Adored
“Laura.” He paused. “You’re looking well.” Laura smiled the thinnest, least sincere smile of her life.
Laura had known that it was Him immediately: She could have picked Him out anywhere, she could have picked Him out of a line up. All this time imagining Him in another country, on another continent, on the moon and yet here He was. It did not seem possible that He was here at the station on a Tuesday morning, buying a ticket, going to work.
As she caught sight of Him she remembered that walk: the lolloping gait and insincere tug at His forelock. Laura had once viewed these things with affection, but not now. There was only one ticket machine in the foyer, and she saw Him join the queue. She looked down at His shoes and noticed that the heels were worn-down on one side more than the other. He had always had the tendency to drag His feet. Laura had not seen her old English teacher for years, but she remembered everything.
Laura remembered sitting in the pub waiting for Him, her face hidden behind her A-Level copy of ‘Possession’. She remembered looking at the red, leather-strapped watch that He had given her for her 17th birthday. Each minute that He was late became a minute less that they had together tonight. Laura remembered the anticipation, of reading the same paragraph repeatedly because she couldn’t concentrate on A.S Byatt. Laura remembered thinking that the reality of Him couldn’t possibly live up to the expectation, but whenever He walked into a room it always did.
Sitting in a pub or waiting at a train station, always miles from home so that they wouldn’t be caught, she would watch Him arrive. He would look for her, His bright, green eyes feline and devious: hunting. There was always a second when their eyes met, but before He smiled. He looked for all the world like a cat about to end its prey, but then His smile eclipsed everything.
These memories came at Laura all at once, and she thought now what an inadequate word ‘remember’ was. The O.E.D defines it as ‘to exercise the power of memory,’ but Laura had no choice here. The memories were involuntary waves: overwhelming upsurges of icy water which crashed over her head and left the taste of salt in her mouth. The wave of the first time that He had kissed her hit now. Laura remembered how she had waited in the alleyway across from the house. She remembered waiting for His wife to leave. She watched Anna’s silver Fiat Uno leave the street. Laura remembered counting to 50 before she knocked at the door. She stepped inside. He had pushed her against the other side of the front- door and it slammed shut. He kissed her like He needed her to live.
Laura remembered how she had felt guilty when she walked into the living room and saw the wedding photograph of her English teacher and her History teacher on the mantelpiece. He had married Miss Jacobs two years ago, but Laura and the rest of the girls at school still called her by her maiden name. His wife had brought in the wedding photographs to show her classes when they came back from the printers, Laura had seen this one before. She remembered how He had handed her a glass of wine and, setting His on the shelf above the fireplace, had turned the photograph flat on its front so that they couldn’t see it, or so that it couldn’t see them.
Laura remembered all of this, all at once. She called His name, and He turned. As their eyes met, Laura saw that He remembered it all too.
Laura’s day had begun two hours before when she had been jolted awake by the anticipation of her alarm. The digital clock’s green numerals stood an inch tall in the black of the dark: 4.57. She had woken early because of Joe. Her fiancé had been on a late shift and come to bed just after three. Many were the morning that the couple had fallen out because of what he considered to be her excessive early-morning noise. Laura’s day had started with shouting and passive-aggressive pillow-throwing only yesterday, she couldn’t face it again today.
It was still the middle of the night by the standards of anyone sane, but she had to be in school before the kids. This was her third year of teaching, but she still couldn’t drive, much to Joe’s exasperation. Laura had started lessons with three different driving instructors over the past five years but always gave up. Silently snapping the ‘alarm’ button off, she swung her legs out of bed and into the cold of the early morning. It was late in the autumn, and the sky outside the dirty bedroom window was grey. Despite the dimness of the light, the morning was still an assault on her senses, she already had a headache. Welcome to Tuesday.
Laura wasn’t yet leaving the house in the dark, although she would be once the new half-term started. Nevertheless, the grey gloom today wasn’t much brighter than darkness. On this particular October morning, Laura wore a red raincoat, hood up. Her iPod was on random as she walked, and the hood and the earphones acted as protection; protection from the early morning, protection from her wine headache, protection from having to speak to anybody on the bus.
She walked with the rhythm of the music and when the song inspired it, she would sing in the empty streets, not caring who heard. The outdated but pleasantly inoffensive disco of ‘Shirley and Company’ was exactly the kind of song that had Laura humming along:
Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame…
Shame on you! If you can’t dance too!
The disco beat was precisely what Laura needed on such a miserable morning. She walked across the triangle of pavement at the dead-end of her street, formed by building the estate around a medieval church. She looked both ways to cross the road. The happy tune had lulled her into a false sense of security, but as the record faded out, The Song That She Didn’t Listen To, began.
Laura felt her stomach fall as the bass guitar began. She felt her pulse in her temples. The hangover from the lonely bottle of wine that she had drunk the night before suddenly felt much worse. There were bar-chimes at the beginning of this song that always reminded her of the sea. She came to a standstill in the middle of the pavement and pulled the iPod from her pocket, the screen filled with the Pollock-inspired artwork from the front of The Stone Roses’ first album. She skipped the music forward. This song reminded her of too much that she didn’t want to remember this morning.
The music changed. She was relieved to hear the intro to a forgotten album track from a forgotten band. It was exactly what she needed now, the sort of music that made her feel nothing. But it was too late, He was in her head. Laura disappeared underneath the cold tide of her memories but managed, just, to get her mouth and nose above the water.
As she approached her bus stop opposite the tube station, Laura was still thinking about the song that she couldn’t listen to. The Stone Roses had come back around now, but a safe one this time:
The pack on my back is aching
The straps seem to cut at me like a knife.
Laura tapped her fingers on the railings as she waited at the crossing. She sang out loud:
I’m standing alone…
A piece of chewing gum had attached itself to the heel of her shoe, and she was attempting absently to scrape it off as she waited for the green man. Hopping on one foot to remove the last remnants of the gum from her shoe, she wasn’t looking where she was going as she tripped through a group of commuters, nearly colliding with her former teacher.
Laura knew without question that it was Him. He hadn’t noticed her and continued walking ahead. Ian Brown was still singing inside her ears:
I’m standing alone
I’m watching you all
I’m seeing you sinking.
I’m standing alone
You’re weighing the gold
I’m watching you sinking.
Fool’s gold.
Laura pulled out the earphones, and despite the people and the traffic, the silence rang in her head like the stony stillness of a church. She remembered.
It was a long time ago.
Laura was flat on her front, nothing between her and the carpet. He was naked too, laid on His side with His head propped up on the flat on His ringless left hand. His glasses had been abandoned in the heat of the last moments, so here in the dim of the bedroom, she knew that He could not see her.
They listened in silence to the music. The needle bumped and crackled along the grooves of the LP. Laura only knew what an LP was because her parents had played them when she was small. She was drunk. Her teacher traced His fingers down the teenager’s spine, the bump of each vertebrae making His fingers jump in time with the percussion. His fingers reached the bottom of her spine. He immediately traced back up her bones again, like a musician playing an instrument. She thought of a glockenspiel, almost expecting to hear a tune emanating from her own body.
Laura raised herself onto her elbows, drinking deeply from a glass of red wine on the floor in front of her. She wasn’t sure that this was hers. Usually, it was apparent which glass was hers from the lipstick mark, but He had kissed all of her lipstick off tonight. What remained of it was all over Him now, marking His mouth and neck with the scarlet shadows of their fucking on the bedroom floor.
The record revolved around the turntable, the light of the streetlamp refracting through the leaded windows and making little triangles of light that shone on the black circle as it turned. A thought gnawed at the edge of her, how many women had He fucked to this copy of ‘The Stone Roses’? He pushed her shoulders so that she fell on to her back, her red hair splayed beneath her head. Their mouths found one another. He laced His fingers between her own and squeezed her hand. This was how He always asked her, a silent question. She gripped His hand back, leaving Him in no doubt. Over these past months, they had done this so many times that He had worn grooves into her now. She could anticipate His every move and yet was surprised each time the ritual began again. He held her arms above her head, pinned at the wrists. Like her own, His complexion was pale, and in the bedroom’s dark, He looked luminescent. The dark stubble on His cheeks and neck had begun to creep through His skin. Each hair reminded her of the fragile shoots of eagerly planted seeds, sprouting through the earth to be closer to the heat of the sun. He had not yet become ordinary to her; she saw the poetry of Him still. He was more than just blood and organs: prosaic, functioning. Above her now, she saw His bones, His permanence.
The song began, those chimes, the sound of water and waves. He put His mouth on hers, but instead of kissing her, He stared into her open eyes from as close as He could.
“This is my favourite one.” He said.
“It sounds like the sea,” Laura replied.
She heard the lyrics for the first time now. Their foreheads touched, and the space between their faces became a lopsided triangle. As she looked into His eyes, Laura thought how strange sex was. It was new to her and yet strangely instinctive and primordial, as though it existed outside of time. Laura closed her eyes against Him. She listened to the music and the sound of His breathing, the waves of the sea crashing over her.
I don’t have to sell my soul
He’s already in me.
She felt His body tighten; the pairs of muscles in His thighs were symmetrical underneath her hands. Watching His face, she thought how close His pleasure was to pain… She could break His nose now, and He would have the same expression.
I don’t need to sell my soul
He’s already in me.
I wanna be adored.
In an effort to raise Himself onto His elbows, He caught her hair underneath His arm. She moved her head and cried out in pain. He mistook it for pleasure and renewed His efforts.
“No, no, my hair!” Laura exclaimed. He rolled her onto her side to free it. His arms were around her, and they moved together. He gripped her hands so that they wouldn’t spin apart like dizzy children on a playground roundabout. They both laughed.
“I love you.” He whispered. It was the truth. He did then.
Adored.
I wanna be adored.
You adore me.
You adore me.
You adore me.
Laura had seen His spectre a thousand times in the years since the day it all fell apart. He had never been seen again after the Sunday that Laura had accidentally broken Anna’s nose. Following that unfortunate incident outside of the big Tesco, He and Anna had sold their house. Soon after, Laura had changed her phone number because her parents had made her. She couldn’t remember exactly when she had broken Anna’s nose now, partly because of the upset and partly because Diazepam and cheap vodka had comprised the main components of her diet that winter. When she imagined the calendar for 2006, the weeks and months were wobbly, not straight lines and neat boxes. Despite the chronology’s haziness, Laura was fairly sure that Anna’s nose had collided with her fist in November or December. Partly this was because she remembered that it had been cold, but mostly because when she recalled the pandemonium of that morning in the supermarket car park, the song that played in her memory, the soundtrack to the blood and Anna’s tears, was ‘Stop the Cavalry’:
Dub-a-dub-a-dum-dum
Dub-a-dub-a-dum
Dub-a-dum-dum-dub-a-dum
Wish I was at home for Christmas.
There had been times over the years since then that Laura had thought that she had seen Him. Sometimes it was in the crush of a tube carriage, other times as a man with a similar accent emerged from a shop or was ahead of her in the queue at the G.P. But, on that Tuesday morning, she had become so accustomed to seeing Him where He wasn’t that the fact of Him made her dizzy. Laura watched now as He stepped forward in the queue. She didn’t know what she was afraid of, but the agitation felt animal, innate. After all, a cat cornered by a fox doesn’t know that they fear being mauled, only that they are scared. Her hands were shaking and she could feel her heartbeat in her throat.
Laura fought her instincts and stepped forward to confront Him. He was occupied with the machine, so she queued politely behind Him. She had never felt more English, trying to pluck up her courage in a queue. A clatter of coins rung around the high-ceilinged hall, and He scooped up a pile of shiny-silver 20 pence pieces. She noticed His fingers as He put the coins back into the machine, she knew those fingers! The reality of Him was jarring. He was so essentially unchanged that it frightened her. All of this time, He had been so close by, metabolising and digesting, respirating and responding: living. Living without her.
Laura looked around the crowded area in front of the ticket barriers. She realised that she was looking for anybody who would stop her now: Anna, her mother, a policeman. She thought that if she reached out her hand, it would touch His shoulder. She raised her hand but had miscalculated and couldn’t quite reach. Laura’s palm brushed His coat, but He didn’t feel it through the thick wool. He had worn that black pea coat every winter since 1998. He had once wrapped her in that coat in the cold of the night, both of them inside it. She remembered the smell of His aftershave on the collar and the warmth of the wool against her school uniform. There had been snow around their feet, a frigid wind too. They had been snogging like teenagers around the back of the park. Laura had been a teenager, of course.
An orange and beige ticket spat itself out of the machine with surprising violence, shocking Laura back into the present. He pulled the ticket from its slot and walked away from the machine and from Laura. Suddenly she heard her own voice in her ears, as though it was someone else’s. She said His name out loud; it sounded so strange on her tongue now, The Name She Didn’t Say Anymore. The first attempt was too quiet for Him to have heard, but now conscious of what she was doing, Laura repeated herself. This time it was louder, bolder, as though she had given herself permission to say it. His name was Irish, it was poetic and musical. It was the sort of name that always sounded beautiful, but here in the ticket hall’s artificial light, it didn’t sound musical, just uneven and like notes played in the wrong order. Perhaps it had just always sounded wrong when she said it.
There had always been something different about this man. When she had first met Him as an 11-year-old, she liked Him immediately. He was an excellent teacher, inspiring and funny, but not trivial. He knew His subject and it fast became her subject too. He was a teacher who could make even the dreariest poem on the curriculum compelling, who wrote thoughtful comments on the bottom of essays. His blonde hair shone in the sunshine that poured through the classroom windows, His green eyes sparkled when he talked about John Donne and T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare and Carol-Ann Duffy.
These thoughts spun around Laura’s brain while the world slowed down around her, but nobody else nearby batted an eyelid, after all, they didn’t know what this was. The tired commuters around her didn’t realise how dangerous and stupid it was to confront her very worst nightmare here in the middle of her waking life. He turned and looked toward Laura’s voice.
“Laura.” He paused. “You’re looking well.” Laura knew that she was not looking well: she was tired, and she looked it. He had left her at 22 when she had the energy and potential of an entire galaxy inside of her. What He saw before Him now wasn’t that; this woman was a collapsing star.
“Likewise.” Without meaning to, she sounded sarcastic.
Laura saw, just for a moment, that devious, feline look that she remembered from the past: The hunter. There was now that split second that their eyes met, but before He smiled. She could see who He really was. Unbidden, the lines from yesterday’s Year 8 lesson rang in her ears:
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Laura saw His claws glint underneath the flat light of that vast hallway, but He withdrew them, and He smiled. She saw the chipped right molar that He had cracked on a Champagne bottle during His first year at university. Her brain’s immediate recall of that story shocked her. She hadn’t remembered it in a long time, and yet there it was, efficiently pulled from the filing cabinet of her memory.
Her teacher might have been smiling, but His eyes darted around in panic. She watched His fixed smile as He swallowed and tried to work out what to say. Laura knew that He was remembering Anna’s blood and worrying about His own nose. She saw His fear, but what Laura really wanted to say was that she was too tired to fight anymore. Besides, Laura still saw that blood in her dreams like a downmarket Lady Macbeth. She was ashamed of that above everything.
Suddenly Laura noticed a flicker of something else behind His eyes. What was it? Intrigue?
“What are you doing now?” He asked, as if they were old acquaintances or former colleagues. She noticed that His hair was going grey at the temples, He had not been greying before. Laura almost reached out to touch it, a split-second of forgetting that the intimacy they had once shared was dead. She considered lying, but because she would always feel like an 11-year-old in His presence, she didn’t.
“I’m an English teacher now,” Laura said. She realised that an adverb was necessary here, so she repeated herself and added it: “I’m an English teacher now, too.” He laughed a genuine laugh at this, it was like seeing someone come back from the dead. She all but staggered backward at the shock of His resurrection. The truth crumbled on top of her like a falling wall: He still existed. The bricks hit her in the face.
“Of course you are!” He exclaimed, chuckling. He wasn’t surprised, Laura supposed that it wasn’t surprising. The casual knowingness really pissed her off. “NQT?” He asked offhandedly, engaging her in the language of her – their – profession.
“No.” She replied, irritated, “third year in.” She said it like it was a prison sentence.
“What made you decide to teach?” He asked. Was He serious? She swallowed hard now to stop herself from telling the truth: ‘I don’t really want to pull at that thread, mate.’ She thought. ‘I was in love with a teacher. His wife is a teacher. Now I’m a teacher.’ Laura shrugged.
“I wanted to do something where I could use my degree every day.” He smiled again; He liked that answer. The song was in her head:
I wanna be adored
I wanna be adored.
“Well, I’m sure that a great school snapped you up!” He replied in a kind of sing-song tone. Laura had only previously heard Him employ this voice when lying to Anna on the phone. The urge to be sarcastic was so strong that holding it in was a physical effort. The words were bitter bile in the back of her throat: ‘Oh, yes, I was a fabulous candidate! Areas of specialty: 19th century Gothic Literature, Romantic poetry. Hobbies: crying, casual sex, taking Valium by day, and drinking heavily by night.’
In the effort to hold in what she really wanted to say, Laura pulled her left hand from her coat pocket and all but hit Him in the forehead with the diamond on her third finger.
“Oh, and I’m engaged!” She exclaimed. She stepped out of her own body and stood next to Him, face to face with her own hollow ghost. ‘Please reconsider this line of conversation, Laura’. The ghost said. She intended her words to be light, an aside, but instead, she practically screamed them in His face: ‘Somebody wants to marry me!’
“Wow!” He exclaimed, smiling broadly. “That’s a huge rock!” Because some things hadn’t changed in all this time, Laura’s nails were still painted red. He held her hand by the tips of her fingers to better angle the diamond at the light. His tone suddenly softened into a parody of generosity.
“I am genuinely thrilled for you, Laura.” He sounded so insincere that she laughed out loud. This new tone was paternal and indulgent, like He was her kindly old uncle or her Infant School headmaster. Did He believe His own words? Perhaps He was just doing His best to get to work without being punched. Showing Him her ring was an ugly gesture, and He had to know it. Laura showed Him that ring to clarify that she didn’t need Him, that somebody else wanted her even if He didn’t. Surely He knew her well enough to know that this was all a lie?
Laura felt blackness wash over her as she realised with icy clarity what she had long suspected: she had only accepted Joe’s proposal so that she could one day flaunt it in her former teacher’s face. She had expected it to feel better than it did, a triumph instead of this awful, crushing emptiness. So much had been taken from her. Not for the first time in these past few years, Laura considered how easy it would be to just give up. Walk out of here, into the path of a bus, stop all of this.
There was silence now, awkward and strange. They had never had nothing to say to one another before. Suddenly, His face changed, and He looked genuinely sad. The look was too heavy, too real, and Laura knew that she was in danger of saying something that she really meant. She couldn’t bear it, and so once again, she became that teenage girl, standing beside His desk waiting for her grade, waiting for His approval. She didn’t have an essay to give Him now though, so she offered Him her right hand instead. He looked puzzled.
“Come on.” She said, “It’s all forgotten.” Laura didn’t know why she said that because it wasn’t all forgotten, far from it. He had stolen from her, and what He took could never be given back. These weren’t her words though, these were the words of that 11-year-old girl who just wanted to give Him her best work. With relief, His face flushed the crimson of a man who was off the hook, again. He took Laura’s extended hand and said thank you. She dropped her hand, and her eyes wandered down to His left side. She saw the cold gold of His wedding ring. He repeated the words.
“Thank you, Laura.”
There was nowhere left to go now that Laura had absolved Him of His crimes.
“Goodbye then.” She said.
“Goodbye.” He said, and then He paused. Laura knew what He would say next because He had always said it, or at least always said it to her. “Take care of yourself.” She smiled weakly.
“Someone’s got to.” She replied. She was aiming for sardonic nonchalance, but the words came out as a vaguely hysterical snipe. ‘Love to your wife!’ She managed not to add.
With more confidence than she felt, Laura turned and strode forward out of the open double doors. She felt like her legs might collapse. Outside, she slumped down onto a low wall. Laura had missed her bus and the one after that too. She wouldn’t make it to school before the first bell. She didn’t care.
After some minutes, Laura attempted to stand, her knees hardly seeming to work. She stood and walked forward towards her bus stops general direction, but it was more through luck than design that she was headed even vaguely the right way. It felt as though she had lost her skin; everyone could see her throbbing entrails now. She acted out the strange theatre of being a normal person on their way to work: She shoved her earphones back into her ears, thawing Ian Brown from his lyrical deepfreeze:
Gold’s just around the corner
Breakdowns coming up round the bend.
Laura sat down on the plastic bench at her bus stop and pulled out a crumpled box of ten Marlboro Menthols that she kept in her bag for after particularly bad lessons. She realised that she didn’t have a lighter. Seeing her predicament, an old man standing at the other end of the shelter wordlessly offered her a red Clipper.
“Cheers.” Laura said, moving to take the lighter. The man smiled kindly, and Laura suddenly appreciated that kindness, there was a pureness to it that reminded her of her grandfather. She handed the lighter back, and inhaling a lungful of carcinogens, she added, “I haven’t got a lighter because I don’t really smoke.” The man looked puzzled but smiled again and put the lighter back into his pocket.
The sky’s grey had begun to leak onto the town as cold dampness that was more than a drizzle but not quite rain. Laura sat and smoked, waiting for the bus and knew that this would never end. Raising her left hand to move her fringe from her eyes, Laura felt sick at the glint of the engagement ring. It twinkled in the weak, yellow strip-light of the bus shelter. There in that second, she hated that ring, its inanimate sparkle looking something like scorn.
She got to school right before the last bell rang. Her form group, 31 Year 9 kids brimming with adolescent energy, were in a line outside of her classroom, looking for all the world like the cartoon characters of ‘The Beano’. The Bash Street Kids of East London, brightly-coloured caricatures. This only added to the strange sensation that Laura felt today of her life not being real. She had the urge to just turn on her heel and leave this place, to throw the key to her classroom to the first pupil it hit and go to work somewhere that didn’t remind her every day of what she had lost. But there was the mortgage and the wedding to pay for. The deposit was already down on the honeymoon to Italy that she didn’t want to go on. She unlocked her classroom door and stepped onto the treadmill of this strange, hard labour that she had condemned herself to. This was her punishment for all the pain she had caused Anna, for not loving Joe, for not really being present in her own life.
It was Tuesday; there would be many more Tuesdays to come.