Can't Let Go

by Jane Hill

  Danny looked at me, and I think he was wondering if I was about to invite him. So I did. He seemed pleased. He seemed happy. He seemed excited. He squeezed my hand. 'So remind me,' he said, laughing at me. 'Is this a relationship or not?'

  I reckoned I had two or three hours before the full force of the migraine hit. I reckoned I could manage the drive down to the coast. I figured I would be able to introduce Danny to my family and then just sit quietly in a corner for a few hours until it was time to go home. No one would expect anything else from me. I could introduce Danny to my nephew Josh and they could talk about music. Josh had seen the Arctic Monkeys recently. I was pretty sure Danny would be interested in hearing about that. Or maybe he could talk to Jem, and she could explain what it was she did for a living, and they could discuss computer games and Japanese comics. My mother and Sarah would be far too busy preparing food and rushing around to talk to anyone – they always took on all the responsibility when there was an event to be catered; they enjoyed it, they wouldn't want me butting in. My father would be his usual benign, vague self. He probably wouldn't even realise who Danny was. It would be all right, I told myself. It would be fine.

  But the weather was heavier than I'd ever known it, and my migraine was developing faster. Halfway down the M23 I realised that my eyes and my brain weren't communicating any more. I saw a sign that told me there were roadworks and lane closures, a sign announcing a speed limit of fifty miles an hour, and I knew theoretically what the signs meant but I didn't know how to act on them. I couldn't translate that number on the circular sign with the red ring around it into the speed that I was supposed to go. Danny grabbed my arm as I suddenly steered out of my lane just before it was coned off, and nearly swerved into the path of another car. I couldn't keep my distance from the other cars in the contraflow. My right eye didn't appear to be working and everything was two-dimensional. Cars kept looming in front of me, closer than I'd thought, and I kept having to brake sharply. Danny was getting nervous – tetchy, even. As soon as I was out of the contraflow I pulled over onto the hard shoulder and stopped the car. 'You drive,' I said.

  'Don't be like that.' He thought I was annoyed by his nervousness and arm-grabbing.

  'I'm not being "like that". I can't drive. I can't see properly. My head hurts. I'm going to be sick.'

  I got out of the car and stepped over the low fence onto the grass bank at the side of the motorway. I sat down, my head between my knees. Danny came over, a bottle of water in his hand, and sat next to me. 'Hangover?' he said, gently.

  'Migraine.'

  He handed me the bottle of water and stroked the back of my neck. I popped an extra-strength ibuprofen from the pack that I had in my pocket, and I gulped it down. I passed Danny the car keys. He jingled them in his hand and then, I guess remembering that I had a headache, suddenly stopped. 'I'm worried now,' he said.

  'What about?'

  'About meeting your family. If this is what it does to you . . .'

  I thought he was joking but I wasn't sure. 'You'll be fine,' I said. 'It'll all be fine.'

  But it wasn't. I guess I hadn't listened properly when my mother had told me about the party. I'd been imagining a small family affair. I hadn't expected the whole parish to be there, filling my parents' driveway and all nearby streets with parked cars. By the time we found a parking space and got to the house, the anvil had settled itself over my left eye, and the right side of my face was starting to go numb. Sarah opened the door to us, glass of wine in hand, and the first thing she said was, 'My God, Lizzie, Mum and Dad have hired caterers. They won't let me in the kitchen.' Then, noticing Danny, she said, 'And you must be . . . nope, sorry. No idea.'

  I guess I must have introduced them to each other. I know that Sarah led us straight out to the garden. There on the patio my father was sitting on a garden chair, surrounded by a whole bunch of what we used to call the 'old dears', the elderly spinsters from church who did the flowers and fussed around the vicar. I said something, I know I must have done. Danny shook my father's hand. One of the old dears said, 'Goodness, it's little Jemima. Hasn't she grown?' Her voice was so loud it hurt.

  And my father said, ' Oh no, this is Lizzie,' and I think Danny repeated 'Lizzie' under his breath and smiled to himself.

  The garden was full of people that I half-recognised. Some of them waved or smiled at me. They were all talking too loudly and I couldn't make out what anyone was saying. The sun was blindingly white. There were teenage girls in white shirts and short black skirts handing out things on trays. My mother did a flustered kiss-and-run at some point, and then she saw Danny and stopped, and spoke to him. I found myself sitting on a bench with a plate of uneaten food on my lap. I closed my eyes behind my sunglasses and tried to slip away. I'd lost track of where Danny was. And then he was standing next to me, and Jem was there. I noticed her white legs in chunky black rubber sandals that looked like car tyres. I was trying to introduce them to each other but I couldn't make the words come out right. Something wasn't working: my face, my mouth, my brain. There was a connection missing. This is what it must feel like to have a stroke, I thought. And the next thing I knew, Jem was holding my hand and leading me back into the house, into the cool dark lounge, and settling me down in an armchair.

  Danny brought me a glass of water, and my mother came in to check up on me, and I could hear her stage-whispering to my father, 'She's having one of her heads.' Sarah put her head round the door and gave me a sympathetic grimace, and then everyone left me alone.

  A blacksmith was hard at work inside my head. I curled into a foetal position and put my fingers to my temples, to the pulse points on my head. I was trying to make sense of the throbbing pain, trying to work out the rhythm. When I was a kid I read an article in the Readers' Digest about a man who survived three days and three nights on a freezing prairie by giving in to the cold, not fighting it, allowing the shivering and shaking to become part of him.

  When I had a migraine I always tried to do the same thing with the pain, drifting into it, embracing it, trying to become one with it; trying to discover how it worked, when each wave would come next. Counting, counting, always counting.

  Eventually I felt well enough to open my eyes. From where I was sitting I could see out through the conservatory and into the garden. Through half-opened eyes and through two sets of windows, I watched knots of people milling around the garden. Through two sheets of glass I watched my family being normal, doing what normal people do. I saw Sarah's well-mannered daughter Katie circulating, talking politely to older people who she couldn't possibly have known. I saw Danny talking to my nephew Josh, who was all gangly and intense with his body language. I watched Sarah and my mother admiring the garden. That was my job, normally: to walk around the garden with my mother, exchanging Latin names of plants in lieu of having actual conversations about how we really felt about things. And then Danny was talking to Jem, and Sarah joined them, and the three of them stood there laughing together, and from time to time Danny cast curious glances in my direction.

  I knew what they were talking about. Jem and Sarah were telling him stories from my childhood. The time I was four and I decided to dance in the park, performing to all the old ladies in their deckchairs. The infamous school concert, when I'd been sent to stand in a corner because I'd punched a boy for singing my solo line by mistake. The nativity play, when I played the angel Gabriel and ad libbed for five minutes when one of the shepherds got stage fright. They were no doubt telling him the same old stories that got told year after year; the stories about Lizzie Stephens, the show-off, the performer, the attention-grabber. No wonder Danny looked puzzled.

  Later the thunder finally came, the thunderstorm that had been threatening all day and that had no doubt contributed to my migraine. The thunder boomed and the lightning crackled and sparked. The rain fell from the sky in sheets and bounced off the patio. The girls in the white shirts and the short black skirts ran around covering up food and bringing trays through into the
house. The guests started to leave, and my migraine started to lift, and my family gathered in the lounge. My father hugged me and told me that they'd missed me. Sarah patted my hand and came and sat next to me. My mother fussed around in the kitchen, with the catering girls and the ruined leftover food. Danny and Jem had both taken photos on their digital cameras, and the cameras were passed around so that everyone could admire the pictures. It was all so utterly, heartbreakingly normal that I wanted to cry. I wished I could belong properly to my own family. Danny was already more a part of it than I was.

  'Lizzie. Lizzie Stephens. You know, I like that name.' Danny was driving me home in his cautious way, sticking exactly to the speed limit, keeping his distance from the car ahead. I was feeling a little better. I was in the lingering exhaustion stage, the washed-out, wrung-out but pain-free bit that follows a migraine. I was annoyed with myself for being ill, for somehow copping out of a potentially tense family occasion; but also for leaving Danny out there, talking to anyone he wanted to, asking questions about me and no doubt finding out stuff. I wasn't in the mood for talking. But Danny was, albeit in a soft, slightly patronising voice that I found particularly annoying.

  'I really like your family. They're good fun. It must be great to have siblings. I wish I did. I thought Jem was great. You never told me that one of your sisters lives in London. Anyway, we got on really well. We were saying that we should all meet up some time.'

  I made some sort of non-committal noise. Danny didn't get the hint. He just kept on talking. 'So, I guess Lizzie is what your family calls you. Do I get to call you that? Do we know each other well enough yet? Do I pass the Lizzie test?'

  'Danny, shut up.' I couldn't stand it any longer.

  He opened his mouth and then closed it again. He looked at me. He looked hurt.

  'I'm sorry, Danny, but I can't do this.'

  'Do what?'

  'This. This whole thing.'

  He was quiet for a while. I guess he was trying to work out what I meant. After a while he said, 'Sorry. You're ill. Your head hurts. I should just shut up.'

  He did for a while. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But Danny couldn't let it go. 'What did you mean, "this whole thing"? Did you mean talking to me? Is that what you can't do, right now?'

  'I mean this. You and me.'

  'You mean our . . . relationship?' His voice cracked slightly. I looked at him, driving. His chin was set in a determined manner. He was looking resolutely straight ahead. 'What do you mean, you can't do it?'

  'I just can't. I just can't do it. Relationships.'

  'Sure you can.' Danny sounded relieved. Maybe he was relieved because I was generalising. If it was 'relationships' that I couldn't do, then it wasn't him in particular.

  And if it wasn't him in particular then perhaps I didn't mean what I was saying. I didn't know. I didn't know what he thought. I was trying to end our relationship and he wouldn't let me, that was all I knew. He reached over and took my hand. 'Of course you can do it. I'm not letting you get out of it that easily.'

  Twenty-one

  The next time I saw Rivers Carillo, I was standing in front of a black curtain and behind a microphone in a tiny, hot, smoky room in the basement of a pub just off Tottenham Court Road. I was about to take the microphone out of the stand. I was about to open my mouth, to try to make people laugh for five minutes. I was about to do my first – and maybe my last – performance as a stand-up comedian. I hadn't seen Rivers for quite a while, except in the bad dreams that were a routine part of my life. But suddenly there he was again, grinning at me. 'Go on, then,' his grin seemed to say. 'Show me how funny you are.'

  It was Zoey's idea. It was all her doing. She'd nagged me. The first time that she'd told me I should turn my 'black cloud' into comedy I'd snapped at her. Of course I couldn't do it, although I couldn't tell her why. But then she mentioned it again, several times. I guessed she'd noticed how much I enjoyed spending time at comedy clubs. Maybe she'd noticed the way it made me feel, the way I enjoyed our conversations about jokes and material. Maybe she was one of the few people observant enough to notice Lizzie lurking behind Beth.

  Most people would run a mile rather than stand on any sort of stage. Most people get nervous – more than nervous – at doing any kind of public speaking. Their palms sweat, their throats constrict. I think most people would sooner undergo root-canal work without anaesthetic than do anything in front of an audience. But there are a few of us, a small handful of show-offs, who thrive on audience attention – who love it, crave it, need it. At the age of five I'd demanded ballet lessons. I spent most of my teens planning to be an actress. I had acted in every school play and every youth-group drama production that I could. I had always loved that moment when the lights went down and the curtain rose, and there was an audience sitting there, hanging on my every word. I had always loved that kind of attention. Perhaps it was because I was the middle child, the one who got overlooked at home, the one who had to shout to be heard? It was probably why I was a pretty good teacher – I had no fear about standing in front of a class and talking to a bunch of teenagers, making them laugh with stupid jokes. I was, by nature, a show-off and an attention-grabber. And for the last seventeen years I had forced myself to keep a low profile. I had forced myself to be something that I wasn't. Maybe that was why I agreed to do it.

  I'd told myself I didn't have much choice. Zoey had organised it. She'd presented it as a fait accompli. She'd rung up and told me she'd organised me a five-minute open spot at a little comedy club, and she gave me two days' notice to prepare my material. I could have told her that I wasn't going to do it. I did make a few protestations – I didn't have enough time to prepare; I'd be rubbish – but she told me that it didn't matter; that it was a fun, no pressure club with a low quality threshold. 'It's called Pear Shaped,' she said. 'It describes itself as the second worst comedy club in London. It's a fun place, usually.

  It's a great place to try out new material. Some of the acts will be really shitty. But you, on the other hand, will be good. You're genuinely funny. You have a really crisp, dry manner. You have no fear about standing in front of people and talking. Teachers generally make great standups. Trust me, you'll be good. And wear that green jacket. That way, if the worst happens and you die, then at least you'll look good dying.'

  Die. Weird, the way comedians used that verb to describe the act – the non-act – of not making people laugh. As if not making people laugh was the worst thing that could happen to anyone.

  I agreed to do it. I agreed, because I wanted to do it. I could see a little chink, the possibility of enjoying myself for a few minutes. It had been many years since I had stood on any kind of stage. Here was my chance: a chance to engage with an audience, a tiny audience, in a dark room in a basement. Comparatively safe, as far as audiences went. Who would possibly know it was Lizzie Stephens, teen killer, up there behind the microphone?

  I thought about some of the things that Zoey had said about stand-up, some of the advice she'd given. Comedy is truth, exaggerated. Talk about the worst thing that's ever happened to you, but make it funny. Turn off your social editor. When I asked her what she meant by that she said it was something that she'd got from the tutor on a stand-up comedy course she'd taken. 'Your social editor's the thing in your brain – the off switch – that stops you being completely offensive and inappropriate in normal conversation. It's the thing that stops you blurting out things you're itching to say. Call it – oh, I don't know – tact, something like that. The idea is that in stand-up comedy, anything goes. Anything you've always wanted to say but couldn't, wouldn't, for whatever reason – now's the time to say it.'

  Turn off your social editor. I thought about that as I stood in front of the mirror in my flat, sweltering in my green velvet jacket, and tried to put together a five-minute routine. Something that I'd always wanted to say, but couldn't. Something that I was itching to blurt out. 'When I was eighteen I killed a man and got away with it.'

  I d
idn't say it out loud. I couldn't; I never had, I thought I probably never would. But I stood in front of the mirror and I said it to myself, and I watched my face.

  It looked hard and determined, and slightly aloof, with just a ghost of a smile on my lips. I felt a shiver go down my spine, and it was almost pleasurable. Suppose I started my routine like that? Suppose I stood behind the microphone and couldn't help myself? Suppose I turned off my social editor so completely that I just blurted it out? What would I do?

  'When I was eighteen I killed a man and got away with it.' I'd say it in my usual slightly posh deadpan voice. This time I almost said it out loud. I mouthed the words, articulating each syllable. I watched my face again, watching the mirror, imagining the audience becoming uneasy. Unease can sometimes make people laugh – I knew that by now. I imagined that maybe there'd be a few titters from the audience. But most of them would be staring at me, wondering if what I'd said was true. So how would I follow that opening line? Reassurance might work: something to break the tension, to key the audience in to the fact that it was okay to laugh. I could go the insult route. 'It's all right, though, he deserved it. He was a bastard.' Or a tosser. A wanker, maybe: that was a good Anglo-Saxon word that I could really sink my teeth into, a nice contrast to my crisp received pronunciation.

  Zoey had told me that the K or hard-C sound worked well in comedy because it made your lips automatically go into a smile, and that could have an effect on the audience's reaction. I'd heard a few comedians use the C word. Maybe that would work. 'It's all right, though, he deserved it. He was a c — ' No, I wouldn't say that. I didn't want to say that word out loud, in that context. The vicar's daughter in me was too strong. Ironic: I could kill a man but I could not bring myself to use certain words.