Perfectly Ordinary People(23)

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘There are no words.’ And then he pushed me away and repeated that this – what we were doing – was dangerous, and that he had to go.

He left me crouching down behind the bushes. I was shaking and crying. I was only just beginning to get an inkling. It will sound strange because these days everyone has seen the photos of the camps, so we know, don’t we? But it was all new then. So it took ordinary people – people like me – an incredibly long time to assimilate what was going on. Because, as Matias said, there are no words. We had no vocabulary to describe what these people were doing to their fellow human beings, and without words there was no way to picture that kind of brutality, that kind of evil, either. A normal person’s brain isn’t wired to conceive of that kind of thing and I remember thinking years afterwards that it was one of the worst things the Nazis had done: they’d made us understand for ever more that people, that humans, could behave that way.

I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t asked Matias what to do with Leah’s baby, and so I ran out on to the street, but it was too late. He was already cycling into the distance. God!

Are you OK?

Yes. I just . . . I just remembered something so vividly . . . I got, you know, one of those flashbacks? It sent a shiver right down my spine.

Can you share it with me?

Of course. It’s nothing really, it was so vivid, that’s all, like it was just this morning. I remembered that the sun was shining really prettily through the clouds as he cycled away. And I remember wondering how God could allow the sun to shine when everything it was shining on was so hateful.

Yes. That’s . . . I like what you said about there being no words that are strong enough. That’s powerful.

It’s pretty frustrating.

And, look, I’m sorry to interrupt, but my tape is just about to end. Shall I put another one in or have you had enough for today? I can come back another time, if you’d rather do it in chunks?

I think we can carry on for a bit, can’t we? It’s not even five o’clock yet. But if you want the whole story, then I’m not sure we’ll get it finished today.

No. That’s what I was thinking.





Ruth. Part Two.

A year went by before anyone could really notice.

When you’re young, people you consider to be ‘old’ warn you how time flies, but trying to tell youngsters to make the most of their youth is a pointless endeavour, partly because the time-flying thing doesn’t really become noticeable until your thirties, but mainly because the one thing youngsters are psychologically incapable of is learning from other people’s experiences.

Anyway, at thirty-two I was starting to suspect that all the old whingers had been right. Spring, summer, winter. The seasons were passing like days of the week.

Christmas ’95 had been a bit lacklustre because despite the supposed thaw in Jake’s relationship with Dad, he and Abby had chosen to spend it in Cape Verde instead. So though the rest of the family had been present, Jake’s absence meant there was still something of an atmosphere. Because things had felt less fluid than usual, I’d postponed, once again, the big conversation I’d been planning with Dad.

By spring, I was so busy that my plans to contact Grandpa Chris also fell by the wayside.

The first novel by a young author I’d signed in ’94, Ellie Day, had finally (after extensive editing) been published, and to everyone’s surprise we had a major hit on our hands. In fact twenty-two-year-old Day’s Party Goers was such a massive success that it was proving hard for a small publisher like us to keep up. In addition to the frustrations associated with our limited size (there were seven of us, including the cleaner) was the fact that our author-and-promotions manager, Miriam, was on maternity leave. The end result was that I ended up having to do all kinds of things that had nothing to do with my job title.

Summer was exhausting but fun, and the fun bit was unexpected. Getting out of my joggers and into heels, sipping champagne in bookshops and chatting to booksellers and journalists made a change. Plus, my ego was loving the buzz that came with the most frequent questions I had to field: ‘Who was the first person to read Party Goers at Impressionable?’ and ‘Who discovered Ellie?’ Because that person, obviously, was me.

On top of all the buzz around Party Goers, getting out and about provided hitherto unimagined opportunities for romance.

So in October I had a fling with a sexy (if over-serious) Times journalist. If you’re the kind of person who reads the culture pages then you will almost certainly know his name, but for obvious reasons, I’m not going to mention it here.

Just as that one was ending, because yes, he was going back to his wife after all, Dan came along, just in time for Christmas.

Dan was the owner and head chef of Meals on Wheels, the ironically named catering company we’d used for the Christmas book-signing I’d organised at Waterstones. He was fit, good-looking, and because of the circumstances (namely one of their waiters being off sick) dressed rather sexily in a tuxedo. And lord knows, I like a man in black tie.

Dan was funny, cute and flirty, and kept my glass fully filled all evening. It was only once the food and drinks had been packed away and he returned to linger beside me that I realised his attention to my needs had not been purely professional.

When I found myself in his flat the next morning, I fully expected to be kicked out and probably never see him again.