Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [2]
Her New Year’s Eve – The One – had been that one, the first the two of them had shared. Skiing in Switzerland. In a chalet belonging to someone’s parents. A snowy, schnapps-fuelled rave in a pretty village square. A thousand people dancing to a hundred different tunes blasting through open windows, a million snowflakes on them all. That big, drunken, loving crowd vibe. Simon kissing her, his mouth so hot in the cold air. Making love in the drying room because it was too cold to do it lying on the snow (and they’d tried) quietly, so no one woke up.
That had been the one.
She’d forgotten about Tom. Well, not forgotten about him exactly. Tom was always there. He always had been. But she’d forgotten that he wouldn’t have forgotten her.
Natalie and Tom had met in August 1977, the summer that Elvis Aaron Presley had died, when Natalie, her two sisters and their parents had moved in two doors down. Bridget had been the nesting one even then, unpacking boxes with their mother, arranging her enormous collection of Whimsies on the white melamine chest of drawers that separated her narrow single bed from Natalie’s in the bedroom they were to share. Susannah had watched television for days on end – they’d showed all of Elvis’s movies: Viva Las Vegas, King Creole, Love Me Tender. The new three-piece suite hadn’t arrived so she practised the dance routines with abandonment in the living room, singing along. She would have enlisted Natalie, if she’d been given the chance, as extra chorus, but Natalie was sulking. She hadn’t wanted to move. She’d liked their old house. Susannah always said she was change-resistant, and that you should embrace change. That was the sort of thing Susannah said a lot, using her long, graceful arms in expansive gestures, silver bracelets jangling.
Dad was going to be a branch manager, and that was why they had had to move. It was a promotion and a good thing and, anyway, no one had asked her.
She had been sitting on the low brick wall at the front of the house, poking at some earth with a twig, when she first saw him. Her mother had come out with some empty boxes just as his mother was walking by – she said they’d been into town to get him some new school shoes before the start of term, and that his feet grew like nothing else, and that he needed a new pair practically every term, and that was expensive enough before you even started to think about football boots and training shoes and wellingtons. Tom – whom Natalie judged to be about her own age but taller – looked mortified, and Natalie’s mum looked sort of stunned, and nodded and smiled a lot, slightly sideways at her when Tom’s mother said three daughters, how lovely and how lucky because their feet, girls’ feet, probably didn’t grow anything like so fast. Natalie had weirdly big feet, which seemed to grow only sporadically, incredibly quickly and usually just after her mum had bought her some new shoes. It was a bit of a family joke. He had stary eyes. Big stary eyes. And too much curly hair. Not down his neck, like a footballer, but all up on top of his head.
Natalie’s mum told Tom’s mum that Natalie was a tomboy, and Tom’s mum said Tom would like that, that there weren’t many other children his age on the street, and that they should be friends.
But, of course, it had taken weeks. Well into the new term at school. Weeks of self-consciously playing at the same thing (bikes, roller skates, toss-ups) in two gardens, two houses apart. It was Mrs Samways, the old lady in the middle, who finally got them together. She had this copper-pan thing she kept in her front room that she put sweets in and then got you to pretend that you had ‘magicked’ the sweets into it by rubbing it. Everyone, except perhaps her, knew there was no magic, but they kept going in anyway and rubbing the pan. Mrs Samways liked the company and the children liked the sweets, even if the front room did smell a bit funny, like