Growing Up Twice Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes, Dorothy Koomson and Liane Moriarty, this is an uplifting and heartfelt novel from the author of The Memory Book, which was featured in the Richard & Judy book club 2014

  Jenny, Rosie and Selin have been best friends since school. Their teenage years were spent drinking too much wine in the park, dressing up for Friday night, and making the wrong choices with the wrong men because tomorrow seemed a very long way off.

  Eleven riotous years later, Jenny realises something. After more than a decade of waiting for her real life to begin, nothing has really changed. Here she is, still hung-over in the park, still dressed up in Friday night clothes and about to make her most inappropriate choice of man yet.

  But Jenny’s not the only one waiting for real life to begin. And when tragedy turns their world upside down, all three friends are forced to realise that the real growing up is still to come ...

  About the Author

  Rowan Coleman is thirty and lives in London with her husband and baby daughter. In 2000 she won Company magazine Young Writer of the Year Competition. Growing Up Twice is her first novel.

  ‘Growing Up Twice is a fresh, warm and hugely enjoyable read. Focusing on three twenty-something female friends who, after various romantic entanglements, falling outs and a heartbreaking tragedy, realise they haven’t even begun to grow up, Rowan’s first novel is truly brilliant. Her captivating style leaps off the page, engrossing you from the first sentence’

  Company

  For Erol and Lily with all my love.

  Chapter One

  ‘Listen. I need you to be honest now. Have I gone cross-eyed? I have the strangest sensation that my eyes are no longer operating in tandem.’

  We are sitting in Soho Square and it is the last Saturday morning in August. We spent last night club hopping and then drinking coffee in a twenty-four-hour café just off Charing Cross Road.

  I am with Rosie and Selin. We have all known each other since primary school and have been best friends since we swapped our ‘first kiss’ stories, real and imagined, drinking mugs of Cinzano Bianco. That was fourteen years ago at a sleepover at Rosie’s house. About eight months ago another chapter opened in our friendship when we found ourselves simultaneously single for the first time in ten years. The last time we hung out so much we were drinking Lambrusco on the swings at our local park and singing Meat Loaf’s ‘Dead Ringer for Love’ to any passing likely-looking lads.

  ‘Look at me. No, look at me,’ I say to Rosie, wondering if maybe she really has lost the ability to focus. ‘They’re fine really; a bit red round the edges but definitely working in unison.’ A look of total horror passes over Rosie’s face and she dives for her bag to fish out her make-up. I smile to myself, I knew she wouldn’t be able to live with red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘I swear to God, it’s that Red Bull that does it, it’s evil. We should write to Watchdog,’ she says, as she sets a complete pocket-sized cleansing, toning and moisturising regime out on the grass in neat little Chanel packages.

  ‘I think it was the coffees, let’s never have coffee again, it’s poison,’ Selin says, lifting her hand in front of her face to cast a shadow over her eyes. ‘Look! Look at me, I’ve got the DTs!’

  I take her hand in mine and examine it. ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘God, you two are so paranoid.’ And I flop back on to the grass, arms outstretched, waiting for the warmth of the sun to find me. Selin lies on her front, propped up on her elbows and Rosie, looking for all the world like Doris Day on a picnic, packs away her used cotton-wool balls in the plastic freezer bag she carries for just such an occasion. She begins to apply her foundation with one of those funny little triangle-shaped sponges. The square starts to fill as the sun climbs and draws last night’s casualties out of the shadows.

  We are secretly waiting for pub opening time and hair of the dog, pretending we are going to look at a photographic exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. We all agreed last night that we would definitely go today, as we have been meaning to go for the last four weeks and it closes this weekend. We all know we are lying.

  One other fine morning just like this one Rosie decided that Soho Square is the last place left in London where fresh clean air is stacked in cubic feet right up to heaven. We often spend this part of Saturday right here, breathing and gossiping. Recuperating from the high jinks of the previous night.

  This fine morning the air has only just become warm, the dew is beginning to disappear and we turn our faces to the sun like the cottage-garden flowers that border the square.

  ‘This is not good. We have to face it. We are old. We can’t do this any more.’ Selin sits up, pulling her fingers through her long and curly midnight hair and shades her eyes from the sun. ‘Look at those nu-metal kids over there. They probably think we’re on an OAP outing. I should have a mortgage by now and a car. In fact, I should definitely have a car by now and definitely not be sitting in a park surrounded by teenagers recovering from a hangover. I should be having a café latte, in a bed bought from Habitat, reading the Independent on Sunday and, and I should have a husband – who looks like the bloke from the Gillette ad – squeezing me fresh orange juice in my fitted kitchen.’ She laughs while she makes her demands to the heavens.

  ‘What do you want a car for in London?’ I ask, ignoring all the other stuff of distant dreams.

  ‘I don’t want a car.’ She slams both palms down on the grass making Rosie jump a little bit so that her eyeliner goes wonky. She scowls at Selin, Selin ignores her. ‘I just should have one. The option to have a car should be open to me.’

  ‘You can’t even drive!’ I think I know where she is coming from but I’m having trouble with her analogy.

  ‘I’m just saying that I’m thirty in ni
ne months’ time and I haven’t got a car. And I had planned to have a car by now, a red one.’

  ‘Look, I’m thirty way before either of you two and anyway,’ I say, ‘when we were fifteen we all thought we’d be married by now and have a house, a proper career and two children and do that every day until we died. But we’re not at that stage yet. Life is still beginning, and it’s fantastic. So let’s enjoy the good times while they last.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rosie contributes, ‘and I’ve already been married, so I know it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Apart from the dressing up, the dressing up was fantastic. And the presents, of course. Oh, and do you remember the hen night? Now that was good.’ Rosie blots her lipstick. Her marriage lasted six months and it was a pretty dreadful six months. Still, she did look great in that wedding dress.

  Selin sighs in that way she does when she feels Rosie and I don’t take life seriously enough.

  ‘Mmm, well it’s the “still” bit that worries me,’ she says. ‘What if life is “still” beginning for us when we’re eighty and getting our kicks on a Stannah stairlift? Or worse, the three of us have had to sell our houses – assuming we ever earn enough cash to buy our own houses, that is – to keep us in an old people’s home and we look at each other and say, “What have we done with our lives?”’

  ‘Selin, I think you are deliberately choosing to be negative,’ I say. ‘Remember your positive affirmations – “I smile, the world smiles with me.”’

  ‘I smile, I get some more wrinkles,’ she says but she is smiling all the same.

  ‘And let’s face it, you can’t afford any more of those!’ Rosie throws in, ducking to avoid the balled-up crisp packet that Selin aims at her head. ‘Anyway, we had a good time last night, didn’t we? There’s life in the old dogs yet.’ And she checks her eyeliner again before lying back on the grass, shading her eyes with the back of her hand. If the last few months have been anything to go by Rosie will keep looking on the bright side until the hangover fully sets in, an eventuality she will doggedly postpone until the early hours of Monday morning.

  ‘You can call yourself “old” and “dog” in the same sentence, lady, but leave me out of it,’ I say and suddenly we’re laughing in the still-sparkling grass; the weak delicious unpreventable sort of laughter left over from too much vodka and a very old friendship.

  ‘Whoa there.’ Rosie clambers to her feet a little unsteadily. ‘I can’t handle this witty banter any more. Let’s go and have a Bloody Mary, I feel a bit queasy and I need something to settle my stomach.’

  ‘Yeah, come on, kill or cure.’ Selin stands to join her, catches my eye and a ‘someone had better look after her’ look of understanding passes between us. Their shadows fall across me and make me cold.

  ‘You know, girls, I’m gonna stay here for a little bit and chill. I’ll catch you up,’ I say, feeling the goose bumps rise on my forearms. I just can’t face the smoke and smell of a pub right now.

  ‘Hang on, not at the pub for the first BM? You’re not breaking ranks, are you?’ Rosie challenges me.

  ‘No, I just like it here. I’m going to stay for a while and get it together and I’ll be along in a little while, OK?’

  ‘OK, lightweight,’ they chorus and walk away arm in arm and, as always, laughing.

  Chapter Two

  I lie back on the grass and look at the sky through the lenses of my shades. I have always been in love with summer, not in the sun-worshipping sense as my pasty freckle-prone complexion will attest, but in the sense that I love sunlight. As a child I wrote rigorously rhymed poetry about golden streams of summer chasing through the leaves and making the shadows dance. Looking into the cloudless sky as it bends over my head, full of city echoes, I get a non-specific kind of nostalgia. A vague wistful feeling I can’t put my finger on.

  The rest of the congregation on the benches and the grass is made up of a curiously harmonic mix of winos; Guardian readers; retro-grunge teens drinking from cans, smoking roll-ups and laughing ostentatiously; and about six near-identical couples with croissants and fully interactive sets of tongues. A gay couple lie side by side not far from me, silent and hand in hand. Looking at them I remember the touch of warm skin.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I ask myself. I’ve got that star-crossed feeling again, an intuition that fate is about to make a delivery. My skin is tingling, and my temples are beginning to throb. It seems that very soon the hangover will arrive in earnest. I stay absolutely still, feeling drowsiness seeping through my veins and enjoying it; it is a badge of honour; combat colours to prove I’m still kicking and breathing. The star-crossed feeling is probably just a toxin overload; I must stop thinking I’m so mystic.

  ‘Hey erm, hello, Jenny? Remember me?’ I have a visitor. I inspect him from behind my shades; it’s a ginger teenager from the retro-grunge gang in the corner. It’s a bit early for beery breath in my face.

  ‘You’re a ginger teenager,’ I tell him, as if he needs no further reason to leave. But he only laughs.

  ‘Yes, that’s it, you do remember me, I was at the party you and your mate had in Ladbroke Grove. We were well hard core, the last to go in the morning, remember?’ His smile stretches from ear to ear.

  Suddenly I recognise his air of false bravado and I do remember. That had been the party. The one good party you throw in your whole life when everyone you invited comes and everyone you didn’t comes too. We had a DJ and a mirror ball and every inch of the carpet caught it.

  I met a Spanish truck driver in the kitchen, some Dutch tourists on the stairs and this couple of kids, probably just about sixteen, on their first ever E. One of them had danced like a puppy all night and the other one had passed out after twenty minutes only to wake up in the morning with just his mate, Rosie and me left. This was the kid right here. We had never called him by his name, only ‘ginger teenager boy’. They had had cups of tea and we pleased them by laughing at their jokes until one of them remembered that he would be late for Sunday lunch at home. They’d gone as quickly as they had appeared, a charming juvenile mystery.

  We discovered that they had left us their two telephone numbers, one of our names bracketed beside each, expressing a preference. We had laughed even more and binned them. The ginger kid had written my name next to his number and here he was again. A little bit older but no nearer any real facial hair, apparently.

  ‘How are you? Still living in that flat? That party was well cool, man.’ He smiles and flops on to the ground next to me. ‘New trainers? We went to see Slipknot last night, they are sick puppies! Do you like them? I’ve got an imported CD with two previously unheard tracks.’ He produces the aforementioned item like a child at Show and Tell and hands it to me for approval. All of their tracks are previously unheard by me.

  ‘Very nice,’ I say, without looking at it, and drop it on the grass. ‘What can I do for you?’ I sit up now and feel the blood drumming in my head. I feel older even than I am, my eyes are aching.

  ‘We’re going for some breakfast. I thought, you know, as your mates have gone you might like to come with us.’ I look at him and try to remember his name; he’s a pretty boy really. His hair is short and spiky and he has a sweet smile and brown eyes, the true best friend of the much-beleaguered ginger person. I wonder what his agenda is.

  ‘Look, I’ve forgotten your name.’ I’m being downright rude and still he sits there with a soppy grin on his face, looking pleased as punch.

  ‘That’s cool. It’s Michael, Mike. So, do you fancy breakfast with us?’ He gestures at his mates across the grass. Two other boys, one with the sides of his head shaved and some attempt at dreads; one with a scrawny pony-tail, both messing about with a box of matches; and a girl, slim and fair, sitting with her knees drawn up beneath her tassel-trimmed skirt, looking right at us. I make the deduction.

  ‘Is that your girlfriend?’ I ask sweetly with my best and first smile for him.

  ‘Yeah, she won’t mind, I told her we’re mates.’ He sends a little wave to her
over the grass, she sends him a little scowl back.

  I ignore the world’s most ill-advised assumption and say, ‘OK, I’ll come for a coffee.’ He doesn’t hide the look of surprise on his face as I hold out my hand for him to help me to my feet. And neither can he stop himself from flinching in surprise when I swing my arm over his shoulder as we stroll over to the café. The second sign of thunder rolls over the nameless girl’s face.

  There is just something about the opportunity to minx a much younger, thinner woman that overrides all of my tenuous, subjective and flexible notions of loyalty to the greater good of the sisterhood. I’m not proud of it, but to be honest I’m thinking about the story I can tell the others when I get to the pub; I am writing them a joke. I always used to say I wouldn’t become a jealous-old-harridan type, the type that used to snub, bitch and bully me during my thin and pert period. But … oh well. I expect it’s evolution.

  Chapter Three

  In the café, one of those shabby genteel affairs, a mixture of Formica tabletops and gold baroque-style mirrors, the kids look quiet and nervous. They probably think I am from the same generation as their mother and the realisation give me pins and needles. Thank God it’s not possible. I wonder if I can work that fact into the conversation, just to make it absolutely clear.

  Michael introduces the boys first – Jake and Andy.

  ‘And this is my girlfriend.’

  ‘Sarah,’ she says and gives him a ‘I-do-have-a-name-you-know’ look. I like her, she’s feisty.

  The coffee comes and just the smell of it makes my stomach lurch. Michael is looking at me a lot and I like it. Sarah is looking at me a lot and I like it. Jake and Andy are trying to catch the coasters they are flipping from the table edge – well, it keeps them occupied.

  ‘So what are you up to these days?’ I ask Michael. I talk just to him, and lean a little bit closer; he smells of grass. He gives me a wide and disarming smile. I bet he gave that smile to Sarah across the playground before they got together. His eyelashes are dark at the root and curve up to golden tips. I begin to see why Sarah is so possessive.