Kiss Me First (2 page)

Mum and I did our sums and worked out how much we would have for my flat. The answer was, not very much at all. Kentish Town was too expensive, so we looked at areas further out, but still, the only places within our price range were Not On: former council flats on the top floor of intimidating tower blocks or, in one case, on the North Circular, the filthy six-lane road mum and I used to get the bus down to get to the shopping centre. I would often not make it past the front door before telling the estate agent I had seen enough.

Back at home, I would tell mum about the viewings, making her gasp with descriptions of filthy hall carpets or a car balanced on bricks in the driveway. Penny, the woman we’d employed to be mum’s carer, eavesdropped on our conversations and one day, looked up from the property pages of her
Daily Express
.

‘It says here that the area around Rotherhithe is a wise buy,’ she said, accentuating the last two words as if they were a phrase she had never heard before. ‘Because of the Olympics.’

I ignored her. She was a silly woman, always offering her banal opinions and fussing around with her lunch, and I had quickly learned to pretend she wasn’t there. But she kept on butting in, going on about Rotherhithe. Eventually, mum and I agreed that I would go and see a place within our budget in the area, just to keep her quiet.

The flat was on the first floor above an Indian restaurant on Albion Street, just behind the Rotherhithe tunnel. There was a huge sign above the restaurant with the (unattributed) statement that it was ‘the best curry house in Rotherhithe’. Albion Street was small but busy; teenagers on bikes barged through shoppers on the crammed pavement, and thudding music issued from a barber’s shop. The pub on the corner had Union Jacks covering the windows, so you couldn’t see inside, and men stood outside drinking pints and smoking, even though it was only three in the afternoon. When I found the front door to the flat, the paintwork was shiny with grease and on the step below lay the remains of a box of fried chicken, a pile of half-gnawed bones.

It was all highly unpromising, but because I had come all this way – it had taken over an hour by tube from Kentish Town – I decided that I should at least have a quick look inside.

The flat had clearly been unoccupied for some time; the front door resisted opening due to the large pile of post banked behind it. On entering I noticed a strong smell of onions.

‘It’s just for a few hours in the afternoon,’ the estate agent said, ‘while they get the curry started.’

He led me first to an unremarkable bedroom, and then to the kitchen. The particulars had mentioned an ‘unofficial’ roof terrace, which turned out to be just a bit of asphalt outside the window overlooking the back yard of the restaurant. The yard appeared to be used as a rubbish dump and was full of drums of cooking oil and catering-sized Nescafé jars. A solitary bush grew out of a crack in the concrete. When the estate agent led me back into the narrow hall, he grazed the wall with his car keys and left two gouges in the soft plaster.

Lastly, we went into the front room. It was dim, despite it being a bright day outside. The reason for that, I saw, was that the restaurant’s sign jutted up over the bottom half of the window, blocking out the light.

We stood there for a moment in the gloom, and then I said I would like to leave. The estate agent didn’t seem surprised. Outside, as he was locking the front door, he said, ‘Well, at least you wouldn’t have to go far for a curry.’

I didn’t reply. On the tube back, though, I started to think that the comment was actually quite amusing so, when I got back home, I repeated it to mum.

I had, of course, intended for her to laugh. Or at least smile; she was wearing her respirator all the time by then, and was short of breath. But instead she said, in her Darth Vader voice: ‘That’s nice.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Useful,’ she said. ‘For when you don’t want to cook. You were never very good at cooking.’

This was not the reaction I was expecting. It was meant to be humorous, because I didn’t eat spicy food. That was the point. When I was eleven, I had a chicken curry at my friend Rashida’s house and went bright red and was sick. Mum had to come and pick me up.

I am not proud to say I got angry. I remember looking at her with the respirator clamped to her face, the tubes up her nose, and having this ridiculous notion that rather than helping her live the tubes were actually sucking out her brain cells, emptying her out to a shell.

‘I hate curry!’ I said, and then, louder, ‘You know that! I was bloody sick at Rashida’s, don’t you remember?’

I didn’t usually swear, and certainly not at mum, so that tells you how upset I was. I remember Penny, who was as usual planted on the sofa, looking up from her Sudoku, and mum’s face sort of folding in on itself.

I stormed off into the kitchen. I know now – I knew
then
– that it was an irrational reaction, but I wasn’t thinking straight. With the benefit of hindsight, I think that her forgetting things was a taste of what life was going to be like when she was gone, when there would be no one left who knew these little facts about me.

I stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes, to calm down. By that point, it wasn’t really a kitchen any more; more like a store cupboard for mum’s equipment and pills. I remember staring at the boxes of nappies stacked up on the table – the same table that mum used to lay for breakfast each evening before bed, where I had taught her how to play chess, where she had plaited my hair before my interview at Caffè Nero – and I had what I suppose you could call a realization. I won’t go into details because, as I say, I intend this to be a factual account, not personal. Suffice to say, I realized that every hour I spent looking at flats would mean one less hour spent with mum, and, besides, it didn’t really matter what my new flat was like. I hadn’t heard of the Mediocrity Principle then, which states that nowhere is more special than anywhere else, but I think that’s what I was applying.

I went back into the living room. Mum’s head was flopped over to one side, her eyes closed. She wore these red satin pyjamas to assist her movement and the front of the top was darkened with drool. Penny was ineffectually wiping her chin, and so I took over and stroked her hair and apologized, and then I held her dead-bird hands and said that, actually, the flat was lovely, perfect, and we should definitely buy it.

So that’s how I came to live in Rotherhithe.

At the funeral, friends of mum – including some distant relatives from York whom I’d never even met before – said that they would come and visit me in my new place, and to get in touch if I ever needed anything. But I didn’t encourage them, and no one pressed the issue. I suppose they didn’t want to intrude, and presumed that my own friends were looking after me.

Rashida was the only person I wanted to tell, because she had actually met mum. We became friends in Year Eight, and because her dad rationed her computer time she used to come over after school to play on mine. Mum would bring us Boasters covered in whipped cream and tell Rashida about how she had once hoped to go to India but then got pregnant with me and so never did, and that she hoped I would go there one day instead. Back then, before she got ill, I’d show my impatience when she repeated herself and said silly things. ‘But I don’t want to go to India!’ I’d say, and Rashida would giggle and whisper to me, ‘Neither do I.’

I hadn’t spoken to Rashida for a few years, but had kept track of her on Facebook, and knew she had moved to Rottingdean with her fiancé, a management consultant. I sent her a message telling her mum had died, and she said she was sorry, and that if I was ever in Rottingdean I must visit her and Stuart. I noticed that she had posted a new picture showing off her engagement ring, and she had done her nails like the girls at school, with a stupid white stripe across the top, which was disappointing.

I didn’t tell anyone else, but I announced my change of address on Facebook. In reply a girl called Lucy, who I’d worked with at Caffè Nero, sent a message saying she was now managing a sandwich shop nearby in Canary Wharf, and that we should meet up. But Lucy was always quite odd. On her breaks she used to go to the Super-drug down the road and steal make-up testers. She was always asking whether I wanted her to steal me something, and got offended when I said no, even though she could see I didn’t wear make-up.

I had seventy-three other friends on Facebook, girls from school mostly, but they weren’t proper friends. Our entire year was ‘friends’ with one another. It was like at Christmas, when everyone would give everyone else a card whether they liked them or not, just so they’d get one back in return and could compare the thickness of their hauls over lunch. A couple of them used to be actively mean to me and Rashida but that tailed off in Year Ten when they got interested in boys and turned their attention to the girls who were their competition.

Every so often, someone would post details of an open invitation party. Once, I went along to one, organized by Tash Emmerson. This was in 2009; mum suggested it when we realized that I hadn’t been out for seven months. The party was in a cavernous bar in Holborn with horribly loud music; I remember this one song that went, over and over again, ‘Tonight’s going to be a good night’, which was ironic. A glass of orange juice cost £3.50. Everyone was talking about their experiences at ‘uni’, which I couldn’t contribute to, and when they weren’t doing that they took photos of each other. I felt so drained just being around them I had to prop myself up against a wall in the corner.

What was odd was that a lot of them were keen to have their photos taken with me even though, as I say, we could not be described as proper friends. I remember Louise Wintergaarden and Beth Scoone advancing on me at the same time from both sides and throwing their arms around me, as if we were really close. When the picture was taken, they dropped their arms and walked off without a word. Then it was Lucy Neill and Tash and Ellie Kudrow. When they put the photos up on Facebook, they didn’t even bother to tag me. I showed one of the pictures to mum and she said the girls looked really tacky, with their bleached hair and orange faces, and that I looked like Cinderella sandwiched between the two wicked stepsisters. I didn’t tell her that under one of the pictures someone had commented,
Ah, the old stand next to a munter trick?
I didn’t care, but I knew she’d get upset.

After that I didn’t go to any more parties, but I read their updates. I didn’t understand what they were on about most of the time. It’d be gossip about people I didn’t know or references to TV programmes and celebrities and YouTube clips I didn’t recognize. Sometimes I’d follow the links they were all getting so excited about but they’d always turn out to be some idiotic thing, like a photo of a kitten squashed into a wine glass or a video of a teenager in Moscow singing badly in his bedroom. And always, these pictures of them dressed up to the nines, sucking in their cheeks, cocking one leg in front of the other like horses. It was like they had all had a lesson I hadn’t been invited to – nor wanted to be invited to – in which they learned that hair must be straightened, nails must have that white stripe across the tip, and that you had to wear your watch on the inside of your wrist and your handbag in the crook of your elbow, with your arm stuck up like it’s been broken.

It was the same with their status updates. Sometimes they’d post these elliptical messages, which didn’t make sense by themselves, like
sometimes it’s better not to know
or
well, that’s fcked it then
, without making clear what they were referring to. Their lives were filled with banal drama. I remember that Raquel Jacobs wrote once that – OMG!!! – she had dropped her Oyster card down the toilet. I mean, who needs or wants to know that? It seemed incredibly stupid and pointless, yet they all responded to each other as if these things were interesting and important and funny, using all this made up language like
whhhoooop
, or misspelling words like
hunny
, or abbreviating words for no reason, and putting XXX at the end of everything they wrote.

It wasn’t that I wanted to be like that myself. But I just didn’t understand how everyone seemed to have mastered it, to know what language to use and respond instantly to comments in the ‘right’ way. Even people who were really stupid at school, like Eva Greenland, seemed able to do it.

Very occasionally, someone would post a proper question, such as what were the advantages of using an external hard drive with their PC versus an internal one. Those I would reply to, and sometimes got a response. Esther Moody wrote back
Thnx u r star xxx
when I advised her how to change her Google settings from Autofill. However, the vast majority of what they wrote was nonsense and had no relevance to my life.

I suppose what I’m saying is that if I was ‘isolated’, it was through my own choice. If I really wanted to, I could have met up with Lucy from Caffè Nero, or gone along to another one of the open parties from Facebook. But I had no desire to.

I liked being by myself. Before mum had become ill it’d been perfect. I’d spend evenings and weekends upstairs, reading or on the computer, and she’d be downstairs, cleaning or watching TV or doing her miniatures, then she’d call me every so often for meals and cuddles. It was the best of both worlds.

I had inherited the furniture from the old house, which had been put into storage; before she died, mum arranged with Penny that her son would pick it up in his van and bring it to my flat. But Penny and I were not on good terms by the end. We had a ridiculous argument over her Sudoku book, when she discovered that I had filled in some of the puzzles. I explained to her that I had only done the advanced ones that I knew she wouldn’t be able to complete herself, but she took offence.

Then, when mum died, Penny kept going on about how odd it was because mum hadn’t displayed the signs of imminent death the day before: ‘her feet weren’t cold, and she had a whole Cup-a-Soup’.

Anyway, the upshot was, her son never got in touch about the furniture. That was all right, though, because I found that I didn’t even want it. Once I took the tube to the storage unit and saw it all there – the coffee table with the smoked-glass top; the white chest of drawers, still with the rubber bands around the handles which we put on to help mum open them; the black leather lounge set; the dinner gong; the tall, framed family tree which she spent £900 getting done and proved that a distant relative once married the aunt of Anne Boleyn. I remember especially the glass corner cabinet, which mum used to display her miniatures. It had been in the house ever since I could remember, and I had always loved looking at the things in it. But now in the storage room, it was just a bit of cheap shelving, and the miniatures were in one of a pile of taped-up boxes. I thought that even if I brought the shelves and the box back, and wiped them clean and arranged the miniatures in exactly the same way as mum had them, it still wouldn’t be the same. I decided to leave everything there, and just keep paying the £119.99 monthly storage fee.