Miss You (15 page)

Which riled her all the more, although, somehow, we always ended up laughing a lot.

The flat was on the seventh floor of a big block on a council estate between Camden and Euston Road. The location, only ten minutes’ walk from the hospital, was
convenient, and we had a view north and eastwards over the mainline out of Euston, and beyond towards Camden, Gospel Oak and Hampstead Heath. At first, the grim, graffitied, concrete wasteland felt
forbidding, but once we became familiar with the routes in and out, it didn’t feel quite so much like a war zone.

Lucy and I took one of the bedrooms, her friends Harriet and Emma, the other two. Until university, I’d never been exposed to the company of women, but found it generally more agreeable
than the all-male environment at school. There, my reluctance to join in initiation rituals, such as tea bagging, where you took another man’s scrotal sac in your mouth, had been condemned as
effeminacy; in the flat, I only had to be watching
Final Score
on Saturday afternoon to be considered unequivocally male.

We all shared household duties, with me volunteering to take the rubbish down (before learning how often the lift would be broken) and do the communal shopping once a week. I took to the role,
searching out the cheapest places for staples like milk and toilet rolls, trawling Inverness Street market for bargains on Saturday afternoons when the stalls were packing up.

Under the tutelage of Stefania, Salvatore’s wife and the chef at Piattini – where I continued working at weekends – I developed an interest in cooking.

‘How many tomatoes can four people eat?’ Lucy asked when I’d arrived back with a crate that cost me a pound.

But she had to admit that roasted with a little olive oil they made a delicious pasta sauce, especially with a little Parmesan cheese grated over the top.

I began to look forward to the methodical rhythm of washing and chopping vegetables, stirring, sipping, tasting and creating something delicious, like
ribollita
, from a few raw
ingredients. It was a good way of winding down at the end of a day of hospital rounds, cheaper and more nutritious than buying ready meals or takeaways, and it was something I could do for all my
flatmates to compensate for their efficiency with all the other household chores, like hoovering and cleaning the bathroom, which were done before I’d got round to noticing they needed to
be.

In October, when my parents, who were curious about my ‘living arrangements’, announced that they were coming up to London for the day and asked me to book a restaurant for Sunday
lunch – ‘somewhere decent, you couldn’t afford yourself’ – I surprised them by instead serving
porchetta
stuffed with fennel, chilli and garlic, accompanied by
rosemary-roast potatoes, and a crisp salad.

‘This is really very good, Lucy!’

My father was doing that embarrassing-dad thing of trying to flirt with her.

‘It’s all down to Gus,’ she told him. ‘I’m useless in the kitchen!’

‘Gus?’ said my mother. ‘Well, this is a surprise. A lovely surprise!’

It wasn’t clear whether she meant my name, the evidence of my heterosexuality, or my cooking. The swell of childish pride I felt in finally demonstrating a talent Ross had never displayed,
was immediately followed by a wave of dread that she would make the comparison out loud instead of inside her head. She didn’t. The day was a success. But not one I wanted to repeat.

‘Your parents are nice,’ Lucy said afterwards.

Your parents. I’d introduced them as ‘my mother’ and ‘my father’ rather than Caroline and Gordon. I wasn’t even sure whether Caroline and Gordon would have
been acceptable to them.

‘Do you think they liked me?’ Lucy asked.

I didn’t know if they even liked me.

‘I’m sure they did. They’re just not the type who express affection very much.’

I’d never really thought about why that was. Perhaps, as only children themselves, they hadn’t needed to; perhaps as people who had risen to the middle class from fairly ordinary
backgrounds, they weren’t sure how they were supposed to behave.

‘You’re not like them,’ Lucy said.

‘That’s a relief,’ I said, glad that her curiosity had been satisfied without the need to take her home to our chilly, lifeless house.

Lucy’s parents were used to their daughters having boyfriends and treated me with exactly the right balance of fondness and suspicion. Lucy’s mother, who instructed me to call her
Nicky straight away, was warm and hospitable. When cooking, she always made a point of asking my opinion about how much spice to put in a curry or how long to give a piece of meat. When I jumped up
to help clear the table, she’d say how nice it was to meet a man who didn’t think that washing up was putting the saucepans in the sink and leaving them there to soak. Lucy’s
father, on the other hand, never told me to call him Bill. His circumspect frown always made me behave slightly clumsily, trailing my sleeve in my cereal bowl or tripping over a rake when I was
helping him clear the leaves from the lawn.

Theirs was a more informal household than I was used to, where you could sleep in on Sunday if you wanted and make yourself toast at any time of day. When Nicky asked me if I’d like to
join them for Christmas, I leapt at the invitation with almost unseemly enthusiasm, telling my parents that I was working in the restaurant until late Christmas Eve making it impractical to visit
them, which was actually true, although I probably could have got the time off.

Lucy’s family did a jokey Secret Santa before lunch. My gift was a pair of those huge soft-toy slippers in the shape of Gromit; the one I picked out for Lucy’s older sister Helen,
after much deliberation, was a soap-bubble-making machine, which delighted her little girl, Chloe. Helen was the sister I was least keen on. She had that cool, detached GP’s way of appraising
you that made you feel as if she’d seen symptoms she didn’t much like the look of. When I’d told her once, only half-joking, that I didn’t think I’d want to be a GP
because I couldn’t see myself sitting on my own and being confident enough to diagnose even a common cold, she informed me, humourlessly, that most colds are caused by a virus and there
isn’t much you can do about them except advise the patient to keep well hydrated until their immune system does its job.

‘But what about the one in a thousand cases that might turn to meningitis?’

‘We all worry about that.’

‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I can’t see myself ever able to make a decision about the nine hundred and ninety-nine—’

‘You will when you’ve got thirty of them sitting reading dog-eared copies of
Hello!
in the waiting room,’ she said, briskly. ‘Never a good idea to over-think these
things.’

The middle sister Pippa was much more fun: slightly flustery and inclined to take offence, but also quick to show affection. Compared to the other two, she was a bit of a rebel. Having suffered
from bulimia in her teenage years – in a family full of doctors, this is the sort of thing they talked about at table – she now kept herself stick-thin by smoking surreptitious
cigarettes at the end of the garden. She was the ‘needy’ one, according to those labels families often hang around their children’s necks.

‘What does that make Lucy then?’ I’d asked Nicky when I felt our relationship was well enough established to get involved in such conversations.

‘Lucy’s the no-trouble-at-all one,’ she told me.

‘Probably because I’ve always had everyone looking after me,’ Lucy said.

‘See what I mean?’ said Nicky.

In truth, Lucy could be a bit needy too. For instance, when I recounted anecdotes about the customers at Piattini, she’d always say, with a little moue, ‘I think you like that job
better than being a medical student.’

And I’d have to assure her, no, I like being a medical student (code for: I like being with you); it’s just that, in a restaurant, you get a glimpse into the lives of all kinds of
people with all kinds of different stories.

‘You do in hospital,’ she pointed out.

‘Yes, but they’re all ill!’

Lucy often thought I’d said something funny when I hadn’t actually intended to.

We ate our Christmas lunch in the middle of the day with paper crowns on our heads, passing gravy and bowls of vegetables up and down the table, helping ourselves to cranberry
sauce straight from a jar. I pictured my parents in the silent dining room dutifully eating their smoked-salmon starter with the correct cutlery and felt a horrible pang of guilt.

After lunch, the adults sat in the living room around the roaring fire opening our proper Christmas presents. After a lot of indeterminate searching, I’d found what I thought was the
perfect gift for Lucy. We’d been to the Christmas fancy-dress party at the Union dressed as Sandy and Danny from
Grease
. Lucy looked great with her hair pulled up into a ponytail,
wearing a fifties dress with a white plastic belt that she’d found in a charity shop. Everyone said so. When I saw a real fifties handbag on the arm of a mannequin wearing a similar dress in
the window of a shop selling American vintage clothes in Neal Street, I’d paid more than I’d budgeted for it.

Without the dress to give it context, however, the white handbag looked more junk than vintage, the purse clasp at the top slightly rusty, the plasticized fabric brittle and cracked at the
corners. As I struggled to explain my thought process, Pippa was unable to contain a little burst of laughter and Helen looked at me as if I’d brought in something nasty on my shoe.

‘I love it!’ said Lucy, loyally, carefully returning it to its wrapping and handing me the heavy package with my name on the gift tag.

Inside was a sketchpad, some drawing pencils and a wooden box of watercolours.

It was a gift that exactly reflected her generous and practical nature. Lucy wasn’t interested in art herself – at the couple of exhibitions we’d been to together, she’d
very quickly started glancing at her watch – but she knew I liked painting and was keen to encourage me.

‘Gus wanted to be an artist when he was little,’ she announced to the family.

‘I can’t imagine Gus being little,’ said Helen.

‘I can, he’s got a very boyish face,’ said Pippa.

‘Who’s Gus?’ asked Granny Cee.

‘Come on, then, draw something!’ Pippa challenged me.

So, with the whole family watching, albeit in a friendly rather than a critical way, I sketched Marmalade, who was asleep in front of the fire.

‘But that’s really good!’ Lucy exclaimed, when I turned the sketchpad round.

I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or a little bit offended by her surprise.

I tore the page off and gave it to her.

‘I’m going to frame it!’

‘Can you draw people?’ Pippa asked.

‘I’ve never really tried.’

‘Try now!’ she said. ‘Go on!’

Keeping the sketchbook almost perpendicular to my thigh to stop anyone seeing my efforts, I did my best to capture Lucy’s face. I noticed that there was a stillness about her expression
that didn’t change very much whether she was tired or bored or happy. I’d never seen that before I tried to draw her, but once I had, I could see that in all the photographs on her
family’s mantelpiece, Lucy always looked more or less the same. The equivalent photos of me on the mantelpiece at home caught me with all sorts of expressions, from pissed off to totally
moronic.

When I allowed the family to look at the drawing, they seemed pleased. I was quite proud of the way I’d caught her aura of contentment.

‘It makes you look like one of those dolls that goes to sleep when you tip it back,’ said Pippa, peeping over her sister’s shoulder. ‘Which is actually how you do look,
as a matter of fact! Maybe you should have been an artist, Gus!’

‘There’s no money in it, though, is there?’ I said, with what I thought was the appropriate amount of modesty.

‘Even Van Gogh never sold any paintings in his lifetime,’ said Lucy.

It was one of two statements that people who knew nothing about art always trotted out. The other was that contemporary art which sold for a lot of money wasn’t really art at all. But I
didn’t want to spoil the jollity by getting into a debate about sheep carcasses or unmade beds.

‘Sorry about Pip,’ said Lucy, as we lay curled around each other in her single bed that night.

‘No, I like her. She’s fun.’

I immediately regretted the word when Lucy said, ‘I should probably be more fun.’

‘You’re
great
fun,’ I assured her, hoping she wasn’t going to ask me to put it on a scale of one to ten as she sometimes did with adjectives.

‘In a week’s time, it’ll be a year,’ said Lucy.

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about us. Did I have to buy a card? Or flowers? Or both? ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Does it seem longer or shorter to you?’

There was probably a correct answer involved, but I didn’t know which it was. Time was supposed to go quicker when you were having fun, so I thought I should probably say shorter, but I
wasn’t completely sure. I’d never thought about it like that.

‘It feels like about a year,’ I said, uncertainly, feeling fraudulent when she laughed as if I’d been trying to be witty.

The pink party dress that I’d bought Hope said 7–8 on the label but it was already very tight on her, and the stretchy, sequinned fabric emphasized all the wrong
bits. Hope wasn’t fat, exactly, but her body was kind of barrel-shaped and her legs were sturdy and a bit knock-kneed. I’d had her thick dark hair cut quite short after an outbreak of
head lice in the class and it was all standing up with static from pulling the dress over her head. Hope regarded herself in the mirror.

‘Don’t you look as pretty as a picture?’ she said. Which were the exact words Mrs Corcoran used when she wore the dress to the last non-uniform day. Hope had stopped saying the
things Mum used to say. All her comforting little phrases had been replaced with Mrs Corcoran’s observations, almost as if Mum had relinquished her.

‘Have you got a pound for breast cancer?’ Hope asked, as we left the house to walk to school.