Twelve. Vanessa Jones
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he says. ‘You start.’
Edward and I are friends. We are better friends in theory than in practice. I love him, but what does that mean? We are going to his parents’ house, which is my favourite house – I love it and I like to think I have an understanding with it. It is elegant and grand, it is family and snug. How? Every room I want to breathe-in. I am always given the same bedroom, which I call Lily’s Room, but Edward’s family call it Bobbin’s room after some great aunt who lived there once. It feels like home to me but it is not my home, and I do not belong to it.
When we arrive, we’ll see through the window Edward’s parents sitting at the table in the middle of the kitchen. If you go in through the back door (and I have never been in through the front), the first room you come to is the kitchen. It is dark, in the way that a wood is dark. We’ll leave our bags in the car. We’ll walk in looking exhausted and dirty in the way parents expect, and secretly like. Edward’s mum will make room for us at the table. She’ll jump up and try to fetch us things, and Edward and his dad will tell her to sit back down. Then the others will arrive and there’ll be a general commotion involving luggage and kisses and fragments of lives. There’ll be a massive lasagne for supper and a treacle tart and after Edward’s parents have gone to bed, we’ll go into the drawing room and drink coffee, and take drugs.
I often wonder how much our parents would like us if they knew the whole truth.
Edward has quite an odd collection of friends which he likes to mix and match on these weekends. And although some of them look like they’re mutual, really I only see them these days by proxy, when I’m with him. We look uncomfortable in the drawing room. We are neither old enough nor young enough to own it. We look like props on the over-stuffed sofas, smugly smoking our joints or, now that we all have a bit more money, snorting a surreptitious line of cocaine. We are an uneasy mix of tailored suits and denim jackets. We have almost completely let go our dreams into the i-wish abyss. But not quite. Another year perhaps, two? at most five.
We’re never at our best on Friday nights. Something it is about coming to the country. We all invest the ‘country’ with some sort of healing power, and I don’t know whether it actually possesses it, but I do think it’s odd that anyone should lead a life they need constant respite from. Tonight I’ll go to bed earlier than I have done all week. Tonight I’ll sleep in Lily’s bed, next to the window which looks out onto fields of sheep. I’ll read a few lines of the Agatha Christie novel that’s always on the bedside table and listen to the silence. It’ll be dark. Properly dark like it is in a memory. No dreams.
After breakfast, before lunch, we go for a walk. To nowhere in particular. Edward’s garden becomes fields becomes the whole wide world. It is summer and the trees look heavy. Flowers bud bloom and rot on their stalks – decadence. If Edward’s mum had come with us we should have heard the names of them all, but today she doesn’t come. Too busy in her usually mysterious way. I’ve never met a mother who isn’t. They make lists, which sometimes branch off into sublists: a, b, c, d. In her absence I ask Edward to name everything. It is another game we play. If he doesn’t know, he knows to make it up. I find this delightful, like being a gummy child. Or Eve.
He points out to the others the line of cedars visible from this hill. He has taught me to love cedars – the elegant stillness of their elongated limbs – but weeping beeches are my favourite trees. They look like the sea stopped. There is one in his garden, and sitting under it I get a panoramic view of everyone’s calves playing croquet. There are sounds but not the words they are making. I’m wondering what Edward talks about when I’m not there and whether he has the same conversations. The light under here is the same as the light of the kitchen. Hands on mallets on balls. Clock-clock.
He is a fanatic games player, Edward. Chinese checkers, bridge, chess and on rainy days, Risk. I have spent whole weekends watching him try for world domination. He tells me that tonight will be perfect for murder so we bring the dining room outside. Tablecloth, candles, the whole kit and boodle. It is an old crone of a moon. Ace of hearts kills; Jack detects.
Edward says ‘the secret of life is to enjoy the world without wanting to possess it’ – but not everyone can borrow such an eden. I feel like pointing this out to him as we drive past the high-rises on the way back to town. I don’t, because we’re having an argument. The same argument we always have on the way back home about me, and how I expect to be driven to my front door. I quite like it because by the time it’s over we have driven to my front door. Rewind. All return journeys are shorter, like the last half of the week once you’ve got past the hill of Thursday, 12 p.m.
Tonight Shirley is watering the hollyhock in her front garden. I say garden, but really it is just the space between the road stop and her house start. She planted it out last year and this summer her hollyhock has swollen to gigantic proportions. It really is an extraordinary sight, barely diminished by her presence next to it.
I have discovered that it is a mistake to make friends with your next door neighbours. I can’t slide into my house now without having some intercourse with her and tonight I’m just not in the mood. It’s the same as going back to school after the long summer holidays. You’ve got something precious from home in your bag, and suddenly you see your teacher or your best friend and it’s sullied. You’re back down to earth and it was only a dream – silly. When I get in I’ll put a bag of blueberries down, and Edward’s mum’s chocolate brownies, and they’ll seem completely out of place and stupid. I’ll go to my room, and it will look like time hasn’t passed, like nothing’s happened. I can’t bear it. I want to hold on for a bit longer before I believe it. ‘Put your sunglasses on,’ says Edward. I do, I get away with ‘Nice weekend?’ and ‘Yes, thank you.’
At the moment, everything reminds me of being at school. Our individual lives are minute replicas of our whole species’ evolution. When a baby gets up onto its two legs it becomes homo erectus, becomes homo sapiens. Thinking man. It occurred to me at the ends of term that the school was a magnet momentarily switched off scattering us, its iron filings, into the beyond. This is how I feel again on Friday nights when we abandon our city, one day never to return. But which day? We live in the meantime. At school there is that sense of another life that will be yours, and now I sense it too. Home – not far away, but too far to touch.
In the meantime, this is my home. Josh is in the kitchen smoking a cigarette. There are five clean shirts on the table beside him, sunday-evening-newly-ironed. The working week is a steep rock face, and tonight is for laying out our crampons. Tomorrow we’ll put on our garb and ointments and we’ll leave the tent for the week ahead. Monday morning a little slow, but we’re picking up momentum. We’re more in the flow by Tuesday; throw the rope, click the clip, up a bit. On Wednesday we can neither see the ground beneath nor the summit above us, we’re dangling on Wednesday. Then dragging ourselves up by our fingernails on Thursday and panting at 12 p.m. Thursday afternoon is – the edge of the abyss: the relief, the run towards it, the ground falling away, time accelerating, it’s a roller coaster we’re on, we’re all feeling a little hysterical, silly we somersault towards The Weekend.
Tonight is just the beginning. Tonight I’m not looking forwards, I’m remembering. I’m hanging onto time and willing it to slow down. I kiss Josh’s forehead. I take my mementos out of my bag and as I predicted they look vaguely flat and tired. Still. They’re still brownies, they’re still blueberries and cream, and one of life’s treats. Josh and I eat them in the garden with a cup of coffee. He swings his legs up onto the bench so his knees hold his elbows hold his hands hold his head. He says he thinks the most highly-evolved form of life is the jellyfish and wishes he could be one, floating. He is one big sigh Josh, and not always of relief.
In mawkish moments it has always been Josh and me. Before we met – I don’t like to think about it – I couldn’t survive it now that I know better. In that respect, perhaps, I’m with God and his adamance on the Tree of Knowledge – once you know things it is very hard to unknow them. It is Josh has created this garden, he insisted on it. He said, in the summer, it’s like having a spare room. It is too small for a lawnmower so he put down paving and a step. To cut us off from Shirley on one side and mr faceless on the other he erected a wooden fence that creaks