Swimming Upstream

12

On a Saturday in late October Catherine returned. It was early in the morning when the telephone rang, making me jump.

“It's me,” said Catherine in a strange voice, that didn’t quite sound like hers. “I’ve left him, Lizzie.”

“Where are you?” I asked. “I'll come and get you.”

“Liverpool Street,” she said. “I got the first train. And don't worry, I'll get a cab. It will be quicker. I just wanted to make sure you were home.”

When I opened the door, Catherine looked as though she had shrunk. She was wearing sunglasses, and her dark hair was lank against her head. She stood on the step with two bags. I leaned forward to help her with them but then I noticed that there was something wrong with her face. I reached up and lifted up her sunglasses instead. Catherine flinched. Underneath she had a black eye and a badly swollen cheek.

I breathed in sharply. “Oh Catherine,” was all I could say.

She smiled, tight-lipped, the whites of her eyes glistening. “It's not as bad as it looks,” she said, but when she spoke her voice was all lispy and I saw that one of her front teeth was missing.

Tears sprang to my eyes. “Oh Catherine,” I said again. “You've lost your tooth.”

“No I haven't,” she said. “It's in my pocket.” And then she started to cry as well.

I took her into the kitchen and made coffee. Catherine sat down at the table and I placed a mug in front of her and sat down opposite.

“What happened?” I asked her.

“I don’t know…I just don’t know. Things were all right. For a while, you know. After I came to stay, before.” There was a slight whistle between her teeth as she spoke. “He apologised for what happened when he came here to find me. Said he had just been worried about me. He didn’t know where I was. He got back from a tournament in Manchester to find me gone, he said, and he just flipped out. I mean, I left him a note - it wasn’t like before. I told him in the note that it was just for a few days. But he said that not knowing where I was frightened him. He was scared. I’d never done that before. I said I understood. I forgave him.” She paused. “And that was the end of it. Things were perfect for a while. So perfect.” She sighed and looked out of the window at the fire escape where a blackbird was pecking at some crumbs I’d put out there earlier.

“So, what happened this time?” I prompted her.

“You know, I don’t really know what started it. I quizzed him over something. He was being cagey about some girl he knows. She had phoned him, and I asked him who she was and he got angry. He stormed out. And when he came back I asked him if he had been to see her. He just went mad. I told him it didn’t matter, after all, that I didn’t mind. And then he saw my head shots... publicity shots, you know? Lying on the kitchen table. I’d just had them done at a studio in town. I was thinking I could just start making a few applications, see how it went.”

“Well, that’s great!” I said.

“Well it wasn’t, not really. Because he started insulting me. Picked up my head shots and threw them across the room.” She started to cry, softly again. “He called me names, said I was an ugly, useless whore, that I couldn’t act. Would never make it as an actress. Then the phone rang and I went to answer it. He ran after me to get there first and that’s when it happened. I don’t think he meant to, but he just…punched out….punched me out of the way.”

I took her hand across the table and squeezed it.

“I fell. I hit my cheek on the corner of the table. And that’s when I looked down and there was blood coming out of my mouth. Then I felt something else in my mouth, besides the blood, I mean, and I spat it out and it was my tooth. When he saw what had happened I think he was more shocked than me. And, you know, it was almost funny, ironic, really. Me on my hands and knees, blood dripping from my mouth while I picked up all these smiling photos of me that were lying all over the floor. It was like that wasn’t the real me, smiling away, make up, hair all perfect. It made me feel what he said. I am useless,” Catherine sobbed. “Completely useless.”

“Catherine, you are not!” I shouted. “You’re a brilliant, talented, wonderful person. And I am so angry that he has done this to you.”

Catherine wiped her eyes. “I’m going to have to get a false one, aren’t I?” she said, placing the tooth on the table.

“Catherine… that’s your front tooth. They are really deep rooted. And he’s knocked it out. This is serious,” I said. “You should let me call the police.”

“No. I don’t want that. He knows he’s gone too far. He won’t come after me.”

“He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this,” I persisted.

“No.” Catherine looked up at me. “Please. I don’t want that. He didn’t mean for this to happen...”

“But it did.”

“... And, besides, it was loose, anyway. I think I have that thing… you know, what’s it called? When your teeth are loose…”

I sighed and fastened my hands round my coffee cup. I stared silently at the tooth sitting on the table between us. I hoped that she wasn’t going to try and mitigate this. If she did, there was no hope.

Catherine was wiggling another tooth with her forefinger. “This one feels a bit loose too,” she said.

“Let me see.” She opened her mouth and waggled it back and forwards. “Okay, leave it alone,” I said. “I'll ring my dentist, get an emergency appointment.”

“You know all those dreams I had about my teeth falling out?” said Catherine, trying to make a joke. “Well, I don't think I was worried about money. My teeth are falling out.”

I said, “Yes, well, they didn't fall out by themselves.”

We sat in silence for a minute or two.

“He hasn't always been like this,” she said. “Deep down he hates himself for it, you know.”

“Good,” I said. “I hate him for it too.”

Catherine sighed and peered into her coffee cup.

I reached out and took her wrist. “Stop feeling sorry for him,” I said. “And start feeling sorry for you.”

“I know,” she said. “I know you're right. But, you know what hurts the most? When I remember what it was like in the beginning. I've still got this image in my head of the guy I fell in love with. He would never have done this.” She shook her head, her voice wavering. “It's like he's possessed, or something. I know deep down there's a good decent person inside him. And that’s the person I miss ... that's the person I want back.” She looked up at me, as if it were in my power to do something, to change it all.

I stroked her arm. “Sometimes people change,” I said. “But you have to face it; maybe he's not coming back. Maybe this is how he is. Maybe this is how he always was, but you brought out the best in him just for a little while.”

We drove round Regents Park to Sainsbury's in Camden. It was a crisp cold morning, and the tree-lined pathways along the outer circle were strewn with fallen leaves.

“I suppose it’s a good job I‘ve got some decent head shots,” said Catherine. “That’s one thing. I’m not going to look so great now with a false front tooth. When I smile, it’s going to show. Oh God. What am I going to look like?” She pulled down the passenger sun visor and flicked open the mirror.

“It won’t notice,” I said. “Not when you’re on stage.”

“At auditions it will. Men will notice,” she said. “It will age me.”

“You could get any bloke you want,” I said. “Teeth or no teeth.”

Catherine laughed out loud.

“I’m serious,” I said. “You’re lovely. A false tooth is not going to change that.”

“You know I used to fancy your brother.”

“Pete? Really?”

“Are you kidding? He was gorgeous. All the girls in our year did.”

I laughed. “I didn’t know that.”

“So, do you hear from him. Ever?”

I paused, and looked across at her. All the years with Larsen and I’d never really talked about Pete. Or my dad, come to that. Not to Larsen, not to Marion, Doug, Karen… any of them. Because he was gone and I didn’t want to remember, not then. But now it was all creeping back, everything. And Catherine was back too, a timely witness to the truth of what had happened. She remembered me in the days before I had had a chance to shut it all out. I was grateful that I didn’t have to explain things, to start from the beginning.

“Occasionally. But not often. Not since he left home, the year after he left school. Maybe that’s why I let you go too. I was trying to forget my past, put it all behind me. But I don’t think it works like that.”

“I wondered why you never called. I thought it was because of your new boyfriend, David whatshisname, that you had just got really involved with him and that you just didn’t need me as a friend anymore.”

“I think it was that too, I’m ashamed to say. David was like a… a transitional object. A teddy bear.”

“He looked a bit like a teddy bear,” agreed Catherine.

I smiled. “He came along at the right time in my life. He allowed me to move away, like Pete did, without being too scared. He gave me strength, strength enough to leave him too, in the end, and to go away to university - and that was what I really wanted to do. Study, learn French. And then go abroad. Travel. Only, my first year at college....well, I didn’t expect to feel so lonely. But then along came Larsen. He helped keep it all at bay. But I knew something was missing. It was like a part of myself had been buried. Along with my dad.”

“Your dad was horrible to you,” Catherine said.

“I meant my real dad,” I said. “Not him.”

Catherine nodded. “Of course.”

“Although he was supposed to be a dad too. To me and Pete. That was the deal. But he only ever really wanted my mother. And so he tore my family apart. Destroyed me and Pete. Or tried to.”

Catherine placed her hand over mine. I changed gear, with her still holding on, and we both smiled.

After a couple of minutes Catherine spoke. “I know what you’re thinking. Martin’s not like him, you know.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he loves me. Whatever he’s done, I know that’s true because I feel it. Felt it,” she corrected herself. “Your dad just enjoyed hurting you. He did it for pleasure. That’s different. And I’m sorry.”

I turned off Albany Street and stopped at the traffic lights. As I looked ahead down Parkway I noticed a kid with a guy propped up in a cart and realised that it was the last day of October, Halloween.

“I still have bad dreams,” I confessed. “Nightmares. Really frightening ones. About ghosts. I know they’re to do with what’s happened. The bits that I can’t remember. The bits that I’ve blocked out. It’s like I know that intellectually. But I can’t seem to make the connection emotionally. It feels like the nightmares won’t go away until I do.”

“Maybe that’s what people go to counselling for.”

“Maybe. Maybe that’s what I need to do. But then I think to myself, maybe it wasn’t that bad. Sometimes, I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t,” I admitted.

“Everything’s real,” said Catherine. “If it’s real to you. Your nightmares, the way you feel now, all these years later. They’re proof that it was that bad.”

I looked up at her gratefully and nodded. “I guess that must be true.”

I turned into the supermarket car park. We got out and Catherine pulled on her black furry coat and her sunglasses.

“You know fate is guiding you,” Catherine reassured me, as we entered the store. She grabbed a trolley and I followed her to the fruit section. “It’s all happened the way it was meant to. Everything. There’s a reason why you’re only remembering things now. And there is a reason why I am here right now.”

“So you’re saying everything’s pre-destined, written in the stars?” I asked her.

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. We’re all on one long spiritual journey. Maybe this is my fate… being with Martin, I mean. The Universe is trying to teach me something about how to deal with it.”

“Deal with it?” I frowned. “You’re not going back to him?”

“No,” said Catherine, uncertainly. She picked up a pack of bananas. “Of course not.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. “I’m sorry, Catherine, I just don’t believe that you can see anything positive in what Martin’s done to you. I think you make your own fate.”

Catherine shrugged. “Maybe.”

“What do you mean? Are you trying to tell me that this was all meant to be? You getting your face smashed in?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” Catherine moved off with the trolley ahead of me and I worried that she was hurt by what I’d said.

I ran and caught her up. Neither of us spoke for a minute as we turned a corner and entered the canned goods aisle. Then Catherine stopped the trolley and put her arms around me. “I love you Lizzie,” she said. “I am so glad you came back into my life again.”

“Ditto,” I said. I buried my face in her shoulder. “I really need a friend like you, right now.”

“Me too.”

“And I’m so sorry if I sounded harsh. It’s just because I care.”

“Don’t ever stop speaking the truth. It’s what’s so great about you. You always tell the truth about things. I know you’re on my side. And that’s what matters. And I’ll always be on your side, too, Lizzie. Even when you’re wrong.”

“I’m never wrong,” I smiled. “I thought you knew that by now. So,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m not going back,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll get a job, or maybe even study. And you?”

“I think I need a new job. And maybe a bit of therapy,” I smiled.

“We can help each other,” Catherine said.

“Sure we can.”

“Deal?”

“Deal. So, who’s cooking tonight?” I asked her. “Or will the Universe provide?”

“Sceptic!” said Catherine pushing the trolley at me.

“Hippy!” I laughed over my shoulder, as I sped off down the aisle with Catherine and the trolley in hot pursuit behind me.