One Thing Led to Another (3 page)

Doubtless the most ingenious popularity device ever known to man, the Jacuzzi comes complete with wooden surround, massage jets, and a film of mould growing around the outside. 21 Linton Street has always been THE back-to-mine post-party house, scores of people padding their soap-sudded feet from the hall to the basement and vice versa, to shrivel up in our Jacuzzi and have drunken conversations about where we’ll all be in five years time. The trouble is, those five years are up now. You’d think that the novelty of having deep and meaningfuls in our swimwear would have somewhat worn off but we’re still at it.

Though Jim took my room when I went travelling in 2002 – he rented his flat out for some much needed cash – it was always very much a single girls’ pad. Then Vicky committed the ultimate crime (in Gina’s eyes anyway) which was to not only marry Richard, but have his babies. It was, of course, totally predictable but still, Gina and I didn’t expect to be here nearly a decade later. In fact Gina was so convinced that whatever bloke she was shagging at the time was about to ask her to move in with him, she didn’t buy a bed for two years.

And I thought I’d be long gone by now, married, living in a garden flat, but we’re both still here, maxing up the rent so we don’t have to get in a third person. Gina continues to go out with tossers (the sort who talk about moving in together by week three, and who have dumped her by week five). And I just coast along quite happily, cheered by the odd shag with Jim, wondering how I wound up, twenty-eight and a half, living like an ageing student.

When I eventually recover from my laughing fit I realize Gina’s glaring at me. Gina doesn’t like people laughing at her boyfriends, even when they offer up the jokes themselves.

‘Tess can do better than that, can’t you Tess?’ she says, playfully. ‘What’s the worst thing
you’ve
ever said in an interview?’

Here we go, Gina loves to wheel this one out at every social occasion. ‘Do I have to?’ I groan.

‘Yes, you have to. It’s genius. Go on.’

‘I once told the Head of a PR company that I was fluent in Italian,’ I sigh. ‘Which would have been fine, if I hadn’t failed GCSE.’ Everyone waits for the punch-line. ‘And she hadn’t been Italian.’

Gina claps her hand with glee. ‘Love it! Cracks me up every time! I wouldn’t mind,’ she continues, hardly able to talk she’s laughing so much, ‘but her name was fucking Luisa Vincenzi!!’

And I have to admit. It is quite funny.

It is only when Marcus starts to get fresh, playing footsie in the water, I come to my senses, realize I am shrivelled like a prune, and am utterly and totally shit-faced. When I eventually make it to the sanctuary of my bedroom it’s gone three a.m. I climb into bed, sink back into the coolness of my pillow and exhale, slowly, deeply. Outside I can still hear cars whizzing past, the faint sound of engines revving, London still alive and throbbing. I don’t know how I’m going to get up tomorrow, or make it through the day on four hours’ sleep.

The other thing I don’t know, is that somewhere deep inside of me, cells are multiplying, life is just beginning.

‘
Funnily enough, Chris was watching football when I came home. “Right,” I said, “do you want the good news or the bad?” “Good news,” he said. “I’m pregnant,” I said. “And the bad?” “It’s due in June.” I called him immediately after Grace was born, but he didn’t pick up. When I heard Pearce and Bates had both missed penalties, I punched the air. Needless to say, divorce proceedings were already underway.
’

Laura, 25, Leicester

The next morning, I’m sitting on a stool drinking tea in the kitchen when Gina wanders in with Jasper, still complete with trilby.

‘God, rough as a bear’s arse,’ she yawns, reaching above my head to get mugs out of the cupboard so I have to duck, spilling tea all over my nightie.

I wince slightly as the heat hits my skin. ‘Don’t feel too clever myself. How about you Jasper? You feeling rough? You’ve got the right idea with that hat, that’s for sure.’

Gina raises an eyebrow, she knows I’m being sarcastic but he doesn’t hear me anyway. He’s got his hands down his pants and his head in last Saturday’s copy of the
Guardian
Weekend.

Gina wanders over to the kettle, coughing, or rather hacking, and switches it on then pulls her curvaceous little frame up onto the worktop. There’s a flash of red knickers from underneath her dressing gown.

‘Jesus, I need to give up the fags,’ she says, when she’s eventually recovered from her coughing fit. She’s been saying that for ten years. I got her four sessions with a hypnotist once, in return for being in a health feature in
Believe It!
magazine. It did nothing to help her kick the habit, but she did gain a new one: the hypnotist. Blaise Tapp he was called, and that was his real name. She ended up shagging him for three months.

‘Tea or coffee Jasper?’

‘Er, coffee. But only if it’s proper coffee. One sugar please.’

He leans back on the kitchen chair, stretching his arms above his head. He’s wearing a string vest, so I can see his thick, dark underarm hair sprouting forth like those fake moustaches you get in joke shops.

I get up to put my bowl into the dishwasher and realize I’m wearing no bra and my nipples are probably on show.

Gina opens her side of the cupboard. We did try sharing everything once, but due to our clashing eating habits, i.e. I eat like a horse and she eats hardly anything, it didn’t work out that well.

‘Fuck, no coffee,’ she mutters under her breath.

‘Have you got any real coffee I can borrow Jarvis?’

I get it out of the cupboard and hand it her; she doesn’t say thank you.

Gina can be a bit like this: brusque, bordering on rude. It gets people’s backs up sometimes. Jim goes into teacher mode and tells her off and Vicky just steers clear. And me? Well, I’m well practiced I suppose. Gina may act like a tough little cookie, but she’s soft as treacle inside, sensitive as anything. I definitely blame the parents: palmed off to nannies as a
baby, sent off to boarding school aged eight. I suppose earning £70,000 plus in the City it’s not as if Gina needs someone to give her financial security, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that even though she resists it like an exhausted toddler resists sleep, she just needs to be loved. Which is why I worry about her choice of men.

Jasper excuses himself and goes for a shower, his jeans hanging off his arse to reveal the start of a most unsightly hairy crack. I worry I’m turning into my mother.

‘He’s such an interesting guy, isn’t he?’ says Gina, walking over to the kitchen window and putting her nose to the glass. Outside, the morning light is cobalt blue, like a church window. ‘So creative.’

So obviously a prat, I want to say, but I don’t. I couldn’t. I mean it’s not that he is an evil person or anything, he just isn’t boyfriend material. And Gina, more than anyone else I know, could really do with a boyfriend.

I am getting out of the shower when I hear my mobile. Oh for God’s sake, piss off! Who can possibly have something so important to say, that it needs saying at eight a.m.?

I get to the phone on the fifth ring.

‘Hello?’

‘Tess?!’

Even though she has known me and my voice for nearly thirty years, my mother still behaves as if I am Terry Waite, and this is the first time she has spoken to me after twenty-five years in captivity. I wouldn’t mind, but this level of drama can be quite exhausting, especially when she sometimes rings twice a day.

‘Oh it’s you. Hi mum,’ I say, sitting down on my bed. I am only wearing my towel and am dripping wet through.

‘Oh, thank God. Thank
God
you’re OK,’ she says breathlessly.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

Had there been a national disaster whilst I was in the shower? A bombing, a military coup? A tsunami perhaps?

‘I just worry about you down there, that’s all. There’s always that part of you when you’re a mum – you’ll see when you become one! – that worries something might have happened in the night.’ Remembering the near miss I had last week, I wince at this, hold the receiver away from my head.

Welcome to the world of Pat Jarvis. Fifty-four, happily married to Tony Jarvis, two wonderful children, Tess and Edward, the loveliest woman on earth, and pathologically pessimistic, especially when it comes to the safety of her own children.

If there had been a train crash in, say, Cardiff, my mother would not rule out the chance that I had been interviewing someone in Wales that day and am therefore lying dead and mutilated on the rail-track. If I am not able to get back to her within half an hour of her ringing, she’ll imagine me bound and gagged in the boot of a crack-dealer’s car, as my phone rings futilely in my coat pocket. When I was a little girl, she would refuse to let me help her bake in case I got my hand mangled in the whisks of her electric blender or my jugular slashed through with a bread knife. To cut a long story short, my mother is constantly amazed that at twenty-eight years old, I am still alive. Such is her faith in my ability merely to survive.

‘I was just calling you to remind you about your brother’s birthday. But before we talk about that, I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news.’

Now there’s a surprise.

‘David Jewson died yesterday. Sixty-two, dropped dead in his garden, just like that.’

She awaits my reaction as I trawl through my brain, trying for the life of me to remember who David Jewson is.

‘That’s terrible. But…um…who’s David Jewson?’

Mum sighs. This is not quite the reaction she was hoping for.

‘Oh come on, you do know David Jewson, Tessa. You went to school with his daughter, Beverley. Lovely girl, very pretty, works at Natwest in town.’

Beverley Jewson had middle-aged hair and once won Young Citizen of the Year (need I say more?). That doesn’t make it any less terrible for her to lose her dad, of course, but why does my mum insist on banging on about the merits of other people’s children all the time? Wasn’t I pretty? Wasn’t I intelligent? (Wasn’t I deplorably childish and should pull myself together?)

‘Oh yes, I remember Beverley now,’ I say, biting my lip. ‘That’s awful. Absolutely terrible.’

‘Well it was Tess, it really was,’ she says, perking up. ‘The thing was, he was perfectly fine last week. I saw him in the Spar as I was buying your dad a chicken Kiev for his tea. There I was, digging around in the freezer section when I felt this hand on my back and heard this voice say, “Hi Pat, is that you?” I felt awful because I had my bi-focals on at the time and I didn’t recognize him and…’

Bla bla bla…

I am only roused from the catatonic state brought on by one of my mum’s monologues when I hear her say…

‘And your dad’s fifty-seven this year and he’s not getting any younger. And, he’s in one of his “funny moods” again.’

Dad gets in what mum calls his ‘funny moods’ every few months. He goes a bit quiet, watches telly a lot and potters around his greenhouse more than usual, but that’s about it. I don’t know why she gets all stressed about it. You just have to know how to handle him, i.e. leave him alone and stop nagging him, poor man.

‘For God’s sake, mum, dad’s not going to drop down dead.
He’s got more energy than you and me put together.’

This is true. My dad owns a construction company so he’s up and down ladders, lifting sacks of cement daily. On top of that, he’s on the golf course every weekend and last year he ran the Morecambe 10K race dressed as a shrimp for Cancer Research. What my mum lacks in get up and go, my dad makes up for ten fold. If anything it’s my mum whose health is dodgy, the amount of time she spends sitting on her backside scoffing stilton and watching
Emmerdale.

‘You’re right lovey, you’re absolutely right,’ she sighs. ‘But the mind does boggle. I mean, alive one minute, dead as a doorpost the next. He was just mowing his lawn at the time, can you believe it? Who’d have thought mowing your lawn could kill you.’

I chuckle to myself at the characteristic lunacy of this comment. If mum had her way, we would all be bubble-wrapped and crash-helmeted in order to protect us from the potentially life-threatening nature of grass cuttings.

It’s ten more minutes at least before she shows any sign of hanging up and allowing me to get ready for work.

‘Now, don’t forget Ed’s birthday will you? It’s next Monday so make sure you post a card on Saturday because there’s no post on a Sunday and…’

‘Yes mum. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a complete imbecile.’ I hold the receiver under my chin as I attempt to put on knickers. ‘I’ll speak to you soon. Bye! Bye…!’

I press ‘end call’ and feel instantly guilt-ridden. Poor mum. Living in London, I never seem to have the time for leisurely phone calls with her anymore and I sometimes worry she feels jealous that I manage it with my dad. It’s just, me and dad have an understanding. Whereas my mum and my brother were born with a tendency to gossip and dramatize, to expect the very worst and then delight in going on about it when that prophecy is fulfilled, me and my dad have always come
at life rather more sunny-side-up: in the belief that everything and everyone is good, until proved otherwise.

I finally leave the house at 8.40 a.m. thinking I’ll just have time, if I’m quick, to pop into Star’s before catching the bus. Star’s is the dry cleaners on New North Road. Its run by a family of Turkish Cypriots, headed up by Emete, whose numerous spare tyres and racoon-ringed eyes belie an energy level so phenomenal, you wonder if this woman could pop out another five babies to add to her brood this week, and still get the whole street’s ironing done.

The bell sounds as I push open the door. Emete bustles to the front of the shop, a tape measure around her neck.

‘Tessa, my love. What a wonderful start to the day!’ She opens her arms – each the size of one of my thighs – and places an enthusiastic kiss on both cheeks.

‘Hi Emete. Morning Omer!’ I shout, peering through the rows of plastic bags to the back of the shop where Emete’s husband sits, coffee in hand, reading the newspaper. He raises a hand without looking up.

‘Now angel, what can I do for you?’ Emete pins a pink ticket to somebody’s jacket and hangs it up on a rail to her right.

I hear the doorbell go again and am half-aware of a presence beside me.

‘It’s this shirt,’ I say, taking the linen shirt out of the bag and laying it out in front of us. ‘It was in my last lot of dry cleaning but it’s not mine, there must have been a mix up.’

Emete puts the safety pin she was holding between her teeth and holds it up to the light. ‘How strange,’ she says.

‘Very strange,’ says a voice. I recognize it instantly. ‘I’ve got the same problem.’

Another item of clothing appears on the counter.

I stare at the white linen dress in front of me, and then at
the hands placed on top of it: tanned, big, with slender fingers and round, shell-pink nails. I’d know those hands anywhere. I trace the arms, lean, boyish, a perfect covering of fine, black hair and then the face, I’m looking at the face. My hand goes to my mouth, my heart starts to race.

‘Laurence?!’

Brown eyes, behind which lie albums and albums of memories of us, are staring at me now, flickering with disbelief. He covers them with his hands. Those oh so familiar hands. ‘Tess?’ He uncovers his eyes again. ‘Shit, it
is
you.’ He looks at the shirt. ‘And that’s my shirt!’

Emete, prone to fits of the giggles at the best of times, is doubled up now, great wheezy laughs making her bosom heave.

‘You know her?!’ Her bulbous eyes are round as gobstoppers. ‘You know him?!’ She summons Omer from the back of the shop. ‘In fifteen years, Omer! I’ve never known…oh! How wonderful!’ Omer shuffles forward, puts his arm around his wife and gives a silent, toothless grin in appreciation of the moment.

We exchange clothes – Laurence gives me my white dress, I try to give him his shirt, but my hands are shaking so much that I drop it, at his feet.

‘Sorry, whoops.’ (What sort of a word is whoops?!)

‘It’s alright, I’ve got it.’ He picks it up. When he stands up, his face is so close to mine I can see the subtle bumpiness of this morning’s shave. Laurence has hardly aged at all. Hairline slightly retreating perhaps, but only to reveal two sun-kissed Vs and some fine laughter lines around those lazy, pretty eyes. I hold his gaze for as long as I can bear, then look away, embarrassed.

‘Hello,’ he says.

‘Hi,’ I say. Then we look at each other, but we’re flabbergasted, half laughing, not having the slightest clue what to
say. I haven’t seen him for five years. Not since that freezing November morning at Heathrow airport.

‘It really is you’ he says eventually.

‘I know, I know!’ I say, giggling like an idiot and wishing I’d at least had time to put some mascara on this morning.

‘I cannot believe…’ He steps back, as if to get a better look at me.

‘Nor can I!’ I look at Emete, who’s still shaking with laughter like a mountain in an earthquake. ‘It’s totally freaky!’

We stand there, all four of us laughing, not really sure what we’re laughing at except that this is turning out to be the most extraordinary, wonderful, glorious morning.