The Story of You (7 page)

Our house was big too: ‘The big pink house in Kilterdale.’ But it was a wreck. Mum and Dad had bought it when I was six, for a pittance, with some big plans (Dad in particular was good at those) to do it up and turn it into a ‘palace fit for a King!’ It was always the party house – there was nothing to spoil, after all, since nothing had been done – and every summer, we’d hold the King Family Extravaganza, where Mum and Dad would dress up as some famous couple – Sonny and Cher, Marge and Homer, Torvill and Dean – and Dad would serve hot dogs and beer from his old ice-cream van. The big renovation plans began, finally, when I was eleven, but then Dad’s work dried up and they’d always spent so much on socializing, on living for the now instead of thinking about the future (good job, as it turns out) that they couldn’t finish. One year, we had to move into a caravan in the driveway, because we couldn’t afford to finish off the plumbing. Leah (who was fourteen at the time and very unamused by the whole situation) would shout at the top of her voice things like: ‘If I have to shove anyone else’s shit down this septic tank, I am going to
throw it at them
!’ I dread to think what people on that street thought of us.

It was a shock to the system then, dragged up amidst such chaos (and a lot of fun), to meet Joe, whose house was a vision of sombre, deep contemplation – at least, that was what I imagined. The first time I went there, his dad was wearing his dog collar. We all had tea and biscuits in the living room, making polite smalltalk to the background sound of the grandfather clock ticking away. I bit into a ginger nut and Joe looked at me like I’d just flashed my bra:

‘Oh,
no
’ he said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You didn’t say Grace, and we always says Grace before we eat anything
.
’

I felt sick. They let me suffer for a good ten seconds before they
all
started killing themselves laughing. So that was the kind of ‘good’ church family
they
were. That was the kind of home the Sawyers had.

The vicarage was an Edwardian villa-type affair, with huge front windows and a big conservatory off the back. The front doors were open when I got there after the funeral, so you could see right through the sun-flooded hall of the house to the lawn, where people were milling in the sun, drinking cups of tea. The scene was very tame – mind you, I’m not sure what I expected: a free bar, like at Mum’s (recipe for disaster in retrospect)? Most people were over fifty and very sedate. I was a bit disappointed the probation lot hadn’t turned up; they’d have livened things up a bit.

I did a quick scan for alcohol and could see none, which panicked me. Then I spotted Mrs Murphy, our old deputy head, and panicked even more – this was exactly why I’d worried about coming: blasts-from-the-past absolutely everywhere. I looked around for Joe, but couldn’t see him, and so I took myself off to the buffet table, before finding a quiet corner, where I was immediately joined by a woman who’d just got back from a Christian Aid mission in Somalia. I’d just put an entire mini pork pie into my mouth when she started telling me about all the horrors there, so all I could do was nod. She left soon after and so I went for a wander, to find Joe, and hopefully some alcohol. I ventured into the cool, dark hall, where one woman – angular and the colour of digestive biscuits – was talking at the top of her voice to an audience, who looked as if they’d not so much gathered, as been passing through and seized against their will.

‘I’ll never forget when Marion came to my Zumba class,’ she was saying. ‘It was last summer. Or was it the summer before? Or was it the one before then?’

Why was it always the one who knew the deceased the least, who talked the loudest at funerals?

I went on to the kitchen, where people were poring over clip-frame pictures of Marion, which I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at. Old Potty was there with his Mexican-wave eyebrows. I was contemplating slipping out, texting Joe later, then I saw Mrs Murphy looking dangerously like she was making a beeline for me, and decided on a tactical toilet break. I sloped upstairs.

The house had hardly changed in eighteen years. It had the same smell: furniture, polish and books. The wide, dark staircase seemed modest enough now, whereas it used to seem so grand to me, so full of mystique, probably because it led to Joe’s bedroom, which was the only place we could be alone, doing whatever we did in there – learning Zeppelin lyrics off by heart, discussing Potty’s eyebrows … Joe’s mum occasionally walking past with the Hoover.

‘Joseph, leave your door open, please, otherwise Robyn will have to go home!’

Behind that door, we’d be sitting, holding our breath, often in various stages of undress. It seemed like an age ago, another life ago. Like it didn’t even happen.

There was the same mahogany side table at the top of the stairs, with the photos on top. I paused to look at the one of all four boys, an eight-year-old Joe on the end, pulling a stupid face, desperate to dash off as soon as the picture was taken.

I gave myself a quick once-over in the long mirror just before you get to Joe’s room.

I was wearing a black Monsoon shift dress. Last time I looked in this mirror, the girl staring back at me was terrified, with peroxide hair: white face, white hair. I just remember that.

The door to Joe’s bedroom was half open, just a slice of the view of the rolling sheep-dotted fields, then the flat grey line of the sea. I couldn’t resist it. I went inside. It smelt different, of a guest room, but it was still completely Joe’s room. There was still the poster of Led Zeppelin’s album
Physical Graffiti
(Joe and I were alone and, it has to be said, slightly ridiculed in our appreciation of Led Zeppelin, which as teenagers was enough to make us believe we were destined for one another) and, above his bed, Béatrice Dalle in
Betty Blue
pouted back at me. Clearly, Joe’s older brothers had introduced him to
Betty Blue
and the wondrous sexiness that was Béatrice Dalle, since we were only little when the film came out, but I’d often looked at her in that poster; the tough, gap-toothed poutiness and the cleavage, and I’d wanted to
be
Béatrice Dalle at sixteen. I wanted to be French and insouciant and wild and sexy. I was kind of annoyed with this gawky, traumatised teenager, who just desperately missed her mum. I wandered around for a bit, examining Joe’s odd collection of boy trinkets: rocks and fossils, and then – I couldn’t believe he’d kept it this long! – the ‘ironic’ pen in the shape of a lady; when you tipped her up, her knickers came off. I’d brought it back from Palma Menorca for a laugh, in 1997. That year – the summer we got together – Joe went to Amsterdam and bought me a wooden clog specially engraved with my name. The fact he’d queued up to get that done (because ‘
Robyn
’ was never on any merchandise in the land) thrilled me. ‘He must
really
like me,’ I’d thought, ‘If he’s willing to queue in front of his mum and dad, to get a wooden
clog
signed.’

‘He’s got tenacity, that one,’ I remember Dad saying. A few months later, Joe wasn’t allowed to set foot in our house. But I still have that clog, and sometimes, when I’m feeling down, I just like to turn it over in my hand; feel its wooden, smooth simplicity.

I stood in front of his bed – it was the same metal, tubular bed in 1980s grey that he’d had back then – and remembered how I’d had some of my most uncomfortable nights in it. It was like sleeping on a climbing frame, and yet, in the times we’d snatched together, it was also where I was happiest; where, for a while, I could forget about Mum, curling around Joe’s warm, strong body. We’d lie there in the dark, thrilled just to be naked together.

Joe was obviously sleeping in this room because there was a wash bag on the bed. I stood looking at it, feeling a wave of sadness. Imagine coming home, to sleep in your childhood bed, knowing your mother is to be buried the next day. Just then, the door flew open, making me jump. It was Joe. He slammed it shut, his back towards me, swearing, leaning his forehead against it for a moment, before fiddling in his inside jacket pocket and producing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He unscrewed the top, muttered something about
Sorry Mum
and
have to do this
, and then tipped his head back and took a swig. Then he saw me.

‘Bloody hell, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ he said.

Then, when he’d realized what he’d said, ‘That’s going to keep on happening, isn’t it?’

I smiled. ‘Probably.’

‘Do you want some?’ he said, holding the bottle out. ‘Can I just say, it was a huge oversight by me not to have organised booze at this wake.’

‘Yup,’ I said, taking a gulp. ‘Still, I don’t need booze to relax.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘’Coz I do.’

I handed him the bottle back. ‘Jack Daniel’s? Going for the hard liquor, then?’

‘I can’t take any risks,’ he said. ‘It needs to reach my bloodstream instantly. I just can’t
talk
to people any longer.’

There was a long silence, during which we just sort of looked at each other.

‘So, er … the bathroom’s two doors down,’ he said, thumbing in that general direction when I just stood there, still clutching Miss Knickerless. ‘Same place it’s always been.’

I felt my cheeks grow hot.

‘God, sorry. I couldn’t resist, I just had this mad desire to—’

‘Snoop around my bedroom?’

‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry.’

‘I’m joking, Robyn.’ His eyebrows gave a little flicker of amusement. ‘It’s actually really sweet.’

He looked pale as anything, washed out. I’d forgotten about that bit, the
tiredness
,
and he pushed the stuff to the side, collapsing on the bed.

‘I should go,’ I said. He’d come up here to be alone, lose himself, and here I was, making that impossible, but he said, ‘Don’t
go
. Why do you keep on wanting to go?’

He looked genuinely annoyed – Joe and his transparency.

‘I don’t know, because you want to be on your own?’

He tutted, dramatically. ‘I don’t want to be on my own. I just can’t take much more of people, of Betty. We’re only on 1978. There’s thirty-odd years to get through yet.’

I laughed, despite myself.

‘I needed someone to save me. Where were you, Robbie?’ he said, turning on his side.

‘Snooping round your bedroom?’

I sat down on the bed next to him. Up close, it was like he’d changed even less, and I had this urge to give him a hug, but wondered whether that was appropriate, him lying on a bed and all, so I said, ‘It’ll be over soon. They’ll all bugger off home and then you can go to sleep or watch a film. That’s what I did.’

‘Really, what did you watch?’

‘
The Evil Dead
.’

‘You
are
joking?’

‘I’m not, as it happens. It’s my job, you see. You start off quite PC and normal and, before you know it, you can’t operate in normal society.’

Joe thought this was really funny. ‘So, basically, you’ve become like, the world’s most un-PC mental-health nurse? Telling schizophrenics to get real?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

We were both giggling now – funeral hysteria.

‘So, anyway, let’s get back to this
Evil Dead
thing,’ he said. ‘Talk me through that.’

‘Well, I found that the key is distraction, not stimulation,’ I tried to explain. ‘No tear-jerkers, which rules out a lot more than you may think, for obvious reasons. No documentaries or kids films ’cause they just remind you of too much. So, yeah, slasher-horror really is your best bet.
The Evil Dead
is the ultimate wake-movie.’

Joe tried to be serious for a second, then smiled. ‘You always did have all the best advice,’ he said.

He turned on his back, closed his eyes and let out this huge sigh. I was looking at the shape of his lips, the Cupid’s bow, the wideness of them, the way they always looked like he was about to say something amusing, trying to remember what it felt like to kiss him. Then remembering that I shouldn’t even be here.

‘
You
bought me that pen,’ he said suddenly. I’d forgotten I was still holding it.

‘Funny, wasn’t I?’ I said. ‘Such a sophisticated, witty sixteen-year-old.’

‘You were,’ he said, taking it and tipping it upside down.

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘I thought you were – cute, complicated …’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh, weren’t we all?’

‘I’m not surprised that you work for the Mental Health Service – the sidelined in our society … You always liked the underdog.’

‘Me and you, too, then, hey?’

When I’d last seen Joe, three years ago, he’d been living with his girlfriend in Preston but seemed a bit lost, career-wise, working in a sports shop. In our brief email exchange during the last few days, he’d told me he was now teaching English to NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) – kids who’d spent most of their lives skiving off school or inside, basically, and wanted to turn their lives around. He absolutely loved it, he said. The perfect job, if you took away the mounds of paperwork, which was exactly how I felt about my work.

‘I can’t say I’m surprised, either, Joe. All that energy had to go somewhere.’

‘We were a pair of little revolutionaries.’ He grinned.

‘Were we? I can’t remember. I just remember you used to say to me –’ I assumed the younger voice of Joe’s radical years – ‘it’s evolution, Robbie, not revolution.’

‘Did I? God, what a dick. I was so
intense
!’

‘Oh, Joe, you’re still intense.’

‘How would you know?’ He said, tapping my thigh, as if chastising me for not getting in touch. I ignored it.

‘Actually, you saying that really helped when things were grim,’ I said, seriously. ‘I sometimes say it to my clients.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, just to remind them that recovery … it takes time. Step by step. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.’

He smiled. He knew what I was getting at.

The room was growing dim, it was getting late, and I was here, having a heart-to-heart, the very thing I’d promised myself not to do. I stood up.