Send Me A Lover (9 page)

As usual, she leaves me speechless.

‘Anyway, I’m sure he didn’t think I was fair game. Not at my age. More’s the pity mind you. I could probably have given him a good run for his money. And if he thought you were, well, you quickly put him right on that score.’ She scrutinizes me. ‘You’re nothing like your mother are you?’

‘Gee, that’s a relief!’ I tease her.

‘I’m talking about charm. There was nothing wrong with that era when women weren’t afraid to be women and men weren’t ashamed to be men. There were a lot fewer cross-dressers and homosapians because of it.’ She lets out a slow whistle, ‘if I were young again, I wouldn’t let a man like that cross my path without doing something about it.’

‘Come on,’ I say. We truck off to the only restaurant that looks open. An affable-face Greek man sits outside and welcomes us with friendly desperation. We order two Greek salads. ‘Oh God…’ I groan when he goes inside, to the fridge. ‘When the chef doubles as the waiter and he’s only got one customer at lunchtime, and your Greek salad only costs two euros, I don’t hold out much hope. Notice how he’s not washed his hands. And I’d like to bet he didn’t wash them after he went to the loo either. Hepatitis here we come!’

‘Angela,’ my mam glares at me. ‘Are you going to be in a perverse mood all week or are you just having a perverse day just to get it out of your system in one dose? Because the latter I can handle, but the alternative, I can’t.’

‘I’m getting it over in one fell swoop,’ I tell her. ‘To do you a favour. Bear with me, I’m coming round to being in a good mood again.’ I smile at her exasperation.

The salads arrive, along with half a litre of white wine. The vegetables are sweet. The feta is creamy rather than salty. And the olives worth moving to Greece for. For eight euros we’re full, satisfied and ever so slightly pissed. The Greek man goes back to sitting outside again, from time to time watching the non-events of the street, and occasionally watching us.

‘You know, we’ve never gone on holiday together, have we? Not since you were a little girl.’

‘When did we ever go on holiday when I was little? I only remember tedious trips to South Shields beach!’

‘Don’t call them tedious! There were us as a family having a good time!’

‘Well they were tedious! Don’t you remember? We had to take three buses to get there because unlike everybody else, we never owned a car, because Dad drank all the money he should have spent on driving lessons.’ Or smoked it. I vividly remember him rolling his Old Holborn cigarettes. The cough before breakfast. ‘And as soon as we got there he’d make a beeline for the first pub, and we’d have to sit there while he got wasted… It was always what he wanted to do, never us.’ Yet he wasn’t a bad man or a bad father. ‘Yeah, it was one of life’s real joys.’

‘Don’t say that!’ she berates me with a guilty chuckle. This tells me she thinks she somehow let me down as a parent because I’ve only got memories of tedious holidays instead of good ones. ‘Anyway, he only did it because, like all men, he was selfish. He didn’t actually mean any harm by it, Angela.’

Jonathan wasn’t selfish. But she’s right about my dad; he never did mean any harm to anybody. He was just easily entertained and he assumed everybody else was.

The Greek man watches us closely, as though we’ve perked up his day. ‘Don’t you remember Blackpool? When your dad bought you those yellow sunglasses that you never had off your face, and he took you up in the Ferris Wheel? And I wore my coral sundress...’ She smiles coquettishly, remembering herself. ‘And I had shoulder-length dark blonde hair back then—like yours—and I used to keep it in soft roller curls, and it was windy and the wind blew my dress up. And there was a man with his wife and little girl… And he couldn’t take his eyes off my legs. He was just fascinated with them. He was walking away and looking over his shoulder at me as though he had his head on backwards.’

‘Oh! That time! Of course. Your legs, and that man with his head on backwards! How could I forget.’

‘You remember!’ she says, thinking I’m being serious. Then she growls, realising that I’m not. ‘Angela! Don’t mock the afflicted!’

I shake my head at her and try very hard not to love her so much that it breaks out of my every pore.

‘Mock me all you want, but back then there really wasn’t much excitement in my life. I was married to a man who couldn’t even give the pub a miss the night I brought our new baby home from the hospital.’

‘Why did you stay, Mam?’ It’s something I’ve always wanted to ask her.

‘Where was I going to go? I had you. You loved him. He was your dad.’

It saddens me now to think that my mother never had what Jonathan and I did. And that she stayed with my dad because of me, when she wasn’t happy.

‘Why didn’t you have an affair?’

‘I had lots of them.’

‘Huh?’ I just about swallow my tongue.

‘In my mind.’ She taps her temples. ‘They’d have different faces on different days. Or they’d be so-and-so’s body with so-and-so’s face. Your dad’s friend, Alan. Or Bill the policeman across the street. Bill with the chunky thighs in his jeans… ‘

‘Too much detail!’

‘It’s my fantasy world we’re talking about here!’

‘I think I’ve heard enough!’ But in some ways I am curious; I’ve never heard her talk like this. ‘Really though, why didn’t you find somebody else? You could have.’ I remember the Rington’s Tea delivery man, the catalogue delivery man, the window cleaner… always how they’d look at her every time they came to the door. Visiting our house was clearly the highlight of their day.

‘I was too kind. And I worried about what would happen if I’d got found out.’ She screws up her nose. ‘Mud sticks, Angela. I didn’t want people knowing that sort of thing about me.’ Her face turns quite serious again. ‘Now though…I’d take my chances.’

I feel sad for her. I don’t want her to feel she’s missed out.

She polishes off the last of the wine now. A tiny lizard walks along the railing past our table, its little bright eyes seem to look right at me. ‘It’s funny how you can lie in bed next to the same person for years and he’ll never know you’re longing for somebody else, or that you don’t long for him. That you’ve never longed for him,’ she says.

‘But you didn’t long for somebody else, did you?’

‘No one in particular. Just some
thing
else I suppose…’ She looks at me matter-of-factly. ‘I was in love with somebody who didn’t exist. Maybe I even still am.’

‘This is depressing.’

‘Not really. Life’s only depressing if you let it be.’

‘Let’s go,’ I say. We pay up and leave. The Greek man says a polite, ‘Thank you,’ on our way out.

‘Perhaps we’ll go back there for dinner,’ my mam links me and hiccups—a slightly tipsy hiccup—as we cross the road to go back to our hotel.

‘You’re wasted.’

She bumps into me a bit. ‘Don’t talk out of your bottom.’

We pass that corner shop again, where we met the man who knew my name. We both look in, as though secretly hoping we might see him again. ‘I wonder what he does for a living.’

‘Who?’

‘Santa Claus.’

She stops and looks at me, knowing damned well who I’m talking about. ‘He’s a chimney sweep. He dusts the flue with his big bottom as he slides down it.’ Then she beams a devilish smile. ‘Oh! You mean him! The full-blood! ‘Shag grannies, with a bit of luck. Now I could ensure he’s never in the unemployment line.’

She links me and we start walking again, and she sighs a slightly tipsy sigh.

~ * * * ~

The beach, as the rep said, is closer than it looks. I venture down there on my own. I’m pleased to see long stretches of pebble-free sand and gently shelving emerald water. I claim an empty lounge chair under an umbrella, take a few photos, then strip down to my white string bikini. I bought this when Jonathan and I went to Barbados. It’s even still got sand in it, because it would never wash out properly, making it look grubby. He wanted to see if you could see through it when it was wet. ‘Christ!’ he said, when I came out of the swimming pool. ‘It’s indecent!’

‘No!’ I cried, and slapped both hands over my groin. He beamed. He was only teasing me.

The heat feels like a spa day for my body. Behind my sunglasses I watch a young couple wrapped around each other in the water. He keeps slowly glancing around with a look that’s both gratified and shifty. Jonathan wanted to screw in the sea, but I wouldn’t be persuaded. I watched him go in on his own—his casual strength as he dove in—watched him for ages then eventually lost sight of him. Never for a moment did I worry about him not coming back, because it was unthinkable that anything bad would ever happen to Jonathan. Jonathan was so vibrant and thoroughly able to take care of himself. Nonetheless, my eyes studied every head in that sea, worrying what if he does disappear? A freak wave? Then I saw him, and a smile broke out inside of me. I watched him swim all the way to shore, watched his lovely body as he walked up the sand, and then threw himself down on the towel beside me. He was dripping wet and kissed me with cool, salty lips.

Jonathan sometimes had a way of looking at me, right into my eyes, deeper than you would think a gaze could go, as though he was thinking things that were too intense for him to communicate any other way. I noticed it the first time we made love. I’d had good sex before. But not quite this good. And I’d never had this feeling. As a kid I used to look at the parents of my best friend, Heather, who seemed to be in a permanent state of heat for each other. I wanted that. I wanted a marriage where the passion wouldn’t fizzle out. Maybe it was rare. It was non-existent in my own family. But I’d seen it wasn’t impossible. Was I on to something here with this guy?

‘My heart’s pounding,’ I remember telling him. ‘Here,’ I pointed to the jumping pulse just above my clavicle. He extracted his eyes from mine then stared at the spot with genuine fascination. He brought his head down, and instead of kissing it, just lay his lips there, as though his lips were feeling the beating of my heart.

That day on the beach, when he came out of the water, he threw himself down on the sand and latched onto my eyes in that same way, gave me that same intense look that I could never quite read. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I said.

I doffed him with the book. ‘Stop it. It’s unnerving. Go creep somebody else out.’ I saw that slightly impish expression of his. Then slowly, undergoing an easy transference of concentration, he slid his index finger underneath one of my bra triangles, moving the material away from my skin so he could see my nipple. Then, with his eyes fixed there, he circled it until it stood up like a prune. I was mortified. ‘Stop! What if people see!’

‘Oh, here we go…’ He groaned and stopped. ‘Who cares who sees, Ange? It’s not like you know them, or are ever going to see them again.’ He flopped onto his back and left me alone now.

I’d ruined the moment. Poor Jonathan. Sometimes I think I was so busy trying to prove to him that I was who I was, and he shouldn’t even bother trying to change me, that I sabotaged not just his good time, but my own too.

The couple in the water are still wrapped in a floating embrace. For some reason I feel turned on now. Does he know that if he did send me somebody it would be fruitless? I couldn’t feel the same. I would always compare.

I slide my hands behind my back, and without thinking too much about it, undo the strings of my bikini and whip the top off over my head. The breeze feels so refreshing against my skin. I lie back and enjoy this ticklish sensation, imagining Jonathan is here and the tingling feeling is of him circling my nipple with his tongue, in public; to hell with whoever might watch.

~ * * * ~

When I come in the door, my mam quickly picks up the book that’s lying on her chest and pretends she hasn’t just been napping.

‘Hello blossom.’ She’s got ‘bed head’ down her left side. Her features look softened with sleep. ‘Is the beach nice?’ She’s wearing one of her full-length 1950s cream slips that she always wears for bed. I used to think it made her so glamorous. Sometimes, as a kid, when she went out shopping, I’d try one on, and lounge there on her bed feeling glamorous, pretending to be her.

‘Yeah. It’s nice.’ I flop onto my bed and suddenly feel quite wiped out.

‘Did you bare your little buzzums?’

‘My what? No! And less of the little!’ I stretch out my arms and legs like a starfish, depositing sand on the crisp white bedspread, and gaze at the high, white ceiling, still feeling a bit horny and unsettled. I wonder if Jonathan could possibly have heard me that night, when I asked him to keep his promise and send me a lover. Are the dead always in tune with the living? Or do they have to make a point of switching on, like you’d turn on a radio and find your favourite station? Because I’m thinking of changing my request. Rather than send me the next love of my life, perhaps he could just send me a holiday romance. My mind flicks to the attractive Greek man from the store. How did he get on my dial?