Another laugh.
‘You think I don’t want you?’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘I’m a bloke, aren’t I? But it matters to me that you’re here too, in this room, in your head, right with me. You’re hot as hell even when you’re high, but I want you awake when I touch you. To know I’m touching you. Not lost out of your fucking mind.’
She bit her lip. ‘How do you do that?’ she said.
‘Do what?’
‘Put me straight without losing your shit.’
I lit another cigarette. ‘I’m screaming at you on the inside.’
We sat in silence for a while. The sun had gone, and the rain must have passed us over. The sky was that deep blue it goes between sunset and darkness. The gloaming, Mum called it once. We’d been sitting on the chalk crown at the top of Wye Downs, watching the houses below turn on their lights.
‘I’d like to ask you something,’ Anna said. ‘If you’ll let me.’
I waited.
‘Your mum. Where is she?’
I heard the birds singing in the trees. Calling each other home, to bed, to rest until tomorrow. The air was very still.
I didn’t answer at first. I continued with my cigarette, feeling it flood my lungs and mind with its deadly peace, then stubbed it out. And then I sat back in the shadows, away from her, and for the first time in my life, I told the story of my mother.
After I had finished, she put her hands over her face and cried.
Early Nineties
Stella was around a lot after it happened. She would do the school run on days Dad was working or when we couldn’t get a lift with another mum. When we needed new uniform, it was her that took us to Marks & Spencer to be fitted, and when there was a cake sale at school, it was Stella who bought one from the shop.
After she drove us home from the circus, we ate our Happy Meals at the table and then Sal and I went to bed. For a while, I sat in my pyjamas on the landing and listened to her do the washing-up. I squeezed my temples between the spindles, closed my eyes, and imagined it was Mum.
She went into the living room to say goodbye when she’d finished, and then she was by the front door, slipping her arms into her coat.
Dad appeared in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. I watched from the landing, the lack of upstairs window light keeping me hidden from view.
‘It went okay then?’
‘Fine,’ she said, doing up the buttons. ‘It went fine. We had candyfloss and I let them have a go on the arcades. I think I succeeded in making him forget you weren’t there.’
Dad nodded, not listening, clinking the change in his pocket. ‘I wondered …’ He scratched his head. ‘What if you moved in? I could make up the spare room nice. It would be easier for you, not having to drive here and back each day.’
Stella put her hands in her coat pockets and sighed. ‘No, Paul.’
He straightened his back. ‘They need you, Stella.’
She gave a laugh, a sad one, and shook her head. ‘No, they need their dad.’
‘What am I supposed to do? I need to work and put food on the table. I can’t be washing clothes and changing beds too.’
She sucked in air through her teeth. ‘You spend enough time at that working man’s club of yours. And you realise I have a job?’
‘Pulling pints at a pub.’ He gave a sarcastic grunt.
‘Yeah, I don’t think tinkering with filthy cars for thirty quid a day is much better, so watch your lip.’ Stella leant down and picked up her bag. ‘I’m happy to help out now and again, Paul, but I do have a life of my own.’
‘It’s not as if you’ve got a family to be dealing with.’
She threw him a sharp look. ‘If I’d wanted kids, I’d have had them,’ she said.
‘Oh, they’d be glad to hear that,’ he said. ‘They think the world of you. Turns out you’d rather be playing bingo and hobnobbing with Jack the lads than caring for your own nephews.’
Stella took out her keys and gave them a little shake. ‘I love those boys more than you can ever imagine, but it’s not me they need. Don’t think I’ve forgotten how it was between you and Dad when we were young. Do you want your boys having the same experience with you?’
Dad looked at the floor.
‘Get yourself a housekeeper,’ said Stella, opening the door. ‘I’ll be by on Monday with a casserole.’
Sal had a way with girls.
At school, he was accompanied almost everywhere by a circle of them. Fashionable girls. You know the ones. They spent half their lives in front of mirrors ironing their hair, puckering lips at their reflections, turning and examining themselves from every conceivable angle. They screamed from the sidelines at football matches and hugged each other when Sal scored. I watched a group of them once get out of a car and wait for the adult to drive away before rolling up their skirts to resemble a belt. They loosened their ties and unbuttoned their shirts. Adjusted each other’s hair. Then they hooked arms and strode into school.
These were the girls we all wanted. They knew their best assets and put them out for us to see. Teenage boys have no imagination. I mean, if you go to buy a sofa and have a choice between the blue on display or a little swatch of green, you choose the blue. Job done. It’s easier to visualise and so the simpler choice. I do know I shouldn’t compare girls to sofas.
Boys are like that, though. They need things spelled out.
But Sal didn’t want any of those girls. I think he liked the chase as much as the reward. It always did seem to me he picked the harder way for everything. But maybe he thought there was nothing left to discover.
His type was small, dark and passionate. The kind who did Theatre Studies and would ring their eyes in black pencil like a petrified raccoon. They always wore black, their hair short and messy or long and wild, and if it wasn’t brunette then they dyed it to be so. Nobody was quite sure where they came in the pecking order of coolness, and this held a kind of allure in itself.
Stacey was the first girl I remember. She’d left our school the year before and got a part-time job in a menswear shop in town. Daz and I would go in and pretend to be interested in the clothes, which were designer and far too pricey for our paper-round wages. The bell would chime as we entered and she’d signal for us to follow her towards the back. I’ve got something that would look perfect on you, she’d say, and she’d make us try on a coat or jumper and stand behind us in front of the mirror, adjusting a sleeve or the fit on our horny teenage bodies. Daz spent an entire term’s wages on a Boxfresh jumper she said made his arms look buff. She must have worked on commission. Daz also didn’t talk to Sal for weeks when we saw him snogging her outside Woolworth’s at the end of summer.
He messed around with a few, but Sal’s first proper girlfriend was Cleo. Her real name was Chloe, but she didn’t think it was interesting enough so she rearranged the letters. He met her at the video store when his stoner manager asked him to interview applicants for a part-time job. Cleo was the first and last through the door.
They spent her first shift arguing over Forrest Gump. It’s shit, she said. Corny as hell. How many world events can they pack into one person’s life? Sal wouldn’t have it: Well, millions of people disagree. I couldn’t care less, she replied. I think it’s shit and so it’s shit. It went back and forth like this until closing time when Sal locked the door and they screwed up against the shelves behind the till where the videos were kept.
That’s how he told it anyway.
They didn’t last long. She was into weird stuff, Sal said after it ended. She’d make him call her by the name of her best friend when they were in bed, and at first he had been into it, but then she began to insist on it every time. She hated being touched, he said, unless he pretended she was someone else. They broke up the following summer when she moved away to study Biomechanical Engineering. She’d changed her name back to Chloe by then.
Tess came next. I liked Tess. She seemed relatively normal after Chloe. She still fitted the mould of da
rk and petite, but there wasn’t the complexity of the others. Or perhaps I didn’t know her well enough. It was clear though that Tess adored Sal, and she would rest her chin on her hands whenever he spoke and cock her head to one side as if she was really listening. I liked that.
‘Tess seems great,’ I said to him once over a pint.
‘Hmm? Yeah, I guess.’ He was frowning at a message that had appeared on his phone.
‘Better than the one you had before. Chloe, I mean. She seems like her head’s screwed on.’
He put down his phone. ‘No, you’re right. Tess is great. I can’t see it lasting, to be honest.’
‘But you seem so great together? Happy, even.’
‘No, we are,’ he said. ‘We are happy.’
‘Is that a bad thing?’
He sighed. ‘I guess some people like the idea of today being the same as yesterday. That they know how tomorrow will be.’
‘There’s a safety in it, I suppose.’
‘Yeah. It would be easier that way.’ He downed his pint.
Sal and Tess were together five years. They were one of those couples that other people wanted to be. The couple spending evenings entwined on the sofa watching old movies. The couple with the same taste in wall colours and which gig to see or which dessert to split. When they shared a curry, Sal dipped his poppadoms in the onions and mango chutney while Tess preferred the yoghurt and lime.
They discussed getting married, having kids or at least a puppy. Sal would bring up the subject of moving away, of buying a round-the-world ticket and seeing which country fitted best, at which Tess would smile and say that a year in France would be quite doable.
Then, one day, Tess arrived home early to find Sal in bed with someone else. She started destroying the apartment, clawing at the curtains and ripping the wallpaper they’d chosen together off in big clumps. Sal tried to calm her, holding tightly to her thin wrists and leaving purple bruises on her skin. He was trying to stop her hurting herself, he said to me on the phone afterwards. He didn’t know his own strength.
They weren’t even screwing, Tess told me later. Their clothes were in a tangle on the floor and the room stank of sex, but it wasn’t that that made her break. It was the way the woman held him, cradling his head as he slept against her chest, his hands tucked peacefully under his chin. He never let me hold him like that, she said. I always wanted to hold him and he always pulled away.
When Tess found them, the woman stretched out her arms and yawned like it was the most normal thing. She threw off their covers and lay naked on their bed, watching and smiling as they screamed at each other.
That was the beginning of Mathilde.
Summer 2003
‘Come in.’
Anna’s house was one of six identical houses on a close in the good part of town. One of those executive detached houses that beams from the front of a brochure or accompanies an article in the Money or Property section. You’ve arrived, it says with its perfect red bricks and white weatherboarding. Aspirational.
She stood in the vaulted front entrance, barefoot, leaning against the door frame. I’d changed my clothes twice, taken two buses to get here, and she said Come in like it was the most casual thing in the world. Like I was her boyfriend.
I closed the door and slipped off my shoes, partly from habit, but also because the polished white marble floor didn’t look like it would take kindly to foreign contaminants. The cold tiles stuck to my sweaty skin.
‘Did you find it okay?’ she said, hands on hips.
‘It was fine.’
‘It’s so out of the way up here. I always wonder if it’s too far for people to come.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘It’s so hot today.’ She pressed the back of her wrist to her forehead. ‘Drink?’
‘Sure.’
I followed her down the hall towards a sunny window at the end. Glass doors led off each side to ever larger rooms, all pale carpets and shiny surfaces. It felt like a stage set of heaven. Bright, white, nowhere to hide.
I watched her walk. Her body looked just as good in denim cut-offs as it had in my bed.
‘Coke?’ she said as we entered the kitchen.
The word echoed around the room. Acres of countertop encircled a giant island in the middle and I gave the stone surface a light tap. Definitely not the cheap stuff.
‘Sure.’
As she opened the American fridge, I glimpsed a reflection of what looked like a shifting ghost in the polished silver door, something uneasy in this picture of calm. It took a moment to realise it was me.
Anna passed me a can and put hers against her forehead, closing her eyes in relief. Her lips parted slightly.
‘Nice place,’ I said, moving my weight from one foot to the other.
‘You think?’ She opened her eyes and gave a bored shrug. ‘If you like that sort of thing.’
‘Don’t you, then?’
She snapped the ring-pull. ‘Who needs two dishwashers?’
That’s when I saw there were multiples of everything. Two ovens, two dishwashers, two sinks, two wine fridges. Above the kitchen island hung three fuchsia-pink pendants, identical, positioned exactly above three bar stools. And then I noticed there was nothing on the countertops. Where is the toaster, I thought. Where’s the kettle and pots of utensils, and the toppling pile of bills?
I looked at Anna, leaning on her elbows against the marble-topped island, and it occurred to me how she also looked out of place, with her chipped nails and warm touch. The only thing that seemed to match was the vibrancy of her red lips against the pendants. And then I noticed she was wearing lipstick.
‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.
I shrugged. ‘Are you?’
She went to the fridge. ‘I’ll make a sandwich,’ she said, taking out the butter, chopped deli ham and a jar of pickles.
I watched as she buttered the bread. She dug the knife deep into the tub and carved out thick wedges that she spread in generous stripes across each slice. There was no stealing butter from one to use on another, of rationing one wedge across two or even three slices like Dad. If she’d been making toast, it would have sat in round, expensive pools on top, refusing to melt. It would have run gloriously down our chins. I buttered bread like Dad, and I wondered how it would be if Anna and I ever lived together. Whether either of us would change our habits to be more like the other, or if we’d argue over how the other person buttered bread.
The sandwich tasted knockout. When we finished, she picked a dishwasher and loaded it with our plates.
‘Grand tour?’ she said, pushing it shut.
‘When do they get back?’
‘Tonight. Their plane lands in an hour.’
She led me through a series of rooms, pointing out random things and referring to her parents as Mother and Father throughout. ‘Inside this are first editions of every Bond book,’ she said, patting the huge safe in the corner of the study. ‘Father’s pride and joy.’ And in the dining room, ‘Where Mother sits each morning with her peppermint tea and Bible study before brunch and a manicure.’
The only photo on display was a large studio portrait in the lounge of the four of them. Mother and Father perched on chairs with their children either side, one hand resting on a parent’s shoulder and another holding the parent’s hand. Their pastel clothes stood out against the dark, mottled background, their faces gleaming with middle-class respectability. It was about five years ago, going by the look of Anna. She was dressed in a purple dress with puffy sleeves and smiled with all the gawk of an early teen. Father was bald with glasses. Mother tanned and hot in that older-woman way. Her brother looked like one of the boys at school who took the piss when I walked in the room. Nike trainers and perfect hair.
‘Revolting, isn’t it?’ said Anna from behind.
‘It’s certainly something.’ I pushed my hands further into my pockets.
‘We look like the family of a serial killer. Mother in her twinset and pearls.
She spent a month laying out different outfits on the bed, coordinating us into her idea of the perfect family.’ She sucked air through her teeth. ‘Look how she had me immortalised. In fucking lilac.’
‘I think you look super hot.’
‘I’m fourteen there, you perv.’
I shrugged. ‘That would have made me seventeen. Only slightly dodge.’
‘Come.’ She took my hand and pulled me towards the door.
It was a house where every room was adorned with a word or catchphrase. EAT in heavily scrolled letters on the dining room sideboard, COOK above the kitchen oven, a cross stitch of RELAX in the lounge. In the bathroom, BATHE floated above the door in complementary hues of blue. A bowl of pebbles sat on the windowsill. ‘Mother collects a stone from every beach.’ Anna turned one over to reveal an inscription in black marker pen. Barbados, ’98.
I wondered if she had a swimming pool. It seemed like the type of house that would. On the walk over, I stopped to buy a cold beer at a newsagent with a billboard outside: Zoo Animals Given Sun Cream & Ice Lollies. We need the rain, I overheard an old lady telling the cashier. My lettuces are dying.
I followed her upstairs, tracing my fingers over hers as she slid a hand along the banister. The feel of her skin against the cold metal felt dangerous, and I boldly reached out to touch her bare waist with my other hand. When she paused at the top, I pulled her back against me and kissed the curve of her neck. I felt powerful, feeling her go soft in my arms. I knew she wanted me, just as I wanted her.
‘Wait,’ she said, pulling away. ‘The tour, remember?’
She pushed open the nearest door. ‘Dear brother’s room.’ I caught sight of a perfectly made bed and a row of what looked like expensive guitars in a staggered display on the walls. It looked uncluttered and unlived in. ‘He’s abroad,’ said Anna. ‘Serving where the need is great.’
‘What?’
She closed the door. ‘Never mind.’
At the next door, she paused to look at me. ‘My room.’
Another Life Page 7