‘Have you rented out my room and are now trying to soften me up before you break the news?’
‘No.’
‘Have you accidentally burnt my belongings?’
‘No.’
‘Oh no, you haven’t broken one of my Angel tapes, have you?’
‘Noooo,’ they chorused.
‘Didn’t you say we’d die horribly slow deaths if we touched them?’ Ed added.
‘Yeah, well, you’d be surprised how ineffective that threat is nowadays,’ I mumbled.
‘We haven’t been near them, we swear,’ Jake said, hand on heart.
‘Then what is it?’
Jake and Ed looked at each other. ‘You tell her,’ Ed said.
‘No, you,’ Jake said.
They carried on like that until Jake finally gave in and said, ‘The thing is, Ceri, we really missed you.’
‘Yeah,’ Ed added. ‘We didn’t realise how much a part of our family you were until you went away.’
‘And then Ed started saying that if you had a good time when you were in London you’d probably want to move back there.’
‘You were the one who said she’d probably realise what a strain it was living with two lads and would decide not to work her notice and go straight back to London, Jake.’
I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. But tears crept into my eyes.
‘And it were you who were almost crying at the idea that we’d end up going back to stained teaspoons and toothpaste smudges on the taps, Edward.’
‘You actually started crying.’
‘Liar!’
‘Is that why you bought all that food?’ I asked.
They nodded in unison. ‘And we got you some wine.’
‘And beer.’
‘Yeah, and beer.’
I started laughing, causing a tear to break free and crawl down my face. I wiped it away with the back of my thumb. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Sure?’ Jake said.
‘Really?’ Ed said.
‘Positive. Ceri D’Altroy is in this house for the duration.’
Both lads grinned like I’d promised to get them subscriptions to the porn channels of their choice. I had to laugh. Just when I was feeling so low I could take to my bed with an armful of Angels and a bottle of wine for a week, Ed and Jake had made me feel loved. Wanted. That’s what I needed when I got my bouts of loneliness dressed up as depression.
How I got sometimes wasn’t, I knew, depression. Not hopelessness when I couldn’t get out of bed. More, teariness at being alone. Emptiness at not having a someone who had it in their job description that they had to be there for me. Pain at never quite getting it right on the relationship level. I could make friends, acquire confidences at the drop of a hat, tell other people how to fix their relationships, but when it came to intimacy with men, things fell apart. Having to accept my life would probably be a love-free zone for ever.
These were the thoughts that dogged my night times, made my heart heavy and achy. That, I suppose, had been part of what I’d been feeling as I traipsed from London to Leeds.
There, in the midst of it, were Jake and Ed. Two lads who actually wanted me around. Who’d panicked at the thought I wouldn’t be around.
‘Thanks for all the effort boys,’ I said, getting up. ‘I missed you too.’
‘Group hug!’ Jake screeched, then they both charged at me, leaving us all in a laughing bundle on the soft-pile living room carpet.
chapter twelve
Party People
‘Oh come on, Cezza, there’ll be men there,’ Jake said.
‘There’s men on my telly,’ I replied, stuffing garlic mash potato in my mouth.
Ed and Jake were off to a party being held by some of their Met buddies and, seeing as this was my first weekend back after my visit to London, they weren’t going to leave me alone. They’d put me on a kind of suicide watch since that Sunday, where one of them had to know where I was every hour of the day. I was constantly called or emailed at college. I had them knocking on my door to offer me tea or food if I sat upstairs. I had two shadows who wanted nothing but my happiness – that phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ kept replaying itself in my head when I started griping that no one would miss me if I wasn’t around.
They weren’t going out this Saturday night without me – and Jake seriously thought blokes at a party would be enough to prise me out of my pyjamas and away from my bowl of comfort food. The choices were: garlic mash, pyjamas and a blockbuster movie on TV or traipsing through the streets, going to a party where I only knew two people and having to move from my sofa to get ready. There was no contest. I was going nowhere.
‘Yeah, but these men will talk to you,’ Jake persisted.
‘The men on my telly talk to me. And, sometimes, I even talk back.’
‘But you might get a snog off one of them,’ Ed chimed in.
What do I say to that? ‘I’ll get a snog off one of the men on my telly?’ And not sound like a freak?
‘All right. But if I don’t get a snog, you lot are in for such a hard time.’
They laughed.
‘Obviously, neither of you realise how hard I can make things for two boys like you.’
They both grinned as I put down the bowl of garlic mash, threw back my duvet and stomped to the stairs.
‘Wear your leather pants,’ Jake called.
‘How do you know I’ve got leather trousers?’ I called back.
‘You just look the type.’
‘Yeah, and wear your sparkly gold top, too.’ Ed added. Fashion advice from Mr ‘Live In My Lumberjack Shirt’, himself.
I got showered, dressed, brushed my teeth and put on make-up in record time. The lads, very wisely, wolf-whistled when I descended the stairs. I was indeed wearing my leather trousers and my sparkly gold top.
With most proper student houses you had to enter through the back door because the front door usually led into someone’s bedroom. It was a way to make a four-bedroom house into a five-bedroom house. This student house, where the party was being held, was no exception.
Ed and Jake went to find their mates – aka the people with the drugs – as soon as we walked in through the back door. They left me in the living room with the rest of the partiers. ‘It’ll increase your chances of a snog,’ they reasoned, ‘not having two men around.’
‘Yeah, cos I’d even look twice at either of you,’ I replied. ‘No offence.’
I leant back against the wall of the living room, ignoring the way my jacket stuck to the wall.
This was a proper student house. The single red light bulb did nothing to mask the horrors that had been regurgitated on the carpet. The furniture had been pushed back to the far end of the room and showed signs of overuse. Generation after generation of student had skinned up on the arms of that browny sofa and non-matching armchair. God alone knew what those stains between the threadbare bits were, but I had my suspicions.
I leant against the wall and let my mind wander back in time. Back about twenty years, actually. I couldn’t help thinking that the eighties may well have been the decade that fashion forgot – actually, that fashion taunted – but at least they knew how to put together a choon in those days. Every other song you got in the eighties you wanted to dance to or sing along to – even if you were wearing a puff ball skirt, a batwing top, bright blue eye-shadow and your perm had been back-combed and hairsprayed to stand at a ninety-degree angle. And anyway, all the people you were dancing to were just as badly dressed as you, they too found joy in frilly white shirts and lip gloss.
Harking back to another era instantly doubles your age, I thought, and started gulping beer. And being stood at a party while doing the harking tripled my age . . . but it was true. Music was music in those days: Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Madonna, Luther Vandross, Haircut 100, Barry White, Howard Jones, Phil Collins all so much better than the trendy nonsense served up nowadays.
Please, put a bit of Howard Jones on. Seriously. Anything bu
t this 21st century nonsense.
Erm, Ceri, how old are you? I asked myself sternly.
Time was when I’d be elbowing my way to the centre of the room so I could be seen by everyone as I danced. I had that much faith in my body-moving abilities. Time was, though, when I wouldn’t have turned up to a student party in leather trousers and heeled boots. In my student days, any person turning up to a party in leather trews would’ve been lynched for being the capitalist, cute-ickle-animal-hurting bastard they were. Nowadays I was more likely to get stock tips on which type of animal you got the best hide out of.
Not that I dwelt entirely in the past, but when I was a student, I had things to worry about beyond where my next joint was coming from, mainly because I didn’t do drugs. (I was completely of the ‘do what you want within reason’ mentality but drugs were not for me. Alcohol did strange things to me; adding drugs to that equation would be asking for my parents to identify my overdosed body.) Even in sixth form I was politically-minded. I stood on the picket lines with the ambulance men; I organised a convoy of coaches to go to Brighton to march in protest against student loans. In school I boycotted any company that had holdings in South Africa.
In college, I lobbied Parliament; I joined the Students’ Union and actually tried to get students involved in political stuff. It goes without saying that I actually got down on my knees and thanked God the day Thatcher resigned. I cast my eye around the room, I’d be lucky if most of this lot knew who was Prime Minister at the moment.
Right Ceri, lighten up. It’s a party. I cast my eye about the room again, this time less critically. This time, looking for boys.
Ohhh, he was all right. Him with the shaved head, beautiful brown skin, huge eyes, flat nose, pouty lips. Hmmmm, very all right. Now, fix him with a look that says you’re interested. No, interested, not desperate, lighten up on the eyebrows, smile a little more, hey, he’s smiling back . . .
I peeled myself off the wall, smiled a little more, fixed him with my dark, mysterious eyes . . .
The lad smiled back. He nodded, ‘come here’. I finished unsticking myself from the wall and a young slip of a girl skipped over to him, flung her arms around his neck and started snogging his face off.
He looked about fifteen anyway.
I guzzled beer, looked even further around the room. And this time, I caught someone’s eye. He was definitely looking at me, his eyes were practically drilling into me. I’d recognise that stare anywhere – he was the man from the pub a couple of weeks ago. Across the smoke and flashing lights and music, he was leant back against the wall, can of beer in one hand, glaring at me. I knew it was me because I glanced around me, there was no one else even remotely close enough to be on the receiving end of that glare. Maybe I knew him. I peered through the smoke and moving bodies to get a closer look. But no, he didn’t look familiar. I was pretty sure I didn’t know him. Maybe he was a writer I’d commissioned in London who was unhappy with the final edit of his feature, so he now scowled at me in revenge.
Like the time in the pub, he made no attempt to hide his glare now that I’d spotted him: if I was caught giving evils to someone – even someone I hated – I’d at least have the good grace to look away, go back to glaring in a minute or two. This man clearly had no grace. He glared and stared and evilled like I had my back to him.
Well, two can glare at that game. I shifted slightly, blanked my face so my mouth was a flat line, my eyes flat, then returned his stare. Mine wasn’t so vicious, I’d save the viciousness for later. I simply stared at him like he stared at me. Pretending the music and dancing people and haze weren’t ther—
‘Fancy seeing you here!’
I jumped slightly as Mel stepped between me and Staring Man. ‘How you doing?’ he shouted above the music.
‘Fine. How you doing?’ I shouted back.
Mel shrugged untidily. ‘Do you want a drink?’
I raised my can. ‘Got one, thanks.’
‘Oh,’ Mel replied. He swigged from his can of beer. He was, of course, wearing a Levi’s combo, but this time he had on a white T-shirt instead of a jumper. ‘Are you all right, then?’ he asked. This had all the hallmarks of becoming a small talk conversation. He was embarrassed because he’d shown me a side to him very few people saw. And, while part of him yearned to get back to that intimacy, the rest of him was horrified about it. Why would any sane person tell a virtual stranger all those things, especially one who they saw in and out of work? Why indeed. I often asked myself this when someone had dragged me into their life.
‘Yeah, I’m fine, Mel. How are you?’
Mel shrugged again.
‘How come you’re here?’ I asked. ‘I came with Jake and Ed.’
‘What?’
‘I came with Jake and Ed,’ I said loudly. ‘Who do you know?’
‘One of my students from All Souls. She lives with The Met lot. And I know quite a few of The Met lot anyway. But my student asked me to come here.’
‘Right.’
‘Do you want to dance?’ Mel asked, indicating to the now packed dance space in the cleared out living room.
‘Honestly?’ I replied.
‘It’s shite music, isn’t it?’ Mel laughed.
I nodded.
‘Give me a bit of Wham any day. I only come to these parties cos it beats sitting home alone.’
There spaketh a lonely man. Mel was used to company. His marriage had just broken up. It was, I suppose, understandable that he needed someone. The noise and the distraction. The only way to stop the constant noise in your head. To stop thinking about what you did to ruin your life. Going out was so much easier than living with the pain. Than thinking the thoughts and feeling the feelings.
‘I know what you mean,’ I replied. The music mutated into another ‘song’ bastardised from a good tune, dubbed into oblivion.
‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,’ he said, ‘since I came to your place.’
I nodded. I thought you might.
‘It’s . . . I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.’
‘Thinking’s not all it’s cracked up to be, is it?’ I replied.
‘No. No it’s not. I, er, almost called my wife.’
Oh?! ‘Oh?’
‘But I didn’t know what I was going to say so I didn’t.’
‘You could try what I do: open my mouth, say whatever words find themselves in my mouth at the time. It’s almost as good as having a plan.’
‘If I did that, I’d probably tell her about . . . you know . . . and she’d be devastated.’
And she isn’t now? ‘Why did you split up? I mean, if she doesn’t know about,’ I waved my hand about expressively, ‘why are you apart?’
Mel looked about him, checking the coast was clear before he shouted more of his love life story above the music.
‘COME DANCE!’ a student screeched in our faces. Young, dark-haired, not as pretty or sophisticated as Claudine.
‘No,’ Mel laughed. Almost like an ageing uncle telling his young niece he didn’t want to dance at her older sister’s wedding. (Well she wasn’t going to be talking to me, was she?)
‘Oh, come on!’ she persisted, she grabbed his hands, pouting. ‘Don’t be an old git!’ Did she give me a sideways glance, when she said ‘old git’? Cheeky cow. I should get out there, show her what dancing’s all about. Or just slap her.
Mel gave me a ‘should I? Well I’m going to anyway’ look. I dutifully took his beer and his carrier bag of cans from him.
The young lady dragged Mel out into the middle of the living room, elbowing aside anyone who had the audacity to get in her way. She had her man and she was going to make sure everyone knew it. She soon wrapped herself around Mel, arms around his neck, body welded to his. She was angling and positioning herself for a kiss, her head kept looking up at him from a side angle, just perfect for him to lean down and place his lips over hers. She was the student who’d invited him to the party, I’d guess. And she’d taken it as a personal come-
on that he’d shown up. If I was her, I would – I’d once taken it as a declaration of love that Drew gave me 10p because I didn’t have enough to buy an ice-cream; a man coming to a party that I’d invited him to would’ve meant he was proposing marriage and offering painless childbirth. It wouldn’t occur to her – or me if I was in her position – that he’d come out to escape the silence in what would’ve been his marital home.
Mel openly wasn’t interested. His body moved in time with the music, but his attention moved everywhere, settling nowhere. And it went nowhere near the woman who was attempting to become his second skin.
In a microsecond of silence between tunes, the atmosphere charged up, someone stuck the whole room into a plug socket and flicked the switch. I felt the electricity of the moment bolt through every cell in my body. Mel froze mid-dance, as though someone had just pressed the pause remote at him. But it was just his body that froze, his face mutated itself into the very picture of horror and terror, his eyes fixed to the door that led from the back door. I looked to the door. Claudine. She was ex-Met. He was ex-Met. The party was Met. It’d stand to reason she’d be here.
Now, from Claudine’s standpoint, this didn’t look good. I could clearly see how this might come across: Mel, who’d been confessing love and all sorts to her, who’d been saying ‘leave your boyfriend’ without actually saying it, was dancing rather closely with a good-looking young student. Those last two adjectives (‘good-looking’ and ‘young’) and one noun (student) when applied to someone Mel was dancing with weren’t going to help matters, either. From Claudine’s point of view, these weren’t the actions of a man who’s madly in love with you. Or even in love with you.
Claudine wrenched a smile across her face and came into the room, followed by her friends. Not lecturers at All Souls, but most of them were her age, well-dressed and very sophisticated. (That was how I wanted to look, all the time. Well-dressed and sophisticated, even if I wore a bin liner. And, whilst one of them looked like she was wearing a bin liner, she still looked sophisticated. I bet her farts smelt of flowers, too.)
Mel extracted himself from the student and, smiling, went to Claudine. The student followed him, stood beside him as Mel and Claudine talked. It was quite comical really. The student slung her arm around his waist every other second and Mel kept shrugging the arm off, while talking to Claudine. No matter how much he removed the arm, the following second, it tried again to re-establish itself on Mel’s body. She didn’t even seem to mind the fact he was completely blanking her. Mel and Claudine talked for a bit, then Claudine gave the most bothered ‘I’m unbothered’ shrug and stalked across the living room with her friends. They were soon surrounded by the men. Real men. People who were nearer my age than the rest of the students’ ages. Where the hell had they come from? I thought as I watched them salivate over Claudine and her friends. I’ve been here since, like, for ever and I didn’t notice one single eligible man and now they’ve all come out of the woodwork. That’s fair, isn’t it?