Читать книгу Precious You - Helen Monks Takhar - Страница 13

Katherine

When I got home from the gym that night I looked at my flat again with new eyes: your eyes. Every inch of our 730 square feet had been maximised. When we planned to sell up, I’d encouraged an old mate to do a piece on the place for ‘Homes & Property’ in the Evening Standard. The headline: ‘The next big thing’, the sell: ‘How one budding novelist styled the life into her conversion in up-and-coming N4’. The piece detailed how I’d turned walls into bookcases, high ceilings into display mezzanines, bedroom stairs into storage, with feature walls created not by wallpaper but oversized Damien Hirst prints. With that article, I felt like I’d really done it. I’d left the old me at my mother’s farm where she belonged. I was no longer insignificant, no longer provincial. I was urbane. Successful. Someone you wanted to be. Someone you wanted to know. Now I barely remember being that person.

We paid for doing up the place with the rent from Iain’s flat in Holloway, which he owned outright, having the foresight to buy it practically on his credit card back in 1990. My friend had written that I was a journalist and ‘writer-in-waiting’ and it was almost true. Two literary agents had asked for the rest of my latest manuscript and only one had passed by the time of the interview. Iain, meanwhile, was still flying high as a senior copywriter for ad agencies and was about to land a gig on the writing team of a sitcom pilot. It seemed we were approaching some terrific threshold: the tantalising possibility of unqualified London success, so close we could taste it in the air and on each other. Our many and varied friends pumped us up.

We’d sell my place, use the equity to shoot for a four-bed fixer-upper on the edges of Highbury and use the Holloway rent to help pay for the works. Iain was in his mid-thirties by then, I was about twenty-six. Life was so good, we just didn’t realise it yet.

‘So, how was it, then? I’ve been waiting for the call all day!’ Iain shouted at me from the kitchen. It was just Iain and me, as you know. We were getting on for twenty years together when I met you. Those years, all the times we’d relished together, all those we’d survived as a couple, had stitched us into each other. That’s how it felt. Not every woman would let Iain be who he was, live the life he enjoyed, and not every man would fit to me. For one thing, I had always been adamant that I never wanted children. I suppose you could say I was a victim of neglect as a child. Iain was the first person I wanted to tell. I also told him I couldn’t risk putting someone else through anything like the experiences I’d gone through. It was too terrifying and, anyway, Iain knew we didn’t want sober lives where we’d have to lock down at six o’clock. Us with kids, who would we be? Not us at all. We agreed early on to leave the breeding to people less interesting than us and focus instead on having a fantastic life together, one that would allow our creative selves to thrive. I believed the narrative was holding.

‘Hello, gorgeous.’ I kissed Iain’s cheek, damp with steam from the pan he was hanging over.

‘Hello, you.’

He and I still looked broadly the same as we did in the pictures for the Evening Standard spread. I’ve always looked after myself. I run. I go to the gym. I run to the gym. I don’t wear leggings unless I’m at the gym. And it is only relatively recently I seem to have found myself in that specific category of invisible I didn’t really understand existed until, one day just before I got ill, I realised I hadn’t told a single slowing van driver to fuck off when I ran to the gym. I could now run all the way down Green Lanes wholly untroubled. Not a single beep. At first it felt liberating, this mid-life cloak of invisibility, for that purpose at least. But I suppose I never thought it would sweep over people like me, and so emphatically, especially when I wasn’t even old yet. Or perhaps I was.

A couple of weeks before I met you, I’d pulled out some short shorts I’d not worn since I was thirty-odd. I ran and waited for the cat calls, but nothing. It seemed white van men were able to age a woman by her calves and thighs alone, but what exactly was old about mine? I hated that I cared. Women like me were supposed to be better than this.

‘How was it?’ I repeated Iain’s question back to him. I’d been wondering what to tell him. I wanted to talk about you, but I also knew if I said what was really on my mind, I’d sound completely neurotic. But I did need to confide in him. Because he and I were best friends. Each other’s only friends.

We’d had many lives together. The one shortly after the Evening Standard spread is where our luck started to turn. London itself seemed to move against us. Iain’s pilot got pushed to midnight, the series dying quietly at birth. My latest manuscript, my final attempt at writing sustained prose in my own voice, was rejected by the second agent and then it seemed like I’d run out of things to say.

‘I’m wai-ting,’ Iain sang, his fingers squeezing the black plastic valve of boxed red he would have started on a couple of hours earlier, sending a drink for me gushing loudly into an expectant tumbler.

Soon after the sitcom was canned, he was made redundant. There was no justice in it, but as he passed forty, Iain was ageing into a professional leprosy. He could only get bits and bobs of freelance work. We started to lose a bit of confidence. By the time I’d been at Leadership for the best part of ten years, I was being paid an editor’s salary, but the fixer-upper crept up to £400,000, then £450,000, then suddenly £700,000 and after that, we stopped looking. We upped the rent on Iain’s place and decided to stay put at mine until the bubble burst. That first day I met you, we were still waiting for the pop.

‘Well, I’d say today certainly feels like the start of “An Exciting New Chapter”.’ I repeated the subject line of Gemma’s first all-staff email (and in gauche title case too) as I hung my jacket up. My eyes caught the poster that darkened my hall, hovering over our lives for the last five years. It was the real reason why I still lived in what should have been my bachelorette flat.

It was a one-off poster of The Film. The Film was supposed to be the start of An Exciting New Chapter for me and Iain. Perhaps Iain would tell you one version of the story, but let me tell you mine from where I think it starts.

As my father had the temerity to die on my mother when I was nine, it had been instilled in me at an early age that no one can save you from yourself, especially not a man. My mother spoke to me only when she sought to remind me that we are all truly alone and no white knight will come to your rescue. This is the one thing my mother and I agreed on. I had looked to my writing to save me, but as I got past thirty, something changed. I lost the will to write for myself. I thought about writing all the time, but the memory of my second manuscript being rejected for the final time, when I felt I’d so nearly become published, hurt too much to put myself through the process again.

The ideas didn’t come. I started a couple of drafts, but somewhere I’d lost whatever it is you inherently have, what I had for a short window in my twenties: the innate belief in what you say and the expectation your words will always find a willing audience. Because that’s how people like you carry yourself about the world, isn’t it? You think someone should always be primed, waiting to listen to you. Maybe not being able to write for myself was the very earliest sign of the beige clouds swirling. While my creative life was in stasis, Iain was still trying to make his happen. Then a way for me to ride his wave came along; a chance for him to save me from myself.

He invited me and most of our old mates to go in on a film he would write and produce. It didn’t take much for us to put our money in; we were all going to be Executive Producers. It proved irresistible to me and everyone else whose dreams had faltered as their fortieth years approached. We put our faith in Iain’s ability, some of us, admittedly, with fingers crossed behind our backs. Because it wasn’t necessarily that we believed Iain was a born auteur. Ultimately, the film fulfilled the belief there had to be something that would provide a final chance to make good on our lives, to snatch victory from the jaws of middle-aged defeatism.

All my savings for the fixer-upper went into the film, and when more money was needed, I wanted to believe remortgaging my Manor House flat to the hilt and adding Iain to the deeds to extract even more from the lender would be the penultimate paragraph on a story that ended marvellously, historically, for him and for me. But no matter what you said about the film, it was not good. It was appalling. It did not rescue us. It died a death and killed our friendships with all those who’d let themselves believe Iain would produce a work of excellence that would generate life-changing money for all investors. Iain said sorry over and over, but there was nothing to say sorry for, not really. He’d made no promises, but he had tried, hadn’t he? We had tried. The one thing your generation excels at is making stuff with your iPhones, pouring your innermost thoughts into your tweets and your blogs until you get better at it and/or something finally sticks. For people like us, things aren’t so easy; and they certainly didn’t come as cheap.

But I admit, I made a mistake. I looked outside of myself for salvation.

It got so that our friends stopped calling us. Part of me was relieved because whenever I saw them, at some point the conversation always turned to The Film. What might have been. What was lost. We had to find new bodies to come back to ours, buying the last round and plenty of coke for those who would venture to Manor House. But soon enough, we found ourselves going home alone together, and at some point a couple of years ago or so, we stopped going out much at all. Then, when we weren’t really looking, we became truly middle-aged.

You don’t need a specific reason to suffer from a mental malaise but I know your lot, always seeking a ‘trigger’ to understand my illness, so, take your pick for mine: the fact I could no longer deny the London life I’d built wasn’t strong enough to save me. It would not put a clear blue ocean of money and creative success between me and the desperate child on a farm in Derbyshire. Nor would it solve the problem of the management consultants circling the magazine, or the failure to move house, or my body starting to do dreadful middle-aged things; chronically dry skin on my shins no moisturiser could address, robust whiskers on my chin I had to pluck away every single day, the first grey pube, then another, and another. I felt so let down by my body, but more by my pathetic attitude to it.

Altogether, things big and small made me feel as if I was breaking down until eventually I was a broken thing. And let me tell you something, Lily, you really learn who your friends are when you become needy and unglamorous. It turns out none of my old girlfriends wanted to know the ill version of me when I tentatively reached out to them again. On a good day, I told myself it might have been different if they hadn’t invested in the film, or if the film had provided them with the stellar returns we’d all hoped were possible. On a bad day, I knew they only loved me when I was flying high. How could I find fault with them when I felt broadly the same?

Iain always smiled as he stirred whatever he was cooking for me. When I was ill, he’d cooked me back to life. It wasn’t that nothing tasted good, it was that everything tasted of nothing: no texture or depth. Iain had to keep me alive like the pathetic rejected lambs my mother forced me to bottle-feed as a child. He couldn’t get out of the habit of hand-rearing me; cooking elaborate, time-consuming, fattening meals; boiling vats of bones all day long, as if he could borrow the distilled marrow of dead animals to give the essence of life back to me in a bowl. That’s what you think we do to your generation, isn’t it, Lily? Steal your young lives for our own self-serving ends?

Iain stirred his stew so vigorously, I noticed while his arms were getting thinner, his stomach trembled above his belt. Mouse-coloured hair, now silvering. But he was still attractive, with well-set grey eyes, a wide symmetrical smile, and a liking for looking at me a little longer than he needed to; he made me feel truly seen. Did you feel that way too when you first met him? What did you really think of him, of us, in those early days?

‘I know what’ll cheer you up,’ my Iain said.

‘Who says I need cheering up?’

‘Some Hungarian New Wave. There’s nothing a little Béla Tarr can’t solve. A spot of Damnation will put it all in perspective.’ He squeezed the last drops of the wine out, having liberated the silver bag from its box, holding it between his torso and underarm like a bagpipe. My partner was what your lot might call ‘an alcoholic’, but you figured that out soon enough, didn’t you? What you’ll never understand is how this wasn’t an issue before you. Perhaps one day your generation will grow to see how life doesn’t cleave along binary lines: hopeless addict/functioning citizen; mentally well/mentally ill; good person/bad person.

‘Well, why ever not?’ I looked into my glass.

‘What’s Gemma really like then?’

I turned on my stool, my back to Iain and the breakfast bar that divided the tiny open kitchen from the living space in my flat. Some instinct made me think twice about introducing you to the conversation, to say your name in my home, to let you invade my domestic space, but still, I felt compelled to speak of you.

‘Oh, she’s alright. Earnest, in an HR-sanctioned way … But she’s landed me with her jumped-up niece.’

‘Another intern is it? How many’s that now?’

‘Six? Seven? I can’t keep track anymore. Anyway, she flounced into my cab this morning. The 141 decided to take the day off and I managed to flag a cab and this millennial jumps in and eventually tells me she happens to be the boss’s niece. What she doesn’t tell me is that she’s the one who gave Gemma Lunt the bright idea of buying out Leadership. She definitely would have known all about me, but played dumb and let me rabbit on about my job before the big reveal. Creepy or what?’

‘Maybe she didn’t recognise you.’ Iain, already on your side. I glowered at him. ‘Well, anyway, is she any good? Going to make your life easier? Worse? Too soon to say?’

I breathed, ‘Well, she’s clearly privileged. Imagine me at her age having a maiden aunt who could go out and pick up a magazine for me to write for? She’s walked in off the street, jangling her family’s money, fresh out of uni, with the cheek to demand we change the front cover. And she starts writing a piece on the awards off-the-bat. Just like that.’

‘How very dare she, and at a magazine too.’

‘Oh shut up, you know what I mean.’

‘Not really,’ he laughed.

‘When I did work experience, you just assumed you’d be making coffee, doing the photocopying, dodging the boss’s busy hands. Or not, depending on who the boss was.’

‘And when you started out, they still called it “work experience,” it lasted two weeks before you were made “senior reporter” and people still used photocopiers … and sent faxes.’

‘That was probably before she was even born. Fuck, she didn’t even exist when I was at peak possibility.’

‘Hey. You. You’re not even close to that yet. Not even close,’ his mouth slopped around on the last ‘s’ sound, but he meant it. He still believed in me.

‘And young people knew their place. Fuck, we’re old.’

‘We are that. And aren’t you just a wee bit glad about it?’ He took another gulp from his glass, then watched me swinging around on my bar stool.

‘Go on. What’s really pissing you off about this girl? Is she fit?’

I shook my head. ‘No. She’s not fit … She’s an absolute knockout.’

‘OK, so let’s see now: she’s got youth, beauty, privilege and nepotism going for her. No wonder she’s writing the cover story on day one.’

I said nothing.

‘And no wonder you’re jealous.’

‘I am not,’ I lied. ‘Come on, let’s not let her ruin our evening. Where’s my Damnation?’

I pretended to look about the flat and again thought of how you would see it. There were indeed all the beautiful things you’d imagined surrounded me: Provençal pots, Ashanti masks, Balinese ceramics, all evidence of a life lived wide and well. Once. I viewed them each afresh with your eyes and saw far too many things. Items fighting for space on bookshelves and display mezzanines I couldn’t face dusting anymore, the cleaner long sacked. A collection of dull silver trays clustered above the door. There was hardly a square inch of wall that didn’t have something on it. No cupboard door sat flush. So many things seemed like they were trying to burst out; I bruised my hips on the corners of overstuffed drawers poking out; I had to duck for cover every time I opened a cupboard, knowing some plate or culinary gadget of Iain’s might fall and hit me. The whole place looked and felt like a life double-backed on itself, looped over and over. Sun-faded Hirst prints. Dusty Moti tapestries from India. Iain’s old gig photography. There was no space anymore. No space for more stuff, no space for new thoughts, no space to create; no real space for the future at all.

I seemed to have collected masks from every corner of the world without ever intending to. So many masks. My own face, now a mask. An exhausted skin caught over a mind struggling to accept it was no longer young. I was beginning to realise something I should have looked hard in the face, then warned you and all women like you about: there’s a big secret only revealed when it’s too late: how you feel in your twenties is an illusion. That unique flavour of power and self-knowledge, you’d never know it at the time, but it dissolves. I should have told you from the off to prepare to save yourself from being caught unawares by the passage of time as I had been. When age moves against you, make sure you’ve built your self-worth around what you’re capable of doing, not the beauty of your youth. And if I’d have done that, who knows, maybe then you wouldn’t have changed my life like you did.

I’d forwarded your CV to my personal email and read it on the bus home. It showed an urbane life. A long list of posh schools, a year out before English Lit at Leeds and what looked like more time out, (travelling on ‘Gem’s’ generosity, no doubt), making you twenty-four to my forty-one. Obscene. The charmed life of a graduate, and a hugely privileged one at that, brazenly stretching ahead of you; a long corridor lined with doors blown wide open by your confidence and your utter gorgeousness. That used to be me, I thought, now it’s other people; now it’s you.

‘What’s her name? Just so I can really get on board when you’re bitching about her.’

I turned my head towards the ceiling, the only clear white space in my whole flat.

‘Her name is Lily.’

‘Lily. They’re always called something like Poppy, or Daisy or Lily. She sounds like a proper Snowflake, love. You might need to watch yourself.’

Damnation is a tale of desire, betrayal and despair. I’d agreed to watch it only to humour Iain really, doing a bit of work on the side. But while he was out-cold after the first twenty minutes, I watched to the bitter end. It spoke to me.

When it was over, I shut my laptop and watched him asleep, or unconscious, his mouth agape in a classic grandad-after-Christmas-lunch way. And I loved him.

‘Iain. Iain? Come to bed,’ I shook his shoulder and touched his face, trying to wake him in the same way I did every night. But he never stirred when he was like that. He’d come round in a couple of hours and throw himself down on our bed. So, as usual, I left him, crept to the bathroom, locked the door and inserted two fingers into the back of my throat, letting go of all the fat and sugar Iain had put in me.

You see, Iain needed to feel he was doing something, anything, to contribute to our life and my happiness. Food was his medium. In the day, I retained the foods I’d chosen for myself. Come the night, I had to let my partner fulfil his role, but I couldn’t have his food pillowing me out into full-frontal middle age. You wouldn’t understand, but this purging ritual was an act of love. It was one of the many secrets of our long and happy relationship.

When I slept that night, I had the dream where I tried to reach the paddock gate for the first time. I cried out for the child in me; the dreadful sense of my mother’s hate relived for the first time in years.