First Love Read online

  So it was both strange, and dreadful—I knew it—to feel that I was managing him, in a way. Beyond bringing him out of himself, or my genuine interest; that I was maintaining this keen and appreciative front as a way to keep him calm, or to distract him. Like—I don’t know—throwing some sausages at a guard dog. This was someone I was supposed to be close to. And wouldn’t he be horrified if he knew that was how I saw it? His scorn would finish us both, I was sure. It was a deep instinct, though, as I was finding out. The deepest, in this new world? I had to hope not. But I was very much without bearings, that first year.

  When I took my own plate out into the kitchen, Edwyn was standing at the sink, gripping the edge of the surface, and breathing deeply.

  ‘Do you want to skip tomorrow night?’ I said. ‘I don’t mind.’

  He turned around, smirked.

  ‘No. We’ll go. He’s your friend, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, but. We don’t have to. Or I could just go.’

  ‘And you’ll want to get drunk afterwards, will you?’

  ‘No. Why do you have to say it like that?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh, forget it. I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter. Like nothing.’

  ‘I have been to five thousand of these fucking events, OK?’

  Now he slammed his hand against the side of the cupboard.

  ‘I just want to know what I’m doing, OK?’

  ‘OK. Well. I suppose I will want to have a drink. But I don’t want to get drunk. I don’t like getting drunk, really, these days.’

  He looked at me with real hatred here. As if I were formidably evil. He stared at me, taking in what I’d said.

  ‘I’ve been drunk once since you’ve known me. I don’t think that’s fair, Edwyn.’

  ‘Yes. You drank until you were sick.’

  ‘Right. OK. But we have been over that, haven’t we? I’ve apologized so many times. I have, Edwyn.’

  ‘And on my money. And all of your friends got drunk on my money. And you were sick. Nice.’

  Whenever we had this conversation—every couple of weeks, it seemed, back then—I knew life was hopeless. I knew it was. My body started to ache. My voice got dull. I spoke like a machine that was running down, while he seemed only to gain energy.

  ‘You offered to pay for the drink,’ I said. ‘I told you I’d pay you back when I could, and I will.’

  He frowned.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t want your money. And don’t get me wrong, I was happy to pay, of course. You can’t have a party with no wine.’

  ‘I was happy not to have a party, if you remember.’

  ‘Sure. But the fact is that you drank until you were sick. And your friends got drunk. On my money.’

  ‘Right.’

  There was a pause. Again I smiled, stupidly, pleadingly.

  ‘Is that a northern thing, do you think?’ he said. ‘Is what a northern thing?’

  ‘Well, you enjoy being sick on yourself, don’t you? I’ve never known anyone else who enjoys being sick on themselves.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So it’s a reasonable question, then, isn’t it? Is that what people in the north do? Is that something you find acceptable, or civilized, or fun? Perhaps it is. I wouldn’t know.’

  —

  I didn’t know how sick I’d been. Honestly. I was drunk. A dead weight. I could remember being yanked up stairs I couldn’t climb.

  ‘This is how you think it’s going to be, do you?’

  ‘This is what you think you’re dragging me into, is it?’

  I was lifted by the shoulders, thrown down with force. Lifted up, again.

  ‘You live in shit, so we all have to live in shit, is that right?’ Edwyn said.

  Everything was rushing. His hatred. His changed face. I just kept trying to breathe.

  ‘Is it?’ he said, shaking me now. I said his name. Tried to. Was this it? Like drowning?

  ‘Edwyn! Please!’

  ‘Don’t you “Edwyn” me.’ He pulled me further into the flat, his hands under my armpits. ‘You keep away from me.’

  I was lifted up again, by one arm, thrown down.

  ‘You keep well fucking away from me. OK? OK?’

  I stayed down, on the floor by the dresser, in the gap by the wall, on my hands and knees but not trying to stand, just ducking my head and keeping still.

  ‘Get back in the sewer,’ Edwyn said. ‘Get back in the sewer, scum.’

  —

  I opened my eyes to daylight. I was on the floor, in the store room. My eyes were watering. I felt I was surfacing, then sinking.

  In painful stages I proceeded. In the bathroom I washed my face twice, cleaned my teeth twice. I sat down on the toilet seat to recover, moaning and crying with the pain. Finally I got down and knelt by the toilet, put my head down there. Cool, porcelain shoulder…

  Edwyn’s rucksack was still in the hallway. His coat was spread out on the bannister. So he hadn’t gone to work. My handbag, I saw, had been emptied out onto the dresser. With shaking hands, I put everything back. Only my keys were gone. Did I remember that? Him taking them?

  In the kitchen I cried while I ran the tap, and then I had to pause after every gulp of water, to suck in a breath, to squeeze my fists. There was Nurofen in the drawer, but when I shook the strip out of the box there were only two pills left, so I couldn’t take them…I cried, again, painfully, when I saw that my suitcase was out, in the living room, open, and with all of my clothes thrown in, hangers and all. I remembered that too, now, Edwyn powering back and forth, while I stood like a ghost, just there, by the cooker.

  Getting changed was painful. My body was like a puppet’s body, my mind sloshing in my skull. I pulled off my sweaty dress, found some jeans, a jumper, then went to the bathroom again, and repeated my routine, brushing my teeth, my tongue, splashing cold water on my sore eyes, my flushed face. Then, again, I had to sit and wait out the room’s violent fairground spinning.

  What could help me? Who? The questions wrung me out. I pressed my teeth together and moaned.

  —

  Like a snake Edwyn rose from his slumber, his face flushed, crumpled, his blond hair hanging in pieces.

  ‘What are you doing? What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing. I just woke up in there. I wondered if you were awake.’

  He stared at me.

  ‘I don’t remember much,’ I said.

  ‘Well. Lucky you.’

  ‘Do you remember what happened? I’m sorry I got so drunk.’

  Now he mimicked my voice:

  ‘What happened? What happened? Don’t you talk to me. Mad bitch. Mad cunt. I remember. I wasn’t drunk.’

  ‘Don’t you come near me,’ he said, as, stupidly, I stepped forward. ‘What makes you think you can come near me?’

  The duvet was wrapped and ranged around his hips, his bare shoulders were pulled back: a bucking centaur.

  —

  I went back to the store room, heart pounding, teeth chattering. But what had I imagined? A hug? A ‘never mind’? I couldn’t think. I curled up in the club chair, waited.

  Perhaps an hour passed before Edwyn appeared, dressed now, in his jeans, his huge flannel shirt, his cardigan. His eyes looked blasted.

  ‘You’re still here,’ he said.

  ‘Please, Edwyn. I’m so ill. I’m sorry. If I can just stay in here until I feel better. Then I’ll go. I really don’t think I can manage now.’

  ‘I don’t care how you feel. You think I care how you feel?’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. If I could just have an hour or two. I won’t bother you.’

  He was standing in the doorway, staring at me. Who’d liked me yesterday. Who’d let me come and live with him. I got down then, on my knees, and put my head down before him and said I was sorry over and over again.

  ‘If I could just have a couple of hours’ grace. Please, Edwyn.’

  ‘Oh, you want a few hours’ grace, do you? You want a few hours�
� grace?’

  I was looking at his bare feet. I edged back.

  ‘Please. I feel so sick.’

  Now there was a hand under my arm. A hand like a blade. I was yanked up.

  ‘Well, if you feel sick, you better had move. Don’t you dare be sick in here as well as every other room in the house.’

  ‘I haven’t been sick.’

  ‘I’ve spent all night cleaning up your sick. You’ve been sick in every room in this flat.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Have I? Have I?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Oh, you think I’m making it up? You think I’m imagining it? Christ, I wish.’

  He let me go and I walked to the bathroom. For a while I knelt and tried to be sick. Nothing. I sat with my mouth open, my heartbeat slamming in my head. Then I sat on the toilet seat. I took deep breaths, as if that would speed up the getting better. I kept twitching my feet, as if I could work it all off like that, somehow. I felt a heat flush through my body, and then a shivering cold.

  —

  Edwyn was waiting on the landing.

  ‘You think I want to be a carer, do you? Is that what you think?’ he said, as I tried to get past.

  I shook my head.

  ‘No.’

  He followed me into the store room, where I sat down again, and curled up, put my hands over my head.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I blame myself. I knew what I was getting. I knew what you were. You never learned, did you, how to interact with other people, in a way that wasn’t mad. How to be in the world in a way that wasn’t sick and mad…It’s not your fault. I do understand that. But I won’t be anyone’s carer. Do you get that?’

  —

  ‘Oh, you’re upset, are you? You’re upset. Stop snivelling. Why do women snivel at everything?’

  I was crying, but I didn’t say anything anymore. I was going to count to a hundred and then stand up. I was going to find my phone charger…Only I kept getting lost in my counting. My head throbbed. Self-disgust was an accelerant. Where could I go? There was nowhere. Nobody. I barely had tube fare. I was thirty-three and that was how it was. Backed into this same wretched corner. Worse each time, in fact. Trying to prove what, exactly?

  Another hour passed. Another two hours.

  To keep myself calm, I pictured a hotel room. In great detail. A kind place. Somewhere like the Kings Cross Inn. (Remember?) Where I could sleep and feel shaky tomorrow, fine on Thursday. In another world…By now I knew, I’d guessed, that Edwyn wasn’t going to throw me out. But what came next in that case?

  It started to get dark, cold. I heard the wind outside. And then Edwyn appeared, again, in the doorway.

  ‘There’s nothing to eat,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’ I said.

  My mouth was so dry, it was hard to speak. ‘Isn’t there?’ Again I had to swallow and wait. He stared at me.

  ‘Do you want me to go and get something?’

  ‘Well, I’m not going anywhere,’ he said.

  In the living room, while I laced up my boots, he came and walked around me. I was covered in sweat. A thick, cold, oily sweat.

  ‘I won’t buy meat,’ I said.

  ‘No one’s asking you to buy meat. Did you hear me say that? Don’t you put words into my mouth. I won’t be told what I’ve said. OK?’

  —

  ‘You’re just going to leave that there, are you?’ he said, looking at my suitcase.

  2

  My grandmother was filthy. My father wasn’t lying. And having had it pointed out by him, repeatingly, it grew hard to ignore: the greasy hair, the old make-up, drifting, in a varicoloured sludge. Long clouds of grime closed on her wrists and her throat, and there was that slightly rotten smell, too, abroad in her vicinity.

  She did wash—herself, her clothes—but, inalienably mindful of the cost, she used cold water, and in the machine, just a snuff-pinch of soap and then a drop of TCP. So—wash isn’t the word, is it? She conscientiously got herself and her clothes wet; the effectiveness of this enterprise: not relevant, somehow. Not what she was being marked on.

  We lived with her after my mother left my father, for four years, until I was eight. During that time she was observant about my being clean, in one respect: she insisted on checking me over after I’d been to the toilet. I had to bend over and touch my toes while she went at me with her crispy, barely damp flannel—a mould-bloomed rag—rubbed repeatedly on one of the cracked old bars of soap she collected. These sat banked around the taps. Black in the cracks. Cracked like bark.

  But was anybody clean back then? When I think of my friends’ houses, they weren’t any less filled with shit. Here were cold, cluttered bedrooms, greased sheets. The kitchens were a horror show: ceilings bejewelled with pus-coloured animal fat, washing-up sitting in water which was spangled like phlegm. Our neighbour’s house, where we went after school, was an airlocked chamber smelling of bins that hadn’t been put out. There was a long skid mark, I remember, on one of the towels in their bathroom. It was there for three years.

  So—I did grow up in shit. It was no slander.

  Shit, filth, stupidity, dishonesty. (Mother looking up slyly from a crying jag.)

  I did use to be sick a lot. No slander, though Edwyn didn’t know it. I don’t think he ever asked about my past, my old lives, which was either sensitivity, discretion or—I don’t know—does it show that his idea of me was fragile? I think I was sick from drink, at least once a week, for about fifteen years. In Manchester, everything made me sick. I was lonely, frightened. I couldn’t manage. I look back on a decade of barely managed helplessness. I’d wake up to people I didn’t know, looking at my things. One tall, bald man in a leather jacket:

  ‘So are you quite a lonely character? Me too. So do you really not get out much? Me neither. I bet you don’t read biographies, do you? No, I do. Now come here, you. Come on.’

  Once I woke up in a hotel in town, to a long heap of sick next to me in bed, like a person.

  And the men I thought interesting, liked—I only ever woke up with them through some drunken accident, usually because they were at a low in their lives. I remember coming round with my old friend Kerrigan, from home, whom I adored:

  ‘I’m just wondering why you want to annihilate everything,’ he was saying, looking round my flat for his clothes. I didn’t remember what I’d done.

  —

  Time doesn’t help. You forget, for years, even, but it’s still there. A zone of feeling. A cold shade. I barely drink now, but when I do, sometimes I see so clearly how nothing’s changed. Not one thing. About who I am and what I am. I don’t have to be drunk. When I least expect it, my instincts are squalid, my reactions are squalid, vengeful. And for what? What am I so outraged by? Little mite with a basilisk stare. Grown woman. My parents were hopeless. And? Helpless, as we all are. Life is appalling. My father ate himself to death. Isn’t that enough? A year before that, in a short email to my brother, he mused,

  ‘Should I tell you/shield you? The latest. Peri-anal abscesses! Pain unimaginable!’

  Won’t that do?

  —

  Kerrigan lives down here now, sharing a flat in a block in Kentish Town. I went and met him for a coffee, earlier this year. His suggestion. A happy surprise, when my phone buzzed. I walked up to Café Rustique one warm and rainy afternoon, after work.

  My old friend stood up as I opened the door, and edged out deftly from his side of the table to give me a hug.

  ‘Are you wet or are you shiny?’ he said, pausing. (I had on my black plastic mac.)

  ‘Hello. Yeah, I’m both. Do you want to risk it?’

  ‘I do. What d’you want? D’you want a coffee? No, I’ll get it, you sit down, darling.’

  Christ, he looked thin. Thin little legs. People do get old, when you look away. I looked old. Hair in a frizz. When he sat back down, he smiled again. His cheeks were raked under his whiskers, as if by rain. I liked his new glasses, though.

 
‘They’re good,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, thanks. Yeah.’

  He took them off and looked at them, gave them a polish with his cardigan sleeve, pushed them back on again.

  I felt we were in some other stream of life, somehow. We’d known each other for so long, and then we hadn’t. He told me about his work, in Wormwood Scrubs, now, the woman he’d been seeing, how he was trying to get a more permanent job.

  ‘It’s dead-men’s shoes these days,’ he said. ‘More or less.’

  He had a flatmate who worked in a phone shop. He was always avoiding him.

  ‘It’s like being at school again, you know, hiding in the toilet for a bit of privacy? I’ve had to clear out today while his kid comes round and you do find yourself thinking, nothing’s changed, when you’re still, you know, killing time in places like this. I was brushing my teeth in there before,’ he said, nodding at the gents.’

  We caught up on the people we knew: Margaret, Paul Powell. I told him about my father’s funeral. I knew he had family in that neighbourhood, too.

  ‘Oh, yeah, I know the place,’ he said. ‘I think they planted my old man there. Think so.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Oh, God, years ago. Five years?’

  ‘Did you go?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t go back anymore. Feel a bit afraid to, if I’m honest. Has a radioactive feel now. Like it would be hazardous! Not reaching the full Chernobyl levels yet. But getting there, you know?’

  ‘I feel that for Manchester more than Liverpool. But yes. Strange, isn’t it? Blameless places. But not.’

  ‘No,’ he said, and he squinted at his drink, then looked back up at me with his eyes still narrowed.

  ‘What do you get up to down here?’ I said.

  ‘Oh. Well. Lots of this, to be honest. Lots of coffee. Coffee with the clients. Coffee with my boss. You know I don’t drink now? Well, now you know. Coffee in the evening. I’m working, mostly. Getting about. I never know where I’m going to be, so. Gadding. Jaunting.’