Losing Gemma

by Katy Gardner

  As I gazed at her, I was overtaken by a rush of affection. There was something so sweet and trusting in the way she fell asleep at every available opportunity. When we were at school she had a habit of dozing off in the middle of lessons and later, in the days of pubs and all-night parties, she was always the first to succumb, curling up in the corner under her coat as we cavorted around her inert body. I was the opposite: too awake, my mind always buzzing. Sometimes I would lie with my eyes wide open all night, waiting for the sky outside my curtains to lighten, for another day to bring me closer to what I thought of as my “real,” adult life.

  And now, finally, I was here. After all those months of planning and saving, I had escaped the tedium of Britain. Unlike my college friends with their deathly city jobs and sad, hemmed-in plans, I was, I told myself with the triumphant optimism of the very young, a career-path refusenik. Not for me the daily trudge to the office. No, I was different. I was going to hurl myself at the world and see what happened.

  2

  THE taxi dropped us at the end of what I know now to be Janpath. Temporarily dazed by the rushing traffic we stood by the side of the road clutching our backpacks and trying to get our bearings. We were standing on a large arterial road, which led into a wide circle of smart shops, restaurants, and airline offices. It was after nine now and the pavement was littered with sleeping bodies.

  I gazed around in excitement. Behind me a boy was squatting in front of a tray heaped with silver-foiled leaves, aniseed seeds, and betel nuts. Further down the pavement a group of ragged children were tugging at the arms of passersby. As I stared across the road I suddenly noticed a turbaned man squat down in front of a wicker basket. Pulling off its lid, he waved his hand over the top like a puppeteer until the jerking body of a long brown snake poked its way over the top.

  “Bloody hell, we’ve just walked into a Merchant Ivory film!”

  Gemma blinked at me. She looked stunned, her mouth hanging slightly open, her arms folded nervously around her waist.

  “Do you think it’s still poisonous?”

  “Sure. You won’t find any real live bitey snakes around here.”

  “Ha fucking ha.”

  Tossing her head, she pulled the Lonely Planet from her bag and started to thumb through it.

  “We really need to work out where we’re going,” she was muttering. “It says here there’s a youth hostel somewhere near . . .” She frowned, concentrating hard on the book.

  “Relax! Let’s just soak up the scene . . .”

  Glancing to the right, where the stream of 1950s-style Ambassador cars and scooters had stopped at the lights, I grabbed her hand and began to pull her across the road. For a second or so it remained empty. Then from the opposite direction a tidal wave of vehicles suddenly poured around us. For a moment we stood paralyzed in the middle of the maelstrom, clutching each other in horror.

  “What do we do now?”

  I stared into Gemma’s small startled eyes. In the traffic roaring toward us, there was just about to be a sudden lull.

  “Just go for it!” I screamed.

  Gripping each other’s hands tightly and yelling at the top of our voices, we ran for our lives. By the time we reached the sidewalk we were shaking with terror and laughter. Perhaps it was too much for Gemma, who was now gasping by the side of the road, her hands on her knees, but I felt as if I had jumped out of a plane and landed on my feet.

  “Yo! We did it!”

  Gemma looked up at me, raising her eyebrows sarcastically.

  “Within an inch of their lives, the intrepid explorers breasted the raging torrent.”

  “But what a way to go!”

  There was a pause, then Gemma said quietly, “Perhaps we should’ve just let that taxi driver take us to his cousin’s hotel.”

  I glanced sharply at her face, but from its benign gaze I decided that this was intended as a question rather than a criticism. Since I was the more experienced traveler, I’d naturally assumed that she was going to leave the practicalities to me.

  “I don’t think so,” I said dismissively. “They’re all on a percentage, these guys. Come on, let’s try this one.”

  We turned down a side road which intersected the main arc of buildings and immediately saw a series of neon hotel signs and, sitting on the sidewalk, a group of backpackers. I smiled at Gemma reassuringly.

  We started to cross again, this time peering in every direction before stepping off the curb. As we reached the other side I nodded at the group, a couple of men and a thin, tanned woman with bare feet and anklets. They looked as if they had been on the road a long time, I remember thinking enviously, long enough to shed their old Western selves entirely. I wanted to be like that, too, with dusty feet and slim brown wrists encased in lines of sparkly bazaar bangles. I wanted to be an old hand, someone “with experience,” who had done and seen it all, not a fresh arrival, straight off the London flight and clutching her guidebook. Most of all, I wanted to be different from everyone at home.

  I glanced back at Gemma. Embarrassingly, she still had the Lonely Planet out and was frowning and waving it around in front of her, like a tourist at the Taj Mahal. Ignoring her I gestured toward the first hotel, a grimy looking place advertising rooms for fifty rupees a night.

  “What about here?”

  Gemma looked at me doubtfully.

  “It doesn’t mention it in the book.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Gem. Forget the bloody book.”

  I turned on my heels and was just about to proceed purposefully up the steps of the hotel when a figure who had suddenly come out of the swing doors lurched down the steps and blundered into me, knocking me backward. With the weight of the rucksack on my back, I fell hard onto my backside.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  I felt a sharp stab of pain in my elbow and for a moment was disoriented. It seems stupid now, but my immediate concern was that the other backpackers might have seen and all attempts at traveler cool would be ruined.

  “Are you okay?”

  For a moment I saw Gemma’s face peering down at me. Then her eyes flicked away, focusing on something to her left.

  “What?”

  Looking past her I glimpsed the fast disappearing back of my assailant: a thin woman weaving almost drunkenly along the sidewalk. She kept starting to run and then checking herself and slowing down, as if aware that she was being watched. Something about the way she moved, perhaps her uneven gait, or the slumped, almost crushed shape of her back, made her appear either very stoned or very scared. She was wearing a long cotton petticoat, the sort worn by Indian women under their saris, and a skimpy top.

  “Jesus!”

  I pulled myself up shakily. It’d been a harder fall than I’d first thought and my arm was stinging. Looking down I saw that my elbow was bleeding and the side of my hand was badly grazed.

  “What’s she on?”

  Gemma rested her hand on my shoulder, her eyes wide.

  “She might at least have stopped . . .”

  We stared at the woman’s back for a little while longer. After about thirty seconds she reached the end of the road and turned into Connaught Circus.

  “She looked Indian . . .” Gemma eventually said.

  “Nah, she’s a Westerner. Probably stoned.”

  “Perhaps she’s had too much of that Indian gas you were telling me about.”

  Turning round, Gemma put her foot on the first step.

  “Wait.”

  I gazed into the late evening haze, watching as the crowd closed around the woman. There was something bothering me.

  “What?”

  “Nah, it’s gone.”

  Pulling my rucksack higher onto my back, I turned and walked unsteadily up the steps.

  WE were given a room on the third floor: a small cubicle with two string charpoy-beds and a shuttered window overlooking the bricks and pipes of the opposite building. It was just what I had imagined: as far from the floral, en suite suburban horrors of th
e package hotel as possible. There was virtually no furniture: on the wall above the beds was a narrow ledge, containing a guttered candle stub and an empty cigarette packet; opposite the window, a bare wooden table, its soft wood indented with graffiti. On the ceiling a fan clattered noisily. Gemma had turned it to “full” the moment the proprietor had left and now it was working itself into a frenzy, the heavy metal hub shaking so violently that the fan seemed in danger of spinning off the ceiling and decapitating us. The “bathroom” was across the corridor, a rusty shower and a filthy hole which, after a cursory inspection, even I, with all my half-baked bravado, had decided was best avoided.

  Gemma threw her rucksack onto the floor next to the farthest bed—an unstable-looking construction of wood and ropes—and flopped down.

  “Thank God for that. I thought he was going to say they were full.”

  I perched on the edge of the bed and started to fiddle uncomfortably with the top of my bag. My hand was still throbbing. Lying opposite me, Gemma was staring across the room. She was brooding, I could tell from the glum shape of her mouth, the pensive glaze of her eyes. Determined to snap her out of it, I stood up and waved my hand jauntily in front of her face.

  “Is the accommodation to your taste, memsahib?”

  She smiled distractedly. “Quite divine.”

  “As you can see, our luxurious suite of rooms caters to the modern tourist’s every need.”

  There was a long pause and then, to my relief, she sat up.

  “If this is a super-deluxe room I dread to think what ‘budget’ involves,” she said slowly.

  “The roof, probably.”

  “I’ve got to have a shower. I feel really yucky.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  Glancing at me, she suddenly closed her eyes and fell backward, her body hitting the taut rope base of the bed with a soft thud.

  “Whatever. I’m knackered.”

  She lay there for a few minutes, her eyes closed, her breathing deep and regular. For a moment I thought she’d fallen asleep again, but then she sat up, opening her eyes wide and yawning as she looked across the room.

  “Christ, this is uncomfortable.”

  We stared at each other. Suddenly her mouth started to twitch, as if she was desperately trying to repress a huge bubble of mirth. Just looking at her made me smile. Thank God, I was thinking; she’s not sulking after all.

  “What? What’s the matter with you?”

  “Oh, come on, little Miss Anthropology. Look at this bloody place!”

  She glanced at me again and the laughter escaped with a great spluttering raspberry.

  “And so, our brave lady explorers face their first night in the wilds of India . . .”

  She collapsed with the onslaught of another explosion. I pursed my lips and fluttered my eyelashes in my famous impersonation of Mrs. Crewe, our A-level English teacher; an old, infantile joke we still found funny.

  “Gemma Harding, I do hope you’re not taking the piss.”

  “It’s like fucking Colditz!”

  “Well, I think it’s . . . delightful.”

  “A stylish example of late 1980s minimalism.”

  “All mod-cons, including, for your own convenience, a delightfully designed communal cess pit!”

  And so it went on, us with the giggles on our first night in India.

  After we’d recovered we sat on our beds, chuckling and wiping our faces. I gazed across the room at Gemma: her cheeks pink with heat and laughter, her damp hair flopping in her eyes. Her features were as familiar to me as my own. I’d grown up with them and knew every contour and expression by heart; she just had to jerk her head or bite her lip and I knew exactly what she was thinking. It was true that she was never going to make it as a Hollywood nymphet: her face was too round, her nose too knobbly, and her legs too short, but I liked how she looked. It reminded me of my childhood, of bicycle rides down country lanes and camping out on cool summer nights.

  She, however, was never satisfied. Her hair and her weight were the two great enemies, and ever since I could remember she’d been waging campaigns against them. Over the last few years she’d been experimenting with the former, cropping it into the spiky post-punk style of the moment, and dying her fringe unlikely colors: pink and orange and most recently, bright purple. She’d also taken to painting black eyeliner around her eyes, a procedure which—as I had tried to point out—had the unfortunate effect of making them appear smaller rather than more alluring. Yet despite these attempts she looked the same to me: her round, podgy face stubbornly shrugging off the slightest overtures of sophistication.

  Then there was her figure. Her body was the traditional English shape: thick legs and hips, a slimmer waist, and small round tits. And, as she was always complaining, her legs were too short. The long pencil skirts everyone wore in the mid eighties made her look as if she was swathed in cheap curtain material whilst drainpipe jeans were, to be honest, a dumpy disaster. So she was constantly on a diet. But however much she starved herself on low-calorie yogurts and apples, or, for a really terrible month or so, a diet consisting solely of bran and orange juice, her frame remained the same. Her legs were still too short and her hips too wide; rather than transforming her into a svelte imp, the weight loss made her face sunken and her knees bony.

  At this point I should probably come clean. It’s not the sort of thing one is supposed to say, but I think we both knew that one of Gemma’s main problems was the way I looked. It’s faded now: I’m too thin and my face is gray and drawn, but as Gem and I used to joke at school, if we put her brains and my bod together we’d have the ideal combo. I don’t think it mattered when we were kids, but later, when the school discos and parties and boyfriends started, it somehow became important. I remember one time in particular; we were getting ready to go to some stupid youth club disco aged about fourteen. Standing together in front of the long mirror in my parents’ bedroom, I suddenly saw myself as a stranger might. I looked almost like a model, I realized with shock and an unfamiliar pride. Virtually overnight, my long legs had turned shapely and my waist had tucked in sharply below my new, blossoming bust. I piled my curly hair onto the top of my head, stuck out my chest, and pouted, like a page three girl.

  “Bloody hell. You look really tarty.”

  Jerking round, I saw that Gemma was standing behind me, watching my performance. Despite the outrageous clothes, lipstick, and mascara, she still looked like a podgy little girl. I think I must have laughed, or said something back, but from then on there was a perceptible shift between us. Something neither of us fully understood had changed.

  Of course we were just little girls dressing up, but we took it so seriously. Suddenly our appearances had become vital and we would spend long afternoons trailing around Top Shop and Miss Selfridge trying on clothes we had no money to buy. I could chart our history from what we wore: a genealogy of fashion statements—mistakes and triumphs—taken on and discarded as the years ticked past. When we were thirteen we had pretended to be punks in hastily improvised miniskirts and ripped tops, pink satin winklepickers, and black kohl, painted awkwardly around our eyes. I tottered around in stilettos; Gemma had a pin which gave the appearance of going through her nose. It was around then that I started to call her “Poly Styrene,” after we saw the real thing, plump and punkily clad on Top of the Pops. I, in contrast, was named “Siouxsie Sioux,” but it was a token gesture, for despite Gemma’s attempts to shake off the image, her name somehow stuck; it summed up a nervous, neurotic quality that even the ripped miniskirts and black lipstick could not fully mask. “Clean my teeth ten times a day,” I used to sing at her. “Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away.”

  Later, of course, we moved on from punk. I had my beloved black ra-ra skirt and my Madonna-style lacy gloves, stained brown at the tips from the cigarettes I learned to smoke. While I donned dangly earrings and New Romantic frilly shirts, Gemma veered toward Student Goth, with black ankle boots and leggings, her army surplus greatcoat, and
long violet tasseled dress.

  But I’m jumping ahead: her grungey phase came later, around the time she started smoking too much dope and dropped out of school. Before that, we’d both tart ourselves up to the nines. We spent hours getting ready, experimenting with makeup and hairspray and fishnet tights. Then, pretending we always dressed in such a way, we would set off for the sad discos and youth clubs we frequented, with that frightened, fluttery feeling in our tummies. We’d spend the evening pretending to ignore the boys in the fifth form, while waiting desperately to see if they’d ask us for a dance: all that giggly, nerve-racking, competitive crap. In retrospect I can see that Gemma found it really hard. She’d spend hours getting ready, then sit miserably in the corner all evening chewing her hair while I got chatted up. “My sex life is carried out vicariously!” she announced after one event. Not fully understanding, I just winked at her and smiled.

  The problem for me was that once I’d got them, the boys at school embarrassed me with their fumbling attempts at seduction and clumsy protestations of love. University was largely the same. I don’t know why, really, but I’d pile up these pathetic, hangdog admirers in the same way that Gemma accumulated books. I always enjoyed the first phase: the being chased, the first kiss or first few weeks of passion, but then I’d grow dispirited and somehow impatient with the whole endeavor. Nobody ever seemed right, and I certainly didn’t relish becoming part of a clingy, predictable coupling. What I wanted, you see, was excitement and change. Aged nineteen or twenty there seemed simply too much of life to experience to spend it with some gauche youth. Besides, I told myself, I was not looking for a man. As was the fashion back then at Sussex, I declared myself a feminist.