Reasons to Be Cheerful

by Nina Stibbe

  She declared the Ossie ‘gorgeous and erotic’. She’d had no doubts anyway, because April was a pro at dressing women of all shapes and ages. I begged her not to call it erotic, and begged her even more not to try it on because I knew it would look far, far nicer on her than on me–and then I wouldn’t want to wear it.

  She said of course she wouldn’t try it on, partly because she was still a bit wobbly after the prolapse and because, yes, it probably would look nicer on her–forty-year-old women were bound to look nicer in dresses than eighteen-year-olds, they’d had twenty years of practice. The awfulness of eighteen-year-olds in lovely dresses being partly the beauty of them, she said, which was perfect of her and made me feel better. I told her about the dinner dance–reciting the menu and the name of the band, and listing the people I knew to be attending.

  ‘I wonder if Andy will be there protesting outside with a placard this year?’ I said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said my mother. ‘He’s going to a talk at the village hall about a bird hide with that friend of his, Andy Lewis.’

  ‘Andy Lewis?’

  ‘Not Andy Lewis, Andy Harris,’ she said. ‘So many Andys.’

  ‘Probably all named after Prince Andrew,’ I said.

  ‘Not our Andy.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Andy predates Prince Andrew,’ she said, with much pleasure. ‘He’s named after Andrew Marvell. “Had we but world enough, and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime.”’

  On the night of the dinner dance I applied a lot of blue eyeshadow and three coats of mascara. I threw my herringbone coat over the Ossie dress and put the gladiator sandals in a carrier bag, and in the end, apart from the Jesus sandals (which I planned to change out of in the car park, after driving there), I looked very glamorous.

  JP and Tammy called for me in the Stag and I got straight into the driver’s seat. JP made a lot of fuss about my seat position and rear-view mirror because of it being such a long journey. Tammy looked lovely in the Halston jumpsuit and with eyelids so golden they looked heavy and the wet-look mouth of cartoon fish. Her earrings, delicate silver chains with intermittent beads of lapis lazuli, were so long they nestled in the hollows behind her clavicles and reminded me of the time I’d done Andy’s filling, when his had filled with blue/black gravelly water.

  ‘Oh, Tammy,’ I said, ‘you look lovely.’

  Tammy said, ‘Thank you,’ without moving her lips.

  Neither of them complimented me on the Ossie. To be fair, I was wearing socks and sandals for the driving part of the evening, but anyone with a flicker of interest would have noticed the sea-coloured sateen underneath my coat, or my clogged-up eyelashes.

  I drove us perfectly safely albeit rather slowly over to Loughborough and reversed the Stag with ease into a spot behind the Swan Hotel even though it was pitch dark. I switched into my strappy gladiator sandals and Tammy applied even more lipgloss without looking in a mirror and then we chattered as we made our way into the bar. It was then that Tammy turned to ask me if I’d be all right on my own–and noticed the dress.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you got dressed up.’

  And I said, ‘Well, of course.’

  And JP said, ‘You know you can’t come into the dinner dance with us, don’t you?’

  And I said of course I’d known that, though naturally I hadn’t known and felt the pain of embarrassment and devastation in my chest. ‘I’ll just wait here in the bar.’

  Tammy said, ‘But then why are you so dressed up in that funny dress and, oh, my goodness, you’re wearing mascara?’

  And JP butted in. ‘Only dental surgeons and other halves allowed into the dance, I’m afraid.’

  And I said, ‘Yes, I know that. I’m meeting someone for a drink.’

  ‘Non-alcoholic, I hope,’ said JP, and then the pair of them swished into the ballroom and I was left there in my wraparound dress with three or four hours to wait.

  I phoned my mother from the phone booth in the foyer. Andy Nicolello answered.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ I said. ‘Is my mother available?’

  ‘She’s taken Sue the dog for a walk,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  I told him I was at the Swan Hotel in Loughborough, all dressed up but not invited into the dinner dance, waiting to drive JP and Tammy home. I thought he might laugh but he was upset on my behalf.

  ‘Only dental surgeons allowed,’ he said. ‘Fucking BDA.’

  ‘I know, and I’m all dressed up,’ I said, and my voice wobbled. ‘I look lovely.’

  ‘You always do.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you should see me, I have on the sexiest dress you’ve ever seen and no pants.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it sounds wonderful.’

  ‘Why don’t you come over here? We could have a meal. You could borrow the Flying Pea, and buy some Durex on the way.’

  ‘Erm, I don’t know, it’s Monday night, and Loughborough’s a long drive.’

  ‘But I’m in this amazing dress that cost twenty pounds,’ I said, ‘and no one’s going to see it because I’ll never wear it again.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll see what your mum says.’

  ‘No, don’t worry, I was only joking.’ And the pips went and I shouted, ‘Bye, bye.’

  An hour later, Andy walked in. I hardly recognized him. He was dressed smartly in a white shirt.

  ‘I hardly recognized you,’ I said, and he smiled.

  ‘I’m going to ask Wintergreen what he thinks he’s playing at, getting you driving them all the way out here and then just leaving you here, sat like a twat on your own in the bar all night.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘please don’t say anything–I really couldn’t stand the humiliation.’

  ‘But the arrogance of the man.’

  ‘I asked for the driving practice and I expect they assumed I’d go over the park and visit my father.’

  We ordered chicken and chips and drank shandy and chatted about my old life. Somehow my worries about eating in public had disappeared.

  ‘How is Sue the dog?’ I asked. ‘And Jack?’

  We talked about my mother’s sci-fi novel and Andy said it was coming along nicely. I told him about Tina and Junior and every other bit of gossip I could dredge up. I asked about the bird hide and he was genuinely excited.

  ‘We need to raise two hundred pounds,’ he said. While we chatted, I fiddled with the St Christopher pendant which was around my neck, and was reminded that I should present it to him.

  Eventually he said I looked nice in all the mascara and the Ossie. And I asked if we were getting back together. And he asked if we ever had been together in the first place and I said, ‘Very much so–in my mind.’ And he said he couldn’t read minds.

  After the food Andy peeped through into the ballroom and beckoned me over. The banqueting tables had been moved, the lights were low and a band played gentle disco music. The dance floor was busy with couples moving together. I could see Tammy dancing with Bill Turner, both of them smiling, doing the kind of exaggerated dancing you’d see in a 1960s film, which looked ridiculous.

  JP was smooching with Jossy–slowly and out of time with the music, her draped over him, drunk. April from Best End Boutique would have been dismayed at the distinct and horribly unsymmetrical outline of her pants.

  ‘Jump to the Beat’ faded and the band started again with a slower song.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, and pulled Andy in. We danced to ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More’, ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’, and then ‘Sunshine after the Rain’, and after that ‘Don’t Give Up on Us, Baby’, and it was truly the most romantic thing, and seemed to go on and on. Andy was such a dancer, not his steps but the way he felt in my arms and the way we swayed; it was so perfectly nice, like the beginning of a dance I knew so well but had never been taught, like suddenly swimming or flying. And the grand setting, although not quite a sunset beach, or a New York bar, the disco ball scattering light, the trumpets dipping, the sensual brushing
on the drums, and the singer–a woman who reminded me of Shirley Bassey in looks, but Elkie Brooks in voice–and Andy smiling and confident, not watching television, and the Ossie shimmering, it was all glorious.

  JP looked over and saw us, shocked. He opened his mouth as if to protest but Jossy whispered something into his ear and, whatever it was, he forgot about us.

  I could feel something on my hip–it might have been the mini Gonk on my mother’s car keys. Whatever it was, it felt sexual for the moment and I realized that Andy and I had never been together until now.

  As the first of the dancers began to leave the ballroom Andy said, ‘Let’s go.’ I reminded him I had to drive JP and Tammy home. He questioned me–in that male way. He couldn’t understand why I was so obliging when they were such utter cunts. I reminded him that it had been my idea and, if I didn’t take them, how were they going to get back home?

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick you up where Blackberry Lane meets Half Moon Lane.’ He’d be parked in the gateway opposite the Half Moon pub.

  ‘Where Blackberry Lane meets Half Moon Lane–in the gateway opposite the Half Moon Pub,’ I repeated. And we kissed and I’ve never felt so happy.

  I’d driven JP and Tammy home, parked the Stag in the garage, said goodnight to JP and Tammy. They’d had a super night and JP had tried to call me a taxi but I’d told them Andy was picking me up outside the pub at the end of Blackberry Lane. JP frowned.

  I went–as agreed–to where Blackberry Lane meets Half Moon Lane, in the gateway opposite the Half Moon pub, but Andy wasn’t there. I sat on a bench and thought about him and us and it.

  Why had it taken us so long? It was difficult in those days–post-permissiveness but pre-sexual equality–to be sexy or act sexually; and to have sex but also still be you (me) was impossible. I had erotic feelings towards Andy but couldn’t act upon them because, A) I was female, and B) because we’d discussed the workings of the human jaw in a scientific way together and devised a strategy for putting the bins out without my having to go into a dark alleyway at night. We couldn’t cross over into sex because I’d been too real and clever.

  Maybe intellectuals like Adrienne Rich could be clever and sexual. But even my mother, who’d always liked sex, said she had to work herself up to it with Mr Holt now they’d dismantled and fixed a gas boiler together and he’d glimpsed her uterus.

  Why had it been so sexy in the Swan Hotel? Not because I was in the Ossie with strappy gladiator sandals, but because no one knew me, and he’d come all that way to see me in that context, and we’d danced, we’d moved about together and faced each other, with a Four Tops song playing. And now that all that had happened, and here I was waiting for him in the dark, I felt electrified. My smoky breath swirled in the night air and I said out loud, ‘Come on, Andy,’ like a drunk. My elongated words bounced around and I said it again, and then, all of a sudden, I was cold.

  I began walking. There was a shortcut through a housing estate, which I couldn’t take in case Andy came along, which I assumed he would. This was what it was like to be my mother, I realized. Planning to have sex with a man, walking alone in a slinky dress at almost midnight, anxious, bewildered and other things, except I wasn’t drunk. My feet started to hurt as the straps of the gladiator sandals began to rub. But never mind, I sat on a low wall and changed back into my Jesus sandals. The feel of the crisp cotton socks and the padded Clark’s footbed were so soothing and reassuring, I took back all my anger at myself for being such a sensible Jenny and stick-in-the-mud. These socks and shoes could literally save my life and I should congratulate myself.

  I walked along beside the golf course and then reached Allendale Road and London Road and Station Road and soon I was at the front door of the Wintergreen practice, expecting the Flying Pea to be sitting in the lay-by–but it wasn’t. Andy hadn’t arrived.

  Had he rejected me? Run out of petrol? Got catastrophically lost? Crashed the car? I climbed the stairs and considered phoning my mother to see if Andy had gone home but Mr Holt would answer and ask me what I thought I was playing at ringing at almost bloody midnight. I was sure Andy would turn up. He’d driven home to get something: a change of clothes, clean underwear, a Durex, a bottle of Blue Nun.

  I kept the Ossie dress on. I didn’t want him arriving to find me in my Snoopy pyjamas or in the nude. I knew from Woman’s Own that men didn’t find nudity very attractive; partial clothing was much more alluring because they liked to move it aside or take it off and feel in control. I turned up the radio, hoping for some late-night love songs, and lay provocatively on the sofa. Then I fell asleep and dreamt I was knocking on a window and woke to hear the front door banging and the bell. Andy at last.

  I checked my appearance in the mirror. I still looked alluring, more so in fact.

  I trotted sleepily down the stairs, laughing, relieved, saying something like, ‘I thought you’d had a better offer,’ as I flung the door open and saw Mr Holt and my mother standing hunched, in the dark.

  BBC Radio Leicester:

  Latest news just in. A local man lost control of his vehicle at the notorious accident black spot on the corner of Melford Road, Leicester, at approximately 11 p.m. this evening. The man, aged twenty-four, was pronounced dead at the scene. Next of kin have been informed.

  PART THREE

  27. Reverend Woodward

  I got up to turn the radio off. My mother and Mr Holt and I sat drinking tea. We ate the arrowroot biscuits that JP always had in for his sensitive tummy. It was four in the morning. Then five, then six and then, at seven, Mr Holt put the radio on to break the silence and we heard that John Lennon had been shot dead in New York. We listened to the report and switched it off. Mr Holt went to the window. John Lennon was my mother’s preferred Beatle. Her preferred man, actually, and I seem to recall her saying, ‘The waste, the waste.’ And Mr Holt standing at the window just staring at the dark.

  Eventually, after some involuntary calculations and conjecturing in my head, I felt quite certain that even if John had been shot dead in New York before Andy had crashed the Flying Pea, Andy could not have known–because of the time difference.

  ‘Do you think Andy could have known?’

  ‘Leave it, love,’ said Mr Holt.

  Later the same morning, my mother and I waited at the doctor’s surgery. She had Danny on her knee, rocking him and chanting, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’ It was me she was talking to, but of course I couldn’t be rocked, not in Flatstone Village Surgery–Mrs Forsythe was there, and Pop Philips from the grocer’s shop, for various ailments, and a woman with a grizzly, bunged-up baby–and not knowing if they knew anything, or whether they cared or not, about who we were and what had happened, and our involvement, and so forth.

  Our involvement. The notion gave me a jolt. Not ‘Andy’s death’ but ‘our involvement’.

  We’d been to this same doctor’s together a few months previously, my mother and I, before the prolapse. Her being measured up for a new diaphragm and some spermicidal jelly, and me wanting to know if there was a contraceptive pill that didn’t cause loss of libido, pimples or depression. We’d laughed, that time, my mother and I, wondering what Dr Gurley must think of us. Mother and daughter, sexually active but neurotic. Goers.

  Dr Gurley knew what had happened.

  ‘Are you Andy’s doctor?’ I asked.

  ‘The Nicolellos are registered at the practice, yes,’ she said.

  She asked why I thought I might need Valium. I gave her my rehearsed speech. I knew she’d be reluctant–she’d spent years weaning my mother off double doses of the stuff.

  ‘It’s completely normal to be sad at a time like this,’ she said. ‘This isn’t depression or anxiety–it’s grief.’

  ‘I’m not just sad,’ I told her, ‘I’m embarrassed.’ And she looked at me, wrote me the prescription, and said, ‘Come and talk to me any time.’

  I woke in my old room, to what sounded like a trapp
ed bird. An orangey glow came from a little light I now saw plugged into a socket by the door. There was no trapped bird, only a poster of Ian Dury that had come unstuck at one corner, flapping in the breeze from the open window. Andy had been dead three days.

  I knew now why people feared outer space. It wasn’t the going there, of course, it was the knowledge of it and the constant dwelling on it, the eternity, the void, the dark. I believed Mrs Woodward who’d been in the day before telling me, ‘Give it time and your mind will leave it be.’

  She should know–she’d had three deaths, a jilting, a divorce, most of her teeth out and was now married to a vicar. And my mother–whose losses had been profound and complex–told me the same. ‘Give it time, all shall be well.’

  My mother and I decided, tacitly, not to talk about Andy in the early days. Though she was usually very good in crises and tragedies, this one was too close and too awful. And I knew for certain that she must be blaming herself. Not that she’d done anything wrong but, we had to face it, she had lent him the car and she was in those days evangelical about seizing the day and being spontaneous.

  I imagined Andy getting off the phone that evening–the evening I’d been alone at the Swan Hotel in the sea-coloured dress–and saying to my mother, ‘Lizzie wants me to go all the way over to Loughborough just to have chicken in the basket with her because she’s waiting in a pretty dress to drive those idiots home.’ And sighing, as if to say, ‘How absurd.’

  And my mother probably saying, ‘Oh, Andy, go, borrow the car–surprise her, it’s so romantic.’

  And giving one of her talks about life being short, and magical adventures being routinely smothered by the mundane things we have to do and Andy saying that driving over to Loughborough on a dark night was mundane in itself and my mother saying, ‘Find the magic, Andy,’ or something along those lines and sending him off.