Part 24 (1/2)

'Should I put something on the jukebox?' asks Stevie.

'Yes.'

'Any requests?'

'Anything but Elvis,' I say.

He must think I'm joking because he chooses 'Viva Las Vegas'. I bite my tongue. I can deal with it. How long does one track last? Three minutes, tops. We are friendly and relaxed while we talk about music, the museum and the menu. I think we can manage to stay affable as long as we keep away from the subject of my multiple marriages.

'About last night,' says Stevie, who perhaps has not drawn the same conclusions.

'I'm not sure we have anything to say, do we?' I hope this sounds like a closing statement rather than a question.

Stevie overrules me. 'I think we do.'

'We'd both drunk too much. It's easy to do silly things when there's moonlight and... cashew nuts and things.' I'm not making sense.

'I see,' says Stevie. He seems reluctant to let the incident lie, but lie it must. I mean, what's the alternative? My grabbing Stevie now, climbing across the Formica table and snogging his face off? Hitching up my skirt and riding him till I'm raw?

'Have you had fun this morning?' I ask, pus.h.i.+ng the p.o.r.n-style vision from my head.

'Yeah.' I'm grateful that he's allowing me to change the subject. 'But even that's confusing, isn't it? How much fun we have together?'

So we're not changing the subject then. I try again. 'You've won a great prize, Stevie. Did I ever say congratulations?'

'No, you never did,' he says. 'You never thought I'd amount to much,' he adds. His tone is observational rather than offended or bitter.

Inwardly, I smile. 'Amount to much'; a one hundred per cent Kirkspey expression if ever I've heard one. 'I didn't think you'd amount to enough,' I clarify.

'Explain,' instructs Stevie.

He is sat with his elbows on the table and stirring his milkshake with a straw. As he issues his one-word instruction he is staring out of the window, seemingly concentrating on a flas.h.i.+ng neon sign that reads: 'Life is Fragile, Handle with Care'. Like so many of those trite little sayings that you find on fridge magnets and Hallmark cards, the message suddenly seems scarily pertinent.

To most people Stevie no doubt looks the epitome of relaxed cool. But I spot the muscle at the side of his mouth twitch; what was it that he'd said about poker faces, last night? I know that Stevie is tensely sat on tenterhooks. My answer matters to him. My answer is important. I take a deep breath. He's right. I do owe him and I get the impression that he's telling me that now is the time I have to pay. I plough in.

'You were on about the people in Kirkspey earlier. The thing is, you were all mixed up with how I feel about them. You still are.'

'Go on.'

'They're not normal and I just wanted to be normal. At one point, you seemed like an escape and I was wild about you. Then you seemed to be part of their clan and I was just... wild at you, I guess.'

'You've lost me. Rewind.'

'Do you want more music? I think I've enough quarters.'

Stevie sees this as the diversionary tactic it is and says no. 'Explain what you mean, Belinda, please.'

He's asking Belinda and she could never resist him.

'OK. When I was sixteen and petting heavily with you in the front room of my dad's house, you seemed like an exotic creature. You'd come to Kirkspey from Blackpool, England.'

'Blackpool? Exotic?' asks Stevie, quite reasonably confused.

'I hadn't been there then,' I mutter, more than a bit embarra.s.sed about my appalling lack of knowledge and sophistication at the time. Was there ever such a naive girl?

'Loving you, having s.e.x with you, seemed rebellious, unruly and promising.' I take a sip of my milkshake. 'For the first time since my mum had died I felt excited about my life and, specifically, about my future. I hadn't even thought of university until you a.s.sumed that I'd be going.'

'I know, your dad hadn't suggested it,' comments Stevie.

'You know that my dad rarely spoke to me at all.'

'And you know that fishermen are very superst.i.tious about women,' says Stevie. 'It wasn't personal.'

It felt personal. Stevie is trying, as he always did, to defend my father's indifference towards me. I shrug, and don't bother to point out I wasn't some remote unlucky woman, I was his daughter. It's an old wound; I'd rather not pick at the scar tissue.

'You paid me attention when no one else did. You opened my mind. You had all these ideas and plans and hopes. I thought that we'd help each other to scramble out of Kirkspey and that you'd help me shake off the loneliness and sense of otherness that I'd always carried.'

I pause and half-heartedly pick up a chip, dip it into ketchup, but haven't the required keenness to get it to my mouth. We both know that when I say 'always' I mean since my mum died.

'When we were at university together you helped me fit in. I just wanted to be normal, like all the other normal middle-cla.s.s students. You were much more confident than I was.' I pause and then ask, 'Do you remember we used to sit up all night reading poetry? Do you think my father's ever done that?'

I give Stevie a moment to call up my father's image. Mr McDonnel, a flat-capped, no-nonsense Scotsman known for his gigantic size (six foot four, and eighteen stone, naked, not that anyone ever wanted to even imagine the man naked, he was scary enough in his clothes). He's a hard, dour fisherman. He breaks chickens' necks with his bare hands. He courted my mum by taking pounds of knock-off black pudding to her mother's house on a Sat.u.r.day teatime; his brother worked in a butcher's. I remember my mum relaying this fact with such pride to a young me. I thought the pride was misplaced back then and I still think so now. Of course, Stevie would not be able to imagine my dad opening a poetry book as part of his seduction technique. I don't want to imagine my parents' coital act at all, but if I have to I imagine the act was silent, perfunctory, distinctly unflowery.

'But then we married and all you wanted to do was go home and tell everyone.' I sigh because I feel as defeated and exasperated as I did eleven years ago.

'Isn't that the usual thing to do when you get married? Isn't that the normal thing, Little Miss I-Aspire-To-Be-Normal?' asks Stevie. And now he does sound a bit peeved. Lost, maybe? Confused?

'Well, we hadn't been normal, had we? We'd eloped. And the ”normal” I aspire to is hosting dinner parties in Wimbledon, eating meals that require a cl.u.s.ter of knives and forks and discussing current affairs. Not three nights a week in the pub, big night out on Sat.u.r.day when you get sausage and chips at the chippie and eat them as you stagger home. I didn't want to spend my life eating fish fingers off a tray on my lap, while watching TV. I didn't want to wear a nylon tracksuit and look forward to Christmas when you'd buy me a piece of jewellery from the Argos catalogue.'

'You're a sn.o.b.'

'Maybe. But I'm thirty years old now and I have to accept myself and my faults or just give up the ghost.'

I could let the discussion drop. Stevie would for evermore think of me as a snooty cow who's ashamed of her background. He'd probably hate me a little bit more but I wouldn't have to delve any deeper. Or (the scary alternative) I could push through this awkwardness and try to explain the small print. I could be courageous and tell Stevie that my discontent was not about the lack of money but about something far more obscure and defining.

'Kirkspey makes me feel limited,' I explain. 'Hemmed in. Underused. They don't expect much from me and when I'm with them I'm not much.'

'They?'

'My family, my childhood friends, even the teachers. They didn't expect much from me or anyone else for that matter. No one from Kirkspey believes anyone from Kirkspey can be anything at all. They are dead before they've lived. You didn't see them as I did. It became impossible for me to imagine our life together.'

'You saw me as one of them? A deadbeat?' he asks, with a perception I could have done without.

'Sometimes.' He looks hurt and drains his milkshake. 'Not always. But more and more often towards the end. You ignored my suggestions to move down south.'

'We couldn't afford it.'

'The day you said we could move back to Kirkspey and live with your mum was particularly bleak.'