Girls' Night In

by Jessica Adams

  ‘Perfect timing!’ said the girl. ‘I’m Annabel! Are you ready? I think it’s going to be great fun, don’t you? Goodness! You look fabulous! Shall we go in?’ Cocà smiled. ‘The – er – photographer’s setting up lights in the main hall. And I think the headmaster’s hanging around in there too.’ She giggled. ‘He’s very excited. Says he remembers you well. Apparently you were quite a naughty girl!’

  Cocà wasn’t listening. She looked across to the familiar building and her mouth, already dry from last night’s wine, felt suddenly as if glue had set inside it.

  ‘… I thought,’ said Annabel ‘that we could start with a tour of your old form room … Is that all right?’

  Cocà nodded mutely. She needed to set the charm offensive into motion, but as she stepped through the door that led into the main corridor she reeled. It was the smell, of course. It reminded her so much of the past – which was only Danny. She moaned, a long, low, private moan – the first sound she had made.

  ‘Are you OK… Colo? Are you OK?’

  Cocà leant against the old drinks machine to steady herself. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s …’ she hesitated. Confession time. The moment she had been waiting for. He would read it. He would forgive her. He would – They would – ‘It’s a bloke I knew here. A bloke I disappointed … badly –’

  Annabel said, ‘Oh. While we’re at it. Could you be sweet and sign this–’ Cocà took the paper that was held out to her – ‘Sorry about that. It’s such a bore, isn’t it? Wretched paperwork. Drives me insane! – Just there… Super! Thank you! Right. Let’s get this show on the road!’

  Annabel’s mobile rang. She moved away and when she returned she looked quite flushed. She said, ‘D’you know what, Colon? I think we’re going to give the old form room a miss! I’ve been told there’s a devastatingly attractive man in the assembly hall demanding to talk to you!’

  ‘Already … Christ … I told him – who’s he talking to in there? You mustn’t believe a word he says! And I said–’ Cocà stopped. There, distinctly, from the old assembly hall, growing steadily louder as it echoed down the corridor towards her – she could hear music.

  Oh! Sasha dooo

  Sasha doo Sasha daa …

  Annabel grinned. ‘Do you want to lead the way?’

  Cocà mumbled something unintelligible, walked a couple of jerky steps towards the hall and then suddenly broke into a run.

  ‘I think,’ said Annabel, as she puffed to keep up with her, ‘this is the moment when I come sort of semi-clean. Because as you are about to realize, I am not actually from the Saturday Express magazine but from a fab new TV show called–’

  As Cocà burst through the double doors into the darkened hall the old school stage exploded into light – and it was just as it had been in July … Sasha doo Sasha daa… the long loose limbs, the broad shoulders (broader now) the long dark curly hair … A familiar figure stood before her, a figure which had dominated her dreams for fifteen years, as irresistible as ever. With a smile he beckoned her to join him and she crossed the hall towards him like an automaton. She was oblivious to everything, the camera man, the sound man, the red-suited television presenter who’d called herself Annabel, the headmaster. All she saw was Danny.

  The ja-ja jolting in your heart …

  He was singing for her again. Just for her. For Melanie. She climbed up on to the stage and stood before him, waiting.

  Has me a gaga from my start – Sasha!

  Oh! Sasha daa-doo-daa.

  The cameraman was lodged between them as the song came to its end. There was a moment’s silence while the old lovers gazed at one another. His eyes were shining. He looked wonderful; lean and handsome and wildly happy. ‘Hello, Cocà,’ he muttered. ‘Remember me?’ He stretched across to stroke her cheek. ‘I’ve been thinking about this moment for fifteen years.’

  ‘Danny!’ She stumbled clumsily round the camera into Danny’s arms.

  Suddenly, inexplicably, the auditorium burst into life. Light flooded the hall and one thousand members of a studio audience broke into raucous laughter.

  Danny quickly disentangled himself, as instructed during the rehearsal, so that Annabel could step into the space between them. ‘Welcome!’ said Annabel. ‘Everyone give Danny a big cheer! Didn’t he do well?’

  Cocà had been summoned to the school, she explained, to take part in an amazing, new peak-time television show in which – ‘How can I put this?’ she said. ‘Old friends are given the opportunity to right old wrongs. To sort of start again. This,’ she said, ‘is really about young love… and –’ she looked at the audience expectantly –

  ‘REVENGE!!!!’ they screamed.

  ‘That’s right!’

  Annabel grinned. ‘Danny’s a computer operator from Swindon and he’s mad about music, aren’t you, Danny? He also happens to be one of Britain’s Angriest Fellas! So tell us what happened, Danny!’

  ‘Well, basically, Annabel,’ said Danny …

  Seven days after the show was broadcast Cocà di Cocà was hiding out in her South Kensington council flat, pretending to listen to Charlie as he wittered over the telephone about Phase B of her re-relaunch. ‘We need to have a complete rethink about your image,’ he was saying. Beside her the radio played a familiar old tune:

  Oh! Sasha dooo,

  Danny sang

  Sasha doo Sasha daa

  The ja-ja jolting in your heart

  Has me a gaga –

  She switched it off.

  Helen Simpson

  Helen Simpson is the author of Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), Dear George (1995), Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), Constitutional (2005) and In-Flight Entertainment (2010). A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories was published in 2012. Her sixth collection of short stories, Cockfosters, comes out later this year. In 1991 she was chosen as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1993 she was chosen as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists. She has also received the Hawthornden Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award. She lives in London.

  Hurrah for the Hols

  Helen Simpson

  These were the dogdays all right, these last flyblown days of August. Her maternal goodwill was worn threadbare. This was the nadir of Dorrie’s year, all this holiday flesh needing to be tended and shameless bad temper on display.

  She was sitting at a table in the unshaded barbecue area by the pool over a cup of terrible coffee. And yet it was supposed to be the annual high-water mark, their summer fortnight, particularly this year when they had rejected camping or self-catering in favour of splashing out on a room in this value-for-money family hotel.

  ‘You really are a stupid little boy. You’re really pushing your luck,’ said the man at the next table to one of the three children sitting with him. ‘I want to see that burger finished now. Can’t you for once in your whole life …’

  His voice was quiet and venomous. What was he doing here alone with his children? It must be the same as Max was doing with their three now, playing crazy golf to give her some time to herself. This man’s wife was probably just round the corner over just such another cup of coffee. Was she too feeling panic at not making good use of that precious commodity, solitude?

  ‘If you don’t do what I say right now there’ll be no ice cream. No swimming. No puppet show. I mean it.’

  The small boy beside him started to cry into his burger, wailing and complaining that his teeth hurt.

  ‘And don’t think you’re going to get round me like that,’ snarled the man. ‘I’m not your mother, remember!’

  All over the place, if you listened, you could hear the steady exasperated undertone of the unglamorously leisure-clad parents teasing their tempestuous, ego-maniacal little people into, for example, eating that sandwich up ‘or I tell you what, and you’re being very silly, but you won’t be going to the Treasure Island club tonight and I mean it.’ It stuck in her throat, the bread of
the weeping child. The parents said nothing to each other, except the names of sandwich fillings. She and Max were the same, they couldn’t talk over, under or round the children and so it turned them sour and obdurate in each other’s company. They held each other at night in bed but again could say or do nothing for fear of their children beside them, sleeping like larks, like clean-limbed breathing fruit.

  She sipped and grimaced and watched the snail’s progress of the combine harvester on the adjacent cliff. There was a splash as someone jumped into the pool, and a flapping over wasps and a dragging round of high chairs to plastic tables, and howls, hoots, groaning and broken-hearted sobbing, the steady cacophany which underscores family life en masse. At least sitting here alone she had been noticing the individual elements of the composition, she realized with surprise and some pleasure. When she was with her brood she noticed nothing of the outside world, they drank up all her powers of observation.

  Here they came now, off the crazy golf course, tear-stained, drooping, scowling. Here comes the big bore, and here come the three little bores. Stifle your yawns. Smile. On holiday Max became a confederate saying things like, ‘They never stop’ and ‘That child is a cannibal’. Their constant crystalline quacking, demanding a response, returning indefatigable and gnat-like, drove him mad. There must be something better than this squabbly nuclear family unit, she thought, these awful hobbling five- and six-legged races all around her.

  She could see they were fighting. She saw Martin hit Robin, and Robin clout him back. It was like being on holiday with Punch and Judy – lots of biffing and shrieking and fights over sausages. What a lumpen moping tearful spiritless mummy she had become, packing and unpacking for everybody endlessly, sighing. Better sigh, though, than do as she’d done earlier that day, on the beach when, exasperated by their demands, on and on, all afternoon, she’d stood up and held out her hands to them.

  ‘Here, have some fingers,’ she’d snarled, pretending to snap them off one by one. ‘Have a leg. Have an ear. Nice?’ And they had laughed uproariously, jumping on her and pinning her to the rug, sawing at her limbs, tugging her ears, uprooting her fingers and toes. Such a figure she cut on the beach these days, slumped round-shouldered in the middle of the family encampment of towels, impatience on a monument growling at the sea. Or was it Mother Courage of the sand dunes, the slack-muscled white body hidden under various cover-ups, headgear, dark glasses, crouched amidst the contents of her cart, the buckets, wasp spray, suncream, foreign legion hats with neck-protective flaps, plastic football, beach cricket kit, gaggle of plastic jelly sandals, spare dry swimsuits, emergency pants. If she lumbered off for a paddle all hell broke loose.

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’ she said weakly as they reached her table.

  Martin was shrieking about some injustice, his father’s face was black as thunder. Robin sprinted to her lap, then Maxine and Martin jumped on her jealously, staking their claim like setders in some virgin colony.

  ‘She’s not your long-lost uncle, your mother,’ said Max, unable to get near her. ‘You only saw her half an hour ago.’

  Things got worse before they got better. There was a terrible scene later on. It was in the large room by the bar, the Family Room, where at six o’clock a holiday student surf fanatic led all the young children in a song and dance session while their parents sagged against the walls and watched.

  And a little bit of this

  And a little bit of that

  And shake your bum

  Just like your mum

  sang the children, roaring with laughter as they mimed the actions. After this, glassy lollipops were handed out, and then the surfer started to organize a conga. The children lined up, each holding the waist of the one in front, many of them with the lollipops still in their mouths, sticks stuck outwards.

  ‘That’s dangerous,’ mumured Dorrie. ‘If they fell …’ And she and other mothers discreetly coaxed the sweets from the mouths of their nearest offspring with earnest promises that these would be returned immediately the dance had finished. Then she glanced across the room and saw Martin in the line, lollipop stick clamped between his teeth. Max just beyond him, sipping from his first bottle of beer, caught her eye; she, without thinking as hard as she might have done, indicated to him the lollipop peril, miming and pointing.

  The conga had started, the music was blasting out, and yet when Max wrenched the stick from between Martin’s clenched teeth the boy’s screams were louder even than the very loudly amplified Birdy Song. Martin broke out of the line and fought his father for the lollipop. Max, looking furious, teeth bared inside his dark beard, was a figure both ridiculous and distressing, like a giant Captain Haddock wrestling with a hysterical diminutive Tintin. Their battle carried on out in the hall, where Max dragged Martin just as the conga was weaving past, with screaming and shouting and terrible fury between them. They were hating each other.

  Dorrie edged up to them, horror struck, and the next thing was that Max was shouting at her. All right, it was their first day, they were all tired from the journey, but this was dreadful. The other parents, following the conga, filtered past interestedly watching this scene.

  ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t,’ said Dorrie several times, but softly. The other two children joined them, sobbing.

  At last she got them all past reception and up the stairs.

  ‘I don’t like you, Daddy,’ wailed Martin through tears.

  ‘I know you don’t, Martin,’ huffed Max, storming off ahead.

  Really, he was very like Martin, or Martin was very like him – both prone to explosions of aggressive self-defensiveness – although of course Martin was six, whereas Max was forty. Because Max did this, she had to do the opposite in order to redress the balance, even though doing so made her look weak and ineffective. He sometimes pointed this out, her apparent ineffectiveness. But what would he rather? That she scream at them like a fishwife? Hit them? Vent her temper or ignore them, like a man? Let them get hurt? Let them eat rubbish? Let them watch junk? Just try doing it all the time before you criticize, not only for a few hours or days, she reflected, as she reined herself in and wiped tears from blubbing faces and assisted with the comprehensive nose-blowing that was needed in the wake of such a storm.

  At least he didn’t hit them when he lost his temper. She had a friend whose husband did, and then justified it with talk of them having to learn, which she, Dorrie, could not have borne. She really would much rather be on her own with them, it was much easier like that. Like a skilful stage manager she had learned how to create times of sweetness and light with the three of them; she could now coax and balance the various jostling elements into some sort of precarious harmony. It was an art, like feeding and building a good log fire, an achievement. Then in Max would clump, straightways seizing the bellows or the poker, and the whole lot would collapse in ruins.

  ‘I’ll get them to bed, Max,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go for a swim or something?’

  ‘I’ll wait for you in the bar,’ he said frostily. ‘Remember they stop serving dinner at eight.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t forget to turn the listening service on.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know when I’m not wanted.’

  She choked down her reply, and gently closed the door behind him.

  ‘Now then,’ she said, smiling at their doleful, tear-smeared faces. ‘What’s up? You look as though you’ve swallowed a jellyfish!’

  They looked at her, goggling with relief, and laughed uncertainly.

  ‘Two jellyfish!’ she said, with vaudeville mirth.

  They laughed harder.

  ‘And an octopus!’ she added.

  They fell on the floor, they were laughing so hard.

  The second day was an improvement on the first, although, as Dorrie said to herself, that would not have been difficult. They turned away from the glare of the packed beach towards leafy broken shade, walking inland along a lane whose hedges were candy-striped
with pink and white bindweed. A large dragonfly with marcasite body and pearlized wings appeared in the air before them and stopped them in their tracks. Then they struck off across a path through fields where sudden clouds of midges swept by without touching them. When they reached a stream overarched by hawthorn trees the children clamoured to take off their sandals and dip their feet in the water.

  ‘This is the place for our picnic,’ said Dorrie, who had brought supplies along in a rucksack, and now set about distributing sandwiches and fruit and bottles of water.

  ‘We can’t walk across the strand today,’ said Max, consulting his copy of the Tide Tables as he munched away at a ham roll. ‘Low tide was earlier this morning, then not again till nine tonight. Fat lot of good that is. But tomorrow looks possible.’

  He had heard about an island not far from here which, once a day, for a short time only, became part of the mainland. When the tide was out you could walk across the strand to the island and visit the ancient cell of the hermit who had lived centuries before in the heart of its little woods.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it,’ said Dorrie, looking over his shoulder at the week’s chart. ‘No pattern to the tides, no gradual waxing and waning as with the moon. I thought the tides were supposed to be governed by the moon, but they’re all over the place.’

  The children sat by them, each with a bag of crisps, nibbling away busily like rodents.

  ‘There is a pattern, though,’ said Max. ‘When there’s a new moon or an old moon, the tides are at their highest and also at their lowest. It’s all very extreme at those times of the month, when the earth, moon and sun are directly in line.’

  Martin, having finished his own bag of crisps, was now busily capturing ants from the grass and dropping them into his sister’s bag.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Dorrie.

  ‘And when the moon’s at right angles to the sun, that’s when you get neap tides,’ continued Max. ‘Less extreme, less dramatic. What the hell’s the matter now?’