‘I don’t know,’ I said. I didn’t want her to stay! I didn’t want her here at all! ‘One of us could sleep on the floor?’ I ventured, every part of me in silent revolt.
‘Yes, that’s what we’ll have to do,’ she said and I hated the chumminess of the ‘we’. We weren’t chums. We weren’t going to be roomies, giggling at midnight in the dark. Her in my bed, no doubt, me on the floor. She was a woman I had tried and failed to make love me. ‘Now, how early can we get a drink around here? I’m up for a really Big Night.’
‘Well, the union opens at six,’ I volunteered angrily. ‘We have to hitch in.’
‘Hitch-hiking? Well, isn’t that just thrilling! I’ll have to show a bit of leg.’
The thought of Marilyn by the side of the road sticking out her leg like Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night was almost too much to bear. ‘Yeah,’ I said, more unhappy than I’d ever been. Who was this woman? I wanted the woman with the floury apron back, the one who’d given me a cuddle and told me I had beautiful curls and a kind heart. ‘Before that, I have a bottle of Lambrusco in the fridge downstairs?’ There was only one way to survive this: I had to get absolutely hammered. ‘You stay there and I’ll go and get it.’
I made Marilyn spaghetti bolognaise on the hob of the terrible oven. She complained it wasn’t tasty enough. That the sauce was too runny. I sat in silence, pushing mine round my plate and knocking back glass after glass of Lambrusco until I had to steal Becky’s Mateus Rosé from the back of the fridge, while Marilyn judged, judged, judged. I felt sick when I heard the front door open and Zara, one of my housemates, came bustling in with a load of bags.
‘This is Marilyn,’ I said weakly, ‘she’s come up for the weekend.’
‘Hi!’ trilled Marilyn, waving her fork in the air. Zara went to put a Fray Bentos pie in the oven. ‘Ooh, she looks like a student, doesn’t she?’ Marilyn remarked. ‘A bit hempy.’
There was no point trying to shush her. She was impervious to a kick under the table, too. I just let the wheels come off, and sat drunkenly at the table while she mithered about her meal and slagged my housemates off one by one as they came home.
Last in was Becky; she’d brought Fisher Boy with her.
‘This is Doug,’ she said.
‘This is Marilyn,’ I muttered. Marilyn’s face was bright red now and she’d just reapplied a matching red lipstick so everything kind of blended in. She was now up at the furnace end of the sofa watching a Jason Donovan video; I was nursing my last glass of Mateus. ‘Sorry, I drank your Mateus. I’ll replace it tomorrow.’
‘That’s OK.’ Becky looked stupefied. ‘And Marilyn is …?’
‘My mother,’ I said, though it killed me to do so.
‘Oh! Well, what a surprise! Actually, you do really look alike.’
This was true and I absolutely hated it. I didn’t want Marilyn’s mouth, nose or almond-shaped eyes, but I had them. It disgusted me. I willed Becky to take Fisher Boy to her room and she did, and Marilyn and I got ready to go out – me in jeans and a stripy T-shirt, her in a very tight off-the-shoulder black dress and a ridiculous pair of shoes.
‘Nobody wears heels in the union,’ I said.
‘Well, I’ll get noticed then.’
She certainly did. She got noticed at the hitching point, where she did hitch up her skirt and shove a leg out; she got noticed walking into the union, where she got a wolf-whistle she absorbed like syrup into a sponge pudding. She was highly noticeable and completely out of place amongst the jeans and DMs and the Ramones T-shirts. And she made a complete show of herself. She ordered a ‘whiskey and American’ at the bar – no one knew what that was; it turned out to be whisky and ginger beer. She flirted with random people, including two goths. Danced inappropriately to Salt-N-Pepa’s ‘Push It’. Went into the Porters’ Lodge at the end of the disco and wrestled the tannoy off Porter Paul to announce a party back at 68 Tachbrook Street (why had I ever written home and given them my address. Why?), to which a gaggle of pissed and excited students turned up at half one, brandishing cans of Guinness. There she danced on a chair in the kitchen to Sinitta, before making a round of fried egg sandwiches and doling them out to everyone on tea plates. I was drunk as a skunk by then. I slept on my own floor, thoroughly pissed off. Marilyn collapsed into my bed sometime later, a gnarly, clawed foot suspended above me.
The next morning I thought I’d get rid of her early, but she insisted we go back into the union because last night someone she’d been flirting with had told her there was a little place which sold fantastic milkshakes and the best ever American style pancakes and she didn’t want to eat anything else from my kitchen, quite frankly. (What about the fried egg sandwiches? I thought. She had no trouble wolfing those down last night.)
I was so hungover I could barely move. I told Marilyn to go on her own but she threatened to make Becky take her so I had to escort her. We had the pancakes and the milkshakes, somehow, without heaving. We walked back to the hitching point. It was sunny and my eyes hurt. We stood there and waited, doing controlled breathing (that may have just been me). I was desperate to be picked up so I could get away from here and send Marilyn off to catch her train. I was also worried some hot young thing she liked the look of would pick us up and I’d find out a week later she was still up here, in Bottom End Leamington with a matching Argos kettle and toaster. And then Mac’s car came around the furthest corner. Oh God, I prayed he wasn’t going to Leamington, as then he’d be required by student law to pick us up.
I realized how ridiculous we must look. Me in rolled-up jeans, DMs and a huge red lambswool jumper down to my knees; Marilyn in hot-pink capri pants, red slingbacks and a cropped jumper with cherries on it, plus the bouffant electric-white hair and the vanity case. He’d think I was standing here with a souped-up bloody Myra Hindley.
Marilyn had a fag on and was blowing smoke over the heads of the incredulous students in the queue behind us. I tried to step away and pretend I wasn’t with her but she grabbed my arm and hung off me, adjusting one of her slingbacks because she was getting a blister. Mac drove past. I could see the eyebrows raise behind the rimless glasses, the half-smile curve of curiosity and amusement. My only salvation was that he was clearly not going to Leamington, so he didn’t stop. But he’d seen her. He’d seen Marilyn. We looked so much alike he’d know now who I was and I hated it.
I did not want to be my mother’s daughter.
NOW
Chapter 12
It’s the morning after the night at Gatsby’s and I wake up with a terrible hangover. I’m groggy and my mouth is dry. My nightie has Nutella stains on it. My hair looks like a giant, electrified dandelion clock and reminds me I need to get my roots done. None of it is a Good Look.
I lurch from my bed and into the bathroom, then back to bed to turn on the radio where Cher, in turn, is turning back time, so I turn it off again. It’s not like me to get so drunk, these days, although at least I am free to do so, since Christian. I’m not quite sure what happened. James left as he said it was late and he had an early viewing in the morning – watched by several pairs of disappointed eyes, I noticed – and then Becky handed me another drink and another and then a dance floor formed itself like an amoeba, over by the front window, with a huge triffid plant bearing down on everyone, and we danced until 3 a.m., with Dominic briefly joining us to stomp on crutches to The Pointer Sisters. It was fabulous, actually.
I wonder briefly if James would have danced, had he stayed. Would he have done the imaginary knocks on the door to ‘Love Shack’ and the doggy paddle-esque running away hand gestures to ‘Tainted Love’? Would he have whoo-hooed to the Black Eyed Peas? I’m not sure; somehow I don’t imagine him to be the dancing kind, though he may have surprised me.
I really enjoyed it. I haven’t danced for ages. I have a vague memory of whirling round and round with Becky as disco lights flashed a kaleidoscope of half-moons above our heads and cast dots and dashes on our faces. I felt free and alive and a littl
e like my old self, to be honest. I never expected that to happen. For those few hours it was like Becky and I had gone back in time.
Becky left with her prospect, in the end, and I shared a taxi home with Dominic and the Leg, which by now had its own fan club and about fifty signatures, phone numbers and propositions written on it, mostly in liquid eyeliner. I did it. I have been out. I have been out with friends and I survived. I’ll give Becky a call from work, later – the first I will have initiated since Christian; it was a shame we didn’t get a chance to talk more last night, about the things that really matter, but maybe today we can. I had an illuminating thought in Gatsby’s on the dance floor running away to ‘Tainted Love’ – one I may share with Becky today, if the call goes well – that I had been targeted by Christian. Recruited: he’d made a career of it, after all. It’s all so obvious now. I was a single mum who had just been left by a cheater; I had an unfeeling, narcissistic mother, a depressed father (did Christian even have some kind of sixth sense that he would leave us in the worst possible way?) … no anchor to cling to in life’s storms to stop me being stripped away to nothing. I was vulnerable, I was easy prey. He saw me coming.
For now I can email Becky at the Opera House, to say thanks for a great evening. I get out of bed and flop to the sitting room where I open the laptop to send her an email, but as I click on to Outlook, three emails down in my inbox, making my heart stutter, is something from Stewart Whittaker.
Dear Arden,
Thank you for your email. I’m so sorry to hear Mac is in hospital. I send him my warm regards and wish him a speedy recovery; if you let me know which hospital I’ll make a visit when I get back from New York in a couple of weeks. I’m afraid I don’t know his son Lloyd’s current whereabouts. As far as I was aware, he was running a bar in London somewhere and I don’t know anything beyond that.
There is someone you can try, if you can track her down. A former student of Mac’s, Perrie Turque, who I once met at a barbecue at his house. I believe she was Lloyd’s girlfriend for a while and as such may know where he is. I’m afraid I don’t have any contact details for her but I believe she is a travel writer and has a blog.
Yours,
Stewart Whittaker
PS. You have an unusual name. Did we meet once, many years ago, in Soho?
These Film Studies buggers have bloody good memories, I think, as I bash out a quick reply. Yes, we did meet once, many years ago, and it was outside the Wiltshire Hotel in Soho. I was terribly polite and desperately trying to look as though I wasn’t having an affair with Mac; you were a big man in a big overcoat, with a curious expression on your face.
It was on one of the best weekends of my life.
I don’t write this, of course. I thank Stewart for his information, tell him Mac is in St Katherine’s and say I will pass on his best wishes.
I then google Perrie Turque and she pops up straight away. She has a travel blog, an Instagram account, and both Twitter and Facebook pages. I wonder if she met Lloyd in his bar and why she went to a barbecue at Mac’s after they were no longer together. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook, but I email her via the blog, with the necessary details, and then collapse back into bed for ten minutes before I have to get up for work.
When I get to the hospital that night, straight from work, Mac is not in his bed. A fear grips me like a cold, gnarly hand round my heart, squeezing it too tightly. I look around wildly for Fran, for anyone. Where is she? Where is he? I run to the nurses’ station and someone I don’t recognize is there, nodding an auburn curly head over a computer.
‘What’s happened to Mac Bartley-Thomas?’ I breathlessly ask.
‘Oh, sorry, love!’ Thank God. It’s Fran, emerging from a cupboard set into the wall and wielding a bed pan. ‘I was looking out for you but I got distracted by Mr Hussain in bed two. Hey! Mac’s fine, he’s fine. He had some bleeding overnight, on the brain, and he’s just having a little operation to release the pressure.’
‘A little operation?’ I realize I am gripping the edge of the desk.
‘More a procedure. It’s pretty standard. Routine. He’s going to be fine.’ Fran touches my arm, to reassure. Her eyes look kind and unfazed. Unfazed enough that I allow my breathing to relax a little.
‘I was so scared when I saw his bed was empty!’
‘Oh, I can imagine. More of a worry if there’s someone else entirely in it, though, to be honest!’
I laugh but the fear hasn’t quite left me. It’s a residue surrounding me – a churning fog I can’t reach out from. I wish Julian was here. Or Becky. Becky. I didn’t even call her today, I realize, or email her. Instead, I spent the day musing about Perrie Turque and Mac’s son, but now the regret that I didn’t contact her pierces through the fog like a lance.
I hear another familiar voice, saying, ‘Good evening.’ It’s James. In another suit, hair combed and careful. I’m in my dog-tooth one, black cashmere jumper. My hair is a bit of a mess as it’s wet and windy out.
‘Mac’s not dead,’ I say hurriedly. ‘He’s just having an operation.’
‘Oh?’ I realize James has actually had a haircut; everything’s even shorter and neater. ‘Everything OK?’
‘I think so. How long will he be?’ I ask Fran.
‘Couple more hours, I expect.’
I wonder why no one has called us then I remember we are not family. No one here has our phone numbers; we are not next of kin.
‘You look tired,’ says James, once Fran has explained everything again to him, patted me on the arm once more and squished off down the ward.
‘Do I? Hungover, more like!’ I remember how all those young girls had looked at him last night, how his soot-grey eyes had been oblivious to them.
‘What time did you stay at that bar till?’
‘About three.’
‘Oh, a big night.’
‘Kind of.’
He hesitates for a moment. Neither of us knows what to do, I think, with Mac not on the ward. We are hovering by the nurses’ station like a couple of awkward spare parts. ‘Do you want to go to the café? Get something to eat?’
‘OK.’ I don’t want to go home. If I did I would only want to come back again.
We leave the ward and navigate the yellow corridors to the infrequently signposted café. In the last corridor, where a casual piece of green tinsel still clings to the wall, we pass an open door and a sign saying ‘Hospital Chapel’, and I sneak a look inside.
It looks peach-painted creepy. Apricot-sterile. There’s a modern stained-glass window at the front – depicting a seascape, three rows of woolly upholstered chairs and a cross suspended on a pleated sage curtain, on the right. If God is supposed to be in this room I can’t see his hand or any other part of him; it looks like it was all done up cheaply at B&Q. Still, people find it comforting, I expect.
A woman comes out in a navy anorak, a tissue balled up in one hand. Poor love, I think, and pray I won’t ever have to go in there. Once, at another hospital, after we lost Dad, was enough. ‘Sorry,’ the woman says, as she brushes past us and I don’t know what to say. She doesn’t look at all comforted. I’m not religious; I don’t come from a religious family. ‘A load of old hokum,’ Dad always said and Marilyn would add, ‘Opium of the people’, quoting Marx to try to make herself look clever. She had a lot of pretensions, that woman. She still has a Goya painting from her old bedroom in Essex in her room at The Cedars – The Naked Maja, the one the real Marilyn had. Actually, the Chapel of Rest reminds me of my mother’s room there: all ‘comforting’ textiles and ‘soothing’ pastels.
It’s busy in the café, there’s a lot of steam rising from behind the counter; lots of different accents ordering hot drinks and lots of kinds of people squatting at cluttered tables. The bustling, bright nature of it actually is comforting. The walls are not the stale peach of the Chapel of Rest, but a vibrant ochre which bathes the café in a cheery tropical sunset, despite the driving rain outside.
‘I always like
d the café in Brief Encounter,’ says James. ‘You seen that?’
‘Yes,’ I say, not surprised he has, after what he told me at Gatsby’s. ‘Carnforth station. I didn’t think you’d like that sort of film.’
‘I like all kinds of films,’ says James.
‘I love it,’ I say. ‘All that black-and-white angst. The repression … And no, you don’t have anything in your eye.’ I laugh, remembering how Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard first meet in that movie. ‘What do you fancy?’
I look up from my purse and at him, and the expression on his face – warm, amused, almost tender? – makes me wonder for the merest of split seconds what it would be like if I did have grit in my eye and he were to take a look at it for me. Then I order a sticky bun and a cup of weak tea and James asks for a chocolate brownie and a hot chocolate.
‘A bit girly?’ he suggests, after he has ordered whipped cream to go on the top. ‘I’m one of those unsociable weirdos that don’t like tea or coffee, and I’m a bit of a chocoholic.’
‘No, of course not,’ I say. ‘Of course it’s not girly.’ He’s different, I think. He’s not like everyone else.
‘And do you want marshmallows on that, dear?’ the elderly lady behind the counter asks. Shrill, old-fashioned, a hefty nose. She looks like she’d fit in quite well at Carnforth.
‘Yes, please.’
We go and sit down. There’s a free small table by a large radiator.
‘It’s terrible,’ says James.
‘What’s terrible?’ I ask, although I can think of a range of answers, to be honest.
‘Mac. The head injury. The operation. Poor bloke.’
‘I know.’ I sip my scalding tea. ‘I hope it goes OK. I’m worried – really worried – that he won’t come round, that this is it, that even if he does I won’t ever get the chance to speak to him again. I know this is totally self-absorbed but so much is missing for me,’ I add. ‘There’s so much I want to know. It’s a big gap, isn’t it? Thirty years? Well, twenty-eight, actually, since I last had a conversation with Mac. I don’t have a clue what’s in all those years.’
You, Me and The Movies Page 16