Yes Yes More More Read online

  You are supposed to have sex now, once you’re in the room with your knickers off. He is clammy and on top of me, trying to fold his not-quite-hard penis into me. I kiss him, which is to balm the embarrassment or to make him feel he is not a vile, lurching thug of a failure. I don’t feel a thing when he’s pushing into me, huffing into my ear, except his weight on my chest. I pull my knees right up but it makes no difference. Drink has deadened me from the waist down. I’m going to stop pretending now so I pull away, slide to one side. He pulls me over and on top of him, so I keep going. From here I can pull on his sticky skin, push and twist his doughy stomach. I push the heel of my hand into his ribs and wonder what’s in there. Which is not his idea of fun so he rolls over on top of me again. I tell him no and I push him off me. “What, you came already?” he asks, a bit annoyed. I head to the bathroom and sit on the toilet. It’s quiet and warm and peaceful in there, solid walls around me. When I go back to bed and lie down he rolls on top of me again without saying a word.

  “Is this, is wha-,” I say.

  “Shhh,” he says, all gently in my ear. I move around and make noises to try to hurry it up. Then I say, “Come on my belly, baby, come on my belly,” because I think he probably isn’t wearing a condom. Maybe my accent sounds sexy to him.

  “You want me to come on you,” he says, not a question, all husky and delighted. I guess he does because when I wake up, he has.

  The drummer is there, asleep on the next bed, in his Eyehategod T-shirt and his dirty skinny jeans and Converse. The door opens and another man walks in with two paper cups of coffee. I have never seen him before. I pull my pants and jeans on, slowly and without turning away.

  The coffee man says hello, shakes my hand. He’s American too, thinks it’s English and proper and funny to shake my hand.

  “You want this, honey?” he asks. He gives me the drummer’s coffee and puts the other one down very slowly and carefully on the little table between the beds.

  “I’ll take it with me.” I want to be outside on my own under the autumn sky with a hot drink in my hand. The bass player, who is now rubbing my lower back, pulls on his lee-zure slacks and walks me out to the hallway.

  “Nice to meet you,” and he slides one hand down my breast and belly. “No babies, okay?” He’s swaying a little. It is too late to make things nice but I try when I smile at him and say, “You too,” and try to look wholesome and like I’m in his gang. The corridor is dimly lit and I’m not sure which direction to go in so I stride down and wait until I hear their door close. Then I just keep striding, to find out if I’m going the right way. The stairs are shallow and wide and they swoop around and down.

  The day has been here for hours, so I’m out of sync when I walk out of the big front door and turn left onto the pavement and straight ahead and then left again and wonder where I am. There’s the park across the road. Here’s a street sign with a postcode I’m not usually in.

  I call Stella and she’s at work, in the office but taking naps in the toilets, she tells me, every hour or so, “like a tramp with a computer and a salary”. She’s eaten a veggie burger from the cafe over the road, a chunky Kitkat, four mugs of tea, a bottle of Purdey’s and three glasses of water with two Berocca in each of them.

  Her voice is giddy. She got a taxi home at five. She doesn’t ask me about the hotel and I don’t tell her anything, just what the street signs say so she can look it up online and tell me which direction to walk in.

  Then she hangs up, off to buy more Purdey’s, and I think about the speed of the traffic rushing past me on Bayswater Road, the weight of each vehicle. Mass times acceleration equals feel better now. I look at the kerb and I think about the here and the there. Here and over there, not far at all. The leaves on the trees are turning, and falling.

  ‌Pussycat

  Consent is clear with my pussycat. Her soft white belly all furry fluff with those little pink nipples that I can’t quite see. Six of them, is it, or eight? I can’t go near that belly, she’d bite me or – slightly more likely – she’d bite me and then she’d dig every one of her claws – four paws and I don’t know how many claws – into the tender base of my thumb, the back of my hand, my wrist, my forearm. Blood and pain and clarity. Consent is clear with my pussycat.

  ‌Lauren, Our Path Emerges For a While

  Where is Lauren? Is she in the muddy rotting leaves under our feet? Is she in my muscle and bone, did I eat her, reabsorb her, burn her up like fuel? She is underneath the surface of the water, apparently, ready to talk, laugh, listen, hug me, curl up on my lap like she did when she was a baby, my little girl with her small shoes and brown eyes and her sweet fat cheeks.

  Lauren is dead and I miss her. Lauren is dead dead dead and I miss her.

  A few weeks ago I was out on the heath for the first time in a long time, and I saw Lauren’s best friend, Claire, her best friend from school and her best friend right up until Lauren was killed in that car. It’s been decades, but I recognised Claire, even from a distance, without a moment’s pause, and she recognised me. I saw her demeanour change: she recoiled very slightly as if a cold gust had hit her in the face, and then she leaned forward and her pace became more deliberate. She walked towards me on the path, with all the years on her that Lauren doesn’t have. She stopped and we hugged and I think we conjured Lauren with our coincidence. I’d say I hugged her for too long but she also hugged me for too long, so we were in agreement there. We said hello and how are you, and she wasn’t in a hurry, she said, so she walked with me for a while and this is what she told me.

  “Me and Lauren lay just over there one summer, warm on the grass, and she recited a poem. We’d done it for A-level and she knew it by heart. You’ll know it, too, it’s really famous – the one with the days of wine and roses.”

  Claire stopped and looked the whole poem up on her smartphone and read part of it out loud, there on the path, reading the same lines to me that my daughter had read to her that afternoon on the grass:

  “They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

  Out of a misty dream

  Our path emerges for a while, then closes

  Within a dream.

  “We swam in the pond that day,” she went on. “It was baking hot by late afternoon, and then as it got dark we went to The Wells Tavern.

  “I can’t go to that pub anymore, I haven’t been in there since, but I go to the pond a lot. She’s there with me, she’s there in the water. Sometimes, I dive in and I pretend that I’m out at Valentino’s in town again with Lauren and we are alive and safe and dancing among the columns of light in the darkness and our bodies moving with more sense and more magic now that we’re under the water and on the dancefloor. We loved dancing so much, Mrs Fletcher, we loved the glamour of it and the seediness, although we wouldn’t have described it like that at the time. It felt like we were practising for an exciting and glamorous grown-up life that never came, for either of us. And now I go under the water in the swimming pond and I picture the evidence left on the surface as I go beneath, and I know that Lauren is in those tiny winking bubbles and that she’s with me down there.

  “There’s a lot I’ve forgotten, most of it maybe. I wish I could remember just one conversation, word for word, one full conversation with Lauren. We must have had conversations, right, I’m not going mad? People have conversations. But I do remember walks, and dancing, and poems, and songs. I remember singing ‘Oo-ooh child, things are gonna get easier,’ after we heard it in a film, and I sing it to myself sometimes now, even though I know it’s not true.

  “You know, Mrs Fletcher, I felt for years that I had left her behind, that I had rudely carried on without her, living my life, seeing the world, or a bit of it, and meeting new friends, falling in love, having kids, building a career. And now, as I get older and I get tired and I get disappointed, by all of it, you know, disappointed by me and by everywhere I go and everything I do and everything I see, now I feel that she was the one who went on ahead witho
ut me.”

  “I feel like that too,” I told Claire. “I feel like that too.”

  “Lauren got to skip all this,” Claire went on. “She missed the disappointments as well as the joys.

  “But I do find joy in the feeling of my warm toes wiggling in my woolly socks in my clomping boots or in the feeling of a deep breath in cold air, and when I feel good I imagine Lauren feeling good too.

  “I don’t want to sound too mad, Mrs Fletcher, but even though I know she is dead and even though I was at the funeral and before that I visited her at the funeral home and after that I stood with you as they put her into the ground and we threw the flowers on top, and I remember that but I also feel the ongoing possibility that Lauren is not dead. She is here and I am a puppet for her, a loving proxy, I give her the feeling of sunshine on my cheek and a giddy giggle when a cute guy smiles at me in the street, but I don’t give her the creaking hips or the layers of tiredness or the slow feeling of horror, real horror, as I watch my husband become this floppy dullard, and my own small enthusiasms in life seem to repel him, and I’m right there with him, cringing at myself, really, just stuck here. Just stuck here.”

  Claire didn’t tell me much about her life or her job or her husband or her kids. Maybe I should have asked more. I mentioned that I was divorced now from Lauren’s dad but she already knew that.

  “He was a good man,” I said. “But the loss was too much for us. The grief was too much to share.”

  “You were both so kind to me,” Claire said. “I remember coming round to your house a couple of days after the funeral and you fed me dinner. I didn’t have the sense to fully realise that I wasn’t having the worst time of it, out of all of us.” She was crying now, there on the heath. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you be sorry,” I told her. “We loved having you come round. We missed you when you moved away.”

  “Your house felt so safe,” she told me, remembering. “Lauren’s dad at the stove, clattering and humming. The kitchen was steamy, it smelled warm and homey. I remember going upstairs and lying on Lauren’s bed for a bit. I could hear you and Mr Fletcher talking, the sounds came up through the floorboards, and pan lids and cutlery. When you shouted ‘Dinner’s ready!’ and I pretended I was Lauren, and I kept very still, there on her bed for a few seconds longer. Then when I got to the bottom of the stairs I stopped again, put my hands on that big wooden sideboard you had, flat on the top with my fingers stretched out like it was a ouija board. You must have heard me come down and I could hear you in the next room, not talking, a tap of a spoon on a bowl, maybe, a knife on a plate. I remember this so clearly, Mrs Fletcher, but why don’t I remember more about Lauren?

  “You were already looking up at the doorway when I walked in, with a soft smile on your face. Lauren’s dad looked like he was going to cry, shoulders sagged, chin slack, looking at his plate. Everything was so slow and heavy.

  “And then Lauren’s dad began talking about using parsley instead of coriander or something, and you said about doing the weekly shop at Sainsbury’s in the morning, and Mr Fletcher was almost cheery, talking about the garden. I didn’t say a word, I had nothing to say. The radio was on, you two were talking, and I just sat there like a lump. And you never looked at one another in that silent coded way, never excluded me in that sharp fast moment of exchanged glances. I was so grateful for that. Kind people, you were, Mrs Fletcher, full of kindness. You have to be so vigilant, to be kind.”

  And then, and then, and then. Me and Mrs Fletcher met up again a week later, by the pond. On purpose, this time, early one evening when the pond was officially closed – you can always sneak in and I frequently do. Lauren’s mum walked ahead on the path, too keen almost to get to the pond. I could not quite keep up and wondered if I’d offended, somehow. Offended would not be the right word though: I was driving that car and Lauren was dead and I had, as they say, not a scratch on me.

  Lauren was taller and leaner than me. She was a few months older too, February to my July. And so we walked together, more or less the same but not quite.

  “It’s pretty here,” I said, thinking of the birds and maybe squirrels. If we’d stopped and kept still for a minute we might have heard some birdsong, or some rustling in the trees and bushes. We got to the gate and it wasn’t closed properly, never mind locked. The changing rooms were empty and so was the lifeguards’ hut. The wooden platform extended over the water, and a ladder ran down into the black.

  I say black, actually the pond reflected light from the sky, which was now a properly dark-blue night sky, clear and starry. The moon was somewhere, not in sight but giving a flattening light. There were ripples on the water, and a couple of little ducks. I loved those ducks.

  “I brought us bath towels,” she said, smiling and lifting her shoulders round her ears, as if she was damp and cold and someone had just wrapped a great big fresh bath towel right around her. We had a flask of tea, too, with lots of sugar in it.

  She folded her glasses and placed them on top of her bag, put goggles over her wide-open eyes. She’d already peeled down to her swimming costume, which she’d had on under her clothes. She gave a “brrrr!” of delight, but that was before she was in. When she sank into the pond she was quiet, and so was the water.

  I changed into my red bikini with the elastic threads sticking out all over it like tiny worms, I’d had it for years. My clothes were on a bench and I was on the ladder, holding on behind me and facing out into the water, having a look, like a carved woman on the front of a ship. Mrs Fletcher was halfway across the pond already.

  “Come on in,” she said, in a shout-whisper because we were illicit there. “Come on in, the water’s lovely!” I was meant to be showing her around because she’d never been here before, but she didn’t need me. She glided over backwards, headfirst, and under the surface. A big fish – face, belly, legs, toes last, and then gone. Just for a second and then up again with not even a gasp.

  There was no shock or chill when I climbed down and in, up to my neck. I kept one hand on the ladder. Mrs Fletcher was maybe twenty yards away now, moving through the wobbling water.

  Then I went straight in and right under. I wondered what the ducks thought of that. I went beyond time, escaped, magic. It’s true that Lauren was with me then.

  When I came up for air, Mrs Fletcher had grabbed hold of a big floating rubber ring stationed in the middle of the pond, a place to rest.

  “How you doing?” she asked me.

  “Fucking great,” I told her, exhilarated. Almost forty and I still felt a thrill swearing in front of my friend’s mum. She laughed. I stretched my legs so they were pointing straight down, and I was almost a bit disappointed that they didn’t touch any weeds or fish or anything at all.

  I stayed there by the rubber ring but I let go of it and leaned back, took a deep breath so my lungs would be full of air like armbands, and let my scalp sink into the water. I wiped the hair from my face, out of my eyes, made sure it was wet so it would stay stuck down. The stars were out, actually twinkling, a long long way away. I thought it was a shame that people had already spent so long going on about looking at the stars, the wonders of the universe, we are tiny flecks and all that.

  “We are all in the pond,” I said to Mrs Fletcher. “But some of us are looking at the stars.” She made a little laughing-huff noise, and she probably looked up at the stars then, if she hadn’t been looking already. I took another deep breath so I’d float a bit higher and I lifted one foot up to touch the gloopy underside of the rubber ring, to make sure I wasn’t drifting off anywhere. Nothing reached up from the depths to grab me, and I didn’t fall into the sky.

  And then I go under again. Sounds are at once very close and far away. I cannot hear my own body. Lauren is here for as long as I hold my breath in the dark soft water. My eyes are closed too. What have I forgotten, about Lauren? I can’t remember her voice and I don’t have a recording. I don’t want a recording. I try to think of one solid thing, one memory I
can pick up and look at, and there is nothing. How cruel. Am I a fraud, to say I loved her? But I remember walking and talking, and swimming and dancing. I know they all happened. I remember the car, when we crashed, and how she was shouting and then how she was quiet. I must have been screaming, because my throat was raw for days afterwards. That was all that was wrong with me, though. Not a fucking scratch on me. It wasn’t my fault you know, officially and legally and in actual reality. But here I am, and where is Lauren? She is under the cold soft dark water, swimming, swimming with me. We are weightless in the slow dark, and there are unknown treasures just beyond our reach, and we move and glance and dream together of wordless pleasures. We are dancing, dancing, to put those pale, lost lilies out of mind.

  ‌Love! Love!

  Carl walked over with this extraordinary pile, this seafood platter on a big silver dish – huge prawns in their armour nestled on the crushed ice, soft golden mussels inside their black shells, raggedy pale oysters all smooth and slurpy inside with chunks of lemon on top. He was grinning. Behind him Lucy carried five shots of absinthe in sherry glasses on a round black tray with a jug of water.

  We were in the Fitzroy Tavern on a bank holiday Sunday and it was still quiet even though it was mid-afternoon. I was playing the early set so we were at a table right by the DJ booth, where my music was in two boxes – one big, one small – tucked under the decks along with our coats. I’d put on a compilation album to keep the speakers busy: John Lee Hooker was about to turn into The Moonglows.