The State of Me Read online

  The State of Me

  Nasim Marie Jafry

  for lizzie

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Note

  Prologue

  Part One

  1 A Lime and a Sofa Bed, 1998

  2 Rita and Nab

  3 Before

  4 France

  5 The Trial

  6 Round Window

  7 Marion

  8 Bob

  9 New Blood

  10 Halloween

  11 New Bras

  12 A Wedding, a Graduation and Ganesh

  13 India

  14 Callum

  15 An Orange Silk Dress

  16 Madeira

  Part Two

  17 FAQs

  18 Granny Fleet, Peter and Finn

  19 Bees and Vitamin C

  20 Wendy and Storm

  21 MA, ME!

  22 London

  23 San Francisco

  24 Jana

  25 A Seduction

  26 Fabio

  27 A Dream About Cocktail Sticks

  28 Rome Then Cystitis

  Part Three

  29 A Pale Blue Dress

  30 A Death

  31 Fizza and a Swollen Eye

  32 The Silvery Tay

  33 Pearl

  34 More Questions

  35 A Seagull, 1998

  36 Vélos and Blue Wasps

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Note

  Tell me right away if I’m disturbing you, he said as he stepped inside my door, and I’ll leave at once.

  You not only disturb me, I said, you shatter my entire existence. Welcome.

  Eeva Kilpi

  (translated by Börje Vähämäki)

  Prologue

  All you need to know is this: Coxsackie. Coxsuckie. Cock-a-leekie.

  Three funny words that sound the same.

  Can you guess what they mean?

  I’ll tell you: a virus, a sexual act and a kind of soup made from chicken and leeks.

  Part One

  1

  A Lime and a Sofa Bed, 1998

  WHEN SHE’S FALLING asleep, she rubs her left foot against her right foot. Stop that, he says, you’re like a giant cricket. He deserves an acrobatic lover, a Nadia Comaneci. When she’s got energy, she goes on top as a special treat.

  Dragging legs, concentrating on every step, I feel like I’m wading through water. I take a trolley even though I’m only buying a few things. I don’t want to have to carry a basket. I pick up some tea bags. My arms and face are going numb, my bones are burning. I stop the trolley and pretend to look at the coffee. The lights are too bright, there are too many shiny things to look at, too many jars and bottles. I don’t feel real. I abandon the trolley and go to the checkout, picking up a lime on the way.

  The woman in front of me places the NEXT CUSTOMER divider between her dog food and my lime. She has a pink pinched face and limpid blue eyes. You can’t see her eyelashes. A mountain of Pedigree Chum edges towards the scanner.

  I focus on the lime and hope my legs will last.

  I’m wondering how many dogs the pinched woman has, and if her husband loves her without eyelashes, when a shrill voice punctures my head: the voice of the checkout girl. I haven’t realised it’s my turn.

  D’you know how much this is? she says, holding up the lime. She’s typed in a code, and PUMPKIN LARGE has come up on the till display.

  It’s not a pumpkin, I say. It’s a lime.

  She rings for the store manager, who appears from nowhere, brisk and important. He gives the girl the correct code and disappears again in a camp jangle of keys. The girl rings up the lime and I’m free. I go outside and sit on the wall. I feel spectacularly ill.

  I make my way home with no shopping. It’s only a five minute walk. I pass the dead seagull folded on the road. It’s been there for three days. It has blood on it.

  I reach the house and the smell of fresh paint hits me as I unlock the front door – we’d painted the bathroom last week, my arms left like rags.

  I’ll need to call him.

  When he answers the phone, I try to sound independent.

  I got ill at the supermarket, I say. Can you please get some groceries on the way home?

  What do we need?

  Pasta, salad, bread. Basics.

  I’ll nip home just now. I need to get out of here for a bit anyway.

  Can you get some Parmesan too?

  Okay.

  I’m sorry, I say.

  It’s not your fault, he replies.

  That seagull’s still there, d’you think I should call the council?

  They’ll be closed, he says, it’s after four.

  Someone’s moved it into the gutter, at least it’s not in the middle of the road anymore.

  Call them tomorrow, he says.

  I just feel sorry for it.

  See you in a bit, he says.

  I imagine him taking off his glasses after he’s hung up, rubbing his eyes and sighing. When he gets home, I’ll tell him I dreamt we had a baby made of lettuce, and he’ll smile and unwind in spite of himself.

  Things had been tense last night. Why d’you have to hack the whole head, why can’t you just chop it normally? he’d said, frowning at the mess of skins and garlic cloves on the work-top. I don’t do anything normally, I’d replied – did no one tell you?

  I lie down on the couch. I can’t get the seagull out of my head.

  Why didn’t you wait for me to come home? he says, handing me a cup of tea. I could’ve done the shopping. You really are your own worst enemy sometimes.

  The fridge was bare, I say, I got you a lime for your gin.

  I have to go back to work for a couple of hours. I’ll make dinner tonight. You don’t mind eating late, do you?

  No, I say, I’m not hungry at all.

  He kisses the top of my head as he leaves.

  I dreamt we had a baby made of lettuce last night.

  Tell me later, he says, I have to go.

  I wonder if he’s really gone back to work or if he’s gone to fuck Lucia. I wonder if I’ll have to call in sick tomorrow.

  She’d stayed with us before Christmas when her central heating wasn’t working. It was supposed to be for a couple of nights, but two nights had become two weeks. She’d given me a bag of Guatemalan worry dolls. For under your pillow, she’d said.

  I know, I said, I’ve had them before.

  She went on, girlishly, Tell them your worries before you sleep, and in the morning, they’ll all be gone!

  I’m worried you’ll sleep with my boyfriend, I’d said into myself.

  She’d slept on the sofa bed in the study. One morning, I’d been woken by loud voices and laughing. I got up. The sofa bed was sticking up in the middle of the floor like a monstrous orange sculpture. It’s stuck, said Lucia, giggling, I don’t know what I’ve done! They’d wrestled with it for a while and finally managed to collapse it and fold it up. Sorry we woke you, Helen, he said. We didn’t want to leave you with it all day.

  I’d hated him referring to Lucia and him as ‘we’. I’d watched them go out to the car. I grudged their intimacy, their shared knowledge of genes and proteins. She was beginning to annoy me with her skittishness, her smart coat and boots, so matching and groomed. I’d gone back to bed and tried to sleep more, but I couldn’t settle: they had to go – I felt agitated, just knowing they were there. I’d scooped the tiny Guatemalans from under my pillow and thrown them in the bin, covering them with rubbish so no one else would see them.

  NB. Helen’s boyfriend and Lucia work together, th
eir affair, however, may be psychosomatic, it’s causing Helen pain, but it’s not really there! Sometimes she sees them, Lucia, so eager to please in her short skirt and boots, him leaning over to kiss her.

  She’s so fucking fragile, Lu, he says, I can’t take it anymore.

  2

  Rita and Nab

  IT IS MY policy never to ask people what they do. If they want to tell me, that’s fine, but I would never ask. I understand the dread of being asked.

  stranger What do you do?

  me I work one afternoon a week. I’ve been ill (for fifteen years).

  stranger You don’t look ill.

  me That’s good, isn’t it?

  stranger You seem to have a lot of energy.

  me That’s ‘cos we’re sitting down just talking.

  stranger Why can’t you do a job where you can sit down?

  me Because it’s not just my legs. If I overdo it my arms feel mashed up and my head shuts down. I can’t think straight.

  stranger I see.

  me You don’t believe me, do you?

  stranger No, not really.

  me I’ve got more fucking ‘O’ grades and Highers than you’ve had hot dinners, so please just leave me alone. (Into myself.)

  It was the same when I used to go to the post office to cash my sickness benefit – the people behind the counter looked at me suspiciously, especially if I was wearing lipstick.

  I am thirty-five, but I still depend on Rita and Nab. Rita works part-time as a librarian. She trained as a nurse and stopped when she had me. Nab’s exotic, he grew up in Greenland. His Danish father taught there. Nab’s a hospital engineer. He’s high up.

  They met on holiday in Tenerife: divorced Nab with his son Finn, and divorced Rita with me and my brother Sean. Rita’d used her savings to get a four-star hotel – we’d had a horrible three-star hotel in Alicante two years before, and my granny had spent the first day cleaning her room with Dettol. I still have my Alicante souvenir, a donkey with yellow nylon fur, peeling now, revealing the cheap grey plastic underneath.

  Nab hired a car and took us round the island. Sean and I admired the bougainvillea and sheer drops politely. Finn was cool and wore black clogs. He was bored shitless. Volcanic rock didn’t impress him. Nab was easy to love but Rita and I secretly laughed at his Scandinavian Jesus sandals.

  My real father Peter had his own dental practice above a butcher’s shop. He had minty breath and slept with his nurses. (A little more suction, please, Denise!) When you went through the close to get to the surgery upstairs, you could smell the meat from the butcher’s delivery entrance. Sometimes there was blood on the ground. There was a fish-tank in the waiting room and the goldfish always had a string of white shit hanging from its tail.

  Peter left when I was ten but we still went to him for fillings. I didn’t find the divorce traumatic – I’d never really liked him. The only thing I have in common with him is that we both love raw onion.

  Sean is four years younger than me. We grew up on the Bonnie Banks. Our house was right next to the park. You nipped over the fence, jumped the ditch, ran past the Michael tree (a boy called Michael fell off it and died), through the rhododendrons, and you were at the top of a huge grassy hill, Loch Lomond spread out in front of you.

  Every spring the park was carpeted with bluebells. We’d pick Rita giant bunches for her birthday, Mother’s Day and Easter. She must’ve been sick of them – they’re not exactly fragrant. In fact, bluebells stink. (Also, they are toxic to deer and cattle.)

  And, there is Brian, I depend on him too, for his big wide love, Rita’s youngest brother, brain-damaged at birth, not profoundly, but enough to make him happy.

  3

  Before

  I HAVEN’T ALWAYS been ill. Once upon a time, I got lots of ‘A’s and played right-inner for the school hockey team. I wasn’t very good but that’s not the point. I loved the clatter of the game and the gorgeous bruises and the orange segments at half-time. I loved the adrenaline at the start, the jamming and locking of sticks when the centre-forwards fought for possession of the ball.

  Ground, Stick! Ground, Stick! Ground, Stick! BALL!

  We had to wear disgusting maroon hockey skirts. We envied the nearby private school whose uniform was deep lilac and much sexier.

  When we left school, my best friend Rachel and I got summer jobs at the Swan Hotel. The staff had to wear tartan. Rachel and I wore mini kilts and flirted with the chefs. The bottle boy was always trying to get Rachel to go down to the cellar with him.

  The local speed-boat owners came regularly with their beer bellies and Alsatians. Dogs weren’t allowed, so the Alsatians clipped along the pier, barking at the swans while their owners devoured scampi-in-the-basket washed down by pints of heavy. Coach parties were a nightmare, tea and coffee for eighty. Josie, the woman who made the sandwiches, would test if the bread was defrosted by holding the cold slices against her hairy face. The tourists nibbled on their egg and cress and gazed out at Ben Lomond, blissfully unknowing. When it was quiet, I would sit at the bar, folding napkins, remembering how Peter used to bring us here on Sundays for chicken-in-the-basket. Sean and I would sneak into the ball-room and slide on the polished dance floor. Rita would be staring out at the loch. She hated it when her husband played happy families.

  Sometimes, after our shifts, we would go up the park and hide in the rhododendrons and get stoned with the commis chefs. We’d talk rubbish, pissing ourselves laughing amongst the crimson flowers and shiny leaves. One time, we put dope in tea and watched Yellow Submarine at the bar manager’s flat. Nothing for an hour then my elbows were made of cotton and my tongue felt like sawdust. It was a bit scary. I kept saying, I’ve got cotton elbows, but Rachel couldn’t stop laughing.

  In my first year at university, I commuted, thought nothing of the mile walk to the train station. Why would I?

  I met Hadi, handsome and narcissistic, at the beginning of the second term. He was Libyan and had his own flat and a fat black cat called Blue because she liked the blues. When Hadi had the munchies he would overfeed her, tipping Whiskas onto a saucer, tapping the spoon against the rim to get her attention: Come on, fat lady, come to eat! Hadi hardly ever went to his engineering lectures and got his friends to photocopy their notes for him.

  His erection was bent like a banana and he rolled his eyes when he came. I thought this was normal. The third time we had sex he complained about using Durex (‘stupid skins’) and said I should go on the pill. I told him I wouldn’t have sex without a condom because I didn’t know his history. He pouted and accused me of being neurotic and clinical about love. When I finished with him at the end of term, he kicked over the rubber plant I’d got him and called me a prick-tease. I told him I was tired of his moods and tired of him shovelling cat food into Blue. I told him I was tired of his friends always being there skinning up, and tired of listening to J. J. Cale. When I tried to leave the flat, he said he’d kill himself. A couple of weeks later, I saw him with his arm round a girl in the Grosvenor Cafe. I half smiled, but he blanked me.

  In my second year, I moved up to Glasgow into a student flat. My flatmate Jana was petite and fragile with a sexy, throaty voice and jet black hair that swung like a curtain. She’d grown up in San Francisco. Her mum was half American Indian and had died of breast cancer when Jana was fifteen. (It’s sad, Jana’d say – she was beautiful but she was bi-polar and she was always going on crazy spending sprees, she got us into a lot of debt.) Jana’s dad was Scottish and her granny lived in Anniesland. Jana had stayed with her when she first came to Glasgow. She loved Glasgow. The first time she’d seen well-fired rolls in Greggs’ bakery she’d taken a photo because she thought they were burnt.

  Ivan lived in the flat above. He was studying biochemistry and looked a bit like Adam Ant, but taller and more rugged. Everyone fancied him. We would eye each other up in the Reading Room, the dome-shaped library where you went if you just had a couple of hours and didn’t want the palaver of checking int
o the main library. The Reading Room echoed with suppressed giggles and shuffled papers and books slammed shut. The librarian was stern and wore salmon pink twin-sets. You could feel her eyes stabbing you when you scraped your chair along the ground or dropped your pen and it echoed. Jana called her the salmon spinster and was always getting thrown out for carrying on.

  In Week Eight, I got off with Ivan in the union bar to Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division. I said I loved his blue eyes. He said he loved my green eyes. They’re not really green, I said, they’re more grey. When I told him I was from Balloch, he said he’d camped there once and someone had jumped on his tent. It wasn’t me, I said.

  You’ll never guess who’s been sleeping in my bed! I said to Jana the next morning. I told her it was Ivan and she screamed and went to check I was telling the truth. She peeked into my bedroom. He was still sleeping.

  I wouldn’t mind doing pelvic thrusts with him, she whispered to me back in the kitchen. Bring him to Rocky Horror. It’s on this Friday.

  I’ll see, I said. I want to play hard to get. And by the way, we haven’t done pelvic thrusts yet, we just dibbled and dabbled. (Dibbling and dabbling was Jana’s term for nonpenetrative sex.)

  I bet he has a beautiful body, she said.

  He does, I said. He’s in the university tennis club. And he’s in a band. And he wears contact lenses. He’s as blind as a bat without them.

  So if I climbed into bed with him now, he’d just think it was you? she said.

  Don’t even think about it, you cheeky wench!

  When she’d gone to her class, I took Ivan tea in bed. Nonchalant and shaking, I asked him about Rocky Horror. Sure, green eyes, he said, peering for the cup. It’s a date.