Can We Still Be Friends (20 page)

‘I think we’ll do a marvellous sweep on the eyelid,’ he suggested, wielding a thick eye crayon.

‘No. What if I cry? And I’m bound to cry. I don’t want black all down my face.’

‘Think Elizabeth Taylor. She was always crying, and that didn’t stop her wearing her eye make-up.’

Annie didn’t know what Lee was going on about. She put her foot down about the eye pencil though.

She found Jackson sitting at a table in the garden at the back of the pub. He jumped from the chair to embrace her.

‘Gosh, I’ve missed you. You look even prettier than I remember. I’ve got you one of your gimlets, babe.’

It was unfair. He was wearing the bright-blue shirt that she always thought suited him so well, the sleeves rolled up to his elbow, his veins, which she liked to run her fingers along, prominent under the skin. The garden was full of after-work drinkers, a bantering huddle of young men, pint mugs in hand, ties loosened, cigarettes waving between thumb and forefingers. At the neighbouring table a grey-haired couple looked quietly at the
Evening Standard
. Annie envied them their placid togetherness.

‘So how’ve you been? What’s new at Tania’s?’ Jackson rattled on. It wasn’t clear whether he was ignoring the fact that she hadn’t spoken, or hadn’t noticed. ‘It was amazing in the States. Very exciting. Everybody’s talking about pop videos. MTV. It’s a whole new area I could get into.’ He reached across the table to take her hand.

He hadn’t even asked her why she wanted to meet. What was so important to her? He was going to avoid the subject if he could. She took a sip of the sweet vodka drink.

‘Don’t you want to know why I wanted to meet?’

‘Of course. I imagined you were going to tell me.’ He spoke softly, smiling at her. ‘I’m so pleased we have. I would have loved to have dinner tonight, but I fixed something up weeks back that was hard to change. But Friday – we can spend Friday together, can’t we?’

Annie could hear the rumble of chatter in the garden. Everybody was having a normal drink at the end of their normal day. They were going to finish their beers, or wines, or gin and tonics and go off with friends, or home to their children, or to see a film. At any rate, they would probably be doing the same thing as they always did and they weren’t about to have to ruin their life. She could feel the tears pricking at the back of her eyes.

‘No. No, we can’t.’ Annie couldn’t look at him. She stared at her glass.

‘Oh. Are you busy? How about Saturday then? I think I’m free.’

‘Not Saturday either.’ She sat up straight, bracing herself, as if by
stiffening her spine she was stiffening her resolve to get the words out. ‘Sal told me about New York. That she’d seen you getting off with someone there.’

‘Ah.’ There was a pause. ‘She did, did she? Yes. I thought she probably would. And that has upset you, has it?’

‘Of course it has. What do you think?’ Please, Annie pleaded with herself, don’t start crying now. ‘It wasn’t my favourite news.’

‘Well, it didn’t mean anything to me. She’s just a girl I know. Nice girl, but nothing important. Come on, cheer up.’ He moved his chair nearer to put his arm around her. ‘Annie, you’re gorgeous. Captivating. Don’t bother about it.’

‘I
am
bothered about it. We’ve been together for nearly a year, and I don’t think this is going anywhere. I never know where you are. You won’t make plans. I don’t know if you’re sleeping with other people, but you probably are. I don’t really even know if I am your girlfriend. And I hate it. It makes me miserable. It’s not what I want.’ Annie felt the tears rolling down her cheeks and was sure that her nose was about to run too.

Jackson held her against him.

‘Sorry,’ she said, wiping her face.

‘Don’t worry. Tears don’t stain.’

For a moment Annie contemplated whether this was true. After all, weren’t tears salty and didn’t salt stain?

‘So what do you want to do?’ Jackson asked, rocking back in his chair, and running his hands through his hair.

‘I think we have to break up.’ Annie spoke so quietly she wasn’t sure he had heard. She hadn’t said ‘I want to break up’, which would make it harder for him to say something like ‘I really love you. You’re the most important person in the world to me.’ There were millions of things he could say which would stop what was happening from happening. If she kept talking, would it make it more likely he might say one of them? Or would it be better to keep silent?

‘Darling Annie, I don’t want to make you unhappy. You’re lovely. I know I’m a shit. I disappoint myself sometimes.’ Annie noticed that he was trying to look at his watch without her seeing.

She didn’t want to look at him again in case she wouldn’t be able to leave. So she pushed the chair back and stood up quickly, forcing her way through the clumps of drinkers, through the dark pub and out into the street. She thought she might run for ever because, if she stopped, then she would really feel the pain.

It was high summer, but neither Kendra nor Sal nor Annie had holiday plans. In central London the streets were filled with tourists wearing over-sized white T-shirts and ill-advised shorts stopping in the middle of the pavement to take photographs. Sometimes the wait for a snake of Italian teenagers to cross the road was so long that the traffic lights had turned red again before it was possible to move. It was a place of foreigners and workers whose usual smart clothes were more crumpled than usual, as if there was nobody left they needed to impress.

The large doors to the Chapel were propped open by a stack of bricks and Kendra could hear Gioia’s deep voice talking in Italian to her brother. She had taken advantage of the sun to sort out some plastic boxes of painting materials outside on the pavement, piling up pots of paint with the colour encrusted around them, reorganizing stubby pastel sticks, their tips now of an indefinable tint. It was so different from the art room at her school, with wooden easels folded at the back, smocks hung on pegs on the walls. Gioia was proud of some of the paintings her brood had produced.

‘That’s good stuff. You have to express yourself, not just copy what you see,’ she had told John yesterday as he worked the paint with his fingers on to a piece of cardboard. A mixture of colourful abstract shapes, interspersed by some figurative paintings, were taped up on the walls. There was one that showed fields, a red church and, standing by a stream, a white cow – or was it a horse? It was hard to tell. Several were of the nearby railway tracks and the tower blocks of the urban landscape. One showed a large black woman with fangs at the side of her mouth holding a bottle and a cross.

Kendra carried a box back inside and went to where Gioia was seated at the plywood trestle that served as a desk looking at the telephone, having just replaced the receiver.

‘You know, we’ve got to get something done about the roof. The weather’s better now. You remember I told you about that woman who said she was going to complain? I saw her looking up at it the other day.’

‘Heavens, girl. We’ve got enough on our plate here just keeping things going. We don’t need to worry about the roof. Nobody’s dead yet.’

‘No. But by the time they are, it’s going to be too late. You’ve got to face it, Gioia, there are people around who don’t want us here. You know that. We know the kids love it, and that’s what counts, but some of the locals seem to have a problem, and it’s not going away. It might be good to at least look as if we’re listening.’ Kendra heard an unattractive bleat in her voice.

Gioia got up and walked into the quiet street, Kendra following in the wake of her exasperation. Standing with her arms akimbo, with her loose crimson trousers tied in some elaborate bow in the front, she resembled a genie, just landed in the north London street.

‘It’s changing round here. Skips everywhere. Yuppie types taking over the asylum. Look at the estate agents on Kentish Town Road – they’ve sprung out of nowhere. The old Christian Aid place, that’s gone.’ She bent to scratch her bare foot. Kendra watched the silver ankle bracelet hanging on its curve. It reminded her of the line in that Eagles song, about sparkling earrings lying on a girl’s brown skin. She would like to be lying in Gioia’s arms, surrounded by the rich, sweet scent of her, rather than having this discussion about crappy roofs.

Sal had only taken a few days’ holiday all year, even though Andrea had warned her that she wouldn’t be able to carry it over. But holidays were complicated. You needed to have somebody to go with. It was one of the best bits about having a boyfriend – knowing that they solved the holiday problem.

She had tried to persuade Annie to think about going away with her, but although they were still sharing the flat, a keen part of Annie’s distress was her resentment at Sal. It wouldn’t have been so
awful if Sal had been sober and had told her in a considered way, the way Kendra would have done. If she’d taken the time to ease her into it in some way – if it was possible to ease her into it. It was the fact that she had been drunk and confronted her with all the consideration of a blunderbuss. When Sal was drunk, she didn’t care about repercussions. She had no comprehension of cause and effect. Even when she was sober she often couldn’t see how an action of hers had caused the subsequent chain of activity.

Annie spent most of the summer weekends in Hampshire with her mother. It was peaceful just lying on the grass in the garden watching clouds move above her, but the very fact of her being there was an illustration of her failure. As soon as there was a problem, there she was, back home, grounded in the cosy kitchen, where she had always been. Even so, it was easier than staying in the flat hoping for a telephone call that wasn’t going to come and that she knew she shouldn’t want anyway.

As every month passed, Kendra’s separation from her parents became more entrenched. She had been surprised by how easy it had been to break away and, after moving in with Gioia, it seemed best not to look back or forward. Better just to be. Gioia’s world was so different to everything she found familiar, but it was new rather than strange, something that, piece by piece, was becoming hers too.

The arrival in her bank account of a monthly allowance from Art made her feel guilty. It didn’t seem fair that he should still be paying for her when she was running away. But there was always something that prevented her from asking him to stop, such as when her bicycle was stolen. She could have bought a dead cheap one from a second-hand place nearby, but the old bike had been really good and, after all, she did travel everywhere on it. Even as she wrote the cheque out for the shiny new acquisition she fretted, but Gioia had told her she was crazy.

‘Don’t be daft, Ken. Listen, if my folk had the cash, they’d probably be giving me an allowance. Let them love you the way they can and, in the meantime, you’ve got a cool new set of wheels.’

In early August Gioia borrowed a car from a friend and they drove out to the coast, the skies becoming larger as they headed east past the straggling city. Kendra could smell the sea before they reached it and was excited to catch the first glimpse, which arrived suddenly. The long beach was hedged by dunes and dotted with coloured windbreakers and the plastic toys of children as they carried the sleeping bags from the makeshift car park set back from the sands. When they arrived at a dent in the dunes, far from the families, Kendra sat and watched as Gioia ran into the water and then stood waist deep before collapsing at the edge and letting the water wash over her.

Untying her long wrap-around skirt, Kendra could still smell the Hawaiian Tropic oil she had been using on that holiday in Corfu. She walked over to Gioia.

‘Aren’t you coming in for a proper swim?’

‘No. I’ll just stay here.’ Gioia’s long black hair already had silver slivers of seaweed tangled in it.

‘You’re like a seal lying there. Come in with me. I want to swim with you.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘Jesus, Ken, do I have to spell it out? I
can’t swim
.’

It was the first time Kendra could remember Gioa admitting to not being able to do something. She was always so capable and, even if she couldn’t do something herself, she knew how to find somebody who could. It was unimaginable not to be able to swim. Everybody could. When Kendra was a child she had been taught in the local pool. She’d won a badge to sew on her costume for a lifesaving course that involved pyjamas, although she couldn’t remember what she did with them. She could see them now, inflated red blobs with elephants on them.

She sat in the shallows next to Gioia, who stared out across the sea, her ankles kicking in the water. There were too many people around for Kendra to do what she wanted to do, which was to take Gioia’s head in her hands and lick the indentation at her neck and
stroke the base of her spine where there was a covering of soft, dark hair. She would have to wait until dark.

Further down the beach were houses with gardens that led directly on to the sands, but where they had set up their camp it was deserted. As the daylight faded, the houses began to light up and the odd sound carried along to where they were gathering driftwood and grasses and piling them up into a bonfire. The evening was warm but, even so, Kendra liked the idea of a fire.

A crimson streak was all that was left of the sun by the time they sat on the scratchy blanket. Gioia produced a bottle of grappa from her knapsack, an unlikely accompaniment to the sandwiches Kendra had made, now littered with gritty grains of sand.

‘It’s lovely here. I never had a seaside kind of holiday when I was a kid. Dad always closed the shop in August and sometimes we went to his family back near Bologna. Not much sea there. Funny how big the sea is when you look at it. Like it goes on for ever.’

‘I think Russia is the nearest land in that direction.’ Kendra gestured across the water. ‘You get massive winds because there’re no hills between us and the steppes. It’s why there’s all the nuclear stuff on this coast. It’s meant to be our first line of defence … kind of creepy. All that danger just out there, and this is so beautiful. As if we’re being deceived. It makes you worry about what could be in the sea. Uranium, plutonium – God knows what.’