Exquisite
Page 7
You can get out of this.
Alice Dark
OK. I’ll write him a note.
‘Dear impoverished Jake.
You were OK when I was skint too, but now I have money, I think I am worth more than you and am going to marry rich, old Ben.’
Bo Luxton
Seriously, at this stage I think a letter will do. You needn’t mention Ben (though I feel sure he would have you).
Alice Dark
I’ll see. Anyway, he might never come home. Got to go. Librarian giving me evils because someone worthier than me wants to use this computer for something other than frippery. Like getting a job or something. I ought to do that. PS: Do you really think Ben would have me?
Bo Luxton
Ben would have you.
It might upset his wife, though.
Alice Dark
Going. Bye.
Bo Luxton
Goodnight, sweetheart. xxxx
From: Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk
Sent: 19 June 2015, 13:17
To: AlicetheEighth@gmail.com
Subject: Are you alright, pet? (To be said in a northern, warming voice as I make us a brew.)
You’ve been very quiet. Are you alright? Has Jake come home? Let me know how you are!
From: AlicetheEighth@gmail.com
Sent: 19 June 2015, 14:53
To: Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk
Subject: Re: Are you alright, pet? (To be said in a northern, warming voice as I make us a brew.)
Jake came home. He’d gone to some weird club thing (I never go clubbing these days. I only ever pretended to like it. The best thing about turning twenty-five was making the decision I’m too old for clubbing now.)
Anyway, he went to a club, took loads of drugs, met some guys who had a van, went back to it with them and stayed there for five days. Apparently, it was like Nirvana in there. His kind of Nirvana, not mine, which is why he didn’t invite me to join him.
So that’s it. He didn’t drift off to France, unfortunately. I’m just going to live in my bedsit from now on. It’s a total pit and utterly depressing, but he’ll never come over and surely we’ll just stop seeing each other … eventually.
From: Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk
Sent: 20 June 2015, 08:16
To: AlicetheEighth@gmail.com
Subject: Take it easy
You sounded flat in your last email. Don’t do anything too quickly. Just try and get used to things for a while; but remember you have £5,000 (minus the eyelash-training money) and I think that money would be well used on getting yourself somewhere nice to live, perhaps with people more like you? You are too sociable to live on your own in a bedsit.
Also, if you’d like some space away from Brighton and everything associated with Jake, why don’t you come and stay here? I’ve spoken about it with the girls, and they are very excited about meeting you (I told them you wear pink boots), and Gus asked if you’re good looking (I said yes) and he said he’d love to meet you, too. (Don’t worry. He’s ancient.)
I don’t think you drive, but if you want to come you can get a train to Carlisle or Oxenholme (whichever is easiest), and I’ll meet you at the station. Stay for a week. I can’t promise an exciting time. All I do is look after my girls and attempt to write, but it would be fun if you were here, too. You will love the Lake District.
Bo xxxx
From: AlicetheEighth@gmail.com
Sent: 20 June 2015, 12:37
To: Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk
Subject: Re: Take it easy
Dear Lovely Bo,
Did you mean to invite me to your house in the Lake District, or did you just type that by accident?
From: Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk
Sent: 20 June 2015, 12:38
To: AlicetheEighth@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Take it easy
I invited you.
From: AlicetheEighth@gmail.com
Sent: 20 June 2015, 12:40
To: Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk
Subject: Re: Take it easy
Then I would love to come, if that’s OK. When were you thinking?
From: Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk
Sent: 20 June 2015, 12:42
To: AlicetheEighth@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Take it easy
We’re here all the time. Come whenever you want. Tomorrow, if you like.
From: AlicetheEighth@gmail.com
Sent: 20 June 2015, 12:44
To: Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk
Subject: Re: Take it easy
Tomorrow is Sunday, which means trains will all be fucked because of a storm in Antarctica fifty years ago. How about Tuesday? (Are you really sure?)
From: Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk
Sent: 20 June 2015, 12:42
To: AlicetheEighth@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Take it easy
Tuesday is perfect. I am really sure. See you then. Hurrah! Can’t wait!!!
2
I hadn’t eaten properly for days. It used to be Jake who cooked, or Maria, and everyone in our house would eat together. Occasionally, when Maria was pissed off that I’d come to stay the night back in October and still not gone home months later, she’d grumble about the fact that I’d never made a single meal for them. ‘Seriously, I can’t cook,’ I’d say. ‘I really can’t. I’ll buy us all a take-away, but you’ll regret asking me to cook.’
‘Try,’ Maria said.
So I did, and they never asked me again. I earned my keep by sharing my cigarettes and buying a bag of weed now and then. It seemed to be enough.
Now, alone in my bedsit, my meals were usually two cigarettes and a cappuccino. I’d just bought a new espresso maker and a milk frother, because I valued the kick up the arse I got from that combination of coffee and nicotine. Nutrition, I thought, was overrated. I’d once known a girl who could dance till 3 am on nothing but two bananas; but I wasn’t like that. I needed the jolting force of chemicals to set me going, push me on.
Bo would expect me to eat, though. Bo was an eater, a believer in nourishment. I sensed that it would do no good to rock up at her beautiful mountain home and chain-smoke my way through five packets of Marlboro Gold (I’d splashed out since inheriting my mother’s money; I usually made do with Lambert and Butler). I wondered if I’d be able to go a week without them. I could arrive there, clean-smelling and immaculate, not talk crap, not be chaotic and not smoke. Surely it was possible. Other people made whole lives out of that sort of behaviour. I suspected it could be the key to why they had survived the mainstream and I hadn’t.
I checked my watch. 8:30. This was the earliest I’d been up since I quit my job six months ago. It felt good, to have something solid to get out of bed for, instead of arranging the endless space of a day around a single trip to the post office or corner shop.
Forty minutes till my train. I checked my bag. Jeans, tops, underwear, notebook, pen, make-up and a stick of Brighton rock for each of Bo’s girls. I hadn’t known what else to get them, had no idea what children liked these days; anyway, I suspected that Bo’s children would not be like others. They were probably more into naming wildflowers and rare bird species than hauling lumps of neon plastic across the floor. They’d probably already read most of Austen and Dickens. I already felt intimidated by them. Lola and Maggie. They would be the cool girls. I remembered the cool girls – the ones who could get away with being clever because they used it to find out about the dreadful things their parents did in their bedrooms at night and mocked you if you didn’t believe them.
I hauled my bag onto my shoulder, looked around the bedsit room one last time, thought how horrible it was going to be to come back here, then walked out, shutting the door behind me. I took the stairs two at a time, hoping to avoid other residents on their way to the showers or toilets. People here were poor – properly poor, not just artistically poor like I was. I would, I knew, find my way out of this. One day, I would have it all together. But these people came from long lines of poverty that went back generations. They’d grown up in bedsits wher
e parents were absent and food was scarce; they’d been to failing schools, been beaten by people who were meant to love them, had any scrap of ambition knocked out of them by the hopeless greyness of their surroundings. Now, they were here, scraping together a living on zero-hour contracts, hardly surviving. Some of them, I knew, received parcels from the food bank: economy soup, economy pasta, treacle sponge in a tin. It depressed the hell out of me, to be here, living amongst it.
I made it to the front door of the building without seeing anyone. Now, I just had to get along Western Road and up the hill to the station without running into Jake. At this time of the morning, I was probably pretty safe, but there was always a chance I’d bump into him, saucer-eyed and cognitively absent, on his way home from wherever he’d been last night. I hadn’t heard from him since Friday night, when he finally came back from the van he’d been staying in. On Sunday, he sent me a text message. Where are you baby. I didn’t reply. He’d been silent since.
Outside was warm and sunny. The streets were already filling with shoppers and buskers, and café owners setting up pavement boards advertising breakfast bagels and wholefoods. I walked quickly. I didn’t want to be distracted by shops. That five grand (minus cost of mascara, espresso maker and whisk) kept making itself known to me, like an itch. I can afford it, I thought, passing window displays of things I didn’t need but that shone with the promise of happiness. But I couldn’t afford it. I needed to do what Bo said and put the money aside.
My train was at the platfrom when I reached the station. Quickly, I collected my tickets from the machine, passed through the barriers and got on board. I’d booked a seat on the quiet coach. I hated the incessant ringing of mobile phones, people’s public conversations, the intrusion of their lives into mine. Besides, I’d brought Bo’s last two novels with me. I wanted to read them carefully and think of insightful, critically aware things to say so Bo wouldn’t regret her offer to mentor me. I had to be worth it. I had to be good.
I settled myself into my seat, my luggage shoved on the shelf overhead, and checked my tickets to make sure I’d got everything right so far. My eyes fell over the date. Dates had become meaningless to me since giving up work, but it was the 23rd of June. Nearly the first anniversary of the death of my mother. I counted the days forward. Friday. I would be at Bo’s, distracted, safely orbiting the bright heart of her family.
3
She was just so normal. That’s what amazed me. This woman – successful, well known, wealthy and clever – lived a completely ordinary life. She squirted her worktops with kitchen spray, applied plasters to her children’s wounds, made coffee and packed lunches, cooked evening meals … All of this seemed extraordinary to me. Extraordinary in its ordinariness. There was, I thought, a humility to it – a humanity at her core that wealth and fame could not remove.
One morning, I looked out at the mountains and streams that stretched on and on to the skyline, and said, ‘Don’t you ever want the excitement of London? The glamour and the parties?’ I wasn’t above being seduced by a party filled with famous authors.
Vehemently, Bo shook her head. ‘There’s nothing I hate more,’ she said. ‘The London writing scene … Some of the people are fine, of course; like people everywhere, but on the whole it’s brutal, and so insincere. I can’t bear it. Give me my middle-of-nowhere life in the Lake District, looking after my children and doing what I love in peace. It’s underrated, this capacity for a life lived privately, competing with no one, having the freedom to be yourself.’
It made it all so easy, being here with her. I’d walked through the front door when I arrived and fit in, just like that. The house was rich with family: the noise, the vivacity, the deep-down wholeness of them all. It wasn’t like the home I’d grown up in, where there’d been nothing but anger and hurt, and damaged people who couldn’t stop damaging people.
Lola and Maggie were great. Vital, energetic, engaged with their lives at school. And loved. They were so loved, I wanted to be them. I wanted to lay down and feel the tender touch of Bo’s hand in my hair; her lips on my face; her endless, patient care.
I said, ‘Your girls have perfect lives. It’s the childhood we all dreamed of.’
Bo smiled, and looked pleased.
I didn’t think much of Gus, though. He was brooding, quiet, and took up more than his fair share of space. The grumpy misery of him filled a room. Even Bo acknowledged it. He went to Manchester on the Friday, leaving Bo and me alone with the girls for the day. When he came home that night, Bo sighed and said, ‘And now the atmosphere in the house will change.’ And that was exactly what happened. He upset the girls; he shouted at Bo when the geriatric cat shat in the corner of the kitchen; he took himself moodily out of the room and slammed the door.
‘Bollocks,’ I said, because I didn’t know what else to say, and felt too inexperienced to offer words of comfort to a woman seventeen years older than I was. If it had been one of my friends in Brighton, I’d have said, straight away, ‘What a cock. You can live without him.’ Then we would spend the next month or two discussing whether she really could live without him, until finally, triumphantly, she’d decide that she could.
Mildly, Bo said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Alice. He’s always like this when he sees I have friends and a life away from him.’
I looked at her anxiously.
She said, ‘It’s fine. I can handle it.’
I knew she was telling the truth. Her shoulders were broad and defended.
Gus had brought a letter in with him and dropped it on the table. Collecting the post seemed to be his job. He usually went off for it straight after breakfast, but he’d left early this morning, and even though we’d walked past the old-fashioned mailbox four times that day on the way to and from school with the girls, Bo hadn’t collected it herself.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed this if Bo hadn’t said, quite pointedly, ‘I wonder whether there will be any horrors in there for me today.’
I looked at her curiously, but she said no more.
Now, she picked up the white, typed envelope and eyed it suspiciously for a while before tearing it open. I watched her read the letter inside, which went on for more than two pages. When she put it down again, she stood perfectly still, took some deep breaths and got herself a glass of water.
After a while, I said, ‘Are you alright?’
She smiled at me. ‘I’m fine. It’s just not a very nice letter…’
She didn’t finish what she was saying. Then Gus came back into the room, so I didn’t have time to ask anything more.
Bo said, ‘Could you take that letter and put it in the bin, Gus? It’s from our old friend.’
‘I didn’t realise,’ he said, and moved as if to read it.
But she put out a hand to stop him. ‘Don’t. Just get rid of it, Gus. Thanks.’
He mumbled something under his breath that I didn’t catch, then dropped the letter into the recycling bin. He stared hard at Bo and said, ‘We need to sort—’
‘Later, Gus.’
I looked from one of them to the other. I didn’t understand what had just happened, but I could see that Bo was biting her lip, trying hard not to cry.
Later that evening, when she was upstairs putting Maggie to bed and I was at the kitchen table with Lola, I caught a glimpse of Gus rifling through the recycling bin. He took out the letter and spent a long time reading it.
The next morning, Bo was back to her usual self. She made the girls’ packed lunches and got them ready for the day, then together she and I walked them to school and afterwards we worked in Bo’s study. I was envious of that room, all its peace and blank space, and the view I thought all writers should have: over the rocky fells to the valley below and the slate-grey gleam of the lake.
Bo was shuffling papers around on her desk. She picked up some typewritten pages and said, ‘Can I read this to you? It’s the first two chapters of my new project. I’m taking a leap into a new area this time.’
&nbs
p; ‘I’d love to hear it.’
‘I’m really in two minds about it. I can’t tell if it’s any good or not, and there’s no point asking Gus, because he has no idea of the difference between world-class literature and absolute rubbish. I trust you, though. You know these things.’
I was flattered, though of course there was no way I would ever say anything critical about Bo’s work. I’d seen quickly enough that Bo, despite all her success, was insecure. She didn’t seem to believe she was as good as everyone said; it was as though she thought she’d tricked the whole world somehow. It was a sad lack of confidence that I blamed Gus for. He was horrible to Bo, I thought. Really unpleasant. A bastard.
Bo started reading. I listened. It was the beginning of something about Britain in fifty years’ time, after an environmental disaster had destroyed the country. Everyone had become refugees, but the world was turning its back on them. It was chilling and frightening, even just those first few pages.
When Bo finished, I looked at her and said simply, ‘Wow.’
Bo smiled, and I could see the relief on her face. ‘Really? It’s OK?’
‘It’s great. Truly. Just great. Oh, God, I’m so jealous of your talent.’
Bo laughed. Then she said, quite seriously, ‘I’d like you to write today. Anything at all. Help yourself to whatever you need, whatever you want, but have something done before you go to bed. There’s coffee on tap in the kitchen. Have as much as you like. I’ll be here, too. I need to get on with this, even though I hate it at the moment. But you’ve cheered me up about it. We can work together, keep each other going. What do you think?’