by Ruby Soames
Back in her open-plan kitchen, Tash is trying hard to ignore me but at the same time, she needs to act normal in case I make a scene in front of her imminent guests. She’s seen the case and now just wants this behind her.
She touches a colourful display of flowers. ‘Every room must have a centre-piece,’ she tells me.
‘They’re pretty.’
‘I got them in Portobello yesterday. If you go as they’re closing the stalls they practically give them away. These arum lilies were only seven fifty each.’
‘Look, about the rent …’
She bristles.
‘I haven’t exactly got it …’
‘Those guys outside are ready to offer you at least £20,000 for a chat.’
‘Tash! I’m not selling my integrity.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘You really can’t give me anything?’
‘I’m waiting for the flat sale to come through.’
She perks up with an idea: ‘What about your handbag?’
She’s always been after that bag. ‘My bag? You know Joseph gave it to me. It’s all I have left of him.’
‘Whose fault is that?’
I let the comment go in favour of an uncomplicated exit. ‘How about I let you have the van instead?’
‘Don’t be silly, Sarah.’
‘No, really, I know I’m behind –’
‘Urgh!’ she grunts. ‘I’ve got people coming. Just let’s … call me later about it.’
‘I don’t have a phone.’
‘What kind of person doesn’t have a phone?’
‘Take the van.’
‘Just leave it.’
‘But –’
‘Sarah, the stupid van’s not worth the fucking rent!’
She lifts her hand to her heart to steady it. I think that’s a little unfair. The van works well when it’s not raining and twelve large dogs can easily fit in the back.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘I can’t pay the up-keep on the van anyway. So why don’t you have it?’
‘It’s covered in dog hair! It never starts!’
‘It just needs a hose down.’
She taps her fingers on the table. ‘Well, it might cover some of the rent owed, not all. And how would you pick up the dogs?’
‘I’ve been offered a job … a great work opportunity.’
‘Dog walking?’ she scoffs.
‘No, in the media.’ I’m floundering.
‘On TV?’
‘Yeah. I can’t talk about it now, it’s all a bit hush-hush, but it could be a real break-through for me.’
‘Sarah, I’m really pleased for you. I always hoped the animal thing was just a stepping stone. You’re a trained lawyer for God’s sake! Walking dogs … what the –’
‘Yeah, well, I just don’t think it’s morally viable.’
‘Hum?’ she asks absent-mindedly while tossing the salad. The news of my lucky break has alleviated the tension; I might even dive in and put the kettle on.
‘When people had slaves, many were convinced they were giving them a better life – look at our domestic animals, taken from their families, living in captivity, bought and sold. One day it’ll be outlawed and people in the future will be appalled by it, and then –’
‘Does the van have a stereo?’
‘Yes, but it’s not.’
‘Not what?’
‘Not stereo. It’s mono.’
She dips her finger into the salad dressing and dabs it on her tongue. ‘More pepper.’
We both look at Elvis who sniffs a chair leg.
She smiles, ‘It’s a reality TV show, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘Oh my God – it’s presenting!’
‘Nothing’s final –’
‘I’m really thrilled something’s come up for you, Sarah. Will you come and tell me all about it when you know for sure, and hey, if you need a PR person –’
‘I know where you live.’
‘Ah,’ she says coming over and giving me a hug without ruffling her clothes. ‘I’ve always known you’d be brilliant at whatever you put your mind to, and I know that you’ve had a bad time.’
So here comes the letting go speech.
‘You’ve been through so much, and I –’
‘You’ll take the van?’
‘I don’t know, maybe, in lieu of one month’s rent, and when you hit the big time you can buy it back off me … fair?’
‘The documents are in my drawer.’
I toss the van keys down wincing as they crash against the table.
8
I’m ready with Elvis, a large suitcase, a holdall, my handbag and a black sack with all my sellable goods. As I stagger out the door, Tash calls out, ‘You know a lot of people are really worried about you.’
‘Well, a lot of people are stupid.’
Elvis and I look at each other unsurprised by how determined she is to tell her friends that she really did try absolutely everything to save me.
‘It’s not stupid, y’know. People care. You don’t appreciate just how much.’
‘That’s sweet,’ I concede, hoping to be spared the lecture.
‘You just don’t see it do you? Just don’t see it at all. You have so much going for you.’ Before I can interrupt, she’s off. ‘You’ve got really good friends, they really care about you, God knows why, the way you treat them.’ She tries to catch my eye. ‘We all have bad times but you just get over them. I know it’s hard for you not having a family, I mean, that’s it, I think all this sadness in you is about not having a father, but you have to just –’
‘Back off.’
‘Sorry,’ she surrenders her hands above her head, ‘I know, I know, taboo area. All I’m saying is that I go home when it all gets too much, obviously you can’t do that with a mad mother, but still, you’ve just got to get up and –’
‘Thanks Tash.’
‘I know what you think of me, that I’m just a … well I-don’t-know-what, but I’ll tell you one thing you didn’t know, Miss First-Class Law degree, there’ve been times when I’ve been really jealous of you! I have. People always like you, everyone wants to be your friend, and boys – you’ve tons of admirers! Look at you: you could be stunning if you just booked an appointment at Lorenzo’s – have Julie do the colour. Joseph would come running back!’
‘I finished with Joseph.’
‘You, him, whatever. The point is Sarah, Joseph really loves you. He really, really does and you’re pushing him away – but you’ll miss your chance to –’
‘To what?’
‘I don’t know-being beside him when he wins an Oscar? He’s pretty confused at the moment and I’m sure there’re quite a few babes who’d like to cheer him up, don’t you –’
‘Who’ve you been talking to?’
‘Your friends.’ She draws the salmon en croute delicately from the oven.
‘Who?’
‘You know, Kamilla, Deborah, Boo, Claire and Susie, Anna … Joseph, a bit and –’
‘Joseph? You’ve been talking to Joseph?’
‘So what? He’s really worried about you.’
‘You’ve called him, haven’t you?’ But I don’t need confirmation, I can tell by the jumping pulse points in her neck.
‘It’s not like that. I just wondered if he would participate in a campaign we were doing for –’ The buzzer sounds. ‘They’re here.’ She waits for it to ring a second time before answering in her cheery, party-girl voice. Without taking her eyes off me, she buzzes her guests in.
‘Let me get this straight. You used me as an excuse to call Joseph?’
‘Oh for God’s sake! That’s paranoid. Look –’
‘No, I know you Tash. I know what you’re like.’ I stand up with resolve. ‘Have the van. Have Joseph – but of course you don’t need permission to go after my ex-boyfriend – Invite JW and SA to dinner Thursday. Go ahead – take it all! The room’s all yours – and the van!’ And at that, I throw the house keys
to her. She’s not fast enough to catch them so they knock over the flowers. Water cascades out of the vase and runs over the table like an infinity pool. Elvis lurches towards the cataract and starts manically licking the puddle until I drag him through the door.
‘I said I don’t want the van!’
‘Just as well. It’s been clamped!’
I hear Tash’s gaggle of guests in the hall as I slam the door. I pound down the stairs, struggling to keep hold of my handbag, suitcase, holdall and black plastic bag. I pass them, my bags scraping against their legs and Elvis sniffing at their ankles. They avert their eyes though one of the girls sings out, ‘Bye Sarah!’ while the others giggle.
9
At Camden Market I find a stall selling winter coats where I unload a leather jacket and a pair of boots for £28.
‘It’s a nice jacket, you sure?’ asks a trucker who’s thinking of buying it for his girlfriend.
‘I’m not really comfortable wearing leather anymore.’
‘Oh right,’ he says rubbing the large, round bulge of flesh between his t-shirt and jeans which makes him look like a front-loading washing machine.
‘Miss? You selling that handbag?’ the stall keeper butts in.
‘It was a present,’ I snap.
I buy two baked potatoes, one for me with grated cheese, and one for Elvis with Bolognese sauce. He eats his lunch as we watch the tourists. Few can resist petting him and he even manages to star in some video-clips. Perhaps I’ll start up a pet-casting agency, but instead of making sensible plans for my future, I pick up Elvis’ poop with pages from Tash’s Goals Book and lose myself in memories of Joseph. It doesn’t help being here, a place we came to on Sunday afternoons looking for stuff to furnish our flat. We were so completely happy together. We were. Really.
We’d met at the end of our second year at university. He was the college heartthrob whose every action was analysed and adored. He studied English and Drama. I’d seen him in a few plays and, like everyone, thought he was brilliant. I understood why he was tipped to be a star and, although he didn’t always play the lead, he was the one everyone watched. So I already knew who he was the night when he and a gang of friends arrived late at a party. The evening had never really got off the ground, it had been the first time a guy in my department, Adam, who’s now a top lawyer in Geneva, had ever had more than four people around. He’d been so overly anxious for everyone to have a wild time that we’d rebelled against his commands of ‘Come on, dance! Drink! Hey, let’s play a game, what about Truth or Dare?’ We’d chosen instead to sit in huddles levering Monster Munches into our mouths and planning an early escape. Just when people were disappearing and the night would have been lost in all but Adam’s memories, Joseph came dancing into the room.
Joseph was like a vortex drawing all attention on him. And I had this epiphany: The One. He is the One. He was the answer to a question I hadn’t even asked – I’d never been so convinced of anything until I saw him shuffling around to Earth Wind and Fire’s Fantasy while Adam nodded at us like ‘that’s what I want from you all!’ That boy, surrounded by tanned, skinny blondes with revealing cleavages, was the prototype of all my romantic dreams. Joseph must have seen me looking at him because he winked at me, and then he gave me his smile like it was something priceless he was asking me to look after for the rest of my life. He smiles like that at everyone.
Of course, I never imagined I’d even come close to anything like him, so I watched with detached curiosity as a pride of gorgeous, brilliant, Olympian females made it their business to protect him from mere mortal interest.
I would never have had the courage to talk to him had our next meeting not been instigated by our mutual friend, Boo. She’d invited us to her family’s country house in Devon for the weekend hoping that this would be ‘the weekend’ for her and Joseph, but she’d staged other people to be there to give it a casual, no-pressure feel.
As Joseph had a car and I didn’t, she suggested that we came together as we were both working in London over the Easter break. I was in the city entering data for a merchant bank while Joseph was a waiter in a Cuban restaurant in Covent Garden. I’d come to his work as he was getting off late.
I sat at the bar trying to calm my excitement, telling myself it was insane to imagine this could mean anything more than splitting the costs of a journey for him, when I heard, ‘This is for you,’ and he presented me with a red rose. ‘When Boo asked me to give her friend a lift, I hoped it was you.’
I had to smile at his sombrero and black waistcoat which was two sizes too small.
‘Why’s that?’ I asked, pulling the stem of the rose through my button hole.
‘I always thought you looked –’ his dark eyes looked into mine, ‘like a girl who could map read.’
‘Have you saddled up your donkey?’ I asked, eyeing him up from his hat to his stirrups.
‘Tequila first?’
10
A warm, sunny evening in spring. We sat outside the restaurant with a plate of black fried beans which constituted supper for struggling students. I was immediately relaxed by his charm and friendliness. He laughed at my jokes, agreed with my ideas and even tapped the names of books I recommended into his phone under the heading, Must read! I wanted to get up, stop passers-by and boast, ‘This is Joseph, Joseph West! Look, he’s talking to me! Quick – take a photo for my Facebook page!’
We left later than we’d planned, sharing the drive and neither of us bothering about how long it took.
As we talked, the evening got darker, as did the subjects: perhaps it was not being able to see each other’s faces and being enclosed in the car, but we shifted early on from banter to revealing intimacies about ourselves that maybe a therapist would have waited a long time to hear. I told him about my mother, the council estate I was brought up on, the father I’d never met and how our struggles had directed me towards studying law.
Joseph had come from a stable, happy family although his father was adamant that he took a steady job once he graduated. He was, however, secretly investigating drama colleges and dreaming of an acting career. From there, we went onto love. Joseph ran through his romance CV but, apart from an older French girl on a ski trip who’d left without saying goodbye, no one seemed to have got to him.
When we arrived at the weekend party, the others had finished dinner and drunk way too much. We unloaded all the tequila bottles Joe had bought from work and were brought up to speed with the day’s jokes and plans for the weekend. Joe insisted on a Karaoke session. We stayed up all night, singing and laughing, and I could feel myself falling for him despite kicking myself for being such a cliché. I never imagined he would feel the same about me – he had the pick of all the girls, but I noticed every time he had the opportunity to be near me, he took it.
I had more evidence that he liked me on Sunday night when Joseph suggested we play The Bottom Game.
‘The Bottom Game?’
He was dumbfounded no one had heard of it. He told the girls to line up in a dark room with their bums bared. The boys were told they had to feel each bottom and say who they thought it belonged to. When it was Joseph’s turn no one could keep quiet through the giggling.
‘Oh it’s so obvious he’ll just go for Sarah!’ lamented Boo before Joseph had been let in.
And that’s what happened. He found me within seconds, circled the tops of my thighs and touched my bum tenderly for as long as he could get away with. When we changed roles, the girls lined up to feel the boys’ bums in the darkened room, I did the same. Joseph turned around, took my wrists and kissed me. All the intimacy built up on the journey, the tension, the attraction, all of it went into that kiss. We had a few minutes in the dark before Boo announced it was a ‘sexist game’. The lights went on and the boys got together to build a fire.
When I was in the kitchen, watching Joseph in the garden carrying logs back into the house, Claire followed my gaze and said, ‘He’s doing all this caveman stuff to impress you
, y’know? He’s hoping you’ll realise that although he acts like a flirt, he’s actually capable of looking after someone.’ We continued watching him through the window cutting off branches with a penknife. ‘Joe likes a laugh and playing characters, all that, but he’s also very serious about the things that matter, the things he’s serious about. He has this Disney idea of “the one”.’
‘The one what?’
‘Love, I s’pose. That when he finds the right girl, he’ll stay with her forever and do everything he can to make her happy. That’s what happened with his parents.’
We watched him lugging a tree trunk over to the house. He looked up at me and smiled.
‘Anyway,’ Claire smiled. ‘Just thought I’d say that because he’s worried you might have the wrong impression of him – he’s more than just someone who thinks up games to do with girls’ bottoms.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He told me. He thinks you’re “intriguing” and “beautiful” and very “cool”. You intimidate him. I’ve never known anyone be able to do that to him before.’
Driving back the following Monday morning, we were silent, hung-over and uncertain where our feelings would go. On the way, I stopped at a motorway station and bought some Danish pastries and coffees for breakfast. As Joseph drove, he let me drop little bits of chocolate into his mouth while I allowed him to lick my fingers. Soon we were stopping at every traffic light to kiss, once even pulling into a lay-by. When we approached London, he took my hand and said, ‘Don’t go. Stay with me.’
And that’s what I did for the next five years.
11
The suitcase of clothes is getting heavy to carry around. I pass a dry cleaner’s and wonder about leaving it there – it’s either that or toss out everything I own.
With little pride left, I try to convince the staff that this is just a regular dry cleaning job. The woman looks at me a long time before asking me to open the case. I pick out each item while she adds it to the list. She takes ages checking the work suits, jeans, underwear, hats, tights … The list covers three pages. She points at the cost – it’s easily more than a new collection of designer clothes.