by Louise Voss
I tried my best not to let her smoke or drink or anything – not that it was really a druggy crowd, though, other than the odd late-night joint going around. Aromatherapists were mostly too holistic to want to get out of their skulls on Class A drugs, and they weren’t those kinds of parties anyway. There certainly wasn’t much in the way of the Madchester influence: baggy jeans and the Stone Roses and ecstasy. They were more your sort of spliff and lager brigade. Anyway, Stella didn’t care what they did or didn’t do. She was just so chuffed to be there, and to be able to tell her school friends that she’d been out till 5am on Saturday night.
My friends used to play things like entire Prince albums at their parties, or James Brown. Or Funky Cold Medina, Tone Loc – that was a favourite, I recalled. And later, the Stereo MC’s record, of course. Hearing it again, coming out of that car, reminded me so clearly of that party.
Stella and I had completely hogged the dance floor for the entire length of the extended mix of Connected. We were a team, we had all the moves. It was the sort of dancing you’d risk looking a prat if you did in a nightclub, but which was just perfect in a stranger’s front room, trying not to bash your elbows on their mantlepieces or your shins on their pushed-back coffee tables. The sort of dance where it was impossible not to grin manically the whole time you did it, not because you knew you looked stupid – the opposite, in fact. We grinned because we knew we looked cool as hell. It was mostly funky disco, with a few sub-Supremes steps and a touch of jive thrown in - over the years of practicing in our bedrooms, we’d refined these moves until all the cheesiness was eliminated and it was casual, hip. Heads turned, nodding along in unison, and because we were both doing it, I didn’t feel remotely shy. It was so liberating. And Stella could have been in Steps by now, I really thought that she could.
I had no idea whose party it was, or why Gavin was there. It was in this big mansion block flat off Baker Street, up millions of stairs and past several bicycles chained to the banisters. Stella noticed Gavin straight away, she said he was leaning against the bookshelf drinking a beer, and that he couldn’t take his eyes off me. Although I was sure I remembered him eyeing up both of us.
He was talking to a much shorter man – when they both propped their elbows against the bookshelf, Gavin’s elbow leaned on the second from top shelf, and the other bloke’s only rested on the middle one. After we had finished dancing to the next record - The Clash, The Magnificent Seven, a surprisingly good record to dance to – we’d gone into the kitchen, pink-faced, breathless and giggly, and Gavin had followed us in. The first thing he asked, gallantly, was what we wanted to drink. The second thing was, ‘Would you like to buy a Barbour?’
I’d raised one eyebrow at him – or at least tried to. It probably came out more like a squint. ‘A what?’ I said.
‘You know, a Barbour. Waxy green jacket thing Sloanes wear.’
‘Do I look like a Sloane?’ I remembered saying, all kind of cool and frosty. It was a good eight years since it had last been considered even remotely trendy to wear a Barbour, unless you were a Hooray Henry.
‘Well - no, actually. Thing is, I’m a bit desperate. A bloke in Canary Wharf flogged me thirty-five of them when I was drunk. They’re in the boot of my car now and I’ve got no idea what to do with them.’
This was Gavin all over. It later transpired that he hadn’t even come to the party in his car, so even in the unlikely event that I had wanted a knock-off Barbour, he wouldn’t have been able to sell me one anyway. It was all talk with him.
Then he asked me where I was from.
‘Acton,’ I replied, and he laughed.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, originally. You look kind of Spanish, or South American, or something. Where are your parents from?’
It was the first time anybody had asked me that outright. I hesitated.
‘Um. They’re English’, I said, managing not to add I think. I knew that I’d been adopted in England, and my adoptive parents were both British but, although I’d often wondered, I hadn’t enquired about the nationality of my birth parents when Mum and Dad were alive.
‘People always said that I looked just like my dad, though,’ I added, on safer, if less biologically-pertinent, ground. As a child, it had been a source of much hilarity to me when old ladies in the street would take in Dad’s and my similar dark brown hair and eyes, and short stature, and comment upon our likeness. If only they knew, I’d think with something approaching glee at our shared secret knowledge of their ignorance.
‘Said?’
‘Pardon?’
‘You said, “said”, in the past.’
‘Yes. He died. In fact, both my parents are dead.’
‘Oh. Sorry. Then why did you say “they’re English”, in the present?’
I sighed. I hadn’t really wanted to get into all this, not in a first conversation. ‘It’s complicated. I was talking about my birth parents when I said they were English. I don’t know if they’re still alive, because I’m adopted. My adoptive parents are dead, and people used to say I looked like my adoptive father, which was mad, because he wasn’t even my real dad.’
‘Right,’ said Gavin, looking as if he wished he’d never asked.
At first I thought that Gavin wasn’t very good looking, skinny and a bit bald, with a funny curving mouth, and it seemed to be Stella who was the most obviously impressed by his charms. They got on so well that I began to worry that he had his eye on her, and was wondering if I should drop in the fact that she hadn’t even done her GCSE’s yet. And then after a few minutes he began to grow on me, too, and within the hour I’d decided that his curved lips were the most appealing part of him.
‘I love your eyelashes,’ he’d said. ‘Would you consider giving me a butterfly kiss?’ He held out his hand to me, wrist-first as if to receive a free perfume sample, and, self-consciously, I fluttered against the warm, smooth skin of his palm, with Stella making puking faces behind Gavin’s back. His hands smelled so masculine, a mingled memory of slapped-on aftershave and engine oil.
‘They used to call me Elephant Girl at school,’ I muttered, immediately worrying that he’d think this was because I had a weight problem, or a thick skin, instead of being a reference to my implausible lashes.
Gavin laughed. ‘You’re far too sexy to be even remotely elephantine, even with those eyelashes.’
Notwithstanding the dodgy Barbours, he was by far the nicest bloke that I’d met in a long time. After that butterfly kiss, he gradually turned his attention away from Stella and began to concentrate on me. The conversation wasn’t just empty flirting, either, but turned into interesting discussions which began with politics - at least as far as my wobbly political opinions allowed - and traced a winding path around to music, books, and films, ending up with a lively debate about whether Four Weddings and a Funeral was any good or not. Gavin dismissed it as ‘girly crap’ and said that Pulp Fiction was an infinitely better movie, but for a change I stuck to my guns and didn’t back down.
‘I like girly crap,’ I said proudly.
It was the best conversation I’d had in months; best of all because it concluded with a long, luxurious, open-mouthed kiss, pressed up against the coat cupboard in the hall. Stella, disgusted, had wandered off to find someone else to dance with and, for once, I didn’t worry about who.
I naively assumed that because Gavin had mentioned the Barbours in the boot, he’d be able to give us a lift home, and I could pick up my car in the morning; but around midnight he’d looked at his watch, like Cinderella, and muttered about having ‘a bit of business’ to see to. He took my phone number and gave me his, produced a large motorcycle helmet, kissed me effusively on the mouth again, and vanished into the night. By which time I was three glasses over the limit.
I’d repaired back to the dance floor to find Stella, bliss floating around me like a chiffon scarf, and told her we’d get a cab home later. At 3am, however, to my horror, I realised I had left my wallet at home. With a view to f
inding somewhere to crash out, we conducted a thorough recce of the flat, but by that time not one single vaguely soft surface remained unclaimed. Beds, sofas, chairs, even the rugs on the dusty wooden floors were taken by semi-comatose bodies.
So we’d clattered off down the many flights of stairs in our party sandals, Stella so tired that I could tell she was fighting an urge to hold my hand. I remembered trying to get comfortable in the car; then peering over the passenger seat to say goodnight to Stella, who was already asleep, stretched out in the back. The sight of her made me feel horribly guilty at my lapse of responsibility, so I turned back again. Removing my contact lenses, I sat them neatly in front of me on the dashboard, reclined my seat and snuggled down under my spread-out cardigan.
As the tiny transparent blue bowls glinted wetly in the night, caught in the light of a street lamp above, I thought of Gavin’s smile, and the way my insides had turned liquid when he kissed me.
Chapter 5
Six years down the line, I still went weak at the knees when Gavin kissed me. I soon discovered that he was by no means a settling-down, 2.4 kids kind of a guy, but I think I probably intuited that, right from when he first offered me a knock-off Barbour at that party. I did sometimes wish that he would come to the garden centre on a Sunday with me, or even perhaps offer to cook for me once in a while, but a spark of some sort was still there between us. That was the main thing, I told myself.
For ages, I had no idea at all what he saw in me - he was an ex-hardcore skinhead punk, a Bristol boot-boy, all shady dealings and brushes with the law; whereas I was nicely brought up, quiet, and utterly law-abiding, having never even so much as whipped a Sherbet Dib-Dab from the corner shop as a kid, for fear of being caught. Over time, I began to wonder if it was my innocence which appealed to him; my malleability, the way that I could blend, chameleon-like, into most situations. I never embarrassed him in front of his friends, and rarely gave him a hard time about his impossible unreliability. That I let him get away with it makes me sound like a total wimp, and perhaps I was. He was the only serious boyfriend I’d ever had; my first true love.
On the night of The Man on The Train, we were supposed to be meeting at seven o’clock, outside the main entrance of the Royal Albert Hall. The gig started at seven thirty sharp, with no support act, so this was a vain attempt on my part to get him there on time. I’d tried to get Stella to be on standby, in case of a no-show from Gavin, but she wasn’t interested, especially when I let it slip that the tickets were really expensive.
‘How much? And the who?’ she said, predictably. ‘Never heard of ‘em.’
‘Yes you have, Dad used to play their records constantly: surely you remember - “I Can See For Miles”? “My Generation”? “Magic Bus”?’
But Stella just shook her head and looked at me as if I was mad. ‘Emma, I was nine years old when Dad died. I was into Take That, not some crumbly old bunch of hippies that he liked.’
‘Mods, Stella, they were Mods.’
‘Whatever. Enjoy the gig. I hope Gav turns up on time.’
‘He’d better,’ I said, doubtfully. ‘I’ve drummed it into his peanut brain that he absolutely has to be there otherwise I will kill him. Surely he won’t dare stand me up.’ Famous last words.
I loved The Who, although Dad’s predilection for the band was the main reason I wanted to be at the gig so badly. One of his lifelong ambitions was to see them play live, and he’d never achieved it, so I felt as if I was going on his behalf. I supposed this made me rather more emotional than I would have been under normal circumstances. The fact that I also had heinous PMT didn’t help, either. My breasts were practically fizzing with hormones, and before Gavin was even late, little stabs of irritation were already shooting around my brain, fighting for supremacy with delayed shock from the encounter on the tube.
When I finally arrived at ten to seven, the first thing I did was dive into the Ladies and wash my hands, lathering them with so much soap that the whole sink filled up with cheap off-white bubbles. I would have given anything for a nail brush, but had to content myself with rubbing my now-clean hands with paper towels until the paper flaked off and disintegrated. I imagined it taking away the clammy stench of the train man’s dirt-sticky hands, but I still felt tainted. In the mirror above the sink, I looked greyish. The other women in the toilets seemed to be giving me a wide berth, and I wondered if the man’s undesirability had rubbed off on me, too.
Feeling marginally better, I trailed back outside to wait for Gavin. There were hundreds of people milling about; mostly thirty and forty year old ex-Mods who’d dug out their target t-shirts and moth-eaten parkas for the occasion. The Royal Albert Hall loomed above us, dignified and ornate. If a building could look disgusted, then that was its expression. If it was up to me, it said, in the elegant curve of its walls and the soft red decorated brick, none of you riffraff would be allowed in. Crinolines for the ladies and top hats for the gentlemen, please. Not you grubby youths in your anoraks.
As I stood waiting, I listed in my head the reason that I loved Gavin. Every Valentine’s Day for four years he’d sent me red roses. He cried at soppy movies, his bristly head drooping on my shoulder. He listened endlessly to the sorry sagas of my trials with Stella’s teenage upbringing, and offered to num-chuck anybody who she might be having trouble with at school, teachers included. He bemoaned the rapid spread of his bald spot – hereditary - and the ebb and flow of his waistline - alcohol indulgence; plus, he was utterly supportive of my aromatherapy business. In fact, he was still my most loyal customer. I could never resist the look of melting adoration in his eyes when, after a hard day on the run from the Inland Revenue or the local constabulary, he persuaded me to give him an Indian head massage or a Reiki session.
Gavin was self-employed, as a… well, a sort of…. a sort of person who consulted others on how to avoid the Inland Revenue, I supposed. A kind of professional Dodgy Person. Actually, he helped people who wanted to set up restaurants and things; for a percentage of the profits, he sourced properties and arranged finance and wooed investors. That was the official story, anyhow. And for someone with such a dislike of the bourgeoisie, he was surprisingly well-connected. Local businessmen and posh totty kind of adopted him as their token rough diamond.
When Gavin had money, he was incredibly generous, and took me and Stella out for very expensive meals at Pharmacy or The Atlantic Bar and Grill, where he seemed to know everybody. He was constantly nodding and waving and nipping over for improbable little chats with anorexic ladies dressed in Burberry. If he was skint, however, although he would still take me out for dinner, it was more likely to be to a Pizza Express where, as a finale to the evening, he sometimes dragged me out without paying the bill, the angry shouts of the waiters ringing mortifyingly in my ears. Mum and Dad would have hated him, and I wondered why this still bothered me.
Twenty minutes later I was still standing outside the Royal Albert Hall, cold, pissed off, and faintly nauseous. I had stopped thinking about Gavin’s good points, and drifted into some less favourable descriptions.
If I ever visualised the demise of our relationship, I always assumed that it would have something to do with his penchant for standing me up. It was the one thing which had always annoyed me most about him, even more than his dodgy dealings and questionable ethics. There had been so many restaurants on so many occasions; me sitting alone at the table, getting progressively more fed up and miserable.
There was an episode of The Simpsons where the teacher, Mrs. Krabappel, went on a blind date to a smart restaurant, dewey-eyed and hopeful in her best dress. But Bart Simpson had set the whole thing up as a hoax, and Mrs. K. was stood up. You saw her sitting expectantly at the table sipping a drink, surrounded by the other diners, then slumping slightly down in her chair, the candle burning lower, her hair gradually becoming less coiffed; until finally hours had passed, the restaurant was empty, and waiters were putting the chairs on the tables and sweeping the floor around her. The candle
had burned out altogether and Mrs. Krabappel’s head had drooped down onto her folded arms in despair. I always identified completely with that scene.
At seven fifteen I rang Gavin’s mobile - God knows why, because he always turned it off when he was late for something, to avoid getting yelled at. I left a crabby message on his voicemail. At seven forty five I left a really nasty second message, saying he was an asshole, I was going in without him, and I’d leave his ticket on the door although it would serve him right if I flogged it to a tout.
By the time I was ushered into my seat, I’d missed the first three songs, and I was fuming and upset. After the couple next to me had glanced over at me once or twice, I realised that I was muttering to myself.
I eventually simmered down enough to pay full attention to the music, only to be hit by an overwhelming sensation of missing Dad. I visualised him in Gavin’s empty seat, cheering and probably jumping up to dance, infecting everyone around with his enthusiasm whilst almost certainly embarrassing the pants off me. The feeling hit me in the stomach, almost taking my breath away with its intensity, and when The Who played “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, I nearly cried. It was that sense of longing, of desolation particular to being amongst thousands of other people enjoying themselves; and I resented Gavin’s absence even more. At least if he turned up I’d have a shoulder to cry on.
I decided that the encounter on the tube had probably affected me more than I thought. But it wasn’t just the man on the train, or missing Dad, or Gavin’s flakiness, or even the PMT which upset me that night.
It was the teenagers with cancer, for whom the concert was in aid; a small brave gaggle of them in the audience, wearing matching T-shirts advertising the Teenage Cancer Trust, some with headscarves or baseball caps covering balding heads, a few with steroid-puffy faces. They looked bemused a lot of the time, probably never having heard of The Who until a few weeks earlier. The less-well ones had to keep sitting down, assailed by the loud guitars and ecstatic punters; old - to them - people who knew all the words to these boring - to them - songs with endless twiddly guitar solos. Whatever their music of choice was, it almost certainly wasn’t this. Nonetheless they clapped gamely, and smiled a lot, and cheered, when they weren’t looking tired or bemused. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.