Love Your Enemies (7 page)

Stephanie bit her lip. ‘Then we, sort of, kissed.’

Jane looked so shocked that Stephanie wanted to laugh, but couldn’t quite bring herself to.

‘What? A proper kiss? A kiss?’

Stephanie nodded. ‘It just happened.’

Jane fought down two competing impulses in her gut, the first of total disapproval, the second of total fascination. Stephanie watched this conflict translate itself on to Jane’s face and said, ‘It didn’t mean anything.’

Finally Jane asked, ‘What sort of a kiss? A French kiss? What did you say after?’

Stephanie blushed. ‘A French kiss. His mouth tasted of cough sweets and smoke. We didn’t really say anything. If he did say something, it was only to apologize about the socks again.’

Jane frowned. ‘So what did you do? After?’

Stephanie shrugged. ‘I … I suppose I put my hand under his shirt. He was wearing a T-shirt.’

‘You were looking for more socks? You were, weren’t you?’

Stephanie burst out laughing. She had recovered from her earlier embarrassment. ‘No. By then I had forgotten about the socks. I was feeling his stomach and his chest. His chest was hairless, but surprisingly firm.’

Jane was silent for a moment, trying to understand what this situation meant. Stephanie had never been a promiscuous person. She stared at her face across the table and looked for any perceptible signs of distress. There were none. After a while she said, ‘Why did it happen? You’ve never done this sort of thing before. I thought you were faithful to Chris. I don’t understand you.’

Stephanie sighed. ‘I was trying to explain earlier. Of course I’ve never done anything like this before. It was strange, as though … like a compulsion. Inevitable. Dangerous but compulsive. I don’t know. I can’t understand it myself. It’s not as though we were immediately physically attracted. It was more the situation itself, the differences between us …’

Jane interrupted. ‘I suppose it was only a kiss. Maybe it was just mutual attraction.’

Stephanie looked momentarily indecisive and then said, ‘No, that’s the whole point. It wasn’t just a kiss. We had sex.’

To fill the following silence she added, ‘The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that it was just a power thing. There was something explosive about the situation, the confrontation, something strangely … well, strange. Erotic.’

Stephanie looked down at her hands. She had never used the word ‘erotic’ before. Especially in front of someone like Jane. Using the word was almost as much fun as the sex had been. She felt like D. H. Lawrence.

Jane was devastated. She looked at Stephanie and couldn’t understand her, she couldn’t contain what she had done in the relevant compartments of her brain. She wondered whether Stephanie was now a slag. A slut. Finally she said, ‘You behaved like a slut, with some big, ugly skinhead.’

Stephanie shrugged. ‘If you mean “slut” in a good way, then yes, I did. The shop was so quiet. We made love behind some racks of mohair jumpers. Nobody came.’

She smiled at her unintentional pun. Jane missed the joke. Her ideas of Stephanie had now been so radically altered that any coherent discussion about motivation and intent seemed entirely fruitless. But she was like a small, common bird, like a sparrow, a pack creature, something that acts on impulse. She wanted to know the details, but this desire compromised her and she knew it. Eventually she said, ‘How was he?’ She had never been able to ask this question about the sexual relations between Stephanie and Chris, but this was different. Stephanie looked for a moment like she wasn’t going to reply, then she said, ‘Good. Strange. Condensed …’

‘Did he have …?’

Stephanie frowned. ‘Don’t ask. It wasn’t like that.’

Jane felt coarse and embarrassed. She snapped defensively, ‘I’m not particularly interested in what it was like. Don’t flatter
yourself.’ She was silent for a second and then added, ‘How can we even discuss it? How can we talk about it? There’s nothing to say.’

Stephanie frowned, trying to understand what Jane meant. She said, ‘I thought I should tell you.’

Jane raised her eyebrows and tried to look ironic. ‘Tell me? Tell me what? I think you should consider telling Chris. I don’t think he’ll be too sympathetic, though.’

Stephanie cupped the bowl of her glass in both hands. She was temporarily confused. She had known that Jane would be disapproving, surprised, maybe even shocked, but the coherence and simplicity of what she had experienced … She repeated the word silently to herself and felt it to be totally appropriate. Simplicity. That expresses it best. It was so simple, unadulterated, natural and yet unnatural.

She tried to articulate her thoughts. ‘It wasn’t sordid, just natural and kind of obvious, that’s why it’s so hard to describe …’

Jane shrugged. ‘Just sex. Are you seeing each other again?’

Stephanie sighed and shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t think so. I hadn’t thought about it like that. It wasn’t like that.’

Jane seemed unimpressed. ‘So you won’t be seeing him again. But will you have sex with other people at work? When it’s quiet, just before closing?’

She was smirking. Stephanie felt at once angry and misunderstood. She spoke instead of thinking, before thinking. ‘Maybe this has changed me. I didn’t feel immediately different, but I think that I might actually be. I knew you wouldn’t approve, but I thought you’d be …’ She tried to collect her thoughts.

Jane turned away from Stephanie and looked over her shoulder and towards the juke box. It was silent. She wondered whether she could be bothered to go over and put some money into it. It then struck her that this might in fact be a good idea, a means to walk away from the conversation, to bring about
a hiatus, a gap, a space, so that when she returned they could discuss other things. She took her purse from her bag and stood up. She said, ‘I’m going to put some music on the juke box.’

Stephanie didn’t reply. She nodded. She watched Jane walk over to the juke box and thought, ‘Suddenly we have no common ground. When she comes back to the table she won’t discuss this with me again. It’s as though nothing can be expressed between us which will make sense, which we can both understand. When she comes back to the table she will be assured in her own mind that she is now better than me, that she has something over me, and yet …’

She sighed and pushed a piece of hair that had fallen across her face behind her ear. ‘And yet something so incredible has happened.’ She felt sad, almost bitter, but in her heart she knew that the space that had sprung up between them, the vacuum, had now opened up inside her, and it was a positive space that could be filled with so many things; ideas, possibilities. She thought, ‘Words are like gifts, some people are generous and some frugal.’ She decided to make herself a present by keeping quiet.

Anne Marie baked cakes every week. Usually she baked for a couple of hours every Sunday afternoon. The family had dinner at five on Sunday so she baked from two until four and then began the Meal Proper. Her husband liked her baking, he appreciated the way that she did things from scratch. Even if the results were sometimes inadequate, he still complimented her roundly and fully on effort and commitment. ‘After all,’ he’d say, ‘this is the Take-Away Age. You do well to stand up against it with its additives and its preservatives and its factory-plastic tastes.’

Anne Marie valued his opinion. Often his family visited on a Sunday so she’d make dinner for five; for Steve, his mum, his dad, little Fiona and herself. Now she had another hungry mouth to feed on its way too; a tiny thumb-sized foetus nestled in her stomach somewhere, eating, growing and forming.

Little Fiona was almost three. Anne Marie had decided to have her children later rather than sooner. She had worked as a legal secretary for twelve years before even considering the idea of conception, pregnancy and birth. Fiona had burst into the world when Anne Marie was already in her thirty-fourth year of life, although she and Steve had been married for ever.

She had begun baking just before Fiona was born because she thought that it made the home more homely and she and Steve more of a proper family. She needn’t have worried though because he took to being a father like a duck to water. He leapt in with his eyes closed and a finger and thumb placed firmly over his nostrils. He said that he was happy about the second baby but that he missed her extra wage coming in. He had calculated that her wage would be back in the kitty when
Fiona had started at nursery school. It didn’t look that way now. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I’m perfectly happy about the new baby, and at least we don’t have to buy a new pram this time.’

Steve worked in his father’s business, which was a small concern that produced paper cups and plates for children’s parties, featuring popular cartoon characters. The business barely supported two executive wages so Steve had to work extra hard for less than you’d expect. He had his eye on the long term. His dad took a back seat, spending long lunch-hours in the Hammer and Tongs, reading the
Financial Times
and smoking Lite cigars.

At the factory the workforce consisted mainly of women working part-time for under the minimum wage. They also had a couple of YOP schemes on the go. The kids learned how to stack packets of cups and plates into groups of twelve before putting them into boxes. It was illuminating work.

Anne Marie took an active interest in Steve’s activities and firmly believed that he was more intelligent than her. He often hinted as much with wry smiles and gentle pats on her head whenever she made as if to discuss anything of worth. He was clever enough in his own way though, clever enough to employ attractive young women at work and to touch their hair and brush himself against them when distributing their wage packets on a Friday afternoon. The women came into his office one by one. He was like an enormous prickly hairbrush, stroking and tweaking, smoothing and glossing. At work the women secretly called him ‘The Brush’. He was so obvious.

Anne Marie didn’t ever like to think bad things about him, she felt that such thoughts were a kind of disloyalty, so she baked and cleaned and made as if to be a model housewife, which she was.

In many ways she led a successful life. Sundays were her days. Steve always said, ‘Anne Marie, Sundays are your days, I’ll read the paper. Would you mind making me a coffee before
you start dinner?’ Little Fiona stood on a chair at the sink and pretended to help with the washing up.

Steve’s mother liked coming to their house on a Sunday because it saved her the effort of cooking. She was always on a diet, so cooking was a trial. She picked at her food. Steve always said that you could tell what sort of person someone was by the way that they ate. Of course, he’d always had a healthy appetite.

Anne Marie thought that she should enjoy baking so she tried to pretend to herself that she did. During the week she pretended to look forward to Sunday. She pretended to enjoy the planning that she assiduously put into play every Saturday morning at Asda over the meat counter and when choosing what kind of potato was best.

In fact she hated it. She hated the hot kitchen and the fiddly preparation, the peeling and primping. She hated cooking. But there was another baby on the way (of course she wanted it), another mouth to feed. She didn’t want to be disloyal.

The food had begun to express her. Since the new baby had been conceived – he had been drunk, she had been drunk but purposeful – the food had begun to develop its expressive faculties to the full, especially on a Sunday when it seemed to revel in its significance. Peas and potatoes, steaks and salads all had something to say, something piquant and niggly. But dinner tasted good just the same.

Little Fiona noticed first. One week she said, ‘Mummy, this lemon meringue pie seems to be angry. It tastes very bitter and the frosty bit is too sugary and full of air.’

Grandad blew smoke rings at her and said that she was a smart girl. He said, ‘The whole point of this kind of dish is its contrasts; sweet and sour, creaminess and fluffiness. In many ways this pie is like a fine woman.’

Little Fiona stared at him with beguiling eyes and said, ‘No, it’s not just like anybody, it’s like Mummy. That’s what I’m saying. It’s like her.’

Anne Marie asked if anyone fancied Brie with biscuits and before the plates had been taken away the entire incident was forgotten.

But from then on every dish was like a person or an emotion. One week the meal was like Steve’s mother. Her meal was a dish of ribs. They were lean but juicy and the sauce was menopausal. Another week the meal was like Steve. They had pheasant and the meat was dark and rich. It was too much. The vegetables were in riot against the game, they hung about in clusters and moved contemptuously around the plate. Anne Marie had made a strong gravy to swamp the meal’s strength. It disguised almost everything.

Sometimes her meals expressed people that they didn’t even know. When the Minister for Social Security didn’t increase Child Benefit, Anne Marie produced an incredible risotto that expressed him to perfection. When
Brookside
was going through an especially engaging period, when the story was particularly exciting and realistic, she produced a series of meals that expressed the programme’s leading characters and their dilemmas. Barry Grant was encapsulated in a daring toad-in-the-hole. ‘Not a proper Sunday meal,’ Steve said, ‘but enjoyable just the same.’

Since little Fiona’s first comments on the subject, Anne Marie had become increasingly aware of her random compulsion to produce food with feeling. Her meals were like feelings; sweet, sharp, painful, joyous, confused, jumbled. Her tarts were like tears, her swiss rolls just didn’t understand.

Anne Marie thought it all through. She was now five months pregnant. She thought it through and decided that maybe the meals were to do with the baby. Maybe the meals were the baby’s introduction to the emotions. She felt like the baby knew everything about everyone and everything about everything. Inside her the baby felt smug. But she was none the wiser herself. When she cooked on a Sunday she felt a pulling from deep inside her stomach, it was as though the baby’s
movements were hunger pains. It was like the baby was saying, ‘Make me real, make a meal that is me, then I will become a proper person. Give me feelings and a soul.’ But every time Anne Marie tried to bake something that expressed the baby she made something or someone else. One week she came close. She thought she’d done it when she baked some coconut cookies but when little Fiona saw them she shouted, ‘Look Mummy, it’s me! They smell so young and nice.’

Steve said that the coconut got stuck in his teeth. He picked at it. He found it irritating.

Anne Marie worried for her new baby. She wondered what she should do for it. Steve was complaining of indigestion all the time. He moaned. She thought, ‘God, he never says what he really feels, he never truly expresses himself to me.’

But she couldn’t gauge her own feelings either. She could only bake and cook. She hated doing it. She thought, ‘Feelings are such dirty and confusing things. I wish I understood them.’ Something big had to happen. Something more.

When Anne Marie was eight months pregnant with a huge stomach and swollen ankles something big finally did happen. Over the past weeks she had baked Cilla Black, her milkman, Roger Scruton, the Famous Mr Ed, Sarah Bernhardt, Michael Aspel and the girl on the cold meats counter in Tesco’s. The larger she grew the more Steve complained about how he missed her wage. Every Sunday afternoon in front of the television when his parents had finally gone home he’d say, ‘Of course I’m glad about the baby, it’s just that we miss your money in the kitty. I’m not made of money myself and times are hard.’ On these occasions the baby’s tiny hands punched and pulled inside her. She felt as though everything was disguised, as though she didn’t have the power to see anything as it really was.

The following Sunday she started baking especially early. She started to make a cake, a big three-layered coffee-and-walnut gâteau. She had never made a gâteau before so it was
something of a random operation. No single recipe seemed adequate so she combined three different ones. The cake was a real original. As she cooked, the baby pulled inside her and she thought, ‘Maybe this is it. Maybe this cake is going to be the baby.’ This thought excited her because the cake was so rich and special and extravagant.

Steve came into the kitchen for a moment as she prepared the cake and moaned that the ingredients were too lavish. He said, ‘What’s wrong with a plain madeira or a Victoria sponge?’ Anne Marie couldn’t explain what was wrong with them. She was unable to articulate.

The gâteau took three hours and thirty-five minutes to complete. It was incredible. When she had finished it Anne Marie felt totally fulfilled and serene. Unfortunately she only had enough time left to make a perfunctory meal of chops and salad for Sunday dinner. Steve grimaced when it was served. His mum said something about it being good for her diet. The meal didn’t express anything. The food was just food and it went down easily. Little Fiona looked vaguely disappointed as the plates were cleared away, but her face lit up when her mum brought forth the gâteau with a nervous show of self-conscious ceremony. She brought it out as if to say, ‘This is my new child, please don’t find fault with him.’

Everyone stared at the gâteau. Its chocolate and coffee decorations glimmered. Anne Marie took a knife to it with the slightest of winces as she cut out four large slices. They began to eat. She couldn’t bear to touch it herself even though the baby stormed inside her like a tiny hurricane.

Little Fiona took a mouthful and said, ‘I love you, Mummy. I hope I have a little baby brother to play with and that you won’t love him more than me.’

Steve’s dad collected some crumbs of walnut sponge together with his fingers and thrust them into his mouth as he said, ‘My wife never cooks properly for me. My son’s a real opportunist. He makes the most of every opportunity; at
home, at work, with the girls in the factory. I suppose you don’t even know it. I wonder what sort of a father he’ll make this time around. He has his eye on the long term, on the main chance.’

Steve’s mum licked some cream from the corner of her mouth and said, ‘He says I never cook. Why the hell should I when I have to starve myself all the time to remain unnaturally thin so that he’ll look at me every once in a while. The kids ruined my figure, I’ve always resented them for that. They’ll ruin yours if you’re not careful, Anne Marie. You look such a frump already and you’re only thirty-seven. No wonder Steve plays the field.’

Anne Marie stood by the table and clasped her hands over her stomach as though she had a bad, bad cramp. She thought, ‘Is this cake the baby? Is this what I’ve made?’

Then little Fiona said, ‘Mummy, may I have some more of the Truth Cake? I like it even though it hurts a bit. It made me feel so light. May I have some more?’

Steve cut into the cake roughly and pulled out another slice for Fiona. He then said, ‘I don’t want another baby, Anne Marie, I don’t need these complications. When Dad dies I’ll own the company and I’ll be able to do as I please. I’m sick of your cookery, I’m sick of it and yet it’s the only thing about you that’s worthwhile. You’re so careful and slow it makes me laugh. I don’t know when it was that I started to find you so ridiculous, maybe I always did. Whatever happens, just keep the new baby out of my hair, that’s all I ask. Just keep it out of my way.’

Anne Marie watched everyone finish their slices and then cleared away the plates in silence. She took the cake to the kitchen and placed it on the sideboard. Almost half was left. She stared at it blankly and felt engulfed by a great wave of depression and confusion. She thought, ‘Why did I make this? I thought that I was expressing the new baby, but all I did was to bake a Hate-Cake.’

Inside her was a smooth stroking feeling as though the baby was rocking and soothing her. She touched her stomach. From within her something called. It said, ‘This isn’t hatred, it’s the truth. This is what feelings hide and show, disguise and reveal. Have some, have some.’ She thought, ‘Maybe the baby is the truth. I feel as though he is finally real, as though he made all of this happen. I wanted the baby because I wanted to find out the truth about everything.’

She removed her hand from her stomach and cut into the cake. Then she ate one slice, another slice and then a third slice.

She swallowed her final mouthful and suddenly felt as though a light was shining from behind her eyes. In her stomach the new child was laughing. She brushed her hair back in one smooth movement and walked towards the open door. Everyone sat around the dining table in silence. They turned towards her. She stood in the doorway and smiled. Then she said, ‘I want to tell you the truth, and the truth hurts.’