Growing Up Twice

by Rowan Coleman

  I shake my head and relief floods his face.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Having been a terrible, uncommunicative daughter for some months, I’ve now been at my mum’s house for the last few days, sitting on her brown velvet sofa, watching winter insinuate its way into her garden.

  My brother and mum came and picked me up from the hospital. There was nothing broken, only bruising and a lost tooth, near the back. I keep running my tongue around its empty groove, making my mouth sore. Mum’s taking me to the dentist tomorrow, just as she used to when I was a kid. I don’t want to go, just as I never used to when I was a kid.

  Owen’s on remand. The police are pressing charges. It seems surreal, to say the least.

  The first morning (or was it afternoon?) that I woke up after it happened, I woke up to Josh’s face. We watched each other, solemn and still for a moment, and then he said, ‘I’ll get your mum.’ He leant down and kissed the back of my hand before he went. I haven’t seen him since, he’s called several times, but I just don’t feel as though I’ve got anything to say.

  The hospital had given me something, drugs to make me feel calmer, or to take away the dull throb of pain in my jaw and my shoulder. I felt peaceful and detached, totally fine. My mum cried whenever she looked at my face. It wasn’t pretty, I guess. Swollen and bruised.

  ‘I can’t believe it but they say they need your bed, darling,’ she said angrily, shedding tears on to the sheets.

  ‘They probably do, Mum. I’m OK really, aren’t I? Just a few cuts and bruises,’ I said mildly, hoping to cheer her up.

  She sobbed again and hugged me so tightly that I winced. ‘You’re so brave. When I think about what might have happened it makes my blood run cold. Well, the doctor’s on his way to discharge you so come on, let’s get you dressed.’ I looked at the jumper and jeans I had pulled on so quickly the night before. It still seemed like a dream, even then.

  Then there were the police, statements, checking, double-checking. They wanted to work out exactly what happened when. At that point, for the first time, a deep freezing fear lurched in my chest. I shook my head, no.

  ‘Jenny, we only want to make sure we have as much evidence as possible. This could really help put him away.’

  I shook my head, rigid with horror. ‘No. You found him in my flat, after forcing entrance, beating me up and on the point of raping me. If that isn’t enough, what is? No. Not now anyway.’

  I knew all that would have to come out eventually. I knew without anyone having to tell me that for weeks Owen must have been following my every move. All the time I had my head in the clouds over Michael or Josh he was close behind me, planning his attack.

  Arrangements were made for me, phone calls and leave from work as long as I liked. Adem promised to re-secure the flat, once the police had finished with it. I was taken back to my mum’s house.

  She brings me in a plate of the nursery food she has been feeding me since I got here. Baked beans on toast and a glass of milk.

  ‘Here you go, love. You’ve got to eat. I’ve got you some of those little cakes you like for after.’ She pats me on the arm and sits across from me.

  ‘Fancy watching Neighbours?’

  I don’t fancy watching Neighbours, I fancy turning my face to the wall and closing my eyes, but I know she does. Since her retirement Mum’s TV and dog routine have become pretty much set in stone.

  ‘Yeah, why not.’ I let the taste of childhood sink into me with a comforting warmth and watch the wind beat the rain against the trees outside. Mum’s dog, Horatio, presses his nose up against the glass of the door. He looks at me and Mum in turn through a shaggy fringe, picking his paws up and down in a little dance, giving sharp high-pitched barks which hardly seem fitting for a dog of his age and size.

  ‘Oh you,’ Mum says to him as she gets up to open the door. ‘No sooner are you out there than you want to come in with your muddy paws all over my floor. It’s no wonder this carpet has gone to rack and ruin.’ Her whole face is filled with an indulgent smile as she ticks him off. His big floppy paws leave small pools of muddy water across the carpet on his trip to the kitchen in search of food.

  ‘That’s your lunch, that is,’ Mum says to me. ‘He knows he doesn’t like baked beans really, but it’s the smell. Drives him crazy, but I bet you, if I went out there now and put some in his dish, he wouldn’t touch them, the mad old dog, and I’d end up throwing them away.’ I smile at her. I’m sure she fusses more over that dog than she ever did over us when we were kids. She looks at the kitchen door.

  ‘Oh well, there were a few left over. Maybe I’ll just pop out there and see if he’s changed the habit of a lifetime. Could have changed his taste in his old age.’

  A sudden gust of wind hurls rain at the window pane like a handful of stones, and I shiver. This is it, limbo. I can’t imagine going back to work. I can’t imagine going back to the flat, new lock or no. I can’t imagine leaving the house and going to the dentist, I definitely can’t imagine seeing the counsellor who has been arranged for me. All I can think about right now is this sofa, the trees outside the window and the dark dense clouds above them.

  I had three years to avoid that moment, that look on Owen’s face when he hit me. I can’t be sure if I remember it accurately or if it has become a nightmare vision that has stuck in my memory, but all the same, when I close my eyes, when I see his face, I see that at that moment he wanted me dead. Three years when, almost daily, I had the opportunity, all the clues to see why Owen was all wrong. I had countless chances to get out and be safe. To let him let me go before he got this way. Before whatever anger and hate he had harboured against the world for so long finally crashed into overdrive. I had three years and only have myself to blame. I just didn’t see it coming. I didn’t let myself see it coming.

  I jump out of my skin as Horatio erupts in a barking fit worthy of any Rottweiler and I hear him hurl himself at the front door. I put my plate on the coffee table and hug a cushion to my chest. More police? Owen? The thought, no matter how irrational, starts my heart thundering in my chest.

  ‘We’re not expecting anyone, are we?’ Mum says curiously. ‘It had better not be that bloke from the catalogue again. I’ve told him. I’m not interested in his special offer on shoe storage. Horatio, if it is I give you full permission to bite him.’

  She hauls Horatio back between her legs and opens the door a crack. The dog’s bottom waggles where his tail would have been if he wasn’t an old English sheepdog.

  ‘Hello, darling! What a nice surprise!’ I hear Mum say and then her voice drops to a more confidential tone. Overcome with the excitement of a visitor, Horatio runs back into the living-room and looks for a gift, sees my toast on the table and grabs it, leaving a sticky trail of baked beans as he bounds off to bestow his treasure on the new arrival.

  ‘Oh cheers, mate,’ I hear Rosie say to him in the hallway and she appears before me, gingerly holding a bit of soggy toast between her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Do you want this back?’ she asks me.

  I nod at the dog dancing at her heels. ‘I think I know someone who wants it more.’

  Horatio snaps it out of her fingers and takes it under the table to kill it before eating it.

  ‘I’m making you tea,’ my mum calls out from the kitchen. ‘And there are biscuits. Or cake. Biscuits or cake, girls?’

  ‘Either thanks, Mum.’

  Rosie sits next to me and for a second or two we watch the TV Neighbours getting aerated in swimwear.

  Everyone has called me since I’ve been here. Josh, Selin, Rosie and even Jackson. But I just haven’t been able to talk to them. I haven’t been able to find anything to say. And now Rosie is here, in person. She looks well, the shadows and strain around her eyes seem to have diminished and the small curve of her belly has begun to grow into a rounded bump.

  ‘Do you mind me being here?’ she asks tentatively.

  ‘No, of course not.’ I am genuinely relieved to s
ee her. ‘I mean, thanks for coming. We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.’ Everything we said to each other seems so trivial now. It doesn’t even seem worth talking about. A look between us silently agrees to let it go without discussion.

  ‘Selin said we should wait until you felt like talking about it, or felt like coming home. You know how sensitive she is. But well, I go for the bull-in-the-china-shop approach to friendship. I said, “I have to talk to Jen, face to face. I have to let her know I love her. That I’m still her friend, no matter what.” So I came.’ She shrugs and grins.

  I sink back deep into the sofa. ‘How are you? How’s it going with Chris?’

  Rosie smiles and nods. ‘He’s outside in the car,’ she says. ‘I’m fine, good actually. I’m starting to feel really well with the baby. And Chris … well, things are very good at the moment. I’m keeping an eye out. Taking one day at a time. I’m prepared for the worst but optimistic for the best. I think he might have grown up, you know. Finally.’ I nod and hope with all my heart that she gets what she wants.

  ‘But I didn’t come here to talk about me. I came to talk about you.’ I brace myself for the quiet sympathetic questions, questions I don’t have any answers for. Over the last few days I have gained a fraction of insight into what Selin and her family have had to endure.

  ‘I mean, fucking Owen, what a cunt, hey? What a fucking nutter!’ She looks at me with such incredulous comic horror that I start to giggle.

  ‘I mean, we always knew he was a total dickhead, but fucking wanker or what? Never saw that coming.’ Rosie claps her hand over her foul mouth as my mum enters with a tray of tea and puts it on the coffee table. She looks at us laughing and smiles at Rosie.

  ‘I knew you’d cheer her up, you’ve always had a knack for it. There are the biscuits. Don’t give that dog any, he’s had far too much today already. Well, maybe save him the end of a couple.’ And she’s gone again. Horatio appears from under the table and positions himself between Rosie and me, his brown eyes fixed on each of us in turn. I think about what Rosie has just said and the light-hearted moment slips away.

  ‘Didn’t you see it coming, Rose? I mean, really? I keep thinking I had an awful long time to see it coming, but even when I did, even when I knew it I never let myself see it. I tricked myself into believing that it would just go away. I feel as though it’s my fault.’ I scrape my dirty hair back from my forehead and tie it into a knot to keep it off my face.

  ‘Don’t you dare say that! You must never say that. It’s not your fault. None of us knows what’s going to happen around the corner, none of us. We just hope and pray it’s not going to be something horrific. Dreadful things happen to ordinary people all of the time. Out of the blue.’ She bites a chocolate biscuit in two and then throws half to Horatio who makes it disappear in an instant.

  ‘What a fucking few weeks, hey?’ She bites another biscuit in half, making Horatio’s day. ‘I mean, first of all I’m knocked up with my ex’s baby, who is no longer my ex, then you have a secret affair with a teenager. Selin plans a secret wedding, well, not that it’s a secret any more. In fact, after helping her write out the invitations the other day I can safely say that the marquee will be visible from the moon. And I tell you what, if she manages to get us into those fuchsia bridesmaids’ dresses she’s got her eye on, we will be too.’ She pauses and looks into her mug of tea. ‘And there’s Ayla. And there’s you.’

  I shudder as if someone has walked over my grave.

  ‘Can you believe,’ she continues, ‘that it was only a couple of months ago that we were all sat in Soho Square just like always, moaning about how nothing ever happens? So much has changed. None of us saw any of it coming. But you made it out, mate, that’s the main thing. You didn’t let him win. You should be proud.’

  I sigh heavily. I want to tell her the truth. ‘The thing is, Rosie, just at the point that the police came through that door, no, just before it, I had stopped fighting. I didn’t care what he did to me at that point. I would have let him do what he wanted. I just wanted to stay alive. I just fucking gave up.’ Something from somewhere – shame, horror, fear – overwhelms me. Rosie wraps her arms around me and I sob into her hair. Horatio pushes his head into my lap and leans against my legs in solidarity. I let myself cry.

  Eventually I find I am quiet. Rosie looks at me. Her own mascara has run onto her cheeks.

  ‘You know everything makes me cry,’ she says quietly. ‘You are seeing a counsellor, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m supposed to. I don’t know if I want to.’

  She looks at me with annoyance and reaches for another biscuit. All of them and the dog have disappeared.

  ‘Jenny Greenway, if you cut off your nose to spite your face, don’t come running to me when you wake up in fifty years’ time and find out that you can’t smell the roses, or something.’ I laugh at her practice maternal tone. ‘Seriously though, give it a try, OK? If it’s awful we’ll think of something else to help you. Yoga maybe, or ballroom dancing. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I say reluctantly, spurred on by the prospect of being bullied into activities even worse than therapy.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise, Mum-to-be.’

  She nods with satisfaction and pats her bump.

  ‘When are you coming back?’ She asks the question I have so far managed to avoid.

  ‘Um, well, I’m not sure. I think Mum needs to look after me for a bit and––’

  ‘Yeah, yeah sure, for a bit but it’s your birthday in …’ she does a quick calculation, rolling her eyes to the ceiling, ‘… Sixteen days. And you’re going to be thirty.’

  ‘I know that, thanks, Rose.’ Thirty.

  ‘Well, that’s over two weeks away. Your mum can look after you, you can start the counselling, and then you can come back to London and we can all go out and have a big party for your birthday. Cool. You’re the first to go over the hill, so to speak, so we have to mark it in style. And you owe it to the rest of us to let us see what it looks like. This thirty business.’

  I frown and punch her in the arm.

  ‘Hitting a pregnant woman,’ she says ‘Nice. Oh, before I forget, here’s your post.’ She passes me a couple of bills and two long cream envelopes, which when opened reveal that I’m welcome to work experience at both Time Out and the Hackney Gazette. I just need to call and arrange dates. It’s funny how the future turns up just when you least want to see it.

  ‘I’ll see,’ I say, tucking the letters behind a cushion.

  Exasperated now, Rosie leaps to her feet and stands over me. ‘Were those letters what I think they were? They were, weren’t they? You are going to call them, aren’t you?’ I press my lips together and look out of the window. ‘You don’t see it, do you? Now look, you didn’t let Owen win without a fight that night, you were the one who got through to Josh, you were the one who kept Owen talking, you were the one who kept things calm right until the last minute. So what if help turned up seconds after you could see no way out. You made it happen so that it did turn up. You beat him that night, Jenny, but if you don’t get back your old life, or create yourself a new life, if you don’t take chances like those ones you’ve just stuffed down the side of the sofa, he will have beaten you. For good. And anyway, we all need a good night out, God-damn-it!’

  I sigh, fish the letters back out from behind the cushion and read them again. I’m tired, my legs drag with tension and sleepless nights, my chest is heavy with hurt and my jaw aches. But she’s right. Before this happened I had turned a corner, I was making progress in the world, for the first time in my adult life I could see the way ahead. I don’t want to give Owen the satisfaction of pulling me back and keeping me down. I’m alive, I’m untouched. I don’t expect it to be as easy as just making up my mind to get over it but I’m going to try and make it, I am not going to give up now.

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll be back by then,’ I say to Rosie with determination.

  ‘OK, then. Good.’ She nods and sit
s down again and hugs me.

  ‘You know what I’ve been thinking, about everything that’s happened?’

  I hesitate to ask, but I don’t feel I can politely change the subject.

  ‘It’s like everything that’s happened has been like that thing, you know.’

  I shake my head, mystified. ‘What thing?’ I ask her. I see her pregnancy short-term-memory problem hasn’t improved any.

  ‘Like, that thing that we were going to have when we went away to the country that time to find ourselves. Like the dead barmaid from EastEnders. What was her name? Tiffany.’

  It all becomes clear. ‘You mean an epiphany!’ I say, laughing out loud. Only Rosie.

  ‘That’s it, epiphany. Exactly. I’m not a religious person, but well, I do think that things happen for a reason. Lots of people let their life slip by without realising how precious and rare it is. I don’t think any of us will make that mistake again. Do you?’

  That certainly is one thing I can agree with wholeheartedly.

  ‘No, I don’t think we will. You’re completely barking, but you’re right. We owe it to Ayla, to that baby in there and to ourselves to do our best.’

  ‘Yeah, right on, sister.’

  I link my arm through hers and rest my head on her shoulder.

  ‘There’s just one thing that worries me about going out for my birthday,’ I say to her, quietly.

  ‘What’s that, honey-bun?’ she asks me sweetly.

  ‘I’ve got sod all to wear.’

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Well, it could seem a little over the top for a Tuesday night in Stoke Newington but here I am in the Vortex Jazz Café dressed in an ankle-length deep red velvet strapless sheath dress topped off with a pair of long black velvet gloves trimmed with feathers. It could seem a little over the top but Selin and Rosie were so determined to dress us all up to the nines that it didn’t seem fair not to join in, especially as both of them are decked out in sequins and glitter in my honour, with silk flowers in their hair, and let’s face it, I’ve never needed that much persuasion to go glam. Even the boys – Josh, Dan, Adem and Chris – have made an effort. Some ancient seventies DJ over black jeans and a pink ruffled dress shirt in Josh’s case, but he still looks pretty cool. Pretty cute too.