Wise Follies (7 page)

I’d wished he wasn’t standing so close. He smelt so nice, and it wasn’t just shower gel. It was him. What he’d just said was so right. Not just about pottery, but about life too. Who was I kidding? I didn’t dislike James Mitchel. James Mitchel was gorgeous.

‘And just let your elbow rest there and that will steady your hand so you can guide the clay while the other hand draws it upwards,’ James Mitchel said, his blond fringe flopping boyishly over his lovely face. Upwards and upwards the clay was moving.

James Mitchel stood beside me, watching the clay growing erect between my hands. His proximity was like a heat haze. The priapic connotations of what I was doing were beginning to make me terribly flustered.

‘Go on, Alice,’ James urged. ‘You’re almost there.’ Small beads of perspiration were gathering on my forehead. I closed my eyes briefly, trying to summon up some sort of calm. As I did so I felt the clay acquiesce. I stuck a finger, slurp, into its centre…and something like a vase began to form.

‘Well done.’ James touched my shoulder briefly but, it seemed to me, with considerable feeling. Then he moved on to someone else. I paused for a moment, an almost post-coital glow surrounding me. ‘Get a grip of yourself, Alice,’ I told myself sternly, but I still felt tingly. I hadn’t felt like that in ages. I looked around, wondering if anyone else had Noticed. They hadn’t. They were as intent on forming misshapen mugs and ashtrays and bowls as ever.

Though James Mitchel had moved away, my radar was now on the alert. I was aware of every glance he made towards me, ostensibly watching my progress. But surely those glances had more to them? ‘Oh, come on, Alice. Don’t be so silly,’ I told myself. ‘He’s a man for goodness sake, and you know what they’re like.’

But did I? Did I really? They couldn’t all be the same. That’s what the Delaney sisters who had Never Married said about, say, peaches. ‘Don’t press them, dearie – they’re all the same.’ But it wasn’t true. It was just convenient. James Mitchel was on some journey too. I could sense it. But his mists, unlike mine, had cleared. It was obvious. I saw it the instant I looked into his eyes. A sweet, unsought-for recognition…the most seductive thing of all. I turned back to my vase with an almost religious intensity. I already knew that I’d lick mayonnaise off James Mitchel’s inner thigh area if he wanted. Even coleslaw, if that’s what he’d prefer.

By the time the class finished I did have some sort of vase made. I had to discard a number of others, but the one before me was the best. It was not the kind you’d buy in a shop. It was not the kind you’d boast about. It was rather squat and heavy actually. It didn’t have conviction. James saw me staring at it. He came over. ‘Don’t worry, Alice,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘By the end of term you’ll have made all sorts of nice things. It just takes practice. It just takes time.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed humbly. James Mitchel was so right. Things do take time. I forget that sometimes. I get impatient. He wasn’t impatient. Maybe he’d been sent to teach me all sorts of important things.

‘You should glaze this.’ James was studying my vase. ‘I like it. It’s a nice shape. And it’s the first thing you’ve made here. It’s important.’

‘Is it?’ I stared at him gratefully. I have a tendency to dismiss my own efforts too easily. To not give myself enough credit.

‘Of course it’s important,’ he smiled, and then he walked off to talk to someone else and I knew I’d have to learn to share him. He’s just that sort of person.

As I walked home I told myself sternly that I mustn’t get infatuated with James Mitchel. I hardly knew him. And it was plainly part of a recognizable pattern. Indulging in complete cynicism for a while and then, suddenly, converting dramatically back to a kind of Mills & Boon idealism. ‘Poor, dear Eamon out there in Peru,’ I found myself thinking. ‘What an innocent you are about me.’

Even so, as soon as I reached the cottage I went to my laptop computer most eagerly. The ‘Sex Comes in from the Cold’ article had to be ready the next day and thoughts of James Mitchel had made me much more enthusiastic about it.

‘Get some chocolate chip ice-cream and feed it to him slowly on a silver spoon,’ I wrote. ‘Then kiss him gently, sharing its delicious sweetness. Let what you’re feeling roll over your tastebuds. Pretend that you are tasting ice-cream and him for the first time. Don’t hurry. Linger in the moment and enjoy it. These things take time…’

Chapter
6

Some things seem to
take a very long time. Especially this concert. We’ve only been here half an hour, but it seems like four. ‘Be who you really wanna be,’ a singer called Laren Brassière is screeching at us. ‘You’re not some sideshow monkey, dancin’ on some lead. Find your tune. Your very own. Only it, and not some streetcar slowin’, not some man, can really take you hoooome.’

I really want to be at home right now. This concert is dreadful. Even the bits of moistened tissue paper I stuck in my ears have only slightly muffled the noise. Mira dragged me here. She says I’ve become obsessed with James Mitchel and need distraction.

I still only see him once a week – at pottery class. I must see more of him. I must. I make love to him every night, but he doesn’t know it yet. Very occasionally I wander around the roads near his house, hoping that we’ll meet. I’ve started numerous letters to him. They go: ‘Dear James, I hope you don’t mind me writing to you out of the blue like this…’ and then they stop.

Mira says I’m behaving as if he’s ‘the last good man’. She says I’ve got the whole thing completely out of proportion and if passion has this effect on me I should marry Eamon. She says Eamon’s proposal has sent me into a panic about something, and I’d better find out what it is. I wish she hadn’t dragged me to this stupid concert. I don’t see how it can possibly help.

Ever since Mira decided to become an eccentric spinster she’s had a very low boredom threshold. A deep need for diversion. She’s been seeking out the oddest people she can find, and Laren Brassière is certainly different. For example, all she’s wearing is a see-through négligée with only a bra and pants underneath. In a boudoir setting this ensemble might look ‘come hither’ but here, on Laren, it clearly says ‘fuck off’. Tall and slim with long black hair that does not appear freshly washed, she seems in her late thirties. Though her lips have a surly confidence, her eyes are huge and almost girlish as they peer out at us.

‘Bugger it anyway, and I’m missing Gardeners’ Questions too,’ I think, as the jangled, mangled music continues. Snatches of it sound like the garbled noises that emerged during French class when the Monsieur Thibaud tape went funny.

‘Plastic!’ Laren is now screeching into the microphone, occasionally curling her body slightly as if riding out some psychic twinge. ‘Plastic! Plastic! Plastic!’ From what I can make out from the lyrics, which break over us like shards of glass, the song is about people. I feel as though I’m listening to nails being scraped across a blackboard. I look at Mira, hoping that’s what she’s feeling too, but she just sits there entranced.

Laren is prancing around the stage now. It’s impossible to ignore her. Everybody is watching her intently. Even the ones dragged here to lend support to battered wives – that’s the cause the proceeds of this concert are going to. Tattoo-less women – women who might as easily be watching Neil Diamond. But there is something about their faces that makes it clear they aren’t. They are looking at Laren Brassière as if for clues. Shocked in some way, but not as much as they’d expected. For though Laren Brassière is both rude and lewd – some of her gyrations are really quite outrageous – there is more to her than that. Even I can see that now. It’s in her eyes. There’s something almost innocent and bewildered about them. And yet she’s obviously not a woman anyone could batter easily. Like James Mitchel, she has conviction.

Laren ends her encore with what looks like a micro-phone blow job, and then slinks sullenly off-stage. ‘Wonderful,’ says Mira dreamily, and with a strange glint in her eyes. ‘I must meet her.’

‘What?’

‘Laren. I must meet her. She’s so – she’s so…’

‘Weird?’

‘Yes,’ Mira agrees blissfully. ‘Come on. Let’s go to the bar next door. She’s probably there. They all go there after shows.’

I sigh. There’s quite a good film on Channel 4.

Mira is right. Laren is in the bar. She’s slouching over the counter having a pint with her band. She’s surrounded by a small group of cautious female fans, many of whom are way past adolescence. They are trying to look as cool as Laren herself. Every so often they throw gimlet-eyed glances in her direction. I glance carefully at her too, though not as carefully as Mira. For it is clear that Laren Brassière is a deeply eccentric woman who does not need spinsterhood as her excuse. As I stand near her I notice that she frequently laughs long and loud in mid-conversation and for no apparent reason. What’s more, the bra under her see-through nightie isn’t even clean.

‘Let’s go,’ I say urgently to Mira, suddenly deeply fearful. She doesn’t seem to hear me. Her eyes are shining. The last time I saw them shining like that she was with Frank, the married man she had a passionate affair with. The man I don’t think she’s got over, even though she insists she has.

‘Let’s go,’ I say again. For I suddenly know that Mira feels herself close to the ‘tune’ Laren sang about earlier, and I’m not at all sure it’s one I’d like hearing.

‘Mellow out, Alice,’ Mira says, suddenly slipping into California-speak.

‘So, are you going to talk to her then?’ I demand. ‘You said you wanted to.’

‘I dunno,’ Mira replies, a little shyly. ‘Maybe later.’

I scrutinize Laren once more…trying to identify her strange attraction. Maybe it’s because she has somehow sidestepped the proprieties most of us have been saddled with for years. Seen in a certain light, that could be a cause of gratitude. This emotion has certainly spilt over on to Mira. She’s talking with a cluster of fellow fans. They’re agreeing that the evening was ‘different’. They’re discussing the aggressive sound-system and Laren’s clothes. Then they move on to other topics, because that’s what adults do. They’re drinking rather freely and, as they talk, small expletives and scowls occur. Slight grimaces twitch upon their lips and when their laughter comes – about men and marriage maybe – it is way too loud.

I have a sudden yearning to get into conversation with Laren myself. I want to ask her how she came to be like she is – and if it’s preventable. The thing is Laren looks like she wants a conversation as much as I need to know more about smiling. She’s scowling. Scowling into her drink and lighting up cigarettes offered to her by her equally weary drummer. She absent-mindedly scratches her elbow every so often. Someone I knew used to scratch their elbow like that – who was it? Now that I’m closer to Laren she seems strangely familiar. Have I seen her somewhere before? Glimpsed her on a poster in Virgin Megastore perhaps? From snatches of conversation I gather she and her band are waiting for their equipment to be loaded into their van. They are not waiting around because they want to. I should have known that. Then a skinny fellow wearing a sleeveless  T-shirt and tattoo comes over to them, says something, and they drain their glasses.

‘Fuck the terrapins – I’m not putting up with them.’ That’s what Laren says to a man with long blond hair as she rises from her bar stool. I’ve heard that voice before. I know I have. It’s nothing like the nasal whine she sings with. As she turns to grab her packet of Gauloises from the counter I look at her. Really look. Burrowing beneath the layers of lurid make-up and spiky, dyed black hair. Like a grainy picture – obscured by its own white spaces – another face flickers for a second in front of me. And then it’s gone and, as the sharp, streetwise features of Laren Brassière condense, I feel even more bewildered. I am now sure I know Laren from somewhere, but I simply can’t place her.

The bar is closing. ‘Look, I’ll drive home,’ I tell Mira. ‘I’ve drunk far less than you.’

‘OK,’ Mira agrees swiftly. She sways a bit as she hands me the keys and keeps exclaiming ‘Oops!’ and giggling as we push our way through the crowds. As soon as she gets into the car she slumps inebriatedly into the passenger seat. Then, as I turn the ignition key, she starts to doze.

As I drive Mira’s car along the dual carriageway I am still puzzling about Laren. Where on earth did we meet before? Do we go to the same hairdresser? No – no it’s more than that. She’s someone from the past, I know she is. The face I glimpsed through all that make-up seemed a grown-up version of the one I knew. Could she be someone from school? Could she be… Laren MacDermott?