Another Life Page 3

  Anna smiled. ‘I bet you’d make a wonderful writer.’

  This expression of faith was surprising. I had never told anyone about my writing, especially not Daz and the lads who would file it away for future taking-the-piss. ‘How about you?’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

  She leant her head on my chest. ‘I love to paint,’ she said. ‘And I’d love to go back to New York one day. I spent three months there last year on a school exchange thing and it’s such an incredible place. Let’s live in the East Village and be a couple of creative bums together.’ She kissed my skin.

  I ran downstairs to smoke out front. Are you really going to leave me alone in your room? she’d said, with a conspiratorial widening of her eyes. I did. I left her there, lying on my bed, despite knowing the nicotine kick would do little to quell the buzz. I liked the idea of her being in a space that was solely mine. When I glanced up mid-smoke, she was at the window, looking down. From the way she was leaning, her hand under her chin and her elbows out wide, I could tell her bare knees were on my pillow, and something about this gave me a strange sort of thrill. I smiled and she waved, then drew back. As I stood there and finished, I imagined her looking at my things, taking me in. When I opened the door, she was right where I’d left her.

  The first night she spent there, in my room, in my bed, we did nothing. We kissed and spoke and slept. When darkness came, we spent it folded together in my bed for one, her body dressed in my favourite T-shirt.

  ‘How many girls have slept in this bed?’ she asked when the sun appeared at an ungodly hour.

  I shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

  I went on to tell her of a time at uni the previous summer, when a girl had knocked on the door looking for my roommate. He was out but due back later, so I invited her in to wait. Ten minutes later, she was in my bed. The lads had laughed so hard when I’d recounted it in the pub, and they’d slapped my back and bought my next round.

  When I finished, she shook her head and turned over to face the wall.

  I should not have told her that story.

  The second night is much more lucid. I have remembered it many times.

  ‘Where’s your dad?’ Anna asked as we walked upstairs. ‘I’ve not met him yet.’

  ‘Out,’ I said. ‘He’s always out.’

  We lay on my bed, the duvet thrown off. The window was open, but there was nothing in the air but thick July.

  ‘I think I want to cut my hair,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘And go blonde. Like a Hitchcock heroine.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ I said, stroking her leg, pale against my olive skin.

  ‘Would you not want me any more?’

  ‘You have beautiful hair. Why would you do a thing like that to your beautiful hair?’

  She placed her palm against mine. ‘It grows back. Hair’s dead anyway.’

  I don’t remember peeling off her clothes, but I remember how she looked and how she wasn’t shy. She wasn’t bare like most girls, and this fascinated me. Even now, I can close my eyes and see her there. Memory is a dangerous game.

  At times, there was her and there was me and there was nothing in between.

  As we neared the final act, I looked at her and said, ‘Are you sure?’

  She closed her eyes and nodded, but I knew and stopped.

  ‘You know it’s not black?’ she said afterwards, draped across my stomach. ‘My hair, I mean.’

  It must have been about 2 a.m. What had felt like half an hour of touching had actually been three hours. Even now, we couldn’t let each other go. I stroked her back with the tips of my fingers, tracing circles on the surface of her skin.

  ‘It looks black,’ I said. In the darkness, her hair blended with the shadows.

  ‘Look at it up close in sunshine and you’ll see it’s dark brown.’

  I pulled her up the bed so I could put my arms around her. ‘I love it, whatever you want to call it.’

  ‘Have you always shaved yours?’ she said, resting on my chest. I imagined the raging beat of my heart against her ear.

  I ran a hand across my head. ‘I get it cut whenever I’m nervous. It makes me feel better, somehow. Cutting my hair.’

  I felt her hands on the backs of my shoulders, her fingers clinging to my skin, and she tensed her grip in reply.

  I kissed her hot, wet mouth.

  For what felt like months afterwards, I found strands of her long, black hair in my bed.

  There’s a town like Ashford in every county, I’m sure. Roundabouts leading to roundabouts. The concrete jungle of a town centre, with its high street that eventually curves down a hill towards traffic, some incarnation of a pound shop in the space where Woolworth’s used to be, an indoor parade of shops with a glass roof that was touted as ‘the face of the future’ when its ribbon was cut in the late eighties.

  On paper, it’s a hot ticket. Grammar schools, a John Lewis, two cinemas, a brewery, the designer outlet, and outskirt villages like Wye where house prices are kept steep by legions of 4x4s and yoga on the green. There’s even an international station to take you to Europe. Get on a train and your next stop is Paris.

  In reality, I think some people move here and scratch their heads. With its three McDonald’s and Champneys spa, it could be called a town still figuring itself out. The new parts thrive while the sixties blocks slump, desperate for interest, even for the wrecking ball of the town planner. The designer outlet draws a crowd, but at the expense of the high street lying half a mile away, choked by a four-lane ring road.

  On this ring road is a tiny graveyard, a sliver of land wedged between a square patch of grass and a car park. It’s not really a graveyard, though. A few years back, I read that the jam-packed headstones were taken from the adjacent Town Centre Burial Ground when it was redeveloped into an area for relaxation. The council put down a few benches and flower beds and moved the headstones a few feet away into the corner. So now they sit tight up together, out of the way, facing the nineties façade of a bowling alley across lines of traffic while empty benches sit six feet above the anonymous bodies. I sat on a bench once, smoking, listening to the hum of cars and watching the collective smog of exhaust fumes. Everything felt disjointed.

  Speaking of graveyards, Anna once took me to Bybrook cemetery to hunt for the grave of a dead philosopher called Simone Weil. It took our whole lunch hour to find a simple square slab of granite on the ground, a name and dates etched into the stone. We stood in front of it, silent, the multiplex where we worked rising a few metres away on the other side of the fence. ‘She didn’t know whether to believe in God,’ Anna said, staring at the grave, ‘because she said nothing could be known either way.’ I just nodded. I didn’t reply that I only recognised her name because it was the same as the four-lane A-road that led to Sainsbury’s.

  As kids, we lived in a village on the edge of town. It was quiet and rural with trees lining the roads and a village green where they played cricket at weekends. But nobody from out of town ever knew the name of the village, so whenever people asked where I was from, I always just said Ashford.

  I moved away once to university, up north, where I made tea wrong and got labelled a southern softie. There’s no ‘r’ in bath, y’know. They were right, I suppose. I do make shit tea.

  I toyed with the idea of not returning. Manchester was cheap and there seemed to be an acceptance of the different ways that people chose to live, and I thought about getting a lackey job at a paper and working my way up. But there was Sal, back in Ashford, and even after three years, I never knew where I was. The rain got to me, too.

  That’s the thing about Ashford. People moan about it and some do leave and begin anew, but for those that stay, there’s a comfort in knowing the street names and short cuts and the faces in the pub.

  Some of us aren’t made to start again.

  It all had a fairly unremarkable beginning.

  I say ‘it’ like our family was an object. Deliberately made. To be
handled with kid gloves. But families aren’t really like that, are they? They grow, one at a time, and not always on purpose. Someone settles, a condom splits, and life jerks off down a new path. Or maybe it fixes a thread around the torso and drags you, and you kick and fight, but few have the strength to change their stars.

  But families should be handled with care. Because, as I know, they have a tendency to break. Perhaps if we mummified ourselves with that postal tape they wrap round cardboard boxes, transparent with FRAGILE writ red in screaming letters, perhaps then people would have no excuse to say You take things to heart too much or I didn’t know how you felt. They’d have no excuse because it would, quite literally, be written all over your face.

  Stop talking in riddles, says Dad in my head. Start making sense.

  Late Eighties

  Every fortnight, when Arsenal were at home, Dad would drive us up to London in whatever rusty car he’d got his hands on. Sal and I sat in the back with our Walkman headphones fixed to our ears, constantly adjusting our music volume so it couldn’t be heard above the sports commentary on the radio. You know the bass of your music gives your father a headache, Mum would say before Dad got in the car. Keep it down low and we’ll all have a peaceful trip. Musical bass and the opening of car windows always set him off. The vibrations!

  Nana and Grandpa lived in a council house in Stoke Newington. It was a sixties box, wedged between other sixties boxes with concrete front gardens and bars on the windows. Grandpa had been mugged countless times on his way back from the casino – he never put up a fight, and if anything would try to engage them in a chat. Somehow he never learned to wear a more modest watch or keep the wearing of jewellery to a minimum. It was there to be enjoyed, he’d say with a raucous laugh. Let them have fun with it.

  The pattern of those Saturdays always stayed the same. We arrived late morning to the smell of Nana cooking a roast. Mum would grab an apron and start stirring a pot while Dad kissed Nana and decamped to the lounge with the paper. Sal and I sat at the kitchen table and looked through the Argos catalogue, making mental lists of what we’d like for our next five birthdays. Sal pined for a Scalextric set; he would stare at the picture of the boy playing with the deluxe edition that did figures of eight across the floor. At times, I wondered whether he was looking at the cars and track or if it was the face of the boy that had caught his gaze. What it would be like to be the kid who wanted something and got it.

  Sometimes, when no one was looking, we’d sneak a peek at the bra pages.

  At midday, Grandpa arrived home in a plume of cigar smoke after a round of cards at the club. Even before he’d shaken off his sheepskin coat and fedora hat, he’d swoop down and envelop Sal and me in an almighty hug, bestowing wet kisses on our hungry cheeks. His scratchy white moustache always left red marks on our skin, and I’d miss the soreness when they faded.

  Seed of McCoy, he’d say with a triumphant air. I took this to mean that he was proud of his grandsons.

  Stella and Bill often came by on these afternoons. Our uncle was a quiet man with small half-moon glasses permanently fixed to the end of his nose. He said very little and had this strange habit of walking backwards out of the room, slightly bowing, like a butler. He was an odd match for our glamorous Aunty Stel, who whooshed through in her leopard coat with her dyed red hair piled high on her head. It sounds awful, but when Bill died of cancer a few years later, we hardly noticed he’d gone.

  After dinner, the men would head off to Highbury. They stood in the kitchen and piled on their layers, Grandpa dominating the scene in his enormous sheepskin and feathered winter hat, and a cigar to his mouth, ready. Dad would be there in his flat cap and leather jacket, the only nod to Arsenal coming from his red-and-white striped scarf. Uncle Bill, though, always went for it. He wore the long-sleeved top from the double winning kit of ’71, the red beanie, a candy-cane scarf, and a red padded coat with the club’s shield proudly sewn on the pocket. He even had the bumbag. On the rare occasion Dad took me to a game, I’d stand mesmerised each time Arsenal were fouled by the opposition, and my timid uncle would transform into a madman who’d rage at the ref and spend ninety minutes curling his hands into fists.

  While the men were at the game, Mum, Nana and Stella sat round the kitchen table, preparing the evening’s tea. They sipped gold-label Coke, and Mum and Stella took turns to sit on the counter and lean out the window for a cigarette. Whenever I think of those women together, they always exist in a kitchen. All these years on, I can close my eyes and there they are, peeling spuds and laughing at a filthy joke.

  ‘How’s tricks, Sal?’ Stella called from the kitchen one time.

  ‘Fine thanks, Aunty Stel,’ he replied from where we were outstretched on the sofa watching Indiana Jones. One of our favourite things about Nana and Grandpa was their satellite dish.

  ‘I’ve told you, less of the aunty. I’m too young for that. Stella’s my name and it’s the same to you boys.’

  ‘Paul won’t have it, Stel,’ said Mum.

  ‘You tell my brother I don’t give—’

  ‘Stella,’ said Nana sharply.

  I peeled myself off the sofa and went into the kitchen for a drink.

  ‘Fine,’ said Stella, perched on the counter. She was scratching her leg and inspecting a ladder in her tights from her ankle to her knee. ‘As always, I’ll defer to my elder brother. But honestly, Mum, I think I should be able to choose my own bloody name.’ She jammed the end of her cigarette into the ashtray and jumped down. ‘And how about you, Nicko? Got a girl pregnant yet?’

  ‘Stella!’ Mum this time.

  I smiled as my face burned. ‘No,’ I whispered.

  She laughed. ‘There’s a guilty look if ever I saw one. Mark my words, Lou, this one’s going to be keeping secrets. He’ll have all the girls running.’

  ‘Yeah,’ called Sal from the lounge, ‘’cept they’ll be going the other way.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Mum. ‘Let’s leave it there before it starts something.’

  ‘I’m only nearly ten, Aunty Stel,’ I said. ‘Girls don’t know I exist anyway.’

  ‘Just wait,’ she said with a confiding wink. ‘A few years from now, you’ll fall in love and it’ll be hell on earth. Best ones always are.’

  ‘Isn’t love meant to be a good thing?’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes. But when it gets under your skin, that’s when you know it’s real. When it makes you dizzy and hungry and you can’t eat a thing.’

  Mum snorted. ‘Bill’s clearly not having that effect on you.’

  ‘Who said I was talking about Bill?’ They screamed with laughter, then Stella turned back. ‘Like your mum and dad. I introduced them – did you know that? Your mum and I went to a disco down the precinct. We got dolled up at her house – remember, Lou? That silver flamenco dress you saved a whole month’s wage to get?’

  Mum’s face shone. ‘I loved that dress. And I did my hair like Farrah Fawcett that night.’ She slipped an arm around Sal, who’d appeared at the door, and hugged him tight.

  ‘And there were no blokes at the disco. Well, none worth having. A few Mariannes, maybe, but they were hardly going to be interested in us.’

  ‘Mariannes?’ I said.

  ‘Never you mind,’ said Nana.

  ‘Mariannes, y’know, gays,’ said Stella. ‘They were fun to dance with, knew all the moves, but they’re hardly going to know how to grope for trout in a peculiar river.’

  Mum covered her face with her hands. ‘Stick to the story, Stella.’

  ‘I knew your mum would be right up your dad’s street, so we checked out early and popped into The Red Lion on the way home. I called him over, your ma fluttered her blue eyelids at him, and I knew right away they were meant to be. He didn’t even care that she asked him for a Cinzano and lemonade. A right goner, was your dad. Happy for the barman to think him a prat.’

  I loved these stories. Stella had the knack of making each time sound like the first time she’d told it,
and although we’d heard this one before, Sal and I listened in silent hope for a new detail. Something we could turn over in our minds on the long journey home.

  ‘Tell them about that time with Paul and the jukebox,’ said Mum, resting her chin on her hand. I could see she loved listening too.

  Sal and I leant in.

  ‘You mean New Year’s?’ said Stella, lighting another smoke. ‘Oh, God almighty. Remember—’

  Then came the sound of a key in a lock. The men came in, the women got up, and that was the end of that.

  I was in Stoke Newington recently and took a walk down Arundel Grove. The boxy houses still cluster together with TV aerials waving from flat roofs, billowing net curtains, rubbish bins out front. But the bars at the doors have been taken down, and as I walked to the bus stop, I passed café after café with trendy tables out front. A bloke sat with a tiny coffee and laptop, hammering away at keys with no fear of a mugger taking a shine.

  Nana and Grandpa and that life are long gone. But the memories never stop playing.

  July 2003

  ‘My God, look.’

  I was already halfway up the path, key at the ready, hoping Dad was still at work or had stopped off at the pub. When she’d suggested mine as a destination, I assumed Anna was joking, but my nervous laugh was stared down. Now she paused at the gate, realising she’d made a mistake in coming.

  ‘You can head, off, if you like,’ I said, looking down at the key in my hand.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Have you got somewhere to be? It’s fine, if so.’

  Her face was creased in my direction, and I sensed the impatience that would flare whenever she didn’t get my meaning.

  ‘What are you on about?’ she said. ‘Where am I meant to be going?’

  ‘I just thought …’

  ‘I was talking about those.’ She pointed to the three sunflowers at the edge of the driveway. They waved gently in the breeze, all five feet of them, knowing they were being admired.