Love Lies (5 page)

7. Fern

I am thirty. It’s official. It’s here. The big day. The enormous so-this-is-what-you-amount-to day. I wonder how long I can keep my eyes shut and pray that the whole messy business will just vanish. What the hell made me issue an ultimatum to Adam? Sweet, sometimes sexy, seriously funny, if not a bit hapless, Adam. What was I thinking? Everyone knows a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, etc. etc. He’s not always a perfect boyfriend but he is my boyfriend. I start to hyperventilate. The problem with ultimatums is you have to follow through with them. Everyone knows that. Otherwise you’re a joke. Will he have got me the big, glittering rock, or not?

Bugger.

I can sense that Adam is awake. He’s lying on his side and watching me, waiting for me to open my eyes. Over the past four years I’ve been exposed to Adam physically in every way possible. He knows me. He’s seen me blubber, howl and erupt into judders during sex. Two years ago he watched me haul my aching body through the 26.2 miles of modern torture that is known as the London Marathon. He was waiting for me at the end and he flung his arms around me even though I was sweaty, bloody and weepy; he didn’t even seem to notice. He’s heard me snore, burp, gargle, hiccup and worse – intimacy isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. I’d never dare fake an orgasm with him; he’d call me on it. As he does now when I’m faking sleep.

‘I know you are awake. Open your eyes. I have something for you.’

Slowly, carefully, I prise my eyes open. I feel sick. With nerves? Excitement? Fear? I’m not sure. This might be it. This might be the first moment of my grown-up life. The happily ever after I’m hankering for. I might just be about to receive the allatrope of carbon that makes every girl a princess.

Or I might be about to get the biggest kicking I’ve ever experienced.

Adam leans close and kisses me on my lips. He smells of morning but in a good way; a little bit salty, with a vague hint of last night’s booze. A little jolt of lust flickers up through my body. Down, Shep. Let’s see if he’s come up with the glistening goods first.

There is a breakfast tray on the bed. He’s tried: tea, toast and Coco Pops. There are no croissants, no freshly squeezed orange juice and no miniature jars of jam. I’m not in a bloody film. Some way from it.

I struggle to sit up and stretch out my arm to grapple to find my dressing-gown. It’s on the floor next to the bed where I left it just before I nosedived between the sheets in the dark last night. I sleep naked and I don’t want crumbs to stick to my breasts. Honestly? I don’t want my breasts on show at all. They are not bad breasts. Away ye false modesty. They are really rather nice; pert, a bit on the small side but even. Most people who have been introduced to them have greeted them quite favourably but recently I’ve started to think of my boobs as superfluous, considering Adam and I rarely have sex any more. They are a bit like a decent bottle of vintage port at an AA meeting: out of place. I pull my pink towelling dressing-gown around my body without upsetting the tray (quite a feat) and then pick up a piece of toast and bite into it although I have no real appetite. I scan the tray for something that gleams and I don’t mean a teaspoon. No sign.

‘Happy birthday, Fern-girl,’ says Adam as he leans in for another kiss.

This one is longer and more lingering than the last. I don’t bat him away but I don’t get what you’d call actively involved, not even when he does that really special thing of gently tugging at my lower lip. There was a time when I thought there was a cord attached to my lower lip that trailed through my body and fastened tightly around my G-spot. One decent smacker and I was putty. Today I need to see what he’s going to pull out of the hat first.

‘OK, Fern-girl.’ I glare at him. He shifts uncomfortably and corrects himself. ‘Fern, gorgeous, I’ve been thinking about everything you said last week.’

Is this the moment to describe what he looks like? I think so because at this fleeting point in time I’m suddenly very aware of him, all over again, as though we’d just met and I’m drinking in the details. Maybe it’s something to do with a rare shaft of sunlight flooding (past the grime) through the window. Probably. Oddly, the heaps of dirty and discarded clothes that litter our bedroom recede. All at once I’m less bothered about the trail of half-empty coffee cups that decorate our place (a unique twist as an interior design feature – other couples have fresh flowers and jars of massage oil, I’m sure). Unexpectedly, all I’m aware of is Adam.

Adam has dark, longish hair. Not ponytail length – heaven forbid! – he’s more scruffy surfer. It’s great hair. I love losing my fingers in it. He has heavy eyebrows and dark brown eyes, thick, long eyelashes that even Bambi might envy. He used to have standy-out cheekbones and a strong chin – truth be known, he’s all a bit fleshier nowadays. But still attractive. Worn in. Familiar but cute.

He’s got great shoulders. He’s not the sort of guy you’d ever hope to see down the gym (sadly) but his job is physical enough to ensure broad shoulders, upon which I love to rest my head when we are lying in bed, chatting, late at night (not as regular an occurrence as I’d like). He has enough hairs on his chest to make it clear that he’s man, rather than boy, but not so many as to create the urge for you to reach for the Shake ’n’ Vac. His stomach is rounder than a Calvin Klein model’s but not as lardy as Chris Moyles’. Sort of average for a thirty-two-year-old guy. He’s wearing black Diesel boxers – he fills them. His legs are long and thin and stick out of the end of our bed. Right now, he seems pretty damn perfect.

I’ve never loved him more.

‘So I’ve given a lot of thought to all you said and I think you’re –’

‘What?’ I nervously jump in.

‘You’re right,’ he says simply.

‘You do?’ I want to kiss him, but I hold off for the moment. I want to hear everything he has to say.

‘Yeah. I need to move on. Grow up. Offer you more than my share of the monthly rent in terms of commitment. In fact, I want you to know I’ve been thinking about this for some time. Before you, er, brought your frustrations to my attention.’

‘Really?’ Kiss me, kiss me. I silently will him to pull me tightly to him. But at the same time I don’t want him to stop talking. I’m fizzing with excitement. This is it! This is the moment I’ve been waiting for!

‘I’ve got something for you,’ says Adam. He reaches behind him.

The ring! The ring! What will it be like? A diamond solitaire? Maybe not, that would be pricey. I’d settle for something semi-precious yet stylish and meaningful. My birthstone perhaps.

Adam hands me an envelope.

‘What’s this?’ I battle to keep the fear and disappointment out of my voice. It’s too flat to be a ring. But then a thought strikes me – house details? Possibly. Maybe he’s done something über-romantic, like got details from an estate agent of a place we might buy together and he’s going to take me there this afternoon. He was very insistent that I take the day off and why else would we be starting the day so early? It’s only 7 a.m. Thinking about it, a couple of months back he did start to scan the property pages of the local freebie rag but he always made comments about how ludicrously expensive everything was – way out of our league – so I never paid much attention. My fingers seem to be incapable of following even the basic motor-skill instructions that my brain is sending to them. But eventually I rip the envelope open.

‘Tickets?’

‘To the Scottie Taylor gig.’ Adam is grinning at me.

‘But, but, I don’t understand,’ I stutter.

‘Had you good, didn’t I, Fern-girl? That whole thing I made up last April pretending I couldn’t get any tickets for the concert, not even on eBay.’

Yup, I remember. Scottie Taylor is doing this major gig tonight in Wembley Stadium. The like of which has never been seen before. He’s performing in front of a massive crowd of ninety thousand. It’s the first time he’s played a gig in over two years. He’s playing for three nights in a row. All the tickets were completely sold out in forty minutes. From the moment the lines opened for sales, I repeatedly pressed redial to the ticket office. I was gutted when I didn’t get lucky. I was furious when none of Adam’s industry contacts could help us find tickets. I wanted to go to the gig more than anything.

But that was four months ago.

The gig seems insignificant now, in light of my ultimatum, in light of my clearly communicated desire to move things on. How could Adam imagine that tickets to a pop gig are a reasonable response to everything I said last Friday?

‘There are three tickets for tonight’s gig; one for you and one each for Lisa and Jess. They are in on this. They don’t really have anything else planned, like I said they had. It was all me. This is all my idea.’

‘All you,’ I parrot, unable to trust my tongue with any sort of independence. Now I understand why my friends were exchanging wary glances. They knew this wasn’t what I was hoping for.

‘And that’s not all,’ adds Adam.

Glimmer of hope!

He reaches behind him and hands me another envelope; it’s identical.

Another crash landing. I feel the shock shudder through my body just as though I have endured a physical impact.

Carefully, slowly, I start to open the envelope. I can’t fake enthusiasm; it’s all I can do to hide my face; bastard, telltale tears of hurt and disappointment are springing into my eyes. I won’t let him see that. I open the second envelope and there are three more tickets, this time to Saturday’s gig. I don’t understand.

‘Tadaa.’ Adam pushes a third envelope into my hand.

‘What?’

‘Open it and see,’ he says. He’s grinning like the Cheshire cat. Why? What makes him think buying two sets of tickets to the same artist’s gig is a good idea? Is he mad? Two sets, these things cost almost fifty quid each.

‘Three sets,’ I say as I open the third envelope.

‘Sunday’s gig,’ says Adam with hideous zeal. ‘Of course you don’t need to take Jess and Lisa every night. Maybe Eliza might fancy it, or Ben.’

I stare at Adam in pure bewilderment. ‘You’ve blown four hundred and fifty quid on this?’ I demand. I’m so shocked I can’t summon the necessary torrent of abuse. I’m not worried; I know it will come, just as soon as I start to breathe again.

‘That’s the beauty of it. I didn’t have to pay for any of them,’ he replies.

‘What, they are knock-off?’ The words are strangled by outrage.

‘No,’ laughs Adam. ‘I’m working at the gig. These are freebies. I’ve got a job with Scottie Taylor. It’s silly money. You couldn’t guess. Like six times the amount I’d normally get for a similar event. Apparently Scottie has this thing about sharing his wealth. I’ve known about the job for a while but I kept quiet about it so as to surprise you today.’

Adam pauses, no doubt waiting for me to leap on top of him and tell him how marvellous he is. I want to pummel him to death with the soggy toast.

‘Fern, you are looking at Scottie Taylor’s assistant stage manager. I have a team, Fern. It’s a promotion. A big one. We are moving forward, like you wanted.’

I shake my head. ‘You didn’t pay for these?’

‘No. I said so, didn’t I? They were free. How cool is that?’

No ring, no ring. Bloody gig tickets but no ring. Free bloody gig tickets but no ring.

I hate him.

8. Fern

I don’t have much time to demonstrate the hate. There’s no opportunity to huffily push him away as he makes stealthy sexual advances because he doesn’t make any advances – stealthy or otherwise. Even though it’s my birthday!

Instead he says we have to get up quickly, or at least he does because he has to be at Wembley by nine. He suggests I should come along with him because he has backstage passes and he says it will be interesting for me to see what he does.

‘I know what you do,’ I mutter grumpily. ‘You climb up and down ladders, twiddle knobs and put bulbs in lamps.’

Adam looks hurt. ‘There’s more to it than that, Fern. I am part of a vital team. My contribution to this spectacular is valid. It’s like being part of an orchestra; even the guy with the triangle thing is crucial to the overall symphony,’ he says.

‘Get over yourself, Adam. Being in an orchestra is like being in an orchestra. You are a rigger. You put up scaffolding,’ I snap. He doesn’t bother to correct me and point out that he’s an assistant stage manager now. I think he knows it will be cold comfort.

‘Come anyway, we always need an extra pair of hands to run to the catering hall for coffee and you are on holiday so you’ve nothing better to do.’

The truth of his statement is horribly shocking. It’s my thirtieth birthday and I have nothing better to do than fetch coffee for a bunch of guys, most of whom aren’t even on nodding terms with soap. I wake Jess and give her an update. She’s as sympathetic as I could hope for, considering it’s this early in the day.

‘Can you skive off for the day and keep me company before the gig?’ I ask, not bothering to keep the self-pity out of my voice.

‘I’d love to, sweetie, but I can’t.’ She squeezes my arm. ‘My area manager knows that Adam got us these freebies and is letting me leave the shop an hour before the end of my shift as it is. He’d smell a rat if I failed to turn up at all today. Plus I’d feel a bit of a cow since he’s already agreed to give me the extra hour with pay. You understand, don’t you?’

‘Suppose,’ I mutter, without any grace. My mind is whirling. Seemingly, I veer off on a tangent but in fact it’s all related. ‘Do you realize I’ve never been on a club 18–30 holiday? I can’t now. That’s a missed opportunity.’

‘I’d hardly class that as a missed opportunity. Who wants to drink luminous cocktails with horny, desperate strangers until you puke or skinny dip?’ asks Jess.

‘I wonder how many other opportunities I’ve missed,’ I muse.

‘Very few, from what I remember of your misspent youth,’ says Jess matter-of-factly. ‘Do you want your pressie?’

Jess has bought me some fabulous Mac makeup brushes. They are really glam and grown up. I thank her and resist commenting that right now all I want to do is stick them up Adam’s backside.

‘I’ll call Lisa and we’ll see you at the gig. Once you’re there, do a bit of a recce and then text me to arrange exactly where to meet,’ says Jess, as she kisses her ticket.

I dress with little care and can barely summon the energy to wave a mascara wand or draw a slash of red lippy over my lips. I’d imagined that I would start the day with a long (post-loving) luxurious bubble bath. I thought I might sip champagne in muted candlelight and maybe even persuade Adam to rub a bit of body oil into my back and shoulders. Then, I’d planned to pop to the hairdressers on the corner, to see if they could squeeze me in for a trim and blow dry. My hair has so many split ends, running off in opposite directions, it could be clinically diagnosed as schizophrenic. But I hoped I was going to be celebrating my engagement. Now, I haven’t got the necessary emotional energy for that level of indulgent pampering. I don’t like myself enough.

‘You look great,’ Adam lies, as we set off towards the tube. ‘The whole dishevelled look is very rock chic.’

I glare at him but don’t answer. In fact I don’t say anything all the way to Wembley. I’m not sure if he notices because he’s reading the sports pages of his tabloid newspaper and even if I came up with a new tool to patch up the ozone and scientific data to prove little green men do indeed inhabit Mars, he’d probably just grunt.

Loads of London venues are being tarted up for the 2012 Olympics and you can’t spit nowadays without hitting an imposing building (or at least the plan or crane for one), but I’ve heard it argued that Wembley is still the most impressive stadium on offer. Renowned architects started work on the project when Noah was a lad and I remember hearing on the news that at one point there were more than three and a half thousand construction workers on site. Of course the project was dogged with delays; ambitious projects always are. On arrival I vacuously gaze around the enormous venue, too wrapped up in my own concerns to bother to make a judgement as to whether the state-of-the-art creation was worth the wait. Adam, on the other hand, is brimming with enthusiasm.

‘There are seventy-five thousand seats and there will be fifteen thousand standing tonight,’ he says. He shakes his head, marvelling at the enormity of the upcoming spectacle that he’s part of. The seats, arranged in a bowl, are all protected from the elements by a sliding roof. The stadium’s signature feature is a circular section trellis arch which Adam informs me has an internal diameter of seven metres and a 315-metre span. The arch is not upright but (again Adam’s geeky info) is erected some twenty-two degrees off true; it rises to a striking 140 metres tall. Everything is super-sized. Adam, oblivious to my moody silence, tells me that the new Wembley is the largest stadium in the world.

‘There are two thousand, six hundred and eighteen toilets, more than any other venue on the planet.’

‘Fascinating,’ I mumble sarcastically. I wonder how much enthusiasm he’d show if I started to relay my own treasured statistics? The average age for a woman to marry is twenty-nine, for instance.

‘The stadium has a circumference of a kilometre.’

‘Right.’ The average length of an engagement in the US is sixteen months; I’m still searching for the equivalent data for the UK.

‘There are thirty-five miles of heavy-duty power cables in the stadium. Ninety thousand cubic metres of concrete.’ The average number of bridesmaids is three. ‘And twenty-three thousand tonnes of steel were used in the construction.’ The average cost of a wedding is twenty-one thousand pounds, but you can do it for a couple of hundred quid.

Someone please give me a drink; a stiff and large one. While I can see Adam’s point (yeah, yeah, the place is big), I’m finding it impossible to pretend I give a damn.

‘Each of the two giant screens in the new stadium is the size of six hundred domestic television sets.’

Marry me. Those were the only words I wanted to hear today. Not this inventory of dull facts. Marry me. Why not? Why couldn’t he bring himself to do it? Am I not his one? Am I just the current one? Or the fill-in one until the next one, who really will be the one? The thought hits me with such force I believe I might implode, right here, right now at Wembley Stadium. I sway slightly, like a cobweb in a spring breeze; there’s a real danger I’ll blow away. Adam reaches for my hand; a habitual gesture but I can’t follow our routine. I don’t take his hand and gently squeeze, I pull away. My heart is hard with thoughts of other ones and the one he might propose to one day.

‘You are dumbstruck, aren’t you?’ he says with a wide, crazy grin. I stare back resentful and shocked that he can’t read me better. ‘I just knew that tickets for the Scottie gig would be the perfect present,’ he beams.

OK, I suppose I can admit that normally going to a Scottie Taylor gig would be something I’d get excited about. It would have been the perfect present if it was any other birthday. I saw Scottie live once before, about eight years ago, and he was bloody amazing; I couldn’t sleep for days, I was that high on the buzz he left me with. And yes, any other day than today – the day I’d hoped and hoped and hoped Adam would ask me to be his wife – I might have been thrilled with an ‘Access All Areas’ pass; as things are, the crappy little bit of plastic seems like an insult. Adam casually flashes his pass and a smug grin at the bulky guys on the door. They nod with respect and check out my legs; I glare back resentfully.

Inside the stadium, it seems to me that everything is set to go. Adam tells me that his recent late nights have all been spent here, setting up for rehearsals. Adam is flying high as a kite. He’s giggling like a seven-year-old girl, flinging orders and cheery hellos by turn at the guys and girls who I assume are his team.

I am now familiar with what to expect behind the scenes before the razzamatazz of the show; I’ve waited in the wings often enough. I scan the endless rows of lights, the towering stacks of speakers, the white cyclorama, the heavy drapes, and the jet black front curtain which are all carefully suspended from complicated zigzag girders hidden in the roof high above. It looks complex bordering on the chaotic. I know that it does demand a lot of patience and skill to get the set-up spot-on and I know that it is crucial for Adam and his team to get every detail pinned down if the trademark Scottie Taylor attention-grabbing spectacle of a concert is to be nailed. I recognize that this stage is bigger than most; there are more dazzling lights and larger stacks of speakers than I’ve ever seen before. I don’t doubt that the set-up has been arduous and that Adam being the assistant stage manager is a big deal.

The thing is – I don’t give a toss.

A girl is meant to take an interest, isn’t she? A good girlfriend should care about her boyfriend’s job. But I don’t. Not today. Whatever is going on here isn’t as glossy and polished as a diamond on my third finger would be. I should be really pleased Adam’s got this great promotion and his career is taking off but I’m not impressed. I wish I was. Adam whips off his leather jacket and flings it my way. He practically leaps up a ladder like some sort of stuntman because he’s seen an out-of-place cable. I can’t remember when he last gave me the same attention.

I kill time watching guys in black T-shirts scuttling like beetles to and fro. On the stage the instruments are already laid out. They are still, waiting for life to be given to them by Scottie’s enormously talented band. The shiny red and silver drums are set up high on a platform, centre stage. There’s not just one keyboard but a whole gaggle of them to the left and the right and there are racks of guitars hung all over the place.

On the outer reaches of the stage there’s a horrendous confusion of wires and plugs that presumably make sense to someone. The maze of wires ultimately leads to chunky black cabinets and monitors. Smoke generated from machines drifts across the stage and hangs around at knee level, giving substance to the beams of continuously flashing lights that slice across the floor.

I check my watch – it’s just after ten. Scottie Taylor won’t be on this stage for another ten or eleven hours and yet it’s as though he’s among us already. His presence can be felt in everyone else’s sense of self-importance; not one bod here can believe they are working with such an enormous star. There are so many dreams coming true on one stage, at this one point in time, that it is likely to be some sort of world record. I can see tension, fear and excitement in everyone’s faces. There’s probably enough energy to power an inner city if it could be harnessed correctly. This is a big gig. Enormous. It means a king’s ransom to everybody.

With the possible exception of me.

My dreams are not coming true on this stage, or any other, come to that.

Adam is still up a ladder and doesn’t seem to remember I’m here at all. I can see from the concentration on his face that he has a lot on his mind. I’d put money on it that he’s not thinking about a princess-cut diamond versus baguette.

I check my phone. There are text messages from two of my four siblings and a voicemail from my mum. I sometimes think mobile phones were invented just so families could avoid talking to one another.

Whenever you tell people you have four siblings they offer up a brief prayer for my mum’s slack stomach muscles and the lattice grid of stretchmarks which she must surely have, and then ask if we are all alike.

No, we are not. Despite the fact that we all have the same mum and dad, and we were brought up with the same Protestant work ethic in the same lower-middle-class semi-detached in Reading, we are pretty much opposed in every way. In an attempt to ensure a close family, poor Mum went to the enormous effort of pushing out a kid every two years – which I find scarier than watching the movie Alien (actually, I imagine the whole experience was like Alien, a series of exploding stomachs). Therefore it must be a bit galling for Mum and Dad that ever since we could all walk, we’ve been walking in separate directions, doing everything we can to carve out a bit of space and individuality.

We are nothing like the Russian doll set that my parents imagined. One of my brothers, Bill, went to Cambridge University to read politics. He glided through exams without having to break into a sweat; he didn’t even appear to break the spine of the cover of a book – he’s just dizzyingly intelligent. He’s gone on to be a trust fund manager. Please don’t ask me what that is because I have no idea. I do know that he drives a top-of-the-range X
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BMW, which, as my dad put it, ‘must have cost a bob or two’, and he married an equally bright (and smug) lawyer and they now live in a huge, tastefully decorated pile in Holland Park with their three kids. The type of kids who watched Baby Einstein on TV from birth and now have an opinion on international current affairs. I’m truly intimidated by my young nephews and baby niece. I usually try to read the quality newspapers before I visit them so that I have topics of conversation to discuss with the eldest (he’s four). Neither Bill, nor his wife, has sent me a text to wish me happy birthday.

My sister, Fiona, managed to get to Salford nursing college but, hell, did she have to work to scrabble together the grades. She’s a dedicated (read knackered) nurse at some OAP hospital, up north somewhere. I truly admire her but just can’t imagine why she wants to work with the smell of pee. She’s incredibly busy, lives miles away and has two kids, so we rarely see each other. When we do meet up (Christmas, big birthdays and Mum and Dad’s anniversary) it’s always excruciatingly embarrassing. I get the sense that we’d both like to be close but we find we have nothing in common and we struggle for something to talk about. My attempts at small talk seem silly in light of the fact that Fiona is pretty much Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa in one neat, determined package. I once commented how I always think of her when I have to deliver a bouquet of flowers to a hospital. She said that flowers were a bloody nuisance and nurses didn’t have time to run around looking for vases, plus they set off sneezing among patients with hay fever. That sort of brought the conversation to an end. Fiona’s text reads: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FGR+D. She doesn’t have thumb time to text her family’s full names.