To Be Someone

by Louise Voss

  It was unspeakably beautiful. For the first fifteen feet or so, where the water was still light, it made an effervescing cauldron of blue-green with sparkling white speckles; intense, but the subtlest thing I’d ever seen. Then as the water got darker it ceased to have that transformative effect, but the ray itself kept penetrating as strongly as ever. I followed it with my eyes as far as I could, which appeared to be to the very center of the earth. Its pull on me was so pure, so forceful that I could almost feel myself being sucked down, compelled to go with it. I wanted to go with it. At that moment I believed that never in my life had I felt so much joy, or so much peace. The black water was no longer threatening. It was a part of me.

  It’s okay to trust life, it seemed to tell me. Take it, it’s yours. Don’t waste it.

  Sam was right, I thought, coming back up for air. It was all up to us, as individuals. I was the only one who could make my life truly worthwhile, to find the value in what I had been given. I supposed I’d spent so many years being dependent on others for my success and happiness: our fans, Sam, Vinnie, even Ringside and Mickey, and now New World. It was time to be more self-sufficient. It was time to be myself.

  “I LIKE STINGS”

  SEEING CRYSTAL LASERS IN THE SEA AND BELIEVING EVERYTHING would be all right was all well and good. But nothing was all right, was it? Sam was dead. Vinnie had betrayed me. I’d lost my eye and my job. The only person I felt remotely like seeing, apart from Sam, was Toby, but there hadn’t been a peep out of him since the riverside debacle.

  Admittedly, he didn’t have my address or phone number, and he had been hanging round Richmond on the off-chance of seeing me—but that was pretty lame, as far as I was concerned. He could have found out that Ron was my agent easily enough, and contacted me that way. For the sake of my dedication to the Plan, therefore, I persuaded myself that, in the cold light of day he’d probably decided that he wasn’t interested after all. It could never have worked out between us, not with all our respective baggage. But I still wanted to see him once more, even if just to say good-bye.

  The manuscript was nearly finished, with just a couple more chapters to go, and I felt ready to tie up a few loose ends.

  I was going to give Ruby the Hel-Sam box.

  I drove slowly through Fulham, peering at the street names until I found Larchfield Road. For some reason I had been expecting number twenty-seven to be a sizable period house, not this narrow-shouldered anemic cottage, sandwiched like an apology between two similar ones.

  I parked, badly, a little way up the street, behind a large white van into whose bumper I reversed. Since losing my eye, my previously pristine BMW was acquiring more knocks and scratches than a toddler’s knees. Still, who cared? I wasn’t going to get sentimental about the bloody car.

  I gathered up the Hel-Sam box, locked the car, and headed for the pale cottage, trying very hard to swallow down a bubble of excitement at seeing Toby again, despite the inauspicious circumstances of our last encounter. I’d have telephoned first, but there’d been so many creases in the balled-up receipt when I’d finally picked it up from the floor of the car and straightened it out that the scribbled phone number was illegible. I had only just managed to decipher the address.

  It was a strange feeling, being excited and suicidal. I hated using the word suicidal but decided that it was about time I started to. It was a step toward making the Plan more than just typed words on a page and a playlist.

  Another step was this meeting. I banged the door-knocker twice, with a briskness that I didn’t feel inside, and waited to see Toby’s familiar smile.

  The door opened. A woman stood there, my age, with Toby’s eyes but a more angular face. She had a pierced eyebrow and the Middleton curls, only hers were dark brown.

  “Are you Lulu?” I stuck out my hand to be shaken. “I’m a friend of Toby’s. Is he still living here? I’d have called, but you’re ex-Directory.” Nerves made me sound aggressive.

  Lulu shook my hand, more of a twitch really, and stared at me. “You’re Helena Nicholls.” I couldn’t tell if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “Yeah.”

  Lulu blushed suddenly, and I realized that she wasn’t being unfriendly, but was phased by my sudden and unannounced appearance at her house. “I’m sorry. Toby is still staying here, but he’s away on business tonight. He had to go and meet a client in Dublin.”

  “Oh.” I’d timed the visit for early evening with the assumption that Toby would have finished work, but I’d never considered that he might be away. I was such an idiot. “Sorry to bother you, Lulu. I shouldn’t have just turned up. Actually, I brought something for Toby to give Ruby. Can I leave it with you?”

  We both looked down at the battered old hat box in my arms. Lulu’s expression read, And you want to give that to Ruby why? I resisted the temptation to tell her that this was my last true link with Sam. My last true link with life.

  “Ruby’s here, though,” Lulu continued. “She’s just getting ready for bed. Why don’t you come in and give it to her yourself?”

  I tried and failed to smile, allowing Lulu to usher me into an open-plan living room. I was clutching the Hel-Sam box tightly against my abdomen, its curves comforting me. When I released it there were speckles of glitter on my hands and down the front of my sweater, and grief made my head spin.

  “Cool house,” I managed eventually, looking around. It was much more spacious inside than its exterior suggested, and beautifully decorated in muted earthy shades. There was nothing extraneous, no clutter. Sting’s voice drifted out of two state-of-the-art hanging egg-shaped speakers. A staircase rose from the middle of the room, stairs carpeted with a nubbly cream sisal carpet. “It’s hard to believe you have a small child staying with you.”

  Lulu grinned. “I’ve just tidied up. “She indicated a closed cupboard door with a jerk of her head. “She’s going home tomorrow, and I’ll miss her—but I’m looking forward to having my social life back again. Would you like a drink? I was about to open a bottle of wine.”

  “Thanks, I’d love one.”

  Lulu headed toward the kitchen, stopping en route at the foot of the stairs. “Ruuuu-by! Can you come downstairs, please? You’ve got a visitor!” She turned back to me. “Make yourself at home. I’ll just go and get Ruby’s milk, and the wine. Back in a second.”

  “I cleaned my teeth,” said a small voice from the top of the stairs.

  I walked over to the staircase and looked up. Ruby was sitting on the top step, a white tidemark of diluted toothpaste crusting around her mouth. Her hair had corkscrewed into a whole new layer of curls, and even her feet looked bigger. I was overjoyed to see her. “I can see that you did. Aren’t you clever? Will you come down and talk to me?”

  Ruby bumped slowly down, step by step, on her bottom, until she was sitting at my feet. She was wearing red Teletubby slippers and a yellow hooded dressing gown over powder blue flowery pajamas, a small riot of color against the pale carpet. I wanted to hug her but thought it might scare her. Instead I crouched down and sat on the step next to her.

  “Do you remember me, Ruby? From the hospital?”

  “Mmm, you’re the pirate,” she said, gazing at my eye patch. “Where’s your eyebrow gone?”

  I usually shaded in the few sparse hairs remaining with a brown eyebrow pencil, but I had forgotten that day, what with all the tension of planning the visit.

  “Um, it sort of got lost in my accident.” I glanced toward the kitchen in the hope that Lulu wasn’t following the exchange. I didn’t like to draw attention to my missing body parts.

  “Never mind, I get my daddy to buy you a new one.” Ruby patted my shoulder in consolation. “A black one,” she added firmly.

  Lulu, laughing, came back into the room with two glasses of wine and a beaker of milk, which she handed to Ruby. She had obviously overheard the conversation. “It doesn’t work like that, Rubes. Helena isn’t Mr. Potato Head, you know.”

  Lulu mistook my frown for i
ncomprehension. “He’s a character from Toy Story. Ruby’s got the toy, and all his bits come off—you know, ears and eyebrows and stuff.… ” Wisely, she tailed off before she dug herself any deeper, but it was too late.

  “I know who Mr. Potato Head is,” I said, frostily, and Lulu blushed.

  She changed the subject, wiping the chalky ring from around Ruby’s mouth with a spit-dampened thumb. “Why did you clean your teeth already, Rubes? You’ll only have to do it again after your milk.”

  Ruby sucked at the bottle. “Because I cleaned my teeth,” she said. Then she cocked an ear toward the nearest eggy speaker. “What’s this music?”

  “It’s Sting,” said Lulu.

  “I like Stings,” Ruby announced mournfully, shaking her head.

  Lulu laughed again. “That means she doesn’t like Sting. It’s all in the intonation.”

  I smiled, deciding after all that it would be churlish to hold the potato-head comment against anyone. Life was too short. “Her language has improved so much—I can’t believe it. She doesn’t even lisp anymore! It’s like she’s a whole new person, in just a few months. How old is she now?”

  Ruby drew herself haughtily up to her full height of almost three feet. “I not a new person. I Ruby Tabitha Middleton. I’m twoana-harf.”

  “Going on fifteen … Helena’s brought you something, Ruby Tabitha. Why don’t we all go and sit down, so she can show it to you?” Lulu passed me a glass of wine and steered us both over to an immense cream sofa, Ruby jumping up and down on the way.

  “Present! Present! It’s my birthday!”

  “No, it isn’t your birthday. Now calm down, please. It’s bedtime in a minute, and I don’t want you getting overexcited.”

  “Sorry,” I said to Lulu. “I shouldn’t have come at such a bad time. Actually, I didn’t think she’d go to bed so early. Not having kids, I don’t really get how these things work.… ”

  Lulu grimaced. “Don’t worry. It’s fine. No, calm down, Ruby. You’ll knock over someone’s glass in a minute.”

  I lifted Ruby onto my knee. For a second she looked as though she wanted to squirm off, until she remembered that a gift was soon to be forthcoming, and stayed put, drinking her milk and leaning expectantly against me. She was heavy, a great plump bundle of yellow terry cloth and smooth pink skin, more like an oversized baby than a little girl. Her hair smelled delicious, of poppies and warm towels and baby soap, and for a second I couldn’t speak. I had an overwhelming urge to touch her soft skin. The baby I’d never have. I gently squeezed one of her bare chubby calves, feeling it give and mold squashily to my hand. Why was it the beautiful minutiae of life that made it so hard to leave: the downy blond hairs on Ruby’s shin, a dog-eared collection of teenage sentiment in a box?

  “Ruby.” I turned her gently around so we were face-to-face again. “This present is something very special. In fact, it’s my favorite thing in the world because it reminds me of a very old friend, and, you know, the best presents are the things that we love most ourselves.”

  Ruby nodded, dropping the now-empty beaker onto the sofa, and Lulu sipped her wine, looking embarrassed. I saw her gaze longingly at a magazine lying on the coffee table. Fortuitiously for her, a telephone rang at the far end of the room, and she leapt up to answer it, slopping a little white wine on the table in her haste to escape this strange display of sentiment.

  “That’s probably Toby, ringing to say good night to Ruby.”

  “My daddy,” said Ruby to me, lifting up her head. I tried to eavesdrop on the conversation, but Ruby continued to chat to me and I couldn’t. “Daddy come back ‘morrow, and we go to live with Mummy again.”

  I started, and a small strange noise came from the back of my throat.

  “Got hiccups?” asked Ruby blithely.

  “With Daddy? You’re all going to live together again?”

  Ruby nodded vigorously. “Yeah, my daddy and my mummy and me. I got all my toys there too, an’—”

  “Ruby! Daddy wants to say good night!” Lulu called, holding out the receiver. Ruby slid off my lap and ran to the telephone. “Toby wants to talk to you, too,” she added.

  I stood up miserably and trailed over to join the queue for the telephone. After Ruby’s revelation, Toby was the last person on earth I wanted to speak to, but I could hardly refuse.

  “Na-night, Daddy. Any fireworks, any scaries?” Reassured, Ruby made kissing noises. “I shout you in the morning, yeah?”

  Lulu pried the receiver out of Ruby’s hand and passed it to me. “I’ll just take Ruby up to clean her teeth again, and then we’ll come and say good night,” she whispered to me.

  I nodded. “Hi,” I said blankly into the phone.

  “Helena! God, I’m so gutted I’m not there! I mean, I’m so glad you’re there! I’ve been going mad trying to track you down—you will leave your number with Lulu, won’t you?”

  There was an embarrassed pause, which I felt physically, a small dropping sensation in the pit of my stomach. This was all a mess. I was tired of everything, too tired to challenge Toby on his hypocrisy at wanting my number if he was about to get back with Kate, too miserable that once again my timing was up the spout.…

  But hold on, I told myself: It was entirely academic whether or not he got back with Kate. It made no difference to me, nor was it the reason I was there, in Lulu’s front room, surrounded by bronze buddhas and artfully arranged piles of smooth stones. My sense of perspective was, as usual, twisting away from me. I should be happy that at least one of us had a future.

  “You were a good friend to me in hospital,” I blurted, unable to think of anything else to say.

  “Not more than that?” Toby asked, hopefully.

  Another pause. “Under the circumstances, I think not,” I said, not elaborating on which specific circumstances: Toby’s marriage, my bereavement, our joint vulnerability.

  “Oh.” His disappointment swelled into my head, as palpable as the crackling from his mobile phone. “Is everything okay, Helena? You sound a bit … strange.”

  I tried to close the lid on my disappointment and frustration, imagining it as an overstuffed suitcase that needed to be sat on before being zipped up. Toby had been a good friend and a good listener. I didn’t want his final impression of me to be of an obstreperous old harridan yet again giving him a hard time. What we both did with our lives was entirely our own business.

  “I’m fine. I’m sorry if I sound a bit off. I guess I’m just disappointed not to see you.” I rushed on, before he could suggest another meeting. “Actually, I came over to give something to Ruby. I’ve been thinking a lot about … her, and, you know, now that I’ve recovered and I’m about to start work again, I figured that it might be a nice gesture to pass something of mine on to her. It might seem a little weird to you, but I really want her to have the box of letters and bits and pieces that Sam and I first started keeping as kids. There’s quite a lot of mementos of the band in there, old fanzines and photos, that kind of thing, as well as the letters.”

  Another pause, but this time a reverential one. “Are you sure, Helena? That’s … that’s just an incredible gift! Why do you want to get rid of it? I mean, those are memories of Sam. Surely you want to keep them?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “Actually, I really don’t. I’ve spent far too long dwelling on them. I need to move on, stop living in the past. I would be honored if you’d accept it, on Ruby’s behalf. If you could just keep it for her until she’s old enough to decide what she wants to do with it. Maybe people can come to her when they need to do research on the early days of Blue Idea, or whatever. I don’t know.”

  “Why wouldn’t people come to you if they need to do research on Blue Idea?”

  I hesitated, feeling caught out. “Yeah, of course they would, and do. I’m talking ten, twenty years down the line here—you never know, maybe there’ll be a huge Blue Idea revival in 2020, and who knows where I’ll be then? I just thought it might be something Ruby would like to
have, one day.”

  Toby still seemed overcome. “What can I say? Thanks, Helena. This is the most amazing present Ruby will ever receive. I promise we’ll take care of it for you.”

  Ruby and Lulu came back downstairs, and Lulu hid the Hel-Sam box behind a large cushion before Ruby saw it.

  “Just one more thing, Toby. Can I trust you not to look in it yourself? I mean, of course you can one day, but … not just yet, eh?”

  “I promise that, too. Ruby should be the one to open it, when she’s old enough.”

  “Thanks. Listen, I’d better go. Ruby’s off to bed now. We’ll be in touch, okay?”

  Toby started gabbling. “I’ll be back tomorrow, leave your number, I’ll ring you then. Why don’t we go out next week? Just as friends, of course, but I’d love to see you—”

  “Bye, Toby.” I put the phone down, sick at heart. Have a nice life. I wish things could have been different.…

  Ruby was sitting on the floor by the sofa, one of Lulu’s feet in her lap. When I came back over to join them, I heard her say, “I’m the lady, you be the man. I wash your feet, yeah?”

  “Bit young for a Mary Magdalene complex, isn’t she?” I said to Lulu, relying on flippancy to push down my anguish.

  “Yeah. I keep telling her that she should stop reading that Bible so much,” Lulu agreed, and I managed a laugh. For a second we exchanged a look that said, loud and clear, we could be friends.

  Ruby stopped pretending to anoint Lulu’s foot with tears and dumped it unceremoniously back on the floor. “Where’s my present?”

  “Oh, yes. We got interrupted by your daddy on the phone. Oh, Ruby, I hope you won’t be too disappointed. It’s only an old box full of letters and stuff, but one day I hope that you’ll enjoy looking through it and owning it.” I retrieved the Hel-Sam box from behind the sofa cushion and put it on the floor in front of her.

  Lulu squinted at the faded label and smiled, reading it out loud: “ ‘The Hel-Sam Box of Important Stuff! Keep Out! Unless you are Helena Jane Nicholls Or Samantha Grant! In the event of the untimely death of either of us, this box is to go immediately to the other one’s house and stay there. No one else is ever, ever, allowed to look inside. It’s all Top Secret.’ So how come it’s not at Samantha Grant’s house, then?” As soon as she’d said it, she bit her lip, and I realized that Toby must have told her about me and Sam.