Four New Words for Love Read online

  I went down next day and demanded to see the boss. He was a man. I started in tears. It was a blinding performance. I didn’t find it difficult. I’ve got a whole stock of sad things I can think about to turn it on at any time. If all else fails I think about Kevin.

  It worked. But it turned out that either I’d overestimated my powers of persuasion or the range of available housing stock. I imagined a balancing act: good flat in a crap area or crap flat in a good area – high ceilings versus good schools. I got a crap flat in a crap area with the disadvantage of being within stumbling distance of Dad. Write down this address on any employment questionnaire and watch your chances go down the toilet. Local shops have bars on the inside. There are attempts at what the local rag calls ‘encroaching gentility’. I live on the fourteenth floor. If I go on to the roof with a telescope I might be able to spot a delicatessen within visible radius. I don’t know what direction gentility is encroaching from, but it’s running as fast as fuck away from me, Dad, Lolly and everyone else I know.

  Of all people it was Dad and his gargling cronies who came up trumps. Pool their resources and I thought all you’d get would be a collection of tumours, but, hats off, they came up with cutlery, a sofa, saucepans, a radio, a telly and loads of other stuff. The cutlery had GCC stamped on it. Glasgow City Corporation went out of existence before I was born. That was the oldest of the knocked-off stuff. The sofa gave off cartoon noises when you sat or stood, and unless you knew about it there was a crevasse just off-centre that could lead to sudden intimacy, or spillage. I got to know its quirks and didn’t mind using it till Lolly said I might have been conceived there. I can scarcely imagine, and that’s saying something, that collision. I get as far as the two of them approaching one another through a pea-super of mutual fag smoke, then there’s an image of Dad’s hand, with its crescents of nicotine, vibrating like a tuning fork, touching Mum’s face and the image derails in a hot flush of horror.

  Patrick, one of Dad’s cronies with the same grog-blossom nose that seems to be the badge of the gang, turned up one afternoon with towels, still damp and with a stray sock in one of the folds. He told me it might not be a good idea to visit the laundrette for a couple of weeks. There was no need because the next day Dad, Patrick and another of the gang I don’t know, turned up with a washing machine. The third man was introduced as Tam, and he made Dad look healthy. It’s obvious they didn’t catch a lot of daylight. They stood squinting in the afternoon sun, Tam looking like Nosferatu turned vegan, coughing up some kind of resin. Looking down on them from the fourteenth floor unloading the thing he seemed to have surrounded the washing machine with pats of shining frog spawn. The lift, miraculously, worked that day. Perhaps there is a God. Lolly and me manhandled the machine in and out. The fittings were there. Lolly got on all fours and plumbed it in while they unashamedly studied her arse, standing around like redundant porters. I produced a can each of the cheap stuff I kept for Dad and they opened them in frothy plumes. They all agreed that the beer was too warm. Lolly straightened and said they should see about getting me a fridge then. They did that too. On first opening, the washing machine gave up a sock. It would have been too much to hope for it being the mate of the one delivered with Patrick’s towels. Perhaps there isn’t a God.

  The only thing I can guarantee was bought was the Lladro shepherdess, complete with Bo Peep outfit and a bona fide receipt, that Dad delivered in a box. It was hideous. He was so proud of it he didn’t trust himself to take it out the tissue. God knows I could have used the money instead, but I trotted it out with the lager and the custard creams whenever he came round.

  So Lolly and I saw in my twentieth birthday in a council high-rise on a burst sofa surrounded by a load of dodgy gear. I didn’t look pregnant, although I’d had the doctor confirm the cinema toilet result. It was too much to expect empathy, but what I wasn’t prepared for was Lolly’s non-stop use of the flat. Until then indoor sex depended on someone’s parents being out, although in summer any dry flat surface will do and she’s got a genius for erotic improvisation. But I felt resentment rise as night after night I could hear her gymnastic climaxes from the next room. The inside walls feel as if they’re made of compressed egg boxes. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination. My temper snapped when a big show-down I was waiting for in Coronation Street was blotted out by another supersonic shriek. I banged the wall and shouted to her that I had to see her now. I didn’t have long to wait. She normally packs them off as soon as they’ve served their purpose: post-coital fag, slam of a door, gone. I don’t even know if the same one reappeared or it was a succession of new ones. They all looked the same anyway.

  ‘I’m not running a fucking knocking shop. Here’s me, abandoned. That’ll be the baby’s nursery. You’re desecrating it.’

  ‘Listen to yourself. Abandoned? Who by? Does he even know? Have you tried to tell him? The truth is that you don’t like depending on anyone except the Social and only then because it’s not a person. You like the idea of being some lonely heroine in a tower even if it’s a fucking dump with a broken lift. It makes you feel different. And what’s so different? You’re up the stick and unmarried. Look around! Even if you had someone who’d stick around, he’d probably slap you about a bit every time his team lost, like half the poor fucking cows around here. “Abandoned”? “Nursery”? “Desecrating”? I must’ve stumbled into 1940. Let me know when the all clear sounds.’

  I didn’t deserve that. I think she’d been bottling something up too, although God knows it wasn’t sexual frustration. She wasn’t right about everything but she was right about a lot of it. She knows me better than anyone. She’s not bright, but she’s got the sharpest instinct I’ve ever come across. After that tsunami her big orange chest was heaving up and down. I could see the half inch roots of her parting, and it suddenly occurred to me that if she’d only stop barbecuing herself on sun beds, and saturating her head with chemicals, she’d be the pale, pleasantly-plump grown up evolving from school photos, not this tangerine caricature in shag-me shoes. And somehow, looking at her just then, I saw all the increments she’d grown out of, like an insect shedding skins, each stage captured by the countless photos we’d taken together: the skinny kid, the pale pubescent, the top-heavy teenager, the chip shop sex bomb, and now this. I’d fallen into her fatal habit of nostalgia. But I’d seen all of her stages and I loved them all.

  ‘I love you,’ I said, and burst into tears. My hormones were all over the place.

  ‘I love you too.’ Her sobs are volcanic. When I’m with her I understand what the phrase to fall into someone’s arms means.

  ‘It’s a pity we’re not lesbos. It would make life a lot simpler.’

  ‘I like cock too much,’ she said. We both burst out laughing, uncontrollably, till it was near hysteria. I looked down. The bump was visible. It might have been the tears but I swear my ankles looked swollen. I faced a vista of support tights drying over radiators on loveless nights.

  ‘I’ll never find anyone now,’ I said and burst into tears again. That set her off. We were just two heads, four arms, four breasts and two bodies convulsing. Looking over her shoulder I could see the whippet-thin specimen that she hadn’t yet kicked out, standing in the hall. He was swaying from foot to foot, looking frightened. His instinct was to run, but I think he still thought it worth hanging around in case another go on the swings was still on the cards. His eyes were on stalks at the mention of lesbians. I think he thought all his Christmases might have come at once. He coughed to let her know that he was still there. She made an irritated flick behind her back, without turning round, waving him to bugger off. He looked punctured and closed the door behind him. I stopped crying. So did she.

  ‘Why do you always go for them?’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘No I mean them, the under-nourished specimens.’

  ‘I don’t know. Staying power? I didn’t think there was a type.’

  But there was, and I don’t think their sele
ction had anything to do with stamina. They were all the colour of sticking plaster gone through the wash. They all looked like illegal immigrants. There was something of the panting fugitive in every one. I thought of them as bowling pins, knocked over by her orgasmic onslaught, once seen easily forgotten, interchangeable, dispensable. She did too. I’ve a theory their selection was unconscious, a genetic thing she doesn’t understand, Lolly’s slob fat genes screaming out for slob skinny genes to make a normal slob, and those deluxe ovaries of hers destined to be thwarted by the barrage of precautions she took.

  The truth was that I was jealous and not just for the company. My libido see-sawed wildly with my mood swings, and I needed something to stop my plunging self-confidence. I felt I couldn’t be less attractive and I made the mistake of telling her. She moved towards the door.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Calling him back.’

  ‘Even if I did find him attractive, I draw the line at your cast-offs.’

  ‘Please yourself. Get changed and then we’ll go out and get two more.’

  But I don’t get changed, the way Lolly does, have a shower and put some slap on and leave your whole history behind you with the pubes in the plug hole. I’m not going to trawl myself round town pouring drink down my neck and stunt my baby just to forget why I got here. I don’t undergo Friday night transformations. I’m the sum of my past, the way Lolly isn’t.

  She took the hint, not just about that night but about my situation. She only ever brought men back when she’d run out of all other possibilities, and she was as quiet as someone with no interior life, and the bedroom manners of the Hulk with a hard-on can be. I spent a lot of nights in. Sometimes, if it was late and I was already in bed, I would hear the key scrape in the lock and then she’d be in my kitchen, by the sound of it banging together the only two pots I owned, although God alone knows why because she can’t cook a thing. And if I suddenly felt more lonely, more unattractive than I normally felt, that uncanny instinct of hers would smell it, the clattering would stop and I’d hear her have a quick pee and a quicker brush of her teeth, and then she’d climb in beside me and say ‘budge up’, while the weight of her bulk had already pushed me onto the cold bit, and she’d put her arms around me and I’d say something like: ‘I hope his intentions were honourable. And by the way, can you at least bring your own fucking toothbrush next time.’ And she’d say something like: ‘If you ever hear me sounding as old as you, feel free to kill me in my sleep. Please.’

  At that time I’d a part-time job in town working as a window dresser, cash in hand to avoid the Social. Thinking back, it shows the kind of blunt stupidity I’d normally credit Lolly with. Who’s more likely to be seen by a benefit spy than someone who spends part of their time on display? I wasn’t a natural. All my artistic flair was taken up by the flat. I use an upturned crate as a coffee table. I have my own style – fucking skint urban rustic. It’s a minimalist approach that has to do with minimal money and the need to hide everything at short notice from the police. I did what I was told in the shop. One afternoon I was half-way up a ladder when suddenly I knew that something wasn’t right.

  I walked home, which was stupid. I called Lolly, which wasn’t any cleverer. Her medical expertise is all used up by remembering to take the pill. She called the doctor. Even before she arrived I’d started to bleed. She called an ambulance. Lolly came with me. All of a sudden I wasn’t pregnant any more.

  They kept me in for three days. They were very nice. They told me it wasn’t as uncommon as I might think. I didn’t think – the frequency of miscarriages hadn’t occurred to me at all. They told me that as far as they could tell ‘It wouldn’t compromise your chances of conceiving again’. When you’re single and twenty and broke, that isn’t really the consolation it’s meant to be. They said that none of the complications that can result had occurred. ‘Everything,’ they said, ‘had come away cleanly’. ‘Everything.’ None of this was said unkindly. I thought: a discharge without complications then. I didn’t feel anything, except a sense of dread that the vacuum was about to be filled by something worse than a sense of emptiness. There were four of us in the room, Lolly’s hand welded to mine, and I didn’t want to give way in front of strangers. One day you’re pregnant and the next day you’re not. A discharge without complications. All the complications have been removed. So they discharged me.

  ‘Everything’ hadn’t come away. ‘Everything’ was the half of it. I started crying on the landing before I got to the door. Lolly fumbled the keys because she couldn’t see the lock. She bundled me in as if trying to barricade all the accumulated grief on the outside. Everything made me cry. Everything. I don’t mean kid’s stuff because at least I’d had the common sense not to buy anything till nearer the time, when I would have been surer of the outcome. The things a dead child leaves behind must be the saddest furniture in the world. Imagine moving a sofa and finding a dusty bear, haemorrhaging stuffing. It would kill you stone-fucking dead on the spot. Or even worse – it wouldn’t.

  I didn’t have that to put up with. I didn’t need it. The excuse for tears was all around: the spatula stuck in the cold fat of the frying pan that I’d intended cleaning after work; the balled-up tights thrown in the direction of the washing basket; the toothpaste Lolly had squeezed from the middle although I always tell her not to; the discarded cap with the hard crust. These were all mementos of a past life three days ago when I had a baby inside. The fridge magnets made me cry. The Hoover made me cry. Lolly had actually gone out and bought food of some description. She hasn’t a penny. The generosity of all that ready-made tat, stacked like bricks in the fridge, made me cry. I wasn’t crying for the life that wouldn’t be, the Disney scenarios that Dad dreamed up. I wasn’t crying at being thwarted because I thought I’d some vocation as a mum. It was some kind of purge. When I wasn’t crying out loud I was crying silently. Lolly said I cried in my sleep. When I got out the bath it was deeper. Dad came round and stared at the crap carpet, being all silent and strong. He’s got a face like a roadmap anyway but the lines had formed themselves into a mask of complete misery. He didn’t say a single thing until he felt himself about to cave in, so he got up and left. Except that he turned round at the front door and said, ‘Was it a boy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s what I had hoped for, a boy. I wanted you to call him Kevin.’ Which wasn’t deliberate but was just about the worst possible thing to say to me just then. He’s not selfish but I’ve never met an alcoholic who isn’t the centre of their own needy world.

  After that I cried all through afternoon telly. Lolly joined in. The sofa became a blancmange. I fell asleep at Countdown and woke up during the late news. We were sitting on an atoll ringed with paper hankies, an ankle-deep reef of tears and crisping snotters. I’d been crying for a week. I took stock.

  ‘Enough’s enough,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want to get changed and go out then?’

  ‘You got over that quick enough!’

  ‘I think you’ll find half of those fucking hankies are mine!’

  But I didn’t want to go out just then, or the day after that, or the day after that, or the number of days it took me to reach some kind of balance. So Lolly went out to get some fish suppers because the pre-prepared crap in the fridge didn’t appeal, and I bagged the hankies and, among the debris, found the remote that had somehow got lost during that lost week. I ate at her nagging and flicked the channels. I didn’t have the attention for anything. Her patience lasted a whole minute.

  ‘For fuck’s sake let’s watch something! I don’t care if it’s Gardeners’ World but let’s watch something!’

  ‘Lolly.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Any time. Give us the remote.’

  So she stayed, again and again. And I did go out in a series of excursions, to the corner shop, the cinema, the radius widening with each trip. And although Lolly’s dope smoke makes imparti
al thought almost impossible I do think, standing here by the window, that I’ve reached some kind of balance. Unless I’m here the minute will pass with no one to appreciate it and all that beauty will go to waste.

  She’s fussing with the camera’s self timer, balancing it on the crate, and there’s a lot of breathing and swearing. She insists I sit on the sofa. The flash goes off as she turns towards me. Her arse has filled the foreground and that’s all she’s succeeded in taking a picture of. She turns back. There’s more fussing and swearing. She touches the button and throws herself on the sofa. It lets out a groan as I’m levered off the cushion. There must be two clear inches of daylight between my arse and the fabric when the flash goes and captures me levitated, Lolly’s arm halfway round my neck.

  ‘Try and remember the maths next time. Fat girl jumps on sofa equals skinny girl airborne.’ But she’s not listening. She’ll spend ages setting up a photo and lose interest the instant it’s taken. I go to the window and step out onto the balcony. The minute has arrived. The smell of warm tar and cut grass rises up from the street below with the sound of kids playing football. The high-rise across the way has turned crimson, the windows flashing like sequins. The bend of the river is a molten curve. The whole landscape looks as if it’s been dipped in honey, hiding, for the length of the illusion, the litter, the syringes, the half-submerged trolleys. ‘Come and look,’ I say, but when I glance across at her she has this underwater look, as the last sucked-down lungful hits. I turn back for the last heartbreaking thirty seconds, standing on this platform in the saffron air. The ball below hits a car, setting off the alarm. An adult shouts. The kids scatter. The spell breaks. The colours fade.