Reversing Over Liberace (2 page)

“The old…oh, yes, right. I, I live in York so…” The “old crowd”? Either he'd forgotten that the old crowd had packed themselves so tightly around him that I'd metaphorically been stuck in the turnstiles, or he was mistaking me for someone else.

“You stayed in York? Cool. Here, give me your number.” As I took the proffered paper and pen, I hoped he couldn't see my hand shaking. “Great. Thanks. I'll call soon, yeah?”

I could hardly breathe as I fell through the door he held open for me, and my treacherous stomach felt squeezed and heavy like a rubber knapsack full of leaking batteries. Slowly, carefully, I walked home, ignoring the bile which chattered away at the back of my teeth.

Chapter Two

My house used to belong to my parents, but they'd given it to me when they decided to go off on the longest hippy trail in recorded history. None of the others had wanted it. My sister OC and her husband lived in an old rectory (which Ash referred to persistently as The Old Rectum) in a village north of the city. Of my other siblings, Clay lived in Beijing, Bree had a flat over his bookbinding business in Harrogate and Ash, well, of all of us Ash had most inherited our parents' free spirit and tended towards no-fixed-abodeness. Although I gathered that an orderly queue had formed of people only too willing to provide him with a roof over his head and, most importantly, a mattress under his back.

I'd better get it off my chest now, before you meet him. Ash is not only my brother, but my twin. I hate, resent and adore him in roughly equal measures. He irritates me so much that it makes my head itch. He's mouthy, stroppy, sulky and permanently late—absolutely nothing like me. Really.

And then there's the name thing. Our parents, relentless children-of-nature that they are, had decided that they wanted four children to name after the four elements, Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Along in due course came Clay, Breeze, Oceana and Ash. I suppose it was no one's fault, more of a cosmic joke, that their last-born fire-child turned out to be child
ren
. They were a bit stumped when it came to naming me. OC apparently wanted me to be called Cinderella, but she
was
only two at the time. Then someone pointed out that Ash is also a tree and the rest, as they say, is played by Cameron Diaz.

As I turned into my street, I could tell they were all already here. Clay was staying with me until he flew back to China, and his little black hired SmartCar was parked neatly aligned with the front door. Bree's van was in front, OC had borrowed her husband Paddy's second car (a convertible BMW) and parked behind. Ash's current vehicle of choice, a 750cc Yamaha motorbike was corralled in my front garden, bridled with the weeds I hadn't had time to clear from the walls since summer.

They were all seated around the dining table and they were, as usual, arguing.

“I don't know what you've got to complain about, Clay, he's left me Booter and Snag, and what the hell am I supposed to do with a couple of smelly spaniels?” My sister patted her barely visible bump. “This is due in four months!”

“Complain? Oh, now why should I want to complain about being left an allotment on the outskirts of York when I live on a different bloody continent!” Clay shouted back. “What did he expect me to do, fly over twice a week to spray the cabbages?”

“No, but this is different, this is a baby.” OC patted her stomach again as though Clay might have missed the point. “Dogs are all germy. Especially those two.”

Ash wandered in from the kitchen at the same time as I entered from the hallway and we exchanged our trademark glare before sitting down. Ash had a bottle of wine and was drinking from it without benefit of a glass. He only did it because he knew how much it annoyed me. “Suppose you're happy with what Ganda left you.” He pointed the neck of the bottle at me. “At least yours is fucking portable.”

“Well, he always said it was lucky.” I took the coffee which Clay passed me and smiled at Bree who was, as ever, sitting listening to the tirade.

“How can it be, for fuck's sake?” Ash waved the bottle now. “Tell me in which context it's lucky to carry your nose in a matchbox.”

“You're only angry because he left you twelve pairs of rubber boots. You could always open your own fetish-wear shop.”

There was a sound of throat clearing from across the table and we stopped bickering to await Bree's pronouncement. He rarely spoke, our brother. It was a family rumour that he hadn't uttered a single word until he was four and had then said “balloon angioplasty” and frightened our mother half to death.

“I think”—and Bree looked around at us all, with his mismatched eyes, one blue and one brown—“that we're just disappointed that Ganda didn't leave us any money. That's why we're bickering.” Then, as though embarrassed that he'd spoken, he looked down at the table and let his long hair fall over his reddening face. He was a man who'd been born to the largely solitary career of bookbinding and found social interaction, of any kind, acutely painful. No wonder Ash tended to refer to him as “the oldest virgin in York”. But he was clever, Bree, and astute. Disappointment was the real reason for this whole gathering of the clan.

“Ganda never had any money to leave, though,” I said. “I should know.”

They all turned to look at me. Even Bree.

“Yeah,” Ash muttered. “We've kinda wondered about that. You were his favourite, you've got to admit, Will, and all he leaves you is a mouldy old body part?”

“Maybe”—heads swivelled again as Bree spoke—“he gave us what he did for a reason.”

“I reckon he gave Clay that allotment so that he'd have something to come back to.” I looked over at our eldest brother, fussily tidying up the fallen leaves of my spider plant on the window ledge. “You're always saying you'll come back to Yorkshire one day, aren't you? Perhaps he was making a point. This is where your roots are. It's the kind of terrible pun Ganda used to love.”

There was a moment of silence. Then I blew my nose and OC rubbed her eyes with her sleeve like a child would. “But Booter and Snag? You have to admit, Wills, they are horrible, even for dogs.”

I sensed the movement as three pairs of eyeballs turned towards me. I loved my sister, absolutely (although I'd never quite forgiven her for the Barbie incident when I was six), but her cleanliness and tidiness fetish drove all of us to want to run round her immaculate house wearing muddy Wellingtons. “Perhaps,” I said carefully, “it was because you're the only one of us with the time and space for two spaniels.” Plus looking after something other than yourself and the obnoxiously self-satisfied Paddy will be good practice, I prevented myself from adding. A well-placed kick under the table made sure that Ash didn't make the point either. Secretly I knew Ganda had thought OC was far too obsessive about her house and he would have delighted in the chaos the dogs would bring. He was probably up there now, chuckling down on our discomfiture.

Ash poked me with the wine bottle. “Okay, yeah, I can go with all that, and let's face it, who else would he have left his books to but Bree—but twelve pairs of waders? What did he expect me to do, take my friends fly-fishing?”

Since all Ash's friends thought that fresh air was a dangerous perversion, this was unlikely to be the case. I shrugged.

“Well, I've got to be going. Paddy will be home at half past six and I have no idea what I'm doing for dinner.” OC aimed a quick kiss at my cheek. “Wills, why don't you come down next week for Sunday lunch? Paddy's got some kind of work do on the Saturday, but he'll be back by Sunday morning.”

Oh goody, I thought, torn between my dislike of Sundays and my hatred of Paddy. “Sounds nice, thanks.”

“And I'd better…” Bree stood up, too. “Bye.” In contrast to OC's fussy farewell my brother simply melted into the darkness. Clay had taken all the used cups through to the kitchen, which left me with Ash.

“One less Sunday on your own,” he remarked, handing me the bottle he'd been drinking from and picking up his helmet. Ash always had the knack of sensing my feelings. “You really must be down, Will, if you'd rather spend it with Mrs. Housewife and the Champion Prick.”

“They're not so bad,” I said. “And everyone else is off doing couply things. Not you and Bree, obviously, but Katie's got Dan and the boys, and Jazz's always at band rehearsals.”

“I could introduce you to some of my friends.” Ash crammed his bleach blond crop into his helmet and raised the visor.

“No thanks.” I walked with him to the front garden where he wheeled the huge bike backwards out of the gateway, manoeuvring it carefully onto the road and throwing his leg casually over the saddle. “I'm not quite ready to be a fag hag just yet.”

“They're not all gay.”

“Name one who's not.”

He snapped down his visor, ignited the engine and muttered something over the roar. I flicked him the finger and slapped his red-leathered shoulder and he rode off, waving a hand.

“Willow.” Clay called from the doorway. “Phone for you.”

I took the handset, presuming that Katie had successfully fought her twins into bed. “Hello.” Then, noticing that Ash had decelerated to take the corner, I let out a wolf-whistle of the magnitude only truly mastered by someone with older brothers. It clearly penetrated his padded concentration, because he raised two fingers and cornered tightly, knee almost to the pavement.

The phone was silent in my ear for a second. After a moment a male voice said carefully, “Is that Willow?”

Oh shit. “Um. Yes, hello, Luke. Um. I was just…”

“Not interrupting anything, am I? I mean, is this a good time to call?”

I rushed back inside the house and carried the telephone upstairs. “No. Yes, I mean. It's fine.” He had the loveliest voice, too, did I mention that? Softly spoken and with a gentle hint of an accent. (His father was Welsh and he'd grown up on Anglesey. Oh, I knew all there was to know about Luke Fry. I could have had him as a Mastermind subject).

“I thought you were talking to someone.”

“Only my brother.” Oh, be still my heaving stomach. “Actually, could you hold on for one second?” I flung the receiver down on my bed and rushed to the bathroom, teeth clenched, but in the event only managed a couple of retches over the sink before the feeling was gone—but this was still unusual, telephone conversations never affected me—“Hello, sorry about that.”

“Look, Willow, I was wondering, if you're not busy or anything, we might have that get-together I was talking about? Maybe tomorrow? If it's not too short notice for you? I thought, perhaps, towards evening?”

Diffident. That in itself was cute. He obviously wasn't one of these drop everything when I call types, just nicely deferential, but I'd played this game before and knew the moves. Never agree immediately, it makes you sound desperate. Pretend your life is so crammed with wonderful experiences that he'll have to join a queue for your attention.

“Well, I am a bit busy.”

But he spoke again, almost over the top of me. “Only I heard you telling that guy in the bar that you weren't doing anything, so I thought, sorry? Did you say something?”

“Me? No, just clearing my throat.”

We agreed to meet at the bar by the City Screen at seven, and he rang off, leaving me breathless and dizzy with the speed of it all. Luke Fry. Oh…my…God.

 

 

 

 

Later that evening when Katie rang me, having hog-wrestled the twins to bed and sent Dan out with his mates for a Saturday night restorative, I was knee-deep in my wardrobe looking for a suitable date dress.

“I don't want to look too tarty,” I explained with the telephone clamped under my chin, both hands busy rattling through the rails. “But then I don't want to look as though I've got librarians in my ancestry either.”

“What about your red dress?”

“Too much cleavage.”

“The purple one?”

“Not enough.” I sighed heavily and sluiced an armful of clothing onto the bed. “Honestly, Katie, my going-out clothes make me look like a cut-price hooker and my work clothes make me look like a geography teacher. Why has no one ever pointed this out to me before?”

Katie coughed. “Um, Will, you don't think you might be reading a bit too much into all this, do you? I mean, perhaps he really
does
want to chat about the old days.”

“Listen, I would dress up to hear Luke Fry read the frigging weather forecast. I don't care
why
he wants me there, the fact is he wants to talk to me, and I owe it to my past self to at least feel not like a complete minger while he's doing it. Now. What about the white dress?”

“Bit bridal. You don't want to scare the bejasus out of the poor guy. And don't you think it's all a bit sudden? When he, ahem, I mean, you have to admit, Wills, he wasn't exactly receptive to your charms while we were at uni, was he?”

“Well, no, but I have changed quite a bit, Katie.” You should have seen me back then. I was a dead ringer for an Afghan hound after a tumble-dry. And so shy, some days I could hardly bear to talk to myself.

“He recognised you though.”

Yes, he had. After Katie hung up to go and have a long, uninterrupted piss, as she put it, I rooted through some of my memorabilia until I found the photograph. It had been taken by my then-boyfriend, a gangly streak of spots called Tom who I'd gone out with because he roadied for Fresh Fingers now and again. He'd been nice enough, quite pretty, too, but the spots had ensured that any attractive tendencies were submerged beneath layers of concealer. So my stomach contents had remained safely content and not avant-garde wall decoration.

The photograph showed Fresh Fingers, posing outside York Minster. The three other lads were sitting on the steps, but Luke had draped himself over the stonework of the south entrance, arm around a carved saint, and was glowering at the camera from under hair which must have made up half his bodyweight. On the far
far
left stood the figure of a girl, almost out of shot. She was wearing a gypsy skirt, a loose tartan top, hiking boots and an overlarge black duster coat. An unruly frizzle of blondish hair obscured her face but, yes, you've guessed it. Looking like an explosion in a charity shop, with split ends in need of extensive welding treatment, and so hopelessly, helplessly, heartbreakingly in love with Luke that a negative aura seemed to surround me, even in a photograph. I was like a black hole with bad hair.