Precocious (5 page)

‘Okay, okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll
let
you take me home. Especially as you won’t see me for a week!’

‘I know. How will I cope?’ You locked the office and we walked the empty corridors, side by side. I tottered to keep up with your brisk strides, the movement of which occasionally wafted aftershave vapours over me.

‘You should wear a coat, you know,’ you chided as you hurried me to your car, your own coat held stretched out over my head. I felt a bit like a criminal being shielded by police, and at the same time felt this was the most gallant act anyone could perform for me, imagining that an observer would see a kind of reverse Queen Elizabeth– Walter Raleigh tableau.

Feet splashing, hair dry, I bounced to the passenger door of your Honda.

While you drove, I had the chance to look at you close up. Not in a classroom, not in a corridor or on stage, you looked smaller. I studied the short perfect scar on the side of your face, etched out in a life before you met me, little me, one in 800; maybe you fell from a tree, or off your bike, before I even existed. When I was born, you were already a teenager.

I could look at you for hours
, I thought. The hair: sandy, scruffy. Chalk-dusted, in the week. The face: always tanned, the face of someone who is outdoors a lot, the wrinkles around your eyes whiter than the rest of your skin. That scar, a sudden hyphen just below your cheekbone.

‘What do you want?’

The question shocked me. I felt defensive. Had I overstepped the mark? Been hanging around too much? Did you mean, what did I want from
you
?

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you want to do with your life? What do you want to
be
?’

‘Oh. I don’t know.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Okay,’ I was surprised to hear myself say, ‘I want to write.’

I had never said that aloud before. It had been a thought, a dream, an itch in the back of my head that I paid no attention to. But in the car with you, I suddenly felt as though I could say anything. Perhaps it was because you mostly had your eyes on the road, casting me only occasional sideways glances. I could speak, to no one, looking straight ahead, or into the passenger window, where I could see your reflection.

And I liked watching you drive, your square hands smoothly turning the wheel, tapping on the dash. You were almost too casual, irritatingly assured, but in a contrived way. Your sleeves were rolled up to the perfect point of insouciance, midway between wrist and elbow; I imagined you in front of the mirror, adjusting them until they were just right. You were calculatedly ruffled.

‘What about the second question? What do you want to be?’

‘Hum. A writer!’

‘And I’m sure you will be. Let me put it another way. What do you
not
want to be?’

I thought about it for a moment. We stopped at traffic lights. You hung your right arm out of the window, and as you pulled up the handbrake you turned your head and looked at me.

‘I don’t want to be ordinary,’ I said finally.

‘I’ve told you before,’ as the lights turned green, ‘and I’ll tell you again. No fear!’

Outside the house, you said: ‘I want you to write something for me.’

‘I write stuff for you all the time!’

You fell quiet, looked hurt. What had I said?

‘For me,’ you repeated. ‘You don’t write for me, you write for examiners. You write for grades.’ Looked at me with those concrete eyes. ‘Write something for
me
.’

‘Thanks for the lift,’ I mumbled, pulling my bag out of the footwell.

‘Bye, sunshine,’ you called, arm still hanging out of the window, sunglasses back down, smile on, accelerator whirring, without looking back.

I could see my breath the next time you took me home. It had suddenly started getting dark at four.

‘I have to rewrite
A Christmas Carol
,’ you said.

‘You have to? Compelled to improve on Dickens, eh?’ I clicked my teeth with my tongue. ‘Wow, it’s true what they say – you
are
arrogant.’

‘Who says that?’ you smiled.

‘Everyone.’ I looked at your profile. ‘You must know everyone hates you!’

‘Nah,’ you said, ‘not the girls, anyway – they all love me.’

I made a gagging sound. ‘Oh, please. Sick.’

‘And come to think of it – the boys all want to be me.’

‘And you say you aren’t arrogant! Oh wait – I get it. Ha, ha. Very funny.’

It was true that most of the girls loved you. In the unofficial hierarchy of fanciable teachers, you were definitely in the Top Three. Mr Hill, Biology, was up there; he was newly qualified so didn’t look much older than us. He had pale skin, a fluffy blond beard and piercing blue eyes. He was skinny; he looked like a boy, to me. He always looked a bit stressed and would blush uncontrollably when the girls flirted with him, which they did, often. Some girls liked Mr Dawson, the Art teacher. He had a dark, brooding look about him and was prone to fits of temper, throwing board dusters across the room and roaring when he felt people weren’t listening to him. He
was
very good-looking, in a square-jawed, textbook kind of way, but he didn’t do anything for me.

The girls who liked you were generally the cleverer girls. You had none of the shyness of Mr Hill or the fieriness of Mr Dawson. You were cool, and calm, and responded to cheek from boys and flirting from girls in equally laconic tones, unruffled. And when you held someone’s eyes, you made them feel like they were the only one in the room.

When I heard them cooing over you and voicing their childish fantasies, I wanted desperately, even then, to shout that I
knew
you, I had more of you than they did. I’d been in your car; we’d talked, and not just about school work, about all sorts of things. I had your phone number. I was special.

‘So anyway, getting back to me being a better writer than our friend Mr Dickens—’

‘As well as being universally adored.’

‘Along with that particular burden, yes. Sister Agnes, in her wisdom, wants me to rewrite the story of Scrooge, in time for Christmas,
and
– wait for it – make it a musical.’

I pulled a face.

‘Wait, aren’t The Muppets doing that?’

‘Are they? Anyway, I’ve only got four weeks to do it. And stage it.’

You rounded the bend into our cul-de-sac and I started to gather my things from the footwell and wrap my scarf around my chin.

‘So I need your help.’

‘Me?’ I laughed. ‘How can I help?’

‘I’ll pick you up on Saturday at eleven.’

‘Saturday? But—’

‘Didn’t you hear me say we’ve got four weeks?’

‘Yes, but …’ I had the car door open and one foot out, and I stopped, confused, ‘where are we going on Saturday?’

‘My house.’ You winked. ‘Bring your first draft.’

We have arranged to meet in the hotel by the orange canal.

I do the thing I hate when others do it: I make the call to work and put on the sick voice. It’s not convincing, and my boss sounds annoyed; it’s Easter week and lots of people are already off. ‘You’re leaving me short-handed,’ he mutters. I croak ‘sorry’ and he hangs up.

I don’t know what I’m doing here.

I’m early. I check my face in the rear-view mirror, regretting last night’s whiskey. I slick on lip gloss, blot it off again with a crumpled tissue from the glove compartment. I don’t want to look as though I’m trying too hard. I walk into the hotel carrying my laptop. If anyone sees me, anyone who knows Dave, I can say I was having a meeting. It’s not that big a city.

I still have ten minutes. I open my laptop in an attempt to look busy. Order tea. Push my hair behind my ears, bite my nails. Sit on my hands.

I’ve always felt that hotel lobbies are in-between places, for in-between people. The scuffed tables are too low to eat or work from comfortably, so all around me people are hunched over. The chairs are school uniform colours of grey and burgundy, and clash with the well-trodden carpet’s hotel logo of royal blue and gold. Beleaguered waitresses tote cappuccinos and scalding pots of tea, and a man in the corner complains loudly about paying £4.50 for a round of toast. He demands Marmite.

This is a place for men on their own. Men in suits, all with square black cases, all with the same slightly rumpled look. Thoughts of the long weekend, thoughts of home, a wife, maybe a football game, are flickering in their eyes as they stare at their screens. A girl walks in and nervously asks two of these men ‘Are you Mr Peterson?’ before a third stands up and extends his hand. Perhaps it is an interview. She smooths down her skirt and sits down, smiling. She looks like a twenty-one-year-old me, filled with hope.

I wouldn’t say I hate my job; that would imply some kind of extreme feelings towards it, and I don’t have any. That’s just it; it’s the banality that gets me.

I have to admit I had a certain perception about sales, and specifically sales people, before I was one of them – hence my publishing ‘lie’. But most people in sales are basically good – there are the players, and the bitches, but they’re everywhere else too, so I’m told. The one thing that binds 90 per cent of us, though, is the fact that we didn’t mean to end up here. We all had other ambitions. I’m used to feeling out of place – at school, at university – not in the sense of being a major outcast, just in a subtle, indefinable way – and now I’m in a job where it’s practically a requirement.

You arrive and the whoosh of the automatic doors brings in a burst of cool air mingled with car-park dust. I see you before you see me. There is no hurry in your walk; it carries the absolute confidence that anyone would wait for you. Despite the threat of rain outside, you wear sunglasses, your rolled-up sleeves exposing a heavy watch and your weathered hands.

You sit down and help yourself to tea.

‘Good morning, sunshine.’

You push your sunglasses onto your head and fix me with your steely eyes. Something inside me flips over.

‘I bunked off work,’ I say.

‘I’m honoured.’

‘Don’t be – I don’t like it much.’

‘So why the laptop?’

‘A prop, I suppose.’

‘Shame. I thought you were tapping out your masterpiece.’

‘Yes, well … not quite got around to writing that yet.’

‘Again, shame.’ You look at me, unblinking. ‘I always thought it was in you.’

I feel my throat start to colour. ‘Maybe it still is,’ I shrug, ‘I don’t know, just … life gets in the way.’

‘I know. Tedious, isn’t it?’

Your grin makes me want to move nearer to you, want to touch you. It is lopsided: your imperfect teeth, your pale lips and the wrinkles that frame them, deeper on your left side. (I wonder whether that’s because you always blow out cigarette smoke to the left? Is that how it works?) It rarely reaches your eyes, but it does light up a face that otherwise would seem hard, with its scar, its angular nose. I want nothing more than to be the cause of that grin.

I want to say ‘Why are we here? What is this?’, but I know what your response will be: ‘you tell me’. So I say brightly, ‘So what shall we do today?’

‘We’ll drink tea,’ you grimace as you take a slug, ‘correction:
weak
tea, and then we’ll go for a walk. We’ll talk.’ You check your watch. ‘I only have an hour or so.’

‘Oh.’ I feel a little knot in my stomach tighten. I’d assumed we would have all day. I had thought … I don’t know what I had thought. ‘If I’m sick, I have to be sick all day.’ I can’t suppress the petulance in my voice. I look at my laptop.

You laugh a cold laugh. ‘I’m sure you have better things to do than hang around with an old man like me anyway.’

‘Of course.’ But the knot is twisting, and rising in my gullet. I’m suddenly conscious of the thudding tick tock of the oversized hotel clock. I wonder what you are doing later, what it is that will take you from me, but I can’t ask. I watch you yawn, lean back, stretch out your legs. The humming conversations, the plinking of computer keys, the clashing hotel colours and the suits, cases and phones are making me claustrophobic. ‘Drink up then.’

You are pleased to be outside, because you can smoke. You wave your cigarette hand at the canal.

‘Do you know why it’s orange?’

I laugh. ‘I don’t, actually. I’ve always just sort of accepted it. It’s weird, though, isn’t it?’

You stop walking, look at me, take a drag.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

You exhale; it’s like sighing. ‘I want to give you a good story now. Want to tell you some magical reason why it’s orange. But the truth is fairly pedestrian.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yep, something to do with iron ore, or something. Even more depressingly, there’s a big project underway to clean it up. Make it … I don’t know, the colour of every other canal. Dirty grey.
Not
orange.’ You suck on your cigarette again, offer me a drag. I decline, but watching it slip back in between your lips wish I had accepted.

‘That
is
disappointing.’ I pause. ‘Did you know there is no word in the English language to rhyme with orange?’

‘I think you told me that, years ago. Or maybe I told you!’

‘Ha! Memory failing, is it?’

‘Sunshine, everything’s failing.’ You reach over and grab my hand, squeeze it, then immediately let go.

‘Speaking of memories,’ you say, ‘whatever happened to that friend of yours … Lorna? Laura? Laura.’ You nod decisively.

‘Laura, yeah.’ I choose my words carefully. ‘We’re still friends. I still see her, but we’re not as close as we used to be. But I suppose that’s normal?’ I know I’m rambling now but this knowledge only seems to be making it worse, and bringing with it a nervous giggle, and when I try to take the rising inflection out of my voice I seem to replace it with a kind of bellow, the mad holler of someone speaking in exclamation marks. ‘I mean, it’s been fifteen years, after all! We’ve both changed!’

You look at me, click your teeth and make a ‘tsk’ sound.

‘Must be a man. Shouldn’t let ’em come between you. I told you that when you were fifteen and fighting over boys. They’re not worth it, kid.’

I don’t remember ever fighting with Laura over boys back then and I’d love to say you’re wrong about this, now, but you’re not, of course.