Sweet Sorrow(16)

It’s true that I thought she was lovely, but I thought this about someone five to ten times on any given day and even alone, I thought it while watching TV. It’s true that during our first encounter a clear, insistent voice in my head had told me concentrate, this will matter, concentrate, and true, too, that part of this was probably just sex, the noise of which underscored almost any conversation that I had with a girl at that time, like a car alarm that no one can turn off. Part of it was a less torrid, more conventionally romantic vision, a momentary flash-forward to a montage – holding hands, browsing in WHSmith or laughing on the swings in Dog Shit Park – and I wondered what that would look like and feel like, all that company.

I had never in my life, before or since, been more primed to fall in love. Catching that fever, I felt sure, would inoculate me against all other worries and fears. I longed for change, for something to happen, some adventure, and falling in love seemed more accessible than, say, solving a murder. But even though I thought she was lovely, I was not touched by some wand, there was no flourish on the harp and no change in the lighting. If I’d been busier that summer, or happier at home, then I might not have thought about her so much, but I was neither busy nor happy, and so I fell.

I remember worrying that I wouldn’t be able to remember her face. Freewheeling at great speed through the strobing light of that wooded lane, straight in the saddle, wind whipping at my chest, I tried to pair what I could recall with someone familiar, someone off the telly whose face I might use as a template. But no one quite fitted and before I’d reached the junction and turned towards town, her face had begun to fade like an unfixed photograph – shape of nose, shade of blue, chipped tooth, the great curve of her skull, the precise constellation of spots and freckles; how would I remember? I had a corny idea that I might draw her as soon as I got home – a few lines, a gesture, the way she tugged at the back of her denim skirt or stored her fringe behind her ear. Until then I’d focused mainly on zombies and alien insects. Perhaps Fran Fisher was my first worthy subject, the ‘something real’ that Helen had told me to draw, and I continued to summon up her features in turn in the same way that you might try to memorise a phone number – shape of nose, shade of blue, chipped tooth, the curve of, constellation of—

Phone number. Why hadn’t I just asked for her phone number? That was what I needed. I’d get it the next time I saw her.

Next time.

I remember feeling a great surge of jealousy towards her boyfriend, without knowing who he was or if he existed. Surely she must have one, because all Chatsborne girls came with a boyfriend of equal beauty and status, constantly doing it in their parents’ pools or at drug-fuelled sleepless sleepovers. There were kids at Merton Grange who had ‘relationships’, but they’d quickly settled into a sort of parody of domesticity, tea on laps in front of the TV, walking around the shops, as if trapped in a particularly committed game of Mums and Dads. Chatsborne kids, on the other hand, were decadent, wild and free like the gilded youth of Logan’s Run or foreign-exchange students. Of all the markers on the road to adulthood – voting, driving a car, legal drinking – the most elusive for a Merton Grange boy was to see a bra-strap without pinging it. To not be a dick: this was the great rite of passage that we had yet to pass through. Even if she were single, why would Fran Fisher be interested in a boy like that, like me?

Finally, there was the realisation that any emotions I might have experimentally labelled ‘love’ were as irrelevant and obsolete as a box of childhood toys. Becky Boyne, Sharon Findlay, Emily Joyce – what had I been thinking? This was an entirely new emotion, and if it was still too early to call it love, then I was prepared to call it hope.

None of this could be said out loud – who to? – and neither did I have much time to dwell on it because as I turned back into Thackeray Crescent I saw the red of the brand-new Mini, with my sister Billie’s face in the back window, looking up from her book.

Mum had come to visit.





Mum


When I was small – when the story still seemed credible – my parents used to tell me how they’d fallen in love. They were students, my mother training to be a nurse, my father halfway through an accountancy course that he had more or less abandoned in order to play saxophone in college bands of variable quality, in this case Goitre, a punk-funk, or funk-punk, five-piece, playing their first and last ever gig at the student union of Portsmouth Polytechnic. Punk and funk, it seemed, were proving incompatible but in the moments when she’d not been looking at the floor, my mother had spotted the one band member who’d had the sense to be embarrassed: the saxophonist. She laughed at the satirical faces he pulled behind the lead singer’s back and noted, too, that he was capable of playing his instrument, so made a point of digging in next to him at the bar where he stood hunched, wiping madly at his eye-liner with the corner of a beer towel like someone hurriedly removing a disguise. She held him by the arm. ‘That,’ she said, ‘was just … awful,’ and he looked at her closely for a moment and laughed. ‘And that was it,’ my father used to tell me, ‘love at first sight,’ and my mum would groan and roll her eyes and throw a cushion, but still, I loved the story: Mum stood next to Dad at the bar and so I came to be.

There’s a photograph of them, taken shortly after that first meeting, with matching cigarettes and leather jackets on a fire escape in the only part of Gosport to resemble the East Village. Short, her black eyes peering through a black fringe, my mother looks ferocious and unstoppable and Dad stands behind her, cigarette held high as if writing her name in the air above her head, laughing with his ragged teeth; my God, look at this amazing woman. All couples should have a photo like this, the sleeve of their imaginary album. They seem invincible, full of fire and hope for their shared future.