Whispers Through a Megaphone (17 page)

I,
Sadie Swoon, feel wretched. Can Alison Grabowski see my wretchedness? I don’t know which was worse: walking around with only the idea of you, or sitting here with the real person, who has now
replaced
my idea of you. (A seed of memory blossoms into an imaginary garden. We walk through it. We have never stopped walking through it.) But this is the story of us, isn’t it? Loss and gain. It makes no sense. It’s wretched.

I was thinking of you when I wasn’t thinking of you.

You were there when you were here.

You were here when you were there.

I wish I hadn’t ordered this glass of wine.

Sadie hadn’t planned to drink. She wanted a clear head and the capacity to drive away from Alison Grabowski as soon as she needed to.
If
she needed to.

She sips pinot noir from a large glass and looks around. Red leather seats. White paintwork. A mirrored wall behind a long bar. Framed advertisements from the Fifties and Sixties. Black skirting boards. Skinny staff with asymmetrical haircuts. Lopsidedness is all the rage. (You know you’re getting older
when you say
all the rage
.) The voice of Elvis, coming out of four speakers. At the next table, three men who all resemble Justin Bieber, eating steak sandwiches, plucking thin chips from miniature steel plant pots. A tattooed girl, sitting by herself, drinking a martini, reading
Ulysses
. Sadie envies the girl, she doesn’t know why. A young couple drinking beer, eating pistachios, playing footsie under the table. A man on his mobile phone saying don’t do this to me, don’t do this to
us
. And Alison Grabowski, who is still wearing her hi-tech trousers and grey short-sleeved shirt, but not the badge with the cartoon bear on it, the one promoting a summer camp for young carers, sponsored by Grab&Go Camping, which does a vast amount for charity.

“So, where to start?” Alison says.

They are dancing to the Levellers. They are chopping vegetables in the kitchen, discussing how easy it is to make a vegetable lasagne as if they are the very first people in the world to discover this. They are watching
Peter’s Friends
at the Odeon; afterwards they will buy two bags of chips and walk home while discussing how brilliant Emma Thompson is. They are throwing snowballs at each other in the park, and Alison says my God just stop and look at this, look at how the snow makes everything beautiful. They are eating bacon sandwiches in a cafe, reading
The Times
, feeling grown up. They are washing Alison’s first car, a red Fiat Panda, and the man next door says oh girls you don’t do it like that, and he disappears inside his house and comes back out with a special wheel-cleaning brush and a square of chamois leather that looks impossibly stiff. They are sitting in the front row of a Tori Amos concert, holding hands, and Tori Amos is staring at them as she sings, she is really staring, and they talk about this for days afterwards, how Tori Amos sang just
for them, they call it amazing and intense and they play the song continually, ‘Cornflake Girl’, the song that brought the three of them together. They are sitting around a dining table with Alison’s parents, sister, auntie, uncle and grandmother, eating turkey and wearing paper hats. They are arguing about a women’s studies lecture on a Friday morning, the one they were supposed to go to at nine o’clock, but Alison wouldn’t get up so Sadie went alone and took pages of detailed notes and rushed home with croissants, feeling diligent, productive, generous, but Alison was still asleep, Sadie called her lazy, Alison woke up and said you’re not my wife; she got dressed and drove off in her red Fiat Panda and stomped around the garden centre, wishing she’d stayed home and eaten her croissant. They are lying on Sadie’s bed, Alison is smiling and running her fingers up and down Sadie’s arm—she says we could have sex you know, just to see how it feels, and Sadie says yeah right,
as if
.

I, Sadie Swoon, am in agony. I lost you, and now I have lost you again by finding you.

“So, where to start?” Alison says.

She would give it all up to be with Sadie. Bessie, the business, their home. Yes, after all this time. She knows this now and she has always known it. The outcome is irrelevant. This is not about the future, only the past, the time when she was living authentically, expressing something that felt true and real. The time when she was most present in her own life.

“I hope you don’t mind me turning up like this,” Sadie says.

“Of course not,” Alison says.

“I’m in a strange space right now. It’s making me think about university.”

“How’s Ralph?”

“I have no idea.”

Alison takes a sip of red wine. She checks Sadie’s hand, looking for the wedding ring. There it is, plain and unbroken. Has she divorced Ralph and married someone else?

“He walked out a week ago,” Sadie says.

“He’s left you?”

“I don’t think so. I have no idea. I kissed my friend Kristin in a cupboard. She’s a printmaker. Designs book jackets too. Very talented.”

Alison detests this woman called Kristin. Some things in life are simple. “So you’re having an affair?”

“Oh no, I’m not having an affair. I’ve never been unfaithful to Ralph.”

(Poor Beverley Smart. The woman who doesn’t count.)

“Right. Why did you kiss her in a cupboard? Still slightly…” Alison pauses. “Inhibited?”

Cutting!

Sadie licks her lips and thinks about what to say. “So, are you some kind of rambler now?” she asks, eyeing Alison’s outfit.

Touché!

“You know I always liked a long walk,” Alison says.

Sadie nods. She doesn’t remember any long walks. She remembers the short ones—around the park, to and from town, the cinema, the chippy—as if their feet had never stopped moving, left and right, side by side, walking through the years.

“Bessie’s the energetic one,” Alison says.

And Bessie jogs into the picture. Not literally, because Bessie is busy right now, running a summer camp in the Lake District.
Energetic
. Is that really the right word, Alison? She could have chosen so many others, like
driven
and
obsessed
and
jumpy
, but she has chosen
energetic
because it sounds better than the others, and Bessie is in competition with Kristin.

“Your partner?”

“In life and in business.”

In life and in business? Did I actually just say that?
Alison is grimacing and Sadie is drinking and ‘All Shook Up’ is playing on the stereo.

“Hold on, didn’t you go on a date with someone called Bessie at uni?”

“Sadie, I brought her to your wedding.”

“My wedding?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“No.”

She genuinely doesn’t remember. She had two screaming babies, a brand-new husband and low-grade flu, according to her GP, who asked if she was happy and wished he hadn’t when Sadie began to hyperventilate. Just breathe into this paper bag, the GP said. Breathe into this bag and everything will be all right. And it was, in a muted kind of way, because he prescribed her antidepressants, which she took for five years without telling a soul.

“I never understood why we lost touch,” Alison says.

“It’s not easy, having twins when you’re twenty,” Sadie says, as if this explains everything. “It was all right for Ralph. He finished his degree, he just carried on. I left with nothing.”

“You left with a husband and two children.”

“One minute we were dancing, then I had two babies.”

“You sound like an advert for the pill.”

Sadie looks up, says nothing.

“Would you like another drink?”

“Please.”

I, Alison Grabowski, choose you, Sadie Swoon, even though you are not mine to choose. How dare you just turn up like
this? You come walking into the shop, giving me no warning, no time to prepare. Do you think I’d be wearing these combat trousers and this shirt if I’d known you were coming? I would have washed my hair this morning, put on some make-up. But you gave me no time and no options. What’s changed, over the years? I had no choices then and no choices now. We’ve been sitting here for less than an hour and already I know why you’re here. The idea of life after Ralph has made you think of life before Ralph, and who was before him? I was. You were never in love with him and he must have known, yet he drifted along beside you like a boy. He’s finally dropped you, that’s why you’re here. I hate you, Sadie. You were so cold. I’ve missed you so much. I’d give it all up to be with you now. I hate you.

They sit and drink wine and there is an arch of melancholy, it rises up and over their heads, their own private architecture, their own private world.

“Do you remember that band we used to go and see?” Sadie says. “Acquiescence?”

“Oh God,” Alison says, laughing. “Acquiescence. The goths from Edinburgh.”

“I loved those goths.”

“I think you mainly loved the lead singer.”

“She was fantastic. We would’ve been great together,” Sadie says.

Alison doesn’t answer. She holds her wine glass with both hands, clutching it as if it were a hot drink on a cold day.

“So, are you all right?” Sadie says.

“All right?”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes, I suppose so, in a way.”

“That’s good.” Sadie pulls a food menu from a wooden stand. “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten for hours. Do you still like pizza?”

I, Alison Grabowski—the one wearing quick-dry technical trousers with built-in UV radiation and wind protection, advanced moisture control, cargo pockets for handy storage, anti-fungus and insect-repellent coating; the one wearing the
dullest
shirt I own—am sitting here with Sadie Swoon, eating pizza, listening to Elvis. I am thinking about
Take This Waltz
, a film I saw with Bessie last week, about a woman who leaves her husband and starts a passionate affair, and by the end of the film she is just as dissatisfied as she was at the beginning. That wouldn’t be us, Sadie, because we are the original couple, the couple that never began, and we’ve been around long enough to know that the excitement turns into something else, and I want that something else with you. We can do this slowly if you like. We can dance around it. We can sit here talking about the old days, drinking red wine. You can ask me if I’m happy and I’ll say yes, I suppose so, in a way. We’ll just dance until we’re tired of dancing.

I
n Miriam's living room, a cuckoo springs from a clock and
The One Show
begins. The programme is presented by a woman and a man, sitting close together on a green sofa. The woman tells us the man's name, the man tells us the woman's name. The camera pans to Sarah Millican, who is sitting on another green sofa, smiling. Ralph has never seen this programme before. As he eats his pie and mash, he marvels at this demented televisual creature, leaping from one topic to another, tame but reckless. Right now, the topic is a man in Wales who runs self-help groups for new mothers who are frightened of breaking their children. This is clearly a risky subject for
The One Show
, which would hate to suggest that not all women are instinctively maternal, able to produce a child and rise to the challenge as if the text from an innate Mother's Handbook had floated into awareness the second their waters broke.

“I ran a self-help group once,” Ralph says. “I wasn't very good at it.”

“I went to one for a few weeks,” Miriam says, finishing her pie.

“Did you?”

“Fenella thought it would be a good idea.”

“Who's Fenella?”

“My closest friend. You'd like her, she's very sane.” Miriam shivers. It's the thought of the self-help group, the one organized by Anita Goodwin, who believed that madness had meaning and should never be stigmatized. Anita had no idea what she was letting herself in for. Miriam wonders what she is doing now—has she recovered from Pam Croft?

“I'm an artist in residence,” Pam Croft announced. Her latest exhibition had just opened in her living room.

“I don't think that's what it means,” said Rudy. “You can't be an artist in residence at your own house.”

“Why on earth not? No wonder you're mad if you live by rules like that.”

“We don't call ourselves
mad
, Pam. It's politically incorrect.”

“We leave that to other people, do we?”

“We call ourselves
challenged
.”

“Challenged?”

“Yes.”

“So what's
your
challenge?”

“I find being with other people a challenge.”

Anita Goodwin, psychoanalyst and group facilitator, waved her hands in the air. “Let's take it in turns to speak, shall we?” she said, like a lollipop lady without a stick, trying to stop the flow of conversational traffic in a soothing tone of voice that others found belittling.

“And where are the
real
mad people, if we're not mad?” said Pam.

“In institutions.”

“What?”

“Extreme cases. Dangerous people. Chronic and acute,” said Rudy, who had tears in her eyes.

“I used to think about murdering my mother,” said Miriam, as she unwrapped a Snickers bar. “Yum.”

“Yum?”

“I was talking to the Snickers bar.”

“And who are you?” asked Anita Goodwin. She had forgotten the first rule of groups: the opening round, in which people introduce themselves, one by one. (How can she have forgotten that? Well, life was complicated for Anita Goodwin, whose husband had started wearing her clothes while he did the weekly food shop at Waitrose. She didn't mind him wearing them—she was quite open to the idea of subverting the performance of gender roles. What she minded was the number of compliments he received, the way their friends, neighbours and acquaintances seemed enraptured by his feminine presence, his taste in clothes, his new identity. She had done the weekly food shop for
years
in those clothes, floating through the aisles, invisible,
unappreciated
, and now she felt like screaming, like ripping every blouse, like pulling the sleeves off every fucking lambswool jumper.)

“Thoughts of murdering one's mother do not make a person insane,” said Cliff Richard, whose full name was Cliff Richard Jones. “It just makes you human.”

“I used to write my name on my legs with a compass,” said Mary.

“Is this a competition? It's starting to feel like one,” said Pam.

“Well why not?” said Mary. “Why not? It'd probably be the first time any of us had the slightest chance of winning a bloody competition!”

“Mary, please,” said Anita. “No swearing or shouting. The Buddhists are next door, trying to empty themselves.”

“I drove my brother's Fiesta into the front of our local Asda,” said Chris. “I thought their bread was infecting people with racism. But I'm over that now.”

Anita Goodwin ran the group for six weeks before quitting all of a sudden due to ill health. By
ill health
she meant
a terrifying sense of inner chaos
. She had discovered that Pam Croft was stalking her from inside a Morris Minor, but it was hard to press charges because Pam actually lived in the Morris Minor, so technically all she was doing was sitting in her own home, looking out of the window, and where's the crime in that?

“That group sounds amazing,” Ralph says. “Anarchic.”

“You think anarchic is good?” Miriam says.

“Sometimes,” he says, with the fettered dreaminess of an orderly mind.

“I'm never going to another self-help group,” she says, staring at the TV. “And I've had my fill of anarchy.”

On
The One Show
, they are discussing a boy who was adopted in 1971 and has just been reunited with his birth mother. On screen now, the man and his mother. His arms are around her, he is pressing her head to his chest as if she were a child. The mother is sobbing. The man looks unfazed, numb, absent. This is accompanied by a bastardized pop song, slowed down and stripped of lyrics, a mawkish version for emotional effect.

“This is disturbing,” Ralph says.

Miriam jumps to her feet and switches off the TV. “Enough,” she says.

Later that evening, the phone rings.

Twelve miles away, a man had been watching
The One Show
with his wife and eldest son. Two days had passed since they
had a long and difficult conversation about a daughter, a sister, a stranger. The conversation took place on Saturday, after fish and chips and mushy peas, as soon as Alfie and Amy Pond had gone to bed. The eldest son: “I overheard you and Mum, years ago, talking about my
sister
.” The father: “I had no choice.” The eldest son: “I got Alfie to put postcards through her door.” The father: “You've been to her house?” Two days later they are watching
The One Show
, on which a man is reunited with his mother, and after three glasses of brandy Eric Delaney stands up and says: “All right, I'm ready to do this.”

Miriam believes that her father is dead. It's a reasonable thing to believe, when you consider the fact that Frances told her he was dead. But facts are often fictitious. Lies are often true. This fabricated world, dressed in perplexing cloth.

“He had an aneurysm,” Frances said. “Dead as a dodo. Dead dead dead.” She felt guilty for a while, until she began to believe her own story, which went like this: “He was a loud, booming man. A simple man. He died of a brain aneurysm while hanging out the washing. Yes, just like that. Who could have seen it coming? He was hanging out my pink beach towel. He left behind a wife and a baby daughter. That baby was you, but you didn't really notice. You were just a baby, weren't you? Babies don't notice when a person disappears.”

This story changed as the baby turned into a toddler, a girl, a teenager, a woman. Sometimes the man was hanging out a petticoat when he died, at other times a yellow Babygro. The one constant in the story was his death. So that must have happened, right?

Wrong.

Miriam's father is not dead.

He has been alive all the time, which is more than Miriam can say about herself.

Where has he been?

In a small terraced house twelve miles up the road.

Once, without knowing, they travelled on the same bus.

Once, without knowing, they passed each other in a supermarket (by the frozen sprouts and frozen peas).

Once, without knowing, they sat in the same waiting room, waiting to see the same dentist. The dentist leant into the room and nodded at Miriam. I'm ready for you, the nod said. No names were spoken. No identities were revealed. It was a top-secret highly confidential manoeuvre that kept a father and daughter apart. He watched her walk over to the water cooler. She watched him pick up a copy of
Country Life
magazine. He watched her stand up and leave the room when the dentist nodded. And that was that. The emptiness remained inside them.

Somewhere, Miriam knows this. Not the fine details, not where and when and why, just the broad strokes of his presence, brushing up against her sometimes, out there in the world, still out there.

I zigzag my way through.

I listen out for you.

(I am always listening out for you.)

A world of white noise, congestion, muzak.

(Still I listen for you.)

I don't know that I'm listening.

(I know in a way that is out of reach.)

I love you without loving you.

(I see you but you have never been here.)

In 7 Beckford Gardens, the telephone rings.

“Hello?” Miriam whispers.

Before speaking, Eric Delaney turns to look at his wife and son. He nods. They nod.

“Hello?” she whispers again. She is about to put the phone down when she hears a man's voice.

“Is this Miriam Delaney?”

“Yes.”

“Miriam, my name is Eric. This will come as a terrible shock, so please forgive me. I'm your father, Miriam. This is your father speaking. Mr Eric Delaney.”