The Story of You (3 page)

I laugh a lot in my job. I guess, with darkness has to come light, and you’d be amazed how gallows the humour can get. ‘You don’t have to be mad to do this job, but it helps,’ they say. But I wonder if we’re not all a bit mad already, and it’s just a question of when, not if, the lid comes off.

I find it hard at the best of times going home and straight to sleep after a night shift. Your body is exhausted but your mind is on overdrive: Will Levi take another overdose? Will John be on the psychiatric ward, yelling for his Dennis the Menace wig? These are usually the things I am thinking as I leave the office for my bed. Today, however, it was Joe’s Facebook message.

We were having one of those freak, early spring warm spells – Peckham’s teens had already stripped to their Primark hot pants – and so I decided to walk to Oval rather than get the bus. Camberwell was alive and kicking: African ladies in tropical-shade headdresses, stalls piled high with okra and plantain, spilling onto the street. A watermelon rolled onto the pavement. As I put it back, I could just make out the wiry form of Dmitri, the owner of the shop, sitting like a drying chilli on his deckchair at the back. I passed Chicken Cottage and the launderette, where the aroma of fried chicken turned into the heavy, bluebell notes of Lenor. Across the road, in the park, a group of teenagers were dancing to some rapper blasting from a pimped-up beatbox.
The heart of South London couldn’t have been beating harder if it tried, and yet, amidst all of this life, I was thinking about death – of Joe’s mum, and my mum, and everything that happened in Kilterdale, and how I really didn’t want to go back there, for a funeral of all things. The question now, of course, was how the hell was I going to get out of it?

Eventually, I caved, and went into Interflora in Camberwell. The woman behind the counter was eyeing me up over her half-moon glasses, as if she knew my game.

‘Can I help you, madam?’ she said eventually.

I smiled at her. ‘No, I’m just looking, thanks,’ and continued pretending to browse around the shop, which didn’t take long since you couldn’t swing a cat in there.

‘Okay, well if you need any help …’ she said, going back to her book, but I could feel her eyes on me; they were following me round the shop. Eventually, I felt compelled to speak.

‘Uh, actually, could you recommend flowers to send to a funeral, please?’

She perked up at this and took off her glasses.

‘Well, the classic of course is the lily,’ she said, getting up from her seat behind the counter and coming round to the front. She had a matronly bosom and was wearing a lilac, pussy-bow blouse. ‘But you can have bouquets arranged with carnations, roses; anything you like.’

I nodded, remembering the carpet of bouquets left outside the crematorium at Mum’s funeral. The messages that all started, ‘Dearest Lil …’ and finished, ‘Always in our thoughts.’ I remember being so depressed that Mum had now become merely a thought in people’s heads. How long before she wasn’t even that?

‘May I ask who it’s for?’ asked the woman. She was much more friendly now. ‘Is it a close family member? Do you know what sort of flowers they liked?’

‘Roses,’ I said, ‘peach ones.’

I must have spent more time with Marion up at the vicarage that summer than I remembered.

‘We do a lovely wreath with peach roses,’ she said. ‘Some irises, green foliage … When is the funeral?’

‘A week on Friday.’

‘In London?’

‘No, up North. A little village near the Lake District.’

She let out a little gasp. ‘Which one? My son and daughter-in-law live up there.’

I hesitated. Nobody had ever heard of it. ‘Kilterdale,’ I said.

‘No … my son lives in Yarn!’

I was genuinely shocked. In fifteen years of living in London, I could count on one hand the number of people I’d met from anywhere near my home village, it was so back of beyond.

She said, ‘It’s glorious up there. Always fascinates me how anyone would move from somewhere like that to here.’

There was a long pause. It was only when she spoke again that I realized she’d wanted an answer to that question. ‘Anyway,’ she looked a bit embarrassed that her foray into conversation hadn’t been more productive, ‘that needn’t be a problem. You can have a look at what the wreath might look like here – I have some in the back – and then we can contact an Interflora branch near where the funeral is being held.’

I felt my shoulders relax. ‘That would be great, thank you.’ Then, as I watched her bustle into the back of the shop, the nagging guilt crept in.

‘
I had no idea, I’m sorry. Now I do
.’ Joe had said in his message. But he did have an idea, even at sixteen. Whilst other lads in his year were worrying about popping cherries, getting it on with Tania Richardson, Joe was dealing with me,
posing
as his sane-and-together girlfriend but who, inside, was collapsing with grief. Now here I was, copping out of his mother’s funeral.

I was kicking myself for even joining Facebook, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be in this position, and Joe would never have found me. I only have fifteen Facebook friends, as it is, most of whom are work colleagues. I say things to my sister, Niamh, like: ‘Why does this person I did swimming with twenty years ago want to be my friend?’ Which she thinks is hilarious. Niamh is nine years younger than me, the accidental result of a drunken, food-themed fancy-dress party for my parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary – yep, my sister was conceived whilst my parents were dressed as a ‘prawn cocktail’: Mum as the prawn and Dad as Tom Cruise in
Cocktail
– and therefore thinks I am geriatric. ‘It’s a social-networking site, dumb-ass. You social-network on it,’ she says. I don’t think I’ll ever like it, though: I don’t want blasts-from-my-past being able to find me, or to see pictures of the sorts of drunken states my sister gets herself into. I worry about her. She turned twenty-three in January and I still worry about her.

I picked up some freesias and inhaled their lovely scent, wondering how long you could leave a message like Joe’s before you answered it, and decided two days was already too long.

‘Here we are …’ The lady clattered through the plastic strips of curtain separating the shop from the back, carrying a peach-flowered wreath. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ she said, holding it up. ‘They’ll be able to make you one up like this in no time.’

I sniffed it.

‘Yes, it’s lovely. How much?’

‘They start at seventy-five pounds and go up to a hundred.’

‘Seventy-five
pounds
?’ It flew out of my mouth before I could stop it.

‘It is expensive, but then when you think of what it’s for … what those flowers say. Your personal goodbye.’

As if I didn’t feel guilty enough already.

Going in person would say a hell of a lot more, I knew that. I knew that for much less, fifty quid perhaps, I could get a train ticket up to Kilterdale, or fill up my car with petrol. So, I wouldn’t even be able to plead poverty if I sent the flowers.

‘I’ll have a think about it,’ I said, having decided to do nothing of the sort.

‘Okay, well don’t leave it too late to order.’ She went a bit frosty after that. ‘They need time to make it up.’

I made a swift exit out of there.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if Eva – my Polish, hoarding next-door neighbour – lies in wait for me. I’d made it into the lobby of my block. I’d even got so far as leaning across the mound of bin bags that block her entrance and, as each day passes, mine, to put my key in the lock, when she swung open her door.

‘Ah, Missus King …’ She was wearing a mustard-yellow sun dress, which clung to her form like clingfilm around an enormous block of cheese. ‘I very happy I sin you, I bin worried sick of you. I not seen you for
days
.’

Behind her, an avalanche of more bin bags stretched back and up, indefinitely.

‘Eva, you saw me yesterday, remember?’ I said, peering past her shoulder. I was always fascinated about how she might sleep: wedged between shelves like you saw on those Channel 4 documentaries about chronic hoarders? Up against an ironing board? ‘We were discussing when you might ring the council for someone to help you come and move this stuff so I can get to my front door without straining a muscle.’

I just gave it to her straight these days. I was over being subtle, even polite.

She looked me up and down through those dark, hooded eyes then: ‘You look thin,’ she sniffed, ignoring me. ‘You still pining for zis, zis little man?’

I laughed. ‘Andy, you mean? No, Eva, I’m fine, it was for the best, but thanks for asking,’ I said, pushing the bags aside with my foot.

‘He no good enough for you,’ she said, as I managed to get close enough to my door to open it. ‘He too old. He no give you enough attention …!’

‘Don’t worry, Eva, I’m really okay,’ I said, then, before I closed the door, ‘Now promise me you’ll ring the council about those bags!’

I locked the door and leaned against it for a second, just closing my eyes. Silence. The thing was, Eva was right: I was pining for Andy – not pining so much as missing him; I was in an ‘Andy mood’. Joe’s message had caught me off guard and I suddenly craved the familiarity of him.

I went into the living room and turned on the TV for company – since Andy and I finished last month, I’ve done this every day – then I ran a bath. I’m also the cleanest I’ve ever been.

It’s funny; when I bought this place – a slightly shabby, ground-floor, two-bed in a small, 1930s block – four years ago with the money Mum left me, I relished coming home to an empty flat. After spending all day talking to people – often about their suicide plans: how they had the vodka and the Temazepam at the ready – I relished having a place to myself; a sanctuary from all the madness. I’d often just sit there when I got in, in silence, take the phone off the hook, read a book, eat sweetcorn straight from the can. Then, a year ago, along came Andy and changed all that. For the first time in four years, I had a boyfriend; and, what’s more, I liked it.

I made sure the bath was as hot as it could be without actually scalding me, then I got in. It was 6 p.m. – 6 p.m.! What the hell was I supposed to fill the rest of the evening with? There’s only so much lying in a bath and exfoliating you can do, after all. I thought about poor Joe – about those awful few days of bereavement, the shock, the need for people around you. Then I thought about the reality of going back to Kilterdale and seeing him after all this time, the feelings it might unearth, the memories I’d boxed up for sixteen years now. It made me so anxious.

I thought about Andy – familiar, benign Andy, who was so wrapped up in himself it made it impossible for you to think about anything else – about calling him and inviting him over, just to ‘veg’, as he put it. I imagined sitting next to him on the sofa, watching
Dragon’s Den
, and sharing a kedgeree (Yes, Andy was a big fan of a smoked-fish item, I thought fondly). What harm could it do?

I met Andy on a speed-dating night. I’d gone with Kaye from work – God, I love Kaye. She always says to me, ‘Kingy, never settle. There’s far too much fun to be had with a packet of Oreos and BBC iPlayer.’ (Kaye is thirty-seven and still refuses to settle. She watches a lot of TV and eats a lot of Oreos.) He was the older man – forty-two to my thirty-one – and I liked that, the idea of being looked after for a change. We chatted easily for the allotted three minutes. Afterwards, he made a beeline for me at the bar.

‘I like you, Robyn. You’re different. In fact, I’d say you’re marriage material,’ he said, and from there, ‘we’ just sort of happened. I gathered he felt free to throw around phrases like ‘you’re marriage material’ because he was going through a horrid divorce and therefore never likely to marry anyone ever again. And we had a lot of fun for a while, Andy and I. I even liked the fact he’d been married and had two kids, at first: it made him seem ‘normal’, as in, what you’d expect a normal, functioning bloke to have done at forty-two, I guess …

Before Andy, I’d given up on any kind of normal. I’d realized normal – as in marriage and kids – was not the way it was going for me. And that was fine, I’d made my peace with that. Kaye and I had decided that, if all else failed, we’d join a hippy commune and grow our armpit hair and eat biscuits all day like we did at work. But then Andy came along and he made me believe in normal again. He made me want it.

I topped the bath up with more hot water and lay back, staring despairingly at the damp patch on the bathroom ceiling, which was encroaching like an oily tide.

Finishing with Andy had probably been the most amicable ending of a relationship I’d ever known, perhaps because I’d never been more than someone nice to fill a space for him, and that was fine. It was as though he’d swooped in, post-separation, for some respite care at the Hospice of St Kindness (i.e. me, or anyone else who would listen to him) and was now recharged, ready to take on the world again. When I’d told him it was over, he’d looked disappointed and taken aback, but not hurt, I noted. It was the sort of expression you might wear if you’d just been told there was no more carrot soup on the menu and you’d have to have leek and potato.

After leaving the restaurant, we’d walked to the Tube together, even chatted as we glided down the escalator. As would be the case, a busker was singing Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ with accompanying pan-pipe backing track when we got to the bottom. He’d taken hold of my elbows and we’d gazed at one another with sad smiles as the busker sang how sometimes it lasts in love, and sometimes it hurts instead. Then Andy said, ‘I’ll be in touch.’

And I’d smiled, because he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t help but promise, even at the end, something he couldn’t deliver.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to.’

‘At least let’s have a cuddle, then?’ he’d said, opening his arms; and we did, and it was nice. Andy’s a good hugger. It’s the one thing we’d both done well probably because there’s no pressure in a hug, is there?

‘Okay, bye then,’ I’d said.

‘Yeah, I will call though, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I’d said.