Losing Me (24 page)

She didn’t say anything.

“But if you don’t fancy it, we could go somewhere else.”

“Frank, you have to stop this.”

“Stop what?”

“Pretending everything’s fine between us when it isn’t.”

“Bar, please. You’ve got to move on from this.”

“I can’t. It’s as simple as that. You left me when I needed you. I begged you not to go, and no amount of flowers and posh dinners are going to change that. . . .”

“Bar, please. How many more times do we have to go through all this? I’m sorry. I truly am. I don’t know what else to say. But I’d signed a contract. There was nothing I could do. And anyway, you’ve coped really well.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve been great . . . just like always. Barbara’s strong. She can cope with anything.”

“You know what? I can’t do this right now. I’m too tired. I need to hit the sack.”

“Fine. Go.”

“But for what it’s worth, I do love you. I love you very much.”

She hit “end.”

•   •   •

Summer 1977. Barbara and her flatmates graduate from teacher-training college and throw a party to celebrate. Frank, this dreamy-looking cool guy with crazy Bob Dylan hair, comes over and starts chatting her up. He’s just finished the BBC’s graduate trainee directors’ course, and now he’s on the payroll. Presently he’s researching a film about social division in Britain. Poverty and inequality is his thing, he explains. “I really think filmmakers have the power to make a difference.” She is so turned-on.

After a while they go out onto the balcony. They smoke weed and snog. At the end of the evening he asks her out and she says yes.

She wears her new halter-neck dress. Then she worries that he might find her sexier in her
Workers of the World Unite
T-shirt and CND pendant. But there’s no time to change. They’ve arranged to meet in Hackney—equidistant from them both. She imagines they’ll go for a curry or maybe to a cheap falafel place. She won’t let him pay. As a feminist, she’ll insist they split the bill. It upsets her that she isn’t able to burn her bra, but her tits are way too big and left to their own devices would wobble and swing.

Hackney hasn’t yet started to get trendy and is still pretty rough. As Barbara waits outside the station, she spies a gang of skinheads with swastika tattoos. They’re coming in her direction. She’s studying their body language, trying to work out if they’re going to approach her and make trouble, when Frank appears. He kisses her on the cheek. “Ooh,” shout the skinheads. Then they call him a wanker and a bender and swagger on by.

“Fucking morons,” Frank says, before telling her how great she looks in the dress. They set off along Mare Street, and he takes her hand.

“So where shall we go?” she says, aware that she likes the feeling of her hand in his. “There are a couple of great curry places along here.”

“Actually, I had somewhere else in mind. I hope you won’t be annoyed.”

“Why would I be annoyed?”

“’Cos it’s not very datey.”

A few more yards and they stop outside a white stone church, once grand but now decrepit. Its windows are covered in wire mesh.

He’s brought her to church? Crap. Could she have gotten him more wrong? “Well, I see what you mean about it not being very datey,” she says. “The thing is, I’m not really sure if I believe in God and I definitely don’t go to church. I’m really not up for being shown the light.”

Frank looks horrified. “What? No. It’s nothing like that. We’re headed for the church hall. It’s used as a soup kitchen. Totally God-free. I promise. I volunteer here once a week. The thing is that when I asked you out, I totally forgot that I’m supposed to be working tonight. So I thought . . .”

“. . . that maybe I’d like to come along and help?”

“Just for a couple of hours, and then we can go on somewhere—I promise. I know I should have called you to explain. But that would have meant canceling and I thought . . .”

“. . . that I’d tell you to take a hike? Because you made a mistake?”

“It did occur to me.”

“Don’t be daft. I’d never do that.”

“So are you happy to help out for a bit?”

“Absolutely. Lead on.”

They walk through the churchyard. It’s strewn with weeds, beer cans. The elderly, lopsided headstones are stained and weather-beaten and covered in moss. A few have been smashed or kicked over. They stop to read some of the inscriptions and remark on how long people seemed to have lived in the nineteenth century. They decide it’s probably a myth that everybody died young. Then Barbara discovers a small section set aside for children. There are a dozen Ethels, Mays, Ediths and Herberts who fell asleep in infancy. Barbara tears up. Frank notices and puts his arm around her. She likes this even more.

Inside the church hall it’s hot and full of people eating and queuing. The place smells of bacon and chips. Occasionally there’s a waft of stale urine or robust body odor. There are trestle tables covered in plastic cloths and long wooden benches. Not everybody shoveling up food with plastic cutlery is a filthy, matted-haired crazy. Many of the diners look like regular people—a bit tatty round the edges maybe, but pretty normal-looking.

Barbara notices a besieged-looking, concave woman with three small children. Her cheek is a purple bruise. But the four of them are clean and tidy. Presentable. They probably have a home. Barbara assumes that the woman and her kids have come here to get away, for some respite from her husband’s violence. Barbara points out the woman to Frank. “Isn’t there a refuge round here?”

“She refuses to go. Insists she keeps having accidents.”

Barbara can’t imagine protecting a man who beat her.

On another table there’s a chap in a grubby business suit and brogues with no laces. He’s clutching an old briefcase to his chest. “Alcoholic,” Frank says. “Used to be an accountant. Wife threw him out. We get a lot of those.”

Barbara thinks about how her friends rail about inequality and poverty, but always from the comfort of a warm flat or a bar with a few beers inside them. None of them—her included—actually goes out and does anything (not that she doesn’t have plans to rectify that). And here is Frank with a full-time job, giving up his time every week to get his hands dirty.

A nice middle-aged lady called Audrey welcomes Barbara and gently chides her for wearing such a lovely dress, which is only going to get sprayed in fat. She hands her a pair of tongs and directs her to a hot plate, where bacon and eggs are popping and spitting. A few moments later Audrey produces a pink nylon overall, which she says Barbara is welcome to borrow.

The half dozen or so volunteers cook, serve and make everybody feel welcome—apart from a group of students who have come in pleading poverty. Somebody hands each of them a packet of crisps and a Wagon Wheel and tells them to bugger off. They duly bugger.

There are jokes and laughter. People who have finished eating play cards. One of the volunteers is on a break. She sits down to play chess with Briefcase Man. Meanwhile, the drunken crazies rant or stare, silent and glassy-eyed. Barbara can’t take her eyes off Frank as he talks down a filthy, shoeless man who has come in drunk, wielding a traffic cone.

When Barbara finally looks back at the hot plate, the bacon is turning black and smoking.

•   •   •

Barbara went downstairs, made herself a cup of coffee and took it back to bed. She lay against the plumped-up pillows, reflecting on the past as she sipped. She’d rarely worn her eighteenth-birthday locket—partly because it had no sentimental value, but mainly because she didn’t like lockets. They were too traditional for her taste. She’d preferred hippie beads and cowbell necklaces—her CND pendant, which hung from a leather thong. The locket ended up in Jess’s childhood box of jewels. But her daughter hadn’t shown much interest in it because it wasn’t glittery and sparkly. Barbara couldn’t remember when she threw it out.

As usual, Rose’s card would contain a check. But these days Barbara had no problem excusing her mother for not making the effort to buy her a gift. Rose was old. She was able to shop for herself, but Barbara knew that the mere thought of doing it for somebody else overwhelmed her. She was lucky that, at eighty-three, Rose even remembered her birthday.

Once again, Barbara found herself replaying the tape of her big conversation with her mother. She forced herself to listen to the section about her birth and how her parents had been overjoyed when she was born. After that came the bit about how Rose had kept her baby bootee, fed and clothed her, kept her out of harm’s way. Her mother’s love tokens: the straws, which according to Jean she needed to grasp. Her best friend was right. It was time to pull back and to stop looking for what she couldn’t have. To make do. It made perfect sense, but it felt like she’d spent her entire life making do.

She knew she was wallowing in self-pity, but she couldn’t help it. By now her mind had turned to Frank and the state of their marriage. Jean thought it could be saved. She was probably of the opinion that Barbara should pull back from her husband as well as her mother—that she should stop looking to him for what he couldn’t offer. But she couldn’t. A good marriage involved both parties caring for each other. If the giving went in only one direction, it caused anger and resentment. Frank had neglected her for decades and she’d rarely complained. It wasn’t that back then she hadn’t noticed or cared. She had. But she’d always felt unworthy. Now she was almost sixty. She’d lost her job. She’d been ill. She needed him. He should have stepped up. Surely that wasn’t asking too much. But even now she questioned her entitlement. How much love did she deserve? It still perplexed her.

It occurred to Barbara that she needed to see a shrink. Dr. Johal had mentioned that counseling might help her get to the root of her panic attacks. But she knew what had caused them. On top of that, it would take months to get an NHS appointment. And then it would only be with some ineffectual, drippy woman in a calf-length skirt and moccasins. Good shrinks cost money. So that was that.

She knew she had to sit Frank down and force him to listen to her—to make him understand exactly how she was feeling. Unless, of course, he did understand, but like Rose, he couldn’t face up to how he’d treated her all these years.

If he refused to make some effort to change, what did she do then? Leaving him was unimaginable. They’d been married for nearly forty years. Two-thirds of her life. The marriage hadn’t been terrible or wretched. Barbara hadn’t lived with a brute who’d beaten her—merely a self-centered workaholic who took her for granted. A million women could tell the same story. She guessed that most of them didn’t leave their husbands. Instead they plowed on in their run-of-the-mill discontent. They carried on because they were scared. Lonely oldness. That’s what prevented them from leaving. It scared Barbara, too. But she also feared growing old in a lonely marriage.

•   •   •

There was a tap on the bedroom door. Ben appeared. “Happy birthday, dear Mu-um. Happy birthday to yooooou.” He leaned over and gave his mother a kiss on the cheek and presented her with his card.

“You OK? You look a bit down.”

“I’m fine,” she said, patting the bed, inviting him to sit down. “Just a bit thoughtful.”

“Come on, cheer up. It could be ages before you have to keep your teeth in a jar.”

“Thanks, Ben. I appreciate that.”

He sat down next to her. “You missing Dad?”

“I guess,” she said, hoping that would be enough to satisfy him.

“Yeah, I used to hate it when he missed my birthday. But he always made up for it with some amazing present. Do you remember I had Pokémon cards before any other kid in the school?”

“Which meant it was at least a year before you had anybody to swap cards with.”

“Yeah. There was that.”

He handed her a lime-green envelope. “Jess is bringing your present over later. We went in on it together.”

She pulled out the card.
Fifty-nine isn’t old . . . if you’re a tree
.

“Wow, such beautiful words. You have no idea how much better they make me feel.”

“I thought they would,” he said.

She opened the rest of her cards. There weren’t many. These days most of her friends—and relatives like Pam—put birthday messages on Facebook.

Jean’s card made her tear up. On the front was a photograph of two laughing women of a certain age, driving a sky-blue vintage sports car. The roof is down. The pair are wearing funky, jewel-encrusted cat’s-eye sunglasses and scarlet lipstick. The backseat is covered with upmarket shopping bags. Inside Jean had written:
Here’s
to the two of us driving through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in our hair.

Barbara couldn’t remember mentioning her Lucy Jordan fantasy to Jean. But clearly she had.

As promised, Jean had also sent a parcel. Barbara pulled off the brown paper. Inside a decorated box was another much smaller box. This contained a jar of Eve Lom cleanser. She knew it was Barbara’s favorite. What she didn’t know was that Barbara had run out weeks ago and that after that scary post-Christmas credit card bill, she hadn’t dared buy any more.

Jess’s card had hot air balloons on the front. She’d written:
Don’t give up, Mum. You’re never too old to fly.
Once again Barbara’s eyes filled up.

Her mother’s message was the usual:
Many happy returns . . . Love, Mum. Buy yourself something with the enclosed.
Inside was a check for thirty pounds. She would treat herself to that chunky Bakelite bangle she’d seen in the vintage shop down the road. It was tangerine with black spots. She would show it off to Rose, who would no doubt hate it, but she wouldn’t get upset. Instead she would practice pulling back. She would kiss her, say thank you and move the conversation on.

•   •   •

Earlier in the week Barbara had invited Jess, Matt and the children over for tea. Jess had protested that it was Barbara’s birthday and she couldn’t possibly host her own tea party, but Barbara had insisted.