Going Out

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘What about the van?’ Julie says, getting out and standing next to them. ‘It’s yours and . . .’

  ‘Just look after it for me,’ Chantel says. ‘We’ll be back. Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘OK,’ Julie says. Her voice echoes in the half-empty carpark. ‘Well, have fun.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘And send me a postcard,’ Julie says.

  Chantel throws her arms around Julie again. ‘I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?’ she whispers into Julie’s hair.

  Julie thinks about Chantel’s grandmother. ‘Yes,’ she whispers back.

  ‘Well,’ Chantel says, pulling away and smiling at Julie. ‘See ya.’

  ‘Yeah, bye,’ says David.

  Then David and Chantel walk off with their little bags and their travel tickets without looking back.

  Chapter 41

  ‘So what was it like going back to Windy Close once you’d been at Greenham Common for a year?’ Charlotte asks Helen.

  Luke’s in the kitchen reading one of the Sunday supplements. He’s wearing the same fleece and tracksuit bottoms he had on yesterday. But no space-suit today, thank God. Charlotte and Helen are standing by the sink, sipping tea and talking. Helen’s been describing how, after her degree, she desperately wanted to be ‘free’, and went travelling to India and then spent some time at Greenham Common. She bought this house from one of the Greenham women, a few years later, and her connection to Greenham was the reason for her wanting to settle in this area. She’s working as a therapist now.

  ‘It felt incredibly strange,’ Helen says. ‘I never felt comfortable there. It was too . . . I don’t know. Too trivial and money-obsessed and, well, too Essex for me.’

  ‘Why did you move there in the first place?’

  She shrugs. ‘Doug liked it. He’s from Essex and he always wanted to move back there. One day he inherited some money; the next he started looking for jobs in the southeast. He spent the money on the house. He said we had to grow up.’

  Charlotte raises her eyebrows. ‘Grow up?’

  Helen laughs. ‘Yep. We were about your age at the time.’

  ‘God. That’s insane.’

  ‘I know. I was just starting a college course as well. I wasn’t quite ready to grow up and play house and worry what the neighbours thought. It was like living in a soap opera. I kept expecting people to come round with a casserole or a cake recipe or something. At that age I still wanted to smoke dope and listen to John Lennon.’

  ‘I suppose having a kid didn’t help?’

  ‘What, Julie? I wanted to take her to Greenham with me – in fact, I wanted to take her everywhere with me – but Doug said she couldn’t afford to miss all that school and I’d probably get into trouble for taking her away in the middle of a term and so on. Also, she wasn’t interested in any of that sort of thing. Do you know her name’s really Juliet? She shortened it to Julie when she was about eight because it was more normal. She always wanted normal clothes and to be just like everyone else. To be honest, we didn’t completely click when she was a child.’

  ‘Juliet?’ Charlotte says. Luke catches her eye. ‘Did you know this?’ she asks him.

  He shakes his head. ‘Nope. Juliet? Huh.’

  ‘Does anyone get on with their kids, though?’ Charlotte asks Helen. ‘I mean, if you’re a – excuse the expression – hippy parent, in particular. Don’t all kids just want to be normal and embarrass you by wanting to go to McDonald’s and wear Adidas and listen to pop music?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Helen says sadly. ‘I had friends who had great kids.’

  ‘And Julie wasn’t a great kid?’ Charlotte says. ‘I can’t believe that.’

  Helen looks thoughtful. ‘It wasn’t just that,’ she says. ‘You know the most terrifying thing about having kids? It’s that you could fail, somehow, and lose them. And then one day it happens; you realise that your worst fear is coming true and you are losing your child because your relationship’s completely breaking down and you don’t know where it went wrong or how to put it back together again. How do you pick up the phone and talk to your daughter when you haven’t seen her for seven years? Especially when you feel like you’ve tried your best, and when she’d rather live with her father than with you, and she never makes contact. And then there was the Barcelona thing . . .’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘I arranged for us to go away on holiday – to Barcelona – after her exams. I was going to ask her to come and live with me here or at least use the time to explain to her that this could be her second home. I wanted to make the effort, to try to get to know her properly, because Julie’s not actually an easy person to know. But I was willing to try. She never turned up at the airport.’ Helen sighs. ‘She just couldn’t be bothered, so I gave up. I went to see her when she got her exam results but she wasn’t interested in me being there. By then I’d given up on her, to be honest. So I stayed for a cup of tea then came home.’

  ‘But . . .’ says Charlotte.

  Luke’s quicker. ‘Hang on,’ he says. ‘That’s all complete rubbish.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ says Helen. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The “Barcelona thing”. She actually came home in tears because she was scared of flying. She almost had a complete breakdown because of it. It hadn’t been the easiest year for her anyway – you leaving, her A levels and everything – and she couldn’t handle the train, and she definitely couldn’t handle the idea of going in a plane. I rang the airport. They said they’d make an announcement and get you to call me.’

  ‘Well, I never got that,’ Helen says.

  ‘It took her hours to get home because suddenly she couldn’t handle any motion at all. All she was saying when she came back was that she’d let you down. I think, to be honest, she thought you might come and see what was wrong with her . . .’

  Helen frowns. ‘So she was trying to get my attention?’

  ‘No,’ Luke says. ‘It would have been nice for her to have it but she wasn’t trying to get it deliberately. She was very frightened.’

  ‘Of what? Trains? Flying? Why?’ Helen looks confused and upset.

  ‘Julie’s had a problem with travelling for ages,’ Charlotte says. ‘That’s why we came here on B-roads. It took absolutely hours. And it’s not just travelling – she’s scared of almost everything. Didn’t you even know that? Didn’t you care when she failed her A levels? It was really important to her that you cared but . . .’

  Helen’s face hardens. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Let me get this right. My daughter’s messed up and you’re both saying it’s my fault? I’m sorry. I don’t think either of you actually know what you’re talking about. I did care, and I do care, but when your daughter hates you, there’s not much you can do about it. Excuse me.’

  She leaves the room. A few seconds later, Luke can hear her going up the stairs.

  ‘That went well,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, fuck it,’ Charlotte says. ‘What have we done?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Shut up, Luke. Stop talking like you’re on TV.’

  Charlotte leaves the kitchen and a few seconds later Luke hears her going up the stairs too. Is she going after Helen? What’s she going to say? Poor Julie, poor Helen. They’ve spent all this time thinking they don’t care about each other, but they do, surely? Luke thinks about his own mother. Is it better to care too much or too little? And who knows how much anybody really cares about anything anyway?

  At about half past six, Julie comes back. David and Chantel aren’t with her.

  ‘You’ll never guess what,’ she says to Luke.

  ‘Are you speaking to me again?’

  ‘What? I was never not speaking to you, silly.’

  ‘But in the van. I was a dick to you.’

  ‘Yeah, you were. But that was yesterday.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, it was yesterday. You didn’t mean it, did you?’

  ‘No. I, uh . . .’ Luke wants
to tell Julie about South Mimms and how he felt but he gets the impression that something’s going on upstairs that’s more important than that.

  ‘You don’t need to explain,’ Julie says. ‘It’s OK.’

  Luke smiles. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘There is one thing, though. It’s just . . . OK, look. It wasn’t so much the go-faster stuff that bothered me. It was the drinking and smoking, like you were trying to kill yourself.’

  ‘I wanted to escape.’

  ‘Yes, Luke, I think we all did.’ Julie frowns. She has an expression Luke hasn’t seen before. ‘You know, Chan and David and Leanne made you a space-suit, and we got a van, and Charlotte found you a healer and we’ve all gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to get you here. You don’t know what it was like last night, when we were trapped and we couldn’t find a way out of the floods. And I know you don’t like it and I know you want to go home but we’re all trying to help you. Before we left, you wanted to go out more than anything in the world. You wanted to be healed. Right? Now, I’m only going to say this once, Luke. Just be nice to everyone because we’re trying to help you, and in order to help you some of us are really doing things we’re not enjoying very much. For example, do you think I really wanted to come here? Just think about it. Anyway, lecture over.’ Julie smiles. ‘I’ve got some amazing news.’

  ‘Is that Julie?’ Charlotte shouts from upstairs.

  ‘Yeah,’ Julie calls back. ‘Hi, Charlotte. I’ve got some news.’

  ‘Can you come up here for a second?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Can you just come?’

  ‘You’d better go,’ says Luke.

  Charlotte comes downstairs a few minutes later and puts the kettle on.

  ‘I think we’ll be making a move soon,’ she says.

  Chapter 42

  ‘You stupid girl. You stupid, stupid girl.’

  Helen’s sitting on her bed with a purple shawl wrapped around her. She’s been crying. Now she’s stopped. Evidently, Charlotte’s told her about the A levels, and Luke’s told her about Barcelona, and between them they’ve told her about Julie’s fears. Julie’s not sure what else has happened or why her mother would have been crying.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now, does it?’ Julie says. She’s standing limply by the door. She doesn’t know what to do; whether to come further into the room or run out screaming. She didn’t want to have this conversation.

  ‘I suppose you can do them again. But you’re twenty-five, for God’s sake. What a waste of seven years – well, nine, when you count the two years of studying you threw away. What a waste. And you did all of this to get my attention. Why didn’t you just pick up the phone?’

  Julie looks at the floor. ‘I did it because of Luke,’ she says. ‘Not because of you.’

  ‘That’s not what your friend said. Charlotte said that . . .’

  ‘Look, Mum, I didn’t do it consciously because of any one thing. Yes, I failed on purpose. I didn’t want to go to university and I didn’t want to leave Luke. I didn’t want my life to change . . . And I guess I wanted to hurt you as well, because I knew how much you wanted me to do well. But also, I didn’t know what I was doing. I just wanted to do something dramatic because my life felt so horrible. But it didn’t work, so I moved on. I know it was childish but I was just a kid at the time.’ She looks at her mother, small and sad on her purple bed. ‘I’m sorry,’ Julie says.

  But why is she apologising? This is confusing. Julie remembers that the one thing about her mother was that she always felt like apologising to her – for who she was, for being less cool than other kids they knew, for liking maths more than reading, for preferring Pepsi to carrot juice. But she remembers a time before that, when she just loved her mother so much, when Julie used to automatically cry when Helen did, when they used to bake cakes together and have flour fights, when if anyone said anything bad about her mother, Julie would cry for the whole day. Then Helen gave up baking cakes, because, as she explained to Julie when she was about eleven, ‘Real women don’t bake cakes. They change the world.’ Julie bets that her mother bakes cakes now, though. And she hasn’t changed the world – well, not much.

  ‘It’s all because we moved there, to that horrible place,’ Helen says.

  ‘Why? What do you mean?’

  ‘If you’d never met Luke . . . I like him but, boy, he messed your life up.’

  ‘Please don’t say that, Mum. He didn’t mess my life up.’

  ‘And those people, those Essex people . . .’

  Julie thinks of Chantel, and David, and Leanne. ‘I like Essex people,’ she says.

  Neither of them says anything for a minute or so. Julie walks a couple more steps into the room, then stops.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Helen says eventually. ‘This is all my fault, isn’t it? I’ve been a crap mother. I’ve been a crap mother and I’ve screwed you up, and I ruined Doug’s life – as he’s always telling me . . .’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Julie says quietly. ‘It’s no one’s fault.’

  ‘But I’m a terrible mother.’

  ‘No you’re not, Mum.’

  Julie walks over to the bed and perches on the edge of it. She notices that there is only one bedside table in the room. On it there’s a lamp and several books stacked haphazardly. One of them is called You Are a Good Person. There’s a small chest of drawers facing the bed. There’s a vase of fresh flowers on it and several new-looking candles. Is Helen lonely in here? Or happy on her own? Julie wouldn’t have a clue.

  Helen’s voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘You would have been OK if you’d had a different mother,’ she says.

  ‘No! Mum, stop this. I loved having you as a mother. I thought you were cool. When you were on TV that time at Greenham I was so proud I almost cried. I thought everything you did was brilliant. I didn’t want a mother who’d stay at home cooking and know how to do laundry properly and stuff. I wouldn’t have wanted Luke’s mum, or Leanne’s, or anyone’s. I thought you were great. The only thing is that I didn’t think you liked me very much and I wanted to try to impress you so you’d like me but you never did.’

  Helen looks down. ‘But that’s ridiculous,’ she says quietly.

  ‘You never asked me to go anywhere with you.’

  Helen looks at Julie. ‘You never wanted to come!’

  ‘I was shy, Mum.’

  ‘Oh . . . But you could talk to me, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Until you left. When you left, I just thought you really hated me.’

  ‘See, I am a crap mother. I didn’t even know that.’

  Julie looks at the way her mother is clutching her shawl with both hands, as if she’d die if she didn’t have it. ‘Dad was there. He could have told you what was happening.’

  ‘He always said you were fine.’

  ‘That’s pretty typical,’ Julie says.

  Helen manages a weak smile. Julie smiles back.

  ‘What happened to us, Julie?’ she says. ‘Why didn’t you just phone me? Just once? Some nights – like on your birthday, or around Christmas, or on my birthday – I just sat looking at the phone, convinced you’d call me. But you never did.’ She shakes her head. ‘You never, ever called me. I ended up telling my friends I didn’t have a daughter any more. I was so ashamed that I had a daughter who didn’t love me. How horrible do you have to be for your own daughter to stop loving you?’

  ‘I never stopped loving you. God, Mum. I just . . . I didn’t phone because I wanted to sort myself out first. I wanted to get rid of all this fear – I knew you wouldn’t like me like this. And I wanted to get Luke better. In my head I had this plan where I’d be able to travel again and I’d call you and ask if I could come and visit . . . Anyway, you never called me either. I used to watch the phone on those nights as well, in case you called. Eventually, I just thought I was right and you didn’t like me, and I didn’t blame you because I’m a bit messed up and I know you always wanted me to be strong . . .’

  ‘I
was scared,’ Helen interrupts. ‘I was scared that, if I phoned you, you wouldn’t want to know me. That would hurt a lot more than you not phoning, so I just waited.’

  ‘Ditto,’ says Julie.

  ‘What a waste,’ Helen says. ‘What a stupid waste.’

  ‘I’m still not the daughter you wanted, though, am I?’ Julie says.

  In her head she can see a well-proportioned girl with long black hair, eating rice and drinking wine and laughing over some politically correct joke. She can see rainbow rugs and organic food and a campsite with colourful tents and women with colourful hats. The girl with long black hair is reciting poetry now and everyone’s listening. Now she’s flying in a plane and it doesn’t scare her. In fact, now she’s parachuting and she’s an aid worker or a traveller or a CND ambassador, and she’s in Africa or Asia travelling with a threadbare rucksack and a big smile. And she’s not scared of anything.

  ‘And I’m not the mother you wanted, am I?’ Helen says. ‘You know, I only ever wanted you to be happy, Julie. I wanted you to be happier than me, happier than I ever could have been. I was so jealous of you, you know? You were born in the right generation and you genuinely had the chance to have a great life and make a difference. Me? I married the wrong man and got pregnant at nineteen and it felt like my life was over. When I started putting my life back together, I was doing it because I wanted you to see how your life could be better than mine. I was angry when you failed your exams. I thought you hadn’t worked hard enough or that you’d been wasting all your time with Luke and I thought that was so stupid because you had all these opportunities that I never had. I never even had the chance to take exams when I was at school. I was sent to the local technical college because I was a girl. I was pissed off because you could have been anything. You could have been a company director. All I was qualified to be was a secretary. You could have been a doctor. I could only ever have been a nurse.’

  ‘I’d rather be a secretary or a nurse, though,’ Julie says. Helen looks so horrified by this that she has to pause and think. ‘But I know what you’re saying. I’m glad we live in a world where I have that choice but it should still be a choice. I mean . . . well, it’s all down to your generation that we have a choice in the first place but . . . Anyway, I don’t think I’ll ever get married,’ Julie says, smiling. ‘If that makes you feel any better.’