My Best Friend's Girl (12 page)

chapter 14

M
y walls. My beautiful white-with-a-hint-of-cream walls.

That’s what hurt the most about all this. The walls. Losing the sitting room wasn’t so bad—it wasn’t as if I had built the room from scratch. It was the loss of the walls I’d spent hours and hours painting that hurt. I had made the bricks and mortar mine when I painted the walls. And now it was going to go.

Tegan stood with a paintbrush in one hand, a pot of red paint at her feet and a mix of happiness, excitement and apprehension on her little face. I’d tied a blue and white scarf around her head to protect her hair. She’d been worried about wearing her pink long-sleeved top and blue jeans for the job, but I’d reassured her that this was what adults wore to decorate. And just to prove my point, I’d dusted off my old decorating gear—dark blue combats, a pink T-shirt, and a yellow-and-white scarf to tie around my head.

“Am I really ’lowed to paint on the wall?” Tegan checked again. She’d asked me that five times in the past minute.

“Yep, any color you want.”

I’d taken us to a DIY store yesterday and we’d bought a host of stencils—animals, stars, moons, suns, dolphins, fish—and paints in red, blue, brown, yellow and green. It was marginally cheaper than painting the whole room again. Not necessarily financially cheaper, simply less costly in terms of my time and sanity.

“Can I paint a fish there?”

She pointed to the space under the window. I’d had to lie on the floor to get right under the windowsill with the cream paint. Now it was going to be graced with a fish.

“What color do you want to paint it?”

She looked down at the open pot of red paint that was releasing fumes into the hot room. The windows were wide open but the cream fabric blinds that hung at them didn’t move because there wasn’t even the slightest stir of wind in the air. “Red.”

“Go on, then,” I said. I picked up the fish stencil, attached it to the wall with tape, then stepped aside for the artist to do her work.

Tegan took one more look at me to confirm that it was all right to do this, and made a stroke in the middle of the stencil. Each of her strokes were short and stubby, nervous and hesitant, carefully placed so she wouldn’t go outside the edges.

The fish looked bereft on the wall, one lone splash of color in the wide ocean of cream-white.

“OK, who’s next?” I asked.

“An elephant,” Tegan decided.

“What color?”

“Blue?” she asked.

“If the lady wants blue, the lady can have blue.” I got down on my knees, picked up the screwdriver, inserted it under the lid of the blue pot of paint and prised it open.

As Tegan colored in the elephant stencil, I went to the stereo and flicked on the radio. I found an easy-listening station, one that would fit with the sun streaming in through the open windows and the warm, fragrant air. I’d forgotten how different the atmosphere was up here. London, much as I loved it, much as it was my “home,” was saturated with urgency. The frantic pace of being a capital city seemed to stain the air. Leeds was a city but without the frenzy.

The pling, pling, pling of Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” started and I flicked the volume up a few notches so it filled the flat. I’d moved all the furniture into the middle of the room when Tegan had been asleep in my room last night. I’d dismantled my desk and put my iMac on the floor in the corner of the bedroom. Old white and cream sheets covered the furniture; newspaper protected the floor. I glanced over at Tegan, whose little body was hunched forward, as she carefully painted her elephant. I could feel rather than see the concentration on her face. I could imagine her little tongue poking out from between her pink lips, her brow furrowed, her eyes crunched up as she made blue marks on the wall. I smiled and cranked up the stereo another notch or two.

It took most of the afternoon to encircle the room with animals. Tegan was very particular and wanted to make sure each animal was equally spaced and all the same height from the ground, meaning I had to get the ruler out and ensure each animal was the same distance from its neighbor. Personally, I would have lived with any imperfections but not Tegan. She was precise in almost everything: at night, she had to sleep on the same side of the bed; she ate her dinner from the center of the plate outward; when she took her shoes off when she came in, she placed them neatly at the same place by the kitchen door every time. I just kicked mine off and pushed them aside so I wouldn’t trip over them.

We stood beside the covered furniture and looked at our handiwork. Tegan’s ark of multicolored animals. She was good at painting, it had to be said. Probably got it from her mother. But then her father had been good at art too. Nate was always scribbling things on pieces of paper. We’d sit in pubs and at the end of the evening, we’d find he’d sketched someone across the bar on a beer mat. At home, while we were watching TV, there’d be the scratch, scratch of his pen on paper as he doodled. It was his way of burning off nervous energy. Some people smoked, others bit their nails, Nate sketched.

Since I’d seen him at the funeral, Nate had been inhabiting my mind. Any space that wasn’t occupied with thoughts of Tegan, Adele and how I would cope, was filled with Nate. I hadn’t thought of him much since the day I collected my belongings from London; there was a part of my mind I’d consigned him to, a place I could ignore, but now he’d breached that, was reaching into every free recess. He’d called me. Had discovered that Adele was gone and had called me. Was he hoping for a reconciliation? Or to use this as a reason to start talking to me again? Or was it simply to find out if I was going to the funeral?

“Like a Virgin” came on the radio and shoved Nate aside, replaced the image of him in black with the image of Madonna in white, gyrating in a highly non-virginal way as she did in the video. I cranked up the stereo until Madge’s voice was on the verge of distorting with the volume. I glanced down at Tegan, who was staring up at me with a confused expression on her face.
Is this suitable listening for a five-year-old?
I wondered.
Ah well, too late, she’s heard most of it.
I didn’t understand the words when I’d first heard it all those years ago and I was a teenager.

I held my hand out to her and she slipped her blue-, red-, green- and yellow-splattered fingers into my palm. I started rocking my hips, swaying my head in time to the music. I moved her hand with mine and she followed suit, dancing and moving in the room of heat and paint fumes. I lifted her hand up in the air and let her twirl a couple of times, then I grabbed both her small hands and rocked her arms. Unexpectedly, she threw her head back and laughed, a giggle that was partway between a belly rumble and a gurgle. It lifted my heart. I pulled her into my arms and started jiggling around the room with her. She was light in my arms, light but so much more substantial than she had been.

“Like a Virgin” segued into Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” and I put Tegan down as we both simultaneously threw our arms in the air and started moving our bodies side to side. Tegan even knew some of the words and sang along to the chorus.

“This is my mummy’s favorite song,” Tegan laughed. And then stopped as she realized what she’d done: she’d brought up her mother when neither of us had mentioned her in the past week.

I stopped dancing too, my heart drumming hard in my chest. Cyndi carried on singing her heart out but Tegan and I stood staring at each other, every word of the song like shards of glass scraping across our skins.

Moving stiffly, I went to the stereo and flicked it off. The silence was sudden and brutal. I didn’t know how to handle moments of sudden remembering like this one. I’d done the best I could to read up on how to help a child deal with death but reading was no substitute for experience, of which I had none. And none of the articles had explained what to do in moments of sudden remembering. When you were having fun even though your mother, your best friend, was gone. None of them explained how to handle the twin emotions of guilt and resentment. Guilt at forgetting for a minute that this horrible thing had happened and finding a droplet of enjoyment; and resentment aimed at your loved one for leaving you. And then more guilt for feeling that resentment. And then more resentment for that guilt. It was a spiral that I stayed on the outside of, thinking around it like you would walk around a puddle in the road—you knew it was there but you were going nowhere near it. Thinking around these feelings meant, though, that I didn’t have the vocabulary to speak to Tegan about it. I didn’t know how to explain to her that it was normal to feel this; that she was allowed to be angry and upset and confused and hurt. And that despite the pain that had surrounded us, sadness wasn’t mandatory twenty-four hours a day, laughing was permissible.

I pointed to the expanse of cream-white on the chimney breast. “OK, so what are we going to do there?” I asked, having fortified my voice with false courage. Neither of us had started to cry so we had to press on, wait until we were ready to let some of our feelings out.

Tegan shrugged her bony shoulders, crossed one leg over the other and sat down on the floor beside the paint pots.

“Ah, come on, you can do better than that,” I coaxed, sitting down beside her. How was I supposed to explain to Tegan that it was all right to be happy sometimes when I was struggling with that concept myself?

Her big royal blue eyes glistened in her pale, heart-shaped face as she stared up at me. The corners of the mouth that had been pointed upward in a grin seconds ago were turned down.

“How about a sun?” I said. Her eyes stared back at me.

“A big yellow sun. And maybe a house?” She shook her head. “OK, a big yellow sun. How about some hills? Some green hills.” She nodded. “OK, a big yellow sun, some green hills. Anything else?”

“A tree,” she whispered.

“OK, trees. I think I can paint trees. What else?”

“Chocolate flowers.”

“OK. So we’ve got a big yellow sun, green hills, trees and chocolate. Do you mind if I make the flowers into those red and white swirly sweets instead? We won’t have enough brown paint after the trees.”

She stared at the wall for a few seconds, then returned her gaze to me as she nodded in agreement.

“I think your mummy would have liked the sun and the hills and the trees and the flowers that are really sweets,” I said. We couldn’t just pretend Del didn’t exist. We had to find a way to talk about her, no matter how painful. “She’d be able to paint them a lot better than me,” I added.

Tegan’s damp, inquisitive eyes stared at me for a long, quiet minute. “My mummy drawed lots of pictures,” she eventually said.

“Yup, she certainly did. And she was very good. Come on, then,” I said, getting to my feet. “Once we’ve done this, we’ll go buy you a bed.”

“Is this really my room?” Tegan asked from the doorway. I stood behind her, watching as she slowly turned her head, careful not to miss anything. It’d taken us another week to get ourselves sorted out, for Tegan’s single bed to be delivered, for Betsy, the woman I shared an office with at work, to send her brother, Brad—a sulky fifteen-year-old who for some reason did whatever Betsy ordered him to do—to come around and help me shift furniture. The cream sofa was moved into the dining end of the kitchen, and sat with its back beside the doorway. My beanbag was placed in the corner at the bottom of the alcove, where I’d built in bookshelves. Brad helped me move the twenty-eight-inch TV into the kitchen too. It sat opposite the sofa. Betsy was the grateful recipient of the large glass table that had sat at the dining end of the kitchen. It’d cost a fortune, even with the staff discount I got from Angeles. There was no way I could keep it; instead I got a small, wood table that separated the living area from the kitchen.

The computer, printer and other paraphernalia had been relegated to my bedroom. The real problem had been my books. I had over five hundred of them on three sets of white shelves in the living room. It’d taken me nearly eighteen months to get around to buying those shelves and putting my books on display. I was loath to give it all up so quickly. In the end, what didn’t fit onto the bookshelves in the alcove was piled up on the floor beside the TV, a leaning tower of books. On the other side of the TV, my pile of videos and DVDs. The only other storage I had were five cupboards that were flush to the wall in my corridor, but half of them were now filled with Adele’s boxes. The small TV that had been in the kitchen was now in Tegan’s room.

The room she stood staring at. Her bed was made up with a single duvet that had a light blue sky and clouds on one side and came with matching pillows. Beside the window stood a light wood wardrobe. Under the window sat a matching drawer unit for her undies, socks and foldable clothes. I’d used carpet tape to fix two large red and white rugs—one under the TV stand and another under the bed—to the laminate floor.

On the other side of the fireplace sat a large toy box. She also had a shelf for the books I knew she loved to read and have read to her. To finish off I’d spelled out “Tegan” on the door in brightly colored letters.

“Yup, it’s all yours. You can do anything you like in here,” I replied, deciding that the “within reason” was implicit.

“Really and truly?” She still hadn’t moved from the doorway.

“Absolutely. Are you going to go in?”

She took tentative steps into the room, then sat on the bed.

“Now I thought you might like to try sleeping in your own bed tonight, but if you want to still sleep in with me, that’s fine too.”

“I like this bed,” she proclaimed. “It’s big enough for Tegan.”

“Cool. Now, I’m going to make a cup of something to drink. Why don’t you try out your television and video?”

Tegan nodded eagerly and jumped off the bed then scuttled across the room to the small television that sat with a new video player I’d shelled out for.

Shelling out was something I’d been doing a lot of recently and it was scaring me how expensive everything was. I hadn’t been the most sensible person when it came to money. I paid my mortgage on time, I mostly paid my bills on time, and I spent far too much on going out. But, despite my job title, I wasn’t raking it in. I’d always lived with an overdraft and a credit card. (Nate had been the sensible one when it came to money, but few of his frugal ways had rubbed off on me.) Now that I had two mouths to feed, clothe and take care of, I was struggling.