The Past and Other Lies (13 page)

What ought to have been another crap Friday night at the community centre’s under-eighteens disco had, surprisingly, not been crap at all. It had been pretty good, in fact. Briefly.

‘There’s Adrian,’ Julie had shouted above the synthesised beat of ‘Planet Earth’ and loud enough that anyone could have heard her. ‘He’s coming over!’

And Adrian Cresswell had come over, weaving between Sonya Marshall and Mark Bickley from 4C who were slow-dancing to Duran Duran, circumnavigating a cluster of white faux leather handbags, and Jennifer had known he was coming over to her. After all, he’d been watching her from the other side of the room for the last fifteen minutes. About bloody time too. She’d been working up to this point since
Christmas
. A smile here, a word there, a walk home from school, a look across the classroom when Darren wasn’t there, and now it was June, the end of term, and finally Adrian was free of that Jackie Parfitter cow and very, very soon she was going to be free of Darren.

‘Alright?’ Adrian had said, throwing back his head and talking to her out of the side of his mouth. ‘Planet Earth’ had ended and Julie had melted discreetly into the background. Yes, Jennifer had replied, she was alright. And Adrian was alright too, in a black button-down Gary Numan shirt, narrow red tie, black straight-leg pegs and black winkle-picker boots with buckles on the ankles.

And he had said: ‘Yeah, so. I was looking for your sister.’

That was what Adrian had said. That was what Adrian had weaved his way across the dance floor to say to her:
I was looking for your sister
.

‘Charlotte,’ he’d added, as though she might not know who he was referring to.

Charlotte!

‘You what?’ she’d replied, mystified, and already a sense of things not going as planned had begun to creep over her.

‘Well, she never comes here, does she? I was wonderin’ where she goes, tha’s all.’ A shrug. ‘She’s not going out with anyone, is she?’

‘Why?’ Jennifer had replied coldly, already aware that she didn’t really want to know.

‘I was just wonderin’.’ Adrian had turned away and sipped his Coke and surveyed the disco critically, his foot tapping to Spandau Ballet. Then he’d turned back. ‘Think she’d go out with me?’

‘Come on. Your go,’ urged Graham, pointing impatiently at the Monopoly board.

Jennifer tossed the dice and got a five.

‘Park Lane!’ crowed Graham jubilantly. ‘With two hotels, that’s...five hundred pounds, please.’

Graham always said
please
when he was fleecing you at Monopoly.

‘Park Lane. I went to Park Lane once.’

Grandma Lake was awake and addressing the television once more.

‘We both went. Late summer it were. There were a lovely brass band in Hyde Park and so many handsome young men. A real treat, it was, to take a tram into town. Me and Jem sat on the top deck and shared a bag of sugared almonds.’

A shot pierced the air and on the television a bandit slumped dead over a low stone wall.

Think she’d go out with me?

Adrian Creswell had come over in a black Gary Numan button-down shirt, the one with the red buttons. He had come over to ask if she thought Charlotte would go out with him.

Julie Fanshawe, along with half the lower-sixth, had been standing just a short distance away, watching and listening. Waiting with barely concealed glee. Meanwhile Charlotte had not ever been there because Charlotte didn’t go to discos. Charlotte didn’t go out. Charlotte spent all her time over at Zoe’s house.

‘No, Adrian, I don’t think she’d go out with you,
actually
.’

There. It had ended right there. That was what Jennifer had said. Just that, nothing else. Then she had spun around and swept out, leaving Julie to retrieve her handbag from the pile on the floor and Adrian standing there in the middle of the disco with everyone staring at him.

Laughing at him.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Graham was busily helping himself to Jennifer’s last fifty pounds and mortgaging off her few remaining properties, joyfully scooping up her set of main-line stations, flipping them over and calculating their mortgage value.

A croupier, thought Jennifer. He’d make a great croupier.

On the sofa, Charlotte suddenly looked up and stared at Grandma Lake as though she’d only just noticed her grandmother was sitting beside her. There was such intensity in her look Jennifer held her breath.

Outside a car approached, its headlights lighting up the hallway. Everyone paused, silent. Waiting. Its engine geared down and the car turned into the driveway.

Mum and Dad were home.

Instantly the atmosphere changed. Charlotte turned away and squeezed herself into a tighter ball, her gaze resting somewhere to the left of the television screen. Grandma Lake got unsteadily to her feet and said, ‘Well, that’s them at last. I’m off to bed.’ Graham began to pack up the Monopoly board. Jennifer presumed she had lost.

A front door key sounded in the lock.

‘—always busy, no matter what time of the day or night,’ said Mum from the hallway.

‘They should never have put a roundabout there in the first place,’ said Dad.

‘Oh, you still up, Mum?’ said Mum to Grandma Lake, who was in the hallway.

‘I’m off to bed, it’s past my bedtime. You need your sleep at my age,’ said Grandma Lake accusingly as she commenced her ascent of the stairs.

‘Goodnight then,’ called Dad, a little ironically.

Mum and Dad came into the lounge and Jennifer jumped to her feet. Dad stopped in the doorway, unzipping his jacket. Mum stepped around him, placing her handbag on the sofa, pulling off her coat. The room suddenly smelled of damp autumn air and alcohol and cigarettes.

They both stared at her wordlessly.

This was the moment they were going to notice Charlotte’s black sweatshirt and jeans.

‘I won at Monopoly,’ said Graham, pre-empting a question he clearly assumed Mum and Dad were poised to ask. ‘I had everything but Whitechapel and Old Kent Road and Angel and the Waterworks.’

‘Doug still owes us for that last round, you know,’ said Dad, turning to Mum and pulling his wallet out of his coat pocket. ‘And I bought him a double, too.’

‘Not
The Magnificent Seven
again!’ groaned Mum, and it became obvious no one was going to notice the black sweatshirt and jeans. No one was going to notice anything.

‘No, Adrian,’ she had said. ‘I don’t think Charlotte would go out with you,
actually
.’ And then she had said: ‘Because she’s already going out with Zoe Findlay,
actually
!’

And everyone had stared. Not at Adrian. At her. She’d spun around and run out and no one had come after her and no one had retrieved her handbag from the pile on the floor so that she had had to come back later and get it herself. And the next week there had been graffiti on the wall of the girls’ toilets.

T
HE TOP-FLOOR LANDING of number 86 Randolph Gardens, SW4, was lit by the feeble glow of a single twenty-five-watt light bulb and by the time Jennifer had run up four flights of stairs and negotiated the double-key deadlock in the semi-darkness, dumped her briefcase, coat and keys and reached for the telephone, whoever was calling her had finished leaving their message and hung up and the answering machine was flashing self-importantly.

‘Shit!’ said Jennifer.

She closed the front door, cutting off the feeble light from the landing and plunging her hallway into darkness. Distant hip hop flooded up from the ground-floor.

Her flat was the converted upper floor of a mid-Victorian terrace in Clapham. An attic, perhaps a servant’s quarters in some other era, it was now the abode of a never-ending stream of unmarried city workers. In that earlier era cattle had still grazed on the nearby common and marshes still bordered some parts of Clapham village. A century and a half later Randolph Gardens was situated in the centre of a triangle formed by Clapham Junction, Wandsworth Road and Queenstown Road station. In summer the rattle of two thousand trains travelling daily to and from Waterloo and Victoria carried over the air. But in January, four flights up, the sounds were muffled: traffic on the main road, a single police siren, a distant shop alarm, hip hop.

The light on the answering machine flashed once, twice, three times, reflecting off the window and bathing the room intermittently in a lurid red glow.

It was freezing.

Jennifer flicked the light switch and turned the central heating on full. It had a timer switch which meant you could set it to come on an hour before you got home, but she had never figured out how it worked. Besides, what kind of person always knew what time they’d get home?

She recovered her coat, keys and briefcase from the hallway and carried them to the sofa, then turned to study the three envelopes she’d retrieved from her letterbox. Internet bill. British Telecom bill. Mobile phone bill. She cleared a space on the kitchen table and filed them there. Most of the calls would be to Nick’s mobile, and when most of your calls were to your ex, that was depressing. He, too, rang her much more often now that they were no longer married.

It was ten o’clock on Friday evening. She’d worked late to catch up after yesterday’s jaunt up north then gone to Vino Tinto around the corner where she’d downed two overpriced caipiroskas, been propositioned by a Norwegian software manufacturer, seen Gloria sitting in a dark nook with Adam Finch, their heads bent close together, and come home. The Northern Line had been experiencing delays and she’d waited twenty minutes at Stockwell for a train and now it was too late to make arrangements with anyone and too early to go to bed. Ten o’clock at home on a Friday evening.

She pressed the PLAY button on the answering machine.

‘
Jen, sweetie, it’s Kim. Just wanted to say thanks so much for helping out Monday evening—it went well, didn’t it? And you were fabulous, of course. Sorry about the last-minute mix-up; Gerry is an idiot but you rose to the occasion sensationally. Anyway, I owe you. Come over for stuffed aubergines one night. Ciao!
’

You sure do owe me, thought Jennifer sourly, particularly if anyone else in her family had decided to watch the broadcast on Tuesday.