Life Begins Read online

  ‘Did you?’ Charlotte gripped the buckle on her handbag and looked out of the window, straining to focus beyond the blur of her reflection to the neon lights of bars and shops streaking behind. Tim had escorted her down the street to a sleek two-seater she had never seen parked outside the estate agent’s. It was more like being in a cockpit than a car. Outside, what she could see of the world seemed equally compressed: huddled figures scurrying under the dark March sky, phones pressed to their ears, each absorbed in the tight, complicated package of their own life. Relax, she scolded herself. Go with the flow. After further doubts and several postponements, her expectations for the date were almost too low for disappointment. Fun, not love – how hard could that be? And if it went wrong she could relay it as a hilarious anecdote to her friends; prove to them, and herself, that she hadn’t lost her sense of humour, that the long stint of playing the complaining wronged wife was well and truly past. Charlotte inhaled and exhaled deeply, releasing her grip on her handbag and noticing that the hard edge of the buckle had left a red ridge across her palm. Like a lifeline, she mused, determined not to let the nerves back in, a new, vivid lifeline, pointing who knew where?

  Beside her, the padded leather steering-wheel made small swishing sounds as Tim slid it between his palms.

  ‘Don’t worry, not too far. We’re heading for Kingston. Are you too warm?’

  ‘No… I – Well, maybe just a little.’ Charlotte shifted her legs away from the island of controls while he pressed various buttons. She could smell his aftershave, a faint but penetrating scent of something citrus. Beneath his earlobe were three long hairs that he had missed with the razor. Every time he changed gear his elbow brushed against hers. The outline of his thigh muscles was surfacing visibly through his trousers as he worked the pedals. ‘Look, Tim,’ she blurted, ‘I think I might have given you the wrong idea – I mean, accepting to come out tonight. I never meant –’

  ‘I know.’ He shot her a grin. ‘Seriously, it’s fine. I made it difficult for you, didn’t I? Bulldozed you into accepting. I can be like that, I’m afraid, when I get an idea into my head.’

  ‘The thing is, I only recently…’

  ‘Separated? I’d worked that one out a while ago. I’m not long out of a relationship myself,’ he added smoothly, swinging off the main road. ‘Ten years, you think you’ve found your soul-mate and then pfff,’ he clicked his fingers, ‘you’re on your own, watering dead pot plants and watching crap on the telly and wondering what the hell happened to your life. You have to do something about it or you go mad.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Charlotte agreed, liking him so much that it was all she could do not to confide the going-backwards feeling, haunting her still, every time she had least reason for it.

  ‘So, I thought, why not have a drink?’ Tim continued. ‘Even with a girl who doesn’t fancy you. Even,’ he pressed on, unperturbed by Charlotte’s failure to interrupt, ‘if that girl is a client and every rule in the book warns against mixing business and pleasure. Ah, here we are.’ He braked sharply and turned past a wooden pointing arm carved with the words ‘El Ranchero’. A few moments later they had pulled up in front of two large wooden ostriches guarding a walkway to an empty stretch of decking and a large door. ‘A friend recommended it. One of those Spanish tapas places – nothing heavy, snacks and drinks. Just a bit of fun, eh?’ He leapt out of the car and gallantly opened her door, then jogged ahead to be able to offer the same compliment at the restaurant entrance.

  The ostriches were hideous close to, crudely carved and so poorly attached to their moorings that their spindly legs juddered visibly as a gust of wind whipped across the car park. But Tim beckoned her towards the warm, bright interior with the confidence of a hotel doorman, and soon they were settled most comfortably on bar stools in front of chilled white wine and dishes of prawns, ratatouille and fluffy miniature tortillas. They talked easily and at length about houses; prices, streets, deposits, surveys. Tim had several funny stories about difficult clients and collapsing transactions, one in particular involving a milkman and a pet cockerel that made Charlotte laugh so hard she almost fell off the stool. And then, quite suddenly, when she was truly relaxed and off her guard, Tim announced that he had liked her from the start, that from the instant she had walked into his office it had been like a light going on. ‘It’s okay,’ he assured her hastily, patting her hand as she flushed and squirmed, ‘you’ve made it clear how you feel and I understand – I respect– that, but…’ he lowered his voice ‘… even as your friend I would like to know all about you, Charlotte Turner, or at least a little more?’ he pleaded, turning the confession into a joke by holding up his thumb and index finger as if indicating a tiny portion of something edible.

  Flattered, her instincts softened by wine, at a loss as to what to make of this man with his twists and turns of tone, so unknown (so unknowable, as it seemed, after twenty years of no one but Martin), Charlotte countered feebly that there was nothing to tell and what about him? She found herself deciding in the same instant that the beard wasn’t so bad. At least there were no specks of oil or food in it; he had been careful about that, dabbing with a napkin between mouthfuls. He ate daintily, too, for a man, which she liked. Martin had gone into a sort of trance when it came to food, shovelling in forkfuls, incapable of sensible conversation until his hunger was appeased.

  ‘I asked first.’ He topped up her glass.

  ‘Okay, let me see.’ She took a sip, and then another. ‘A potted history would be roughly… born in Sri Lanka – or Ceylon, as it then was – because my father was into tea, then we moved to Constantia in South Africa –’

  ‘Tea in South Africa?’

  ‘No, wine by then.’ Charlotte laughed. ‘Okay, I’ll leave it there.’

  ‘No, no,’ he protested. ‘Don’t leave it there. Go on. I want to hear more.’ He ran his fingers across his lips in a charade of zipping them shut.

  ‘I was despatched to boarding-school at the tender age of nine. A few years later my parents came back to England for good, to Tunbridge Wells. My mother still lives there. We don’t get on too well. Er… what else? Oh, yes, my father died when I was eighteen. I had just started at Durham University. That’s where I met my husband. We had Sam, moved to London, separated last year, divorced this – I hope.’ Charlotte picked up her glass and put it down again, twiddling the stem and smiling shyly. ‘I think that’s about it. A simple thing, a life, isn’t it? The bare essentials, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, yes, so simple,’ Tim agreed, although his attention had long since drifted from the substance of the conversation. He liked the way she had left the top three buttons on her cardigan undone, drawing the eye – deliberately, he was sure – to the modest swell of her breasts. They looked in pretty good shape, too, given that she had had a kid and had to be pretty close to forty. Through the thin cream wool of the top he could just make out the edging of her bra. Or maybe it was a camisole, a piece of pretty silk with a lacy trim. And her mouth was enticing, having the natural cherry redness that so often went with auburn colouring. In his view it was even more irresistible now that the lipstick had worn off.

  It was wrong, Tim knew, to let such thoughts in. He had said he understood how she felt, so he should stick to that, play out the charade of wanting friendship. Talking was so important to women, sharing feelings and so on. Phoebe had rammed that home often enough, ticking him off for not listening to her, for having feelings that were either insufficient or never about the right things.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your potted history.’

  She was leaning on the bar and turned towards him to await the answer, resting her left cheek in the palm of her left hand, her sharp green eyes properly alive at last. A moment before, she had run her fingers through her hair, raking it off her face and letting it fall in two silky sweeps across her ears. Tim suddenly remembered reading somewhere – in one of his men’s magazines probably, brought out of hiding s
ince Phoebe’s departure – that such preening by a female denoted genuine physical interest. Body language was everything, the article had said. Undisguisable, it proved that behind the elegant structures of our sentences – the so-called communication that Phoebe had been so keen on and eventually abandoned – humans were no more advanced than the rest of the animal kingdom. Love, hate, hope, fear, desire – none of it needed any words. It was all there in eyes, hands, elbows and legs. You just needed to know how to look for it. Inspired, Tim mirrored her position – elbow on the bar, head resting on his hand. Making eye contact, holding it as he moved closer, he delivered the less than inspiring pronouncement that his father had been an electrician and then, with great speed and, he hoped, gentleness, lowered his mouth on to hers.

  After rain the grass sings. I listen, standing in the shade of the jackfruit tree, its great emerald leaves dripping. Above me one of the fat knobbly green fruits dangles, heavy with moisture, big enough to kill, my father says, should it land on my head. I look up, studying its gnarled features – like an old man’s face – wondering what it would feel like to die, or whether it would be like sleep, which you couldn’t feel. I am supposed to be asleep now. It is after-lunch time when the heat sits like a pillow on your face and the strays lounge in scraps of shade, snapping at flies. My mother thinks I’m lying on my bed under the whirl of the ceiling fan, the amah nodding in the wicker chair, my lunch settling. She is meeting someone, a someone with a girl my age whom I was supposed to meet, too, but who is unwell.

  I cross the grass, my bare feet sinking into its new softness, leaving prints that do not last. I look through the hole in the fence and see the gardener curled in a Z-shape next to his tools, the white-pink soles of his feet towards me, his thin black legs like dusty sticks. Around him, half over him, the bougainvillaea and frangipani explode like the fireworks on the Queen of England’s birthday. I am bored, the thrill of disobedience quite gone. I think of my mother’s friend’s sick child and wonder if she is nice. I wonder whether she has lovely dolls with elaborate clothes like my playmate Freya, who has gone back to England. I want to be in England too, near the Queen who has such grand birthdays, near Freya and her toys and her mother’s home-made scones.

  My skin prickles in the heat. My hair is wet on my neck. Through the hole the gardener stretches, raises his head and looks towards me as if he can see through the wood. I scamper back across the grass. The door of the workshop is ajar and I slip through the opening, one leg first, then my head and shoulders. It is almost as good as diving into the sea from the jetty – the plunge of my hotness into the wet cold. But then something snags. I pull but I am caught. I can hear the gardener approaching the fence. I can feel his eyeball boring through the hole, rolling in its socket, looking for trouble. He will find my amah and tell on me. He likes her. They sit on the back step sometimes sharing the juice of a king coconut, sucking at two straws, their lips close. I pull harder and hear the rip of cotton. Looking down I see that a rusty nail has gashed my shorts – my favourite gingham shorts. The front panel hangs open; the torn edges are frayed and brown, like a wound.

  I want to cry but I don’t want to be found. Inside the darkness of the workshop it is like being stroked by cool fingertips. It is soothing to be stroked. My amah does it sometimes when I cannot sleep, running the backs of her roughened nails up and down my legs and arms, humming one of her funny songs that have no tune.

  I step towards the worktop where the vice gleams in the dim light. I am taller now and can reach the tools pinned along the back. Knowing they are within my grasp makes the urge to touch them less strong. Even the tiniest screwdriver, with its neat tip and little wooden handle, looks ordinary. I sigh, sensing something lost as I turn back towards the room.

  It is only then that I see them. I see the whites of her eyes first, huge in her black face. She makes no sound as she presses her lips to my father’s ear. I see the back of his head, the hair curling up from his shirt collar. He is on top of her, on the rush matting next to the dolls’ house whose roof came loose and which he has promised to fix. He is on top of her and moving. His trousers are round his ankles, his shirt tails trail over his backside and thighs. The moment holds, endless. I know what they are doing. I know because Freya has told me, giggling, as she points up under the skirts of her dolls.

  The eyes are wider, whiter. As her lips leave his ear he stops moving and turns his head towards me. But I am already running, out of the shed, my gashed shorts flapping. I race back across the grass, past the butterfly petals of the flowers, past the hole in the fence. The whip of the sun stings my head. The ground, dry now, is silent and hard, yet I feel as if I am running through air, upside-down, weightless, lost.

  Jessica had been surprisingly nice. She had let him stay up late and told him about trying to eat only fruit for ten days straight and a boy named Darren who never called. It had reminded Sam that once upon a time, before the new silliness at school about who liked whom and how much, he had got along pretty well with girls. Once upon a time, even longer ago, he had actually quite fancied having a kid sister. George had one called Matilda with puce cheeks and knotty hair who would fetch and carry for him like a slave. On one occasion she had eaten Airfix glue because George asked her to, and then not told on him, not even when George’s mum – a terrifying spectacle, eyes popping, her face livid – had screeched about dying and stomach pumps.

  It had occurred back in the days when George still invited him to tea. Sam had witnessed the episode in awe, both on account of the display of sibling loyalty (to have such an ally!) and the shouting – not just by George’s mum but by George himself and his little sister and the brothers, joining in for good measure. And then, suddenly, like a storm passing, or a language everyone but him understood, there had been rounds of hugging and quietness and toasted muffins. Returning to his own household, Sam had felt more acutely than ever the not talking going on between his parents – his father shaking the newspaper like a shield, his mother laying knives and forks with fierce, terrifying precision; it was like white noise, constant, invisible, deafening.

  Hearing an echo of it now, in the dark of his bedroom, Sam switched on his light. He had a favourite Astérix book that lived under the bed for emergencies, but for some reason he wasn’t in the mood. He stretched instead, to his very fullest, pointing his toes and fingertips in the hope that it might have some permanent effect on his length. His body was invisibly diseased, he was sure of it. Each night for weeks now he had been measuring himself against the babyish wall-hanging of a tape-measure that lived behind his bedroom door (a giraffe with a grinning mouth and a lolling tongue; it had occupied that spot ever since he could remember) and each night there was no change. After his nice time with Jessica Sam had felt especially hopeful, especially tall. He hadn’t even tried to cheat as he usually did, but had pressed his palm lightly on the flat of his head and kept it steady while he performed the contortion necessary to get a reading. And yet it had been the measly five feet two it always was, just by the tip of the giraffe’s big black nose.

  Staring at the stupid creature now, feeling it was staring at him, Sam experienced such a wave of loathing that he scrabbled in his bedside drawer, among penknives, flints and other treasures, for his darts. Balancing on the mattress, he hurled all three across the room in turn, pinning the giraffe’s silly cartoon face to the wall. His mother would tell him off, of course – holes in the wall when they were selling the house. Sam mimicked her under his breath as he bounced back under his duvet. He didn’t want to move house anyway, and she was the one who had got his hopes up about growing – any minute now, she always promised, any minute now, saying what was nice, as per usual, instead of what was actually true, so you couldn’t trust any of it, not really.

  Sam was almost asleep when he heard a car pull up in the street outside. Ducking up under the curtains, he couldn’t help thinking how cool the estate agent’s long red sports car looked next to their silly old Volkswagen. To cons
ole himself he thought of his dad’s BMW and Cindy’s Saab, both black, both convertible. The cars sat on the hard standing outside their new home, gleaming, sleek, like two members of the same family. They had matching bikes as well, and all the gear to go with them – helmets, pumps, Lycra T-shirts and shorts. Recently they had given Sam a bike too, as an early birthday present, his dad had said, so they could go on expeditions together. They hadn’t done that yet, but he had been out with Cindy a couple of times, along the walkway next to the river, which had been sort of fun but also weird, like they were playing at having a good time instead of really having one.

  Half on the window-sill now, his knees aching with cold, Sam waited, wondering why his mother wasn’t getting out. He opened the curtain wider, craning his neck to get a better look, wishing he had Superman’s laser eyes so he could bore through the roof. Then, suddenly, the passenger door swung open and there she was, looking as she always did in her old black overcoat.

  Sam slid back under the bedcovers, pulling them up to his chin. She would come up, surely. She would because she always did. She always had, even during the worst times, after shouting and door-slamming when not even the dark could hide the puffiness in her eyes and he knew that the slightly salty taste of her kiss was from crying.

  And yet now those same lips might have touched the hair-framed mouth of the estate agent… during that time in the car, those long minutes. Sam exhaled slowly, closing his teeth round the cotton fringe of the duvet cover. When the landing creaked, he rolled on to his side, burying his face in the pillow. He couldn’t control anything, he realized, good or bad. The mattress tipped as she sat down. Sam didn’t move, not even when he felt her mouth brush the crown of his head, soothing the exact spot that had failed to outgrow the giraffe.

  Chapter Three

  Theresa hummed quietly as she always did when she was busy. The curry was taking shape now, the rich aromas of frying beef and spices conveniently masking the smell of fresh paint seeping in from the sitting room. Next to the oven top, splattered with brown drops of meat juice, was the final invoice from the decorator. Through the wall she could hear the muffled clatter as the man folded away his ladders and shifted the furniture back.