Aphrodite's Workshop for Reluctant Lovers (9 page)

As I watch the poor kid I tell myself that if I ever have any myself, kids, that is, which doesn't seem all that likely seeing as I'm stuck in this early-adolescensce phase for what seems like for ever, I'll do something really radical and actually listen to them. Not pretend to while I'm thinking about something else. Not think I am because I am so convinced that I know best, but actually listen.

Mother waves her hand at the video player.

‘I've learnt all I need to from her childhood: please fast-forward to her teens.'

Mother asks me, ‘Did she ever meet that boy, the one from France?'

‘Dunno.'

‘Well, of course you don't. I don't know why I bother asking you anything. But I have to tell you that it's exactly that attitude that will ensure that you remain a minor figure, and you have no one to blame but yourself.'

‘That's so unfair …'

‘It's perfectly fair, I'm afraid.' Mother points to the remote. ‘I believe she got married very young, barely twenty, yes? Forward to the time leading up to her marriage. You must have had your reasons for bringing her together with Tim Lodge.'

I'm feeling just a tad uneasy. It's all pretty hazy but I'm beginning to think that I've cocked up somewhere along the line; I'm just not sure when or how.

The party was well under way when Rebecca finally arrived. Her hair had taken rather a long time to style as somehow the bleach had made it quite a lot wavier as well as drier; on the other hand it had turned really blonde. Standing in the doorway she gazed out across the vast room, peering through the cigarette smoke. Amy was by the drinks table with Matilda and Leonora, handing out cups of fizzy white-wine punch.

When she spotted Rebecca she said, ‘Wow!'

‘You really think it suits me?'

‘Yeah. Don't you think it's good, Matty?

Matilda nodded.

‘You know, you actually look a little like the blonde one in ABBA, but curly.'

‘Lance will love it,' Amy said.

‘Where is he?'

‘I don't know. I haven't seen him for a while, actually.'

There was still no sign of him when Robert came up to her and asked her to dance. She nodded and downed her drink. She danced as if Lance was watching her. He wasn't. After three tracks she excused herself and went back to the trestle table, pulling out a bottle of Bacardi from beneath the long tablecloth and tipping some of it
into her glass of punch. She downed the drink as she pushed her way through the throng.

‘There you are,' Matilda said, barring her way. ‘You're pissed.'

Rebecca shrugged.

‘Have you seen Lance?'

‘You still haven't found him?'

Rebecca shook her head.

Matilda looked at her friend's shiny bright eyes and flushed cheeks.

‘You sit down,' she said, pointing at one of the bales of hay left behind as seats. ‘I'll go and find him.'

Rebecca grabbed Matilda's arm.

‘Don't tell him I asked you to.'

She waited a full ten minutes and finally Matilda returned. Rebecca knew from the look on her face, pity mixed with the tiniest bit of excitement, that the news would be bad.

‘Bastard.' Matilda sat down next to Rebecca and picked out two Marlboros from the packet in her pocket. She lit them both and handed one to Rebecca. ‘Bastard,' she said again.

‘Why?' The word came out in a squeak.

‘He's with that slag, Julie.'

‘With Julie? What are they doing?'

Matilda gave her a pitying look.

‘Oh.' It was a long oh, said in a small voice.

They each inhaled deep on their cigarettes.

‘Oh,' Rebecca exhaled. She got to her feet.

‘Now where are you going?'

‘Out,' Rebecca said and weaved her way across the
dance floor towards the exit, pushing through the gyrating, stomping, hip-swinging, hand-waving crowd, grabbing her coat and her red woolly hat from the seat where she had left them. She pulled on the hat but dropped her coat to the floor as she spotted Lance locked in an embrace with Julie FitzGerald.

Her feet thumped the frosty ground and she got into a rhythm, her breath creating little cloudbursts. She kept on running as the track turned into a road. She turned a corner and ran straight into the headlights of an oncoming car. There was a screech of tyres as it slid to a halt no more than a foot away from her. She stood where she was, half blinded still by the lights. The driver was young, her own age or there-abouts, fair-haired, white-faced. That was all she saw.

The headlights dimmed and the door opened.

‘Are you OK?'

Rebecca didn't reply. The shock had sobered her enough to know exactly how stupid she had been; she did not intend to hang around to be told as much. Instead she turned and headed back to where she had come from, slip-sliding down the bank and on to the farm track, hurrying off into the night.

‘Are you OK?' the boy called again.

The church bells started to chime midnight.

Without looking back or stopping she raised two fingers to the starry sky and yelled, ‘And a Happy fucking New Year to you too!'

The next morning she woke with a headache and a …

‘Stop! Stop the tape right there,' Mother orders. I do what I'm told. ‘Rewind,' she says. ‘No, stop. What's that, in the top left-hand corner?' We both stare. ‘Goodness, Eros, it's you. What are you doing there? Forward. No stop. You're shooting! You've shot the girl Rebecca … forward … and she stumbles and then the car … you shot the boy as he was driving. So that's it: their eyes never meet. Oh for heaven's sake, Eros, what were you thinking of? Who is the boy? Had I asked you to shoot him or was this one of your own harebrained little schemes?'

I try to remember. It wasn't long ago by our reckoning, but still … who the hell was he and why had I shot at him, and her?

‘Yes?' Mother demands, her arms folded across her chest, her eyes opaque.

‘I'm
trying
to remember.' I lean back on the chaise longue, closing my eyes. New Year's Eve ... I check the tape box … 1981, their reckoning. What had I been doing? Party – that was it. I'd been partying with Dionysus and some of the other guys. Had a bit too much to drink, head hurting, wings sore …' I sit up. ‘I must have …'

‘Yes?' Mother's voice is low and deceptively mild and I know I'm in for a bollocking.

‘No. I can't remember. I'm sorry, OK?'

‘No, Eros, it is most assuredly not OK.'

‘I told you I wasn't feeling too good that night.'

Mother is livid.

‘No wonder things have gone so badly for the pair of them,' she says. ‘Think about it, Eros – although sometimes I do wonder if you are actually capable of coherent thought – as a
result of your incompetence or lack of care, those two will have wandered through life searching for someone, not knowing who, leaving discord in their wake. Anyway, who is the boy?'

YEARS LATER HE WAS to tell people that he became a barrister because without law there can be no civil society, but actually it was to please his mother.

His mother's love, though great, was of the tearful variety. When John was little she would fold him in her arms with a grip that was surprisingly strong for such a fragile-looking woman and then she would cry. She cried when he made his prep school's first fifteen at rugby and when he passed grade eight on the trumpet. She cried when he got his twelve O levels and her pretty squirrel-brown eyes were red-rimmed for days after he received his offer to study law at Cambridge. Three years later, on the morning of his graduation, he knew when he returned to his rooms from breakfast that his mother had already arrived because of the trail of coloured Kleenex on the stairs.

John's very first memory was rising to the sky on a friend's garden swing. His second was of his mother pulling him down off the swing, shaking him one moment and hugging him the next, and saying, ‘Never forget, my darling, that you're Mummy's everything. Always remember you are my world.'

Mostly she chose not to notice the rituals her darling boy was beginning to develop, such as pulling a door shut behind
him and not letting go until he had counted to a hundred and having to start again if he got into a muddle, or swimming out to the furthest buoy in the sea every day on holiday even when the temperature of the water was no more than 13 centigrade and it had dropped to 15 outside. Even when she had the evidence thrust before her, a skinny eight-year-old trembling with cold and with lips the colour of blueberries refusing to get out of the steel-grey sea, she shook her head and smiled at his ‘perfectionism' and ‘funny little ways'. He was crying out for help, in need of it as surely as if he were drowning in that cold sea, but to his doting mother he was just waving.

And then there was the time a year or so later when he fell in love with the stories about Biggies, the fearless flying ace. He had cycled to the library to return the first volume in the series, heady with the knowledge that there was an entire shelf of further thrills waiting for him. But he knew it was all over when, scanning the shelves, a thought so quick it was more of an impression shot through his mind. It went something like this: unless he wanted something terrible to happen to his mother he would have to read his way through the alphabet, an author for each letter, before he could finally settle on J for W.E. John, his hero's creator. The elation from just a few minutes ago drained from him leaving him cold with despair. He was trapped. Helpless. A small yelp of distress escaped his lips and an elderly man lifted his gaze from the tome in front of him to glare. John tried to retrieve the thought in order to unthink it. But it was too late. The challenge had been issued and the smile of anticipation had been replaced by the anxious set to his jaw his mother saw as determination. Nine books would take him the rest of the holiday to read. And he was only allowed to take three out at a
time. The cycle ride alone took half an hour each way. But he had a choice: either he read his way through those nine books or he did not get to read about Biggies again, ever. He squared his shoulders. At least he could pick the shortest ones.