‘Dex?’
‘Hm.’
‘Let’s just cuddle, shall we?’
‘Of course. If you want,’ he said gallantly, though in truth he had never really seen the point of cuddling. Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp. Best now to admit defeat and get home as soon as possible, but she was settling her head on his shoulder territorially, and they lay like this, rigid and self-conscious for some time before she said:
‘Can’t believe I used the word “cuddle”. Bloody ’ell – cuddle. Sorry about that.’
He smiled. ‘S’alright. Least it wasn’t snuggle.’
‘Snuggle’s pretty bad.’
‘Or smooch.’
‘Smooch is awful. Let’s promise never, ever to smooch,’ she said, regretting the remark at once. What, together? There seemed little chance of that. They lapsed into silence again. They had been talking, and kissing, for the last eight hours, and both had that deep, whole body fatigue that arrives at dawn. Blackbirds were singing in the overgrown back garden.
‘I love that sound,’ he mumbled into her hair. ‘Blackbirds at dawn.’
‘I hate it. Makes me think I’ve done something I’ll regret.’
‘That’s why I love it,’ he said, aiming once again for a dark, charismatic effect. A moment, then he added, ‘Why, have you?’
‘What?’
‘Done something you regret?’
‘What, this you mean?’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Oh, I expect so. Don’t know yet, do I? Ask me in the morning. Why, have you?’
He pressed his mouth against the top of her head. ‘Course not,’ he said, and thought this must never, ever happen again.
Pleased with his answer, she curled closer into him. ‘We should get some sleep.’
‘What for? Nothing tomorrow. No deadlines, no work . . .’
‘Just the whole of our lives, stretching ahead of us,’ she said sleepily, taking in the wonderful warm, stale smell of him and at the same time feeling a ripple of anxiety pass across her shoulders at the thought of it: independent adult life. She didn’t feel like an adult. She was in no way prepared. It was as if a fire alarm had gone off in the middle of the night and she was standing on the street with her clothes bundled up in her arms. If she wasn’t learning, what was she doing? How would she fill the days? She had no idea.
The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at . . . something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.
It wasn’t much in the way of a guiding philosophy, and not one you could share, least of all with this man, but it was what she believed. And so far the first few hours of independent adult life had been alright. Perhaps in the morning, after tea and aspirin, she might even find the courage to ask him back to bed. They’d both be sober by then, which wouldn’t make things any easier, but she might even enjoy it. The few times that she’d gone to bed with boys she had always ended up giggling or weeping and it might be nice to try for something in between. She wondered if there were condoms in the mustard tin. No reason why there shouldn’t be, they were there last time she looked: February 1987, Vince, a hairy-backed Chemical Engineer who had blown his nose on her pillowcase. Happy days, happy days . . .
It was starting to get bright outside. Dexter could see the pink of the new day seeping though the heavy winter curtains that came with the rented room. Careful not to wake her, he stretched his arm across, dropped the end of his cigarette into the mug of wine and stared up at the ceiling. Not much chance of sleep now. Instead he would pick out patterns in the grey Artex until she was completely asleep, then slip out and away without waking her.
Of course leaving now would mean that he would never see her again. He wondered if she would mind, and presumed she would: they usually did. But would he mind? He had managed perfectly well without her for four years. Until last night he had been under the impression that she was called Anna, and yet at the party he hadn’t been able to look away. Why had he not noticed her until now? He examined her face as she slept.
She was pretty, but seemed annoyed by the fact. Her bottled-red hair was almost wilfully badly cut, alone in front of the mirror probably, or by Tilly whatsername, that loud, large girl she shared this flat with. Her skin had a pallid puffiness that spoke of too much time in libraries or drinking pints in pubs, and her spectacles made her seem owlish and prim. Her chin was soft and a little plump, though perhaps that was just puppy-fat (or were ‘plump’ and ‘puppy-fat’ things you weren’t meant to say now? in the same way that you couldn’t tell her she had tremendous breasts, even if it was true, without her getting all offended).
Never mind that, back to her face. There was a slight greasy sheen on the tip of her small, neat nose and a spattering of tiny red spots on her forehead, but these aside there was no denying that her face – well, her face was a wonder. With her eyes closed he found that he couldn’t recall their exact colour, only that they were large and bright and humorous, like the two creases in the corners of her wide mouth, deep parentheses that deepened when she smiled, which seemed to be often. Smooth, pink mottled cheeks, pillows of flesh that looked as if they would be warm to the touch. No lipstick but soft, raspberry-coloured lips that she kept tightly closed when she smiled as if she didn’t want to show her teeth, which were a little large for her mouth, the front tooth slightly chipped, all of this giving the impression that she was holding something back, laughter or a clever remark or a fantastic secret joke.
If he left now he would probably never see this face again, except perhaps at some terrible reunion in ten years’ time. She’d be overweight and disappointed and would complain about him sneaking off without saying goodbye. Best to leave quietly, and no reunions. Move on, look to the future. Plenty more faces out there.
But as he made his decision, her mouth stretched open into a wide smile and without opening her eyes she said:
‘So, what do you reckon, Dex?’
‘About what, Em?’
‘Me and you. Is it love, d’you think?’ and she gave a low laugh, her lips tightly closed.
‘Just go to sleep, will you?’
‘Stop staring up my nose then.’ She opened her eyes, blue and green, bright and shrewd. ‘What’s tomorrow?’ she mumbled.
‘Today you mean?’
‘Today. This bright new day that awaits us.’
‘It’s a Saturday. Saturday all day. St Swithin’s Day as a matter of fact.’
‘What’s that then?’
‘Tradition. If it rains today it’ll rain for the next forty days, or all summer, or something like that.’
She frowned. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Not meant to. It’s a superstition.’
‘Raining where? It’s always raining somewhere.’
‘On St Swithin’s grave. He’s buried outside Winchester Cathedral.’
‘How come you know all this?’
‘I went to school there.’
‘Well la-di-da,’ she mumbled into the pillow.
‘“If on St Swithin it doth rain/Something dum-di-dum again.”’
‘That’s a beautiful poem.’
‘Well, I’m paraphrasing.’
She laughed once again, then raised her head sleepily. ‘But Dex?’
‘Em?’
‘If it doesn’t rain today?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘What are you doing later?’
Tell her that you’re busy.
‘Nothing much,’ he said.
‘So shall we do something then? Me and you, I mean?’
Wait ’til she’s asleep then sneak away.
‘Yeah. Alright,?
?? he said. ‘Let’s do something.’
She allowed her head to drop onto the pillow once more. ‘Brand new day,’ she murmured.
‘Brand new day.’
CHAPTER TWO
Back to Life
SATURDAY 15 JULY 1989
Wolverhampton and Rome
Girls’ Changing Rooms
Stoke Park Comprehensive School
Wolverhampton
15 July 1989
Ciao, Bella!
How are you? And how is Rome? The Eternal City is all very well, but I’ve been here in Wolverhampton for two days now and that’s felt pretty eternal (though I can reveal that the Pizza Hut here is excellent, just excellent).
Since I last saw you I have decided to take that job I was telling you about, with Sledgehammer Theatre Co-operative and for the last four months we have been devising, rehearsing and touring with ‘Cruel Cargo’, an Arts Council-funded spectacular about the slave-trade told through the medium of story, folk song and some pretty shocking mime. I have enclosed a crudely photocopied leaflet so that you can see what a classy number it really is.
Cruel Cargo is a TIE piece (that’s Theatre-in-Education to you) aimed at 11–13-year-olds that takes the provocative view that slavery was a Bad Thing. I play Lydia, the, um, well, yes, the LEAD ROLE as a matter of fact, the spoilt and vain daughter of the wicked Sir Obadiah Grimm (can you tell from his name that he’s not very nice?) and in the show’s most powerful moment I come to realise that all my pretty things, all my dresses (indicate dress) and jewels (likewise) are bought with the blood of my fellow human beings (sob-sob) and that I feel dirty (stare at hands as if SEEING THE BLOOD) dirty to my SOOOOOOUUUUL. It’s very powerful stuff, though ruined last night by some kids throwing Maltesers at my head.
But seriously, actually, it’s not as bad as that, not in context, and I don’t know why I’m being cynical, defence-mechanism probably. We actually get a great response from the kids who see it, the ones that don’t throw stuff, and we do these workshops in schools that are just really exciting. It’s staggering how little these kids know about their cultural heritage, even the West Indian kids, about where they come from. I’ve enjoyed writing it too and it’s given me lots of ideas for other plays and stuff. So I think it’s worthwhile even if you think I’m wasting my time. I really, really think we can change things, Dexter. I mean they had loads of radical theatre in Germany in the Thirties and look what a difference that made. We’re going to banish colour prejudice from the West Midlands, even if we have to do it one child at a time.
There are four of us in the cast. Kwame is the Noble Slave and despite us playing mistress and servant we actually get along alright (though I asked him to get me a packet of crisps in this café the other day and he looked at me like I was OPPRESSING him or something). But he’s nice and serious about the work, though he did cry a lot in rehearsals, which I thought was a bit much. He’s a bit of a weeper, if you know what I mean. In the play there’s meant to be this powerful sexual tension between us, but once again life is failing to imitate art.
Then there’s Sid, who plays my wicked father Obadiah. I know your whole childhood was spent playing French cricket on a bloody great chamomile lawn and you never did anything as déclassé as watch the telly, but Sid used to be quite famous, on this cop show called City Beat and his disgust at being reduced to THIS shines through. He flatly refuses to mime, like it’s beneath him to be seen with an object that isn’t really there, and every other sentence begins ‘when I was on telly’ which is his way of saying ‘when I was happy’. Sid pees in washbasins and has these scary polyester trousers which you WIPE DOWN instead of washing and subsists on service station minced beef pasties, and me and Kwame think he’s secretly really racist, but apart from that he’s a lovely man, a lovely, lovely man.
And then there’s Candy, ah Candy. You’d like Candy, she’s exactly what she sounds like. She plays Cheeky Maid, a Plantation Owner and Sir William Wilberforce, and is very beautiful and spiritual and even though I don’t approve of the word, a complete bitch. She keeps asking me how old I am really and telling me I look tired or that if I got contact lenses I could actually be quite pretty, which I ADORE of course. She’s very keen to make it clear that she’s only doing this to get her Equity card and bide her time until she’s spotted by some Hollywood producer who presumably just happens to be passing through Dudley on a wet Tuesday afternoon on the lookout for hot TIE talent. Acting is rubbish, isn’t it? When we started STC (Sledgehammer Theatre Co-operative) we were really keen to set up a progressive theatrical collective with none of that ego-fame-getting-on-the-telly-ego-showing-off bullshit, and just do really good, exciting original political devised work. That may all sound dopey to you, but that’s what we wanted to do. But the problem with democratic egalitarian collectives is that you have to listen to twots like Sid and Candy. I wouldn’t mind if she could act but her Geordie accent is unbelievable, like she’s had a stroke or something and she’s also got this thing about doing yoga warm-ups in her lingerie. There, that’s got your attention, hasn’t it? It’s the first time I’ve seen someone do the Sun Worship in hold-up stockings and a basque. That can’t be right, can it? Poor old Sid can barely chew his curried beef slice, keeps missing his mouth. When the time finally comes for her to put some clothes on and go on stage one of the kids usually wolf-whistles or something and in the mini-bus afterwards she always pretends to be really affronted and feminist about it. ‘I hate being judged on my looks all my life I’ve been judged on my exquisite face and firm young body,’ she says as she adjusts her suspender belt, like it’s a big POLITICAL issue, like we should be doing agit-prop street theatre about the plight of women cursed with great tits. Am I ranting? Are you in love with her yet? Maybe I’ll introduce you when you get back. I can see you now, giving her that look where you clench your jaw and play with your lips and ask about her careeeeeer. Maybe I won’t introduce you after all . . .
Emma Morley turned the page face down as Gary Nutkin entered, skinny and anxious, and it was time for the pre-show pep-talk from the director and co-founder of Sledgehammer Theatre Co-operative. The unisex dressing room was not a dressing room at all, just the girls’ changing room at an inner-city comprehensive which, even at the weekend, still had that school smell she remembered: hormones, pink liquid soap, mildewed towels.
In the doorway, Gary Nutkin cleared his throat; pale and razor-burned, the top-button of his black shirt fastened tight, a man whose personal style icon was George Orwell. ‘Great crowd tonight, people! Nearly half full which isn’t bad considering!’ though considering what exactly he didn’t say, perhaps because he was distracted by Candy, performing pelvic rolls in a polka-dot all-in-one. ‘Let’s give ’em one hell of a show, folks. Let’s knock ’em dead!’
‘I’d like to knock ’em dead,’ growled Sid, watching Candy while picking at pastry crumbs. ‘Cricket bat with nails in, little bastards.’
‘Stay positive, Sid, will you please?’ implored Candy on a long, controlled out-breath.
Gary continued. ‘Remember, keep it fresh, stay connected, keep it lively, say the lines like it’s the first time and most importantly of all, don’t let the audience intimidate or goad you in any way. Interaction is great. Retaliation is not. Don’t let them rile you. Don’t give them that satisfaction. Fifteen minutes, please!’ and with that Gary closed the dressing room door on them, like a jailor.
Sid began his nightly warm-up now, a murmured incantation of I-hate-this-job-I-hate-this-job. Beyond him sat Kwame, topless and forlorn in tattered trousers, hands jammed in his armpits, head lolling back, meditating or trying not to cry perhaps. On Emma’s left, Candy sang songs from Les Miserables in a light, flat soprano, picking at the hammer toes she’d got from eighteen years of ballet. Emma turned back to her reflection in the cracked mirror, plumped up the puffed sleeves of her Empire line dress, removed her spectacles and gave a Jane Austen sigh.
The last year had been a series of wrong turns, ba
d choices, abandoned projects. There was the all-girl band in which she had played bass, variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit, which had been unable to decide on a name, let alone a musical direction. There was the alternative club night that no-one had gone to, the abandoned first novel, the abandoned second novel, several miserable summer jobs selling cashmere and tartan to tourists. At her very, very lowest ebb she had taken a course in Circus Skills until it transpired that she had none. Trapeze was not the solution.
The much-advertised Second Summer of Love had been one of melancholy and lost momentum. Even her beloved Edinburgh had started to bore and depress her. Living in her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankeillor Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small. ‘But you’ve got a double-first! What happened to your double-first?’ her mother asked daily, as if Emma’s degree was a super-power that she stubbornly refused to use. Her younger sister, Marianne, a happily married nurse with a new baby, would come round at nights just to gloat at mum and dad’s golden girl brought low.
But every now and then, there was Dexter Mayhew. In the last few warm days of the summer after graduation she had gone to stay at his family’s beautiful house in Oxfordshire; not a house, but a mansion to her eyes. Large, 1920s, with faded rugs and large abstract canvases and ice in the drinks. In the large, herb-scented garden they had spent a long, languid day between the swimming pool and tennis court, the first she’d ever seen that had not been built by the local council. Drinking gin and tonics in wicker chairs, looking at the view, she had thought of The Great Gatsby. Of course she had spoiled it; getting nervous and drinking too much at dinner, shouting at Dexter’s father – a mild, modest, perfectly reasonable man – about Nicaragua, while all the time Dexter regarded her with a look of affectionate disappointment, as if she were a puppy who had soiled a rug. Had she really sat at their table, eating their food and calling his father a fascist? That night she lay in the guest bedroom, dazed and remorseful, waiting for a knock on the door that clearly would never come; romantic hopes sacrificed for the Sandinistas, who were unlikely to be grateful.