Precocious (3 page)

But all too soon, the play gave way to serious work and we found ourselves surrounded by seemingly interminable mess, noise and dust. Plaster dust, dust from the crumbling underlay we uncovered beneath the ancient carpets, dust that whirled and settled in corners and on windowsills and lingered in our hair and our lungs even weeks later.

Marriage, home, harmony. Even the patter of tiny feet – or paws, at least. Our shared love of dogs was one of the first (‘amazing’) things we’d uncovered about each other five years ago. And so as soon as we had a home-life we deemed stable enough, and solid wooden floors that could withstand muddy prints, we found a seven-week-old bundle of fur, eyes and paws and christened her Bella.

Neither of us wanted children; at least, that’s what he said, then. It would change, later, but I couldn’t have known that.

I definitely didn’t want children and I was just grateful that he didn’t press me too hard for my reasons. Of course, I realise now that this was probably because he assumed I would one day change my mind.

Funny how we can fall in love, claim to love everything about someone, and then set about trying to change them into someone else.

So this is what you do. You take the chaos of love and you weave it into a pattern. You make an Axminster of it. Put a ring around it. Sign for it. And I must be happy now, because I have someone to protect me from the catalogue of mini disappointments that has been my life so far.

But somehow in my dreams it is always that musty first room in Nice, and jumping on the bed swatting flies with the rolled up porn magazine we found in the drawer, and leaning over that balcony perilously close to falling, and rubbing aftersun on his shoulders, and making tipsy love all night in the glow of that (blink, blink) shaving light.

On Thursday I go to see Mari. Mari lives in a flat above a music shop, not far from the estate where we grew up, and is my only friend from that place.

My friends are compartmentalised and the compartments never mix: school friends; university friends; work friends; friends of Dave’s; friends from the estate – or technically, friend from the estate, since, as I said, this particular compartment consists only of Mari.

We met when she saved me from getting beaten up, when I was thirteen.

The houses we grew up in were grey, and pebble dashed. There was one park on the estate, but even that was more grey than green, its slides delivering children onto unforgiving concrete. There were horror stories: the girl who went so high on the swings that she went all the way over, fell out onto the ground and split her head open. Everyone said you could see her brains, right there, spilling out. Years later they would install a pit of wood shavings at the foot of the swings, but no one ever knew if the brain story was true, and back then, it was still concrete.

Depending on which crowd they belonged with, the estate kids hung around either on the park (the grebs) or the precinct (the skaters).

Grebs and skaters were largely defined by the kind of music they listened to, and each group looked on the other with the particular disdain that comes from
knowing
your taste is correct and everyone else’s is wrong. Grebs listened to rock, mostly, sometimes heavy metal, sometimes goth music too. They bought albums from the kind of shop that also sold hemp and bongs and tie-dyed clothes. Skaters were about pop music, pure and simple, and they had picked up dance music in its late-1980s incarnation. It sounded tinny and trivial tip-tapping its rhythms out of their Walkmans.

As well as their place and their sounds, each crowd had their uniform. The skaters wore baggy jeans, or long shorts, and bright colours. And of course, they each carried their board, like another limb; on the rare occasion you saw them without, their usual swagger would become a shuffle. They seemed most comfortable when their tricks and twists sent them air bound; the ground held no interest for them, except as a place from where they could set flight.

I’d thought I would find my place with the skaters until I became friends with Mari, who was high ranking among the grebs. The grebs wore Doc Marten boots, a lot of black, and even the boys (some of them anyway) wore eyeliner. I was a little bit scared of them, they always looked so serious and severe, but actually when you got to know them they were a really good laugh. Mari was two years older than me and worked in a tobacconist’s after school. It was from the window of the shop that she saw two orange-faced girls, their hair pulled so tight into hairbands that they looked as though they had extra cheekbones, their lips pinched, laying into me. Her plea wasn’t particularly emotional: with her head and one arm dangling out of the window, gesturing as though swatting a fly, she simply yelled, ‘Leave it – she’s had enough,’ and the two orange-faced girls with their flying fists ran away. After this, she just kind of carried on looking after me.

Mari said I reminded her of her kid sister, who had died when she was a toddler. I didn’t understand how I could remind her of a two-year-old, but I didn’t ask. Not having sisters myself, I liked the way she sometimes hugged my neck and called me ‘sis’ or, more commonly, ‘doll’ or ‘babe’.

Coming back to the estate always makes me feel uncomfortable. They say the past is a different country; it’s one I recognise less the further away I move from it. Everything looks smaller. There are street names I don’t recognise, or don’t remember. I am here because of the one thing that hasn’t changed: the friend I can say anything to.

Mari’s flat can be described as minimalist. Not in a contrived way, not in the sense of clean lines and a neutral palette – just in the sense that there isn’t much
stuff
. Mari doesn’t think much of possessions. She doesn’t even have house plants, says they are ‘too much responsibility’.

‘Well, doll,’ she says, appearing from her tiny kitchen carrying a bottle of whiskey and two mugs, ‘to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’

‘I need to talk to someone.’

I take a deep breath and pause for effect. I am ashamed to find myself excited to have something scandalous to tell Mari. She is my wild friend, the part of myself that never gets let out. She is usually the one with the stories, the one with the drama.

It comes out in a tumble.

‘I saw Morgan last night, we went for a meal, we kissed.’

‘Wait. Morgan?
Mister
Morgan? Henry Morgan?’

It’s funny how, even as an adult, I still feel more comfortable using your last name. This was how I first knew you, after all; in school it was as though teachers didn’t even
have
first names, or lives outside the classroom, or interests beyond the subject they taught and were defined by. Even when I got to know you, properly, I would avoid calling you Henry (you used to say Henry Morgan was a pirate’s name, remember?). I avoided calling you anything at all, to your face, the way children sometimes feel awkward saying the first names of their friends’ parents.

But I enjoy, now, hearing Mari say ‘Henry Morgan’ out loud. It proves you still exist, that I did see you, that this is really happening.

‘You kissed?’ She lights a cigarette. Hearing my confession repeated to me, I realise how small a thing a kiss is. I want to make it sound like more so I say it again.

‘We kissed.’ I am solemn.

In my head, in the space of fewer than twenty-four hours, the kiss has become epic. It is a movie kiss: sleeting rain, thundering heartbeats and the irrefutable proof that here you are, at the worst possible time, back in my life, fated to cause heady, passionate chaos. Your hands in my hair, my heart in my mouth – every nuance of the thirty, perhaps sixty, seconds heavy with meaning.

At other times I’ve had to remind myself that it
was
a minute, only a minute among the millions of minutes of my life, and what’s more the further away the minute moves the more shadowy and intangible it becomes. In these moments I’m plunged into gloom – it was nothing, a mere brush of the lips, perhaps you were just being friendly and I’ve completely misread the situation. One thing’s for certain: you won’t be obsessing about it the way I am.

I stop myself from saying all of this to Mari, who is pulling a face having taken a large swig of whiskey.

‘Well, a kiss is nothing really,’ she says airily, waving her cigarette around. To be fair, Mari routinely kisses complete strangers.

‘It is when you’re married.’

‘Hmm. So what happens now? Did he take your number?’

I look at her. Somehow, stupidly, I hadn’t thought of that. No – you didn’t. You didn’t ask for it, I didn’t offer. I am never going to see you again. Why didn’t you ask me for it?

The kiss-minute moves away another mile.

‘No.’

‘Well, no harm done then. I mean, as you say – you’re married. And more to the point, why would you want that old perv back in your life?’

‘Listen, I know what you think of him, but …’

‘No buts, babe. Let it go,’ she pauses, exhales, ‘let
him
go.’

Let you go.

It was nothing.

No harm done.

We drink, and talk, and bitch about which of our friends has put on weight and who has lost weight, and laugh about old times, and I ring Dave to slur goodnight, and I fall asleep and Mari covers me with a prickly old blanket.

I am too old to drink whiskey in the week and crawl to sleep on other people’s sofas. Mari brings me tea. I grimace.

‘I hope that isn’t the same mug as last night.’

‘Of course not,’ she says, but I’m not convinced. She runs her fingers through her scarlet hair, rubs her eyes. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’

‘I’m not gonna lie, I’ve felt better,’ I rub at my temples, ‘and listen, about what I told you. I feel a bit daft now. Ridiculous, actually. Thanks for listening … and for putting me straight. God,’ I laugh, ‘you can tell how boring my life has become when I make such a drama out of nothing!’

‘Nothing wrong with a bit of boring, babe,’ Mari smiles, and for a moment it’s like I’m thirteen again, and she’s fifteen, and I feel like she has all the wisdom of the world.

The beeping text alert actually makes my head hurt. It’s from a number I don’t recognise.

Mrs Worthing. Please call me re: collision on Weds night.

Could it be …?

‘What is it, doll?’

‘Um … you know I told you I scraped that car. I left my number on the windscreen. It’s … I guess it’s them.’

‘Uh-oh. Too honest as usual, kid. Well, your insurance will cover it, won’t it?’

‘Yep, I suppose. I’ll call them from the car.’ I gulp down my tea. ‘Thanks for having me honey, sorry to rush off but I’d better get to work.’ I wink. ‘The oily wheels of capitalism won’t turn on their own, you know!’

She hugs me at the door.

‘Any time you need to talk, just call,’ squeezes me tight, ‘and, give my love to Dave.’ This is the first time in five years she has ever said that.

Mrs Worthing. Please call me re: collision on Weds night.

Has to be. I take a deep breath and dial the number. A voice reverberates through the car speakers.

‘Ah – Mrs Worthing.’

I know immediately of course that it is you. I’m surprised by how much I dislike hearing you use my married name.

‘Mr Morgan,’ I laugh. From married woman back to schoolgirl, in a breath. ‘You took my number from that car’s windscreen? Neat trick.’

‘You knew I would, that’s why you left it there. Neat trick.’

‘No wonder they haven’t called me about the damage.’

‘It was only a nudge. Practically nothing. You got away with it.’

‘Are we still talking about the car?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, it was careless of me. I shouldn’t have had wine with dinner.’

‘No, probably not. Very naughty. What are you doing?’

‘Going to work … but I can be late.’

Diary: Thursday, 1 October 1992

The fourth white shirt of the week hangs on my wardrobe door. It’s the first thing I see, bright and ironed to stiffness, delivered by the Laundry Fairy, aka my mother. Every night she comes, swift and stealthy as Santa, gathering up the grubby and bestowing clean, pressed replicas.

It’s the first day of a new month (white rabbits, etc.) and the first page of a new diary so I thought I should start with a suitably descriptive opening paragraph. I was told recently, while doing work experience for a local newspaper, that I suffer from ‘verbal diarrhoea’. The editor was a woman, the rest of the small staff men, but not a trace of sisterly solidarity. On my ‘report’ all she could do was complain about the level of my neck/hem lines. Anyway I don’t care: I want to be a writer, not a journalist.

I’m going to hide this diary better than the last one, which got read ‘accidentally’ (how do you read a diary accidentally?) and naturally led to all sorts of scenes, even though I’d gone to the trouble of omitting certain details, using codes, abbreviations and general red herrings. It’s a strange thing, writing a ‘secret’ diary in the knowledge that it will probably be read. Anyway I will keep you with me, to be on the safe side.

I proceed to cover my body in regulation grey, and stand in front of the mirror. I look the same as every other day. Why wouldn’t I? Mousey hair, fair skin, grey eyes. Unremarkable. I leave the house, looking the same as every other fourteen-year-old girl gathered at the bus stop on Wellbeck Street: grey sweater, striped tie, white shirt, grey skirt, white socks, black shoes.

It’s a good job I know I’m different.

The school bus is a marvellous thing, especially for a writer. I watch boys flick various small inanimate objects at each other, their faces too red, their voices too loud. I watch Helen Taylor, Jo Maloney and Claire Smith studiously rearrange themselves. Their shin-length flannel skirts become thigh-skimming with a dexterous flick of the waistband. Sleeves are rolled up, collars opened, ties discarded. There is a blast of hairspray and they are done.

Me, I don’t have to work to achieve disarray. I’m naturally untidy-looking. However neat I look when I leave home, somehow on the bus I invariably spill something, lose something or tear something. By the time we get to the school gates I always have a shoelace undone, or a button missing, or a loose thread trailing.