To Be Someone (38 page)

We did very little that holiday, except lie on our begonia-bright terrace, gawping at the stunning view around the dramatic horseshoe-shaped cliffs and over the black volcanic island. Sunset was our favorite time. We sat companionably in our deck chairs in the charged silence, as the massive sky before us changed into every outlandish shade of red we could imagine. The volcano got blacker, the clouds pinker, and finally the sun slunk down in a blaze of orange into the dark Aegean waters of the caldera. It was so far away from everything: perfidious boyfriends, the sound of my voice echoing out of cafés and cabs and offices all across London, scarred lungs. To both of our delight, Sam felt better that week than she had for a long time.

“It’s all the negative ions in the air from the volcano,” I informed her one evening when we were out for a “walk” (I was pushing Sam in her wheelchair). “Apparently the health benefits are well documented. It says so in the guidebook.”

“Wish we could stay for longer,” she said wistfully as I propelled her chair with difficulty up the steep and ill-kept road, struggling womanfully until we got to the brow of the hill.

“Me, too. But I tell you what: Healthy, it might be; flat, it ain’t,” I puffed, before deciding that perhaps we shouldn’t go down the other side, as I might not be able to control the speed of our descent.

I laughed out loud as something occurred to me. “Hey, Sam, this reminds me of the Great Continental Quilt Bob-Sleigh Race—you know, heaving like mad to get into position, then losing all control on the corners and down the stairs—we nearly killed ourselves!”

“Oh God, yes! I used to be so terrified when you were dragging the quilt, but I couldn’t get enough of it. Hey, how about a quick turn down the hill now? I’ll sit on your lap in the chair!”

I started protesting, horrified at the thought, until I saw she was laughing. I gave her a friendly slap on the shoulder, and we looked out at the beautiful view of the sun shimmering across the flat turquoise sea instead, an act much more befitting our age and status.

Later that evening, both of us glowing pink from the day’s sunshine, we were polishing off a bottle of retsina and flicking olive stones off the balcony wall in the hopes of starting our own cliffside olive grove.

“We need more wine, and some music.” I jumped up and ran to fetch a CD and a fresh bottle. “I want to hear Ann Peebles again.”

I came back out with my Discman, setting it on the wall next to us and inserting the CD. The introduction to “I Can’t Stand the Rain” quivered, somewhat more tinnily than from my deluxe car stereo, out of the tiny little Discman speakers, filling the ionized air around us.

“John Lennon thought this was one of the greatest songs ever,” I started to say, but about halfway through the sentence, my voice stuck and unexpected tears flooded my eyes.

“What’s the matter?” Sam asked with alarm.

I shook my head and gesticulated at the Discman. I found that I had just proved my own theory of music and memory. “I forgot we’d been listening to this song when you told me about your lung transplant.”

I knew at that point that forever more when I heard Willie Mitchell’s orchestrated drum “raindrops” at the start of that song, I would relive the feeling of driving through a Hampshire village with the trees in bud, and Sam telling me that she had to have a life-threatening operation.

We sat listening to the track in silence, holding hands, me dripping tears all over the begonias. It was such an instinctive reaction: “I Can’t Stand the Rain” equaled tears.

Eventually Sam opened the new bottle of retsina. “Come on, get some more of this down you. Let’s enjoy life while we can, eh? Nobody else can do it for us. It’s too short to waste.”

I nodded, held out my glass, and swiped my hand over my face.

“I tell you what, Helena,” she added. “You don’t half cry a lot, for an international pop star.” She grinned at me.

I gulped down half the contents of my glass. I wasn’t sure whether I was quite ready to be teased or not, but the strong bite of the retsina reassured me that perhaps I was.

“Hey, you know me.” I managed to grin back. “Some people have weak bladders; I have weak tear ducts. It’s a quirk of nature, that’s all. Top me up again, would you?”

Sam obliged, and this time we clinked glasses in a toast.

“To enjoying life.”

My other enduring memory from Santorini came on a day when Sam had been feeling a little tired and had decided not to venture off our terrace. I had set off alone, to find a swimming spot I’d heard about right at the bottom of the cliffs at the highest point of the island.

I wound my way down three-hundred-odd shallow and uneven steps, overtaken constantly by knock-kneed donkeys bowing under the weight of lazy tourists, to sea level, past a neat little seafront bar and round a corner. Here the path petered out, and I had to clamber over heaps of jagged rocks to a small secluded place where a group of locals and a few tourists in the know were sunbathing and diving off a selection of bigger, flatter rocks.

About twenty feet out into the sea was a tiny, tiny island—less an island, really, than one huge stone jutting out of the water. Perched on the side of it facing the volcano was a stone shrine, simple but beautiful in the way that rural Greek architecture always was, merely an arch with a bell, a small altar, and steps leading from a crude stone mooring place. I thought it was a shrine to the Virgin Mary, but I couldn’t clearly remember.

What I did recall, though, was swimming out alone round the island to where the sea suddenly became deeper than I could possibly have imagined. This was where the volcano had blown out the center of the main island, sometime during the second millennium
B.C
. When I dived down even a few feet, the water became much, much colder and darker, and it frightened me. Suddenly I experienced a sensation of unutterable loneliness. It was as though I could feel the sadness of Santorini’s Bronze Age inhabitants as what they must surely have dreaded came to pass: In a vast evil plume of molten lava their beautiful civilization was buried, frozen forever in time. What was not blown up or covered in many feet of pumice was flooded out by the sea, which had rushed in to fill up the vacuum left by the subsequent collapse of the volcano’s magma chamber.

In the silence of the water’s depth I felt the grief of a lost people, perhaps even the mighty Atlantean race; this could conceivably have been the furthest Western tip of Atlantis. The air was so vibrant there that anything seemed possible.

But being under the water was too frightening, too much like death, and I shot back up to the surface to where I could once more hear my breath and feel the hot sun warm my chilled face. Seagulls wheeled reassuringly around my head, and I de-misted and replaced my goggles before turning to swim back to the shore, unable to shake the feeling that something might grab at my legs from the ineffable depths. As I’d struck out for the rocks at a brisk crawl, my face alternately in the water and to the side for air, something caught my attention and I stopped. Just ahead of me a sharp ray of sun had pierced the water’s surface and was shooting down through the blackness, lighting it like a laser beam. I put my face back down in the sea and stared at it underwater.

It was unspeakably beautiful. For the first fifteen feet or so, where the water was still light, it made an effervescing cauldron of blue-green with sparkling white speckles; intense, but the subtlest thing I’d ever seen. Then as the water got darker it ceased to have that transformative effect, but the ray itself kept penetrating as strongly as ever. I followed it with my eyes as far as I could, which appeared to be to the very center of the earth. Its pull on me was so pure, so forceful that I could almost feel myself being sucked down, compelled to go with it. I
wanted
to go with it. At that moment I believed that never in my life had I felt so much joy, or so much peace. The black water was no longer threatening. It was a part of me.

It’s okay to trust life, it seemed to tell me. Take it, it’s yours. Don’t waste it.

Sam was right, I thought, coming back up for air. It was all up to us, as individuals. I was the only one who could make my life truly worthwhile, to find the value in what I had been given. I supposed I’d spent so many years being dependent on others for my success and happiness: our fans, Sam, Vinnie, even Ringside and Mickey, and now New World. It was time to be more self-sufficient. It was time to be myself.

“I LIKE STINGS”

S
EEING CRYSTAL LASERS IN THE SEA AND BELIEVING EVERYTHING
would be all right was all well and good. But nothing was all right, was it? Sam was dead. Vinnie had betrayed me. I’d lost my eye and my job. The only person I felt remotely like seeing, apart from Sam, was Toby, but there hadn’t been a peep out of him since the riverside debacle.

Admittedly, he didn’t have my address or phone number, and he
had
been hanging round Richmond on the off-chance of seeing me—but that was pretty lame, as far as I was concerned. He could have found out that Ron was my agent easily enough, and contacted me that way. For the sake of my dedication to the Plan, therefore, I persuaded myself that, in the cold light of day he’d probably decided that he wasn’t interested after all. It could never have worked out between us, not with all our respective baggage. But I still wanted to see him once more, even if just to say good-bye.

The manuscript was nearly finished, with just a couple more chapters to go, and I felt ready to tie up a few loose ends.

I was going to give Ruby the Hel-Sam box.

I drove slowly through Fulham, peering at the street names until I found Larchfield Road. For some reason I had been expecting number twenty-seven to be a sizable period house, not this narrow-shouldered anemic cottage, sandwiched like an apology between two similar ones.

I parked, badly, a little way up the street, behind a large white van into whose bumper I reversed. Since losing my eye, my previously pristine BMW was acquiring more knocks and scratches than a toddler’s knees. Still, who cared? I wasn’t going to get sentimental about the bloody car.

I gathered up the Hel-Sam box, locked the car, and headed for the pale cottage, trying very hard to swallow down a bubble of excitement at seeing Toby again, despite the inauspicious circumstances of our last encounter. I’d have telephoned first, but there’d been so many creases in the balled-up receipt when I’d finally picked it up from the floor of the car and straightened it out that the scribbled phone number was illegible. I had only just managed to decipher the address.

It was a strange feeling, being excited and suicidal. I hated using the word
suicidal
but decided that it was about time I started to. It was a step toward making the Plan more than just typed words on a page and a playlist.

Another step was this meeting. I banged the door-knocker twice, with a briskness that I didn’t feel inside, and waited to see Toby’s familiar smile.

The door opened. A woman stood there, my age, with Toby’s eyes but a more angular face. She had a pierced eyebrow and the Middleton curls, only hers were dark brown.

“Are you Lulu?” I stuck out my hand to be shaken. “I’m a friend of Toby’s. Is he still living here? I’d have called, but you’re ex-Directory.” Nerves made me sound aggressive.

Lulu shook my hand, more of a twitch really, and stared at me. “You’re Helena Nicholls.” I couldn’t tell if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Yeah.”

Lulu blushed suddenly, and I realized that she wasn’t being unfriendly, but was phased by my sudden and unannounced appearance at her house. “I’m sorry. Toby is still staying here, but he’s away on business tonight. He had to go and meet a client in Dublin.”

“Oh.” I’d timed the visit for early evening with the assumption that Toby would have finished work, but I’d never considered that he might be away. I was such an idiot. “Sorry to bother you, Lulu. I shouldn’t have just turned up. Actually, I brought something for Toby to give Ruby. Can I leave it with you?”

We both looked down at the battered old hat box in my arms. Lulu’s expression read,
And you want to give that to Ruby why?
I resisted the temptation to tell her that this was my last true link with Sam. My last true link with life.

“Ruby’s here, though,” Lulu continued. “She’s just getting ready for bed. Why don’t you come in and give it to her yourself?”

I tried and failed to smile, allowing Lulu to usher me into an open-plan living room. I was clutching the Hel-Sam box tightly against my abdomen, its curves comforting me. When I released it there were speckles of glitter on my hands and down the front of my sweater, and grief made my head spin.

“Cool house,” I managed eventually, looking around. It was much more spacious inside than its exterior suggested, and beautifully decorated in muted earthy shades. There was nothing extraneous, no clutter. Sting’s voice drifted out of two state-of-the-art hanging egg-shaped speakers. A staircase rose from the middle of the room, stairs carpeted with a nubbly cream sisal carpet. “It’s hard to believe you have a small child staying with you.”

Lulu grinned. “I’ve just tidied up. “She indicated a closed cupboard door with a jerk of her head. “She’s going home tomorrow, and I’ll miss her—but I’m looking forward to having my social life back again. Would you like a drink? I was about to open a bottle of wine.”

“Thanks, I’d love one.”

Lulu headed toward the kitchen, stopping en route at the foot of the stairs. “Ruuuu-by! Can you come downstairs, please? You’ve got a visitor!” She turned back to me. “Make yourself at home. I’ll just go and get Ruby’s milk, and the wine. Back in a second.”

“I cleaned my teeth,” said a small voice from the top of the stairs.

I walked over to the staircase and looked up. Ruby was sitting on the top step, a white tidemark of diluted toothpaste crusting around her mouth. Her hair had corkscrewed into a whole new layer of curls, and even her feet looked bigger. I was overjoyed to see her. “I can see that you did. Aren’t you clever? Will you come down and talk to me?”

Ruby bumped slowly down, step by step, on her bottom, until she was sitting at my feet. She was wearing red Teletubby slippers and a yellow hooded dressing gown over powder blue flowery pajamas, a small riot of color against the pale carpet. I wanted to hug her but thought it might scare her. Instead I crouched down and sat on the step next to her.

“Do you remember me, Ruby? From the hospital?”

“Mmm, you’re the pirate,” she said, gazing at my eye patch. “Where’s your eyebrow gone?”

I usually shaded in the few sparse hairs remaining with a brown eyebrow pencil, but I had forgotten that day, what with all the tension of planning the visit.

“Um, it sort of got lost in my accident.” I glanced toward the kitchen in the hope that Lulu wasn’t following the exchange. I didn’t like to draw attention to my missing body parts.

“Never mind, I get my daddy to buy you a new one.” Ruby patted my shoulder in consolation. “A black one,” she added firmly.

Lulu, laughing, came back into the room with two glasses of wine and a beaker of milk, which she handed to Ruby. She had obviously overheard the conversation. “It doesn’t work like that, Rubes. Helena isn’t Mr. Potato Head, you know.”

Lulu mistook my frown for incomprehension. “He’s a character from
Toy Story
. Ruby’s got the toy, and all his bits come off—you know, ears and eyebrows and stuff.… ” Wisely, she tailed off before she dug herself any deeper, but it was too late.

“I know who Mr. Potato Head is,” I said, frostily, and Lulu blushed.

She changed the subject, wiping the chalky ring from around Ruby’s mouth with a spit-dampened thumb. “Why did you clean your teeth already, Rubes? You’ll only have to do it again after your milk.”

Ruby sucked at the bottle. “Because I cleaned my teeth,” she said. Then she cocked an ear toward the nearest eggy speaker. “What’s this music?”

“It’s Sting,” said Lulu.

“I
like
Stings,” Ruby announced mournfully, shaking her head.

Lulu laughed again. “That means she
doesn’t
like Sting. It’s all in the intonation.”

I smiled, deciding after all that it would be churlish to hold the potato-head comment against anyone. Life was too short. “Her language has improved so much—I can’t believe it. She doesn’t even lisp anymore! It’s like she’s a whole new person, in just a few months. How old is she now?”

Ruby drew herself haughtily up to her full height of almost three feet. “I not a new person. I Ruby Tabitha Middleton. I’m twoana-harf.”

“Going on fifteen … Helena’s brought you something, Ruby Tabitha. Why don’t we all go and sit down, so she can show it to you?” Lulu passed me a glass of wine and steered us both over to an immense cream sofa, Ruby jumping up and down on the way.

“Present! Present! It’s my birthday!”

“No, it isn’t your birthday. Now calm down, please. It’s bedtime in a minute, and I don’t want you getting overexcited.”

“Sorry,” I said to Lulu. “I shouldn’t have come at such a bad time. Actually, I didn’t think she’d go to bed so early. Not having kids, I don’t really get how these things work.… ”

Lulu grimaced. “Don’t worry. It’s fine. No,
calm down
, Ruby. You’ll knock over someone’s glass in a minute.”

I lifted Ruby onto my knee. For a second she looked as though she wanted to squirm off, until she remembered that a gift was soon to be forthcoming, and stayed put, drinking her milk and leaning expectantly against me. She was heavy, a great plump bundle of yellow terry cloth and smooth pink skin, more like an oversized baby than a little girl. Her hair smelled delicious, of poppies and warm towels and baby soap, and for a second I couldn’t speak. I had an overwhelming urge to touch her soft skin. The baby I’d never have. I gently squeezed one of her bare chubby calves, feeling it give and mold squashily to my hand. Why was it the beautiful minutiae of life that made it so hard to leave: the downy blond hairs on Ruby’s shin, a dog-eared collection of teenage sentiment in a box?

“Ruby.” I turned her gently around so we were face-to-face again. “This present is something very special. In fact, it’s my favorite thing in the world because it reminds me of a very old friend, and, you know, the best presents are the things that we love most ourselves.”

Ruby nodded, dropping the now-empty beaker onto the sofa, and Lulu sipped her wine, looking embarrassed. I saw her gaze longingly at a magazine lying on the coffee table. Fortuitiously for her, a telephone rang at the far end of the room, and she leapt up to answer it, slopping a little white wine on the table in her haste to escape this strange display of sentiment.

“That’s probably Toby, ringing to say good night to Ruby.”

“My daddy,” said Ruby to me, lifting up her head. I tried to eavesdrop on the conversation, but Ruby continued to chat to me and I couldn’t. “Daddy come back ‘morrow, and we go to live with Mummy again.”

I started, and a small strange noise came from the back of my throat.

“Got hiccups?” asked Ruby blithely.

“With Daddy? You’re all going to live together again?”

Ruby nodded vigorously. “Yeah, my daddy and my mummy and me. I got all my toys there too, an’—”

“Ruby! Daddy wants to say good night!” Lulu called, holding out the receiver. Ruby slid off my lap and ran to the telephone. “Toby wants to talk to you, too,” she added.

I stood up miserably and trailed over to join the queue for the telephone. After Ruby’s revelation, Toby was the last person on earth I wanted to speak to, but I could hardly refuse.

“Na-night, Daddy. Any fireworks, any scaries?” Reassured, Ruby made kissing noises. “I shout you in the morning, yeah?”

Lulu pried the receiver out of Ruby’s hand and passed it to me. “I’ll just take Ruby up to clean her teeth again, and then we’ll come and say good night,” she whispered to me.

I nodded. “Hi,” I said blankly into the phone.

“Helena! God, I’m so gutted I’m not there! I mean, I’m so glad you’re there! I’ve been going mad trying to track you down—you will leave your number with Lulu, won’t you?”

There was an embarrassed pause, which I felt physically, a small dropping sensation in the pit of my stomach. This was all a mess. I was tired of everything, too tired to challenge Toby on his hypocrisy at wanting my number if he was about to get back with Kate, too miserable that once again my timing was up the spout.…

But hold on, I told myself: It was entirely academic whether or not he got back with Kate. It made no difference to me, nor was it the reason I was there, in Lulu’s front room, surrounded by bronze buddhas and artfully arranged piles of smooth stones. My sense of perspective was, as usual, twisting away from me. I should be happy that at least one of us had a future.

“You were a good friend to me in hospital,” I blurted, unable to think of anything else to say.

“Not more than that?” Toby asked, hopefully.

Another pause. “Under the circumstances, I think not,” I said, not elaborating on which specific circumstances: Toby’s marriage, my bereavement, our joint vulnerability.

“Oh.” His disappointment swelled into my head, as palpable as the crackling from his mobile phone. “Is everything okay, Helena? You sound a bit … strange.”

I tried to close the lid on my disappointment and frustration, imagining it as an overstuffed suitcase that needed to be sat on before being zipped up. Toby had been a good friend and a good listener. I didn’t want his final impression of me to be of an obstreperous old harridan yet again giving him a hard time. What we both did with our lives was entirely our own business.