Trudy saved the message log on her hard drive, would have printed a copy but was out of paper. “I think I’m falling in love,” she read, and re-read, luxuriating in the words; listening to them roll off her tongue; watching her expression in the mirror; imagining Roger saying them: “I think I’m falling in love.”
“TRUDY—R U STILL THERE?” Her screen was saying.
“YES.” she typed back quickly, suddenly realizing that she’d not responded to his earlier message. “I’M HERE, AND I THINK I’M FALLING IN LOVE TOO.”
They could have picked up the phone, spoken directly, said what they wanted to say, heard what they wanted to hear, yet neither did, preferring to add another veil to the eternal dance. Lovers, fumbling in the dark, excited by the uncertainty of what they may find, deliberately delaying gratification—or disappointment.
Trudy called for Margery the following morning, something she rarely did of late, but she was unable to contain her excitement. Margery’s cigarette-thin mother, a length of ash dangling precariously, answered the door to Trudy’s cheery, “Hi—is Mar …”
She got no further. “Hang on, Luv,” she said, flicking the ash past her onto the street. “It’s for you Marg,” she shouted, turning to face the stairs.
“Go on up, Luv. It’s time she was up for school,” she called over her shoulder as she turned back to the kitchen.
Margery was miffed, “I thought you’d found a new friend,” she sneered, dived under the bedclothes and buried her head in the pillow. One foot stuck out, her azure toenails—”Chic” according to one of her mother’s magazines—contrasting sharply to the chalkiness of her skin.
“You’re still my best friend, Marg,” Trudy tried soothingly, closing the bedroom door behind her. “But Roger is sort of cute.”
“Cute! Cute! You don’t know what he looks like for gawd’s sake,” she shot back.
“I do so.”
“Bollocks you do.”
“Yeah, well that’s where you’re wrong, see.”
Margery leapt up, almost knocking Trudy off the edge of the narrow little bed—a cheap standby bought for a nine-year-old eight years earlier. “You’ve met him?” she asked excitedly.
“Not exactly, Marg. But I know what he looks like, and he’s sending me a photo. He’s tall, well fairly tall anyway, and he’s got dark skin. Not Paki or anything like that—just sort of tanned. Oh, and I nearly forgot, he’s got brown eyes the same as mine. He’s got a really posh job as well—some sort of computer programmer in the city.”
Margery, stirred into momentum by Trudy’s excitement, decided she might as well get up. She’d slept naked under the bedclothes, and now stepped, unashamedly, in front her friend, to examine her neat little body in the cracked, full-length mirror on the back of the door. “I think they’re getting bigger, what do you reckon, Trude?” she said as she turned to face her friend, her hands pushing under the little mounds of flesh, squeezing every available gram of fat into her breasts.
Trudy, her mind fixated on Roger, raced ahead. “He commutes, you know.” Is that an achievement or what? “He gets the train. Reckons he travels first class ’cos his firm pays. Oh, and wait for this, he’s got his own house. Sounds pretty posh, too. And you’d never guess where it is.”
She didn’t wait for Margery’s guess. In any case her friend was showing little interest, more concerned with retrieving various bits of clothing from around the room, carefully sniffing each.
“It’s in Watford,” she concluded triumphantly. “Not bad. Eh!” she added, carefully emphasising each individual syllable, and then repeating them for even greater emphasis, “Not bad. Eh!”
Margery didn’t think it was bad, not that she thought it was good either, so said nothing. Her choice of knickers selected, she put them on, coyly turning away from Trudy as if she’d suddenly discovered she had something to hide.
“Just think, Marg. Watford on a Saturday,” she said dreamily, her mind on the famous soccer club.
“Didn’t think you wuz interested in football, Trade,” Margery said at last, just to be annoying.
“Don’t much. But I might get to see Elton John. They reckon he’s there nearly every week.”
Margery was not a John fan, never had been, couldn’t understand anyone of her own age idolizing a strange little bald man old enough to be her grandfather. “Oh great!” she mocked, “Just what I always wanted.”
Trudy’s conversations with Roger had continued. Becoming longer; more intimate, more revealing, and even more desperate, as the tentacles of two lonely souls reached out to mesh with each other. Her mother, concerned mainly about the rising cost of the phone bill, had warned her about getting too involved. “You don’t know anything about him really, Trudy love,” she’d said, kindly, when her daughter had been explaining, excitedly, about some clever remark Roger had made. “Just be careful, that’s all. He might be married, or weird, or … or, I dunno. You’re only sixteen, plenty of time for boyfriends yet. Anyhow, you know what blasted liars men are. Remember your father?”
Of course she remembered her father, how could she forget her father; although, thinking about it, she was surprised to discover she hadn’t visited him for more than a year. His new wife, younger and definitely prettier than her mother, didn’t like her, had never liked her. “It’s like going to see him in hospital,” she had complained to her mother after her last visit.
Her stepmother had fussed around them all afternoon like an over-attentive ward Sister, insisting they do nothing. “You two have a nice little chat,” she had said, bustling in and out with cups of tea, finicky sandwiches, and fancy cakes from Marks & Spencer’s on a silly little silver coloured cake stand, that, Trudy thought, looked as though it had been pinched from a one-star hotel. Her stepmother, the “Sister” was determined Trudy would go home to tell her mother how much better her father was being cared for now. But, beyond the smiles, and the seemingly kind words, there was a coldness, a distance, a chasm, and her father was being slowly drawn across it. Trudy was left standing on one side of the ravine as her father was being led by his new wife to the other, and by five o’clock her stepmother had had enough, repeatedly checking her watch, hinting about the bus times, anxious to ring the bell to mark the end of visiting time.
“Remember the time we caught him?” her mother was saying now. Though Trudy, only ten at the time, didn’t feel she’d been personally involved in catching her father—although she’d certainly been there when he was caught.
“You should have seen his face,” her mother continued, dreamily, forgetting for a moment that Trudy had.
He had been sitting at a corner table in a little Indian restaurant; she, her stepmother-to-be, stroking one of his hands with both of hers. The flame from the flickering pink candle warmed both their faces as they held each others’ gaze, unwilling, or unable to let go; neither of them bothering to examine the plates of sizzling food the waiter was carefully placing on the pink tablecloth in front of them.
“Please be careful, Sir. It is very hot,” warned the waiter, wondering why he was wasting his breath, before retreating. Trudy’s mother wasn’t retreating. She’d watched from across the room and now marched to attack. “So this is ’working nights,’ is it?” she accused, her mouth taught with emotion. Then she swung on the other woman, biting out the words, “I’m his wife—I’m his day shift. I bet he hasn’t told you about me.” Without leaving any opportunity for a reply, she continued, in a sort of singsong voice. “And this is Trudy his little girl. Say hello to Daddy, Trudy.”
Trudy, confused, upset, alarmed by her mother’s uncharacteristically powerful performance,