Before She Was Mine (20 page)

‘You star,’ said Liv. Amazing how little you have to do to win praise if your default setting’s Idle Bugger.

I had no appetite, so I took my plate upstairs where I could dispose of the contents discreetly.

Then, instead of eating, I lay on my bed with my earphones in, listening to Keane. I stared at the ID chart of harlequin ladybirds and let the memory come of a biology GCSE paper Nicky and I
both sat, and how upset she’d been as we walked out of the exam room. ‘I missed out a whole question at the end,’ she moaned. ‘Mum’s going to kill me.’

‘Your coursework’s good, though. Even if you totally cocked up, you’d still scrape a pass,’ I’d told her.

She’d shaken her head. ‘Mum doesn’t work like that. It’s top marks or big trouble.’ And she’d slouched away, looking miserable. Sometimes I’ve blamed
Liv for not pushing me harder, but would I really want someone like Joan Steuer standing behind me, prodding me in the back every time I dared take a breather?

That made me think of the phone call I’d made from my hall of residence, sitting on the narrow bed in that sweltering box of a room, to tell Liv university wasn’t for me and I was
jacking in the course. Expecting her to blow up, or complain; dreading it, but being obscurely disappointed when she went, ‘So do you want me to come and pick you up?’ It’s true
she did say a few times afterwards it was a shame, but never with much conviction. Nicky was too loyal to comment beyond a regretful shrug. Melody was just pleased to have me back. Only Michael
voiced any real criticism. ‘Who the hell are you to stick your oar in?’ I’d asked him, outraged. ‘Your friend, I hope,’ he’d said.

I thought of a summer fête at the high school, how Nicky and I had been manning refreshments when we spotted some Year 10 bitch sniggering at Liv’s hippy dress. I’d filled a
jug of squash and ice, and Nicky had shimmied through the crowds with it till she was near enough to tip it down the girl’s back. Even now I could recall the screaming and swearing, Nicky
holding perfectly her expression of innocent surprise.

I thought of a common newt I’d squashed with a planter in our garden, and how Liv had taken the floppy body between her fingers, like a shred of slimy meat, and somehow revived it so it
swam off into the depths of our pond, with only a shudder.

The memory flicked to Oggy’s hedgehog, then to the Red Lion where Oggy sat at a table in the saloon bar boasting he could take the metal cap off a beer bottle with his teeth. It was me
who’d run him to casualty afterwards, at near-midnight in freezing fog.

I thought of planting crocuses round the base of Colin’s Special Tree. And I remembered, the day after I turned eleven, Liv taking delivery of a tank of harvest mice and installing them in
the front room. This was the nearest I ever got to owning a pet (‘I’d have bought you a pet,’ Melody used to say. ‘If you’d been mine.’) The mice were part of a
captive breeding programme, but after a certain number of litters they were laid off. Their cute factor was huge: eyes like black map pins, curling tails like monkeys’, tiny tiny claws which
they wrapped around the grass stalks. Everything perfectly miniature, a miracle of nature.

Like Melody’s baby’s face.

That image I pushed away quickly. I wanted to remember comforting things, like Liv bringing me Horlicks with brandy when I’d broken up with Oggy. But the memory slid out of reach and
became Liv straight after her operation, weak and groggy and talking garbage while Geraint sat by the hospital bed and picked at his thumbnail. I struggled for another, something nice from when I
was very small. A Christmas, a birthday, maybe. Recollections half formed – a clump of fly agaric under our birch; Liv telling me to sit on the riverbank and make a noise like an apple. Once,
when we went to get her wellies from the greenhouse, there’d been a mouse inside one of them and I’d actually wet myself laughing. But these times seemed far away, like scenes from a
programme I’d watched on television once.

Why don’t we notice when we’re happy? Liv says that as part of the bedtime routine when she was little, her grandma used to make her tick off all the good parts of the day and thank
God for them. I reckon there ought to be a secular version of this, public information films reminding us to count our blessings. They could stick them on the end of the National Lottery Draw.
You may not have won a fortune, but, hey, at least you’ve got food and shelter, which is more than millions in the world have
. That way, more of us would start each day grateful to
have escaped disaster—

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the screen of my mobile light up. I wrenched off my earphones and made a dive for the phone.

Nd
2
C U. Rd Ln 8? N
, said the text.

On my wy
, I messaged back.

Nicky would save me from myself, for tonight.

We used to come to the Red Lion all the time when we were in the sixth form. Friday and Saturday nights for definite, and some lunchtimes too. It was our unofficial common
room.

In the corner sat the fruit machine where John Jones, previously unluckiest boy in the school, had stuck in a random quid and won fifty back, golden coins sliding out in a fantastic cascade. The
win made him a bit of a hero and the kudos stuck, enabling him to get a girlfriend and invitations to parties and an amnesty on planting weird objects in his locker. Amazing how a single incident
can reverse your entire cred.

The bar top was the same one Neil Froggat ricocheted off, after boasting Lily Peterson had given him a blow job in the car park and earning a fist in the face off her brother. The dartboard Oggy
used nearly every night back then was still on the wall, despite a recent spruce-up by the brewery. And opposite was the hearth where Sasha Morris once attempted a strip after persons unknown, but
likely to be Oggy’s friend Tyler Dawes, spiked her drink with about a litre of vodka. The tacky carpet in the girls’ loos had gone, but the cracked mirror was still up, as was the
condom machine with the smiley-faced dick felt-tipped on the side. I must have spent thousands of hours in those toilets, gulping water out of the tap and bitching and mopping tears and tormenting
my hair.

‘Let’s get one thing clear from the off: I don’t want to talk about my family,’ I said to Nicky as we pushed through the swing door into the public bar. ‘I just
want to hear about weddings and films and clothes and reality TV and any kind of general crap you want to throw at me.’

She nodded. ‘Let me get the first round in, then. I won’t feel so guilty about bending your ear after.’

I went and bagged our usual place, near the back entrance. A couple of tables away sat a crowd including Denny Fletcher, who I’d dated briefly in between interludes with Oggy. I sat up in
my seat and tried to catch his eye but he didn’t take me on. Already he was getting paunchy, even though he’d been skinny at school. In those days, though, he was on the athletics team
and training every weekend. Now he worked behind a desk at the builders’ merchants off the ring road. As I watched he put his arm round a girl with long dark hair and rosy cheeks. I vaguely
recognised her but couldn’t dredge up a name.

‘Marie Evans,’ said Nicky, when she returned with our drinks. ‘Don’t you remember? Got so drunk at Kipper Harrison’s eighteenth, she went home in someone
else’s shoes. And knickers, if you believe the rumours.’

Marie saw me looking, and smiled. Then she spoke to Denny, who turned and nodded. My eyes strayed to her stomach.

‘Shit, she’s pregnant,’ I said to Nicky.

‘She’s married. They got married last year.’

‘You never told me.’

‘I did. I think I did. I only know because I saw it in the
Herald
. Are you bothered?’

‘Of course not. God, he was as exciting as a flatfish. She’s welcome to him. And all his little fry.’

I was smiling, but the swollen belly had been a shock. I didn’t want anyone to be pregnant right now.

‘And John Jones is married,’ she went on. ‘He lives in America now, has a job in Washington. Tyler Dawes got hitched but he’s in prison.’

‘What for?’

‘Not sure. Affray, maybe.’

‘How do you hear all this stuff?’

She shrugged. ‘Local papers. Dad. Dad’s on so many committees all the gossip passes his way eventually.’

I thought, that’ll be me, I’ll be a story doing the rounds.
Did you hear about Freya Hopwood? Running between two mothers, both of them a mess
.
She’s the girl who had
to leave the Fox Howl camping trip early because she was homesick. What’s her job these days? Didn’t she go to university?

I said, ‘How’s Christian?’

Nicky frowned. ‘Busy this week. They’re filming psychic phenomena in the Norfolk area. He’s not due back for days.’

‘Bad luck.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if it is.’ She pushed her glass away from her and leaned back in her chair. ‘We’ve been getting on each other’s nerves.
Sniping about the wedding plans. About his bloody mother. About mine. You know how it is when you’re organising a wedding.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, even though I didn’t.

‘Everyone has an opinion and no one’s prepared to compromise.’

‘I can’t imagine Christian sniping.’

‘Believe me, Frey, he can.’

‘Well, I expect he’s under a lot of pressure.’

‘Aren’t we all,’ she burst out. ‘I’ve had a gutful, for a start!’

It wasn’t like Nicky to raise her voice, especially not in public.

‘Is it – have you had a row?’

‘Not a row. Not outright.’ She swept her hair back off her face in a gesture that was both cross and weary. ‘You know, it’s not even really him. It’s his stupid
family and his mental mother. All of a sudden Corinne wants her local church, now, not mine, because apparently there’s a tradition going back a hundred and fifty years of Bliaises marrying
there. I told her, it’s a bit late in the day for that, isn’t it? You never thought to mention it right at the start? Not that it would have made a difference if she had. I mean,
it’s always the bride’s home church you use, isn’t it? And anyway, Mum’s been a member of St Alkmund’s for years, she’d have had a fit if we’d even talked
about holding the service anywhere else. Plus, how are we supposed to ferry everyone all the way to Pinewoods for the reception? It’s a stupid idea from start to finish. The trouble is,
historically Christian’s lot have married locals, so it’s only ever been a hop between parishes and no one’s minded. This time they’re having to travel all the way up to the
grim north—’

‘Grim Midlands.’

‘Everything above Banbury’s north as far as they’re concerned.’

I said, ‘She can’t be serious. She can’t expect you to shift everything at this late stage.’

‘She isn’t. It’s just a power trip, a last-ditch attempt to assert the Bliaise authority. If they’d only ignore her! But she twitches her little finger, and the rest of
them jump.’

‘Your mum’s met Corinne, hasn’t she?’

‘Once, in Tewkesbury, for a Sunday lunch. I thought it had gone OKish. And they talk on the phone, in fact I know who it is straight away because Mum puts on this ludicrous lah-di-dah
voice as though she’s in conference with the Queen. Corinne must laugh her socks off.’

‘Your dad and Julian?’

‘Mostly they’ve ignored each other. During the meal Julian read a newspaper, which I could tell Mum thought was incredibly rude but she didn’t dare say anything. Oh, and he
used the F-word about his scallops, twice. That nearly sent her into a blue fit. There she’d been beforehand, tying herself in knots in case she used the wrong cutlery, and then Julian turns
out to have a mouth on him like a docker.’ She grinned weakly. ‘It was very upper-class swearing, though. Sort of, “fahhk”, “fahhking”. None of your nasty
working-class vowels.’

Across the bar, Marie was pushing her chair back while Denny was poised, solicitous, to help her out of her seat. I thought how nice it must be for someone to be that aware of what you
needed.

I made a sympathetic face. ‘And you don’t feel Christian’s giving you enough support?’

‘I don’t, no! I
asked
him to come up this weekend so we could talk it through, get him to see he has to be on my side, and he said he couldn’t because of the filming.
But I don’t think the filming’s got anything to do with it. I think that’s an excuse. He’s frightened of her. And what kind of marriage is it going to be if his
mother’s always on our case?’

‘Have you spoken to your mum about it?’

‘You must be joking. She’s the last person I could confide in.’

I thought of Joan, her blue-toned dresses and her sturdy bosom, her flower vases and matching tableware and frilly valances. Yet she and Nicky had seemed close when we were younger.

‘Don’t you understand?’ said Nicky. ‘They’re coming at me from all sides. This wedding’s like my mother’s happiest day ever. She won’t allow
anything to jeopardise it. All that crawling to the secretary of the Ladies’ Society, all the lunches she hosts for the English Heritage Book Club, those fine-cuisine courses she goes on:
this is her pay-back. Her only daughter’s about to marry a toff. There’s a danger she’ll expire with excitement.’

‘That’s a good thing, though? I mean that you’re bringing her so much joy.’

‘No. Because after this it’ll be something else. She’ll never let up. Once I’ve bagged Christian, and had the most perfect wedding ever recorded, then she’ll be on
at me to produce a perfect child. Then a perfect sibling. Then places at the best kindergarten, prep school, high school, university. It’ll never stop. I know. I’ve had years of it
already.’

Her shoulders drooped.

‘Aw, Nicky. I don’t know what to advise. I wish I did. But what do I know about fiancés and weddings and in-laws? You might as well be asking me about calculus. I
wouldn’t know where to start.’

She glanced up. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not looking for solutions. I wanted to off-load, that’s all.’

Denny and Marie came back from wherever it was they’d been, hand in hand. He guided her into her seat and sat down opposite, all the while never taking his eyes off her.