by Ruth Thomas
Sally turned back to Rowena.
‘Sure you’re OK?’ she chirped. ‘Not pregnant, are you?’
Rowena breathed in.
‘So. You’re not going to throw up in Maths or anything, are you?’
‘No. Sally –’
‘Yeah?’
But before she could continue, the lunch bell rang.
‘What? Are you OK? What’s wrong?’
‘It’s OK. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Sure? You can talk to me, honey pie.’
‘It’s OK. I’ll tell you later.’
Through the window Sally could see a collision of schoolboys on the pavement outside, all pushing each other and swearing. Flinging little fire-crackers on to the ground, to make the girls scream as they walked past. All of them, without exception, lacking beauty, irony, sophistication.
She turned back to Rowena, leaned forward and touched her friend’s shoulder briefly, the way she might have patted the side of a horse.
*
Her love for Colin had started to expand by this time, to increase without warning. Of course he loved her! He wasn’t interested in Rowena: she felt ashamed for suspecting it.
Something in particular had triggered her confidence: the comment he had made about her eyes.
‘Your eyes are so beautiful,’ he had said, brushing her cheek with his finger. ‘So blue and so sad. And with the slightest, cutest little squint.’
‘Squint?’ Sally replied, horrified.
‘Are my eyes squint?’ she had asked Rowena a few days later during lunch break, as they stood in the queue for Vegetarian Goulash.
And she wondered why Rowena had had such an angry expression on her face.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Rowena said.
‘Do you think my eyes are squint? Colin thinks they are.’
‘Haven’t you got more important things to think about?’ Rowena snapped, declining a plate of orange stew and stalking back to their table with a side plate, a knife and a Golden Delicious apple.
Hurt, Sally chose to sit somewhere else. She sat with Christine Pringle and Susan Temple and discussed their shared love of Supertramp.
At the time she thought it was because Rowena was jealous. She really thought that was why they were falling apart.
*
She was supposed to have gone back to Rowena’s house that evening: the day of the goulash and the Golden Delicious apple. But, still angry, she told her she didn’t feel well and went home. She felt a little hollow. Bleak. She let herself in to the house and roamed around for a while, eating toast and watching children’s programmes: Jackanory. Paddington. The feeling of hollowness did not go away. And neither of her parents was in to cheer her up. Her mother was cleaning some big house in the posh part of town, her father was on late shift at the sorting office.
After she’d finished her toast she switched the television off. The house was terribly quiet. Nothing moved. And suddenly she felt a kind of compulsion, a magnetic pull towards somewhere else. Someone who understood. Colin. My soulmate. My kindred spirit.
Now she didn’t hesitate. This was the only thing to do. She hardly even stopped to check her reflection in her bedroom mirror – just briefly, to brush her hair (washed for the second time that day) and to reapply shimmery eyeliner at the corners of her eyelids. To wonder about her slightly squint eyes.
Then she flew down the garden path to the pavement, up to London Road, past the station, down a long flight of steps and on, the soles of her feet crashing against the tarmac. She ran past the library, the pet shop, the supermarket, her old primary school. She pounded through the streets towards Colin’s flat. I love you, I love you. It was cold and raining now, but she had put on her mother’s big trench coat because it looked dramatic – like a coat in a film she’d seen once. And she was wearing her hair long and loose and wavy from the plait. But her big feet in her big shoes – she could do nothing about them. Her big shoes went slap, slap through the shiny puddles. And beneath the rain her scalp tingled with apprehension. In ten minutes I will be there. She was wearing her best knickers and new white bra. She had already Strip-waxed her legs and applied Nivea moisturising cream to her arms and shoulders. Now she imagined herself running up the worn stone steps, past the sign that said ‘No Hawkers, No Salesmen’; she saw herself arriving at his door, knocking on the peeling green wood. Waiting. And then, when he opened the door, she pictured herself falling into his open arms.
‘Sally, what’s wrong?’ he would say. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh Colin, I love you. I love you …’
Slap, slap, went her shoes through the broken-coloured puddles.
‘Where’s the fire, love?’ asked an old man she nearly flattened as she ran past.
‘Sorry,’ she shouted back over her shoulder, and continued to run, past the neon restaurant lights, past closed shops, past the new roundabout, past people clutching dreary plastic bags at East Grinstead’s bus stops. They stared as she ran on, towards the dim orange lights of distant London. It was five-thirty, dark and cold, and she felt that she was at the beginning of something. Colin’s flat was almost within her sights now: the small, white building above the kebab shop, the dark, depressing stairway, the smell of tomcats. Here was the municipal bin and the lamppost and the lone, brave little silver-birch tree. She had run so fast that she was here even earlier than her racing brain had calculated. The clock on the hotel said five-forty, and she knew it was five minutes fast.
And now she was doing what she’d imagined. She was looking at the peeling paint and the sign that said ‘Beware, you are entering the house of a genius.’ She was looking at the metal door handle, knocking on the door; hearing him walk towards it.
And here he was, opening it.
‘Wh–’ he said.
This was the point at which the imagined and the real collided, and she was not prepared for it. She was actually a little unsure what to do next. She had not envisaged Colin with that expression on his face. She had not captured the smell of Heinz Winter Vegetable soup emanating from the kitchen; or pictured the damp grey underwear flopped over the radiators. In her imaginings, the door to the bathroom had not been open, with its view of an economy-sized pack of salmon-pink toilet rolls and the broken-seated toilet. Undeterred, she strode straight down the hallway, past the broken-legged table and into his room. Her eyes were wide, all-seeing. She felt wild, almost insane, rainwater dripping off her mother’s trench coat. Tonight she was going to proclaim her love; she was ready emotionally, spiritually, physically –
‘What are you wearing that for? What the hell’s the matter?’ Colin was asking in a not very affectionate voice. She noticed how white his face was.
‘Oh Colin,’ she began, and as she spoke she glanced down at the carpet, because some curious object at her feet had suddenly caught her attention. For a second she couldn’t quite understand its significance – why the sight of it should appall her so much. Colin’s flat was such an incongruous setting for it, and it looked so ridiculous and out of place that she almost laughed. It was lying on the floor at the foot of his bed: Rowena’s stripy orange blouson (very easy / très facile).
Know what is meant by the International Textile Care Labelling Code, and how you would care for the items you have made. Understand the importance of labels.
The Guide Badge Book, 1998
Petit Point
I’m an airport regular. I fly to Paris at least four times a year, and have become the sort of woman who pulls her wheeled luggage through town, irritating the local residents. I own ‘crushable’ dresses and scarves that double as sarongs or ‘evening cover-ups’. I own noise-reducing headphones, a travel iron, magnetic chess, a palm-pilot on which I sometimes play Solitaire.
Together, Kenneth and I have been to over half the countries in Europe, as well as parts of Africa, South America and Iceland (a trip I made, a very cold trip with Joe, aged eight, and someone called Craig Pinski. We saw whales, the
Northern Lights, a sulphurous, mud-flinging geyser around which delicate butterflies congregated. That was the holiday when Craig Pinski told me he couldn’t see me any more because he would never be able to commit; it was a problem he had; he had forgotten to tell me about his commitment problem.)
*
After breakfast (muesli served from a silver bowl; dates; thick yogurt; nice coffee), I phone Joe. He sounds slightly hungover. His voice is low and flat. Maybe he was up all night after we left, drinking whisky.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ he replies, defensively.
He suggests a visit to the Botanic Gardens, which is a good place to go, I suppose, if you have a headache. Airy. Optimistic. I would have done this with my parents, I think, as I put the phone down; I would have shown them the ponds and banana plants and the Chinese lanterns. I would have taken them to admire the ferns and the winter jasmine.
I consult our Guide to Edinburgh. Then Kenneth and I put on our coats, pick up our bags and leave the hotel. We get on a 23 bus, career fast down The Mound, across Princes Street, up a short hill and down a long one, past art galleries, corner shops, antique shops, round a bend and – quick – get off the bus. Joe is already waiting for us at the gates: there he is, tall and quiet, my son, my son, and not wearing a warm enough coat. It is just gone eleven on Thursday 27 November. He is not even going to be with us for Christmas. I hurry towards him, to give him a hug and kiss his cheek.
The sky above is flat white. We peer into the fine drizzle.
‘This is known as a haar,’ Joe says.
‘A-hah,’ says Kenneth.
‘So,’ says Joe, and we all turn and troop silently through the silver gates and into the gardens. Signs point us to the Rockery, Café, West Gate, Demonstration Garden, Glasshouses. Everything today seems glassy, silvery, intangible. Even the flowers. The flower beds seem to be filled mainly with young mothers extricating their children from beneath low-spreading trees. On the lawns toddlers pick up damp leaves and pine cones and chase the pigeons. Squirrels canter fatly past.
‘It’s a nice place, the Botanics,’ Joe says. ‘A nice place to come and think.’
I expect he used to come here with his girlfriend, on summer’s evenings, hand in hand.
‘Where shall we go then? The Rockery?’
‘How about the glasshouses? It’s nice and warm in there.’
And we wander on, past red-leaved trees, purple autumn crocuses, a pond with swans, until we come to a door marked ‘Glasshouse Experience’. Kenneth pulls open the door and we step inside, into the jungly warmth of the tropics. It is a kind embrace.
‘It’s fantastic on a day like this,’ Joe says.
It reminds me of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The scent of leaves and ferns.
I pull off my scarf and gloves.
*
England was oddly hard to leave. It was a wrench, twenty-two years ago, to give up its parks and pavements, its daily walks. No more school! No more college with its vending machines, its linoleum floors, its student bands! No more Tetley’s tea-bags! No more home!
We were impoverished in Paris for a while, me and Joe, but it was not like La Bohème. It was not moving. To begin with, my grant cheque did not come through. My French bank account had yet to disentangle itself from red tape. I broke out in stress-related eczema during our first week there, and had to spend most of our minuscule funds on a French version of Betnovate cream. Then Joe contracted hand, foot and mouth disease – something I had previously thought only occurred in livestock. He was ill for a week with a fever and a different type of rash. He blamed me for this unsatisfactory turn of events. He didn’t want to be covered in rashes in France. He didn’t want to visit the Orangerie or the Jardin des Plantes: he wanted to take his bike to the park in Maida Vale, the one that always smelled of wallflowers in the spring.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ I used to say, stroking his hair and trying to resist the urge to scratch my own rashes, ‘I’m sorry. But we can’t go back just yet. Not just yet. Let’s give it a bit more time.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’ve only just got here.’
‘But why can’t we go back?’
‘Because … we’ve got to give it more time. You have to, sometimes.’
I had nothing comforting or reasonable to say. No justification for my words or actions. What on earth were we doing here? At the age of twenty-two I felt the weight of being a selfish mother.
We spent the first two weeks before the start of my course wandering the streets. Moving from A to B because there was nothing else to do. One day we got caught up in a carnival in the eleventh arrondissement, squashed against people’s backs and legs. All around us was the sound of drums and whistles, the smell of sweat and marijuana. People looked down at Joe and put out their hands to him. I hung on to him so tightly that he complained I was squashing his fingers.
By the end of our first week I concluded I had made a dreadful mistake, removing my son from England for this – a poor, unstructured life in a foreign country. We stopped being able to afford Métro tickets and spent our time wandering around a local market, confronting stalls full of pigs’ trotters and skinned rabbits (‘Look, Mummy – meat with eyes!’). We walked to the Pompidou Centre and Les Halles, our footsteps echoing around the underpopulated shopping-malls. We sat and ate an approximation of English sandwiches in formal, unaccommodating parks. Joe sat seriously by my side and watched the huge numbers of dogs and their owners that Parisian parks seemed to contain. ‘What is the French for dog?’ he asked, wrapping his chewy crusts into small, clingfilmed bundles. He seemed very small and pale. What if he hates school in France? What if he detests it here? I used to buy very cheap oranges and apricots and biscuits and bags of bread for him in the grubby and non-touristique market. Ramshackle pigeons barged against our feet. Stall-holders tried to sell me glass bangles and plastic necklaces, telling me how pretty they were, and how cheap.
At the beginning of our second week my grant cheque came through. We went to the laverie a couple of blocks away and drycleaned our fusty, rented duvets. With the change, I bought Joe a small toy lion which he christened Gary.
‘That’s a nice name for a lion,’ I chirped brightly, wondering if his choice of an exceptionally British name said something about our being in France.
‘Bonjour, Gary,’ Joe said to the lion.
Joe seemed fine in fact, after a very short time. He did not resent me. And the people we met on the streets and on the dark oak staircase of our apartment block began to seem kinder. ‘Ça va, mon petit? Ça va, le p’tit m’sieur?’
He had never liked English primary school anyway.
*
I missed my parents. I was homesick for their house. The polished piano, the clean carpets, the magazine rack, the big sliding door into the garden.
In the evenings, after Joe had fallen asleep on his fold-out bed, I would sit in our tiny kitchen and look through the window at the empty sky (our apartment faced the wrong way for a view of the Eiffel Tower). In the courtyard below, people hung out their washing or shouted or kicked footballs around. It sounded almost like home. But I didn’t know anyone. I would sometimes write a letter to my cousin in Wolverhampton or Jane King (a girl I’d met at a mother-and-toddler group) or Susan Temple (a girl I had known at school) or listen to the World Service on the radio. I thought about Sally Tuttle, my old best friend. I mourned my parents. Sometimes loneliness seemed almost like a physical presence, sitting in front of me.
I pulled myself together after a while.
My course began.
I found a place for Joe at a local school.
I bought:
a stove-top percolator
some cushions
some picture books
some pot plants
I met a guitarist called Julien at a bookstall on the Left Bank. I bought:
a radio-cassette-player
some wine glasses
a repr
oduction of a painting by Manet
a potato peeler
The store cupboard became populated with new tastes: pots of tarragon and packets of madeleines and dried mushrooms and couscous. Some evenings I would look across at Joe, asleep on his fold-out bed and think: This is a way to exist; this is one of the ways.
*
‘Look at that red flower,’ Kenneth says as we are walking through the Temperate Room. He stops to gaze at it. ‘Just like a pom-pom,’ he says.
I am turning to smile back at him, to say ‘Isn’t it calm in here? Isn’t it lovely and peaceful?’, when suddenly it is not: there is suddenly an extremely loud noise – so loud that I am aware of a tiny, primitive twitching of the bones in my ears.
For some reason I feel instantly, oddly, upset. The noise – a young, human wail – is so out of keeping with the tranquillity.
‘That’s quite a pair of lungs,’ Kenneth says, ‘for a baby.’
‘Babies have the biggest lungs,’ I reply.
The sound is coming from the room next door.
The three of us do our best to ignore it. Quietly we walk past the pom-pom flowers, the tree-trunks covered in bright green moss, the creepers, the purple orchids – and over a bridge beneath which huge Coi carp flail and splash. But the screaming continues. We stop on the bridge and look down at the carp. The largest – a white, cantankerous-looking one with orange, cow-like splotches – must be nearly two foot long. We lean over the railings, watching the fish swim beneath us, before heading for the Aquatic Room walkway.