Growing Up Twice (8 page)

As I walk back to my desk Carla is sitting on Kevin’s desk and conspicuously holding a piece of paper as if it were her passport to flirting. When she sees me coming she gives him a little smile and goes back to her desk.

‘We’ve caught up on those faxes, Jenny,’ she says as I go past.

‘Super,’ I say, in a boss-like fashion. ‘Well done.’ And I walk back to my desk, still in awe that anyone pays attention to anything I say.

One thing after another happens at work and I get in about fifteen minutes before the taxi is supposed to pick us up to go to Selin’s mum’s. Rosie is waiting for me, reclining on the black velveteen sofa in a nice pair of khaki linen trousers from Hobbs, her yellow hair in a neat French pleat and her face perfectly made up, all peaches-and-cream natural. By her feet there are three old cups of tea, two small plates with toast crumbs on and an empty foil carton that contained Chinese food some time last week. I get a little heavy feeling in my heart and I am glad the time is coming when we must finally be tidy.

‘Hello,’ she says, absent-mindedly staring at the TV.

‘Hi, how was the doctor’s?’ Aware that I won’t have time for my planned shower I sit at the three-legged table and reapply the make-up that I keep there over the make up that I put on this morning. Rosie, who would no sooner consider doing such a thing than she would eat leftover take-away out of a rubbish bin, looks at me with distaste.

‘You’ll clog your pores and your skin won’t be able to breathe and then you’ll go all grey and get spots, and then when you’ve got spots
and
wrinkles don’t come running to me for a miracle cure. The doctor was very nice. She gave me official confirmation and a leaflet. I have to make appointments for scans and things after that. You’ll come with me, won’t you?’ She waves a bit of pink paper at me and I nod mutely, contorted, as I try to drag the mascara brush through my already-mascaraed lashes.

‘Oh, God, I look like a drag queen,’ I say when I examine my handiwork. Talk of the baby seems like a distant reality. Almost like our childhood discussions of what we wanted to be when we grew up.

‘There are three messages for you, all from Owen. One polite, one whiny, one pissed off.’ I look at the blinking red number three on the answerphone and without any hesitation I press Delete. We both watch it as it makes its little whirring and clicking noises and resets itself to nought. I had hoped he wouldn’t call again, a vain wish, I suppose, given his track record. He’s not a man who likes to be ignored. It crossed my mind in the early hours of this morning that maybe seeing him would be the best way to get him to leave me alone, but as soon as the weary sun had pushed its way through my bedroom curtains I knew it would be madness. The best thing to do is to put him out of my mind and move on. Funny really, not so long ago I would have been pacing the floor, desperate for him to call me again.

I pick up my comb and I’m pulling it though my hair when the buzzer goes, making us both jump, as it always has every time it has rung as long as I’ve lived here.

‘Here he is, right on time.’ Rosie waves down to Kaled, a driver from the taxi office over the road. She has an account with the firm for work purposes and during the course of several trips took a particular shine to Kaled, whom she now asks for by name. He has even given her his private mobile number, which she does not hesitate to use much to the annoyance of his girlfriend and the pleasure of Kaled. In fact, over the last few months they have become firm and, by all accounts, platonic friends. I check my bag, keys, purse, inhaler, cheque-book (you never know) and phone, still switched on and three bars of battery showing. Still no call from Michael and the end of day four approaches.

In the taxi Rosie sits in the front seat and chats away to Kaled nine to the dozen about the baby, the house move, Owen and anything else she can think of. It’s really nice to see her so relaxed and laughing; those two really get on well. I think they will miss each other a bit, or at least they would if it wasn’t for the fact that Rosie has already invited him to our moving-in party for the flat we have yet to acquire. It’s a shame Rosie can’t have such an easy and open friendship with all the men in her life, but then again none of us lives up to that ideal very often.

The bottom of Green Lanes where the Mehmet family business and home is located is always busy and the traffic is always heavy. The many Turkish restaurants and cafés are always full, mostly of men drinking coffee and whisky and just talking.

The accountancy firm Mehmet & Mehmet has a shop front covered by venetian blinds and a brown-and-cream sign with back lighting that Selin’s dad is extremely proud of. He had it installed the day that Selin passed her first set of accountancy exams. Selin grew up in this house and the rest of her family still live in the two-storey turn-of-the-century apartment above the building, part of a dark and ornate red-brick block complete with turrets, tower and ornate balconies that now sits uneasily over rows of newsagents, mini-marts and pizza places. As we press the buzzer Rosie and I exchange glances, feeling nervous.

‘Have you brought some wine?’ I ask.

‘Yes, red so that I won’t be tempted,’ she says – she hates red wine.

‘And have you got the stuff?’ She winks at me and opens the blue carrier bag to show me. We are prepared.

Ayla, Selin’s ridiculously pretty and slender sixteen-year-old little sister, opens the door to us. She has her hair smoothed back into a neat bun and two long gelled ringlets hang just below her jawbone. With the family olive skin and molten brown eyes she is a beautiful young woman.

‘All right?’ she says with a bright smile and kisses each of us on both cheeks.

‘Looking forward to the new term?’ I ask lamely, hating the fact that I sound like my Auntie Marge. As we follow her up the stairs I notice that she has literally no bottom. I guess she would think I was a mad old fogey if I asked her where she got her hipster jeans shot through with a silver shimmer. Jeans like that are a long-distant memory for my hips.

‘Yeah, thanks,’ she replies cheerily. ‘I’ve made some new mates already. Quite a few of the girls who’ll be in my class have summer jobs at Sainsbury’s too. They’re really cool.’ I’m pleased about that. Ayla was very shy as a child and watching her gradually come out of her shell as she grows up has been a pleasure to see. Last year she had to move school as for no apparent reason she had become the target of some bullies. Despite her best efforts to face it out and numerous trips with her parents to see the head the problem continued. Ayla had had a terrible time. She lost weight, broke out in a rash and cried all the time, until her GP tried to prescribe her Prozac. The only solution it seemed was to move her to a new school. Shy and sensitive as she was with strangers, it took her a little bit of time to settle in to the new school so I was really pleased when she made new friends and managed to take her exams despite all the upset, ready to start back at the lower sixth.

‘How were your GCSEs? Selin said you did well.’ That’s it. I have been possessed by the ghost of my Auntie Marge, and she’s not even dead.

‘I got nine: four As and four Bs and a C for maths. Dad wants me to retake it.’ She looks over her shoulder and rolls her eyes at us.

‘Nine?’ Rosie chimes in. ‘How can you have nine? You must be a genius. That’s bloody millions. I only got four.’ She taps me on the shoulder. ‘How many did you get?’

‘I got five, but we did O-levels back then, it was different.’

‘Yeah, much harder for starters,’ Rosie says, and it’s my turn to look over my shoulder and roll my eyes at her, secretly thinking she is right. ‘Rosie, GCSEs are equally difficult and hard,’ I say out loud.

‘Yeah, and don’t forget Selin got nine O-levels and an A in maths, as my dad is always telling me,’ Ayla says lightly and without malice. Damn it, she’s right. Rosie and I were just lazy and preoccupied with clothes and boys. Selin wasn’t lazy, and she was preoccupied with clothes and boys
and
algebra. It’s a winning combination.

We are led into the warm and bright sitting-room, which is covered in original seventies wallpaper that has just come back into fashion. Selin comes out of the kitchen to kiss us both. She has twisted her copious black hair into an unruly up-do and is wearing her favourite red silk shirt, and she looks gorgeous. Mrs Selin, elegant and curvaceous, follows, kisses us both on each cheek and offers us some Hula Hoops in a little glass dish. Then the baby of the family – the child that was a surprise after the surprise of Ayla – Hakam, who is just eleven, is pushed our way. After vigorous and physical prompting from his mother he comes and kisses us both and then looks as if he wants to vomit.

‘You wait,’ his mother says, ruffling his hair. ‘In a few years you won’t be able to wait to kiss beautiful women like these two and you’ll wish you got the chance more often.’ Everyone laughs; Selin digs Ayla in the ribs and they wink at each other. Hakam, who will one day be very handsome, goes a lovely deep rosy colour and sticks out his bottom lip. I think about Michael, briefly, who seven years ago might have been going that special kind of red-haired-person pink at being forced to kiss family friends. Seven years ago I had my second-ever job as the world’s worst PA to a very tolerant boss who used to do all his own typing because I couldn’t. I was seeing a philosophy student with a beard at the time; he was a lot of laughs.

‘You girls sit in here and have a glass of wine. Ayla, come and help me in the kitchen.’ Ayla sighs, rolls her eyes again and follows her mum to the kitchen. Hakam, seeing a temporary escape route, legs it up the stairs to his PlayStation. Poor kid. Being the youngest in a house regularly full of dominating women can’t be easy.

‘Dad’s gone out to fetch some wine,’ Selin smiles, as she throws herself in an armchair, swinging her legs over the arm. ‘So? To what do I owe this pleasure?’ She knows that something unusual has happened as we hardly ever come to visit her. It’s not that we don’t see her all the time. It’s just that for some reason, coming back to the place where we grew up has always seemed like a pointless exercise when there is so much to see and do out there. My mum moved out of town with my older brother a few years back when my niece was born. Rosie’s mum went to live in Florida with an American she met whilst working as a tour guide at Tower Bridge. Both our sets of parents divorced in the eighties and neither of us really knows our dad any more although Rosie has tea with hers about twice a year and he gives her money. I know mine lives in Battersea with his clichéd ex-secretary second wife, who is about six years older than me. He wears a leather bomber jacket, drives a sports car and has a firm belief that his comb-over makes him look less bald. Despite my efforts to make sure he has always had a number to contact me on, he never calls me and on the few disastrous occasions when I’ve seen him since he left he patently wishes he could be elsewhere, back in the life where he can forget he ever had a former family. For a long time, I thought there must be something I could do to build bridges, but gradually I realised that he just didn’t want to know. It made me feel like an over-persistent, clingy ex-girlfriend.

But on the way here tonight, seeing the school we all used to go to and the café we used to drink Coke in after school, hoping to get a look at the sixth-form hunks, made me smile. These places and others, like the bus shelter where I avidly kissed my first boyfriends in full view of the poor commuters, and the park in which we cracked open those first illicit bottles of Lambrusco, formed such a seminal part of my early life that they suddenly seem inviting and reassuring once again. There must be something about getting older that makes reminiscing pleasant and the country of your childhood a safe haven. Just at this moment, though, that country seems very far away. Of all the news we’ve broken to each other over the years, this must be the biggest.

‘We brought some wine.’ Rosie hands Selin the bag and she looks into it.

‘Oh, red, that makes a nice change from your usual …’ She stops dead in her tracks. She pulls out a large party pack of fun-size Mars Bars from our off-licence carrier bag. She looks from me to Rosie and says, ‘Who?’

Rosie and I, still standing like the accused in the dock, point at each other.

‘Hang on,’ I say uncharitably and unfairly. ‘Yours is much worse than mine.’ I can see that Rosie has changed her mind about wanting to tell Selin the news. I can see she is considering moving countries, changing her name by deed poll and undergoing plastic surgery in order to avoid telling Selin the news. And when you consider that earlier today she phoned her mum in Palm Beach and had no trouble telling her at all, you’ll understand exactly how much we care about each other’s opinions. Especially Selin’s, who in all of our years of friendship has never ever been wrong, not once. That’s not an exaggeration.

‘Owen is back in touch,’ Rosie says, shrugging her shoulders for my benefit and waggling her eyebrows. I think she is trying to tell me she wants to abort the mission. But this is going to have to happen at some point between now and next May and I’m not letting her off the hook.

‘Oh no, tell me you aren’t going to see him again.’ She looks at Rosie. ‘Did you tell her about, you know, the thing that we discussed?’

Rosie nods.

‘Yes, she did tell me, thank you, oh, and thank you for deciding what I am and am not grown up enough to deal with myself.’ I am still indignant about that even though I know they were just trying to protect me and that Rosie’s tactic of prolonging the moment before she makes her revelation is working.

‘I’m
not
going to see him again. I wasn’t even before Rosie told me her bombshell, I’m not interested. No, Rosie go on, tell Selin the real news.’

Rosie gazes longingly at the glass of wine in Selin’s hand and then, looking as though she has had the best idea in the world, says brightly, ‘We’re moving back to Stokey to get away from Owen.’

Selin breaks into a huge smile, leaps up from the chair and hugs us both at once, dripping a bit of wine on to my foot. I wish people would stop hugging me when there are beverages involved.