WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT
ON THE FAR SIDE, THERE’S A BOY
Auntie-Uncle Moon is everyone’s confessor: controlling tides, and ovulation, waxing and waning over space and time while the tectonic plates of people’s lives shift and collide. A new writer with an absorbing tale, Paula Coston gives us a wonderfully contemporary book with a very contemporary voice.
Jamila Gavin, Whitbread award-winning author of Coram Boy, novel and show in London and on Broadway
Paula Coston addresses what will, in time, be seen as one of the central themes of our time: what becomes of the woman who wanted to be a mother but it didn’t work out? Considering that 1:5 women born in the 60s hasn’t had children, and that it may rise to 1:4 for those born in the 70s, this is a question on which our culture is in collective denial. Not everyone facing middle age without a child chose that outcome and indeed, some of the choosing and not-choosing is rarely clearcut. So it is for Martine, the novel’s protagonist. On the Far Side, There’s a Boy is an important novel which finally fleshes out the interior world of the ‘nomo’ (not-mother) and shows how the themes of motherhood-or-not surface in unusual ways in the lives of modern women. She has set a high benchmark, but I hope it encourages other nomos to write their novels too – we need our stories to be heard!
Jody Day, Founder, Gateway Women;
www.gateway-women.com
First published by Roundfire Books, 2014
Roundfire Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,
Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK
[email protected]
www.johnhuntpublishing.com
www.roundfire-books.com
For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.
Text copyright: Paula Coston 2013
ISBN: 978 1 78279 574 2
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.
The rights of Paula Coston as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Stuart Davies
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.
Dedication:
To the many I’ve loved, the few I’ve lost and the one
I never found.
‘There is nothing you can think that is not the moon.’
Matsuo Basho, 17th-century Japanese poet
1 Martine
Friday 1 February 2013
Martine Haslett stoops, hands on knees, her salt and chilli-brown hair any old which way, watching the chameleon she bought recently. She’s thinking for both of them, We’re cornered in a landscape. We shouldn’t be where we are. More words rise up, from a fund of feeble cracks. Once they made a joke about a chameleon but nobody could see it. Her lined brow crimps, narrowing her eyes down to black dots.
She sprinkles brown crickets under the heat lamps, into Sancho’s cage. He clambers through the foliage, they jump pointlessly about and he shoots his tongue and whisks them in. He sees the water gun in her hand, creeps forward along a branch and averts his grey-green head in anticipation, shutting his limpet sockets and opening his mouth. The warm jet hits it at the corner. It closes, opens, closes on the stream. His cage is wedged into the railway-carriage squeeze of the kitchen. He was a momentary indulgence to delay important changes.
On 15 November last, her mother said her usual ‘Love you,’ as if ending one of their phone calls, and turned over in bed, away from her. A statement of closeness, then one of separation. She was eighty-seven. With her gone, Martine has been shuffled up to eldest in the family. It’s a promontory, further from some people than she’d like.
She activates her smartphone on the square of kitchen table, pushing on her varifocals.
An email rebukes her. ‘Martine, I need a decision. Jocelyn Teague.’
There are new texts, too.
Friend Leanne says, ‘Going into the rush hour grind. Talk about it at Stew n Pickle tomorrow night?’
Matthias says, ‘IM ON THE TRAIN!!! Retreat OK. Have prayed over peanut fudge and posted.’
Pearl says, ‘Remember what my feminine side did to me. Dont rush in.’
Ali says, ‘Moored by a pub, drinkin & thinkin that u shd take yr time.’
The texts take Martine back to the email from Jocelyn Teague and the decision she hasn’t made.
She murmurs, ‘All thanks but let me be.’
Her eyes turn to the window, to the waning moon above the city. Years ago, she reminisces, I was Martine the scientist and it was just a turning rock, scientifically explicable; now it seems like a strip torn from a message, fluttered my way. She’s discovered now that life is one part fact and one part fantasy, like the moon.
The correspondence that also hangs over her is in the guest room. It’s in a large, grey-lidded carton, somewhere among her mother’s barely used golf clubs, two cases of her mother’s redundant clothes, the dog bed holding the pointless dog toys, bowls and lead and all her mother’s secret trophies, wrapped up in paper in their box.
She re-read the letters only last year. Most envelopes are empty, the contents unfolded, their crinkles spread. The letterhead announces ‘InterRelate’ and under it, there’s that jumpy English typing. The Sinhala script is filigree, the foreign paper slight; staples, not even rusted, join the pages in one language to the pages in the other. There’s a blue manila wallet full of sheets; also, three unfoldered letter bundles, labelled. There are other documents and messages as well. She sometimes wonders why she’s kept them, chiding herself with, As if the past, like them, is solid.
Of course she doesn’t have the emails from the crisis of last spring, the pinged-off words whose sting will never leave her: ‘How dare you neglect me, fail me, lose me? Just when I thought I’d got you, why weren’t you there – not least to help me with the fact that you weren’t there?’
If she says yes to Jocelyn Teague she’ll have to clear the carton, find it a new place out of her eyeline. She moves to her bedroom. She leaves the door ajar and switches on a lamp. She climbs on to the white IKEA four-poster, swinging her legs up, sinking her head back on the pillows. So much to recover from back then, let alone since. Among the papers in the box she recalls that there’s a postcard somewhere, an ordinary view of an English country market, and on the back her mother’s round hand, unhurried, as if the two of them had all the days in the world. But it’s Mum’s real voice she needs, a warm hand between the shoulder-blades, a steer to some new way.
The city glows between the undrawn curtains. Their pattern of stems and leaves writhe in the moonlight over their folds: paper-chase creeper; Mussaenda frondosa, to a tropical botanist. She turns her head, staring at her wardrobe with its tall white doors to nowhere, and thinks of its high shelf. If she agrees to Jocelyn Teague, she could stow the carton there.
* * *
1982–1983
In 1982, Martine felt fine: happy and fine.
An ordinary day back then found her dotting about in a seminar room, ignoring the rubbing of her left high heel and resigned to the little comedy of her stubby darting body, she and assistant Pippa arranging chairs and putting out dry-wipe pens at the whiteboard, notepaper for the students on the tables. Her disobedient, mud-toned hair caught inside her shirt collar as she
wrote up ‘Welcome to “Identify, Analyse, Create”’, adding her name with the expected naff-but-disarming smiley face. Teachers sleepwalked in from their London working days and sat with their friends as close to the back as they could. From the sidelines she kept up an intent, unwavering smile, welcoming them with rum jokes about school life. Her voice alto with a hint of lisp, fluid with saliva, a thing men seemed to like.
She gave them a paired exercise, then pinballed between the tables registering the raised voices of the baffled and the belligerent and the mutters of the lazy. Some had been sent by their senior managers, some really wanted new skills.
‘The secret,’ as Martine would remind her team, ‘is to ration your speech, to let the students talk.’
She cajoled the argumentative with teasing or a question. Each student she had down as a different challenge.
Soon she announced a movie. Popcorn went round, to some giggling. She flipped off lights and the group slumped, relieved to be passive for a while.
‘You’ll see a total lunar eclipse,’ she explained. ‘Afterwards, we’ll talk about two or three things about it that you could ask children to identify; one that they could analyse; and one that you could ask them to create. Remembering,’ she added, ‘that “creation” can mean hypothesis.’
She switched on the film. The captured eclipse would turn from penumbral, then partial, to total, then maximum, stages that a class of teenagers could break down. On the screen a silver-rimmed moon flicked on, stamping the darkness, and the time-lapse sequence started.
In Martine’s early decades, like everyone she’d got scars. She’d lost her father to America as a child; coped with her mother coping; was kept prisoner by someone for five whole days in her mid-twenties; and said goodbye to several lovers, one someone more special. These were her seas and craters, over time giving her her smile nearly as unchangeable as the moon’s.
On the screen now, shadow overtook the 2D lunar circle, progressing. Then the player rattled and chewed to a halt. Martine tried to fix it; two teachers rallied to her, but failed to help.
She used the phone in the room to contact assistant Pippa.
The voice grumbled, ‘Tell me how much you need me.’
Martine said patiently, ‘Please, Pipsqueak, get one of the technicians.’
‘I’m your flipping saviour, aren’t I?’ Pippa said.
‘Meanwhile, bring me overhead transparencies and pens.’
‘“Thanks, Pipsqueak,” I hear you say,’ said the remorseless Pippa. ‘“And thank you, God, that Pipsqueak can multi-task.”’
Martine grinned. Pippa was needy; she’d give her flowers or something after a few more incidents like that.
This was Martine at the work she loved: people who were problems, and smoothing them out.
But in 1982, something new started.
One Sunday in March, after a three-bottle lunch at her best friend Ali’s, Martine shuffled the Sunday papers. ‘Where’s the Observer supplement?’
Ali, a statuesque blonde who alternately pestered or stung her friends out of love, pestered, ‘Tell me who your latest man is.’
Martine said, ‘There’s something I want to cut out,’ but Ali said, ‘Answer the question,’ and she said, ‘Nobody you know. Nobody I know, come to that.’
Ali frowned.
Sprawled on the floor still searching Martine said, ‘Men are my colour supplement: I’m not really fussed if there isn’t one, although of course I’d prefer …And where the bloody hell’s the colour supp?’
Weeks later, on Friday 6 April, Martine had finished work. Gusts of wind tangled her hair the colour of leaf mould as she rushed to Harry her newsagent’s booth and bought the Evening Standard news of the Falklands War Cabinet, He’s a Tease! and her regular Time Out.
She fluttered Time Out with a sideways look. ‘If you read this, you’d get out more.’
Harry laughed. She hurried off for Bernard Street and down into Russell Square tube.
At 27 Aldebert Terrace, Stockwell, a tall, Victorian house in a row of others, she scaled the stairs to her maisonette, unlocked the door and hung her coat. She tucked the heels of her ankle boots round a Habitat stool at the red Corian breakfast bar, with Joe Cocker rasping from her new CD system and the telephone pulled towards her, and a Cinzano and soda and her Neville Brody calendar and Filofax to hand. With Time Out open, she made a spate of phone calls, ‘When? OK,’ ‘We’ll meet there, shall we, loverboy?’, bantering, agreeing dates with friends and scribbling them in her diary. The full moon was at her window when she got up to clean a smudge from one of her mirrored kitchen cabinets on the loosened cuff of her power shirt.
But that night in Time Out, she also read the Lonely Hearts pages. 6 April marked the peak of her ovulation. She was indifferent to the moon back then; all the same, like a woman from an unlit tribe her body responded to it. Its complete, ovoid light dragged at her left ovum and floated it into her peritoneal space, urging her cells towards something her mind wasn’t even aware of. Her fingers were drawn to even more slippery pages than just the Things to Do, Places to Go. The Lonely Hearts pages, there to be stroked and turned.
She limited herself to one ad, responding with a letter. In the photo she sent, a hand was pulling her up onto a stage. She wore a lace blouse with puff sleeves over the broadness of her shoulders; a low bodice beneath it enclosed a boyish bust. Her skirt was full and gauzy, one arm hoicking up a handful, hurrying as usual, exposing a dimpled knee. There were balloons onstage, daubed with male nudes, and in the background a line of sequined figures of some gender or other. She was scrunching up her near-black flakes of eyes and smiling, as she so often does.
She chose only one ad to reply to because she worked, at the London College of Education, more than full-time. Monday evenings were filled with late meetings, followed by swimming at the nearby public pool. Tuesdays, she usually visited friends in Pimlico. Wednesdays were often a work friends’ night out. Thursdays, swimming again. Fridays and Saturdays meant a party or a club. Sundays, a social lunch or an outing. Thursday was the only dating slot left.
The man from the ad wrote back. On meeting him, she thought, He sniggers too much. But after that she saw others. Brian talked dirty, tasting of lychees; Ben sanded her like timber; when Oliver undressed, she ejaculated violently; there were bruises on Faruq’s thighs that had an intriguing texture; Si made her orgasm with a sinuous big toe. Each time she took her watch off, but not her precious armlet. This secret token marked the fact that sex was the one thing she was lyrical about.
À Bordeaux, off St Martin’s Lane. Lautrec prints and wine racks, guttering candles stuck on oak barrels. It was a rainy day in August. People criss-crossed shaking out umbrellas, carrying filled glasses. Her work friends Claire, Leanne, Lesley and Pippa surrounded her table, gabbling mock-advice. Beneath a jade-green satin sleeve, her armlet circled her bicep. Her hair was tightly permed, taming its scattered life.
‘You’ve given me the benefit of your piss-dom. Now bugger off,’ she growled.
They reeled off with laughed goodbyes.
Waiting, she kept turning her eyes on the doorway, and suddenly her half-brother banged through it. He cradled a box: he made deliveries back then. He loomed there turning his long, rain-shedding muzzle, then side-stepped behind the bar: he’d seen her, not seeing she’d seen him.
He leaned towards the bar boy, mouthing ‘Sister’.
She distracted herself by lining up each new male arrival with mental portraits of Lucho from university, Angus from the drug squad, diamond broker Patrick, and Fred, Freddy to her, the one of them who’d been significant enough to infantilise his name.
The date with his red book came. She stayed with him, and Jonas left instead.
She invited Jonas to Stockwell.
He’d set foot in England fourteen months before, thirty he was then. His excuse for leaving Chicago and their shared father was finding his roots; things hadn’t worked out with some girl he’d met on the plane
; he’d contacted Martine almost straight away; but it was her mother who’d managed to overlook Verdon Haslett’s abandonment, taken in Jonas and let him stay. These days, when Martine saw them together she’d catch Jonas frowning protectively at her mother’s fragile-looking kneecaps in the slacks she’d taken to wearing and think afresh, He’s become Mum’s son.
The moon was piercing a window again. Whiffing of sweat and cheap deodorant, Jonas shambled about her flat startled by the mirrors multiplying his image. Martine plundered the fridge for wine, uncorked it.
She said, ‘New jacket. Members Only. All that shine!’
Her mother had bought it. Jonas’s gaze took off.
She’d looked forward to seeing him. On the kitchen counter she’d laid out chicken pieces, garlic, lemons and the other raw ingredients, and now she was trying not to look as Ali said she often did, already wanting to clear the table and wash up.
‘Dinner was at seven, right?’ said Jonas.
‘You want to cook for Mum,’ she said.
‘You’re giving me a lesson?’
Martine said, ‘I saw you in À Bordeaux,’ and Jonas said ‘Mom has a cold’ at the same time.
‘When?’
‘Wine bar, last Thursday.’ She ducked into the peppers charring under the grill. Her message, why he was there, was, ‘There’s no need to say more.’
He sniffed, ‘You brought it up.’
She said, ‘I’ll tell Mum when I find someone.’ Smiling, she passed him the wooden spoon and a decoy question. ‘How about your love life?’
On a reflex, he blurted some dating details. They sounded thin to her ear.
The letters that haunt her were spawned by Jonas, she used to think.
One night she was in The Wellington, in a booth.
‘What’s your house like?’ the man was asking.
It was a dull question, but his jacket sleeves, turned back to an orange lining, showed a forearm with a promising thicket of black hair.
She was rambling, ‘Boudoir… bed. Painted and gilded it myself…It’s…’
On the Far Side, There's a Boy Page 1