‘No. No,’ I replied quickly, trying to calm him, stop him . . . ‘I was wondering . . . Is she your girlfriend?’
‘I don’t have a girlfriend, you know that, Serena. You know that I can’t have a girlfriend when I’ve got you.’
I didn’t understand what he meant, whether he was saying I was his girlfriend or not, but I couldn’t ask. ‘OK,’ I said, quietly. ‘OK.’
We sat on opposite sides of his living room, him on his big leather settee and me on the hard, wooden chair he kept by the telephone table. He got up from the settee and my heart bolted to my throat, my body tensed. With every step he took, the more rigid my body became. I braced myself as he came to a stop in front of me, braced myself for it. For that moment. He reached out, took my hands in his and then pulled me gently upright.
Slowly, gently, he enveloped me in a hug, took me in his arms. ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ he said.
It took a while for me to realise it wasn’t going to happen. Then it took me another second to realise what he had said: ‘I love you’. I had been waiting to hear those words since the moment he stroked my face in the classroom, and now he had said it and I had almost missed it.
I nodded quickly, in case he thought I didn’t know he loved me.
‘I’d hate to think you didn’t realise how special you are to me. How much I love you.’
I relaxed a little. He really did love me, after all. It’d been worth it, it’d all been worth it.
‘I only went with Poppy because she’s a virgin and you weren’t, the first time.’
My body tensed again and he held me tighter, almost as if trying to hug away my body’s anxiety. ‘I was,’ I said quietly. I was. I honestly was. I hadn’t done that with anyone else. I couldn’t. I hadn’t met anyone else I loved as much as him.
‘A complete virgin? No one had ever kissed you or anything like that?’ he asked.
When I was thirteen, Tommy Marison had grabbed me when we were alone in a classroom together and pushed his mouth on to mine. It lasted for all of three seconds and I hadn’t even wanted him to kiss me so I didn’t think of that as a kiss.
I’d told him about it, of course – I told him everything about me – and at the time he’d said it wasn’t a kiss. Why had he changed his mind?
‘Tommy Marison pushed his mouth on to mine. That wasn’t a real kiss,’ I said.
‘Real or not, a kiss is a kiss is a kiss, baby, and Poppy had never been kissed before. She isn’t damaged goods. I needed that. To be with someone pure. You understand, don’t you?’
‘Please hurry up and find yourself another naïve fifteen-year-old virgin.’ Isn’t that what Marlene had said in her message? Her words, the conviction in her voice, whirled around my head like a battery-operated spinning top.
‘Please tell me you understand, baby. I need for you to understand. I didn’t do it to hurt you, it was what I needed. Tell me you understand.’
‘I understand,’ I stated. I understand a lot of things. I understand that this is not my fault. I understand that I did nothing wrong. I understand that I cannot say to you I did nothing wrong.
I understand that I am scared of you.
There, I have thought it: sometimes I am scared of you and you should not be scared of the person you love.
‘Thank you, baby, that means so much to me. You mean so much to me. Poppy, she’s nothing. I can’t get rid of her just yet – me being her first means she’s really attached to me. It’d break her heart. I don’t know what she’d do to herself if I ended it now. I’ll keep her around for a bit longer and then let her down gently, OK?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘You make it so easy to love you,’ he said.
I have to get away from you, I thought. You are going to keep hurting me if I stay.
The day I got my O’Level results, after I had opened them to show my parents, I had come over to his house and had handed him the envelope. He’d pulled out the slip of paper and had screamed with joy.
‘My God, Serena, you’ve done it!’ he shouted, then scooped me up in his arms and spun me around. ‘You’ve done it, you’ve done it! You’re amazing! Seven As and four Bs. I couldn’t have hoped for better for you.’ He kept spinning me round and round until we were both dizzy with happiness. ‘You can do anything you want now, you know that, don’t you? The world’s your oyster.’ He put me down then, telling me to wait where I was, he sped out of the room and upstairs, then came back with a box wrapped up in gold paper.
‘I got this for you, but it doesn’t seem enough now, after you’ve done so well.’
I carefully opened up the paper and inside was a Walkman. My very own Walkman. I’d been saving for one of them and now I didn’t need to because he had got me one. It played tapes on both sides, as well, so I wouldn’t have to keep taking the tape out to turn it over, and it was a beautiful blue colour.
He pressed a kiss on my mouth suddenly. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ he said, quietly, seriously. His voice caught in his throat and tears filled his eyes. He looked away for a second, composed himself. ‘I don’t think I could be more proud of you than I am at this moment.’ I had to leave to go home for a family lunch but on the doorstep he’d smiled at me and said, ‘No one deserves these results more than you.’ And I’d floated on air all the way home.
That was only three weeks ago. Three weeks ago he thought I was the most amazing person on earth. Things had only really started to go wrong between us when he met this girl. They hadn’t been perfect before, but they were a lot better. Maybe I should give him another chance. I wasn’t scared of him all the time. Maybe if I just let him deal with this Poppy in his own time, afterwards, we could be together properly. We could even go public. All I had to do was wait for him to get rid of her, then things would be good between us again. Good. Solid. Wonderful.
After all, he said he loved me. And that was what I’d always have over her. He would never love her, not when he was with me.
Not when he’d said it not once but three times.
September, 1986
She was smaller and curvier than I expected. Of course she was pretty, and it was hard to believe she’d never been kissed before him.
I wanted to ask her how she could live with herself when she was sleeping with someone else’s boyfriend. I wanted to ask her if she knew how much it hurt me to know he had been with her. I wanted to ask her why she couldn’t find someone of her own. Instead I stuck out my hand for her to shake and said, ‘Good to meet you.’
‘You too,’ she said.
And I fancied for a moment that I heard the faint click of a key turning in a lock; the moment destiny set the lock of the shackles that would bind me to Poppy for ever.
poppy
‘Well, well, well, fancy meeting you here,’ he says.
It’s that idiot from the pub the other week. He cuts a striking form along the promenade which is packed with people, even on a Wednesday afternoon.
I was in the middle of a painting break, munching on an apple rescued from Mum and Dad’s fruit bowl and drinking from a bottle of water filled from the tap, when he appeared. Although there are many, many people on the seafront, all out here trying to soak up their own little piece of sunshine, he stood out. His frame, tall and wiry, was sheathed in an eye-catching Hawaiian shirt that was a mass of green, red and yellow palm trees, beige knee-length shorts and Jesus sandals. I recognised him even with his wraparound sunglasses on – because there was something forced and purposeful about the way he sauntered down the promenade.
‘You’re the cock from the pub,’ I say, without removing my sunglasses. I picked up these sunglasses for just over a fiver in the markets in the old post office in Brighton the other day. Marcus would have pitched a fit if he caught me wearing these: they would have offended everything about looking polished and finished he held dear. I started to get like that, too. It wasn’t worth the pain, the consequences, not to pay close attention to how I looked by following what
he said I could and couldn’t wear. Nothing was worth that. But these black plastic things are all I can afford and, honestly, not so bad. They do the job, keep the sun out of my eyes, and that’s all that I can ask for, really.
‘No, I’m Alain,’ says the man in front of me with a smile.
‘That’s what I said, you’re the cock from the pub the other day.’
‘And, like I said, I’m Alain.’
This could go on a while and I have no interest in partaking any further. As it is I’ve broken my ‘do not engage’ rule twice in two minutes. I return my gaze to the sea, a blue that I have never seen anywhere else before, and my breathing immediately falls in time with the rock and roll, the to and fro of the waves. I had been captivated by the surfers who were sitting astride their boards, paddling further out in search of bigger waves; and I’d been fascinated by the yachts and boats bobbing around casually as a backdrop to the swimmers and paddlers who have ventured into the water. Every day I am astonished by the world. Every day, I remember that I had forgotten that these sorts of things existed. When my life was grey and boxed in and regimented, this was going on ‘out there’. This and a hundred million other amazing moments. I take another bite of the apple, sighing to myself as its delicious tart juice fills my mouth.
‘Lovely day for it,’ A Lon says. I thought he’d rightly guessed I had no intention of speaking to him again.
A feeling slips down from my head to my stomach, filling me with an icy dread. I turn back to him, and instinctively shade my already shaded eyes so I can see what his face does when I ask, ‘Have you been following me?’ I stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago and this is one coincidence too far.
A Lon does not dismiss my question straight away and more chilling dread creeps through me. He bobs down to my height and curls his top lip in to chew on the right side of it. ‘Not exactly,’ he says, eventually.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I saw you a week or so ago, here. You were painting the side of the hut and you looked . . . Your fringe was getting in your face and you kept doing this really cute thing of blowing it away. You had the tiniest splatter of paint on your face, and lots of little spots of paint on your arms and hands. I just thought you were so beautiful. I wouldn’t have dared speak to you, then I saw you again in the pub and I thought, “It’s Fate, I have to give it a go”.’ All the time he is speaking, his head is bowed, like a man in prayer, his gaze focused downwards where his prayer book should be. He is avoiding eye contact because he is lying.
‘And, I kind of recognised you. I kept thinking I’d seen you somewhere before, you seemed so familiar.’ Now he glances up, dares to look me right in the eye. ‘Then you said that thing about being in prison so I typed in lots of different things on the Internet about women who kill their boyfriends, until . . .’
‘You found my picture.’ I swivel back to stare at the sea.
‘I found your picture. And I kind of remember some of the stuff from that time. I was about eighteen then.’
‘So, what are you doing here? Most men would have run a mile.’
‘I like you,’ he says.
‘Right,’ I reply with a sigh. Fetishist. Probably wants me to dress up, beat him, hurt him, pretend I’m going to kill him. I had many, many letters in prison from people like that, people asking for that; people who didn’t seem to realise I was locked away from the world.
‘I do,’ he insists, ‘I came for a walk today hoping you’d be out here.’
‘Right,’ I say again.
‘All right, I’ll come clean.’
This is more like it. ‘Yeah?’
‘I’ve always wanted access to a beach hut. You’ve got one, I have to pretend to like you to get access to it.’
My head snaps round to stare at him. He grins and raises an eyebrow. ‘Which reason are you gonna believe, huh?’
I shake my head and look away, to hide my ever-so-slight amusement. No one has gone out of their way to make me laugh in a while. To give him his dues, he is funny – but he is a man. And I do not have the best track record with men. The first was my last for twenty years. The first has probably broken me.
He sits back, rests on his arms.
‘I didn’t say you could share my beach hut space,’ I remind him.
‘No, but I have the feeling you’re going to.’
‘You know, A Lon—’ I say, not looking at him.
‘That’s Alain. Alan with an “i” – it’s the French version, my father’s French,’ he explains.
‘Right, I see. Alain, I was in the library the other day.’
‘That’s good, you should always use your local library.’
‘Yeah, you should. Especially if you can’t afford books.’
‘True, true.’
‘Like I was saying, I was in the library the other day and I came across this book called He’s Just Not That Into You.’
‘I know it. There’s a movie too.’
‘Really? I never did! You know, the title offended me so much I couldn’t actually make myself reach out and pick it up.’
‘OK,’ he says cautiously.
‘“Who do these people think they are,” I was thinking to myself, “letting men get away with all sorts of poor behaviour and telling women to accept it because they’re ‘just not into them’?”.’
‘Right . . .’
‘Turns out I was wrong.’ I fix him with a beady-eyed, hundred-yard stare. ‘It’s a great line. Because, you know what, I’m just not that into you. Please leave me alone.’
‘Go on, give me a chance, you might find you grow to like me,’ he asks. ‘What have you got to lose?’
I curl my lips, salty from the sea air, into my mouth and shake my head. He goes to speak, a protest on his lips, but I speak to halt him. ‘I’ve lost half my life already, don’t you think I’m entitled to at least have myself heard when I tell someone I want to be left alone?’
He sighs a little. ‘You’re right, of course, you’re right. I’ll leave you alone. But is it OK if I drop by every now and then to visit the beach hut? I’m going to miss it so.’
‘It’s a free country, or so I’m told.’
He jumps to his feet, makes a big show of patting gravel off the palms of his hands. ‘I’ll see you?’
Replying to him with a sort of head shake/nod is the best I can manage at the moment. I do not want to encourage him, but of course I’m disappointed by what I had to do as he walks away. He is someone who wants to spend time with me, even knowing where I have been and what the world thinks I did. Ghost Marcus was right: I do like him, I could grow to like him even more. I’m sure if I spoke to someone more worldly-wise about these things they would probably say it was perfectly normal to want to have . . . that with him. I don’t mean just sex, I mean the whole lot. That is what I have missed. When I had it with Marcus it was fabulous. It was like floating on air and believing you’d never touch solid ground again. He knew how to make me feel like there was no one else in the world but me.
Marcus knew about the other stuff as well – he knew how to make life far too real. He knew how to twist pain and fear and terror into the strands of everyday moments.
It’s that ‘real’ stuff I do not want any more of. I’ve had about as much reality as I can take. Alain seems nice. He looks like someone off the telly. He has a sense of humour. But he could still turn. And that is a risk I’m not willing to take.
BANG! CLASH! BANG! behind me on the road has me leaping out of my seat and ready to stand well back from the door before I think what I’m doing. My head swings around, wildly, looking for the prison van, waiting for the silent screams of the first-timers as they are uncuffed and herded like frightened cattle into the holding area. On the street beyond the green behind my hut is a man unloading a couple of deckchairs and a picnic hamper from a campervan. It is not the prison van. I am not still in prison.
When will that stop? When will I stop jumping to attention every time I he
ar the shutting of car doors or the jangle of keys or the smell of cheap, watered-down bleach? When will I get back to normal?
I must look a little silly standing here like this, gawking at the campervan couple who are oblivious to the anxiety they’ve sent spiralling through my veins. I recap my water and wrap my apple back in its plastic bag for later. I need to get back to painting the beach hut. I need to get back to doing something I know I can do and I can focus on.
I need to concentrate on this and forget all about the man with the Hawaiian shirt, dazzling smile and tight ass who I sent walking out of my life.
serena
I’m being followed.
At least, it feels that way.
I can’t be sure, and I don’t know who would or why they would, but it’s a feeling I’ve been having a lot recently. One of being watched. One that someone is encroaching on my personal space from a distance. It used to happen to me all the time, after everything.
Notoriety of the kind I managed to garner does not go away overnight. It is not fleeting and forgotten, wrapped indelicately around someone’s fish and chips the next day, even after I was found not guilty of murder. It sticks around, waiting impatiently for someone to discover something else new, or someone to remember a story that might just prove my guilt. Then it would start again, and I would have that creeping sensation of someone trying to learn a little bit too much about my life by watching me.
I have that feeling now. It is Thursday and Evan and I have an appointment with the priest at the church where we’re going to get married. There are so many things left to do that I’m having to work ridiculous flexi-time hours, but my boss is all right. I’ve been his personal assistant for many years and as long as I get all the work done and he never misses a meeting or family birthday, he doesn’t mind how I structure my hours. When I first applied for the job, he’d said that someone who had eleven O’Levels, three A-grade A’Levels and a first-class Honours degree would be under-challenged in the role on offer. I’d proved him wrong. I had applied to do a doctorate in English Language, but I now had a baby and she had to come first. Also, Evan and I needed the money, especially after stretching ourselves to buy the house in Preston Park as part of his move to work at a small surgery down in Brighton.