Growing Up Twice

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Ayla!’ I cry, unable to repress my dismay. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that has ruined so much of her school life recently. I can’t believe someone as sweet natured as her would inflict the same thing on someone else. Not little Ayla who wanted to marry Gary Barlow when she grew up and used to trail around after us suffering in turn our adoration and annoyance with her toddler devotion.

  ‘Yeah, I know. It’s the worst thing I can do, isn’t? But they were my mates, you know. My only mates.’

  I keep silent and let her talk.

  ‘Well, then there’s this girl in our year, Lucy, she’s nice and that, but she’s almost deaf, you know, got a hearing aid, she talks a bit funny. She’s a bit overweight, not much, but a bit. Well, they just started laying into her every day. Calling her names, writing stuff about her in the bogs, spreading rumours, saying she was a slut. That she’d give any boy a blow-job for a quid. At first I thought it was just messing but yesterday I was with them when they caught up with her in the park. They hurt her. They made her bleed. I’m not like that. I told them I’d had enough of it. Tamsin said I’m a stuck-up cow anyway, she called me a slag. She said if I talked to anyone I would be next. I took Lucy home. She says she’s not going to tell.’

  ‘You have to tell someone,’ I say firmly. ‘You can’t stand by and let that happen to someone else.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Yeah, but they carry knives, Jen, and Tamsin is a real psycho. And I don’t know anyone else. No one else in that school is going to be my friend now. And Tamsin said she’d cut me if I told.’

  My blood boils when I think of some jumped up little bitch, with a penknife trying to lord it over kids like Ayla. There’s no excuse for kids like Tamsin – her parents are working, they live in a nice Victorian semi on Lordship Lane. They go to a time-share villa in Ibiza every year.

  ‘Ayla, why haven’t you talked to your mum and dad, or Selin?’ I’m touched that she came to me, but her family is a close one.

  ‘Because they’d bloody kill me! After everything I put them through, with the old school and the doctors and that. Can you imagine how let down they’ll be if they find out what I’ve done? And they’re really busy with everything right now and I hardly see Selin at the moment, what with everything she’s got going on. And Josh would just go round there and he doesn’t really get it.’

  I can’t imagine Mr and Mrs Selin not having time to talk things through with their own kids, they have each taken time to talk things through with me in the past. But I can imagine how hurt they will be when they find out about this. I can see how difficult it must be for Ayla to tell them.

  ‘You have to tell them, Ayla, at some point.’ I can’t get involved in covering this up from her family.

  ‘I know. I know what I have to do. But I thought maybe if I could sort it out before I told them, they might not kill me so much?’

  I bite back a smile and nod. ‘Go to the head, face out Tamsin and the girls. If they’re carrying knives they’ll be expelled for sure.’

  ‘Excluded. And I don’t think that will make much difference to how they feel about me.’

  ‘Look, Ayla, excuse me for saying this but girls your age are all mouth and no trousers. Girls my age are all mouth and no trousers. They won’t really hurt you, not if you show them you’re strong. And I bet Jamie will still be your friend, won’t he, hey?’ I nudge her gently in the ribs with my elbow and a tiny smile softens the tense line of her mouth.

  ‘Yeah. Jen?’

  ‘What, honey?’

  ‘Will you come with me, Monday morning? To see the head?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ I say, with no idea how I’m going to explain yet more absence from work. ‘And then later I’ll bunk off work a bit early and come and meet you from school, OK? Then we’ll both go and tell your mum and dad about it. They can kill us together.’

  ‘All right, thanks.’ She delicately dabs the end of her nose with the kitchen roll. If I remember correctly it’s hard to be sixteen. You look twenty-five but inside you’re still just about twelve. I’ve always thought that I haven’t changed inside since my eighteenth birthday but looking at her I can see I have, I’ve changed a thousand times, like a butterfly constantly cocooning and emerging. Maybe I don’t have to be stuck in a rut after all. Maybe I’m changing right now.

  I watch Ayla walk down the stairs and give her one last wave as she turns on to the next landing before I shut the door. Striding back along the hallway I push open the living-room door and look at Michael spread out over the entire sofa.

  ‘Right, Cousin Mikey. I’m starving. Go and get us some fish and chips.’

  Chapter Thirty-six

  As soon as I open my eyes I am wide awake, despite the fact that it is Sunday morning and my alarm clock says it has only just gone 7.00. I wish some big-bearded astrophysicist-biochemist person would explain why this early-morning alertness only happens on weekend days next time they’re making mind-blowing discoveries about the universe in a lab in the middle of the Arizona desert.

  I roll over and look at Michael’s back. His broad shoulders and the faint heatwave given off by his body prove tempting and I scooch in behind him and wrap my arms around his chest, tucking my knees into his. He stirs a little and one hand reaches back to squeeze my thigh before he drifts back into deep sleep. One thing about being eighteen; you never suffer from insomnia.

  This weekend we have had the chance to become properly close. We have had the hours and the space to become intimate. We have talked about music (he’s a lost cause), books (he doesn’t read real books but is quite partial to graphic novels), football (he supports Chelsea and wishes he could play like Zola, I support Arsenal and wish Tony Adams had been my dad), and after a brief (very brief) discussion about sexual politics I had teased him about the possibility that he might be a bit homophobic.

  ‘Homophobic?’ he replied with horror. ‘I’m not scared of the fuckers!’ We laughed but I’m not entirely sure he was joking.

  And we even discussed our futures briefly. I asked Michael what he wants to be when he grows up. A rock star. He asked my why I told his dad I want to be a journalist.

  ‘Because I do, one day,’ I’d said.

  ‘You don’t reckon you might have left it a bit late then?’ he asked cheerfully.

  I changed the subject.

  Late last night after I’d taken an excursion to the kitchen to down a glass of cranberry juice he asked me how many men I’ve slept with.

  ‘I’m not telling you!’ I replied, horrified by the question.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked, grinning but perfectly serious.

  ‘Because. Because haven’t you seen those films or read those books where the bloke persuades the girl to tell him how many men she’s slept with and then he feels jealous, sexually inadequate and secretly thinks she’s a slut?’ In fact I didn’t have to watch any films or read any books to garner that piece of experience, I’d fallen into that trap many a time myself. Even Owen, who increased his bedpost-notch tally during our relationship, had thrown a tantrum when I finally told him.

  ‘It’s a lot then, is it?’ Again he adopted this jokey but edgy tone.

  ‘See! See! It is not a lot but it is more than you, OK? It doesn’t go into double figures. OK? Subject closed.’ Of course it does go into double figures, but frankly it’s none of his business. In fact, it’s about fourteen, assuming that I haven’t forgotten anyone (and let’s face it, some of them deserve forgetting). Fourteen that I’ve had actual sex with. People I’ve kissed? That could run into three figures frankly, I’ve always been a fan of kissing. Fourteen sexual partners is not a huge number given that I started doing it twelve years ago. Fractions aren’t my forte but it is a lot less than two a year. Girls are prettier than boys, sex is more available to us, so in my experience no matter which girl you are, if you’ve had more than one partner you are likely to have shagged more people than your current squeeze. The golden rule is never tell him the truth.

&n
bsp; I’d taken his mind off the question with oral sex in the end, which seemed to make him decidedly happy, and after that we drifted off to sleep.

  This morning, with every inch of my physical self screaming, ‘Why aren’t you asleep? You were up most of last night, you will get bags!’ all I can think about is, where do we go from here.

  After all the revelations and discoveries about each other and after all the sex that each time has been a little bit different, a little more emotional and eventually downright fabulous, I can’t pin down how I feel about him. It’s not Creeping Repulsion. I still want him, I’m still happy to be welded to the warmth of his body and don’t have the compulsion to invent an early five-a-side game of soccer for him to go to in the park. (I’m not joking, it’s worked in the past. You can make boys do almost anything with the promise of a game of footy, even an imaginary one. It’s like a metaphysical blow-job. Probably.)

  It’s more a question of what I want from him. When this began I wanted a quickie with a teenager, then I wanted his admiration and reflected glory. Now that I know him properly that’s changed. He’s sweet and inexperienced. He’s not cynical yet or cruel. He’s open and still growing emotionally and probably physically. In some ways I feel like an aged vampire trying to suck back some youth. I am one of the partners he’ll never forget, simply because I’m the first (and really rather good at oral sex). I don’t want to fuck him up for the next one. I love Michael but this is going nowhere, when it comes right down to it. I have always known from the moment I agreed to take him from Ye Olde Parson’s Nose that this would end in tears one day. The only questions are whose tears and when?

  Despite everything, I’m not in love with Michael, I’m in love with the idea of him and what he does for me. I’d really love to be in love with him, to confront everyone we know with our relationship and bravely say, ‘So what? This is love!’ I could blame it on the fact that it’s still too soon after Owen to meet the love of my life, but I know that’s not true. I know you can fall in love seconds after a relationship if you want to, if you meet the right person. I know that all the months we give ourselves to get over someone are really just an excuse while we wait for the right thing and sometimes it takes a year or more and sometimes it takes two days. Michael and I is a lovely thing, a joyous thing but it isn’t the right thing. I decide the only question has become whether I should finish something that makes me happy just because it isn’t quite right, when it is very nearly so.

  He stirs again and his muscles tighten and stretch before he twists to face me, circling his arm around my waist and pulling me as flush to his chest as is possible. He’s no exception in the early-morning erection stakes then.

  ‘What’s the time?’ His voice is husky with sleep.

  ‘Seven-ish,’ I reply, brushing his fringe out of his eyes.

  ‘Seven! I never wake up this early. It must be the irresistible allure of a naked woman in my bed.’ His hand moves from the small of my back to my bottom and we kiss.

  Oh, well. Now doesn’t seem like the right time to think about endings.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Michael is still my boyfriend. The rest of the morning he was so sweet and pleasant that I decided the fact that we are both happy is reason enough to continue. In fact, it took Rosie’s call from the train to chuck a cold bucket full to the brim of reality in my face and to finally get Michael chaperoned out of the front door.

  The moment he left I became instantly and happily exhausted. I flopped face first on to the sofa and have spent the last hour or so drifting in and out of the half-dream world of the EastEnders omnibus.

  ‘Hello!’ Rosie calls down the hall as she lets herself in.

  ‘Mmm,’ I mumble back, unable to muster the energy to take my face fully out of the cushion it’s buried in. She bustles into the room, chucks her overnight bag in a corner and stands in front of the telly, leaning forward to scrutinise me.

  ‘Bloody hell. Have you been shagging all weekend?’ I stifle a yawn and drag myself up into a sitting position. I know that lying this one away is going to be a bit tricky given that my hair’s a mass of knots, I have shadows under my eyes and my mouth is bruised and swollen with kissing.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, casually.

  ‘Fuck me! Who, who was it? Was it Jackson?’ Her voice doesn’t waver but I can tell she wouldn’t like it if it was.

  ‘No, no. It was this guy, I met him ages ago at a party. We just bumped into each other and, well, one thing led to another. Very satisfying.’

  Rosie elbows her way into my sofa personal space. ‘Well? Are you going to see him again?’

  ‘No, probably not.’ This half-truth thing is more complicated than I feel like dealing with on no hours’ sleep.

  ‘Why not? You look like you got great value for money.’

  ‘Oh, I just don’t think I will. Anyway, how about you? Come to any earth-shattering conclusions about your horrible ex?’

  ‘Well, he has got a really nice cottage in the country and lots of money,’ she sighs wistfully.

  ‘That’s reason enough then, get back together with him.’ I shake my head at her with about as much sarcastic vigour as I can muster while suffering from the jet lag of too much sex.

  ‘But after the way he hurt me so much, common sense tells me I’d never be happy. I do still have feelings for him, but even so, I’m sure you’re right, it could never work out,’ she says with a total lack of conviction.

  I flop a comforting hand on to her shoulder and pat her a couple of times with limp-handed apathy.

  ‘Well done. Good girl.’ I pat her again.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not just about my happiness, is it. It’s about the baby too. The baby’s happiness. In the olden days people got married because of babies and they stuck together through thick and thin. And arranged marriages, those people don’t know each other very well, do they? But love grows. Maybe Chris has changed and maybe we might make it work.’

  I blink at her and take a moment to repeat what she has just said to myself.

  ‘Are you saying you are going to go back to the slimy chinless weasel?’ Over my dead body.

  ‘No, Jen, I just haven’t decided yet. You can’t decide things like that in one weekend, you know. I still have to think about it. And please, he’s not a slimy chinless weasel and after all these years you should know that the more horrible you are about the men in my life the more I defend them and the more I like them. You’re practically forcing me back into his arms.’ We laugh and smile during this exchange but each one of us is aware of the serious undertones. Eventually I take her hand and say, as kindly as I am able, ‘Rose, if you go back to Chris it will be the worst thing that you ever do and you will surely live to regret it.’

  ‘Will you still be my friend?’ she asks defensively, expecting the answer we have always given one another. And perhaps it’s because I’m overtired or maybe it’s because I’m angry at myself but I don’t feel like mincing my words.

  ‘I love you, Rosie, but I don’t know that I could face going through all that pain with you again.’ I don’t really know what I mean by that, and I’m honestly rather shocked to hear myself say it out loud.

  ‘So you’re asking me to choose between you and the father of my baby?’ Tears well up in her eyes.

  I shake my head. ‘No, no. Look, I feel pretty strongly about this. I don’t have the answers, but I do know that at some point, in order to be proper friends, we all have to stop being so accepting of each other’s mistakes. I’m only saying what I think because I love you.’

  Rosie nods her head, but looks bewildered and hurt. ‘I see, well, I understand that,’ she says softly. I feel cruel, but for once I’m determined to stand by my convictions. Rosie continues, ‘It’s just that, well, maybe I should have done the same thing the second or third or fourth time you went back to Owen instead of giving you all my support and standing by you no matter what?’ She sighs heavily and eases herself off the sofa. ‘I’m off to bed,
’ she says, and as her door shuts the small amount of distance between us opens up just a little wider.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  The clock on the wall opposite me ticks audibly. If you stare at it for long enough, your brain tricks your eyes into believing that the second hand travels backwards in time, just for one brief moment. And time should go backwards, it must. Everything that has happened over the last few hours is wrong. It’s a mistake.

  Somebody has to correct it.

  Everything started as normal this morning, as expected. It had rained during the night but the morning was bright. When I looked out of the window I could see puddles of blue sky reflected in the wet road surfaces. The leaves on the trees that line the nice end of the road had begun to turn and small flame-coloured piles of leaves had collected in the crevices of their roots. Every single one of these tiny details I remember absolutely.

  Rosie and I went through our breakfast ritual, silently handing each other mugs of coffee, pieces of toast, pots of jam, warily avoiding dicussing Chris. I spent ten minutes sitting over the steam from my drink trying to think of a way to ease the situation but by the time I’d thought of something to say Rosie was in the shower and the door bell announced Ayla’s arrival. I let her up and she sat silently on the end of my bed while I brushed my hair and put on my morning make-up: foundation, mascara, lip gloss. I had decided to get into work late and blame it on the buses, something that’s easy to do when you live in a tube-free zone like Hackney. Georgie hasn’t been near public transport in the last fifteen years at least so I was pretty sure she wouldn’t rumble me. I hadn’t worked out how I was going to get off early to meet Ayla from school yet but I decided to cross that bridge when I came to it.