Love Will Tear Us Apart Page 7

  The plan was set and Paul and I figured we’d get to Bristol, find the Hippodrome and buy tickets when we arrived.

  I went home after school, did my hair and make-up, changed my clothes and grabbed a fistful of money left for ‘food, or school things or what have you’ by my dad before he left for Czechoslovakia a few days before.

  I’d essentially dressed like Pete Burns from Dead or Alive, who were big at the time, my hair crimped and back-combed, a satin shirt I’d swiped from my mum’s wardrobe and a denim skirt. When Paul opened his door to me, he was wearing his mum’s blouse unbuttoned to the waist, black Morrissey-style glasses and drainpipe jeans. We looked at each other approvingly.

  Paul’s glasses were actually varifocals that he’d found in the Save the Children in Castle Cary. He couldn’t get to grips with them, walking like a man on the moon as the ground seemed to rush up to him, and grabbing hold of my arm for support every few steps. In the end I took them from his nose and popped the lenses out before giving them back.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, and we ran the rest of the way.

  ‘What are you two dressed as?’ The old man in the ticket office at Castle Cary station asked. We looked at each other as if for the first time. Paul with his little pigeon chest on display, my ludicrous hairstyle and daytime satin.

  ‘Two child returns to Bristol Temple Meads,’ I said, with less conviction than intended.

  The old man passed the tickets over, laughing. ‘Carnival’s not ’til October,’ he added.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Paul said, solemnly.

  ‘Thank you, sir!’ This made us laugh again and again as the afternoon train wheezed along towards Taunton.

  ‘I don’t look stupid, do I?’ I asked, tugging my crinkled hair.

  ‘No, you look ace,’ Paul answered emphatically.

  ‘You look ace,’ I replied.

  We arrived in Bristol at gone six. A group of older teenagers with Smiths T-shirts hopped off the train in front of us so we tracked them like shoddily conspicuous spies until one of them stopped and turned back.

  ‘You going to the Hippodrome?’ he asked, the start of a bum-fluff beard impressing us.

  ‘Yeah,’ Paul said, flicking his hair out of his eyes. I noticed with affection that he tried to make his voice sound gruffer when even now it’s gentle.

  ‘Wanna walk with us?’

  We trudged in excited silence, bellies rumbling as we were used to having the tea that Viv had left for us by now. A big bottle of Coke was being passed around among the group, whose names we never learned. They seemed like a serious bunch, aged sixteen or so. When the drink came to me, I took a big thirsty swig only to cough it all back up. It’d been boosted with cheap vodka. Paul took a more cautious sip and passed it on, quickly.

  ‘What time are they on?’ Paul, emboldened, asked the bum-fluff guy.

  ‘Who, the support?’

  ‘Er, yeah.’

  ‘Half seven. It says on your ticket.’

  Paul and I looked at each other.

  ‘You’ve got tickets, haven’t you?’ We looked at each other and blushed.

  The plan, as devised by our new gig-going ‘mentors’, was to find a ‘tout’ outside the venue. This was a shady kind of character we’d not heard of before, naively believing that we’d be able to stroll up to the box office and buy a pair of tickets, though the gig had been long sold out. As we approached the building, a snake of flower-holding, weedy-looking poets shuffled around on the pavement out front. Some of them were stooped, others were sitting on the floor with their sprawling Doctor Martens littering the path. I felt foolish in my off-genre outfit and guilty that Paul had to be seen with me after he’d done a much better job of dressing for the occasion.

  As the crowd made its way inside, we spotted some scruffy older guys looking shifty. A couple of the group we’d latched on to went over with my money to check if they were selling weed or tickets and came back with both. The former being some kind of commission that had not been pre-agreed but we pretended to be fine with that.

  We lost the older group as soon as we were inside the Hippodrome, pushing our way through the smoky crowd and claiming a little spot somewhere in the middle just after James – the support act – had left the stage.

  When Johnny Marr jangled those opening chords to ‘William It Was Nothing’, Paul grabbed my hand, kissed my cheek and jumped on the spot.

  When I remember that night now, it’s in black and white. For a first gig, we could not have asked for more. At forty years old, I still feel a surge of teenage pride for going.

  ———

  Days later Viv had called through to us from the kitchen where she was doing laundry. ‘Why is my good blouse in your basket, Paul?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I answered loudly for him, my volume still scrambled from the ringing in my ears. ‘That was me, I borrowed it to try on and—’

  ‘Why does it smell of smoke?’ she interrupted. Paul and I looked at each other in a panic.

  ‘I took ’em to the pub with me,’ Mick said from the sofa, without looking up from his Daily Star.

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ he said quietly to us, trying not to smile.

  The funny thing, looking back, is how many times the girls at my school would brag about doing things with boys and having secret rendezvous and here I was, sleeping in a boy’s room almost every night and sneaking out to go to concerts. But I never said a word to my classmates. I couldn’t bring myself to shape it like that.

  I think Viv and Mick might have worried more about us fooling around had they not been convinced that Paul was gay. Viv’s childhood experiences of her male relatives left no room for foppish, soft-handed boys who were also heterosexual. And Mick didn’t understand Paul at all. However, he never pushed his son to change or to ‘man up’, and he must have taken flack for it at the pub, especially when Paul started to affect a fey walk around the village, confusing camp for poetic.

  Viv didn’t seem to care if Paul was gay or not, even in those clumsy days of stereotypical sitcom characters and mean-spirited jokes. She just adored him.

  And Paul adored his mum back. He tried to play it down but I knew. One time, when Paul was little and before we were friends, Mick had done some work for a cash-rich ‘it fell off the back of a lorry’ type, called Bob. And one day, after dropping Mick off, Bob had given Paul a fiver, sloughing it from a stack.

  Armed with his fiver, Paul walked into town all by himself at the age of seven. He spent the money on a gold-plated necklace for Viv. She wore it with pride every single day.

  When Viv spoke about things that mattered to her, she put her hand flat on the top of her chest so the little gold necklace was pressed against her palm. When she talked about Paul and me, about our futures or our talents, the things that made her proud, her hand would creep up unconsciously. Many years later, when she watched us get married, she made this gesture. And then her eyes had sprung with tears and a strange rictus smile had ground her to the spot.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  November 2012 – Tuesday morning

  I wake up again. I think an hour or more has passed. Downstairs, I can hear wails from Izzy and muffled protests from Harry. As I tug my jeans on, I notice the waistband is looser than I realised. It’s not a surprise, my appetite slid to the gutter as soon as I found the letter. It’s been almost as hard to hide that as to hide the letter itself.

  I hear footsteps crashing upstairs followed by Paul bellowing, ‘Go and cool off!’

  I stumble out and pause by Harry’s room, poised to knock. But I don’t knock. I can hear his breathing from my side of the door, steaming, fast breaths, like a charging bull in slow motion. Like his father. It’s best to just stay out of the way when they’re like this.

  Izzy’s sing-song giggles flutter out from the lounge and I head towards them, hoping to get in on the act but the laughing stops when I walk in.

  ‘Sounds like you’re having fun,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah,’ s
ays Izzy, and flops onto her belly in front of the television. ‘Harry was being really naughty though.’

  ‘What did he do?’ I ask Paul, in the same insipid and cautious tone I’ve been talking to Izzy.

  Paul groans a little as he gets up and goes into the kitchen, asks if I want a tea without looking back.

  I’m rarely privy to their fun. Izzy is the very definition of a daddy’s girl. She belongs to him and he to her. She mimics him, does everything she can to get and hold his attention. He seeks her approval like a lovesick teenager. Like him when he was a teenager.

  She was hard-won. After the first six months of negative tests and unwanted periods that increasingly felt like taunts, we ramped up the sex. Daily bouts of angry, defensive love-making ‘just in case ovulation is out of whack’. Paul blamed me, though he never explicitly said so. I blamed me. We could only bring ourselves to fight that fight for a few more months after which we stumped up for our first round of IVF. We did everything they told us but it didn’t work. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work. The stupid thing, though, is that you always believe, on some level, that it will.

  The second time, because we had a failed attempt under our belts, they punctured the outer shell of the two embryos to give them a better chance of implanting. I imagined the doctors scratching at our babies, and struggled to sleep for the images. All of the injections, seasickness, spots, excruciating extraction of the eggs and even the previous failure had been building up to that second IVF cycle. Despite the damp squib of round one, it felt like momentum would somehow carry us through this time. It felt like fair’s fair, it had to happen.

  During the two-week wait to find out if they’d ‘taken’, we even started to worry about handling twins. We started to write lists of all the double items we’d need, talked bedtime logistics and night nurses.

  I took the pregnancy test in our en suite, getting up at five in the morning to use that hallowed first piss of the day. Afterwards, I sat on the loo with the negative test in my hand for twenty-five minutes before waking Paul. Breaking it to him. Holding his head to my chest.

  By the third round, I was a tight knot of hormones, emotions and spots. Our whole lives had started to revolve around injections, clinic appointments and small, sturdy sample pots. I worked myself up into an exhausting frenzy watching Harry sleep every night, suddenly all the more aware of how precious he was.

  If the third round hadn’t worked, I wanted to stop. To draw a line in the sand. A circle around the three of us.

  Harry would have been enough for me. He was the love of my life. Unlike Paul, I was still so in awe of that rowdy little article that I didn’t see an insurmountable loss in sticking with what we had. We’d have had to write off the thousands of pounds that we – Paul – had already ploughed into the endeavour, but it was hardly a good use of savings to keep throwing money into a black, scarred pit. As much as I liked the idea of giving Harry a sibling, that territory also felt uncharted, unreal and suddenly unlikely.

  A few days before test day, I tried to tell Paul that I was ready to stop. He looked so horrified by the opening bars of the conversation that I back pedalled wildly. And then, of course, that cycle worked. One of the embryos didn’t make it but Izzy did. And she’s been making herself known ever since.

  I had a tricky pregnancy – ‘high risk’ – needing weeks and weeks of bed rest. I lay on our bed like a big fat hen on top of the most precious golden egg. Harry and his little elbows and his excitement were kept from me at all costs. A nanny was brought in to look after him, while I lay upstairs too scared to move in case I shook the precious pearl free too soon. Like the cows and calves in the cruel Somerset summer, I could hear Harry cry for me as I lay murmuring for him. At thirty-six weeks, it became too much and I edged out of bed to go down to him, my waters breaking before I reached the doorknob.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1985

  After a year of extended absences that Viv had started to ask me about in increasingly concerned tones, my mum came home. Unfortunately, most of her time in Somerset was then spent being ill.

  The lie-ins seemed to last longer and longer until they overlapped and she wasn’t getting up for days on end by the summer. She had a constant cold and needed thick bedding even in July, but complained that she felt grotesque from night sweats. She wasn’t really complaining to me, as such. She was just complaining in general and I was the only person who tended to hover near her bed long enough to hear it.

  Sometimes she would tell me stories from college, or talk about the boys at the Blitz Club, muddling up years and months, sometimes, I suspect, confusing me for someone else in her feverish confusion.

  We’d planned to watch the Live Aid concerts together that summer, using an extension lead to wheel the large television out onto the patio area. But when she didn’t come downstairs that Saturday as planned, I crept up into her room. I was wearing a bikini top and shorts, my shoulders pink from sitting outside for just a few moments, trying to work out where best to put the TV.

  As I approached the bed, I realised how thin and pale my mum’s arms were. I saw a thick purple mark on her chest, peeping out from her nightdress. I knew not to ask.

  ‘Hello, you,’ she said softly, panting a little as she propped herself up with a pile of white pillows.

  ‘Can we watch it in here, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘The concert? Is that today already?’

  She crunched the remote control to get BBC 1 up on the screen and I scrambled up onto the bed.

  As Richard Skinner came on the screen to introduce the event, I lay down on my belly with my feet up near the pillow, chin resting on my hands at the foot of the bed.

  About half an hour in, I looked around to smile at Mum as Style Council walked onstage, not that either of us liked them, but her eyes were rolling back and her mouth was slack.

  The blistering day outside eventually cooled in the hours that we lay there, while my calves swayed in the air in a mimic of the crowd’s arms.

  I stayed on her bed until Phil Collins reappeared on the screen, nudging my mum to try to tell her that Concorde had flown him from London to Philadelphia to play again. She either didn’t wake or didn’t care so I flopped off the bed and went downstairs to make myself some toast before going to my room.

  She slept until the early hours, when I was woken up by her shuffling slowly along the hall. I considered going to see if she was okay, until I heard her pass my room and head towards my father’s. That was when I really started to worry.

  After the strange, shadowy summer that year, I was almost relieved to get back to the routines of September. Almost. School started later for me than Paul that year so for his first week, I waited outside Ansell’s gates to walk home with him. Every day we were trailed by a group of boys from his class yelling sexual suggestions and asking Paul repeatedly if my pubes were red like my hair. They hadn’t put it quite like that.

  ‘Oi short arse, do ’er collars match ’er cuffs?’ was the politest version.

  ‘Sorry,’ Paul would say repeatedly, as if he was in any way responsible.

  ‘I don’t give a shit,’ I lied, my heart thumping as they yelled and stamped along behind us.

  On the final day that I walked home with him, they threw a small rock which sailed over Paul’s head and hit my cheek. I spun around, tears in my eyes and a dotted red line on my cheek. The boys ran off at the sight of blood and trouble, and Paul angrily threw the stone back at them, hitting one of their duffle bags.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that, they’ll give you hell next week,’ I said, although I was tremendously grateful.

  ‘If I wasn’t such a short arse, it would’ve hit me,’ he said, apologetically.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I said, and remembered to stoop a little for the rest of the walk.

  Paul was always waiting for a growth spurt that never came. He felt it had been promised to him.

  ‘You’ll catch Katie up soon, Paul,’ Viv always said. ‘It�
��ll happen when you hit your teens, you’ll see. That’s when the boys take over.’ Because Viv was a nurse and had worked on the children’s ward before intensive care, Paul took her words as gospel truth.

  When he reached thirteen that September and I was still an inch taller, he was furious.

  Paul’s dad Mick was tall. Tallish, anyway. Five foot ten, maybe. Viv was small, just a little over five foot. Paul held her largely responsible for his stature, even though he eventually reached average height. He didn’t thank her for the intelligence, the creativity, the fierce eyes he’d inherited. He also didn’t thank her for the adoration or the sacrifices or the encouragement. Kids don’t thank, do they. Not if they’ve always been given these things without question.

  I thanked her. She adored me, made sacrifices for me and encouraged me. And I thanked her. Because she didn’t have to do any of those things.

  ‘I think Mum always wanted a girl,’ Paul had once huffed in a way that I think was intended to be light-hearted but didn’t land like that. He was sore because Viv had used the Focus Points she’d saved from Mick’s fag packets to buy me a little art set as a gift.

  ‘Don’t be a dick, Paul.’

  ‘You’re the dick.’

  ‘No, you’re the dick.’

  And so on.

  We’d never really fallen out before, but I noticed that we were bickering more and more that year. I felt like Paul was seeing me for the first time, fully seeing me and all my differences. And he seemed to hold me accountable. That my family had money, that I was tall.

  We scrapped and bickered and tussled and I would sometimes catch Paul glaring at my long legs. And he sometimes caught me narrowing my eyes at him as he rolled his eyes at his mum. We started to do this a lot. Perhaps it was catching, because while we bickered upstairs, Paul’s mum and dad bickered downstairs. Mostly it was just sniping, the kind of argument that simmered and then cooled without ever really boiling. The kind that comes from tiredness or low blood sugar or a red bill that needs to be paid.