by Julia Crouch
‘I did. Just now,’ Polly said to Rose’s back as she slowly got up and made her way down behind her.
Five
It took Rose a while to settle Flossie back into the car seat; she had managed to wake up all the others with her wailing. Anna had been trying to calm her sister, which somehow made Rose feel worse, as if she had committed a double dereliction of duty. Polly just got in the car and sat and waited for Rose to finish, barely acknowledging Yannis and Nico, who were wriggling with discomfort in the back.
Rose eventually climbed into the driver’s seat. It was nearly seven o’clock and she wanted to get home to the stew she had cooking in the Aga, to feed the travellers then settle them into their new digs. She was a little angry at Polly for not having told her earlier about Flossie, but she made allowances for tiredness and for grief. By the time they were back on the motorway, she was able to speak again.
‘What are your plans then, so far?’ she asked Polly, but there was no answer. She glanced over and saw that Polly had curled around her seatbelt and fallen asleep. She looked so calm and so innocent like that – at least ten years younger than she actually was. Rose turned her attention back to the road and quickly had to brake. The car in front was stationary and it looked like there was a long queue up ahead.
As she sat in the traffic jam, Rose felt a growing sense of responsibility for her visitors. Her own and Polly’s histories were so bound up together, it was hard to know where one of them began and the other ended. It was Rose who had introduced Christos to Polly, back in the Notting Hill flat days, and it was because of Polly and Christos that Rose had got together with Gareth.
Polly had been very successful in the early nineties. She had ridden high in the indie charts with her raw yet poetic music, and had been the pin-up for a certain type of kohl-eyed boy. When she came up to London to do her teacher training, Rose had rented a room in Polly’s velvet-lined Notting Hill flat. Those had been heady days. Polly was Rose’s ticket to the glamorous and exciting London that she, a maths graduate and trainee primary school teacher, shouldn’t really by rights have had access to. She remembered only too well the feeling of facing a raucous class of seven year olds with the dregs of cocaine in her system – and, on one very memorable occasion, her nostrils – from the night before. She was well known as Polly’s sidekick, and her photo often appeared in magazines, in the background or in the back of some taxi, behind the main story that was Polly.
And then it all went wrong. Polly’s fourth album, a pared-back piano-based series of the darkest songs she had ever written, was universally loathed. ‘Music to cut your wrists to,’ was one critical opinion, ‘and not in a good way’. Polly, who lacked the thick skin to deal with such blows, sank low, and the recreational use of cocaine and heroin that they had both enjoyed soon became, for her, a daily necessity. Sepulchral at the best of times, Polly started to look like a corpse. Her skin greyed, her legs looked like she had rickets, her hair began to fall out. But even like this, she exuded a childlike sexuality that seemed to draw men to her.
Rose, bored by the people that Polly had begun to hang out with – junkies breed junkies – had, for the first time in her life, started going out on her own and making her own friends. She and a couple of her PGCE contemporaries had edged their way into a group of older boy MA Fine Art students at Goldsmiths, where they were all studying. She enjoyed hanging out with them, spending half-term afternoons in lock-ins in smoky New Cross pubs, arguing about minimalism, structuralism and postmodernism over pints of Red Stripe. She was drawn to the conceptual, left-brain stuff they went on about, but was at a loss to understand how they then translated that into creative work. It was something that still both perplexed her and provoked her admiration.
The MA boys were romantic figures, all work-worn fingers, splattered DMs and intense cigarette rolling. Christos had caught her eye from early on, and it wasn’t very long before he asked her to go with him to ‘this little Greek place my Uncle Stavros runs’.
It was the middle of a heatwave and everything about London was a little heightened. The night they went to the restaurant, darkness had brought no relief from the humidity of the day. It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary nights of Rose’s life.
After a dinner of char-grilled souvlaki, thick garlicky tsatsiki and tooth-achingly sweet baklava, Rose and Stavros stayed drinking Raki and Greek coffee until the restaurant closed. Opening bottles of cold beer and chilled Retsina and handing them out to all the restaurant staff after hours, Uncle Stavros turned the music up loud, cleared the floor and turned the place into a party venue. This was quite normal, Christos had explained, for a weekend evening.
The night was long and sweaty. Rose found herself dancing next to a dripping, squat Mexican dish-wash boy and a waitress she had decided early on was a great beauty. Then Christos stepped in, put his arm around her waist and in a gesture that was grand and romantic, like something from an old-fashioned movie, he swept her away so that he had her all to himself.
They danced for hours, glued together at the groin – skin on skin with her arms under his T-shirt, twined around his back. He smelled, she remembered, of Eau Sauvage, garlic and fresh sweat. She could recall it so clearly even now, over a decade later, with him in his grave, and it still made her make a small involuntary sound at the back of her throat when she thought about it.
Then at four-thirty, just before sunrise, his uncle called a load of cabs. Everyone poured out of the restaurant into the clammy night and piled in.
‘Now for the best part of the evening!’ Christos grinned as he handed her into the taxi.
They went up to Hampstead Heath, where, like a pack of giggling children, they climbed over fences to break into one of the bathing ponds. This was how they always ended a hot Saturday night, Christos said. It was a hangover from the days when his uncle had run a restaurant in the Plaka in Athens, and they had all gone down to Rafina to see the dawn in from the Aegean, before a trip to the fish market to buy the next day’s menu.
‘Hampstead Heath Pond isn’t quite the same, and the fisk is delivered in a dirty white van, but what can you do?’ Uncle Stavros shrugged, and, tugging off his clothes to reveal a darkly-haired body that had seen perhaps too many souvlaki and kleftiko, he bellyflopped into the cold, dark water.
The others followed him. They were all so hot, the water practically sizzled when they jumped in.
Christos swam across the pond, leading Rose off to a dark corner, away from the others. As the shouts and laughter died down, and everyone began to drift off, Rose and Christos made love, naked on the grass, in the early-morning light. He came at her like a hungry animal, licking and eating. She was quick to respond.
Looking back on that night, she reckoned that Christos had lit something up in her that she had never known about before, and she was grateful to him for it.
As they walked back across the Heath in the warm morning sun, Rose thought that she had very high hopes for this one. They kept stopping for deep, devouring kisses, adding more ache to their already tired mouths and faces.
‘Would you like to come in for coffee?’ she asked with a smile when they arrived on the doorstep of the flat she shared with Polly.
‘I’d like to come in and fuck you some more,’ he whispered. ‘Then I’d like to sleep with you.’
So he did. As usual, Polly had been partying all night and had gone to bed leaving the place looking as if a bomb had hit it, but for once, Rose couldn’t care less.
They woke in the late afternoon and lay in bed, listening to the Sunday silence. Rose got up to make a cup of tea for them both, and was annoyed to see that Polly still hadn’t cleared up from the night before. She also noticed that there, amongst all the beer cans and vodka bottles, was a dirty set of works and spillages of white powder on the coffee-table. Not for the first time, Rose thought that if Polly didn’t sort herself out soon, she was going to have to start thinking about taking the almost unbearable step of leaving this f
lat and living a life apart from her friend. As she crossed the floor towards Polly’s room, she indulged in a little fantasy, where she moved into a cottage on a cliff by the sea with Christos and was finally able to stand on her own two feet.
She was working out how many children they would have when she knocked on Polly’s door.
‘Poll? You awake? Want a cup of tea?’
There was no reply. Rose knocked again. Surely she couldn’t have gone out and left all that crap out there?
Carefully, she opened the door and there was Polly, completely naked, sprawled on her back across her bed, strings of drying vomit in her black hair and blood smeared around her face and pillow. She was the same colour that Rose and Gareth would later choose to paint their living-room walls: duck egg blue.
Rose ran to her and took her pulse. She thought she could feel something, but it was hard to tell because her own heart was pounding so strongly. She grabbed a mirror from Polly’s bedside table and held it to her face, sprinkling tiny grains of white powder over her as she did so. It steamed up, so she was breathing, slightly.
Rose began shaking her, trying to wake her, but Polly just flopped back like a bluebell a day after picking.
Then Christos was by her side. He was completely naked.
‘Is that—?’ he asked.
‘Yes, it’s her.’
‘Polly Novak?’ he gasped. Rose had kept the fact of her famous flatmate a secret from her Goldsmiths friends.
‘Yes. Look, she’s not well. You’ve got to call an ambulance.’ Rose held Polly to her breast, shaking now only inside herself. Christos gently put his arms around Rose and kissed her hair.
‘You go, Rosa. I know what to do – this happened to a friend of mine. I’ll lift her up, get her walking around. You go: I’m stronger, you know the address and everything.’
So Rose went to call the ambulance and the emergency operator asked a whole string of questions like what Polly had been taking, when and how much. There wasn’t much Rose could say definitely, but she answered as truthfully as she could. Who cared if it caused a scandal? Polly needed to stop what she was doing or the next time Rose found her, she might not be breathing. Despite the messed-up living rooms and the chaotic lifestyle, when it came down to it, Rose couldn’t bear to think of what her life would be without her.
The operator finally let Rose go, saying the ambulance would be there as soon as possible. Talking had calmed Rose down. She went through to tell Christos the news, but stopped in the doorway. He was standing in the middle of the room, naked, holding the equally naked, floppy body of Polly in his big arms. She had come round slightly and had a worn-out ecstatic smile on her face, like the clipframed print of Munch’s Death and the Maiden she had on her bedroom wall. She looked beautiful. Christos was singing one of her songs to her, stroking her hair.
Seeing them there like that, fitting together like two worn but beautifully jewelled belt clasps, Rose knew that there would never be a house on a cliff for her and Christos.
And she was right: through Polly’s stay in hospital and the media hoo-ha and the rehab, Christos hardly left her side. Rose was forgotten, and all she had of him was that one night. But, in his absence, his best friend and fellow MA student Gareth Cunningham just sort of stepped in. And shortly after that, it was the degree show, and then there was no time for looking back.
Rose could have felt resentful about Christos going off with Polly, but she saw that, once introduced, they had no choice. It was hardly that Polly had stolen him from her – she had, after all, been unconscious when he fell in love with her.
It was just one of those things that Polly did to men.
‘Why have we stopped?’ Anna had woken up and was leaning forward in the car, tapping Rose on the shoulder.
‘Who knows. Some sort of roadworks perhaps, or an accident,’ Rose said. ‘Try and get back to sleep.’
‘I’ll just look out as we go along. I like the lights in the rain.’ Anna leaned back and pressed her face on the cold condensation of the window.
Soon they were off again, crawling along the shining road, the exhaust from the cars around them like a swirling fog.
Rose saw the ambulance lights up ahead, and the swooping blue light of the police cars.
‘It’s an accident. Look the other way, Anna.’
They crawled past the scene. It looked as if a lorry had ploughed into a people-carrier that had been parked on the hard shoulder, half crushing it, sending it out into the path of the traffic coming behind the lorry.
‘Look away, Anna!’ Rose yelled as they went past the people-carrier. It was on their side of the road and, despite her better instincts, she couldn’t look away herself. She saw the emergency workers trying to get at the occupants, who looked like a family of puppets with their strings all cut. One small body – it looked like the first to be freed – was being stretchered away under a blanket. Rose looked sharply up the floodlit grass verge and saw a little girl sprawled near the top, one leg bent right under her body, her head at an unnatural angle, her eyes open. A couple of paramedics stood over her. One looked like he was crying.
Six
Gareth was in his studio when they finally arrived, two hours later than planned. He didn’t come out to the car to greet them, which Rose chose to see as a good thing. If he was so involved in his work, this was progress, and she wasn’t going to spend a moment supposing that his not showing might have more to do with the fact that he wasn’t keen on seeing Polly.
‘You go in, it’s unlocked,’ Rose said to Polly and the boys. ‘Anna will show you the way.’ And her little girl led them off down through the herb garden to the front door.
‘Mind the steps,’ Anna said, looking back, feeling the responsibility. ‘There’s lots.’
Rose unbuckled Flossie’s car seat and lodged the handle in the crook of her arm. She scooped up the bottles of milk she had picked up at the late-night garage on the main road outside the village and followed the others down to the house.
‘Very nice,’ Polly said, standing dwarfed by the vaulted kitchen ceiling. ‘Must’ve cost a bob or two.’
‘The house was a wreck, so it was actually quite cheap for round here,’ Rose said, as she busied herself setting the table. It was a little annoying that Gareth hadn’t done a thing towards getting the kitchen ready. ‘But we made up for that with our blood, sweat and tears.’
‘It looks very smart now.’ Polly curled up in the large old armchair in the corner of the kitchen, watching Rose work. ‘Very finished.’
Rose wondered why this sounded like a criticism.
‘We can’t do finished,’ Polly went on. ‘Christos always gets distracted into other things. He can never settle on the one task. So we live in the middle of ongoing projects – paintbrushes in the kitchen sink, wires hanging down from ceilings. It never ends. Oh, God.’
Polly leaned back in the chair and covered her eyes with her hands. Rose went over to her and put her arms around her.
‘Beep beep!’
A crowd of children barged past them. Anna and the boys were racing round the circuit you could make around the ground-floor rooms – from hall to living room to study to kitchen to hall and so on. Already, this part of the design of the house had become a major attraction for visiting children.
‘Well. They’re settling in just fine,’ Polly said, wiping her eyes.
‘Oy, calm down, you lot!’ Rose got up to get a glass of wine for Polly and herself. A panting Yannis bowled up in front of her.
‘Rose, can we stay for ever?’ He leaned his sweaty little face right into hers. ‘I love it here!’
‘You can stay as long as you like,’ Rose said, giving him a big hug.
‘Come on, Yannis, I’ll show you my dolls. I’ve got some Action Men, too.’ Anna grabbed the little boy’s hand and took him away. Nico, at nine years old too cool to show enthusiasm for dolls, nevertheless followed along up the stairs behind them.
‘Oh, happy boys,’ Polly
said, cupping her wine glass in her dry, cold hands. ‘She works well, your girl. But we’re not going to stay too long – just until I can get us on our feet again.’
Rose started to slice a loaf of bread. ‘What are you going to do about money, Polly? I mean,’ she added, detecting a flicker in Polly’s eyes, ‘not that we’re going to ask you for anything. You’re our guests and we love you and you must stay as long as you like.’ She laughed. ‘I keep saying that! But that’s because I mean it.’
Polly drew her knees up to her chest, making herself look tiny in the armchair. ‘What surprised me most of all about – about what happened to Christos – apart from the actual fact of him dying, of course – was that the month before he died he had actually got it together to sort out some insurance. Against his life, you know?’
‘Wow,’ Rose said. It was the last thing she would have expected from someone who had lived so very much in the moment.