Seeing Other People

by Gayle, Mike

  Penny stood up and kissed me goodnight and was about to leave the room when the phone rang. We exchanged wary glances. Good news never comes via a late-night phone call.

  ‘It’s your mum,’ said Penny, handing me the receiver.

  ‘Hey Mum, everything OK?’

  ‘I’ve got some bad news,’ she replied. ‘I’ve just had a call from the uncle of that girl you used to go out with when you were young, you know the one, Fiona Briggs. Well, she died apparently, some sort of accident while playing tennis.’

  ‘Tennis? What kind of accident can you have playing tennis that can kill you?’

  According to my mother Fiona had been playing tennis at her local club and was struck on her temple by a ball which briefly knocked her unconscious. She insisted that she was all right and determined to play on and eventually won the game but fainted an hour later in the tennis club showers hitting her head on the corner of a tiled bench. She was in a coma for a week but never regained consciousness. They couldn’t make any funeral arrangements until after the coroner’s verdict but that came in yesterday – death by misadventure – and the funeral was at St Thomas’s next Tuesday. According to Fiona’s uncle my name was down on a list of people she wanted to be there. My mother paused. ‘Is that something people do these days? Make lists of who they want at their funeral like it’s a birthday party?’

  ‘No, Mum,’ I replied, ‘but it is a very Fiona thing to do. She was a control freak of the highest order.’

  My mum sighed, as though I was speaking gibberish. ‘Well, I don’t know about that but he said that if you wanted to pay your respects you’d be more than welcome.’

  Fiona Briggs.

  Dead.

  By tennis ball.

  There should be a name for it when the first person you ever slept with dies. There should be a word that communicates the fact that a little part of your history is gone forever. That she was a complete and utter nightmare of a girlfriend and that my buttocks clenched at the very thought of her was neither here nor there. She might have been one of the most obnoxious and controlling human beings I had ever had the misfortune to encounter but she was my first, and I was hers, and as such we would always be inextricably linked.

  I was never quite sure how I started going out with Fiona. Looking back it was almost as if one moment I was a carefree sixteen year old enjoying a lazy summer of messing around in the park with my mates and then out of nowhere Fiona appeared with her big hair and fashionable clothes reeking of the designer perfume Poison by Dior. In no time at all I was coupled with Fiona with no means of escape. Nothing I did was good enough for her, she hated my friends and wasn’t all that keen on my family either. During the eighteen months we were together – in which time I endured daily bullying, belittling and deriding at her hands – I attempted to split up with her on at least a dozen separate occasions but it never seemed to stick. Every time I raised the topic of ending the relationship Fiona would invariably dangle the prospect of my gaining access to her underwear to dissolve my resolve and because I was seventeen and shallow it worked every time. Finally however, a fortnight before we were due to go to university at opposite ends of the ­country I received a handwritten note pushed through my parents’ letter box:

  Dear Joe,

  This is the most difficult thing I have ever had to do but I do it all the same because deep down I know you will understand. Of late I have been giving great consideration to my future. Although I care for you deeply I feel we have been growing apart for some time now, and therefore think it’s best that we end our relationship sooner rather than later. Please always think fondly of me.

  Yours faithfully,

  Fiona xxx

  PS. Please do not try to change my mind.

  It was all lies of course. Two days later my friend Tony saw her in WHSmith in Swindon town centre hanging off the arm of Ian Mallander, who was five years older than her and worked at the local B&Q. By rights, I should have been hurt by the deceit she’d employed to get rid of me but I was too busy celebrating to give it a second thought. Finally I was a free man, one who was about to go to university to study English Literature with hundreds if not thousands of members of the opposite sex some of whom I was pretty sure would have sufficiently low standards to actually consider sleeping with me. And I wasn’t going to be satisfied with sleeping with one girl with no standards: no, I was going to sleep with as many girls with no standards as would allow me into their beds and only when I had reached double figures would I even contemplate becoming embroiled in another relationship.

  At least that was the plan. Two days into my university career I was attempting to inveigle my way into a group of female modern language students at the freshers’ night disco when I’d felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see Fiona’s best friend, Sara, accompanied by a pretty, dark-haired girl wearing a vintage floral tea dress and lace-up ankle boots. I couldn’t tear my eyes from this girl. Something about her was so warm, inviting and strangely familiar that all I wanted to do was get to know her.

  ‘Sara,’ I said, forcing myself to sound pleased to see her even though I loathed her as much as she had patently loathed me. ‘How funny to see you here.’

  ‘It’s not that funny,’ she said sharply. ‘You knew I was coming to Sheffield because I told you and where else would a first-year student be on freshers’ night?’

  ‘Good point,’ I replied, hoping that Sara’s friend hadn’t taken me for a complete idiot. I flashed a hesitant smile in her direction and got an equally hesitant one back. ‘Hi, I’m Joe, I didn’t quite catch your name.’

  ‘That’s because I didn’t introduce you,’ Sara butted in. ‘I only came over to tell you that Fiona has changed her mind. She wants to go back out with you. She’ll be up the weekend after next to stay with me so if you know what’s good for you, you’ll meet her outside my halls first thing on the Saturday morning.’

  This was all too much. I wanted to cry. To shed actual man tears that would express the level of desperation I felt. Fiona was like the serial killer in a horror film who just wouldn’t die and stay dead.

  ‘But I—’

  ‘But you what?’ demanded Sara. ‘You want me to pass on some message to Fiona that we both know will make her angry? No, if you have something to say to Fiona, say it to her face when she gets here.’

  Fizzing with frustration at the thought of falling into my ex’s clutches once more I nursed bottle after bottle of Newcastle Brown in an effort to build up a head of steam sufficient to propel me to call Fiona’s parents in the hope of obtaining her number in Southampton. I was going to stop this madness – which I was pretty sure it would be – before it started if it was the last thing I did, but as I reached the wall of payphones that lined the lobby of the union I noticed Sara’s friend standing next to one. She seemed upset.

  ‘Hi, you’re Sara’s friend aren’t you? Are you OK? Anything I can do?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just leave me alone.’

  The tears. The telephone. It could only be one thing.

  ‘Boyfriend trouble?’

  She nodded. ‘Am I that obviously pathetic?’

  ‘Not at all, it’s just . . . look, are you really OK?’

  ‘It’s silly, really. We were finishing the call and I told him that I missed him and he didn’t say it back, and when he finally did say it I knew he’d only said it because I’d made him say it.’

  I winced. ‘The insincere “miss you” is the worst kind. What you really want is someone saying: “All days are nights till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.”’

  The girl looked at me in awe like I’d just grown a foot in height right in front of her. ‘That’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘What’s it from?’

  ‘One of the sonnets, I forget which,’ I lied. ‘For some reason those lines always stuck in my head.’

  The girl grinned. ‘I’m Penny, Penny Morrison.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Penny Morrison,
I’m Joe.’

  We stayed up all night, Penny and I, listening to music in her room and talking about what we hoped to do with our lives. Penny told me that she wanted to change the world and work for a campaigner like Greenpeace while in turn I told her that I wanted to be a writer and move people with my words. When we finally kissed at dawn watching the sun rise over the self-catering accommodation block and I told her that even if I lived to be a hundred I would never forget this moment she smiled and told me she felt the same.

  By the time Fiona arrived on campus a fortnight later Penny and I were practically living together. Although Fiona’s friend Sara was well aware of this fact she clearly hadn’t wanted to be the bearer of bad news and I’d been so wrapped up in Penny that I hadn’t given Fiona a second thought, which was why I was so surprised when I came face to face with her in the union bar while waiting for Penny to come back from the toilet.

  ‘Fiona, what are you doing here?’ There was genuine fear in my voice at the thought of how this whole situation might play out.

  ‘Looking for you,’ she replied tersely as she coolly played with the zip of her snow-washed denim jacket. ‘Didn’t you get my message? You were meant to meet me this morning. Why didn’t you call me instead of making me track you down round this dump? I don’t know what gets into you sometimes. You obviously need me to organise you. Anyway, we’re out of here, so get your things. Sara knows a good place in town that’s doing cheap shots until ten.’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly and Fiona stepped back in surprise. I’d never used that word to her before.

  Her eyes widened. ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘I mean, I’m not going out with you tonight, I’m not going out with you at all. I’ve moved on. I’ve got a new girlfriend.’

  Fiona took a menacing step forward and jabbed me in the chest with her index finger. ‘You don’t get to dump me. I’ll be the one who does the dumping around here so consider yourself dumped. But just remember this, Joe Clarke: I was the best thing that ever happened to you and one day you’re going to look back at this moment and regret how you’ve treated me.’ With that she was gone and it was the last I ever saw of her.

  2

  I felt distinctly odd as a week later I walked up the front steps of St Thomas’s Church in Swindon dressed in a dark-blue suit and black tie. I had been in two minds about the virtue of attending Fiona’s funeral – I just couldn’t begin to imagine how exactly any good could come of it – but Penny was firm on the matter. ‘You have to go,’ she said. ‘As odd as it is that she put your name down on her special list we have to believe it was because she wanted you to be there.’ I’d tried to explain that it was probably part of some evil practical joke from beyond the grave but Penny wouldn’t budge. She even offered to take the day off work to come with me but I couldn’t see any point given the logistical conundrum of arranging childcare.

  In the porch of the church resting against an easel was a large framed photograph of Fiona. It was hard to connect the Fiona in the picture with the girl I had known. In the picture she looked grown-up, calm, confident and self-assured like a newsreader or a politician. She had remained attractive but in the same hard and unyielding manner as when I knew her, only with much less eyeliner.

  Breaking away from the photograph’s unsettling gaze, I made my way inside the church and took a seat on one of the pews at the back, partly because I wanted to be able to make a quick escape once it was all over but mostly because I was afraid that it might be an open casket affair: I wouldn’t put anything past Fiona.

  The service kicked off with a couple of stirring hymns followed by a reading and then the eulogies. The first came from Fiona’s elder brother Frank who had an unfortunate tone of voice, which made him sound bored even though he was obviously devastated. He was followed by Fiona’s boss who used the opportunity to recite some incredibly bad poetry that he’d written over the weekend (lots of stuff about her being ‘a shining star’ and heaven having ‘one more angel’; it was mortifying). He was followed – rather oddly I thought – by the head of the tennis club committee where apparently Fiona spent a lot of her spare time and was ‘admired’ by all who came across her and finally, because Fiona had been resolutely single for many years, the last speaker wasn’t her partner but rather her dad, Peter Briggs, who was just as tall and world-weary as I remembered back when Fiona and I had been together. Mr Briggs barely uttered three words before he was crying. It was awful stuff to watch. Terrible. I felt guilty for even daring to think a bad thought about his daughter. Maybe she’d changed in the course of the last twenty years. Maybe she’d learned her lesson and become a decent human being somewhere along the way. It wasn’t impossible was it? People changed all the time. Mr Briggs concluded his eulogy with a story about how the week before Fiona died he’d noticed how tired she was and had asked her why she didn’t slow down a bit. Apparently she’d laughed and said, ‘You have to make every day count because you only live once.’ To some degree it was a pretty tactless thing to say because you could argue that if Fiona had been just a little less ‘seize the day’ she might have gone for a lie-down after getting hit in the head rather than soldiering on with the game for the sole purpose of thrashing her opponent three sets to two. I don’t know whether it was just because I was having a bad day or simply because funerals always make you think about your own mortality but somehow this stupid, cheesy, piece of homespun wisdom moved me more than I ever could have imagined. So much so that when I accidentally brushed a hand against my cheek as we stood up to sing Fiona’s favourite hymn, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, I noticed it was wet from tears.

  That night, lying in bed next to Penny, my mind was plagued with so many thoughts about Fiona, mortality, and the search for life’s meaning that I barely got any sleep at all. I couldn’t seem to let go of this idea that I was drifting through life like a ghost barely registering with anyone. Penny was absorbed in a demanding job, the kids were busy missing their mum, and I was just going through the motions in a job where no one really appreciated me. I felt like I was sleepwalking through life and crossing my fingers in the hope that somehow it would magically get better all by itself. If Fiona was right, if you really did only get one life, surely this was no way to live it.

  Fiona’s death was the last thing on my mind however as I entered the lobby of the Correspondent on the following Monday morning. It couldn’t be. I had too much to do, chiefly making last-minute preparations for the photoshoot that was happening that day for The Weekend’s alternative Father’s Day issue.

  As feature ideas went it was hardly the most original: corral a selection of photogenic, professional, recently separated fathers together into a photographic studio along with their adorable kids, get in a decent snapper, make-up artist and stylist to transform them into eye candy for the female readers and then once the shoot was in the bag, interview them making sure to gather plenty of background colour and tear-jerking anecdotes about their internal emotional states as they approached this, their first Father’s Day as single parents. The title of the piece (which had come to me in a flash as I’d pitched the idea at the weekly features meeting) was ‘The Divorced Dads’ Club’, and my boss, Camilla, had loved it so much she decided on the spot that it would be the cover story. To be honest I’d been more than a little surprised she’d gone for it in such a big way, but after the meeting she’d explained in her own inimitable way. ‘Truth is Joe, our readers never get tired of seeing good-looking guys who have made a mess of their lives.’

  At the time it had sounded like the easiest brief in the world. As a journalist working in the high-pressure environment of a national newspaper I knew a lot of guys who had made messes of their lives – in fact if I had closed my eyes and thrown a stick across the office it couldn’t have failed to hit a divorcee, recovering alcoholic or budding gambling addict – and some of them were actually not bad-looking. Yet while these guys were ruled out of my search by dint of working on the paper I’d
felt sure that they’d all have enough good-looking but emotionally damaged friends of their own to make the feature a slam dunk. But the more I began to investigate the clearer it became that none of the potential interviewees I dug up quite fitted the bill. I could find good-looking guys who had separated from their partners in the last few months but had no kids; I could find good-looking single dads who had separated from their partners years ago and remarried; and of the three guys who fulfilled the first two criteria, one had a bitter ex-wife who wouldn’t let their kids appear in the feature, the second couldn’t make the day of the shoot because of work commitments and the third turned out to be living in Seville and it simply wasn’t worth the expense of booking flights and hotels just to make up the numbers. And so with the clock ticking I had resorted to the tactics of the truly desperate hack: social networking sites. The message read as follows: Journalist for national newspaper requires recently separated fathers and their children for feature (must be free for shoot on Friday morning). Reasonable expenses will be paid.

  I just needed them all to be up to scratch.

  As the lift doors opened I nodded to the receptionists and was about to head over to Carl Smith, The Weekend’s art editor, who was co-ordinating the shoot when a young female voice called out my name from behind and I turned to see a woman in her mid-twenties looking back at me. She had dark brown hair piled on top of her head in the fashionably untidy manner that seemed to be all the rage these days and was wearing a black jacket and skirt with a cream top and knee-high boots. Her eyes were a deep brown and there were a light scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She looked oddly familiar but I just couldn’t place her.