Her (2 page)

She’s pushing one of those big triangular buggies, its handles hung with hessian bags, and there’s the child, Christopher, ferociously constrained by the safety harness, his face set with resentment. ‘No biscuits,’ she’s saying briskly. ‘It’s lunchtime.’ When the lights change she crosses the road by the pizza restaurant, and I see the movement as someone seated in the window half-rises and waves at her. I feel in my bag for my sunglasses and put them on so when I walk past the restaurant a few moments later I can look in without anxiety. Emma is seated at a table with a few other women, and the kids are all in highchairs, throwing things on the floor, while the waiter stands back, smiling with pained tolerance, attempting to take the order.

I’d like to know where she lives.

Of course, it’s not the first time I’ve done it, but when I google her, the same thing happens: nothing comes up. She may have someone else’s surname now, but even in her historical incarnation she left no trace, lost among all the other Emma Halls. I shouldn’t judge her for this. We both came of age before the internet, so I can find no evidence of how she spent her teens or twenties or even her thirties, though really I don’t need the proof of what I’ve gleaned from these two brief sightings: the arts degree, the job in magazine editorial or publishing or possibly some sort of curatorial role, and then – just as she was beginning to despair – the chance to bolt, to try out a new life for a while. Transport systems, controlled crying, soft play and coffees in the park with the other older mothers.

Are you enjoying it, Emma?
I find myself thinking as I unscrew the cap from the tube of purple madder and squeeze a shiny worm of pigment onto a saucer.
Is your life the one you were due?

Sunlight slides relentlessly over the studio’s concrete floor. The metal-framed windows are open and a few storeys below people are talking, popping car boots and lugging things in and out of the storage unit opposite. I don’t have much of a view: the studio overlooks the black windows of empty workshops, a series of flat gritty roofs seamed with lines of asphalt, weeds colonising cracks in the brickwork.

I look up, into the white burning sky.

In the end, it comes down to luck. I must have dropped my wallet as I came out of the greengrocers’, and she finds it on the pavement.

‘Oh, it’s no trouble,’ she says on the phone. ‘Your details were on the library card.’

‘I can’t tell you what a relief it is,’ I say, although I hadn’t even noticed I’d lost the bloody thing, in the usual confusion of shopping bags and getting the wilting lettuce into the fridge, and Christopher’s disgust with his green beans. ‘Are you local? I could come round to collect it once my son’s finished his tea. Where are you?’

‘Oh, let me bring it back, it’s no problem,’ she says. It’s a soft voice, a little hesitant-sounding.

‘Gosh, how kind, are you sure?’ I say, and she says she’ll be over in ten. She’s only around the corner, in Pakenham Gardens. As she says it I see the street, its clipped hedges and crisp pointing, its doors painted olive and lavender. The black and white chessboard tiling on the front paths, the coloured glass in the top panels of the windows: pink, green, gold. ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ I say, as Christopher drums his beaker on the tabletop, demanding milk rather as Tudor kings requested malmsey.

Of course, she turns out to be exactly the sort of person I don’t want to meet; exactly the sort of person I’d choose not to find my wallet on the street. I stand there in the doorway, with a stained tea towel over my shoulder, ketchup on my jeans, and (though I don’t find this out till later) flour in my hair, and I look at her and just for a second I recognise her, her life; and I want it so much, really, that it hurts.

When I see her waiting there on the step, I know pretty much everything about her. At one level, I’m seeing someone about my age, small and dark, in black cotton and ballet slippers: slim brown limbs, a simple rather boyish haircut which is a little damp, as if she has just had a shower or a swim. At another level, I read her as one woman reads another, and I can tell, in that instant, that she is
free
. How do I know this? It’s something to do with how slow and unhurried she is. There, on the doorstep, I feel she’s waiting for something. Just for a fraction of a moment, she waits to smile, she waits to speak, and I rush to fill the gaps, sounding like an idiot. Only then does she start to look for the wallet, somewhere in her big straw shopper.

She looks like a person who can afford to take her time. Nothing, right now, seems more exotic to me than this. My whole life runs to a schedule: the headlong conscientious dawn-to-dusk rush to feed and entertain and bathe and rest Christopher (my own needs, necessarily, come somewhat further down the line, if at all). There’s always the next thing to think about, or the thing after that.

And if I have the audacity to forget the timetable, or attempt to improvise, I know I’ll pay for it, sooner rather than later. Christopher’s margins are ribbon-narrow; if I allow him to get hungry or tired, he’ll punish me. And those punishments are hard to bear. I’m already someone else, but the person I turn into at these low points is someone I never imagined I could be a few years ago: someone with a hot knot of fury where her heart used to be.

I spent my old life meeting people’s needs, anticipating unreasonable demands and worst-case scenarios; I built a career on that sensitivity, that apprehension. It’s my particular tragedy that I’m still programmed with a desire to solve all problems, even now, when the authority I’m answerable to is a tiny illogical tyrant. Managing him, his whims and caprices, his passions and hatreds, requires every scrap of my energy, every ounce of patience. And usually even that isn’t enough.

So I open the door, and I see her, and in that moment I also see myself, my shortcomings. All the many things I now lack.

‘Nina Bremner,’ she says, holding out her hand.

‘I’m Emma. I really can’t thank you enough . . . You’re a lifesaver.’

Her hand in mine is dry and cool. I release it hurriedly.

‘Not a problem,’ she’s saying, starting to rummage vaguely in her bag. ‘It was just lying on the pavement by the postbox. Outside the greengrocers’.’

‘Oh – yes, I had that thing to post. Christ. Some days I think I’m going mad.’

‘Well, at least you’ve got a good excuse,’ she says, nodding at my belly. ‘When’s it due? I remember what that’s like.’

‘November. You’ve got children?’ I ask, and somehow I’m disappointed by this. She looks so
other
. I don’t want her to turn out to be like me, only better at it.

‘One. But she’s seventeen. Another species.’

‘You don’t look old enough, you must have been a child bride?’ I say, and she laughs.

Behind me, down the corridor, in the kitchen, there’s a crash. And then a roar.

‘Ah, OK, you’ve already got one. How old?’ she asks, dipping her head over her bag again. ‘Sorry, it’s here somewhere, I just . . .’

‘Two and a half. I’d better – Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?’ I don’t suppose she will. Why should she? But she seems amused. ‘Sure,’ she says. And then she’s in the hall, stepping neatly round the bulk of the all-terrain buggy, bringing a faint clinging fragrance with her, pulling the front door shut as I hurry away, towards the kitchen and Christopher, who is pinned into his highchair and surveying the mess on the floor with lordly vengeful satisfaction.

Some visitors spectate. They stand there at the edge of the room, smiling and chatting as I rush around with carrot sticks and J-cloths, and I know deep down they’re enjoying seeing me reduced to this. Of course, Nina didn’t know me before, doesn’t know the real me, but she notices what needs doing, and she does it: quietly, without ostentation or apology. While I’m flapping about, scooping houmous off the floor and wiping up the spilled milk, she fills the kettle and drops the dirty plates in the dishwasher. ‘What a pretty house,’ she says, finding mugs. ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘We bought it just after Christopher was born,’ I say. ‘We lived in Atwell Street for a bit after we got married, and it was a nice flat, but we wanted a garden. Of course there’s loads to do, we haven’t got around to any of it, we can’t really afford to do anything now. Sorry about the mess. I never seem to be able to get things straight.’ I hear myself saying these things, and I know what I sound like.

With deft small movements she lifts the kettle and pours the boiling water into cups, and as she does so the kitchen is wreathed with shimmering skeins of steam, catching on the sunlight slanting through the windows. ‘I remember what that’s like,’ she says. ‘Some days you feel like you’re running the wrong way on a conveyor belt, never getting anywhere.’

‘I never realised how much mess is involved in just living,’ I say, with a little laugh, giving Christopher a matchbox of raisins and lifting him out of the chair. ‘You know: just making him a meal is the act with a thousand consequences: all the peeling and cooking and cooling down and cutting, and then afterwards all the scraping and rinsing and wiping and sweeping. One stone, all these bloody ripples. Just the act of tidying up the chaos seems to generate more chaos. I open the cupboard to get out the mop, and when my back is turned he scatters clothes pegs all over the house, or hides the Hoover attachments in the recycling box. Or I find him wandering around clutching the bottle of bleach . . .’

I stop. I’ve said more than I meant to. It just came out in a rush. I’m glad I didn’t tell her about the line I stumbled across in a dictionary of quotations, the eighteenth-century suicide note: ‘All this buttoning and unbuttoning.’ It’s a phrase that I hear over and over, as if it’s playing on a loop, as I move through the days.

She looks at me. She looks at me as if she recognises me, the real me. It’s a shocking moment. For a second I’m scared I’m going to cry with the relief and horror of it.

‘Sit down,’ she says, pushing a chair forward a little. ‘Drink your tea.’

I stare out at the small battered rectangle of grass littered with coloured plastic, the defeated unloved shrubs, the shed door that Ben promised to fix but which for now continues to list on its hinges, a reminder of our joint paralysis. Over the overgrown hedge, the Callaghans’ washing sags on the laundry line.

Christopher is hunkered down on an upturned plant pot, eating his raisins, the ones he’s not dropping. I see him bend over, pushing through the grass, searching them out with careful fingers. I think:
cat shit
. But then I think:
sod it
. So I sit. She pulls up another chair.

‘Sorry,’ I say, and I don’t want the moment to linger, it’s too painful, so I say, ‘God, listen to me! I’m not always like this. Post-holiday crash. You know what it’s like.’ The cup, when I pick it up, is hot in my hands. The tea is too weak, but so what, there’s a novelty in not having made it myself.

When she asks me where we went, I tell her about the agriturismo near Lucca, using the approved techniques for describing summer holidays (imply it was heaven, without going into too much tedious detail; make a joke out of the noisy humourless Belgians in the next apartment, the lack of mixer taps, and the dread anticipation of the next credit-card statement).

She says she hasn’t been away. Her daughter Sophie spent most of the summer in the States with the father and the stepmother. (Not at all, it’s all very cordial.) She missed Sophie, of course, but looking on the bright side, it turned into a fairly productive summer workwise. ‘I hit a rich seam,’ she says. ‘So I stayed put, made the most of it.’ She’s a painter. Landscapes, mostly. Abstract. She has a studio in Kentish Town, in the old piano factory, and a show coming up at a gallery I’ve heard of in Fitzrovia. ‘You should come to the opening,’ she says, almost shyly. ‘If you fancy it.’

I say I’d love to, which is true. I don’t say that it’ll never happen. ‘Can’t think of anything nicer,’ I say. And now I’m seized with wistfulness, a desire that she should see me in a different context, so I add, ‘Gallery openings! That’s the sort of thing I used to do, when I worked in TV.’ And as I say it, I feel the burn of humiliation, as if I’m claiming kinship with someone I barely know, someone infinitely more glamorous and sought-after. As if I’m trying to ride on the coattails of a person I was once introduced to a long time ago.
God, you sound pathetic
, I think.

‘I’ll drop an invite round,’ she says. ‘It would be great if you could come.’

There’s a noise from outside: Christopher, bashing the hedge with his stick, frightening the cats. I step outside to tell him to stop while she finishes her tea, looks around for her bag. ‘I’d better get going, Sophie’s got a friend round and I said I’d make paella. Oh, I almost forgot.’ She reaches into her shopper, pulls out my wallet and pushes it over the table towards me: a shamefully practical thing in jolly patterned oilcloth, its clasp straining against an undisciplined mess of receipts and loyalty cards.

I see her out into the early evening: a clear sky, full of chance and opportunity, the people coming home from work and walking along the street, heading for a jasmine-scented pub garden or a game of tennis in the park.

Christopher’s calling for me. Has he hurt himself? It’s not always possible to tell the difference between injury and indignation. I stand there in the hall, among the boots and the coats, the toys and the clothing catalogues I can’t bring myself to deal with, listening to him. There’s a broken rice cake underneath the radiator, and while I’m stooping to retrieve it I find a single red sock patterned with robots. When I pick it up it’s firm and knobbly, oddly jointed: filled with a pebble, a clump of Lego bricks and a ring of dried apple.

If she remembers
, I think,
I’ll bloody go.

In the end, it’s ridiculously easy. I’m coming back from a run when I see her going into the greengrocers’, manoeuvring the enormous unwieldy buggy between the straw-filled trays of plums and avocados, the sunny upturned faces of the gerberas. The greengrocer wears a patient smile as Emma moves around, blocking the aisles while she tries to interest Christopher in purple or green grapes. An elderly gentleman has to climb over the heirloom tomatoes – oh my God, the terminology – in order to reach the till.