The Story of You (12 page)

It was just after six. Usually, at this time on a Friday, I’d be going for Friday beers with Kaye and everyone from work. I imagined Kaye with her Guinness moustache, standing outside the Hermit’s Cave in the evening sunshine, and I
longed
to be there with her, having a laugh, Kaye doing her impressions of Levi Holden’s mum. ‘He lazy, dat boy.’ (Genevieve would say this whilst he was sitting, catatonic with depression.) ‘He bin lazy since the good Lord sent him to me.’

I washed my hair, trying not to look at my sore, veiny boobs that didn’t look like my breasts any more. They looked like they’d been pumped up and hardened. They looked like steroid boobs.

I got out of the shower and wrapped a towel around myself. Then, I sat on my bed and called Kaye.

She was already in the pub.

‘Hey, Kingy! It’s Kingy, everyone!’

There was a lot of cheering and whooping – they were well oiled already.

‘How you doing, darlin’? Still chucking up and shitting through the eye of a needle?’ (I’d spun them some yarn about having the Norovirus.) ‘Poor you. Stomach bugs are the pits …’

‘She means the shits,’ someone shouted – Leon or Rik. I couldn’t have cared less if they knew I had the shits.

‘Tell her to get her runny arse down here now, these people are boring me to death,’ someone else shouted, voice like a foghorn: Parvinder.

‘
Parv says come down, we’re boring her to death,’ said Kaye.

‘I know.’ I laughed. ‘I heard her.’

‘Oooh, I hate to think of the Kingster led-up-poo-erly.’ You can always tell when Kaye’s had a few because she starts taking the mick out of my northern accent, even though she can’t do it for toffee. Kaye’s born-and-bred East End.

‘Are you seriously not feeling any better?’

‘Yeah, course, loads better. I’ll definitely be back on Monday. Look, Kaye …’ I needed to tell her. I just needed to tell someone. To get it out.

But the line went all muffled, like when someone calls you by accident and you can just hear the inside of their pocket. There was laughing and squealing and obviously people trying to grab the phone because Kaye was going, ‘In a minute, in a
minute
!’

Then Parv came on. She was talking really loudly and I had to hold the phone away from my ear because it hurt.

‘Now, listen here, darling Robyn.’ The line crackled, probably as she swayed about. Bloody hell, they were all
legless.
It was the first properly warm day of the year and they’d all been in the drinking mood.
‘It’s Parvinder here. You need to get dressed and get yourself down here – I’ll pay for the cab – and stop pretending you’re ill, ’coz we all know you’ve taken a skivey Friday and have probably got Joe there, bonking as we speak.’

Joe. Just the mention of his name made my stomach lurch.

‘And I am struggling here,’ she went on. ‘These people are dangerous to anyone’s mental health. I’ve got Leon banging on about his root-canal surgery, Kaye who can only be funny when she’s got you around …’ (I heard Kaye snort with laughter in the background) ‘… and Leon who’s about to abandon us, to go and have hot gay sex with someone called Yves – as in Yves Saint Laurent …’ They all laughed. ‘I
need
you!’

A strange noise was coming out of me. I looked at myself in the mirror on the wardrobe door. I’d gone grey and goose-pimpled with cold. My mouth was pulled into a grin. The sound was laughter, but it didn’t sound like my laughter. I looked like a mannequin.

I said, ‘Honestly, I leave you alone for five minutes and you’re a mess, you lot. A mess, I tell you!’ I was jabbing a finger at the laughing person in the mirror. I looked so unfamiliar, I was freaking myself out.

Silence on the other end. Parv had obviously wandered off.

‘Sorry, I can’t come down,’ I said to nobody.

Then another voice: male. Leon.

‘Kingy, Robyn, are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here.’

‘Another reason you have to be here on Monday is because Levi is having none of it. When I went down there today and it wasn’t you, he wouldn’t answer the door. He just kept shouting, “F-off,” through the letterbox, “I want Robyn, my Robyn.” Then when I asked him how he was, he opened the letterbox, chucked a bit of cat litter through it, and said,“How do you think I fucking feel? Like this. Like cat shit!”’

I felt a wave of affection for Levi, which was good; it made me feel better. I couldn’t fall apart, because Levi, the people I looked after, they needed me. ‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘Levi really does tell it like it is, doesn’t he?’

Then the phone went dead.

My hair was dripping down my shoulders. I sat on the edge of the bed, holding the phone in my hand, until I was so cold, I was shaking. Then I picked up the photo on the side of my bed. I often like to look at it when I’m feeling down or anxious. It’s of all five of us on Blackpool Beach – I’m about ten, Leah’s thirteen and Niamh is a chubby one-year-old. You can only see Mum’s and Dad’s heads because we buried them in the sand. They’re both killing themselves laughing. That evening, we’d all gone to see the Blackpool Illuminations and Leah and I sang Take That songs really loudly, out of the car windows. For once, she didn’t seem to mind hanging out with me. In fact, she seemed to enjoy it. It was one of the best days we spent together as a family, perhaps of my entire childhood.

I turned the picture over in my hand, then I put some clothes on and left. If I hurried, Kaye would still be at the Hermit’s Cave in Camberwell. I would go and find her. I would tell her everything. If I didn’t tell someone, I might combust. There were workmen relaying tarmac on my road when I got outside – the most banal, everyday thing … And, yet, perhaps it was the smell of fresh tarmac, or the vibrations that the digger sent reverberating around my body, but immediately a memory struck me: October 1997, nearly six months after Joe and I started going out, practically a year to the day since Mum died, and I have locked myself in our big but shabby bathroom, with its avocado suite, to do a pregnancy test. Leah is banging on the door, shouting (I kid you not), ‘Bloody hell, Robyn, what are you doing in there, having a baby?’ And outside, they are digging our road up, and there is the same thick smell of tarmac wafting through the bathroom window and the same vibrations beneath my feet. At least, I think it’s the digger doing that now.

It was still rush hour when I got to Archway Tube. The escalator was spewing out suits who were straight on their iPhones, as if something major might have happened whilst they were underground. I went to the bit where you top up your Oyster card. ‘I’m going to Zumba,’ I heard one girl say on the phone. She was wearing a pinstriped skirt suit and court shoes. ‘But there’s that Sainsbury’s fish pie in the freezer.’

I’d never really yearned after a pinstriped-skirt-suit and fish-pie-in-the-freezer type of existence, but now it was all I wanted. In fact, I yearned for it, ached for it, like you yearn for something you once had, but had lost.

It was busy on the Tube and I started to feel my heart go. Since I found out I was pregnant two weeks ago, literally the day after Joe had told me he was coming to London, I’ve had a couple of funny turns: one catastrophic one on the Tube that resulted in St John Ambulance being called out (how stupid did I feel?) and one at work. At first, I was petrified. It honestly felt like I was going to die. Now, at least I had some warning that one was coming on, because my heart beat faster, my limbs grew hot; but also there was this sensation, like when you’re underwater or walking alone in the dark and you become aware that you can’t hear anything but your own breath; like you’re all alone in the world. Like if anything went wrong, nobody would be able to help you.

I didn’t want to become one of those people who can’t even get on the Tube, though, so now I was concentrating hard and I was talking to myself, soothing myself:
It’s
okay, it’s okay
… and I was counting to seven, seven times on my fingers and people’s feet, which I know sounds mad, but for some reason it helps – most of the time. This time it didn’t, and all I could think of was that last time I was on the Tube, and the man in the boiler suit who smelt of turps. By some miracle, I managed to make it off the Tube before I was rendered immobile by sheer terror, and was now standing outside Camden Station, shivering. I thought about going to find Kaye, getting back on the Tube, and I knew I couldn’t do it. I decided I’d go and sit in the pub across the road.

‘Could I have a ginger beer please?’ My voice seemed extra loud in the pub. I knew my mouth was moving but it felt like the words coming out of it were somebody else’s. There was a copy of
Reveal
magazine on one of the tables. I intended to sit there, reading nothing more taxing than an article about Kerry Katona’s bikini diet, until my heart had slowed down, but I’d been reading perhaps fifteen minutes when someone said, ‘Hello, Robyn.’

I looked up at the person like you look at anyone you can’t place because they’re in the wrong context: personal trainer in the pub, your local vicar in the crisis unit, for example. Then, it twigged.

‘Oh, hello, Tim.’ Tim lived in the flat below me. ‘How are you?’ I said, remembering too late that Tim is the sort of person who thinks that ‘How are you?’ is a real question.

‘No Fujiko?’ I said, when we’d gone through the leak in his bathroom and his nephew’s birthday party. Fujiko is Tim’s Japanese wife. They’re attached at the hip.

‘She’s gone to the specialist Asian hairdresser just round the corner. Apparently, they’re the only ones who can do her hair properly. Don’t ask …’ He chuckled. I smiled politely. ‘But I’m off back home now, coming back to pick up Fuji in an hour. Would you like a lift?’

It looked a bit grey out now; a lift would be good. Otherwise, I’d have to walk home or get on the Tube again, and I certainly didn’t fancy that.

‘Yes, if you’re sure. Yes, that would be great.’

‘I’ll sit in the back,’ I said.

‘Are you sure? You can sit in the front. You may have to put up with my conversation but, I promise, I don’t bite.’ I smiled. I knew he was harmless. ‘No, really, I get sick in the front,’ I said. ‘I know it’s usually the other way round, but there we go, I’m a bit strange.’

Tim chuckled again. ‘No bother, you pop yourself in the back.’

Elton John was playing.

‘Fuji and I love Elton,’ Tim said. ‘Have I told you the story about our first dance at our wedding?’

He hadn’t, so, as we drove along, Tim told me the story about their first dance to Elton’s ‘
Rocket Man’
and how they’d choreographed a whole routine themselves. The sun was at that level in the sky where, no matter how far you pull the visor down, it’s in your eyes. Its white-heat spokes were casting starbursts off buildings and Tim was having to lean right back, his arms straightened, so he could see. I couldn’t take my eyes off his arms: they were stocky and covered in freckles and dense, curly, amber hairs. When I looked at his face, I noticed his stubble glowed orange in the sun.

Elton John was whacking out ‘Rocket Man’ and Tim banged a chunky, freckled hand on the steering wheel in time with the music, singing along. He banged the steering wheel again and I flinched. ‘Sorry, did I make you jump?’

‘No, no, I’m okay.’ I said, but my heart was going again like someone hammering on a door. The sun was showing up every particle of dust and dandruff on the dashboard. I still couldn’t take my eyes off Tim’s arms, swapping over each other as he turned the wheel, those amber hairs glistening in the light. I closed my eyes and tried to think about Joe; about his kind, sloping eyes, the colour of moss, his tender touch when he held me in the barn; but all I could see, playing on the mottled red of my eyelids, was that chicken with its beady eye, standing in the glow of the barn. The fan-shaped shadow it cast on the floor.

Tim said something, laughing, and I looked up to acknowledge him, but then my neck ran icy cold because it wasn’t Tim’s face I saw staring out at me from the rear-view mirror, it was Saul Butler’s.

My heart thumped horribly. ‘You can just drop me here.’ I said.

‘No, you’re all right, we’re only five minutes away.’ There was the tick-tick of his indicator as we turned right.

‘It’s okay, I can walk,’ I said again, more desperate this time.

‘All right, if you’re sure.’ Tim did a double take in the mirror. ‘But it’s really no …’

That face was still there: pale piggy eyes in a huge moon face; amber stubble twinkling in the evening light. I squeezed my eyes shut.

‘
Tim
…’ I pulled quickly at the handle.

‘Hey!’ he said, pulling into the kerb sharply, alarmed. ‘Okay, okay … I’ll let you out.’

He clicked the central locking off. He said something, but I wasn’t listening. I managed, ‘Thank you,’ before I slammed the door shut and walked quickly away, or tried to because, as I did so, my legs almost gave way, like they’d gone dead; like they weren’t my legs at all.

Joe hadn’t responded to my email cancelling our meeting on the 24th like I’d hoped. He hadn’t seemed to notice I was cancelling at all, in fact, and had emailed back the next day, saying simply …

Something came up? This is all very enigmatic. Don’t worry, I’m going to be at Bomber’s for a few days, so maybe we could meet on the Sunday instead? The 26th?

I didn’t reply to that email for three days and when I did, it was about inconsequential things. I didn’t mention meeting up. For the two weeks that followed, there were a couple more emails from him but I didn’t reply. I felt terrible about it. He’d lost his mum just weeks ago. He was still so raw. In between the flirty banter and the jokes about nurses in those first emails, before I’d found out I was pregnant, there’d been calls where he’d just cried down the phone; one particular one where he’d been in Curry’s in Lancaster, of all places. Michael Ball’s
Showtime Greats
had come on (Michael Ball being his mum’s favourite) and he’d had to flee the store in floods. ‘The worst thing was, Robbie,’ he said (he rang me whilst still standing in the car park, having inadvertently shoplifted a Dusterbuster), ‘people must have thought I was moved to tears by Michael Ball singing Barnham.’