The ABCs of Love (10 page)

orphans

I have been an orphan for two years now. It’s difficult to say that without sounding pathetic, but my friends are now my family. Well, John is now my family.

No, I am completely happy. I miss nothing. I am searching for nothing. Especially not a father figure. Sally is wrong. She is just jealous because although Colin has more money, he does not treat her as well as John looks after me. I can tell John everything. And I do. He says he wants to protect me so carefully that no harm will ever happen to me. This is why I have to do what he says, be what he wants. Everyone needs someone to look after them.

See also Stepmothers; Teaching; Voices; Zzzz

outcast

Until we started on her, Dawn was no different from any other girl at school.

But then one day in the lunch hall, she dropped her tray. It was full of food, but while embarrassing, even that might have been all right on its own. After all, it was something we worried about doing ourselves. But then, instead of cursing or picking it up or doing anything, Dawn just stood there, blushing. Soon she was completely red.

Dollops of shepherd’s pie in greasy gravy lay around her feet. Chunks of tinned pineapple, banana, peach left snail trails on the floor where they’d skittered away from the shattered bowl.

After the initial thud, the dining hall was completely silent. Everyone was watching Dawn. I felt my stomach well up and get stuck in my throat. Why didn’t she do anything? My head seemed to be expanding beyond my skull. I wanted to scream.

I don’t know who it was who first started to clap, but soon we were all joining in. That slow clap-clap-clap, each one separated by a heartbeat’s silence. Even the teachers seemed frozen, until Dawn spun round and ran out of the hall. She must have kept on running through the school and into the street because the next time we saw her, she was standing next to her father as our form teacher told us all about how we must be kind to everyone, regardless of their background. How we mustn’t ostracize Dawn just because she was not like us.

We stared at Dawn, trying to work out what was wrong with her background. I honestly don’t think anyone had noticed anything special about her before. It was then that we saw the hole in her cardigan at the elbow, the dirty socks, the smudges on her face not wiped off by a mother’s spit. She was looking down at the ground as if to give us a better view of the scruffy parting of the hair, not painfully sculpted each morning like our mothers did with the sharp end of the comb.

Then we started on her father. We asked ourselves what was he doing there in school when all our fathers were at work. Why was he in dirty old jeans and a V-necked jumper without a shirt, let alone a tie? We saw him looking at us all, not defiantly, but with eyes full of what we could recognize even then as defeat.

I can’t remember anyone ever talking about it, but I can’t have been the only one who felt my blood rise at how they could just stand there and take the humiliation. We became pack animals, the rest of us, trying to rid ourselves of the weakest links.

Dawn never had a happy day at school again after that. Sometimes she tried to talk to me because I was left on my own at playtime too, but I’d turn my back on her.

Couldn’t she see being hated was something two people could never have in common?

See also Captains; Start-rite Sandals; Vendetta

P

pain index

If John and I were together all the time, I know we would be able to speak normally to each other. The trouble is, when we speak on the telephone now, I have a second conversation—the things I really want to know— going on in my mind. This makes it difficult to talk, so when I do eventually say what I want to say, it comes out too quickly and harshly and I start crying.

John says he can’t bear it. He just wants things back to being as they were. He says I need to find a way round this.

See also Nostrils; Utopia

phantom e-mails

The first time I e-mailed myself, it was just a joke. To see what would happen. I wrote:

Dear Verity,

You are my life. Every time I wake up, I wish you were next to me. Nothing is worth us being apart.

And then one click of a button and it was gone. I forgot all about it, but the next time I checked my e-mails, I felt a rush of joy when I saw there was one waiting for me in my in-box.

It was everything I could have wanted. Brian must have seen the smile on my face because he started teasing me. I had to admit that, yes, I had just received a wonderful note. “You are my life,” I whispered to myself. For the rest of that day, everyone was nicer to me than they usually are. I think they wanted to rub a little of my joy off onto their own lives.

I kept checking all day, but there wasn’t another e-mail. Late at night, after a bottle of wine, I went on the Internet again. By the time I got into the office in the morning, there were three e-mails waiting for me, each one as magical as the first. This has made me see what I’m missing in my life, and how easy it would be to make it happen.

See also God; Mistaken Identity; Zero

phone calls

Since I’ve started receiving the e-mails, I’ve been feeling better. I’ve also had more courage about contacting John at work. I rang him up once when I knew he was in a meeting. I imagined his little office full of people talking about kitchen equipment.

“I can’t stop wanting you,” I said. “Do you want me too?”

He told me yes, he believed he did.

“Would you like to make love to me now, on the carpet, with everyone looking?” I asked. He said that that would be a consideration and that he would think about it very hard when it was more convenient.

“I’d take off all my clothes,” I said, “and climb on your lap. You’d be wearing your suit, but I’d be able to feel how much you wanted me through the material. I’d rub my bare skin all over you.”

He said that this was definitely a matter he needed to spend more time on. He wondered if it would be possible for us to talk about it later. When we could take it further. In more depth. Perhaps there were other angles he needed to investigate.

I put the phone down then. When we did talk about it later, he told me that he suddenly realized that he was cradling the receiver like a baby and stroking the telephone cord like it was my hair. Everyone in the room, he said, was staring at him.

He made me promise never to do it, ever again, but that night we made love for such a long time, he missed his train home and had to get a taxi.

See also Codes; Marathons; Teaching; Vacuuming

pop stars

Last week after we’d made love, John told me that when he was a teenager, people used to think he looked like David Bowie. He asked me which pop star I used to fancy when I was young. The phrase sounded so odd and old-fashioned coming from him like that.
Pop
star. Fancy.
I wanted to giggle.

We were in bed. John had his eyes shut, and the way he was lying against the pillow made him look as if he had a double chin, so I found a little spot on the ceiling to concentrate on instead.

Did I like David Cassidy or Donny Osmond? he asked, because in his experience, girls usually went for one or the other. Although, of course, he went on, his eyes still shut, if a girl was really cool, she’d go for Bryan Ferry. Kate had liked . . .

By the time I turned to him, his eyes were wide open and he was watching me.

It’s important to be able to talk about everything, I told him. But when I said who I’d liked when I was a teenager, he said he’d never heard of him.

I wonder if that spot on the ceiling is damp. The people above have probably let their bathwater flow over. Sometimes they have no consideration. I keep watching it now every time John and I go to bed. I could swear it’s getting bigger.

See also Youth

positive thinking

My mother was a great believer in the power of positive thinking. Her idea of a self-help book would be called Buck Up and Sort Yourself Out. I tend to agree with her, so why did I spend £8.99 at lunchtime on a book called
How to Keep Your Man
? I can’t stop thinking about Kate. Has she no self-respect?

See also Happiness; Imposter Syndrome

poverty

John says we would be very poor if we lived together. I still haven’t told him about my inheritance. Instead, I tell him that I know what it is to be poor.

After all, my father often told the tale about how when he was young, his family didn’t have enough money to buy him any clothes so he could never leave the house. But then when he was eighteen, they saved up enough money to get him a cap so he could look out of the window.

Actually, I don’t think that story is true. But I do believe this one. My father’s family scraped up enough money to buy him one good coat for school. They were so proud the day he went off wearing it that they all stood in the road to watch him go. But at lunchtime he didn’t come back. Eventually, my grandmother went up to the school to find him, and he was in the changing rooms crying because someone had stolen his brand-new coat. There was only one coat left hanging up, but it was too big and very, very scruffy. Because she was so cross, my grandmother made my father wear it, and his own new coat was never found.

John’s grandmother used to make clothes for the gentry. One day she had to make jackets for the local hunt. She used what material was left over to make winter coats for her children, including John’s mother. All the other children used to tease them, but the material would never wear out because it was of such good quality. It was hunting pink.

I held John close after he told me that story. When I think of my father now, a picture of John comes into my mind. He’s in a very big pink coat, and he’s this little shrimp, all lost and white-faced, looking out.

See also Fashion; Indecent Exposure; Objects

promotion

When you are happy, good things happen to you. It’s all a question of attitude.

We were asked for suggestions as to how we could improve the atmosphere at work. John had just rung me up to tell me he loved me. I felt like I could rule the world.

Why not turn the downstairs storeroom into a staff café? I wrote. Bring in plates of sandwiches every lunchtime, put jugs of fresh orange juice on the tables, have coffee machines so people can help themselves to fresh coffee. We can talk to one another about work, relax, forge a communal atmosphere, even invite clients there.

Now everyone keeps coming up and telling me what a good idea it was. The chairman even stopped me on the stairs and asked how I was enjoying my job. Brian says I’m bound to get a promotion. I just need to keep up the good work.

John hasn’t phoned me at all today. I have just spent an hour typing out
John call Verity. John call Verity,
over and over again. It’s an attempt at mind reading, but in reverse. A whole pile of work I’m supposed to be getting through is lying abandoned at the back of the desk. People are starting to get cross with me. Brian keeps harrumphing at me from the other side of the room.

The trouble with the staff café is that I will have to spend my lunchtimes at work now. I won’t be able to sneak out and meet John.

See also Bosses; Positive Thinking; Zero