Growing Up Twice (13 page)

Selin conitunes, ‘And so we decided to come back and keep you company. Thought we could get a take-away.’ She pats me gently on my arm and smiles at me in that old-friend way so that I feel just about as guilty as a girl can feel without wanting to spontaneously confess. I’m going to make it up to them, I promise.

‘I want healthy take-away though,’ Rosie says optimistically. ‘But you can choose, Jen, as you’re poorly.’

‘First of all,’ I say, wanting to stop them being so nice to me, ‘Sister Sledge were geniuses, every last one of them, and second of all, can we have Chinese?’ How the hell am I going to get Michael out of the flat without them noticing?

Rosie looks at me and frowns. ‘How long have you been into surfing?’

I look down and realise I’m still wearing Michael’s O’ Neill T-shirt. ‘Oh, it belongs to some bloke I pulled once,’ I say so shiftily that they must surely rumble me. ‘I found it in my drawer today. Thought it would be good for slobbing out in, you know. Poorly like.’

Rosie, who never slobs out in anything but Nike sportswear, wrinkles her nose at me and Selin, taking control as usual, gets off the sofa, turns on the TV and rifles through the various take-away menus we keep on top of the video. Now’s my chance.

‘I’m just going to the loo,’ I say blithely.

‘Mmmmm,’ they reply in unison, mesmerised by the last five minutes of
Casualty
. I leave the room, on my way into the hall casually kicking the old bit of brick that stops the door from swinging shut. I go straight into my bedroom. It’s in darkness. He isn’t there. He isn’t in the bed. He isn’t under it. He isn’t in the wardrobe. He must have gone already. He must have sneaked out. I sit on the bed and breathe a sigh of relief, then pull his T-shirt over my knees.

Hang on. If he’s gone, he’s gone topless. Fuck. He’s in Rosie’s room.

I run next door and hiss at him, ‘What are you doing in here, moron!’ He looks offended.

‘You said second on the left!’ He’s definitely pouting now.

‘I did not!’

‘Did too.’

Oh God, I haven’t got time for this.

‘Did not!’ I stop myself. ‘Anyway. You’ve got to go
now
.’ I pull his T-shirt over my head and hand it to him before I remember that I am naked underneath.

‘Flipping heck,’ he says, unable to look me in the eye. I grab Rosie’s dressing-gown and hurriedly put it on.

‘There’s no time for that now,’ I whisper. ‘Come on, get dressed. I’m getting you out.’ He puts his top on and steps closer, forcing me to look up at him, making me feel like the girl again, instead of the mother.

‘Have I blown it for good with you?’ he says, pulling me close by the lapels of the dressing-gown. I don’t have a chance to respond before he has slipped his hands inside the towelling and is rubbing his thumbs across my nipples. I still his hands so that I can think. I do want to be here again. Not here in Rosie’s room likely to be found out at any second, but here in his arms. Yes, I do want to be here again. I push his arms back by his sides.

‘You haven’t blown it. We made a good start tonight. Maybe we should just try again, another night when we can really be alone. Maybe go on a date. It doesn’t have to be about sex,’ I say, not sure what else it is we might have in common.

‘Like as if you’re my girlfriend?’ he says with such a hopeful expression it almost makes me want to slap him. Instead, the palm of my hand just rests on the side of his face.

‘Yes, but let’s keep it quiet for now, OK? Let’s keep it our little secret.’ As I say this I am filled with a vague feeling of discomfort and I have to remind myself that he is almost old enough to die for his country as I push him towards the front door.

‘I’m just taking this rubbish down, it stinks!’ I call through to the living-room. I imagine the raised eyebrows and quizzical looks between the girls as I push him out of the door and walk him down the stairs. He is muttering something about being called rubbish.

In the shadows of the porch he whispers, ‘So I can call you?’

‘Yes, or I’ll call you,’ I say quickly. We will call each other but now let’s go home.

‘And what about tonight?’ He pulls his long T-shirt uncomfortably over his hips and looks at the toes of his trainers.

‘Don’t worry about it, tonight was lovely. It really was. Are you OK to get home?’ I say and I pat my jeans pockets looking for some cash.

‘Oh yeah, I’ll be fine. Mum bought me a return ticket this morning.’ He bends to kiss me goodbye and I watch him lope down the grove.

As I walk back up the stairs I realise the extent of my inebriation. How much of what I feel at the moment is the cheap warm white wine churning in my stomach, and how much the tingly pleasure of unconditional adoration, and how much is actually about Michael himself? Will Rosie and Selin notice that I haven’t taken the rubbish out and that it still stinks and still overflows from the kitchen bin?

I shut the flat door, change into my pyjamas, exchange my own dressing-gown for Rosie’s and wander back into the living-room.

As Rosie hands me the menu for the local Chinese and Selin puts
Dirty Dancing
in the video again I lean back into the sofa, drunk and almost content.

Right now I don’t care what my motives are, I just want to live with the pleasure of the moment. Yes I know that at some point it will all end in tears, but tonight I just want to enjoy it. Tomorrow I’ll work it all out and do the right thing. Honest I will.

This morning, I’ve woken up wishing that I were a singer. I don’t mean a midriff-baring teen sensation that looks like a souped-up spaniel puppy. I mean me in some smoky old-style nightclub, some jazz café, in a full-length red-velvet hip-hugging number and elbow-length gloves. Me belting out ‘Cry Me a River,’ or ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ or some classic sixties soul number. Head tipped back, throat exposed, eyes shut tight, feeling each word to the tip of every finger, the whole room in my thrall.

The only drawback of no longer living alone that I can think of is that my imaginary singing career has been somewhat curtailed. I still find myself doing a number in the shower, singing along to the kettle, or pulling the curtains and shutting the windows in the living-room to do a whole dance routine along with Ginger, Doris or Julie depending on which Saturday afternoon musical is on BBC2. But if Rosie catches me she’ll tease me mercilessly for hours on end and come out with an ever more bizarre list of people she thinks I should impersonate on ‘Stars in Their Eyes’.

I used to be able crank up ‘Lady Marmalade’ while washing up, loud enough to make sure I couldn’t hear my own voice, never actually finishing the washing-up as I was too busy shaking my stuff round the kitchen, singing to the scouring pad, wearing soapsuds in my hair like diamonds and Marigolds on my hands like silk.

We all have our little showbiz fantasies, don’t we? In another life, with another voice (and an American passport) I would have been a torch singer, a jazz siren, a Motown mystery or disco diva. Somewhere around 1979 the history of music lost its charm for me and I stopped caring about chart stuff any more.

My devotion to all things post-1900 and pre-1980 would be sad if I had been eighteen back then when punk came to town, because that would mean I was stuck in my youth unprepared to move on with the times, unable to embrace my own generation. But I was only eight at the time when my brother and I stopped watching
Top of the Pops
to enact out our own version of
Rockin’ Robin
, and started to watch it to diss’ the hairstyles and shout ‘Crap!’ after each track in the top-twenty countdown. My brother got a parka and took up smoking on his first step to becoming a Smiths fan, and I refused to give up my lime-green nylon flares with the elasticated waist even when they flapped a good two inches above my purple sneakers. So I’m not sad, I’m retro funky classic, just like my favourite nightclub in town. A singer in a jazz club, one of the things I promised myself I’d do if only once before I got to thirty, along with journalism and learning to drive. Oh well, you can’t do everything, can you? Or sometimes anything.

There was one time when Rosie joined in with my ‘secret’ love of singing.

There was one time when the pair of us decided to hire a car and go to the country for a week for an epiphany. We didn’t find ourselves but we did find an old country-and-western compilation tape stuck in the tape deck. Left with no alternative but to play it (have you heard local radio?), by the end of the weekend we were whizzing down those country roads belting out Leanne Rimes like troupers. But country lost its appeal as we got closer to London.

We never spoke of it again.

And once Selin and I did ‘Stand by Your Man’ at some karaoke night, except Selin rediscovered her dignity before the end of verse one and left me standing there all alone finding it hard to be a woman, and toughing it out solo. But everyone cheered at the end and no one laughed, so that was fun.

Lying in my bed I can see the chrysanthemum-shaped patch of damp that has been slowly blossoming over my head for the last two years and the brown-and-orange floral curtains my mum gave me as a stopgap when I moved in, and which I never got round to replacing. I look at my £12.99 Ikea bookshelf, now dusty and bare since I packed all my books into five boxes from Sainsbury’s, and the four black dustbin liners full of clothes piled up in the corner.

It is one week since Michael and I had our near miss on the sofa, one week since Selin announced that she had found us a flat we might fancy, and one week since Rosie and I began the probably futile task of straightening the place up sufficiently enough to merit the return of my deposit.

We are moving today.

Selin told us about the flat last Sunday, in a café on the Portobello Road. The three of us must have been the only people in an establishment awash with
lattes
who were actually eating. No wonder the waitress loved us so much, although she looked as if she could benefit from a good fry-up and a couple of cakes herself.

‘Mmm, by the way I think I’ve found you a flat,’ Selin had said through a mouthful of waffles, whipped cream and maple syrup. The offhand way she dropped the news into the conversation had made me smile. In reality she had probably been waiting all of that night and most of the following morning to tell us that she had rescued us again. As we always expected her to. We weren’t in the least bit surprised and not nearly grateful enough.

‘Really, how?’ Rosie asked, ostentatiously waving smoke from a neighbouring table of thin second-hand-leather-coated types out of her face. They say the reformed ones are the worse.

Selin’s excitement at having found us a flat caused her cheeks to flush and her eyes to glitter, making her look exceptionally pretty. Like a teenager in the first flush of love, almost. She is the only person I know who can get this worked up about organising stuff.

‘This bloke my dad knows, I know him too, a bit. He’s cool, straight as a die. It’s a nice flat too, just off Burma Road, ten minutes from mine, rent’s not too much, two double bedrooms and one little box room. What d’ya think?’

‘Sounds perfect. Can you give us his number so we can go and see it?’ I asked.

Triumph spread over Selin’s face like a sunrise. ‘No need,’ she said, reached into her bag and pulled out a bunch of keys. ‘We can go right after lunch.’

Kaled turned up about twenty minutes later even though it was his day off, and as we travelled across town he told Rosie he had sacked his bird for doing his head in. Rosie agreed that she did sound a bit unreasonable. Kaled asked Rosie if she fancied going to this underground garage anthem night he was DJing at and Rosie said she’d love to but what with the baby and all that she should take it easy. Kaled said how about this chilled night at an after-hours bar he knew in Brixton, and promised to look after her if she came along. The back of Rosie’s head looked very tempted but yet another flash of the new Rosie that’s developing along with her baby made her say, ‘Thing is, Kaled, all I feel like doing at the moment is eating burgers and throwing up.’

‘Just like Elvis,’ Kaled said dryly, making her giggle. ‘No probs man, it’s cool, some other time, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ Rosie said as we turned into Burma Road.

We loved the flat. It was clean, it was roomy, it had one of those mirrors in the hallway that make you look thinner than you are, and best of all it had an original sixties L-shaped kitchen with bright orange-fronted units and Formica worktops covered with a stylised flower-power design. We wrote out our deposit cheques immediately. For some reason the mystery landlord had instructed Selin to deal with the contracts, which I did think mildly weird, but I guess if he was a client it might be an accountanty type thing to do. Anyway, at least we knew Selin wouldn’t rip us off so we signed them and we had a new home.

I called my old landlord, Mr Bilton, that very night. It took him a few minutes to remember who I was, but when I gave him a week’s notice he wasn’t too bothered. Turned out he had just been about to chuck us out and sell the flat to a housing association anyway.

So here we are a week later, and I’m about to say goodbye to seven years of variable luck, a few dozen beetles and the brown floral curtains.

My new room already has curtains, and they look as though they might be from Habitat. They’re not, but they look as though they might be.

Josh is bringing over a mate with a van to help us shift the heavy stuff. Selin is already here, having stayed the night and, judging by the sound of movement, is probably already labelling boxes with the marker pen that she brought from the office especially.

I suppose I should feel sentimental, sad even. I have had some good times here. But every single happy memory I have is eclipsed by some low-down thing that Owen did to me. All the laughter I have had here is hidden by the shadows of the tears; I think I’d have to live here another hundred years to wipe out all the bad memories – and just imagine what the beetles might have evolved into by then. As it turns out I’m really glad that Rosie’s pregnancy forced my hand. Sometimes I think that if the whole of my life were left just up to me nothing would ever change.