I picked up my letter from the Post Office. It is a strange building, flat and red. They say government spies live on top of the posta. The spies, if they’re there, are welcome to watch me. I do not care about the government. The queues were long because I went at lunchtime. There are fifty queues, and the rules are always changing. I went to my box, clutching my key. The metal felt slippery and hot in my hand. I held it so tight that it marked my palm.
I was so excited when I saw there was a letter. God had sent me a letter on my birthday. I am not a child, wanting cards and presents, but a letter from my son is my heart’s desire. Jamil had remembered my birthday, a miracle! I felt the whole post office was smiling at me. Trying to hurry, I dropped my letter, and had to clutch it up from the dusty floor.
I saw my own name, in blue ink, swimming closer. At first I was sure it was Jamie’s writing. My eyes caressed it; my heart leapt and thudded.
Then it snapped into focus, and everything was wrong. Neat angular writing. Not my Jamie’s. I recognised it, somehow, but it was not his.
And then my skin stood up in small pimples like the legs of a chicken dead on a table.
The writer-woman’s writing. Yes, it was her.
I am still not ready to open it.
4
Justin is dreaming about his childhood. It is six pm, and he is still in bed. He has thrown off the thick cloud of duck-down duvet his mother got out for him yesterday and lies sprawled on his back in a sheen of chilled sweat, streaks of blonde hair slicked across his pillow.
In the dream, all his school-friends have come for tea. He is still at his local primary school, so the friends are every shape and colour. It is his birthday, they are smiling at him. Mary Tendo is making the tea, plates and plates of white bread and red sweet jam, the food he always liked best as a boy, though his mother never allowed white bread. Mary used to buy it when his mother was out. And chocolate biscuits, and crisps, and baked beans.
But now they are eating a small white giraffe that Mary has bought for him as a treat. The giraffe is quite tough, and starts wriggling, but he wants to eat it to please Mary, though the other children push it away. Now it cocks up its head and looks at him, big reproachful eyes, a long tremulous lip. Suddenly it gets up from the table. It is his mother, who has just come home. Her teeth are big and sharp and yellow and she smells very strongly of giraffe.
Justin cries out, afraid, and wakes, and sits up, and sees he is alone in a darkening room. Outside the window, it is raining again. He scratches furiously, and goes back to sleep.
Two rooms away in the big suburban villa, bought for a song twenty years ago, Vanessa Henman is exercising hard, driving herself through her hundredth stomach crunch, her neck tendons cording, her vertebrae clicking. She tries to support her head with her hands but it’s almost impossible to relax it: the head seems to go on working on its own, such a heavy head, such a narrow neck, too long, far too long, for the rest of her body. 100, 101, 102—and then she remembers she need only do 100, but a voice in her head insists she go on, and for neatness she aims for 110, but the demon drives her to 120. Until ten years ago she ran every day, but the bones in her hips began to ache.
“You have to accept you are getting older,” the doctor had said to her, quite gently, when she went to ask him to deal with the pain, a decade ago when it still seemed new. “None of us is getting any younger, Mrs Henman. It’s probably best to give up the running.”
“Dr Henman, actually,” she’d snapped at him. (She flushes pink now, remembering.) “I can’t give up running, it’s part of me. In any case, I’m only in my forties.”
Had she known the future, she would have kissed him. For after that meeting with Dr Truman, she had taken up Pilates instead of running, made friends with Fifi, her Pilates teacher, and co-written a book which had made her name and earned them both a lot of money, The Long Lean Line: Pilates for Everyone. It hit the beginning of the craze for Pilates: Vanessa was on every radio show, though Fifi, who was younger, got the television dates, and starred alone in the video, which had almost caused an argument between them, and Vanessa had to be forgiving. They had followed it up with another three, The Long Lean Line 2, 3 and 4.
Though it seems the vein might soon be exhausted. She’s had a phone call from her editor. “I’m talking to Marketing, Vanessa darling. Maybe we’re coming to the end of the line. No, sorry, of course I’m not trying to be funny.”
In any case, novels are her metier. She published two novels in the 1980s, which were ‘very well reviewed’, as she always points out. On the strength of them, she got the job she still holds, as Lecturer in Creative Writing at one of the new universities. She started that department, and designed the course, which over the years has grown increasingly popular.
But the students always ask her what she’s written recently. They only half-smile, and look slightly disappointed, when she tells them about her Pilates books.
“They have made me a lot of money,” she assures them. “Remember there is money to be made from non-fiction.”
“Most of us want to write fiction, and novels,” a brave, and ignorant, student protested. She gave him B- for his next two assignments.
Creative Writing, she has come to understand, is a magnet for the unteachable. Two in ten students are actually mad. In recent years she has too often caught herself listening to a student describing the plot of his novel, the two-hour tutorial extending like a desert, as a voice in her ear hisses, quite loudly, “This person is insane. Both of us must be. The story he is telling me is not worth telling. Nothing at all in this exchange is real. Why aren’t I writing my own novels?” She is starting a new module this term, called ‘Autobiography and Life Writing’. Perhaps this will encourage the students to make sense: or perhaps the madness will just come out.
At least she is still all right for money, though there is the enormity of Justin, the problem of Justin, a limp dead weight, sucking up her energy, her time, her money, weighing on her like a mountain of debt. Every time he breathes, he becomes more costly. How can she write novels with him in the house?
Vanessa frowns as she trots downstairs. And the stair-carpet’s filmed with a faint spume of hair, her own yellow-blonde hair, which tends to fall out. She is temporarily without a cleaner, since the last one met Justin naked on the landing. “I just don’t feel right with men around,” the woman had whined, as she handed back their keys. Vanessa told herself she could manage without; these days one had to pay cleaners a fortune, and they didn’t do it half as well as oneself. But she’s finding herself too busy to clean, though she sometimes attacks a pan or a surface with furious vigour for ten minutes or so.
Justin is a liability. How can she keep cleaners with a nudist about?
It is time for another conference with Tigger- her nickname for Trevor, Justin’s father. She gave him up two decades ago, once she realised he had no ambition, and refused to take things seriously; including her writing, including her. He wouldn’t read the parenthood manuals she bought him. They separated when the boy was just a baby, one and a half, just beginning to talk (it hurt that he said ‘Dadda’ before ‘Mumma’). But Tigger still hung around the house all the time. Though in the last year, since things went wrong for Justin, Tigger has too often been otherwise engaged, falling for a stupid young would-be artist not so much older than his son, some kind of Indian who doesn’t speak English.