Love and Fallout (8 page)

I'd not long finished university in Leeds, and my friend Sabine had got tickets for a band. The gig was packed but we'd struggled to the front. Luckily there'd been a tall lad standing beside us and I used him as a marker when I went to the bar because Sabine was tiny, even in her high-heeled boots. The support band came on, and everyone was dropping their empties, so by the time the headliners appeared we were jumping on a sea of cracking plastic. All at once Sabine rocked over and crumpled in a heap. She was yelping, and I was trying to move with her through the wall of bodies when the tall lad appeared, picked Sabine up in a cradle hold and carried her out.

He found us somewhere to sit, and a girl in a leather jacket arrived and said she was a student nurse. She handed me her bottle of lager, put Sabine's child-sized foot in her lap and felt around while Sabine gasped and swore at her in French. The student nurse thought something might be broken, she said we'd have to get her to A&E. Before I could work out how to find a taxi, the tall lad offered us a lift. He had a kind face and long, floppy hair and he said his name was Pete. I thanked him but refused, I said he'd miss the band. He said it would only take twenty minutes, and anyway, he'd seen them before. Neither of those things turned out to be true.

We sat in A & E for three hours. Pete stretched out his long legs, one foot crossed over the other, and for some reason I noticed the left trainer had an eyelet missing, so the lace went straight through the hole. I don't know why I found that touching. We talked, nearly forgetting poor Sabine beside us, drowsing through her painkillers. He told me about teacher training college and said he'd always wanted to teach history. I told him about the politics degree I'd just finished, and my job at the women's shelter where I spent my mornings answering phones and the rest of the day in the kitchen. We looked at the people coming in and made up lives for them. I didn't tell him about the post-graduate student I'd been wanting to break up with, how I'd been secretly bored to death sitting in his bedsit having long discussions about the penal laws. Me and Pete made each other laugh. When he dropped me home in his dented Cortina he said, ‘We should do this again.' I said I'd ask around, see if anyone else had something to break. And then we'd leaned forwards to kiss lightly on the lips, as if we'd been doing it all our lives.

Tess'n'Pete, Pete'n'Tess, tipping up at parties and festivals, a battered tent rolled in the back of his car, another event always over the hill. Eighteen months and we were married.

My trance is broken by a clank from downstairs. The bath water's gone lukewarm so I climb out, rub coconut moisturiser into my skin, put on a clean pair of pyjamas and get into bed. The curtains aren't completely closed, and a crease of light from the street lamp partially outlines the shapes in the room; Pete's guitar which he doesn't play much anymore, our shoes knocking around together in a heap by the chest of drawers.

Another clank. Then cursing. He's stumbled over something else, probably the cat's bowl or perhaps the mop and bucket the film crew kept moving while they were working out their shots. When I hear him on the stairs I roll onto my side and pretend to be asleep. He creaks down the landing, the bathroom taps run and the loo flushes, then he's in the room, the sound of unzipping, another thump. This time he giggles to himself and despite everything, I smile in the darkness. He must have tripped over his trouser leg.

‘Tess.'

He smells beery. The alcohol has loosened whatever lock it is that keeps us distant in bed these days because he slides a hand over and lays it on my thigh. Once, after an argument, he would have laid his head on my breast. He would have looked up and made the puppy face, a trick he established back in our early days, back then it was endearing, a silly shorthand for sorry. All couples must have these signs and signals; there must be a couple in the Borneo Rainforest who know how to get around each other by tickling a particular part of the other's ear. But we have lost our recourse to that old matrimonial glue.

‘Sorry,' he says.

‘I don't want to talk about it now.'

He falls quiet. We lie still, thinking our own thoughts, not asking each other what they are.
Like a woman for once.
I rearrange myself so his hand is no longer on my thigh.

‘I'm trying to apologise,' he says, directing his voice at the ceiling. ‘I don't know what your problem is. You've been fussed over for two days and had a load of free clobber. They made you look gorgeous.'

The word
made
fills the darkness.

‘Tessa?'

‘But I didn't want any of it. How would you like it if I got a gang of people to mess you about?'

‘I wouldn't mind, if they did a good job.'

‘Yes you would. And what's the point of it anyway?'

‘It was for you.'

‘None of it was for me; it was for other people, if anything it was for you.'

‘Oh don't get all
Woman's Hour
on me for God's sake.'

‘I'm not getting all anything.'

‘Yes you are, you're doing your Greenham Common bit.'

I flick the bedside light on and sit up. ‘What do you mean, Greenham Common bit?' I blink against the lamp. ‘You pretend to have your liberal middle-class values but you clearly thought Greenham was full of woolly-minded women. You said as much to Dom.'

‘Ohhh.' He lays a wrist against his forehead as if he's suffering a fever. ‘No, I respect it, I do, but they got rid of the weapons after the INF treaty, that's fact.'

‘Which made it what, a footnote to history? A twenty-year protest?'

‘I'm not saying it wasn't well-intentioned…'

He's got his historian's hat on. It's infuriating when he tries to parcel up history as if he's qualified to make an absolute judgement, and I say the peace camp went worldwide, but he's not really listening. ‘Oh look, you weren't there.'

He turns his head sideways on the pillow. ‘Tell me about it then.'

‘I'm trying to…'

‘No, tell me what it was like for
you
. You never talk about it.'

Half a dozen images come at once: Rori's silver peace-symbol earrings catching the firelight; our boots plugging and unplugging the mud; the green-streaked inside of the roll-top bath; Di sitting with a placard beside the road; Rori turning away into a winter night as I call after her. I say something inconsequential about being young, only staying for a few weeks. He gives up.

‘Well I'll never know what it was like, will I? Not that I could have been there.'

‘The men got too aggressive, they wanted to take over.'

He looks at me, ‘So you're telling me that none of those women acted like banshees. I remember the footage too.' He blinks at the ceiling. ‘Why are we talking about this? God, if I knew it was going to end in a row I never would have…' He stops.

‘What?'

‘Nothing.' He shifts in the bed.

‘You said I
. I
never would have…'

‘Let's not have an argument.'

Suddenly it makes sense. ‘You and Maggie were in this together, weren't you?'

He sits up properly, concerned. ‘Look Tessa, she phoned me, ok? She phoned a few weeks ago, told me she thought it would be fun, and it was going to be a treat, and did I think it was a good idea. And I said yes. So she wrote the letter.'

‘My own husband.'

‘I don't see the problem.'

‘No? Then why did you blame it all on Maggie?'

‘I did it for you, Tessa.' He thuds the duvet for emphasis.

‘No. You did it for yourself.'

I throw off my side of the duvet, cross the landing to Pippa's room and get into her bed. Behind my eyelids purple lava is bubbling. I try some diaphragmatic breathing, pushing my belly out on the in breath, but it doesn't help and in a couple of minutes I open my eyes again. How are we supposed to sort out our relationship if he's busy trying to turn me into someone else? Communication, in the corny language of therapy, that's the word Valeria always repeats. We are supposed to talk honestly. But what's honest about this?

All around are signs of my disappeared daughter: a framed swimming certificate, her rows of spine-cracked A-level text books bleached by the sun, an empty bottle of perfume on the dresser. I pick up a discarded magazine and leaf through. Pages and pages of fashion; an actress under thirty who already looks airbrushed to within an inch of her life. More fashion. A double-page spread featuring the best and worst products for busting cellulite, complete with close-up photos of dimply thighs and bottoms:
pinch a handful of skin and squeeze, do you see an ‘orange peel' effect?

I close the magazine, reminded of the afternoon I caught Pippa, hardly into puberty, with a measuring tape wrapped around the widest part of her thigh. The diets started when she was fifteen and I tried to talk her out of them, but they kept coming, one after the other, grim as prison wardens, each with a new set of restrictions, each making her pallid and irritable and tired. During her A-levels I left a copy of
Fat is a Feminist Issue
in her bedroom and found it again with a warning note: ‘Please don't interfere.'

I turn onto my side, thinking about Pippa and playing back the argument with Pete. How long has he wanted me transformed? Was it simply a reaction to Maggie's idea? Another voice takes over in my head, a practical no-nonsense voice, reminiscent of Jean's from camp.
Come on old thing, stop feeling sorry for yourself
. This voice usually straightens me out when things go awry, but tonight I don't have the energy to listen. My mind lurches from Pete to Pippa, then floods with faces from the past until I fall at last into an uneasy dream.

6

Woman in a Bath

I woke up with pains in my legs and buttocks. The hood of my sleeping bag felt damp and my eyes stung from lack of sleep. After the men had vanished I'd stayed awake, enacting their return in my imagination, convinced of footsteps with every creaking branch.

The walls of the tent had sagged overnight and fluttered in the chill breeze as I lay still, trying to take charge of my thoughts, both of them: what am I doing here? And, what do I do now? In the end I roused myself with a verse of ‘I want to be Free,' by Toyah.
Don't want to be nobody's fool
, I sang as I climbed out of my sleeping bag fully clothed,
Don't want someone living my
life for me
, I sang, easing off my socks and putting thicker ones on, inspecting the O of my new blister in the process,
I want to be free
I sang, digging out the trainers from my rucksack.
I'm going to turn this world inside out, I'm going to…
I unzipped the tent and surveyed my new home. In the light of the October morning, things looked even worse than they had last night: it was as if someone had taken a skip and spread its contents thinly over an expanse of mud.

Between the tents and the igloo-shaped shelters dotted around the clearing, I could see a one-wheeled bike balanced upside down on its saddle, a washing-up bowl blown loose from its mooring, and a broken straw bale moulting in yellow shreds across the grass. A banner reading WOMEN AGAINST was strung droopily between trees. Obscured by branches, the missing word could have been anything – convention, war, washing-up.

I'd been camping with my parents once in Tenby, but our experience of the great outdoors had been tempered by the sight of other families happily adapting the norms of domesticity; mums pegging out washing, dads cooking sausages on Calor gas fires. Here there was no shower block, and there were no children playing Swingball either, although a half-deflated beach ball sat wrinkled in the mud not far away, like a strange fallen fruit. The overnight rain had calmed but the wind was still loaded with mizzle.

I'd filled an empty squash bottle with water for the train journey and now used some of it to brush my teeth, spitting a pool of foam into the mulchy leaves beside the tent. I knew there was a food storage arrangement beside the Welsh dresser, but since I'd brought a few supplies with me, it seemed easier to scoff down a bruised banana and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. As to the problem of emptying my bladder, well, there weren't going to be any flushing toilets around, that was for certain, so using my Toyah force-field I navigated a path through the bracken and found a tree private enough behind which to squat, awkwardly, leaning backwards on my hands. I'd not quite finished when I glimpsed a woman wheeling a barrow in my direction. After a scramble to pull up my jeans, I recognised her as the woman I'd sat next to the night before, the one with the serious spectacles. Angela. I raised my hand in a weird half salute, still clutching my belt. She gave the slightest nod and carried on wheeling. I watched her small upright figure disappear towards the road, conscious of a damp spot on my inner thigh.

A low cloud scudded overhead, its belly swollen with rain. What did they do when it rained? In fact, what did they do, full stop? How did demonstrating against nuclear weapons work on a day-to-day-actually-filling-in-the-hours basis? Should I go and sit at the fire where two women were toasting bread on sticks and drinking tea? That would be a start. And yet it was all quite intimidating. Behind my tent the silver birch thickened into woods. Perhaps I should explore my new environment, get a feel for the terrain.