Bad Friends

by Seeber, Claire

  On Sunday morning Seb brought fresh coffee and smoked salmon up to bed, and I tried not to make comparisons between this new man and Alex, who couldn’t even boil an egg. He ran me a bath and filled it with bubbles, and then he dragged me out again and made love to me under that wobbly ceiling and I felt like I was starting to heal; like fresh skin was growing over my heart, over the deep chasm where old sticking plaster had once been.

  But as the clock ticked on remorselessly we grew ever quieter. I cooked roast lamb for lunch, and then Seb took Digby outside and threw sticks for him while I washed up. On the radio they were discussing the BBC story again. I laughed at something irreverent Russell Brand said.

  ‘What?’ Seb leaned against the kitchen table and unlaced his muddy boots. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Oh, nothing really. Just this story about TV producers trying to make it look like something happened that didn’t.’

  ‘Why’s that funny?’ Seb looked puzzled. ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose. But it’s so typical.’

  ‘Is it?’ He frowned. ‘It shouldn’t be, though, should it?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I turned the casserole dish over to dry. ‘But everyone knows TV bods make stuff look like they want it to look, surely.’

  ‘You really think poor old Joe Public understands that?’ Seb flung his boots over by the door. ‘Of course they don’t, poor bastards. They’re just the unsuspecting victims of your power.’

  I gazed at him, perplexed. ‘God, Seb. That’s a bit strong.’

  ‘I don’t mean your power, individually.’

  ‘Well, no, I realise that.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He recovered himself a little. ‘It’s just all so bloody manipulative.’

  ‘I had no idea you felt like that.’ I dried my hands slowly, considering his words. ‘I mean, granted, it’s bad. It’s not something that sits comfortably with me, all the manipulation.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked back at me, his face blank.

  ‘Yes, really.’ I was beginning to feel irritated. ‘But come on, Seb, actors are hardly paragons of virtue. You’re all pretending to be something that you’re not.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s for entertainment.’

  ‘So – supposedly – is what I do.’

  ‘Supposedly, Maggie. You said it. I just think it’s – it gets abused sometimes.’

  ‘Can we discuss this another time? I’ve got to go and make the bed.’ I put the tins back in the oven and shut the door, hard. ‘We need to leave in about an hour if we’re going to miss the traffic.’ I strode out of the room before he could answer.

  ‘Maggie,’ he called up the stairs a minute later. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you. Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘No thanks.’ I stomped into the bathroom and pulled the airing cupboard open to find clean sheets. Something fell out with a crash. I picked it up slowly. It was a photo of me and Alex kissing under the mistletoe that first Christmas. I looked horribly adoring. Horribly in love. God knew what it was doing in the airing-cupboard; I couldn’t have put it there. Could I? Anyway, it was broken now, the glass in smithereens – just like our relationship. ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘All right up there, butterfingers?’ Seb was trying for jolly now – too late. I tried to think why this photo would have been in there. I thought I’d removed all traces of Alex months ago, but surely I hadn’t stuffed them in the airing cupboard?

  ‘Okay?’

  I jumped as Seb put his hands on my shoulders. ‘Oh God, you scared me.’

  ‘Sorry, babe. Can I help?’

  ‘You could get a dustpan and brush if you fancied.’ I tried to hide the photo, but too late, he’d seen it.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ he asked calmly, taking the frame from my hand. I still hadn’t spoken about Alex and, fair play to him, Seb hadn’t asked. ‘You’re bleeding, you know.’ He took my scarlet-stained finger and put it to his mouth; he sucked it slowly.

  I breathed deeply. I breathed long and hard, then I looked up at him.

  ‘I was thinking, actually,’ he pulled me into him now, dumping the picture on a chair, ‘I was thinking, actually, you might be coming down with something, mightn’t you? A bug, you know. You feel a little warm.’

  Slowly I ran my hands up beneath his sweater, ran them over his bare flesh. ‘I think it’s called Monday-itis.’ His skin was smooth, his shoulder-blades taut under my hands.

  ‘Ah yes,’ I said gravely, ‘Monday-itis.’

  ‘I’ve heard it can be serious. Let me take a look.’ He led me towards the bedroom, and suddenly he didn’t look that calm any more; suddenly he had a blaze in his eyes that I’d begun to recognise. I felt my legs go rather shaky, so it was lucky that he picked me up and practically threw me on the bed. I’m glad I didn’t bother making it, was my last coherent thought.

  I woke up in Seb’s arms about an hour later. My mouth felt tender and slightly bruised, my skin bore traces of his finger-marks. I felt satiated and slightly dazed. This sex had been different from any we’d had before, a tension in Seb that I’d not known before. He muttered in his sleep now, a lock of hair falling across his forehead, his wide mouth almost smiling as he dreamed.

  The wind had got up while we had been distracted. Downstairs the kitchen door banged in the draught; the dying wisteria tapped against the window. I’d never felt nervous in Pendarlin, it was my true home – but recently I never seemed able to quite relax anywhere.

  I reached for a cigarette but the packet on the bedside table was empty. I suddenly felt starving again. I eased myself out of bed and pulled the duvet up around Seb just as the phone rang.

  I clattered downstairs to pick it up, but whoever it was had rung off by the time I reached it. Letting Digby out and putting Handel’s Messiah on the stereo, I unpacked the remains of the fish stew and whizzed it into a thick soup. I made a spinach and radicchio salad to go with the cold lamb, and then I eyed the pot of double cream left over from lunch and the half-dozen eggs we hadn’t eaten. Far too much food, as usual – I always worried my guests would go hungry, a habit I’d learned from Gar.

  When Seb wandered down a while later, yawning and stretching like a cat, I was just pulling eight perfect little meringues from the oven.

  ‘My, my, Nigella, you have been busy.’ He kissed the tip of my nose. ‘Mmm, whipped cream. I’ll light the fire, shall I?’

  I blushed happily, happier than I had been in a very long time.

  After supper I switched the television on.

  ‘Seb,’ I called, ‘they’re about to review Love All on The 8 O’Clock Show. Quick, you might be on it.’

  He strolled into the room, wine bottle in hand, Digby at his heels. ‘Top-up, babe?’

  ‘Thanks.’ I offered up my glass. Seb sat in the armchair and I watched him for a moment as the television bleated on in the background about Russian art.

  ‘What?’ He suddenly turned to me. The scar above his mouth was paler than the rest of his skin as he smiled. ‘Does my hair look funny or something?’

  I blushed. ‘No.’ I took a big slug of wine. ‘No. It’s just, I was thinking how – how sort of, relaxed you look. Here, I mean.’

  ‘Well, I am, babe. This is a very comfortable chair, I must say.’

  ‘No, I mean, comfortable in my home.’ I was getting a bit muddled now. ‘You just sort of – fit in.’ I bit my lip then. ‘Sorry. You probably think I sound a bit mad.’

  ‘Not very.’ He lowered himself to the floor where I lay propped against the sofa. ‘But I do know where I’d like to fit in.’ He picked up the remote and snapped the television off. The phone started to ring again.

  ‘Leave it,’ I murmured, as Seb idly unzipped my sweatshirt and ran his wineglass down my naked skin. Digby wandered off in disgust. The fire crackled and the wind moaned. Quite soon after that, so did I.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Seb had to be back by Monday afternoon for the tech run of Twelfth Night, so we left at pra
ctically dawn, heading up the motorway to London with Don Giovanni blaring in a vain attempt to cheer us up. The sky was grim and flat and the clouds menacing. I felt a curious tightening in my chest as we approached the capital. Seb read the paper he’d bought at the garage, and then some book about Shakespearean film adaptations. I was wrapped up in thoughts of how much I was dreading going back to work, and how I was going to have to take my chances with Charlie’s threats and get the hell out – although what to, I didn’t know.

  My mood grew ever bleaker as we left my beloved hills and beaches far behind; as the landscape became greyer and more suburban by the minute, sucking us into the metropolis like a huge magnet. Even Digby looked miserable, twitching in his sleep on the back seat. Somewhere in Somerset we slowed behind a convoy of army trucks, crawling beside a great muddy field of grazing horses in their green blankets, and I gritted my teeth as a huge grey stallion wandered towards the fence. From time to time Charlie called my mobile but I ignored it. I’d sent him a text saying I was ill and sleeping.

  Don Giovanni ended. A depressing debate on Radio Four about Care in the Community came on, which I promptly switched off, suddenly aware that Seb was scrutinising me.

  ‘What?’ I felt a prickle of discomfort.

  ‘Nothing.’ He chucked his book into the bag by his feet. ‘It’s just – you never finished telling me about your mum, you know, after you mentioned her the other day.’ That was a polite way of putting it. ‘You never really explained what you meant.’

  ‘Nice juxtaposition, Seb.’ I overtook a rusty Beetle.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He frowned.

  I nodded at the radio. ‘Care in the Community and my mum.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that, babe. Sorry. It was a bit crass, I suppose. I just – it just reminded me, that’s all.’

  There was a pause. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I muttered eventually.

  ‘No, of course not.’ Seb lit a cigarette for me in a smooth gesture that reminded me a bit of Cary Grant. I inhaled deeply and opened the window a bit, the car suddenly full of white noise from the road.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ I asked quietly.

  He craned to hear me. ‘Well, whatever you want to tell me, I suppose.’ He raised his voice against the shudder of the wind.

  ‘Which isn’t much.’

  ‘But you – you did say – your words were – she was mad.’

  ‘She was severely depressed. Not mad. Nowadays, I think they call it being bipolar. It’s quite fashionable, apparently.’

  ‘Like manic depression, you mean?’

  ‘I guess so. But back then, they didn’t seem to be able to get a handle on it. She was misdiagnosed.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘She was institutionalised. Because she was misdiagnosed, they gave her the wrong medication and it didn’t agree with her. It – it kind of made it worse. Turned her into a – a sort of zombie.’

  I felt him trying to find the right words. I sensed he wanted to comfort me, but didn’t know how. I withdrew into myself. ‘I’m sorry, Maggie. I really am,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Thanks. So am I.’ I threw the cigarette-end out of the window. It was whipped against the glass for a moment, a tiny glowing spearhead. ‘She was – in the end, she became –’ the word still stuck in my gullet, even now, ‘suicidal.’

  My phone rang. Saved by the bell: this time I answered it, balancing it precariously between ear and shoulder. It was Sally.

  ‘Where are you? Charlie’s going ballistic.’

  ‘I’m ill.’ I cast a guilty look at Seb, who raised an amused eyebrow. ‘Tell him I’ll be in tomorrow, would you?’

  ‘You do know the Dumped show is on Wednesday, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Sal. I scheduled the bloody thing in the first place. Look, I’ll see you early tomorrow. I’m not feeling too good right now.’

  Seb didn’t mention my mother again. But when we passed the crash site, marked with a plaque, bouquets of flowers and photographs still festooning the grass bank, he put one hand gently on my leg as he gazed out of the window.

  I had last seen my mother when I was thirteen. Swamped by adolescent hormones and utterly confused by circumstance, I must have seemed hideously ungracious. In truth, I was just lonely and more than a little lost; longing for my mother’s love and unable to express it.

  My father collected me from school one afternoon near the end of term. It was horribly humid that day, and I was cross even before I got in the car, annoyed to be missing both my running meet and Madonna on Top of the Pops. Then Alison Jackson, standing by the railings with her miniskirted cronies and their Slush Puppies, started to chant ‘Daddy’s girl’ with blue-tinged lips as I clambered into the Granada. I felt my cheeks flaming with shame; I flicked her a V when my father wasn’t looking, surprised by my own daring. Alison blew a contemptuous pink bubble in response. I stared ahead. I’d pay for it tomorrow.

  We drove out to the home in virtual silence, through the bosky July lanes of Kent, through the tunnels of dappled light falling through the trees; honeysuckle and wild roses peppering the lush hedgerows. The beauty of the afternoon didn’t ease our trip at all. My father stopped to let a sturdy young woman on horseback cross into a field; she waved her crop cheerily, the chestnut flanks of her small mare gleaming like my dad’s cricket bat when it was oiled. I thought of the fat ponies I used to ride as a small child, my mum leaning over the gate, watching oh so proudly; the two of us drinking Tizer afterwards on the bench beside the paddock.

  I thought she’d always be there.

  Why wouldn’t I?

  No one had explained to me how very sick my mother was. Perhaps they hadn’t realised. Gar was visiting friends in Cornwall, unaware of how irrefutably our lives were about to collapse – and my father, my poor father, he was so lost himself, now my mother was in this strange place.

  Walking into her room, I struggled with the fact that she found it hard to even smile, although she sort of tried – and I, well, I couldn’t bear to see the shell she had become. She sat in that wicker chair in the corner like she’d given up, her beautiful red hair limp, stripped of its vibrancy, her body shrivelled. Trapped by her own depression, abandoned by her spirit.

  As ever, my dad had brought her a pile of books, a new tape of piano music, the latest school photo of me, self-conscious and rather spotty, my hair carefully pushed back to show my newly pierced ears. She took the picture and held it in her hands without looking at it. She clutched it hard. Dad talked about our forthcoming summer holiday to Brittany; tried to joke with my mother, asking her if she was looking forward to snails and frogs’ legs, telling her he’d ordered up the sun especially. At one point she held her hand out to him and he took it gladly. But it wasn’t long before her fingers slipped from his grasp again. She was so monosyllabic, kind of curled up and sunken, that in the end he gave up entirely.

  ‘I’ll go and get some tea, shall I? I’m parched.’ He was too bright, practically backing out the room, his angular frame starting to stoop as he always would from this time on.

  As the door swung shut, my mother looked at me properly. I picked at the hem of my school skirt.

  ‘Come here, Maggie, would you?’ Her voice was little more than a whisper as she patted the bed next to her, placing my photo carefully on the table. I scuffed my way across the room and sat. She took my hand in her skeletal one.

  ‘Did you see my earrings?’ I twisted my head this way and that to show off my gold studs proudly.

  ‘Oh, they’re lovely.’

  Actually my ears were red and angry, a crust forming round the small studs every night.

  ‘I wanted – I wish I could have taken you,’ she said, forlorn.

  ‘S’all right.’ I was generous. ‘Gar came. And Bel. They do crosses on your ears with felt-tips, did you know? It did hurt.’ I spun one round. ‘I didn’t cry, though.’

  ‘Darling Maggie, you know –’ she cleared her throat like it actu
ally hurt her to, ‘you do know how much I love you, don’t you?’

  ‘S’pose,’ I mumbled. I rolled one white sock up; I rolled it down again. I looked at a younger me, at the happy family photos of us being normal. I studied the watercolour Gar had painted for her only daughter of her beloved Pendarlin, trying to bring the light back to her life. I looked anywhere but into my mother’s great blue eyes because I couldn’t stand to see the pain.

  Her grip tightened on my hand. It was the most energy I’d known her to exert for months, but I didn’t understand. Freeing myself, I crossed the room to fiddle with the net curtain.

  ‘You’ve got so tall. You’re getting like a willow.’

  ‘I know. Dad says I’ve got to stop growing cos I’m costing him too much. He has to keep buying me new uniforms.’

  I thought my mum looked anxious then. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I think he’s only joking.’

  Although the windows were all open, there was a peculiar calmness here; an enforced silence. An enervated hush. The perfectly shorn lawn was green like the glassy emeralds in my mother’s engagement ring. A few croquet hoops were placed at strange angles, but no one played. A bee hummed across the quiet, and, unnerved by his lone noise, hummed off again.

  ‘My Maggie.’

  Why didn’t she tell me she was saying goodbye? Sometimes still I wake in the middle of the night and I want to scream at her. If only I’d known.

  I could have stopped her.

  Couldn’t I?

  Instead, I watched an old lady sitting in a stripy deckchair on the lawn. She seemed quite normal; a grandmotherly type, though not like Gar. But gradually I saw that she muttered to herself, constantly adjusting her straw hat like it hurt her.