Real Life

I was driving over to Caro's, snuffling into my tissues and checking in the rear-view mirror for stray mascara. It was the first time my daughter, Lizzie, had stayed overnight with Siobhan and I knew I should be looking forward to my evening of freedom, but when she kissed me goodbye and scampered up to Siobhan's bedroom with her suitcase full of Barbie dolls, I just knew I was going to go wet.

I go wet every time Lizzie grows up a bit more, leaves me for new adventures, each time I lose a bit more baby. That's one of the things about being a single mum, you spend all your time worrying about the future until it's too late. You've missed the moment and your child will never be the same again.

"What are you going to do while I'm at Siobhan's?" Lizzie had asked the previous day. "Will you be lonely?"

My daughter, at nine, can never slip fully into the selfishness of childhood for long. Sometimes I think we worry about each other twice as much as normal, perhaps to compensate for the fact that Ted seems not to worry about either of us at all.

"I'm going to Caro's," I told her.

For a moment she bit her lip, wanting to come too. Lizzie loves Caro, whom she has known all her life and Caro, surprisingly, has remained constantly adoring.

"You see, you're going to stay with your friend and I'm going to stay with my friend," I told her. "That's fair isn't it?"

Lizzie smiled.

"Don't smoke will you, at Caro's?" she said.

I'd given up for six months, but Lizzie was well aware of Caro's influence. I shook my head.

"And tell Caro to stop smoking too."

I joined the heavy traffic into London, wondering if Lizzie would get homesick during the night, and hoping Siobhan's mother wouldn't let the girls go out on their own. Siobhan, I knew, was more daring than Lizzie, less scared, and there was something in her perfect little smiling face that I didn't quite trust. I didn't like the way she teased Lizzie about being fatherless and I didn't like the way the two of them giggled behind my back, but I told myself that all nine-year-old girls were the same. Had I the choice, I would never have picked Siobhan to be Lizzie's best friend, but at the same time I kicked myself for my judgemental suspicions. It was unlikely, I smiled to myself, that my own mother would have blessed my friendship with Caro.

It was hot and muggy but the roads were clearer than usual, the rich having left London for August, and I arrived at Caro's flat only half-an-hour late. I hammered on the door.

"Piss off you slag!" she shouted through the open kitchen window. "I said seven o'clock."

Then she flung open the door, grabbed my bag and grinned the grin I've got on a hundred photos, the one she says looks like she's slept all night with a coat hanger in her mouth.

"Good haircut! How was the journey? How's Lizzie? Gin?"

Caro and I never kiss each other. She patted my new bob and turned me around to admire the back view before filling tall glasses with ice and pouring long gin-and-tonics as I sat at the kitchen table, telling her about Lizzie, and Siobhan.

I was well into my second gin by the time I'd finished. Caro sucked her teeth.

"She's a nasty little piece of work," she agreed, "but not dangerous. It'll all be over in a couple of months - Lizzie'll be heartbroken for about an hour, and then she'll have a new best friend and she won't be any the worse for wear. She'll have drunk a glass of Siobhan's mother's sherry, played with matches and been sick on a cigarette - she has to do it sometime."

Caro reached for a packet of cigarettes and extracted a pure white tube with a gold band.

"St. Moritz!" I laughed. "Have you gone pretentious or what!"

She lit up and drew a long lungful, wincing slightly.

"Painful lungs," she told me. "Menthol's the only thing that doesn't make me choke."

She didn't look ill. Her eyes were as bright as ever and I couldn't tell how much weight she'd lost under her baggy T-shirt.

"How are you?" I asked.

She stretched out her long brown legs and examined her scarlet toenails.

"Good tan, don't you think?" she said.

I nodded.

"I bought it in a bottle in Boots," she said. "£3.99. Have you seen Ted?"

I told her all about Ted as she cooked us pasta with little strips of smoked salmon and creme fraiche. She had opened a bottle of white wine and I knew I was beginning to babble, but it didn't matter with Caro. Caro has a way of listening, of absorbing, of feeling other peoples' pain.

"Bastard," she growled occasionally as I talked and then, over dinner, we began to laugh as she plotted a course of outrageous revenge. By the time we had finished Ted really didn't seem to matter anymore.

"Can I phone Lizzie?" I asked her. "Just to make sure she's okay."

Caro grinned at me.

"Allright Miss Neurotic, but try not to slur your words or you'll never be allowed here on your own again."

I could hear Siobhan's mother calling Lizzie for ages before she came to the phone.

"Mum? What is it?"

"Nothing, I just wondered how you were."

"Mum, I'm fine. Can I go now?"

Caro blew a kiss and pointed at the phone.

"Caro sends you her love."

"Oh - can I speak to her?"

I passed the phone and heard my daughter's loud chatter as Caro held the receiver slightly away from her ear.

"Yes - yes - no - absolutely not - I promise - yes - I love you too - bye."

She raised her eyebrows at me.

"The child is a tyrant," she said. "She's just told me that if I let you smoke she's going to live at Siobhan's forever."

I pointed at her cigarettes.

"Gis one!"

We giggled and she threw me the packet.

"So do you want to hit the town?" asked Caro as we lay end-to-end on her enormous sofa.

"Actually I don't think I can move," I laughed.

"Oh good," she said. "I'm a real party bore these days - I get so tired, you know."

It was a big admission for Caro. I jumped at the knock at the door and Caro groaned melodramatically.

"But they just can't keep away!" she cried.

"Who's that," I asked, watching her expression change to mischievous delight. "Oh God, not a man!"

Caro snorted and staggered off the sofa.

"Straight faces," she instructed. "My luscious neighbour, no doubt."

I snatched a glance in the mirror as she went to open the door, thinking that I looked middle-aged.

"Chrissy - Graham."

He was a big man, not Caro's usual type, solid like a rugby player. He had sandy hair and a bland sort of face with an unfinished quality about it. He smiled at me, showing a set of very small teeth of which there appeared to be more than the usual number.

"Pleased to meet you, Chrissy," he said. "Listen, girls, I'm having some friends round for a drink, bit of a party. It'll be a good crack - Polish vodka in the freezer - why not come round?"

Caro sat down in the armchair opposite him and crossed her bare legs slowly in front of her. I watched his eyes check the bottom of her mini-skirt.

"Chrissy and I are having a girls' night in, Graham," said Caro.

"Doing what?" asked Graham.

"Oh, you know, talking about girls' things," said Caro lighting a cigarette.

Graham laughed.

"What girls' things?" he persisted. "What do you girls talk about when you get together?"

"Men," said Caro, smiling sweetly at him.

Graham flushed slightly.

"Okay, babe," he said. "I'll leave you to it. Pop round if you run out of things to say."

Caro kept smiling.

"Oh we will," she said.

He winked at me.

"Maybe see you later," he said, "I'll see myself out."

We waited until the front door clicked shut before collapsing onto the floor.

"He called you babe!" I shrieked. "Caro - you've been having an affair with a man who calls you babe! I don't believe it!"

"What do you think?" she asked.

I screwed up my nose.

"Not my type. Nice shoulders, I suppose, but a bit of a slime-ball."

"Charming," said Caro. "The word is charming."

I raised my eyebrows. She collapsed into giggles again.

"Oh Christ," she sighed. "Why, oh why? Shall I open some more wine?"

"Can I have mine intravenously? I don't think I'm capable of manoeuvring the glass to my lips. I thought you were supposed to be cutting down anyway."

"I am," said Caro. "Fourteen units, the recommended intake for women. I'll just tell the doctor I thought it was a daily allowance."

She brought in another bottle and the corkscrew.

"Is he good in bed?"

She studied the label on the wine.

"Eleven per cent. Gnat's piss!"

"Well?"

"You know, Chrissy," she said, twisting the corkscrew slowly into the bottle. "I was thinking about all the times we used to chase men, play them at their own game, up front, hands down their pants before they'd even bought you a drink -"

"Ahem - your hand down their pants if you don't mind!"

"Oh, come on, Chrissy, you were just as bad, slappers together - all out to get what we thought we wanted."

She looked at me.

"But you know there was something wrong - I don't mean I didn't want it - it's just that somehow I began to realise that it wasn't a natural role. I didn't want to be the assertive one any more, the chaser. I wanted to be chased. I wanted to slouch about in a ragged, floral frock, looking like something out of a Tennessee Williams play, and I wanted to be picked up, and carried off, and thrown on the bed."

"Thrown?"

"You know, have you ever been picked up and thrown onto the bed?"

"Caro - that's not Tennessee Williams - that's pure soap opera."

"Chrissy, my life is a bloody soap opera."

Caro pulled the corkscrew violently from the bottle and filled our glasses.

"It always has been a soap opera because I don't know how to lead a real life. I was brought up on Instant Whip and the Famous Fives. Graham's not real. He calls me babe and he struts in here like Marlon Brando, and he threw me on the bed!"

I spluttered into my wine.

"Oh you're not serious! He didn't!"

Caro had stopped smiling.

"He did. He picked me up and carried me in his arms to the bedroom and he threw me on the bed - and I thought 'this has never happened to me before'. Why has this never happened to me before? All the men I've had, and not one of them has ever picked me up and thrown me on the bed."

I realised suddenly that Caro must be as drunk as me.

"No one's ever thrown me on the bed either," I said. "What was it like?"

She stared at me.

"Was it good?"

Caro burst out laughing.

"Yes," she said. "Marvellous. It was a marvellous idea. But my mind just wasn't on the job. All I could think was 'Just wait till I tell Chrissy!'"

"So," I said. "Are we going to the party?"

We stood in front of Caro's wide mirror, applying lipstick.

"Are we mad?" I asked her.

"Yes," she said. "Just like old times."

Before Caro got ill, before I had Lizzie, we used to go out every night. I was feeling the same tingling excitement as we shared a cigarette and Caro's mascara. We used to dance a lot. Caro and I would dance to anything, anywhere. Once, in a guest-house bathroom in Brighton, we had danced to the sound of a dripping tap.

Caro started back-combing my hair.

"What happened to Dominic?" I asked her.

"Married," she replied. "In May. I wasn't invited. A pity really, I kind of wanted to stand at the back of the church in a Joan Collins veil and put the shits up him."

"When did you last see him?"

"A couple of months before. He turned up one night all maudlin and ended up staying. Strange."

She stopped combing my hair and looked at me in the mirror.

"He was on a guilt-trip, of course. They make these daft rules for themselves, don't they - so we didn't fuck. But he let me do everything else - like he was trying to pretend to save his virginity for his bride or something."

She sneered.

"And then he fell asleep with me holding him, and every time I tried to let go, to move away, he twitched and jerked and cried like a baby in his sleep, so I held him all night like his bloody mother or something."

It was hard to imagine. Caro hated even to share her bed after sex, let alone be in someone's arms all night.

"Yeah - like his fucking mother and his fucking whore all in one night - that's what they say thought, isn't it - the psychoanalysts - mother, Madonna, whore. Shame I never get to be the Madonna."

She smiled at me in the mirror and patted my hair.

"Ready?"

"I'm glad I'm not a man, Caro," I said. "You observe them like insects, dissect them afterwards."

"Better than eating them," she replied. "Shall we go?"

As we walked round to Graham's flat I remember that I was no longer remembering. Lizzie, Ted, the bills, my dreary job and the hole in my exhaust were suddenly, for the first time in weeks, not forgotten but secondary. I can remember the warm evening breeze blowing up my skirt and the lights in the houses looking exciting, the possibility of other peoples' lives changing my own.

Graham opened the door holding a screwdriver and kissed Caro briefly on the cheek.

"Sound system's just gone off," he told us. "Go in and get yourselves a drink."

I followed Caro into the hot, smoky flat, edging past a group of tartan-shirted men in the hallway and into the crowded kitchen.

"Hello boys," said Caro. "Where's the vodka?"

I saw a pretty blonde girl give her a look of distaste but one of the men passed her a bottle of vodka and a glass.

"And one for my friend," said Caro.

She handed me a huge glass and poured three inches of vodka into it.

"Any mixers?" I asked.

"Lightweight!" she whispered into my ear. "Get it down you!"

"And what's your name?" slurred a man in an orange silk shirt, offering me a cigarette.

"Chrissy."

He had black curly hair which looked permed, and skin that shone sweatily. I took a gulp of vodka and choked.

"Steady on, babe."

He patted my back and let his hand rest over my bra strap. My eyes were watering and I could feel the vodka burning somewhere around the top of my nose.

"Alex," he said, massaging me between the shoulderblades. "Hey, guys, this is Chrissy - Caro's friend."

There was a muffled snigger behind me which reminded me suddenly of Siobhan. I looked round for Caro but she had disappeared. I spotted a carton of orange juice on the table, extracted myself from Alex's arm and topped up my glass. I took a long drink and wiped under my eyes.

"Better now?" said Alex, coming up behind me and kneading me roughly in the back.

"Yes thanks," I said. "You can stop the First Aid now."

I took two steps sideways and ended up sandwiched against the wall. It was so hot I could hardly breath.

"Any friend of Caro's is a friend of mine," said Alex. He lit my cigarette. "Do you live far?"

"Miles away," I said. "Excuse me - I must powder my nose."

I pushed past the group of tartan shirts in the hall, found the bathroom and locked myself in. I looked in the mirror, wishing I had brought some make-up with me, and repaired my smudged eyes with a piece of toilet paper. The naked lightbulb in the white bathroom made me look like a gargoyle. Holding on to the sink I realised that I was much too drunk. The Rolling Stones suddenly blared out of the living-room. Caro would be dancing now, and I thought I would probably ask her for the keys and go back to her flat, to bed. I wondered if she would come with me. We always used to say that the best things about a party happened before and afterwards. Even if I left now, on my own, I knew I would get to live the party again, drinking coffee on Caro's bed tomorrow morning.

I opened the bathroom door and walked straight into Alex.

"Not so fast now, babe," he said, pushing me back in. "I was wondering where you'd got to." His arms came round me and he kicked the door shut behind him, pinning me against the sink.

"Now, babe, what about a little kiss?"

I strained against him but he pushed me backwards so the edge of the sink bit into my back.

"Come on now, I thought you were a friend of Caro's - Graham told me she had a friend for me."

He pushed his knee between my legs and forced me further back. I felt like my back was going to break and all I could think about were insects, pinned like a specimen under the glare of the white light. Not even a butterfly, I was caught like an ugly moth. I screamed.

Graham looked irritated when he opened the door.

"What the hell's going on?" he demanded.

Alex let go of me and turned to the toilet, unzipping his flies.

"She doesn't like me, Graham," he smirked, letting out a noisy stream of urine into the bowl.

Graham ignored me.

"Why don't you look after Caro for me then," he said. "She's not too fussy."

Alex looked over his shoulder.

"Generous of you, mate."

"Got my responsibilities," said Graham. He winked at Alex. "Remember, a dog's not just for Christmas."

He turned to go but Caro was standing at the door.

"Talk of the devil," said Graham, smiling.

Caro's look of contempt was only slightly spoilt by the lipstick on her teeth. One of the tartan shirts stumbled into the bathroom with a bottle of vodka.

"Okay, which one's Caro?" he grinned. "The one that fucks like a rabbit?"

Caro took my arm.

"It seems you've messed up my rental service, Graham, she said. "Let me know when you've sorted out a rota."

We left.

"Bastard!" spat Caro as we walked home.

My head was throbbing. Suddenly she sat down on a low wall and pulled me next to her.

"Let's go back."

"What?"

She nodded at the front door of a terraced house. On the doorstep were four empty milk bottles.

"Through his window."

She skipped up the path and picked up a bottle, then another.

"Better take two - my aim's not as good as it used to be."

Under the streetlight her eyes were shining.

"Wait here for me if you want."

"Caro," I said. "He doesn't even care about you. He'd call the police."

"So?"

"I'm too drunk to come and bail you out."

She looked at me for a long time. Then, very carefully, she placed the bottles on the wall. I'd never seen her do that before. I'd seen her throw bottles through windows, off roof-tops, at cars, at men and at nothing at all, but I'd never seen her change her mind.

"Do you think I'm growing up? she said.

We got up very late the next day.

"I'm giving up men," said Caro over breakfast of bacon sandwiches and paracetemol. "Bad for my health."

She looked different without make-up, tired and pale. Caro looked ill. I wondered how she had looked in hospital and why it was that she always refused visitors when her health failed her. That morning I'd seen her tipping pills from many different bottles, more than I'd ever seen before.

"Tell me about your holiday," I said.

First thing in the morning, with her mask off and her defences destroyed by a hangover, was the nearest you could ever get to Caro.

"Holiday?" she said. "Oh - you mean my convalescence trip?" she laughed. "Enlightening," she said sarcastically. "No, seriously, it was good for me. I was just out of hospital, feeling pretty shit and I needed peace and quiet, with no one fussing over me, asking me how I was, Cornwall seemed like a good option - rolling waves, peaceful sunsets, birds, that sort of thing."

She reached for her cigarettes. I pulled them away and she stuck her tongue out at me and continued.

"Yeah - it was good for me - it made me realise that I'm not normal, never will be, because the sunsets for me weren't peaceful at all. They looked chaotic. At a bird sanctuary I tried to watch the ravens being sinister and the puffins being cute, but I couldn't take my eyes off the people, the couples, identically dressed with their children in sensible shoes and I listened to the fathers' silence and the mothers telling the kids what not to do, and I sneered, Chrissy, I sneered. And I thought to myself, just who do you think you are, to have such contempt for real life.

She touched my arm.

"Do you think I'm sad?" she asked.

"Do you feel sad?"

"No, I mean do you think I'm a sad individual?"

"Of course not," I said. "No one would ever think that - you're too much fun."

Caro nodded slowly.

"Fun," she said. "Fun's allright when you're young. It all changes though, doesn't it? Suddenly. One minute you're fun and the next you're a dog."

"Oh come on!" I said. "You're not going to take any notice of that bastard are you?"

"No," she said. "It's not just that. It's just this morning I woke up with the feeling that the carnival had been rained off."

"Come back with me," I said. "Stay for a few days - Lizzie'll love it."

Caro shook her head.

"Thanks, Chrissy, no."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah - thanks - and Chrissy, thanks for last night."

Lizzie squeezed me so hard I thought I was going to be sick.

"Mummy you look really rough."

She chattered happily all the way home, telling me about Siobhan's dog, Siobhan's brother's bike, the horrid shepherd's pie that Siobhan's mother had cooked, and the noises Siobhan's father made in the bathroom.

"What did you do Mummy?"

"Oh, you know," I said vaguely. "Chatted, ate a lovely meal, drank some wine."

Even though I wasn't lying I felt guilty.

"Where did you go this morning?" I asked her. "Siobhan's mother said you'd gone out."

Lizzie looked out of the car window.

"Oh, just out."

"Out where?"

We stopped at traffic lights and I looked over, but she was staring intently away.

"Look, Mum, they've got rabbits in that pet shop.

I didn't push it. I crossed my fingers and wished for my daughter's secrets always to be happy ones.

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