Chapter 15
I have done so many things with Shane.
Some of these I’ve banished from my brain in order to survive five nights sharing a mattress with him.
But now my head fills with less contentious memories – like all those hours we spent chatting, and the times we got drunk together, far more than I can count.
All the gigs we played, and the night I laughed, rather cruelly, when a drumstick flew out of his hand and pinged right off the stage, hitting a man on the head.
That time we lay together on the sparse, parched grass in the park, when he insisted he didn’t need sunscreen because he ‘never burned’.
Because obviously, Shane wasn’t a normal boy, but one with skin made from asbestos.
I have dabbed calamine lotion onto his tender back and shoulders.
I have run to his house, yelling that he had to come over because my parents were out and a crow had somehow flown down the chimney into our living room.
It was flapping around madly, crashing into Mum’s prized shepherdess ornaments and hitting the window with a thud.
Unfazed, Shane had cornered the bird and somehow wrapped it gently in a tea towel and carried it to the back door and set it free.
I’d have been no more awestruck if he’d rescued a baby from a burning building.
‘My hero!’ I’d joked, and hugged and kissed him, our kisses growing deeper and hotter and then—Don’t even go there!
I command myself as I steal a quick look at Shane.
It’s all I can do not to keep watching him, as this is an entirely new experience for me.
Because what I have never done is sat in a vehicle being driven by him.
Perhaps it’s because I haven’t had my pill today that everything seems sharper than I’m used to – as if my internal settings have been altered.
Whatever it is, I cannot get over the fact that somehow, the boy with choppy home-cut hair and a love of charity shop overcoats and Findus Crispy Pancakes is now a properly adult man, currently driving an ambulance at a steady 60 mph as if it’s nothing.
Dale, Cora’s dad, didn’t drive. (He didn’t do much apart from getting stoned, drinking lager and wearing the same underpants three days running.) However, in my late twenties in London, I felt obliged to learn and bought a terrible old Fiat that belched thick black exhaust fumes, which caused people to stop and stare.
The plan was to force some semblance of grown-upness upon myself, as if possessing these things – driving licence, car – would magically turn me into the sophisticated woman I yearned to be.
However, I hated driving, and when Cora was around five, the rusty old heap finally expired, never to be replaced.
‘Great,’ my friend Gaby teased me. ‘That’s saved you cleaning it out!’ Admittedly it had become little more than a receptacle for crisp packets and withered fruit.
Travelling in a vintage ambulance is an entirely different experience. ‘D’you know how old this thing is?’ I ask.
‘Um… mid-nineties, I think,’ Shane replies.
Ah, the era of listening to Supergrass with a bottle of Hooch. Kate Moss in that crinkly see-through dress, accessorised by Johnny Depp. Discovering I was pregnant after a brief reconciliation with Dale, my abject horror soon reshaping itself first into stoical acceptance, then quiet delight.
‘Before mobile phones and the Internet,’ I remark. ‘Was that before suspension too?’
He laughs. ‘Not exactly a smooth drive, is it?’
‘It’s like being rattled inside a gigantic tin.
’ Already it feels as if my fillings are being shaken loose, one by one.
Yes, weirdly, this feels interesting rather than alarming.
Perhaps that’s also due to the lack of pills.
I am hyper aware of every bodily sensation and wonder if this is the new me: tingly with nerves, yet somehow feeling fully alive.
We’ve slipped into silence now, and I gaze out at the endless flat, green landscape.
For the last two hours on the road, we’ve been alternating light, inconsequential chit-chat with quiet spells over the whine of the engine.
I’ve already decided that Shane is something of a closed book, and that I’m unlikely to get to know him as a fully-fledged adult on this trip.
Fine, I tell myself. If this is the tone we’re adopting for the entire five days, then I’m okay with that.
It’s not as if I want to spill out my innermost feelings – about our shared past, my life now or any of that. In fact, I’d rather not.
The silence stretches, beginning to feel a little taut.
When the rain starts, Shane makes a brief remark about the windscreen wipers being a bit crap.
More miles, more rain. The engine grinds along stoically.
I mentally calculate that between now and the blissful moment when we arrive back in London and I bolt out of this van amounts to…
something like 120 hours. A full 120 hours of community service for my crimes!
For telling Cora that Zack is ‘such a great guy!’ while secretly hating him.
For giving him the finger behind his back.
For faking orgasms with Lloyd, yet saying the sex was ‘amazing’, even though I’ve often lost concentration part-way through the proceedings, wondering instead where my lost slipper might have got to (could it have fallen down the back of the radiator where I’d put it to dry, after spilling coffee on it?).
In the absence of playing I spy or listening to music (amazingly, this ancient van possesses no sound system) I continue to mentally list further sins.
‘Borrowing’ and then shrinking Lloyd’s sweater and saying I’d never seen it.
Concealing said sweater under a load of vegetable peelings and cold spaghetti in my kitchen bin.
Nicking a big bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk from the Co-op in 1986.
Me and Shane and Ravi guzzling my parents’ Cinzano and smoking a copious amount of cigarettes while they were out and telling them we’d burnt some toast.
And at work, although innocent of the crime I’ve been accused of, I have done other bad things.
Such as: throwing up in the back room sink after Gaby’s fifty-fifth birthday party.
Claiming to have ‘no idea’ about the source of the sour smell that lingered when Rupert returned from an errand, and blaming ‘the drains’.
Allowing an elderly lady to bring in her toy poodle, despite our strict no dogs policy, another time Rupert was out.
After the pooch had leapt up onto his upholstered swivel chair and done a little widdle, I’d denied all knowledge of how the wet patch got there.
Oh God – Rupert probably thought he’d done it himself, that he has a dribbling problem. I basically gaslighted him.
So I deserve this, really: being trapped with Shane in a van all the way to Grimsby.
I am aware of yet more oestrogen draining from my body, down through the soles of my peasant trotters and the base of the van, finally dripping out onto the M1.
And I wonder if Shane, a mere arm’s width away from me, can sense this.
‘Doing okay there?’ I ask pleasantly, to break the lull.
‘Yep, I’m good,’ Shane replies. ‘You okay?’
‘I’m fine.’ Although I’m pretty sure that the effects of yesterday’s pill have now fully worn off. ‘Let me know if you want me to take over,’ I add recklessly.
‘What, driving?’
‘Sure!’
‘Um… I’m okay,’ he says. ‘Unless you’d like to?’
‘I’m fine if you are.’ We settle back into silence punctuated by the odd inconsequential remark. It’s as if we are work colleagues thrown together – tasked with driving to a retail park to collect some refurbished office chairs.
We stop at a service station for fuel, batteries for the lamp, plus coffee and cheese toasties, flattened to extreme thinness and oozing oil.
The rain is heavier now, sheeting down the café window, and people are running to their cars with jackets pulled up over their heads.
As I chew on my toastie I try to calculate how many of this particular kind of joyless snack or meal we’ll eat together over the next five days.
I sip my coffee and glance at Shane, wondering if he’s starting to regret this. ‘So, what d’you remember about Grimsby?’ I ask.
He gnaws away thoughtfully and then replies, ‘Our first gig away from home, wasn’t it? No friends to come and support us. We didn’t know a soul.’
‘Yeah, it was pretty scary.’ Until then we’d stuck to our home town’s familiar pub venues, where our loyal gang could be relied upon to show up and be disproportionately enthusiastic.
But the tour had felt like something else entirely, and Ravi had insisted that we’d rise to the challenge.
She was always in charge. She’d invented our ‘style’ (a mishmash of whatever we could fling together), wrote all our music and announced that, with six songs in our repertoire, of course we were a proper band now, ready to play at the world’s most iconic music venues.
The Laughing Haddock in Grimsby! The Mucky Duck in Huddersfield! She was unstoppable.
Nerves aside, as the tour loomed, the thought of being ‘on the road’ with my best friends – with Shane especially – wasn’t entirely terrible.
We’d have a whole week away, the three of us together.
How thrilling it would be to stay in ropey guest houses, Ravi’s uncle’s caravan, Shane’s great-auntie’s box room and on the living room floor of some distant family friend of mine.
Ravi sprayed her hair neon pink from an aerosol can (we knew nothing about climate change) and Shane grudgingly let her hack at his floppy dark hair with kitchen scissors.
My choppy crop – also home-cut – was bleached by Ravi in her impossibly glamorous bathroom (jacuzzi bath!
Fluffy peach carpet that fitted around the loo!).
She made our ‘stage outfits’ – spotty miniskirts worn with wide studded belts – that caused her mum to laugh and roll her eyes.
We yearned for Chelsea Girl and Miss Selfridge, but these thrilling emporiums of style were a million light years away in Bradford.
Meanwhile, Ravi forced Shane into a Breton top with a ripped neckline and persuaded him that a little make-up would look great.
What a ragbag we were, barely competent onstage, yet bubbling with the joy of all being together.
Ravi made all of that happen, just as she is making this happen on this bleak, wet, Saturday afternoon.
She was so ill, and I didn’t even know. My vision fuzzes and I clear my throat.
‘I don’t remember much about the actual town, though,’ I announce, checking Shane’s set expression. ‘Grimsby, I mean.’
‘Neither do I,’ he says.
I take another bite of my now cold toastie and swallow it down. ‘Well, it was a very long time ago.’ A lull settles. ‘That was when Ravi did your make-up,’ I remind him.
‘Only eyeliner,’ he says with a grin. ‘And I thought it looked pretty cool.’
‘It did! And she teased up your hair into a little quiff, remember?’
He chuckles. ‘I do remember that.’
‘“We’re doing something with that barnet, Shane!”’ I mimic her strident tones.
‘“You look like a bloody geography teacher!”’ he chimes in. ‘And I did. So square and boring, compared to you two…’
But you weren’t square and boring at all.
You were adorable with your shy, off-centre smile and that choppy brown hair, constantly flicking into your dark eyes.
I wanted to look at you so much that I had to keep telling myself: STOP LOOKING, YOU IDIOT!
Or Ravi would realise, and the unspoken rule was that nothing would upset the dynamics of our little trio…
‘…in those outfits,’ he continues. ‘Those matching skirts you used to wear. What did Ravi make them out of?’
‘Pillowcases,’ I remind him.
‘Your mum was worried about you going out like that.’ He looks across the table at me with a smile.
‘Yes, but she was more worried about me electrocuting myself onstage. My parents were terrified of electricity, remember?’
‘Oh yeah! All the plugs pulled out of their sockets at night…’
‘They thought our appliances would catch fire. Even the kettle and toaster. They were worried about us being incinerated in our beds…’
Shane smiles fondly, and I catch a wistful look crossing his green eyes.
As if, for a moment, he was right back there.
I think of how we kissed, that day with the crow, and push the thought away again.
We were just young and reckless, and everyone kissed everybody back then. I was only thanking him.
‘Your parents were always lovely,’ Shane adds.
I smile. ‘You know they were so fond of you,’ I tell him, and he flushes. Of course, everyone knew what Pete, his stepdad, was like, although Shane was always reluctant to go into any of that.
‘You said they’ve moved to Northumberland?’
‘Yeah. I was really surprised, actually. Maybe I was the one who’d held them back all that time.’
‘They didn’t want to uproot you?’
‘Possibly.’ To my shame, I’d always assumed that they weren’t brave enough to relocate and make a new life for themselves. That they’d remain in our little terraced council house until the end of their days.
I finish my coffee and push my cup aside, relieved that we’ve managed these first few hours together at least. But something is niggling and now, before we’re faced with The Mattress Situation, seems like the best time to address it.
‘Shane,’ I start, ‘I was thinking… maybe we should have a few rules on this trip?’
He frowns. ‘Rules?’
‘Yeah.’ I nod firmly. ‘For one thing, we’re going to be driving an awful lot. So I think we should share it.’
‘Of course! No problem. Drive the next leg if you like—’
‘Maybe not this bit,’ I say quickly. ‘Maybe later.’
‘Fine. Just say, whenever you want to.’
‘And if one of us wants to stop somewhere, or go off and do our own thing, we should say so. Shouldn’t we?’
His eyes widen in surprise. ‘Well, er… yeah. Of course. Absolutely.’
I take a breath, wondering why this doesn’t seem to be coming out quite right.
All I mean is, we should have the option to please ourselves – to take time out from each other if we need to.
I push a hand through my dishevelled hair, wondering if I actually brushed it this morning.
‘All I mean,’ I blunder on, ‘is that we should both feel we can say what we want, and what we need, because I don’t think this trip is going to be easy.
’ It’s all tumbled out in a rush, and something flickers in his eyes.
He looks hurt, I realise, and a little confused.
‘No,’ Shane says quietly. ‘I don’t suppose it is.’
And with that, as we leave the service station café and hurry through the rain, I wish I could stuff my stupid words back into my mouth.