‘I could try,’ Mac replied, sitting up and munching on cheese and crackers, a glass and a bottle of red wine at his side. An after-shag snack.
‘When, where?’ I demanded. ‘How?’
He trailed a tickling finger up my arm. I stole one of his crackers and devoured it, whole. The only way we could do it, we decided, ultimately – after more cheese and crackers and another roll in the cool hot sheets – was to return to Warwick. Mac could pretend to come and do some pressing preparation for next term; I could tell Dad and Marilyn I was meeting a couple of friends for a night out in Coventry and we were hiring rooms in halls. People did that, apparently, in the university holidays.
So that’s what we did. One day, in late July, after a month of flopping aimlessly around at home, wandering shopping precincts and cornfields, avoiding old school friends and getting under Marilyn’s feet (shudder), I stole £100 from her tea caddy (only used for sundries, i.e. her face cream and condoms, probably), caught the train to London, survived a startlingly hot tube journey across the capital and then boarded a fast train from Euston to Coventry.
Mac was waiting for me in his car – a red MG – at the station. I felt like Audrey Hepburn; I should have been wearing a headscarf and slingbacks. No matter that I was in rolled-up jeans and a Lloyd Cole and the Commotions T-shirt; Mac looked pleased to see me, anyway. He had sunglasses on and a thin chambray shirt I could almost see his chest hairs through. We sped away like, well, Bonnie and Clyde.
The campus was dead, eerily quiet, but quite exciting, in a way. It had become its own micro ghost town; tumbleweed city. We parked in the car park by the medical centre, in case anyone saw Mac’s car at Westwood, and walked to his flat.
I dumped my quirky floral carpet bag, he his leather bowling one and we went to Sainsbury’s and bought a picnic to have back in Mac’s room: a bottle of red for him, some hock for me, pre-packed sandwiches, crisps, dips, cheese and crackers and cherry tomatoes. We were coming out laughing, with our distended carrier bags, when Mac said simply, ‘Jesus.’
‘Where? What?’
‘The Dean.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’
The Dean – Alistair something, a rotund figure in round tortoiseshell glasses I’d only ever seen smiling myopically from the Student Newsletter – was about ten feet ahead of us, scuttling between the trolleys and the cashpoint like an engorged beetle and stuffing something in his back pocket. We hid behind a scuffed grey pillar, like in a comedy scene. I crouched behind Mac, my head down, clutching on to him and giggling. We were definitely Bonnie and Clyde, without the stupidly good looks. And I doubt Bonnie would have been seen dead with a bottle of hock in a Sainsbury’s carrier bag.
The Dean took ages at the cashpoint. He must have been checking his balance, asking for a receipt, everything. Finally, he left it and exited, stage right, towards the footpath that led back to the main campus.
‘What would he have done?’ I asked Mac, when I dared to speak and had returned to a standing position. ‘If he’d seen us? What would you have said?’
‘He would have said “hello”,’ replied Mac, exhaling with relief. ‘Asked me what I was doing here in the holidays. Asked me to introduce you. Tried to make it obvious he didn’t know you were a student I was having an affair with. Pulled me in for a chat. Told me it was frowned upon, that my reputation would suffer unless we were discreet, that he couldn’t promise it wouldn’t get out … None of it would have been good.’
‘He might have thought we’d just met up for extra tuition,’ I said, with a clear and present glint in my eye.
‘You’re not on my course.’
‘Oh yeah, sometimes I forget.’ I grinned.
‘But he didn’t see us,’ he said. ‘I want to keep you under wraps for as long as I possibly can. My wraps, under my covers.’ His eyes looked all far away, disturbed. ‘My cards would have been marked. It would have made things very uncomfortable. Difficult.’
‘Me too,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure I liked what Mac was saying. That he was thoroughly relieved not to have been caught with me. Although I was relieved too, it would have been nice if he’d said he’d be all defiant, all stand-by-me and fight-for-me until death. I supposed that stuff only happened in the movies, but still. I detected a note of fear and almost cowardice in Mac that chimed awkwardly with my view of him. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘Skulk around here for a while. Wait until the coast is clear.’
Skulking again. I wished I had a trench coat and dark glasses. ‘I feel like a fugitive,’ I said, shaking off my disappointment at his relief. ‘This is exciting.’
‘Trust you to find it exciting!’ Mac rolled his eyes and I played up to my part by giggling and clutching at him again. We loitered for ten minutes then made our way back to Westwood, me looking left and right and pretending to jump at things and generally winding Mac up.
‘Did I put my card back in my wallet?’ asked Mac, slapping at his back pockets as we rounded the last corner. ‘No, I thought I hadn’t.’ He pulled his credit card from his right back pocket and his wallet from his left. As he opened his wallet, something fluttered down to the tarmac and I picked it up.
It was a photo. It was a photo of a blonde woman sitting on the end of a seesaw and the seesaw was high in the air as there was the top of a tree behind the woman’s head, and she was laughing.
I hadn’t asked Mac what he had done the day before, or what he was going to do the day after. I wasn’t going to say anything about Helen. But here she was, and she wasn’t a dry and academic husk with glasses, hippy hair with a centre parting and a scarf tied on top of her head. She was Timotei blonde, with long straight hair and a pretty fringe that fell in her wide-set, earnest-looking (probably blue or possibly green) eyes. A small mouth. A delicate chin. And something surprising. A darker strip of skin across the top of her nose – a birthmark, a blemish – like Adam Ant’s make-up or the marking of a strange and beautiful tiger. Oh God, she was not only spectacularly pretty but she was striking, unrepeatable; unique.
I felt the first stirrings of despair. It was quite a shock, and seas and oceans and continents apart from what I was expecting Helen to be.
‘Is that Helen?’ I asked, trying and failing to sound breezy. I had competition.
‘Yes,’ said Mac, and he slipped the photo into the card section of his wallet and tucked it back in his pocket.
‘She’s pretty,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘So what are you doing with me?’
‘Helen is Helen and you are you,’ he said, as though that explained everything in the whole universe and beyond.
I had to be satisfied with that. I tried to remember that despite him saying Helen was kind and affectionate, he had also said she sometimes made him feel small. I clung on to that like a drowning woman to a plank of wood; if she was evil in some way, then I could win. I had to win. So in an attempt to make myself feel secure, I went big; I leapt at Mac as soon as we got back into his apartment, clawed at his chambray shirt and thrust my hand down the front of his trousers.
‘Hey! Steady on!’ he cried, but I was determined in my quest to override Helen, to put myself so far in the foreground she would be a mere speck on the horizon; to make love to Mac over and over again, with only small intervals to drink hock and munch ravenously on brie and crackers with slices of tomato, until a watery sun came up the next morning and a giant bird started chirping outside our window, making us laugh. Mac put a pillow over his head and yelled for it to ‘Shut up!’
‘Don’t, he’ll come and peck you,’ I said, lying in my post-coital haze, my knickers stuffed to the foot of the bed. ‘Remember Tippi?’
‘Tippi was – probably – being punished,’ said Mac. ‘I don’t think we are, do you?’
‘No,’ I said, remembering the Dean, his beetle-like form. ‘Not yet.’ And I whacked Mac with that pillow, full of gaiety but already dreading our goodbye later that morning. It was a hun
dred years until October and the beginning of the autumn term. How the hell was I going to survive that long?
‘When you see me next I might be wearing a beret, like Faye Dunaway,’ I said, as I pouted by his car in the medical centre car park, having flung my bag in the boot. He was giving me a lift to the station, then he was driving home. To Helen. It seemed she could only ever be temporarily dispelled and I hated that.
‘I look forward to it,’ said Mac. ‘You’ll look cute.’
We kissed there and then in the car park, by his car, with me instigating, and then Mac motioned for me to get in, so we could kiss some more. I couldn’t bear the thought of him driving this car home to Helen. To spend the rest of the summer with her, to make prospective babies, to flick that blonde hair out of her eyes and run his finger softly over her tiger stripe. To do whatever it was two academic geniuses did together – The Times crossword? Chilli prawns with an avocado dip at sophisticated dinner parties? High-brow barbecues with other learned scholars, chuckling about paradigms and intricate world views? The more I thought about her, as we were kissing, the more bitter I felt inside until I was kissing him quite violently, in a pre-emptive strike. I wanted to leave a mark on him, a brand so deep he would feel it all the way to October.
‘Steady on!’ he cried again, as I devoured him alive.
‘No!’ I said.
Finally, I released him, to let him drive, and when we got to the station I had a cloud of anger so black and massive around my head I’m surprised a passer-by didn’t alert the Met Office. I wanted to be all surly and feel all martyr-ish. I wanted to show him I was upset that we had to be apart for so bloody long, while he kept house and a baby-making sex schedule with another woman. It was childish but I didn’t care.
I was glad of my short shorts and my little shirt which tied at the waist. I was glad my hair was big and wild and cute and my shirt a little too far unbuttoned as I got out of his car. I wanted to look sexy and angry and tragic and beautiful. I wanted him to see me that way – through his prism, his viewfinder – and I wanted him to know!
‘Bye,’ I said, slamming first the passenger door then the boot and walking away. I may have been the best damn girl in the Midlands but I sure as hell didn’t feel it.
NOW
Chapter 10
Maybe it’s good Mac can’t speak to me properly, I think, as I leave work on Monday. Perhaps he would tell me just how bloody awful I used to be. Precocious. Demanding. Quite the little brat. I wonder exactly what he saw in me back in the day. Oh, I was a sexy little thing and all that, and maybe that transcended everything else, but, boy, was I hard work! I’m embarrassed by lots about my old self. I hope he can see I’m different today. I have a conscience, I’m not so selfish; I have baggage dragging at my heels that has qualified and altered me. I wonder how surprised he was by the story I told him, of what has happened to me since him. I wish he could tell me his.
The former best damn girl in the Midlands didn’t make it to the hospital this weekend. My sneeze turned into a two-day stinker of a cold that I didn’t dare bring to St Katherine’s as I was terrified of giving it to Mac and the other patients. Instead, I hunkered down with my cold, a huge box of tissues and Sky Movies, where I watched loads of black-and-white films I hadn’t ever seen with my ex-lover in Ward 10. I missed him; I missed taking my seat at the hospital, and I hoped he didn’t mind too much that I wasn’t there. I even phoned and asked one of the nurses to pass on a message to him, that I hoped to be back on Monday.
I feel much better today – apart from a slightly croaky throat – more like my old self if not my old old self. I dive in my bag as I walk, checking I’ve got my phone. Funny, I think, that there were others who seemed to like the old, wild, selfish Arden, or at least tolerated her. Becky did. (The thought of her gives me a pang to the heart. How we used to be together. The fun we used to have. I have a sudden vision of us dancing to Terence Trent D’Arby in the students’ union. Laughing. Throwing our arms round each other.) The other people on my course. I can’t have been all bad. Yet, I had an affair with a married man, without guilt. I betrayed another woman, however far away she seemed. I don’t think I’m heightening my past image in any way, making it more dramatic or playing up to the retrospective camera of my own mind. I can see clearly who I was. At the same time, knowing I am nothing like the girl I was – good and definitely not so good – makes me sad. That girl was confident: she was sassy and she was feisty. My sass and feistiness have long since fled the coop; my spirit, once so free and eager and full of its own potential, crushed underfoot like a wandering beetle. Telling my story to Mac may have been a mistake. I have admitted how much of an empty shell I now am and he may not be surprised, but disappointed with me.
I’m popping home to get changed before I go to St Katherine’s. I’ve got my phone. It’s snug in a side pocket. The last text on it is from Julian telling me that Rain Man is on telly tonight and that I’ve seen it a hundred times but he knows I’ll want to see it again. The last call I had on it was some woman from Newcastle telling me I’d had a car accident and I should be claiming for whiplash injuries (oh, the irony). The last work call I had today was Becky, just before I went home, and I answered it by accident because I was distracted by Nigel wittering on about the key to a lock-up for a DBS (Discovered Body Scene) and didn’t look at the caller ID.
‘There you are, stranger!’ she said as I felt my face redden. ‘You don’t write, you don’t call …’
It’s been fairly easy to avoid Becky as she’s one of the small handful of people on this earth who don’t have a mobile phone. She called me about a year ago – on my work phone, so I didn’t have a chance to not answer – saying she’d got rid of her mobile as she wanted to simplify life, so all our one-sided communication is now between her desk phone at the Opera House and mine at Coppers. It suits me, of course: there have been no texts to not reply to. Even when Becky had a mobile, though, during the hell of my marriage, it wasn’t difficult to bend to Christian’s will and shut her out. All I had to do was ignore all her messages and calls and not answer the door to her when she came round to the house. It killed me, but that’s what I did. I have one particularly awful memory of hiding in my own kitchen, squatting down by the worktops, heart pounding, as she rang and rang on the doorbell. It was a Saturday. My car was there; she knew I was in. I hid until she went away. Seeing her just wasn’t worth the anger and the recriminations and the sulky, endless silent treatment I would get from Christian. The scales of my life inexorably tipped fully in his direction; it was just easier that way, and I was rewarded, by him, for getting rid of Becky. I was told how happy Christian was when he had me all to himself, that he hated sharing me, that I was special. The usual.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ she asked, and I had to admire her eternal optimism. She keeps asking; I keep shoving her away.
‘Working,’ I lie, and I find myself back on the well-trodden, somewhat slippery path of the consummate liar. I became such a good one it began to be instinctive.
‘Ah, that’s a shame.’
‘Yes.’ And then I decide I don’t like it on that treacherous, worn path. Would it really harm to step off it? To dare to tell some sort of truth to Becky? I can now – it’s so stupid really; after all this time, sometimes I forget that I am free. ‘Well, not working, actually, but I have plans.’ Now she will hate me for the initial lie, but she probably does anyway.
‘What are they, chickee? Because there’s a cool new bar called Gatsby’s opening in the West End and I think we should go,’ she says, skating over the fact I’ve just fibbed to her and proving once again she’s a far better person than me. ‘Don’t say you’re washing your hair or doing your nails, or I shan’t believe you for a bloody second. Will you come?’
‘It’s a Monday.’
Becky sighs. It’s like the sound of a seashell to my ear, at the beach, not a gentle sound, though, but rather blistering. I’m sorry I’ve made her sigh. ‘Monday is the
new Friday,’ she says.
‘I’ve got plans,’ I limply say again, although I suppose I could go to the hospital a bit earlier and go out afterwards, if I wanted to. Do I want to? Maybe I do. ‘But I suppose I could be free about nine.’
‘Great!’ And while I’m thinking her voice has a slight edge to it, that it has the whole phone call, I feel relieved she hasn’t made me say what these plans are, as I would have chickened out of telling her. I’ve been an idiot really; I should have just told her I was still ill. ‘Dominic’s going to come as well,’ she continues, ‘and I’ve got a kind of date I need moral support with – well, checking out, really. Well, he’s not actually a date at all but someone I really like. I need you there, Ardie!’ she says, and the edge seems to disappear. ‘It should be a laugh.’
An actual laugh – for a whole evening – may be beyond me, but it is just the sort of thing I used to love, a thousand years ago. And Becky says she needs me, which makes me think. It would be nice to be needed, not as a cowering, flattened mat to have huge, bruising boots stamped on, or a human dartboard braced for sharp words, but for support and for friendship. If only I had it in me to provide them.
‘OK, yes, I’ll come,’ I say, and damn, damn, damn, I think, as I put down the phone. I’m going out, to a bar, at night, for the first time in years.
There’s a card waiting for me on the mat when I get home. It’s a card with a little cartoon on it of a pathetic-looking bird and inside, in spidery, looping writing, are the words, When are you next coming to visit me?
My mother. Again, she’s just so wheedling. The address is written by someone else – she obviously got one of the staff to do it. And fetch a stamp for it. And post it. Haven’t they got better things to do? The card makes me never want to go and visit her again, but I check my calendar hanging on the back of the kitchen door and resignedly write ‘visit Marilyn’ on Saturday 12 January in red biro.
You, Me and The Movies Page 13