Precocious (2 page)

Today is Wednesday.

Once I have thawed out, warmed up, talked about my day, I will put everything, including myself, away.

Tonight I will do all of the same things I do every night, but tonight is different. Tonight I feel like a ghost in my own life.

Dave often says: ‘I can see right through you.’

It’s one of his favourite phrases – he’s said it for years. I used to take it literally, and I hated it; it made me look at the pale skin through which I can sometimes see my own veins. He would tell me, ‘don’t be silly’, but all the while he would be absentmindedly stroking the fine purple lines on my inner wrist, my temple, my breast.

Then for a while I loved it: it made me feel completely
known
, and wanted. Safe.

Now it frightens me. What if he can? I feel high-pitched; a different, shiny version of myself. Does he notice?

I kick off my shoes and unpack the shopping, sliding melted ice cream and car-boot-warmed cheese straight into the dustbin with a smile. I prepare a bowl of spaghetti for Dave and a piece of chicken for the dog.

‘I saw someone today,’ I say casually. ‘I mean, I bumped into someone.’

‘Oh yes?’ He lifts the fork to his mouth. The bowl is balanced on his lap, his eyes fixed on the TV. I watch the blood-coloured sauce tipping, from left to right, towards his trousers, towards the sofa cushions.

‘Mm-hum. An old friend.’

‘Right.’

‘That’s where I was. I mean, that’s who I had dinner with. In case you were wondering.’

‘I just assumed you were with Mari. So where do you know her from?’

‘Who?’

‘This friend. Who is she?’

‘Oh. From school. It’s a he.’

‘Uh-oh, should I be jealous?’ He puts the bowl down and nuzzles my neck, jabbing at the TV remote, eyes never leaving the screen.

‘He was my teacher.’

‘Ah, that’s a no then. If he was your teacher, what is he, about ninety?’

‘Cheek!’ I pause, as if mentally calculating, as if I don’t know your age in years, months, weeks and days off by heart. ‘Forty-three.’

‘Should I be jealous?’ he says again.

‘I don’t think so,’ I lie.

I lie awake: I, who have always been able to curl like a cat into any available space, any time, can’t sleep.

You are replaying in my mind like a movie. How typical of you, to turn up like that, to put a spanner in the works, a cat among the pigeons, walking cliché that you are. I’m married. I’m happy. Finally I’ve put to rest the irritating feeling I’ve had for most of my life, the suspicion that I might be missing something, that around the corner, or tomorrow, I would find the thing that would satisfy me. I have done the done thing, and it is working. Has been working.

Then all of a sudden we were knocking each other over in the freezer aisle and I was hugging myself not from the cold, but for protection, and next I hugged you, and later there was the kiss.

Silence in the bedroom is an extra blanket: sometimes comforting, but not for long; usually too thick. Hot and scratchy. Through this deep cover my husband hears the sound of me rustling in his bedside drawer.

‘Can’t sleep?’ he murmurs.

‘Mmm.’

‘Fee,’ he lifts his head from the pillow, ‘you had dinner with your forty-three-year-old ex-teacher?’ Raises a quizzical, sleepy eyebrow.

‘Like I said – he was kind of a friend. Aren’t there any bloody pens in this house?’

Apparently satisfied with this response, he settles back into the pillow. ‘Come back to bed.’ Within seconds he is snoring softly.

I’ve always thought it is only when you spend the night with someone that you know whether you can love them. If you can bear their sour night-breath; if you can get used to their flickering eyelids and the knowledge that something is happening behind them that you can’t know about; if you can lie and listen to their dream noises, you have a good chance.

I pad down to the kitchen like a thief, down to the bottom floor of our cavernous house. The dog barely stirs.

The kitchen takes up the whole of the basement. Copper-bottomed pans hang from the ceiling, so clean they look like they’ve never been used. In the windowless half-light they seem like weapons.

I pour a glass of filtered water (bottled is too expensive, tap too dirty, according to Dave) and attack the heavy oak drawers.

I need to find something to write with. The bill drawer – that’s the one. On top of the neat pile of mail, a cheque book, a spiral bound note book and a rollerball pen. The itch in my head that I haven’t felt for years is there, and I settle at the table to scratch it out onto the paper.

He was kind of a friend
.

‘If you trust me,’ you used to say, ‘I won’t let you down.’

So I trusted you, and you did let me down, and later, you introduced me to your girlfriend.

It was the fifth year leavers’ ball in 1994, that last summer before fifth year became known as year eleven at our school. There was a May smell of cut grass and keenly sucked ciggies behind the building. The fact that we were promised booze meant no one bothered to bring vodka in a Coke bottle. As it turned out, we only got one glass of watered-down wine each with dinner. I wore a pink and blue dotted puffball skirt and low cut white top. I was carrying a ‘proper’ handbag for the first time in my life and was rummaging in it as I tottered into school and straight into the two of you.

You coughed in my cloud of Lou Lou.

When I say ‘girlfriend’, she wasn’t a girl, she was a woman, of course. She had ash blonde hair swept into a chignon and she wore her age like a badge pinned from a birthday card. It towered over me, gave her height.

‘This is Fiona,’ you said to her. ‘The Genius.’

You both chuckled. She was not surprised – by my presence there, by your description. So you had talked about me.

I always thought teachers made fun of only the very dull (because they don’t get it) or the precocious (who can give it back). Which was I supposed to be?

I left, and I left school, and until today I hadn’t seen you since.

Tell me about Dave
, you said. Okay, I’ll tell you. About him, about me, about falling in love.

These are the things that did it:

The First Night Out. We argued. An amazing thing: to be relaxed enough to disagree instead of preening, lying and straining to impress.

The First Night In. The way we stayed up all night and talked and talked so urgently, desperate to
find out things
, and the way every uncovered shared interest or belief seemed incredible, natural, destined. Coincidence and magic in everything.

The First Morning After. He left, wearing stale clothes and shocked hair, drove round the block then came back, and stood on the doorstep, smiling.

It was about money. That first argument, that first night.

Dave never earned much, but spent less and borrowed nothing. I couldn’t believe he’d never had an overdraft; mine seemed to have lingered after university like a hangover. The thing is, it never really bothered me, but Dave was different. He was cautious; but then, he’d shelled out nearly fifteen grand for a wedding that didn’t happen. That would make anyone err on the thrifty side.

‘Most couples end up arguing about money anyway,’ he’d said. ‘Might as well start now.’

‘You’re assuming we’ll become a couple,’ I’d pointed out. I slurped up my spaghetti, I remember, not caring if I got sauce on my chin.

Dave didn’t say anything but I think he knew, even then, that we would end up together. That’s the way Dave works – and he’s the same in every area of his life, there’s no ‘side’ to him, no secrets – he sees something he wants and slowly, methodically, with no drama but with the utmost determination, he goes after it.

What is it to fall in love? Is it a different thing from being in love? At what point does falling become being? When do you land?

Some say love is security. It’s a comfort thing. It was like that with Dave. It was feeling utterly relaxed, melting into him the way a cat pours its every muscle onto a table or a chair arm, or someone’s leg, moulding it to them. It’s almost impossible to get up once a cat has sat on your lap, because they just make themselves belong there.

Love is: butterflies; a warm feeling; fear; jealousy; a grin you can’t shake; sleeplessness; tears; hours of staring at the wall, staring at the window, staring at his photo, staring at his face; love is change. Security, insecurity. Passion, fights. Chatter, silence.

Love is chaos.

Dave and I didn’t so much fall in love as stumble into it, both dazed and war-torn, like survivors of some disaster who cling to each other in their shock and find years later they are still holding on. He was stinging from the slap of the aborted wedding, I was tired and dispirited from a string of no-hopers, badly-suiteds and just-not-quite-rights.

I remember when it was just Love. Before it was Family, before it was Commitment, before it was
Arrangements
.

I remember wanting to say the word so soon but not wanting to say it first.

And when it was said, feeling strangely disappointed.

I love you.

Because it’s the same thing as everyone else says, and I felt an odd sort of traitor to my heart, and cursed my own lack of originality, and thought,

I love you
, followed by
(that’s all).

And I had, and still have, an uneasy feeling that once you’ve said ‘I love you’, the only way is down.

When I finally sleep, dreams bring the sea, and a replay of our first holiday together. The pebbles hurt my feet, but it was worth it when we got to the warm, bright blue. ‘So, this is why they call it the Cote D’Azur then,’ I murmured. I sat at the shoreline, half in, half out, my legs being lapped by the waves. Frothy tendrils crept up my thighs then shyly retreated, leaving my wet skin to sizzle in the late afternoon sun. All around, glossy heroines looked out from the covers of fat paperbacks strewn on sunbeds, were pored at through Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. For a few moments I almost felt like one of them; I felt as though I belonged.

In truth, our Nice was a ten minute walk, four flights of unlit stairs and a world away from the shimmering seafront. The room we had secured with the help of Dave’s barely remembered schoolboy French was high-ceilinged but narrow, with a worn-out carpet and a flickering shaving light over the sink in the corner (the sink had cost us an extra fifty francs). The bedding, at least, was clean. When we pulled back the plucked pink curtain we found we had a balcony. It was no more than six inches deep, we could barely stand on it, but we could lean out. I pressed myself into the black iron railing and breathed in the smells of the street below, from fresh bread and coffee to the over-ripe smell of the drains, and if I craned my neck I could see the sea.

Dave aspired to be the people on the seafront, in the impossibly grand hotels with white facades and cool marble floors. He wanted a pool (he never swam in the sea – too much salt), room service, doormen, à la carte dinner and fine wines. By the time of our honeymoon, the resort was different (Dave never liked to go to the same place twice – waste of money, he said), but we had all of the things he’d wanted.

So inevitably we ended up in the big hotels. Then we ended up in our own little hotel, our castle, our cabin, our casa, our so-called home. As love grows, dreams shrink. They get local. Instead of wanting to see the world together we wanted to make our own little world. After all, you can’t just backpack forever. Can’t keep ‘staying over’, like children, leaving a toothbrush there and just one drawer full of stuff. Eventually we were spending every night together anyway, and when I woke up late, again, with an extra half hour’s drive to work ahead of me, and found I had forgotten to bring a clean shirt so had to scrabble on the floor for last night’s crumpled top and spray it desperately with his deodorant, then the novelty of having two toothbrushes started to wear off.

This is how big decisions are made.

You can’t have backstreet France forever.

You have to do the done thing.

Dave had bought the house with his ex-fiancée but they’d never moved in – they were waiting until they got married to start the renovations. Of course, the wedding never happened and the stately Victorian terrace sat gathering cobwebs while Dave stayed in his little rented flat. The ex continued to pay half of the mortgage for a while, perhaps out of guilt for leaving him, if not quite at the altar, then virtually en route to the church.

They had it on the market and when he asked if I’d consider moving in there, I think he was surprised when I said yes. I agreed to go and look at it, at least, and as it was the first time he’d seen it in months, he said he wasn’t even sure whether he really wanted to live there.

‘I was worried you’d think it was too full of ghosts,’ he said as he put the key in the door and pushed it open with a creak, but as soon as we stepped inside I could see from the shine in his eyes that he
did
want to live there, that the house had been his choice, his dream, and I knew in a rush that he, that
we
, could make it a home.

‘No ghosts.’ I slid my arms around him, no idea why I was whispering the words except that I was afraid they would bounce too loudly around the high ceilings and cornices. As we crept from room to room, as if afraid to disturb the spiders who had been busily crafting their gossamer networks for weeks on end, I fell gradually in love with the possibilities of the place, its sad past receding like a wave.

We spent three days sleeping on the living room floor. The bed was going to be late, and we’d no sofa at this point either, so we sat cross-legged like squatters in the middle of the living room, eating Chinese takeaway and drinking champagne out of mugs. The glasses were who knew where, so tightly packed in newspaper and bubble wrap that the thought of locating and unpeeling them gave me a headache.

We had plans and a child-like giddiness, born out of a shared purpose, that we’d not felt before. For a couple of days we just wandered from room to room, dabbing tentative dots of tester-pot paint on walls, playing at being homeowners. It didn’t seem real, more as though we were idling with a child’s toy that we’d be giving back before long. I liked it when friends visited and I could repeat this tour, pausing here and there to give excited voice to our vision: ‘this will be the kitchen … bi-fold doors into the garden … yes, these floors will be sanded and waxed.’