The trumpet was still playing, a slow, sad ribbon of sound. The man at the piano appeared almost asleep but I knew he was just lost in the music. ‘Your mum sounds lovely, Julian.’ I tried not to be jealous.
He grinned. ‘She is. The very, very best.’
‘Well, mine isn’t. And I’m not being a brat. I’d love to think,
Oooh, Mum didn’t know what to do with Fiona so she sent her to ballet school
… But that’s not what happened. Apart from anything else, Mum hated Fiona dancing. She hated anything that drew attention to us. It makes no sense that she’d choose to let Fi train as a performer. I mean, it would have felt like Mandy all over again, wanting to be an actress!’
Deep anger started to pulse up again, ringed with
bitterness and helplessness. It crossed my mind that Julian might think I was mad but I was too worked up to care. I’d never had this conversation with anyone and it felt strangely cleansing. It had been inside me for years, spinning round and round at a low whine.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘And remember, I’m on your side, OK?’
I smiled briefly.
‘Well, on top of that, Mum had spent years trying to stop me and Fi getting too close. Telling me I should make “some better friends”. Julian, there’s no two ways about it. She basically didn’t want me being influenced by Fiona. Turning out like her. So when she realized she couldn’t keep us apart, she sent Fi away.’
A single tear squeezed out of my eye and I brushed at it furiously with my sleeve.
Damn my family. Damn their cruel, conservative little lives. Never hugging Fiona. Never popping her on their knees and checking how she was doing. Getting rid of her at the first opportunity they had, acting like martyrs when Fiona had got a full grant and they hadn’t had to pay a penny
.
Fury ebbed and flowed, more tears tracked down my cheeks, and I didn’t try to stop them.
‘It’s OK,’ Julian murmured, when I eventually gestured apologetically at my face, the tears and general air of madness. ‘It’s completely OK. Here.’ He passed me some more cake napkins and I felt gratitude that he hadn’t begged me not to cry, tried to stop me feeling it all. He’d just watched the whole thing with a sympathy that seeped right through to my bones. A deep, understanding kindness that was new to me.
The strangest thing, I thought – as I discharged tears and snot into a napkin – was that I hadn’t known quite
how angry I was with Mum and Dad. How thick and intractable the rage would feel if I ever let it out in the open.
Julian is unique
, my head told me dazedly.
I’m
me
with him. The real me
.
I’d never known there was a real me.
Julian stuck out a finger and mopped up a final mascara trail from near my mouth. ‘Here lieth anger,’ he remarked, looking at the black mess on his finger. ‘Anger well spent.’
The trumpet wound down and lazy applause spattered around the bar. I looked at Julian’s smooth, brown hand with my tears on it and smiled. His hands, I saw, were covered with reminders. And also ‘Sally’ with a big cheesy heart round it.
‘Finally, you noticed.’ He grinned. ‘I was thinking of getting a tattoo. Maybe with my name too, and a small Cupid hanging around.’
I laughed, and realized how tired I was.
‘I didn’t mean to interfere, and I’m sorry if I did,’ he said. ‘Families are difficult. Really difficult. I’m honoured you told me all that stuff and I’m not surprised you feel so responsible for Fiona. Reset?’
He wiped my mascara off his index finger and held it out towards me.
I pressed mine against it. ‘Reset.’
Later still, there was just a piano, a bass and a gentle drum playing. An ancient couple danced, lost in a world I’d never see. I felt lighter for having told Julian everything and I really wanted to stay there with him, in that softly lit, lovely place, but I was drunk with exhaustion. We were a long way from Brooklyn.
Sensing I was dropping, Julian stood up. ‘We have to dance before we go home.’ He smiled, holding out his hand. ‘Then you can tell everyone you’re proper ace cos you danced in Paris Blues.’
‘ “Proper ace”.’ I grinned, as he pulled me into his shirt. Julian Bell was the strangest and best mixture of people I’d ever met. A farm boy, a dignified widower, a forgetful, scruffy moron, a sparky New York wit, and the warmest, kindest Anglo-American
hottie
on earth. And he wanted to dance with me. He’d insisted on dancing with me.
I didn’t really know how to dance to slow music, like some smudged, sexy woman in an American film. But, as with so many other things, I found myself able to do it with Julian Bell.
‘There’s something about you that I love,’ he muttered, into the side of my head. ‘And I think that thing is you. Can I see you tomorrow? And the next day? And the day after that?’
I grinned ecstatically into his shoulder. ‘Say that again,’ I whispered.
‘Oh, I just sort of mentioned this strange suspicion that I’ve fallen in love with you,’ he said. ‘Not so conventional, if you look at our twenty-four-hour history, but … well, there it is.’
I started to reply but he put a finger on my lips and shook his head, smiling.
He already knew.
Perhaps unrealistically, I had rather hoped for an apology from Fiona the day after her party. She knew I’d spent hours organizing it and – more to the point – she must have known how devastating it would be for me to catch her taking cocaine while chatting merrily away with Julian.
I received no apology. The next day I didn’t need to be at the Met until four o’clock, but by the time I left the apartment she was still asleep. I saw Raúl in the stairwell as I left the building, so I knew she was in there on her own.
‘I’m sorry I left so abruptly last night,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Hey, no worries, man. You were upset.’
‘I heard she never actually came to her own party.’
Raúl shook his head. ‘Nope. But it was a blinder. We went on until seven a.m.’
‘How come? Were there drugs?’ I spoke far too quickly.
‘Um – I dunno. If there were, I wasn’t on them,’ he said defensively.
‘No, no, sorry, Raúl. That’s not what I was thinking. I was actually worried about –’ I stopped.
‘Fiona,’ he finished for me. Her name hung heavily in the air between us.
‘Yes. Are you two OK?’ I sounded desperate.
Raúl’s face clouded. ‘I hope so,’ he said sadly.
It was a terrible blow – yet deadeningly predictable – when I got a call from Barry later on to say that Raúl had finished with Fiona. Barry didn’t know the precise circumstances but he reported that there had been a lot of screaming and crying, and that after Raúl had gone, Fiona had thrown an ashtray through the window so we now had the challenging task of trying to find a warehouse window pane.
I thought of what Julian had said last night, about how mad Raúl was about Fiona but that he couldn’t be anywhere near people who took drugs. And I felt a chill.
When I got back from work that night, close to midnight, the apartment reeked of bad humour. Fiona barely acknowledged me but sat hunched on the sofa with a huge measure of Scotch, a bag of ice melting slowly beside her. Her pupils were massive, she was talking complete shit to Barry and her hands were shaking. I felt sick. When I tried to talk to her she stalked off to her bedroom with the Scotch, slamming the door behind her.
Julian arrived shortly after with a box of Yorkshire Tea. And a sachet of Bird’s custard. ‘I’m too old to crack open the booze after midnight,’ he explained cheerfully. ‘And I
miss
this shit! I get it imported! Let’s make some custard and drink tea!’
I was so relieved to see things like custard and tea, rather than Scotch – and Julian’s smiley face, rather than Fiona’s black scowl – that I burst into spontaneous
honking. It was something between laughter and tears and it made Julian hug me and honk a bit himself, although his honking was pure laughter. ‘You sound like Pam the dog when she’s having a bad dream,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’ He pulled back. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘You’re not. Well, I’m going to make you some custard. We’ll sink a couple of bowls of that and then, if you want to, we can talk about Fiona, and if you don’t, we’ll just eat some more custard.’
Julian held me all night and didn’t make even a cursory attempt to have sex with me. It was our first night together and it was very confusing. I felt madly, glowingly happy but being madly, glowingly happy felt a bit wrong, given the hole in our warehouse window that said,
She is completely out of control
.
But he was so warm. He told me what he loved about England, and it was all the same stuff that I loved about England but had never noticed before. He didn’t snore. He felt strong, not in a pumped-up gym sort of way but in a gentle, dormant-strength-that-could-lift-a-car-off-you-if-you-got-run-over sort of way. And he smelt of soap and skin and good things. When he stripped down to his boxers I noticed that he’d attempted to darn a hole in them and that he had a Muppets plaster on his toe from where he ‘walked into a trash can’ (trash can! He said ‘trash can’!) and as I stared at him, that stunning, warm, forgetful man, who needed a haircut and darned holes in his pants and walked into things, I felt positively intoxicated.
He is an actual miracle
, I thought, as I drifted off to sleep.
He even likes my bottom!
I hated my bottom with a crabby
little passion but tonight Julian had told me it was ‘unparalleled’. He hadn’t stopped cupping it wondrously and exclaiming things like ‘I have been waiting for this bottom all my life!’
Maybe I’ve been wrong about my bum
, I thought drowsily.
Maybe I’ve been wrong about a lot of things to do with me
.
Over the following days I fell even more head-over-heels in love with Julian Bell, while things with Fiona went from bad to worse. She and Barry were due to start rehearsals for
Swan Lake
that week but had said they’d secured another week off so that they could stay in New York.
Three days after Fiona and Raúl’s break-up we discovered that Fiona had been lying. Unlike Barry, she had failed even to email the Royal Ballet, let alone call them. They phoned her repeatedly but she ignored her mobile and, when they finally called me, they told me they had no choice but to suspend her immediately. She would face disciplinary action on her return to London.
When I relayed this to Fiona she went on a twenty-four-hour bender.
‘OMG! I shagged a guy
waaaay
better looking than Raúl,’ she bragged, when she got back the following night. She made a noise that sounded like a distant cousin of a laugh, and clacked around the apartment on her stilettos.
‘
Favoloso
,’ Bea purred. ‘Get back on that horse, darling.’
I didn’t even bother to try to silence Bea, whose approach to sex and relationships was beyond my
comprehension. I just watched my precious little cousin marching around in last night’s clothes, tossing out sordid details of her sordid night like peanut shells. She’d texted me to say she was staying out but, of course, I hadn’t slept. Julian had stayed up with me, telling me funny stories about his Devon childhood that I’d barely been able to hear.
Dancers shouldn’t wear stilettos
, I thought numbly.
Dancers shouldn’t wear stilettos. Dancers
…
Fiona looked thinner than ever, and was a sniffy, flushed mess. She carried on bragging, ignoring the man I’d paid to come and fix the window, and between anecdotes she gulped hungrily at a large bottle of Diet Coke.
I felt ill.
What should I do? What should I say?
She cut through my panicked thoughts. ‘Yeah, Sal, you know what? Fuck my job. They’re never going to promote me, they don’t respect me, they think I’m shit so, yeah, fuck them. I’m thinking of staying in New York. There’s loads of really cool shit going on here and Julian was telling me about some guys he knows who run an experimental dance company and he said his flatmate might be moving out soon so I could rent her room maybe and, yeah, I might do that because I really think that the Royal Ballet was holding me back. I mean, they’re great and everything but they deliberately put up a fat picture of me on their website –’
‘Of course they didn’t!’ I interrupted uselessly. ‘They’d never do something like that! It’s
you
who thinks you’re fat!’
Fiona shook her head dismissively. ‘Er, whatever, Sal.’ She raised her eyebrows at Bea, muttering, ‘Fuck’s sake!’
I hated myself for not knowing how to handle Fiona. What had happened to me? All I could think was how hurtful it was that Julian had almost offered her a spare room and not told me. I was pathetic.
I cleared my throat and spoke, my voice small and tremulous: ‘Fiona, can we talk?’
She stopped clacking around and stared at me warily. ‘Yes?’
‘Alone?’
She crossed her arms. ‘What have you possibly got to say to me that you can’t say to Bea? We’re all friends.’
I stared at my lap, all searing cheeks and racing pulse. I loathed myself for being so weak when she needed me to be strong.
‘Freckle, I’m worried about you. I’m worried you’re taking drugs …’ I trailed off, frozen.
She threw her hands into the air and clicked off to the kitchen. ‘
Jeeee
sus!’ she muttered, as if I were a meddling old lady.
Bea turned in her chair. ‘Sally?’ she said. ‘You think she is on drugs? What drugs?’
‘Cocaine,’ I whispered.
‘FUCKING BULLSHIT!’ Fiona yelled from the kitchen. ‘You just caught me having a cheeky line at the party! What do you think I am, some sort of
druggy
? Oh, my God! You’ve lost it!’
Bea was watching me curiously. ‘Why do you think she is on drugs, darling?’ she asked.
‘Because I saw her taking coke at the party. And …’ I dropped my voice even lower ‘… Julian’s convinced of it.’
Bea stared at me thoughtfully, then smiled. ‘Fiona is a
party girl, we all know this,’ she said decisively. ‘She is not on drugs, Sally. Of course she is not. She would have gone mad!’
I gestured frantically in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Oh,
preziosa
,’ Bea smiled, ‘Fiona has always been like this. She is probably just sad that you have met this gorgeous man who might take you away from her.’
I sat back, slightly shocked. That hadn’t occurred to me.
‘Why is Julian so sure?’ Bea asked gently. ‘Where is he getting his information from?’
The question hung in the air, like stale smoke.
Fiona stormed back in from the kitchen with several large packs of Oreos. ‘I’m going to eat all of them,’ she announced, and stomped off to her room.
I remained frozen. Useless. Failing her yet again.
‘I hear nothing,’ said the window-repair man timidly. ‘Ees OK. I hear nothing.’
The next day Fiona stopped eating but started a campaign to feed and fatten us, which was what happened when she was at her worst. Whenever she wasn’t in black fury in her room she would cook huge lunches and dinners for us all, which she would watch us eat, claiming to be ‘full’.
As I picked miserably at her giant home-made burritos one afternoon, Barry remarked – somewhat unhelpfully, I thought – ‘Fiona, you’re bein’ a soddin’ lunatic, my petal. Any chance you could stop force-feedin’ us? If we’re not careful I’m going to end up getting overly comfy like Chicken here.’ He patted my stomach, then moved away in case I punched him.
Fiona usually allowed Barry to mock her. But not today.
She stormed off to the kitchen, muttering about us being ungrateful twats and, of course, I followed her because I didn’t know what else to do.
She was pacing back and forth, looking wild and slightly feral. ‘I ate loads of burritos while I was preparing them,’ she said, her eyes darting around fearfully. ‘And now I can’t get it all up. I’ve got to get it out of me, Sally. You have to help me.’
I stared at her, aghast. ‘You’ve made yourself sick?’
‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘And save me the lecture. I’ll go and see the doctor and tell him I’m insane, if you want, but for now
this is an emergency
. I’ve got to get it out of me. Do you understand? Sally?’
Her hands, wringing together, looked disproportionately huge at the end of her tiny, sparrow-like arms. I wanted to cry but was paralysed with shock. I’d never known her to make herself sick.
I
had
to do something. But what? I tried to plead with her but she just stormed into the bathroom, cursing me under her breath. Barry, unaware, sat back and belched. ‘I swear I’ll properly die if I keep on overeating like this,’ he said. He had had a quarter of a burrito. I threw a spare tortilla at him, and it landed square on his head, but nobody laughed. ‘You’ve eaten nothing, Chicken,’ Barry said, clearly confused. ‘Are you well?’
Julian, who was taking me out after the burrito-fest, had watched the whole thing. After dinner he ordered me calmly into a taxi where he handed me a Jammie Dodger from his pocket. ‘You need this,’ he said.
The biscuit had seen better times, but it made my day. I
smiled at the lovely man with a blue jumper and blue eyes and blue biro reminders on his hand. We’d been going out (could you call it going out?) for just over a week. He leaned over and kissed my cheek, swollen and lumpy from the mouthful of sugary carbs I’d just shoved in it. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ He tucked my hair behind my ear.
I munched my Jammie Dodger, staring out of the window as Driggs Avenue swept us out of McCarren Park and into Williamsburg. Simple little eateries were lighting candles; the evening was beginning. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said wearily. ‘I think I’d probably prefer to have a nice time with you. Where are we going?’
Julian scrumpled up his face, as he did when he was thinking hard about something. He’d refused to tell me so far where we were off to, but could probably see I’d appreciate some good news. Ok ok, I’ll tell you. We’re –’ suddenly he clapped his hand over his pocket. ‘BOLLOCKS!’ he shouted. ‘Why am I such a bollock? I left my phone in your bollocking bedroom! And I’ll need it when we get there. Bollocks!’
I sat back and laughed as he asked the driver to turn round. Julian was a disaster. The best disaster of all time. ‘It was meant to be a big thumping surprise,’ he grumbled. ‘
And
I’d planned to bring you a Mr Kipling apple pie, but I forgot that too. I reckon Pam’ll be eating it by now.’
‘I’d like to meet Pam. Can I come and stay at yours soon?’
Julian looked thrilled. ‘Yes! That’d be amazing! I’ll take Pam to the dog parlour cos she stinks of farts, and I’ll get my roommate to clean the toilet for once, and I’ll make us lots of tea, and – and it’ll be brilliant!’ He leaned over and
kissed me again. ‘Sally Howlett doing a sleepover in my flat! Apartment! Whatever!’
My spirits lifted. Maybe I could have an evening off worry.
But when we ran in to get Julian’s phone, Fiona was back in the toilet.
You are
never
going to have a night off worry
, my head told me tiredly.
Forget it
. I returned to the taxi somewhat deflated.
‘Oh, Sal,’ Julian said sadly. His eyes were so full of kindness I could hardly stand it.
‘What can I do?’ I asked. ‘What should I say? I don’t know what to do.’
Julian stroked my cheek. ‘My poor little Sally Howlett,’ he said softly. ‘I know how awful this is. But, I promise you, there’s nothing you can do.’
‘But I
have
to do something! I have to make her stop!’
Our taxi was heading up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, buildings falling away underneath us. ‘I know you want to. But you can’t,’ Julian insisted. ‘Does she look like a girl who has any control over what she’s doing?’
‘She’s a free-willed human! Of course she can control herself!’
‘Addiction doesn’t work like that,’ Julian said. ‘Free will goes out of the window.’
‘But she’ll die!’ I cried. ‘I can’t just sit here and say, “Yeah, she has no choice. I guess I’ll just watch her die.” I can’t!’ Tears stood in my eyes. ‘She’s being so selfish,’ I whispered. ‘So selfish. Doesn’t she care what this is doing to us all?’
We were bearing round towards Williamsburg Bridge,
Manhattan sparkling at the end of a jungle of steel trusses. My heart was breaking. New York was meant to be my happy place.
‘You’re only being selfish if you have a choice,’ Julian said, after a pause. ‘And I think Fiona lost the power of choice a long time ago.’
I tried to counter his argument but couldn’t because, deep down, I’d always known she had no choice. I slumped back into the taxi seat.
‘She’ll get help when she’s ready,’ Julian continued. ‘I’ve seen this sort of shit go down before. And I’m telling you, you shouldn’t exhaust yourself trying to force an intervention.’
I sighed, resigning myself to agree with him for now. A subway train chuntered past us and I tried not to feel so hopeless. Julian was reassuring but his attitude towards Fiona rankled slightly. Why was he always telling me to back off? Why was he always defending her?