Lifesaver (17 page)

Ken found me lying on the bed staring at the ceiling, some fifteen minutes later. ‘What’s the matter? You and Vicky had a row?’

‘Oh Ken,’ I said, unable to stop my voice cracking. ‘I hate falling out with her.’

‘What were you rowing about?’ He sat down next to me, his weight on the mattress causing me to list slightly towards him, like gravity’s pull. I leaned my head on his lap and he stroked my hair.

‘Um…ell, just the kids, really. She—moans about them so much.’

I was so tempted to tell him the real reason, but I knew if I had, and she found out, that really would have been the end of our friendship. The secrets were already beginning to stack up, I thought, a messy growing pile of them, like unshuffled cards.

‘It’s hard for her, Annie. She gets no help from Peter, does she?’—Ken didn’t much like Peter either—‘Crystal’s a handful, and Pat doesn’t sleep properly and is always ill with something or other. No wonder she’s finding it a struggle.’

‘Well, nobody ever says it’s easy, do they? I mean, isn’t that just part of the deal - you put up with the drudgery of the first five years because you’ve got two gorgeous children, and then you forget about all the hassle, just like you forget about the pain of childbirth?’ I couldn’t keep the envy out of my voice.

‘That may well be true; but, easier said than done though, isn’t it?’

‘Whose side are you
on
?’ I demanded, moving my head away from his hand.

‘Chill out, Anna, I’m not taking Vicky’s side. I’m just saying that you seem to be pretty down on her, when she’s having a hard time.’

I rolled over, turning my back on him. You don’t know the half of it, I thought. Downstairs, his mobile rang again. ‘You told me you’d switched that off,’ I said accusingly. He didn’t reply. ‘Go on, you’d better answer it.’

He walked out and thumped down the stairs, and I punched the residual dreams out of my pillow with anger and frustration. Everything in my life suddenly seemed sour; bitter as lemons. Surely, on top of everything else, I wasn’t going to lose my best friend too?

I met Vicky at the interview day for the Reading University drama degree. It was only a couple of months before Dad died, and Greg and I were in the thick of our affair. But when I first saw Vicky, she was leaning against the wall outside the Ladies loo in the drama department, a deliciously gorgeous boy apparently licking her tonsils. The boy was grinding his crotch into Vicky’s, oblivious to the passers-by, as if they were alone in a forest clearing at midnight pressed against a tree, not in a college hallway in broad daylight. I’d gaped at them; at the boy’s curly blonde hair mingling with Vicky’s purple spiked affair. She wore torn fishnets, a denim mini, and a battered leather jacket which, I later discovered, said
The Circle Jerks
in wobbly white paint on the back.

I was glad then that I hadn’t allowed my mother to force me into my interview suit, a heinously unstylish affair consisting of a long, A-line skirt and equally frumpy boxy jacket, in what looked like blue curtain material. I felt square enough as it was, in my tight black woollen tube skirt and neat white blouse. I could have been mistaken for a stray waitress, had it not been for my trusty Doc Martens. I’d told Mum that I wouldn’t go to the interview unless I could wear them; and now I was unutterably relieved that I’d held out. Mine were only eight-hole black to Vicky’s sixteen hole burgundy, but at least they were Docs.

Vicky had come up for air and caught me staring. I blushed puce, for, as embarrassing as it was to admit it, watching them bumping and grinding right there in front of me was turning me on. I was mad about Greg, but suddenly I wished he was twenty years younger.
Greg
would never have snogged me in a public place. Even when we were alone, he spent most of his time looking nervously over his shoulder.

Lifting her right hand and forming a fist, Vicky made a triumphant gesture in my direction, beaming such a naughty, sweet beam at me that I couldn’t help laughing. The boy heard, wheeled around, then glared first at me, then at her.

‘What are you looking at?’ he said. Vicky and I both stared shamelessly at the lump in his drainpipe jeans, and cracked up.

He covered his crotch with his hand, and sloped off. ‘Catch you later. Maybe. Slag,’ he said, and vanished round the corner.

We fell about; my own laughter partly out of admiration for Vicky’s sheer chutzpah and blatant sauciness.

‘Is that your boyfriend?’ I asked.

She snorted again and wiped her eyes carefully, trying not to smudge the thick black Siouxsie Sioux kohl. ‘I wish! Sexy, wasn’t he? No, we just got chatting and I told him he could snog me if he wanted. Wasn’t sure if he’d take me up on it, but he did. So that was a good start to the day. He’s here for an interview for Chemical Engineering, but that’s all I know about him. Have I got any lippie left on?’

I inspected the faint pink residue on her lips. ‘No. I think he’s probably wearing most of it.’

She unzipped one of the pockets of her jacket and extracted a stub of scarlet lipstick, which she impressed me further by applying impeccably without needing recourse to a mirror.

‘Are you here for the drama interview?’ I asked her, and to my delight she nodded.

‘Yeah. You?’

‘Yeah. Twelve o’clock, isn’t it, that we’ve got to do our sketches?’

She nodded. ‘Fancy coming for a coffee and a fag first?’

I beamed, and away we went.

We’d been told to prepare a three minute sketch, using a prop, about anything we liked—a brief which was terrifying in its scope - although for some reason I hadn’t anticipated performing it in front of the assembled group of about thirty eighteen year olds. When I’d walked into the large rehearsal room, a couple of paces behind Vicky, my throat constricted at the sight of so many people, none of whom I had anything evident in common with, excepting age. I focussed instead on the flaky white emulsion of
The Circle Jerks
logo on Vicky’s back, allowing her to lead us to a space on the scratchy blue carpet tiles where we sat down. She hunched her shoulders and crossed her legs in front of her, apparently not caring that the gusset of her tights was in full view below the short denim mini. I’d wanted to sit cross-legged too, but when I attempted it, my tube skirt stretched out like a woollen roof between my knees, so I had to fold my legs awkwardly round to the side of me instead, which made my back hurt. Perhaps I wasn’t cut out for a career on the stage after all, I’d thought miserably. My small triumphs in the local drama club seemed provincial and paltry in the shadow of what, I was sure, was the cornucopia of raw talent around me.

There was a girl to our right in full Sloane uniform, all the requisite items present and correct: stripy shirt with collar turned up—check. Barbour—check. Thick navy velvet hairband in her shoulder-length wavy highlighted hair—check. Pearls—check. Navy pleated skirt—check. Pale pink lipstick—check. She knelt primly on the floor as if in the saddle, with a ramrod straight back and an irritatingly expectant expression on her face. Even though nothing was happening, she had an open notebook on her lap and a Mont Blanc pen poised in her hand. Vicky and I took one look at her, rolled our eyes, and pointedly didn’t engage her in conversation even though she had no-one to talk to. We were a pair of bitches at that age.

Finally the interviews started. Vicky’s surname then had been Attwood, so she had to go first; and she set the benchmark sky-high. Her interview piece was everything I’d guessed it might be: hilarious, sharp, tragic, moving. It was about a girl who got pregnant and had the baby, and her struggle to adapt to the trials of teenage single motherhood, which she conveyed in three minutes, brilliantly, with just a baby’s dummy as her prop.

By the end of it, tears stood in my eyes and I clapped until my palms were sore, and it was clear that the tutors were equally impressed. Simon Maltby, a short, bearded earnest man who was the spit of the illustrated male in
The Joys of Sex,
only with spectacles, looked close to tears himself, and he and the other tutor (the implausible-named Elton Casagrande) nodded at one another until I thought their heads would fall off.

The next few pieces were instantly forgettable, mostly because I was distracted by the Sloane. Right from when Simon and Elton had stood up to welcome us, she had begun to take notes in an ostentatiously scratchy scribble which continued non-stop throughout the entire introduction and through everyone’s sketches. When the tutors called her name—it was Rosemary Gregson—Vicky had leaned over and offered to carry on writing notes for her while she did her sketch. It was a suggestion which Rosemary greeted with an icy glare of steely disdain, as if Vicky was a mongrel snapping round the heels of the thoroughbreds at the Hunt. (Ironic, really, since we later discovered that Rosemary had grown up in a small terraced house in Ruislip, and had probably never been hunting in her life).

Rosemary walked across to the stage area, smoothed down her skirt, and delivered an extraordinary soliloquy to a dear departed family Labrador called Pickles. Her prop was Pickles’s collar and lead, and whilst every cell in me sneered at the rank sentimentalism and melodramatic tears which Rosemary had no problem squeezing out, I had to admit that I was almost as moved as by Vicky’s piece. I had to turn my head away so that Vicky couldn’t see my face when Rosemary, in her rather squeaky voice, declaimed that ‘the spot in the bluebell woods marked by a small wooden cross was where she went to remember her Pickles.’

Vicky, meanwhile, was pretending to puke next to me. I blinked away the tears and sniggered with her, and we viciously slagged her off to ourselves later in the post-sketch debrief. The tutors had clearly disagreed with our diagnosis, because she ended up on the course with us.

I’d gone next. My piece, in contrast to the emotionally overwrought efforts beforehand, was a lame monologue by an overweight woman on the phone, telling her friend how well she was doing at Weightwatchers whilst simultaneously ingesting a bar of chocolate. As my props, I had brought an ancient Bakelite telephone with a frayed fabric-covered cord, and a Mars Bar; only I hadn’t really stopped to consider how difficult it was to cram Mars Bar into my mouth at the same time as enunciating with any clarity. Plus the Mars Bar made me feel sick. At the end, there was a smattering of applause ( polite from everyone except Vicky, who really went for it). Simon Maltby steepled his fingers together and said, ‘Interesting. Where did you get that from?’

‘I brought it with me,’ I said. ‘I found it in our garage.’

He’d smiled condescendingly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I meant the idea, not the telephone.’

‘Oh,’ I said, looking at the floor. Later, Vicky pointed out to me that I had chocolate collecting at the corners of my mouth, and a thin strand of toffee stretching like cat dribble off my chin.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard I’d got in too. In the end, I hadn’t done so well in my ‘A’ levels, but allowances had been made for me in the light of the fact that Dad had recently died. I was almost more pleased that Vicky and I would be together for the next three years, than I was about the place.

I drove back and forwards from home to Gillingsbury every day for the following two lots of Monday to Fridays, letting my car’s wheels swallow more than miles: first accelerating over Vicky’s hurt silence; and then, two days later, speeding past my disappointment at having got my period. Since Ken and weren’t having sex at all, it would’ve been the second Immaculate Conception had I actually been pregnant, but even so, I couldn’t shake the usual crushing feeling of anti-climax I always got when my period arrived.

I tried to imagine how Ken and I would be feeling if I was late, if a test had shown positive. One thing was for sure - mingling with the anticipation would be something far darker: fear. We were both afraid of the horrific familiarity of the process, of hopes raised then dashed; the weeks passing in terror watching my belly growing and every day thinking, was this going to be the day when I started to lose it?

In many ways it was easier not to even try; and Ken’s body was confirming this by ensuring that he literally wilted whenever I went near him. Which wasn’t often—he was spending so much more time at the office that I was beginning to wonder why he bothered to come home at all.

But if we didn’t try, we’d never have a baby. It wasn’t fair. Every time I thought of Vicky, my teeth clenched with emotions I couldn’t quite identify, rage or rancour, or maybe jealousy or defeat. Whatever they were, they weren’t good feelings. If I’d been an American, I’d have said that ‘I wasn’t in a good place’ as far as Vicky was concerned.

Every time I set out on the drive, I wondered if Max would be at the other end, sitting on a chair dangling his skinny legs and fiddling intently with a small toy. I saw him in my mind so often that I was always faintly surprised when I walked in and he wasn’t there, as if the others had whisked him off behind a curtain for a joke when they saw me coming. But he never had been, not for a whole fortnight. Once, apparently, I’d just missed him. Then he went to his grandparents’ again for four days; and then Adam told me he was with a childminder—Mrs. Evans, the lady in the rain hat who’d brought him into the pub - until the mosaic project was completed. Adam didn’t like Max spending too much time at Moose Hall with all the tile dust getting into everything; meaning, into his lungs. I was anxious enough myself about the state of his lungs for it to lessen the disappointment I felt at not seeing him.

Although then I realized that the school year was about to begin, and panicked. No more mural project. No possibility of seeing Max at all, once I no longer had an excuse to see Adam. I started to daydream about Max in school uniform, imagining long baggy grey shorts and a striped tie, maybe a maroon blazer. He haunted my thoughts as if he was the object of my affections. I had a crush on a four year old boy! If that didn’t make me certifiable...but I was desperate to see him again. On every drive back home from Gillingsbury, I tried to plot how I could engineer another meeting without overtly flirting with Adam, which, of course, would have been a deeply unfair thing to do. I didn’t fancy Adam, I told myself sternly. Nice and all though he was, it wasn’t Adam I wanted to be with, it was Max.