Four New Words for Love (7 page)

I don’t know if she does but she stops and looks at me and I see a face that looks as if it’s been pulled in with a drawstring. I know if I don’t do something to keep the
momentum going she’s going to cry. I take her arm and begin walking again. ‘We could let Lolly loose on you. No – ignore that. I’m just thinking aloud. Lolly could cheapen
anything.’

‘Lolly doesn’t like me.’

‘She can’t stand Moira. She doesn’t dislike you.’

‘I’ve spent my life not being disliked. You have to stand out, even a little, to be disliked. Not being disliked isn’t the same as being liked.’

I stop us and swivel her round to face me. ‘Well stand out then. Even a little. Take a risk. I like you. Lolly loves me. She’ll come round.’

* * *

‘But she’s boring.’

‘She’s nice.’

‘But she’s boring.’

‘Not when you get to know her.’

‘How would you know? It’s half past fucking
ten.
I sent you out at seven. You haven’t been round her for long enough to know how boring she could become. We grew up
with her and she was boring then. Boringness is like having a stutter or something. It
clings.
And it’s catching. Moira’s a cow but at least she’s not boring.’

‘If it’s catching then how come Moira didn’t catch it? Because you’re talking crap, that’s why. By the way, I told Moira you couldn’t stand her.’

She makes that irritated flicking gesture. She cares even less for Moira’s opinion than she does for Moira.

‘Why her? Why Moira? We’ve always known what a selfish cow she is. Your first night out in ages and you choose her.’

‘I’ve been asking myself that since seven o’clock.’

‘Half past fucking
ten
! Three and a half fucking hours! I wanted you to come back tomorrow morning, rogered senseless by Mr Right.’

‘You don’t find Mr Right in three and a half hours.’

‘Mr Wrong then.’

‘People have different ideas of what a good night is.’

‘Something’s happened. You caught the wrong bus, got contaminated by those old bingo trolls and came back sixty.’

‘Until I started talking to you I actually thought the night had been okay, because of what I salvaged.’

‘What?’

‘Ruth – of course.’

‘I swear to God if there was a poker round here I’d beat you to death with it.’

‘She said she would come round and babysit so that we can go out.’

‘If tonight’s anything to go by I don’t know if I can keep up.’

But I knew she was pleased at the thought of a night out. I think she thought it was going to be the way it used to be and I didn’t want to put her right – yet. Ruth was as good as
her word. I thought she might go back to being one of Moira’s satellites, but she didn’t. She stopped being frightened of Lolly when she saw her with Millie. There’s nothing more
irritating than someone who tries to worm their way in by being nice to other people’s kids, but Ruth took to Millie the way Lolly took to puberty.

My first night out with Lolly I go for a first pee at half past nine, and come back to find her with a man who wasn’t there two minutes ago. He’s stretching to put a casual arm round
her waist.

‘This is Tam.’

‘At this rate I’ll be home even earlier than last time.’

‘Tam’s got pals.’

‘I’m sure he has.’ And looking round I could spot them. All hormones and bravado. But I couldn’t complain. She’d toned down her behaviour for long enough, and it
suited me not to be within half a mile of the epicentre when Tam found one of her many G spots. She didn’t want to let me go home alone, and I didn’t want to spoil her night, so she hit
on a compromise by pointing at one of Tam’s pals and telling him across the room to see me to the taxi rank. He looked like Tam, typical Lolly fodder. I didn’t know his name.
What’s sadder, I didn’t want to find out. With the speed he jumped up he obviously thought him walking me to the taxi rank would have the same ending as Tam walking Lolly.

The rank was full of the usual hoi polloi you see everywhere: trogs wanting to fight; a hen party pumping out oestrogen like nerve gas, the bride-to-be wearing L plates and hiccupping like a
metronome; more students, still putting the non-matriculated world to rights; a posh bird on her mobile at a volume that even drowned out the students, who kept saying ‘Ciao’ till she
silenced the phone with a poke, only to start all over again till I wanted to slap her.

The truth is that there wasn’t anything wrong with the queue any more than normal. It was me. I never wanted what Lolly wanted and somehow tonight made me feel that although, with the
exception of Millie, I didn’t know what I wanted, I was further away from it than ever before. Tam’s pal was leaning against me in an unnecessary way, talking about his car or job or
something, some crap attempt to impress, when suddenly I thought if that girl says ‘Ciao’ one more time it’ll take an archaeologist to retrieve my shoe from her arse. The taxi
arrived just in time. I body-checked him, climbed in, called out the address and watched his disappointed face slide past. We crossed the river, the strung lights on the embankment mirrored wavily
in the dark water. All over this city, under this dark sky, people are eating meals, or holding hands, or being ecstatic or just watching telly and being companionable. Maybe there’s a given
quota of happiness, like cinema seats or minerals, and it’s all booked up or mined out at the moment. I don’t know what I looked like when I got home, but Ruth took one look and said
‘cry if you want to,’ and with no intention of doing it – I did.

I don’t know if crying in front of Ruth was a watershed or not, but it seemed to work wonders for her confidence. Lolly noticed it and said I was responsible for turning her from a doormat
to a lippy cow. The drawback was that they began to compete for my attention, and Millie’s affection. I arrived with groceries to find them at either side of the sofa, Millie in the middle,
both calling her name. She was watching the telly, ignoring them both, but that’s not the point. I showed the wisdom of a Sunday-school Solomon by dropping the bag, covering her ears, and
telling them both to get the fuck out my flat. Bad temper has no more effect on Lolly than bad language. We’ve fallen out with one another three times a day since Primary One. But Ruth looked
shocked. She went out, going back to that apologetic crouch she used when following Moira around. Lolly slammed the front door with a bang that rattled the letterbox. I could hear her rage on the
landing, saying they should let that ungrateful cow stew in her own juice, and is this fucking lift
still
broke? When she paused for breath I could hear Ruth say she could see my point.
Lolly started again as they walked down, a rant halted by stops for breath. I’d had a change of heart by the time they reached the fifth landing, but I wasn’t about to tell them that. I
took a peek from the balcony. By the time they’d reached the street
they
looked companionable.

Lolly came round the next day with a packet of chocolate digestives, which is code for an apology. We didn’t mention last night. I didn’t hear from Ruth for a week. She sent me a
letter. I’d had bills but I’d never had a letter before. Lolly was more touched than I was, not by the prose but the effort. This represented a strain on the attention span she could
only guess at. Lolly thinks punctuation is embroidery, and I could see that Ruth came from the same school of thought. The letter was one sentence long, which wasn’t an attempt at style, and
must have cost her as much effort as it would have done Lolly. She was sorry she hadn’t been as good a baby-sitter as she should have been and she understood why I was angry and she hoped
Millie wasn’t upset and she hoped I could see my way to letting her try again and she could understand if I’d rather not and she hoped Lolly and me would make up because she
didn’t want to be the cause of a friendship that long ending and I was to kiss Millie and forgive Lolly for her and it limped on like that with an ‘and’ at the beginning and end
of every line till it wheezed itself to a standstill. Lolly, who can’t read without moving her lips, began reading it out loud till she got to the part about kissing Millie and forgiving her.
Her voice broke, she burst into tears and threw herself on the sofa to more catastrophic noises. I packed Millie in the pram while the purging waterworks continued. I come back to the living room
to find Lolly brandishing the crumpled note.

‘I hope you’re satisfied. That poor – Where are you going?’

‘Ruth’s.’

‘Can I come?’

‘No.’

I left her consoling herself with the chocolate digestives. Ruth lived with her parents in a stone-built terrace in Cathcart, two miles as the crow flies, light years socially from the pre-fab
high-rises most of us grew up in. It was eleven in the morning when I got there. The place had a pleasing solidity to it, not like mine, occupying a space that birds flew through thirty years ago
and will again when the structural faults turn chronic. I stopped to drink it in, this perfume of leafy suburbia, when I noticed the upstairs curtains twitch. A woman, maybe sixty, looked down. She
had an expression like she’d trod in dog shit and was obviously annoyed at being caught peeking. I was staring up at her staring down at me when the door opened and Ruth, whose face only ever
seemed to hold back some secret worry, smiled like a sunflower and fell on Millie with an avalanche of kisses. I enjoyed watching it run its course.

‘So are you going to invite us in?’

I’m shown into the parlour, as I’ve heard they used to call them, with Millie, while Ruth disappears elsewhere. There are net curtains, flock wallpaper and the full nine yards. One
minute you’re in Cathcart, the next you’re in the 1970s. God knows I’m no snob, couldn’t afford to be even if I wanted to, but I’m looking for string pictures and
plaster ducks, symmetrically receding. I’m distracted by a movement from the hall and I see Ruth’s mum, with her back to me, put something in her housecoat pocket. She does the same
thing again and stands aside. Ruth comes in carrying a tea tray. There’s a bowl of hot water to heat Millie’s bottle, which is thoughtful, two mugs of milky tea and a
big
plate
with
two
Bourbon Creams.
Two.
From her upstairs assessment the old woman has decided we aren’t important enough to merit more. I feel inclined to walk out there and then but
that would have defeated the purpose. Besides, walking out had already separated Ruth from Moira, and it’s not as if Ruth has a social life to fall back on. Looking around I felt quite bad
when I realised that depriving her of a distraction, even if it was Moira, had probably condemned her to spending more time in this museum. No wonder she was keen to babysit.

She noticed I’d noticed the miserable biscuit quota. She went red. I chatted to cover the embarrassment, studied the room some more, and looked out the back window that gave on to one of
those narrow terrace-house gardens, a strip the same width as the house, that extended to the back brick wall. Half the garden seemed to have been given over to vegetables. A man in his sixties, in
a comfortable looking cardigan, was tending some kind of furrowed crop with a hoe. Sensing he was being watched he looked up and smiled, one of those apologetic downward-looking smiles, till Ruth
stood beside me and held up Millie. Then his face broke into the same sunflower grin we’d got minutes before on the doorstep. Like father like daughter. I defy any mother to dislike someone
who shows genuine happiness at their child. A breeze lifted his comb-over like the flip lid on a sauce bottle. It’s impossible to take someone with a comb-over seriously. I might have
laughed. He licked his hand to slick it back and busied himself with the hoe to cover his embarrassment.

‘Your dad’s nice.’

The door opens and Mrs Miniver, fifty years on, enters. Either she was wearing the full regalia under the house coat or she’s managed a remarkably quick change. ‘What a delightful
child,’ she says. It looks to me like she’s evaluating the pram rather than taking Millie in. I’m wondering if ‘delightful’ is a word often bandied about in Cathcart,
or it’s one of the set pieces. There follows a couple of minutes of idle chit chat that involves some blushing on Ruth’s part, and almost nothing on mine. The few questions she does ask
are put in just for the sake of form. This is a one-way story. I learn in minutes that she’s a grammar-school girl and that she met Dennis, the poor bastard with the hoe, at the Borough Hall
dance. She makes it all sound like good Christian fun, but it’s obvious she hasn’t a Christian bone in her body. I’m nodding every ten seconds to show I’m listening; while
trying to work out her age against Ruth’s. If she married late it’s possible she had to. She breaks off to go to the window and make some kind of secret gesture, because Dennis comes in
and starts nodding faster than I am, like one of those toy dogs on the parcel shelf going over bumps. She starts talking about the garden, mentioning one or two plans. He’s obviously been
called in to do lots of agreeing. It’s hard to reconcile her ambitions with the view from the window. She makes it sound like Hampton Court Palace, instead of the little suburban khaki strip,
exactly the same as all its neighbours.

I’m astonished. Why does she feel the need to impress a single mother she’s thought fit to allocate only one Bourbon Cream to? It could be that she’s so starved of company that
any chance to talk about herself is welcome. The more likely explanation is that it’s automatic, a role she can’t help herself adopt, like a comic-book hero in times of crisis. The
doorbell rings, she slaps on the emergency make-up, and steps out of the house coat already in costume: Genteel Suburban Woman. Dennis and Ruth are exchanging sympathetic glances, and I can see the
obvious affection there. There’s an old car at the front door. The sofa, although ten times better than mine, is threadbare through the cap sleeves. The vegetables in the back garden
aren’t cosmetic. Whether she’s intended to or not she’s set out her stall: Dennis hasn’t provided the lifestyle a grammar-school girl can reasonably expect, and Ruth’s
an obvious disappointment to her. Poor Ruth – small tits, big bum, manic mum.