Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Acknowledgements
Copyright
‘Growing Up Twice is a fresh, warm and hugely enjoyable read. Focusing on three twenty-something female friends who, after various romantic entanglements, falling outs and a heartbreaking tragedy, realise they haven’t even begun to grow up, Rowan’s first novel is truly brilliant. Her captivating style leaps off the page, engrossing you from the first sentence’
Company
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781473527355
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Arrow Books in 2002
5 7 9 10 8 6 4
Copyright © Rowan Coleman 2002
Rowan Coleman has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Century
Arrow Books
The Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.rbooks.co.uk
Addresses for companies within
The Random House Group Limited can be found at:
www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099427681
For Erol and Lily with all my love.
With thanks to Kate Elton and Lizzy Kremer for all their help, support, inspiration and spelling corrections.
Also to my dear friends Jenny Mathews and Rosie Woolley who graciously lent me their names when I couldn’t think of any for two of the characters, and on whom neither namesake is based!
Especial love and thanks to Erol for his unwavering support and belief in me, and last but in no way least to my daughter Lily who grew at more or less the same rate as the book and was born just after its completion. She has made growing up wonderful.
‘Listen. I need you to be honest now. Have I gone cross-eyed? I have the strangest sensation that my eyes are no longer operating in tandem.’
We are sitting in Soho Square and it is the last Saturday morning in August. We spent last night club hopping and then drinking coffee in a twenty-four-hour café just off Charing Cross Road.
I am with Rosie and Selin. We have all known each other since primary school and have been best friends since we swapped our ‘first kiss’ stories, real and imagined, drinking mugs of Cinzano Bianco. That was fourteen years ago at a sleepover at Rosie’s house. About eight months ago another chapter opened in our friendship when we found ourselves simultaneously single for the first time in ten years. The last time we hung out so much we were drinking Lambrusco on the swings at our local park and singing Meat Loaf’s ‘Dead Ringer for Love’ to any passing likely-looking lads.
‘Look at me. No, look at me,’ I say to Rosie, wondering if maybe she really has lost the ability to focus. ‘They’re fine really; a bit red round the edges but definitely working in unison.’ A look of total horror passes over Rosie’s face and she dives for her bag to fish out her make-up. I smile to myself, I knew she wouldn’t be able to live with red-rimmed eyes.
‘I swear to God, it’s that Red Bull that does it, it’s evil. We should write to Watchdog,’ she says, as she sets a complete pocket-sized cleansing, toning and moisturising regime out on the grass in neat little Chanel packages.
‘I think it was the coffees, let’s never have coffee again, it’s poison,’ Selin says, lifting her hand in front of her face to cast a shadow over her eyes. ‘Look! Look at me, I’ve got the DTs!’
I take her hand in mine and examine it. ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘God, you two are so paranoid.’ And I flop back on to the grass, arms outstretched, waiting for the warmth of the sun to find me. Selin lies on her front, propped up on her elbows and Rosie, looking for all the world like Doris Day on a picnic, packs away her used cotton-wool balls in the plastic freezer bag she carries for just such an occasion. She begins to apply her foundation with one of those funny little triangle-shaped sponges. The square starts to fill as the sun climbs and draws last night’s casualties out of the shadows.
We are secretly waiting for pub opening time and hair of the dog, pretending we are going to look at a photographic exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. We all agreed last night that we would definitely go today, as we have been meaning to go for the last four weeks and it closes this weekend. We all know we are lying.
One other fine morning just like this one Rosie decided that Soho Square is the last place left in London where fresh clean air is stacked in cubic feet right up to heaven. We often spend this part of Saturday right here, breathing and gossiping. Recuperating from the high jinks of the previous night.
This fine morning the air has only just become warm, the dew is beginning to disappear and we turn our faces to the sun like the cottage-garden flowers that border the square.
‘This is not good. We have to face it. We are old. We can’t do this any more.’ Selin sits up, pulling her fingers through her long and curly midnight hair and shades her eyes from the sun. ‘Look at those nu-metal kids over there. They probably think we’re on an OAP outing. I should have a mortgage by now and a car. In fact, I should definitely have a car by now and definitely not be sitting in a park surrounded by teenagers recovering from a hangover. I should be having a café latte, in a bed bought from Habitat, reading the Independent on Sunday and, and I should have a husband – who looks like the bloke from the Gillette ad – squeezing me fresh orange juice in my fitted kitchen.’ She laughs while she makes her demands to the heavens.
‘What do you want a car for in London?’ I ask, ignoring all the other stuff of distant dreams.
‘I don’t want a car.’ She slams both palms down on the grass making Rosie jump a little bit so that her eyeliner goes wonky. She scowls at Selin, Selin ignores her. ‘I just should have one. The option to have a car should be open to me.’
‘You can’t even drive!’ I think I know where she is coming from but I’m having trouble with her analogy.
‘I’m just saying that I’m thirty in nine months’ time and I haven’t got a car. And I had planned to have a car by now, a red one.’
‘Look, I’m thirty way before either of you two and anyway,’ I say, ‘when we were fifteen we all thought we’d be married by now and have a house, a proper career and two children and do that every day until we died. But we’re not at that stage yet. Life is still beginning, and it’s fantastic. So let’s enjoy the good times while they last.’
‘Yes,’ Rosie contributes, ‘and I’ve already been married, so I know it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Apart from the dressing up, the dressing up was fantastic. And the presents, of course. Oh, and do you remember the hen night? Now that was good.’ Rosie blots her lipstick. Her marriage lasted six months and it was a pretty dreadful six months. Still, she did look great in that wedding dress.
Selin sighs in that way she does when she feels Rosie and I don’t take life seriously enough.
‘Mmm, well it’s the “still” bit that worries me,’ she says. ‘What if life is “still” beginning for us when we’re eighty and getting our kicks on a Stannah stairlift? Or worse, the three of us have had to sell our houses – assuming we ever earn enough cash to buy our own houses, that is – to keep us in an old people’s home and we look at each other and say, “What have we done with our lives?”’
‘Selin, I think you are deliberately choosing to be negative,’ I say. ‘Remember your positive affirmations – “I smile, the world smiles with me.”’
‘I smile, I get some more wrinkles,’ she says but she is smiling all the same.
‘And let’s face it, you can’t afford any more of those!’ Rosie throws in, ducking to avoid the balled-up crisp packet that Selin aims at her head. ‘Anyway, we had a good time last night, didn’t we? There’s life in the old dogs yet.’ And she checks her eyeliner again before lying back on the grass, shading her eyes with the back of her hand. If the last few months have been anything to go by Rosie will keep looking on the bright side until the hangover fully sets in, an eventuality she will doggedly postpone until the early hours of Monday morning.
‘You can call yourself “old” and “dog” in the same sentence, lady, but leave me out of it,’ I say and suddenly we’re laughing in the still-sparkling grass; the weak delicious unpreventable sort of laughter left over from too much vodka and a very old friendship.
‘Whoa there.’ Rosie clambers to her feet a little unsteadily. ‘I can’t handle this witty banter any more. Let’s go and have a Bloody Mary, I feel a bit queasy and I need something to settle my stomach.’
‘Yeah, come on, kill or cure.’ Selin stands to join her, catches my eye and a ‘someone had better look after her’ look of understanding passes between us. Their shadows fall across me and make me cold.
‘You know, girls, I’m gonna stay here for a little bit and chill. I’ll catch you up,’ I say, feeling the goose bumps rise on my forearms. I just can’t face the smoke and smell of a pub right now.
‘Hang on, not at the pub for the first BM? You’re not breaking ranks, are you?’ Rosie challenges me.
‘No, I just like it here. I’m going to stay for a while and get it together and I’ll be along in a little while, OK?’
‘OK, lightweight,’ they chorus and walk away arm in arm and, as always, laughing.
I lie back on the grass and look at the sky through the lenses of my shades. I have always been in love with summer, not in the sun-worshipping sense as my pasty freckle-prone complexion will attest, but in the sense that I love sunlight. As a child I wrote rigorously rhymed poetry about golden streams of summer chasing through the leaves and making the shadows dance. Looking into the cloudless sky as it bends over my head, full of city echoes, I get a non-specific kind of nostalgia. A vague wistful feeling I can’t put my finger on.
The rest of the congregation on the benches and the grass is made up of a curiously harmonic mix of winos; Guardian readers; retro-grunge teens drinking from cans, smoking roll-ups and laughing ostentatiously; and about six near-identical couples with croissants and fully interactive sets of tongues. A gay couple lie side by side not far from me, silent and hand in hand. Looking at them I remember the touch of warm skin.
‘Are you OK?’ I ask myself. I’ve got that star-crossed feeling again, an intuition that fate is about to make a delivery. My skin is tingling, and my temples are beginning to throb. It seems that very soon the hangover will arrive in earnest. I stay absolutely still, feeling drowsiness seeping through my veins and enjoying it; it is a badge of honour; combat colours to prove I’m still kicking and breathing. The star-crossed feeling is probably just a toxin overload; I must stop thinking I’m so mystic.
‘Hey erm, hello, Jenny? Remember me?’ I have a visitor. I inspect him from behind my shades; it’s a ginger teenager from the retro-grunge gang in the corner. It’s a bit early for beery breath in my face.
‘You’re a ginger teenager,’ I tell him, as if he needs no further reason to leave. But he only laughs.
‘Yes, that’s it, you do remember me, I was at the party you and your mate had in Ladbroke Grove. We were well hard core, the last to go in the morning, remember?’ His smile stretches from ear to ear.
Suddenly I recognise his air of false bravado and I do remember. That had been the party. The one good party you throw in your whole life when everyone you invited comes and everyone you didn’t comes too. We had a DJ and a mirror ball and every inch of the carpet caught it.
I met a Spanish truck driver in the kitchen, some Dutch tourists on the stairs and this couple of kids, probably just about sixteen, on their first ever E. One of them had danced like a puppy all night and the other one had passed out after twenty minutes only to wake up in the morning with just his mate, Rosie and me left. This was the kid right here. We had never called him by his name, only ‘ginger teenager boy’. They had had cups of tea and we pleased them by laughing at their jokes until one of them remembered that he would be late for Sunday lunch at home. They’d gone as quickly as they had appeared, a charming juvenile mystery.
We discovered that they had left us their two telephone numbers, one of our names bracketed beside each, expressing a preference. We had laughed even more and binned them. The ginger kid had written my name next to his number and here he was again. A little bit older but no nearer any real facial hair, apparently.
‘How are you? Still living in that flat? That party was well cool, man.’ He smiles and flops on to the ground next to me. ‘New trainers? We went to see Slipknot last night, they are sick puppies! Do you like them? I’ve got an imported CD with two previously unheard tracks.’ He produces the aforementioned item like a child at Show and Tell and hands it to me for approval. All of their tracks are previously unheard by me.
‘Very nice,’ I say, without looking at it, and drop it on the grass. ‘What can I do for you?’ I sit up now and feel the blood drumming in my head. I feel older even than I am, my eyes are aching.
‘We’re going for some breakfast. I thought, you know, as your mates have gone you might like to come with us.’ I look at him and try to remember his name; he’s a pretty boy really. His hair is short and spiky and he has a sweet smile and brown eyes, the true best friend of the much-beleaguered ginger person. I wonder what his agenda is.
‘Look, I’ve forgotten your name.’ I’m being downright rude and still he sits there with a soppy grin on his face, looking pleased as punch.
‘That’s cool. It’s Michael, Mike. So, do you fancy breakfast with us?’ He gestures at his mates across the grass. Two other boys, one with the sides of his head shaved and some attempt at dreads; one with a scrawny pony-tail, both messing about with a box of matches; and a girl, slim and fair, sitting with her knees drawn up beneath her tassel-trimmed skirt, looking right at us. I make the deduction.
‘Is that your girlfriend?’ I ask sweetly with my best and first smile for him.
‘Yeah, she won’t mind, I told her we’re mates.’ He sends a little wave to her over the grass, she sends him a little scowl back.
I ignore the world’s most ill-advised assumption and say, ‘OK, I’ll come for a coffee.’ He doesn’t hide the look of surprise on his face as I hold out my hand for him to help me to my feet. And neither can he stop himself from flinching in surprise when I swing my arm over his shoulder as we stroll over to the café. The second sign of thunder rolls over the nameless girl’s face.
There is just something about the opportunity to minx a much younger, thinner woman that overrides all of my tenuous, subjective and flexible notions of loyalty to the greater good of the sisterhood. I’m not proud of it, but to be honest I’m thinking about the story I can tell the others when I get to the pub; I am writing them a joke. I always used to say I wouldn’t become a jealous-old-harridan type, the type that used to snub, bitch and bully me during my thin and pert period. But … oh well. I expect it’s evolution.
In the café, one of those shabby genteel affairs, a mixture of Formica tabletops and gold baroque-style mirrors, the kids look quiet and nervous. They probably think I am from the same generation as their mother and the realisation give me pins and needles. Thank God it’s not possible. I wonder if I can work that fact into the conversation, just to make it absolutely clear.
Michael introduces the boys first – Jake and Andy.
‘And this is my girlfriend.’
‘Sarah,’ she says and gives him a ‘I-do-have-a-name-you-know’ look. I like her, she’s feisty.
The coffee comes and just the smell of it makes my stomach lurch. Michael is looking at me a lot and I like it. Sarah is looking at me a lot and I like it. Jake and Andy are trying to catch the coasters they are flipping from the table edge – well, it keeps them occupied.
‘So what are you up to these days?’ I ask Michael. I talk just to him, and lean a little bit closer; he smells of grass. He gives me a wide and disarming smile. I bet he gave that smile to Sarah across the playground before they got together. His eyelashes are dark at the root and curve up to golden tips. I begin to see why Sarah is so possessive.
‘Well, we’ve just done AS levels. I was bloody crap – reckon I failed them all.’ He gives a kind of Gallic shrug, confident and carefree. ‘It’s the end of the summer holidays now. Ages off, it was fantastic, man. But I’m eighteen in a few weeks so I’m having a right big party, with a DJ and that, like you did. You should come.’
Sarah has taken the end of the ribbon of her draw-string top in her mouth and is chewing it. Now she is looking at him. He is definitely not looking at her.
‘I’d love to.’ I put my hand on his wrist. It turns out he has light golden skin and fair little hairs on his forearm. He has long fingers stained with biro. They remind me of a guitarist I once knew.
‘Yeah, your mum said you should have adults present,’ Sarah says. Michael blushes, until the pink flush clashes with his hair. I think he is more embarrassed for me than himself, but her words sink in and I suddenly catch my reflection in a mirror and see a dishevelled twenty-nine-and-nearly-two-halves-year-old woman flirting with a kid who is not even eighteen yet. Trounced by a newcomer, I feel panicky. I need to see the others. I need to get back to my world. My excursion is suddenly over.
‘Look, I should go, I’ve got to meet my friends. It was nice to see you, though.’ It is the lie I tell most next to ‘I’ll call you next week.’
I walk down the street about to call Rosie on my mobile to find out where they are, when suddenly he is walking next to me. I stop. If I had run that far that fast, I think, I would have been out of breath. He isn’t.
‘Can I borrow your phone?’ he says and takes it out of my hand. He dials and a few moments later I hear a ringing from the pocket of his combats. He hands it back to me.
‘Now I’ve got your number and you have mine,’ he says quietly. He is looking at me again and I am suddenly aware that he is taller and broader than I am and that the sunshine makes me want to touch his hair.
He places the palms of his hands either side of my face and kisses me. A breeze is shaking the petals from the tree we stand under and they float down like snow. I feel a sense of déjà vu; he is reminding me of something that I miss, I lean towards a memory. We part and he stands back and looks at me, he bites his bottom lip. I have nothing to say.
‘I’m going to call you,’ he says with resolution and turns, walking away quickly without looking back. I stand there for a moment to collect myself; there is a gradual subsidence of physical sensation. I find I am regretting its regression.
My phone rings and makes me jump. I half want and expect it to be him but Rosie’s name flashes. I press ‘OK’ and everything clicks back into place.
‘You are never going to believe this,’ I say.
I press ‘End’ on my phone two seconds before I push the door of the pub open, and I don’t have to look around for them because a two-double-Bloody-Marys-at-least cheer greets me as I walk in.
‘Here she is!’ Rosie shouts. ‘A Mrs Robinson for the twenty-first century!’
Selin is wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes as I sit down at their table. It’s almost twelve o’clock; there aren’t many people in the pub, but the few that are there are the faithful, the Coach and Horses characters.
Long coated, long haired or shaven headed, designer glasses, notepads and pens in pockets, portfolios and Filofaxes tucked under arms. Poets, painters, media boys and girls all Guinnessed up or whisky chased rather more than is recommended and thoroughly disapproving of us, flippant, drunk and laughing as we are.
That is one of the reasons why we come in here. It wasn’t long ago that I was in a relationship with one of these types, for three years, in fact. I have a vague female notion that I’m annoying him by proxy with my flippancy. Owen was a serious man. He always carried a volume of Proust, he thought a lot about death. It would have been no surprise if I had been presented with the opportunity to annoy him in person in this pub where we had our very first date. But in the last few months since our relationship finally ended for good I haven’t seen him once. I’ve gone to the same places and hung out with the same people but our paths never crossed. Selin says it’s God’s way of protecting me from myself, but then she never did approve of us very much. Actually, none of my friends approved of him very much and all of his friends disapproved of me.
‘Tell us again, pleeease,’ Selin pleads, ‘I only got Rosie’s half of the conversation.’ Her black eyes sparkle and she flashes her famous three-cornered grin at me.
‘Get the drinks in then!’ I say and sit back in my chair smiling. I’m happy; not ten minutes ago I was kissed and now here I am with my two best friends, the greatest story to tell and a large Bloody Mary. Daylight fights its way through the frosted glass, bouncing off glasses and bottles, illuminating the slowly turning unfolding swirls of smoke. The smell of ash and old beer seems suddenly appealing. There is nothing like the slow and somehow illicit pleasure of daytime drinking.
‘He’s sixteen,’ Rosie says, leaning back on her chair so that it balances on two legs (just like she used to in the back of the class), fanning her flushed face with a beer-mat.
‘Nearly eighteen, actually,’ I say, slightly annoyed that she is hijacking my moment.
‘He’s a ginger,’ she continues, putting her hand on my wrist as if to restrain me, but really to stop herself from tipping over.
‘No. No,’ I protest. ‘More sort of blondey auburn.’ Selin looks at me over the top of her glass and raises one of her dark, beautifully arched eyebrows. She is the only one of us who can do this. Many a teenage evening was spent practising in front of mirrors and only she managed it. She’s been flaunting it ever since.
‘He is skinny and has spots.’ Rosie drains the last of her drink and rattles the remaining ice-cubes under my nose. ‘Your round.’
‘He’s filled out a lot since you saw him last, and his skin has cleared up. God, I’m twenty-nine and I still get spots,’ I say, aware that I’m losing all comedy value by defending him too much. The bar is only two feet away and we carry on talking as I go to get the drinks in. A man with a long grey pony-tail turns his back on me and tuts.
‘I don’t remember seeing him at that party. Did I see him? Why didn’t I see him?’ Selin says.
‘Because he passed out after about five minutes on Jen’s bed and you were too busy snogging that Spanish truck driver,’ Rosie reminds her.
‘Oh yeah, Raoul,’ she giggles quietly to herself. ‘It turned out he was from Bromley.’ I return to the table carrying three glasses simultaneously, a trick I learnt back in my barmaid days.
‘No, you’re joking! He was so convincing,’ I cry. ‘He gave me a recipe for paella! Hang on, why didn’t you tell us this at the time?’
‘Wasn’t even of Spanish extraction. I can’t remember why. It wasn’t that good a story.’ Typical Selin. Rosie and I will tell anything to anyone, but Selin is just a little bit more remote. Always up for a carefree snog and a dance when we’re out but she hardly ever gets involved past that, never swaps phone numbers, never arranges dates and never takes anyone home. I don’t mean she hasn’t had her wild moments, and she’s certainly no virgin, but some time over the last couple of years she just decided to become much more reserved and cautious. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rosie and I hadn’t put her off men for ever. She’s had one long-term relationship (with a boy from her street) and they only split up because she felt she was too young to get married; they’re still really good friends. She never gossips about her personal life, never spills her guts the way Rosie and I do. It’s like getting blood out of a stone. Sure, she complains sometimes about her job, or money, or the lack of a good man, but in general she is very serene and sort of complete. She doesn’t seem to carry the angst that Rosie and I have been investing in so heavily for so long. Well, not her own angst. She’s carried a lot of ours over the years.
‘This country. Can’t trust anyone,’ Rosie sighs, and I’m not sure who she is referring to.
‘Back to the boy!’ Good, Selin is curious.
‘Well, he just ran up to me, grabbed me and kissed me. Right there in the street! It was kind of sweet really. You know, romantic.’ I can’t help the coy little smile that curls up the edges of my mouth.
‘Romantic!’ they cry and grab each other in a mock melodramatic clinch.
‘Wasn’t it sloppy and dribbly?’ Selin asks.
‘No!’
‘Tongue like a Rotavator?’ Rosie enquires in her usual forthright fashion.
‘Certainly not.’
‘Teeth and nose bumping?’ Selin.
‘No. None of that, it was nice, he was good. I mean, look, we all had our first snog at around fifteen, right?’
‘I was eleven,’ Selin said.
‘I was nine,’ Rosie chimed in. ‘Edward Stone, back of the art class.’
‘OK, I had my first snog at fifteen.’
‘And eleven months and two weeks. I remember because it was at Cathy Barker’s sixteenth and yours was two weeks later. You snogged that bloke who went mental a couple of years ago. It could have contributed.’ Rosie grinned.
‘His name was Sam Everson and he didn’t go mental, he had a breakdown and it was years later when I didn’t even know him. And my point is, even I, late flowerer that I was, had had three years’ intensive snogging practice by his age. I was pretty good at it by then. So our kiss was accomplished, romantic and even a bit sexy and anyway, god-damnit, I haven’t had a snog in ages and I enjoyed it!’ I’m slightly flushed and the tingle of the Tabasco is melting the back of my throat.
Rosie and Selin look at me. They look at each other. They look at me. Selin purses her lips, getting ready to be maternal.
‘You fancy him,’ she says.
‘I don’t! I’m just saying it was nice!’ I roll my eyes up to the nicotine-coloured ceiling.
‘You fancy him. You fancy him, you do. Please God don’t tell me you’re going to phone him, because I know you’re not. You’re not, are you?’ Selin is anxious and I know why. She has seen me merrily trot off, usually in cahoots with Rosie, into one outlandish and disastrous encounter after another. She has been at our respective doors with two bottles of wine and a large bar of chocolate on more occasions than we can remember. When Rosie moved in with me after she split up with her ex, Chris, just after Owen dumped me for the last time, Selin even remarked on the fact that our flat sharing would save her a bus fare at least (and God help the neighbourhood).
‘Of course I’m not!’ I say and I mean it. I’m not. Really.
‘You should,’ Rosie says. ‘You might be his first. You could teach him how to pleasure a woman.’ And she says it with a fake French accent.
‘I doubt it very much, if his slutty-looking girlfriend was anything to go by,’ I say, somewhat unfairly, driven by an unhealthy and arbitrary competitive streak. ‘But it doesn’t matter because of course, of course, I’m not going to phone him. And if he phones me, I shall be very sweet so as not to drive him to breakdown in later life.’ I look pointedly at Rosie. ‘And I shall say I can’t see him again, thank you very much.’
‘Unless he has two good-looking friends.’
Oh, Rosie.
This morning when I open my eyes, for the first time since spring the electric light from the hallway is casting a yellow glow under my bedroom door. Rosie is up already and autumn is on the way. I can see a chink of blue sky through my curtain, but the cast of the light bulb somehow reminds me of being cold and I turn my back on the window and curl up. Now I can see my phone.
The third requisite day between swapping your phone number and getting the call isn’t, strictly speaking, until tomorrow. I had thought that, being young and presumably impetuous, he might have called me sooner, but I guess they learn the mind tricks even earlier in man development these days. I think he will phone me tomorrow. I don’t mind if he doesn’t phone me. It will be easier in a way. It’s just the waiting. It’s annoying, and even more annoying when you’re waiting for a call from someone you don’t want to call you.
But I’ll leave my mobile switched on, just to get it over with. I mean, I don’t want to have to call him back, do I?
It’s Monday. I imagine Rosie is up before me because she has got today off and a day-long date planned with this man she met through work. They are going boating. It’s an original idea for a date and Rosie likes to be original. Her last first date took place in a yoga class. ‘Well, at least you’d know if he was up to it,’ she had said mysteriously. But apparently he wasn’t, because she had only seen Yoga Date Man the once.
She has this strange superstition that to refer to a man by his actual name, until they have seen each other at least four times, means that the relationship will end prematurely. Consequently I have never learnt the names of very many of her acquaintances. Her ex, Chris, was Total Fox Man the first few times I met him, which I thought was a debatable tag. Self-important Slimy Git Man was how Selin and I referred to him in private, until the shock news of their whirlwind engagement. After that we thought it best to be more polite about him.
I’m not good at mornings, they get me down. I always stay in bed a bit too long, spend a bit too much time over breakfast and a bit too long in the shower. I never can find anything clean or nice to wear and it takes me two and a half cups of instant before I can really take in the day. Although I don’t mind my job, because for the first time ever I’m earning a real wage, and the people are nice and I get listened to sometimes, I just sort of stumbled into it rather than found my vocation and usually, just before I open the door to leave in the morning, I take a deep breath and say, ‘Oh well, here we go again.’
Rosie comes out of the bathroom. She looks dreadful: her blonde hair is in tangles, she has dark smudges under her bloodshot eyes, and her face is still creased with the marks of a restless night.
‘I feel awful.’ She slumps against the bathroom door. ‘I’ve been throwing up since dawn.’
‘Oh, poor love, did you get a take-away last night?’ I ask her.
‘No, toast.’ She must feel poorly, she can’t string a sentence together.
‘Booze?’ I ask cautiously, it was my first guess. Over the last week or so I have noticed the effects of her hangovers keep her in the bathroom longer than usual, but she gets sensitive if you mention her drinking and it’s too early to face a fight.
‘No, not a drop.’ She rubs her eyes and tucks her usually silky hair behind an ear. ‘I feel strange.’ I follow her into her room and she sits on the bed.
‘Do you want me to phone thingy and cancel him?’ I offer. It wouldn’t be the first time. Once I told someone she had had to emigrate overnight for legal reasons.
‘Mmm, yes please.’ She gets back into bed and pulls the duvet up under her chin.
‘Jen?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘Mumphalaeneltnt,’ she mumbles.
‘Pardon?’ Three or four deep breaths pass and she repeats herself a little more clearly.
‘I think I might be pregnant.’ A brief moment of horror passes through me and I take a deep breath and calm down. This is probably typical Rosie overdramatics. She couldn’t possibly be sick just because she ate or drank too much.
‘Don’t be silly, you haven’t done it with anyone since the husband, right? And that was months ago.’ I can say this with confidence because we really do know everything about each other’s lives. And if ever there has been something we haven’t told each other for one reason or another we always break the ice by buying each other a Mars Bar. Over the years it has become a symbol for big news. Selin blames our gradual weight gain throughout our twenties on Rosie’s erratic and tumultuous life, which seems fair, as most of the Mars-Bar-related news has come from Rosie, with quite a bit from me, and there has been none from Selin for years. And of course Rosie eats what she likes and never puts on a pound.
‘I’ve missed two periods, I’m about to miss a third.’ This comes from under the duvet. Two periods, that’s OK. This girl from work didn’t have a period for a whole year, sometimes it just happens.
‘I think you’re overreacting, Rose. I mean when? Who?’ Personally I think it’s probably stress and a lifestyle that doesn’t exactly bode well for the natural rhythms of the female cycle.
‘Chris!’ The name comes out in a high-pitched little screech. Chris her erstwhile husband, Chris?
‘But, mate, you’ve been living here for eight months. The last time you saw Chris was at that dreadful work party and he was there with his new bird and you said she was fat … although she probably wasn’t, you think anyone over a size eight is fat.’
Another muffled strangulated sound comes from under the covers.
‘Rosie? Come on, tell me.’ A hand appears and fumbles around on the bedside cabinet, around two glasses of stagnant water, a pewter hip flask, an aromatherapy candle, some neatly folded lottery tickets and an empty packet of Hula Hoops, until it finds the edge and then the knob of the drawer. Opening it, the hand disappears briefly and returns clutching a Mars Bar. King size.
‘Oh, Christ,’ I say and immediately unwrap it and take a bite. It’s 7.45 a.m. The ritual now complete, she pushes back the covers and looks at me.
‘I’d check the sell-by date, if I were you, I’ve been meaning to give it to you for weeks.’
‘What happened?’ I say, not sure that I really want to know.
Rosie’s alarm-clock radio clicks on suddenly and the room is filled with the intrusive blare of some dreadful carping ‘breakfast crew posse’. She reaches over, turns it down and leans back against the wall holding her spare pillow to her chest like a child with a toy. I can see she has hardly slept. She must have been thinking about this for weeks, poor love. She rubs her fingers across her tired eyes and begins.
‘Well, it’s mostly like I told you. Remember I had to take some clients to that ridiculous awards ceremony a few weeks ago? I knew that Chris would be there because his team was nominated for Best Child-orientated Campaign which is why I got that new dress and shoes. And bag. And my hair done, purely for the “ha-you-sucker” factor. And of course he was there and he brought “her” with him. And she was fat, honestly. Or if she wasn’t fat she shouldn’t have worn a skirt that short. Well, he clocked me, of course, and we sent each other a few glares and I was very happily having a few glasses of champagne, because you know it was free, and talking to Yoga Date Man, that’s where I met him, remember? Well, then I went off to “powder my nose” so to speak and …’ She stopped and clapped her hand over her mouth.
We were supposed to have given up cocaine, it was our New Year’s resolution.
‘… But it was free, so it doesn’t count really and anyway it seems that he followed me down the stairs and well when I came out there he was, waiting. Before I knew it he had me back in the ladies’ in a cubicle and we sort of … well … we accidentally had sex.’ She stops talking and looks at me. I can’t think what to say. Part of me is thinking that the months and months of us helping each other get over our exes have been for absolutely nothing and I feel angry with her. The other part of me just wants to give her a hug and help her get through it. I go with the hug option for now and decide to save the good-talking-to option for later. I climb into bed with her and put my arms around her.
‘You think I’m a dreadful old slapper, don’t you?’ she sniffs and rests her head on my shoulder. Her hair covers her face but I can tell by her trembling shoulders that she is trying not to cry.
‘Well, yes, but let’s not discuss that now. Come on, darling, it’s OK. You’re on the pill, anyway, so you can’t be pregnant, can you?’ I say softly to the top of her head.
‘That’s what I thought. But the morning before it happened I was sick just after breakfast. A few too many vodkas the night before. I didn’t even think about it affecting my pill working. Not until I was late.’ Well, it was a minor setback but not conclusive proof.
‘Ah, but you always use a condom, because we promised each other, didn’t we?’ That was our New Year’s resolution circa 1992 and as far as I knew we had always stuck to it. Maybe if taking the pill hadn’t made me blow up like one of those poisonous fishes and turn into a tearful Attila the Hun it would have been harder to stick to but, as successfully integrating into society for at least three weeks out of every four is somewhat essential in the customer-care environment in which I work, I had decided to give the pill a miss and stick to traditional methods instead. Owen used to complain about it a lot, about the interruption, the loss of sensitivity and all that. He used to give me a really hard time in fact. But I just think it’s unfair that when you’re a girl you have to either take chemicals, stick a wire contraption up your bits, fiddle about with a sponge and spermicide or wear an internal version of a sou’wester. I mean, it’s incredible what lengths men have gone to to avoid having to deal with contraception at the business end. If you’re a boy all you have to do is pop a bit of ultra-thin latex on your willy. Just do it and shut up. The three of us have agreed on this countless times, in countless conversations, in countless bars over the years. So you make them use a condom, don’t you?
Don’t you?
‘Not with your ex-husband in the bog when you’re off your face, you don’t.’ Oh well, that blew that theory.
I don’t think Rosie is pregnant. A girl who drinks as much as her and eats as little food, who lives on coffee and is no stranger to illegal narcotics, can’t be that fertile. My sister-in-law gave up everything from alcohol to crisps for two years before she conceived. And besides, Rosie and Chris only did it the once. By the time you get to our age you know it’s actually damn hard to get pregnant, whatever way you look at it. You just don’t tell the teenagers. It’s probably the worry that has stopped her coming on.
‘OK, look, I’ll take the day off sick,’ I say. ‘We’ll go to the pharmacy and get a kit. It’ll be fine, we’ll go to the pub. It’s really hard to get knocked up, you read about it all the time. Girls our age are always missing periods; it’s probably stress, or too much booze or something.’
‘OK. I love you.’ She raises her head and looks at me.
‘You’ve been worrying about this for ages, haven’t you?’ I say gently. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’
‘Because I thought you’d kill me. Especially after everything we said about “never going back come hell or high water”. And because I needed to decide what I would do about it, if I were, you know … thing. I sort of needed to get it straight in my head first, before it all became real. I thought you and Selin might not understand this time.’ I climb out of bed, sit on the edge again and hold her hand.
‘Look, if anyone can understand it’s me. Look how many times I went back to Owen over those last three years, despite all the promises I made to myself and to you two. It’s a painful lesson to learn, but well, sometimes I think you have to keep going back until you learn it. It’ll be fine, you’ll see. I’m sure you’re not pregnant.’
I stand up and stretch as Rosie disappears under her duvet again.
‘Where’s your phone? I’ll phone thingy and cancel him.’ She hands it to me and I scroll down through her address book.
‘What’s he listed under?’
‘Boating Date Man, of course,’ the disembodied reply comes.
By the time we leave the flat, dirty grey clouds have descended over our end of the grove and are leaning menacingly on the rooftops of the Georgian houses that line either side of the street.
Our flat is on the top floor of a flaky purpose-built block right at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, just a few hundred yards away from the Harrow Road and quite literally only just on the right side of the railway tracks that run directly behind the building. The trains thunder past every twenty minutes during the day and once an hour throughout the night, which many of my guests over the years have found unbearable, but I like the comforting rumble that can sometimes make the night seem more friendly. And it used to really piss Owen off, so that was a plus.
I have lived there for seven years, on my own for most of it, only able to afford it because it is squalid, damp, mostly broken and prone to little outbursts of small-unidentified-black-beetle activity. I like it because it is only fifteen minutes’ walk from Portobello Road and I have two bedrooms, a big broken kitchen and a living-room with a ramshackle collection of damaged goods from Ikea.
The landlord has never bothered to put the rent up in all these years and I have never asked him to fumigate the house, fix the leaky roof or mend the cooker so that more than one ring on the electric hob works. I am a domestic slut and so is Rosie. Our life together is a cheerful amble through the boundaries of reasonable hygiene until we reach a kind of critical mass and rush around picking things up, washing them and hoovering up the beetles (which, I’m sure, when they reach the rarely emptied-out fluffy crumb-filled haven of the hoover bag, yell, ‘Yippee – beetle heaven!’) until we are ready to begin again. The only exceptions to this rule are clothes, the bathroom, cosmetics and us. These are the only items and areas we pay attention to every single day.
As much as I love it, I have had my toughest times here too, the worst times with Owen as well as the best. I had been thinking about upping sticks and getting a house share in the Time Out tradition of making new friends, but I felt so low I didn’t think I was brave enough to go through the endless rounds of flatmate interviews. Trying to look trendy enough to be fun but not annoying, and clean enough to be liveable with but not an obsessive compulsive. Pretty enough to hang out in bars with, but not so pretty that your boyfriend would want to sleep with me, that kind of thing.
When Rosie came to live with me she saved me from having to make that kind of lifestyle-changing decision and frankly I was relieved.
She was in a bad way back then. Chris had just upped and told her he didn’t love her and he didn’t think he ever really had. He had told her it was a huge mistake, that he had asked her to marry him just to get him out of a fight they had been having and that he hadn’t really thought of the consequences. That he had met someone not long after they got back from honeymoon who he thought might be ‘the one’.
Looking back, I think we saved each other. The very night that she turned up on my doorstep with two suitcases, no money to pay her cab and her face streaked with mascara-tinted tears was the night that Owen had left a Post-it note for me to find when I went round for dinner that evening. It was stuck to his front door.
‘Gone out. Can’t face tears. It’s over,’ it had read, fluttering cheerily in the breeze. I stood there for a long moment in the rain before turning and walking away, back to the bus-stop and home. I suppose that, during the three years of on-and-off passion, infidelity and violent drunken eruptions, I had got used to his mood swings, the sudden sea changes in his regard for me. Earlier that afternoon we’d been talking on the phone about the poached salmon en croute he was preparing and the nice bottle of wine he had chilling in the fridge. If I’m honest, as I trudged back to the tube station, all I really felt was a kind of weary resignation, a ‘here we go again’.
At that point I fully expected two or three weeks apart, news of another girl picked up in the park or a museum, shortly followed by long earnest conversations, declarations of our imperfect but irresistible love and before you knew it we’d be back to the beginning of our cycle. Perfect blissful passion.
In retrospect it’s hard for me to explain how life was with Owen. When I met him I was out in full spin, living the city life to the city limits. It was a time when Selin was studying, Rosie was seeing some guy and I was drifting between second- and third-generation friends and a series of half-hearted boyfriends. I often had the dizzy feeling that gravity only just had a hold on me and that any moment I could slip away into a cloud of stars, lost from the real world for ever.
I was looking for love, I suppose, but more than that I was looking for something solid and strong to hold me down to earth, the kind of firm dependability I felt I’d lacked since my dad had walked out of my life over fifteen years before. Although I had a romantic idea about self-destruction by vodka and kisses, a notion that stopped me going mad from boredom between five in the evening and nine in the morning almost every day of the week, I was really waiting to be rescued.
Owen is eight years older than me. He lives in a rooftop flat in Clerkenwell, which he moved to before it became so trendy, when it was still an eclectic mix of fishmongers and second-hand bookshops, before the five-star restaurants and the hottest clubs sprang up on every street along with another branch of Starbucks. His walls are lined with shelves heavy with all kinds of books. He doesn’t own a TV, only a battered old radio that is always tuned to Radio Four. He has the look of a dissolute Leonardo Di Caprio, twenty years older and after several crates of Irish whiskey, with dirty-blond hair and slanted green eyes.