Other People's Fun, page 9
Jess confesses she hasn’t had a moment to study the proposal, but it’s at the top of her to-do list. She has to say, Sookie’s life sounds pretty appealing. Free agent, not answerable to anyone. Jess wouldn’t mind a bit of that.
‘Right. There are upsides.’
‘I get that!’ says Jess. She lives for Jeremy’s work trips. He’s pickier than the twins. Won’t touch Thai, aubergine, kale. Soup’s not a meal! When he’s out of town she makes a batch of dal or chickpea curry and sits on the sofa with a spoon, watching Below Deck, and it’s basically heaven.
She doesn’t mean it. However much Jess complains about Jeremy, she can’t conceive of a life without him. She’s one of those women who needs other people to remind her who she is – to show her herself. She spins through life like a pinball, re-energised by every flipper. It is hard to picture her alone, quiet, sitting still in an empty room. She was always like this. You saw the whites of her eyes as the girls stood up and began to move off at the end of a lesson or lunch break. She feared being left to her own devices because she wasn’t sure she had any.
On they go, listing the perks of absence. Being spared the snoring. Sleeping in the middle of the bed. No nose-hair clippers left out on the bathroom counter. Jess begins a long story, something about a conference cancelled while Jeremy was halfway to New Mexico, and my thoughts drift to a memory of Robin otter-faced in the armchair, ankles crossed, green socks, breathing through his mouth, fully and privately absorbed by the small screen in his hand; there in the room with me, and yet not there at all. I don’t miss that, I think, the memory going through me like electricity. Living with that was fucking awful.
Sookie holds the stub of her cigarette under the dribbling tap, then closes the window. She offers herbal tea in a manner that makes it easy to refuse. Jess’s long story bored her too. She’s had enough of us, of our company and conversation. Perhaps she wants to check her messages. Jess catches the signal and rises to her feet, full of regret: such a drag, meeting with the venture-capital people first thing, she must go home and sober up.
In the riotous carnival of her departure – the retrieval of bags and water bottles, the hugs and kisses, the insistence that we must do this again soon – I find my way back to the kitchen to give them more room, scraping plates and dropping them into the dishwasher. As I dry my hands on the tea towel, preparing to start my own farewell, Sookie returns. ‘Just help me finish this,’ she says, picking up the bottle. It seems she was only tired of Jess.
‘I do love her, but dear God, she brings out the slacker in me,’ she says. ‘It’s envy, of course.’
‘You’re envious of Jess?’
Sookie props her cheek on her fist. ‘Oh, you know – she’s so… busy. People to see, places to be. All that purpose. Get up and go.’ She lets her hand fall to the table, the click of her wedding ring hitting the wood. Then she says, ‘I don’t suppose she wakes up in the morning wondering what happened to her life.’
Candour, as clear and refreshing as a drink of cold water. This feels like the most honest thing Sookie has ever told me, and I’m filled with a rush of emotions: surprise, sympathy, pity and, yes, a strange kind of excitement, because she chose to say this to me, and her confession at this moment feels like a sort of anointing. Teetering on the brink of an unfathomable future (no longer needed by our children, confronting the thrill and dread of being superfluous), we are both, surely, aware that such gestures of intimacy are rare and bold, full of significance. Not unlike those moments, long ago, when someone you didn’t know well waited for you after class, and, as you made your way to the buttery, casually took your arm.
She has entrusted me with something important, and I must honour her bravery, because it will take us somewhere new. It’s a turning point. Perhaps before too long she’ll tell me about Waxham – ‘Ian’ – and maybe in return I’ll be able to make my own confession, permit myself to be seen. Leaning forward, feeling the warm glow of the pendant lamp on my shoulder, I say, urgently, ‘Jess may not feel like that, but plenty of us do. You know? I mean – I do.’
But she does not hear me. She does not react. She keeps talking, as if I haven’t said anything; or as if I’ve said something unremarkable, of no interest. Perhaps it’s what I’ve said; perhaps it’s simply that I was the one who said it.
She wonders if she’s having these gloomy thoughts because she finds herself here, ‘back in London in my parents’ flat, on my own, living this funny little life. You know what I’ve realised? This is the first time in my life that I’ve lived by myself.’ She went from Howard to flatmates to boyfriends to marriage and children, people piling in to keep her company. ‘I’ve never done this before. I’m trying to decide if I like it.’
She yaks away and I lean back, removing myself from the pool of light, saying nothing. There’s no point. She isn’t listening. She doesn’t care what I think. I remember those moments when we’ve been alone together, in the Witch Wood, in the empty house, and the thought occurs to me: maybe she really is a monster.
Sookie continues to talk. Air circulates between her mouth and her lungs, is pumped into words, strings of them, as whimsical and inconsequential as bunting or fairy lights, and while she talks she moves her hands, smoothing her hair or ruffling it, twisting it off her shoulder, and all the time her eyes are on her reflection in the window over the sink. ‘My old life seems so far away… and Murray calls me, just to check in, and I see it’s him calling, and I’ve started – this is really bad – I don’t always take the call. I’m getting ready to go out, or I’m watching something, and his picture flashes up, and I think: CBA. I mean, I could be in the shower or having an early night. Right? No big deal. But that’s not good, is it? I mean, it’s not good that I don’t feel I have anything to say to him.’
That’s not quite true, is it? I think. You have plenty to say. You just don’t want to say it to him.
‘Must be tough for the two of you, being separated like this,’ I say, just to be polite.
‘No, of course, it’s—’ and then I see her hesitate, and I wonder if she is on the brink, experiencing the temptation to give this great untold story of hers an airing. On the other hand, it’s quite possible she’s thinking of something else entirely – something bland and obvious, a remark about visas or Air Miles – in which I will be expected to take just as much of an interest. Who knows? I find I no longer care.
The pause hangs there, a piñata full of potential confidences, but instead of tearing into it with adroit questions, I step back. I offer bland and obvious remarks of my own, conventional reassurances – they’ll be reunited before too long, all couples have their ups and downs – that also signal I’m tired and the evening is coming to an end. As I gather my things, I observe her air of faint dejection, and this gives me a blaze of pleasure, an amplification of the pleasure I felt when she told me she was lost in her life.
Cuts both ways, I think, buttoning my coat and making my way out into the frosty night, leaving Sookie behind in those overheated, overstuffed rooms. Perhaps I do have some small power over her, after all.
I must thank her, of course, but an iMessage will do; no reason, now, to go to the bother of finding a pretty card, stamp and postbox. So I type a few words and press ‘send’; and I tell myself it’s as if I’m pressing ‘send’ on her, too, dispatching her in the way that I’ve been dispatched so many times and by so many people. She won’t mind that I’ve let her go; indeed, she is unlikely to notice. But that’s not quite right, because she texts back a few minutes later, a link to a show at Tate Britain mentioned at supper: Shall I book? Not responding to this, I feel a tiny dopamine hit, and then I return to the Tyrolean inn website I’m revising for summer visitors, adding details about family-friendly hiking trails, boat trips, geraniums spilling over windowsills.
Perhaps Sookie’s more intuitive than I’ve given her credit for, because she seems to sense my new ambivalence. Maybe she’s one of those people who, unused to rejection, finds the novelty of the brush-off quite compelling. Either way, over the next few days I ignore several chatty messages, and decline two FaceTimes. A fortnight passes, another week, and then she’s back again, a flurry of activity. I’ve just opened the door to the estate agent when the first message arrives.
Hey, just checking in, everything OK?
Garrett Wragg is an underpowered young man in a carrot-leg suit, and as he wanders through the rooms he leaves behind him a stickily fragranced haze indicating he didn’t have time for a shower this morning. I stand in doorways as Garrett eyes the scuffed skirtings, the place where the shower has leaked, the fault line snaking over Elizabeth’s ceiling. Arms folded defensively, I think of the things that happened in these rooms, the moments that dragged or slipped by without anyone noticing, and the moments that changed everything. We were opening tester pots on the landing when I told Robin I was pregnant. I used to feed the baby in that armchair. I was in the kitchen, making risotto, when I understood my marriage was over.
The flat is full of ghosts. They sit on the bottom step learning to tie their shoelaces, they open gas bills, they realise the guy who cleared the gutters nicked fifty quid, they hang up laundry and put out the recycling and write Christmas cards to people they haven’t seen for ten, twenty, thirty years. They hunt for thermometers and Sellotape and matching socks and the good vegetable peeler, they go off on holiday and come home again, they celebrate birthdays and exam results and small professional advancements. They do Covid tests and unpack groceries and end their marriages. They have no sense of me at all.
Garrett and I gather at the foot of the double bed, tourists at a tomb. The bedroom faces north, so it’s always a little dark; and today, with an overcast sky, it’s gloomy despite the lamps. The bed linen, which I shook and smoothed down so carefully first thing, now looks wrinkled and dismal. The pillows were set out like this – one on either side – quite deliberately, to save someone’s embarrassment, though I am not sure whose.
Garrett makes a few notes, comments politely on the garden view, and says he’s seen enough. As I stoop to turn off the bedside lamp, the thought half forms; and there’s the rush and crackle, the white flash, the sense that something is loose and wild in the room. I whip my hand away. The heat fades from the bulb.
These incidents have, I realise, become slightly less regular. After Robin left they seemed to happen every few days; now a month can pass, or two. Today I find I welcome this reminder, because it indicates some household gods will not be appeased or ignored, even as one begins to feel more at home in the middle of the bed, or has cause to remember his feet in those green merino socks. ‘Cheap bulb – there’s nothing wrong with the wiring,’ I say, and this is true; I got an electrician out when it started happening, he had a good look and couldn’t find anything – no problems at all.
It’s my wiring that is at fault. Over time, the idea has become almost attractive. I think of small stars fizzing and spilling over a tangle of cables, the smell and soot of scorch; something smouldering in the dark, trying to catch fire in a wall cavity or under the stairs. Out of sight, beyond reach.
The phone shivers again in my pocket and I’m filled with resentment. Here she is, still clamouring for my attention. Are you OK? really means Look at me.
When Garrett has gone, I check her Instagram and see she has put up one of those birthday-tribute carousels, a sequence of Murray cooking half a cow on a gas-fuelled BBQ, riding a Lime Bike, leaping from a rock into a Cambridge-blue sea. In the comments it emerges that he’ll be in London next month, just a flying visit, she can’t wait. I’ll bet. Like Waxham, Murray can’t be snooped on as he has no online presence beyond LinkedIn and an inert Facebook.
Sourly I scroll through the curated clutter. Toria Stewart posts a heartfelt RIP to a film star she nannied on a press junket thirty years ago. Dribbler shows off his latest mid-life crisis tattoo (acorns and oak leaves). And here is another dispatch from Jo Upshaw.
Jo is the daughter of my mother’s old friend Pam. As my mother has yet to get to grips with Instagram, she insists on referring to poor Jo while making a Pity Face, because Pam filled her in on all that business first with IVF and then, later, with custody battles and restraining orders. But Jo seems to be making a decent fist of moving on. Her feed celebrates her ‘miraculous, unlooked-for’ second marriage and her Grade II-listed mill, with its wildflower meadow and espaliered pears (not to mention the Pigeon Loft, which will launch as a holiday rental next year, along with a range of hand-poured scented candles called things like ‘Morning in the Orchard’ and ‘Walled Garden at Dusk’). Jo is forever bottling sloes, arranging sweet peas, harvesting herbs for simple suppers. In this exquisite atmosphere, the occasional glimpse of her second husband, a bloodstock agent with a penchant for zippered fleeces and pinkie rings, is vaguely traumatic.
It is hard to reconcile this Jo, with her spaniels and stuffed courgette flowers, with the frazzled person I knew long ago, the Jo who tipped oven chips onto baking trays while her boys bullied Elizabeth on the trampoline. Nowadays these boys have buns and beards and careers, and she refers to them as her ‘Best Beloveds’. When they visit, they smile uneasily from hammocks and wingback chairs, conscious props.
The world turns, and Jo, freed from a career in arts administration, must go out and document the stirrings of spring in Wiltshire, scattering ellipses like birdseed between Sensitive Thoughts: ‘Dusk is sweeping over Flaxton Courtenay as I stand at the Aga, preparing our supper of local chicken with a splash of vermouth, sautéed homegrown spinach and a dish of roast potatoes… Few things are as cheering as the sight of the first emerald-green shoots peeking from the earth; as brave and shy as girls at their first party, they are as irrepressible as hope – each one a miracle, a tender tribute to all that has been, and a promise of all that is to come… A joyful gift, and one I am glad to share with this kind and gentle community…’
She’s only giving thanks, I know. She’s only counting her blessings. There’s no room here for reality, though she will have her share of boiler issues, health scares, financial worries. But Jo’s account is an incantation, a prayer, a gratitude fantasy. Surely it’s that, rather than a bullhorn fuck-you going out to all the naysayers, the mean girls, the men who never called, the maternity-leave cover who took her job, Simon, and Simon’s junior associate who gave birth to their daughter last month; and all those people on the periphery of her life – people like me – whose homes are, unfortunately, not quite as nice as hers.
Sookie tries again, once or twice, and then the messages peter out. She has given up and gone away. Every so often I notice her getting on with her life, the life she chooses to show to the rest of us, and it seems – as I get on with mine – very far away, and even flimsier than my own.
I’ve been through a bottleneck with various small but finicky projects, and then the usual happens once I’ve met the deadlines: brief relief, then my anxieties start to build. What if the work dries up completely? What then?
I have a few days of feeling wretched and then, coming out of the dentist near Russell Square, I learn I’ve won a contract with a German manufacturer of kitchen appliances, to work on their UK marketing content. The contract isn’t worth a great deal, but it’s a fillip, something in the diary. It’s starting to spit with rain so, buoyed by good news, I decide to take refuge in the British Museum.
I haven’t been here for years, not since Elizabeth was small (too small to take an interest, on one of those winter weekends when we all needed to go somewhere for a few hours). At the main gate I’m reminded again of the illustration from an E. Nesbit novel: statuary, swords and storage jars flying between the vast columns into the courtyard, magicked from dusty display cabinets by the Babylonian Queen. It’s a vision that seems less outlandish now, as if, finally, the times have caught up with it.
Inside, the spaces are filled with snaking lines of children in hi-vis bibs, primary-school processionals that carry with them a carnival atmosphere as if en route to a gala event. I go upstairs, where it’s quieter. Drifting between glass cases, I am not sure what I’m looking for beyond the shock of connection: something both remote and familiar. A hand gesture, the pleats on a carved tunic, a cat’s striped fur on a fragment of pottery. For a moment my attention catches on a display of small sooty-eyed figurines made of stone, clay or blue-glazed faience, but something about their unblinking scrutiny discomfits me, and I move on, drawn to more fabulous and glittering things.
Later, I’m coming home, rising to the surface, stepping off the escalator when I see Gretchen Armitage up ahead in a green coat, waving her Oyster at the gates. I fall back as she crosses the ticket hall but she stops by the exit, daunted by the rain. She checks in her bag for an umbrella and I see the little crumple of her posture as, briefly, she gives in to self-hatred. The rain blows in against her, wetting her sleeve, the skirt of her coat, her boots. She retreats. There’s no way around it so I put my hand on her arm and say hello and we laugh and complain about the weather. ‘You’re more than welcome to share mine!’ I say, pressing the button. My umbrella opens with bat-like alacrity. Respecting superstition, I hold it away from us, towards the street; the veil of rain dances before us, coarse and then fine, twisting in the light.
Gretchen weighs it all up: a few moments of enforced intimacy under my brolly versus waiting here, cold and damp, with the Big Issue seller.
‘Very kind,’ she says. ‘I only have to get as far as the bus stop,’ and we step out together, shoulders and arms bumping in awkward proximity. It is strange to find myself this close to another body.
In a shopping centre the other week, I allowed a sales rep demonstrating ceramic hair tools to use me as a model. I wouldn’t have agreed if there was an audience, but the plaza was quiet, apart from soft pop and the splash of fountains, and she looked as if she’d had a lousy day, and I was tired, so I dropped the tote containing printer paper and teabags and sat down on her little stool.
