Precocious (24 page)

‘Yes, please.’

‘I’m quitting,’ she says, peeling the cellophane off a packet of cigarettes, and unlike the hundreds of times she’s said it before, I believe her. Still, she says, ‘I really am. Soon. But for now, for a while, I just want to pretend.’ She looks at me, her eyes shining. ‘I want to go back.’

I nod. I understand.

Within a few hours we’ve both smoked ourselves hoarse and burnt our throats with neat spirits. No time for wine, or beer, tonight; we are serious about getting drunk.

It’s okay, though; we’ve been laughing. Crying a bit, too, but finding the occasional space to laugh. We lie on our backs, a battered sofa each, our heads at opposite ends, our feet close enough to extend to the occasional playful kick.

Old stories, old conversations, play out before us like cinema reels. We dig out questions we’ve been meaning to ask.

‘You and Todd,’ she says suddenly, and I groan a ‘not that again’ groan, which makes her giggle. ‘No, seriously. Why not? You two could’ve been the perfect couple. Coulda been, like, childhood sweethearts. All that rubbish.’

‘Yeah, and you could’ve married The Tobacconist.’

‘Very funny.’

‘I mean it!’ I touch her foot with mine. ‘Remember the time you gave me sex advice?’

She spits out her whiskey laughing.

‘The only sex advice I ever gave you, kid, was not to have it.’

‘I know. More responsible than you looked, weren’t you?’

‘I always did feel sort of responsible for you,’ she says quietly, ‘not sure why.’

I look up at the ceiling and watch the reel unfurl.

It was before a party; we were fourteen and sixteen, drinking cider and kohling our eyes. ‘Once you’ve done it, you can’t get it back,’ Mari was saying. The two years she had over me seemed like eons of wisdom. ‘You can still have fun. You can be the “everything but” girl. They’ll respect you more that way.’

‘What about you?’

She laughed.

‘I’m the “everything” girl, kiddo. Unfortunately. It’s too late for me – I was spoiled a long time ago. But once you become that person, people look at you a certain way. Damaged goods. So what I’m saying is, don’t rush anything.’ She paused, looked at herself in the mirror. ‘Christ, I sound like your mother!’

‘Yeah, except my mother would never give me such good advice,’ I said. ‘Or any advice, in fact. Mari?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Is that why you like The Tobacconist?’ We always called him The Tobacconist, instead of by his Christian name; I don’t know why, it was just a habit we started and couldn’t shake. It made us laugh for some reason.

‘Pah! I don’t
like
him. I just work there.’

The main thing I remember about The Tobacconist, it’s funny, is that he didn’t eat much, but he loved cheese. He was older than Mari; early twenties, looked thirty. He wore a small fluffy beard. He’d inherited the shop from the grandfather who’d raised him; he was an orphan.

He ate a different cheese every day, Mari told me. He was stringy thin.

‘Maybe it’s a sort of eating disorder,’ I would frown. Mari scoffed; she considered most illnesses a kind of vanity, and reserved the greatest of distaste for the psychological variety.

‘A man with an eating disorder,’ she’d say incredulously, ‘I mean. Ugh. That’s just wrong.’

And she shuddered and rubbed her hands together, looking rapidly around as though for a place to wash them; to wash the idea off her.

The Tobacconist (what was his name? It began with K, I think. Kevin? Keith, maybe) loved her, of course. Why else would he have employed her to work every single day – albeit for only a couple of hours each day? The shop was hardly busy; there wasn’t much call for a real, old-fashioned tobacconists’ on our estate.

Mari worked there not just for the money, but for the smell, she told me. She loved the smell, especially of the pipe tobacco.

‘You love
his
smell, you mean,’ I’d tease. And she’d wrinkle her nose and say that the smells of Wensleydale; of Brie; of apricot-studded Stilton, cancelled him out. But in her smile I could tell there was something, not just the shop, the smell, the money, it was him; he kept her going back.

‘You know what I’m saying,’ I said quietly. ‘He – he looks at you a different way, doesn’t he? He thinks you’re … better.
He
doesn’t see you as damaged goods.’

She was shaking her head, but she was smiling.

‘Just you stay
un
damaged for as long as you can, kid,’ she said. ‘As long as you can.’

Back in the present, she’s murmuring, ‘Kendal. That was his name.’

‘God, no wonder I’ve forgotten it. Really? As in mint cake?’

‘Yep.’ She sighs, ‘But anyway – you and Todd. What happened? Or more to the point, why didn’t it happen?’

‘Everything you said. Damaged goods and all that.’

She sits up.

‘What?’

‘It didn’t happen,’ I say slowly, ‘because of him. Because of Morgan. By the time I realised Todd liked me, and that I might have liked him, it was … too late. That’s how I felt, anyway.’

‘Todd wouldn’t have known.’

‘Maybe not, but I would have.
I
knew.’ I put out my cigarette and announce, ‘After tonight, I’m quitting, too.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘No, I mean it. And I’m going to cut down drinking, and eat well, and go to the gym.’

‘Gonna give up everything that’s bad for you, are ya?’ Mari narrows her eyes.

‘We’ll see … yeah, maybe I will. Maybe I’ll be good and go back to my husband.’ I’d not even considered this until saying it aloud, and am surprised to hear how familiar, how warm, the word ‘husband’ sounds in my mouth.

‘If he’ll have you.’

‘That’s not funny.’ My turn to sit up on the sofa. ‘Shit. What if he doesn’t?’

‘Well, you can’t expect him to have just waited around for you.’ She must see something in my face because she adds quickly, ‘But he will, babe. Course he will. But the thing is …’ She trails off, and for a minute she’s so still and so silent I think she’s fallen asleep. Just as I’m considering taking the burning cigarette out of her hand and throwing a blanket over her, she says, ‘Well, maybe you should be on your own for a while. Without either of them.’ She flicks away the teetering cone of ash, and somehow it lands in the empty glass on the floor without her even looking. ‘You could always stay here.’

My head is in my hands.

‘I think I’m getting my hangover early,’ I say, looking at the clock. 3 a.m.

‘You don’t have to take the safe route, you know. I’ve always said follow your heart, follow your dreams, all that crap, haven’t I?’

‘Yes,’ I laugh, ‘but if it’s that easy, how come I’ve got what I thought I always wanted and I’m not blissfully happy? How come I suddenly don’t know which way to go?’

‘Because maybe Morgan isn’t it, babe. The only way to know is to watch, and listen, and trust your gut. You know what they say,’ she smiles, ‘you only live once.’

I must have drifted off, because it’s 4.30 a.m. when Mari shakes my shoulder with the reproach, ‘Come on, kid – we’re supposed to be on an all-nighter. Like the old times.’

‘Jeez,’ I rub my temples, ‘I don’t remember signing up to that, but then right now I don’t remember much.’ I consider the half-empty glass of rum by my feet and think better of it, stumbling into the kitchen for water.

‘Remember that dumb ex of mine?’ Mari calls.

‘Ha! Which one?’

‘Very funny. You know, the married one.’

‘Oh yes, the married one. The one we don’t speak of by name anymore.’

‘Exactly. The one whose tyres I let down.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Well, I did more than that, you know. I never told you.’

I sit down next to her, cradling my glass. ‘What? What did you do?’

‘I sent stuff. To his wife. Photos, letters.’

‘Jesus, Mari.’

‘I know.’ She’s laughing but it’s a nervous laugh. ‘I had to. I had to do something, you know? It was spiteful, I suppose. I mean, I really hated her. I’m not proud of it.’

I picture her, running her tongue along the glue, sealing her evidence in a brown envelope, writing ‘Mrs’ coupled with his name on the front in her broad, curly handwriting. Or maybe she disguised her handwriting.

‘This was after she found out about you?’

‘Yep, and after he told her it was all over, when it wasn’t. It
was
spiteful, of course it was – I did it so there would be no way back for them. But I also did it because I knew it would make him hate me. So there would be no way back for
us
, either.’

She lights a cigarette; her eyes are filling with tears, but I know Mari well enough not to make a fuss, not to offer her a tissue. I know to pretend not to notice.
Still in pain
, I think,
after all these years
.

She goes on, ‘Because I would always have been tempted, you know? It would never have ended. And at best, sooner or later, I’d become the wife, and I’d be at home and I’d be the one he was cheating on. He’d be taking photos of someone else, writing letters to someone else. And I couldn’t have dealt with that.’

‘So you made sure that could never happen.’

‘Exactly.’ She tries to blow a smoke ring, makes herself giggle. She wipes away a tear. ‘Best damn thing I ever did.’

When there are only questions, you flit from place to place looking for answers. A few days after seeing Mari, I leave your door and take the train back to my parents’ house for a long overdue Sunday lunch.

I stare out of the window watching the landscape unfold behind the reflection of my eyes. Houses line up, identical apart from their gardens and their colour, the subtle ways people set themselves apart from their neighbours. Outer paintwork white, ecru, magnolia, beige. Shades of sameness. Desolate industrial estates slide by, barren chimneys, empty car parks. Miles and miles of inactivity.

I like listening to people’s conversations on the train. A young man, bright with the freshness of college or university, talks to a much older man (not his father, but an uncle? A family friend?) about accepting a job offer and turning another down. All around me, half-heard stories about choices. It strikes me that everyone’s life is a series of choices, of crossroads, and later, of What Ifs? And Whys? Why did I take the route I took, what if I hadn’t, where would I be now?

As my stop nears I’m overwhelmed by an urge to get off the train and get on another, go in a different direction, go somewhere I’ve never been, see what happens.

What if I disappeared? Suddenly for a moment I can see why people would do it. What if I just threw away my phone, took money out of the bank then cut up my cards, got on a train somewhere and never looked back? What would happen to me? Who would I meet? Where would I end up?

But the choices we make are not just the ones we take note of, like taking a job or not for this young graduate, like getting married or not, moving city or not. We make them every day, because every day we choose not to disappear. We choose to go on, and keep living the same life. And this is actually the most momentous choice of all.

What was mist is becoming fog now, and the way it half shrouds the buildings makes them eerily beautiful, as though they are hiding something.

Every day, I think, looking around the carriage, people do make the choice to disappear. And some of them are noticed, and missed; and some aren’t.

It’s a short walk from the station and the familiar streets make it seem even shorter. I’m annoyed by the litter, the overgrown gardens. I feel sad for my parents, that they never moved from here, and relieved that I managed to escape. Then I feel immediately guilty about it; what makes me better than the people round here? I appear in the doorway and am greeted, of course, with tea, and the usual question: ‘No Dave today?’ and disappointment when I shake my head.

The moment, for me, when Dave and I stopped falling in love and ‘landed’, was when I first took him home to meet my family. We had got to the point where you realise that even with the day to day humdrum of putting out the bins, and weeding the garden, life together is better than tolerable. Life together might even be good. We were only weeks away, as it turned out, from his marriage proposal, so he must have been thinking the same, and amazingly my family didn’t put him off.

In short bursts, of course, other people’s families are more than bearable; they can even be entertaining. In short bursts it’s easy to cover the cracks, and especially on a first meeting everyone is on their best behaviour. Consequently on days like this I loved them as well.

Today is no different. We’re a family at our best on Sundays, no interruptions apart from each other. My brother and I become kids again, teasing, nudging, laughing. His wife, Jill, looks on with amusement at a side to Alex she’s never seen. She’s good for him, I think. She’s quiet and studious and she looks at him in a way that makes me feel warm. I like her but she’s always been a bit guarded with me, as though I’m a living reminder of the world she pulled him out of, a bridge to an earlier, less civilised time. I want to reassure her, take her arm and whisper ‘don’t worry, I don’t want to go back there either’.

Our nostalgia is more than rose-tinted of course; it’s downright false. I know neither of us remembers getting on this well when we were kids, but we’re playing roles that make everyone comfortable. ‘Remember the time you?’, ‘Remember when we?’, we chuckle and snigger, even though we both know it wasn’t funny at the time, not funny at all.

For years I’ve felt that I’ve moved on and everything at home had stayed the same, and I thought that’s why I always resisted coming back, and felt uncomfortable when I did. But it dawns on me that they have moved on. Mum and Dad have become people again, not just parents: Dad shows me his new shed, Mum talks about painting the bathroom, but also, of course, about the darts team and her plans for a night out with the girls when they win the league. They seem to have fallen into contentment together, at last. I even see him squeeze her shoulder while she stirs the gravy; she smiles and doesn’t shrug him off.

Dave is everywhere in this house. The chair he usually commandeers; the window he looks out of into the garden while he chats with my dad about the football, about the weather. The imprint of him is on my parents: at a glance I can still see the pride on my dad’s face when he walked me down the aisle two years ago and shook Dave’s hand; the way my mum always blushes when he compliments her cooking, always over-feeds him, sometimes ruffles his hair as though he’s a beloved puppy. Shortly before we got married, Alex and Dave went out for a beer, for a ‘boys’ night’, and I remember looking at Alex in a new way, shoulder to shoulder with my husband-to-be. He wasn’t a boy any more, he was a grown-up, going for a grown-up drink, talking ‘man to man’, and I felt proud of my brother, proud of Dave.