The Last Resort (2 page)

“Well—that would be when you told me you’d meet me at the pub for a drink on Friday night. Except then you didn’t.” (I
really
hadn’t intended to do that, by the way.)

I suppose if you really want to understand, I’ll have to start at the beginning.

I wasn’t always jumping planes and flying off around the world, before you start getting the idea that I’m some kind of jetsetter.

Before all this, my life consisted of weeknights in with my Mum. Friday nights were spent with Sharon in the pub, or maybe out somewhere (she was at night classes almost every evening besides). Most weekends were spent recovering from Friday, shopping, or just mooching around either at home or at Shaz’s, watching reality show marathons and eating Pop Tarts. I was 21 and single, with no idea what to do with my life: I went to work, came home from work, spent my pay on crap, and every month decided it was too expensive to get a place of my own. And so things rolled on.

Sometimes I’d be gripped with panic that this was all my life was going to amount to. But then I’d tell myself it was far too early to start worrying about things like that; after all, lots of people only hit the big time when they were thirty-five. I had plenty of time.

Didn’t I?

Every few months, Sharon would gently suggest that I take a look at the Open University brochures she’d downloaded for me. And I would; some of the courses looked really interesting, but somehow never quite interesting enough. Sort of the same things as the boys I met.

There was a blip, though, just before the chaos started that led me off to Heathrow one fine morning. Sort of like that butterfly that flaps its wings in the jungle and causes a hurricane on the other side of the world, or whatever it’s supposed to be.

My sister Mia—the golden child of infinite promise—announced she was getting divorced.

Mia. She never forgave me for being born, although the sting of resentment seemed to decrease as I proved to be the princess of underachievers, and she the queen of all she surveyed.

Mia got a double-starred first in Art History at the most prestigious college in Cambridge. I scraped though secondary school, couldn’t stomach college, and had no discernable talents (hence dead-end job, no prospects, etc.). She’d had Luke wrapped around her little finger since she was 17, and married him when she was 22; I’d had two boyfriends since school, and both of them were awful. Mia was strawberry-blonde, porcelain-fine, and emerald-eyed; I had middling-brown hair that my mother insisted was hazelnut, and grey eyes she insisted were blue.

When Mia’s marriage fell apart, to say it hit her like a ton of bricks is an understatement. It was more like a super-tsunami. We—my mum and I—pieced it together in fits and starts, while Mia yowled incoherently at the Christmas table. (She announced it on Christmas Day, with the full complement relatives present—on top of being perfect, Mia was also a drama queen
par excellence
.)

Here’s how it happened: it all started when the sub-prime crisis began to take its toll. Luke, a stockbroker with a Ken-doll smile, felt the crunch quickly as his commissions dropped and the interest rate soared. Mia, in her usual style, put in place Draconian measures in order to save their elegant flat in the cheaper bit of NW3 (not to mention their weekend pied-à-terre in the country). And so, every Saturday, Luke was dispatched to Lidl and Asda with a WWII-style shopping list, while Mia scrubbed the flat from top to bottom, their weekly cleaner having been designated an unaffordable luxury.

It was in these straitened circumstances that Luke met Vicky, a comely nineteen-year-old Goth from a Hounslow foster home, who worked morning shifts at the till after visiting the all-night pool halls in Brixton. Luke, for reasons I think he himself didn’t fully understand, made sure he was always standing in her queue.

When he was made redundant four months later, he must have turned up for his weekly shop looking raw-eyed and drawn. Their eyes met across a crowded shop floor; Vicky doubtless felt her New Romantic heart throbbing insistently at the sight of him. After sharing a cigarette in the car park, the die was cast. They started sneaking around; weeks turned to months; inevitably, Mia found a text from her on his phone; and that was that.

He insisted that Vicky was nothing but a balm for his battered self-image.

Mia, enraged by his self-pity, countered by asking him why he’d found it so easy to destroy their marriage with something so meaningless.

He bristled and replied that she, Mia, had been the one who’d made him feel like he was less of a man for being fired, so what did she expect him to do but find comfort elsewhere?

She told him she wasn’t about to take the blame for his “shameless man-whoring” (direct quote), and threw half their dinner service at him in disgust, and flounced out of the house with nothing but two suitcases full of clothes.

Mia’s ego was in tatters. The conversation (or, rather, the monologue) on that Christmas Day turned from dissection of the financial toll a divorce would take, to enraged wailing about Vicky’s seduction technique (“Black lipstick? How am I supposed to compete with
black lipstick
?”), to an itemisation of Luke’s flaws.

“I couldn’t leave him alone for a second or he’d fuck something up,” she lamented, clutching a dangerously full glass of Chenin Blanc to her chest, miserably wedging mince pies into her mouth one after the other. By now, the relatives had left politely, shielding smaller cousins’ ears from the torrent of profanity that spewed forth from Mia. Mum and I watched, mesmerised, as twin rivulets of mascara met at her chin and dripped into her wine. “I couldn’t trust him to wipe his own arsehole, never mind keep his boxers on in a supermarket. I hate him.”

Later, we brought her bags in from the car. She stayed on. Neither Mum nor I had the heart to ask how long for. Luke showed up a few times, a pathetic figure, begging her to take him back; every time we had to escort him out, sadly but firmly.

The atmosphere in the house was funereal. She swung wildly between rages and sulks, and Mum and I tiptoed around her, just as we had after Dad died.

After the first few weeks, she lost her job too, not having turned up to it for ages. Knowing she was in no state to look for a new one, she signed on; it was surreal to see her, the former overachiever, waiting excitedly for her benefit payment and relishing drinking it away in the pub down the road.

Those days were interesting. Mia hadn’t lived with us since I was barely teenaged, when I was still in awe and fear of her. Now I could see her up close, observing her as she hit rock bottom and stubbornly refused to bounce back. Sometimes I’d think I was lucky to be single and going nowhere: at least I had nothing to lose. I know that sounds stupid, but if you saw the state Mia was in for those few months, you’d also have started to wonder whether love, marriage, and career success were worth the pain.

She was a dreadful mess. She seemed to be permanently drunk. Crying through all the soaps, leaving the room in a huff during
Trisha
, begging me to throw her mobile phone down the toilet whenever she was tempted to ring Luke (i.e. all the time), having complete meltdowns when Mum left toast crumbs in the margarine. (“I tried for three years to get Luke to stop doing that,” she wailed in explanation, “and now I don’t even have him here to do it anymore”.) It was
awful
. She had to be babysat at all times, Mum and I tacitly agreeing to take turns on unofficial suicide watch.

Four months after Christmas, the divorce was final, and Mia was a free woman—although not a particularly happy one just yet.

~

It was to celebrate her newfound singlehood that Mia invited me to accompany her to a gallery opening in London—her most significant outing in months. Well, this was Mia, so she didn’t invite me; it was more a case of my presence being required. But she was my sister, and she was an unemployed divorcee, so I felt I had a duty, etc., etc. Anyway, now that she was living with us, it was too easy for her to make my life a living hell in the event of noncompliance.

I wore Mum’s Mary Quant sequin minidress, the one she got on Carnaby Street once upon a time. I needed something to buoy up the old morale, since I knew the evening would most likely be a bleak one. Both Mum and I were beginning to get exhausted with looking after someone who had been so miserable for so long.

“What’s that noise?” asked Mum while she backcombed my hair.

“What? That wailing noise?”

“Yes.”

“That’s Mia. In the shower.”

We exchanged uncomfortable glances in the mirror.

“You’d better keep an eye on her,” Mum said warily. “Who knows what she’s liable to do.”

Little did either of us know that it was going to be
me
who needed an eye kept.

“Did I say the dress code was tarty go-go dancer?” Mia spat at me on her way from the shower to her bedroom. Then tears sprang into her eyes and she went crimson. “I’m sorry I’m such a cow,” she quavered, “only I don’t know how I’m going to cope. . .”

And she stood outside the bathroom, hair in rats’ tails and leftover mascara streaking her face, and cried enormous, heartrending tears.

“There, there,” Mum and I soothed, leading her back to her room. More pointed looks. Mia apologising? It was even worse than we’d thought.

She snivelled all the way to the gallery. It was one of those high-ceilinged, ancient warehouses that have probably been around since the 1800s—grotty, but in an interesting sort of way, and swarming with people in large dark glasses. Once we were inside, and it became clear just how hilariously pretentious this evening was going to be, Mia cheered up and I relaxed a bit.

We noodled around, sipping the free wine enthusiastically, snorting with laughter at the pubic hair collages and paper dolls made of bacon and so on. I had a good giggle at some performance art involving muscular men in full leotards, who were having glittery pink paint flicked on them by the female artist as they slowly marched in a circle, smiling broadly. Apparently something to do with “the feminisation and commoditisation of the masculine in contemporary Western culture”. At least, that’s what I heard an ambiguously-gendered person in black harem pants say.

Mia drank a lot because she was nervous. I could see her anxiously scanning the faces in the crowd. Was she looking for Luke? Or was she wondering how she was ever going to get back on the horse (so to speak)?

Like I said, it was tiring taking care of her. “Hold this,” I said, and thrust my drink at her before she could protest (which was very quickly indeed). “I’ve got to wee.” I took my respite breaks where I could.

Being in such edgily glamorous surroundings gave me a delicious sense of anonymity, and I savoured it as I glided through the crowds of people that had poured into the gallery. Living in Ickenham, obviously we came into London all the time, but even so there was something about the city that made my blood run faster. Something tense and dangerous. Was that Pixie Geldof I saw chatting to Yoko Ono? And Dita von Teese’s younger sister sipping a Bellini near the installation of dismembered storefront mannequins? I shivered with delight at how urbane it all seemed. This was London, and I was part of it.

The loo was a masterpiece of minimalism. I waited near a vast, gleamingly white couch for a stall to open up, admiring my dress in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. Afterwards, I had my first full cringe of the evening when I couldn’t work out how to get the extremely-pared-down taps to turn on. A nice lady with a Marilyn piercing and full sleeve tattoos had to show me how to wave my finger in front of the sensor. I washed my hands gratefully.

Outside the loo is when I first saw him.

His back was to me. He stood somewhat in shadow, positioned on the edge of the crowd: a dispassionate spectator, a philosopher; not a frivolous man who sought the limelight. But even so, I could have sworn that it was the rest of the crowd that plunged into darkness, with his form remaining as the only one visible.

He was tall, much taller than me, and despite the modesty of his extremely well-cut suit, I could clearly see the outline of strong shoulders. He looked as if he had stood on that spot for a thousand years, like a god cursed for some divine transgression.

And suddenly the universe folded in on itself. He turned a little, saw me, turned some more, and leaned back against the balustrade. Then he looked straight into my face, and said, “Hello.”

It was perfectly possible that this mysterious person had great plans to saw me up into little pieces and make a nice braised dish out of me. But somehow, I didn’t care.

“Hello,” I said, my voice quavering just a little.

Hopefully he’d have the decency to murder me thoroughly before getting on to the sawing bit.

He looked steadily at me, his body perfectly relaxed, as at ease as a panther in a tree after a kill. Smooth skin—pampered-looking, somehow. Taller than my high-heeled self, and at least thirty. Eyes dark, but not brown: maybe dark blue, even black. His expression—the configuration of his features themselves?—had a distant expression.

By now, we had been standing in silence for far too long. I felt I was expected to come up with something witty and flirty to say, but I was stumped.  He spoke again, with a smile. “Are you enjoying the exhibition?”