Zoey, all I had to do was listen to her talk. She made no conversational demands of me beyond the occasional laugh or comment, or the odd interjection to keep her on the subject in hand. With Danny, it was different. We were both awkward, and it struck me that I had no idea how to talk normally to a boyfriend. I had no idea how to make normal conversation. I was so starved of usual social intercourse that I found it easier to substitute facts for social niceties. It was a form of shyness, I guess, or maybe self-defence. Facts were good. Facts were safe. They were a useful currency. I could tell Danny something that he might not know and he could tell me something in return. And it could almost pass for a conversation, if we kept it up long enough.

  It was amazing to me how good the sex could be between two such awkward, inexpressive people. Or maybe it was good because it was something else to do that stopped us having to talk properly to each other; something that filled the time when normal lovers would be swapping endearments or discussing their feelings for each other. Sex with Danny was tender and gentle, full of kisses and stroking, and hair being pushed away from my face. It was full of his mumblings – 'Is this okay? And this?' There was usually music playing while we made love. Afterwards, if we were at Danny's place (and we usually were), he would get up and walk across the room to change the C D , and then he'd get back into bed and hold me, and stroke me some more, and he would tell me something about the music on the stereo in his soft, gentle, almost monotonous voice. And I wanted to cry, every time, because I felt guilty about sleeping with such a sweet and lovely man. I felt guilty about letting him stay in my life. I felt guilty about taking advantage of him. I felt guilty about not warning him about me.

  We went for a picnic one Sunday. Danny had surprised me mid-morning by knocking on my door with a rolled blanket under his arm and a plastic carrier bag in his hand. We lay on his itchy blanket in Regent's Park, surrounded by hundreds of other people doing the same thing. We ate slightly soft pork pies and bags of crisps, washed down with lukewarm beer and cans of Coke. 'Sorry, this is a bit of a shit picnic,' he said.

  'No, it's nice.'

  'I should have brought some salad. Maybe some tomatoes or a tub of coleslaw. Or maybe some of those leaves in a bag. All that posh stuff, like rocket.'

  'Rocket. When did we all start eating rocket?'

  'Or frisée.'

  'Endive.'

  'Radicchio.'

  'Lollo rosso.'

  'You win,' Danny said, turning to me and kissing me on the forehead. 'Also, maybe some fancy sandwiches, like brie and grape.'

  'Stilton and banana.'

  'Mozzarella and melon.'

  'Camembert and castor oil.'

  He laughed. We kissed again. We held hands and lay there, side by side, in the sun, in companionable silence. It was nice. And then it almost imperceptibly faded from nice to not-so-nice. The silence went on. It went on too long. It stopped being companionable and started being awkward. My hand started to sweat in his, and my fingers started to go numb. The silence hung over us. One of us would have to say something soon, or else I could imagine us lying there for the rest of our lives, neither of us ever talking again. Danny squeezed my hand. I squeezed back. He disentangled his fingers and shifted slightly onto his side. He looked at me, and stroked the hair away from my face. He leaned over me. He took a deep breath. I thought he was about to say something dramatic about the state of our relationship. But instead he asked me if I wanted an ice cream.

  I lay there on that blanket waiting for Danny to come back, squinting at the hot summer sky, looking at the other picnickers out of the corners of my eyes. It wasn't even August yet and already we were taking it for granted, that hot summer weather. Already we had the Mediterranean mind set. Already the whole of Britain woke up every day knowing it was going to be hot. We were taking no precautions – taking no jumpers or waterproofs or umbrellas with us when we set off for the day. The whole country was making plans as if every day for the foreseeable future was going to be hot and dry and sunny.

  No precautions. We'd been lulled into an unusual sense of security about the weather. How quickly it had happened. And then I thought about me, and the sense of security I'd allowed myself to indulge in. I was doing things I'd never done before. I was dating someone, I had a friend. I was enjoying myself, doing what normal people did. I had stopped taking precautions. That note had scared me more than anything else had ever done, in my whole life. And then I'd just thrown it away. I'd said that it didn't matter; I'd allowed myself to assume it was a practical joke. And somehow, because that note didn't matter, because that one fear was false, I'd allowed myself to relax, to drop my guard, as if I wasn't a killer but just a normal person.

  The sky was high and big and so pale it was almost white. It was a huge hot blank space above me. It was a huge blank sheet of paper. And that was when I realised what I was doing, all the time I was with Zoey and Danny, all that uncharacteristic social activity. Summer was looming above me and ahead of me like a big blank sheet of paper – hot and white and empty. I was trying to fill it. I was trying to scribble all over its pages, like the pages in a diary. I was trying to fill the space with people and things. I was trying to keep my fear at bay.

  Summer was the most dangerous season. It was big and it was empty and it could seem endless, and it made me do stupid, evil things. There was too much time and too much light, and it had to be filled. That was what had gone so horribly wrong in San Francisco. The summer had stretched out ahead of me. The possibilities were endless and overwhelming. I had felt tiny in that big city, like a little ant scurrying around trying to impose order and purpose on my life. Maybe that was why I clung to Rivers Carillo like that. Knowing that I was going to see him again helped me draw lines and margins on my blank sheet of paper. It helped me fill my diary.

  Hot summers like this summer were the worst. Not only were they endless and empty but they were relentless as well. The sun beat down every day on a mission to burn and expose. It dried up ponds and puddles and killed grass, leaving behind dust and faded litter and hard, caked, cracked earth – soil burned and purified down to its very essence. Day by day London was drying out, getting dirtier, becoming more intense, revealing the cracks at the heart. The days of intense heat were piling up behind us and ahead of us. Travelling by Tube, it felt as if all the days of progressively hotter weather were being stored down there, in those tunnels, waiting to explode. The hot sun had cracked and shrivelled the paintwork on my windowsills, uncovering the rotten wood underneath. Even the little bits of paper, the torn-up note that I threw out of my window, were still there, in the gutter outside my block of flats, drying out and fading but still winking at me, mocking me, every time I left the building.

  Danny and Zoey – all they were to me were frantic scribbles in my diary. I lay there in Regent's Park under the sun, surrounded by people and people and people, as far as I could see, and I shivered with fear. Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. This would never get better. How could it? I would never stop being a killer.

  Twenty

  Maybe you've had one of those mornings when you wake up and, no matter how early you went to bed, no matter how long you've been there, you feel as if you've been dragged kicking and screaming from the depths of sleep. Daylight is simply too bright for your eyes to bear. So you sit on your bed or at the kitchen table and eventually – with some combination of rubbing the sleep from your eyes, splashing your face with water and drinking some strong coffee – you begin to feel like a human being. Now imagine that you're sitting there feeling like shit, blinking in the brightness, and you realise that nothing you can do �
�� rubbing your eyes, splashing water, drinking coffee – will make any difference at all. And in fact the way you feel now, as your skin starts pricking and dots start dancing in front of your eyes, and you feel as if your eyelids have been forced open by someone with gluey fingers – that is the best that you're going to feel all day.

  I'd told Zoey that a migraine was like a hangover, but the truth is that while they both start out feeling similar, hangovers get better while migraines get worse. With a hangover, there are things you can do, or take: a banana, some aspirin, a can of ice-cold sugary full-fat Coke, a pint or two of sparkling water, a fry-up. With a migraine, there are drugs that you can take, but they don't often work; and also taking drugs involves putting things into your stomach, and sometimes that's something that's impossible to face. It can make things much, much worse.

  Before I'd ever had a migraine I'd dismissed them as glorified headaches, in the same way that someone who's never had a proper bout of flu assumes that it's synonymous with a bad cold. Sure, a migraine's main course is a headache – a hard, heavy, metal headache with sharp edges, like a tarnished anvil being forced into your skull and sitting, weighty and immovable, on top of one eye socket. But that's just the main dish of a seven- or eight course menu that starts with lethargy and nausea, moves through disorientation and dizziness, visual disturbances and aphasia, sometimes facial paralysis, and ends eventually on a lingering quiet note of absolute exhaustion.

  And since I had feigned migraines to escape family commitments on a number of occasions, perhaps it served me right that on the one occasion I really couldn't miss – the day I was taking my new boyfriend to meet my family to celebrate my parents' fortieth wedding anniversary – I had the beginnings of the migraine from hell.

  Why had I even invited Danny? I guess it had been a spur-of-the-moment thing as we walked back home from the picnic. I needed to do something, to say something, to bring things close to normal, to show some indication of whether I wanted to continue with him or not. I felt bad about being distant from him for much of the picnic. I felt bad for not being a good enough girlfriend. Danny was talking about what we could do during the week, and making plans for the following weekend, and I said, suddenly, out of nowhere, 'I have this . . . thing. A family thing. Next weekend. It's my parents' anniversary. They're having a party, down in Sussex. I have to go to that.'