‘Pity, that,’ I say, taking a gulp of strong coffee. Because the reality is, I’m about to share a mattress with Shane for five days. And if that’s not an emergency situation, I don’t know what is.
15
I have done so many things with Shane.
Some of these I’ve banished from my brain in order to survive five nights sharing a mattress with him. But now my head fills with less contentious memories – like all those hours we spent chatting, and the times we got drunk together, far more than I can count. All the gigs we played, and the night I laughed, rather cruelly, when a drumstick flew out of his hand and pinged right off the stage, hitting a man on the head. That time we lay together on the sparse, parched grass in the park, when he insisted he didn’t need sunscreen because he ‘never burned’. Because obviously, Shane wasn’t a normal boy, but one with skin made from asbestos.
I have dabbed calamine lotion onto his tender back and shoulders. I have run to his house, yelling that he had to come over because my parents were out and a crow had somehow flown down the chimney into our living room. It was flapping around madly, crashing into Mum’s prized shepherdess ornaments and hitting the window with a thud. Unfazed, Shane had cornered the bird and somehow wrapped it gently in a tea towel and carried it to the back door and set it free. I’d have been no more awestruck if he’d rescued a baby from a burning building.
‘My hero!’ I’d joked, and hugged and kissed him, our kisses growing deeper and hotter and then—Don’t even go there! I command myself as I steal a quick look at Shane. It’s all I can do not to keep watching him, as this is an entirely new experience for me. Because what I have never done is sat in a vehicle being driven by him.
Perhaps it’s because I haven’t had my pill today that everything seems sharper than I’m used to – as if my internal settings have been altered. Whatever it is, I cannot get over the fact that somehow, the boy with choppy home-cut hair and a love of charity shop overcoats and Findus Crispy Pancakes is now a properly adult man, currently driving an ambulance at a steady 60 mph as if it’s nothing.
Dale, Cora’s dad, didn’t drive. (He didn’t do much apart from getting stoned, drinking lager and wearing the same underpants three days running.) However, in my late twenties in London, I felt obliged to learn and bought a terrible old Fiat that belched thick black exhaust fumes, which caused people to stop and stare. The plan was to force some semblance of grown-upness upon myself, as if possessing these things – driving licence, car – would magically turn me into the sophisticated woman I yearned to be. However, I hated driving, and when Cora was around five, the rusty old heap finally expired, never to be replaced.
‘Great,’ my friend Gaby teased me. ‘That’s saved you cleaning it out!’ Admittedly it had become little more than a receptacle for crisp packets and withered fruit.
Travelling in a vintage ambulance is an entirely different experience. ‘D’you know how old this thing is?’ I ask.
‘Um… mid-nineties, I think,’ Shane replies.
Ah, the era of listening to Supergrass with a bottle of Hooch. Kate Moss in that crinkly see-through dress, accessorised by Johnny Depp. Discovering I was pregnant after a brief reconciliation with Dale, my abject horror soon reshaping itself first into stoical acceptance, then quiet delight.
‘Before mobile phones and the Internet,’ I remark. ‘Was that before suspension too?’
He laughs. ‘Not exactly a smooth drive, is it?’
‘It’s like being rattled inside a gigantic tin.’ Already it feels as if my fillings are being shaken loose, one by one. Yes, weirdly, this feels interesting rather than alarming. Perhaps that’s also due to the lack of pills. I am hyper aware of every bodily sensation and wonder if this is the new me: tingly with nerves, yet somehow feeling fully alive.
We’ve slipped into silence now, and I gaze out at the endless flat, green landscape. For the last two hours on the road, we’ve been alternating light, inconsequential chit-chat with quiet spells over the whine of the engine. I’ve already decided that Shane is something of a closed book, and that I’m unlikely to get to know him as a fully-fledged adult on this trip. Fine, I tell myself. If this is the tone we’re adopting for the entire five days, then I’m okay with that. It’s not as if I want to spill out my innermost feelings – about our shared past, my life now or any of that. In fact, I’d rather not.
The silence stretches, beginning to feel a little taut. When the rain starts, Shane makes a brief remark about the windscreen wipers being a bit crap. More miles, more rain. The engine grinds along stoically. I mentally calculate that between now and the blissful moment when we arrive back in London and I bolt out of this van amounts to… something like 120 hours. A full 120 hours of community service for my crimes! For telling Cora that Zack is ‘such a great guy!’ while secretly hating him. For giving him the finger behind his back. For faking orgasms with Lloyd, yet saying the sex was ‘amazing’, even though I’ve often lost concentration part-way through the proceedings, wondering instead where my lost slipper might have got to (could it have fallen down the back of the radiator where I’d put it to dry, after spilling coffee on it?).
In the absence of playing I spy or listening to music (amazingly, this ancient van possesses no sound system) I continue to mentally list further sins.
‘Borrowing’ and then shrinking Lloyd’s sweater and saying I’d never seen it.
Concealing said sweater under a load of vegetable peelings and cold spaghetti in my kitchen bin.
Nicking a big bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk from the Co-op in 1986.
Me and Shane and Ravi guzzling my parents’ Cinzano and smoking a copious amount of cigarettes while they were out and telling them we’d burnt some toast.
And at work, although innocent of the crime I’ve been accused of, I have done other bad things. Such as: throwing up in the back room sink after Gaby’s fifty-fifth birthday party. Claiming to have ‘no idea’ about the source of the sour smell that lingered when Rupert returned from an errand, and blaming ‘the drains’. Allowing an elderly lady to bring in her toy poodle, despite our strict no dogs policy, another time Rupert was out. After the pooch had leapt up onto his upholstered swivel chair and done a little widdle, I’d denied all knowledge of how the wet patch got there. Oh God – Rupert probably thought he’d done it himself, that he has a dribbling problem. I basically gaslighted him.
So I deserve this, really: being trapped with Shane in a van all the way to Grimsby. I am aware of yet more oestrogen draining from my body, down through the soles of my peasant trotters and the base of the van, finally dripping out onto the M1. And I wonder if Shane, a mere arm’s width away from me, can sense this.
‘Doing okay there?’ I ask pleasantly, to break the lull.
‘Yep, I’m good,’ Shane replies. ‘You okay?’
‘I’m fine.’ Although I’m pretty sure that the effects of yesterday’s pill have now fully worn off. ‘Let me know if you want me to take over,’ I add recklessly.
‘What, driving?’
‘Sure!’
‘Um… I’m okay,’ he says. ‘Unless you’d like to?’
