Growing Up Twice (44 page)

And to top off a productive day I have just got back from my first ever driving lesson. I think it went pretty well: I didn’t crash. The instructor, Jim, recommended that I sign up for twenty lessons rather than ten but given that I didn’t know where to put the ignition key when I got in, it could have been a lot worse. I reassured him that I was a fast learner once I got the hang of things.

‘Let’s bloody hope so,’ he had joked, ‘I haven’t got much hair left as it is.’ What a card.

And so now, here it is: my Friday night in, alone.

I’ve got that feeling again that it might not be quite as boring as I anticipate, but that has probably got more to do with the sugar rush I experience after eating a king-size Aero bar and drinking a can of full-fat Coke instead of having a sensible cup of tea. I have got a bottle of wine but somehow drinking alone on a Friday night seems much more needy and desperate than drinking on your own any other night of the week, so I have left it chilling in the fridge. As the evening progresses I’ll decide how needy and desperate I feel.

I have a bath early, and lie on the sofa painting my nails as Friday night TV passes me by. I catch five seconds of some boring top-ten music programme dedicated to thrash metal and I think of Michael. A tiny little bit of me wants to chase my latest star-crossed feeling and try his mobile, just to test whether or not it would be possible to get him to spin his mother a line and have him on the 9.20 from Twickenham and heading right into my arms. For a moment I imagine him coming through the front door again and I let myself drift into a little trip down memory lane, but to be honest the only reason I want to call him is to find out if I still have power over him, not because I miss him at all, not really.

This is no good. I’ll think I’ll open the wine.

The theme tune to another rerun of
Friends
greets me as I return from the kitchen with my wine. As the first glass slips down I spend fifteen minutes trying to work out which one of them is trying to shag which other one who may or may not fancy the first one. I can’t tell, but the second glass of wine makes it seem less important and I find myself giggling out loud.

Around ten o’clock I think about Josh. Call me, he said. He meant for me to call him. He is so intent on keeping our agreement and staying out of my way until I’ve ‘found myself’ that he has lumbered me with the heavy burden of making the first move. Well, it’s the twenty-first century, I’m fairly sure he won’t blow me out, so I reckon I can manage it. When the time comes, which is not going to be in five minutes, I will have the willpower.

Instead I try to work out why how I feel about him changed so radically.

It’s an odd thing being a girl, now bear with me here. Because attraction to one person or the other can be sparked off by the oddest little things. Just look at Dan, for example. Ha, ha. No, but seriously. I’ve known Josh for most of my life and I’ve always liked him, he makes me laugh, he’s a good listener, he can dance pretty well for an artist, but I have never, apart from that brief time as a teen, really fancied him, and even then I think it was in the safe-distance-crush kind of way. The sort of unformed fantasies you have about boys that involve nothing more scary than imagining the kind of kiss where your noses don’t bump. But two things have happened to change how I see him. The time that we kissed, it was definitely a kiss that I could go to bed with, no doubt about that, and secondly, it’s his neck.

His neck and shoulders to be precise. It’s his warm olive-coloured skin and the little hollows at the base of his neck that lead into the mysterious and powerful breadth of his shoulders. Ever since his opening party last week I have been thinking about running my tongue along those little hollows. It always does start with a single body part for me – hands with Michael, but it has been forearms, eyes, ears and now neck. Oh, that neck.

Feeling reckless, I reach into my bag and pick up my mobile phone, turn it on, and scan through the numbers until I come to Josh’s. I could just press Call and get him over here right now. In half an hour or so I could be discovering the delights of that torso for myself. But something tells me that sex with a frustrated and drunk girl isn’t what Josh wants out of me, and it’s not what I want him to want either, so I toss my phone back in my bag and content myself with a little more fantasy.

Now that I’ve established that I
lust
after Josh and that I really like him, I should probably question the ethics of going out with someone who has always been a friend, but suddenly I feel quite sleepy and after all, tomorrow is another day. Well, you can’t expect me to dump years of happy denial all at once, can you?

The lovely thing about having an early bath is that all I have to do now is brush my teeth and I can fall into bed. I turn the heating on because I’m too tired to put on my pyjamas and climb naked into bed, stretching out against the clean sheets and turning off my bedside lamp.

As I lie on my back and wait for the familiar shadows to emerge out of the darkness I smile to myself. My evening hasn’t turned out to be as exciting as my intuition had told me, except for the fact that I have decided that one day, quite soon, if he hasn’t changed his mind in one of those horrible twists of irony, I’m going to find out more about Josh naked. And that is an exciting thought to go to sleep on.

I can’t breathe. I’m trapped. I’m trapped under a rock or a tree, it’s dark and I can’t breathe, I twist and struggle but I can’t move. I force myself awake.

I can’t breathe.

I blink in the darkness. There is a hand covering my nose and my mouth. There is the weight of another person on the bed. On me.

I blink again. I swallow.

I
am
awake.

‘Hello, Jenny, I said I’d be seeing you soon,’ Owen whispers in my ear.

My first instinct is to struggle, but he has pinned me to the bed, the duvet the only thing keeping me from him. I’m not afraid yet, I’m still half asleep, I’m probably still half drunk. I have no idea what time it is, I have no idea how he got here, all I know is that he
is
here right now. I don’t feel afraid yet, I feel angry. What’s he playing at this time? I try to shake my head clear of his hand, but his fingers dig into my cheeks. I don’t
feel
the pain but I stop moving. I don’t feel the pain, but I know he is hurting me.

‘I’m going to take my hand away now, don’t scream. If you scream that will make me very angry and you know what that means.’

I nod dumbly. His breath stinks of alcohol and his fingers of stale smoke.

As he slowly releases his hand from my mouth I gulp in some fresh air. He reaches over me and turns on the bedside lamp.

I look around the room, and listen to the familiar rumble of the constant traffic along Green Lanes.

He is here. I am not dreaming. He
is
in my house.

Now I am afraid.

‘You always did prefer it with the light on, didn’t you?’ He has straddled me but now he sits back, smiling down at me with the same indulgent smile he used as he poured me wine, or presented me with a meal or a gift. I don’t know if I am supposed to speak or not. I free an arm from under the cover and pull the duvet up as far as it will go.

‘So modest, that never used to be one of your more obvious traits,’ he smirks.

I wince, remembering. What does he want? Has he come here for sex, has he come here to hurt me? I take a deep breath, I remember his tempers, I remember his moods. Try to be rational, try to be smart. Talk quietly in a neutral tone. I won’t provoke him.

‘It’s just a surprise, that’s all. I didn’t expect you to turn up like this?’ I attempt a smile.

‘Well, let me see, you won’t talk to me face to face, you won’t speak to me on the phone, you won’t reply to my e-mails. I had no choice, Jenny. I needed to see you and you left me no choice.’

I want to ask him how he knew where to find me but I daren’t, I’m too afraid of making him angry, of reminding him that I didn’t want him to know.

‘I’m, I’m sorry. I never meant to shut you out. I was … trying to get over you. You know how hard I find it.’ If I pander to his ego, maybe that will calm him down.

Suddenly he lunges down until his face is millimetres from mine; the stench of his breath forces me to resist the impulse to gag. His hands grip both of my wrists. I can’t be sure, but his irises are almost entirely obliterated by the black of his pupils, he’s probably taken some coke too.

‘I didn’t
want
you to get over me, you stupid little slut,’ he whispers. ‘I still love you, don’t you understand that?’ I feel his knee dig its way between my legs, pushing them apart under the covers.

I am not going to let him do this to me. Not without a fight. Think, be calm. You know him.

‘Owen, I didn’t realise. The last time we finished it seemed so final. I really thought you didn’t want me any more.’ I try to stay calm, to stay still, I don’t want to move. I think furiously: where is my phone? In the other room. Is there anything here? Anything heavy, the wine bottle? Not within reach. Don’t make him angry. He doesn’t seem to have a knife or anything. But he’s big, he’s bigger than me. He’s strong.

‘That’s why I’m here,’ he says, bending his lips to my neck. ‘To show you how much I still want you.’ His hand releases one of my arms from its grip and begins to make its journey under the duvet, a sickening reminder of our sex routine.

I will not let him do this to me.

‘Owen, wait!’ I say with more command than I could have expected to muster.

He withdraws his hand and looks at me. ‘Come on, you know how you love it when I fuck you,’ he says mildly.

‘Look, you say you love me, you
know
how I feel about you. But this is all too fast, we can’t just jump back into bed. We need to talk. Let me get dressed. I’ll make us some tea. Let’s talk things though.’

He studies me through swollen and red lids. I hurry on.

‘I can see just by the very fact that you’re here how much you care, but it’s still a bit of a shock. We need to talk things through, like we always do. I bet you’ve got things you want to say to me, haven’t you?’

Even this Owen, the drunk and drugged Owen, must surely be the same Owen deep down, the Owen who loves the sound of his own voice. With one movement he springs off the bed and takes a seat in the corner.

‘Women, they always want to be wooed. Fine,’ he says. ‘Get dressed. We’ll talk. I’ll undress you later.’ I can see that he is not about to provide me with any privacy. I can see that in his drug-addled eyes rape wouldn’t be a problem for him. My instinct is to shy away from him, curl and hide, but instead I steady myself and dress as quickly as I can without looking as though I’m afraid, letting him watch me, keeping him calm. I keep waiting for the dream to end, to blink myself awake to the sounds of my alarm clock. Keep waiting for those few confused moments just as I wake when I work out that it’s all a dream.

He follows me into the kitchen and I fill the kettle. I could throw boiling water in his face but it wouldn’t knock him out, it would just make him angry. He would come back at me. I open the cutlery drawer for a teaspoon, I could go for him with a knife, but he’s stronger than me, he could turn it on me instead. All I can think about is keeping him calm, staying safe. I look at the clock on the microwave: 3.28 a.m. It seems like a long time until dawn. From somewhere the statistic that women are more likely to be raped or murdered by men they know insinuates itself into my mind and I nearly lose it. Tears sting my eyes as I turn my back to him. My knees buckle and wobble, the wine I had earlier on rises in my throat and before I can stop myself I find that I’m retching into the kitchen sink.

Owen is instantly at my side, smoothing the hair away from my forehead. I force my stomach to be still and stand back from him, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

He hands me a glass of water.

‘Must be the excitement,’ he says and something in his eyes at that moment tells me that he knows exactly what he is doing. And that he is loving every minute. I gulp down the water and return to making tea. Stay calm.

‘Let’s go into the living-room,’ I say. If I can get to my mobile … What then? What if I can get to my mobile? One step at a time.

I take a seat on the sofa, hugging my tea between my knees, my bag at my feet. I try and think back to earlier on. Is my phone switched on? Yes. Who did I call last?

Owen takes centre stage opposite me and begins to pace the floor.

‘The thing is, Jenny, it’s the arrogance of it all that hurts me. The way you think you can simply drop me – as if
you
have the choice. You don’t have the choice, you belong to me,
I
make the choices.’

I nod at him and think back. I was going to ring Josh, that’s right. I had called up his name and then I hadn’t had the guts to go through with it and I chucked my phone back in my bag. If the battery hasn’t run down, right now the display on my phone will say ‘Josh, call?’ I can’t talk to him, of course, but maybe he’ll be able to hear, maybe he’ll know, maybe he’ll understand what’s going on and he’ll get help.
If
he’s there,
if
his phone is switched on,
if
it wakes him up and
if
it doesn’t go to messages. It’s all I can think of right now. I make a show of finishing my tea and I bend to put the cup on the floor. As quickly as I can I reach into the open bag, find my phone on top of the clutter and press the Call button, sitting upright again slowly, carefully, not distracting Owen.

Maybe Josh can help.
If
he can make out what’s going on.

‘You’re the only one, Jenny, the only who has ever really touched me, who has ever really given me what I need. So I can’t just let you go, can I?’ As Owen talks on, warming to his theme I strain to catch the faint call tone, terrified he’ll hear it too. It seems to ring for ever before it is cut short. I
think
I can just make out the tinny sound of a voice on the other end. Either he’s picked up or it’s a recorded message. Now what? If he’s there I can’t let him hang up.