A Certain Age (15 page)

Sod it, I’m having a shower. [
Sounds of running water; during next bit she gets undressed and has to raise voice over bathroom noises
] So then everyone starts taking an interest. The boring Kevin, who paid considerably less than us for this holiday, remember, said all the usual things, and I thought, Pat, here we go. When you’re a celebrity, you hear the same stuff time and again, and it’s your duty, I think (I know, hark at Tina), to pretend these are new questions no one’s ever had the wit to ask before. Kevin goes, “I had no idea you were famous.” I go, modestly, “Well, it was a long time ago.” Jill, the vegetarian, says, “Well, I can’t remember you at all.” And then Kevin goes, “I could have been a swimmer, I had very good racing
turns, but I developed sinusitis.” And I go, “Ah.” Because people always say something like that. And there’s no reply you can make. I bet Andrew Lloyd Webber meets a lot of people who could have been a knighted multimillionaire composer if they hadn’t developed sinusitis too. I bet Stephen Hawking meets a lot of people who could have formulated a revolutionary theory of time, if their Oxbridge application form hadn’t been eaten by the dog. When I’m queuing up at the gates of Heaven, I’ll say to St Peter, “I could have been a saint, you know, but my dad wouldn’t let me use the moped.”

[
Gets in shower; has to shout
] So I don’t say anything to that. I don’t want details of bloody Kevin’s nasal problems. But then, things improve a bit when he asks where me and Pat got started, and I say, “Well, the public baths in Romford, actually,” and he asks whether we teach (no, we call it coaching), whether it’s an unfair advantage to have enormous feet like that Australian bloke in the Sydney Olympics (no), where we stand on all-over body suits (all in favour), and so on. Jill looks visibly bored. I blame the lack of protein. And then finally, Kevin goes to Pat, “Janice and I don’t take much of an interest in the world of sport. Too busy with one thing and another.” So I think, oh yeah, don’t tell me. But Pat stops describing to the Gillingham people how although we were born thirty minutes apart, Tina was only ever a tenth of a second behind in the races, so she deserves a lot of credit for the way she nearly caught up, and says, “What do you do, then, Kevin?” in a very gracious way. And then Janice leans across and drops the bombshell. “Kevin’s a genius in the world of graphic image-making, girls. He works with Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, George Lucas. We’ve got two Oscars on our mantelpiece.” [
Shower abruptly switched off
]

Kevin pretends he’s a bit cross with Janice. “Oh don’t, Janice,” he says. “You promised. You know I’d much rather hear about what the girls do.” And she goes, “What they did twenty-five years ago in Canada that no one can remember?” And he says, “Yes.” But Janice, it turns out, has been dying to tell us all about this Hollywood stuff. It’s been driving her nuts pretending to be impressed by swimming. “Have you been to LA, Tina?” she says, and I say, “No.” “I wanted to move to LA,” she goes on, “but Kevin prefers to keep the movie world at a distance, don’t you, dear? Kevin says it’s very superficial. Doesn’t want to lose touch with ordinary people. He said this morning, didn’t you, dear, we would never have met two lovely unaffected girls like Tina and Pat in Hollywood.” At which point the veg-for-brains Jill suddenly caught up with the conversation. “Steven Spielberg?” she said, stretching her eyes. “Well, I don’t know about the 1976 Olympics, but Steven Spielberg?
THAT
’s famous.”

I looked at Pat. She looked at me. [
Amused
] Ooh, Pat. Pat’s not going to like this. As soon as I could, I went out on deck and stood on the prow and sort of hugged myself. The wish come true! Someone with more celebrity than Pat! Stars; stars in a black, black sky. [
Lights up again
] The idea was to have a bit of time to myself, but they’re jumpy in Egypt about tourists getting attacked, so after about twenty seconds Hisham came on deck to bring me back in. “Don’t jump, Rose!” he says. He’s referring to
Titanic,
of course, which just goes to show how weird the world is. At the pyramids they wave postcards under your nose going, “Take a butcher’s at these.” And when you walk off without buying any, they say, “See you later, alligator.” So when Hisham says, “Don’t jump, Rose,” I laugh and he laughs, and it’s really nice for a minute. Nice bloke,
Hisham. Very patient with people like Pat who get Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt the wrong way up; who can’t say Nefertiti without sniggering about the titty bit.

“Isn’t this fantastic?” I say, waving at the night sky. “You are fantastic,” he says. “I have been watching you. Not boastful like your sister.” He leads me back to my cabin, and we’re laughing about
Titanic,
and when we look in here the cabin-boys have somehow used all the towels to make a model of a striking cobra on my bed. They do it every day – sometimes a cobra, sometimes a crocodile. But I pretend it’s a surprise and I scream, and he says, “I’ll save you, Rose!” and he jumps on the bed and wrestles with the towels until they come apart. And I laugh and laugh. “You won’t kick me out of bed, I think,” he says, breathless, finally. And I think Pat’s really not going to like this, but on the other hand she did kill that bloke in Iceland and Hisham’s too young to die. So I shut the door softly behind me and switch off the light.

Scene Three: deck sounds, fading to cabin (air conditioning; distant chug of boat’s engines); Tina is angry

Pat and I had it out this afternoon. And I’m bloody glad we did. The thing was, we arrived at Abu Simbel this morning – the thing we’ve come thousands of miles to see – and what does she do? She says, well, that’s nice, are you pleased then, Tina, and she looks at Abu Simbel from the deck and then says she feels a bit tired and disappears to her cabin for a couple of hours, and Hisham says he’s feeling a bit unwell, and I’m like thanks a lot, left trailing on my tod round this amazing place with Janice, who’s like a dam’s been burst, now we know how important
Kevin is, can’t stop bloody going on about what she wore to the Oscars and how it suited her a lot more than it did Drew Barrymore, who was wearing the same outfit. “At the same time?” I go. “What?” “Never mind,” I go. “Kevin could re-create all this for the screen, you see, on his computer,” says Janice, pointing at the statue of Amun-Ra in the holy of holies. I wish Hisham had come with us. This always happens when I sleep with someone; they go all sheepish and don’t want to see me again. I think I’m too keen, if you know what I mean. Whereas with Pat, she goes all not bothered, and they become enslaved.

One of the doorkeepers tries to show us around and me and Janice keep saying no thank you, no thank you, but he won’t go away, so in the end I give him some money, which is the wrong thing to do as he now feels he’s got to earn it, so he keeps on following us about. “Boat,” he says, pointing at an outline on the wall. “Slaves.” And I keep walking off, trying to work out what I’m looking at with just the aid of my little torch and my book on
How to Recognise Egyptian Gods Unaided Because You Have Bonked the Native Guide.

I thought I’d have to pay for it with Pat. That’s why she sulked all morning, I thought; she knew I’d been at the rumpy-pumpy when she hadn’t. But when I get back aboard I see Hisham leaving her cabin and there she is wrapped in a bath towel having a fag with the door open and I thought holiday or no holiday, Pat and me we’ve got to have this out. “You look terrible, Tina,” she said. “Not much sleep last night, I understand from the horse’s mouth?” She always does that. Gets the boot in first. I say, “Why are you so competitive, Pat?” and she says, “Why are you such a loser?” And I go, that’s better than being a show-off, and she goes, at least I’m not a bloody snob.
A what, I go. You’re a snob, Tina, everyone says so. Me? A snob? How could I be a snob, I go, what have I got to be snobby about, and she goes, “That’s what I’d like to know, Tina.” I’m almost speechless. Everyone says so? That’s so typical of Pat to say everyone says so. What she means is she’s been talking about me with Hisham. She steals a bloke I really like, and I’m the one in the wrong! It’s never-ending, this. “A tenth of a bloody second, Pat!” I shout. And she shouts back, as I storm out and slam the door, “Ha! Yes! A tenth of a bloody second!”

I cried afterwards. Came back in my cabin, locked myself in the bathroom and cried. [
Self-pity
] All my life I’ve seen people going, “Isn’t it funny how those two can be so alike and so different? Pat’s so outgoing! And what lovely cheekbones. Tsk, poor Tina hasn’t got cheekbones at all. And Pat got the gold, too, of course, because when it came to the big day in Montreal she swam the better time.” “The better time” – that’s what they’ll put on Pat’s gravestone. “She had the better time.” I’ll never forget how I raised my head out of that water, tore off my goggles and looked at the clock; how my pounding heart almost broke. In my heat, you see, I broke both our records; and then in the final Pat swam in the lane next to that amazing German who got the silver and although I matched my qualifying time, they both beat me, Pat got the gold and I got the bronze. So they’ll put “Pat Conway – she had the better time” on Pat’s gravestone. And on mine, which will be slightly smaller than Pat’s and further away from the path, it will say, “Tina Conway – pipped at the post”.

It’s not easy having Pat as your sister. I never beat her at anything. I should have stopped introducing my friends to her years ago, because inside of twenty minutes they always fall in love with her, and I can see this look cross
their faces when they realise they’ve sort of forgotten what they ever saw in me. “She’s amazing, your sister,” they say, thinking I’ll be pleased. “Can your sister come?” they ask. Look at my wedding to Tony. Pat not only upstaged me with a chic tailored outfit in contrast to my sticky-out dress, but danced provocatively with the best man, and even got in more photos than I did. The man who took the video made a short film which could have been called
A Day in the Life of Pat.
“You’re the clever one,” mum used to whisper privately to me, folding a stray bit of my hair behind my ear. Can you believe it, I kept that as a precious secret for about twenty years and finally, when both Mum and Dad had passed on, I told Pat one day when I couldn’t think of any other way to hurt her. “Well, Mum said I was the clever one,” I said, flatly, playing my unbeatable trump. And Pat wasn’t hurt! Her eyes filled with tears and she said, “Oh Tina, wasn’t that a kind thing for Mum to say?”

We sail back from Abu Simbel tomorrow. Pat hasn’t even been ashore yet. In fact, now I come to think of it, she’s hardly been ashore the whole trip. And now she’s put a note under my door to say she’s so upset by our argument she’s not coming to dinner – so I’ll have to go on my own, and it’s bloody mummification night, with the bog roll, so what a waste of all that practising. Janice couldn’t guess what Egyptian party games involved, so I said if she put a hook up Kevin’s nose, and dragged his brain out through the nostrils, she’d stand a pretty good chance of winning. She’d get my vote, anyway.

Scene Four: Tina; sounds of deck, chugging, birds

Well, you won’t believe it. Hisham’s being chucked off the boat for sleeping with the tourists. Pat came knocking at my door at eight o’clock, saying, “Tina! It’s terrible!” And I thought, oh no, she’s killed another one, but it was that he got caught with the vegetarian in the middle of the night, and the tour company are sacking him. Pat and he had a regular early-morning rendezvous, apparently, which explains why she was so tired all the time, and incidentally clarifies that she was sleeping with him before I was, in case I ever doubted it. So she got fed up waiting, and went to have a look for him at about half past seven, and he told her what had happened. Pat was so upset I had to nurse her at the breakfast table, and get her a special boiled egg and a special cup of tea, while Jill, the erstwhile vegetarian, had a massive fry-up to restore her spirits. And when we set sail from Abu Simbel I was so preoccupied making sure Pat was all right that I forgot to watch it or even say goodbye. If I hadn’t mentioned that – I only mentioned it – things might be all right now. But I said, “Oh Pat, that was the only chance in my life to see that beautiful sight, and I missed it because of getting you some soldiers,” and she said, “I’ve decided I don’t want to come on holiday with you any more, Tina.” And I said, “Oh.” And she said, “Sorry. I’m a bit upset.” And I said, “No, no, that’s all right, Pat. I was going to say it soon if you didn’t.” And she said, “Really?” and started crying. And I thought, why can’t I say something cutting? But I couldn’t. Instead I looked at her weeping over this Egyptian casanova, and I said, “Pat. I never want you to be unhappy.” And she says, “I never want you to be unhappy either, Tina.”

[
She’s quite affected by all this. Lights up, sniffs
] I’ll be all right. I just had to come back here for a bit and think. I haven’t told many people this but I did therapy for seven years with this woman called Georgina and every step of the way she was saying she’d never seen sibling rivalry like it: if I was to evolve as a human being I had to shake off Pat; stop comparing myself to Pat; stop bloody going on holiday with Pat, no wonder my marriages didn’t last; stop defending Pat. And I said in the end, all right, come to my house and meet Pat, I’ll get her round, come on, it will help you get a handle on it. And Georgina came round and I didn’t tell Pat who she was and Pat looked great and was all poised and fantastic and brilliantly well groomed and charmed the pants right off her, and I’ll never forget, Georgina collared me at the front door with this manic gleam in her eye and said, “You were right, Tina. She’s amazing.” “So can I stop coming?” I said. “On the contrary,” she said. “I think we should step it up to five times a week.”

The thing is, I could break away from Pat if I wanted, that’s what she didn’t understand. All my life I could have turned round and gone, “Pat, stop ruining my life.” I mean, I’m not stupid. Even Mum used to say, “If she makes you feel small, Tina, you’ve got to stop living in her shadow.” But the way I see it is, Abu Simbel makes you feel small. The pyramids of Giza make you feel small. What’s wrong with it? I just remember how on July 24, 1976, Pat dived into that Olympic pool and she carved through the water like a dolphin. We were in the same race but whenever I watch it, it’s Pat I follow – her white hat so steady, the grace and beauty of her windmilling arms, the strength of her kick, the absolute determination to prove herself the best in the world. I look at that race again and again.
The big German girl on one side of her; me thrashing my way to the bronze in lane eight, the crowd cheering and yelling and the commentator saying, “And Pat Conway seems to be leaving the others behind!” And I never stop saying, as she forges through, Pat Conway reaching and kicking and bloody well winning, [
very affected
] “That’s my sister, that’s my sister, that’s my sister.” [
Trying not to cry
] Ooh, hark at Tina.