Читать книгу Twelve - Vanessa Jones - Страница 9

three

August is the room of a party an hour before dawn. What was last night sparkly and exciting has now begun to fall apart and stink a little. It’s unpleasant and you want to leave but you can’t quite. Because on the other side of it, there’s only Today.

Is hot air thinner than cold air? And if so, what’s missing? I could find out the answers to both these questions but (it’s a freedom I take so much for granted that) I won’t bother to. I do imagine though, living before anyone knew and no one could tell. The air is very thin this August and it’s confusing me. It’s as if the last few months of evaporating bodies, steaming dogshits, hot-baked rubbish and car exhausts are having their effect now. Strangely though, the air seems thinner. There’s nothing in it to breathe. I hate August. And beyond it, only winter.

Nothing to take my mind off it but Colin. The most unlikely stories are the sweetest ones. We haven’t got over it yet, we keep saying, ‘Wow’ and ‘I can’t believe I’ve found you’ and ‘Just say I hadn’t felt brave’. We have been lovers for six months now and have slipped into an easy intimacy. It amazes me (but only in retrospect) how reality shifts and is just accepted. I no longer hesitate before I say the words ‘my boyfriend’. Now when I go to Edward’s house, I don’t sleep in Lily’s Room, but with Colin – in the best pink spare on the second floor.

Of course, I took my life in my own hands when I went off to meet him – it’s something we fondly laugh about now. When I rang him he said ‘I didn’t think you’d call,’ and I said, ‘Neither did I.’ Surely though, such a spontaneous gesture deserved a return. More than this I was flattered and it had to go somewhere. It wouldn’t be much of a story would it? if ‘And what happened then?’ was followed by ‘Nothing’. Memories are things you have to earn. Besides, I wasn’t playing that high-risk a strategy, rapists and murderers are not the majority. I met him in a public place on a Saturday afternoon. What did we talk about? I can’t remember now – everything. No. Nothing I’d ever talked about before. And Josh likes him.

The underground’s a strange setting for a love scene and not one that I would have chosen. Tonight I’m on it to go to meet Edward. It’s so hot that I’ve not bothered to fight for a seat but am standing by the window to the carriage next door. It’s open for ventilation but it always makes me laugh, the thought of ventilation down here. If I stand the right way round my hair is in my eyes and up my nose, so I’m standing the wrong way round with it blowing off my face and I’m looking into the neighbouring car. Another set of possibilities in there. Perhaps it would have made all the difference if I’d been on that side and looking in here – if I’d been just five feet further down that day, Colin would never have seen me – so do things happen because they’re supposed to? or just because they can? Chances are, it’s possible.

Edward and I are going for a walk after work in the park. In the winter these are reserved for Sunday afternoons, when he doesn’t seem to notice that it’s raining and freezing cold. On the way back we get stuck in the week-again traffic. He says, ‘C’mon c’mon c’mon; c’mon c’mon c’mon; c’mon c’mon c’mon’ over and over under his breath like a mantra. At his flat we sit in front of his lookalike fire and drink tea (if I can be bothered to make it). He cleans his shoes on the Sunday magazines and makes me read to him from their papers. He lends me a dry pair of socks (which I never return) and I catch the train home. Sometimes he walks me to the station.

The park is a long way by underground, until it becomes overground and almost until the end of the line. Tonight though I suppose I’m enjoying it. It’s quite nice, this breeze on my face and those people to watch and this film in my head where I’ve spent the next six months in love with Colin. And it’s so bizarre down here. It’s science fiction. Shunting through tunnels under the earth and in the dark (it’s always dark in science fiction). It reminds me of those pictures for children where the earth’s sliced through: here are the people walking the streets and here are the people travelling beneath. So many people, like bunnies in burrows, like patients on their way to some spooky experiment in a secret laboratory. And not one of them taking any notice of me. If I made such an impression on Colin why not so on them?

I’m making a mental note not to talk to Edward about Colin – he is a purist when it comes to conversations. The problem with mine, according to him, is their tendency to be experience-led. He doesn’t like to know what I’ve ‘been up to’, he’s not the least bit interested in plot – if I try to tell him he’ll say, ‘This isn’t a conversation, Lily, it’s a soliloquy.’ So to get his views on the subject I’ll have to couch it in altogether different terms. I’ll have to conceptualise. Colin will have to become a debate about – I don’t know quite what yet. I’ve got three more stops to work it out.

Edward and I have been coming to this park ever since we met. It’s a pastime which belongs to him though and not to me. I’m sure he brings other people on similar trips while I’d never dream of coming with other than him. It’s his place. He’s never said so, though. It’s his possession and he has no need to point it out. When we first became friends we’d fill our pockets with bottles of beer and walk up the hill to see the sun set. We’d sit and watch it getting drunk on its glory, mostly in silence but pointing out the occasional flash of colour till it had ended. Then, humbled, Edward would give his views on how he’d have improved it.

There he is waiting for me in the front of his car. He’s in his usual position, feet on the steering wheel, bum in midair, swapping his suit for something more suited to walking. No attempt at discretion. I can tell by the way he’s yanking on his jeans that he’s not in good temper. Well, he never is for the first five minutes, like he finds it hard to make the change from his own good company to someone else. He glares at my feet as I get in beside him, I say, ‘I’ve got my trainers in my bag.’

‘We’re going for a stomp, Lily, do you know what that means? It means working your lazy blood around your lazy body, working up a sweat, moving fast and covering a lot of distance and if there’s even the smallest chance that you’re going to make me cut it short because your feet hurt, then you’d better get out now.’

‘You always lay this on me, and I’ve never complained my feet hurt.’

‘Well, you must have done once, or else I wouldn’t say it. So what’s it to be?’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Good,’ he says, and he speeds off.

Edward has always driven like a maniac. He says he does it to calm himself down. I remember the first time he took me to his parents’ house he swerved down the tiny country lanes as though he were the only person likely to be using them. He turned to me at ninety miles-an-hour and said, ‘At least if we die we’ll die together,’ which I didn’t find exactly relaxing. But then, I’m not friends with Edward that I might relax. I’m friends with him for lots of other reasons which I’ve suddenly completely forgotten. I’m not in the mood to deal with his mood, I’m fighting one of my own. Beyond this light summer evening, beyond this lovely walk, beyond this beautiful park and the friend that I love, it’s August, and winter ahead.

I surrender. Edward always does this and I always put up with it; I’ve stood on a sweating train for an hour to get here and at least he could be slightly pleased to see me; if I did to him what he constantly does to me our friendship would be over in five minutes; and whereabouts along the line did we agree that he was allowed to be a crotchety old git and I patient till he’d got over it? I feel like making a big gesture, I feel like telling him to stop the car and getting out without explanation, I feel like going home and never seeing him again. But I can’t, I won’t, I don’t, and this makes me crosser. My throat starts to throb and tears fill the backs of my eyes. I sometimes think it’s this pain in my neck and not the pain from anything else which makes me start crying – it’s unbearable and tears the only way to clear it. I can’t cry though, I can’t cry with Edward here in the front with me – nothing’s happened. Nothing unusual. This is the way he always is for the first five minutes, and nothing’s happened today to warrant this bad temper. Nothing unusual. But it’s like this mood is always lurking, like it’s easy to give into, like once I’ve crossed the line it’s such a job to send away.

We park the car in our usual place with the hill out in front of us. It’s seven o’clock and the summer light has brought out the punters. They play with their dogs, they play with their children, they even play with balls (I’ve never understood the attraction), they lie on their backs and they look at the sky with their fingers knotted in the hair of the one they love. Little boys fly kites and float model boats on the water. Why is this fun? I’d rather be the kite, I’d rather be the boat. ‘My God,’ I say ‘there’s even someone doing Yoga.’

‘There’s a hint of scorn in your voice.’

‘No there isn’t.’

‘There is – scorn and envy.’

‘I’m not envious.’

‘Are you in sparring mode this evening?’ he says, joking, but I take it badly, ‘Because if you are I don’t need to remind you who always wins.’

I hate Edward. I hate him tonight. He’s smug and we always do what he wants to do. We’ll begin our walk as usual in the Louisa Plantation and then he’ll make me march up that hill – which is agony but I never complain – and we won’t be allowed to stop at the top to look at the view but we’ll have to run down the other side, and then continue for another half an hour at least before returning to his car, where he’ll put my life in danger all the way back to his flat, where he’ll neglect to offer me tea.

I love Edward though, I’ll love him always, and how else would I have any of our walks, which are usually perfect? how else would I have him? I’m not really cross about any of these things – so what is it that I’m cross about? Somewhere I’m laughing at myself sulking but what makes me sulk more is that I just wish one part of me would win, would be it, would be me.

No one remembers who Louisa was, but her garden is a tropical paradise of waxy leaves and stupidly beautiful flowers, and you can’t hear the traffic from here. As we go in Edward says, ‘It’s all just going over. We should have come two weeks ago. Never mind.’

‘Never mind?’

‘I rather like it like this. Everything fermenting on its stalk.’

‘I’d have preferred it spectacular and two weeks ago.’

‘But there’s something so decadent – don’t you think? – about it, and I like the smell.’

‘Of rotting flowers?’

‘Perhaps I was a maggot in a former life,’ and then, ‘What’s that?’

‘I’m not playing.’

‘Only cos you don’t know.’

‘I do know.’

‘What is it then?’

‘An iris.’

‘No, it’s a gladioli. Come on, we’re going to our bench.’

I wonder with how many others of his friends Edward refers to this as ‘our bench’. I’m trying not to. Admittedly not that hard. It looks onto a pond from which you get a double dose of colour – first on the bank, then reflected in the water. He sits down. He never sits up straight. He says, ‘You’re right, it would have been spectacular two weeks ago.’

I say, ‘A garden takes such a lot of work and it’s all over so quickly. Bud bloom rot, it slightly freaks me out.’

‘Yes. But then it starts all over again.’

‘I know. It’s a wonder nature doesn’t get bored.’

‘Like you, you mean?’

I say, ‘I spent all last winter looking forward to summer, and now it’s August, and I’m going to spend all next winter doing the same.’

‘Well I’m sure you’re going to be doing other things as well. Let’s not get too dramatic.’

‘You know how when you’re a child, time seems to go really slowly? I’ve always wondered why that is. I mean, surely time should go more quickly then, when everything’s new and exciting, and slowly now when everything’s predictable and the same.’

‘I said that to you.’

‘No you didn’t.’

‘I said that to you the last time I was bored.’

‘Well, you should be flattered that I think it’s worth repeating.’

‘Yes – and here’s something else for you that’s worth repeating: Boredom is one thing that time doesn’t heal. You can get bored of being miserable or bored of longing for something that you can’t have, but you can’t get bored of being bored.’

‘So?’

‘So spur yourself into action. Make some effort, Lily. Do something.’

‘Like what? Anything I do will only be a temporary measure. Everything’s a temporary measure and that’s what’s depressing.’

‘Well, get used to it,’ he says, ‘You’re in for the duration.’

No doubt I’ve missed the point he’s making, but our conversation has made up my mind. I get home, I find the piece of paper and I do it immediately. When I tell him who I am Colin says, ‘I didn’t think you’d call.’

I say, ‘Neither did I.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ he says, ‘you must have thought I was a nutter.’

‘You still could be,’ I say.

He says, ‘The thing is, I was in the same carriage as you a few days before. I never thought I’d see you again – and when I did …’

‘How bizarre,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ he laughs, ‘how bizarre.’

It’s always a little unnerving when someone’s shared a moment with you of which you’re unaware. Once from the top deck of a bus stuck in traffic I saw Josh ambling along the pavement. He’d become one of a multitude of strangers making their way to various destinations, and, not aware that he was being watched, was showing himself to me so carelessly, so entirely, it felt rude to be observing – but I couldn’t look away. I’ve never told him. You always fancy yourself invisible, don’t you? going about your business, thinking your own thoughts, but Colin watched me in the carriage. And this is why it’s startling: here I’m the narrator, there I’m just the extra, entering and exiting stage right, stage left but suddenly we’re meeting: Centre Stage.

At this time of the year there’s a fairground set up in the middle of town. A merry-go-round made of horses (they’re boring), a big wheel, a roller coaster, waltzers, slot machines, ducks to shoot, toys to win and massive sticks of miraculous candyfloss. This is the place Colin has chosen for our first date. Ten out of ten for originality. The thing that’s worrying me is I can’t remember what he looks like, I’m not sure I ever knew. I’ve arranged to meet him by the 2p jackpots, but I’d quite like to know which one he is before he knows it’s me so I’ve got the choice to slip away … It’s quite exciting though. I’m taking my phone in case of emergency and Josh is to call it every two hours to check on me. He’s slightly excited too. We’ve laughed, he’s said, ‘You’re going under cover.’