‘Thanks,’ says Julie, putting two sugars in the tea.
‘This must be weird for you. It must look so different in here . . . I heard you had to move out in difficult circumstances. I heard . . . Well, Chantel’s not supposed to know, but I found out about what happened here. You poor love.’
‘Oh, God . . .’ Julie realises that Nicky thinks she’s Charlotte. How embarrassing. Nicky thinks she’s upset because she’s Charlotte, and Charlotte has every reason to be upset, and Julie doesn’t have any reason and . . . ‘I’m sorry. I . . . I’m not . . .’
Nicky frowns. ‘You used to live here. Your boyfriend . . .’
‘No. That’s Charlotte. I live at number 18, down the road. I’m Julie.’
‘Oh. So . . . ?’
‘I’m sorry. I just wasn’t feeling very well. I was looking for Charlotte, actually. We’re friends. I just, sort of, um . . .’
‘You’re not on, you know . . .’
‘Drugs? No!’
‘Is it like an anxiety thing?’
Julie looks down at the table. ‘Maybe.’
‘It could be an iron deficiency,’ says Nicky. ‘You look pale.’
‘Could an iron deficiency make me feel dizzy and weird?’
‘Oh yeah, definitely. You should get it checked out.’
‘I will.’
‘Unless . . . You’re not pregnant, are you?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Julie sips some tea. ‘No. Definitely not.’
Nicky raises an eyebrow. ‘Definitely not?’
‘Definitely.’ Julie smiles. ‘Unless it was by osmosis.’
Nicky laughs. ‘Maybe you just need to get laid, then, love.’
Her laugh sounds like she just smoked a hundred fags, one after the other.
Julie laughs too. ‘Yeah, that’s what Leanne always says.’
‘Bless her. She thinks everything can be cured by sex or a manicure.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Has she told you much about us? We didn’t used to be rich, you know. We lived in a bungalow that wasn’t much more than a shack, really, before we came here. One day Leanne came to visit – she only ever came once; no one ever came more than once – and she took one look at the place and our horrible rugs and how we had a goat inside, and she rushed straight out to the car for her manicure kit. “It’ll cheer you up,” she said. But that’s Leanne for you. She’ll never talk about her feelings or do anything that makes her uncomfortable, or do anything practical like washing up or ironing – but she’ll give you a manicure at the point when you’re so depressed you don’t care if your hands fall off. It did make me feel better, though. What? What have I said?’
Julie’s smiling. She likes Nicky. ‘A goat? In the house?’
‘Billy. Yeah, well, he didn’t like the cold. Rob, my ex – it was his goat. Rob used to live in a caravan,’ she explains. ‘They all had goats. Billy used to like cigarette-ends. He used to eat them when they were still alight. Ate the curtains – which was a good job, really; they were horrible – and anything you put on the washing line. In fact, even if it was warm it was better to keep him indoors so he couldn’t eat the washing. Washing out: goat in. Washing in: goat out. You get systems going in these situations.’ Nicky sips her tea thoughtfully. ‘I’ll bloody miss that goat.’
‘This is a really nice house,’ Julie says.
Nicky looks around as if she’s seeing it for the first time. ‘Do you like it? Yeah, I suppose it’ll grow on me.’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Yeah, of course. It’s lovely. I think I’m just a bit overwhelmed by it all. It’s too nice, almost. I mean, when Chan won the money, I was like, Oh my God, new curtains. But I never expected this. I’ll have to get used to living near my sister again, though. Might be a bit tricky. Me and Michelle don’t see eye to eye on everything.’
Karaoke’s started in the sitting room. Nicky pops a pill in her mouth and washes it down with her tea as someone sings the last few lines of ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams. There’s some clapping, then the first few bars of another song. Oh, God, it’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. That means . . . Yep. The next thing Julie can hear is Charlotte’s voice, low, rasping and desperate, and several people shouting for her to shut up.
It’s nice in the kitchen. The red Aga is warm. One of the cats is sitting on it, slightly wet, just in from the rain. Little lights illuminate the work surfaces. It feels like Christmas in here. Julie realises she’s taking up Nicky’s time and Nicky is probably only talking to her because she’s worried – and because she thought Julie was Charlotte – and that the polite thing to do would be to go back to the party and let Nicky get on with whatever she was doing.
Julie gets up and puts her mug in the sink. Nicky gets up too.
‘Thanks for the tea,’ Julie says.
‘Are you feeling better now?’
‘Yes thanks.’
‘Well you can help me clingfilm these, then,’ Nicky says. There are various plates on the breakfast bar; each one has a few sweaty-looking canapés left on it. ‘These’ll do for tea tomorrow. And then I want to show you something upstairs.’
The bedroom is fluffy and clean. It makes Julie feel sleepy. She sits on the edge of the peaches-and-cream bed and the cotton is so crisp she just wants to rub her face in it, and roll on it, and breathe the clean, new smell forever.
‘Here,’ Nicky says. She hands Julie a photograph. ‘That’s me.’
Julie doesn’t know what to say. ‘It doesn’t look like you. Wow.’
The thing in the picture looks like it’s on its way to suck up a small American town in a fifties B-movie. It looks barely human – let alone like Nicky.
Nicky looks proud. ‘Know how old I was then?’
Julie shakes her head. ‘How old?’
‘Fifteen. Two years before I had Chantel.’
‘God. You look twice that. This is incredible.’ Julie’s only recently understood diet-photo etiquette. It’s OK to say the person looks like a fat blob, as long as the picture’s pretty old, and they’ve had such a dramatic weight loss it’s impossible for them to ever gain that weight again.
‘Mad, isn’t it? Little me, used to look like that.’
‘Wow.’
‘Keep that,’ Nicky says.
‘Keep it? Thanks. I mean . . . Why?’
No one’s ever asked Julie to actually keep one of their diet photos before.
Nicky laughs. ‘I like you. Look, I’m giving you this to remind you of what I’m going to tell you now. Right? Now look – I did this. I went from that to this and it wasn’t easy but I did it. And I’m not exactly Miss Willpower. I drink. I smoke. I went out with a dodgy bloke who treated me like shit for years, so I’m far from perfect. But I solved the biggest problem in my life because I decided to. You can do that too.’
‘How do you know I’ve . . . I’m . . .?’ Julie asks.
‘You virtually collapsed in my kitchen, remember? And you’re not ill, are you?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ Julie pauses. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘You’re fat, just like I was.’
Julie looks down at her stick arms and stick legs. ‘Thanks,’ she says, smiling.
‘Not fat with weight, but fat with anxiety, problems.’ Nicky taps her head. ‘It’s all in there. I’ve seen it before. So you take this photo and you remember that you’re as fat as I was, just not with weight but with fear. And you’re going to get rid of it all, just like I did.’
To be normal. To be thin and normal and attractive and have no baggage . . . For what? To be normal, so you can go to normal pubs and have normal experiences and dodgy blokes can fuck you and use you because you’re so pretty and normal and they just want to break you? Nicky looks like a Barbie doll that’s been barbecued, or put in the oven, slightly small and burnt, like you’d run out of Shrinky-Dinks and just done Barbie instead, because you fucking hated her and wanted to hurt her, and melt her perfect plastic skin . . . But Nicky’s nice, and what s
he’s saying not only makes sense, it’s also probably the most profound thing Julie’s heard all year. But Nicky would have been just as nice if she was fat.
‘How did you lose it?’ Julie asks. ‘The weight, I mean.’
‘Slim-Fast,’ Nicky says. ‘Milkshakes. It was easy.’
‘Shame you can’t get those for fear,’ Julie says.
Nicky laughs. ‘I like you,’ she says again. ‘You’re funny. Now, let’s go and find Chantel. I haven’t seen her for hours.’
Chapter 22
Chantel’s at Luke’s. She’s been there all night.
‘So you’re not going to your party at all?’ Luke asks.
It’s almost ten and Chantel looks like she’s settled in for the night. She’s taken off her trainers and curled up on the bed. Luke’s sitting on his armchair trying to work out whether Chantel’s about to jump him or not. Luke’s not that good at reading women – at least, not real ones who actually exist. He has no trouble anticipating what a character on TV is about to do but he simply has no idea with real people, particularly not women. Luke’s had four sexual partners in his life. The first, somewhat inevitably, was his home tutor, Violet, a sexy, kind woman in her early thirties. Having taught Luke to read and write and add up, she eventually took pity on him and taught him how to fuck. He was sixteen then.
After that, Luke immersed himself in a distance relationship with a pen-pal he found on Teletext. Luke had various pen-pals at the time but they all fell away when he discovered Chloe. The relationship ended after Chloe came to visit Luke for the first time. They had sex, and afterwards Chloe was oddly silent and withdrawn. Then she left and never answered Luke’s letters again. He always wished she’d told him why, and what he had done wrong, but she never did.
A year or so after Chloe, Luke met Paula, a mature student from Plaistow, on the Internet. Paula had three kids, a sick mother and the degree course to keep her busy, and she would joke that Luke was the perfect boyfriend: ‘Low maintenance, always know where he is, never goes down the pub.’ She wasn’t easy to read, though. Some days she’d come over in a skirt and high heels and want to giggle, have sex, and talk about her dreams and the future. Other days she’d walk in slumped with her face pinched and drawn and want to talk about her kids and how tired she was. Luke could never tell which Paula he was going to get, and although the clothes should have been a clue, sometimes she’d start crying even when she was wearing a skirt. Luke had no idea how to read her at all.
Paula came over quite a bit in the few months they were together, but in the end she couldn’t deal with the whole situation any more. Luke just wasn’t very worldly, she explained. Her life was just too full of brutal realism to be understood by someone who’d been educated by TV drama. And she couldn’t deal with Luke’s mother. Luke’s mother had a habit of reminding her to have a bath before she came round. Who could deal with that?
And then there was Leanne. Luke’s thing with Leanne is the nearest he’s come to an actual relationship, in the sense that they see each other often, they have normal enough sex and Leanne doesn’t cry all the time. But the relationship is still deeply flawed by the fact that he doesn’t really like her and they don’t have anything in common.
Chantel wrinkles her nose. ‘I might do. Maybe later.’
She has small freckles over her nose and her voice is husky and cracked.
‘What about your cousin?’ Luke asks.
‘Leanne? She’ll be having plenty of fun without me being there.’ Chantel looks a bit uncomfortable suddenly. She sits up. ‘Look, do you want me to go?’
‘Go?’ Luke looks at his TV screen. He can’t hear what’s going on, and he’s confused, until he remembers he muted it. Chantel brought some cans of beer with her and, feeling reckless, he’s drunk about half a can. He’s never drunk alcohol before. While he’s been drinking it, Chantel’s been talking about how much she loves surfing. ‘Why would I want you to go?’
‘You keep asking me about my party.’
‘I just don’t know why you’d rather be stuck here in this room with me than at your own house-warming, that’s all.’
Chantel shrugs. ‘You’re more interesting.’
‘How can I be?’ Luke asks. ‘I haven’t done anything. I haven’t done anything at all with my life apart from sit here reading books and watching TV.’
Luke thinks about all the people who’ve turned up here to see the amazing freak – TV BOY! – the same way you’d look at a fish in an aquarium or a weird bug someone’s caught in a jam jar. He feels like a freak show, not because of Chantel exactly – she seems OK – but because of the years of having to receive strangers here, of having to be witty and amusing and answer questions in crowd-pleasing detail about how exactly he would die if he came into contact with sunlight, how fast his skin would shrivel up and whether he’d turn red or black afterwards. Those dicks who came here never wondered if Luke got bored with all that crap – for them it was always the first time.
Chantel cocks her head to one side. ‘So you’re really boring, then?’ she says.
Luke laughs. ‘I felt like a freak show for a minute just then – it’s a long story – but yeah, I am pretty boring.’
‘What’s your favourite colour?’ Chantel asks suddenly.
‘Uh, orange.’
‘See, you’re not boring. Boring people don’t choose orange.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I read it in a magazine. Anyway, half the people I know live the same way as you; the only difference is that they go to work during the day. I can’t believe you think you’re a freak. You seem really normal to me. Not boring-normal, just normal-normal.’
‘Thanks, Chantel.’
‘Call me Chan, please. Otherwise I sound like a stripper.’
Luke giggles. ‘OK.’
Chantel starts looking in her bag for something. ‘Anyway, I’m a bit shy at parties – especially if it’s, like, my party and everyone wants to talk to me and stuff. I’m sure no one’ll notice I’m not there. Anyway, I did want to meet all my neighbours properly.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Well, you’re the only one I haven’t met yet. Oh, apart from Julie.’
‘She’ll come here later.’
Chantel seems to be pulling everything out of her little rucksack: hair-glossing creme, hairbrush, plasters, deodorising wipes, a diary covered in little furry elephant stickers that Luke asks to touch because he’s never seen stickers like that before (‘Wow, they really are furry; how do they do that?’), a Salt Rock purse, a Kangaroo Poo keyring with a few keys on it, a toy elephant (‘It vibrates, look’) and, finally, a little address book and a little birthday book, both with pictures of female surfers on them. These seem to be what she’s looking for, because once she’s found them, she starts putting all the other stuff back in. Luke wonders if she got it all out just so she could show him, because it can’t be that hard to find two small hardback books in a bag that size.
‘I’m glad you came, actually,’ Luke says.
‘So you should be. Especially now you’ve seen my vibrating elephant.’
Luke laughs. ‘Everyone’s been talking about you for ages – Leanne wouldn’t shut up about you. I wanted to see you for myself. I was very curious.’
‘Leanne was going on about me?’
‘Yeah, totally.’
Chantel frowns. ‘I see. So she’s not embarrassed about me any more, then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Never mind. Oh, I used to be fat, and really poor. When’s your birthday?’ Luke tells her and she writes it in her birthday book. ‘Address? Oh, actually I know that already. Phone number?’
Luke gives her his number. ‘I’m always on the Internet, though,’ he says. ‘No one ever gets through on the phone. Do you want my e-mail address as well?’
‘Um . . . Go on then. I haven’t really worked out e-mail yet, though.’ Chantel frowns with concentration as she copies it into her book. ‘So what’s the
long story, then?’
‘Huh?’
‘Before. You said you felt like a freak show.’
‘Yeah.’ Luke sighs. ‘Oh, it’s just that I’ve had a lot of people come here just to look at me, like I’m a creature in the zoo.’ Of all the things outside that Luke can’t understand, a creature in the zoo is one he reckons he’s come closest to. ‘I don’t mean you or anything – you’re my new neighbour – but sometimes people come here and they just want to ask me question after question about what my life’s like.’
‘Do you get a lot of people around here, then?’
‘Yeah, quite a few. Maybe not so much any more but a few years ago this place was crawling with . . .’ Luke searches for the word. In American it’s ‘stoners’, but what’s that English expression Julie and Charlotte use? Oh, yeah. ‘Puff-heads. You know, all these people would hear about me down the pub or something and come round and smoke loads of dope and watch Cheech & Chong films – which, incidentally, were completely unintelligible to me – and then talk about the meaning of life and what it would be like to be me and it was funny the first few times but my God it got boring.’
Chantel’s laughing. ‘Did you get stoned as well?’
‘No,’ Luke says. ‘I’m not allowed. Allergies.’
‘So you’re trapped in the house with a load of puffheads, being forced to watch Cheech & Chong when you’re not stoned? Fucking hell. I didn’t even think people still watched Cheech & Chong. I thought those films were like a relic from my mum’s youth.’
‘Sadly, they still do.’
‘You poor thing. Do you . . . Oh, this might sound like a weird question, and tell me if I’m out of order, but do you get much sex, you know, being trapped in here?’
Luke looks at Chantel and tries to assess whether this is an I’m-interested-in-the-answer question or an I’m-going-to-jump-on-you question. Her face looks open, like it’s just a question.
‘Yeah. A bit,’ Luke says. ‘It hasn’t ever been a huge problem.’
She doesn’t jump on him.
Luke gets the impression that Chantel would like to ask him more questions, and actually he wouldn’t mind talking about this – he could answer Chantel’s questions then ask her questions of his own about girls and where she thinks he may have gone wrong in the past, and how he could somehow sort out this situation with Leanne. But now he’s made a fuss about feeling like a freak show maybe Chantel feels scared about asking him more about his life. In any case, she doesn’t, and instead asks him if he can show her some sites on the Internet.