Precocious (29 page)

‘Get to class, all of you. You’re late,’ and you were gone. Gradually, I stopped writing about you, until this last diary entry, in tipsy, looping letters, the remainder of the book blank pages, empty lines, as though time from this point had stopped:

Diary: Thursday, 26 May 1994

Disco was good.

HM has a new girlfriend. Jean or Joan, or something. She seems nice.

Danced to Climie Fisher with Sean S at the end of the night. That was cool.

Signing off.

Fee.

By 3 a.m. I’m wondering how many entire nights’ sleep I’ve missed this year if I count up all the hours I’ve lain awake.

I get out of bed and drag out the suitcase from the spare room, the one bursting with diaries, letters, photos, memories.

I’m looking, this time, for something in my own hand, and I won’t be distracted by other people’s faces and words until I find it.

Here it is; your address on the front, no stamp.

The letter begins:

Dear Older Person
,

which makes me smile, in spite of myself, because that’s what I used to call you, and you called me Younger Person, or Kid. At twenty-two, fresh out of university, my handwriting looked bigger, more confident, than it was at fourteen, and than it is now. Sloping and curling with a smile behind it.

Remember me? I wonder!

I told a couple of uni friends – acquaintances, really – about you. About Us. I thought they would find it funny, I thought it would make me seem cool. Turns out, they didn’t, and it didn’t. I was shocked.

They told me that I should ‘do’ something. Tell someone. About ‘what you did’. But naturally, I don’t see it like that.

They say to me, you should have a stance on this.

A stance. As though this is a political issue, not something I lived.

I know my stance on capital punishment (against), a woman’s right to choose (for).

This? You? I don’t know.

So this is it, my darling. This is my stance. Just this letter.

Because I didn’t have the guts to face you again.

Because I felt weak for saying nothing.

Because I was not strong enough to speak out, in the self-serving belief that others would be strong enough to not be affected.

Because I was vain enough to think that I might be the only one.

Because in the sad broken part of my heart I could never face you and see anything less than adoration there.

Because this is the only way I knew how.

Because I could be kinder to you this way.

Because maybe this would meet with your approval. Haven’t I done well?! Look at me: still a writer.

I dare you to come back, now. I’m twenty-two; not old, but I’ve lived a bit.

This makes me laugh. I look at the pages as though watching a character on TV. I wonder: what did the twenty-two-year-old me know that the fourteen-year-old me didn’t? I keep going.

I’ve uncovered truths, seen reality. You weren’t so experienced, so worldly, after all. I’ve met people better travelled and not as old, would you believe! I’ve been back to London – I lived there – and I see now that we may as well have been on the open-top bus that day. We were tourists. I thought you were so clever, so knowing. You weren’t; you’d just read a guidebook and knew you could impress me with a half-decent hotel and being able to follow the tube map.

I know you thought they were all layabouts, or stoners, those kids I hung around with. But you were wrong. They were – we were – just kids, that’s all.

If you came back now, I would be:

Tougher

Less pliable

Sexier!

I would put you through the mill a bit.

I would eat you for breakfast, now.

There I go, still wanting to affect you, one way or another. But the truth is, if you came back I would probably just go back to being the overawed, devoted schoolgirl I tried so hard not to be. Remember? You saw through my bluff and bluster, of course, but played along – it suited your game, to give me more credit than I was due.

The truth is, I still want to please you.

The truth is, I won’t even post this letter.

Yours, as ever,

Fee Fi Fo Fum

I start to fold the pages, put them back in their envelope, as predicted, never to be posted. Then I notice a PS:

You spoiled me for everything and everyone that was to follow. Why couldn’t you do what you were supposed to do, and leave me alone?

I sit back on my heels, stare at the page. It seems the twenty-two-year-old me knew even more than I do, now.

I like snow. It demands to be looked at. It stops things, doesn’t it – when it’s thick, I mean, when it comes down properly, in cotton-wool balls. When it’s thin and halfhearted and turns quickly to slush, turns grey, it just riles people; sends them, like the hands of a clock on a winter afternoon, hurtling forwards into miserable gloom.

Thick, white,
proper
snow has the opposite effect: people slow down. People smile; they play.

‘Can’t go anywhere today,’ they say cheerfully, and their clock tick tocks happily back to childhoods, to sledges tugged up roads usually heavy with traffic, to mittens and snow angels.

A sense that there might be, once it’s melted, something clean under there.

Wrapped in a blanket, I creep back to the suitcase. I find an envelope, my home address (childhood home – isn’t that what everyone really means by ‘home’?) in solid, impersonal type; postmarked London. I’m puzzled, genuinely don’t remember what it is until I open it.

Dear Confused of Manchester
,

It opens. Ha! I look at the date; I would have been fourteen. I remember it now.

Thank you for your letter. We get so many letters to our pages every week that unfortunately I can’t print them all in the magazine. Hopefully you will find this reply useful nonetheless.

Your feelings for Mr X are perfectly normal at your age. In fact, they’re better than normal: they’re great practice for when the ‘real thing’ comes along! These feelings show that you are sensitive, that you have the capacity to harbour strong affections for people, and these qualities are not only normal but essential to living a fulfilled life.

However, I’m afraid I have to bring you back down to earth. You say you feel an affinity with each other, but the truth is you don’t really know this man. You don’t know anything about his home life, for example. He could be married, or have children.

(I remember the teenage me sitting on my bed, biting my nails, turning this very page over in my hand, shaking my head, puzzled, angry.
No, no. You’ve got it wrong. You didn’t read my letter. You’ve got me mixed up with someone else. You’ve sent me the wrong reply. Look again
.)

He’s kind to you, and takes an interest in you, and that’s his job. But that has to be as far as it goes. If he were to take things any further, he would be risking his job, his family life and possibly face a criminal conviction.

Could it be possible that you’ve misconstrued his good intentions in helping you, and mistaken them for altogether more intimate feelings which in fact don’t exist? Sometimes when we feel so strongly about someone, it is hard to imagine that they don’t feel the same in return.

The best thing you can do is spend less time with Mr X, particularly outside of lessons. You may be making him feel uncomfortable or even putting his reputation at risk if people are gossiping, as your letter implies.

Please continue to work hard at your studies, particularly in English, as it sounds as though you have a talent in that subject. Soon you will be preparing for exams, and you need to apply your energy to that, and spend time with friends of your own age.

Best of luck for the future.

Kind Wishes,

Jessie
.

Extreme Teen Magazine.

I now know what people mean by the phrase ‘you have to laugh’. Unable to do anything else, now, I tear up the advice and throw it in the bin.

Dave is coming back home but he doesn’t want to know anything, he says. I want to tell him, but that would be selfish, of course.

This is my penance
, I tell myself.
To carry this. To carry
you.

There are things I must tell him about, of course. Like the pregnancy. Now that I’ve written it down, remembered it, properly, perhaps I can also say it out loud.

He’s remorseful. He wants to make up for the things he thinks he’s done wrong, but how can he, when all he did wrong was to not be you?

How can he fix me when he doesn’t even know the ways in which I’m broken?

I’m curled up on the bathroom floor. I come in here often. The bathroom is the only room where you can have privacy when you’re married. My head is on my knees as though trying to overcome a dizzy spell; I’m shaken with silent sobs.

When you cry and try not to make a sound, it hurts. Hurts the lungs, the throat, the head.

Splash my face with cold water; the shock of it erases the tell-tale red blotches. Wipe away streaks of mascara. Blow my nose.

Put on a bright smile, a front.

Wearing the coat of a wife, I’m back.

For the first time in I don’t know how many months he watches me in the bath.

Sits on the floor, leaning against the toilet. His feet pointing one way, mine the other. Chatting. Then staying silent. Like we used to, in our first home, a rented house with a green bathroom with a worn carpet and a blackening patch in the top left corner.

Today everything is white and modern, and clean, and ours.

He watches me wash my hair. I use a heavy ceramic jug, wash slowly, tipping my head back and rinsing, smoothing down the hair, following the path of the water with the stroke of my hand, pressing. Tip, pour, press, squeeze.

Water drips back into the bath, expired.

‘No one will ever love you like I do,’ he says quietly.

‘I know,’ I say.
That’s what Morgan said
, I think.

We will be alright, I think, Dave and I. I know you will scoff at that. If I can be mended, if what our marriage should have been can be recovered, we will be alright. I aspire now to be one of the ‘ordinary’ people you so enjoyed looking down on. Because when I tried to scramble up to join you on that lofty plane of yours, it was they who never stopped trying to hold my hand.

‘It’s nearly Christmas,’ Dave says, as though I could have failed to notice the tinkling carols in the shops, the lights adorning the streets, the adverts for turkey and sparkling wine and party dresses.

We are curled into each other on the sofa, almost like old times, except that my limbs feel awkward, I can’t quite get my elbows and knees into the right place to be comfortable. I feel changed out of my normal shape, somehow.

‘I was wondering if we’ll be spending Christmas together?’ He’s almost shy, like when we were first dating and he asked me to go away for a weekend.

Yes
, I think,
yes
.

‘And with the new year, maybe a new start?’ He looks at me hopefully and I know without anymore words what he means.

A baby. A chance to start again and to become something more than the sum of us. To do something that’s both ordinary and extraordinary. I look at Dave and try to visualise the child we will make. I can’t, but maybe in time a picture will form. A new focus, watching the dates and taking folic acid and waiting for a result, the beautiful clarity of that ‘yes/no’ moment. The chance, finally, to say the words ‘I’m pregnant’ and have everybody respond happily, the way they’re supposed to. Everything, in fact, just the way it is supposed to be.

I look out for you but I don’t see you everywhere anymore. Car registration plates now are just that. Your initials have disappeared from view. I don’t hear your songs, smell your aftershave. I don’t have your taste on my lips. I taste only of mint and water.

I smell the fresh roses that my husband has arranged artlessly on the bedroom windowsill. Your words are burnt out and the memory of them is in shadows.

The thing that remains is this: my promise to you. Here is my book. Here is my paltry revenge, light in your hands.

A second copy sits on my shelf. Final destination undecided, but it’s there, and you should know this. You can wait, now, for the knock on the door, the phone call, the visit that will make your cleverly constructed little world come apart.

‘Write something for me,’ you used to say, and I did, I always did. That was how this started: a chronicle of us, but also another attempt to win your approval. But it’s funny how memory, and experience, can make a fool of your intentions, and now everything is different.

Here is my book.

What’s written is true.

Thank You

To my parents and step-parents, for your love and support, and to Stephen, the brilliant big brother I will always look up to.

To the amazing friends who have encouraged me, I am fortunate that there are too many of you to name, but you know who you are. I will repay you each individually, probably with cake.

To my fellow Hog’s Back Writers, for listening to and believing in this book.

To Caroline Ambrose, Dionne Pemberton and everyone involved in the Bath Novel Award, for plucking my manuscript out of many hundreds and setting me off on this fantastic path. I’ll always be grateful.

To Juliet Mushens, agent extraordinaire, for your warmth and wisdom. I’m proud to be on your team.

To Gillian Green, Emily Yau, Ellie Rankine and all at Ebury, for your belief and commitment and for helping me to make this the best book it could possibly be.

To Gethyn, my greatest love.

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