The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

  ‘Better than ignoring the elephant in the room,’ Harry says.

  ‘God, Harry. When will you get it?’ Tom says then. ‘The elephant isn’t death. It’s life. That’s the real bloody torture. You two live in fantasy land. You’re still acting like you’re seventeen. Like there’s a happy ending. When we all know the truth – that it just gets harder.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Harry exhales. ‘Trouble in Paradise?’

  ‘That’s my point.’ He lets a whisky glass clatter down on the counter. ‘There is no paradise. Why, is your life perfect?’

  Harry snorts. ‘Hardly. My tits are leaking, I’ve got fourteen stitches in my fanny and our mother just died, or had you forgotten?’

  Tom closes his eyes. ‘Shit. Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just . . . this is a weird day.’

  She shrugs. ‘I know. I haven’t even cried yet. What the fuck is that about?’

  ‘You will,’ he tells her. ‘It will come.’

  ‘Oh goody,’ she says. ‘Well, that’s something to look forward to. And on that note, I’m going to bed.’ She stands, kisses the top of Tom’s head, then mine. ‘Then maybe I can have at least an hour’s uninterrupted sleep before my services are required.’ She squeezes her swollen breasts, sighs as she trails out of the room. ‘I’d declare her an utter fucker if I didn’t bloody love her so much.’

  Tom dangles the bottle of Jack Daniels at me. ‘Nightcap?’

  ‘I should go,’ I say. ‘It’s late.’ And I promised to call in on you.

  But I don’t remember that then, do I? Or maybe I do and I don’t care. Whichever, when he says, ‘Go on. Just one for the road,’ I cave and nod. When he says, ‘Let’s go to the den,’ I slip off my heels and stand them in the hallway, a skinny ghost of eight-hole cherry-red Docs, then tread softly in his footsteps towards a sliver of light seeping under a door.

  He lies on the sofa. I slide down onto the floor in front of him. His arm drops and pulls me back and he kisses the top of my head, on the very spot Harry’s lips touched a moment ago. But hers didn’t send my heart hammering, my stomach swirling, alive with butterfly wings.

  ‘I didn’t mean what I said,’ he whispers into my hair.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ I say. ‘And you were right.’

  ‘No.’ I feel him shake his head. ‘You should never give up on all that. On . . . on stories. Harry was right. This is about me. Things are shit. It’s not just the Washington thing. I asked her to come home. Come here. It seemed obvious. She could be here with Dad and I could commute to the London bureau. But she’s refusing to leave the States.’

  I take a breath, force the question. ‘So what are you going to do? Take the Washington job?’

  ‘I was, but . . .’

  ‘. . . but what?’

  ‘I can’t leave Dad. Harry’s too busy, and—’

  ‘I’m here,’ I blurt. ‘I mean . . . I don’t mean that’s a reason to stay. But to not to. Shit. This isn’t coming out right.’ I try to find the words. Better words. ‘I can look in on him. If that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘He doesn’t need someone to look in on him. No disrespect. He needs someone. Full stop.’

  ‘So you’re going to stay?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘For good.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I know.’

  We stay like that, in the semblance of silence, for a few minutes. Feeling the velveteen nap of the couch that Angela brushed on a daily basis, smelling Glade and underneath it the fust of old feathers and hardback books; hearing the heavy tock-tock of David’s gilded retirement gift and the light rise and fall of our own breathing.

  My phone rings. I pull it out, glance at the number, see it is you.

  Jesus, Edie, I think. What is wrong with you? Why can’t you just . . . be? Just . . . work? You, you are our elephant in the room, your life, or the mess of it. I shouldn’t have to check in on you. Shouldn’t have to clean up after you. And yet I do it, time after time. You are right, you are a fly right now. A fly that I wish I could swish-swish away.

  Then you’d be gone.

  ‘Answer it,’ he tells me.

  ‘No.’ I decline the call, then switch the phone to silent, stow it away under the side table.

  ‘Do you remember Live Aid?’ I say then. ‘We slept in here.’

  ‘Did we?’

  I look round at him, stunned at his forgetting. Not because it meant so much to me, but to the world.

  He sees my surprise, smiles. ‘I’m joking,’ he says. ‘I do remember.’ I let my head turn again, lean back against him. ‘You kissed me,’ he adds.

  ‘I . . .’ I feel it then, the heat of shame, of memory. But only momentarily. Because what does that matter now? What does that matter in the face of what came after?

  ‘You left,’ I said.

  ‘I did.’ He slides off the sofa so that we are shoulder to shoulder, legs aligned, hands touching. ‘I won’t tonight.’

  And he doesn’t. When I wake at five he is still there, his lips just inches from mine, his breath fuggy now, morning-tainted, but his, still.

  I could kiss him again, I think. Kiss him now like I did last night, like he kissed me. Could start it again, cling on to us, to something, in all this wreckage.

  But life isn’t a fairy tale.

  And he is still married.

  And I am fooling myself in every possible way.

  ‘Di?’ Tom stirs, reaches for me.

  I pull away. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, softly. ‘Now.’

  Before Martha wakes and brings Harry, bleary-eyed and bloat-breasted, stamping downstairs for coffee.

  Before David knocks to offer tea and toast.

  Before I do something, say something I can’t take back, only to end up empty-handed again.

  It is better this way. Best.

  I fumble for my clothes – find only a funeral dress, and pull it on as I pad down the hallway, pick up my shoes, and step swiftly, silently out of the front door, like a cat burglar from the scene of the crime.

  I should take a left at the gate, head down the hill and home. To bathe, to sleep, to wait for an agent who promised to call. But as I flick on my phone, see the missed calls – fourteen of them, the last only two hours ago – I remember, reluctantly, my promise. And so it is duty, not love, that turns me to the right, to the gingerbread house.

  But it is love – God, Edie, it is love that kicks in when I round the corner and find myself bathed in light.

  The house is a jack-o’-lantern: every lamp switched on, the door ajar. From over the road, flashes of anglepoises behind twitching curtains. And across it all, the hypnotic wash of blue from the ambulance.

  And I slip as if through quicksand to a long-gone Christmas Eve, to hot, spiteful words, spat out like grape seeds. Then to the drip-drip of a cold tap and a pool of pink-ribboned water.

  You do not like being upstaged. Not by her.

  Or ditched. By me.

  ‘Fuck.’

  I burst barefoot, knickerless, into the hallway, head straight for the stairs, treading on shoes, coats, a plate as I go. ‘Edie? What have you done?’

  ‘In here.’

  I trip, turn. The voice – not yours – is coming from downstairs, from the kitchen.

  Oh God. Not the bath, then. Not slit wrists. But something else. Pills? A gun? I rack my memory for Harry’s roll call of other options, better options, but they all end the same way, however painlessly or quickly.

  Fuck.

  I stumble back down, fling myself towards the front room, and find myself in the arms of an ambulance man – paramedic, that’s what they call them now, but he was an ambulance man to me then, a knight on a shining white steed – and behind him, you prone on the sofa, your eyes closed, your body still, another ambulance man bent over you.

  ‘What has she done?’ I demand, trying to push past. ‘Tell me. Edie. What have you do
ne?’

  He blocks my path, bullish but calm. ‘Are you Di?’

  I nod. ‘Dido. I’m . . .’ Say it, I think. Tell him who you are. ‘I’m her daughter.’

  He nods. ‘She’s been asking for you.’

  ‘Is she . . . is she . . . ?’

  ‘She had a heart attack.’

  ‘A heart attack?’ I think back. To you clutching the counter. To your ‘I’m dying’ – a declaration I dismissed as no more than a cry for help of the fairy-tale kind. I feel my legs buckle; feel this stranger brace himself to take my weight.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he soothes. ‘It’s a shock, I know. But she’s alive.’

  ‘How alive?’ I ask stupidly. ‘Enough?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘We’re taking her in.’

  And so I watch as your body is carried out on a stretcher, your face gaunt, distorted behind the plastic of an oxygen mask, but still I see your fear, see the tracks of tears traced in Max Factor black.

  ‘You should come,’ he says, as you are loaded like a black bin bag, like a box, into the back of a van.

  I nod, clamber up, the floor cold metal on my still-bare feet.

  ‘Do you need to call anyone else?’

  ‘No,’ I say, quickly. ‘There’s no one. Just me and her.’

  Then I hear it. His voice. My hero. My Prince Charming. Here to rescue us. Rescue you.

  ‘Di? Is it Edie? Is she—’

  ‘She’s alive,’ I say. ‘David, she’s alive.’

  Forever

  December 2004

  Did you ever get lonely, Edie?

  You seemed so self-sufficient, or self-obsessed maybe; so wrapped up in your own cultivated weirdness and wonder that even when the men stuck around they seemed more like minions, hangers-on. ‘Never let them change you, Di,’ you warned me once, after the estate agent, or maybe the yoga teacher. ‘If they try, then run for the fucking hills.’

  But we all alter: metamorphose from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly and back again the moment we meet someone new. And that is how it has to be, it seems. I read a piece – in a newspaper, I think – that said the self is not contained in hard casing, unbreachable like a nut or a pearl, but is rather a piece of Plasticine, a shape-shifter that forms and reforms in the company of others. We all do it, mould ourselves like clay to fit around the shape of other people, other people’s lives, because we need them to do the same for us. We crave company, contact; without it we simply do not exist. Except you, I remember thinking. You were the exception that proved the rule. Or so it seemed to me.

  Do you remember that one wedding? Denzil’s? You and me, we stayed up late into the night in our twin-bedded, shared-bathroom, no-room-service hotel room. We lay on the thin sheets and candlewick covers, dizzyingly drunk from cheap Cava and the rich cavalcade of old friends and absurd strangers we had danced with in that hall in Shoreditch, me staring at the slow turn of the ceiling carousel, you defying the warning sticker on the plywood door by lighting up a last rollie begged from a woman called Bob.

  ‘I want that,’ I had said to you, a rare, heartfelt confession.

  ‘A fag or a wedding?’ you replied, unable to walk the line yet somehow still managing to summon sarcasm. ‘The first will kill you, the second is probably only worth it for the floor show.’

  ‘God, Edie, do you have to?’

  ‘What?’ you demanded. Then, seeing my face, half-heartedly flapped a hand in the smoke, as ineffective as it was irritating

  ‘Not that,’ I said. ‘I . . . don’t you want to be with someone like that? Like Denzil and Marie. Not even the whole to have and to hold thing, but just to be with that person, I don’t know, completely?’

  ‘I’d rather be alone or dead than wed to a woman who thinks no bra is an option when you’re a bloody D cup and pushing fifty.’

  And I had sighed and dismissed you as belligerent. Your refusal to believe in love, true or otherwise. But maybe it is just that you had tasted it, and had it taken away.

  I heard once, or read it maybe, that unrequited love is the only truly pure form. Because it can never be sullied, dimmed with the dull tarnish of reality. But to those of us who have loved, and loved, and loved with no return, it is dirty, desperate; springing from bright-eyed hope, but cloaked, by the end, in humiliation. An exercise only endured because what is the alternative?

  Heartbreak.

  Not the fey melancholy we imagine when we are children, but a snarling, slicing, blackened cancer of a thing that comes to us in the end anyway.

  And all from a lack of three little words.

  I love you.

  Did you ever say those words, Edie? To him, I mean. You’ve let them slip from your tongue as slickly as if they were no more than a hello to friends, to acquaintances, to anyone, everyone who wandered into our lives. ‘God, I just love you!’ you would exclaim to Harry, to Mrs Housden who found your purse under a table at the Duke of York, to the bread man. I can’t do that, be flippant with language, foolish with it. Those three words carry such weight, such heaving, electric possibility within eight letters, loaded as they are with atavistic meaning, with expectation plucked from films, television, books and some deeper collective consciousness. And when I summon up the daring to let them fall, finally, from my lips – these full, fat, ripe cherries – only an absolute echo will measure up in return.

  What do I want with an I care about you? What does it matter if he really likes me? There is nothing to be done with those replies. Not even silver-medalled, they are poor runners-up; they are also-rans. Because what he’s really saying is that I will do for now. But love? I was not enough to be worthy of love: not pretty enough, not funny enough, not clever enough.

  Or so I told myself.

  Was that what you told yourself too?

  David and Angela called time on their Christmas Eve party long before the tumour began to swell. Old friends had moved, or had grandchildren of their own to set out stockings for. And new neighbours, airdropped from faceless London suburbs, were wary of anyone even saying hello; and an invitation in for cheese and wine is too reminiscent of a scene from a Seventies sitcom to be taken seriously, let alone taken up.

  But this year David is determined to do something, if not for Christmas itself, then for New Year. ‘I want to mark it,’ he says on the phone. ‘A new beginning. For all of us. You will come, won’t you? I know Edie wants you to be there.’

  I know that too, because you have asked me yourself not once but three times. And each time I have told you yes, of course I will come. No, it isn’t because I have nothing else to do – though that is true, I don’t – but because I want to be there. Because it matters.

  ‘Come here first,’ you say, your voice girlish now, free of fag smoke and alcohol, instead edged with guileless delight at this new chance you’ve been given – we’ve been given. ‘Then we can get ready together.’

  So we do. We dress in your room from a bed piled high with a flotsam and jetsam of cast-offs and collectables, from vintage Chanel to voguish charity-shop finds; paint our faces side by side in a lipstick-smeared mirror; spray ourselves with scent from the same stoppered bottle that has sat for years – for a lifetime – on a dressing table found in a skip on Coldharbour Lane and dragged home by you and Toni, with me marching at the rear.

  ‘Ready?’ I say as we stand at the foot of the stairs, shoes on but coats left hanging from their hooks, for the walk we have to make is so short, and our excitement will make it swifter still.

  ‘Ready,’ you say, then salute me.

  I take a breath and turn towards the front door. ‘Where are you going?’ you ask. ‘This way.’

  And taking my arm, you lead me out of the back door, through the weed tangle and dead leaves of our path and to the gate in the wall.

  ‘It’s open?’ I ask.

  ‘Abracadabra,’ you say and turn the handle.

  As if by magic, Narnia appears. A frost-sparkled scape of fir trees and lawn bathed pale by a luminous mo
on, then warmed at the far edge by the glow of a street lamp fastened to red brick. And underneath it, my own Mr Tumnus, putting out the last of the party peanuts for the birds.

  Tom.

  ‘I’ll see you inside, then,’ you say, knowing what I am thinking before I do.

  ‘Thanks,’ I reply, then watch as you walk to him, tilt your cheek up for a kiss, then slip through the door and into the heart of your new world.

  We talk outside until our fingers blanch and then blue, and the chattering of our teeth drowns our whispered words – about the boys, about his new job back at ITV, about the bloody commute, but he’s still not ready for London, might never be; about my new book deal – a series this time, ‘Enid Blyton for the modern age,’ Jude claims. ‘Inevitable,’ he calls it, but both I take as compliments.

  In the kitchen we are conjoined twins, Chang and Eng, our hips touching, my head leaning on his shoulder, my high laugh blending with his as Martha lies defiantly across our feet and crosses her arms because she is not sleepy and will not go to bed. Then, when Harry takes Milo back upstairs from his fifth foray into the land of the grown-ups and slips into bed with him instead; when Max falls asleep on the sofa with a glass of brandy in one hand and an unlit cigar in the other; when you and David head back to the gingerbread house, because you will do most things – all things – but you will not sleep in her bed, we follow our two-sizes-smaller footsteps, our teenage selves, to the den, pull the beanbags from behind the chesterfield, and lie on our backs, heads spinning in our own private carousel.

  ‘You don’t believe in fairy tales,’ I say, as his hand cups my face.

  ‘Some I do.’

  ‘Well, I don’t believe in drunk kisses.’

  ‘Dido Jones, are you seriously giving me the brush-off?’

  ‘Just for now. Ask me tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow never comes.’

  ‘Yes, it does. There is always tomorrow.’

  ‘What if you run away in the night?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘What if a witch casts a spell in the night, or a goblin curses you, or a wall of thorns grows up around your house and you don’t wake up for a hundred years?’