Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2000

Copyright © Vanessa Jones 2000

Vanessa Jones asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006551942

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008228415

Version: 2016–11-08

Praise

From the reviews for Twelve:

‘Lily is a twentysomething woman living in London with a dull job and no man. Lily’s confessional narrative tracks her confusion, her sense that she should be somewhere else, someone else. In an effort to escape the “steep rock face” of a working week, she seeks respite with weekends in the country, parties and a date with a stranger. But she can’t escape the feeling that there’s something missing, that she’s a bit-part actor in her own life … As Twelve progresses, Jones layers each chapter with a different character’s voice: old friends, a down-to-earth neighbour and Lily’s date, Colin. There are sensitive, incisive observations and a knack with words that twists the imagination. By asking the unexpected, this first novel is unsettling, unusual and perceptive.’ Amazon.co.uk

‘Debut novelist Vanessa Jones uses her vividly realised group of self-absorbed twentysomethings to make some keen observations about urban isolation and longing.’ The List

‘A zippy, fresh first novel’ The Voice

Dedication

For Joyce and Noël

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

one

Every Friday night we rehearse the desertion of the city. Its pull becomes a push – a heartbeat pumping us out – to its limits and beyond. Trouble is we’ve got varicose veins. Or gout – look at this road. Stasis. We’re always stuck on this spooky bit of road, and it is always the same. Once it must have been a normal slice of quiet suburbia, but now most of the houses are boarded up: sold to the department of transport, bought by the department of road expansion, leased to the drivers of these cars.

One resident in every ten is hanging on. And they have painted their cause on the boards of their neighbours, their rantings against the drivers and their exhausts, dirt, noise. But I have only ever seen this in evidence and never the protesters themselves. ‘Time is suspended here,’ I say to Edward, who’s driving. ‘The anti-car campaigners always in precisely this state of invisible outrage, the cars in exactly this state of non-movement.’ Every moment is a freeze-frame in an action movie – it is a sculpture, a still life.

He doesn’t answer because he’s considering his next move in a word game we’re playing, a meaningless game, the way to win it is not to come to the end of it, its only point is to pass the time. ‘How apt,’ I think, and laugh. I say ‘Everything’s a metaphor,’ and then, ‘– I love statements like that which prove your point.’

Edward says, ‘You talk absolute shit, do you know that, Lily?’

‘The car is the city’s metaphor for freedom,’ I say, ‘its get-out clause’ – but once in, freedom is lost. We have no choice but to go with this not-so flow. Breathing in. People use this gas to kill themselves!

‘T-H-M,’ says Edward.

Country weekends. Weekends away. ‘I’m going away for the weekend.’ Maybe one day no one will live in the country. Perhaps one day it will be populated only from Friday evenings till Monday mornings and the city in hush.

‘Your go,’ says Edward. ‘God, this is boring.’

‘Well, we could have a conversation.’

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘You start.’

Edward and I are friends. We are better friends in theory than in practice. I love him, but what does that mean? We are going to his parents’ house, which is my favourite house – I love it and I like to think I have an understanding with it. It is elegant and grand, it is family and snug. How? Every room I want to breathe-in. I am always given the same bedroom, which I call Lily’s Room, but Edward’s family call it Bobbin’s room after some great aunt who lived there once. It feels like home to me but it is not my home, and I do not belong to it.

When we arrive, we’ll see through the window Edward’s parents sitting at the table in the middle of the kitchen. If you go in through the back door (and I have never been in through the front), the first room you come to is the kitchen. It is dark, in the way that a wood is dark. We’ll leave our bags in the car. We’ll walk in looking exhausted and dirty in the way parents expect, and secretly like. Edward’s mum will make room for us at the table. She’ll jump up and try to fetch us things, and Edward and his dad will tell her to sit back down. Then the others will arrive and there’ll be a general commotion involving luggage and kisses and fragments of lives. There’ll be a massive lasagne for supper and a treacle tart and after Edward’s parents have gone to bed, we’ll go into the drawing room and drink coffee, and take drugs.

I often wonder how much our parents would like us if they knew the whole truth.

Edward has quite an odd collection of friends which he likes to mix and match on these weekends. And although some of them look like they’re mutual, really I only see them these days by proxy, when I’m with him. We look uncomfortable in the drawing room. We are neither old enough nor young enough to own it. We look like props on the over-stuffed sofas, smugly smoking our joints or, now that we all have a bit more money, snorting a surreptitious line of cocaine. We are an uneasy mix of tailored suits and denim jackets. We have almost completely let go our dreams into the i-wish abyss. But not quite. Another year perhaps, two? at most five.

We’re never at our best on Friday nights. Something it is about coming to the country. We all invest the ‘country’ with some sort of healing power, and I don’t know whether it actually possesses it, but I do think it’s odd that anyone should lead a life they need constant respite from. Tonight I’ll go to bed earlier than I have done all week. Tonight I’ll sleep in Lily’s bed, next to the window which looks out onto fields of sheep. I’ll read a few lines of the Agatha Christie novel that’s always on the bedside table and listen to the silence. It’ll be dark. Properly dark like it is in a memory. No dreams.

After breakfast, before lunch, we go for a walk. To nowhere in particular. Edward’s garden becomes fields becomes the whole wide world. It is summer and the trees look heavy. Flowers bud bloom and rot on their stalks – decadence. If Edward’s mum had come with us we should have heard the names of them all, but today she doesn’t come. Too busy in her usually mysterious way. I’ve never met a mother who isn’t. They make lists, which sometimes branch off into sublists: a, b, c, d. In her absence I ask Edward to name everything. It is another game we play. If he doesn’t know, he knows to make it up. I find this delightful, like being a gummy child. Or Eve.

He points out to the others the line of cedars visible from this hill. He has taught me to love cedars – the elegant stillness of their elongated limbs – but weeping beeches are my favourite trees. They look like the sea stopped. There is one in his garden, and sitting under it I get a panoramic view of everyone’s calves playing croquet. There are sounds but not the words they are making. I’m wondering what Edward talks about when I’m not there and whether he has the same conversations. The light under here is the same as the light of the kitchen. Hands on mallets on balls. Clock-clock.

He is a fanatic games player, Edward. Chinese checkers, bridge, chess and on rainy days, Risk. I have spent whole weekends watching him try for world domination. He tells me that tonight will be perfect for murder so we bring the dining room outside. Tablecloth, candles, the whole kit and boodle. It is an old crone of a moon. Ace of hearts kills; Jack detects.

Edward says ‘the secret of life is to enjoy the world without wanting to possess it’ – but not everyone can borrow such an eden. I feel like pointing this out to him as we drive past the high-rises on the way back to town. I don’t, because we’re having an argument. The same argument we always have on the way back home about me, and how I expect to be driven to my front door. I quite like it because by the time it’s over we have driven to my front door. Rewind. All return journeys are shorter, like the last half of the week once you’ve got past the hill of Thursday, 12 p.m.

Tonight Shirley is watering the hollyhock in her front garden. I say garden, but really it is just the space between the road stop and her house start. She planted it out last year and this summer her hollyhock has swollen to gigantic proportions. It really is an extraordinary sight, barely diminished by her presence next to it.

I have discovered that it is a mistake to make friends with your next door neighbours. I can’t slide into my house now without having some intercourse with her and tonight I’m just not in the mood. It’s the same as going back to school after the long summer holidays. You’ve got something precious from home in your bag, and suddenly you see your teacher or your best friend and it’s sullied. You’re back down to earth and it was only a dream – silly. When I get in I’ll put a bag of blueberries down, and Edward’s mum’s chocolate brownies, and they’ll seem completely out of place and stupid. I’ll go to my room, and it will look like time hasn’t passed, like nothing’s happened. I can’t bear it. I want to hold on for a bit longer before I believe it. ‘Put your sunglasses on,’ says Edward. I do, I get away with ‘Nice weekend?’ and ‘Yes, thank you.’

At the moment, everything reminds me of being at school. Our individual lives are minute replicas of our whole species’ evolution. When a baby gets up onto its two legs it becomes homo erectus, becomes homo sapiens. Thinking man. It occurred to me at the ends of term that the school was a magnet momentarily switched off scattering us, its iron filings, into the beyond. This is how I feel again on Friday nights when we abandon our city, one day never to return. But which day? We live in the meantime. At school there is that sense of another life that will be yours, and now I sense it too. Home – not far away, but too far to touch.

In the meantime, this is my home. Josh is in the kitchen smoking a cigarette. There are five clean shirts on the table beside him, sunday-evening-newly-ironed. The working week is a steep rock face, and tonight is for laying out our crampons. Tomorrow we’ll put on our garb and ointments and we’ll leave the tent for the week ahead. Monday morning a little slow, but we’re picking up momentum. We’re more in the flow by Tuesday; throw the rope, click the clip, up a bit. On Wednesday we can neither see the ground beneath nor the summit above us, we’re dangling on Wednesday. Then dragging ourselves up by our fingernails on Thursday and panting at 12 p.m. Thursday afternoon is – the edge of the abyss: the relief, the run towards it, the ground falling away, time accelerating, it’s a roller coaster we’re on, we’re all feeling a little hysterical, silly we somersault towards The Weekend.

Tonight is just the beginning. Tonight I’m not looking forwards, I’m remembering. I’m hanging onto time and willing it to slow down. I kiss Josh’s forehead. I take my mementos out of my bag and as I predicted they look vaguely flat and tired. Still. They’re still brownies, they’re still blueberries and cream, and one of life’s treats. Josh and I eat them in the garden with a cup of coffee. He swings his legs up onto the bench so his knees hold his elbows hold his hands hold his head. He says he thinks the most highly-evolved form of life is the jellyfish and wishes he could be one, floating. He is one big sigh Josh, and not always of relief.

In mawkish moments it has always been Josh and me. Before we met – I don’t like to think about it – I couldn’t survive it now that I know better. In that respect, perhaps, I’m with God and his adamance on the Tree of Knowledge – once you know things it is very hard to unknow them. It is Josh has created this garden, he insisted on it. He said, in the summer, it’s like having a spare room. It is too small for a lawnmower so he put down paving and a step. To cut us off from Shirley on one side and mr faceless on the other he erected a wooden fence that creaks like a ship in the wind. He doesn’t believe in buying plants, so from trips to the country, from front yards we passed on the street, from commemorative gardens in town he has ripped cuttings. Usually under cover of darkness, but never intended. His garden has grown exactly as he has grown, slowly and by series of chance. It is the same with all his possessions, furniture, clothes, books and friends. I try to be more like him but I am too much in a hurry. I have an idea and like to realise it all at once. He waits, and he finds the design by accident. He is far less often disappointed.

I don’t think I have ever seen the garden looking as real as it does this year. It has come into itself. The plants are growing so thickly that it looks like a secret, but still it manages to steal the sun. In it, on the paving, Josh has drawn a backgammon board in chalk. A game of skill and chance. He suggests one.

Could I ever not understand backgammon? could I survive without Josh? how did people get hold of me before my mobile phone? can we forget concepts once we have them? could we unlearn the word “car”? Luxury turns right turns given turns necessity. When I was younger I could almost have moved in with someone who lived in a barrel of water, but I have definite needs now, definite edges. I don’t understand how anyone manages to fall in love after the age of seventeen. I do understand claustrophobia.

Because every day I make the decision to see exclusively. I must not register certain realities – like: there is no silence, or: I am never further than ten feet away from another person above below left right – for I am going down a tunnel. And looking straight ahead it seems there is room to manoeuvre but noticing the backdrop is never starting again, and attempting to turn around is: panic.

Josh and I make packed lunches for each other. It started off as an economy drive but has become a game of surprise. It was his turn last week and on Wednesday he shocked me with a cockle sandwich. It was a coup, not least because he did it on the most uninspiring day of the week. This week it’s my go, and I’ve decided on a radically different approach, five days of egg mayonnaise. It’s a huge price for not-that-funny a joke I realise this morning as I’m slicing the bread. For a start, egg mayonnaise first thing. For another, I too have to eat it. For a third, if someone did it to me I’d think they were very sad. Will he? Well …? Here we go.

When we first started working, we used to smoke a joint before we left the house. I don’t know how we did it, it is entirely unthinkable now. At the least delay on the underground, we’d come home and phone in to say we were catching a bus. We did wonder if they could hear us filling the kettle on the end of the line, but we decided we didn’t care – they could sack us – then we’d roll another. Funny how you get over it without noticing. Funny how what the company does was once ‘what they do’ and is now ‘what we do’. Funny how it doesn’t hurt.

Still, Monday morning it is definitely them and us and ‘them’ is everyone apart from me and Josh. We stride to the station, we sandwich ourselves between varying amounts of aliens and we look straight ahead, soft focus.

So many people all rushing to do their jobs. I wish I knew whether they enjoyed them, or got from them some sense of satisfaction. To my mind, work is the most monumental waste of time. I know that I could be thinking a larger thought, or having a more interesting conversation elsewhere. But I suffer from a lack of imagination. I don’t know where elsewhere is, or how to make it pay my rent, I can’t picture anything that could keep me interested nine-to-five, monday-to-friday, forty-eight-weeks-of-the-year. And I’m inclined to believe that everyone agrees with me for if they didn’t, surely there’d be no such word as ‘holiday’. Watching them, joining them struggle for space in this survival-of-the-fittest test first thing in the morning, every morning, the city seems to me a complex organism with a terminal disease. The new age has notions which oppose its ethic – fitness, health food, relaxation – and the age of communication has negated its reason to be.

After twenty minutes, Josh goes east and I go west. When I was little, I used to steal application forms and leaflets from banks, and with some other small friend whose every detail is now lost to me, played ‘work’ which consisted of, fundamentally, filling in these forms and reorganising them in piles. This is pretty much what I find myself doing for real now and it’s somewhat lost its appeal. The origami heaps on my desk are exactly how I left them minus my friday-air of elation. As far as they’re concerned, the weekend was my illusion.

It is ironic that, as an atheist to the work ethic, I have incarnated as a recruitment consultant. It startles me sometimes that my journey to this point is entirely due to a secretarial course that I never wanted to take. If I could unlearn to type, how different my life might have been. I started here as a temporary secretary and I have never left. Well, you’ve got to do something and I’m no good at first days. On my first day at school I got sent to the corner for colouring the moon in yellow and not knowing why I’d used that colour; I hated being new and I was new often. Now, I’m an old hand and no longer a secretary, in fact I’ve got one of my own. He tells me this morning that I have wall-to-wall interviews till lunch time. Time will fly then. Then I’ll think of Josh, ignorantly tucking in.

Time is subjective. The interviewees sitting in reception find the ten minutes until I can see them an eternity of sweating palms. The fly on the wall beside them spies in an even slower motion which lets it dodge the swiftest of swatting hands. Someone has found life on Mars. Well. Even if it were more than a single-celled bacteria, it would be as distinct from a human as a fly, or a lion. It would have no knowledge of day or night, week weekend, month year century millennium. We have invented millennia. And although I know we’ve made them up, I can’t help but feel apocalyptic at this point in time, in the madness of weekday mornings, on the Friday nights when we abandon our metropolis, one day never to return.

The city is sick. At its centre is chaos because everyone within it is dispensable, yet the central icon of our times is: the individual. In a tunnel though, there is no direction but straight ahead. Evolution involves the collation of information, to no end but survival, but how will we survive? I may feel apocalyptic but I’ve no idea what should happen next, I suffer a lack of imagination. And so does everyone else, I imagine. We’re neither-nor. We laud people over machines, but we can’t help looking forward to the day when computers can make love to us. We’re unsure whether to live organically farming or safe within the helmet of a virtual world. It is the end of the decade, the century and the millennium. It is Thursday Afternoon all over the world and this is what I’m wondering: where are we going for the weekend?

two

Shirley’s father died when she was eleven months old. It is this, she says, that has given her her unique spin on the politics of men and women. ‘Being brought up without a father,’ she tells us quite often, although now it doesn’t grate so, ‘gives you a very different outlook. It means you don’t play to roles.’ She is married to Andrew and together they have a small son called Oliver.

It is because of Oliver that Shirley and I met in the first place. She was background music before then, heavily pregnant when we moved in and leading to a few do you think they know they’re alive? conversations: babies in stomachs and bodies in general and breast-feeding (it can’t be right). But babies, they perform the same function as dogs do in human interaction. You pretend you’ve not noticed the person queuing next to you for the past three months and then all of a sudden it’s ‘hello, fella’ and ‘isn’t he sweet?’ and ‘does he bite?’

This house has Shirley on one side, mr faceless on the other and behind it, garden-to-garden back-to-back, it has naked neighbours. These others have neither children nor animals and so have remained objects of peeking and conjecture. Sometimes sitting in the garden, doing my thing while they are doing theirs, it seems like we are plastic figures placed in toy town being repositioned by a giant child. To him, mr faceless is a secret. He is intriguing because neither Josh nor I are able to describe him. If we saw him somewhere other we’d never recognise him, and we quite often have arguments about the colour of his hair. Our naked neighbours live in a flat parallel with our first floor. On weekday mornings, they iron shirts in their boxer shorts and they eat cereal in them at the weekends. I go red when I see them on the street fully clothed. They have the bodies of young gods and I’m sure that to the child in charge they’re superheroes. And me and Josh … ?

Shirley, because we spoke, dwells in the realms of bleak reality. She is a constant source of minor irritation. She claims not to play to roles with Andrew, but she has taken to them with a vigour with me. Like her marriage though, I’m sure she views our relationship as evidence to support her theories and, vexingly, I see how she could be justified. Still, there must be degrees of correctness, in the end I must know that I’m more right than she is, otherwise we’d agree.

Not that she knows we disagree. This is one of the things that most annoys me about myself.

I have no idea what Shirley was like before she became a parent, but she so entirely epitomised the last few weeks of pregnancy that I’m sure that she has taken to every stage of her life with like completeness. As soon as she became a mother to Oliver she became a mother to me, and now feels it her duty to advise me on the complicated process of love. This morning she came round to drop off Oliver and dropped off also the benefit of her experience. She said ‘No red lipstick today then?’

I said, ‘No, I didn’t like it, I could feel it on my lips. And anyway Josh told me I looked like a man in drag.’

‘Well of course he would say that,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you before, living with Josh is a terrible put-off.’

Shirley quite often begins her sentences with ‘well of course’, especially those relating to Josh. She has her own ideas about him and the reason we are friends. She is very fond of telling me that he likes me, of course, because I look like a boy. I did wonder this morning whether I was going to hear this again, but it was the red lipstick (one of her cast-offs) that had grabbed her attention. She said, ‘You know, despite the fact that men – well, most of the men that I know – say they don’t like too much, really they prefer plain girls who wear make-up to beautiful girls who don’t, because they are making an effort. Men like us to make an effort you know, otherwise they say “I see you’ve let yourself go.”’

I really hope that Shirley isn’t right. Her version of life, love, women and men is one which makes me want to let myself go. Floating. Up into the air.

Oliver has come round today because Shirley and Andrew have gone off house hunting. They are hoping to move to the north of the city where Shirley assures me that the air is cleaner. I do worry that when they move I might never see him again. He’s three. He’s the only person I have known all his life. I don’t like children, and I hope this isn’t the reason I’ve made an exception in his case. He has soft brown hair and an enquiring look. His favourite thing to do when he comes round to our house is to make rose-petal perfume from one of Shirley’s bushes that has spilled over our fence, and which Josh has trained to grow underneath his window.

Today he is sorting petals into piles according to size and shape. Each pile has twelve petals in because that’s as far as he can count. He is possessed by an intensity of concentration that I have no recollection of in myself. Maybe one day. Sitting here watching him, I am aware, as I so often am with him, that these days we have together remain in his mind for only the shortest of spaces, soon to be collated into the murky swamp that is childhood. When he moves up north, if I never see him again, how long will he remember me? And I’ll know him until I die.

I used to (and I still do sometimes, only now he doesn’t take it seriously) try to take him back as far as he could go. When he began to speak I thought, it’s not that long since he was in the womb, not that long before he was. And I’d sit him down and ask him questions, hoping he’d remember and I’d get an answer to the secret we’re all longing to tell. Sadly nothing. And now he knows what I want to hear and makes up stories. Usually involving plots Andrew has read to him the night before. Before he was born he was a pirate, he was a wrestler and, most surprisingly, he was a small blue bicycle called Bertie.

Little scrap, he only weighed five pounds when he was born. I was fascinated to watch him and work out exactly when he acquired his edges. At first, he thought the whole wide world was the same person and that person was him. Admittedly he had his favourites, but if Shirley had died, or if I had died, he wouldn’t have noticed. God needs us more than we need Him.

Oliver and I have discovered together that if you put rose petals into cold water and then boil them, the perfume is far more fragrant than if the water’s warm to start with. Also the more water the better, but boiled off to just a tiny amount and then put in the blender to mush.

I have to say that the rose-petal perfume started as a demonic joke. A couple of years ago, Josh and I were convinced it was up to us to change everyone’s opinion, especially Shirley’s. We were unreasonably irritated by her ‘being brought up without a father’ conversations, which were usually followed by trite examples of her conjugal arrangements with Andrew. ‘He and I just do the things we’re best at,’ she continues to explain, quite patiently, ‘I do the girly things and he does the manly things, but that’s because we’re good at them.’

To Shirley, ‘manly things’ means taking out the rubbish.

In the days when Oliver only weighed five pounds and we would sometimes babysit, Josh used to lean over his cot and murmur ‘Olivia! You’re so pretty!’ I doubt we’ll ever know the outcome of that experiment. The perfume was another of his ideas but the joke was lost, to the great gain of all parties, because Oliver has never gone home smelling of roses and must never have mentioned to his mother how he’s spent his afternoon. His secrecy is one of the qualities that has forced me to like him.

Today, Josh comes in just as we are decanting our brown musk into jam jars. He’s carrying a bag of clothes from the local charity shops. He’s got a red hat for me and a miniature skiing jacket for Oliver. They seem ridiculous in the heat of the summer and we laugh as we put them on. Oliver says, ‘Can we jump now?’ and we take an arm each and hurl him up into the air. We are custodians of his dizziness. We look at each other when we play this game and recognise our mutual jealousy. We wish we too could have two big people to make us feel weightless. We bought Oliver his baby-bouncer because we remembered what a sad day it was when we had to get out of ours. And the man who invented bungee jumping knows how we feel.

When Oliver leaves, I’ll pour the results of our day on the garden. It would be more cyclical perhaps to feed them to the roots of the rosebush, but they’re on the other side where I can’t get to them. Plants eat their dead ancestors. I think this as I tip our perfume away. Plants are cannibals. More than this, they eat bits of their dead selves. Horrid.

Tonight, Josh and I have been invited to a party by a sort-of-friend of ours called Garry. The theme is Army Camp and everyone is to dress up in combat gear. We are goodtime girls, me and Josh, but we’re not getting into fancy dress for anybody. I’ve persuaded him that we are totally within our rights to go in mufti.

Maybe ‘goodtime girl’ is a bit too optimistic. In a few hours’ time I’ll be persuading him not to go at all. I’m never sure whether I’m trying to talk him out of it or making him talk me into it. We always do go. We’re always glad we’ve gone. It’s like this, I’ve a friend who prefers women although she told me once she sometimes needs to sleep with men. In the morning she smiles and says to herself ‘thank god I’m gay’. Parties and clubs and bars, they’re always incredibly exciting in advance, and such a good idea afterwards. But while you’re actually there? Somehow they make coming home such a relief.

As far as we can work out, at this one we’ll know nobody there. Not as good as knowing everyone, but better than knowing a few people not very well and dreading they’ll leave your side. Desperately trying to entertain them. Judging when you’ll see their interest waning. Thinking on your toes of what to hit them with next.

Josh says this party won’t be much of a talking one anyway, more a dancing. In that case it will depend entirely on the music. I wonder if we’ve steadily raised the volume over the past forty years to blot out our dwindling interest in chat. We used to clothe ourselves with words but now our armour is drugs and drums. It’s easier behind these, requiring less, providing an excuse. What people say, what they do are no longer criteria by which to judge them. In the chaos of a rave, their behaviour, our reaction, cannot be trusted. We rely instead on being perspicacious. We get a ‘good vibe’ from this dancer here and ‘the fear’ from that other over there.

Still, it’s fun isn’t it? And it’s not only the charity shops that Josh has been to. He pulls from his pocket his other purchases of this afternoon. Two microdots. I wink at him. Speed is scummy, coke is self-obsessed, E – I have spent evenings in my youth on E putting ice-cubes in the mouths of kissing couples, thinking they’d love it, maybe they did – I don’t know, it’s that enforced tribalism thing. I’d rather do it with people I really love, who I really think are beautiful. Acid is my favourite and he knows it.

It’s not a great idea to take it before we’ve got ready before we’ve called a cab, but we’re deciding to anyway. That way we’ll have burnt our boats, that way we’ll have to dress and go. Quickly and without thinking about it. And when we realise what we’ve done, we’ll be there.

In the cab I know we’re both checking the other for signs. I can see it in the way I’m looking at Josh, in the smile that’s playing round his lips, we’re both nearly giggling and I’m very aware of my cheeks. It’s so exciting this waiting. It’s a high in itself. What am I going to get? For once I know I’m going to get something. I’m definitely going to get something and I’m going to like it, but I don’t know what it is yet. It’s Christmas in heaven. All presents and no disappointments.

We find the street, we find the house. And I kind of don’t want to go in because the something I’m going to get is not dependent on the party. I’d have a great time just tripping with Josh and far less frightening. I mean, what is this party going to achieve? Have I ever been to a party and made a new friend? I don’t think so. No. Is this odd? Has anybody? The door is open but in front is a metal lattice which is locked and through which a girl is leaning. She has lost the plot, she’s saying ‘the philosophy is sound’, I think. But she can’t quite make her mouth move in conjunction with her voice so the effect is of some cheaply-dubbed film. From what I can make out behind her, she seems a valid example of the scene at large. Josh says, ‘Will you get someone to let us in?’ as though this is likely to happen. Please don’t let it happen. From nowhere though Garry appears. He has an iron key on a chain. I look at Josh to tell him I’m still sober, I don’t want to go in, hello! welcome to hell, but he smiles his in-for-a-penny smile and gives Garry a kiss. Garry locks the door behind us.

I can’t get over the fact that Garry has locked the door. I mean, what if there’s a fire? I want to point this out to Josh but somehow he’s been swallowed by a mass of faces in the hall and Garry’s leading me by the hand upstairs. I can’t believe it. I’m going to lose Josh. It’s my biggest fear and I’m having to confront it at the beginning of the evening. Without him, how will I get home? That whole taxi trauma, finding a number, making yourself heard, sitting off your head in the back and hoping they’re normal – it’s an ocean between me and my bed and Josh is the bridge. What happens if I don’t find him again? I will find him – I’d ask Garry only, how ridiculous. I’m in a house. You can’t lose a person in a house. Upstairs downstairs.

Upstairs seems a terribly long way. It must be like this for Oliver. Always. Imagine having more stairs than numbers at your disposal. Like walking into the infinite. Like walking up a hill that apparently never ends. This is a hill. Too many people, like so many bushes and trees and boulders, blocking my view of the top. I can’t see down, I can’t see up, I squeeze Garry’s hand to tell him to stop.

There’s a sort of corner with a wider stair and room to rest. He’s saying, ‘Okay, sweetheart? Okay?’ and rubbing my hand with his thumb. It feels delicious. Like the first time I’ve been touched. I’m nodding I think, I’m trying to smile. But that’s just it: I’ve no idea if what’s on the inside is getting through to the outside. He’s saying ‘Meet…’ and then a sea of faces where our safe stair was. I can’t meet, my mouth’s all tremble. ‘Meet Mary.’ Mary. Mary. It sounds funny, Mary. I don’t like her I think. Bad vibe. Oh definitely. She’s pointing to something in her cleavage, she’s saying ‘Should I lose the Action Man?’ She’s only wearing a bra, a bra and a doll. Should it go, yes or no? She’s demanding a decision. Don’t stop rubbing my hand, Garry. My neck is too weak for my head. Baby me.

Up up up, we’ve got there, but where are we going? I say, ‘Where are we going, Garry?’ and he says, ‘Yes’. Hopeless. More keys into a room, bed, cupboard, desk. Diet coke that he’s giving me. I’m breathing. He’s saying, ‘Just relax. Just relax and go with it.’ He smooths my eyebrows with his thumbs, he says, ‘That’s it. There’s no one else in here.’

Will you kiss me, Garry. I know you don’t, but will you? Would it be too horrid for you? A smile, and then a kiss and oh! it’s dreamy. I feel like I’m sucking the life out of him, feel like he’s feeding me. This is just what I wanted to earth me, now I’m slowing down.

Garry grins. He kisses my nose. He takes my hand and sits me on the bed. He takes off his top. I’ve never noticed before but he’s got a beautiful body. Club culture. The gym. What would Henry VIII make of the gym? Lifting things that don’t need to be moved. Running when nobody’s chasing you. He’s taken off his trousers, little cotton pants he’s wearing, and now he’s dressing in new clothes. Exactly the same but clean. He says, ‘Ready?’ and I say, ‘Yes.’

Back downstairs – and there is Josh on the dining room dancefloor. He’s surrounded by soldiers, giving it some where the table should be. He winks, he laughs, he takes my elbows and moves me to dance. I know how to do this. Find some space and start off small. Keep moving. Now feet, now arms, now hips perhaps. It’s the call of the drums this music, pom pom pom. Pom pom pom and your body jerks to it – Don’t look at anyone else yet cos they’ll put you off your rhythm before you’ve found it and suck you into theirs. You might not be able to dance to theirs. Little jerks getting bigger until the music encapsulates you, and your body learns the beat. Then your mind can wander, then when the rhythm changes and the tune comes in it’s like you’re flying, endorphins rushing, your body a freeway of racing blood, you go like billyo and you’re dancing, properly dancing, forgetting you’re physical, forgetting you’re dancing at all.

If we could float a little off the ground, would there be any need for this? I see why whirling dervishes. I see why baby-bouncers. Roller coasters, swings, fast cars and dances. The end is this: after that rush to float, after that speed to take off.

There’s Hideous Mary. Sans Ken. I don’t like her trainers – perhaps that’s why I don’t like her. I turn round to ask Josh what he thinks but he’s no longer there. Oh my god. No, he’ll come back. Even if he doesn’t I’ll get home eventually. I won’t be here this time tomorrow and that’s what I must keep thinking. Thinking, thinking. It’s so solitary, this. It’s not socialising at all. And now I’ve remembered that I’m dancing. And now I’m going to have to start all over again. Looking like I’m having a good time. Until I am having a good time.

We’ve been here for four hours. Four hours ago I was snogging Garry in his bedroom. I can’t believe I snogged Garry. Well yes, I can believe that – I can’t believe Garry snogged me. Did Garry snog me? I was very high then, very high and now I’m not so – so in four hours’ time I’ll be pretty much back to normal. Hooray for normality. Hooray for coming home. When Josh comes back I’ll brave going to the loo. It’s a terrifying prospect I know, but think this: you’re in a house. If it were daylight you wouldn’t give it a second thought. There’ll be people and you might trip up, but that’s the very worst. And Josh must be there now so Josh can tell you where it is and maybe, if he’s feeling kind, Josh will come with you.

Fingers and buttons, they’re the tricky bit – it makes Josh laugh that it takes me so long. I say, ‘Cut me some slack,’ which makes him laugh more because it sounds so peculiar. I laugh too. Hysteria on the bathroom floor. No, no, I’ve got to stop this, I’ve got to go to the loo. Concentrate. Buttons push through buttonholes. These things I’ve learnt go first. Zips and trousers under my fingers, the space from me to the lavatory, but my instincts are intact. Inside, my body carries on without me. I am a machine, a clockwork toy, and I’ll go until the last turn of the key.

Josh tells me that he’s found the chill-out room, and this is where we’re headed. Inside, a mound of cushions, a sofa and an armchair. Hideous Mary is collapsed on the cushions, Josh has colonised the armchair, leaving me with space for one buttock beside three men on the sofa. They look like triplets. Shaved heads, combat trousers and tight white tee shirts. They’re having a conversation about some girl. In front, two dancers moving like the wind. One’s saying ‘This is my favourite bit coming up.’

‘The elephant bit?’

‘Elephant?’

‘Yes, listen,’ and he’s making a childish trunk and doing an impression. There are elephants in this world, it suddenly occurs to me. Right now, there are elephants. Doing their own thing.

One of the clones beside me has had enough. He says definitively, ‘Look, she won’t age well.’

‘What are you on? Those cheekbones!’ I turn to look at them and hear, ‘See what I mean?’ and realise with some horror that they’re talking about me. It’s one against two in praise of my longevity. I can’t handle this now. I’m not at my best. My face feels like one of Picasso’s. I close my eyes and hope they’ll go away. They don’t. I deal with it. I congratulate myself for not freaking out. I open my eyes and Josh says, ‘You are such a wreck,’ and laughs. This is not great for a girl’s confidence. Thank god it’s getting light and we could conceivably go home. I say ‘Shall we go home?’ and astoundingly, he says ‘Yes’.

We decide to walk for twenty minutes and then catch the first train. Our ears are ringing still with the sounds of our night – techno track on auto-reverse, early-morning birdsong mixed in with the beat. Josh looks flushed, his skin thin, I think I see his blood vessels moving behind it. But he is normal compared to the weirdos on the train. Whenever I’ve travelled at this time there have only been strangers. And I’ve never been certain if it’s me or it’s them. I keep my eyes on Josh. Safe. I hold his hand on the escalator. Behind I am faintly aware of someone running, then someone tapping me, me? then someone putting a bit of paper in my hand and catching the stairs back down. Josh and I are in shock. He says, ‘What does it say?’

‘“Colin” and a phone number.’ It’s not just me, is it? It is an odd thing to do.

Josh shrugs – later – and threads my hand through his arm. Later we’ll pick through the events of the evening, later decide we’ve had a brilliant time. But sleep first. Sleep. The sun is rising. Herald of a beautiful day we’re going to miss.

And Shirley and Oliver are just waking up.

three

August is the room of a party an hour before dawn. What was last night sparkly and exciting has now begun to fall apart and stink a little. It’s unpleasant and you want to leave but you can’t quite. Because on the other side of it, there’s only Today.

Is hot air thinner than cold air? And if so, what’s missing? I could find out the answers to both these questions but (it’s a freedom I take so much for granted that) I won’t bother to. I do imagine though, living before anyone knew and no one could tell. The air is very thin this August and it’s confusing me. It’s as if the last few months of evaporating bodies, steaming dogshits, hot-baked rubbish and car exhausts are having their effect now. Strangely though, the air seems thinner. There’s nothing in it to breathe. I hate August. And beyond it, only winter.

Nothing to take my mind off it but Colin. The most unlikely stories are the sweetest ones. We haven’t got over it yet, we keep saying, ‘Wow’ and ‘I can’t believe I’ve found you’ and ‘Just say I hadn’t felt brave’. We have been lovers for six months now and have slipped into an easy intimacy. It amazes me (but only in retrospect) how reality shifts and is just accepted. I no longer hesitate before I say the words ‘my boyfriend’. Now when I go to Edward’s house, I don’t sleep in Lily’s Room, but with Colin – in the best pink spare on the second floor.

Of course, I took my life in my own hands when I went off to meet him – it’s something we fondly laugh about now. When I rang him he said ‘I didn’t think you’d call,’ and I said, ‘Neither did I.’ Surely though, such a spontaneous gesture deserved a return. More than this I was flattered and it had to go somewhere. It wouldn’t be much of a story would it? if ‘And what happened then?’ was followed by ‘Nothing’. Memories are things you have to earn. Besides, I wasn’t playing that high-risk a strategy, rapists and murderers are not the majority. I met him in a public place on a Saturday afternoon. What did we talk about? I can’t remember now – everything. No. Nothing I’d ever talked about before. And Josh likes him.

The underground’s a strange setting for a love scene and not one that I would have chosen. Tonight I’m on it to go to meet Edward. It’s so hot that I’ve not bothered to fight for a seat but am standing by the window to the carriage next door. It’s open for ventilation but it always makes me laugh, the thought of ventilation down here. If I stand the right way round my hair is in my eyes and up my nose, so I’m standing the wrong way round with it blowing off my face and I’m looking into the neighbouring car. Another set of possibilities in there. Perhaps it would have made all the difference if I’d been on that side and looking in here – if I’d been just five feet further down that day, Colin would never have seen me – so do things happen because they’re supposed to? or just because they can? Chances are, it’s possible.

Edward and I are going for a walk after work in the park. In the winter these are reserved for Sunday afternoons, when he doesn’t seem to notice that it’s raining and freezing cold. On the way back we get stuck in the week-again traffic. He says, ‘C’mon c’mon c’mon; c’mon c’mon c’mon; c’mon c’mon c’mon’ over and over under his breath like a mantra. At his flat we sit in front of his lookalike fire and drink tea (if I can be bothered to make it). He cleans his shoes on the Sunday magazines and makes me read to him from their papers. He lends me a dry pair of socks (which I never return) and I catch the train home. Sometimes he walks me to the station.

The park is a long way by underground, until it becomes overground and almost until the end of the line. Tonight though I suppose I’m enjoying it. It’s quite nice, this breeze on my face and those people to watch and this film in my head where I’ve spent the next six months in love with Colin. And it’s so bizarre down here. It’s science fiction. Shunting through tunnels under the earth and in the dark (it’s always dark in science fiction). It reminds me of those pictures for children where the earth’s sliced through: here are the people walking the streets and here are the people travelling beneath. So many people, like bunnies in burrows, like patients on their way to some spooky experiment in a secret laboratory. And not one of them taking any notice of me. If I made such an impression on Colin why not so on them?

I’m making a mental note not to talk to Edward about Colin – he is a purist when it comes to conversations. The problem with mine, according to him, is their tendency to be experience-led. He doesn’t like to know what I’ve ‘been up to’, he’s not the least bit interested in plot – if I try to tell him he’ll say, ‘This isn’t a conversation, Lily, it’s a soliloquy.’ So to get his views on the subject I’ll have to couch it in altogether different terms. I’ll have to conceptualise. Colin will have to become a debate about – I don’t know quite what yet. I’ve got three more stops to work it out.

Edward and I have been coming to this park ever since we met. It’s a pastime which belongs to him though and not to me. I’m sure he brings other people on similar trips while I’d never dream of coming with other than him. It’s his place. He’s never said so, though. It’s his possession and he has no need to point it out. When we first became friends we’d fill our pockets with bottles of beer and walk up the hill to see the sun set. We’d sit and watch it getting drunk on its glory, mostly in silence but pointing out the occasional flash of colour till it had ended. Then, humbled, Edward would give his views on how he’d have improved it.

There he is waiting for me in the front of his car. He’s in his usual position, feet on the steering wheel, bum in midair, swapping his suit for something more suited to walking. No attempt at discretion. I can tell by the way he’s yanking on his jeans that he’s not in good temper. Well, he never is for the first five minutes, like he finds it hard to make the change from his own good company to someone else. He glares at my feet as I get in beside him, I say, ‘I’ve got my trainers in my bag.’

‘We’re going for a stomp, Lily, do you know what that means? It means working your lazy blood around your lazy body, working up a sweat, moving fast and covering a lot of distance and if there’s even the smallest chance that you’re going to make me cut it short because your feet hurt, then you’d better get out now.’

‘You always lay this on me, and I’ve never complained my feet hurt.’

‘Well, you must have done once, or else I wouldn’t say it. So what’s it to be?’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Good,’ he says, and he speeds off.

Edward has always driven like a maniac. He says he does it to calm himself down. I remember the first time he took me to his parents’ house he swerved down the tiny country lanes as though he were the only person likely to be using them. He turned to me at ninety miles-an-hour and said, ‘At least if we die we’ll die together,’ which I didn’t find exactly relaxing. But then, I’m not friends with Edward that I might relax. I’m friends with him for lots of other reasons which I’ve suddenly completely forgotten. I’m not in the mood to deal with his mood, I’m fighting one of my own. Beyond this light summer evening, beyond this lovely walk, beyond this beautiful park and the friend that I love, it’s August, and winter ahead.

I surrender. Edward always does this and I always put up with it; I’ve stood on a sweating train for an hour to get here and at least he could be slightly pleased to see me; if I did to him what he constantly does to me our friendship would be over in five minutes; and whereabouts along the line did we agree that he was allowed to be a crotchety old git and I patient till he’d got over it? I feel like making a big gesture, I feel like telling him to stop the car and getting out without explanation, I feel like going home and never seeing him again. But I can’t, I won’t, I don’t, and this makes me crosser. My throat starts to throb and tears fill the backs of my eyes. I sometimes think it’s this pain in my neck and not the pain from anything else which makes me start crying – it’s unbearable and tears the only way to clear it. I can’t cry though, I can’t cry with Edward here in the front with me – nothing’s happened. Nothing unusual. This is the way he always is for the first five minutes, and nothing’s happened today to warrant this bad temper. Nothing unusual. But it’s like this mood is always lurking, like it’s easy to give into, like once I’ve crossed the line it’s such a job to send away.

We park the car in our usual place with the hill out in front of us. It’s seven o’clock and the summer light has brought out the punters. They play with their dogs, they play with their children, they even play with balls (I’ve never understood the attraction), they lie on their backs and they look at the sky with their fingers knotted in the hair of the one they love. Little boys fly kites and float model boats on the water. Why is this fun? I’d rather be the kite, I’d rather be the boat. ‘My God,’ I say ‘there’s even someone doing Yoga.’

‘There’s a hint of scorn in your voice.’

‘No there isn’t.’

‘There is – scorn and envy.’

‘I’m not envious.’

‘Are you in sparring mode this evening?’ he says, joking, but I take it badly, ‘Because if you are I don’t need to remind you who always wins.’

I hate Edward. I hate him tonight. He’s smug and we always do what he wants to do. We’ll begin our walk as usual in the Louisa Plantation and then he’ll make me march up that hill – which is agony but I never complain – and we won’t be allowed to stop at the top to look at the view but we’ll have to run down the other side, and then continue for another half an hour at least before returning to his car, where he’ll put my life in danger all the way back to his flat, where he’ll neglect to offer me tea.

I love Edward though, I’ll love him always, and how else would I have any of our walks, which are usually perfect? how else would I have him? I’m not really cross about any of these things – so what is it that I’m cross about? Somewhere I’m laughing at myself sulking but what makes me sulk more is that I just wish one part of me would win, would be it, would be me.

No one remembers who Louisa was, but her garden is a tropical paradise of waxy leaves and stupidly beautiful flowers, and you can’t hear the traffic from here. As we go in Edward says, ‘It’s all just going over. We should have come two weeks ago. Never mind.’

‘Never mind?’

‘I rather like it like this. Everything fermenting on its stalk.’

‘I’d have preferred it spectacular and two weeks ago.’

‘But there’s something so decadent – don’t you think? – about it, and I like the smell.’

‘Of rotting flowers?’

‘Perhaps I was a maggot in a former life,’ and then, ‘What’s that?’

‘I’m not playing.’

‘Only cos you don’t know.’

‘I do know.’

‘What is it then?’

‘An iris.’

‘No, it’s a gladioli. Come on, we’re going to our bench.’

I wonder with how many others of his friends Edward refers to this as ‘our bench’. I’m trying not to. Admittedly not that hard. It looks onto a pond from which you get a double dose of colour – first on the bank, then reflected in the water. He sits down. He never sits up straight. He says, ‘You’re right, it would have been spectacular two weeks ago.’

I say, ‘A garden takes such a lot of work and it’s all over so quickly. Bud bloom rot, it slightly freaks me out.’

‘Yes. But then it starts all over again.’

‘I know. It’s a wonder nature doesn’t get bored.’

‘Like you, you mean?’

I say, ‘I spent all last winter looking forward to summer, and now it’s August, and I’m going to spend all next winter doing the same.’

‘Well I’m sure you’re going to be doing other things as well. Let’s not get too dramatic.’

‘You know how when you’re a child, time seems to go really slowly? I’ve always wondered why that is. I mean, surely time should go more quickly then, when everything’s new and exciting, and slowly now when everything’s predictable and the same.’

‘I said that to you.’

‘No you didn’t.’

‘I said that to you the last time I was bored.’

‘Well, you should be flattered that I think it’s worth repeating.’

‘Yes – and here’s something else for you that’s worth repeating: Boredom is one thing that time doesn’t heal. You can get bored of being miserable or bored of longing for something that you can’t have, but you can’t get bored of being bored.’

‘So?’

‘So spur yourself into action. Make some effort, Lily. Do something.’

‘Like what? Anything I do will only be a temporary measure. Everything’s a temporary measure and that’s what’s depressing.’

‘Well, get used to it,’ he says, ‘You’re in for the duration.’

No doubt I’ve missed the point he’s making, but our conversation has made up my mind. I get home, I find the piece of paper and I do it immediately. When I tell him who I am Colin says, ‘I didn’t think you’d call.’

I say, ‘Neither did I.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ he says, ‘you must have thought I was a nutter.’

‘You still could be,’ I say.

He says, ‘The thing is, I was in the same carriage as you a few days before. I never thought I’d see you again – and when I did …’

‘How bizarre,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ he laughs, ‘how bizarre.’

It’s always a little unnerving when someone’s shared a moment with you of which you’re unaware. Once from the top deck of a bus stuck in traffic I saw Josh ambling along the pavement. He’d become one of a multitude of strangers making their way to various destinations, and, not aware that he was being watched, was showing himself to me so carelessly, so entirely, it felt rude to be observing – but I couldn’t look away. I’ve never told him. You always fancy yourself invisible, don’t you? going about your business, thinking your own thoughts, but Colin watched me in the carriage. And this is why it’s startling: here I’m the narrator, there I’m just the extra, entering and exiting stage right, stage left but suddenly we’re meeting: Centre Stage.

At this time of the year there’s a fairground set up in the middle of town. A merry-go-round made of horses (they’re boring), a big wheel, a roller coaster, waltzers, slot machines, ducks to shoot, toys to win and massive sticks of miraculous candyfloss. This is the place Colin has chosen for our first date. Ten out of ten for originality. The thing that’s worrying me is I can’t remember what he looks like, I’m not sure I ever knew. I’ve arranged to meet him by the 2p jackpots, but I’d quite like to know which one he is before he knows it’s me so I’ve got the choice to slip away … It’s quite exciting though. I’m taking my phone in case of emergency and Josh is to call it every two hours to check on me. He’s slightly excited too. We’ve laughed, he’s said, ‘You’re going under cover.’

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