Growing Up Twice

by Rowan Coleman

  It’s not fair, I know. It’s exploitation and it’s probably dreadfully politically incorrect, but at some point during the history of the world evolution decided to turn men into blithering idiots at the sight of a partially exposed mammary and I feel it’s only my duty to make the most of it.

  ‘Neat trick,’ Jackson whispers in my ear as we negotiate our way back through the rows.

  ‘Just lucky, I guess,’ I throw back over my shoulder with a three-cornered grin, but I feel a secret rush of pleasure that he is certainly not blind to my charms.

  When we reach the table Carla is alone, having despatched her minions to a long and thankless campaign at the bar. I take my straw in my mouth with my tongue and smile at her before I take a long suck. Jackson shifts his chair a little closer to mine so that we can talk and I suck a little bit harder on the straw, sinking slightly in my chair so that we are shoulder to shoulder, heads tipped towards one another.

  After this drink, or maybe the next one, I’ll work out exactly what my intentions are regarding Jackson. Michael is somewhere, right now, in some hired-out scout hut in Twickenham drinking cider and black with a gaggle of schoolgirls and somehow his constant presence in my mind and his impending visit tomorrow seem suddenly very far away. I briefly recall an eighteenth I went to all those years ago and the vivid recollection causes me to push the now faint thought of Michael and his party even further into the distance. My glass is half-empty in what seems like seconds.

  As Jackson comes back from the bar with another round we both smile in delight: whoever is in charge of the music has put on ‘D.I.S.C.O.’. It makes the metal table hum and I find myself tapping my foot and singing the words to myself as the mixture of vodka and brandy hits the back of my throat and my brain moments apart. The tensions of the day begin to fade and I get that sudden rush of star-crossed sensation again as the beginning of an evening full of promise and possibilities begins to unfold. Something is going to happen tonight.

  It’s too loud to talk normally and so Jackson leans his lips closer to mine and tells me about his apartment in New York and his dog, Trooper, who still lives on his parents’ ranch in Texas. I get in another couple of drinks and as he reminisces he tips his head back a little and casts his bright blue eyes at the ceiling as if watching a distant movie. As I watch him talk I wonder if, just maybe, something’s going on here and if it is, what I’ll do about it. I mean, the whole e-mail thing. It must have been from Jackson, who else is there? And he is really cute, although it’s not that I’ve just forgotten Michael, well, not exactly. A brief fling with a colleague from overseas, I can’t think of anything more stupid or insane to get involved in, but then again …?

  And then this happens.

  Imagine that you are an Elizabethan playwright. You’ve had this idea knocking around the back of your head for a while about a couple of Italian teenagers who fall in love, but after a nice bit of poetry and a couple of exciting fight scenes they end up tragically dead. And then one day, as you take your morning constitutional before you finally settle down to commit it to parchment, you come across a poster for Romeo and Juliet and you think, ‘Oh well, there’s no point then. Shakespeare’s gone and created a masterpiece again.’ Or, let’s say, you’re a composer in the eighteenth-century Austrian court and you’ve spent the last ten years working really hard on a piece of music that’s going to finally make your name with the Emperor. Just as you think you’ve cracked it, some seventeen-year-old kid called Mozart goes and knocks the Emperor’s socks off with a full-scale symphony and well, you might as well just go home now and hock your harpsichord.

  Can’t quite see where I’m coming from? OK, let’s say you’ve sort of had your eye on this bloke, you’re not sure really, but you think he likes you and you wouldn’t mind seeing if there’s a snog on offer later even if you decide not to take it. You’ve think you’ve just about vanquished the skinny youngster in the non-existent dress when, suitably late, your film-star-beautiful pregnant best friend makes an entrance Grace Kelly couldn’t have pulled off. In about three seconds you lose his sexual attention for ever and get relegated right back down to the role of his girl mate, her less beautiful friend.

  Basically it’s the same principle.

  Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not pissed off or upset or jealous. That would be like getting annoyed because the sun rises or sulking because the tides came in again. Rosie in full sail, happy, glowing and untroubled, is like the brightest star in the sky; all eyes are drawn to her and judging by the way his jaw dropped, swiftly found its place again and then supported his most winning smile, Jackson is no exception. She must have secured that client she had the four-hour lunch with because she looks radiant, as if she has managed to push all her Chris-related dilemmas firmly to the back of her mind. If there is one person I know who’s better at denial than I am, it’s Rosie.

  We’ve laughed about this kind of thing over the years, Selin and I. It’s not that Rosie has had more boyfriends than us, or more opportunity. It’s not that she has ever pinched anyone we’ve fancied. (Well, she did snog Josh back when I had a crush on him, which pissed me off for a week, but that was only because I had pretended I didn’t have a crush on him any more when I did. I slapped her face and we had a laugh about it and then we snubbed him. I don’t think he noticed, he was too busy avoiding us.)

  Plenty of men have been beguiled by Selin’s exotic long-legged grace and flashing dark eyes and been blind to Rosie or me. And I’ve had my fair share of devotion from many a man who goes for curves and curls over the china-doll look. But despite all that, while Selin and I can happily consider ourselves attractive, pretty, charming, sexy or gorgeous depending on the year, the outfit and/or the time of the month, Rosie is properly beautiful pretty much all of the time and Jackson is clearly enchanted.

  Rosie leans over to kiss me and envelopes me in Allure by Chanel. I’ve been hoping that she’s going to give me her half-full bottle but apparently it’s a timeless classic and I’ll have to buy my own. I take my bag off the seat I’ve been saving her and she slides into it.

  ‘Hi, darling. God, what a fantastic day, I’ve landed the most incredible deal. Christmas bonus, here I come!’ She eases off her tailored black leather jacket and smiles at Jackson, seeing him for the first time.

  ‘Well done you,’ I smile. ‘Jackson, this is my flatmate Rosie. Rosie, Jackson who is on a short visit from New York.’ Jackson leans across me to take Rosie’s hand but luckily for good taste and decency he does not kiss it.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, not taking his eyes from her.

  ‘Hello,’ she says in her poshest Lady Di voice. Funny how he always gets that response, even Carla picked up an ‘h’ for him. As they regard each other for a moment longer than is strictly necessary, I look at over at Carla and for the first time ever we exchange a ‘Oh well, win some lose some’ glance and a wry smile.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I ask Rosie. She is wearing a top and some trousers we bought in Formes. The top is orange and red silk and billows out over her tummy before it tapers to a 1920-style tie that fits snugly around her still-slim hips.

  ‘Pretty good actually, might not make it to the club though.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Jackson smoulders at her.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m pregnant, so you know I have to take it easy.’ Absolutely nothing changes in the expression on Jackson’s face but in some abstract way all of his features fall.

  ‘Oh, you’ve left dad at home then?’ he asks.

  ‘Nope, the father and I are divorced.’ I watch this exchange with fascination. I had fully expected Rosie not to mention the pregnancy thing at all in preparation for an evening’s flirtation. Never before have I seen her bring up her divorce in the first few seconds of meeting someone. She usually waits for date three or four. Even more intriguing is that news of Rosie’s divorced status cheers Jackson up just as imperceptibly but equally as clearly as his disappointment had shown in his handsome face. So it’s not the b
aby that puts him off. Does that mean he’s a genuinely nice guy or a cad? Does that mean the e-mail card was a cheap trick or a friendly gesture with no overtones? When he offers to go back to the bar to get Rosie a vodka-free Sea Breeze and another couple of Cosmos I turn to Rosie and say, ‘You appalling slut.’

  She laughs and tips her head back, smiling like a cat after a couple of pints of cream. ‘You fancy him, don’t you?’ she asks sweetly.

  ‘Well, ye-heah! Look at him. But not in a getting-off-with-him way.’ Well, only in a pretend-TV-crush way.

  ‘He is rather scrummy, isn’t he?’ Rosie licks her lips. ‘Mmmm, American Eighties Fox Man.’ And henceforth, thus shall he be known in the kingdom of Rosie.

  ‘Aren’t there rules about pulling when you’re preggers?’ I tease her.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe there’s a section on it in that scary book. Let’s get it out from under the doorstop when we get home.’

  Slipping into good-friend mode, I say, ‘Look, he goes back to New York soon, so just watch yourself OK? Don’t get hurt. You’ve got enough on your plate at the moment. What with crying when the Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes run out and all,’ I say, glossing over the Chris situation. But she knows what I mean. We both watch Jackson return with three tall glasses, turning his fair share of heads on the way.

  ‘Do you know what?’ she says softly into my ear. ‘I’ve got a feeling that Jackson and I will get on just fine.’

  At about ten Rosie announces that she’s ready to go home and Jackson offers to walk her to a cab. As I wait for him to return I look around for the others. Carla is nowhere to be seen and Kevin and Brian are now standing furtively near a group of girls who are determined to remain oblivious to them despite their stage-managed bursts of laughter, gung-ho shoves and reckless drinking. Poor Mrs Kevin and Mrs Brian; I can hardly bear to imagine the state of their bathrooms later.

  Cosmo-fuelled rhythm keeps my foot tapping to some ungodly garage track with some squeaky bird repeating the same phrase over and over again. Her enunciation isn’t great and I might be a tiny bit tipsy but I’m fairly certain she keeps hollering, ‘Take me up the arse!’ That’s the trouble with the music of today, no tunes, no proper instruments and you can’t hear the lyrics. I wonder if there is some kind of exorcism I can have done to rid me of the spirit of Auntie Marge for good? Or maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe I am becoming Auntie Marge. God help me.

  The responsibility of keeping our four-seater table unoccupied by strangers falls heavily on my shoulders and I try my best to look as sulky and as threatening as possible. Some young kid from the Kevin and Brian school of flirtestry winks at me from a few feet away. I glower at him.

  Like a kickback from a tequila slammer, the pain of missing Michael suddenly crashes into my head. He is somewhere with his friends right now pogo dancing as if he invented it to a band called Soggy Wafer or something. Or worse still, Sarah has washed her hair for once and she’s fluttering her eyelashes at him from behind a can of Top Deck. After all, he’s offloaded his virgin thing, hasn’t he? He probably wants to go after scalps of his own now, not spend his time on a tired old has-been like me. Even at this very moment the inexorable wheel of fate could be spinning an empty bottle of Thunderbird slowly towards him, marking him out as the next person to full-on snog Holly, the girl who is good at improvisation.

  I close my eyes and feel the world shift a little underneath me. I might possibly have had one cocktail too many. The only problem with drinking spirits sitting down is that you can never be sure if it’s safe to stand up again. I open one eye to look at the table. It seems to be fairly static, if a little blurred. I count the number of tall empty glasses on the table, divide them by three and wince. There should be a law against making alcohol taste like Ribena. Not only am I suddenly far too pissed to go dancing, I’m also jealously obsessing about a fling, a meaningless thing. A rebound affair, another one; God knows I’ve had enough practice. He’s not supposed to mess with my head like this.

  Missing Michael so badly now, alone and, let’s face it, drunk in a busy bar is like fancying a Mars Bar when spending a weekend at a fat farm. You always want most exactly what you can’t have. (Although personally I have to say I pretty much feel that way about Mars Bars wherever I am).

  I concentrate on his sweetness at our last meeting, his long and ardent kisses in the cinema and his excited and happy tone on the phone when I invited him over tomorrow morning.

  Christ, he’s coming over tomorrow morning! Look at me, I’m ratted. If I go home now and take two paracetamol, drink two pints of water and remember to take my mascara off I might just scrape a pass when I see him. Any other course of action is personal suicide.

  Jackson returns to the table, after a suspiciously long time finding Rosie a cab, and the faint whiff of Allure lingers about his person.

  ‘Come on then, dancing queen, let’s boogie,’ he says, holding his hand out to me.

  That strange little drunk-goldfish-short-term-memory thing kicks in and for a nano second I forget he’s come down the stairs and is standing in front of me. I see him as if for the first time and remember again that he’s been there for the last ten seconds just after I blurt out, ‘Jackson! Thank God you’re here, take me to a cab, I can’t walk.’ Which my time-lagged memory immediately follows up with, ‘Hi, Jackson, do you know? I think I’ll go home. Bit squiffy.’ Even talking slowly so that I can double-check that I’m not accidentally saying, ‘Please take me home and fuck me,’ it seems that I am slurring.

  ‘Oh, baby,’ Jackson laughs and helps me to my feet. My heels give way like Bambi legs beneath me. We try again and slowly totter towards the Everest of stairs that leads to the exit. When we finally make it outside I stand for a moment under the false illusion that several deep gulps of pollution will make me feel better.

  ‘Are you going to blow chunks, honey?’ Jackson says, holding my forehead. I’m dimly, ever so slightly aware, in the last tiny bastion of my brain that remains unassaulted by Ribena’s evil twin, that I shall be so seriously mortified by this moment next time I see him that I’ll go pink and stutter. Please God, let me forget it and let him be kind enough to laugh about it behind my back.

  ‘No, no,’ I say, standing more or less upright. ‘I’m fine, really I am.’ I lift my chin and totter to the pavement’s edge.

  ‘Taxi!’ I yell to a cab-empty street. ‘Where are you, you bastard?’

  Luckily for me, Jackson can hold his drink and it is only through his careful marshalling that any driver worth his salt would let me in the back of his cab.

  It is Jackson who makes sure that I don’t get into any passing Mondeo and holds out for a licensed cab. It’s Jackson who bundles me on to the back seat and interprets my garbled address for the driver. Jackson hands the driver a tenner and a fiver and asks him to make sure I get through the door. The driver swears and Jackson gives him another fiver. All this I am watching as if from a distant universe, or from the other side of one of Jackson’s misty-eyed recollections as he recounts this tale to Rosie next time they see each other. Must not forget to quiz Rosie about this later.

  For a while, slumped low in the seat, I watch the orange blossom of the street lights slide by and then the intermittent blinking of the red door light and then, well, I’ll just close my eyes for five minutes.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  ‘Jenny? Jen love? Jen?’

  The evidence of my head turning inside out, my eyes stuck together by industrial tar and the transplant of the Arizona desert into my mouth tells me that I did not complete any of the three steps that I usually recommend to avoid feeling like an early-bird member of the living dead after a night out. Slowly I sit up. The bed creaks like a coffin lid.

  I focus on Rosie, who is biting back a smirk and holding a cup of coffee tantalisingly just out of my reach.

  ‘Bleah fime if id?’ I try to say before I realise someone has Superglued my tongue to my mouth during the night. I reach for a glass of the night befo
re last’s water and down it. Rosie sits on my bed, unable to prevent a snort of derision escaping from her nose.

  ‘You were in a right state last night.’

  ‘Me? Was I? Weren’t you in bed?’ I say, gradually gaining control of my vocal chords. ‘Give me that sodding coffee, will you.’

  She hands it to me and flops back on my bed with a blatant disregard for my personal safety considering that I’m holding hot coffee and my hand-to-eye coordination isn’t quite in conjunction yet. I retreat as far back from her as possible, huddling against the security of the headboard, and resent her fresh-faced dewy-eyed unhungover look. You tell me: just what are the just deserts for irresponsible sex resulting in unplanned pregnancy? Because if it’s a gaggle of foxy men hanging on my every word, and never feeling shit due to alcohol poisoning again, then line me up for some. I’m going for it.

  ‘I wasn’t in bed. You arrived about ten minutes after I got in. It wasn’t even eleven! You couldn’t get your key in the door and you couldn’t remember the number of our flat so you buzzed everyone until you got me and then I thought you were taking a rather long time getting up the stairs and when I looked, it was because you were crawling. Unfortunately for you, two of our neighbours had a good look too. Anyway, when you did get in you gave me permission to marry Jackson, told me Chris was a Rupert and passed out pretty much as you find yourself now. I took your jeans and top off in the interests of personal hygiene.’

  I peek under the covers and see I’m still in my underwear down to my socks. I hate it when Rosie is the grown-up one. She just milks it so much.

  ‘So have you woken me up this early to fit in all the smugness you can before you go?’