The Forever Girl (32 page)

She smiled at his tribute.
More faithful than you can imagine
, she thought.

“I’m going to miss you when you go next week,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed having you around.”

“Would you mind if I stayed a bit longer?”

She had not thought it through, but suddenly she did not want to go. James was in Melbourne – or would be – and she did not want to leave the place where he was; it was as simple as that.

“No, of course we wouldn’t mind. Aly and Joy will be fine. They like having you here too.”

Now the rest of her inchoate idea came to her. She would change her ticket for a later departure – her particular fare would allow for one change – and she would stay in Australia without telling James. She did not want him to know. She would allow herself a final … she struggled with the period, and decided it would be a month. She would have a final month and then she would begin to do what she knew she should have done all along: she would begin to forget. And in that final month she would allow herself just a few glimpses of him. That was all. She had his address now, and could see him on the street. She could watch him coming out of his flat. It would be saying goodbye from a distance, slowly, as goodbye used to be said when you could actually see people leaving; when they left by trains that moved slowly out of stations, or by ships that were nudged gently away from piers still linked by paper streamers; or when people simply
walked away and you could see them going down paths until they were a dot in the distance before being swallowed up by a world that was then so much larger. It was only watching; that was all. It was definitely
not
stalking. Stalking was something quite different; that was watching somebody else with hostile intent or with an ulterior motive. She had no such thing; she loved James, and that was what made it different; she was not going to make any demands of him. How could she?

James, of course, would think that she had gone on to Singapore to stay with Judy, and it would complicate matters to have him think differently; more than that, it would be impossible to explain what she was doing. She would write to him as if from Singapore, and in this way she could keep some contact; again, there was no harm done in
writing
to somebody. There was e-mail. You can’t tell where e-mails come from, she thought; in a sense they conferred a limitless freedom, for they came from somewhere that could just as easily be Singapore as it could be Melbourne.

She told Greg. She had not planned to, but at the time it seemed right, and it helped her too. They were in the kitchen together and had shared half a bottle of wine. She felt mellow, and in a mood for confession. The disclosure made her feel less anxious, less burdened.

Once she had stopped speaking he looked at her in astonishment, and she wondered whether she would regret what she had just said. Her story, she knew, must sound absurd to others, and it
was
absurd. But then
we
are absurd when you come to think of it, she thought; we are absurd, every one of us, with our hopes and struggles and our tiny human lives that we thought
mattered so much but were of such little real consequence.
Think of yourself in space, as a tiny dot of consciousness in the Milky Way
, one of the teachers at Strathearn had said.
It puts you in perspective, doesn’t it?

Greg’s look of astonishment changed to one of puzzlement.

“You actually told him that you had gone to Singapore?”

“Yes. I know it sounds stupid, but I did. I suppose …”

He waited.

“I suppose I wanted him to think that I had a life of my own … I suppose I hoped it would somehow make me more interesting.” She looked ashamed. “Does that sound odd to you?”

He looked as if he was making an effort to understand. “What do you expect me to say? No, it’s quite normal to tell somebody you’re in Singapore when you aren’t? Is that what you expect?”

She did not answer.

“I suppose,” Greg continued, “that people try to impress others in strange ways. Maybe being in Singapore would impress him – I don’t know. But what bothers me is the point of it all. Why? I mean, most people would just tell him the truth, don’t you think? They’d go up to him and say something like
I’ve always had the hots for you
.”

“Would they?”

He grinned. “I would, if I were a woman and there was this guy I wanted.”

“That’s what Frieda said. That’s what everybody’s said all along.”

He shrugged. “Well, there you are. I think that’s about it.”

She wanted to explain – as much to herself as to him. “But the problem is this: I know how he feels about me. He doesn’t think of me in that way. I’m just a friend to him – somebody he’s known since he was six or whatever. That’s all.” She paused
before the hardest admission. “And there’s somebody else. He’s seeing this girl.”

Greg sighed. “Another girl? Oh well, that’s not so good, is it? If somebody has somebody else, there’s not much you can do.”

“He’ll never love me,” Clover said. “I know that. And I know that if I were to go up to him and tell him how I felt that would probably end our friendship. He’d feel sorry for me and … and that’s the last thing I want. I’m a little bit of his life right now, but I’d be less if he decided that he had to keep me … keep me at arm’s length because I had gone and fallen in love with him and spoiled everything.” She stared at Greg, hoping he would understand. “Do you see what I mean? If somebody falls in love with you and you don’t fall in love with them, then they’re just a nuisance. You’re embarrassed. You want them to go away.” She willed him to react. “Do you get what I’m trying to say?”

He tried. “Maybe. A bit.” Now he looked intrigued. “So let me get this straight: you’ve told him that you’ve gone on to Singapore?”

“Yes. I know that sounds …”

“Weird.”

She said nothing, and he continued: “So now he’s back from Adelaide and he thinks you’re in Singapore staying with this girl …”

“Judy.”

He looked at her dubiously. “Who exists?”

“Of course she exists.”

“I just wanted to make sure how big the fantasy is. That’s all.” He looked thoughtful. “It’s peculiar, but you know what? I suppose it’s harmless – and fun too. You’re inventing a life for yourself there?”

She nodded. “It sort of grew. I sent him an e-mail telling him I’d gone and he sent one back. He asked me about Singapore and what it was like and I was so pleased that he had actually answered me that I wrote back.”

“Telling him about it?”

She looked down at the floor. “It was an excuse to be in touch with him. I bought a book – a guide book. And one of those coffee table books with pictures.”

He suddenly gave a whoop of delight. “Oh, Clover, you crack me up! You’re serious fun – in a vaguely worrying sort of way.”

“He wrote back … again.”

“And you continued with the story?”

“Yes.”

“All of it invented? Made up?”

“I told you: Judy exists. And I was going to stay with her for a few days on the way back. So it’s true – in a way. All I’ve done is to bring it forward by a few weeks.”

They had been talking in the kitchen of the flat, and now he got up from his chair and walked over to the window. “You know what? Let’s make one up. Could I try? Get your computer and write it down.”

“Do you …”

“Yes, come on.
Clover’s day in Singapore
. You go shopping. That’s what people do in Singapore. Big shopping place. And you buy …” He broke off to consider. “You buy a T-shirt. Big deal. But that sounds just right because people do that sort of thing, don’t they? They go out shopping and they come back with a tee-shirt. Yours says … You know what it says? It says
Foreign Girl
, but you can’t resist it because you think it says it all. You
are
a foreign girl, and here’s this T-shirt that admits it. It’s a
very honest T-shirt.”

He warmed to his theme. “And on the way back to the flat somebody steals your purse. You don’t know how it happened, but it goes. Maybe there was this guy – yes, there was, I remember now – this guy brushes past you and he says how sorry he is but he’s actually taken your purse and he goes off in the crowd.”

“There’s no crime in Singapore. My book said that. Or they have a very low rate of crime.”

He laughed. “That’s what they say. And maybe it’s true. But even if it is, there’s bound to be some crime. So you go to the police station and … and it’s really clean. Clean policemen, clean desks, clean criminals – not very many of them, of course – and this sergeant … It was a sergeant, wasn’t it?”

She entered into the spirit of it. “Yes. He was Sergeant Foo. He had one of those name badges on and it said
Sergeant Foo
.”

He said, “Oh, I like that guy. I wouldn’t cross him, but I like him. Sergeant Foo takes your statement and then he says,
This is very regrettable. Rest assured, lady, that we will catch this … this malefactor. He will be severely punished
. And then you went home. And Judy had invited these people over for dinner and she didn’t have any …”

“Arborio rice. She was going to do Italian and she needed some Arborio rice.”

“So you went out to this shop round the corner,” he said. “And there was this whole stack of Arborio rice because there were some Italians living nearby and they were always wanting Arborio rice. All the time.”

They laughed together. “Silly girl,” said Greg, gazing at her fondly.

She avoided his gaze. She did not feel silly. Nothing about her feelings for James was silly.

She had imagined that there would be one or two e-mails from Singapore, but she was to be proved wrong. James replied to each, often almost immediately, and began to include, in his responses, news of his own. There was a different tone to his e-mails now – something that she had not noticed in his earlier messages. He had been almost business-like before and had said little about himself and what he was doing; now he seemed more open, more inclined to chat. He told her about Adelaide and the hotel that he was staying in. “It’s one of those old Australian hotels that were always built on street corners,” he wrote. “There’s a pub in it called the Happy Wallaby – I’m not inventing this; it really is – and this fills with rather rowdy locals each evening and it depresses me, I’m sorry to say, and I wish I were back in Melbourne. I like this country, and I know that I’m half Australian – just like you’re half American, aren’t you? – but there are little corners of it that seem … I don’t know the word. Is it
lost
? Is that what I’m trying to say? There are places where somehow everything is
lost
in the vastness of it all. The buildings stand there against a backdrop of emptiness, or mountains, or whatever it is and they seem adrift. It’s like being on the sea. And if there’s a wind, you find yourself thinking,
Where’s this wind come from?
”

She wrote back to him: “I know what you mean about Australia. I liked it too – not that I saw very much of it. And I liked the people – I liked them a lot, but you could very easily feel lonely there, couldn’t you?”

‘Yes,” he replied. “You could feel lonely.”

She stopped saying very much about Singapore. This was not because she had no ideas as to what she was doing in her
Singaporean life – she and Greg spent hours imagining it, and his suggestions, although occasionally preposterous, would have made up a quite credible daily life – but she felt increasingly guilty about the fact that what she was saying amounted to lies. She was deceiving James, and she did not like doing it. And yet she had started it; the whole conception had been hers.

In due course she would tell him, she decided. She would make light of it – as if it were a long-drawn-out joke, and as harmless as a joke might be. He might be surprised, but surely he would not be hurt by what she would portray as innocent imaginative play.

“I’m going back early,” he wrote. “The audit took less time than they thought we’d need and so it’s back to Melbourne for all three of us. But not for long. Listen to this: Singapore. The firm has a big client there – it’s an Australian engineering firm that does a lot of South-East Asian work and they’re looked after by our office in Singapore. But one of their staff is in London for a month and another has been poached by an American firm. So … Singapore for two of us from the Melbourne office – for five weeks – quite a big deal for a first year trainee but that’s par for the course with this firm, apparently. Right, then … dinner next week? I love Chinese food and somebody told me you can get it cooked on wood fires in Singapore. And there are these big food markets where you can eat – have you been? I leave here on Wednesday, which gives me three days to get ready after I get back to Melbourne. Tuesday or Wednesday suit you?”

She read the message twice, and then sat still, appalled by what she had done. She had known that there was a risk that her deception would be exposed, but she had not imagined that it would happen so soon. She went to Greg, who read the e-mail
and then raised an eyebrow. “Exposure, Clove. It happens. So what are you going to do? Come clean?”

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I’m going to tell him eventually. But I can’t do it now. I can’t face it.”

He was silent.

She reached her decision. “I’m going there. As soon as I can.”

“Singapore?”

“Yes. I was going to see Judy anyway.”

He made a face. “Money?”

She explained about her father’s gift. “I can afford it. I’ll have to pay to change the ticket again, but I can do that.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe this, you know. You’ll do anything it seems for this guy – anything. Except tell him the truth about how you feel.”

“How can I?”

“Open your mouth and speak. It’s that simple. Give him a call. Ask him. Say:
Are you still going out with that other girl?
And if he says yes, then end of story. If he says no, then you could say what everybody’s been telling you to say. Get it sorted out one way or another.”