I think of Samuel Johnson: ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ I am tired actually. Very bloody tired.
‘It was paying the rent very nicely, thank you.’ Marlena is tart. ‘It was just my conscience I couldn’t live with any more. Look, why are you really here, Jeanie? Do you need help again?’
‘No.’ I push my egg around. ‘I just want your solidarity.’
‘Really?’
Ever the cynic, my little sister. I suppose she has plenty of reason to be. And who am I kidding? Not her apparently. We both know what Marlena did for me last year when all the crap hit the papers. ‘Well there might be one thing actually…’
‘I knew it!’ she crows. She hates being wrong. ‘So. Spill.’
‘It’s just… Someone sent Matt an email – and they sent one to the college that offered me a job too. With a link to – the thing.’
‘Fucking hell, Jeanie,’ she exhales loudly. ‘I warned you. I knew that would happen if you didn’t tell him yourself.’
‘Please, Marlena. No told-you-sos…’
She pulls a face. ‘Okay. So?’
‘Some idiot sent him a link to the first article about a week ago. The one from the Sun on Sunday.’
‘And the job? You hadn’t told them either? That you were cleared?’
‘What do you reckon?’ I look at her squarely. ‘And now I’m more concerned with who’s going around talking about me and saying they’re a “well-wisher”.’
‘Have you got the email?’
I pass her over the printed email. She reads it.
‘And I’m guessing Matthew didn’t recognise the sender either?’
‘He says not. But actually…’ I feel uncomfortable again.
‘Actually what?’
‘He didn’t want to say who’d sent it. I had to – look.’ I feel overwhelmed and really, really sad. I haven’t even begun on my other worries. ‘But he said he doesn’t know them.’
‘It’s going to be all right, Jean.’ Marlena pats my hand again – like when we were kids. ‘I know it is.’
‘Is it?’
‘Course. And have you got any idea at all who might’ve sent it?’
‘I suppose I thought it could be – you know, Otto’s mum.’
‘Hmmm.’ She stands suddenly, sending the chair skidding across the tiles. ‘Can we go outside? I’m dying for a fag.’
‘ “Dying” being the operative word…’
‘Our vices make life’s crap bearable.’
I can’t really argue with that.
Outside we huddle together under the awning. It is drizzling and grey – and generally depressing.
‘Have you contacted her?’ She lights up. ‘Old Ma Lundy?’
‘No way.’ I shake my head. ‘I don’t ever want to see that woman again.’
That woman had been my biggest detractor for six months; she’d made it her own personal quest to take me down, even when both her own son and I had denied every charge; despite the fact there had been no evidence, nothing really to say we were guilty –nothing apart from that bloody, bloody photograph.
Marlena helped me then.
I knew for a fact the Lundys weren’t good parents, and the only reason Otto and I had become close was because he was so overlooked at home.
I hesitate to say he was neglected, but it wasn’t far off.
Marlena checked the parents out in the way that only a ruthless journalist would know how to do. Their own past wasn’t pretty, and when they were threatened with disclosure about some of their own misdemeanours, they slunk off, tails between their legs – but it wasn’t long before they threatened pressing their own charges, civilly. Thank God that never happened.
‘I’ll check it out,’ Marlena offers now.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I’d appreciate it.’ I watch her blow her smoke up into the city sky, and I feel like I can’t catch a breath myself.
I have this feeling, all the time, that I’m paying for my brief happiness with Matthew, that I don’t deserve it and never did – and so it’s over, and I must pay the debt now.
‘And if it’s not her?’ I say. ‘What then?’
‘You’ve really got no other ideas who it could be?’
Of course I do. But I shrug, non-committal. ‘Someone who doesn’t like me.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Marlena promises, flinging her cigarette into the gutter. Then, weirdly, she kisses me. She smells of fags and Chanel. ‘Nice to see you, J, but I need to crack on.’
I sink my face into her shoulder till she struggles, muttering, ‘Yeah, all right. Don’t go all Jean Harlow on me.’
Jeanie with an ‘ie’ for the original blonde bombshell Jean Harlow: dead with suspect kidney failure by the age of twenty-six.
Marlena for Dietrich, only with an ‘a’ instead of the ‘e’ – because our mother was half-cut the day she registered her newborn.
Our names: constant reminders of our failure to attain their dizzy heights.
‘I’m not,’ I mumble – but I really don’t want to let go of Marlena, and I don’t want to go home to that big, empty house where things keep going wrong.
Where the husband I live with seems ever more like a stranger.