by Louise Voss
I hadn’t always been quiet, though. In the right circumstances, particularly if alcohol was involved, I’d been described as ‘a right laugh’. It was like unbunging a drain. Once I started to flow, I flowed – only not just a few days after being dumped.
I gazed towards the door, tuning out their voices, willing Gavin to appear and take me away from all this, until the irritating tone of someone’s mobile phone interrupted my thoughts. It would have been so nice if my own mobile was programmed full of the numbers of friends whom I could just call up and invite to join me. I tried to picture it. 'Come on down, if you're not doing anything. I'm just here with Stella and her mates, but they're, you know, so young. It would be great to see you - I could do with a decent chat about something other than Gilles Peterson; no, he's not a weatherman, he's a DJ.' But my phone only had five numbers programmed into it: 'Home', 'Stella Mob,' ‘Gav’, 'Train Enqs' and 'Health Cent.’
It wasn’t that I had no friends. I did have quite a few once, but apart from Mack, whom I saw quite a bit of - partly because he was a neighbour, partly because he secretly fancied Stella, and mostly because we just kind of clicked - I’d seen them only intermittently over the past few years. Between work, Stella, and most of all, life on Planet Gavin, I just didn’t seem to have any spare time. Doing aromatherapy from home meant that most of my appointments were in the evenings, after the clients finished work, and so whenever I had a night off, I only wanted to see Gav.
Plus, he’d been very much a one-woman man; as in, one bird, but loads of mates to drink pints and smoke spliff with. His idea of purgatory would have been to sit around a dinner table with other couples, discussing how nice the hanging baskets outside The Royal George were; or bemoaning the trials of finding somewhere local to recycle plastic milk containers. Gavin was more of the ‘ducking and diving, dodging and weaving’ school of social behaviour, which I had found exhilarating to begin with, then occasionally exciting, and eventually completely frustrating and something he should have grown out of at twenty. Still, he loved me – or so he said. I could forgive him a lot for that.
I wondered, for the millionth time that week, why he’d stopped loving me. If he ever really had loved me. If I was even loveable.
The students were still talking about nightclubs and DJs, and I listened half-heartedly for a few minutes before tuning out again. They might as well have been talking in a different language. Stella went clubbing most weekends – she did all her dancing without me these days. Which was as it should be, since she was grown up now, and had her own friends. Besides, I felt too old to be out till four a.m., gurning manically and spinning on my head. I was much happier curled up on the sofa with Gavin, watching a video. Or at least, I had been.
‘Do people still spin on their heads?’ The words in my brain were suddenly on the outside, without me realising I’d said them aloud, cutting right through an animated discussion about Fatboy Slim’s last album. Everybody stared at me.
‘What?’ Stella wore an expression comprised of equal parts of indulgence and embarrassment, and I felt as if it was me who was the silly younger sister, out of her depths in this big grown-up conversation.
‘Um – you know, I suppose it started with the breakdancers in, what, ’83, ’84, didn’t it? They literally used to spin on their heads, and then it came to be like an expression for what kids did in discos – ‘
Cringing, I heard the words ‘kids’ and ‘discos’ jarring discordantly around the table. I felt about eighty-five years old. I looked at Charlie, the other ‘older’ person present, for support, but he appeared to be intently counting the bubbles in his pint of poncey European lager.
‘No,’ said Stella. ‘Nobody spins on their heads anymore.’
‘I think I’ll just go to the loo,’ I said, standing up and cracking my knee against the edge of the coffee table. ‘Excuse me.’
More than anything, when I was fifteen, I wanted to be able to breakdance. I used to beg Mum to let me rip up the lino in the kitchen so I could carry it around with me in an unwieldy roll, ready to lay down on any sort of surface and do my stuff. I could do a passable back spin, but the first time I tried a swan-dive, where you dived on your front and then slid back up as if nothing had happened – it had been a disaster. The lino I was practising on was still attached to the kitchen floor, so there had not been a lot of available space. I’d banged my head so hard on the side of the fridge that I nearly knocked myself out.
So my breakdancing skills were never honed enough for public display – and I’d have been far too shy to perform, anyway - but it was around that time I began to teach Stella some of the disco moves we later evolved into our own dance routines. I realised that I missed going dancing with Stella.
When I emerged reluctantly from the Ladies’ again, I saw from across the bar that Stella was holding court, talking animatedly, more than half-drunk, waving her slender hands with their heavy silver rings in the air and then momentarily stilling them while she pulled out a cigarette from the pack on the table in front of her. Her hair looked incredible loose around her shoulders, its artfully snaky blonde waves like a sculpted Pre-Raphaelite.
Suddenly, everyone round the table, except Stella, who was still occupied with her smoke, raised their heads and watched me come towards them. Through some strange and unpropitious coincidence all the conversations at the other tables around them abruptly dropped in volume, allowing me to hear Stella's words quite clearly, despite the cigarette flapping between her lips as she held a lit match to it:
'.......well, she’s not my real sister, she's adopted. Oh, and guess what, she plays the recorder! And when she was a kid, her best friend was a gorilla called Betsey!'
It seemed to me, approaching as if in slow motion, my cheeks flaming, that the whole bar turned to see who this strange, adopted, monkey-loving recorder-playing weirdo was. The lack of reciprocal laughter from her friends alerted Stella to the fact that she'd been rumbled, and she leaped up awkwardly as I got back to the table.
'I was just telling them about Betsey, Em. It's such a cool story.'
Through her sugary-liquor flush, Stella's face turned peaky and anxious as she watched me gather up my coat and bag from the depths of the leather sofa.
'Nice to meet you all,' I said, putting one arm into the sleeve of my coat, 'but I've got to go now.' Stella rushed to help me with the other arm, but I violently shrugged her off. I turned to leave, then turned back to the sheepish-looking group of students. 'Oh, and by the way, Betsey wasn't a gorilla. She was an orang-utan.'
I didn’t know why Stella had said Betsey was a gorilla. Our mother had been a zoologist who spent years working on a PhD on the behavioural patterns of orang-utans - not gorillas, or chimps, or baboons; orang-utans. I think I was as much hurt by Stella’s lack of respect for our mother’s research as by the insulting nature of her comment about me.
Mum had based her research project at London Zoo, over time becoming friendly enough with the zoo-keepers to obtain permission for me, aged four, to play with a baby orang-utan called Betsey, so she could observe Betsey's reactions. Thus was the start of a beautiful friendship - although Mum used to joke that the PhD should have been about me rather than Betsey, as I’d learnt to swing on an old car tyre tied to a tree, and deftly peel bark from branches.
Nobody, not even Mum, ever really understood my relationship with Betsey. It went much deeper than the novelty of being allowed in the orang-utan enclosure, with the general public standing outside; the divorced fathers laughing and pointing me out to their enthralled toddlers; kids’ noses pressed enviously up against the thick glass, while Betsey and I climbed on dead tree branches together and fed each other bananas.
For almost five years, until Stella was born, Betsey really was my best friend, my most loyal companion. She showed me unconditional, straightforward devotion, unswerving in its constancy, never prey to the fickle fluctuations marking the relationships of the other little girls in my primary school. Betsey never ca
red about stunt kites or Mousetrap or Wonder Woman, or that you couldn’t join the most popular club in the third year unless you owned Voulez-Vous or looked like Anni-Frid or Agnetha. And even with Mum and Dad long gone, it was Betsey I remembered with crystal clarity, not my parents. The hairy gentleness of her long sinewy arm around my neck, the sweet acrid smell of orang-utan pee on the straw in the cage; her liquid brown eyes and tender rubbery nostrils.
I couldn’t even remember what Mum smelled like. Not even a hint; not perfume, not skin, not even the heavy scent of sleep after all the countless nights I spent cocooned in bed between her and Dad, in those years when I was still an only child; Dad grumbling and fidgeting in his sleep, Mum’s arm flung protectively around me as I lay stretched out in a contented, mattress-hogging sleep. Even their faces had faded, apart from as pictured in the one-dimensional reminders framed on the mantlepiece.
No, when I dreamed of my losses, they were almost always personified by the ugly beauty of big yellow teeth and thick pinky-orange eyelids; gentle long black horny-nailed fingers, like a simian pianist.
What was more, I’m almost sure I wouldn’t have become an aromatherapist if it weren’t for Betsey. Although she couldn’t speak to me, she responded by touch. If I’d had a bad week at school, or felt poorly, Betsey seemed to know before I even told her. I would sit cross legged and talk to her about it, sometimes sniffing as I relayed my current tale of woe - Patricia Jackson hadn’t let me have one of her Blackjacks when she’d given everyone else one, or, I had to have a filling at the dentist, or, Dad had shouted at me for writing my letter to Father Christmas on the back of his passport application form. Betsey would put her head on one side and then she would stroke my arm, or my shoulders, searching for non-existent fleas, grooming me firmly, but with what felt like such love that my childhood grievances or pains would gradually dissipate into a wonderful relaxed catharsis of security.
It felt exactly the same as when Mum used to stroke my forehead when I had a headache, except that Betsey could keep going for ages. The first time Mum saw me, keeled over, fast asleep in the straw, with Betsey still petting me, she thought something terrible had happened, and rushed into the cage to rescue me. I’d woken up in her arms with a bleary, blissed-out smile on my face.
Outside the bar, I heard Stella's stricken voice behind me, reedy in the cold night air. 'Don't be cross, Emma, I only mentioned you were adopted because Lawrence said we didn't look at all alike.'
'It was the way you said it. So you don't think I'm like a real sister to you then? And what the hell did you mean by saying ‘guess what, she plays the recorder’? So what? It might not be the trendiest of instruments, but it relaxes me, OK? You made me sound like a complete freak. Well thanks a bundle, Stella. Now at least I know what you really think of me.'
Stella grabbed my arm again, but I shook her off.
'Get lost, Stella. I've had enough of you and your boring little friends.'
Two men with crew cuts and sports shirts, each carrying laptop computer cases in one hand and bottles of lager in the other walked past and sniggered. 'Girls, girls,' said the shorter of the pair. 'How about a nice bout of naked mud wrestling to sort out your differences? It can be arranged, for a small fee.'
‘Mind your own business, assface,' hissed Stella. They too were the sort of men who would extract an unnecessary amount of comedy mileage on learning that I did ‘massage’ for a living. I began to walk away, but she followed me.
'I'm really sorry, Emma. It was so tactless of me, ‘specially after this whole Gavin thing, too. I promise I'll never tell anyone you're adopted again, not unless you say it's OK. Or that you play the recorder. And of course you’re a real sister to me.’
Stella curled her fingers into my palm, her rings clicking against my one signet ring, left to me in Mum’s will. 'Friends again?’
I didn’t answer, and wouldn’t take her hand. Stella, unaccustomed to conciliation, lost patience. 'All right then, Saint Emma, have it your own way. God, some people can't accept an apology. If you think my friends are so boring, why don’t you go out and get a few of your own? In fact, why don’t you just go and get yourself a bloody life? You know, things could be much worse – you’ve only been dumped, but you’re still lying round the flat like a total martyr all day! It’s just lame.’
'Fuck you,' I said, and wheeled around towards home, walking so fast that I caught up with the two would-be mud wrestling organisers. I barged recklessly past them, almost daring them to say something else to me, but they must have caught sight of my expression, because they wisely refrained.
In the distance I could hear a penitent wailing; ‘Em-ma, I’m sorreee, come baaaack’, but I didn’t turn around.
Chapter 11
I hated arguing with Stella. We hardly ever fought these days; not the way we had ten years earlier. Although, having said that, I was perhaps finally starting to realise that there was a fine line between keeping the peace, and being trampled on.
She did try to come in and see me when she got in from the pub, but I’d locked my bedroom door and pretended to be asleep. I was just too tired to deal with it all. I decided I’d accept her apology in the morning.
But her words had hit home. I made myself get up early the next day - I had to go back to work at some point, and that day was the start of three new baby massage courses, so I couldn’t very well not turn up. Gavin may have dumped me, I’d had a row with Stella, and it looked like rain – and yet somehow I kept seeing the face of the man on the train; the terrible confused expression of somebody who was not in control of their own life. I just kept thinking, I don’t want to become like that.
However much I missed Gavin, it was a new week. I had things to do – more constructive things than locking myself in my room with a descant recorder. I had a mother to start looking for.
Stella, needless to say, was still in bed, so I sat alone at the breakfast table with a bowl of Special K and my novel, Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido, propped up against the teapot. It was the first day since Gav and I split up that I’d even had the inclination to read a book, so I took that as another good omen.
Ten minutes later, I rinsed my cereal bowl under the hot tap and upended it on the draining board, again noticing the muscle definition in my forearms. My burgeoning body-builder arms were the things I hated most about my appearance, and I wondered if it would put off any prospective new boyfriends – not that I wanted a new boyfriend, not yet. It felt weird, to have to view myself through the eyes of a stranger, to see how I rated for sexual attractiveness after so many years of being spoken for.
I mentally listed my attributes and flaws, trying as usual not to compare myself unfavourably to Stella. I didn’t mind wearing glasses, because I knew I had nice eyes - people raved about my eyelashes, and it always embarrassed me. And my body was OK. Not perfect, a bit too pear-shaped for my liking – if I wore my hair scraped back off my head, I thought I looked like a pinhead - but I could just about get away with little tops and tight trousers. I wished I were tall, though, like Stella. We had the roughly the same measurements, but she appeared much slimmer because of the extra four inches she had on me. Still, she had to go swimming twice a week to stop all the alcohol she consumed turning into chins and love-handles and wobbles, whereas the physical effort of my massages kept me fit. Not to mention the added strain of having to heft the Bastard around with me on the tube the whole time.
At least I didn’t need to take the Bastard into town that day. Three hour-long classes of teaching neurotic new mothers how to soothe their windy Baby-Gap-clad bundles into a state of perfect baby relaxation – much nicer than businessmen’s impervious backs. I prided myself on the success of those classes; loved the way that a roomful of fractious hollering could be simmered down into contented gurgles – and that was just the mothers….
Stella was still in the bath, and I wondered if she was trying to avoid me. I stood outside the bathroom for a moment, not barging in like I’d norm
ally have done, just knocking softly on the door.
‘Can I come in? I need to clean my teeth.’
It was funny how arguments imposed such a spiky formality on even the closest relationships. I waited a moment, then heard a watery swoosh.
‘All right,’ she said faintly, grumpily.
I opened the door and went in. Stella was lying in the bath, staring straight ahead of her with a set expression on her face, bubbles hiding her body and bearding her chin, her blonde hair piled up messily on top of her head. She looked red-faced, but I knew that was because she always ran the water in at much too high a temperature. Wordlessly, I went to the basin and began to clean my teeth, relishing the sharp minty taste of a new day. It was true that I was feeling better – but I was still waiting for another apology.
‘Right, I’m off, then,’ I said, in between spitting out mouthfuls of water. I replaced my toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet, noticing as I did so, Gavin’s old spare toothbrush lying next to a box of Neurofen and a pink plastic razor. I picked it up and looked at it, its yellowing splayed-out bristles somehow reminding me again of the man on the train.
‘Won’t be needing this anymore,’ I said, dropping the toothbrush in the mini swing bin next to the toilet, and trying not to think about how much I missed Gavin’s warm clumsy body and his lame excuses. The reflection of my face loomed smearily in the bin’s stainless steel top. All the surfaces in our bathroom were smeary. Neither of us were very adept at keeping them polished, but we couldn’t justify the expense of a cleaner.
Stella turned her head and looked at me for the first time, sweat beading her forehead, her cheeks an unbecoming aubergine sort of colour.
‘I didn’t mean what I said last night.’
I went over and sat on the edge of the bath, getting a damp patch on the seat of my jeans.