by Vivien Brown
‘Sixteen! And a half.’ Things between him and Eve were not as perfect as Eve had led me to believe. Maybe I had a chance after all. ‘Not so much younger than Eve. And I haven’t had a doll for years.’
‘Sorry. My mistake. Or Eve’s. Do you know, I think we might just have lots of fun tomorrow, you and me.’
He had that look in his eyes then. Like fun could mean much more than just spending a day at a museum.
‘I’m sure we will.’
‘Time you went up to bed, I think.’ He pulled away from me, quite abruptly, his hand brushing against my arm as he stood up. ‘It’s late, and we don’t want your old man to come home and catch us alone, do we?’
‘Don’t we?’ I put on my best innocent face and held his gaze for just a second too long.
‘Night, Sarah,’ he said, and then he did something he hadn’t done before. He leaned forward as if to kiss me on the cheek, but I moved my head just at that exact moment and managed to catch the last of it, just at the edge of my mouth, in a delicious kiss-that-missed sort of a way.
‘Oops!’ I said, the taste of him sending a sudden thrill through me. I took a reluctant step back and looked up at him, wanting so much more.
He lifted his finger to his own lips and then across to mine, leaving it there for a few seconds. ‘Tomorrow, Sarah,’ he said, and pushed me gently towards the stairs.
Eve never did say what had happened between them, why they had rowed. She was already in bed when I went up, and had turned her back, a clear sign she wasn’t going to confide in me. I lay there in the dark for ages, my hand lying against my still flat stomach, wondering if I could be wrong about my dates, and hoping so hard that I was. This wasn’t the time to have to deal with an unwanted pregnancy, or to have to think about Paul Jacobs, when I had already consigned him to the past, with a big ‘mistake’ label over his head. Not when all I really wanted to do was work out what I was going to wear the next day that could lift me, once and for all, out of little-sister territory and get the gorgeous Josh to see me as the grown-up potential girlfriend I knew I could be. Because if Eve didn’t want him, I certainly did.
Chapter 11
EVE
Five years later
‘Your sister’s had the baby.’ Mum sounded excited down the phone, but all I felt was a cold hard lump that suddenly appeared somewhere at the back of my throat, making it hard for me to swallow, let alone breathe. And a ridiculous urge to cry. ‘A little girl,’ Mum went on, utterly oblivious to my discomfort. ‘Seven pounds on the dot, and pretty as a picture. They’re calling her Janine Caroline. Caroline, after me! Ooh, I’m that pleased! But it’ll be Janey, for short. Just think, only hours old and she has a nickname already!’
‘Right.’
‘Right? Is that all you can say? You’re an auntie now, Eve. And after all they went through the last time … Oh, you will come down, won’t you? To see her, I mean. And us. It’s been so long.’
‘I’m busy, Mum. The start of a new school term. I can hardly just up and go.’
‘Of course not. But at the weekend? We’re only a couple of hours away on the train, Love. And isn’t it time this silly feud ended? She’s your sister. The only one you’re ever going to have.’
‘Well, I wish she wasn’t.’
‘You don’t mean that! Surely, by now, you could let bygones be bygones. It’s been five years, and it’s not as if you and Josh were engaged or anything …’
‘As if that would have stopped her, even if we had been. He was my boyfriend, Mum. Mine. And she took him. It’s not what sisters do.’
‘Oh dear. Look, I know it was you who first brought him home, Love, but there didn’t really seem to be anything that serious between you. He was your friend, yes. Boyfriend, if that’s what you like to call him, but boyfriends come and go, don’t they? And he was your first. You certainly weren’t showing any signs of wanting to settle down. Your course, your career … and, well, it’s not as if I approve of the way they went about it. Under our own roof, and your sister getting pregnant so quickly, but you have to admit they’ve made a go of it. He’s Sarah’s husband now, Eve, and the father of her child. After all they went through, losing that first baby, can’t you at least try to be happy for them now?’
‘Give my congratulations to Sarah. Well, to both of them, and I’ll send a card, but—’
‘I really think it would be nice if you spoke to your sister yourself, Love. Maybe a phone call, if you can’t come down just yet …’
Nice? Surely we were beyond being nice?
I made an excuse about someone knocking on the door and hung up. Mum didn’t understand. Well, I don’t suppose anyone did really. I had loved Josh. No, I hadn’t run around telling the world how I felt, chucking myself at him, snogging his face off in public. I wasn’t that sort of a person. Not then, and not now either. I had my reservations, my inhibitions. I knew that, and so did Josh. And we had been dealing with them. I had never said the magic words. Never told him I loved him. But he’d known how I felt. Hadn’t he? And we’d been getting there, or I’d thought we were. Taking our time, getting to know each other slowly. Not ripping our clothes off and jumping on each other the way so many other couples seemed to do without a moment’s thought. I had believed he would wait, until I was ready, until I was absolutely sure, but all it had taken was a few hours away from me, an offer of sex he clearly couldn’t refuse, and there he was, in bed with somebody else. And not just any old bed, or any old body. My bed. And my sister …
How was I supposed to forget that? Or to forgive? It was hard to know who I felt angrier with, who had betrayed me the most. Her? Or him?
I moved the papers around on my crowded dining table. It was half past nine on a Sunday evening and I was alone, as usual, in my tiny rented ground-floor flat in the back streets of Cardiff, and I still had a pile of marking to do for the morning. A class full of fifteen-year-olds reading the First World War poets, and all most of them had managed to write were a few words about how boring it must have been in the trenches or a paragraph clearly copied from a text book. What about the language? The imagery? The emotion? To me, it leapt from the page and grabbed me by the throat. But they weren’t all like me. In fact, very few of them were. Most of them, I had to concede, were probably a lot more like Sarah. Heads filled with boys, and bodies filled with the rush of hormones, desperate for school to end and what they saw as their real lives to begin. I sometimes wondered why I bothered.
I pushed the homework aside and closed my eyes. I couldn’t stop the images and the emotions that were flooding into my head, and they had nothing to do with the war poets. That awful day, when I came home early from seeing Lucy, was still so clear in my memory. The silence of what I thought was an empty house. Mum and Dad still at work. Every step I took up the stairs, Buster pressing at my heels. Opening the bedroom door and seeing them there, a tangle of naked limbs and crumpled sheets. My sheets. Somehow, that meant more, hurt more, than I could ever explain. Not only had my sister stolen my boyfriend, and so casually taken the one thing he was meant to be saving for me, but she had chosen to do it in my bed. When her own, untouched and perfectly made, was just feet away.
Josh sat up instantly, surprise, shock – and was that shame? – written all over his pale face as he saw me standing in the doorway. But Sarah just lay there, flat on her back, a big purple-red suck mark on her neck, her small breasts horribly exposed, and gazed up at me, her expression totally unreadable.
‘Eve. I’m so sorry.’ Josh was tugging at the bedclothes, trying to hide himself, and her …
I heard Buster jump up onto the bed, tail thumping, as I turned away, but Sarah pushed him off, his paws sliding as he landed awkwardly on the floor.
Sorry? Was that it? What was he thinking? That this was another of those fifty-pence moments, when I would laugh it off and say that saying sorry wasn’t necessary, that everything was going to be all right?
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
The word had r
un around and around inside my head as I charged blindly down the stairs, Buster knocking against my ankles, almost tripping me up, and straight into Dad, coming in through the front door, with a badly folded newspaper under one arm, his keys still dangling in his hand.
‘Eve? What’s happened? Whatever is the matter?’
I pointed up the stairs, wordlessly, leaning on the banister for support, and he dropped the paper on the hall table and walked up past me, slowly, cautiously, as if he expected to find a burglar or a giant spider, or maybe even a dead body, when he reached the top.
I couldn’t stay, after that. The idea of sharing a room with Sarah, or of sleeping there, in that house, that bed, after what they had done …
I spent that first night at Lucy’s. I wailed and raged and cried, and she listened, like the true friend she had always been, as I spilled out all my hurt and disbelief and heartbreak, until we both fell asleep, buoyed up with vodka, exhausted, my pillow damp with tears. And then, the next day, Lucy went round to the house and packed me a bag of essentials, refusing to divulge my plans to my parents who, she assured me, were clearly as outraged as I was, and I got on a train to Beth’s. I didn’t ask Lucy about Sarah, if she had been there, what she had said. I really didn’t want to know. And with a bit of luck, I had thought, since Dad had apparently thrown him out onto the street and chucked his bags out after him, I would never have to set eyes on Josh Cavendish ever again. How wrong I was.
I spent what was left of that summer shuffling about between my uni friends, from one town and one sofa to another, calling my parents from time to time to let them know I was okay, that I was surviving, but knowing the last place I wanted to be right then, despite their pleas, was home.
It was only when I moved back into my room at Bryden and immersed myself in the second year of my English literature course that I was finally able to feel anywhere like normal again. From then on, I was determined to lead the only life that mattered.
Sarah’s pregnancy had shocked us all. I couldn’t believe she had been so careless. Or that Josh had. We all knew about being careful. There had been lessons at school, embarrassing though they were, and Durex machines in the toilets in just about every pub we ever sneaked into. Magazines packed with agony-aunt pages and advice columns. I knew Josh carried a condom in his wallet. I’d seen it and been impressed by his good sense, even if I had checked a few times over the months we had known each other, to make sure it was still there.
How had they let it happen? I couldn’t help dreaming up scenarios in my head. And blaming myself. Because we’d had such a nice day, hadn’t we? And I’d been the one to spoil it. Hyde Park. Lying side by side in the grass, me on my back, twisting the long dry stems together, trying to make a bracelet, him propped up on his elbows, holding one thick blade of grass and tickling me with it until I begged him to stop. Sharing a paper bag of grapes, a bottle of lemonade, a kiss … I know I probably reacted too strongly, pushed him too hard, spoke loudly enough for a couple on the path behind us to turn around and stare, but his hands had been moving too quickly, finding their way into my clothes, and it had been broad daylight …
We didn’t speak on the way home. He had finally lost patience with me; he’d waited long enough, he’d said, and nothing had changed. Nothing ever would. He’d called me frigid, said he was going to leave, pack up and go the next morning. I made some excuse about having to see Lucy, hoping he would just leave while I was out, but then I think it was Dad who suggested Sarah go out with him, to some museum or other, so he wouldn’t have to go alone. And before I could do anything, say anything, she was agreeing to it. Smiling up at him the way she always did, like some kid with a crush.
I could imagine it all. Rightly or wrongly, I could see it unfurling in my mind. Sarah getting bored with the exhibits at the museum, as I had known she would. Them going for food instead, and drinks. Cans of cider on some bench somewhere, as she was too young for the pub. Sarah giggling, talking, spilling out confidences, tilting her face at him, throwing back her hair, flirting, letting him know she was interested, willing, available … His arm going around her on the train, their bodies squashed together, close, too close, and then stumbling into a quiet, empty house, her dragging him upstairs, or perhaps him dragging her, the raw passion taking over, or maybe just the need for revenge, pushing all thoughts, all common sense, aside. Had it been like that? I would never know. But she had him then, didn’t she? Trapped, like a fly in a web, bound together by what they had done, and by what they had made. A baby, who didn’t even survive long enough to make any of it worthwhile.
I looked up at the clock. It was getting late. I quickly finished the last of the marking, giving it the same level of inattention the students so obviously had, and pushed it aside. I wondered, briefly, as I boiled the kettle for a final cup of tea, what they would be doing now. Sarah and Josh. She would probably be propped up in her hospital bed, her new daughter pressed – I hoped painfully – to her nipple, her hair all messy, and wearing one of those hideous open-fronted cotton nighties. Or maybe she’d be trying to sleep in a noisy ward, lying there wide awake, finding it hard to believe what had just happened but seeing her baby in its little transparent cot beside the bed and knowing it was true. And Josh? He would have been out wetting the baby’s head with his banker mates in some pub somewhere, or more than likely crashed out by now in their little flat above the dry cleaner’s, still in the clothes he’d worn all day, shattered after hours of hand holding and brow mopping, his camera bursting with photos of little Janine that he couldn’t wait to share with everyone he knew.
It was hard and, after five years, it still hurt. If only Josh had waited. If only he had cared about me in the same way I’d cared about him. He’d told me he loved me, just days before, and I had believed him. But he hadn’t meant it. Hadn’t meant any of it. He couldn’t have done. It had just been a way to try to get me into bed. And, when it hadn’t worked on me, he’d simply transferred his words, his attention, his body, to her.
Oh, yes, I still had my books, my teaching career, a little boxy home of my own, miles away from the life I once knew, a few friends from uni who I still met up with from time to time, but that was all. I hardly ever saw my family. I had lost my sister, and I had lost Josh, irretrievably and forever, and had never felt the urge to replace him. I didn’t know who to trust anymore, or if I ever could, and the idea of meeting another man, embarking on some sordid, loveless sex life with anyone else, sent shudders through me. I was alone, and I was lonely. Sarah had stolen my life.
***
‘Miss?’ Laura Wilson, one of my Year Eights, was standing in front of my desk, with an open poetry book in her hand and a puzzled look on her freckly face.
‘Shouldn’t you be outside with the others?’ It was break time and I had been hoping for a few minutes of peace, a cup of coffee and a doughnut, with my feet up, in the staff room.
‘I suppose. But I wanted to ask you something, Miss.’
‘Can’t it wait?’ I started gathering up my paperwork and bundling it into my bag, ready for the next lesson down the hall.
‘I suppose,’ she said again, but she didn’t move away.
‘Go on then, but make it quick.’ Oh, God, I sounded prickly. This really wasn’t the sort of teacher I wanted to be. ‘Sorry, Laura. Don’t mind me. I must have got out of bed on the wrong side this morning!’ I plastered on a smile, dragging myself away from the memory of the restless, sleepless night I had endured thanks to Sarah and her baby, whose tiny face I could already picture as a miniature version of Josh’s. ‘Go on, ask away.’
‘Well, it’s what Keats wrote about the clouds, and the stubble, and the gnats.’ She held out her book, and I could see the poem we had been studying, ‘To Autumn’, and the light pencil marks she had made all over it. ‘Don’t worry, Miss. I will rub those out again when I’ve finished, I promise. But the last verse of the poem’s not just about what happens to the crops and stuff in autumn, is it? Not just about n
ight time coming, or winter?’
‘What do you think it’s really about, Laura?’
‘I think it’s about dying, Miss. You know, the changes, moving on, being ready to give up …’
I took the book from her hand and motioned for her to sit down beside me. ‘And does that make it a sad poem, do you think?’
‘Oh, no. I think it’s beautiful, and such a nice way of saying things that aren’t nice at all.’
‘I agree. The language makes it very special, doesn’t it? And the image of the fruits all bursting into life and then not being there anymore, and the spring lambs now grown up and bleating on the hillside. It’s a lovely portrayal of nature, and its cycles.’
‘My granddad’s dying, Miss,’ she said, suddenly. She looked up at me, her face betraying nothing of what she must be feeling. No tears.
I put the book down on the desk. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’
‘It’s okay, Miss. I’m sad, but he’s not in any pain or anything. He’s just old, and it’s his time. That’s what my dad says, anyway. But Keats says it even better, doesn’t he, Miss? I think the swallows are gathering now, like at the end of the poem, and he’ll be gone soon. And then, before we know it, it will be spring, and my mum will have her new baby, and everything will start again.’
‘That’s a lovely way to think about it, Laura. I didn’t know your mum was having a baby, but I’m so glad the poem has meant something to you. Something personal. Helps bring it all to life, doesn’t it? Gives the words real feeling and depth.’
‘It’s the way you explain things, Miss. It sort of makes sense of the words that are hiding behind the words. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes, I do. And thank you for coming to talk to me. I know it’s not always easy to talk individually in class. If you like Keats, there are other poems I could show you. Other poets too.’
‘Oh, yes, please. I’d like that. I’d much rather sit on a bench with a book to read than go out there playing with a ball or doing each other’s hair or something. Such a waste of time.’