He really hadn’t understood why I was sobbing: I’d been crying because he had done this thing – I couldn’t pretend it was anything other than what it was – which meant I wasn’t allowed to love him. But I did. I loved him so much.
When I’d heard the shower spurt on, I had got up, grabbed my jacket and left the flat. Without really knowing where I’d been going, I had walked down to the river, still hiding behind huge sunglasses as the tears continued to stream down my face. This was the money shot the photographers would love to have: me leaving the house in tears, proof that all was still not well in the world of Todd and Nikky. At the river, I’d turned towards the Tube station, walking slowly with my head down. With every step, the tears had slowed, with every movement away from the flat, away from Todd, a real calmness had descended upon me. My phone had begun ringing in my pocket and I’d known it would be Todd. I had virtually no one else to call me.
By the time I had got to the Tube station my phone had rung at least twenty times; each time I had let it go to voicemail. Normally, there’d be hell to pay for not answering – he’d ask me and ask me and ask me what I was doing that meant I couldn’t answer the phone; why did I disrespect him by ignoring him; who was I with, what was his name, how long had I been fucking him … On and on and on he would go until I’d be quivering, wondering if I had been doing something, if I was behaving in a way that was disrespectful. In the gaps between rings, I’d stood outside the Tube station entrance, taken the phone out of my pocket and switched it off to go underground. I hadn’t switched it on again and I didn’t really care what the consequences would be.
Once my trip down Memory Lane had halted at this park bench, I had felt totally calm. Totally calm, totally alone – just some girl, sitting on a bench, looking sad because she’d had a row with her fiancé. I closed my eyes, tried to call up a song that would play through my mind and take me away from it all. Run-DMC’s ‘It’s Like That’ began. Its heavy beat was like a balm, it dampened down all the raw edges of my nerves, helped me to think. Helped me to see the reality of the situation: I had nowhere to go.
I had nowhere else and it was getting dark. Eventually, when the dark and the cold had merged to create night, I got up and started the long journey back.
The moment the flat’s front door shut behind me he was there, I was in his arms, he was holding me so close I could barely breathe. ‘I didn’t mean for you to leave, you big silly,’ he said. ‘Where the hell have you been? I didn’t mean for you to actually go – I thought it would stop you crying. I didn’t think you’d take me so literally. When have I ever meant anything like that? I’ve been calling you. I was so worried. Where the fuck have you been?’
He paused then, his monologue over, and I was meant to take up the loose end he had left for me.
‘Just around,’ I said quietly. I wanted him off me, away from me, but I couldn’t say that. I had nowhere else to go, no parents to reach out to, so I had to accept all of this, didn’t I? It wasn’t like he was going to change, it wasn’t like I had any other option.
He finally let me go, but took my hand instead and led me through to the living room and to the sofa. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘that we should set the date for the wedding.’
Married? Married? After the past few days, after today, he thought that was a good idea?
‘Nikky, I’ve been a dick to you recently. I’m under so much pressure at the club and I’m not dealing with it very well. I shouldn’t take it out on you but I do. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. I’m going to change, for you. I love you, and I’m willing to change. I don’t want you to feel bad again, about anything. I’m going to change and having the wedding to focus on will be really helpful.’
I could feel the tears welling up again. But not the tears from before – these were tears of pure, unadulterated relief. I pushed them down, though, stopped them leaving my eyes in case he misunderstood. This was what I wanted. I just wanted him to admit it, to understand what he’d been doing, to acknowledge that he was taking things out on me and then try to change. If he changed, went back to being the lovely, perfect man I’d met years ago, we’d be all right. I could pretend the other night didn’t happen, I could ignore all those things I’d been thinking about earlier, and we could go back to being happy.
‘What do you say?’ Todd asked.
‘I think it’d be amazing if you could do that,’ I said quietly.
Todd reached out to stroke a lock of my hair out of my face and I flinched. Shame flittered across his face and guilt spun inside my chest – he was trying his best. ‘Baby, I love you,’ he said softly. ‘And I’m sorry for how things have been. I am going to do my absolute best to turn this around so we can get married as a new start.’
‘OK,’ I replied. ‘That’d be great.’
He pulled me down on to his lap and reached around me for his diary, which was splayed open on the coffee table. ‘I’m going to need a lot of help,’ he added. ‘I’m going to need you to let me know when I’m being out of order, don’t just let it slide.’ He was distracted as he talked because he was flipping pages, searching, I presumed, for a month that was free. ‘And don’t be too hard on me if I don’t always get it right.’ Flip, flip, flip. ‘I’m going to try to stop being such a stress head.’ Flip, flip, flip. ‘And it’d be great if you would stop pushing my buttons so often.’ Flip, flip, flip. ‘It’d be great if you could reassure me more often, and let me know how well I’m doing.’ Flip, flip, flip. ‘How does that sound?’
He finally stopped flipping and looked at me. It sounded like I would be doing as much as him, if not more, to change.
‘Fine. It sounds fine,’ I said. What else was I going to say when I had nowhere to go and he had promised to change?
Todd leant in to kiss me and I flinched again. This time he didn’t seem to notice, didn’t experience any shame or regret. He had moved on from what had happened so I let him kiss me knowing I was expected to have moved on now, too.
Roni
London, 2016
‘To be honest with you, Veronica, I thought you’d be back by the weekend after you left. Begging for your room back and wanting to get back to your studies,’ my father reveals. He doesn’t do big emotions, my dad. Taciturn is how I would describe him. He takes his time to consider things, to formulate how he feels.
I know, though, that he is pleased I am back. Gently teasing me is his way of telling me so. I was seventeen when I told my parents that I wouldn’t be going to university after A levels but instead, I was going to start the process of becoming a nun, which meant speaking to many different convents and having visits with them, working up to a short stay and then eventually moving into a convent. They had both been stunned, enough for Mum to pause in her sewing, but not to actually look up at me, and enough for Dad to lower his paper and ask me what had brought that about. ‘A book?’ I said. And the silence reading that book brought to my constantly noisy mind. ‘A nun gave me a book and it made me want to be a nun.’
‘Right you are then,’ Dad had said. Mum went back to her sewing.
It’d been a big deal to me at the time. I had thought they would have something to say about me admitting that I had found God; that the thought of being closer to God was the nearest I had come to finding the silence inside. This, though, was my parents’ reaction. It was pretty much their reaction to everything: Dad would ask a couple of questions, Mum would avoid looking me in the eye, then everything would go back to normal. I was the last of their children at home: my brothers Brian and Damian had both fled to university as soon as they were old enough, rarely to be seen back at home again – not even for Christmas, Easter or summer.
This evening, four of us are sitting around the dinner table and it feels small in the dining room. Small’s the wrong word – probably more close, snug, almost like we’re all sitting on top of each other.
‘Your mother had far more faith in you,’ says Uncle Warren of my leaving to join a conven
t one hundred miles away from home. ‘I knew she believed you were gone for good when she celebrated by throwing a party for twenty of her closest friends to regale them all with the plans she had for your room.’
After the time Uncle Warren left after Damian’s accident, I started to notice how mean-spirited he could be. He could be nice most of the time, but then he would see a small sliver of vulnerability and he would crack it open with a nasty remark. However, there’s more than a droplet of honesty in his meanness this time. The briefest of glances at my pink-cheeked mother shows he is telling the truth – the moment she and Dad waved me off through the iron gates of the monastery in the Coventry suburbs, she came back home and threw an ‘I’M FREE!’ party.
‘I’m really grateful you threw that party, Mum,’ I say. ‘Thank you for believing in me enough to do that. When I first left, even though I’d been working towards becoming a nun for all those years, I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted, or if I could do it, but I must have known on some level that I wouldn’t have a place to come back to and that helped me to stay focused.’
Across the table, my uncle seems uncomfortable with what I have said because I haven’t risen to his baiting either by biting back or bursting into tears.
‘I hope you didn’t really think that, Veronica?’ Dad says. His forehead is knitted in a frown, his fork is paused halfway between his mouth and plate. ‘You will always have a home here. Won’t she, Margaret?’
‘Hmm-hmm,’ Mum replies.
It’s odd, being called Veronica again. I was Sister Grace for over eighteen years. And now I am Veronica again to these people. When I introduce myself to new people I automatically go to call myself Grace.
‘At least you don’t look like a nun,’ my uncle says. ‘Those big penguin suits you all wear, used to give me the heebie-jeebies.’
I’ve missed Vespers. For the first time in seventeen years, since I was a postulant (a nun-in-waiting), I have missed Vespers and I am unsettled. I said my final Mass this morning, I carried out Lauds, even though it meant rushing for the train down from Coventry, but I have missed having my mind and heart filled with the beautiful singing of Vespers and I do not feel right. This is what I have to look forward to, I know. Stretching out ahead of me is a long life without the order, the calming islands of prayer, contemplation and Mass in my day. I used to almost resent them, those obligations I had to fulfil no matter what I was doing, no matter where I was, but now, I miss them like the second skin they were to me. I miss them for the moments they drew me from here and left me there. Even though, if I am honest with myself, in the past year, there has been so much disquiet in my prayers, a constant nagging need to follow another path.
‘What, are you praying or something like that?’ Uncle Warren asks.
‘No,’ I reply.
‘I was saying, at least you’re not all dressed up in the garb like demented, giant penguins.’
‘I wasn’t aware you required an answer to that,’ I say.
‘I’m just making conversation,’ he says, again rattled by lack of upset.
‘I see.’
‘That’s what people do, isn’t it? Someone says something, the other person replies. It’s called conversation.’
I smile at my plate. ‘I often spend great swathes of my day in silence, and only really speak if I absolutely have to. Conversation is often very much rationed.’
‘You really did that? You honestly lived in silence? I always thought that was a load of cock and bull.’ Mum and Uncle Warren are very different people. She is posh and middle class and always keen for people to know how posh and middle class and refined she is, and he is posh and middle class but always being the mockney, playing at the East End-boy-done-good role.
‘Yes,’ I reply.
‘That’d drive me bananas,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t it drive you bananas, Margaret?’
‘Quite possibly,’ Mum replies.
‘How about you, Geoffrey, wouldn’t it drive you crackers?’ Uncle Warren asks, wanting more backup than a wishy-washy ‘possibly’.
‘No, I don’t think it would, actually. I think it’s admirable that Veronica was able to do that.’
‘Yeah, especially since we could never shut her up as a kid,’ Uncle Warren says.
Veronica. I am Veronica now, not Grace. The other Veronika Harper’s middle name was Grace and she told me once that if she ever got to go on the stage as a dancer she would use Grace instead of Veronika or Nika, like everyone called her, because it would make her a different person. She wouldn’t be shackled to all the different expectations that came with her given, used name. When my first Mother Superior named me Grace (she had asked me to choose a name, but I wanted her, and therefore God, to find the right one for me), I knew I had done the right thing. It was a sign from above that I was meant to dedicate my life in service to others for what I had done to Veronika. It would be a daily reminder of why I was there. I needed to atone for what had gone before, do as much as I could to make up for my betrayal.
‘I said, especially as we couldn’t shut you up as a kid,’ Uncle Warren repeats. I am supposed to laugh.
‘I know what you said,’ I reply.
Irritation radiates outwards from him, and with my eyes fixed on my food, I can still see him look first to my mother on his right and then to my father on his left, surprised that neither of them are laughing either. They both have small smiles of quasi-amusement playing around their lips, but none of us are laughing, nor tumbling into anecdotes about how much I used to talk. None of us have any because it didn’t happen.
‘You wanna watch her,’ Uncle Warren declares. ‘She’ll have you down at that church in no time if you’re not careful. Daily Mass and weekly confession, you mark my words.’
‘I would never do that,’ I say. ‘Everyone has to find their own path to God, or their own path without God. I would never force anyone to choose.’
My mockney uncle looks at his watch, the same ostentatious, large gold Rolex he has had since I was a child. ‘Phew! Who had twenty minutes before God was mentioned? Geoffrey? Margaret?’ Uncle Warren throws his head back and laughs, his slender hand bashes on to the table – bang, bang, bang – to emphasise how funny he is.
‘I’ll make a start on the washing-up,’ I state.
‘Oh, no, no,’ my mother says.
‘It really is no bother at all. Once I’ve washed up, I’ll make you a cup of tea or coffee.’
‘Wow, this is like having maid service,’ Uncle Warren chimes in.
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I reply.
That wave of irritation swells to tsunami proportions and may well engulf him. There was a time, even after I stopped liking him, that I would worry about pleasing him, would panic if I had upset him in any way. I don’t feel that way any more. Maybe it’s being thirty-six now. Possibly it’s my time away. Most likely? It’s the obsession I have with Veronika. I keep remembering the first time I saw her and knowing that we were going to be best friends for ever.
Nika
London, 2016
My sister runs across the park towards where I am sitting on the bench by the swings. She has a box in her arms, and it bounces as she runs, her straight black hair whipping into her face, the wind clawing at her long black coat. I stand to meet her and she virtually throws the box on to the bench beside my rucksack and guitar case, and barrels into me, clutching me to her.
Slowly, I slip my arms around her. I didn’t expect this kind of welcome from her. We’d never been close and I didn’t know she’d miss me. ‘Nika, Nika,’ she says with each sob, bringing me closer and closer to her. ‘Nika, Nika, Nika. I thought you were dead. I really, really thought you were dead. I thought—’ Her words disintegrate into the sobs that fill the tiny space between us. Her grief … it seems huge, it seems unassailable. She clings to me as she cries, as though she has been waiting years to let go like this, years to accept that she may never see me again. I didn’t even know. I didn’t know anyone would miss me if
I was gone.
London, 2004
I sat beside the quiet man in the expensive, well-fitting suit, watching a train gear up to speed off into the distance. I loved to do this on the days I went shopping or to the hairdresser or to the gym twenty minutes away. I loved to take a detour and come and sit here, by the river, on the hood of this black car, watching the trains come and go from London Victoria.
‘What do you think I should do, Frank?’ I asked after the train horn had faded into the distance, and we watched another train come crawling towards the station.
Frank was my driver. Todd’s last big new signing, which was for so much money it made my eyes water just thinking about it, had meant he was able to splash out a little more: get himself a newer, faster car, more designer clothes, pay off a huge chunk of the mortgage on his flat. And also have a car service on hand for me whenever I wanted to go anywhere. I’d wanted to learn to drive, had brought it up with him, but Todd had thought this would be better for me. Less dangerous, less stressful. The driver would be able to take me to places, look out for me, stop any photographers getting too close. Not that the photographers bothered with me any more. Hadn’t since we’d announced the engagement. They bothered with him, were always showing photos of him chatting to various women, spinning the stories to never quite say he was cheating, but hinting at it.
The driver thing was kind of nice because I got to know the drivers: very often they’d let me ride up front with them and we’d have a chat about films, music and books. Frank was my favourite. He drove me the most regularly, and we liked the same books and films, he also loved music. We talked a lot about music – not only the albums and singles, the charts and types of music. We talked about the words, the way they were woven into the threads of the music, the way certain ones were chosen, placed here, omitted there. Words and sound were like a dance, we agreed, a duet that had to be carefully managed, always spinning and moving together in perfect motion with each other. He’d confessed, when I asked him, that the song he was embarrassed about listening to over and over was ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ by U2.