Precocious Page 5

‘Oh really?’

  ‘Yeah, he got her the diamond, they had the party, but somehow I just don’t see it happening. It’s almost as though he enjoys keeping her waiting.’

  ‘Well,’ you say darkly, ‘some men are just like that.’ You stop walking, glance at your watch, light another cigarette. I want to tear the watch from your wrist, stop time. Chattering birds sweep down and graze the surface of the canal. You lean over the graffitied railings and flick ash into the water. ‘I need to leave soon, you better hurry up and tell me about the rest of them.’ I frown, but you wink, nudge me playfully. ‘Come on, I want names, occupations … vital statistics! I’ll try and keep up.’

  So although I want to protest (there haven’t been that many), and don’t want to think about the men who punctuated the thousands of nights between you and my husband, I am mindful of time, and wonder if by holding your attention I can buy some more. I remember how you used to like my stories, my characters. I list them as you ask me to; I try to keep it light, and witty, and am sometimes even cruel about them, to try to make you laugh, while mentally I say sorry, sorry, to these blameless ghosts.

  We kick stones into the canal.

  Every now and then you make a show of getting their names confused.

  ‘Hmm. Jason? Which one was he, again? The tennis coach, or the junkie?’

  ‘He wasn’t a junkie. He just smoked too much weed. It made him kind of – moody.’

  ‘Hmm. You liked the little weed smokers when you were at school, as I recall.’

  I ignore this.

  ‘Anyway, that wasn’t Jason, that was Spencer.’

  ‘Spencer? What kind of name is that? Isn’t that a surname?’

  ‘At least it’s not an old man’s name, Henry.’

  ‘Was he the one with the snakeskin shoes?’

  ‘That was Jason.’

  ‘So which one was the tennis coach?’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘Who did you have the most fun with?’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Whose heart did you break?’

  I laugh and look you in the eye. ‘What do you think? All of them.’

  ‘And which one broke your heart?’

  ‘That story’s for another time.’

  ‘Who is the man you have been most attracted to?’

  ‘Are you hoping that you will be the answer to one of these questions?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  We wander in companionable silence for a while. I keep glancing at you, trying to photograph your face. I want to ask when I’ll see you again.

  ‘And now you have Dave.’

  ‘Yes. Now I have Dave.’ I touch my wedding ring.

  ‘And he’s perfect?’

  I laugh. ‘He is. It’s me I’m not sure about.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s just … I feel like he’s always trying to change me.’ Even as I hear the whine in my own voice when talking about Dave, a little electric shock of guilt runs through me. But I continue, ‘I mean, he’s always trying to improve me.’

  ‘Not possible!’ you smile.

  There it is. The nearest thing to a compliment I know I am going to get, and I am going to hold onto it if it kills me. So many of your words I’ve let whisper away.

  Not possible. I am un-improvable. I could cheer. Of course, it was a glib, throwaway comment – not meant, not literally anyway, and as quickly said as forgotten (especially with your ailing memory).

  Suddenly we are at your car, and those two nice words, and the fact that you held my hand momentarily – I suddenly know I can live on these for weeks. As we say goodbye, without so much as a kiss on the cheek, by the canal that won’t be orange for much longer, I know I may have to.

  I drive for a while, through the city I thought I couldn’t wait to get away from when I was eighteen and couldn’t wait to return to after three years in London.

  I think about the canal, watch buildings loom whose histories you’ve chronicled for me, from the cathedral to the town hall; disused mills and designer hotels. You know about things; I love that. You know about wine and architecture. Politics and art. You’re so unlike me, with the butterfly mentality that always made you laugh.

  On one of what seemed like hundreds of shared car journeys back then, as part of my continuing efforts to get you to open up to me, I quoted John Donne at you.

  ‘No man is an island,’ I said sagely.

  ‘Ah. Getting into the metaphysical poets now are we, my little bookworm?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I think, as a group, they infused new life into English poetry.’

  ‘Hmm. Tell me more about that then.’

  Long pause.

  ‘I can’t. I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.’

  You leaned over then, and playfully tickled my neck.

  ‘You’ll be fine when you go to university,’ you said (I noted the ‘when’, not ‘if’; your confidence in me always gave me a thrill). ‘So full of curiosity.’

  It was the summer of the bomb when I went to university, and when I came back, a new city was rising. Somehow the fact of its having been wounded made me protective towards it, as though towards an injured (but still scrappy) puppy.

  Manchester has always been a bold sort of city – cocky, even – mistrusted by the mill towns that surround it. A city born of industry turning its back, turning towards industry’s flashier, better looking cousin, commerce; a city in a race with itself to become something else, especially now. It was a pretender; too big for its boots. And I loved it. I liked its confidence, its style; always wished a bit of that style would rub off on me.

  Not long after coming home, of course, via Spencer and Tom and all the others I’ve told you about, I found Dave, who was every bit home, who was old school northern town, and 100 per cent reality.

  We met through friends of friends of friends, on one of those nights out populated by a gaggle of loose acquaintances with little in common except the threads of past work or college and an empty Saturday evening to fill.

  I was in recovery from a messy break-up and was of the opinion that men were best used for drinks and sex and not much beyond that. The prospect of finding intimacy again was unwelcome to my newly armoured heart, so when he asked me if I’d like to meet one evening that week for ‘a date’, I’d scoffed and called him old-fashioned and pressed him instead to come back to mine for some ‘no-strings fun’.

  I don’t suppose I looked like the greatest purveyor of fun, my eyes tired from weeks of crying and not enough sleep, my mouth a hard line no longer open to flirtatious chat and soft kisses. I think I said something like ‘don’t be a bloody misery, just take me home and fuck me’. I remember he said nothing, just squeezed my hand, wrote his phone number on a beermat and when I refused to take it, slipped it into my bag.

  He left the pub shortly afterwards and I went home, placed the beermat on my bedside table, looking at it for three nights before calling him and saying a halting ‘okay’ to the date.

  Now I have the rest of the day to do the thing I can’t do when Dave is here – to visit the past.

  Under the bed in the guest room I keep a suitcase full of diaries, photos, letters and ‘souvenirs’ (mainly from bars, here and abroad: beer mats, cocktail parasols, matchbooks, menus and even a couple of ashtrays).

  The diaries are illuminating in what they leave out. The days the teenage scribe is most effusive are actually the average days. I recognise myself just trying to be clever, can see my younger self poised with the pen touching her lips, spending long minutes thinking of just the right word. Writing, even then, performing, for an invisible reader.

  The extremes, the ups and downs, are harder to read – literally. On the good days, a large hurried scrawl reading ‘Good day, censored’ followed by a flurry of exclamation marks and a row of words coyly interspersed with asterisks. Bad, black days are never identified as such but are marked out by empty pages. Nothing to say.

  I ski
m through them impatiently.

  ‘Which one broke your heart?’

  I always think everybody has only one major heartbreak in their life. If you think you’ve had two, you can’t have. The big one just mustn’t have happened to you yet – so watch your back. If you’d had it, you wouldn’t mistake it for anything else.

  In the past, some people exist in pictures, some in words.

  I smile as among the photos I catch a glimpse of the black-haired, black-eyed boy who came as close as was possible, after you, to breaking my heart. He is best remembered as a visual: his smile, his unbuttoned shirt, his tan. His words, as pretty as they were, dissolved like the smoke rings he blew around them.

  I have kept your letters, of course. For all these years. For every ten I wrote to you at the time, you perhaps responded once, or twice.

  I always keep things that people write for me. I printed out and kept all the emails Dave sent me in the first few weeks after we met. They weren’t particularly lyrical, but they were warm, and funny, and full of promise. And he could spell – I liked that about him and I suppose I’ve kept the emails partly as evidence. Friends laugh when I list that as one of Dave’s qualities, but it’s important to me – I don’t know why.

  I find this, dated only a few weeks after I met him:

  You think too much, but I like that about you. You make me laugh, as well. You make me more fun, more interesting. I don’t understand you; not yet. Don’t know where you go when you get that weird look in your eyes, but I like that, too, and I’m in no hurry to find out. I’ve got time.

  And this is me: I give everything away. You may as well have it all upfront.

  Here are the things I love:

  Laughing

  Crime novels

  Those foam sweets shaped like bananas, even though they’ve been the direct cause of at least three fillings

  Ginger biscuits

  Dogs, of course

  Rugby (as a spectator, not a player – not anymore – dodgy knee) Oh, and

  You.

  I prefer letters to emails, though.

  Your letters were good. Unlike Dave, you never gave too much away, but the letters gave me something of you that I could hold on to.

  ‘You cannot imagine,’ you used to say, ‘how much of a strain writing letters is for me. I think I have a limited number in me and each one is a countdown to death.’ And then, because I always teased you about your age – which seems strange looking back, given that you were younger then than I am now – you said, ‘There can’t be many left.’

  When you did write, though, you wrote eight or ten pages, plain paper covered in your perfect, lilting handwriting. I studied your lines and loops; your capital ‘G’ that looked like a treble clef; the way you sometimes crossed your ‘t’s twice.

  I paid at least as much attention to the way you wrote as to what you wrote, because it wasn’t about the content of the letters, not really. I wasn’t naive enough to think that in those pages I would ever find a declaration of wild, tumescent emotion, or a sexual tension that might have given my adolescent libido a tremor.

  What I loved was to think of you in the act of writing, to imagine you at your desk, or on your sofa, or sitting up in bed, leaning on a book, pen in hand, moving it across the page, creating something only for me. What I loved was that for those few moments, I was in your mind.

  I find them, in a bundle, bound in the back page of a hand-written story, a fifteen-, sixteen-year-old page with your phone number on it. Red ink, and a blot like a bloodstain.

  Every day, Dave comes through the door at 6.45 p.m. I don’t know why I wait until 6.35 to try your old number. It rings twice.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘So soon?’ There is a smirk in your voice.

  ‘You still live there.’ I’ve been looking for you all these years, I think, and you were there, all the time.

  ‘It would seem so.’ You pause. ‘What’s up, sunshine?’

  ‘Why didn’t you kiss me again?’ I blurt it out, squeeze my eyes shut and wait for your answer. Seconds feel like minutes.

  ‘You’re married,’ you say simply.

  ‘So – what? You’re a good guy now?’

  ‘Like you said, kid. People change.’

  I hear footsteps on the drive. He’s early.

  ‘Can I call you again?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re married,’ you say again. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. Take care, sunshine.’

  Dave’s key in the door, the click of you hanging up in my ear.

  The same as every day, he calls out, ‘Fill many pages today, babe?’

  The same as every day, I say, ‘Hundreds.’ I take a deep breath then trot out my line, ‘Sell many shoes today?’

  ‘Oh, thousands.’ He slips his arm around my waist from behind and kisses the top of my head. Just as I slide my phone into my pocket, it beeps, vibrating against me. My stomach lurches.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asks into my hair.

  ‘Chicken casserole,’ I murmur. ‘Could you take Bella out while I warm it up?’

  At the sound of her name and the word ‘out’, Bella bounds into the room and starts nudging her head into Dave’s hand.

  ‘I have to now, don’t I?’ he laughs, bending to stroke her. ‘Come on, girl. No rest for the wicked.’ He kisses me again before grabbing the lead from the sideboard.

  I smile but all I can think is, Go, go, go, feeling the phone in my pocket like heat.

  As soon as he leaves I pull it out and stare at the little envelope icon. I click it and there it is, your number, no name attributed to it but memorised by me already.

  You’re not the kind of person to have an affair, the message reads. I move my thumb rapidly over the keys.

  What kind of person am I?

  Don’t ask me that, don’t make me say it. It’s not fair.

  So of course I fill in the blanks for you, and wonder what your words would have been, and this makes my heart feel light, and dark, all at once.

  five

  So this is how the lies begin, and how they spread, like bacteria. They need only themselves, and air, to breed and multiply.

  They begin as lies of omission. That black-haired boy who almost broke my heart (I can’t even say his name, so I suppose he must have been close, very close) was adept at this technique; I now know I must’ve gone through all that pain with him so I could learn his cheating skills.

  ‘How can I have lied to you when I haven’t said anything?’ he used to say. ‘Not telling you something is not the same as lying.’ It’s an irresistible argument, and one I now keep in my armoury in case I am found out.

  Of course, I know from experience that I will only be able to ‘not tell’ for a limited time. Sooner or later I will create entire stories, I will fashion them in my head while driving away from you and back towards him, and I’ll recite them with an unblinking eye and busy hands.

  So this is where my creative skills will come in useful.

  It is two weeks since our supermarket collision, our dinner. Two weeks of phone calls, of texts, of brief daytime meetings. Nothing more than that, not yet.

  Dave is becoming an irritant. The wet munching sound of him eating breakfast. The way he leaves the tap running while he brushes his teeth. Who would do that, waste water like that?

  Criticising him, I hear your words coming from my mouth.

  Example: you have accused me of caring more about things than about people. ‘Face it – you got married for the gift list,’ you said.

  On an innocent Sunday, Dave asks me if I think we need a new dishwasher. Every time the door closes the power switches itself off and his incessant tinkering has done nothing to improve the situation, in fact we now appear to have a leak. A creeping puddle is forming on the kitchen floor.

  ‘Your problem,’ I sniff, ‘is you care more about things than about people.�
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  He blinks, looks confused, continues struggling with the door and mopping up the spills with tea towels.

  I don’t care about damned dishwashers, and new tiles and carpets, and whether this picture or that one looks better hanging over the sideboard. Everything is unbearably neat, and clean, and feels stifling.

  I want to be outside, in a field or on a beach, carefree as a child. I want to be drunk, or better yet, high, laughing uncontrollably.

  I want extremes.

  I don’t want a twenty-minute debate about whether we should have sofa cushions in mocha or cappuccino. None of that matters. What matters is living.

  The ‘beep, beep’ of a text gives me a getaway.

  ‘It’s Mari,’ I announce, ‘some crisis or other. I don’t know how long I’ll be.’

  And I’m gone.

  It’s a strange and intoxicating thing, seeing someone again from the past. You can step across years as though crossing the street, oblivious to the detritus at your feet. You summarise thousands of minutes into pithy sentences. It’s an editing job. It makes everything look simpler, and prettier, than it really was.

  I drive to your house, my quickening heart thudding out the risks one by one. Risk One (da-dum): you have someone there. Someone else. A woman. Risk Two: you just won’t want to see me. Risk Three: you will (which is worse?) want to see me, and we’ll be alone for the first time, without the safety of streets and public places to cover us.

  I swing the car into a petrol station and do something I haven’t done for years: I buy cigarettes. I drive ten yards off the forecourt, make a U-turn and go back in to buy a lighter, and mints for later, to disguise the smell of the cigarettes.

  I pull over, two or three streets away from your house, musing on the fact that the last time I was here I didn’t know how to drive.

  (‘When you’re old enough,’ you used to say, while my hand idled on the handbrake, ‘I’ll teach you.’)

  Company cars are funny things. Even the phrase summons images that aren’t entirely positive and don’t match up with the way I thought my life would be. Mine is a ‘pool car’; there are a fleet of them, all lined up, all the same, outside the offices. They let me choose the colour. I didn’t care, but I knew that Karen, who started at around the same time as me, wanted the silver one, which of course made me want it just for devilment. We’d stood in the car park, looking at the identical grilles, headlights, bonnets. There were three we could choose from: silver, red, black. Karen’s eyes were hungry. She wore fake fingernails and a pout, except when smiling too widely, maniacally, at the boss.