Growing Up Twice (7 page)

I had phoned Selin last night but we got her answerphone, and her mobile was switched off. Needing to talk to her and knowing she wasn’t one for going out mid-week, I phoned her parents who live two streets away from her in a flat over the family business on Green Lanes. Even though she officially left home over three years ago, she spends at least four evenings out of seven with her family.

‘Hi, Mrs Selin, it’s Jenny Greenway,’ I say, even though she’s known me for nearly fifteen years and no one but Rosie or I calls her Mrs Selin.

‘Hello, Jennifer, how are you, darling?’ Selin’s mum and dad moved to London from Turkey in the sixties, and I never grow bored of listening to the remnants of her accent combined with years of north London life.

‘Pretty good. Is Selin there by any chance, please?’

‘No, sweetheart, she’s out with her dad. Don’t you know? On Monday they play pool down the road, they’ve been going for weeks. Selin has beaten him the last two Mondays. Now it’s a grudge match.’ I didn’t know, and I was surprised that Selin hadn’t mentioned this unlikely bonding exercise with her father. She adored her dad; her conversation was usually littered with anecdotes and stories about him. I adored her dad too and he’d gamely stepped up to the plate to fill the absence of my own dad at various points over the years, stopping by to put up shelves when I’d first moved in, once giving me a lift to a job interview when it was pouring with rain and there was a tube strike. I laugh when I think about Selin and her dad playing pool and I suppress a little burst of jealousy. Maybe she was getting ready to hustle us on one of those afternoons when it seemed like a good idea to put as many pound coins as we could find between us on the pool table in our local and wind the men up by taking all day about it.

‘Oh, we’re thinking of coming over to see her tomorrow if she’s around, that’s all.’ Rosie and I had discussed a plan of action and decided we’d tell her face to face. Selin would know immediately that something was up – we hadn’t been north in six months – but we decided it was the best way.

‘Tomorrow? Well, if you’re coming over this way I’ll make you girls dinner. It will give me an excuse to feed up that girl of mine. You children with your mothers so far away, you need a good meal too.’ A sensible person would never pass up the opportunity to eat at Mrs Selin’s table. At the risk of offending my own mother, she is the best cook in the whole world. However, I sort of thought under the circumstances that it might not be the best place to discuss the baby, the move, Owen’s reappearance.

‘Oh, we don’t want to put you out …’ I said feebly, knowing that nothing bar nothing in the fifteen or so years I’ve known Mrs Selin has ever put her out.

‘Don’t be silly, the children will love to see you and I’ll get Coşgun over too. That boy never eats. Up all hours, up to goodness knows what, but he never eats. Drinks, too much in my opinion, but never eats. Runs around with all those girls but––’

‘Let me guess … never eats?’ I finished, and wondered about the universal preoccupation of mothers with force-feeding their offspring. My own mother thinks I’m anorexic if I don’t have two slices of cake for dessert and then has the cheek to comment on my weight. I wondered if Rosie would turn into a feeding maniac. Considering how sparingly I’ve seen her smear her disgusting low-fat spread on her crispbread I’d be surprised but, well, the mystery of motherhood is uncharted territory for us. The thought of seeing Josh again was nice, but in a way I didn’t want to hear any more news that might bring Owen nearer.

‘Well, I’d better check with Rosie – hang on.’ I put my hand over the receiver and called, ‘Rosie?’

‘Yes?’ Her disembodied voice came from her bedroom.

‘Mrs Selin has invited us to dinner tomorrow?’

‘Yippee, yes please!’ Rosie obviously didn’t have the same reservations that I did; in fact maybe she was pleased to have a reason not to come straight out with things. And one thing was true – we could both do with a good meal.

‘Rosie says yes please, if you’re sure that’s OK?’

‘Of course it’s OK, of course.’

‘Should you check with Selin?’

‘Don’t you worry, darling, Selin will be here waiting for you tomorrow and then you girls can go and have a drink after dinner and talk about boys or whatever it is you don’t want to talk about in front of us old fogies. So I’ll see you tomorrow about eight?’

‘OK, thanks again.’

‘No problem. How’s your mum these days, out in the country?’ My mum moved out of town a couple of years ago with my brother and his family to just beyond Watford; the countryside, I suppose, in comparison to N16.

‘Oh, she’s good, she loves being a grandmother,’ I said politely, wondering why it is that women of a certain age feel the need to talk longer on the phone than is strictly necessary.

‘I should be a grandmother by now. At your age I was married eight years.’ I briefly wondered how Rosie’s ‘young’ mum with her trendy hairdo and Calvin Klein wardrobe would feel about being a grandmother. It’s almost as hard to imagine as Rosie changing a nappy.

‘I know, but there is only one Mr Selin and you don’t want to share him, do you?’ I said, making her giggle before she blew me a couple of kisses down the phone and said goodbye.

Now, after dropping Rosie safely off at the doctor’s and turning my fingers black thumbing through
Loot
on the tube, I’m back at work in the Customer Care and Sales call centre, phone headset on, picking up calls from clients on average every two minutes. I periodically yell from my little goldfish cubicle that it would be nice if someone else on the sales floor could manage to interrupt their dissection of last night’s TV to pick up some calls. We all wear Madonna-esque headsets so the phones don’t ring here, they beep; all I can hear around me is a cacophony of monotonous beeps and they all seem to be coming my way.

The one good thing about all this is that I haven’t really thought about Michael and the fact that he hasn’t called me yet. OK, last night as I was drifting off to sleep I did think about the kiss and wondered what else it might have led to, but I know that’s dangerous territory. I mean, we all know that the more of a dream personality you attribute to someone you hardly know, the more you will be let down. But it’s OK with Michael because I’m not going to get to know him at all, so if I use him to take my mind off real things that’s OK. It will be OK until he actually phones me, and then I’ll put a stop to the whole thing. So for now it’s OK to dream about his sweetness, the soft warmth of his mouth and his long guitarist’s fingers.

Day three and he hasn’t called yet. My phone has been turned on and charged up since Saturday, although I will never know why I bothered to buy it – the only people who ever phone me on it are Rosie and Selin and the occasional shop. When I chose the tiny model with its glittery casing and ‘Disco Inferno’ ring I had the vague notion that I’d need it for emergencies. Really, I wanted it because Rosie had got a pink one that plays the theme tune to
Top Cat
and Selin has a holographic cover for hers that makes it look like it’s covered in 3-D love hearts. Deep down we are still the three little teenagers who used to swap coloured shoelaces to go in our trainers and badger our mums for stiletto-heeled patent-leather shoes from Freeman, Hardy and Willis, just like our friends had, still not proper grown-ups.

Today my phone is sitting like a tiny glittery little toad next to my work phone, sparkling provocatively under the daylight-effect strip lighting. I look at my calendar, 28 August. When do kids go back to school these days?

My work phone beeps a long single beep which means it’s an internal call and the display tells me it is my boss, Georgie.

‘Hello, Georgie.’ I try to remember to sound a bit croaky.

‘All right, darling? How are you today?’ When I read Georgie da Silva’s name on my interview letter three years ago I pictured some horsy long-faced Sloane, fished out my fake pearls and turned up the collar of my shirt especially for the occasion. When I met her and found out that she was an East End princess with a thing about new-age alternative Eastern therapy I couldn’t have been more surprised. But it’s partly her faddy experiments with crystals,
feng shui
and the like that make life here fun. She is a brick really, I feel bad lying to her. But not enough so I can’t live with it.

‘Yeah, much better thanks. I think it was one of those forty-eight-hour things, you know.’ I cough, pretty realistically I think.

‘Those girls giving you trouble?’ She is referring to the call-centre team I am in charge of (in theory), two of whom are actually boys. In practice, I think I just preside over the natural rhythms of their work pattern: gossip until ten, work like bastards until one, dawdle around until three and then pretend to file until it’s time to go home. I don’t mind really, my pattern is the same. As long as the calls get picked up and I don’t get any customer complaints and we meet our targets, I don’t mind. It’s not exactly the world’s most dynamic career but at least I can afford good shoes, which goes a long way towards making up for a lack of personal fulfilment any day of the week.

‘No, they’re a good bunch, really,’ I say.

‘The floor looks a mess, doesn’t it?’ she says.

Oh no, here we go again. The paper will be blocking the flow of our
chi
and causing a build-up of negative forces or something.

‘Do you think? I’ll get them to do a tidy-up,’ I say, thinking there isn’t a cat in hell’s chance.

‘No. I’ve got an idea I want to go over with you. Pop over and see me, will you?’ And in a typically Georgie style she hangs up without saying goodbye.

Emerging from my little office, I pick my way through old photocopying paper boxes full of, well, old photocopying, navigate my way around the green bags of rubbish that accumulate by the recycling bin and stop short at the fax where the orders seem to have piled up beyond the collecting tray and are now fluttering on to the floor.

‘Carla,’ I turn to the youngest member of the team, who is clearly going to have to work for at least five years before she’s any good at anything, much like myself at her age, ‘can you pick up these faxes and distribute them amongst the team, please?’ I turn to the floor as a whole.

‘Ladies, and Kevin and Brian, can you please
try
and remember that we are here to process sales, therefore when orders come through on the fax we need to deal with them quickly? Thank you!’ There is a general murmur and a couple of them get up from their desks and come to help Carla sort out the pile of orders. Well, Brian and Kevin actually, Carla being exceptionally pretty, with her waxed blonde curls piled up on her head and her
very
short skirt making the most of her
very
long legs. Sometimes I wish my powers extended to enforcing a dress code.

A couple of years ago I was the one slacking behind my VDU and ignoring the hum of the faxes. I never thought I’d get to the stage where I was confident enough, efficient enough and grown up enough to run a team of people every day, it just sort of crept up on me. It’s a bit scary when I think about it.

Georgie has her feet up on her desk and the crystal that hangs above her chair glints in the sunlight that I can’t see from my office. She is an attractive woman, and looks exactly the way I want to look when I’m her age: pretty in a mature way, with clear blue eyes that are surrounded by pleasant laughter lines when she smiles. Of course I have the laughter lines; I just don’t find them very pleasant just yet.

‘Ah, hello love … ooh, you do look a bit peaky.’ I nod pathetically and cough a bit. I’m not offended. I am the sort of person who does look peaky at the drop of a hat; it’s the pale complexion and dark hair that does it.

‘You want to get some Echinacea down your neck, that’ll sort you out sharpish.’ And she shoves a couple of brown-looking capsules at me, which I pocket with a grateful smile and a plan to dispose of them later.

‘Now. Hypnosis, what do you think of it?’

‘Well, in what context do you mean?’ I can’t figure out where she’s going with this one. The Christmas party maybe?

‘You know, like, helping you give up fags, stop being afraid of spiders, lose weight, that sort of thing.’

‘Yes, well, it certainly seems to work for some people,’ I nod. It’s best to be noncommittal on these occasions or before you know it she’ll have you enrolled in a retreat for Buddhist nuns for six weeks.

‘Well, anyway, hypnotherapy. I’m thinking of having you all done.’ And she waves her hand expansively towards the now seemingly orderly office floor. ‘What do you think?’

‘Done?’ I am almost afraid to ask.

‘Yes, a group hypnotherapy session to make you all tidier. You know, something along the lines of seeing your in-tray full of paper making you feel compelled to process and file it. What do you think?’ she repeats.

I’m silent for a moment. The air-conditioning makes the wind chime by the door tinkle and I can see a tiny spider busily weaving a web between the leaves of her money plant.

‘You see, Georgie,’ I say slowly, ‘the thing is, hypnotism used in that way might, you know, contravene the basic human right of free will – don’t you agree?’

She looks disappointed. ‘I thought it might be a bit iffy, but I thought, well, as it helps everyone to improve themselves it might not be a bad thing? And we’ve got this American due to visit any day now, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to make a good impression.’

‘Yes, but there is something faintly megalomaniac-fascist-despot about that way of thinking, isn’t there?’

‘Well … if you say so. What about an early-morning yoga class?’

‘Super,’ I say, wanting to cheer her up even though the likelihood of the young ones getting in early enough or the more mature ones being arsed is slim.

‘Really?’ She smiles.

‘Great idea. Count me in.’

She smiles again and starts flicking through her Rolodex. ‘I’ll sort someone out now. Oh and Jen, love, there are some special deals I want you to take the team through today. We’re launching them tomorrow; the targets are on the sheets.’ She hands me our new project.