Dead Lovely

This book wouldn’t have happened without the faith and perseverance of my agent, Adrian Weston at Raft PR: thank you, thank you, thank you.

Louise Thurtell, Lauren Finger and everyone at Allen & Unwin – thanks for turning this into
something
I’m truly proud of.

Thanks to Wanda Gloude at Ambo Anthos, who was the first to believe in the book, and to Helen Francis at Faber & Faber.

And to the tireless Sergio Casci who keeps me sane and very, very happy.

Some people find themselves all at once, like an explosion. Backpacking in the Himalayas maybe, or tripping on acid. Some people study the art of finding themselves, and graduate – or not – after years of diligence. I found myself bit by bit, through a series of accidents really.

The first bit I found was in a tent on the West Highland Way. My best friend Sarah was asleep. Her husband was lying beside her, and I was swallowing his semen.

I discovered the next piece of me at the bottom of a cliff, where I dragged Sarah’s dead body, bumping her head from rock to rock. Sarah, my best friend since we were little girls, who I’d betrayed and murdered.

And then, in the darkness of my parents’ attic, I found the rest of me.

Until a week ago I had only made one really
significant
mistake in my life. I knew I had faults. Little things, like I was vain and impatient and I drank twenty units of alcohol a week, which is a lie, because it had to be at least twenty-five, which is also a lie. But I had only done one thing that I was truly ashamed of.

I’d gone to Tenerife with Marj from work, who knew a guy who knew a guy who could get us some pills. So Marj and I spent seven days sleeping on black sand drinking orange juice, and seven nights in a nightclub touching each other’s faces and dancing to specks on the dance floor, which seemed somehow beautiful and threatening at the same time. I was dancing to one particular speck one
evening
when I realised a man with white teeth, dressed in a khaki T-shirt and Diesel jeans, was dancing with me and also understanding the speck on the floor.

We looked at each other for a moment, and smiled, both thinking exactly the same thing at the same time. ‘At last, someone who knows me.’

I shook my head in disbelief. I’d found him!

He touched my shoulder with love, with a true touch of love. I felt his face with my warm fingers. Then I took his hand, walked calmly to the ladies’ toilets, pushed him into the cubicle, curled my black thong down my legs, and pushed his head down and into me. He surfaced with surprising swiftness, and we made love against the pure white tiled wall
of that wonderful, soft place. We looked into each other’s eyes, held hands, and made love.

It’s weird how a hangover creeps up on you. Mine came at the same time as the man with the teeth did. Almost like a gunshot, exhaustion, eye pain and bad breath banged into me. Boom. I was hungover, and I could see that the white grit between the tiles was actually grey with the settled, damp fumes of pee; that the toilet was brown with steamed-on shit; and that my man, my beautiful true love, had a piece of something orange fused between his two front teeth.

I wished he would wipe the slime from me off his face, and I needed a drink of water.

I found Marj and hauled her from her place on the dance floor and we went back to our hotel room.

Until a week ago, that was the only big mistake I had ever made. The only thing I truly regretted. Conceiving little Robbie in that way. My little baby, Robbie.

It was Sarah who helped me through the pregnancy. We had a history friendship – time had earned us the right to each other’s unconditional love. And while we annoyed each other endlessly, especially as the years morphed us into our mothers, we felt true love for each other. If the parking inspector did not back down, it was Sarah I rang for a whinge. If I had an ingrown hair that required surgery, it was Sarah, the nurse, who operated. If I needed to sit on a sofa and not talk, it was Sarah who silently provided the very good crisps. She was my rock, my protector.

Sarah and I met when we were four, and I
immediately
loved her because she was pretty, with
well-brushed
shiny blonde hair and bright blue doll-like eyes. She was never alone in the playground, was never worried about people liking her or not, and was soothing to look at, like the sea.

Sarah was everything I wasn’t. She was sensible, and would never rollerskate down a steep hill or spill juice on her spelling jotter. She was girly. While Santa brought me water pistols and gardening rakes, Sarah got pink fluffy things and dolls that peed and cried (and freaked me out). But perhaps the biggest difference between us was that Sarah was an indoors person. She could spend all day in her room playing with Tiny Tears – cooking for her in her mini kitchen, ironing for her with a mini iron, dressing her in those mini dresses.

I, on the other hand, hated being indoors. I’d play in the street, in Pollok Park, at the arcade, in my friends’ gardens, but when I played at Sarah’s house we almost always stayed inside. If I ever managed to get Sarah to come outside to play when we were little, it would be on the strict condition that Tiny Tears could come too, and while I would build a mini tree house for the doll to escape to, Sarah would feed her porridge, wipe her face, change her nappy and rock her to sleep.

Poor Sarah. A baby was all she’d ever really wanted for as long as I could remember. At first when Sarah was trying to conceive she’d ring her husband Kyle excitedly at his surgery and get him to come home and do it because the time was right – her discharge was clear, her temperature was high, and she was
horny as all hell. Afterwards they’d giggle as he put his stethoscope on her tummy to ‘listen to him swim’.

But as time passed, Kyle found he couldn’t leave patients waiting, or he had home visits to do, and Sarah wondered if her cycle was more elusive than she’d believed. After a while, she decided that it wandered around the month invisibly, and in order to catch it she and Kyle should have sex every night.

This went on for two years. They got good at it. Who needs lubrication? One difficult shove at the beginning is a small price to pay for efficiency.

But after twenty-four months of nightly sex, the sperm still seemed to be doing bugger all.

So Sarah left work, deciding the stress in Intensive Care could be having a detrimental effect on her ovaries. Then Kyle used his clout as the longest-serving GP in South Shawlands Surgery to get a speedy referral to the best fertility specialist in the United Kingdom. Sarah took medication, felt ill and grumpy, no longer tended her garden with gentle care, put the renovation plans for the
weekender
near Loch Katrine on hold and moaned to her oldest and closest friend – me – every night on the telephone.

‘Kyle is working all the time! Why? Why? Why?’

The first time she rang, I suggested we go out and get drunk.

‘Do you want the baby to grow up short?’ exclaimed Sarah.

Next I suggested going out for dinner. I only suggested this once, after she put me off mussels marinara forever with her concern about bacteria.

I am deeply ashamed of this now, but after months and months of calls I got tired of it all. I had listened and counselled with proper concern for so long. I had cried with her, my friend whose
inexplicable
maternal urge had exploded inside her with enthusiasm but without capacity. I had bought her homeopathic remedies, books, nicotine patches, gum and inhalers. What about this? That? Get Kyle checked out. Check your elasticity down there. Clear and elastic. Most important, relax.

But none of it had worked, and I got tired.

So, there came a time when I found myself taking a very deep breath before answering the
late-night
calls. There would be a silence and a snuffle, and I would ask her how she was and the answer would never be good. She was obsessed. Everything in her world had found its way to her ovaries. Dinner, work, clothing, footwear and dog shit were ovary-related.

In turn, the single aim of my conversations became ovary-evasion. ‘How’s the stone wall going in Loch Katrine?’ I asked her once at 10.33 pm on a weeknight.

‘I’ve stopped,’ she said. ‘The strain might be bad for my ovaries.’

When Sarah rang at 11.03 pm one night to say Kyle didn’t even want to do it anymore, I’m afraid I snapped and told her to pull herself together. I told her that not having sex was probably quite a
significant
factor in not getting pregnant, and unless she sorted herself out who could blame Kyle for not wanting to go anywhere near her?

She hung up on me.

Ashamed at my outburst, I phoned back. She didn’t answer. I phoned back again. And at last I got Kyle, who said in a conspiratorial voice, ‘She’s not available.’

So I went round and knocked on the door. Kyle answered with that annoying expression of his. I
remembered
that expression from university days when I’d shared a flat with Kyle and a friend of ours, Chas.

I’d met Chas while eating dhal with my right hand in Goa. He was living in a tree at the time, as you do, and pondering. He was cute, and we had our Scottish background in common, but he was not my type. He was kind of grungy: scraggly, rough around the edges, a bit too skinny, but with magical eyes that someone one day would fall hopelessly in love with. He wore unusual clothes that he threw together oddly, and looked better naked than clothed. I knew this because I had seen him in an outdoor shower once in Goa and he was surprisingly muscular and square, not at all weedy. I found his company to be the most comfortable I had ever had.
No expectations, no bothersome political
differences,
and no sexual tensions. Chas always said yes if I needed an emergency date to make an
ex-boyfriend
jealous, but I never once considered him as a sexual partner, never thought of him in that way at all. There was one time when we got very drunk at a medical ball and he tried to kiss me in the taxi on the way home. It felt like I was kissing my brother and I pushed him away with a ‘Yuck!’ We’d both laughed, but it had felt kind of weird.

Chas moved into my flat a while later and spent his time singing and occasionally proclaiming truths about beauty, among other things. We’d get openly annoyed with each other when the milk or the loo roll ran out, and read the papers over breakfast in companionable silence.

Kyle was mostly fun to live with. He could whistle the theme tune to every seventies cop show, and not just the obvious ones like
Kojak
or
The Sweeney.
We’re talking
Rookies, SWAT
and
Barnaby Jones.
But when he had an exam and Chas and I were making too much noise in the lounge he’d come in and sit on the sofa, his facial features settling around his nose, all scrunched up in a tight ball of bloodless tension. We’d get the hint pretty quickly and go to bed so he could study.

Kyle was the only one in the flat who really had to get through a lot of work at university. I was doing social work and never had to study very hard. And
Chas dropped out of medicine after a year, threw himself into ill temper, and started smoking copious amounts of dope with the apparent long-term plan of graduating from depression to schizophrenia.

I looked at Kyle all these years later and thought to myself, why can’t you just say how you feel? ‘My wife is driving me crazy and I wish you hadn’t upset her.’ Instead, he stood there as he always had when distressed, fizzing inside with a tornado of emotions that he had no idea how to harness.

He beckoned me into the kitchen and there was an awkward moment as we stood trying to chat as if nothing was going down.

‘How’s work?’ he asked me.

‘Busy! Awful!’ I replied.

It struck me as we stood there talking that it was probably the first time Kyle and I had been alone since he’d met Sarah.

We were all twenty-one when the two of them met. Sarah had dropped around to see me after work one day and Kyle answered the door. He’d just had a shower, so he had no top on. Chas and I felt the sexual tension between them straight away so we made our excuses and went to the pub, feeling giggly and excited at the prospect of our two friends getting together.

Later that night, and throughout the courtship that followed, our respective mates gave us glorious details that we exchanged and analysed.

According to Sarah, on that first evening they had four coffees and talked for three hours about hospitals.

According to Kyle, Sarah leant forward, affording him a clear view of her bosom.

According to Sarah, Kyle was everything she’d ever wanted – a decent, hard-working, honest man.

According to Kyle, Sarah was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Sarah loved how Kyle was so patient and respectful.

Kyle said by the time Sarah agreed to do it he’d developed wanker’s cramp.

Kyle’s proposal was everything Sarah had ever dreamt of …

And the ring cost a fucking fortune.

Sarah looked sensational as a bride. Her hair was as curly, blonde and glossy as it had been when she was tiny and her whole face beamed with happiness. Kyle couldn’t take his eyes off her. The perfect wedding for the perfect couple. The wedding party was a sea of large hats, kilts and stiff two-piece
skirt-suits.
I wore a shiny mauve dress and felt like a Teletubby. Sarah’s mum mustered her acting skills to evoke emotion in the university chapel with a Shakespearean sonnet. Kyle’s best friend, Derek, read out a raucously sexual speech.

‘Sarah will make the perfect doctor’s wife,’ he said. ‘Big, y’know, ideas, and a goer, according to the residents in the Royal! But, seriously,’ he said to a
half-silent, half-chortling audience, ‘seriously, though, they do make a wonderful couple … and she does go like a bunny.’

Sarah’s dad, who she hadn’t seen for years, drank too much and groped several guests on the dance floor.

After the honeymoon they sold Sarah’s Southside flat and bought a three-bedroom tenement in the trendy West End, which Sarah did up. Two years later they sold the flat for an extortionate sum, bought a four-bedroom house a little further out (‘where the good schools are’), and started trying to make babies.

Unable to control her reproductive system, Sarah concentrated on the things she could control. From the outside, it seemed as though Sarah was
renovating
her husband at the same time as she was renovating the house, redressing old windows with carefully selected fabric, feminising bed linen and bathroom accessories, ripping out kitchens and cheap lean-tos, and re-roofing, bit by bit obliterating the existence of the old so that by the time the house was done, Kyle was nowhere to be seen. No hint of him in the bedroom, nor in the attic, nor in the living room, nor in the shed. He had been covered over like the hideous fifties wallpaper.

Sarah realised she was becoming more and more anal and obsessive. At her kitchen-warming party, she confessed to me that she’d called Kyle a useless
prick because he’d put potato peel in the everyday bin. She hated how controlling she was becoming; she could sense that it was driving Kyle away, but she couldn’t stop herself.

I gave her the number of a therapist my
workmate
Marj knew about. Sarah would come to my place after her sessions and debrief over a glass of wine. According to her, the therapist was in her early thirties, with kids – the photo was on her desk, and a loving husband – the photo was on her desk. For a huge fee she listened to Sarah talk. Apparently, they worked out together that Sarah had suffered a
fractured
attachment. This meant she had a really crap relationship with her parents. Sarah’s mum and dad were divorced when she was a toddler. Vivienne Morgan was off filming for the entirety of Sarah’s childhood and her dad stopped being her father after the divorce and started being her estranged father. Things hadn’t improved when her stepfather arrived on the scene, and seemed to get even worse after he left, as her mother’s fondness for a refreshment developed into a full-blown love affair.

Together, Sarah and the therapist worked out that Sarah lacked trust because of this fractured attachment. They worked out that Sarah wanted a baby most of all to right the wrongs of her own
childhood,
and that this was not healthy. They also worked out that Sarah felt guilty, a little present from Catholicism.

Sarah told me she worked out all by herself that therapy was a very expensive way of learning to despise herself even more than she already did.

Talking to Kyle in his marital kitchen felt very
uncomfortable.
The Kyle I knew at university had pretty much disappeared and been replaced by Kyle the Mr Serious, Mr Works-Non-Stop, Mr Reads-His-Newspaper-Joylessly-And-For-Too-Long, Mr Why-The-Fuck-Can’t-You-Get-My-Friend-Pregnant.

He’d had other parts to him in the old days, really nice parts, and that was why I’d been so excited when he and Sarah got together. As well as being incredibly fit, with the hardest calf muscles I’d ever felt in my life, he’d been smart, kind and hilariously funny, telling surreal anecdotes about couscous and pigs when stoned, and was unbelievably good at Pictionary.

After what seemed like an hour of small talk, Kyle left me in the kitchen and went to fetch Sarah. She emerged red-eyed and her lips started to quiver as she got closer to me.

We hugged and talked and I apologised profusely and spoke soothingly.