Calendar Girl (8 page)

“I’ll take the day off work. I’ll only go to them for a couple of hours. I’ll meet you in town.”

“No.”

“I’ll be home with you by nine thirty.”

“No.”

“OK. Well I’ll bring dinner. I’ll buy your favourite takeaway. And we can have champagne. Well, you can have champagne. We’ll get a video out. And we could go to a club. You know you always want to.”

True. I did always want to go to clubs and she’d always promise to go with me and then discover she was too tired at about ten thirty.

“No. I want to be with you. It’s my birthday for God’s sake. I want you. What am I going to do by myself for four hours?”

“Oh, come on Maggie! You’re a grown up, you’ve got friends, call someone, see if Dolores wants to go out and I’ll come and meet you later.”

“Right. Yes. Good move. That’s ideal. Now … what shall I say? – ‘Hi, Dolly, it’s Maggie. You know how you always told me it wouldn’t work? Well it hasn’t. It’s my birthday
and she’s gone home to her mummy and daddy. And no they won’t be sending me a present.’ Now that would be the ideal present for Dolores wouldn’t it? I can just see it, she’d be round here with open legs to comfort me in no time.”

“There’s no need to be crude, and anyway you know Dolores is far too much in love for that, even on your birthday!”

She was right. Dolores had fallen head over heels with a wonderful woman. A landscape gardener. And pagan. So now even my barbed confidante was not as free as she had been.

“You’re right there. So what do you suggest I do? Sit at home and be the good little wifey until you’re ready to come and play with me? Or perhaps I should come with you?”

That got her. She seemed genuinely scared that I should want to go with her. So scared in fact that it didn’t occur to her that I couldn’t possibly make the trek all the way to Golders Green merely to be insulted by her parents. So scared that she didn’t even realise I wasn’t serious. The protestations began.

“But you couldn’t … I mean they wouldn’t let you.”

“They couldn’t do much if I just turned up though, could they? Surely they wouldn’t cause a scene in front of the neighbours?”

“Well, no they wouldn’t. But you can’t. It’s not fair …”

“Not FAIR? It’s MY birthday!”

“Well you can’t, that’s all there is to it. I won’t take you.”

“I’ll go by myself. I’ll just turn up and knock on the door. In fact I’ll go early, before you’ve finished work, so I’m
waiting there for you when you get there. I’ve got the address. Yes. That’s it. I’ll go by myself. About time I met the in-laws anyway.”

I was furious by now, and so carried away that I almost believed I could do it. Almost believed I could brave their anger and hate. And she collapsed in front of me. Just collapsed like a punctured beach ball. Just curled up at my feet and begged me not to. Begged me not to go. Said she’d cancel. She’d stay with me. Said her mother couldn’t cope. Said she was sorry. She was thoughtless. She hadn’t known it mattered so much to me. Well, neither had I. She said she’d spend the whole day and night and every waking minute with me. Only she begged me not to go to her parent’s house.

She begged me not to do it.

And because it was up to me, because I was in control, because it was my decision, I said I wouldn’t.

“Don’t be silly darling, of course I wouldn’t go to your parents’. Can’t think of anything less fun to do really. Anyway, now I come to think of it, Dolores said Annie was probably having a party that night so I think I’ll go to that. You can come and get me later. I’d rather do that really anyway, after all, as you so rightly said, we do have the rest of our lives together.”

She hated me for that. But she never could hate me for long. Because I can never hate anything for long and I don’t let people around me stay mad. I get very, very angry, very quickly and then it’s gone. Like it was never there, except for the burn marks where my white hot rage has scarred someone or something.

She looked scared – and scarred – for a day or two and then, when she realised I really wouldn’t carry out the threat, life picked up as usual.

The way life usually does.

The day of my birthday dawned crisp and sunny with a strong breeze carrying promises of a clear day. I woke in her arms and, all pain of the previous week gone, began to make love for another year of my life.

Began to make love for another year with my love.

At nine thirty I rang in sick for her while she heated croissants and poured fresh coffee. We moved to the lounge for the sunshine and lay on pillows and duvet watching Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in
The Hunger
while we allayed ours. It was still early, before midday when she brought me clothes to dress in. Functional, warm clothes. Then she led me to the car where she blindfolded me and lay me in the back seat.

I got my day trip after all.

I succumbed to this order readily. For a treat with me as the centre I will always succumb.

It is when the event is not about me that I need to take control.

She drove, playing my favourite music for about two hours. My sense of time defined by which tapes were played and for how long. We arrived at the sea. It was sea by its sound and its smell. She sang to me in the back of the car and then she took me out to the shore. I taught her how to skim stones. To make them hop just across the surface
of the water, to make them curve as if they could come back to you, just before they sink deep under. She told me the names of different kinds of seaweeds and we picked shells from their beds and told each other stories of the crabs that had lived there.

“This was Mr Joseph Crab. When his girlfriend told him she was pregnant he ran away to sea and became a … hermit crab!”

“This is Miss Caroline Crab, all the other crabs hated her because she was too big and ugly to fit into any of the old shells and her hands were always too hard and ungainly, then one day while looking in the Directory of Crabs and Crustaceans she discovered she was not a crab at all, but a beautiful baby lobster.”

“So she climbed happily into a pot of boiling water and lived deliciously ever after.”

“Maggie! That’s so cruel!”

The Woman with the Kelly McGillis body wouldn’t know. She eats bacon sandwiches but not shellfish or any seafood. Not so much dietary laws as allergies.

I’m allergic to very little. But when I am, it’s obvious.

She brought lunch out from the boot of the car. Cheeses and bread, olives and hummus and salad and fruit and still frozen ice-cream and chocolate and champagne for me and beer for her. And so we ate and drank and feasted on each other and the day until it was mid afternoon and time to return. This time I watched as we drove home. Watched her sure and steady hands directing the car, much the same as her hands directed me. Sure, steady and always attaining their goal, my goal.

My hands are shaking.

She took me home where we washed and dressed. She for her parents, me for Maximum Impact. And then she dropped me off at Annie’s house on the way to the house where she’d grown up.

I walked in, about three hours before most of the other party-goers. Annie and Dolores were upstairs. Dolores was dressing. I could tell by the shouts coming from the bedroom.

“No. NO. NO. NO. That’s horrible. I hate them. I hate all my clothes. They’re hideous. Horrendous. I hate them.”

It was a cry I’d heard at least three times a week ever since I’d first known Dolores. Annie’s brother let me in and took me into the kitchen for coffee. Annie and her brother run the landscaping business together. She came out when she was seventeen and went straight into gardening. He went to Oxford, married a very nice woman, was “something in the city”, father to three children and the apple of his parents’ eye. Then when he was forty-three his perfect wife died and he and the three teenage children, none of whom had ever done anything more domestic than make a cup of coffee, discovered they couldn’t cope with grief AND housework. Annie moved her collective of housemates out and her family in. The five of them had lived very happily with each other and their fading grief for five years now, Keith doing the books and bookings and Annie doing the digging with occasional help from Keith’s son. And now they had Dolores on semi-permanent loan from her grateful flatmates. Keith handed me coffee and I handed him a few bucketloads of sympathy.

“Honestly Maggie, it’s not that I don’t like her – how could I not? I love the woman. And the kids are besotted with her. Of course they are, she’s completely loveable. It’s just that she … well, I know she’s your friend but she’s … so …”

“Mad?”

“Yes. And she doesn’t do the dishes.”

“That’s Dolly, Keith. She’s also crap at getting dressed.”

By the time Annie managed to force Dolores downstairs (wearing one of her dead grandmother’s sequinned cocktail dresses), other people were starting to arrive. The selection at Annie’s parties was always eclectic. Though she was only recently with Dolores, we’d both known her for years, so a good deal of my past turned up at that party too. By about nine o’clock they were all there. Two of my ex-lovers, Keith’s son and his girlfriend, his daughters and their boyfriends (it is a truth universally acknowledged, that given “alternative” parenting, teenagers will regularly emerge with partners far more suitable to their grandparents’ choice than their parents’), Keith’s mother, all of my ex-flatmates, half a dozen husband and wife couples and a gentle sprinkling of London lesbians. (The Brixton contingent stunning in mini skirts and platform shoes, the Stoke Newington crowd with DMs and dogs). And despite this huge group of people, loads of old friends, and a massive cake made by Dolores’ own hands (no candles, but three incense sticks – that is reality for Dolores!), despite all this, I still wanted my darling. Wanted her to wish me Happy Birthday. Wanted her to sing to me. Wanted her to hold me. Wanted her.

Which is when I did it. Went to the phone. Picked it up. Dialled their number. And hung up straight away. Of course they wouldn’t let me speak to her. Of course they’d
hang up on me. So I grabbed Keith. I made him call them. A man asking for her wouldn’t do anything but appease them. She’d thank me AND be able to talk to me. It was ideal.

Keith dialled to my instructions. He mouthed to me the phone was being answered. I could hear a man’s voice. He asked for her. There was talking on the other end of the phone and then Keith said goodbye. He hung up.

“Um, I’m sorry Maggie. That was her father. He said she hadn’t been there. Not all night. Not for a couple of weeks. He said to try her at home.”

I called our home number, but of course there was no reply. I asked Keith not to mention it to anyone and sent him to get me another glass of wine. I went outside to sit and wait. And think. I didn’t have to wait long. The car came round the corner within five minutes and I made my decision. It was my party and I didn’t feel like crying. I wasn’t prepared to argue with her so I decided not to mention it. Perhaps she’d been off buying my present. I ran inside to say goodbye and then dashed out to the car.

“Don’t let’s go back in. I just want to be with you. Let’s go home now.”

“OK birthday girl, whatever you say.”

On the drive home she told me about her evening. How her mother had asked about her job, how her father had just grunted when she bravely mentioned my name, how she’d stolen me another bottle of champagne from her parents’ supply.

And I just smiled and nodded and accepted her story. Like I accepted her present – a beautiful, big oval silver and
onyx ring. Accepted it even as I wondered how she could possibly afford it. She put it on my finger.

“Maggie, I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you tonight. But believe me, I thought of you the whole time.”

I let her kiss me and tried to return the kiss. I felt like my body was with her while my soul was off on the third level of Hell. I kissed her back then and held her very tight as if by holding her I could keep out the sharp splinter that was driving between us and cutting me. Cutting me up.

Of course I couldn’t. Once it was in there, it had to drive much further in until it could be finally drawn out the other side and the wound cleaned to heal.

She stroked my hair for hours that night. Her last words before she fell asleep were “I want to stay with you for the rest of my life.”

And she did.

Saz didn’t have to wait long for Charlie to come round. She was woken by the shrill alarm of a telephone call at 7am.

“Hey, ah, yeah … could I speak to Mrs Hannon please?”

“Mrs Wha … oh, yes, sorry, this is Mrs Hannon speaking.”

Saz regained her accent and her composure.

“Is this Charlie?”

“Yeah, ah, you said I should call … I know it’s early but I don’t have a lotta time.”

“No, of course not, Charlie it’s fine. I did want you to call me. I’d like to meet you if I could. Soon. Today. Obviously, I’ve just woken up, but …”

“Well, why don’t we meet for breakfast? I don’t start again until three, so that should give us plenty of time.”

Saz arranged to meet him at ten, hoping that five hours would be long enough – sure it was lots of time for what Charlie had in mind, but was it enough for her to get all she needed to know from Charlie?

She dressed in her most seductive outfit – mostly borrowed from Caroline and hailed a cab with the abandon brought
on by spending a week in New York on John Clark’s money.

She arrived at the coffee shop fifteen minutes early, wanting to be there before Charlie so she could set herself up with a nice high status position and give him lots of room to grovel to her. She ordered coffee for both of them and a croissant for herself. She didn’t have to wait long for Charlie. He had obviously spruced himself up for the occasion. His shoes shone as brightly as his slicked back hair and he came armed with a small bunch of violets.

“For you, I hope you like them.”

Saz felt almost guilty at having led him on so far, but decided to get on with her story anyway.

“Charlie, I’m afraid I must come clean about something straight away. I have to tell you I’ve deceived you.”