The Way It Never Was (7 page)

Cleaning her sunglasses, Liv spat and polished. ‘I notice you always put Joe on a pedestal. You really shouldn’t. Seriously. He’s a cocky son of a bitch. I’m just saying. And while I took on board Liv’s concerns about his regular habit of counting out how many friends he had on Facebook, or his blatant befriending of the hostel newbie to get a free drink at the pub, I still couldn’t see the wood for the trees. To me, he just seemed so dynamic, so charming and so ridiculously funny, I felt like I could listen to him until the cows came home.

That afternoon, Anna was lying in an unnatural pose, wearing a decorative bikini that barely covered her bits, complete with belly chain. Being her usual aloof self, she wasn’t attempting to join in on the conversation with the girls. She was more interested in squealing flirtatiously at the boys every time she got so much as a drop of water on her. It was really quite irritating.

‘Thing is Liv,’ I said hesitatingly, shutting my eyes in the sun. ‘I would be happy to just try and stay out here as he’s got a new contract starting and has already said he doesn’t do long distance relationships.’ Compared to Joe’s absolute resolve about his career, working out my own ambitions started to seem so inconsequential now.

I opened my eyes to find Liv giving me this look of utter disbelief. ‘You have so many choices and I think you’re so fucking crazy to give it all up for a boy you don’t really know. This is not real life you know. This.’ She then made a waving gesture towards the picturesque beach. ‘Seriously, don’t make your time here about him, he’s totally not worth it.’

Suddenly, the boys who’d been playing the ‘who can hold their breath’ competition burst up through the water – Joe a fraction of a second in front. Wiping his eyes and shaking his hair over us like a dog in a really annoying way, he pointed over to the pub on the corner. ‘Girls, I do believe we need to go for some schooners of VB’.

Upon hearing this, Anna immediately stood up and stuck out her chest, while sucking in her already taut stomach to put on her sarong – sort of like a slow motion striptease but in reverse. ‘Oh God, okay! Twist my arm, I’m in!’

Later on that night, I had a little taster of just how dispensable I was to Joe. I found out from Liv that he kissed some girl at the pub just five minutes after I’d called it a night. Five minutes! Couldn’t he have waited fifteen in case I came back for my room key or something? This bombshell had me holed up in the hostel’s smelly loos crying my eyes out, while Liv just kept saying over and over the same thing.

‘He’s an asshole Kate. An asshole with a ponytail.’

I don’t know whether it was Liv’s words echoing around my head, Joe’s unconvincing excuse for having done it in the first place – he was drunk – or the rather small matter of having run out of money, but the following morning I booked my ticket home. If I was going to extract myself from whatever this was with my dignity and bank balance intact, I was going to have to at least appear like I was showing common sense, even if I didn’t feel like it inside.

‘We were so right but our timing was wrong,’ sighed Joe at the Departures Gate, stroking that golden ponytail of his thoughtfully. ‘This is for the best.’ Without uttering a word, I just listened to him say all the right things and then give me his idea of a kiss to end all kisses. ‘Remember, if I was in London, we’d be together, you know that right?’ he said and looked me right in the eyes, by way of demonstrating sincerity at having to part. ‘It’s just that I’m on my path.’

Following his destiny with the universe supporting him, Joe couldn’t get me on that plane quick enough.

CHAPTER 7 -
BY THE SEA

I get out of the train station at Broadstairs and head down the hill towards the harbour. Walking past all the shops lining the high street, I’m feeling a little sweaty and more than a little tired, not helped by a rough night’s sleep at Anna’s on a sloping futon that really should belong in a skip – clearly payback for not committing to a second date with Chris. Added to which, there was a one-hour delay on the train and no seat for half the journey – just my bags on the floor and a mind full of stuff going around and around like a washing machine on the spin cycle.

Stopping every five to alternate the load on each hand, I wave back at a blacked out Chelsea Tractor who has beeped at me at the lights. I have absolutely no idea who that was but I smile all the same, before stopping at the corner shop that sells sweets to buy some gum. This was where my flatmate Claire used to live with her parents, living off a diet of cola bottles and the bon-bons that her friends were offered whenever they went to play. Once my parents realised that her folks basically said yes to whatever the request despite us being only in our early teens, I wasn’t allowed to go there again – not before I had been to the Margate arcades, tried a night bus after late night skating and worn electric blue mascara. I used to stand there late at night, waiting for Claire to finish snogging someone, wondering why it was called a ‘french kiss’ when it took place in England.

Funny how there are people that have become like mythic folklore and the subject of numerous anecdotes for those that still know each other, disappearing off the face of the earth as though they only existed to give you an interesting story to tell: And yet the likes of Claire, who I genuinely thought I would see again, are still in my life.

Claire positively hated secondary school for the whole time we were there. When she wasn’t grimacing at having to do lessons, she was wearing her hair in an enormous pineapple do and sneaking round the back of the sheds with the boys to smoke cigarettes. What’s more puzzling still, is that given the amount of sweets she ate everyday, Claire has wound up being a skinny beautician, with a hostile manner that affords me not so much as a free leg wax, let alone a blackhead steamed off. I’m pleased to report however, that her two front teeth are crowns and unbeknownst to her, glow neon on the dance floor at our local pub – a stark reminder of why it’s never good to go to bed with a bag of cola cubes.

Sweating profusely and feeling the strain of the bags cheese wiring my hands, I stop in front of the window of Claire’s salon to catch my breath, catching my reflection in the glass looming back at me – I look so tired, my mascara has run, my lipstick has bled around the edges, and my auburn hair is now tied back with an elastic band for the tension headache effect. It’s not a good look.

Claire has worked at Divine Beauty since she left school, by far the trendiest beauty salon in town, with a state-of-art interior and a wall at the back containing a professional photo shoot of all the beauticians that work there. Now co-owner, Claire has the job title of ‘Vice President of Beauty Operations’, which as my brother puts it, ‘sounds like she’s about to start working with Madeline Albright’. Wax off the super fancy title though and her day-to-day essentially involves plucking eyebrows and filing nails for ladies who are waiting for school pick-up time.

‘I am a perfectionist Kate,’ she tells me on a regular basis. ‘I just can’t abide people who don’t work to the same standards.’ I’ve yet to find out just what these standards are.

Many a time I’ve caught Claire staring at me appraisingly. ‘You’d be stunning Kate, if you tried a bit harder. You do know that right?’ Just as I’m taking in the sight of a six-foot window display of my flatmate posing with feathers in hair like Pocahontas, I hear someone behind me.

A loud female voice jolts me out of my own thoughts. ‘She’s looking good hey!’

My immediate reaction is to pretend I’ve not heard them, because on any given day you can bump into at least four people a) you used to be friends with and still like, b) you used to be friends with and fell out with and c) you are friends with but as you are looking like a dog’s dinner you do not want to see. I seem to always meet the latter. Sometimes I get away with it when I’m wearing sunglasses but not on an overcast Tuesday morning. In a small town like this, everyone round here knows everyone else’s business – sort of like the Kevin Bacon connection, only in deepest darkest Kent.

I turn around and there jogs Scary Linda who was also in my year at school. For the whole of the first year, I didn’t know her name until she and Claire started hanging out in the common room, becoming this impenetrable force to be reckoned with. I call Linda ‘scary’ as she’s everything I’m not – highly determined and bloody minded – a woman who doesn’t just grab life, she bites its ears off and makes a stir fry out of the bits afterwards. Not surprisingly, by sheer determination and force of will she now owns her own successful travel agency and a flat in the same building as me. And finally, after three years of online dating and hundreds of bleak anecdotes, she also appears to have found true love – no doubt prompting a collective sigh of relief from the world’s male population. Scary Linda is a permanent fixture on my couch, forcing me to do much of my telly watching, sitting on a dining chair.

Today, Linda is jogging on the spot, dressed in a dark blue lycra running top, red in the face, and sporting a very short pair of cycling shorts hugging her nether-regions, along with luminescent trainers that look like they’ve never had an outing before. Her blonde hair scraped back and her oval face dripping with sweat, she is wearing those sunglasses that you only ever see people wear for Olympic speed cycling. Combined, it’s a striking mishmash, but if that weren’t enough, she also sports the ultimate fitness accessory guaranteed to lose those stubborn remaining pounds – a very large tyre connected to her waist by a rope. No wonder she can barely run.

‘Hi Kate! She’s looking good no?’ she pants, pointing towards the picture of Claire that is boring into my skull. Despite thinking that it’s taking marketing to a whole new level, I find myself nodding in agreement.

‘She certainly stands out from the crowd,’ I say.
Well
,
she
would
wouldn’t
she
,
with
the
skin
the
colour
of
mahogany
and
piercing
blue
contact
lenses
.

‘Anyhow, how are you?’ she disconnects her car tyre, as though settling in for a nice long chat.

‘Oh, err, okay, lots going on,’ I reply, mesmerised by that fitness accessory lying there on the floor looking like it should be helping a car move and not this sweating girl.

I wonder what she knows, as to this day Linda’s still best friends with Claire. I decide to be guarded, concentrating hard on ensuring that what I say by way of explanation is not a lie but still gives nothing away. Besides, she doesn’t want me to elaborate, as she is a nice girl and is just being polite.

Like her best friend, I always find myself closely studying Linda’s nails, a hangover from when I was a teen, when her nails were so long that she would get one of us to do up her shirt after gym class. I was the complete opposite, used to wear horrible tasting varnish to try and avoid nibbling at my bitten down stubs. And sure, she might be looking very plain but those talons are still as glamorous as they ever were, better still, she’s upgraded them from iridescent pink to encrusted rhinestones and diamonds – fake I presume and courtesy of Claire.

‘I was saying to Claire the other day, I think the last time we all went out together properly was a year ago, for your birthday, you know the same night Stan started going out with your friend.’ Scary Linda’s right. I’ve not hung out with them in a social setting, for good reason: They never include me.

‘Yes, it’s been ages hasn’t it?’ I manage to sound upbeat. ‘Though I still see you at the flat don’t I?’ I say, delivering the understatement of the century, as it would appear we are her chosen destination for every second of her downtime.

Linda then launches into a detailed account about the minutiae of her day. ‘God, I can’t remember when I last had a free hour since I’ve been seeing Dave.’ Here we go, another one who’s decided that her life as a career woman was a slight blip, and being in a couple is what truly matters, because she worked so damn hard to get a boyfriend and doesn’t want to go back. I am clearly the only person she has properly spoken to all day because I hear it all – her niece’s school play, her having to fire someone for cancelling a customer booking by mistake – and why she’s running around lugging a tyre (as she’s got a boyfriend now). Then she goes into the damp treatment she is having done in her front lounge, the fennel she’s experimenting with in her dinner tonight, and did I know that Dave had a near miss with a piece of scaffolding flying through the window in a local restaurant due to the windy weather? Blimey, I think, Linda must have been jealous to not own that near death experience story, although give her time and she’ll soon be adopting it as her own.

As she finally comes up for air, I try to think of a reason to get away but she gets there first and tells me she is so terribly busy as this is her lunch hour and that she really must go, as though I’m the one who has been keeping her. Yup, she is that woman who is always busy, who books you three weeks in advance to have a drink of an evening and who always gets off the phone first. Just as I’m thinking I’m going to get off lightly, she makes her usual closing enquiry. I have nowhere to run or hide.

‘So, have you found anyone yet? Claire says no joy.’ Linda does not ask, she states, treating my lacklustre love life the same way as job hunting.

Over the last couple of years, I have given up wondering why people feel they have the right to comment about my love life like I’m some sort of zoo attraction. It’s not like I quiz her all the time about her boyfriend – she is the one volunteering every single thing. Claire is also single like me, contrary to how she tries to come across and despite the energy she puts into spinning a yarn. The only difference is that whereas I just avoid talking about it for fear of opening up the floodgates, she employs smoke and mirror tactics and talks about who fancies her. Seeing as I am the single one who never wants to disclose much, I presume that is why my love life is an open book.

I take a deep breath and then reel out my stock answer about being happily single and not looking to settle down. My mission statement is so eloquent, but it would be wouldn’t it, because what with endless people asking, I’ve had the chance to fine-tune it. I used to supply too much information, but I then worked out that if you do that then people think you are lying about being happy, or that you want to talk about it. Now I keep it no more than three sentences.

‘You always were fussy’, Linda pants, giving my arm a friendly squeeze. ‘You need to get out there!’

Out
exactly
where
? I think. That would require enthusiasm and confidence, both of which I appear to have left behind in Australia.

‘I’m cool Linda. I’m really happy with my life right now,’ I protest, thinking that if I say it enough times I might start to mean it.

‘I don’t believe you. You really need to meet someone Kate. You’re so pretty. You’re slim. And you’ve got good skin. Wait a minute.’ I wait, wondering what wisdom is going to pour forth. ‘I’ve just had an idea! You should do what I did. You know, try online dating,’ she says, as though she’s invented the Dyson. ‘I’m now really serious with Dave. And that’s how I met him. Yes, I got up off my arse and endorsed myself and got a man. You could too.’

Visibly flinching at the thought of Scary Linda being some sort of dating mentor, I cast my mind back to the time she drunkenly told me that her criteria for finding a man basically involved finding out his star sign, checking for a pulse and zooming right in. Oh yeah, it only takes a little booze and it all pours out of her. This newish boyfriend of hers must have the constitution of an ox.

‘Where does Dave live?’ I enquire, pretending I haven’t had the entire scoop from Claire.

‘Well, he’s actually based up north but comes down most weekends to see me. Between you and me, my flat is nicer.’

I like the fact that while owner of a travel agency selling long-haul holidays, Linda doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a complete home bird. The nearest she’s got to owning a passport is taking the imaginative leap to move all of three roads away from her folks and one floor down from me. Just when it seems that the conversation will continue to go down this course, the universe spares me.

‘Shit. Do you know what? This tyre has got a nail in it! And I have an office to run!’ Linda cries.
What
are
you
going
to
do
?
Call
the
AA
? ‘Must go. To be continued! Hope to see you at Claire’s pamper session Monday?’ She bids me farewell and power walks off with the flat tyre dragging after her. It would appear Linda too has got baggage.