her. I really did sincerely hope so. The chances of getting home any other way were apparently very slim indeed.
“We should never have come,” she said miserably.
“Yes, we should have,” said Megan gregariously. “I’ve had a great time.”
“So’ve I,” came Meredia’s voice, as she lumbered along about fifty yards behind the rest of us.
Unbelievably, the car was fine.
As soon as we rounded the corner, the little girl who was supposed to be guarding the car appeared as if from nowhere. I don’t know what kind of threatening look she gave Hetty, but it was enough to make her immediately grope around in her purse for another couple of pounds to give to the girl.
We couldn’t see any of the other children, but we could hear whooping noises and shrieks and the sound of smashing glass coming from somewhere nearby.
As we drove out of the project we passed a crowd of them. They were doing something to a camper van. Completely destroying it, I think.
“Don’t they have to be in bed at any time?” asked Hetty anxiously, appalled by her first brush with a ghetto. “I mean, where are their parents? What are they doing? Surely something can be done?”
The children were delighted to see us. As our car approached them, they began laughing and shouting and pointing and cackling. Obviously they were still greatly interested in Meredia. Three or four of the boys gave chase to us and managed to run alongside us, laughing and making revolting faces at us, for quite a distance before we managed to shake them.
As soon as it became obvious that we had made good our escape from the little brats, we relaxed. It was time for the postmortem on what Mrs. Nolan had said and the four of us were a bit excitable. The noise in the car was deafening, with Meredia and Megan competing to tell their stories.
“She knew that I was Australian,” burst in Megan excitedly. “And she says that I’m going to have some sort of split in my life, but that good will come of it and I’ll cope with it marvellously, the way I do with everything.” She said the last piece a bit smugly.
“So maybe it’s time to go travelling again,” she continued. “Either way it looks as if I won’t have to be looking at your ugly mugs for much longer.”
“She said I’d come into money,” said Meredia happily.
“Good,” said Hetty, sounding oddly bitter. “Then you can give me back that twenty-pound note you owe me.”
I noticed that Hetty was quieter than usual. She wasn’t joining in with the general hilarity and excitement but was just driving the car and staring straight ahead.
Was her upper-crust conservative body still in shock from such close contact with working-class children? Or was it something else?
“What did she say to you, Hetty?” I asked, a bit concerned. “Did she tell you something bad was going to happen?”
“Yes,” said Hetty, in a little voice. She even sounded a small bit tearful!
“What was it? What did she say?” we all blurted out at once, drawing our faces nearer to hers, eager to hear predictions of terrible things—accidents, illness, death, bankruptcy, mortgage companies foreclosing, boilers bursting—whatever.
“She said that very soon I’m going to meet the love of my life,” said Hetty tearfully.
A silence fell in the car. Oh dear! That was bad. Very bad.
Very bad indeed.
Poor Hetty!
It’s unsettling to be told you’re going to meet the love of your life when you’re already married with two children.
“She says I’m going to be completely smitten with him,” sniffed Hetty. “It’s going to be awful. There’s never been a divorce in our family. And what about Marcus and Montague?” (Or it might have been “Troilus and Tristan” or “Cecil and Sebastian.”) “They’re finding boarding school difficult enough without the embarrassment of their mother having a love affair and leaving home.”
“Oh dear,” I said sympathetically. “But it’s only a fortune-teller’s prediction. It probably won’t happen.”
But that just made her tears flow faster. “But why shouldn’t I meet the love of my life? I want to meet him.”
Megan, Meredia and I exchanged shocked looks. Good lord! It was most irregular. Was the normally sane and calm—I’d even go so far as to say boring—Hetty having some kind of nervous fit?
“Why can’t I have some fun? Why do I have to be stuck with boring old Dick?” she demanded.
She thumped the steering wheel every time she said “I” and the car lurched alarmingly into the other lane. All around us cars were beeping their horns, but Hetty didn’t seem to notice.
I was amazed. I had worked with Hetty for two years and, while we were never soul mates, I thought I knew her quite well.
There was a nonplussed silence in the car while Meredia, Megan and I swallowed and tried and failed to think of comforting things to say.
It was Hetty who rescued the situation. She didn’t have a fourteenth cousin, three times removed, as a lady-in-waiting to the Queen for nothing. She hadn’t gone to a hugely expensive finishing school without learning to smooth over awkward social situations. “Sorry,” she said, suddenly seeming to become Hetty again, the veneer of polite calm and reserve firmly clipped back in place. “Sorry, girls,” she said again. “You must forgive me.”
She cleared her throat and squared her shoulders, indicating that there was nothing further to say on the subject. Dick and his boringness were not to be topics for discussion.
Such a pity. I had always wanted to know. Because to be honest, Dick did seem extremely boring. But, then again—and I mean this in the nicest possible way—so did Hetty.
“So then, Lucy,” she said crisply, deflecting the last few remaining crumbs of interest away from her. “What did Mrs. Nolan predict for you?”
“Me?” I said. “Oh yes. She says I’m getting married.”
Another silence fell in the car.
Another stunned one.
The disbelief of Megan, Meredia and Hetty was so tangible it was like a fifth person in the car. If it wasn’t careful it would end up having to contribute to the cost of the gas for the trip.
“Really?” asked Hetty, somehow managing to get sixteen syllables from the one word.
“You!” shouted Megan. “She said that you are getting married.”
“Yes,” I said defensively. “What’s so wrong with that?”
“Nothing really,” said Meredia kindly. “It’s just that, you know, you haven’t been exactly lucky with men.”
“Not through any fault of your own,” said Hetty hurriedly, tactfully.
Hetty was good on tact.
“Well, that’s what she said,” I said sulkily.
They didn’t really know what to say and conversation remained subdued until eventually we reached civilization again. I was the first to be dropped off because I lived in Ladbroke Grove. The last thing I heard as I got out of the car was Meredia telling anyone who cared to listen that Mrs. Nolan had said that she would travel over water and that she was very psychic herself.
Chapter 5
I shared an apartment with two other girls, Karen and Charlotte. Karen was twenty-eight, I was twenty-six and Charlotte was twenty-three. We were a bad example to each other and spent a lot of time drinking bottles of wine and not very much cleaning the bathroom.
When I let myself in, Karen and Charlotte were asleep. We usually went to bed early on a Monday night to recover from the excesses of the preceding weekend.
There was a note on the kitchen table from Karen saying that Daniel had phoned me.
Daniel was my friend and, while he was the closest thing that I had to a steady man in my life, I wouldn’t have become romantically involved with him if the future of the human race depended on it. So that will give some idea of just how male-free my life was.
My life was the Reduced-Male variety, the Male Lite life.
Daniel was wonderful, really. Boyfriends came and boyfriends went (and believe me,
they went), but I could always rely on Daniel to be the boyfriend figure in my life, to annoy me with sexist comments and say that he preferred the shorter, tighter skirt.
And he wasn’t unattractive, or so I was told. All my friends thought he was adorable. Even Dennis, my gay friend, said that he wouldn’t kick Daniel out of the bed for eating potato chips. And whenever Karen answered the phone to him she made faces like she was having an orgasm. Sometimes Daniel came to our apartment and, after he’d gone, Karen and Charlotte would lie on the bit of the couch where he’d been sitting and roll around and make noises like they were in ecstasy.
I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Because Daniel was a friend of my brother Chris, I’d known him for years and years and years. I just knew him too well to have a crush on him. Or for him to have a crush on me, for that matter.
There might have been a time, once, several thousand light-years in the past, when Daniel and I smiled shyly across a Duran Duran record and contemplated kissing each other. But then again, there might not have been, I couldn’t actually remember ever feeling like that about him, I just assumed that I had because, in the free-for-all of emotions that was my adolescence, I had a crush on just about everyone.
It was really for the best that Daniel and I didn’t like each other that way because, if we did, Chris would have to go to all the bother of beating Daniel up for violating his sister’s honor and I didn’t want to cause anyone trouble.
Karen and Charlotte—quite mistakenly—envied my relationship with Daniel.
They would shake their heads in wonder and say, “You lucky bitch, how can you be so relaxed around him? How are you able to be funny and make him laugh? I can never think of a thing to say.”
But it was easy because I didn’t have a crush him. When I did like someone I panicked and knocked things over and opened conversations by saying things like, “Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be a radiator?”
I looked at the note that Karen had left for me—there was even a little stain on it that she had labelled “dribble”—and wondered if I should ring Daniel. I decided not to, he might be in bed.
Accompanied, if you follow me.
Damn Daniel and his active sex life. I wanted to talk to him.
What Mrs. Nolan had said had given me food for thought. Not what she had said about me getting married—there was no way that I was fool enough to actually take that seriously. But what she had said about me being under a dark cloud had reminded me of my bouts of Depression and how awful they’d been. I could have woken Karen and Charlotte, but I decided against it. Apart from the fact that they could turn nasty if roused from their slumber for any reason other than an impromptu party, they didn’t know about my Depression.
Of course, they knew that sometimes I said I was depressed, and then they said, “But why?” and I would tell them about an unfaithful boyfriend or a bad day at work or not fitting into last summer’s skirt, and they would be more than sympathetic.
But they didn’t know that I sometimes got depressed
with a capital D. Daniel was one of the few people outside my family who actually knew.
That’s because I felt ashamed of it. People either thought that depression was a mental illness and that consequently I was completely nuts or, more often they thought that there was no such thing as depression, other than a vague, neurotic concept. That I was merely indulging myself, wallowing in teenage angst that was way past its use-by date. And that all I had to do was to “pull myself together” and “snap out of it” and “take up sport.”
I could understand that attitude, because everyone got depressed sometimes. It was part of being alive, part of the deal, sunny days and earaches.
People got depressed about money (about not having enough of it, I mean). Unpleasant things happened to people—relationships fell apart, jobs were lost, televisions broke down two days after the guarantee ran out and so on and so on—and people felt miserable about them.
I knew all that, but the depression that I suffered from wasn’t just an occasional bout of the blues or a dose of Holly Golightly’s mean reds—although I got them also, and fairly regularly at that. So did a lot of people, especially if they had just had a week of heavy drinking and very little sleep, but the blues and the mean reds were mere child’s play compared to the savage black killer demons that descended on me from time to time to play crucifixion with my head.
Mine was no ordinary depression, oh no, mine was the super, deluxe, top-of-the-range, no-expense-spared version.
Not that any of it was immediately obvious on first meeting me. I wasn’t miserable all of the time, in fact a lot of the time I was bright and personable and entertaining. And even when I felt dreadful I tried very hard to act as though I didn’t. It was only when things got so desperate that I couldn’t conceal it any longer that I took to my bed and waited for it to pass. Which it invariably did, sooner or later.
The worst bout of depression that I ever had was actually my first one.
I was seventeen and it was the summer that I had left school, and for no reason—apart from all the obvious ones—I got the idea into my head that the world was a very sad, lonely, unfair, cruel, heart-breaking kind of a place.
I got depressed about things that were happening to people in far-flung corners of the world, people that I didn’t even know and wasn’t ever likely to know, especially considering that the main reason that I felt depressed about them was that they were dying of hunger or of a plague or from their house falling in on top of them during an earthquake.
I cried at every piece of news that I heard or saw—car crashes, famines, wars, programs about AIDS victims, stories of mothers dying and leaving young children, reports on battered wives, interviews with men who had been laid off in their thousands from coalmines and knew that even though they were only forty they would never work again, newspaper articles about families of six who had to feed themselves on fifty pounds a week, pictures of neglected donkeys.
I found a child’s blue-and-white mitten on the pavement near my house one day and the grief that it triggered was almost unbearable. The thought of a tiny chilled hand, or of the other mitten, all alone without its mate was so poignant that I cried wet, hot, choking tears every time I saw it.
After a while I wouldn’t leave the house. And shortly after that I wouldn’t get out of bed.
It was horrendous. I felt as though I was personally in touch with every ounce of grief in the world, that I had an Internet of sorrow in my head, that every atom of sadness that had ever existed was being channelled through me, before being packaged up and transported to outlying areas, like I was a kind of centralized misery depot.
My mother took charge. With the efficiency of a despot being threatened with a coup d’état, she imposed a total news blackout. I was banned from watching television.
And every evening when my brothers came home, my mother frisked them at the front door to relieve them of any copies of newspapers that they may have had secreted about their persons, before they could gain admittance to the house.
Not that her media clampdown made any difference. I had the admirable skill of being able to locate a tragedy—however small—in absolutely anything. I managed to cry at the description of little bulbs dying in a February frost in the gardening magazine that was my only permitted reading material.
Eventually Dr. Thornton was sent for, but not before a day or so was spent tidying and cleaning frantically in honour of his arrival. And he diagnosed depression and—surprise, surprise—prescribed antidepressants for me, which I didn’t want to take.
“What good will they do?” I sobbed at him. “Will the antidepressants give those men in Yorkshire back their jobs? Will the antidepressants find the pair to this…to this…” (by now I was gasping and incoherent with crying) “…to this MITTEN!?” I wailed.
“Oh, would you ever shut up about that bloody mitten,” tsked my mother briskly. “Yes, doctor, she’d be delighted to start on
the pills.”
My mother was like a lot of people who hadn’t been allowed to finish their schooling in that she believed that anyone who had been to a university, especially doctors, were almost Popelike in their infallibility, and that taking prescribed narcotics was a mystic and sacred kind of a thing.
(“I am not worthy to receive them but only say the word and I shall be healed.”)
Also she was Irish and had a huge inferiority complex and thought that everything English people suggested had to be right. (Dr. Thornton was English.)
“Leave it to me,” my mother grimly assured Dr. Thornton. “I’ll see that she takes them.”
And she did.
And after a while I felt better. Not happy or anything like that. I still felt that we were all doomed and that the future was a vast wasteland of bleak greyness, but that it mightn’t hurt if I got up for half an hour to watch some TV.
After four months, Dr. Thornton said it was time for me to stop taking the antidepressants and we all held our breath, waiting to see if I could fly on my own or if I would dive-bomb back to that salty, single-mittened hell.
But by then I had started at secretarial college and I had faith, however fragile, in the future.
My world opened up at college, I learned many strange and wondrous things—I was amazed to hear that the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, that i comes before e, except and only except after c, that if I began a letter with “Dear Sir” and ended it with “Yours sincerely” that the world would come crashing to an immediate end.
I mastered the demanding art of sitting with a wirebound notebook on my lap and covering the page with squiggles and dots, I strove hard to be the perfect secretary, quickly working up to four Bacardis and diet Cokes on a night out with the girls, and my knowledge of the stock of the local department store was, at all times, encyclopedic.
It never occurred to me that perhaps I could have done something else with my life—for a long time I thought it was such an honor to get the chance to train as a secretary that I didn’t realize how much it bored me. And even if I had realized how much it bored me, I wouldn’t have been able to wriggle out of it because my mother—a very determined woman—was adamant that it was what I would do. She actually cried with joy the day I got my certificate to say that I could move my fingers quickly enough to type forty-seven words a minute.