Precocious (14 page)

This is what I want: to know you, under your layers.

There are yearbooks, lined up neatly, in chronological order. This was a trend that started after I left school. I’m surprised you’ve kept them; I would’ve thought you’d have found them a vulgar Americanism, like Trick or Treat at Hallowe’en or leaving the ‘u’ out of words like ‘colour’ (‘It’s just lazy,’ you used to say. ‘How lazy do you have to be to need to write five letters instead of six?’).

I flick through the pages, some of them signed, which doesn’t surprise me. You were always a ‘cool’ teacher, after all, and most of the comments reflect this. Am I looking for a comment in girlish handwriting, loaded with meaning? Am I looking for something, someone, in the pictures? I scour the faces but they all look the same. It strikes me how a uniform isn’t just clothing, it doesn’t just affect the body, it somehow reflects onto and permeates the face, the whole being. The regulation pullovers in their bottle green (in later years, sweatshirts; in later years still, grey with yellow stitching) cast a sickly glow over hundreds of faces: some smooth, some pockmarked; all bored or embarrassed to be photographed.

In every class picture, each separated by a year, you look the same. The same pose, leaning slightly forward while everyone else is upright; forearms lolling on your knees, tie loosened. Unsmiling, staring out the camera. You look like the class rebel.

‘Fee,’ you call; I jump as if snapped back into the present. A hot, sweet smell, chillies and soy, suddenly fills my nostrils.

‘I’ll be there in a sec.’ I carefully but quickly put everything back in its place. ‘Just a couple of bits to finish up.’

I go back to my cardboard box and take out the book that you gave me years ago. Before homing it on the shelf I slip between its pages the note from my pocket: ‘Call me – A’ and a phone number.

Diary: Saturday, 12 December 1992

Morning!

Getting ready to go to HM’s house. I’ve reassured him that I won’t repeat my previous bad behaviour, ha ha. I’m wearing a burgundy top, my black Lycra skirt, black tights. He says I’ve got nice knees. We’re supposed to be having a ‘committee meeting’ about the play, which happens next week. But really he’s going to be cooking me lunch and hopefully we’ll have a nice chat. God I’ve actually got butterflies! What does this mean? Every time I hear a car, my heart skips a beat. Waiting … bored … but excited.

Much, much later!

I’ve just got back! I’m knackered. Well what can I say? I’ve had a very nice time. Firstly we had lunch, which was very nice (what a stupid word ‘nice’ is!) We did a lot of talking, as usual. I’ve had three or four glasses of wine, with the meal, which is probably why I’m tired. But then again I’ve had an equal number of cups of coffee, and some biscuits and a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. We ended up looking at old photos – God, he hasn’t changed a bit! Anyway we were lying on his front room floor for ages, then at some point he put his arm around my shoulders (he says I’ve got nice shoulders, that is a good compliment coming from him because he’s got a bit of a thing about shoulders!), my head was resting on his arm, my hand on his chest and he was kind of making little circles with his fingers. We just kept on talking as normal though, and it was really nice (aargh! There it is again). Our foreheads kept touching and we’d kind of look at each other, laugh, then go back to the original position. We just lay there, and looking back I can’t imagine what the hell was going through my mind, or his, come to that. I just know I could have fallen asleep there quite comfortably!

‘An “A” just marks you out as better than the herd. You should be aiming for more than that.’ No one had ever said anything like that to me before.

My dad didn’t even know what an ‘A’ was, I’m sure. He left school at fifteen and while he wasn’t opposed to education, he just didn’t understand it; almost was unaware of its existence, except that there was a building where I and my brother were supposed to show up every day at 9 a.m. When I eventually went to university, the first in the family to do it, he was proud, I think, in his quiet way.

Dad worked hard though, and he had opportunities. He was once offered a big important job in London. London in the late sixties was, to my dad, and probably lots of other people, a mythical place. It seemed almost impossibly distant, requiring a Dick Whittington-style odyssey to get there, but promising vast rewards. He didn’t take the job, of course; he met my mother. It’s possible he’s resented her ever since.

In their wedding photo, still trapped behind glass high up on the shadowy landing, they aren’t looking at one another. Dad is staring straight ahead, as though trying to make out the finishing point of a too-distant horizon. Mum is looking coquettishly to the side, eyes tiny under thick black lashes, her bouquet concealing the burgeoning bump that would become Alex.

Dad was a man of few words. ‘Actions speak louder than words’ was his motto, or would have been, if he ever said that much. His usual ‘actions’ included doodling over crosswords or tinkering in the garden shed or, in extreme cases of needing to escape the house, fishing with Alex.

Consequently I learned most of his life story from Mum, who would put on a fake posh voice and begin imperiously, ‘Your Father always used to …’ or ‘When Your Father was young …’ It was clear she’d idolised him once, which must have made even more crushing the disappointment she suffered when he failed to deliver her into the glamorous lifestyle he’d seemed to promise.

‘Hello Boy, Hello Girl,’ Dad would call up the stairs every night, before sinking into silence.

My brother was delivered, so the story goes, by a stern-faced registrar and a trainee Polish midwife, and it took the efforts of both of them to pull him out with forceps. When he was finally dragged screaming into the world, the Polish woman apparently announced: ‘It is Boy.’

‘Yes, it is,’ my father had laughed, and the name stuck. When I came along two years later (much more quickly, so much so that I was almost born into a hospital toilet), Mum and my father had both said immediately, ‘It is Girl.’

They still loved each other then, I think.

One night Mum and I found each other, coming home.

It was coming up to Christmas and there was something about the coloured lights in people’s living room windows that made me sad.

People tried too hard to make everything look jolly, in my opinion; there was something depressing about people dressing up their ugly houses in fairy lights and tinsel.

Number one had a fluorescent reindeer sleigh on the roof. Number three: a twiggy rose bush adorned with lights that weren’t meant for outdoors and died with a crackle and a hiss the first time it rained. Number five: fake snow, from a can; stencilled words in the window:
Season’s Greetings
. These words would stay there, slowly fading, well into the spring.

And everywhere, lights; and always coloured lights. I wanted to live somewhere where there were
white
lights. Laura’s house had white lights. I wanted candles, and the smell of wassail, and instead of a tin of Roses next to the electric fire, its contents melting and sticking to the wrappers, real candy canes hanging from a real tree. Perhaps it was true what Mum was always telling me: I was a snob.

Most nights Mum would step into heels and click out onto the street and down to the pub. She went out, not so much for the drink, as for the life. She always suspected there was something going on out there and she had to check, just in case.

‘There must be more to life than this,’ she had sighed to me more than once.

‘Yeah,’ I would murmur because although this was the kind of thing I knew people said all the time, at school, at work, on buses, and although I thought I knew what it meant, I didn’t know how you were supposed to reply when your mum said it.

We stood in the street looking at each other in the way people do when they’ve seen each other out of their usual environment. Like when you see your doctor at the supermarket, small without his heavy oak desk and white coat, or when you see someone off the telly just sitting having a coffee, and you think for a second that you know them.

‘Oi you,’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous for you to be walking round the estate at this time of night.’

‘Likewise.’

‘S’pose we’d best walk together then.’

‘S’pose so.’

She didn’t ask me where I’d been or who with, just took my hand, linking fingers, and plunged it into her sheepskin pocket, like she used to when I was little.

One Sunday Dad taught me how to peel potatoes. First sharpen the knife; then use downward strokes.

‘This way, if you slip, you’ll only slice your thumb off,’ he said, ‘not your whole hand.’ He winked. ‘Far less messy.’

While I did the potatoes he washed the carrots, scraped off their skins, shedding them onto an old newspaper at his feet. He looked like a sculptor, whistling softly with the radio, his glasses slipping down his nose.

Looking back, I can see now that my father was a man at odds with the modern world. Technology baffled him; twentieth-century society defeated him. He sought to prove himself to me by showing and sharing skills I didn’t have, and often didn’t need; by telling stories that he thought would make me look up to him.

‘But Dad,’ I would say, ‘I can do that on the computer,’ or ‘they have machines that do that now, you know,’ or ‘they sell them in Asda already chopped and wrapped’. And he would shake his head and tell me that when he was younger than me he spent his Sundays wringing the necks of chickens, plucking them, scraping and cleaning out their insides.

She left, of course, for a while. We weren’t supposed to talk about it. I didn’t even note it in my diary.

For a week I became brisk and industrious, in a soundless round of cooking, washing, ironing and organising. Alex retreated into his room, into his head. Dad didn’t seem to change one bit.

I immediately assumed they were getting divorced. There didn’t seem to be an in-between state, to me: there was marriage, and there was divorce. It would be okay; lots of people had divorced parents. Mari had never even met her dad, that’s what she told me. She used to say even her mum didn’t know who he was, but I knew that wasn’t really true, I think she just said it for effect.

So why should it bother me?

The house became quiet when she left, me in my room, my brother in his, the two of us appearing and disappearing as we needed to, to make a Pot Noodle or to take out the washing. Dad in the living room with the sound turned down on the TV, peering at his crossword in flickering light.

Slowly all the things that had driven me crazy about her, all the ways in which she was different to Laura’s mum, for instance; within a week of wearing her shoes, I started to understand them.

The truth is, she didn’t
fit
with us. She was too colourful, too noisy. She was too much herself. Who wouldn’t be driven crazy by Dad’s silence, and his piles of half-completed crosswords clipped from the papers, gathering dust? Or Alex’s refusal to wash his hair, the weird smell from his room, his gloomy, tuneless guitar strumming?

And me: all my clutter and clatter. The make-up stains I left around the sink and on towels; my magazines everywhere; my superior attitude to everyone else in the family, my pretentious over-use and over-enunciation of words like ‘
act
-ually’ and ‘
ult
-imately’.

Even so, it took me a while to see why she had to go and cause such a
drama
. Dad was so passive, so inoffensive, to me it was like saying you were trapped when the cage door had always been open. But slowly, as I adopted the routines of domesticity that came with no respite and (worse) no reward, I came to see how your own life could trap you, and you could be complicit in your own capture.

She left with only a small bag. With hindsight I see this was because she always knew she would come back; at the time, I began to imagine her as some kind of wandering spirit, an easy going traveller, with gypsy blood and songs in her heart. I began to love her fervently in her absence and, while I wanted her back, I didn’t want to be the reason why she couldn’t be herself; I didn’t want to keep her from a new, exciting world of possibilities.

Each night I would take myself up two flights of stairs, over the same pale green carpet and past the silently hanging photographs, into my room. I’d painted it myself, dark blue, walls and ceiling, and taken the blind down from the skylight, so that when I lay on my back and looked up it would all look like one sky and I would feel as though I was outside.

Every night I lay in bed and looked at the stars, wondering where in the world she was.

In the wings, holding the script, I felt like a writer. When the actors got stuck I mouthed the words to them, and they were my words, our words, and each one felt perfect on my lips. Of course some were Charles Dickens’s words, and my actors were kids with mostly monotone voices and guileless expressions, but still the thrill – of my name on the programme, of the tremor of applause – was like nothing I’d known before. Even Alex, in the audience, had looked proud as he filed into his seat.

They came dashing off stage in a flurry of face paint and exclamations and I, not for the first time, felt torn between envy (should I have been out there, singing and performing, instead of back here, in my ordinary clothes, prompting?) and superiority (no one else could do what I had done; at least, no one else had been
chosen
to). I glanced across the darkening stage, over the bobbing heads, blonde, brown, black, ginger, anonymous to me, their inane chatter just a mildly distracting hum, and I saw your face; a wink, a smile.

You were mouthing something I couldn’t make out. You started making hand gestures like on that TV programme – ‘film’, ‘sounds like’, ‘three syllables’. I giggled, beckoned, mouthed with an exaggerated mime ‘come here’, and as the curtain fell and the applause subsided to the sounds of scraping chairs and cooing parents, you dashed and skidded across the confetti-strewn stage and scooped me up in a hug.