The Forever Girl (33 page)

“No.”

“That’s all you can say? No?”

“Yes. I mean, no.”

“I give up,” he said harshly, and then, almost immediately, relented. “Sorry. I wish I could be positive, but how can you be positive about something that has disaster written all over it?” He repeated the word to underline his warning. “Disaster.”

32

Judy gave her an enthusiastic welcome.

“I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you’re here,” she said. “I’ve asked
tons
of people to visit me and not one has taken me up on the invitation. Not a single one – apart from you.”

They were standing at the window of the spare room in her flat. This flat was in a building that was not high by Singaporean standards – four storeys, arranged around a courtyard dominated by an inviting blue swimming pool. Two young children, brother and sister, frolicked in the water at the shallow end of the pool, watched by a uniformed nurse. The nurse spoke constantly on her phone, occasionally getting up, mid-conversation, to admonish the boy for splashing his sister too enthusiastically.

“Those children,” said Judy, “belong to some people on the floor below. You never see the parents with them – just one of the Filipina nurses. There are two of them – the Filipinas – and I’ve got to know one of them quite well, but not this one. They spend their lives working for other people, although they have children of their own back home. The other woman’s sister works in the Middle East. She looks after the children of some ruling family over there. She says the children never even learn to tie their own shoe-laces because they have a Filipina to do it for them. Can you imagine that?”

Clover watched the children. She had grown up with that sort of thing in the Caymans, where the Jamaicans did the work of the Filipinas.

Judy looked at her and smiled. “The truth is – I’m bored stiff. I don’t know what to do. I’m only here because my parents want me to be. I’m going to have to talk to them about leading my own life.”

“Do another degree,” said Clover.

“That’s what I’m planning to do. That’s what master’s degrees are for, aren’t they? To keep graduates out of the unemployment statistics.” She paused. “How long do you want to stay?”

Clover suggested two weeks and Judy gave a cry of delight. “Oh my God, that’s fantastic. I thought you were going to say two days. That’s what most people do – they come here on their way to Australia or Bali or somewhere sexy like that and then they go. Or, in my case, they don’t come in the first place.”

Clover took a deep breath. She knew that she would have no alternative but to tell Judy about her deception, and now she did so. Hearing her own account of what happened only served to deepen her disquiet. “I know it sounds stupid,” she said at the end. “But that’s what I did.”

Judy’s reaction took her by surprise. “Totally reasonable,” she said.

“So you don’t disapprove?”

“Why should I disapprove? Nobody’s died.”

Clover said that she felt that she had involved Judy in her dishonesty.

“No,” said Judy. “You didn’t. It’s entirely up to me as to whether I play along with this – and I’m cool with it. Absolutely. Men mislead women all the time – they’re such liars – this is just a return match.”

“You’ll back me up? You’ll go along with what I said happened?”

“Of course. Just give me the details.”

She gave her the broad details of the imaginary life that she had created for herself. Judy listened with growing amusement. “We had a terrific time together,” she said. “Our virtual life was much more interesting than real life.”

“We’re going out for dinner on Tuesday,” Clover said.

“Tuesday? Good. I’m free.”

Clover was silent for a few moments. She had invited herself to Singapore and she could hardly tell her friend that she was not welcome at dinner. Judy, though, picked up her hesitation.

“Sorry, it was going to be just the two of you. I shouldn’t have …”

“No, I’d like you to come. You’ll have the chance to catch up with him.”

Judy did not protest. “All right. Thank you. I haven’t seen him for ages. Not since Cayman, really – we didn’t connect in Edinburgh.”

“I’m sure he’ll be keen to see you.”

Judy smiled. “I know this really great place where everybody wants to go these days. My father knows the owner – we’ll get in no matter what time we arrive.”

She made a list of the places that she had mentioned to James in her e-mails to him, and asked Judy about these, reading out what she had written – the fiction of her created life.

Judy seemed bemused. “You wrote that about me?” she said. “You told him that we went out for a meal and saw that movie and so on? All of that?”

Clover nodded ruefully. What had started with so little thought, what had seemed so innocent and inoffensive at the time, had now taken on the appearance of a monstrous deception. “I don’t know why I did it,” she said. “Well, I do, I suppose … I suppose I wanted to be involved with him. I wanted him to pay attention to me and what I was doing. Does that make sense to you?”

“It does. In a way – as a form of attention seeking.”

“I feel such a fraud,” said Clover.

Judy laughed. “But you are,” although she rapidly added, “No offence, of course.”

And soon, rather sooner than she might have wished, James arrived in Singapore and telephoned from his hotel. She took the call with trepidation, signalling to Judy across the room. “Him?” mouthed Judy.

She nodded, and Judy gave the thumbs up signal.

After the call, Clover said, “He never phoned me before, you know. Or hardly ever. It was always me.”

Judy was encouraging. “I’ve got a good feeling about this,” she said. “I think that something’s changed. I think it’s over between him and …”

“Shelley.”

“Yes. He wants to see you, I think.”

“You really think so?”

Judy grinned. “Well, why else would he bother?”

“Maybe he just wants somebody to show him round Singapore.”

Judy shook her head. “People don’t need to be shown round Singapore,” she said. “You get a map and places are where they’re meant to be. It’s very well organised. No, I think at long last he’s come round.”

“I feel as if I know this place,” he said.

Judy had poured him a beer and was sitting opposite James in the flat. Clover was on the sofa next to him.

“You’ve been to Singapore?” Judy said.

“No. Not Singapore. This flat. Clover wrote to me and told me what she was doing. What
you
were doing.”

Judy caught Clover’s eye, and smiled. “Chick lit,” she said.

“
Two Single Girls in Singapore
. How about that for a title? Fiction section, of course.”

James seemed amused. “It wasn’t very steamy,” he said.

“The whole place is steamy,” retorted Judy. “You’ve probably been in air conditioning since you arrived. Open the window. Let in the steam.”

Clover felt uncomfortable about this exchange and tried to change the subject. “Judy knows this place for dinner,” she said. “What’s it called, Judy?”

The answer was addressed to James, and not to her. “Billy Lee’s. It’s mostly seafood, but you can get other things. He has this incredibly ancient chef – he’s ninety or something like that, and he comes out and speaks to everybody and asks them whether they’d like to come and help in the kitchen. And when they say yes, as they tend to do, he says that it’s the washing-up he was thinking of, and everybody laughs.”

“That’s where we’re going?” asked James.

Again the conversation was between James and Judy. “We thought you’d like it,” Clover interjected.

James turned to her. “But of course I will.”

“I didn’t know whether you liked Chinese food.”

He smiled. “But don’t you remember? We went for that Chinese meal in Cayman – a hundred years ago. Remember? It was Ted’s birthday party – we were about twelve or something, and Ted’s mother took us all to that Chinese restaurant near the airport and they had made a massive cake for Ted. Don’t you remember?”

It came back to her. She remembered wanting to sit next to him, but he had been with other friends and she had watched him over the table. He had been her hero, the object of her
admiration, her longing. It was well before she had an inkling of what love was like, but it was there, already planted, its first tender shoots about to take root; which would take over her life, she now thought.

For a moment she was back there. “I wanted to sit next to you,” she said. The remark came unbidden.

James looked surprised. “To me? At Ted’s party?”

Judy was watchful.

“Yes,” said Clover. “I wanted to sit next to you, but you always seemed too busy for me. You wanted to be with other people.” She stopped herself. She had not intended to say any of this.

James was abashed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … to ignore you, or whatever it was I was doing.”

Judy now entered the conversation. “Boys don’t like girls at that age. They want to be with other boys. Look at groups of kids. The boys all talk together and so do the girls.”

“Oh, I know,” said Clover. “But they can still be friends, can’t they? And lots of people are. Lots of people have best friends of the opposite sex when they’re young.”

Judy looked doubtful. “I don’t think so. What do you think, James? Did you have a best friend?”

He picked up his glass. Clover noticed the pattern in the condensation where he had held it. His hand. James’s hand. “I had a friend called Ted,” he said. “I don’t know whether you’d remember him from Cayman.”

Judy shook her head. “No, I don’t. We left so long ago.”

“He’s a friend of Clover’s too. I suppose that Ted was my best friend for a long time. We went to different places, though, when we were sent off to boarding school.”

“Ted’s gay,” said Clover. She felt a moment of doubt, and
wondered whether she had unwittingly betrayed a confidence: had Ted talked to James about that? She thought that he made no secret of it, but was not sure now that he had mentioned it.

James did not react. “Yes,” he said. “Of course he is.”

Clover thought she knew what Judy was thinking. Judy would be imagining that this was the thing that she – Clover – had failed to spot all along. James was not interested in her because of a very simple reason, and you, Clover, didn’t pick up on it because you were too obsessed by him to see the glaringly obvious truth. Talk about naïveté!

But it was not true – it simply was not true. Ted and James had never been boyfriends because … She hesitated. Ted had confessed to her that he saw James in that way but had never hinted that his feelings were reciprocated. And James had had various girlfriends, which pointed the other way, except, of course, if he were repressing something.

“Women,” said Judy, “like to have a best gay friend. He’s no threat. You can talk to him.”

“Of course,” said James. “Whereas you can’t talk to straight men, can you?”

There was a sardonic note to his remark, and Clover watched its effect on Judy. The other woman had to think quickly. “You can,” she said, adding, “If they allow you. Straight men have barriers.”

“Oh?” said James. “Do we?”

Do we
, thought Clover. And she wanted to say to Judy, “That settles that.” But then it occurred to her that it did not. It depended on the sincerity of the
we
. Or the possible irony.

Judy looked at her watch. “I reserved for about twenty minutes from now and we need to go.” She turned to Clover.
“How should we get there, Clover? What do you think?”

She was taken aback by the question, and it occurred to her that in entrusting Judy with the story of her subterfuge she had created a hostage. She did not think that Judy was about to reveal her secret to James; rather, she thought that she was playing with her here – taunting her with the possibility of exposure.

“It’s up to you,” she said evenly. “I forget how we did it last time. Taxi?”

Judy grinned, acknowledging that Clover had batted back the verbal grenade.

“Taxi, then,” she said.

They made their way to the restaurant. James was clearly excited to be in Singapore and asked Judy a series of questions as they made the taxi journey. Judy seemed to enjoy the attention; she knew the city well and he listened attentively to what she had to say about it. Clover sat back and stared out of the window. Everything was going wrong, and it was all Judy’s fault. Somebody on their course in Edinburgh had once described Judy as selfish, and Clover had defended her; but the criticism must have been justified, as she was selfish here; an unselfish friend would never have suggested accompanying her as Judy had done.

In the restaurant, Judy paraded her knowledge of the menu and her few, mispronounced words of Chinese, patiently received by the staff.

“I’m trying to remember what we ate when we came here,” said Judy, picking up the menu. “Do you remember, Clover?”

Clover looked at the selection. “You had far too much,” she said dryly. “You felt sick. Remember?”

This brought a sharp glance, and Clover bit her lip. She would have to tolerate Judy, because a word from her could spoil
everything. She did not trust her.

After the dinner, they picked up a taxi directly outside the restaurant. Judy asked James the name of his hotel and then said, “It’ll make sense to drop you first. It’s on our way.”

James accepted. And then to Clover, “I’ll call you. Are you free on Friday evening?” That was three days away.

Clover noticed Judy staring at her, and wondered whether she assumed she would be included in the invitation. “Fine,” she said quickly. “I’m free.” She stressed the
I
.

“I …” began Judy, but James cut her off.

“Maybe you should come round to the hotel,” he said. “We could go out somewhere from there.”

She noticed that the remark was very clearly addressed to her and that it excluded Judy.

James turned to Judy, and said, apologetically, “School reunion time.”

Judy made a carefree gesture. “Of course. Clover will know where to take you, won’t you, Clover?”

“Yes,” said Clover. “No problem there.”