Growing Up Twice Page 5

  Of course, I’d never meant to find my way into customer services. I’d meant, upon leaving university, to be Kate Adie, an intrepid and courageous journalist, but with more make-up and hopefully less chance of getting hit by bullets. If I ever stop to wonder why it has never happened I comfort myself with the thought that only about two or three people get to be like Kate, and only a few hundred, maybe fewer get to work on the really interesting papers or news programmes. Knowing my luck I’d probably have ended up reporting on a mischievous parrot called Reggie who turned out to be the mysterious cause of the neighbourhood knickers disappearing, and so my life wouldn’t have had that much more meaning than it does now.

  And then, of course, coupled with the enormous odds against me ever making it, is my relationship with personal commitment. My mum had always encouraged me, all through my childhood and early adult years. ‘You can do it, but it’s very competitive; it’s competitive and it requires commitment and even after all that hard work, you might not make it. But if you believe you can, you just might,’ she’d say when I told her I wanted to be an actor, ballet dancer, singer, fighter pilot, writer, and then finally journalist after one night when Kate’s new report left me emotionally aghast for the first time ever about the state of the world. I went to bed that night fired up with determination, but woke up the next day thinking, ‘Mmm, hard work, commitment, might very well fail …’ I managed to carry the flickering ambition as far as two weeks post graduation, but when faced with the nitty-gritty of making it really happen I’d got a temping job as receptionist on a science park instead.

  ‘Are you going to call him?’ Rosie says, bringing more tea in from the kitchen. She is probably the only person in the world who would understand if I did.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s weird. This time last year, or this time six months ago, I would have done like a shot. But I’m not calling him. No. I just don’t want to.’

  ‘You know he’ll call you again. And again. You know what it’s going to be like. It’ll be flowers and tears and letters and poems and books again, just like it always is when he wants you back.’ This is unusual for Rosie. Over the years when I’ve asked her what to do about Owen she has always said, ‘If you want to go through it again you have to go through it again. I can’t stop you.’ So I always used to ask her and not Selin, because Selin used to say what I didn’t want to hear.

  ‘Yeah. I know,’ I say. ‘But we’re moving soon, so sod him.’

  Rosie sits down and shuffles in her seat. ‘You’re going to kill me,’ she says, chewing her bottom lip.

  ‘What, even more?’ I ask her, thinking she is changing the subject.

  ‘There’s … there is something that we haven’t told you. Selin and I.’

  ‘What? A Mars Bar kind of thing?’ I say in a small voice. I’ve got that quiet feeling of dread in my chest.

  ‘Well, yes, strictly speaking, but I haven’t had a chance to get another one in. I’ll put it on the slate.’ She smiles nervously. ‘It’s about Owen. Selin heard something about him through Josh.’ Josh, Coşgun, Selin’s older artist brother, whose name sounds like Joshgun and whom we all call Josh.

  ‘What about him?’ I am beginning to feel panicky and cross.

  ‘The last time he split with you, it was for this girl Josh has met a couple of times through his collective, a sculptor or something. Well, after a while she wised up to him and didn’t want to see him any more. I guess that was a bit of a shock for Owen, he didn’t like it. I mean, he usually does all the hiring and firing, doesn’t he.’

  Instinctively I walk away and turn my back on her to try and collect my thoughts. A small part of me still hurts when I hear about the other women. A small part of me feels afraid of what Rosie might say next.

  ‘Why are you telling me this now?’ I ask her. I feel hurt. I feel hurt, frightened and fucking angry.

  ‘He refused to leave her alone, mate. He started following her around. Calling her all hours. Sending her nasty e-mails. Josh says he heard that he broke into her house and trashed it. She wasn’t in, luckily. She got an injunction against him and he’s on bail for breaking and entering.’ She looks at her feet. ‘We didn’t tell you because it was over between you two. We didn’t want you to worry about him any more. We didn’t think you needed to know.’

  ‘Well, why are you telling me now? I don’t want to know.’ Strangely I am not surprised by this information, but the uneasy sense of dread has spread to my stomach. Owen was always going to do something like that to someone one day. I’d always known it really.

  ‘Because he’s called you, called again. Maybe he wants you again. It sounds mean but I hoped he would stay fixated with this girl. Jen, he’s a nasty piece of work. He treated you like shit for years and he thinks he owns you. I’m just afraid of how he might react when he realises he doesn’t.’

  I turn and march up to Rosie, furious. I stop inches from her face. ‘He’s an arsehole, but he’s not a stalker, for fuck’s sake,’ I shout, well aware how much the evidence suggests otherwise. I rationalise: ‘He was probably drunk. He was always doing fucking stupid things when he was drunk. Like that time he punched out the ticket bloke at Tottenham Court Road tube station because he didn’t have the right ticket!’ My words ring hollow, bouncing off the bare walls.

  ‘I’m not saying he is a stalker,’ Rosie lies for my sake. ‘I just thought you’d like to know that stuff before you call him back, if you decided that you wanted to call him back, I mean.’

  ‘I’m not fucking calling him back!’ I shout and I’ve slammed the door shut on my bedroom before I realise I’ve left the room.

  Lying on my bed I can feel the heat in my face and the sting of tears in my eyes. I blink hard. I am determined not to cry.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I ask myself. I try to work out why I’m feeling so sick and angry. It isn’t because Selin and Rosie have kept something from me; any two of the three of us would have made the same choice. And it isn’t because of this other girl, not really. I knew when he left me the Post-it note that there would be someone else along the way.

  It’s because I know – and I think I always have known – that there is something else to Owen, something a bit darker and more threatening than his self-obsessed narcissism. Because somewhere just behind his sweet romantic moments, the passion-filled afternoons and repetitive tearful reunions, I’ve always been a little bit afraid of what he might do next. Up until now I’ve always complied with what he wanted. Always gone back to him when he wanted me and always left him when he didn’t; in a sense he has owned me. Now things are different. I don’t need to go back any more. I don’t even want to speak to him. I don’t want to hear the sound of his voice, let alone see his face. Whatever he did to this girl is no surprise. Something like this was always coming, I am just glad I got out soon enough before it came my way.

  There is a quiet knock on my door.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Rosie comes in and sits on my bed. ‘We should have told you. Josh was getting ready to tell you himself, but we stopped him. He was a bit pissed off with us, I can tell you.’ Sweet Josh has always been big brother to all three of us and looked out for us since we were kids. My head hurts and my stomach is in knots but I know I shouldn’t take it out on Rosie.

  ‘No. It’s not you. It’s him. I’m just fucked off that he’s still fucking me off nearly a year after we’ve finished, and just when I thought I’d got him out of my head.’

  Rosie pulls the hair back from my face and tucks it behind my ear. ‘Yeah, I know. But we’re going to move and then he won’t know where you are or anything about you any more.’ She flops down on the bed next to me, clutching Loot. ‘Look, I’ve phoned this place here, not far from Selin’s. It costs quite a bit more than here but at least it’s got a roof and central heating and they’re viewing this afternoon. Apparently there will be two couples and two other girls there at the same time. Do you want to go?’

  I take the pink paper from her hand and look at
the ad as if it will give me a clear picture of the flat she has in mind. Two double b/room, fitted kitchen, f/freezer, balcony, gas c/h, close to b/stop and shops. ‘Yeah. Let’s get there early, and take your cheque-book.’

  She smiles and nods, leaves again and closes my door behind her.

  I should be out there talking about her baby, not in here moping about a long-gone ex. A train rumbles past. It’s all finally gone, I think. Every moment that I spent with Owen in this room. Every book he gave me, with a message scrawled in the front. Every shell he picked up for me and every poster he bought me. None of it means anything any more. Not even the seven years I have spent in this flat. I just want to be as far away from every association I have with him as possible. I want to go. I want to go now. Before he calls again.

  Chapter Ten

  I got up this morning with Rosie just after six and held her forehead until the queasiness subsided. Between bouts she told me this had been going on for days before she’d plucked up the courage to tell me. Looking back, I can see that it all fits in with the way she’s been acting recently, early-morning bathroom bouts and all. Feeling guilty that I hadn’t picked up on the clues earlier, I didn’t leave for work until the doctor’s surgery opened and I could call and make her an appointment. I had to say it was an emergency, even though Rosie doesn’t seem to think there is one, as the only other appointment they had on offer meant she would have been taking the baby to primary school by the time her pregnancy was confirmed.

  Unsurprisingly, we had had no luck with the flat we went to see. The two bedrooms turned out to be one bedroom and a large cupboard, the central heating a dodgy gas fire and the balcony a decidedly unstable-looking railing that was apparently designed to prevent you from falling out of an entirely arbitrary third-floor french window. Anyway, both of us had forgotten that the advent of a child would require a third bedroom, one day at least, so the next thing I did after booking Rosie in at the doctor’s was to pick up another copy of Loot on the way to work.

  I had phoned Selin last night but we got her answerphone, and her mobile was switched off. Needing to talk to her and knowing she wasn’t one for going out mid-week, I phoned her parents who live two streets away from her in a flat over the family business on Green Lanes. Even though she officially left home over three years ago, she spends at least four evenings out of seven with her family.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Selin, it’s Jenny Greenway,’ I say, even though she’s known me for nearly fifteen years and no one but Rosie or I calls her Mrs Selin.

  ‘Hello, Jennifer, how are you, darling?’ Selin’s mum and dad moved to London from Turkey in the sixties, and I never grow bored of listening to the remnants of her accent combined with years of north London life.

  ‘Pretty good. Is Selin there by any chance, please?’

  ‘No, sweetheart, she’s out with her dad. Don’t you know? On Monday they play pool down the road, they’ve been going for weeks. Selin has beaten him the last two Mondays. Now it’s a grudge match.’ I didn’t know, and I was surprised that Selin hadn’t mentioned this unlikely bonding exercise with her father. She adored her dad; her conversation was usually littered with anecdotes and stories about him. I adored her dad too and he’d gamely stepped up to the plate to fill the absence of my own dad at various points over the years, stopping by to put up shelves when I’d first moved in, once giving me a lift to a job interview when it was pouring with rain and there was a tube strike. I laugh when I think about Selin and her dad playing pool and I suppress a little burst of jealousy. Maybe she was getting ready to hustle us on one of those afternoons when it seemed like a good idea to put as many pound coins as we could find between us on the pool table in our local and wind the men up by taking all day about it.

  ‘Oh, we’re thinking of coming over to see her tomorrow if she’s around, that’s all.’ Rosie and I had discussed a plan of action and decided we’d tell her face to face. Selin would know immediately that something was up – we hadn’t been north in six months – but we decided it was the best way.

  ‘Tomorrow? Well, if you’re coming over this way I’ll make you girls dinner. It will give me an excuse to feed up that girl of mine. You children with your mothers so far away, you need a good meal too.’ A sensible person would never pass up the opportunity to eat at Mrs Selin’s table. At the risk of offending my own mother, she is the best cook in the whole world. However, I sort of thought under the circumstances that it might not be the best place to discuss the baby, the move, Owen’s reappearance.

  ‘Oh, we don’t want to put you out …’ I said feebly, knowing that nothing bar nothing in the fifteen or so years I’ve known Mrs Selin has ever put her out.

  ‘Don’t be silly, the children will love to see you and I’ll get Coşgun over too. That boy never eats. Up all hours, up to goodness knows what, but he never eats. Drinks, too much in my opinion, but never eats. Runs around with all those girls but––’

  ‘Let me guess … never eats?’ I finished, and wondered about the universal preoccupation of mothers with force-feeding their offspring. My own mother thinks I’m anorexic if I don’t have two slices of cake for dessert and then has the cheek to comment on my weight. I wondered if Rosie would turn into a feeding maniac. Considering how sparingly I’ve seen her smear her disgusting low-fat spread on her crispbread I’d be surprised but, well, the mystery of motherhood is uncharted territory for us. The thought of seeing Josh again was nice, but in a way I didn’t want to hear any more news that might bring Owen nearer.

  ‘Well, I’d better check with Rosie – hang on.’ I put my hand over the receiver and called, ‘Rosie?’

  ‘Yes?’ Her disembodied voice came from her bedroom.

  ‘Mrs Selin has invited us to dinner tomorrow?’

  ‘Yippee, yes please!’ Rosie obviously didn’t have the same reservations that I did; in fact maybe she was pleased to have a reason not to come straight out with things. And one thing was true – we could both do with a good meal.

  ‘Rosie says yes please, if you’re sure that’s OK?’

  ‘Of course it’s OK, of course.’

  ‘Should you check with Selin?’

  ‘Don’t you worry, darling, Selin will be here waiting for you tomorrow and then you girls can go and have a drink after dinner and talk about boys or whatever it is you don’t want to talk about in front of us old fogies. So I’ll see you tomorrow about eight?’

  ‘OK, thanks again.’

  ‘No problem. How’s your mum these days, out in the country?’ My mum moved out of town a couple of years ago with my brother and his family to just beyond Watford; the countryside, I suppose, in comparison to N16.

  ‘Oh, she’s good, she loves being a grandmother,’ I said politely, wondering why it is that women of a certain age feel the need to talk longer on the phone than is strictly necessary.

  ‘I should be a grandmother by now. At your age I was married eight years.’ I briefly wondered how Rosie’s ‘young’ mum with her trendy hairdo and Calvin Klein wardrobe would feel about being a grandmother. It’s almost as hard to imagine as Rosie changing a nappy.

  ‘I know, but there is only one Mr Selin and you don’t want to share him, do you?’ I said, making her giggle before she blew me a couple of kisses down the phone and said goodbye.

  Now, after dropping Rosie safely off at the doctor’s and turning my fingers black thumbing through Loot on the tube, I’m back at work in the Customer Care and Sales call centre, phone headset on, picking up calls from clients on average every two minutes. I periodically yell from my little goldfish cubicle that it would be nice if someone else on the sales floor could manage to interrupt their dissection of last night’s TV to pick up some calls. We all wear Madonna-esque headsets so the phones don’t ring here, they beep; all I can hear around me is a cacophony of monotonous beeps and they all seem to be coming my way.

  The one good thing about all this is that I haven’t really thought about Michael and the fact that he hasn’t called me yet
. OK, last night as I was drifting off to sleep I did think about the kiss and wondered what else it might have led to, but I know that’s dangerous territory. I mean, we all know that the more of a dream personality you attribute to someone you hardly know, the more you will be let down. But it’s OK with Michael because I’m not going to get to know him at all, so if I use him to take my mind off real things that’s OK. It will be OK until he actually phones me, and then I’ll put a stop to the whole thing. So for now it’s OK to dream about his sweetness, the soft warmth of his mouth and his long guitarist’s fingers.

  Day three and he hasn’t called yet. My phone has been turned on and charged up since Saturday, although I will never know why I bothered to buy it – the only people who ever phone me on it are Rosie and Selin and the occasional shop. When I chose the tiny model with its glittery casing and ‘Disco Inferno’ ring I had the vague notion that I’d need it for emergencies. Really, I wanted it because Rosie had got a pink one that plays the theme tune to Top Cat and Selin has a holographic cover for hers that makes it look like it’s covered in 3-D love hearts. Deep down we are still the three little teenagers who used to swap coloured shoelaces to go in our trainers and badger our mums for stiletto-heeled patent-leather shoes from Freeman, Hardy and Willis, just like our friends had, still not proper grown-ups.

  Today my phone is sitting like a tiny glittery little toad next to my work phone, sparkling provocatively under the daylight-effect strip lighting. I look at my calendar, 28 August. When do kids go back to school these days?