once again to that clinically cold list of details about those young women, their haunting faces, their lack of family or friends or proper employment. I know people live like that. I know not everyone is as lucky as I am. But who would want to collect all that information and pool it into one horrible document?
‘You don’t mind, do you, Julianne? I’d hate to miss it.’
My mother’s voice snaps me back to the present. She’s brandishing the TV remote at me. I’m tempted to remind her of the state-of-the-art Sky Q facilities she has at home and how, if she was so desperate to see this particular film, she could have easily recorded it. Instead, I resign myself to another few hours of her company and try to get myself in the frame of mind to watch Judi Dench and Bill Nighy smile and joke their way across India, knowing it’s the last thing I want to do.
Holly
Oxford, 1990
My dad once told me that friends come and go and you never really know which ones mean the most until they abandon you. Strong words for a father to tell his seven-year-old child, but that was my father for you: inappropriate and unaware. My mother overheard him and came to tell me that Daddy had actually had a bit of a mix-up and forgotten to mention that most people grow up to have a great group of friends they can have a fun time with. Dad stood back as Mum set about correcting his statement, looking slightly puzzled. When my mum walked back into the kitchen – we had been standing in the corridor, me swinging precariously from one of the lower banisters – he had sighed deeply and then just said, ‘Maybe I was wrong. I’m sure you’ll work all this out for yourself, little Holly.’
Although I probably wouldn’t say this conversation caused me to be a loner throughout the rest of my childhood and most of my teenage years, it was probably a contributing factor. I always found I could never quite trust someone enough, whether it was Stephanie and George in art class, who liked to chat endlessly about popstars and trashy movies, or Greg, the first boy I thought that, in another world, I could have dated. None of them managed to install a framework of trust within me. There was no pattern of reliability; not because they continually let me down – more because I never gave them much of a chance not to.
When Ally suggested she thought I should spend more time with her, Ernest, James and Peter, I saw this as proof my mother had been right, but also, at the same time, a challenge to the gods of fate to see if my father would be right as well. I did test them privately on this, when I used the communal telephone in the hallway. Mum got one version of the story: I had met a lovely group of people, very posh but not bad posh, and I was having a good time discussing my interests with them, most of which they shared, and we had nice outings and food together (‘The Wimpy! I know, so strange, but really fun’) and I thought there might be something of a romance blossoming between one of the boys, James, and me. That last bit was pure exaggeration. My feelings for James had grown more intense by the day, to the point where I had started to pull out a couple of strands of my hair to take away my nerves each time I went somewhere I knew he would be. Not enough for there to be bald spots on my head. Just one or two. I found it helped. But I didn’t tell Mum that part.
Dad, on the other hand, received a different version of Holly’s Time at Oxford University. He was told that I’d sort of befriended a group of posh people I didn’t think he would like. I didn’t like them much either, but I was focusing mostly on my studies and they were good for me to sound ideas off. No, I wouldn’t be bringing any of them home over the Christmas holidays, he didn’t have to worry about that. Boyfriend? No, there wasn’t anything much like that on the horizon. Maybe a boy I liked, but it wasn’t anything worth mentioning.
Some people might have found the way I approached occasional phone calls home to my parents odd, but it worked for me. Each conversation was crafted so it lasted long enough to make the call worth the money but not so long as to bore any of the parties involved. The details that would most impress Mum were emphasised and the parts that would least appeal to Dad were played down or excised completely. All in all, I did a pretty good job of giving each of them what they wanted.
So when I found myself going on my third outing as part of ‘The Ally Club’, as I continued to call it in my head, I found I was judging conversations and how people reacted to me through the dual perspective of my parents. Or, rather, through my own filtering mechanism, deciding how I would relay the event to each of them if I were to call them when I returned home (which I wouldn’t be doing, since I had phoned them only four days previously).
We were going to Blackwells, in Broad Street. I knew it was a famous bookshop – I had been there with my parents when we’d looked round the university and read the little plaque on the wall saying it had been opened in 1879 – but I still nodded and seemed interested when Ernest told me this. He was frequently doing this; treating me as if I needed the world explaining to me (and not even just the posh aspects of the world; sometimes things as mundane, though curiously unmanly, as how best to get stains off clothes). I usually just smiled and nodded and said the right things. I’d always been good at doing that. And that’s why I quite enjoyed occasionally doing the complete opposite and challenging what people said. A lot of pleasure could be derived from being the mouse that roared.
Ally and I had arranged to get a milkshake from a small café before meeting the boys at the bookshop. The purpose of the visit was to stock up on reading material for the Christmas holidays. Over their school breaks, Ernest and James had always held a competition: which of the two could read the most pieces of literature. They had devised a points-based scoring system, too. Five points per book under six hundred pages. Ten points per book over six hundred. Two points would be deducted if the book had been written after the turn of the century, with the exception of those that had won either the Booker or the Pulitzer, or were by authors who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Five points would also be deducted from the total amount if the participant failed to include a ‘reasonable spread’ of genres, periods of writing and nationalities. Ally gave me a thorough explanation of all this on our way to buy the milkshakes and while we drank them. ‘Apparently the teachers at Eton egged them on, rather. Kept recommending books they should add to their lists. They like competition, Etonians. They’d turn everything into a game if they could. God, they even turn masturbating into a competitive sport.’
I realised I’d pulled a face at the word ‘masturbating’ but Ally seemed spurred on by it. I got the feeling she’d come to like shocking me. ‘Oh yes, apparently they all stand around in a circle with a biscuit on a table in the middle. Then they pump away at themselves and the first person to spill his seed, so to speak, is the winner. The last person is, well …’
‘Well, what?’
‘The loser.’
I grimaced. ‘And what happens to the biscuit?’ I said, thinking I could probably guess the answer.
‘The loser has to eat it.’
‘That doesn’t sound very appetising.’
Ally chuckled. ‘I don’t think it’s meant to be. Just a bit of fun, I’m sure.’
‘Can’t you get AIDS that way?’
She tilted her head to one side and took a sip of her milkshake, apparently considering this. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure, to be honest. I doubt it. Otherwise I think most MPs would be on their deathbeds!’
She laughed loudly at her own joke.
‘So, do you know which books they’ll be
