J’observe: my boyfriend, his dark eyes and closely cropped head, the taut ligaments at the back of his neck, the beautiful, rounded shape of his skull. We’re talking in rapid French. There was a time, years ago, when I spent hours with a voice coach perfecting my accent. Nonetheless, I’d made it a rule to date non-native French speakers and I still stick to that. It would only take the smallest verbal mistake to be outed.
“We’re in England now, Nate,” I say in slower, accented English. “Your ’ome country. I should be talking English while we’re ’ere.”
He smiles and switches to English. I like hearing him speak in his native tongue. His accent is an interesting mix of all the places where he’d spent his childhood—mainly a combination of London and New York, with drawn-out words and the odd glottal stop, but I can hear his mum’s Irish influence in there too, something softer, a little more lyrical.
“Then tonight we’ve got supper with my sister and Robyn.”
“I remember.”
“They’re good people, you’ll like them.” He pulls me to him, tips my chin up and kisses me. “Where will you start?”
“Right here”—I wave at the tangled sheets strewn across the bed—“with a little meditation.”
“Okay,” he says, glancing at his watch. “I’d better go.” He smiles, gives me a long look. “I love you,” he says.
Nate is a wonderful man. He’s easygoing and has an inner joy that bursts out of him at unexpected moments, an enthusiasm for life. He’s smart, and talented in ways that he’s worked hard to achieve. He has large, animated hands, and he’s open and interested in pretty much everything. But, most of all, he’s kind. He’s a saint compared with me. He takes a genuine interest in other people’s lives, and he’s so passionate about his work teaching music that he gets tears in his eyes. In another life I’d have wanted to stay with him. By now we’d have started to explore ideas about the future, talked about living together, making a life. He is easy to love.
But that would be another life, not this one. We’ve been dating for over a year, longer than I’ve ever dated anyone, and it’s already way too risky. I’ve seen it before. Gradually they start to question why there’s a whole bunch of beads missing from the rosary. Then their questions become more angled, and, like sharp little stilettos slipped between the ribs, they find they’ve killed the thing.
And Nate will do that too in time, I know. I should have ended things ages ago, but somehow I’ve never quite manged to find the right moment. The truth is, I haven’t wanted to. It’s like he has a sacred heart, a love for me that shines so brightly it’s practically visible, smack bang in the middle of his chest, blasting rays of light in every direction. And he’s going to get hurt and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.
“Okay,” he says, picking up his bag. “And if you get tired of London and fancy a change of scene, you can always use the car, get out and explore the countryside a bit.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Something inside me seems to contract.
“What?” he says. “You’re looking at me oddly.”
“Am I?” I remember myself. “Oui, bonne idée. So we’ll keep London to explore together, yes?” He throws me the keys to the ancient 205 that we’ve borrowed from his aunt, and I catch them in mid air.
“Don’t forget to drive on the left.”
***
The Peugeot has a sat-nav, and the traffic moves slowly, so it’s easy enough to find my way out of the city and on to the A22. In time, I’m driving on smaller roads and passing through pretty villages with greens and traditional pubs. It’s a cold, sunless morning in early December. Skeletal winter branches stretch over the road, casting grainy silver light on the car’s windscreen, flickering like an old home movie playing without sound.
Eventually, I pull up outside a barrier that bars the entrance to a private road. On a wide, grassy verge a large sign reads private, below that, residents only and below that 5 mph. I draw in and stop. I think about parking up and walking, but I don’t want to draw attention to myself. I’d be the only pedestrian. I’m still thinking through my options when a delivery van pulls up. He punches a code into a mounted keypad, and the barrier opens. And I just follow him in.
I drive slowly, keeping to the speed limit, peering down each of the long driveways to large houses cushioned from the road by wide green lawns. A lot of them I don’t recognize; old houses I once knew have been torn down and replaced by bigger, grander homes in a mishmash of horseshit architecture: I spot mock-Tudor, Edwardian, Regency, even Victorian Gothic. The whole thing reminds me of a job I once had at Disneyland Paris.
I pull up in front of a building site, earth churned up like the spilled guts of roadkill. A completely unnecessary sign announces the building of a new executive home. You couldn’t miss the thing: it’s only half built yet it already covers almost the entire plot. Almost hidden behind it, a small tile-hung cottage is caged in by high metal fencing, like it might make a bid to escape. Everywhere signs read keep out, and sadness wells in my chest. I’d known this place when it was a secret garden, full of old roses and meandering pathways, fruit trees and vegetables. I put the car into gear and drive on.
Further along the road I park up at a pair of ornate gates topped by angled CCTVs with red lights that occasionally blink. On the top of a brick plinth is an engraved slate sign that reads laburnum house. I switch off the engine, step out into the chill day and look through the metal latticework of the gate. A long, graveled drive loops around a central circle of grass, beyond which is a Georgian-style house with a white stucco façade and stone steps that lead up to a pair of solid oak doors. Off to one side of the house is a large conservatory, with three sets of double doors that lead on to a wide stone terrace; I’ve seen it before, once, a long time ago, but it’s a part of the house I’ve never actually been inside. Craning my neck to look past towers of rhododendron bushes, I can just about make out the squat outline of a separate building that stands alone in the far left of the garden: the windowless bunker known as the pool house. Main uses: storage for chemicals and badly behaved children. I’ve been in there.
I find myself wondering if my mother is at home, and the thought makes something like a snake coil around the insides of my gut, a quiet and dangerous need to know if she’s in. Or even if she still lives here. I push it away.
I wrap my fingers around one of the gate’s fanciful scrolls, and the shock of cold iron whips needles through my palms. I shiver. They’re new, as is the high brick wall. I wonder how they might open, say, if you needed to leave in a hurry. Would they just open automatically as you ran toward them? Or would you have to push a button?
So much easier not to have gates at all. Just to walk to the end of the drive, pause and, instead of turning right, as always, as expected, turn left.
And, just like that, as simple as that, it turns out you can leave.
***
I was wearing my school uniform that morning—a gray plaid kilt, white shirt, house tie and blue blazer. In my bag I had a plum, my gray school jumper, a pencil case, some pads and a book I’d nicked from my mother’s bedside table. I was going to school, walking fast. When I got to the end of the drive, I stopped. It was still early and long shadows fell in a kaleidoscope of soft greens across the road. I ran a hand over my hair, and the short stubble bristled under my palm. My head felt strange and fascinating. And cold. I put my bag on the ground, took my jumper out and draped it over my head like a veil. Then I wound the sleeves round my head and tucked them in, making a sort of turban. I picked up my bag.
Further along the road sunlight glanced off the bonnet of a large silver car that was crawling along, edging its way over speed bumps. The road’s residents always made a show of sticking to the speed limit, especially if they happened to find themselves in front of a delivery van. It was a point of honor never to hurry anywhere. I could hear wood pigeons.
Behind me came the sound of tires scrunching on gravel. I turned to see the builder’s van bouncing down my parents’ drive and stood to one side to let it pass. The van pulled up next to me, its rear end sitting on the driveway, front end on the road. The builder, Ian Cox, wound down a window.
“You’re the Martenwood girl, right?”
“One of them.”
The silver car came to a slow stop on the road. Felicity Williams, a neighbor, sat in the driver’s seat. A Shih Tzu sat next to her on the white leather of the passenger seat, its white hair tied in a little red ribbon above its head, revealing uncoordinated, bulbous eyes. From inside the car, they both turned to look at us and I noticed our neighbor’s eyes had the same protuberant bulge as her dog’s. After a long moment she indicated the partially blocked road with an exaggerated show of exasperation, raising her hands in a slow mime, indicating the van and widening her eyes in disbelief.
“Christ,” Cox muttered, “you could get a fucking bus through there.” He stuck his van into reverse and a spray of gravel shot up from his tires as he pulled back on to the drive. Felicity Williams plus dog returned their globular eyes to the empty road, as if the act of driving a car at five miles an hour took every fiber of their joint concentration. The car slowly rolled forward as Felicity Williams moved her head in a slow, deliberate shake, moving not a single hair from its assigned position on the blond helmet of her head. She appeared to be speaking but it was impossible to hear her. She was hermetically sealed inside her car.
Ian Cox moved his van back alongside me.
“Waiting for your mum?” he asked. He glanced behind him, back up the drive, as if he half expected to see my mother appearing from the house.
I didn’t say anything.
“Interesting headgear.”
I looked at the interior of the van, at the folded copy of the Sun on the dash, the old coffee cups, crumpled drinks cans and bits of greasy paper that littered the passenger seat.
“Don’t say much, do you?” he said. He looked back up the drive. “All right, then. Tell your mum I’ll be at another job today, let the cement set. I’ve seen your dad.”
His eyes looked me up and down once more, from my gray turban to my black school shoes. I looked at his scruffy gray hair, his checkered red flannel shirt, the thrust of his belly against the steering wheel. He gave me something almost like a smile. I looked back up the drive.
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Sure.”
He gave me one last look. Then he revved up and took off fast down the road, the wheels of the van skidding over its speed bumps, black smoke billowing from the exhaust.
God, I thought, how incredible to have that freedom. To up sticks and go somewhere else for a day. To just drive away. I looked down the empty road. To the right was my known life, the walk that would lead me to a school full of girls who thought I was weird. Now they wouldn’t even recognize me. When I’d last seen them, at the end of the summer term, I’d had long hair. And flesh on my bones. The beginning of breasts. Now my uniform hung off me. It didn’t fit. Nothing fit. I didn’t fit. My entire life didn’t fit. I thought about the dull year ahead, the endless routine of classes and bells and homework and organized games. I thought about the half-curious questions my classmates would ask about the state of my hair, the sly, judgmental looks they’d exchange. They wouldn’t be unkind, at least, not directly to my face. All of them were nice girls, already well versed in ways of dealing with undesirables, and, once they’d satisfied their curiosity, they would simply close the gates of their exclusive friendships, leaving me on the outside. None of them would ever risk talking to me again. Everyone knows weirdness is catching. That’s just how it works.
I thought about Willa. She’d be nearly at school by now, walking fast, anxious about being late and seeing her shiny friends again after the long summer break.
I looked back at the house.
This was a life where I didn’t belong.
So instead of turning right, I turned left.
