Growing Up Twice (31 page)

I nodded as I remembered what could be classed as Selin’s only serious emotional upheaval until this week. ‘Yeah, but I mean maybe she never loved him or something, and she just felt a bit relieved that it was over. She’s not, you know “showy” is she, with her emotions? But this, I mean we know she adored Ayla, they all do. This is different.’ I’m searching for easy access to an experience I can only feel peripherally.

‘Of course it is. But the thing with Selin is it’s really hard to know what she wants, what she’s thinking, how she’s coping.’

We sit in silence for a few moments more and then I say. ‘Don’t you think we should know?’

We watch the end of the film without answering the question.

I compare this Friday to last Friday morning and I think about how much can change in a week. I have to go back into the office today. Actually I don’t have to, Georgie told me I could take the whole week off, but for once the prospect of a mundane office job seems more appealing than an unarmed exploration into the world of daytime television. Under normal circumstances I am fully equipped with a full battery of irony, sloth and indifference but for the last couple of days the vapid lull of the TV has only set my mind free to think about Ayla, Selin, Josh and Michael.

It’s a tough choice between thinking things over in my living-room and thinking things over in the office but at least at the office I’ll have Jackson’s and Carla’s endless prattle to preoccupy me. When I think that dithering over some fax in a desperate attempt to get back into Georgie’s good books made me late for Ayla I feel suddenly overcome with angry fatigue. Something that insignificant should not play a part in someone’s death. No one would have died if that order hadn’t gone through, if it had been chucked out with the rubbish. Georgie would have acted as if someone had died, probably me, but no one actually would have. And yet if I’d treated the fax like the stupid piece of pointless money-making paper that it was someone might even have lived. Someone I cared about. This is the side to irony I never wanted to become acquainted with, the real-life implications of the messenger missing Romeo on his way to find Juliet dead in the chapel.

I’ve phoned Selin a few times, but her answerphone has always picked up and I’ve felt awkward about phoning the family home. I don’t want to intrude.

Michael. After nearly a week, I only spoke to him briefly yesterday and I’m expecting to see him tomorrow morning. I was on my way back from the police station after giving a full statement, walking down Stoke Newington High Street closely followed by an angry drunk mumbling obscenities under his breath. I had ducked into the safety of Woolworths and was spending some preoccupied minutes looking for an all-the-rage Barbie my niece desperately wants for Christmas when my phone rang. I answered it quickly, for the first time in my life keen to silence ‘Disco Inferno’. It briefly occurred to me that it might be Owen, but I had said, ‘Hello?’ before the thought registered.

‘It’s me, how are you doing?’ It was Michael; straight away his sweetly cheerful tone annoyed me. ‘I just I thought I’d say hi. We haven’t spoken since the weekend?’ He finished the sentence as if it were a question. He really wanted to know why I hadn’t called him.

‘Not good, actually. You remember Ayla? The girl who came round to my flat? She’s … um, she died.’ The fact that I was telling him several days after it had happened suddenly threw our relationship in to stark shadow and light.

Normal boyfriends you phone straight away under those circumstances, you expect them to rush over or talk you through it and be there for you. It’s a long, long time since I have had a normal boyfriend, but the dull philosophy student I told you about, he would have come over with some red wine and discussed existentialism with me, that sort of thing. For a moment I wistfully missed his stolid predictability and even his beard. I realised that I hadn’t even wanted to talk to Michael as a distraction, and really he’s the best kind of distraction there is.

‘She died! No way, you’re kidding, right?’ He laughed. I knew it was nervous laughter but it was exactly the wrong thing to do. I bristled.

‘No, I am
not
kidding and it is
not
funny. She is
dead
. She was run over on Monday. Right in front of me, actually.’ I realised my voice had risen and become tight with tears and that people were watching me. I put down the Barbie I had been clutching and marched swiftly out of the shop. Some Twickenham static crackled in my ear.

‘Fuck,’ he said eventually. ‘But she was only, what, seventeen?’

‘Sixteen,’ I said and turned from the cut-price squalor of the high street into the bohemian café society of Church Street.

‘Fuck, I’m only a couple of years older than her. Fuck.’

I sighed impatiently as the enormity of mortality hit Michael for the first time, my temper stopping me dead outside an estate agent’s window.

‘Michael, I should go really, OK? I’m on my way to the police station to give a statement,’ I lied.

‘Look, should I come over tonight? Do you want to talk about it? I could skip school tomorrow and we could go somewhere, forget about it.’

I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to forget about it, but I thought back on the last time I saw Michael and how nice it would be to spend some more time like that with him, in our little bubble of denial. But not with Rosie in the next room.

‘No, look, it’s not a good idea just now. But Rosie’s mum is in the country at the weekend so she won’t be around Saturday. Why don’t you come over in the morning, we can spend the day together. You’d have to go before she got back though.’ I said it quickly, feeling guilty for making arrangements when I probably should be seeing if Selin wanted some company, especially when Rosie was going to be in Surrey with her mum. The invitation is out of my mouth before I realise what I’m saying. I’m not sure how seeing Michael will help me, to be honest, but at least he can’t make things any worse.

‘Yeah sure, I’ll cheer you up in no time,’ he said brightly, with an absence of tact I knew he did not intend.

‘I’m not sure it’ll be that easy, Michael,’ I said harshly despite myself. ‘Someone I have known for most of her life is dead; a very good friend – two very good friends – have lost a sister. I need to deal with it. This is grown-up stuff. I’ll see you Saturday, now go and play football or something.’ I hung up and stormed the last twenty minutes home full of rage. I knew I had taken my anger out on him when he didn’t deserve it but I felt a nasty pleasure that for once the recipient hadn’t been me, and a seedy kind of triumph that despite my cruelty I would still see him Saturday morning, keen as a puppy.

Since then I’ve had my phone turned off. To avoid any more messages from Owen as much as anything else. It occurs to me that I should maybe sit down and think about the whole Owen thing, try and work out where he’s coming from, what he’s likely to do next, but I can’t and anyway I refuse to. For me to be dwelling on the mysterious ways of Owen is exactly what Owen wants. I put it out of my mind. He’ll get tired, some poor girl will take his fancy in a bar or a club or a library and he’ll leave me alone in favour of some novelty. Despite his self-delusion, not even Owen is so overdramatic as to keep this up for long.

The office seems quiet when I get in and I realise that I’m almost half an hour early, an eventuality that I never achieve by design, usually timing my departure from home to ensure that I am at least ten minutes late into the office, maybe more if the buses don’t come on time. I spend a moment trying to commune with the psyche of the rest of the city’s worker drones. How many of them get a kick out of going to work and how many, like me, see it as a way to fill time until real life starts in the evenings? Hmm, filling time. Probably shouldn’t be filling time when you don’t how much you’ve left. For some reason a memory of Josh’s desolate face as he hunched over the balcony railings after Ayla’s funeral flashed back to me.

I stare at this week’s filing and speculate on the reality of the paperless office as I look at the colour-coded and yet indecipherable array of Post-its that adorns my monitor.

Ayla used to love stationery.

I don’t know why I’ve suddenly remembered that. When she was eleven or twelve she used to collect reams of pretty writing paper and notelets, scented erasers and matching pencil-and-sharpener sets.

In fact, somewhere around here is the three-colour Tipp-Ex set she so longed for that I’d pinched for her a couple of years ago. I never did get around to giving it to her before she grew out of that phase and into aspiring after a belly piercing.

On impulse, I root around in my desk drawer and look for the set. I find an old toothbrush, a single earring and half a pot of glitter eye shadow, the other half of which has spilt over the rest of the drawer’s contents. Under the office lights’ fluorescent glow it gives off an oddly festive feel. Right at the bottom I find the Tipp-Ex set and right under that something else I’d forgotten. The application form for the journalism course I’d always wanted to apply to but had never got around to.

I lift it out of the drawer and gently blow the glitter remnants away. I think of the look on Ayla’s face when she used to pack her pencil case for a new term full of promise. I could fill it in, couldn’t I? I could send it off, see what happens.

And anyway, it would give me another reason to ignore that filing.

After completing the form and slipping it in with the work post, I wondered if my last phone call with Michael had constituted even more of a shift in the power balance of our relationship and if that was what I had actually wanted, actually meant by being so unkind. It made me think about the countless cruel things that Owen had said to me over the years. For the first time I think I understood him in a small way, understood his impulse to hurt other people rather than himself, to be in control. Thinking about Owen made me wonder what delights might lurk in my in-box this morning, or how many silent calls I might pick up. I thought about Ayla’s sixteen years of life and my thirty. And I made a decision. As soon as this time, this hiatus, is over I am changing everything. As soon as everything is back on an even keel I’m going to go back to college, or at least I’m going to do
something
. My birthday is in a few weeks. By the time the next one comes around I
will
have achieved some personal success, damn it.

Jackson is next in and he strides straight to my office and to my visitors’ chair, tipping it back on two legs, a habit he has probably picked up from Rosie. I smile to myself.

‘Hey,’ he says in an unusually downbeat tone.

‘Hey,’ I reply, with the false ring of an English person speaking American.

‘How are you doing?’ As we talk I go through my morning routine of booting up my tortoise-speed PC and opening internal mail envelopes stuffed full of invoices and external circulars offering me security guards or cut-price office furniture. I absently-mindedly bin what I hope is the junk mail.

‘Oh, not so bad. Well, terrible really,’ I smile at him wanly and he returns the favour, very sweetly not turning on his full-power smile.

‘Yeah, Rosie seems to be taking it pretty hard too.’

I fish an invoice out of the bin and replace it with a letter about water coolers that I had mistakenly shoved in the dark and rarely sorted world of my pending tray.

‘So, what is the deal with you and Rosie?’ I ask, in the vain hope he might tell me something she hasn’t.

‘Nothing, no deal. We’re friends. I’m hopelessly in love with her, of course,’ he says lightly, ‘but she’s got a whole lot of baby on her mind, not to mention a repentant ex-husband, and I’m going back to NY in less than a month. Friends is about all we can be.’ He nods, his handsome face a picture of resignation, and somewhere beneath the tan I detect a nuance of genuine sorrow. I have got so used to Jackson that I can’t believe he’s going back.

‘Less than a month? That’s gone quickly. But you’ll be back on a regular basis, won’t you? And as long as you’ve persuaded her not to go back to Chris, you never know what might happen,’ I say hopefully, watching the interminable turning of the PC egg-timer as it attempts to open my e-mail in-box.

‘Well, I gave it my best shot, it’s true. You never know what’s going to happen.’ He tips the chair back on to its four feet and rises. ‘Do you want to have lunch later?’ he throws over his shoulder as he leaves.

‘Lunch? Yeah, lovely.’

My unbelievably slow, unbelievably noisy, unbelievably archaic PC finally finishes its whirring and my in-box opens. Thirty-six new e-mails. I check them quickly: several from Georgie, a couple from Jackson, something jokey with an attachment from Selin that she sent on Monday, just a few hours before Ayla died. And the rest the usual complement from my colleagues throughout the building. Nothing that looks as though it might be from Owen. I breathe a sigh of relief.

Maybe he is somewhere out there still, hunched over some pay-as-you-go terminal in an internet café, sending me alliteration-heavy missives like there’s no tomorrow but they don’t get into my mail box, so they don’t really exist as far as I’m concerned. I’m just not going to think about him any more.

The relief makes me feel bold and I turn on my mobile. I wait with baited breath for it to ring to tell me I have messages but it is silent. There is one text message, however. I chew my lip as I open it, it’s from Michael.

‘sry sry. pls call. mxx.’ I look at it for a moment. I probably should call him and make him feel OK, confirm our plans for tomorrow morning but instead I delete it. I’ll think about him later. Right now I feel elated. Owen has finally found something better to do; I don’t have to think about him any more.

The afternoon runs down slowly and the absence of anything much to do has left me exhausted and almost looking forward to a quiet night in.

‘Bye then,’ I call to Jackson as I leave dead on five.

‘Yeah, bye, I’ll see you Monday,’ he calls back.

‘Yippee yi yay,’ I reply glumly as I exit the doors.

I have the bus-stop in sight when I feel a stranger’s hand fall heavily on my shoulder. I whirl round in shock, crashing the arm away with the full force of my forearm. My heart is pounding and I clutch my bag to my chest, thinking ‘Owen’, and ‘Don’t be such a fool’ in one brief moment of panic. I find myself glaring into Michael’s eyes.