Andrew stared at it, and then the tune came into his head. This time, though, he willed it on. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone. He started to hum the tune out loud. He could sense that Peggy was beginning to panic. Ask me. Please, he begged silently.
“So, just so I’m clear,” Peggy said. “Diane just . . . doesn’t exist? You invented her.”
Andrew grasped his glass and tipped the remaining liquid into his mouth.
“Well, not entirely,” he said.
Peggy rubbed her eyes with her palms, then reached into her bag for her phone.
“What are you—who are you calling?” Andrew said, starting to get to his feet, yelping at the pain, having forgotten about his bruised foot.
Peggy waved her hand at him, getting him to sit back down.
“Hi, Lucy,” she said into her phone. “I’m just calling to check you’re all right to look after the girls for another couple of hours. Thanks, pet.”
Andrew readied himself to speak but Peggy held up a hand. “I’m going to need an oil change before we go any further,” she said, downing the rest of her drink, snatching their empty glasses and marching to the bar. Andrew clasped his hands together tightly. They were still so cold he could barely feel them. When Peggy returned with their drinks she had a new resolve about her, a steely look in her eyes that said she was prepared to hear the worst and not appear shocked by it. It was, he realized, exactly the sort of look Diane used to give him.
— CHAPTER 29 —
Andrew had gone to Bristol Polytechnic the summer after his mother’s death. With Sally in Manchester with her new boyfriend, it had been less about a yearning for higher education and more about finding some people to talk to. Without any real research he settled on some digs in a part of the city called Easton. The house was just off a stretch of grass with the optimistically bucolic name of Fox Park, which in reality was a tiny patch of green separating the residential street from the M32 highway. As Andrew arrived outside the house, hauling his possessions in a bulky purple rucksack, he saw a man in the park dressed entirely in trash bags kicking a pigeon. A woman appeared from a bush and dragged the man away from the bird, but to Andrew’s horror this was only so she could continue the assault herself. He was still recovering from having witnessed this harrowing tag-team display as he was ushered into his lodgings by the landlady. Mrs. Briggs had a fierce blue rinse and a cough like distant thunder, and Andrew quickly realized she had a good heart underneath her stern exterior. She seemed to be constantly cooking, often by candlelight whenever the electricity meter ran out (which it regularly did). She also had an unnerving habit of slipping in criticism halfway through an unrelated sentence: “Don’t worry about that feller and the pigeon, my love, he’s bit of a funny one, that lad—gosh, you need a haircut, m’duck—I think he’s one sandwich short of a picnic, truth be told.” It was the conversational equivalent of burying bad news.
Andrew soon grew fond of Mrs. Briggs, which was just as well, because he hated everybody on his course. He was savvy enough to work out that philosophy was going to attract a certain type, but it was as if they’d all been grown in a lab somewhere purely to annoy him. The boys all had wispy beards, smoked shitty little roll-ups and spent most of their time trying to impress girls by quoting the most obscure passages they knew from Descartes and Kierkegaard. The girls were denim-clad and seemed to spend all the lectures stony-faced, anger broiling away underneath the surface. Andrew only worked out later that this was largely due to the male tutors, who engaged in lively debate with the boys but spoke to the girls the way you might to a rather intelligent pony.
After a few weeks he made a couple of friends, a pudding-faced, largely benign Welshman called Gavin who drank neat gin and claimed to have once seen a flying saucer going over Llandovery rugby ground, and Gavin’s girlfriend, Diane, a third-year who wore bright orange-rimmed glasses and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Andrew quickly realized that Gavin was obviously the biggest fool of all, constantly testing Diane’s patience in increasingly creative ways. They had been together since before uni (“Childhood sweethearts, you see,” Gavin told him for the seventh time one evening, after his sixth gin), and Gavin had followed her to Bristol to do the same course. (Later, Diane would confide that this had been less Gavin’s not bearing for them to be apart and more that the simplest of tasks were too hard for him. “I came home once to find him trying to cook chicken nuggets in the toaster.”)
For reasons that were unclear to Andrew, Diane was the only person he’d ever met in his brief adult life whom he found it completely unproblematic to talk to. He didn’t stutter or stumble over his words when he was with her, and they shared a very specific sense of humor—dark, but never cruel. In the few instances where they were alone—waiting for Gavin to meet them at the pub, or in snatched moments when he was in the toilet or at the bar—Andrew began to open up to her about his mum and Sally. Diane had a natural gift for helping him to find the positives in what he was going through without trivializing anything, so when he spoke about his mum he found himself recalling the rare occasions when she seemed unburdened and happy, which usually occurred when she was gardening in the sunshine with Ella Fitzgerald playing in the background. When he spoke of Sally, he remembered a phase around the time they were watching Hammer horrors with Spike when she started to come back from the pub with presents she’d “acquired” (clearly from a dodgy regular who’d got them off the back of a lorry), including a Subbuteo set, a little wooden instrument apparently known as a “Jew’s harp,” and, most magnificently of all, an R176 Flying Scotsman with an apple-green engine and a teak carriage. He loved that engine, but it was Diane who made him realize that it was more than just an appreciation of the thing itself, that it was really emblematic of that brief period of time when Sally had been at her most affectionate.
Occasionally, through a haze of smoke in a rowdy pub, he would catch Diane looking at him. Unembarrassed at being caught in the act, she would hold his gaze for a second before rejoining the conversation. He lived for those moments. They started to be the only thing keeping him going. He was failing in his coursework to the point where he’d stopped bothering with it completely. He was resigned to dropping out at Christmas. He’d get a job somewhere and save some money. He told himself he’d go traveling, but in truth he’d found it hard enough moving to Bristol.
One night, he, Diane and Gavin were invited to an impromptu party in a fellow philosophy student’s halls of residence room, the caveat to the invite being they had to bring a crate of beer each. A large gang of them crammed into a bedroom and cracked open cans. Nobody wanted to talk about uni work, but Gavin found a copy of On Liberty and began drunkenly reading out passages as everyone tried to ignore him. As Gavin searched for a new book (perhaps Kierkegaard was what this party needed!), Andrew reached for what he was 50 percent sure was his Holsten Pils, but someone took his free hand from behind and pulled him outside. It was Diane. She led him through the corridor, down the three flights of stairs and out into the street, where snow was falling in thick clumps.
“Hello,” she said, putting her arms around his neck and kissing him before he could reply. By the time he opened his eyes again there was a carpet of snow.
“You know I’m going back to London later this week,” he said.
Diane raised her eyebrows.
“No! I didn’t mean that . . . I just . . . I just thought I should tell you.” Diane politely advised him to shut up and kissed him again.
They snuck back to Mrs. Briggs’s that night. Andrew woke the next morning and thought Diane had left without saying good-bye, but her glasses were still on the bedside table, pointing toward the bed as if watching him. He heard the toilet flushing in the shared bathroom and then the sounds of two different sets of footsteps meeting on the landing. A short standoff. Awkward introductions. Diane climbed back into bed and punished Andrew for not coming to her rescue by clamping her ice-cold f
eet to his legs.
“Don’t you ever warm up?” he said.
“Maybe,” she whispered, pulling the duvet over their heads. “You’ll just have to help me, won’t you?”
Afterward, they lay on their sides with their legs still entwined. Andrew traced his finger on the little white scar above Diane’s eyebrow.
“How did you get this?” he asked.
“A boy called James Bond threw a crabapple at me,” she said.
* * *
—
Five days later, they stood on the train platform as the sun warmed them through a gap in the fence. They’d been on their first official date the previous night, to see Pulp Fiction at the cinema, though neither of them would be able to remember a great deal about the plot.
“I wish I’d worked harder,” Andrew said. “I can’t believe I’ve messed this up so badly.”
Diane took his face in her hands. “Listen, you’re still grieving for goodness’ sake. The very fact you managed to get out of the house is something you should be proud of.”
They stood huddled together until the train came. Andrew bombarded Diane with questions. He wanted to know everything about her, to have as much as possible to cling on to after he’d gone.
“I promise to come and visit you whenever I can afford the ticket, okay?” Andrew said. “And I’ll call. And write.”
“What about a carrier pigeon?”
“Oi!”
“Sorry, it’s just you are talking a little bit like you’re being shipped off to a war somewhere, not Tooting.”
“And remind me again why I can’t just stay here?”
Diane sighed. “Because a) I think you should spend some time with your sister, especially at Christmas, and b) because I think you need to move home for a bit and decide what you want to do next independently of me. I have to concentrate on my degree, for one thing, and when that’s finished I’ll probably end up moving to London anyway.”
Andrew pulled a face.
“Probably.”
After a moment of silence he realized how unattractive his sulking must have been to Diane, but as she hugged him good-bye she gripped him so fiercely that he felt the warmth of her all the way back to London.
* * *
—
He moved into the spare room of a house currently occupied by two Dubliners who’d just discovered speed, and whom he managed to largely avoid apart from when they’d summon him to help settle entirely incomprehensible debates. (He tended to side with the one who looked most likely to set fire to something if he wasn’t declared the winner.) He survived entirely on Rice Krispies and the thought of the next time he’d get to speak to Diane. They had an arranged time every week when he’d go down to the pay phone at the end of the road and call her, Diane demanding they start every conversation with him telling her about the newest “busty” or “exotic” woman being advertised in the phone box. He kept an empty Nescafé jar on his bedroom windowsill where he saved up money for train fares to Bristol. He’d found work behind the till in a video rental store exclusively patronized by shifty-eyed drunk men buying porn, something he’d only told Diane after much carousing in the pub.
By this point he’d all but given up on the idea of coming back to try to finish his degree. Summer was creeping toward them and it made him anxious just thinking about the idea of being back in classes again.
“So you’re just going to sit about in London working in a porno shop?” Diane asked him. “What happened to you making decisions, or is this really the height of your ambition? You need to find out what you want to do for yourself. If you’re not going to finish your degree you need to work out how you’re going to have a career.”
“But—”
She waved away his protests. “I’m serious. I won’t hear another word about it.” She put her hands on the sides of his face and squeezed, turning his mouth into a comedy fish. “You need to believe in yourself a bit more and just bloody get out there. What’s your dream job, your dream career?”
She released the fish and waited for him to answer.
What was his dream job? More importantly, what could he say that she wouldn’t laugh at?
“Working in the community somehow, or something, I suppose.”
Diane narrowed her eyes, searching his face for signs of facetiousness.
“Well then, good,” she said. “So that’s the first positive step. You know the area you want to work in. You just need some experience. That means an office job, first up. So as soon as you’re back in London you’re going to find one. Agreed?”
“Yeah,” Andrew mumbled.
“Don’t sulk!” Diane said, and when he didn’t respond she moved down the bed and blew a fierce raspberry on his belly.
“What about you then?” Andrew laughed, pulling her up so that she was lying on top of him. “What’s your dream job?”
Diane rested her head on his chest. “Well, as much as I spent my entire adolescence saying I’d do the complete opposite of my parents, hence the philosophy degree blah blah blah, I’m thinking about a law conversion.”
“Oh yeah? Brokering deals for drug-dealing informants, that sort of thing?”
“The fact that’s your first thought makes me think you’ve been watching lots of terrible straight-to-video films from your shop.”
“It was either that or the porn.”
“And you’ve not watched any of that.”
“Absolutely not.”
“So if you want to have some ‘alone time’ you just picture . . .”
“You. Exclusively you. Wearing nothing but a smock made out of pages from Virginia Woolf novels.”
“I thought as much.”
She rolled off him so they were lying side by side.
“So, you’re going to be a lawyer then,” Andrew said.
“Either that or an astronaut,” she yawned.
Andrew laughed. “You can’t have a Welsh astronaut. That’s ridiculous!”
“Um, why not?” Diane said.
Andrew prepared his best Valleys accent. “Well there now, rrrright. That’s a small step for man, that is, and a great big giant one for mankind, see.”
Diane huffed and went to climb out of bed, but Andrew dived and grabbed her arm that she’d left deliberately dangling there. He loved it when she did that. Teasing him. Knowing that she would only get as far as a step away before he pulled her toward him.
* * *
—
Back in London, he spent his time behind the video shop counter circling jobs in the paper. He’d just sold a horrific-looking video to a gaunt-faced man who explained, “Wanking helps me with the come-downs,” when the phone rang. Five minutes later he replaced the receiver and considered the possibility that the woman who’d just asked him to come in for an interview might have been hired by Gavin as some sort of cruel act of revenge.
“Firstly, you’re insane,” Diane said when he spoke to her from the phone box later that evening (Bella, gorgeous busty blonde). “Secondly, I’m pretty sure I’m entitled to say I told you so. So we can do that now or wait till after you’ve actually got the job. It’s up to you . . .”
The interview was for an admin assistant at the local council. He borrowed one of the Irish boys’ suits, which had once belonged to his father. Checking his pockets as he sat in the waiting room, he found a ticket stub from a 1964 production of a play called Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which had been performed at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Had Sally gone to Philadelphia when she was in the States? He couldn’t remember, and he’d long since thrown away the postcards. He decided that the optimism of the title was a good omen.
The following morning, Diane’s opening line as she picked up the phone to him was “I told you so.”
“What would you have done if you’d said that and I hadn’t got it?” Andrew l
aughed.
“Um, pretended it was one of my other boyfriends?”
“Oi!”
A pause.
“Wait, you are joking, right?”
A sigh.
“Yes, Andrew, I’m joking. Hamish Brown accidentally touched my boob while trying to fix an overhead projector last week, that’s about as close as I’ve come to cheating on you . . .”
Despite himself, Andrew spent possibly 70 percent (okay, 80; 90, tops) of the time worrying about Diane’s being enticed away by someone. He always pictured a floppy-haired rower called Rufus, for some reason. All broad shoulders and old money.
“Luckily for you, fictional Rufus is no match for a real-life skinny philosophy dropout who works in a porno shop and lives with two speed freaks.”
Andrew was so nervous on his first morning at the council that he was forced to make a decision on whether it was less strange to spend the entire time on the toilet or to be sitting at his desk wincing with stomach cramps every five seconds. Thankfully, he managed to get through the day, and then a week, and then a month, without shitting himself or accidentally setting anything on fire. (“We really need to work on your benchmarks,” Diane told him.)
Then the most glorious of days arrived: June 11, 1995. Diane’s course was over, and she was coming to London. Andrew said good-bye to the two Irish boys, who were surprisingly emotional (though that could have been because they’d been up for three days straight) and piled all his stuff into the taxi waiting to take him to the flat he’d found for him and Diane, who’d managed to get everything into a couple of suitcases and taken the train from Bristol.
“Mum wanted to drive me,” she said, “but I was a bit worried you might’ve rented us a crack den or something and I didn’t want her having a panic attack.”
“Ah. Hmm. Funny you should say that . . .”
Something to Live For Page 24