As I passed some hunters, dressed incongruously in camouflage gear and orange caps, I wondered whether this boring life was going to suit me. The men smiled and said hello, and I returned their greetings and carried on walking, hoping they weren’t going to shoot the deer I had seen in the garden earlier. I knew that there was someone spirited hiding inside me, but I did not intend to let her out. Nobody knew I had an alter ego who popped into my head from time to time, making bitchy comments and suggesting rash courses of action. Nobody appeared to have noticed that I was normal to the point of parody, that, like an abstaining alcoholic or a newly naturalised citizen, I was too zealous, too keen, because I had made myself into something that, essentially, I was not. Of course nobody noticed; the only social interaction I had was small talk that invariably involved Alice, the weather, or both.
Ever since I had moved into the box room in Holloway, which had been decorated in pink by my cousins in honour of my arrival, I had shut off my true nature and concentrated on being good. Being good at the age of three and a bit had involved not having tantrums, always saying sorry even when whatever had happened had not been my fault, and allowing Bella to dress me up and use me as a prop in her games. Being good when I was fourteen had involved doing my homework, laying the table without being asked, and staying well away from boys.
I had gone to university, like a good girl. I studied French, on a campus a couple of miles outside a small city. I spent the third year in Paris, but I let the experience pass me by. I spent the year sitting in my hall of residence, doing my homework and reading books. I looked at art on my own, and sat in cafés on my own pretending to be engrossed in English and French newspapers, and I waited for it all to finish. Everyone else had the time of their lives, which, according to received wisdom, was the correct course of action. I kept to myself. After a while the other students stopped asking me to their parties, and I was relieved.
For four years, I did my work on time. I got a first, and almost sang with relief when it was all over. I never got drunk. I never had mindless sex. Occasionally, I would become slightly tipsy, and then I would panic because I hated the loss of control. A couple of times, I slept with someone, but only when I had planned it in advance. For six months I had a closet relationship with one of my tutors. I broke it off because, although he was thirty-seven and single, it was technically not allowed. I did not like feeling that I was doing something that was forbidden. Although my relationship with Stephen was harmless in the extreme, I did not want to become accustomed to breaking the rules.
I suppressed my inner rebel, and concentrated on being boring. I cleaned red wine stains out of carpets to avoid the loss of a deposit, even when it wasn’t my house. I pushed people into taxis and handed money to the driver. The following day, I would often hear the person in question marvelling, ‘I have no idea how I got home!’ I would smile to myself, and keep quiet.
My fellow students liked to sit up late, drinking cheap alcohol and swapping confidences. Sometimes I would go to the bar and sit at the corner of a table, but I never joined the conversations. I remained aloof and largely ignored.
I looked at my watch. I had to be at school on the dot of twelve fifteen to collect Alice. It was time to turn back. The sky had cleared, and it had become much warmer. The ice was melting, and I was hot in my big coat. As I walked back down the hill, I noticed that the trees on either side of the road had the very beginnings of buds on them.
My dullness at university had not saved me from drama altogether. The fact that I was, essentially, an orphan made me strangely attractive to a particular type of young man. They would corner me and ask me questions. I normally managed to shake them off by being unfriendly. Only one persisted. He was a self-consciously troubled art student, who called himself Po.
‘What happened?’ he would ask, cornering me in a bar. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ My answer was unequivocal. I never knew my father. My mother died when I was three. No, thank you, I do not wish to talk about it; least of all to you.
This seemed to make me more attractive to him. The primmer I was, the more determined he became.
Po followed me around for years. He revelled in being riven with angst, and tutted despairingly over the trivia that preoccupied our colleagues.
‘Like I’m supposed to give a fuck about her hair!’ he muttered to me one summer evening, with a complicit smile. ‘Some people have no sense of perspective, do they, Ems?’
He made my skin cold with distaste. The bar was crowded and smoky, and on the pretext of letting someone else in at the table, he moved his chair cosily up to mine. ‘I mean, who cares about their hair when there’s so much that really matters going on in the world, hey, Emma? I mean, I don’t hear you demanding that the whole bar gives you an opinion on the perm versus bob conundrum. You have beautiful hair, and that’s that.’ He lifted his hands defensively. ‘I know, I know, I shouldn’t even notice. But you know what’s what. I can see that, because you’ve suffered a terrible loss at an early age. You’re self-reliant and I respect that. So, what actually happened to your mother? Was she ill? Or do you not feel ready to talk about it?’
I looked at him. He ostentatiously made no effort over his appearance. His hair was dyed orange and stood up on end. His face had, in the past, been ravaged by acne. He wore tie-dyed trousers, Doc Martens, and an enormous granddad shirt. I suspected that it took him quite some time to perfect his look, not least since the degree of dishevelment did not vary from one day to the next.
Po apparently had a much better looking older brother and tried to extract some angst from the fact that he was constantly living in his shadow. I had no sympathy, and I was sure my face said as much.
‘My mother died,’ I said, in answer to his question. ‘What happened to
your
mother?’
He was surprised. ‘Mine?’ I could see him casting around for something to say. ‘Oh, she was a bit ill last year, as it happens.’
‘But she’s better now?’
‘Yes. Well, as far as I know she’s OK.’
‘What was wrong?’
‘Um.’ He looked down, as if seeking some genuine trauma on the fag-burned carpet. ‘Women’s problems, I believe.’
‘The menopause?’
‘Something like that.’
I looked at him. ‘Poor Po,’ I said softly. He looked into my eyes, and smiled winsomely. ‘You would actually like to trade your menopausal mother for my dead one, wouldn’t you?’ I continued. ‘You have no idea.’
That was a gross confrontation as far as I was concerned. As I got up to leave, he pulled the edge of my T-shirt.
‘My parents had a trial separation,’ he pleaded. ‘It’s not my fault they got back together.’
Po almost stalked me. He left me notes, wrote me poems, painted my portrait (from memory: nothing would have induced me to sit for him). For a while, he left a single red rose in my pigeonhole every Friday. Often, I would discover it when I plunged my hand in and was pricked by the thorn; I was sure he infuriated everyone else whose surname began with ‘M’. For two years, he laboured under the misapprehension that I was not interested in him because he could not produce an emotional scar from his past. He thought that I would tear off my clothes and pour out my feelings if only he could match me, trouble for trouble. I was scared of him. I came to dread the sight of him. I ignored him. I pretended, unconvincingly, to be someone else when he rang.
Then, during the summer after we graduated, he turned up on the doorstep in Holloway.
‘Emma!’ Geoff called up the stairs. ‘There’s someone here for you! A young man!’
I walked down gingerly. I did not have unexpected visitors, least of all young men. I didn’t really have visitors at all. I tagged along with Bella and Charlotte and their friends.
My heart plummeted when I saw him standing there. His trousers were torn cotton. His shirt was crumpled. Everything about him was distasteful.
Geoff had rushed back to his study, no doubt to give me ‘some privacy’, and everyone else was out. If Bella had been around, she would have seen him off for me.
‘Hello, Po,’ I said stonily. ‘Come in.’
He followed me into the kitchen. ‘Do you want a drink?’ I asked, in a voice that I knew conveyed that the desired answer was no.
‘Mmmm. I could murder a cup of tea,’ he said enthusiastically, and sat at the table. ‘You look lovely. I like your trousers. So, what have you been up to?’
‘These are my pyjama trousers,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been applying for jobs. What can I do for you, Po?’
I put the kettle on. I calculated that it would take me five minutes to make the tea, ten minutes to drink it. I would get him out of the house before twenty minutes had passed.
He looked at me intently, and laughed, a hollow laugh. His manner was suddenly confrontational, hostile.
‘What can you do for me?’ he echoed. ‘Do you have any idea? I’ve loved you from the day I met you, Emma Meadows. You’ve made it plain that you don’t feel anything for me. I need you. I can see your soul. You need me, too. One day you’ll realise it. But by then it will be too late.’
He sounded self-conscious, and I knew that these weren’t his words, that he was parroting lines from films and songs and trashy books. I tried not to laugh.
‘Po,’ I told him, ‘I like you, but I’ll never, ever be in love with you.’
‘You will. But like I said it will be too late.’ He stood up and started walking towards me.
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, a kettle half full of just boiled water in my hand.
‘I’m talking about this,’ he said. He reached behind me, took a knife from the block, and swiftly pulled it across his wrists. He did it the right way, cutting downwards rather than across. Blood spurted out. It splattered my clothes, my face, my hair. I dropped the kettle and scalded our feet. Po placed the knife on the worktop, and held his wrists out.
‘Now do you believe I love you?’ he asked, triumphantly, as blood poured out.
I must have screamed, because suddenly Geoff was there, pulling me away from Po, and phoning an ambulance.
Po left me alone after that. He had, I supposed, achieved his ambition. He had given himself some literal scars and an excellent anecdote to recount secretively to vulnerable girls. My feet were scalded by the hot water, and I had the marks for life. I thought he probably did, too.
I kept away from anyone who was interested in me after that. I kept my feet covered. I closed myself off further, stayed at home, and only spoke to men who were evidently sane and well balanced. I learned to call Christa and Geoff ‘my parents’. I kept my mother a secret. For a long time I was sure I was destined to be alone for ever.
Yet I do not have bad memories of Po. He reappeared in my life in Brighton, where we ran into each other from time to time. By then he had wisely reverted to the name Peter; and, four years ago, he turned my scared little life upside down by introducing me to Matt, one sunny day in Brighton.
When I walked into the classroom to fetch Alice, I could see the tear stains on her face. She ran straight at me and clung to my knees. I picked her up. She buried her face in my shoulder.
‘How was it?’ I asked the teacher. She put her head on one side.
‘I nearly rang you,’ she said. ‘It was hard because I tried to comfort her but she didn’t understand what I was saying.’
I felt soiled with guilt, and left as quickly as I could. I tried to drop the planning application in at the
Mairie
on the way past, but it was closed for lunch.
The garden needed an immense amount of work, and I suddenly realised that I could do it. When Matt was away, when Alice was at school, I had little to do except for my daily nagging phone call to the builders. I did not dare make these calls without a full transcript of the way the conversation might go in front of me. I would go for walks and wait for the post, which yielded official communications of various daunting sorts or, occasionally, a postcard from my cousin Greg in south-east Asia. I treasured the postcards, but I needed a project. On Alice’s first full school day, I started to negotiate my way around a hectare of abandoned, boggy land.
That morning, I dropped Alice off, with her napkin in her bag and a lunch ticket tucked into her book. She didn’t scream and yell and cry because she had realised that did no good. She just looked at me with miserable reproach, and stalked off to play by herself in the toy kitchen.
I drove home feeling guilty, as usual, but looking forward to a day by myself. I changed into my worst jeans and my wellies, and took my coffee outside to examine the garden. It had been a wonderful weekend with Matt, and because he had commented about the terrible state of the garden, I had decided to tidy it up a little as a surprise for him on Thursday.
The garden had looked thoroughly dead when we had arrived. In fact it was so muddy and overgrown that I had barely walked around it. Now that I did, however, I noticed that, everywhere, there were signs of life. Leaves were about to bud on many of the trees. There were weeds everywhere, but as I stood on a flower bed to get a better view of the lower branches of a cherry tree, I noticed something strange. In between the weeds and nettles and self-seeded beginnings of new, unwanted trees, there were green shoots. Strong, green shoots pushed up everywhere I looked. I thought they might be daffodils, though my horticultural knowledge was limited. But they were there. The garden was still alive.
I rushed out and bought myself three pairs of gardening gloves and a random selection of trowels and spades, and a scythe. I spent the rest of the morning pulling weeds out of the soil, digging up those tiny trees, which were surprisingly tenacious, and patting the soil carefully into place around the shoots. At half past one, I stopped for lunch, and wolfed down a baguette, a chunk of cheese, two tomatoes, a bag of crisps, seven chocolate biscuits and two cups of tea. Then I carried on hacking until four twenty-five, scything away as much of the bramble as I dared, and piling it all up into a future bonfire.