by Lucy Dillon
9
Angelica’s ladybird-red coat made a bright splash against the drab concrete of the precinct as she walked through the middle of town. She pulled the collar up against the swirl of freezing air that barrelled between the high walls, direct from the frozen North. A couple of old ladies pushing tartan shoppers turned to peer at her as she passed, which confirmed her suspicion that bright-coloured clothing in Longhampton was still viewed with something bordering on suspicion.
Angelica was pleased that she still didn’t care.
She’d always brightened herself up with red, even when she was a little girl. Looking at the first album last night had brought back a memory she could almost taste of her red summer Clarks sandals – you needed a splash of something bright growing up in the relentless grey, grey, grey of Longhampton in the sixties. The only town in the country that couldn’t be bothered to raise its own Merseybeat knock-offs. Angelica had always had a bit of colour about her. A bit of something different.
Not that it had endeared her to her schoolmates. ‘Olive Oyl,’ they’d called her, on account of her long dark plaits, tied up with a red ribbon. And on account of her skinny legs too, probably, and her pale face. Angelica didn’t care, even then. She knew she didn’t fit in in Longhampton, and she knew she wasn’t going to hang around to be hammered into the dull life open to girls of her age: babies, a till job, more babies, then grandchildren.
She turned the corner, where a Tesco Metro now stood instead of Dixon’s the Fine Jewellers, and found herself slowing down at the old girls’ entrance of her old school. It was bricked up, and a new plastic sign announced it as Longhampton Community School, rather than All Saints’ Grammar, but otherwise, it was as it was back in 1961: a turreted monolith of a school, with high pointed windows, separate entrances for girls and boys, and a dominating need to shuffle everyone in line, until they were all exactly the same, trotting out of the other end like academic soldiers.
Or Tiller girls, she thought, then smiled at the memory of some of her classmates. They thought they were tough, those Evelyns and Pennys, but they wouldn’t have lasted ten back-breaking minutes in a bitchy three-times-a-night chorus line.
To her surprise, Angelica realised the trickle of nostalgia breaking through was actual pleasure that the school hadn’t been knocked down. It proved she’d once been here, and left, and come back her own person.
She stared up at the windows, her eyes searching out her last form room, where she’d gazed out over the terraced roofs of the town from her desk by the window, willing the days away until she could leave, and travel beyond their corrugated limits.
It had been shamefully easy to leave her mum and dad, once the offer of the job in London had come up. The pay wasn’t great, but she’d be able to get some real lessons, and proper experience, more to the point. Her mum, of course, had encouraged her even with tears in her eyes; ‘You have to go, Angie,’ she’d insisted, proud and miserable at the same time. ‘You’ll be able to have lessons with the best teachers, and you won’t get that round here.’
It had been her mum who’d sent her to the ballet class in the Memorial Hall, and bought her the red ballet shoes she’d begged for. Pauline was one of Longhampton’s mighty army of ballroom dancers, although even at twelve Angelica knew it was more enthusiasm than skill that propelled her parents round the sprung Memorial Hall floor. Her bosom, Pauline explained, got in the way, which made Angelica grateful for her own flat chest, but she was happier to have inherited her mum’s small feet.
Funnily enough, though, when a friend of a dancing friend tipped her off about the audition to dance in a West End show called Not Now, Napoleon!, it was Angelica’s dad who slipped her the train fare. He wasn’t exactly a doting father, but then which dads were back then? Angelica couldn’t help feeling that he wanted her to go to London, so he could have Pauline back to himself, rather than because he wanted her to embark on a glamorous life of dance. ‘You’ve always done us proud!’ her mother had sobbed on the platform, as Angelica leaned out of the train window, tearless.
Cyril Clarke always looked a bit peeved at that, and Angelica knew it was because her dancing lessons were cutting into his pools money.
Still, he got pride of place back in the house in June 1966, when Angela Clarke left All Saints’ Grammar after her O-levels, too tall by an inch to be a ballerina, but just the right height to dance in the London shows with three-foot feathers on her head and sparkles on her thighs. In her free time, she followed her mum’s passion, ballroom. What seemed dowdy and a little faded in Longhampton was so different in London, like taking the gauze layer away from a photo album; the costumes were brighter and more daring, the partners didn’t grope you, and the music blared until her ears ached with pleasure, performed by live bands of dinner-suited musicians. And as her mother hoped, she took extra lessons whenever she could, constantly improving herself, polishing up the glamorous new Angelica.
She wrote letters home, telling her mum the dancing gossip, and sent snaps of herself in all the nightclubs, and brought her special ballroom shoes at Christmas. It was a great time to be young in London, and an even better time to be young and dancer-thin, as her Olive Oyl legs fitted Biba fashion perfectly. Her dad wasn’t impressed by the kipper ties she bought him in Carnaby Street; in fact, he’d been almost offended. ‘I’m not one of your nancy-boy friends!’ he’d bellowed, as the highpoint of his Christmas Day 1969, and after that Angelica stopped bothering.
The bell rang for lunchtime in the school, the same shrill ring now that Angelica remembered from forty years ago, and she jumped. Teenagers started to spill out of the doors, their uniform a scruffy parody of the rigid navy and yellow she remembered, and she began walking again, before she realised how young they looked and how old she felt.
Angelica felt little jabs of nostalgia as she walked around the town centre. Her memories were like bumper cars at the fair; she could be hurrying through the precinct, with its modern shops, and then suddenly be jerked back to her childhood by a faded old chemist’s sign above a modern awning, then bumped forward into more recent, sadder thoughts. She’d been reliving the past a lot recently: going through her mother’s paperwork, slipping the browning photographs back into their paper corners, pulling old letters out of their envelopes and sorting out the boxes that had come from the attic. It sounded like a quick job, until you factored in the hours of suspended remembering it set in motion. Every box seemed to give her another week of broken sleep, as the new things she was learning, and the old things she thought she’d forgotten jostled their way back into her dreams.
That’s why she’d called in to see Dr Carthy, for the discreet something she needed these days to help her sleep, as well as something to take the ache off her worn-out knees. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept through a night without some help.
Angelica crossed the main road towards the abbey, where the smarter Victorian terraces started. Their white-painted and respectable fronts rose up above gardens of box-trees and honeysuckle, or, more commonly, newly concreted drives. Doctors’ surgeries now, or dentists, or nursing homes. Maybe Mum would have preferred to stay here, she thought. Angelica had the uneasy feeling that her mother never really settled well in London, no matter what she said. Never got to know anyone properly and then when her hip got bad she couldn’t even come along to the tea dances any more.
Angelica’s brisk steps slowed as the sadness of that final year welled back up, and she had to stop, resting against the sturdy brick wall of someone’s garden.
‘You’ve been an angel,’ her mum had said nearly every day, sitting in her chair by the window, growing smaller and more faint by the week. Angelica had put the CD player of big-band tunes within reach of the arthritic fingers, then turned her easy chair to face the canal, which you could see from the back of her house in Islington. Though it wasn’t a river, like the one that ran through Longhampton, it was something for her to look at. There were usually some ducks. ‘You’r
e a good girl to look after your old mum like this.’
‘What else would I do?’ Angelica had said, every time, impatiently at first, then more sadly. ‘If you hadn’t sent me to ballet, I wouldn’t have been a dancer, and I wouldn’t have gone to America, and I wouldn’t have married Jerry, and I wouldn’t have this house to have you in. You looked after me, Mum. It’s my turn to look after you.’
And they’d shared a look, and thoughts would pass unspoken between their eyes: Angelica never said she missed her dad, because she didn’t, and Pauline never mentioned Jerry, or the woman he’d married after the divorce brought Angelica back to England, or the long months when Angelica had fallen out of touch with everyone. The loneliness she never wanted to talk about. Her mum knew what to say, and what not to – a skill she’d picked up over forty years with Cyril.
Just once, though, when Mum was a bit doped-up on her painkillers, she’d forgotten, and it slipped out like a black beetle scuttling out of a plant pot.
‘Looking after me, like I looked after your little Rosie,’ she’d joked, and the pain flared up in Angelica’s face. She tried to summon up her dancing expression, the wide smile that masked raw feet and an aching back, but her mother had felt her hand twitch, and sensed a sorrow that she couldn’t quite make out in the bad light without her strong glasses.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, love,’ she’d said, contritely. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Me too,’ said Angelica, suddenly Angela again, plain Angela with no fake smile to hide behind.
They had sat, holding hands, not saying anything, but thinking of Pauline’s cold, empty house miles away from Islington’s self-conscious streets of antique shops and pavement cafés.
That was the thing about dancing, Angelica thought, shaking herself back to the present day. It gave you an escape from everyday life, but it filled up every corner until there was so little room for anything else. And your dancing life spilled into your real one, eating it up like a hungry caterpillar.
She tugged on the collar on her ladybird coat, and carried on walking, her heels clicking briskly on the pavement and her sleeping pills rattling in her handbag.
10
In Peter’s sparse community centre consulting room, Katie had taken as long as she could to rearrange herself, her bag, her cup of cold water, her packet of tissues, her chair and her notebook. She’d put off the evil moment for a good six minutes, but the large clock on the wall was very visible to Ross, and, more importantly, to Peter, who was keen to get going with their session. He had the patient look of a man who’d seen a lot of desperate time-wasting, and wasn’t about to start indulging it now.
‘So.’ He smiled patiently, but with a warmth that reached his eyes, unlike the phoney smile Katie had managed to plaster on to mask her nerves. Ross, she noted, wasn’t even bothering to pretend. ‘Shall we make a start? How you met. Who wants to go first?’
Ross turned his puppy-dog eyes towards Katie, expecting her to take the lead. As usual, she thought. Doesn’t he ever think for himself?
Her incipient irritation must have showed, because Peter pounced, casually tipping his head towards Ross. ‘Why don’t you get the ball rolling? I’ve noticed you tend to let Katie take the initiative in discussions. That’s not a great habit to get into, if you want to keep a healthy balance in your relationship, so why don’t we turn that around now? Start us off.’
Good, thought Katie, ignoring the counsellor-speak. So I’m not the bad guy all the time here.
Ross cleared his throat with a dry splutter, his usual giveaway nervous tic, then said, ‘OK. Well, I met Katie in a pub near where I used to work, The Horse. It was a quiz night, and she was there with some girls.’
‘From the office,’ added Katie. ‘First time we’d been. I don’t spend a lot of time in pubs.’
‘Mind if I finish?’ asked Ross.
‘Sorry. Go on, sorry.’
‘I was there with a bunch of old mates from school – we went every week, but to be honest, we were there for the beer, rather than the quiz. I noticed the girls next to us were coming up with answers to everything. Well, one girl next to me.’ Ross’s tensed shoulders began to drop as he got into his story. He didn’t even need to look at the notes Peter had asked them to make.
‘They kept telling her to whisper, but Katie’s got quite a carrying voice,’ he went on. ‘And there was something about the way she spoke that just . . . clicked with me. She sounded clever, and confident. Attractive. Anyway, the pub was packed, and the tables were really close together. She was sitting nearest us, so I kept leaning further and further back until we were almost touching, and . . .’ He shrugged, a shy smile starting in the corner of his mouth. ‘I pretended it was a joke for the lads, the comedy eavesdropping, but I was just looking for an excuse to start a conversation, really.’
‘And you did?’ prompted Peter.
‘Well, yeah. She caught me eavesdropping and had a right go at me, so the least I could do was offer to buy her a drink. Then we got talking and Katie did some kind of deal where they traded some current affairs answers for our pop music round, and . . .’ The smile bloomed into a full-on goofy grin. ‘We swapped phone numbers too. And that’s how we met.’
‘Can you remember what she was wearing?’
‘Yes,’ said Ross immediately. ‘A red V-neck jumper and a pair of black trousers that made her legs look about a mile long. And red shoes, with pointy toes.’
Peter looked genially at Katie. ‘That’s quite a compliment, isn’t it, that that’s still so fresh in Ross’s mind?’
‘He’s a visual person,’ explained Katie, seeing where the discussion was going. ‘He’s meant to notice things like that.’
‘Can you remember what I was wearing?’ Ross demanded.
‘Jeans,’ she said, fairly confidently. Ross always wore jeans.
‘And?’
‘And . . . a band T-shirt?’ she hazarded. In the old days, she’d been fascinated by all the obscure bands Ross loved but she’d never even heard of. He looked cool, with his trendy black-framed glasses, his Japanese jeans and tiny gadgets, but Ross didn’t have any of the snottiness that the ‘cool’ people at college had had. How could he, he’d said, pushing his long fringe out of his eyes, with a name like Ross? She’d loved the way he wanted to share his discoveries, not guard them. He’d even painstakingly copied CDs for her, trying to coax her off Jamiroquai and onto scratchy, yelpy groups he’d seen in sweaty Brixton clubs.
Katie caught herself melting inside at the memory of it. But it was a memory, that someone else might have told her about. When had he stopped being so sexy?
‘Which one?’ he asked.
Without thinking, she answered her own question with a vivid mental image: sitting at the kitchen table, the night before their first mortgage meeting with the bank. She was three months pregnant with Hannah. When they’d argued for the first time about the household budget. And she realised that Ross had no savings, but over four hundred CDs, half of them ludicrously expensive imports.
‘Which band T-shirt was I wearing?’ needled Ross.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she snapped, her brain still struggling with the basic truth that she could hardly be mad at him for something that had been there all along. The sudden rush of remembered anger was as vivid as the early rush of remembered desire had been, but this time it was personal. That same anger was still there. Still there, and growing, and the roots of it were in an anger with herself.
‘What does it matter? We’re talking eight years ago! Ross, I’m so stressed out these days, I can barely remember what I’m wearing now!’
Ross looked wounded.
‘So, how do you remember the evening, Katie?’ asked Peter, turning his attention to her.
She stiffened defensively. ‘Like that. More or less.’
‘Do you want to describe it to me?’
‘Erm . . .’
No, not now I know it’s going to be marked out of ten for romantic value. And then th
ere’s the other thing, the thing Ross hasn’t mentioned yet. The thing that’s going to make me look like a real bitch, even though it’s not relevant . . .
They were both looking at her now: Ross with an intense expectation in his eyes, Peter with a non-committal encouragement.
Concentrate, Katie told herself. Just . . . just tell them the relevant bits.
‘I’d agreed to go to the pub quiz with some girls from my old office, but I had no idea they were going to be so competitive. Ross was on the table next to us, with some trendy-looking guys . . .’
Who in reality had made her feel simultaneously shy and desperate to impress.
‘And, um, as Ross says . . .’
‘I want to hear what you say,’ Peter reminded her with his maddening calmness.
‘OK, well, Ross kept leaning nearer and nearer me, and someone made a big deal about him copying us, so I felt I had to say something. I did wonder . . .’ She paused. ‘I did wonder if he was taking the mickey when he asked if I wanted a drink, because he wasn’t the sort of guy who’d normally . . . I mean, I didn’t think I was the sort of girl who’d . . .’
She looked up, suddenly feeling hot. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘No?’ said Peter.
‘I mean,’ said Katie, gritting her teeth, ‘that Ross was a trendy designer type of guy and I . . . wasn’t. I’m still not. OK?’
‘You thought I was taking the mickey?’ said Ross. ‘You’ve never told me that.’
‘No, well, why would I?’ Katie felt caught off-balance. She’d never actually let that thought slip into words before. ‘Anyway, we got chatting, and he talked me into giving them some answers, in return for some help with the music round.’
‘I did it so I could whisper in her ear,’ added Ross, obviously buoyed by Katie’s confession.
‘So, you were both amazed that the other could be interested in you. That’s . . . interesting,’ said Peter, taking off his glasses.
Oh God, thought Katie, here comes the devastating remark.