The Girl Before You

Ruth shakes her head. ‘I don’t think he …’ she begins, then corrects herself: ‘I think it’s now or never.’

She glances over again. George’s group has been joined by a couple of girls. One, in a particularly arse-skimming dress, has started to talk to him.

‘Do you want it to be special?’ Kat asks. ‘Because it probably won’t be. With him.’ She takes out her cigarettes and offers Ruth one.

‘I know it’s not a grand romance, but I do like his spirit.’ Ruth’s voice sounds plaintive. ‘I like making him laugh.’ She takes a gulp of wine.

‘For me, I just wanted to get it over with,’ Kat says. ‘I mean, it’s uncomfortable however you do it, so why not do it quickly?’

Ruth nods. ‘I shouldn’t say this, but I can say it to you …’ She lowers her voice. ‘I feel like when I’m with George, people notice me.’

‘You’re daft.’ Kat shakes her head, catches Richard’s eye from the other side of the room. ‘People notice you all the time anyway.’

Ruth takes another slug from her glass. ‘I guess I hate to lose.’

One of the girls talking to George keeps touching her hair, gathering it up and dropping it down one shoulder, exposing her bare neck to him like a willing vampiric victim.

‘I want another shot at it,’ Ruth says. ‘It was just a false start.’

‘OK,’ Kat says.

Richard’s hair is messy, as usual. He’s carrying a book in his hand.

‘I don’t want to be needy and clingy and girlish,’ says Ruth, emphasising the last word. ‘I want to be equal. I want to be powerful. I want to be free.’

‘OK,’ says Kat again, wondering if Ruth should ease up on the wine.

‘I want,’ says Ruth definitively, ‘not to be a virgin any more.’

‘Go and tell him.’ Kat gives her a push. ‘Not all of it – maybe just that last bit.’

George is still talking to the other girl. Their heads are close together as Ruth approaches; his hand is on the girl’s forearm, as if to keep her attention. Ruth makes her way across the room towards them and stands for a few seconds, her face flushing while George ignores her. Kat wonders for a moment if she will give up on her mission – wonders, too, if Richard is watching as Ruth says, ‘Excuse me,’ to the girl, takes George’s hand and leads him off, as Kat will hear later, not to the bathroom but a more private store room, where things go better the second time round.

Naomi

In the mornings our father smelled of aftershave and soap. When we woke, he’d be up already, starting his paperwork downstairs, but his scent lingered in the corridors of the hotel behind him. Our father was tall, with silvering auburn hair. He wore bow ties with his suits so as not to be like other people. It was embarrassing. He also wore leather shoes that clicked on the pavement as he walked.

‘That’s the sound of a real man walking,’ our mother would say. ‘I do like a man with proper leather shoes.’

‘And a bow tie?’ we would ask.

‘Hmm,’ replied our mother.

She always sounded less sure about that.

Our father’s car was an Aston Martin with a personalised number plate, which was the most embarrassing thing of all. The Aston smelled of clean leather seats, as if it were still new. It purred along so close to the ground that we couldn’t see over the hedges. The world looked different through the windows of the Aston. It didn’t win our father many friends.

‘You win some, you lose some,’ our mum said of the car.

She drove a battered but sturdy Volvo without a personalised number plate. In her car, we would sit in the back, pushing our fingers through the guard to touch the dogs’ wet noses. They weren’t allowed near the Aston Martin.

But in the evening, the leather shoes and suit were gone, replaced with corduroys and old jumpers with patches on the elbows. He would do odd jobs in the hotel garden when he could – mow the lawn, build bonfires – and he smelled of wood smoke and beer when he came to kiss us goodnight. The rough texture of his jumper tickled us as we sat up in bed to hug him. He wasn’t the best at bedtime stories – it wasn’t really his thing. Our mother was better, revealing tantalising snippets from Gone with the Wind or acting out the narrative of operas with doll’s house dolls – though not Madama Butterfly (‘it’s too sad’). Our mother had to be careful about things that were sad.

Our dad was good at sums and puzzles. Horses and riding. Dogs. Swinging us high in the air. Long walks on the windy clifftops. Our mother was for tummy aches and baking cakes and singing. She’d sing in the hotel bar on open-mike nights – never for long, just a couple of songs, which she’d murmur into the microphone with her eyes closed, her hair messy from a night’s waiting in the restaurant.

The men in the bar would look at her face carefully then, as if they were looking at the sun. ‘A rare beaut,’ our father used to call her. ‘You’re my rare beaut,’ he would say as he stood behind her in the kitchen and wrapped his arms around her, and she would smile and say, ‘You’re silly. Isn’t your dad silly?’ But she would look flustered, as though she liked it really.

The men who drank in the hotel never really forgave our father for stealing our mother – I think that’s the way they saw it. They called him a spiv. Ruth dared me to ask our mum what it meant and I knew, even as I asked, that it was an ugly word – something we should have looked up in a dictionary rather than saying out loud. Our mother’s fingers touched the corner of her apron, squeezing the material in a ball for a second.

‘Where did you hear that?’

We had heard the word in the bar, from the mouth of Dai the Poet, a camp, overweight man in his fifties, with drama school enunciation and a nasty turn of phrase when he was drunk.

‘What does it mean?’ Ruth asked.

‘It means people are jealous.’ Our mother let go of the apron, brushed it down and looked away.

Of the many things our father was good at, making money was the one that attracted the most attention. It was his gift. He could see opportunities where other people couldn’t; he could crack through the sums; he could glance at the restaurant or the bar and know, more or less, how much they would take that night or what they could do to make more. He had turned our grandmother’s Pembrokeshire hotel from a bohemian labour of love into something profitable in just eighteen months.

‘He came from nothing,’ the posh men would whisper in the bar. Like that was a bad thing: to create something from nothing.

‘He’s not even from here,’ the locals would say. As if that were the final insult: that he had whisked away their most beautiful girl, made heaps of money and, worst of all, he didn’t even have the decency to be Welsh.

The bar was full of tribes – the rich men who’d made their money early in life or inherited and come out to live on the coast; the locals who’d cram the bar on Fridays and Saturdays; or the holidaymakers whose drinking tended not to be bound by which day of the week it was – but our dad didn’t belong to any of them.

Instead, we made a tribe of our own: Ruth and our father with their red hair, my mother and me, with our dark eyes. Neither parent had much tolerance for tales, though we never gave up trying to embroil them both in the ongoing battle of the halfway line, mainly in the car, where it existed as an imaginary border that separated Ruth’s messy side from my neat one.

There were just eighteen months between us. We witnessed the very first moment we met on cine film, a silent movie in muted colours. Ruth, clutching Nunny, her pink toy rabbit, in our grandmother’s arms at the front door, had stretched out to greet our mother as she came back from hospital carrying me in a large white blanket.

‘Baby,’ mouths our mother in the film, tilting my face, peeking through the blanket, towards Ruth.

‘Baby,’ repeats my sister, climbing out of our grandmother’s arms to join me, heedless of the halfway line even then.

Alice

February 2016

It has been three weeks since Alice had approached Naomi on Facebook and had no response – three weeks, too, since the doctor had told her unequivocally that she was pregnant. The news had come as a shock to both of them: Alice wonders now if perhaps they had started getting used to the idea that they couldn’t – or wouldn’t. George had leaned heavily against the kitchen counter when she’d told him. He was quiet for what seemed like a long time. Eventually, he had said, ‘Oh! darling, that’s wonderful,’ and come over to where she was sitting at the kitchen table to embrace her, pressing her face against his stomach.

A baby. A person made up from George and her. Alice tries hard to think of what such a person might look like and finds she can’t picture it, can’t imagine how George’s strong features might be combined with her more delicate face. Lying in bed, she puts a hand on her stomach. Since her sixth week when she found out she was pregnant, she has been feeling extremely unwell indeed. She’s had to take weeks off work and finds herself staggering around the house from the bedroom to the loo. It is not quite the euphoria she imagined. The sickness makes her feel light-headed, depleted. She has fitful dreams often set in St Anthony’s, with Dan there too, and other people she hasn’t seen for years. But the dreams are so vivid, so clear, it feels as if no time has passed at all.

When she feels well enough to get up, she wanders down to George’s study. She trawls the internet looking up people on Facebook, searching for Ruth’s face. In a weak moment, she decides to order Richard Wiseman’s book but she clicks through too quickly and finds she has sent it to her work address. On a well-worn trail, she tends to return to George’s desk, to try the drawers in case. Just in case.

Yesterday, a particularly bad day, she picked up the photo collage on his desk and looked at it again. It took her a moment to realise, but the photos seemed to be in a different order from when she last saw them. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. Yes, they’d been changed around. Her eyes returned to the photo of George and Dan, and it seemed smaller, as if it had been cropped. Alice traced her finger around the edge. The red hair had disappeared. It had been cut away.

She had called Christie to talk about it but found she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it out loud. Perhaps she’d wait to see her in person. Instead, she said, ‘Did you know Naomi Walker is pregnant, too? I noticed on Facebook.’ It had been something a mutual friend had written, tagging both Naomi and Alice in the post.

Christie paused. ‘No, I hadn’t heard.’

‘It just made me think,’ said Alice, playing with the cord of the house phone. ‘It just made me think that if Ruth were still alive, it might give her a reason to come back.’

Christie had been silent for a long time. She has been quite short with Alice recently. Maybe she just thinks Alice is being a wet blanket. Christie efficiently pushed out three bouncing boys without any fuss and was back to work within six weeks of the last one’s arrival.

‘Don’t you think, darling,’ she said, ‘that you’re being weird about this?’

What had she been like before she met Christie? Alice tries to focus. She had always thought of herself as, if not mousy exactly, someone who had to try rather hard. She had started college a term late because of glandular fever, which had lingered for months after her A levels. By the time she arrived, other freshers had separated into clusters. She’d had to make up for the lost months. So she was grateful to have happened upon Christie, who had the bedroom above her and invited her up one morning for coffee. Sitting there, as Christie fussed over a compact Italian coffee machine, Alice noticed the Post-it notes on the wall above her desk: ‘Fit not fat’ and ‘You can always do better’. And while part of her shrank from the blatant ambition, another part admired it. Was this what it took to improve oneself?

Alice and Christie weren’t alone in striving in that way. Alice recognised the signs in other girls: grey smudges under their eyes, the way they pushed their food around their plates in formal hall, watching the men, watching the other girls, measuring up the competition. Alice spent her days measuring, too: measuring her waistline, measuring time, calculating hours left in the library or minutes on the rowing machine in the college gym.

There was always so much to be done. There were cocktail parties and yoga classes, ballroom dancing, rowing, the library – always the library, armed with lists of books so long that she would feel a lump in her throat when they were handed to her in tutorials.

Alice observed how Christie took care of herself: her manicures, her glossy hair. Christie, she noticed, never drank too much. She sipped her drinks, put them down for long stretches of time, and seemed to listen intently to other people without saying a huge amount herself. Despite not having the obvious charisma of other, more show-offy girls, Christie’s cool self-possession and dry wit meant friends flocked to her, but for some reason she chose Alice, of all people, to be her closest confidante. ‘I can tell we’re both alike,’ she said that morning over a cappuccino. ‘I think we know the value of things.’

One afternoon, after Alice had fallen into bed with a handsome rugby player and was feeling rather dreadful following his retreat, Christie had popped down to see her. Surveying the dark room, Christie had pulled the curtains open, drenching it with light. She’d perched on the end of Alice’s bed and said crisply: ‘I don’t want to lecture you, but they don’t stay with the ones who sleep with them straight away.’

‘It doesn’t sound very modern,’ huffed Alice.

‘It isn’t,’ Christie agreed. ‘But it works. Especially with the rugby boys – they’re the worst. Or you can just muck around, have fun.’ She made it sound like a bad thing. ‘It’s up to you, of course, but did you have fun? Really?’

Alice thought of the previous evening – the flush of flirtation over cocktails, the initial rush of excitement, yes, but with sweatiness, disappointment, the prickling of embarrassment hot on its heels.

‘My mother says these are the years,’ said Christie.

‘The years for what?’

‘Finding the right person. We’ll never have it as good as this – never again be surrounded by so many bright young men.’ She looked hard at Alice. ‘Do you know Magnus? The only decent hairdresser in town. He’s da bomb.’ Christie had the unfortunate habit of trying to pep up her rather conservative way of speaking with occasional street lingo. It didn’t really work.

Alice put a hand to her hair. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘I’m going to take you to see him. He’ll sort you out. My treat.’

As she sat in Magnus’s chair, her hair falling from her in drifts, Alice suddenly felt unspeakably sad, as if she were being shorn of her old self; as if pieces of her childhood were falling away from her. She closed her eyes.

‘It’s going to be so worth it,’ said Christie from behind her, reading her mind. And, strangely enough, she was right. Alice emerged from the salon as if from a chrysalis. Her brown hair became a short blonde bob, framing her eyes and making her look neat, in charge and altogether less mousy.

‘We need to get you some clothes to match,’ Christie said. ‘Let’s start with a dress.’

That night, in her new Karen Millen dress, George, in his final year, noticed Alice for the first time. It was not a style Alice would have normally gone for, with a bodice in turquoise and a hot pink skirt, but it attracted the eye, as Christie put it, and emphasised her tiny waist. It cost her a serious chunk of her student loan, but it was worth it for the reaction it got. In between making eyes at George, she calculated how she was going to live for the rest of the term. She’d certainly have to work through the holidays.

At the end of the night, George walked her back to her room, but she allowed him only to the bottom of the staircase.

‘So, which one’s yours?’ He smiled, looking up the stairs.

‘You’ll see.’ She smiled back. ‘Maybe.’

His mouth looked sulky for a moment; he took a step closer to her.

‘But it would be fun to see it now.’

Keep it light, Christie had said.

‘Yes, but it’ll be something for you to look forward to.’

Alice stepped closer too, glanced up through her eyelashes at George.

He reached for her hand, his eyes glassy, unfocused. It wasn’t quite how she’d imagined it. Standing on tiptoes, she kissed his cheek for a second, inhaling the whisky and aftershave smell of him, then turned quickly and trotted up the stairs.

‘Anna, come back!’ George had called after her petulantly. ‘Anna!’

‘No,’ she shouted back. ‘And it’s Alice.’

Naomi

She always had a temper. She broke my arm as a child – an accident, of course: I’d been cheating at Grandmother’s Footsteps and she pushed me too hard, misjudged her own strength.

Then there was my first boyfriend, Jamie Havers. A boy with brown hair and freckles. He used to follow me around Pony Club Camp when I was eleven. I liked him, but I didn’t want to kiss him, so he stopped talking to me and told the other boys I was frigid. It made me cry.

The day after he dumped me, Ruth asked the boys if she could join in with their game of touch rugby. I remember it was a hot August day and being outside all week had tanned the boys’ noses. Mrs Jenkins, who was in charge of looking after the children at camp, was wedged into a deckchair outside her caravan, keeping an eye on everyone and watching the game.

Ruth considered the scene for a bit and then approached the biggest of the boys. ‘Can I play?’

He squinted down at her. ‘There aren’t any other girls playing.’

‘So?’

‘Let her play,’ said a cheery dark-haired boy who was friends with Ruth.

She hung back at first, running for the ball but not trying too hard. She was biding her time for when Jamie got hold of it, which he did before too long. He was a good player, tenacious and nippy. But Ruth was faster. As he ran for the try-line, she began to give chase and just before he reached it, she caught the edge of his T-shirt in her hand and gave it a yank so that he fell, stumbling, to the floor. Then the pair of them were wrestling for the ball, rolling over and over each other. It got so vicious that the other boys started jeering and even Mrs Jenkins sounded panicked as she heaved herself up from her deckchair to disentangle them.

Ruth came out of the tussle wild-haired, with a scratch down her face, but she laughed off any fuss from me. ‘It’s just rugby,’ she said. ‘Just a fight for the ball.’

Where we were from rugby was a religion. The bar didn’t have a telly – Grandma wouldn’t hear of it – but the locals would gather afterwards to discuss the game. Everyone had an opinion on it.

We knew our father was different, though: he didn’t care as much for rugby as other men did, but he had to pretend. He was proud of the differences he’d chosen – the bow tie and flashy car – but there were ways in which he wanted to be the same, wanted to fit in with the posh crowd. Loo not toilet, lunch not dinner, long-sleeved shirts not short. There was so much to remember and apart from the voice, the slight flatness of his vowels, you’d almost never have known.

‘What do you think about these changes to the scrum rules?’ he asked one day in the bar after a game, cribbing from a newspaper article he’d just read.

‘It’ll make it harder on the pitch. Not that you’d know.’

It went quiet, the hum of conversation dying down for a moment the way it does in films. Dai the Poet had been drinking in The Swan all day. His hands looked swollen on his glass as he handed it to our mother for a refill. No please or thank you.

‘What do you mean?’

Our father wasn’t as drunk as Dai – he didn’t drink like that – but he’d had a couple of beers and you could tell, if you knew him well, when he was about to lose his temper: a quick tightening of the mouth, which Ruth inherited, a change in the focus of his eyes.

Dai’s laughter came out like a breath. ‘Not a game you played at school, I imagine.’

Our mum, with Dai’s glass in her hand, paused for a moment before filling it.

‘Where was that again?’ Dai said. ‘Your school?’

Our father ignored the question. ‘I played rugby at school,’ he said shortly, looking away from Dai as the lie came out.

He never talked about his childhood. And you could see that Dai – I never knew why they called him Dai; he sounded as English as they came – guessed, too, and that it was a test.

When the glass she had been holding shattered on the tiles, our mother didn’t do anything to clear it up, just looked at Dai steadily: ‘I remember coming to see you play rugby.’ She glanced at our dad. ‘He wasn’t very good.’

Later, chopping avocados in the kitchen, she said to us: ‘Public school boys. They are soft on the outside and hard on the inside.’ She held up the stone of an avocado. ‘Be careful of them, girls. They seem so polite, so courteous …’ She paused, looking for the words. ‘I don’t know what those schools do to them.’ She didn’t usually speak to us like that. As if we were already grown up. ‘And the worst thing is,’ she added, looking sadder than I’d ever seen her, ‘he wants to be one of them.’