First Love

by Gwendoline Riley

  I took our drinks back to the booth, sat down. Now, after a silence, a sip, he asked me the question he always used to ask.

  ‘So have you, um, dated anyone since we last…saw each other?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘It’s not for me, you know.’

  ‘Ya, you always said that.’

  ‘I did. Because it’s true.’

  He looked at his drink, and then at the bar, impatiently. But I would have been devalued whatever I’d said. That’s what I felt then. That he had a picture of me that he needed to deface. This was how he’d always proceeded, after all: reaching my periphery, meanly maundering there. (Yes, this was when it started, that night. When we both started to dig in.)

  Being drunk, I decided to elaborate on what I had done in the last five years. Soon Michael had his head pressed against the wall, turning away from me, and he was chewing his thumb.

  ‘That wasn’t exactly the question, but OK.’

  ‘What do you think happens?’

  ‘And you couldn’t wait to tell me, could you?’

  He looked like a nasty little goblin then. But he was right. I had wanted to tell him. I’d always had to affect such cool around his girlfriends, fiancées, when he’d brought them up, artlessly, full of carefree, saccharine sympathy for a hurt which I never expressed. He felt no such compunction, clearly. I have thought, sometimes, that there should be more to getting along with people than negotiating with this jumpy primordial goo. But no—there often isn’t. I back-pedalled a little.

  ‘I just can’t see myself in a couple,’ I said. ‘Watching box sets all night long. I can’t put the hours in.’

  I was being fatuous, but that was fine, as it turned out—he didn’t notice, or ignored that, instead he reached across the table. Dreadful, what was about to happen. The heavy fall of the same old machinery.

  ‘Um…Could you not see yourself, watching television—with me?’ he said.

  I looked down at his hand. I felt panic. So nor could I help what I did next, the table suddenly seeming littered with mousetraps. I drew my hand back and frowned at him. I stood and went to the bar. When I came back there was another silence. Another long look. His eyes had a different cast then, but a familiar one.

  ‘I can’t think of you…’ he was saying, ‘I don’t think I can think of you…outside of the context of—loving you?’

  This too had the air of something rehearsed. Rehearsed but deployed now accidentally, just—falling off the shelf.

  Still, at midnight, a taxi. A slow ride through bouncing rain, the yellow light swimming before us. Then an off-licence near King’s Cross, whose hot-pink sign said OOZE.

  In his room in the Hotel Apollo I hung up my coat, sat down on the tightly made bed. I swigged from my bottle. Michael didn’t want any, he’d decided, which drew another graceless frown from me. And then, while he was fiddling with the TV, asking me if I wanted to listen to some music on his phone, his ‘fancy-ass new phone?’ he said, I took off my clothes, pushed off my tights. I was so drunk. I sat there in my underwear and pointed out (‘Hey look!’) how the fleur-de-lys pattern on the carpet matched that on my bra and knickers.

  —

  The streets looked dingy in the morning. The puddled pavements, dank guesthouses. Michael was pulling his little suitcase behind him. The wheels clicked along.

  At the station, while he looked at the tube map, I shamefully said,

  ‘When are you coming back?’

  Then I said I could come to the airport with him, if he wanted?

  ‘Oh. No,’ he said, smiling blandly.

  This was at King’s Cross at nine a.m. Streams of people: macs, tote bags. After Michael had gone, I hunched my shoulders to push through them to the street.

  —

  On the train home I was jittery and it wouldn’t abate. Sweating, head throbbing, I was also weathering another racket: that conviction I mentioned, now gorily undead, and appallingly immune to revelation. This ghastly other self kept breaking the surface of my real, frightened self, insisting scornfully that things would be fine, in fact, between Michael and me. Nothing was instant. Last night had been a step forward, in fact…

  Possessed by the fact that I had to, I emailed him very early the next morning. I started by saying I was sorry that I hadn’t been able to keep hold of his hand over the table. I’d felt frightened, I said, because I was in love with him, as he knew. My tone, as I recall it, reckoned itself very calm and straightforward here: as if we were just a few administrative clear-ups away from this happy new region we could attain together, after all these years of sad botching. It took him a week to write back, but long before that I realized what I’d done, and from then on I was in pain.

  He began, ‘Gosh, this is a lot to digest.’ Then there were a lot of emphasizing capitals. I believe he wrote, ‘Again, I WAS curious.’ He definitely wrote, ‘And YOU were clearly receptive to that also.’ But the feelings I talked about weren’t there for him, he said, and if I couldn’t ‘handle that,’ ‘maybe it WAS a bad idea’ for him to have ‘reached out.’

  Have I ever been as frightened as when I read that? Frightened of myself, I mean. Ashamed of how I worked. In my panic I started to reply. A letter amounting to, Please don’t cut me out. I didn’t send it. I felt afraid of my words, then, of that machine.

  I left Manchester soon afterwards. I moved out while Margaret was away; didn’t stay to say goodbye as we’d planned. I just dropped the key in her letterbox and went. Befitting what I was.

  2

  Glasgow, I barely knew. I’d stayed overnight before; walked through the drizzling dark from the station to the bookshop, from the bookshop to the hotel. Now, trying to find a flat, I spent four nights in a Travelodge, rode the subway, talked to letting agents. Neighbourhoods, areas began to mean something, up and down Great Western Road. I ate my lunch back in my room every day, scrolling through Gumtree, calling numbers I’d seen in shop windows. At night I walked the wide streets quickly, arms folded. My way into life was the same.

  I took a lease on the first place I liked, which was in Partick, in a tenement opposite the infirmary. From my small, square hallway, doors opened to the bedroom at the back and the living room at the front. The kitchen was a nook, behind a folding vinyl door, and the bathroom was a narrow cut; you had to squeeze into the shower, elbows tucked: a saint in its niche. The place had the feel of an old B&B, I thought, or rooming houses I’d read about: the knotty carpet, cane furniture; the souvenir coasters in the cutlery drawer.

  My landlords were my neighbours: Mark and Mary Bowles, a brother and sister in their fifties. They were also custodians of a huge cat, Kit-Kat, whose habit it was, most afternoons, to slip out of their living room and make her way to my place. Three floors up, she’d step along the rust-coloured stones, rounding the corner to my bathroom, whose window she could further open with a paw-push, a headbutt, before decanting herself onto the cistern, then onto the toilet seat.

  I rarely saw Mary, but Mark was always around: sweeping the stairs every morning, first with a broom, then getting into the corners with a small plastic brush. The walls were tiled to waist height out there, with bottle-green bricks. He’d sponge them down, carefully carrying his steaming bowl of suds between the landings. After a blowy night, I’d see him retrieving any bin lids that had been scattered around the courtyard. With a spool of hairy twine and a pair of kitchen scissors, he’d retie each one to its parent. When he wasn’t working, I might pass him on the house’s front step, where it was his pleasure to stand and smoke, catching the ash in a little anchovy jar. Whatever the weather, he wore a tight, stripy polo-shirt, and blue jeans, and fleece-lined Crocs.

  I just had my clothes and my laptop. In the fridge were the vegetables that I cooked in the evening; in the cupboard, a jar of tahini and a bag of sunflower seeds, for protein. My cleanser and my toothpaste and toothbrush were wedged behind the taps of the tiny bathroom sink.

  If I
walked into town, it was to Waterstone’s, or to Holland & Barrett, for teabags. Back at home I lay on the bed and read, while outside the wind roamed. Seagulls fell. Sleep swept me up, that first summer. Sleep and lazing, with Kit-Kat. Later, when I got a job up there, in a fancy soap shop, I found it difficult, at first, to talk to people.

  In fact, any urge for contact fell away, really, for a while. I was my own. Quiet.

  Only very rarely would restlessness have me leave the flat at night, and usually the impulse could be quitted by buying a bottle in the Costcutter and heading home again. The current of night life on Dumbarton Road was only old men walking back from the pub: bow-legged, in glossy blazers, flapping jeans. Lying on my bed, feeling my face and mind warmed over, it wasn’t the stab of loneliness that ebbed away, but the idea that there was any cure for it out there. I read. I worked on a novel. And then weeks might go by before I’d find myself trotting down the stairs again. To hang on bars. To feel a rising panic, no matter how I held my head up.

  Stevie Gillies, at work, was one friend I made. He was funny. An unillusioned person. I used to sit with him while he wrote emails to his son, in the internet café under his flat; The Lite Byte, a seedy place, selling coffee and powdered soup, its walls covered in peach bathroom tiles. I’d go with Stevie in his van some nights, too, when he was doing his other job, a delivery job.

  One morning, as we were leaving for our Saturday shift, I found a postcard on my doormat. One of those kitsch postcards: repurposed photographs. This one featured an old lady from the seventies, with a cauliflower perm and garish makeup. She was wearing a cleaner’s tabard and wielding a duster, camply. ‘Get in Touch or I’m Coming to Visit!’ said the caption, and on the back my mother had written: Only joking!!! Mum. I passed it to Stevie, while I locked the door, and he read it and handed it back. I was going to reply, send an email maybe, but before we’d even got to the shop that day, she texted me:

  CUT ALL MY HAIR OFF DO YOU WANT BRUSH AND BOBBLES ETC. MUM

  At lunchtime I phoned her, from a quiet bit of the arcade.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Nothing’s going on, Neve.’

  ‘You’ve had a haircut?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I have. I’ve cut it all off. But try telling Rodger that! I was sitting there having tea with him and I said, Er, notice anything different, hey? Ahem, ahem. No. Nothing. “What are you talking about?” But then he never looked at me before, did he, so why should he notice now, I suppose? So yes, I thought, I’ve got this hairbrush now that I don’t need and these bobbles, so…’

  ‘I have got my own hairbrush, thanks.’

  ‘OK, well. I’ll keep them, then, anyway. I won’t throw them out.’

  ‘Everything OK otherwise?’

  ‘Well. No, Neve, not really.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Well, I did…The night after that business with the haircut, we were having tea, and I did say then, because I’ve been thinking, and it is all a bit much lately, so I did say, to Rodger, Well, Neve’s moved and it’s so exciting, a new city, and it’s made me think I’d like to move now, try somewhere new, so yes, I did say then that I was thinking I might move out.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘Oh, he just went mad. Absolutely mad. But—I was prepared, so…You know I’ve been making this list, well, you don’t know, but I have, of things he does that I don’t like, or, you know, not very nice things, and it ran to three pages in the end! So I did show him that.’

  ‘You showed him?’

  ‘Yes. And oh, he went mad. He just said—Out. Get out. So I went straight upstairs then and started looking at flats on Rightmove. But he has lifted that sentence now, so…I can go in my own time. But yes, I am going now.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yes. Well. I think it’s just…I’d had enough, really!’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. All my activities are in Liverpool, but then he says that’s over now. None of his friends would want to stay my friend, apparently, so I’m to be ostracized, you see, he says, my name’s going to be mud, apparently, so…Persona non grata.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Well, that’s what he says. Anyway, I’d like to move to Manchester, I think.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I love Manchester, Neve.’

  ‘OK. You’ve got a plan, then, you can start looking for somewhere.’

  ‘I’m already looking. I’ve looked at lots of places.’

  ‘Great. Well, I’m out and about, so I should probably go. Are you coming to visit or was that an idle threat?’

  ‘Well, I thought I could. I thought, I love Glasgow so much, and I am retired now so why not take advantage, having a daughter who lives there…’

  ‘Why not take advantage.’ Words to live by. I turned off my phone and thought about crossing the precinct to slot it down the grid outside Zara, or maybe dismantling it, dropping the pieces in the three different bins I could see: a discreet disposal, before I went back to the shop.

  —

  As it turned out, it was a while before I heard from my mother again. She went quiet. Went dark. I got a parcel at Christmas. When she did start calling, in spring, I didn’t pick up at first. I’m not often in the frame for her attentions (I imagine my brother bears the brunt) but with Rodger potentially off the scene back then, I felt I had to be careful.

  She left a message in the end. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’ve finally got a gap in my schedule, so…’

  3

  Blobs of rain shivered on the Plexiglas. I looked down at Mark about his labours, pegging washing on a carousel, and Kit-Kat on the wall, and a seagull despoiling a binbag. That courtyard was like a well, or a sea cave; slathered in wet green moss. My mother was due. She was getting a taxi from the station.

  She arrived with her usual cargo. Two William Morris tote bags, which I took off her on the stairs, leaving her with her plump old handbag, and her yellow shoulderbag, in plastic made to look like wicker. Across her body was a turquoise sports bag, and further to these panniers, she held a Boots plastic bag in her right hand, and a paper bag in her left: her half-eaten sandwich from the train. She was staying for two nights. I stood by the door as she stepped into the flat, as she bared her teeth and crept forward. This was my home, and I was letting her into it. I’d never done that before. I haven’t since. It gave me a strange feeling. Revulsion, I suppose you’d have to call it.

  I put her luggage in the bedroom, and then admired her coat, which was purple, bell-shaped, with large white buttons.

  ‘Oh, do you like it? It’s “mod,” isn’t it? Do you know, I bought it online because it was just so reduced, but it wasn’t until it came that I saw it said “Do not get wet” on the label, so I haven’t been able to wear it all winter! This is the first time I’ve dared put it on! Of course it’s too warm now! I don’t know!’

  Purple is my mother’s ‘favourite colour’ and that day her nails were painted magenta and her lipstick was a shimmering mauve. Under her coat she wore a purple jumper and brown checked ski pants. The shoes were an old pair of mine. I used to wear them to school.

  ‘Have they not fallen apart?’

  ‘Oh, no. No. And they’re back in now!’

  That first evening we walked up to Byres Road, to a Greek restaurant. My mother took it all in excitedly: the clipped-on paper tablecloths and the blue-and-white striped placemats, the mock vine creeping over the bar. The wall behind her was painted like a vase: a train of callipygian swains, with blunt beards and beetle brows. She twisted around to look up at them.

  ‘Oh dear!’ she said.

  ‘Is this a regular haunt, then?’ she said, smoothing out her napkin.

  ‘No. I’ve never been here. I’ve just been past. I don’t eat out, I’m poor.’

  ‘Oh. Well. Looks nice, anyway, doesn’t it?’

  She picked up the menu.

  ‘Lots of things
you can eat,’ she said. ‘Houmous.’

  ‘Yep.’

  She’d stuck with her new hairstyle. It was quite severe: a crop, with a saw-tooth fringe. She kept touching the back of her neck, kept trying to tuck two little darts of hair behind her ears.

  ‘I don’t know what these are,’ she said. ‘They don’t listen, do they, when you go in.’

  When we both knew what we wanted, she tried to catch a waiter’s eye. She didn’t have much luck, but kept grinning, lifting her chin. I said,

  ‘So you’re single now.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I am. Single lady. Well, separated.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Well. Thank you!’

  ‘How long were you with him, in the end? Was it ten years?’

  ‘Yes. Now. Neve. Shall we just catch him, while he’s in the vicinity?’

  She lifted her hand up, showed her teeth. A tall waiter came and crouched by the table. He spoke to her indulgently, as if she were much older than she was, and she smiled back at him happily, nervously, as we both gave our orders.

  ‘Was it ten years?’ I said, as he left.

  ‘Well, yes, it is ten years now, just about…Yes, I was fifty-two when I married him, so…Yes, I remember thinking, Well, that’s that, then, winding down. I don’t know. Fifty-two seems young now, now that I’m sixty-two!’

  ‘He just turned nasty, did he?’

  ‘Yes, he just…Yes, he did turn. I thought, Do I want to spend my life with this miserable old man, really? He never wanted to do anything or go anywhere.’

  ‘You two were always going out.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but I had to organize that, you see. That was all down to me. I had to sort of corral him into that. And then when he was going out with his mates, I wasn’t invited. He’d say, I’m going for a drink, and I’d say, Ahem, am I not invited, then? And, no, I wasn’t.’