I hadn’t pushed him on it, but Eric hadn’t called her since he’d arrived. He didn’t own a mobile – ‘They’re the work of the Devil’ – and when I reminded him to call her to say he’d arrived safely, he’d replied he’d do it later. And hadn’t. Before our parents arrived I’d asked him if they’d rowed before he left and he’d half shrugged and started questioning me about Greg. It was a blatant diversionary tactic that had worked because I didn’t want to upset him.
While the rest of us sat on the train, waiting for it to leave, Eric walked back and forth along Platform 1a as he talked. The scowl on his face relaxed with each passing minute. His face slowly came alive. His jaw unclenching, the knot of a frown on his brow smoothing itself out. I hadn’t realised until now how aggravated and tired he’d looked since he got here. I wished there was something I could do to make it OK for him. I couldn’t bear to see him suffer. Not emotionally or physically. What hurt him hurt me, deeply. He was like my twin. Greg shifted in the seat beside me, pressing his thigh close to mine as I watched Eric walk and talk.
A sudden feeling crawled up my neck then spread its tingling tentacles across my body. Eric wasn’t talking to Arrianne. The way he was smiling – his face excited and keen – told me he wasn’t talking to his wife. Things were worse than I thought: my brother was having an affair.
‘How serious are you about Gregory?’ Mum asked as she sliced onions for dinner. She was going to make Ghanaian stew, followed by semolina pudding. The menfolk had volunteered to go out for semolina and rice. (There were two bags of rice in the cupboard, but not enough Mum had decided. Because you never know, do you? Jesus could drop by any second with his five thousand mates, all claiming that those five loaves and two fishes weren’t filling enough.) The ‘volunteering’ by the menfolk meant, of course, they’d ensconced themselves in the Fox & Grapes round the corner. For which Greg would be getting a couple hours’ cold treatment – how dare he make me into the little woman staying at home while he went drinking; D2 would be getting a mouthful for the entire length of the Ml tomorrow; and Eric? Weeellll, Eric had a blue suit, cream shirt and blue tie.
How serious was I about Greg? Now there was a question. One I hadn’t answered for myself, let alone for my mother. My mother. I didn’t talk boyfriends with Mum. I didn’t talk anything like that with her. It was icky. Anyway, we weren’t like that. Eric had always talked to her and Dad2 about girlfriends and stuff. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t.
I had a far more different relationship with them. They weren’t there for that kind of thing. I’m sure, usually, Mum would’ve assumed the foetal position and screamed her head off if I tried to drag her into my love life, whereas Eric did it because he did. He didn’t care how they reacted. He wanted to share with them, so he did. Although he probably wouldn’t be confessing to them about his affair. (I’d decided, in the tradition of so many before, to ignore what Eric was doing. I was still trying to assimilate the shocking information that my beloved brother was a bastard.)
So, why was my mother questioning me? ‘We just got together,’ I said.
Mum’s knife froze in the middle of slicing up pinky-white chicken breasts, horror and disgust plastered across her face.
Oh.
Ah.
Mum now not only knew that I had defiled myself with the sexual act but I’d done it within a short amount of time; I’d just told my mum I was easy.
‘Is that right?’ she said, evenly, then started slicing again.
‘I’ve known him for three years, though,’ I said, back-pedalling for all I was worth. ‘You know Jen? He’s her boyfriend’s best friend. We’ve known each other for three years.’
‘Is that right.’
‘Yeah,’ I husked and stirred at the Ghanaian stew that was bubbling away on the stove. She’d found the pants. She’d most likely found the condoms and the vibrator, she knew I’d shagged Greg in record time, might as well complete things with our favourite positions.
‘What future do you see with him?’ Mum asked.
She wasn’t going to let this go, was she? ‘I haven’t thought about it,’ I replied.
‘Do you think he’s serious about you?’
I thought about it. Then realised I didn’t want to think about it. He’d met my family. How much more serious did Mum think I was? How much more serious could anyone get in three months? ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Do you think Gregory wants to be with you a long time?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Amber, why would Gregory want to stay with a woman who is . . .’ She paused, struggling to find the right words. ‘Free with herself ?’
Free with herself?! I thought, glaring at the tomatoes breaking down to become the stew in the pot. Why don’t you say, ‘A woman who is a whore,’ because that’s what you think I am, isn’t it?
‘He will probably think you’re like that with all men,’ she continued.
‘What, that I sleep with them?’ I said in an uncharacteristic moment of free speech.
‘Yes.’ Mum was embarrassed but I felt my body bridle.
‘Did you have this conversation with Eric when he got together with Arrianne?’ I asked.
Mum was always doing this. Setting me the kind of standards that Eric wasn’t expected to meet. I loved Eric, but sometimes I wanted to have what he had. The freedom to be bad. My brother was always so naughty, so awful, when we were growing up and nothing ever happened to him. But if I tried anything . . . Put it this way: when my dad, my real dad, lived in England – he moved to Ghana three years ago – I went to visit him (and Mrs H), those months I moved back to London. I’d been to the pub with the people I was temping with and got a bit drunk. Not falling-down drunk, just drunk enough to make me mega chatty. Considering it was a struggle to speak to my dad at the best of times and I only spoke to Mrs H when I absolutely had to, imagine their delight when I became Ms Chatterbox. I thought I’d had the best night in a while with them; they thought different. Dad wrote a long letter to Mum blaming her for me turning into a juvenile delinquent. I was twenty-four at the time.
During that same nine months, Dad2 took me to one side when I’d stayed with a friend three nights in a row and said he and Mum didn’t want me behaving badly. In other words, having sex – I wasn’t even having sex. I’d lived away from home for nearly five years at that point. I was twenty-four. I was twenty-four, but between the ages of sixteen and eighteen Eric had regularly climbed out of his bedroom window to go have sex with his twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend. All hell broke loose when they found out when he was seventeen, of course. It was the worst few days since Eric and Leonard had come to live with us, but despite the shouting and threats and long, long silences, it didn’t stop Eric. He told them there was nothing they could do about it. Whereas when I was twenty-four, I couldn’t drink or sleep out without it being a crime. I got pressure from all sides to be good.
‘Eric is different,’ Mum said.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘These things are different for men. No man will respect a woman if he thinks she’s like that with all men. Do you think your father would have married me if he thought I was like that with all men?’
I almost dropped the wooden spoon in my hand. What?! Was I hearing this correctly? My mother, who was living with a man she wasn’t married to, was eulogising her relationship with my father. My father, the man who ended up married to someone else after cheating on her and rowing with her and hitting her.
Besides, if a man doesn’t respect you after you’ve slept with him, then he didn’t respect you beforehand, did he? What was it going to change? Sex was important, it distinguished things from other relationships, but if he did a runner after sex, he sure as hell didn’t intend to stay before sex. (Unless you were truly truly awful in bed.) Also, what about women respecting men? Was Greg’s father pulling him to one side and saying, ‘Son, you wanna stop all that shagging about, no woman will respect you if you carry on like that’? Nope. It was women
buying into this nonsense that kept it going. If women didn’t look down on women who shagged and fucked around instead of ‘making lurve within the boundaries of a relationship’, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. All these arguments fought to get out of my mouth.
‘Things are different nowadays,’ I said. If ever there was a clear and firm statement of how I felt, what I thought, the principles of the creed by which I lived my life, that was it. Not.
I started quivering inside. Adrenalin whizzed through my veins, making my heart pound and my breath quiet but laboured.
This was why I was path-of-least-resistance woman; why I didn’t row with people. If I did want to, I couldn’t. I became physically incapable. The fight or flight response inside me was broken. I got too much adrenalin so I could neither row nor run, just speak in spasmodic, breathless tones. It’d started when I was young; when I saw what arguing got you. I learnt that if you answered back, you got a punch in the face. A kick in the stomach. Called names. That’s why I was always giving way with Jen. Why I didn’t row with Sean. Why I got panicky when I heard Martha and Renée rowing. It was also why I knew Greg was different: more than once I’d come close to rowing with him.
My broken fight or flight response was also why I reacted with humour in times of stress – I was trying to defuse a situation with laughter.
In the present, with Mum, the best I could do was, ‘Things are different now.’
‘It does not matter,’ Mum said. ‘Even now, Amber, I get looks and comments when people find out I’m with Leonard but our surnames are different. Leonard’s sister still won’t speak to us because we are not married. You don’t have to go through all that. You can not have anything lasting with Gregory if you behave like this. If you don’t make men respect you.’
‘It’s not like that with Greg,’ I said.
‘Listen.’ Mum slammed the knife down so hard onto the worktop I jumped inside. She wouldn’t ever hit me; she would never hit anyone, I knew that. I knew most people wouldn’t hit you. But people can hurt you without hitting you. Which is why I was terrified of people’s reactions. Even if they don’t hit you, even if they don’t slap or punch or kick you, they could take their love away. They could shut you out of their lives. That was why I never pushed it with Jen. Even if she was being unreasonable, I couldn’t risk her abandoning me. Couldn’t do anything that would result in her becoming a past tense in my life.
‘I am far older than you, I know what I am talking about,’ Mum said.
I concentrated on stirring the stew. I was holding my breath. Hoping Mum wouldn’t carry on with this. Because if she did, despite my fear, despite the possibility she’d stop loving me, I was on the verge of telling her to leave it. That no matter how perfectly she expected me to behave, I wasn’t going to finish with Greg. He was here for the foreseeable.
The key slid into the front door, halting our potential row. Moments later, the men came stumbling in, bringing with them a fuzz of alcohol, smoke and levity from the pub. Eric was carrying the rice and semolina while Greg clutched a bottle of red wine in one hand and a bottle of white wine in the other. Dad2 went over to Mum and peeked over her shoulder at what she was doing. She gave him an unimpressed sideways look. It wasn’t a proper Mum look. She might have squeezed her lips together and narrowed her eyes, but she wasn’t really cross with him. His absence had made it possible for her to tell me what she thought. Anyway, she loved him. She rarely stayed angry with him. They didn’t row, either. I was always waiting for it but it never came. I suppose because Dad2 is like good-quality milk chocolate. Very easy to get on with. The kind of chocolate you’ll stick with throughout your life: the taste is simple, comfortable, so you’ll keep going back to it time after time. You may think about trying something else, but you’d always, always go back to the smooth-tasting, sweet treat that you knew and loved.
Dad1 is like that too. Now, he’s like that. Before, he was like one of those Wonka bars that had crackly bits which would explode unexpectedly. You’d always be careful when dealing with it because you couldn’t be sure when you’d encounter an explosive bit; when it’d blow up in your face. Now, after getting older and less angry, I suppose, Dad1 is like good-quality milk chocolate too.
‘Nice time in the pub?’ Mum said to Dad2.
‘Don’t be like that, Eden,’ he said. ‘We had to talk to Greg. Make sure he’s treating our precious Amber properly, didn’t we, Eric?’
‘Yes, Dad,’ Eric slurred. ‘It’s our duty, as the men of the family.’
I jabbed at a bit of tomato in the pot. They were doing it too. Acting as though I had to be protected from sex. Yes, it was a joke, but it came from the same place.
Greg, who seemed to sense the tension and anger emanating from me, came to me. He moved his head slightly in front of mine and our eyes locked.
He was asking silently if I was OK. I smiled a little smile at him. I smiled, but inside I was wondering if I could have anything lasting with Gregory?
Can I have anything lasting with any man if this is what I get from my family?
‘true strength is being able to eat a bar of chocolate without feeling guilty’
chapter twenty-four
talk
Tense.
It’d been a fortnight since my family had visited and things had been tense between Greg and me. Very tense.
Greg had met my family. We were practically engaged in my head now. Not a good thing when you didn’t believe in marriage. When I spoke to a family member, they asked about him. Asked about my man. He’d become my SO (Significant Other) and I wasn’t even sure I could have anything lasting with a man.
I wasn’t sure if Greg was reacting to my behaviour, my slight withdrawal from him, or if, now he’d bared his soul about Kristy, he felt closer to me, but he’d been different too. On edge. Which translated into him being mega clingy. It was a shock to discover that someone who used to be a cold, calculating bastard could mutate into someone who infected every moment with his cloying presence. Every day he sent me long, long emails about nothing even though he was going to be seeing me in a few hours. He had to know where I was every second of the day, even if I was sitting beside him and got up to go to the loo. (I almost asked him if he thought I was going to climb out of the bathroom window or something.) He’d even asked if I preferred Tom Cruise when he had long hair or short hair – I suspected he was asking me if I wanted him to cut his hair – and I replied: ‘I preferred him when he’d had his head repeatedly kicked in by his ex-wife.’
‘Amber, that never happened,’ Greg reassured me.
‘Oh,’ I replied, ‘well, a girl can dream.’ (Yes, that had been my chance to get rid of his ridiculous hair, but he did have to ask me about the one celeb I actually hated, didn’t he?)
Tense. Nervous. Strained. The pressure had been building up until today.
Today you could slice off chunks of the tension and sling it on the barbecue because, today, Greg had stretched my very last nerve as taut as it would go and was dancing up and down on it.
We’d gotten out of bed at eight o’clock – on a SATURDAY MORNING – to go flat-hunting. By two o’clock we’d seen, what?, six trillion flats and none of them were right. For example, the last one we’d been to: a one-bedroom flat in a modern, purpose-built block, second floor, all mod cons, £105 a week plus bills. It was smaller than my place but Greg was essentially living out of one bedroom at the moment, so having a kitchen/living room, bedroom and bathroom plus cupboard space for himself would be more than enough. But Greg had uttered the immortal ‘I can’t see myself living here’ – as he’d been uttering all morning – and turned it down.
At which point, I’d lost the will to live, let alone flat-hunt. It wasn’t like I needed to flat-hunt. I had a flat. I lived there very happily. I couldn’t imagine myself living there when I’d seen it, but it was close to Horsforth station, close to a pub I’d been to several times as a student and I knew the area because my ex-college was up the
road. Regardless of whether I could see myself living there or not, I took it. Then found I could see myself living there because I did live there.
We must’ve walked every inch of Headingley today and were still no closer to finding the place where Greg could see himself living. My feet were killing me, even in trainers.
Greg held the newspaper we were working from in his hands. ‘There’s still a couple left we can see,’ he said hopefully.
I perched on the low, whitewashed wall outside the Skyrack pub on Otley Road. He perched beside me. ‘It’d be easier if I was looking with someone. I could buy a place then. It’d be a joint effort.’
‘You? Buy a place? You’ll be wanting to get married next,’ I scoffed.
Greg’s expression was knocked asunder by my comment. ‘Of course I want to get married. Don’t you?’ he said.
‘Haven’t we already had this conversation?’ I replied testily. Didn’t like house-hunting, just like I didn’t like moving. I didn’t begrudge this as much as I begrudged helping Matt to move because Matt had never given me a multiple orgasm – and, thankfully, never would.
Greg didn’t say anything for a few seconds. ‘Maybe I should go ahead and buy a place.’
He was thinking out loud. For fuck’s sake! What was he vacillating about? This man, the one sat next to me, ran a department on Yorkshire’s biggest Sunday paper and he was dithering about where he should live, when he had somewhere to live.
The psychologist in me knew there was something else under all this. Beneath each layer of his finding a place but not liking it, under every leaf of his indecision and now considering the option to buy, was a scared little man. Probably his fear of responsibility. If he gave up his student house that would mean, effectively, giving up his student lifestyle. Although he’d done that already and simply didn’t realise it. The woman who didn’t like flat-hunting in me wanted to tell him to get a bloody grip and choose somewhere.