Straight Talking

by Jane Green

  “Because her parents were divorced, and naturally, her father was now living with the object of the affair.”

  When you’re eleven years old, there are very few terrible things that can happen. When your happiness, security, and stability are dependent on there being two parents, together, who can give you what you need, the most terrible thing you can envisage is those parents splitting up.

  As an adult it may still be difficult if your parents divorce but you can cope because you are surrounded by a network of friends who have experience, wisdom, and your best interests at heart. As an eleven-year-old, you have no one, other than a best friend who is merely projecting her own pain and confusion onto you. And you wonder why I’m screwed up?

  I carry on talking, almost wincing with the pain this still causes me, even as a thirty-year-old.

  “They didn’t divorce, but from my perspective it was touch and go for a few weeks. It was touch and go while there were still frosty silences, while my parents didn’t touch, while I felt guilty, because perhaps this was something to do with me.

  “Perhaps if I was more perfect, if I tidied my room, helped my mother in the kitchen, tried not to eat as much, perhaps that would make everything OK.

  “The funny thing is that everything was OK for a while. It was OK until I was seventeen, until I discovered my father having an affair myself.

  “I was with a group of friends, sitting in a café in Covent Garden, talking about boys and sex, which none of us knew much about, and smoking myself stupid, as we all tended to do in those days.

  “We were having what we thought was a deep and meaningful conversation, when I happened to glance up and out the window. There, walking along the pavement opposite me was my father. My face lit up as I got ready to run out of the restaurant and greet him, what a lovely surprise.

  “But then I noticed that the woman at his side was holding his hand, and of course she wasn’t my mother, she was a friend of my parents, a woman who had never been married, a woman who, I suppose, used to have affairs with married men.

  “I stopped in confusion. Why were they holding hands? But inexperienced as I may have been at seventeen, even I wasn’t that naive. And then, as I watched through the window feeling like an eleven-year-old girl whose world is about to shatter into pieces, my father turned to this woman and kissed her. Not a hello, good-bye kiss. A kiss of passion, a kiss of longing.

  “Perhaps I should have run toward them, I wanted to tear her face off, to slap her until she screamed, to pull her hair until tears ran down her cheeks.

  “But I didn’t. I sat back down again very quickly, and tried to act normal, tried to pretend there was nothing wrong. I was so angry, so upset, that I couldn’t talk to my father, I couldn’t tell him. I was terrified I was right, and I was terrified I was wrong. Maybe it was just a kiss, maybe it didn’t mean anything. I had kissed boys who I hated, it was just a snog. But of course I knew, I just didn’t want to know.

  “Other things started fitting into place after that. The times my mother had been on holiday alone, and the phone had rung late at night and I’d heard my father murmuring into the telephone.

  “‘It’s Anthony,’ he’d say, his partner. ‘He sends his love.’ And I’d back out of the room because I knew that men don’t murmur to other men, they murmur to other women. Women who aren’t their wives.

  “And the times he’d go out saying, ‘I’m with Joe if you need me. Won’t be back late.’ And I’d phone Joe, needing to ask my father something, needing to be reassured that he wasn’t going to leave, that everything was fine and Joe would say, ‘Oh, he’s just popped out to get some cigarettes, I’ll get him to call you when he’s back.’

  “And five minutes later my father would call and I’d want to trap him, I’d want to ring Joe’s house immediately, knowing of course he wouldn’t be there, but I never did. I knew, but I didn’t want to know.

  “Or he’d come home in the early hours, while I was lying in my bed pretending to be asleep, but listening for the sound of the front door and watching the hours tick by on the clock. And the next morning I’d say, ‘What time were you home?’ and he’d roll his eyes and say, ‘Not late. Around eleven I think.’

  “But of course he wasn’t. I accused him one day. When I picked up the telephone extension to hear the tail end of a woman’s sentence, and then my father shouting, ‘Put the phone down, Anastasia.’

  “For the first time in my life I got angry with my father, and wasn’t afraid to show him. ‘How dare you?’ I hissed at him. ‘You’re having an affair. I know.’

  “He put his arms around me and said, ‘Tasha, I would never do anything to hurt you or Mummy. You need to know that. Never.’ But of course that’s not a denial, is it? That’s justification.

  “Imagine being a seventeen-year-old who loves both her parents, and doesn’t want to hurt them, doesn’t want them to hurt each other. Imagine carrying the burden of your father’s infidelities around for your whole life. You can’t talk to your friends because they don’t understand why it matters so much. You can’t talk to your mother because you don’t want to cause her unnecessary pain.

  “So you carry this betrayal, this lack of trust around with you, and slowly it colors every relationship you have. You start off trying to choose men who aren’t like your father, and in the early days of your relationships you say things like, ‘The worst thing you could do to me would be to have an affair. That would be unforgivable.’ And they nod and say they’d never hurt you, but of course inevitably they do, because you’re expecting it, you almost want it to happen.”

  “Why do you think you want it to happen?” I’d almost forgotten about Louise, lost in my own thoughts, and I’d almost forgotten about you too. I’m sorry, this is heavy shit, I know.

  “I think subconsciously it’s what I think I deserve. It’s what I know, family equals betrayal. My father betrayed me and my mother, so I wait for my boyfriends to do the same thing. If they’re not betraying me by being unfaithful, I’ll find another reason.”

  “And as a child you felt that you weren’t good enough to hold your father, hmm?”

  “Yes. And as an adult I feel I’m not good enough to hold a man. Even the times when I have had relationships with men who are faithful, who do appear to love me, I can’t trust it. I introduce them to my friends who are, I think, prettier than me, and I sit back and watch, watch them chatting, being friendly, and in my head I convince myself they’re flirting.”

  “And how does that make you feel?”

  “It makes me feel sick. I literally feel like throwing up, pure panic. I am absolutely terrified of them walking out. Of being alone. Which is so ironic, because the times when I am single, when there aren’t any men around, I am so together, so happy. But the minute I start a relationship, I go to pieces.”

  “We have to look at why, as a child, divorce was the worst thing that could have happened,” says Louise, in the tone of voice that means she’s about to start a roll, she’s going to tell me something I don’t want to know, something I already know but I’ve been too frightened to admit.

  “You have never broken away from your father. There’s an incestuous psychological relationship going on, you’ve never broken that attachment so even as an adult, when you know your parents are adults too and their lives have nothing to do with yours, you can’t let go.

  “And there’s a huge well of resentment there. You are furious. You are furious that you have these parents, that your father was unfaithful, that you were made to feel you weren’t good enough.

  “And now you have to take responsibility, you have to become accountable. Until you start to tell yourself that you are in control, that your parents aren’t to blame, nothing will change.

  “But when you say, OK, this happened, it molded me into the person I am today, and yes I do have anger, I do have resentment, I am pissed off, you will start to grow. You will start to break away, and to live your life as an emancipated woman.”
>
  “But how do I do that? Is that just a process I have to work through with you?”

  “Yes. And it will take a long time. It happens differently for different people, but it will happen. You will get there.”

  10

  I leave Louise’s and just as I’m putting the key in the door I can hear the phone ring. The one thing I hate more than anything else in the world is when people phone and I don’t reach it in time, the machine picks up and by the time I get there they’ve hung up.

  Thank God for 1471, the four digits that have changed my life, but even then, even though you are supposed to be able to trace most of your calls, if someone’s calling from work, or a mobile phone, or they’ve barred their number, you’re up shit creek, and you haven’t got a clue.

  When they first introduced 1471 I spent my whole life ringing back numbers I didn’t recognize and telling some stranger that someone in their household had phoned me. Most of the time I found them, but now I don’t really bother. It’s only important when you’re waiting for a man to call, and I’m not. Not really anyway.

  I run to the phone and pick it up breathing heavily because fitness is not, er, one of my strong points, and even a short dash down the hallway, around the corner, and into the living room has rendered me slightly breathless.

  “Tasha? It’s Andrew.” A smile spreads across my face, I didn’t give him my number, he must have gotten it from Adam.

  There’s a silence while he waits for my reaction, which is the bog standard, “Hi, how are you?”

  “I’m well. Actually I’m not that well, I could be better.”

  “Oh, why’s that?”

  “Do you know it’s been ages since I last had a shag.”

  I can’t quite believe he’s started already, this early on in the conversation, but he’s tempting me again.

  “I can’t believe that, why not?”

  “Maybe I haven’t met the right woman. Or maybe I have, maybe it just hasn’t happened yet . . .”

  “You don’t strike me as the relationship type.”

  “Who said anything about relationships? What I need is some nice uncomplicated sex with no strings attached.”

  A pause while I digest what he’s saying. Does he mean with me? Is this an offer I wouldn’t refuse? I can’t take him up on his offer, because I’m not sure what he means, so instead I say suggestively, “Don’t we all, darling?”

  “So what are you up to?”

  Well, I’m hardly going to tell him I just got back from my therapist am I, so I quickly say, “Just polishing up a script for the show.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to be working all night? I wanted to know whether you’d like to go out and play.” My heart skips a beat, and damn, I’m seeing Adam tonight.

  “Well, I won’t be working all night, I’m going to grab a bite to eat with Adam later on. Why don’t you join us?”

  “I won’t be intruding then?”

  Hardly. But of course I can’t say that, I say, “No, the more the merrier.”

  “Well, I’m coming straight from work so why don’t I meet you at the restaurant?” I tell him to be at The Red Pepper in Formosa Street at 8:30, and I put the phone down and can’t wipe the smile off my face.

  I hadn’t thought about what I was going to wear; after all, it was only going to be Adam and I was going to go straight out in my jeans and boots, with makeup that hadn’t been freshened up since this morning.

  But now, now I have to plan. Now I have to decide whether this is a good hair day or a bad hair day. I have to pull everything out of my wardrobe, try everything on and decide which outfit is flattering, sexy, sophisticated.

  I have to spend at least half an hour applying the same makeup that normally takes me ten minutes, and I have to stay calm. I have to make the bed, tidy the clothes up, and shove them back into the bottom of the wardrobe. I have to leave a bottle of white wine chilling in the fridge just in case.

  I have to frantically sprinkle that disgusting Shake ’n’ Vac stuff on the carpet, and quickly polish my wooden furniture with lavender-scented beeswax, and light a small oil burner with a few drops of Ylang Ylang to make the flat smell sensual, inviting, delicious.

  I have to do all these things because even though I want to resist Andrew, even though I know he’s bad for me, tonight could be the night, you never know.

  Because enlightened as I may be, enlightened as you may be, wouldn’t you agree that deep down every woman goes for the Andrews because she hopes she’ll be the one to change him? Oh come on, you must.

  She goes in with eyes wide open, fully aware of what he is and why it won’t work out, and even though he’s told her it’s just a fling, he’s not ready for a relationship, she’ll hang on and hang on because she prays that one morning he’ll wake up, see her sleeping beside him in her lovely silk Janet Reger special, and he’ll be hit by a coup de foudre, a flash of lightning. My God, he’ll think, I’m in love with her.

  God, we are so pathetic. We know this, we talk about this with our girlfriends and if a friend happens to be in the same situation we’ll advise her to get out because we know he won’t fall in love with her, we know she’ll end up with tears on her cheeks and cracks in her heart.

  Here’s my theory on men and women. When a man meets a woman he decides within around thirty seconds whether or not he finds her attractive. If he doesn’t, they become friends. If he does, they might become friends, but the potential for them to become lovers never quite goes away.

  When a woman meets a man she decides within around thirty seconds whether or not she finds him attractive. Even if she doesn’t, they become friends, but at any given point in their relationship, she could fall in love with him. She could fall in love with him because he’s kind, sensitive, and he makes her laugh. Because she grows up and realizes that sexual attraction is not the be-all and end-all to life. Because she finally realizes she deserves a nice guy. That nice guys aren’t all boring. That sometimes they do wonders for your ego, that sometimes they’re just what you need.

  Men are far more visually stimulated than women, who want to go deeper, want to find out what makes a person tick. And you wonder why all my close friends are women? Jesus, makes you wonder why you bother with men at all sometimes.

  And I know that Andrew won’t change. I know he’s attracted to me, and I know I won’t make him fall in love with me, but I still make that extra bit of effort. Just in case.

  Finally, when my flat is perfect and I am happy with my reflection and my hair, and my choice of clothes—a black silk clinging cardigan with my best underwear underneath, black lace just visible if I lean forward, which of course I don’t plan to do, much, and black lycra trousers with a little flare at the bottom—I’m ready.

  I drive up to the restaurant and Adam is already waiting. Adam is so reliable, he’s always on time, never moans if I’m not, and he’s always happy to see me.

  “Wow. You look gorgeous,” he says, as he gives me a big hug. “You look so well, how are you?”

  I do look gorgeous because my eyes are lit up, and I’m glowing inside because Andrew will be coming, a man I fancy, a man I’ve been daydreaming about.

  “I’m really well. Did Andrew call you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Oh, he just phoned me earlier and he’s bored so he’s joining us. That’s OK, isn’t it?”

  “Of course,” and I could be wrong but I’m sure I saw a faint shadow of a cloud pass over Adam’s face.

  “Let me go and tell them it’s now a table of three. I’ll be back in a sec.” I watch Adam’s big burly frame as he walks through the restaurant, feeling a pang of affection.

  It’s funny, isn’t it, how your true family are not your flesh and blood? They are the people you meet throughout your life who prove themselves to you. The people who you grow to love, who love you equally in return, who are always there for you.

  Mel is my family, Emma and Andy are my family. And now Adam is my family. And it�
��s becoming increasingly difficult to remember what my life was like before I met them.

  So I’m standing there, watching Adam and thinking about how much I adore him, when I’m clasped around the waist and a big smacker of a kiss lands on my neck.

  This is evidently becoming Andrew’s trademark greeting, the equivalent of a kiss on the cheek, and as I stand there I hope and pray that I’m the only one he does this to. That I am special. That his kiss on my neck means infinitely more than hello.

  If I thought Andrew was gorgeous before, seeing him now, in his dark blue single-breasted Armani suit positively takes my breath away, and I can’t help myself, I have to say something, to feed his already overenlarged ego.

  “You look good in a suit,” I offer lamely. “It suits you.” He smiles and raises one eyebrow because of course he knows he looks good in a suit, he’d look fantastic in a garbage bag, for Christ’s sake.

  “Thank you, Tasha. And I have to say, you look incredibly edible yourself.”

  I laugh, and as I do so I lean forward, ever so slightly, just enough to give him what I hope is a tantalizing glimpse of the black lacy bra.

  Adam comes back and they shake hands then hug. They actually hug, although Adam seems slightly reticent, but Andrew’s so tactile you can’t resist him. At least, I can’t, and sorry for being selfish but that’s all I really care about right now.

  We go to the table to sit down and I’m so proud walking through this restaurant because every single woman in the place turns to look at the two tall handsome men I’m with, and I can feel their eyes piercing into my back thinking, what has she got that I haven’t, and I don’t care, because they’re with me.

  It’s a complete treat going out for dinner with two handsome men. Especially when both are flirting with you and you can sit and bask in your reflected glory, which is what I do, aware that people are watching me with envy, and enjoying every second of it.

  “I bumped into Kay last night,” says Adam to Andrew. I know Kay, not well, and I’m not too sure I like her. She’s always pleasant, always friendly, but I can’t put my finger on it, she’s just not someone I feel completely comfortable with.