by Joanna Nadin
I almost want to cheer: after years of waiting, wanting, willing it, you sound like an actual mother. But that would be conceding at this point.
‘I’ll stay here, then. You’re always saying women should be able to fend for themselves.’ One point to me, I think, foolishly, as I fling feminism back in your face.
But I am new to mother–daughter brawling, and unaware that you will always, always wield the trump card.
‘You’re not a bloody woman,’ you retort. ‘You’re a child.’
The word stings, as if you’ve slapped me hard across the face with it, for there is no worse insult, at least this year, other than being called a ‘slag’ or a ‘lezzer’. ‘Well, thank you for making that clear,’ I hurl in desperation. And with my parting shot a pigeon pea to your silver bullet, I exit stage left, slamming the door like I’ve watched Harry do. But I forget it’s on the latch so, instead of a satisfying crack, it just swings feebly back open letting in next door’s cat, which I’m sure at the time I thought was a metaphor for my entire existence.
‘We’re back in three weeks,’ Harry says. ‘Then you can just come and stay with us.’
We’re lying on sun loungers, dark glasses on, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ drifting into the garden from Tom’s still-battened-down bedroom.
I attempt to feign nonchalance, and fail spectacularly. ‘Is he . . . Tom, I mean, going with you?’
‘He reckons not, but good luck with that.’
In the space of seconds I imagine an entire novella in which we both stay behind, write groundbreaking poetry, and then he invites me to the sixth-form disco.
‘He’s sixteen,’ I contend. ‘Legally he can do what he wants.’
‘Have you met my mother? She’d have a total spaz-out.’
‘God, I totally know how he feels.’
Harry sits up and lifts her Ray-Bans, all the better to throw me her ‘Are you fucking kidding?’ look. ‘You have no idea.’
‘I . . .’ But I don’t bother finishing that sentence, because I don’t know where it’s going and I’m pretty sure Harry’s not listening any more, anyway.
If he doesn’t go, I tell myself, then I won’t.
The next morning I watch from my window as Mr Trevelyan loads the Volvo up with suitcases, a striped windbreak, and two members of his family. I hold my breath as Harry, Walkman already on, pulls her door shut.
‘Drive,’ I plead, ‘drive.’
But as the car coughs thrillingly into life, threatening imminent exit, the front door opens and a scowling Tom slopes barefoot across the pea gravel and slumps in his place on the back seat.
Two days after that, we leave for Somerset.
The commune is, as predicted, purgatory, and the journey nothing less than a ferry ride across the Styx.
We have a car now: a juddering shell of a Citroën 2CV which you, in your ongoing quest to upset the neighbours, christen Elizabeth Taylor. When we venture into the Cromwell estate to collect it off a man called Dwayne, I am stunned. Not just at its awfulness, but at the very fact you can drive at all. There has been no evidence of this feat until now; you’ve always scrounged lifts from Toni, from Chinese Clive, increasingly from David. I had just assumed this was a necessity, not bloody-mindedness or poverty.
The car costs £200. It is barely worth it. Seemingly held together with nothing more than duct tape and faith, it stalls at every given opportunity, and smells faintly of cat pee and wet dog – an aroma that will only intensify as we add apple cores, chocolate wrappers, and the butts of your endless rollups to the already overflowing ashtray. Something rattles; no, everything rattles, and there is a Crystal Gayle tape jammed in the cassette player, so that every journey is accompanied by an ill-fitting easy-listening soundtrack. As if Elton John has been erroneously hired to score a Mike Leigh movie.
Years later, when I am clearing it out before it’s towed to its burial, I will find treasure: a spare key taped to the sun visor, four Murray Mints in the glove compartment, a man’s grey leather glove pushed or kicked beneath the driver’s seat. But for now it is the scene not of joy or discovery, but of resentment, regret and petty one-upmanship. And we’ve not even made it past Sawbridgeworth.
‘Christ, Di. Anyone would think I was taking you to bloody borstal.’
‘You might as well be.’
You push the heel of your hand into one eye, a gesture I’m unconvinced improves your already questionable concentration on the road. ‘Fine. If you don’t like it, we won’t stay. Happy now?’
‘I won’t like it,’ I say.
‘You might. You don’t know until you try. It’s like blue cheese.’
It’s not like blue cheese, I think, cursing myself for my U-turn from hatred to half a slab of Stilton in one afternoon. ‘I won’t,’ I insist.
And for once, I am right.
I hate it.
It rains. God, how it rains. And so day after day, in my cold, dripping box of a bedroom, I pull down my hat and seethe into my WH Smith notebook, listing everything that is wrong with my life, which apparently runs to seventeen pages. In no particular order, these are the house’s worst points:
1. There are three other women here not including us and Toni: Petra and Marta, who share the same lank hair, and bed, and who row frequently and violently, and Toni’s girlfriend, Susan, an artist with a shaved head and a tobacco-furred tongue. At various points one or all of you will wander around naked in spite of the cold, and I find myself imagining glistening patches of secretion on the kitchen chairs, and take to wiping them down with toilet roll before I sit.
2. You told me the house was next to a wood and in my innocence and optimism, even in the face of potential devastation, I imagined bluebirds and green clearings, and myself an overgrown Little Red Riding Hood skipping through it all. But this is no enchanted forest. This is mud and nettles and the rotting corpse of that mythical sheep. Susan says it’s art and takes photographs of its empty eye sockets and half-eaten lips while I retreat, gagging, to the house and vow to become vegetarian, a vow I keep for twenty-three days.
3. Nowhere amongst my fourteenth birthday gifts is the Walkman I requested to better lock myself in my melancholy. Instead I am given a ceramic pendant, a copy of The Group, and a rape alarm. The pendant was handmade by Marta and is shaped like a vulva. I know for a fact that it is a self-portrait, and redden with such intensity when I unwrap it you offer me a glass of water.
4. The nearest village is four miles away, the nearest shop and phone box another three beyond that. And the only way of getting to either of them is in the 2CV or Toni’s van, both of which require an adult chauffeur and thus supervision. Twice I have braved it to call Harry’s number in Cornwall, but the phone rings into empty rooms, and on the way home Toni tells me I should stop chasing that boy because I deserve better. I am mortified that she knows, and stick another invisible pin into my imaginary mannequin of you.
It is everything I remember about the squat, only with the volume amplified and in inglorious technicolor. Night after night of talk about taking a stand, changing the world, and yet you lie in bed, all of you, till gone midday, while I roam the house in two pairs of socks, picking up discarded mugs and cigarette ends.
But one vital ingredient is missing, one that you, I know, cannot do without: men.
Toni says you should stop disrespecting your vagina. You say it’s your body and you can do with it what you bloody well want because it’s the 1980s not the 1880s, but even so, it’s a relief not to have them around because God knows they only ruin everything. And Marta, Petra and Susan nod sagely, like they’ve been there before. But Toni knows, and I know, and you know, that it is only a matter of time.
And three days later you prove us right.
It’s my fault. Or so I thought back then. I am desperate to leave, but you are just finding yourself, you claim. Though where you are in the series of grim, outsized canvases, daubed in Rothko-esque gradations of red – for menstrual blood – I am yet to fatho
m.
‘You can do this at home,’ I point out. Then add belligerently, stupidly, ‘It’s not like you’ve got anything else to do.’
‘I’ve got you, haven’t I? What, you think that’s not a fulltime bloody occupation?’
‘You don’t even make my lunch.’
You flap a hand, dismiss it. ‘Because you told me not to.’
‘Because no one else has bloody hummus sandwiches. It’s disgusting.’
‘It’s good for you.’
‘What is, hummus?’
‘This!’
You have handed victory to me on a plate, and I smile triumphantly before presenting my straight flush. ‘If you cared about what’s good for me you’d take me home.’
You pause, momentarily thrown but not fallen, then deliver an ace. ‘If you gave a shit about me, you’d stay. It’s your sodding fault I never finished art college in the first place.’
This is a slap, stunning me into a stomach-churning silence. Your fingers rest on your lips, as if checking that you really did let those words out. But you did, there is no taking them back, no swallowing them down along with your pride. No taking back the sucker punch I’m about to throw either.
‘Well, I wish you’d never bloody had me.’
And, riotous applause ringing in my ears, I exit stage left, slam the door and lock myself in my room.
It’s Toni who comes to me, an hour later.
‘She didn’t mean it,’ she insists. ‘You’re the making of her. She knows that.’
I pull a face, an I-don’t-believe-you.
‘Look,’ Toni continues, ‘the only person stopping Edie paint is Edie. Self-sabotage, darling. She’s too bloody scared to find out she’s shit.’
‘She isn’t shit,’ I retort, inexplicably, instinctively leaping to your defence.
‘I know that.’ Toni pushes strands of snot- and salt-soaked hair out of my eyes. ‘But Edie doesn’t.’
I consider this possibility. That you don’t believe you’re the gilded, glittered star you appear to be. It seems implausible, but Toni doesn’t lie, never has.
‘I don’t wish she’d never had me.’
‘Then tell her. Tell her that she’s brilliant. And say you’re sorry. And then let her say sorry as well. And if she doesn’t, you send her to me.’
I half laugh, half sob.
‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be all right. Look, she’s gone to the village for milk. She’ll only be half an hour. Why don’t you wait at the top of the lane for her?’
And so I do. I haul myself out of the damp, narrow bed, pull on a jumper and mud-clogged boots, and trudge up the lane to make it up with you, to tell you I’m sorry. To tell you you are beautiful, brilliant, born to be an artist.
To tell you I love you.
But these words will be left unspoken. Because seven hours later you come back milkless, car-less, drunk, and in the arms of a man called Jermaine. He is half limp, half swagger and he wears a hat with a pheasant’s feather in the band. I hate him immediately.
‘He saved me,’ you slur as you stagger into the sitting room.
‘From what?’ demands Toni, prising you off his shoulder and onto hers. ‘Dragons? Bloody hell, Edie. We were worried.’
‘Did you send a search party?’ you ask, hopeful.
Toni stays sullenly silent but the answer is yes. We all went out in the van to look for you. But there was no sign of the car, and the woman who runs the shop said she hadn’t seen you since you bought a bottle of vodka, a lighter and a packet of French Fancies two days ago.
‘I went on an adventure,’ you continue. ‘To find the big town. But Betty died.’
‘Who’s Betty?’ Marta asks worriedly and in a thick accent.
You laugh, and manage to stumble even while standing still. Toni hauls you up, then lowers you onto the sofa. ‘Elizabeth Taylor,’ you giggle. ‘The car!’
‘Did he get you drunk?’ Toni demands.
‘No,’ says the man, who is still, inevitably, here. ‘She managed that herself. And it’s Jermaine, thanks.’
‘Yeah, well you can go now, Jermaine,’ Toni tells him.
But Jermaine has other ideas. ‘I’ll see you, Edie. Bring back the car for you when it’s fixed?’
‘Thank you, Lancelot,’ you say.
‘Jermaine,’ he says again. But he’s smiling. And my stomach sinks because I know then that it is too late and he has already fallen down the rabbit hole of you.
I am right. The next day he turns up in a miraculously fixed Betty, with a four-pack on the front seat and a blanket in the back. You drive to the stone circle, to feel the spirits, you say. But when you get back your cardigan is covered in grass and your neck bruised, the same telltale purple oval I have seen Tina Fraser showing off in the lower-school toilets.
And it’s not just me who sees it.
That night you and Toni row. I listen through the floorboards as she tells you the house is a safe space, and that men are barred, you know that. You say not every man is a rapist just because they own a dick. Toni says something after that and then there is a silence so thick and weighted I could spoon it like soup. Followed, a minute later, by the sound of a door slamming, then the reluctant choking and gagging of Betty being pressed into service, the slip of tyres on wet soil. And I pull the pillow over my head and beg for the ground to swallow me or the world to end.
Both fail to oblige, but I wake the next day to you flinging the few clothes I’ve bothered to remove back into my green suitcase.
‘Edie?’ I ask. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Di!’
You seem delighted, and, I assume, high.
‘What’s the matter?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ you insist. ‘Why should anything be the matter?’
‘I . . . what are you doing?’
‘What does it look like? Packing. You wanted to leave, we’re leaving.’
I know then, even though we have lasted less than two weeks, that I haven’t won. I know this is down to your desire, not my desperation, but I am too relieved to care, and I pull back the duvet, slide onto my knees and push my last remaining pairs of knickers into the peach satin pocket. In less than five minutes I am standing next to the car, waiting for you to say your goodbyes.
But you are sober, and stubborn, and so is Toni, and so it’s me she turns to.
‘Dido.’ Toni puts a slender hand on my shoulder. ‘Do you really want to go?’
At her concern, I feel myself tremble, feel tears begin their ascent. I am not used to being defiant; that is your role, Harry’s role. On me it is a borrowed dress, one I can barely carry off. But I am tired, I am fourteen, and I am living in the middle of nowhere with four lesbians and a slut of a mother. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
She hugs me then, and I stand, arms dangling awkwardly with my suitcase in one hand and my book in the other.
‘Get in, then,’ you say.
I put my suitcase in the boot, and climb wordlessly into the passenger seat.
You look at me as if I’ve sprouted horns or trodden in dog shit. ‘What are you doing?’
‘What?’ I don’t understand.
‘In the back,’ you say.
I look over my shoulder at the can-and-crisp-packet-littered rear seats.
‘Go on,’ you say. ‘Unless you want to sit on Jermaine’s lap.’
And then I realize that not only have I not won the battle, I have lost a war I didn’t even know I was fighting.
As the three of us drive away from the house, and out of Toni’s life for another three years, Crystal Gayle soundtracks our departure. ‘Don’t it make my brown eyes blue,’ she laments.
Jermaine hits the cassette player and the tape flies out.
‘See,’ you say. ‘I told you he’d be useful.’
I sigh, and slump back in my seat, then mentally click the heels of my red wellies three times, and say a silent ‘There’s no place like home.’
And when we f
inally get there, after two breakdowns, and an argument over a pasty at a service station that I still don’t understand, I discover I am right.
He isn’t broad, or even that tall, and yet he fills our house as if there are three of him. His shoes clutter floors and doorways so that I trip and stumble my way through the downstairs; he eats the bread, the cheese, my biscuits, a packet at a time, and forgets to buy more; he leaves long, curly pubic hairs lying on the tiles of the bathroom floor and stuck to the wall and, when he bothers to shave his beard, the sink is flecked and speckled with foam and clippings. And then there’s the sex.
Oh, God, the sex.
He makes a grunting noise like a pig or a dog, and then, at the end, a howl, as if he is mortally wounded, and my imagination conjures up a Hieronymus Bosch scene of medieval torture crossed with the tattered copy of Club Harry and I once found in a hedge by the old railway track: all contorted faces and hairless, airbrushed parts.
I count down the days until Harry gets back so I can tell her how horrible it is.
But when, after eight days and four hours, they do pull up, I discover it’s me who is out of touch.
Harry has met a boy – a waiter at the beach cafe in Rock – and is full of it. They kissed on the ferry back from Padstow, and promised to meet again next summer. But it’s not the romance that’s thrilling her, but what happened behind the bins when his shift finished.
‘And then,’ she says, eyes wide, ‘he put his finger right inside me.’
I think of Jermaine’s ridged knuckles and dirty fingernails and shudder. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘No. God, Di, why would it hurt?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s like a tampon. Only nice. You should try it.’
And then it’s not Jermaine I see but Tom. His hand sliding down under the once-white cotton of my knickers, his finger pushing through the hair (I was, thankfully I now decide, not spared this addition) and finding its target.
I feel myself contract down there, feel myself flush with embarrassment at what I want, despite my disgust.
But Harry hasn’t noticed. She’s got another secret to tell, and this one isn’t about her. Hers, it seems, is just the appetizer.