Growing Up Twice Page 3

  We were supposed to have given up cocaine, it was our New Year’s resolution.

  ‘… But it was free, so it doesn’t count really and anyway it seems that he followed me down the stairs and well when I came out there he was, waiting. Before I knew it he had me back in the ladies’ in a cubicle and we sort of … well … we accidentally had sex.’ She stops talking and looks at me. I can’t think what to say. Part of me is thinking that the months and months of us helping each other get over our exes have been for absolutely nothing and I feel angry with her. The other part of me just wants to give her a hug and help her get through it. I go with the hug option for now and decide to save the good-talking-to option for later. I climb into bed with her and put my arms around her.

  ‘You think I’m a dreadful old slapper, don’t you?’ she sniffs and rests her head on my shoulder. Her hair covers her face but I can tell by her trembling shoulders that she is trying not to cry.

  ‘Well, yes, but let’s not discuss that now. Come on, darling, it’s OK. You’re on the pill, anyway, so you can’t be pregnant, can you?’ I say softly to the top of her head.

  ‘That’s what I thought. But the morning before it happened I was sick just after breakfast. A few too many vodkas the night before. I didn’t even think about it affecting my pill working. Not until I was late.’ Well, it was a minor setback but not conclusive proof.

  ‘Ah, but you always use a condom, because we promised each other, didn’t we?’ That was our New Year’s resolution circa 1992 and as far as I knew we had always stuck to it. Maybe if taking the pill hadn’t made me blow up like one of those poisonous fishes and turn into a tearful Attila the Hun it would have been harder to stick to but, as successfully integrating into society for at least three weeks out of every four is somewhat essential in the customer-care environment in which I work, I had decided to give the pill a miss and stick to traditional methods instead. Owen used to complain about it a lot, about the interruption, the loss of sensitivity and all that. He used to give me a really hard time in fact. But I just think it’s unfair that when you’re a girl you have to either take chemicals, stick a wire contraption up your bits, fiddle about with a sponge and spermicide or wear an internal version of a sou’wester. I mean, it’s incredible what lengths men have gone to to avoid having to deal with contraception at the business end. If you’re a boy all you have to do is pop a bit of ultra-thin latex on your willy. Just do it and shut up. The three of us have agreed on this countless times, in countless conversations, in countless bars over the years. So you make them use a condom, don’t you?

  Don’t you?

  ‘Not with your ex-husband in the bog when you’re off your face, you don’t.’ Oh well, that blew that theory.

  I don’t think Rosie is pregnant. A girl who drinks as much as her and eats as little food, who lives on coffee and is no stranger to illegal narcotics, can’t be that fertile. My sister-in-law gave up everything from alcohol to crisps for two years before she conceived. And besides, Rosie and Chris only did it the once. By the time you get to our age you know it’s actually damn hard to get pregnant, whatever way you look at it. You just don’t tell the teenagers. It’s probably the worry that has stopped her coming on.

  ‘OK, look, I’ll take the day off sick,’ I say. ‘We’ll go to the pharmacy and get a kit. It’ll be fine, we’ll go to the pub. It’s really hard to get knocked up, you read about it all the time. Girls our age are always missing periods; it’s probably stress, or too much booze or something.’

  ‘OK. I love you.’ She raises her head and looks at me.

  ‘You’ve been worrying about this for ages, haven’t you?’ I say gently. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’

  ‘Because I thought you’d kill me. Especially after everything we said about “never going back come hell or high water”. And because I needed to decide what I would do about it, if I were, you know … thing. I sort of needed to get it straight in my head first, before it all became real. I thought you and Selin might not understand this time.’ I climb out of bed, sit on the edge again and hold her hand.

  ‘Look, if anyone can understand it’s me. Look how many times I went back to Owen over those last three years, despite all the promises I made to myself and to you two. It’s a painful lesson to learn, but well, sometimes I think you have to keep going back until you learn it. It’ll be fine, you’ll see. I’m sure you’re not pregnant.’

  I stand up and stretch as Rosie disappears under her duvet again.

  ‘Where’s your phone? I’ll phone thingy and cancel him.’ She hands it to me and I scroll down through her address book.

  ‘What’s he listed under?’

  ‘Boating Date Man, of course,’ the disembodied reply comes.

  Chapter Six

  By the time we leave the flat, dirty grey clouds have descended over our end of the grove and are leaning menacingly on the rooftops of the Georgian houses that line either side of the street.

  Our flat is on the top floor of a flaky purpose-built block right at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, just a few hundred yards away from the Harrow Road and quite literally only just on the right side of the railway tracks that run directly behind the building. The trains thunder past every twenty minutes during the day and once an hour throughout the night, which many of my guests over the years have found unbearable, but I like the comforting rumble that can sometimes make the night seem more friendly. And it used to really piss Owen off, so that was a plus.

  I have lived there for seven years, on my own for most of it, only able to afford it because it is squalid, damp, mostly broken and prone to little outbursts of small-unidentified-black-beetle activity. I like it because it is only fifteen minutes’ walk from Portobello Road and I have two bedrooms, a big broken kitchen and a living-room with a ramshackle collection of damaged goods from Ikea.

  The landlord has never bothered to put the rent up in all these years and I have never asked him to fumigate the house, fix the leaky roof or mend the cooker so that more than one ring on the electric hob works. I am a domestic slut and so is Rosie. Our life together is a cheerful amble through the boundaries of reasonable hygiene until we reach a kind of critical mass and rush around picking things up, washing them and hoovering up the beetles (which, I’m sure, when they reach the rarely emptied-out fluffy crumb-filled haven of the hoover bag, yell, ‘Yippee – beetle heaven!’) until we are ready to begin again. The only exceptions to this rule are clothes, the bathroom, cosmetics and us. These are the only items and areas we pay attention to every single day.

  As much as I love it, I have had my toughest times here too, the worst times with Owen as well as the best. I had been thinking about upping sticks and getting a house share in the Time Out tradition of making new friends, but I felt so low I didn’t think I was brave enough to go through the endless rounds of flatmate interviews. Trying to look trendy enough to be fun but not annoying, and clean enough to be liveable with but not an obsessive compulsive. Pretty enough to hang out in bars with, but not so pretty that your boyfriend would want to sleep with me, that kind of thing.

  When Rosie came to live with me she saved me from having to make that kind of lifestyle-changing decision and frankly I was relieved.

  She was in a bad way back then. Chris had just upped and told her he didn’t love her and he didn’t think he ever really had. He had told her it was a huge mistake, that he had asked her to marry him just to get him out of a fight they had been having and that he hadn’t really thought of the consequences. That he had met someone not long after they got back from honeymoon who he thought might be ‘the one’.

  Looking back, I think we saved each other. The very night that she turned up on my doorstep with two suitcases, no money to pay her cab and her face streaked with mascara-tinted tears was the night that Owen had left a Post-it note for me to find when I went round for dinner that evening. It was stuck to his front door.

  ‘Gone out. Can’t face tears. It’s over,’ it had read
, fluttering cheerily in the breeze. I stood there for a long moment in the rain before turning and walking away, back to the bus-stop and home. I suppose that, during the three years of on-and-off passion, infidelity and violent drunken eruptions, I had got used to his mood swings, the sudden sea changes in his regard for me. Earlier that afternoon we’d been talking on the phone about the poached salmon en croute he was preparing and the nice bottle of wine he had chilling in the fridge. If I’m honest, as I trudged back to the tube station, all I really felt was a kind of weary resignation, a ‘here we go again’.

  At that point I fully expected two or three weeks apart, news of another girl picked up in the park or a museum, shortly followed by long earnest conversations, declarations of our imperfect but irresistible love and before you knew it we’d be back to the beginning of our cycle. Perfect blissful passion.

  In retrospect it’s hard for me to explain how life was with Owen. When I met him I was out in full spin, living the city life to the city limits. It was a time when Selin was studying, Rosie was seeing some guy and I was drifting between second- and third-generation friends and a series of half-hearted boyfriends. I often had the dizzy feeling that gravity only just had a hold on me and that any moment I could slip away into a cloud of stars, lost from the real world for ever.

  I was looking for love, I suppose, but more than that I was looking for something solid and strong to hold me down to earth, the kind of firm dependability I felt I’d lacked since my dad had walked out of my life over fifteen years before. Although I had a romantic idea about self-destruction by vodka and kisses, a notion that stopped me going mad from boredom between five in the evening and nine in the morning almost every day of the week, I was really waiting to be rescued.

  Owen is eight years older than me. He lives in a rooftop flat in Clerkenwell, which he moved to before it became so trendy, when it was still an eclectic mix of fishmongers and second-hand bookshops, before the five-star restaurants and the hottest clubs sprang up on every street along with another branch of Starbucks. His walls are lined with shelves heavy with all kinds of books. He doesn’t own a TV, only a battered old radio that is always tuned to Radio Four. He has the look of a dissolute Leonardo Di Caprio, twenty years older and after several crates of Irish whiskey, with dirty-blond hair and slanted green eyes.

  When we met he was strong and paternal, I thought he’d give me some kind of guidance. He was besotted with me and passionate. He made me feel as if there was no other woman in the world. He persuaded me that I was beautiful and clever, that I had depths that only he could reach. He wanted to possess every last fibre of my being, he said and, happily, I let him.

  It was after about three months that I came bounding into his flat one evening to find him in a quiet and unresponsive mood. Hurt and confused, I badgered him for an explanation for his coldness until he eventually exploded in anger, hurling the book he was reading at my head. He told me I bored him, that he needed more excitement from life, that there was someone else, a French girl who had asked him for directions just outside the British Museum. She was vivacious and interesting, he said. Not stuck in some dead-end job going nowhere, without a meaningful thought in her head, like I was. He told me to get out of his flat. When I refused, when I cried and begged and pleaded with him to change his mind, he threw me out, leaving bruises on my wrists that took a long time to fade.

  If he hadn’t come back to me it would have been fine really, in the long term. I would have been down for a while, back on my night-time odyssey of bars and clubs, but in time I would have lurched on to the next thing, maybe the thing.

  Only he did come back. It was less than two months later when he called me at work and asked to meet me. I was holding my breath when I saw him; I used to think that he was so beautiful. We sat over coffee and talked for hours about our relationship, how he missed me, his hang-ups and problems. How he needed me and needed me to understand him. He said, ‘I think that I love you too much to even admit it to myself. I think that’s why I behave the way I do. But God, I do love you. There has never been anyone like you, you have to come back to me.’ He took me home and when we made love that night I felt as if I was drifting out of control in that cloud of stars.

  It was six months after that that the next girl came along and our cycle began again. For three years I really believed that the pain and the abuse was all worth it, just for those first few weeks when we were back together again and life was as wonderful as I had ever known it could be.

  When Rosie showed up at my front door the night I found the Post-it note, I got that star-crossed feeling again. Somehow her being there with news of Chris brought the situation with Owen home to me. This time it was really finished. Something was different; something in the cycle had broken.

  I believed that it might be me.

  I got in maybe ten minutes before Rosie rang the bell. We didn’t tell each other the details that night, we just opened the bottle of vodka I had bought on the way home and then the bottle of gin that Rosie had brought with her and swore and wept and laughed. But in the following weeks we talked about nothing else. We followed each other from room to room, cups of coffee or tea or glasses of wine in hand, trying to explain our lives to each other.

  I’d sit on Rosie’s bed trying to understand how it had taken me three years and all those broken promises to finally see what he had done to me. I was angry with myself, and angry with Owen, three wasted years. She’d wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me that she couldn’t sleep. All she could think about was her wedding day, the speech he had made and the message he had written in a card on some flowers he had sent her on the eve of the wedding: ‘Yours always.’ In our own ways, both of us felt like fools but at least we were fools together.

  Selin would come over most evenings and sit quietly with a glass of wine in her hand as we talked it all out, nodding and agreeing, offering to get the Turkish mafia on the case for a small fee, making us laugh and letting us cry, just listening.

  Gradually the three of us created a kind of equilibrium. Mornings became less painful, Friday and Saturday nights became more fun and our years-old friendship, which had always been true, re-formed once again into the kind of closeness that we hadn’t really had since we’d left home for different colleges over ten years earlier.

  Soon after she moved in Rosie began to drink even more than we were used to, but we were all drinking a lot and it didn’t seem right to preach. Anyway, mentioning it was a sure-fire way to start a stream of denial that devolved into a fight. Selin was working too hard, still trying to prove to her dad that she was as good a partner in the family accountancy firm as her brother would have been if he hadn’t decided to become a starving artist instead. Still trying to prove it even though her dad had realised it years ago and was as proud of her as any father could be.

  I got used to not seeing Owen. I got over expecting to meet him around every corner or to hear his voice every time I picked up the phone. An intonation in someone’s voice, an advert or a carton of milk stopped making me cry and gradually I began to feel free. Things moved on and got better, and right now things are pretty good.

  Rosie couldn’t really be pregnant, could she?

  Chapter Seven

  As I wait for Rosie outside the flat it occurs to me that in all the years the three of us have known each other we have never bought a pregnancy testing kit. I’m sure I must be infertile.

  ‘Christ almighty, I feel like I’ve been beaten up by a big fuck-off bastard,’ Rosie says articulately as she stumbles out of the doorway in a fake-fur coat and aviator shades that she really doesn’t need, considering the overcast sky. She makes me smile, for despite her situation she has managed to pull her hair up into a chic little topknot and apply some lip gloss. Whatever the morning will bring she is determined to look presentable.

  ‘Well, you can stay here if you like and I’ll go,’ I say kindly, taking my phone out of my coat pocket to check that the keypad is locked and th
at the battery is charged.

  ‘No, no, come on, fresh air and all that. Who are you waiting to call you?’ she says, nodding at my phone.

  ‘Are you going to ask for the kit or shall I?’ I digress nonchalantly.

  ‘Oh, you, you please. I can’t ask, he knows me.’ She lights up a cigarette.

  ‘Well, he knows me too, we both go in there all the time, remember?’ We are often in the small corner-shop chemist on a boring Saturday afternoon, rifling through the bucket of bargain nail varnish, or buying silly hairgrips shaped like butterflies, or five bangles for 99p.

  ‘Yes, but he knows me because I go in there to get my prescription for the pill cashed. What’s he going to think if I get a pregnancy-testing kit?’ Rosie turns up the collar on her coat and nuzzles her chin into the fur.

  ‘But he knows me too, I go in there to get my inhalers. He’s going to think I’m asthmatic and that I have irresponsible sex!’ I say, though I’m not absolutely sure why that should worry me. We stop at the shop front and look in. I notice a little basket full of nail transfers at half price.

  ‘Oh come on, I’ll ask,’ I say, as I knew I would, and we push the door open and go to the counter.

  ‘Hello, ladies, what can we do for you today?’ Mr Chemist is always the nicest and politest of men, he loves us because we spend a fortune on his lovely but useless bits of shiny frippery.