One Thing Led to Another

Mum sighs. This is not quite the reaction she was hoping for.

‘Oh come on, you do know David Jewson, Tessa. You went to school with his daughter, Beverley. Lovely girl, very pretty, works at Natwest in town.’

Beverley Jewson had middle-aged hair and once won Young Citizen of the Year (need I say more?). That doesn’t make it any less terrible for her to lose her dad, of course, but why does my mum insist on banging on about the merits of other people’s children all the time? Wasn’t I pretty? Wasn’t I intelligent? (Wasn’t I deplorably childish and should pull myself together?)

‘Oh yes, I remember Beverley now,’ I say, biting my lip. ‘That’s awful. Absolutely terrible.’

‘Well it was Tess, it really was,’ she says, perking up. ‘The thing was, he was perfectly fine last week. I saw him in the Spar as I was buying your dad a chicken Kiev for his tea. There I was, digging around in the freezer section when I felt this hand on my back and heard this voice say, “Hi Pat, is that you?” I felt awful because I had my bi-focals on at the time and I didn’t recognize him and…’

Bla bla bla…

I am only roused from the catatonic state brought on by one of my mum’s monologues when I hear her say…

‘And your dad’s fifty-seven this year and he’s not getting any younger. And, he’s in one of his “funny moods” again.’

Dad gets in what mum calls his ‘funny moods’ every few months. He goes a bit quiet, watches telly a lot and potters around his greenhouse more than usual, but that’s about it. I don’t know why she gets all stressed about it. You just have to know how to handle him, i.e. leave him alone and stop nagging him, poor man.

‘For God’s sake, mum, dad’s not going to drop down dead. He’s got more energy than you and me put together.’

This is true. My dad owns a construction company so he’s up and down ladders, lifting sacks of cement daily. On top of that, he’s on the golf course every weekend and last year he ran the Morecambe 10K race dressed as a shrimp for Cancer Research. What my mum lacks in get up and go, my dad makes up for ten fold. If anything it’s my mum whose health is dodgy, the amount of time she spends sitting on her backside scoffing stilton and watching Emmerdale.

‘You’re right lovey, you’re absolutely right,’ she sighs. ‘But the mind does boggle. I mean, alive one minute, dead as a doorpost the next. He was just mowing his lawn at the time, can you believe it? Who’d have thought mowing your lawn could kill you.’

I chuckle to myself at the characteristic lunacy of this comment. If mum had her way, we would all be bubble-wrapped and crash-helmeted in order to protect us from the potentially life-threatening nature of grass cuttings.

It’s ten more minutes at least before she shows any sign of hanging up and allowing me to get ready for work.

‘Now, don’t forget Ed’s birthday will you? It’s next Monday so make sure you post a card on Saturday because there’s no post on a Sunday and…’

‘Yes mum. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a complete imbecile.’ I hold the receiver under my chin as I attempt to put on knickers. ‘I’ll speak to you soon. Bye! Bye…!’

I press ‘end call’ and feel instantly guilt-ridden. Poor mum. Living in London, I never seem to have the time for leisurely phone calls with her anymore and I sometimes worry she feels jealous that I manage it with my dad. It’s just, me and dad have an understanding. Whereas my mum and my brother were born with a tendency to gossip and dramatize, to expect the very worst and then delight in going on about it when that prophecy is fulfilled, me and my dad have always come at life rather more sunny-side-up: in the belief that everything and everyone is good, until proved otherwise.

I finally leave the house at 8.40 a.m. thinking I’ll just have time, if I’m quick, to pop into Star’s before catching the bus. Star’s is the dry cleaners on New North Road. Its run by a family of Turkish Cypriots, headed up by Emete, whose numerous spare tyres and racoon-ringed eyes belie an energy level so phenomenal, you wonder if this woman could pop out another five babies to add to her brood this week, and still get the whole street’s ironing done.

The bell sounds as I push open the door. Emete bustles to the front of the shop, a tape measure around her neck.

‘Tessa, my love. What a wonderful start to the day!’ She opens her arms – each the size of one of my thighs – and places an enthusiastic kiss on both cheeks.

‘Hi Emete. Morning Omer!’ I shout, peering through the rows of plastic bags to the back of the shop where Emete’s husband sits, coffee in hand, reading the newspaper. He raises a hand without looking up.

‘Now angel, what can I do for you?’ Emete pins a pink ticket to somebody’s jacket and hangs it up on a rail to her right.

I hear the doorbell go again and am half-aware of a presence beside me.

‘It’s this shirt,’ I say, taking the linen shirt out of the bag and laying it out in front of us. ‘It was in my last lot of dry cleaning but it’s not mine, there must have been a mix up.’

Emete puts the safety pin she was holding between her teeth and holds it up to the light. ‘How strange,’ she says.

‘Very strange,’ says a voice. I recognize it instantly. ‘I’ve got the same problem.’

Another item of clothing appears on the counter.

I stare at the white linen dress in front of me, and then at the hands placed on top of it: tanned, big, with slender fingers and round, shell-pink nails. I’d know those hands anywhere. I trace the arms, lean, boyish, a perfect covering of fine, black hair and then the face, I’m looking at the face. My hand goes to my mouth, my heart starts to race.

‘Laurence?!’

Brown eyes, behind which lie albums and albums of memories of us, are staring at me now, flickering with disbelief. He covers them with his hands. Those oh so familiar hands. ‘Tess?’ He uncovers his eyes again. ‘Shit, it is you.’ He looks at the shirt. ‘And that’s my shirt!’

Emete, prone to fits of the giggles at the best of times, is doubled up now, great wheezy laughs making her bosom heave.

‘You know her?!’ Her bulbous eyes are round as gobstoppers. ‘You know him?!’ She summons Omer from the back of the shop. ‘In fifteen years, Omer! I’ve never known…oh! How wonderful!’ Omer shuffles forward, puts his arm around his wife and gives a silent, toothless grin in appreciation of the moment.

We exchange clothes – Laurence gives me my white dress, I try to give him his shirt, but my hands are shaking so much that I drop it, at his feet.

‘Sorry, whoops.’ (What sort of a word is whoops?!)

‘It’s alright, I’ve got it.’ He picks it up. When he stands up, his face is so close to mine I can see the subtle bumpiness of this morning’s shave. Laurence has hardly aged at all. Hairline slightly retreating perhaps, but only to reveal two sun-kissed Vs and some fine laughter lines around those lazy, pretty eyes. I hold his gaze for as long as I can bear, then look away, embarrassed.

‘Hello,’ he says.

‘Hi,’ I say. Then we look at each other, but we’re flabbergasted, half laughing, not having the slightest clue what to say. I haven’t seen him for five years. Not since that freezing November morning at Heathrow airport.

‘It really is you’ he says eventually.

‘I know, I know!’ I say, giggling like an idiot and wishing I’d at least had time to put some mascara on this morning.

‘I cannot believe…’ He steps back, as if to get a better look at me.

‘Nor can I!’ I look at Emete, who’s still shaking with laughter like a mountain in an earthquake. ‘It’s totally freaky!’

We stand there, all four of us laughing, not really sure what we’re laughing at except that this is turning out to be the most extraordinary, wonderful, glorious morning.

Omer finally speaks and when he does, it’s worth every syllable.

‘So how do you two know each other?’ he says, flashing his gummy smile.

Laurence takes hold of one of my hands. He looks at me from under those heavy lids.

‘She was my girlfriend,’ he says finally, proudly even. ‘We went out together, for two years. Till I went and ballsed it up.’

Laurence and I met in April 2000 – the unseasonably warm spring of our final year – and all I was doing in Manchester was lazing about campus with Gina, sipping beer out of plastic glasses.

‘Do you fancy coming to this party?’ Gina asked one day.

‘Er, yeah!’ I said. (Was the Pope a Catholic?) ‘What kind of party? Count me in.’

‘A garden party,’ she said. ‘At my mate Laurence’s parents’ house in Sussex. They have one every year.’

She said Laurence was studying media studies at Leeds University and was a mate from boarding school. I can’t say that ‘garden party’ really got my pulse racing but as with most things involving Gina, there were a few surprises in store. For starters, any preconceptions I had about ‘parents’ and ‘garden party’ were swiftly eradicated the moment we accelerated up to the main gates in Gina’s Fiat Bravo (the purchase of which I hold entirely responsible for me delaying learning to drive). There was some kind of French rap music, the sort you expect to throb from Parisian banlieue, reverberating from their huge, sprawling farmhouse as we walked up the long gravel path. Huge red and gold lanterns adorned the front of the house. A barefoot, wild-haired woman wearing a sequinned waistcoat and holding an enormous glass of red wine almost ran towards us, arms out-stretched. ‘Bienvenue and welcome!’ she cried, kissing Gina then me on both cheeks. (I immediately had a personality crush.) She was Laurence’s mum – or Joelle as she insisted we call her – something which seemed biologically impossible since she looked about thirty. She’d been in England for twenty years, even though her French accent was still treacle-thick. Joelle and Laurence’s dad, Paul, had met when he was a student in Aix-en-Provence and Joelle was working as a life model (so French! I loved her even more). Now he was a lecturer in French at the University of Sussex and skulked about the house wearing Woody Allen-style glasses and smoking Camel Reds. Joelle poured us equally huge glasses of wine. ‘Make yourselves at home,’ she said. ‘All my boys are outside.’

At that point, a bare-chested young man sauntered into the kitchen, wrapped his arms around Joelle, who was stirring something sweet and spicy on the Aga, and kissed her on the cheek. ‘And this,’ she said, reaching on her tip toes and kissing him back, ‘is my most beautiful and most idle one.’

I should have let that be my warning, but I fell in love – well, it was all-consuming, primeval lust at that point – on the spot.

Laurence was six foot two with closely cropped black curls which looked like they would spring to life like his mother’s if he let them, sultry dark eyes with languorous lids and an exquisite dimple in his left cheek. He was wearing Levis twisted jeans and white flip-flops that showed off the most perfect tanned toes. I remember curling mine, complete with chipped purple nail varnish and the odd unsuccessfully frozen verucca, inside my trainers.

We’re standing outside the dry cleaners now, Emete and Omer still watching from the window.

‘So what are you doing now?’ Laurence says it as if we have options.

(A coffee maybe? Stiff G&T? I suppose a quick session back at mine would be out of the question?)

‘Oh, work, unfortunately,’ I say, hoisting myself back down to earth. ‘And you?’

‘Yeah, work,’ says Laurence.

‘What kind of…?’

‘Bar manager. I manage a bar in Clerkenwell,’ he says, hands in pockets. ‘My dad’s gutted I’m not a lawyer or a doctor or a fucking philosopher come to think of that but you know me.’

‘I know you.’

‘Never one to do as I’m told.’

We shuffle from foot to foot grinning inanely and not knowing quite what to do with ourselves.

‘So God, I mean, how come I’ve never seen you around here before?’ I say, wanting to keep him here, not wanting this to end. ‘Where are you living?’

‘Not here. I mean, here for now, but not usually. I’m staying at a mate’s. And you? You live with Gina of course, for which you clearly deserve a medal.’

‘She’s alright, is Marshall,’ I laugh. ‘You’ve just got to be strict. We live on Linton Street. You come out of that dry cleaners and turn first right. Bit of a party house as you can imagine…’

‘So I’m told,’ says Laurence. ‘So how is work in the big bad world of publishing? Still tragedy correspondent?’

‘Tragedy correspondent?’

‘Yeah, Gina said you earn a living hearing other people’s sob stories.’

‘Cheeky cow!’

He backtracks with a smile.

‘In a good way.’

‘It’s “triumph over tragedy”, get it right. Even if they’ve been taken in by a polyamorous cult, had all their limbs amputated and all their family have been massacred by a crazed gunman, there’s always a positive angle. And if there isn’t, we just make one up.’

‘Like?’

‘Like he didn’t like his family anyway. Or his legs come to think of it.’

Laurence laughs. I find my face reddening with pleasure.

‘I forgot how funny you are.’ He studies me. ‘And quite how foxy.’

It’s a good job we both see a bus trundling towards us at that point, otherwise I might have had to react to that statement and it would definitely, have been idiotic.

‘Well, this is me,’ Laurence says, taking his wallet out of his pocket. ‘But here, here’s my card.’

‘And here’s mine,’ I say, hastily rummaging in my bag and handing over my fuscia pink business card with Believe It!’s slogan emblazoned all over it: From the touching to the twisted, every single week! Classy.

‘Thanks, um…’ As Laurence reads the card I see his eyebrows flicker and inwardly cringe. He says, ‘Just ring the bar, I’m usually there. Well, I come and go.’

Like a cat. An elusive cat.

He gives me a kiss on the cheek ‘Bye,’ he says.

‘Yeah, bye,’ I say dumbly.

Then he runs across the road, and I keep watching him. He’s almost jogging now, his rucksack over one shoulder, his jacket riding up. Cute arse. Gorgeous arse. Round and perfectly formed and slightly uplifted and filling out those jeans like an arse should. He still makes the blood rush to my nether regions. He still makes my head surge with indecent thoughts.

It’s 8.30 a.m., barely an hour since I got up, and I am walking to work in broad daylight, wondering how the hell we buggered that one up.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘When I said my vows, “In sickness and in health”, little did I know how far that would be tested. But when I saw Howard in hospital bandaged and bloodied, his face unrecognisable from the burns, there was no doubt in my mind that he was still my Howard. Freddie was born three weeks after the bomb and it’s been so hard. But even now, I look at both my boys and all I see is that they are the spitting image of each other.’

Dee, 32, London

I stride into the atrium of Giant Publishing with, miraculously, fourteen minutes to spare. 9.16 and already the place looks like Piccadilly Circus only shinier.

I get into a lift with two people: one is Justine Lamb, the Editorial Director, head to toe in cream cashmere. The other is Brian Worsnop, owner of the lowest hairline in trichological history, currently devouring a Ginster’s Scotch Egg, very noisily.

He beams at me, revealing bits of sausage meat between his dentures.

‘Super night last Friday wasn’t it? You looked a little merry, to say the least, I particularly liked your…’

‘Yes, OK, Brian.’ I smile, tight-lipped. Justine Lamb does not need to know about my drunken impressions of Blanche Jewell, our MD, complete with a pair of enormous false teeth.

I landed my job as writer on Believe It! magazine in 2003, as soon as I got back from what turned out to be a pretty traumatic year travelling. It was the least glamorous title in Giant Publishing’s portfolio and was edited by Judith Hogg, a pigeon-chested tumour of a woman who couldn’t feel empathy if her life depended on it. However, it was a proper job in journalism and with stories like ‘I lost my nose but still sniffed out love’ it was hard not to see the funny side. The relentless interviewing of people with such shit lives meant you couldn’t help but think your own was maybe not that bad. It was the perfect distraction from a broken heart, too. A heart broken by Laurence Cane.

Bing! The lift door opens and I stride out, into a pool of morning sun which drenches the office in an orange-pink glow.

‘Morning Tess.’

‘Morning Jocelyn.’

Jocelyn, our receptionist, is from Perth in Australia. She has a shocking-red bob that swings around her face when she walks or even moves (mainly due to a sort of wave effect brought on by her sheer size) and a bottom as wide as her homeland.

I feel I can say this and not sound fattist because Jocelyn is far from embarrassed about her body. In fact she accentuates her ‘womanly curves’ with sleeveless, bingo-wing-revealing tops in lurid prints and tight, white, cellulite-enhancing trousers.

‘May I say Tessa, you look fintistic today,’ she trills, biting into a ham and cheese croissant. ‘Off on a date tonight by any chance, met someone nice on the Internet again?’

Ever since I made the grave mistake of telling Jocelyn I had a date with a guy from Match.com, she has asked me this question on average twice a week.

‘No, not tonight, Jocelyn,’ I say, hanging up my coat. ‘I’ve gone off men from the Internet anyway, all they ever seem to be into is skydiving and bungee jumping if their photos are anything to go by.’

‘Quite right too,’ says Jocelyn. ‘I’ve never been one for adrenaline sports myself.’

Back at my desk, I hear Anne-Marie busily relaying the latest in the saga of Vegan Boyfriend to someone on the phone. ‘He won’t even kiss me if I’ve eaten a bacon sandwich, you know,’ she’s saying proudly, pop-sock-clad feet up on the desk. ‘That’s how committed he is.’

I give her a little wave, she gives me one back. I turn on my computer and see the little red light is flashing on my phone.

‘You have two new messages,’ says the automated voice.

Beep.

‘Hiya…is that Tess? This is Keeley. You came to our house last week to interview me and Dean. Fing is, yeah, we woz a bit pissed when we did the interview. Dean had just bought me that bottle of Asti to help with the nerves and now we’re worried everyone’s gonna find out…’

Oh dear. Another second thoughts casualty. You’d think what with the tape running and the photographer turning up, people might realize the larger ramifications before they start blabbing about their boyfriend’s penis enlargement to the national press.

Next!

I try to concentrate but thoughts of Laurence are like a swarm of butterflies in my brain.

Next is a message from a woman from Dudley. Her husband is forty-three stone and bed-ridden, can we do a campaign to save his life?

‘Before I ballsed it up,’ he said. I can’t stop those words from circulating in my mind. Admittedly, there had been a brief moment when I felt like punching the air – it is only right he should have suffered a bit after what he did to me. But that was years ago now and anyway, let’s face it, I ballsed it up too. If I hadn’t been so flighty, if I hadn’t done a Tess special and buggered off around the world, assuming everything would be hunky dory when I got back, maybe we would be together now, in love, married, maybe even a baby on the way.

I’ve got seventeen things to do on my desktop To Do list but I all I can do is day-dream. The fact is, when I look back to my two and a half years with Laurence the entire era reverberates with a huge WHAT IF. What if I had engaged my head as well as my heart, what if I had not been so naïve, what if I had been thinner, more demure, more exotic. What if, for example, I had not got caught having sex with Laurence Cane the very first time I met him, by Mrs Cane herself? At her garden party. Maybe it was jinxed from the start.

I blame the sun. That and his liberal parents who plied us with an endless flow of Beaujolais. (My parents would have provided two boxes of Asda’s best, announcing, ‘and when that’s finished, it’s finished, Tessa.’) By three a.m. everyone who was going home had gone and Gina had passed out on the sofa-bed in the spare room. So, it was just the two of us, talking and drinking at the kitchen table.

‘Your mum’s so cool,’ I slurred, nursing about my eightieth glass of wine, my teeth black as a peasant’s. ‘So exotic and bohemian.’

Laurence laughed. ‘Everyone says that,’ he said. ‘And yeah, I suppose she is.’ Then he paused, hesitated, then said, ‘But she’s not as cool as you.’

That’s when he turned to me, took my face in his hands and started kissing me, passionately and urgently. ‘You’re funny,’ he said.

‘Funny?’

‘Yeah, and kinda sexy, you make me laugh.’

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. But what did it matter anyway? I was snogging a Thierry Henry look-alike.

He reached inside my top and placed his hand on my breast. ‘Come here,’ he whispered, fixing me with eyes that told me how much he wanted me. Then his hand was suddenly in my bra and he drew me close and we were kissing, harder this time, our tongues exploring each other’s mouths hungrily, hot, quick breath moist on my skin. He gestured for me to hold my arms up, he removed my top. He removed my bra. And not with a teenage fumble, but in one, smooth, masterful stroke, as if he undressed women for a living.

Then, pulling me upwards, never taking his lips from mine, he put his hands around my waist and picked me up, sitting me on the table in front of him. His hands were big and warm and as they explored me: my shoulders, my neck, my stomach, the nerves in my groin suddenly sparked into action.

‘Should we be doing this?’ I looked at him, eyes shining under the table lamp.

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘Yes, yes, of course I bloody want to!’ I said, which came out far more eager than I had anticipated.

‘Well that’s good then,’ he said, looking at me from under canopy-sized eyelashes.

He swept my hair back from my face, then gently pushed me back onto the table, never diverting from my gaze.

‘Stop it!’ I giggled. ‘Your parents might come down, your brothers might hear!’

‘So what,’ he said, ‘I don’t give a shit.’

He undid my jeans and I undid his, my hands trembling, and we were kissing all over each other’s faces and necks and he ran his hands through my hair, pushing it back from my face and kissing me again. Then he was flicking his tongue all over my nipples and I was moaning and half laughing at the same time and pulling him into me and we were going at it hammer and tongs over this huge oak table and I’d already decided it was true what they said about French men. And the lamp above us was creaking slightly with the motion of us, and I felt like Vanessa Paradis in one of those late-night saucy films. Then:

‘Putain de merde Maman! Qu’est ce que tu fou?!’

Doing a course in French, I knew this loosely translated as ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Then Laurence leapt off me, his erection waving about like a rather awkward third person and pulled up his jeans.

‘Oooh la la.’ I noted the distinct lack of humour in his mother’s voice. Then in her face. She was standing right in front of us. ‘It’s three a.m. And you have a bedroom to go to, Jesus Laurence, have some respect.’

And then I said the weirdest thing, to this day I don’t know what possessed me.

‘Merci beaucoup!’ I shouted after her. Just like that. No joke. I nearly died.

‘What did you say?’ Laurence said incredulously. Eyeing me up like he’d just spent the last half an hour getting off with a mutant.

But I couldn’t say anything. I covered my face with my hands.

My stomach churns at the memory. I turn back to my inbox and there it is.