The Forever Girl

31



She left the Old Fire Station two days later, in spite of Frieda’s apologies, that came the next day: I always, always, always put my feet in things; I’m really sorry, Clover; you have every right to be cross with me, my God, I know that. She made light of these, and told Frieda how grateful she was for giving her somewhere to stay, but she felt restless, and her restlessness was not helped by the irritation she felt over her older friend’s ways – her over-statements and her extravagant way of speaking. The cupboard itself seemed less attractive now, and following up an advertisement in a give-away newspaper she found a room in a flat that the other tenants were happy to let her take for a few weeks. With James away, she had no real reason to be in Melbourne, but she somehow lacked the will to do the obvious thing and leave for a backpacking trip. She found herself brooding over her evening with James and how, before it had begun to go wrong, it seemed to be going so well. He had looked at her with fondness in his eyes – she was sure of that – and her recollection of what he had said – in so far as it went – was encouraging. If only she had been by herself, without Frieda, and her obvious, ham-fisted hints, she might have been able to convey to him what she had so long wanted to tell him but had found impossible.

There were moments of complete clarity when her situation presented itself to her realistically, just as she knew it to be. At such times – moments that came without warning when she was sitting in a coffee bar, browsing in a bookshop, or simply lying in bed looking at the ceiling – she understood exactly what she was: a young woman of twenty-two, who had been given every advantage, who had everything she needed in a material sense, who had parents who loved and supported her, who had never been obliged to struggle for anything or work against the odds. All of that she knew – and did not take for granted – but she was more than that young woman; she was also somebody who did not have the one thing she wanted in life and now, in such moments, understood and accepted that she might never get it.

At such moments, along with this self-understanding, there came an awareness – and acceptance – of what she had to do next. She had to wait out her remaining few days in Melbourne and then return to Scotland. She had to try to get her old job back – or something like it – and then in due course go off for the rest of her gap year. There was Nepal, and that school somewhere that she would help to build. Then she had to find a proper job, support herself, meet somebody else, and start leading the life that everybody else seemed to be prepared to lead without constantly hankering after something that was not to be. That was the plan, and as she marked time in Melbourne, it even began to have an aura of desirability about it. The rest of my life, she thought. The rest of my life.

But then James came to her in her dreams – not once or even occasionally, but every night, or so it seemed. He was just there – entering a room in which she found herself – a room that was somewhere geographically vague: not quite in Scotland, nor in Cayman, but somewhere in between. One night, in that dream that precedes wakefulness – the one that remains, if only for a few seconds, in memory – she was in Australia, because that was how it felt, and she was with James outside a house with a silver tin roof, and there were swaying eucalyptus trees behind the house, and he gestured to her that they should go in. She took his hand, and he let her place it against her cheek, and she kissed it, and he said: Of course, Clover; of course, and then was suddenly not there any more and she felt a great sense of having seen something that she had never seen before, of having been vouchsafed a vision of sorts, as a religious person might see an angel in the garden, or a child an imaginary friend. The house with its silver roof, of course, was love; she had read enough pop psychology to understand that.

She woke up and stared at the still darkened ceiling, and it seemed to her that James had really been in the room with her and had somehow sanctified it by his presence. Which is what he does, she thought. James makes everything whole for me. She thought that, and allowed the words to echo in her head, luxuriating in them; then she turned and closed her eyes for sleep again, if it would come, so that she might return to the dream in which he had been present. She hugged herself, imagining that her hands were his, but then let go, almost guiltily, struck by sheer embarrassment at the thought that she was one of those people who must rely on the embrace of an imaginary lover. She thought of Padraig, again with guilt, and asked herself whether he had meant anything to her. Had she treated him badly by allowing him to think that she loved him when all along she had only ever loved one person, and it was not him? Or had they both been a temporary solution for each other – an equal bargain between adults, a perfectly adequate way of filling an absence; in her case for the boy she remembered and in his case for the girl he hoped might one day come into his life. She had always known that he had such an idea; she had seen him glance on occasion at some girl and had said to herself, with the satisfaction of one who detects a clue to some mystery or conundrum, So that’s his type; so different from her – self-possessed types, with hair swept back, and the confident poise that went with their education at south of England boarding schools. Their cool Englishness was the polar opposite of Irishness, and yet he obviously liked them. Yes, for all his advice to her not to live in thrall to an impossible love, Padraig had been doing exactly the same thing himself.

The thought occurred to her that perhaps most of us were like that; perhaps it was common to live with an image in our minds of what might be, of what we truly deserved if only the world were differently organised – in a way that gave proper recognition to our claims. So the lowest paid imagined the sumptuous life of the banker, the lame envisaged what it must be like to be athletic, the lonely closed their eyes and saw themselves surrounded by friends. We might all cope with a dissonance between real and unreal simply by making do, simply by admitting to ourselves that dreams are just that – dreams. Perhaps the real danger was to think that the thing you felt you deserved could really be achieved. And yet it was also possible that you could get what you really wanted, if you simply took it when it presented itself. She had come across a poem by Robert Graves that put it rather well; a poem called “A Pinch of Salt” about the bird of love, who came sudden and unbidden, who had to be clutched by the hand in which he landed, clutched and held tight lest he fly away. That had struck her as being true, and yet she had not done what the poet said you should do, and so the warning implicit in the poem, the warning of loss, applied to her.

She got on well with her temporary flatmates whose uncomplicated ambition, as far as she could ascertain, was to have fun. They were two young women and one young man. One of the women was an architectural student, and the other was marking time before going off on a working holiday to London. The young man, Greg, who was loosely connected with one of the women in a way which Clover could not quite understand – he was an ex-boyfriend, she thought – worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency and had ambitions to be a novelist. The social life of these three consisted in endless outings to bars and restaurants, and they were happy for Clover to tag along with them. She did so, and met their friends, who were doing much the same thing as them, and accepted her with the same readiness that they seemed to accept everybody else. “Success,” pronounced one of these friends, “is being able to eat out every night. Every night. 7/7.” She thought he might believe it, even if he said it with a smile.


Greg flirted with her – mildly and with a certain wry humour – and she responded. But when he came to her room one evening after they had been in a bar together and said pointedly how lonely he found Melbourne and the worst thing was loneliness at night, she could not bring herself to an involvement that she knew would be short-lived and mechanical.

“I’m in love with somebody else, Greg,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t like you. I do. It’s just that I’ve loved somebody else for a long time and I can’t …”

“It’s just sex,” he said. “That’s all.”

She laughed at this, partly to defuse a potentially awkward situation, but also partly because what he had said struck her as being so completely wrong – not wrong in any moral sense, but in the sense of being psychologically reductive. Sex was not just sex; it was everything. It was … She faltered. It was James.

“I’m sorry, Greg.”

“No need to apologise. Should we watch a DVD instead?”

“It’s just a movie,” she said. “That’s all.”

He nodded his agreement. “DVDs are better than sex. Everybody knows that. Or at least everybody who’s not getting any sex.”

They watched together, and at the end she took his hand in a friendly, unthreatening way, and patted it. He grinned at her. “I’m glad you said no,” he said. “I’m glad you’re faithful.”

She smiled at his tribute. More faithful than you can imagine, she thought.

“I’m going to miss you when you go next week,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed having you around.”

“Would you mind if I stayed a bit longer?”

She had not thought it through, but suddenly she did not want to go. James was in Melbourne – or would be – and she did not want to leave the place where he was; it was as simple as that.

“No, of course we wouldn’t mind. Aly and Joy will be fine. They like having you here too.”

Now the rest of her inchoate idea came to her. She would change her ticket for a later departure – her particular fare would allow for one change – and she would stay in Australia without telling James. She did not want him to know. She would allow herself a final … she struggled with the period, and decided it would be a month. She would have a final month and then she would begin to do what she knew she should have done all along: she would begin to forget. And in that final month she would allow herself just a few glimpses of him. That was all. She had his address now, and could see him on the street. She could watch him coming out of his flat. It would be saying goodbye from a distance, slowly, as goodbye used to be said when you could actually see people leaving; when they left by trains that moved slowly out of stations, or by ships that were nudged gently away from piers still linked by paper streamers; or when people simply walked away and you could see them going down paths until they were a dot in the distance before being swallowed up by a world that was then so much larger. It was only watching; that was all. It was definitely not stalking. Stalking was something quite different; that was watching somebody else with hostile intent or with an ulterior motive. She had no such thing; she loved James, and that was what made it different; she was not going to make any demands of him. How could she?

James, of course, would think that she had gone on to Singapore to stay with Judy, and it would complicate matters to have him think differently; more than that, it would be impossible to explain what she was doing. She would write to him as if from Singapore, and in this way she could keep some contact; again, there was no harm done in writing to somebody. There was e-mail. You can’t tell where e-mails come from, she thought; in a sense they conferred a limitless freedom, for they came from somewhere that could just as easily be Singapore as it could be Melbourne.


She told Greg. She had not planned to, but at the time it seemed right, and it helped her too. They were in the kitchen together and had shared half a bottle of wine. She felt mellow, and in a mood for confession. The disclosure made her feel less anxious, less burdened.

Once she had stopped speaking he looked at her in astonishment, and she wondered whether she would regret what she had just said. Her story, she knew, must sound absurd to others, and it was absurd. But then we are absurd when you come to think of it, she thought; we are absurd, every one of us, with our hopes and struggles and our tiny human lives that we thought mattered so much but were of such little real consequence. Think of yourself in space, as a tiny dot of consciousness in the Milky Way, one of the teachers at Strathearn had said. It puts you in perspective, doesn’t it?

Greg’s look of astonishment changed to one of puzzlement.

“You actually told him that you had gone to Singapore?”

“Yes. I know it sounds stupid, but I did. I suppose …”

He waited.

“I suppose I wanted him to think that I had a life of my own … I suppose I hoped it would somehow make me more interesting.” She looked ashamed. “Does that sound odd to you?”

He looked as if he was making an effort to understand. “What do you expect me to say? No, it’s quite normal to tell somebody you’re in Singapore when you aren’t? Is that what you expect?”

She did not answer.

“I suppose,” Greg continued, “that people try to impress others in strange ways. Maybe being in Singapore would impress him – I don’t know. But what bothers me is the point of it all. Why? I mean, most people would just tell him the truth, don’t you think? They’d go up to him and say something like I’ve always had the hots for you.”

“Would they?”

He grinned. “I would, if I were a woman and there was this guy I wanted.”

“That’s what Frieda said. That’s what everybody’s said all along.”

He shrugged. “Well, there you are. I think that’s about it.”

She wanted to explain – as much to herself as to him. “But the problem is this: I know how he feels about me. He doesn’t think of me in that way. I’m just a friend to him – somebody he’s known since he was six or whatever. That’s all.” She paused before the hardest admission. “And there’s somebody else. He’s seeing this girl.”

Greg sighed. “Another girl? Oh well, that’s not so good, is it? If somebody has somebody else, there’s not much you can do.”

“He’ll never love me,” Clover said. “I know that. And I know that if I were to go up to him and tell him how I felt that would probably end our friendship. He’d feel sorry for me and … and that’s the last thing I want. I’m a little bit of his life right now, but I’d be less if he decided that he had to keep me … keep me at arm’s length because I had gone and fallen in love with him and spoiled everything.” She stared at Greg, hoping he would understand. “Do you see what I mean? If somebody falls in love with you and you don’t fall in love with them, then they’re just a nuisance. You’re embarrassed. You want them to go away.” She willed him to react. “Do you get what I’m trying to say?”

He tried. “Maybe. A bit.” Now he looked intrigued. “So let me get this straight: you’ve told him that you’ve gone on to Singapore?”

“Yes. I know that sounds …”


“Weird.”

She said nothing, and he continued: “So now he’s back from Adelaide and he thinks you’re in Singapore staying with this girl …”

“Judy.”

He looked at her dubiously. “Who exists?”

“Of course she exists.”

“I just wanted to make sure how big the fantasy is. That’s all.” He looked thoughtful. “It’s peculiar, but you know what? I suppose it’s harmless – and fun too. You’re inventing a life for yourself there?”

She nodded. “It sort of grew. I sent him an e-mail telling him I’d gone and he sent one back. He asked me about Singapore and what it was like and I was so pleased that he had actually answered me that I wrote back.”

“Telling him about it?”

She looked down at the floor. “It was an excuse to be in touch with him. I bought a book – a guide book. And one of those coffee table books with pictures.”

He suddenly gave a whoop of delight. “Oh, Clover, you crack me up! You’re serious fun – in a vaguely worrying sort of way.”

“He wrote back … again.”

“And you continued with the story?”

“Yes.”

“All of it invented? Made up?”

“I told you: Judy exists. And I was going to stay with her for a few days on the way back. So it’s true – in a way. All I’ve done is to bring it forward by a few weeks.”

They had been talking in the kitchen of the flat, and now he got up from his chair and walked over to the window. “You know what? Let’s make one up. Could I try? Get your computer and write it down.”

“Do you …”

“Yes, come on. Clover’s day in Singapore. You go shopping. That’s what people do in Singapore. Big shopping place. And you buy …” He broke off to consider. “You buy a T-shirt. Big deal. But that sounds just right because people do that sort of thing, don’t they? They go out shopping and they come back with a tee-shirt. Yours says … You know what it says? It says Foreign Girl, but you can’t resist it because you think it says it all. You are a foreign girl, and here’s this T-shirt that admits it. It’s a very honest T-shirt.”

He warmed to his theme. “And on the way back to the flat somebody steals your purse. You don’t know how it happened, but it goes. Maybe there was this guy – yes, there was, I remember now – this guy brushes past you and he says how sorry he is but he’s actually taken your purse and he goes off in the crowd.”

“There’s no crime in Singapore. My book said that. Or they have a very low rate of crime.”

He laughed. “That’s what they say. And maybe it’s true. But even if it is, there’s bound to be some crime. So you go to the police station and … and it’s really clean. Clean policemen, clean desks, clean criminals – not very many of them, of course – and this sergeant … It was a sergeant, wasn’t it?”

She entered into the spirit of it. “Yes. He was Sergeant Foo. He had one of those name badges on and it said Sergeant Foo.”

He said, “Oh, I like that guy. I wouldn’t cross him, but I like him. Sergeant Foo takes your statement and then he says, This is very regrettable. Rest assured, lady, that we will catch this … this malefactor. He will be severely punished. And then you went home. And Judy had invited these people over for dinner and she didn’t have any …”

“Arborio rice. She was going to do Italian and she needed some Arborio rice.”

“So you went out to this shop round the corner,” he said. “And there was this whole stack of Arborio rice because there were some Italians living nearby and they were always wanting Arborio rice. All the time.”

They laughed together. “Silly girl,” said Greg, gazing at her fondly.

She avoided his gaze. She did not feel silly. Nothing about her feelings for James was silly.

She had imagined that there would be one or two e-mails from Singapore, but she was to be proved wrong. James replied to each, often almost immediately, and began to include, in his responses, news of his own. There was a different tone to his e-mails now – something that she had not noticed in his earlier messages. He had been almost business-like before and had said little about himself and what he was doing; now he seemed more open, more inclined to chat. He told her about Adelaide and the hotel that he was staying in. “It’s one of those old Australian hotels that were always built on street corners,” he wrote. “There’s a pub in it called the Happy Wallaby – I’m not inventing this; it really is – and this fills with rather rowdy locals each evening and it depresses me, I’m sorry to say, and I wish I were back in Melbourne. I like this country, and I know that I’m half Australian – just like you’re half American, aren’t you? – but there are little corners of it that seem … I don’t know the word. Is it lost? Is that what I’m trying to say? There are places where somehow everything is lost in the vastness of it all. The buildings stand there against a backdrop of emptiness, or mountains, or whatever it is and they seem adrift. It’s like being on the sea. And if there’s a wind, you find yourself thinking, Where’s this wind come from?”

She wrote back to him: “I know what you mean about Australia. I liked it too – not that I saw very much of it. And I liked the people – I liked them a lot, but you could very easily feel lonely there, couldn’t you?”

‘Yes,” he replied. “You could feel lonely.”

She stopped saying very much about Singapore. This was not because she had no ideas as to what she was doing in her Singaporean life – she and Greg spent hours imagining it, and his suggestions, although occasionally preposterous, would have made up a quite credible daily life – but she felt increasingly guilty about the fact that what she was saying amounted to lies. She was deceiving James, and she did not like doing it. And yet she had started it; the whole conception had been hers.

In due course she would tell him, she decided. She would make light of it – as if it were a long-drawn-out joke, and as harmless as a joke might be. He might be surprised, but surely he would not be hurt by what she would portray as innocent imaginative play.

“I’m going back early,” he wrote. “The audit took less time than they thought we’d need and so it’s back to Melbourne for all three of us. But not for long. Listen to this: Singapore. The firm has a big client there – it’s an Australian engineering firm that does a lot of South-East Asian work and they’re looked after by our office in Singapore. But one of their staff is in London for a month and another has been poached by an American firm. So … Singapore for two of us from the Melbourne office – for five weeks – quite a big deal for a first year trainee but that’s par for the course with this firm, apparently. Right, then … dinner next week? I love Chinese food and somebody told me you can get it cooked on wood fires in Singapore. And there are these big food markets where you can eat – have you been? I leave here on Wednesday, which gives me three days to get ready after I get back to Melbourne. Tuesday or Wednesday suit you?”

She read the message twice, and then sat still, appalled by what she had done. She had known that there was a risk that her deception would be exposed, but she had not imagined that it would happen so soon. She went to Greg, who read the e-mail and then raised an eyebrow. “Exposure, Clove. It happens. So what are you going to do? Come clean?”


She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I’m going to tell him eventually. But I can’t do it now. I can’t face it.”

He was silent.

She reached her decision. “I’m going there. As soon as I can.”

“Singapore?”

“Yes. I was going to see Judy anyway.”

He made a face. “Money?”

She explained about her father’s gift. “I can afford it. I’ll have to pay to change the ticket again, but I can do that.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe this, you know. You’ll do anything it seems for this guy – anything. Except tell him the truth about how you feel.”

“How can I?”

“Open your mouth and speak. It’s that simple. Give him a call. Ask him. Say: Are you still going out with that other girl? And if he says yes, then end of story. If he says no, then you could say what everybody’s been telling you to say. Get it sorted out one way or another.”

“No.”

“That’s all you can say? No?”

“Yes. I mean, no.”

“I give up,” he said harshly, and then, almost immediately, relented. “Sorry. I wish I could be positive, but how can you be positive about something that has disaster written all over it?” He repeated the word to underline his warning. “Disaster.”