At the end of that session, Fay said, What if it’s not what happened with this boy you regret, it’s you? It’s the you who you left behind. It’s who you were at eighteen and the things that happened subsequently and you look back on it as a watershed. You broke up with yourself.
This hit me as fearsomely true.
I mean, if I was Doctor Who’s new companion, and he was agitatedly racing round the Tardis, throwing levers on the control panel, the noise like bellows starting as the time machine mechanism booted up and saying, ‘Where to, Georgina Horspool?’ I’d waste no time in identifying early evening in a crap pub in northern England in the early twenty-first century.
A blonde girl in a red dress from Dorothy Perkins and uncomfortable shoes is unsteadily making her way there.
For the time being, she has no experience of managing chronic pain.
11
If there’s one thing you don’t need after a dark night of the soul, reliving your worst moments from the past and facing up to a grim present, it’s a Sunday lunch with family. Particularly, my family.
I’d love to give Esther a swerve today but she’ll be waiting on a debrief from last night, not to mention I’ll get a horrendous guilting about how she’s catered for me.
In the competition between How Much Aggro To Not Go vs How Much Aggro To Drag Myself There, Esther’s vigour makes the latter choice a clear winner.
I’m summoned for midday, decent booze in hand. Luckily, I rootled out some decent bottles of Beaujolais from the last time Robin was here. Despite his ‘fresher week’ diet, Robin liked classy booze.
I may be skint but a taxi to Esther’s is the only plausible option on a Sunday when she lives on the wrong side of the city and a journey by public transport would take in three buses and half the Peak District. I stare morosely out of the window as the view changes: the boxy post-war houses and takeaways and chippies and bookies of the largely itinerant community of Crookes give way to the city centre, then out into the Peaks until we’re in greener and pleasanter spaces.
My sister, her husband and their son live in the village of Dore, in an architect-designed detached house. It’s palatial, with a double garage and bi-fold kitchen doors leading on to a properly kept rectangle of garden, with a large patio for barbecues in summer.
Inside, Esther is fond of the sort of uplifting wall art that says things like LIVE LOVE LAUGH. It’s weird, because she’s the world’s least whimsical person. It always has a whiff of the floggings will continue until morale improves to me. I might get her one saying LAUGH DAMN YOU.
As much as my still-delicate stomach feels like it’s on a catch-up delay, like I’ve walked too quickly on an airport travelator, the scenery from the cab window soothes me.
Of all the ways I could feel a failure, still being in my home town is something I’m obstinately proud of. I love Sheffield, even if it is often freezing and everything is uphill. If cities have a spirit, then its spirit is mine.
‘Here she is, the pink sheep of the family!’ says Geoffrey, who answers the door and critically assesses my coat. If I had to find a Geoffrey quote to sum up Essence of Geoffrey, it’d be this greeting; ostensibly merry but delivered with teeth, not his place to say it, too close to the knuckle to be easy to laugh at.
Yet I’m required to, or I’m churlish. Participating in my own ridicule: it’s what I do best.
He’s always in a size-too-small Pringle V-neck, his hair, teased across his pate, and a curious unnatural colour that Esther and I secretly christened Butternut Squash Shimmer. I give a strained smile, pulling my arms out of my furry outerwear as he takes the wine from me and twists the label round to face him, re-balancing his readers.
‘Hmm … not heard of this one. Looks like it’ll help wash the taste of the broccoli away, at least, har har.’
Boom, a one-two punch. He grins and I grimace and not for the first time, I think: I know it was a tough time, Mum, but really, him? Then consider I’m not in the strongest position to be thinking such things.
The kitchen is a blur of activity, doors in the range cooker being opened and banged shut and oven gloves being clapped together. Geoffrey considers himself a Yorkies expert – he’s one of those men who turns everything into a contest – so he and Mark and Mum cluster round the pudding mix in a Pyrex jug, debating tactics, though Mum is hanging back so not as to get her wrap dress splattered. My mum is expensively silver-blonded, and always immaculately turned out. Geoffrey once referred to her as ‘the gold standard’. Eeesh.
Esther calls to me: ‘Sit with Milo and I’ll bring you a drink through,’ and I very willingly trot back down the hallway and into the front room.
My nephew Milo is six, wearing dungarees, and engrossed in what my untrained eyes assess to be a Lego treehouse.
‘Hello, Milo!’
‘’Lo.’
‘What’s this? Bears In A Forest … World?’
‘Ewoks,’ he says, with evident frustration at having to break concentration.
‘Ah! Yeah I knew that. And this is their home?’
Exasperated: ‘Yes.’ Even the child’s pissed off I’m here.
‘That one looks very smart. Who’s he? Or she?’
Milo actually screws up his face in the effort of pandering to my inane intrusions.
‘PAPLOO!’
‘Paploo! I like his scarf.’
Milo mutters: ‘Head dress.’
Esther appears with a flute of blush-coloured cava for me. Looking at it, I have a moment’s reflexive twinge of ‘oh God no’, swiftly followed by ‘actually go on, oh God yes’.
‘So how was last night?’ she says, peering closer. ‘Did you manage to behave yourself?’
Esther looks like me facially, otherwise she’s leaner and smaller chested, with layered, short I-have-a-busy-life hair. She boasts various skills I do not possess. How to audit tax returns. How to make a proper béchamel for a lasagne. How to exercise restraint. I know that any detailed chat about last night will end badly, as I’m still feeling too raw to bat on a proper inquisition, but luckily I have the perfect news to distract her – if she massively disliked Tony, I’m reasonably sure that she positively detested Robin.
‘It was fine, thank you. The bigger news, really, is that immediately after my sacking from That’s Amore!, Robin and I broke up.’
‘Oh,’ Esther says, eyes widening, and hesitates, before deciding she’s going to sit down with the other glass of cava she’s holding. ‘What happened?’
‘I … er …’ On the one hand, it irks me to confirm her suspicions about him. On the other, if I want to be close with my sister, shutting her out isn’t going to achieve it. Plus, I can never resist an anecdote. ‘I caught him …’ I rub the side of my nose and look towards Milo. ‘… With his Double-U Eye Ell Ell Why in a lady.’
Esther gasps and grabs at her Tiffany padlock necklace, running the pendant up and down the chain. ‘Caught him? As in you were there?’
‘On premises and with a clear view of the stage,’ I say, taking a bracing swig of cava. ‘I would say dress circle. He gave me a key to his flat and obviously I was unexpectedly not working my shift.’
‘Oh my God. I literally don’t know what I’d do if I could … if I walked in on it.’
‘Neither did I. I shouted a lot. It was his personal assistant, Louisa.’
‘Ugh. And he’d told you he was out of town?’
I open my mouth to say ‘No, why do you say that?’ then recall my fib about why he wasn’t going to be here today and hastily turn it into: ‘… Uh? Yeah.’
‘I’d say I’m surprised but he didn’t seem the most reliable of people. Something of a loose cannon. Cracking jokes about drug-taking in front of Mum and Geoff, honestly.’
‘Mmmm.’ That was selfish.
And that’s it really: above all, Robin was morbidly selfish. I stare at the column of bubbles whizzing upwards in my glass, and my half chipped off aqua nail polish.
‘I couldn’t tell how seriou
s you were about Robin.’
‘I don’t think I could tell either. I wasn’t, I guess. I was happy to see where it went, and here we are.’
Esther checks that Milo’s engrossed in his plastic figurines, and says, quietly:
‘I know you and your feminist friends would flay me for this, and yes it’s old fashioned, but I don’t think sleeping with anyone on the first night, before you’ve got to know them, is setting you up for success.’
I groan. A previous unwise disclosure, made for the same reasons as this one.
‘Look at me like that if you want!’ Esther says. ‘It’s a hard fact of life, no one appreciates what comes too easily to them, whether you’re male or female. You didn’t want him to treat you like another disposable groupie. And yet …’
She gazes at me, trying to work me out.
My sister has a completely warped idea of my sex life. She thinks I am at the forefront of liberation, that I have one-night stands as often and as with as little thought as she gets a Caffè Nero. I’ve never bothered to correct her, to explain I’ve only been with the boyfriends she knows about. I’m not completely sure why. She thinks I haven’t found anyone worthwhile because I’m so unserious. I would rather she thinks of me as unserious, than tragic.
‘I don’t think holding out was here or there with Robin. He pulled the whole doesn’t believe in being faithful to one person thing, like he thinks he’s in the Sixties. We were merely ships, passing in the shite.’
Our eyes flicker to Milo but Milo is whispering something to Paploo.
‘Sorry,’ I mouth at Esther.
‘Careful. He’s like a bloody Mynah bird at the moment,’ she hisses. Then more loudly: ‘What a timewaster. You’re thirty. Of course you want more commitment than that.’
She says this the way Mum does, hoping that by asserting it, it’ll make it true. I go into mutinous teenage mode, because they’re making me feel like a scutter.
‘I don’t know if I want a proposal or whatever, but yes, maybe more devotion than having ess-ee-ex with other women would be nice.’
Esther drums her fingertips on the arm of the chair.
‘Who are you looking for? I struggle to picture him. I know he’ll have to be different, somehow.’
She sounds like Rav. Am I being obtuse, trying too hard? Showing off? Dad once told me I was a natural show-off who hates being the centre of attention: ‘a paradox you will have to resolve one day’. Not a day Dad hung around long enough for.
‘I strongly suspect Mr Georgina doesn’t exist,’ I say, lightly. I take a handful of pistachios from a leaf-shaped china boat on the coffee table, and pick at a shell. ‘I think that’s why I went for a wild card instead.’
‘I am sure he does exist. It’s just …’
Here it comes. There’s no tail without sting, with my sister.
‘… There’s what you think being in love is when you’re nineteen or twenty and then what it actually is when you’re a grown-up, and these are two different things. But some of us keep looking for the first version long after we should’ve let it go,’ Esther says. This lands hard, particularly with last night fresh in mind, and I say nothing.
‘Well, what I thought love was going to be, perhaps, I know you weren’t like that,’ Esther adds, completely misreading my silence and everything else too. I know she means well. ‘What I’m saying is, lower your expectations. Being “in love” is a contented kind of bored with each other. You’re not going to find someone who sets you on fire and is also a good idea and you know why? Because being on fire isn’t a good idea. It’s destructive. When anyone describes love nowadays they usually mean lust.’
I start laughing weakly and put my hand over my mouth so I don’t spray shards of nut.
‘What’s funny?’
‘Lower my expectations. I found Robin up to his plums in someone else. Lower than that? Should I start writing to lifers in prison? Dear Peter Sutcliffe …’
Even Esther snorts.
Milo says, while lowering a net trap full of pistachio shells: ‘Plum. Pluuuuums.’
‘Milo! Remember what we said about repeating things? Auntie Georgina was talking about plum crumble. Weren’t you?’
‘Entirely. That well known autumnal dessert, plum crumble.’
‘Crumble,’ Milo says. ‘Plum crumble. Plumble.’
‘Yes!’ Esther says, emphatically. ‘Plumble! Awww … Anyway.’ She shakes her head, gives a beatific Mum Mode smile. ‘What’s that Ewok called?’
‘Shipshite.’
I did say to Esther, once Milo had been given a thorough debriefing, surely it’d be worse if he was repeating the name of the Yorkshire Ripper. She was not mollified.
After we’ve sat in and are making monsters of ourselves over the roast potatoes – there’s some sort of witchcraft going on involving a semolina crust – a large vehicle pulls into the driveway. I see the man at the wheel get out and start unfolding a wheelchair. Moments later, the bulky, octogenarian form of Nana Hogg is helped into it.
Mark’s paternal grandmother is feared and despised in equal measure by Esther, due to her habit of being exorbitantly, lavishly rude. Esther claims she’s senile but I’m not sure she isn’t just cantankerous and decades into the Do I Look Like I Give A Fuck years. An outing from her care home is a chance of anarchy.
Due to a sense of duty and deference to her age, no one has considered not inviting her to Sunday lunches. Esther loathes her but I enjoy her hugely. Probably because, unlike everyone else, I don’t have a respectable façade for her to tear down.
‘I didn’t realise she was coming today!’ I say, brightly.
‘Mmmm,’ grimaces Esther, looking up at the clock. ‘Only an hour and a quarter late, lucky us. She thinks she’s Princess Margaret.’
‘She’s had trouble with a water infection, she’s slow to get going,’ Mark tuts, as he heads to the door. The only time he’s publicly critical of Esther is when she runs Nana Hogg down.
I mean, she’s his granny so he’s going to be defensive, but Mark is an incredibly nice person anyway. Mild, kind, sees the good in everyone, always interested in others, in a self-effacing rather than nosy way.
When Esther first told me she was seeing someone on her accountancy degree ‘and I think he’s the one!’ I was like: ruh roh, he’ll be at worst a ruthless bastard and at best a crashing bore. She had a taste for mean jocks at school. Thank God, given he turned into husband and father of her child, that Mark is lovely – witness his job-giving generosity with me. He wears hand-stitched moccasin slippers around the house and yet I would lay down my life for him.
‘Don’t wait for me then,’ is Nana Hogg’s version of ‘hello’ and ‘sorry I’m late’, when she sees the laden table.
‘Glad you could make it,’ Mark says, leaning in to give her a peck on the cheek. His modus operandi is to simply ignore her tone. And her words. And her behaviour.
She has her silver hair in tight roller curls and the sort of bust that rolls out like the swelling tide.
‘Hello!’ I say, with a small wave. ‘Nice to see you again.’
She doesn’t acknowledge me, though she might not have heard during the manoeuvres to get her seated.
‘Oh it’s beef? I can’t digest beef,’ she says, and Esther looks like she’s been tasered up the birth canal.
‘But we asked if …’
Mark puts his hand over Esther’s. ‘You can have lots of everything else. Geoff, if you’ll hand me the peas and carrots …’
‘We’ve met before, I’m Geoffrey,’ he says smarmily to Nana Hogg, getting up to offer his hand to shake across the roast, ‘Patsy’s husband.’
‘Yes I know who you are, I’m old but I’m not crackers,’ she says, ‘not seeing’ his hand, and I have to plug my mouth with a parsnip to stop myself from laughing. Why did I contemplate crying off this lunch? Carbs, more alcohol, hot gravy and Nana Hogg lols. It’s the perfect distraction from my distress.
‘Gog’s been sacked f
rom the restaurant,’ Esther says, conversationally, throwing me to the wolves as distraction.
‘Oh no, Georgina!’ Mum says, putting her cutlery down with a bump, ‘What did you do?’
‘I didn’t do anything, the restaurant critic from The Star came in and complained and Tony the chef made a show of binning me. A sacrifice to the gods, to stop him from writing about the grim food.’
‘The vicissitudes of still being casual hire-and-fire labour,’ says Geoffrey, with evident pleasure, lifting a glass to his mouth. ‘So few rights, unfortunately.’
I almost pull a face at him. Geoff has been retired from vice presidency of a central heating firm since forever, on a giant pension.
‘It’s time to buck your ideas up. Go on a shorthand course and get yourself something in an office,’ Mum says.
‘I don’t think anyone cares about shorthand anymore, Mum. There’s no typing pool. There’s no bosses chasing secretaries around desks.’
‘Well you’re soon going to be past the age where you’re chased around anything anyway.’
Whump. Right in the solar plexus.
‘We called you “jail bait” in my day,’ Nana Hogg says to me, and Esther gets up abruptly to refill the gravy boat, which I know is an excuse because she’s fuming about inappropriate talk in front of her young son. What about the inappropriate talk in front of her younger sister.
Don't You Forget About Me Page 8