This could be everything, p.16
This Could be Everything, page 16
‘Yes. But not now. I don’t play now.’ I felt a hammering inside me.
‘She played five days a week until seven months ago,’ said Theo. I wanted him to stop. I couldn’t bear it.
‘Why don’t you play now?’ Theo asked.
‘I just don’t,’ I said. I felt the room trembling all around me. Everything looked too big. I could hear Bruno Brookes tapping on his desk impatiently. Four-thirty! He was waiting for me to get back! What was I doing here? I was always waiting for the show to start! It couldn’t start without me. I had to be back. I couldn’t sit here and talk about tennis. Plato leaned into the table and stared hard at me.
‘Right. Shut up with all this bullshit about not playing. You want to play some time? I can play tennis. I’m good. I mean, really good. I’ll give you a proper game. That’s what you need, Tracey-November. A proper, good, long hard… GAME.’ He leaned back again and nodded at Theo.
‘I don’t play anymore,’ I said.
‘Oh, come on! Wouldn’t your sister have wanted it? If not, why the fuck not?’
‘Leave me alone,’ I said. ‘Stop talking about it. Stop!’ I banged a hand down on the table.
I could hear a hysterical rise in my voice. I was tipping over the edge of somewhere.
‘She just wanted me to go with her to her hospital appointment. That’s all.’
‘Feb, it’s OK,’ said Theo. I saw him looking at Plato and shaking his head, like he was warning him not to say anything else. But he was too late. I was there now. They had to know now.
‘She had a hospital appointment the morning of the accident,’ I said. My voice was rattling like a train on a track now. I felt Grandma Abby watching me, nodding, on the porch; I felt Mama and Daddy looking at me, listening to me as though they didn’t somehow know what the hell had happened that day. ‘It was her regular check-up, and I always went with her. She went twice a year. Her eyes. Her eyesight was bad. Poor. Very bad. Her eyes needed to be checked. There was a chance she could lose her sight altogether if it wasn’t monitored. She had a hospital appointment, and she wanted me to go with her. She went every six months, to have her eyes checked. I said I couldn’t go with her. I had a tennis match. When she was away, I got used to myself, to me, and when she got back, it was as if it all had to go back to how it was before. Me running around after her, making sure she was all right. I didn’t want to. I wanted her to understand how it had been for me all our lives. I told her I wasn’t taking her. She was surprised.’
‘Angry with you?’ asked Plato.
‘No. Not angry. Worse than that. She was just – confused. I went off to the match. All I had to be was her twin. I just had that and I wasn’t. And now she isn’t.’
‘She wouldn’t want you to blame yourself,’ said Theo.
‘How do you know? You never knew her! You never met her!’
I realized as I said this, how much I’d wanted to say it to him: You didn’t know her! You never met her! What can you tell me about Diana that I don’t already know? He put his hand out to me.
‘Feb, I…’
I put my hands over my ears and stared down at the table. Concentrate on anything but tennis. Last week’s Top 10. The lyrics to ‘Doin’ the Do’ by Betty Boo… ‘I’m bolder, c-c-cold, gettin’ colder…’
But it was no good. I could see myself, standing on the court, holding my racquet, waiting to serve… I could see myself watching the club secretary hurrying out, see her rushing onto court, holding up a hand to make sure that we stopped the game. She had tripped over as she ran towards me and fell right over like a child in the playground. I’d run to her to help her stand up again, and when I looked at her face, she was white as a sheet and she had grazed knees and palms. In my head, the conversation that Diana and I had had that morning.
‘Will you come with me to hospital?’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘What?’
‘I said, no. I don’t want to. I can’t. I’m playing tennis.’
‘But you always come with me! Every six months—’
‘Your eyes haven’t got any worse, have they?’
‘No, but—’
‘So, I have to come with you forever? You’re a grown-up, aren’t you? You can take someone else with you, can’t you? I can’t run my life based on what you’re doing all the time.’
‘All right. All right. It’s OK. Lisa can drive me. I won’t be long.’
And that puzzled look on her face. And the strange, dark little sense of triumph in me. I had refused Diana something! I had said no!
I stood up. The only thing that mattered now was getting back. The smell of chips and beer was making me feel sick. I had to get back to Bruno. I could picture Diana’s face, anxious, as we hurried back to listen to the Top 40 after Mama and Daddy’s funeral.
‘Come on, Feb! We can’t miss it! If we miss it, something else bad might happen.’
No one could have accused Diana of not speaking everything that was on her mind. When she feared things, she tipped them out of her head and into the space in front of her, regardless of who or what was there. Her magical thinking had overtaken her, just like it had overtaken me.
‘Don’t go,’ said Theo.
‘Diana and I used to listen every week,’ I heard myself saying. ‘It was our good luck thing. We couldn’t afford any more bad luck in our family. We only had each other left.’
‘Hate to say it, but I’m not sure the good luck thing worked out,’ said Plato.
‘But I missed the charts the Sunday evening before she died. I hadn’t got back from tennis on time. After the accident, I made the promise to Diana. I had promised I would listen every single week, and record it, and feel her next to me every Sunday and every day of the week after that.’
‘Then you keep yourself locked up forever?’ Plato had a loud voice. Several people turned and looked at us again. People had never really talked to me like Theo and Plato did. I had never known it, I had never felt the focus, the light on me, the questions, the demands. Everything had always been for Diana, at Diana, to Diana. I was never enough on my own. Never. I didn’t like it. I had to leave.
‘You want everything, Tracey,’ said Theo. He leaned forward. ‘I can feel it in you. In everything about you. When I first saw you, it was like seeing someone who had taken themselves captive and was trying to gnaw off their own arm to set themselves free. But you know the key’s in your pocket. It always is. It’s in your pocket all the time.’
‘Back to the point,’ said Plato. ‘When do we play? What does the winner get?’
I could see Bruno in my head, putting his headphones on, pulling up his chair, gulping down a mouthful of coffee, waiting to start the countdown. I could hear him talking to me: And we are waiting for Miss February Kingdom! What are you doing, Feb? We’re all waiting! Diana’s waiting. You can’t be late, we have to start on time. This is the only chart that counts. What are you doing?
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Theo. ‘I can’t do this. It’s too hard.’
I started to walk fast uphill again, and I ran, ran, ran back to St Quintin Avenue, barely stopping at the top of Notting Hill Gate, rushing over the road on red lights, and I pounded my body back towards my bedroom, back to Yellow and Kate, and to my bedroom where I was safe, and where I couldn’t be tricked by the daylight pretending everything was all right when it wasn’t all right. I ran as fast as double-struck lightning away from Kensington High Street, and this time, when I felt the Trench Effect assailing me, it was flooding every part of my body, it was in the energy, in the thud of my feet on the ground, it ran with me, so that with every step it felt like it was gaining power. I could see them all – Mama and Daddy trying to escape the flames at King’s Cross, Mama knowing that Diana and I would be waiting for her, Daddy unable to save her and himself. I could see Diana, her face on the morning that she died, when she had walked off after I’d refused to drive her to her eye appointment, the disappointment, the confusion in her, impossible to ignore. My hand shook as I turned the key in the lock, and I raced upstairs and ripped the plastic off a new ninety-minute cassette and shoved it into the stereo. I bowed at Yellow and Kate, and they looked at me agitatedly, and I sat on the floor and watched them fly up to the perches on the top, down to the bath, up again, and they seemed uneasy, restless, like they understood. I held my hands in front of me. Sometimes when I look at my hands, I can imagine I’m looking at my sister’s, they are the only parts of us that were identical. But then again, I didn’t want to see Diana’s hands. I pulled the sacred tennis ball off the shelf and held it out in front of me so that they became my hands again. I could come back to myself—
Well, you cut it fine! I heard Bruno saying to me, and then a moment later, he was on air introducing the chart and I felt a salty relief. I had done it; at least I hadn’t broken that promise.
‘Good afternoon, it’s exactly five o’clock and this is Bruno Brookes with the official UK Top 40…’
I opened the window and lay on the bed and I imagined Theo and Plato leaving Sticky Fingers and walking back to the tube together, and I wondered if they had talked about me, and I wondered if…
No, I thought. Not that. I can’t actually love him.
Love is a grave mental disease.
For the first time, I understood what the hell Diana had felt when she had talked about Daniel.
19 Double A Side
Diana had fallen in love every other week since the age of about seven months old, but her most meaningful encounter with the lure of boys had been with Andrew Adamson, the only son of the folks who lived across the road from us in Austin. Andrew was just ten – a year older than we were – and looking back, I think probably knew in his own soul even then that he was as gay as the day was long, but he loved Diana for her sheet of thick, straight white-blonde hair, and he would ask us over to his house nearly every Thursday after school to play hairdressers. Our grandma Abby would walk us over there, slow as slow, in her great big red and yellow flowery dress, her ankles swollen in the heat, plodding along the hot concrete waiting to cross the road, and when we arrived she would stay for one cup of coffee and a slice of apple cake in the garden under the shade with Andrew’s mother, Moira, and then she would plod slowly back home, and Diana and I would sit next to one another on high stools in the Adamsons’ newly modernized kitchen, holding magazines upside down and talking gossip like real ladies we had heard in Headspace, the salon on Cut Saddle Pass down the road, and Andrew would talk to us in his unbroken, pitchy Austin drawl, while he twisted our hair into knots and plaits and buns, handing us glasses of iced water from the new fridge, and packets of tiny salted crackers shaped like fish that we tipped into our greedy little mouths in ecstasy.
One baking June afternoon, Diana asked him to cut her hair. Andrew– give the guy credit – hesitated.
‘But I don’t want long hair anymore,’ Diana had said. She pouted and flipped her ponytail at us. I frowned at her. ‘Go on,’ she said again, looking at Andrew. ‘Do it!’
‘I might-could cut it,’ he said hesitantly. He was hard pushed to disguise the tremor of excitement in his voice.
‘No might-could about it,’ said Diana. ‘Just get it cut.’
‘Your mama won’t be pleased,’ observed Andrew, who was not the brightest kid on the street but at least knew how to read a room.
‘Mama won’t mind,’ said Diana. ‘She lets me do things I want to do, long as they’re good things.’
‘Don’t be so silly,’ I said. Diana had annoyed me that afternoon by telling Missy Jackson in our math class that I would help her with her homework, and I would be happy to be paid in cherries. Diana always had to be liked, even when it meant pulling me into her plans, whereas I didn’t really mind whether I was liked or not. Missy Jackson was a liar more slippery than a pocketful of pudding. I didn’t want to help her with her homework, cherries or no cherries.
‘I think Andrew could cut my hair real pretty,’ said Diana. ‘I’d like to feel it short in my fingers. It’s too hot for long hair in summertime. Anyway, thing about hair is it grows back, any case.’
‘You’re stupid,’ I said.
‘I’m not! Off with my hair!’ shouted Diana. She exploded with laughter.
Andrew looked at me and I shrugged. Let him ruin her hair for all I cared! He needed no more encouragement than my silence. Hesitantly, he took the ponytail in his hand and held it up like he was holding the brush of a fox.
‘I got some scissors,’ he said quickly.
And lo, Andrew did her hair so beautiful, it looked like it had been cut by Vidal Sassoon. He copied the style from the model on the inside of a copy of Vogue, but Diana ended up looking better than the model. Her hair was now short as short; I wanted to ask him to cut mine too, but I was aware of how the comparisons would fall, so I said nothing, and went home with my hair still long and uneventful, while everyone around – even Grandma Abby who despised change – went mad for Diana’s new look. People copied it at school, and before too long Andrew started to charge people for his services, and he sure as hell wouldn’t accept cherries for haircuts. Diana fell heavily in love with him after this; he was her one great, soft landing of an unrequited love. It wasn’t until right at the end that this happened to her again, and the landing wasn’t soft this time. It was hard as dried mud, jarring everything out of place.
Usually, when Diana liked a boy, or more often when a boy liked her, I would hear about it every second minute, but it would be over as fast as it started. Once they fell in love with her, once they had fallen at her feet, she lost interest. The boy called Daniel was different. She started talking to me about him just before our eighteenth birthday. It was December.
‘When can I meet him?’ I asked her.
‘Not yet,’ she said.
‘Why not? What’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothing! He’s just… nothing.’
‘He sounds like he must be something.’
Diana sounded exasperated, truly pissed off with me. ‘He’s not ready.’
‘Not ready! What does that mean? Why does he have to be ready to meet me? I’m not going to set him a test or something! Is he at Cardinal Vaughan?’
Cardinal Vaughan is the school a little further down the road from Westbury House. It tends to yield the cleverest boys, with the added thrill of Catholicism, which Diana admired for its heavy emphasis on incense, melodrama and self-flagellation.
‘He’s not at Cardinal Vaughan.’
‘Oh. Holland Park? St Paul’s? Has he left school altogether? Have you taken an older lover?’ I laughed at her. Most times Diana loved this sort of chat from me. But she lowered her eyes.
‘Leave it, will you, Feb? I want a cigarette.’
‘OK.’ I paused. ‘But he’s nice, is he? He’s nice to you?’
‘He’s perfect,’ said Diana. ‘That’s the problem.’
‘Why is it a problem?’
‘Just is.’
‘If I could meet him, I could tell you whether he’s perfect,’ I said. ‘Are you ashamed of me?’
Diana raised her head and smiled at me sadly.
‘Oh, Feb. The only person I’m ever ashamed of is myself.’
As it happened, she never introduced me to Daniel, because he ended it with her a few weeks later, at the start of 1989. People didn’t end things with Diana, it wasn’t what happened. She didn’t seem to know what to do with the facts of the matter; she was – at first, at least – more astounded than anything else, then her astonishment turned to desperation.
‘He said that we would never work in the long run,’ she said to me. ‘He kept talking about the long run. I’m saying to him, who cares about a long run?’ We were walking through Kensington Gardens, the wind up. There was snow forecast, the sky was pewter grey so that it felt like a pillow was being held over the park, a slow, gentle suffocation, for which we should all be grateful as we were moving towards the end of the twentieth century and maybe the whole world would fall apart anyway, and gentle oblivion was better for all of us.
‘How does he know about the long run?’ I said. I felt a fury with Daniel for reducing my sister to this, but at the same time, I couldn’t quite eliminate a tiny degree of admiration for the guy. Who was this man who dared to dump my sister?
‘He said I’m too young for something this intense, and I should be living my own life. He says it would be a mistake for us to carry on as it will only get worse.’
‘God. What does that mean?’
She pushed her hair under her hood. ‘He says it will only get worse,’ she repeated.
We were nearly at the Serpentine. People were throwing sticks into the water for their dogs; a black Cocker Spaniel ran up to us and shook water over our legs. We had stopped in front of Physical Energy, the statue of a horse and rider a little in front of the lake. Robert had marched us up to the statue on one of our historical tours, and when he talked to us about it, I could have sworn there were tears in his eyes. Now Diana stretched out her arm and felt the huge bronze horse’s hoof in her hands and closed her eyes.
‘ “A symbol of that restless human impulse to seek the still unachievable in the domain of material things,” ’ I said.
‘How do you remember all that stuff he tells us?’ Diana said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s the weird way my brain works.’
‘Easy to be restless and seeking material things and fame and glory if you’re a man,’ said Diana, with sudden savagery.
‘But you’ve made more money in the past few weeks than Daddy did in a year,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well. Why don’t I care then? Why doesn’t it mean anything to me?’
The birdsong was muted around us. In the distance I heard the wailing of a siren.
‘Lisa says I should get out to New York,’ said Diana. ‘I got another three offers this week for work there. She says she’d come with me.’
I breathed in.
‘What? Now? What about the exams?’
‘We both know I’m shit at exams.’
