When he did not find me outside he would stand there for a while, he would look down the street, he might even call for me. ‘G!’
But he would go no further.
‘She could be anywhere by now,’ he would tell himself. ‘There’s nothing else I can do.’
He would shake his head and feel a bit bad but console himself with the thought that he had done all he could. Under the circumstances.
I knew, by then, how far he would go for me.
25
2015, London
Who am I?
I am a younger sister, older sister, middle child, only child.
I am the daughter of a junkie hairdresser and an alcoholic model, daughter of a sex-addict drug dealer and a born-again Christian accountant. Before my sister died I was the good one, the sensible one, more like Mum than Dad, hiding behind my pink-rimmed NHS glasses, hand up in class with the answer to every question (‘Give the other children a chance, Gavanndra’). But after Candy died I had to be her as well as me. I absorbed her, split myself in half (shattered into a million pieces). I became the naughty girl, the wild girl, Daddy’s girl.
I am a bereaved sister, bereaved daughter, bad sister, bad daughter. I am a mother, wife, friend. Keeper of memories, teller of stories. Greedy and funny. Cold and intimidating. Loyal and loving. Survivor (how I hate that word).
I never wanted anyone to feel sorry for me because that would mean that they saw someone who was broken. I don’t want to be broken. I don’t want to feel sorry for myself. I have no patience with people who indulge in self-pity. Get up and fix yourself. Why are you waiting for someone else to do it for you? Who do you think is going to save you? There is only you. There is only me.
Alone.
Angry.
When I go to see Fiona we don’t talk about Candy, we don’t talk about Dad, we don’t talk about Mum, we talk about me. Fiona asks me to imagine the younger version of myself, the child who had to make her own breakfast, whose parents were too high to remember significant acts like conception.
‘Imagine she is sitting opposite you. Give her a name.’
I call her Newt after the little girl in the second Alien film, who lives alone on a spaceship and has seen her parents devoured by a terrifying alien with glutinous saliva dripping from its many pin-sharp teeth.
‘How do you feel about her?’
Maternal. I want to give her a bath, give her dinner, put her to bed in clean sheets, read her stories, hug her till she falls asleep, be right there by her side if she wakes in the night. Make her feel safe.
‘Yes, that is what I want to do too,’ says Fiona.
And it feels good. Imagining it makes it feel as if it has actually happened. Newt’s grubby face is clean now; her hair is brushed; she’s had second helpings of roast chicken.
‘Now think about fifteen-year-old you. Imagine her sitting opposite you.’
Drunk, high, smoking, laddered tights, black around the eyes, greasy hair. Bitch, liar, cheat. She makes my stomach flip in revulsion. I don’t want to be in the same room as her, let alone be her.
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s horrible.’
‘But don’t you want to hug her, clean her face, make her feel safe? Don’t you want to look after her?’
‘No,’ I say, becoming bolshy and uncommunicative, staring Fiona down. ‘No.’
Fifteen-year-old me is not sitting over there any more, she has moved inside me, her painful energy filling my veins. I am becoming her again. I want to rip her out of me.
‘But I do. I want to hug her just as much as I want to hug Newt,’ says Fiona, making a hugging motion.
‘I can’t stand her. I am so ashamed of her,’ I say, and I drop my head.
‘I don’t see why. She was pretty amazing. Think of all she lived through, think of what she achieved, think of the good choices she made.’
I come home and look at the diaries I wrote when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, hoping to find someone in there that I can love as much as Fiona seems to (perhaps she is the mad one!).
The diaries are scrawling and incoherent, all about getting pissed, getting high, going out, dressing up. Occasionally there are a few lines of Latin vocab, a burst of coherence in the chaos, but mostly it is furious black ink, swearing and showing off. Incidents are written down, Julia, Adrian, Dad, nightclubs, restaurants and raves, but never how these people or places made me feel. Neither of my sisters, Candy or Maranda, are really mentioned.
Is this it, the extent of my innermost thoughts? Is this a depiction of my sixteen-year-old soul? No wonder I hate who I was.
I have lunch with someone I knew from school whom I have recently got in touch with again. Kate sat next to me in Latin for two years during our GCSEs, and in front of me during the exam.
‘I just remember you writing and writing, pages of it. I remember asking you, “What do you do with it, all the words?” and you said, “I burn them. I burn everything.”’
I do not remember the burning or the writing. What was I writing? Why was I burning it? Is it because I found it all so horrible that even though I knew I had to get the words out of me, words that felt like fire in my chest, I couldn’t let those words exist in the world?
I can’t stop thinking about what Kate told me. It feels like an act of kindness, to have kept this memory of mine safe all these years, to give it back to me when I was able to hold it once more. And it is not just an act of kindness to the person I am now, it is an act of kindness to the girl I was then.
There were other acts of kindness. Not everyone disliked me as much as I disliked myself.
My teachers agreed that even though I had not achieved the grades that I should have I could still take the A-levels I had chosen. Latin, Chemistry and Ancient History. I was given a huge second chance. So I took it. I studied. I plunged myself into Virgil, Herodotus, protons, electrons, carbon bonds, Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic. At night I dreamt of dusty hoplites with long spears and Persians with golden armour and hair slickly curled. By the time I was seventeen I was doing well enough for my teachers to suggest Cambridge University. My Latin teacher, Miss Yeats, had watched my transformation from a studious Tolkein-loving twelve-year-old still trying to get her head around the move from a state school to a private school, so much catching up to do (I had never done French or played tennis), to a smoking, back-chatting fifteen-year-old who was rarely at school and who, when she was, was hungover or high. It was Miss Yeats who arranged for me to go to Newnham College for a meeting with the director of studies for Classics, Professor Mary Beard. Miss Yeats wanted me to see what a different life might look like, and whether I might want that life for myself.
I wore a long floral skirt, a purple mohair jumper and glasses. I dressed up as the girl I wanted to be. Serious and studious. I sat outside Mary’s office, the interiors quiet and ornate, a white curling balustrade and dark wooden cabinets. I remembered how I used to steal the black Penguin classics from the Classics room at school, translations of Euripides and Sophocles, Aristotle and Lucretius. I had a whole bookshelf full of them. I didn’t read them, but I did dust them, made sure they looked neat, tightly packed, spines shiny with care. My bookshelf was a sacred place; the rest of my bedroom was a grubby mess: dirty pants, teacups floating with green mould and orange peel that had been used as an ashtray.
In Mary’s room – high-ceilinged, long-windowed, looking out on to the green of the vast gardens – the books were part of the mess. There were so many piles of them, higgledy-piggledy, just one more pamphlet or journal would send them tumbling like a domino run.
I didn’t want to end up as a waitress on the King’s Road, sitting on men’s laps to get drinks bought for me, laughing at jokes that weren’t funny, selling a bit of coke to my friends on the side. I wanted this.
So I worked harder than ever. I got my A-level results, got my place at Newnham. I remember the day the letter arrived from Cambridge, a Januar
y morning. I opened it with shivering fingers.
I cut my hair, bought sensible black leather loafers, took out most of the gold hoops from my self-pierced ears. I went to live in Rome for six months so I could practise being this new person, a girl who loved Latin literature, Roman history, Kate Bush and Russian novels. In Rome I didn’t have to tell people about my dad or my sister, all the shitty things that I had done. In Rome I learnt that it was so much easier to be me when I was pretending to be someone else.
26
1994, Rome
‘My father is coming to visit.’
It was more a spoken thought than a conversational offering. We’d talked on the phone that day and Dad had asked me to arrange a hotel for him and Julia. He’d already gone to the travel agent’s and bought cheap flights. He would be here next weekend. It was something he’d talked about doing before I left. I hadn’t realized he’d been planning to bring Julia too.
‘That’s great!’ said Giuseppe.
We were sitting on the pink sateen bedcover on the bed in my room. We were watching television. This was the only television in the flat and often we would all gather in my room in the evenings, lounging, smoking. But it was late and everyone else had gone to bed so it was just me and Giuseppe. He didn’t even live here; he was a friend of one of my flatmates.
He laughed. On telly three men in shirts with the top buttons undone, displaying impressively hairy chests, were gesticulating with their cigarettes, interrupting each other and shouting. It was a programme about politics and I couldn’t really follow it. I preferred Rimini Jazz!, an entertainment show with performers singing jaunty ballads against a backdrop of the sea at sunset.
‘This guy, he is so funny, he is comedian, but he know everything about politics, he is so funny,’ said Giuseppe.
Giuseppe was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. He had taken his shoes off, but was still wearing his grey socks. He was tall, over six feet I reckoned, with blond hair, long on top, short at the sides, and blue eyes. He was a law student from Bari. His favourite film was Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood and he didn’t speak very good English, but his blue eyes were fringed with long black lashes and he had an amazing smile, wide and wild. He looked more like a Viking than a Roman.
I felt the side of my body that was closest to him tingle with the electricity of anticipation.
‘What he is, your father?’
‘Do you mean what does he do?’
‘Sì. Sorry. Yes.’
I had told Giuseppe that I would help him with his English. He was meant to be helping me with my Italian too, but so far that had just involved watching lots of television together.
‘My dad runs his own business,’ I said, thinking that is not a lie.
‘That is good,’ he said.
Giuseppe’s father was important in the army, something to do with fighter jets; his friends called his father ‘Il Generale’, which made him sound intimidating. I wondered if Giuseppe’s father and my father would ever meet. On our wedding day perhaps. But not before that, not before it was really necessary.
‘He’s got shops,’ I said. This was also not a lie. We did call the salon ‘the shop’. And once there had been shops plural, in Covent Garden, in Soho, even in Camden, when things were going well, when he was sober.
‘Great,’ said Giuseppe, and he coughed and shifted a tiny bit closer to me. I realized that he was nervous, and that made me light up inside, because it meant he might actually like me.
The programme finished.
‘Do you want to come to the Forum with me tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘Il Foro? Certo! Yes. I’ve never been. Can you believe?’
‘Great, shall we meet at eleven?’
‘OK. Good. I go now.’
He kissed me chastely on either cheek. I felt the warmth of his skin, his rough stubble, concentrating hard so I would never forget that feeling, him touching me, his hand on my shoulder. I was too scared, too self-conscious, to turn my head so that our lips might meet, which is what I wanted to do. More than anything.
He slid his feet into his brown loafers, put on his coat and picked up his motorcycle helmet.
‘Domani!’ he said, raising a palm in farewell.
The next day I wore tights, a black skirt, black loafers, a blue T-shirt and a denim jacket. I brushed my hair and put on a little bit of make-up. I was a Classics student on my year off between school and university, absorbing the sights and smells of Rome, trying to find ancient history in a modern city. That is what I was and that is what I wanted to look like. It was spring in Rome but the sky was grey. Giuseppe was dashing in a long black coat. He paid for us both to get in and he bought me the guidebook.
We walked together among the inexplicable broken stones, under swaying pillars, beneath triumphal arches. Giuseppe was gentlemanly; if ever the path was too narrow for us to walk side by side he would gesture that I should go first. I explained things to him: this is where Julius Caesar was assassinated, this is where Mark Anthony made his speech, this is where the Vestal Virgins lived, this is where they kept the grain that fed the population of the city. There were nests of snarling kittens, overfull bins, groups of bored schoolchildren, but I saw none of that, I only saw the magic of the place, stepping where the Romans had once walked, the space between then and now not so wide, not really, if I was here and they had once been here too.
‘Will you bring your father here too? You are a very good guide,’ said Giuseppe.
‘Maybe,’ I said.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to alter my memory of this place by coming here with Dad and Julia. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Dad coming at all. The skies were so wide here and I was so free. I was unfurling in the sunlight. I didn’t want him to come and squash everything, without even realizing he was doing anything wrong.
‘Who, me? Don’t be mean to your old dad.’
We went for pizza afterwards in Suburra, the slum where Caesar was raised. We talked about film, music, food. The language barrier made it hard for us to talk about much more. We did not talk about my life before I’d come here, carrying a suitcase filled with dictionaries, primers and Latin texts, so heavy I could barely lift it.
Dad and Julia’s flight landed at 11 p.m. We’d agreed that they would get a cab directly to the hotel and I would pick them up the next morning. They were only here for two days and Dad had never been to Italy before. I wanted to show him as much as possible. I thought that in the morning we could go to the Porta Portese flea market, then lunch in Trastevere and then we could go up to the Capitoline Museums – we could see the bronze of Romulus and Remus suckling the wolf and the statue of Laocoön and his sons being squeezed to death by the two serpents sent by Athena. That would be fun. Then they would probably want to stop and have a drink somewhere.
I arrived at the hotel at 11 a.m., as planned. The hotel was actually on the eighth floor of a building. I had to go up in an old-fashioned lift that shuddered and whined as it ascended.
Julia had left school and was now working as a receptionist in Dad’s salon.
I had not seen either Julia or my father for three months.
I asked the receptionist which room they were in. Away from the reception area the hotel was shabbier than I had expected, a brown tiled floor with dust in the corners, thin wood-veneer doors, a pile of dirty bedsheets, the sound of two women arguing.
I knocked on their door. No answer. I knocked again. Perhaps they had already gone out, but they should have left a note at the very least.
Then I heard shuffling, grunting. Dad.
He opened the door, holding it and peering around it, eyes crusted with sleep. He rubbed the hair on his head, his arm hooked upwards, like a monkey.
It was as though I’d seen him only yesterday.
‘Chubbs! What are you doing here?’
‘It’s eleven. We’re meant to be going out.’
They weren’t even ready. I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t they want to see the city?
He staggered back to the bed, naked. It was not a big room; the bed took up most of it, a mess of white sheets and pillows with Julia at the centre. The place smelt of Paris perfume and Baileys liquor. They must have had fun in duty free.
‘Shut the door, I ain’t got any clothes on!’
‘Who is it?’ wailed Julia.
‘Our leader.’
‘What?’
‘Gav Two.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you want me to wait outside while you get dressed?’
‘Don’t worry about that, sit down!’
Dad pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt. I moved the torn-open pack of two hundred Silk Cut on to the floor so I could sit on the leather armchair that was shoved in the corner of the room.
‘How was your flight?’ I asked.
‘It was great, wasn’t it, J?’ he said, addressing Julia.
‘What’s the time?’ she said.
‘Eleven,’ I replied, checking my watch. ‘Actually eleven seventeen.’
‘Well, my watch says ten fifteen,’ said Dad.
‘It’s the time difference. You didn’t adjust your watches?’ I said.
‘There you go, I was right,’ said Dad.
Julia groaned and pulled the sheets over her head.
‘We really should get going,’ I said. ‘Otherwise …’
I wished he could have come by himself. I wished I could have shown him the place that I had learnt to love so much, just the two of us. It was impossible with her here.
‘Come on, out of your pit, our leader has spoken!’ said Dad, tugging the sheets off Julia.
My heart twisted in a way that I had forgotten about, that I had forgotten to prepare myself for. I had gone soft so fast.
‘Gav!’ she shouted, pulling the sheet back. She had black make-up smudged all around her eyes and had dyed her hair black too. She wrapped the sheet around her and got out of bed, trailing it behind her as she went into the bathroom, locking it. I heard her turn on the shower and her echoey squeal. ‘It’s cold!’
The Consequences of Love Page 15