Four New Words for Love (22 page)

‘We’re looking for Gina.’

‘You’d better come in.’

So they clip clop into the living room in their designer shoes and give this the once over too. One of them gives the same bit of carpet a nudge with her foot that Gina did when she talked about
the chance of happiness. In a way it’s a bit insulting. They’ve got the same kind of curiosity David Attenborough probably has visiting a flock of chimps or something. Gina said
they’re nice but dim and looking at them I agree, or ‘concur’ as they said on the
Crown Court
rerun the other day. Both their hair is so shiny it looks like fibre optic
or something and I realise what it is – money. It’s what Gina told me about. It’s not just expensive shampoo, it’s years of vegetables and stuff like that that I know I
should eat instead of Pot Noodles and the like, but can’t be bothered.

‘I like your top,’ one of them says. And all of a sudden I like her. ‘Gabby,’ she says, holding out her hand. And so does the other one, and I like her too even though I
didn’t want to like either of them. I don’t remember meeting new girls and shaking their hands. You felt as if they’d learned this stuff on the hockey pitch or something and there
was something fresh-airy about them.

‘Mind if I smake?’

‘What?’

‘Smake.’ The way she says it rhymes with ‘cake’. I must have looked blank till she pulled out a packet of fags.

‘Flash the ash.’

‘What?’

‘Hand them round. Let’s all have a
smake.
’

So we all took the coffee table, in other words the crate, out on to the balcony and sat on that and had a pally fag. I don’t know if it was the afternoon light or what but the other one,
Naomi, was
exactly
the colour I’ve been aiming for in the past forty sessions. I put my arm against hers.

‘TANerife. I can get you a discount.’ I didn’t say how. ‘Where’d you get yours?’

‘Verbier.’ I ran my mind over all the tan stands around town and couldn’t come up with it.

‘Where’s that?’

‘Swiss Alps.’

‘Fuck.’ I could imagine her and the big-dicked ski instructor. Sauna sex. Chocolates. Fondue. The fucking lot. Suddenly draining wee Tam’s pods in the back room of TANerife
lost some of its glamour. ‘You know, by rights I should hate the two of you from the off.’

‘Why?’ They’re dismayed.

‘Cause you’re both everything Gina said you were.’

‘But we like Gina.’

‘Gina likes you.’

‘Where is she?’

‘At an interview.’

‘But we don’t want her to leave!’ It was a chorus. A chorus of people who’ve had pretty much what they’ve wanted their whole lives just by saying so. It’s
what I’d have said if I’d been them. And suddenly I thought – there by the grace of God, as those shrivelled old women teachers used to say. It’s not their fault
they’re airheads without any
real
knowledge of the world, like me, graduate of the school of hard knocks and all that. Just because they haven’t had my advantages, it’s
not their fault they’re sitting there wearing three hundred quids’ worth of clothes apiece without a thought in their heads. So I get my stash out and roll us a titanic, super-jumbo,
Olympic torch spliff and time just seems to melt and before I know it the front door goes and she’s standing there like the angel of death, shouting through the fog at me about being the
worst negligent babysitter with no sense of responsibility, doped in charge of a kid, blah blah. The full boonah. ‘Keep your hair on,’ I say, and explain how Millie woke up and Ruth
came up and pleaded,
pleaded
to take her out in the pram, and I thought it might settle her. ‘And,’ I say, picking up my mobile and pointing at it, laying on the sarcasm like
marzipan, ‘we agreed to keep in touch with one another in case anything happened, with this little gadget you may have heard of called a telephonic device.’ And that shuts her up long
enough to take stock till she says ‘And what if she needs you? What are you going to do, like this?’ But she doesn’t wait for the reply I don’t have because she’s
distracted by her new pals being there. They’re both past the point of noticing she’s back and are wearing that skunked-out thousand yard stare apiece.

‘Girls. Girls.’ She sounds like that posh teacher in that film about Edinburgh schoolgirls. She even claps her hands and looks at me, accusing like, as if I’ve corrupted them
or something. And I say, ‘Nobody asked them to smoke.’ And the one with the Alps tan says, ‘You did.’ And then I remember that I forgot to ask them not to say anything about
me being to the shop. I don’t think I’ve got anything to worry about because Gina’s got them to their feet. She knows she’s not getting any conversation tonight and I think
her worry is getting them home safe. ‘It’s not a war zone,’ I say, ‘they found their own way here.’

‘And then they found you.’

‘Thanks for the smake,’ says one.

‘See you at the shop again,’ says the other.

‘Shop!’ says Gina. ‘What fucking shop? What have you done?’

And I explain. And she’s so grateful she burst into tears. Well, actually, I burst into tears. And Gabby manages to miss the couch and the linoleum and every other thing that
wouldn’t matter a fuck and throw up on top of the telly. The only thing that works. And it’s pretty liquid. There’s a slow drip, drip and Ruth barges in with the pram, timed like
one of those crap ITV sitcoms that depends on stupid coincidences. And I say to Gina, ‘These posh girls – fucking amateurs.’

But there was one good thing that came out of it. The telly was well and truly gubbed, with Gabby’s puke getting in the electricity or whatever. Two days later a titanic, super-jumbo,
flat-screen, surround-sound televisual
experience
arrives at Gina’s door. I know, cause I watch the progress from van to panting floor-by-floor delivery. So does half the block,
their only employment guessing who the lucky bastard is who’s getting it. I lean over the stairwell to all these faces looking up, like the view backwards from a cockpit when the
plane’s climbing vertical to avoid a mountain through the mist. ‘Mind your own business!’ I shout. The heads disappear. I want to lay down a marker there’s nothing happening
to
this
telly.

There are two guys to
install
it. My stuff and Gina’s is all plug and play – previously unplug and steal. I breeze in behind the boys, ignoring the fact that she
doesn’t like me for a week. ‘Ignore me if you want,’ I say, ‘but you can’t be such a cow to stop me from watching this. Wee Tam’s got one. You can watch
Ben-Hur
and it’s as if you’re
in the chariot
.’

I open the card that comes with it. ‘Gabby’s apologised,’ I say.

‘Help yourself,’ she says.

‘Still. Nice of her to pay,’ I say, ignoring the insult.

‘She didn’t pay anything.’

‘You could have fooled me.’

‘And people frequently do.’ She gives off one of those sighs she always does, the ‘God grant me patience’ ones, as if she’s trying to explain algebra to a dog.
‘Even if it came out of her wages she didn’t pay for it. Things don’t cost what you give for them, they cost what you give up to get them. She didn’t give up anything. She
meant well but it wouldn’t occur to her to sacrifice a thing.’

‘Sorry, I fell asleep at the beginning of the economical lecture. Look, are we watching this or not? Let’s get Ruth up.’

So I called Ruth and told her to pick up some Garibaldis and Coconut Creams and beer and a movie at Davinder’s on her way back from her shift. ‘Nothing serious,’ I said,
‘no explosions or that. Just slush.’ So she came up with
Beaches
, ‘cause I already had it downstairs, and we sat in a sea of crumbs and howled. Well I howled, and Ruth
did the discreet turn away thing and pretends to be scratching her cheek or something while she wiped her eyes. And I looked at them and said, ‘You
are
the wind beneath my
wings.’ I waited till Ruth went downstairs before I said anything.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You
always
cry at
Beaches
.’

‘Maybe I’m just not in the mood.’

But I knew her better than that. There’s nothing better than a good cry. Well there is, but a good cry’s almost up there with that too. It’s the valve in the pressure cooker,
the bursting boil. It stops sad things building up.

‘I defy anyone to sit dry-eyed through that and say they’re not holding something back.’

‘I’m not holding something back.’

Then she fetched Millie, even though she was asleep, and took her through to sleep with her. Adrift. Again.

She went back to her old new job but something was wrong, and I don’t think it was just boredom with what she was doing. She knew I knew, and tried to avoid talking about it about as much
as anyone around me can avoid talking about anything I want to talk about. Aside from Millie, me and Ruth, in that order, she didn’t seem to take any enjoyment out of anything. She never
wanted to go out. I said, ‘I said it before and I’ll say it again – he was just a man. It was just a job. Move on.’ She said she had moved on, but I don’t think she
had. She’d made the fatal mistake of letting someone else’s view of her become her view of herself. She said she hadn’t. But I could
see
it. I told her as much.
‘Imagine if I did the same,’ I said. ‘Here’s me, a healthy girl with healthy appetites and a healthy tan. So – I might not have done so well at school or read many
books, or any books really, and my career might not have taken off
yet.
So what? If I thought of me the way those bastards,’ pointing out the balcony at the world, ‘thought of
me, I’d have myself convinced I’m an overweight orange dole tart. And how stupid is that? You’re not what he thought. Who gave him the right?’

‘I did.’

‘Then you’re stupid. You’re special. Even more important, you’re special to
me
.’

But some kind of mood descended on her, like one of those times before it rains when you feel the clouds are pressing down on the air. And it didn’t break. And one time I got her on her
own for two hours, and got two drinks down her, she said she was ‘only going through the motions’, whatever that meant. Motion is life. Death is the big stop.

It’s one afternoon. Nice light outside. I’m half watching the telly,
Columbo
or
Murder She Wrote
or
Ironside
or
Quincy
or who cares what.
Ruth’s at work. I hear her upstairs, moving about, and that sets me easy in my mind because I feel more comfortable with the thought of the little family above me. I’m dozing. And then
I’m awake and I hear a noise. It sounds like it’s outside the building and it take me a minute to realise it’s coming from upstairs. It’s regular, almost mechanical, but I
know right away it’s not coming out a machine. It’s a kind of chant, but there’s something terrible about it. I burst out the front door and burst into hers. Millie’s
door’s open and she’s not there. I run into the living room. She’s sitting, with
her
on her lap on the balcony, rocking, making this terrible high drone that wavers as
she leans forward and back. The only thing I can compare it to is those women in the news, African probably, headscarves, after a war, or a famine, or both, kneeling over a lump in a shroud,
wailing something, a high warble that sounds like pure distilled grief. It’s the worst noise I ever heard and I hope I never hear it again.

It was truly – fucking – terrible.

* * *

There were all these arrangements to be made. How can someone who never got to reading age cause so much paperwork? Ruth was a star. I did everything I could but I felt as if I
was living under water, not least cause I couldn’t stop crying. Stuff happened in slow motion, till it didn’t. Gina’s dad was totally useless. I prized him away from his drink one
night to try and get information on her mum. I was holding the back of his hair and I thought that if I let him go, his head will hit the table. We had no way of finding her. It was Ruth’s
suggestion. I didn’t see the point. She was as useless last time as he was now. Would she even want her here? I didn’t think so. Gina wasn’t really there to consult. From not
sounding like a machine she became one. She was totally wooden. I cried enough for the both of us because she didn’t cry at all. Or talk. Or eat – unless we made an issue of it. I could
tell that in her mind she was away in that lifeboat. Adrift. With
her.

We had a Humanist ceremony. The poor bastard did his best but what are you going to do? If it had been religious he could at least have said something about Heaven and stuff, all meeting up
again. I think of Heaven, if I think of it at all, as a dingy waiting room, at the train station or the ferry terminal, where you meet all your old pals. You all squeal when you recognise one
another again, cause it will only be the ones you want there. And then you go on out to a supernatural knees up. I don’t know if there’s a God, but if there is I don’t think
he’ll begrudge me this fantasy. I’m not doing anyone any harm when you look at other religious fantasies that are out there. But this ceremony just seemed to say we should all be nice
to one another. Fair play to him, and I don’t doubt
she’d
have grown into the kind of woman who’d get his approval, but
she
didn’t even get to the age
where
she
got the chance to be nice to anyone. When we talked about it in front of her beforehand Gina stopped being a statue for two minutes. I said we should go for the full regalia,
priests, ministers, whatever. She looked at me and asked me if I believed in a God who took
her.
That was the first time I ever felt there was nothing I could say that would get
through.

And then she stopped being wooden – when we weren’t looking. We were taking turns at being with her during the day and I was sleeping with her at night. And then she was gone. Just
like that. I went rabid, tearing through her things for clues, trying to work out what she took, as if that would give me a clue to anything. Ruth looked worse than I’d ever seen her –
which
is
saying something. We trawled every place we could think of she might be, and then we did it again. I thought her dad was useless before. He was even worse now. The talk in the
scheme is that he fell to bits when Gina’s mum left him. Personally I always found her a bit common.