by Jenny Colgan
I didn’t say any of this, of course, just buried my head in her shoulder, so pleased to be home. Dad patted me lightly on the back in his jolly way.
“Hello, girl,” he said.
“Hi, Dad.”
I found myself choking up a bit, which was ridiculous as I’d only been away for two months, but I hadn’t been like that girl Jules in my class who’d gone away to university miles away, then worked in America and traveled all over the place. That wasn’t me at all, never had been.
I looked at Kidinsborough with a funny air through the car windows. Another pawn shop had opened. Another little café had closed down. The people seemed to walk so slowly. I wondered, almost abstractly, if I was turning into a snob, but it wasn’t that. If you believed the papers (which I didn’t really understand anyway), the UK was doing well, while France was pretty much running on fumes, but you really wouldn’t see it to set up a street in Kidinsborough against the rue de Rivoli.
On the other hand, that was hardly fair. I was sure there were plenty of grim former industrial towns in France, cluttering up the border with rusting railway tracks and thundering lorries. I watched a woman shouting at her pram. She was wearing two tank tops, both grubby, neither of which reached all the way over the rolls of fat down to her leggings. She was pushing a buggy loaded with huge thin plastic bags through which the family bags of chips were clearly visible.
I winced. I was turning into a snob.
- - -
“Anna! Have you turned into a total and utter snob?”
It was Cath on the phone. I was so pleased to hear from her.
“Yes!” I screamed back. “I can’t help it! I don’t know what to do. I’m kind of horrible now.”
“Everyone in France is horrible,” she said with all the authority of someone who’d been told off by a ferry operative on a school trip to France in 1995.
“Everyone knows that. They eat dogs and stuff.”
“They don’t eat dogs,” I said crossly. “Where did you even hear that?”
“Well, dogs, or horses or something.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“Oh. My. God. It’s true. Do they eat horses?”
“Well, if you eat cows, I don’t really see the difference…”
“Oh my utter God, that is total rank. Did you eat a horse? Oh man, that mings the mong.”
I started to feel less snobby.
“Get ready,” said Cath. “We’re going out.”
It was good to be home.
- - -
Cath let herself into my room, armed with blow-dryers and curling tongs. She stopped short when she saw me.
“What?” I said.
“Dunno,” she said, but she didn’t look pleased. She had a bright blood-red streak through the top of her hair that made her look like a particularly cheerful vampire. “You look…different.”
“That’s because I’m not in bed vomiting up blood and crying,” I pointed out.
“No, even after you got sick.”
“Well, I’m not out of work and crying in the morning.”
She shook her head. “Neh. It’s more than that.”
She opened up her hairdressing bag and pulled out two clanking bottles of WKD.
“Uhm, Cath, we’re thirty,” I reminded her. “You don’t need to smuggle drink into the house. Dad would make us a martini bianco if we asked him nicely.”
“It tastes better like this,” she said. “Can I smoke out the window?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes.”
She lit up and climbed on my bed, regarding me closely.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said accusingly.
Actually I’d lost a lot of weight in the hospital, then regained it all again by staying indoors being depressed and eating extra-spicy KFC. Then the last few weeks had been so busy I hadn’t even really noticed, which was, I will say, not at all like me. But my jeans had certainly felt looser. But I still considered myself fatter than every other person in Paris. The women were so tiny. Maybe I was just falling into line.
“You’ve gone Frenchy-thin,” she said. “Hmm. Do you smoke now and eat nothing all day except frogs’ legs and dog?”
“It’s horse,” I said.
“I knew it!” yelled Cath.
Her eyebrows would have arched if she hadn’t had that dodgy cheap Botox that she didn’t even need. It had given her a look that screamed Botox. She adored it, all the sheen without the need for repeated injections. Everyone assumed she had it about once a week.
“What’s this man like?” she asked.
“There’s no man,” I said. “Well…I mean…No, no man.”
“Oh my God, what’s he like? Is he tiny and without an arse? French men never have arses.”
“How come you’re so well-informed?”
“Everyone knows that,” she said dismissively. “I’ve met a few men in my time.”
This was undeniably true. I drank the blue drink. Had it always been this revolting? I wasn’t sure.
“Well, I kind of nearly met someone, then he saw my foot and had a serious freak out.”
Cath put her glass down. Her voice was quieter.
“Seriously?”
“It’s all right,” I said, taking a swig. It wasn’t much better than the first one, but I persevered. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What a twat,” she said.
“Oh no, it wasn’t really his fault…my shoe fell off and he thought my toes fell off too.”
She paused for a second then, suddenly, we both burst out laughing.
“What an idiot!” she said when she paused for breath. “Thank God you didn’t brush your hair. He’d have thought your head was falling off.”
The blue drinks must have been getting to us, because we found this very, very funny too, and suddenly I realized that while I might have been learning lots of new things and experiences, I hadn’t had a bloody good laugh for ages.
We headed out to Faces, and there were loads of people there I hadn’t seen for absolutely ages and everyone was dead nice and bought us drinks and congratulated Cath on beating that shoplifting charge, to which Cath assumed a heavenly look and pretended she wasn’t in the least bit surprised, and a bunch of lads we went to school with were there and that was so funny, the married ones all fat and tired-looking, the unmarried ones all flash-looking and bragging about their cars. A few more blue drinks and everything seemed hilarious again and I even ended up giving Darr a bit of a snog for old times’ sake—well, he was right there, and I felt like I needed the practice, but he was absolutely, I realized, rubbish compared to Laurent, so I quickly knocked that on the head. Then me and Cath marched home arm in arm, singing a Robbie Williams song, and it was exactly what I needed.
Even with it though, I still felt different. Like I was an outsider, looking in. That I was playing at being a Kidinsborough girl rather than actually being one. Even though I was, wasn’t I? Of course I was.
It was very kind of Claire not to ring until the afternoon the next day.
- - -
Actually, it was better than kind; it was bliss. I sat in front of the gas fire, watching the telly—my mum had taped loads of reality shows; she likes anything where people come to a sticky end—and we ate toast (no one could believe it when I told them the French had never really heard of toast and ate this indigestible crunchy preburned stuff) with marmite. The boys let me eat some of their massive supplies of chips, which was their way of saying they were pleased to see me, and my dad didn’t really say anything much, just popped his head around the door every now and again, smiled, then popped out again. I’d forgotten how nice it was at home. I’d also forgotten that by the next day, Mum and I would probably be driving each other up the wall and I’d be down at the discount store begging for a job and tripping over the boys’ sneakers…
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And I had promises to keep. The second I saw the wheelchair, I knew this was going to be a bigger task than I’d counted on. It was…well, it was huge.
“I know,” Claire said. “I hate it too.”
“It’s just so…”
Claire was sitting on the sofa and we were both staring at the ugly, hideous big National Health Service wheelchair that we both knew so well from trips through hospital corridors, to operating rooms and blood-testing departments, with jaunty porters who always had a cheery word. But now it was just us.
“Well, I’m sure I can fold it up,” I said, not sure at all. I’m only five foot three and a bit wobbly on the one side.
“And people will be kind,” said Claire firmly.
I looked at her. She’d lost even more weight; the bones on her face made her look like one of those ballet dancers from the opera. Blue veins were visible underneath her skin, except on her arms, where repeated stabbings had caused them all to retreat and hide. The story was that she was off the chemo so she could get well enough to operate on. She insisted this was the case, but she didn’t look better to me. Not at all.
She didn’t wear a scarf or a turban in the house, and I inspected her head. It was covered in a tiny fuzz, like a duckling’s.
“I reckon Cath could do something with that,” I said, but she didn’t smile. I noticed she didn’t like to get too far away from her drip, which usually indicated, psychologically, that she was in pain.
“How are you feeling?” I asked softly, even though I knew it was a question she got asked ninety times every day.
“Well, I’d be a bit better if everyone didn’t keep telling me not to go,” she said, almost snappily for Claire, who never snapped, not even when I burst into tears over my inability to grasp the subjunctive (a really stupid tense they have in French solely for shouting at people).
“We’ll be fine,” I said with renewed vigor. “We shall charm every porter from here to the Gare du Nord.”
She gave me a slight smile and her hand fluttered a little to her neck.
“He…he knows I’m coming.”
“He does,” I said. “It’s the first time he’s smiled since his heart attack.”
I didn’t tell her about Alice and Laurent. I would deal with all that later.
I looked at the large suitcase Patsy had packed, under duress. It contained an oxygen cylinder we would have to declare at customs. I was terrified of it and the situation in which I might have to use it. I was terrified, full stop. What if they didn’t let us go? That might even be better, part of me thought. Then we could say we’d tried our best and that was that, and now they could talk like sensible people, on Skype, and I could go back and work the shop back up for Thierry and after that…well, come home, I suppose. Go flatting with Cath again, figure something out. I’d worry about that when it happened. But for now…one thing at a time.
“I only have a small bag,” I said, although my mum had loaded me up with bacon and cheddar cheese and anything else she heard I couldn’t get ahold of easily. She felt I was fading away. The idea of changing in London scared the crap out of me. I didn’t know London at all, and it didn’t open itself up to walking in it the same way Paris did, but I’d worry about that later too.
We were leaving Tuesday morning. I had Sunday lunch at Mum and Dad’s, made conversation with my brothers, saw a lot of Cath and tried to persuade her to come and visit me—I reckoned her and Sami would get on, even if they didn’t speak the same language, but she’d gotten unusually sheepish.
“Neh,” she’d said. “I don’t think it’s for me.”
We were walking down by the canal on Monday night, looking for something to do. It was warm out still.
“You’d love it,” I said. “There’s a party every night and champagne everywhere and it’s really beautiful and I live right at the top of this spooky old house.”
She turned to me sadly.
“You’re dead brave, you are,” she said. “Everyone thinks you’re the quiet one, but it’s not like that really.”
“Don’t be daft,” I said. “You’re the one who jumped into the canal fully clothed that New Year’s. I thought you’d kill yourself.”
Cath shook her head.
“Oh, it’s one thing hanging around here,” she said. “Out there…neh. You might as well take me to the Amazon jungle. This is where I belong, Anna. Along with the shitty shopping trolley in the canal, and Gav, and me mam and everything really. You’re not like that.”
“Course I am,” I said.
“Neh,” she said. “You are the brave one.”
And we linked arms and walked back home together.
- - -
Seven a.m. and my dad was running the car outside. It had suddenly turned cold and he was sounding very cross. Our train wasn’t till twenty past eight, but I had decided better to be safe than sorry, which was just as well, as we were having a heck of a job trying to fold the wheelchair into the trunk of the car, and I was starting to wish I hadn’t bothered and wondering whether the very first half hour was an acceptable time to give up the trip altogether.
Dad got out and helped me, while Claire sat in the front seat, the seat belt almost flat against her, so thin was she now. I’d locked up the house—it was immaculate, the fridge empty, which I found slightly off-putting. She’d be back in three days. This felt like an empty house. But I wasn’t going to argue with Patsy (again).
Claire watched us in the rearview mirror swearing and sweating as we tried to maneuver the wheelchair in by taking down the backseats, but we still weren’t having much luck. We were going to be very tight for the train as it was. And the London train went from the opposite platform. I could feel myself starting to panic.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, love?” said my dad quietly, to which I could only reply, “I haven’t got a clue, Dad.”
Being my dad, he just patted me on the shoulder, and that was the best thing to do. Even so, it wasn’t boding well.
Suddenly up the quiet street glided a very large, very quiet car. You didn’t see one of those often around Kidinsborough; it looked to be one of those enormous Range Rover things, all shiny black. It slowed down next to us and a distinguished-looking man stepped out beside us on the pavement, dressed in a smart tweed jacket.
Claire gasped in the mirror, then opened the front door of the car and, holding herself carefully, got up and out of the car on her own.
“Richard?” she said.
- - -
She wouldn’t have guessed it in a million years. She stared at him, completely dumbfounded.
“Richard,” she said again.
It sometimes felt to her like he had hardly changed a bit, was still the awkward boy with the clarinet case and the brown horn-rimmed glasses. His glasses were still horn-rimmed, but she’d always liked the style, so he’d never changed it. He’d kept his hair, and having a new wife and a stepdaughter had kept him trimmer than he might have been otherwise. She could still remember his admiring tone from so long ago. He’d never taken her off that pedestal. That had been the problem, really. No, she chided herself. She had been the problem. She had always been the problem.
“What are you doing here? I am going, you know. It’s kind of the boys to worry but I truly feel this is something I have to…”
“No,” said Richard simply, raising his hand. “I’m here to help.”
- - -
I had no idea who this geezer was—he was pretty handsome for an old bloke, that was for sure—but it became clear pretty quickly. I looked at his huge Range Rover.
“Yes,” he said. “Why don’t I drive you in that? Then you won’t have to get on and off the train.”
I thought about all the money Claire had spent on first-class rail tickets but didn’t mention it. I was enough in her debt already.
“Great,” I said, with massive relief, and I meant it. The folded-up wheelchair fit into the back of the car with ease, and I helped Claire up the high step—I’d never been in such a fancy car before.
Dad looked on, a bit crestfallen. I felt bad about that.
“Look, it’s good Richard’s helping us,” I said.
Dad looked at his old Peugeot.
“I like your car,” I said. “This is a stupid car. It’s going to destroy the planet and kill us all. Oh look, it has a telly in the backseat!”
Dad smiled ruefully. “You’re off again then,” he said.
“Not for long,” I said. After living in pajamas and one slightly ill-advised neon miniskirt for two days, I’d put my Paris uniform back on.
Dad shook his head.
“Your mother thinks it is for long. She thinks you’ve left.”
“Don’t be daft,” I said, my voice cracking a bit. “This will always be my home.”
Dad gave me a hug.
“There’s always a home for you here,” he said. “That’s not quite the same thing, mind. Anyway, you’re thirty, love. About time you got your life started, don’t you think?”
- - -
I felt like a kid sitting in the backseat, but I didn’t mind. There was a stack of DVDs carefully put on a little shelf, obviously for the grandchildren, and Richard offered to put one on for me.
Claire hadn’t spoken much about her ex in the hospital, although the boys were very good at coming to see her, and it was clear they must have resembled him. I understood that it had ended and that they weren’t in touch, but what had ended it and why I had no idea. So I figured it was best to slip the headphones on and let them get on with it.
- - -
Claire glanced briefly at Anna in the backseat, completely engrossed in the film like a child, and smiled to herself. She was in a little pain—her joints felt sore, as if she had a strong flu, and a headache was circling and threatening to descend from any quarter, but thankfully she wasn’t vomiting. For that, small mercies.