First Love

by Gwendoline Riley

  It must be a dreadful cross: this hot desire to join in with people who don’t want you. This need to burrow in. But, then—perhaps I’m not one to talk. A few years later, I was buying tickets for a preview of Terence Davies’ new film: in Liverpool, so I asked if she wanted to come. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘And am I allowed to bring Rodger?’

  Of Time and the City ends with fireworks dashing skywards, poppop-pop, raining blue sparks over the Pier Head. The voiceover says:

  Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night, good night…

  Following the producers up onto the stage, Davies took his bow and I clapped hard. I was deeply moved by his flushed face, his clasped hands. Here was an artist to the tips of his fingers, and he’d been treated so shabbily, so disgracefully. He’d said somewhere, ‘I lost all hope.’ Wouldn’t you call that sickening?

  Later, as we were standing to leave, as I was getting my bag from under the seat, my mother said, ‘Oh, well, it’s all very well for him going on about Liverpool, but he doesn’t live here anymore, does he! And what’s with that Donald Sinden voice?’

  She was looking to Rodger.

  Don’t be squalid, Mum. That was a beautiful work of art.’

  She pulled a face now. An indignant face: mouth gaping. She put a hand to her chest.

  ‘Squalid, moi?’

  Rodger yawned, in his horse-ish way. Again, he didn’t look at her, but pronounced, finally, as he zipped his coat,

  ‘Not art. Fart.’

  Rodger was a painter. He’d taught for years at the College of Art. Elsewhere I’d asked my mother what she thought of his work, which hung throughout his house.

  ‘Oh, well, I’m not allowed an opinion, you see, not having been to art school,’ she said. ‘My opinion’s worthless, apparently, so…but I think they’re all crap, yes. Absolute crap, so…’

  ‘Have you told him that?’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t listen to what I say!’

  —

  Edwyn and I got married this year. Against both of our instincts, I think, but undertaken on his solicitor’s advice, all part of putting his affairs in order. Everyone named in his previous will being dead, as he put it, and he wanted to take care of me. ‘Do something useful,’ he said. We went to the register office in Chelsea. A small, sunny room. An old wooden desk. There were no guests, just the two witnesses. Afterwards, outside, Edwyn had one of them take some photos on her phone. It was the hottest, driest day. Blazing sun. Nonetheless, Edwyn had brought his umbrella out with him, so in each shot he’s holding that, or leaning on it. In the last snap he’s using it to point the way: a thin black signal, down to the river for a drink.

  3

  That was in June. We didn’t go away. We were due to drive down to Devon, but Edwyn’s condition flared up, and he couldn’t face the journey. Instead he stayed in bed for three days, then went back to work, desperately unhappy, difficult to soothe.

  —

  Those were a tough few weeks. Every day dawned humid, sticky. No cooling gusts on Cromwell Gardens. The thunder only proclaimed itself. I used to sit here with the windows open, the blinds down. Just me and the flies: quick-quick-slow, in the well of the room.

  I had nowhere to be. In term time I’d be teaching on Wednesdays and Thursdays. (I didn’t miss that.) And then on Friday afternoons I used to see a psychotherapist. Miss Moore—Amy—was based in Gospel Oak, in the Ford Road ‘Serenity Centre,’ an old Deaf School, I believe, now a warren of treatment rooms; long corridors lined with crowded noticeboards and empty coat pegs. I saw her for seven months, but gave my notice a few days before the wedding, finally overwhelmed by the powerfully childish sense of drag which had started to get into me, almost as soon as I sat down with her; before I sat down, when I set off from home.

  I felt good as I left the last session, at least; delivered into my old silence, walking down the hill. I was glad to get the time back. Not incidentally, I was glad to save the money. I thought about the things I could do with it, as I waited for the tube, and then as I stood at the end of the carriage, swaying in the hot, rushing air.

  —

  Edwyn got in that night, as usual, at about half past eight. He called out, ‘Phew, bloody hell!’ as he climbed the stairs, and looked nice when he appeared on our landing, with his sunglasses dangling and his hair damp; his blue linen shirt untucked, but sticking to his round stomach and his back.

  ‘Hello!’ I said.

  ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘It’s detritus. I’m sorting things out.’

  I stood up and took the wastepaper basket into the kitchen. Edwyn still had his rucksack on. He stood with his mouth slightly open, recovering from his walk.

  ‘You’re not going to leave that there, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m just emptying this.’

  ‘Do you have to have the blinds down?’

  ‘I do. But you can open them now.’

  I stood at the sink, washing the dust from my nails. Soon enough Edwyn was behind me, looking at what I’d made for tea, giving it a creaturely sniff.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said. ‘Let’s have a cuddle now.’

  ‘Hm…Yes, I’m OK. I think I will have to avoid the Central line till the weather breaks, though.’

  ‘Oh dear. Yes, go a different way. Poor thing. Prr prr. You smell nice.’

  ‘Don’t I smell horrible and sweaty?’

  ‘No, I like it. Prr prr. Lovely Mr Pusskins.’

  ‘Lovely Mrs Pusskins! Prr prr.’

  4

  It’s seven years now, since I packed those boxes, moving out of my place in Tempus Tower and into my friend Margaret’s spare room. I was there for two years, in the end, then in Glasgow for three years, on my own again. I knew a few people in London when I moved down, but I haven’t sought them out much (nor they me, as it goes). I have made some new friends. I find I like how things work down here, seeing people once a month, if that. Once every six months. I’m very happy to spend my time with Edwyn. I love our evenings, our routines.

  Still, there is an occasional surprise. This January I got a text from Bridie, my best friend, as was. Doggedly, affrontedly, long after we were sick of each other, that’s what we called each other. She left Manchester about five years ago, to teach drama abroad, and it was only then that this stubborn alliance could dissolve. She wrote to me sometimes, about the troupe she’d joined, but less frequently as the months went by. Her updates were entertaining, as these things go. Long, dashing, offhand bursts. In her new gang, there was someone who’d been in EastEnders, she told me, a hard man run to fat, who she’d been sleeping with. Her boss, too, she started sleeping with. What did he sound like? A freewheeling type, a patched-up, pot-bellied minstrel, who wore novelty socks, drank a lot, again, and ‘Stank like shit!’ as she put it. She was in Russia the last time she wrote, doing The Wind in the Willows for schoolchildren. Her new best friend was called Olesya, she said. They’d recently got drunk with a cosmonaut, she said. I wrote half of a reply to that before deciding I couldn’t match her brio.

  I don’t know if she knew I’d moved to Scotland, but word had reached her, evidently, about my being down here. She’d been home for Christmas, she wrote, and was going to be in London before flying to Moscow. Did I want to meet? She needed to buy some boots, so I suggested the Nero near Westfield.

  I saw her first, just ahead of me in the queue. That was her little head, her little topknot, crowning a busy hive of flossy blond hair. She wore a cone-shaped, carrot-coloured coat, grey tights, blue Converse.

  ‘Bridie.’

  ‘Oh, my God! Hi!’

  ‘Hiya. Shall I get that table?’

  ‘Yes! Quick! What would you like?’

  ‘Oh. Soy cappuccino, please. Small one. Thanks.’

  I got us the window seat, then moved her bags: a backpack and a long, sausage-y holdall.

  Bridie had been working in Venice, she’d said, in her text. But as it turned out, when I asked her what that was l
ike, she hadn’t quite made it there.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t really in Venice.’

  ‘Were you not?’

  ‘Oh, no. I could have got to Venice if I’d wanted to take three buses and have no way to get back! I was living on an industrial estate! I don’t know where it was!’

  ‘Do you just get trafficked around, then?’

  ‘Yeah! You just answer adverts. So I was on this, yeah, industrial estate, living in this cupboard! No, it was bigger than a cupboard. There was me and one other teacher, so-called, from Birmingham. Our landlady had no hands, so she’d bring our trays in like this—’ Bridie mimed the action. ‘There was nothing in town. Total shithole.’

  ‘Hadn’t you settled down in Moscow?’

  ‘Pffft. Well, maybe. I mean, I am going back now. I was living with this man called Ivan.’

  ‘That’s exciting.’

  ‘I know. He is a bastard, though. He’s impregnated two women while I’ve been gone. He’s given another one herpes. I check his emails.’

  ‘Can you read Russian now?’

  ‘Mm…I can read what he writes. Anyway, he kept flying out to see me but I just sent him back. He kept screaming at me. He said there’s a special time in a man’s life when he has to have two women. I was his number one, he said. But he did need two, though. Bit depressing, really. All the women he likes are just terrible-looking, too!’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘In Russia if you say you fell in love at first sight, it translates as “I fell down.” This other one he’s been with recently is older than him, and he first went with her when he was fifteen or something. Ivan says when he met her he fell down, so he was fucking furious when I found a picture of her. Because she looks like shit. She looks like a granny. Basically he just screams abuse at me. But I am going back to live with him now. He has kept chasing me around the world to ask me, so…If this visa comes through, anyway. I’ve got to go up there before seven.’

  ‘Up where? The embassy?’

  ‘Yeah. The embassy. I’m down as a “consultant” at this university in the far north of Moscow. But that’s not real. I’ll find something. Recently I infiltrated this group of politicos. They’re all my friends now. I’m this children’s entertainer, English teacher-tutor, fuck knows what they think, except that I’m with Ivan. Their last meeting was in this place called the American Grill. They were all sat around a table the size of this room. There was this handsome young man there called Ilya. Someone had bought him a pair of boxer shorts with dollar bills all over them, so he was wearing nothing but them. Basically Russians go out and act disgusting. That’s what they do. The women are beautiful but lots of them don’t speak. The men smoke cigars. Ilya is seeing this heiress now. She’s the daughter of one of Putin’s cronies. She’s a sort of Paris Hilton figure. He’s seeing her to raise his profile…’

  Bridie took a long sip of her coffee here, and then she put down her cup and beamed at me, stretching her arms out before her, holding a shudder like a note.

  ‘You are quite teacherish now,’ I said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ she said.

  —

  We walked up to the shops, into the throat of the wind. People were moving slowly, obstructively, in both directions: only these little tiptoe scutters when a gust caught them: arms lifted, bags.

  ‘Ivan would be furious if I turned up in these,’ Bridie said, holding out one foot as we rode up the escalator. ‘I’ve got to get some serious boots!’

  —

  She changed her shoes as soon as we left Westfield, crouched in the doorway of Toni & Guy. She half-posted the huge box into a bin, tied her Converse to her backpack.

  ‘Do you live near here?’

  ‘Yes, not far. Couple of stops. Do you want to come for a cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes, please! I’m nosey!’

  Knock knock knock went her boot heels as we hurried up Cromwell Gardens. It was five o’clock. The light was going.

  —

  She was terribly polite, in the flat. She sat on the sofa with her hands on her knees; looked around wide-eyed, smiling. Edwyn was in, at the table, work laid out in front of him. There was less talk of incident and adventure now. We drank our cups of tea, then I saw Bridie out.

  ‘He’s attractive!’ she whispered, mouthed, on the stairs.

  ‘You’re living my dream!’ she said.

  Edwyn made no comment, when I went back upstairs, and I felt baffled, frightened, by what my old life had been.

  —

  The next night, coming home from work, I surfaced from the tube to an email from my agent. My cousin Patricia had found her online, she wrote. She wanted to speak to me urgently about my father. Should she pass my details on, or not? What would I like her to say? She hoped everything was all right? Out on the street my phone buzzed again. I bit off my glove to listen to the message. The same cousin had written to Edwyn. (How on earth did she know about him?)

  It was late. Cold. I dipped my head and met the wet wind, feeling queasy, harried. There seemed to be a party happening at a bar I passed: a gulping beat, pulsing lights. I got as far as the glass doors, thinking I’d just have a drink, but gave up when I saw the press of bodies inside.

  —

  Edwyn was insistent that nothing I’d heard meant that my father was dead. I knew that he was dead.

  ‘Well, call this woman and find out,’ he said.

  ‘Well, no, because if he isn’t, I don’t want to get dragged into anything. I’ll think about it in the morning.’

  —

  A few days later Edwyn got home to find me still crying, my teeth chattering. I couldn’t get warm, though the heating was on. Nor could I feel clean, though I’d been sitting in the bath every morning, dousing the coarse gooseflesh. My hands felt grubby, and my face, and my feet. I would keep shuddering, as if I were trying to adjust to the change. I loitered by the kettle. Then long sips, deep breaths. I was treating myself as if I were a nervous imbecile, really.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Edwyn said.

  I was on the settee with my blanket. He was standing in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You’re an intelligent woman. Did you imagine he was going to live for ever?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We all feel guilt, honey. Guilt is just what you feel when this happens.’

  ‘OK. Fine.’

  ‘He’s dead, you’re alive, you’re guilty, it’s desolate,’ Edwyn said. ‘Sooner or later you are going to have to get over this.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘That’s just realism, honey.’

  ‘Great. Thanks. Can you leave it now, please?’

  ‘I’m happy to leave it.’ Here he walked back into the kitchen, started banging the pans about. ‘I know I’m just an irritant to you. Everything I say and do and think…When I do speak you want me to shut up, and when I don’t you wonder why I’m not talking to you. If only I’d kept my father’s Luger. I could have just blown my fucking brains out, how’s that?’

  This is frustrating, about Edwyn. That when I’m upset he panics.

  ‘I don’t feel guilty,’ I said, or called out.

  He came back to the doorway then, and looked at me keenly: a lawyer who’d marked an inconsistency.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You don’t feel you were unfair to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, I must have misunderstood you, I’m sorry. Yesterday you said you felt guilty.’

  ‘Did I? Well, I don’t now.’

  ‘And you’re sitting there snivelling…’

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  I told him I’d been reading the list my mother made of the things my father had done to her. A strange document I’d taken years ago. I had thought it might check my tears.

  ‘Listen to this,’ I said. ‘Slapped, strangled, thumbs twisted. Hit about head while breast-feeding. Hit about head while suffering migraine. Several kicks at base of spine. Hot pan thr
own, children screaming.’

  ‘Oh, she kept a list, did she?’ Edwyn said.

  ‘Not at the time. She had to write it down for her solicitor. Not that anyone listened.’

  ‘I see. And how long were they married?’

  ‘Eight years.’

  ‘And she could remember that far back, could she? Did she keep a diary?’

  ‘Did she keep a diary? What a weird, horrible question.’

  He frowned slightly, but he was smiling too, his eyes were glittering.

  ‘It was a genuine question,’ he said. And as he went on, he spoke slowly, softly, as if I were very stupid. Stupid and volatile.

  ‘She must have a very good memory, that’s all. Some people do. Of course they do. That’s all I wanted to know. I’m interested. It’s very interesting to me. That she’d remember, quite so clearly, all of these…what might you call them?’

  ‘Assaults,’ I said.

  He tilted his head, musing on whether to allow that.

  ‘Well—incidents,’ he said.

  —

  I had another sleepless night, that night, Edwyn snuffling next to me, and outside, for a while, our little fox yelping. Incredulous little yelps.

  5

  The funeral was at Springfield Crematorium in Garston, very close to my father’s house. Most of his family live around there, or in Aigburth, or Speke. He was the oldest of fourteen, and the first to die, too. ‘It’s put the wind up everyone, you can imagine!’ my aunt Christine told me.

  I hadn’t seen any of my aunts or my uncles or my cousins in fifteen years. Not since our Saturday ‘access’ visits.

  I nodded at my brother, at the gates. I hadn’t seen him since I’d left home either. He’d grown tubby, gone grey. There were whole patches of white in his short, schoolboy haircut. Standing by the wall, he seemed uncomfortable, suspicious even, half-leering, half-wincing when people went over to say hello. The woman he was with shared his look. She held his arm and glowered.