Someday Find Me Page 8

  Two minutes on the screen and I suddenly realised the girls behind us were talking about sex and so I leant back to listen because I’m only human really and caught the words ‘cum’ and ‘tongue’ but then they started whispering and the giant round woman behind me and Saf started talking to the skinny tall man next to her about the roadworks outside and how she was sure they weren’t doing anything much except digging holes and filling them back in again and she wouldn’t be surprised if it was all a scheme to get us to spend money on the Tube, which as a conspiracy had a lot of holes in it when you thought about it but he didn’t say so. Maybe he was scared she’d sit on him or maybe he agreed. There was one minute on the screen by then, which was a relief because I could feel my hair starting to get sweaty at the edges and stick to my face and when that happens I look a right prat. The bloke with the speaker thing was telling everybody to use the whole length of the platform although obviously nobody was listening because they already knew exactly which carriage they were getting on whether they had to flatten themselves against the door to get in there or not.

  Saffy had taken her hand out of mine and she was wiping sweat off her top lip and when I looked down at her she was a bit grey and pasty, so I said, ‘You all right, Saf?’

  She nodded and wiped a bit more sweat off and the bloke was announcing our westbound service and the first flicker of light was just showing on the furthest bit of black wall we could see and I could hear the rumble of the train, and then I suddenly thought, OH FUCK I haven’t got my fob and I was really pissed off because that would mean going back because I couldn’t go to work without it, you needed it to work the till and to put orders in to the kitchen and to get in the stockroom. So I knelt down on the platform and opened my backpack up and started fumbling around in it, and there it was at the bottom of my bag next to my gimpy little apron thing, and I breathed a sigh of relief and zipped my bag up quick because the train was blaring round the corner now, lights in my eyes and roaring up the tunnel, and then there was a little plop as Saf dropped her bag and I picked it up and held it up to her but her eyes were closed and she was rocking forward, toppling like a skittle when you go bowling. And the train was rushing up behind her and someone was screaming and I realised the someone was me, as the giant fat round woman was rushing up behind her and grabbing her by her little twig arms and pulling her back and she fell backwards onto the platform and lay there still. And then time pinged into place and the train was in front of me an inch from my face and Saffy was sprawled on the tiles with her short hair spread out around her head like an angel’s halo. And people were gathering around and some were filing round us like ants to get on the train and I was still kneeling with her little yellow handbag held up in the air to no one. I crawled forward on my hands and knees and peered over the round woman’s shoulder and wailed. The tall skinny bloke put a hand on my back and said, ‘It’s all right, mate, she’s just fainted, it’s hot down here, she’ll be all right,’ and I nodded up at him and clutched at her yellow bag but really I wanted to yell at him, Well, it’s not all right, is it, mate? It’s really not, because from where I was sitting she looked like she was dead.

  When I woke up the next morning there was a Saffy shape next to me but the covers were pushed back and she was nowhere to be seen. I could hear her in the next room with Quin so I lay there and listened to see what they were chatting about, not in a nosy way or anything like that, just pleased to hear their voices.

  ‘Whose house are you going to again?’ Saffy was asking.

  ‘Freddy and Milo’s. They’ve got a new puppy, did I tell you?’

  ‘No! Cute.’

  ‘Very sweet apparently. Anyway, it’s Hector’s birthday so we’re all going to stay for the weekend. Walks on the beach, debauchery, that type of thing.’

  Saffy giggled. I liked hearing them together like that because it brought out a lovely side in both of them, like Quin became all fatherly and jolly and Saf turned back into a little girl. When he was excited like this his sentences became big and grand and funny like he was saying them on a stage, and being around him it was quite catching, it made everything seem dramatic and glamorous and fun. I could hear him clinging and clanging hangers on his little rail as he put stuff in his bag and the good mood was sort of glowing through the whole flat. He’d been out the day before so he didn’t know anything about Saffy nearly dying in front of the Tube train, and seeing as me and her hadn’t even talked about it since we’d got back home, I didn’t reckon she was going to tell him and I didn’t know if I was either. She seemed happy enough that morning, singing along to the radio and occasionally saying, ‘Yes,’ or ‘Hmm,’ as Quin held up clothes he was deciding whether or not to pack. I could picture her where she would be, sitting in the chair watching him with her legs crossed and her hands bunched up in the sleeves of her hoody.

  ‘What are you guys going to get up to while I’m gone then?’ he was saying.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’d quite like to go to the park if it’s sunny.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ he goes. ‘Listen, can I have back that cash you borrowed? I wouldn’t normally ask but I need it this weekend. Extracurricular activities, if you know what I mean …’ I think we all knew what he meant but I was wondering when and why Saf had borrowed money off him and why she hadn’t said anything to me so I got up out of bed quietly and started looking about for some kecks or jeans or joggers.

  ‘What money?’ she goes, and I could hear her eyes getting narrow and cross all the way through the wall.

  ‘The money,’ he goes. ‘Fifty quid. It was in my blazer pocket on Tuesday. Now it’s gone.’

  I heard her shrug through the wall too. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘You must’ve spent it.’

  ‘Don’t start this again,’ he says. ‘The lying is when it starts getting really bad.’ I had one leg in my pants and one out but I stopped.

  ‘What do you mean, start this?’ she said. ‘Start what?’

  ‘You’re not well, darling,’ he says. ‘It’s getting worse again, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, fuck off. You’ve spent too much money and suddenly I’m getting “ill” again. Bore off, Quin.’

  I put my other leg in my pants and then I opened the door very very quietly, sssh. ‘Come on, Saf,’ Quin goes. ‘You know we have to do something about this.’

  ‘About what? Your finances? I totally agree,’ she said, and she sat back down arms crossed and looked at him like he was stupid.

  ‘About this!’ he said, and he stormed across the room and opened up one of his Brideshead videos. ‘About this,’ he said more quietly, and he lifted out a plastic bag with all chewed-up bits of meat and mashy chips in it, and it looked a lot to me like a dinner we’d had ages ago, back when things were still going okay.

  She stared at it and you couldn’t tell what she was thinking but then she stood up really quickly and grabbed the copy of Brideshead resting on the arm of the sofa, the one he found a year before in a special shop and he cried when he got it he was that excited, and she goes, ‘Me? There’s nothing wrong with me. What about you, wanking over your weird cad porn? All the pages are sticky, look! Surely with all the wanking it should be you who lost SOME FUCKING WEIGHT.’ And she held the book between her fingers by some of the pages and the rest all flopped towards the floor like a beautiful word-filled bird, and we all stared at it for a second and then there was a horrible rip sound and the book fell on the floor and the pages she was holding fluttered down after it.

  ‘Saffy!’ I said, and I hadn’t meant to but it just slipped out and she looked up, surprised to see me, but she didn’t seem guilty or sorry. Quinton was still staring at the book on the floor and then he turned away but not before I saw the tears in his eyes. He picked up his bag and he didn’t say ’bye he just walked out, and I looked at Saf but she just kicked the book and sat back down and she wouldn’t look at me. I walked very slowly back into the bedroom and I sat down on the end of the bed for a
very long time.

  There I was, stomping home, and there was a bit of a breeze about and a few leaves on the ground so it must’ve been getting to be autumn. I did up my jacket, smacking myself in the chest with the pint of milk swinging around in the orange placky bags that were digging into my hands. I was fucked off and upset and I couldn’t take any more, sitting there looking at Saf looking at nothing, thinking all the time of the money she’d given to me to get a takeaway or the little baggies that kept turning up in the house like they were creeping in off the pavement. She just sat there looking at the telly while I sat in our room and tried not to think about the horrible strange not-Saffy way she’d talked to Quin or the way she’d lied because I knew she had lied and I knew she had taken money off him and that in turn made me start to wonder just how much money she’d spent and how long she’d been keeping all of this from me, and all these questions started popping up in my brain and after a while I realised she was standing in the doorway behind me and I wanted to turn around and ask what was happening to her but I didn’t because I was scared and it felt like we were suddenly in a different place and I had no idea where, and if I said something we might be stuck there with no way back.

  I’d thought if I carried on acting normal maybe this would all go away and things would go back to how they were before, so I’d made myself stand up and pretend like everything wasn’t falling down around us, and just said, ‘C’mon, 60 Minute Makeover’s on, innit? I’m not in work till six so let’s have a duvet day.’

  And I’d put on a happy smiley face and hummed a little tune as I dragged the duvet off the bed and into the lounge, and she trailed along behind me not saying anything and she sat down very still, not even making a dent, and I kind of tucked the duvet round her and kind of folded myself around her too, which wasn’t all that easy, it was a bit like hugging a stick, and then we both looked at the telly and pretended that we cared. And I tried, I really tried, but I couldn’t do it, just sitting there still as statues watching people dashing about chucking paint at walls and throwing up wallpaper and pulling up carpets and hacking into big sheets of pretend wood, and the only movement on our side of the screen was Saffy’s eyes flicking from thing to thing, from window to sink to door to floor to telly to bookshelf to window again, and I swear I could actually hear them as they went round and round without stopping, click-click-click.

  So in the end I threw off the duvet and got up to do the washing-up and there was loads of it, all sticky cups and mayonnaisy spoons and even though I loved Quin I was still a bit pissed off about that – there’s nothing I hate more than a mayonnaisy spoon in the sink going all claggy and minging. But I got stuck in and Saf sat there without moving still, and then after a long silence, not a sound except the splosh of paint and the blow of the whistle for teabreak and the super-enthused presenter bird yapping on, I heard a noise behind me and just for a second I didn’t want to turn round, I felt like I was in a scary film and as soon as I slowly swivelled round she’d be there chewing off her own leg. But then I told myself not to be silly, this was Saffy we were talking about, my Saffy, the girl who could have an hour-long chat about building a house out of marshmallows and whether it would melt in the sun and drip on your head or whether that might actually cement them and be a good thing in the long run, so I turned around, and she was still sat there, still as a rock, but she was laughing to herself, giggling away, and even though she looked a bit creepy I thought, Well, at least she’s doing something. I wandered over with a wet plate and the scrubber still in my hand dripping suds on my feet and looked at the telly but there was nothing funny that I could see, nothing at all, just the presenter woman and the bald designer bloke looking at some pebbles he’d lined up on the bathroom windowsill and last time I checked there was nothing much funny about pebbles. And then she stopped laughing and just sat in silence again. I stood looking at her for a second, thinking, She’s cracked, she’s actually cracked, or maybe she’s on something weird and what should I do and how long should I keep looking at her before I do something and what am I going to do anyway, wheel her out onto the street and say, Oh, excuse me, my girlfriend’s gone mental, which way to the nuthouse please?

  She moved a bit then, tucking her legs up under her and pulling the duvet up a bit and, feeling a tiny bit relieved, I said, ‘You cold, babe? Shall I put the heating on?’

  And she looked up sweet as sugar and said, ‘Oh, I’m fine, thanks, honey, this duvet’ll do me.’

  And so I stood there a bit longer but she was quiet again and anyway the makeover was up to forty-five minutes by then and that’s the bit where it gets good, so I sat on the arm of the other chair and watched it, and then I sat in the chair properly and watched a bit more and then it was Loose Women and the gobby one with the big boobs was on and she was my favourite, proper naughty you could tell, so I put my legs up and watched that a bit longer but I couldn’t really concentrate. So then it was my eyes that were flicking about and I kept looking at the stack of videos in the corner and wondering how many of them actually had videos in them and how many had chewed-up chips or scraps of meat stashed in there.

  I got up and started fiddling with the book, because I was sure Quin’d be back in a day or so and I wanted it fixed by then, and I couldn’t get his little face out of my head and his hand half raised in a goodbye and the pages were so flimsy and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to fix it and I was just making the holes bigger the more I tried, so I put the tweezers down and just looked at my hands on the counter for a minute. I looked at Saffy and she was still sitting there not paying any attention but, just in case, I slid the book and the pages into the drawer under a tea-towel and then I picked up my jacket off the back of the chair and said, ‘I’m off to the shop, hun, you fancy anything?’

  And she looked up a bit miffed, like it was a real pain having to tear her eyes away from the mouldy old biscuit tin on the auction programme she was watching, which is dead boring at the best of times, and said, ‘No, I’m fine, thanks, love,’ and as a bit of an afterthought gave me a squarish grin.

  I nodded and waved as I went out the door, but she was already looking back at the screen at a close-up of the biscuit tin and it was pretty rusty if you asked me, you wouldn’t want to stick your custard creams in that. I pulled the door shut quietly on my way out so the draught from the hall didn’t get in and make her cold.

  Out on the street the sun was still shining and there was just a bit of a breeze starting up. A girl was walking past wearing these big round sunglasses that made her look like a fly, and she had freckles across her nose and cheeks, like this rag doll Hannah used to have when we were kids. Saffy sometimes got freckles when it was sunny, but usually just on her shoulders. She hated them but I thought they were dead lovely, like little sprinkles. I’d tried joining them up once, we were sat in the park, me with my back against a tree and her lying between my legs like I was an armchair, with her jeans rolled up and the straps of her top rolled down and her bare feet wiggling in the grass and these heart-shaped sunglasses on. I sneaked a pen out and started joining them up, and she didn’t mind, she was easygoing like that, or she was back then anyway, and when I was done, there was this biro blue lace over each of her shoulders. She didn’t try and wipe it off; she liked it, she said, trying to see it properly in the reflection in my Aviators and she wiggled her toes in the grass and settled back down, arms on each of my knees just like you would a chair. She got sunburnt feet that day and all night I could feel them glowing away at the end of the bed like a little heater.

  When I got to Sainsbury’s it was ram-packed and I had a little sigh to myself and pushed my sleeves up as I picked up a basket, cos I knew it was going to be a right chore. I didn’t have a list, and my mum always used to say you shouldn’t go shopping without a list and as always she was right. I floated hopelessly through the aisles picking things up and putting them down and wondering what Saf actually liked to eat and thinking how bloody weird it was that I didn’t k
now, not normal at all, and looking at cauliflower and celery and thinking that was stupid cos they’re nobody’s favourite foods, but in the basket they went anyway. I felt lost, pottering about the shop with everybody else powering around, chatting to each other and looking at wine and salads and making plans, and I couldn’t even think of something that Saf liked to eat, anything at all, and that just seemed so stupid when you thought of all the time we had spent together, all the hours in bed looking at every inch of her from the squishy little half-nails on her little toes that never grew properly because of the pointy high shoes she liked to wear to the blonde hairs round her knees that she always missed shaving and you could only see in the mornings when the sun was coming in through the curtains across the bed to her sharp hips which pointed sexily down to the main attraction her little slit of a bellybutton and her little 5p nipples which she got mad if you laughed at, to her pointy chin and her little elf ears, just all of it, and it just made my head spin that you can know somebody and not know them at all when you really looked at it.

  My basket had somehow filled up without me noticing, and who knows what I thought I was going to cook with it all, with celery and cauliflower and cheese and pasta and a bag of salad and a bit of chicken and milk and chocolate and pink fairy cakes and my old pals, those fucking pink apples. I was feeling all worked up by then, thinking about it and thinking about Quin and the book and the train and the water and the shower and her hair and the ket party and Spike shagging that bloke’s face and Lilah just leaving her and Saffy not being able to be left alone and the money and the staring and the coke and the quiet and it was all spinning round and round and making me sick.

  I paid for the shopping quickly and then I went to the cigarette counter to buy a couple of scratchcards and took them outside and leant against the dirty brick wall with all the shopping bags round my feet rustling in the wind. The sun had gone behind a massive cloud that covered most of the sky, and the air smelt like it does right before it pisses down with rain. I closed my eyes, counted to three thinking of three pound signs lurking behind that silver flaky stuff, and fumbled around in my pocket for a penny. I scratched them both without looking, making my eyes go all blurry on purpose, and then held them both out in front of me and looked carefully very carefully over each of the symbols, once and then twice. Not a sodding thing. The last symbol was a smiley face, and wasn’t that just a right joke. I scrunched them up, picked up all the orange plastic bags, and stomped home.