Precocious Read online

  ‘This is Fiona,’ you said to her. ‘The Genius.’

  You both chuckled. She was not surprised – by my presence there, by your description. So you had talked about me.

  I always thought teachers made fun of only the very dull (because they don’t get it) or the precocious (who can give it back). Which was I supposed to be?

  I left, and I left school, and until today I hadn’t seen you since.

  two

  Tell me about Dave, you said. Okay, I’ll tell you. About him, about me, about falling in love.

  These are the things that did it:

  The First Night Out. We argued. An amazing thing: to be relaxed enough to disagree instead of preening, lying and straining to impress.

  The First Night In. The way we stayed up all night and talked and talked so urgently, desperate to find out things, and the way every uncovered shared interest or belief seemed incredible, natural, destined. Coincidence and magic in everything.

  The First Morning After. He left, wearing stale clothes and shocked hair, drove round the block then came back, and stood on the doorstep, smiling.

  It was about money. That first argument, that first night.

  Dave never earned much, but spent less and borrowed nothing. I couldn’t believe he’d never had an overdraft; mine seemed to have lingered after university like a hangover. The thing is, it never really bothered me, but Dave was different. He was cautious; but then, he’d shelled out nearly fifteen grand for a wedding that didn’t happen. That would make anyone err on the thrifty side.

  ‘Most couples end up arguing about money anyway,’ he’d said. ‘Might as well start now.’

  ‘You’re assuming we’ll become a couple,’ I’d pointed out. I slurped up my spaghetti, I remember, not caring if I got sauce on my chin.

  Dave didn’t say anything but I think he knew, even then, that we would end up together. That’s the way Dave works – and he’s the same in every area of his life, there’s no ‘side’ to him, no secrets – he sees something he wants and slowly, methodically, with no drama but with the utmost determination, he goes after it.

  What is it to fall in love? Is it a different thing from being in love? At what point does falling become being? When do you land?

  Some say love is security. It’s a comfort thing. It was like that with Dave. It was feeling utterly relaxed, melting into him the way a cat pours its every muscle onto a table or a chair arm, or someone’s leg, moulding it to them. It’s almost impossible to get up once a cat has sat on your lap, because they just make themselves belong there.

  Love is: butterflies; a warm feeling; fear; jealousy; a grin you can’t shake; sleeplessness; tears; hours of staring at the wall, staring at the window, staring at his photo, staring at his face; love is change. Security, insecurity. Passion, fights. Chatter, silence.

  Love is chaos.

  Dave and I didn’t so much fall in love as stumble into it, both dazed and war-torn, like survivors of some disaster who cling to each other in their shock and find years later they are still holding on. He was stinging from the slap of the aborted wedding, I was tired and dispirited from a string of no-hopers, badly-suiteds and just-not-quite-rights.

  I remember when it was just Love. Before it was Family, before it was Commitment, before it was Arrangements.

  I remember wanting to say the word so soon but not wanting to say it first.

  And when it was said, feeling strangely disappointed.

  I love you.

  Because it’s the same thing as everyone else says, and I felt an odd sort of traitor to my heart, and cursed my own lack of originality, and thought,

  I love you, followed by (that’s all).

  And I had, and still have, an uneasy feeling that once you’ve said ‘I love you’, the only way is down.

  When I finally sleep, dreams bring the sea, and a replay of our first holiday together. The pebbles hurt my feet, but it was worth it when we got to the warm, bright blue. ‘So, this is why they call it the Cote D’Azur then,’ I murmured. I sat at the shoreline, half in, half out, my legs being lapped by the waves. Frothy tendrils crept up my thighs then shyly retreated, leaving my wet skin to sizzle in the late afternoon sun. All around, glossy heroines looked out from the covers of fat paperbacks strewn on sunbeds, were pored at through Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. For a few moments I almost felt like one of them; I felt as though I belonged.

  In truth, our Nice was a ten minute walk, four flights of unlit stairs and a world away from the shimmering seafront. The room we had secured with the help of Dave’s barely remembered schoolboy French was high-ceilinged but narrow, with a worn-out carpet and a flickering shaving light over the sink in the corner (the sink had cost us an extra fifty francs). The bedding, at least, was clean. When we pulled back the plucked pink curtain we found we had a balcony. It was no more than six inches deep, we could barely stand on it, but we could lean out. I pressed myself into the black iron railing and breathed in the smells of the street below, from fresh bread and coffee to the over-ripe smell of the drains, and if I craned my neck I could see the sea.

  Dave aspired to be the people on the seafront, in the impossibly grand hotels with white facades and cool marble floors. He wanted a pool (he never swam in the sea – too much salt), room service, doormen, à la carte dinner and fine wines. By the time of our honeymoon, the resort was different (Dave never liked to go to the same place twice – waste of money, he said), but we had all of the things he’d wanted.

  So inevitably we ended up in the big hotels. Then we ended up in our own little hotel, our castle, our cabin, our casa, our so-called home. As love grows, dreams shrink. They get local. Instead of wanting to see the world together we wanted to make our own little world. After all, you can’t just backpack forever. Can’t keep ‘staying over’, like children, leaving a toothbrush there and just one drawer full of stuff. Eventually we were spending every night together anyway, and when I woke up late, again, with an extra half hour’s drive to work ahead of me, and found I had forgotten to bring a clean shirt so had to scrabble on the floor for last night’s crumpled top and spray it desperately with his deodorant, then the novelty of having two toothbrushes started to wear off.

  This is how big decisions are made.

  You can’t have backstreet France forever.

  You have to do the done thing.

  Dave had bought the house with his ex-fiancée but they’d never moved in – they were waiting until they got married to start the renovations. Of course, the wedding never happened and the stately Victorian terrace sat gathering cobwebs while Dave stayed in his little rented flat. The ex continued to pay half of the mortgage for a while, perhaps out of guilt for leaving him, if not quite at the altar, then virtually en route to the church.

  They had it on the market and when he asked if I’d consider moving in there, I think he was surprised when I said yes. I agreed to go and look at it, at least, and as it was the first time he’d seen it in months, he said he wasn’t even sure whether he really wanted to live there.

  ‘I was worried you’d think it was too full of ghosts,’ he said as he put the key in the door and pushed it open with a creak, but as soon as we stepped inside I could see from the shine in his eyes that he did want to live there, that the house had been his choice, his dream, and I knew in a rush that he, that we, could make it a home.

  ‘No ghosts.’ I slid my arms around him, no idea why I was whispering the words except that I was afraid they would bounce too loudly around the high ceilings and cornices. As we crept from room to room, as if afraid to disturb the spiders who had been busily crafting their gossamer networks for weeks on end, I fell gradually in love with the possibilities of the place, its sad past receding like a wave.

  We spent three days sleeping on the living room floor. The bed was going to be late, and we’d no sofa at this point either, so we sat cross-legged like squatters in the middle of the living room, eating Chinese takeaway and drinking champagne out of mugs.
The glasses were who knew where, so tightly packed in newspaper and bubble wrap that the thought of locating and unpeeling them gave me a headache.

  We had plans and a child-like giddiness, born out of a shared purpose, that we’d not felt before. For a couple of days we just wandered from room to room, dabbing tentative dots of tester-pot paint on walls, playing at being homeowners. It didn’t seem real, more as though we were idling with a child’s toy that we’d be giving back before long. I liked it when friends visited and I could repeat this tour, pausing here and there to give excited voice to our vision: ‘this will be the kitchen … bi-fold doors into the garden … yes, these floors will be sanded and waxed.’

  But all too soon, the play gave way to serious work and we found ourselves surrounded by seemingly interminable mess, noise and dust. Plaster dust, dust from the crumbling underlay we uncovered beneath the ancient carpets, dust that whirled and settled in corners and on windowsills and lingered in our hair and our lungs even weeks later.

  Marriage, home, harmony. Even the patter of tiny feet – or paws, at least. Our shared love of dogs was one of the first (‘amazing’) things we’d uncovered about each other five years ago. And so as soon as we had a home-life we deemed stable enough, and solid wooden floors that could withstand muddy prints, we found a seven-week-old bundle of fur, eyes and paws and christened her Bella.

  Neither of us wanted children; at least, that’s what he said, then. It would change, later, but I couldn’t have known that.

  I definitely didn’t want children and I was just grateful that he didn’t press me too hard for my reasons. Of course, I realise now that this was probably because he assumed I would one day change my mind.

  Funny how we can fall in love, claim to love everything about someone, and then set about trying to change them into someone else.

  So this is what you do. You take the chaos of love and you weave it into a pattern. You make an Axminster of it. Put a ring around it. Sign for it. And I must be happy now, because I have someone to protect me from the catalogue of mini disappointments that has been my life so far.

  But somehow in my dreams it is always that musty first room in Nice, and jumping on the bed swatting flies with the rolled up porn magazine we found in the drawer, and leaning over that balcony perilously close to falling, and rubbing aftersun on his shoulders, and making tipsy love all night in the glow of that (blink, blink) shaving light.

  On Thursday I go to see Mari. Mari lives in a flat above a music shop, not far from the estate where we grew up, and is my only friend from that place.

  My friends are compartmentalised and the compartments never mix: school friends; university friends; work friends; friends of Dave’s; friends from the estate – or technically, friend from the estate, since, as I said, this particular compartment consists only of Mari.

  We met when she saved me from getting beaten up, when I was thirteen.

  The houses we grew up in were grey, and pebble dashed. There was one park on the estate, but even that was more grey than green, its slides delivering children onto unforgiving concrete. There were horror stories: the girl who went so high on the swings that she went all the way over, fell out onto the ground and split her head open. Everyone said you could see her brains, right there, spilling out. Years later they would install a pit of wood shavings at the foot of the swings, but no one ever knew if the brain story was true, and back then, it was still concrete.

  Depending on which crowd they belonged with, the estate kids hung around either on the park (the grebs) or the precinct (the skaters).

  Grebs and skaters were largely defined by the kind of music they listened to, and each group looked on the other with the particular disdain that comes from knowing your taste is correct and everyone else’s is wrong. Grebs listened to rock, mostly, sometimes heavy metal, sometimes goth music too. They bought albums from the kind of shop that also sold hemp and bongs and tie-dyed clothes. Skaters were about pop music, pure and simple, and they had picked up dance music in its late-1980s incarnation. It sounded tinny and trivial tip-tapping its rhythms out of their Walkmans.

  As well as their place and their sounds, each crowd had their uniform. The skaters wore baggy jeans, or long shorts, and bright colours. And of course, they each carried their board, like another limb; on the rare occasion you saw them without, their usual swagger would become a shuffle. They seemed most comfortable when their tricks and twists sent them air bound; the ground held no interest for them, except as a place from where they could set flight.

  I’d thought I would find my place with the skaters until I became friends with Mari, who was high ranking among the grebs. The grebs wore Doc Marten boots, a lot of black, and even the boys (some of them anyway) wore eyeliner. I was a little bit scared of them, they always looked so serious and severe, but actually when you got to know them they were a really good laugh. Mari was two years older than me and worked in a tobacconist’s after school. It was from the window of the shop that she saw two orange-faced girls, their hair pulled so tight into hairbands that they looked as though they had extra cheekbones, their lips pinched, laying into me. Her plea wasn’t particularly emotional: with her head and one arm dangling out of the window, gesturing as though swatting a fly, she simply yelled, ‘Leave it – she’s had enough,’ and the two orange-faced girls with their flying fists ran away. After this, she just kind of carried on looking after me.

  Mari said I reminded her of her kid sister, who had died when she was a toddler. I didn’t understand how I could remind her of a two-year-old, but I didn’t ask. Not having sisters myself, I liked the way she sometimes hugged my neck and called me ‘sis’ or, more commonly, ‘doll’ or ‘babe’.

  Coming back to the estate always makes me feel uncomfortable. They say the past is a different country; it’s one I recognise less the further away I move from it. Everything looks smaller. There are street names I don’t recognise, or don’t remember. I am here because of the one thing that hasn’t changed: the friend I can say anything to.

  Mari’s flat can be described as minimalist. Not in a contrived way, not in the sense of clean lines and a neutral palette – just in the sense that there isn’t much stuff. Mari doesn’t think much of possessions. She doesn’t even have house plants, says they are ‘too much responsibility’.

  ‘Well, doll,’ she says, appearing from her tiny kitchen carrying a bottle of whiskey and two mugs, ‘to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’

  ‘I need to talk to someone.’

  I take a deep breath and pause for effect. I am ashamed to find myself excited to have something scandalous to tell Mari. She is my wild friend, the part of myself that never gets let out. She is usually the one with the stories, the one with the drama.

  It comes out in a tumble.

  ‘I saw Morgan last night, we went for a meal, we kissed.’

  ‘Wait. Morgan? Mister Morgan? Henry Morgan?’

  It’s funny how, even as an adult, I still feel more comfortable using your last name. This was how I first knew you, after all; in school it was as though teachers didn’t even have first names, or lives outside the classroom, or interests beyond the subject they taught and were defined by. Even when I got to know you, properly, I would avoid calling you Henry (you used to say Henry Morgan was a pirate’s name, remember?). I avoided calling you anything at all, to your face, the way children sometimes feel awkward saying the first names of their friends’ parents.

  But I enjoy, now, hearing Mari say ‘Henry Morgan’ out loud. It proves you still exist, that I did see you, that this is really happening.

  ‘You kissed?’ She lights a cigarette. Hearing my confession repeated to me, I realise how small a thing a kiss is. I want to make it sound like more so I say it again.

  ‘We kissed.’ I am solemn.

  In my head, in the space of fewer than twenty-four hours, the kiss has become epic. It is a movie kiss: sleeting rain, thundering heartbeats and the irrefutable proof that here you are, at the wo
rst possible time, back in my life, fated to cause heady, passionate chaos. Your hands in my hair, my heart in my mouth – every nuance of the thirty, perhaps sixty, seconds heavy with meaning.

  At other times I’ve had to remind myself that it was a minute, only a minute among the millions of minutes of my life, and what’s more the further away the minute moves the more shadowy and intangible it becomes. In these moments I’m plunged into gloom – it was nothing, a mere brush of the lips, perhaps you were just being friendly and I’ve completely misread the situation. One thing’s for certain: you won’t be obsessing about it the way I am.

  I stop myself from saying all of this to Mari, who is pulling a face having taken a large swig of whiskey.

  ‘Well, a kiss is nothing really,’ she says airily, waving her cigarette around. To be fair, Mari routinely kisses complete strangers.

  ‘It is when you’re married.’

  ‘Hmm. So what happens now? Did he take your number?’

  I look at her. Somehow, stupidly, I hadn’t thought of that. No – you didn’t. You didn’t ask for it, I didn’t offer. I am never going to see you again. Why didn’t you ask me for it?

  The kiss-minute moves away another mile.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, no harm done then. I mean, as you say – you’re married. And more to the point, why would you want that old perv back in your life?’

  ‘Listen, I know what you think of him, but …’

  ‘No buts, babe. Let it go,’ she pauses, exhales, ‘let him go.’

  Let you go.

  It was nothing.

  No harm done.

  We drink, and talk, and bitch about which of our friends has put on weight and who has lost weight, and laugh about old times, and I ring Dave to slur goodnight, and I fall asleep and Mari covers me with a prickly old blanket.

  I am too old to drink whiskey in the week and crawl to sleep on other people’s sofas. Mari brings me tea. I grimace.