Precocious Read online

  I draw my legs up towards me.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Damn right.’

  ‘Some people get a lot of enjoyment from their pets.’

  ‘Yeah, because they anthropomorphise them and project all these ridiculous emotions onto them that they can’t possibly feel because, guess what, they’re just animals. But no, they can’t just treat them as animals, they have to act like they’re their children or something.’

  ‘Okay, while we’re on that,’ I take a deep breath, ‘what about children?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Well, you could say that about children. I mean, God forbid they should die before you, but even if they don’t, they’ll probably cause you loads of heartache. But people still have them, don’t they? Millions of people.’ I think back to that first rainy night in the restaurant, the night that started all of this. ‘Normal people.’

  ‘Screw the normal people. Who wants to be normal?’

  ‘Well, not you, obviously.’

  ‘I’ve no interest in having children, if that’s what you’re getting at.’ You lean over to the coffee table, pick up a newspaper, untangling yourself from me in the process. ‘And from what you’ve told me, nor have you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say quietly, ‘I mean, that’s what I told Dave, but … that was just easier than the truth.’ I want you to ask me to say more but you don’t. I go on anyway. ‘The truth is, you were the only person I ever wanted to … do that with. And I felt like that chance had come and gone.’

  You throw down the newspaper.

  ‘We’re not going to go down that road, are we? What happened to not speaking about it again?’

  ‘Well, that was fifteen years ago. I thought maybe enough time had passed that I would be allowed to bring it up.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What do you mean, what for? I might want to talk about it. I’ve never … it’s difficult, keeping a thing like that to yourself.’

  ‘Best way if you ask me. Look, you make a decision and that’s that. You have to deal with it and move on. You can’t change it, and I don’t think you’d want to, so what’s the point in brooding?’

  ‘Brooding. Great choice of word.’

  ‘Fee, what’s this all about?’

  ‘I’ve been writing again.’

  ‘Well, that’s good.’

  ‘And … thinking. Remembering. Stuff about us. Me and you. Only, some of it’s a bit shadowy, and maybe if we talked about it …’

  ‘The past, the past,’ you say irritably, putting down your wine glass. ‘All past. What’s the point?’

  ‘But the past is what makes us. It’s why we’re here.’

  ‘The past is nothing but smoke and mirrors. Made-up memories and unreliable stories. You said it yourself. Shadows. The only thing that’s real is right now.’

  And you pull me towards you and that’s all the talking, for now.

  There’s a strange nervousness, ringing someone you used to see every day and not knowing what to say. I look at the phone in my hand as though it’s a bomb about to go off.

  Dave and I rarely spoke on the phone – why would we? We were only ever apart with good reason, and when we did use the phone it was functional and often by text:

  What do you want for dinner?

  What time will you be home?

  Can you just check I turned the iron off?

  Phone calls are for people who live away: from a parent on the other side of the ring road, to the friend who moved to America. They’re not for the person whose warmth was still on the duvet when you crept back under it with your cup of tea to the comforting sound of them running the shower in the next room.

  You don’t run out of things to talk about after years together; the things you talk about just change. I’ve used up all of my surprises, most of my stories, in the way everyone does: you gamble them all at the start, going all out to impress, maybe keeping one or two fascinating facts or funny anecdotes up your sleeve but more likely all your conversational cards are on the table in those first weeks and months. After all, you want to create the impression that this wit, this raconteur, will be a perfect first date/holiday companion/partner for life.

  But suddenly we have a new topic: Us. Funny how couples only talk about Us when things are going really well, or really badly.

  I’m assuming, of course, that Dave will want to talk about getting back together. After all, he’s in bits, Mari said.

  I prepare my lines as though writing a play: editing and refining, discarding clichés and hyperbole with a critical eye. Does anyone even dare say ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ anymore? I smile in spite of myself. Dave always argued that clichés become so for a reason – because there is some truth in them.

  But my lines leave me when I hear his voice. He doesn’t sound broken up. What was I expecting? Tears? I should’ve known better; this is Dave, he is tougher than he looks. I’ve only been gone a couple of weeks and yet there are things, important things, that I’m forgetting about him.

  He’s loving, and generous, and open, but he’s also practical. He gets on with things. He won’t have taken time off work as I have, won’t have hit the gin bottle. He might be taking pills, I worry about that, wonder whether that’s why his voice sounds so calm, and want to ask him, but I won’t. He’ll still walk Bella every morning and night, and the thought of them crunching through the leaves together, him speaking in the soft voice he uses only for her, sends a small pain through me.

  Living in the city can keep you removed from nature, its colour shrouded by the buildings and exhaust fumes, its sounds obliterated by police sirens, the incessant click of hurried heels on pavements, the raucous chatter of nighttime revellers. So the park, only a couple of streets away from our house, kept us anchored to the changing earth, and Bella gave us a reason to be there twice a day.

  In the park, the seasons are bold and obvious, from April bursts of pale blossom to the rust-coloured carpets of autumn. The centre is marked by a war memorial fountain in which Bella habitually jumps and splashes.

  ‘How come,’ Dave used to laugh at her, ‘when I put you in the bath it’s like you’re allergic to water?’

  I know how Bella, the fresh air and exercise and all the routine of looking after her, will have kept him from dissolving, so I shouldn’t be surprised he sounds like he’s coping.

  But I should also remind myself that this isn’t exactly a social call: I’ve asked him not to contact me for a while, so he wouldn’t have, not even through Mari, unless it was important.

  I thought I had all my defences prepared. That’s why I’m caught off guard when he says, ‘You had a visitor.’

  Here it is. The second I stop anticipating it, of course, here it is. I hold my breath.

  ‘A girl. Alice somebody?’

  Number three.

  She went to my house. She saw my husband. Perhaps this is what helps me make the decision: the threat of two worlds colliding. I know I have to call her.

  twelve

  She asks me to go for coffee. What a civilised thing to do when you’re about to tear someone’s world apart.

  This being the oh-so-cool Northern Quarter, it’s not actually a coffee shop but a tea shop, as this is the latest trend. It’s the kind of place you would absolutely hate: laden with ironic chintz, mismatched tablecloths and ‘shabby chic’ chipped-paint birdcages and picture frames. There are jars of different varieties of tea lined up on the counter, tied with spotty ribbons, and huge slabs of Victoria sponge and coffee cake. A smell of baking teases the back of the throat. A beaming girl in a gingham apron takes our money and cheerfully offers us a complimentary newspaper.

  In here, every day is Sunday.

  Alice perches on the edge of a sofa, the hard lines of her face incongruous among the cushions, but I choose a straight-backed, wooden chair and point it directly at her. I look at her coldly.

  ‘Go on then – say your piece.’

 
She takes such a deep breath that for an insane split-second I think she is going to burst into song. But the voice that comes out is low, and what she says is not what I expect.

  ‘It’s not me, really. It’s Dennis. He’s the one who thinks I should do this.’

  Dennis is the boyfriend, it seems. I think about them laughing together behind the fountains.

  ‘I told him about Mr … about what happened, with …’ she straightens her back, ‘with Henry.’ She pronounces your name carefully, as though for the first time. It sounds foreign on her lips. ‘And he said I should report him.’

  When she says the word ‘report’ she meets my eye, an unblinking challenge. I sit back, fold my arms, an attempt to keep my thundering heart in my chest.

  ‘And what is it he’s supposed to have done, exactly?’

  She emits a brittle laugh.

  ‘I was fifteen. I thought I was ordinary, until somebody … until he convinced me otherwise.’

  A cruel observation flashes across my mind: she looks pretty ordinary to me.

  Her blonde hair is darker at the roots, the ends dry from too much bleach. She’s thinner than I am. Not athletic; she has the physique of the self-starved. Something about the hollowness of her cheeks, the shape of her collarbone. Her thinness is unnatural; she ought to be bigger. Her hands are constantly fluttering and I can see all of the bones in her wrist, like the way you can see a bird’s skeleton on the underside of its wing.

  She has placed a little tin of Vaseline on the table in front of her, and every so often dips her spidery fingers into it and runs them over her lips. She has small, pointed teeth.

  ‘So you’re going to report him for that? Doesn’t sound like a crime to me.’ But my voice breaks a bit on the word crime.

  ‘No, but I’m assuming you don’t want the gory details. You don’t need them anyway – you were there before me, after all.’ Her voice is light and a smile plays on her lips as though she’s just told a joke.

  ‘Okay, tell me in legal speak then. When you report him, what exactly is it you’re going to accuse him of?’

  ‘Now, let me think. According to my solicitor it’s known as,’ she speaks slowly, as though reading it out, ‘sexual activity with a child.’

  ‘A child? You just said you were fifteen.’

  ‘A child in the eyes of the law, Fiona.’

  I don’t like the way she says my name. Her ‘o’s are soft and round, out of place here among northern accents. She must have been living in the south – the same change started to happen to my voice after three years in London, but I fought it. I want to ask her: ‘Did you come back up here just for this?’ Instead I ask, ‘And you say this is your boyfriend’s idea?’

  She falters.

  ‘Well, not his idea exactly, but …’

  ‘Whatever you think went on with Morgan,’ I say your name in a whisper, ‘this Dennis doesn’t like it and he wants – what? Some sort of revenge? Or is that what you’re after?’

  ‘I’m not after anything.’

  ‘Not half.’ I feel heat rising in my cheeks, I’m trying to keep my voice under control. ‘Attention? Revenge? Money? Is it some sort of compensation you want, is that it?’

  She sighs as though suddenly exhausted, runs a hand through her hair in a way that reminds me, perversely, of you.

  ‘Look. Don’t get angry. Please. I just wanted to talk to you. I just want to do what’s right.’

  ‘And why me, Alice? I mean, how did you know to come looking for me?’

  ‘Once, he said I reminded him of someone. He said your name.’

  ‘And you remembered, all this time.’ Of course you did, I think. I would have. I did. ‘What else did he say about me?’

  ‘That you were … different.’

  She doesn’t have to say anything else. Any doubt I might have had, any hope I was holding onto that she was a fantasist, that she’d never even met Morgan (she wasn’t in the yearbooks, I’d checked), much less been taught by him, been held by him – it starts to crumble.

  ‘He’s back,’ I say suddenly; Alice frowns. ‘I mean, I’m back … with him.’

  ‘I heard you were married.’

  ‘I was. I am. It’s complicated. I moved in with him.’

  ‘Wow.’ She makes a soft whistling sound.

  ‘So you see, these things you’re saying, I don’t … I can’t hear them.’

  She leans forward and rests her chin on her delicate hands, clasped together as though praying. She has the expression of a child trying to work out a puzzle.

  ‘I wondered why you were being quite so … protective. Maybe this changes things. Maybe not. I still think I need you. And maybe you need me, too.’

  She gets up and heads to the bathroom, leaving her words in the air between us, and her bag on the sofa. It’s a battered satchel, clumpy and too full. With what? I wonder. A compulsion to search it, to tip it out, starts to rise in me so I look around to distract myself, and to place myself back in the reality that is other people.

  A couple sit at the next table; they are married, wearing rings, but his body language has already left her. His knees point away, his eyes scan the room. He’s good looking, in an empirical way: the square jaw, the broad shoulders. She is leaning over a notebook, ticking off tasks, her bobbed hair neat, her face free of make-up. They aren’t speaking. He looks as though he is wondering how he got here with her.

  Another table is overrun by a huge family; the cantankerous old man at the centre of it is bullying his wife loudly to fetch him a more comfortable chair. She looks around desperately; the place is heaving. Her daughter’s voice rises and rises over the noise made by her clutch of children, who are running in circles and keep knocking the tiny table, dishes holding muffins and flapjacks sliding and shifting like tectonic plates.

  A student with headphones on scans a textbook, makes notes in the margin, checks her phone which ‘beep, beep’s every third minute or so, sips herbal tea, scribbles again, chews her pencil.

  Alice is back, and smiling as though she is my friend.

  ‘You know, for a long time I’ve wanted to meet you.’

  ‘I can’t say the same. He’s never mentioned you.’

  ‘I bet,’ she laughs. Then says archly, ‘but that doesn’t mean I don’t exist.’

  How much does she have of you? I stare at the satchel, imagining you somehow wrapped up in there. I want to tear open its bulging seams. How much does she have of me?

  Somehow the fact that you’ve talked about me is what troubles me the most. I’m beginning to realise that stories are rarely for their own sake; they are usually used for some other purpose. For what purpose did you use the story of me?

  I’m torn between wanting to know everything and wanting to hear nothing.

  How many times, where, when? How was it similar or different to how it was with me?

  I want to know where I rank.

  ‘Do you want to ask me anything?’ she says quietly, as though reading my mind.

  ‘Yes and no,’ I say honestly. She studies my face.

  ‘We should leave it. For today.’

  ‘Alice,’ I say, ‘why am I here? I mean, what is it you want from me, exactly?’

  ‘I want you to testify against him.’

  I almost spit out my tea.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Jesus. You did hear me before, right? I’m living with him.’

  ‘Look, it’s seven, eight years ago. There’s no evidence, not really. It’s my word against his. I need … I need backup.’

  I suddenly feel like an older sister, oddly protective. I wish I could take myself out of the situation, watch from afar as a third person version of me gives her a hug. But my overarching need is all about you; all about us.

  ‘Just listen to yourself, Alice. Think about what you’re suggesting. How serious it is.’ I pause. ‘If you do this … he’ll be suspended.’

  She looks at me, emotions pass
ing over her face quick as light. Confusion. Pity. Triumph.

  ‘It’s done, Fiona. He was suspended three weeks ago.’

  I stand outside the tea shop. I know I’m not ready to go home, wherever that is, but I don’t know where I should go. There’s a whirring in my head so loud, for a moment I think it’s the traffic. I’m in two pieces, I feel like two people with differing views, neither one making a decision. I want anonymity; I want crowds. I want silence; I want solitude. Into this confusion God, or Fate, or whoever is the choreographer of the insane dance that is suddenly my life, sends the person most likely to throw me into more turmoil.

  Matt.

  He’s sort of jogging towards me, one hand holding a briefcase, the other positioning a newspaper over his head to protect his hair from the rain that I hadn’t even noticed. He’s grinning and I have my back to the glass doorway so I can’t avoid his smile, and short of turning and going back inside there’s nowhere for me to disappear to.

  One half of me, remembering Laura’s pained expression last time I saw her, wants to slap him.

  The other wants to laugh. Seeing his beaming face is a kind of relief. I long for the time when a flirtation with Matt was the most I had to feel guilty about.

  ‘Hey,’ he leans forward and kisses my cheek, ‘how you doing, Fee? Good to see you.’

  ‘You, too,’ I say truthfully.

  He looks over my shoulder through the glass into the steam and chatter.

  ‘Listen, would love to chat but I need to get in there. I’m meeting someone.’

  I suddenly have the sense of all the pieces of my life connecting and a fear comes over me.

  ‘Who? I mean … it’s not …’

  ‘It’s not a woman, if that’s what you mean,’ he says irritably, ‘it’s a work thing. And anyway,’ and in an instant, with a wink, the old Matt is back, the tease, the flirt, ‘when did you get so virtuous? Marriage must really agree with you.’

  Marriage. I look into his honey-coloured eyes and know we are complicit in our betrayals. ‘She’s pregnant’, I want to spit at him, but the words sound hollow in my heart, before they even reach my mouth. His eyes say, ‘we’re the same, you and me’. Is it true? Are my fantasies just that – shadows I build to make the reality seem less sordid? Do we cheats seek each other out? Is there some invisible sonar, is that why he touched me the way he did when we danced? Did I encourage him, just by being what I am, this faithless creature?