Losing It

‘Yes. You haven’t talked about him much, lately. You used to all the time. I just wondered if he was OK?’

It really made me think, when she said that. It was true – I did used to tell her about Dad’s cases and things. They were always pretty interesting when he was dealing with divorces and stuff: he was cool about telling me some of the really strange things people get up to and how he had to question them about all the intimate bedroom things that went on. But he hadn’t been telling me much recently, and I hadn’t realised until Holly asked.

‘I think he’s OK,’ I said, ‘but he is a bit quiet, now you mention it. Just working hard, I suppose.’

Judy (#ulink_8fc5d459-8bcf-5eb5-8cd0-6830ad063eab)

Charlie’s been a bit strange lately. All this volunteering to do the shopping is most out of character: I know he says he’s interested in the fat checkout girl and seeing if he can cheer her up, but I find it very hard to believe that’s really what he’s up to. It must be six or seven times he’s gone back there now, over the last couple of weeks. Maybe he feels guilty about me: I know I’ve been working too hard and it worries him. Rather sweet really, the way he’s trying to take the pressure off me. But I do wish he’d go back to Sainsbury’s or Waitrose, even if it would spoil his experiment with the girl. I think we’re all getting rather tired of the small selection he finds at SavaMart. I’ll have to put my foot down and insist I do the shopping again for a while.

Meanwhile, I think it’s time I did something about the way I look: I caught sight of myself in a mirror on the wall of the gym at the school I’m inspecting and I was quite shocked. I thought I knew exactly how I looked – after all, I stare into that mirror in the bathroom every morning and evening. But there was something about the way I was standing or – I don’t know; I looked more like sixty than forty-eight. And yet, when I’m at the school, I feel far more in tune with the children than I do with the staff, almost as if I’m pretending to be grown-up when I’m discussing things with the head. She’s probably feeling exactly the same. I know when I was teaching I felt utterly different from the way I used to think teachers felt when I was a girl; they looked so secure and smug and certain about everything they said or did. How I longed to be like them. They didn’t look as if they could ever feel frightened of going to the dentist, or being late with giving work in or wearing the wrong thing. All the things I was so scared of. I could see it would all be fine once I was past the age of twenty or so.

Now I know you feel exactly the same, of course, but you pretend that you don’t. So why should I go round looking like a mature woman of sixty-something when I feel the same as I did at fourteen? There has to be a happy compromise, surely. I know I can’t go round in a short, tight skirt and strappy top like Sally does, for heaven’s sake, but there has to be something in between that and these sensible suits I seem to have crept into wearing. And there must be a way of doing my hair and make-up that’s a bit more – well, a bit prettier. My figure’s not too bad, and although my hair’s thinner than it was, it’s still –

Oh, for God’s sake – listen to me! I sound like something off the pages of a women’s magazine. Is this it? Am I going through a mid-life crisis, just when I thought I was skimming over the surface of the menopause so successfully? A confident, modern, professional woman, that’s what I am – how bizarre to find myself worrying about all this stuff, like a teenager. I haven’t got time for all this.

I wish I hadn’t gone off sex. Not just for all the obvious reasons – that I enjoyed it and it kept Charlie and me close and made me feel wanted and all that – but also because it spoils so many other things. I was Christmas shopping today, for example, in Oxford Street, and it struck me how many aspects of life are geared to the business of physical attraction. When I buy clothes and the odd bit of make-up now it’s just like stocking up on anything else, and I know it’s since sex has gone out of it that it’s stopped being fun. Well, it was – terrific fun, to sit in front of the mirror and dress and paint my body to make it attractive. Now I dress simply to look neat and tidy for its own sake, not to be actively attractive to the opposite sex. Clothes, make-up, shoes, hair and all the other nonsense become far less interesting when they don’t give you that little frisson of feeling potentially desirable – it may be unfashionable to admit to thinking that, but I do.

Charlie has never minded that I’m less proactive in our love-making – it’s not as if I can’t get any pleasure out of it. I can – it’s just that if I were honest I’d probably rather be reading a good book. I miss so much that wonderfully desperate need that I had in my youth: it was so energising and animal to be dominated by my physical urges. Probably the only time in my life I’ve really enjoyed being out of control.

I remember how Charlie used to stay at my parents’ house when we were going out together. We lived in one of those tall Victorian houses in Highgate, and he’d just got himself attached to chambers as a junior of some sort. He had rooms, of course, but half the time he’d come and live with us. For my mother’s food, he used to say, and she’d beam with pride and my father would shake his head in mock despair and mutter about being eaten out of house and home. They loved it really, not having had a boy of their own, and it suited Charlie and me very well to have him treated as a surrogate son. Made him my surrogate brother, I suppose, but – my God, he certainly didn’t treat me as any self-respecting brother would. It wasn’t the food he was hungry for in those days – and he wasn’t the only one who was starving either.

We had a very simple system. His bedroom was on the top floor, in what would have been the servants’ rooms when the house was first built, I suppose, and my room was on the floor below, just above where my parents slept. There was no bathroom at the very top and Charlie used to have to come down to use the one next to my bedroom. It would have been far too risky to creep into my room, so he used to leave a little note or drawing in the bathroom when he felt like a bit of hanky-panky, as my father would have put it. The notes were never rude, naturally: in fact they were devised to be as innocuous as possible and if discovered would simply have looked like scraps of paper dropped accidentally and inscribed with odd jottings about law books or train times. But when I went to brush my teeth the sight of one of those bits of paper would set me on fire and I’d be up those stairs in a flash – or, at least, in as near to a flash as I could manage while avoiding the creakier stair treads. It wasn’t only one way, either – there were many times I’d make sure I got to the bathroom first, and left notes of my own, signalling my impending visits.

The habit continued as a silly part of our foreplay for several years after we got married. A note inscribed with something like ‘Gaston’s Matrimonial Property Law Book IV’ or ‘6.40 Waterloo to Haslemere’ left on my pillow would send me into smug swoons of delight and straight into his arms. What fun I had choosing nighties or underwear that I knew he would enjoy, dressing myself up like a present for him to unwrap slowly in the soft light of our bedroom. How I miss it.

Ben shut himself in his room after school today, and when I knocked he said not to come in because he was working. That’s not like him – I hope he’s OK. I always used to think he was the tough one when they were little, but – it’s funny – he’s grown up to be the one I worry about the most. I just wish he didn’t have to pretend to be all right, all the time – I’m sure it’s the mixture of trying to look cool and in charge with being so unsure underneath that’s getting to him. I’ve never felt that with Sally. Maybe Holly can talk to him about it – perhaps I’ll ask her.

I hate it though. Having to give my little boy over to the care of another woman when it really counts. It’s not the empty-nest syndrome they should warn us all about – it’s the empty heart. Sounds ridiculously soppy but it’s true: it’s so hard to have Ben still here in his physical presence, but gone from me in so many other ways. I felt like screaming outside his door today: ‘Don’t you realise I wiped your bottom and fed you at the breast and washed your snot and vomit and tears off the shoulders of all my clothes for years? I was the centre of your universe, the most perfect, necessary being; now I’m an embarrassment.’ But of course I just said, ‘Oh, OK, darling’ or something feeble like that and went back downstairs.

Crystal (#ulink_dbf18fb6-28d9-5ee2-b045-71f3d2f7ebd5)

Dear Stacey,

Hiya! Guess what!!! I finally gotta date!! So I’ll be going on to the other side soon after you read this – or maybe I’m even there already. I guess your British post takes forever, huh?

Anyway, pray for me, Stacey. I know you will, and I know the Lord is gonna take good care of me and I’ve got the cute little teddy you sent and he’s gonna go in there right alongside me and I’ve got my angels praying for me too, so it’s like – hey! – it’s all gonna be just cool. No – I am NOT gonna send you a picture – you’ll just have to wait until after, when I’m thin and gorgeous (and pigs will fly, huh?)

You remember I’d seen my PCP beginning September? Ooops, sorry, I forget you don’t call them that over there – you’d say your general doctor, I think. Is that right?? Anyway – you know what I mean. And – whaddaya know?? – I got a referral. So I saw the WLS guy early October – hey, maybe I told you all this, but I’m just so excited!! – look, here’s one of my real smiley faces to show you how happy I am – cute, or what, huh???? Anyways, I had real high BP so I had to have medication for that and then a pap smear and all kinds of stuff, and he told me to come back in a month, so I did and he was real pleased with me and said my BP was down and now I’VE GOT A DATE FOR THE OTHER SIDE!

I got my approval from the insurance real easy, too. Some people have all kinds of trouble, but when they heard my weight and my history and I told them who my surgeon was they were real sweet and I got approval right there and then over the phone. I feel kinda scared, too, but I just know everything’s gonna be fine. I was real surprised it was so easy, ’cos I’m not like their usual – well, it’s hard to explain, but let’s just say I’m a little different. And no – I’m not gonna tell ya ’cos I like my little mysteries!

Pray for me, Stacey, and I’ll pray the Lord will find a way to help you over to the other side too, sweetie.

Yours with the peace of the Angels to watch over you

Crystal

Charlie (#ulink_707fbbf8-869b-530b-b90c-82dabaf9b6b6)

I can pinpoint almost to the second the moment everything changed. I was feeling so fatherly, caring and – I don’t know – sort of smug about my relationship with the checkout girl until then. I’d been back many times to SavaMart, making sure I chose Stacey’s till of course, and getting her to open up to me that little bit more each visit. I’d get home and describe progress to Judy, enjoying the fact that I now knew more than she did about the whereabouts of various goods in the store. I knew it was irritating her that I insisted on doing the shopping at SavaMart rather than Waitrose or Sainsbury’s, which, admittedly, do have a far better class of produce, not to mention service and choice. But Jude can be very understanding when she wants to be, and when I explained that this wretched checkout girl had become a bit of a project, if not challenge, she put up with the unexciting selection of goods I invariably returned with, and relaxed into the unusual luxury of not having to shop.

Meanwhile, I determined to help Stacey – as to why, I find that very hard to answer. Looking back on it, it’s difficult to rid myself of the way I now inevitably see things, and to try to remember what originally prompted my innocent and uncomplicated interest in the girl is almost impossible. I know I had become fond of her: making genuine contact with her had become a bit of an obsession, I can see that – it was certainly more than an amusing challenge, which was how I presented it to Judy and Ben. I keep coming back to the word fatherly. Yes – paternal, quite definitely. I think, in spite of the gross physical differences between the two of them, Stacey somehow reminded me of Sally, or, at least, of Sally when she was still at an age to need her dad in a real, physical way. Stacey’s disguised but – to me – quite apparent vulnerability stemmed from her size and Sally’s was simply because of her youth and inexperience, but the protective response they both produced in me was the same.

So, a middle-aged attempt to replace a beloved daughter? No, not replace: Sally, however changed and grown-up, will always keep that particular place in my heart that a first child has. But my feelings – and I use the word lightly in the context of those early days – for Stacey rekindled the caring, nurturing part of my character, if you will, that had previously been reserved for my offspring. One reads so much about the unhappiness of today’s youth – and, indeed, I come across its manifestations only too often in court – but it’s rare for me to come slap bang up against it in real life, so to speak, and I was determined to do my little bit to change the fortunes of at least this one unfortunate creature. I was also aware that since I had begun to take an interest in her, the bouts of depression, or boredom, that I had been experiencing increasingly often over the last few years had entirely ceased. Something about the girl fascinated me, and took me out of myself so much that I noticed I was worrying about her rather than about my own problems.

Each time I saw her I wondered whether her size bothered her in any way – she seemed so bored by everthing around her, apart from the brief flicker of life I’d seen in her eyes at the appearance of the store manager, the smooth Warren thingummy, that I really wasn’t quite sure if there could be any sensitivity to her own condition buried deep within the parcel of flesh. But, having seen Judy and, more markedly, Sally worry obsessively about their figures over the years, I knew that Stacey’s apparent indifference was almost certainly hiding a miserable awareness of her own unattractiveness. I thought a compliment couldn’t go amiss, and might just chip away at the defensiveness she wore around her like an impenetrable shawl.

‘What a pretty ring!’ I said to her on about my tenth visit to the store. On the middle finger of her right hand she wore a small gold ring, sporting a swirling design of filigree work and tiny blue stones. Inevitably it was partly submerged in the fleshy roundness of what still tended to remind me of a sausage, but it was true that the little points of blue against the gold, nestling into the cushions of pale, smooth skin, as in folds of cream satin in a jewellery box, made a sweet and surprisingly touching sight. I wondered briefly if the adored Warren had perhaps had a moment of madness and presented it to her as a birthday gift, or, more likely perhaps, if it came from a doting mother or father.

‘QVC,’ said Stacey, mysteriously.

It never ceased to surprise me just how often this girl came out with words or phrases that made no sense to me whatever. My brain, in a desperate attempt to cobble some sort of meaning out of the apparently random and disconnected three letters, struggled for a moment with the mad idea that the girl had said ‘QED’. Could Latin have acquired street cred without my being aware of it? It hardly seemed likely; close proximity to Ben and Sally kept me reasonably up to date with modern parlance, and, in any case, it would have made no sort of sense as a reply to my compliment. I hesitated, loth to admit I had no idea what she was talking about. I felt like one of the mothballed judges I sometimes encounter in court (‘Tell me, learned counsel, just what is this BOGOF?’).

‘Sorry?’

‘I bought it on QVC.’

‘Ah!’ I was none the wiser, of course, but nodded briefly as if in approval. Clearly, to buy a ring ‘on QVC’ was something positive – nothing to be ashamed of, at the least – so that an acknowledgement of her wisdom could do no harm. I assumed that it was some sort of hire-purchase agreement. It was clear, however, I didn’t fool the girl for a second with my pretence at understanding.

‘Shopping channel,’ she said flatly, looking up at me with a mixture of boredom and sympathy in her expression.

It all suddenly fell into place. ‘Of course!’ I laughed. ‘QVC shopping channel. Yes, yes, indeed, my wife and daughter have shown me that on Sky. Fascinating. Strangely addictive, my wife tells me. Do you know, Stacey, I thought you meant you’d bought it on some sort of hire purchase: I mean that QVC was a type of credit loan or something.’

Did I see a hint of a smile? Yes, I did – I was sure of it. The dimpled folds either side of her mouth deepened a fraction, and the toffee-coloured eyes, as she looked back up at me, definitely twinkled.

‘So did you buy it for yourself? Or was it a birthday present or something?’

‘I bought it myself. Off QVC.’

‘Yes, I see. So tell me,’ I went on, as I packed a net of sprouts into the plastic carrier, ‘how does it work? Do you phone them up or what? I mean, how do you order what you want?’

‘Yeah, you just phone them up with the credit card.’

‘Amazing.’

‘No – s’easy.’

And then she smiled. Genuinely, wholeheartedly smiled. And all the clichés in the book couldn’t describe the change that smile made to the girl’s face: yes, the clouds parted; the sun came out – it all happened, and more. It made her look quite extraordinarily pretty – the softness of her round, plump face was, in an instant, made charming rather than podgy, and the eyes, brightened with the touch of warmth, were more startlingly golden than ever.

I was desperate to capitalise on this moment of breakthrough, and, on impulse, leant over the checkout belt and picked up her soft, warm hand to take a closer look at the ring. She didn’t appear to mind; she looked down at her own hand in a detached, vaguely interested way and then back up at me, still smiling.

‘Nice, innit? You just phone, you see. Even you could do it.’

I laughed out loud. ‘Yes, I deserved that, Stacey. I didn’t mean to be patronising, I assure you. It really is a bit of a mystery to me, all this TV ordering and stuff. Buying over the internet and so on. My wife does it frequently, but I’m afraid I’m a bit out of date when it comes to all that.’

This was real progress. I even got a grudging ‘Bye’ out of her as she handed me my receipt, and I carried my shopping home, if not with a song in my heart, at least with a few random crotchets.

Over supper later I told Ben and Jude of the breakthrough of the day and made them laugh at my pathetic attempts at communicating with the poor girl.