Unlike a Virgin (8 page)

‘Go on, Grace.’

‘Dan! No! Jesus!’ I say stroppily, then I stomp outside and look up at the stars. It’s always raining in Wales, though not tonight, thankfully.

‘Rubbish birthday to me, rubbish birthday to me, rubbish birthday to Gracie, rubbish birthday to me,’ I sing sadly.

‘See, you’ve still got that voice.’

It’s Mr Bellend again.

‘Do you know where the nearest pharmacy is?’ I demand rather than ask.

‘Oh,’ he says, seemingly taken aback. ‘There’s a Boots in Carmarthen.’

‘How far is that?’

‘Seventeen miles.’

‘Will it be open now?’

‘No.’ He laughs at the concept, then he takes a sip of something that looks like whisky judging by the glass he’s holding.

‘Damn!’ I say vehemently, taking his glass from him and having a slurp myself. Ooh, bit of a burn. It is whisky.

‘It should be open tomorrow. It’s a slow old drive from here, though,’ he adds.

That’ll be my one lie-in of the week gone, then. But if I get up and go first thing, it’ll only be about twenty-four hours since the accident, so I should be all right.

‘Rubbish birthday to me.’

As a rule I endeavour never to get into arguments. People often assume that because I’m quite feisty, I like a good barney, but they couldn’t be further from the truth.

Mum and Dad never argued, either. At least, not that I knew. They often spoke passionately about choreography or the merits of Candarel over sugar, but I never once heard them raise their voices or slam doors. Except the night before Dad died. It was late when I heard them. We’d already said good night and gone to bed. I was lying awake thinking about glaciers and they were in bed chatting. I could hear them murmuring to each other. It was all the same as every night, until suddenly I heard Mum’s voice, loud and firm, saying, ‘NO!’ Then there was the sound of movement in their room and more words being angrily spoken by Mum. I couldn’t hear it all but I caught the gist. She was repeating herself a lot. ‘What about me?’ she kept shouting. And, ‘It will be all about
the two of you. How do you think I feel? I’ll be forgotten.’ Mum hadn’t been invited to the meeting with the television company, and it sounded as though she was worried they would want my dad to partner someone younger. Wendy thinks this is why I can’t bear confrontation. She says that because I heard this row, and then soon after Dad died, I associate arguments with bad things happening. She may well be right because I can’t bear raised voices and I hate any form of confrontation. Normally, I’ll do anything to avoid it, but today I’m having a very trying morning and am dangerously close to having a scrap.

My day was going quite well, too. I’d managed to unglue my eyes at eight o’clock this morning, which was a feat of unimaginable dexterity as I’d stayed up until 3a.m. doing the washing up with Danny’s mum. Not my finest washing-up hour, it has to be said, as I was really clumsy and broke two wine glasses. Then I dropped a bowl of mayonnaise, which I wouldn’t recommend as it was very messy. The mayonnaise hit the floor and then began bouncing around all over the place like Penelope Pitstop. I can be a bit of a liability in the kitchen, although I’m not usually that bad, but I do like to stay up and help Pam. The boys tend to conveniently pass out in the living room, leaving Pam and I to open a bottle of port and put our Marigolds on. We normally have a bit of a gossip, but she was quieter than usual last night. I hope she’s not cross with me about the singing, or the mayonnaise, or anything actually. I really love Pam.

So this morning I got out of bed, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds because Danny’s parents’ spare bed is so comfortable and its blankets so soft and the room so quiet that you feel like
you’re lying on a spongy cloud in Heaven (the fictional, spiritual place, not the gay club). Anyway, I managed to haul my tired body up and then crept around like a brilliant burglar getting dressed and washed and leaving the house. Outside, I took a big lungful of fresh Welsh air and got in the car. I had just about managed to convince myself that a nice seventeen-mile drive in the country was what I should be doing first thing on a Sunday morning, rather than basking blissfully in bed. I even kept calm, smiled and waved at the maniacal-looking farmer who made me stop my car so he could walk a gazillion gormless sheep across the road. Calm was still in attendance when I got stuck behind a vehicle that was seemingly being driven by a short drunk person with neither hand on the wheel. My relationship with calm encountered some turbulence when I got to Boots at 8.59 a.m. only to find it doesn’t open until ten thirty. Ten thirty! There wasn’t even a café open where I could get a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich. But I really wanted to make it work with calm, so I dozed in the car. That’s not much fun in a Nissan Micra, but I tried. Calm and I were still going steady.

I must say, however, that right now calm is in danger of being brutally dumped in favour of her sister, fury. Because – wait for it, you will want to bonk fury, too – the pharmacist is refusing to give me the morning-after pill.

‘Um,’ Swallow, breathe; don’t thump the woman, Gracie. ‘Why not?’

‘It’s our policy.’

POLICY!

Danny says it’s very obvious when I’m annoyed with someone and trying not to wallop them. He says I start blinking like
I’ve got a bug in my eye and I move my mouth strangely, as if I’m trying to devour my bottom lip. I’m doing that now.

‘Why?’

‘A pharmacist has the right not to distribute it. If you’d been raped and the police were involved then we would reconsider, but otherwise it’s our policy not to give out the morning-after pill.’

‘But … but … it was an accident and surely you’ve got no right—’

‘As I said, we do have the right and it’s our policy.’

‘Please, I’m begging you. I’m only twenty-five – well twenty-six, but only just – and I can’t have a baby at the moment. Please. I know my circumstances and it’s not the right time. And pardon me for saying but … you’re not the person to tell me I should. It’s my decision.’

‘It’s not just your decision. There’s the father, your family, his family, God.’

God! That’s the sort of ridiculous statement that makes me scrunch my face up really unattractively and stare at her. No one believes in God any more.

‘Excuse me, but you shouldn’t be having sex if you aren’t prepared for the consequences.’

‘But everyone has sex for pleasure. What else are you supposed to do?’

As I look at her I realise that actually she might not have sex for pleasure, and anyway, yesterday’s two-minute quickie definitely didn’t constitute pleasure.

‘Sorry. Please.’

‘I’m sorry, no. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get on.’

‘This is sh—’ I stop myself. I was about to say a rude
word, which wouldn’t get me anywhere. Regroup, refocus, Gracie.

‘OK. Right. Fine,’ I say, with poisonous pleasantry. ‘But if I do get pregnant, I’ll bring the baby here and you can look after it.’

With that, I leave.

Whenever my day’s going terribly I always have to meet my mother. It’s one of the Laws of Rubbish that my life religiously follows. Today’s a case in point. Not only have I been denied birth control and had to drive for hours on a road where one lane was unavailable for use for sixty miles for no apparent reason other than to give hundreds of orange bollards an airing, I now have to endure Sunday roast with my mum. Actually, the roast isn’t the bad part. My mum’s roast is quite good. She always spends ages preparing the meal when Danny and I come over; she goes the whole Yorkshire pudding and five vegetables hog for us. This is mainly because she dotes on Danny. The cooking is all for him. She will force feed food upon Danny like he’s a suffragette on hunger strike, though she’ll hardly eat anything herself, so fearful is she of putting on half a pound in weight. She’ll also spend the duration of her time at the table trying to dissuade me from eating anything either. I ignore her, but it’s hard to really enjoy your food when someone
is watching you and commenting, ‘Is that five roast potatoes you’re having?’ and, ‘There are hidden calories in horse radish, you know,’ and, ‘You don’t want any more, do you?’ in an accusatory tone.

‘Oh, Danny, do we have to?’ I ask, as I turn the ignition off in Mum’s driveway.

‘Yep, come on. I’m starving and we’re late,’ he says, opening the door and stretching his legs.

I don’t even take off my seatbelt. I just flop forward and lay my head on the steering wheel.

‘I just want to go home to bed,’ I whine.

‘Not long now.’

‘Oh, hang about, what did I do with those letters?’ I say, taking off my seatbelt and reaching towards the glove compartment. I open it and pull out the scary letters I took from Dad’s study yesterday, then I lay them on my lap, look at them and yawn.

‘Nice tonsils,’ Danny says, because he always says that when I yawn.

‘Nice penis,’ I say, because it’s my retort. I’ll never be a lady.

‘What you got there?’

‘I got a bun in the oven,’ I say in a bad American accent.

‘Don’t scare me, babe.’

‘Oh! Oh! It’s kicking!’ I joke.

‘Don’t.’

I don’t want a baby, but Danny doesn’t have to look so appalled by the concept of me having his child.

‘It’s OK. I’ll get the morning-after pill – or the two-days-after pill as it’s now called – as soon as we leave here. There’s
a late-night chemist, hopefully without morals, on the Harrow Road.’

I pull out the first letter. It’s a credit card statement.

‘Drop us at the pub first, babe,’ Danny says. I hear him but I don’t answer, I’m too distracted by the letter I’m holding.

‘Uh oh.’

‘What?’

‘Uh oh.’

‘Grace, what have you got there?’

‘My mum owes eleven thousand pounds on a credit card – and she hasn’t made the last two payments.’

Eleven thousand pounds! That’s a car. Or a new kitchen and bathroom. Or a deposit on a studio flat with no outside space in Cricklewood. How is she going to pay that back? It took me years to save ten grand and I work! The estimated interest is over a hundred pounds for last month. It’s debt that’s getting bigger and bigger, like a genetically modified chicken.

I pass it to him.

‘Uh oh,’ he agrees.

‘Are you coming in?’ It’s Mum calling from the porch.

‘Rosemary,’ he says, throwing the letter back at me, ‘you look ravishing.’ Danny always turns into a smarmy maître d’ around my mother, but I’m grateful of it today because it gives me a moment to compose myself. I put the statement and the other unopened letters back in the glove compartment and close it.

‘Hey, Mum, you look nice,’ I say, getting out of the car. My mum gives me the glassy smile that I’ve become used to over the years.

‘Danny, I was wondering if you’d mind changing some
light bulbs for me; you’re so nice and tall,’ my mum tweets. Not as in online networking; as in flirting. ‘And whenever you get a second, I’d be so grateful if you could pop over and do the lawn.’

‘Not a problem, Rosemary.’

‘I spoke to your father this morning, Grace.’

Whoa. I wasn’t expecting that so fast. She normally waits until pudding to drop the ‘I’ve been talking to the dead’ lines.

Mum talking to my dead father is a relatively recent phenomenon. It didn’t happen when I lived at home, or at least if it did she didn’t mention it. In the early days after Dad’s death, when we were all a bit loopy, she used to wake in the night and claim to have seen him watching her from the end of the bed. But that only went on for a few months. She’s often dreamt about him, and occasionally she would mention the dream, but they used to be the ‘I dreamed your dad and I were in Cornwall’ type statements to which I would usually reply, ‘I’ve never been to Cornwall,’ or, ‘Cornwall’s supposed to be beautiful.’ There didn’t seem anything particularly unhealthy about it, until one day about three months ago, she called me at work. Wendy put the call through to me and made an eek face, as she sometimes does when Mum sounds a bit odd. So I picked up the phone and said, ‘Hey, Mum.’

‘Grace, Grace, I’ve spoken to your father.’

She made it sound as though she’d been trying to get through to him for ages and the number had been engaged. Her delivery was so matter of fact that I couldn’t respond.

‘He … he …’ she was starting to sound excited now and couldn’t get her words out. ‘Grace, you’re not to wear purple.’

‘Sorry?’

‘That’s what he said. I heard his voice this morning and he said, “Gracie, don’t wear purple.” Don’t wear purple, of all the things!’ She was starting to trail off and sound emotional now. ‘Are you wearing purple now?’ she whispered.

‘Yes.’

She gasped.

‘You’d better go home and change then.’

So I did, and all the time I worried that Mum, who for a long time had had a scatterbrained approach to the plot, had finally lost it.

I feel Danny tense behind me. I’m not surprised. He’s probably worried I’ll get back in the car and he won’t get his roast, and it does smell good.