The Story of You

I’d got Joe’s Facebook message on the night shift. By now – 8 a.m. at handover – I could think of nothing else. I knew it off by heart. I’d read it so many times.

I turned away from my computer to find the whole office waiting for me to start and Jeremy – our team Manager, perched on the edge of a desk, wearing one of his ‘five for a tenner’ shirts.

‘Yes, it was eventful,’ I stuttered. ‘Really, really busy actually.’

In fact, there must have been something in the planets – something in the full moon, which hung like a mint imperial over south London – because, as well as receiving Joe’s Facebook message, the first contact I’d had from him in five years, it had been one of the busiest night shifts I’d ever done. Everyone was going mad.

John Urwin – one of Kingsbridge Mental Health Trust’s most notorious clients – had been arrested after being caught having sex in Burgess Park.

‘And all you need to know about that,’ I said, when I finally got myself together enough to join in handover ‘is that he was butt naked when arrested but still wearing his Dennis the Menace wig, and I think you have to love John for that.’

Kaye, Parv and Leon, also CPNs (community psychiatric nurses), had an affectionate giggle, but Jeremy was not amused. ‘If you could just stick to what actually happened, Robyn.’

And so I told them how John was a little ‘agitated’ when I arrived at Walworth Police Station. (This was a distinct downplay of events. I’d been able to hear him shouting as soon as I got there.)

‘WHY CAN’T A MAN HAVE SEX WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND IF HE WANTS TO? IT’S AN ABUSE OF MY HUMAN RIGHTS, DOCTOR! MY HUMAN RIGHTS!’

But Dr Manoor and I had managed to calm him down. Dr Manoor has been John’s psychiatrist for years, and thankfully knows him as well as I do.

John is perhaps one of the more extreme clients I work with (although there’s not really such a thing as ‘extreme’ in this job) and institutionalized now. I find people like him the absolute saddest. It’s as if they had their breakdown aged 18 and stayed that age – arrested development. John has been sectioned more times than most people have had hot dinners. Still, if you talked to John when he was well, he talked a lot of sense. He was a bright man – he could tell you every single species of butterfly – and he was in a relationship.

Because the night shift had been so full on, handover ran over. As well as John Urwin baring all in Burgess Park, Levi Holden was admitted with an overdose. I really don’t mean to sound glib when I say this happens quite often.

Of the thirty people on my caseload, Levi is probably my favourite: six feet of utter gorgeousness for a start. He’s also hilarious, when he’s not suicidal. And even when he is suicidal, he’s probably funnier than the average person. He has a little job washing cars in the Dulwich Sainsbury’s car park. The other day, he was making me laugh so much, slagging off all the Dulwich mums in their four-by-fours and their two-hundred-pound weekly shops.

‘Those mo-fo dull witches wid der massive wagons and their whining dollies in the back and enough food to feed the whole of Peckham. It’s a wonder they’re not more mo-fo wide, the amount of money they spend on food!’

I laugh a lot in my job. I guess, with darkness has to come light, and you’d be amazed how gallows the humour can get. ‘You don’t have to be mad to do this job, but it helps,’ they say. But I wonder if we’re not all a bit mad already, and it’s just a question of when, not if, the lid comes off.

I find it hard at the best of times going home and straight to sleep after a night shift. Your body is exhausted but your mind is on overdrive: Will Levi take another overdose? Will John be on the psychiatric ward, yelling for his Dennis the Menace wig? These are usually the things I am thinking as I leave the office for my bed. Today, however, it was Joe’s Facebook message.

We were having one of those freak, early spring warm spells – Peckham’s teens had already stripped to their Primark hot pants – and so I decided to walk to Oval rather than get the bus. Camberwell was alive and kicking: African ladies in tropical-shade headdresses, stalls piled high with okra and plantain, spilling onto the street. A watermelon rolled onto the pavement. As I put it back, I could just make out the wiry form of Dmitri, the owner of the shop, sitting like a drying chilli on his deckchair at the back. I passed Chicken Cottage and the launderette, where the aroma of fried chicken turned into the heavy, bluebell notes of Lenor. Across the road, in the park, a group of teenagers were dancing to some rapper blasting from a pimped-up beatbox. The heart of South London couldn’t have been beating harder if it tried, and yet, amidst all of this life, I was thinking about death – of Joe’s mum, and my mum, and everything that happened in Kilterdale, and how I really didn’t want to go back there, for a funeral of all things. The question now, of course, was how the hell was I going to get out of it?

Eventually, I caved, and went into Interflora in Camberwell. The woman behind the counter was eyeing me up over her half-moon glasses, as if she knew my game.

‘Can I help you, madam?’ she said eventually.

I smiled at her. ‘No, I’m just looking, thanks,’ and continued pretending to browse around the shop, which didn’t take long since you couldn’t swing a cat in there.

‘Okay, well if you need any help …’ she said, going back to her book, but I could feel her eyes on me; they were following me round the shop. Eventually, I felt compelled to speak.

‘Uh, actually, could you recommend flowers to send to a funeral, please?’

She perked up at this and took off her glasses.

‘Well, the classic of course is the lily,’ she said, getting up from her seat behind the counter and coming round to the front. She had a matronly bosom and was wearing a lilac, pussy-bow blouse. ‘But you can have bouquets arranged with carnations, roses; anything you like.’

I nodded, remembering the carpet of bouquets left outside the crematorium at Mum’s funeral. The messages that all started, ‘Dearest Lil …’ and finished, ‘Always in our thoughts.’ I remember being so depressed that Mum had now become merely a thought in people’s heads. How long before she wasn’t even that?

‘May I ask who it’s for?’ asked the woman. She was much more friendly now. ‘Is it a close family member? Do you know what sort of flowers they liked?’

‘Roses,’ I said, ‘peach ones.’

I must have spent more time with Marion up at the vicarage that summer than I remembered.

‘We do a lovely wreath with peach roses,’ she said. ‘Some irises, green foliage … When is the funeral?’

‘A week on Friday.’

‘In London?’

‘No, up North. A little village near the Lake District.’

She let out a little gasp. ‘Which one? My son and daughter-in-law live up there.’

I hesitated. Nobody had ever heard of it. ‘Kilterdale,’ I said.

‘No … my son lives in Yarn!’

I was genuinely shocked. In fifteen years of living in London, I could count on one hand the number of people I’d met from anywhere near my home village, it was so back of beyond.

She said, ‘It’s glorious up there. Always fascinates me how anyone would move from somewhere like that to here.’

There was a long pause. It was only when she spoke again that I realized she’d wanted an answer to that question. ‘Anyway,’ she looked a bit embarrassed that her foray into conversation hadn’t been more productive, ‘that needn’t be a problem. You can have a look at what the wreath might look like here – I have some in the back – and then we can contact an Interflora branch near where the funeral is being held.’

I felt my shoulders relax. ‘That would be great, thank you.’ Then, as I watched her bustle into the back of the shop, the nagging guilt crept in.

‘I had no idea, I’m sorry. Now I do.’ Joe had said in his message. But he did have an idea, even at sixteen. Whilst other lads in his year were worrying about popping cherries, getting it on with Tania Richardson, Joe was dealing with me, posing as his sane-and-together girlfriend but who, inside, was collapsing with grief. Now here I was, copping out of his mother’s funeral.

I was kicking myself for even joining Facebook, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be in this position, and Joe would never have found me. I only have fifteen Facebook friends, as it is, most of whom are work colleagues. I say things to my sister, Niamh, like: ‘Why does this person I did swimming with twenty years ago want to be my friend?’ Which she thinks is hilarious. Niamh is nine years younger than me, the accidental result of a drunken, food-themed fancy-dress party for my parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary – yep, my sister was conceived whilst my parents were dressed as a ‘prawn cocktail’: Mum as the prawn and Dad as Tom Cruise in Cocktail – and therefore thinks I am geriatric. ‘It’s a social-networking site, dumb-ass. You social-network on it,’ she says. I don’t think I’ll ever like it, though: I don’t want blasts-from-my-past being able to find me, or to see pictures of the sorts of drunken states my sister gets herself into. I worry about her. She turned twenty-three in January and I still worry about her.

I picked up some freesias and inhaled their lovely scent, wondering how long you could leave a message like Joe’s before you answered it, and decided two days was already too long.

‘Here we are …’ The lady clattered through the plastic strips of curtain separating the shop from the back, carrying a peach-flowered wreath. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ she said, holding it up. ‘They’ll be able to make you one up like this in no time.’

I sniffed it.

‘Yes, it’s lovely. How much?’

‘They start at seventy-five pounds and go up to a hundred.’

‘Seventy-five pounds?’ It flew out of my mouth before I could stop it.

‘It is expensive, but then when you think of what it’s for … what those flowers say. Your personal goodbye.’

As if I didn’t feel guilty enough already.

Going in person would say a hell of a lot more, I knew that. I knew that for much less, fifty quid perhaps, I could get a train ticket up to Kilterdale, or fill up my car with petrol. So, I wouldn’t even be able to plead poverty if I sent the flowers.

‘I’ll have a think about it,’ I said, having decided to do nothing of the sort.

‘Okay, well don’t leave it too late to order.’ She went a bit frosty after that. ‘They need time to make it up.’

I made a swift exit out of there.

Chapter Three

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if Eva – my Polish, hoarding next-door neighbour – lies in wait for me. I’d made it into the lobby of my block. I’d even got so far as leaning across the mound of bin bags that block her entrance and, as each day passes, mine, to put my key in the lock, when she swung open her door.

‘Ah, Missus King …’ She was wearing a mustard-yellow sun dress, which clung to her form like clingfilm around an enormous block of cheese. ‘I very happy I sin you, I bin worried sick of you. I not seen you for days.’

Behind her, an avalanche of more bin bags stretched back and up, indefinitely.

‘Eva, you saw me yesterday, remember?’ I said, peering past her shoulder. I was always fascinated about how she might sleep: wedged between shelves like you saw on those Channel 4 documentaries about chronic hoarders? Up against an ironing board? ‘We were discussing when you might ring the council for someone to help you come and move this stuff so I can get to my front door without straining a muscle.’

I just gave it to her straight these days. I was over being subtle, even polite.

She looked me up and down through those dark, hooded eyes then: ‘You look thin,’ she sniffed, ignoring me. ‘You still pining for zis, zis little man?’

I laughed. ‘Andy, you mean? No, Eva, I’m fine, it was for the best, but thanks for asking,’ I said, pushing the bags aside with my foot.

‘He no good enough for you,’ she said, as I managed to get close enough to my door to open it. ‘He too old. He no give you enough attention …!’

‘Don’t worry, Eva, I’m really okay,’ I said, then, before I closed the door, ‘Now promise me you’ll ring the council about those bags!’

I locked the door and leaned against it for a second, just closing my eyes. Silence. The thing was, Eva was right: I was pining for Andy – not pining so much as missing him; I was in an ‘Andy mood’. Joe’s message had caught me off guard and I suddenly craved the familiarity of him.

I went into the living room and turned on the TV for company – since Andy and I finished last month, I’ve done this every day – then I ran a bath. I’m also the cleanest I’ve ever been.

It’s funny; when I bought this place – a slightly shabby, ground-floor, two-bed in a small, 1930s block – four years ago with the money Mum left me, I relished coming home to an empty flat. After spending all day talking to people – often about their suicide plans: how they had the vodka and the Temazepam at the ready – I relished having a place to myself; a sanctuary from all the madness. I’d often just sit there when I got in, in silence, take the phone off the hook, read a book, eat sweetcorn straight from the can. Then, a year ago, along came Andy and changed all that. For the first time in four years, I had a boyfriend; and, what’s more, I liked it.

I made sure the bath was as hot as it could be without actually scalding me, then I got in. It was 6 p.m. – 6 p.m.! What the hell was I supposed to fill the rest of the evening with? There’s only so much lying in a bath and exfoliating you can do, after all. I thought about poor Joe – about those awful few days of bereavement, the shock, the need for people around you. Then I thought about the reality of going back to Kilterdale and seeing him after all this time, the feelings it might unearth, the memories I’d boxed up for sixteen years now. It made me so anxious.

I thought about Andy – familiar, benign Andy, who was so wrapped up in himself it made it impossible for you to think about anything else – about calling him and inviting him over, just to ‘veg’, as he put it. I imagined sitting next to him on the sofa, watching Dragon’s Den, and sharing a kedgeree (Yes, Andy was a big fan of a smoked-fish item, I thought fondly). What harm could it do?

I met Andy on a speed-dating night. I’d gone with Kaye from work – God, I love Kaye. She always says to me, ‘Kingy, never settle. There’s far too much fun to be had with a packet of Oreos and BBC iPlayer.’ (Kaye is thirty-seven and still refuses to settle. She watches a lot of TV and eats a lot of Oreos.) He was the older man – forty-two to my thirty-one – and I liked that, the idea of being looked after for a change. We chatted easily for the allotted three minutes. Afterwards, he made a beeline for me at the bar.

‘I like you, Robyn. You’re different. In fact, I’d say you’re marriage material,’ he said, and from there, ‘we’ just sort of happened. I gathered he felt free to throw around phrases like ‘you’re marriage material’ because he was going through a horrid divorce and therefore never likely to marry anyone ever again. And we had a lot of fun for a while, Andy and I. I even liked the fact he’d been married and had two kids, at first: it made him seem ‘normal’, as in, what you’d expect a normal, functioning bloke to have done at forty-two, I guess …

Before Andy, I’d given up on any kind of normal. I’d realized normal – as in marriage and kids – was not the way it was going for me. And that was fine, I’d made my peace with that. Kaye and I had decided that, if all else failed, we’d join a hippy commune and grow our armpit hair and eat biscuits all day like we did at work. But then Andy came along and he made me believe in normal again. He made me want it.

I topped the bath up with more hot water and lay back, staring despairingly at the damp patch on the bathroom ceiling, which was encroaching like an oily tide.

Finishing with Andy had probably been the most amicable ending of a relationship I’d ever known, perhaps because I’d never been more than someone nice to fill a space for him, and that was fine. It was as though he’d swooped in, post-separation, for some respite care at the Hospice of St Kindness (i.e. me, or anyone else who would listen to him) and was now recharged, ready to take on the world again. When I’d told him it was over, he’d looked disappointed and taken aback, but not hurt, I noted. It was the sort of expression you might wear if you’d just been told there was no more carrot soup on the menu and you’d have to have leek and potato.

After leaving the restaurant, we’d walked to the Tube together, even chatted as we glided down the escalator. As would be the case, a busker was singing Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ with accompanying pan-pipe backing track when we got to the bottom. He’d taken hold of my elbows and we’d gazed at one another with sad smiles as the busker sang how sometimes it lasts in love, and sometimes it hurts instead. Then Andy said, ‘I’ll be in touch.’

And I’d smiled, because he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t help but promise, even at the end, something he couldn’t deliver.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to.’

‘At least let’s have a cuddle, then?’ he’d said, opening his arms; and we did, and it was nice. Andy’s a good hugger. It’s the one thing we’d both done well probably because there’s no pressure in a hug, is there?

‘Okay, bye then,’ I’d said.

‘Yeah, I will call though, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I’d said.

‘Take care of yourself, honey.’

Then we’d turned and gone our separate ways. Two minutes later, I was gliding up the escalator when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him coming down the other way.

‘Sorry, I went the wrong way,’ he said, and I laughed to myself all the way home because, was there ever the end of a relationship that so exactly replicated the relationship itself? Hit-and-miss, half-baked, stop-start. Just a little bit of a shambles, basically, with some farce thrown in.

No, finishing with Andy Cullen was the right thing to do, I decided, lying there until the bath water grew cool. I didn’t want to see him, I was just scared and putting off getting back to Joe.

I decided to ring my sister, Leah, instead. It’s practically impossible to have a normal conversation on the phone with her these days because she’s always so busy with the kids, so it’s a numbers game: if you ring her ten times, you might just get lucky once. Jack, my five-year-old nephew answered. We had a short discussion about peregrine falcons – I totally dig the conversations I have with my nephew – then I said, ‘Is Mummy there?’

There was some high-pitched squealing in the background, which could have been Leah or Eden, my three-year-old niece – it was difficult to tell.

‘She’s cleaning up Eden’s poo,’ said Jack.

‘Oh,’ I said, darkly.

‘She needed the toilet but didn’t make it. A poo fell out of her skirt in the kitchen.’

I laughed. Then stopped. Jack wasn’t laughing. This is because Jack knew that a poo in the kitchen was on a par with the apocalypse for his mother.

‘Okay, well, don’t worry. Tell Mummy—’ I was about to tell him I’d call back later when Jack shouted:

‘Mummy! Aunty Robyn’s on the phone!’

I could hear Leah’s sigh, literally metres away in the kitchen.

‘Well, tell Aunty Robyn that I am knee-deep in your sister’s crap at the moment and that her beautiful, adorable, butter-wouldn’t-melt niece’s bum has exploded all over my new kitchen floor.’

‘Oh.’ Jack came back on the phone. ‘Mummy said the C word.’

‘Mm,’ I said, ‘she did. That must mean she is very stressed. Tell her I’ll call her later, okay?’

‘She’ll call you later, Mummy!’

‘Ha! Well, she can try, but I’ll be doing bedtime then …’

I reasoned that I may not have got to speak to my sister, but at least any yearnings for Andy, and/or a boyfriend or family life had been very successfully abated.

That evening, I sat on the sofa, nursing a bottle of wine, writing fantasy replies to Joe, hoping that, the drunker I got, the more likely I’d be just to press ‘Send’.

Dear Joe,

I’m so sorry to hear about your mum and ordinarily I’d love to come to the funeral, but unfortunately I am on holiday …

Dear Joe,

I can hardly believe it’s taken me three days … the reason is, I was trying to think of a way of telling you …

Dear Joe,

Oh, my God, what must you think of me?! I rarely log onto Facebook so …

In the end, three days, in fact, after Joe sent me the message, and mainly because I ran out of different ways to apologize, I wrote:

Dear Joe,

I’ll be there. See you at 3 p.m.

Robyn x

Chapter Four

Dear Lily

I was thinking today that of all the things I’ve told you so far, I haven’t told you how I got together with your father. He says it’s typical of me, that the day we should get together is the day I save him, when what he doesn’t know is that he saved me.

The date was 18 May 1997 – almost sixteen years ago! It was the end of the summer term, of high school, and we were signing one another’s shirts: SHINE ON, YOU CRAZY DIAMOND! Although, personally, I was doing nothing of the sort …

Picture your mother: I am sixteen, I have thick dark hair with a fringe, and very recently I’ve committed trichological suicide by trying to dye it peroxide blonde. Your granddad didn’t notice for a fortnight, which gives a very good indication of how he was at that time. The barnet is an atrocity; every time I get it wet, it goes green for some reason, and so my sister Leah gives me a ‘body perm’ in the kitchen one Saturday, in the hope this will distract the eye (it doesn’t).

It’s been six months since we lost Mum and I’m blown apart. There seem to be bits of me everywhere; some shrapnel is still inside. I don’t know who I am, or who to be, and so I try different guises: ‘arty’, ‘rebel’, ‘one of the crowd’. Mostly, I am just all over the shop. But you have to at least believe it’s going to be okay, don’t you? And even though Mum is gone, I still believe in life. I think, if I can get past this bit, it will get better. Your grandma always said I was the strong one, and I’m determined to prove her right.

So here I am, this mad, sad, determined girl with green hair on the day I save your dad’s life at Black Horse Quarry. On the day he saves mine.

In those days, the quarry was a glittering lagoon to us; our little piece of paradise. Now, I realize, it’s a death trap, surrounded with dog-turd-laden scrubland (funny how what you remember and what actually was are often two different things). The wayward among us would bunk off and go down there in those last weeks of term. That day, I was there with my best friend, Beth, as usual. Your father was there with Voz and other members of ‘The Farmers’. There were also some ‘Townies’ (named because they went to school in the town, rather than in Kilterdale – the back of beyond – like us ‘Farmers’); all that strange, male, tribal rivalry. Saul Butler was ringleader of the Townies. Your dad had a love – hate friendship with him (i.e., he knew he was an idiot but that it was wise to keep on the right side of him too).

So there was I, sucking my stomach in, in my new tie-dyed bikini. Beth and I were discussing losing our virginity. Beth had lost hers the week before to Gary Trott. It had been quite the spiritual experience and, apparently, she’d ‘cried uncontrollably’.

I said to myself then: Robyn, you are not ‘crying uncontrollably’ with any old person. You will wait for the right person – for Joe.

The quarry had almost mythical status in the area back then. There were cars and old shopping trolleys down there for us to get our legs tangled in and our parents had forbidden us to go anywhere near it – which obviously heightened its appeal.

It was surrounded by cliffs of varying heights that we called the ‘forty-footer’, ‘sixty-footer’ and ‘hundred-footer’. (Only those with a death wish attempted that.) It was a scorching day, this 18 May 1997. My skin was sizzling away in Factor zilch coconut oil. Beth was jabbering about Gary Trott. I was looking at your father, admiring his muscular legs in his Speedo swimming trunks. All the boys were running to and from the edge of the hundred-footer now; your dad was pretty wild back then – all this energy and none of it channelled, trying to be the big man in front of the Townies. There were several big splashes as the Farmer lot jumped in. Then there was just Saul Butler and your dad, standing on the edge, sizing each other up.